Dracaspina

[honeypiehotchner]

i want to read a very specific fanfic and i’m so mad that i can’t (it’s sitting in my drafts) (unfinished)

[honeypiehotchner]

so glad this post is resonating with people bc it’s still resonating with me as i am once again not working on said fanfics that i want to read

[reverie-de-la-rose]

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.

[the-big-mood]

A few months before he passed away in 2003, a 74 year old children’s television host sat down in the same studio where he had filmed 895 episodes over 33 years and recorded one last message. It wasn’t for children. It was for the adults who had grown up watching him.

Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on American public television from 1968 to 2001. For over three decades he walked into the same set, changed into a cardigan and sneakers, looked directly into the camera, and spoke to children as if each one of them was the only person in the room. He never raised his voice, never talked down to his audience, and never rushed a single moment.

In that final recording, he looked into the camera one last time and said “I’m just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger. I like you just the way you are.”

He passed away from stomach cancer on February 27, 2003. He was 74.

[curiousmsmeg]

Sometimes you're in your 50s and still need a dose of courage from Mr. Rogers when the world feels scary.

[uniquewastelandpeach]

I will forever miss Fred Rogers. RIP

[dracaspina]

Afraid to re-read my Doctor Who/Ladyhawke AU fic. I want to finish writing it, but I'm scared that I'll want to trash it and start over from scratch.

[dracaspina]

Reason #39,764 I think that I may have ADHD:

I keep spacing out in game, and as a result keep doing stupid things that could expose myself to the evil folks that I would have definitely NOT have done if I had heard the third sentence that the DM just said.

There is just enough good luck/bad luck in the dice rolls to squeek by without getting caught.

"Wow, that half-elf bard traveling with us is fantastic! Nah, she couldn't possibly be the half-elf performer that we're looking for."

DM: you impress the tavern owner so much that they hire you, and put a poster of your face and name on the door. People crowd the tavern for three days and come from all across the city to hear you. The folks searching the city for you have no clue.

[dracaspina]

I miss gaming with my friends over zoom. Both of my pandemic gaming groups disbanded because of life.

[dracaspina]

It's very frustrating having irregular on/off cycles with different websites. Like here, I'll go for two years without posting/reposting something and then suddenly I have to come back and catch up on EVERYTHING and wonder where all the nice people went.

[rederiswrites]

History will remember you today, Minnesota. Well done.

[leebrontide]

IN NEGATIVE TWENTY DEGREES!!!!!

Please spread this around. Don't let ANYONE lie and say my community is anything but ASTONISHINGLY UNITED in rejection of ICE's behavior. This crosses generations, race lines, party lines, class lines. THAT is how bad ICE is. THAT is how bad we want them gone.

THAT is how loudly we are DEMANDING they leave!

Do you understand what a crowd like this means in a small city like Minneapolis??? In weather that hurts to breathe???

Can you imagine what that takes?

[ralfmaximus]

Bigger turnout than his inauguration!

[polarity-disturbed]

I saw someone say awhile back that you should think of Classic Who, especially the early stuff, less like a television show and more like a stage play. It was written at a time when television was still actively inventing itself, and that framing really clicked for me.

It explains why I don’t struggle with watching it the way some people do. I already work in theatre and spend a lot of time around low-budget community productions, so the pacing, the blocking, the heightened performances, it feels familiar rather than off-putting.

But the perspective also made me think about how many people avoid live theatre or older television in general because they can’t get past the special effects. I never quite know how to respond to that, because it seems rooted in an assumption that spectacle is the primary value of storytelling.

Limitations aren’t failures. They’re constraints, and constraints shape the art. When you can’t overwhelm an audience visually, you have to earn their attention elsewhere, through dialogue that carries weight, performances that are legible even from the back row, atmosphere that does the work of a thousand digital effects. There’s a reason so much early television feels theatrical. It had to be.

What’s being asked of the audience in those cases is different, too. It’s an invitation rather than a command. You’re not being bludgeoned into belief by realism or scale. You’re being asked to participate, to meet the story halfway, to accept a cardboard wall as a castle because the narrative and the performances are sincere enough to hold it up.

A cardboard set doesn’t break the illusion unless you expect the illusion to do all the work for you. There’s something beautiful about that shared agreement, the trust between creator and audience that says "we know this is artificial, and we’re choosing to believe in it anyway." It’s a reminder that storytelling doesn’t live in the budget or the effects pipeline. It lives in the willingness of people to imagine together.

[dracaspina]

"French-Klingon" Fusion cuisine makes me wonder about other human-alien mashups that had to have happened after a thousand years of shared history.

I am particularly curious about Vulcan-Mexican dining.

[dracaspina]

My roommate wants to eat at the Romulan-Thai restaurant.

[dracaspina]

"French-Klingon" Fusion cuisine makes me wonder about other human-alien mashups that had to have happened after a thousand years of shared history.

I am particularly curious about Vulcan-Mexican dining.

[cloudmancy]

unreasonably charmed by Pendant in the shape of a ram's head, Eastern Mediterranean, 5th–4th century BC, made of glass

[cloudmancy]

I never thought about this... you're right, that's awesome

[stuckinapril]

People who have brown eyes and don’t know the power they could wield with it piss me off so much because all it takes is a black waterline and a smudged cat eye w glitter in your crease for you to look like the baddest bitch to have walked this planet

[dracaspina]

Finally saw Kaos, and of course I loved seeing Billie Piper play Cassandra

Naturally, that got me going back down the old Teninch Fic rabbit hole. What David Tennant character do I pair her with?

My first thought is Peter Vincent.

But I don't know if that is a good fit.

Then there's Barty Crouch Jr.

But for obvious reasons I don't want to engage with that source material anymore.

Who would be a good fit with Greek mythology and a refugee prophet who no one believes?

[boybanderdyke]

RIP to the leather baddies who were full of joy and taken from us too soon 💔

[sap-say]

Sweet

[fantasticbluebox]

Just because I feel like making a sappy, happy photo dump of the Doctor and Rose being stupid happy.

Tons of pics I collected from Google searches. At least one I can credit @badwolfrun for.

[bobcatblahs]

Hand-Stitched Hearts Ch 6:Mummy. Is now up!

Summary:

Rose Tyler had always assumed her life would pass without incident in monotonous mediocrity- Until an injured runaway from the next kingdom sweeps her both out of her rut and off her feet…

Royal AU with adventure, action, secrets and drama

Find chapter 6 here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61799494/chapters/165476239

Or start with chapter 1 here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61799494/chapters/158014765