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sensiblecatI love Donna. I also love Rose, and back in the day I was pretty cool with Martha. It got me into all kinds of trouble. It seemed that I had to pick my ship and hate all the other ones. I even got banned from a couple of communities for writing very gentle fics about how the Doctor could have deep feelings for more than one person.
Ship wars are very interesting. One reason I'm not all that active in the Donna-centric communities is that you come up against so much Rose hate. It's spoiled a lot of otherwise brilliant fics for me, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I've even heard it suggested in some quarters that in some way Rose was responsible for what happened to Donna, which I can only interpret as a way the writers deal with their entirely understandable feelings of disgust at RTD. Rose was special to RTD, RTD shafted Donna, therefore it was Rose's fault.
Sometimes you get a similar thing going on in Torchwood. If you ship Jack/Ianto you have to hate on Gwen and accuse RTD of privileging her all the time. Why can't she be the one who dies? And now I suppose it'll all start again as fans try to figure out how Jack/Angelo could exist without diminishing Jack/Ianto. A few continuity errors, which I suspect the writers waved through to give new viewers a bit more awareness of Jack's back story, have led to a lot of speculation that the Jack we see in TW/MD 7 might be post CoE, and therefore post-Ianto.
I'll be honest, I've never really got the Jack/Ianto ship and I found a lot of things about the Jack/Angelo one more touching and convincing. I could imagine them together in a way that I never sould with Ianto, but that's just me, and it doesn't matter. What does intrigue, and also sadden me, is that we demand such simplicity from our fictional characters. Jack and the Doctor are both infinitely more complex than your average human, for a whole variety of reasons, and even humans are perfectly capable of loving different people deeply in different ways at the same time. If the Doctor loves Donna (as he clearly did), is that cheating on Rose? If Jack loves again after Ianto, does that mean he thinks any less of him? (After all, even if we go with the vanilla option, that Jack meets Angelo while he's waiting for the Doctor to come back into his life, it's clear that he's had at least three serious relationships in canon between TPOTW and Utopia - Angelo, Estelle and Alice's mother). I think only the most rabidly shipping fan would begrudge him that in 140 years.
So when we get hot under the collar about "our" ship, that little phrase speaks volumes. It's not really about the Doctor and Jack being faithful at all, it's about having our own conception of them and not wanting it disturbed. It could be there's some wish-fulfilment in there, that if you're the slightly more mature type and you adore Donna, it's a real slap in the face when she's not allowed to have her forever - and yet Rose gets hers, albeit with a different-ish Ten. It's as if RTD is insulting us personally. I don't know if it's my age, but I ship Ten/Rose like crazy and I also love Ten/Donna and think it's got far more potential as a satisfying relationship for Ten. And I often read, indeed sometimes write, fics where I know perfectly well that my Doctor has wandered straight out of canon into a parallel universe where he's a different person. For example, I don't believe for a minute that he'd ever settle down with Rose and have three kids, but I read the Chaos-verse because I'd much rather read about that Doctor than RTD's self-flagellating emo-boy.
Funnily enough, Steven Moffatt has come closer than anybody to making the Doctor do domestic. I read a brilliant interview with him the other day where he pointed out that the Doctor always has an exit strategy even (and I quote word for word) "with Rose, whom he loved so much.") There, it's official, the Moff ships the Doctor and Rose, but he's absolutely right. The Doctor never lets himself say the l-word and when he has the chance to have Rose back, he doesn't take it. But I think it misses the point for Donna fans to punch the air and say he'd grown out of Rose - because he expects to lose Donna, too. Jack and the Doctor have the same problem - they live on an eternal time scale and they'll never be able to have satisfactory, fulfilling relationships. It really is bloody depressing at times, not to mention repetitive.
Jack in Immortal Sins seems to be chanelling Ten word-for-word. It's a very tragic set up because it seems that in Angelo he falls in love not only with a person, but with the idea of being like the Doctor and having a companion of his very own. It doesn't work, it goes horribly wrong and that's at least partly because he's in love with the mystery surrounding his own character. It might be suicidal to tell anyone else he's never going to stay dead, but I don't think that's the only reason he keeps quiet about it. I think he likes being the mystery man. And it's interesting to reflect on why he makes his worst mistake, which is coming back from the dead to freak out Angelo. Why does he do that? Is it just that he can't live without the guy, or is there a bit of pride involved? I can kind of see why Angelo turns against him. After all, if someone is powerful enough to deal with aliens, predict the future and cheat death, why does he leave his lover to rot in jail?
It's what the Doctor does all the time of course. He's the boss. He witholds information, he messes with people's heads, he seduces them, falls for them and then abandons them, and don't tell me that, at least sometimes, he doesn't enjoy having that power and control. Jack always trys to be like him, in the bad ways as well as the good. We can tie ourselves in knots trying to make sense of Jack's personal timeline, but in the end our relationship with Jack the character as viewers and fans will be an evolving text and form a chronological narrative in which we respond to the experiences we've already watched him go through. We see the Jack who lost Ianto falling for Angelo, even if the meta says Ianto hasn't even been born yet.
This is very vague and not at all well constructed, just a sort of stream-of-consciousness burble. Oh, and something else occurs to me. Canonically, Jack has now been romantically involved with three men whose names all end in "o". As does the word "hero". Someone cleverer than me (I can think of a few on my flist) would read some deep mirroring into that. I'm inclined to think it's either coincidence or RTD having one of his Smith-and-Jones type jokes on us.
(Apologies for formatting problems, I don't get this 'cut wizard' business at all, I'm afraid.)
Ship wars are very interesting. One reason I'm not all that active in the Donna-centric communities is that you come up against so much Rose hate. It's spoiled a lot of otherwise brilliant fics for me, and it seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I've even heard it suggested in some quarters that in some way Rose was responsible for what happened to Donna, which I can only interpret as a way the writers deal with their entirely understandable feelings of disgust at RTD. Rose was special to RTD, RTD shafted Donna, therefore it was Rose's fault.
Sometimes you get a similar thing going on in Torchwood. If you ship Jack/Ianto you have to hate on Gwen and accuse RTD of privileging her all the time. Why can't she be the one who dies? And now I suppose it'll all start again as fans try to figure out how Jack/Angelo could exist without diminishing Jack/Ianto. A few continuity errors, which I suspect the writers waved through to give new viewers a bit more awareness of Jack's back story, have led to a lot of speculation that the Jack we see in TW/MD 7 might be post CoE, and therefore post-Ianto.
I'll be honest, I've never really got the Jack/Ianto ship and I found a lot of things about the Jack/Angelo one more touching and convincing. I could imagine them together in a way that I never sould with Ianto, but that's just me, and it doesn't matter. What does intrigue, and also sadden me, is that we demand such simplicity from our fictional characters. Jack and the Doctor are both infinitely more complex than your average human, for a whole variety of reasons, and even humans are perfectly capable of loving different people deeply in different ways at the same time. If the Doctor loves Donna (as he clearly did), is that cheating on Rose? If Jack loves again after Ianto, does that mean he thinks any less of him? (After all, even if we go with the vanilla option, that Jack meets Angelo while he's waiting for the Doctor to come back into his life, it's clear that he's had at least three serious relationships in canon between TPOTW and Utopia - Angelo, Estelle and Alice's mother). I think only the most rabidly shipping fan would begrudge him that in 140 years.
So when we get hot under the collar about "our" ship, that little phrase speaks volumes. It's not really about the Doctor and Jack being faithful at all, it's about having our own conception of them and not wanting it disturbed. It could be there's some wish-fulfilment in there, that if you're the slightly more mature type and you adore Donna, it's a real slap in the face when she's not allowed to have her forever - and yet Rose gets hers, albeit with a different-ish Ten. It's as if RTD is insulting us personally. I don't know if it's my age, but I ship Ten/Rose like crazy and I also love Ten/Donna and think it's got far more potential as a satisfying relationship for Ten. And I often read, indeed sometimes write, fics where I know perfectly well that my Doctor has wandered straight out of canon into a parallel universe where he's a different person. For example, I don't believe for a minute that he'd ever settle down with Rose and have three kids, but I read the Chaos-verse because I'd much rather read about that Doctor than RTD's self-flagellating emo-boy.
Funnily enough, Steven Moffatt has come closer than anybody to making the Doctor do domestic. I read a brilliant interview with him the other day where he pointed out that the Doctor always has an exit strategy even (and I quote word for word) "with Rose, whom he loved so much.") There, it's official, the Moff ships the Doctor and Rose, but he's absolutely right. The Doctor never lets himself say the l-word and when he has the chance to have Rose back, he doesn't take it. But I think it misses the point for Donna fans to punch the air and say he'd grown out of Rose - because he expects to lose Donna, too. Jack and the Doctor have the same problem - they live on an eternal time scale and they'll never be able to have satisfactory, fulfilling relationships. It really is bloody depressing at times, not to mention repetitive.
Jack in Immortal Sins seems to be chanelling Ten word-for-word. It's a very tragic set up because it seems that in Angelo he falls in love not only with a person, but with the idea of being like the Doctor and having a companion of his very own. It doesn't work, it goes horribly wrong and that's at least partly because he's in love with the mystery surrounding his own character. It might be suicidal to tell anyone else he's never going to stay dead, but I don't think that's the only reason he keeps quiet about it. I think he likes being the mystery man. And it's interesting to reflect on why he makes his worst mistake, which is coming back from the dead to freak out Angelo. Why does he do that? Is it just that he can't live without the guy, or is there a bit of pride involved? I can kind of see why Angelo turns against him. After all, if someone is powerful enough to deal with aliens, predict the future and cheat death, why does he leave his lover to rot in jail?
It's what the Doctor does all the time of course. He's the boss. He witholds information, he messes with people's heads, he seduces them, falls for them and then abandons them, and don't tell me that, at least sometimes, he doesn't enjoy having that power and control. Jack always trys to be like him, in the bad ways as well as the good. We can tie ourselves in knots trying to make sense of Jack's personal timeline, but in the end our relationship with Jack the character as viewers and fans will be an evolving text and form a chronological narrative in which we respond to the experiences we've already watched him go through. We see the Jack who lost Ianto falling for Angelo, even if the meta says Ianto hasn't even been born yet.
This is very vague and not at all well constructed, just a sort of stream-of-consciousness burble. Oh, and something else occurs to me. Canonically, Jack has now been romantically involved with three men whose names all end in "o". As does the word "hero". Someone cleverer than me (I can think of a few on my flist) would read some deep mirroring into that. I'm inclined to think it's either coincidence or RTD having one of his Smith-and-Jones type jokes on us.
(Apologies for formatting problems, I don't get this 'cut wizard' business at all, I'm afraid.)
