One Day of Memes
30 Days of Fanfic? I will forget after two days. Oh well, that is another meme I will be probably skipping :( Have some wanky navel-gazing instead!
Doctor Who Domestic Fic: Why I Both Hate And Love It, by nos'
I hate DW domestic!fic because almost everyone does it badly. This is a harsh thing to say but I have found it to be broadly true. It is entirely possible that I myself do it badly, I am prepared to accept that.
I love DW domestic!fic because it is the most wrong thing you can possibly write in the fandom. Sure you can darken it up a bit with violence and misery and abortions and French, but I feel that the only concept darker than "the Doctor goes evil" is "the Doctor settles down" because that suggests he's stopped caring or that he's trapped and slowly going insane.
The love meets the hate with the fact that mostly people don't seem to realise just how wrong it is. By all means marry the Doctor off to your Companion of choice and have them pop out the babbys, but it tends to miss most of the potential when the rest of the universe is simply forgotten. It's the world of darkfic that didn't mean to be dark.
We have some moments of it on the telly, most obviously in The Lodger. (Human Nature doesn't count.) What we get is the Doctor being obviously unable to live a life that on occasion even appeals to him. Going back to "the slow path" with Reinette is a last resort, and as soon as his real beloved the TARDIS is within sight again he's off. He'll do Xmas dinner with the Tylers and then look horrified at the idea of a mortgage. Domesticity is a nice place to visit, but he wouldn't want to live there. Half the appeal of River Song is that she isn't looking to tie him down because she doesn't want that for herself anyway. The Lodger is interesting in that he knows/hopes it's only temporary and even then he's unable to entirely fit in as a human. What I'm saying is, you have to justify the Doctor settling down because on the telly it seems incredibly unlikely.
All this Oncoming Storm talk that annoys people so much should be hammering home the idea that the Doctor is important to the universe whether he likes that idea or not. He can't just retire, he can't just not bother. He doesn't want to not bother, being both compassionate and easily angered by injustice. You could torture the Doctor pretty effectively by making him live through something awful happening to other people while he has no way to stop it, and even better if stopping it would fuck up the universe. (Yeah, the Master wasn't being nice when he didn't do much to the Doctor during the Year That Never Was.) River's tears as she dies might come from knowing exactly what she's doing when she traps the Doctor in a paradox that involves her own death. What I'm saying in too many words is, the boy isn't just going to stop because he caught whiff of some pheromones.
That is why it is deliciously wrong to make him do so! It is the story that doesn't want to be told. This is also why it is fucked up when people do it without realising what it means. It's the stuff that makes you wonder if people even know what they're watching.
I like making the Doctor do the most mundane things possible. I don't like when he has a job that people think of as having some status to it. Let's go all the fucking way with it and make him live like common people, eh? It's a weird fic-kink, I know that, and it makes me sad that there is very little that appreciates the wrongness of the concept. If it's remaining at all true to the Doctor as a character then eventually he has to get back to the TARDIS, and that's not always going to be good for everyone involved. There will be pain and heartbreak, there will be anger and accusations. It will be like an episode of Eastenders but with time-travel in it. There will not be a Happily Ever After unless that Happily Ever After is a return to the status quo of the series.
I tend to think that the Doctor fantasies about doing domestic while having no wish to actually live it, and he knows that the fantasy is nothing he'd actually want to experience in reality. It's just an occasional daydream, because however much the universe needs him there's nothing out there to actually stop the Doctor giving up and marrying himself off if that's what he really wanted to do. (This being why Ten/Rose should be one of the greatest tragic stories in fandom, yet it somehow isn't.)
In conclusion UR DOIN IT RONG DO IT LIEK I WANT U TO INSTED!!11!
Doctor Who Domestic Fic: Why I Both Hate And Love It, by nos'
I hate DW domestic!fic because almost everyone does it badly. This is a harsh thing to say but I have found it to be broadly true. It is entirely possible that I myself do it badly, I am prepared to accept that.
I love DW domestic!fic because it is the most wrong thing you can possibly write in the fandom. Sure you can darken it up a bit with violence and misery and abortions and French, but I feel that the only concept darker than "the Doctor goes evil" is "the Doctor settles down" because that suggests he's stopped caring or that he's trapped and slowly going insane.
The love meets the hate with the fact that mostly people don't seem to realise just how wrong it is. By all means marry the Doctor off to your Companion of choice and have them pop out the babbys, but it tends to miss most of the potential when the rest of the universe is simply forgotten. It's the world of darkfic that didn't mean to be dark.
We have some moments of it on the telly, most obviously in The Lodger. (Human Nature doesn't count.) What we get is the Doctor being obviously unable to live a life that on occasion even appeals to him. Going back to "the slow path" with Reinette is a last resort, and as soon as his real beloved the TARDIS is within sight again he's off. He'll do Xmas dinner with the Tylers and then look horrified at the idea of a mortgage. Domesticity is a nice place to visit, but he wouldn't want to live there. Half the appeal of River Song is that she isn't looking to tie him down because she doesn't want that for herself anyway. The Lodger is interesting in that he knows/hopes it's only temporary and even then he's unable to entirely fit in as a human. What I'm saying is, you have to justify the Doctor settling down because on the telly it seems incredibly unlikely.
All this Oncoming Storm talk that annoys people so much should be hammering home the idea that the Doctor is important to the universe whether he likes that idea or not. He can't just retire, he can't just not bother. He doesn't want to not bother, being both compassionate and easily angered by injustice. You could torture the Doctor pretty effectively by making him live through something awful happening to other people while he has no way to stop it, and even better if stopping it would fuck up the universe. (Yeah, the Master wasn't being nice when he didn't do much to the Doctor during the Year That Never Was.) River's tears as she dies might come from knowing exactly what she's doing when she traps the Doctor in a paradox that involves her own death. What I'm saying in too many words is, the boy isn't just going to stop because he caught whiff of some pheromones.
That is why it is deliciously wrong to make him do so! It is the story that doesn't want to be told. This is also why it is fucked up when people do it without realising what it means. It's the stuff that makes you wonder if people even know what they're watching.
I like making the Doctor do the most mundane things possible. I don't like when he has a job that people think of as having some status to it. Let's go all the fucking way with it and make him live like common people, eh? It's a weird fic-kink, I know that, and it makes me sad that there is very little that appreciates the wrongness of the concept. If it's remaining at all true to the Doctor as a character then eventually he has to get back to the TARDIS, and that's not always going to be good for everyone involved. There will be pain and heartbreak, there will be anger and accusations. It will be like an episode of Eastenders but with time-travel in it. There will not be a Happily Ever After unless that Happily Ever After is a return to the status quo of the series.
I tend to think that the Doctor fantasies about doing domestic while having no wish to actually live it, and he knows that the fantasy is nothing he'd actually want to experience in reality. It's just an occasional daydream, because however much the universe needs him there's nothing out there to actually stop the Doctor giving up and marrying himself off if that's what he really wanted to do. (This being why Ten/Rose should be one of the greatest tragic stories in fandom, yet it somehow isn't.)
In conclusion UR DOIN IT RONG DO IT LIEK I WANT U TO INSTED!!11!