Ten Little Chances to be Free

Eeeeee. Best Doctor Who we've had since A Town Called Mercy. Maybe better? This one was certainly doing more stuff and doing it well, but suffered from some writing problems that Mercy didn't have. Neil Cross needs to keep better track of who knows what and when, and how they find out, because this is the second one he's done in a row where the Doctor goes in not knowing much about the main mystery but apparently gets a series of psychic telegrams over the course of the episode detailing exactly what's going on. However! While that particular weakness completely undermined the climax of Rings of Akhaten, this time there is a lot more packed into the plot and it is better-developed and doesn't throw a big speech at you out of nowhere and demand that you have feelings about it, so the Doctor Magically Knowing Things from time to time is more easily excused as plot expediency.

And I had feelings about it. A lot of feelings. ( Spoilery )

And now we come back to the exact question that plagued me at about this time in 2011: halp how do I multi-fandom? I am so laughably bad at sustaining obsessive interest in more than one thing at once, which usually ends in me feeling guilty for dropping one thing in favor of another (see: disappearing from Les Mis fandom because Doctor Who ate me), but that is not actually possible right now because I've done a hard 180 back into Les Mis fandom just as a new (half-)season of Who is about to air. And this time I love them both to pieces with active fangirl joy, am not burned out on either of them, and want to keep participating in both. *flaily hands*

Les Mis kinkmeme now bigger than eleventy_kink, heading into Round 4 soon, will probably hit 24,601 comments before Barricade Day, about to get a Big Important Rules/FAQ Organizational Post, and getting me to write fic again. Even if it is all shameless porn. And now a digitized copy of Hugo's original manuscript has shown up, which is not exactly dissuading me from falling right back down the research-and-Brick-geekery rabbit hole. But before I embark on any new translations or anything I should probably trawl through back archives of my LJ tags, dig around on my hard drive, poke through old Abaissé threads, and compile a few massive HERE LET ME SHARE YOU A THING BECAUSE YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE SEEN IT BEFORE link posts for people who weren't here in 2009 or whenever. And ahaha oh Christ the DVD is coming out tomorrow, which opens the possibility of vidding once I'm done watching it sixty bazillion times and weeping.

And then Doctor Who season 7b starts at the end of the month. Am still v. v. interested in Clara, still convinced she's already dead and her brain's in a computer somewhere and she doesn't even know it, still not sure how that connects to Already-Dead People The Doctor Might Be Married To Whose Brains Are Also In Computers Somewhere, still vaguely suspicious that the Doctor might not be going through s7 in broadcast order. But my interest in Moffat Who is still largely cerebral--which, given the way my brain works, is enough to sustain quite a lot of interest! But I'm not sure I have Feelings about it the way I have Feelings about Ten, or Seven and Ace, or One and the Original Team TARDIS. And there is a lot of classic Who for me to go develop Feelings about. (Turlough? I don't know if I have Feelings about Turlough. I like his stupid face a lot, and he hits the same "dysfunctional fuckups who suffer way too prettily" pervy buttons as Ten, but I've only really seen Frontios and Mawdryn Undead--and Planet of Short-Shorts but I was watching that for the Doctor/Master and knew zilch about Turlough at that point--so I will have to reserve judgement until I've seen more.)

Gallifrey One has come and gone, was AMAZING, Happiness Patrol cosplay was a hit, and holy god I met my doppelgänger. We were both running around being Simm!Master and looking scarily alike, except that she's a foot taller and twice as good-looking. Freema Agyeman is the loveliest human and so so nice in Q&A sessions, Sylvester McCoy continues to be a ridiculous man, Philip Hinchcliffe has v. interesting things to say at panels, Frazer Hines is Frazer Hines and he and Deborah Watling make a super-entertaining double act, Nick Briggs miiiight have been at the Big Finish merchandise booth while I was busy giving them all my money and I was too tongue-tied to say anything to him. But HNNNGH I love Big Finish; a few weeks before the con I stumbled upon the "Doctor Who scripts that were never produced" Wikipedia article and almost cried with longing for what could have been, and then I found out BF does audios of some of the lost stories and look, I'm not saying I dropped ridiculous amounts of money for One, Barbara, Ian, and Susan meeting Alexander the Great in a dropped season-one script by a Turkish playwright, except for the part where I totally did.

And then on the last night of con I somehow wound up at the bar with Neve McIntosh, aka Madame Vastra, furtively talking smack about Moffat's writing problems in between mutual fangirling of Vastra & Jenny. She is... pretty much the awesomest, and spent that whole evening drinking like a sailor and flirting with everybody and generally being the life of the party.

Then after Gally work took over my life and I wound up crossing eleven time zones in four days (LA to DC Monday, DC to the Comoros Islands Thursday). And that trip was long and stressful and way too busy and I didn't even really get to go see anything outside a quarter-mile radius of the hotel, which sucks. Because coral reefs and crater lakes and active volcano and I'm really going to have to devise a way to go back there for vacation rather than work sometime. And now I am back. And not really recovered. Because Air France lost my luggage and still hasn't got it back to me, and Air Kenya completely jerked me around and almost caused me to refund my ticket and hop on the next flight to Antananarivo in a panic through sheer boneheaded lack of communication, and I came back to find the Les Mis kinkmeme erupting in its very first honest-to-god wankstorm. It is impressive that it took 15,000 comments for anyone to start snarling at anyone else, and kind of hilarious that the thing that finally broke the kinkmeme's tolerance was a request for a Confederacy AU, but fuck it couldn't have been more ill-timed.

That... is all, I think. Oh, and I am finally on pills that seem to be making headway against the depression-y shit, at least the grey fog of "everything is blurgh" and the occasional downswings into active self-loathing. The "having energy for RL activities and regularly accomplishing basic tasks such as laundry and feeding myself" bit remains to be seen.

On my way to Gallifrey One! (Side note: You know sort of travel anxiety that lingers in the back of your head and goes "What if you can't find the hotel? What if you can't find it because it doesn't EXIST? What if you step out of the plane and your entire destination doesn't exist, and there's nothing but a cornfield or a howling void filled with asteroids or a chillingly empty hole in spacetime?" Yeah, the sentence "I'm going to Gallifrey!" really doesn't do a lot to defuse that anxiety.) Flight gets out of DC National at 5:45 AM, which is pretty much the ass end of EVERYTHING, and the best transport I could arrange was to be dropped off around 1am by my brother. So, close on five hours in Reagan National, sitting on my butt on the very hard floor of the elevator/pay-phone alcove, because that's the only place where the muzak isn't earsplitting. Who the fuck ghetto-blasts muzak at three in the morning, anyway? Well, okay, an airport named after Ronald Reagan, that's who. At least there's WiFi.

Costumes lined up for Gally this year: Simm!Master as usual, Yana!Master, possibility of Ninth Doctor, and--fingers crossed that the last-minute assembly/tinkering at the hotel goes all right--tag-team Happiness Patrol cosplay with a buddy from Tumblr. I realize it would probably be mean to mount a guerrilla "Cheer up, emo Time Lord!" campaign against random Tens, but... well, it's still deeply tempting. I've been too much of a failface lately to rig up a pair of faux-stone wings that could survive an airplane trip, so weeping angel has to stay at home again.

1. I finally caved and got a Netflix subscription, and proceeded to break it in by watching Withnail & I. I am very, very glad I only found out about the drinking game after I watched the movie, because I'm pretty sure there is no variant of that drinking game that isn't a one-way trip to the emergency room. (The drinking game, for the record, has a single criterion: drink whenever the characters do.)

If anyone has W&I fic recommendations--particularly Withnail/Marwood slash, cracky Doctor Who crossovers, or well-done pastiche/missing scenes with the characters being their bad selves--hit me up, because I will read the shit out of it.

Also this gif/macro made me burst into uncontrollable cackling for at least a full minute. And I am so glad to have the sort of living situation where roommates drawn over to the computer by the racket promptly dissolve into cackling as well.

2. Q: What's the difference between an LD50 of Kessel spice and five Imperial stormtroopers deciding to execute you by firing squad?
A: Your chances of survival are lower with the LD50.
(I guess I got sick of making dead Gallifrey jokes and moved on to the impeccable marksmanship of the Empire's finest?)

3. More Doctor Who speculation: I continue to be bothered by the fact that Amy Pond's house doesn't just have too many rooms, it has too many stories. Literally. It's a two-story house from the outside--maybe two and a half if you count room for the attic--and yet there is a prominent staircase on the upper-floor landing. Too nice (and too well-lit) to be attic stairs, too prominent to be a continuity error in an episode that draws attention to the rooms that nobody notices. A too-prominent staircase to nowhere that bears a disturbing resemblance to the one in The Lodger. Given that we still don't know what's behind that proto-TARDIS in The Lodger and the s6 opener, and that we still don't know why the TARDIS blew up on Amy and Rory's wedding day, and that there appears to be a whole extra story folded into Amy Pond's house that isn't there on the outside, I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say that just because the Ponds' story is officially over doesn't mean there isn't more to it.

(Edit: Also, sorry for being crap about replying to comments lately--okay, and by "lately" I mean "for a long time now." I've been doing the Depression Turtle act for far too long.)

Back home! Have spent the past few months slowly rewatching all the Tenth Doctor episodes with housemate coyotegestalt, who's never seen them and is remarkably tolerant of my overinvested, oft-snarky commentary. Rewatch continued tonight wiiiith... The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. Which I don't think I've ever rewatched in full. So I had totally forgotten that The Stolen Earth and the first fifteen minutes of Journey's End are made of THE MOST GLORIOUS CRACK and I don't even care that the plot is spread thinner than that last half-spoonful of jam. GLORIOUS ALL-STAR TEAM CRACK.

And then the bottom falls out and it's just... shockingly bad. You can almost see RTD sitting there going "And ALL THE TIMELINES CONVERGE ON DONNA because... uh... because I'm supposed to make all the lines of narrative converge on Donna right now and--oh, fuck it, I'll just write that into the text." And... oh god I could just sit here rattling off all the empty plot resolutions and the circle-jerking of Ten's manpain, but I wouldn't be able to cover all of it and anyway, the only thing interesting going on there is the utter self-loathing Ten takes out on his clone. (Particularly the WAY he does it--identifying Handy's more violent acts with post-Time-War Nine, whom he can safely dissociate from and pretend he's a better person now, instead of with his rather more recent string of genocides, most of which were committed on much slimmer pretexts than "it was literally the only way to save all of creation from a bunch of omnicidal pepperpots". Um, Ten, baby, you are SO fucked up.)

Also Donna's ending is EVEN WORSE THAN I REMEMBERED. I mean... holy shit, there are so many things wrong there. Starting with Donna--Donna, of all people!--not having any agency in her big moment of saving the day, passing right through all the ways the memory-erasure scene is bad and wrong and icky, and ending with... that is actually a really crap way to save her life if it can be undone by a single mention of her adventures as a companion! Not a robust solution at all, FFS. Doctor, you have a device that can rewrite biology and selectively suppress memories, either make her a Time Lord or stick the Time Lord-y memories in a fob watch and be done with it. (Oh! Oh! That reminds me! Just for EXTRA ICK FACTOR, the music playing over Sad Forever Alone Ten as he leaves Donna's house and the credits roll? "Dream of a Normal Death," first heard in Family of Blood when John Smith glimpses the life he could've had if he chose to remain human. Yeah--Ten is not only taking his "no more dead companions!" issues out on Donna without her consent, he is forcing his id fantasies of erasing his Time Lord side and living out a mundane human life on her as well. GROSS. Remind me again of why we're supposed to feel sorry for him, except in a "wow, you poor thing, you are too fucked up to be allowed out without supervision" sort of way?)

So in conclusion, I want the fic where Martha actually manages to blow up the Earth just as the Daleks teleport her out, Handy succeeds in blowing up the Daleks but Team TARDIS are the only survivors of the human race, Ten flips his shit and enters into a critical meltdown of Gallifrey feels, Martha powers through the remainder of the episode on shock and adrenaline but collapses into a post-traumatic puddle after Ten starts screaming at her, Rose finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to take up Martha and Handy's defense and get it through to her Doctor that he's the one making everything worse, and Martha doesn't snap out of her catatonia until Donna starts breaking, because wow, three Time Lord brains in the room and she's the only one to remember the Chameleon Arch. And then... oh god my brain just filled in "and then Martha and Handy have angsty h/c sex," which is deeply horrifying to the part of me that can't ship Martha with Ten at all, but feels oddly appropriate for an AU where they each reenacted half of the destruction of Gallifrey.

Found via kouredios: Jacob's recap of Doctor Who series 3, courtesy Television Without Pity. Is this just... a thing that everyone else already saw back in 2007 and I am just late on the bandwagon as usual? Has everyone else already had their mind blown by it? Because... BOOM.

I wouldn't even call it a review or a recap. It's meta. It's analysis. It's standing at the end of series 3 and going through each and every episode to examine it in the light of the finale and the whole season arc. Not only is this guy's brain super-tasty, he gets the way RTD writes: by layering. RTD's absolute favorite thing to do ever is to take a theme, a situation, a line of dialogue, that seemed like a throwaway gag the first time you watched it, but then a season and a half later you go to rewatch that episode for shits and giggles and end up going holy fuck. (My favorite example of this is from Dalek: "Is that the end of it? The Time War?" "I'm the only one left. I win. How about that." Let's play spot how many times those lines reappear, each with a more horrifying twist than the last.) He reuses things with a twist; he has a bunch of themes that play out in full in the series finale, but he makes sure that every monster-of-the-week episode contains a subset of those themes in miniature, or as a mirror image, or rearranged or turned inside-out to examine them from a different angle. (Jacob uses the term "isomorphisms," which... yes.)

The thing that's making me go "AAAAAAAAAAA," though, is that Jacob is looking at s3 the same way I do and zeroing in on completely different things. And articulating exactly what is going on there in a way that I am bad at. I mean, Runaway Bride? I would've gone straight for the sham marriage the Racnoss makes Donna and Lance act out, her macabre "go on, laugh, it's funny" routine, Lance casting his lot in with the Racnoss because humanity looks so puny to him and he wants a shot at the exact wrong kind of "something more", Donna weeping over the meaninglessness of her life on her first time-travel jaunt and the Doctor reassuring her that humans are amazing because they try to bring order, however trivial or arbitrary, to make sense of the chaos. In my head, that is a massive wibbly-wobbly ball of significance that's all tied up with the Master, Lucy Saxon, the Untempered Schism, and the end of the universe. But I can't untangle it or make it go in a straight line. Jacob, though, goes straight for a completely different moment of wedding imagery, and manages to lay out something I'd never even considered: "She was getting [the huon particles] in her coffee, and they can't be biodamped by a simple ring. Which is to say, the thing she thought would make her special is now the thing that can't stop her from being special. Which is to say, she's not a replacement Companion; she's a mirror: The Last Of The Singletons, so desperate to hear those four little words that she can't see the danger signs. So afraid of being alone."

And... AAAAAAAAAA. The "forests/trees" metaphor had me nonplussed at first, and then... bam. It just sort of--slots together two of the biggest things happening in s3, the tension between individual and community and the tension between the Doctor as a man and the Doctor as a god. And gets at the paradox between them. It--oh, just read it. *flaps hands*

I mean, there are things I don't quite agree with (though I have a couple pages of it left to go, which I have not read yet because my internet has gone wobbly). The Tinkerbell Jesus bits in particular make me go "okay, I think that's more or less what RTD was going for, but this still makes me deeply uncomfortable because Ten makes for a shit-tastic Jesus, he has zero right to forgive on behalf of all humanity, and the implication that humanity has somehow redeemed itself by praying to him is gross." I've always felt that Last of the Time Lords has the bones of a good story, it just botches its big moment with awful execution and sets everything else retroactively awry; perhaps the thing it needs is a more explicit acknowledgement that the Doctor isn't the savior of humanity here, he's the one being saved.

(elisi, have you read this thing? It's also full of "The Hollow Men.")

Title: Faithful Companion
Author: tenlittlebullets
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Tenth Doctor/Simm!Master
Summary: Half-porny, half-cracky fill for a prompt on sizeofthatthing: "10 takes Simm!Master with him after TLotTL but the Master, of course, eventually manages to turn the tables. Discontented at being made to feel like a pet, he turns the Doctor into one, wholly. Bondage, plugs, cock rings, attachable tails, gags, sleeping in the console room, the works. No sex. Just a sexually frustrated hound as the Master uses his TARDIS to do whatever he likes." Pretty much as ordered, with the addition of Ten being... well, Ten.
Warnings: Abovementioned laundry list of kinks. Breathplay. Chastity devices. Spit-take-worthy mental images. Dub-con, but only in the sense that neither of them seems to notice or care that consent missed the turn at Albuquerque. Off-label uses of the sonic screwdriver.

( The correct response is 'woof.' )

Looks like LJ's endless rounds of comment-page fuckery are making all the postsecret comms, kink memes, anon memes, prompt challenges, etc. pack up for Dreamwidth. As of yet, Dreamwidth doesn't appear to have a Doctor Who kinkmeme. So the question is: how much of an opportunist am I? And is there enough interest to sustain one if I create it?

1. Ford's Theatre was short of ushers for 1776 last night, so mmebahorel and ladybranwen invited me along to pinch-hit. I agreed because hey, I get to see the show for free! It, uh, wasn't until I got there that I put my dates together and realized I was ushering at that Ford's Theatre on the anniversary of the Lincoln assassination. Fun and a little bit creepy.

2. Considering opening up a Doctor Who forum and inviting the entire Tumblr DW fandom along, because Tumblr is full of awesome people but it's frustrating to only ever interact with them in gifsets and quips. I miss conversation and long-form fangirling, dammit! And I miss forums as a fandom platform, and unlike LJ-based sites a forum could easily occupy a niche as a supplement, rather than a replacement, for Tumblr.

The problem is, what the fuck do I call it? Leaning towards some variant on the Time Vortex--a hangout place beyond time and space, and besides, it has the potential for endless jokes about overgrown eight-year-olds from Gallifrey Base going mad from staring too long into our wretched hive of slash and fangirling.

Guys guys guys I randomly got the vidding urge again but I have TOO MANY IDEAS. Help me pick one to work on?

"Raise it Up" - Florence and the Machine - Martha Jones, the sacrifices she makes for the Doctor, and the flawless badassery that emerges from all her trials
- Pros: It would be fucking awesome, insanely appropriate, and very meta. I actually started working on it a long time ago and it's about a third done. I have large parts of the rest of it meticulously planned out and I know most of Martha's episodes well enough to make clip selection easier.
- Cons: I never finished it because it's fucking difficult. The verses are rhythmically tricky, I'll have to do very careful clip selection and editing for some parts so it doesn't present too many ideas too fast, and there are one or two sections where I just have no ideas.

"There's a Light that Never Goes Out" - The Smiths - Rose, the Doctor, and "it's been great not dying with you"
- Pros: This is another idea that burned itself into my brain and now the vid is all planned in my head almost to the second. If I shipped Doctor/Rose romantically at all, this song would probably be how I shipped it. Also, I am dead sure that Ten listens to it unironically when he's alone and cries. ("I never never want to go home / because I haven't got one, anymore")
- Cons: I really don't ship it, and make no mistake, it would come off as shippy. There might be some minor hassles with clip selection, since I'd have two seasons to work with and most of those episodes I've only seen twice or so.

"Sonne" - Rammstein - episodic vid for "42"
- Pros: The song might as well have been written for this episode ("the sun shines out of my eyes," the countdown, bringer of light as bringer of destruction--it's kind of spooky really), Rammstein is a joy to vid, I know more-or-less how I'd do it, and focusing in tightly on one episode would be a good exercise
- Cons: It's... not as soul-devouringly fascinating as the other ideas?

"Cosmic Love" - Florence and the Machine - Eight/Charley, probably heavily centered on the Neverland/Zagreus arc
- Pros: HOW AMAZING WOULD THIS BE. HOW WELL DOES THIS SONG FIT. HOW MUCH OF A BADASS WOULD I BE IF I PULLED THIS OFF. Obviously there is no video footage to work with, but I have a pretty good idea of how a vid could be cobbled together: TVM footage of Eight, selected clips from the classic series, shamelessly reappropriated clips from the new series (I am thinking in particular of one scene from Unquiet Dead--the maid becoming a gateway--that would be fabulous for the crescendo on "so darkness I became"), evocative footage scavenged from elsewhere (burning airships, hand-holding against a white background). And then--the coup de théâtre--Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec prominently features, I swear to God, an Edwardian adventuress riding a pterodactyl over Paris. She doesn't look a thing like India Fisher, but holy crap, otherwise it's perfect.
- Cons: This would be an INCREDIBLY ambitious project, I'd have to pull in footage from an astonishing variety of sources and I've no idea where to find half of it, and the target audience would be tiny. Also, I fear running into the same problems as "Raise it Up" re: FatM being rhythmically tricky at times. This is probably one to keep simmering away on the back burner until I have more experience.

"Feuer Frei" - Rammstein - Doctor/Master/River, all the best Time Lords are fucking crazypants
- Pros: This would just be FUN. Rammstein, my favorite terrible people, and a whole lot of explosions. Plus, the verses: the fire that burns the flesh (gratuitous regeneration sequences!), the fire that burns in desire (gratuitous OTPery!), the fire that burns the soul (gratuitous angst!).
- Cons: ...look, it would basically be brain candy consisting of my personal porn, all right? Also, if I don't restrain myself I will come up with vids for everything on the goddamn Mutter album, including Moffat-centric vids for dark fairy tales like "Mein Herz Brennt" and "Spieluhr." (The latter could actually be a really interesting vid about Moffat's tropes involving children.)