#jlmarch

I guess I’ll start with how much i Fuckin Hate Their Politics bc i’ve been watching classic who and jesus christ time lords are worse than i ever could have imagined. I thought for a long fucking time that i was just kind of like...... exaggerating how much i hated them bc i synpath the doctor so fuckin hard but. no. they’re actually awful

LIKE FIRST OF ALL. they’re literally just so pretentious as people. like think about the most annoying, passive aggressive, high society pompous british fucks you could think of, and then multiply it by at least three. i’ve posted about this in the good omens discord before but for a race often purported to be one of the most intelligent, benevolent, progressive species every to exist, they raelly have a Very Fucked political system and an even more fucked past.

first of all, they’re elitist, classist, oligarchical assholes. during the doctor’s visit when the master has the president assassinated and the doctor gets blamed for it (i’m not entirely sure of the arc title, but), all the gallifreyans (aka the non-aristos who weren’t indoctrinated into high time lord society and don’t live inside the citadel) live in small pastoral tribes on the outside of the city. again, depending on what canon you decide to accept and what you’ve read/heard outside of tv canon, this kind of differs but!

their political ideology??? is fucking WACK because their political system is controlled by a lord president, who commands a small elite council who are the leaders of the great houses. therefore, power remains within the top echelons of gallifrey. the president isn’t even elected. when the president ISN’T assassinated, like he was in the previously mentioned arc during 4′s run, they choose their successor. otherwise, they’re chosen by the high council (in “the five doctors,” the doctor is “elected” by one member of the high council because president borusa was absorbed into rassilon’s tomb!

also, they purposely keep things hidden from the general public in order to save face -- every single time the doctor comes to gallifrey (up until where i am, which is season 21 so i haven’t seen “a trial of a time lord” yet), there’s a member of the high council who ends up betraying the rest of the council, and every single member of the time lord high council are like “what!!! no!!!!! there’s no way!” and then someone betrays them and they’re like *surprised pikachu meme*. in the one arc where the president is assassinated, they purposely keep the fact that the guy worked with the master to assassinate the president so that he wouldn’t lose face and the time lord high council wouldn’t be seen as weak. so i’ve come to the conclusion that gallifreyan politics are literally ready to topple at any moment, but the time lords are too beurocratic or lazy or cowardly to do anything about it, so things just KEEP GOING ON for hundreds of years, because the president doesn’t have any official cap to how many terms they can serve-- at least not from what i’ve seen.

AND ANOTHER THING! rassilon, aka the founder of time lord society, who created time lords as we know them (if i remember correctly, this is vague memories of pre-season 12 wikipedia and we all know how well my recollection is gnringri) through genetic modification of gallifreyans, taking the 1% of their society and altering their physiology in order to create a subspecies that touts their racial superiority in order to maintain power. APPARENTLY (according to the second doctor in “the five doctors”) there were some people who said rassilon was, in fact, an evil tyrant against whom the time lord high council rebelled, locking him away in the dark tower in the death zone in eternal sleep/death. but of course, time lords being time lords, kept this hidden as well. and i have no fucling clue how the timelines work out re: the time war, but as far as i know, rassilon ended up coming back, a guy against whom their predecessors rebelled, and they just -- LET HIM TAKE CONTROL AGAIN. like i said earlier, the time lords are too lazy and cowardly to ever do anything, so they let him become president, and then he proceeded to start a fucking war (somethign apparently gallifreyans have a history of, along with imperialism and colonialism).

that’s a lot but there’s a lot more but that’s my Takes About Politics.