fandom top 5's, pt. 1

[rm]

Top five things that would be different about Torchwood if [I] were the showrunner.

1. Solid chronology. I know that's insane in the Whoniverse, but I think Torchwood always suffered a lot from us never knowing when any event happened in relation to any other event. I've really just come to the conclusion that CoE takes place maybe a week after The Dead Line -- it's the only thing that makes sense, but I hate that we're all always left grasping around for these things. I know it rains a lot in Cardiff, but what fucking season is it?

2. More would have happened with "Ianto is a lying liar who lies" sooner. Cyberwoman was great, and letting that just sit for a while is smart. But we don't have hints of Ianto's dishonesties again except in: Fragments and From Out of the Rain, which actually just looked like a research error when it aired. We also get a sense Ianto might be a lying liar who lies because of the two different birthdays that exist for him, if you include tie-in material canon. I also always felt that the "master tailor" line felt wrong in my gut; I'm not sure why, maybe I've spent enough time on both sides of that equation that it just hit my antenna funny. But then, we never really get the confirmation of Ianto is lying liar who lies until the Debenham's moment. It's brilliant and completely re-opens the character for us. But I would have made sure it was seeded better and used it as a more significant plot point, especially since it's interesting that Ianto, the lying liar who lies, is also the only one who can bring the truth to the fore in Adam. I thought the show really wasted its possibilities on this front.

3. Play up Jack's alienness. Jack's first language isn't 20th century English, and his culture is not an earth culture. Sure he's been here a long time, and knows how to assimilate for all sorts of reasons, but we have Jack use all these awkward idioms ("the worst creatures you can imagine") and there are all these cracks about Jack's manners, and it would have been so easy with a line or two here and there, with an extra shot or two in any of the episodes that reference Boeshane, to really get the Jack is alien. I think reducing Jack being different down to either his sexuality or his immortality short-changes the character and the complexity of what Torchwood could be.

4. Have Euros Lyn direct everything. Really. He got much more nuanced performances out of Barrowman than anyone else who directs for Torchwood, and he was able to keep GDL's considerable skills focused and on target. His choices with sound and space were, I think, fantastic, and I wonder a lot about what he could have done for us in all those "monster of the week episodes."

5. Non-sexual love. This isn't about toning down the sex in Torchwood at all. This about the fact that the show is, in my opinion, at its finest in Jack's interaction with that guy that comes through the Rift on the plane. That serious, adult drama there in the conversation Jack has with him in the bar -- man to man, and more moving for Jack being queer and for it not being about that -- I would have really love to see that sort of love and affection explored in other places, including between the team (Tosh, we hardly knew you!) and being vocalized. Our culture is very "just friends" but often some of the hardest relationships are those that involve love without the expectation and recognition that comes with sex and family.

6. Yes, there's a six. I get a six, because six shouldn't even have to be on the list, but woah, less with the offensive South Asian portrayals/castings/plotlines. Torchwood is faily faily faily here, and that would not be happening if I ran the world or the show.


Top five peeves re. Deathly Hallows?

1. SNAKE BUBBLE TO THE HEAD. Really, it's not just that. It's that JKR took a narrative about outcasts and then made the popular kids into outcasts instead and threw out all the marvelous grey that was Snape's character by just making him a creepy stalker that couldn't get laid.

2. It wasn't ready for prime-time. It needed a tighter edit.

3. Remus. Tonks. Off-screen demise. WHUT?

4. Draco. Another chance for complexity in just a sentence or two thrown away.

5. One of the best moments in the book revolves around Kreacher, who explains that he did not die because his master told him not to. It's horrifying. It's brilliant (weirdly, I hate the house elves, and they get all the best moments in Deathly Hallows), but it's sort of thrown away in a mid-book bury and the people hearing the story don't even react to that part of it. There's no nice way to say this, but I felt like Book 7, in a series that's all about love, kinda proved everyone is actually a bigot, and not in a useful, teaching moment way.



Top Five Vehicles

Seriously? I don't even drive. This is hard work.

1. The Tardis.

2. An old-skool BSG Viper. Fuck yeah!

3. Okay, my favorite show when I was like eight, was Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I don't remember what his ship was called, and I don't care, but it's going on this list, right here, right now.

4. That lovely little plane that comes through the Rift in Out of Time. Sweet.

5. The big triangular battleships in Star Wars (I am a bad geek, I don't know my terminology). There's a shot in one of the films in the first trilogy with two or three of them passing each other real close, like, it was was always breathtaking, so breathtaking to me.

Comments

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

a visible and significant South Asian minority

I'm not going to dispute that (I'm hardly going to say that people with South Asian families or heritage in Wales are insignificant or invisible) but I do wonder where, as a New Yorker, you get that from.

I think it's hard to say if Suzie was South Asian: her surname- Costello- was Irish. If she was then the implied abuse by her father that produced her nihilism might be read as a broaching of the topic of hidden abuse among South Asian families and communities in the UK, which is a difficult and thorny issue in contemporary British culture.

With the reduction of the TW crew to three, and now two, white Anglo-American people a more ethically diverse cast might be a very good thing, but that requires hard work to avoid tokenism or stereotyping. Tosh, after all, was the scrupulous, conservative computer pro, and of course was Asian.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Among other things, see icon; my co-writer is Bengali (well, I mean, she's from New York, but she's lived in India and has lots of family there and spends time there and so forth).

We still can't figure out _what_ was going on with the Suzie casting. Indira Varma plays arguably non-Indian characters a lot (see ROME, but that's another case of non-clarity... so maybe; they did do a reasonably good job of trying to get the very multi-ethnic look of the emerging empire in in that show), and "Costello"... as you say. The hidden abuse thing is interesting, I think since we're not actually British (although she has a lot of family in Britain and spends time there) that probably didn't factor into our "huh, what?" line of reasoning, but it's a good point.

And the issue isn't about having leads on the show who are South Asian. The issue is not having them be so many random villains, or every mention about India or Pakistan being about how supposedly fucking awful those places are. Golden Age, one of the radio plays, tried to address its own colonialism issues and then sort of failed but then sort of made sense in light of some of the issues in CoE, and it just sorta left me wanting more clarity and care; it's something I wind up feeling like I have to clean-up after in fanfiction a lot.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

I think the only person who can really comment on the significance, visibility acculturation and self-definition as a minority of South Asian people in Wales is a South Asian Welsh person. And since you can only supply a South Asian and I can only supply a Welsh person the point remains obscured, but it is tangential anyway.

The bigger question is just how do you increase visibility of Ethnic Minority characters on TV shows. If 8.4% of all People in Cardiff are non white should one in ten people with lines be non white- and of them apportion one half to be non-white Asian http://83.137.212.42/sitearchive/eoc/PDF/ethnic_minorities_in_wales.pdf?page=17399 ? Do you deliberately ignore real world demographics- and if you do that are you automatically engaging in tokenism? If real world economics and social inequalities generally limit people from certain ethic backgrounds to certain types of job are you compromising the believability of your characters by putting them in situations or occupations they wouldn't likely have the opportunity to enjoy in real life? As a writing team how do you answer all those questions, if I can ask?

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

I had missed that Suzie was meant to be south Asian. I'm bad at names and generally know actors by face and not name until i've seen them in a lot of things.

I do agree there is a problem.

I do think there were east Indians looking for lost relatives in the episode with the involuntary time travellers. it was the only counter example that comes to mind, though.