#3AM lets go lesbians its dr whom musing time

[notcatherinemorland]

ok more doc whom thoughts. yes i should be asleep. no i am not <3

ok i have been mulling this over and i think what’s been nagging me is that clara (and amy until s7) has no Wants. she has no goals. she doesn’t have a self-driven desire for anything... and you know what i’d argue this doesn’t even extend to wanting to be in the doctor’s presence. i think its why she’s been coming across to me as hollow, because she wants for nothing! her temperament is so benign! she is, frankly, beige.

Martha was a jr doctor (god bless), she had a level of desire and determination baked into her character just for that. And she wanted to be seen, to be recognised by the doctor. i didn’t even mind the crush line, because it wasn’t a romance plot, it was the doctor being unable to heal from Rose to recognise that he was carting about a whole new companion. it wasn’t pure sexuality, there was attention and all sorts of things thrown into that dynamic that made it interesting. Martha was amazing and i love her very much.

Rose and Donna... they want adventure i think. they want something more than earth had to offer them. Donna i think had escapism thrown in. Rose had something to loose back on earth. they wanted New, they wanted Exciting, they wanted adrenaline and education and More Experiences. donna wanted to make her grandfather proud. rose loved her family so much.

Rose did ultimately end up wanting the doctor and u know what? it was substantiated. it was sweet. i liked it because they actually had good experiences together and they were positive influences on each other.

donna’s end makes me cry dont talk to me. angy. i start war. it’s nearly 3am so i will come back 2 her.

amy uh.... well apart from the amount of sexual desire she shoved in the dr’s general direction, she kinda wanted to be around him but More Hightened than the other 3. I’d make the argument that what she wanted was validation of her childhood memories. amy & 11 didnt really uh. spend a lot of time around each other like rose and 9/10 or martha and 10 did. they didn’t... chat. i know we were utterly spoiled by the tenent/tate dynamic banter but i don’t rlly recall amy&11 getting anything low-stakes enough to chat. there was too much SHITE! in the way. THAT’S WHY i liked god complex so much it just!!! GAVE me something about the way amy’s whole character functioned. and then it changed her and i. CONTENT. DOUBLE CONTENT. about WHY amy thinks and acts the way she does. it is LATENT in rose. martha outright articulates herself. donna grows from someone who thinks there’s nothing in her into a character with dreams and motivations who understands herself. (and then it all got taken away from her and i cried) but amy... it took a while but she got Things in the end. S7 amy i LIKED! because of her life outside the dr. she and rory had grown! and lived their life a bit more. they had Things! they had hot girl shit to do. rory had a fucking backbone would u even believe. 

and fucking frankly, the ONLY thing clara has done that wasn’t staring at the dr is hold a tea mug and offer up a book. NO wait i contradict myself. i really liked her friendship with Merry in that weird cult choir ep, that was Nice. but clara doesn’t have that same..... drive for experience or recognition or autonomy/their own lives like any of the others. she just seems to stare at the dr. and i am BEGGING for literally anything at this point. just give me a reason just a little bits enough just to something we’re not broken just bent and we can learn to write female characters

for the record i also have ^ the same crit for river song but at least she’s a self-identified psychopath that’s established in the narrative to have been trained not to have wants or desires apart from murdering 11 so like. I Guess. i dont like it but at least its substantiated in a sense.

i know the way i want my visual media to be is very strongly influenced by a particular western canon of storytelling that i am now learning is very orientated around modernism and post-modernism because i like grand narrative hot girl meta shit and also character psychology. but also a) i love jane austen so much i want all characters to have distinct motivations for Acting and i enjoy watching them interact when they overlap. b) in a show like dr whom where the character arc ARE the stories. none of this plot shit, give me EMOTIONS. give me HUMANITY. give me GROWTH AND ARCS. not to get gothic lit but if your fantasy isn’t an articulation/allegory of a human experience/facet/thing, then i am simply not fucking interested. 

and clara isn’t articulating anything herself, the story isnt FROM her, she’s part of this big overarching plot that isn’t about her in specific, it’s externally driven. it’s a pound shop donna. yes, donna had the same thing where her fate wasn’t her ‘fault’ in a sense - ie how martha left the tardis on her own terms - donna had something tragic happen that wasn’t derived from who she was. it HURT because of who she was. and frankly im not feeling any same optimism of pain for clara yet.