(no subject)

Stopped dreaming about people from SGA.
Started dreaming about Doctors 6 and 13.
*Gives subconscious a hard stare*


Doctor 12 was being mopey and very very old, and he was going on about how he was going to die and be the only one of his race to die alone, and it was all very much about the glory days of old and bitter regrets.
And I was being commiserating and sad about how time travel works, because "After all, it's not like a future you ever turned up on Gallifrey. That would really mess about with things. You would have noticed."

So then he looks at me and gets a bright idea combining homesickness and predestination paradoxes. And when in his life exactly everything went really apocalyptically wrong. And how he could do it better if he had to do it over again.



All I know about Trial of a Time Lord is a summary I read somewhere. But if 7 kicked off the Time War by accident or design, with that whole announcing himself to the Daleks bit, could a future Doctor get desperate enough to want to undo himself? Does it make more sense that way?

I read only that it made bugger all sense the first way, so *shrugs*.



Would be a way to shake up the series if they ever get bored with the lone traveller format. And give him extra regenerations. Paradox himself into having all those lives over again.

Only that would paradox all his future companions out of existence, or into a different existence, or something.

But maybe he'll have decided he was bad for all of them.

Or maybe he'll have collected up all the ones that haven't come to a bad end already and they'll be in a TARDIS somehow protected from paradox effects.

Or maybe he'll think it's a personal sacrifice thing, to screw over the lives of everyone he cares about and himself in order to give Gallifrey a chance.



My asleep brain was intrigued by the possibilities anyways.



Also there was a bit where old school cybermen could get me through the flat panel TV
but that's not exactly unusual.

paying attention to canon = weird

I'm finding myself in the unusual situation of not believing fic on the grounds that "he wouldn't because he didn't".

I mean usually you have to ignore 'didn't' because 'didn't kiss' would be top of the list.

Suddenly I'm reading a pairing with actual canon - two if you count the Doctor - and I keep on winding up out of sorts because wouldn't-didn't.

This is deeply, deeply strange.

... do het writers have to deal with this all the time???

lazy SF

Reading a lot of fic - not just fanfic but general genre stuff - I'm often disappointed by lazy worldbuilding. There's shiny new technology, and maybe they call the money something different, but the social impact isn't followed through at all. People are basically the same as they are in the time and place the story was written, down to the local values of the social group the writer was from. And sometimes that's used deliberately, kind of a 'we're perfect and we're staying that way' manifesto, or a 'look how messed up this would be if it didn't change' thing. But it usually reads as just plain lazy. The writer seems to have decided that their own experience is universal, even if there's added tentacles.

The kind of SF I like - love, go back to, would aspire to write if world building on that scale were my forte - follows through on the social, sociological, psychological ramifications of whatever changes it introduces. If it gets really, really clever it sets up several different followed-through techs, several different groups, who have all developed their own norms and values. I love the worlds of C J Cherryh, because they all seem so odd when you start reading and so sensible by the time you've finished the book, they all follow through logically, and then they go crunch into each other. Lois McMaster Bujold does that kind of thing too, only then she throws Miles at most of it, so she's got a guy that never quite fits to observe it all through.

Apply this to Torchwood? And we've really only got the one alien to play with - Captain Jack Harkness. Whatever his society looks like, it's going to be *different*, just as the world Methos grew up in was different, or ancient Greece was many kinds of different, or the various versions of Rome. He's living in our world, but he's carrying the values of his into it. That's something the best of Highlander touched on, but there we're talking history, which can be researched. The future has to be extrapolated, which always gets political. More political. Ideological, or something.

Any assumptions about how Jack would or should act are coming from a set of purely local norms and values. Clashing assumptions about things like deference to rank or how people in a team are meant to relate to each other or expected sexual behaviour tend to get Jack into trouble. And, okay, sometimes he's being outrageous on purpose, but that's because he thinks it's somehow a better thing to do.

And it all gets complicated because he's a time traveller. He's from a future, but he's dreaming of a past. And which version of the past? One particular war? What part of it, what aspects of what story?

If he's written as basically a 21st century omnisexual polyamorous kinda military guy then that kinda works. But to be a guy who doesn't even see the labels, let alone fit the boxes? He's from somewhen a lot more different than that.

And living here/now. Or there/then. And never quite fitting in.

Is interesting.

Torchwood: Theme in a line?

"Don't let the job consume you."

... other lines?

(no subject)

I'm tagging old entries, and apparently I did some big thinking about Torchwood 1-03 and what it reveals about various characters in a compare/contrast way, and now I think it looks pretty shiny having watched the rest of the season.
Cool.

... is linking to my own old entries kind of weird?
... probably.

I'm tagging them as
torchwood episode review
torchwood 1-01
torchwood 1-02
torchwood 1-03
torchwood 1-04
torchwood 1-05
torchwood 1-06
torchwood 1-07
torchwood 1-08
torchwood 1-09
torchwood 1-10
torchwood 1-11
torchwood 1-12
torchwood 1-13


I've got about a week of LJ to trawl before I've tagged all of 2006 that way. Then there's just 2007 to do.

... yes, this is somewhat time consuming, but, I get to re-read all my old thoughts. some of them were cool, some less so.

is quite amusing watching my Ianto love evolve.

(no subject)

http://paulcornell.blogspot.com/2007/02/canonicity-in-doctor-who.html#links

Doctor Who has no canon, contradicts itself every which way, has an excellent set of excuses, and is generally a game anyone can play.

Okays.

But when I'm wondering if something is canon I'm wondering how to write a particular character. I mean the Doctor changes personality on a semi regular basis, so it isn't like there's only one answer to that. But there's stuff like him being a father and a grandfather, or who he's travelled with, or how he died all those other times, that seem sort of significant.

I quite like the idea that characters can be living in different versions of history. Like, history worked one way for the Doctor, who travelled around in it and kept making changes. But the people who stay still are living in another version, which is subject to change that retcons them along with everything else. And other time travellers are each living in their personal timelines and so remember things that didn't happen that way from the point of view of other people.

It would all get utterly insane to live in and you'd have to kind of give up on the whole concept of history and/or consensus reality.

It would also be possible to meet the love of your life and find out they never met you before.

Actually now I'm thinking Time Cop, where he comes back to base and there's a different president and stuff.

But any time traveller that gets split up from the people they care about would *know* that it's possible everything changes for them while they've been apart.

Nasty.


Add to that memory alteration technology and... I think I'd end up really really insecure and possibly using those stretchy don't run away thingies just to make really sure of people.


Or, to look at it another way, it's difficult to figure the emotional arc of a character who might have had their entire history rewritten since last time we saw them.