stunt_muppet

So I have got to cut myself off from this cracky character-number meme because it's taking up time that I'm supposed to be using for my essays. Posting the answers I have come up with so far seems a good way to tell myself to stop. I will answer the questions in installments because my answers tend to get stupidly long and if I try to answer them all before I post them I will never get them all done.

You can still ask questions if you like (more crack is good for everyone!), but if you do please do so before you read these answers, because it's kind of spoiled if you know who's who.

Questions answered: Four. Fandoms represented: Doctor Who, Final Fantasy X, NCIS, Iron Man movieverse, Tranformers Animated, Star Trek Reboot, Pirates of the Caribbean, ReBoot, and Bones. I've noted which character goes with which fandom to ease confusion.

( Two of these questions take up four pages, ack. )

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So very late, guys. Must pick up laundry. Then finish two papers. And then I'm done for a week. Hoorah.

Almost done with project. Almost done with project. Oh my god it's five in the morning.

Stolen from futuresoon :

1. Write down the names of 10 characters.
2. Write a fic of fifteenish words or less for every prompt, using the characters determined by the numbers. Do NOT read the prompts before you do step 1.

1. Abby Sciuto (NCIS)
2. Polly Wright (Doctor Who)
3. Temperance Brennan (Bones)
4. Ryan Wolfe (CSI: Miami)
5. Tim McGee (NCIS)
6. Liz Shaw (Doctor Who)
7. Will Turner (Pirates of the Caribbean)
8. Captain Christopher Pike (NuTrek)
9. Wendy Watson (Middleman)
10. Nick Stokes (CSI)

( Hey, look, stories. )


Once more unto the breachbug box, friends, once more. *sigh*

So I've mentioned that Galaxy Quest is a much more entertaining movie when you know something about Star Trek, yes? 

The other thing I realized is that the movie already addresses shipping, in a tangential way, with the Taggart/Madison fangirl asking Gwen if she and the Commander "had a thing". If we extend our understanding of fandom into this alternate universe, shipping is presumably a large part of the fannish community, there are probably zines and fanworks and rec.arts.gquest listings and all that.

Which means, if we draw the logical parallels between Galaxy Quest and Star Trek, in the movie's verse, Taggart/Dr. Lazarus was the most prevalent ship and the first to coin the term "slash". There are probably piles of mostly-regrettable zinefic and less-regrettable Nine Inch Nails vids. 

Jason Nesmith probably knows all about it. Hell, he's probably shown it to Alexander.

I'm not sure why this amuses me so, but the other conclusion I drew from watching the movie was that shipping Jason Nesmith/Alexander Dane would essentially be writing Shattner/Nimoy RPS with the serial numbers filed off, and I needed to find something less brain-breaking to latch onto fast.

(Though I do wonder at how the Uhura stand-in being a white woman would have affected shipping trends, given that the main reason Uhura wasn't given a romantic subplot in Star Trek: TOS was because the studio execs forbade an interracial romance on TV. It's possible that within the Galaxy Quest universe, the Taggart/Madison subtext was much more played up and much more textual - unless the racial issues weren't a factor in the alternate 70s, but that might be too much to hope for.)

Things like these probably shouldn't be what I ponder in the early morning.


And now, I must check the anthills, and then panic about my dw_femslash ficathon story. Don't suppose anyone would be up for futher brainstorming?

In reverse order:

Five-year-old girl writes Kirk/Spock fanfic. Where they go on a date to the movies. The first sentence is "Kirk loves Spock, and that is a fact, and it's not gross, so shut up."

Awwww.

(via srevans )

And now another meme, offa elyssadc , because that seems to be the majority of what I do with this journal lately:

1) Post a list of up to 20 books/movies/anime/TV shows/video games/bands [fannish etc.] that you've had an obsessive fannish love or interest in at some time in your life.
2) Have your f-list guess your favorite character/member from each item.
3) When someone guesses correctly, strikethrough the item and put the name of your favorite character next to it.

This is going to be hard because I actually have...clusters of favorite characters, if that makes sense. Like I have three or four characters (or five or six, depending on the cast size) whom I absolutely love and I at least like most everybody else. But any character in the cluster counts.

Also this is going to be where I own up to my old embarrassing fandoms, hurrah.

1. Doctor Who Three, Jo, the Brig, the Master, Liz, Polly - guessed by drho , gorengal , and airie_fairy .
2. CSI: Miami Horatio, Marisol, Yelina (one unguessed) - guessed by gorengal .
3. CSI: Vegas Warrick, Nick, Catherine - guessed by gorengal .
4. Law and Order Connie (one unguessed!) - guessed by gorengal .
5. Law and Order: SVU Munch, Fin, Olivia - guessed by gorengal .
6. Burn Notice Sam - guessed by gorengal .
7. Pirates of the Caribbean Will and Norrington - guessed by kayliemalinza .
8. Star Trek Reboot Sulu, Pike, McCoy, Chekov  - guessed by elyssadc , airie_fairy and kayliemalinza .
9. Final Fantasy X
10. NCIS
11. Bones Booth and Zac Addy - guessed by kayliemalinza .
12. Discworld Death - guessed by drho .
13. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (I wrote fic for it; it counts)
14. Resident Evil (game-verse) Jill Valentine (one unguessed) - guessed by elyssadc .
15. Golden Sun
16. Justice League - Wonder Woman (one unguessed) - guessed by drho .
17. Batman: The Brave and the Bold Aquaman - guessed by elyssadc .
18. Middleman
19. Star Wars Luke Skywalker - guessed by gorengal .
20. Sailor Moon (you shush I was eight okay everyone was into it back then) Ami/Mercury and Makoto/Lita/Jupiter - guessed by airie_fairy .

And now I should go get lunch.

And for some reason I felt obligated to finish it tonight, so now I'm up way too late again and I'm already all thrown off for this week and have missed stuff, this is just bad karma. I was doing so well. D: After this I'm done. I promise. I'll get back on track.

Ahem. The answers to the shipping meme, all 7 pages in Word of them. I talk a lot.

( I do wish Word could copy and paste into Rich Text posting so I wouldn't have to format this by hand. Bloody Vista. )


Ugh. SLEEPS. Needs it now. *collapses* Memes are so stressful sometimes.

Trivialities first: Not only are Linkara and Spoony doing a joint review, but there's been a Blake's Seven reference AND a "He tried to kill me with a forklift" song within the space of ten minutes.

Like I didn't already have a raging fangirl crush on both of them.

Also, while I've been watching bits and pieces of Star Trek: TOS, I hadn't really been making a concerted effort, since over the summer I didn't have much opportunity to watch and  this year so far I've been too busy getting my classes and things in order to take up a new fandom.

However, I'm well tempted to take a look at The Next Generation, purely because I've watched the video review of the Star Trek: Borg FMV video game (yeah, there was a game; don't act so surprised*) and Q looks awesome. I mean, he also looks like a smug, insufferable douche, but an awesome smug insufferable douche, and at least in the game footage John de Lancie looks like he has the time of his life playing him and I always get a kick out of it when I can tell actors are enjoying their roles.

Of course, I have vague memories of watching TNG with my dad when I was very young, and even though I didn't know who the characters were or what they did I remember being very fond of Data and Worf. And Geordi, but I suspect I mostly liked him because he had a cool visor.

So, friends more versed in TNG than I, is Q really that amusing or does he wear a bit thin on the actual show? How much does he even show up? And does Worf ever get to be as badass as he should be? And does Geordi have a whole lot of ablism!fail plotlines?


*On the subject of video game tie-ins, did you know there was actually a Doctor Who pinball game? Which seems like one of the most incongruous extensions of a brand I've ever heard of, because, really, it's not like they even made a proper game out of it (and I think Who would make a nifty point-and-click PC adventure a la King's Quest or Curse of Monkey Island), it's just pinball with the characters pastede on yey.

Although two more minutes on Wikipedia tells me there are also various games for obscure consoles and/or CD-ROM, which still seem odd and incongruous to me, mostly because I'm hurting my brain trying to imagine Colin Baker or Patrick Troughton in sprite form.

Although, reportedly, the CD-ROM game has Raston Warrior Robots, which is a substantial point in its favor. It also apparently includes some rather silly-looking clips of Anthony Ainley on a 'shoppy flame background and the posthumous voice of Jon Pertwee, because apparently it wasn't creepy enough when the audios did that.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I can't be the only one unsettled when the voices of dead actors are used in movies, especially if those actors have been dead for a while (i.e. they didn't die between the end of filming and the release of the movie a la Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight). I mean, granted, it doesn't happen very often (the only time I remember it happening was "Laurence Olivier" in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and it doesn't quite apply in this situation because Pertwee had agreed to appear in the game before his death (though it's more applicable in the case of Zagreus) but when I saw it in Sky Captain all I could think about for the rest of the movie was the Unfortunate Implications.

I mean, Olivier didn't agree to appear in that movie. You don't know he would have had he been alive. (Although hey, doing camp action movies seems to be a Thing for legendary Shakespearean actors, see Exhibit A: Ian McKellan.) If you're an actor of such stature that people would want to use your image, who gets to decide which films you "appear" in? Are you, after your death, to be sold to anyone who pays enough, or will considerations be taken for what sort of work you did and exactly how your image is to be used? Will actors have to start drafting such considerations in their wills, or will that be seen as presumptuous? Of course there are limits to how a dead actor's likeness can be used, as they can't record new reactions or new dialogue, so I can't really believe that using dead actors will be anything beyond a novelty, but it's still creepy. 
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That  went on for way longer than I expected. On to the main topic! Also, all generalizations are based on my own experiences and may not apply across all fandoms

Talking with kindkit recently brought to mind a trend I've noticed in fic; out of all the fic in every fandom I've read, most use either a) first-person POV (which isn't frequent) or b) tight third-person POV, where the narrator is only privy to one character's thoughts and feelings at a time. While I've read some fics that use omniscient POV (either journalistic description-only omniscient POV or an omniscient POV that describes all the characters' thoughts and feelings as appropriate), they're not the majority; most fic only changes POV between scenes if it changes at all.

And I think, because most fic (in my experience) is in that tight third person, a switch in POV within a scene can look like the author slipped up. It reads as messy, or just incorrect, even though I think it's technically valid. I'm curious; do you think that a POV switch within a scene actually is sloppy? Or are we just so used to reading the single POV at a time that omniscient POV reads wrong?

For that matter, why do most fics go for tight-third-person? For an introspective fic, or a fic about, say, one character specifically reacting to another, the choice is an obvious one, but even in, say, ship-fic, if the thoughts and feelings of every character involved are included, they're included one at a time. Technically, you could include both of their thoughts in the same scene, and in some cases it might actually better serve the fic to do so. Of course, the switching POV also gives the author a convenient location for a scene break.

Do you find you usually write in limited-third-person POV? Any particular reason why? What affects your choice of POV when writing, or where you switch POV if at all? How would a POV switch within a scene read to you?

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Oh my gracious it is so late. I really must go to bed, like two hours ago.

And other things, but that's the first item on my list.

1. I was freewriting a scene the other day, and I wound up describing a recently-regenerated Doctor's hands as "just beginning to callus". Reasoning: if the body only came into existence a few weeks ago, the skin wouldn't have had time to roughen in response to constant use. 

I belatedly realized that this actually doesn't make sense, since freshly-regenerated Time Lords still have a full head of hair, full set of teeth, etc., and generally already come with a few facial creases and wrinkles that would take time to develop and wouldn't be there if their skin was truly "new". They come pre-worn, as it were, so the wear on their skin would be there right off the bat.

But I really like the sentence that description is in. Can I get away with it? Am I in fact thinking about this too much and no one else would even notice or care?

2. New Trek fic recs: Proving Today, by eldee , a Chekov-centric ensemble gen about Chekov slowly becoming part of Team Enterprise, and and you take me the way I am, by londondrowning , a genderswapped Kirk/McCoy with a girl!McCoy that still sounds perfectly in character. Check them out.

3. All the genderswap coming out of New Trek fandom makes me realize just what a dearth of it there is in Doctor Who fandom - I've read some nice girl!Doctor and girl!Master fic, but there isn't nearly as much of it. Yet another fic project I must embark on: those girl!Doctor fics I meant to write oh those many months ago. Now that Trek has made genderswap cool I feel slightly less self-serving writing them.

Though I admit my reasons for writing them are still fairly self-serving, namely "girl!One with Ben and Polly during The Smugglers would be cute in a weird way, and girl!One would remind Polly of a grumpy schoolmarm at first but eventually they would bond" and "girl!Three/Brigadier would be so ridiculously awkward and yet terribly sexy". Oh, and "Steven would feel all protective of girl!One and girl!One would not take very kindly to that at all".

3.a. I still want to do that drag ficathon. :( I kind of dropped it because I wouldn't be able to run it properly over the summer (and I probably still won't, given that I went and signed up for who_remix  because I've clearly gone mad), but most fandoms need more drag and Who is no exception.

A question, however: How does one refer to a crossdresser's appearance in relation to their gender? I know that transgendered people use FtM and MtF, but is their an equivalent term for transvestitism? Or do you just use "a female/male transvestite"?

4. Watched the season finale of Miami without even realizing it was the season finale. As such, wasn't sure what half of the plot threads were on about, but Family and I came to the conclusion that the Miami crime lab is actually staffed by undercover superhero clones. Horatio is Superman, and the reason he's been so permanently annoyed at everyone since Season 4 is that with all the glass walls in the new crime lab he has nowhere to change into his super suit. Calleigh is Wonder Woman because bullets bounce off of her. I don't know what Ryan is, maybe the Flash.

The reason this came up is because we concluded that ( spoilers! )

I kind of want to write a crackfic along these lines, to be honest. I shouldn't, but I do.

And that wraps up this somewhat bizarre entry. Ta for now.

Dear Messrs. Pine and Quinto,

Forgive me for doubting you, especially since my doubts were foolishly mostly founded on a) not liking Sylar all that much and b) you both not being Shatner and Nimoy.

Dear Mr. Abrams,

Well played, sir. Well played.

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So. Um. As you may have been able to tell, I rather enjoyed it. It was exciting and well-produced and deliciously meta and eeeeee.

( Thing I enjoyed (including possible spoilers) )


So yes. I loved it. I would very much like to see it again. And I think I may just be pushed to Trek fannishness, though I must watch more of the old series before I feel comfortable enough for that. Can't decide if I'd rather write TOS fic or movieverse fic, though.

I'd forgotten how nice it is to see and enjoy a movie divorced from its fandom. I'm sure once I start reading reactions I'll start realizing things the movie did wrong or ways the new movie has Greivously Wronged Trek Fandom, but for now I'm riding the squee and I'm glad not to have to listen to anybody wanking themselves dry over the movie or baiting oldfen/noobs/shippers/nonshippers just to start a fight. Perhaps this is trying to tell me something about my own preferred level of fannish participation?

More points of fannishness to come later, plus real life, but I should go to bed. Night, flist.