The Girl Who Waited Survived: Fan

Rewritings of Amy Pond

Slide 1

I’m going to preface this paper by owning

up to a possibly controversial opinion: I

really, really can’t stand Amy Pond. I was

having a conversation about this with

some colleagues yesterday, one of whom

asked me what it was about her that I

didn’t like, and my answer was well,

actually, everything. Now that’s perhaps

not an entirely acceptable answer for an

academic, but the more I thought about it

the more I realised that what annoys me

about the character can be summed up in

the episode I’m, rather handily, talking

about today. And what’s more, what I don’t

like about her can be contrasted with the

immense possibilities that are open for

her, particularly in fan fiction. What

I'm going to do in this paper then, is use

Amy Pond to move away from Henry Jenkins’

1992 understanding of fans as ‘poachers

of textual meanings,’ who ‘actively

struggle with and against the meanings

imposed on them by their borrowed

materials’ (1992, 33). Fans then, are

acting not only from a position of

resistance, but from what Bertha Chin

calls a socially subordinate space.

Instead, I want to make the case for fans

actively seeking out weaknesses and

points of contention within texts, and

addressing these in their own works.

Slide 2

The depiction of female characters under

Steven Moffat’s tenure as Doctor Who

showrunner has long been a bone of

contention among fans and critics. Jane

Clare Jones writes that his “tendency to

write women plucked straight from a box

marked "tired old tropes" has seriously

affected the show's dramatic power” while

Foz Meadows argues that Moffat has a habit

of depowering his female characters to

make his male protagonists look stronger.

Slide 3

Conversely, Michael Hogan considered Amy

“the joint best assistant of the rebooted

Who era – far superior to Catherine Tate

and Freema Agyeman, equally as excellent

as Billie Piper” and Patrick Mulkern

states that Moffat “seems compelled to

bamboozle us with enigmatic women”, River

and Amy among them. This polarisation of

opinion, however, seemed to come to a head

with the sixth season episode The Girl Who

Waited . The Guardian ’s Dan Martin wrote that

the episode contained “the series’ most

tearjerking suckerpunch so far” and

called it “damn near perfect”, while

IGN’s Matt Risley praised writer, Tom

McRae, for giving a “simple yet

refreshingly new examination of Amy

Pond”. However, Lindsay Miller argues

that “The writers cannot seem to come up

with anything for [Amy] to do that doesn’t

involve being a sexual or romantic

object, a damsel in distress, or – more

recently – a uterus in a box” and Phoebe

North writes “Now that I’ve had a more

concrete vision of what Amy could be

dangled in front of me I want a sign of that

woman  on the actual show.  I want some sign

that Amy can grow into a brilliant, kick

ass person even as she stands by her

husband’s side”.

But it’s not just in episode reviews

that fans are able to address their

problems with Amy. The amount of Doctor Who

fanfiction published online has

increased since the rebooted series began

to air in 2005: the show currently has

more than 41,500 stories posted to

fanfiction.net alone, and of these, over

7,000 involve the Eleventh Doctor. In

this paper I examine fan fiction based on

The Girl Who Waited , undertaking a textual

analysis of stories posted to

FanFiction.net, the LiveJournal

community dwfiction, the website Whofic

and An Archive of Our Own (also known as

AO3). While there were many pieces of work

which examined the Doctor or Rory’s

responses to the events of the episode I

focussed exclusively on fics told from

Amy’s point of view. In total, I analysed

80 stories, ranging in length from

drabbles of around 100 words to multi-

chapter fics of over ten thousand words.

Time prevents me from discussing all of

these in this paper, but I hope the

overview and analysis I provide will

demonstrate the way in which fans

actively seek out and address the

weaknesses of the episode.

Slide 4

The Girl Who Waited is the tenth episode

of season six, in which Amy, Rory and the

Doctor travel to the planet Apalapucia, a

top ten holiday destination. They find

that the planet is under quarantine due to

the Chen7 plague, which kills two-hearted

beings within 24 hours. Amy gets

separated from the Doctor and Rory and

ends up in an accelerated time stream,

from which she needs to be rescued. When

the Doctor and Rory eventually latch on to

Amy’s time stream and attempt to save her

they realise they’re in the wrong

timeframe. Amy is 36 years older than when

they left her, much more bitter, and

refuses to trust the Doctor. Initially

Old!Amy, as the fans have termed her,

refuses to help the Doctor and Rory rescue

her younger self - she knows if she does,

she will cease to exist. She later changes

her mind, on the condition that the Doctor

takes her as well, but on reaching the

TARDIS the Doctor slams the door and Old!

Amy is left to die.

Slide 5

I’ve already touched upon some fan

reactions to this episode, but I want to

consider two main areas of fan discourse

which are relevant to the fics I discuss.

Firstly, fan reaction draws attention to

that which we don’t see in the episode:

namely the 36 years Amy spends on

Apalapucia developing her fighting

skills and surviving. As you can see from

the two quotes here, fans were frustrated

that the character development afforded

Amy through the course of the episode,

through becoming Old!Amy, were taken away

by the ending.

Slide 6

Several of the fics I analysed dealt with

this aspect of the episode, drawing on

canon to fill in the blanks of Amy’s life

on Apalapucia. In Ace of Emeralds’ ‘One

More Minute And He Doesn’t Love You’ Old!

Amy and Rory discuss why Old!Amy won’t

help her younger self. Old!Amy has come to

the realisation that she’s ‘not a little

girl anymore’ and can’t keep expecting

the world to wait until she’s finished.

A clear distinction is made between

the Amy who was – young, feisty, sexy but

also reactive rather than proactive and

reliant on the Doctor – and the Amy who is –

older, wiser, stronger and capable of

surviving on her own. Of particular

interest, relevant not only to this

episode but Amy’s entire character arc

throughout Who, is her decision to stop

waiting. She says: “I wrote on that door

that I'm waiting. I'm not waiting

anymore, I'm just surviving.” Given Amy’s

position as the girl who waited – and we

know how many references were made to her

as such – this works as a comment on the

somewhat passive nature of the character.

Now, however, rather than waiting,

reacting, Amy is active, making decisions

that fundamentally change her nature.

Slide 7

This emphasis on survival is made clear in

two other fics which focus on Amy’s

Apalapucia years. The first of these is

Rule Number 1 by EachPeachPearPlum. The

fic is a series of snippets detailing

Amy’s life waiting for the Doctor. This

extract is the 17th , approximately two

thirds of the way into the fic. That Amy

has learnt a great deal during her time on

the planet is evident in the opening

paragraph, and the focus on the helmet,

“modelled on some she found with the

weapons, mostly Roman, some Greek, a very

few Medieval ones” demonstrates her

ability to actively protect herself. She

is capable of using her own ingenuity to

fashion armour even while traces of the

old Amy – dressing up in Kate Middleton’s

wedding dress – are apparent. Though this

snippet comes at a point in the fic where

she still believes the Doctor will come

for her the final lines (She was more than

capable of defending herself. Good , the

voice said. You need to be. She didn't argue

back) suggest a change in her attitude

towards the Doctor as well; the

suggestion that she has to defend herself

because no one else will do it. This

changing attitude to the Doctor is also

prevalent in the majority of the fics I

examined, though unfortunately I don’t

have the time to examine this in any

detail today.

Slide 8

The two fics I’ve looked at so far then,

deal with the different ways in which Amy

changes. The first details changes to

Amy’s attitude and the second her ability

to create armour and weapons with which to

protect herself. The third extract, taken

from Nightengale’s Thirty Six Years, Four

Months, and Three Days deals with Amy’s

increasing technological knowledge.

Three years after being separated from

the Doctor and Rory Amy has developed the

ability to hack the interface and begin

searching for knowledge that will aid her

stay. She downloads books on computer

programming, C++, reformatting and a

range of other materials that help her to

survive in Two Streams. And when the

interface is unable to give her any

information on how to leave the facility,

she learns how to use a sword.

In his discussion of Star Wars fan fiction,

Will Brooker argues that fan fiction of

all genres is involved in the same

practice as officially sanctioned

‘Expanded Universe’ fiction:

“extrapolating from the films, filling in

spaces, daring to go off on tangents, but

always using the primary texts as a

baseline” (2002, p.133). These three Who

fics also follow the same pattern. They

engage closely with details of the

original episode and conform to rules of

chronology. The fics lead on closely from

the canonical text, the authors repeating

words and phrases used in the episode to

lend their stories an air of

authenticity. I would suggest that these

missing scene stories cannot be

categorised as textual poaching in the

way that Jenkins argues. Although Jenkins

does refer to ‘filling in the gaps’

fanfic, noting that recontextualisation

is one of the approaches employed by fan

writers, he places this in the context of

interpretation, appropriation and

reconstruction. The function of missing

scene stories is to add meaning to the

text and encourage other readers to

revisit certain characters and plots in

order to understand them differently, but

they are not necessarily operating from a

position of resistance. The fics dealing

with Amy’s time in Two Streams fit almost

seamlessly with what we see in canon: Amy

survives, Amy learns to fight, Amy begins

to hate the Doctor. Fan fiction,

therefore, is not always as clear cut an

example of textual poaching as Jenkins

initially suggested.

Slide 9

The second area of fan discourse I want to

examine is the way in which the episode

ends. Phoebe North points out that when

the Doctor suggests that they rescue Amy

from her past, rewriting her out of

existence, she says no. The Doctor and

Rory, however, both insist that Amy’s

isolation is “wrong”. For both of them,

and despite Rory’s apparent discomfort at

the Doctor’s actions towards the end of

the episodes, there’s no choice between

which woman is worth saving. No matter how

much Old!Amy, who lived through these

experiences, wants to survive, young Amy

must be rescued.

Of all the fics I looked at, the

majority of longer pieces dealt with an

alternative ending to the episode. Old!

Amy’s survival appeared to be an

important aspect of fic writers’

reimaginings of The Girl Who Waited, and

the ways in which she survived were many

and varied. In CJ Burns’ ‘Paradox

Schmaradox’, for example, Amy is visited

by the Doctor as she lies dying. He tells

her that no one should die alone, but Amy

has already programmed the Rory Bot to

inject her with an antidote to the

Handbots’ medication. The Doctor decides

to take Amy with him in the TARDIS,

ignoring the paradox that was such a

feature of the episode, to have an

adventure. ‘Paradox Schmaradox’ is

perhaps the most straightforward

alternative ending of the fics I have

examined, but it still functions to

demonstrate the possibilities fans find

of rewriting their objects of fandom. A

more substantial rewriting, however,

comes in ‘The Way We Live Now’ by zlot, in

which Old!Amy is the one to survive.

Slide 10

The fic mirrors some aspects of the

episode, such as the question Amy asks

when she recovers from the anaesthetic:

“Where is she?”. But the premise and the

way in which the fic plays out are

markedly different. Rory’s choice to save

Old!Amy affects his relationship with the

Doctor and leads to his decision to leave

the TARDIS, but the relationship between

Old!Amy and Rory becomes the focus of the

fic. Old!Amy has to rely on Rory in ways

that young Amy didn’t – calculating a tip,

making small talk, going to the bank. In

some ways Old!Amy mirrors young Amy, but

the parameters of her relationship with

Rory have shifted and she remains much

more reliant on herself than we saw at any

other point during the series. Of

particular note is the way in which she

disappears every few months. Parallels

can be drawn with young Amy through

various points of the series, of course,

running away on the night before her

wedding, for example, but Old!Amy in this

fic appears much more aware of her and

Rory’s relationship:

There was a time she would have worried about him. She doesn’t now. He might

even go back for one last fling in the TARDIS. And she’s very aware how long

that last fling could last. A billion places to go, and the Doctor’s terribly

lonely. Amy gets that now, at least.

Slide 11

Rory’s desire to save Old!Amy also plays a

part in the next fic, though the ending is

different to both The Way We Live Now’ and

The Girl Who Waited. In ‘The Doctor: out

of time’ by Heliopause Old!Amy tells Rory

not to let her into the TARDIS, as in the

episode, but asks him to let her take a

final look at him and young Amy. Rory

relents and opens the door to the TARDIS,

allowing Old!Amy to burst in and attack

the Doctor. The hatred Old!Amy feels is

palpable. She almost growls at him "And

you... and you , Doctor... I have had

thirty-six years to learn how to hate the

man who is so sorry ." The surprise comes,

however, when Old!Amy throws the Doctor,

Rory and young Amy out of the TARDIS and

appropriates it for her own ends. It is

clear from the fic that she feels no pity

for any of the characters who left her in

the situation. Unlike in the episode, in

which her love for Rory results in her

sacrifice, the Old!Amy of this fic is

resolutely looking after herself. This is

perhaps the most clear example of a ‘fix-

it’ fic: one in which the issues within an

episode are fixed by the fan fic writer.

The author’s notes, provided at the end of

the fic, make this clear:

my second, and I suspect last ever, Doctor Who story. I have only just seen

the episode entitled "The Girl Who Waited", and...you can tell what I

thought of it. And okay, there's another possible ending, fitting all

the rules, saving all of them, but I am so fed up with S. Moffat's recurrent

sexism that I am getting rid of his self-insert here and now. Out of time,

Doctor!

http://archiveofourown.org/works/816310

Jenkins has argued fan responses to texts

do not simply involve fascination or

adoration, but also encompass

frustration and antagonism, and the

combination of these responses motivates

fan engagement with the media: “If the

original work did not fascinate fans,

they would not continue to engage with it.

If it did not frustrate them on some

level, they would feel no need to write

new stories”. As with ‘The Doctor: out of

time’, this frustration takes the form of

something fans dislike (or hate) in

canon. This is also perhaps the most

obvious example of fan fic as

resistant. The notion of fan-produced

work as a form of resistance has been

popularised by early examinations of

fanfiction, and particularly the study of

s lash (that is stories which posit a

homosexual relationship between two

characters). Jenkins, arguing that fans

are textual poachers, sets all fans up as

resistant to meanings imposed on them,

but general or heterosexual fic can be

just as resistive as slash can. I would

suggest that Old!Amy killing the Doctor

and throwing Rory and young Amy into

Apalapucia is more resistive than a fic in

which Rory saves both old and young Amys

and lives with them both on the TARDIS

(the plot of The Other Woman by

The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting).

Slide 12

The final series of fics I want to briefly

examine are those in which Amy is rescued

by companions. There are, perhaps

surprisingly, more of these than I had

anticipated. In And All Our Yesterdays by

nextstop-everywhere, Old!Amy is saved by

River and taken to Bad Wolf Bay, a place in

a different timeline where she can live

without creating a paradox. In The

Alternative Source’s ‘Everything's Got

to End Sometime’ Old!Amy is saved by Rose.

And in Arguing with history by TheAndy,

Old!Amy is saved by Donna. Of the fics

that feature companions, this is the most

critical of the Doctor. Unlike River, who

argues that the Doctor is fundamentally

good, or Rose, who loves the Doctor Donna

recognises him for a stubborn old man, not

a god, and resolves to stop him from

abandoning another Donna or another Amy.

Again the author categorises this as a

‘fix it’ fic, writing in the author’s

notes “So, this is a sequel to a fic I

haven't finished yet where Donna gets to

be Doctor Donna again. Basically just

fixing everything I have a problem with in

Doctor Who”.

In this paper then, I’ve looked at two

broad kinds of fics – those which fill in

the blanks, and those which fix what the

writers have a problem with. I suggest

that neither of these are textual

poaching in the way that Jenkins

understand it. The fans rewriting Amy

Pond are not taking something from a

private cultural preserve (as Julie

Parrish argues); instead, they reimagine

the preserve itself. Fan writing, she

suggests, is not about guerilla action,

borrowing from a system, or taking the

goods that belong to others; instead it is

‘a way of thinking’. And it struck me that

this shift away from textual poaching can

be understood in a similar way to which

fan fic writers understand Amy. Poaching,

in a way, is a passive action: it is a

reaction to a text, a retrospective

attempt to change. In many ways it is

similar to Amy waiting for the Doctor to

save her. Conversely, I argue that that

rewriting is active: it is fans seeking

out issues with a text and deliberately

reworking them to create an alternative

story. It is Old!Amy making armour,

learning to fight, hacking the interface.

The distinction is perhaps a subtle one,

but I think it’s an important one.