stunt_muppet

I quite love the word "suchlike".

Somehow, some way, First Doctor/Catherine the Great of Russia has become my historical crack!ship. No, like I seriously ship them. I have whole stories thought out where he somehow becomes one of her advisor/lovers during one of his early off-Gallifrey excursions, and while he objects on principle to the monarchy, serfdom and social injustice endemic to her era they fascinate one another. They engage in intellectual debates. She offers him one of his first glimpses of human society at its most contradictory. There may or may not be sex.

Maybe a wee Master even tags along at some point, and spending a little time in Russia is how he picked up the nickname Koschei.

...I have no idea how this happened. And, really, I have no idea how it'd even work, because most of Catherine's later lovers were selected by Potemkin, and having the Doctor in Potemkin's good books at this early date is stretching credibility even more just a little. But for some reason, I've convinced myself that it is practically canon. And that there must be fic.

Granted, it's not as weird as that brief and troubled time where I was shipping Nine/Louise Brooks, but still. I just don't know where this came from.

If a One/Catherine the Great ficlet turns up on whoniverse1000, you know who to blame, is all I'm saying.

Speaking of fic: You have until the 15th to sign up for lizbee's DW/TW/SJA Cliche-Swap Ficathon! You know you want to! The minimum wordcount's only 500! Come on, even I can manage that. Hopefully.

Speaking of the ficathon: Writing down the list of pairings I was able to write made me realize what a boring hetshipper I've become. I mean, my reading habits include slash, het, femslash, and gen in mostly equal measure (insofar as an equal measure is possible for some of those categories in some fandoms - e.g. my reading habits in the CSI fandoms were largely gen and het because most of the slash had pairings I didn't like and femslash didn't exist), but my writing is almost exclusively het. The only non-het ship I said I could write for the ficathon is Three/Brig, and I'm not entirely sure I can even write that - just because I did it once doesn't mean I can do it consistently, you know?

I'm sure this is a Problem of some sort, and I've been working on fixing it, I really have, because there's m/m and f/f pairings I'd really like to write, but fic I try to write about them generally heads in a gen direction. And, as with my previous quandary, I simply don't know why.

Speaking of boring hetshipping, and on an entirely less serious and pointlessly introspective note: One of the ways I kept myself awake during my epic all-nighters was finishing Carnival of Monsters, and I am sorely tempted to do an entire picspam focused on the Doctor and Jo's shoes. Really. They are wearing his'n'hers kickyboots throughout the entire thing and there are several lengthy shots of said kickyboots as they walk places and it makes me so very happy.

I like shoes. What can I say.

On the subject of movies: My uncle and I went to see Body of Lies on Saturday, which was...okay, I guess. Maybe because I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about going, maybe it's because I had to take two separate ladies' room breaks, that's how long the thing was, but it just didn't speak to me. I think Russel Crowe's character was supposed to be morally ambiguous and a Surprisingly Dark indictment of our homeland security officials and et cetera, but aside from the fact that he had a wife and kids there was nothing redeeming about him, nothing to complicate him. He ended up a cardboard character, a uniformly loathsome human being with a good-ol-Southern-boy accent passing as charm. And can I just say, here and now, that every time a protagonist in a movie, especially a SRS BISNESS movie like this, says "Where's the girl?" without a lick of irony, I want to punch something. Can we at least pretend that our refrigerator-bound Token Girlfriend has an identity outside of you, please? And while we're at it, how about we stop giving the protagonist a love interest solely so the bad guys have someone to threaten? I'm not saying we have to totally get rid of that plot device forever, because that's never going to happen, but can't we at least retire it for a while?

That said, that all might have been worth it for Mark Strong's character, the head of the Jordanian police force (Hani Salaam, I want to say his name was). He was gentlemanly, charming, and perhaps the most truly morally ambiguous character in the bunch. And if it weren't missing the entire point of the movie and/or I cared enough I would so ship him and Leonardo DiCaprio's character. I'll have to keep an eye on him; I'm sure I've seen Mark Strong in something before, but I can't think what.

Anyway. Point is, one of the previews before the movie was for that new Angelina Jolie movie, Changeling. Frankly, I wasn't going to see it, since it looks like the sort of Oscar-bait pain parade that I generally avoid until it comes out on DVD (Shallow? Me? Surely you jest.), but the trailers revealed to me that Jeffrey Donovan was going to be in it; specifically, I think he's playing the head of the local FBI, which means not only is he going to be dressed in sharp twenties-ish apparel, he's also (hopefully) going to play the type of magnificent bastard that he's so very good at. I'll fork over ten-fifty to see that, yes I will.

...I think that's all for the moment. I should probably go pack or something like that. Good evening to you all.

ETA: A further pimp: livii and rivrea are running a Doctor Who Historical Ficathon, because for a series where you could go anywhere and anywhen there isn't nearly enough historical fic. Currently open for prompting; minimum wordcount for fics is only 500. Go submit some prompts (but be sure to read the rules first!), and indulge your inner history nerd.