Fic commentary: The Genuine Moral Incentive
This is a commentary for The Genuine Moral Incentive (non-explicit Doctor/Master). It was requested approximately forever ago by tweedymcgee. I live up to my commitments! Very slowly. If you want to read the commentary, I suggest reading the original fic first. Also about three hundred years worth of moral philosophy. Sorry.
If, for some reason, you have ( Read more... )
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Comments 4
that the Master isn’t hurt by the Doctor hating him, but that he’s hurt by the Doctor hating himself for liking the Master. It’s made the most clear in Operator, Operator, I think. There’s two fics that are totally different in tone.
And yet both are awesome! Especially because they both contain that idea, which I think is really insightful and ouchy and which instantly slotted into my Master headcanon the first time I read "Operator, Operator." I kind of want to babble on here about the whole hate/love thing and how the Master sees that dynamic, but I don't think there's anything I can say to put it more succinctly than you already have. So.
Seven and Ainley!Master or even Six and Ainley!Master would have been more realistic, but it would have been such a different conversation.
A very different conversation. IDK, I for one really like that it's Five. One of the interesting things about Five/Ainley that tends to get glossed over in fic ( ... )
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One of the interesting things about Five/Ainley that tends to get glossed over in fic is just how fucked up Five would have to be to go there.
YES. This is honestly why I don't write a lot of Five/Master, because I can't always do the sort of mental gymnastics to get myself over all the hang-ups. Obviously people don't need to mess with that for their fluffy shipping fics, but I agree with you, it's really fascinating. Five would have to be experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance, and he could deal with that in a number of innovative/unhealthy ways. I think in the show he just kind of ignores the whole issue of Ainley!Master running around in another man's body, which seems like the most reasonable thing he could do, I guess. It must have sucked for Nyssa, though, and I'm sorry we don't see more about that in the show/in fic.
...Yeah. Thanks for making this fic sound more reasonable!
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Guilty confession: I've never actually read Schopenhauer, just other people yawping about Schopenhauer. (Cracks in undergraduate edumacation: Showing.) But the essential distinction you're drawing here, between morality based on altruism and morality based on fear of consequences, shone through bright and clear for me in the fic.
The problem of morality is always in the ship, and it’s something most people ignore (including me!)I love this. Spot-on. It's what makes the ship interesting, for me anyway. And I wish it were at the forefront in more fic, especially in ways that are more subtle than "Doctor Good/Master Bad ( ... )
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The Master seems to be claiming the intellectual high ground here, arguing that his moral architecture is more honest and internally consistent than the Doctor's, and I like that.Yeah! I think often it's the extremist positions that are most logically consistent. Any more moderate morality has to make a lot of compromises and often becomes very logically fuzzy. I don't think that's a bad thing - the world is really complicated and requires a lot of compromise, after all - but logical simplicity is very appealing too ( ... )
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