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Frankly, trying to appeal to the female fans of Doctor Who by making the Doctor a woman strikes me as about as wrongheaded as would trying to appeal to the male fans of, say, Tomb Raider by making the next game star "Lars Croft". A basic point seems to have been missed somewhere.
I mean if there were 20 different individual 'Tomb Raiders' across a series spanning 60 years of production, I don't think it would be crazy to have one of those 20 be 'Lars Croft' for one game. Could be fun.
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We've had Time Ladies before, there's no reason they couldn't have introduced a new one to be a co-lead with the Doctor. But things like River Song just turned me off, and I'm not anything near a hardcore Whovian. Oh, the Doctor was married? Well, presumably, since the very first Doctor had a grand daughter, but we really don't need to have the Doctor and his love life on show. That's not what the show is about, even if it did start off with the excuse of being "oh it's educational for the children, it will teach them about history because of the Doctor time-travelling". All the lectures about woke issues and 'we must have a female Doctor' (why?) just made it boring.
Well...
>"More girls than boys (under-16s) watched Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who debut - 378,000 v 339,000," Parker wrote. "Last year's series opener: 143,000 girls / 390,000 boys.".
Looks like a 13% increase in overall viewership plus major capture of a new demographic, opening the door to new advertisers and new types of merchandising.
'Never attribute to ideology that which is adequately explained by capitalism.'
Girls and SF is one of those perennial questions. For a long time, it was considered a boys' and men's playground, and women were scarce on the ground indeed. Then we got a lot of good female writers. Then SJW came along and well, you know the fall out of that, plus the Hugos débacle, culminating now in the perceived necessity that you have to be female, LGBT+ or ethnic minority to have any chance of winning one of the awards.
How many of those girls will stick with SF? Hard to say. I think there have always been girls interested in the field, but how many will keep watching Who after the female Doctor is gone?
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