twincityhacker

My Uncle and his wife had a stroke of brilliance when it came to Christmas presents this year. Either that, or my aunt remembered the conversation we had while driving me from the airport to my grandparent's house. As I have a Uhura action figure, and "Torchwood: Rift War" comic book. Which has a totally lying cover as it's a post-Meat pre-Rest fic, so it's TEAM fic story and not just post-series Two story that I was expecting.

Also, it has a timy-whimy aspect AND Steampunk!Torchwood makes a cameo! And Toshiko is featured taking actions and doing things other than read things off of computer monitors. Oh, and she rides Myfanwy.

The minuses is that, at times, the human cast is drawn very oddly. There are three artists on the book, and it really, really shows. ( The back up feature is drawn beautifully! ) Owen did not show all that well, and cannot really remember what he did.

I still cannot speak about Children of Earth for more than five minutes without breaking out into CAPLOCKS OF RAGE four months after the series aired.

Sometime in the future juliet316 will produce a post on Gwen's Heroine's Journey. I was thinking about that myself the other night, and was fairly pleased with it until I got to the "final task" portion. I was thinking that her test was keeping the kids safe, and if it was, then she failed her task. And, then, got all the traditional rewards of suceding in her task.

I'm not saying that Gwen did not deserve having her family alive at the end of the series, nor her being given the task of rebuilding Torchwood. I blame RTD. I blame him HARD. I mean, when you manage to fuck up one of the basic units of storytelling, you need to seriously examine what the fuck you're writing.

On the bright side? RTD is still better than Frank Miller. If you have never heard of Frank Miller, one of the things he's written is Batman kidnapping Dick Grayson ( Age 12 ), keeping him in the Bat Cave, and made him catch rats for food until he earned the privilege of being fed human food. For a slightly more humorous take, Linkara reviewed the first two books of All Star Batman and Robin here. Yesterday I dared myself to read series set in that universe, and I chickened out around chapter five. It was one of the more horrifying stories I've ever read.

Oh, and if I read another fic where Captain Jack Harkness does not understand/speak a little Welsh, I shall cry. Since, he was, you know, living in Wales when an large percentage of people spoke Welsh AND some percentage spoke only Welsh. Especially since there was a large draw from the monolingual Welsh areas into Cardiff, as well as from everywhere else.

Of course, this doesn't mean that Jack speaks flawless Southern Welsh. I'm not sure what his accent would sound like, and what would he screw up since I don't know what his native language is and how much his speaking of Modern American English daily for the last few months would effect it.

I'm also not sure when /z/ and the rest of the borrowed phonemes crept into Welsh except for /sh/ and it's mutated /dz/ because it was both borrowed and developed out of /si/. It's a bit confusing because siop was borrowed really, really early.

Ianto and Gwen know a little bit of Welsh too. Heavy emphasis on a bit because they had to pass an A-level in Welsh, and they might have forgotten everything except a few words if they never used it regularly afterwards.

Okay, semi-regular rant about Welsh and Torchwood over. Carry on.

I felt much better today, though there was some doldrums transitioning from afternoon to evening, as there always is.

Also, I now think that fic with Estelle, Alice, and the Tarot Girl needs to be written right now. They all live in the Cardiff at the same time, and since Cardiff is not a megalopolis, they could run conceivably run into each other.

That, and there needs to be more Alice/Johnson femslash. But thats a lot harder to write because of Alice's grief, so I'll let it slide for now.

Not going to mention RTD inverviews at EW.com and AfterElton because my complete rage about the subject. Espeically the fact that RTD said that the event in Day Four happened just to put Jack in an emotional head space to do what he did in Day Five. Then declared the decision good art.

What I am doing is linking to the Children in Need donation page in the memory of Ianto Jones. And the BBC News page about the project.

At the time of posting, donations for Children in Need was £2,218.83. I'm going to throw something in the kitty myself.

I was looking at iantos_desktop wondering if lorannah had posted any Children of Earth stuff. Instead I saw she made some very nice 19th/20th/21st timelines, though something very interesting on the twentith century timeline caught my attention. Since lorannah footnoted it with coming from "The Torchwood Archives" and me actually having that same book, I decided to look up the information myself.

...Those clever bastards. Lucia Moretti, one of the people mentioned in "Children of Earth" is mentioned in "The Torchwood Archives" as well. Both sources agree with her staffing date, 1968-1975, but disagree on her date of death. Torchwood Archives says 1998, CoE says 2006, and for a CoE reason, the Archives Date doesn't work.

Also, there's a lot of references to Children of Earth in the James Moran's Captain's Blog Ongoing Archive notes of a Dr. Patanjali as a young medic at the hospital asking about Torchwood. On the Lost Souls page there's also a yellow sticky post with "Why can I find no trace of Jim and Mary Sangster at the GRO?"

EDIT: Earlier in the book there are two post-its that also contain references. The first is "Who is Timothy White? and the other is "Where is Clemont McDonald?" Thanks to eawen_penallion tip-off that there were even more references.

( What all these references mean )

I wonder if there's any references to Lilian Cartwright, who works in the council offices, or SilverClaw who a member of the school computer club in any of the audioplays, books, or audio exclusives.

Going along, doing other things, I suddenly get foam in the mouth rage again over Torchwood. I was watching thingswithwings's vid "Though the Glass." which can be found here.

And even though Jack and Ianto are both on the same side of the glass, it's still there.

I got done watching Day Five a little while ago, and spent the last half hour hashing over it with my Dad. I can say it really was an excellent piece of television drama. I'm a little teary-eyed, but no where near last night. Probably since I've already gotten over the initial shock of my show being gone. I'm still sad and pissed off about it, but not crying buckets.

I know I'm going to stay in the Torchwood fandom. I'm probably not going to buy the discs because I don't think watching emotionally devastating things is a good time. Or suspenseful, or horror, or, frankly, serious films. The two darkest films I own is Sleepy Hollow and Nosferatu, and those are dusk at best.

Everything else I really need to stew over. There may be essays comparing this to classical Greek drama coming up, or attempts to bring Children of Earth in line with the previous Torchwood series. Or Torchwood fic completely ignoring everything that happened previous to the last ten minutes of "Reset"!

I write Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfic. I'm very, very capable of missing the point of a series entirerly. Plus, I have a cliche bingo card to fill and I still want to write about Elves!