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omorkaThe question crops up in several forms of fiction: when you are an immortal being, or long-lived enough to fake it, who happens to be dealing primarily with humans, or at least sophonts with lifespans within an order of magnitude of a human's, how to you maintain any sense of relationship with them? From your perspective, their lives flash by - they practically age before your eyes.
Immortal villains typically just give up, treating them as either fungible pawns or as if they didn't count as sentient. Quite often, that's an aspect of their villainy. The ultimate examples are the various Cthulhu Mythos beings. However, a few of them also go for the second option.
Most immortal heroes or hero-helpers instead end up relating to not just individuals but their families (which a few of the immortal villains also do). This sometimes results in their treating an entire bloodline as if it were one continuous individual. For instance, Gandalf, in The Hobbit, clearly has a relationship with the Took family of Hobbits, and it takes him a while of dealing with Bilbo to clearly differentiate him from all the other Tooks he's known. He learns, of course; he doesn't make the same mistake with any of the three Took-descendents he deals with in the next generation. We learn that he deals with human families in much the same way, and, as with the Tooks among the hobbits, he typically interacts with royal families, or as close as their society has.
So, does the Doctor do this? You'd expect it, wouldn't you? He and Gandalf are both Merlin-figures, after all, and Merlin certainly had a thing for the family Pendragon. (They're also both, as Grima correctly noted of Gandalf, storm-crows - you really don't want either of them to show up, because it means something very bad is about to happen; your only consolation is that you won't have to face it alone.) And in the books, he does with at least one human family - the Lethbridge-Stewarts. But as far as I know, from my casual Who-fandom, he doesn't make a habit of it. Anyone with a more thorough knowledge of the Whoniverse know of another one?
[Edited because I can't spell again.]
Immortal villains typically just give up, treating them as either fungible pawns or as if they didn't count as sentient. Quite often, that's an aspect of their villainy. The ultimate examples are the various Cthulhu Mythos beings. However, a few of them also go for the second option.
Most immortal heroes or hero-helpers instead end up relating to not just individuals but their families (which a few of the immortal villains also do). This sometimes results in their treating an entire bloodline as if it were one continuous individual. For instance, Gandalf, in The Hobbit, clearly has a relationship with the Took family of Hobbits, and it takes him a while of dealing with Bilbo to clearly differentiate him from all the other Tooks he's known. He learns, of course; he doesn't make the same mistake with any of the three Took-descendents he deals with in the next generation. We learn that he deals with human families in much the same way, and, as with the Tooks among the hobbits, he typically interacts with royal families, or as close as their society has.
So, does the Doctor do this? You'd expect it, wouldn't you? He and Gandalf are both Merlin-figures, after all, and Merlin certainly had a thing for the family Pendragon. (They're also both, as Grima correctly noted of Gandalf, storm-crows - you really don't want either of them to show up, because it means something very bad is about to happen; your only consolation is that you won't have to face it alone.) And in the books, he does with at least one human family - the Lethbridge-Stewarts. But as far as I know, from my casual Who-fandom, he doesn't make a habit of it. Anyone with a more thorough knowledge of the Whoniverse know of another one?
[Edited because I can't spell again.]
