Ten Little Bullets in my Hand

What I’ve learned from the nuWho Fandom

Reblogged from fucknodoctorten

fucknodoctorten:

If you are a white blonde woman obsessing over an unattainable godlike man who does not fully disclose his past relationships, you are his true love for all time and should be exalted and cherished.

If you are a black woman doing the same thing, you are an attention seeking slag trying to get in his pants.

…pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

On Martha Jones hate, and Martha being “needy”

Reblogged from orbitingasupernova

cyruspotnoodle:

tenlittlebullets:

[snip]

the most telling moment is when he goes “Martha, when I say now, push the button!” and she says “Which button?” and immediately runs for the instruction manual.  Would Rose have immediately gone for the biggest most prominent button?  Probably.  Would it have been the wrong one?  Quite possibly, given that this was basically how the writers kickstarted half the plots in s1—

Except this was the end of the episode and also s3 so Rose had grown REMARKABLY… carry on.

Point!  Though I do think it’s more fair to compare Martha’s début to the beginning of Rose’s run.  It would barely be worth mentioning, except that “Marfa suxx0rz in comparison to Roes because she doesn’t hit Satan Pit levels of badassery on her very first trip” is a meme that Ten himself spends a good chunk of Shakespeare Code indulging in. To say nothing of the legions of Martha-bashing Rose stans.  Your comment about rose-colored glasses is spot-on—comparisons between the brand-new companion and the companion who’s just had two seasons of character development are inevitable, but I think some people forget that Rose was also a newbie once, and attack Martha for not immediately being a champ at things that Rose only learned to tackle with confidence mid-s2.

Also, I sort of find the wary love of Rose all over fandom pretentious, but I’ll skip it because IMPORTANT POINTS ABOUT MARTHA FUCKING JONES!

Can I ask for more elaboration on this? :) Just curious—I follow the shit out of the Martha Jones tag but I am less up on fandom’s various reactions to Rose.  I know in my case, the love is wary because the show pushed the One True Companion thing so hard, and seemed to be setting Rose up as some universal archetype of female humanity that everyone could relate to.  As a writing strategy it backfired spectacularly in my case, because Rose is pretty much the opposite of me—which would otherwise be cool, but if she’s supposed to be my viewer avatar, suddenly I’m being assumed to have weaknesses I don’t have and expected to have strengths that don’t come naturally to me.  Add in the breakdown along stereotypical gender lines and yeah, I resented the shit out of Rose my first time through the show, because I generally resent the shit out of the assumption that I’ll relate to social/emotional intelligence and compassion over analytical intelligence just because I have a vag.

It wasn’t an intellectual decision or some sort of principled stand, though, it was an instinctive reaction that I only managed to tease out the reasons for while I was in the process of deciding those reasons were absolute crap as justification for disliking a character.  (Justification for fuming at the writers, on the other hand…) Half of them disappeared anyway when I got further into the show and realized Rose wasn’t the One True Companion, and the other half died a slow and ignoble death when I settled in for a rewatch and started liking Rose-the-person once I’d stopped worrying about Rose-the-ideal.  Like… I doubt I will ever share in the wholehearted adoration that Rose fans have, because I don’t instinctively connect with her and that was the whole problem at first, but just because I had to work though some hangups first doesn’t mean I’m not genuinely fond of her now.

Martha is different than Rose. Naturally, fans have preferences. Just… don’t be a douchebag while explaining those preferences. Don’t talk about how Rose’s class makes her cheap or stupid or unfit to be with the Doctor. Don’t talk about Martha’s falling in love with the Doctor as a BAD thing if you’re okay with Rose or River falling for him. Please.

And seriously? Don’t call ANY of them sluts, whores, skanks, bitches, pigs, fat, ugly, cunts, dogs, slags, chavs (for you British classists out there), hoes, etc.

AMEN.  God, classist Rose-bashing irritates the shit out of me—it’s just so trivial and mean-spirited and contrary to the whole ethos of the show.  I will fucking cut the next douchebag I see calling her a chav, and then I will go punch the next douchebag who criticizes Martha for pining after Ten and in the next breath calls her a slut for trying to keep her options open and flirt with other people.

On Martha Jones hate, and Martha being “needy”

Because I apparently have some inner fount of Martha Jones meta that wells over periodically.

- On Martha hate: the vast, vast majority of this seems to come from people who not only got their introduction to the show with Rose’s seasons, but weren’t… familiar with the way the show works, the revolving door of companions, and the way the Doctor and the TARDIS are the only true constants.  It’s a perception shift: Rusty billed the series so hard as The Doctor And Rose Show, probably trying to get as broad an audience as possible, dispel the old stereotypes of DW being fanboy fodder with disposable eye-candy companions, and grab female viewers who weren’t necessarily sci-fi fans already.  And so he gives us Rose, an everywoman character who knows and cares about sci-fi shit about as much as the audience Rusty’s trying to reach, but who is totally in love with all the aspects of the show that transcend genre—and he reassures us that she is integral to the fabric of the show.  She’s not going to get sidelined so the boys can play.  She is just as central as the Doctor himself.

Which is great for getting the show re-established, but then Billie Piper leaves.  And I can easily see how, if s1 and s2 are all you’ve got to go on, this is tantamount to trapping the Doctor in a parallel universe and letting Jack Harkness step in as the main character, or grinding to a halt halfway through Romeo & Juliet and replacing Juliet with some girl we’ve never heard of.  It’s the same principle that drives hatred of Mary Sues in fandom: “I don’t care what this new character is like, I’m in this fandom to read about the further adventures of the characters I love, not to watch your OC skip in and steal the show from them and warp the fabric of the fictional universe so everything revolves around her.”  It’s the exact same “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” fault-finding that produces ludicrous “is your OFC a Mary Sue?” checklists and causes Rose stans to excoriate Martha for all the ways she’s similar to Rose (“you’re just trying to replace her, but you’re not as good at it!”), then criticize the ways she’s different from Rose as character flaws.  The only difference is that in fanfic, no offense, we are all here bonding over an existing fictional universe and not over your OCs, but Martha hate is caused by a skewed perception of how that fictional universe itself is constructed.

Full disclosure: it took me a while to warm up to Rose.  Partly because I was always one of those sci-fi geeks that RTD specifically wasn’t aiming for with Rose, because he guessed (rightly) that we’d all be latching onto the Doctor instead.  And you know, that’s cool and the Doctor is awesome, but it annoyed the piss out of me that the female lead was there to be the pathologically non-genre-savvy ~emotional core~ of the show, which usually translated into the person making me yell advice at the screen as the writers tossed her the Idiot Ball yet again.  I did warm up to her, and will even confess to crying like a baby the first time I saw Doomsday, but the instant Martha walked onto the screen I was bouncing and punching the air in glee, because she articulated all the things I’d been yelling at the screen all this time.  It was a huge relief to discover that Rose was the emotional core of the show because she was Rose, not because that’s the only thing the writers knew how to do with the female lead.

- Anyway!  On to my girl Martha.  One of the accusations frequently leveled against her by the haters is that she’s “clingy” or “dependent.”  For the longest time I thought this was utterly bonkers and they couldn’t be watching the same episodes as I was, but I think there… could be some kernel of truth in there?  In the sense that the haters are taking legitimate character development and casting it in the most negative possible light.

Here’s the thing: Martha relies on external validation and guidance.  This is not necessarily a bad thing!  It’s a double-edged sword, like Rose’s reliance on gut instinct and snap judgements.  Martha is fiercely analytical, and if she feels like she doesn’t have enough information to assess a situation, she’ll go after that information like the dickens but she’ll also be at a bit of a loss until she obtains it.  And if she thinks there might be a higher authority or someone more knowledgeable than she is, she won’t necessarily defer to them, but she will seek out information and advice.  Martha needs to feel like she knows what she’s doing.

Think I’m pulling this out my ass?  Smith and Jones.  Yeah, she’s endlessly speculating, trying to figure out what’s going on, questioning the Doctor, but the most telling moment is when he goes “Martha, when I say now, push the button!” and she says “Which button?” and immediately runs for the instruction manual.  Would Rose have immediately gone for the biggest most prominent button?  Probably.  Would it have been the wrong one?  Quite possibly, given that this was basically how the writers kickstarted half the plots in s1—but this is not a companion pissing contest, it’s an illustration of how differently Rose and Martha react to things.  Rose might’ve gone for the wrong button, Martha might not have found the correct instructions in time—double-edged swords all ‘round.

Shakespeare Code.  Martha gets her first chance to time travel, and spends the first ten minutes grilling the Doctor on how time travel works and what the rules are and how she can operate safely without causing a fuckton of paradoxes.  Ten is flippant to the point of rudeness even though these are all valid, intelligent questions, because he’s used to traveling with someone who trusts herself to wing it and trusts him to warn her if she’s about to fuck something up.  And here we have prior examples of how Rose approaches this stuff: Father’s Day.  In an analytical light Rose did something incredibly dumb, but what matters to the Doctor isn’t that it was smart or dumb, it’s that she acted on instinct and did something incredibly human.  One of the other accusations leveled against Martha is that she’s a “stuck-up bitch” or a “know-it-all” or “thinks she’s better than everyone else,” and while I have yet to see any TV canon that supports this, I do see where the defensiveness comes from.  If you judge Rose by the things Martha values or the standards Martha sets for herself, Rose comes off pretty poorly.  On the flip side, if you judge Martha by the things that made Rose awesome, Martha starts looking insecure (because she has to analyze before she can act, because she looks to the Doctor for knowledge and validation) and overly willing to go along with the Doctor’s views instead of stubbornly wandering off and looking at things from her own perspective.

I could go on. “Blimey, did you have to pass a test to fly this thing?” “Yes, and I failed!” The mere fact that he thought to leave video-recorded instructions for Martha in 1913, and her frustration when she encountered problems way beyond the scope of the video.  But we’re not talking blind deference to authority or lack of initiative here—if Martha knows she’s the most competent person in the room, she will totally step into a leadership role, going right back to the scene where she tells everyone to shut the fuck up and calm down when her hospital ends up on the moon.

And she analyzes.  She puts pieces together.  Once she has a sense of what’s going on, she and Ten can pull off brilliant two-prong plans: he can just wink and pass her the psychic paper and let the Daleks take him prisoner, and she will figure out they’re off to the Empire State Building and bluff her way in to investigate what the Daleks are using it for.  She can lure the Lazarus monster up into the belltower to put it in a position where Ten can get at it, in symmetric payback for that one time she figured out he was using himself as bait to get the plasmavore in a position for Martha to bring smackdown.  As the series goes on, he starts abusing the privilege somewhat, and Martha ends up on her own for long periods—not executing half of a two-prong plan, but doing all the work while he’s incapacitated.

And that right there is Martha’s character arc.  She starts out needy, yes, and desperate for the Doctor’s validation.  Because she needs to feel competent, she needs to understand things in order to deal with them, and she’s just been tossed into a whole wide unknown universe where her only guide—her only external source of knowledge and context—is a moody overgrown teenager who keeps weighing her in comparison to his ex and finding her wanting.  What she learns over the course of the season is that even if she doesn’t know the rules of time travel or the customs of the time period she’s in, she is good.  She can figure shit out on the ground and come up with a plan, and she doesn’t need 900 years of experience to be a brilliant fucking badass.  The Doctor’s validation?  It’s nice when he gives it, but she doesn’t need it, and if he wants to be an ungrateful ass that’s his problem.

And yeah, her crush is fuelled by desire for validation more than anything else.  It also only happened in the first place because Ten spent half a season being Mr. Mixed Signals Alien Tease and Martha, true to form, didn’t reject the possibility of a romantic entanglement until she had enough evidence to be sure he wasn’t interested.  By then it was waaaaay too late to nip it in the bud.  I don’t like the unrequited-crush subplot and I think it distracts from what’s really going on with Martha, but it develops for reasons that are consistent with her character, and she sure as hell deals with it like a mature motherfucking adult.

A 100% accurate summary of The Shakespeare Code

MARTHA: Doctor, I have an extremely clever and relevant question about the mechanics of time travel.
TEN: Pfffft, stop worrying about it.  Don’t you watch Doctor Who?  You should know this show’s handwavey approach to time travel already, silly.
MARTHA: Doctor, I have an extremely clever and relevant question about whether my skin color makes me eligible to get carted off as a slave in this time period.
TEN: Martha, stop trying to understand things, it takes all the wide-eyed wonder out of them.  Rose was full of wide-eyed wonder.
CARRIONITES: WITCHCRAFT! MAGIC! MAYHEM!
MARTHA: If I could interject with a couple of observations that happen to be spot-on even if they don’t solve the case right away—
TEN: Martha, why don’t you immediately understand what’s going on?!  Rose would understand things!  You’ve been here an entire episode and a half, you suck for not being as clever and relevant as Rose was after a season and a half of character development.
CARRIONITES: WITCHCRAFT! MAGIC! MAYHEM!
TEN: Ah-hah, you call it magic, I call it a different but equally valid form of science that happens to be based on words!  Your voodoo doll is in fact a DNA replication module!
MARTHA: Doctor—
TEN: Martha, what have I told you about wide-eyed wonder and trying to understand things?  TIME TRAVEL IS MAGIC, OKAY.
MARTHA: Doctor, it’s not that, it’s just that we’re going the wrong way.
TEN: No we’re not.  God, why did I even bring you along when you never say anything worth listening t—HOLY SHITBALLS WE’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY.

Ah, Rose…

Reblogged from dangerpro

dangerpro:

The awkward collision of the version of s4 that fandom wanted with the one that Rusty actually wrote.

…alas, this is one of the few shipping triangles in New Who that would end with Ten trapped helplessly in the middle of an epic battle of possessiveness, overinvestment, and spiteful one-upsmanship, rather than Ten trapped helplessly in the middle of an enthusiastic three-way naked pile-on.

Because not only would the Master be the Terriblest Companion Ever in any imaginable alt!s4, he would be the Terriblest Influence Ever on Rose, who is a lovely human being unless you (a) egg her on into being nastier than she realizes, or (b) fall afoul of her territorial streak.  In other words, the combination of the Master being a bastard, Rose giving as good as she gets, and both of them feeling entitled to full claim on Ten’s attention would probably result in a careening trainwreck of competition that would escalate exponentially until it collapsed in on itself and created a universe-destroying singularity.

Something I find interesting about the parallels between Rose and Martha:

Reblogged from wibblywobblytimeywimeymess-deac

wibblywobblytimeywimeymess:

Rose was inherently insecure, and she did have a strong selfish streak possibly due to this. I mean, she was an only child, and she basically mothered Jackie because, let’s face it, Jackie wasn’t the most ideal mother at first, and she gets out there, finds this amazing alien who thinks the world of her, and she wants it all to herself. Of course she does. So, Rose does have these very selfish tendencies regarding the Doctor, but we also see her at her most selfless with him. More than anything, Rose doesn’t want the Doctor to have to be alone. Thus, since Rose is more naturally selfish, her best moments are when she’s selfless.

(And, just a bit of a side-note before I get into Martha, I think this was extremely important for the Doctor to see, that it was okay to be selfish sometimes. Although the Doctor does consider himself a “selfish, stupid man”, in the end he doesn’t really know how to be selfish. He doesn’t know how to allow himself to be happy, in some way, because he was so destroyed by guilt that he always ruined it for himself. But that deserves hours of my time and several more hours of rewatching to write a solid essay, SO, moving onward.)

Martha, on the other hand, was considered by RTD to be the “only truly selfless” character of the series (and, yes, that was pretty much a direct quote from The Writer’s Tale). She stuck by the Doctor through thick and through, well, thicker, seeing as things never were easy for her. She dealt with so much while dealing with this unrequited love, but she’s drowning in it; Martha is being so selfless - has always been so selfless, always being the go-between for other people’s arguments, never mind her own feelings! - and it’s destroying her. And, IMO, Martha’s absolute best moment comes when she finally, finally is selfish: when she tells the Doctor, “this is me. Getting out.” For once, Martha isn’t letting other people’s concerns rule her life. Instead, she’s doing the best thing she possibly can do for herself; making her own decisions for her own well-being, and getting out.

I think the Martha scene is particularly poignant for me seeing as I spent seven months in a relationship with a boy (I know! Seven months is SOOOO LONNGG!!!!) when I was a freshman in high school - he was about two years older than me - and the entire time, I was looking after him. And even when I finally broke up with him, I was still looking after him (despite living in different states), because I was the one basically talking him down from the ledge whenever he called me up and said, “I’m going to kill myself,” or anything along those lines. But I finally, finally got out of that situation, and I am so much stronger as a result of it. So the scene with Martha really resonates with me because of that, and I admire her so much for having that strength. (I mean, after walking the planet being hunted down by the Master’s henchmen, what isn’t Martha Jones strong enough to do?)

And this isn’t meant to be a one-is-better-than-the-other thing. I think Rose and Martha are both absolutely fantastic, and, TBH, if anybody tries to say one is “better” than the other I’d probably want to punch them in the face. You can say you like one over the other, but never say one is BETTER. 

You know, I was thinking about this the other day and drawing similar conclusions: Rose and Martha follow inverse trajectories when it comes to self-worth.  We get Rose who has pretty much been shat on by life: no job, no A-levels, no future, a mother who berates her and drags her down despite loving her a lot, every reason to think she’s a nobody and a screw-up who will spend the rest of her life just getting by.  Even after she meets the Doctor, let’s face it, she spends a season and a half being completely rubbish at this Time and Space Adventurer schtick, making dumb mistakes and causing the shit to hit the fan wherever she goes.  And yet the key to Rose is that she has so much faith in herself, in the Doctor, in the basic worth of everyone around her.  She doesn’t even have to try for it, she just knows that she is everything to him and he is everything to her and she deserves respect and love.  And that ultimately is what makes Rose extraordinary—her stubborn refusal to let Nine deal with her or anyone else like a soldier instead of a person, her stubborn insistence on sticking by him even when it’d be better for all involved if she just stayed home.  I think Rose always quietly knew that she was worth a lot more than what her life experience taught her to expect, and it was travelling with the Doctor that really affirmed that and allowed her faith in herself and others to shine.

(Side note: when I was originally pondering this, the subject that led me to it was that Rose is completely rubbish as a Spacetime Adventurer until, like, halfway through season 2.  The thing is that the Doctor is a good enough Spacetime Adventurer for both of them and doesn’t really need a sidekick who’s good at the things he’s good at, what he needs is a human counterweight.  Nine especially, because Nine is painfully re-learning how to be a person and not just a soldier, and he needs someone to give him a good kick in the arse when he’s too busy assessing the situation to consider the humanity of the people in it.)

Now enter Martha, who’s got everything going for her: she’s brilliant, she’s capable, she’s going places in life, and she’s got a healthy enough level of self-esteem to expect people not to treat her like crap and to get exasperated when the Doctor doesn’t treat her with a minimum standard of decency.  Her problem?  She’s brilliant and capable and she meets someone even more brilliant and capable than she is, and she wants so badly to get up to his level of Badass Spacetime Adventurer that she lets him set the standards for her.  Meanwhile, Ten is crushed over the loss of Rose and a bit resentful that Martha doesn’t start out at the same level of Spacetime Adventurer BAMFitude that Rose achieved by the end of season 2.  (Side note #2: s2 is very much the story of two people in love trying to emulate each other and meet in the middle—Rose gets more capable and more Doctorish and Ten tries desperately to be human.  The tragedy IMO is that the gulf is so intrinsically vast that they’ll never be able to truly meet in the middle, and they spend most of the season in massive denial about this.)  And on some level he doesn’t want Martha to meet or exceed Rose’s BAMF quotient because he’s idealizing Rose so hard.  All of which adds up to make him the worst possible person to seek validation from, and I think Martha realizes this but still implicitly lets him set the standards because Spacetime Adventures are so fucking awesome and it’s not like there are any other yardsticks around to get a sense of how well she’s doing.  She has the vague sense that he’s being an unreasonable ungrateful bastard, but not to what extent, so she jumps through all the hoops with a flourish and just grits her teeth when his reaction is “Rose would’ve jumped higher.”

It would be too easy, though, to break it down into “Rose has absolute faith in herself and Martha defines her self-worth in relation to external factors,” because Rose was never given reason to doubt the Doctor’s love and respect for her, whereas Martha gets only the most backhanded of affirmations—Ten just assumes she’s willing and capable enough to deal with his shit for him.  Because the thing about Martha is that she is The Person Who Deals With Other People’s Shit, whether or not it’s her job and whether or not she’s being ill-used.  It’s the role she’s most comfortable in even when she’s aware that she’s the only one in the room who’s not being a complete dick—she mediates for her family, she goes to medical school to help people deal with their shit, then she ends up as Ten’s nanny, emotional snotrag, and go-to person for all his grunt work.

Which in the end makes her far too Doctorish to get along with the Doctor.  Remember Eleven working in a shop with the nametag that said “The Doctor - Here to help”?  Yeah.  And that brings us back to Side Note #1: Martha is awesome in ways that Ten doesn’t want or need, because he doesn’t need a Spacetime Adventurer double—as nice as it was that Rose took a few levels in badassery, what he really wanted was a human counterweight.  Martha is too busy taking sixteen levels in badassery and cleaning up after Ten’s ungrateful ass to be a Nurturing Feminine Compassion archetype, and yet that’s what the needy bastard was really desperate for.  Last of the Time Lords would’ve played out so differenty with Rose, because it hinges on the Doctor unquestioningly relating more to the Master as a fellow Time Lord than to anything else in the universe, and Rose would’ve fought tooth and nail to keep him away from that.  And while that’s admirable, I think LotTL was necessary for the Doctor—it’s a side of himself he was in total denial about that finally got laid bare over the course of s3.

So yeah.  Rose is an awesome lady who finally got affirmation of her belief in herself and of her dreams and desires, and while her selfishness is often positive, that arc is what makes her moments of selflessness powerful by contrast.  Martha is an awesome lady who was led to doubt herself and to give and give without ever getting anything back, which is what makes it powerful when she finally decides to put her own needs first—and when she finally dares to say that it doesn’t fucking matter whether the Doctor validates it or not, the end result of all that work and sacrifice is that hell yes, she is good.