I know that my updating lately is inconsistent, and a large part of that is how I position myself in fandom; I still think of myself largely as a Buffy fan, and of course since I'm not up to date on the comics or anything (and don't seem to be able to find the time to participate in femslash_minis) there isn't much to be said. But these are the shows that are currently airing which I do make a point of keeping up-to-date with:

Bones
Doctor Who
Eureka
The Guild
In Plain Sight
Sanctuary
Torchwood

I'm pretty sure that's pretty much the entire list.

And all of this is more or less an introduction to my saying . . . I think last Sunday's In Plain Sight (which I finally watched today) might well have contained one of the greatest scenes in the history of television. Love love love.

ETA: Obviously Sarah Jane Adventures would be on this list too were it not for Liz Sladen's sad death--although Wikipedia claims that the filmed episodes of Series 5 will air this fall.

Title: Skasis
Fandom: Doctor Who/Arcadia
Summary: Thomasina solves the Skasis Paradigm.

( Skasis )

So there's been this version of "Cliff, Shag, Marry" going around with surprisingly complicated rules:

1. Comment and I will give you the names of 3 fictional characters or celebrities.
2. Post this meme with your answers.
3. Provide pictures and the names of the three people.
4. Label which you would marry, shag, or cliff.

I got three lists of names, one list each from maechi, kindkit, and netgirl_y2k.

( ROUND ONE: Summer Glau, Dawn Summers, and Joss Whedon )

( ROUND TWO: Emma Frost, Buffy Summers, Hermione Granger )

( ROUND THREE: Dawn Summers, River Tam, Lucy Saxon  )

Comment if you want me to do you. Alternately, if you just want to play regular Cliff/Shag/Marry, leave the names of three characters.

( Random Quiz )

( spoilers for Revenge of the Slitheen  )

It occurs to me that SJA is, in a lot of ways, the flip side of Torchwood, and Who is the synthesis of the two. Jack is the Doctor's dark side, Lonely God and Lord of Time, answerable to no one and capable of genocide with a quip, and Sarah Jane is his ethical side, the part that says "This is where I stand; I can do no other."

Which is of course yet another reason why TW/SJA crossovers need to happen. (Spunky investigative journalist takes down secret illegal extragovernmental organization, with the help of teenagers! Would hit my kinks so hard.)

I was thinking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in part because I've just finished reading the The Long Way Home arc and in part because it's come up in a couple of discussions I've been having lately. And it made me think of the way that for me, fanfic works as a sort of je me souviens--a way of saying "I remember" to the source canon.

Most canons sort of pummel forward without looking backwards. That probably was more true in the 90's than now, since serial storytelling seems to be coming back into vogue now and starting with a "Previously on" has become the norm rather than the exception. Something I loved about Veronica Mars was that the same set of supporting characters kept on returning in seasons one and two--and when that stopped being the case in season 3 I quickly lost interest in the show, because I wanted to know what Gia Goodman and Carrie Bishop and Madison Sinclair and Van Clemens and Trina Echolls were all up to.

And just ask any Voyager fan just what happened to Joe Carey.

Sometimes the new stories are worth telling in their own right. I'm not saying there's something bad about the new Who giving us Reinette and Sally Sparrow instead of using all its time making references to Romana and the Rani (whoever they might be)--because there isn't, not at all.

Regardless whether a canon seems to be suffering from massive long-term memory loss or is actually rather decent on referring to what has come before, fanfic is a way of hearkening back to those beloved times, of remembering them and saying that I love them. Or that I hate them. Or that I just think they're funny.

It's a way of taking minor characters--like Scott Hope from Buffy (who is, remember, canonically gay), or Reinette or Sally Sparrow from Doctor Who, or some forgotten character from old Who (which I haven't seen much of--most of my old Who knowledge comes from apocryphal audios)--and reaffirming one's love for them. It's a way of remembering that quirky piece of canon that everyone else seems to have forgetten and to bring it to the front and make something new with it. It's a way of returning to a favorite line of dialogue or a particularly stunning visual image. It's a way of saying "Remember when?"

And every "What if?" is also a "Remember when?" when you think about it.

It's a way of digging our fingers deep into the canon we already have and engaging with it. Fanfic can tell new stories using the characters we love, the same way canon does. But fanfic, IMHO, is at its best when it does all that and embraces where its come from in a way that the source text rarely does--rarely is able to, if we are honest.

This is why I write Amy Madison so much, because she exists in these odd corners of the text but never in its center, and by inhabiting  I've invented new villains and new heroes and new demons and new mystical texts, because sometimes they are what the story I want to tell needs, but if I can reference something we've already seen in canon I'll choose to do that almost every time, because I love it and I want to bring it into my story, a metatextual whisper of ":Wasn't it great that one time when....?" to the reader. Remember that lame episode when a demon came from outer space? They're the catalyst in my Buffy/Torchwood crossover.Jurisdiction.

The entire premise of Divine Interventions was just to get Ethan, Amy, Dawn, and Cordelia in a room together, stir in Hecate, Janus, and Osiris (all deities mentioned in the show itself), resurrect Rack, and see what happened. Because these were pieces of what had gone before that I loved (or at least liked--I'm not really sure how Cordelia got in there) was interested in playing with in the present.

When "The Girl in Question" is bashed, retconned, and fanwanked, both my Buffy/Immortal fics (in which Buffy not only is dating the Immortal but marries and has a daughter by him) and The Ransom of Andrew Wells are my way of saying, yes, I did see that happen, and I loved it. I'm not going to forget it.

Each and every fic is, in its own way, a love song.

Through events like buffyverse1000 and femslash_minis, I was able to dig my fingers deep into the forgotten and underutilized corners of Buffy canon, inhabiting at times a wide arrange of characters who populate the periphery of the text. I can't think of a more potent way of saying "I remember" than writing Gwen Raiden/Nina Ash, as cadence_k did. Or, you know, Edna Mae Wilkins fic. *loves femslash_minis co-participants*

As many problems as I may have with The Long Way Home (even beyond one particular retcon), this is one of the things that I think Joss got right: the comic really does engage with the seven seasons of Buffy (and five seasons of Angel) that preceded it--indeed, to a degree that I don't think would have been possible in a television format.  It's partly because the comics really are more like fanfiction than like canon that he can get away with it--he can have a character (I won't say which one so as not to spoil anyone) mention their mother and have us remember the one episode in which that mother appeared and understand the implications of the reference. (And it's not spoilery, because I can think of at least four characters off the top of my head who had parents appear in exactly one episode and I'm sure there are more). Also, comics don't have the practical considerations that make it necessary for canons sometimes to move forward; they don't have actors negotiating for money or the difficulty of arranging for certain guest stars to return.

Unfortunately, not all creators are Joss, and we're rarely so lucky.

In some ways, there's nothing more depressing than when a show you once loved seems to have forgotten its past completely, as sometimes VMars seemed to do in its third season and as Voyager seemed to do starting with its third episode, to the point that two seasons might seem to be entirely separate canons from each other, one open and the other for all practical purposes closed, that just happen to share some characters and/or settings. But even then fanfiction provides us with a way of remembering that past and proving that we at least, have not forgotten it.

It allows us to say: I remember. Je me souviens.

And I'm damn well not going to forget.

When I was at the Best Buy looking for a birthday present for my brother, I came across the BBC's The Bernard Shaw Collection on DVD and of course I had to have it, seeing as Shaw is my favorite playwright. I ended up watching The Millionairess first because I haven't read or seen the play and because Maggie Smith rules.

It was everything it promised to be. Maggie Smith pwns everyone and anyone, including the criminologist from Rocky Horror, and ends up falling in love with the Fourth Doctor disguised as an Egyptian.

I am so full of squee.

( picspam with a theme! )

( Look, ma, I can crop! )

Should Summer Glau ever be photographed in a pair of spectacles, the world would explode from the sheer amount of guh.

Here are twenty-five favorite characters from twenty-five different shows, in no particular order.

1. Dawn Summers (Michelle Trachtenbeg) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
2. Fred Burkle (Amy Acker) from Angel
Bonus! Drusilla (Juliet Landau) from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel
3. River Tam (Summer Glau) from Firefly

Is there really anything else to be said about the above?

4. Player (Justin Shenkarow, Jeffrey Tucker, Joanie Pleasant) from Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? ( Commentary )
5. Dr. Olga Vukavitch (Justina Vail) from Seven Days ( Commentary )
6. Morgan Matthews (Lily Nicksay, Lindsay Ridgeway) from Boy Meets World ( Commentary )
7. Capt. Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) from Star Trek: Voyager ( Commentary )
8. Cindy Mackenzie (Tina Majorino) from Veronica Mars ( Commentary )
9. President Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis) in Commander-in-Chief( Commentary )
10. Donna Moss (Janel Moloney) from The West Wing ( Commentary )
11A. Tess Doerner (Summer Glau) from The 4400 ( Commentary )
11B. Maia Skouris née Rutlidge (Conchita Campbell) from The 4400 ( Commentary )
12. Clarissa Darling (Melissa Joan Hart) from Clarissa Explains It All ( Commentary )
13. Alex Mack (Larissa Oleynik) from The Secret World of Alex Mack ( Commentary )
14. Fred Rogers (Himself) from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood ( Commentary )
15. Nona Mecklenberg (Michelle Trachtenberg) from The Adventures of Pete and Pete ( Commentary )
16. Rogue (Lenora Zann) from X-Men (90's cartoon) ( Commentary )
17. Kitty Pryde (Maggie Blue O'Hara) from X-Men Evolution ( Commentary )
18. Jan Brady (Eve Plumb) from The Brady Bunch ( Commentary )
19. Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family ( Commentary )
20. The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant) from Doctor Who ( Commentary )
21. Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelly) from Star Trek: The Original Series ( Commentary )
22. Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan) from Battlestar Galactica (2003) ( Commentary )
23. Rita Repulsa (Barbara Goodson, Carla Pérez, Machiko Soga) from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers ( Commentary )
24. Ezri Dax (Nicole de Boer) from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ( Commentary )
25. Rory Gilmore (Alexis Beidel) from Gilmore Girls ( Commentary )

Ari wondered what it meant that she guessed that most of my favorites were female. It means that she knows me well, because most of my favorites--all but four, plus the ambiguously-gendered Player--are female. Which is interesting, because many of these relate to early childhood, when my heterosexuality wouldn't have been a factor (right?). I'm not sure what it says that I've always found it easier to identify with (or at least be interested in) female characters than male ones, but I think it's pretty clearly true.

Okay, it's actually today today. Saturday. So that's good and all.

Spent the day listening to Dr. Who audiobooks, and I'm now ready to have Tennant's mpreg babies.

His Rose impersonation seemed a little off, didn't quite capture her spunk, and his Doctor was curiously understated compared to the way he plays him on TV, but he nailed Jackie and Mickey. Is that because they have more distinctive accents? And some of the other voices were just amazing. And hearing him switch between the Scottish accent (for narration) and the English one (for the Doctor) was so much fun.

And the dialogue given to the Doctor by the book writers was so perfect. It was as if you could hear the Doctor saying it. Well, you could hear the Doctor saying it, which was the beauty of it all.

Listening to the Doctor Who/Treaure Island fusion and comparing it to fanfic was particularly interesting especially since the debt to Robert Louis Stevenson wasn't disclaimed.

Speaking of the Tenth Doctor, let me say I'm overall satisfied with the way "Doomsday" panned out. I agree with all the opinions of the people on my flist. This includes the people who hated, those who loved it, and those in between--I agree with you all.

( spoiler )

I recognize that it's the nature of Who that ( slightly spoilerish about something everyone knows now anyway ) but I like shows with continuity and continuing story arcs so I hope we will continue to see some of the recurring cast. I'd especially like to see Harriet Jones again. In some ways, my concern is similar to my concerns about the directions Veronica Mars will be going next season. (I better get to see Madison Sinclair again. Preferably as much as we saw her in the first two seasons, but short of making her a vampire I don't know how to make that work.)

Memes that have been going around my flist, the first of which being answered in excruciating detail (includes visited countries, visited states, and combat card):

(Click here to post your own answers for this meme.)

✓ I miss somebody right now.  ("I miss my girlfriend" is sort of a mental catchphrase for me. Then again, I have a lot of mental catchphrases, inluding "What day is it?" "What's for dinner?" "Where am I going?" and "Clothing is discouraged but not forbidden." They're just random lines that pop into my head when I'm not really thinking about anything.)	✓ I don't watch much TV these days.  (I watch more than I used to, though, between Who and Veronica Mars and random other things.)	✓ I own lots of books.
✓ I wear glasses or contact lenses.  (Glasses are hot.)	× I love to play video games.	× I've tried marijuana.
× I've watched porn movies.  (I still remember the time in high school when, after class, I found what I can only assume was a pornographic video. When Brother Jim, the Dean of Students, walked by I immediately flagged him down and informed him of what happened, and he destroyed the video in front of me.)	× I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship.  (I've had no past relationships. Unless you count various relationships that weren't.)	✓ I believe honesty is usually the best policy.
× I curse sometimes.  (My expletives include "WTF?" "Zut alors!" and "Expletive!" I've never said the F-word. This might surprise those of you whom have only read my fic--I do NOT talk/think the way my characters talk/think.)	✓ I have changed a lot mentally over the last year.	× I carry my knife/razor everywhere with me.  (I really feel like I should, though. And that I should have a cigarette lighter at all times even though I don't speak. After all, I was a Boy Scout once.)

( it goes on... )