![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rose-related
Various people are criticizing Rose Tyler for saying, in Journey's End that the day she lost contact with the Doctor was 'the worst day of my life'..
I really do not think that anyone figures out 'the worst day of their life' in rational terms - the worst day of my life was not 9/11, or the day the US failed to ratify Kyoto, or the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, sorrowful as I was on all those occasions and bad as the effects on the world were. Nor was it the deaths of various friends, various occasions when doctors seriously screwed up my body or the day I failed to get a first-class honours degree.
It was probably the day that the woman I was in love with at the time rang me up at the behest of her other lover and said that she was severing all ties - even though there was a lot more of that story and I got to be very horrible to that other lover in due course. Or the day that a close friend came round and told me what a total shit I was - even though I knew at the time that this was bullshit, and years later we totally got past it.
The worst day of your life is the one you felt worst about at the time, and where the memory of that pain still hurts. AND THAT IS NOT ACCESSIBLE TO FRAKKING REASON OR THE PHILOSOPHIC CALCULUS OF JEREMY FRAKKING BENTHAM.
Sometimes, eg now, I despair of fandom.
I really do not think that anyone figures out 'the worst day of their life' in rational terms - the worst day of my life was not 9/11, or the day the US failed to ratify Kyoto, or the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, sorrowful as I was on all those occasions and bad as the effects on the world were. Nor was it the deaths of various friends, various occasions when doctors seriously screwed up my body or the day I failed to get a first-class honours degree.
It was probably the day that the woman I was in love with at the time rang me up at the behest of her other lover and said that she was severing all ties - even though there was a lot more of that story and I got to be very horrible to that other lover in due course. Or the day that a close friend came round and told me what a total shit I was - even though I knew at the time that this was bullshit, and years later we totally got past it.
The worst day of your life is the one you felt worst about at the time, and where the memory of that pain still hurts. AND THAT IS NOT ACCESSIBLE TO FRAKKING REASON OR THE PHILOSOPHIC CALCULUS OF JEREMY FRAKKING BENTHAM.
Sometimes, eg now, I despair of fandom.
no subject
Though I must say, the response Joss Whedon received when Tara died is probably still the most inappropriate fandom reaction to date.
no subject
no subject
1) Everyone's personal decisions must be amenable to rational analysis.
2) I am a Logical, Sensible person and if I come to a considered conclusion on a matter, then it is the Last Word.
3) From (2), it follows that anyone who disagrees with my reasoning must be wrong, and from (1) this includes anything they say or do that I wouldn't have said or done myself.
Running conventions got a whole lot less stressful when I realised this.
(no subject)
well Yeah
Re: well Yeah
Re: well Yeah
no subject
The conclusion of the Rose subplot was as unsatisfactory as the rest of it.(Not that I am paid to seed the internet with defenses of RTD... but we can now seriously talk in terms of plots, subplots and even - if we insist - *gag* arcs, and who's introduced that? Rusty).
But I felt more cheated on Rose's behalf than anything else... She didn't have all that much to do, in the end, and we don't know that 10.1 is all that different from 10. He's got more of a gob on him, and the Tommy Steel thing going on... that's all we know. So maybe she has got to start all over again.
Casting about trying to find something to captivate me, having waited all day nursing my foreboding and dread, I was struck by how Tantric Dr Who's getting. It's only ever been overtly alluded to in Planet of the Spiders.
Lamas and gurus don't just reincarnate, they also emanate (there are, at least, 3 Panchen Lamas... "worthy to be" Panchen Lama lives in ireland last I heard of him). The vociferous protectiveness of Rose as an idea on the part of some fans is like the devotion students develop towards female protector deities, investing their own feelings and thought processes in both the depiction and narrative about the Goddess. (And RTD turned Rose into one, overtly).
As the mythos extends maybe it is mirroring more aspects of Tantra and Tantric Buddhism especially, because both fit with the pattern that is dormant in our minds: that we don't want surrogate or real parent figures, or attractive love interests, to leave us.
Perhaps RTD and Billie Piper have achieved something very significant in creating a point of view character companion that young female fans strongly identify with, even when all they have to scrap over in the final denouement is something as thin as that ending was.
You are right, of course, about the nature of trauma and memory, but then most fans online seem quite young. Coping isn't the same thing as getting over something.
no subject
Thank you (although I wonder what I'm doing spoiling myself here, as I'm at American speed.) But yes. Very much so.
I also get this in discussions with people on whether the Doctor and Rose are actually in love. While I'm actually a tad indifferent to the answer, I get perturbed when people say "But why would he fall in love with her instead of, say Sarah Jane." To which the only answer is, "Oh. Love works like that, does it?" Maddening.
(no subject)
no subject
I also think given the truly appalling set-up at the end the likelihood is that the worst day of Rose's life is yet to come: being given as a duty "saving" a man with terminal heart disease, PTSD and the worst case of survivor guilt ever seen, who has also in one day lost his life's work and companion (well, they didn't clone the TARDIS that I noticed) and who, worst of all, appears as the identical shadow (though not and never the substance) of the man whom one thought one could love across all worlds and time - seems productive of mental tortures which make Davros and even the Master's best efforts look like Playschool.
no subject
I'm seriously afraid to start reading the reaction posts to this episode. I think some people are in this fandom for the sole purpose of nitpicking random things about Rose Tyler and then using them to spew immense hate-filled venom against her. :(
no subject
But the discussion in Doctor Who Confidential about what the Doctor was thinking and why he acted the way he did; well, that felt wrong, even if it was the writer saying it.
(no subject)
(no subject)
no subject
I think I'm, as ever, annoyed less by Rose herself, as by this portrayal of someone who's been promoted not so much by the show itself as by certain fans and the creators in extra-canonical stuff as the Best Ever, who is raised above all others by her explicitly romantic love for the Doctor. And the overtones of selfish romantic love as supplanting all forms of feelings for others or responsibility to the world in general, which has just been disturbing me more and more in fannish responses to assorted canons since Whedon's work.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
re excessive adoration of Rose
no subject
I remain unimpressed at the apparent hagiolatry of '10rose', a Doctor-Companion relationship I never much enjoyed. Though if some future episodes further elucidate the Time War (which we now know is not unbreakably "time-locked"), and what it did to the Doctor, maybe the cynics among us will better appreciate how special a Companion Rose Tyler was (assuming she was his first post-Time War Companion).