myazavier

[myazavier]

i hope as much as the next guy that fourteen doesn't overshadow ncuti's doctor or his stories, and i also hope fourteen gets rad specials and maybe even appears on the unit spinoff. but there's a part of me that wishes that they'll release like 10 minute web shorts of the doctor trying to do mundane tasks for the first time. like we see a close up of tennant, sonic at the ready, hair spiked to the gods, and he's like "alright. allons-y!" and then we cut to the title card and it's like

[myazavier]

[myazavier]

"Nine and Donna would've hated each other" WRONG they would ADORE each other they would be the two cattiest bitches in the book club. Donna would lean over and tell him "honestly sounds like Rassillion was a bit of a cunt" and he snorts so hard he almost regenerates right then and there

[myazavier]

Every Other Doctor Who Companion: They’re brillliant. They’re the smartest being in the universe. Being near them is like standing next to the Sun. They are EVERYTHING.

Donna Noble: You skinny gay idiot.

[myazavier]

WARNING: DOCTOR WHO SPOILERS EXPLAINING REGENERATION SHENANIGANS

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okay so I was kind of not on board with the concept of bi-regeneration, mainly because of how it seemed like all of the Sad and the Trauma that the Doctor had undergone got kind of handwaved away? i'm all for ncuti's Doctor being sort of a fresh start/jumping on point for new viewers, but i didn't get how that could work if like, literally 40 minutes ago he was David Tennant being a sad wet puppy dog of a man

however, after rewatching it, i've realized what i think happened there, and it goes all the way back to something introduced with the 4th doctor's regeneration that was never explained: the Watcher

^this spooky guy

so, for those that don't know (or haven't seen every episode of a show that is over half a century old), the Fourth Doctor regenerates at the end of a story called Logopolis (he falls off a satellite dish, but that's not important right now). all throughout the episode, this weird figure, The Watcher, stands off in the distance, and even intervenes slightly by saving the Fourth Doctor's companion. there's not much given in the way of an explanation until the Fourth Doctor regenerates, saying "it's the end. but the moment has been prepared for..."

the watcher walks up, and gets absorbed in a super rad 1980's digital effect (never change doctor who), while his companion just gives us the not-super-helpful-for-lore statement "He was the Doctor all the time!"

then, in a crossfade, the Doctor goes from Four to weird-powder-man to Five

canonically, the Watcher is explained as a future version of the doctor that comes about in sort of a weird overlapping thing with the doctor's timeline, it's very wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.

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SO what does this have to do with biregeneration and satisfying character arcs/moving on from trauma?

Well, remember, Fifteen said this, about Time Lords doing rehab out of order:

so, here's the thing: Fifteen is the Doctor AFTER Fourteen (duh, I know?) But to be clear...Fourteen lives out an entire lifetime with Donna and family, gets to a ripe old age, and then, when his lifetime of healing is over, he gets yeeted back through his own timestream just to zoot himself out of David Tennant's chest.

Remember, his first words to Fourteen (after popping out of his chest) are "So good to see you! So good!", not the RTD classic "what?". He greets himself like he's almost expecting this, he then says "does anyone want to tell me what the hell is going on here?" which only makes sense if he's coming from a different point in his own timestream (remember, when two doctors interact, memory gets really weird, 10 and the War Doctor don't remember the events of Day of the Doctor until they live through them as 11).

SO TO BE CLEAR: Ncuti Gatwa is playing the Doctor AFTER he has spent years healing from his traumas. His Doctor is fine because Fourteen takes the time to rest and work on himself.

tl;dr: I didn't like biregeneration at first because I thought it looked like this:

In actuality, it looks more like this:

[myazavier]

"average person sees 3 spiders a year" factoid is a statistical error. Sephora Georg, who attracts 3 million horny spiders with the spider sex lotion, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[myazavier]

One thing I will say about the Doctor Who fandom on here is that they reblog stuff I've never met a group that reblogs more and I respect it

[myazavier]

firefox just started doing this too so remember kids if you want to stream things like netflix or hulu over discord without the video being blacked out you just have to disable hardware acceleration in your browser settings!

[myazavier]

they have to kill 14 next episode because they cant let him live long enough for harkness to find out theres a version of the doctor who openly talks about loving his companions and finding men hot

[myazavier]

Shaun Temple is a fucking real one actually. You meet a woman who has allegedly just had a mental breakdown so severe she's lost a year of her memory. She's loud and brash and is NOT taking your name and you are like ohhh I can't not marry her. You two have a kid, the most amazing daughter in the world. Your wife has a hole in her heart aching for something that she can't identify and your daughter feels like she's from another planet and both of them have dreams they can't explain and you probably chalk that up to them being extraordinary but in an ordinary way where their hearts are too big and their minds are too brilliant to not carry some grief. And then it turns out that oh your wife has a best friend who's a ????? years old Alien that's the last of their species and also your daughter IS part alien bc technically your wife genetically is also part alien but also maybe not now? And then your wife is like. The happiest you've ever seen her and she fucks off for two days but and the world literally starts to end but she fixes it and she brings back her ???? years old alien best friend forever and is like WE'RE KEEPING HIM AND ALSO THIS WOMAN THAT I MET LIKE TEN HOURS AGO and now he's calling you his brother-in-law and is definitely co-parenting now you're like. Just cool with all of that. Not a single hint of jealousy or nothin. Honestly king shit.

[myazavier]

it really is unbelievable that gamers aren't the most anticapitalist demographic ever. like imagine if mobile game devs had their needs met and could make actual videogames instead of brainless filler between ads for other games that are also brainless filler between ads. imagine if games didn't need to be shoved out the door a year before they're ready filled with microtransactions because shareholders wanna see a line go up. imagine if studios were owned and run by the people making the games and not business bros who have never touched a videogame. how is this not an automatically won battle

[myazavier]

like man doesn’t it fucking suck that there’s not really any public space. that you can’t go anywhere without spending money on food or transportation, that unless you wanna sit on a mall bench all day or browse library shelves you basically can’t do anything in public? even standing in front of a building without paying for something (“loitering”) is illegal. everything is built to punish homeless people which means if you ever want to sit down or rest or exist in public every building and park bench and windowsill is telling you to kill yourself instead. maybe that has something to do with the unpleasantness of online spaces, where everyone is shoved together into a giant digital chamber because it’s the only “public square” still available while also being isolated and alone in their room on their phone because everything sucks and a global pandemic is still happening. like I’m just saying I think that has more to do with how annoying people are on the internet than like mcu fanfiction

[myazavier]

Watching the new Percy Jackson episode, and while by no means is the show perfect, I do love how they updated the blending of Greek mythology and the American Gothic for social commentary.

What I mean is Echidna, the mother of monsters, is some respectable-looking vaguely southern white woman who is able to convince the police on the train that three kids shattered a train window and used those institutions to isolate the kids so she can target them and scare them for the chimera's hunt. The way that the police especially treat Annabeth. Now, as a young black girl, she has to know how to ask if they're getting arrested, and gets called out by the police for her tone.

And then, at the St. Louis Arch, we see Grover upset because of the museum, which is basically a monument to Manifest Destiny (literally, there's a shot where the words are in full display in the background). And while they say, "Grover is upset because he doesn't like it when people hurt animals," they explicitly depict America's colonization and destruction of indigenous communities as The Bad Thing. It adds another layer of flavor for the whole "Pan is missing" - it's not just about Climate Change. It's about the extermination of indigenous groups (the centaurs they saw on the train, the reminder that there used to be more of them until humans started killing them). They say "humans" are bad, but they're showing us Western/American colonizers.

Also, a rare yet interesting moment of conflict between Annabeth as a daughter of Athena and Grover as a Satyr. Annabeth insists that the museum's commodifying and glorifying of American colonization is "not what the arch is actually about, it's about architecture and math," but Athena is the goddess who protects social institutions and a patron goddess of the state, law, order, industry, and war. The Industrial Revolution and Western social institutions definitely contributed to colonialism; just saying. We also see in this episode that Athena can be arrogant and cruel - letting a monster go after her own daughter because she was embarrassed.

Anyway, idk. Maybe I'm overthinking this but these were the things that popped out to me on first watch, and now that I think about them more, I would love a continuation of these kinds of themes and tropes in future seasons, if we get them.

[myazavier]

the lines “this has always been a family story” and “this is the kind of family they are” are SICKENING in the context of a series that starts with “the campers here, they're mostly good people. after all, we're extended family, right? we take care of each other” and ends with “family, luke. you promised”

[myazavier]

ncuti’s love and appreciation for jodie is everything to me 😭

[myazavier]

[myazavier]

“Careful. I think you were about to call me a friend.”

Oh we knew that line hit her deep. You could tell she’s been thinking about that comment since the second he made it. That’s gonna haunt him the rest of their relationship.🤭