Doctor Who News!

This is literally almost nothing, but it's Doctor Who, so it's inducing heart attacks and hyperventilation all over the place! Is he a good man? Does Clara even know? Do we???

And there's more!

• The premier will be "feature length"!
• It comes back on Saturday, August 23 at 8pm on BBC1--and it seems to be the same date for the US, too! Yay no delay!
• There's a new character who looks like she's Victorian (though, really, who even knows since everyone sort of looks Victorian lately) called The Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere, among other guest stars
• There's still apparently no lady writers!
• The Paternoster Gang will come back!

Personally, I'm still scrabbling for the show. I miss it like a missing limb. A limb that just turned into someone else's limb, and might not be a nice limb anymore. Which I hope is just worry-mongering, because Eleven was dark enough, and there was that lovely lightening of the mood in the 50th, and I really want a Doctor that's not like slamming face first into misery, don't you? 

Here's my hopes:

• He's cranky, but not dark
• Clara really gets to shine, the way Sarah Jane was great with Three, but shone with Four
• The new characters are ongoing--not just one-and-done, and that there's LOTS of companions--I always want there to be lots of Companions, like the Doctor is leading a school field trip
• The core story is Finding Gallifrey, not some other thing that isn't Finding Gallifrey, unless that other thing is super cool and then leads to the right one
• Twelve^ solves things differently--like, instead of going on the warpath, be comes at it sideways and negates the need for confrontation at all, or something
• Clara stays in the Tardis instead of always going home in between
• The return of more Classic Villains!

What do you want to see?

Twelve Papers I Haven't Written About Loki

1. Loki Stole My Feels: The Overwhelmingly Sympathetic Fan Response To Loki
2. He Killed 80 People In Two Days: Loki as a mass murderer
3. Loki For Love In All The Wrong Places: Loki as the damaged child of a questionable father
4. Winter (God) Of Our Discontent: Loki, Thor, Odin and Lauffey as Shakespearean tragedy
5. The Sassy Loki Show, featuring Thor: How the trickster almost got his own movie
6. A Portal Found By Ramming Yourself Into A Wall: Secret suicidal tendencies in the immortal being
7. Tom Hiddleston Is Why We Love That Bag Of Crazy: A dissertation
8. Both Of You Were Born To Be King (but only one of you gets to): Power dynamics in royal Asgardian home-politics
9. It's Too Late: Loki as the pawn who fought back
10. Unanswered Questions: Seven things we still don't know about Loki, his plan, and his activities while off-screen
11. It's In His Nature: Why we want to see Loki redeemed, and why it probably won't work
12. So What's Up With The Incest: Loki, Thor, and the tendency to read them as shippy

We need a channel called Second Seasons

So it's a pain every Nerd knows well. A new show happens. It's about robots and cops, or space cowboys, or dudes with microchips in their heads. You think it's a good idea, so you watch it. And you love it. And for every Sleepy Hollow that gets renewed on the third episode and given five more weeks to play out its story next season, there's an Almost Human, an Intelligence, a Firefly. Good shows that were never given a chance, probably because of FOX. Shows you loved despite the fact that you knew that loving it was a curse that would kill it, like you're some sort of show-destroyer who should just stay hidden from TV...or is that just me?

It's like that gif up there.

So here's my proposal:

Since SyFy has suffered from the sort of channel drift that means the creator of Farscape is now covered in ghost hunters and pro wrestling, and isn't rescuing shows like it did with Stargate, no matter how awesome they'd be in their lineup, we need a channel that is just for rescuing shows recently cancelled by skittish networks. 

Think about it. How many times has a wonderful, well-written (or at least well-conceived) show not been given a chance, and we hear "the creators are shopping it to other networks", and then we never hear from them again, unless we're talking about Veronica Mars? Well, what if this was the other channel? What if there was a built-in channel that is dedicated to giving another season to shows with vocal, but maybe smaller-than-networks-like new shows? And giving those shows' creators and writers enough leeway to do what they wanted to do the first time? And giving them the chance to prove that the show really was a hit waiting to happen?

After that, the channel can keep them, or move them to a more traditional sister channel just for the ones that do prove themselves, or sell them back to their original networks with a nice smug profit, or allow the creators to close the series the way they always wanted to--whichever works best for everyone involved. It can be a niche cable channel like TNT, or a premium channel like Starz or HBO, or it can be a new breed of internet channel, or it can be a figurative "channel"--a way to get shows made, and then sell whole seasons to Netflix or something.

The point is, there'd be a way to get more goodness out of good things, without destroying them in the process, AND there'd be a safety net--a place to take these shows if the home networks drop them, as well as a competitor that the home networks know is just waiting for them to cancel something, possibly incentivizing (I hate that word) them into giving more effort, leeway, chance and support to the sorts of shows Second Seasons would like to have!

And! Second Seasons could pick up any show it wants, if it's off the air. It could give new seasons, or TV-movie-wrap ups to all of those shows that sit like sore spots in all our fandom psyches! Hell, if they're really bold, they could even do a TV version of Kindle Worlds, and sort of legalize fanfic--let original writers and actors show what they would have liked to have happened, and have guest writers tell stories they might have told, given a chance. 

What do you think? Would you watch this channel?

Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark

Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark:

"You can’t even blame that on a DC/Marvel divide because Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies were very concerned with the effect of superheroes on normal people. The Dark Knight trilogy, almost to its own detriment in the end, cared a great deal about how a superhero would impact the lives of the people who live in the city he occupies. But even though Nolan executive produced Man of Steel, no such care was shown in that movie."

'via Blog this'

Good geek from others - Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark

Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark:

"Snyder & Co. confused compromising the world around Superman with compromising Superman himself. It’s not killing Zod that does it—that moment actually feels justified—it’s just the complete disregard for loss of human life occurring throughout the third act. Yes, it is realistic that if two hyper-powerful beings flying through the air engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight, they would topple buildings and people would die. But it isn’t realistic that Superman would so damningly forget himself and endanger more people than necessary by not simply luring Zod to a remote location for their showdown. Lois and the Army guys are working on shutting down the machine destroying the city center. There’s no reason for Superman to be there, except that the filmmakers really wanted to show city-wide destruction with no thought to what that means for the characters."

'via Blog this'

Good geek from others - Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark

Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark:

"Snyder & Co. confused compromising the world around Superman with compromising Superman himself. It’s not killing Zod that does it—that moment actually feels justified—it’s just the complete disregard for loss of human life occurring throughout the third act. Yes, it is realistic that if two hyper-powerful beings flying through the air engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight, they would topple buildings and people would die. But it isn’t realistic that Superman would so damningly forget himself and endanger more people than necessary by not simply luring Zod to a remote location for their showdown. Lois and the Army guys are working on shutting down the machine destroying the city center. There’s no reason for Superman to be there, except that the filmmakers really wanted to show city-wide destruction with no thought to what that means for the characters."

'via Blog this'

Good geek from others - Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark

Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark:

"Cap is Cap is Cap. But Bucky is fluid, an evolving character whose struggle is not with the world in which he lives but with the man that world has forced him to become. Bucky Barnes is the one undergoing the Hero’s Journey, not Captain America."

You guys, this article is so much fun to read.



'via Blog this'

Good geek from other people - Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark

Captain America ruined Superman for me | Cinesnark:

"I don’t mind a morally ambiguous Superman. I don’t mind a Superman who maybe doesn’t like the human race all that much. I don’t mind a Superman who’s willing to break the villain’s neck if that’s what it takes to stop him. But I do mind that Superman never seemed to realize that lives were being lost—by the thousands—as he face-punched his way through downtown Metropolis."

YES YES YES YES YES SO MUCH THIS YES.



'via Blog this'

The problem with Hawaii Five-0 (the new one) is Strong Female Characters instead of female characters who are strong

Okay, first? This title is totally clickbait.

Second? I really like the reboot of Hawaii Five-0. I just keep getting wildly annoyed at how it Doesn't Know What To Do With Women.

Evidence:

1. They switched Classic Kono to Female Kono...and then didn't give her anything to do. 
2. They brought in a cool double agent, made her likable, gave her a great relationship with the team...and then shot her in the heart after being gone for ages, in which most of her story apparently happened off screen.
3. They replaced her with a taller, more classically pretty agent...who then got transfered because she was going soft.
4. They sent Kono on a lame, ages-long story where she was literally only looking for the boyfriend who lied to her and betrayed her and almost got her killed more than once, and presented it as a great love story without ever dealing with all that squickiness.
5. While Kono was gone, they brought Catherine to the front, made her capable, made her funny, and then as soon as Kono came back, shuffled her off with her ex.
6. They brought in Steve's badass RED-style mom, and then continually waffle about what any of it means and whether she even has a moral or story center at all.

Which means:

1. They can apparently only have one sort of woman, and only one at a time.
2. A lot of the women are flat our victims because of love that isn't really love.
3. They're either girlfriends or they're liabilities because of not being girlfriends.

I read this article recently, "We're losing all our strong female characters to Trinity Syndrome", that put it all in context for me, this whole thing that's been bugging me about the series: It's totally Trinity Syndrome, and the writers don't seem to be all that concerned about it. Or, at least, they aren't in all that much of a hurry to figure out how to make Kono less annoying, or how to keep more than one lady in the cast at once, or how to make them valid, competent, independent characters. I mean, it can be argued that the men are co-dependent fuckups, too, but they're not getting shot in the heart or shuffled off when they get sweet on someone.

Here's some options I think would be cool:

1. Have Kono break up with David because he's dangerous and has a history of lying, and let him solve his trust issues on his own without using her as a crutch and a built-in victim. Meanwhile, have her actually do something on the team; at the beginning, she was the one on the ground, and then she was moved to the computers in the office, and then she was the one with the most messed-up storylines.
2. Bring another girl into the team or it's support staff. Better yet, a few other girls. Make them friends with each other away from and not involving the boys. Make them different sorts of girls--a touch chick, a quiet nerdy girl, a gristly veteran, a mom that's not a selfish weirdo.
3. Let the girls rescue themselves sometimes.
4. Let the girls rescue the guys sometimes.
5. Let everyone not need rescuing because they're all literally supposed to be the best of the best, so they can all get themselves out of problems.
6. When the writers catch themselves going down the same old streets, have the girl about to be shot kick the gun out of the guy's hand and stop it before it happens, have the girl who has had crappy boyfriends in the past see the same behavior before she's victimized by it and get out, have the girls refuse to be the reason the boys do stupid things. It's find if they're weak at the beginning; but any character has to learn from mistakes and get better at dealing with life, or they're flat.
7. Let the girls be equals to the boys, and the boys acknowledge that without any drama or machoness (there's plenty of macho in this show already), and have everyone go to whoever has the best skills and info for the problem, regardless of gender.

So what do you think? 

How to survive a whole summer hiatus from your favorite show

Now is the summer of our discontent. Or, more specifically, the time when new episodes of all* the Good Shows are ending / ended, and the reruns and summer-reality-tv-fill-ins are just beginning. If you're like me, the whole idea of a cliffhanger just about ruins your calm, and the concept of waiting for things is not one of your many talents.

So here's some ways to survive until the fall**, when shows come back.

1. Rewatch everything that exists up until this point. Bonus points if you liveblog / livetweet it and then discus every minute detail with the fandom until the show comes back.
2. Really get involved in the fandom. Easiest if you're already rewatching. Find the discussion sites--I like Tumblr, but Twitter is popular, too, and easier to get feedback from the actual actors and crew. Find the fansites and groups. Start making fanart. Watch vids on YouTube that put everything into different contexts. Debate the merits of plot points, worldbuilding, characterization. Go into the new season so full of knowledge.
3. Read fanfic. There are some very dedicated fic writers who will fill the whole summer gap with amazing stories--I once spent a summer reading what was basically a whole alternate season for Stargate SG1, and years later did the same thing for The Mentalist. The really good writers have the characters down pat, but don't have to listen to producers and network people, and so can do things the shows will never do!
1. And, of course, there's also all the bad fic, weird fic, crossover fic, and endless supplies of both fluff and smut...
4. Write your own fic. I wouldn't recommend publishing it if you're planning on being an actual paid author unless you're really good at fending off lawsuits and fan-based crazy***, but even if no one else in the world ever sees it, it can ease the pain and work through the stress of waiting forever. 
1. Then again, if you're writing Veronica Mars fic, or GI Joe, or fic for just about anything from Wildstorm Comics, you can set the stories up on Kindle Worlds and become an official part of the fannon, recognized by the actual people who actually made the actual thing. Those properties are outside the scope of shows on summer hiatus just now, but sometimes revisiting an old fandom can help with the pain of a current one, too.
5. Get the DVDs and look at all the behind-the-scenes stuff, the deleted scenes, the gag reel, and cry over how perfect they all are. This applies especially to Supernatural, when you're talking about epic gag reels, but pretty much any show worth the cost of its DVDs will have nummy nuggets of awesome to give you on the special features.
6. Go back to something beloved that's no longer painful. Fandoms rarely go away--they just end and their active status gets replaced by newer shows that eat your brain. It's sometimes useful to go back to something complete that you loved before, and remember why you loved it--and distract yourself from the current ones.
7. Find a new Fandom. There's never enough time in the day / week / season to see every episode of every show you want to watch, so the summer, when the series that take up the most of your time leave, is a great time to check out those other shows that you missed this past season--or in previous entire runs.
8. Change mediums. This discussion is about easing the pain of tv shows, so why not switch it up and feed the fandom centers of your brain a string of movies, or a bunch of books, or something made for Netflix or the Internet, or that new album from that musician you like? A brain with a lot of other  interests in it is a happy brain, and a happy brain is less likely to take it so personally when a show does something crazy, and implode on you, ruining your life.
9. Unplug entirely. How terrible! But sometimes, a body and a brain needs to take time off the things we love that are eating up too much of our conscious minds as much as it needs to take time away from the things we hate that eat up our lives.

How do you deal with hiatus?

NOTES:

*Well, BBC has some good stuff just starting, and some of the expensive pay channels do, and there's TBS, but all the network shows that give us more episodes a year and therefore more to feed off of are done.

**Or the spring, in the case of Sleepy Hollow...

***Like Cassandra Clare.

Slash! The game of crack fic!

Okay, I know that this is yet another of the card-based story-telling games I've basically become addicted to recently and can never get anyone to play with me, but this one, guys? This one is made for fans. Like, the weirdest and most awesome fans. Like, the strangest parts of Tumblr fans.

Meet Slash: Romance Without Boundaries.

Basically, whoever is going puts down a card with a character on it, and everyone else plays a card from their hand with a character they think would be the best pairing for them, and then everyone argues about which is the best and tells the stories to prove it.

A random selection of characters from my deck:

• Professor Moriarty
• Dr Girlfriend
• SwamptThing
• Treebeard
• Zatanna
• Cobra Commander
• Daenerys Targaryen
• Darth Vader
• Jake the Dog
• Ke$ha
• Patrick Swayze

Just think how bizarre this game could get!

Now I just need to find weirdos to play it with me.