@bluesqueakpip Ha! Thanks. A charity shop in the nineties, maybe, someone having a closet clear-ou! Why not? Did they have on-seam pockets? One thing I *really* can’t imagine is the Doctor choosing clothes with No Pockets. But that’s partly because I myself refuse to have or wear such things — and I’ve been keenly aware for years in the US, at least, many women choose pants with no pockets as part of seeking smooth and tight silhouette to look sexier, and what they heck, they carry purses and pocketbooks for their keys . . .
So, how *is* 13 going to deal with fashion and “dress codes” now, with all the fuss about looking — or choosing *not* to look — “sexy” to appeal to one’s chosen gender of partner? SO easy to offend — somebody, anybody, *everybody*, with how that’s handled! Hell, I’m offended already, although I did, in fact, back in whatever day was “the day” as they say, make reprehensible “fashion” choices of my own, for reasons that seemed very important at the time. So I’ll be wanting to cut 13 plenty of slack on the matter . . . and it’s going to be like that with so much else as well. Chibnall could go for the kind of casual look that says, “I really don’t care about this bit” and just ignore it all except for some side-quips when 13’s attention is momentarily snagged by, say, somebody sporting false eyelashes as long as window drapes; but where’s the fun in that? I mean, there *is* another side (at least one!) to the matter.
What female models does 13 have in her copious memory (assuming she pushes through the effects of a pretty traumatic regeneration reasonably quickly and *can* remember) to draw upon in terms of looks and habits and modes of action and self-presentation? Is this getting too complicated, too grown-up for the “target audience” with questions like this? Chibnall better be prepared to consider that too, since the DW fandom in Moffat’s hands drew in a whole cohort of grown-up female fans. Some sophisticated thinking will be needed, along with the longed-for slapstick and comic-book action-hero stuff (“I just want it to be *fun* again” is a lot of people’s code for “Surface and fast action, please don’t make me think”), to hold those people’s interest — unless the new admin decide those folks are expendable, aim for the kids.
13 is young (post-adolescent, at any rate) and female, and young, female fans are themselves experimenting with their “look” as part of being young, female, and feeling their oats (hormones). Play too hard with all of that, and many of those fans may shrug off the whole enterprise. Ignore it as an issue, and — ditto: “my life-eating and agonizing style concerns aren’t important to DW?! That’s not a girl [like me, or my sister, or my school friends], that’s a fake!” And of course it *is* — triple-fake, in fact: the Doctor is a) not a typical “girl” or “boy”, and b) not even a human being, and what’s more c) a fictional person rather than a “real” one. And sometimes you want to be reminded of these things, but sometimes not.
I think the sanest, most productive course would NOT be to ignore the whole “but she’s a Woman now!” thing, which, IMO, is what would best please the fans who really didn’t want this change in the first place, to degrees of not-wanting that vary from dubious frowns to screaming tantrums complete with the throwing of DW merch out of the window. It *could* be, “Let’s pretend this never happened”, plus the odd quirk-browed dig at weird girly-things that 13 can’t be bothered with because, well, this never happened and (s)he’s the same old, default gender-setting the male Doctor’s always (mostly) been no matter what (s)he wore.
Instead, what I hope for is that Chibnall will dig in and and encourage his co-writers to do the same, and write 13 as having to confront and make personal decisions (or postponing them) about those “girlie” things as they come up, with revisits to those decisions as needed (high heels for dress up, even though Cybermen will be among the guests — but high heels can be fun? What to do when someone repellent is attracted to you, and you don’t want to be a tease but you don’t want to be nasty — or get attacked, since that does happen sometimes — either; or maybe you’re attracted back? And perhaps most tricky *and most important of all*, how do you relate to and treat *other* female characters, now that you’re seeing them, maybe a little more sharply, from the inside of the default (in adventure stories) Not-Okay Corral? And so on).
I expect a mix of approaches, which I think I’d like best of all. Sometimes being female is an issue in some way, large or small — constraining, exploitable, extra-dangerous to self and/or others, a nuisance, a joke, painful, unexpectedly jarring or powerful, and so on; sometimes not. The fans would be in a constant uproar of quarrels about approval, disapproval, moaning about “consistency” and how “realistically” an issue has been handled, whether it *is* an issue (they will lose the outright misogynists straight away anyhow, just for acknowledging that yes, there really are common problems for women that men don’t usually encounter), how everybody *else* would have dealt with it much better instead of what Chibnall’s crew did, etc., etc. forever.
In other words — the usual, really, for DW fandom only louder: but, most importantly, alive and kicking.
Craig 4 years, 3 months ago.
syzygy. Reason: lots of freakish code keeps appearing
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