Very special episodes.

[mrissa]

During his visit, alecaustin and I watched the Doctor Who "specials" discs, and markgritter watched the last two with us. (timprov apparently has a self-preservation instinct.) And it triggered a theory or perhaps a reminder for the writerly types:

If you feel that you have to have sympathetic supporting characters reminding the reader/viewer at every turn of how Just Plain Gosh-Darn Wonderful your central character is, this is a warning sign that your central character has not been acting Just Plain Gosh-Darn Wonderful enough in plain sight of the reader/viewer.

In the seventh grade we were solemnly taught a list of things you can know about characters, and they included things other people say about them and things they believe about themselves. But these things cannot trump actions. If you have somebody being a megalomaniac onscreen--if you have them being self-indulgent or self-involved or a whiner or whatever else that is not sympathetic and amazing and gosh-darn wonderful--after a certain point, the sympathetic character saying, "Jinkies, you're swell," does not give us information about the non-swell person. It gives us information that the sympathetic person is willing to self-delude and/or ignore evidence. Which is also important information! Just not in the same way. So beware the protag who suddenly seems to have people declaring, "You're dreamy," in herds and droves. This is telling you something, and the thing it's telling is often pretty sketchy.

Comments

I find that I am thinking this a lot at work lately

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

If you have to editorialize your own actions for the benefit of my interpretation, then your actions either haven't brought about closure or they aren't nearly as strong and decisive as you want them to be.

Re: I find that I am thinking this a lot at work lately

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee, yes, it's true in real life too. If you have to tell me you're brilliant, famous, or beautiful, you probably aren't.

Re: I find that I am thinking this a lot at work lately

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Way to not think of anyone in particular, Kore-Upon-LJ! Okay, well, way to not mention anyone in particular with your outside voice in a way that could be incriminating, anyway. Hee.

Re: I find that I am thinking this a lot at work lately

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(Yes, I do think of your lj account as like unto Stratford-Upon-Avon.)

Re: I find that I am thinking this a lot at work lately

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am much more like Eleanor of Aquitaine, I'm afraid. With urging towards the smiting and the making of other people wail, rather than the assurances that all will be well.

Re: I find that I am thinking this a lot at work lately

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I sure am glad I don't know anybody like that.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I think the having characters tell other characters what they're like works much better for negative traits than positive, particularly if it's backed up with a scene dramatizing the trait. So if you show a character doing something that may or may not be construed as selfish, you can nail the point home with a character calling them selfish. But for positive traits, that are supposed to build sympathy, yeah, it's not the same. You have to work harder for that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure if it's negative vs. positive so much as borderline. As in your example with selfishness, if it's something that might or might not be construed that way--"in this family we would always show up for Grandma's birthday" vs. "eh, the actual day of is not so big a deal, as long as you do something around the birthday"--having the reinforcement of other character reactions.

But this can show up on the positive side, too. "Oh, honey, that was just the right thing!" says-Grandma-happily is much more important if Grandma is a minor character and the reader doesn't know in their bones that it's just the right thing, rather than, hey, I saved Grandma's farm from foreclosure--not a borderline act. Hardly anybody going to go, "Well, y'know, lots of elderly people like financial ruin and being thrown from their lifelong home." It's a lot easier to interpret than whether the book Our Heroine bought Grandma is perfect or perfectly awful for Grandma's taste.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Good point. In general, I think you have to work harder to support story events that go in favor of your character, rather than against them. Coincidences that help your protagonist beat the bad guy? Not allowed. Coincidences that totally screw him over? Fascinating.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well...fascinating until they start to feel gratuitous, I think. Because there is a point past which it gets to be the universe picking on poooooor little protag, and that's tedious. But up until that point, evil coincidences! Evil coincidences for the win!

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there is that "Oh, come on!" threshold you don't want to cross.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Hee. I have been reading TIntin comic collections. Evil coincidences *and* deus ex machina galore! (Dei ex machina? Machinae? Machinas? I have no idea how you pluralize that.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So the thing is, Ten is, as far as I have one, My Doctor. And they managed to make me glad he was going. So fie on that. We were in full on Midsummer Night's Dream/Pirates of Penzance mode with the end of that last "special." It was just awful.

And also fie on any ending that counts as a Death of the Magic ending, which they totally totally did with the end of the Donna bits. Fie, fie, fie.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(Or, if you are my husband, muttering "JUST DIE ALREADY.")

Yes, well. This is where Pyramus-and-Thisbe come in handy: "Now--die--die--die--die--die!" And also Major-General Stanley: "But you don't go!"

Donna was not my favorite companion. Nothing like. Donna's granddad was my favorite part of Donna. Can I be cheaply purchased for the low-low price of an amateur astronomer granddad? Pretty much, yes, yes I can. Onwards, writers! Go on out and try it! Buy my affections by packing your stories and scripts with amateur astronomer granddads! We will also accept model train/airplane granddads! granddads with nifty gadgets! granddads who like to go to the library and then get a hot cocoa! etc.! Grandmothers in these and related flavors also accepted!

But even though Donna was not my favorite companion, interludes about granddads aside, anyone having that happen--anyone at all--it would have just made me furious. If Alec had not been visiting in this specific interlude, I would not have picked up more Doctor Who for Really Quite Some Time.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Yet another reason to be glad about [i]Among Others{/i}! (I was very fond of the grandfather there.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

YES.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

The 'resolution' of Donna pissed me off much in the same way that the end of the ELO cover band episode did. Either the writers badly badly misjudged the Doctor character or he's far more mean-spirited or cowardly (depending on the episode) than I'd believed.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh God the cover band. That was the first time I thought, "Maybe I don't want to watch this anymore."

My headcanon is that from Nine on, we have the Doctor with chronic PTSD brought on by the Time War.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

That's just headcanon? I took it as realcanon. Sure seems real to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, I watched nothing before Nine, so this is the only way I know the Doctor, and it's fascinating to me that the Time War didn't always PTSDify the guy. How could it not? How weird.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

It's because the Time War didn't happen to *him* until after the American TV special. In fact, there is a strong suspicion that the American TV special sparked the Time War.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Basically what cyranocyrano said - the (Last Great) Time War didn't exist as a fictional conceit before the Russell T. Davies seasons.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Could be, I dunno...I quit watching after the Tinkerbell Doctor moment.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

The thing here is, I really liked the *idea* behind the episode--that people started to notice all this crap the Doctor was doing, and were networking. And I loved the 'and then we kind of got bored and we played ELO songs instead'. It's so very human.

But the ending... oh, shudder. Because the Doctor loves humans, and I cannot imagine him thinking "You know what would be way better than dying? Being frozen, unable to move, in a block of aggregate, for ever."

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the "and also it's really cute how our sex life is now."

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

I tried not to.
But yes, seconded.

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

God, yeah. What happened to Donna was utterly shameful. Mind-wiped in such a fashion that her head will explode if she is ever reminded about any of the neat stuff she took part in.

Um, good thing she doesn't live on a planet that now gets invaded by aliens every six weeks or so...

(incoherent swearing and throwing things at the TV screen)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's also a good thing that Donna will never encounter any references to, say, Ancient Rome or Agatha Christie or anything else they did in their travels, because those things are so culturally obscure that they won't come up in life ever ever ever.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Or her ex-fiancee. And the wedding that everybody she knew was at.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I feel better if I pretend that the specials were a hallucination experienced by Ten after he tripped and bumped his head on the TARDIS console and started to regenerate.

I've always read the business of other characters running around telling us that the Doctor is awesome as a very specific type of fan service. It's basically Russell T. Davies giving a big shout out to all the people who, like him, were Doctor Who fans back when it was desperately uncool, and saying, "Isn't it awesome that everyone now thinks the Doctor is cool!"

Like most fan service, it should be deployed sparingly, and not in a way that interferes with non-fan's enjoyment. Also, I hate how often Davies insists on telling me that the Doctor is awesome at the precise moment that the Doctor is being a gigantic dickhead. During the end of the Davies era, I found myself rather intensely missing Seven, who was frequently a manipulative bastard, but usually got told so by his companions.