More on the Great Dr Who debate..

[green_amber]

.. from email conversation..

Reasons why people didn't like Love and Monsters

- it's not Who
- the Doctor (and Rose) wasn't the main character
- it "confounds expectations" (as if that was a bad thing!)
- it's like a soap opera, and that's NOT WHO

I think at root what we're seeing here is the naked faaaan mentality - we want it to look like the Who
we remember, monsters, aliens, no characterisation and no emotional development - that's for GIRLS. There's also a lot of gender and class issues floating around in there - Dr Who is above soap opera, and , god help us all, popular culture references - it's POSH and for BOYS. (oddly enough, exactly the kind of boys who will get the ELO references - which makes the hostility all the oddder.)

I do think anyone who could say it wasn't funny has had a complete sense of humour failure- but this seems to include people like Swisstone, so I'm utterly bemused..

It's CHANGE. Like I always say, nobody likes that :-)

Comments

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was change per se that bothered me - and I am someone who was only a fan when a child and am not A Fan now.

I didn't think it was funny because I thought the humour was way too heavy-handed and a splendid cast was wasted in the process. As for the gender/class issues - one of the things I loved about Dr Who as a child was the element of escapism which would have been ruined for me if half of it had been set on an inner city council estate like the one where I lived. I was emphaticvally neither posh nor a boy, yet it was definitely for me, not least because it didn't have romance. It had characterisation by the bucketful and subtle inferences about relationships that were a lot more interesting to pick up on than the banality of the Dr/Rose romance - and were drawn out over several episodes.

The focus on the importance of lurv and family life/values smacks to me of the syrupy 'moral' endings of American sci fi series. The obsession with Rose's parent really irritates me as I think it would put children off, if anything.

The pop culture references are so numerous that the stories seem to rely on them - and will date very quickly as a result.

I thought it was tacky, boring, unimaginative and played to an adult/fanboy audience - genrally a bit of an egowank for RTD.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I take (and have previously taken) your point generally, that Dr Who was escapism from the normal for many of us when we were kids, and perhaps especially for girls, from the convention of all girl drama being about teen romance fixations.
But this was an ep that didn't have Rose in at all, practically, so most the above seems to be a coment on the RTD series generally, not this ep. Nor did this ep have a fixation on fathers or family values (which I am also fed up with, believe me, but not nearly as fed up as I am with the Doctor pontificating about how neat the human race is - for chrissakes he's a Time Lord that travels the universe - being this keen on humans is either akin to Aspergist zoo-keeping, or racism against all the OTHER intelligent races in the universe.. anyway..)
I think it did play to an adult fan audience, yes - and unashamedly being one, I enjoyed it, lots. I'm not surprised you didn't. But I don't think it was just for boys (whatever RTD said, he's gay innHE!) - indeed my straw poll is I think that more women than men have enjoyed it of the LJ-fan coterie (tho with some clear exceptions.)

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

We shoudl meet up some time and rant and frighten passers-by.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* today I am so grumpy I might even win an argument - I have just bawled out Costa Rican e commerce slave..