#I have a lot of feelings about ten

[lizstiel]

head in my fucking hands right now thinking about how ten was literally born out of his love for rose tyler. how when he gets hit by the dalek in journeys end, she’s so upset she’s going to lose him again that he refuses to regenerate into a new doctor. thinking about how regeneration is just rebirth. “new face, same man, same memories” but it’s very much letting go of that cycle and moving on to something new, sometimes violently if necessary. not something you want but something you need etc. etc. and he WOULDNT let go because rose was there. siphoned all that energy and newness into the hand and remained where he shouldn’t have remained because he didn’t want to leave her and then HAD TO LEAVE HER ANYWAY. WITH THAT PART OF HIM THAT DID REGENERATE. even though “he’s you before we met” he’s also the part of you that was ready to move on. that DID MOVE ON to something new. and ten stayed. he stayed and he sat with all of that for another arc. all alone. he lost everyone. and I think that’s part of the reason why his final regeneration is so explosive. there’s so much ANGER in it. he’d rather destroy the interior of the TARDIS than have some new version of him flying around in it. his last act as ten was to take that away from eleven. head in my hands. HEAD IN MY HANDS.

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

Alright, I'll say it: Jack Harkness and the Doctor's relationship is possibly the most fleshed out/complicated dynamic in Doctor Who and that is INCLUDING the master/doctor relationship. Seriously, think about it:

the fact that when they meet jack is presented as sleazy con man and the doctor makes him brave- makes him good

but that they are both willing to die for rose as long as she is safe

and then she comes back and dooms them both to live (even though jack has already died for her and the doctor WILL die for her)

(ninerosejack is canon and you cannot convince me otherwise)

but then the doctor sees jack as immortal as someone he COULD spend the rest of his life with

and instead of embracing it like you'd think he would because he is so wrecked by people leaving him/being left by him the doctor RUNS bc the Doctor is so scared of jack of what he means of what he is

jack ends up abandoned in dalek dust goes back in time to find the doctor suffers a hundred years alone/being tortured but STILL WAITS

(screw amy being the girl who waited or rory being the boy who waited- Jack Harkness is the boy who waited and he did it FIRST)

Jack finds out that he was abandoned. that the man that he loves HATES the sight of him. that the doctor would rather have a genocidal murderer than have him

and so Jack gets the hell out of dodge to go to a man who DOES love him

and don't get me wrong Jack loves Ianto and Jack DOES remember Ianto until he dies as the Face of Boe don't forget that (protecting Novice Hame from the virus as he couldn't Ianto

BUT AFTER EVERYTHING THE DOCTOR HAS DONE TO JACK JACK STILL LOVES THEM

Jack still considers five billion years cursed to never die to be BETTER than the alternative: dying a young time-agent-turned-con-man

Jack has more reason than any other companion save maybe Amy to hate the Doctor & yet spends 20 years in jail to rescue Thirteen still LOVES HER

AND AFTER FIVE BILLION YEARS HE ORGANIZES THAT FIRST MEETING ON SATELLITE FIVE HE ORGANIZES 9/ROSE'S FIRST DATE

jack harkness is a living ghost a reminder of the doctor's failures a physical fixed point and yet he still loves the girl who cursed him and the time lord that turned him into the kind of person that would give his dying breaths to protect the last of humanity in a dying city and tell the doctor that he is not alone

because fuck it, YANA was a warning but also a reminder a final gift

jack had been there all along, a ghost an echo a PROMISE

there is no more human character than jack harkness

[bunnieswithknives]

Dev this is serious stop beatboxing.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you all for an incredible 500 days of love and support. I offer you: answers to questions that no one has asked.

(As always, more can be found in the tags <3)

[bobcatblahs]

I found this alignment chart and like- over all it is funny

But also kinda sad? Especially the whole top row- and SimmMaster…

Like don’t even get me started on the break neck turn around between Nine and Ten… and oh, my wonderful Donna 🥺

[barawrah]

brother

[firefighterkinard]

2x09/7x06

[doctor-disc0]

Bethesda needs to bring back elder scrolls games taking place over multiple years. I'm sorry, but I genuinely don't think that the Oblivion Crisis and all the Oblivion DLCs happened in 4 months.

And don't get me started on the fact that every event in ESO happens in the same year.

[ialwaysknewyouwerepunk]

the loneliness and sadness that creeps into you in a way that only growing up queer can cause. your parents can accept you and still make you feel like an outsider. your parents can love you and still reject parts of you. that old-fashioned kind of love where they think trying to mold you, make you tough, is better for you. or that quiet status quo where you just don't talk. and where everyone is accepted, though some are more than others. generations and generations it's just been easier to let it slide. to let it be. not cause a fuss. but then we sit there with a knot in our chests all our lives wondering how it got there

[many-gay-magpies]

god what really gets me about dead boy detectives and what i think i love so much about the show and the relationships in it is that like. the romantic and sexual relationships aren't portrayed as being more unique or important than the platonic relationships. they're all just RELATIONSHIPS.

charles and crystal's attraction to each other and eventual hookup isn't this big end-all be-all relationship that shatter charles and edwin's friendship and draws charles' attention away from edwin; it's just a THING that happens. they're just two people that care about each other and happen to also be attracted to each other, and a hook-up happens, then they decide that neither of them are in the right place for it and it's nothing awful. crystal kisses charles, but it isn't some big spectacle of her declaring her love for him; it's just her saying goodbye and that she cares about him, like her hugs with niko and jenny and her handshake with edwin.

edwin realizes he loves charles romantically and tells him, and charles says he doesn't really love edwin romantically BACK, but it's okay, because they still love each other so much in so many other ways that this one tiny difference could never change them—and it doesn't!! they're still just as close, still care for each other just as much, still SHOW that care for each other just as much. their relationship didn't completely end because edwin loved charles in a way charles couldn't reciprocate, but at the same time it isn't "solved" by edwin getting over it, because there's nothing TO solve. it's just another type of love, added to everything that already exists between them. and they have LITERALLY FOREVER to figure out what it means.

the relationships between edwin & niko, crystal & niko, and crystal & edwin aren't given any less weight for being solely platonic, just as charles & crystal's relationship and edwin's feelings for charles aren't given (that much) MORE weight for being romantic. crystal and charles' conflict in the closet is about EDWIN, about how they're BOTH his friend and BOTH want to get him back; it has very little to do with the feelings between THEM, romantic or otherwise. similarly, the weight of charles' and edwin's relationship isn't diminished in the LEAST by charles not reciprocating the romantic side of his feelings (or SAYING he doesn't reciprocate, at least—we can all argue about the legitimacy of that in the notes).

i'm sure there are more examples than this, as well as probably some examples that CONTRADICT this, but like... by and large, it feels like dead boy detectives is a show where all the relationships are given equal weight regardless of platonic, sexual, romantic, or familial status, and as someone on both the asexual and aromantic spectrums who has struggled time and time again with shows casting out the importance of all other relationships in favor of prioritizing romance, that is INCREDIBLY refreshing to see.

[queerofthedagger]

i'm re-reading the hobbit (aka it's my current falling-asleep audiobook) and there is something to doing that after having just read the silm and the great tales and (almost) the entirety of HoMe that just hits me in the sense of. so much of the great tales talk of great heroics and incredible deeds of valour. and yes of course their mode is different and that's why they feel like this, why they are a little untouchable sometimes, bigger than life, almost. but there still is something so poignant to returning to scared, terrified, shaking-in-his-boots bilbo baggins who faints at the notion of a dragon and baulks at the idea of an adventure and then goes anyway.

i don't have a very coherent conclusion about this yet beyond, it keeps making me think of the 'courage is not absence of fear, it's being scared and doing it anyway' and how on one side it says so much about bilbo, about how he goes, and keeps going, keeps growing with each new step on the road, without ever quite stopping being scared out of his mind. and how on the other side it is also a reminder that regardless of the tales painting them great, we should not forget how often all the great heroes must have been scared, too. how they went anyway. perhaps finrod did not faint at the prospect of facing sauron, but he went anyway. perhaps hurin did not quail in the face of morgoth, but he must have been terrified for himself and his family anyway. how he kept resisting anyway. perhaps luthien did not try to convince herself just to stay home on page, but how hard the road regardless. how she walked it anyway! like!!

[synodic-lupine]

Nine and Ten's arcs go hand in hand as a collectively great PTSD narrative imo. I think Ten's wishy-washiness about relationships and inability to fully open up to Rose is often characterized as plain old fear of commitment yet I see that as a progression to another presentation of PTSD. When we first meet Nine, he seems like he's halfway to planning on how to get himself killed. He meets Rose, he heals, he changes, he grows. Then he regenerates into someone with a desire to live and the seeming capacity to just be happy. At the same time, he regenerated for and because of Rose. Recovery that hinges on one person is a tricky thing. When you're with that person it can feel like there's no more work to be done, like you're totally 'fixed'. Every moment with that person feels like the best thing in the world... which makes it significantly harder to open up about anything trauma related. When you're feeling high on a person's presence why would you ever want to think about the bad things? THEN because he finally properly wants to live, The Doctor gets hit with the realization that living a full life means losing Rose in the end and it's downright intolerable to him. It makes him push and pull and act like a bastard sometimes. We get glimpses of who he is without her in the moments when she's threatened. He loses his damn mind any time she's threatened- he gets that crazed look akin to Nine in Dalek more than anything. This is also in contrast to how Nine used to react to Rose being threatened, where he used to still be able to keep it reined in. THEN... he loses her for real and he backslides majorly. We see the effects in Turn Left, that if Donna hadn't been there he would have died right after saying goodbye to Rose. He's more or less back where he started as Nine in the beginning of series one, looking for a way to die. He lives though, and has to accept that no, he's not perfectly recovered and keep on working on it. He opens up about things in ways we saw him struggle to in series 2. Though he's more callous in series 3 and 4, he seems to struggle more with relating to humans, his bastardous tendencies pop up more. He's also a freaking disaster man in series 4 with the number of times he offers or tries to give up his life for others. He DOES make recovery progress through series 3 and 4, just is slow like in real life. All of that makes JE make sense to me in that this is a man who is experiencing turbo PTSD triggering. He pushes everyone away all at once, because maybe being alone will hurt less than losing people after all. Even after all that in the end when he is dying he says he doesn't want to go. He was born into wanting to live and be happy so of course he doesn't want to go.

[hella1975]

would you like to talk about how bad the mha ending was hella

as much as i would love to give like. a comprehensive response i genuinely dont think i can get my words together just yet without it being a constant unintelligble stream of 'AND ANOTHER THING-' and bc it's become quite torn in the fandom on if the chapter was good or bad i want like. an actual coherent response here. so i will reblog this if/when i can word it but know IM NOT FUCKING HAPPY

[the-way-astray]

i think my problem with the point five books thing is not the books themselves, so much as it is the marketing and way they're presented.

for those that aren't aware: point five books have a generally understood meaning/connotation that authors and fans both sort of know. it's basically code for "book that is not mandatory to understand the story, but it's there for fans that want extra content". usually this comes in the form of short story collections or whatever else the author may want to do. sometimes it's just a single short story. for example, a proper way for kotlc to utilize point five books would be to for instance, make a book 7.5, which has keefe and fitz's flashback short stories in it. extra bonus content from flashback (book seven), but you don't have to read it to understand the main story itself. you'll be okay without it. that is what a point five book actually means, as far as the wider literary world is concerned.

but books 8.5 and 9.5 in this series are not extra bonus content. you very much do have to read them to understand the main story. if you read it book eight, then nine, then ten, you will be lost or miss important stuff that's crucial to understanding the story.

just call it book nine. just call it book eleven. all this will do is label the books properly and not confuse people. and people will be confused. we aren't seeing the effects yet, because books are still coming out and everyone in the fandom keeps up with shannon's updates, so we all know what's up. but trust me, in a few years, after the series is over and new people get into it, they will be confused. they will skip straight over book 8.5 or 9.5 unknowingly, and it won't be good.

my theory is that someone on shannon's team wants to make this series seem shorter than it really is. because that is the only logical explanation here. you could describe this series as having "nine and a half books" now, instead of ten, and by the way the series is officially marked, that's not incorrect. but it is. this series has ten books. because there are ten mandatory books that you have to read that are out right now. stop calling books that aren't supposed to be called point five books as point five books!!!! this isn't quirky, it's just going to throw people off.

this is super, super confusing for people that aren't "in the know" with this series, so to speak, and there will be people that read this series incorrectly because of this. i have been a casual fantasy series reader for pretty much my entire existence on this planet, and let me just tell you, this is not how this works. at all. if i didn't know books 8.5 and 9.5 were mandatory, i would skip over them completely, going on my understood knowledge of how these epic fantasies are generally structured.

just market them correctly. praying to the heavens for shannon's team to stop. this is actively hurting your readers!!!!

*i assume it isn't shannon herself who is coming up with this strategy

[coquelicoq]

what i love about the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi of it all is that...it's not just that he's famous and therefore widely recognizable wherever he goes. like yes that is very funny because he was an exorcist before he became a famous actor, which means he CHOSE, on purpose, a day job that would make it harder to hide his double life/secret identity from the hordes of his adoring public, but it's more than that. it's not just that he's famous, it's that he's famous specifically for being an ACTOR, aka a person whose job it is to dissimulate, to make believe, to inhabit roles and emotions other than his own. like he decided he was going to become as visible as possible (which again was literally not necessary! he could have gone into any other career for his day job!!) but in such a way that everyone would see him but no one would see him - they would just see his various made-up personas, including the Famous Actor Natori Shuuichi persona. i can't decide if he's a genius or if he just made so many absurd decisions that they canceled each other out and circled back around to working out. he's either playing 9-dimensional chess or he's eating the pieces. too soon to say.

[ropebunnykant]

those people trying to cancel sabrina carpenter for being an adult that sings about adult things while parents continue to bring their kids to her concerts despite her having lyrics that literally say “i’m so fucking horny” are gonna get a real kick out of the twelve year old that thought she was getting picked for the juno bit 🙃