isn't it brilliant when
someone really articulate says exactly what you were thinking?the main point of the article is exactly what i've been saying for the past three years: davies is a very good writer, but not a great one; because he never seems to learn from his mistakes. which, by the way, the author is very fair about pointing out in balance
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anyway, yeah, i've never really gone in for that whole 'omg rtd is a talentless hack!!!' vibe that a lot of people annoyed with him seem to go for, because, really, you don't get to executive produce your own show for nothing...plus he's dealing with about a billion and one non-writing-related issues that affect the story that we can't even begin to know about. but, as you point out, he IS a very 'fake-it-till-you-make-it' kind of writer, particularly where endings are concerned. and although i have a certain sympathy for this, given the kind of deadlines he has to deal with? he ends up sending a lot of REALLY ugly messages when he lets stuff slide in his writing (ie rose and handy; suicidal women; poc being 'not as good' as white characters). and i just wish he'd pay a little more attention to that.
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I have gone from thinking of him as someone where I'd watch his stuff if the concept interested me to never wanting to hear of him again. Like, I can't watch his Casanova now that the racefail is an ongoing thing. Plus his whole "uninteresting women > accomplished, fascinating women" which really doesn't paint a nice picture of his gender politics. It's not that I went off him cos he can't write (though his DW work is generally far from his best), it's that it's made me think he's a horrible person who puts that horribleness into his work.
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yeah, that's a huge one, although i'd amend it to 'ordinary, average, infantilized women'. he seems to glorify women who are 'spunky' in the passively rebellious way that children are, but who have no real power or agency and therefore pose no real threat to the male power structure. and those that do get punished severely: harriet jones and yvonne hartman spring immediately to mind.
I have gone from thinking of him as someone where I'd watch his stuff if the concept interested me to never wanting to hear of him again.
sadly, amen to this. i can put up with him until the finales are over, but after that, i don't think i'm ever going to watch anything else he's ever written if i can help it. seriously, it's not worth the tooth-grinding. 'augh, teh genderfail; it burns!!'
and i dearly hope you're right about donna, although her being just a footnote to the story (ie, reinforcing how worthless her life is without the doctor) would almost be more insulting than killing her. but rusty's clearly not too chicken to kill his own characters, and the way people have spoken about the finale in interviews makes me worried for donna and particularly wilf.
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Yeah :( Maybe it's just seeing so much in a short time, but I have gone right off his stuff because the issues are so obvious. And he isn't a good enough writer (in skill or in ideology) to earn a pass from me. Genderfail, racefail, classfail, DO NOT WANT D:
Wilf might die. He's old and would have no life post-Doctor anyway. Donna I think will be married off to someone she's only just met (cos that's what happened to the other two) or will otherwise be having a happy life with no memories. She's not Rose, she doesn't get to be "fixed."
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