#i hate publishing opinions on this site but also i'm sick of the frame of mind

[ssaalexblake]

" #13 is already scary club!!!!! #she's just more emotionally mature than men 1 through 12" THIS, I am fully into this and agree!

Yeah, I mean, the first run through of season 11 I ended up focusing more on her chipper side, so I deliberately watched out for anger and personality faults on my second go through, and really, it’s all there in Whittaker’s performance. Especially in Resolution, which isn’t surprising considering what the bad guy was, it was also, strictly speaking, the first proper barometer we’ve had to measure thirteen’s reaction to something we’ve seen the other doctors react to.

I just have a lot of very jumbled thoughts about the actual narrative, where i think they’re going with this, and kind of… Weariness?? At the logic behind wanting a ‘snap’ from 13 just to prove she’s angry?? I ended up using this as an excuse to vent stuff i’ve been trying to say but am bad at putting into words, oops.

I mean, 13 was Clearly not in a good mood over that Dalek. Compare her reaction to seeing Tim Shaw again to seeing the Dalek again and that’s brutally obvious. She blatantly mocked Tooth face, and regarded him so little that she just marched off away from him and pretty much forgot entirely about him while trying to put those planets back where they came from, even After she realises that Tim Shaw pretty much slaughtered the inhabitance of a handful of entire planets she still totally disregards him.

Which, frankly, is kind of terrifying in itself considering what he did to (potentially) many billions of people, and says a lot about the doctor’s view on casualty counts, but not currently my point. In the end, she doesn’t even end up doing a single thing about him, and just leaves him in the stasis pod that it’s Very unlikely anybody will come across ever again considering the planet messes with the brains of whoever walks on it, even time lords!

Aaaaaand compare and contrast to Resolution, 13′s entire frame of mind in the whole episode was in crisis mode, she did not let it get one over on her, but she was Clearly incredibly more worked up in this episode, which, contrasting with the previous ep, is kind of jarring.

She’s erratic, frantic, at times perversely entertained, accidentally changed the entire tardis colour scheme to red in a fit of temper, takes out time more than once to taunt the dalek (and uhm.. she does this and it gets away and the next scene is of it slaughtering a bunch of soldiers), oh… And that thing where Ryan’s dad was like, about to get spaced and die horribly with the dalek and she just froze and did absolutely nothing about it. I mean, in the same episode she controls the tardis with a clap of her hands… which i will assume was just her doing it telepathically and being weird about it, which means she really doesn’t get to use ‘well i was holding on myself’ excuse to get out of That one, and this is among other things which i’m sure i’ve forgotten.

More importantly, i can trace the above things back to moments in previous episodes, like, perverse glee??? Demons of the Punjab. Anger??? King James just had that effect on her even when he Wasn’t actively being a sexist asshole, she didn’t like him hitting too close to home. Threatening? Kerblam’s ‘if i ever find out you’re lying’. Taunting? she legit taunts Krasko into straight up throttling her. Sacrifice one for the good of the many? Kerblam, you could easily view Charlie as her first proper kill. It all has roots, didn’t come from nowhere.

I’ve spoken before about how she’s deliberately tempering her anger, and how it all roots back to ‘laugh hard, run fast, be kind’, but i feel like that’s kinda made it seem to people that she’s not scary just because she’s not being openly ostentatious about it?? When in actuality she’s just performing intense amounts of emotional labour in a genuine effort to improve herself, and it’s not gender based because canonically this utter disaster had no clue how lousy they’d been to their female companions or anybody else until some very blunt life lessons… in an episode in the back half of the season, so canonically we legit Can’t write her previous behaviour off on any kind of female socialization.  

And while I feel like we are heading to 13 crashing and burning, you know, figuratively (but she’s still the doctor so i won’t rule out a 50% chance of literal crashing and burning), bottling isn’t a super idea either and she’s probably going to combust, i’m justminorly uncomfortable with the insinuation that the base line of all anger is the explosive outbursts the doctor is prone to. I’m not against her snapping and having a classic doctor outburst, pretty sure that’s where they’re heading because she’s slowly but surely gradually losing ground with the image she’s trying to project and the only time we’ve already seen her called on it (king james) she… Did not react positively.

I just have issues with the insinuation that to be the doctor she has to act out their worst qualities when we can see them in her clearly without her doing so just to Prove she’s the doctor. She’s already angry and arrogant, it’s there in the show, it’s just… Angry outbursts aren’t good? And having the storyline framed around her snapping actively being scary and bad for both her and others is more where my head is at, I think i feel like this is where it’s going, for it to be a breaking down moment rather than framed as something liberating, i just don’t feel comfortable with the grandeur surrounding it potentially happening in a liberating fashion.

I mean, from a gendered perspective, women having to temper reasonable anger is bad and oppressive and i understand the bad optics of it and wanting it it happen for the very reason of avoiding that, but also? Men Not having to bother to temper violent angry outbursts is also an awful thing on the list of shitty things about patriarchy, but that doesn’t just mean everybody should be able to have angry violent outbursts, it means nobody should, it’s not about stooping, it means work on self improvement if you do do this and stop, not ‘hey everybody gets a free pass to be an explosive scary jerk’.

The discussion around this all often makes me uncomfortable in the ways we treat violence and anger. I’m not a fan of loud/cold/threatening outburst kinda people, real or fictional, which is probably why my favourite Who characters are almost never the doctor. But I Do recognise they’re finally making an effort these days, and I do recognise and appreciate it in 13 and it makes me like her a lot more than a number of the other doctors. They’ve reached a stage where they’re actually working on it, methods aside, i respect that I can see all of the doctor’s questionable qualities within her but i can also see some kind of attempt to actively work on them.  That is laudable.

I mean, ok, maybe Not the best story to go with after 12+ men and suddenly one woman, but it Did start with 12 and Capaldi whose presence bought age and wisdom to it, Whittaker is just following the thread, really. It also Probably wasn’t purposeful that it ended up like this??? Considering new management and writers etc etc, but i also very much feel like s11 was a groundwork season and even in that i can see the fascade slipping away episode by episode, in resolution she even tells them one of her deepest shames, at the time with little context, but if any of them think back on it, they’ll Understand.

(disclaimer: I don’t have anything against anybody who wants a snap (if written well, i would also enjoy it, i like angst), i just have an issue with our cultural relation to violence in certain circumstances and this narrative kind of creeps towards the idea that if you’ve had outbursts before that you can’t stop yourself the next time and I don’t like that as a message, i don’t dislike any of the doctors, i just like the companions Significantly more 90% of the time, and yes i would very much like to be able to show anger as a woman without being demeaned for it, but there is a difference between being looked down upon for being justifiably angry, and thinking it’s ok to let your anger take control of you and scare others. Also: Not all emotional labour is bad, i have to write this bc i’m publishing on tumblr so yeah. )