Some wanky ranting, to clear the tubes

[charamei]

I keep trying to work out how to get this into a review of the 2009 Christmas trilogy without driving it off-course, and I can't; but I feel a need to document it somewhere, because it's important (to me, at least). Therefore, here, have one giant meta wank with a bit of TMI thrown in.

First, the declaration of interests for those who are unaware: I am asexual. So yes, when I wank about Time Lords and asexuality and RTD's insistence on sexualising them, I'm doing so from an unusual angle. Heck, from this position alone I could start ranting about being othered and probably be justified.

But for me, personally, it goes deeper than that.

I had a really, really weird puberty, and I don't mean that in a good way. I knew pretty early on that I had no interest in boys, because, well, I didn't. A couple of wonderfully open-minded people at my primary school (very late in primary, obviously) started calling me a lesbian (implied to be a bad thing) after they saw me hugging and kissing a friend of mine on the forehead, but short of feeling bullied, I ignored them, because I wasn't. I don't think I even had the faintest idea what a lesbian was.

And once I changed schools, it was a non-issue in any case. I now knew not to kiss my friends, and it wasn't until I was fifteen or so that I really started to consider that maybe I should have, y'know, had some sort of sexual interest by now.

Except I had, hadn't I? I'd had crushes, sort of. (Actually I'd had squishes, in retrospect, but let's not get into that here.) I wanted to cuddle. I was theoretically okay with kissing. Just, I had no interest in men.

So I must be a lesbian.

Except I had no interest in women, save for a terrific squish on one of my friends.

So I must be... etc, etc.

It is difficult to put into words how utterly soul-destroying this sort of dilemma is. I spent a good six or seven years rocketing back and forth between straight and gay: I 'just knew' that bi wasn't right, although I did eventually settle on it because, well, logic said that if I was equally unattracted to both... suffice it to say, it hurt a lot.

And then Doctor Who started up again.

And then I started writing Time Lord romance. Asexual romance.

And if was right, and easy, and it made perfect sense that a relationship could proceed in this way and this way but not that way. It was a year or so longer before I found swankivy's website and had my glorious epiphany, but here's the thing - I would never, ever have clicked on that link if I hadn't been prepped by Who.

So when RTD puts in a clever little aside about the Doctor getting off with Elizabeth I, when he starts making metaphorical references to dancing, for me it's worse than merely being othered. For better or worse, this is a character around whom I have accidentally built my self-identity: and every time that gets taken away, I go straight back into that dark, windowless uncertainty of the soul, and there's no escape except that episode of Big Bang Theory in which we are informed that Sheldon has no deal. Except Sheldon... isn't the Doctor.

And if the Doctor isn't asexual, then what am I?

/\/\/\

Now hopefully I can write the damn review without getting my wank mixed up with a more objective discussion of the trilogy.

(In happier news, massive props to Big Finish for once again handling the same issue with tact and intelligence. The 'And you have a son... how did you manage that?' exchange in An Earthly Child made my day.)