Fellow Guardians, Fearlings and Dream Pirates

Picked up from a few people a little while ago, but then I was ill(er) again. I'm pretty sure I have done this once before, but not for years, so...

From your AO3 Works page, look at the tags and find the answers to these questions.

Current number of works on AO3: 711

1. Under what rating do you write most?

Ratings break down like this:

General Audiences (563)
Teen And Up Audiences (147)
Mature (Mature)

(I was curious for a minute as to what the mature one was and then remembered it had to be the EatD one with the German Generalmajor and the English Major General, and that's mainly for the suicide warning, but, er, the whole thing really.)

2. What are your top 3 fandoms?

Doctor Who (1963) (231)
Doctor Who (2005) (98) --> obv as this is all DW, plus also some BFA, and take away any tagged with both, so I got up the meta tag results within works and came up with DW = 293

Sapphire & Steel (88)
Blake's 7 (62)


I like my old time Brit TV SF? XD I need to get back to my B7 rewatch soon. I miss it when it's been so long since I've watched it or written it. Which explains a lot about the tags.


3. Which character do you write about most?

Silver (Sapphire & Steel) (55)

Followed closely by Sapphire (44) & Steel (42). That's what you get when your most prolific fandom has umpty million characters across 60+ years and various spin-offs and different media and my second has 4 main canonical characters, only 3 of whom turn up more than once in canon. (Kenny Phillips still shows up disproportionately at (29), which is because I once claimed him for 30ficlets. Claims are hard. Even if I love a character, after about 10 pieces in a row, I want to write about somebody else!)


4. What are the 3 top pairings you've written?

The top is actually OFC/OMC, which is not fandom-specific, so have the top four.

Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s) (11)
Elizabeth of York Queen of England/Henry VII of England (11)
Ruth Evershed/Harry Pearce (9)
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart/Liz Shaw (9)

I suppose this could be correct. It doesn't feel correct, but I think that's because I always have a crisis when tagging Sapphire/Silver/Steel, because I know full well my definition of it mostly would count as gen for many people so I panic and wildly select either & or / or both or something. Otherwise I feel like that would beat 11. Although it could just be AO3's counting, which definitely used to be very off in these side-bars.

I didn't know I'd done that much Ruth/Harry, but there have been a few little ficlets over the years and I suppose they added up! I had a very intense Brig/Liz period ages ago, so that's no shocker at any rate. Most of my shipping is very much one or two and move on, with a few exceptions. *points*


5. What are the top 3 additional tags?

Ficlet (214)
Crossover (143)
Humor (126)

Not accurate at all, lol. /o\ I mean, I feel like I've been a lot less funny lately, and written a lot less prompt ficlets and a lot less crossovers, but me writing crossover crack ficlets played straight for prompts from the flist is a lot of my fannish life, it's true. No regrets. Even the Steed/Baldrick one. XD


The rest are:

Alternate Universe (68)
Meme (65)
Drabble (46)
Post-Canon (45)
Community: hc_bingo (42)
Fluff (30)
Flash Fic (30)

Which, yeah. The AU is largely the AU meme - I have done a lot of that one over the years! It's fun, though. Not done drabbles so much lately, though. And hc_bingo has closed down, alas. I'm really surprised Hurt/Comfort didn't make it in. Er, HOW did I write 42 works for hc_bingo but not then 42 works tagged Hurt/Comfort? AO3 counting or my failure to make it properly h/c enough to tag, but just enough to count? Tbf, that did happen a lot with that one, but... surely, given lots of Hurt/Comfort written outside the bingo, it should even out? I suspect foul play here...

I've not been around so much again, because I had to go out and have a filling amongst other things, and ME/CFS and anaesthetic do not play well together. The rest of the time, when I had energy, in fannish things, I have been mainly focused on making sure I get my yuletide fic typed up. Anyway, as of yesterday, I have a first draft and am not too far off a bus pass version even (\o/), so I shall try and be a bit less faily at keeping up around here again.

I had half a watching post done, and it was already quite long actually, so I will just post that here:


Some more summer watching! This isn't the order I watched them in, but I made my way through two more cosy crime series, and some of Jeremy Northam's remaining CV.

The two BBC cosies were Ludwig starring David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin, which was very good although an odd mix of tone that is exactly encapsulated by the two leads. Some parts of Ludwig felt like the kind of tense, proper crime drama with bent coppers and the like in which you might expect to find AMM and others were more of an outright comedy than most, as seems only right with David Mitchell. It was a strong entry, though! David Mitchell is a reclusive puzzle-setter ("Ludwig"), John, whose identical twin brother James is a police detective who has vanished. His sister-in-law Lucy manages to prise John out of his house to come and help - by pretending to John. Cue John getting a) extremely stressed by all of this and b) distracted by the need to solve the murders that he's sent to deal with, all the while trying to find out why James has disappeared and help out Lucy and his nephew.

Anyway, there should be a s2, with hopefully less stress for John helping the police as a consultant now, rather than trying to pretend to be his twin brother and panicking a lot. I look forward to seeing how that goes.


Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders have been on my radar for a while because people kept mentioning them, so nearing the end of the summer of the cosies, I thought, why not go for broke, and watched it too. These were really great! They were one serialised mystery per series, rather than case of the week, but Lesley Manville is crime editor Susan Ryeland, whose star crime writer gets murdered. In the course of trying to find the missing chapter of his otherwise complete last manuscript, she inadvertantly winds up on the trail of his killer. The really fun/clever thing about this series is that as she reads the last novel, we follow the fictional detective Atticus Pünd in his investigations, which parallel hers and which are a pastiche of a golden age detective series. Occasionally, she imagines discussing the murder with him, so they meet in dreamlike sequences. Tim McMullan as Pünd is really great - I hadn't come across him before, and it's a lovely performance. Conleth Hill is also fun as the late Alan Conway. Moonflower Murders follows the same pattern, as someone else has noted Alan Conway's spiteful tendency to put real things he oughtn't into his books and pays Susan to investigate the parallels between an earlier book in the series and a death at their hotel.

There's supposed to be a third series to come, so I'll look forward to it, although I understand that it's supposed to have a different writer (as in not Alan Conway in-narrative, not irl - they're all adapted by Anthony Horowitz who wrote the original books), and we'll see how that goes. But it was really unusual and fun.


Creation (2009) Biopic about Charles Darwin, starring Paul Bettany. ( This got quite long )

I've been thinking for a while of doing Fandom 50 or Fannish 50 and just doing posts on what some fandoms/parts of fandom I like are and why I like them, but then I felt too flaky to sign up. So this is me doing but not doing it. It gives me something to aim for, but not to worry if I don't make it - or if I want to continue. Also I don't have to decide which of those two is best to sign up for - it's very confusing!

I was thinking about doing something like this for ages, because I love manifestos, but there are so few of us left in these parts, it would be ridiculous to expect to get people into things, so they'd just be annoying. But it's always useful to explain exactly what things are again, and it means I can hopefully spend a bit more time chatting about things I love.

(Anything above any cut text should be safe from any major spoilers; if I feel the need to get spoilery in my love, that will always go under a cut).


Obviously, I had to start with Doctor Who, but since that would be a very big post as a whole, I shall probably mainly pick some serials/episodes in between other fandoms. This might be more useful anyway, because while DW, even in the older eras does have some continuity and context and development, it is nevertheless, even in modern eras, still the nearest thing to an anthology show the BBC have left, so if anyone gets curious, there's no reason not to just watch most individual installments.

So I thought I'd remind myself how much I love Doctor Who by talking about one of my absolute favourites, which is from my "least favourite"* Classic Who era - the Third Doctor's run, because DW is awesome generally.

Inferno (BBC 1970)

gifset (by timelordinaustralia)

What is it?

The seven-part** final serial of the Third Doctor's first season, written by Don Houghton & directed by Douglas Camfield (& producer Barry Letts for eps 5-7, as Camfield suffered a minor heart attack during recording) & guest starring Olaf Pooley, Derek Newark, Sheila Dunn & Christopher Benjamin. The show had lately been reinvented in a swither by the BBC between that and cancelling it, and so returned that season in colour, with a new Doctor (Jon Pertwee), now exiled to Earth and stripped of the ability to pilot the TARDIS,working for the military outfit, UNIT, aka the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) and his handful of men, along with brilliant Cambridge scientist Dr. Liz Shaw (Caroline John).

Inferno finds UNIT safeguarding Professor Stahlman's project to drill through to the Earth's core in search of a new energy source he believes he will find there (Stahlman's Gas). The Doctor, meanwhile, is using Stahlman's reactor to power his experiments to get the TARDIS working again. But the project's computer is predicting catastrophe if the core is penetrated, Stahlman is refusing to listen, people are turning into monsters, and the Doctor's test TARDIS trip takes him sideways, leaving him trapped in a fascist parallel earth where Stahlman's project is hours ahead of the one in our world - and things are turning apocalyptic fast...


Why do I love it?

7 episodes is a hard length to pull off (see the rest of the season, even though I love it all), but Inferno does it beautifully - it gives the story sufficient time to allow us to understand and care about what's going in the 'real' world and the parallel Earth, the characters and their parallel world counterparts, and give the fates of both the weight needed, while tension is maintained by the constant hum of the drill - the mounting, unheeded sound of the world ending. The Doctor, the Brig and Liz are a really strong trio and this is not only another great story for them, but lets us see alternate versions of the latter two. Among the guest characters, Greg and Petra (particularly the parallel universe versions) are favourites.

It has that very UK 70s TV thing that always gets me so hard of being simultaneously one of the most bleak and optimistic DW serials ( Vaguely spoilery details ) ♥

On paper it's got a whole lot of would what become very typical Third Doctor era ingredients (unwise 70s scientific projects! green slime! HAVOC!***), but in practice, it truly is something special, and I love it.


ETA: An Inferno-related fannish recs-list.


* It's comparative. Like, yes, but also. It's DW. I love it anyway.
** Seven parts here = 7 x25 mins (although minus the intros/outros and 5 episode recaps and often with shorter runtimes - most given DW serials are about the same length as a regular/shortish film, the six-parters as a long film. It's just that some of them also feel like wading through porridge).
***HAVOC = stunt outfit run by Derek Ware. I think they were HAVOC officially by this point, but at any rate, they were definitely present and correct, pulling off the then record for highest UK TV stunt fall during the course of it, and in another case, getting accidentally actually run over by Pertwee in the course of duty). Also, of course, not that I am saying there is anything wrong with lots of green slime, dodgy scientific projects causing trouble and HAVOC. Obv all top notch ingredients!