Yeah, I'd rather not be influenced, so I'll post my reactions when I get to those episodes. :D And thanks for refraining! We can talk more about the meta-stuff after I've seen the rest of the season if it gets more into spoiler territory, too.
The thing about River Song, I guess, is that I didn't feel that the narration was trying to push me towards liking her, aside from just presenting her as a badass character, which I was down with. *g* And I really love her take-no-nonsense attitude towards the Doctor, which was something I also really liked about his dynamic with Donna. I'm not overly fond of Fumbling Towards Romance plots, generally preferring established romance, which is why I think the Doctor/River romance might actually work for me, in a way this kind of thing normally doesn't -- it's already an established relationship for her (assuming the series isn't planning on throwing a curve ball), and by the time he meets her for the "first" time (from her point of view), it already will be an established relationship for him too ... or at least he will have had time to get used to the idea. In a weird kind of way, there is no "first meeting, getting to know each other" period in their relationship, which is normally where TV romance tends to throw me off. Either he knows her, or she knows him, in that bizarre way that only works when time travel is involved.
Moffat does have a tendency to stick a lot of romance into his plots -- something I'm definitely noticing as the season progresses -- but I find that I generally like his romances; they're melancholy, bittersweet and low-key, and tend to work really well for me, especially compared to the over-the-top way that RTD used to do romance when he'd tackle it. Perhaps that's even why River, as a character, works so much better for me now than she did in the Library episodes, because RTD was still at the helm and RTD seems to go for Doomed Love Through Space and Time, rather than the more subtle way that the River/Doctor interactions seemed to play out in these episodes.
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The thing about River Song, I guess, is that I didn't feel that the narration was trying to push me towards liking her, aside from just presenting her as a badass character, which I was down with. *g* And I really love her take-no-nonsense attitude towards the Doctor, which was something I also really liked about his dynamic with Donna. I'm not overly fond of Fumbling Towards Romance plots, generally preferring established romance, which is why I think the Doctor/River romance might actually work for me, in a way this kind of thing normally doesn't -- it's already an established relationship for her (assuming the series isn't planning on throwing a curve ball), and by the time he meets her for the "first" time (from her point of view), it already will be an established relationship for him too ... or at least he will have had time to get used to the idea. In a weird kind of way, there is no "first meeting, getting to know each other" period in their relationship, which is normally where TV romance tends to throw me off. Either he knows her, or she knows him, in that bizarre way that only works when time travel is involved.
Moffat does have a tendency to stick a lot of romance into his plots -- something I'm definitely noticing as the season progresses -- but I find that I generally like his romances; they're melancholy, bittersweet and low-key, and tend to work really well for me, especially compared to the over-the-top way that RTD used to do romance when he'd tackle it. Perhaps that's even why River, as a character, works so much better for me now than she did in the Library episodes, because RTD was still at the helm and RTD seems to go for Doomed Love Through Space and Time, rather than the more subtle way that the River/Doctor interactions seemed to play out in these episodes.