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Okay, this is an idea that originally came up as a throw-away remark in the comments to someone, and just sort of... built in my head, until I realised it sort of explained a huge amount about how I feel about the characters in Doctor Who, especially Rose.
And what it all comes down to is first impressions.
Rose was designed from the very start to be a viewpoint character - that's pretty obvious from Rose, when the story is almost all told from her POV, and for the next few episodes, which are all about her experiences as she discovers time and space. And she's the touchstone for most emotional moments throughout S1, and getting us through the regeneration.
Rose is our eyes for the show. We see what she sees, empathise with her emotions, feel her joys and hurts.
At least, we are supposed to.
As I said, the first few episodes are designed to set up Rose as a POV character, and as far as I can tell, and at that, at least, they were a great success. The response to having Rose as viewpoint is more varied - you get the rabid "I AM Rose" over-associating fangirls, who vow to never watch after Rose leaves, and write Sue!Rose shipperfics; you have the initial Rose fans, who have been struggling as of late with her because they have been seeing things through her eyes for so long, and are getting frustrated with her character developments (as in the character feels inconstant with the things that have been experienced/seen); and you have the people who would se things through her eyes, but whatever reasons can't, and thus tend to dislike her for being a jarring presence.
Now, this doesn't describe everyone, but it does account for an awful lot of people. And the groups, despite diverse opinions between and within themselves, have one constant - Rose being the viewpoint character (supposedly, at least), and thus central to viewing.
And here's where I differ from the majority, because I don't have Rose as a viepoint character, or even as a central character. Which sounds bizarre, what with equal status to the Doctor and all that, but it's true. And I think a lot of it comes from when I started watching the show.
See, unlike most people, I didn't start with episode 1.01, "Rose". The first ever episode I saw of New Who was, of all things, World War Three. Yes, that one with the Slitheen.
No, it isn't the best episode - or for that matter particularly high on the list of best episodes. No, it's not the episode that go tme hooked, that'd be the next week, with Dalek. But what it was - not alone, but in conjunction with the upcoming episodes, I will admit - was the very first episode of New Who that I saw, and thus an awful lot of my opinions about the characters was based on it.
In WW3 we see Mickey saving the day. All with huge amounts of assisstance from others, of course, but he is brave and heroic, he saves Jackie's life, he is responsible for the Slitheen's destruction, he turns down the Doctor's offer because he knows himself that well. In WW3 we see the Ninth Doctor as knowledgable, clever, alien, and also horribly manipulative, indecisive, and completely hung up on some blonde girl for absolutely no apparent reason.
And then, of course, we have Rose. Who in WW3 does what, exactly? Nothing. Well, nothing of huge value. She runs and hides and talks and answers questions, and has the Doctor obsessing over her and has people worried about her. But plot wise, she does nothing. She's just there. The only way she really seems to matter in this episode is how other people are effected by her.
I'll admit this is not the strongest episode for Rose's character. But I'll also admit that it's the first one I saw, and as the saying goes, first impressions count. And so my first impression of these characters were of Mickey as a reluctant and not too brave hero, Nine as a smart alien who obsessed over a human girl to the point of unhealthiness, Jackie as the amusing but caring mother, and Rose as just being there.
And so what was my first impression of Rose? Not as POV character like people had with the earlier episodes. I never had that chance to get into her head, and find out if I loved it or hated it or whatever. For other people who were looking on from Rose's viepoint, perhaps this episode showed her in a better light, but what I saw then? Was not a show-leading character. What I saw was a MacGuffin.
"A MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story, but has little other relevance to the story itself." Yes, Wikipedia is hardly the most reputable source. But it's description of a MacGuffin is exactly what Rose was to me in that first episode. Her importance to the story had nothing to do with who she was, but was entirely due to how she effected other characters. And the next few episodes only served to back this up.
I mean, Dalek? Rose gets Adam's attention, gives the Dalek the source of it's power, had Nine emo over her, and causes him to not fire and the Dalek to kill itself, before getting Adam invited on board. The Long Game? Um... is called the best, and is who Adam is compared to?
They didn't do a lot to change the Rose = MacGuffin in my head, and by the time Father's Day came along, where she did have an actual character part, it was too little, to late for me. Perhaps that's why that episode leaves me cold - I had no emotional investment in the Rose. She was in my head a MacGuffin, and by Hitchcock's definition of MacGuffin, even though the plot revolves around them, "The audience don't care" about the specifics of the object itself.
Quite simply, because I haven't that viewpoint character tie to Rose, because she started out for me as just a MacGuffin, I don't care about her.
I care about what happens around her, about how she effects the plot and all that, about how characters are effected by her actions, but her herself? I don't care. Which explains a lot of things about my views on her that I have had difficulty explaining to others.
For all that she has equal status in the credits, Rose has never been to me anywhere near as important as the Doctor. She was designed as viewpoint character, specifically on an emotional level, but I never got that, I never had that investment in her. The viewpoint, the emotional heart for me has been the Doctor. (Which is probably why I am less fond of Nine - his emotional states was always a sort of background emo, and so wasn't quite as Ten and his sheer exuberance and variety of emotion).
And because I have no emotional investment in Rose, I can treat her in ways that baffle some of my friends. I can ignore her when she is annoying, which has bewildered certain people who can't see how I can ignore a central character (but of course, to me she isn't central in herself but only as a device to move the plot forward). I had no problems at all with the shifting away from Rose, and towards the Doctor's POV during S2, inevitable because of Rose's departure, but has caused some problems for people invested in Rose's POV. Whereas for some of them this is new territory, and thus are less fond of the shows new angle, this is heading to what I always had going on.
And I am not sorry that she is leaving, because firstly I saw it coming way off, and secondly because I have never cared enough about her to be sorry she is going.
Of course, just as there are people like me who have no emotional investment in Rose, there are those who are over-invested in her. Those who have difficulty with the shifts in POV away from Rose, and towards the Doctor. Those who can't see how the show can possibly be good without Rose, and will quit watching then. Those certain people who believe they are Rose in that little subconcious self, and feel she is OOC if she does something they wouldn't do (or say they wouldn't do). Just as my lack of investment in Rose-as-character, and having the Doctor as POV character has meant I prefer S2 for it's Doctor focus, I can start to see why those who have invested in Rose perhaps a little too have such antipathy towards parts of it.
It can't be easy having the entire foundations on the show as you know it shift on you. It's Rose's emotions that they are keyed into, and for an episode such as Girl in the Fireplace, in which Rose's emotions are of no importance, are disregarded it must feel like a personal betrayal, almost. Or at the very least, it leaves them as cold as Father's Day left me.
The thing about POV characters is that we are supposed to empathise with them, to feel for them, so we don't just see through their eyes but feel what they feel. And to do this, a certain amount of emotional investment is required - without that, the character looses all their significance. And the introduction of the character is supposed to trigger that investment. And for Rose, I never had that.
Instead of Rose as emotional heart, I had Rose as Maguffin. Perhaps it's my fault for not watching the episodes in order, for having the wrong start. But it's interesting how different my perspective on a lot of things seems to be because of this first impression and it's results.
And I am wondering, what other people's first impressions of the characters were, who they have invested in, and how they will be effected by Rose's departure. And how the changes in show have affected them.
Wow. That's a lot of words, in which I say... not very much, really. However, I would like to hear from people on how different or similar their experiences have been compared to mine.
ETA: Read the comments. I've got some very diverse and interesting perspectives on Rose and just companions in general.
And what it all comes down to is first impressions.
Rose was designed from the very start to be a viewpoint character - that's pretty obvious from Rose, when the story is almost all told from her POV, and for the next few episodes, which are all about her experiences as she discovers time and space. And she's the touchstone for most emotional moments throughout S1, and getting us through the regeneration.
Rose is our eyes for the show. We see what she sees, empathise with her emotions, feel her joys and hurts.
At least, we are supposed to.
As I said, the first few episodes are designed to set up Rose as a POV character, and as far as I can tell, and at that, at least, they were a great success. The response to having Rose as viewpoint is more varied - you get the rabid "I AM Rose" over-associating fangirls, who vow to never watch after Rose leaves, and write Sue!Rose shipperfics; you have the initial Rose fans, who have been struggling as of late with her because they have been seeing things through her eyes for so long, and are getting frustrated with her character developments (as in the character feels inconstant with the things that have been experienced/seen); and you have the people who would se things through her eyes, but whatever reasons can't, and thus tend to dislike her for being a jarring presence.
Now, this doesn't describe everyone, but it does account for an awful lot of people. And the groups, despite diverse opinions between and within themselves, have one constant - Rose being the viewpoint character (supposedly, at least), and thus central to viewing.
And here's where I differ from the majority, because I don't have Rose as a viepoint character, or even as a central character. Which sounds bizarre, what with equal status to the Doctor and all that, but it's true. And I think a lot of it comes from when I started watching the show.
See, unlike most people, I didn't start with episode 1.01, "Rose". The first ever episode I saw of New Who was, of all things, World War Three. Yes, that one with the Slitheen.
No, it isn't the best episode - or for that matter particularly high on the list of best episodes. No, it's not the episode that go tme hooked, that'd be the next week, with Dalek. But what it was - not alone, but in conjunction with the upcoming episodes, I will admit - was the very first episode of New Who that I saw, and thus an awful lot of my opinions about the characters was based on it.
In WW3 we see Mickey saving the day. All with huge amounts of assisstance from others, of course, but he is brave and heroic, he saves Jackie's life, he is responsible for the Slitheen's destruction, he turns down the Doctor's offer because he knows himself that well. In WW3 we see the Ninth Doctor as knowledgable, clever, alien, and also horribly manipulative, indecisive, and completely hung up on some blonde girl for absolutely no apparent reason.
And then, of course, we have Rose. Who in WW3 does what, exactly? Nothing. Well, nothing of huge value. She runs and hides and talks and answers questions, and has the Doctor obsessing over her and has people worried about her. But plot wise, she does nothing. She's just there. The only way she really seems to matter in this episode is how other people are effected by her.
I'll admit this is not the strongest episode for Rose's character. But I'll also admit that it's the first one I saw, and as the saying goes, first impressions count. And so my first impression of these characters were of Mickey as a reluctant and not too brave hero, Nine as a smart alien who obsessed over a human girl to the point of unhealthiness, Jackie as the amusing but caring mother, and Rose as just being there.
And so what was my first impression of Rose? Not as POV character like people had with the earlier episodes. I never had that chance to get into her head, and find out if I loved it or hated it or whatever. For other people who were looking on from Rose's viepoint, perhaps this episode showed her in a better light, but what I saw then? Was not a show-leading character. What I saw was a MacGuffin.
"A MacGuffin is a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story, but has little other relevance to the story itself." Yes, Wikipedia is hardly the most reputable source. But it's description of a MacGuffin is exactly what Rose was to me in that first episode. Her importance to the story had nothing to do with who she was, but was entirely due to how she effected other characters. And the next few episodes only served to back this up.
I mean, Dalek? Rose gets Adam's attention, gives the Dalek the source of it's power, had Nine emo over her, and causes him to not fire and the Dalek to kill itself, before getting Adam invited on board. The Long Game? Um... is called the best, and is who Adam is compared to?
They didn't do a lot to change the Rose = MacGuffin in my head, and by the time Father's Day came along, where she did have an actual character part, it was too little, to late for me. Perhaps that's why that episode leaves me cold - I had no emotional investment in the Rose. She was in my head a MacGuffin, and by Hitchcock's definition of MacGuffin, even though the plot revolves around them, "The audience don't care" about the specifics of the object itself.
Quite simply, because I haven't that viewpoint character tie to Rose, because she started out for me as just a MacGuffin, I don't care about her.
I care about what happens around her, about how she effects the plot and all that, about how characters are effected by her actions, but her herself? I don't care. Which explains a lot of things about my views on her that I have had difficulty explaining to others.
For all that she has equal status in the credits, Rose has never been to me anywhere near as important as the Doctor. She was designed as viewpoint character, specifically on an emotional level, but I never got that, I never had that investment in her. The viewpoint, the emotional heart for me has been the Doctor. (Which is probably why I am less fond of Nine - his emotional states was always a sort of background emo, and so wasn't quite as Ten and his sheer exuberance and variety of emotion).
And because I have no emotional investment in Rose, I can treat her in ways that baffle some of my friends. I can ignore her when she is annoying, which has bewildered certain people who can't see how I can ignore a central character (but of course, to me she isn't central in herself but only as a device to move the plot forward). I had no problems at all with the shifting away from Rose, and towards the Doctor's POV during S2, inevitable because of Rose's departure, but has caused some problems for people invested in Rose's POV. Whereas for some of them this is new territory, and thus are less fond of the shows new angle, this is heading to what I always had going on.
And I am not sorry that she is leaving, because firstly I saw it coming way off, and secondly because I have never cared enough about her to be sorry she is going.
Of course, just as there are people like me who have no emotional investment in Rose, there are those who are over-invested in her. Those who have difficulty with the shifts in POV away from Rose, and towards the Doctor. Those who can't see how the show can possibly be good without Rose, and will quit watching then. Those certain people who believe they are Rose in that little subconcious self, and feel she is OOC if she does something they wouldn't do (or say they wouldn't do). Just as my lack of investment in Rose-as-character, and having the Doctor as POV character has meant I prefer S2 for it's Doctor focus, I can start to see why those who have invested in Rose perhaps a little too have such antipathy towards parts of it.
It can't be easy having the entire foundations on the show as you know it shift on you. It's Rose's emotions that they are keyed into, and for an episode such as Girl in the Fireplace, in which Rose's emotions are of no importance, are disregarded it must feel like a personal betrayal, almost. Or at the very least, it leaves them as cold as Father's Day left me.
The thing about POV characters is that we are supposed to empathise with them, to feel for them, so we don't just see through their eyes but feel what they feel. And to do this, a certain amount of emotional investment is required - without that, the character looses all their significance. And the introduction of the character is supposed to trigger that investment. And for Rose, I never had that.
Instead of Rose as emotional heart, I had Rose as Maguffin. Perhaps it's my fault for not watching the episodes in order, for having the wrong start. But it's interesting how different my perspective on a lot of things seems to be because of this first impression and it's results.
And I am wondering, what other people's first impressions of the characters were, who they have invested in, and how they will be effected by Rose's departure. And how the changes in show have affected them.
Wow. That's a lot of words, in which I say... not very much, really. However, I would like to hear from people on how different or similar their experiences have been compared to mine.
ETA: Read the comments. I've got some very diverse and interesting perspectives on Rose and just companions in general.
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It would be nice to think so, but I've seen/heard of some pretty batshit overdone opposition to her, as a reaction to the batshit pushing of her by other fans. And to what some perceive as TPTB shoving her (and the ship) down our throats. Which I don't actually think they've done at all. But then, a lot of people went completely "OMGdoesnotexistlalaNOOOO!!!" insane over Eight planting a couple of smooches on Grace in the TVM, completely ignoring the fact that he was in the middle of regeneration-crisis mood swings and, immediately prior to the more notable one, literally jumping up and down with joy at the fact that the shoes she had given him fit. He was thisclose to kissing the TREE they were next to.
With the hysteria engendered by that, the reaction to honest-to-goodness canon shippiness from some people has been downright TERRIFYING.
An interesting quote I heard about School Reunion a while back was that it could be seen from two different emotional perspectives: Rose for the new fans, and the Doctor's for the old school fans. Interesting, huh?
*nods* A bit simplifying, as such things necessarily are, but accurate. Especially because, in the old school paradigm, the companions were mostly audience identification for the general audience (especially kids), while fans were far more likely to identify with the Doctor. We mostly don't need him to tell us what's going on -- we're often the ones doing the explaining. But for the newer fans, who've quite reasonably approached it as they would any other show, it feels more like "a show about these two people," rather than about the guy who does the explaining and the young person who stands in for the young audience. And with modern fandom, specifically participatory online fandom, being overwhelmingly female, we have a plethora of hardcore fans identifying with the companion rather than the Doctor.
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But that might just be the circles I read. I've certainly seen ship-hate, but not so much focused on Rose herself as the writers and all that.
And with modern fandom, specifically participatory online fandom, being overwhelmingly female, we have a plethora of hardcore fans identifying with the companion rather than the Doctor.
Which really must be a bit of a paradigm change for those involved. I know a lot of people who seem offended by the suggestion, but there really are more old school male fans than female. It's not sexism or bias against the female old school fans, or denying their existance - they do exist - but there aren't quite as many. But there seems to be an increase in their numbers. And the thing about most fandoms is that a lot of people - not all, but a lot - will associate the strongest with characters of their own gender. RTD was smart to bring in a female character of equal significance to the show with females in fandom increasing now, and smart to try and make her good enough so that those who associated with her didn't feel patronised. Whether he succeeded or not is another question, but he knew what he was trying to do, anyway.
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No point in being offended, although I sort of get why they are -- it's a statement of fact, but it's also tied in people's heads to a derogatory stereotype that's basically the same as the stereotype of the Classic Trek fanboy. A lot of why it's darn near impossible to have an intelligent discussion of the Asexuality Doctrine without someone popping up to snark that (a) those who subscribe to it are just sad fanboys who can't get any and don't want the Doctor to get any either, or (b) they're sick of being dismissed in terms of (a). It's WAY more complex than that, but someone always wants to reduce it to those terms, and then any hope of enlightenment on either side gets gutshot.
What's changed, I think, is less the numbers than the recognition of participatory fandom by the industry. The creative output of the fandom 20 years ago was very much like online fandom now: Most of the fic zines I've ever seen were edited, and largely written, by women. Granted, this perception was probably skewed somewhat by my knowing some of them, so I'm more likely to see their stuff. But it's still the case to a large degree. Legions of guys subscribed to newsletters and joined fan clubs and such, but participatory fandom had a VASTLY higher proportion of women. The "hardcore" fan demographic, in all honesty, probably hasn't changed nearly as much as people think.
RTD was smart to bring in a female character of equal significance to the show with females in fandom increasing now, and smart to try and make her good enough so that those who associated with her didn't feel patronised. Whether he succeeded or not is another question, but he knew what he was trying to do, anyway.
Oh, definitely. It's nice to have a conscious impetus to create a character the female fans will want to identify with, instead of the happenstance of hiring someone the producers think the dads will want to ogle, but who turns out to be just kickass in the eyes of female viewers. (Leela being the classic example there.)
Going back to your original premise, and a lot of what Nos has been saying, the problem may ultimately be that they tried too hard to do that. That they tried so hard to make her All That because the viewers who would be identifying with her deserve for her to be. Except that, as often happens in such cases, they didn't quite know how to go about making her what they kept saying they wanted her to be. Or something.
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Going back to your original premise, and a lot of what Nos has been saying, the problem may ultimately be that they tried too hard to do that. That they tried so hard to make her All That because the viewers who would be identifying with her deserve for her to be. Except that, as often happens in such cases, they didn't quite know how to go about making her what they kept saying they wanted her to be.
That...sounds about right to me. When they couldn't quite make her as awesome as the wanted to be in the show, due to plot and character stuff, and to be fair on other characters, they had to move a bit of the hyping over to the publicity, where they went a little... too far with it.
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Like... Rusty going on about how Ten is exactly the same as Nine when he clearly isn't, like how he said School Reunion is all about Rose's emo and I was surprised by how much it wasn't because he'd totally sold it to us a Being About Rose to the exclusion of anything else.
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That may have been the producer's thinking, but I doubt it was that of the writer who created her - kickass seems to have very much been his intention. Apparently she was modeled on a cross between Emma Peel (the original kickass chick) and, of all things, a female Palestinian militant of the time (whom she was named for). In 1970s Britain, in the middle of a big conflict with the IRA, modeling a companion after a terrorist militant was not a small deal, even if it was very coded, and the writer who created her has a history of very strong female characters - he was trying to write Aeryn Sun types in several shows in the '70s (with admittedly mixed success when he allowed other writers to take them over and the producers to step in). So I don't think that was accidental at all, even if the "audience figures going up" (to borrow a phrase) was on the mind of the producers.
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I remember being DEVASTATED when she left, and it took me MONTHS to warm to Romana. So the writer did his job for this 7-to-8-year old. :-)
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The first Romana wasn't exactly a warm character anyway; she was pretty cool and aloof. I'm still not sure I've entirely warmed to the Mary Tamm version. :) But yeah, losing Leela was a real shame, she was pretty awesome. There are still very few characters on TV who match her, I think.
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Oh, and...
Not too surprising. Most old school fans are pretty well programmed to like a companion simply because the Doctor does. There are very few companions who are significantly disliked (some of them unjustly, IMHO, but that's another topic).
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Re: Oh, and...
They're in the throes of mourning now, but I think they'll like the new one just as much.
(Though their conviction that the new one will be chosen to be pretty is... yes.)
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Re: Oh, and...
Well, what else were all the old school ones chosen for?
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Re: Oh, and...
Yeah. But isn't there an awful lot of "she's pretty! she'd do!" in the "omg who r teh new one" threads?
*fidgets* I want to seeeeeee who we have next. Probably pretty soon after ep 13 airs, yeah? I can't see them saying before then in case it overshadowed Billie going a bit.
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Re: Oh, and...
But I think after 13, yes.
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Also, have you noticed the bizarre conviction that when Rose goes we will lose the idea of Companion As Equal And Realistic Character? There's a lot of confusion between Rose-as-Rose and Rose-as-function.
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Re: Oh, and...
And I have noticed that a bit. To which I just respond with a hearty WTF? Seriously, how dumb would the production team have to be to make a move as stupid as these people think. Just because Rose was a more "Realistic" character doesn't mean this realism was because of Rose. It was because of the writers, you idiots!
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Re: Oh, and...
I am fairly well uninformed on the topic of the whole Asexuality Doctrine but just from the Four eps I've managed to Netflix thus far I'm finding material to make a case for the "just not shown onscreen due to the mores of the era/prior treatment of the first three versions" viewpoint.
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Re: Oh, and...
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I actually don't see it with Nine; he doesn't treat her very differently from previous companions at all. Every once in a while, you'd get a clumsy line that leads you to think the writers want you to see the world around them proving they're chocolate and peanut butter, the two great tastes that taste great together, but it's not really in his behavior. (I mean, I know that Dalek absorbed the internet and all, but even with all that fanfic it read, how is it in character for a Dalek to know or care enough about love to use it in a sentence? But it's mostly just the odd clumsy line like that.)
He was thisclose to kissing the TREE they were next to.
Eight/Jabe OTP OMG! :)
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no subject
Methinks there's room for a brilliant Eight/Tree Nine/Jabe icon. A pity I'm at work and PhotoShopless or I might have replied with one.