The Wrong About Companions Bingo Card

[lizbee]

Look, I just reached a tipping point, okay?

All of these are things I've seen actual people say about actual companions.  Sometimes in what are ostensibly feminist critiques.  Left out due to lack of space: victim, actress is responsible for sexism, a few others. 

"Agency" is included because in the last couple of years I've seen it being chucked around with abandon, regardless of situation, context, or, indeed, whether or not a character has any agency.  This is a problem across fandoms, not just Doctor Who, but the result is that it's become as meaningless to me as labeling a character a Mary Sue or a Strong Female Character.  ("Fridged" is going the same way, especially after complaints that Sophie was fridged in "Closing Time" because she ... went on a holiday ... and came back alive and happy at the end.)

Comments

[nonelvis]

The truly sad thing is I'll bet it didn't take you more than a few minutes to come up with a full card and some extra wrongness to spare.

[lizbee]

It didn't! The hardest bit was when I realised that the bingo card generator I'd used didn't permit apostrophes, so I had to go into Photoshop and fix some words.

[ladymercury_10]

Wow, fandom. I can see why that would be a tipping point.

*headdesks*

[lizbee]

Yeah, there was just one combination of sexism and thoughtless parroting of received wisdom too many.

[wolfy_writing]

This is a problem across fandoms, not just Doctor Who, but the result is that it's become as meaningless to me as labeling a character a Mary Sue or a Strong Female Character. ("Fridged" is going the same way, especially after complaints that Sophie was fridged in "Closing Time" because she ... went on a holiday ... and came back alive and happy at the end.)

It's like an internet law - any terms created for feminist critique of how female characters are written will inevitably be used by fandom to trash every female character. (A big part of this is falsely equating "It's bad if all or a disproportionate amount of female characters were written like this" with "Anytime a female character is written like this, it's bad!")

[lizbee]

Yup! My new favourite is in Elementary fandom: "Irene cannot have been fridged, because the show needs a strong female character!"

Watson. Is right. There.

[wolfy_writing]

Do they not consider her strong, or have they completely forgotten about her?

(I got into this whole thing where someone was starting with the perfectly legit point that Tolkien doesn't have many female characters, and someone countered with the completely irrelevant "But Eowyn is awesome!" and then it turned into a trashing of Eowyn, and the Things You Should Never Write Female Characters Doing List now apparently includes both "Typically feminine stuff like falling for men and getting married" and "Stuff that's not typically feminine like going to war and being good in battle".)

[lizbee]

Looking at fandom, you could be forgiven for concluding that the most feminist possible option is to not write any women ever.

(In fact, I saw a post on Tumblr about how Moffat needs to go write submarine dramas or something, and that way there won't be any women for him to "mess up". I didn't bother pointing out that submarine dramas come with women these days.)

[wolfy_writing]

Looking at fandom and the weird twists they put on social justice stuff, I get the impression that the most enlightened response is to just not write anything ever, lest you either under-represent, over-represent, or misrepresent any particular group.

(Seriously people, it's not hard. Stuff can be problematic when it's replicated massively on an industry-wide scale and perfectly acceptable in one particular work. In fact, anything specific enough to make for an actual character would be problematic if it was presented as the only image of People Like That.)

[recessional]

No, because then you're "giving up" and "whining" about how life is too hard for you, you evil privileged person you.

[ide_cyan]

...and more than just one submarine drama: Last Resort, too, has female characters working aboard a submarine.

[lizbee]

Oh, I missed that one! Well, more like I decided to put off watching it for a couple of seasons, and then it got cancelled. BUT STILL.

(I remember The Sarah Connor Chronicles had Australian Stephanie Jacobs playing a former submarine commander, because Australia is the only country that allows women to serve on nuclear subs. Has that changed?)

[philippos42]

No, no, representation of outsiders is always bad one way or another. Also, no one should have accents or dialects.

Everyone should be white, male, and speak in RP, so minority can be "messed up." Because poor representation, or just being written like a flawed character, is worse than no representation at all.

...

At least, that's the impression of social justice fandom I got some time back. I wonder what's really going on with some people.

rereads: Oh, great, I'm turning into an old guy who repeats himself.

[jesuswasbatman]

No, I think it's the odd phenomenon of allegedly-feminist fan critics arguing that women only matter if they're potential love interests for the protagonist.

[wolfy_writing]

But isn't that the opposite of feminism?

[chocolatepot]

I think the argument is that only love interests count because to the writer and the unenlightened audience, those are the only female characters that matter, so writers need to do their feminist stuff with them to prove they really mean it.

[wolfy_writing]

Ah, so they're making condescending assumptions about the audience as a justification for replicating the sexist "Women's importance is determined by the importance of the men who want them romantically" idea! That's understandable, in kind of a depressing way.

[sabra_n]

Oh, kids. Irene cannot have been fridged because there's no way the show would kill her without ever really using her.

[lizbee]

That, and if her death was what triggered Sherlock's spiral into addiction, how was she sending him letters in rehab?

(Which explains to some extent why Holmes is so determined to not read and eventually destroy them. He's in too much pain to recognise them as the clues that they are.)

[sabra_n]

Oh, I'd forgotten about the letters! I should watch that ep again...

[drakyndra]

I think my favourite is complaining about a specific companion lacks development or agency because "their entire character revolves around the Doctor", and then calling the same companion mean or heartless because they prioritised their own desires over spending the rest of their life nannying the Doctor's manpain.

(I've seen this for Martha, Amy and River.)

[lizbee]

I know, isn't it great! WOMEN: WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE, YOU'RE A BAD PERSON.

:p

[philippos42]

Of course you're bad you're not sexy like David Tennant get out of my way strumpet you're blocking the pretty.

[nam_jai]

I think "fridged" is already there, and that gloriously ludicrous "Closing Time" example confirms my opinion. I've thought so ever since that Female Character Flowchart that (for feminism's sake, of course!) dismissed every female character ever, where any dead female character came to her flowchart end on the "Fridged Stuffing" circle.

[chocolatepot]

THAT FLOWCHART. It came to mind the other day for some reason and I got all irritated. Honestly, if they had just struck off that top row and been like, "this is a map of tropes for female characters" they would have been fine, I have no idea who thought it would be great to say that all of the example characters they used were sexist cardboard stereotypes.

[nam_jai]

When it first came out, I hadn't watched Avatar: The Last Airbender yet, but after I had, at some point I came across the flowchart again, and got to be irritated all afresh: "Azula? You singled out Azula? Bad flowchart! Bad!"

[lizbee]

THAT MADE ME SO MAD! It had her as, like, a sexy femme fatale or something? And I was like, really? The 14 year old girl who once tries to express her sexuality, and it comes out really awkward because she's not all that good at it?

That flowchart was the actual worst.

[nam_jai]

I had to go look at the thing again this morning, so I can report: The flowchart considered her "sexualized" but her classification was not "Femme Fatale"; she was "Girl Hitler."

[lizbee]

Oh, right! It was the "sexualised" bit that pissed me off.

[wolfy_writing]

I am so sick of "Female+dead=fridged". (Or "Female+dead+important male character shows any signs of caring=fridged".) If you're going to write female characters with anything close to the range and depth traditionally given to male characters, some of them are going to die (or suffer equally nasty fates), and if you strip all complexity and nuance from the idea of fridging, you end up with some rule saying that female characters have to be either impervious to harm or not valued by the guys in the story. (Or, if you take the "Closing Time" example at all seriously, a rule which says female characters, once introduced, can never be removed from the narrative in any way, even temporarily.)

[innerbrat]

And sometimes a woman is legitimately fridged and it's STILL a good story! (YMMV on that one, and I'm not giving examples, because way subjective.)

It's a shame, because I want to keep talking about fridging - Like, f'r instance IRENE ADLER, but everyone has ruined it.

(Also: AGENCY. As in "Rapunzel didn't have any agency in Tangled." WHAT MOVIE WERE THEY WATCHING?)

[skywaterblue]

Ugh. Last example is crazy making.

[nam_jai]

It doesn't even need to be a guy mourning her -- I saw complaints following the pilot of the CW's Beauty and Beast that the female protagonist's mother was fridged. Now, I haven't watched that show beyond the pilot, so I can neither defend nor criticize how it's handled this plot point overall, but I saw nothing inherently wrong or unfeminist with having this woman be motivated by the unsolved murder of her mother.

[nostalgia]

ALL OF GALLIFREY IS DEAD AND HALF OF THEM MUST OF BEEN WOMEN THEREFORE FRIDGING ON AN EPIC SCALE OH NOES!

[lizbee]

I've actually seen people argue that because we only see a handful of female Time Lords, it was an all-male civilisation.

Sorry, Romana, Rodan, Flavia, the Inquisitor. No existence for you!

[nostalgia]

THat is a strange argument.

[philippos42]

Because we've seen so many male Time Lords.

[kerravonsen]

complaints that Sophie was fridged in "Closing Time" because she ... went on a holiday ... and came back alive and happy at the end.

Um, what?

[lyssie]

I have this strange urge to use that card as fic prompts and attempt to get Bingo while writing the companions. hrm. (miniskirted screamers, especially)

[(Anonymous)]

I think my Americanism is showing. I had to look up what "chav" means. And I really haven't heard the word "agency" used in that fashion either before. So I was kinda confused. But I find the rest of your bingo card to be sad but true in terms of people complaining.

FairladyZ2005