#not the shippiest thing in the world but hey

[love-birds-stuff]

HALF PAST MIDNIGHT. (A little drabble of stargazing and wishful thinking.)

↳ Ceolacanth/Sasha

Ceolacanth finds Sasha perched on the roof of the caravan, looking out at the stars, the metal creaks under his weight and she turns back to look at him like a hawk sizing up it's prey, her hand instinctively reaching for her gun, the Atlas Silver she'd taken quite a liking to.

"You're still up," He whispers, to no one but the night sky, plunks himself down next to her, earning a quiet hum in response as her shoulders slump, visibly relaxing. Good enough.

It was a lot nicer up there than being crammed with four other people and two robots, the cool night air a welcome reprieve from how stuffy the caravan got these days. They actually had some room to breathe, Ceolacanth mused. The stretch of silence was comfortable, peaceful, and if he tried hard enough he could just about ignore the sound of skags in the distance. Just barely.

And so they stood in silence, just watching the stars and the clouds drifting through a dark sky. It'd been a few years since he'd gone stargazing, it was nice.

"Huh." Ceolacanth mused outloud, "We didn't have those back home." He points to a bundle of stars, grouped together in what vaguely resembles a cross. Sasha's eyes follow, she'd never really paid attention to it before.

"Really?" She asks, shifts so her weight is leaning on her hip, somewhere between sitting and lying down.

Ceolacanth wasn't from here, that was clear as day. The way he spoke gave it away, stressing the 'r's a little too hard, slurring some words into one big jumble on the occasion. It still carried that same tinge from the border planets, just not quite. Whatever the case, he'd blended in well enough, Sasha could respect that much.

"Yeah." He replies, finger tracing a shape of the constellation as if he were trying to draw lines between each star. Sasha watches him, in his own little world. Age had worn at his features the same way it had her sister's, even in the darkness the light crease under his eyes as he furrowed his brows was unmistakable. "Dunno, I think you'd like it there."

"Uh huh?" She snorted, somehow she doubted it. Though a part of her, childish and hopeful entertained the though, maybe somewhere closer to the inner planets, far from Pandora. It quickly gets snuffed once reality settles in again, they're both stuck here and she doubts he'd even be here in the first place if he had a way out. She's heard it before, empty promises tossed to the wind. Thing is, he wasn't making any promises. Just spitballing hypotheticals.

"Eh, maybe it's just wishful thinking," He concedes, turning to look at her. And he smiles, nose crinkling with the motion. Maybe she'll indulge, just for one night.

[nileqt87]

Big Finish: Ten x Rose

http://gallifreybase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=245111&page=7

If we were getting more than 3 audios per year, I'd be far more willing to give up the every-other-year Catherine/Billie dynamic for new companions or solo adventures here and there. It pains me already that if Freema comes in that it wouldn't be until 2020 that we'd see Ten/Rose again (2019 is bad enough!). I realize it's next to impossible to get David + Catherine or Billie's high-demand schedules worked out for anything more than what we're getting, but this already feels like the limit of how long to wait between the next batch of either companion. It's different with these audios, given we get so few, than it is for, say, the Classic Doctors or ranges that get far more audios per year. And for some like Tom and Paul, it's way more. Obviously, Tom's age makes him a priority (ditto William Russell in The Companion Chronicles range before he retired) and they're trying to build him up to where Peter, Colin and Sylvester are. If David was doing 8+ audios per year like Tom, weird little forays into other dynamics or a wider variety of companions would be fine. But with it being every other year already for 2 companions at a mere 3 audios each, the fewer companions to split between, the better. Best to make it the ones the audience most wants more of until the actors are willing to spend more time in the audio booth. Sadly, that might take a decade or more. I also note that Billie was on the show before the utterly massive deluge of media started getting produced for DW. It actually picked up dramatically during series 3. More Rose isn't actually giving her wildly more than Martha or Donna, given there are far fewer Ten/Rose books and NSA audio exclusives (didn't exist) than many later Doctor/companion dynamics got. There's also the fact that when Rose is placed with a Doctor for some kind of multi-Doctor comic, comic range or anniversary book collection, she gets given to Nine for lack of other choices for him, which means that Ten hardly ever gets to be with Rose for comics or books beyond the ones that were published during series 2. Despite the enormous fan following of these two (to this day!), it's a surprisingly under-served era in media. If we want to do a different dynamic, I'd suggest Metacrisis!Ten II and Rose (I'd suggest that Big Finish allow more mature character work), given they're an entirely blank slate and the story could ultimately be taken anywhere with no inevitable conclusion. I note that Camille's Short Trips are the first foray into exploring them. And that's another thing, it's obvious that Camille wants to do a lot of Big Finish and she really needs David and/or Billie. You can only have so many adventures of Jack and Jackie while the Doctor and Rose are away! LOL. Speaking of character work, as great as these adventures were, we need more character building. One thing that RTD did even in the most inane episodes was to put some big character moment. Even in the seemingly naff filler Fear Her, we have Rose reacting to Ten saying he's been a father before. These moments and the will they/won't they tragedy of it all are what make the era beloved by the people who actually love the era. Play to the audience that loves them in the first place. It would be a mistake to placate the haters of even the faintest whiff of romance or mutual attraction (most of these fans don't even care to buy Tennant-era anything). Obviously, it never got to the point of mutual declarations of love (despite 3 broken sentences about to say it and a Dalek declaring it), but it would be a mistake for Big Finish to eliminate the more soapy dramatic aspect of the Tennant era that was absolutely present and should carry over into audio form. Big Finish has this huge opportunity to play with this audience to build up to Army of Ghosts (not to mention the Metacrisis open-ended story) with a dynamic that coyly played with the audience to the point where how far the relationship had gotten is left a complete mystery up to a point. There's a lot of wiggle room. RTD pointedly gave the audience WTF moments like Rose mentioning the baby on Bad Wolf Bay that ended up being Jackie's pregnancy, but it was still played up for shock value with both the audience and the Doctor's own reaction. The relationship was at least serious enough that the Doctor had Rose's shirt with him in the console room and arguably was more blatant about his feelings for Rose after she was gone (using it to shove distance between himself and Martha and then making a big deal out of being only mates with Donna) than when she was there. Big Finish has options up to a point on how far they want to play with that. Of these audios, Zaross and Chevalier clearly give the most in terms of character depth and personal moments. More of that, at the very least. The 'shippiest thing here was probably Ten and Rose dressing up as a Harlequin and a devil (there's a flirtatious moment there with "you little devil") for the 1791 masquerade ball and Ten trying his hardest and failing to impress Rose with his swordsman skills (fangirl fantasies fulfilled). So far, the book that catered to the fangirls the most was The Stone Rose (Ten kisses Rose at the end in his exuberance at not being a stone statue), which is why you'll find it so popular in the community. That's an example of tie-in material knowing its audience and trying to do what RTD did rather than just [insert Doctor] and [insert companion] generic adventures. Zaross also had great stuff for Rose and Jackie, especially regarding Marge's classism and comparing her daughter at Cambridge to both 'runaway' Rose and 'cashier' Jess. The message that everyone has worth and you don't need fame or the greatest education/success/wealth felt very RTD. My suggestion to Big Finish is to do less generic, cookie-cutter adventures with Ten/Rose. Do things that are more personalized to their very unusual dynamic in the Whoniverse and follow RTD's character-centric approach. Even RTD's fillers had character moments, but the best episodes were ones that challenged the characters on a personal level. Remember that David excels at being a dramatic Shakespearean actor (Billie and Catherine are also strong at it). If anything was missing in these audios, it was perhaps that we didn't see enough serious, dramatic material. Perhaps if these were 2-hour adventures, we'd get scenes in between the madcap adventures that are quiet conversations with opportunities for something a bit more meaningful. Every RTD episode had some moment that was dead serious. Big Finish needs to remember that in the future. There was more to series 2 Ten and Rose than just happy-happy. Ten blowing a gasket over the Wire stealing Rose's face or his "you wither and you die" immortality speech are examples where even the Doctor at his most happy and love-struck is still the PTSD-suffering Oncoming Storm and Lonely God who is afraid of losing everyone he [loves]. Big Finish needs to remember this element of Ten in the future. The closest we got to it in this batch of audios was Zaross when Ten realizes that the villain has not only killed the few humans permanently, but has also killed others on many planets in their quest for fame. More of this, but remember that Ten also had such serious moments with his companions, too, not just villains.

My favorite scene, F.Y.I., was actually the callback to The Mind Robber and the Land of Fiction. You just know what name-dropping Ten would be like in such a meta world of fictional characters (think Babes in Toyland and Once Upon a Time on psychedelic LSD). I'd be pleased as punch if we got to see Ten and Rose journey through the Land of Fiction. Hey, maybe she can meet fictional!Jamie from Six's City of Spires tetralogy, given that Jamie was name-checked in Tooth & Claw, and I could have my two favorite companions together! Also, Scottish accents on parade.

[ourmrsreynolds]

stuff i read November 2019

Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance (2014) (Stormlight Archive #2) “I don’t want my life to change because I’ve become a lighteyes … I want the lives of people like me—like I am now—to change.” Kaladin Stormblessed, ACTUAL LOVE OF MY LIFE. Contrast: Dalinar whose “well you just have to be twice as good by distinguishing yourself in the position I gave you, that’s how you change the world” rhetoric makes my skin crawl. Nah it ain’t fam. Dalinar may be be a good person who has never personally mistreated a darkeyes, but that’s beside the point. He still benefits from a highly unequal, unjust arrangement that places him at the tippy top of the social, economic & political pyramid. And the parshmen at the bottom. If the next book isn’t 100% about Parshmen Rights I'm outta here. this book—well there were moments i was on my feet cheering, like that four-on-one-duel where Kaladin is the only one with the cojones to jump into the ring, and Adolin’s “bridgeboy” goes from a term of disparagement to a term of endearment. When we found out the Shardbearer whom Kaladin killed in Amaram’s service was Shallan’s brother that was WELL-PLAYED SIR that punch really landed. Renarin turning out to be a Radiant is a pretty harsh indictment of the overvaluation of martial prowess, and I liked that too, but on the whole I didn’t like this book as much as Book 1 because I wanted MOAR KALADIN.

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019) “Nothing empire touches remains itself.” They say that science fiction is psychology and fantasy is sociology. If that’s true (and I don’t remember where I heard it) this book bucks that trend because it’s all in for both sci-fi (it’s a space opera!) and sociology. It’s been getting a lot of well-deserved buzz and I really enjoyed it. I do think it’s fair to point out it’s a story centered on whip-smart highly-educated bureaucrats and the imperial court they orbit; that the perspective of “ordinary” people is missing, and you feel the lack because in the course of the book there’s a revolution/coup?? But I mean, if you think about the Roman Empire (the author is a Byzantine scholar) the kinds of “barbarians” it attracted were always from the better-off stratum of “barbarian” society. I guess the chimney sweeps wouldn’t have been reading Catullus. Nothing empire touches remains itself.

Robert Galbraith, Lethal White (2018) (Cormoran Strike Mysteries #4) The unresolved tension between the leads is A+ 10/10 but I feel like the actual mystery plot is not resolved as elegantly as I expected from JK Rowling? She’s like, the queen of tight plotting and I didn’t think she’d just round up 7 suspects only to let 6 of them off the hook with an apologetic shrug of “whoops that was a red herring.” There’s a metric shitton of gratuitous bashing of socialists & other lefties, which didn’t even faze me. What bothered me was the novel’s unevenness. The portion of it that was dedicated to character work was phenomenal. Rowling’s always had a gift for invoking petty and/or aggrieved secondary characters and she absolutely nailed it here, plus the main characters experience extraordinary personal growth while still bearing the scars of their traumas. Yet tbh Chamber of Secrets is a better mystery novel and I say this as someone who ranks Chamber of Secrets dead last on my personal “HP books, ranked” listicle.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the body, and primitive accumulation (2004) Pluses of academic writing: you get to raid the ENDNOTES and BIBLIOGRAPHY for more texts devoted to your topic of interest. Minuses of academic writing: dense as hell, puts you to sleep. Praise be to Silvia Federici whose arguments are uncommonly lucid and contain almost no bloat, though the sections covering the New World are definitely weaker than the European sections, which is where Federici’s speciality lies. She argues that the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages were a political project, a campaign of terror designed to decimate the power of peasant women, sever them from their communities, and subjugate their reproductive capacities to doing USEFUL stuff like accumulating surplus for capitalists. The parallel between the enclosure of public commons and the enclosure of women’s bodies & labor power—all done with an eye towards private profit—is one that will haunt me for the rest of my life. What an absolutely staggering work of scholarship. So glad I sprung for the physical copy so I could annotate copiously.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1848) It’s been 20 years and I’m still salty about Jo/Laurie. This is the first time I’ve actually reread it cover-to-cover instead of just reimbibing the shippiest bits and I gotta say, props to Louisa May Alcott who is a much better writer than I recalled. Her treatment of the process and the craft of writing is also right on; the 1994 movie by contrast just has Jo climb up into the garret and don her writing hat and hey presto, a manuscript. What I’d forgotten was Alcott’s mastery of tone to skewer a character—I don’t wanna say she rivals Jane Austen in this department but she comes close. I had also forgotten how much of Part I in particular is just Jo repressing her desire to marry Beth and cart her off to a lesbian utopia bursting with grand pianos. My girl is dead set against any of her sisters marrying, insists she’ll man up herself in order to keep the family intact, and if you only read Part I you may well conclude she’s not wrong. Part II is painful because it’s where Alcott sinks my ship. Hate to say I can see why she does it?? It’s because Amy and Laurie have the most to learn from each other, and Alcott is all about GROWING and LEARNING as a person. You know what, the text doesn’t belong to Alcott. The text belongs to all of us, and I will proclaim Death of the Author from the rooftops. Jo and Laurie love each other without labels, they’re not “romantic” or “platonic,” they set no limits on that love.

Cat Sebastian, The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017) (Turner Series #2) You know why this mlm Regency was absolutely DELIGHTFUL? Because it’s literally kidfic. They bond over the kid, that’s the story. It’s not the whole story, I just mean the arrival of the kid kicks the plot into high gear, even if there isn’t undue focus on the kid as a character in his own right. God this book is so relatable: They both have the worst case of imposter syndrome. “Neither of us is normal but have we ever thought to question whether fitting in is good, or normality is desirable?” It’s that trope where “I’ve insinuated myself into your life under false pretenses and now I’ve gone and fallen in love with you, how do I make a clean breast of it,” meanwhile your romantic interest knows FULL WELL you’re a con artist and it doesn’t lessen their attachment in the slightest. Also relatable: Lawrence likes being alone, clings to routine because unscripted social interactions give him anxiety.

Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom (2004) (Saxon Stories #1) I marathoned all three seasons of the BBC/Netflix adaptation earlier this year and I gotta say, lead actor Alexander Dreymon and his combination of martial arts background and tenderness 100% makes the character. Whoever does the score for the show also knocked it out of the park. In comparison, the book falls flat. Uhtred comes off as merely bratty rather than deeply conflicted in his loyalties, which could be a function of his extreme youth—he’s 18 I think at the end of this installment. The Danish vs Saxon identity contest is less prominent here; he pretty much accepts he’s a Saxon. @Bernard Cornwell your English ass is showing. There isn’t a real tight three-act structure, the plot just sort of meanders along from one battle to another (which is a hallmark of Cornwell’s writing, and never bothered me in his Grail Quest trilogy which are some of my favorite books of all time, so idk why it seems like weak sauce here) . One thing that remains constant is that Uhtred becomes irrational when threatened with the loss of things or people he considers MINE. Uhtred: sees a random dog paddling along in the middle of a storm. Uhtred: IS THAT RAGNAR’S DOG. Lmao.

Brandon Sanderson Oathbringer (2017) (Stormlight Archive #3) I opened this book with some trepidation because it is Dalinar’s book, the way Book 1 was Kaladin’s book and Book 2 was Shallan’s. I mean, all the flashbacks belong to Dalinar. You can tell Brandon Sanderson built this world around Dalinar, that Dalinar is more foundational to this ‘verse than any other character. And I gotta hand it to him, when I put the book down there were actual tears in my eyes: “The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says ‘journey before destination.’ But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, he journey ends. That failure becomes our destination. To love to journey is to accept no such end. I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one.” I think about when Kaladin took the first oath way back in Book 1, when we first heard “journey before destination,” and I say BRAVO SIR BRAVO. I think about how Gavilar’s assassination is this primordial scene we keep circling back to; with each new book we return to the scene of the crime with a different POV and we keep peeling back the layers and upending everything we thought we knew. Other things I am here for: Shallan referring to Kaladin internally as Brightlord Brooding Eyes (I’m still recovering from how Sanderson sank my Kaladin/Shallan ship). Kaladin running into his archnemesis & ex-bully and all he can think is “Adolin would never be caught dead in a coat three seasons out of date” lmao Kaladin x Adolin brOTP of the century. Ok but remember how I said while I was reading Book 2 “I hope Book 3 is 100% Rights for Parshmen”??? Well I called it didn’t I. Turns out humankind are the invaders—they literally rolled up from another planet which they had accidentally destroyed, they came as refugees and they proceeded to…enslave the indigenous parshmen. What. The fuck. Brandon Sanderson was born and raised in the USA, where the ideology of settler colonialism is fucking hegemonic. We are REALLY GOOD at conflating preemptive warfare with self-defense, dispossession with property rights enforcement. We tend to think of democratic self-rule as coextensive with coercive rule over alien subjects. Sanderson’s choice to dismiss out of hand the “would you give the land back to the parshmen” argument is troubling because it absolutely bolsters the settler colonial narrative that indigenous elimination is a necessary condition of settlers’ “freedom”. I realize that the parshmen are currently being led by Hitler but that’s a choice on Sanderson’s part. Giving us 95% human POVs is a choice. This is the story of humans reckoning with their blood-soaked history, not the story of parshmen throwing off their chains.

[cymbalism]

A friend is making a quilt for me (!) and as a last-minute addition asked for some favorite quotes and books and TV shows to add some details. You’d think that’d be a simple request, but it sent me into a tailspin of self doubt and embarrassment (do I want fandom all over a quilt?) and a whopping dollop of ohmygodiloveeverythingtoomuchwhydidileave. Anyway. She’s been sending me machine embroidery patterns for stuff like SPN and Merlin to make sure the images match the shows and my sense of the aesthetic and that + having now been away from fannish worlds (i.e., canon, tumblr, writing and reading fic) made me realize just how many of my ideas and memories of these things I love passionately and relied on for solace and happiness and friendship and beauty exist ONLY IN MY HEAD. Like, fandom participation basically overwrote canon in my memory. It’s not just that the shippiest bits stick our more than they actually exist, although they do. I was also confusing quotes from the show with titles from awesome fanfics. And there’s a buttload of stuff from SPN, for example, that just doesn’t resonate with me (an apocalypse mytharc fan and deancas shipper) the way the it would for an early-seasons or Wincest fan. Like, even though hunting is obviously badass and totally integral to the show, I had to stop and think about it (”Hunting people, saving things. The family business.”) as what represents the show, because my first thought was, like, idk, this: 

And, god, I had to pretty much stay away from Trek and X-Men entirely because I can hardly see canon through the forest of on-screen eyefucking. Like, do I really even love X-Men or just Erik/Charles? I mean, sure I love it. Grew up with the cartoon. Think it’s an important exploration of the value of people and how to practice tolerance, embrace difference, and move forward despite cultural and personal challenges. But I mean. 

There’s also this:

And this:

And this:

So. You see the problem. 

Oh wait, more problematic? This is Star Trek to me: 

Emphasis on CPine’s crotch. 

(Side note: What the hell happened to the 900,000 gifs that used to exist of Jim plastered against a broken console, heaving breath back into his lungs post-emotionally compromised Spock? And why did I never save one? Huge oversight, fandom. NEVER FORGET.)

What was I saying?

Right. So, mega universes that mean a lot of things to a lot people, and I am not AT ALL intending to trivialize or overlook their multiple layers of importance to anyone or even myself. I’m just saying that images (and quotes) that make me ~feel~ things about these stories are not easily captured or particularly shareable ones. 

Point is, that’s what got me thinking more seriously about reconnecting with fandom recently. I don’t like that it’s not part of my life right now, but somehow I haven’t found a way to fit it in between or with the new community and new people and new jobs and new house. (Never thought I’d miss being a gov’t desk jockey . . . ) And it feels particularly hard to come back to these universes when what I love about them seems so distant now, so very and overly specific to me and the ways in which I learned to love them. I feel like there’s an overwhelming amount of catching up and bias-shedding to do. What are the new interpretations to love? Where are the other people who love them? Not to mention I’m empty-handed. (Is it weird to have anxiety about the thing where lots of people go to escape anxiety? Well, here we are.)

Anyway. There’s a smart meditation on trappings of fandom memory and actual canon and broader fandom content that could/should be done, but my brain’s not there yet. 

Mostly I’m just saying, hey fandom, ’sup?