Doctor Who- this might be the last straw even for me.

[TinselAngel]

For fucks sake

Juno Dawson as a writer.

Unbelievable and sickening to read this and imagine a 13-year-old reading it. It's so damaging for this pornographic stuff to be available to children in this way.

They lost me when the singing started. If I want a musical, I will watch a musical. What I don’t want is an alien spaceship landing in the middle of Mamma Mia. Can they not just be a sci-fi show, with sci-fi writers? Sigh.

it’s a shame. I love Tom Baker. I really really enjoyed the Matt Smith era. But it’s now become a completely different show and seems to be in the process of Top of the Pops’ing itself. Hopefully it will be resurrected again one day for pure entertainment without any agenda.

Singing??? When did that happen? (The DT reincarnation episode with Rose finished me off)

I loved Doctor Who as a kid, and I loved the reboot. Thought Ecclestone, Tennant and Smith were all great - the odd duff story here and there, but generally very good.

I think Capaldi had some great episodes, but got off to a very rough start - the personality change was a bit too jarring. Obviously each Doctor is different, but the Ecclestone>Tennant>Smith regenerations felt a lot more subtle. Still watched his entire run, felt it improved once Clara was jettisoned and Bill came in.

We tried with Whittaker, but eventually ended falling off. She had a few good episodes, but her run was generally a bit boring, and the scripts she was given gave her Doctor a sort of Temu Tennant energy, but without the underlying gravitas and darkness of an ancient alien.

TBF I also wasn't a massive fan of a female Doctor (or the Master for that matter, but Michelle Gomez as Missy was great), just because it wasn't a clearly established fact that Timelords could switch sex on a whole, and it seemed a bit weird that every regeneration had been male. I also kind of appreciated the Doctor as a role model for boys - a bit weird, a bit quirky and nerdy, but still a powerful Hero who uses his intelligence to overcome evil. But I was willing to give Whittaker's run a go, but although I felt she had the potential to be great, she was hamstrung by boring stories and flat characterisation. I never even got to the Timeless Child stuff, but I've heard from friends who persevered that it was terrible, and messed with established canon in a pretty bad way.

Not even attempted Gatwa's run.

I’ve just cancelled my 12yo DDs subscription to the Dr Who magazine and replaced it with a young scientist magazine after hearing this.

Ive been a Dr Who fan for almost 5 decades, my whole family are including my children, we even go to comic cons and love cos playing Dr Who characters, but I’m becoming more and more disillusioned with the creators and their obsession with pushing their own personal agendas on fans. I won’t outright stop my DCs watching it, but I certainly won’t be pulling out the stops and getting everyone excited about family Dr Who viewing like we have in the past.

Before anyone starts, I couldn’t care less about the colour of the Dr, I actually quite like NG I had never watched sex education so didn’t know him when he took on the role, I think him and Millie were a good pairing. Jon Pertwee will always and forever be my favourite Dr, even though he played the role before I was even born. I loved DT but have to admit his crusade on pushing his personal beliefs have soured my opinion of him.

This latest announcement has just pushed me to the edge, especially after reading up on this Juno person, which is why I cancelled my DDs subscription and won’t be encouraged her to read shit by someone who sexualises small children.

I think it’s very sad because as others have mentioned the creators are alienating (pardon the pun) its core fan base. Disney won’t care about the show or history behind it, if viewing continues to fall they will just stop showing it.

Can you imagine the shit storm of whining and cancellation if JKR was going to write some episodes? Because of her wrongthink?

But someone who writes porn especially for children (and unintelligible drivel on social media)? Crack on love, that's what we want our show associated with!

This is what I hate about what EDI has become. Queered to all fuck. Only interested in the right kind of diversity (ie queerness), women, old people and the disabled can stand at the back of the queue, as usual.

Absolutely loved all of the re-booted Doctors until Jodie. Such a shame but I just couldn't get my head round the Doctor being a woman.

Ncuti is a decent actor and VERY easy on the eye but the show has become far too obviously inclusive for me, purely for inclusivity's sake. If an actor is good for a role then they're good for a role, regardless of sexuality, race or gender. Doctor Who now just feels like a melting pot for the above just to tick boxes. My DC is gay and gender-neutral and even they got fed up with it.

Glad you liked it.

(Although the song seems pretty explicit to me, which is interesting.)

Sadly not joking. The title is "This Book is Gay" by Juno Dawson. The Women's Rights Network (WRN) visited libraries throughout the UK and discovered that some (e.g. LibrariesWest) have classified it as Young Readers (juvenile) - in other words, as suitable for pre-teens.

I've just checked my county's library service and Dawson's book 'This Book is Gay' can be found by using the search filter Audience - children. It's stocked in the local high schools.

His other book 'What is gender? How does it define us? And other big questions' is stocked in the schools around here under the following categories - School Non Fiction, Teen Non - Fiction and Children Non - Fiction.

I used to run my town's local library for a bit. Knowing that I couldn't officially get these books off the shelves, I just used to accidentally let them slip down the back of the stacks. Oh dear.

Interestingly, while a huge proportion of our YA stock was LGBTQ++ themed, very little of it was ever checked out. It was nearly all dead stock. And yet they kept buying more of it.

I figured if the powers that be could be so obviously driven by an agenda in terms of purchasing stock, I could even things up a bit by losing some of the books that were actually harmful / pornographic.

This is the publishing equivalent of McDonalds prominently advertising "plant based" fast food that nobody buys, isn't it?

I know that in comics and graphic novel publishing, the big incentive for publishing endless boring LGBTQ+ themed material is that you can count on libraries to buy a certain quantity. Non-library sales are often statistically zero.

What happens if libraries start to notice that nobody ever checks this stuff out?

Well done you! Though not a librarian there was a book I regularly slipped down the back, but not for those reasons. How the world was created by Odin who made different varieties of human to live in different places where they should stay. Self published and shelved with the Earth science books. Librarians do make some peculiar choices. These are worse.

I'd never thought about it before, 'young adult fiction' is such a weirdly wrong designation. Wiki tells me it's 'typically written for readers aged 12 to 18' ... so, not adults at all. Adolescent fiction. It may be that a lot of it is bought by adults, but the idea that it's all suitable from 12 up is misguided.

It's all the crying that eventually made me switch off - every episode Gatwa would end up crying - put me right off. You're THE DOCTOR for god's sake - stop crying and get on with saving the world!

It’s a visual medium and they hadn’t had that particular opportunity to make a pretty picture of tears rolling down the Doctor’s face before. I imagine that was as strong a creative impulse as character portrayal.

There definitely was too much of it though.

Repeating the same pretty picture over and over doesn't sound like 'creative impulse' so much as 'one trick pony', which I'm sure is unfair on the actor.

Well obviously it wasn’t the actor’s decision …

I expect it was in what passed for a script.

Maybe reading the script is what made him cry

The YouTube scifi media criticism community has heard about the new writers for Doctor Who, and, in general, they have most of the same concerns that we have here on FWR:

Re the links in my previous post - watching mostly male reviewers talking about this topic has really brought home to me how much men are blunt (and often rude) when discussing things they dislike and disagree with. But they don't receive anywhere near as much anger and pushback as women do when they discuss the same topics (and typically use much more polite language).

honestly - yes Juno Dawson has written 2 non fiction books about LGBTQ issues but the vast majority of her books are YA fantasy in a very similar vein to Dr Who.
The books have a myriad of protagonists, and she's a YA bestseller. Why on earth wouldnt she be approached to write this show??

Well, I suppose they do need a "name" YA fantasy writer since Neil Gaiman is unlikely to be available.