#later in uhhhh revelation of the daleks? he doesn't tell her about a real danger

[lurking-latinist]

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#ooh I have a lot of thoughts about Six and Charley and her mysteriousness and how he responds to it #but they intersect with my Six's Mental Health Thoughts which are extremely headcanony #and I know a lot of the fandom would rather just kind of wall off Twin Dilemma and assume Six's proper characterization doesn't include it #and I don't know that I blame them for that #but I like trying to make things fit together #and also there's no way to do that without probably misusing real-world mental health terminology #because (watsonian) the doctor is an alien with an alien brain and (doylist) the writers do not know all that much about psychiatry #but. at least for a bit after his regeneration he deals with paranoia right? #like that's the term the narrative uses. (and it clearly explains his attack on peri - he's perceiving her as a threat due to delusion) #& she says 'I'm not letting a manic depressive paranoid personality like you shut me up' & he objects specifically to 'manic depressive' #later in uhhhh revelation of the daleks? he doesn't tell her about a real danger #and he says 'I didn't want to burden you with what might have been a piece of paranoid speculation on my part' #again I cannot emphasize enough how much I am talking about a fictional character with fictional problems. I do not know psychiatry either! #I do not want to mislead #but one of this character's problems is that he has a badly calibrated sense of danger. sometimes he sees things as threatening that aren't #and sometimes he overcompensates for that #and I think when he first meets Charley he is really not very sure whether he should trust the alarm bells he's hearing or not #she seems deeply suspicious! but also nice? he wants to like her? but deeply suspicious! #'or am I just being crazy?' he asks himself #and so he just kind of... keeps watching her #also unrelatedly to all that I think he kind of likes having the excuse of Mystery for doing what he does anyway which is orbiting her #just slightly obsessing over his companion at the time even if he also occasionally forgets they're there #(he's just very all or nothing in everything all the time) #but yeah. you know how 11 gets about Clara and her Mystery Plotline? 6 is like that about every companion in turn anyway #so he doesn't actually mind having the excuse of Mystery with Charley #this is also why 6 and Clara is so compelling #(this was a tag essay in response to lrb but I decided it was opening too many cans of worms and needed its own post)