commanderoswald:

impossiblyimmortal:

twelvesangels:

Steven Moffat’s savage reply to the negative reactions of the new Doctor. (x)

#THE NOISE THAT JUST LEFT MY MOUTH. #STEVEN SLAY THEM ALL MOFFAT EVERYONE.

MOFFAT JUST BURIED THE NECKBEARDS ALIVE

Makes him sound good, but misogyny is a very real thing – and this is not how to address it. I didn’t see ‘the same three’ posters, I saw hundreds and ongoing commentaries that made me cringe. One of the original Doctors, Peter Davison, is taking a lot of heat right now for his sexism, stating that with a female Doctor ‘boys won’t have a role model.’ This isn’t a joke to be brushed aside at a media event to gain applause. I understand the need to minimise the trolls’ influence, but women live with this everyday, in various ways and we can’t brush it aside saying it doesn’t actually exist or undermine our tormentors with a casual flick of the wrist. Doesn’t work like that.

He had an opportunity to address the real damage of sexism, trolling and misogyny and missed it in favour of immediate and easy praise.

emilysidhe:

ami-angelwings:

I remember when I was reading that story as a kid, Sherlock goes on and on about The Woman, the only one who ever beat him, and you’re thinking, he’s had better villains than this. And then you click: he fancies her, doesn’t he? That’s what it’s about.

– Steven Moffat on A Scandal in Bohemia.

That quote from Moffat that I just reblogged made me think of something about the way most adaptations have handled Irene Adler and Moriarty.

In the original stories, Adler wasn’t a plot device, she was the adversary in the mystery that matched wits with Holmes, outsmarted him, and that he respects greatly at the end. While she’s still a character in the story, she doesn’t exist for Holmes, and she comes up with a solution to the dilemma that’s actually superior to his.

But Moriarty existed purely as a device for Arthur Conan Doyle to get rid of Holmes. He had to create a reason for Holmes to be willing to sacrifice himself, so he created Moriarty who was given this big criminal past and was said to be super smart. The story itself really didn’t show him being particularly smart, and most of what sets him up is just told to us. At the end he ends up being tossed off a cliff by Holmes after Holmes has ruined his empire. He’s completely a plot device, his entire raison d’etre in the story is focused around Holmes, and to get ACD from point A to point B which is having Holmes die a hero’s death that hopefully the fans would accept. He wasn’t Lex Luthor, he was Doomsday.

Adler didn’t exist as a plot device, she didn’t revolve around Holmes, and she got what she wanted at the end. Moriarty existed just to facilitate Doyle getting rid of Holmes, everything he does in that story revolves around Holmes, and Holmes gets what HE wants at the end (even without Holmes coming back to life, it had already been established Holmes was prepared to die to get rid of Moriarty).

Yet in almost every adaptation, it’s the opposite. Adler is the plot device, she’s a romantic interest, she’s a hostage, she’s the fake out, she’s the bait, etc… and Moriarty is the active agent who is smarter than Holmes and outwits him (at least until he’s defeated) and that Holmes respects as an equal. Adler tends to exist for Holmes, revolves around Holmes, and Moriarty is the greater character with his own story.

The Moffat quote makes me wonder if many boys (him included) grew up reading A Scandal in Bohemia, rolling their eyes and going “stupid chick, he probably let her go just because he likes her, why else would he think she’s so great?” while reading the much less fleshed out Moriarty who Holmes defeats and going “WOW WHAT A COOL BRILLIANT DUDE! HE’S SO SMART AND AWESOME. WHAT A WORTHY FOE.” Even though he’s not shown as being so, he’s just said to be so, but he’s a man and he captured the imaginations of boys reading the story, while she’s a woman and they fit her into a slot for women characters (and how women are seen in relation to men in society) and dismissed why she had won such profound respect from Holmes. So when they grew up and wrote the adaptations that now shape how people see these characters, their biases changed the way the characters were represented, and also the way people now see them.

Yes!!! Also? Yes, Holmes has had better villains than this whom he didn’t have much trouble defeating AND Irene Adler’s one of very few people who’ve ever defeated him and it IS because she’s a woman, but not because he’s too attracted to her to think??? It’s because he massively underestimated her due to paternalistic sexism! Moriarty has no chance against Holmes because against the male math genius with the criminal empire, Holmes brings his A-game. But when faced with a female opera singer, he totally half-asses it. You can tell while you’re reading that he’s treating the whole Irene Adler case as a joke right up until the moment when she righteously smacks him down and it’s glorious. So glorious that he practically thanks her for the privilege!

But of course so many men can’t see sexism in our own society unless it’s in their face twirling a mustache, so they read this story and they don’t see the obvious signs that Holmes didn’t take her seriously until it was too late because she was a girl, they just see that she outsmarted him when she probably shouldn’t have been able to and go, “Ah, I’ve seen this plotline before, it must be the feminine wiles.” Because it never occurs to them that their own thinking might be colored by unconscious biases, much less that the great logician and unbiased reasoner Sherlock Holmes could be susceptible to the same weaknesses.

Eloquently deduced.

I’m a bit worried about Bill Potts.

Not that Moffat will kill the lesbian, just that…it’s Moffat and he’s written some blatantly sexist stuff in his time, has not been big on racial diversity during his tenure for both Who and Sherlock, and he brings us a companion who is a queer woman of colour.

And, just so we know she’s a queer woman, she wears a rainbow-striped tank and her name is Bill.

Also: she isn’t the first openly queer companion the Doctor has had (Captain Jack, Clara). You think the BBC would know the show they’ve produced for the past 54 years.

I want to be wrong about all the things that worry me here, and hope yet another generation of Whovians, who have been craving representation on this show, aren’t let down. *Fingers crossed*

Why does the man behind ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Sherlock’ still have a job?

vaspider:

bookshop:

smaugy-poo:

viewovermerryton:

stopitsgingertime:

Steven Moffat’s dismissive attitude toward women somehow seems to help his career.

this article is so so important please read it

holy shit, though. wow.

OH.MY.GOD. it has EVERY QUOTE. WITH A LINK. this article must’ve been burning in this writer’s mind for ages…well done.

True story: when I initially pitched this article, my editor thought I was joking and squelched it, and I went back and screamed at him a lot until he understood there is NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT THE RAGE-INDUCING EFFECTS OF STEVEN MOFFAT and let me write it, haha.

(Also, since a lot of people have been questioning the veracity of the quotes, I just want to say that everything in “” in the article is a word-for-word quote that comes from either a video/radio or print interview by Moffat, or a tweet from his now-deleted twitter, or a line one of his characters says. Every other link is tied to arguments about the narratives of his series, so yes, it’s all as verified as we could possibly make it.)

I haven’t watched Sherlock or Doctor Who in a long time. This is basically why.

Narcissistic white male showrunners who do not respect their audience (especially the women in it) and write women into demeaning roles – you know I love them. While this article is certainly diatribe territory, it is not without merit as a character study, but the best way to know Moffat is to look at the women he creates.

– Reinette (The Girl in the Fireplace) – adores, obsessed with The Doctor since meeting him as a child. Flirtatious, sexually dominating, promised travel, dies before he gets back.

– River Song – adores, obsessed with The Doctor from childhood, flirty, sexually dominating (a characteristic so common in Moffat’s females as to imply an old-fashioned ‘whoreish’ quality – the male object isn’t flirty, or sexually provocative. He is innocent of her wiles), though ‘raised’ to kill him, she willingly allows herself to be imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit and lives for the days he comes to visit her. How good of him. Eventually dies so he doesn’t have to.

– Amy Pond – adores, obsessed with The Doctor from childhood, flirty, sexually dominating, clever, but not as clever as Him, eventually becomes River Song’s mother and her storyline is over. The 11th Doctor imagines her visiting him at his regeneration, just to adore him once again.

– Abigail – not a companion, but an important mention. Precursor of the wrong done to River Song. Abigail is an innocent woman, dying for an unknown reason, who is kept frozen in a vault – she is only brought out on Christmas Day over the course of a few years to live out her life entertaining a Scrooge-like character who falls in love with her (with The Doctor’s help). At no point does The Doctor ever try to save her or find out what is killing her (he focuses on saving the awful old white man). She lives only for the man in her life (one, face it, she doesn’t really know – Abigail is never given a character, though, unlike other Moffat women, she swings to the opposite sexist spectrum, not the Whore, but the Angel).

Clara Oswald – Like Reinette, Amy and River, meets The Doctor as a child, comes to adore him and be obsessed with him, eventually giving her life for him (over and over and over again), having no existence for the longest time except for him. With the introduction of the 12th Doctor (physically older-looking than his predecessor), the tables are turned a bit, with the adoring older Doctor unable to truly show affection but he often belittles her (the woman who saved him over and over again) for being all the things Moffat loves to write women as: controlling and bossy. Clara is where a break is made in the pattern, in that she does ‘escape’ The Doctor’s gravity as it were and goes on to have her own life and adventures without him, but for a long time, she was just sweet-looking filler, too. Like River, implied to be bisexual (River might be pan), but we’ll never see her trysts with Jane Austen or with Me, either, likely. Will we ever meet The Wives of River Song (one is likely The Doctor, eh?)? Eh.

Missy – Irene Adler’s big sister, no reason to call her ‘mistress’ (women are Masters as well and mistress has a sexual connotation and ‘Missy’ is a little childish and a little haughty-sounding – no offense to anyone named Missy), flirty, dominating, like River a little mad, but capable of Reason and Humour. The Master has always been obsessed with The Doctor, so she’s no different, only now presented more like an ex-wife who likes to get under his skin.

I don’t know why Clara (and Missy more or less) have escaped Moffat’s usual sexist touch, perhaps it wasn’t him or he got bored and decided to make them People. Other significant female characters like Kate Stewart and Osgood seem outside the form, Osgood being especially interesting as she embodies fan culture and even seems like a character designed to please fans, perhaps appease them a little (even though she (or her doppleganger) was killed off – was that a nasty little commentary from Moffat?).

I like to think Peter Capaldi has had some serious influence in the story and character-telling, and only time will tell how Bill fares. She seems more in the form of older companions, but there isn’t enough to even guess at anything. If anything she seems so far from anything Moffat would create one wonders if he did.

It’s interesting how all these women are more or less self-sacrificing when it comes to the Doctor, willing to risk or give their lives for him. While it is Rory who points out how dangerous that is (turning his friends into weapons), Rory is written as the Man Who Loves More – and keeps score. There is an underlying bias: men are better than women and it is their honest love that redeems these wayward females.

It is noteworthy that during Moffat’s tenure it was written into canon that Time Lords can change gender. At first, it was a laugh on his part (Matt Smith’s horror at possibly being a girl after his regeneration), but at some point you have to put up or shut up and we got a female Master to tie us over. Capaldi’s Doctor seems positive about the possibility of this kind of change, but it is one Moffat will not be lording over.

Small mercies, I suppose.

Why does the man behind ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Sherlock’ still have a job?