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I realised today that John Hurt's death back in January deprived us of the chance of seeing the most amazing Doctor Who film ever: a Time War movie starring him, Derek Jacobi as the Master, and Timothy Dalton as Rassilon.

So I decided to make all of you miserable by imagining what might have been:



The film starts with the War Doctor (John Hurt) hunting for the War Master (Derek Jacobi). The High Council of the Time Lords wants to resurrect Rassilon; Lady President Romana (Lalla Ward if she's interested; Juliet Landau is also a possibility) thinks that's dumb, and has tasked the Doctor with finding another plan. The Doctor wants to resurrect Davros instead (it's a Time War, no-one stays dead), and needs the Master's help.

It doesn't work. Instead, the Master imbues himself with energy from the Eye of Harmony, at the same time claiming the mantle of Omega, the other legendary founder of the Time Lords. And having Omega stomping around again is enough to shake Rassilon from his tomb. He takes the body the current Castellan (Timothy Dalton) and returns to the Citadel of the Time Lords.

Romana refuses to hand over the Sash, Crown, and Rod of Rassilon. It's unclear at this point whether Rassilon is truly returned, or whether the Castellan just has his power (like the Master does Omega's), but the Council don't particularly care - they see his power, and want him to rule.

As the debate rages, the Master descends on the Citadel. He greets Rassilon as if he was Omega, and the Council are delighted - but neither of them trusts the other. At the first opportunity, they betray one another - and as it happens, that opportunity is the Doctor breaking into the Citadel and trying to shoot Rassilon in the face.

As the Time War continues to rage (appearances by the War Council, yes please!), civil war breaks out in the Citadel. Romana, Rassilon, and the Master each end up with their own factions, each seeking their own goals. As the war goes on, Rassilon creates the De-mat gun and uses it to create his gauntlet; the Master deploys all manner of horrors from the depths of the Time Lord vaults; and the Doctor hunts for the third founder of Gallifrey - the mysterious Other, whose name isn't even know. Is (s)he still alive? Did (s)he even exist?

The outcome is actually the least exciting part of the film, because we already know it: the Master flees to the end of time, wiping the Doctor's memory of his face along the way. Rassilon secures his rule of Gallifrey. And the Doctor finds that the Other's power has been bound up in a tool, or a weapon, a small, simple box... something known as the Moment.

Part of the fun is that this is a Time War. The timeline of the film twists and turns: we see Rassilon, the Master, and the Doctor facing off before we ever see Rassilon resurrected. The designers get to let their imaginations run wild when coming up with temporal weapons for both sides to use.

Along the way, we make use of the threefold nature of our primary cast. The three Founders correlate directly to the three protagonists (the Doctor is said in non-TV stories to be the reincarnation of the Other), but there are also three ancient Gallifreyan gods at play: Pain, Death, and Time line up nicely with the Master (who's crazy), Rassilon (who will just straight-up kill you), and the Doctor (who wants to change history). They also fit the stories of the Founders, at least as depicted here.

Obviously this isn't a perfect outline - it probably needs a twist somewhere in the third act, to avoid the inevitable march towards Utopia/The End of Time/The Day of the Doctor. But it's enough to make me sad that we can never see it.

And hopefully you too. ;)

hS

(PS: I know I'm only doing Friday Forum every other week or so. Maybe if the news would stop being so depressing I'd do it every week.)

How do we break thee? Let us count the ways:
We claim the Hammerhand slew friend and foe,
When truth holds him a hero in the snow!
King Helm needed no ring to win our praise!
Nor need Isildur flee the Eye of Flames
When Sauron was disbanded, sent below,
In no fit state to grant a ring of woe...
And these are but a tithe of our dismays!
Should Sauron claim a wraith but leave the One?
Should Nazgul rise three thousand years too late?
Did Saruman not find Isildur's bones,
And Helm not stand eternal at the gate?
No, say we! Let us rest, our battles done
And keep us heroes, as the Words dictate.

(With sincerest apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.)

Yeah: to claim Isilgul, Sauron would have had to go 'oh, what was that shiny thing that fell off your finger into the river? WELP GUESS IT WAS NOTHING, OFF WE TROT.'

hS

I'm pretty sure Helmwraith directly contradicts the movies, let alone the books. Remember the 'Tomb of the Nazgul' in Desolation of Smaug? They claimed the Nine were buried there after the fall of Angmar, in 1935 - around the time the last king of Gondor died. But Rohan wasn't even founded until 2510, and Helm died in 2759. Helmwraith would have had to be buried eight hundred years before his death.

Or maybe the claim is that the Nazgul keep being killed off and replaced? But that's... dumb. And anyway, Isilgul has an even bigger problem: Sauron was gone at the time when he needed to place a ring on Isildur's finger. That's literally the whole point.

I am annoyed. I am so annoyed that I must express myself...

...

...

... through POETRY!

(Once I've written some.)

hS

... there was a bout of 'agent and Flower team up to make a department' in 2004. That's exactly how DOGA was formed, and I wouldn't put it past Maly and the Elanor to have done the same thing for the DOOCH.

In those departments, the personality of the founding agent plays a major role in defining the department's MO. The Pyro Department took its lead from Dafydd; the DCUP's inventiveness is from Scorpia; the DOOCH is pointless and hugs things because of Maly. How well that inspiration sticks probably depends on the recruits [/the later writers]: DOGA has kept 'destroy' but without holding onto 'burn', but DOOCH seems to be maintaining its 'hug a hobbit today' outlook.

I take two things away from this:

-I clearly need an 'Ephemerals' follow-up focussing on this phenomenon.

-I badly need to update the DOOCH page.

hS

But that doesn't mean anybody else needs to. {= ) To quote DCUP's main page:

"[DCUP's] would-be trademark is an overactive imagination when it comes to slaying time, although if you actually think about it, all of HQ could really make that claim.

"The only person who really takes DCUP seriously is its founder, Scorpia Lotus, who had never heard of TV Tropes when he chose its name and thus thought he was being terribly clever and original. Scorpia started life as a Marty-Stu. This might explain a lot."

So no, there's definitely no actual need to treat the Duty in DCUP any differently than you'd treat any other Floaters mission, except for the agents complaining about the eccentricities of their boss and forebear. It should, however, probably be an incentive for you, the hypothetical DCUP writer, to push yourself to come up with ideas that haven't been done before, or at least really strive for poetic justice and humor.

(I would also speculate that the original agents caught hell for nuking that songfic and that's why we haven't heard from them again, but that is 100% speculation on my part.)

~Neshomeh

We know from "Ephemerals" that the current head of DCUP, the Sadistic Bladderwrack, was once head of the Department of Clichéd Humor. To directly quote Huinesoron's "Head of Department" entry for the DCH: "The Bladderwrack, who had not yet become Sadistic. After the department collapsed, it spent six miserable years doing odd jobs for the other Flowers in an effort to persuade them to give it another chance, before finally starting the DCUP."

So I basically see it fully as motivation on the Bladderwrack's part. Its previous department, where the agents constantly exemplified humor, was taken apart. It worked hard to finally become head of agent teams again, so this time, it made sure to make the agents behave oppositely, focusing on punishment rather than jokes.

So do the DCUP agents need to come up with ridiculous punishments? Not really; the Bladderwrack is the only one who cares. Heck, in the second DCUP mission ever published, the punchline at the end is that the agents give up on being creative and nuke the entire fic. It's not that they're actually trying to be different from other departments' teams; they're just giving their annoying boss what it thinks higher-ranking Flowers expect of his division.

—doctorlit, unusual but not cool

Question: *Since DCUP agents must utilize creative and original means for disposing of badfic or risk being fired*... How exactly would that work? Sues already die creatively, and torture isn't allowed.

For a given value of funny, of course.

Nice story, and the puff of logic so satisfying to see in action.

The last interlude I published with them showed her attempting to teach Charlotte some combat skills, but Charlotte's blowing her off. After all, once she's out of ESAS, there's no need to worry about getting ripped apart anymore, right?

Riiight?

It was a fun read, though some of it really made me think: what happens when Charlotte has to realize that she isn't going to be invincible as a human? What happens when she rushes in and gets torn apart and doesn't come back? Because she's got into some seriously bad habits when it comes to Suvian takedown tactics, and it's frankly worrying that Ix hasn't brought her up on it even once.

As Charlotte's deal with the Flowers comes closer to an end, she and Ix are sent against a ridiculously overpowered Twilight Sue.

Hopefully, they won't inflict this indignity to more kings and Nazgul?

I mean, they're all about how they follow an 'alternate timeline' from canon, but there is AU and... badfic.

You know, you can tell it... British are all preparing a cheap energy source for the after Brexit with this game, right?

That's... incomparably stupid.

hS

And that makes me ashamed of using the opportunity to point out a month-old news about Shadows of War (beware of 'spoilers'). They're not even trying anymore.

Now that I've been exposed to more different kinds of people and learned more about the world, though, I definitely do.

I think about my gender when I have conversations about books with an older friend of mine who is so very female she finds it difficult to relate to male characters in male-authored books, who (she says) don't care about the things she cares about. That experience is totally alien to me, though I suspect it's fairly common, so it does make me question my female identity. I've always related to male characters just fine, my first best friend in preschool was a boy, and though my closest friends in elementary school were girls (one a tomboy and one even more introverted than me), from about middle school on, I've tended to get on with most men better than most women. I also write a ton more male characters than female ones, and even as a kid, I'd happily play male roles. In dreams, sometimes I'm a guy, too. It's not me, I don't think—I'm often not me in dreams—but still.

And yet I'm female, always have been, always will be. I find that pretty dang weird. ^_^; Like, with all that maleness in me, why am I not trans or agender? Because I know I'm not.

I tend to think it's because I was never treated as weird by my family? It was always okay to like who and what I liked, and be who I wanted to be, even if they didn't always entirely approve of my choices (like outfits consisting entirely of pink sweatclothes, yeesh, why was I allowed out the door).

Hence why I would sort of like it if the whole concept of gender would go defenestrate itself, because it's confusing and weird and often seems to hurt more than it helps? Except that it's actually important for lots of people.

~Neshomeh

I was waiting to see how long it took Scape to realise how banjaxed her HTML was. ^_~

Her post was supposed to be this:

---

Have some stained glass of Chrysoplax!

Also, small question: did you enjoy the peculiar craft sodas I gave you at the Gathering?

---

The location of the hidden part of my reply is left as an exercise to the reader. :D

hS

It doesn't appear for me.

I think I may just be to introverted to grasp, in any non-intellectual sense, the concept of 'belonging' that you're trying to convey. But having multiple perspectives is always helpful; it gives me new angles to see it from. So thanks.

hS

(PS: 'not much reason to put a lot of thought into it'?!?! Iximaz - this is the PPC! Putting too much thought into things is what we do! ^_~)

I think, in general, it's safe to say most cisgender people don't go "Hmm, what am I, yes I am male" or "yes I am female" because they don't need to question their identity. To them, their gender just is.

I identify as agender (most of the time; it tends to change) and while I was a kid, I never much thought about what I was. Whenever I told people I was a boy that day and was laughed off, I figured it was just me being weird and kind of suppressed that. And then puberty hit, and with it came the dysphoria and a sense that something wasn't quite right. Still, I kept on thinking maybe I was just a weird girl, because I knew I wasn't a boy (except when I was, oh god why is this so confusing what is happening to me is this normal?).

When you already know what you are and where you feel you belong, there's not much reason to put a lot of thought into it.

So that's my $.02, for what it's worth.

I have a mid-length (~7000 word) non-PPC Voyager story that could do with a third pair of eyes; I'm mostly concerned about the plot and dialogue, rather than just SPaG issues. Shouldn't stray above a T-rating. Does anyone have the time to help me out?

hS

Next time, I will bring sleepy/nervous Canterbury fudge. Next time... =]