STFU Moffat

Anonymous submitted:

You do realize how many of your posts require a sexist and/or homophobic viewpoint to make any sense?

You ask for LGBT characters to come out the instant they’re present. You complain when any other way occurs: romantic banter, quips, or remaining unmentioned on the show… This makes no sense on the show. You require them to alienate themselves in order to not be homophobic? Really? 

You require women to be strong, yet complain that they’re fetishes when they are. You view misogyny negatively and portray it as such (like this whole blog demonstrates), yet when the show does the exact same thing, you complain that it’s somehow supporting it. You want women to be liberated, yet when they are, it’s degrading. You complain when female characters have male friends, with the assumption that they must be wholly dependent on those male characters. This is never the case. 

Oh, and you complain that Doctor Who is about… the Doctor. Seriously?

Characters interact. No male character is independent of being defined by female acquaintances: the same is true of female and male characters. The Doctor and his companions: the companions and the Doctor. Amy and Rory: Rory and Amy. 

And finally, the character Moffat-attackers always forget about, Sally Sparrow. Non-sexual, dependent on no male characters (though she has male friends), and the Doctor owes her the TARDIS. And before you say that RTD was head-writer, he never touched Moffat’s scripts, as he often said. 

Moffat is only sexist if you make the conscious effort to view him as such. Oh, and take a look at how his male characters are portrayed: the exact same way. Always. 

Think about it: is there any conceivable female character that you couldn’t find some flaw with? Any weakness would mean a flawed portrayal: too much strength would be a fetish. Interaction with male characters would mean defined by them: anything else would be making them alienated, or making female characters a clique (and doing the same). 

When have we ever asked queer characters to “come out the instant they’re present”? As queer viewers ourselves, we’re quite aware that being out isn’t always—or sometimes, ever—safe. We’re asking for more positive representation and visibility, and that’s different. 

Do you know how much Oswin’s “I was going through a phase” hurt to hear as a queer person? Do you know how deeply that cuts when it’s just another microaggression on top of a lifetime of bisexual erasure? Do you know how easy it would have been to avoid that? All Moffat had to do was change that one line. “I dated a Rory, but she was a girl.” Still light, like the original exchange, but without apologetically squeezing Oswin back into the closet. 

Of course for some people, dating people of the same gender isn’t permanent. For some people, it is a phase. But when this is the only model of queer female sexuality present in Moffat’s work, it’s disappointing and reductive (in regards to Irene, my complaint is similar—of course gay people can fall in love with/feel attraction to someone of another gender, but when very few positive depictions of lesbians exist in the media, structuring a storyline around a gay woman’s downfall through her love for a man is incredibly offensive). 

Canton Edward Delaware III, by contrast, has been acknowledged as one of Moffat’s stronger queer characters. Unlike Oswin, he didn’t come out solely to flirt with someone of another gender, and even though he had very little depth, at least he wasn’t given two seasons to languish without further development, like River. But although his coming out scene wasn’t sexualized, it was played for laughs and presented Nixon as sympathetic (he was deeply racist and homophobic). In addition, Moffat doesn’t deserve extra credit for simply mentioning that the agent’s fiance is black. It would have been amazing to actually see a queer poc on Doctor Who—and before anyone says that would have been unrealistic during Nixon’s presidency, what’s stopping Moffat from writing queer characters of color in other time periods?

Moving on to strong women, I really don’t think it’s asking too much that Moffat avoid the pitfalls of both misogynist stereotypes and superwoman. It could have been really easy to avoid Amy’s post-fainting trip in the Doctor’s arms in Asylum of the Daleks—unlike other instances where the Doctor carried a female companion, it did nothing to advance the storyline. The problem isn’t that Amy fainted—people faint, women faint—it’s that Moffat wrote her that way at a particularly weak moment in her character arc, after Rory and Amy’s offscreen breakup. And River’s physical strength stands in empty contrast to her lack of character development, the absence of any flaws (even the Doctor has flaws, why doesn’t River? Flaws don’t make a character weak, and we only object to certain flaws in female characters when they support misogynistic stereotypes), and her horrid ending that felt wrong even minutes after meeting her in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. 

Your assertions concerning misogyny and male friends are too vague for me to address.

As regards Sally Sparrow, I’m not sure where people get this impression that STFU Moffat is against sexual women. We’re against characters who read like caricatures of sexual women, as imagined by straight men. But yes, Sally is one of Moffat’s stronger female characters, though her arc is not without problems. 

- R