Shoutout to the temporary ships that were created with the intention of getting in the way of the intended ship but that I actually liked way more than the ship the writers were trying to get me to root for.
(a.k.a I kinda get a bit salty on this one)
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1. Laurel and Tommy - Arrow
As soon as they got introduced I felt the feeling of doom. Because they were so immediately adorable and full of chemistry. I loved them from the word go even though it was so clear they were going toward a Laurel and Oliver resolution (and then to add insult to injury they changed their minds on that, but Tommy was taken from Laurel anyway).
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2. Clara and Danny - Doctor Who
It's up for debate if Clara's relationship with the Doctor was meant to be romantic-coded or not (I personally prefer it as 'not' but they really were very fuzzy with the lines) but either way Danny was still used as the threat that might separate them. And that was really annoying for me because I liked Clara and Danny so much. And then they killed him (which is a scene that still tears my heart to pieces).
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3. Cordy and Doyle - Angel: The Series
They were short and sweet and I enjoyed them (and though the Cordy and Angel thing wasn't really a thing at the time, there were some signs that it was on the writers' minds... and I wasn't a fan). And then they killed Doyle (...I might have to rename this post to 'killing off the love interests I actually enjoyed to give way to the ships I didn't').
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4. Rachel and Joey - F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
This ship went past my notice when I watched the show as a kid (my entire obsession rested on Monica and Chandler) but after rewatching as an adult I actually really liked their potential. It might have come up a bit unexpectedly but there really was something quite genuine about it (and Rachel deserved so much better than Ross). I wish they hadn't ended it as such a joke.
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5. Worf and Troi - Star Trek: The Next Generation
They were created with the sole intention of getting in the way of Troi and Riker. But I liked them better. I just found them more interesting.
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6. Tamsin and Bo - Lost Girl
They were more fun to watch than Bo and Lauren, had better chemistry and I just enjoyed them a lot more ('and then you see you' living in my head rent free for years now). But instead they gave Tamsin the short end of the stick and used her as a stepping stone (in so many ways, genuinely, even past shipping they just never gave that Valkyrie a single break... and then killed her in the most insulting way possible, because of course they did).
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7. Wynonna and Dolls - Wynonna Earp
Talk about chemistry. Season 1 of that show was so good and I really did fool myself into thinking this was where they were heading but no, of course not (I should have learned my lesson about Emily Andras after she killed off Hale on Lost Girl). How is an old dude with a gross mustache more interesting than a literal dragon? The answer as far as I'm concerned... they're not (now guess if they killed him off. Guess!).
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8. Lucy and Flynn - Timeless
A tragic love story happening in the wrong order and out of time because he meets her when he needs something to hold on to and she gives him a crusade. And she meets him while he's zealously following that crusade and thinks he's just a terrorist? Dude. But no, apparently the happy ending is supposed to be the guy that wanted the cake and to eat it too (sometimes I genuinely boggle at how the writers just will not notice when they've hit gold and instead go on beating that dead horse even more to death (and yup, somehow manage to kill the gold)) .
9. Dutch and Johnny - Killjoys.
(First I have to say that I still recommend this show a 100% and this is just quibble of a shipper at heart) But how is it that when you build the whole series around the heart of this relationship, you still end up using Johnny as a brief stop point (a la basically a Married!AU) before you put Dutch back with his brother? Like, yes, they're each other's best friends and always will be but people that are in love can be each other's ride or die best friends too.
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10. Mel and Abigael - Charmed (2018)
Alright, Mel went through the intended love interests like candy (and I liked most of them well enough) but Abby was the one that intrigued me the most, so it was a great shame that she was never properly Mel's love interest at all and more enemy/antagonist/ally/friend with mostly one-sided feelings for Mel (enemies to friends to lovers was RIGHT THERE).
It isn’t a coincidence that the face of the British soldier is cast as a Black man — not a person in a position of privilege in the racialized, imperialist state in which he lives and which he has fought for. The show has no interest in exploring that further.
Twelve’s run of Doctor Who is a lot more unflinchingly critical of the military and militarism in terms of its sci-fi scenarios, in episodes such as “Into the Dalek” and “The Zygon Invasion”/“The Zygon Inversion” especially. But in terms of Britain’s actual imperialist agendas in the Middle East, Danny Pink and his mindset are treated with a lot more compassion and he is able to be redeemed, to undo his mistake. He pays for it with his life, of course, but he is able to clear his soul and prove that he is good, that the common soldier is good, and ultimately capable of being innocent. His guilt is centered, not the life of the child he killed, and it’s yet another example of Western media making its soldiers the real victims of their own war crimes.
Danny himself seems conflicted about his role in the army. In “The Caretaker,” Clara attempts to defend Danny to the Doctor, reminding him that Danny is a maths teacher, not a soldier. But Danny refuses to be defended. “One thing, Clara. I'm a soldier, guilty as charged,” he says. “You see him? He’s an officer…I'm the one who carries you out of the fire. He's the one who lights it.” His point about the Doctor being an officer is an interesting one, and we can argue all day about the degree to which it’s justified. That’s kind of what season eight, with all its heavy-handed writing, is for. But Danny still believes that the job of a soldier is to carry a person out of the fire, that it’s got “a moral dimension,” as he says in “Into the Dalek.” It’s an identity he doesn’t quite want to let go of, and that extends beyond the posturing that he and the Doctor are doing in “The Caretaker.”
But it isn’t that simple, of course. After all, after the events of “Kill the Moon,” we get this exchange between Danny and Clara:
DANNY: I think I've seen this look before.
CLARA: No, you haven't. This is new for me.
DANNY: No, not on your face. On mine.
CLARA: What did you do?
DANNY: I left the army.
CLARA: You loved the army.
DANNY: Yep. And then one day I didn't.
He killed a child, by accident, and that persuaded him that he didn’t belong there, that being in the army had changed him in a way he didn’t like. Of course, it’s the officers that are to blame, as he hints at at the end of “The Caretaker” when he expresses his concern that Clara followed the Doctor’s orders without question or fear, comparing it to his experiences with officers during his time in the army. Now, that is one criticism of Clara that does not seem fair, to be honest. “Listen” and “Dark Water” come to mind. But the more interesting point is what it says about Danny. His clear criticisms, the idea of killing anyone, including yourself, because you’re told to, and turning into someone you’re not, are exactly the same as the Doctor’s. In this respect, they do understand each other. It’s just that they assign the blame a little bit differently. The Doctor has been an officer, in Danny’s terms, but he has been a soldier, too. The Doctor’s anger at Danny and all soldiers is pointed just as much at himself, but like Danny, he excoriates himself for it in private, and everyone else for it in public. It makes both of them honorable, and both of them hypocritical. And of course, much of the fandom chooses to take a more dichotomous interpretation, on racial lines.
Because it also isn’t a coincidence that yet another left-behind love interest is cast as a Black person (see Mickey Smith, Martha Jones, even arguably the young adult Melody Pond). It isn’t a coincidence that yet another person the Doctor underestimates and belittles is cast as a Black person. No, the Doctor doesn’t do it because he’s Black, he does it because he’s a soldier. But the Doctor isn’t real. Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies and everyone else who made that choice are real, though, and are allergic to treating Black characters with care.
I do not understand how the fandom can consider Danny to be pushy or controlling. He never once asks her to leave the Doctor. In “The Caretaker,” all he asks is that she tell him if being with the Doctor ever stops feeling good, “because if you don't tell me the truth, I can't help you. And I could never stand not being able to help you.” Clara ends up meaning to leave the Doctor, but then backtracking, but deciding to deceive Danny, because she, internally, has a sense that she is doing something wrong by not breaking her relationship with the Doctor off. When Danny finds out in “In the Forest of the Night,” he tells her once more, “I just want to know the truth. I don't care what it is. I just want to know it.” He doesn’t leave her. He forgives her, and wants to help her, once again. He just doesn’t want to be lied to. And as we see in “Dark Water,” Clara really would have told him the truth. She is capable of it.
Danny is not a bad boyfriend. Danny is an incredibly good boyfriend. The problem is that he and Clara are not compatible, and that even as he challenges her, she doesn’t challenge him. He helps her, but he kind of just. Exists to help her. He exists to send her a message, to give her an opportunity to become less like the Doctor, more grounded, more human, but honestly, she’s already too far gone. From “Listen” to “Flatline” to “Dark Water” to “The Girl Who Died” to the culmination of “Face the Raven” and “Hell Bent,” we know that Clara will become the Doctor. I love her for it. I love how she and the Doctor are so evenly matched, how they push each other to be braver, kinder, stronger, but more arrogant and reckless and caught up in one another and their big-scale adventures and saving the universe. All things that don’t leave them much time to stop and think and stay.
At the end of “In the Forest of the Night,” Clara asks Danny to come with her and the Doctor to watch the solar flare, but Danny refuses. He tells her, “I was a soldier. I put myself at risk. I didn't try too hard to survive, but somehow, here I am. And now I can see what I nearly lost. And it's enough. I don't want to see more things. I want to see the things in front of me more clearly. There are wonders here, Clara Oswald. Bradley saying please, that's a wonder. One person is more amazing, harder to understand, but more amazing than universes.” That’s a beautiful philosophy. And it is one that Clara is utterly incapable of adopting at this stage. It’s good for her to hear, and leads her towards compassion, and she respects and admires Danny all the more for it, but she cannot emulate it. She has a sweet moment with him, but then leaves to see the solar flare with the Doctor. Meanwhile, she doesn’t try to persuade Danny otherwise. She doesn’t want to change him. In her eyes, he is perfect already. But that’s the problem. He’s perfect. He’s not really a fully developed character, he’s a symbol, and eventually he’s a motivation. But the Doctor on the other hand…well. He’s harder to understand but more amazing than universes, to Clara.
That’s not to say that Danny is an uwu softboi. His feats of badassery in “The Caretaker,” “In the Forest of the Night,” and “Death in Heaven” are amazing. I once saw a meme on this very site of Danny and Clara as Clark and Malfina, and you do you, but…I wildly disagree. Danny is not just Some Guy. He is an incredibly self-aware, deeply thoughtful person with a hero’s skill set. He’s just not the type of hero that Clara is, and that the Doctor is. The Doctor Who narrative demands that either he change, or he leave. And for all the messiness of “Death in Heaven,” I am glad that he didn’t change.
Even in the throes of her “Dark Water” rampage, Clara knows that she’s clinging to Danny as a symbol as well as a man. When she’s talking with Danny’s consciousness at the 3W institute, trying to get him to cooperate with her resurrection attempts, she tells him in desperation, “I have to be with Danny Pink.” Not with you, but with Danny Pink. The name means an entire life, a human life, that she realizes she’s cut ties with, that’s dead in so many ways. It’s selfish of her to see him that way. But it’s also understandable and complex and makes her a better protagonist, not a worse one (so many critiques of Clara are really anger that a female character is as complicated as the Doctor…). And in the end, she has to let him go, and let him die on his terms, repaying his debts. Meanwhile, Clara throws herself more into her Doctor identity than ever. She never attaches herself to another human in quite the same way (flippantly mentioned Jane Austen fling aside). She dies by trying to fill the Doctor’s shoes, by being too compassionate but above all too clever, too arrogant. It’s only when she realizes, once more, that she is mortal that she briefly calls on Danny Pink’s name, his identity to her, the symbol that she has made him into, one last time.
So um. Yes. I vehemently ship Clara and the Twelfth Doctor. I think Clara and Danny Pink were not compatible. And I love the character of Danny Pink, and I suspect anyone who says that Danny Pink was controlling or caddish of racism and intellectual laziness.
Whouffaldi: Jelous of the attention Clara gives Danny’s buff physique, 12 tries to start working out more to impress Clara. Only for Clara to say that she loves 12 for the stick insect that he is😊
*vibrates* OT3 OT3 OT3 OT3
2213 words; exists in the AU where Clara has two boyfriends (though they are not boyfriends together bc I highly doubt Danny swings That Way); there are times where I really REALLY wish we had that extra episode along in the s8 production, because we could have had some more time with these three and gotten more along the lines of dynamic and character growth; contains Danny Pink and Pinkwald positivity coexisting with Whouffaldi, so if you don’t like it you can bugger off
-_-_-_-_-_-_-
“Why are you looking out there?”
Clara snapped from her daydream to see the Doctor standing in the middle of the school corridor. Oh yeah, it was Wednesday. She took a step away from the window and tried to seem at least semi-put together.
“Just seeing what Danny was doing before we get going,” she said. It was true, but there was a bit more context than that. The Time Lord stepped over to the window and looked out, seeing that Danny was entertaining the Coal Hill Cadets by doing pushups with a sack of basketballs resting on him.
“What’s he doing?”
“Showing off to the kids,” she explained. “The main purpose of the Cadets is not to actually recruit them, but for extra P.E. support before and after school. Don’t you remember our conversation from last month?”
“Where he yelled at me?”
“Where he rightfully called you out for being a prat for accusing him of doing the exact opposite of what he does for the kids; really now.” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “If we wait for a couple minutes, Namila’s auntie will come to pick her up and her baby cousin will be tossed atop the basketballs.”
“I am not going to watch infant endangerment.”
“She’s in Year Two, and it’s actually really funny watching as they pile on the extra weight.”
“Still, we have to leave before the TARDIS’s coordinates go out of alignment,” he insisted. The Doctor grabbed Clara’s hand and pulled her away towards the other end of the corridor. “There’s a temporal oddity in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, and I want to see if we can get there in time to meet up with an old friend. Too much waiting around means that the TARDIS will loose her lock.”
“You win,” she chuckled. Clara went along with the Doctor, a little disappointed that she was going to be unable to watch Danny struggle underneath the weight the Cadets were dumping on him, but she knew that it was ultimately worth it. Temporal anomalies? Definitely worth investigating.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-
After the adventure was done (it had been rather anti-climactic) and some dancing around the subject, the Doctor found himself laying in bed with Clara, staring at the ceiling while she slept. She was curled into his side and snoring quietly, having been tired out by a combination of all the running they had been doing, as well as the frustrated sex they had indulged in after realizing that all that excitement had been for nothing. He was still not yet tired enough for sleep, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
Clara snorted and rolled over, letting go of the Doctor as she grabbed hold of a pillow instead. He in turn shifted onto his side and snugged up behind her, sliding his arms around her waist and tucking her head underneath his chin. It was tempting to take advantage of their skin-to-skin contact and watch what she was dreaming, but he knew that to was likely best to leave it be, despite knowing she’d long ago given him permission. He needed something to keep him occupied while he was waiting for her to wake up, and he wasn’t entirely certain how to go about it. His equations were boring him, he wanted to be around when she woke, and it wasn’t a good idea to allow his mind to wander.
Alright… just a small peek. The Doctor closed his eyes and brushed his mind up against Clara’s, observing what was happening within her sleeping subconscious without fully stepping into it. They had practiced it before, so that it would be easier to communicate should she be rendered unconscious, and it was not the most interesting scene he had dropped in on. In the dream, Clara was sitting on a bench in the park by her flat; it was a gorgeous day, with people enjoying the uncharacteristically good weather. She half-heartedly was reading a book, the words on the pages blank as her mind did not have enough to conjure even a couple paragraphs from the things she assigned for her students. Instead, her attention was focused not on the people passing by or the squirrel and sea gull warring for some discarded chips, but what was going on atop the grass on the other side of the walkway.
There, plain as could be, was Danny playing with a couple of small children. Their faces were blank, as the rest of the unknown park denizens were, yet the Doctor knew exactly who they were: children from a prospective union between His Clara and P.E., who did not have faces only because they did not exist. It was clear to the Time Lord that, while Clara craved adventures with him, that she also wanted all life had to offer, including the stability and normalcy of a home and a husband and two children young enough to be in nursery school. Were the faceless weans the right age for Nursery? All he knew was that they were there and P.E. was playing with them and making Clara’s dream-state rather pleased.
It was then that the Doctor noticed something: P.E. was being very physical with the kids. He was tossing them up high in the air, allowing them to climb all over him, walking with a child clung to each leg—it was all stuff he remembered doing with his first family on Gallifrey. He’d even done that with Susan, all that he was able to accommodate, and it was normal. Wasn’t it? Of course it was—parents were designed to be playscapes for the most energetic of children, to some degree. Wasn’t that what he was told, oh so long ago…?
Then, he saw it: Danny began to do pushups on the grass, with his imaginary children climbing onto his back and sitting down in a fit of giggles. Clara inhaled sharply and the Doctor could feel the subtle changes in her that signaled that she was incredibly turned-on. He retreated from the dream and allowed her privacy once again—that was more than what he needed to see.
What was he doing? There was no doubt in his mind that P.E. was better at that sort of thing than him, the being a rock on which to secure a home life. It was P.E. that could be there to greet Clara when she stepped out the TARDIS door, to take care of the children, to manage while she was away. She was always good at flirting with mountain ranges, so what was a mountain but a rather large rock? It was something he could not blame her for fantasizing over…
...and yet, the very specific things that she was dreaming about brought him back to before they stepped into the TARDIS and got their Wednesday Adventure under way. She was still thinking of the other man’s athleticism and all that could entail. Why was she thinking that after an adventure? Especially an adventure that had been capped off with a round of annoying the TARDIS by satisfying their libidos within her confines? He wanted to make certain it was a coincidence, but at the same time…
...to think it was purely a coincidence was to take the threat laying down. The Doctor was no fool—he only had Clara for a short time in his long life, while P.E. was going to have her for much of his, no matter what sort of lives they ended up living. No matter how much she insisted that P.E. was no threat to him or them, there was still a part of him that flat-out refused to believe it.
Possibly, he was getting grouchy in his old age. Maybe paranoid. Definitely something.
-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Some hours later, Clara woke up in an empty bed, with no sign of the Doctor anywhere. He had gathered his clothes and vanished, which she was disturbingly used to by now. She ran down the list of most likely places for him to be as she went and put her clothes back on, the TARDIS having been kind and forgiving enough to go and gather them up for her.
“Where in the hell is that idiot hiding?” she wondered aloud, placing her hands on her hips. The TARDIS gently whirred and dimmed the lights, letting Clara know. “Wait, what, really…? You mean it…?”
The corridors went dark, with only the baseboard lighting illuminating the path ahead of her: the ship was dead-serious. She followed the baseboards until she came to a very specific room, one that she rarely had time for, considering everything else they got into...
...except to her horror, there was the Doctor, in the TARDIS’s workout room, attempting to wobbily lift an unweighted barbell off a weight set.
“Doctor, what do you think you’re doing?!” Clara wondered. He dropped the barbel into its rest in a panic, almost falling off the bench press.
“Oh, uh, nothing…” he said quickly. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I was, but I’m awake now.” She looked at the equipment she had just seen him using and raised an eyebrow. “What are you doing in here?”
“Uh… nothing…”
“Well, it looked like you were lifting weights,” she pointed out, “which is really hilarious considering those unbaked breadsticks you call arms.”
“Did you ever have the thought, Clara, that I might want to try something a little different?” he posed, laying his voice in false insult. “I can choose to do that of my own volition, you know.”
“Doctor… what is this about…?” She folded her arms across her chest and frowned, neither impressed nor convinced. “You smell like a locker room and look like you scraped yourself off the floor of one. What are you trying to prove?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re lying.”
“Clara…!”
She shifted her weight from one hip to the other as she waited for him to confess. Eventually, the silence was too much, and he cracked.
“I… just thought you’d like it if I tried to bulk up a little. Not a lot… just…”
“Now why would you think I’d like that?”
“You enjoy it when it’s Danny.”
His words hit her, and hard. The Doctor never used Danny’s name. She tilted her head and narrowed her gaze.
“I still came with you, didn’t I?” she posed, voice more than a bit irritated. “I still came with you, still went on a piss-poor adventure—which I know wasn’t your fault—still shagged your brains out when it was clear we were way too antsy afterwards… what ever possessed you to think that?!”
“It certainly looked it,” he insinuated.
“When? In the classroom?”
“No, in your dream.”
Clara let herself process that knowledge for a moment before she made a face that the Doctor wasn’t entire certain he’d seen before as she moved closer to him. There was exasperation, as well as pity and embarrassment. She pulled him down into a gentle kiss, pressing her lips first to his, then to the tip of his nose.
“You idiot—I enjoy being with Danny because he’s Danny. I enjoy being with you because you’re you. If I’m not about to make him become more like you—which would be a bloody disaster, thanks for asking—then I sure as hell am not going to ask you to become more like him, not in any sense of the imagination. Yeah, you’re both very different, but that’s part of why I love you both.”
“A Time Lord can’t help but wonder sometimes…”
“…and he can simply hush as he stops wondering,” she insisted. “If I catch you in this room again, you better have a damn good excuse for why, do you hear me? I will not have you thinking you are anything less than what you truly are.”
“...which is…?”
“My idiot.” She patted his chest, a cheeky look upon her face. “You know, Danny’s not the only one I dream of at night.”
“Well, I should hope not,” he blushed. He looked down at her and his eyebrows shot up. “Oh… I was in your dreams last night as well…?”
“You ducked out at the wrong time,” she teased. “You really think I wouldn’t include you when dreaming about the perfect day off?”
“I’m not entirely certain what you’d dream about,” he admitted. “You’re entitled to some privacy and secrets.”
“Well let’s get you in the shower, and then I can show you a little bit of a preview.” She winked at him, which made the Doctor go dark pink in blush. “It all starts when Daddy begins to put the kids down for bed, after Mummy has said her goodnights.”
“...then what does that make me?” he wondered. Clara began to pull him along, out into the corridor and down towards the bedroom. “If he’s Dad and you’re Mam, am I also Dad?”
“You’re the Doctor, silly,” she chuckled. She brought him into another kiss, this one long and lazy, where she ended with their bodies pressed together and her arms slung over his shoulders and his fingers in her hair. “Let’s talk about who’s who when we get to that point, alright?”
Danny Pink gets so much unnecessary hate istg he was actually a great character and a wonderful addition to the show and he gave more depth and meaning to Clara’s life outside the tardis. he was also really smart and one of the moments that he rlly stands out to me is from S08E07 ‘kill the moon’ when Clara’s venting to him angrily about how she’s completely done with the Doctor and he says you’re never done while you’re still angry AND. THAT. NEEDS. MORE. APPRECIATION. HOW is he so underrated HOW?? he was intelligent and kind and empathetic and he didn’t bow down before the Doctor, he spoke his MIND and he wasn’t scared of the repercussions. Danny Pink was great and his personality was a refreshing change to the series.
