After reading that Weeping Angel commentary I am now formulating elaborate headcanon about the origins of the Weeping Angels. 

However, as I have a paper to write currently, it must wait. I shall post it when it is complete.

blueboxdreams:

yourcroft:

theumbrellaseller:

evelynvincible:

Okay, so I’m just going to try to catalog what things are in the canon about the Weeping Angels.

This is interesting to me, because they only have three storylines/ 4 episodes. It’s not like they’ve been developing over decades, or have dozens of hours of on-air history or anything. Discrepancies in the Angels’ behavior/ physiology/ appearance from episode to episode are more damning than variations with Daleks, Cybermen, etc. 

Things established in Blink:

1. It’s an Angel when you see it. All we know is that if you look at it, it turns to stone. Not “It pretends to be stone” or “It appears to be made of stone,” but “It is a hunk of stone in the shape of an Angel.” 
2. An Angel does not choose to turn to stone. It’s a function of the Angel’s biology that when it is seen, it turns to stone. It cannot opt in or out of being stone. “Thinking” you can or can’t see it doesn’t matter (continuity error in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone)
   Related to this, Angels turn to stone. Not copper, bronze, brass, plastic, etc.  
3. We don’t know what the creature itself looks like. If they turn to stone when seen, they must not be stone when they are unseen. Because you cannot observe an Angel without it being forcibly turned to stone, the Angels cannot be shown moving onscreen. (continuity error in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone)
4. When stone, the Angels cover their eyes so they do not accidentally see one another. Because the Angels are themselves living things, seeing another Angel (or being seen by another Angel) means one or both of them is turned to stone. This fact of their biology saved Sally Sparrow and Video Store Guy in Blink. When the Angels saw one another in a ring around the TARDIS, they were all turned to stone, and trapped as such because none of them could move. (continuity error in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone)
5. Angels feed off time energy. The Angels send people back in time the same number of years they would have continued to live, and feed off the energy given off in the transferral (or something). This is why they wanted the TARDIS, and why they feared the Crack in the Universe. Moffat did acknowledge this discrepancy in Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone.

Things established in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone:

1. The image of an Angel is an Angel. This is particularly problematic in The Angels Take Manhattan, because there are images of the Statue of Liberty everywhere, yet none of them come to life and zap anyone. This also creates questions about all the people with SOL postcards, T-Shirts, photographs, paintings, computer desktops, etc. Shouldn’t all those people be in mortal danger right about now? Why isn’t anyone worried about that?
2. Angels can strip peoples’ neocortexes and use them to psychically communicate? I don’t know, that was a weird one. 

[Spoilers for The Angels Take Manhattan]

Things that are problematic in The Angels Take Manhattan:

1. Angels are made out of everything. Stone, bronze, copper, etc. 
2. Angels do not look like Angels. Not just “they’re decrepit and damaged” like in Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone. The Angels in Manhattan take all kinds of forms. They’re colonial settlers, children, babies, and Lady Liberty, in addition to traditional Angel forms.
3. Angels do not take the Angel pose. None of the non-Angel-shaped statues cover their eyes when seen. There are some Angel statues whose eyes are covered, but by and large the other statues do not.
4. How the fuck did Lady Liberty get to that hotel? I had assumed from the preview that there was some mass power outage, and so Lady Liberty could not be seen. This was patently not the case in Angels Take Manhattan, so am I seriously meant to believe NO ONE, in a city of millions of people, had Lady Liberty in their line of sight for her ENTIRE WALK to Winter Quay? We heard her walking, so it’s not like she magically flew or disapparated or anything. When Rory and Amy were jumping off the roof, there were cars driving in the street below. But no one saw her?

That’s a whole lot of canon that got either sidestepped, rewritten, or ignored over the course of four episodes. Moffat’s a man with great ideas, but he’s shit with long-term plotlines and continuity.

And anyone going “CONTINUITY IS A HUGE ISSUE IN DOCTOR WHO IT’S NOT JUST MOFFAT GOD YOU’RE SUCH A HATER,” this is continuity over the course of four episodes. If he can’t keep it together for four episodes, there is something wrong. Sorry I’m not sorry.

Related: The Angels failure to cover their eyes was especially obvious in scenes where there were multiple angels swarming after a character, for example when they were at opposite ends of a corridor or when the Doctor and River are surrounded by them at Winter Quay. If we were to adhere to the rules established in Blink all those Angels would be able to see each other and would be trapped.

This is a good breakdown of continuity errors, HOWEVER, I have a bone to pick with you re: your analysis of us not knowing what angels look like.

Angels can be shown moving on screen because the audience, for those shots, were not considered part of the universe. There are some shots where a director will choose to break the “fourth wall” by bringing in the audience in some way, usually through eye contact with the actors, or some plot something or other - this was the opposite. The audience got to see the horror of the angels moving, because we were explicitly not included in those events.

So no, that’s not a continuity error, blah blah blah, carry on …

Agree with the thing about the Angels moving because the audience doesn’t count as “seeing them” except for the fact that they wouldn’t be statues because they turn to stone, presumably they aren’t always angel statues and if no one in the show is seeing them they would be something else.

I really liked in Blink how the audience counted as people in the universe, even only looking through the camera lens, it made it much more real for me.

Steven Moffat has this unfortunate tendency to ignore continuity in favour of things that look cool (moving angels, Lady Liberty) and it infuriates me.

mfnazgul:

I tell myself, all the time, that they’re not real. That even if they were, I’d be able to handle it, I know what they are and how they work, and besides, it’s not like they actually kill you. They let you live, really, until you’re dead. Just like any other person, you live until you don’t any more, even if it means that you’ll never see your friends and family again. What they do isn’t painful, isn’t hurtful, isn’t even bad, not really. It’s just inevitable, and that’s maybe the worst part. Knowing that there is nothing to be done is harder than anything else.

They are not scary, and they are not real. They’re just images. But the likeness of an angel is an angel itself, and I can’t help but wonder how it is that they’ve so thoroughly invaded my brain as to make me afraid of something that used to make me feel wonder and joy. It’s irrational, and I don’t want to be afraid. I am afraid of them because meeting one would make me afraid, and I hate fear.

They’re fear itself, really. They are the strange and scary-not-scary figures that linger in my peripheral vision, that make me afraid to look behind me, because seeing it, knowing, would be worse than having it come from no where. It’s better not to know, in the end. Not to have to stare down your worst nightmare and know that you’re going to die before you even got the chance to live. And the worst part? You can’t look away, or you’ll die all the faster. Closing your eyes just lets them come closer, because “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me” doesn’t apply to the real world. With them, you can’t look away for a second, you can’t even blink, blink and you’re dead.

I know that they are not real. I know it in the logical part of my mind, but that doesn’t stop me from flinching whenever I see statues with empty eyes, or checking out my window to make sure that there isn’t one watching. It doesn’t stop me from hoping that the Statue of Liberty will always have eyes on it, that there are always lights on in the parts of the world populated by figures of angels. It doesn’t matter that I know that they’re just pictures, just imagination. Because to me, they are creatures of fear, and there is nothing to be done.

Don’t blink. Blink and you’re dead. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. And don’t blink. Good luck.