#also relevant: the wording from Adelaide's POV sections “madness” “watching a man lose his mind” losing all “trust” in him

[seaweedstarshine]

Tags by @transmasc-rose

#DOCTOR: Because she's forgotten. She's got over four thousand living minds chatting away inside her head. It must be like being#well#me.#yeah yeah yeah#I feel like we gets bits and pieces that something is going on with the Doctor#that isn't shown so much in the show#but gets expanded on (inconsistently) in eu material#and is also stronger in Moffat's run#one bit I think about sometimes is this bit from Forest of the Dead#which not-so-coincidentally was also written by Moffat#I've seen people interpret this as about being psychic#but with what we see of the Doctor#and his relationship with his self#and his regenerations#and at times hallucinations (visual or auditory)#well.

Oh, you're spot on! This reblog is me recording that line in my tag, because how hadn't I thought of it before? Incidentally, in the time since my original tags where I said I didn't read ten as psychotic — okay, ever since imbibing The Waters of Mars Novelization — I have completely changed my opinion on psychotic Tenth Doctor, because,

⚠️ This is now a The Waters of Mars Novelization appreciation post! ⚠️

Time Lord Victorious as a grandiose delusion:

(with notes of paranoia)

A delusion — not because he thinks he's a god (it’s not like there’s not a family in Rome actively worshiping him) — it’s the way the fact of it becomes so irrefutable to him he can’t fathom how anyone could see it differently:

He may be vain, but the Doctor explaining what snow is isn't vanity:

Anyway, the main point is his pressured speech that slips into clang associations he works to focus. It reads to me as a psychotic episode, and probably one connected to mania, even outside the novelization:

So I see the Tenth Doctor's psychosis specifically as being (usually) more connected to mood episodes, and for an incarnation with a lot of depression ever since losing Rose — it clicks with Forest of the Dead (“is ‘alright’ special Time Lord code for ‘really not alright at all’?”) — hell yes is Ten in his Season 4 psychotic depression era. “She's got over four thousand living minds chatting away inside her head. It must be like being, well, me.” yes!

Mister Speeches trying to find the words:

*I actually want to go through all of Time Lord Victorious books/audios/comics/etc sometime so I can talk about this (I only ever listened to like, The Minds of Magnox and some of the audios which were good but super confusing out of the context).

I love Amy's Choice and I love The Day of the Doctor Novelization, but something that only clicked for me recently — is that the reason the Eleventh Doctor is able to instantly recognize and brush past the Dream Lord when he appears — is because for as long as he's had this body, he's been hallucinating the War Doctor’s voice taunting him in a very similar way (minus all the jokes).

Similar like this:

Of course at the end of Amy's Choice, the Doctor sees the Dream Lord reflected in the console, looks distressed, and says nothing, and I just. I love how Moffat used that novelization to flesh out so many different elements he included in his run.