And all this, my love♡ ...in fear of you.

“I’m still quite socially awkward.”

I’m not saying the small uproar that apparently resulted over this line/scene was rooted in some unconscious sexism but… I kinda am

i like when river song is a mess. i love that. i think she should have been violently traumatized more often. i think they should have showed just how much being raised by aliens who could fracture her mind without any effort and implant orders in her head she wouldn’t even remember receiving or be able to tell apart from her own thoughts, would fuck her up. and above all i think she should have always been paranoid that they’d find her and do it again.

Doctor Who The Doctor’s Wife | 6.03

Eighth doctor autism moments part one billion

​this picture of five wearing half moon bifocals and holding a Green Science Object begs to differ

Sutekh listening to 12 babble about some time traveller and beethoven:

I love Amy's Choice and I love The Day of the Doctor Novelization, but something that only clicked for me recently — is that the reason the Eleventh Doctor is able to instantly recognize and brush past the Dream Lord when he appears — is because for as long as he's had this body, he's been hallucinating the War Doctor’s voice taunting him in a very similar way (minus all the jokes).

Similar like this:

Of course at the end of Amy's Choice, the Doctor sees the Dream Lord reflected in the console, looks distressed, and says nothing, and I just. I love how Moffat used that novelization to flesh out so many different elements he included in his run.

Thinking about the inherent panic of his usual coping mechanism for this situation being unavailable to him. Because in Amy’s Choice, he can't even close his eyes, or the dream will take him.

Do I see… parallels in the Eleventh Hour flashback? 🧐

“Dreams, delusions, cheap tricks.” I see you, canon psychotic Eleventh Doctor.

The way it all fits together! Like, of course, onscreen, we're shown in some outward ways that the way he processes his surroundings are out of step. Increasingly, he learns to rapidly course-correct with altered input.

In The Beast Below, he says “I think a lot. It’s hard to keep track,” which sounds a lot like flight of ideas, a part of thought disorder associated with psychosis. (Associated derailment, circumstantiality, neologisms, echolalia, palilalia, dysphemia, and other disorganized speech patterns, reflect out-of-the-box thought associations, and for this incarnation especially, tend to impact communication.)

Back to The Day of the Doctor Novelization, we see the outward behavior contextualized in relation to his pseudohallucinations, for example:

We also see his thought disorder interact with his auditory hallucinations. In his typical manner, it takes time and confusion over the phone for him — in this case — to identify his hallucination as a separate voice. (Regardless of whether it “sounds” like Armitage or the War Doctor — here the voice is just quoting the War Doctor's greatest hits; processing is clearly relevant).

“The Doctor gripped the console to steady it, although it wasn't the console that was shaking.” Anyway, while the writer ultimately used a 2018 novelization to explicitly depict the Eleventh Doctor’s psychosis, the way it fits so perfectly into his characterization as a whole — merely exemplified in 2010’s Amy’s Choice — leads me to believe Moffat at least had it in his mind from the start.

Tags by @transmasc-rose

#DOCTOR: Because she's forgotten. She's got over four thousand living minds chatting away inside her head. It must be like being#well#me.#yeah yeah yeah#I feel like we gets bits and pieces that something is going on with the Doctor#that isn't shown so much in the show#but gets expanded on (inconsistently) in eu material#and is also stronger in Moffat's run#one bit I think about sometimes is this bit from Forest of the Dead#which not-so-coincidentally was also written by Moffat#I've seen people interpret this as about being psychic#but with what we see of the Doctor#and his relationship with his self#and his regenerations#and at times hallucinations (visual or auditory)#well.

Oh, you're spot on! This reblog is me recording that line in my tag, because how hadn't I thought of it before? Incidentally, in the time since my original tags where I said I didn't read ten as psychotic — okay, ever since imbibing The Waters of Mars Novelization — I have completely changed my opinion on psychotic Tenth Doctor, because,

⚠️ This is now a The Waters of Mars Novelization appreciation post! ⚠️

Time Lord Victorious as a grandiose delusion:

(with notes of paranoia)

A delusion — not because he thinks he's a god (it’s not like there’s not a family in Rome actively worshiping him) — it’s the way the fact of it becomes so irrefutable to him he can’t fathom how anyone could see it differently:

He may be vain, but the Doctor explaining what snow is isn't vanity:

Anyway, the main point is his pressured speech that slips into clang associations he works to focus. It reads to me as a psychotic episode, and probably one connected to mania, even outside the novelization:

So I see the Tenth Doctor's psychosis specifically as being (usually) more connected to mood episodes, and for an incarnation with a lot of depression ever since losing Rose — it clicks with Forest of the Dead (“is ‘alright’ special Time Lord code for ‘really not alright at all’?”) — hell yes is Ten in his Season 4 psychotic depression era. “She's got over four thousand living minds chatting away inside her head. It must be like being, well, me.” yes!

Mister Speeches trying to find the words:

*I actually want to go through all of Time Lord Victorious books/audios/comics/etc sometime so I can talk about this (I only ever listened to like, The Minds of Magnox and some of the audios which were good but super confusing out of the context).

all of the doctors are, by human standards, AuDHD (autistic + adhd). but the question stands which incarnations are more autistic and which are more adhd

more autistic: 1, 3, 5, 7 (!), 9, 12 (!), war, fugitive

more adhd: 2 (!), 4 (!), 6, 8, 10 (!), 14, 15

maxed out on both in equal measure: 11 (!!!), 13

thank you for coming to my ted talk. the master is not quantifiable and has fashioned their copy of the DSM-7 into an origami cyberman

As much as I love the character, it does bother me how, as overtly ableist the depiction of the Master's Drums is… how little it's talked about (that I see)? I love tensimm as much as the next shipper-of-messy-ships, so I really want to believe the narrative isn't saying psychosis made the Master evil, but if it's not the fact that in both The Sound of Drums and The End of Time Part 2, the Doctor is on the brink of convincing him to come with him before the Master argues he can't stop because of the Drums, it's this exchange:

In the text of Season 3, the Doctor thinks the Master is evil because of his mental illness. The fact that RTD didn't plan for the Drums to be an implanted signal until several drafts into The End of Time (according to The Writer's Tale) makes it so much worse.

People talk about In the Forest of the Night for its deeply weird message about antipsychotic medication (that episode is not watchable in a paranoid headspace, but I can forgive ignorant rather than malicious, and I can theoretically appreciate what it was clumsily failing to get at).

But I mostly like the Moffat era's approach to psychosis (especially, in my opinion, Listen), and Bill talking to her dead mother could've been more developed but it's very nice (I actually think Nardole’s comment helps to frame it as normal, and allay potential romanticization from the climax of The Lie of the Land, not that I have an inherent problem with the Moon Knight/Deadpool “madness is a superpower” trope in itself). The Day of the Doctor: The Target Novelization is everything to me for confirming psychosis-spectrum Eleventh Doctor. I appreciated that aspect of the depiction of the Simm Master in The World Enough in Time — his improved mental health only makes him more efficient at his cruelty, essentially retconning RTD's he's-evil-because-he's-crazy. (Earlier Simm Master would never be able to maintain that facade for ten years without Archangel.)

And yet, the fact that I see more criticism (not tumblr specific) for In the Forest of the Night than for The Sound of Drums just shows where some neurotypicals' priorities lie when it comes to the humanity and autonomy of psychotic people. Apparently, it's more dangerous to encourage psychotic people not to take medication than to paint psychotic people as evil.

10/10 tags by @transmasc-rose

#thats a good point#I'm far from the authority on the subject so take everything I say here with a grain of salt#and give Tree's tags a read too if you're reading these#I think a lot of the time people enjoy the drums#as a metaphor#(Something terrible done to him as a child that he never feels he can escape from/he will never be clean)#or the isolation/estrangement that it brought him#(the doctor both didn't believe the drums were real and acted extremely dismissively of them when he thought they were “all in his head”#They only mattered to him when they were “tangible” in a way he could hear. And then. suddenly. he listened.)#or like him BECAUSE he's not a palatable trauma victim#(he does horrible things but the doctor still thinks he's worthy of help)#but while that speaks to RTD's ability to create emotional stakes#He wrote about a seeming hallucination driving the Master into being a “monster”#leaning into the extremely old and tired trope#of the “dangerous madman”#I do think something people latch onto is the Doctor's willingness (in the simm master era) to love the Master despite everything#that no matter how much he kicks and scratches and screams the Doctor doesn't want to abandon him again#and feel comfort in that... certainty? The idea that no matter what he did (you do) someone loves him (loves you)#but then again if you think about the s3 finale#more strictly through the lens of the Master as someone who is psychotic#or otherwise mentally ill in a stigmatized way#then Ten's comments about wanting to keep the Master#locked in the TARDIS and under his care#take on a much more uncomfortable lens.#I can't think of the word at this second. Conservatorship?#The Master chooses to die rather than submit to a final loss of autonomy#and I do think a lot of people relate to him for that too#his unwillingness to forfeit his freedom#but its going to make as many people angry that it was written like that at all#and that people HAVE TO relate to characters like him

Yes yes yes yes, so well put, I think the part you say about him being an unpalatable victim who the Doctor still thinks is worthy of help, about that certainty of not being unlovable, is where I was vibing by “unconditional love” in my original tag — because for all that the concept grates me, I still cry when the Doctor says “I forgive you.” I love him too.

There is a lot to be gotten from the emotional core with the caveat that it’s not less of a twisted love from the Doctor than it may be from the one who kept him drinking out of a dog bowl for a year—

so real of you re: conservatorship! And I’ve seen fic writers look at it with a way that connects it to Ten’s god complex. Isn’t it another social power he’s weaponizing, like when he took down Harriet Jones and averted the golden age of Britain? How often do you hear people express their love for disabled people talking like “this is more painful to me more than you” thinking they’re proving their love? That condescending kind of love where they know what’s best — which happens with many disabilities, but especially psychosis and other stigmatized mental illnesses? How often do they only show care when they can see the symptoms in some way (including when the person causes harm, usually to themselves), showing a complete absence of trust in their own experiences? And even then, only understanding through the external? Ten thinks the Drums aren’t “real,” therefore the Master can’t be trusted to know what's best for himself, so his conclusion (which is widely seen as correct “you can’t trust him”) is to take complete control of his life choices instead of attempting to understand what he actually needs to feel okay. If you divorce it from the way the narrative justifies it with literally every single thing the Master does, the relationship is an everyday kind of saneism all throughout the Year That Never Was taken to its very realistic endpoint. Because the Doctor knows best — “I've always had the greatest secret of them all. I know you.” — and the Master makes the only choice he ever sees being afforded to him, choosing to die.

Also, jumping off of that, just because the Master’s perceived delusion is being “called to war,” how does this not bring up the question if the Doctor’s patronizing superiority is why he thinks the Master’s psychosis is causing his sadist actions — because even while the Master lashes out at everyone just for lack of being heard unless he forces people to hear him — the Doctor has so little respect regarding in the Master's internal experiences, he is completely unable to imagine the Master having any agency over his own actions?

Listen (2014)

( the eleventh hour / the girl who tore through the universe by nikita gill / dead of winter by james goss / the big bang / the girl who tore through the universe by nikita gill / the girl who waited / apollo 23 by justin richards / the big bang )