I haven’t put anything up on here for months! Hope you all missed me (you didn’t), but as previous entries on here have shown to me, there’s not much point speaking if you have nothing to say. But I then noticed that that hasn’t stopped some people on the internet, so I thought I’d write about that.
I like Doctor Who (yes, it’s another one of those posts), having watched it since 1998. I still enjoy it now. Something funny happens sometimes when a new series has started. Friends might ask me after it’s been on, me specifically, “What did you think of the new episode?” That’s fine, I don’t mind people asking that, it’s not the most personal question. (As it was, I thought Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was the best episode in a while, let down only by the fact that I was naked while watching it, and despise my own body- Ah-ha, it was personal after all! You’ve stumbled into my trap, reader!)
Questions like that are fine, nothing wrong with people engaging with you. But I sometimes think it’s a bit silly that someone would be interested in my opinion specifically, as if, having been a fan for a while, my opinion’s more interesting, or that I’m somehow more qualified to judge whether the programme’s good or not. (“Well, I liked that, but I wonder what a die-hard like Tom would think, with his seasoned knowledge, eloquence and charm?”)
The problem is, when talking about the programme with others who like it, I find it easy to get swept up in things. I can forget that it’s just a laugh, that none of it really matters, that we’re just having fun swapping our opinions. Fans of things can do that, and people’s views can become very deeply ingrained, personal to them. I hope I’m getting better on this front, but I occasionally lapse in the company of friends and come across as very opinionated (sorry, Becky), though that’ll normally be because I’m actually annoyed about something else, probably.
On the internet, however, there are one or two people don’t mind if they come across as a little opinionated. At all. Steven Moffat left Twitter a couple of days ago, and the general consensus seems to be that he’d had enough of the trolls on there, telling him that he had to go. Amanda Abbington received death threats after defending him, so perhaps he received some too, who knows? At least Clint Eastwood only spewed his empty babbling at a chair, not a person. (Yet seeing him have his confused conversation with no one does put me in mind of these online fans. The isolation you can see in their anonymous, frustrated ramblings.)
It helps you stay sane at these times to see such attacks bringing the silent, lovely, intelligent majority out of the woodwork, defending strangers who they nonetheless care about and admire. But something else which caught my eye as I browsed those tweets was a link someone had sent to Amanda Abbington: a blog which has given itself the sole purpose of exposing and exploring the inherent misogyny and homophobia of Steven Moffat’s writing. It’s given itself the name STFU Moffat so as to assure the reader of its total lack of bias, and goes into as much detail as possible in its examination of the bigotry that contaminates his work.
Personally, I think the idea’s largely ridiculous. A man’s writing, and frequently joking, about sex, while at times reductive in its representation of different groups, does not mean that he hates women and gays. There’s often a problem of misrepresentation on TV, but is Steven Moffat honestly the worst offender? Really? The people at STFU Moffat might like to ask his wife what she thinks, but then maybe she hates women too. Or perhaps Russell T Davies only left Moffat in charge of the show because he’s simultaneously homophobic and homosexual – that rare and exotic combination.
Mind you, they don’t seem that interested in facts over there anyway. They argue (speculate) that Caitlin Moran may only claim to like Steven Moffat because she is forced to by her position as a woman in the patriarchal media world. In their analysis of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, they wilfully misinterpret lines and scenes as sexist, homophobic or, at their absolute low-point, as making light of rape, by viewing them without giving any apparent thought to their context or tone. In a recent update, “How Moffat Ruined Doctor Who for my Little Sister”, the author writes (after having admittedly made a couple of valid points):
“…it has destroyed her favourite television show for her.
All of this would be forgivable if Moffat was willing to listen to people’s concerns and criticisms about his writing, but he blatantly dismisses all opinions but his own.”
And lo, we come to the actual problem I have.
Why exactly should Steven Moffat take the fans’ advice? What makes the fans so entitled to be heard above the rest of the 8-9,000,000 people who regularly watch and enjoy the show? How are their opinions worth more?
STFU Moffat have made a point of saying that no one who posts for them has ever directly communicated with Steven Moffat to attack him. They do not sink as low as that. They merely post scathing articles, rife with deeply-held personal views about his work, in the public domain, and lament that he simply will not listen to those disheartened fans who care so deeply about their show that they’ll insult and abuse people for it. Well, let’s see what Russell T Davies, who they seem to respect a little more at STFU Moffat, had to say about this in his book The Writer’s Tale:
“Creating something is not a democracy. The people have no say. The artist does. It doesn’t matter what the people witter on about; they and their response come after. They’re not there for the creation.” [p. 104, paperback edition]
And yet some people remain sure that they know best, that if only they were given the chance, they could achieve something better, something that was how things should be. And, like the writers they aren’t, they simply will not listen.
It’s sad to admit, but some fans can be a right bunch of Clints.
Star Shaped 