Moffat

I am a gigantic Dr. Who fan (Tom Baker was my first and favorite until Eccleston and then Tennant and even Smith came along), and ever since (and before) Russell T. Davies stepped down from the post of Writer, Moffat has been writing impressively interesting and dangerous plots with incredible time-travelling plot twists and it’s been all very entertaining and enjoyable. But…

The fly in the ointment is that apparently now that he’s writing Sherlock, which I also have enjoyed, but I haven’t seen this episode, it’s become clear that Moffat is another gigantic, entitled prick of a sexist. With a bit of totally transparent het-boy lesbo-has-the-hots-for-a-man fantasy thrown in.

And let me tell you, I find that pretty disturbing. What is it about these shiny minds that live in men’s heads that bring them to such enjoyable heights of lunatic storytelling that has to become entangled in something so petty and stupid and wasteful and alienating as being a sexist shithead?

I guess because I enjoy the Doctor so, we’ll see. But I’m not interested in tolerating this bullshit, Mr. Moffat, and it is VERY disappointing.

It’s enough to make me molt. And I’m not even biologically male.

What I was thinking about in response to this today has some bearing on the everpresent Racefail discussions about cultural appropriation (the co-opting of other folks’ traditions and ethnic identities). It’s not that folks who are not the “other” (in Moffat’s case, he’s not a lesbian adversary of one of the greatest fictional minds in forensics) can’t write believably about the other. It’s that it’s so often that whoever writes the “other” writes a tired, nasty, bad tempered, stereotypical bullshit fantasy that has no bearing or so little bearing on how folks of that other group actually live that it’s frustrating. Here you are, Mr. Moffat, brain the size of a planet, and all you can write is tired old insulting, awful, unjust tropes that stupidly point out your shortcomings when you write this other? And all you can do is tell your critics to grow up?

Do it yourself, sir. Save us the trouble.