beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I'm getting frustrated reading stuff where nothing happens except characters explaining the plot and backstory to each other.

Story needs to be thrifty. If you have to drop in explanations they also need to reveal who these people are and how they uniquely interact with the world. Also the scene needs to change something, and hopefully someone. If all that happens is all the characters speak enough to know what the reader knew two chapters ago we don't actually need to see it, they can just say 'x got me caught up' and move on to the next bit where something changes.

Also people need to do the yearning having cycle. They need to Want something, and Persuade someone else to let them have it. And just because it is perfectly reasonable if everyone knows what the readers know, that isn't enough reason to do it. Plus some characters just plain will not do gratitude. And they break their word, so keeping them on track is difficult, and they will expect others to do the same thing. You have to find a Motive that hooks into their core characterisation somehow, something they want or someone they want to be, and then you have to wrangle them into admitting everyone's needs could get met. It's herding cats at best.

... this story I am paused of reading basically has the cats marching in lines and having realised that I think I'll go skim read until something interesting happens or the story ends.

I have read a bunch of crossovers in a row now
that were just
intro outro.

Everyone meets, gets introduced, hits a bunch of stuff, goes away again.

And the hitting tends to take like a paragraph?

I feel like the hook to a crossover needs to be a bit more than just
look they all hit things real good
even with a common theme like magic or angels or demons.


The story of two or more people meeting needs to be something like
what need do these people fill for each other?

and 'need to hit things real good' doesn't really cover it when they are in hit things real good shows.

It's just a bit frustrating when I can see how each would offer a perspective that could get the other unjammed at some points in their canon
but they are just
gonna hit a demo about it.

And don't get me wrong, there are many ways to write hitting a demon about it that are *also* about confronting your emotions and getting a character arc unjammed, it's just not always what happen.


Like, say Sara Lance meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Key things to talk about: Did We Come Back Wrong? Bloodlust and the fashionable blonde! The Burden Of Command (that you didn't ask for but look at these guys when you don't do it). Ex Boyfriends with a whole angsty vigilante thing going on, possibly dying to save the world edition. Sapphic crushes and how much the crime parts don't make the crush go away. Or, sapphic crushes, and how much Sara hasn't met Ava yet. Give Buffy a holiday, Sara's good for it.

That's so many themes! You could pick one theme and get so many words out of it!

... I just read a fic that only had them fight and decided Sara would epic lose to Slayer strength, as if she doesn't fight superpowered beings for a living.

At least have them fight and do the thing where they each have a signature move that ends with a knife at Buffy's throat and a stake to Sara's torso, Sara would be into that. Buffy would be into that. Throwing each other around would work for both of them, the story should know this.

Or pick one of the more superpowered eras of Sara Lance and have Buffy mistake her for the source of the threat and they have to clear up the misunderstanding through angsty mutual personal revelations and then have sex about it.


... I did not start typing this with some kind of Sara/Buffy agenda but now I'm talking myself into it.


It's just like you can do a crossover to be all Look at these two great tastes that taste great together
but then like
if it do click there will be so many more things to do with it.


Time travelling demons! Say there's a demon nobody can figure out how to defeat and they have to Bill and Ted it by going back to the demon's Ascension and, like, rescuing the food crowd or smashing the box of pointy food or something, removing a key part of Ascension so when they get back they know the pure demon is actually vulnerable. A reason to go over the mythology of both shows.

But! Legends is the resolving things with a sing along or the power of Beebo show. Like sure in season one they fixed things by blowing stuff up and a spot of murder, but things evolved from there. So how would the Legends react to Buffy's general Slay Them All theme after the seasons where they met a bunch of supernatural beings and it was clearly Hell organising the capture and torture of them?

So many ways to smush the shows together and have new story fall out.



But if you don't need to smush the shows to get that exact same story, I shall end the page kind of vaguely sad, and apparently full of plot bunnies.

I finished Inevitable Excess on Hard :-D

The fight that was kicking my butt and the final fight featuring two demigods were not the same fight. The final fight was fine. I mean sure I had to ressurect the animal companions but aside from that fine.

The witch hex that turns enemies into allied animals continues to interact *very poorly* with anything triggered by Win This Fight. I had played before so I knew where the cut scene and mythic power up belonged so I hung around until the hex wore off and killed everything properly, but I don't know what would have happened if I'd not known to do that and just arrived at the final fight with some bonus animal sidekicks. ... probably get my butt kicked by not having that upgrade.




I have a new fun theory about Inevitable Excess, which is: ( Read more... )


I have another longer standing fun theory that all the different play throughs of every character everywhere are in the Pathfinder universe also all true. Like with Shyka the Many and ( Read more... )

The game is over and it will not give us the chance to save the remaining tragedies, but it is an interesting enough world that I keep on trying to rotate the pieces until it is possible.

This way it looks possible but you'd have to persuade so many people of very different motivations to go use it.


But pondering it is fun.

Haven't said much so far this month.
Having rediscovered things that are not Doctor Who exist, I have been mostly rereading, which I do not then re review.
Also there are Power Tool Things happening in the building and I Do Not Like That.

Today I started rereading a fanfic, a really good long one,
https://archiveofourown.org/works/28820259/chapters/70685889 Initiation
Jaspergirl (old_fashioned_gal)

I like it because it makes specific interventions to bring more characters into the Initiative and then extrapolates plausibly from there. Old issues setup, existing characters, new answers roll out.



But when I reread or rewatch things I keep on getting annoyed
at the characters that have not changed
due to the linear nature of time
and the nonlinear way one can revisit twenty years ago in read only mode.

I get annoyed that the rerun people never learn.

Or sometimes they just seem so young, on account of being young, and then I'm not annoyed but I'm not exactly right there with them, you know?

So the obvious thing to do is to fic up a few ideas about what people are or would be doing now.
It's just if you maintain the event density of the original source then twenty to thirty years is a *wild* amount of time to extrapolate. I mean, they could do anything. They could be anything. Ascension is not off the table here. So how do you math that out?
( Read more... )

So I either invent people I'm annoyed with or start sorting out and resolving their tensions and end up with ones I like but no longer believe.



... either way I don't write them down so it's all one to the rest of the world, but.
tricky.

( Read more... )



So okays, I have been typing for over an hour I think and I'm not sure any of those paragraphs were actually helpful, and now it is sleeps time.


But I keep getting grumpy at existing stories, for staying the same, so I do need to come up with some answers for how to change things.

I've seen people being proper anti a Buffy sequel on the grounds that they did it right the first time
which I have some sympathy for, though the original does continue to exist regardless.

Today I saw a gif set with some Sunnydale students in a corridor that made me think about what I would tell them if I was there
starting with 'boots then corset' and 'have one towel specifically for after hair dye or experience Regret', because this was sparked by their fashion statement, but:

What would the generation who had been through All That say to the newest 16 year olds?

And, for the sake of generating Story,
How would it be exactly the wrong thing to say?

It's like, every time I see people saying you should restrict social media and ban kids from having phones because
they meet demons on the internet
it just translates in my head to
stay isolated kids! never talk to anyone! definitely never listen to someone you don't already know!
we know how that works out!

... and yes, there's some real problems observed there, but, those solutions, they are problems in the making.

Original edition Buffy the Vampire Slayer had some pretty heavy handed Adults Are Useless moments
and Giles alternated between actually a person and In The Role Of Patriarchy
but in theory everyone does things because they think they'll make the stuff they care about turn out for the best.

Even Cruciamentum justified itself to Watchers by saying the girls that went through it were better at surviving
(ignore the cause and effect).

So that was a generation of
toughen up, it never did me any harm!
actually doing a lot of harm.

Or MOO, which was a one episode demon mind controlled gag, but, Mothers Opposed to the Occult, bundling the Slayers in with the Demons. Both being so much danger. Make it a mind control thing and then never have to deal with consequences!

Or, make it where the story lives, the rejection of the perceived dangers.

The idea that you can stay safe from all harm by Spotting The Wrong Sort and keeping them uninvited
clashes with the reality that you can't tell who is going to do Wrong until they're doing it (game face on).

... of course these days precautions in place to filter out people with a high temperature work pretty well for spotting someone with a very low one. The tech barrier to spot every vampire is waaaaay lower now. So what's the consequence of that?

With one or two vampires with a soul you don't get much fallout from Spot The Wrong One By Their Blood (temperature)
but if there's been progress in re ensoulment, and now there's dozens, hundreds?

Story in that.



I also want to see the story deal with trans Slayers. Every girl in the world who might have the power will have the power... so who defines girl?



I mean when you get down to it I am less and less satisfied with story that suggests
Hit Things Until They Stay Down
is a viable strategy.

Fighting demons with cathartic violence just doesn't work for me like it once did.


But, there's a lot of story in taking what we learned last time
and showing how it's just not a good fit now.

So we can very much work with that.

Today was Very Busy, we did the Monday and Wednesday tasks both at once, due to a cancellation.
Then I had an accidental nap for most of the afternoon.

I dreamed Torchwood was famous among museums for its collection of clothes, everyday items, and ephemera.
They didn't know what else the Torchwood Archive did, but they did know a lot of ordinary ish people had bequeathed all their worldly goods to Torchwood upon their deaths, so each death got you a snapshot of a life.
It's exactly the kind of comprehensive cross section that most museums don't have the space for but an Archive can preserve.

... obviously for this to be a Torchwood story there would be something about the outfits on carefully arranged tailor's dummies that went Horribly Wrong. But the dream didn't get that far.

I dreamed there was a bunch of scam artists who bought a compound half way up a mountain, left it on the market so people would come up to see it regular, so they've filtered for rich enough people already, and then when they got there they would be greeted by 'formerly dead loved ones' and conned into staying and pouring all their money in etc etc etc. The people running the scam were trying to pitch this as some kind of past lives thing where you can wake people up to who they shared a soul with and then you can see your loved ones again. But once Torchwood got involved it became clear it was all just shimmers.

Not even mind control, just illusions, internet searches, and basic cold reading bastards.

So I dreamed Ianto Jones but in the most unwelcome context so far.

Also dreamed I knocked them all out and zip tied them and called Jack to call the police. Shimmers were Torchwood business but everything else could just get arrested.

I dreamed their entire plan fell apart because they'd been relying on people caring too much to fight back when their 'loved ones' were threatened. Someone just being done enough to stun them all and let the powers sort it out really ruined their day.

See this is almost a Torchwood shaped plot but it's too close to three others I can think of, it'd need new ground to cover. New bits of people to explore. Otherwise holo!Ianto and House of the Dead and the cult stuff in Believe all hit the high points already.

Still. Bunny.

I hurt my wrist in my sleep, which is annoying because shouldn't you have to at least Do Something to get ow?
I'm hoping it'll fix in my sleep too but I write down when the ow started so I won't just ignore it.



I had a thought about ascension in Pathfinder but it's a bit of a walk from the text and not exactly of practical use
but
I was thinking that even very small gods can hear all their prayers. At once. All the time.
And to be a successful god they have to be able to understand and answer them?
Which is a span of control / attention span problem that *swiftly* gets carried away.

Wrath of the Righteous spoilers under the cut:
( Read more... )

I have a feeling like I've figured out a half a thing and need to keep turning it around and around until I see where to click it together.

But it's all tools and what you can do with them, stories and which ones can be told with these settings.

Seems like some very story in there.

I keep going back to Wrath of the Righteous and imagining throwing new different characters at it or making more plot around the edges of what the Knight Commander was doing. Fanfic stuff, obvs. But I dont think there's really an audience for my multiverse xover mixing the computer game with the paper one and beyond. So I just circle it a lot and worry at it like a problem set.

... wants to redeem more characters. The story keeps dangling them in front of me and then going oops nope can't help this one. So I'm like watch me. But by introducing them to people and situations from other stories and genres.

Like, Adam, from Torchwood, applied to Camellia, from Wrath of the Righteous. Big spoilers for game and for Torchwood episodes from... lots of years ago... ( Read more... )


I just have that feeling where it seems like you could rotate these characters just right to click
and get a new and possibly better for them or probably just very dramatic story out of it.



And that's without even getting into the fact that almost the first thing you learn is Resurrection is possible in this game. Terendelev's scales. Then scrolls at the Defender's Heart. The computer game doesnt have True Res but in theory all he needs is a name, or optimally a name, date time place of birth, and same of death. Ianto has that in his mental files for we don't know how much of Torchwood. ... plus about 823 had the same date and place of death, which is a bit easy to memorise...

Huh, just checked via wiki and wayback, and the website said 823 total staff of whom 27 survived. I had it memorised as 823 down out of 850. oop.

ANYway:

Ianto Jones, Torchwood survivor, dropped on a planet where True Res is a thing, is going to start trying to save enough gold to start saving people.

Which makes him a very different guy from the canon Knight Commander, who only has the context and friends the game gives him.

Plus while one can imagine Ianto being very on side with closing the Worldwound, Torchwood does have form with wanting to exploit rifts, and the Trickster path has ever so many temptations on that front, so you'd want to bring back friends who would be on several sides of an argument.

Also, imagine Owen being the one to pick up the wand that triggers the Undead mythic path. Tangly. He'd understand exactly what he was risking, or he'd think he did, but if he tried taking it he'd find himself in way too deep. You could fit an entire story arc into one of the time gaps for the Knight Commander. Would need to tweak the logic a bit though. Or, use the DLC where Nahyndri gets involved, and all paths say the Knight Commander isn't the only one who tried getting on that boat of bones.

Plus greed is a temptation for everyone, but when every gold piece gets you closer to another life saved... Owen has such a list. All of them do. And if they start bring back their guilt list instead of filtering for how they'd cope, ever so many stories arise.

... kind of want to play through with Owen now and get to the what have I done point... but I don't want to play evil...

Anyway! Throw different people at the same story, get different story, obvs. Throw different story at the same people, also get different story. Including an excuse for a continuation of it.



Still turning them around in my head for now though...

Today I did most of the Wednesday tasks (cleaner day worked, laundry didnt)

and continued rereading a very long fic
https://archiveofourown.org/works/13727895?view_full_work=true

I've reread Initiation more, by the same author, and have left myself a to do item to comment on it because it is very very good, but so far I continue to be quiet. So I'll rec it here.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/28820259

I keep trying to think up a story that changes things the way I'd want to, to imagine something that doesn't leave me with that bitey feeling of things need done, but I am currently stuck on All Problems All The Time.

Specifically with Giles and Ethan I find myself thinking nothing is really solved if Giles has his canonical attitude to magic. Ethan's attitude to magic makes things difficult for everyone, but also shows them possibilities they hadnt thought of. Which generally pisses them off. But. They live in a world where this very real avenue to power is cut off by pure ideology and refusing to teach.

But the other fiction world I spend a lot of time imagining, Pathfinder rpg's Golarion with the attempted apocalypse at least every six months, seems like it illustrates what happens when everyone and anyone can get magic. Lots of kaboom. Extraordinary amounts of kaboom. And a lot of undead even compared to the Buffyverse.

People want magic the other guy doesnt have. When everyone has magic you spend most of yours on protection spells or you get flattened going out the door. Or mind controlled. So so much mind control. You boost your resistance at every opportunity or do someone else's bidding.

Kind of reminds me of the early promise of the internet vs actual ai spewed garbage and malware. Something that should be magical is mostly tedious because otherwise it's all... Warren and the Trio.

But trying to keep the power safely controllable is how the Buffyverse ended up with One Girl In All The World.

... would be nice if the follow up stories after season 7 actually played through like handing out power had up sides...

Trying to imagine a balanced sort of attitude to magic, a safe enough world, an ethical framework you could teach at magic school, entrance exams for magic school... I mean unless literal everyone has magic you get a form of inequality as unequal as the magic economy is from the everyday survival sort of money in rpgs. Magic users have choices, everyone else has problems.

But if everyone has magic everyone also has problems.

So it's a tricky one to imagine.



But if I read in fic Giles swearing to never do magic again, or even never do magic with Ethan, that's... wrong. Like swearing to make himself small. That's not a useful or self actualising response to realising how bad he screwed up. Power is still there, still part of him, so even without the metaphor layers the idea the only right thing he can do with power is give it up or give it away is just... too limited.

So it's a difficult problem.

Even before you get to the specifics of
what is magic for
and what do they need magic for?

Because he used it for escape, the sleepwalker, and that goes poorly.

But there's so much else.

Unless it's a magic as drug use metaphor again, which goes poorly with the gay metaphor magic and the magic as actual power.



I have a little daydream about entrance tests for magic school
where they screen out all the TERFS and transphobes
because the fundamental principle of magic
the one thing you have to believe in order to do magic
is
Things Change, If You Make Them Change.


I kind of think that's what Giles gave up. To do his tweedy best to fit in and make himself safe. He wrapped himself in tradition and gave up on change.

Which changed in later seasons.

So he logically should go back to magic.



But I keep turning the thoughts over a bunch without coming up with anything solid or story worthy.


As I have been for rather a lot of years if I think about it.

Ah well. Worth thinking anyway.

I'm having the cranky sort of bored when you have all the things but whichever things you start on turn out to be Not The Thing.

Not even Doctor Who.

Or not that Doctor Who.

I'd like to listen to Torchwood but I'm waiting on the next new Torchwood.

Also I know I will get more Ianto (yaay) but I think I want the Ianto that has been in my head since playing Wrath of the Righteous, and the only one who knows that Ianto is me.

Which is why writers do the thing, but, nobody wants a write up of a playthrough of a video game where you just so happened to name the player character after a blorbo, and, nobody who wants to hear about Ianto is going to find his exploits after the worldwound particularly comprehensible anyway, because too much context is from the game.
( Read more... )


Canon Ianto has one set of problems that got cut off short. The End. Those are the only problems he ever has.

Legend!Ianto in my head has to deal with being one of the most skilled and knowledgeable humans to have ever lived, just about being able to back up 'I know everything', but because of that knowing how much worse things can get.
... and, also, having just as much of a mess of a love life as anyone else. Possibly more, because he has the old layers of feeling he's not important enough and the new layers of everyone else thinking he's so super important that's the only thing they see about him, plus a general feeling that with his Persuasion skills he could do all the deciding and *does not want* to.

That's just a different guy even if I played all the in between steps.



A lot of my characters get like this. Too many steps from canon to be in character but not enough to be original. It's from hanging out with them in my head for like decades. Like when you hug the toys too much.

Ah well.

I should go find something to read or some such.

I have a new dishwasher that is exactly like the old dishwasher but working and likely to take longer between repair visits 🤞

It got all installed yesterday but I havent run it yet. I need to like actually sleep more than four hours and just cope with the New Thing of it all.

The not sleeping thing is getting old and can go away again any time now.

I read a long fanfic yesterday that was a rewrite of Harry Potter where they thought they had fixed everything but it just made me want to do an entirely different rewrite or just take the interesting bits and run off and file the serial numbers off.

And today I listened a bunch of Gallifrey and got up to when they open the Academy to new people and there's different chapters on Gallifrey but Prydonians are basically if Gryffindor and Slytherin were just one house and also where they put all the ones who look in the vortex and go mad. So. All the interesting is happening in one place and the other places just stand for, like, How About We Do Not Do That.

... which is a very defensible position in universe.

The thing is though they did the education thing completely backwards if they want their own people to accept it, which of course is the basic plot generator. But like, if it was optimised for function not drama, you wouldnt start by inviting people in, you'd send true believers out. ( Read more... )


I have taken those ideas for a wander for long enough I think.

Sleep would have been more useful. And yet.

*sigh*



But I still kind of want to write a wizard school or three and keep an eye on what they're actually saying about how people work and what should be rewarded and punished. Because that can get weird.

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.