To the Twelfth Doctor:
It’s hard, changing. People don’t react well to someone who is different—we like conformity. We like to keep our boxes neatly partitioned and separate, sealed and shut once we ‘know’ someone. You may have noticed, Doctor #12, a certain reaction to the announcement of your regeneration. Please don’t take it personally. You have to understand, this cycle is normal. This is what we do.
We don’t like change, humans. We like to keep things as close to stagnant as we can.
We don’t like people breaking out of our notions of them.
We fear that change will make us unimportant, irrelevant.
That in the cataclysms we will lose our anchor.
We view change as death.
It’s why, perhaps, fanatics react so pugnaciously to changes. Fandoms are built around a world, a person, a myth that resonates so deeply that for that world to change means that nothing is sacred. Being part of a Fandom is a religious experience, in that metaphor becomes myth becomes dogma and Fandoms worship—critically, intelligently, but wholeheartedly—at the altar of personality and story.
Most authors/creators of worlds with a Fandom following take altering the fabric of that world very seriously. Or take a demented joy out of ensuring that the readers/viewers/followers never know who’s safe (looking at you, R.R.Martin, Whedon) but either way, the world remains secure. Fans take a glee in knowing that Games of Thrones is really Don’t Get Attached; some get a perverse sense of enjoyment being martyrs to a fandom whose leaders declare: ‘No one is safe. Anyone can die.’ But at the end, Westeros still stands in conflict; Serenity flies again.
Courtesy of the BBC.
But, Doctor, you’re different.
You don’t die. You change. You become unrecognizable, retaining only certain core values. You see the world differently; you approach problems with different tactics. You like different foods. You are unarguable different.
But not.
Not really.
You’re still you, aren’t you?
You’re an anomaly. You don’t make sense. A fandom shouldn’t follow a character through twelve cast changes, through long gaps of silence, for over fifty years, and still care so deeply, so wonderfully, so closely as your fandom does.
Why do they care so much? About a raggedy man, a time traveler with a screwdriver in a dodgy blue box and somewhat crap special effects?
What is it about you, Doctor, that captures our imaginations and our allegiance not just once or twice but twelve times over fifty years?
Fifty years. That’s three generations, fathers to daughters to grandsons…aunts to nephews to cousins. There are countries who haven’t lasted that long.
Why, Doctor?
Maybe it’s because, as much as humanity fights change, we know, deep down, that change is constant. Change is everywhere. Every moment alters our perceptions, our opinions, our judgment—if we are an amalgam of what we have experienced then every heartbeat make us someone new.
The child we were is unrecognizable to the adult we are now; the girl in high school is a stranger. Our twenties feel like they happened to someone on TV; last year is a memory of who we had been.
Perhaps we react to the Doctor because we know, instinctively, what it is like to sit up and wonder ‘am I a ginger?’ because sometimes in the morning, caught between the alarm clock and start of day, we don’t remember. Are we the child? The fifteen-year-old caught making a 37-point turn on our driving exam? The 21-year-old clubbing in New York City? The young wife or the stern teacher? When we open our eyes at the blare of the clock, will we suddenly remember why we loved sour candies as a child, even though we can’t eat them now?
Doctor, you may get a new face, but so do we. Lines appear, freckles fade, our hair turns grey, then white. We get taller, than shorter, we get thinner or fatter. We change, every year, so that sometimes we are unrecognizable to ourselves.
Courtesy of BBC, Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor.
So when you regenerate, Doctor, and each time you find your footing—each change is a successful you—it comforts us. It eases that deep worry that as we have changed, we have lost.
Doctor, you prove to us that as we change, we only gain. We only improve. We have not lost the five-year-old who could play, naked, happy, joyful, for hours in a haystack. We have only gained all the other us-es.
The Doctor allows us to look forward to who we will be become, and encourages us to let go of who we were—holding onto only that which serves us for the now, but never forgetting what we owe to all that we did before.
So, Twelfth Doctor, the fandom may be querulous now, but they are reacting only to the fear in their own lives—we will grow to champion you. And accept you. Just as we—hopefully—grow to accept and champion ourselves.
You show us that change is not death, only different.
So, welcome, Doctor.
And thanks.