beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Today my only achievement has been noticing I wasn't having much fun playing Wrath of the Righteous and stopping.
I started Inevitable Excess on Core difficulty with Angelica the gold dragon from my last play through. Core is a smidge higher difficulty than I was playing her at. It is entirely unforgiving of error. On the other hand, I have a giant stash of diamonds and Daeran Arendae, so my errors last as long as it takes to cast Resurrection. Which probably isn't much fun for the characters but thus far works.

I think I want a new story. But I want a new Pathfinder story, and they haven't made that for the computer yet.
... still sad about Kingmaker being so shonky, it was so good as a story and so utterly crashing unplayable as a console game.

Other than that I have been rereading Torchwood fanfic, ones from my bookmarks so I know I like them already. So far it has been a collection of time travel fixit fics, almost all from the set of fics that clearly and explicitly approve of polyamory. When I was reading through the Jack/Ianto fics I found a lot that thought Jack needed fixing so he'd be monogamous, and a few absolute nightmares that think Ianto being his One True Love is a great ending. Those ones are fans of different characters with the same name, and have a wildly different idea of how things work to me. Five billion years of story to fill in, I think they'd have more fun with more dances.

So far the fic I've been reading was from before Big Finish got their hands on them.
There is a lot a lot a lot going on in Big Finish that sort of decides how to interpret characters and then fills in... something ever approaching all the days we didn't see.
Makes stories that are simply TV canon compliant feel like half a conversation even though that's what we usually mean by canon.

( Read more... )

Ah well, this is quite long for not many thoughts, I'll go do something else.

It's Christmas themed but blurs into New Year a bit so I timed listening to it just right.
Ace and Mr Colchester tell each other ghost stories by firelight.
By Joseph Lidster, and you can tell.
( Read more... )
I don't want to say much about the plot(s) because this is an excellent piece, tense and personal.
It fits well with what we know of them already but isn't predictable. It expands on Torchwood, the Institute, and what they have been like. And then it ends on an excellent note.

I give it 5/5 stars.

Bought these because James Marsters playing Captain John Hart.
Had no particular expectations because what is Dark Gallifrey? Whatever Big Finish pleases, I guess.
Listened to the first part and was unsure I understood more at the end than the beginning.
Listened to the second and it was ( Read more... )

So the third part was the trap chewing up Captain John and the Master. Quite a lot of the middle was genre 'terrible things happening to terrible people'. But the ending was just wild. ( Read more... )

So okay, that was very much in character, but I did not see where that story was going at all.

And the story leaves room for the changes to be permanent or to wear off or to be paradoxical, so will Big Finish use this later? I mean, why not, it's their universe.

So: I listened these for more Captain Hart content. And it did have that.

But I am still not quite clear on what the story was doing for quite large chunks of it, so you have to have a pretty high tolerance for weird for this set.

Also for reading this... it's not even a review, I was trying to write down the cool bits to see if they added up, and I think they do. But. It is both very spoilers under those cuts and not making entire sense, sorry.

I think that was fun to listen to but I might have to have another go later.

I get what they were trying to do with this one. Outsider point of view, someone who has probably been retconned, but they're still living with the trauma. Torchwood swept through their lives and this is what is left.
It's a solid premise for a story.
But it just leaves the story with the confusion and the powerless bits. A whole audio about being done to and feeling awful about it. Made me feel sad and squirmy.

I'm glad the Torchwood audios have room to do stuff like this though. Sometimes you get three months of Ianto, sometimes you get something more like Random Shoes, with the odd under informed bits.

Still. Sad.
Probably won't be relistening much.

I have for a while been thinking about Pathfinder and how the easyish presence of ressurection can make any imported character's life super complicated.
And I keep starting with Torchwood.

The thing with Torchwood is
the writers looked at the characters and went
"you know what this one needs? more pain!"

So like, some shows, you've got that one fridged woman in the backstory, so one man can have angsty manpain, and only mention her when mentioning she's dead. Right?

But on Torchwood:
( Read more... )

The thing is you get people saying that bringing back the dead is sort of cheap and loses all the stakes. But there are so many *different* stories right here in a list of people who they once couldn't save but now get a chance to, only they've moved on different amounts since then and don't quite know each other. I mean Owen has arguably done Some Murder, and even Toshiko doesn't know all of it. Ianto has done... so many things that people he'd bring back wouldn't imagine. So many different stakes in there, that aren't just The End.

Not to mention that Torchwood and Pathfinder have different ideas about The End, and making them fit together does not come up pretty.

So I want to get the characters out of their box and make the story continue.




Obviously the point of stories about grief and loss is you never ever ever again get to do that
but I feel after fifteen years we have that story told.

New ones time.

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...

Norton and Andy story, stuck in a time bubble that is destroying the world and killing them, but in a silly funny way.
If silly funny Norton and Andy is what you are in the mood for then this gets plenty of stars, but I'm not sure how often I'll be in the mood for it. ( Read more... )

The third in the Ianthology by Gareth David Lloyd, this one is about Ianto and his dad.

It's a strong story. Part of me wants to reject the plausibility because it's like the nightmare scenario, but, that is part of how it kicks you in the feels. And you spend most of the story not knowing 'Disco's' name and wondering why that's built up to be a big deal, but then when it lands, boom, it definitely hits.
( Read more... )

Going to rate this one 5/5, but it isnt exactly uplifting to listen to, so I may not relisten as much.

I think I liked this one. The last lines about the stopwatch felt a bit pasted on and I'm not sure they fit, and quite a lot of the story is lets make fun of newbie Ianto hour, before he Saves The Day at the end, but it has a lot of good story. And some bits were hilarious, in an incredibly dark way. And its sad tragic when you stop to think about it. And each character was very definitely a character who made sense. I'm just a little hesitant about the final mix because it never quite gave me what I was expecting next.

I reckon I'll like it better when I listen again.

Quite a good one.

Ace and Mr Colchester.
They're fun because there's a tiny overlap in the venn diagram of their interests that puts them on the same side, but ever so much else where they're not. They respect each other but they've got different jobs with different priorities. So they spend much of this audio sort of politely telling each other they're doing the wrong job the wrong way.
It's all the kind of plausible in the real world corporate ecological problems that could go in a different genre most of the time, but it's also plausibly what Ace and Mr Colchester would be doing these days.
It's almost a surprise when the Whoniverse story turns out to be about aliens after all.
Like you've been busy with the people stuff and forgot what else they do.
I like it a lot.

Another audio I had never heard before. Another by Joseph Lidster.
It's a bit weird because early on Jack says he's finally in hell
only the audio I heard a few days ago, by the same author, very much sent Jack to hell, so, figure Jack applied some retcon to that whole situation, which, you know, fair.
But then later he says he's seen hell so many times, so also possible he's just Like That about it.

Jack tries to get away from it all by going to a planet surrounded by red lightning that no one can get near
and then finds there's a lot of very familiar stuff on that planet just waiting for him.

He gets dragged through his own memories, trying to make him feel guilty, ( Read more... )


I think this was a good story but I'd rather see it written than hear it, at least with this reader.
I didnt get the hang of the voices first time through and I dont see the logic in the accents second time.

Still, lots of Jack character stuff, canon moments revisited, insight into his emotions and why he is like that.

Read by Kai Owen, who is good at doing the voices.
This one I definitely haven't heard before. Dont have it on CD, even though its from 2012, just this apple books on my phone I've been listening.
It's set after Miracle Day but has a flashback to the full team; sometime after Rhys knows what they do for a living but while Owen is alive, which I think narrows it down a lot. ( Read more... )

I like this one less the more I turn it around in my head, and I wasnt overly impressed as it was happening.

I want to use the parts for something else, I dont think they quite worked here.

I did like the voices though.