today's Doctor Who casting announcement
Jul. 16th, 2017 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI am cautiously pleased. I'm not personally invested in the Doctor being female, but it's certainly well past time that it happened.
Everything will depend on how it's handled. I want the character to be "the Doctor, who just happens to be female in this regeneration" and not "the female Doctor." The way Missy was handled (though I haven't seen all her episodes) seems like a good template: she's clearly the Master who happens to be female, and that saved her character from Moffat's general inability to write more than one type of personality for a woman. (Sexy, flirty, sassy, making a big show of independence but utterly devoted to her man--on reflection, it probably helps that the Master was most of those things already, but there were moments when you could see echoes of previous incarnations in Missy, and that grounded her and kept her from being just an antagonistic River Song.)
Things I emphatically don't want to see: more focus on romance for the Doctor (though if it's f/f romance I'll tolerate it), the Doctor suddenly becoming interested in shoes or babies, the Doctor becoming more nurturing or empathetic or any other stereotypical female quality, the Doctor becoming in any way like a Moffat-written woman. I do know that Moffat won't be the showrunner anymore, but I'm not sure I trust Chibnall not to copy a winning formula (everyone who isn't me seemed to adore River Song).
Every version of the Doctor has a different personality, and I'm prepared for that. I just want Thirteen to be a recognizable version of the Doctor who is female, and not have her Doctor-ness suffocated under a thick layer of "this is What Woman Are Like, so that Doctor must be like this now."
Everything will depend on how it's handled. I want the character to be "the Doctor, who just happens to be female in this regeneration" and not "the female Doctor." The way Missy was handled (though I haven't seen all her episodes) seems like a good template: she's clearly the Master who happens to be female, and that saved her character from Moffat's general inability to write more than one type of personality for a woman. (Sexy, flirty, sassy, making a big show of independence but utterly devoted to her man--on reflection, it probably helps that the Master was most of those things already, but there were moments when you could see echoes of previous incarnations in Missy, and that grounded her and kept her from being just an antagonistic River Song.)
Things I emphatically don't want to see: more focus on romance for the Doctor (though if it's f/f romance I'll tolerate it), the Doctor suddenly becoming interested in shoes or babies, the Doctor becoming more nurturing or empathetic or any other stereotypical female quality, the Doctor becoming in any way like a Moffat-written woman. I do know that Moffat won't be the showrunner anymore, but I'm not sure I trust Chibnall not to copy a winning formula (everyone who isn't me seemed to adore River Song).
Every version of the Doctor has a different personality, and I'm prepared for that. I just want Thirteen to be a recognizable version of the Doctor who is female, and not have her Doctor-ness suffocated under a thick layer of "this is What Woman Are Like, so that Doctor must be like this now."
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Date: 2017-07-17 11:20 am (UTC)