Loves and stratagems

randomocityjunction:

this is literally the first fanfiction i’ve written in years. {vaguely inspired by this.}

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what’s the use of your love?

{you never used to be very romantic.}

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you loved a boy once, didn’t you?

the first time you met you bought a half-dead flower off him. then you went and killed his mother {you had to, you were saving the world, weren’t you?} and took him with you. you felt sorry for him. maybe that was your first mistake. you kissed him. maybe that was the second. maybe that’s when he fell in love with you. maybe that was the moment that ruined his life.

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So, Vastra basically said that Nine, Ten, Eleven, and even Five and Eight, and every incarnation who looked younger than Twelve, were sort of a ”mask” the old Doctor wore to flirt with young girls. That’s wrong and creepy on so many levels I can’t even count them.

mumblingsage:

alez-on-mars:

Clara: “I did not flirt with him”.
Vastra: ”He flirted with you”.
Clara: “How?”
Vastra: “He looked young. Who do you think that was for?”

While I’m always happy to crit Moffat’s writing, I feel this is reading a little too into it. For one thing, Vastra doesn’t *know* any of those previous incarnations (at least there’s no proof she did). Instead, this line makes more sense as a comparison: he looked young-er, now he looks old-er, and that’s where the difference lies.

And I realize here I may be viewing things too strongly through my ace headcanon lens, but I felt like the rest of the conversation broadened the definition of ‘flirting’ from a mere sexual connotation to a wider ‘trying to appeal to’ sense. The Doctor tries to look young so that he is more appealing to humans in general (‘to fit in’ as Vastra says, comparing it to her mask—which is not seductive at all), not just as a way to seduce companions. Actually, that’s an interesting thought, as his younger-looking incarnations also seem to be some of the more vulnerable (Five and Eight both had nigh-catastrophic regeneration trauma, for starters). Just as babies and small animals look cute to arouse our protective instincts, maybe Time Lords look appealing to disarm potential threats. Hmm…

I agree with Sage here. To my mind, the point that they made with this conversation was that the Doctor is so impossibly old, impossibly anything, that human beings (or for that matter anyone, because Time Lords aren’t your average sapient being) would not be able to relate to him if they had complete insight into this. Twelve certainly doesn’t look as old as he is, but he looks older, and unlike Eleven (or other incarnations that look young) he can’t hide behind his exterior in the same way. That goes for any interaction. Basically, there’s a difference between a mask and a veil. A mask pretends to be a face. A veil is something altogether different.

I really like the observation that younger-looking incarnation are often more vulnerable. Of course, that might well be that creators find it easier to write vulnerability to go with youth. However, it’s appealing to see it in-verse as a subconscious attempt at self-protection.

(via mumblingsage)