Ten Little Chances to be Free

Life remains mostly unexciting. The biggest news is that my trip to Côte d'Ivoire, which was slated to run from the last weekend in November until a week before Christmas, has been rescheduled to early January. Which is theoretically good, because it means the schedule won't be as tight and I'll miss any riots that may accompany the legislative elections in December, but since I've long since completed most of the pre-trip work, it also means that unless they can scrounge up something for me to do I'll spend another month getting paid to play sudoku all day.

Also there are rumors of David Yates directing a big-ticket Doctor Who movie. Which, lol, we all know how well that went last time, but it could be fun. I just hope that if they're going to do something completely independent of the NuWho universe (and that seems to be what Yates is planning), they bother to handwave it into some splinter timeline like the Star Trek reboot to avoid massive canon wars between movie fans and TV fans. Not that they bothered to do that for the Cushing movies, Big Finish, Shalka, spin-off novels, or anything else in the EU, but a big Hollywood film will bring in scads of new fans and truckloads of oldbies-vs-newbies wank, which will be orders of magnitude more vicious if each group thinks the other is trying to retcon its canon out of existence.

Fandom explosion and doomsday predictions are already underway of course. By far the best post I've seen is the denizens of doctorwho trying to top each other's ridiculous ideas for the worst that could possibly happen: James Bond meets Transformers in space, RPattz as the Doctor, and more!

My humble contribution:

Breaking news: Yates in talks to direct "Doctor Who: The Musical" with score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Frank Wildhorn, in association with Jim Steinman. No Doctor has been confirmed as of yet but rumored casting includes Emmy Rossum and Nick Jonas as the plucky young companions and Patti LuPone as the Master. Insiders report that the production team are in talks to kick Wicked out of the Gershwin Theatre in order to stage a $90 million Broadway production of the musical extravaganza, whose special effects will, according to one source who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "make Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark look like a middle school production of Grease." No stunt safety consultants could be reached for comment.

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Apparently everyone who's heard the big power ballad, "One Heart for the TARDIS (And One Heart For You, Babe)" has panned it, but I bet they're all just snobs who are bitter about anything that isn't Sondheim.

There's also some pretty vicious gossip going around that the stage version blew its whole budget on TARDIS dematerialization effects and a zero-G chase sequence on wires, and the rest of it is all wobbly sets and bubble-wrap monsters. Clearly they don't understand that it's all for artistic effect. Bring on the nostalgia, say I!

Title: Except for Cheap Tricks
Author: 10littlebullets
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Doctor/Master (Academy era)
Summary: Crossing your own timeline is strictly forbidden, except to double-team your almost-evil not-yet-ex-boyfriend.
Notes: Someone on the reallygoodcuffs kinkmeme wanted Academy-era Doctor/Master smut. Somehow my brain spat out equal parts porn and crack. Beware fisticuffs, mad science, and nefarious application of the Blinovitch limitation effect.

( I can't tell you what I'm thinking right now )

Title: You'll Be Sorry But Your Tears Will Be Too Late
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Characters: Ten, Martha, Sexy
Summary: Pure crack. A hug and a thank-you are not nearly enough recompense for all the shit Martha put up with in 1913, and if Martha isn't going to wring anything better out of the Doctor, well, the TARDIS has her ways.

( Will I help you? Don't be funny. )

“Then I spent a long time thinking about body-swapping - so the Master becomes the Doctor and vice versa, which would give us Evil David Tennant. That would be fantastic, especially in his swansong.”

- Russell T. Davies, The Writer’s Tale

WHY was I not previously aware that RTD's original plan for End of Time involved Master-Doctor bodyswapping? Considering Tennant!Master has been right up near the top of the "fandom crack theories I wish we'd been able to see" wishlist for ages and I might have recently written a few thousand words of crappy porn with Ten and Martha and roleplaying as the Master which sprang solely from the mental image of Tennant getting to say "I am the Master, and you will obey me." And SIMM!DOCTOR and the two of them getting to play off each other and it would've been the best crack ever, far better than the six billion Masters. And the sheer POSSIBILITIES of the Master getting to impersonate the Doctor! Imagine the episode starts, the Doctor is taking control of some messy situation as normal, and then he goes and does something ludicrously evil and the title credits roll. Fucking awesome pre-theme-song cliffhanger, especially right after Waters of Mars. And at some point "the Doctor" would call UNIT up and ask them to send over Martha Jones to help him deal with "the Master," and we'd get ten or fifteen very tense minutes of her playing along before she bitchslaps him at the climactic moment and is all "the Sontarans tried to replace me with a clone once, do you think I can't tell you're not the Doctor?" Not to mention the slash would be glorious and I might've gone a bit slack-jawed when I tried to imagine the EoT bondage chair scenes with the actors swapped.

And then I flailed about this with filia_belialis and one of our tangents led to her instructing me to go watch Time Monster. Which I just finished watching. And oh, Delgado!Master, you GQ motherfucker, if it's wrong of me to secretly root for you then I don't want to be right. Even when you are doing stupid things like summoning chronovores. So goddamn classy, even when he's sending Jo and the Doctor to their deaths, and I love how laid-back Three and Delgado are about each other. "Oh yes, it must be my archenemy, of course he's up to something. I guess I'll have to go thwart him soon. More tea?"

(Am I alone in thinking that Tennant!Master would've been very, very Delgado? Only more crazy intensity and less GQMF. Not that they resemble each other, exactly, more that they're both capable of being all eyebrows and bared lower teeth and stagey classical expressiveness.)

Other things that have resulted from conversations with filia_belialis: it is now my headcanon that any time the Doctor mutters about humans and their silly linear notions of time and space, it is because Time Lords use elliptical geometry instead of Euclidean. It also explains the circular writing system. And the timey-wimey ball. Time isn't a linear progression of events any more than a cornfield in Iowa is a flat plane; the plain is part of a globe, the timeline is part of the timey-wimey ball, and the timey-wimey ball is more like a trampoline that sags under the weight of important events to make temporal gravity wells, fixed points holding other scraps of history in orbit around them. At least, until the Doctor Who writers need new rules about changing history.

...also headcanon that Academy!Koschei once built a tiny paradox machine powered by some professor's desk toy (the Time Lord equivalent of a plasma ball?), overcame Theta Sigma's initial reservations about it by using it to solve the halting problem and wowing him with Rule of Cool, and the two of them used it for increasingly ridiculous things until it overloaded its feeble power source, exploded, and unleashed a Reaper in the middle of a physics lab.

YOU GUYS

YOU GUYS

I JUST FIGURED EVERYTHING OUT

There are AT LEAST SIX POSSIBLY SEVEN OR MORE DOCTORS running around at the time of Impossible Astronaut:
- Eleven, doing his thing in the main plot
- Older!Eleven from the (coughwhisperspoilerwhisper) might also be in 1969 somewhere for all we know
- Ten and Martha are stuck in 1969 waiting for Sally Sparrow to send the TARDIS back
- Ten and Martha also went back to see the moon landing four frigging times as mentioned somewhere in 'Blink'

SO NOW I KNOW WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN

Clearly Moffat has been elaborately trolling us since 2007, and instead of any sort of cliffhanger resolution in the next episode, we are going to get forty-five minutes of Time Crash only with even more witty one-liners. And then since Jack lived through the whole 20th century he will show up and the whole thing will devolve into a Ten/Ten/Ten/Ten/Ten/Eleven/Eleven/Martha/Martha/Martha/Martha/Martha/Billy Shipton/Canton Everett Delaware III/Amy/Rory/River/Jack orgy. On the moon. With David Bowie along for the ride. And one of the Tens is possessed by the Master and tries to see how many of the other Tens he can get in bondage before anyone gets suspicious.

It r trufax I know it because of my learnings. Also I really should be doing schoolwork.

The very day after I discovered "Miss Lucy Had Some Leeches," somebody posted a summary of Les Mis in clapping-game format to fanfiction.net, and it seemed kind of pointless because what's the fun of Miss Lucy if there are no averted swearwords? And then the rhymes started bouncing around in my head. I'm still not sure there's a point (which is why I'm inflicting it on you, dear f-list, instead of posting it in the wild), but my inner six-year-old is amused.

( Miss Fantine had a lover: A cautionary tale for young ladies at risk of going astray )

Apparently my life is just not interesting enough to write about anymore.

Um. I did get together with elyse24601 and a friend who lives in my house on Friday. We watched the last three-quarters or so of the incredibly bizarre 2000 Les Mis miniseries--the one where EVERYONE BUT COSETTE is a massive sketchball. Valjean? Pervs on Cosette; nuff said. Javert? Got his PhD in lurking from Conspicuous University; also, John Malkovitch wtf; also, black leather trenchcoat. Thénardiers? Were sketchy enough in canon, but now there's random gross PDA that may or may not involve their kids. The Mother Superior of the convent? Grim and creepy and obviously chain-smokes if her voice is any indication. Eponine? Skeevy and goth and tells Marius she'll show him Cosette's house if he'll sleep with her. Marius? Fugly; also, AGREES to skeevy Eponine's proposition. Fauchelevent? Has that "I know your name is Jean Valjean because I listen to you talk in your sleep" moment. Enjolras? ...okay, he's cute and ambiguously slashy, but he does shoot Fauchelevent in a crowning moment of WTF.

Actually, there were so many crowning moments of WTF that it's not even worth it to enumerate them.

Also, it is snowing like crazy and I have sixty pages of The Red and the Black to read and a bunch of Latin subjunctive forms to memorize by tomorrow. Woe. And I spent breakfast talking with my friends who are biochem and physics majors, which made me wonder why the fuck I never got to take a real hard science class except biology in 10th grade, which in turn made me wonder why the fuck I got shunted into the remedial dumb-kid science classes after I left middle school. The official excuse was that I "clearly wasn't very good at math," AKA I was a straight-A student who got a C in algebra under an incompetent teacher. But I have to wonder whether those two X chromosomes had anything to do with the assumption that I shouldn't bother my pretty little head with AP Chemistry and all the scary math it entailed.

At any rate, I really regret never having taken a "real" chemistry or physics course. (And no, the "Matter and Energy" bullshit I got stuck with in high school does not count; it was where they put all the kids they thought were too dumb to take the real thing, so we could learn the basic concepts and move on with our lives.) It's something I cannot fit into my schedule at all at Smith, but I wish I could; maybe after I graduate I'll take community-college courses or something.

The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated to this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully, and with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My mother?--"

At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic."

FADE TO BLACK, CUE PORNO MUSIC

Next chapter:

That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel, at the moment when it is torn open with the iron, in order that grain may be deposited within it; it feels only the wound; the quiver of the germ and the joy of the fruit only arrive later.

BC/EFA and Les Mis update after I get some sleep. For now? I found where the Uwe!Javert/Pasching!Enjolras surprise buttsecks picture is from. And it's even more hysterical than the actual picture.

Death visits the barricade. MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED.

omg.

To be filed away in the plotbunny warehouse:

- He whose name might conceivably be shortened to Raphael Enjolras, owner of a first-edition Social Contract;
- Antoine-Jaques Grantaire, but only because 'Corbeau' was taken by that bloke with the tenement;
- An exceedingly ill-timed bathroom break;
- A stern reminder to self to never browse random people's journal archives again.