colour palette meme
↳ bill potts for taiey
doctor who
I feel like we need to talk about valid criticism.
Like, I just saw this transcript from a podcast about the Doctor Who Christmas special, with the obligatory “This is how M*ffat fucked up this time” commentary, and the point they were making was that Steven Moffat created the character of Bill Potts and made the Master a woman only as a knee-jerk reaction to people who criticised the lack of diversity in his work.
And that’s the grain of “Fuck You” that Steven Moffat puts into his writing. Steven Moffat writing diverse characters is like a teenager angrily doing chores he doesn’t want to do. And it’s like, this is a trivial task, this should not be such a big deal to you.
– The Hosts of Talk From Superheroes on Steven Moffat and Diverse Characters
Apart from the fact that I never, not for a single moment, felt that Bill was written with less than the upmost enthusiasm (I could be wrong about that, I don’t know what Moffat feels when he’s writing apart from what he tells people and neither do you), I feel like this is tremendously unfair.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m all about pointing out worrying patterns in storytelling so we can do better in the future, I’m all about telling an author “Hey, you keep doing this oddly specific mistake” so they learn. I’m a writer. I want people to point out things to me so I can do better. And I have my own beef with Moffat (see-> 95% of every creative decision he ever made on Sherlock).
But I feel like criticising someone for doing something wrong, then watching that person doing better, and then criticising that person again for not having it done right the first time around, only to then imply that their efforts to do better are not sincere, that’s just fucking mean.
If I were in Moffat’s shoes, that would be the point where I would hurl my notebook against the wall and withdraw to go live in a cave on some swamp island to write a dream journal and wear knitted cardigans.
You really don’t have to kiss someone’s arse for doing what you feel shoud have been done in the first place, you don’t need to give anybody a second chance if you don’t want to, and you can even just say “man, I just don’t like the guy” and leave it at that, but for heaven’s sake, you don’t smack people in the face for working on their flaws and yell “You want a cookie for that, asshole?”
I mean, even if Moffat wrote these characters as a “Fuck You” to the audience; what kind of a Fuck You is that? “Fuck you, you want female characters? Here, have lots and lots of them. You want lgbt representation? Have a whole bucket full of that. You want more people of colour? There you go.”
Thank you Moffat, that’s the best Fuck You I’ve ever been given in my life. What do your Piss Off’s look like?
