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There's a fic I read once I'm trying to remember the name of now. I think it was by someone I really ought to remember. I think it was Due South. The key part is that they keep writing the day wrong, so it stays Tuesday over and over until they work through their issues. And that image has bunnied me for Torchwood. I know it's a bit groundhog day too, but if I'm inspired by something specific it seems polite to mention it in the notes, you know?
So, anyone know which one? I almost know but it's been bugging me all day, and you can't exactly google usefully for Tuesday.

ETA: Solved!
http://www.trickster.org/speranza/Eight.html
(see comments)

(no subject)

Am reading more lit textbook.
Speech act theory now.
Could apply it to Torchwood.
But I have the feeling it would come up with useful things like "Captain Jack is the boss of them" and "Torchwood try and control the perceived and expressed reality of others"

there was a handy thing though about how we accept things a sentence takes for granted. like if you say "my brother could beat up your brother" then you might doubt that they could in fact beat them up, but you won't so much doubt that the brother exists.

It also said that if you say "I'm going to visit the fairies" then the audience takes for granted that there are fairies. But I think it's rather compressing that. Because audience may or may not accept the existence of fairies, depending on genre conventions, context of statement, character context, and sundry other factors including Being Very Awkward.

Also people are less likely to suspend disbelief for the niggly details. I mean, we can accept there are aliens and fairies and suchlike but people get grumpy when the Torchwood 'verse reality seems to be that of a popular movie rather than that of a carefully researched bit of history. Because they're getting it Wrong, you see. Except actually they're saying something more like their 'verse is a sekrit xover. Is a bit like how the Doctor keeps on reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Just because it's utter rubbish in our 'verse doesn't mean he's getting it wrong. Just that physics and/or translation from the Gallifreyan is a bit different over there.


I was also thinking that the bits of a play you would pay most attention to, where they set up character and suchlike, are the bits of a *series* most likely to be full of goofs and ignored-later stuff. Because the actors don't know as much as their characters would *or* as much as they and the audience will by the end of the season so their initial choices can be difficult to reconcile with later knowledge. But the more episodes get piled up the more characters sort of settle in and have a middle as well as a bunch of outliers. I mean, there's a usual character, once you have a lot of data. At the start there's just a scatter of data points. But just because we have so little to work with we're going to work those scattered points very hard. Which is a bit awkward if they decide to change them later.


... for some reason I keep wandering back to Ianto in 1-01 kind of grinning at Gwen and nodding her through the door. The gesture amuses me. But I also want to pull that sequence apart and analyse it for character and themes and stuff. Because we have the first introduction to Torchwood-the-place and it's all about deception, false fronts, Owen being a twat the staff not actually being very good at the hiding (partly because they can erase their mistakes), and the bit about CCTV so she was all being watched even when she thought she was being sneaky. There's a lot of theme to pull out of that.

And then Jack tries to control not just what Gwen does but how she phrases her observations. That's taking control sort of higher up the chain? Like... if he just wanted her to do like he said he wouldn't have to be so insistent on her saying it right, it's more like he wants her to *think* like he says, so he keeps poking until she expresses in an acceptable manner.

And then there's the bit where she's all 'you can't do stuff to me I'm police' except she's already cheating if she's police, she isn't acting like police or in uniform or properly like the law says with searching places after you ask. She's being sneaky with pizza. So she's as two faced as the others already. Only not very good at it. And trying to use her group affiliation as a shield when she's already stepped outside it. Which doesn't work so very well. A bit like in Day One she tries to use Torchwood as a magic word but it don't work yet because they're all grrr at her and don't believe her. She hasn't got word power yet. So Jack has to be the magic word instead.

... I could rephrase that to be more coherent or I could go read more book. I think book.

reworking Border Princes

Border Princes has been bugging me. Because like I said, it has a lot of good parts scattered around the edges. So I kind of want to pull it apart and reassemble it into something that works instead.

There's a couple of main problems. 'Presence of Marty Stu' is a heading, not a detailed problem. What a MS does is distort the characters around it so they only exist in relation to it. Also it tends to magic away the problems - like, maybe character X is a jerk but he's not a jerk to MS because MS is Just That Cool. And what you end up with is a nasty combination of no distinctive characters (because they're all reacting to Just That Cool) and no conflict.

BP has conflict in the run-and-shoot sense, but in the emotional sense all the conflict is pushed to the edges. Conflict is when two characters are in a scene and they want different things. And it only exists for non-Team characters in BP. plus if James+character are in a scene the only time anyone wants something different than James is if they want to kill him or run away or something, never emotion-different. Like, Gwen's only conflict is if to leave Rhys, there's never any doubt James is Just That Cool and perfect. It would have been a bit more interesting if James had some kind of objection to Gwen acting as she did.

The other set of thought is intertext clearer - In the Buffy episode Superstar the character Jonathan MSed himself into a AU where he was Just That Cool, but he did it by stealing recogniseable aspects of other characters. When the spell wore off they got their aspects back. It was like a wonky version of the enjoining spell they worked at the end of the season, where everyone voluntarily pooled their best assets to create a Buffy that was Just That Cool (and Kick Arse). (note a- this condensed canon can be argued with) (note b- I should stop doing the capital letters thing, probably.)

So what would be interesting to do with James... who should be called Jonathan for the intertext funnies... would be to make him *recogniseably* a composite of the best characteristics of the other characters, and leave them *noticeably* lacking them.

Bear with me on this.

What I mean is - okay, so he gets the superpower of Giving Cool Names, which in canon is something Ianto does. Ianto loses his verbal dexterity, which leaves him a shadow of his former self. Without the snark, he really does just bring the coffee.
This is pretty much what happens in the book, if you want to look at it from just the right angle.
Now what would make it an interesting story with canon character illumination and some conflict would be if, sometimes, it *wore off*, so James lost his borrowed cool and the canon characters got it back. In the context of this example, Ianto would get his snark back, just briefly, and instead of a Torchwood slang entirely shaped by the interloper, they'd start having cute rhyming names for things because Ianto shapes their expressive language instead.
Further, instead of James being communication central, Ianto would be the one who passes the messages and reshapes them through his specific forms of expression.
And in seeing him lose and regain this function, we would see what his function *is*. We see Ianto has snark because someone stole it for a while.

So what else would a composite character have?
( Read more... )

A deliberate MS is always going to be dead dodgy, and persuading a widely read audience to read him past page, well, in my case, 42, is going to be very difficult. I think you'd have to give away the cuckoo nature at the start, have the spell fade *in*, so you establish status quo and then break it. And then you'd have a conflict between writing and audience - persuade all of them to like the new character even as he demolishes the existing ones! Rather difficult. Can be done, though, if he uses the 'sympathetic character' checklist as well as the MS one and has a bit of conflict and some self sacrifice and some needs-hugs and such.

Eventually the character-eater aspect of the MS would mean nobody else was remotely necessary.

But the world would get saved a lot, so is the trade off worth it?

... and we have to reboot to regular canon by the end, but that doesn't necessarily mean the canon people all decide 'no'. They could mostly decide 'yes' and have a couple of people with opposite reasons for deciding 'no'. Maybe Owen being selfish and Tosh being... I don't know, I haven't thought of anything for Tosh to do in this setup thus far. Or maybe it could be that Owen doesn't want to be selfish and is aware all his selfsacrificing bits got nicked by the interloper. That would be nifty. The MS makes it so the others can't be heroic therefore sets them up to try and break him up which would leave them with their heroic bits back which would then make them wonder if they should put him back together.

... I'm confusing myself now.



The point is, having a character or outside factor distort the canon characters is not necessarily of itself a bad thing, because you can use it to compare/contrast with the way they usually are, and highlight why we like them.


But the book doesn't do that. At all. So I want to take it apart and do something more interesting with it.

PS Bunny following my previous thought

If what you start with is a mannequin that steals the self-perceived best and most important traits from whoever it connects with
then you've got a toth-stick situation, two Xanders, or two Captain Jacks - All the strengths in one and all the weakness in the other.
But then you add more people, or gradually take them away, or both.

... there's all sorts can be done with that ...