beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Sometimes I just find the idea of Methos really encouraging.

Like, here is this man, five thousand years old, and still living.
Not just hanging around.
... also hanging around, judging your music, cadging beer, obvs, but not only that...

He still throws himself at life. Five thousand years old and he knows all the ways it is going to hurt, and he does it anyway. Still falling in love, knowing how it will end every time except maybe the last. And not just the happy whirlwind part, not just the endorphins of meeting someone pretty who maybe likes him back, he's sticking around for the sad parts too. See the world and stay with her in hospital, however much of each happens. Because it's worth it.

Five thousand years old, and staying alive is still worth it.

And he's not some perfect angel who earned some reward. He has been the worst of the worst. But he grew out of that. Took him longer than some kingdoms ever existed, but he did. He tried being evil, and he just got bored.

So he tried reading books and hanging out with philosohers instead.

And maybe it's weird that this seems so encouraging, because he's a story, we made him up, maybe anyone would get bored of everything after the first thousand years...

... except logically, no, we wouldn't. Look at how much the world has changed. The whole of human history, all over the world, could anyone really see it coming? I know we love the bits of history that say humans have always been human, but also love the bits that are just... so much of the world we live in would be wildly new, undreamt of, and it is brilliant.

Any time I feel stuck or like the future's... 2020 and then some, I have to stop myself. Because really. What do I know? What do any of us know about what might be? The future is wild.

And usually you get that sense watching science fiction, and I do like seeing people racing starships, but I also just get a really heartening perspective thinking about human civilisation aka what this one man lived through.

And still wanted to live.

To be part of it.



It's brilliant.

Amanda from Highlander can go everywhere and meet everyone though

distracting Dana Scully

meeting Faith in prison or teaching her after

lifting some priceless egyptian artefacts and getting more than she bargained for - swapping security system tips with Sam or just generally getting along like a house on fire with Vala. Can you imagine the shopping trips?

Parker. Meeting the legend. Yes I've read that already but there's so much scope there.

River Song. OMG Amanda and River Song, time travelling archaeologist and her Immortal girlfriend, bumping into each other across millennia. They would get along far too well.

Alex Danvers. Again, a whole law enforcement and priceless weird artefacts angle. But showing Alex a thing or two. ... I mean I ship the canon ship there too but I haven't seen it yet so it's a bit theoretical. But I'm sure the more the merrier.

Amanda and Sara Lance on Legends would be too easy, but then there's unexpected time travel shenanigans like meeting several centuries apart, and angst when Sara has experience with immortals and hence doesn't trust Amanda an inch, and yet more angst when Amanda learns how Sara is even still alive and that there's a way to bring mortals back, and arguments where Sara has to talk her out of it on the basis it isn't worth it because bloodlust and killing and why bring back a monster with your loved one's face, and then Amanda talking her down because sometimes you have to fight and it even feels remarkably good but that doesn't make them monsters and... hang on, I may have talked myself into 'shipping them, that's a proper plotty one that is. ... though now I'm wondering if anyone else has seen both shows anyway...


Amanda still alive in the furthest futures. Babylon 5 and Ivanova after... everything. Or B7 and Servalan. Robbing her, of course, but how would she feel about her rise and fall? And either way it's a hell of a challenge to stay the shady side and keep shiny with that much future tech around.

And by the time we're up to Starfleet and a post scarcity society you have to wonder what she'd do at all. Something new. Mixed with some very very old. Or perhaps archaeologist adventurers are a theme...

Just, Amanda and anywhere in fannish history.

Or with anyone in Highlander. It's not like there's a shortage. Even if we have to skip back before canon there's a thousand years to do that.

Just, even though a pair of occasionally crossdressing sword wielding lady adventurers is very much my style, it's kind of a bit awkward if I write about Rebecca...


But there should be more Amanda.

(and old fic links should never die)

*sigh*

My first fandom, with conventions, mailing lists, and fanfic, was Highlander. That's where I got both my icon and my tattoo. I haven't rewatched it for a while, partly on the sneaking suspicion it might not be as good as the good bits version in my head, but it did shape me.

I build a character by choosing their weapon. It don't have to be a sword, or even a tool of violence, but whatever it is, it will be very specific. Each weapon has a specific use, a culture and community who used it, a history, a heritage. Their use was learned somewhere, and perfected over time as that particular tool seemed suited for that character's tasks.

Highlander was big on flashbacks. ( Read more... )

So I learned from Highlander that every character has history. Which seems pretty obvious. But a lot of shows, just by only telling the present, they make it seem like a character's life started in the pilot episode, or at least the interesting bit. ( Read more... )

A character's journey, historic and geographic, will influence which ideas they carry as well as the tools they use. And it can be very, very specific. ( Read more... )

And that kind of depth and detail is an absolute bugger to build into a created 'verse, fantasy or SF. It's hard enough to show what a world is like now, but it'll feel like a paper backdrop until it can give the impression it had a journey to get that way.

It's tempting to leave an individual in a holding pattern before the story gets started. ( Read more... )

I sat down to write this just to say that I think the space colony series I've been planning could benefit from flashbacks. ( Read more... )

Buuuuuut, presence of extensive flashbacks does not automatically endear a show to me. And even shows I like can have (interminable) flashbacks I could do without. I think the tricky bit is to keep it both relevant and fresh, despite it being the past. If the same thing happens in every flashback, bored now. And it's nice to see what made a character the person they are today, but it's tricky to get the right speed of revelation and to keep it tied to the plot of the week.

I'm also thinking about arc vs self contained stories. If one timeframe is arc and the other is self contained, does that compliment or drag at each other? ( Read more... )

The thing with my space colony though, I was going to use fanfic characters to give it depth of background, only to adapt them to this setting which is kind of a fusion or AU then I'd need to retell the most significant bits of their lives. New old friends, yes? Even if I used familiar names we'd need to get to know them twice, who they were in the fusion backstory and who they are in the ongoing plot. ( Read more... )

I keep telling myself that I haven't started writing this thing because if I just let it stew a bit longer it might be possible to file serial numbers off and make it proper original. Actually at the moment I have two slightly different offworld colony stories that just don't mesh, one with capertillers and Welsh stone circles and a very British cast, the other with a straight up Stargate setting. The Stargate one is always going to be fanfic, but right now it's merely a mess of a multi fandom fusion that I can't imagine anyone would read, and with a bit of polish it might be spin off series level original. The two series don't quite mesh, but they do both deal with disability and some magic cures. And I know that nobody hesitates to write different Being Masculine On a Starship stories, but I'm hesitating over different Being Disabled in a Space Colony stories, even though the differences are not things I could smush together. One is a low character point low resources ordinary people story, the other a high power vast resources big politics tale that draws on comic book characters and Star Trek level competence. They don't match, they don't go the same places, I kind of want to tell both, I stall on telling either.

I stall on putting one word next to another, and whenever I notice that, instead of opening a file and trying it, I just talk myself into a woe spiral about how maybe I'm not a writer after all. Blergh.

Or, as you may notice, pontificate at length in meta.

i'm going to post this and get breakfast. it's only 1530, i've been up since 0730, that's a totally reasonable interval before breakfast...

Half of viking burials actually women
Previously the graves were figured to be for males because they had swords and armour and, you know, Boy Things. But how did people know they were Boy Things? Not by looking at the bones. They just now did that. "The bones were sorted for telltale osteological signs of which gender they belonged to, rather than assuming that burial with a sword or knife denoted a male burial." Now they have looked at the bones, half of them were guys, half of them were women.

... is this how women get invisible? Did they just not actually look before?

So, now they have found that half of Vikings was women (or roughly, maybe, could have been), what does the article conclude?

"Women may have accompanied male Vikings in those early invasions of England, in much greater numbers than scholars earlier supposed, McLeod concludes. Rather than the ravaging rovers of legend, the Vikings arrived as marriage-minded colonists."

... you see the *facepalm* in that paragraph?
Why phrase it that women accompany men when they were 50/50?
And why, when the witness reports say they were kick arse ravagers, conclude that the reports are wrong, because women were there so it must be Secretly About Marriage?

There's more context and evidence and the move here start a family version is probable from other stuff I've read, but those two sentences do not belong on the end of this report.

Women had swords. And shields. And viking burials with them.
Conclusion: Women kick arse too.

So far today I have listened to 3 episodes. They're about Kronos, Silas, and Caspian. Except I'm pretty sure it isn't properly them. The stories are based on a twist on the Highlander concept. Instead of 'take their head and with it their power' the whole thing is based on the idea you can take parts and pieces away, eat bits of an Immortal's Quickening and with it some aspect of their emotions, capacity and personality. It combines this with the Dark Quickening concept. And it keeps playing with the mechanics of Immortality, with what you could do to really permanently mess up an Immortal.

Highlander is 'romantic talmudic discussion with swords'. This... isn't. It's a three episode horror story about grotesque ways to die and things worse than death. I'm at once grossed out and bored.

And it's repetitive. It comes up with a new bad guy and a new bad thing he does and then it just repeats it. Why bother?

So now there's just the Methos story left to listen to, but I don't think I want to, because right now I only need to erase these mucked up fanfic versions of the other three Horsemen, and I know plenty versions of them already. A mucked up Methos would be... well, rather worse.

Details: The Kronos story didn't do anything too distorting to his character. I guess I was okay with that one, I just found it a bit pointless. ( Read more... )

I need now a list of any time any Immortal suffers a head injury. Bullet to the brain pan, sword in the head, arrows, I don't know. If there is evidence I need to have the knowing of it. Because this can't be right.

It's also really boring. We learn something about Silas and Caspian that doesn't apply to anyone else, that can't be a question in our own lives. ( Read more... )


I'm currently regretting I bought these.

I didn't buy the first season because I thought they'd have a different idea of What Highlander Is About than the (mostly female fanfic writer) fandom I knew did. I kind of wish I'd stuck with that idea, because really, very much correct.

Bored and icked.

This month's FT has a roundup of lightning related deaths, including one where Highlander fans can fill in some details ;-)

Church vaults were often used to store large quantities of gunpowder - a terrible place to hoard explosives, as lightning frequently strikes high church steeples. In 1769, lightning hit a church tower in Brescia, near Milan, and blew up the 100 tons of gunpowder stored there. The explosion leveled one sixth of the city and killed about 3,000 people, possible the worst recorded lightning disaster in history. Times, 26 June 2007

... and of course two guys with swords were not involved at all...

So, today's bunny is for Highlander.
... yeah, somewhat of a surprise.

But anyways, today's bunny is, how to out Immortals.

Because it's not as easy as it sounds. I mean, I wrote an article for Fortean Times with a whole bunch of TCBOO incidents in the news, and they re-edited it to look like I was saying Immortals are real, and yet? Still nobody believes it.

So what would it take?

( Read more... )

On pondering, I have a bit of a motive:

There are many reasons to kill somebody. 'To keep a secret' is not a good one.

So, if someone was killing for that reason... what would our Heroes do?

Because there's two ways to stop that being an issue. Kill the killer... which might not be possible if we're talking an entire organisation. Or... tell the secret.

Nothing to protect, then.


So now the bunny has Methos visiting an art historian who has a trunk full of finds pulled out of the rubble of an old pub currently being demolished in Norwich. That puts them in the right building. Methos of course has bits of paper proving he has some relevant expertise, maybe in linguistics. Say the trunk was opened upside down, and the oldest things are what they find first. Sumerian clay tablets. Egyptian papyrus. And Methos, of course, can read them. So we get flashbacks, which as far as the art historian is concerned are just stories he's translating, but which the viewer gets as flashbacks. And gradually, along with the newbie, the viewer gets to figure out it isn't just him identifying with the historical figures in the texts - he really *is* that guy. Find out at the top of the trunk, with the daguerotypes (sp?).

Why would Methos tell the truth? Maybe the art historian is hot. Or maybe he's trying to recruit a new Watcher. Either way, hell of a lot easier than trying to cover up a find that's already been photographed and in the newspapers and such.

Unfortunately, there's other Immortals who can read whatever got in the papers, and one of them thinks that killing to keep the secret is of the good. This leads to tragic stabbing outside the building, and big Quickening.

It doesn't lead to all Immortals being outed. But it does give Methos a chance to state his attitude about cover ups. Spin good, stabbing bad. He really really means it, in the sharp edges way.

So *then* something else has to happen that puts the secret at risk... the police investigation. Methos can't/doesn't get to the artefacts to hide them, including the photos. And he was found standing over two dead bodies. There's going to be one hell of an investigation.

So if someone wants to cover up? They'd have to get rid of police.

Lots of people going to object to that idea.

... I think this bunny has more of the necessary parts now. Yup.

There are a bunch of ways people's senses can not work so very well.
What if there was an Immortal who was deaf to the sensing another Immortal buzz?
He'd never know what he was fighting
except for watching them come back from the dead or heal or whatever.
He'd have to decapitate everything and hope...

My plot bunny is so loud right now its entirely distracted me from eating.
Must eat. Fainting unhelpful to writing.

But now I think I know what order things happen in, and how it fits in with opening times and suchlike. I still need to watch the tower tours a bit more for descriptions, but basically I know where they run and how the action breaks up and that.

Plus there's an actual natural break for long angsty conversations, or as natural as writing gets anyways. And I don't have to send writers in clown suits to make the final confrontation be in the last act.

(In Highlander they have to have the big Quickening be the last thing, and sometimes breaking up a fight was not so easy, so somewhere I picked up the phrase 'here come the writers in their clown suits' for how to get people from killing each other just yet.)

On the other hand, I get the feeling I've only got 2 acts left, not three. Which works fine, and makes my final word count that bit less scary. But shows what my outlines are worth :eyeroll:

In the mail today: PWFC sends new shiny pretty pictures
Peter Wingfield pretty :)
happy :-D

The first 2 sections of Exogenesis - out of 6 - are too messy to work. grr arrgh sulk.

I'd forgotten how much I loved Marcus Cole, the Ranger. And if I could forget that it has been *far* too long since I've watched these.

The theme of the ep was miscommunication, so the series of *facepalm* moments range from funny to tragic. Though, given how things end for him and Ivanova, the bit with Marcus and the roses acquires a bit of tragic. *sigh*

The thing with the alien symbiotes who were memory, that clicked in my head with Highlander style Immortals. I had this xover theory once that the Vorlons made Immortals - I think there was something about how both have Quickenings when they die - but the Shadows corrupted them by introducing 'There Can Be Only One' and that whole mess about the Prize. Because obviously they were originally meant to fight in a far away place, but not each other.
But, Immortals would have that same function of preserving a culture through the long nights induced by the repeated cycle of Shadow wars. Walking memories.

I know 'The Source' is coming up and likely going to screw up the whole origin of Immortals again. I know making Immortals be part alien is perilously close to Zeist territory. But for a fanfic theory I thought it was fun.

I've been thinking, trying to figure out why some people don't like Richie.
To me this is a tricky problem. I'm a Richie fan. I step up to flag wave by reflex. I like the guy, the story, the possibilities.
But, thinking on it, even I have to agree, there were times Richie was... less easy to adore.

And there were times he would have been easy to leave out.

Richie is the sidekick, usually the comedy kind. He plays the damsel in distress sometimes, or dates her. He's often the source of the plot. He'll bring home someone or meet someone or get the attention of someone and somehow it ends up being Mac's problem, especially in the early years. So he's annoying, because of being often the problem.

He is also often distracting. There's times Duncan and Tessa are talking and he steps in the middle. If you don't see his story as interesting of itself, thats kind of irritating. There are a lot of times he'll disagree with Mac, often turning out to be wrong, and using a lot of words to prove it. There are times when his plot seems totally irrelevant to the rest of the plot. I can see some thematic connections in 'Methos', but I have to stretch to find them, and I do sympathise if people want to skip his sections.
So the writers use him to say something, or to stretch the story out long enough. And because he isn't the main character, that's kind of annoying, because who wants to see him just to see him?

Well, me, of course. Because...

There was this post someone wrote the other day about the difference between hero, main character, and protagonist.

Richie is not the main character on Highlander. You can tell, on account of the show not being called Richie. With the way the show is structured, that means his basic function is to make Mac look good. Which necessarily involves him being not so good.

He always tries to be the hero. This involves a lot of Cunning Plans, some of which work out better than others.

But the part that I like the most about him is that he is, quite often, the protagonist.

In that he is often the one that is changed.



Richie starts off as our way in, breaking in to the world of Immortals. He starts off trying to steal all the shiny things, but Mac gives him some options, and soon he's the guy minding the store and protecting things. Richie changes enough that when he goes back to the old neighbourhood he doesn't fit in any more. He keeps trying to find a way to be, something to do to make his life mean something. Sales and bike racing in the more mundane side of the world, both of which he is good at but quits for moral reasons. And in the Immortal world? He keeps trying to make a difference there. Immortals never intimidate him. If he sees someone in trouble, he'll grab a gun and protect. Sometimes it'll get him in more trouble, sometimes he's chosen the wrong side, but he keeps trying and keeps getting better at it. And then he gets shot. And dies. And wakes up Immortal. And here's this whole world we/he has been watching, and here's his chance to be part of it. Which turns out not so simple. So he has to try and deal with all of that, and keeps finding new situations and challenges that require him to change to keep up with it all.

Richie is *always* being changed. Right up until his last line of the series (that I'll admit to), "I'm learning." That right there is essence of Richie.


So, yeah, there are episodes where he doesn't do so very much, and episodes where he needs bucket of cold water treatment, and he isn't always very skilled at what he tries to do, but. There are other times. When he's the story of growing up. Which I think is worth watching.

Five thousand years alive.
One thousand with brothers, as a horseman.
Four thousand alone.
Immortals stay in one place maybe 10 years unnoticed.
Double that, perhaps, if they love that life enough to risk the questions.
Two hundred different lives.
Married sixty eight times.
One hundred thirty two without a wife.
One life with Byron, once a slave, once a doctor treating them. Then the Watchers, befriending, or being.
One hundred twenty seven without a trace.
Untold teachers, students, lovers, friends, mortal and Immortal...
In the dojo, back away and tell her, "You don't know me."
Hundreds of times true.


( Read more... )