stunt_muppet

1. So I finally saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, approximately a year or whatever after I was supposed to have seen it.

1. Neil Patrick Harris is like a cherub made flesh. I want to pinch his cheeks and ruffle his hair and bake him cookies and tell him that it really is all going to be okay, he can be the biggest baddest supervillain ever if he wants to be.

1.a. That said, he has a distressingly sexy evil laugh in Act III. I respect a man who can pull off an evil laugh. And a diabolical smirk. While singing.

2. Other people with lovely singing voices: Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. I really liked Penny's singing voice, especially in "On the Rise", and Captain Hammer...oh lordy. On the one hand, I wish that singing voice could be put to other purpose besides proclaiming what a jackass he is. On the other hand, "What a Man's Gotta Do" and his epic posing were delightful, and I could see "Everyone's a Hero" as a comment on institutionalized prejudice when I wasn't laughing in a rather horrified fashion. Oh, dear.

3. That said, my favorite part of the entire series might be Bad Horse's inexplicable cowboy chorus. I loved them. Especially during the phone call.

3.a. Actually, listening to it again, "Brand New Day" might be my favorite part of the series. Cowboy Chorus comes in close second. Sorry guys.

4. WHEDON. WHEDON. WE NEED TO HAVE A CONVERSATION. Like about how long you can trot out the "feminist" credentials despite killing off female characters so they can serve as a plot/characterization device. Not that I didn't see Penny's death coming, because it's you, and that's kind of what you do except for that one time you mixed things up by killing off the husband, but seriously, that was the most physically implausible Girlfriend Refrigeration I think I've ever seen.

I want to think it's some kind of meta point you're making, on how the female must die in these male-centric stories, no matter how whacked-out the cause, because she's merely a device of the origin story rather than any kind of character with any kind of agency in her own right and it's her job to die so the hero/villain can be spurred into action. But...thing is, except for the "nation mourns what's-her-name headline, you really played it too straight for me to see it that way. It just looks like yet another freaking woman in the refrigerator.

And that is not cool.

4.a. Truth is, I'd be interested in fic where Captain Hammer was the one to die in the explosion instead of Penny, and, by killing the city's hero, Dr. Horrible gets accepted into the Evil League anyway, trying to take Penny with him. He certainly wouldn't be the same Dr. Horrible that we see at the end of Act III - he'd be much less committed and probably more amenable to changing sides - and Penny gets to have some agency in her interactions with him, by trying to talk him down; by interacting with him; eventually, maybe, by leading an effort to stop him, since she has access to him in a way that no one else does and she knows what has to be done.

Er. Does anyone feel like writing this? Tell me I don't have to do it myself.

5. On a less RAEG-y note: can I please, please, please go back to the 70's and get a job playing supervillains? I want that job so badly.

6. ...so there are Doctor Who vids to these songs, yes? I'm sure there are. There must be.
So that was fun. Best part was, it topped off a day of going to dinner with friends, walking around outside, clustering around friends' computers watching Muppets shorts, and just...generally feeling much better than I have been. Note to self: getting outside and spending time with people: it helps.

I even managed a tiny bit of writing (finally), though little of any consequence. Refreshingly, most of it was stuff that I'm actually supposed to  be working on, although I have a feeling that trying to avoid looking at fic-writing as an obligation will do something to lighten the load and help me have a more positive outlook on things.

I've got an outline together-ish for Chapter 2 of Experiment, laid out day by day, but I'm still not sure what sort of emotional climax I want them to reach - if any, because Liz and Three just don't seem the type for emotional climaxes, even of the non-dramatic sort. More for quiet, sober admissions that living like a human simply isn't going to work for the Doctor and there's nothing he or anybody else can do about that. But I still have to fulfill the prompt, and the prompt specified that the Doctor, if he could, would almost want to be able to live like a human with her, and that's...much more overtly romantic than I think I'm comfortable getting with them.

The main thins I'm not sure about, though, is how much I want Liz to help him adjust - by trying to get him to see things from a different perspective, for example. I believe it was eponymous_rose's meta I read it in, but it's a good point: Liz doesn't push the Doctor the way the Brig or Jo does. She disagrees with him and calls him out when she thinks he's wrong, but she doesn't offer quite the same incentive for him to change his behavior as they do. It's why I was so hesitant for her to even suggest that he take a break in Chapter 1 - it didn't seem right to me that she'd be so forthcoming. On the other hand, she does worry about him (see Inferno), so I suppose she could have made that suggestion out of concern for him, which is what I was hoping to play up.

But I don't know where to go from there, whether she tries to engage him and get him used to living on Earth or if she just sort of steps back and lets him work it out on his own. The latter seems more likely, but it takes what used to be a vaguely cracked story on a downright depressing path: the Doctor and Liz have fun sharing a space for a while, debating theoretical physics and accidentally setting the lab on fire; eventually, they stop having any fun with it as the Doctor gets moodier and grumpier and more tired of living like a human, but Liz doesn't say anything about it and neither does he, save routine grumps; eventually he starts working on his TARDIS again before the week is out because he simply doesn't know what else to do with himself, and Liz quietly suggests that he should move back out since this obviously isn't helping.

Realistic, but gloomy.

Anyway, I also worked on the plot summary for "Nothing Up My Sleeve" - again, sorry it's taking so long to get it out there. The middle is still a big, puzzling blank, and attempts to write my robot!villain!OC out of the ending aren't going so successfully, but we'll see how it goes. Perhaps that's what I shall do during homework breaks tomorrow.

A few sentences added on to "Kama" and "Nothing Lasts" as well, since I've completely given up on trying to structure them and am just putting down whatever poetical vaugely-on-topic nonsense comes into my head in the order it arrives, presumably to be arranged in some sort of order before posting. WHY DO I FAIL AT DOCTOR/MASTER WHY WHY WHY.

Polly/Benton also has a few more sentences to its name, but UNIT dating is, as it so frequently does, ruining my fun. It'd make everything much easier if Benton was still serving at UNIT in 1986, when the events of The Tenth Planet took place -

Oh. Oh hey, I just got a different idea. Does anyone have any idea when Invasion of the Dinosaurs takes place? It'd be sometime in the seventies or thereabouts, right? And we know Benton's still serving then because he's you know, in the episode and all.

That makes my life much easier. And it still allows me to use The Tenth Planet without having to bork TV canon to do it, even though I'm really not fond of TV canon as it relates to Benton anyway. :(

And, um, I am working on a kinkmeme prompt again. Well, I'm supposed to be working on several, but there's another one I've picked up. I tried writing it in an hour, but that didn't really work, since it's taking a pairing that I normally see as very fluffy and sweet and making it twisted and kinky and bizarre and also it involves a character subbing who...requires some mental gymnastics to imagine subbing, at least to this particular other character as the dom. Maybe I'll ponder it further under filter, but anyway the point is I've got to stop committing to kinkmeme prompts because I fail a bit at kinkmeme.

 

Aaaaand it's way later than I thought it was. Off to bed with me, and I really, really cannot neglect my laundry tomorrow.