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Doctor Who isn't a documentary about a progressive spaceman. It's a TV show that has always been the product of its time. Even if the Doctor himself didn't have obviously embarrassingly sexist lines, he was written by sexists and appeared in plenty of sexist stories. If they're dialing up the sexism of the character to comment on the era and how times have changed: good. Maybe Moffat's not the man for the job (or any job requiring nuance), but it's better to acknowledge and confront the demons in your past than wallowing in wistful hagiography. This isn't a condemnation of what the Doctor can be. Obviously he'll be on both sides of the issue here, and soon will really be on the other side of the issue. The episode still might suck and be bad in any number of ways, but making the first doctor an out of touch character from the 60s is, by itself, a good move, and more fundamentally honest than making his character conspicuously okay with modern sensibilities or evading the issue altogether.
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Dec 19, 2017 08:11
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The third, and most important, reason is that it's straight out of the sexism-apologist playbook. The "the only sexism is the overt "Women should only be in the kitchen" sexism" playbook. The "sexism no longer exists" playbook. By equating historical sexism with only the big stuff it enables lower key, more subtle, sexists to get away with their poo poo. I will say it could be a stepping point to examine current Doctor/modern day failings. "I was like this and thought it was okay, what am I like now?" is a question that a story like this could ask. I want to reiterate that I would not be surprised at all if Moffat fucks it up, I just don't think the concept of examining this kind of stuff this way is a bad one.
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Dec 19, 2017 20:29
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MrL_JaKiri posted:It should be examined, but there's also a benefit to having some things be pure escapism. Sexism and racism affects a lot of people every day, and in ways that's difficult to ignore; not everything has to remind them that it exists. I don't really know what pure escapism would look like. Every conflict is going to be a commentary on a real conflict in some capacity, or else it's literally meaningless. An episode without "conflict" in the traditional sense would be really neat, but that's not really how Doctor Who has ever operated. This is a semantic issue though because I do understand that some things can be too raw and unpleasant for the affected people, and it's cool to let them enjoy stuff without making daily struggle a plot point. I'm not sure that's a good reason to make looking at sexism in Doctor Who stories taboo, but I'm sympathetic to that position. It's probably a compelling reason to make Moffat talking about sexism taboo, though. Eiba fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 21:05
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Timby posted:This could get offensive real fast if it falls into a "Doctor inspired Rosa" / white savior trope, or if aliens / monsters were somehow involved. It's easy to see a ton of ways this could be really hosed up and bad, but I don't think it's worth getting preemptively upset. Context matters a whole lot here and we don't have that. I mean, I'm totally prepared to call it garbage after it proves to be garbage, but I'm holding of judgement for now. I will say I admire the show for trying to tackle racism head on, even if I don't quite have total faith it'll be tackled well, and I recognize it could quite possibly be incredibly counterproductive and bad.
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Jan 21, 2018 06:30
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I would add, "celestial" can absolutely still be a slur. If someone was calling Chinese people "celestials" in 2022, it might be a weirdly archaic slur, but it would be unambiguously still be a hateful thing to say, even if it would mostly be met by confusion. But yeah, calling something that isn't a Chinese person celestial isn't going to be an issue these days, and if Doctor Who hadn't used it in a racist way it probably would have been fine. Just calling the character The Toymaker and moving on seems like it should be fine for Doctor Who.
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Jun 14, 2022 22:14
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