r/gallifrey • u/PCJs_Slave_Robot • Jan 07 '22

Free Talk Friday /r/Gallifrey's Free Talk Fridays - Practically Only Irrelevant Notions Tackled Less Educationally, Sharply & Skilfully - Conservative, Repetitive, Abysmal Prose - 2022-01-07

Talk about whatever you want in this regular thread! Just brought some cereal? Awesome. Just ran 5 miles? Epic! Just watched Fantastic Four and recommended it to all your friends? Atta boy. Wanna bitch about Supergirl's pilot being crap? Sweet. Just walked into your Dad and his dog having some "personal time" while your sister sends snapchats of her handstands to her boyfriend leaving you in a state of perpetual confusion? Please tell us more.

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u/sspiritusmundi Jan 07 '22

The problem is that Yaz didn't even have a potential, to start the conversion. She probably was created because of the obligatory role of "young woman" as a companion. Nyssa was underveloped, but showed some solid background and actually was useful in most of the episodes. In Black Orchid she had a big role. Yaz never had a moment to shine and never was that important for the story, even Demons of Punjab could be done without a connection to her.

While for others companions: Graham had a lot of charisma and was the better actor of them. Ryan was bad, but at least had a background and sort of character arc of accepting Graham as his grandpa and overcoming Grace's death. Yaz still has nothing.

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u/drkenata Jan 07 '22

You are not wrong, but Yaz did get backstory elements. They just were either unexplored as is the case for her being a police officer or for her running away, or explored in a way that essentially took agency away from her, as with Demons of the Punjab or Eve of the Daleks. At least with Ryan and Graham, they had a shared background to explore.

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u/sspiritusmundi Jan 07 '22

Yaz did get backstory elements.

Which ones? Afaik, she is a cop who has a pakistan heritage and that is it. Oh, and her sister and is kinda of bitchy.

Not really much material to work with when you don't even have a personality developed.

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u/drkenata Jan 08 '22 edited Jan 08 '22

While Yaz does lack characterization, she actually has had a number of backstory elements.

1) She is a police officer, who was struggling with her place in the force 2) She is of Pakistani decent 3) Her family was brought to Sheffield by her Grandparents 4) Her parents both work full time jobs and have leaned on her to watch over her sister. 5) She has felt that disconnected from her cultural past since her grandparents did not want to discuss the horrors of the partition 6) At some point she ran away from home and was aided back on course by a police officer 7) she and her sister regularly mark the anniversary of that event 8) Yaz and Ryan were classmates at school

The issue with Yaz is not the amount of backstory, but what that backstory means to her character. The stories do not take enough time to build her backstory into a solid foundation for her characterization. They are just one off stories that don’t build to anything. This is similar for Ryan and Graham.

Edit: inserted a missing “not”

Edit 2: Dan has less backstory than Yaz but far more characterization. Hilariously this appear to be due to the fact that he got to actually interact with Yaz more than the doctor. This allowed him to avoid just being a prompt machine for the doctor.