No one has asked, but I want to write about it anyway, so I’m doing the meme myself for Two/Jamie. And then perhaps later I can do Eight and Charley or something someone else asks for that I’ve forgotten, I don’t know.

SO. Here is my Two/Jamie meme thing then! I hope someone enjoys it! (I had to rewrite this whole thing after I lost it this morning. I may have been really, really upset about it.)

1. When or if I started shipping them: I’m not sure I know, because these things tend to happen to me sort of nebulously.  We ( the girlfriend and I) started watching Classic Who a little over a year ago with Five. At the end of his run, I was very excited about Five/Turlough, and we continued our marathon right into Six’s run, which we had a hard time easing into.  I was all, ‘omg the Doctor is different and kind of a dick’ (it’s okay, I love Six now! Everything around him, no, but him, yes!), so it was rough going.  Meanwhile, I ran into people in the Turlough camp who were also in love with Jamie, and I was intrigued by their talks of incessant clinging. I looked at this old black and white source material and thought there was no way it could be as gay as they told me it was. Black and white was old and uptight, after all. I noticed that The Two Doctors was next in our marathon, however, and I was definitely interested in seeing Two and Jamie in action. When we finished the serial, which I loved despite Peri and Sontarans, I decided I needed to go back and see all of Two’s stuff, post haste, because adorable.  I was devastated when I realized this was one of the eras hit by BBC deletion, but was actually really relieved to learn that there were serials with surviving bits, and that audios and pictures of everything still existed! I started out learning about the era on Tragical History Tour, where most serials are listed as having a running time of N/A, which I took to mean 'There is nothing of this, at all, period!’ Imagine my delight when I heard otherwise! I went from being a person who thought we had something like six episodes and that was all, to learning we had pictures and audios and lots of orphan episodes! Even color photos! I have since always been a person who has been so glad that we have what we do rather than spending too much time lamenting what we don’t.

I was so blown away with how much I loved it all. There was a Doctor and a companion I loved, which was a welcome break from Peri and something I didn’t even realize I could be missing, since I had been just barely tolerating all of Five’s companions until Turlough (who I started out hating, and then grew to love furiously, even!) as well. To have a combo of Doctor/Companion that I utterly LOVED everything about was thrilling and wonderful. There was so much child-like joy in Two’s serials that I feel in few other places. And while I watched, I was literally completely unprepared for how much clinging there was and I was unable to not ship this. Not that I was ever intending not to.   I finished all of Two’s serials, recons included, inside a week, because I simply could not have enough.

2. What I think their challenge is: What I mentioned with Five/Turlough is even more a problem with Two/Jamie and that’s the problem of the Doctor initiating anything.  Morally, it’d be a really awful thing to do to Jamie.  Imagine there’s a person you look up to, and you trust.  Older than you, immeasurably wiser than you, providing you with food, shelter, clothing and the means of getting back to your home time/space.  They also teach you everything you know about the world as it is, and they have demonstrated incredible knowledge about your world as well their own. As much as you would want to think otherwise, if that person suddenly comes to you with a romantic interest, it would be deeply difficult to separate the teacher/student or dominant/subordinate dynamic from your consideration.  Thus, the initiating of something falls to Jamie, which sort of presents another problem.

Jamie is from the 1700s, which means he was raised in a culture that was going to have some moral, mostly religious, problems with homosexuality. So for him to even accept any kind of attraction, let alone say anything about it, he’d need to get over a lot of cultural baggage, probably no matter how strong his own convictions may or may not be.  Theoretically, going along with the Doctor and having him teach and show Jamie the rest of universe by example could loosen everything up, but it takes a lot of time and effort and stuff to undo stuff like that. Ideas are the hardest things to change about people, after all.

3. What makes me happy about them:  I feel like I could say 'EVERYTHING’ and that would about cover it, but it’s not a real answer, is it?  

I love the kind of ease that they enjoy together. They look so obviously comfortable together, and they interact in a way that only people who are incredibly used to each other can.  They behave like they know what the other’s thinking when it really matters and that’s lovely. People who are friends are my weakness, really.

Something that’s really lovely is that despite the intellectual and species gap between them, there was a lot of trust and mutual consideration. The Doctor asks Jamie’s opinion and values it. There’s a scene in the Wheel in Space that seems to be made just to show that the Doctor needs and values both Zoe’s high-logic and Jamie’s practical instinct-y stuff. 

I love that when they go into a situation, they go in very much as a unit.  The Doctor isn’t dragging Jamie along, and Jamie isn’t accidentally slipping into danger. When Victoria expresses her fear, stress and unease with traveling and being in danger, Jamie tells her that’s part of the fun and tells her to trust the Doctor.  He loves it, despite how much clinging in terror he does.

When it boils down to it, it’s the sense of childish enjoyment of the universe, even when they’re coming at it from different perspectives, terrified out of their minds that makes me love them so much. And that that enjoyment and terror is expressed in a good firm cling.

4. What makes me sad about them: The War Games, of course.  I can’t imagine anyone doing this meme for these two doesn’t respond this way.  There are so many really lovely and beautiful things that happen during the course of that serial that when the ending hits, it is really heartbreaking. Imagining that the Jamie who decides to talk to a redcoat rather than attack him and who accepts technology with relative ease will in essence be wiped out is just crushing to me. He’s learned so much while traveling from the Doctor, it feels so wasteful to see it all vanish.  And of course, in shipper land, the Jamie that was able to overcome his cultural hangups in order to ask the Doctor about the next level of cuddling was killed too.

5. What moment I wish had never happened: Despite all I’ve just said about The War Games, there isn’t one.  Jamie’s ending could have been, like so many other companions, to wander off with someone he’d allegedly fallen in love with over the course of a day or two in The Laird of McCrimmon, and I imagine that that wouldn’t lend itself so well to Season 6B shenanigans.  The War Games’ ending of him being forcibly removed from the Doctor sits much better with me. And really, any moment containing Two and Jamie is a good one, whether they’re separating or not. I adore them too much, and moments of them are so few, that I can’t wish any of those moments away.

6. Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: My OTP-ness is showing again in that I just can’t see any other possibilities.  Jamie’s thing for Victoria seemed very one-sided to me in that she seemed to view him as a good friend and a great protector, but nothing like the 'something else’ he might have been interested in. As far as Zoe is concerned, he treats her like a sister in my eyes - someone you protect fiercely, but someone who is not a 'real lady’ and definitely not someone you attempt to romance. 

As for the Doctor, who the hell else is there? Who else does he even interact with? I’d rather him just being quietly fond of Jamie and with no one else than shoved in with someone else. I think it would feel creepy and forced were it anyone else.

7. My happily ever after for them: I’m a shameless Season 6B supporter, even though it really cheapens the impact of The War Games if it exists. It would make me happiest to see Jamie just travel with the Doctor until he couldn’t anymore, both of them saving planets and absorbing each other’s mannerisms and finishing each other’s sentences and seeing and learning about the universe. Jamie having a death in space protecting the Doctor or just from wearing out is preferable to me than one he might experience in Scotland surrounded by (admittedly probably adorable) children and grandchildren and dying of something painfully curable like the flu.  That’s if he’s lucky and doesn’t remember his travels.  If he goes back with his memories, he’s doomed to be branded a mad man.   How do you go back to 18th Century Scotland when you’ve walked on the moon?

When Jamie is gone, I think Two is as well. He goes back to the Time Lords after that and begins his exile, and Spearhead From Space is none the wiser.

I’m planning on addressing a ton of this in the Cyber-Jamie story, so this may explain the giant text wall. Not that this is abnormal for me, as I seem to need to have the capacity to give a thesis on a pairing before I can consider myself a fan.