Loves Them All (in some way)
Dec. 9th, 2008 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainshadedThis started out as a comment on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
biichan's post, but got too long to inflict on someone else's journal.
The anon meme is all that is worst about fandom. Evil, evil place. Ever since just the first few pages of post one seriously depressed me with the level of hate and stupid in fandom, I try to ignore it.
I love fandom, but increasingly my definition of fandom is my flist; lovely, sane people.
I will be always be grateful to my best friend for introducing me to the new series and RTD to making it, but only for this leading to discovering how much more awesome the Classic series is. At the moment, my level of interest is low enough that I don't care who Eleven is.
I love the Classic fandom and will take it being quiet over being like New Who fandom any year. The idea that hate is being directed at Classic characters makes me very sad, because it threatens one of my favourite things about Old School fandom, that I can like, love and ship characters without being categorised. I love Liz and Romana, but I don't hate Jo and Ace on principle, I quite like what very little I've seen of them.
Also, despite having seen little of Jo, I am confident that the Doctor never told her that Liz would know what to do.
Although I'm glad that Internet fandom didn't exist while the Classic series was on the telly because JNT seems to have had something about Sarah Jane very similar to RTD on Rose.
I read a Doctor Who: The Companions book by JNT from the 1980s and while it was actually a) about the actors and creation and b) pre-Sarah companions averaged about a couple of lines (Jo's was 'Katy now lives in Australia'), he found time to go on about how SUPER-SPECIAL and SPARKLY and UNIQUE Sarah Jane was and how much he loved her and how she was so STRONG and LOYAL and CLEVER and STOOD UP TO THE DOCTOR (true enough, but) and NO COMPANION HAD EVER BEEN LIKE THAT BEFORE, EVER so much that I found myself almost disliking her, before I remembered that I actually liked Sarah. I fear I may have lost the battle of liking Rose after S4 and she was my first companion, she was a big part of why I got into DW.
Although a certain level of regard is of course necessary in a Doctor/companion relationship, this can be expressed in different ways and doesn’t need to be romantic. At all. Companions don’t need to be validated by the Doctor’s romantic love in order to be liked, otherwise Susan would be the most reviled companion ever. Nor do they need a great destiny to replace being in a romantic relationship with the Doctor; I don't need Donna to be "the most important woman in creation" and actually would have preferred it if she wasn’t, seeing what that led to which basically seemed to contradict the whole ‘Donna is equal to the Doctor’ thing.
I'm a multi-shipper (and all of them place me as an elitist 'Other', yay!), but I absolutely loathe the idea that romantic love > platonic love. It sounds like something RTD would say! Oh wait, he did!
I love the subtext of Classic Who, that it is open to interpretation (yes, it is) and that's part of the reason I hate watching the Confidentials and having 'ultimate answers' pronounced upon me. We watched the end of PotW and the Confidential as a rerun on BBC Three once while my parents were waiting for the program that came afterwards and I was disagreeing with everything that was being said (until 'SHUT UP, Emma, we don't care!). Likewise, River Song. It's not made clear in the episode and really, 'the Doctor's greatest love' is a huge pronouncement to make.
But not quite as lengthy. Ramble ends now so I can go and eat chocolate and watch Classic Who.
biichan's post, but got too long to inflict on someone else's journal. The anon meme is all that is worst about fandom. Evil, evil place. Ever since just the first few pages of post one seriously depressed me with the level of hate and stupid in fandom, I try to ignore it.
I love fandom, but increasingly my definition of fandom is my flist; lovely, sane people.
I will be always be grateful to my best friend for introducing me to the new series and RTD to making it, but only for this leading to discovering how much more awesome the Classic series is. At the moment, my level of interest is low enough that I don't care who Eleven is.
I love the Classic fandom and will take it being quiet over being like New Who fandom any year. The idea that hate is being directed at Classic characters makes me very sad, because it threatens one of my favourite things about Old School fandom, that I can like, love and ship characters without being categorised. I love Liz and Romana, but I don't hate Jo and Ace on principle, I quite like what very little I've seen of them.
Also, despite having seen little of Jo, I am confident that the Doctor never told her that Liz would know what to do.
Although I'm glad that Internet fandom didn't exist while the Classic series was on the telly because JNT seems to have had something about Sarah Jane very similar to RTD on Rose.
I read a Doctor Who: The Companions book by JNT from the 1980s and while it was actually a) about the actors and creation and b) pre-Sarah companions averaged about a couple of lines (Jo's was 'Katy now lives in Australia'), he found time to go on about how SUPER-SPECIAL and SPARKLY and UNIQUE Sarah Jane was and how much he loved her and how she was so STRONG and LOYAL and CLEVER and STOOD UP TO THE DOCTOR (true enough, but) and NO COMPANION HAD EVER BEEN LIKE THAT BEFORE, EVER so much that I found myself almost disliking her, before I remembered that I actually liked Sarah. I fear I may have lost the battle of liking Rose after S4 and she was my first companion, she was a big part of why I got into DW.
Although a certain level of regard is of course necessary in a Doctor/companion relationship, this can be expressed in different ways and doesn’t need to be romantic. At all. Companions don’t need to be validated by the Doctor’s romantic love in order to be liked, otherwise Susan would be the most reviled companion ever. Nor do they need a great destiny to replace being in a romantic relationship with the Doctor; I don't need Donna to be "the most important woman in creation" and actually would have preferred it if she wasn’t, seeing what that led to which basically seemed to contradict the whole ‘Donna is equal to the Doctor’ thing.
I'm a multi-shipper (and all of them place me as an elitist 'Other', yay!), but I absolutely loathe the idea that romantic love > platonic love. It sounds like something RTD would say! Oh wait, he did!
I love the subtext of Classic Who, that it is open to interpretation (yes, it is) and that's part of the reason I hate watching the Confidentials and having 'ultimate answers' pronounced upon me. We watched the end of PotW and the Confidential as a rerun on BBC Three once while my parents were waiting for the program that came afterwards and I was disagreeing with everything that was being said (until 'SHUT UP, Emma, we don't care!). Likewise, River Song. It's not made clear in the episode and really, 'the Doctor's greatest love' is a huge pronouncement to make.
But not quite as lengthy. Ramble ends now so I can go and eat chocolate and watch Classic Who.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-09 08:49 pm (UTC)romantic love > platonic love
This drives me absolutely crazy. Probably at least in part because I've run into people (mostly females) in real life who seem to believe the same thing and will happily dump their friends for Love Interest Of The Week. Which never seems to end well for them. But on a less bitter-personal-life level, in fandom it drives me insane because a certain subset of shippers use it to invalidate every other companion (or general character, sometimes) except their Chosen One. And being naturally inclined towards multishipping and preferring subtext to in-your-face text and falling in love with completely obscure characters in all fandoms...this puts me rather at odds with that subset.
(The fact that I don't particularly like their Chosen One also puts me at odds with them, but whatever.)
I always felt like a companion ought to be validated by their own unique awesomeness, in which case all the companions (even the ones I don't like!) are equally but uniquely important and special in the Whoniverse. The idea that their importance/specialness hinges on how much the Doctor wants to score with them is...creepy and squicky and exclusionary and totally against the feeling of Old Skool Who.