Make Me Your Villain @darklinaforever - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
Make Me Your Villain
@darklinaforever
I am a bisexual woman of color. Second blog: @tuiandlayinandyang. Oh, and I am clearly an; anti-Malina, anti-Mal Oretsev, anti-Jordan & Hope, anti-Becho, anti-Bonrad, anti-Conrad Fisher, anti-Kataang, anti-Maiko, anti-Gwynriel. anti-Elucien, anti-Byler, anti-Jancy, anti-FinnRey, anti-Thomas & Ellen, (2024), anti-Zeki.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of most of the ships I like and that you will see me talking about on this Tumblr. And you are free to come and talk to me about them.
Lost:
Kate & Sawyer.
Jin & Sun.
Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy:
Jack Sparrow & Elizabeth.
Davy Jones & Tia Dalma.
Friends:
Rachel & Joey.
Monica & Chandler.
Phoebe & Mike.
Avatar: The Last Airbender universe:
Zuko & Katara (From the animated show and the live action).
Sokka & Sukki (From the animated show and the live action).
The 100:
Bellamy & Clarke.
Murphy & Raven.
Gabriel & Octavia.
Echo & Hope.
Lincoln & Octavia.
Levitt & Octavia.
Abby & Kayne.
Monty & Harper.
Murphy & Emorie.
Lexa & Clarke.
Romance with villains:
Sauron & Galadriel (From: The Rings of Power show).
Sarah & Jareth (From: Labyrinth, 1986 film).
Gabe & Kinsey (From: Locke and Key show).
Ennemies to lovers:
Rey & Kylo Ren / Ben Solo (From: Star Wars).
Rumi & Jinu (From: Kpop Demon hunters).
Gothic romances:
The Creature & Elizabeth (From: Frankenstein, 2025 film).
Lisa & The Creature (From: Lisa Frankenstein film).
The Bride & Frank (From: The Bride, 2026).
Ellen & Orlok (From: Nosferatu, 2024 film).
Erik & Christine (From: The Phantom of the Opera, book and musical).
Thomas & Edith (From: Crimson Peak film).
Dracula & Mina (From: Dracula, 1992 film, and Dracula A Love Tale film).
Why the Doctor’s Healthiest Romantic Relationship is with Rose Tyler
(Updated to include my sources. I was lazy the first time around).
Overview:
From the moment the Doctor and Rose Tyler enter each other’s lives they become mutual healing and growth forces for one another and they both have full agency to choose to be in close relationship one another. It is the Doctor’s total and free choice to ask Rose to travel with him after being alone for a century, and it is Rose’s total and free choice to say yes. There’s no outside influences manipulating either of them.
The Doctor is still deeply traumatized from the time war and in a state of deep self loathing, but Rose is constantly mirroring back to him that he is deserving of love. Rather than shut him out for blowing up her job, she wants to know him better. Rather than going back home after nearly dying on their first trip, she asks to relax and have chips before going back out again. She sees the good in him time and time again and focuses on it.
Rose is struggling with self esteem issues herself. She was struggling to find a purpose in life and by the standards of everyone on earth, she was a “loser” who dropped out of school. Her mother loves her to pieces but also doesn’t challenge her to reach her potential. Mickey actively benefits from Rose feeling bad about herself.
When the Doctor comes along, he is the first person in her life to not just see her true potential but to actively encourage it. In the Doctor’s mind, she is someone he believes in more than anything or anyone he’s ever encountered. And Rose feels it. We see her grow leaps and bounds in confidence and courage. From feeling like a nobody, she expanded to become someone capable of independently hopping dimensions, shooting the devil, and even helping Donna on her journey of realizing her own importance.
Meanwhile, the Doctor has started learning to care about individual people again. He had shut down that capacity because to think of individuals is to think of everyone who died at his hands in the time war. But with Rose, can start to consider them again. It’s safe to consider them again because of all the love, care, and devotion Rose shows him.
Dr. Wind Goodfriend (2016), a social psychologist who has written textbooks for students and is a current lecturer, described the Doctor and Rose’s relationship in terms of self expansion theory. They help each other expand towards their best selves and that’s one of the many reasons their bond is so strong. Here’s one direct quote from her. You can also find the entire passage she’s written HERE.
“Rose's ability to challenge the Doctor, to confront his weaknesses and make him stronger, kinder, and wiser, is what makes her special. This may be why the Doctor feels a love for Rose beyond his love for his other companions: She pushes him to expand his cognitive and emotional self in ways he never encountered before.” -Dr. Wind Goodfriend
In 9/10 scenes where the Doctor and Rose are together, they are happy. They are overjoyed and truly enjoying one another. The only times they aren’t, it’s because they are processing their relationship in necessary ways. Such as when Rose tried to save her dad. She had no idea how that was going to damage time, but the Doctor had to go within and address his fears of being taken advantage of. By the end of the episode he does trust that Rose didn’t mean it. He knows she wasn’t trying to use him and didn’t know the damage she was causing. They fought, but it laid important groundwork for their relationship and continued trust in one another.
Relationship expert Dr. John Gottman (2015) believes a healthy relationship consists of five positive interactions for every negative one. The Doctor and Rose not only meet that ratio but exceed it. They consistently bring each other far more happiness than emotional turmoil. Both of them prioritize the other’s mental and emotional well being. At no point is either of them willing inflict suffering on one another nor are either of them willing to abandon the other to suffer in any way. They both care about one another more than their own egos and so when they’re together, they’re almost always just happy and enjoying one another.
Yes, at times they put each other above everything else. They didn’t do this recklessly and when it does happen, it’s just part of being a unit with someone else. For the Doctor to be a perfect selfless hero, he would have to be lonely too. Because as long as he had someone like Rose around, he was gonna put her first.
Growth in a relationship doesn’t mean people become perfect. Just that they are better with that person than without. Which they were. Neither of them became perfect. Rose never does seem to draw clear boundaries with Mickey (which was an issue in their relationship prior to the Doctor). The Doctor also struggles to function without Rose. This is what makes their relationship feel real. They grew leaps and bounds with each other but still had flaws.
Contrast with other relationships:
When asking the question “are they better together than apart?” The Doctor’s relationship with Rose is the only one that comes up as a yes.
The amount of confusion, manipulation, distress, and cognitive dissonance that River causes the Doctor doesn’t make him better off when she’s around (entire essay about that is in progress). River herself has apparently mused that perhaps her life would’ve been better if she never met the Doctor in one of her novels. Nor was that relationship borne out of either individual’s free will.
Then there’s Clara, a person selected by the Doctor’s arch nemesis, Missy (before any desire to reform herself), with the entire purpose of causing both Clara and the Doctor distress. Rather than growing into a better version of herself or seeing the Doctor as just a role model, Clara sacrifices her own potential identity to become a direct copy of the Doctor. Meanwhile, the Doctor is emotionally unable to break himself free of a dynamic with a person who he knows was 100% willing to take his TARDIS from him and leave him stranded on a volcano to get what she wanted.
Charley Pollard from the audios did benefit to some extent from her travels with the Doctor, but had to suffer a great deal of trauma from the dynamic. The Doctor seemed to be completely unable to tell what genuine love looked like while they were together, even forcing Charley to kill him at one point, and both individuals wound up quite tortured throughout the entire dynamic.
None of this is to say the primarily toxic ships are invalid. They can be more interesting than a healthy one. But I feature the contrast because I want Rose Tyler fans to know the nuance and details when they’re out in the wild hearing accusations that the Doctor and Rose were just as toxic as “x ship”.
Dependence:
Yes, it’s also true that Rose and the Doctor had a lot of dependence on one another. They worried about each other all the time and at many moments struggled to be apart from each other. Is this the same as toxicity though? In recent times, the word codependence has been something that’s thrown around quite a bit (Bacon et al., 2020). It has no standard definition and the word originated as a way to define a person who enables an addict (Bacon et al., 2020). It’s somewhat harmful to throw this word around because any amount of interdependence between two beings can be labeled as codependent. And not all dependence is always bad (Johnson, 2008; Van Langue, 2012). Humans are designed to be a social species and if you look at nature, other social species like Wolves, crows, several other primates, and lions all have dependencies on one another. The same would apply to Time Lords since they too lived in a society. In fact, healthy dependence is a positive, and necessary thing for a relationship (Jonson, 2008).
Dependence causes an issue when one person loses their sense of self, when imbalances in dependence level causes a power dynamic that one party exploits, when one party is less attached and therefore much more willing to leave the relationship, or when it is necessary for one or both parties to function apart and they cannot (Van Langue, 2012). The Doctor and Rose do face some dependence level issues but not to the extent that might be imagined when that codependent label is thrown around without any nuance.
The emotional dependence seen between the Doctor and Rose is entirely mutual. An imbalance in the mutuality of dependence can cause a potentially harmful power dynamic, but that doesn’t exist here.
In terms of functional dependence, Rose is initially dependent on the Doctor for navigating time and space travel when it’s something that’s brand new to her, but she gains independence over time and the Doctor doesn’t take advantage of her dependence nor is he upset by it. So, it doesn’t cause them any interpersonal issues. And in fact, the Doctor and Rose do split up quite frequently and effectively even early in their travels. And both parties do function independently of one another quite well most of the time.
When one or both of them is in danger, the emotional distress this causes seems to disrupt their abilities to function, but that is a separate thing from dependence. That’s just two people who love each other undergoing distress if another is in danger.
The biggest issue Rose has in functioning without the Doctor comes when he’s in a regeneration coma. She believes she’s incapable of doing anything but running, suggesting there is a dependence issue at play, but she’s also in distress because she doesn’t understand regeneration. She’s upset because he’s clearly sick and she’s not sure if he’s even the same person. Which makes it hard to even pin this down entirely as a dependence issue.
Both individuals maintain their separate identities despite their closeness. The Doctor doesn’t try to become Rose, he learns from her and heals form her. Likewise, Rose doesn’t try to become the Doctor. She emulates him at points but never tries to be anyone else but Rose Tyler.
When the Doctor believes he is permanently separated from Rose he is unable to cope in a very healthy fashion. He’s lost regard for his own life and is struggling to relate effectively to anyone else he meets. This is a dependency issue. He was emotionally reliant on Rose.
Conclusion:
What I want to leave you with, is that this final example of extreme reliance was the cost of having a relationship as deep and as joyful as what they did have while together. There is no such thing as a perfectly healthy relationship because the closer people get, the more dependence is created. And likewise, an active avoidance of dependence will hurt how close people can get (Johnson, 2022). If Rose and the Doctor were less attached to one another, perhaps the grieving process would’ve been less dramatic, but the joy and closeness they got from one another would’ve had to have been diminished too. Dependence and therefore great pain in the absence of your beloved, is always a side effect of a deep impactful love. The best outcome is just that the emotional dependence is mutual.
Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life. -Merle Shain
The choice was either some amount of dependence or distance. The Doctor and Rose chose some aspects of dependence and I think it’s beautiful. Despite neither being perfect, their net effect and impact on one another was positive. The relationship did them both far more good than harm. Despite the difficult grieving process at first—in the end, Rose’s name kept the Doctor fighting.
References:
Bacon, I., McKay, E., Reynolds, F. et al. The Lived Experience of Codependency: an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Int J Ment Health Addiction 18, 754–771 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-018-9983-8
Goodfriend, W. (2016). [By Any Other Name: Evolution, Excitation, and Expansion]. In T. Langley (Ed.), Doctor Who psychology: A madman with a box (pp. 143-151). Sterling Publishing/Smart Pop.
Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (Revised edition). Harmony/Rodale.
Johnson, S. (2008). Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown and Company.
Van Lange, P. A. M., & Rusbult, C. E. (2012). Interdependence theory. In P. A. M. van Lange, A. W. Kruglanski, & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of theories of social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 251–272). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249222.n39.
I just saw people saying that the incest scene between Aemond and Alicent is meant to destroy Aemond and that people hate him because Ryan is supposedly Team Black. The denial is insane. Ryan just has a kink about parent/child incest. Something that doesn't exist in George R.R. Martin's canon. And since he did it to Daemon, he thinks he has to do it to Aemond too because the characters are like foils to each other narratively. Except Aemond is supposed to be Daemon's dark reflection. That's how it is in Fire and Blood. But since Ryan made Daemon worse and Aemond softer in the show, he completely changed that. Ryan Condal isn't trying to demonize Aemond. He's just softening him. The way people have interpreted Fire & Blood astounds me...
People who say the Doctor is pansexual in every regeneration annoy me. No. The 15th Doctor was gay. It was explicitly stated. Sexuality is one of the things that can change during regeneration.
Literally, if the show ever comes back and instead of removing the regeneration with Rose's face (easy to do, fans already did), they actually decide to do an episode with Billie, it has to be related to Bad Wolf and nothing else.
You are neither Bisexual nor Woman of Colour. Most Your Ships Are Straight who the frick are you fooling!
I'm a bisexual woman of color and I don't give a damn what you think. And I have all kinds of ships. Queer or not. You're crazy. By the way, this list of most of my queer ships is free for a long time now:
I will reblog this post everytime now, so that from now on you won't come out with this nonsense about me not having a queer OTP. This is becoming ridiculous.
And seriously, right in the Pride Month? Fuck you.
Also (as the comments on this post point out very well), I could only ship hetero ships, it wouldn't change the fact that I am still a bisexual woman of color.
Doctor Who has always been political, has always shown different sexualities, races, and genders. Hell, the whole concept of the Doctor is based on the ability to change all those things from always! Those who say that have clearly never watched a single episode of the show. Or maybe they only watched it as kids and never watched it as adults! Bunch of idiots!
And how is romance a problem when it tells a story? When it makes sense within the narrative? Also... Grace wasn't a teenager. Rose wasn't a teenager. Clara wasn't a teenager. River wasn't a teenager. Yaz wasn't a teenager. Etc.
You automatically assume that being a victim of abuse means being on the right side, which isn't the case at all.
The point of Anne Rice's vampire stories is that they're all monsters, but also victims at the same time because they've been through horrible things.
They're both. They're multidimensional. Complex.
Lestat is a fucking anti-hero (and the main character), not a hero.
And then, even in the book, Lestat is a victim of his mother. Not in such an explicitly sexual sense, but there's an abusive relationship between them as well. Gabrielle participated in Lestat's abuse in a way and saw him as a very explicit male version of herself.
But she was a victim of abuse herself, which partly explains why she was a bad mother. Again, she's a monster and a victim too.
As for the show, only one episode aired. Just one. I doubt you can truly judge how Gabrielle was written in the show.
Then, it makes sense that the show portrayed this relationship that way.
Anne Rice, in her books, really starts from the premise that being a vampire changes you completely, and there are incestuous undertones (Gabrielle & Lestat) or even borderline pedophilic ones with Claudia & Louis.
In a TV show, we would never (at least not in our time) be willing to put that on screen. So either we remove it, or we make the relationship even more abusive. Especially for a parent-child dynamic.
The romantic aspect of Louis & Claudia, for example, was removed to become a platonic parent/child relationship.
The Lestat & Gabrielle relationship was strengthened to fit our current, modern perspective.
Because I imagine it's easier for a secondary character like Gabrielle to be guilty of atrocious things toward her child than for Louis.
Also, removing this aspect doesn't detract from the core of the story, which centers on Claudia, Louis, and Lestat: the loss of a child. So removing these disturbing elements between Louis and Claudia isn't a problem.
Furthermore, since there was already a form of grooming in Gabrielle's on Lestat in the books, it couldn't be removed; it was central to their relationship, so it had to be kept.
But also, it was easily adaptable, and the interpretation of amplifying it as the show did isn't at all unreasonable. They simply made grooming more obvious and explicit.
In conclusion... Yes. Lestat is a victim. In many situations. The one with Gabrielle is one of them. But he is not always in a victim situation. Cause he is also a monster.
Given the news that Doctor Who is currently on hiatus/temporarily off, I'm for re-editing it the end, so they cut the final scene before we see Billie Piper's face and move directly to credit as a transition! That way, it's a true ending and not a cliffhanger! And let's be honest, in my opinion, either they'll end up making a special with Billie Piper, or they'll cut that part to make the regeneration unclear and introduce whichever Doctor they want to for revive the show.
I find it hard to believe that zuko and katara wouldn’t have had each other occupying their minds after the last agni kai. He took lightning for her. They both reached out for each other. She healed him. It wasn’t just about the fire nation prince and the avatar. Katara was the constant one. The world wouldn’t have the avatar without katara, he wouldn’t have survived without katara. The fire nation prince wouldn’t have survived without katara. It was change. It was water. It was katara.
So apparently in the show Jace isn't going to die trying to save his little brother, but just to prove his courage? Excuse me, but what the hell is this? Ryan Condal, I hate you.
