vulcancoded - Tumblr blog

[vulcancoded]

why is this about to make me sob

[vulcancoded]

I've also seen people upset that the Doctor was fighting so hard to try and save these objectively horrible people, and I understand where they're coming from, but a big part of that scene is the fact that their own hatred and ignorance is leading them to their deaths, and they won't even let themselves consider for a second that the Doctor could help them, even when he is screaming at them, begging them to listen. And in any case, it would have been horribly out of character for him to just give up instantly.

[vulcancoded]

There’s a move that RTD has been doing recently that I don’t really have a Judgement on, like I can’t say if it’s Good or Bad, but it is FASCINATING to my specific dr who preoccupations

He is (selectively, only sometimes) bringing racism that has always been present in dr who into the diegesis. I first noticed it with the Toymaker; instead of being a racial caricature in the same way his ‘65 appearance was, the 2023 toymaker is a character who poorly appropriates the signifiers of real-world cultures as part of his style of Play. He’s not just an East Asian caricature non-diegetically played by a white man. He is, within the diegesis, a white man who intentionally disrespects earth cultures by imitating and parodying them. We only see him directly do this to white/western cultures (the German, French, American, and British accents he takes), but he’s clearly textually racist to characters of color in the episode.

Racism and racial stereotype are some of the Games the toymaker plays. They’re not erasing racist production/narrative decisions. They’re placing them in a new context.

“Dot and Bubble” is the same; it recontextualizes previous adventures with all-white casts, not by reimagining them as more diverse, but by making that lack of diversity diegetic. I’ve seen some point out that previous episodes had, unexamined in the narrative, few characters of color either as a critique of “Dot and Bubble”. How can RTD expect us to notice that the cast is all-white as something with narrative significance when we’ve seen the exact same not ten years ago portrayed as a completely normal state of affairs? But I think part of the specific narrative moves that this episode is doing is that we can also examine those past episodes through this same new context. That the white Doctor, and his white companions, were not forced to encounter the circumstances that made the situation they’re in all-white, and so they did not at all engage with them. This is not to say that these previous episodes were intentionally saying anything at all about racism; they were the product of racist writing and casting, and that can’t be changed or ignored. But fan analysis as a school of thought is often far more concerned with the watsonian than the doylist, and RTD is aware of this as someone who grew up in fandom. This provides a watsonian path to exploring the racism of the show’s history, without sugarcoating or ignoring it.

It’s worth noting when he doesn’t do this as well; he seems far more willing to engage diegetically with racism than ableism, for example. Davros does not get any sort of redemption or examination as one of the only wheelchair users we see in the vastness of time and space; instead, he is simply no longer a wheelchair user. I think we should be paying a lot more attention to what gets folded in narratively and what doesn’t because it seems very clear that RTD is intent on continuing doing this and it’s something I’m keeping my eye on. Again, I don’t know whether it’s Good or Bad that this is happening, but it sure as fuck is interesting

[vulcancoded]

1am time to post the cunty saint sebastian colin baker image

[vulcancoded]

It's June 1. It's time.

Go be gay.

[vulcancoded]

I’m very upset and having a rough fucking week, time to listen to my comfort sounds (Paul McGann being tortured and moaning)

[vulcancoded]

happy twirl!!

[vulcancoded]

In honor of movie day, have a sparkly little baby who hasn't experienced the horrors yet.

ID: a realistic digital painting of the Eighth Doctor in his tv movie outfit and curly hair blowing in the wind. Gold light edges his face as he looks off to the side, and the background is a deep blue green speckled with gold. end ID

[vulcancoded]

team two + text posts (see more)

bonus bc i had too many of jamie and zoe:

[vulcancoded]

Ethical consumption under capitalism? These slug creatures only eat white supremacist influencers

[vulcancoded]

i love how open 15th Doctor is about himself

Maybe a little too much XD

[vulcancoded]

what i think REALLY works about dot and bubble is it plays with the genre conventions of doctor who itself. We've seen doctor lite episodes like this, we know how they work. There's person who needs to be saved who gets indirect help from the doctor, maybe they're flawed and learn a lesson at the end, maybe they're part of some flawed society that is just kind of set dressing or ends up being torn down at the end without examination. About halfway through the episode I was ready to brush this off as a fun but predictable classic rtd ep that wasn't really anything special. Then from the the betrayal of ricky September on its like watching a house of cards that has been built the entire episode without us noticing collapse into a perfect stack

[vulcancoded]

happy pride

[vulcancoded]

happy pride month :3

[vulcancoded]

Watching Dot and Bubble like

[vulcancoded]

In this house 🏠 we STAN the man-eating 🍴 anti-racist slugs 🐌

Eat the rich 💵 (real) (this is a threat)

[vulcancoded]

Sorry I doubted you, slugs