//OKAY LOOK. It’s REALLY important that the Doctor ASKED YAZ AND RYAN if her pushiness was “too bombastic” because ALWAYS in the past the Doctor has felt entitled to be preachy but not anymore, yet she’s still assertive GOD! THIS SEASON IS SO GOOD!!!!!
Let’s talk about how the Master wants the Doctor to shoot Rassilon as much to have the fact that he was used and duped all his life, when he values his autonomy so much, validated by the Doctor.
Let’s talk about how “you never would, you coward” is a bluff of courageous defiance when really he is terrified and his expression, his eyes, plead for the Doctor to comply. His words command, but his face begs and his face pleads.
Let’s talk about how that little shake of his head in the second to last gif proves that.
This is the closest they ever came to reconciliation without any force involved, and it kills me. It kills me.
It bothers me that Missy’s looking down and the “still bad” Master is capable of looking the Doctor in the eye. It implies shame and deference on her part and those emotions shouldn’t be so inextricable from this stage of her redemption. I don’t like how Simm Master’s defiance is equated with evil and Missy’s complacency is equated with good. That’s now how a redemption arc works.
Missy’s own line about how the Doctor’s idea of good is not universal should have been more in evidence in the Series Ten finale.
Mind control? Surprisingly, too easy: not enough of a challenge. No, it’s not enough for people to be obeisant; they have to want to obey him. They have to worship him because they truly desire it.
“I would make it so others would see me only as I wished them to.”
There. He could construct a desirable persona; a worthy persona; a self that had unequivocally earned the right to attention and love. A way to finally placate a terrible, insatiable hunger for validation. And then others would choose to be his.
THANKS FOR ASKING!!!!!!!! *puts on my meta and headcanons hat*
So this is a play on the Master’s self-donned moniker. I’m essentially inverting what most people assume to be the meaning of the term “Master”: control of OTHERS. Really, it’s control of SELF. It’s based onthis Ask that got me thinking about what I might be able to change the URL to in order to reflect how my Simm Master is unique from (or perhaps within) the canon, what things I want to emphasize, etc, and I came up with the notion that he strives to obtain “self-mastery.” Meaning, he wants to be wholly autonomous from others, from their thoughts, their expectations, their will, and, lately, even from the cage of his narcissism, and his need for the validation of others (particularly the Doctor).
At the same time, it’s a note of hope in keeping with Thirteen’s new era, in that anything and anyone can honor the past while changing for the better: he can master his own destructive and cruel tendencies, if he cares to try.
It also came from an rp I did a couple days ago with my main Doctor, @mostincrediblechange, in which Thirteen tells the Master that he needs to learn that he holds value that is discrete, self-contained and divorced, from her or from anybody or anything else, that he can stop chasing the attentions of others, their worship and praise, in order to feel he has value. As much as he professes to be independent, a defiant iconoclast and survivor, this is something he secretly struggles with and is still learning. Which loops back around to the concept of self-mastery again. :3
//There are a few things but I feel like I already rant about them ad nauseam on this blog, LOL.
1) His tenacity to survive, and how that dogged denial of the odds eternally stacked against him is a form of perverse heroism, and honor. Most Masters seem to focus on his cruelty and his manipulativeness, which are qualities he’s learned to develop in order to maintain the upper hand in power dynamics, and things I definitely need to deal with as a writer…but I feel every canon muse is a matter of what parts of the canon resonate with you, and you choose to emphasize. For me, Simm Master appeals initially because he’s so fucking defiant. Even when it shoots him in the foot or (literally) stabs him in the back, he will not yield when his own sense of self mandates that it’s foolish. He self-preserves, and that is not inherently evil. What it is, is inherently alive. No matter what The Doctor Falls tried to prove.
2) Closely connected, as many have more eloquently detailed, such as @natalunasans and @modernwizard, my Master uniquely emphasizes the neurodivergent roots of his hurtful behavior. As a child, and in every face, his telepathic abilities were uniquely sensitive, and rendered his psyche, his feelings, thoughts, and impulses more porous than those of other Time Lords. This porousness–a kind of sci-fi trope for Borderline Personality Disorder, Sensory Processing Disorder, and maybe something on the autism spec–was a source of social ridicule, and also of paranoia, and finally, most importantly, a thirst for autonomy. For self–mastery. Never once was he certain his own thoughts and convictions were his own. So he forced himself to fanatically shut off others, to deny any attempts, direct or indirect, to exert control over himself (a terrible irony is that from childhood Rassilon was already doing this via “the Drums”).
This was great, nuances like this were a GREAT way to show racial microaggressions aren’t always as obvious and violent as smacking Ryan, a black man, on the face, for speaking to a white woman; they include MAKING A BROWN WOMAN FEEL LIMINAL. SHE HAS NO IDEA WHERE TO SIT, WHERE SHE STANDS IN THE SOCIAL HIERARCHY. IT DISORIENTS AND DISEMPOWERS HER. IT MAKES HER AWARE OF HER UNBELONGING.
This scene was really really well done.
This episode was literally the best ever in this show and you can fite me.
//this episode is good discourse on how a historical resistance figure can change things for the better but not without the individual agency and daily choices of hundreds of thousands of subsequent people, both in her own era (synchronically) and throughout time (diachronically).
There is so much embedded in that line. –I have the power to PERMIT you, no matter what your flawed social system condones. –You have the choice to do that to me, or not. –You are responsible for your actions, entirely. –I have the choice to resist you. –I also have the choice to resist you in a way that is dignified and nonviolent.
Okay SO? This is actually a lot more than even the superficial comparison, which bless you, OP, for making.
I’m an art history professor so bear with my nerdgasm.
The title of the painting is Wanderer Above A Sea of Mist/Fog. It was painted by Caspar David Friedrich in 1818. Friedrich was a German Romantic painter and it’s crucial to understand the landscape painting movement for which he was famous, to grasp what the cinematographer shooting this scene of the Doctor was trying to imply.
The title itself is indicative of the Whovian genre: “I’m just a traveler,” the Doctor claims, when her newfound friends laud her for her aid and efforts. This is actually extremely compatible with the Romanticist genre, which encompassed writing, philosophy, and art in the late 18th and early 19th century, from which other movements, such as Transcendentalism, sprang. It’s a response and a foil to the Enlightenment, generally agreed to have been fathered by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that self-governance and individual, Reason-guided moral compass should take precedence over institutionalized thought (both church and state). Romanticism as a foil to the Enlightenment posits all of the strange, unique/baroque, eccentric, uncontrollable, ineffably powerful and sometimes terrifying qualities of the human experience (largely emotion-driven) are crucial to a fully enriched life. This lended itself well to landscape painting, which served as a metaphor for the human psyche, and the full gamut of human emotion (including the bad stuff–rage, fear, grief, loss) in the form of untamable natural phenomena like storms, oceans, fires, earthquakes, waterfalls, etc.
A particular subgenre of Romantic landscape (and of Romanticism) is the Sublime: that which cannot be categorized or fully understood when experienced, that which is awesome and unknowable, simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming (even frightening). Think Niagara Falls. It’s beautiful, but huge and very loud, and if you tipped over into it, you could drown. Now translate that feeling to a painting, and you have a Sublime Romantic landscape.
Which brings us to Friedrich, who often married Christian religious ideology with the worship of the Sublime in nature. Here he is showing us an anonymous man, unknowable, his back turned to us, having climbed a mountain to view the mighty range, partially obscured by fog. He BEARS WITNESS AS THE VIEWER BY PROXY to nature’s–to the world’s, to LIFE’S–amazingness. In the ACT OF LOOKING, he provides us with a CONDUIT for our own wonder.
Icarus 