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May. 25th, 2026 05:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have relistened all the Charlotte Pollard from the main range.
That includes the three with Mila at the end. Paper Cuts was a very good one.
But the range did a weird thing where they'd written Charley into a corner where she'd never let the Doctor go and then it budged her out of the way and made a new exaggerated copy of her to make that behaviour creepy and then solved that with a good being blown up and that somehow fixed the Charley problem? Like she could become a grown up off screen. Obviously they gave her some pretty spectacular reasons to change behaviour, since the consequences of her actions included the entire Viyran mission, five genocides and the near extinction of the human race at an indeterminate date that probably breaks the web of time, but the weird that I am objecting to is the whole Mila caricature and sacrifice of it all. We couldn't watch Charley have a What Have I Done moment? And she always relied on the Doctor to fix it so seeing him have to nearly die to fix it is the jolt she needed. So I. suppose it made sense but it was weird sense.
Sometimes I get the feeling that fangirls are being told off for behaviour the range has written. It's weird.
Someone wanting to be a companion so much she does an identity theft about it is an interesting beginning, but the only appropriate resolution is to have her become her own person, and Mila instead is implied to leave all her own terribly selfish traits behind from the necessary learning. Which feels creepy. Also kind of like Ng and Gwen, which was creepy.
I don't know, something about how they wrapped that up felt like they'd written themselves into a corner and then put a mirror up and walked out through it.
... which would be fine in genre anyway and is basically what physically happened in Time of the Daleks so it is difficult to come up with a comparison.
They set up a question and answered a different question and it felt a bit unsatisfying.
Having listened to all the Charley up to this point I am not encouraged to listen to her some more.
But there is more, Further Adventuress and more recent ones.
So that is up next.
That includes the three with Mila at the end. Paper Cuts was a very good one.
But the range did a weird thing where they'd written Charley into a corner where she'd never let the Doctor go and then it budged her out of the way and made a new exaggerated copy of her to make that behaviour creepy and then solved that with a good being blown up and that somehow fixed the Charley problem? Like she could become a grown up off screen. Obviously they gave her some pretty spectacular reasons to change behaviour, since the consequences of her actions included the entire Viyran mission, five genocides and the near extinction of the human race at an indeterminate date that probably breaks the web of time, but the weird that I am objecting to is the whole Mila caricature and sacrifice of it all. We couldn't watch Charley have a What Have I Done moment? And she always relied on the Doctor to fix it so seeing him have to nearly die to fix it is the jolt she needed. So I. suppose it made sense but it was weird sense.
Sometimes I get the feeling that fangirls are being told off for behaviour the range has written. It's weird.
Someone wanting to be a companion so much she does an identity theft about it is an interesting beginning, but the only appropriate resolution is to have her become her own person, and Mila instead is implied to leave all her own terribly selfish traits behind from the necessary learning. Which feels creepy. Also kind of like Ng and Gwen, which was creepy.
I don't know, something about how they wrapped that up felt like they'd written themselves into a corner and then put a mirror up and walked out through it.
... which would be fine in genre anyway and is basically what physically happened in Time of the Daleks so it is difficult to come up with a comparison.
They set up a question and answered a different question and it felt a bit unsatisfying.
Having listened to all the Charley up to this point I am not encouraged to listen to her some more.
But there is more, Further Adventuress and more recent ones.
So that is up next.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-05 05:38 pm (UTC)That's a fantastic articulation of the problem! Definitely sounds like one to me.