"We're 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒇𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈 the polarity."

[ID: Header is the Twelfth Doctor with his hand on an orange crystal wall, overlaid with a post reading, “I have been in this gay ass room for ten thousand years.” Profile pic is the Twelfth Doctor with the panromantic and demisexual flags behind him and the words “Polarity Disturbed.” /end ID] Aspiring time traveler powered by tea, sci-fi, and existential dread—mostly found screaming about Doctor Who. Anti AI. Anti TERF. Pro Palestine.

[polarity-disturbed]

layout ids:

Header is the Twelfth Doctor with his hand on an orange crystal wall, overlaid with a post reading, “I have been in this gay ass room for ten thousand years.”

Profile pic is the Twelfth Doctor with the panromantic and demisexual flags behind him and the words “Polarity Disturbed.”

Hi! I’m Polarity (they/them).

🛸 What’s This Blog About?

I originally made it as a Doctor Who blog, and that’s still the gravitational center, but it’s since spiraled out into a wider orbit of British TV, sci-fi in general, and any media that’s narratively weird, emotionally devastating, or aesthetically feral. Sometimes all three.

📎 Some of Favorite Posts by Me:

📄 Useful Doctor Who Links

💡 Lighting Design in Belinda’s Bedroom Scene Analysis

🎙️ Why Conrad Clark Is Hilariously Bad at Podcasting

♻️ Doctor Who Logos Ranked by Logo-ness

📚 Why You Should Support Your Local Library

🎵 Delia Derbyshire is my “Roman Empire”

🃏 Mana Typing of the Doctors From the Magic the Gathering X Doctor Who Collaboration and What They Mean

📺 Doctor Who and PBS

🕳️The Shovel Post

🍪The Carpet Post

🔤Doctor Who Title Analyses:

🔤The Four Most Common Words in Classic Who Titles

🔤The Four Most Common Words in New Who Titles

🔤The Four Most Common Words Across New and Classic Who

🔤Most Common Words Across the Eighth Doctor Adventures (EDA) Titles

I also run 👾 Doctor Who Monster of the Week and 🎡Classic Who Episode of the Week

📍 Find Me Elsewhere:

✍️ AO3: PolarityDisturbed

🚀 TARDIS.guide

🎥 Letterboxd

📺 MyAnimeList

🦋 Bluesky

📷 Instagram

🧵 threads

🤮 twitter

# Tags:

#polarity posts for original posts

#polarity reblogs for reblogs

#doctor who comics

#doctor who books

#doctor who audio dramas

#gallifrey audios

#polarity fics/poetry

"We can always choose to be kind, and that will always matter." (banner is a meme from this post)

[green-is-gay]

i dont WANT pride months to be over,

on the other hand...

[polarity-disturbed]

I'm so normal about the new Nine audio.

(vibrating)

I swear guys I'm very normal about everything that happened.

[polarity-disturbed]

I'm so sorry gallifrey frindos, I was gonna try and continue my gallifrey tonight but....... they released a new Nine audio

I'm sure you understand

[mcweasel]

“the fifth doctor is so boring” the fifth doctor is an old man who woke up as a young man. a man who remembers what it’s like to be old and aspires to reach that level of maturity again to be taken seriously in his new body, but who can’t because he has an almost pubescent temperament. he tries and fails to be the doctor because he is simply ill-equipped on a mechanical basis and his entire character arc is built on the tragedy of losing a child who was in his care. this permeates his development to the point that he sacrifices himself for the life of one girl he barely knew.

THE FIFTH DOCTOR IS NOT BORING! he is a tragic hero.

also sometimes he shoots guns and says funny things. goaaaaat

[polarity-disturbed]

Sometimes the world is beautiful, sometimes the internet shows you a clip of Bad Bunny and Damon Albarn from the Gorillaz performing Clint Eastwood together.

[scunthotter]

People who are making posts telling us what is happening over on threads, twitter, and Instagram are like war correspondents sending us reports from the front.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

Doctor Who is a great fandom to be in on tumblr because you'll see spoilers everywhere but not a single one of them is coherent unless you've seen the episode anyway. like oh the glorbon is secretly trying to ensnare humanity in a giant crab trap? the new companion Jiminy Pubble turned out to be the latest regeneration of the Doctor's old enemy The Fuckwizard? thanks I know less than I did before

[mackdrawsstuff]

hear me out: the Rani with BIG HAIR

[no-context-seagull]

when companions say "my doctor" they mean the incarnation(s) they've travelled with, but when the master/missy says "my doctor" they mean that possessively, the doctor is theirs to have and theirs to kill, no one else can have the doctor

do you see my vision?

[polarity-disturbed]

For the people this will even makes sense to.

The dynamic between the Doctor, the Master, and the Rani is that of an exhausted theatre technician listening over a headset while two actors are having yet another dramatic meltdown somewhere backstage as they're trying to call a lighting cue.

[polarity-disturbed]

The lighting cue is actually part of an unethical experiment on the audience to measure biological mutations caused by exposure to otherworldly lighting inputs for research purposes, but like, that's not important.

Don't worry about it.

Everything is fine.

Probably.

Please direct your attention to the actors dramatically engaged in a limp-wristed slap fight.

[polarity-disturbed]

For the people this will even makes sense to.

The dynamic between the Doctor, the Master, and the Rani is that of an exhausted theatre technician listening over a headset while two actors are having yet another dramatic meltdown somewhere backstage as they're trying to call a lighting cue.

[polarity-disturbed]

I say this as someone who genuinely loves monster of the week stories.

Their explosive popularity during the years they dominated television meant a lot of narratives that probably shouldn't have been monster of the week shows got shoehorned into that format anyway.

But the decline of monster of the week television alongside the rise of streaming has meant that a lot of stories that would benefit from an episodic structure now get squeezed into the same five or eight episode prestige television mold.

[polarity-disturbed]

Rocky is so thoroughly neurodivergent-coded in both the way he presents himself and the way he navigates the world that I'm honestly really glad the fandom has, for the most part, resisted the urge to infantilize him.

I've definitely seen some of that happen with Grace, which is its own separate ick.

But I'm happily surprised it hasn't happened more with Rocky.

Because on paper he has all the ingredients fandoms usually latch onto for that kind of treatment.

He's an alien.

He's small.

His vocabulary, at least from the audience's perspective, is limited because of the translator.

And yet he's generally perceived as an intelligent adult who simply communicates differently, processes the world differently, and exists within a different cultural and biological framework.

I'm genuinely happy that, at least from what I've seen, most people seem to understand that distinction.

[penny-anna]

I'm gonna be honest. Merlin left a bad taste in my mouth, it read to me, especially at the time it was airing, like a good minority thing. Like "oh this government wiped out everybody like you but by being completely loyal and not like those other magic users you'll change his mind, and anyone who fights back clearly will push your rights back". Like especially after Arthur became king and shit didn't get better at all

OH no absolutely. that is what the text of the show is saying. my personal feeling is that it was down first and foremost to incompetence but if so a large part of that incompetence was that u know. nothing about the narrative they had created struck them as Off!

[polarity-disturbed]

As someone who grew up with that show and still has a lot of nostalgia for it, revisiting it has made me realize that many of its problems stem from the themes it wants to explore constantly pulling against the storytelling format it chooses to tell them through.

On one hand, it wants to be a story about oppression, prejudice, and the ways the those in power and their biases actively harm marginalized communities, in this case magic users.

On the other, it wants to be a monster of the week show where, almost every episode, someone evil or reckless with magic appears and creates a crisis that has to be stopped.

The problem is that those two ideas naturally don't support each other.

Because if, week after week, the story presents magic users abusing their powers, terrorizing innocent people, or validating the fears held by those in power, it inevitably reinforces the very prejudice the narrative insists is unjustified.

The audience is told that magic users are being unfairly stereotyped.

Then it's repeatedly shown examples that seem to justify those stereotypes.

It's a contradiction the series never really resolves.

I still have a tremendous amount of affection for the show.

But it's constantly wrestling with the consequences of the storytelling structure it chose for itself, and that ultimately undermines its ability to communicate the very ideas it's trying to explore.

[the-evil-skull]

Hrmmm I think Commander Maxil should have tortured the Doctor a little in arc of infinity. Regenerating out of pure spite with the face of the man who shot you is insane enough. Imagine regenerating with the face of your torturer. Follow me for more insights on how we can make DW more erotic

[art-the-f-up]

Dialogue parallels