pears? in this economy?

Celebrating 12 years of River Song, the Doctor’s wife.

“You are always here to me. And I always listen. And I can always see you.”

“When will you stop hurting me?”

River: sweetie-

Twelve: I can't hear you River, you're dead. She bled out in your lap. How will you break the news to me, let's see?

Nardole: we don't have to do this-

Twelve: ah Nardole, how are things going with River, the love of my life? Wait, why are you here at this late hour? Whose blood is that?

Nardole: okay, I get it-

Twelve: it's River's??? This is devastating. I am inconsolable. And *snaps* I've killed myself.

Nardole:

Please check out my patreon account! I’ve been putting this off for a long time, but now it’s come to a point where I’ll either lose my home or my chance to go to school. To help ya girl get an education, please support me! Even just three dollars goes a long, long way.

For those of you who’d like to learn more about the reasons why I’m doing this and how everything works, keep reading:

Chapters: 2/6 Fandom: Doctor Who (2005) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/River Song, The Doctor/River Song Characters: Thirteenth Doctor, River Song Additional Tags: Episode Fix-It: s04e08 Silence in the Library, Library Fixit, spacewives, Angst, Post-Darillium River Summary:

It’s not a favour, it’s a sacrifice to the holy goddess of everything. Thank you for asking!

A few days ago, @riveralwaysknew raised some interesting questions about River’s arc, specifically this part of it - saving the Doctor in Let’s Kill Hitler, or as she called it, ‘Melody’s redemption’. This episode is very important for River’s story as a whole and I have a lot to say about it, so I decided I’d finally write it down. Here’s why I think River chose to save the Doctor.

(also, thanks loads to @tillthenexttimedoctor, my go-to meta writer. I adore her work and recommend anyone who likes the show to look into it sometime. You inspire me a lot!)

Let’s Kill Hitler is… controversial. Automatically because most episodes written by Moffat have at least some amount of controversy around them, but even more so than usual, this episode gets a lot of negative criticism, especially regarding River. I think a lot of it derives from it being the first time we see young River. Naturally, it makes this episode very risky - to take a character we already know and love, and suddenly show us her past - it changes everything. We’re all built on our childhood, where we come from, what we were taught, what we learned. And with River’s timeline, it affects not only how we see her in the future, but also how we saw her up to this point.

This is when River Song is born. This is when she regenerates into the River we know, this is when she starts using her name. This is the episode that must show us why.

So why? What made Melody Pond choose to become River Song? What made her choose to save the Doctor?

Keyword: choice.

Even people who love River and the Doctor as a pairing can agree that it’s not because she loved him. She’d only just met him, and also… tried to kill him. She doesn’t go from hating him to loving him in the blink of an eye.

But. I do believe she’s building up to it.

River doesn’t save him because she loves him. She saves him because she chooses to love him. And she does it to claim her freedom of choice and her right for her own identity.

Amy: Uh oh.

11: What?

Amy: Somebody’s in love.

11: Yeah, right. I just think she’s cool, okay?

So shipping her with River makes no sense. Because she loves guns. River has no mercy. She made a Daleks scream for help.

Thirteen wouldn’t be at all interested in someone like that. It’s out of character. She despises someone for even mentioning a gun…

IM LAUGHING. Anyway. Does that mean that shipping her with 13 makes no sense? Nah. You can ship 13 with Rose even if Rose likes guns. (If for any reason it would make no sense it would be because Rose is happy in another universe with her Doctor/Donna amalgam & wouldn’t waste her precious time waiting for a doctor that chucked her and then forced her to stay when she didn’t want to THREE TIMES. Guurl run away.) Anyway.

Let’s break this down, shall we?

Every Doctor professes to hate guns. There’s a point to this, it’s so that other options can be explored first. I say first, because sometimes the use of a gun is the only option, a la The Time of Angels, and many many others…

But the Doctor tries their best to figure out another plan, sometimes that includes even deadlier means, like bombs, lasers, wipe-outs, his own hands, you know the doctor has twisted people’s necks and stabbed others, right? etc. LOL

Now here’s the real kicker, the Doctor has said he doesn’t like guns, but that he likes River, and kinda likes that she can kill people. Not, LIKES or ENJOYS it, but CAN. When needed. 

This is early River, Stormcage River that’s still young and kicking out her previous conditioning. Does she shoot everyone without mercy, no, she doesn’t. She almost never uses her gun, she killed a Dalek that shot the Doctor and would have continued to HUNT HER FAMILY DOWN until they were dead. Rory shot it too. Thanks. Also, she killed the Silents who kidnapped her mum, and were planning on enslaving the whole of humanity. Like. Wouldn’t you? YEAH. 

AND NOW LETS GET TO DA GOOD PART YEAH? Even though she likes her guns and carries them around, THE DOCTAH LIKES IT. saaay WHAT. Like, OMG. What a change. SOUND THE ALARM. the doctor LIKES IT. WHY? whyyy? BECAUSE HE LOVES River Song. OH SHOOT OH SHOOT OH SHOOT (pun intended) He loves his River so much that his gun rule is waived. BYE. 

BYE GUN RULE. There’s one exception and that’s River Song. 

HOLY WOW. Never before has this happened.

Let’s turn to later in life River Song, she no longer carries a gun. SAY WHAT? Yeah, she’s been out of Stormcage and she’s grown into herself. She’s a professor, and now she uses her supercomputer

 or a sonic trowel

Does she still like guns? Probably. Will she use one if she needs to? Without a doubt. But she’s also not the same person she was when she was young. She’s not. It called character development. And she threatens peeps wit her sonic trowel but he all ‘haha ur threats are empty’ oops. she caught! run away rivah.

anyway.

FAST FORWARD to her final days, she’s not as wild anymore. she’s still confident and sexy af but she’s got responsibilities. she cares about her team of daves and anita. she got a team of companions she takes around exploring the universe! Now she’s got her good ‘ol supercomputer, a sonic (that 12 MADE FOR HER omg no one else has gotten a gift like that from Mr. Song, yeah that’s how it works) but SHE DOES, oh and – WAIT FOR IT – A SQUARENESS GUN. Oh waaaaat?

Yeah, oooooo yeah, it’s a squareness gun and the doctor’s face when he sees it? Y A READY KIDS??? 

HE A FAN. lmao. he’s like proper impressed. And then what does the Tenth Doctor do RIGHT AFTER THAT? TAKES HER HAND. Oh yeah, he takes her by the hand and they run down the aisle together. 

UM. CAN I SAY FORESHADOWING? I mean if you’re jumping to cray conclusions so can I?

Anyway, my point is, River isn’t the same person she was. Her intersection with the Doctor softened her rough edges and her violent tendencies, just like the Doctor’s interactions with her made him a better man and friend, one that finally thought about the reprisals to his saviour complex.

To make my final point — 13 HAS ALREADY SAID SHE LOVES HER WIFE RIVER SONG. yeah.

did you miss this GEM?

The Thirteenth Doctor comic that’s in collaboration with Chris Chibnall CONFIRMS 13/River. That’s 13 speaking in the BOXES. She’s remembering an old adventure she had with River.

1) 13 STILL considers herself MARRIED dA HOuse

and 2) LOVES HER WIFE. 

BECAUSE IT her beautiful green and gold timewife with her vortex manipulator time travelling life. There’s ONE constant in their story, dey married and no matter who the doctor is, they’ll always love each other.

So to end my PBS SpeciAL: 13 and River ARE space wives. Like, the OG space wives. legit. they married yo. they’re not a hope. I don’t have to pretend they oncoming blondes. or hope they married in some universe. They are. In this one. They married AF. I mean WOW. goals.

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.