Just the start of it all

Near-pointless jumbled thoughts post on the latest Who ep:

( Spoilers for the ep, and discussion of rumoury spoilers/spec I've heard for pt2 and S5; also spoils book things that Rusty seems to be 'influenced by' )

( 22 year old spoilers )

I watched Twin Dilemma at the weekend too, incidentally (my last ever Colin-I'd-never-seen-before) but I'm still wrapping my head around what I think of that. (Well, except that I want to know where all the Four/Azmael that-time-by-the-fountain slash is, fandom. Does everyone hate this story so much that they don't get inspired by the incredibly obvious stuff?)

I'm disappointed; none of you asked anything really wanky, though I'd have been happy to tell the truth. I did consider cheating and adding the questions that would prompt the rants I really want to write, but that wouldn't really be in the spirit of it. (Free opinion, though: if Torchwood hadn't had a Who connection, I'd have given up on it in disgust after the first Day One.)

( Some discussion of third hand specials/S5 spoilers/spec, be warned )

I have found it very hard to work out what I think of this one, and last night I felt very much as though I was being buffetted by whatever opinion I'd most recently read. But having spent a day thinking about it when I should have been working, I am currently of the belief that I liked most of the bits of it individually, but I didn't like the way the bits added together at all.

( The same thing, but tl;dr and with spoilers )

A picspam made entirely of pictures you have seen hundreds of times before.

( Nyssa/Tegan )

( Bonus: Nyssa/Turlough from that Terminus photo shoot )

(all nabbed from shillpages and THT, obviously)

I think that the existence of this hymn conclusively proves that Ace's dialogue is entirely realistic there was at least one other person in the late '80s/early '90s apart from Ian Briggs who thought that teenagers talked that way.

(You're probably not supposed to call that sort of rubbish a hymn. I don't care.)

ETA: If you thought the words were bad just by themselves, check out this YouTube rendition.

( The general trend with these is that my opinion regresses to the mean somewhat, and this one's no exception )

So, er, I have gone off it a bit on balance, but I still basically like the things I liked first time round. It's such a shame, it'd be a neat little SF-as-satire ep without that huge element of awfulness embedded in it.

Twice, in fact, for the henriettastreet ficathon:

• Origin Stories which is about Iris's bus.
  
• Mixed Signals which is me writing down a wodge of mah Time War fanon for the first time ever and shoving Compassion into the middle of it, on account of she is awesome.
  

(The rest of the ficathon is here and you should totes read it, just like I'm planning to now that I can without feeling guilty.)

So there has been quite a lot of fannish-type telly while I've been semi-away. I am going to pretend that you care what I thought of it.

( New Doctor Who! )

( New Red Dwarf! )

( New Ashes to Ashes! )

Terminator 2 was on at the same time as Ashes to Ashes, so I taped it even though I have it on proper bought-in-a-shop VHS somewhere. The little bit I did flick to after A2A was over completely messed up my Cunning Theories about how time travel works in SCC, though. Argh. (I have also spoiled myself ever-so-slightly for 2x22 [only Wikipedia-episode-list-summary level, accidentally], which spoilers suggest I am even wrongerer.)

You might be able to tell that as well as The Internet, I have spent today catching up on comics. I can't find anyone talking about this in the places I might have expected to on LJ, but maybe I'm just being faily at looking. I'm pleased, though, because IDW have finally got done something right with the Who franchise! Hurrah!

( The rest of this is very spoilery )

But anyway, good stuff, yes. I hope the other five IDW one-shots are of a similar standard.

( spoiler cut )

Also, I don't think Who's going to win a Hugo this year. The general consensus seems to be that Turn Left is a mediocre dystopic AU with far too much racefail (which I wouldn't disagree with objectively, but I have NO quality standards when it comes to dystopic AUs, so I love those elements of it anyway -- q.v. the way every future the X-Men ever visit is a variant on Days of Future Past and I love it every time; the racefail is hideous, though). The S4 Moffat eps aren't as good as his previous winners, and meanwhile BSG and Lost are both in their final seasons which might gee up their fanbases and everybody seems to have loved Dr Horrible, apart from the people who didn't. It is an open field, it seems to me.

This is typical me, make a post about how I'm going to be away more and THEN get really spammy.

(It's been over two months since AoL/WWIII, eep.)

( Dalek )

In issue #5 of IDW's Doctor Who comic The Forgotten, we're told that Eight only had "brief companions" in that incarnation. Like many things about The Forgotten, this annoys me. But I think I have grounds for my annoyance in this case. (This was originally a reply to doyle_sb4 on my previous post, but it got long and statistical and might possibly be vaguely interesting to people apart from my axe-grinding, so here it is as a post.)

What I've done is work out the length of service for each companion who I think has a reasonable claim to have been a "current" companion in at least one branch of the ongoing story of Doctor Who (and yes, this is the sort of thinking that privileges the NAs over the MAs) both in terms of adventures they were involved in and the number of our months they were the current companion for. The point being to explode the idea that for those of us who follow the story, Eight's companions were "brief".

So here's the top 10, sorted by number of adventures:

1. Fitz Kreiner (49)
   
2. Benny Summerfield (42)
   
3. Ace (41)
   
4. Charley Pollard (28)
   
5. Anji Kapoor (24)
   
6. Sam Jones (24)
   
7. Izzy Sinclair (23)
   
8. Chris Cwej (22)
   
9. Rose Tyler (21)
   
10. K9 (21)

And by months of being a current companion that fandom was experiencing stories about:

1. Izzy Sinclair (85)
   
2. Charley Pollard (94)
   
3. Ace (82)
   
4. Fitz Kreiner (72)
   
5. C'Rizz (46)
   
6. Frobisher (45)
   
7. Benny (44)
   
8. K9 (40)
   
9. Tegan Jovanka (37)
   
10. Sarah Jane Smith (35)

Now, this is really mostly about the nature of middle school more than anything else (note that telly companions only squeeze in in the bottom two or three places on each measure), but Eight's companions feature heavily in both these Top 10s (50% of the first and 40% of the second, with the top spot taken by an Eight companion in each case). Not only did he not have brief companions, he had most of the longest serving companions. He is the Doctor it is least sensible to make that claim about, if you're going to count spinoffery. And since The Forgotten is a spinoff ...

( If you're interested, full lists and caveats etc. under the cut )

I think this might possibly be my favourite meme ever:

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

(You can comment and not get things, if you want. It's not compulsory or anything.)

silly_cleo gave me:

( Being into Old Who fandom before the new show )
( Nyssa/Tegan and femslash generally )
( the Doctor Who books )
( Buffy )
( being sane about fandom )

requested by biichan, to whom much thanks because this is one I really wanted to talk about; this was written for last year's lgbtfest, and they've just got up and running again for this year (plug, plug, plug; there might just still be time for you to submit prompts)

( Hardly Moving Yet: the more than you really wanted to know version )

requested by magicallaw, who said she was going to do the meme herself but hasn't yet, which means I can't request Girl from Mars from her (that was gloriously unsubtle, wasn't it?)

( Do You Remember The First Time? the long-winded edition )

coming soon: Hardly Moving Yet, requested by biichan, and I'm still taking requests, if you haven't been completely put off by all that smug self-congratulation

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

kseda gave me:

( Anji Kapoor )

( sizeofthatthing )

( my favourite comic book artist )

( how awesome my username is )

( pie )

(If you want to comment without being tagged for the meme, just say. If you do want to be tagged, be aware I may be offline for a while because I am probably about to switch off my router until I have finished this thrice-damned fic that doing this meme was blatant procrastination from.)

In the interests of proving that there's nothing I'd say on who_anon that I wouldn't say with my username attached, a one-time offer:

Ask me anything about DW or its fandom and I will give you my honest opinion on the matter.

Title: Ten of the Sword/Sufficiently Advanced Technology
Author: ionlylurkhere
Characters/Pairing: Ace/Shou Yuing, Seven
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1800
Summary: Ace and the Doctor's POVs, post-Battlefield.

( You go ahead and enjoy yourself, Ace, I'll be fine. )