Donna; period-accurate vocabulary
So... I finally got around to obtaining the four 2009 Dr Who specials which weren't in my boxed set of Seasons 1-6, and so I have caught up on what happened to the Tenth Doctor before he turned into the Eleventh Doctor... and I hated the end.
That epilogue round of pay-offs to selected old companions I thought stank! The idea that you set someone up with a sexual encounter with a third (unknowing!) party as a way to say 'thanks' is just low, as is the idea that what he did to Donna (and goes on having done) can be paid off by a big lottery win... this is so empty in both vision and decency that .... urrrhhhh.
The awfulness of that epilogue is what is staying with me now, but when I saw the 'New Doctor' episode I was depressed, as well, putting it together with 'Journey's End', and went in indignant haste and posted on AO3 to try to rewrite that history - which, apart from the three-sentences fictions, was the first time I have ventured out of Narnia in fanfiction. That was before I saw the last special ('The End of Time') and I suppose it's now totally not possible that my story could happen. Is that ('The End of Time') the last we see of Donna? :(
On a different topic: trying to get period-accurate vocabulary. I flailed around a bit recently, trying to find a way to say something like "clever-clogs" in a way which was likely to have been said by one schoolboy (a Pevensie) to another in 1940ish as well as being understandable and not a stumbling-block to readers. I didn't actually succeed (not a big problem) but I found that http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english has (down the bottom, RHS; it only shows up after you have looked up a word) a section which graphs usage of whichever word it is you're looking up over the last ten years, fifty years, hundred years or three hundred years! I have just, as an example, looked up the word "spiffing",and seen that it was (apparently) first used around 1770, that it fell into disuse quickly, rose again through the first half of the twentieth century, and then declined towards the end of that century, hitting a peak (discounting an inexplicable spike in 1963) around 1950. Spiffing!
That epilogue round of pay-offs to selected old companions I thought stank! The idea that you set someone up with a sexual encounter with a third (unknowing!) party as a way to say 'thanks' is just low, as is the idea that what he did to Donna (and goes on having done) can be paid off by a big lottery win... this is so empty in both vision and decency that .... urrrhhhh.
The awfulness of that epilogue is what is staying with me now, but when I saw the 'New Doctor' episode I was depressed, as well, putting it together with 'Journey's End', and went in indignant haste and posted on AO3 to try to rewrite that history - which, apart from the three-sentences fictions, was the first time I have ventured out of Narnia in fanfiction. That was before I saw the last special ('The End of Time') and I suppose it's now totally not possible that my story could happen. Is that ('The End of Time') the last we see of Donna? :(
On a different topic: trying to get period-accurate vocabulary. I flailed around a bit recently, trying to find a way to say something like "clever-clogs" in a way which was likely to have been said by one schoolboy (a Pevensie) to another in 1940ish as well as being understandable and not a stumbling-block to readers. I didn't actually succeed (not a big problem) but I found that http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english has (down the bottom, RHS; it only shows up after you have looked up a word) a section which graphs usage of whichever word it is you're looking up over the last ten years, fifty years, hundred years or three hundred years! I have just, as an example, looked up the word "spiffing",and seen that it was (apparently) first used around 1770, that it fell into disuse quickly, rose again through the first half of the twentieth century, and then declined towards the end of that century, hitting a peak (discounting an inexplicable spike in 1963) around 1950. Spiffing!