As Twitter collapses into a black hole of sheer nastiness, there are still bright points of light on its event horizon, burning with the desire for some kind of happiness in this cold, cold universe.
Like so many of us, I've drifted away from almost all social media, bored by idiotic algorithms and the slow and dawning realisation that most people on planet Earth are actually complete cunts. Twitter used to be a genuinely invaluable source of breaking news, but has steadily become more and more useless, with extremely lax quality controls fucking it up for everyone. Even with an incredibly proactive block policy, it's got worse and worse, and now feels like just another dying suburban mall.
But even those terminal malls have some kind of interesting stores between the shuttered chain outlets, and if these are actually the last days of Twitter (I'm not calling it X because I'm not a fucking 14-year-old edgelord) before it fades away into terminal obsolescence, I will remember them as the time of one person's utter delight for Doctor Who.
For a long while I would go online and look up all sorts of instant reactions to Doctor Who episodes as soon as I'd seen them, but I stopped doing that somewhere in the reign of the Eleventh Doctor, because even the mildest of episodes were targets for unrelenting negativity. Just too much nitpicking, too much needless context, too much fucking baggage.
But then along comes jeje - a Matt Smith fan who just started randomly watching Doctor Who because they hadn't seen the big man in his first big role and just fucking loves it, with lots on intensely happy reactions.
You can see the glory of it all for yourself here, although the Doctor Who stuff is mainly in beautifully mad rambling and messy of threads, so there is no good place to start. But it's full of deeply inappropriate reactions memes, ridiculous nicknames for the cast and proper wide-eyed enthusiasm for this silly little show.
It's impossible for me to watch Doctor Who in such a pure way, coming at it with decades of backstory, and the sheer love is such a surprise after years immersed in Who fandom, that it's genuinely charming and refreshing. The fact that a 61-year-old TV show can inspire such joy is testament to the glory of Doctor Who, and to finding some light in the dark.
Your tearoom of despair has served me many similar offerings of delight across the years, whether through your undimmed enthusiasm for comics, movies and music, or the love and pleasure with which you write about your family. Just wanted to say thank you!
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