A Hypothesis for me and fandom
Nov. 8th, 2010 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthOkay, so my brain can’t focus on NaNo this morning (I’m doing pretty good over all though just so you know) and this has been brewing for a long time so I’m going to see if I can write about it coherently.
Hypothesis: that my fondness for ships where there are significant age gaps/different life expectancies is why the Doctor’s ‘wither and die’ issues just never worked for me.
Relevant shipping evidence:
Here’s a example from my earliest “shipping” (aka, I have either become aware of the term and how it could be applied to me, or at least noticed my interest in the romantic plot as highly relevant to my interest in the show). Because starting at the beginning is a logical way to lay out the evidence.
John Sheridan/Delenn (Babylon 5)
We don’t really know how old Delenn is...ever in the show to my quick recollection, but it’s likely she’s at least a bit older than John. But the real clincher is that by the time they get engaged he knows he has a limited time to live (assuming he survives to reach that point), he tells her that he has a time limit and guess what they stay together anyway. To quote John-boy, “Whatever time [he] has left, [he] wants to spend it with [her].”
And Delenn goes into it, knowing that mimbari live longer than humans usually and his life expectancy is even less than normal. I can’t off the top of my head recall any times we delved into her feelings about knowing the man she loves will die within twenty years, but we know she doesn’t think it’s fair to have such a time limit, but it’s rational to conclude that her thoughts mirror John’s, that the time they have together is worth it and something to be savored.
We do know that 80 years after John’s death, as Delenn herself is about to die, she still loves him. It’s pretty clear she doesn’t regret having loved him even when she had to live on without him for so long.
Here are some also early examples that sort of go under the umbrella, but I’m only glossing over.
Lois Lane/Clark Kent (L&C: tNAoS)
(Another example of my early human/alien shipping tendencies.) Relevance:
-People are pretty regularly trying to kill Superman/Clark, and Lois seems to end up in danger a lot too. At some point one of these attempts could work and the other would be left alone; so they hold on to each other more tightly.
-In a last season episode it’s revealed that Superman has a longer life expectancy that human, he hadn’t known about it of course. By the end of the episode no one actually knows what his lifespan might be (thanks to a conveniently timed plot point) but it was an interesting angle to explore I thought. But there was never any talk that this would change the relationship they had now just because in the future it would come in to play. There was no doubt that Clark and Lois would have their lives together, it was just a matter of if he would live on after it.
Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Relevance:
-Well this one’s a little more tricky as they weren’t really together during the show. But my reaction to it parallels my attitude towards the Doctor’s issues. ‘Grab life and love while you have it because you don’t know if it will be there tomorrow.’ Of course in their situation it was more regulations keeping them apart than the knowledge than the constant threat that one of them could die of cancer/abduction/brain problems. But those are the kind of things that linger too.
-I would also argue that Scully’s cancer actually brought them closer together, that in the face of death they actually did grab the time they had left (in a very M/S was of course).
Now let look at my shipping tastes in the Buffy-verse.
Buffy Summers/Rupert Giles (BtVS)
Yeah I ship them, did from about the third episode of Buffy I ever watched. It’s also incredibly relevant to this discussion that I did. Because they fill both the age difference requirement and the life expectancy one.
Because Buffy is the Slayer, this means she has a life expectancy that approaches zero. Slayers don’t live long, and if anyone is very aware of this fact it’s their Watchers. You very seldom see B/G fics that don’t deal with this aspect of their existence. She could die and he could very easily be the one that sent her there to die. It’s an angsty situation, but in the fanfics I love they realize that that threat of death only makes it more important to make the most of the time they have.
This was incidentally the ship I cut my teeth on in the world of fanfic. I’d read fanfic before of course, but for B/G I gorged (this contributed to by bad freshman year of college I admit). So while obviously there isn’t really much to comment on regarding the show, I can reference what I looked for in fanfic. And what I expected, usually got, and saw as logical was to live and fight to stay alive, together. That the looming death of a Slayer was something that held them apart early on but that they resolved not to keep them apart any more when they got together.
And even in the post-finale world, they live dangerous lives, and the age difference still applies so the issues don’t really disappear.
Of less import, but deserving a mention:
Angel/Cordelia Chase (BtVS/AtS)
Relevance:
-Age difference: check. He’s a vampire who’s lived for a couple hundred years, she’s a teenager/woman in her early 20’s.
-Life expectancy: check. She’s a lot more likely to die of battle wounds, he has limited ways of being killed. Vampires don’t age, humans do.
-Yep, I’d say this is in the relevant column. At least as far as those things go.
One more older reference before moving on to fairly recent ones.
John Crichton/Aeryn Sun (Farscape)
Sebations live longer than humans, it’s a simple as that. And there’s really no getting around it (this is a relevant point to the Doctor/Rose discussion we’re getting to...eventually). As seen in ‘The Locket’ where Aeryn is already a fairly old woman by the time Crichton joins her on the planet and it still alive as Crichton grows older until they are functionally the same age when they return to Moya.
This is placed in the back of the audience’s mind although the characters never really comment on it outside the episode. However, they made a point of it clearly in that episode, so it should be ignored. I’m not positive they are aware of it since we’ve never seen them sit and hash out the life expectancies of each other their races, although after the trip to Earth and the partially returned memories from The Locket, I think Aeryn must be at least aware of it. But again, it never matters to the character because what matters is that they can have each other for however long they have.
Okay, so my modern examples are more just age difference and how that might relate to life expectancy than supernaturally created differences.
Betty Suarez/Daniel Meade (Ugly Betty)
-Age difference shows up. Not insurmountable age difference, but it’s there.
Gene Hunt/Ales Drake (Ashes to Ashes)
-Age difference and as it turns out life expectancy differences as Gene’s world goes on and on without Alex in it.
Jeff Winger/Annie Edison (Community)
-Fairly noticeable age difference (although it didn’t actually occur to me until it was pointed out). But once I noticed the should-have-been-noticeable age difference it didn’t change anything about my shipping it, in fact I think it got hotter.
Daniel Jackson/Rose Tyler (personal crossover shipping)
-Obviously this is only head canon, but the way I line up the time lines he’s ~10 years older than her, and I tend to fall on the side of her having a longer life expectancy do to Bad Wolf effects and TARDIS boosted immunities. The age difference they’re obviously aware of but it never matters, her longer life expectancy not so much, partly because again they already lead pretty dangerous lives so it may never have the chance to matter. Even in my totally head canon ship I end up with these things mattering.
Okay, so after all of that evidence, how it relates to my attitude towards the Doctor’s ‘wither and die’ issues.
Okay, so obviously it never really bothered me that a nine hundred year old time lord and a nineteen year old girl could fall in love. Nope seldom even enters my mind, so let’s just not spend any time on that side of the issue. I might have occasionally gotten the vibe that Nine saw himself as a dirty old man for it (not often but I can believe it at least crossed his mind), but not with Ten, and since Ten is the one where the wither and die issues show up so much he sort of is the focus.
This is the situation as I see it:
-The Doctor regenerates, but (until recently) that meant twelve regenerations. He’s already on Nine when he meets Rose and promptly regenerates within a year or so. Now, Nine is an outlier on the short side, but to the best of my knowledge One was an outlier on the long side. So let’s just average it out that each regeneration works out to ~100 years and quite frankly at the rate he’s been going through them that’s probably generous for the future.
-The Doctor has a TARDIS, this means they have access to medical technology from all of time and space. I’m not talking about Cassandra unnatural life extensions, but say nanogenes to keep from being killed by most wounds, and access to the non-awful remedies of New Earth (which isn’t even as far in the future as they could go). How is it not reasonable to assume Rose could live for at least a couple hundred years? And that *without* Time Lord Rose or Bad Wolf side effects.
-There are things that *can* cause the Doctor to just outright die. He talked about it in TEoT, and we saw that in Turn Left (admittedly in that case dying of emo). No matter how many regenerations he had he can still die, he’s not completely immortal.
-Rose has never let on that the different aging thing is a sticking point for her. Yes she may be a bit put off that he might go off and forget her/never mention her after she’s gone, but the idea she’s on the short end of the life expectancy stick doesn’t bother her terribly.
So taking all of that the question seems to become: Is it worth the future pain of knowing I’ll live longer than her but we can have a long and happy life together possibly for centuries before it happens?
The second part is I think the part that he never really thought about, he was too stuck on the first, and that’s what makes the issue so bull-headed in my opinion. He supposed to be a genius but he can’t think of the most basic of math that under-informs so many of my ships, that the time we have is something to treasure and fight to preserve. Instead he gives up because he can’t deal with the wither and die issues when he’s a Time Lord, but thinks his half-human counterpart is the better solution.
And so I end up feeling he’s a idiotic git, in part because these life expectancy issues have show up in so many of my ships before that him chickening out and running from them just seems false and stupid.
So, I do think my hypothesis is at least in part correct, how about you all?
Hypothesis: that my fondness for ships where there are significant age gaps/different life expectancies is why the Doctor’s ‘wither and die’ issues just never worked for me.
Relevant shipping evidence:
Here’s a example from my earliest “shipping” (aka, I have either become aware of the term and how it could be applied to me, or at least noticed my interest in the romantic plot as highly relevant to my interest in the show). Because starting at the beginning is a logical way to lay out the evidence.
John Sheridan/Delenn (Babylon 5)
We don’t really know how old Delenn is...ever in the show to my quick recollection, but it’s likely she’s at least a bit older than John. But the real clincher is that by the time they get engaged he knows he has a limited time to live (assuming he survives to reach that point), he tells her that he has a time limit and guess what they stay together anyway. To quote John-boy, “Whatever time [he] has left, [he] wants to spend it with [her].”
And Delenn goes into it, knowing that mimbari live longer than humans usually and his life expectancy is even less than normal. I can’t off the top of my head recall any times we delved into her feelings about knowing the man she loves will die within twenty years, but we know she doesn’t think it’s fair to have such a time limit, but it’s rational to conclude that her thoughts mirror John’s, that the time they have together is worth it and something to be savored.
We do know that 80 years after John’s death, as Delenn herself is about to die, she still loves him. It’s pretty clear she doesn’t regret having loved him even when she had to live on without him for so long.
Here are some also early examples that sort of go under the umbrella, but I’m only glossing over.
Lois Lane/Clark Kent (L&C: tNAoS)
(Another example of my early human/alien shipping tendencies.) Relevance:
-People are pretty regularly trying to kill Superman/Clark, and Lois seems to end up in danger a lot too. At some point one of these attempts could work and the other would be left alone; so they hold on to each other more tightly.
-In a last season episode it’s revealed that Superman has a longer life expectancy that human, he hadn’t known about it of course. By the end of the episode no one actually knows what his lifespan might be (thanks to a conveniently timed plot point) but it was an interesting angle to explore I thought. But there was never any talk that this would change the relationship they had now just because in the future it would come in to play. There was no doubt that Clark and Lois would have their lives together, it was just a matter of if he would live on after it.
Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Relevance:
-Well this one’s a little more tricky as they weren’t really together during the show. But my reaction to it parallels my attitude towards the Doctor’s issues. ‘Grab life and love while you have it because you don’t know if it will be there tomorrow.’ Of course in their situation it was more regulations keeping them apart than the knowledge than the constant threat that one of them could die of cancer/abduction/brain problems. But those are the kind of things that linger too.
-I would also argue that Scully’s cancer actually brought them closer together, that in the face of death they actually did grab the time they had left (in a very M/S was of course).
Now let look at my shipping tastes in the Buffy-verse.
Buffy Summers/Rupert Giles (BtVS)
Yeah I ship them, did from about the third episode of Buffy I ever watched. It’s also incredibly relevant to this discussion that I did. Because they fill both the age difference requirement and the life expectancy one.
Because Buffy is the Slayer, this means she has a life expectancy that approaches zero. Slayers don’t live long, and if anyone is very aware of this fact it’s their Watchers. You very seldom see B/G fics that don’t deal with this aspect of their existence. She could die and he could very easily be the one that sent her there to die. It’s an angsty situation, but in the fanfics I love they realize that that threat of death only makes it more important to make the most of the time they have.
This was incidentally the ship I cut my teeth on in the world of fanfic. I’d read fanfic before of course, but for B/G I gorged (this contributed to by bad freshman year of college I admit). So while obviously there isn’t really much to comment on regarding the show, I can reference what I looked for in fanfic. And what I expected, usually got, and saw as logical was to live and fight to stay alive, together. That the looming death of a Slayer was something that held them apart early on but that they resolved not to keep them apart any more when they got together.
And even in the post-finale world, they live dangerous lives, and the age difference still applies so the issues don’t really disappear.
Of less import, but deserving a mention:
Angel/Cordelia Chase (BtVS/AtS)
Relevance:
-Age difference: check. He’s a vampire who’s lived for a couple hundred years, she’s a teenager/woman in her early 20’s.
-Life expectancy: check. She’s a lot more likely to die of battle wounds, he has limited ways of being killed. Vampires don’t age, humans do.
-Yep, I’d say this is in the relevant column. At least as far as those things go.
One more older reference before moving on to fairly recent ones.
John Crichton/Aeryn Sun (Farscape)
Sebations live longer than humans, it’s a simple as that. And there’s really no getting around it (this is a relevant point to the Doctor/Rose discussion we’re getting to...eventually). As seen in ‘The Locket’ where Aeryn is already a fairly old woman by the time Crichton joins her on the planet and it still alive as Crichton grows older until they are functionally the same age when they return to Moya.
This is placed in the back of the audience’s mind although the characters never really comment on it outside the episode. However, they made a point of it clearly in that episode, so it should be ignored. I’m not positive they are aware of it since we’ve never seen them sit and hash out the life expectancies of each other their races, although after the trip to Earth and the partially returned memories from The Locket, I think Aeryn must be at least aware of it. But again, it never matters to the character because what matters is that they can have each other for however long they have.
Okay, so my modern examples are more just age difference and how that might relate to life expectancy than supernaturally created differences.
Betty Suarez/Daniel Meade (Ugly Betty)
-Age difference shows up. Not insurmountable age difference, but it’s there.
Gene Hunt/Ales Drake (Ashes to Ashes)
-Age difference and as it turns out life expectancy differences as Gene’s world goes on and on without Alex in it.
Jeff Winger/Annie Edison (Community)
-Fairly noticeable age difference (although it didn’t actually occur to me until it was pointed out). But once I noticed the should-have-been-noticeable age difference it didn’t change anything about my shipping it, in fact I think it got hotter.
Daniel Jackson/Rose Tyler (personal crossover shipping)
-Obviously this is only head canon, but the way I line up the time lines he’s ~10 years older than her, and I tend to fall on the side of her having a longer life expectancy do to Bad Wolf effects and TARDIS boosted immunities. The age difference they’re obviously aware of but it never matters, her longer life expectancy not so much, partly because again they already lead pretty dangerous lives so it may never have the chance to matter. Even in my totally head canon ship I end up with these things mattering.
Okay, so after all of that evidence, how it relates to my attitude towards the Doctor’s ‘wither and die’ issues.
Okay, so obviously it never really bothered me that a nine hundred year old time lord and a nineteen year old girl could fall in love. Nope seldom even enters my mind, so let’s just not spend any time on that side of the issue. I might have occasionally gotten the vibe that Nine saw himself as a dirty old man for it (not often but I can believe it at least crossed his mind), but not with Ten, and since Ten is the one where the wither and die issues show up so much he sort of is the focus.
This is the situation as I see it:
-The Doctor regenerates, but (until recently) that meant twelve regenerations. He’s already on Nine when he meets Rose and promptly regenerates within a year or so. Now, Nine is an outlier on the short side, but to the best of my knowledge One was an outlier on the long side. So let’s just average it out that each regeneration works out to ~100 years and quite frankly at the rate he’s been going through them that’s probably generous for the future.
-The Doctor has a TARDIS, this means they have access to medical technology from all of time and space. I’m not talking about Cassandra unnatural life extensions, but say nanogenes to keep from being killed by most wounds, and access to the non-awful remedies of New Earth (which isn’t even as far in the future as they could go). How is it not reasonable to assume Rose could live for at least a couple hundred years? And that *without* Time Lord Rose or Bad Wolf side effects.
-There are things that *can* cause the Doctor to just outright die. He talked about it in TEoT, and we saw that in Turn Left (admittedly in that case dying of emo). No matter how many regenerations he had he can still die, he’s not completely immortal.
-Rose has never let on that the different aging thing is a sticking point for her. Yes she may be a bit put off that he might go off and forget her/never mention her after she’s gone, but the idea she’s on the short end of the life expectancy stick doesn’t bother her terribly.
So taking all of that the question seems to become: Is it worth the future pain of knowing I’ll live longer than her but we can have a long and happy life together possibly for centuries before it happens?
The second part is I think the part that he never really thought about, he was too stuck on the first, and that’s what makes the issue so bull-headed in my opinion. He supposed to be a genius but he can’t think of the most basic of math that under-informs so many of my ships, that the time we have is something to treasure and fight to preserve. Instead he gives up because he can’t deal with the wither and die issues when he’s a Time Lord, but thinks his half-human counterpart is the better solution.
And so I end up feeling he’s a idiotic git, in part because these life expectancy issues have show up in so many of my ships before that him chickening out and running from them just seems false and stupid.
So, I do think my hypothesis is at least in part correct, how about you all?
