#ramblerambleramble

[starsxpphire]

butler? turn on my music, please. i need to grossly misunderstand songs for the purposes of my own selfships...

[nelsonwyldst]

another one? :P

[vampy-campy]

so silver clearly fell in love with madi and all and tried to bond over love with flint with that stuff about madi being his vulnerability and with taunting flint about thomas

like i imagine his thought process being something like "so flint has been in love, if he felt about thomas the way i feel about madi then surely that means that there's some sort of humanity in him, surely he would give up this war for thomas, surely love could save him"

and i'm also thinkin about how flint started this war because thomas died whereas madi died because of this war or you could argue that she died because of this war ("flints war")

but then there's the "it wasn't.......your fault. it wasn't your fault" and i'm not sure what it means

like is he acknowledging in this great moment of loss that this war is much bigger than just flint (denouncing the belief that flint can control the weather and read minds and summon the spanish forces just to get his way) and that it would be insane to put the blame on flint

or is he blaming flint on the inside while feeling no choice in the matter but stay friends with him because he's sacrificed so much to stay committed to him ("you made your choice now live with it")

idk it also made me think back to that moment where silver was like "you're not the villain you think you are" and that kind of reassurance i kinda got the same vibe here but i'm not sure because silver's really a mess now and it's really hit him in the face what can happen in war and it'd be . kinda huge to offer reassurance to the man who was responsible for the safety of madi idk

[theuntitledduser]

Wanted to try this meme

[seaalgae]

literally the one thing that's been missing in a lot of the fanfic discourse is the idea that like

yeah you can write whatever you want

the thing you write can still very much be distasteful or poorly executed and it's not some great conspiracy if people react badly to stuff that is kind of gross

i do think it's just pure bad faith to present that as a matter of being "problematic" or making asinine arguments about the relationship between fiction and reality when a lot of the time it's people reading it and saying "wow, you have to have been an asshole or worse to think this was a good idea"

[a-stitch-in-time-and-space]

i just think that the ideal o’briens dynamic is technically the “genius woman loves her just-some-guy husband” except miles is also a genius at what he does (thank you lower decks for acknowledging), he simply exudes the just-some-guy-isms so intensely that you may be forgiven for not realising that the two of them are well-matched, despite the show not giving us enough scenes of it, and keiko’s so onboard with everyone having sex with him, she wants him to be everyone’s just-some-guy genius husband and he -- despite his initial mess-up starting the show, which if one were to explore more deeply is kind of the core of their dilemma as an otherwise solid married couple (who have eaten each others cultural foods prior to marriage i don’t care what the show writes) and very interesting! --

they want the other to do what they love, and they are learning how to divvy up life so as to make this possible, while still spending roughly equal time taking care of the kids, and being swingers, truly the couple who want and eventually kind of manage to Have It All

[thatonetvheadapple]

bg3 spoilers i think?

So Durge and Gortash had a previous relationship and its viewed in a lot of different ways but I personally like to think that it would be Gortash trying to kiss Durge's hand and almost taking his nose off

its just 'Romantic Gesture/Feral Response' and I love it

[variousqueerthings]

i went and read through all the scorecards and commentary you’ve written so far, and i just have to comment that i think you’ll have a much better time rewatching twelve’s era - it’s got its own problems, of course, but it’s such a breath of fresh air. i think m*ffat actually took some of people’s biggest criticisms of s5-7 to heart - the hamfisted sexiness is toned way down, and he did away with the whole “the doctor is the center of the universe and the most specialest guy ever” angle almost entirely. honestly, i almost have a hard time believing both eras were written by the same person.

hahaaa thank you, and idk why the below got so long, when your ask was relatively simple, blame it on the hyperfixation!

I acknowledge I tend to write m*ffat (mainly because im not trying to put stuff in tags to be a buzzkill but also as a joke about censoring him), but I do think he got... better

in the sense that he was overall less sexist and more character-driven later on and seems to have really run with a lot of what people wanted set up in terms of genderbending Timelords and queer lead characters, although I am finding s6 has some really good stuff... not.... his episodes so much lol...... but I'm liking it more than s5 which runs contrary with my assumptions/memory of his era, which is pleasantly surprising

I don't think he's egregious in the way writers like, say, Joss Whedon were, I've not heard stories of him being an asshole on set (except for that one story about him throwing a hissyfit about not getting the horse through the mirror in GitF back in s2), which may just be me missing stuff, so can let me know, BUT... nothing I know of. and while he's said some... Highly Dubious Shit About Women Especially and also asexuality, I genuinely think he's been working on some of those biases and fucking nonsense

we went from the Doctor kissing a lesbian without her consent to Bill Potts (who has some flaws -- the fat joke I've been seeing mentioned on Tumbls, the somewhat off-centre flirtation with the one-night stand she doesn't get to have that seems more like it comes from girl-on-girl porn than like a way lesbians might speak with one another)

from writing Rants about the dullness of asexuality that assumed a cis- and heteronormative perspective of the Doctor (he's a bloke of course he'd want to have sex was a lot of the Vibes of it) to in a "confused but got some of the spirit" writing about how the Doctor wouldn't understand human definitions of sexuality and monogamous relationship structures (there's a post about that somewhere in the depths of my blog @fabiansociety made some excellent points)

from describing the original first casting for Amy as "wee and dumpy" to... well, actually can we have some clarification there sir, also the shit you said about Karen Gillen basically just being cast because she was hot (I'm not saying I am super Yay Moffat after all), but at least toning down the sexy sexy talk on the show from what you say!

also maybe a smallish thing, and idk how much power he had and and and, buuut I appreciate how he went from the way he talked in GiTF about how Reinette was "worthy" of the Doctor because she was cultured and educated and whatnot... when Rose is literally the companion of the season and semi-textually Created Ten (regardless of youknow, reads of the relationship and all that, definitely important to the narrative and the Doctor), to having Rose appear as The Bad Wolf in the 50th anniversary special... haunting the naaarrative baybey

and I remember feeling like "Missy" when introduced was just a rehash of River Song rehash of Irene Adler (or whatever way around those characters existed) but then Gomez is actually amazing as The Master, to the point that she's the Number One thing I remember from that era of the show

and he's not an asshole about trans people, which, low bar perhaps, but not in this flipping country, especially not saying so out loud, which, like... Doctor Who is a big deal in this country and RTD is obviously a big ol' queer who's been yelling from the rooftops from Day One, but to not just have it be him, to have a cultural institution firmly in our corner, it's good feeling-wise, and Moffat is a part of that too

and what you're saying, which I cannot quite remember the details of but will eventually reach, the pivot from how the Doctor is portrayed in the Eleven arc vs the Twelve arc, and what the core of that story is, and the glory of Capaldi!

the limitations of this praise then come in the fact that he was learning this stuff while running two of the biggest British institutions, a version of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, and so the above Things that he was a dick about, alongside the mocking of fandom during Sherlock and the weird "queer but not queer" stuff with Sherlock/Watson (look, the fucking... BBC marketed it through the lens of a ship, and then there was a whole idk... campaign to make fandom seem weird and over-invested, and then of course Sherlock actually sucked as a show for so many reasons...) means that he's managed to be a prat in real time and it's meant that what should have been fun engagement in storytelling wasn't so much for many of us wincing through the shit he was saying and writing in his shows

... that time he was like "people are accusing me of being sexist, but I love strong, sexually confident women who can step on me, and having a dominatrix kink that I'm projecting onto my female characters onscreen is the opposite of sexism actually Check Mate" (that paraphrasing was mean, sorry not sorry, but also.... I could find the quote or just a handful of handy videos that have aaaaalll of the quotes... because they were happening.... in national newspapers and in interviews and panels and twitter and.... like.... not in private... there's more I'm vaguely remembering but not sure enough to just throw out there, so yeah... but he did not shut up!)

also I will never think he's a good writer so much as Very good at thinking up cool concepts that others might be able to run with or work with him on, and he should never ever be left to his own devices and encouraged to do whatever he wants (... Sherlock..... Jekyll.... from what I've heard, Inside Man....) AND I think generally and hope that RTD2 is going to be about heralding in the next gen of creators, including perhaps... a future showrunner who didn't grow up when Classic!Who was in its infancy (I don't mean that as a diss, I just mean that we've had three of those showrunners so far), and perchance isn't a cis man, because I think a lot of cool shit that could have been better might have been if moffat wasn't learning the ABC's of third wave feminism at the same time

Gosh and he's the least sexy writer I have ever come across... maybe not ever, but considering how confident he was being about allosexual alloromantic Doctor, that man is as sexy as getting slapped by a wet fish (unless you're into that, in which case insert something else here)

ALL OF THIS TO SAY... yeah, I'm excited for Twelve. and I'm enjoying Eleven more by watching the way I'm watching and being able to set criteria for worse and for better!