beccaelizabeth: my Watcher tattoo in blue, plus Be in red Buffy style font (Default)
beccaelizabeth ([personal profile] beccaelizabeth) wrote2014-12-29 07:04 pm

Doctor Who audios

Yeseterday I listened to two 7th Doctor audios, Starlight Robbery and Daleks Among Us.
There was plenty of plot with running around doing things, and I usually like 7, but my lingering impression at the end of the story was, that's a lot of dead women.
It's kind of not, because it's not a lot of women in the first place, but the percentage who end up dead by the end is very high. One of them survives. And we are at one point led to believe she's dead.
This is the kind of spoiler I'd rather put outside the cut, but social convention has its reasons too.
It's just, it makes it really, really clear who the center of the story is, and it is not the female companion.
The new guy, the one whose primary characteristic is fanboy, he gets featured extensively. He is apparently very attractive to multiple species, so women keep fancying him and letting him live and bringing him in on their plans. And then they get dead.
He's also epically inept, but he gets rewarded for it. Place on the TARDIS, boss acknowledges she shouldn't have been about to fire him, that kind of thing.
I can see why this character exists, but he's just a giant invitation to leave to half the human race.

What happens with Klein isn't cool either. She spends her time being a prisoner, thinking Sontaran suicide missions are pretty cool and then being suspected of being a nazi in both timelines. And she has a super secret origin that's even more complicated than the one we knew about? It's pretty much instead of giving her an interesting personality, things to do, or very many lines. She ought to have skills, she ought to have more skills than the fanboy dude and in roughly the same areas, but now the dude is there, and somehow she doesn't.

Maybe I'm being oversensitive and secretly she was essential to the plan and didn't spend the vast majority of the time waiting to be rescued. but that's not the way I heard it.

And so the story arc refocuses on men while devaluing the female companion and then killing off all the female one story arc characters.

Oh, and following a trend I grow ever more annoyed with, male antagonists, including actual facts nazis, get more time, attention, things to do, lines, backstory, and future prospects having survived stories, than the female characters get.

I'm sure nobody sat down and consciously decided that the trouble with Doctor Who is having too many women doing too much. They just sat down and decided that men were more interesting, and wrote a three disc story arc accordingly.


So I was bored, and felt strongly that the story didn't want me around.

Doctor Who gave me that feeling.



:-(



The bit with the naked statue of Ace just on reflection adds insult to injury.
(it gets demolished and the point of it existing is everyone there has forgotten her. this felt... unintentionally ironic.)




So, then, today I listened to a few 8th Doctor audios, starting at the beginning in the main range. Which means listening to rather clunky stories that have not mastered the art of audio and have the Doctor talking to himself a lot to describe what is going on. Plus, also, Charley Pollard.
I always want to give Charley a fair shake. Surely she doesn't annoy me all that much.
And Edwardian Adventuress who runs away to see the world sounds like a good start.
Except then everything from her voice on through actually does annoy me.
And I can't on the whole figure out why, except that smug entitled upper class who doesn't really believe bad things will happen to her yet and is already complaining the Doctor takes her to only nasty places when she's been offered all of time and space... kind of rubs me the wrong way.
I got as far as 'the stones of venice' today, a story I recall deciding didn't really need relistening to, but I'd forgotten why. I still don't like it. Charley's instant interest in helping the local underclass is a bit condescending, but well intentioned, and answering it by having her kidnapped, drugged, trapped into a forced marriage (that doesn't go through but the ones setting it up obviously wouldn't know that in advance), and just generally treated as bait and distraction... FFS, this is not what we're here for. And, yes, the Doctor gets captured and imprisoned too, but the rather significant differences include nobody sexualising it, his free will never being impaired, and the Doctor getting his own self out of it again.
Why are the adventures given to women so damn circumscribed? Why are we always the damsels? It makes no sense.



So here's the thing: The latest season of Doctor Who on the TV almost all annoyed the hell out of me, with two episodes that were acceptable. Listening to new Big Finish audios is feeling tedious and seeming full of the same gendered problems as everywhere else. Relistening to old Big Finish is just feeling like seeing cobwebs when the lights come on.

I appear to be bored of Doctor Who.



This is not a thing that should be possible, and is somewhat alarming.
... well, theoretically alarming, but mostly seems more just tiresome and blah.



I need to figure out what would be exciting. What would be interesting and engrossing and fun.
... having done cultural studies the list is never simple, but there has to be something.

It has to be something that invites me in and wants me there. That sounds basic but it's by no means guaranteed. And Doctor Who should give me that. The Doctor always wants new friends. He's standing in the TARDIS with the light spilling out and his hand out making an offer. All of time and space! Meet new people and mostly save them! And so many awesome women in this story!

Except the longer I'm here the more I see how we're treated, how we're always pushed aside and eventually kicked out, how we have to choose to follow his awesome life around and so very seldom get an awesome life of our own out of it.

My escapist fiction just keeps kicking me out of it. On purpose. Repeatedly.

And I know with Doctor Who specifically the only way to fix this, the proper only way, is for the Doctor to regenerate as a woman. After the scripts for the season have already been written, so nobody gets any bright ideas about everything or anything having to be different.

But there has to be other stories where we fly the damn ship.

I think I need to go look for those.

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

If you are unable to use this captcha for any reason, please contact us by email at support@dreamwidth.org