Apology accepted. Thank you: that couldn’t have been easy to write.

I hope if nothing else you can at least see I was not a troll, but merely a common or garden idiot.

Fair enough! I look forward to future comments from you, then.

I’m sorry that I posted an incoherent, overlong comment in which I allowed minor frustrations about the discussion at hand to hinder both my reasoning and the clarity of my writing. I am doubly sorry that I did so to the point of causing offence, and would like to reassure you that I had no intention of doing so.

If I do become a regular reader and commenter, I’m confident you will see this was a momentary blip. I was going to ask if you could point out specifically what problems you had with my post, but I’ve just reread a small portion of it and in my slightly better-rested state it’s painfully clear…

Finally, I think it’s worth apologising for cluttering up your comments with this nonsense. I’ve irritated you and your readers, and rather distracted from what points I did have. I hope if nothing else you can at least see I was not a troll, but merely a common or garden idiot.

Sorry if I came off a bit condescending

And above all, learn not to compound offense with a “sorry if” non-apology.

I stand by some of my points and I’m a little troubled (not in some jumped-up Internet Guardian way, just as a new reader who feels less than welcome) by how speedily you turned to attacking my presumed motivations, but having seen the quality of the comments on other even vaguely political blogs (and not read through my own again yet) I can’t really hold that against you.

Also, I just realised I never thanked you for your initial post, so thank you! Valuable reading even if I don’t quite agree (and that’s always the most valuable kind of reading, isn’t it?). Keep it coming (and I mean that as encouragement, not permission!)

Yeah, me too. It’s like they really think they run the Internets. ;-)

Wait, what: you’re trying to claim that because there was Martha Jones and Mickey Smith – actually you forgot Mickey Smith, didn’t you? – that makes RTD immune from criticism about institutional racism and use of racist tropes thereafter?

This is a misrepresentation of the point it responds to, which didn’t claim RTD was “immune from criticism” or anything of the sort – merely that “you would need to demonstrate that this was a consistent bias” to make a comment about the writer more broadly. (I’m by no means sure you’d made any such comment at this point, but you seemed happy enough to go with it in your response so I’ll not go any further into that.)

And it does appear that his vaunted refusal to write “a negative take on homosexuality — if the only aspect being portrayed is the trouble, the tears and the angst” does not apply if he’s writing about lesbians.

You could have had a point here – the character did seem to succumb because she was the most emotionally weak, and that was because her relationship had failed, though she seemed pretty clearly defined as extending beyond her romantic interests there – but your subsequent response to questioning on it suggested you had nothing of the sort in mind. Rather, you suggested it was a negative portrayal because she ended up on the receiving end of a bizarre alien… thing. Considering that that was through no fault of her own and every other human outside the cockpit gave in, more or less, to unsympathetic, amoral paranoid groupthink it seems to me she came off quite well. You used a similar little twist later on – you moved from this character being a victim to characters turning out to be evil, which is very different. I don’t know if you’ve been doing it on purpose or not, but either way this sort of thing’s poisoning your credibility for me.

“the black character dies to save the white characters” is a cliched trope.

Just a little thing – the link you included here has nothing at all to do with your comment. In fact, dying first and dying to save others are generally in direct opposition, as the saving traditionally comes pretty late. I don’t really know if the point itself is accurate in general or reflected in Doctor Who (though I suspect not – it does come up rather a lot and I can only think of one other example played by a black actor. And she was a tree. I suspect there may be another in one of the episodes I don’t remember very well, but I can’t actually remember what happened to that character or, indeed, her ethnicity, so all in all she’s not the best example to try and use.) This could well be an honest mistake, but it also smacks of an attempt to provide support for your assertion without actually having to do so. (There is, of course, Secret Option Number Three, that there were plenty of examples of what you were actually talking about on that page and I just didn’t read far enough through the examples. Apologies if so, but I would suggest that you point that sort of thing out in future.)

When the character’s name, address, and survivors’ details are readily discoverable from her employer, ending the story with the survivors sitting round going “we didn’t even know her name” gives the clear message “and we’re not going to bother finding out, either!”

Of course, the survivors could go and find out her name. In fact, it would be strange if the Doctor didn’t – it’s precisely the sort of thing he’d do, which is really why he asked. But the point was – and I thought pretty obviously, given the whole thrust of the episode – that none of them bothered to find out what her name was while she was still alive, when she was just the hostess. It’s easy enough to want to know what someone’s name was when they’ve just sacrificed themselves to save you. The basic thing these people lacked, which caused them to turn on each other so easily, is the sort of empathy that might also have led them to try to find out her name before she did that. Now I appreciate that your discussion of this was in response to other comments which couched the scene in these terms, but that doesn’t give you leave to indulge in such straw-clutching.

Any of these things (if my assessment of your arguments is near the mark) could have been honest errors; any of them could have been quite intentional. Neither possibility fills me with confidence. It’s a shame, because as I said I don’t think I agree with those who think there’s nothing to what you’re saying, and I think with a bit more effort or honesty or detachment or whatever it might be that’s producing this sort of thing by its lack, you’d be producing analysis that I would want to read regularly. On the other hand, of course, I’d rather people were flagging things up that might otherwise go unnoticed than staying silent, even if I find myself frustrated by the way you’ve gone about it here. Whether it’s true or not, it often seems as though you’re more interested in scoring points than in making substantive ones, particularly once you’re engaged in direct argument.

I know this comment has remained rather tied to you alone, Yonmei – I’m not trying to attack you rather than discuss your position, I just thought it best to concentrate on you as the author of the initial post. As you can see I have a tendency to go on a bit; I can only imagine how long I’d be here if I was to cast my net more widely. Similarly, if I’ve been a little too accusatory in tone it’s because I’m a lot more interested in being able to get more from your future posts than I am in assessing this particular episode of Doctor Who. My final apology is for shoddy proof-reading; I’ve spent rather too long on this (procrastination…) and I genuinely cannot afford to go over a comment of such absurd length in fine detail.

*sigh*