It's a big, risky, weird thing to introduce a secondary character who has met your POV-character at some unspecified time in the future and then get no omniscient-POV info on her, so that we are "meeting" her out of order as well.
is it really that big and risky? i recall the time traveler's wife being an incredibly popular book and film. i haven't seen the film, but i've read the book, and it certainly does the same thing -- except there it's in the service of a very run-of-the-mill love story.
meanwhile, i don't think that outside of fandom people are really having the same issues with river song. they seem to be enjoying the return of the weeping angels and are vaguely interested in whether river is really his wife from the future.
i don't doubt that plenty of people in fandom have legitimate reasons for not liking river -- maybe she just doesn't speak to them. i'm that way with jack, for example (i like him okay, but he doesn't really do it for me the way he seems to for most of fandom). i also don't doubt that a massive amount of the fandom backlash against her is to do with misogyny and double-standards for male and female characters. river's hardly the first female character to get slagged off the way she does because she's a woman, just as martha was hardly the first character to get ignored because she was black.
It's the "I don't like her because she's [noun] (as opposed to [adjective])" stuff that made me sit down and examine what I didn't like about her.
I was incredibly troubled when I realized the things I didn't like about her were the usual extrapolations people use to get around saying they don't like a character because they're [noun].
Unlike a lot of people in fandom, I'm not going to get on anyone's case for liking River Song. It's entirely likely I'll begin to warm to her now that I know my issues are with the way she's written and her narrative is presented to us and not her character itself.
I can't speak for anyone else in this thread, though. ;)
is it really that big and risky? i recall the time traveler's wife being an incredibly popular book and film. i haven't seen the film, but i've read the book, and it certainly does the same thing -- except there it's in the service of a very run-of-the-mill love story.
meanwhile, i don't think that outside of fandom people are really having the same issues with river song. they seem to be enjoying the return of the weeping angels and are vaguely interested in whether river is really his wife from the future.
i don't doubt that plenty of people in fandom have legitimate reasons for not liking river -- maybe she just doesn't speak to them. i'm that way with jack, for example (i like him okay, but he doesn't really do it for me the way he seems to for most of fandom). i also don't doubt that a massive amount of the fandom backlash against her is to do with misogyny and double-standards for male and female characters. river's hardly the first female character to get slagged off the way she does because she's a woman, just as martha was hardly the first character to get ignored because she was black.
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I was incredibly troubled when I realized the things I didn't like about her were the usual extrapolations people use to get around saying they don't like a character because they're [noun].
Unlike a lot of people in fandom, I'm not going to get on anyone's case for liking River Song. It's entirely likely I'll begin to warm to her now that I know my issues are with the way she's written and her narrative is presented to us and not her character itself.
I can't speak for anyone else in this thread, though. ;)
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