[ SECRET POST #2221 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2221 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #317.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Can you give some examples, OP?

The hero's morals *often* reflect the author's, and even when they don't, usually the world is reflected to show them anyway. If the hero does something amoral, then other characters or some consequences happen to indicate that.

Without examples, I can't tell if it's an example of people being unfair to the author, or you missing the signs that the author DOES mean for the hero's actions to be moral.

[(Anonymous)]

not OP, but I remember rolling my eyes at...I *think* it was this page on tvtropes...when someone laid out this great big six-point explanation for why the Tenth Doctor was soooooooo wrong for getting Harriet Jones booted out of office. And then tried to claim it was an example of "dissonance" simply because none of the characters explicitly yelled at him for it, even though it was still obviously portrayed as a no-no during the series.

[(Anonymous)]

...But...I would argue that RTD DEFINITELY saw the Doctor as being morally correct in almost everything. The only times he's shown as being wrong, he's called out for it. He IS presented as the kind of guy who is right and just in making huge moral decisions and imperatives upon other people because he's just such a wise and noble figure.

He's pretty explicitly written as being a moral paragon, sometimes to ridiculous standards (refusing to use weapons, being angry when anyone else does is a pretty bad one). Fans like getting into debates about the ways he's wrong or misguided, but I think it's pretty clear the showrunners do not mean for him to come off as misguided.

In fact, I'd say it's Moffat spends way too much time addressing what he felt was a fault in RTD's writing by constantly calling out Eleven for the sort of actions he'd make as Ten and get away with.

[(Anonymous)]

Really? I thought that by season 4 and the specials, it seemed like RTD did intend for the Doctor to come off as wrong about a bunch of things (Harriet Jones for sure), but he just...did a shitty job of it, primarily because he would troll the audience for ages before finally hinting that maybe doing X thing wasn't such a good idea after all.

But yeah, IA, I have the exact opposite problem with Moffat. All the way through season 6 I constantly felt like yelling "OKAY. DOCTOR WRONG. YES. WE GOT IT THE FIRST FOURTEEN TIMES YOU TOLD US THANK YOU VERY MUCH." What would be so wrong with having just one episode centered around hammering home the nice tidy moral of "stop doing bad stuff -> bad stuff stops happening!" I'll never know...

[charming_stranger]

I got the impression RTD was purposely ambiguous about it. It's kind of a slippery slope: At first, the Doctor is the one who has to make all the hard decisions. Then he starts making them when he doesn't have to: Harriet Jones, the Family of Blood (an eternity of torture? Really?) - and "forgiving" the Master, as if he could absolve him of crimes he'd committed against at least two entire planets just in that arc. Donna is a good influence on him (cf. "Fires of Pompeii"), but then she goes away and he's nudged a bit further still toward the edge. And then, what do you know, "The Waters of Mars" happens and suddenly it's really, really obvious that he's gone too far and he's been going too far for quite some time now. But it's not entirely clear just when he first crossed the line - maybe that's what you call "troll[ing] the audience for ages before finally hinting that maybe doing X thing wasn't such a good idea after all". I think of it as another case of that thing RTD kept doing, which I loved, where he'd foreshadow like mad but you didn't notice at first because it was really subtle, until the season finale where all those little signs suddenly came together.

There seems to be a difference between Ten and Nine here too (I haven't seen enough of Eleven to tell where he fits in, but I do hope he learned something from Ten's mistakes). Nine couldn't bring himself to commit another genocide in the season finale. Ten - at least post-"Journey's End" Ten - probably would have done it.

[(Anonymous)]

The problem is, everything you're describing would be absolutely fascinating if Doctor Who was a gritty HBO drama about a complex tragic antihero.

However, it's not. it's a sci-fi family show about a crazy alien in a big blue box who flies around saving people from megalomaniacal villains and pepperpot nazis.

Now, of course that doesn't mean a show like that can't have depth and darkness and ambiguity, but it has to be a different kind of ambiguity. A different method of conveying it, is all. You can have him do something bad that haunts him for a long time. You can have him being repeatedly forced to do bad things, while acknowledging that they're bad and feeling bad about doing those bad things. However, you can't string kids in the audience along, telling them that they should look up to and admire this amazing clever magical guy, who's becoming less and less of a good guy even though no one's saying so, and then finally, after four seasons, suddenly pull the rug out from under those kids' feet and say "surprise! He's actually not very good at all!"

That's the kind of arc you can pull off amazingly and without being annoying for half a season. Maybe for one full season. But not for four whole seasons. Not on a show like Doctor Who. Sure, you'll have come up with a really sublime ending, but the enjoyment of a lot of the glorious, goofy, wonderful, sparkly, fun stuff that comes before that ending is tainted.

(re, your last paragraph: season 5 is wonderful about Eleven systematically dialing back and avoiding repeating his mistakes as Ten and learning to accept and see things that Ten couldn't. Season 6 is awful because it decides viewers were too dumb to understand it in season 5, and does all of season 5's lessons over again, except really obnoxiously.)

[charming_stranger]

The problem is, everything you're describing would be absolutely fascinating if Doctor Who was a gritty HBO drama about a complex tragic antihero.

However, it's not. it's a sci-fi family show about a crazy alien in a big blue box who flies around saving people from megalomaniacal villains and pepperpot nazis.

You know, I keep forgetting that DW is supposed to appeal to children as well as adults. Yeah, from a ... producer's? perspective, it probably wasn't the best choice, even if it worked fine for me personally. It's not bad writing in and of itself, but context certainly matters. I really don't think anyone should be expected to remember plot events that took place a fourth or a third of their life ago ...

As for annoying, well, YMMV - like I said, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing and didn't find it annoying at all. Then again, I had the advantage of not watching the show over four years' time and not having to wait a week between episodes and months and months between seasons. I think RTD's Who might really be one of those Better On DVD shows.

(And from your description, it seems like the opposite might be true for Moffat's Who. Argh, I hate it when writers don't trust the viewers to get the point! I can tolerate a bit of heavy-handedness, but not repetitiveness. Both at once? That's just obnoxious.)

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

*nods* Yes yes! And IA about Better on DVD. I've learned to appreciate 10's issues and season 4 and the specials even though a lot of things about it bothered me first time around, because after rewatching a few times and digging deep into it with other fans, the meta and potential for character analysis is glorious. I could happily read and write pages about that character arc.

However, in my eyes that doesn't justify the really grating and misdirecting way the story was actually presented in the show itself. It's just kind of a bright side of a flawed idea: "hey, sorry about irritating the fuck out of you for four years and capping it off with such unsatisfying disappointment, but at least you have some really juicy meta to dig through!" Also on the bright side, the memory of the stuff that Ten went through made season 5 and the struggles Eleven goes through (especially the finale, and the nature of his relationship with Amy) really interesting before the writers broke out the sledgehammer.

[(Anonymous)]

The hero's morals *often* reflect the author's, and even when they don't, usually the world is reflected to show them anyway. If the hero does something amoral, then other characters or some consequences happen to indicate that.

That's really, really not true, in a lot of works. You can in a lot of cases talk about an author's moral sensibility on the evidence of his work, I won't deny that, but I really don't think you can do so in the kind of in-universe way that you're indicating here - that is to say, I really don't think you can say as a general rule that the universe indicates the moral preferences of the author. It's simply not the case that in fiction bad things consistently happen to people who the author regards as bad, or that someone will disapprove if the protagonist does something amoral. It's, you know, a little more complicated than that.

[(Anonymous)]

The only works where this is not the case is where the hero is explicitly amoral and surrounds his or herself with amoral people. However, that constitutes a very very VERY VERY tiny portion of fiction. It might seem big because there's billions of stories out there, but it's not.

[(Anonymous)]

That's, again, just not the case. There are cases where it's not explicit, or where the hero's moral status is legitimately ambiguous, and similarly the moral status of the universe. You're drawing conclusions from a small sample set.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, it is. You're simply wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

What the anon above me said. Plus, if it's a big enough subset of fiction to have its own archetypes (like the antihero) and thousands of stories in it, it's a big enough slice of the whole that you can't in good conscience say that the hero's or the world's morals reflect the author's, only to dismiss the many that contain legit moral ambiguity as "well, I didn't mean those."

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I'd say the fact there's a subset for it furthers my point: the moral hero is SO common and SO normal that there is actually a separate clause and term for ones who aren't.

Thousands of examples is still an incredibly tiny tiny tiny portion when it comes to the billions of stories out there. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of blind people in the world, but you still presume that most people you meet or hear about are sighted, do you not? Because the great and overwhelming majority are, despite there being a sizable portion of blind people out there.

[vicfrankenstein]

My example would be Dumbing of Age. That's the first one that comes to mind. David Willis's characters are almost all well-intentioned but deeply flawed characters in a variety of ways. They're also young, amd, you know, the whole title of the comic. Still, people get a raging hate-on over some things. Mostly because yeah, those flaws are super personal to them, and I get that, but then they pick apart any tiny thing or joke into "reasons why CharacterX is the FUCKING WORST."

I mean, I guess it doesn't fit perfectly with the secret, but it still came to mind.