on Moffat and children's stories
Er. I appear to have tripped and committed meta.
On Moffat, Misogyny, and Children’s Stories
“The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned up and farther off from the rooftops of Omaha, Nebraska, to which September did not even wave good-bye. One ought not to judge her: All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one.” --Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
I read an old post on the internet about that perennial issue of Moffat’s misogyny in Doctor Who, which is a frustrating topic for me. It’s certainly not that I think Moffat has no issues at all - there are those stupid jokes about women and driving, for example - but I also think that the discussion is largely driven by people who don’t take into account either the prevalence of Moffat’s favorite story ideas with male characters as well, or the kinds of stories Moffat tells.
It seems to me, for example, that Amy is constantly being derided or dismissed as a passive, sexist character because she’s the Girl Who Waited, without taking into account that Rory is also, canonically, the Boy Who Waited: whatever we think of waiting as an action, it’s coded as positive in Moffat’s universe, and it’s something that characters of both genders do.
(As longtime readers are well aware, I am also of the belief that waiting is not actually passive, because waiting in Moffat Who is the same as believing: Amy waits for the Doctor because she stubbornly believes that he’s real; Rory waits outside the Pandorica because he believes that Amy will emerge from it alive. I also think that the show interrogates the idea of waiting, because the thing you wait for has to be worth the wait - as when the Doctor asks Amy this point-blank in “The Big Bang,” but also when the Silence taunt Rory in “The Wedding of River Song” by telling him that Amy will never come back for him. But that’s another issue - although a related one, I think, because of the narrow parameters that fandom often gives for what counts as a “strong” character, in ways that rule out things like “waiting” as virtues. And I’m not going to turn this into another “Amy Pond and agency” post: been there, done that, bought the miniskirt. I’ll just reiterate that I think fandom often defines agency as “being in absolute control of everything that happens to you” - which pretty much means that every character is going to “lose her agency” at some point - and I tend to think of it more as “what you choose to do even when the situation is out of your control.” [I mean, hello, my dissertation was totally about agency in Shakespeare’s comedies; of course I think that.] But even if you think that waiting is negative, Rory is as “guilty” of it as Amy is.)
Likewise, it’s true that Moffat has written several female characters whose childhoods and lives are shaped by the Doctor’s presence - Reinette, Amy, River - but the discussion is lopsided without noting that he does the same thing with Kazran in “A Christmas Carol.” This is a pattern that Moffat clearly loves and keeps coming back to - it’s pure Peter Pan, with Peter flying into the nursery while Wendy grows older every year. And if this is hinted at with Amy at various points (as when she flies off in her nightie), it’s made absolutely explicit with Kazran; that shark that eats half of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is clearly a riff on Captain Hook’s crocodile with the clock in its belly. And in fact, it’s Kazran whose childhood is most bound up with the Doctor. With Reinette and Amy, the Doctor meets them once as little girls (technically twice for Reinette), and then when he sees them again, they’ve grown up; he only sees River (or Melody) once as a baby, after he’s known her as River for some time. (And Clara doesn’t count; if she ever does actually connect the Doctor to that “sad man” she talked to on the swings, it certainly hasn’t shaped her life in any way. The Doctor is driven to find her, but her initial impression of him is “...who is this weirdo at my door who thinks I should know him for some reason?”) But with Kazran, the Doctor comes back every Christmas for years; he actually enacts the Peter-and-Wendy dynamic more closely with Kazran than with any of Moffat’s female characters. And it’s Kazran’s life that he deliberately rewrites, as opposed to accidentally showing up in eighteenth-century France or crash-landing in her back garden. So whether we’re tired of the motif or not, to say that Moffat only does this with female characters just doesn’t make sense to me.
(Also, I’m waiting for the same people who freak out about this issue when Moffat writes it to have similar freakouts about the way Nine spends time with baby Rose in “Father’s Day,” in an episode where Rose herself raises the possibility that Mickey might have imprinted on her when he was a child. Haven’t seen it yet.)
But it’s also the case, I think, that Moffat is writing a slightly different kind of Who than RTD, and that plays out mostly with female characters because most companions are female, but it’s not explicitly gendered. I’ve seen people complaining that Moffat “doesn’t know how to write women” because he doesn’t spend a lot of time developing their back stories (unlike Russell, I guess, who...gave all the companions essentially the same back story of “running away from nagging mothers”), but I really think it’s that his interests lie elsewhere. RTD was interested in family drama and in companions’ home lives, so we got Jackie, Francine, and Sylvia and Wilf. (Though I am still annoyed by the fact that some of the same people who complained that Martha was just “not well developed as a character” or “not relatable,” when talking about how Rose was a much better companion than Martha, now use Martha as an example of how RTD wrote companions that were so much more believable and relatable than Moffat’s. But whatever.) Moffat, on the other hand, is interested in Who as a children’s story, and as a fairy tale/romance - and sometimes these are in conflict with each other, in the same way that RTD’s desire to write dark, tragic Who often seemed to bump up against the constraints of the family show.
In children’s stories, parents are often insignificant, the thing you have to ignore or get rid of in order for there to be adventures - think of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, for example, where James’ loving parents are dead, and his guardians are the enemy, but also the obstacle: the story can’t start until James gets away from his aunts. (The Eleventh Hour: “I don’t even have an aunt.” “You’re lucky.” “I know.”) Or Pippi Longstocking, a red-haired girl all alone in a ramshackle house (sound familiar?), eating whatever she pleases (fish fingers and custard?) and riding horses indoors. And even when the protagonists do have parents, they’re usually relegated to the background, because they have to be out of the way in order for the adventure to begin, for the children to do the dangerous things their parents would try to prevent if they knew; Max in Where the Wild Things Are gets to come back home to a loving mother and a dinner that’s still hot, but he has to leave home in order to be monstrous and gnash his terrible teeth. So Amy Pond first has no parents, and then she’s always had parents (as she puts it in “Good Night”), but in both cases her parents, as people, aren’t that significant to the story that Moffat is trying to tell: Amy Pond as Girl Adventurer. Same with Clara; in her day-to-day life we only hear about her father as a man who calls and complains about the government. Clara is Mary Poppins - and does anyone ever ask if Mary Poppins has parents?
At the same time, though, parents also have a great symbolic importance in Moffat Who, and this is where the fairy-tale/romance aspects come in. Reclaiming your birthright and/or being recognized by your parents is key in fairy tales: think of Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the lost girl reunited with her parents by the end of the play; or the daughter who reveals herself to her chastened kingly father at the end of “As Meat Loves Salt.” The Disney versions of “Sleeping Beauty” and “Rapunzel” arguably play up the element of reunion even more strongly than in the originals (Princess Aurora grows up as Briar Rose, not knowing who she is; Tangled’s version of Rapunzel is likewise a stolen princess reunited with her family at last). The animated film Anastasia draws on this pattern too, creating a happy reunion scene complete with the talisman that proves the heroine’s identity (in her case, the music box key, the only thing Anya has left from her past). And film versions of Burnett’s A Little Princess change the story so that it’s even closer to the fairy-tale structure: Sara’s father isn’t dead, as in the novel, but only has amnesia, and Sara is ultimately reunited with him - restored to her proper place as princess - at the end of both the Shirley Temple and the Alfonzo Cuaron films (“Don’t you know me, Papa?” Sara cries out in the latter). Fairy tales and romances ask a central question - “who am I?” - by asking, “who are my parents?” - or, in Moffat-speak, “Are you my mummy?” So even though Augustus and Tabitha Pond aren’t important to Amy’s story in the same way that Jackie Tyler was important to Rose’s story, they are incredibly important structurally, because their presence gives Amy’s story a fairy-tale trajectory, as she goes from orphan to child reunited with her family. (Although what’s interesting here is that when Amy remembers her parents back into existence, she inverts that formula slightly by claiming them: “You’re my mum”; “You’re my tiny little dad!” Also, “Augustus Pond” is a perfectly Roald Dahl sort of name, isn’t it?)
And we certainly see mothers recognizing their children, as with Nancy and Jamie in “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” or Amy finally recognizing River as her daughter by reading the talisman that says both “Melody Pond” and “River Song.” (Clara’s talisman is the leaf, the gift from her parents that lets her declare who she is. But Clara is different in that she’s not separated from her parents, or unaware of who they are. She’s not the heroine of a fairy tale/romance, unlike Amy or River.) But we also see fathers claiming their children in “Night Terrors,” “The Curse of the Black Spot,” and “Closing Time.” (I get why people think that Moffat was being somewhat gender-essentialist in “Widow” by saying that women are coded as strong because they can give birth, though I also think that Amy’s inability to have children after Demons Run complicates that picture a bit. But more importantly, I’m puzzled by the fandom narrative that says that Moffat thinks the most important thing women can do is be mothers, because if that’s true, and I don’t know that it is, it’s also the case that the most important thing men can do, in season 6, is be fathers. Learning to be a dad stops Cybermen, okay.) (We also see fathers failing to be fathers in both “A Christmas Carol” and “The Snowmen,” where Victorian Clara tells her employer that it’s time for him to be a father to his children.) This is a Moffat Thing, but I don’t see that it breaks down along gender lines. We spend more time with Amy and River because they are main characters, but it’s hardly the case that female characters are the only ones with this sort of arc or dynamic.
The conflict between “children’s story” and “fairy tale” comes in, I think, because Moffat tries to put Amy into both types of story at the same time. Some people have complained that Moffat wastes the opportunity to develop Amy by bringing her parents into the story, once they’ve come back. (This is evidence of his misogyny, because Real Characters Have Relationships, I guess, and Amy’s relationships with the Doctor and Rory don’t count, even though they are the two constants in her shifting and rewritten lives, because relationships with men are misogynist.)
(I know, I know, Bechdel Test. I’m all for that, really! I would love to know more about Amy’s friends from “The Power of Three,” for example. But it’s not like Rory has tons of friends who aren’t Amy, either; for most of the series, they are each other’s primary human relationship. Which may be bad writing, if you don’t like that sort of thing, but it’s not specific to gender. And I just feel like people are constantly shifting the goalposts with Amy and what it would take for her to be a well-developed character. Like, “why doesn’t she have a real job?” Oh, well, she’s been a model and a travel writer and a children’s book author - but that doesn’t count, because Moffat only told us about them, even though, seriously, what better jobs for a girl who loves playing parts and making stuff and traveling through time and space, and how much time do we usually spend focusing on companions’ jobs, this show is not exactly a workplace drama? [Again, remember people complaining about how Martha’s job as a doctor was just tacked-on or whatever because all she ever did was CPR now and again; we didn’t know why she’d chosen to be a doctor, which we would know if she were well-developed? But sure, now RTD always wrote rounded characters and Moffat doesn’t.] “She has no interests outside of Rory and the Doctor!” Oh, well, she clearly loves art and ancient history - but that doesn’t count, because...I don’t even know why, fandom is great at extrapolating whole characters from one appearance and two lines of dialogue, and I don’t remember Rose having a ton of extra interests and yet people still managed to like the character, but somehow Amy is just this weird blank slate, why does she do the things she does? [See also: “ugh, River only became an archaeologist to find the Doctor,” because of that one line at the end of “Let’s Kill Hitler,” even though she clearly goes right on being an archaeologist after she’s found the Doctor again, and her mother is canonically interested in ancient history, and her father is a freaking Roman and the subject of Melody Pond’s first bedtime story, and her whole life is about how there are secrets hidden in the history books, everywhere you look. River knows how time works; she knows that ancient messages will someday be translated and that legends are real. Her entire life is a case study in euhemerism. “You don’t know about the Doctor, because you’re stupid.” “I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.” Also, and this bears repeating, her father is the Lone Centurion. Why wouldn’t she be an archaeologist? I feel like fandom laps up the tiniest little hint of a hint with other characters, but with Amy and River, nope. And, like, why is it okay that Rose and Martha work for UNIT because of their time with the Doctor, but River’s becoming an archaeologist is a horrible problem? That’s a genuine question, because I’m confused.])
Um, that got ranty. I just have a lot of Pond feelings, sorry. Anyway, the point is that if Amy is the heroine of a children’s story, then it’s not likely that her parents would claim significance in the narrative. (Instead, this gets displaced onto Rory’s father, who takes on the “Jackie Tyler” role. Amy’s story ends with that little girl in the garden, waiting for the adventure to begin; Rory’s narrative ends with the letter to Brian Williams in “P.S.”, because Rory’s narrative can absorb the weight of that function, having the parent left behind to worry. (Again, think back to Peter Pan: as readers, we might see Mrs. Darling in the nursery, but the children have to go on being “young and heartless” for the story to continue. If Amy’s parents become real, that changes the focus: not on the girl who waited, but on the people who got left behind. Which is a totally valid story to tell. It’s just not Amy’s.) Similarly, Amy’s role as Girl Heroine is in conflict with her role as fairy-tale parent: how do you tell a story about a girl and her imaginary friend, and also have that story be about a woman and her daughter? Obviously, the partial answer is “time travel”; I’m not sure that Moffat gets the balance right, but I don’t think it’s because he’s a raging misogynist. I think it’s because these two stories actually tug in different directions. He tries to have it both ways with the whole “flesh avatar aboard the TARDIS” thing, and I do think that has problematic elements, but I think they’re accidentally problematic - that is, I think they come from trying to solve a problem and doing it badly, rather than because Moffat really believes that women are just incubators or whatever. I can certainly see why people found this part of the plot to be dismaying; I don’t want to dismiss that or minimize it. I do think there’s a reading of this that says that the part of Amy that’s capable of bringing a baby to term - that is, her body - is much less important than her “heart and mind and soul,” all the parts of her that are said to be aboard the TARDIS when her body is at Demons Run. (The Pond family specializes in out-of-body experiences: Rory’s plastic Roman body contains a real human soul; River gets downloaded into the biggest hard drive in the universe, and is still considered alive by all the metrics that matter.) But I understand how that might fail to convince people, or erase the image of Amy screaming in pain and terror when she wakes up to discover that she’s giving birth - if that less-negative reading is possible, I’m not saying I think it’s successful. I just also don’t think that the case for Moffat’s misogyny deals with all the evidence a lot of the time.
On Moffat, Misogyny, and Children’s Stories
“The Leopard of Little Breezes yawned up and farther off from the rooftops of Omaha, Nebraska, to which September did not even wave good-bye. One ought not to judge her: All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one.” --Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
I read an old post on the internet about that perennial issue of Moffat’s misogyny in Doctor Who, which is a frustrating topic for me. It’s certainly not that I think Moffat has no issues at all - there are those stupid jokes about women and driving, for example - but I also think that the discussion is largely driven by people who don’t take into account either the prevalence of Moffat’s favorite story ideas with male characters as well, or the kinds of stories Moffat tells.
It seems to me, for example, that Amy is constantly being derided or dismissed as a passive, sexist character because she’s the Girl Who Waited, without taking into account that Rory is also, canonically, the Boy Who Waited: whatever we think of waiting as an action, it’s coded as positive in Moffat’s universe, and it’s something that characters of both genders do.
(As longtime readers are well aware, I am also of the belief that waiting is not actually passive, because waiting in Moffat Who is the same as believing: Amy waits for the Doctor because she stubbornly believes that he’s real; Rory waits outside the Pandorica because he believes that Amy will emerge from it alive. I also think that the show interrogates the idea of waiting, because the thing you wait for has to be worth the wait - as when the Doctor asks Amy this point-blank in “The Big Bang,” but also when the Silence taunt Rory in “The Wedding of River Song” by telling him that Amy will never come back for him. But that’s another issue - although a related one, I think, because of the narrow parameters that fandom often gives for what counts as a “strong” character, in ways that rule out things like “waiting” as virtues. And I’m not going to turn this into another “Amy Pond and agency” post: been there, done that, bought the miniskirt. I’ll just reiterate that I think fandom often defines agency as “being in absolute control of everything that happens to you” - which pretty much means that every character is going to “lose her agency” at some point - and I tend to think of it more as “what you choose to do even when the situation is out of your control.” [I mean, hello, my dissertation was totally about agency in Shakespeare’s comedies; of course I think that.] But even if you think that waiting is negative, Rory is as “guilty” of it as Amy is.)
Likewise, it’s true that Moffat has written several female characters whose childhoods and lives are shaped by the Doctor’s presence - Reinette, Amy, River - but the discussion is lopsided without noting that he does the same thing with Kazran in “A Christmas Carol.” This is a pattern that Moffat clearly loves and keeps coming back to - it’s pure Peter Pan, with Peter flying into the nursery while Wendy grows older every year. And if this is hinted at with Amy at various points (as when she flies off in her nightie), it’s made absolutely explicit with Kazran; that shark that eats half of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver is clearly a riff on Captain Hook’s crocodile with the clock in its belly. And in fact, it’s Kazran whose childhood is most bound up with the Doctor. With Reinette and Amy, the Doctor meets them once as little girls (technically twice for Reinette), and then when he sees them again, they’ve grown up; he only sees River (or Melody) once as a baby, after he’s known her as River for some time. (And Clara doesn’t count; if she ever does actually connect the Doctor to that “sad man” she talked to on the swings, it certainly hasn’t shaped her life in any way. The Doctor is driven to find her, but her initial impression of him is “...who is this weirdo at my door who thinks I should know him for some reason?”) But with Kazran, the Doctor comes back every Christmas for years; he actually enacts the Peter-and-Wendy dynamic more closely with Kazran than with any of Moffat’s female characters. And it’s Kazran’s life that he deliberately rewrites, as opposed to accidentally showing up in eighteenth-century France or crash-landing in her back garden. So whether we’re tired of the motif or not, to say that Moffat only does this with female characters just doesn’t make sense to me.
(Also, I’m waiting for the same people who freak out about this issue when Moffat writes it to have similar freakouts about the way Nine spends time with baby Rose in “Father’s Day,” in an episode where Rose herself raises the possibility that Mickey might have imprinted on her when he was a child. Haven’t seen it yet.)
But it’s also the case, I think, that Moffat is writing a slightly different kind of Who than RTD, and that plays out mostly with female characters because most companions are female, but it’s not explicitly gendered. I’ve seen people complaining that Moffat “doesn’t know how to write women” because he doesn’t spend a lot of time developing their back stories (unlike Russell, I guess, who...gave all the companions essentially the same back story of “running away from nagging mothers”), but I really think it’s that his interests lie elsewhere. RTD was interested in family drama and in companions’ home lives, so we got Jackie, Francine, and Sylvia and Wilf. (Though I am still annoyed by the fact that some of the same people who complained that Martha was just “not well developed as a character” or “not relatable,” when talking about how Rose was a much better companion than Martha, now use Martha as an example of how RTD wrote companions that were so much more believable and relatable than Moffat’s. But whatever.) Moffat, on the other hand, is interested in Who as a children’s story, and as a fairy tale/romance - and sometimes these are in conflict with each other, in the same way that RTD’s desire to write dark, tragic Who often seemed to bump up against the constraints of the family show.
In children’s stories, parents are often insignificant, the thing you have to ignore or get rid of in order for there to be adventures - think of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, for example, where James’ loving parents are dead, and his guardians are the enemy, but also the obstacle: the story can’t start until James gets away from his aunts. (The Eleventh Hour: “I don’t even have an aunt.” “You’re lucky.” “I know.”) Or Pippi Longstocking, a red-haired girl all alone in a ramshackle house (sound familiar?), eating whatever she pleases (fish fingers and custard?) and riding horses indoors. And even when the protagonists do have parents, they’re usually relegated to the background, because they have to be out of the way in order for the adventure to begin, for the children to do the dangerous things their parents would try to prevent if they knew; Max in Where the Wild Things Are gets to come back home to a loving mother and a dinner that’s still hot, but he has to leave home in order to be monstrous and gnash his terrible teeth. So Amy Pond first has no parents, and then she’s always had parents (as she puts it in “Good Night”), but in both cases her parents, as people, aren’t that significant to the story that Moffat is trying to tell: Amy Pond as Girl Adventurer. Same with Clara; in her day-to-day life we only hear about her father as a man who calls and complains about the government. Clara is Mary Poppins - and does anyone ever ask if Mary Poppins has parents?
At the same time, though, parents also have a great symbolic importance in Moffat Who, and this is where the fairy-tale/romance aspects come in. Reclaiming your birthright and/or being recognized by your parents is key in fairy tales: think of Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, the lost girl reunited with her parents by the end of the play; or the daughter who reveals herself to her chastened kingly father at the end of “As Meat Loves Salt.” The Disney versions of “Sleeping Beauty” and “Rapunzel” arguably play up the element of reunion even more strongly than in the originals (Princess Aurora grows up as Briar Rose, not knowing who she is; Tangled’s version of Rapunzel is likewise a stolen princess reunited with her family at last). The animated film Anastasia draws on this pattern too, creating a happy reunion scene complete with the talisman that proves the heroine’s identity (in her case, the music box key, the only thing Anya has left from her past). And film versions of Burnett’s A Little Princess change the story so that it’s even closer to the fairy-tale structure: Sara’s father isn’t dead, as in the novel, but only has amnesia, and Sara is ultimately reunited with him - restored to her proper place as princess - at the end of both the Shirley Temple and the Alfonzo Cuaron films (“Don’t you know me, Papa?” Sara cries out in the latter). Fairy tales and romances ask a central question - “who am I?” - by asking, “who are my parents?” - or, in Moffat-speak, “Are you my mummy?” So even though Augustus and Tabitha Pond aren’t important to Amy’s story in the same way that Jackie Tyler was important to Rose’s story, they are incredibly important structurally, because their presence gives Amy’s story a fairy-tale trajectory, as she goes from orphan to child reunited with her family. (Although what’s interesting here is that when Amy remembers her parents back into existence, she inverts that formula slightly by claiming them: “You’re my mum”; “You’re my tiny little dad!” Also, “Augustus Pond” is a perfectly Roald Dahl sort of name, isn’t it?)
And we certainly see mothers recognizing their children, as with Nancy and Jamie in “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” or Amy finally recognizing River as her daughter by reading the talisman that says both “Melody Pond” and “River Song.” (Clara’s talisman is the leaf, the gift from her parents that lets her declare who she is. But Clara is different in that she’s not separated from her parents, or unaware of who they are. She’s not the heroine of a fairy tale/romance, unlike Amy or River.) But we also see fathers claiming their children in “Night Terrors,” “The Curse of the Black Spot,” and “Closing Time.” (I get why people think that Moffat was being somewhat gender-essentialist in “Widow” by saying that women are coded as strong because they can give birth, though I also think that Amy’s inability to have children after Demons Run complicates that picture a bit. But more importantly, I’m puzzled by the fandom narrative that says that Moffat thinks the most important thing women can do is be mothers, because if that’s true, and I don’t know that it is, it’s also the case that the most important thing men can do, in season 6, is be fathers. Learning to be a dad stops Cybermen, okay.) (We also see fathers failing to be fathers in both “A Christmas Carol” and “The Snowmen,” where Victorian Clara tells her employer that it’s time for him to be a father to his children.) This is a Moffat Thing, but I don’t see that it breaks down along gender lines. We spend more time with Amy and River because they are main characters, but it’s hardly the case that female characters are the only ones with this sort of arc or dynamic.
The conflict between “children’s story” and “fairy tale” comes in, I think, because Moffat tries to put Amy into both types of story at the same time. Some people have complained that Moffat wastes the opportunity to develop Amy by bringing her parents into the story, once they’ve come back. (This is evidence of his misogyny, because Real Characters Have Relationships, I guess, and Amy’s relationships with the Doctor and Rory don’t count, even though they are the two constants in her shifting and rewritten lives, because relationships with men are misogynist.)
(I know, I know, Bechdel Test. I’m all for that, really! I would love to know more about Amy’s friends from “The Power of Three,” for example. But it’s not like Rory has tons of friends who aren’t Amy, either; for most of the series, they are each other’s primary human relationship. Which may be bad writing, if you don’t like that sort of thing, but it’s not specific to gender. And I just feel like people are constantly shifting the goalposts with Amy and what it would take for her to be a well-developed character. Like, “why doesn’t she have a real job?” Oh, well, she’s been a model and a travel writer and a children’s book author - but that doesn’t count, because Moffat only told us about them, even though, seriously, what better jobs for a girl who loves playing parts and making stuff and traveling through time and space, and how much time do we usually spend focusing on companions’ jobs, this show is not exactly a workplace drama? [Again, remember people complaining about how Martha’s job as a doctor was just tacked-on or whatever because all she ever did was CPR now and again; we didn’t know why she’d chosen to be a doctor, which we would know if she were well-developed? But sure, now RTD always wrote rounded characters and Moffat doesn’t.] “She has no interests outside of Rory and the Doctor!” Oh, well, she clearly loves art and ancient history - but that doesn’t count, because...I don’t even know why, fandom is great at extrapolating whole characters from one appearance and two lines of dialogue, and I don’t remember Rose having a ton of extra interests and yet people still managed to like the character, but somehow Amy is just this weird blank slate, why does she do the things she does? [See also: “ugh, River only became an archaeologist to find the Doctor,” because of that one line at the end of “Let’s Kill Hitler,” even though she clearly goes right on being an archaeologist after she’s found the Doctor again, and her mother is canonically interested in ancient history, and her father is a freaking Roman and the subject of Melody Pond’s first bedtime story, and her whole life is about how there are secrets hidden in the history books, everywhere you look. River knows how time works; she knows that ancient messages will someday be translated and that legends are real. Her entire life is a case study in euhemerism. “You don’t know about the Doctor, because you’re stupid.” “I hate good wizards in fairy tales; they always turn out to be him.” Also, and this bears repeating, her father is the Lone Centurion. Why wouldn’t she be an archaeologist? I feel like fandom laps up the tiniest little hint of a hint with other characters, but with Amy and River, nope. And, like, why is it okay that Rose and Martha work for UNIT because of their time with the Doctor, but River’s becoming an archaeologist is a horrible problem? That’s a genuine question, because I’m confused.])
Um, that got ranty. I just have a lot of Pond feelings, sorry. Anyway, the point is that if Amy is the heroine of a children’s story, then it’s not likely that her parents would claim significance in the narrative. (Instead, this gets displaced onto Rory’s father, who takes on the “Jackie Tyler” role. Amy’s story ends with that little girl in the garden, waiting for the adventure to begin; Rory’s narrative ends with the letter to Brian Williams in “P.S.”, because Rory’s narrative can absorb the weight of that function, having the parent left behind to worry. (Again, think back to Peter Pan: as readers, we might see Mrs. Darling in the nursery, but the children have to go on being “young and heartless” for the story to continue. If Amy’s parents become real, that changes the focus: not on the girl who waited, but on the people who got left behind. Which is a totally valid story to tell. It’s just not Amy’s.) Similarly, Amy’s role as Girl Heroine is in conflict with her role as fairy-tale parent: how do you tell a story about a girl and her imaginary friend, and also have that story be about a woman and her daughter? Obviously, the partial answer is “time travel”; I’m not sure that Moffat gets the balance right, but I don’t think it’s because he’s a raging misogynist. I think it’s because these two stories actually tug in different directions. He tries to have it both ways with the whole “flesh avatar aboard the TARDIS” thing, and I do think that has problematic elements, but I think they’re accidentally problematic - that is, I think they come from trying to solve a problem and doing it badly, rather than because Moffat really believes that women are just incubators or whatever. I can certainly see why people found this part of the plot to be dismaying; I don’t want to dismiss that or minimize it. I do think there’s a reading of this that says that the part of Amy that’s capable of bringing a baby to term - that is, her body - is much less important than her “heart and mind and soul,” all the parts of her that are said to be aboard the TARDIS when her body is at Demons Run. (The Pond family specializes in out-of-body experiences: Rory’s plastic Roman body contains a real human soul; River gets downloaded into the biggest hard drive in the universe, and is still considered alive by all the metrics that matter.) But I understand how that might fail to convince people, or erase the image of Amy screaming in pain and terror when she wakes up to discover that she’s giving birth - if that less-negative reading is possible, I’m not saying I think it’s successful. I just also don’t think that the case for Moffat’s misogyny deals with all the evidence a lot of the time.