doctor who meme: [2/3] otps, amy and rory
“You know when, sometimes you meet someone so beautiful, and then you actually talk to them and five minutes later, they’re as dull as a brick? Then there’s other people, and you meet them and you think, ‘Not bad; they’re okay.’ And then you get to know them, and their face sort of becomes them, like their personality is written all over it. And they just turn into something so beautiful. Rory’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.”
amy pond
The main companion per series: Amy Pond (Series 5)
You know what I said about getting back for tomorrow morning? Have you ever run away from something because you were scared, or not ready, or just, just because you could?
i miss doctor who. i miss the soft lighting of series one and two. i miss ordinary but extraordinary rose. i miss strong but caring martha. i miss loud but fragile donna. i miss guilt-ridden nine and furious ten. i miss the old tardis. i miss when doctor who was about people, not production value.
I miss Amy and her mental problems, which were like mine. I miss her abandonment issues, her anxious “We’re still together in ten years?” to Rory, her complete sobbing breakdowns whenever something went badly wrong. I miss that girl who could barely take care of herself, because I could barely take care of myself either back then. I watched Amy rebuild the universe from her memory and I thought if she could do it so could I. I remember observing her neglectful aunt placing her face in her hands as Amy shouted out at her wedding and reflecting on how very little my own moments of madness were understood.
I miss Rory. He was great, not a flawless person but a good man. I miss his constantly being torn between the masculine fantasy of the Last Centurion and the oft-mocked reality of being a male nurse. I miss his always striving to be kind in a very unkind world.
I miss Clara. What a goddamn amazing Mary Sue! She got her own TARDIS and her own companion and her own way of cheating death. She was a liar and a manipulator and the cleverest person in the room. She kissed ladies and loved it and she kissed men and loved it and she wasn’t punished for anything. She got to live forever.
I miss Danny. I think of him sometimes when Remembrance Day rolls around and poppies are everywhere, even though I shouldn’t, he was fictional. But I thought he was a good stand-in for the millions of real soldiers who return from war and have to pick up the pieces of their life all alone afterwards.
I miss River. Whenever people compliment her, someone always jumps in with a “How dare you compliment the clueless man who wrote her?” as if she was nothing more than her author. So many female characters get that, although few of the male ones do. She was a walking power fantasy, an abuse survivor who shot dead her abusers, a wisecracker, a genius, a person who always came out on top. Brave, heroic, reckless, ruthless, pansexual, perfection. A female Captain Jack Harkness with half his fandom.
I’m going to miss Bill when she leaves. The racist British tabloids are always quietly gleeful over the possibility of her only staying for one series, just as they were with Martha. I know she’s going to be amazing, have you seen Pearl Mackie’s Twitter, that girl is on FIRE. I hope she burns a huge hole.
I don’t miss being told there’s only one kind of people stories should be written about.
Amy Pond, Aunt Sharon, mental health, and child neglect
Okay, so: Amy Pond realises halfway through her wedding that there’s someone missing, that while she has gained her parents back she has lost something else. With two different timelines playing through her head, she stands up and calls, begs, for the Doctor. Reactions are…mixed. “The psychiarists we sent her to!” wails her mother. Aunt Sharon, Amy’s sole guardian in the previous version of her childhood, does this:
Which is not a look of sympathy.
If you’re anything like me, you may actually wince a little at that gif. My mental health can usually optimistically be described as ‘fragile’, but I’ve had the verbal version of Aunt Sharon’s facepalm hundreds of time. The reactions of both Sharon and Amy’s mother rather indicate that though they tried to help Amy – sending her to psychiarists and the like – they started to flail as soon as the going got rough.
We don’t know much about Amy’s mother, but we actually do know a bit about Aunt Sharon, and unfortunately none of it is positive. When the Doctor first meets seven-year-old Amelia, he’s surprised to realise she’s been left all alone in the middle of the night, but Amelia herself doesn’t seem too bothered, indicating that it’s not an uncommon occurrence. The laws on leaving a child alone at night are iffy about whether it’s an actual offence to leave a seven-year-old home alone, but it’s clearly not a million miles off. And the clock on the wall in the scene in question shows that Sharon was absent from at least 8:30 to 11:20 – god knows what she was up to, but she’s clearly well-off enough to afford a babysitter, or at the very least someone to check in on her very young niece, and she didn’t do those things.
What I’m getting at here is that Amy Pond, in the first version of her childhood, was pretty clearly neglected. There’s the above, but there’s more: she’s been living with Sharon for presumably quite a while, but doesn’t seem to have particularly warm feelings towards her – “I don’t even have an aunt” “You’re lucky”. When we actually meet Aunt Sharon, she seems nice enough, and has hired a psychiarist for Amy, but as soon as Amy says something she doesn’t like she crossly grouches ‘Oh, Amelia!’ Which, for a seven-year-old, would probably just reenforce ideas like ‘positive attention from adults is dependent on whether or not I fit in with their ideas about the world’. It’s no wonder she grows up to push everyone’s boundaries and behave immaturely.
You can debate til the cows come home about whether Amy is “really” mentally ill in a world where the Doctor actually does exist and it’s the people who don’t believe in him who are wrong (at the moment, I’m not gonna talk about that, I’ll just mention that yes, I think she’s got a similar brain to me), but – Amy’s family react to her, in the scenes we see, as if she’s a problem. That rings…
…awfully true, for people living with mental illness.
There’s one line that’s so important to Amy’s characterisation, and it comes right at the beginning. “Give me five minutes, I’ll be right back” says the Doctor. “People always say that,” says seven-year-old Amy. And she’s right: her parents have abandoned her by circumstance, and her aunt by choice. The Doctor then accidentally contributes to this cycle, making the adult Amy even more deeply mistrustful – but I think, all things considered, it wasn’t actually him who stole her childhood.
Reblogging this because today I learned that Aunt Sharon’s actress, Susan Vidler, played another (more fatally) neglectful parent at the start of her career: the mother of the baby in Trainspotting.
……….Also because I still very much stand by this 100%
