So there’s a lot of shorthand for things in poses and compositions, you know?  Like the vantage point affecting how powerful or powerless a character looks.  And there are poses that the internet has become collectively aware are only ever applied to women (and expected to be taken seriously), like the twisty spines and other horrors of the Escher Girl type. And I’ve been aware of those for a long time and made some conscious decisions regarding them. 

But while doing Thirteen, I was there just generating poses and things and I did a few that struck me as ‘wrong.’  And I realized they were wrong because they were a little bit magical girl.  There was a little too much floating meaningfully in space like Sailor Moon that really didn’t fit, and I at first didn’t know why it didn’t fit.  And then I asked myself if I would draw any other Doctor that way and it clanged super hard.

There’s nothing preventing, say, a short 50-year-old British man with big wacky eyebrows and clothes that don’t fit from floating pastel-fully in space with his lips slightly parted if he wants to, but you feel what’s being projected a lot harder when it’s him (any of him) and not Thirteen.   It’s soft, it’s a little weirdly vulnerable, it’s kind of young.  It’s a more subtle off feeling than the ridiculous boobs and butt poses and skin tight boob window outfits, but it was still there.  Because the expectation is that women are good when they are those things and they’re expected to be those things.  

And the fuck of it was like, I get most excited about Thirteen when she’s like, hey, I’m adorable and I’m having fun but I Will Absolutely End You if you continue what you are doing.  Also nose scronch.  But I wasn’t embracing that part, I was getting a little mystical and soft.   Which, again, fine in theory, but asking myself, ‘Would I draw any other Doctor like this?’ revealed largely ‘No.’   Not that I don’t think the Doctor has softness, but I was almost defaulting there for 13 and no one else, and HMMMM, you know?

I wasn’t doing the ‘straight man comic artist’ thing of inflating all the boobs on Earth, no matter the actor’s actual size or shape, but I think I almost robbed her of some power.  I’ve found some much better approaches by filtering every idea through Patrick Troughton first, haha.   There’s certainly some accounting for differences in the portrayal of the character from regeneration to regeneration, so there are ways I could go that I could technically say, ‘eh, this is fine, 11 would do this’ or whatever, but usually it’s because that Doctor doing it is a way of displaying him doing weird gender things, and not because the depiction is inherently strong or core to the character or something.   So I’m keeping an eye on it.

The other wild thing is that I have routinely been reversing or universally applying a lot of gender things to the Homicides crew of two girls, two boys, and one nonbinary person.  I did a collection of headshots featuring all of them with slightly open mouths like sexy lipstick models, knowing full well that’s what I was doing.   (I then made sure they all looked cracked and dry, because.)  So it’s not like I did not know this, but it still almost snuck in while I wasn’t paying attention anyway.

So I basically don’t want to do anything to 13 that I wouldn’t do to a solid majority of the rest of the Doctor because I discovered some leftover biases for ‘ways to depict woman’ even if that ‘woman’ isn’t one, or at least hasn’t been one for 1,000 years.  I don’t want anything to be done to her ‘because it’s acceptable now,’ even if it’s small.   Like, do I love the Doctor Barbie?  Yes. Am I little :| that the Doctor needed to be a small blonde lady for that to be a thing?   Yeaaaahhh.