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Reblogged from diaryofateenageprocrascinator
diaryofateenageprocrascinator:
Reasons people say they hate Martha:
- She’s ‘clingy’ (as opposed to Rose who traveled through parallel universes which is extremely dangerous ripping holes into the fabric of time over and over again to see her Doctor.)
- She is ‘not relevant to the Doctor’s storyline’ (fuck you. Really, fuck you. She literally saved the world in the Year that never was. If it wasn’t for her, the Doctor would have been a shriveled little pickle in a cage.)
- She is ‘bitchy and loud mouthed’ (as opposed to…um, Rose, and Donna, and Amy, and River, basically all of the Doctor’s companions. But you laud them for having the same characteristics Martha does.)
- She ‘left the TARDIS’ (blasphemy! No matter how amazing it is to travel the stars and planets and save the earth (and deal long term with sexism and racism while the Doctor ignores it because his white, straight male privilege clouding his senses) it really comes down to love. And you can’t stay with a man who doesn’t love you wishing he would. It is one thing to have the person you love be light years away, it is quite another and infinitely more difficult to be near him every day and know that he would never feel the same.)
Reason why I think people hate Martha:
Deny it all you want, you know it’s true. She is no more flawed than any of the other companions yet every time I go through tags of her, it’s just hate, hate and more hate. It’s like you’relookingfor reasons to hate her. I think she is bad ass, and for a show that rarely ever has people of color except as a fulfillment of some kind of bullshit quota and then they are depicted as lap dogs to other main, white characters (Mickey to Rose) to have a WOC companion is refreshing.
And I don’t think I need to add this, but if you hate Martha because she is black, that just makes you a terrible human being.
Basically.
Caveat: I think Rose stanning factors into it too, in that lots of people come into s3 predisposed to be wary of the new companion, and the ill-thought-out romance subplot is just fuel on the flames. But the REASONS people come up with to justify their continued hate for Martha, long after the adjustment period should be over, all pretty much boil down to “uppity bitch is getting above herself.”
How DARE she fall in love with the Doctor? (Yeah, no one would ever do th—oh wait.) How DARE she try to follow up on her crush when he’s blasting mixed signals all over the place, and then back off and still get sad from time to time when it’s clear he’s off-limits? Doesn’t she know she’s not good enough for him and that her sadness is an imposition because it makes him feel kinda guilty? How DARE she get her knickers in a twist over being unfavorably compared to Rose all the time? It’s not like she DID anything for him except save his life in almost every episode and look after him and take on the Doctor role on the frequent occasions where he was incapacitated, so how DARE she feel underappreciated? It’s not like there’s anything to appreciate, right? And besides, wanting a “thank you” or a “wow, you did great” from time to time for saving the world is really needy and, liek, harshing his angst mellow. Can’t she just be selfless and stay in the background where she belongs instead of demanding respect? She should be down on her knees in gratitude that he even deigned to invite her poor unworthy self along in the first place.
I really, seriously did not understand where any of the Martha haters were coming from at first because none of their criticisms seemed remotely valid—even the ones that were true I was like “wait, when did this become a negative trait?” And then I realized how much of it comes from a couple of baseline assumptions:
1. Martha is unworthy—nay, worthless.
2. Because of (1), any needs, feelings, desires, or pain she might experience are a grossly offensive overreach of her place in the universe. By expressing them, she is stepping waaay out of line and being a whiny, needy, entitled brat who’s demanding more than she deserves. Only people who matter have the right to have feelings, dammit!
If you believe (1), get the fuck out of my fandom. It’s a classic case of WoC having to work twice as hard for half as much appreciation. If you say that Martha is a bad companion because “she’s useless” or “she needs saving all the time” or “what has she ever done for the Doctor?”, you are actually factually WRONG: if you hold that “being of practical use” or “knowing what to do in a crisis” or “saving the Doctor” are the primary measures of a companion’s worth, I can give you episode-by-episode proof that Martha is in fact a better companion than Rose. That sounds stupid, right? Because what Rose gave the Doctor was different and intangible and can’t be chalked down on a scoresheet. Okay, great. So stop using “being of practical use” as a measure with which to weigh Martha and find her wanting. Because one, it’s bullshit, and two, that is a test where Martha Jones comes out waaaay ahead of everyone else.
If your Martha hate is fuelled by (2), I suspect you have a broken empathy circuit somewhere. Try hotwiring the human-emotion links and superseding the internalized internalized internalized internalized—
Snark aside, I suspect (2) is why so many haters interpret Martha’s handling of her relationship with Ten as more threatening and aggressive than it really is. (Gee, reading inappropriate threat and aggression levels into everything a black person does? I’ve never heard that one before.) Either that, or I watched some apocryphal version of series 3 where Martha gets a crush on a brilliant alien, tries to follow up on it and sort out his mixed signals, and is mature enough to (a) back off when it turns out to be unrequited, (b) only allow herself to angst when she has a bit of downtime and he’s not in earshot, and (c) demand some of the respect and appreciation that he constantly withholds from her, WITHOUT demanding a return of romantic affection. Clearly I need to track down the televised version, where she throws herself at him with no provocation or reason to believe he might be interested, trash-talks Rose and Joan Redfern out of jealousy, and throws tantrums at him because he doesn’t love her.
