beccaelizabeth | Feb. 13th, 2007

Feb. 13th, 2007

Further to yesterday's comments on canon: I do have one idea on what clearly isn't canon - the stuff that never made it into the series / book / comic at all. If they were going to but didn't then they didn't, on purpose, and it therefore is an example of deliberately not true.

This applies to who would have died and what order the episodes go in. There are series where a channel messed up the order, but to the best of my knowledge Torchwood is not one of them. The episode order as seen on TV and DVDs is in fact the order they happened in. And as to who would have died, I don't really see how that's useful data at all, on account of they didn't.

Flattering to the actor data, yes, but not useful to the kind of construction of a shared reality fans do.

Teh Internets look quite different when I haven't got the accessibility overrides stamped all over them.

And frequently less legible, which is the problem.
The temptation to style=mine the whole world is very high; even if it reduces the pretty, it also reduces the headaches.

I have been having vague thoughts about turning people into categories, and how it can sound sort of freaky, especially in the middle of a sex scene.

Obviously, when you're writing descriptions, you focus on the distinctive. With het sex you can sort of get away with 'he' and 'she', but with slash? Not so very. So you end up with 'blue eyed blonde' syndrome. Because apparently saying their name a lot would be breaking some rule of writing. :eyeroll:

Which is all very well, but... every label carries connotations. And while many of them are sort of politically neutral - 'short' has to be really extreme before it turns into a rights campaign - there's a whole other set. Technically 'black' is a simple physical descriptor, and yet, once it's on the page? Really not.

And there's so many ways that can get wonky. If one character gets a name and another is more a description, if race is used as adequate shorthand for one guy but the characters from the dominant ethnic group get a lot more detail, all sorts. And then there's what happens if you have some kind of power dynamic in the relationship, even a fun who's on top PWP kind of thing. As soon as you start using category words for a person you're kind of writing things done to a whole category. Which... very wonky very fast.

Thing that's been bugging me in fic lately is use of the label Welsh. I mean, it's a perfectly accurate label. It's a great label. It applies to many people who would happily claim that label.

But when you're applying it to one half of a slash pairing... since when did he become his country?

... which is a weird reaction, in some ways, but what I mean is...

Ianto is a lot of very specific things, individual traits, collected around the sign Ianto and called a character. And granted the blue eyed brunet thing isn't going to set him apart in some stories, but is Welsh really that distinctive it would?
And then calling Jack American... it's a pov thing, I guess, but I always find it jarring because we know he has the accent but we can be fairly sure it's a sign interpreted falsely by the locals. And it's entirely possible it's being used deliberately to be fake. So just having him unproblematically American strikes me as wrong.
Though, granted, not necessarily in the middle of reading porn.
Just once I start thinking too much again.

Also, it's kind of distancing dropping in a label that big. I mean, instead of being up close and looking at their eyes, you're suddenly looking at their country. Which... less fun.
( Read more... )

Of all the tags I use, only Highlander, Meta, RL and Torchwood have gone above 100.

One of these things I've been talking about for many years less than the others.

I like this book. It keeps making points and ties them to texts and it has a glossary in the back. All kinds of helpful.

protagonist Greek proto (first) agonistes (actor/combatant); nowadays used of the leading character.

***

p90
We thrive on stories; we love to hear them. And telling stories is a deeply human activity. Each of us has a notion of the story of our own life, which helps us make sense of who we are; it is part of our identity. We make sense of the world by making or learning stories about the world, ordering our experiences into causes and effects. The practices of science and medicine depend ons tories, as does commentary on the arts. We tell the history of the universe or evolution; connect in orderly fashion the nature of the virus, methods of infection, life habits, symptoms, the action of drugs (they change the situation), likely outcomes for individuals and the likely demographic scenario to come. And we sort artworks into movements or models of cultural production, linking them to events at large.

Just as theatre and playing can become part of a play's concerns (metatheatricality), some plays script a concern with our need for and delight in telling stories, of setting out a narrative, of making the disorderly confusions of real life settle down into an acceptable or pleasurable pattern.

[And some narratives compete, contest each other's version of events.]
[/quote]
***

Difference between action and event - the way I figure it, it's like those click clack thingies, Newton's cradle. Events are just stuff that happens, Actions change the situation. So events are all those balls in the middle and actions are the ones on the end that turn things around. Except for obviously it doesn't have to go back and forwards like that, it can go all over the place.

Anyways.

Human = storyteller.

Jack = storyteller.

And what stories he tells illuminates how he organises and explains the world, his cause and effect, his categories.

But most of the stories we hear from him - like, vast majority - are just about events. With or without the things he's telling the story of, he would still be the same Jack, pretty much. Unless you think the twin acrobats really changed his life.
Figuring out which stories are about Actions gets more complicated. Though I suspect it's inversely proportional to the amount of detail he puts in - play by play accounts are not going to be the important things.

Going back through Torchwood season 1 and finding which things click clack into which other things and where the turn around points are = intersting.

And Jack waking up with a "Thank You" is probably a really big turn around right there, compared/contrasted with "I felt so alive"

I had a think just now that everyone at Torchwood seems to be playing different conversation games.

Jack plays Anecdote. He fills up the conversation space telling stories. And for reasons unknown, he gets away with it. He gets to monologue. Nobody interrupts. And nobody plays anecdote back at him.
Do they?

Gwen asks questions. Even her team bonding game was a question. A rather poorly chosen question if her goal is being nice to people. Or hiding; questions incompatible with that.
Jack only rarely answers. Stories are not necessarily answers, especially when he can figure that the listener will fill in the context quite different than he could.

Tosh offers information. She knows things she wants to share with people. I realise that mostly this is her expositionary function or her as the computer interface (I have a whole thought about how Tosh is kinda cyborg, but it's being blobby at the minute), but also when she's chatting in the pub she tells shiny things, and when she wanted to show Gwen and Owen something when she got in to work they weren't surprised because it was part of a pattern.
This is different from anecdote because she doesn't do telling to get a reaction. Jack is trying to get a specific, usually emotional, reaction from a listener. Amuse or amaze or sometimes freak out a bit. Tosh is being amazed so she shares something she thinks is cool. Inform, not poke buttons.

Ianto is frequently right data right time dude too, exposition function. But it's usually for plot purposes, and harder to generalise to character. But he puts a spin on it, so it's somewhere between Inform and Anecdote - see King Ianto's Coffee Club. Call it Illustrate?
He also has a splash of snark in just about anything he says. He's trying to get a reaction, too, but not with quite the same tools as Jack.
Jack's anecdotes pretend to be self revelatory. Ianto talks about outside stuff. If I'm remembering right even in 1-04 he's talking about Lisa and Jack, even if it shows a lot about him. Exception being answering Gwen's direct question, but he still turns it around to make it a 'you' thing.

If Ianto joined in Anecdote, you could bet it would be dry, snarky, sound almost entirely factual, and while it might involve him he probably wouldn't be the star the way Jack tends to be.

If Owen was playing Anecdote, he'd be the 'top that' guy. The one who has to go one better. Except he's up against Jack, who generally has done more than pretty much everyone, and gone places Owen (and Owen's masculinity) isn't even willing to, let alone going to say he's gone further in.

Owen's conversation is... aggressive? Messy? Hints of violence, death, sex gets tangled with it. I mean even when he's talking about job stuff, the dead dude in 1-07 got explained by way of a loop through sexual practices of satanists. There's a bit of a habit loop there.

Jack talks about sex a lot, but usually it's "and aliens" not "and violence".

I can't think of a handy one word game for Owen's conversation.

And I had to resort to website data for Ianto's.

I don't know, might be a bit of a useless thought, then.

Book says: "Either Prospero, Ariel, or both are involved in every scene: Shakespeare structurally foregrounds their control of events."
(I can't comment on specific example because I'd have to, er, read Shakespeare)

So if presence => control
then absence => lack of control
and suddenly there's a structural reason for 1-05 to have so very much of it have no Torchwood people in it, because that's a situation where they've got bugger all control.

The fact that it was also kind of boring watching all those one offs have stuff happen to them is from that way of looking at it an unfortunate side effect.

1-09 has a reason too - the way the alien has knock on effects in ordinary lives, the extent to which Torchwood does not conceal or control things, and in a sideways sort of way the extent to which it does. I mean, his alien stuff is so lame because Torchwood got all the good stuff. And yet he has alien stuff. The idea is powerful even when the evidence is supposed to be controlled. Torchwood are not in control but they're a sort of black hole and things swing around the absences they create.

Or, you know, they maybe needed an episode with not so many main cast in it.

But using lit tools to find shiny in the otherwise boring is part of the fun.
... shaky, difficult to support fun, but fun.

TV is much more of a pain to write up a scene analysis of than plays with an actual stage to walk on. Because TV can have as many images in a minute as they think we can see. Which is considerable more than they can have actual people run on and off.

Of course stages can have TV stuff happen on projection bits, which would make them at least as complicated.

I was just thinking though because the book had an exercise that, applied to any of the bits of Torchwood that sprang to mind, would drive me entirely nuts, because they switch about between people-places in the middle of speeches and it's just a right bugger to write down.

Have now read about half of the 'Studying Plays' book.
Books that require thinking take a teensy bit longer than the ones you just read.
This one has a bunch of exercises at the end of every section. I haven't technically done them, just paused and had a think on them. They're useful.

I don't know what happened to my intention to read a bunch of books over the holidays; January just kind of went foggy and vanished somehow. But this month has had 2 books begun, one finished, and one half done. Nifty.

Of course there's another... ~~half a~~ dozen? Something ridiculous like that. Many that I haven't finished and/or haven't started yet.

Next semester, Poetry.
With any luck it'll be much quicker to read.
I'm sure it'll make up for it in fiddly theory tools though.

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