#csv meta

Ok, *cracks knuckles*

Important initial disclaimer: since this is headcanons, I’m talking about how I think it (likely) happened in canon and none of this applies to fics. I absolutely do NOT have to have a fic match my headcanon (that would eliminate at least half the fun!). Basically my fic reading parameters are: they love each other, Rose ends up with (any one of) the Doctor, and if Tentoo exists, he has to be happy (more on that later). I read every Doctor with Rose - write Rose living with Ten forever, hell write Rose living with Nine forever, and I’ll probably love it. (Maybe I’m a bit Rose-centric too. :P)  ETA: whoops, I ended up mentioning fics a lot, but I want to emphasize that everybody should follow their muse when writing and I love that fic writers can and do take the story a million different ways.

Nine: I’ve used the word enthralled for them before, because I think this was the initial state. Enthralled, limerance, kilig - it was all of that at first sight for them! They’re rushing around being SO HAPPY. Yes, some angst and fighting because the Doctor is rediscovering his connection to humanity through Rose, and because Rose feels secure enough with her place in his affections to push back and fight with him. The Doctor doesn’t have to think about his hurt and loss all the time because he can throw all his energy into coming up with new ways to light up her face. Rose is discovering herself along with the universe. It takes her longer to realize he’s IN LOVE with her because she doesn’t put him in the category of Men Trying to Get in my Pants (”He’s better than that!”). Probably by Father’s Day she knows she’s in love with him too, and then by the time he’s resonating concrete she’s ready to hit him with the full power of the Tyler flirtation and it is GLORIOUS!  

So, obvs I LIVE AND BREATHE the idea of these two confessing their love and getting it on in a thousand different ways, but truth is I believe they weren’t shagging in canon. The main reason (assuming compatible sexuality) is that the Doctor has been around long enough to understand power differentials, and taking companions is about seeing the universe together, not taking advantage. It would take a lot to overcome that boundary. (I love to imagine/read/write about how that boundary could be overcome! Rose is an adult who can make her choice, but she’s still young and living on HIS ship, so he would tread carefully. If someone wants to make a case that they *were* canonically sleeping together, by all means, convince me! :D)

Did they love each other romantically? Absolutely. But I believe their first kiss was their last, and that the canon story is ever more powerful for that. I believe they spent their (at least) year and half or so together in that heightened joyful state of understood but unspoken mutual attraction and love. I also think it was a good long time, there are a lot more adventures in extended media. ROSE WAS NOT 19 FOREVER. She would have turned 20 soon after they took off. There was a lot of tension and oodles of handholding and touching (look at how they walk down the street!), cuddling, falling asleep on the couch, him carrying her to her bed and pretending to grouse about it. I could easily see bedsharing and nightmare comfort happening. I tend to think that as different as Nine and Ten seem to be outwardly, they still have a lot in common, especially when it comes to Rose, so general habits with her wouldn’t be so different.

Ten: Ahhh, now some complications. Rose had to grieve Nine and adjust, but (like Billie lol) she was able to see the Doctor inside him and accept him and start enjoying everything fun about this new self. Early S2 I call “regeneration honeymoon period,” because New Earth and Tooth & Claw are ridiculous! Ten is born like “mah Roes, there she is! Do you still love me? pls pls.” They survived the Daleks and Bad Wolf and regeneration still together! They’re even so busy being reinfatuated with each other that they miss how they look to others and thus plant the seeds of their own doom with Torchwood :(:(

Ten differs from Nine in that he starts taking the long view again. I think Nine lived more in the moment because of being born from the Time War, and was just happy for each day he got to spend with Rose. Ten is loving his life and loving being himself but starts to get afraid about his life after Rose. (And then it happened so quickly *cries*). Thus, the School Reunion conversation: he’s pushing back a little, trying to make her think about the big picture, but then he still says “not to you.” 

Relationship unnamed but they KNOW. That’s the running theme here through Satan Pit-Doomsday-Turn Left-JE: he thinks she knows, even though they’re never going to SAY, but because of that unspoken nature she believes but can never be SURE.  There is a different quality now to how Rose relates to him -  she’s lost a bit of that naive confidence she had with Nine. Look at the difference between the Father’s Day fight and the School Reunion fight.

GITF: pfft,headcanon it away or pretend it’s an Eleven/Amy/Rory story, because really it was Moff writing his own characters. It is so OOC and so skews Ten’s arc and the Doctor/Rose relationship enough that I just can’t make it fit without ignoring most of what happened. (That being said, it makes for truly excellent angsty fic fodder!)

They developed into some kind of assumed, if still unacknowledged, relationship through the end of the season. “We were together” means just that. Sexual relationship? I could go either way. There is a lot of evidence that it was, especially the “you’re not?” which is either RTD really fucking with people’s heads or it means something. The Doctor not being human, and the show being a family show (ie Watsonian/Doylist), makes it ambiguous. He doesn’t pursue sexual partners in the (stereo)typical human way, even in incarnations that seem open to romance. But the body language in Fear Her and Army of Ghosts is very intimate, even considering how touchy-feely they’ve always been.

And then follows two seasons of grieving!Doctor to really hammer home what they were to each other. Including grief that he never just said it? And  not saying it didn’t protect him from the pain at all? There is just so much almost and longing and anguish in the first two parts of their story that I believe that is why we ship it hard enough to do all THIS all the time! The resolution didn’t come until the very end and after the end of their story. Thus:

It’s true that the reason I lean toward Not on the “were they doing it?” question is because of Tentoo, and because of how long the Tentoo endgame was foreshadowed. See @chocolatequeennk​‘s meta on this question. From the beginning of fic reading, I’ve always felt that the Tentoo resolution makes the most sense if they were not sleeping together, mainly because it is nigh impossible to imagine him sending her away if they were. (He still could have, but daaaamn that EXTRA hurts.) 

The point of Tentoo is he is the Doctor who becomes human, and stays–to live a human life WITH her, in every sense. Either way, it’s utter tragedy for the Doctor who goes on without them. But I believe it’s Ten’s deep, deep love for her, as well as his hundreds of years of experience with humans, that makes the decision. (And of course, his thinking he knows what’s best for everyone, that never changes *sideeye*.) As a Time Lord, his identity is experienced differently from ours. He knows that one of him gets to live the happy ending, that “streetcorner 2am” “all I’m after is a quiet life” kind of ending with the love of his lives, and that would be it’s own kind of satisfaction. He himself has no choice but to go on for something like forever, for the sake of the universe. And he’s been through it enough to know that regeneration and new companions will ease the ache, though his Tenth regeneration will be defined by loving and losing and grieving her (now I’ve made myself cry). 

IMO, the Tentoo question is impossible without reckoning with the Doylist/Watsonian issue. If this story were not a TV show with actors who were leaving and a showrunner bringing his era to a close, would Tentoo have existed? 

Maybe not! But then maybe so! The lifespan tension has to be resolved - to stay together, one of them must change to match the other or the result is tragedy (see all the fics that dive straight into the tragedy in sweet and bitter ways.)  If there is no Tentoo, a great resolution to the lifespan tension is a Bad Wolf!Rose who gets to live a very long time as the Doctor’s mate. (Thus the thousands of fics that do it this way and God bless them for it! ) But (Watsonian) a Bad Wolf!Rose is not necessarily an ideal outcome - in most mythology, immortality is a curse as much as a superpower. This includes DW, see: Jack Harkness, and the Doctor himself: “I’m old enough to know that a longer life isn’t always a better one.” 

So canon options being what they were, the Doctor changed to match her life, instead of them staying separated forever (or one of them dying!). The immortal becomes mortal, it’s iconic, it’s mythological, and it’s ours -  a gift from RTD, considering that a tragic ending is what most writers would do with this tension!! (I spent most of JE expecting Rose to die, because I know TV 😒.) 

Oh, Tentoo; I love him SO MUCH. I love that he’s the Doctor, plus an extra heap of vulnerability. I love that he’s mostly a fandom-created character, that he’s the delightful lemonade made fic-by-fic from JE tragedy lemons. I feel protective and am very cautious about him, more so than any other Doctor. I love a good angst and drama journey post JE, but the endgame is crucial. (True, a lot of really great fics use the trope of Tentoo dying for reunion purposes, and yeah it hurts, but if he and the relationship are respected and I trust the author, I’ll go with it.)

All that to say, I believe right now in Pete’s World Tentoo and Rose are growing old together, happy and shagging six ways from Sunday!! Oh, here’s my controversial-for-Tentoo-fandom opinion: I don’t think the TARDIS coral makes sense for a limited human life. (And I have too much experience with attempted legacies to trust that something that powerful could be passed down to part-human successors perfectly.) But again, for fic purposes, rock on! Grow the baby TARDIS and give them adventures with it! I wrote one myself, so I love playing with the idea too. :) [ETA: haha, that headcanon has now been jossed by Big Finish! And you know what, I’m happy to be wrong. :P]

My main headcanon for Tentoo, though, is that he’s like John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels - “no longer riding on the merry-go-round, I just had to let it go.” Retired, basically, from the crushing weight of responsibility for the universe that the other Doctor can never escape. Maybe he’s a professor (having lots of desksex, ahem), maybe he consults at Torchwood so they’re coworkers. They’re the Doctor & Rose Tyler, so they travel a lot and probably get into trouble and have to save the day regardless. I think they would have a family of their own eventually, but that could go either way. I love the idea of them living in an old house that they remodel. Tentoo has a Time Lord mind, and thus enough telepathy to form some kind of link or bond with Rose. I think they live an extra long healthy life, like Ian & Barbara (it’s canon!). But I think that ultimately they live a human life, legacy in their descendants, some Time Lord TNA becoming part of the web of humanity, and that’s the beauty of it.

It’s this video of Moff talking about his run on DW. The whole thing is pretty interesting, I thought. But if you’re sensitive about his view of GITF (as a wistful, what-might-have-been sudden love affair) and his character interpretation of the Doctor in re: who he loves, it’s going to be pretty aggravating. 

In that post I was bouncing off his characterization of the Doctor/Rose relationship “he falls in love with her in his Doctor way,” i.e., something other than, or alien to, what we all understand “falling in love” to be. Like, ok dude, but look at all these moments, if that’s not falling in love as we all understand it, then we have some irreconcilable differences about how we see this show. The post is intended to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, but ultimately sincere. 

(Gonna take the opportunity to say, as far as RTD-era fandom goes, I’m on the less anti-Moff side of the bell curve overall. I’m a Whovian first, and I watch every new thing eagerly and do my best to enjoy it for what it is - even if nothing will ever, EVER, get me in the heart like RTD-Who. I think Moff is very good at a lot of things, which is why he frustrates me so entirely in very specific ways. If he was utter shite all the time, it wouldn’t be so aggravating. I have done my absolute best to take everything as it comes and not stay in that “bitch eating crackers” place with him. All that said, the things he believes about, say, Reinette, and the things he thinks are funny, like the jokes about Nancy in TEC....I cannot. And that’s what this post is about. There are some things he apparently will never grok, and the entire arc of the Doctor/Rose relationship is one of them.)

(pictured: a regeneration, not a clone, and the culmination of a three-regeneration love story arc)

Tropes:

Oh lord, all the romantic tropes: the Doctor being a smitten kitten, mutual pining, bedsharing 🔥🔥, fake married, arranged marriage, love realizations, telepathy, jail cells, I adore UST but have a hard time keeping it U for very long, memory loss (with happy ending). I’m going to steal @megabadbunny‘s phrase: a certain brand of non-caveman jealousy. [Jealousy is one of those tropes that can be guuuuh so delicious in fic but is SUCH a flaming red flag for abusers in real life that I fanmom-worry a bit…]

Angst is not my wheelhouse, though I have some plans that include it and would like to develop more resonance. But I’m allllllll about happy endings so that’s what to expect, (even if the happy ending is bittersweet due to the nature of the trope/genre ie timey wimey).

Smut tropes: all the fun places (walls, showers, closets, etc), lots of oral, alien anatomy (don’t know if I’ll write it but I like it sometimes, so I might), sex pollen/aphrodisiac, consensual roleplay or dom/sub dynamics, shibari/other bondage, sex!god!Doctor because this is my fantasy dammit, orgasm control, desperation, erotic spanking which is well documented on this blog lol  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  

Nopes:

The Doctor with anyone other than Rose or them cheating on each other. (I would probably only allude to a previous relationship rather than depict it.) The Doctor is not a Casanova.

Character bashing of Doctors or companions

I’ll never disparage one Doctor in favor of another (unless, you know, humorously with the understanding that all are equally loved). If I’m writing anything that invites comparison, I’ll be handling very carefully and asking for beta feedback, and I would hope it comes through that even if Nine is my Doctor, I love them all, and more importantly, Rose does.

Character death: highly unlikely to write it. (though I do read sometimes)

Whump/torture: I read this quite a bit, probably don’t have it in me to write though

Smut nopes: non-con, anal, more come to mind that are not common to our fandom so I won’t mention. :D  

Babyfic:

Maybe if I had a good idea for one, but so far I don’t. I always say being currently in the throes of raising small children makes it hard for me to romanticize it - and I’m here for romanticizing! But, hey, give me ten years and I’ll probably be writing all the babyfic and bawling about it 24/7! 😂😂😂

That said, sometimes things come along and get me straight in the heart. I’ve had phases of reading tons of knocked-up fics (I miss Rointheta) :) I expect Tentoo and Rose would have kids eventually, but that could go either way. And I do have a thing for gruff-but-tender men with little babies…

Headcanons that influence my writing:

This is an interesting question because most of my writing does not conform to my headcanons about what happened in the show. :P See discussion below. So I had to think through the things that DO matter for what I write:

The Doctor loves Rose Tyler in every universe. They start falling in love from the moment they meet and their relationship is romantic even before/whether it’s sexual.  

The Doctor has loved and probably had sex with other people before, though it’s not common for him and Rose becomes his ultimate. The details could vary. 

Eight is the War Doctor  

Tentoo is the Doctor

If Tentoo exists, he is with Rose and happily living a life, day after day, and having #all the sex in Pete’s World. :P They might have pain and trouble and adventure getting there, but he is the only peaceful happy ending the Doctor will ever get, and they won’t squander it.  ETA 2018: OH HEY THIS IS CANON NOW! (Ahem, unless he and Rose both stay with the other Doctor. #we could have had it all #kidding on the square)

Later Doctors will always love Rose, but if she’s not there, they will be happy that one of their lives was lived out with her

I’m mindful of the power imbalance between them, and I think most of the time the Doctor would be as well. Even if it’s not outright addressed, know that I’m aware of it and maybe shifting the balance in other ways if it’s a story that needs it. 

GITF…is an interesting case. I believe the most canon truth would place it early on in Eleven’s run, because it’s clearly written for Moffat’s Doctor. I don’t like how it skewed fandom’s characterization of Ten over the gazillions of fixits and other angsty stuff that had to written. If you lift it out, the Ten/Rose arc makes a lot more sense and has way less angst. However, it led to a lot of GREAT fic, which makes it hard to completely wish away. (ETA: expanded on that here) 

The DW novels are canon. There is so much great extra material to work with! Like, Rose literally lost her head one time! And another time Nine had to rewire her brain and body to be like a superhero and drive her! And more Team Tardis adventures! And some horrible stuff we won’t mention in Feast of the Drowned. BUT EVERYTHING IN THE STONE ROSE IS CANON!!!!!! ETA 2018 (because what eVEN was this year in canon??) Rose novelization and TCI  novelization 

Very important to me: The kiss in Parting of the Ways counts and matters, and could very well have led to the change in relationship we witness in later season 2 when Rose remembered it fully. We know she knew it by Doomsday - seems reasonable that she could remember the events that unfolded, if not “the whole of time and space” that only her Bad Wolf persona could comprehend. I don’t know if they were actually shagging at this point but they are definitely acting “together” in body language (and Ten literally says “we were together”). That kiss is a crucial step on the path.

Thoughts on other companions:

I love them all! Especially enjoy Martha/Mickey together. Love Amy/Rory. Love when AUs have all the couples coupling up! River is tougher case. I very much want to like her, and could have separated the shipping universe in my head from being ok with the Doctor moving on on the TV show, but yeah, see all the well-discussed issues. If I ever write her, it will be respectfully. (If I need a catty other-woman character, Reinette is available, ha! Though I am not inclined to write other-woman tropes.)

Other things of note:

Ok! So I look at headcanons as relating to but not necessarily determining fic preferences. My philosophy of fanfic is that it’s all about: What If? 

I love the arc of the canon love story of the Doctor and Rose beyond all reason. I love that this alien with an epic and painful life and a special love for the human race, at the point of his greatest loneliness, fell in love with a human that other humans would think was nothing special, and that he lost her and never ever got over it, and then became human like her (and all the other humans he’s been so fond of) to live out the one adventure he could never have but had come to crave. With her.

I think we are lucky to get a canon happy ending for THIS TV SHOW in particular.

THAT BEING SAID: we make our own endings. With no real-world constraints we can do  a n y t h i n g  we want. Write Ten and Rose staying together forever, hell, write NINE and Rose staying together forever (I might do that!), write Rose going back and living out her natural life with Eight fighting the Time War - anything is possible! I ADORE huge, epic, intensely alien, universe-and-eon-spanning fics, though I don’t know if I have it in me to write one.

I’ll write a lot of things that don’t conform to what I think was happening in canon. Most glaring example would be that I don’t think Nine and Rose were shagging in canon and I think their first kiss was their last (never over it!!) But…SO WHAT :P:P They’ll shag six ways from Sunday if I read it or write it or imagine it in my head every day.

I have more examples (even some less popular ones lol), but really, what I think likely happened doesn’t even matter for more than discussion purposes. Every fic has it’s own canon and headcanons. If I’m reading it or writing it, that means I buy it for this particular story.

Great post that explains a lot for me here! My writing is mostly heartcanons and crotchcanons :P (I might write a particular smutty thing just because I want to see them doing it, not necessarily because I headcanon that they would be into X thing.)

Open for prompts?