#lindy talks

[linda-likes-to-draw]

Happy Birthday to me! (17/01)

Thank you everyone on tumblr for being with me for the past year! I rarely post now because of irl stuffs to do.. but i am still here! and hopefully one day i'll find my motivation back xD

Special thanks to my mutuals for making this year better than ever <3 @metallic-scaled-scarf - @b-lizi - @mellowscrolls - @tomatotimes - @thetempleofmara ! And special thanks to @99corentine for letting me pick up my pen to draw again with GHD.

Have a wonderful day!

[tinkerbitch69]

My favourite part of dot and bubble (besides ncuti’s performance in the last scene my god!!!) is that the episode kinda misleads you into thinking Lindy is so dismissive of the doctor and the disappearance of others because of the social media echo chamber she has isolated herself in. That she is scared to leave it and that she could be a better more empathetic person if given the chance to leave.

But then the final scene happens!

All of her actions, from putting Ricky in the firing line before her to lying about it to refusing the help of the doctor because of her thinly veiled racist beliefs, reveal that this refusal to acknowledge the reality around her to the point of putting people in danger and inevitably allowing the problem to become worse was a choice. She was not some innocent victim of media manipulation but had complete agency in her denial of the danger others were and just didn’t care about them.

The reveal is an important part of the episodes critique of social media echo chambers, I think. Their danger isn’t that they obscure information that challenges the users but that they allow people to choose not to be confronted with information that challenges their worldview or their behaviour. Which is an experience vital to developing critical thinking skills and being a compassionate, empathetic human being. But by removing the agency of people who choose not to break from their bubble, we also enable the insularity of these echo chambers!

God I love this episode so much <3_<3

[claraoswalds]

DOCTOR WHO Dot and Bubble

[starleska]

can we talk about the brilliant execution of Dot and Bubble's big reveal!!!

i am still absolutely gobsmacked by what a well-written episode Dot and Bubble is. startling, disarming, confrontational, and tremendously impactful. and holy shit i really really want to talk about how excellent the 'twist' (which really should've been obvious in retrospect 😭 was done):

as a white person it took me about ten minutes to clock that Lindy's friend group were a nightmare Aryan Tupperware Party collective: all white, all blue-eyed, and even Gothic Paul was dressed in blues and whites, with no black at all. but you know how i responded to that? mentally i went 'oh i'm sure it's nothing!' and shoved it aside. and i think it is exactly that insidious tendency to ignore, normalise, and validate overt and covert racism that the episode does such a tremendous job of tackling! everything in the episode gives us the lore we need to understand Lindy and the people of Finetime are white supremacists. Lindy's disgusted face and immediate blocking of The Doctor versus the amount of time she spends with Ruby. Lindy's shock at the Doctor and Ruby occupying the same room implying segregation on the Homeworld. Lindy calling the Doctor and Ruby 'criminals' not for being in the Bubble, but for breaking segregation. Lindy using Ricky September, a white influencer, to calm herself down not just from the monsters, but from interacting with a Black person. the tradwife aesthetic of the Finetime residents making a comeback in real-life right-wing racist circles. ugh, there's so much and it was all right in our faces!! yet many of us who aren't POC had the privilege of going through the episode baffled and uncomfortable, without being able to put a finger on why until the final bit of the episode. doesn't that tell us how quickly and easily we've all taken to ignoring both micro and macroaggressions? that we needed talk of being 'contaminated', improper use of the word 'voodoo', and Lindy straight up telling the Doctor that face-to-face contact was unacceptable, to understand they're white supremacists? oh my God 😭😭 what a genius play, to make Lindy so detestable from the start. she's an arrogant, vain, self-absorbed, moronic, uncompromising, traitorous bitch...and by layering that abhorrent personality and then giving us the reveal of her white supremacy, there is no argument even the most wishy-washy of people could have re: their awful views. Lindy and her friends are revolting racists who are so wrapped up in their own echo-chamber 'bubble' that they would genuinely rather be devoured alive than challenge their own narrow, bigoted views. i'm still blown away by the power of Ncuti's final scene. the disbelief, the frustration, the sadness and the fury...and yet the Doctor still tries to save them against all odds. i think the most common response to this episode was 'The Doctor should have gone all Time Lord Victorious on them', and you're right - he should have! but doing that would've affirmed the beliefs of the real-life racists viewers. the Doctor responding not with violence or righteous vengeance is a very deliberate writing choice: we are supposed to come away feeling revolted that he needed to behave that way, to almost be supplicant to the white supremacists. because that is the real-life view of so many people who don't even view themselves as racist: Black people need to 'perform' to a higher standard, than white people just to be considered worthy of respect. the more i watch it, the more i'm convinced this is the best episode of the whole season, and one of the best Doctor Who episodes we've ever had. we were taken off-guard by having an episode overtly about racism set in the future rather than the past, because our tendency is to assume equality is a natural consequence of becoming technologically advanced. this clearly isn't the case, and Dot and Bubble is a masterclass in confronting racism head-on rather than dancing around it for the comfort of white viewers. just. aaargh!!!! absolutely amazing 🔥🔥🔥

[thetatardis]

dot and bubble’s commentary on modern day upper middle/upper class corporate life is really interesting to me. like lindy’s “job” description and title not really making sense and having the most frilly fluffed up wording possible (like most corporate titles and descriptions), lindy not really being able to explain it outside of what is clearly the exact description she was told, spending her “work” time screwing around with her friends on her bubble, whining about her “long hours” even though she is clearly spending them doing nothing and was paid through to get the job by her mother/parents and is wealthy enough to just go out and party after just two hours of working, even dr pee telling her when to go to the bathroom like a scheduled work break. this episode man

[edwardshundredyearoldspunk]

dot and bubble might just be my favorite episode this series. it's safe to say there have been NAUR bad episodes but the futility of dot and bubble, the slow realization that these young adults (who have been chosen as the final vestiges of this civilization) aren't just rich and beautiful, they're also ALL white. the subtle, unexplained hostility lindy pepper-bean has for the doctor. the way she listens to only ruby, addresses only ruby even when it's the doctor who is talking to her. and then. that ending. the doctor's disbelief. he can't believe these people aren't letting him save them just because he's black. and they could have gone the allegorical racism, the whole sci-fi alien bigotry. but I'm glad they didn't. the doctor has never encountered this problem before and what does he do? he screams. he cries. because if there's anything the doctor will always hate, it is the meaningless loss of life. and that's exactly what will happen to lindy and her friends. they will die. and as audience members there is some part of us that enjoys that, because we hate bigots and we love the doctor. but the doctor cares, so part of us cares, even when we don't want to. and that's the beauty of doctor who. I truly don't believe a piece of media has had more of a hand in making me as empathetic as I am and for that I love it. best episode so far this season for me. rtd at his absolute best!

[seaweedstarshine]

Late to the game as I’ve kinda been kinda non-here for a minute but I scrolled through the Dot and Bubble tag, and thought I wanted to write this post into existence.

There's this part in Doctor Who Unleashed where RTD says this:

“What we can’t tell is how many people will have worked that out before the ending. Because they’ve seen white person after white person after white person, and television these days is very diverse. I wonder, will you be ten minutes into it, will you be fifteen, will you be twenty, before you start to think, everyone in this community is white. And if you don’t think that — why didn’t you? So, that’s gonna be interesting. I hope it’s one of those pieces of television you see, and always remember.”

And I'm like. Yeah. But the reason this works even as well as it does is largely thanks to the work of the previous showrunner with the previous creative team, which was notably the first era to have any writers of color (amongst other firsts in terms of inclusivity in directors, composer, actors). While Chibnall fumbled whenever he tried to write about race himself, he did have the self-awareness to have Black and South Asian writers writing the episodes where race is the focus (and a female writer for the episode where sexism is a focus; my point is, he seemed to know his shortcomings).

I wonder what the current creative team looks like? (not really, but I wasn't 100% sure for all of them)

To quote RTD:

“...before you start to think, everyone in this community is white.”

This is pretty non-self-aware, right? It's pretty “It is said, and I understand this, there was a history of racism with the original Toymaker, the Celestial Toymaker, who had ‘celestial,’ and I did not know this, but ‘celestial’ can mean of Chinese origin, but in a derogatory way,” right? (from The Giggle Unleashed) It's pretty “and I had problems with that, and a lot of us on the production team had problems with that: associating disability with evil,” right? (from Destination Skaro Unleashed)

—none of which are issues that should be overlooked, but think how much exponentially better they might’ve been addressed if he’d consulted with Chinese writers and wheelchair-using writers before going straight to giving the Toymaker weird fake accents and making Davros walk?

How many Black or non-white people do we think saw the Dot and Bubble script before it landed in Ncuti’s hands?

And this just keeps happening.

And like, from some of the shocked responses I've seen from white viewers to the ending of Dot and Bubble, maybe the episode's unsubtlety was needed? From the way RTD talks about it in Unleashed, the episode was written with a white audience in mind, Baby's First Microaggressions (where of course the microaggressions come from people who are pretty self-admittedly white supremacists). Ricky September, a more seemingly normal depiction of someone in the racist bubble of Finetime, seemed like an interesting element, up until the way he died.

The ending worked for me, because I do think the Doctor's reaction is true to how the Doctor would react. I just keep thinking of how much better the core themes could've been handled by someone with actual lived experience on the subject matter.

[rapha-reads]

Dot and Bubble - Doctor Who s14e05

"That's what we do, we work and we play" - ooooooooooooooh, I DON'T LIKE THAT.

Oh, wow. She's horrible. Oh, wow. She's. She's awful. Holy fuck. Oh, they're all fucking horrible. Doctor, Ruby, get away from them, please. Wow. On their way to destroy a full planet now. I hate them. Can someone slap them? Lindy is awful. They're all so dumb and awful. I'm. I need a minute.

Is this the first time the Doctor can't get through the people they're trying to save? Given Fifteenth's reaction, I'd say it's the case.

Also, after Thirteenth going through being unable to make people take her seriously because she is a woman, welcome to Fifteenth unable to make people trust him because he's Black. Ooooh, I. I am having a huge reaction to that episode.

Hey, even the Black Mirror episode about social media didn't go as hard (as far as I remember it). RTD really has been sitting on this one for ages.

[wineauntie]

Oh yikes…have so much fun with him buffalo 😳

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

"These are the true blue bloods. The upper crust, if you will."

The Librarians S02E06 And the Infernal Contract.

[girl-drink-drunk]

i'm not crying, i'm just remembering the episode of the librarians where cassandra leaves for a while after a bad artifact retrieval and jenkins is worried about her the entire time and then it's her memory of him that helps her through a panic attack and at the end he takes her home gushing about how extraordinary she is

[lickmylundqvist]

Goons

[wavebiders]

All these posts talking about how it's kinda gross that fans jumped to stanning the white supremacist society white boy from the episode, and are just assuming he wasn't racist just because he's nice are very based and correct

However, I do think the fact that this is even a discussion is partially a result of the way the episode frames all the racist characters as cartoonishly obnoxious people well before the racism is made explicit, and then kills off the only likable one before his racism even comes up at all

Which, in my opinion, is a far weaker storytelling choice than giving us characters that were actually likable if you failed to pick up on the micro agressions would have been

[nemfrog]

Hepcats Jive Talk Dictionary. 1945.

Internet Archive

[mamawasatesttube]

perchance does anyone remember offhand what issue of yj98 it is where kon and cassie go to that school dance together? i have a vague recollection of thinking it looks like theyre doing lindy hop but i dont remember... it doesn't really matter but im just thinking abt yj dance team concepts again hehe

[toffoliravioli]

to the anon about brendan smith, to sum it up all he’s good for is getting penalties!

and that’s it

not many devils fans if any at all, like him.

I like him off the ice which is what’s upsetting bcuz he’s one of the nicest people

….but like bro your game stinks 😦 but you’re also another uncle so we have to play you bcuz dad (lindy) feels bad-