#jack harkness: bi-tender

[finalgwen]

Ok putting aside John Barrowman for this because it's just sad and disappointing how he's ended up, Jack Harkness is one of the most important characters of all time.

Russell T. Davies decided that he wanted to create the bi representation he wanted to see on screen, in his words "a bisexual space pirate swaggering in with guns and attitude and cheek and humour into primetime family viewing". And we need to appreciate how brave that is. The British media are not kind to queerness in general, and we were only two years after the end of Section 28 where acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people existed was literally illegal in British schools. This was a series being primarily marketed to kids, we got Captain Jack action figures being sold in stores across the country.

So he gets his flirty introduction in Empty Child/Doctor Dances, we get the kinda polycule vibes in Boom Town, and then we reach Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways, and that wonderful goodbye scene. He had this cocky flirty character kiss the Doctor and Rose in quick succession with genuine tenderness. It's beautiful and tragic, and the character goes off to meet his fate, doomed by the narrative like so many queer characters before him...

Except not. If you look at RTD's outside work like Its A Sin, you know that he's seen too many wonderful queer people die and disappear, so what did he do with Jack?

He made a queer hero that couldn't die.

And then he made him the centerpiece of a new show where the whole main cast were some degree of bi/queer, where he got to have an m/m relationship that grew and developed and was kinky and wonderful and sincere. He made this flirty bi disaster one of the lynchpins of his era, turning up for two big finales. And I don't know if people will realise now quite how revolutionary this was, how utterly different Torchwood felt, how it made bisexuality something tangible for us kids who were figuring ourselves out.

Like, all due respect to Bill and how refreshing her arc was, and Pearl Mackie is amazing, a bi woman getting to play a really fantastic lesbian character who also gets a way to survive the impossible, but for me it's an easy choice here.

Who is the Biggest Gay Icon?

TOURNAMENT MASTERPOST

[apictureofspace]

endless list of Doctor Who AUs (2/?)

The New Romantics [NEW SERIES ON AO3]

It’s 1978 and London is a abuzz with a new pop culture movement. Ever since David Bowie took the stage as Ziggy Stardust six years ago, the New Romantics have dominated the music scene with their glam rock personas and defiant attitudes. Their records and performances are all the rage at the city’s hottest clubs, and the Blue Box is no exception. 

John Smith, a burly man who never leaves his leather jacket at home and could lay you out flat with a single punch before you could say “banana” (but who’s actually a teddy bear on the inside), is the club’s bouncer, and has been for the past ten years. He works there with Jack Harkness, the bartender who flirts with anything that moves - much to the chagrin of his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Donna Noble, who works for the temp agency down the block. He makes a mean X-Rated Tangerine Touch, though, so she lets it slide (with the occasional well-deserved, sometimes-kinky, slap).

John’s little sister, Jane Smith, is a tiny blonde feminist firecracker who dreams of forging her way in the world with a girl power group that will blow Britain’s minds. Her piano-playing skills are unparalleled and, with Martha Jones on the guitar, she knows that they’ve got what it takes to make it big. They just need a singer. 

One comes in the unlikely form of Rose Tyler, John’s new friend (who just so happens to be an ex-stripper that went by the stage name of Red Riding Hood and no, Jack, she isn’t going to pole dance in the middle of a club where it isn’t required). After getting her a job working at the Blue Box, John and Rose grow closer, but his feelings for her may be compromised when A) she opts to join his baby sister’s band (a foolhardy endeavor which he does not approve of) as their new lead singer, and B) Dr. Theo Noble strolls into the club, all clean-cut suits, messy hair, and with an exuberant energy and a smile that makes all the girls swoon. 

Will the girls, after coining themselves “Bad Wolf”, make it big? 

Who will Rose end up with? John, who swept her off her feet when she was at her lowest; Theo, who makes her heart race and her panties drop; or Jane, whose thinly veiled crush is getting harder and harder to conceal? 

And how many times will Donna slap all of the men in her life, boyfriend, brother, and best mate included, before it’s all over?

Read the first installment, “Seasons of Love”, now! 

[woozapooza]

Black Sails 1x01

Here we go!!! A new show!!! What a good pilot episode. So much happened, I can’t believe it’s only been one episode.

I was apprehensive about starting Black Sails because I’d been anticipating it for months and had built it up in my head. It’s the same apprehension I had starting Wynonna Earp. But once again, I have correctly judged from a tiny bit of information that a show is an excellent match for me. I’m not nearly as good as I’d like to be at following and remembering the events of shows, so after I finished the episode, I recounted as much of the plot as I could remember to myself. While doing that, I realized one thing that made it such a good way to start a show: it’s brimming with the theme of gambling, of making dangerous choices that may pay off hugely down the line or may end in disaster. Combine that with the numerous interesting characters, not to mention the fact that it’s a period drama about pirates I mean come on what’s better than that, and you’ve got the perfect recipe to make me keep watching. I hope everything in the following lil recap/review is factually correct but eh who knows.

Let’s start with Flint. The trope of angsty morally dubious loner captain dude, while cool in theory, does not always go over well for me (see Jack Harkness and Mal Reynolds, neither of whom is as questionable as Flint). But I think in Flint this trope (which probably has a name, or at least is an amalgam of a few tropes that have names) may finally work for me, and I’m not just saying that out of ginger solidarity, nor just because aesthetically Flint is #goals. Flint has been “gambling” for months before the show even starts: he’s been going after ships that don’t seem like good targets because he thinks they’ll lead him to the jackpot, the Urca de Lima. The result of him keeping his plan secret from the crew is low morale and the threat of mutiny. Flint has to walk the line between keeping the crew satisfied and pursuing a goal that will more than make up for the toll its pursuit takes. He fails to walk this line, but Singleton’s mutiny gives Flint the opportunity to change tactics while still very much gambling: by accusing Singleton of stealing the Urca’s schedule, he gets to fight and kill Singleton (he also had to bet on Singleton choosing a duel over a trial, but I’m assuming he knew Singleton well enough that it wasn’t a risky bet) and pretend to recover the schedule from Singleton’s corpse. Until he produced the blank sheet of paper, I really couldn’t guess whether he actually suspected Singleton or he was just looking for an excuse to put down the mutiny. I didn’t expect the trick with the blank paper. Flint may be the main character but you can’t always see into his head, so I expect he’ll be a lot of fun to watch. I enjoy his cleverness, his ruthlessness, and his moments of vulnerability. I’m still unsure whether he meant it at all when he apologized to the crew for keeping secrets from them. I’d like to think it wasn’t a complete lie, even though it was also a ploy to get them to like him again, but it’s not like he’s stopped lying to them. He has his crew’s loyalty back—fortunately he was right to gamble that Billy would play along and pretend Singleton really did have the schedule—but it will only last so long before they realize he doesn’t have it. He also has to hide the fact that Guthrie, who was key to getting the ship, is a) under arrest and b) so far, unwilling to help. Will Flint get the schedule for realsies before the crew figures out that he lied to them again?

Lying now and hoping he’ll have the means to make up for it later is not the worst thing Flint does in this episode. It’s the killing of Singleton that really shows that he’s not a straightforward hero. I wouldn’t say mutiny justifies murder, but then again I’m not a pirate. I also wouldn’t say theft merits the death penalty, but that’s how pirates do. What I’m getting at is, Flint may do questionable things (like, in addition to the very fact of piracy), but he’s not the only one. I guess pirates have their own morality and just because Flint does things I wouldn’t do doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some kind of code. He even acknowledges, speaking to Billy, that pirates have a way of life that makes sense to them but not to mainstream people (I know I’m making pirates sound like hipsters but it was the first phrasing that came to mind): “men who keep what is theirs and fear no one.” 

Speaking of Billy the boatswain, I really like him as well, and not just because he’s played by Tom Hopper. His type of gambling has to do with how much of his faith and loyalty he’s going to put into Flint. He pretends that Flint was correct to accuse Singleton of theft, but he’s by no means a sycophant. When Flint is brutally interrogating Richard Guthrie and tells Billy to point the gun at Guthrie, Billy has no problem pointing it at Flint instead. So if Billy is playing along with Flint’s scheme, he must have weighed the options and decided this was best. Billy, like Flint, thinks, speaks, and acts for himself. Also, he looks like Tom Hopper.

Silver is a bit of a weird character because he’s to some extent our point-of-view character, but he’s also absent for large parts of the episode. Regarding his role as the audience stand-in, it was cool to show him discovering all the information about the Urca de Lima at the same time that Flint’s voiceover was explaining the same information. Regarding Silver’s personality, I really enjoy his unapologetic selfishness and self-preservation. Everyone on the show has their ways of looking out for themselves, and for Silver, that happens to mean hiding below deck, killing the cook (in self-defense, to be fair), stealing the Urca’s schedule because he knows it’s valuable even though he doesn’t know why, and pretending he’s a cook so he gets to join the crew of the Walrus (I’m looking forward to find out whether he actually can cook). But when Flint kills Singleton, do I dare see in Silver’s face a hint of remorse that his actions might have gotten someone killed, or do I need to be more cynical? Anyway, his main gamble is to hold on to the schedule rather than hand it over to Flint. He also has to make the gamble to trust Max.

Max, who is pretty mysterious so far but very alluring, likewise has to gamble to trust Silver. I like their dynamic—good teamwork from two blatantly self-interested people. Her acquisition of the schedule parallels how Silver got it: he could tell the cook really wanted to hold onto it, she could tell he really wanted to hold onto it. Both of them are clearly good at identifying where profit lies and getting there. Silver says that when he sees an opportunity for gain, he can’t help but take it; when given the chance to back out of a partnership with him, Max isn’t tempted, which suggests that she is much the same. As for another of Max’s relationships, as I have said, one of the reasons I wanted to watch this show was that I knew it had quality gay/bi content and WOW it turns out they hit you with it right in the first episode! I ship her and Eleanor by default (and because of the line “Max is your harbor,” I’ve decided my ship tag will be “all I want is to be your harbor”) but their interaction was mostly sex, so I hope we get to see more depth to their relationship soon. However, one of the episode’s few tender moments was Max’s concern when she saw the bruise Vane left on Eleanor’s face, so that bodes well for her and for the two of them.

I think Eleanor might be my favorite character so far, largely because Hannah New is very attractive when she’s swearing. And in general. She gambles by funding Gates’ efforts at bribery (making their interaction also a gamble for Gates) and oops she almost won that gamble but not quite. She also has to choose between loyalty to Vane and loyalty to Flint. She chooses Flint. We’ll see how that turns out. She is undoubtedly and unapologetically self-interested, but without crossing the line into immorality. (I mean immorality relative to the show’s baseline morality.) Same goes for most of these characters, now that I think about it, including Max. In addition to their similarities, these ladies balance each other: Eleanor is gruffer but more emotional, while Max is more subtle and more sanguine. Ship ship ship.

While watching The 100 I often wondered if Roan was just a boring character or if there was an innate boringness to Zach McGowan. Now I can declare that Roan is just a boring character. Vane is not boring. He’s pretty frightening, really. Maybe ZM should just only ever play villains? I don’t know. Anyway, despite being set up as the antagonist, I’m not yet convinced that Vane is really much worse than Flint. We shall see. He’s got a plan of his own, though it doesn’t really fit the gambling theme: he tried to engineer the victory of Singleton’s mutiny so that, once the crew of the Walrus realized they no longer had a competent captain, they’d defect to Vane’s crew. That didn’t pan out since Flint took down Singleton and made up with his crew, but Vane didn’t really lose anything, at least not as far as we’ve seen. For that reason, he’s probably the character who came out of the pilot looking the least vulnerable.

Gates, like Flint, feels like a character type I have seen before: the practical, long-suffering but loyal second-in-command to the headstrong, risk-taking team leader. The only other example I can think of is Bennet Drake from Ripper Street, but I think I’ve seen it elsewhere as well. Gates is the one who puts into words the theme I’ve been talking about: he tells Eleanor that if she loans him money to ensure Flint retains the captaincy, it will be an “investment in the future.” I’m looking forward to seeing whose investments pay off and whose future wins out.

There’s a lot of conflict already, but there’s a lot of overlap of characters’ traits, I guess because they all know this piratey world quite well and what kind of person you have to be to survive and to thrive. Basically, the first episode sets up a rough world where everyone is looking out for themselves and making difficult choices that they think are for their own good but that might have explosive consequences down the line. We get a glimpse of what these characters want and what they’re willing to do to get it. Also there are pirates. What’s not to love?

WHO DOES RACKHAM REMIND ME OF? I looked up Toby Schmitz’s filmography and I don’t think I’ve see him in anything else but I swear he reminds me of someone!

Best dialogue of the episode:

Gates, to Billy: You’re a highly regarded member of this crew. The captain regards your input more than you know.

Gates, to Flint: Billy’s going with you.

Flint: Who’s Billy?

[apictureofspace]

The New Romantics [SERIES ON AO3]

Part 2 / 6 : “Red Riding Hood and the Leather Jacket”

Her shout of pain was drowned out, suddenly, by the squealing of tires on the pavement behind her and the roar of an engine – a motorcycle engine? – and then Jimmy’s hateful, pawing hands were gone. Seconds later she heard the sharp snap of knuckles against skin and then Jimmy was on the concrete, groaning in agony apparently equal to that which he had inflicted upon her.

Rose could feel her heart pounding in her ears, both from the pain in her wrist and the shock of her rescue, and it took her a moment to realize that her knight-in-shining-armour was talking to her – or, rather, her knight-in-a-big-leather-jacket with shockingly blue eyes. Blinking in a few times in an attempt to clear her head, Rose slowly focused in on his features.

Blue eyes, check, tall, bulkily muscled, with short hair and rather large ears. Not conventionally handsome, but handsome none the less.

Upon realizing that she was staring, Rose finally asked, slightly disoriented, “…sorry, what?”

“I asked if you were alright,” the deep, northern voice responded, rain dripping down his jacket and cheeks as the drizzle continued around them. In the heat-of-the-moment turned panic, Rose had actually forgotten that it was raining. “Did he hurt you?”

Read it now!

[vainvex]

THE TENDERNESS WITH WHICH WHICH JACK AND THIS OTHER MAN ARE LOOKING AT EACH OTHER . YOU NEVER SEE THIS

BISLUT JACK HARKNESS MY BELOVED