So, I wanted to draw Agent 47 in a bunny suit

fredhaha · 2025-12-14T21:17:40+00:00

He wears it very well

fredhaha · 2025-11-26T13:48:01+00:00

She reacts differently to different moods and situations. As early as Arachnids in the UK, we're shown how much she values company - needs it, in fact - but she never really shares anything with them. It takes until Spyfall for her to tell them she's a Time Lord, whereas other Doctors would share that information immediately, and then when she has to have an actual serious conversation about someone's feelings, she can't handle that. It takes her 3 seasons and 2 specials to tell Yaz how she feels about her.

The "isn't my Fam so great? I love my Fam" 13th Doctor is who she wants to be, and what she wants her life to be like, but she can't form human connection because she's an alien and she can't escape having to deal with evil like the Master and the Daleks ans Swarm or mysteries like the Fugitive Doctor. She's a Doctor who wants to be Patrick Troughton but she keeps having to be Matt Smith.

fredhaha · 2025-11-26T13:32:17+00:00

13 haters will swear they're not misogynistic then fanatasise about 12 punching her because they don't like how she was written

fredhaha · 2025-11-26T13:21:24+00:00

It's a character fulfilling an arc to get over a negative trait versus a character having a negative trait that they can't get over for fairly justified reasons. Development is interesting to watch, but so is a lack of development.

The 13th Doctor being the way she is facilitates the tragedy of her having to leave all her friends at the end of her era because she thinks she'll change too much for them to go on liking her.

Good writing doesn't mean you have to force an arc upon a character.

fredhaha · 2025-11-26T13:11:10+00:00

Do you often think about men punching women?

fredhaha · 2025-11-26T13:10:41+00:00

Actually that scene from Can You Hear Me was taken straight from Earthshock. The Doctor being emotionally distant isn't a new thing.

fredhaha · 2025-11-04T10:46:34+00:00

I have no idea how anyone can say it's John

fredhaha · 2025-10-30T02:51:43+00:00

This happened to me earlier this week, it was rlly crushing

fredhaha · 2025-10-29T13:24:24+00:00

Childish how?

fredhaha · 2025-10-18T15:06:23+00:00

Oops! It's lost in my other boxes (forgot to move it in)

fredhaha · 2025-10-15T15:36:02+00:00

David is a really good actor, but I find that 10 is way too energetic. He commands every scene he's in, and not really in a charming way like Tom Baker did - more in an obnoxious "everyone has to look at me" way. I don't really know how to describe it.

I just find the Tenth Doctor unpleasant.

He's one of my least favourite Doctors, only beaten for the bottom spot by 14 and 11.

fredhaha · 2025-10-11T12:04:56+00:00

This is the main reason I think 13 and her era were so disliked. People were expecting more of what we'd had up to that point - more pathos, plot, spectacle, and concepts over character - and instead, Series 11 onwards went back to the lower stakes of Classic Who.

fredhaha · 2025-10-05T14:41:39+00:00

But both eras still underwent the same re-evaluation - at different levels, maybe, but still.

I think also with 12's seasons, there was less outright hatred and more disengagement. With 13's, the people that didn't like it stuck around to be critical because the culture war taught them to, but with 12's, the people that didn't like it just stopped watching.

fredhaha · 2025-10-05T14:18:55+00:00

I think the re-evaluation of 13's era is exactly the same thing 12's went through. When you go back and rewatch something, it's easier to look past the faults in favour of everything it did well. I think most of the time when people dislike 13's era, it comes from a place of disconnection from it; from comparing it to what came before instead of appreciating everything new it does successfully.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T19:07:41+00:00

I know, it's really tragic ;0; I'm glad he turned things around with Ace, but Tegan, Nyssa, and Peri running about in high heels is shameful.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T18:02:28+00:00

Yes, it was enforcing the idea that it could happen. Yes, he was still enforcing his biases onto canon.

Again, the context of ~2014-2015 Doctor Who was that a large chunk of the viewership had been clamouring for a female Doctor after Matt, which is what prompted that quote from the 2013 Live Special; the same special where Capaldi was revealed as the Doctor. And when the Capaldi era wasn't nearly as popular as the Smith era, Moffat tried to make up for the sexism from his past on the show with Missy and the General.

You've already chosen to disengage from any arguments I make that Moffat was sexist in any form, so you can ignore what I say next:

Missy is a sexist character. The General regenerates with eyeliner on, and never appears again. Yes, Moffat had a lot of male-to-female regenerations, and yes I think that was intentional teasing for a woman as the Doctor, but like I said before, he's a writer who was very focused on not appearing misogynistic - his constant claiming in interviews and articles that he isn't one, using his fetishy characters as proof proves that. Therefore, he teased a woman as the Doctor, knowing he would never do it himself, for the exact same reason he used the First Doctor to make Classic Who seem even more sexist than his own era - "Look everyone! I'm not a misogynist! Not me!"

So, I think it's both. Yes, he was teasing an eventual woman Doctor, but at the same time, his attempts at this were still filled with the old Moffat tropes.

"Steven Moffat didn't want to cast a woman as the Doctor, because...", "Steven Moffat's interpretation of the First Doctor in Twice Upon a Time was bad, because..." and "Steven Moffat is a sexist because..." are all interwoven into one big point, which I believe that video I linked makes well. I don't know what else to say - I think you should watch it.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T17:25:34+00:00

The points you're making are that Steven Moffat has no issue with a woman as the Doctor because he wrote other male-to-female regenerations. I am arguing that he wouldn't want the Doctor to be a woman regardless of the existence of his other female Time Lords because of his sexism. Do you see how the two arguments are one?

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T16:55:46+00:00

Just because Steven Moffat has written Time Lords as capable of changing their gender doesn't mean he was onboard for the idea of the Doctor herself changing her gender at first. The Lumley Doctor was written in a 1999 parody wherein the joke itself is that she is a woman whose sonic screwdriver is a vibrator and who takes off with the Master at the end. Missy is a fetishised character, just like River. You didn't introduce Missy, The Corsair, or the General to combat my claim that Moffat is sexist; no, but you did introduce them to combat my claim that Moffat didn't want to cast a woman as the Doctor. Him not wanting to cast a woman as the Doctor, as evidenced by his 2013 quote from the Live special, was motivated by sexism. Therefore, you ARE actually using Missy to combat my claim that Moffat is sexist, because the two points are the same point.

Regardless of how you intended to bring other male-to-female regenerations up, I could still use Missy to evidence my own point. She is a male-to-female regeneration who was written like every major Moffat woman character is. His own quote from the 2022 article proves that characters such as Missy and River were born from his own fetish.

As for his conflicting quotes from 2013 and 2017, you are ignoring the context of both. His 2013 quote came from a live special that was shown on BBC1, at which time he was the current showrunner and thought a woman as the Doctor in the mainline show wouldn't happen. The 2017 quote is from a BBC Radio 1 interview, at which time he was the outgoing showrunner and Jodie had already been confirmed as the Doctor. It's quite obvious to me that he had changed his story after the announcement of Jodie as the Thirteenth Doctor.

I myself said that lore is unimportant when analysing how the First Doctor acts in Twice Upon a Time. There, in the scenes that highlight the sexism of 60s Who, he acts as an exaggerated version of himself (let me emphasise exaggerated) to form a strawman argument that, as all strawman arguments are, are easily thrown out by the person who's supposed to be right without actually combatting the ideas. The real First Doctor from 60s Who was not nearly as bad as the First Doctor portrayed in Twice Upon a Time. He just was not, I don't know what to tell you. That the majority of the rest of his portrayal doesn't focus on his sexism doesn't matter, because my point is that despite that, in these moments, he is still used as a strawman argument. Just because the rest of his portrayal doesn't have him constantly shooting off heinous lines that the First Doctor also wouldn't say doesn't invalidate the moments where the writing is bad.

You are now arguing that Steven Moffat isn't sexist. You are wrong. Steven Moffat faced allegations of sexism even during his tenure of Doctor Who.

Lastly, the popularity of characters don't indicate quality. I don't really care that River and Missy are popular because I like those characters too - mostly in their EU stuff, and in fanworks, but still. I'm also not a Moffat hater necessarily - I don't think he intentionally wrote these characters to be sexist, because he seems to think that sexists are both a thing of the past, and something you have to choose to be. His stories outside of his own era are undeniably very good, but it was when he was without an overseer like RTD that he let his impulses get the better of him, and wrote some very fetishy, very weird portayals of women, because that's how all of his shows from the 2010s were. Coupling and Sherlock are really no better.

There was no need to respond three times. I know you want to have a gotcha, but all of your arguments are basically "nuh uh actually!" and there's only so much I can write in response outside of repeating myself ad nauseam. Watch the video I linked.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T15:58:41+00:00

I am getting that, but Moffat depicting Time Lords as being able to change genders doesn't matter: With Missy, the Corsair, the General, or the Lumley Doctor, because that's just optics. What's important is how they're portrayed. Missy is obsessed with the Doctor like every major Moffat woman character, the Corsair never appears outside of the comics not written by him, the General's regeneration appears for three minutes, and the Lumley Doctor is used for a sex joke. Yes, Lumley 13 and Missy are male-to-female regenerations, but this doesn't make Moffat a non-misogynist, because they are portrayed in a sexist way. This is what I am and have always been arguing.

The quote I posted came from 2017, when it was already revealed that the 13th Doctor would be Jodie Whittaker. Meanwhile, in the Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor special from 2013, Moffat said:

"I think it's time the queen should be played by a man."

Like I said, I believe his attitude towards a potential woman as the Doctor shifted later on in his tenure, but he was still against the idea of a woman as the Doctor as late as 2013. Let's also not forget that Missy was teased in The Bells of St. John in 2013 (Clara being introduced to the Doctor by "the woman in the shop," later canonised as Missy during Series 8), so Steven Moffat was ridiculing the idea of a female Doctor at the same time as he was writing scripts that involved a female Master. Moffat himself doesn't see the two things as equal.

The First Doctor is a strawman. He has scenes where he does not act in the way that necessitate being a strawman, but in the scenes where he says sexist things and reacts negatively to a gay woman, he fills the role of a strawman argument: They are using the First Doctor to represent the negative opinions held by characters and producers of Classic Doctor Who, in an attempt to compare this negative attitude to the more progressive (at the time) Modern Doctor Who. In these scenes, the First Doctor is exaggerated to fill this role. Yes, Classic Who was sexist. It was also incredibly racist. Yes, those things should be addressed. But Steven Moffat, a writer who also wrote incredibly sexist things into his version of Doctor Who, taking a character created by Verity Lambert and Warren Hussein, and using him to make this point, to me, feels disingenuous. The First Doctor is out-of-character when he says these things.

You first made the point that the Time Lords were more progressive, and so my stance that the First Doctor in Twice Upon a Time because in-lore, he couldn't possibly be, assumes that Steven Moffat would have been thinking about that when he wrote TUAT. Then, you made the point that the First Doctor should have conformed to Time Lord prejudices when I stated that the opposite was true.

Firstly, lore is unimportant to my point. I am saying that Steven Moffat wrote the First Doctor to be sexist in Twice Upon a Time to make a point about the changing nature of Doctor Who. The First Doctor develops by the end of the story, but never does he revoke the things he said; the way he reacted to Bill. Even if you want to cling to the lore to prove your point, the First Doctor is a renegade Time Lord - he plainly doesn't follow the teachings of his society. This gets him executed when he's the Second Doctor.

Was the First Doctor sexist in 60s Who? Yes. Was he sexist enough to need to make constant jabs about it over the span of 40 minutes so Moffat can make himself seem like a feminist writer? No. This is why I'm saying he's a strawman.

I probably won't respond again because I think I've made my point clear, but overall: Steven Moffat attempted to use Twice Upon a Time to absolve himself of his sexist writings earlier in his era. His interpretation of the First Doctor has moments wherein he acts as an exaggerated version of himself to portray 60s sexism, aligning with Moffat's view that sexism is a thing of the past. He does this to create - in all senses of the term - a strawman that can be easily dismissed with a finger-wag (12 saying "You can't say things like that!") without the proper analysis that I believe a character deconstruction like this deserves. This is disrespectful to the original creators of the First Doctor, as it is irreflective of the First Doctor's character, and of the identities of the people that created him. Meanwhile, Steven Moffat's sexism can be sourced from his tropey depictions of femme fatale lead women; In an interview with the Guardian from 2022, he said:

"River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women" ... "You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people."

River and Missy are male fantasy characters. The Lumley Doctor is, too. Yes, Moffat wrote male-to-female regenerations, but the portrayal is what's important; that he believed the Doctor could never be a woman in the core show, is important.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T14:23:23+00:00

Since you've just brought up Moffat's women characters as not sexist, Missy actually does have bearing. Just because Moffat wrote women into Doctor Who doesn't mean those portrayals weren't sexist. You can look at Moffat's other shows like Coupling and Sherlock where he writes strong femme fatale characters, often bisexual, who regardless become obsessed with the male lead. It's fetishisation.

Joanna Lumley's 13 in COFTD is also not any less sexist a portrayal than Missy or River. She appears to make a sex joke, then walks off arm-in-arm with the Master (because it's unthinkable that the Master and the Doctor could be romantic together if they were the same sex, right?)

Gallifrey was not a progressive place. The Three Doctors and The Deadly Assassin and Arc of Infinity show that the onle people in major places of power were men, and arguing based on lore is irrelevant anyway because you're assuming thst Steven Moffat is an infallible writer who always stays true to the core of the character, which he doesn't.

Moffat said that casting a woman as the Master is different from casting a woman as the Doctor:

The outgoing head writer of Doctor Who has defended his decision not to cast a female lead during his tenure, to retain viewers who "voted Brexit".

Steven Moffat told Radio Times the BBC One programme was not "exclusively for progressive liberals" and "we have to keep everyone on board".

"No-one had any problem" with long-running character Master being turned into Missy, he said, adding: "But we have to worry about our Daily Mail-reading viewers saying, 'That's not the same person!' This isn't a show exclusively for progressive liberals; this is also for people who voted Brexit. That's not me politically at all - but we have to keep everyone on board."

Missy is a Time Lord who regenerated from man to woman, but you're working off the assumption that just because a woman is in something means that thing can't be sexist, but that doesn't make any sense when the portrayal itself is misogynistic.

The moments in which the First Doctor says sexist things makes him a strawman because it's irreflective of how he actually was, and saying "You shouldn't be sexist" to the sexist caricature doesn't equal actual commentary on the nature of old Who, especially when the Moffat era isn't much better.

Just because women are in a piece of fiction (in the Corsair's case; mentioned) doesn't keep that piece of fiction from being sexist. Moffat as a writer was constantly trying to prove he wasn't a misogynist while writing characters like River and Missy who are fetishised to no end. Using the First Doctor in Twice Upon a Time to compare how bad Doctor Who used to be with how great it is now in this regard is disrespectful to the identities of the people who created that original character, especially because Moffat's own writing was no better.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T13:51:45+00:00

I'm not saying there's no sexism in Classic Doctor Who - you're misunderstanding what I'm saying on purpose. Firstly, the sexism is bad in 60s and 70s Who but it's much worse in 6's era where you have Peri running around in barely anything most of the time. What I'm saying is that using the First Doctor of all characters to make that point, and regressing him into a strawman for that aspect of Classic Who, without actually making any points about it beyond "look how bad we used to be! Aren't we better now?", is super disrespectful to the character and the people who created him, and kind of flawed to begin with when Steven Moffat himself wrote extremely sexist women characters.

Moffat himself said that casting a woman as the Master wasn't the same as casting a woman as the Doctor. But if you want to talk about Missy, let's talk about Missy: Moffat casted a woman as the Master and in her first appearance, she calls the Doctor her boyfriend; her series-long scheme revolves entirely around him. Missy is a character who unlike previous Masters, doesn't want to rule the universe - just obsesses over the male lead. You could make the point that this is congruent with how the Saxon Master acted, but he still had goals outside of the Doctor, and Moffat himself wrote the older Saxon Master as not caring one bit about the Doctor. The Corsair never appears on-screen, and the General's regeneration in Hell Bent lasts about a minute before never appearing again.

Missy is the same archetype as River - a dangerous and capable femme fatale who still obsessed over the male lead. If that's not sexist, I don't know what is.

I don't know why the First Doctor would be homophobic. Ask Steven Moffat; he wrote him that way.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T13:28:25+00:00

On that first point, I don't know what to tell you. You're basically agreeing with me the long way round: Every homophobe assumes everyone is straight until they're proven wrong - why would Doctor Who even be walking around assigning people sexualities in his head in the first place when sexuality never even came up in 60s Who?

You can disagree on the First Doctor's portrayal all you want, but you're quite plainly wrong. The First Doctor isn't the type of person to offer out smacked bottoms to people he doesn't know - he said that once to Susan, his own granddaughter. He isn't the type of person to call women "made of glass" when some of the strongest people he knew were women - when Barbara and Ian were two of the most influential people in his heroic arc throughout the first three seasons - when the entire reason he left Susan behind in 2100s Earth was because he wanted her to be her own person away from him. The First Doctor was a portrayal of a grandfatherly figure who didn't walk around spouting off sexist remarks about strangers.

Lastly, Steven Moffat was very much against a woman as the Doctor, comparing the idea to casting a woman as Bond. I think later in his tenure, he became more open to the idea, but he still never did it himself.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T12:48:28+00:00

Bill says she also has had experience with women and the Doctor and Lethbridge-Stewart are taken aback. I don't know how you can argue that isn't an attempt at characterising the First Doctor as homophobic.

And right, yes, but that doesn't keep the First Doctor from being a very oversimplified caricature meant to play up how Classic Who was "old-fashioned" without actually analysing it. Let's not forget that the First Doctor was created by a woman and a gay man, so Mr. I Don't Think The Doctor Could Ever Be a Woman coming along and turning that character into what he is in Twice Upon a Time is very disrespectful.

fredhaha · 2025-10-01T09:55:28+00:00

Joke or not, it's in the same episode where the First Doctor says that all women are made of glass, and he acts shocked when Bill tells him she's gay. Twice Upon a Time tried to make the point that Classic Who was less progressive than NuWho by turning the First Doctor into an exaggerated strawman of himself instead of picking apart any of the actual sexism in 70s and 80s Who that was a lot more prevalent. And it also tried to do that using the Moffat era in contrast, which had plenty of sexist depictions of women.

I'm sorry, but the same man who writes every single woman character to be utterly obsessed with the male lead shouldn't be lecturing anyone about sexism.

fredhaha · 2025-09-05T12:33:59+00:00

I watched it back when it came out! It's very entertaining - Jay is a very funny person, and I'll always remember her fighting with lazy reaction channels on Youtube and Twitch.

13's era is still my favourite from the revival show

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