and what do I call you?

(Source: areyoumarriedriver, via obsessedobsesser)

spectroscopes:

jomarch:

But why assume that the Doctor even has the power to decide what other people call themselves?  Especially as someone who describes “the Doctor” as something he “calls himself”, and not a name, why does the Doctor calling Amy by a different last name need to have any effect on what her name actually is?

Because the show presents it as a hugely significant moment for Amy and never challenges or comments on his doing it or has her reject the identity that he has bestowed upon her.

Whatever her name actually is—which is her decision, not the Doctor’s

I agree! This is the crux of my problem! The show does not present it as being her decision. The show does not allow her to override him.

Remember that Rory only ended up travelling with the Doctor because Amy already was, and remember Rory’s insistence that Leadworth dream was real life in Amy’s Choice, while Amy and the Doctor were leaning towards the TARDIS being real.

Yes? — and I remember being disgusted by his paternalism? — and particularly in “Amy’s Choice” where he spent the whole episode telling Amy what she wanted and contradicting her when she said that she wanted a life of adventure?

The implication is that travelling=fairy tale=Pond and the adventure of real life at home (and it’s fair to see this as an adventure because it’s something Amy was scared of and ran away from, only to realize it’s something—not everything, necessarily, but something—that she really wanted) is associated with home, and home is associated with the homebody who doesn’t want to fight aliens and who only got dragged into travelling because Amy was doing it: Rory.  And his last name is Williams.

And … yes, this is indeed what I said. And that’s the conflation of Rory taking Amy’s name as a “fairy tale” and Amy taking Rory’s name as a gateway to adulthood. That’s still the symbolism here. The fact that that symbolism came out of the fact that Rory has spent two years telling Amy that she should give up on a life of adventure does not make it less gross.

And Amy never, ever, ever ‘realised’ that she wanted to live a “normal life”. She wanted Rory but she didn’t want the life that Rory wanted. In “Amy’s Choice” she was depicted as bored and lonely and still waiting for the Doctor so that she could resume her adventure. And even if she had been brow-beaten by Rory and the Doctor into ‘wanting’ that life? The narrative of women ‘realising’ that they don’t want a life of adventure, that they want to live a “normal life” with their husbands in a house, is inherently gross and paternalistic. “Silly girls! You think you want adventure but you’ll learn once you grow the fuck up!”

I am frustrated that so much is being made to hinge on a name.  Perhaps it wasn’t challenged because what matters is the change in their relationship and the parting of the ways, not the way that the Doctor associates the change to not travelling with him and being at home with the homiest of people.  I still don’t see why there’s even anything to be overridden.  I can call my friend Potato, if I want, but that won’t make it her name.  Yes, it’s a significant moment for Amy, but I feel like the issue of how her life is changing a lot is more important to that significance than anything else, including the name issue.

Similarly, why does Amy need to explicitly override him?  It’s ridiculous to think that he gets to decide what she calls herself, so why does she need to point that out?  I find that it’s only with children (I’ve worked at a summer camp several times and at a preschool) that it’s important to actually say “we call people what they want to be called” or “don’t call people names they don’t like”.  

Surely, as demonstrably pretty good people (yes, dark sides and all that, but still) who are quite close to each other, they don’t need to scold each other for getting their names wrong.  One would hope that they could see past that and get out of it what he means.  Or if it does hit a sore spot, why does it have to be addressed immediately, at the end of an episode that is already jam packed with highly significant plot and emotional points?  

As for the relationship between Rory and Amy, I think it’s unfair to toss aside his insistence as paternalism.  He really wants a life with Amy, he thinks that they’re on the path for that, and then she runs off with the Doctor, even making quite a strong move on him.  Insisting that the Leadworth dream was real to me reads more as Rory’s wishful thinking, just like the Doctor wanted to believe that the TARDIS dream was real.  And since deciding between the two hinged on getting Amy to agree, and because this is something he a) thought she wanted, and b) thought they were going to have, he desperately needed Amy to agree with him, hence his insistence.  People phrase their insistence in arguments like this all the time without it implying an assertion of control.

Also, people who want different things have to compromise to be together.  As it happens, despite their different tastes for travelling and home, it appears that what both Amy and Rory want the most is to be with each other.  They did end up getting married, which is something that Amy had to definitively decide, and not just go along with: she ran away from her wedding and then deliberately chose to go back.  Also, look at when she remembers him at the end of series 5, and The Girl Who Waited for more evidence of how much they want to be together.  And so that means travelling with the Doctor, because that’s what Amy particularly craves, as well as having a life at home, because that’s what Rory particularly craves.  There is definitely such a thing as wanting something because someone you care about wants it, and there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s not uneven.  And it’s not: they’re doing both. It’s not a choice between adventure and home, it’s getting to have both because both are valuable.  I fail to see how either is privileged over the other.  Even the Doctor, who clearly chooses travel over home, a) has a side to him that really wants that hominess (see John Smith and the nurse) and b) characterizes his travel as running away, not as something noble.

spectroscopes:

jomarch:

My problem with this analysis is that the Doctor calling her Amy Williams has more to do with his own conception of their relationship/her whimsical life than with any kind of maturity, etc.  When he first meets her, he says that “Amelia Pond” is like a name from a fairy tale.  Well, if he really is leaving Amy and Rory behind, then that fairy tale life is ending.  So in his own mind, she’s more aligned with the less naturally adventurous/whimsical Rory Williams, and no longer with the name Amelia Pond.

But that’s ultimately sexist. The fact that he frames her husband’s identity as an adult identity in contrast to her childish chosen identity is sexist — and the show never challenges him on it or on his sexist expectations on her identity, and Amy never asserts that she’s still going to go by ‘Amy Pond’. Like belsrowley said, this whole clusterfuck could have been avoided if only the show had presented ‘Amelia Pond’ as the name the Doctor discarded now that she was a child (now that she has discarded that name as childish) and ‘Amy Pond’, the name she chose for herself as an adult, as the name he needed to call her by now that she was an adult.

And the thing is, there’s no reason to think that he’s indicating that this is now her new name.  She can call herself whatever she wants.  The point is more that when she traveled with him, she was in a fairy tale, and now she’s not.  That’s it.  The Doctor had previously and repeatedly referred to Rory as Rory Pond (as well as Roranicus Pondicus—if you haven’t seen the show, Rory spent some time as a Roman Centurion—long story) and to the couple as the Ponds, so it seems pretty clear that the Doctor doesn’t place any store in patriarchal naming traditions: it all has to do with what the people are actually doing.  Which I think ties in very nicely with him calling himself the Doctor and the Master calling himself the Master.

There’s nothing to indicate that it’s not her new name. The assumption is just left there hanging, unchallenged by the show. And the fact that this episode implies that Rory taking Amy’s name was part of the “fairy tale” and basically childish, and implies that now that they’re grown-ups they need to go by Rory’s name just adds another layer of grossness to the whole thing — “non-patriarchal naming conventions only belong in fairy tales; it’s time to grow up and enter the real world as the Williamses now”.

But why assume that the Doctor even has the power to decide what other people call themselves?  Especially as someone who describes “the Doctor” as something he “calls himself”, and not a name, why does the Doctor calling Amy by a different last name need to have any effect on what her name actually is?

I understand that making a link between non-patriarchal naming and fairy tales and a link between patriarchal naming and adulthood is terrible, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening.  

Whatever her name actually is—which is her decision, not the Doctor’s—she’s not having adventures and she’s not in a fairy tale.  Remember that Rory only ended up travelling with the Doctor because Amy already was, and remember Rory’s insistence that Leadworth dream was real life in Amy’s Choice, while Amy and the Doctor were leaning towards the TARDIS being real.  The implication is that travelling=fairy tale=Pond and the adventure of real life at home (and it’s fair to see this as an adventure because it’s something Amy was scared of and ran away from, only to realize it’s something—not everything, necessarily, but something—that she really wanted) is associated with home, and home is associated with the homebody who doesn’t want to fight aliens and who only got dragged into travelling because Amy was doing it: Rory.  And his last name is Williams.  There is no value judgement attached to this: both modes of being (travelling and not) are adventures and signify adulthood, but one is associated with the fairy tale of travelling through all of time and space and the other with something that can be equally scary: life with family and friends and Rory, without the Doctor.

(Totally frivolous and only tangentially related sidenote: this whole discussion reminded me of this, which I felt I should bring to everyone’s attention again, because it’s kind of amazing.)

spectroscopes:

In “The Eleventh Hour”, the adult Amy chooses the name ‘Amy Pond’ for herself — rejecting the Doctor’s favoured name for her, Amelia Pond, which she associated with the childhood she left behind when the Doctor broke his promise to her — and she continues to go by ‘Amy Pond’ after she marries Rory in “The Big Bang”. This is the name she has chosen for herself, as part of the adult identity she has created for herself. This is why it’s so disgusting that the Doctor frames ‘Amy Pond’ as a name which Amy has to shed in order to become an adult. It’s not a question of whether Amy is ‘allowed’ to take her husband’s name — of course she is, and if Amy had chosen to go by ‘Amy Williams’ when she married Rory in “The Big Bang” there would have been nothing contentious about it — but Amy did not take Rory’s name in this episode: it was bestowed upon her by the Doctor, as part of an ‘adult’ identity which he created and defined for her. Amy implicitly rejected the name of ‘Williams’ when she kept going by ‘Pond’ after “The Big Bang”, and she explicitly rejected it when she chose to name her daughter Melody Pond. The fact that this episode frames ‘Amy Williams’ specifically — the identity she’s expected to assume by the patriarchy as a holdover from a time when women were quite literally the property of their husbands — as the identity that Amy has to assume in order to be a grown-up (the fact that it associates her maiden name of ‘Pond’ with immaturity, as if her decision to keep her maiden name when she got married was nothing more than a childish whim) is almost a tangential detail, merely the icing on the misogynistic subtext cake. It’s not the name itself that’s the problem: it’s what it means specifically within the context of Amy’s storyarc. Doctor Who conflated the adoption of your husband’s surname with the idea of growing up. That’s the problem.

Review: Doctor Who 6.11, “The God Complex”

My problem with this analysis is that the Doctor calling her Amy Williams has more to do with his own conception of their relationship/her whimsical life than with any kind of maturity, etc.  When he first meets her, he says that “Amelia Pond” is like a name from a fairy tale.  Well, if he really is leaving Amy and Rory behind, then that fairy tale life is ending.  So in his own mind, she’s more aligned with the less naturally adventurous/whimsical Rory Williams, and no longer with the name Amelia Pond.

And the thing is, there’s no reason to think that he’s indicating that this is now her new name.  She can call herself whatever she wants.  The point is more that when she traveled with him, she was in a fairy tale, and now she’s not.  That’s it.  The Doctor had previously and repeatedly referred to Rory as Rory Pond (as well as Roranicus Pondicus—if you haven’t seen the show, Rory spent some time as a Roman Centurion—long story) and to the couple as the Ponds, so it seems pretty clear that the Doctor doesn’t place any store in patriarchal naming traditions: it all has to do with what the people are actually doing.  Which I think ties in very nicely with him calling himself the Doctor and the Master calling himself the Master.

(via cindysherman-deactivated2011102)

willowmansdaughter:

oneironautical:

sol-shine:

“Ainsley Crystal?”

“Ansley Christell, actually.”

“That’s what I said?”

“No, ANsley like Raggedy Ann. And Chris-TELL. Accent on the second syllable.”

*person looks at me like they’re still positive that’s what they said*

Oh god always.

People always mispronounce my last name as ‘Lollipop’.

SHIPWASH ABERCROMBIE LOLLIPOP, COMING THROUGH. I guess it’s a good thing my birth name is ‘Hannah’, but it’s still an absurd name. My entire class burst into laughter when they read it off during graduation.

I think my third-grade self would have taken “Lollipop” over “Prettypants” in a heartbeat.

God bless my mother, though. Every time someone asks her how to spell our last name, she gives them the benefit of the doubt and, if English is their first language, assumes they have some degree of familiarity with the English language.

“It’s just ‘pretty’ and ‘pants’ put together,” she’ll say.

“Huh?”

“Just take ‘pretty’ and pants’ and make one word out of them.”

“‘Pretty’ as in…?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, P-R-E-T-T-Y-….”

Well, I always get “Sarah” instead of “Sara”, but unless I’ve had to correct someone multiple times, I just let it go, it’s understandable and not too terrible.

I do get frustrated when people completely butcher my really very easy to pronounce, especially if you Anglicize it (which I almost always do, to make it even easier), Spanish last name.  I mean, it’s a fairly common word that most people have heard and know how to say, even if they don’t speak any Spanish at all.  And it’s not too hard to be aware that an “a” in Spanish is definitely NOT pronounced like the “ai” in “pain”.

I mean, really.

misterstibbons:

a-game-of-tumblr:

missyaggravation:

queerfeminist:

bronwenstumblrthing:

halleyboballey:

bizarrothatty:

fussyfangs:

ohcorny:

tailor

taylor literally means tailor

sigh

Erik derives from a Norse name that means either “ever-ruler” or,…

First name: princess (Hebrew)

Middle name: grace and beauty (French)

Last name: white (Spanish)

(Source: illuvium, via amadgirl-withablog)