The Misconception of Amy Pond
5.01 “The Eleventh Hour”
Rory: How can he be real? He was never real! It was just a game. We were- we were kids. You made me dress up as him!
Right here, with this quote, I knew the characterization of Amy Pond was going to go seriously awry.
Kids love to play pretend, don’t they?
Moffat was a Who fan as a kid, right? I bet he played Doctor Who pretend. Yet somehow I don’t think he assigned the role of Doctor to others. I mean, the Doctor is the hero! You don’t assign that role to another kid! You fight for your right to be the Doctor! Maybe you take turns with who gets to be him. Maybe there’s three Doctors running around at the same time and it gets a big squiggly. But whatever you do, you don’t freely abdicate the hero role.
Unless you’re a girl.
Apparently.
Steven Moffat could not conceive of a little Amelia Pond who would look at the magical Doctor and his blue box and want to be him. He assumed she would want to be with him instead.
Actual little girls, however, are well-versed in this problem. I know I had a lot of contradictory feelings about Indiana Jones. (“He’s so dreamy!” “I want to be an archaeologist when I grow up!” “Mom, can I have a whip for my birthday?”) Most of the heroes- the characters it’s most fun to imagine being- are dudes. If you also happen to find some of those dudes attractive, you’re going to develop the “I want to be you/I want to be with you” duality. This is something that straight guys like Moffat have not needed to deal with, as characters for them were nicely divided into a binary of those they want to be (male heroes) and those they want to be with (the hot ladies male heroes get).
So when Moffat created Amelia he projected this binary on to her, but reversed it. She’s a girl! The Doctor is a dude! Obviously she wants to be with him! I’m not even sure he realizes it’s possible for Amelia to want to be the Doctor. Yes, if someone asked him directly if he thought little girls wanted to grow up to be the Doctor he’d probably agree, but the point is it didn’t occur to him when he was actually writing her character.
And so she becomes The Girl Who Waited, waited for the hero’s return, and not The Girl Who Dreamed, dreamed of being the hero.
Amelia Pond, drawing Doctor fanart in crayon- are you our on-screen fangirl cypher? Dreaming of what male creators think we want: romance! With an awkward, unnecessary love triangle! Uh, girls love that, right?
Enter the series 7 promo still.
I look at this and think- what fantasy does this appeal to? That’s no hero shot, not of Amy Pond.
The girl who waited, carried away.
It’s everything that’s been there from the beginning, that we’ve tried to put aside. The misconception of Amy Pond. As the love interest, the sidekick, and not the hero. In the hero’s arms and not the hero.
Where is the image of Amy Pond, hero? Why can’t that sell the show? Why a damsel in distress shot?
Ah, but we don’t want to confuse the little boys, the mini-Moffats, by making them want to be her, instead of just be with her. How weird that would be!
So Amy will stay as she is, in the Doctor’s arms, safe.
I still maintain this was inspired by La Pieta.
Look up “superheroes La Pieta” or “comic book covers La Pieta” and then tell me no powerful main character would be seen in this pose.
At the risk of bringing my Catholic upbringing into this, Jesus was not generally portrayed as weak either.
I still can’t see this promo image as anything other than a tribute to an iconic statue and pose.
(my bolding)
wait. what. at the risk of bringing *my* cathollic/protestant upbringing into it, christ is portrayed as, literally, the sacrificial animal. he is brought into being explicitly to be ‘sold’, bound, beaten and then crucified. one can certainly argue that he submits by choice, but nonetheless he does submit. a complaint of many commentators, but inside and outside the christian tradition, was/is that christ is an ‘unmanned’ divinity. the pieta is striking precisely because the figure who is rendered limp, vulnerable, – available – is a young male, the very form otherwise deified (haha) as virile and potent and active. the problem with the rendition of amy in the same pose is that it plays *with* not *against* the usual depiction of the young female form. cf the rape of the sabines etc etc etc etc
You’d think somehow Jesus would’ve won points for traditional ‘feminine’ qualities being valued, but…hah, yeah, not so much.
BUT. The thing about Amy here is that I don’t think it’s actually a ‘girl thing.’ It’s a ‘companion thing,’ and it’s sort of how fanning Doctor Who works. Many a child fantasizes about being the Doctor, but we know that’s just play. The Doctor is the Doctor—weird, alien, unique. We, as humans, are not the Doctor, though we can play him on TV. The companion, though…oh! That could be anybody. By the rules of Who, to be a companion is an attainable goal. He could drop down in your back yard one day and ask you to run away with him. As Whovians, we play games about being the Doctor, but we ask ourselves: what would we do if we met him?
And sure, the companions are often women, but there’ve been plenty of men: Ian, Ben, Jamie, Steve, Adam, Harry, Adric, Turlough, Mickey, the Brig, Jack… So yeah, Moffat’s totally capable of being a sexist jerk, but in this case I don’t think it’s that.
Amy’s also got a unique strength to her (particularly as a female character) in that she likes being who she is. She doesn’t want to be the Doctor; she wants to be the Doctor’s friend Amy, who travels with him and saves the day her very own self. (Because okay, seriously, given Amy’s character, try to imagine how those games with Rory might have played out. She probably tied him to a tree and then came and fought off the monsters so she could rescue the hero.)
(Though I would give a hell of a lot for the Doctor to regenerate as a female sometime.)
As for the picture, given we’ve had a couple of seasons, now, of Amy being rather terrifyingly awesome, I’m not really feeling that the strength of her character is being undermined by a picture in which she turns up unconscious after tangling with the Daleks. People do that. It’s usually a sign that they just did something badass and got themselves shot for their troubles.
In fact, I’m hereby reclaiming this poster in the name of feminism. Amy’s the one who just did something stupidly badass to save the day, and the Doctor’s the one who was out of the line of fire well enough to carry her out of the explosion. Amy wins. Bam. And you can’t prove otherwise till we see the episode, so hah.