Fortunately for all of us, a friend stumbled upon the most in-depth ramen tutorial I’ve ever seen. I gotta say, I was a little turned off by the chicken feet at first, but since they don’t make it into the actual soup, how am I to know I haven’t been eating broth made from chicken feet my whole life? There are pork spareribs in the broth base too, so it’s not just exciting chicken broth.
For those of you who know your broth types, this tutorial is for a shoyu ramen, and for those of you without a pasta machine, it’s really okay to just buy your noodles. Don’t forget to be exceptionally proud of yourself once you make this and are happily slurping your noodles.
Speaking of pride, it’s Pride month and I’m super excited because one of the series dearest to my heart FINALLY has a queer character filling the role of companion! Meet Bill Potts from Doctor Who season ten.
With TV consistently being fairly white and hetero, Bill is a welcome addition to the Doctor Who cast. With the Master regenerating into a woman in season eight, the show has been ramping up for some major changes for a while. And Bill, a woman who only likes women and definitely isn’t white, is just the breath of fresh air the series needed.
The show also isn’t falling into tired old tropes about queer characters, like having them be head hunted when they time travel and their sexuality is revealed. In episode ten of season ten, Bill has a very different sort of conversation about sexuality than one would expect with a Roman soldier.
.@Pearlie_mack on the very 'modern' conversation between Bill and the Romans!#DoctorWho #PrideMonth pic.twitter.com/O5NZiBx4oU— Doctor Who Official (@bbcdoctorwho) June 17, 2017
The show does a good job of portraying how Bill deals with the normal assumptions and prejudices of her own time, too. In the first episode, Bill’s roommate tells her not to bring any men home and Bill mumbles under her breath that men won’t really be a problem. Later in the episode, we see Bill falling in love. Although Bill’s crush Heather does die in this episode, she dies for a very different reason than the usual “kill the lesbians so we don’t have to feel guilty about their forbidden love” reasons. Heather becomes the monster of the week, and follows Bill throughout time and space because she promised she wouldn’t leave a particular place without Bill. What’s exciting about this is that Heather isn’t dead to remove Bill and the audience from taking responsibility for enjoying the same-sex relationship. Heather dies to become the antagonist of the episode. Heather is eaten by what is left of a self-repairing alien spaceship. When it melds with Heather, she’s waiting for Bill. Because of this, the spaceship sees Bill as its passenger. The reason Heather becomes the antagonist is because she is keeping her promise to Bill—assumedly, because she cares about her. In a world where most of our media forgets to include the full spectrum of human experience, a story like that is exciting.
Pearl Mackie makes a wonderful point when interviewed about playing Bill Potts, however.
She’s just playing a part. Bill Potts is a person, and people are gay, and people are black. There’s nothing special about it, because from her perspective it should be normal. While I admire her optimism, there’s a reason we still celebrate Pride every year. There's a reason we in America put Black Lives Matter signs in our yards and our businesses. That said, it means a lot to have an actress treat the role of the first ever lesbian Doctor Who companion as normal.
The show doesn’t stop there this season, however. Since it was canonized that Time Lords could regenerate into different genders in season eight, whether the Doctor has ever been or will be a woman has been a pressing questions on fans’ minds. During a conversation Bill and the Doctor have in episode eleven of season ten, the Doctor talks about his childhood and his friendship with the series long time antagonist, the Master.
The Doctor: I think she was a man back then. I’m fairly sure that I was too. It was a long time ago, though.Genre fiction has always been a place for progress and upsetting the status quo, but it means even more to see a series as old and prestigious as Doctor Who making things like gender fluidity and women who like women their norm. Happy Pride, everyone!
Bill: So, Time Lords. Bit flexible on the whole, like, man/woman thing, then, yeah?
The Doctor: We’re the most civilized civilization in the universe. We’re billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.
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