November 18 is Moffat Appreciation Day!

I literally found some old meta in a drawer today, that I will dust off for this special occasion. Come and join me, if you're still out there and feel like sharing some positivity, in whatever form.

I was tagged by @queenhawke and I have WAY more than 10 faves but here are the first that come to mind:

Tsukishima Kei

Arthur Pendragon 

The Doctor (Eleven and Twelve but I’m combining them into one so I can leave a spot on this list open for another character ha cha cha)

Connie Maheswaran

Tara Maclay

Anya Jenkins

Danny Phantom

Peyton Charles

Alison and Donnie Hendrix 

Adrien Agreste/Chat Noir

but also

Niska from AMC’s Humans

Kageyama Tobio

Ginny Weasley (but exclusively from the books)

Amy Pond

Nathan Young

Ravi Chakrabarti

Liv Moore

Major Lilywhite 

Clive Babineaux

all this is true, and i wasn’t unhappy to find these tags on my post. you shouldn’t have to personally identify with characters to find their stories meaningful. i even agree that you shouldn’t necessarily have to justify your dislike of a character -- in a perfect world, anyway. in reality, we all bring our biases to the things we consume, and we’re not aware of the prejudices that drive our dislike, you know? but in a better fandom, the relatability of fiction would probably not be the measuring stick used to validate it.

but then i look at the doctor who fandom, where so much of generally accepted moffat critique is “remember when the show was good? remember when the companions weren’t ~special~? remember when companions were JUST LIKE US? THESE characters aren’t real.” and i think that it NEEDS to be said that a lot of us identify closely with them, and statements like that alienate actual, real-life people. 

for instance, i relate really hard to clara's fear and her struggle for control. and then i’m told that it shouldn’t be possible for me to even see that in clara, because she's flat and uninteresting, and everything that shows her displaying those traits is another instance of moffat being terrible at writing female characters.

in this fandom, the “moffat sucks at writing women” criticism tends to run that his female characters are ‘’’special’’’ → therefore his characters are “not normal” → therefore “normal people” in real life cannot relate to them → therefore they are bad. but long before you get to “cannot relate”=“bad” you get the implication of a norm. but wait! normality is a construct. what you consider to be ordinary is not what other people consider to be ordinary. saying characters have to be “normal” implies that there is a real-life “normal,” and anyone who doesn’t fit into that is silenced.

this is worst for fans of amy, who frequently relate to her childhood of neglect and her abandonment issues, to her mental illness, to how she felt out of place in her world, to how everyone told her she was lying or making things up or cr*zy. for me, this is not a case of relatability, but of empathy -- i haven’t experienced what amy has, but i’ve talked about her arc a ton with nativehueofresolution. amy’s issues make her and real-life people feel alienated. the potential power of fandom to create empathy is enormous; instead, amy fans get shunted right out of the doctor who fandom because of their love for her.

aka, because they aren’t the kind of fan who hates moffat and everything he stands for because, duh, he can't write women like rtd used to. 

(i’m not even saying anything about what rtd wrote or what i think of it. i am literally JUST saying that i have found stuff in moffat’s era that speaks to me, and so have other people, and we’re valid.)

statements that moffat’s characters are not “normal people” and therefore unrelatable assume ONE PERSPECTIVE that real-life people MUST fit into. which is so so SO othering to people who don’t feel “normal,” who have been MADE to feel abnormal. those people are here. they are here. they are here.