![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI decided to focus on A Good Man Goes to War. Because. I don't know, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I've been rewatching the Amy and Rory and 11 and River episodes. I'm up to A Christmas Carol. There's a lot of very upsetting themes in these things. It's not just Daleks and Cybermens and Silurians, it's suicide and child abuse and... well, more suicide and scared children. I'm used to things having more of a cloak on, but here the monsters are, mostly human looking and frightened of plausible things.
And then there's the time travel stuff, and trying to sort it out in your head. Which is a bit less plausible. But still really about things like losing a child or not really knowing the important things about someone you love.
I just watched the extras on the season 6 discs, the Night on the TARDIS set. No, I haven't seen before, far as I can remember I bought the discs and, well, felt ill and didn't get around to watching them. That's levels of ill that I do not wish to repeat, that is. Blergh.
One of them has him yelling for River to tell Marilyn to take the biplane or something like that. It makes the throwaway Marilyn joke quite a bit less creepy, if he's going off to have adventures with her later. Or possibly earlier, there's no knowing with him. But it struck me as an unfortunate throwaway reference in the Carol, and this mollifies that a bit. Cause he doesn't throw her away.
The bit where he's telling Amy that everyone's memories are all true and it's Time getting rewritten... on the one hand, cute, on the other hand... it's hard enough being crazy without ideas like that floating around. It's a tiny bit like saying all the nightmares are true, as well, all the couldn't bes and never weres. So, less cute the more I think about it.
"Cheer up. Have an ice cream."
... yep, that's totally helpful...
Amy has two whole lifetimes and Rory has two lives with really lopsided amounts of data in them and goodness knows what the Doctor can remember and we saw Kasran get his whole life redone and it's just very scary if you actually think about it, so it's good to know that ice cream is the only necessary answer. :eyeroll:
It's creepy though because time travellers can mess up a lot of lives. If everyone's wonky memories are because time can be rewritten then either there's a lot of time travel or there's a lot of knock on effects from any time travel. This seems like a pretty good reason to not time travel, if everyone ends up with doubled memories or a feeling like they've forgotten something really important. The version where any change has already happened is a lot safer than the version where time can be rewritten. It's hard to see time tourism being moral if it just revises memories all down the timeline.
And then there's the ones with 3 of River. (After 2 of Amy, and with 2 of the Doctor. Do we now know too much about Moffat's happy place? :eyeroll: ) She's like that past present future ghosts bit but all on one night and probably without knowing. But only probably, because the Doctor isn't the only one with secrets. And he says she never changes, which could be one why she gets wound up about changing in Angels take Manhattan. But he might mean the significant bits never change. Otherwise he's kind of blind, because we just got the quick version of how she does change. Some bits don't but other ways change a lot. They have this weird relationship of not really knowing each other and it's epic sad in rather adult ways.
And her first night and last night are all locked together and how does he even cope?
Except everyone's like that for him.
So it's like girl in a box in Christmas Carol, everyone he knows has a countdown, and even if for most people he doesn't have such a precise knowledge of the end, every day he spends with them is another he's used up on the way to none left. He lives so much longer, everyone's like that to him.
Except the TARDIS. His true love.
I was thinking though, how does his baby rocking cradle thing end up in the TARDIS if it were the one he was in as a baby? He stole the TARDIS. It wasn't his as a baby... was it? Did he steal his Dad's TARDIS?
Sneaking out with River while her parents are asleep... except he has to break in to prison to go get her to do it... *blinks*
It do leave rather fun acres of extra time for adventures, since now its canon that he doesn't sleep as much as his companions so he has other different friends for night times.
Huge, mad possibilities.
I was going to write something more proper lit theory ish though.
Things I have been reading lately... were not as useful as I might have hoped.
Trasker had a lot to say about 80s and early 90s action movies but I didn't find books on more recent television and gender. Except the Buffy one I already own and haven't re-read for this. That's still not very recent.
I should have studied longer ago, everyone's looked at it so there's stuff to actually read.
There was stuff about action hero men and how they're always getting beaten up, so it's not just the running around being violent, there's a lot of being not-exactly-victims too.
Not much relevant to AGMGTW but Rory don't half spend a lot of time being ... well, dead, actually, but also getting shot first and drowning and suchlike. Also the Doctor got very beat up in The Big Bang. Dalek zapped. But in action movies people get beat up in the rain while wearing very little.
There's a lot in those two Trasker books about the tendency to get action hero and heroines half naked and make them fight in the rain. Is about vulnerability and clinging clothes, muscles as armour and spectacle, contradictory impulses of power and objectification. Which is all well and good, but I think it is also, importantly, about being filmed somewhere warm.
Doctor Who is not filmed somewhere warm.
Doctor Who is filmed in an aircraft hangar where the only one who didn't consider being freezing their most prominent memory is the one in the Sontaran suit, which usually overheats.
Torchwood did do some being rained on. They got wetsuits to wear under their clothes.
Gareth did not get a wetsuit. Gareth did a lot of lying around in water without having a wetsuit. Gareth was unamused at this.
But in general, if there is rain on Doctor Who or Torchwood, it's because Britain is bloody raining again. Same with some of the snow. There's snow in the xmas episodes because season, but there's snow some of the rest of the time because weather happened to them. This is also a difference in budgets, since big budget movies can film on a purpose built sound stage with control over its environment, or can wait for a good day for the weather. Doctor Who has to live with whatever happens, if at all possible. So, snow, and rain.
And costumes that are mostly designed to let actors wear thermals under them if necessary.
And then there's Amy.
Hungry Earth / Cold Blood (is that the other way around?), she's spending the whole episode explaining she dressed for Rio. While the lizard scientist reckons women are clearly more resistant to cold than men.
But she's not wearing very much very different from usual.
Her skirt in the Comic Relief sketch, the one which causes the problem because "my skirt, my husband, and your glass floor", is actually longer than many of the other things she wears. Certainly longer than the kissogram policewoman, though she did spend substantial time in character pulling the skirt down and looking slightly embarrassed.
So, my theory on action movies and how action hero warrior costumes in Britain are going to cover more, that makes perfect sense, right up until we see Amy's legs.
Which we do.
A lot.
they're usually wearing tights though, unless she's in her nightie. Tights of varying thickness can be surprisingly adaptable to weather conditions.
I have not seen action heroes in tights outside of very specific genres. Mostly Shakespeare era.
Not that Shakespeare did action heroes as such.
They're more specific than just people that do fighting.
So I read a lot about action heroes and mostly about how they're not in fact relevant to Doctor Who.
There was a bit about dressing up as your own gender in a weirdly pathologised way, like crossdressing but for uniforms and being hyper masculine or something.
homovestism? Dressing as a man, if you are a man, probably in uniforms or in a stereotypical way, as a way to allay anxieties and raise self esteem.
... I wrote it down but it wasn't what that bit was mostly about and also it's a weird idea.
But you can see how Captain Jack or Captain John are a performance, are pushing gendered costumes to the point they just look like a costume rather than a natural gendered look. Rory the Roman is the same kind of thing. Camp constructed gender, like drag only matching. Somebody somewhere has to have written about that.
Trasker had a lot about different sorts of women in action movies and cowboy films and other sorts of stuff.
So there's River Song, using guns, driving the TARDIS, fixing tech. Action heroine! The Doctor plus guns in high heels.
All the fun stuff.
Also, never mind locking ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, how about the locking ‘masculine’ and ‘powerful’ being really the problem. Active women mess with previously stated boundaries.
There were bits about tomboys, who break stereotypically feminine roles but usually get bundled back in a dress at the end to get married. Also about how women having power, shooting guns especially, usually being 'explained' within the text by reference to their relation to men. Like, maybe they only had a father, so they grew up just like him, or they didn't have a father, so they had to take on the role. Father died so they have to do his job is a really common one, there were examples of it explaining the new sheriff in town. Or they had a husband but he died and again, they had to take over the role. So tomboys aren't just masculine because they felt like it, they're masculine because of a lack of men, or an excess of men (which makes no sense because how can opposites have the same effect? Oh wait, ideology!). When there's precisely the right number of men around, ie one, in a heterosexual relationship with them, then the woman can go back to being girly and feminine and not use guns any more and no more having adventures.
There's examples of feisty or spunky females, wearing high street fashions that tend to be a bit more masculine, like in Speed, driving the bus. But then in Speed she gets to be the victim at the end and that makes her ready for a het relationship? That sounded bizarre. But there were a lot of pages demonstrating a pattern, which amounts to, women can be strong, or they can be shagging a man.
This is made of suck.
River and Amy break all those rules. River has guns and shooting people and driving the TARDIS and fixing tech and general being awesome. Backwards in high heels. While dating the Doctor. And while travelling with her dad.
Her dad, who is the Last Centurion, and in no way emasculated or insufficiently manly. Well, there was that one time the psychic paper called him a eunuch, but by the point we find out he's a dad, he's very kick arse. So the women don't need to step up to fill in for a lack of man, they just step up to be awesome anyway.
Buuuuuuut I can argue the flip of that too, since Melody Pond was actually raised by a woman, Madame Kovarian, as far as we know.
She was intended as a weapon against the Doctor.
... I read a thing about alien women where there was a planet of the Amazon women type setup where they abducted women to deprogram them from patriarchy and send them back to fight men.
... I LOLed and made notes in the margin that it can look like that's what happened to River. Someone wanted rid of this powerful white male who swans about as if he owns the place, and so they found a woman and taught her all the things that went wrong were because he didn't fix them, and then set her to kill him.
But mostly, River is with the Doctor, and does not let him be the boss of anything, and protects him, with guns, if necessary. And River travels with her dad and still kicks all the arse. There is no explaining away River's power as being because of lack of man.
... sort of.
And then there's Amy. and again there's the tension where I can argue it either way. She grew up without a dad, in the original history... no, wait, in the pre Big Bang history that was actually highly edited. After Big Bang she could remember both. Huh, it's after Big Bang she gets the swords and guns sort of thing to do. Before that she was more about lock picking and remembering things.
She travels with her boys, and they do do rescuing her a lot, but they take turns, sort of.
I don't know, I've been taking notes to answer this very question, and I'm not sure Amy does rescuing more than the once so far. But it was a very good once! Something blue!
Oh, no, Space Whale! That's twice.
And her dreams saved the world in the first episode.
Victory of the Daleks she saved the world by understanding the power of fancying someone.
Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone she was definitely the rescue-ee, except she did save herself once first.
Vampires of Venice was again a being rescued, but she went to rescue Isabella and that almost worked, and it was one of the scream for help get help times which is better than screaming and it not working.
Amy's choice pissed me off beyond the telling of it. No saves. Kills.
Hungry Earth and Cold Blood... she spent a lot of it in a box, and her attempt at rescue mission with gun really emphatically didn't work. Victim, not rescuer. But she did manage to get herself out of the restraints via pickpocketing, so she saved herself a little.
Vincent and the Doctor: Mostly screaming. Some flirting. No actual rescuing.
The Lodger: Screams and being rescued, but with some useful reading off a screen. ... no, that doesn't really help.
Pandorica Opens: well she dies. That's kind of a problem.
The Big Bang: Little Amelia saves big Amy sort of. Then Amy saves the Doctor, yaays!
She is not an action heroine. River is easy to see because tech and guns, masculine style powerful. Amy is harder to decide about because mostly she does talking and being a bit flirty and making people happy and understanding them a bit. She's much more likely to be screaming for help than fighting off anything ever. But the talking is helpful and so is the screaming even. And the dreams and stories and remembering let her understand things the Doctor misses. That's quite a lot of power, when the Doctor is supposed to be so smart.
And it's a more stereotypically feminine power, is flirty and understanding.
So maybe they're both powerful in different ways?
But Amy keeps on changing, she'll have quite a different score card by the end of season six.
The thing that got me when I first saw it, and which is worth writing down in a theory thing, is that she doesn't get married off, she doesn't have to stop having adventures to have a heterosexual grown up life, she just keeps having both. Brings her husband along. Has part time adventuring when her career allows it. The can have it all approach.
Even brings her kid along from a certain point of view, just it involves time travel so her kid grew up with her and is most of the time quite a lot older.
... kids that take care of their parents is a self help book theme point I keep thinking I should be able to do something with.
So there's different sorts of power from the two main women, the guns sort and the flirting sort. River does the flirting sort too, and Amy ends up doing the guns sort too. And they don't need excuses about not having men around to do it for them. Quite the contrary, the Doctor needs River around to do some things for him.
There's the thing from the TARDIS dissertations book that says screaming womens are easier for kids to identify with. I need to type up the quotes from that.
And there's the whole Mulvey thing about the male gaze and cinema and that's really about power and identifying with the powerful and objectifying the powerless. Because it's fun to be powerful.
Those things are opposites though, one says powerless is easier to identify with, the other says powerful is easier and more comfortable.
But it's more fun if they start powerless and get powerful.
There was a bit in Trasker about Red Sonja and that, how it happens in a lot of heroine movies so maybe it's part of the point. Sarah Connor runs away from the Terminator, learns what Kyle has to teach her, tries to save Kyle by adopting a military persona, then when Kyle dies kills the Terminator herself. Evolution, progress, learning. Starts ordinary and relatable, becomes powerful.
Companions can do that.
... I'm not saying they always or often do, but they can.
So Amy is a random kissogram girl with some lockpicking and pickpocket skills (really Amy? you practice on what? wait, you'd lost the key to those handcuffs...)
but eventually she's this kick arse leader of soldiers, has all the memories and specialist knowledge needed, and can use gun.
but then she backs down from that, too angry is too Dalek like, stops being that and...
throws herself off a building because she can't live without Rory.
again.
Really, it's creepy and sick how they die for each other a lot.
Rory died for the Doctor that one time but you got the impression he thought seeing his own future meant he had to survive so mostly he died of stupid. Or ignorant, which does a good impression of stupid.
So there's all that, power and powerless and identification and gender
and then there's the military stuff
Rory the Roman, the church militant, River, Amy
and how it messes people up and gets them killed
the Doctor being too military is changing the meaning of Doctor, no longer a wise healer, but a great warrior
and that made him turn his whole life around
and now he's getting himself forgotten
I object strongly to him making himself forgotten
stories tell us not that monsters are real but that they can be defeated
if he gets rid of all the stories of the defeats of the Daleks, everyone will act different about Daleks
remember when Jack was all "I'm sorry, we're all going to die"? He only changed his mind because Doctor.
If the Doctor stories are all gone, then nobody will know all those times of fighting back and winning, they'll just be like Jack, curled up in a corner scared.
The problem wasn't being famous or winning a lot.
the problem is maybe the tactics, maybe the blowing up entire fleets to ask a question, little things like that.
Stories tell us how they can be defeated
and while the 'get by with a little help from my friends' approach demonstrated a lot of good things, and the way said friends used to be enemies was an important point too
blowing stuff up... didn't work out so good.
Rory was a nurse once.
Sontaran nurse dying in glorious battle? Not as much fun as he'd thought it would be.
That's why I picked this episode, such a big glaring comparison it made there.
So there's a being a soldier messes you up point
which plays interestingly with traditional depictions of masculinity as military
and with River being both a bit trad masculine (guns guns boom)
and also rather messed up
there's also also the child soldiers thing
Britain still recruits 16 year olds
so that's a current political Thing.
Sontaran nurse was nearly 12.
Melody the baby being taken to be trained up.
So: theory things
weave Trasker and Mulvey and that TARDIS thingy together better
find more to say about the military bits
... feel a horrible sinking sensation as one becomes convinced this wouldn't fill an essay, much less a dissertation.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm handing in tomorrow, this is my best shot thus far, I have nothing.
Balls.
I've been rewatching the Amy and Rory and 11 and River episodes. I'm up to A Christmas Carol. There's a lot of very upsetting themes in these things. It's not just Daleks and Cybermens and Silurians, it's suicide and child abuse and... well, more suicide and scared children. I'm used to things having more of a cloak on, but here the monsters are, mostly human looking and frightened of plausible things.
And then there's the time travel stuff, and trying to sort it out in your head. Which is a bit less plausible. But still really about things like losing a child or not really knowing the important things about someone you love.
I just watched the extras on the season 6 discs, the Night on the TARDIS set. No, I haven't seen before, far as I can remember I bought the discs and, well, felt ill and didn't get around to watching them. That's levels of ill that I do not wish to repeat, that is. Blergh.
One of them has him yelling for River to tell Marilyn to take the biplane or something like that. It makes the throwaway Marilyn joke quite a bit less creepy, if he's going off to have adventures with her later. Or possibly earlier, there's no knowing with him. But it struck me as an unfortunate throwaway reference in the Carol, and this mollifies that a bit. Cause he doesn't throw her away.
The bit where he's telling Amy that everyone's memories are all true and it's Time getting rewritten... on the one hand, cute, on the other hand... it's hard enough being crazy without ideas like that floating around. It's a tiny bit like saying all the nightmares are true, as well, all the couldn't bes and never weres. So, less cute the more I think about it.
"Cheer up. Have an ice cream."
... yep, that's totally helpful...
Amy has two whole lifetimes and Rory has two lives with really lopsided amounts of data in them and goodness knows what the Doctor can remember and we saw Kasran get his whole life redone and it's just very scary if you actually think about it, so it's good to know that ice cream is the only necessary answer. :eyeroll:
It's creepy though because time travellers can mess up a lot of lives. If everyone's wonky memories are because time can be rewritten then either there's a lot of time travel or there's a lot of knock on effects from any time travel. This seems like a pretty good reason to not time travel, if everyone ends up with doubled memories or a feeling like they've forgotten something really important. The version where any change has already happened is a lot safer than the version where time can be rewritten. It's hard to see time tourism being moral if it just revises memories all down the timeline.
And then there's the ones with 3 of River. (After 2 of Amy, and with 2 of the Doctor. Do we now know too much about Moffat's happy place? :eyeroll: ) She's like that past present future ghosts bit but all on one night and probably without knowing. But only probably, because the Doctor isn't the only one with secrets. And he says she never changes, which could be one why she gets wound up about changing in Angels take Manhattan. But he might mean the significant bits never change. Otherwise he's kind of blind, because we just got the quick version of how she does change. Some bits don't but other ways change a lot. They have this weird relationship of not really knowing each other and it's epic sad in rather adult ways.
And her first night and last night are all locked together and how does he even cope?
Except everyone's like that for him.
So it's like girl in a box in Christmas Carol, everyone he knows has a countdown, and even if for most people he doesn't have such a precise knowledge of the end, every day he spends with them is another he's used up on the way to none left. He lives so much longer, everyone's like that to him.
Except the TARDIS. His true love.
I was thinking though, how does his baby rocking cradle thing end up in the TARDIS if it were the one he was in as a baby? He stole the TARDIS. It wasn't his as a baby... was it? Did he steal his Dad's TARDIS?
Sneaking out with River while her parents are asleep... except he has to break in to prison to go get her to do it... *blinks*
It do leave rather fun acres of extra time for adventures, since now its canon that he doesn't sleep as much as his companions so he has other different friends for night times.
Huge, mad possibilities.
I was going to write something more proper lit theory ish though.
Things I have been reading lately... were not as useful as I might have hoped.
Trasker had a lot to say about 80s and early 90s action movies but I didn't find books on more recent television and gender. Except the Buffy one I already own and haven't re-read for this. That's still not very recent.
I should have studied longer ago, everyone's looked at it so there's stuff to actually read.
There was stuff about action hero men and how they're always getting beaten up, so it's not just the running around being violent, there's a lot of being not-exactly-victims too.
Not much relevant to AGMGTW but Rory don't half spend a lot of time being ... well, dead, actually, but also getting shot first and drowning and suchlike. Also the Doctor got very beat up in The Big Bang. Dalek zapped. But in action movies people get beat up in the rain while wearing very little.
There's a lot in those two Trasker books about the tendency to get action hero and heroines half naked and make them fight in the rain. Is about vulnerability and clinging clothes, muscles as armour and spectacle, contradictory impulses of power and objectification. Which is all well and good, but I think it is also, importantly, about being filmed somewhere warm.
Doctor Who is not filmed somewhere warm.
Doctor Who is filmed in an aircraft hangar where the only one who didn't consider being freezing their most prominent memory is the one in the Sontaran suit, which usually overheats.
Torchwood did do some being rained on. They got wetsuits to wear under their clothes.
Gareth did not get a wetsuit. Gareth did a lot of lying around in water without having a wetsuit. Gareth was unamused at this.
But in general, if there is rain on Doctor Who or Torchwood, it's because Britain is bloody raining again. Same with some of the snow. There's snow in the xmas episodes because season, but there's snow some of the rest of the time because weather happened to them. This is also a difference in budgets, since big budget movies can film on a purpose built sound stage with control over its environment, or can wait for a good day for the weather. Doctor Who has to live with whatever happens, if at all possible. So, snow, and rain.
And costumes that are mostly designed to let actors wear thermals under them if necessary.
And then there's Amy.
Hungry Earth / Cold Blood (is that the other way around?), she's spending the whole episode explaining she dressed for Rio. While the lizard scientist reckons women are clearly more resistant to cold than men.
But she's not wearing very much very different from usual.
Her skirt in the Comic Relief sketch, the one which causes the problem because "my skirt, my husband, and your glass floor", is actually longer than many of the other things she wears. Certainly longer than the kissogram policewoman, though she did spend substantial time in character pulling the skirt down and looking slightly embarrassed.
So, my theory on action movies and how action hero warrior costumes in Britain are going to cover more, that makes perfect sense, right up until we see Amy's legs.
Which we do.
A lot.
they're usually wearing tights though, unless she's in her nightie. Tights of varying thickness can be surprisingly adaptable to weather conditions.
I have not seen action heroes in tights outside of very specific genres. Mostly Shakespeare era.
Not that Shakespeare did action heroes as such.
They're more specific than just people that do fighting.
So I read a lot about action heroes and mostly about how they're not in fact relevant to Doctor Who.
There was a bit about dressing up as your own gender in a weirdly pathologised way, like crossdressing but for uniforms and being hyper masculine or something.
homovestism? Dressing as a man, if you are a man, probably in uniforms or in a stereotypical way, as a way to allay anxieties and raise self esteem.
... I wrote it down but it wasn't what that bit was mostly about and also it's a weird idea.
But you can see how Captain Jack or Captain John are a performance, are pushing gendered costumes to the point they just look like a costume rather than a natural gendered look. Rory the Roman is the same kind of thing. Camp constructed gender, like drag only matching. Somebody somewhere has to have written about that.
Trasker had a lot about different sorts of women in action movies and cowboy films and other sorts of stuff.
Cinematic images of women who wield guns, and who take control of cars, computers and other technologies that have symbolized both power and freedom within Hollywood’s world, mobilize a symbolically transgressive iconography. At the most fundamental level, images of the active heroine disrupt the conventional notion […] that women either are, or should be, represented exclusively through the codes of femininity. The critical suggestion that the action heroine is ‘really a man’ [...] stems from this assumption and represents an attempt to secure the logic of a gendered binary in which the terms ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ are locked together.
So there's River Song, using guns, driving the TARDIS, fixing tech. Action heroine! The Doctor plus guns in high heels.
All the fun stuff.
Also, never mind locking ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, how about the locking ‘masculine’ and ‘powerful’ being really the problem. Active women mess with previously stated boundaries.
There were bits about tomboys, who break stereotypically feminine roles but usually get bundled back in a dress at the end to get married. Also about how women having power, shooting guns especially, usually being 'explained' within the text by reference to their relation to men. Like, maybe they only had a father, so they grew up just like him, or they didn't have a father, so they had to take on the role. Father died so they have to do his job is a really common one, there were examples of it explaining the new sheriff in town. Or they had a husband but he died and again, they had to take over the role. So tomboys aren't just masculine because they felt like it, they're masculine because of a lack of men, or an excess of men (which makes no sense because how can opposites have the same effect? Oh wait, ideology!). When there's precisely the right number of men around, ie one, in a heterosexual relationship with them, then the woman can go back to being girly and feminine and not use guns any more and no more having adventures.
There's examples of feisty or spunky females, wearing high street fashions that tend to be a bit more masculine, like in Speed, driving the bus. But then in Speed she gets to be the victim at the end and that makes her ready for a het relationship? That sounded bizarre. But there were a lot of pages demonstrating a pattern, which amounts to, women can be strong, or they can be shagging a man.
This is made of suck.
River and Amy break all those rules. River has guns and shooting people and driving the TARDIS and fixing tech and general being awesome. Backwards in high heels. While dating the Doctor. And while travelling with her dad.
Her dad, who is the Last Centurion, and in no way emasculated or insufficiently manly. Well, there was that one time the psychic paper called him a eunuch, but by the point we find out he's a dad, he's very kick arse. So the women don't need to step up to fill in for a lack of man, they just step up to be awesome anyway.
Buuuuuuut I can argue the flip of that too, since Melody Pond was actually raised by a woman, Madame Kovarian, as far as we know.
She was intended as a weapon against the Doctor.
... I read a thing about alien women where there was a planet of the Amazon women type setup where they abducted women to deprogram them from patriarchy and send them back to fight men.
... I LOLed and made notes in the margin that it can look like that's what happened to River. Someone wanted rid of this powerful white male who swans about as if he owns the place, and so they found a woman and taught her all the things that went wrong were because he didn't fix them, and then set her to kill him.
But mostly, River is with the Doctor, and does not let him be the boss of anything, and protects him, with guns, if necessary. And River travels with her dad and still kicks all the arse. There is no explaining away River's power as being because of lack of man.
... sort of.
And then there's Amy. and again there's the tension where I can argue it either way. She grew up without a dad, in the original history... no, wait, in the pre Big Bang history that was actually highly edited. After Big Bang she could remember both. Huh, it's after Big Bang she gets the swords and guns sort of thing to do. Before that she was more about lock picking and remembering things.
She travels with her boys, and they do do rescuing her a lot, but they take turns, sort of.
I don't know, I've been taking notes to answer this very question, and I'm not sure Amy does rescuing more than the once so far. But it was a very good once! Something blue!
Oh, no, Space Whale! That's twice.
And her dreams saved the world in the first episode.
Victory of the Daleks she saved the world by understanding the power of fancying someone.
Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone she was definitely the rescue-ee, except she did save herself once first.
Vampires of Venice was again a being rescued, but she went to rescue Isabella and that almost worked, and it was one of the scream for help get help times which is better than screaming and it not working.
Amy's choice pissed me off beyond the telling of it. No saves. Kills.
Hungry Earth and Cold Blood... she spent a lot of it in a box, and her attempt at rescue mission with gun really emphatically didn't work. Victim, not rescuer. But she did manage to get herself out of the restraints via pickpocketing, so she saved herself a little.
Vincent and the Doctor: Mostly screaming. Some flirting. No actual rescuing.
The Lodger: Screams and being rescued, but with some useful reading off a screen. ... no, that doesn't really help.
Pandorica Opens: well she dies. That's kind of a problem.
The Big Bang: Little Amelia saves big Amy sort of. Then Amy saves the Doctor, yaays!
She is not an action heroine. River is easy to see because tech and guns, masculine style powerful. Amy is harder to decide about because mostly she does talking and being a bit flirty and making people happy and understanding them a bit. She's much more likely to be screaming for help than fighting off anything ever. But the talking is helpful and so is the screaming even. And the dreams and stories and remembering let her understand things the Doctor misses. That's quite a lot of power, when the Doctor is supposed to be so smart.
And it's a more stereotypically feminine power, is flirty and understanding.
So maybe they're both powerful in different ways?
But Amy keeps on changing, she'll have quite a different score card by the end of season six.
The thing that got me when I first saw it, and which is worth writing down in a theory thing, is that she doesn't get married off, she doesn't have to stop having adventures to have a heterosexual grown up life, she just keeps having both. Brings her husband along. Has part time adventuring when her career allows it. The can have it all approach.
Even brings her kid along from a certain point of view, just it involves time travel so her kid grew up with her and is most of the time quite a lot older.
... kids that take care of their parents is a self help book theme point I keep thinking I should be able to do something with.
So there's different sorts of power from the two main women, the guns sort and the flirting sort. River does the flirting sort too, and Amy ends up doing the guns sort too. And they don't need excuses about not having men around to do it for them. Quite the contrary, the Doctor needs River around to do some things for him.
There's the thing from the TARDIS dissertations book that says screaming womens are easier for kids to identify with. I need to type up the quotes from that.
And there's the whole Mulvey thing about the male gaze and cinema and that's really about power and identifying with the powerful and objectifying the powerless. Because it's fun to be powerful.
Those things are opposites though, one says powerless is easier to identify with, the other says powerful is easier and more comfortable.
But it's more fun if they start powerless and get powerful.
There was a bit in Trasker about Red Sonja and that, how it happens in a lot of heroine movies so maybe it's part of the point. Sarah Connor runs away from the Terminator, learns what Kyle has to teach her, tries to save Kyle by adopting a military persona, then when Kyle dies kills the Terminator herself. Evolution, progress, learning. Starts ordinary and relatable, becomes powerful.
Companions can do that.
... I'm not saying they always or often do, but they can.
So Amy is a random kissogram girl with some lockpicking and pickpocket skills (really Amy? you practice on what? wait, you'd lost the key to those handcuffs...)
but eventually she's this kick arse leader of soldiers, has all the memories and specialist knowledge needed, and can use gun.
but then she backs down from that, too angry is too Dalek like, stops being that and...
throws herself off a building because she can't live without Rory.
again.
Really, it's creepy and sick how they die for each other a lot.
Rory died for the Doctor that one time but you got the impression he thought seeing his own future meant he had to survive so mostly he died of stupid. Or ignorant, which does a good impression of stupid.
So there's all that, power and powerless and identification and gender
and then there's the military stuff
Rory the Roman, the church militant, River, Amy
and how it messes people up and gets them killed
the Doctor being too military is changing the meaning of Doctor, no longer a wise healer, but a great warrior
and that made him turn his whole life around
and now he's getting himself forgotten
I object strongly to him making himself forgotten
stories tell us not that monsters are real but that they can be defeated
if he gets rid of all the stories of the defeats of the Daleks, everyone will act different about Daleks
remember when Jack was all "I'm sorry, we're all going to die"? He only changed his mind because Doctor.
If the Doctor stories are all gone, then nobody will know all those times of fighting back and winning, they'll just be like Jack, curled up in a corner scared.
The problem wasn't being famous or winning a lot.
the problem is maybe the tactics, maybe the blowing up entire fleets to ask a question, little things like that.
Stories tell us how they can be defeated
and while the 'get by with a little help from my friends' approach demonstrated a lot of good things, and the way said friends used to be enemies was an important point too
blowing stuff up... didn't work out so good.
Rory was a nurse once.
Sontaran nurse dying in glorious battle? Not as much fun as he'd thought it would be.
That's why I picked this episode, such a big glaring comparison it made there.
So there's a being a soldier messes you up point
which plays interestingly with traditional depictions of masculinity as military
and with River being both a bit trad masculine (guns guns boom)
and also rather messed up
there's also also the child soldiers thing
Britain still recruits 16 year olds
so that's a current political Thing.
Sontaran nurse was nearly 12.
Melody the baby being taken to be trained up.
So: theory things
weave Trasker and Mulvey and that TARDIS thingy together better
find more to say about the military bits
... feel a horrible sinking sensation as one becomes convinced this wouldn't fill an essay, much less a dissertation.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm handing in tomorrow, this is my best shot thus far, I have nothing.
Balls.