Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara

Good points: Romana's outfit. Okay, so purple and turquoise is a color combination very much of it's time, and in daylight the fabrics looked like the godawful synthetics they were, but, purple! With piping! Mute it out a bit to a light blue, pick a purple that doesn't go quite so wine colored in daylight, made of win! And also, with a hat. Hats are good.
I think I liked the prince's outfit better though. Red, with chainmail arrows on the shoulder. Stylish.

Also good: Sword fight! And, er, apparently that was the whole description for the last episode, so *lots* of sword fight. With clowning.

"Next time I shall not be so lenient" says the retreating bad guy who just lost completely.
I giggle muchly.

There's also all the fun of mistaken identity with added androids. That is made of win. Especially nearly sawing Romana up for parts. Plus whenever someone made an anti-android comment the Doctor said it was exactly what androids said about humans, which is kind of fun.



Less good points: You know I don't demand much in the way of coherence from my classic SF, but... okay, they've been tasked with a universe saving quest by one of the two most powerful beings in the universe, right? So, what does the Doctor do?
Play chess (badly) and go fishing (very badly).
It's either wildly implausible or further proof that the Doctor is utterly, utterly, insane. And responsibility averse on a pathological level. And getting him to do things apparently involves following him around with an electrified sword, and even then he gets stroppy.

The thing is, all that character stuff? Entirely fitting.
So then we end up with... well, you know how Jack seems to kind of worship him? Some days I want to show him all these DVDs and, well, pat him on the back while he *facepalms* and commiserate while he gets over the crush. Not that the Doctor isn't still heroic and all, it's just, sometimes it's everso reluctant and quite often you want to dump ice on his head. You know? So.
When I say 'gets over the crush' I don't mean 'and dumps the Doctor'. More like 'and realises the Doctor is, all in all, a bit of a prat sometimes, and while not human per se very much metaphor-for-fallible-type-human, and decides he likes him anyway'.

Sometimes I read fic that kind of believes the hype about the Doctor and I get this feeling like... well, you know how the Companions change pretty regularly? As long as they're new they're still impressed.

I think he's more fun if he's a bit of a lunatic and a very daft man and yet saves the universe a lot. All that god stuff is more or less by accident anyway. Sort of.

Trickster much.


ANYways, in the 'reasons Romana should have dumped him early on' column goes 'going fishing while Romana does the difficult and dangerous quest stuff'.

Also it really should be the Doctor's turn to get forced into a political marriage sometimes.



I was wondering though, do you think all Time Lords look like a specific other non-Time-Lord person or is it just Romana?


All in all: Mostly liked the story, though the last ep could have done with a bit less sword fight, and this is *me* saying that.



In other news I, er, may have finished the whole cake. This is not of the good. So then I decided to give my hands something to do that wasn't eating, so I did more knitting. Have realised I can remember how to knit but not how to stop knitting. Am looking at it in puzzlement trying to remember how to make the thing finished. It's only a couple of inches long so far but it's already picked up an extra stitch and it's really never going to be anything useable anyway. But, something to do.

More Torchwood bunnies

I need to finish writing Triage. I wrote a short version and then realised I'd sent the characters to do the wrong jobs and needed to back up and try again. Plus then I got an idea for how it should be structured that would make it three times as long. Three povs, Ianto-Tosh-Owen, just some missing scenes in and after 1-13.

But just now I got a follow up bunny.
( Read more... )

I don't know what I'm going to do with all the pieces yet.


I think the titles are either variations on 'Triage' so it sounds like Tri or Age, or they're a countdown, like words involving Two.

There's a doubled time track and doubled memories and a sort of ... cat is both dead and alive thing going on. So Two words could probably fit. If I can think of just the right one.

conversation skills

I have been pondering
and I think my conversations should go a bit more like this:

*listen listen listen*
I hear this thing you said!
I repeat bits back and comment!
I have a shiny thought it makes me think of!
*listen listen listen*

or, and fairly importantly,

*listen listen listen*
I hear your problems
I have much sympathy
I would like to fix them
but cannot think of anything useful.
Have a shiny! They're distracting! Also, fun.
(If not fun, there's always another shiny.)
Still sad? I sad too.
... shiny?



... as it is I tend to skip straight to Shiny! because, you know, in my head it's the same thing. But, um, in the outside my head world it is not the same thing at all, and can rather give the impression I'm not listening.
Especially since problem I can't fix tends to make me go hide instead.

But I'm listening/reading/being very interested really, and only listen/read the people I do because I actually want to (and not, as I may accidentally imply, the people that happen to be around when all the other people went away, because there are actually people but these are the people who are still around and I want to talk to) and I offer shiny much the same way I offer food and drink and small presents, because it's the best I can think of to do.



This is why fandom works better, because if I just bring the shiny, it still kind of mostly works out.

It's the feedback problem, basically. Like, reading and offering the drabble it made you think of is yaay, but, reading and offering *feedback* is much more yaay. And I need to remember that when it is talky words too.




/very obvious


(also, when I mean to say "yaay to see you! see you more is yaay!" then I should not say it in the way that sounds like telling off. Like, "yaay this story part!" is nice but "boo why don't you write quicker" is not. Oops.)

Hate hate?

I have been thinking about hate, and why it is a bad thing.
Someone this afternoon suggested it could sometimes be a good thing, like if you hate slavery, and I kind of flailed a bit and went 'no, because... *completely different thing here*'. Because it seemed obvious, so I hadn't thought about it.

So my now thought is that not-thinking is a large part of why hate is of the bad.

Like it leads to a kind of blindness. Like the thing that is hated is just... no longer examined, because there's this category that is Bad now and the only reaction is Hate.

And hate is sort of hungry, like it wants to get bigger? Like... the idea of collaborators, or if you're not with us you're against us? Because there's this thing that is Bad, and if you don't see it that way that makes you Bad too. Because Hate is very very sure of itself and not looking at alternatives any more.

And then there's that thing, that little leap that isn't little at all, between hating an idea or an action, and hating the person that holds that idea or does that action. Difference between hating slavery and hating slavers. Getting rid of slavery sounds of the good, but getting rid of all the people that have slaves not so much.

And hating people is not even hating the 4D continuing person, because it isn't seeing evidence and change and stuff, because hate mostly sees hate. Like, hate has this set idea about the hated, and that's the only thing it sees, not anything outside of hate.

So hate is blind, and therefore of the bad.

I think.



Ignorance as the bad that makes all the other bads; makes sense to me.


I don't think hate is a kind of energy that lets a person aim it and use it to get things done. It seems to me more that hate is a kind of energy that aims people and gets them to do things. Except for the part where people are the ones making the hate because at the minute I'm not thinking of a universe of disembodied forces.
Feedback loop?
Difficult to get out of sort, where more hate means thinking more hate is appropriate.



I am still thinking about this one. I've thought plenty about Lust but not Hate. Probably says something about me.

Also I thought a lot about Pride.
And how there's a sort of thing that is opposite of Pride in a lot of ways but also does damage - like that thing where Willow didn't seem to think she could mess anyone up seriously because she was Willow, rather than noticing that actually people were getting seriously messed up therefore she was powerful. Like underestimates are dangerous too?
There's probably already a word for that but I'm still poking the thought into shape.




Sometimes I want to just go study philosophy properly, because people have been having these thoughts and arguing about them for the longest time.

Except Cultural Studies seems to me to be about figuring how thoughts work once they get out into the world, which is a bit like philosophy only on the output side, sort of thing. So studying this bit first or as well seems pretty useful.

But I still feel like I'm reinventing the wheel and having half an argument that everyone probably had already a lot.