Three Contributions
Mar. 3rd, 2010 01:09 amFirst, the latest member of the Red Lantern Corps.

from Champ
Then a reaction to recent, spoilery developments in Blackest Night.

And finally, a legality scan.


series:foxtrot
char:sinestro
event:blackest night
(fanart tag)

from Champ
Then a reaction to recent, spoilery developments in Blackest Night.

And finally, a legality scan.


series:foxtrot
char:sinestro
event:blackest night
(fanart tag)

no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 06:48 am (UTC)"Daleks are the race supreme!
Your race will die with anguished screams!
Your end is near, accept your fate,
Sinestro corps: EXTERMINATE!"
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Date: 2010-03-03 11:10 pm (UTC)I'd love to see something like that on Doctor Who proper. XD
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Date: 2010-03-03 07:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 07:01 am (UTC)I guess the secondary question is: does she have a lima bean fetish?
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Date: 2010-03-03 07:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 04:20 pm (UTC)Honestly, all this retrograde John Gray Mars-Venus "humor" is why I skip over 90% of the newspaper "funnies." Well, that and the painfully mediocre drawings.
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Date: 2010-03-03 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 09:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 12:47 pm (UTC)I suppose it's not your fault, really; your biggest exposure to Daleks has been from their lacklustre appearances in the new series. Apart from the poorly-named 'Dalek', the RTD writing team approached the main villains the same way they did every other aspect: in the manner of a toddler on a sugar rush. You should have seen the subtle, oppressive terror employed in their first-ever appearance, or the Frankenstein-like emergence of their hatred before Davros in "Genesis of the Daleks". Back before Davies mucked everything up they were proper hide-behind-the-sofa fierce, not pushovers who could be wiped out entirely after every single adventure.
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Date: 2010-03-03 01:32 pm (UTC)"THIS IS NOT WAR! THIS IS PEST CONTROL!"
"WE WOULD DESTROY THE CYBERMEN WITH ONE DALEK!"
"YOU ARE SUPERIOR IN ONLY ONE RESPECT; YOU ARE BETTER AT DYING."
I just love everything about the Daleks. Probably my favorite race of evil aliens.
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Date: 2010-03-04 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 12:31 am (UTC)"You're odd" is entirely different to "you're terrifying". It's impossible to take them seriously, and I'm not talking about the last four or five years or whatever (although agreed that RTD needs to back away from the keyboard. Or at least seek immediate psychiatric help for his problems, 'cause evidently, the man has quite a few).
There is a not a single appearance where they haven't left me with the grand feeling, "meh". Oh no, the pepper pots want to kill everything, I'm trembling in my boots. Trembling, I tell you. They're just not scary. I mean, they're not, I don't know how else to rationalise that. And it's the constant press -- maybe it's the British way of storytelling, maybe it's a lack of budget or whatever, but the entire Whoverse seems built on telling rather than showing. The Doctor has press telling us he's great and wonderful and heroic, and up close and personal he's a wanker. The Daleks have press telling us how they're terrifying, and Jackie Tyler with a big gun can make one go "boom". Again, I'm shaking in my boots. And I think you're giving them far too much credit given the wealth of alien creatures running amok in fiction, at that.
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Date: 2010-03-04 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 05:32 am (UTC)I find that's the problem with Doctor Who. The show has *such* a fanbase, and has been around for *so* long, that not-enjoying the franchise (and finding the Daleks about as scary as wet cardboard) puts you in a tiny little minority.
And people -- a lot of people -- feel quite threatened when you really don't care for it. When I told my friends that, after watching the show I found it quite lacking, my geek-cred got shredded (as one of my friends put it*). And it does seem like, you're not an acceptable-sci-fi-nerd unless you know and love Doctor Who. My exposure was *mostly* Nine and Ten, and I'm gonna give Eleven a try, but no, it all really turns me off. Don't get me started on the technobabble, either.
* -- to be fair, that same week I'd (1) admitted to liking the movie version of "Twilight", (2) become a fan of Australian football and (3) attended a Britney Spears concert when she was in Australia. In my defence, (1) the movie was a damn side more entertaining than the books, (2) some of those players are hot, and (3) one of my best friends worked at the concert-place and was given some free tickets. Still.
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Date: 2010-03-04 06:17 am (UTC)As I recall, everyone was pissed about that. Rose gets sent to an alternate universe, eventually ending up with her very own Doctor, Martha eventually leaves, and gets married--to the only other prominent black guy in the Davies run--and Donna, who is pretty much the anti-Rose, gets her memories wiped, despite the presence of a device that sucks the Time Lord out of people which played a major part the previous season, and could doubtless be reconfigured with thirty seconds of Davies' Patented Dramatic Breathless Technobabble.
So, yeah. Issues.
>And people -- a lot of people -- feel quite threatened when you really don't care for it. When I told my friends that, after watching the show I found it quite lacking, my geek-cred got shredded (as one of my friends put it*)
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinio
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Date: 2010-03-04 10:43 am (UTC)Oh hell yes. The Doctor can do anything, has a space-ship-time-ship that can do anything, has a sonic screwdriver that does whatever the plot requires it to do, can monologue in insane technobabble longer than anyone in human history -- but Donna still got screwed. And never mind the theme of the season was, "Look, despite her lack of confidence, Donna Noble really is brilliant and wonderful and brave and oh wait no she's not, never mind."
And there were so many easy ways to write Catherine Tate out of the show without doing *that* to her. So mad.
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Date: 2010-03-04 12:55 pm (UTC)Bad Wolf Byebye by *mimi-na on deviantART
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Date: 2010-03-04 08:21 am (UTC)I can't stand chavvy old Rose Tyler, I don't like the new Cybermen compared with the classic ones, I'm appalled by the writer's ridiculous need to appeal to the kid's audience first for a sci-fi series originally intended for adults (imagine them remaking a series of Star Trek that way), so that the climax of many episodes seems like it's been written by a 8-year-old - "And then, erm, er, ALL THE DALEKS ARE DISAPPEARED FOREVVER AN' EVER!", "And then the Master dances around and puts the Doctor inna cage 'cos he's silly!", etc. - while simultaneously upping the body count to troubling levels. The last two episodes displayed graphic cannibalism as Christmas teatime entertainment. What?
Also, Simm's Master was rubbish. Give us a new direction, sure, even give us a Master who smiles a bit, but make sure he looks capable of tying his bloody shoelaces together.
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Date: 2010-03-04 11:12 am (UTC)This.
Oh my lord, this.
That was really the deal-breaker, for me, on RTD's run. The sheer number of bodies that piled up around the Doctor while everyone else sung his praises. What is this, 90s comics? My picture of the Doctor is the guy who doesn't save people's lives, he just apologises for the fact that he won't. And if people weren't dying en masse, they're killing themselves in horrific and gory fashion -- because that's what he inspires in people. RTD seems to have this idea that the only way to be a good human is to be a dead one. And for me, it approached snuff films.
There's aliens in a school that the Doctor, Rose, Sarah-Jane and Mickey are investigating -- of course the teaching staff die grisly deaths. An entire ship of people are killed by a robot crew (where he goes back to France), the angels on the Titanic ship kill probably *thousands of people* , a guy gets torn apart by a werewolf, whenever the Cybermen are onscreen we get screaming victims having their brains ripped out of their bodies. Whenever a monster is on the loose, it has to have killed dozens before the Doctor stops it. The Doctor finds that the Daleks, stuck in the 1930s, have murdered thousands of people -- but it's okay because he manages to save the pig-face guy (he doesn't actually reverse the mutant-pig-process, just keeps the guy alive).
A chick throws herself out of an airlock and into the sun (!) in "42", which is where it just got funny. What, she couldn't have been getting mauled to death by a werewolf, having her brain ripped out of her body, getting her limbs hacked off, being electrocuted and lasered to death ALL AT THE SAME TIME? That wouldn't have been suitably dramatic?
("Midnight" was also pretty funny. Oh noes, it's wrong to throw someone out of the airlock! ... unless the Doctor's life is in danger, then it's fine)
Steven Moffatt's episodes seem to have the least body-counts, but even then -- in "Blink" (which I absolutely loved either way, but...), the Doctor's plan on stopping the weeping angels is contingent on leaving those two people (Sally's girl friend, and the black cop) trapped in the past. As opposed to figuring out a way to stop the angels and then using his fucking time machine to nip back and save them.
I mean, it's too much! I can't even think about "Waters of Mars", where the dilemma of the day is, "Should I actually bother to save these people, or just let them all die screaming?" And by the time he does get off his ass and do something, they're all dead anyway! Most of them. And of course, one of the survivors kills themselves in a horrific fashion because that's what the Doctor does to people.
And I'm sorry, I really am (and now I even sound like Ten) if any huge fans of the franchise are reading this and becoming offended at my criticism. But it's just too much. I want my heroes -- particularly the ones whose press is a pretty constant "He's so amazing and wonderful and awesome and heroic!" -- to actually save people, not wander around leaving nothing but carnage behind him.
And I know, that's not the Doctor's fault, it's this pathetic attitude of his creative team to crank up the body count higher and higher, and you know. I just can't deal with that. Like I said above, RTD needs to see a competent psychiatrist, because this constant need his characters display to commit suicide in gory fashion, I just absolutely hated it. I'm sorry. But I did.
I don't even remember which episodes display "Graphic cannibalism as teatime entertainment", because that's a lot of them. And it all just got too much for me.
I remember watching "Gridlock" and being *sure* the two kidnappers would die horrible deaths, only to be shocked when they actually lived. But never fear! An episode back, a living screaming teenage boy gets ripped to shreds by three alien witches. Hurray!
Fuck you RTD. Fuck. You.
I apologise to the Who-fans in the audience for this rant. But I stand by it.
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Date: 2010-03-04 12:46 pm (UTC)It's funny, because when I saw that season finale with Davros, we got to the point where they flashback to all the deaths that Ten has caused, and my family were all just nodding, going "Well, yes, Davros does have a pretty good point there". You'll notice there's also a casual bit of racism thrown about here and there - in that episode, Jackie "Most Insultingly Stupid Supporting Character Ever" Tyler gets to survive but the poor Muslim woman next to her is vaporized, and in the Titanic one the only survivor out of thousands is the first mate and the old rich white guy. Oh, and Kylie, now reprising her Moulin Rouge role as a sparkly fairy.
(How stupid was that episode, BTW? An entire starship full of human figures wearing human clothes, eating human food and served by robots in the shape of the human idea of an angel, and a walking red conker as the token weirdo, and we're supposed to react to them as alien tourists with no knowledge of Earth culture at all? Bloody lazy work on the FX department, I can tell you. Why not throw a couple of Ice Warriors in there?)
I was referring to The End Of Time in my cannibalism comment - and there, we were also given the nice spectacle of the Doctor acting as if he'll become a different person entirely when he regenerates (i.e., without the same memories) and thus whinging about it, then - unlike EVERY SINGLE OTHER regeneration, even the non-canon ones - halting his change from body to body by hours and hours so that the cast & writers can go on a saccharine trip down memory lane/ten years later. It didn't work at the end of The Deathly Hallows, and it didn't work then. Oh, and of course, in the finest tradition of last words (One: "This is not the end, my dear", Three: "Where there's life, there's hope", Four: "The moment has been prepared for")...we get "I don't wanna go".
Purely pathetic on their part. I do hope the new creative team resurrect the idea of the Doctor as an unapologetic bastard - the shot in the trailer of him bitterly firing a gun and bashing a Dalek with a hammer seems to support that notion.
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Date: 2010-03-05 12:02 am (UTC)And for all his bullshit -- and I think omnicidal maniacs are generally full of bullshit -- I agree with your family. Davros kind of had a valid point there. Even the Doctor acknowledged that in "The End of Time" with Wilfred -- "I don't kill. I got clever, and manipulated other people into killing themselves". And that's true. And just a little deplorable. But it's hard to be mad at him specifically when it seems to be the entire theme of the show.
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Date: 2010-03-06 01:17 am (UTC)This is untrue. BBC's online archive of Doctor Who concept documents make it very clear that the show was carefully designed to appeal to as broad a swathe of the population as possible. Long prior to the 2005 revival DW had long-standing cachet as a children's show that adults could watch with their kids and which kids found pleasingly terrifying.
That said, I am sick to death of Russell T. Davies, but wanting Doctor Who to appeal to children is not one of his flaws.
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Date: 2010-03-04 02:51 am (UTC)What do you think of Torchwood? I either get people raving about it, or deriding it as gussied up Doctor Who fanfic.
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Date: 2010-03-04 05:22 am (UTC)I *did* watch "Children of Earth".
*BIG* mistake.
But if I type out the list of reasons *why* I thought CoE wasn't brilliant, I'm likely to offend the people who enjoyed it.
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Date: 2010-03-04 06:02 am (UTC)I've never seen the show myself, since it's on BBCA, and I don't pirate. I'm not sure I'm missing much. I liked Jack well enough as the Doctor's sidekick, but I'm not sure there's enough character depth there to lead his own show.
*I'm guessing on this one.
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Date: 2010-03-06 01:44 am (UTC)- When intro'ed in Doctor Who, he was a former secret agent-ish type from the future with trust and honesty issues that were implied to extend from the traumatic and likely shady tampering with his memory by the organization he was a part of, and the ensuing identity/betrayal issues.
- Then he reappears in Torchwood, where he still has identity and betrayal issues, this time ensuing from his abandonment by the Doctor and the little miseries that come with being immortal. All acceptable and even plausible developments, except that TW!Jack is immediately established as being perfectly okay with wiping people's memories, a reversal that was never explained. (The creators involved later admitted they'd completely forgotten about his missing two years. Well, that's understandable; after all, it was only the basis for the primary conflicts of the character in Doctor Who!)
- We later learn that he was coerced into joining Torchwood and has spent the ensuing hundred-plus years as, more or less, an indentured lackey to an organization which disagrees with his most profound beliefs.
- Plus he felt responsible for the disappearance and probable violent death of his little brother as well as the disintegration of his family after said disappearance.
- Then he showed up again in Doctor Who and not only got his trauma thrown back in his face by the Doctor, but he was tortured for a year by a genocidal psychopath. After which the Doctor, onscreen, cried for said madman, but not for him. He returns to Torchwood and everyone's mad at him (not unjustifiably) without having a clue what he went through.
- Shortly afterwards, two of his coworkers and closest friends are murdered by his long-lost brother who hates him working with his former partner. He can't help his friends because he was buried alive for two thousand years and didn't get out until it was too late.
- His dear friend Rose returns from the parallel universe and, judging by the pacing of the last few scenes, gets dumped back there before they can catch up.
- He's never shown to deal with the aftermath of being BURIED ALIVE FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS, or even the repercussions of seeing Rose (instrumental in his redemption from con man, and also for making him immortal!) again.
- Instead, he watches his lover die in front of his eyes and has to murder his own grandson in front of his daughter to save the lives of other children. His daughter cuts off all contact.
Seriously, a couple of these would be fine -- three or four, even, if the ramifications of earlier traumas were dealt with somewhat before piling on more -- but this is just ridiculous. He's gone from being a campy but mysterious and obviously troubled man learning to let himself be good again to an even wangstier Doctor with more guns and a convoluted backstory.
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Date: 2010-03-06 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-06 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 12:50 pm (UTC)Don't get me started on the sheer playground-game writing style of "Cyberwoman", or the disgusting insult of "Countrycide", where the people-eating monsters turn out to be...depraved humans. When you read about local mass murders in the news EVERY DAY it seems beyond tasteless to write sci-fi episode about it, with the protagonists sleeping around on each other AGAIN by the closing credits.
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Date: 2010-03-06 01:20 am (UTC)The only people I know of who liked Children of Earth are a segment of the people who'd never seen Torchwood before. I'm sure there ARE fans who liked it, but I've never spoken to or read commentary from any!
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Date: 2010-03-06 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-06 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 01:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 09:56 am (UTC)And I'm going to have to show the Dalek one to my mom. She'll probably get a kick out of it, being a Dr. Who fan.
Nerd Alert!
Date: 2010-03-03 10:35 am (UTC)2. Daleks are genocidal robots.
3. ???
THEREFORE
4. Daleks join Red Lantern Corps
Re: Nerd Alert!
Date: 2010-03-03 01:09 pm (UTC)Daleks are mutants in little tanks. Not robots.
Re: Nerd Alert!
Date: 2010-03-03 07:44 pm (UTC)Re: Nerd Alert!
Date: 2010-03-04 01:09 am (UTC)Re: Nerd Alert!
Date: 2010-03-04 09:54 pm (UTC)Re: Nerd Alert!
Date: 2010-03-03 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 02:38 pm (UTC)May and Can are two very different words. Learn it! Knowing is half the battle (GI-Joe *swoosh*)
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Date: 2010-03-03 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 05:12 pm (UTC)Second of all - so is she a Grammar Nazi or a Femminazi? Or both?
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Date: 2010-03-03 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-05 12:00 am (UTC)And for all his bullshit -- and I think omnicidal maniacs are generally full of bullshit -- I agree with your family. Davros kind of had a valid point there. Even the Doctor acknowledged that in "The End of Time" with Wilfred -- "I don't kill. I got clever, and manipulated other people into killing themselves". And that's true. And just a little deplorable. But it's hard to be mad at him specifically when it seems to be the entire theme of the show.