Ethan Rayne + maths
Oct. 2nd, 2011 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThis morning I dreamed Ethan Rayne teaching maths. Interesting advanced maths. Which obviously I don't understand in the slightest.
I've been reading a lot of Stargate Atlantis fanfic lately, mostly because I ran out of Stargate Jack/Daniel long fic on AO3 and there was this other pairing right there.
So this morning I vaguely started to put together a fusion 'verse, where the space vampires are fought by a team off Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only with both 'verses spun so they fit together better.
I read the other day a fanfic series that did Lovecraft mythos stuff to Stargate. And, er, regretted it due to the creepy terror. That worked rather too well. Stargate is all gods and stuff, but because they're just science they get beat by clever humans doing more science at them. Add the horror back in and make it seriously beyond our ken and it gets darker quickly. In science fiction you have the chance to apply brain and get answers. In horror you're just going to realise that any such attempt is futile and everything dies.
So stir together Stargate and Slayer 'verses and what do you get? Science vampires and math magicians? If it's a crossover you get Buffy et al treating Wraith as just another kind of demon and stargates as just another portal to a demon realm. And being kind of right and kind of wrong. You get more tools to fight with because unascended beings can use magic and ascended answer prayers and incantations. But Stargate does most of the same things sometimes, it's just a different spin.
Putting together a team for a one way trip through a Stargate, would you start with the best and brightest? Could pull people out of prison and make a team you'd be just as happy to have fail. Start with Toshiko, if Jack wasn't in that 'verse to get her. Ethan from the Initiative.
Adding actual vampires and werewolves would change the tone some. Stargate teams go out and meet aliens. Teal'c is technically alien but spent all his time trying to undo it. All the times meeting strange beings with stranger powers didn't turn into teams with strange powers. It just stayed humans applying brain to universe.
So no Slayer, no vampire, no werewolves. No witches? Psi powers were on Stargate too but they got undone by the end of the episode.
Ethan would have something to do with gates or teleport, because Janus is the god of gates and doors. A math version of Ethan could do that. Atlantis and Stargate have a Janus ancient but is not the same.
Sometimes I'd rather invent some original story, but TV has been using so many elements of so many stories there's no such thing. Well, there's never any such thing, language is made up of words that only have meanings because someone has used them before, truly original would be meaningless. But even just trying to make a SF&F 'verse, the parts are pretty well chewed by now.
If you make stories around magic doors that lead instantly between places, how many stories are you copying at once? Not just Stargate. Not just Young Wizards. Or Narnia. It's too basic.
Yet if you made a TV pitch for people travelling planet to planet through linked gates, it would be shot down as a Stargate rip off.
Even though travelling with starships isn't all a rip off of any one show.
Primeval and Torchwood both use the Hellmouth / Rift / hole in the world that goes somewhere somewhen else with different rules and denizens.
There's an idea that there are only two stories, going on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Which is really only one story from different points of view. Also, it's wrong, there's bazillions of stories. But. If you're going to do the going/arriving every week, there needs to be a way to do it. Doors or rifts or portals or gates or roads or rivers or ships. Some are more used than others. Depends on genre I guess. There is not much world saving heroism based out of a tour bus, but probably much band stuff.
I'm bored. I should read something for college. One set of reading is Maus, which is depressing, and the other is Victorian poetry, which is annoying. I wish to study things that do not wind me up. Yet I can see the value in getting a nice mind stretch from reading all these many sorts of things. I just... rarely end up more interested in them than I was to start with.
:-p to college.
Studying with Ethan would be rather more interesting. And probably more lethal.
I've been reading a lot of Stargate Atlantis fanfic lately, mostly because I ran out of Stargate Jack/Daniel long fic on AO3 and there was this other pairing right there.
So this morning I vaguely started to put together a fusion 'verse, where the space vampires are fought by a team off Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only with both 'verses spun so they fit together better.
I read the other day a fanfic series that did Lovecraft mythos stuff to Stargate. And, er, regretted it due to the creepy terror. That worked rather too well. Stargate is all gods and stuff, but because they're just science they get beat by clever humans doing more science at them. Add the horror back in and make it seriously beyond our ken and it gets darker quickly. In science fiction you have the chance to apply brain and get answers. In horror you're just going to realise that any such attempt is futile and everything dies.
So stir together Stargate and Slayer 'verses and what do you get? Science vampires and math magicians? If it's a crossover you get Buffy et al treating Wraith as just another kind of demon and stargates as just another portal to a demon realm. And being kind of right and kind of wrong. You get more tools to fight with because unascended beings can use magic and ascended answer prayers and incantations. But Stargate does most of the same things sometimes, it's just a different spin.
Putting together a team for a one way trip through a Stargate, would you start with the best and brightest? Could pull people out of prison and make a team you'd be just as happy to have fail. Start with Toshiko, if Jack wasn't in that 'verse to get her. Ethan from the Initiative.
Adding actual vampires and werewolves would change the tone some. Stargate teams go out and meet aliens. Teal'c is technically alien but spent all his time trying to undo it. All the times meeting strange beings with stranger powers didn't turn into teams with strange powers. It just stayed humans applying brain to universe.
So no Slayer, no vampire, no werewolves. No witches? Psi powers were on Stargate too but they got undone by the end of the episode.
Ethan would have something to do with gates or teleport, because Janus is the god of gates and doors. A math version of Ethan could do that. Atlantis and Stargate have a Janus ancient but is not the same.
Sometimes I'd rather invent some original story, but TV has been using so many elements of so many stories there's no such thing. Well, there's never any such thing, language is made up of words that only have meanings because someone has used them before, truly original would be meaningless. But even just trying to make a SF&F 'verse, the parts are pretty well chewed by now.
If you make stories around magic doors that lead instantly between places, how many stories are you copying at once? Not just Stargate. Not just Young Wizards. Or Narnia. It's too basic.
Yet if you made a TV pitch for people travelling planet to planet through linked gates, it would be shot down as a Stargate rip off.
Even though travelling with starships isn't all a rip off of any one show.
Primeval and Torchwood both use the Hellmouth / Rift / hole in the world that goes somewhere somewhen else with different rules and denizens.
There's an idea that there are only two stories, going on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Which is really only one story from different points of view. Also, it's wrong, there's bazillions of stories. But. If you're going to do the going/arriving every week, there needs to be a way to do it. Doors or rifts or portals or gates or roads or rivers or ships. Some are more used than others. Depends on genre I guess. There is not much world saving heroism based out of a tour bus, but probably much band stuff.
I'm bored. I should read something for college. One set of reading is Maus, which is depressing, and the other is Victorian poetry, which is annoying. I wish to study things that do not wind me up. Yet I can see the value in getting a nice mind stretch from reading all these many sorts of things. I just... rarely end up more interested in them than I was to start with.
:-p to college.
Studying with Ethan would be rather more interesting. And probably more lethal.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-03 05:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-06 07:52 pm (UTC)Is that by any chance Martha's _Tatters?_ (it may be if you've been reading Jack/Daniel Stargate fic)I love love love that to pieces for doing serious, disquieting, well-characterised horror that is based not on open gore (lots of fans of 70s gory/zombified horror at pub last night) but on dreamscapes and strangeness. Also any fic that has Gunn from Angel explaining the rules of basic prosody to a slightly-stunned Cordelia and Wesley is made of win. (I was rereading Tatters the other week after watching the creepy-hotel ep of NuWho).
For me, I love plenty of happy-ending and ingenious retcon stuff, but I like dark stuff if it's earned its way by characterization/realism (not necessarily naturalistic realism, but the sense that if weird shit happened it would happen just this way. It's a feeling I get from Martha's stories, and Sheri Tepper's Marianne books (if you like delicate dreamlike dark fantasy you might like those), or the better parts of Stephen King where he's writing tightly enough for his stuff to not unravel through sheer excess. M R James can occasionally be formulaic but because I like the formula of Edwardian-academic-meets-something-disturbing he generally works for me.
Buffy, for example, works for me because of Whedon's writing, and because he's not too lazy in using horror: I still remember _The Body_ fondly: kids who are competent at dealing with all the Hellmouth stuff are really shocked by the plain banal ordinariness of death. The better episodes of Torchwood like the one about Suzie coming back from the dead work for me (but not Countrycide). That's a personal list of works which somehow slightly disturb me or make me think. None of them start off in the same place (I assume) as Hammer Horror/Friday the xth/zombie flicks, but they all actually draw me in. YMMV. YLIPD (your list is probably different), but I'm interested in what makes people think 'oh, come off it!' vs 'This is interesting', and the distinction between out-and-out horror and dark/urban fantasy is one of those borderlines.
Ruth
no subject
Date: 2011-10-29 02:20 pm (UTC)creepy hotel = interesting connection.