Rose-related
Jul. 6th, 2008 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rozkVarious 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.
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Date: 2008-07-06 04:02 pm (UTC)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.