amy pond

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fakegeekgirlslikeus:

I feel like they had a missed opportunity with really developing Amy Pond’s character from Doctor Who. They could have made her so much more badass (like the way they made Rose) but instead put her in short skirts and made her have this silly crush on the Doctor the whole time.

What female character in nerd/geek/fan culture do you wish was more developed? Send us your thoughts at www.fakegeekgirlslikeus.tumblr.com/submit

But Amy Pond isn’t a badass, nor should she be.

Not a badass in the traditional way, anyway – she has tremendous strength of character, a great deal of intelligence, and it can’t be denied that she likes to hit things. But this is just one more example of the bizarre faux-feminist Strong Female Character argument that leaks into so much of online discourse- Rose isn’t some generic ‘badass’ either, nor Martha, nor River, because ‘badass’ isn’t a description of someone’s character. If we’re judging women to be missed opportunities or not based soley on the amount of Cool Stuff they do, we’ve set the bar incredibly low.

No-one put Amy in short skirts apart from Karen Gillan, and she talks about that here. Which actually brings me neatly round to my next point: Amy shouldn’t have to be more more like Rose, either. Female characters, just like female people, are not one-size-fits-all. I can’t help but notice that on that fakegeeksgirlslikeus website, they’ve grouped three very different women – Martha, Amy, Tauriel from The Hobbit – under the banner of, basically, ‘could have been more interesting if they hadn’t crushed on the Doctor/been part of a love triangle.’ Well, why? Nothing about their love lives cancels out what they actually achieve, which is plenty. Going back to Amy-

-like, I relate to Amy. I did as far back as The Beast Below. She’s immature in her attitude to sex and relationships (hence the ‘silly crush’). She’s abrasive and insulting even to her loved ones, she’s afraid of abandonment, she has complete mental breakdowns in bad situations (Like me!), she likes history and storytelling and art. I honestly don’t think these are things that are easy to miss, either: I don’t buy the ‘not developed enough as a person’ argument.

I found some of the little details of her character – her strength in the face of lack of support, her doubting her own mind sometimes (again, like me!) to be affirming. I know I’m not the only one who thinks that, either. But, yeah-

-I suppose she could have been badass in the way none of the Doctor Who companions actually are. When her husband is dying in her arms, she could have yelled ‘DON’T YOU DIE ON ME!’ and brought him back with a punch to the chest. When being sucked into the earth, she could have made a sarcastic quip about it. When told to hand over her baby daughter, she could have blown Kovarian and her soldiers up with a big gun and walked in slo-mo away from the explosion-

–or she could have cried, panicked, pleaded, and acquiesced. Which is what she actually did. Rose (to give just one example) probably wouldn’t have done. But that’s alright too, because female characters should represent the entire spectrum of women. And we’re not all strong, and we’re not all badasses, and we shouldn’t have to be to gain respect.

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theladyinquisitors:

there is this thing that fandom does, where fans who love female characters aren’t able to even discuss their flaws, to talk about the negative things they say or do, in a constructive way, because we’re too busy defending their right to fucking exist against people dumping all manner of hate on them

and it really sucks? i would love to have some nitty gritty conversations picking apart the ladies i love and viewing them as complex people

like wouldn’t it be nice if we could discuss sansa stark’s flaws without constantly having to sanctify her to people who think she deserves every single awful thing that’s happened in her life, but we are mired in a culture that only allows us to lavish nothing but positive attention on minority characters we love because everybody else is bound and determined to shit on them

we can’t even get a breath in to treat them as people because we’re too busy defending their right to exist

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Anonymous: I found this for Amy Pond on TV Tropes “Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Very genuinely thinks that abusing Rory is okay, and (emotionally and physically) beats Rory over the head a whole lot. Gets called out on it hard on occasion, and slowly learns that there are other ways to love someone. It’s still her default defense mechanism when she feels her that relationship isn’t heading the right way.” What do you think about this? You may have done a thing on this topic before, but IDK.

abossycontrolfreak:

tillthenexttimedoctor:

I don’t really agree? For the most part, it seems to lump together emotional and physical abuse and comes to some slightly odd conclusions based on that.

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#one of my favourite things about amy#is that she is a textbook *problematic fave*#in the vein of the ninth doctor or sherlock or ward or owen#and before amy I hadn’t really seen a female *problematic fave*#so I think that’s a brave and worthy creative choice (via thatsabsurrrrd)

Amy isn’t perfect, and she doesn’t always have a particularly healthy relationship with Rory, and she often screws up and sucks at communication and she can be kinda awful to people sometimes. She learns, sort of, through experimenting and trial and error, what makes her and the people around her happiest. But she’s not perfect, and she’s never perfect, and that’s okay.

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softtonys:

Well, so might you do, to protect everything you loved.

I think this quite nicely illustrates such a big difference between Amy and Clara:

On losing a loved one, Amy puts herself (and only herself, the Doctor didn’t have to get in the car with her) in danger to bring Rory back. But Clara? She’s going to drag the Doctor down with her, utterly destroy him if necessary, to get what she wants.

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tillthenexttimedoctor:

When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend. The raggedy Doctor. My raggedy Doctor. But he wasn’t imaginary, he was real. I remember you. I remember! I brought the others back, I can bring you home, too. Raggedy man, I remember you, and you are late for my wedding!

Amy, when we first meet her, had an unimaginable amount taken from her. The crack not only ate away at her life and stole away her parents, it robbed her of the knowledge of what she had lost. What is left is an empty house in Leadworth, with an aunt who was neglectful enough that Amy, at the age of seven, was already used to fending for herself and entirely unshaken by an alien crashing in her backyard.

The truths that she does retain, the magic of reality in the form of her Raggedy Doctor, is something which no one believes. Even Rory is just playing a game. She’s the perpetual outsider in a village which does not even speak like her, full of people who think the impossible truth of her life is a mere story. Madness even, psychiatrist upon psychiatrist telling her it isn’t real.

The Doctor sees that lost little girl and feels kinship, and he takes her travelling, but he doesn’t share the tragedy of her past with Amy. Along the journey, Amy loses another person she loves, as Rory erased from existence. Amy was the girl running away on the night before her wedding. Now she’s just a girl running. And she’s grieving, without even understanding why.

Brave, wonderful, flawed, smart Amelia Pond. Who saves a star whale, empathises with a machine created by the Daleks, infiltrates a school of fish vampires, and brings joy into Vincent van Gogh’s last days. She’s so vibrant. But her freedom is tainted. It is there, in her very spirit, in every glorious thing she does, but it’s also an illusion. She’s stripped of knowledge and truth and her entire history. She doesn’t make sense.

So claiming all of it back is the single most important moment of series 5. All that damage the cracks in time waged on her life, on her mind, also give her the power to change, to retrieve, to heal. She brings back the parents she never had and always had. She brings back Rory Williams, the man she loves. And then, finally, she brings back the Doctor. Her Raggedy Doctor. Her stories are real. Even more than that, they become real.

Amelia Pond single-handedly brings the fairytale back into the world, her world… and for everyone to see.

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tillthenexttimedoctor:

pursuingpositiveperspectives:

tillthenexttimedoctor:

…But that scene in The Big Bang, when Amy remembers the Doctor back into existence during her wedding to Rory, her parents in attendence… that is her first major triumph. Because she claimed back what was stolen, because she proved the magical to be real, because she demanded the universe to give her what she wanted and the universe did just that.I have seen people argue that it somehow devalues her story prior to this point, but for me that’s the most hopeful moment of all. The lost girl, with the house that was too big, who grew up to not recall the loving family she had or the wonderful man she came to adore. And she just has the power to change it all.

Because she’s Amelia Pond.

Well this is interesting„,now I’m starting to rethink Amy’s arc…

(Agency might not be the best term to use. Power might be better.)

Amy, when we meet her in series 5, is a person who has an unimaginable amount taken from her. The crack not only ate away at her life and stole away her parents, it robbed her of the very knowledge of what she had lost – memories of a happy childhood, full of life, not alone in the empty house in Leadworth, with an aunt who was neglectful enough that Amy, at the age of nine, was already used to fending for herself and playing up her confidence.

The truths that she did retain, the magic of reality, an alien crashing into her backyard with the promise of adventure, is something which no one believes. Even Rory is just playing a game. She’s the perpetual outsider in a village which does not even speak like her, full of people who think the impossible truth of her life is a mere story. And a dangerous one at that, madness even, psychiatrist upon psychiatrist telling her it isn’t real, to the point that after twelve years, even she doubts it.

And throughout the series, the Doctor never tells her the truth. He sees that lost little girl and feels kinship, and he takes her travelling, but he never tells her of the mess, of the tragedy, that is her past. He doesn’t tell her why she’s grieving. And they watch powerlessly as Amy loses another person she loves, Rory erased from existence and her memories. Amy was the girl who was running away on the night before her wedding and now she’s just a girl running.

And she acts. Oh does she act. Brave, wonderful, flawed, smart Amelia Pond. But she’s stripped of knowledge and truth and her entire history. Her freedom is tainted. It is there, in her very spirit, but it’s also an illusion. She doesn’t make sense.

So claiming all of it back is the single most important moment of series 5. All that damage the cracks in time waged on her life, on her mind, also give her the power to change, to retrieve, to heal. She brings back the parents she never had and always had. She brings back Rory Williams, the man she loves. And then, finally, she brings back the Doctor. Her Raggedy Doctor. Her stories are real. (Even more than that, they become real.) She single-handedly brings the fairytale back into the world, her world… and for everyone to see.

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clarabosswald:

“According to legend, wherever the Pandorica was taken, throughout its long history, the Centurion would be there, guarding it. He appears as an iconic image in the artwork of many cultures, and there are several documented accounts of his appearances, and his warnings to the many who attempted to open the box before its time. His last recorded appearance was during the London blitz in 1941. The warehouse where the Pandorica was stored was destroyed by incendiary bombs, but the box itself was found the next morning, a safe distance from the blaze. There are eyewitness accounts from the night of the fire of a figure in Roman dress, carrying the box from the flames. Since then, there have been no sightings of the Lone Centurion, and many have speculated that if he ever existed, he perished in the fires of that night, performing one last act of devotion to the box he had pledged to protect for nearly two thousand years.”

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