kafkaesquely | *Shows up late to New Year with a poorly mixed smoothie and a secondhand copy of Nabokov's Lolita*

Yeah, I know it's a bit late for a New Year post, but hey, whatever. I could say I've been busy, but actually I haven't done what i was supposed to do (i.e. studying) so I'll admit that I've been:

Knitting (expect progress posts of my infinity scarf)
Reading (expect reviews)
Watching doctor who (expect recaps. Spoiler: I don't like the Moffat era, so beware).
Watching Adventure Time (I want to catch up with this one)

So that's pretty mucho has been my Christmas break (which won't end until January 9th, but it's close enough to be afraid of finals). And as it's customary: I'M NOT DEAD.

Current Mood: scared
Current Music: this year - the mountain goats

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kafkaesquely

Yeah, similarities are always Important. But I also loved Martha because, while Rose seemed to have given up (left high school unfinished and started working on a shop, and suddenly unemployed), Martha was still fighting, and intended to do so until the very end. On those episodes where she had to play the Doctor's maid and people told her she couldn't be a doctor because she was a woman and black she wouldn't stop to tell those people how stupid they sounded. That was the moment I learnt I couldn't love a companion the way I loved Martha.

I think I understand you. We're so used to see badly developed plots and characters that we think that's the only way it can be done. I always see it on female characters: they are usually classified as "sluts" or "virgins", and while I see it clearly, most people say I'm overthinking stuff. But that's because I've read about TV and movie tropes, and it's a subject I'm very interested on. I think I can apply what you said (the difference tumblr has made for me... ) on my experience, because it helped me see awful stuff, but also articulate what I thought on the awful stuff I already noticed. And also, I'm taking TV and film studies at college, so over the course of the past year and a half I've learnt to notice the little things on scripts (mostly). That has also made a difference, I think.

From:

alasse_irena

Yes! This is one of those things I really loved about Martha - she was really deeply involved and invested in her life without the Doctor, so that it as well as providing a backdrop to her character - it was something she wanted actively to keep doing.

It's a little bit like that children's novel trap of making your main character an orphan - sure, it stops you having to deal with the logistics of protective guardian + adventurous child, but it starts to feel like a cheat after a while, and one day I really want to pick up a book where the first thing the teenaged protagonist does when she encounters the supernatural is ring her mum like, "You'll never guess what, Mum - vampires are real!"

Giving your Doctor's companion no pressing commitments at home makes it *easier*, yes, but it also misses out on some really interesting character stuff that I think Martha played out really well - eventually realising that her life with the Doctor wasn't worth as much to her as the life she was leaving behind to travel with him...

And yes - I've never formally studied scriptwriting, but I think all the writing-about-writing stuff I have read has made me far more able to explain *why* I didn't like a thing, as well. So you go from, "That book was boring" to "That book was boring because..." (Speaking of, I often find Moffat's episodes really badly paced? Like, they will be so slow that I'm bored for the first half an hour, and then it's almost as though they realise suddenly that they've only got ten minutes left to wrap it up, so the endings feel really rushed... I don't know, is that one just me?)

From:

kafkaesquely

I feel like the end of the fourth season was a way to get rid of all the RTD's crew. There was no way any of then would show up for any unsolved business (yup, still thinking about this).

Yeah, it has come to a point where teenager fiction is pretty much all the same. All orphans that turn out to be part of some ancient legacy related to magic creatures or races and have to save their king from the big bad final boss. It'd be great to get one of those. Like "mum, this guy told me I'm half a dragon?? Also he's cute??" and mum has a vote on the thing.
Instead of seeing no giving the characters a strong backstory at home as *easy*, I see it as lazy writing. That's something I liked about the beginning of Amy's story arc. She was getting married, but she was running away from her responsibilities. In the end it all came to the front line and it became a TARDIS business so it really didn't matter, but it was a neat starter point.

Being able to explain why you don't like the thing is amazing. Gives you a deep understanding of the story, the characters and their reasoning. There's also I've learnt that bothers me: realism. People complains about realism on tv and movies all the time, when those don't even try to be "realistic", but believable. Anyway we have jerks saying movie dragons don't look like real dragons. Ugh.
I've found many Moffat's episodes badly paced, too. Whether it's because they have a lot of filler, or because they built very complicated plots, they end up being annoyingly slow, and in the end they fail when it comes to solve everything in a believable way.

From:

alasse_irena

Re Amy: yes, that was something I was quite interested in at the beginning of Amy's arc, and then it was all about Amy fancying the Doctor (having fancied him since she saw him that one time when she was a kid??), which was disappointing. (Not to mention that that arc contained one of the early appearances of Moffat's weird non-consensual kissing kink...) In the end, I just never really connected with her the way I did with RTD's companions.

(I also remember being really ticked off at the Doctor for making a mess of a seven-year-old's kitchen in the middle of the night, promising her a trip away, and then buggering off... Seriously, it's a time machine. Couldn't he have rocked up 20 years late, gone, "Oops, missed a bit," and then headed back? Or at least stuck around to clean up.)

I think the thing where people complain about realism in movies that are not going for realism is not so much an idiot saying, "Those look *nothing* like the dragons I've seen in real life" as it is just people having difficulty expressing the lack of believability. So when they say, "The way it flies is just not realistic," what they mean is that when they looked at it, they weren't convinced... Not jerks, just people not expressing themselves as clearly as you need them to?

With regard to teen novels, I would just really like to see a protagonist who learns about the existence of a hidden supernatural world and doesn't turn out to already have some sort of secret connection to it. Because a lot of the nice thing about that kind of novel is reading it with the feeling that, yes, this could happen to any normal person, and it would be really nice if it really was "any person" and not, "any person whose estranged father was secretly a sorcerer".

From:

kafkaesquely

I feel like that is also happening with Clara now (I last watched S08E02). There's background, but most likely it will die pretty soon. I've read somewhere that Moffat's companions are cool because they have an independent life, but in the end it doesn't matter because the only interesting thing about them seems to be about the Doctor. In the end, there's no difference with RTD's companions. Also, yeah, physical attraction and love are the only attachments a woman knows. And non-consensual kissing? Yeah, they crave that shit.
At first I loved Amy so much, and I still somehow do, but there are many things that doesn't make much sense to me. My main example is she losing her baby. After it happens, she still travels with the Doctor and Rory and nothing happens?? That's not how a mother deals with losing her child. And I've been told she didn't know she was pregnant so it made sense, but then again once the kid was born she took care of her for a while, and protected her not just like a baby that must be protected, but like a mather protecting her new born baby girl. They quickly turned her into a mother, but suddenly she's not.

That's something I did't understand, but then again, I didn't understand it when it happened on Season 1 (when Rose was supposed to be gone for 12 minutes, but in the end it was 12 months and the Doctor didn't take her back because that's what time machines are about).

Ok, I see your point. It's like saying " I see the green halo on those people because they used a green screen and they did it poorly" or "that CGI is not well rendered", but in a simplistic way. Sorry I made a jerk of myself.

I still enjoy reading my teen novels because there's a great part of me on them (I always secretly wanted to be like the cold-hearted yet caring character, because let's face it, there's always one), but you're right. The way I see it, they want to make you think you're special, but instead they tell you "you MAY also be special" which is not the same.

From:

alasse_irena

Don't worry - you didn't make a jerk of yourself, and there are definitely people out there crying for realism in silly places (see: those people who say "But it's *realistic*" about the lack of female characters in a book which literally has dragons). But I do think there is a place to say things like, "Her friendship with the centaur just didn't seem realistic to me". You know, there aren't any real world examples to compare it to, but we have the imagination to figure out what it *should* be like.

I'll be honest, most of what I read is still teen novels, and that's why I have so much to say critiquing them: I have seen so many things I've loved, or wanted to see again, and I have a tonne of favourite books, but there are also things that, the more I read, the more I *want* to see, that just aren't appearing, and one of them is the "ordinary teenage girl" being, literally, an ordinary teenage girl, whose interesting traits and plot points come from her own choices and actions rather than things she's born with?

I found the way Amy dealt with pregnancy and motherhood and losing her child very unsatisfying, for probably the same reasons. It was like, on the one hand, the writers wanted to make her a mother, and on the other hand, they didn't want to deal with the consequences, so the baby was stolen, and then Any's desire to find her never really followed up. To me, finding Mels and growing up alongside her didn't really satisfy the desire to raise her child I felt like Amy was written with, and so it felt like the show let something that was important to Amy drop without following it up...