Mary Jane Watson, Amy Pond and Sansa Stark form a support group called ‘Redheads Who Get Hatred From People Who DO NOT UNDERSTAND What A Normal Reaction To Trauma Is.’
amy pond
For the commentary meme, skalja asked for a scene from Things They Talked About In The Playground. Which is easily the most disturbing, triggering thing I’ve ever written, so it’s under the cut.
Warnings: discussion of rape and victim blaming.
From the personal diary of H.M. KOVARIAN, 50/15/5145
At
some point I went through all the Doctor Who wiki to try and work out
when exactly A Good Man Goes To War was set and if I had any leeway with
the timelines and whatnot. I think I got the year either right or not
overly wrong.
The ceremony was a stupid idea.
Manton
gave a little speech, directed at his soldiers, about how it is the
highest honour for a woman to be a mother. About how marriage isn’t
marriage without kids (that directed, I know, at me- he knows what I
did),
Hey, Moffat, I stole your line! A year or so back, in your intro to the Good Man Goes To War bit of the Guide To The 2011 Series, you talked about how marriage can’t be considered real marriage unless you’ve had a kid. And really pissed me off. So…er…congrats. More on you later.
about how we must show Amy the utmost respect now. And her husband, too, if he arrives and proves to be an ally. (There has been talk about this possibility- it seems incredibly unlikely even to me, but we do not know what sort of man Rory Williams is.)
I really like the Legend
Of The Last Centurion thingy they played with a bit in Series Six. I
like the idea of Rory pretending to be an ancient, vengeful creature
when he’s really…not.
Anyway. He dreams of a new Mary and
Joseph with a little female Jesus- a dream soon to be dashed, I fear.
More so than they have been already, for things did not go as planned.
Manton gave his speech, and then he gestured to Amy Pond, up above them
all in her prison with her baby. She was dressed in white, like a ghost,
and she looked so small with the crowd beneath her.
If this
fic had a subtitle, it would be, simply, ‘Who undressed Amy’? Because
when she was kidnapped, there’s no way she was wearing that white gown
thing she gave birth in. Someone must have undressed her while she was unconcious. (Fun fact: That maaaaay be why I reacted so strongly to this.) Even before we knew that other stuff happened at Demon’s Run – something that left Amy barren – we knew they stripped her.
They raised their hands to her. Some of them clapped. Amy looked down
on them. I have read Manton’s primitive fairytales- the ones with which
he controls his lackeys- and Amy Pond looked in that moment much more
like a warrior of god than any of the soldiers down below.
With a
thousand men and women staring up at her, she raised her hand to her
chest. She undid the buttons on her gown, one by one, with her sleeping
baby in her other hand- and slowly but surely she disrobed entirely,
stood naked before us.
We all of us saw it, the scars and the
stitches crisscrossing on her skin. We were all of us forced, for less
than half a minute, to see. Her body altered by childbirth, legs
unshaven, breasts limp- eyes cold and calculating. She stared at me.
I got chills when I wrote that. Amy really does have no agency, no hope whatsoever here, and yet she still finds
a way to fight back against her captors, even if it’s just by showing
them the true price they’re all paying. It’s just…it just seemed so
in-character for her. Amy Pond knows a lot of things, but mostly I think
she knows how people’s minds work. She knew Kovarian would see her and be ashamed. It was the only triumph she was gonna get, and she took it without a second thought.
I looked back, of course, at the thick red lines. I could not be
ashamed of my own handiwork, of the collateral damage, of the egg I
broke. But eventually, like almost all the others did, I turned away
from Amy Pond. I have seen places on and in her that even her real own mother had not…
Madame Kovarian (who earlier in life, it is noted, gave up a daughter with red hair) slips up a little there.
it seemed obscene for her to be showing to men what only women had seen-
Madame Kovarian terrifies me in this because she geniunely believes she has a right to Amy’s body. Why? Because a) she needs it for a higher purpose and b) …the even more terrifying reason…she thought Amy had, through having sex, through being promiscuious, relinquished her own right to it. This is what Madame K says later to her: “Think of what you were before we found you. A vacant, pretty face who dressed like a slut and sold her mouth to men! You were a nothing then, and you are a nothing now. A human incubator.” Madame K is utterly and totally a misogynist and the worst kind of victim-blamer: Amy Pond is not the correct sort of woman, so she deserves everything she gets. It’s horrible…
…and
I’d be lying if I said some tiny part of it wasn’t influenced by
fandom. I love Amy. Adore her, and relate to her a lot. It stings when
people call her things like “just a pretty face” “not a character” “ a
wank fantasy” and so on. Some people say things like “Moffat obviously
hates women, because he wrote Amy as a slut.” I shouldn’t even have to
talk about what’s wrong with that, and yet…I did talk about it, because I
think that might even be what the fanfic is about in some sense. Or at
least what sparked it.
Who owns the body of a woman who’s not real?
I know the Amy I’m writing about in this fanfiction isn’t, can’t be, the exact same Amy Steven Moffat wrote into a glass tube. (Aside from anything else, I thought about the implications of her kidnapping and pregnancy, and he didn’t.) I mean, this Amy swears; original Amy is on a children’s show and can’t. The characers who surround this Amy can say the word ‘rape.’ And that’s just for starters.
But…characters
are always real people to the people who love them. So I was writing
Amy as if she was a real person: not created by Steven Moffat, not
created by anyone, just a person who walked into my life with all those
particular, horrible experiences. If someone had said those things to
the real-life Amy, that woman who doesn’t exist, they would have been…a
profoundly terrible person. Amy’s not real, so it’s all a moot point.
But at the moment I wrote Kovarian’s dialogue, I wasn’t thinking any of
that. I was thinking, “How dare you judge this person by what happened
to her, instead of what she is.” Amy says almost that exact thing, at
the end of the story.
Dr White reached for a control pad and
turned the lights off in her cell. I do not know if he punished her- I
don’t think he did, and certainly not in that way, I watched the
security cameras even after dark. But she did not get her DVDs, I know
that much.
The punishment MK was thinking of is exactly what you’re thinking, too. (I dunno if I went too far with that line. Maybe I did. I suppose this is at its core a story about misogyny, but I don’t know.)
Things They Talked About In The Playground is absolutely the most – important? – fanfic I’ve ever written: it influenced my original work massively. I’ve loved Doctor Who since I was sixteen, I’m twenty-six now, it’s been with me for a massive part of my life.
But mostly through my adulthood.
I used to work in a school playground; kids absolutely talked about Doctor Who. I hope they will for many years to come, but I am certain that some of them, especially the girls, will watch the Amy pregnancy arc later on and wonder – Who undressed her? Who spread her legs? My story gets a bit meta at the end. MK tells Amy children will talk of her in the playground, but there’s a real playground, real children, in real life. Amy herself sums up what was pretty much the reason I wrote this story:
“They still might talk about this in the playground,” she said. “When and if the story ever gets told. And they’ll wonder, eventually, they’ll wonder. They’ll wonder who stripped me. They’ll wonder who cut into me. They’ll wonder what went where, when that was done. They’ll wonder. And what will their parents tell them, when they ask?”
I want to teach my future kids to be critical of the media they consume. I’ll most likely be that parent. I may not – beyond “judge people by what they do, not by what was done to them” – know what to tell them.
But I’ll be so glad that I taught them to ask.
In Amy Pond’s first episode as companion, she saved the last of the Starwhales and everyone in the UK by using her observational skills and emotional intelligence to work out a solution. In her second episode as companion she used her intelligence again to figure out how to use the Daleks’ weapon against them hence saving London, and then used her emotional intelligence again to figure out how to stop the Bracewell bomb from detonating hence saving the entire world. In the next episode she saved herself from a Weeping Angel. She later saved her boyfriend from a Fish Vampire thing, saved Rory and the Doctor from pirates (swordfighting, no less) and saved Rory from Silence (machine gun!). She also survived alone in a containment facility for 36 years, before nobly sacrificing herself so that a younger woman could live.
Throughout her two series on Doctor Who she’s had this character arc where she goes from a childlike girl with abandonment issues who craves adventure and danger and is impulsive because she has no security in her life, to a woman who is secure and has her own business, own career, own relationship. Rory in Vampires of Venice says to the Doctor “You know what’s dangerous about you? It’s that you make people want to impress you. You have no idea how dangerous you make people to themselves when you’re around.” By the end of series 6, Amy doesn’t want or need to impress the Doctor any more. She’s stopped waiting. The Doctor doesn’t want her to sell perfume: she wants that for herself because (as has been established since the start of series 5) she loves being creative and she loves being in charge of things. She used her intelligence to go after what she wants, again. The other thing about Amy Pond is that she is a sexual subject, rather than just a sexual object. Okay, so she likes to show off her nice legs, and that’s her choice and it’s a realistic and common one. But she also doesn’t really care whether the Doctor fancies her or not: she wants him, she’s determined to have him. It’s a flaw actually, but it’s not a conventionally female one and I love that. She’s not only a woman who is in control of her sexuality, she’s a woman with commitment issues who initially would rather have a one night stand than get married. How often is that ever portrayed as acceptable for a woman? That’s a ‘male’ trait. Sure, she changes her mind eventually, but she does so at her own pace: no one in the text ever condemns her for who she is. She’s flawed, and that’s okay. She’s also entirely unjealous and gets on brilliantly with River from the moment they meet despite River fancying the man that she wants. So she’s sexual, but she’s also allowed to be intelligent, creative, brave and empathetic.
But one person is so distracted by a certain attribute of Ms Pond’s that she seems to have missed all this. This is what this “feminist” has to say about Amy Pond:
Amy has legs. Really good legs. Christ, do I wish I could say more than that.
…
This is, incidentally, in the context of her describing Doctor Who/Moffat as sexist. I have never argued that either Moffat or Doctor Who is perfect. But I have never, ever heard either of those say anything as blatantly misogynistic as to erase everything a woman is, everything she has achieved—to say that she is just a pair of nice legs.
And I know what people will say—it’s just a TV show. It’s never just a TV show. You’re never just insulting a female character. You’re insulting every woman who identifies with that character or shares her personality or values. Fuck it, you’re just insulting all women. Any woman who shows off her legs is nothing but her legs. Fuck off.
Let’s talk about Amy Pond. She’s feisty! And sexy! And she wears short skirts because she’s really sassy like that! She used to work as a strippogram, and then she became a model, and then the Doctor gave her a house and a car!
*Let’s talk about Amy Pond. She’s confident, quick witted and doesn’t take any bullshit. And sexy! She wears short skirts because she likes wearing short skirts, as lots of women do. She used to work as a strippogram and then she travelled with the Doctor, saving his life and her boyfriend’s and countless other lives, and then the Doctor gave her a house and car and then she earned her own money running her own business.She used to see therapists, but that’s ‘cus she’s a funny, kooky kinda girl!
*she used to see therapists because she refused to stop believing in the Doctor, and this forms part of her abandonment issues which are really crucial to her character arc
Y’know, I’m all for women owning their sexuality. But
“I’m not sexist but.”
I’m pretty sure that’s a fantasy of an “empowered” woman made up by a predominantly male writing team.
I’m pretty sure she sounds empowered to me and I’m a woman. I mean look at the first two paragraphs and then explain again how none of that makes her sound empowered?
Oh ho ho, we’re going to talk about the RTD era now! and how super duper feminist it was. Goody.
Donna held down a string of temp jobs, and tried to cope with the low self esteem she got from her mother.
Her mother, who was irrational, unreasonable and a hindrance, just like every mother that RTD ever wrote. Donna who was obsessed with marriage and ended up happy in the end by having her mind forcefully wiped and then getting married? Donna whose sexuality was treated as a joke? That Donna?
Martha was training to be a medical professional, and saved the planet Earth through a year of hard, practical work.True enough. Martha with another RTD Mother, and a father who went off with a woman who we’re supposed to believe is a gold digger on the basis that she’s blonde and tanned and appears legs first because that’s not a sexist stereotype at all. And her happy ending was being married as well, to the other leftover.
Rose worked in a shop, and was described by her creator as “selfish”.
Yeah, Rose who had “nothing at all” happen in her life before she met the Doctor and was willing to abandon her whole family for one man. She literally described herself as having died when she could no longer see him. And oh yeah, she had another RTD mother. And her happy ending was getting the man she wanted and her job was to “fix him” because of course women should fix broken men because that is their job and their obligation. Also the treatment that Rose puts up with from the ninth doctor is ridiculous and I imagine, given the comparison in Journey’s End, that TenII might treat her similarly.
These are girls I know, real girls who have jobs,
Like Amy Pond in fact, or do you not count sex workers or “models” (which she wasn’t) as having jobs?
who have lives that aren’t tangled around the Doctor
Ahahahaha. No.
who have skills,
Right because Amy doesn’t have any skills apart from her problem solving skills, her art and craft skills….
personality traits,
I can’t even be bothered.
emotions
Yeah, Amy Pond never shows any emotion at all.
Look, it’s a bad argument. For all the reasons listed above. That in itself I could deal with. It’s this part I can’t get over:
Amy has legs. Really good legs.
Honestly? If this person was looking for ways in which Amy Pond was an interesting, empowered character, she could find everything I put in the first two paragraphs up there—and much more. It seems she’s looking to prove Moffat is sexist and in the meantime perpetuating ideas that are sexist as fuck herself.
Amy can be the hero in as many stories as she likes, she can sacrifice herself so that another woman can live, she can be incredibly clever and brave and selfless, she can be flawed and she can grow more mature as the series goes on, and she can be independent and have her own business and totally be the dominant one in her relationship. But as long as she’s got her pins on display, Ms Pond gets “sexy, feisty, good legs”.
Nice one, fandom.
Not getting into Moffat’s writing (I’ve been into that…) I just want to say that this bit of the original article-
She used to see therapists, but that’s ‘cus she’s a funny, kooky kinda girl!
…is upsetting. Jesus bloody christ, there’s nothing funny or kooky about feeling so horrible you try to help yourself by going to a therapist! Granted, Amy was probably made to go by her aunt or parents, but there’s nothing funny about that either, it probably wasn’t a nice experience for any of them.
HOW do you look at that- at a girl who had such a troubled childhood she sought help or had help sought for her, at a girl whose mother still talks about ‘the psycharists we sent her to!’ years later- and think that character detail does Amy a disservice? It made me relate to her!
I’m slightly angry now, I gotta admit. Just come talk to me- I’ll tell you about all those hours spent in waiting rooms or crying at people- I’ll tell you how funny and kooky it was.
