“We hope the new Doctor will join us in taking a stand for animals and inspire others to switch to a healthy, Earth-friendly, life-saving diet.”
Anothr reason to hate PC made decisions, every PC nutjob thinks they now have a shot at getting their particular PC nutjob “role model” crammed down your throat.
My favorite video of all time regarding Doctor Who isn’t a clip of the show. It isn’t even one of those fan-made compilations, although if you want to see a really good one I’ve been playing on a loop, it’s this one, “Just See Me.” No, it’s the one linked in the above photo credit, a compilation of fan reactions to one of the most iconic moments in the revived series, when the 13 Doctors all return to save their home planet of Gallifrey. I am thoroughly addicted to these kinds of videos.
Reaction videos are sort of a hard thing to explain, really. Why would you watch other people watching a thing you’re actually watching yourself or have already watched? What is even the point?
I would argue that it’s the same reason people will go see a movie that they’ve already seen before in the theater. It’s why you sit someone down and make him or her watch just one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s why you carefully curate the DVDs you want to share with your kids.
Fandom is like religion. Jesus might have asked us to pray in a closet, but most of us like to feel things in a group. Not to mention convert others to make the group larger. God knows I’ve spent a fair amount of the Houston Press’s money trying my damnedest to bring Doctor Who to more people.
What I like about reaction videos is the fervor, the exultation. I get that it’s fandom as performance art, and Rassilon knows Doctor Who is up there with Harry Potter and Supernatural in the sadness-porn genre of pop culture. Some people simply enjoy being emotionally destroyed by the art they love. I even wrote a bit on Life Is Strange exactly about this phenomenon.
That aside, we live in a post-South Park world, where caring is considered worthy of mockery. It’s a world where even Captain Freakin’ Kirk, of all people, can accuse people of being social-justice warriors as an insult. It’s a world where the highest virtue, from the egg account on Twitter to the President of the United States, seems to be as disconnected from empathy as possible.
So, when I see people in these reaction videos, I see people who have let their guard down. They allow moments in a stupid television program to flow through them hard enough to make them cry, gasp or scream in absolute happiness. It’s wrinkles in time when love and loss and birth and death and joy and sorrow are allowed out into a society that represses emotions as a matter of course.
All fandom is memetic. There is really no difference between, say, ancient depictions of Greek myths and modern shares of a wands up GIF. Both cases are ideas based on stories that have stuck in the human head.
It’s hardly surprising that things in Whovian fandom like “I don’t want to go” and “One day, I shall come back” have achieved that level of meme. Blasted across millions of minds, they are bound to stick, and now, reacting to those ideas is its own form of entertainment. Feeling, as exhibition, is legitimized as a way to legitimize our own exploration of what art does to us. When it’s good, we hurt, and we heal stronger.
A final thought…
I have a specific memory of the fourth grade, when we were doing a classroom read of The Bridge to Terabithia. I was way further ahead in the book than the rest of my classmates, and I got to THAT part. I started sobbing, uncontrollably, in the middle of class. I’d never read anything like it, and it was like a bullet to my soul. Other kids asked me what was wrong, and I just said, “You’ll get there.” One by one they did, and, one by one they looked at me with this knowing gaze.
It’s better to feel than to not. That’s why I love Doctor Who reaction videos. I plan to make one myself this Christmas, when Twelve leaves us and Thirteen comes to take us on new adventures.
More evidence that Jodie Whitaker wasn’t a Politically correct choice. Hurray! 🙂
As Andrew Marr observed a decade ago: ‘The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.’
Why, then, is the government intent on making the BBC even more gay? In one of the less-reported sections of this week’s white paper on the future of the corporation, John Whittingdale lays down a target that 10 per cent of senior leadership roles at the BBC be filled by LGBT staff by 2020.
Nearly a year after we launched our ambitious strategy to hardwire diversity into everything the BBC does, today we’re unveiling the results of our recent and most comprehensive staff census that shows the BBC has met its 2017 targets – and is well on the way to hitting our 2020 goals:
14.5% of our workforce are from black, Asian or minority ethnic background, including more than 10% of our leadership.
Over 48% of our staff are women – approaching the 50% target set for 2020.
Over 10% identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender.
More than 10% of our staff have told us they have a disability – already ahead of the goal for 2020.
Good thing Quotas never discriminate and are always fair and equal! 🙂
“Indeed, the only way to make them disappear is to keep aggressively fighting their bigotry until, as successive generations follow one another, it dissipates completely. “
I agree. Just about YOU not Me. 🙂
“Perhaps, yes, much of what motivates these men stems from economic fears, from the terror of knowing that late capitalism has abandoned them and that women are indeed starting to share at least some of their already diminished power.
But they don’t deserve our respect and they don’t deserve our sympathy. What they deserve is our scorn. It might be just what they need.”
Not Politics here. No Political Correctness at all.
I’m still an “asshole”.
Can the Left move on? Of course not. Heaping scorn and ridicule on their political opponents is what they live for. So contrary to the sub-headline to the article :
Don’t ignore the haters and their male fragility. Buckle down and crush them — you’re doing them a favor.
We are doing them a favor by giving them someone to spew their vitriolic hatred on. They need it.
Good Luck, Mrs. Whitaker. With Fans like these who needs Daleks…Sontarans…Cybermen!
Oh, I’m going to the well one more time because this was just too good an idea .
Sung to that 1985 hit, “Doctor in Distress”
Sixteen days ago is too long to bait
Bring back the doctor don’t hesitate.
It was a cold wet night in November
Fifty Four years ago,
There was a police box in a junkyard
We didn’t know where it would go,
An old MAN took two teachers
Into time and space,
It started off a legend
That no other could replace.
Doctor in a Dress
Let’s all answer his S.O.S.,
Doctor in a Dress
Bring him back now, we won’t take less.
There were evil mental creatures
Who tried to exterminate,
Inside each of their minds
Was a bubbling lump of hate,
We met social justice humans
With no respect at all,
Warriors of the internet
Who stood over us all.
Bring him back now we won’t take less,
If we stop his travels he’ll be in a mess,
The galaxy will fall to evil once more,
With nightmarish monsters fighting a social justice war.
NO! NO! NO!
We’ve learned to accept many doctors
With companions at their side,
When they were faced with danger
They didn’t run and hide,
There was a Brigadier and a Master
And a canine computer,
Each successive girl just hoped
That a Doctor wouldn’t lose her.
Doctor in a Dress
Let’s all answer his S.O.S.,
Doctor in distress,
Bring him back now, we won’t take less.
MY Doctor Who 