merlinbtch

[merlinbtch]

my friends know that I follow rules very strictly and that's part of how my autisim works like they have to wait with me for the crosswalk to turn green instead of going when they can.

me we're planning on moving in together cause we basically live together already but they just made a joke list of a bunch of rules that only apply to me. and it reply hurts and I'm scared because I don't want to have no escape form this either because we ll work together and I don't have a car ☹️☹️

[merlinbtch]

Sooo I've just seen some beautiful fanarts of thirteen and eleven and I have Thoughts

So Im gonna talk a bit about Eleven and Thirteen, their relationships with Ten and Twelve, and the concept of 14 and why I think it fits so well.

My main thesis is this: Thirteen and Eleven are very, VERY similar, they are hurt in very similar ways from their previous regenerations, and deal with those things in similar ways. However, while Eleven gets a forced catharsis in Trenzalore, Thirteen only gets an optional one, which she rejects, forcing the regeneration into Fourteen and, later on, the bigeneration. Let's go!

I'd like to begin with Ten and a brief recap of his tenure. It begins with Rose, someone she knew from his previous regeneration, someone who, in many senses, healed him from the cynical POV he had adopted since the Time War. She becomes a bit too doctory, and ends up trapped in a parallel universe, largely because of him and his influence.

He then meets Martha. She ends up leaving him because he can't get over himself and his very recent trauma with Rose. He's on his own for a bit, and meets Donna, arguably his best friend in a long while. And, just like Rose, his actions end up with him being forced to depart from her. He is SO DONE at this point. He keeps travelling on his own, doing his own thing, a distant doctor (but a doctor still) who ends up becoming the Time Lord Victorious. In this state of Loneliness, he is forced to end Gallifrey again, and is saved by the closest thing he has to a friend at this point: the Master. He regenerates.

So, what does the Doctor do immediately after that, in his eleventh incarnation? When he meets Amy he decides to try again. This time, however, Amy is not a life-in companion, as Rose and Donna were (Im not sure about Martha, but I think she was one as well). Instead, he begins to microdose the Ponds, popping in every hundred years or so, seeing them for a while, then leaving again. After Rose, Martha and Donna, he absolutely refuses the idea of losing someone again: he is painfully aware of the time limits, and if working around them means not seeing the Ponds except on rare occasions, so be it. He is RUNNING AWAY.

Except, of course, it doesn't work. A lovely trip to New York ends with the Ponds being zapped back in time, a tombstone confirming they died, and a letter from Amy certifying that he never went back to see them, which, of course, means that NOW he can't. It's written, it's part of the timeline.

So he gives up. He refuses to engage, he refuses to take a new companion and, you know what, this time he won't even be a Doctor. He tried that after Donna and see how it worked out, no, no, never again. He is so tired.

This is arguably the end of the post-time war era. That part of him is definitely healed, and now all his wounds come from after that.

What happens then? He meets Victorian Clara. And she dies. But he's seen Clara die before. He's seen the same person twice, he's seen her die twice, and now here she is, a third one. His curiosity gets the better of him, but there may also be a bit more: for this woman, a death is not the end.

So they travel together, she moves in, and, with her, he starts healing again. This is somewhat similar to a Nine-Rose situation. What happens next?

Well, remember how he keeps running away from loss, what he was doing with the Ponds? This time it's enforced. He is trapped on Trenzalore, leaves Clara, and can only see her every few hundred years. He is forced to stay somewhere and see everyone be born, grow up and die, strapped to a chair, Clockwork-Orange-Style, to see his worst nightmare again and again and again. He lives through it, and Clara is there, always.

He regenerates.

Clara is with him, and she becomes to his twelfth incarnation what Rose was to his tenth. After many adventures, and after a beautiful mirror of Trenzalore in which it is the doctor who is forced to die again and again, Clara leaves in a way that mirrors Donna.

He could enter a second Time Lord Victorious era at this point, but he won't. He's been here before, he knows how it works, he's older and knows better. You can't run from death forever. He says goodbye to River Song and retires, but not in a hermit way, as he'd done before, but in a Professor way. He engages. He takes Bill as a student, but he will not let her become another Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Clara. She is not an equal, a partner, but his student and his protegée.

He also remembers. Last time, when he was in this situation, it was the Master who was with him by his side. The Master, who is also a timelord, who grew up with him, who's always been there. Perhaps, he thinks, there is the answer. He becomes her guardian, tries to fix her.

And, as we know (but crucially he doesn't), he succeeds. But he believes she -the one who was to be his friend- betrayed him, his protegée dies because of them, and now what? He gets into an explosion, but he does not die.

He is so tired. He's been through this twice already, as Ten and as Fourteen, and something like it as Eleven. Nothing works. His last shot, Missy, fails. He refuses to do it again. He does not want to regenerate.

Here's when Thirteen comes in.

She comes right after an attempt of giving up. It comes after recalling his friends (what makes his life worth living) and recalling how much she's grown via meeting One. Fine. Another attempt. Let's go.

But, just like Ten-Eleven, this new chance comes without any self-reflection, any attempt at fixing herself. Just like Eleven, she knows that she just has to run away, she just has to make friends, keep them well, keep them happy, and everything will be okay, just don't think about it. We sometimes see her brooding on her TARDIS alone, but she resumes her act as soon as Yaz (or anyone else) appears. She won't let the Fam see anything: the Bill dynamic worked well, so they're gonna be her students, not her equals. Not again.

So she's alone, perhaps more than ever. She has no friends, only students who she wants to convince they're friends to her, her wife's dead, the only other timelord remaining, her friend, has betrayed her and trashed all her previous efforts, and now it turns out the land of Time Lords, her equals, the ones she might have come back to, the ones she'd finally saved, have been destroyed again (by her friend!) and she isn't even one of them, she's an anomaly in an entire universe. And she HAS to carry all this on her back, not relying on anyone, not letting anyone close this time (unlike Clara-Eleven), AND has to pretend everything's fine for the humans she's decided to keep with her AND now it turns out one has caught feelings for her? Requited feelings at that?

Thirteen is a tragic figure. Unlike Ten, who had ups and downs, recoveries and reprises, and Eleven, who is forced to stay in Trenzalore and recover, she just... Dies. Carrying the same trauma from start to finish, and getting more and more and more and...

She can't. She just can't. She needs to stop. In these situations, humans somatize and just collapse, but she can't. So, how does her body force her to stop?

Old face.

Not Twelve, he was also alone. Not Eleven, with Amy and Rory timelocked. Ten, then? Yes, Ten might do. Back to an old face. Her TARDIS, seizing this chance, takes him to his friend, Donna. An equal, not a student.

But he still refuses to stop, refuses to engage, he just runs and runs and runs, never stopping, never sharing, never trusting. The ONE TIME he opens up a bit, it turns out it's to Fake Donna. Actual Donna doesn't remember. He powers on, as Thirteen did.

And then he gets shot.

But his body refuses. It is NOT giving up. It is not gonna let this chance go, it is not gonna give it a new face just to keep running from everything, as Thirteen and Fourteen did. No, Fifteen won't do that. The body regenerated eighteen hours ago: theregeneration energy is still fresh. Last time it had this face, he grew a new hand. Perhaps there's time for one last trick, it thinks.

[merlinbtch]

as a current Jimmy Johns worker, yes.

[merlinbtch]

smash.

Sienna ,Terrifier 2

[merlinbtch]

this show is balls to the wall fucking insane

[merlinbtch]

[merlinbtch]

It's called "plus size" because it's a plus when a girl is that size :3

[merlinbtch]

TORCHWOOD.

[merlinbtch]

what is the FUCKING POINT then???

[merlinbtch]

my favourite losers

[merlinbtch]

Percabeth is the only ship ever, half the time Percy thinks she's plotting to kill him (he's scared but weirdly into it) but then you get into her head and she's thinking about what flowers are going to be at their wedding

[merlinbtch]

said it once i’ll say it again torchwood as a show is genuinely so fucking funny to me bc in dr who it was such a big Thing this giant secretive organization that caused a catastrophic mess and then you cut to the show and its just a tiny team of 5 horny bisexuals who have to stop making out for long enough to save the world and i think that is beautiful. that was the only correct way they could have used jack as a character

[merlinbtch]

ianto jones is not an uwu baby. ianto jones shot his coworker. ianto jones wrestled a pterodactyl in order to land a job with a top secret organization. ianto jones kept a killer robot and her conversion machine in the basement for MONTHS bc she was his girlfriend. then he fucked the guy that killed her after telling the guy he was excited to watch him die.

ianto jones is the ultimate example of 'beware the quiet/sweet ones' he will remember how you like your coffee and then two hours later try to cave your head in for something he may or may not be in the wrong about

[merlinbtch]

this is what the inside out emotions inside my head look like

[merlinbtch]

look i've been partaking in fandom for a number of years now but nothing so far has affected me quite so much as ninejackrose, and doctorjackrose in general. i feel nauseous just thinking about them.

because you have the obvious angle; they seem so in love, then jack is abandoned and waits for the doctor for 150 years only to find that rose is gone and the doctor a) has a new face and b) has moved on. after they left him, after all that sincerity and affection, they just carry on as normal as though he'd never been there to begin with. but also, rose clearly doesn't know about jack's immortality, so we have to ask, what does she think happened to him? what did the doctor tell her? how do you even begin to untangle the fucked up ethics of that one?

rose made this man immortal because she couldn't bear to think of him as dead, and no one even told her he'd died in the first place. she was nineteen. the doctor was over nine hundred. jack was in his thirties. she made him into essentially a perfect companion; somebody who the doctor loves, and who he cannot outlive. a reminder of rose's boundless capacity for love, and ten can barely even bring himself to look him in the eyes.

by the time ten meets him for a second time, when the daleks invade, jack is already older than him. jack is more than a thousand years older than him, in fact, because he was buried alive in 27ad and was forced to live for a millennia as a prisoner to the earth and to his own brother. jack finds a new family, finds somebody to love, and they all die. rose gets an imitation of the doctor to love in a world that isn't really her own; their lives will be a blink that the others won't get to see. the doctor also finds love and a family, and also loses them - every version of them.

they meet in a prison millions of lightyears away from where they first met – thousands of years after, depending on who you ask – because jack heard that the doctor needed help. he's barely aged; the doctor has had two faces between this one and last time. she recognises him immediately, though he mistakes someone else for her.

they still remember rose.

[merlinbtch]

whoniverse cheating queens of the 2000s and 2010s they could never make me hate you <33

[merlinbtch]

Captain Jack text posts. Clearing out my jack tag