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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

4 Comments

  1. Tymothi
    August 6, 2013 @ 8:58 am

    Sorry for the off topic comment, but I wanted to ask something, and this seemed as good a place as any where it might actually get seen.

    Would casting the Doctor as a minority or a woman be, in itself, problematic? He's an alien, and the role is meant to be, to some extent, the Other. Admittedly, I wish they did more with it than they do, but the role is inherently a subversion, taking the most familiar of fictional protagonists, white male, and making it the Other. How well would that work with, say, a black Doctor? The character wouldn't be a black human, with that set of experiences, he'd be, in a sense, in black face. And he would be, inherent in the role, made alien and strange, which seems…problematic to me. I'm not saying it couldn't or shouldn't be done, it just seems like there's an inherent issue there, where taking a white male and making him strange and alien is punching up, but taking a black man or a woman or a Chinese woman or whathave you, roles that are already so often cast as the Other, and doing the same, could be problematic in itself. I mean, it could be brilliant in some ways, it would be great to have the Doctor return to Victorian England as a black woman and spend a story not having anyone listen to her. I'd love to see the Doctor regenerate as something other than a white male and see it done well, but what would that entail? Any thoughts?

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  2. Nyq Only
    August 6, 2013 @ 9:47 am

    "Would casting the Doctor as a minority or a woman be, in itself, problematic?"

    I don't think casting the Doctor as a woman would have problems. A change of ethnicity has issues but I think more problematic is a change of social class. The Doctor fits into the British educated middle-classes and the Doctor is inextricably British (OK we could probably just about imagine an Australian Doctor but an American one just seems unthinkable).
    The nearest shift in social class was Christopher Eccelstone.

    Reply

  3. Ross
    August 6, 2013 @ 9:51 am

    The harder thing, for a production team, is that while it would indeed make a great story, it would not make a great "Every story set in the past and certain parts of the present," so they'd need to ford that, while at the same time not doing something monumentally insensitive by pretending that, outside of the one episode where we addressed it, race generally doesn't affect the lives of people whose race isn't the one that's locally empowered.

    Reply

  4. Ewa Woowa
    August 6, 2013 @ 11:32 am

    veni, vidi, empti, et liberatus est hodie !

    Reply

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