hi i’m felix! you can find me at butchthirteen on tumblr or at regenderate on ao3/regenderate-fic on tumblr. i will happily talk your ear off about doctorrose, bad wolf’s effects imagined as a disability, anything to do with the doctor and gender, how doctor who engages with greek tragedy, how hilariously inaccurate the fires of pompeii is to actual history, the rose tyler dimension cannon audios, and probably many other things.
i’m mostly a new who fan, i’ve seen a bit of classic but not too much (although i do plan on watching it all eventually). i haven’t engaged with a ton of eu stuff either. i’m particularly fond of rtd as a showrunner, and i have a long and complicated relationship with chibnall era but thirteen continues to be important to me. but actually i think i have to say fifteen is my favorite doctor, at least so far! and i imprinted on rose tyler like a little baby bird when i was twelve and now i can’t ever go back.
Welcome to the Forum. If you want a fun way to jump into Classic Who, or talk our ears off over New Who, check out the TV Club. We’re doing a story a week alternating between modern and classic with new threads dropping every Monday. We’re currently in the middle of Series and Season 1. The current threads are Marco Polo (Serial 4) and Aliens of London/World War Three (S1:E4-5). The Thread on Dalek drops on Monday.
It’s not anything that you have to comment on that week. The four clubs (TV Club, Book Club, Audio Club and Comic Club) are designed so that anyone can go and comment on any thread whenever. New threads will be posted according to a tentative schedule (here’s the one for May 2024: May 2024 Club Schedule) but anyone can jump around and comment whenever. If you want to give thoughts based on your memories of story, great. If you want to wait til you consume said story so it’s fresh in your mind, also great. The important thing is to have fun with it. If all you want to do is lurk silently, absorbing everyone else’s comments, that’s fine too. Have fun, browse through the various categories, comment on anything that strikes your fancy.
i mean i’m very sure i’ll be lurking in the dalek thread, i love that episode! but yeah otherwise we’ll see… i’m somewhere in three’s era in classic, but i don’t remember exactly where, and it’s been a while since i’ve watched.
welcome !!! i hope to see u make some essay-length posts on here on any of these topics i would love to join you. we can have a round table on all the gender stuff going on in the series like a bunch of little academics
Welcome! I’d like to hear your theories on Doctorrose.
I’m in Italy on holiday at the moment and we actually visited Pompeii today! You can find some of my notes about this in the story we just did for the Audio Club, another Pompeii based story Audio Club: The Fires of Vulcan.
I’m about to go post about something else I remembered from my tour but would love to hear about other comments you have.
i would love a round table about all the gender stuff… maybe i’ll make a thread in the off topic category! i have some meta posts on tumblr too but honestly i need to update them…
actually, some of what i feel are inaccuracies are contradictory to your post, so i’ll have to go look for more sources specific to pompeii–particularly i mean the idea that they didn’t know what a volcano was. there are ancient greek and roman works that talk about volcanoes and similar that absolutely predate pompeii! i believe that they were probably surprised by the eruption but the idea that the concept of a volcano was totally unfamiliar does not ring true to me. we also have limited textual evidence of what happened, so it’s hard to know what the actual experience was (common problem when it comes to anything ancient).
also this might be subjective but i don’t think vesuvius is as close to pompeii as the episode makes it seem? i have been to pompeii but it’s been almost six years now.
the other thing that really gets me is just that donna mispronounces “veni vidi vici,” or at least she doesn’t use the pronunciation that they would’ve used at the time and place. i’ve always headcanoned that they didn’t understand her because she didn’t pronounce it correctly. (it would be pronounced more like “weni widi wiki.”)
i’ve always wanted to translate the episode into latin just for the fun of it but i haven’t done it yet! and at some point i want to research the historical accuracy further and write an essay about it but again, haven’t done it yet.
(edit: i forgot about the theories on doctorrose. this is the video essay that got me thinking about them this way, but i do think of them as an allegory for being gay–it’s about the love for each other that they both feel they have to repress, and also about how many of the episodes in rose’s run are about touch as both the problem and the solution, ie. dalek, empty child/doctor dances, new earth.)
The article suggests they didn’t expect the eruption, but not that they didn’t have any awareness of the concept of a volcano to the point that Donna wouldn’t have been able to warn them. There are a number of volcanoes around the Mediterranean that ancient Romans would have been aware of–most notably Mount Etna in Sicily. In a quick search I did find this article (and if you can’t access it and want to read it I’ll figure out how to send you a PDF) that talks about some of the textual evidence we have for the ancient Romans’ scientific understanding of volcanoes–at some point I’ll have more time and I’ll go looking at the sources myself. But it seems really unlikely to me that they wouldn’t have known what a volcano was at all when we have documentation of volcanic activity. I would be more willing to believe that they didn’t talk about/conceptualize volcanoes in the same way as we do–it looks like they don’t always differentiate too heavily between “volcano” and “earthquake.” But again that’s just from a really quick search!
I remember going by car, and we went a ways up the mountain too, so it took 40 minutes or so… I feel like the Doctor and Donna get there very quickly/easily on foot, though, which doesn’t seem likely.
I don’t take issue with Donna pronouncing it that way! It’s just funny to me that it’s treated as evidence of how the TARDIS handles it if you speak the language it’s translating you into when there are other reasons the people wouldn’t understand. None of this is a criticism of the episode; I love the episode, and I don’t think it needs to be historically accurate to be good or enjoyable. But it’s funny to me that it’s not.
but would love to hear about other comments you have.