How important is it for Doctor Who Companions to be ordinary people?

[betawho]

I just saw this quote from nrrrdy_grrrl about Supernatural, and realized it could also apply to Doctor Who.

Quote:

It took me a while to figure it out but the biggest difference between old and new Supernatural for me is that I miss Sam being a little brother. I miss him picking fights and being the one with a perspective from normal life, I miss the challenges

Comments

[10littlebullets]

I think it's important to draw a distinction between outside the Doctor's world and normal. Especially with a show like Doctor Who, which tends to attract people who are, well, a little odd, and who often cling to their own oddness as part of their identity. It took me a long, long time to warm up to Rose, for example, because she was so aggressively characterized as being normal and down-to-earth, and then the One True Companion claptrap started creeping its way into the show and alienated the hell out of me. Because it was setting her up as a normal/default viewer-identification figure and then glorifying that as the only way to be, and the problem was I barely related to her at all. Nor to Rory, though I didn't react the same way to him because he was always one of multiple views on what was going on. But I liked both him and Rose a lot better after I dropped the "oh, this is what the writer is telling us regular people should be like" idea and got a handle on their quirks and flaws and individuality. (I'm half-convinced you don't have a good character until you can imagine people passing gifsets or excerpts around Tumblr and going "Oh my god, $CHARACTER, you are the actual worst" with great affection.)

I mean, yes, it is necessary to have an outside perspective to balance out all the games of gods and monsters, and it helps if that perspective is one that's familiar to us Earthlings in the audience. But it shouldn't be over-generic in an attempt to get everyone to identify with the companion--it can and should be individual, and it can even be a bit weird, as long as it's a weirdness we can recognize.

(There are other risks to making the companions overly generic, too--most people want to imagine themselves as special and different somehow, or at least see some extraordinary qualities in their viewpoint character that they can aspire to. And with female Doctor Who companions there's the additional risk of coming across like you just needed some vapid eye candy and couldn't be bothered to write in a personality--it may not be entirely fair as a stereotype, but it exists for a reason, as it's a pitfall not all writers manage to avoid.)

[betawho]

I had this same reaction to Rose, the fact that she was being passed off as so incredibly normal that she almost couldn't be real, and yet at the same time we were being told how amazingly special she was. Either way, she didn't seem like an actual person to me. No one is that normal.

And I completely agree, one of the risks of going for that approach is that most people do want to consider that there is something special about themselves, no matter how normal they all. To me, every normal person has some focus, some attribute or attitude or aptitude that is different from most other people.

As you say, it is a balance. Most people are normal, but there is no actual thing as "the norm." Everyone is, in some way, a little bit different.

Generic is a good word. There's a difference between normal and generic. And most people don't want to be generic.

Either way, too big an extreme in either direction too generically normal or too "special" and it is harder to view that person as a person, and they end up becoming just a character, which, in Doctor Who especially, is possibly more of a problem because so much of what they see and face is made up anyway, is odd, unusual, and strange.

So there seems to be the need for something normal to both contrast with that, and balance it. To make things both easy to relate to, yet also to enjoy how strange it is.