beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I liked this one. Not exactly deep with the character stuff, though you get an interesting slice of background, but it's a horror story in a department store and it thoroughly had fun with the setting.
I liked how Jack was so matter of fact about the building trying to kill him. Like, oh yes, just a murder building, life is like that if you're Jack Harkness.
Jack's past as a freelancer for Torchwood comes up, and he isn't the only one.
The story also set up the opposition as people who tried to profit from alien technology, as if that's unlike Torchwood. Which, yeah, unlike Jack, but, very like Torchwood One in the Doctor Who episodes, I thought.
I liked the ending. It makes a point of everyone seeing Jack go ruthless and cold, but he still does an ending with the most chances and the least damage.

Mostly I thought it was very good at being a specific time and place, only, that time and place feels like history now. Like, it's about a department store being out competed by a shopping mall, but last time I went in a shopping mall it was almost empty of actual shop, and that was years ago. I havent been near enough one to know if they've recovered a bit, but they feel as yesterday as the department store.

I just keep realising how long it has been since Torchwood while I listen these.

And, also, how long it has been since college, and the bit of my life where it seemed to have a plan and a forwards direction.

Ah well.

Still a good story.

Written by Joseph Lidster, whose work you may recall
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Joseph_Lidster
this one was very good indeed, if horror is what you're looking for.

I own this audio, I gave it a five star rating in 2009, and yet somehow I had forgotten the contents entirely
and it is a very intense one.

You know one entire entry ago I was all wishing for character stuff, insight into Jack, and more Ianto?
This delivers. Big time.

( Read more... )

Spoilers above under the cut, in some detail because I'm sitting here with my eyes all big.

So yeah, I recommend this audiobook, and I recommend listening this one without spoilers, which I managed to do twice by forgetting about it for about fifteen years.

But it is A Lot.

Like, I'm glad I'm not planning to go to sleep for a few hours, A Lot.



The only bit that doesn't quite work now I've thought about it for five minutes is the framing story where Gwen is telling the middle story, because there's no way she could know some to most of it. But it does add something; another layer of things to worry about mostly.


Good writing.

I'm almost sure I listened this before but I didnt remember it. It's... odd. It just finished but I dont know why. Like, okay, they've figured out the problem, but I dont see why people have stopped shooting them about it. And yet, the book ended.

It had some interesting bits about immortality. ( Read more... )

I kind of want to take all these elements, transform it *back* into the Highlander fanfic it so clearly wants to be, and do something more interesting with them. ( Read more... )

... all of which is miserable actually.

Okay, how about the body walks out of the morgue and Jack has a new friend?

Or, Owen goes to Golarion and starts studying alchemy due to the actual evidence it works.



Nope, still chewing on the ending wondering why it ended. Meh.

Oh well.

January's Big Finish Torchwood is a good one I think, lots of properly scary elements, vs just Rhys on his own, Torchwood adjacent enough to figure out something is wrong but ordinary enough he can't figure what to do about it except get angry. There's gaslighting, denial of other people's senses and accusations of mental health problems, and because it's an audio and Big Finish only give us very vague time referents we can hear what we think is going on but it keeps uncomfortably close to plausible. The story is about a missing child and Rhys is a father but on his own right now so it has an extra layer of worry. Because we know he married Gwen and they had Anwen, but without a timestamp it's always possible something has gone very wrong, and there's moments he starts talking to himself and is all 'I dont know what I'd be like if you actually left me' to imaginary Gwen, so that glimmer of doubt creeps in.

The only problem is, do you ever feel like a story has missed the actual story in their story?
Because the most scary thing in this one is ( Read more... )

So the more the plot ramped up into being very specific - and I wonder what their schedule looks like to put a Samhain adventure out in January - the more I felt like it was ignoring the interesting bits to do something from another genre.

But I think probably if you can listen to the story they were actually making it's good.

So far today I have listened to two out of three parts of the Lives of Captain Jack volume three
a set of audios I have been putting off listening to because then there are no more.

So far they've been really depressing.

details under the ( Read more... )

It's the way the sci fi stuff, the immortality and all, just amplifies really ordinary things. The ex you can't get over. The grief that makes you focus on those gone instead of making new connections. Its so real and understandable that scaling it up to Jack lifetimes is just... bleak.

So they're strong well written stories, but I'm going to need a break before I try another one.

I keep thinking of bringing Ianto back, as you do.
Canon already did the heavy lifting on 'back from the dead' with House of the Dead,
so we just need 'back from the Rift'
and that's easy.
That can happen literally any time.
I mean, if we want and we're doing even audios, it could be the next minute for Ianto, and he walks out of the pub wondering where Jack went.

The problem isnt How to do the story, it's Why.
What story are we telling, what story needs telling.

If we bring him straight from 2009 we have a time travel story where we import a different historical perspective without all that one decision at a time stuff from in the middle, so he's dropped straight in to 2024 attitudes with a 2009 perspective. That's only 15 years, usually story does at least 20s. And it's tricky because the writers have to get both sets of attitudes right.

If we're telling the story with Ianto, a lot of his story is about who he dates. Black woman, white man, drop him in a different era and there's story from either. His own attitudes to being queer and bi and potentially out are... frozen by where the story left off, and not comfortable if we take some of the books as canon. Oh, and book canon made him physically a woman for a while, so he has a rare perspective on being trans.

He's got the usual Torchwood thing about non human sentients, ie usually they're trying to kill him so he may have some Issues and it is their actual job to lock them up and erase all evidence they exist, but Jack hasnt been disappearing them as often at Torchwood has the reputation for, so that's... nicer? So Ianto could be written as non human racist, but he seems nicer than that, and also his boyfriend has definitely dated non humans. Ambiguity and tension makes drama, so having mixed feelings about alien life is a drama plus.

What I kind of want to do, on tv even so we need a reason for Gareth to be older, is to have sent Ianto somewhere he had to take the long way home. Just make it so he's been Out There for all the years in between. Because the Rift connects all these places, all these planets, so he could be Anywhere. But it connects them to Cardiff, so there could be humans wherever Ianto lands. Could be a human population goinf way back. Plus we know like Trion and Traken there's a lot of looks humans out there, and would Ianto know one way or another? So he could meet a population that looked like him, on a Rift in soace and time, presumably needing protection just as much as Cardiff does.

Torchwood Golarion (Pathfinder xover) is just one of many delightful options.

So the story I want to tell is what happens when he brings all these people back to Cardiff.

Torchwood being the 'adult' show has really put them in a corner for how things work out. If it works out happy and hopeful and optimistic, that's a Sarah Jane adventure. If a bunch of people die but it gets sorted out in the end, Doctor Who. So what's left for Torchwood? Everything awful always.

And some people think that's more realistic. Blergh.

What I want to do is write about a large but understandable population arriving on Earth as refugees. Torchwood has an Asylum policy as of that BBC audio, and Ianto knows it. If he figures out how to get home there can be many and more reasons to take friends with him.

Or to have to risk blind jumping through the Rift, possibly accumulating friends as he goes.

It could be a bit like a reverse Atlantis if we wanted, where they know how to open a connection but the team of a hundred that arrives on a one way trip arrives to Earth rather than from it.

Mostly though I want a big set of characters that can defamiliarise refugee stories. Not an alien invasion, so its led by a friend coming home, someone we trust already. Not something the Doctor can sort out by taking them back to their home planets, because for a wild assortment of reasons that wont work out for them. And not easy to look at and stereotype, because Ianto considers them all people and mostly basically human, but a lot of them look to weird to categorise to the average viewer, and the rest have never been near the continents they look like they're from to us.

DW does a lot of 'basically human but painted' characters, so that's a good start, tell stories about fantasy racism with fantasy races, maybe mix in some tiefling and aasimar type visuals that let people stereotype at a glance and then be wrong about it. Put the wildest differences on the characters that look most familiar. Maybe have half of them sound American for no obvious reason, like Jack.

Tell the story half in flashback, so we know where they're coming from and that they made it safe to here, but we find out why. Get to know them in the here now being 'weird' before we start seeing their pasts, so then they make sense and the viewer is led to understand they were too quick to judge.

Just stop telling stories of alien invasions and start telling how we're going to get along with people not exactly like us.



That's two separate reasons to use Ianto coming back, the time travely one and the one where we'll trust him cause we know him. The issues dont entirely fit together. But they both generate story.

I'm reading a Torchoood fic that has time travel set in Cardiff, and it just became clear that the writer hasnt noticed how rapidly things change, specifically architecturally. Which is a pity, because judging from the list of Tallest Buildings in Cardiff, the 60s when the fic is set and the early 2000s when the series happened both had a tendency to construction that changed the skyline.

It's mentioned in some of the Torchwood books that Cardiff experienced a building boom during the timeframe of tbe Torchwood series, an economically exciting time when everyone thought the future needed big expensive flats, but by the later books it's a plot point that said flats didnt sell, and they're scaling down their expectations from luxury apartment to possible student housing. The architectural excitement made it into the opening credits - the really tall building Jack stands on was absolutely new that year, according to wiki. The twenty first century is when everything changes, and you could see it building up. But then it didnt work out the way anyone thought it would.

And Big Finish has a Cardiff that hit... really rough times both economically and architecturally. The Hub has gone through some rough patches both on and off screen, and the things people will do for a good flat make story mileage.

So if you set a fic in the 60s, Jack can't go stand on the same familiar rooftops, because they didnt exist. He's up there in the 2000s surveying the changes in His City from the vantage point of a really big change. Back in the 60s if he likes to be tall (on a scale that still gets on the list) he is either going fully historical and climbing the Cathedral, climbing a clock tower, or he's up a block of flats that probably still has the scaffolding on.

Any of which make mileage as metaphors, what with the time travel leaving him stuck in a past that must seem so ancient, waiting for the future to hurry up and get built.




But I wouldnt put this in a comment, because rude, so I'll just write it here and feel like it's a missed opportunity.

I relistened to Ex Machina today, a Torchwood audio with Ianto where the audience knows more than the characters at almost every point.
( Read more... )


I like this one well.

Been thinking about Exodus Code
Been thinking Jack has spent a long time under the Earth, one way or another.
Reckon it was weird if all that cave wanted was his body.
So what if Mother Earth missed him?
An alien intelligence, sure, in that 'verse, but, one that lay there dreaming for a thousand years, while Jack dreamed with them.

Then the signal that drove people mad (if they have to keep that)
is a grief loss screaming
trying to call him where he's gone.

That way when he understands he rebuilds that connection
and possibly teaches it about wifi so they don't need the earth around them
to communicate.



... the fic world does not need a rewrite of that book
but it Bothered me in that particular sticky way
that keeps sparking ideas.

It's not that I think I could write it better, because lo, the entire lack of writing lately is not better, it's just I can see what's annoying me and it feels like a lot of it wasnt even the intended point.

Like okay this is apparently a Jack story where everyone else is baggage.
But that's not its biggest problem, we can roll with the hero being the hero.

When constructing a story, I have heard that Lois McMaster Bujold sits down and asks,
What is the worst thing I can do to him now?

And sometimes the answer is something like
be treated as a beginner even after his background leaves him well educated
and sometimes it is
get everything he wants at least twenty years before he's ready for it.

Sometimes it's
his strengths that help him achieve all his goals are the power of ignoring his disability and applying sheer epic bullshit
and sometimes it's
ignoring his disability and applying sheer epic bullshit has made him a danger to himself and others
and now he is going to have to admit it
in order to avoid getting everything he ever wanted.

Those are some excellent situations, right, because they arise from the character strengths and weaknesses, dangle their desires in front of them, and then ask what's the worst thing to put in between where he is and were he wants to be?
(The worst thing is always Himself.)

So okay, how do you get to The Exodus Code by asking
What is the worst thing that can happen to Torchwood now?
or
What is the worst thing that can happen to Jack Harkness?

And there's pieces that lead straight from where their characters were last at into the horror, so, okay:

( Read more... )

I've got a GURPS Horror book that helps you design rpg campaigns by breaking down what kind of classic horror tropes can be used to build what kind of underlying fears. I'm mostly remembering fear of madness and fear of contamination right now. Book is on the shelf in the other room, and those two will do for talking about Exodus Code.

But one thing to consider is, is the story in the fear of the monster, or the fear of becoming the monster?

Because if the story is about madness you are doing very different things if the focus is fear of becoming mad, or if the focus is fear of mad people.
( Read more... )

I dont get how the ending dealt with the fears or paid off the... anything.

It just kind of happened.



I'm going to let it go again, I just, keep niggling at this book like I want to unravel it and keep the yarn.

Some of the yarn.

ish.



I feel mean criticising it though. Look, a complete book happened, that's winning.

just, it could have... been better. actually.

Today I finished reading Torchwood Exodus Code.
It took a few tries.
I cannot recommend it.

I'm sure no one sat down and decided Let Us Do A Sexism
but they very much did a sexism
and it was boring.

I feel like if I unraveled this story and had another go with some of the same parts it could be okay but as it is there's a bunch of messy parts and mad women and I am making a face like :-/

The ending also didnt seem to pay off much of the book. Although ( Read more... )

I feel like I could be kinder to this book
but Gwen gets made 'mad' and sedated and carted around like so much baggage through a plot that really is affecting her most of all
yet is there to raise the stakes for Jack and make him suffer.

So I'm not feeling kind towards this book.

Honestly I'd have liked it better if it was a Captain Jack adventure and just left Gwen out of it.

There'd still be the problem of weirdly sexist pheremone induced madness
but...

nope, still making a :-/ with an option on >:-(

A Bilis Manger story that possibly plays with our expectations of a Big Finish Bilis Manger story.
Lots of creepy bits, pretty solid ending, but ( Read more... )

It was quite good but doesnt give me the lingering creepies that Bilis stories so often arrange.

This Torchwood audio adventure is set post all the canon, and had Gareth David Lloyd on the cover
and Murray Melvin, Bilis Manger.

Anyone who has only seen the TV show is thinking uh oh, but if you listen the audios it is fully UH OH with an option on YIKES.

And this one is up there with the most tense and terrible Bilis stories, so, you know, be in the mood for that before you follow the urban explorers in.

Spoilers under the cut:

( Read more... )

The audio gives interesting characterisation and motives to Bilis, sketches in vivid personalities for the new characters, and leaves us with an interesting jumping off point should we want to use it.

But if you are there for Ianto you get much less.

I am not sure what the appeal of that was meant to be.

But it's a very creepy Bilis episode.