Okay, I have one more aroace rant for this month in me. And it’s gonna be a personal one, even moreso than the earlier ones. AND it’s also gonna reference something that has become inextricably linked with the absolute nadir of fandom (AKA Tumblr) since it was revived. So hunker down, folks.
Even though I didn’t realize that I was some flavor of asexual until my 30s, mostly due to lack of reference points in my formative years, there were always hints there that wouldn’t make sense until viewed in hindsight. The biggest clue that I was aroace in particular was that I had zero interest in 90% of romances in media. I never got into the various 90s Spelling teen dramas or series that overlapped with that genre (such as Buffy) because I would inevitably get bored with all of the dating & sex shenanigans that fueled those shows. The roots of the great shipping infestation in fandom were just starting online, where you could still sort of discuss other topics related to whatever work you were a fan of besides who you wanna see kissing (or more, usually), but that feeling was fading fast. But because it was expected that I’d HAVE to like something romantic/sexy/both, I kept trying to fake it.
I never got why my friends would have crushes on the fictional characters that they liked the most, especially the ones from anime; at least with a live actor from a live action show, I “got it” on some level, but the animated ones struck me as especially alien, doubly so when they’d find an ink & paint person more attractive than someone flesh & blood. Or that said attractiveness was the characters’ sole measure of worth, not talent of a performer or being a compelling character. I got so desperate to try to understand WHY others liked romances (and make myself like them) that I took a whole college course on romance novels. My main takeaways from that class were twofold: one, that genre was “slop” before slop was a thing, and two, if your book wasn’t good enough to sell as a mystery/caper/historical piece/literally any other genre, just toss in a couple sassy conversations & a few sex scenes, and it’ll be picked up by a romance publisher in a heartbeat*. It was exhausting playing along with this omnipresent thing that I just didn’t comprehend.
But it was also around this time that I discovered reruns of the original Doctor Who on a third-string PBS station**.
Man, that original show was a breath of fresh air. The Doctor was the first character that I really “clicked” with on some level that I still didn’t fully understand at that time. He was definitely heroic & principled, even if he wasn’t always nice; he was a character designed more around being distinctive & appealing on a personality level than casting the hunky-wunkiest guy in his vague 20s/early 30s that they could find. He was an alien who hung around with & helped humans not because he had no other option but because his world kinda sucked. He had a constantly rotating stable of companions who he treated like friends or students, and the only hint of a romance would come from either a companion deciding to leave to pursue one or from whoever they were helping in that storyline. And even then, those instances were pretty rare. The show was cheesy, was rich in that uniquely claustrophobic & dusty British TV aesthetic, and had often-goofy effects that managed to become legitimate threats thanks to strong writing & performances. But best of all, it wasn’t designed around that very annoying 90s/00s idea of “sex appeal”, and the main action of any given storyline wasn’t getting derailed for patience-testing romantic tension. There was nothing else like it, and even 15-20 years after its then cancellation, it felt like a breath of fresh air. It was a unicorn.
When the show came back in 2005, they turned that unicorn into yet another horse. CGI effects, slick production, the Doctor being one in a string of conventionally attractive guys with a “last of my kind” backstory, and a focus more on the companion less as a partner & more as both the “real” hero of the stories AND as the ultimate soulmate love interest… it was like the revival was designed to surgically remove everything that had made the original show so refreshing. The clever writing of the original, one that could easily show The Doctor as ultimately heroic while still willing to make what seem like cruel choices (such as the fate of the Silver Nemesis) was replaced by the kind of “monster of the day, with slow building thread to be picked up for the finale, along with smatterings of romance” plotting that I never liked in other genre works of the time. I tried in that first season & a half, I really did, but between the “Rose can do anything” writing & the heavy emphasis on her being The Doctor’s purest truest love, along with other cliche choices***, I just could not get on board. And it just kept getting worse as the show went on, especially with the embarrassingly hornt-up spinoff Torchwood… and then came Tumblr.
Now, I would be lying if I didn’t say Tumblr had some good points. I would never have discovered that I was ace if it hadn’t been for someone sharing a comic about the subject, reading that, and having that “OH” moment when you can finally put a word to something you’ve felt for ages. But personally, the place has been more of a cesspool than a gazing pond. And when the revival of Doctor Who hit Tumblr, it did so at the perfect time for it to become a site-wide obsession:
First, the latest incarnation of The Doctor was a guy who met the Tumblr standards for being a heart throb;
Second, the show was taken over the same guy who was the lead writer for Sherlock, which was already beloved there; and
Third, the series had come out of its “super companion saves the day using hints she gave herself via time travel & that were (admittedly cleverly) seeded through the past seasons, then had a tragic parting with her one true love” finale that made people kinda wild.
If my timeline is off, I… honestly, I don’t care. Point is, this was the era of Superwholock on Tumblr, of everyone being a little hot for David Tennant, and of downright worship of Steven Moffat. This was also the era when Tumblr collectively discovered that you can be the worst kind of bastard to ace people online and no one will care.
Lots of us had to close DMs, cuz people would happily fill them with anonymous insults, threats, & GIFs of gore or hardcore porn. The battle cries of “the A stands for Ally” and “don’t use (insert term and/or symbol here), it’s stealing from people with autism/REAL queer people” were constant. Even mentioning canon examples of ace characters in media would result in comments that… well, at best you’d get “omg, no one CARES about YOU PEOPLE”, a sentiment that would get you rightfully punched when applied to anyone else. I got to witness more than one artist I followed go on her journey of identity discovery and come out of it genuinely declaring, “I used to identify as ace but realized I’m not, ergo no one else can possibly be ace”. And their television creative hero Moffat gave them the bludgeon of declaring us “too boring” to ever be worth anyone else’s time, in fiction or in life. It was a horrible time, and once it was no longer confined to Tumblr, it would metastasize into the much more direct, organized, & vile harassment on other platforms we got in 2018-2019****.
So imagine just how much FUN it was to be someone who had once loved Doctor Who, who realized belatedly that part of why you loved it was because the lead character was VERY ace-coded along with its many other unique creative qualities… and the dominant discussions around it were being led by the same people who celebrated just how generic it had become and who would while away a boring study hall by sending suicide bait GIFs to strangers online solely cuz said strangers were ace. You had a work that showed that someone like you could be the great hero driven by principle & wits, the subject of interesting stories without them being built around their dating woes, that could have friends that rotated in & out of their life but always regarded them fondly… and it was snatched away to great celebration by people who, at BEST, think all you could possibly be is “boring” and removed everything that made this work unique except for intellectual property names. When even my father, a conservative man of relatively simple tastes, declared the revival series to be “dumbed down” with its inclusion of constant “companion equals love interest or tease thereof” subplots, you know that it’s been a FALL.
He still watched it, though. And because of that, he kept me updated on it. He’d show me scenes I’d like, notably Tom Baker’s cameo (which was like seeing a favorite teacher again) & the animated episode, and keep me updated with his always-positive impressions of the newest incarnations. He even showed me a pattern for the striped scarf that Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor wore at one point, since he knew I’d probably like to try making it. So I was never completely unaware of what the show was doing. But I couldn’t really articulate to anyone in everyday offline life why I had drifted away from Doctor Who, and thanks to the Tumblr Exodus & fandom weirdos’ penchant for term searching, I couldn’t vent about it online.
It didn’t help that Doctor Who became yet another Culture War battleground+, when any criticism would be characterized as somehow fueled by hatred towards Jodie Whitaker or Ncuti Gatwa; that people existed who DID hate them just for being who they are didn’t help, so now all criticism had to be hammered into the warring sides’ respective boxes. But little by little, possibly because of Disney money being involved & them being an acceptable target for hate from both divisions of the Culture War, people felt safer commenting on dropoffs in quality. Even after the failed attempt to “bring back the hits” with the double regeneration and casting Rose’s actress as the would-be-impending new Doctor, one that to the fandom’s credit the majority saw through as creatively bankrupt, I still didn’t feel comfortable expressing my own thoughts on why I was disappointed.
It wasn’t until I watched this video during my 2025 Ace Week preparations that I finally heard from another ace person who shared my thoughts. For so long, even other aces would be okay with the constant love subplots, even if they were the most obnoxiously hetero things ever, but now I FINALLY heard from someone in the same boat. Who liked what the show had been because it was free from cliche romances that dragged down the main plot. Who saw The Doctor as a noble ace hero with new layers added & revealed with every incarnation. Who gave up on the revival because the writers were so obsessed with romance that it became obnoxious. Someone else who remembered when that horse used to be a unicorn.
As I’m writing this, it’s been recently announced that there will be no 2026 Doctor Who Christmas special and that the series is on an indefinite hiatus. More than a few people are citing the “bring back the hits” decisions made with last year’s special, but I’m seeing something that I didn’t expect to see. People are talking about the original series again. Lots of comparisons are being made between the Seventh Doctor declaring that the adventures will most definitely continue versus RTD’s favorite laughing wordlessly as a failed “wham” moment. One made people excited for what could have been (which you could argue was seen with spinoff media), while the other was met with confusion at best & eye-rolling dismissal at worst. There IS potential in the idea++, but given that it’s being handled by the same guy who treated the last character she played as the “real” lead (in a way akin to my complaints about Jessie here), it’s just gonna be more of what was already done. The main response from people who enjoyed the revival appears to be disappointment at what it’s become and wondering if its abrupt ending is a mercy kill.
I sympathize. Y’all definitely seemed to love that horse. I just wish your horse hadn’t been what was left after my unicorn was mangled beyond recognition. Either way, we’re both gonna miss it.
And now I’ve reached the hardest part of any given piece, figuring out how to wrap this up nicely. So I’ll put this tangentially related thought out there. There’s a tendency to read a lot of shounen manga heroes as being some level of ace. This ranges from examples where I can see it (Luffy), examples where it’s against canon but still kinda fits (Goku), and examples that I just don’t know (the lead guy in Dr. Stone). As far as “unofficial” representation goes, it’s probably the best we’ll get that doesn’t fall into “heartless & unemotional, not even human” stereotypes. But when I was younger & I had no words for myself besides “weird”, I had The Doctor: a man who’d save the galaxy constantly but could also make the hard decisions, who estranged himself from his homeworld because Earth was just kinda better, who had a large network of friends & colleagues that would always welcome him & be welcomed by him in turn. He might not have had that shounen power scaling, but he was just as much an aroace hero as any of my examples. I just hope that it’s finally safe to articulate that after all this time.
But just in case it’s not…
No idea who made this, since it clearly was swiped by whoever I swiped it from in turn.
Because this is a compulsion with me, here we go with the footnotes:
*= One glance at what’s considered the “good stuff” on BookTok & similar circles makes the stuff I read look like James freaking Joyce. And those didn’t have covers that look like Heartstoppers fanart on their badly written smut delivery systems, either.
**= The PBS situation in my area is… weird. The main one airs “marquee” British dramas, staple shows like Nova & Frontline, PBS children’s shows, and a bizarrely large amount of “reverse Alzheimer's with this simple pamphlet” glorified infomercials (usually during pledge drives, depressingly enough). The secondary one focused on New Jersey issues and was more likely to rerun British & classic comedies, ranging from Red Dwarf or Last of the Summer Wine to SCTV. The third-string one isn’t really considered a PBS affiliate anymore and has become a modern public access channel, but back in the day, it got the stuff deemed “too niche” for the other two. Hence, airing OG Doctor Who at 2am & 6pm on Sundays.
***= I wanted to mention how much RTD in particular LOVED to fall back on “evil fatty fat-fat fat person” in his run but couldn’t fit it into the main piece. But yeah, he had that uniquely British hatred towards anyone with the slightest bit of pudge that you’ve also seen in other works (it’s especially bad in Harry Potter).
****= It feels like even the “ace community” people want to forget this era ever happened, and as someone who was basically shoved violently back into the closet because of it, I really REALLY resent that. Respecting people who were hurt and acknowledging who did it & when it happened is infinitely more important than kowtowing to the perpetrators in the name of “community unity” or some shit.
+= One day I’ll get an essay or Sampler out there on how frustrating it is that literally every single piece of niche/”nerd” media becomes this weird battleground, and how the absolute worst are the ones whose tactic does more to silence criticism of mass media in the name of perceived progressivism (including one particular example who was uniquely bad about it), but not yet.
++= Seriously, “huh, I just regenerated into a duplicate of my ex” is an idea with both dramatic & comedic potential, but let’s be honest, RTD would never be able to realize it.
No comments:
Post a Comment