Torchwood books
Apr. 13th, 2023 04:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWent quiet because I've been reading Torchwood books. I have read
The House that Jack Built
includes some very vivid deaths, domestic violence, and a reflection on Jack's love life that... didn't feel to me like it was written by someone that likes Jack.
Detail and spoilers under the cut:
There is a plot with a lot of unlikely and gruesome deaths, but I of course am already letting those details fade from memory and concentrating on the bits about Jack's relationships.
But his relationships are the thread that pulls the whole story along and the big bads of the piece imply that his getting involved is what got their attention.
So the story focuses on a particular house, one that Jack lived in once.
Gwen's research says it's tied to a long history of messy death, murders, suicides, killing sprees.
Jack says he would have noticed, and it turns out he's right, this is a time travel story. Things from Beyond are messing with the timeline. But Jack remembers the unaltered, much less violent, past.
He still remembers something sad and nasty, tied to that house. He bought the house, invited his lovers there. Each visited and spent time with him. Then told him they were marrying each other. He went to the wedding, lurking at the back. The bride and groom panic, both fearing their affair will be revealed. Because apparently Jack was shagging both of them without them knowing that. Jack leaves, sure he's messing things up. And then that night the new husband kills his new wife.
Jack never lives any specific place long, and that house had a lot of different residents, so, probably he didnt stay there long after that.
The big bads say his intervention in their timeline was what got their attention, and now they're stirring up paradox to feed from. Jack sorts that bit out. But the big bads confront him in his lovers forms. Try to make him feel too bad to do the plan against them.
Jack concludes "I didn't kill her. That arrogant, image-obsessed and deluded lover we shared did." "I can't take the blame for everything that happens to people I know. Miles killed her because he couldn't stand who he was. That's sad but hardly my fault."
And then on the way out of the house / complex temporal situation, he gets to walk through moments he shared with each of them, say goodbye again.
So it's guilt grief relief, it can be read as another one about the atemporality of grief and trauma, and how the past tries to eat you, or get you to jump to it's tune.
But then at the end, complex temporal event resolved, Jack has made it so those specific events in that specific place couldn't have happened. He's solved the trauma by unmaking it in the first place. And he learns that in the new timeline the bride lived a long life.
Maybe that's supposed to be a happily ever after, but it actually loops around to actually factually blaming Jack for their tragedy, and makes an argument for Jack's simple presence breaking time, which... what else is he supposed to do?
So I want to sit down and argue with the book, and also hug Jack, and assure him he's allowed to exist, and love.
And I'm probably overthinking it, it's a Torchwood adventure, was it doing all that about feelings? But if it wasn't I dont know what it was doing.
It also explicitly names Jack's sexuality, via Ianto expressing jealousy.
The actual quote is funny, and I've remembered it out of context for ages:
page 155
"He prefers the term 'omnisexual'," said Ianto, stepping into the room. "It's the polite way of saying he'll sleep with anything - men, women... cephalopods. I must be the only boyfriend that's ever has to get jealous in a fishmongers."
"Don't knock the sensual embrace of the tentacle," Jack replied with a wink.
"Oh God..." Ianto replied. "I could have died happy had I never heard you say that. Changing the subject - because one of us has to before someone throws up - I've disconnected four monitors, the amp and a couple of speakers, so we're all set."
"Isn't he wonderful?" Jack said to Julia, kissing Ianto on the forehead. "What would I so without him?"
"The same things you do with me, just to someone else," Ianto deadpanned.
/p155
Okay, so, the fishmonger thing is funny... sort of. But in context of that paragraph it's about Ianto not feeling loved in a specific particular way, and in context of the book, the murdered bride expressed basically the same feeling, that Jack would just shag someone else.
Which was why she got married, and that didnt work out, so if it's saying something it's not saying a simple thing.
But a few pages earlier... page 134, Ianto says he knows everything from the files about Jack, and says "I'm like a stupid teenager swotting up with a copy of Smash Hits." Then he and Gwen between them agree Ianto is just Jack's shag, and if Ianto thinks otherwise he's deluded. Ianto says "I've never been much good at casual."
And while it is possible to read Ianto's beliefs that way... well I have listened to House of the Dead and he is clearly dead wrong. So why is the book saying it? The tragedy? Wind up our feelings? No cathartic payoff though. Ianto hugs Jack when he gets out of danger, with a "Not that I was worried" and then... back to work.
And Ianto does get some good work bits to do. He is not being dismissed as the tea boy, he's pretty much playing tech, and very observant. But it still dont feel like he got an arc as a character, or a relationship arc.
Ianto doesn't learn enough on the page to know anything Jack has been through, let alone have feelings about it.
The final scene is the one where the woman was better off in the no Jack timeline.
It's just... difficult to read it as Ianto being wrong. Just within this book, it's easy to read it as about Jack's omnisexuality screwing up all their lives.
Just juxtaposing Jack's memories of that one screwed up relationship with the history of domestic violence and the present day reality of the man who lives there hurting his wife, it lines up Jack's desires and these violent incidents. And then fixes them by taking Jack out of the other people's story.
It feels like the narrative blames him.
But, it does say love, not just shag, when his point of view sees people he loves. So it's not flat simple.
I dont know. Maybe there's a better angle I havent figured out how to read it from.
I liked it in a way, strong horror story, but... I wouldn't write it that way. It feels like it's saying something about Jack being destructive and it ties that to his sexuality in a way I don't like. Even if it's not about his violence, it ends up implying he's a destructive influence, specifically for loving many people. Not right.
The Undertaker's Gift
Honestly don't have much to say about this one. That's a lot of horror, even for Torchwood.
Also it took the opportunity to hurt the team in many and varied ways.
Not my sort of thing.
Consequences
This book is a series of short stories that hand off to each other, ending with one that wraps threads you probably didnt even notice scattered through earlier books.
Virus
by James Moran
Is the first story I think of when writing them up, because mostly fun.
Ianto is the last one standing and kicks righteous arse about it.
It's like he gets a turn being Jack.
He gets to use alien weapons and go into a big fight all brave and mighty and actually survive it despite being very unsure that part will work.
Also he snogs Jack, and Gwen. Which was actually uncomfortable, because Gwen and Jack were trapped in their minds unable to move and unable to consent at the time, so he actually needs a telling off. It's like someone saw the moment Jack kisses Rose and the Doctor before going off to maybe die and kind of missed how the moment they'd set up was different.
I liked the bit that was a call back to... probably Risk Assessment, I've been reading too fast to be sure. Jack showed Rhys the alien weapon store after telling him not even Ianto knows the code to get in.
In this short story, Ianto uses the code he is not supposed to know.
He tells mind looped Jack p187 "Don't feel bad that I worked out the code for the weapons warehouse. You did a fantastic job of keeping it secret, honestly, you really did. Took me ages and ages. It's no reflection on you at all. It's just that I'm very crafty." /187
The story does a good job establishing real stakes. Jack and Gwen get infected with an alien virus that leaves the body all fine and just loops the mind to be stuck in a single moment. That's a danger even to Jack.
Ianto is the one who does not get virused. ... yaay.
And after his daring raid gets the antidote - which is very action movie and also very Ianto because he walks in there complaining about the coffee - he gets Rhys and they have to reach their respective partners through good positive shared memories. Compare and for once no contrast. Ianto mentioning relationship moments we know, and lots of new ones we don't, so there's plenty of new jumping off points for the vivid imagination. And the story keeps the specific memory that brings him back private, so we have to speculate and fill in something we'd believe. Good craft, well done. Funny fun bit, Gwen and Rhys leave to go home.
And the Jack asks Ianto what he'd have done if the antidote didnt work, and Ianto says "I'd have looked after you. Every day." Because of course he would, that's logically the first thing we really learned about him, he doesn't give up just because his partner's paralysed and no one else has any hope. So it snaps back to big feelings. And ends on Jack and Ianto spending the evening together.
That's how you do emotional payoff, that is.
Makes me annoyed at how many of these books dont do it.
ANYway, there were four other stories in this book, and I dont have half as much to say about any of them. Good stuff in all four, and they keep the focus on consequences, so we don't just see Torchwood swoop in to do Torchwood things and swoop away again, we see how people are affected by it.
We see how they're hurt by it. Because apart from that one blink of happy ending at the hub, there are a lot of miserable endings to go around. Addiction, suicide, mind control and memory loss over and over again. Children abandoned, abused, and dead.
Even Virus has Ianto do some pretty nasty things, and shows him having to act without backup because Torchwood have pissed off the police and failed to build trust.
So the title is good, the focus is good, each story picks the ideas up and passes them on. But I did have to read it in several small pieces, because it's grim in the Torchwood corner of the whoniverse.
Good book, but as usual dark.
So I end up mostly thinking about the cool Jack/Ianto bits.
The thing is, I know with fanfic we're not playing the same game, we don't have to color inside the lines, and resolving the romantic relationships in a satisfying way is often what we're there for, but
what the books are doing made me miss fanfic
especially the fics that take 51st century definitions of love seriously.
I feel like more often than not the tie in writers have a subtext that Jack is wrong, that how he loves, dates, shags, is wrong, especially when compared and contrasted so often with Gwen and Rhys having a happily perfect marriage.
And that's a choice, and not the only one they could make. I mean season one Gwen and Rhys were... obviously rather not perfect. And Jack and Ianto had some communication problems on the issue of how important their relationship is to each other, but there's more than one way to work with the canon evidence on that, as fanfic does over and over.
And it's so seldom immortality angst, it's... well, it's Ianto failing to believe his omnisexual boyfriend likes him in specific particular.
And that feels less real to me than the blip in time / thousand years stuff.
But it's plausible. Having Ianto be uncomfortable when he's perceived as gay is plenty plausible. There's lots of plausible.
I just wonder why these are the stories they felt needed telling. Why they expect we'll be interested in them, what they think we'll get out of them.
Fanfic can be much more comfortable than this and yet canon is where we start from.
Uncomfortable doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
I keep on being surprised by the plots in these books because I don't remember much from them. I remember Ianto expressing jealousy of tentacles, but I don't remember him saying a few pages earlier that he's just a shag to Jack. And I don't remember the plot at all. So the books aren't giving me the good stuff, whatever it is that keeps me interested in Torchwood.
But it's not because they're coloring outside the lines.
So I end up vaguely dissatisfied but feeling like I shouldnt be.
Also though, I dont think most of them are good at balancing which characters get something to do. Several think Jack is The Hero, and the others exist to get in danger. Or today Owen is The Hero. Or for one short Ianto was The Hero, but only when he was literally the only one left conscious. I feel like the books aren't good at utilising the whole cast at once even after the cast is down to three.
The audios are so much more focused, they can do so much better.
Reckon I'll go back to them for a bit.
The House that Jack Built
includes some very vivid deaths, domestic violence, and a reflection on Jack's love life that... didn't feel to me like it was written by someone that likes Jack.
Detail and spoilers under the cut:
There is a plot with a lot of unlikely and gruesome deaths, but I of course am already letting those details fade from memory and concentrating on the bits about Jack's relationships.
But his relationships are the thread that pulls the whole story along and the big bads of the piece imply that his getting involved is what got their attention.
So the story focuses on a particular house, one that Jack lived in once.
Gwen's research says it's tied to a long history of messy death, murders, suicides, killing sprees.
Jack says he would have noticed, and it turns out he's right, this is a time travel story. Things from Beyond are messing with the timeline. But Jack remembers the unaltered, much less violent, past.
He still remembers something sad and nasty, tied to that house. He bought the house, invited his lovers there. Each visited and spent time with him. Then told him they were marrying each other. He went to the wedding, lurking at the back. The bride and groom panic, both fearing their affair will be revealed. Because apparently Jack was shagging both of them without them knowing that. Jack leaves, sure he's messing things up. And then that night the new husband kills his new wife.
Jack never lives any specific place long, and that house had a lot of different residents, so, probably he didnt stay there long after that.
The big bads say his intervention in their timeline was what got their attention, and now they're stirring up paradox to feed from. Jack sorts that bit out. But the big bads confront him in his lovers forms. Try to make him feel too bad to do the plan against them.
Jack concludes "I didn't kill her. That arrogant, image-obsessed and deluded lover we shared did." "I can't take the blame for everything that happens to people I know. Miles killed her because he couldn't stand who he was. That's sad but hardly my fault."
And then on the way out of the house / complex temporal situation, he gets to walk through moments he shared with each of them, say goodbye again.
So it's guilt grief relief, it can be read as another one about the atemporality of grief and trauma, and how the past tries to eat you, or get you to jump to it's tune.
But then at the end, complex temporal event resolved, Jack has made it so those specific events in that specific place couldn't have happened. He's solved the trauma by unmaking it in the first place. And he learns that in the new timeline the bride lived a long life.
Maybe that's supposed to be a happily ever after, but it actually loops around to actually factually blaming Jack for their tragedy, and makes an argument for Jack's simple presence breaking time, which... what else is he supposed to do?
So I want to sit down and argue with the book, and also hug Jack, and assure him he's allowed to exist, and love.
And I'm probably overthinking it, it's a Torchwood adventure, was it doing all that about feelings? But if it wasn't I dont know what it was doing.
It also explicitly names Jack's sexuality, via Ianto expressing jealousy.
The actual quote is funny, and I've remembered it out of context for ages:
page 155
"He prefers the term 'omnisexual'," said Ianto, stepping into the room. "It's the polite way of saying he'll sleep with anything - men, women... cephalopods. I must be the only boyfriend that's ever has to get jealous in a fishmongers."
"Don't knock the sensual embrace of the tentacle," Jack replied with a wink.
"Oh God..." Ianto replied. "I could have died happy had I never heard you say that. Changing the subject - because one of us has to before someone throws up - I've disconnected four monitors, the amp and a couple of speakers, so we're all set."
"Isn't he wonderful?" Jack said to Julia, kissing Ianto on the forehead. "What would I so without him?"
"The same things you do with me, just to someone else," Ianto deadpanned.
/p155
Okay, so, the fishmonger thing is funny... sort of. But in context of that paragraph it's about Ianto not feeling loved in a specific particular way, and in context of the book, the murdered bride expressed basically the same feeling, that Jack would just shag someone else.
Which was why she got married, and that didnt work out, so if it's saying something it's not saying a simple thing.
But a few pages earlier... page 134, Ianto says he knows everything from the files about Jack, and says "I'm like a stupid teenager swotting up with a copy of Smash Hits." Then he and Gwen between them agree Ianto is just Jack's shag, and if Ianto thinks otherwise he's deluded. Ianto says "I've never been much good at casual."
And while it is possible to read Ianto's beliefs that way... well I have listened to House of the Dead and he is clearly dead wrong. So why is the book saying it? The tragedy? Wind up our feelings? No cathartic payoff though. Ianto hugs Jack when he gets out of danger, with a "Not that I was worried" and then... back to work.
And Ianto does get some good work bits to do. He is not being dismissed as the tea boy, he's pretty much playing tech, and very observant. But it still dont feel like he got an arc as a character, or a relationship arc.
Ianto doesn't learn enough on the page to know anything Jack has been through, let alone have feelings about it.
The final scene is the one where the woman was better off in the no Jack timeline.
It's just... difficult to read it as Ianto being wrong. Just within this book, it's easy to read it as about Jack's omnisexuality screwing up all their lives.
Just juxtaposing Jack's memories of that one screwed up relationship with the history of domestic violence and the present day reality of the man who lives there hurting his wife, it lines up Jack's desires and these violent incidents. And then fixes them by taking Jack out of the other people's story.
It feels like the narrative blames him.
But, it does say love, not just shag, when his point of view sees people he loves. So it's not flat simple.
I dont know. Maybe there's a better angle I havent figured out how to read it from.
I liked it in a way, strong horror story, but... I wouldn't write it that way. It feels like it's saying something about Jack being destructive and it ties that to his sexuality in a way I don't like. Even if it's not about his violence, it ends up implying he's a destructive influence, specifically for loving many people. Not right.
The Undertaker's Gift
Honestly don't have much to say about this one. That's a lot of horror, even for Torchwood.
Also it took the opportunity to hurt the team in many and varied ways.
Not my sort of thing.
Consequences
This book is a series of short stories that hand off to each other, ending with one that wraps threads you probably didnt even notice scattered through earlier books.
Virus
by James Moran
Is the first story I think of when writing them up, because mostly fun.
Ianto is the last one standing and kicks righteous arse about it.
It's like he gets a turn being Jack.
He gets to use alien weapons and go into a big fight all brave and mighty and actually survive it despite being very unsure that part will work.
Also he snogs Jack, and Gwen. Which was actually uncomfortable, because Gwen and Jack were trapped in their minds unable to move and unable to consent at the time, so he actually needs a telling off. It's like someone saw the moment Jack kisses Rose and the Doctor before going off to maybe die and kind of missed how the moment they'd set up was different.
I liked the bit that was a call back to... probably Risk Assessment, I've been reading too fast to be sure. Jack showed Rhys the alien weapon store after telling him not even Ianto knows the code to get in.
In this short story, Ianto uses the code he is not supposed to know.
He tells mind looped Jack p187 "Don't feel bad that I worked out the code for the weapons warehouse. You did a fantastic job of keeping it secret, honestly, you really did. Took me ages and ages. It's no reflection on you at all. It's just that I'm very crafty." /187
The story does a good job establishing real stakes. Jack and Gwen get infected with an alien virus that leaves the body all fine and just loops the mind to be stuck in a single moment. That's a danger even to Jack.
Ianto is the one who does not get virused. ... yaay.
And after his daring raid gets the antidote - which is very action movie and also very Ianto because he walks in there complaining about the coffee - he gets Rhys and they have to reach their respective partners through good positive shared memories. Compare and for once no contrast. Ianto mentioning relationship moments we know, and lots of new ones we don't, so there's plenty of new jumping off points for the vivid imagination. And the story keeps the specific memory that brings him back private, so we have to speculate and fill in something we'd believe. Good craft, well done. Funny fun bit, Gwen and Rhys leave to go home.
And the Jack asks Ianto what he'd have done if the antidote didnt work, and Ianto says "I'd have looked after you. Every day." Because of course he would, that's logically the first thing we really learned about him, he doesn't give up just because his partner's paralysed and no one else has any hope. So it snaps back to big feelings. And ends on Jack and Ianto spending the evening together.
That's how you do emotional payoff, that is.
Makes me annoyed at how many of these books dont do it.
ANYway, there were four other stories in this book, and I dont have half as much to say about any of them. Good stuff in all four, and they keep the focus on consequences, so we don't just see Torchwood swoop in to do Torchwood things and swoop away again, we see how people are affected by it.
We see how they're hurt by it. Because apart from that one blink of happy ending at the hub, there are a lot of miserable endings to go around. Addiction, suicide, mind control and memory loss over and over again. Children abandoned, abused, and dead.
Even Virus has Ianto do some pretty nasty things, and shows him having to act without backup because Torchwood have pissed off the police and failed to build trust.
So the title is good, the focus is good, each story picks the ideas up and passes them on. But I did have to read it in several small pieces, because it's grim in the Torchwood corner of the whoniverse.
Good book, but as usual dark.
So I end up mostly thinking about the cool Jack/Ianto bits.
The thing is, I know with fanfic we're not playing the same game, we don't have to color inside the lines, and resolving the romantic relationships in a satisfying way is often what we're there for, but
what the books are doing made me miss fanfic
especially the fics that take 51st century definitions of love seriously.
I feel like more often than not the tie in writers have a subtext that Jack is wrong, that how he loves, dates, shags, is wrong, especially when compared and contrasted so often with Gwen and Rhys having a happily perfect marriage.
And that's a choice, and not the only one they could make. I mean season one Gwen and Rhys were... obviously rather not perfect. And Jack and Ianto had some communication problems on the issue of how important their relationship is to each other, but there's more than one way to work with the canon evidence on that, as fanfic does over and over.
And it's so seldom immortality angst, it's... well, it's Ianto failing to believe his omnisexual boyfriend likes him in specific particular.
And that feels less real to me than the blip in time / thousand years stuff.
But it's plausible. Having Ianto be uncomfortable when he's perceived as gay is plenty plausible. There's lots of plausible.
I just wonder why these are the stories they felt needed telling. Why they expect we'll be interested in them, what they think we'll get out of them.
Fanfic can be much more comfortable than this and yet canon is where we start from.
Uncomfortable doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
I keep on being surprised by the plots in these books because I don't remember much from them. I remember Ianto expressing jealousy of tentacles, but I don't remember him saying a few pages earlier that he's just a shag to Jack. And I don't remember the plot at all. So the books aren't giving me the good stuff, whatever it is that keeps me interested in Torchwood.
But it's not because they're coloring outside the lines.
So I end up vaguely dissatisfied but feeling like I shouldnt be.
Also though, I dont think most of them are good at balancing which characters get something to do. Several think Jack is The Hero, and the others exist to get in danger. Or today Owen is The Hero. Or for one short Ianto was The Hero, but only when he was literally the only one left conscious. I feel like the books aren't good at utilising the whole cast at once even after the cast is down to three.
The audios are so much more focused, they can do so much better.
Reckon I'll go back to them for a bit.