(no subject)

[beccaelizabeth]

I woke up so when my shopping arrives I will have clothes and a bit of being conscious.
I'm randomly achy in my joints and sort of generally annoyed about it.
Do you think Sentinel's get joint pain? Cause then it could be really tiny pain but with really high sensitivity. Ouching because of moving = bad.

I stayed up real late finishing reading a long story that actually really annoyed me. It decided to 'fix' things to the Doctor and Jack and Rose get back together. I routinely skip such stories because usually they annoy me. But I think this was a rec somewhere. Also, I keep not finding stuff to read lately. So I read it, and it turned out to 'fix' things by erasing all the difficult bits.

So talking about it means including sort of anti-spoilers about what never happened and some spoilers about what did.

So Jack never loved Ianto really and Ianto never loved Jack really and the Torchwood team are better off without him and that tidies that side up. And, okay, I can kind of live with that, you can get there from canon at the end of season 1 or if you ignore the asking for a date subtext, it's just kind of boring.

But then the Rose part kept bending things further out of shape. She comes back and the universes aren't broken and there's a magic machine that means it's easy to do? Well, okay, Time Lords used to do it, fine, whatever.

But the Master got simplified in one line so he ran away and hid before the Time War, didn't fight in it. That really wound me up. It was interesting poking my brain to see why. Because if the Master stood his ground and fought... well, there's the 'saving the thing you're standing on' level, clearly, so it's plausible. And there's the thing where once again the Master is closest to understanding the Doctor, just from the wrong side. I mean really, is it the stay at homes on Gallifrey who know why they do what they do, or the Renegades out there in the universe together? And then they both went through the war. So it's not just biology that says the Master is important to the Doctor. He's the other guy that knows. He just got more broken by it. But the other thing that winds me up, the not specific to Doctor/Master thing, is it takes a guy who fought in a war to try and save everyone and just writes it off, calls him a coward and a bad person and oh he couldn't have done anything that useful. Which is a bit like the shell shock guys in hospital in 2-03 and RL, only saying if they were that scared they must have never fought. So that's just wrong. And then there's the worrying tendency to oversimplify. I mean Doctor Who isn't hugely layered and deep about the bad guy's motivations anyway, but taking out that one little bit of twisty is just... misrepresenting how people work. Even the most total bastard that ever lives has the potential to do a good or useful thing sometimes. Even the best person has the potential to do a terrible thing. And that's what the Doctor and the Master embody, in the Time War. And taking that out veers once again perilously close to saying Good People Do Good Things Always, which is too much like saying all things done by a good person are good, whatever the things. This is the logic that leads people to do killing because their cause is just. Or torture to get the devils out. It's a tendency in the human mind, to excuse all the actions of people we sympathise with and demonise the actions of people we don't like, rather than applying the same standards to the same actions all the time.

And then there was what they did with Gray and John Hart. Talk about simplification. They killed Gray, had the Gray that John had hostage be a fake, and John Hart be the source of all evil, basically. He was threatening to blow up Cardiff, Gray wasn't involved anywhere. He hadn't been searching for his former lover's lost little brother that whole time since they were apart, he just used the image to mess with his head. And that little thing with the memory loss, that was him too. And the details of the plan in 2-13 all got changed so it was easier to fix... which actually follows logically from it not being Gray who plans it, and Hart's motivations being just to make Jack choose who he loves best, but this demonstrates how non-canon and oops was there canon over there the whole exercise was. Instead of having some complex compare/contrast with Rose's actions (which she did from love, so everyone forgives her) and Hart's actions (which he did from love, maybe, with a side order of fear, so he got forgiven) there's just love-Rose hate-Hart and it's all a bit boring.


If, to make your OT3 work as OT3, you have to erase other character's personalities and inconvenient actions and general importance to your OT3, it's not really convincing in the OT department.

Seriously.

And if your entire 'verse is rearranged for the convenience of one Rose Tyler, so everything she does turns out right and everything other people does turns out eeeeeevul, well, you have plenty of canon precedent right there, but it's the exact problem with a Mary Sue, so, you know, bad.

It's not just that I like Jack/Ianto. I'm a multishipper. There's enough of Jack to go around.

But if you have to shave bits off other people to prove the awesome of your favourites, how awesome are they really?

Everyone awesome. We seen it on TV already. Is kind of the point, with the Doctor and all his many and diverse friends. They're all different kinds of brilliant. And ignoring that is just... boring.

Comments

[louiex.livejournal.com]

There's only so much handwaving (or the preferred LALALAL HOPHOPHOP-ing)that can be done over things like that before everything is just blown away :D I totally know what you mean, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't (and sometimes its an AU that should just be labeled as such).

[beccaelizabeth]

yeah. and the trouble with AU labels is anything that brings Rose back is AU right there, so.