I just want you all to know, that if and when this site does experience a real exodus and/or get sunsetted for good, even if we don’t keep in touch I’ll remember you so fondly. You’re the online equivalent of the other kid on the beach where we built sandcastles together; the girl at the campsite where we explored the trees. You’re the drunk person who shared kind words in the bathroom at the club, you’re the talented artists at the life drawing class or the poetry night in a city where I don’t live anymore. It makes me sad that maybe in the future our paths won’t cross so easily, but even when we leave this little shared piece of cyberspace, carried away on our briefly intersecting trajectories, just know I still love you
And it is an interesting character choice. Have the new character react fairly underwhelmingly to a cat being vaporised before her eyes. No panic, no terror, no rage, no pain.
Like we got Clara’s Doctor-mirror faults more slowly. She’s still pretty bondable with at the beginning, and then depending on how much you like the Doctor’s traits and quippiness when expressed by someone else it’s easy enough to go off her, even if you’re not sure why.
But from the jump we get that. We don’t see grateful or happy patients or friends or family showing yes rough and perfunctory edges but she’s still loved or appreciated in spite of that. She’s the one who sent them to the guy in the first place (and implied to be before he “disappeared to Margate” so judging her age minus seventeen, he was a teenager when he got Al’d and scooped - not that you have to sympathise, but that’s the story). She’s a capable medic who throws herself in with fellow nurses and patients - positive personality trait for sure. But is also tut-tut and eye-roll to everybody else with seemingly no awareness of this hypocrisy when she later throws it at Al. Decides unilaterally to draw the robots to the front door, even with immobile patients clearly in danger of robots who will clearly shoot anyone, just because she decides she knows best. She hears the Doctor’s explanation that Al is saying “help me, save me”, but she still laughs when he’s blown back to a single fertilised cell and “cleaned up”. Doesn’t ruminate on his death being her fault on multiple accounts. Doesn’t ruminate on the deaths of the others, staying firm that it wasn’t her fault they died and not showing a twinge of regret on that front. She readily brought up Sasha’s death to the Doctor to get her point across, despite seeing how painful it had been to him, implying it was his fault she died.
Any of these things you can argue are justifiable, but it’s not about that. It’s about these being incredibly weird choices to have your character make in their opening episode. Russell is a very capable writer, he knows what he’s doing. I just wonder why. Not why make a companion a dick - many of our favourites are. But why make her a dick with no bonding moments beforehand? Why not ease us in? Not even shorthands from us seeing her with friends, loves, kids, animals, aliens that she’s bonded with. Not so much as “Clara’s a live-in nanny to her dead friend-and-former-crush’s children while they all adjust”. That ‘is a capable nurse’ is having to do some very heavy lifting against a lot of negative character traits right off the bat.
I write, some of you write. Why would you stack against a new character like this? Why wouldn’t you automatically throw a few bones - feels guilty or responsible for something, upset over something, bonds with someone or something. What would your plan have to be to not write those automatic ‘likeable’ sentences. For me it’d have to be a later event where you look back and go ‘oh wait, maybe she was always like this’. After she screws him over. Panics and dips like it’s implied the Doctor did, leaving the Master behind? Or just sells out and runs - any powerful Doctor mirror is also a Master mirror after all. And I don’t think she’s set up as the kind of mirror that corrects the original’s personality flaws.
y'all ever heard of Save The Cat? It’s how screenwriters establish a character as heroic or ‘good.’ I think you may be onto something with this.
Oh helllllo, no I hadn’t. @spoonietimelordy you had cat vibes, you heard of this?
The title, Save the Cat, is a screenwriting term coined by Blake Snyder and refers to a particular plot device. The save the cat method involves having the protagonist do something admirable toward the start of the story in order to establish them as a likeable person and get the audience on their side.
Save the Cat is a screenwriting rule invented by Blake Snyder that says: ‘the hero has to do something when we meet him so that we like him and want him to win’, for example, saving a cat from a tree. Snyder uses the example of Al Pacino in Sea of Love (1989). When we first meet Pacino’s cop hero, he lets off a criminal because he has his son with him, but says ‘catch ya later’. Pacino has saved the cat by showing the audience he is a good guy, and done it in a cool, stylish manner which the audience enjoy.
Ok well if he is playing with this concept, he almost certainly does know of that.
yep. Also, the hero literally saving the cat/dog is seen as an overdone, unoriginal narrative device. It’s something that most people will see and expect from the hero if an animal is in danger. So by making her not react to the cat’s death, RTD is pointing a red arrow to her not being a hero. Which is heavily hinting at her being written as someone who doesn’t want to get involved in the doctor’s adventures. Which is confirmed at the end. But it’s not just that. Because there is loads of other ways to show someone risk-averse. Which btw we know she is not, she is a competent nurse who most likely worked during covid and who is putting herself on the frontline, by calling the robots on herself.
So if it’s not to show that she is risk-averse, what is he telling us?
Let’s go back to her very first line. Her literal introduction to the show. We see her doing her job, taking care of a patient. But what does she says to him?
“So who bit you? was it a dog? was it a man? was it your wife?”
BAM!
her introduction is also pointing at a trope subversion. She is a nurse, but she laughs at her patient, while still doing her job. She is a contradiction. She is cynical. Her not caring about the cat is the same thing but make it 100% unmissable. And if you still missed it, here you go she doesn’t give a shit about Allan, but she keeps the star name certificate framed on her wall.
She is a walking contradiction who is extremely good at seeing the doctor’s hypocrisy, but who doesn’t seem to be aware of her own.
She is an anti-hero, now in which direction is rtd going to go with this I’ll need at least another episode to try to figure it out.
I think y'all need to read The Tale of Custard the Dragon, by Ogden Nash, because Belinda isn’t a common name.
i love this because it’s like. why did paleolithic peoples paint the hunt. perhaps to celebrate and honour brave deeds that kept the community alive. perhaps to bring luck for future hunts. perhaps to instruct those who came after how to slay the beast. perhaps to remind us we can: that the mammoth is not unkillable.
That liminal space where an artist you follow has switched their social media avatar from a trending anime girl to a female OC, the he/him pronouns have quietly vanished from their bio, and their drawings of cartoon ladies with big boobs have taken on a distinctly aspirational cast, but they haven’t publicly said anything, so you’ve gotta keep your damn mouth shut.
it’s fun that Mormonism is based off pseudo-archeology and Scientology is based off pseudo-psychiatry. By that logic the big American New Religious Movement of the 21st century is gonna be based on… pseudo-computer science?
Once upon a time there was a girl whose wicked stepmother forced her to clean the entire house for Pesach all by herself. So while her stepmother and stepsisters left early for the grand seder at the Prince’s palace, the girl spent the afternoon sweeping and dusting and washing and polishing. As she finally burned the last crumbs of chametz in the fireplace, she saw the sun setting and knew she would never make it to the Prince’s seder on time, so she began to prepare her own meager dinner: a little Passover pizza. But miraculously, her fairy godmother appeared and transformed the pizza into a flying carpet to take her to the palace, and the cheese into a beautiful dress for her to wear. And to commemorate this story, to this very day, that cheese is named after that girl: they called her Matzah-rella.
*crying laughter* reading a fairly well written fic set in a world analogous to the 1960’s (oct 1968 according to in-verse cues) and the characters watched a dvd. I turned into a real life version of pointing woman with a glass of water.
Buddy, kid, op, they didn’t even have betamax yet and sure as hell not in the soviet union. I am mentally handing the author some playing cards, dominos and old school board games. Also a no to ‘late night’ television unless you enjoy watching static. Stations would cut off transmissions between 10pm-12am. That remained true up through my childhood.
omG I SEARCHED GOOGLE FOR A SEWING MACHINE DIAGRAM AND THIS CAME UP I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING
We actually keep this picture hanging up in our costume shop. If you have ever operated a sewing machine, this picture will speak to you on a spiritual level.
(Bluesky’s nuclear block function means the original post isn’t visible here, but the context is yet another leftist doing the “Dems bad, don’t us for refusing to support Dems, etc., etc.” song and dance)
You know, the second to last post is true for a lot of these Very Online leftists, I think. They actually do know the parties aren’t the same, deep down, but they can’t possibly risk being seen as Cringe and a bootlicker by saying so, leaving them to hope everyone else acts like an adult and does the work for them
[ID: A Bluesky thread from Dana Simpson @danacorn.bsky.social responding to a post on Bluesky that the person screencapping had blocked:
(1) Sure it can. Let me help you.
Leftists are a tiny and unreliable sliver of the population. Dems would like your votes, but you’ve spent the last decade angrily calling them names and refusing to give them credit when they do the things you say you want.
You’ve declared your votes ungettable.
(2) Dems therefore HAVE to win without leftist votes. They can! It’s just harder.
And we still get to be mad you made it harder. We think you should be a bit more willing to take yes for an answer, to be part of a coalition even if that means compromise, and a bit more concerned with stopping fascism.
(3) Also, democrats don’t “eat shot constantly”. They win about half the time.
The fact that they do this in elections where you loudly announced you were going to make them lose if your ever-shifting demands weren’t met makes you seem pathetic.
(4) However, sometimes you say that and they DO lose, and yes, it’s reasonable to think you contributed to that by yelling loudly for the entire campaign that they suck and should lose.
You don’t get to then go “uwu I’m a smol bean with no power”.
(5) “I am going to do everything in my power to make the Democrats lose.”
Dems: lose
“Hey, why are you mad at ME?”
(6) Why aren’t you happy that you openly got what you said you wanted? If a Democrat says you’re partly responsible, why isn’t your reaction “damn straight, that was my goal”?
(7) Kinda makes it seem like you DO want Democrats to win, you just don’t want to be SEEN wanting them to win. You want to make it hard for them to win, but for them to then win anyway.
