The writers should give the Doctor a baby to hold more often. Seeing them with one always brings me such glee. Like...there! The parent! The grandparent! That's them right there! Come on, give them a baby carrier to strap to their chest and have them start running around like the silly alien they are.
okay because people have shown up in my dms talking smack I'm going to make one blanket statement on the 1000 year loli chilchuck thing.
yes, there has been a problem with young girls being put in suggestive positions in anime with the "uhmmm she's actually a bajillion years old" excuse. yes, other characters don't treat chilchuck like an adult. yes, he is short with big eyes.
However, chilchuck consistently acts like a grown man. he- in both the manga and the anime- straight up just is an adult. He looks like an adult when he is any other race during the swaps in the manga. When the other characters get turned into half-foots they look similar to chilchuck. He is explicitly stated to have more dungeon and general life experience than laios, and he acts like it.
The 1000 year loli trope explicitly functions as an excuse to prey on people who are inexperienced and unable to advocate for themselves. Chilchuck is a parent, is a union organizer, has explicit boundaries that he enforces rigidly, and he is treated as an adult man by everyone who doesn't have a fantasy racism-focused character arc/issue.
I can see how if you haven't read the manga and seen that he has an established life that he later reveals (and haven't paid attention to him in the anime lol) you could get a mistaken impression about him. Marcielle does too in the source material! It's part of her character at the start of her arc that she has issues with longevity!
The thing that irks me a little about this interpretation is that it leans into the child-coded discourse that was prominent a while ago (she's short!!!!! but has boob???? ILLEGAL!!1!) and it does a disservice to the themes of infantilization as a policy maneuver hurting the working class.
I saw chilchuck and his labor advocacy for half-foots both as a metaphor for racism (obvious take ik) and for ageism.
The working gen z as a cohort are being infantilized and pushed out of job markets due to infantilization, similar to half-foots in the show. gen z is being maliciously portrayed as too young to vote, enter office, know themselves, know their rights, and take advantage of their resources. Simultaneously, child labor protections and protections against workplace abuse are being rolled back in the US. In Japan, young people are being worked to the bone for nothing and are becoming disenfranchised as a generation while simultaneously expected to be the labor faction that supports the postwar generations in their old age.
Chilchuck's being treated poorly I saw as a clever commentary on the ways infantilization allows for protections to be stripped away under the guise that "oh it's just a job for teenagers- they don't need more than minimum wage" or "let the kids rescue the economy! they're always complaining about that job market!" while simultaneously stripping away rights under the guise of protection- "We can't have that on the internet! think of the children!" "to protect these young people we must raise the age of medical consent for hormones/reproductive health decisions!"
Kui's work with this series spoke to me on many levels, and specifically, the infantilization issue touched me in a way that few other pieces of media have. The struggle to be taken seriously in a stem field as someone young, as someone female, and as someone who had a high-pitched voice to the point I did years of voice training to be taken seriously, chilchuck's character resonated. I (kinda) understand your instinct to think "SHORT! CHILD! RALLY THE MASSES AND KILL THE PEDOS!!1!" but in this case, it's misdirected- mostly because the author was trying to use this misdirection to prove something to you, the reader.
Kui consistently makes cutting commentary on modern issues, the show's take on food neutrality as its headliner, but also the author's takes on cultural issues and the environment (with a focus on our place in the food web as animals). I feel that reducing chilchuck's very conscious position as a tradesman and an activist discounted due to his apparent age down to "1000 year loli ewwww let's send this random tumblr user suicide bait" just displays a lack of critical analysis of the show and a level of disrespect towards Kui and the work as a whole.
TL:DR- stop sending me kys messages I'm fucking that old man
9 minutes in and the doctor has already told us his entire backstory is that lazy expository dialogue or is this doctor just engaging in nuclear levels of trauma dumping
Whats also pissing me off is that if you dropped each new episode on BBC1 around 8pm GMT on a saturday? While simultaneously dropping it on streaming? The American's are still able to watch it at lunchtime on their day off!! Everyone wins!!
But noooo the mouse needs control like the media blackhole it is
Eddie and you doing the whole “you hang up, no you hang up” thing except it’s just him sitting in silence because he’s so goddamn high that he straight up forgot he was on the phone with you. Meanwhile, you don’t want to hang up because you’re afraid you might miss something if you do. Like what if he starts talking right as you go to hang up and you just completely cut him off? You can’t have that. So you two just sit silently on the phone with each other for nearly four hours, only to be interrupted by Wayne coming home and telling Eddie to “get off the damn phone and go to bed, boy.”
From what I remember Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator was basically an episode of Doctor Who??
The Great Glass Elevator (which I am hereforth referring to as the GGG because I refuse to type that out every single time) was basically a see-through TARDIS. It had loads of buttons all over the walls, some of which made it go different directions/speeds, and some of which changed conditions inside (turned gravity on/off, etc.). I cannot remember whether or not it was bigger on the inside because I read this when I was eleven.
In the beginning they travel in time because, long story short, Charlie’s Grandma Georgina takes too many youth pills and ages herself back to before she was born. They have to travel in time to get her back from being ‘a minus’ before she disappears. They end up in a smoky, dark place full of monsters from which they have to rescue her and take her to the real world.
There is a hotel in a space ship for very rich people (Voyage of the Damned: Christmas special 2007, End of the World: S1 E2) that Willy Wonka visits with Charlie & fam later on that’s really nice yet FULL of these aliens called Vermicious Knids that look like giant, flesh-covered eggs balanced on the pointy end (which feels very much like an RTD-era monster if you ask me).
Willy Wonka is similar to the Doctor, with his crazy inventions and unbelievable genius. He fights the Vermicious Knids when they try to get inside the GGG to kill them. He basically adopts Charlie (as the Doctor does with companions), and helps the rest of his family to lift themselves out of poverty.
He is friends with ‘aliens’ (the Oompa-Loompas) and gets along just fine with all manner of creatures, travels extensively, and nobody knows exactly how old he is (remember, kids: in the book he is not a youthful Johnny Depp but a sprightly old man!). There is nobody quite like him. He dresses strangely and is generally agreed to be eccentric yet sweet, however he has a dark and dangerous side which can emerge. He doesn’t have very good social skills, but he largely gets along with the people of the town.
Anyway this is a very long post about a book I hardly remember, but all this to say: I want RTD to get Timothée Chalamet’s Willy Wonka into s16 so I can see him be devoured by a ginormous, carnivorous flesh-egg.