The best worst reactions to the news that the next Doctor Who will be a woman

The numbering issue is simple: She’s the 13th Doctor, the 14th face of the time lord known as the Doctor, and the 15th regeneration. (my theory on the Mobius Faces is that they are versions of The Other, who seems to be strongly related to the Doctor)

I’m so excited about this.

And the fact that it’ll be a bit less…Moffaty.

Sorry, although I’m a fan of both Sherlock and Dr Who and sometimes his style is a bit overwrought.

The people who are complaining before they watched it are the exact people who say they want merit-based judgement, not judgement on gender.

You haven’t watched the show.

Therefore you are judging solely on gender.

Not merit.

You divvies.

From WWTH: “I also saw some tired ass jokes on twitter about how a feeemale will be unable to drive the Tardis and how it’s unrealistic to expect feeemales to know how to use a screwdriver.”

Okay, I get that these dudes are trying to make har-dee-har “just a joke” sexist stereotype jokes, but… I mean, did they miss the whole River Song arc, or what?

Re: william parslow’s tweet, and others like it–there’s a major correlation/causation assumption here. “Feminists were calling for a female doctor, therefore the BBC gave it to them, therefore they won.”

True fact: Some feminists (and some non-feminists!) wanted to see a female Doctor.

Also true fact: The new Doctor will be female.

Unproven assumption: the latter is directly a result of the former.

Fandoms are filled with all kinds of people clamoring for all kinds of different fan service all the time. Yeah, creators will sometimes throw the fans a bone, but they also have to filter out an awful lot of petitions, suggestions, demands, and begging, because people are always asking for and hoping for things. Sometimes the things would make the show worse, sometimes the things just don’t fit the creator’s vision, sometimes the things are directly contradictory to what another segment of the fandom is also demanding, so the creators couldn’t unilaterally bow to fan pressure even if they wanted to.

Most major successful creative works aren’t driven by a “YOU decide what happens next!” model. But–in true-to-form projection–because the internet alt-right try to get their way by throwing noisy tantrums, they assume that the Doctor Who creators must be caving to a feminist tantrum instead of their own.

Dudes. DUDES. What if… and I know this is hard to imagine, but WHAT IF the show creators actually wanted a female Doctor *because they thought it was a legitimately cool thing to do*?

All the whiners have been okay with an entirely different person being the Doctor, but only as long as that person was a man. And they have given no reason for that besides misogyny.

@Andy Cooper
I think Smith could have been significantly better, but was hurt significantly with bad writing. I’m extremely glad that I’m not the only one who thinks that McCoy is best Doctor.

Liz
July 16, 2017 at 8:00 pm
Can I suggest another Tweet for the list?

https://twitter.com/IanLevine/status/886627111712239616

Sorry if the embed doesn’t work. First time commenting!

I think this one deserves some context. Ian Levine is a record producer who came to some modest success in the late 70s through the 80s. He was one of the people who modernised the Northern Soul scene, he was the main DJ for Heaven during its early years, and was a major populariser of the Hi-NRG subgenre of dance music. He co-wrote and mixed songs for Take That, Bronski Beat, Erasure, and the Pet Shop Boys amongst other popular acts.

And he is a self-professed Doctor Who superfan. He ingratiated himself to the production team in the mid-80s, becoming a story and continuity consultant, most notably contributing plot points to the Colin Baker era serial Attack of the Cybermen. When Baker’s Who was put on hiatus, he put together a charity song called Doctor in Distress, which was woeful. In later years he’s found lost episodes of the show and returned them to the BBC, produced extras for various DVD releases, and paid for animation to be produced for a DVD release of the unfinished Tom Baker serial Shada, but it was rejected by the commissioning editor.

Since the 90s, he’s become increasingly a polarising figure in Who fandom, throwing around his links to the production office, while also loudly quitting fandom and returning repeatedly. He’s frequently held up as an example of how toxic fandom can be, especially when the writers of a show start listening to the kind of people who are more obsessed with ensuring consistency than storytelling.

(Not that consistency is a bad thing, but slavishly holding to continuity, especially in a show that has never really cared about it before is just… no)

I am a mental health nurse, and a man. People who make jokes that imply ‘doctors are male, nurses are female’ don’t offend me; I just pity them.

@Roadkill:

Maybe I should seal the can back up, but….

My comment about Starfleet being racist is largely due to the treatment of Vulcans in general. Spock is routinely and universally ridiculed for his logical approach, Tuvok is forced to put up with Neelix’ (OK, technically not Starfleet) constant abuse etc.

In one episode, Tuvok even complains about Starfleet’s institutional racism, which caused him to quit Starfleet (he rejoined later).

The deliberate use of an inappropriate honorific seems to me like an extension of that racism. On the other hand, as people here have noted, “Mr” – in the movies at least – is applied to people regardless of gender. Again, I believe this is a Roddenberry thing. I think he wanted Starfleet to be gender-blind, so everyone got the same title. Granted, it was a blithering idea to make this “Mr” but perhaps his heart was in the right place. It didn’t extend to pronouns either, making it especially ill-conceived.

Alex Kingston learning the news while onstage at Raleigh Supercon.

I was frightened by the Daleks as a child; it left scars I tells ya!

I watched some of the earlier series as a kid, everyone did I think and my Who watching has been sporadic since the first Christopher Eccleston episodes. I’m a casual fan, in that if it’s on the telly I won’t turn it off or over, but I don’t generally go out of my way to watch an episode. I missed the whole of the Capaldi incarnation because of telly issues. It’s not a big deal, I’ll catch up eventually. I’ll probably watch a few episodes of the new series and the Christmas Special to see if I want to keep watching.

That being said, even as a casual Watcher of The Doctor I seem to know more about the programme than most of the twits complaining about having a woman as Time Lord. I picked most of it up from my friends who are more into it and watching a few episode. Boggles my mind that they don’t know the Doctor can regenerate into any form, and that there was always going to be a woman playing the Doctor because the original writer thought there should be, sometime in the 80’s (a couple of other people have already mentioned this).

I’m bored of all the wailing and whining about how terrible it is that a woman has finally got the role, and hope that the writing for her will be as good as she deserves. I’m sick of all the complaints that the BBC is run by a bunch of lefties. Hahaha, the BBC has consistently shown a right wing bias for decades. There was a recent Oxford study showing that whichever party was in power the Tories always had more representation, and the political editor, Laura Keunsberg (I know I’ve spelt her name wrong but I can’t be bothered to look it up) has been reprimanded for her bias and outright lies during the last year. My social media for the last couple of days has been full of people complaining, and other people taking the mick out of the ignorance of the people complaining. Can’t wait for the noise to die down.

P.S.

I am still in moderation. I have emailed David and am waiting for a reply. Hopefully, soon I’ll be able to have conversations with you all properly.

P.P.S

From what I’ve seen of their characters I love River Song, and also the Lizard Lady and her potato-shaped butler.

I was really into Doctor Who at one point, but not much these days. I do keep some related art prints up on my wall, but that’s because they’re Art Nouveau in style and reference Gustav Klimt pieces.

All that said: its rather absurd that – with a two-hearted time-traveler who becomes a different person with every death, uses a gadget that is whatever the plot needs it to be at that point, and has a rogues gallery who have all supposedly killed off many times and come back anyway – The Doctor being female makes them lose their collective shit.

Reminds me of how people try to excuse a lack of prominent women or people of color in high fantasy by saying the completely fictitious (thus, made-up) setting is suppose to represent feudal Europe and blah, blah, fucking blah. I’d get not liking some aspect of the narrative, how someone is characterized, or the dialogue – but it’s incredibly odd to argue that women and non-white individuals being more present are the most unbelievable thing in a world with magic, dragons, orcs, and whatnot.

Lindsey Ellis observed this with The Transformers films recently too…

https://youtu.be/uMfV7S5hfUo

One last thing: Dave Cullen is so goddamn annoying.

What always irks me about this is the “role model” objection.

Girls have absolutely no trouble with male characters for role models (and not necessarily from dearth of female role models, but because children don’t limit their aspirations and pretend games by gender or species or whatever), so why would boys be unable to cope with having opposite gender role models? I am not even going to say that boys are socialized away from it. Maybe that’s true somewhere, but in my own childhood experience they were not. Boys I knew and played with had no problem whatsoever with having female role models in fiction as in real life. So, uh, sorry angry twitter dudes, the problem you allude to is not a problem for the developing male psyche. Boys cope with it just fine.

@banned@4chan:

The thirteenth and final Doctor Who is going to be female? And people are acting like it’s unfair?

Nequam:

I thought they manage to rescind the regeneration limit for the Doctor?

That’s right! How could they not? And it’s not like the show broke its own rules — the Time Lords offered the Master a new regeneration cycle in “The Five Doctors.”

@Swedish Sexual Bread:

I am one of the people who didn’t like what Moffat did to the series. My main area of complaint is that the plot arcs always left a niggling little piece missing, that rarely ever got resolved.

It’s been a lot less massively arc-y like that, though. Lot more character-driven arcs.