#especially when thinking about rtd's intentions with rose as both the showrunner and the writer who created her

[quantumshade]

i agree on a lot of your points, specifically on Rose being complacent in her life, but i'm gonna push back on labeling her purposefully homophobic for a couple reasons.

(under a cut because i don't know how to shut up, sorry 😭)

honestly? i think we underestimate how bad things were for gay people when this was being written. maybe i just grew up in the early 2000s, but "you're so gay" is so tame. people would just say that. i heard a lot worse daily in school, even before i was personally targeted for being queer. and yes, that is homophobic, but i would argue that that is an instance of cultural homophobia rather than individual homophobia. i don't know how productive it is to call this 19 year old character from 2005 homophobic, especially in our terms in 2024.

i think, much more so than the culture she comes from, an integral and thematically relevant part of rose's character is that she identifies with people the world looks down on and she goes out of her way to be kind to them. like there is a lot to say vis a vis s1 rose + queerness but i would say that is in relation to her Own queerness, and discovering that she can be more than everyone said she could be, not her discovering that Homophobia Is Bad Actually

that leads in to what i want to say about the doctor dances: i don't think she's put off or disgusted or made uncomfortable by jack flirting with a man. i think it's much more a combination of "i was flirting with this guy all night and i thought he was interested, did i misread this situation?" and also "wow. this thing that is a massive problem in my time and culture doesn't matter at all in the future" AND "there's gay people in 1940 even though i was told my whole life that wasn't a thing".

all the rtd companions have moments like this, not just Rose, because rtd is a gay man and he knows how people react to that sort of sudden knowledge, especially in the early 2000s. martha has a moment like this in the shakespeare code, donna has one in unicorn and the wasp. hell, even ruby sunday has her face journey after the houdini comment in the church on ruby road.

i'm gonna put in a quote from the novelization of Rose, written by RTD:

Mickey’s little gang sat in the kitchen: Mook Jayasundera, a shy, tiny lad with big staring eyes; Patrice Okereke, the gangling, grinning joker of the pack; and Sally Salter, born Stephen Salter, sharp, spiky-haired and cautious but always, Rose thought, smiling at some private joke. They all whooped and stood and hugged her and asked about last night while Mickey made them coffee. Rose loved this little gang. They called themselves a band, rehearsing their R&B once a week, after hours, in the garage where Mickey worked, but they had few musical ambitions beyond earning £60 in the Lamb & Flag once a month; really, they were together for the laughs. And laugh they did, this untidy little kitchen often full of booze and music. Rose thought the company he kept was one of the best things about Mickey. His crew weren’t just mates, they were all escaping something; the flat had only one bedroom but the living room settee was usually taken up by whichever member of the band had fallen out with someone the night before. Mook was the youngest of six brothers and came to No.90 so he could gradually, cautiously, definitely be gay. Patrice held down three jobs, saving for the day he could leave home and escape his mother’s sullen boyfriend. Sally had never gone back to her parents since starting to transition, calling her old home Stephen’s house, keeping a toothbrush and clothes at five different flats scattered across the estate. And Mickey was the centre of their lives. He’d been on the housing list at 16, and at 18 he’d been granted that holy grail, a flat of his own. The first thing he did, when given the keys to No.90, was to prop that door open and make others welcome.

i'm mostly sharing this because i absolutely love the book and also because the fact that mickey and rose have a gay friend group on the estates brings me so much joy. it also recontextualizes a lot of these moments, as well as gives a lot of insight to how rtd wanted to characterize her at the beginning of her story. don't get me wrong, rose IS an incredibly flawed character who grows so much over her time with the doctor, but i don't think the purpose of things like rose's "you're so gay" or her surprise about how open jack is with sexuality is to express that she is herself homophobic. "you're so gay" is honestly just typical "young person from the 2000s" speech. and her surprise expresses that she is discovering that the world is bigger than she previously thought, in more ways than one.

the "you're so gay" line is good because it's important that rose ascends from casual homophobia to being in a polycule with the two queerest dudes on tv in 2005

[quantumshade]

i’m sorry people in the notes are calling you “harmful” for this, that really was not my intention with my response — i honestly think they are just two different readings. i don’t think we have to agree at all, i think it’s good to have different takes on these things.

in defense of my reading, i have to say that while discussing TEC/TDD as “complicated queer art”, it is, at the end of the day, a story written by a straight man who enjoys making homophobic jokes in his episodes. it is a story about sex, and a queer reading is worthwhile and certainly not unsupported by the text, but i'm not sure i would label the story itself as inherently queer. i don’t say this to go “haha moffat Bad” or whatever, but rather to try and put this moment in context for what it is both for moffat as a writer and rtd as a showrunner. rtd, by his own admission, did not look over or rewrite moffat’s scripts to the extent he did other writers, which is worth considering when talking about his intention with the story. so reading their individual discourses on queerness as one cohesive and intentional narrative, one from a queer man writing from personal experience and one from a straight man who is not, and arguing that looking at these things separately is disingenuous, does not appeal to me personally as someone who prefers to read these things in context.

remember, the episode also has a scene where nancy threatens to out a man (who is characterized as greedy and rude and not much else) as gay, using this fact as blackmail, and this scene is presented as the man getting what he deserves for being a hypocrite. and this compares to a lot of similar scenes in later moffat episodes. i don’t think reading this in context of the writer’s biases and known repeated writing beats should have to be disappointing. i like both rtd and moffat. i think they both can be very good writers, especially in the masterpiece that is series one, but they Are different. and they have different perspectives on things. that’s not a bad thing, it just is, and it’s worth talking about when discussing the “direct line” of different character arcs. i also think minor critiques and criticisms are warranted for both of them here and not at all a bad thing to discuss. they are both thoughtlessly bigoted at times, and those times are not the same as portraying a character as deliberately flawed, but we can disagree on what times are what.

personally, i think you can read the empty child and the doctor dances as a lot of things. i’ve written about my jewish reading of it in the past. it’s about healing from war. it’s about a homeless girl’s struggles in a world that ignores her, and poor children surviving during wartime. it’s about csa (“there was a man there”; and the implication is there, and left intentionally ambiguous, that nancy herself is a victim) and choosing to live on the streets during the blitz rather than continue to face abuse. it’s about how fascism seems so hopelessly unbeatable that a girl in 1941 struggles to believe she’s meeting someone from the future who isn't german. it’s about sex and love and someone like jack, who is open about those things, acting as a foil for the doctor, who is not. it's about "at the beginning of this war i was a father and a grandfather. now i am neither." and it's about "yeah. i know the feeling." and above all it's about how against all odds, sometimes, just this once, everybody lives.

series one is about rose learning that she can be more than what the world expects from her, and that the universe is not nearly as cruel and uncaring as she thought it was, not when there are people like the doctor (and people like jack) out there. it’s about her opening her mind to new ideas and growing into herself as a person. rose is an incredibly flawed character, complacent in her life and believing the things people tell her she should think about herself and the world are inherently true, because you’re right, she is the product of the culture around her. i argue against labeling her homophobic because to me it feels reductive to her development and her journey, especially when other companions have comparable moments. it also feels reductive to me, as someone who grew up working class, to assume that this background would make her homophobic.

i also bring up the novelization not just because i enjoy it, but because i think it gives insight into how rtd thinks of these characters at the beginning of their respective arcs, despite being written much later. to me, it feels like it implies that rtd did not intend for homophobia to be a significant part of rose's character arc. who knows, maybe he changed his mind about rose’s homophobia between writing the episode and writing the novel. maybe he didn’t. it doesn’t really matter, i guess, except for how we want to choose to interpret these characters with the evidence we are given. and if those interpretations are different, then i think that's fine and good actually

the "you're so gay" line is good because it's important that rose ascends from casual homophobia to being in a polycule with the two queerest dudes on tv in 2005