Just the start of it all

Things I was tempted to spam you about in the last week or so, all in one handy post.

1. I know it's deeply tedious to LJ about having trouble getting onto LJ, but the servers are significantly less robust since the move, y/y?
   
2. I liked the remake of Terry Nation's One Other Good Idea Survivors, myself. ( Collapse )
   
3. I have been thinking about the tendency of bad fic to drive out good, which is a pattern I've seen in pretty much every comm I'm familiar with that's even slightly active. ( Collapse )
   
4. I'm going to cop to this one publicly rather than on my filter because I'm quite proud of it: I wrote TARDIS/Sapphire for the kink meme and here it will be on Teaspoon. (YAY! The 'spoon lets you do colours! I'm so glad I have any sort of self-restraint at all, or all my fics would turn into rainbows or something.)
   
5. I am thinking about rewatching S1 of New Who properly all the way through soon to see how it holds up. I liked it at the time for being new Doctor Who on the telly but I have always hated Nine's inability to take the tough choice, which is pretty much his defining character trait as far as I'm concerned and the thing that gets him killed. And also the arbitrary "this person > that person" thing which I had issues with ever since Mickey in Rose. If I do should I post about it, or would it become tedious and be too likely to be hatey? (I may rediscover all the things I enjoyed first time round, or I may notice lots of stuff that prefigures RTD's patterns of fail that weren't obvious as patterns at the time.)
   
6. I keep getting in fights on who_anon with people who tell me I'm an emotionless drone who cannot appreciate any modern TV, just because I think the emo in new Who is overdone. ( Collapse )
   
7. Manufactured American girlpop seems to be having a very good run at the moment. Or my ability to have any discernment whatsoever has jumped straight out of a twentieth-floor window. One of the two. The worst part is that I really like Katy Perry's new song and am now trying to work out whether Kissed A Girl is really objectionable or not.
   
8. OTOH: oh, god, James Blunt is so annoying. His songs are bad enough but when he's being interviewed he's so vapid. He's just saying all the standard "I just do my thing and if anyone else likes it that's a bonus" stuff, but he comes across so smug. I should know better than to watch E4 Music when they're not just putting videos on.
   
9. Comics! Angel: After the Fall has finally started to make something resembling sense, inasmuch as we've found out what various people are up to. I am bloody well going to have to reread it from the beginning, aren't I? Also, there are lots of good comics coming out tomorrow. I'm a bit grumpy that the release schedules of Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy have aligned, as it means I get all my Cosmic Marvel at once instead of nicely spread out through the month. Also, there is new Blue Beetle! I still can't believe that's been cancelled. Woe. Does anyone know many more we're getting? (My one Blue Beetle icon, let me show you it.)
   
10. I am going to catch up on SJA now. ( Collapse )
    

I seem to have spent quite a lot of time recently debating new school S1 and related topics on the anon meme. My overall opinion of S1 is low, for reasons mostly relating to Nine's "Time War damage" masking certain parts of the Doctor's personality that are very high up my list of "things that make the Doctor the Doctor", and partly to fandom itself and the way it treats it.

So I've decided to watch it all through again, properly, in order. I don't know how long this will take, it could be a few weeks if I race through them over Christmas, or it could be months. (You can tell I have decided that this is a definite plan, 'cos I've gone and got myself an icon specially. And I have maked a tag.)

But I thought first of all that I'd have a look at what I currently think before rewatching, to set a baseline (and to serve as fair warning about how much I don't like it). I'm going to split this up into "what I thought at the time" and "what I think now after three years of endless fandom arguments", though I'm not going to claim my ability to disentangle the two is perfect (though I am going to go to the OG archive to see whether it can shed any light).

I would not advise people who were involved in the making of S1 to read further, to be honest. (These things do happen in today's modern world of the internet.)

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Actually, revisiting the OG archive is mostly making me feel smug that I was right about various things, like Buffy being the main model for the new format rather than B5, the destruction of Gallifrey being nothing to do with TAC, and the plotting not being some convoluted Adam-is-Davros-is-Bad-Wolf nonsense. Oh, the debates we had. I think at one point I did allow myself to entertain the hope that Fenric was going to turn out to be the Big Bad. LOL. (Also, I used to go along with the Mickey-bashing far too much. I'm 99% certain I'm not retconning having liked him from early on.)

OK, so I'm going to break this into four sections: a recapitulation of what I put in the intro post of my pre-rewatch thoughts about it, and then Good, Bad and Ugly (the distinction between bad and ugly being things I don't like vs things I think are actively bad bad).

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Lots more good than bad there, and even the big worrying bit is undermined by everything that leads up to it such that it doesn't really make sense. This is a very encouraging start.

(BTW, did they clean up the Nestene Consciousness's "Time Lord" for the DVD? I could swear Jabe was the first to say it unambiguously on screen in the new series and that Nick Briggs just sounded all roary and growly on that line just like the rest of the Nestene dialogue. But this time around it was almost too clearly audible.)

ETA: BBC3 is just starting Human Nature. I would just like to point out before Father's Day comes up in six posts' time that I love that pissmidget more than anything and think Timewyrm: Revelation is at least one of the Real Beginnings of the NAs. So it's not that I don't like Paul Cornell. (Of course I may yet discover some deep and abiding love for Father's Day, which is kind of the point. But, er, don't hold your breath.)