sex, gender, and the Doctor

The announcement of the Twelfth Doctor's casting has again led to dismay for people who would like the next Doctor to be a woman.

I have to confess that I've always been a little uncomfortable with the assertion that if the Doctor regenerated as female it would be no big deal to the Doctor. On a Watsonian and also a personal level, I have doubts. These doubts have nothing to do with the solid Doyleist real-world reasons (feminism, basically) why a female Doctor would be a good thing. I acknowledge and agree with those reasons.

My qualms, as I said, are Watsonian and personal. They're to do with the Doctor as a character, which is to say as a fictional person for whom we assume a fictional subjectivity, and with my own experience of gender.

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Kink Bingo fic: "All Parts There Made One Prisoner" (Rivers of London)

What do you do when you've got "tentacles" as one of your Kink Bingo squares, but you've decided you want to write all your KB stories in fandoms that relate to the World Wars? You thank your lucky stars for the canonical magic in Rivers of London.


Title: All Parts There Made One Prisoner
Fandom: Rivers of London
Pairing: Thomas Nightingale/OMC
Rating: Explicit
Word count: 1871
Kink: Tentacles
Content Notes: No standard notes apply. The kink is risky in the context of the story universe, but fully consensual.
Summary: Fear won't make Thomas refuse this.
Notes: I have not yet read Broken Homes, the latest RoL novel, so this story might contradict Nightingale backstory included there. I've reused Desmond Tolhurst, my OMC from Ghosts of Ettersberg, although this story can be read without having read "Ghosts." The title comes from Robert Herrick's The Vine, the earliest example of tentacle kink I know of (warning if you're going to read the poem: it contains rape fantasy).


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