the thing they don’t tell you about getting into les mis as a teenager is that there is no point at which you gain the capability of being normal about enjolras and grantaire. bc here’s the thing folks. grantaire asked for enjolras’s permission, to give him the honor of dying next to him. enjolras smiled and took his hand. and then they died. holding hands. and then there’s “you believe in nothing” / “i believe in you”, the sun/moon imagery, the comparisons to achilles/patroclus and orestes/pylades etc, and dont get me started on george blagden. it’s insane
Occasionally people rag on Martha for “leaving all of time and space because a boy didn’t like her”. And I’m like hang on a minute, time and space? Think about it. Where exactly do we see Martha Jones go on the TARDIS?
Elizabethean London, meets Shakespeare. Nice.
The slums of New New York
The slums of old New York
Home.
SS Pentalion, a cargo ship currently crashing.
Stuck in 1913
Stuck in 1963
The end of the universe, as everything dies
Messaline, unterraformed planet of soldiers
They go to one nice place. There is one other mention of having been somewhere nice. (The moon landing, four times) They never spend the start of an episode just larking about, or end the episode intending to hang around and have fun. (Think Long Game, Idiot’s Lantern, Fear Her, stuff like that.) (Smile, Thin Ice, Vincent and the Doctor, The Rebel Flesh, Unicorn and the Wasp, Midnight, Fires of Pompeii…)
Then consider that a lot of the time it wasn’t just ‘not fun’. She has to spend two months in a British village in 1913 working as a maid, with no protection from the racism surrounding her; working in a shop for some period in 1969. Walking the conquered Earth, alone, for a year.
There isn’t a problem with “bad things happen to characters in action-adventure shows”. But the uniformity of Martha’s experiences is unique.
There’s also the fact that she’s allowed to make that choice. She’s choosing to stay with her family because she knows how it is to be far away and powerless to keep them safe. She chooses to stay and be a doctor. Most companions don’t get to make that choice. She took that opportunity and nobody should hate her for that.
