First, some RL things! I should have posted about this ages ago, but I have an Etsy store up and running under the name
RavenCrossing, selling my origami jewelry. I did the April craft fair mentioned a few entries ago and it went okay-ish - I was one of the sellers who did the best business there, which isn't saying much as there were loads of booths that made no sales at all. But there are definitely more craft fairs in my future! I just need to find the right ones and get some applications out.
Also on the business front, I've sold several pieces of jewelry to a local antiques/gift shop (
The Precious Possum) owned by a family friend! So that means my jewelry will be for sale/on display in his shop front, which is on Main Street and gets a lot of bridal registry business as well as a lot of walk-ins. Publicityyyy~! :D AND I have a commission to do the table centerpieces for a friend's wedding, which is excellent! I wouldn't say the business is rolling in yet, but I haven't fallen on my face either. :)
So with that bit of news out of the way, it's time for some another long entry of fandomy blather.
First: opinions on Doctor Who, take 87.
I should preface this by saying that I have not seen ANY of the Eleventh Doctor stuff, that I may or may not intend to watch it in the future, and that no matter how much you may or may not love it and want to tell me about it, it has NO BEARING on my opinion of/critical ponderings about seasons 1-4. They're hardly even the same show, are they? Old-New-Who and New-New-Who. The jump from 10 to 11 with a total overhaul of companions and writing staff feels like as much of a reboot as series 1 was in 2005.
With that caveat, I want to look back at some of my seasons 1-4 opinions with some hindsight. Not as much with the towering inferno of rage, as I'm sure lots of people will be pleased to know. Just some things that have occurred to me in my years (years now? wow) of chewing over why my viewer/show relationship with DW crashed and burned so badly after a long period of it being THE BEST SHIT EVER and #1 in my fandoms.
When pressed for an opinion, I usually say that Nine is "my" Doctor and Donna is "my" companion. But I also consider series 3 to be my absolute favorite season, and not even just a little bit my favorite, but my favorite in a Secretariatish way, 31 lengths and still pulling ahead. While other seasons contain episodes I love, season 3 as a whole hits every single aesthetic, narrative and character-development button I have. It is simply the one season that functions best as an articulate storyline within the range of my personal taste; Human Nature/Family of Blood, Blink and the Master trilogy, Tinkerbell Jesus notwithstanding, are my all-time favorite episodes of the whole show, with Father's Day, Impossible Planet/Satan Pit, and Midnight following a little ways behind like hopeful puppies. (You can see the way my taste runs just from that list of favorites...) In short, season 3 was DW's high point for me as entertainment. A show I could look into deeply if I wanted to or enjoy on a surface level, just enough angst but not too much messiah!Doctor (excepting Dobby and Tinkerbell Jesus, LSKDJGLKJ;ASHG), and the best DW meme ever spawned (emo John Smith). Also season 3 has a companion who has a solid arc, stands on her own remarkably well without being crippled by having "love interest" shoehorned into her personality, and actually gains lasting strength, independence and empowerment from her experience of traveling with the Doctor (rather than being led around, emotionally manipulated and ultimately abandoned, as Rose was, or having her empowerment forcibly denied to her, as with Donna).
So if I love this season so much, why am I relatively uninvested in the characters of Martha and Ten? Not to say that I don't care about them, but it's a more surface care, more objective. What I've realized is that when I call Nine and Donna "my" Doctor and companion, I really mean that they are the "me" Doctor and companion. It's not that I am entertained by them so much as that I identify with them, often to a degree that makes watching their seasons uncomfortable. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but in a way that is uncomfortable to share with other people; the fact that I see so much of myself in the way Nine and Donna (and Ianto as well, for the same reasons) are written makes it impossible for me to watch them as objectively as I can watch Ten and Martha. I can pick apart Ten and Martha, enjoy the mental aerobic workout of a good meta analysis, and then walk away when I want to. I can't walk away from the aspects of Nine, Donna and Ianto that are reflected in me, and which reflect on my real life, and it is deeply unsettling to analyze those aspects in fictional characters because I can't help also applying them to myself.
I can draw a pretty clear distinction between three different ways in which I "like" characters. First, the "I have a huge girly crush on them" sense (Desmond Hume, Sirius Black, Tony Stark, Jack Harkness). I may also find these characters deep and complex and fun to think about, but I would say that the primary reason I noticed them and became attracted to them was because... I was attracted to them. Second, there are characters I like in the "I want to be them because they are badass/smart/funny/embody some sort of ideal I aspire to" sense (Aeryn Sun, L, Sabriel, Sokka, Martha Jones). I don't want to be with them, I want to be them. Lastly are the characters I like (if like is the right word) in the "hitting way too close to home" sense (John Crichton, Vash, Remus Lupin, Zuko, Sakaki from Azumanga Daioh, Tohru from Furuba - and Nine, Donna & Ianto).
The first two groups follow pretty consistent types. I mean, look at Desmond, Sirius, Tony and Jack and tell me I don't have a type. ;D And the characters I want to be tend to be assertive, confident, skilled and practical. The third group seems to veer all over the place. We have some quiet, reserved characters, some loud and outgoing characters, some fighters and some pacifists, some more intelligent than others, etc. etc. The common element that ties them together, albeit loosely, and that ties them to me, is an overwhelming tendency towards being a
Type A Stepford Smiler. Some don't smile as much - Sakaki, Ianto - but the idea of the composed, unassuming mask hiding everything going on inside is still very much in play.
How pathetically emo, right, that their common element is just that they wallow in angst a lot? And I know that it is an almost universal human trait to feel isolated and alone, to wear a "public" identity that is not the same as who you are in private, and to feel some angst sometimes. I'm not claiming any kind of uniqueness for myself. But I do think that there's more to the commonality of these characters than a simple angstfest. The characters I identify with tend to keep up a Stepford Smiler persona not to cover up egocentric self-pity, but to cover up a semi-permanent existential crisis - the constant, somewhat resigned, somewhat guilty feeling that they are a waste of space, that they have to work every day to justify their continued existence. These characters also all share a desperate desire to be liked and needed by others, frequently to their own detriment as they find serious confrontation difficult.
Specifically in terms of Doctor Who, Nine is this way because he's suffering from massive survivor's guilt without quite the same manic egocentrism that Ten develops later. You get a stronger sense from Nine that he is desperate to justify his not having died with the rest of the Time Lords, and he does so by forcing on the old grin and companion/adventure lifestyle. When he changes into Ten, there is a strong sense that it is because he has finally recovered a bit and become less brittle (for the duration of Rose-as-companion, anyway). Ianto is also suffering from survivor's guilt after Canary Wharf and Lisa, etc etc. I can identify with their reactions to trauma and I can identify with the kind of people they are, their personalities, their attitudes - but I cannot specifically identify with a huge trauma followed by PTSD or survivor's guilt. However, with Donna, the self-identification is a thousand times more acute because she lives a normal life. An average modern life, job and fiancee, living with her parents, slipping into a persona of brash shrewishness because it at least elicits a reaction from people, it feels like a way of clawing at the world to prove that she exists in it. And IDK, maybe I read too much into her, but I believe she is the way she is because she feels worthless. And over the course of season 4, she slowly sheds that spiky persona that had pushed so many people away, and she reaches almost a state of enlightenment, I think. She is so much kinder and in tune with her circumstances by the end of the season. Her whole arc examined a lot of behavioral failures that I struggle with all the time, and it did so beautifully and concisely, and I felt like Donna was being slowly healed and me along with her. It was empowering in the most intense and personal way.
Mom pointed out to me that I have been ten times more judgmental and cynical about everything I watch since the end of DW season 4. She's right, and the whole ugly business really hurts. Still. It makes me angry all over again to realize that not only did the end of s4 forcibly violate and deny Donna's experiences and empowerment, it also somehow knocked me back down into the snappish contrariness that Donna's journey had helped me realize I needed to overcome. But now - once bitten, etc. It's increasingly difficult to let myself get truly, deeply invested in something, especially if I spot a character with whom I strongly identify. I'm so tired of mentally "wearing" characters I identify with as a sort of fictional avatar, only to somewhere down the line get a slap in the face and a gut-punch telling me that, BTW, you are worthless, lol.
Well, there. A couple years after the fact and I'm finally able to write a coherent analysis of my towering inferno of rage. It feels good to have reached a point where I can at least be articulate about it. Ianto was a similar reaction - and made all the worse by coming right on the heels of the end of s4, when I had set all my hopes on Torchwood series 3 being able to make me feel a bit better after the Donna fiasco, and Children of Earth aired the week of my birthday, so I was super-excited to get new TW as a present. Ianto had a similar personal journey, what with coming out of his shell, finally feeling accepted and loved and a part of the team in his own right, feeling like he'd finally earned the right to continue living. By the end of season 2 he had more or less emerged from his Stepford Butler persona and packed on a few pounds of self-esteem and badassery, so he was quickly moving into the very rare overlap of characters I identify with and want to be. The thing is, if he had died as some sort of heroic sacrifice preceded by a legitimate moral dilemma, or indeed if he had died for any narrative-, plot- or character development-related reason at all, then I would have been very sad and probably angry but I would have gotten over it. Like Sirius Black, RIP never forget etc, but there was a clear narrative reason Sirius was the one who died in that book, and it served multiple narrative purposes later on, most notably breaking Harry out of his CAPSLOCK RAGE, for which everyone was thankful. (But then Remus, THE ONE WITH WHOM I IDENTIFY, dies for not much reason at all except for the sake of some poetic symmetry at the end... I AM SEEING A PATTERN.) But, as I was saying, it was the sheer bloodyminded pointless ignorant vapid stupidity of Ianto's death that sent me into a roaring fit, and still does. That entire scene MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL.
Ah. Um. I'm losing my coherence, so I'd better leave off that.
Anyway. Ugh. I feel like I started this with a couple of other fandoms in mind that I was going to poke with sticks for a while, but I've forgotten what they were and it's late. I apologize for the worst-organized post ever. Promise I'll stop harping on about Donna and Ianto. I just wanted to eventually be able to explain without yelling, and now I have done, and so I am moving towards recovery. Joy! :)
On a lighter note, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard for several days straight that my throat is sore and I've given myself a mild headache. But a few days is how long it's taken me to watch all of
The Yogscast's Minecraft adventure videos and I have not stopped wheezing and crying and herniating the whole way through. They. Are. Hysterical. The videos start a LONG way back on their Youtube channel, and the first "season" is simply labeled "Minecraft." Simon and Lewis are the main members of the
Yogscast, which basically consists of those two doing multiplayer Let's Plays, with a fair number of game reviews and animated podcasts thrown in. Pretty much everything they do is pure gold, simply because they play off each other so perfectly - Lewis a bit more level-headed but easily distracted, Simon the sort of player who sets fire to wooden floors to see what will happen. The Minecraft videos simply have to be seen to be believed, though. It started off as them doing a basic multiplayer Let's Play of Minecraft, but since MC has no story, they quickly got bored and began doing random shit in the game and creating their own improvised story. Then some friends got involved, basically "acting" as NPCs, building elaborate in-game sets behind the scenes and turning the whole thing into an RPG-esque machinima. As far as I know it's only loosely scripted, and a lot of Simon & Lewis's bemusement and shock at the storyline and the sets sounds genuine.
tl;dr HILARIOUS GAMING VIDEOS, I WATCH THEM. And so should you! Then you, too, can say "OLD WOMAN I DEMAND YOUR FINEST BACON!" or "That'ssss a very nice everything you have there..." or "I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole! Diggy diggy hole!"
WHERE IS DRUGS
-rave