#alias tv

[subjectsix]

hello I am still on vague non-declared hiatus BUT

in cleaning things out, mom and i found a CD with a lot of her photoshop work for the Alias forums (hey, if any of you hung out on SD-1/SD-6, say hi?), Orlando Bloom forums, and LOTR/POTC forums. I popped the disc in and goodness sakes. I need to find a good place to archive some of this, because she had SO many resources.

It's also fun to look at her old photoshop fanworks. I'd love to share them here if she gives the go-ahead. We talked some about how important recap sites were (specifically, in this case, twoevilmonks for Alias and Firefly), the struggle to get good screencaps (no pausing the episode to pore over details!), and me realizing how amazing forums really were in ways that I forgot (like more easily organized challenges to encourage more fanworks).

Anyway. I love old fandom. My mom is cool. Toodles for now.

sorry for calling it old fandom but also not at all, btw. i think people would call my fandom experiences old fandom at this point, which is wild. the different landscapes....

[darius-1]

[iris-in-the-rain]

Jen and Victor continue to be everything 🥰

[lesbiansayaishii]

oh my god people are still writing for sydney bristow/anna espinosa on ao3

[tippenfunkaport]

SPOP Alias AU

This is just a full on incoherent ramble about some misc thoughts I had about this so I am putting it under the cut 😅

for the benefit of the youths, Alias was a show about spies! and plot twists! and wigs! and how Jennifer Garner looks good in literally any outfit you put her in (seriously, just google Sydney Bristow disguises)

(so this is not a 1:1 AU but general spoilers for the TV show Alias to follow)

Adora is Sidney basically and working for what she thinks is the CIA doing nerd stuff at a desk job. And then her finance, Catra, is murdered!

And she's still mourning but Light Hope sends her on an undercover mission to do sexy spy work in Outfits! and Wigs! and while on a mission could swear she sees… Catra, whaaa?

So she's like WHAT is happening and goes back to Light Hope who is cryptic and says if she wants answers she has to join the CIA. And Adora is basically like, "…do i not already work for the CIA?" and finds out, in fact, she does not and her entire team (which is basically all the Horde characters) are actually working for SD6, an evil organization pretending to be the CIA. The real CIA (the princess alliance) wants her to go undercover and help take SD6 down from the inside. And she agrees because she wants to find out what happened to Catra. (And I know you're thinking why not make Catra Vaughn aka her handler but it's more fun if Catradora are both kinda on opposite sides for a while so her handler can be Mara and Adora is never really sure how much to trust her bc her girlfriend Light Hope is also a double agent working for SD6 and whose side are any of them really on?).

Light Hope and Mara kinda share the role of morally ambiguous Jack Bristow/mentor figure and Shadow Weaver is Sloan.

Anyway, meanwhile, Bow is Adora's innocent civilian roommate / best friend who has no idea that any of this spy nonsense is going on (so, he's Will aka Bradly Cooper before he was cool) but has been very earnestly trying to investigate Catra's "death" because something doesn't add up. He accidentally uncovers too much though and Light Hope thinks that he is a weak spot that SD6 could use to keep to Adora in line (bc Adora is starting to doubt their mission, the same reason that Catra had to fake her death). So Light Hope sends one of their best agents (Glimmer because I am who I am) to spy on and eventually eliminate Bow.

Meanwhile, Catra is basically a combo of Irina and Nadia (obviously not actually related to Adora) but where it's unclear which side she is on or how much influence SW as Sloane has on her but she ultimately prove to be on the side of good after lots of homoerotic fighting in Wigs! and Outfits!

So, in the show, (big spoilers for Alias) Adora's two best IRL non-CIA friends are Will and Francie and eventually Will and Francie start dating... but it turns out that the real Francie was murdered and someone else stole her face and is posing as Francie to spy on Will and manipulate him. (Alias is WILD, man) And Will eventually finds out and has to murder this person who l looks like his best friend that he loves in self defense. So! Clearly we are not doing that!

Instead, we are going to steal some of the vibes and have Glimmer (who Bow has no preexisting relationship to) sent in as an agent whose job is to seduce him and get close to him and pretend to be his girlfriend to keep an eye on Adora (bc Light Hope doubts her loyalty knowing she's trying to find Catra). And Glimmer starts to become torn about her mission as she starts to genuinely like Adora and feel bad about betraying her and to actually fall for Bow for real. So when she gets the order down to kill Bow, she can't do it and flees. Her only ally is the disgraced Shadow Weaver, who fled when SD6 fell apart and is perfectly happy to manipulate Glimmer in her darkest hour.

She teams up with Catra who recognizes she's not a bad person and then two of them take down SW and get back into the CIA's good graces.

Meanwhile, Adora puts Bow into the witness protection program which protects him because everyone wants to kill him now, but also means he has to cut all ties with his family. So he HATES Glimmer for all those months of lying to/using him and ruining his life. He starts to work for the CIA as well because what else is he going to do after all that? and Glimmer is working there too after it's revealed she ultimately protected Bow and Adora and her and Catra took out SW so she comes to work there and ✨ tension✨. Because he's really mad at her and doesn't trust her at all but they have to work together and have been fake dating for a year and how much of those feelings were real and something something eventually they start to become actual friends for real this time and decide to try dating for real and they kind of pretend they just met and try to keep it all sweet like a real first date except they have too much history and end up fast burning.

And while Glimbow are being a disaster Catra and Adora are trying to rebuild what they had but the whole war between the factions have made them very different people and they need to figure out how to get back to each other while stopping SW who is back from the dead and looking for magic First Ones artifacts that lead to immortality / the end of the entire world.

Standard stuff, really.

[delicatebluebirdruins]

honesly Vaughn cares more about Dixon then Sydney and Jack when Dianne died. Like they are two incredbily different people and they should have taken a moment to think how they handle a situation is not how Dixon would do it if they did that. then maybe Dixon wouldn't have had to doctor his results for the drug test and you know the explosive show of grief later on in the episode (and the almost physical explosion)

[sarah-maclean-completist]

"You can just tell of the three books in the series so far that [Knockout] is the one she was really excited to write. It's a bit like a Victorian London era episode of Alias."

ShinyHappyPurple

[archivyrep]

Archives in Fiction's selections

In this post I'm going to feature and expand on some examples of archives in fiction which were noted by Archives in Fiction (herein AIF), an account which notes "portrayals of archives in fiction of all kinds." [1] This includes the following examples:

Alias, Season 1, Episode 8

Alias, Season 1, Episode 16

Alias, Season 1, Episode 18

Alias, Season 2, Episode 4

The Americans

Loki

Age of Ultron: Book 8

Station Series

Berlin

Zoo Station

Restless

Age of Ultron

Killing Eve

Rogue Male

Midnight Library

The Defenders

Slough House

Inspector Montalbano, Season 14, Episode 1

The Da Vinci Code

The Pulse: Part 11 "The Fear"

The Pulse: Part 10 "House of M"

The Pulse: Part 5 "Thin Air".

Kingdom: Ashin of the North

Weapon X #10

These examples include the protagonists breaking into the classified archives of the CIA, an elaborate plot to infiltrate secret archives, and early examples of digitization of a show set in the 1980s. Others focus on a book with archival records featured throughout with acknowledgements crediting archivists as helping with the work, possibly vast archives, the "judicious use of the 30 year rule," a film where the villain scrubs digital files to frustrate attempts by the heroes to follow him, so they dig out boxes of files, and an "interestingly shot and well edited sequence...in which Jessica Jones tracks The Hand through archive records." [1]

Reprinted from my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog. Originally published on Aug. 20, 2021.

Jessica Jones character explores archives in New York in an episode of the live-action series The Defenders.

AIF says they were "less amused by her treatment of the finding aids" because she removes index cards, and further says they were surprised that they let her have the run of the place, but added that is "nice to see a superhero doing her own research instead of relying on sidekicks." AIF also mentions Midnight Library, saying that while this might be a stretch of archives in fiction but says that "infinite storage, incredible rolling shelves and...musings on the reliability on the reliability of memory," make it memorable, as does a line about librarians as "soul-enhanced search engines."

Furthermore, AIF noted that archives are the heart of a novel, some "through appraisal" going on in one episode of a TV series, archives in a well-known film, and Wolverine sharpening his...archival research skills? The specifics of what is being referred to is noted in AIF's certain tweets, linked throughout this post. In one recent example mentioned by AIF, they note an episode of Alias which has a break-in at a technical library in Moscow, with use of a finding aid and a retrieval system, even though "there was a trail of destruction and misappropriation." This contrasts a nice, clean repository elsewhere.

I wish AIF had featured some animated series, but I'll be trying to look into some of those in the future, with draft posts about: Wan Shi Tong in Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, Tony Stanza in Welcome to the Wayne, and Miss Quackfaster in Ducktales. Whether I write those or not, I don't know, but there are hopefully topics out there to write about going forward in the future.

© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] For Age of Ultron: Book 8, AIF notes mention of archives in this comic, saying jokingly, "Surely Tony would've rebranded these Starkives?" For Berlin, AIF says that in this book by David Downing there isn't much to report when it comes to archives in fiction. For Zoo Station, AIF says that this book by David Downing features include theft from archives, invisible archives labor, and no provenance. For Killing Eve, AIF says that archival material has a part to play in this trilogy. AIF also notes this appeared in the TV series of the same name. For Rogue Male, AIF says that there is a brief nod to archives in this novel by Geoffrey Household and said they were annoyed by "describing an archive as some kind of pit, the bottom of which is reserved for inconsequential items." They noted the story was excellent otherwise. This doesn't include AIF talking about almost an archivist in Andrew Caldecott's Rotherweird and says that the Thrilling Adventures of Babbage may be inspired by archives. AIF also notes: mention of archives in this comic, The Pulse: Part 11 "The Fear"; mention of archives in this comic, The Pulse: Part 10 "House of M"; mention of newspaper archives in the comic, The Pulse: Part 5 "Thin Air". AIF also noted improper records management in an episode of Community, early mentions of the Library of Alexandria in Brad Thor's Blowback, and suggests possible archives in the She-Hulk comic, along with theft from an archives in another piece of pop culture.

Update:

The account is on "indefinite hiatus" per their Twitter profile

Their last tweet was on July 10, 2022, and their blog has nothing but this one webpage.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (1963)

[userautumn]

Tommy eating trans!Buck out like his life depends on it. send post.

[darius-1]

[iris-in-the-rain]

Started my rewatch of season 4 of Alias and Jack is still the king of sass and snark 😆

***

Jack and Sydney sitting in complete silence.

Jack: That's the best conversation we've had in weeks.

***

Jack, showing up to a party he clearly wasn't invited to.

Jack: Must have gotten lost in the mail.

Sydney: Your invitation??

Jack: Unless it was an e-vite.

Sydney: ...

Jack: I don't read e-vites.

***

Jack: Is something on your mind, Agent Vaughn?

Vaughn: No, not really. I'm not sleeping very well.

Jack: It's Lauren, isn't it.

Vaughn: I think I see her sometimes; I thought I saw her in the market in Algeria. Did that ever happen with you?

Jack: Do I have visions of Lauren?

Vaughn: ...

[texaschainsawmascara]

Peggy Lipton, 1970

[scarywardrobe]

[delicatebluebirdruins]

Jack played the piano?!?!?

love when Sydney plays goofy

and Rachel having a lot of fun hitting her old boss with a shovel

[iris-in-the-rain]

There is woeful lack of Jack Bristow on my timeline. I seriously forgot how much I love him! It's been nearly 20 years since I watched Alias and I love Jack as much as ever!!

Moodboards of Marvelous Men

12/13

Jack Bristow (Alias)

Bronze secrecy, ruthless amorality, protective father, grieving husband, devoted spy, fighting against evil where it threatens his loved ones