Poor Criccieth tried to wade into the Ianto/Gwen controversy and got a whole bunch of interesting comments for her trouble. In reading them, I realized that there will never be a meeting of the minds because the personal zeitgeists of the combatants are so different that there is no possibility of it. You start with a simple statement of how you see things, and suddenly accusations are flying in every direction. Better to stay out; there is no shortage of people who understand and appreciate your viewpoint, and life is too short and fandom too interesting to spend your life in slanging matches.

Having said that, I'd like to say a few things about Gwen, because I blame RTD completely for the dislike some people feel for her.

When I heard about the Torchwood cast, and the way they were described, I turned to my sister and said, rather sardonically, oh goody, another Rose/Doctor pairing. Mind you, I had liked Rose; she is probably RTD's best creation. Rose goes from a girl with no education and no prospects to a world-saving hero, and she does so quite believably. So when I heard about Gwen, I figured we were going to see something similar, but I wasn't particularly upset by it.

Unfortunately, Torchwood's own character derailed that approach. Rose/Nine are in a vacuum; even when Mickey or Jack are around, it's all about them. Rose is being shown the Universe and she's finding out that she has the brains and the moxie to cope with it and is exhilarated by it all; Nine is traumatized by the death of his whole race and his own part in it and he's basically being walked back from the edge of insanity by this little fireball he's educating. It's even worse in the second season, because the only character that truly could compete for attention with Rose, the one that turns the dynamic from two to three -- Jack -- isn't there at all. So Doctor Who is a two-people show. In different ways, the relationships between Martha and the Doctor and Donna and the Doctor play out in the same fashion.

In Torchwood, you have a team. Inevitably, people will look at the other characters and find someone to identify with that is not whom the creators expected. Clever creators let that happen naturally and take care to give all the characters a little bit of time and development. In this case (and I firmly believe it is because Gwen is RTD's alter ego, no matter how much he denies it), they didn't. There is very little character development in the first few episodes. Heres what you get: (1)Jack, who is sort of a known quantity from Doctor Who, but who is pictured as being darker and nastier due to his life experiences after being abandoned by the Doctor; (2)a pretty Asian science geek who is totally socially repressed; (3)a mouthy doctor with a penchant for using alien date rape drugs; (4)a ghostly presence in the background who looks good enough to eat; (4)the heroine girl who's supposed to explain it all to us.

And then Cyberwoman hit. And Gareth David-Lloyd acted his heart out. And suddenly there was a character almost anyone could identify with, and IT WASN'T GWEN.

Now, if the creators had been clever, they would have done something catastrophic TO GWEN and show us how she coped with it. But they never do. Tosh meets up with Mary, and has her heart well and truly broken, which drives her even deeper into her shell, but makes her incredibly more sympathetic; and Owen meets up with Diane and has his heart well and truly broken, and you glimpse the desperation inside him, and he becomes more sympathetic. Even Jack meets up with the real Jack and if you don't feel for the guy, you don't have a heart.

But Gwen? Gwen skates over everything, eyes opened wide and every stupid thing she does carries no consequences, because she is "the heart of the show". But a heart that is never broken is not very interesting. Worse, after a while, the character is not very sympathetic. The perfect example is Adrift. In spite of being repeatedly told to back off, she continues; even after Jack shows her Flat Holm, she decides that because she would have wanted to know, everyone else would too. Her consequence? Crying prettily in Rhys' arms. After Owen has become a hero and everybody realizes Tosh is heading for a nervous breakdown, GWEN IS STILL THE SAME. Hell, by the end of the second season, RHYS has grown more than Gwen.

The fact that Gwen is still likeable is wholly due to Eve Myles, because she pulls Gwen up by the scruff of the neck. And the fact that Eve and Kai have remarkable chemistry makes what you see of the relationship so beautiful and believable that you understand why Gwen, in spite of her attraction to Jack, would have ultimately chosen Rhys. And in (ahem) the season that never was, she is what Gwen should have developed to be. But we haven't been privy to that development, except in small fits and starts shoe-horned in between whole reams of Gwen adoration.

I am not a "fan-girl" or a slasher. I came to Torchwood as a science-fiction and Doctor Who fan. Much before I liked Jack/Ianto as a pairing, I liked them as characters. If you read my fic, I have always been sympathetic to Gwen; Jesus, you can't be more sympathetic than to make the woman the ancestor of a new line of Time Lords. But I did it because I believed in what Gwen could be, rather than what she had been.