Amy Pond
Why people love her
She’s fun and brave
Why people hate her
She’s bossy, mean, and a cold bitch
Selfish, stubborn, rude, arrogant, immature, and petty
Stupid, useless
Not worthy of the Doctor, not worthy of Rory
Slut
Poorly written!
What I think about her
Okay, we’ve made it to Amy. I have to say, I have a lot of
feelings about Amy; I love her the most and I also hate her the most. I thought
that she was the best and most interesting companion at the start, but she had
such poor writing that she ended up with the worst development.
I liked Amy a lot in the first few episodes. She had a
strong personality from the get-go, and I thought she seemed a lot like me.
Plus, she has a lot of juicy flaws and interesting quarks to work with. One of
the reasons I didn’t like her as much in later episodes was because I got tired
of her really quickly. This wasn’t because she wasn’t an interesting or
worthwhile person, but because the character didn’t get any meaningful
development after her first few episodes. She just didn’t change. We were told
sometimes that she had changed, but we really didn’t see it. I stopped being
able to relate to her. She rarely talked about her feelings, and while this can
be great as a character attribute, it does make it harder for the audience to
understand her. Those emotional explanations have to be replaced with something
else so that the audience can relate to the character.
And the audience just couldn’t relate to Amy. Some of her
lines were odd and alienating, which did horrible things for her reception
because the audience never got close enough to her to understand her. In this
way I think it was kind of a Donna-gone-wrong situation. She was similar to
Donna in that she had traits that viewers weren’t inclined to like. But unlike
Donna, she was so under-developed that few people grew to understand and
appreciate her. In fact, she came off as a caricature sometimes. Whereas Donna
was sometimes caricatured for the sake of comedy, Amy was caricatured for the
sake of packing in more convoluted plotlines. She was yet another character
whose development was sacrificed in favor of the Doctor’s development. Nearly all
the things we are told about her are there for us to understand the Doctor’s
frame of mind, his guilt and wavering morality. They are not for us to
understand Amy. This is in huge contrast to Donna’s development. I felt that
her story was smoother in the sense that we learned about her for her benefit,
and because we understood her growth so well, we automatically understood how
she had changed the Doctor. We didn’t need to be told, because we saw it.
Nobody’s character development had to be sacrificed for the Doctor’s
development. Instead, the development of each character individually fit
together with the development of the others and each character was enhanced
rather than deprived of development. But anyway, I’m talking way too much about
Donna. I love Donna. Go read my Donna post, because this post is supposed to be
about Amy…
Amy’s personality: Now all that is not to say that Amy
doesn’t have personality. She definitely does. Maybe even too much personality.
I don’t know how they managed it, but I think the writers actually took the
“person” out of “personality.” She’s full to the brim of spunk and sass and
there is no room for the other things that make up a real person. For me, she
went from the most relatable companion in her first episodes to the least
relatable by the end.
She’s bossy, mean, and a cold bitch: Amy is not your typical
nice girl. While I do think that she tends to get judged a little too harshly
for this, I won’t deny that she can be rather demanding and domineering.
I think Amy’s coldness is really interesting. She just isn’t
comfortable with emotions. She rarely gives compliments, which can be hard if
you’re Rory and your love language is words of affirmation. She doesn’t expect
compliments either, which is why I think she gives them to herself. Her love
language is touch, probably because touch is societally powerful whereas
emotional words are societally weak. She wants flings instead of relationships
because she doesn’t want to get close to people (as she knows they will make
her promises and then disappear). Amy undoubtedly gets her ideas of
relationships from society, because she grew up without a family. She never had
an example of adult relationships, she only saw the relationships of her peers.
I think she calls Rory names because she doesn’t know how to express her love
for him. She’s stuck as an eight-year-old, being mean to her childhood
boyfriend. I think this is an extremely interesting facet of her personality
and ties in really well with the idea of not growing up. But it was so
unexplored that I’m not sure if the writer’s intended this to be part of her
character or if it’s just a coincidence or something I made up to give her some
semblance of characterization.
Amy does come off as bossy. This is another way that Amy is
similar to Donna. She sometimes tells the Doctor and Rory what to do. I think
this comes from her being totally involved in whatever she’s doing. She doesn’t
hesitate, she’s confident. She takes charge and makes decisions quickly and
efficiently. She rarely ask for others’ opinions. This is pretty standard for a
boss type, and is also standard behavior for the Doctor; it is, however,
unusual for a female character. Again, she gets judged harshly for going
against what is expected for her gender.
She may have a forceful personality, but she rarely actually
bosses the Doctor around. She is playful with him, but she also venerates him
and very often does what he tells her to do. In fact, she only tries to control
the little things and is absolutely afraid of emotional confrontation. So, she
mostly only bosses Rory around. I think this could say a number of things about
her, though the script is never explicit on this front: It could come from
wanting to feel like she is at home in the TARDIS. She traveled in the TARDIS
before Rory did and she wanted to feel like she really belonged there, and she
probably wanted Rory to think that she belonged there too. Also I think this
was a writing thing to suggest that she had traveled for a long time. Because people
complain that she had only been there a few episodes and was acting like she’d
been there a long time. But, it is implied that she did go on more trips with
just the Doctor before picking up Rory, as they talk about that later. Also,
she had been thinking and dreaming about the Doctor for 14 years at this point,
so it makes sense that she would feel at home and wouldn’t have to take the
time to rearrange her schema like the other companions did. We actually see the
same thing with Rory: when he first steps on to the TARDIS he is prepared and
has been reading up on relative dimensions, so he isn’t shocked. And there are
other reasons for her bossiness too: I personally think that Amy has some sort
of power-complex. This would make a lot of narrative sense, as Amy’s entire
life has been slipping through the crack in her wall and she has lost control
of it. And she is also constantly at the Doctor’s whimsy, as is demonstrated
time and again throughout the series. I think this power thing also plays into
her sexuality, but I’ll talk about that later. But neither of these theories
are really explored by the script. So, finally, I think that the real reason
Amy is bossy is for comedic effect. The writers just think it’s funny that Amy
bosses Rory around, and so they built their dynamic around that. I think that
this is fundamentally based around sexist stereotypes. We would “naturally”
expect the dynamic to be reversed, and funny comes from the unexpected, so make
Amy bossy to the point that it doesn’t make sense and Rory subservient to a
point that is unrealistic. (Only they fail to consider that in reality, which
doesn’t always conform to sexist stereotypes, women can be abusive of their
husbands and that is not funny).
And this is why I have a problem with Amy’s meanness. This
is not a healthy relationship; it is emotional abuse. And it’s meant to be
funny and even romantic. Rory talks about how she hits him, and she’s always
calling him stupid and putting him down. I fail to see how this is funny or
sweet. I also don’t think it has a place in a family show, at least not if it’s
glossed over and excused the way it is here. To me, abuse is against everything
the Doctor stands for. (Although the Doctor actually is also quite abusive and
controlling, I hope that one day he won’t be written that way). I would be fine
with Amy being this way if it was addressed. They could have explored why she
did this, why she thought it was okay, and why she stopped. Because by the time
of the Ponds’ departure, Amy has largely stopped doing this. But it is never
explicitly addressed and Amy’s growth on this front is incidental and goes
entirely unacknowledged. Like maybe the writers just forgot to put those lines
in the later episodes and not that the absence of those lines was supposed to
mean something.
Does Moffat not think that women are powerful enough for
their abuse to have an impact? I don’t think Amy and Rory’s relationship is
realistic because it starts out really quite unhealthy and then somehow ends up
perfectly romantic.
She’s selfish and immature: I can see where people are
coming from in this criticism. I think that one of the biggest themes with
Amy’s character is that she has refused to grow up. She’s naïve in a lot of
ways for most of the series, and she is quite emotionally stunted. But again,
this theme of her character just wasn’t developed enough for viewers to
appreciate. She is selfish in some ways: she has definite priorities when it
comes to people. (Rory, Melody, the Doctor, herself, and then everyone else).
Donna was all about objective equality and just wanted to save anybody. Rose
even wanted to save the Daleks at one point. Amy is different. She has a sort
of normal amount of compassion for other people but she isn’t as concerned, for
example, as Donna is. I think that she is about as selfish as anyone in real
life, but we are used to seeing companions that serve as more of a foil to the
Doctor and therefore we have trouble accepting this about her.
In most of the other companions, we see moments where the
harshness of death and the relativity of the Doctor’s morality gets them down.
Amy never really has a moment like this. She is only ever affected by the
deaths of Rory and the Doctor and she actually embraces the Doctor’s morality
(or lack thereof). She accepts it as how it always is and how it has to be. The
only time she ever questions the Doctor’s morality is in A Town Called Mercy, where he is acting extremely un-Doctor-y. She
sometimes questions his conclusions (like with the Star-whale) but she never
questions the ethical reasoning that got him there. I don’t know whether this was
purposeful by the writing team or if they just didn’t think they had time to
address it.
I think we also judge Amy harshly for her selfishness and
immaturity because of her gender. We have a real problem in our society with
using the moniker “teenage girl” as an insult. And that’s what Amy is. In my
experience, we tend to be more understanding of the hard things that teenage
boys go through while we deride teenage girls for caring about stupid things
and being emotional. Which is probably why Amy tries so hard not to be those
things, and yet we still hate her for acting like anyone her age would. I say
this is unfair because I actually think that the Doctor and Rory are equally as
selfish as Amy is. In fact, I think that the Doctor is much more selfish than
Amy is, because his is a mature and calculated selfishness while Amy’s is an
immature and naïve selfishness. Actually, the eleventh Doctor and Amy are
extremely similar and their relative ages are their biggest difference. The
eleventh Doctor is (at least arguably) worse than Amy in each of the offenses
listed here, and yet we still don’t hate him! I personally think that Rory is
just as selfish and every bit as immature as Amy even though it manifests in
different ways. His heroic nobility comes from a place of selfishness much more
than empathy. He has an inferiority complex and wants to be better than the
Doctor, so he tries to become a medical Doctor, doggedly protects Amy, and even
gets his own legend. He’s really no more empathetic than Amy is, and he does
the things he does for her because he himself can’t stand to lose her. He
constantly passively-aggressively gives her what she wants because he wants her
to feel sorry for him and value him. And there’s more but this post isn’t
really about Rory. But still, Rory is selfish and nobody hates him for it
either.
She’s rude: I actually don’t think Amy really is rude, at
least not in the ways we usually use this word; I think rude usually has a
connotation of rough-around-the-edges social ineptitude. Amy is not socially
inept. She can be forceful at times, but she has a very developed sense of her
relationship to and boundaries with the person she’s addressing. When she
crosses boundaries, it’s purposeful—this is what makes her able to manipulate
people (which she does for better or for worse). She acts very differently
towards Rory than she does towards people she’s just met. She knows how people
will react to her and she plays to that. She’s forward but never off-putting.
Often surprising but rarely unpleasant. I mean, Winston Churchill adored her. And
so did everyone else. She had an ability to be gentle, like she was with her
“Paisley boy” in Victory of the Daleks. She
was very kind and loving towards Vincent Van Gogh and even spent time on her
own just trying to cheer him up.
She’s stupid and useless: For some reason we like to judge
companions on this unrealistic usefulness standard. Like in order to travel
with the Doctor, they must be just as “useful” as him. But what does “useful”
mean? Are regular real-life human beings useful? I don’t think so. So why does
Amy need to be useful? The Doctor doesn’t choose his companions for how
objectively useful they are, he chooses them because they are good people. So
it isn’t the Doctor who creates this bar, it’s the audience. I think it
actually comes from a place of audience jealousy. We get mad at Amy just for
traveling in the TARDIS because we want to. So we say she doesn’t deserve to,
as if we do. But in real life, people are rarely as consistently useful as Amy
is. She comes up with novel solutions and she just gets things. But Amy just
can’t win. When she is successfully useful, people call her a Mary Sue. But do
you know who the real Mary Sue of the show is? It’s the Doctor. He comes up
with impossible solutions every episode, and he is way more clever than he has
any right to be. So sometimes, Amy calls for the Doctor when she doesn’t know
what to do. And that makes her useless? I don’t think it does. True, Amy
sometimes makes things worse. But this is just the structure of TV. It has to
get worse before it gets better. The Doctor also often makes things worse.
True, Amy sometimes gets captured and requires rescuing (a lot, actually, but
this has much less to do with her competence and more to do with the stories
that the writers chose to tell). Sometimes, Amy has to get rescued because it’s
part of a trap the Doctor set. Sometimes, Amy has to get rescued because it’s
part of a trap set for the Doctor. In both these situations Amy is extremely
useful—she just isn’t interesting. And that’s the writers’ fault, not hers.
She’s not worthy of Rory/The Doctor: I think this is another
criticism that comes from jealousy. First of all part of Doctor Who’s canon is
the inherent worth of people and equality. So I don’t think that there’s really
supposed to be room for us to judge who is a better person than who in this
universe; we’re even supposed to be questioning the ethicality of the Doctor’s
decisions about the worth of people who are dangerous villains. And yet viewers
want to compare and rate the characters. That’s natural, I guess. But I’m just
inclined to play the Devil’s Advocate here. I’d say, the Doctor has become so
dark in this series that it’s really him that doesn’t deserve Amy. But anyway,
I don’t really like the comparing of people. I don’t want to be compared to
other people in my life. I already have a complex about not being good enough
for my husband. And so does Amy—that’s why she tries to give him up in Asylum of the Daleks.
I get especially huffy when people try to back up their
arguments for hating Amy by comparing Amy in The Girl Who Waited to Rory in The
Big Bang. I think it’s a little fallacious. It’s like comparing apples and
oranges and just doesn’t have a leg to stand on when you examine it closely:
In The Girl Who Waited,
Old Amy talks about how she is so different from what Young Amy will ever be.
So it’s unfair to judge Young Amy by what Old Amy does because, as the episode
goes to great lengths to establish, they are actually two totally different
people who have years of totally different experiences. It’s also unfair to
compare Amy against Rory because they are also
two totally different people who have years of totally different experiences.
They treat each other differently for a number of reasons besides one just
being a better person than the other. Not only do they have drastically
different desires and personalities that make them prone to different choices,
but they have different experiences. And Amy’s waiting experience was different
from Rory’s. I have compared them here in the way I see it in case I haven’t
convinced you yet:
Amy got accidently left behind on an alien planet that was
trying to kill her. She was let down by the man she loved. That made her feel
bad about herself and bad about him. For those 36 years, she did not know
whether they left her on accident or on purpose, whether they were still trying
or whether they had given up, or even whether she would ever see another human
being again. In order to keep going, Amy told herself that she and Rory did not
love each other—that she had not lost everything. Amy felt like she was
sacrificed. And on top of that, her waiting was pointless, and it gave her the
sense that her whole life was pointless. When Amy saw Rory again, she felt
upset that she had wasted her life and her youth and grown old alone while he
was still young. She was afraid that he would not accept her and that therefore
she could no longer be with him in the way she wanted.
In contrast, Rory chose to wait for Amy. He was not let down
by her; in fact, he had just let her down by literally ending her life, and so
decided to atone for it by guarding her, which she didn’t ask him to do (Hi, I
want to introduce you to a thing called “nice-guy entitlement,” where movies
tell us that when a “nice guy” does something for a girl, she now owes
him—whether she wanted him to do it or not.) It made him feel good about
himself and good about her. He had a distinct purpose and kept himself grounded
in that purpose and in his noble sacrifice. In order to keep going, he told
himself that they loved each other. He may have been bound to stay near the
box, but he was still on earth. He would occasionally see other human beings
(we know he did because of all the sitings and legends). His life was never in
danger, because he was plastic. He knew that one day it would end and it would
all be worth it. When Rory finally saw Amy again, he still looked young and still
had an infinite amount of years to spend with her. He could still be with her
in the way that he wanted.
Rory became a soldier. Amy became a survivor. Not just
because of who they started out as but because of what they went through. Rory
became more loving and devoted. Amy became disillusioned. Rory gained a sense
of himself and an appreciation of his unusual abilities. Amy lost her sense of
herself and her appreciation of adventure.
I’m not trying to say that one experience was harder than
the other. I’m just saying that they are different experiences that lead to
different results. It hardly lends itself to a comparison of relative worth.
I also have another point, one that I haven’t seen anybody
bring up. Rory actually had an experience that was more similar to Amy’s than
the one in The Big Bang explored
above. And he reacted more similarly to Amy in The Girl Who Waited. In The
Doctor’s Wife, Amy and Rory get trapped on the TARDIS by House. In the
midst of running around, they get caught in two different time streams. What is
2000 years for Rory is minutes for Amy. It was an accident—something she had no
control over, didn’t choose, and couldn’t have foreseen. (Sound familiar?) It’s
maybe even more Rory’s fault than Amy’s because he fell behind. We see Rory at
a few different times in his journey, and each time his anger at Amy has
escalated. At one point, he physically attacks her. By the end he has written
on the wall in (presumably) blood terrifying things like “hate” and “kill Amy.”
So… tell me again whose reaction was worse? I assume part of the reason this
hasn’t been talked about is because it may not have been real. House could have
just made up those reactions I guess. But Old Rory was not a hologram or trick
of the eyes, he was a real person. We know that the TARDIS has the capability
to create, archive, and otherwise mess with time streams from Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, so
I say it is at least as likely that in one version of Rory’s timeline he lived
for 2000 years on the TARDIS, trapped and waiting for Amy, and then died and
was replaced just like the older alternate version of Amy. If this is the case,
then that is in fact “actual” Rory’s reaction, just as much as it was “actual”
Amy’s reaction in The Girl Who Waited.
Or at the very least, House took the scenario from their own heads and
personalities, making it just as valid a reaction. Just something to think
about.
And this all goes to show how remarkable it was that old Amy
forgave Rory in the space of a half hour after 36 years. Old Amy may have been
a bit harsh to him, but she also sacrificed her life, her growth, and her
memories of those 36 years just so that Rory could have the Amy he wanted back.
It’s pretty obvious that she still loved him. So if you say you hate Amy for
her reaction in The Girl Who Waited,
know that I feel differently. I love her for it. (At least in part because this
version of Amy gets an arc and some character development.)
She’s a slut: I personally think this is a really interesting part of
Amy’s character. I wish it would have been explored more. Maybe it wasn’t
because this is a family show. But I think they could have easily explored it
in a delicate way, which I think would have been much better than leaving it in
the way it was, with no exploration into the emotions and experience behind the
actions. They just left it there for the kids to absorb and spit out later. The
lack of discussion and purpose to Amy’s attitude towards sex leads me to
believe that Amy’s sexuality wasn’t for her. It was “for the dads” as they say,
and maybe a little bit for the Doctor to feel bad about how Amy grew up without
him there to keep her on the “right track.”
Now I do think it’s fun to see a female character who’s
flirty. In RTD’s era we saw a lot of women’s sexuality played out for comedic
effect (especially Jackie and Donna). So I loved seeing a character whose
sexuality was a big part of her who was taken at least a little more seriously.
It’s still played for laughs, but at least in this area Amy is usually making
the joke instead of being the butt of the joke (well sometimes).
I think Amy gets a bad rap here. People especially seem to
rag on her for cheating on Rory, and for flirting with the Doctor and having a
drawn-out love triangle. I thought that these criticisms made sense until I
re-watched her seasons. People usually
cite Amy’s Choice as the episode
where Amy chooses Rory. I disagree. It’s actually Vampires of Venice where Amy chooses Rory over the Doctor, which is
the episode right after she propositions the Doctor and is the very first
episode where Rory travels with them in the TARDIS. Admittedly it does take Amy
a long time to decide to actually get married, but this has very little to do
with Rory versus the Doctor and more to do with Amy versus herself. At the end
of Vampires Amy is hand-in-hand with
Rory and has made it clear that she wants to be with him. Rory offers to go
back home and Amy asks him to stay. They’ve kissed and made up and Amy has
realized what she appreciates about Rory. She never really goes back on this.
She does continue to be her sexy self but she never cheats on him again. She
rarely actually flirts with the Doctor. The only times are in Flesh and Stone where she kisses him; in
The Big Bang, where she tells him he
may kiss the bride; and sort of in The
Impossible Astronaut, where she calls him a flirt after he flirtatiously
calls her a stalker. That’s really it. Besides that we barely see her flirting;
we mostly just see a lot of Rory not trusting her around men and the Doctor
saying that she’s a flirt (i.e. “she’s Amy and she’s surrounded by Romans. I’m
not sure history can take it”). It’s particularly interesting that Amy didn’t
flirt with the Doctor when she didn’t remember Rory. One might think that she
would be more inclined to flirt with the Doctor without Rory there but she
didn’t. It was like it didn’t even really cross her mind. They were just mates
and he was “sort of funny” like she had seen him as a child. This says a couple
of important things to me: 1) she really only flirts when she’s really happy
(just survived her first big adventure, just saved the Doctor and got married,
and just saw the Doctor for the first time in months). She doesn’t do it when
she’s sad—and she was sad when Rory was gone, even if she didn’t know why. And
2) She was never really interested in a romantic relationship with the Doctor
and wouldn’t have tried to seduce him if it weren’t for her stressing over the
pressure of marrying Rory at 21. If Rory never existed she never felt that
stress and she never tried to seduce the Doctor.
Similarly, Amy remembers Rory in the alternate universe in The Wedding of River Song. Even though
it took her a while to realize who he was, she was the one that remembered him
and not the other way around. In The Girl
Who Waited, old Amy lets herself die because young Amy tells her that it’s
what Rory would want. She kills herself after Rory’s death in one of her first
episodes, Amy’s Choice, just as
readily as she does in her last episode, Angels
in Manhattan. She’s totally devoted to Rory… so why do people say she
isn’t? Is it because of the way she acts in just those first few episodes? I
don’t think this is really fair. First of all, in her first episode, The Eleventh Hour, she isn’t very
devoted to Rory. I’d say this is fair though, because it seems to me that at this point in the timeline they had just
started dating. And she just saw the man she’s been dreaming about her whole
life. So she was a bit weird about it. I think that’s normal. The next time we
see her it has been two years and it’s the night before her wedding. That means
that in her mind it is basically her last chance to see what she could be
missing—final decision time. She has craved adventure and abhorred normality
her entire life and she was about to commit to what she thought was going to be
a boring and stagnant life. (And also, I think that their relationship was just
not at marriage stage). I think we judge her a bit harshly in this instance
too. I think a lot of people would have acted exactly the same in Amy’s
situation. Then pretty immediately she gets the confirmation that sticking with
Rory is the right decision, and she never goes back on it. I wonder if part of
the reason we can’t forgive her is that Rory doesn’t. His insecurities last all
the way until A Good Man Goes to War,
midway through season 6. But we blame his insecurities on her instead of
letting him own his insecurities. I think this is a really immature way to deal
with them, but it seems supported by the writing. I think the writers also
blamed her for them. In reality, I think Rory’s insecurities started way before
Amy, when he was seven and small and nobody liked him. It’s not really Amy’s
fault, but we blame her anyway.
She’s a kiss-o-gram: To me, this is extremely interesting.
It tells me that Amy craves adventure and human connection. She likes sex, she
loves to be sexy. For her it feels exciting to dress up as a character and to
meet and feel close to new people. This could come from growing up without a
family, as it would make sense that she craves relationships but doesn’t know
how to open up emotionally. But, here’s the thing, I had to infer all of this.
None of it is explained in the least by the writing. This is true for so much
of what Amy fans defend about her character and actions. It seems at least as
likely to me that the writers made her a kiss-o-gram just to make her seem sexy
to the viewers.
So sex positive? I don’t know. She recognizes and values her
own sexuality, but at the same time, she does get criticized for it—by the
Doctor, Rory, and all of us. So, you can’t really sell the character’s
sex-positive image if you’re going to have unrefuted criticism of the
character’s sexuality in the same breath.
Here’s a great quote on that topic from this post by Claudia Boleyn:
“Is her being a kissogram supposed to have negative connotations? Certainly, the way the Doctor reacts to the news is rather out of place. Should Amy Pond, a character Moffat made a conscious choice to make flirty and witty and sexy and dress in short skirts, then be shamed for this aspect of her personality? It doesn’t seem right at all.”
Another reason fans tend to hate on Amy is the love triangle
for the ages. I think part of the reason that we tend to think that the love
triangle lasted for so long when it really didn’t comes from the writing later
on that explored Rory’s insecurities. I’m talking about Day of the Moon where Amy gets kidnapped and we hear her talking
about how much she loves Rory but it’s meant to be unclear whether she is
talking about Rory or the Doctor. Similarly, there’s that bit that lasts all
the way into A Good Man Goes to War where
the writing keeps suggesting that Amy’s baby might be the Doctor’s and not
Rory’s. But Amy had nothing to do with this at all. For Amy, the love triangle
ended as soon as it began. The writers co-opted her words to create suspense,
putting in drama where there wasn’t any. Amy was only ever devoted to Rory. We
were doubting her and it was totally unfounded! We can’t blame her for that.
Going back in time a bit, there is one thing about Amy’s
sexuality that I want to address. Of course, it’s Flesh and Stone. This isn’t a problem I have with Amy, since I think
it’s perfectly alright for a character to have flaws and I think this is one. I’m
gonna get real serious for a second and say that Amy sexually assaulted the
Doctor in this episode. I totally understand why she thought it was okay to do.
Because of her characterization and because she’s a pretty girl, she probably
has an assumption that she knows what boys like, and that this is it. It
wouldn’t occur to her to think he wouldn’t want it. And that’s exactly the
problem. She didn’t know that she was doing something wrong. And neither did we,
because we also tend (as a society) to carry that assumption. And now all the
people watching have had their rape culture paradigm reinforced because no one
explained that it is wrong. Or because they can say that it looked like the
Doctor did want it. Or because it was funny, because men can’t be sexually
assaulted or raped by a woman. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of
consent and rape culture and is not helping viewers to be better and show each
other respect. And I think that’s absolutely against what Doctor Who is about. I blame the writers for this and not Amy the
character. Especially because the Doctor later sexually assaults Jenny in The Crimson Horror. And the writers
treat it the same. It’s just meant to be funny. Honestly, the Doctor is
hundreds of years old and he should know better. Amy is 21. They should both
know better, and the writers missed the opportunity to teach them and everybody
else.
Actually, if we’re talking about “sluts” here, I just want to point out that
the 11th Doctor is the bigger slut of the two of them. He’s quite
aggressively sexual. While Amy kissed two people (Rory and the Doctor) the
11th Doctor (not even factoring in other incarnations) kissed significantly more: Amy, Rory, River, Jenny, Clara, and even the
TARDIS matrix in Idris’s body (and probably more but who’s keeping count…)
I think it also may be important to look at why Amy does the
sexual things she does. It’s particularly interesting that she doesn’t
proposition the Doctor until she is already back in her bedroom. After she has explained
that she’s getting married in the morning. This tells me that she actually
wasn’t that eager to sleep with the Doctor but that she actually just wanted to
talk about and explore those feelings but didn’t know how. I think that should
have been addressed, because it seems pretty unhealthy and would probably have
led to lots of regret the morning after if the two had followed through.
The way she dresses: I personally don’t have a problem with
the way Amy “chooses” to dress, as many do. She’s at perfect liberty to dress
however she wants to. I think that Amy’s attractiveness has had a big effect on
her life experience, which is realistic, and would therefore also affect the
way she dresses. However, it is just as much the creators of the show who
choose what Amy wears as it is Amy. And I don’t believe for a moment that it
didn’t cross their minds that Karen Gillan’s beautiful legs would be good for
business. I didn’t think much of it at the time but now I’m reconsidering: the
costume choice of only short skirts has been cast in dubious light now that
Clara also only wears short skirts. I’m starting to think it may be possible
that those in charge have a nefarious agenda to objectify the wymyns. And
actually, short skirts are absolutely impractical for space adventures. I will
say it for all those who don’t know, you can’t run fast in a short skirt and
still cover your butt. The skirt will ride up and you will either have to hold
it down as you run or be exposed. But you don’t have to take it from me; you
can see it in Amy’s first episode, The
Eleventh Hour. In it, Amy is wearing a skirt; because of that, she runs
comically slow, stuck in the background almost out of frame; she struggles to
hop over obstacles the size of a large step; and she is constantly pulling her
skirt down. I know Amy isn’t stupid, so I want to say that maybe she thinks
that she will more successfully get out of trouble using her legs as objects to
be looked at than she will using them for running? Not sure that’s supported.
Either way, Amy doesn’t do much running. Which is unusual for Doctor Who. And which is also a shame
because she would probably be good at it—with her long legs and low weight. I’m
starting to think that this is the reason Amy wears pants in the few episodes
she does: The Curse of the Black Spot
and The Girl Who Waited, because she
has fight sequences; and The Impossible
Astronaut and Day of the Moon because
she actually runs in those episodes, though not for long. They definitely put
her in a skirt whenever possible, even though realistically Amy would not know
in which adventures she would need to run and fight and therefore would most
likely wear pants as often as possible because she hates to be constrained. And
this adds to my growing suspicion that the creators were obsessed with Amy
looking good. Oh, she isn’t attractive when she runs? Let’s have her run as
little as possible. In fact, let’s stick her in a box. Let’s tie her to a
chair. Let’s trap her on the TARDIS. etc. etc. etc.
She’s poorly written: I think this is true, and I know I’m
not alone. There’s just too much that’s missing. There are lots of great subtle
hints at character, but there was just so much to focus on in these seasons
that the audience totally missed it. There were some things about the writing
that were fantastic, but Amy’s character development was not one of them. There
was some really brilliant plot development—repeating themes, mysteries seeded
seasons in advance, and more. As the seasons progressed, it was like Amy just
got forgotten. She was only important for how she related to the plot, existing
in the background.
They had a great story about this family, but they didn’t
have time to really build up the relationships on-screen because of the plots
taking up all the room. A lot of Amy and the Doctor’s bonding takes place
off-screen, and then you are told about it later. I think this probably has to
do with the fact that the writers didn’t want to waste time showing her finding
out things that we already know. We assume that she has all of our knowledge,
because she throws out lines like “you told me what you did to your people” and
“you let him call you sir, you never do that.” But we don’t get to see her
learn and we don’t know what she does and doesn’t know. We don’t get to see how
learning things about the Doctor changes her, because she basically comes fully
formed with all the knowledge of life-changing things already there. She only
has to ask questions to fill in the gaps of what the audience doesn’t know,
like “what are you doing” and “how does that work.”
It kind of seems like Amy has some development, but it isn’t
really character development: it actually takes the form of plot development.
I’m talking in large part about the fact that Amy ages 10 years throughout her
run in the show (and that’s not including any of her time as a child. I’m not
sure if it counts The Eleventh Hour
at all actually, as that’s two years before Amy starts traveling with him
regularly and I just got the 10 years thing from a random bit of dialogue in The Angels Take Manhattan—otherwise I
never would have guessed it had been 10 years). So again, we get told that Amy
has changed when we don’t really see it. I mean, I won’t deny that there is
some change in her character (she does seem a bit older in later episodes—though
maybe she just looks older and doesn’t act it, I can’t tell) but the change is
not anywhere remotely close to ten years’ worth of change.
I mean, that means that at the time of that episode, the
Doctor had been a part of Amy’s life for at least 22, maybe 24 years out of her
life. That’s 24 out of 31 years, approximately, which is over 75%. All but the
first 7 years. That’s a really interesting dynamic and something that we hadn’t
seen in New Who before. The companions before Amy were only with the Doctor for
months. I’d say two years each at the max, and that’s being really generous.
Imagine if we got to explore the influence of that explicitly instead of it
just being a throw-away line, part of the background. We get a tiny taste of
that in episodes like The God Complex,
which gave Amy some of her most interesting development by exploring her faith
in the Doctor. It’s interesting that this episode is the one I think has the
most development (after Amy’s Choice
and The Girl Who Waited), because
this episode is really about the Doctor and not Amy (he’s the one with the God
complex, after all). But again, it’s more part of the background, there to
supplement the Doctor’s development, and like nearly everything else with Amy,
falls off the face of the canon after that one episode. Her supposed loss of
faith in the Doctor did not affect her at all in any other episode. The next
time we see her is in The Wedding of
River Song, and she seems right back to the old Amy. At first I thought
this was because she actually was the old Amy, circa The Impossible Astronaut, which would make sense (the Amy at the
beach should have been the one pulled into the alternate timeline if the Doctor
that was pulled into the timeline was the Doctor at the beach). But it seems it
isn’t that Amy because this Amy knows that River is her daughter, which that
Amy didn’t. Unless of course she somehow got extra knowledge just by being in
the alternate timeline, of what her future was supposed to teach her even
though she hadn’t lived it yet, although that would make her basically
all-knowing, which I don’t think she is. So anyway, timey-wimey as it is, we
never ever get to see the fallout of Amy’s growth in The God Complex. She reverts right back to trusting the Doctor in
every episode after.
This lack of development affects our perception of Amy. Viewers
may complain that Amy doesn’t think about the consequences of her actions. I
say it isn’t Amy who doesn’t care about consequences—it’s the writers. Amy
never has to think about consequences, because the writers never give her any.
Everything she does gets forgotten, or re-written, or is just never brought up
again. For example, the battle-hardened and jaded warrior Amy of The Girl Who Waited never existed.
Neither did the Amy in the alternate timeline who killed Madame Kavarian. These
instances are some of her biggest moments of character development, and they
basically get retracted.
Furthermore, Amy has such large time jumps in her story that
she never gets the chance to react to something for more than one episode. As
soon as something is established, it gets changed or forgotten or invalidated.
Amy’s experience of losing her daughter was basically invalidated in the next
episode with the reveal that Mels was her daughter all along. The only time it
really even gets mentioned is in the alternate timeline, which never existed.
Her experience of being kidnapped for nine months hardly changes her at all.
Amy apparently loses her faith in the Doctor in the God Complex, but we don’t
see this carried through to later episodes. There is no fallout after the divorce
thing is resolved in Asylum of the Daleks—it’s like it never happened. If
anything, Rory changes a tiny bit and Amy doesn’t. Amy doesn’t change when her
family is brought back; this probably makes the least sense. She went through
all that to bring them back and it made absolutely no difference. We only even
see them in one episode!
So many life-changing things happen to her, but the most
incredible thing is that she isn’t changed by any of them.
One last thing: It’s interesting that we seem to love young
Amelia but hate Amy. Because, they are remarkably similar. Shocking point to
bring up, I know, but really. There is no part of young Amelia that isn’t there
in Amy. The one thing that’s really added is a heavy dose of sexuality and the
societal constraints and expectations that for whatever reason make Amy’s
personality traits unforgivable in an adult.
So in conclusion, I’d like to quote that earlier post by Claudia Boleyn some
more:
We know that Amy was invalidated as a child. We know she was taken to see psychiatrists. We know she was a bit of an outcast. We know that she grew up without parents. (At least in one version of the timeline.) We know that she suffered from major abandonment issues. We know that it was a struggle for her to keep hold of her creativity and imagination in the face of the big-bad adult world.
So why was this not a major facet of her personality?
Some would argue that the job of Doctor Who is not to accurately portray mental illness, but I’m of the personal opinion, that giving Amy emotional difficulties and a traumatic childhood was a deliberate narrative choice, and it’s lazy not to portray the consequences of that.
When you create a character, you must create them as a full human being. You must remember that they react like a human. You must give time for their thoughts and reactions and emotions. You must occasionally allow them to refuse to be pleasing to the male-gaze, for the sake of storytelling.
As I’ve said in an earlier post, Vincent, in Vincent and the Doctor, was allowed his moment of ‘ugliness’ as he struggled with mental illness, but Amy was not.Think on that. A character in one single episode was given more scope to have their emotions explored than the heroine of our entire series.
And I do believe it’s partly a sexism issue. I think men are ‘allowed’ to show this ‘ugliness’ whereas women are not. I think Moffat would rather his lady characters were witty and sexy and pleasing, than crying and curled up in bed in dirty pyjamas with tearstained, red faces.
I don’t think Moffat would have found it ‘compelling’ to see Amelia Pond struggle with the staggering emotional repercussions of losing a child.
Which is why we never did.
BOOM. If you made it this far, thank you for reading!
