amelia pond
The Girl Who Waited: Why I Hate Amy Pond
Finally! Someone has been able to put into words my issue with Amy's character. It's not that I dislike her, because I don't. I just find her plotlines to be boring. OI find it telling that the only episode of the sixth season that got me excited was the Neil Gaiman episode (where the TARDIS becomes a woman), where Amy played a very, very small role.
Unlike the author of that post, I would not go so far as to say that I hate Amy Pond. I wouldn't even say that I dislike her, because the truth is that I just don't feel strongly enough about her to have much of an opinion on her.
She has just enough personality to not be an empty shell of a person. I can't just insert myself into her place and pretend like I'm the one traveling through time and space. She had potential to be interesting, but that potential was never fully realized.
And so I am bored with Amy Pond.
I loved Rose. I loved Martha. I loved loved loved Donna. Amy is just kind of 'meh.' Now, if Amy was a real person that I met in real life, I'm sure I would genuinely like her. But the main thing there is if Amy was a real person. Because the way she’s presented in Who she doesn’t feel like she’s real-she isn't a fully realized character. I keep hearing a lot about how Amy is complex and wonderful and honestly I just don't get it. Yeah Amy is funny, and smart, and she likes sex (a genuine rarity among fictional women), and I guess that's a win for feminism. But who is she? Before Amy met the Doctor what did she want in her life? What were her goals and aspirations?
We knew that Rose was bored and directionless, and that's why she just ran away with some random dude in a time machine; she wanted the adventure that her life lacked.
We knew that Martha wanted to be a doctor. She had career goals ad aspirations, she wanted to help people and she wanted to make the world a better place. She ran away with some random dude in a time machine because it was the logical extension of her natural curiosity.
And we knew that Donna…well, Donna came of as rather shallow and a bit unlikeable at first, but over time we saw who she was. Turn Left showed us that she, like Rose, was unsatisfied with her life. She couldn't live up to her mother's expectations for her, and was gradually being worn down and defeated. In Partners in Crime, we saw that her brush with the Doctor had left her with a thirst for adventure that temping in 21st century Earth just couldn't provide for her.
The most important thing we knew about these characters, something that was revealed over their respective seasons, was that they cared. Rose cared deeply for the Doctor, and that was her whole shtick, but Martha and Donna cared deeply for those they met while traveling. All three showed their humanity in their capacity for love. And that's what made them so strong. Amy…Amy is like a caricature of a strong woman. She’s feisty and spunky, but we don’t really understand why she puts up a fight. She’s just a rebel without a cause in an environment where there are so many causes to be taken up. (Seriously, you have a time machine. You’re traveling with the Doctor. His whole shtick is this godlike defender-of-the-weak act, even if he fucks it up occasionally.)
I felt like after the run of the RTD companions that I knew them. I knew that Rose had fallen in love, both with the Doctor and her amazing life with him. I knew that Martha was independent and would rather find fulfillment in comparatively mundane human world than be tortured by a crush that would always be unrequited. (Yes, crush. Martha got over it too quick for it to be anything but a crush. And face it--if you were going on grand adventures through time and space with an individual, and that person was the only constant in a life awash in adrenaline, you'd probably develop some kind of sexual feelings for that person, too. It'd probably end at that though. You'd want to fuck that person, not move into a suburban house with a white-picket fence in which you would raise your 2.5 kids in a happily-ever-after. Plus there's that whole "Holy shit I almost died but now I'm alive and really horny" thing, aka "Thank god we're alive sex.") And Donna…The writers made damn well sure that you knew who Donna was. She had more character development than any other character on that show. We saw her go from being shallow, self-centered, and kind of obnoxious, to being the empathetic, tearful-yet-strong and courageous woman challenging the Doctor's ethics and checking his ego with her smarts, her humor, and her take-no-shit attitude. We saw Donna relish in the adventures in a way that neither of the other companions did, and we saw Donna transformed by those very adventures. Hers was a journey of coming to love one's self because you know what? We're all important, we're all amazing and beautiful and smart and we all deserve to be loved. It was downright heartbreaking to have the writers take that away from her and turn her back into that self-conscious woman who took people down to make herself feel mow important rather than trying to build both herself and others around her up.
This contrasts starkly with Amy, who essentially did not exist before the Doctor. All we know is that she was afraid of the crack in her wall in the same way that every kid is afraid of the monster in the closet/under the bed/in the air vents/whatever. Her family and most of her life was eaten up by the crack in her wall, so anything that she may have had before meeting the Doctor has literally been erased out of existence. The only memory people have of Amy is of she had that wacky imaginary friend, the Raggedy Doctor. I don't know who she is or why she ran away with some random dude in a time machine other than the fact that she had always wanted to run away with some random dude in a time machine. It's not adventure that was missing from her life; it was the Doctor himself that was missing. It was a man who was missing from her life.
RTD gave us so much for his female companions while Moffat has yet to reveal just who Amy is. I don't feel like I know her in the sense that I know Rose and Martha and Donna. Amy's just a pretty face who makes witty comebacks and helps advance the plot. She exists in the story, but sometimes it feels as if she doesn't actually live in it. She certainly doesn't invite other viewers to come inhabit the story as well.
I've been reading a few lovely posts by bookshop, and I want to take a minute to say that this is not an Amy-hate post. This is not "Amy isn't as cool as the Doctor or Rory" post either, because honestly I'm not too attached to either of those characters either. The Doctor isn't fully human and he never has been. This has made it hard for me to emotionally invest myself in the Doctor despite the fact that, at the end of the day, Doctor Who is his show. Sure, I like the doctor. I think he's a fun, witty character and I enjoy watching his antics. But if he died I'd mostly be sad because that would mean my show has ended, not because a beloved character is gone. As for Rory, he suffers from the same exact problems as Amy. I just don't really care about him. I don't feel like I know him like I know Rose, Martha, and Donna. He's too perfect, I guess. Like he's some tragic, romantic paragon whose only real flaw as that he's a bit jealous and socially awkward-basically he's every underdeveloped charter ever.
Moffat writes stories, not characters.
Look at the episodes he wrote in the RTD era: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. These are all good episodes with fantastic plotlines. Blink still keeps me awake at night with fear. It's good storytelling. But in each episode he found a way to write the main companion out of the plot and introduce his own. Rose was distracted by Captain Jack while the Doctor dealt with the Creepiest Child Ever in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Rose acted a bit childish as the Doctor indulged his infatuation with Madame du'Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace. Martha and the Doctor only existed as DVD extras in Blink allowing Sally Sparrow and whats-his-face to take center stage. Donna got downloaded into a computer to live some weirdo suburban fantasy in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead which usheredin the era of River Song. He replaced characters written by other people to introduce people he didn't have to really flesh out. Others took over the continued characterization of Captain Jack. Sally Sparrow was never seen again. River Song died at the end of an episode where she was supposed to be awesome with some Meaningful Death but, to me, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time whining about how the Doctor wasn't her Doctor. Yeah, later she got better, she really just had a shitty introductory episode, but her characterization has been all over the place. She was criminally insane in Let's Kill Hitler after seeming much more stable, if rather rebellious, as Amy and Rory's out-of-the-blue childhood friend Melody in the same episode. She's flirty, smart, and tough but other than that…who is she? Really? That's not a rhetorical question. If anyone can answer who River Song is I am all ears.
This wouldn't be so bad if I found the stories to be enrapturing and intellectually compelling. But I don’t. Certainly the Moffat era hasn’t churned out any instant-classics like Blink, despite the fact that Moffat wrote that fucking episode and ostensibly knows what he’s doing. But RTD era episodes, which are often less serious in nature than the Moffat ones (farting aliens, anyone?), were so powerful because they drove character development. Let’s take those farting aliens as an example. Aliens of London/World War Three, despite seeming on the surface like it was geared specifically for immature middle school students, yet that plotline spoke so much about who the Doctor was and how much he was hurting after the Time War. Or look at any of the Dalek episodes. The Daleks are lumpy chunks of metal with a toilet plunger and an eggbeater for a pair of arms. And yet we're afraid of them because we see the emotional damage and pain they cause characters like Rose and the Doctor. RTD era characters hurt and we hurt with them but I have yet to feel sympathy-pain for the trials and tribulations of Amy and Rory.
And for the record, I think the River Song/Melody Pond plotline is the silliest thing ever-sillier even than those farting aliens. The not pregnant/pregnant theme for Amy quickly turned tiresome, and I found it hard to believe that she had gone into full mama-bear mode seemingly hours after actually finding out she was pregnant. Like…no. I do not believe she could have mentally processed her pregnancy quick enough to become that fiercely protective of something that she was so scared of just a few episodes earlier (The Impossible Astronaut/___) and that she barely even mentioned again. Plus there was that whole “Oh, Amy’s a ganger!” thing. Um, what? And then I saw what they were doing with River Song in the finale episode and figured it out before the big reveal, so the climax felt more like the writes trying to catch up with me than it felt like they were blowing my mind with plot twists. (I've talked to other people who didn't see the ending coming, and I know they were thrilled with the episode. But for those of us who perhaps are a bit more genre-savvy, or even fiction-savvy, the climax was rather anticlimactic.)
I don't know, maybe it’s less about Amy and Rory and more that I just miss the old show. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the old format. The defining characteristic of the RTD era was fluidity. Things were always changing. Companions came and went (and came back again and went away again), the Doctor changed his face. Each adventure was in a different place at a different time. Each episode played with a different genre: mystery (The Unicorn and the Wasp), horror (Blink aka ohmyfuckinggod scariest thing I have ever seen), comedy (Partners in Crime), drama (The Parting of Ways), etc. The Moffat era lacks that. Don't get me wrong--that lack of constant change isn't by nature bad. Moffat has his own style of storytelling, a style that prefers to focus on arcs and the big picture, and that is a style this is both equally valid and a style that I personally tend to prefer. Sixth-season Who is just not the show I fell in love with. For me, change and fluidity are a part of Doctor Who just as much as intricate and intertwining myth-arcs belong more in a show like Supernatural or layered stories and in-jokes are so much a part of Arrested Development. Hell, I'd go so far to say that change and fluidity are as much a part of Who as the TARDIS. That episodic style is a part of a show's identity, and to change it up after a few seasons is to fundamentally alter the show. Again, I'm not saying this is bad. And okay, that’s a valid way of writing. If you want to focus on the Epic Plot and the Big Picture that’s cool, too. I'm just saying that I personally miss RTD and the way he ran things.
Finally! Someone has been able to put into words my issue with Amy's character. It's not that I dislike her, because I don't. I just find her plotlines to be boring. OI find it telling that the only episode of the sixth season that got me excited was the Neil Gaiman episode (where the TARDIS becomes a woman), where Amy played a very, very small role.
Unlike the author of that post, I would not go so far as to say that I hate Amy Pond. I wouldn't even say that I dislike her, because the truth is that I just don't feel strongly enough about her to have much of an opinion on her.
She has just enough personality to not be an empty shell of a person. I can't just insert myself into her place and pretend like I'm the one traveling through time and space. She had potential to be interesting, but that potential was never fully realized.
And so I am bored with Amy Pond.
I loved Rose. I loved Martha. I loved loved loved Donna. Amy is just kind of 'meh.' Now, if Amy was a real person that I met in real life, I'm sure I would genuinely like her. But the main thing there is if Amy was a real person. Because the way she’s presented in Who she doesn’t feel like she’s real-she isn't a fully realized character. I keep hearing a lot about how Amy is complex and wonderful and honestly I just don't get it. Yeah Amy is funny, and smart, and she likes sex (a genuine rarity among fictional women), and I guess that's a win for feminism. But who is she? Before Amy met the Doctor what did she want in her life? What were her goals and aspirations?
We knew that Rose was bored and directionless, and that's why she just ran away with some random dude in a time machine; she wanted the adventure that her life lacked.
We knew that Martha wanted to be a doctor. She had career goals ad aspirations, she wanted to help people and she wanted to make the world a better place. She ran away with some random dude in a time machine because it was the logical extension of her natural curiosity.
And we knew that Donna…well, Donna came of as rather shallow and a bit unlikeable at first, but over time we saw who she was. Turn Left showed us that she, like Rose, was unsatisfied with her life. She couldn't live up to her mother's expectations for her, and was gradually being worn down and defeated. In Partners in Crime, we saw that her brush with the Doctor had left her with a thirst for adventure that temping in 21st century Earth just couldn't provide for her.
The most important thing we knew about these characters, something that was revealed over their respective seasons, was that they cared. Rose cared deeply for the Doctor, and that was her whole shtick, but Martha and Donna cared deeply for those they met while traveling. All three showed their humanity in their capacity for love. And that's what made them so strong. Amy…Amy is like a caricature of a strong woman. She’s feisty and spunky, but we don’t really understand why she puts up a fight. She’s just a rebel without a cause in an environment where there are so many causes to be taken up. (Seriously, you have a time machine. You’re traveling with the Doctor. His whole shtick is this godlike defender-of-the-weak act, even if he fucks it up occasionally.)
I felt like after the run of the RTD companions that I knew them. I knew that Rose had fallen in love, both with the Doctor and her amazing life with him. I knew that Martha was independent and would rather find fulfillment in comparatively mundane human world than be tortured by a crush that would always be unrequited. (Yes, crush. Martha got over it too quick for it to be anything but a crush. And face it--if you were going on grand adventures through time and space with an individual, and that person was the only constant in a life awash in adrenaline, you'd probably develop some kind of sexual feelings for that person, too. It'd probably end at that though. You'd want to fuck that person, not move into a suburban house with a white-picket fence in which you would raise your 2.5 kids in a happily-ever-after. Plus there's that whole "Holy shit I almost died but now I'm alive and really horny" thing, aka "Thank god we're alive sex.") And Donna…The writers made damn well sure that you knew who Donna was. She had more character development than any other character on that show. We saw her go from being shallow, self-centered, and kind of obnoxious, to being the empathetic, tearful-yet-strong and courageous woman challenging the Doctor's ethics and checking his ego with her smarts, her humor, and her take-no-shit attitude. We saw Donna relish in the adventures in a way that neither of the other companions did, and we saw Donna transformed by those very adventures. Hers was a journey of coming to love one's self because you know what? We're all important, we're all amazing and beautiful and smart and we all deserve to be loved. It was downright heartbreaking to have the writers take that away from her and turn her back into that self-conscious woman who took people down to make herself feel mow important rather than trying to build both herself and others around her up.
This contrasts starkly with Amy, who essentially did not exist before the Doctor. All we know is that she was afraid of the crack in her wall in the same way that every kid is afraid of the monster in the closet/under the bed/in the air vents/whatever. Her family and most of her life was eaten up by the crack in her wall, so anything that she may have had before meeting the Doctor has literally been erased out of existence. The only memory people have of Amy is of she had that wacky imaginary friend, the Raggedy Doctor. I don't know who she is or why she ran away with some random dude in a time machine other than the fact that she had always wanted to run away with some random dude in a time machine. It's not adventure that was missing from her life; it was the Doctor himself that was missing. It was a man who was missing from her life.
RTD gave us so much for his female companions while Moffat has yet to reveal just who Amy is. I don't feel like I know her in the sense that I know Rose and Martha and Donna. Amy's just a pretty face who makes witty comebacks and helps advance the plot. She exists in the story, but sometimes it feels as if she doesn't actually live in it. She certainly doesn't invite other viewers to come inhabit the story as well.
I've been reading a few lovely posts by bookshop, and I want to take a minute to say that this is not an Amy-hate post. This is not "Amy isn't as cool as the Doctor or Rory" post either, because honestly I'm not too attached to either of those characters either. The Doctor isn't fully human and he never has been. This has made it hard for me to emotionally invest myself in the Doctor despite the fact that, at the end of the day, Doctor Who is his show. Sure, I like the doctor. I think he's a fun, witty character and I enjoy watching his antics. But if he died I'd mostly be sad because that would mean my show has ended, not because a beloved character is gone. As for Rory, he suffers from the same exact problems as Amy. I just don't really care about him. I don't feel like I know him like I know Rose, Martha, and Donna. He's too perfect, I guess. Like he's some tragic, romantic paragon whose only real flaw as that he's a bit jealous and socially awkward-basically he's every underdeveloped charter ever.
Moffat writes stories, not characters.
Look at the episodes he wrote in the RTD era: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. These are all good episodes with fantastic plotlines. Blink still keeps me awake at night with fear. It's good storytelling. But in each episode he found a way to write the main companion out of the plot and introduce his own. Rose was distracted by Captain Jack while the Doctor dealt with the Creepiest Child Ever in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Rose acted a bit childish as the Doctor indulged his infatuation with Madame du'Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace. Martha and the Doctor only existed as DVD extras in Blink allowing Sally Sparrow and whats-his-face to take center stage. Donna got downloaded into a computer to live some weirdo suburban fantasy in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead which usheredin the era of River Song. He replaced characters written by other people to introduce people he didn't have to really flesh out. Others took over the continued characterization of Captain Jack. Sally Sparrow was never seen again. River Song died at the end of an episode where she was supposed to be awesome with some Meaningful Death but, to me, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time whining about how the Doctor wasn't her Doctor. Yeah, later she got better, she really just had a shitty introductory episode, but her characterization has been all over the place. She was criminally insane in Let's Kill Hitler after seeming much more stable, if rather rebellious, as Amy and Rory's out-of-the-blue childhood friend Melody in the same episode. She's flirty, smart, and tough but other than that…who is she? Really? That's not a rhetorical question. If anyone can answer who River Song is I am all ears.
This wouldn't be so bad if I found the stories to be enrapturing and intellectually compelling. But I don’t. Certainly the Moffat era hasn’t churned out any instant-classics like Blink, despite the fact that Moffat wrote that fucking episode and ostensibly knows what he’s doing. But RTD era episodes, which are often less serious in nature than the Moffat ones (farting aliens, anyone?), were so powerful because they drove character development. Let’s take those farting aliens as an example. Aliens of London/World War Three, despite seeming on the surface like it was geared specifically for immature middle school students, yet that plotline spoke so much about who the Doctor was and how much he was hurting after the Time War. Or look at any of the Dalek episodes. The Daleks are lumpy chunks of metal with a toilet plunger and an eggbeater for a pair of arms. And yet we're afraid of them because we see the emotional damage and pain they cause characters like Rose and the Doctor. RTD era characters hurt and we hurt with them but I have yet to feel sympathy-pain for the trials and tribulations of Amy and Rory.
And for the record, I think the River Song/Melody Pond plotline is the silliest thing ever-sillier even than those farting aliens. The not pregnant/pregnant theme for Amy quickly turned tiresome, and I found it hard to believe that she had gone into full mama-bear mode seemingly hours after actually finding out she was pregnant. Like…no. I do not believe she could have mentally processed her pregnancy quick enough to become that fiercely protective of something that she was so scared of just a few episodes earlier (The Impossible Astronaut/___) and that she barely even mentioned again. Plus there was that whole “Oh, Amy’s a ganger!” thing. Um, what? And then I saw what they were doing with River Song in the finale episode and figured it out before the big reveal, so the climax felt more like the writes trying to catch up with me than it felt like they were blowing my mind with plot twists. (I've talked to other people who didn't see the ending coming, and I know they were thrilled with the episode. But for those of us who perhaps are a bit more genre-savvy, or even fiction-savvy, the climax was rather anticlimactic.)
I don't know, maybe it’s less about Amy and Rory and more that I just miss the old show. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the old format. The defining characteristic of the RTD era was fluidity. Things were always changing. Companions came and went (and came back again and went away again), the Doctor changed his face. Each adventure was in a different place at a different time. Each episode played with a different genre: mystery (The Unicorn and the Wasp), horror (Blink aka ohmyfuckinggod scariest thing I have ever seen), comedy (Partners in Crime), drama (The Parting of Ways), etc. The Moffat era lacks that. Don't get me wrong--that lack of constant change isn't by nature bad. Moffat has his own style of storytelling, a style that prefers to focus on arcs and the big picture, and that is a style this is both equally valid and a style that I personally tend to prefer. Sixth-season Who is just not the show I fell in love with. For me, change and fluidity are a part of Doctor Who just as much as intricate and intertwining myth-arcs belong more in a show like Supernatural or layered stories and in-jokes are so much a part of Arrested Development. Hell, I'd go so far to say that change and fluidity are as much a part of Who as the TARDIS. That episodic style is a part of a show's identity, and to change it up after a few seasons is to fundamentally alter the show. Again, I'm not saying this is bad. And okay, that’s a valid way of writing. If you want to focus on the Epic Plot and the Big Picture that’s cool, too. I'm just saying that I personally miss RTD and the way he ran things.