Ugh

[selenak]

I hate bullies. Internet bullies who believe they're propagating "social justice" while doing their bullying are a particularly revolting suspecies. God knows I have my own criticisms of Moffat's writings, but death threats? With an added low of also going after twelve-years Caitlin Blackwood, who plays young Amelia Pond? What she said.

Not that this is new. I'm reminded of the internet back in Children of Earth, Day 4 and after time, when it were RTD and James Moran, but then Rusty wasn't on Twitter. Or going back to the Buffy days, those charmers who wished miscarriage on Marti Noxon when she was pregnant because they hated seasons 6 and 7 of BTVS.

Fandom can be fantastic to be in, but every now and then it makes you recall that "fan" comes from "fanatic", and not in a good way.

Comments

[bobbiewickham]

Hah! Yes! Tone argument! Plus the kid was obviously, like, privileged, anyway.

(Nota bene: I'm not rejecting the very concept of either privilege or the "tone argument," merely the formulaic and dogmatic way certain Social Justice types apply these concepts when it suits them).

[legionseagle]

FWIW, I agree with this; one of the things that annoys me in some respects most of all is that the rabid misuse of social justice concepts as a means both of being bullies and of taking the moral high ground while doing so really damages people who would like to argue, say, for a more nuanced and sophisticated view of women's issues in popular media or better approaches to multiculturalism and so forth. But with the stfu_moffat mob and their hangers on, I'm not even going to concede the "sincere argument badly presented" ground.

Personally I strongly prefer Moffat as Who showrunner to RTD because RTD's attitude to middle-aged women I found so intensely annoying (I'm having a long discussion somewhere else about how The Christmas Invasion really was a terrible example of a male writer tarrying any woman Prime Minister with the Thatcher brush - whatever RTD says, I'm not buying the idea that that wasn't about the sinking of the Belgrano - and how that coloured my opinion of Ten as a character from the outset). But "better than X" or, as I think I'd probably better phrase it"Better than X at dealing with an area which I find fundamentally important to me" doesn't mean "Beyond criticism" - it could even include "Actually, a lot worse than X at dealing with a second area which I don't find so important so failure there bothers me less but which other people might well find at least as troublesome as I do RTD's 'mad, middle-aged and dangerous to know' trope."

But the people who are causing the trouble really are managing that combination of behaving dreadfully and then claiming that they're martyrs when people criticise them for behaving dreadfully, which I can't abide in general, especially not when it's poisoning all possibility of sensible debate on the issue.

If it hadn't been overtaken by the current row, I'd have liked to point out that while I normally dislike Chris Chibnall's work, it was absolutely clear that he and the showrunners had been listening to criticism in that a) the International Space Agency were recognisably based in the Indian sub-continent in a way that accurately reflected current trends in space exploration and investment and broke out of the UK/US binary assumptions of much SF; b) Nefertiti appeared in a leading, non-antagonist role, had agency and survived the episode triumphantly; c) stereotypically sexist attitudes were explicitly raised in order to be mocked; d)the woman as healer/man as fighter trope was deliberately reversed. Unfortunately, any chance about whether this was good enough, whether it worked or how it could have been done better got drowned out in the kerfuffle.