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Honestly kind of hosed up the Doctor leaves companions hanging by "dying" in front of them. There's absolutely no reason that a non-Dead version of that Doctor can't pop in and just carry on adventures until companion is ready to move on. I guess 11 sorta did it? Tangent: my wish for a companion is someone who is an artist, unable to make anything of self-described value in the modern earth of AI and advertising and commercialism but ends up making some meaningful prices to specific weirdoes across space and time and of course these drawings help blow up the Blorgons in the end somehow.
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Nov 19, 2023 17:40
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https://twitter.com/FlightRed50/status/1726062842611175670
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Nov 19, 2023 17:46
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I want canon to collapse in on itself so hard that each episode is basically just a shitpost where anything and everything could happen. Just a veritable mess of ever-shifting timelines. The Doctor regenerates into Colin Baker, only to be Gatwa again next episode. Skaro is Earth’s second moon that has always been there. gently caress, have a companion change mid-scene, with zero acknowledgement. Doctor Who will truly be free when nothing matters.
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Nov 19, 2023 17:56
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HD DAD posted:gently caress, have a companion change mid-scene, with zero acknowledgement. There's a Time War boxset that does this, I think
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Nov 19, 2023 18:00
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One thing I feel is being lost here in the disability discussion is that this is a show for children. We love it, and we should, but "that's not MY Davros" from a grown-rear end adult matters a hell of a lot less than some kid in a wheelchair or with, say, abundant facial scars, sees their circumstances as a signifier of villainy yet again.
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Nov 19, 2023 18:04
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LividLiquid posted:One thing I feel is being lost here in the disability discussion is that this is a show for children. Absolutely. Like I said earlier, DW's true canon is its commitment to Do Better. When it loses that it loses itself
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Nov 19, 2023 18:10
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"My fellow Kaleds, I am saddened to report that, in the course of his latest experiments, a horrible tragedy has befallen our greatest scientist" [draws back curtain, revealing the Abzorbaloff]
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Nov 19, 2023 18:14
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egon_beeblebrox posted:I just don't see how 'canon' even works in Dr. Who. They're constantly changing history, everything's canon, even the contradictory poo poo. Yeah canon goes out the window as soon as you start looking at Earth's future timeline and how many different ways it "ended"
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Nov 19, 2023 18:15
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Lol I love future Earth mentions "oh yeah such and such year the humanity all got bored and left in big rear end peanut butter jar city ships, oh yeah this is a retro earth buncha refugees came back to model life after the beanie babies era it's a religion to them, oh all the humans are psychos in murderballs living in a cold star at the end of the universe oh yeah yeah humans always stuck it out Earth to makensure the lizard people dont get another go at it" For me, I'm not gonna have much issue with canon changes since most of the universe was actually destroyed, but in a way that absolutely nobody in the universe seems to give the slightest poo poo about. Therefore, the universe, see itself missing most of it's bit simply filled them with new universal STEAM cells which coalesce and fill the void with doctor who-y shaped realities that have now had always been there. Essentially the old canon is all still there, in the pre-destroyed universe. But that poo poo got blown up by the sugar hill gang, it's over.
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Nov 19, 2023 18:31
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The old cannon is in the dot above the eye in the Jeremy Bearimy shape of time.
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Nov 19, 2023 18:32
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Canon in fiction is a dumb concept anyway. It only exists for people to get bent out of shape about, and for concepts of commercial ownership of settings.
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Nov 19, 2023 18:34
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HD DAD posted:Skaro is Earth’s second moon that has always been there. Skaro being a dragon's egg is a step too far. Davros1 posted:There's a Time War boxset that does this, I think Yes, the first 8 Time War box set, and it's great. When things started getting scrambled I was going, "Wait, wasn't it something different?" It worked really well. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Nov 19, 2023 |
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Nov 19, 2023 18:35
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CommonShore posted:Canon in fiction is a dumb concept anyway. It only exists for people to get bent out of shape about, and for concepts of commercial ownership of settings.
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Nov 19, 2023 18:39
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LividLiquid posted:Every story needs to have a baseline of consistency or nothing matters. It can break its own rules, but it can't just not set them up. That's not true. There are countless storytelling modes where rigid conceptions of plot are not particularly important.
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Nov 19, 2023 19:05
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All art needs boundaries. If there's nothing there to say no, you can make dumb mistakes that you don't see.
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Nov 19, 2023 20:54
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DoctorWhat posted:That's not true. There are countless storytelling modes where rigid conceptions of plot are not particularly important. If something huge happens in the first act, you don't just pretend it didn't by the third because whatever, who cares, that was an hour ago. We've all moved on. You write your way out of it. Sometimes wriggling out of this is as easy as "they are Klingons. And it is a long story." I'm not asking for everybody to stop dead in their tracks to explain why some minor thing from 40 years ago isn't matching up exactly right, but if it's a big enough part of the story, you can't just pretend it isn't. This stuff absolutely matters. It just shouldn't be so strictly adhered to that it becomes a problem in the other direction. You can ignore the Timeless Children, but you can't ignore everything The Doctor has ever done so hard that you tell the viewer that nothing they're seeing now will ever matter. There needs to be some sense that the things we see happen mean something to these people or why the hell would I ever bother getting invested?
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Nov 19, 2023 21:07
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CommonShore posted:Canon in fiction is a dumb concept anyway. It only exists for people to get bent out of shape about, and for concepts of commercial ownership of settings. Not at all. I get the kvetching over it can be exhausting, particularly if you just don't care, and it's fictional and doesn't have to be coherent or consistent. But it's a tool in the fictional toolbox and can be used to good or bad effects like any other. Relatively few properties even have the backlogs to play that much with canon one way or the other, and sometimes it's used to add richness to a universe, even retroactively add something to an old episode on a rewatch, and others it's just whatever, and sometimes they gently caress it up and you feel better disregarding the canon. To me it's mostly a case of if I personally care or get something from a canon, if not, just scroll past it when it comes up because it doesn't apply to me in a way that also means I don't really have anything to say on the matter. Usually I find the creators themselves handle canon with mixed enough hands and approaches that being neither all-in or tuned-out detract much and it's more for idle internet conversations.
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Nov 19, 2023 21:21
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I just want to say that Julian Bleach owns bones and whether in classic form or his new more upright portrayal he is an absolute delight as Davros. The man could read an instruction manual for a washing machine and it would be both enthralling and slightly terrifying.
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Nov 19, 2023 21:26
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Except "canon" isn't about any given story or plot. It's this expectation of a certain kind of rigid continuity and consistency between stories or plots, often by entirely separate authorial sources. And it exists with the assumption of dividing the storytelling between authentic and inauthentic categories. A story needs to be internally consistent and play on its own rules, yes, and a story that's playing with recurring characters should stick to basic premises about those characters for the sake of making them recognizable. That is not the same thing as "set of texts #1 is official and set #2 is unofficial."
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Nov 19, 2023 22:25
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If a companion dies in one episode and is walking around like nothing happened in the next, because canon "doesn't matter," why would I give a poo poo about anything? Is that clearer?
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Nov 19, 2023 22:31
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LividLiquid posted:If a companion dies in one episode and is walking around like nothing happened in the next, because canon "doesn't matter," why would I give a poo poo about anything? That's not "canon" as people use it and argue about it - that's continuity within the arc of a season. A better analogy would be if there were a separate youtube short where said companion dies. The argument becomes about whether that short "counts" and that's the argument gets tedious. It should be enough to say that "I don't care about that short," but the discussion of canon about whether that short is "official" is where poo poo gets stupid.
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Nov 19, 2023 22:39
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That example was deliberately paired down to the most simplistic version of what canon is to help better explain why I think it matters, and I'm getting the sense that I'm not gonna' be understood here, but I'll try one more time. You can bend it all you want, but you can't break it too often or nothing ever matters. You might as well have an anthology show at that point. The canon is there for a reason and is a part of why we all love the show. It's a tool. One that when used properly makes viewers far more invested in a show. If everything for the last 60 years has mattered, it follows that everything for the next 60 will too, so I'd better pay attention and can allow myself to get invested. And once you have that, the little stuff — or even the occasional huge, then-igored misstep like half human on my mother's side — don't matter.
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Nov 19, 2023 23:08
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Canon isn't story, it's background. It's past history. It's what we tabletop wargamers call "fluff". It's stuff that happened prior to the events of whatever current story that you're watching/reading/etc. It can inform the current story, but it most emphatically is not the story itself. Like history (or background, or "fluff"), it's malleable and can be reshaped to suit the whims of whoever's telling the story. A lot of fanboys get their noses out of joint when what they perceive to be rock-solid story foundations are discarded or reshaped by whoever's working on the current version of whatever, because they have made the mistake of assuming that history (or "fluff") can't be retold or discarded by whoever's in charge. Doctor Who having "canon" is laughable. The Time Lords went from near-godlike beings that even the Doctor feared, to stodgy old bureaucrats, to fearsome warriors fighting the Daleks. The Master has changed bodies and personas so many times, sometimes without even being able to regenerate. The universe has been destroyed and rewritten like two or three times since the revival started. Hell, there's even been different causes for what caused the Big Bang to happen, and still other causes for what started up life on Earth itself. To fuss about "canon" at this point is futile. It's better to just ignore the parts you don't like and move on, than it is to argue about what is or isn't canonical in DW.
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Nov 19, 2023 23:24
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You're saying all that as if it weren't exactly the sort of fun thing to make a canon discussion more interesting.
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Nov 19, 2023 23:47
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Canon in Who works best to give writers a sense of world buliding and history, and can make for fun call backs when used well. It makes the show's world feel bigger. About the Davros thing: it's been firmly shown that he was evil, even by Kaled standards BEFORE the bombing. He's the missing link between the Kaleds and the Daleks - what their hatred and fascism caused, just because they couldn't share the planet. If they want to stop referring to it as a 'chair' fair enough, but Davros continously experimenting on and upgrading himself to unnaturally stay alive out of spite added some body horror. This was a guy who decided to mutant his own species into angry blobs. Of course, more positive representation of disabled characters is a plus. Representation shouldn't have to draw attention to itself, it should just be there and treated as "some people are like that in society, no issue with that". Although Doctor Who has always been political, as sci fi should be - I think some of reactionaries would have a meltdown if they listened to something like The Fear Monger! On another note, according to IMDB, William Russell is 99 today(!). His cameo in the Power of the Doctor was rather lovely, and an example of how canon should be used on the show.
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Nov 20, 2023 00:02
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Khanstant posted:You're saying all that as if it weren't exactly the sort of fun thing to make a canon discussion more interesting. These kinds of discussions are meaningful not so much as an objective arbiter of what is "truth" as much as they are discussions of what is meaningful to each viewer. Stories, once internalized, exist thenceforth in the mind*. "Canon" is a purely mental abstraction, and as such inherently personal. The debates are the best part, not the consensus decisions. * Though one can of course also argue about how successful a production was at expressing its intent, and that's fun too.
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Nov 20, 2023 00:30
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Sydney Bottocks posted:This thought did occur to me, but I didn't feel I could articulate it properly without sounding like an idiot (or moreso than usual, anyways If that's how Davros has evolved to be perceived that's a fair point. But as was said earlier ITT, Davros didn't become disfigured as a result of his evil or hubris. He was hurt in a war. To his own people, he was a hero trying to save them, despite his scars (much like Palpatine in Star Wars, who would be another candidate for revision in that case). He also is portrayed as a genius who overcame his injuries through sheer intellect (designing his life support unit) and continued to participate in his career in science and as a high government official afterwards. He would be a positive portrayal of a disabled person if he wasn't a meglomaniac who decided to betray his own people, get them killed, and then kill his enemies so his creations could become the supreme lifeform--but that had nothing to do with his disability. I'm not disabled, so I don't have the perspective Open Source Idiom has, but I agree with them. Saying a disabled person can't be a villain would be like saying a racial minority or woman can't be villains because it makes black/brown people or women look bad--which would rob us of two of the best Masters, Michelle Gomez and Sacha Dhawan, as just one example. RTD's motives here remind me of Moffat's well meaning but misguided idea of showing medieval British villages as full of black and brown people "because that's what Britain looks like today and modern British people should feel represented". It sounds good, until you imagine him saying "Modern Beijing is very cosmopolitan and full of people from all over the world, so let's do a episode about 14th Century China where a bunch of white people are walking around." Or perhaps more problematically, "whitewashing history" in the sense that it says "many modern white British people are tolerant and live in harmony with minorities, and they were that way 800 years ago too." So British people just kinda became racist for a bit when they were colonizing India, Africa, and the Americas? That is covering up some elements of history that need to be known. Then you have the opposite where again, meaning well, in Chibnall's Rosa, white racism is so ingrained humanity still hasn't overcome in in thousands of years, which is bleak as gently caress, and changing one protest would derail all progress since the 60s (which ignores the contributions hundreds of others had to the Civil Rights movement). To me, one of the most effective progressive moments in DW was Ace coming across the "No Coloureds" sign in that supposedly very nice lady's window in Remembrance of the Daleks. It was jarring to Ace, and to us. It was presented as matter of fact and reminded us of how recent that sort of thing was. And they didn't teach the lady a lesson, get her in trouble, or dramatically cold cock her. It just was, and made you think. I do appreciate seeing Bleach as Davros out of the chair. I just wish it was explicitly "pre-accident" because that would make it clear his fascism and meglomania predated his injuries. I also don't have a problem with it in a nit-picking canon sense either, because it could easily be explained by Time War changes. I'm sure there are tons of timelines where Davros was uninjured, the Thals won and became the blond haired/blue eyed scourges of the universe, etc. None of that is the case though--RTD is basically saying this is how Davros always looked, like TMP Klingons.
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Nov 20, 2023 00:33
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Look at it this way, I think "You cannot recognize fascism by appearances, it will sometimes come to you as a charismatic, completely normal looking guy" is as timely a message as any.
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Nov 20, 2023 00:36
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Watching the original Genesis of the Daleks on Britbox last night, but when it got to the middle of Tom's "Do I have the right?" speech, Tennant's TARDIS smashed into the Dalek breeding chamber and obliterated it
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Nov 20, 2023 00:54
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Astroman posted:If that's how Davros has evolved to be perceived that's a fair point. But as was said earlier ITT, Davros didn't become disfigured as a result of his evil or hubris. He was hurt in a war. To his own people, he was a hero trying to save them, despite his scars (much like Palpatine in Star Wars, who would be another candidate for revision in that case). He also is portrayed as a genius who overcame his injuries through sheer intellect (designing his life support unit) and continued to participate in his career in science and as a high government official afterwards. He would be a positive portrayal of a disabled person if he wasn't a meglomaniac who decided to betray his own people, get them killed, and then kill his enemies so his creations could become the supreme lifeform--but that had nothing to do with his disability. I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but unfortunately there's nothing any of us can do about RTD's decision. Short of not watching the upcoming season of the show he's helming, anyways (which I was already planning on, but that's more to do with not liking modern DW in general, and especially not liking RTD's "it should be franchised as heavily as Star Wars or Marvel" approach to it). As the cliche goes, it is what it is.
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Nov 20, 2023 00:57
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:Look at it this way, I think "You cannot recognize fascism by appearances, it will sometimes come to you as a charismatic, completely normal looking guy" is as timely a message as any. True, but then again, they cast Julian Bleach  Sydney Bottocks posted:I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but unfortunately there's nothing any of us can do about RTD's decision. Short of not watching the upcoming season of the show he's helming, anyways (which I was already planning on, but that's more to do with not liking modern DW in general, and especially not liking RTD's "it should be franchised as heavily as Star Wars or Marvel" approach to it). As the cliche goes, it is what it is. Agree. I checked out after Timeless Child and I'm giving this a shot. Davros being redesigned won't be a dealbreaker. I got over viewscreens on Enterprise, I can live with this. I'm more wanting to see the tone in general. If it has to go Marvel, at least it's a trusted hand at the helm so I'm reserving judgement.
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Nov 20, 2023 01:26
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:Look at it this way, I think "You cannot recognize fascism by appearances
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Nov 20, 2023 01:38
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Astroman posted:If that's how Davros has evolved to be perceived that's a fair point. But as was said earlier ITT, Davros didn't become disfigured as a result of his evil or hubris. He was hurt in a war. To his own people, he was a hero trying to save them, despite his scars (much like Palpatine in Star Wars, who would be another candidate for revision in that case). He also is portrayed as a genius who overcame his injuries through sheer intellect (designing his life support unit) and continued to participate in his career in science and as a high government official afterwards. He would be a positive portrayal of a disabled person if he wasn't a meglomaniac who decided to betray his own people, get them killed, and then kill his enemies so his creations could become the supreme lifeform--but that had nothing to do with his disability. OK, let's first look at what RTD actually said: RTD posted:...there’s a problem with the Davros of old in that he’s a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there’s a very long tradition of this. I’m not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes and when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well. So we made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without the wheelchair, or his support unit, which functions as a wheelchair. I say, this is how we see Davros now, this is what he looks like. This is 2023. This is our lens. This is our eye. Things used to be black and white, they’re not in black and white anymore, and Davros used to look like that and he looks like this now, and that we are absolutely standing by. So it's pretty strange to be arguing that RTD's saying "this is how Davros always looked" when he explicitly says "Davros used to look like that." Nobody is going back and editing out Davros from earlier stories, or even putting up a "this was wrong then and it is wrong now" title-card on the streaming versions. And the two salient points here: RTD says (accurately) "there's a very long tradition of this." It would be true to say, for example, that a Jewish actor should be allowed to portray a Jewish villain, but you can't say that while ignoring the number of explicitly antisemitic "Jewish" villains in plays and stories across centuries, or the moment of history we're living in right now. Not everyone is going to agree, but it's a plausible argument to say "this is 2023" and refuse to write or portray a stereotypical Jewish villain on stage or screen. Given that this show, in particular, has a long history of portraying disability and disfigurement as a sign of "evil," it's a reasonable argument even if it isn't one you personally accept. The second point: it is RTD's show. He and "a lot of ... the production team had problems" with this kind of depiction. So they've made a decision to change it. If you become Who showrunner one day, you can bring the old Davros back. I could see an argument here if Bleach were himself disabled and this change required a recasting with a performer who isn't in a wheelchair, but in fact, zero of the performers to play Davros have needed to use wheelchairs (or been blind, or been disfigured), so the big opportunity of "I am a performer in a wheelchair and I can play this meaty villain part" simply isn't a thing at all. Maybe we'll get an explanation; maybe not. Davros and the daleks have the capacity to time-travel; maybe someone else made the change and Davros will have no idea he ever looked any different. One last point: saying the Master must be played by a white man is clearly racist and sexist. Saying Davros must be played by a fully-abled performer pretending to be disfigured and in a wheelchair isn't clearly prejudiced against those with disfiguring injuries or who must use wheelchairs. And it's especially reasonable when pointing to the general portrayal of people in wheelchairs or disfigured people as heroes or villains: they're substantially overrepresented on the "evil" side of things. You can't equate these two instances.
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Nov 20, 2023 01:54
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It should also be noted that RTD did mention that he and the production team decided to do this for the Children in Need special, because they knew that children with disabilities or with scars or other disfiguring elements would potentially be watching, and they didn't want them to be feeling like "disabilities/disfigurement= being an evil person" when they're watching what is supposed to be a light-hearted DW special in aid of charity. Yes, he definitely could have handled it differently, but I can at least understand where he was coming from.
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Nov 20, 2023 02:02
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In fairness, I've read at least 3 or 4 attempts at constructing a chronological history of the Daleks, using only what we're shown or told in the show, and I don't think any one of them agree on much of anything. Chucking another bit of historical nonsense into a history that's basically mythic and fuzzy anyway isn't going to alter much.
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Nov 20, 2023 02:15
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Plus the events of both Genesis and the Time War make it impossible to hold straight.
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Nov 20, 2023 02:53
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I honestly feel the Cybermen are worse than Davros when it comes to representation of disability - their whole concept is 'Prosthetics make you less human!'
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Nov 20, 2023 04:19
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A thing that I only learned recently is that the original impetus for the Cybermen wasn't about ordinary medical heart transplants. It was about a paper the author read about the prospect of using organ replacements to facilitate space travel. Observe how many cyberpunk stories or, say, Repo! a Genetic Opera look at Oregon replacement and transplants under capitalism or under ecological collapse. Life-saving medical techniques are a boon for humanity, but the conditions of access can reproduce the deep-seated evils that define our society. Persons who no longer can serve as productive members of a workforce or an army unaltered are forcibly altered by state power to serve those interests. Persons who have bodies that are inconvenient to the state or regime have those bodies altered - look at institutional sterilization of disabled people, the impoverished, and racial minorities. I think World Enough and Time is interesting on this front. Partially because it's a continuation of Moffat's interest in "monstering" companions and sympathetic characters, but also because it treats Bill's cyber-conversion as a very specific and individual violation - but not one that can actually strip her of humanity, and later, she ascends past human biology entirely without becoming a "monster".
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Nov 20, 2023 04:53
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The Time War rewrote and changed so many things. What's that you say, we've seen Davros since the Time War ended so it's effects can't have changed him now? What limited four dimensional thinking. When canon is changed purely because someone doesn't care to find out what came before, that sucks. It's why parts of early Discovery and the JJ reboots felt off, not because things were changed, but that it felt like they were changed because some involved didn't really want to be creating stories in that universe. RTD loves Who and knows the history inside and out. If something changes under his watch you know it's because he's made a deliberate choice to change because he thinks it will make for a better episode of Doctor Who, and I'm here to trust him. It might not always work, but it's clearly done with love of the original material and that's what matters.
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Nov 20, 2023 05:48
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Astroman posted:RTD's motives here remind me of Moffat's well meaning but misguided idea of showing medieval British villages as full of black and brown people "because that's what Britain looks like today and modern British people should feel represented". It sounds good, until you imagine him saying "Modern Beijing is very cosmopolitan and full of people from all over the world, so let's do a episode about 14th Century China where a bunch of white people are walking around." Or perhaps more problematically, "whitewashing history" in the sense that it says "many modern white British people are tolerant and live in harmony with minorities, and they were that way 800 years ago too." So British people just kinda became racist for a bit when they were colonizing India, Africa, and the Americas? That is covering up some elements of history that need to be known. Yeah, speaking of this and that clip I think there's something a bit misguided about casting an Asian man in the role of a Kaled high command leader (or whatever role he has, he's obviously fairly high up) since he's hailing from a society that's very much an allegory for Nazism. More POC Space Nazis is very "they say the next one will be sent by a woman". But I guess the composition of (some) real world fascist organisations have changed with the times and their metaphorical versions might change as well. But it still strikes me as a little wrong. LividLiquid posted:One thing I feel is being lost here in the disability discussion is that this is a show for children. I just don't understand why you'd use Davros at all if this scene was largely for kids with a naive understanding of the show and its history. You'd not actually communicating anything meaningful to them because they don't know anything about past depictions of the character. This change is only meaningful if you have an understanding of the show's history (and only clear given the context of the Radio Times interview, something a naive viewer also wouldn't be aware of). So it's a change that's very much aimed at people familiar with the show. Besides which, an absence of the negative representation isn't, in and of itself, the presence of positive representation. If the intent of the piece was to fight marginalisation then it absolutely failed, because there are no disabled people in it.
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Nov 20, 2023 09:13
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