tempestsarekind, posts by tag: pond family - LiveJournal

…is kind of adorable? I might have to start watching Doctor Who again? (In like a year, or whenever it actually starts up again.)

In related "news," I saw a gifset of the Ponds today and my whole self went "waaaaaaah," because apparently I am never letting my babies go.

According to the BBC's official Doctor Who website, today is the Ponds' wedding anniversary!

…maybe I will use this as an excuse to watch some of season 5 or 6 tonight.

And Eleven feelings, too:

The Eleventh Doctor's Legacy Was Loss and Failure
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/12/t…

I don't know that I agree with everything in this piece (or at least, I don't give the same weight to everything mentioned in this piece), but the first paragraph hit a little too close to home:

"Whovians have only had one season away from the Eleventh Doctor, and it’s rough for some to remember that this year isn’t a brief reprieve before his return. Fans are missing his childlike wonder, his comforting cadence, his attractive-science-professor fashion sense, his undeniable sweetness in the face of a universe worth of terrors."

Okay.

( Collapse )

So I mostly just feel like I'm glad to be done with that season? There were some bright spots, but man, it was grim. And I didn't like the episode, for reasons that have way more to do with what I like in stories than anything about the episode, probably, but it wasn't the note I wanted to end on. (Like, there were several things that, if they had happened in a different episode, I would have been all over, but instead I just felt like it all felt weary and hollow, to me. This is not objective! I hope everyone who wanted to love it was able to love it. I just didn't.)

And I really hate being That Person, but I miss Eleven and my Ponds more than ever now.

(I haven't seen the new Doctor Who episode yet, so there are no spoilers in this - just a few goodbyes.)

I was away for the weekend, so I haven't gotten to see the new episode of Doctor Who. Instead, when I got home yesterday, I went back and watched “The Time of the Doctor” again – and realized that yes, I have been digging my heels in about Eleven’s departure, just sort of pretending that it hadn’t happened even though I’d seen his last episode months ago with my very own eyes. Part of that – probably the greater part – is that Eleven is my beloved space idiot, and Matt Smith brought such wonderful shadings to the role; I’ve written so much about both Eleven and Matt that it would be superfluous to repeat that here. But some of it is that in my mind, the Eleventh Doctor is so closely associated with Moffat Who, and particularly the things I’ve loved and valued so much about Moffat Who: the way that the show has leaned back toward joy and hope and redemption and possibility – regeneration, recreation – instead of trying so hard to turn the Doctor into yet another Tragic Hero. It means so much to me that despite the fact that Eleven is a trickster who will dodge death when he can, he also, nevertheless, faces his death at various points with acceptance, with gratitude for what he’s experienced in his long life, with tenderness toward the people he’s cared about – from cleaning up Craig’s house so he won’t get in trouble at the end of “Closing Time” to wanting to protect Clara one last time in “The Time of the Doctor.” It matters so much to me to have been given a Doctor who can call life a pile of good things as well as bad things and try to offer hope to Vincent van Gogh; who can comfort a grieving widow by telling her that her children’s happiness still matters even if – especially if – they’re going to be sad later; who believes that time can mend us instead of just destroying us; who promises in his last moments to remember who he’s been before embarking upon a new self, instead of comparing change to death and whimpering that he doesn’t want to go. It’s so important to me that the strongest thing the Doctor’s companions and friends often bring with them is love: love strong enough to face down Weeping Angels, to remember lost people back into the universe, to scatter themselves throughout time and call an entire unseen planet of Time Lords to account. They don’t need to take on some other power outside of themselves; they only need their own fierce and willing hearts. (“I won’t let them take him. That’s what we’ve got.”)

Faith, hope, and love, right? Those are the big three, and Moffat Who, for me, has had them in spades. An abandoned little girl who’s always afraid that everyone will leave her learns to stop running and believe that people will come back. A plastic Roman keeps a centuries-long vigil outside of a box, with all the steadfastness of his plastic human heart. And a lonely old man finds a place set at the table every Christmas in expectation of his coming, a village of children to dance the “drunk giraffe” with, a young woman who will pull open the Christmas cracker for him when his hands are too weak to do it on their own. (Did you ever notice how RTD’s Christmas specials were disaster movies, and Moffat’s are It’s a Wonderful Life?)

Anyway. What I realized is that somewhere in my subconscious, I think I’m worried that the end of Eleven-era Who will somehow be the end of all the things I’ve valued about Moffat Who - that changing the Doctor will mean changing the show in ways that I don’t want to happen: that it will become flintier, and colder, and less full of joy.

I did want to say one thing about “The Time of the Doctor” itself, though, that occurred to me while I was watching. We’ve seen a lot of examples of the way the Doctor hops in and out of people’s lives in Moffat Who, while others are stuck on the “slow path”: “The Girl in the Fireplace,” of course, from whence that phrase comes; “The Eleventh Hour,” where the Doctor breaks little Amelia’s heart by leaving her for twelve years when he only means to be gone for five minutes; “A Christmas Carol,” in which the Doctor leapfrogs from Christmas to Christmas in Kazran’s life, playing an ageless Peter Pan to that young boy’s changing Wendy; and on the grandest scale, the way the Doctor casually moves from moment to moment of the earth’s decay, in “Hide,” like the pages of a flipbook. We even see this a bit in “Blink,” where it’s Sally Sparrow who has to remind the elderly Billy Shipton that the rain outside his hospital window is the same rain in which they met, so many years and also only a few minutes ago.

So one of the things I really love about Eleven’s final episode is that for once, the tables are turned – it’s not just that he takes the slow path this time, but that for Clara, those hundreds and hundreds of years are happening in the space of a single Christmas dinner. How long does the Doctor protect the villagers on Trenzalore? Depends on how you decide to frame your answer: several centuries, and also about as long as it takes to cook a turkey.

Huh. Apparently I wrote something about the Ponds' leaving (and how they seem to "leave" several times before that point) last year, and never bothered to post it:

I’ve been thinking about the Ponds’ departure, and stories and un-stories. S5 has such a tightly structured arc, in some ways; I mean, it’s generically baggy in the way that Doctor Who seasons are always a bit baggy, because the episodes are so often individual adventures, but emotionally the narrative ties together quite neatly: Amy starts off opposing childhood (magic, adventure, the “Raggedy Doctor” who sounds like the childhood story, the childhood toy, that Amy makes him into) and growing up (marriage), and the end of the season – like “Amy’s Choice” – reveals that for the false dichotomy it is: growing up and getting married doesn’t mean leaving adventure and the Doctor behind. But it’s also true that no one can travel with the Doctor forever, and the Doctor both knows this and doesn’t want to know it, because he loves his companions and doesn’t want to give them up. (Amy seems, often, to know this far better than the Doctor, maybe because she’s waited for him for so long and so often; she’s the one who talks about the Doctor traveling without her: “long after the rest of us are gone,” she says in “The Doctor’s Wife,” and it’s a recurring theme of both the S5 and S6 minisodes, whereas the Doctor says things like “You’ll be there till the end of me” [in “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”] – trying hard to believe that, at least for the moment.)

Moffat’s on record in interviews as saying that the Eleven-and-the-Ponds story is one about what happens when the Doctor stays in his companions’ lives too long, and it’s possible to see S6 as an answer to that question: his involvement in their lives past their “natural” separation point sees Amy and Rory’s daughter taken from them. So he tries, after that, to let them go, at the end of “The God Complex.” But Amy and Rory are his friends and his family, and Amy is ‘the first face his face saw,’ and so he can’t let them go after all; he comes back, at the end of “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,” when it looked like Amy’s story with the Doctor was finished, because relationships don’t end like stories do. And so, ultimately, season 7.1 winds up feeling formless, because it’s an un-story rather than a story: it’s about characters unable to find a proper ending, because they love each other too much to let go cleanly. If you find yourself thinking that the Ponds could easily have left – narratively, at least – after “The God Complex,” it’s because they could have. But in terms of their relationship with the Doctor...well, Amy was still setting a place for him at the table and listening for the sound of the TARDIS, and he was still picking up the phone to call them and leave them messages, hoping to hear Amy’s voice before facing down some danger. The narrative problem of the Ponds is precisely the (to me) delightful way that they mean so much to the Doctor, and he to them.

Having Tam Lin feelings about Amy and Rory again, send help

I just - she loves him so fiercely and stubbornly that she remembers him back into the universe, and then is prepared to love him until he's human again (hold me fast and fear me not); she tears apart time for him; she's ready to do battle for him against creatures that want to take him out of time and away from her, with nothing more than her will... oh, Amy Pond, darling girl, no one told me you were going to choose to casually live inside one of my favorite narratives; I was not prepared for you.

This is one of the reasons it bothers me when people argue that Amy choosing Rory is automatically misogynist, that Amy is a passive character - as though "love" isn't also a verb, an action; as if it isn't terribly hard and brave; as if learning the kind of trust and faith that love requires isn't a major part of Amy's arc. As though telling stories that center around love is always sexist, no matter how they're actually executed, because love is weak and all girls in stories should fight with weapons and with fists; anything "less" is less than feminist.

In other media thoughts...I was looking at the book The Art of Brave a few weeks ago, and one of the people who wound up working on the movie said he was initially hesitant, because it was a princess movie (ugh, girls), and that mother-daughter relationship territory had been covered so often... Except, no? Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Jane from Tarzan: all father-daughter stories. (Mulan was the first Disney girl in ages to even *have* a mother; but all the big emotional scenes are between her and her father.) There are plenty of princesses who have wicked stepmothers, but that's really not the same thing. I guess there's a little bit of mother-daughter stuff in The Incredibles? Maybe? Non-animation, there's Gilmore Girls, and...Freaky Friday? Maybe I just watch the wrong stuff, but I'm drawing a blank on stories where the mother-daughter relationship is really central. (There are family shows like Joan of Arcadia and Parenthood with various important familial relationships, mother-daughter being one; that's good, but also not the same.) There was that Ya-Ya Sisterhood movie, I guess, but the mother-daughter relationship seemed (in the bits of it I saw on tv) like the frame narrative rather than the central story. And Anna Quindlen's One True Thing (the movie was kind of terrible, but I loved the book for quite a while. I wonder how I'd feel if I went back to read it now). I'm sure there are tons of books where mother-daughter relationships are key, but my point is that I don't think this is actually a narrative that's being done all the time in prominently visible media, like, oh, you can't swing a cat without hitting a mother-daughter story, let's not do another one of those.

And then I tried to come up with mother-son stories, and came up really empty there too. Tarzan, I guess, and The Iron Giant, and maybe Treasure Planet, not that I ever saw that one. I don't actually watch Teen Wolf, but gifsets on the internet suggest that the main wolf character has a good relationship with his mom? (Honestly, this is the first thing I've heard about the show that made me want to watch it. The life of a girl who loves supernatural creatures but has no interest in vampires, werewolves, and zombies, it is a hard life.) I saw a book at the library once about how our culture often sidelines and even stigmatizes close mother-son relationships (the term "momma's boy" is *not* a compliment), just at the moment when boys are going through all kinds of hormonal, emotional drama and need more support, not to be told that they're men and need to "cut the apron strings" or whatever - I spent a good while flipping through the book, although I have no memory of what it was called - and that came to mind while I was utterly failing to compile any sort of list.

Er. I appear to have tripped and committed meta.

On Moffat, Misogyny, and Children’s Stories

“The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned up and farther off from the rooftops of Omaha, Nebraska, to which September did not even wave good-bye. One ought not to judge her: All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one.” --Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

I read an old post on the internet about that perennial issue of Moffat’s misogyny in Doctor Who, which is a frustrating topic for me. It’s certainly not that I think Moffat has no issues at all – there are those stupid jokes about women and driving, for example – but I also think that the discussion is largely driven by people who don’t take into account either the prevalence of Moffat’s favorite story ideas with male characters as well, or the kinds of stories Moffat tells.

( Collapse )

I'll...just sit over here in this corner and cry, shall I? Don't mind me.

Oh, Amelia Pond, you brave, fierce, stubborn, glorious girl, never anything less than fully and unapologetically yourself: I will miss you. And Rory Williams, patient centurion, always being left behind; voice of caution and caretaker: you too.

Bye-bye, Ponds.

And goodbye, Karen and Arthur, you ridiculous hipster stupidfaces you. I am so going to miss watching you three be ridiculous and darling.

( Collapse )