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#it is 2am and i care a normal amount about how imformative to spydoc that twissy is
ssaalexblake · 2 years
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The thing about the twissy arc for me is that i actually really love it as a Tragedy? It is trying to be a tragedy and it is completely successful at what it is attempting. The characters Want to reconcile, be friends (i would make some comment about Love here but the ghost of missy would hunt me down), but it Doesn’t Work. Because of things both of them do, ideals both of them hold, because of things done in the past, they are prevented from getting what they want and it is sad and it’s tragic and then them both dying alone in the dirt hurts in a punch in the gut kind of way because they were so close to going out, hand in unlovable hand, side by side, but instead die alone. It’s sad! It was trying to be heart-breaking and sad and it worked. 
And I mean, if you don’t like tragedy stories, fine, whatever floats your boat, but it IS a tragedy either way. 
So the idea that 13 and Dhawan are an insult to that arc and that the story following is disrespectful to them because spydoc are the realistic nasty fallout to said tragedy IRKS me so much. Twissy was a tragedy, making it Untragic by ignoring the end of the story is what would be disrespectful to what i personally consider to be a hauntingly tragic story of trying and wanting and ultimately failing anyway. 
The ultimate disrespect would be ruining the tragedy. This isn’t a ‘actually they lived happily ever after after a few road bumps’ story, it’s a ‘there was love here and it Mattered but ultimately didn’t change a thing’ story. 
Dhawan!master alludes to the events of twissy as a way to dig at 13 a fair number of times in what has been very few appearances. He has weaponised his own pain, correctly deducing that it Also hurts the Doctor as much. He’s not wrong. Of all the outside things going on in S12 with the lore, it’s a pretty consistent thread between their interactions that he will allude to being Bad and Irredeemable to hurt her for ever trying (because he knows she cares), and she’ll goad him and rage back in response and try and hurt him like he hurt her and she scores her own hits by knowing him too well as well. It’s nasty and brutal and it works because they are so deeply hurt by what happened with Twissy as a base line for everything else. 
It’s just that twissy is written All over spydoc, without Twissy their Intense and Visceral rage does not make sense, even. They are both hurting even Before you consider the plot events of s12. They are both still hurting actively because they are poorly coping with how their previous story ended. Mostly, if they’d written it to be anything Other than an absolute clusterfuck it would be a case of ‘why are you ignoring what happened last time they saw each other???’. 
The doctor thinks the master abandoned them to die alone and that their decades worth of help was just some scheme to use to stay alive, probably, they Definitely did not know Missy intended to shank Simm and go back to 12 no matter how comforting a concept that is. The master is severely traumatised by being both the victim and perpetrator of a murder/suicide simultaneously. The fact that that event was entirely the result of the doctor’s influence over them and that in s12 they find out the doctor Also influences them on a genetic level, too adds to the mess of trauma. 
Twissy’s a tragedy, it was trying to be one and succeeded. It was tragic alone as a secular event, but if you track what the events of their arc do to their next regenerations it makes it More tragic, which is what it Should do. It should not defang the story from before, it should bolster it. Spydoc being violent and angry and horrifying makes that twissy came So So close all the more tragic. 
The insult would be to make the tragedy Less tragic. 
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