So. I have, at this point, seen every episode of the Classic series featuring Ace, nearly every Main Range story between 1 and 200 that she’s been in, and the Big Finish adaptation of Love and War off the VNAs. I’m noticing a small but nagging difference in how Ace is typically characterized in stuff before and after the start of the Wilderness years.
In the Classic series, Ace is shown to be very charismatic and friendly and very quickly makes friends with people she meets around her age. In every serial (minus Silver Nemesis, I guess) she’s got a sort of one-off companion of her own (ex: Mags, Shou Yuing, Mike Smith). Notably, most of the characters she develops a strong bond with are girls. There’s a strong degree of homoeroticism in a lot of these relationships, enough that fans have coined the term Ace’s Girl of the Week to refer to them. For some of these, the homoeroticism is definitely intentional – Rona Munroe has gone on-record about the dynamic she wrote between Ace and Karra, and it’s hard to imagine certain scenes from Ghost Light being written that way accidentally – while in others it’s less clear. Either way, Ace is pretty firmly cemented as a queercoded character.
In my experience thusfar with the Monthly Range, Ace seems to rarely make close connections with new people, and when she does its mainly with men – usually with a romantic undertone if it isn’t already outright romantic. The only exception to this I can think of is in this weeks audio club, The Genocide Machine with Bev Tarrant (as a side note: Ace becoming friends with a character from the Bennys without meeting Benny herself in this line of canon is so funny to me). Also notable I think, when Ace does get the opportunity to form a connection with other women in the Main Range, it’s [spoilers here for Black and White and beyond] Aristedes and Sally Morgan, both of whom she’s pretty hostile towards. The antagonism makes sense for their shared history, admittedly, but the fact that she seems particularly hostile towards Sally Morgan, who seems to be pretty well in line with the typical Girl Of The Week archetype – going so far as to call her Barbie – is a little… interesting.
Once I noticed the difference in how Ace interacts with new people I couldn’t stop noticing it. I’ve got a few little conspiracy theories about the causes, personally.
Anyways, my questions for you all are these: What do you think of the differences in Ace’s characterization post-Survival? If you’ve gone through the VNAs, her appearances in Gallifrey, or any of her other non-Classic-series appearances, does Ace ever get another Girl? Do any other Extended Universe writers give her back her friendliness? What’s your favorite Ace/Girl dynamic?