Doctor Who meta (and creative titles)

[seriousfic]

It just occurred to me that, of the cast members in The Sarah Jane Adventures...

Maria is a child of divorce, as Patrick Bateman might say.

Luke is artifically conceived and adopted by a single mother (his "return" to a two-parent household is presented as a Very Bad Thing indeed).

A throwaway line specifies that Clyde is also a member of a single-parent household.

And in Doctor Who... Rose's father is dead (and the later restoration of her family was treated as mitigating circumstances in a tragedy).

Martha Jones is a child of divorce, although I think her parents' split-up could've occurred when she was an adult.

I think Donna Noble has both parents, but I also don't know if she was conceived from the start as a full-time companion.

Don't know about Torchwood, but I doubt there are a bunch of people going "Man, my childhood was awesome!"

So there's this weird message where, to experience the majesty of life, you can't be "normal," you have to have some sort of secret pain or something.

---

While I'm on the subject, isn't there something hinky about Luke being the product of thousands of people being compiled into an Archetype... yet he's lily-white? I'm probably putting more thought into this than the producers, who just wanted "kid with superpowers and endearingly little social skills." But then, by the same token, should he really be vanilla heterosexual? Leaving bisexuality alone, imagine the sexual kinks you'd inherit from having thousands of people contribute to your psyche.

But then, if I wanted to ponder the sexuality of fifteen-year-olds, I'd be in Harry Potter fandom. Ooooh, douche chill!

---

I cannot ship anyone on Sarah Jane Adventures except maybe Sarah Jane and Alan Jackson. Well done, show, you've reduced me to the canon subtext. No, no, Sarah Jane/Maria would be weird. It really does play as a maternal relationship. Plus, you know, thirteen. I choose to believe that no child thinks of sex at that age. No, they just play with slingshots and learn life lessons at supper camp.

---

Christy is presented as such an OTT rhymes-with-witch that it makes me frowny-face when they tease a reunion with Alan. Perhaps they're trying to portray a healthy divorced family, but having her blithely discuss her love life in front of her daughter and ex-husband just makes her look monstrously insensitive. It makes you wonder how Alan stayed with her as long as he did (Maria's, what, thirteen, and the Jacksons divorced six months ago, so even if Christy only got pregnant on her honeymoon and they had a whirlwind engagement, that's over a decade in holy matrimony). Skater boi, drop that zero, get with the hero.

Comments

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

In Season 4 of NuWho, Donna's father will have died, but that's because the actor who played him died in real life. Still, point taken, although I don't think the NuWhoniverse is saying that this is the way that things should be, as much as that this is simply the way that things are. I'm not sure what the stats are for the UK, but the last time I checked, the divorce rate in America was something like 67 percent, which means that, by the law of averages alone, if you've been a child in America at any time since the 1970s, you're more likely than not to come from a "broken home." My parents are still together, and we had a very happy home, but whenever I looked around at my classmates as a kid, I sensed that this made me something of a freak.

On the subject of the UK being different from the U.S., I'd point out that, even with the recent explosion of Asian immigration, the UK's latest census reports show that it's still something like 90 percent white (yes, I looked it up), which means that Luke being Caucasian over there, after being compiled from a collection of local ethnicities, is light years less glaring than it would be if the Bane had conducted a similar experiment in the U.S. (where, by demographic percentages alone, I'd expect Luke to appear Hispanic more than anything else).

Likewise, the statistics of sexual orientation remain relatively steady in reporting that 10 percent of the population is homosexual, so if they really wanted to incorporate that into the show, all it would take is establishing that, one time out of every 10, Luke is attracted to a boy. I must confess that I fail to see your problem with speculating too much on the kids' sex lives, though, but then again, I remember what it was like to be 13, because I wanted to fuck everything that moved, so I'm loath to retroactively project innocence onto that age group now.

Agreed about Sarah Jane and Alan. He could not have made his attraction to her more apparent if he'd literally said, "THIS IS MY 'I WANT TO FUCK YOU' FACE," when he first met her (I mean, seriously, sprinting across the street, just to shake her hand? You know that the mere thought of her has added at least 15 minutes to every single shower he's taken since then). What's more than a little cognitively dissonant about it is that Joseph Millson, who plays Alan, is about 33, a year older than me, while Lis Sladen, who plays Sarah Jane, is 60, a year older than my mom. And yet, they have such undeniable chemistry, even though Lis made me frown when she shot down the idea of them getting together because, "It'd be robbing the cradle!" Memo to Lis: You are still a beautiful woman, and there are countless young men out there, some young enough to be your grandsons, who would walk across hot coals just to go down on you, AND I AM ONE OF THEM, so please stop denying your own inherent hotness, thank you.

Indeed, on a side tangent, my personal fanon is that, in the Trickster's timeline, Alan and Andrea were already fucking on the sly, since Andrea was way more aggressive than Sarah Jane, but they simply weren't telling anyone, because they didn't want to unsettle Maria any further in the wake of the divorce, much less give Chrissie something to screech about. To my mind, that's part of why Alan seems so personally betrayed in his scenes with Andrea, when she confesses what she's done, because it's bad enough that his daughter has been taken away from him, but it's also been done by the first woman he's allowed himself to trust and be intimate with again, after being betrayed by Chrissie. But then, as I say, that's my own fanon.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Chrissie, my take on her is that she got pregnant with Maria accidentally-on-purpose, in order to trap Alan into getting married. She obviously has no empathy for children, either her own or anyone else's, nor does anyone else really seem to exist to her, outside of serving to entertain her or make her feel good about herself. Her reactions to Sarah Jane and Luke being pulled apart in "The Lost Boy" were simply monstrous, because what everyone else saw was an innocent boy in raw pain over the adults who were fighting over him, but all Chrissie saw was a chance to cackle at Sarah Jane's misfortune. She is a total bitch, full stop.