AN: I don't know about you guys, but I've found it pretty lame for there to be a scenario in every series 9 episode where either Clara's or the Doctor's or both of their lives are at risk. The overusage of the foreshadowing kind of cheapens however Clara is going to leave the TARDIS. What can I do about this? Look at it through the characters' perspectives, and find new meaning. I believe I have with this prologue. Check it out ;)
Situation - You hear a joke. It's probably the funniest joke you've heard in a while, or at least the first good one. What separates it from all the other jokes is that you haven't heard it before. It's new, you laugh. All the others started out exactly the same way, but what happened? What changed? Absolutely nothing! 'Still the same joke, but it's not the quality that's the matter. Sometimes an individual's opinion is based solely on the quantity of something, or the amount of times that something occurs. Soon the new joke will suffer the same fate as the ones prior to it, depending on your willingness to spread it like a disease, and your hearty laugh will fade into nothing more than a little ha-ha.
If you've been looking for a name for this, there isn't one. Now, depending on how drawing that bit of information would have been for you, you could be yapping about it all over the place, spreading it like a disease. You're welcome. It's not just jokes that fall victim to the blah blah effect (though if you must know, it could relate to semantic satiation, if you want to Bing that).
However, sometimes the effect's reversed. You could feel one way, or nothing at all, about an event, but then the event occurs again and again, and you find your feelings for it have increased a significant amount. Sometimes it's so bad, you don't want to let go.
Being over two millenia, I of course have had my share of running into certain "continuities," as you will. It could be the same people, the same warnings, similar adventures or journeys. You name it (and then there's probably someone else who named the same thing, too). As we've already justified, there are two ways that I feel about these continuities. However, quite recently I have come across a situation that has become something of a normality, something I don't know if I'm tiring of hearing, or if every time I hear it, my hearts beat a little faster, my brow produces a little more sweat, a few more tears rest on my eyelids.
Sometimes it would be my enemies who told me.
Davros. "You cannot help her now, Doctor."
"Clara's dead, Doctor. This is the one that killed her." Missy.
Sometimes my friends.
"She'll die on you, you know. She'll blow away like smoke." Ashildr-slash-me.
Even my own ship would remind me. I once was explaining to a very confused pudding brain, "I'm going to save Clara, because that's what I do. And I don't see anyone here who's going to stop me." Of course, the only one who COULD stop me, my own TARDIS. The cloister bell donged; she was going nowhere.
Yet somehow I always managed to save Clara Oswald, despite the warnings, the lies. That's where it got redundant, repetitive, but all the more or less (literally more or less) painful. The only way I can describe this feeling is that it's as if more and more pieces of me crumble off, and they fall into the dust that's already collected on the floor.
It hurts, the truth, but what hurts even more is the truth that, the FACT that my fears of losing my companion, my Clara, may have finally caught up to me. The jokes have to stop somewhere.