#River says the Doctor doesn't love her and Hydroflax scans her and says it's not a lie and it's not!!! it really isn't a lie!!!

[fortes-fortuna-iogurtum]

look I'm sorry, I really am. but if you watch The Husbands of River Song and interpret that as being a definitive picture of what River is like as a person... you're wrong. and you've missed the point.

[sonickedtrowel]

If I may with the love languages... I kinda feel like they're both acts of service to show their love, but two different ways. Dr being a grand show/act at their core and a variance outside with each regen (ie. touch for 10 and 11, quality time for 12), and River being the more mundane/making sure it's done in the bg and the Dr only notices the affects after it's done. Bc she's always working in the bg to make sure their plans work etc (ie. teleporting Amy in that first ep with 11 after he'd said it was impossible and gave up on teleporting Amy away from the angels) and making sure they have fun - the one grand show she did was their wedding (and arguably when she offers to kill herself and when she actually does, but I'd say those are more of her getting desperate bc she did say to Rory in the 1969 eps that her greatest fear was the Dr not knowing her at all, and the only times we see her offering to kill herself are the early days).

I think River THINKS the only love language is words of affirmation. 'cause she's always putting herself last and verbally confirming her love on the surface, and I doubt she grew up with many words of affirmation (and was probably told shit like no one loves her etc by Kovarian) - plus that's kinda the only way people confirm love in media (bc we know she researched the Dr after escaping the Silence - she's not real but like, people irl take ships as not canon if ILY isn't said so I feel like it'd make her a more realistic character that way - and if you think about their wedding, she still also verbally confirmed her love like she needed to explain it). And then she sees Amy and Rory, and they're always saying they love each other etc after the penny drops for Amy. So presumably the only example of love that she'd trust is them, and they're really the only people she'd see as a healthy couple (and were obvs the first couple she experienced at all as both Mels and River, and Rory behaved the same way where he needed verbal confirmation from Amy and River knew and saw that). Idk. I just think she'd probably assume words are the utmost expression of love bc there's no way she knows the Dr so well and doesn't know they love her bc it is so, so obvious. But their acts of service go to everyone they love, so I can see how it might be hard to differentiate the type of love (romantic vs platonic) - and if she truly believed words are the ultimate and only way to express love, it'd explain how she wasn't lying when the Hydroflax body scanned her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry for the long ask! ☠️

Haha I appreciate the long ask!  I think you have some very good points.  Unfortunately my analysis of this is always going to devolve into criticism because I come in VERY firmly on the side of “the Doctor does tell her he loves her, perhaps less often than she does but he does, they just don’t show it on screen” (except they do in Let’s Kill Hitler - honestly there’s NO way he said anything other than that with her reaction.  Literally nothing else makes any sense.)  And I say this all the time, but you don’t trust someone enough to routinely jump out of spaceships and off buildings and then go on about how they’re not there for you and don’t care when you’re in danger, lol.  There are some Significant Discrepancies in the way their relationship is portrayed and how confident River is in it before and after TATM.  And if they were going to make that a big crisis in their relationship that made her believe he didn’t even love her after seeming very confident in that before, boy it sure would have been nice to like see???? any of that???  (I say nice.  I don’t want to see that, keep that shit away from me lol.  But if you’re going to go there don’t just leave it all for us to fill in the blanks and try to make some goddamn sense of it?????)  Anyway so yeah this makes it difficult for me to analyze bc my analysis of this apparent issue in their relationship is basically “fuck that, I’ll work around it in fic if I must so we can have Darillium, but Moffat is still wrong and I would like to see the receipts on the Doctor EVER not being there for her thanks.”  😂 If we want to make the breakdown of communication about the other stuff in TATM like her not wanting to show any weakness because she knows how much he dreads coming to the end with her, him putting so much on her and being a whiny brat when HER parents got sent to the past... let’s do that.  But we just had dead silence and River vanishing from the show instead.  Sigh.