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Ehehehehehe

Omg he broke into The Doctor’s TARDIS!!

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WELL DONE EVERYONE

Round One: Doctor Who Tournament

Who is your favourite?

Click here for Tournament Table

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The round things actually do shit!?!? It just turned into a camera screen!! No way!

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no one talk 2 me i'm too busy staring at him ( the tallest guy )

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Mmm.

Dude is very very bad at making deals with others to team up for an evil scheme. He’s got a 3/3 track record atm of being double crossed or tricked by his co-conspirators

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Jo is a fashion ICON

Absolutely in love with Jo’s all pink fit

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happy shakespeare day! ✨

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You know? That's apt

These guys look kinda like marbled cheese

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“I thought you might be worried about me. But it’s alright. I’m alive and well 🙂”

“I’m extremely sorry to hear that. 😑”

Remind me who the villain is again???

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Rereading the Lord of the Rings series recently, and it's so fascinating to me how much the series is a denial of the typical juvenile power-fantasy that is associated with the fantasy genre.

Like, the power-fantasy is the temptation the Ring uses against people It tempts Boromir with becoming the "one true king" that could save his people with fantastic power. It tempts Sam with being the savior of Middle Earth and turning the ruin that is Mordor into a great garden. It tempts Gandalf and Galadriel with being the messianic figure of legend who brings salvation to Middle Earth and great glory to herself.

The things the Ring tempts people with are becoming the typical protagonists of fantasy stories that we expect to see. and over and over we see that accepting that role, that fantasy of being the benevolent all-powerful hero, is a bad thing. LotR is about how power, even power wielded with benevolent intent, is corrupting.

And its so fascinating how so much of modern fantasy buys into the very fantasy LotR denies. Most modern fantasy is about being that Heroic power-fantasy. About good amassing power to rival evil. But LotR dares not to. It dares to be honest that there is no world where anyone amasses that power and remains good.

I guess that's one of the reasons its so compelling.

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One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.

We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…

Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.

The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith. 

J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.

What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.

So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.

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So presumably we will get the precise mechanics of Marian's illness, possibly some more details of Anne's death, maybe some more Eleanor backstory to completely destroy Philip's reputation, and I would guess the story of his friendship with Sir Percival. He saved his life in Rome, didn't he? That incident was probably what caused his break with the Brotherhood.

I agree that Eleanor really seemed like she was going to do... anything. But this last chapter and her interactions with Walter seem to suggest that she's actually into whatever her effed up relationship with her husband is. So I think we will not get a heel face turn, but probably a reveal of her as w serial poisoner of comparable villainy to her husband.

But yeah as of right now I am thoroughly convinced that Fosco is a dead man walking. Walter may have unwittingly bought him another nine hours of life. The "fair haired foreigner with the scar" has been tailing him since the theater, I can't imagine his object is anything but assassination.

I feel like the duel is just there so that the choice placed before Walter is one that could still cost him his life - and also to assure us and him that Fosco has no intention of killing him immediately upon getting the letter in hand. I think Collins also wants to keep Walter as the unstained hero who never kills anyone but totally could guys, it's not that I'm not manly enough for murder, I agreed to a whole duel and everything, I'm gonna get a good grade in manhood, it's just divine providence that my enemies keep getting destroyed by their own machinations and not by me, promise!

Sir Percival got a classic Disney Villain Death that allowed Walter to be properly heroic without ever laying a hand on him, and I am sure Fosco is about to as well. And honestly, I'm cool with that.

But it would have been nice for Marian to get some catharsis out of all this.

Okay caught up.

I don't think Fosco is gonna live to the end of the block tbh. I think there's gonna be an article in the paper tomorrow about a tragic carriage-wreck and the escape of a load of white mice.

...maybe they'll eat his face

Now you say it, it does feel like his story is done now that Walter has the manuscript. I guess there could be a Fosco leaves -> timeskip -> Fosco returns for a duel storyline but it doesn't feel like that's the direction the story is going in.

Madame Fosco still seems to me like the dog that didn't bark. I would like her to snap and be the instrument of Fosco's destruction, but I don't see that happening either.

Presumably we get the Narrative According to Fosco next. But what is there left to learn from that? We know what happened to Laura, more-or-less. There must be some further twist but I can't figure out what it would be.

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He'll also appear in Carnival of Monsters in season 10 as a grey-faced bureaucrat. Doctor Who reuses actors a lot, and it can become a fun game of I Swear I've Seen That Guy Before

Im loving the little intermittent news reporter narration this episode

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Rereading the Lord of the Rings series recently, and it's so fascinating to me how much the series is a denial of the typical juvenile power-fantasy that is associated with the fantasy genre.

Like, the power-fantasy is the temptation the Ring uses against people It tempts Boromir with becoming the "one true king" that could save his people with fantastic power. It tempts Sam with being the savior of Middle Earth and turning the ruin that is Mordor into a great garden. It tempts Gandalf and Galadriel with being the messianic figure of legend who brings salvation to Middle Earth and great glory to herself.

The things the Ring tempts people with are becoming the typical protagonists of fantasy stories that we expect to see. and over and over we see that accepting that role, that fantasy of being the benevolent all-powerful hero, is a bad thing. LotR is about how power, even power wielded with benevolent intent, is corrupting.

And its so fascinating how so much of modern fantasy buys into the very fantasy LotR denies. Most modern fantasy is about being that Heroic power-fantasy. About good amassing power to rival evil. But LotR dares not to. It dares to be honest that there is no world where anyone amasses that power and remains good.

I guess that's one of the reasons its so compelling.

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Do other writers ever get this like, hyper-specific dialogue exchange drop into their brains and you know exactly where these character are standing and what they’re doing and how they’re saying these words but that’s all you get. You don’t have much other context and this specific moment that exists only at this time in your headspace??

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Now I am genuinely curious what would have happened had Marian come along chez Fosco. Would she have been able to swallow her hate sufficiently to make the same deal for Laura's sake? Would the presence of a second (and well loved) person have spoilt Walter's desperate gambit with the letter - or would Fosco's affection for her have been proof against that? Would Aunt Eleanor have finally snapped and murdered her in a jealous rage?