it's a magical world

I'm bored. I mean, I am eternally grateful that for a short space of time I have had ACTUAL WEEKENDS, and I'm sure I'll be kicking myself this time next week when I realize yup, they're going away again for another few months. But I have no particular fannish projects holding my attention at the moment (still in post-Big Bang slump, though it still needs another round of editing once my betas have had a chance to slog through it) and nothing much to DO. I've watched another disc of True Blood, which finishes the first season. There are other shows I'm vaguely interested in, but none enough to seek out for download. And while I would love to curl up with my laptop and read good fic, I'm still in a Jack/Ianto frame of mind and I've spent the past month rereading just about every halfway decent fic for the pairing, and I want to read NEW fic. But that fandom's taken a bit of a hit since CoE, and even the CoE fix-it phase of fandom seems to have died down, at least for the moment.

And there is no new Doctor Who today. TRAGIC.

So instead I'll knock out a few more of the TV meme, since I am terminally incapable of posting on anything resembling a regular basis.


Day 19 - Best TV show cast

I freaking LOVE ensemble shows. TEAMS! The biggest downfall of Doctor Who, for my particular tastes, is that it focuses too tightly on the Doctor and the Companion. This is why I get so bloody excited about multiple companions, like Nine & Rose & Jack, or Eleven & Amy & Rory, and why for all of the many pitfalls of "Journey's End", I will love it forever for giving us all of those awesome people flying the TARDIS together. The TEAM! element of Torchwood is vastly more important to me than my shipping Jack/Ianto, and my biggest problem with CoE. But I digress, clearly. So: Whoniverse, basically out for this one.

THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD ENSEMBLE SHOWS, guys! I clearly cannot pick just one! Here, have a celebratory picspam of AWESOME TEAMS BEING AWESOME. ( ensembles FTW! )


Day 20 - Favorite kiss

I was going to say, there is no way I can narrow this down. And then maybe try to picspam you again. Because there's Mulder/Scully in "Millennium", and Nine/Rose in "Parting of the Ways", and Simon/Kaylee MAKING THE FUCK OUT FINALLY in "Serenity" (yes I know that's the movie, but it's just an extension of the show and it totally counts), and Stuart/Vince at Vince's birthday party, and and and...

But no. Look, I have a ship for every show, and every kiss is awesome. But I do play favorites occasionally. ( yeah, that one. )

Look, this is the scene that made me start watching the Whoniverse as a whole. I had seen nothing, and then I saw this scene on YouTube, and then I downloaded the first episode of new!Who and went for it in order to eventually see this in context. That is one damn important kiss in my fannish life.

Also, NNGK.


Day 21 - Favorite ship

DO WE HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS AGAIN.

Picspams take a freaking long time. I'm going to be lazy now.

Torchwood - Jack/Ianto. Doctor Who - Doctor/Rose, Amy/Rory(/Doctor). West Wing - CJ/Danny. Firefly - Zoe/Wash. QAF UK - Vince/Stuart. X-Files - Mulder/Scully. All of these are ships for which I will trawl the internet for quite literally weeks or months on end, to varying degrees of success. Every show has its own ship, but those are the ones that are still my bulletproof kinks. I am not shippy to the exclusion of other pairings, nor to the point of hating any pairings involving just one of my ship. But yeah.


Day 22 - Favorite series finale

...hmm. Most series tend to drift by the end; there are very few series finales that leave me satisfied. I'm definitely not counting miniseries here, because they're written to be one complete story -- otherwise "Points" for Band of Brothers would be an automatic win.

Toss-up: "West Wing" ended VERY well, given how long the show ran; the final episode is a bit sentimental, but god knows it earned it. And I love love LOVE Josh in the Oval Office with Santos -- "What's next?" BIG SPARKLY HEARTS.

But also? Queer as Folk UK. Now there was one show Russell T Davies showed out with style. Everyone gets their own freaking awesome epilogue -- Hazel gets married (for tax reasons)! Bernard becomes a porn baron! Nathan becomes king of the world! -- and, most importantly: There are many rumours about Stuart and Vince -- all of them true. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

What I planned to do this evening: finish the last remaining scenes in my Big Bang fic. (Seriously, there are, like, three scenes I still haven't properly written. And I have failed to finish them ALL WEEK.)

What I did instead: TV MEME!

This is not a big picspam, but I couldn't resist. Shows: Band of Brothers - BSG - Doctor Who - Dollhouse - Firefly - HIMYM - QAF UK - Sports Night - Torchwood - True Blood - West Wing - X-Files.

Day 14 - Favorite male character

Even narrowing it down to one per show -- and not including ALL of the shows I like -- THIS WAS HARD.

( BOYS! )

You know, without ever giving it any serious amount of thought, it is 100% my personal canon that at some point in the 1990s, Jack Harkness shagged Stuart Alan Jones. This is just kind of a given to me, in the sense that it vaguely baffles me that other people might not assume it to be obvious.

I've had a long meta post brewing in my head for a while, about Queer As Folk and Torchwood, and the many, MANY ways in which the Jack/Ianto relationship is set up to directly parallel or reflect Stuart/Vince (though I'm undecided as to whether Russell T Davies did that deliberately or whether it's just a series of connected tropes he keeps unconsciously repeating). At some point I'll organize it into a comparative essay of some sort, but seriously. The Stuart & Jack parallels are pretty straightforward, though obviously their backstories are VERY different; and don't even get me started on how Ianto is really just Vince v.2.0 -- honestly, I think Vince is more or less exactly what Ianto would have become if he hadn't been recruited into Torchwood London. (And for the longest time, when I started watching Torchwood, I was really thrown off by how deep Ianto's voice was, because I kept expecting to hear Vince instead; yeah, I dunno either.)

And a large part of my frustration with the end of Children of Earth comes from how completely the parallel arc of those relationships was subverted. Yes, I realize Torchwood is an entirely different show tackling completely different topics and with a completely different tone; but it's the brainchild of the same creator, and subconsciously, that's been informing my experience with Torchwood throughout. QaF ended on a note of absolute escapism and sheer joy; CoE inverted that in the darkest mirror possible, but still absolutely paralleling: ( spoilers for both )

So this is where my CoE fix-it fic comes in -- because I want to restore the parallel arc to its original form. Because, goddamn it, I want to give Jack and Ianto the ending RTD gave Stuart and Vince. Because that would be so fucking beautiful --

There are many rumours about Jack and Ianto -- all of them true.


...I really need to actually write up the full meta I have on this at some point.

In these multifandom days, I seem to work on cycles. I'm back on a QAF UK kick now, apparently. Which, y'know, is all squeeful and lovely, except it's always a rather sad fandom to cycle back to, because it's been virtually dead for years, and aside from Yuletide (which always seems to toss us a new QAF fic or three every year, thankfully), there really aren't any new good fics that I haven't already practically memorized from my previous cycles. Bah. Ah, well, I'll cycle back out into HP or House or sommat soon enough, I suppose. HP, most likely, since I do have a couple of WIPs I would like to finish before the last book completely josses my personal fanon.

newredshoes, I still need to initiate you on the wonders of the Stuart and Vince love. And I shall continue needling you about it until you can put down your silly Sorkinverse nonsense for a day or two and watch QAF with me. So there. (And, of course, I also have Sports Night season 2, which I will shamelessly exploit to lure you in if necessary.)

I swear, QAF UK is one of the only things that got me through this year. Whenever I feel crappy and lonely and depressed, just watching it all over again makes everything better. I have no idea what it is with this show -- there are certainly cleverer TV shows out there, and better actors, and more compelling scripts -- but I have such an overwhelming amount of love for these characters, I just don't care. And the US version is technically the better show, in many ways, but I just don't like Brian or Michael or Justin anywhere near as much as I love Stuart and Vince and Nathan. GAH. So much love. So so so much love. Even with the Stuart/Vince fics suddenly disappearing off the internet like it's going out of style (Mallory Klohn's fics seem to be gone now, too). Still. Massive <3s. I have no OTP as true.

Aw, man. The Rhipodon Society fics are all gone. They're not up on the wayback machine whatsit anymore. Fuckses. Those were some of my favorite QAF UK fics, there. I don't suppose there's any chance someone's got them up somewhere?

Just rewatched all of QAF UK series 1. Ahhhh. My Stuart/Vince(or Brian/Michael) need has been nicely assuaged. It's very nice to have the UK version there to support my OTP, no matter how scandalously it is denied in the US version.

Also, I am in love with what I now call the 'Vince's Declaration of Independence Theme', because it plays whenever Vince actually takes control over his own life. Three times in series 1 -- at the end of ep 4, when he chooses to walk away from Stuart after Stuart and Nathan screwed around in Vince's old bedroom; at the end of his party in ep 7, when he (again) chooses to leave Stuart because Stuart is the asshole to top all assholes; and at the end of ep 8, when he chooses to dump Cameron and go back to Stuart. Three of my favorite moments in the show, those are. Which is why I can't understand why people think Vince (or his US counterpart, Michael) is weak or clingy or follows Stuart around like a trained dog. Sure, at the very beginning of the series, he is and does, but he finds his own damn strength over the course of the show, and when he goes back to Stuart in the end, HE'S the one in control of their relationship, and he knows it. It's FANTASTIC. Stuart self-destructs when Vince isn't around, but Vince could do just fine without Stuart -- he just doesn't choose to. My love for this pairing, it knows no bounds.

I quite like this sort of pairing, actually. Always have. Those two personality types bouncing off each other -- one who is outwardly always in control but in reality needs the other desperately, and one who may appear weaker but actually is completely self-sufficient and when he/she chooses to love, hot damn. It's kinda Mulder/Scullyish, even, or my interpretation of Sirius/Remus...

Okay, in case you haven't noticed, in the past two days I have become rather abruptly OBSESSED with Queer as Folk UK. It is a cruel state of being. I just watched the entirety of the television series. There is no more. And for FUCK'S SAKE, ( minor spoiler, cut just in case )

So, er, how's QAF US? Because, you know, my addiction, it demands to be fed. I realize that the actors won't be nearly as sexy without Charlie and whoever the hell the adorable, adorable geek that is Vince is played by, but. I mean, there's more than one season + minimovie. That means it'll take me more than ONE NIGHT to get through the ENTIRETY of the QAF.

Is it any good? Is it worth buying?

So I'm trying to buy the QAF UK DVDs. So I go on amazon.co.uk because, well, I'm in Ireland. And they have it for about 11 pounds, or about $20 American. But it's region 2 format, and, as I am American, I need a region 1. So I go to US amazon.com, thinking that at least I can order it now and just wait until winter break to watch it. The price for the region 1 encoding? $64. THREE TIMES AS EXPENSIVE.

This is ridiculous. That's about as much as I paid for a full X-Files season, which is 24 hour-long episodes. QAF would be 8 half-hour episodes. WTF?

So, is there ANY way for a nice American girl to purchase this DVD without spending waaaaay more than it's worth?