handcuffsandbowties:
cyruspotnoodle:
this is actually how I feel when I think about how river’s life has turned out
Hmm, you mean how she was brainwashed into hating the Doctor and killed him then turned her life around because she saw that he wasn’t totally bad like she had been raised to believe and you know what, she could possibly fall in love with him one day.
Actually, I mean how she was stolen away from her parents due to their connection with the Doctor as an infant, and then raised and traumatized and tortured into hating the Doctor enough to kill him for years. And then, when she finally gets to see her family, she’s shot by her mother, regenerates ALONE and then finds her family AGAIN, is never able to tell them this huge secret of hers (that she is their daughter), eventually meets this man she’s been told her whole life to hate, attempts to kill him and then magically he charms her enough to make her fall for him. It’s ludicrous. Brainwashing doesn’t just go away. She’d need years of therapy just to be able to see him in a positive light.
And then enrolled in archaeology to relearn all of history since her perception of it had been so warped and twisted by the Silence, and she needed to find all of the good things the Doctor had done.
Yeah, that’s quite a feat, and we never get to see it because Moffat loves skipping over the “unimportant” things. Like her life at the university. Like her work. Does she develop passion for archaeology, or is it just to find the Doctor? Because that’s what is implied—that she is just looking for the Doctor in history. She makes a choice, not based on real passion, but based on a need to see a guy who fucking abandoned her after this LIFE ALTERING EVENT takes place.
Got forced back into the astronaut suit, refused to kill him, selfishly at first, and then built a distress beacon to show him that he was so loved by the universe and she couldn’t see why he would want to die.
I do love her selfishness here. Because she refuses to do what he says—but then, any agency she has here is ripped away when he tells her to do as she’s told (and that does have a real quantifiable impact on her; she tells Amy that companions of the Doctor always do as their told, and that is simply not true.) He manipulates her into killing him by marrying her, hardly a romantic gesture, and he doesn’t even do that—it’s a Teselecta. So when he “dies,” she takes the fall for him and has to spend YEARS in a jail cell, waiting for him to feel the urge to merge.
Then she went to prison to keep the secret that he was alive, but still breaks out when he comes to get her, and breaks out on her own quite often.
Yeah. We don’t really know how often he breaks her out. And honestly, who knows how much time he spends without her, traveling with other companions in the meantime?
And then when she does get out of prison she goes off to become a Professor and lives her life.
Yes, and for a few years of her life she is independent of him—until she has to die for him to save the timeline. If she doesn’t die in the Library, he’ll never meet her and Reapers. It’s not just a romantic sacrifice; she knows a little something about paradoxes.
She’s strong, independent, stubborn, confident as hell, and doesn’t take any shit from anyone, even him. Oh, she’ll make it look like it did, but she brushes it off because she knows that he still has so much to learn, and if he brushes something off as not working she’ll continue working on it because it’s what she thinks is right.
No. She’s not independent if her life and her choices revolve around the welfare of one man. I’m sorry, wielding a gun and flirting a lot does not a strong woman make. If anything, she’s strong because she deals with the strife in her life. She’s strong because she’s suffered for so long. But even in her death, her choice isn’t really respected—the Doctor puts her in a sort of computer life thing and it’s just… I don’t know, it’s Moffat who can’t let a character die and it irritates me to no end because sometimes there is justice and honor in a character making that sacrifice and MAKING THAT CHOICE completely.
And you know what, she just happens to be very much in love with him so when she starts seeing him less and less it hurts her because she just happens to love being with him. That doesn’t make her weak, it makes her someone who’s in love, and it makes her a wife.
No, it doesn’t make her weak. Well, that doesn’t make her a wife. The ceremony makes her a wife. Her heartbreak makes her a woman who has lived a very tragic life.
That’s not a bad thing, I sit and I wait hours for my husband to come home, he works anywhere from 16-34 hours at a time and I don’t see him, I live for when I do because I’m in love with him.
Well, that’s your choice. But does River choose to be brainwashed? No. Does she choose to be sent to jail? Not really; the Doctor definitely forces her hand there. And the choices she makes, again, they all have more to do with the Doctor than anything. And we never see the repercussions. That’s what I have an issue with. We never see her strike out on her own. We never see her passion for archaeology when it’s not about the Doctor.
Oh yes, her character has been absolutely ruined.
Her treatment has been terrible and misogynist. She’s essentially a woman in a cage waiting for her man to come and save her at night. She’s a sex object, not just a sexual creature.
Do you understand that my discontent with River’s storyline comes from a place of love for the character? Because if I didn’t care, I would suspend my disbelief and accept the bullshit storyline she’s been given. But I do care. And when I look at the treatment of Rose and Donna and Martha, all of whom were given lives that didn’t just have to do with the Doctor, all of whom made choices that reflected their own values rather than things they had to do or chose to do because of emotional manipulation, I feel bad for incubator!Amy and River.
So does Doctor/River make me upset? Hell yes. Because I wanted to ship it. I do believe that the Doctor should love again. But it doesn’t feel like love. It feels like obligation.
