time and relative dimension in space

I finally finished reading all of The Swamp Thing, up through the June 2012 release. Wow. It's over. Finally.

I have no idea if I'm going to keep up with it from here out or not.

Thoughts on the series as a whole beneath the cut.

( Tefé Holland is too good for this series )

There's this very wet semi-snow thing going on outside and obviously that means I should write half-articulated Doctor Who meta that's been meandering around in my head for a while.

Thesis: I think there are three major differences between Moffat and RTD's eras of New Who headrunning, and one of them is actually their major similarity.

( first, the similarity that is nevertheless a difference )


( home and family )


( and finally, a bit on memory )


Thoughts?

The newest round of the Amy Pond debate is going around, so I'm going to share some of my thoughts, disorganized as they are.

( when is a duck pond not a duck pond? when it's an amy )


Not really related: I want to know when/how/why Amy became a master pickpocket, because there has to be a story behind how she got those mad skillz. In Leadworth.

I've been poking at doing a Top-10-Episodes-Of-LOST picspam, and while doing so have noticed a couple interesting things.

It also led me to reflect on some things not directly tied to episode trends or whatever.

Since none of this would have any place in the aforementioned picspam, if I ever even get around to doing it, I'm going to post them here.

1. There are four Charlie-centric episodes: The Moth, Homecoming, Fire + Water, Greatest Hits. All but one of those is strongly Claire-influenced as well. "The Moth" is not only the only Charlie-centric episode where Claire doesn't play a major role; she doesn't appear in it at all. ...this is made all the stranger by the fact that The Moth is followed by Confidence Man, which is infamous for its Charlie/Claire adorableness. (Peanut butter. ♥)

2. Walt has never had (and likely never will have :/) his own flashback episode, and I want to say he's the only original member of the main cast not to have one. He has a scene in Michael's first flashback episode (there's a flashback in Special to Walt and Brian and Susan at home in Australia, the bird dies, etc.) which is clearly his flashback, not Michael's, as Michael is not present for the scene, but the episode is otherwise entirely Michael's. And aside from the dead bird thing, the scene tells us nothing about Walt.
2a. As an aside, I think this is an interesting and weird choice because it's never repeated. We have multi-person-centric episodes (a lot of season openers and closers, plus episodes like "Confirmed Dead), and we have episodes that center around somebody who has pre-Island ties to someone else on the Island (Shannon & Boone, Sun & Jin, etc.), but in the former case the episode's flashbacks are split approximately evenly between participants and in the latter the flashbacks are clearly from one person's POV (hence how we get half the story with the bloody-shirt bathroom scene from Sun's POV in one episodes, and then half a season later get the rest of the story from Jin's perspective). "Special" is the only case I can think of where the flashbacks are entirely from Person A's perspective except for one isolated scene.
2b. Also, having said this, someone is going to point out another original cast member who didn't have a flashback episode. Or another case of isolated-flashback-from-Person-B's-perspective. I welcome corrections.

3. There are a lot of stories I don't think are going to get tied up before the end of the series, and that makes me sad. I mean, these are stories that logically don't need tying up; they're not relevant to the main plot, most viewers would have forgotten about them by now, and they never were all that important to the story being told. Still, I get attached to minor characters and minor plots and it makes me sad.

4. I miss the old-school feel of the show. I like where it's gone, I think they've taken the story in the direction it needed to go in, and I don't think the season one tone was sustainable. But I miss it; I miss the camps, and Shannon sunbathing, and Hurley wondering whether Vincent can track water, and everyone worrying over food supplies, and the sense that the Island was unknown but knowable (as opposed to full of people if you just walked a couple more feet I mean seriously how did you not know about the temple and New Otherton and the friggin' lighthouse and *rages*), and I have to say I miss the big hulking corpse of Oceanic 815 sitting over half the scenes. Not sustainable, but fabulous.

5. Hey, remember way back in the day when people were raging over the introduction of more characters? About how, dammit, we're attached to "our" characters, we don't want them pushed in the background for some new characters, this is the moment the show jumped the shark! ...how many of those people do you think are now listing Desmond, Juliet, Ben, Richard, Daniel, Miles, etc., among their favorite characters?
5a. Also, remember that other group of people who insisted that if Darlton were introducing a new bunch of 815 survivors they would turn out to be important to the story, dammit? Remember how most all of the Tailies were dead within a season and a half and didn't really do that much while they were there? ...ahaha. I mean, I love Bernard, and I love Libby and she is still relevant, and I'm glad we had Eko even for as short as we did, but really.
5b. Srsly, if we'd had Frank from the beginning, either the plane wouldn't have crashed (win for them!) or we would have had six seasons of Frank Lapidus on our screens (win for us!) Why did this not happen?

So I have been reading a lot of old Andromeda fic. Why? I don't know. Because. That's not the point.

( extremely old stuff about pre-Maru Harper and Andromeda fandom )

YMM, of course, V. I over-think stuff.

Also, I should probably get a life. Or at least babble on at length about a fandom I'm overinvested in for a fandom that isn't really fairly old and forgotten in Internet terms. :/

Has everyone read this post? It's about the desexualizing of same-sex relationships in fandom and about asexual relationships in fandom and about asexual invisibility in slash (and wider) fandom and many related things and it is very very good and I thumbs-up it. A lot of the comments are excellent as well.

In very much related news, I have an itch to write fic about Kevin Donnelly coming to terms with his own asexuality even if he doesn't have a label for it (because I'm not sure Kevin would have a label for it).

There's a part of me that keeps saying no, I can't do that, it would be entirely too soapboxish and using someone else's character to explore my own thoughts about my own sexuality. On the other hand, that voice says pretty much the same things when I want to make an original character asexual and actually explore that in my original fic, as well. And you know what? I want asexual characters, and I want fic about asexual characters, and nobody's going to just hand that to me...the best place to start is by writing some myself, right?

To complicate matters more, actually writing that fic would probably necessitate a canon rewatch and also I'm not in a great writing space right now...aside from a couple hundred words of Better Than It Sounds every few days, I'm not really writing anything worthwhile right now. And it's up for debate if Better Than It Sounds is worthwhile anyway. ;)


...I swear tomorrow I will post things that have like squee and whatever in it.

So is everybody reading this week's xkcd series? Because if not you should be. Because it's AWESOME.

More to the point, does anybody know if Nathan Fillion is reading it? I know somebody on the RSS feed claimed to have tweeted him a link, but I don't know if he actually saw said link or is reading it. If not he should be.

Also, "no, that's the opposite of true" and "things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously" are awesome lines and I'm going to be stealing borrowing at least the first for my Better Than It Sounds 'verse because it's exactly the sort of thing Liam would say to Kyle.

Speaking of.

( cut 'cause it's long and probably not of interest; rambling about worldbuilding and original fiction and why I rarely have any actual writing to show for the hours I spend on it )

Random Doctor Who thoughts/beliefs/bits of personal canon! Lots of stuff about sexuality and romance contained within.

( you can't change history )

So this is one of those totally random fandom-musing posts that comes out of nowhere.

Any and all Andromeda fen on my flist are probably quite aware that I'm very in love with one Seamus Harper and his various character/story arcs. Also probably very aware that I have severely mixed feelings for the episode "Bunker Hill" -- I love the Harper, I love the Harper/Rommie, I love Boston and the Boston kids and Mark Hildreth as Brendan and the whole human/Dragan war in general, and this is also the episode that got me to completely hate Dylan with a passion.

This musing is on "Bunker Hill", but it's not on the above part...no, as mixed as my feelings are for the episode, they make sense. However, the following quote always throws me off whenever I rewatch it, and I will explain why:

Harper: "Well...It's a place you love, it's, you know, a good feeling. Until you have to see it all torn down around you."
Rommie: "And there's nothing you can do to stop it."

The "it's a place you love" bit makes sense. As bitter as Harper often is about Earth and growing up there, he is just as often nostalgic and clearly in love with his homeworld and its history. (Harley-Davidsons, people.) "Until you have to see it all torn down around you", however, does not make sense. Because it was all "torn down" more than two hundred years before Harper was born. He was raised in the post-apocalyptic hell, not thrust into it.

It's easy enough to write it off as Matt and Joe wanting to simultaneously give Harper and Rommie a chance to bond over their mutual loss of civilization and give the audience a sympathetic view towards Harper's Earth. That, however, doesn't hold up for an in-universe view which is what I always aim for when analyzing fandom stuff.

So, uh. Anyone have any ideas for what Harper means by that? It's possible, I think, that he means seeing his family killed off one by one; it's possible that he means some increase in Magog or Nietzschean attacks when he was a kid; it's possible he's being poetic. But none of those answers exactly works for me.