I really love this short trip. And our first glimpse at our new companion, Bill, looks incredible.
A couple of thoughts…
I’m getting MAJOR Ace and Donna vibes off of Bill – the sass, the directness, finding the humor and absurdity in her adventures, and her ability to completely baffle the Doctor.
I love using a short adventure to introduce us to the new companion. It gives us such a great look at Pearl Mackie, Bill, and the dynamic between the Doctor and his new companion.
Bill sounds like a really amazing character. Pearl Mackie describes her as “Fantastically written, cool, strong, sharp, a little bit vulnerable with a bit of geekiness thrown in.” This is pretty much everything I could’ve wanted.
Bill will be the first non-white companion to travel with the Doctor since Martha, and it was long past time for that to happen.
its so important to have disabled presence in children’s media, disabled kids grow up with really harmful messages about being burdens, ugly and unwanted and that needs to be challenged, we need to be showing disabled kids that they’re valued and amazing
like I remember a few years ago here in the UK, there was a disabled woman, Cerrie Burnell, who’s right arm ends a little past her elbow, who did some presenting on kids tv and parents wrote in and complained about her and said she was scary for children and shouldn’t be there because she was disabled
children are seen as being needed to be sheltered from the ~terrifying~ and ~horrifying~ reality of disabled people and that really hurts disabled kids and also massively contributes to adults hating and fearing disabled people since that’s what they were taught to do as kids
whether it’s disabled presenters or disabled characters, children’s media has to do more to acknowledge and celebrate disabled people
This is so important. We are unlikely to go through life without a single member of our family or a single friend being disabled. Disability is not uncommon. Disabled presence in media in general helps disabled children, helps children who will become disabled in early adulthood, helps children who have disabled classmates and friends, helps children whose parents are or may become disabled, helps parents who will have disabled children, helps teachers who will have disabled students etc etc on and on.
When I became disabled at age 20 the one school friend who stayed in touch, who didn’t ghost, had a mother with MS. I am 90% sure that’s what made the difference between her and the friends who just didn’t know how to deal with me.
15 percent of the world population are people with disabilities. That’s one in every seven people on the face of the Earth, a total of one billion people. If disabled people were our own country then we would be the third most populous country in the world, behind only China and India.
And yes, some conditions are age related, so the older you are the higher the odds of eventually becoming disabled.
The media does not even BEGIN to reflect the real portion of disabled people in the population.
CBeebies (the BBC children’s channel Cerrie Burnell presents) is really, really good at this. They run Something Special, which is specifically designed for kids with learning difficulties, and Melody, which is about a young partially-sighted girl (who is played by a young
partially-sighted
girl). They also have a puppet in a wheelchair amongst their cast of puppets, and most of their shows are signed I think?
(Also, Burnell is still one of the main presenters. Fuck those people who complained about her, seriously.)
tl;dr“Anyone can die” won’t be a truthful sentence until “any kind of character can be at the very heart of the story” and “anyone can run a TV show” are factual statements as well.
this tl;dr ^^^^^^^
this whole article. Mo Ryan is regularly preaching truth atm, I’m so glad she’s at Variety.
my fave thing that ever happened in dr who was when they had a bi girl protag who got murdered on accident and it was made out to be a shock value/furthering the main guy’s tragedy thing (the usual thing) but instead of leaving it like that they brought her back, made her immortal, and gave her a girlfriend and a time machine. the end. i’m very grateful for that
Also that time a lesbian was murdered by the monster of the week in
front of her horrified wife, gasped out some stricken last words,
collapsed –
And then came back to life none the worse for wear about five minutes later.
Let me tell you a story. Once at a party, I had all the little girls sitting around me and I was asking them about their favorite parts of all the princess movies. The birthday girl was sitting next to me, and tells me, “Princess, your skin is the same color as mine.” I smile and agree, and try to move the game along, but she interrupts and says, “Your skin is brown and you’re a princess. It’s the same color as mine, but you’re a princess.”
“Well, if my skin is brown and your skin is brown, and I’m a princess, then you must be a princess too.” I tell her. And then I spent the next 10 minutes assuring all the black girls at the party that yes, they have lovely skin and yes, they can be princesses with me.
This happens at most of the parties I go to. I have had my arm stroked, my hair patted, my skin color commented on more times than I can remember. I am not simply hired out to entertain a bunch of cute little girls dressed in poofy skirts who want to play with a big girl in a poofier skirt. I am hired out because I am an affirmation. For these little black girls (and boys! I’ve dazzled a few of them too) Princess Tiana is proof that for once, they can be special BECAUSE of the color of their skin, not IN SPITE OF.
Raise your hand if you’re actually quite excited about the Spider-Man reboot now, but simultaneously afraid about what ableist shit might happen to Harry Osborn (who is canonically schizophrenic, possibly bipolar, and an abuse survivor) if they decide to include him in there
Ok he’s only schizo and bipolar because he injected himself with the Goblin Serum.
And yes while his dad was a dick, he never beat Harry or even all that emotionally abusive. Just very distant and kinda neglectful until he went full wacko. (Unless Osborn did something recently in the comics)
That still doesn’t give him an excuse to be a fucking asshole trying to kill Peter on MULTIPLE occasions.
Harry Osborn is not a broken little fragile bird. He is his father’s son in every capacity.
That’s…not entirely right. Harry was diagnosed with schizophrenia after his LSD overdose, before he became the second Goblin:
And Norman’s abuse of Harry was a part of their story at least since the 90s:
(that’s Peter seeing Harry’s memories through his eyes, hence the Spider-Man costume)
And while no, it’s not an excuse for some of the shit he did (most of what happened between Harry and Liz was pretty fucked up too) even Peter and MJ, who bore the brunt of most of Harry’s supervillainy, wanted to get him help more than anything:
And Harry’s mental state is almost always depicted as something more or less beyond his control (though I imagine the hate he has for Peter is real):
So there’s that. (There’s also this, which is all of the above gone into in more detail.) It’s not about making Harry a ‘broken little fragile bird’, it’s about ‘can Marvel please treat mental health issues, especially very stigmatized ones, with some respect if they end up using Harry, because at the moment the most famous mentally ill character in the comic book world is the fucking Joker.’
the buffy episode “seeing red” came out in 2002 and in it, a lesbian character was accidentally killed by a bullet meant for somebody else, right off the back of an f/f love scene.
this episode of the 100 aired in 2016 and in it, a lesbian character was accidentally killed by a bullet meant for somebody else, right off the back of an f/f love scene.
i just want to grab every novelist and movie maker by the ears and screech no, exactly the same characters, just make them women into their face until they see reason
i want the farm girl with a destiny who rescues a prince who turns out to be her brother and loses a hand to the arch villain, who nobody mentioned was her mother
i want the smart-ass conwoman and her handpicked team of awesome ladies – the sisters, the new kid, the big one with a temper – who pines over that one guy who broke her heart whenever she’s not fast-talking her way out of a situation she accidentally got herself into
i want the heiress who fronts as a dumb and ditzy flirt and beats the crap out of super-powered villains at night, haunted by the memory of her dead parents and the wide eyed girls who donned tights and went out with her and didn’t come back – and the grinning madwoman who meets her head on time and time again
i want the disabled daughter of an imperial house who buys a ship on a whim on the way to her grandmothers and bluffs her way into a major command position and then has to explain to her mum, the prime minister, and her as-good-as-a-sister the empress, why she accidentally committed treason
i want the arrogant and goofy young woman who was abducted from her home planet as a child being forced to team up with a heavily scarred woman seeking vengeance for her murdered husband and son, a tree princess, an illegal experiment who named herself after her favourite kind of weapon, and the devastatingly handsome adopted son of the most feared woman in the galaxy (and we get lingering camera pans over his thighs and butt every time he changes costume, which is like four times in the movie, and at one point the heroine saves his life and then straddles him in a corridor for no apparent reason)
(for some reason this keeps deleting when I try to reblog, but description from the OP):
2.10.16
Larry Wilmore speaks to 11-year-old activist, Marley Dias, who has collected about 1,000 books with Black girls as main characters after she became frustrated with always “reading about White boys and dogs” in school.
