PLEASE tell me more about aro gwen cooper. she's my favorite Torchwood character and I do not see enough people being creative with how they see her
Ok first of all thanks SO much for asking - the concept of aro Gwen has got my brain absolutely buzzing and I'm very grateful for the excuse to really get into the meat of it and write up a proper Aro Bi Gwen Cooper Thesis Post. Fair warning a lot of this is going to be me collating stuff I've said in other tumblr posts or in my discord dms with various people so fingers crossed it all ends up making sense! And isn't just me talking in circles for what has ended up being nearly 3000 words.
Without further ado...
Part 1 - "Like the whole wide world is bigger"
Gwen was always meant to be Torchwood's equivalent to a Doctor Who companion, and she's a very NuWho companion-esque character in a lot of ways. Or maybe it's more accurate to see she's a very Russell T Davies companion-esque character, specifically. Either way, she's got plenty in common with the quintessential NuWho companion: an ordinary person who is dissatisfied with their normal life and is drawn into a fantastical world of aliens and adventures and futuristic technology. We see plenty of Doctor Who characters who fit this archetype to varying extents, with Rose and Donna being perhaps the most obvious and clear-cut examples.
I bring this up because I think Rose and Donna make a very telling comparison point for why, IMO, Gwen specifically has a certain aromanticism je nais se quois that the DW companions don't necessarily share. Because unlike Rose, who was a disaffected 19 year old with a dead-end job and no hope for her own future, or Donna, who was a disaffected 30something year old with no job who had recently moved back in with her unsupportive mother, Gwen's life pre-Torchwood is, by any traditional metric, a massive success story. She has a respectable job that she's clearly passionate about, she lives with her long-term boyfriend who it later turns out is a year away from proposing, she's thinking about kids. She's living the dream. She's succeeded in just about every way society tells her she can.
And it doesn't make her happy.
This is where I think, if you will forgive me a slight detour because I saw an anniversary screening of this movie recently and it got some cogs turning in my brain, the most apt comparison to make with Gwen Cooper isn't any Doctor Who character, but Roy Neary, the protagonist of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If you've not seen it, the main character of Close Encounters is an ordinary family man who experiences a UFO sighting one night and becomes obsessed with the prospect of seeing it again. He starts acting irrationally and neglecting his family in favour of trying to hunt down the UFOs, to the point that his wife and children end up leaving him. Now, I've got my issues with this movie, mostly because I can't stand fictional men who are dicks to their wives (but crucially not the other way around #misandry) BUT THAT BEING SAID, do I find the notion of being drawn away from your nuclear family life that everyone is telling you you should want to be resonant? Do I find the idea of losing yourself in visions of mountains and aliens even as everyone around you begs you to return to reality to be compelling? Of course I do! The nuclear family is a prison and aliens are sick as fuck!
Gwen, in a lot of ways, follows a similar trajectory. Unlike in Close Encounters, she doesn't end up abandoning her relationship and family entirely (and literally has a kid in Miracle Day), but I do think it's worth examining how she spends much of the first couple of seasons of Torchwood running away from that perfect nuclear family life. In Countrycide, she says this:
I had a good job before this. I thought in a year or two, perhaps a baby. I know Rhys would be a good dad and I could try for Desk Sergeant and, well, it was all slotting into place. And then I met you lot. All these things... all these things, they're changing me. Changing how I see the world.
And it's a quote that stays relevant to her throughout the entire show. This dichotomy and conflict between "ordinary life": marriage, family, kids, and her job hunting aliens and saving the world with Torchwood is a central part of her internal struggle. Her life with Torchwood is something she has an incredibly love/hate relationship with, which marks another difference between her and characters like Rose and Donna. Rose and Donna, being Doctor Who characters, get to run away from their boring mundane dissatisfying lives to these incredible adventures in time and space. The things they experience are frightening, yes, but also magical and beautiful and exciting. In Torchwood, there are no incredible adventures in time and space. Getting wrapped up in Torchwood's own brand of sci-fi adventure isn't at all beautiful - it's terrifying, and it's heartbreaking, and it ruins lives. And over and over again Gwen keeps running back to it, at the expense of a normal life and family. As she puts it herself in Immortal Sins:
I'm trying to be honest, okay? Because do you know what the worst thing is of all? Out of all the shit we have seen, all the bloodshed, all the horror, do you know what is worse than all of that? I loved it. I bloody loved it. And I'd keep telling Rhys I was sorry, and I'd say to little Anwen I'm sorry, but I loved it so much. I knew things no one else knew and, oh, I felt so special. And when we lost people, it was so, so big and I could say it was worth it. Because the bigger it was, the more important I was. And the more people we lost, the more that meant I was a survivor and I was better than them. My God, this is all my fault and now they've got my beautiful little girl and I wished this on her.
As a sidenote, I do wonder if maybe this difference between Gwen and the Doctor Who companions I mentioned might be part of the reason she historically got landed with a lot of haters (also like. the misogyny. lol). I think compared to Rose and Donna's narratives, Gwen's is less immediately relatable and sympathetic. Most people can probably automatically understand why Rose and Donna make the decisions they do, why they choose to leave their ordinary lives behind. Gwen's choice to join Torchwood and let it consume her life is perhaps a bit more confusing. But, and here's the rub, I think for a lot of aro (or otherwise a-spec) people, that very idea of having the exact things society and everyone around you tells you should make you happy and should make your life perfect and it not being enough, I think that is incredibly resonant. I think the idea of rejecting a seemingly perfect, safe, normal life in favour of something weird and terrifying, something none of your 'normal' friends and loved ones could ever understand the appeal of, I think that is incredibly resonant. Even if you don't interpret Gwen as literally being aromantic, I think it makes sense that aromantic people would be able to relate to her on this front. The way she chafes against normative expectations of her, the joy she gets from a life that most people would, let's be honest, find kind of a nightmare, and of course her discomfort with conventional life milestones and romantic relationships and monogamy. I get it. I get her.
Speaking of which, let's talk about Gwen and romantic relationships for a minute.
Part 2 - "There's Torchwood, and then there's real life"
No shade to Rhys, but it's hard to look at their dynamic and not come to the conclusion that Gwen is kind of incapable of functioning in a conventional romantic relationship. And maybe part of that is blameable on her having an incredibly intense job that takes up most of her time, but some of it does also feel kind of like this:
Gwen has a priority list, and the romantic relationship that she is actually in is somewhere near the bottom of it. She's ticking a lot of boxes in terms of love losing. She does the cheating on her partner with her job thing. She literally cheats on her partner with, notably, the most seemingly allergic to commitment guy she can find. Her actual cheating still somehow manages to feel less like cheating than her secret third thing bullshit with her gay best friend does. She spends a whole season not talking to her boyfriend about anything. Even after Rhys finds out the truth about Torchwood, she continues to basically never want to talk to him about anything, least of all Normal Couple Things. She acts weird as hell when he wants to talk about if they want kids in Adrift. She appears to be gunning for the title of first ever female deadbeat boyfriend.
And I don't think any of this is out of her not loving Rhys, I think it's made very clear by episodes like End of Days and her reaction to the reality of losing him that she does. I think this again just comes down to a very genuine discomfort she seems to have with normative relationships and commitment and the expectations of how she should act in a relationship. Gwen loves people very, very much. But by god, at some point we need to start asking if maybe she's just not the kind of person romantic relationships work for.
I think the way the show itself approaches this also adds a lot to the Gwen Cooper aromanticism of it all. Because while on paper it might seem that the show is presenting this narrative about Gwen learning that her ordinary life with her husband is just as important as her sci-fi adventures with Torchwood, it's actually more complicated than that. And by that I mostly mean that the show is not particularly coherent, but in a way that's very compelling. The main noticeable issue here is that despite Torchwood regularly gesturing at the idea that Gwen should probably stop emotionally neglecting her boyfriend/husband in favour of her job, it's also never really prepared to commit to the idea of her deprioritising Torchwood in her life. Which yeah, is probably mostly just the natural consequence of her being one of the main characters in a show about Torchwood. But it sure does create an impression.
Adrift is probably the clearest example of this - it explicitly spells out this idea of ordinary life being as important as all of Gwen's alien hunting.
RHYS: You know, sometimes I fucking hate you. I mean, look at you, caught up in your little group like nothing else matters. Like being a hero is an end in itself. Well, it's not. You save this city. Well done. You save the world, whatever. What for?
GWEN: Sorry?
RHYS: I mean, why are you doing it? What are you trying to protect? What are you fighting for?
GWEN: Because if I don't
RHYS: Shut up. I'm talking now, right? You do it so people can live their lives. And there's nothing more important than that. Falling in love, getting married, buying flats, having kids or not. But real life. That's what you're protecting. And if you're starting to think that your shit is more important than real life, then we're not gonna last very long here, love.
But it's also not willing to actually commit to its own conclusion with regard to Gwen and Rhys' relationship. One of the points of the episode (allegedly) is that Rhys can't always be there for her with her giving him nothing in return and not caring about Couple Things. But then in the end when Gwen tries to be there for him, it doesn't work because she is, frankly, a bit busy having a full on breakdown about what she's discovered in that episode's monster of the week sci-fi plot and Rhys has to once again be there for her expecting nothing in return.
And is the weird back and forth here good writing, per se? Probably not. But the tension there does really compel me, far more than I think Gwen's character arc would if she ever did deprioritise Torchwood and saving the world.
Part 3 - "All these things, they're changing me"
I think the reasons why she's with Rhys in the first place are also worth considering. The reasons she gives for marrying him are... made a little confusing by the fact that the version of her explaining why she said yes to him in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and the flashback to the same scene in Something Borrowed are slightly different. For reasons that are frankly inscrutable to me. But for the sake of argument, I will use the Something Borrowed version, where she gives her reasons for marrying him as such:
I think the mention of stability is very revealing, which is the main reason I wanted to use the Something Borrowed flashback - while that line is intact in the shooting script for KKBB, it doesn't make it into the actual episode. Gwen's desire for stability is something that comes back a lot in the show, and I think it dovetails nicely with not only how much of Gwen's personal identity she invests in the idea of being 'normal', but also how much others place that idea on her.
You can see why she likes Rhys and wants to be in a relationship with him, because he is a normal, stable guy who is also incredibly understanding of the Weird Shit going on in her life and willing to roll with the constant endangerment Gwen puts both of them in. He's like her anchor, in a lot of ways. But what I don't think the show ever really sells me on is the idea that she has actual romantic feelings for him. And it really doesn't help that Jack seemingly has to remind her that she loves him multiple times.
I also wanna dig a bit more into the way Gwen hinges her identity on the idea of normality. For one thing, she's explicitly supposed to be "the normal one" of Torchwood - she's hired in an attempt to keep the organisation grounded and human, instead of isolating themselves completely from normal life. She's also the only one to really have a life outside of Torchwood, with a boyfriend who initially doesn't know anything about aliens and buys into the "drugs in the water supply" excuses, and later on a daughter. She also has a normal relationship with her parents, which is possibly a Torchwood first.
Obviously a lot of Gwen's arc revolves around her struggle to hang onto her normal life instead of getting swept up in Torchwood's wake, which I touched on a bit in the previous two sections. But I think this determination to cling to normality also informs a lot of her attitude to relationships. Ironically enough, I do think Something Borrowed is one of the most compelling episodes in terms of the aro Gwen reading. Gwen's determination to get married "today" is kind of fascinating in this interpretation.
What, exactly, is she worried is going to happen if she doesn't get married right there right then? Is this actually what she wants, or is she just desperately clinging to the prospect of having something normal for once?
And also it's an episode where Gwen's parents think that she's about to start a family and give them grandchildren and she struggles with not being able to explain to them why that's not actually true. Which could mean anything.
I'll end all of this by going back to Gwen's iconic speech from Immortal Sins, her admission that for all she might have believed the possibility of a normal life was the most important thing to her, she loved Torchwood maybe more than anything.
She wanted to be special. She wanted to know things no one else knew. She had everything at the beginning of the show, the perfect normal life she should have wanted. And then she looked away from the life in front of her and saw something strange and inexplicable and alien and nightmarish, and she chose that.
If that's not at least a little bit aromantic, idk what is.
i seriously love your art so much, the things you do are so unique!!! i was also obsessed with gem’s s10 base so i’m super excited to check out your game fic. what a creative idea i’m just so hyped.
thank you so much!! hc10 gem is so dear to me and i tried putting all my love for her base in that fic, so i hope you'll like it :D
