Whenever I hear that old chestnut about “lol superwholock and its queerbaiting” I always want to ask “…have you actually watched Doctor Who?” and the answer is usually no, and that makes me sad, that everyone thinks it’s a homophobic mess, because Russell T Davies.
Like, I have my issues with Russell T Davies (oh boy, do I have my issues) but back in 2005 he did something huge with Doctor Who, which was use it to – being gay himself – completely and utterly normalize queer relationships on British TV. And he did it really well and he did it really loudly, to the extent that you had homophobes both online and in the media complaining about his ‘gay agenda’ on pretty much a weekly basis. By the time the Doctor and Jack kissed in The Parting of the Ways, it was sort of cemented that Yes, Gay and Bi People Had A Place In Doctor Who Now. (Doctor Who has actually had a “gay following” since at least the 80s, but it really seems to be all but forgotten these days, although maybe not in the UK?)
And I know that people are right at this moment gearing up to type “That all went away with Moffat’s era, though” but it…mostly didn’t? Madame Vastra and Jenny were introduced and ended up a loving lesbian couple who faced down monsters constantly and yet remained alive. Clara and River both made allusions to relationships with women that revealed them to be bisexual. (Even though the show still hasn’t ever said the word, sigh.) Don’t get me wrong, this all sure as hell wasn’t/isn’t perfect – the T is still mostly missing from the LGBT representation the show has and that’s just for starters – but it was such a big, awesome deal at the time, it’s still making waves now even.
Essentially, it just seems a real shame that all the things Russell T Davies did for Doctor Who, and for questioning kids have just been forgotten, smushed together with a couple of other shows and completely dismissed. Because he really fought hard for it. Remember that lesbian adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that everyone rightly adored when it aired on the BBC? That wouldn’t have happened without Davis first setting the groundwork with Doctor Who.
let’s have a doctor who reblog spam
Regarding “Amy isn’t a real person/is just a blank snarky slate” etc…
It can’t just be people’s hatred for Moffat rubbing off on Amy, surely. It took two series of Who, two series of Sherlock and a hamfisted pregnancy arc for Moffat to really build up a hatedom – coming into Doctor Who series 5, people actually generally quite liked him. He’d given us Sally Sparrow and Nancy, for a start, and goodwill for Russell T Davies had really, thoroughly run out after the resolution of Donna’s story and quotes like “nine hysterical women [were the ones upset at Ianto’s death in Torchwood]”.
Amy was Moffat’s creation, we all know that – but back then people hated her even whilst quite liking her writer, way back in 2010. Complaints were plenty: why does she get to save the day two episodes in a row (The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks), why is she so stroppy, why is she so sulky? SFX Magazine had an ‘Amywatch: A log of (mostly) infuriating Pond moments’ for their reviews of Series Five, with comments like “There’s a rare instance of Amy looking cheerful here. Pause and savour” and criticism about her “defensive barrier of irony”. Posters on Gallifreybase etc complained a lot about how immature she was, or how spoilt she was (???) or how there was just something off about her.
…..Which was her mental health! The same thing that’s off about me!
Anyway. Literally one of the first things we learned about adult Amy Pond is that the various bad things that have happened to her throughout her life have given her some deep-seated mental health issues. “Four psychiatrists!” she spits at the Doctor in her very first episode. She shows symptoms of PTSD right from the beginning, she even does some hugely unsympathetic things in her first few episodes that hint at her state of mind.
And yet, no matter what, “Amy was just Moffat’s hot redhead wank fantasy” is pretty much the preferred narrative now. Which is discouraging, to say the least, because there’s a lot to her. All those complaints about her up there? Those are my favourite things about her – her immaturity and grouchiness and defensiveness. Not to mention her fearfulness, her self-esteem issues, her love of history, her love of art…
So I still can’t work about where this idea that she’s a Nothing or worse came from. Because her personality and trauma and relatable-ness is there! It’s all there, it doesn’t even take much looking to find! So, well-
I’m at the point now where I wanna know why Amy doesn’t get the divorce from her author that so many other characters do get, I guess. No-one comments on gifsets of Princess Leia in her slave outfit with anything like ‘lol, Leia was such a sexist wank fantasy”, they call the outfit itself – and the men who put her in it – sexist. S’like, Buffy’s generally thought of as being a separate entity from Joss Whedon, even after people started to call him out on his sexism. Martha Jones is likewise quite rightly considered a separate entity from Russell T Davies even though he’s made racist jokes (often involving his own characters) more than once. So I don’t get why Amy doesn’t get that, I guess. She gets to be an offshoot of the guy who made her and no-one’s really cared enough to look for more.
But why? Why didn’t people care enough? Okay, so lots of people dislike Amy as a character because of Steven Moffat, we’ve established that pretty thoroughly. What I really want to know is why people dislike her as a person. Because she hasn’t really done anything to be so written off except –
(you knew this would probably come around to this eventually)
– show a lot of the symptoms of mental illness. Like, a lot. (This is the woman who puts herself into a potentially fatal situation after Rory dies because “if this is real life, I don’t want it”; who responds to someone else holding a gun to their head with “I understand. Really, I do”; who has sobbing breakdowns a lot. Like, even if you really do feel she’s too unwritten to have a mental illness, you can see how she’d be quite valued to people with mental illnesses, right?)
So, uh, I guess what this comes down to is: what is it? What’s making Amy so unrelatable, such a blank slate, so unworthy of further exploration? Someone’s bound to jump in here with a “Maybe she should try being better written”-type comment, but we’ve already covered that.
What is it?