Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2011-06-06 01:22 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2011-06-06 01:22 am
Entry tags:
In which I muse on What I Find Horrifying.
So there was a fandom_secrets thread about people being terrified of Doctor Who episodes that didn't scare anyone else they know, and then I babbled at lots of people over IM about how good Paul Cornell is at disturbing me. In a good way! Sort of.
See, Steven Moffat is really good at scaring me in the way I like to be scared. Jumping at shadows, side-eyeing perfectly harmless objects, then laughing about it afterwards. Scary-movie scared. Cornell? Cornell is batting two for two when it comes to reaching deep down into my subconscious, grabbing a handful of existential terrors, and yanking on them.
Then I thought about it, and looked at a list of Who episodes, and realized the only ones I'd found truly viscerally disturbing were Father's Day, Turn Left, A Christmas Carol, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Human Nature/Family of Blood.
Human Nature pushes some of my buttons but not all of them, and thus it's the one that's easiest to articulate--identity issues, having your self mutated or erased. The Doctor becoming a different person? I could've dealt with that. John Smith being a person in his own right, a person who will cease to exist when he opens the watch? Kind of disturbing. The fact that no matter what happens, whether he opens it or not, somebody gets their identity erased? We have entered existential horror territory. And just to put the cherry on top, the fact that the Doctor didn't even consider this beforehand. And this is where I'm grateful to Cornell, because the writing 100% acknowledges that the Doctor is really dark in this episode, and that what he's done here is actually pretty scary.
On the other end of the scale we have A Christmas Carol, which I walked away from feeling okay but not overly impressed. And then I started thinking about it and the fridge horror (no pun intended) grew exponentially. Rewriting someone's timeline? Do not want. Intentionally rewriting someone's timeline in a way that makes them a different person? OH GOD DO NOT WANT. Intentionally rewriting someone's timeline to make them a different person, while they watch and tell you to stop? OH GOD OH GOD FLAILING WITH HORROR THIS IS NOT OKAY ON SO MANY LEVELS. Like--if I read fic where the Master did that to the Doctor, I would be fascinated and intrigued and really shaken up by that, more shaken up than if I'd read a dozen horrifying non-con fics, because there's violation of body and then there's violation of self. And to have it packaged up and presented as fluff? HORRIFYING. All the more so because the presentation is so good that even I walked away from it feeling okay but not overly impressed.
Turn Left--dystopian splinter timeline with the possibility of becoming real if you don't act very, very carefully? Yep, disturbing. I think everyone can kind of understand why though.
And then there's Father's Day, which freaks me out and breaks my heart in ways I can't even articulate because it yanks on too many primal horrors. Unstable splinter timelines. Time loops. The hit-and-run driver popping in and out of existence re-enacting the same event over and over. Reality being wrong. Reality being wrong because you broke it. Reality being wrong because you broke it trying to save one of your parents from dying and oh god she just wanted to hold his hand and reapers and disillusionment and the TARDIS becoming just a police box and and and--Pete Tyler. I love Pete Tyler so much. He and Adelaide Brooke should form a "we died to save reality after an emotionally-unstable time traveler broke it" club.
(Speaking of fridge logic, imagine Adelaide never killed herself and humanity never made it out to the stars, or did so in a vastly different way. That means no Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, which means no Satellite Five, which means no Bad Wolf. Which means Nine didn't regenerate into Ten there, which means the Doctor's ~issues~ developed differently and Ten didn't have the chance to go all Timelord Victorious and save Adelaide Brooke. REAPERS. REAPERS EVERYWHERE.)
In conclusion, I'm a psychological minefield who should not think too hard about time travel and its possible implications, lest I break something.
See, Steven Moffat is really good at scaring me in the way I like to be scared. Jumping at shadows, side-eyeing perfectly harmless objects, then laughing about it afterwards. Scary-movie scared. Cornell? Cornell is batting two for two when it comes to reaching deep down into my subconscious, grabbing a handful of existential terrors, and yanking on them.
Then I thought about it, and looked at a list of Who episodes, and realized the only ones I'd found truly viscerally disturbing were Father's Day, Turn Left, A Christmas Carol, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Human Nature/Family of Blood.
Human Nature pushes some of my buttons but not all of them, and thus it's the one that's easiest to articulate--identity issues, having your self mutated or erased. The Doctor becoming a different person? I could've dealt with that. John Smith being a person in his own right, a person who will cease to exist when he opens the watch? Kind of disturbing. The fact that no matter what happens, whether he opens it or not, somebody gets their identity erased? We have entered existential horror territory. And just to put the cherry on top, the fact that the Doctor didn't even consider this beforehand. And this is where I'm grateful to Cornell, because the writing 100% acknowledges that the Doctor is really dark in this episode, and that what he's done here is actually pretty scary.
On the other end of the scale we have A Christmas Carol, which I walked away from feeling okay but not overly impressed. And then I started thinking about it and the fridge horror (no pun intended) grew exponentially. Rewriting someone's timeline? Do not want. Intentionally rewriting someone's timeline in a way that makes them a different person? OH GOD DO NOT WANT. Intentionally rewriting someone's timeline to make them a different person, while they watch and tell you to stop? OH GOD OH GOD FLAILING WITH HORROR THIS IS NOT OKAY ON SO MANY LEVELS. Like--if I read fic where the Master did that to the Doctor, I would be fascinated and intrigued and really shaken up by that, more shaken up than if I'd read a dozen horrifying non-con fics, because there's violation of body and then there's violation of self. And to have it packaged up and presented as fluff? HORRIFYING. All the more so because the presentation is so good that even I walked away from it feeling okay but not overly impressed.
Turn Left--dystopian splinter timeline with the possibility of becoming real if you don't act very, very carefully? Yep, disturbing. I think everyone can kind of understand why though.
And then there's Father's Day, which freaks me out and breaks my heart in ways I can't even articulate because it yanks on too many primal horrors. Unstable splinter timelines. Time loops. The hit-and-run driver popping in and out of existence re-enacting the same event over and over. Reality being wrong. Reality being wrong because you broke it. Reality being wrong because you broke it trying to save one of your parents from dying and oh god she just wanted to hold his hand and reapers and disillusionment and the TARDIS becoming just a police box and and and--Pete Tyler. I love Pete Tyler so much. He and Adelaide Brooke should form a "we died to save reality after an emotionally-unstable time traveler broke it" club.
(Speaking of fridge logic, imagine Adelaide never killed herself and humanity never made it out to the stars, or did so in a vastly different way. That means no Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, which means no Satellite Five, which means no Bad Wolf. Which means Nine didn't regenerate into Ten there, which means the Doctor's ~issues~ developed differently and Ten didn't have the chance to go all Timelord Victorious and save Adelaide Brooke. REAPERS. REAPERS EVERYWHERE.)
In conclusion, I'm a psychological minefield who should not think too hard about time travel and its possible implications, lest I break something.