The more I read RTD's comments on TW CoE...

[beccaelizabeth]

... the more I feel the need to... well my pacifist principles are conflicting with the rest of that comment, so I'm basically down to 'complain loudly about it on the internet, and to his face if ever the opportunity occurs', but dumping ice on his head is way up there in the alternatives. Grrr.

http://community.livejournal.com/torch_wood/5176208.html

Spoilers there and under the cut

Question: One of my readers wondered if you were under pressure to de-gay Torchwood and that's why you killed him off.
DAVIES: I think you can forget about people picking up gay rights as an issue. It's rather like children picking up nursery blocks and waving them in the air but having no idea what it entails. We’re talking about issues in my entire life here, not just one small television program. If they did research they’d go and look at the history of gay and lesbian characters that I have put on screen. They should simply grow up, do some research, and stop riding on a bandwagon that they actually don’t know anything about.

... what? What?

What assumptions is he even making there?

Is he somehow under the impression that, what, only very young straight people are complaining about this?

The implication it's childish to worry about this stuff... does he really think it's only his life? I just... I'm trying to find an angle to read this from that makes it not insane and I'm ...


Okay, so he probably means we should read this one death in the context of all his other work. I can see how he could mean that. And then we could look at all the not-dead queer people in all these other stories.

My problem is, look at all the dead queer people! All over TV! And movies! And Torchwood!
And I think this is a valid problem.

Or to put it another way, I don't care how many characters he didn't kill, he killed this one.


Ah, realised: It's the pressure part he's annoyed about. It's the thing where you say 'this writing contains stuff we read as homophobic' and someone hears 'you bad person' and it all goes a bit horribly wrong.


Right. So.

I am annoyed he thinks we're childish. I think he's making a major mistake there.

I do not think he consciously set out to be homophobic.

I do think I would rather like, just for once, to have some actual living queer characters all over my TV. Who are not evil. Or mentally ill. Or morally wrecked.

Heroes. Please.

Comments

[aeron-lanart.livejournal.com]

I do agree with one thing that was said though.

But death is death in this case. It would devalue the entire plot if we brought him back.

In Rusty's hands, it would.

Leave it to the Fic writers!

And while dumping ice on his head might feel good I don't recommend it. I tried it with a pint of water over someone's head once - and then promptly got banned from attending a bunch load of cons.

[beccaelizabeth]

In RTD's hands... I'm just hoping he leaves the stories I care about. He's no good at endings, he's not very good at setup, and I can live without the bits he is good at cause they're not that unique.

Getting banned from cons would be bad.

Maybe I should wait until I'm a famous writer person and can get invited to my own cons.

[louiex.livejournal.com]

You should read the interview he did with AfterElton.com there (http://www.afterelton.com/blog/michaeljensen/russell-t-davies-answers-the-question), where RTD flippantly disregards the fans upset as merely being the lack of hot man-on-man action being on tv anymore. The editor makes a specific note to say that is NOT what he asked about nor is it the answer he was looking for.

As many people have said online, he sounds like a pouting child who realizes he's in trouble and is only angry in response to it. And as for the whole 'no, he's really, really dead'; that's crap. Rose was really, really gone once. Rhys was really, really dead too. Ianto got backlashed back to season 1 where he was just the quiet, unsure of himself boy, who was Jack's armcandy and got to be axed out for DRAMA.

[beccaelizabeth]

If the man is writing science fiction he needs to deal with the fact the setting has science fiction possibilities. Saying they would cheapen the story is saying he set it in the wrong place, imho. Plus why do we need another story about grief? Stories about living are pretty damn cool too!


AE: Why did you decide to kill off Ianto?
RTD: The problem is, if someone hadn’t died you couldn’t have a threat that great and have them seem untouched by it. So on the first day of discussions on the story [for Children of Earth], that was my first decision – that we would have to have a horrible war casualty. And it had to have the greatest effect on Captain Jack because I always sort of knew that Jack would kill his grandchild in the last episode … and in order to do that you got to have a Captain Jack who is badly, badly damaged.

So it [Ianto's dying] was maximum damage to Jack. And it had to be Jack who was damaged because he’s the sort of moral player here. He’s the one that gave away 12 children back in 1965 to these alien gods. So actually he paid the price to damage him, to make this a tale of retribution and perhaps redemption all come around to him, you have to kill his lover.

I can follow his logic here, but he's flat wrong about the bolded bit. If RTD had set the choice up properly, which he didn't but lets ignore that, if it was kill one child to save the world, he doesn't have to be damaged, he has to be logical. Killing Ianto to drive him to it cheapens *Steven's* death and the weight of the choice involved. Saying Jack wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been grieving his lover puts really ugly spin on the whole thing.

The series was about children and risk to children. That makes Gwen and the baby the logical choice, the death that ties to the theme. If you start killing adults then instead of killing one child to save millions of children he's killing a child to save adults.

I can see that it's Jack that's the moral player, I can see that it's Jack who has to pay for handing the children over... except that it wasn't his choice, just his doing. If he had said no they'd have done it anyway. He wasn't presented as having any other options. So that whole moral thing? Kind of a mess. Because Ianto was the one who said the option is always standing up and resisting, and Ianto got killed for *that*, not for Jack, not in-world.

So he's just wrong.

[louiex.livejournal.com]

My reaction to that meta is a rather inappropriate UNF but yeah, that's exactly the reason why the end is filled with fail. Ianto's death had no point because you're right, Jack's made terrible choices before per Spock's always relevant 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'.

But in the end, the children all were being sacrificed to save the adults anyway. The deal was being made, children rounded up; Jack finally listened to Ianto about standing up and fighting too late and it got them both killed.

From the dramatic sense, I agree that it'd of been far more poignant if the death Jack had to endure was solely Steven's. It would be the painful rehashing of mixed morals we saw in Small Worlds, as well as sever the ties to this 'family' that Jack was trying to rekindle; it'd be a victory built on a failure of his morals and those around him. That might very well drive Jack off planet, Ianto still there for cuddles and love or not.

On an aside, I think the thing that bugs me that RTD is so focused on people being miffed at the lack of Jack and Ianto SEX as opposed to mere couple-esque interactions is ridiculous. There were so many bits where they could show the audience, as you said before in another post SHOW don't TELL, the love that they have. Any first time viewers would see Jack being far more emotionally distant from Ianto than he was with Gwen unless one or both of them were about to die. Couple discussions are either shrugged or laughed off, death is the cause for their one hug and two kisses, and that's not even going into the whole Jack turned down sex because of BEANS issue. I'm not running about asking for there to be scenes like the hot-house, but c'mon XD Ianto's fessing up to his sister he cares for this man in ways that confuse the hell out of him while Jack barely gives him a second glance for most of their scenes? I can't imagine what that must have been like for a first time viewer. Then pile atop that the rather tragic/romantic death before the 456 and I'm sure a non-fan viewer was a bit puzzled since there was very little season 3 context.

But yeah, killing off someone else to prime Jack to be forced to make a bad decision does seem pretty slap-dashed of an excuse. He was hired back in 1965 because he was capable of staring in the face of these situations and being able to walk away with his grin still in place; it's not like it would be a new concept to Jack.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods*
especially to cold!Jack - characterisation was... odd, served only that one moment.


but the child-to-save-adults thing was something the bad guys were doing, but if it's Ianto's death motivating Jack then...


and it wasn't that he listened too late. It was that there was no plan. Shouting at the aliens doesn't usually work.

[wiked-94.livejournal.com]

i'm still living in the hope that, after seeing nanogenes/nanoforms in sarah-jane adventures, ianto will come back.
i can live in hope

[beccaelizabeth]

hope is nice. but it puts all the power in the hands of the exact same peoples as screwed it up in the first place. I find it more productive to live in fanfic.

re: your icon - Jack is omnisexual. He fancies tentacle whatsits. And even girls. So it's not funny.