we have therapy tomorrow it's too late to screw

[raven]

Hey, internets. You know those things that I, for lack of a better term, will call television sci-fi tropes? Not the whole scope of TV tropes, but those things that are just a necessary feature of a certain kind of show: Buffy, SG-1 and Atlantis, to a lesser extent TNG, Voyager and the X-Files monster-of-the-weeks? Like, body swaps, telepathy, alternate universes where everyone has different hair, benevolent-aliens-who-are-actually-evil, gender swaps (although, actually, no fandom I can think of has canonically done this), everyone gets turned into children, etc. That kind of thing. Would y'all mind thinking up the ones I've missed? I promise there is a reason I'm asking, it's just... too embarrassing to go into right now.

Also, while I'm here, jacinthsong has been worrying about a plot hole in the Buffyverse. When Buffy dies in "The Gift", why is no new Slayer called? After pondering this for some time - and after my realising that while Memory Alpha is a wonderful resource on many levels, it does not have the answer to all life's questions - we decided that, probably, only the first death counts. Or otherwise they could have just kept ducking Buffy in a tank of water and solved the problem that way. (Or, as she was the one-girl-in-all-the-world, and not in-Southern-California, maybe the new Slayer was called in Mongolia and beat up demonically possessed yaks.) Life is hard, when filled with such quandaries as these.

In other news, I'm still here. Getting myself out of this whole horrible mess by deliberately Revising, Applying For Jobs, or Watching Star Trek, and Nothing Else, with a side order of Not Crying. Not crying takes a lot of effort, but I'm getting better at it. Last weekend, I went down to Bristol to see vampire_kitten and shimgray, and it was very lovely; I went on a train that had come from Glasgow and was going to Penzance and there was nowhere to sit and the toilets had all gone boom and people were turning feral. It was an unpleasant experience, but I liked Bristol - the last time I was there was in 2004, and the less said about that the better, I suspect, but I liked the city. It has an excess of hills and precariously-positioned greenery that reminds me of San Francisco, down to the small signs reminding you to leave your handbrake on if you want to live. Funny, really - if my life had gone even slightly differently I'd still be living in Bristol now, most likely, and miserably at that.

Shim and I were going to go the Banksy exhbition at the city museum, but failed at this on account of the two-hour queues to get in (it's a free exhbition; even though we didn't get to go, it makes me happy in an obscure way that people were queueing two hours in humid heat for a free art exhibition) and spent the day mostly wandering, with interludes in cafés and bookshops that may or may not have led to my acquiring thirteen books, which is, perhaps, slightly excessive. Have since returned to grim north, read three of them, taken too many baths to count, discovered the joys of listening to BBC iPlayer whilst in said baths, run out of TNG and started on Deep Space Nine, applied for a job, oh my god my life is so exciting I could explode.

So as not to finish on a dull note, I steal a meme from musesfool: Name a fandom, and I'll give you the scoop on at least three of my unpopular opinions related to that fandom.

As she says, if you ask about a fandom I don't know, I shall feel absolutely no compunction in making shit up.

Comments

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Not that unpopular, but:

1. Kirk/McCoy is the new pairing of the revolution, not Kirk/Spock - I mean, it's nice an' all, and traditional, but omg-so-bff, yes.

2. Scotty is the best thing ever to live. No one else agrees with me on this, except possibly thistlerose, but dude. He is, and there should be fic and icons and SHRINES IN HIS HONOUR.

3. The canonical making fun of Chekov's accent bothers me a bit. Because, sure, the "nuclear wessels" thing was funny way back when, but in this version he's a kid and he's on a starship filled with people who are all older than him, and it seems kind of puppy-kicking.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Tru dat. Also, the idea that the ship's computer can't get his accent? Not cool.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I mean, the ship's computer canonically gets Klingons shouting at it, and people howling at it over the sound of explosions...

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

Kirk/McCoy is the new pairing of the revolution

So much yes!

(Also, I hear you on 3.)

[marymac.livejournal.com]

2 is unpopular?
How can 2 be unpopular? Scotty is awesome!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

But there is no fic! There are no icons! People are not EXPRESSING THEIR LOVE!

(okay, I am getting slightly overexcited BUT STILL)

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

I watched Relics the other night. Scotty does not do very well out of that episode. Poor Scotty.

GIP

[fyrdrakken]

I reply with my Scotty icon. There was another good Scotty icon in the set I got this one from.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

3. The canonical making fun of Chekov's accent bothers me a bit.
It is also daft because THAT'S NOT A RUSSIAN ACCENT. Or not a Russian accent anyone I know has recognised as such, I am open to corrections. You can plausibly interpret "nuclear wessels" as hypercorrection, but him actually not being able to pronounce vs is just...what.

[fadagaski.livejournal.com]

Possibly he might be Ukrainian? Which was Russia back in the 60s, but ... yeah, no, I don't understand how he can have a 'v' in all 3 of his names but can't pronounce 'Vulcan'.

[jacinthsong.livejournal.com]

USSR, not Russia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Soviet_Federative_Socialist_Republic), tho; I don't think people from the other SSRs would typically define themselves as Russian. He's so specifically proud of that nationalethnicthing, things are invented by little old ladies in Leningrad not Kiev, etc. bravecows, subservient_son and I fanwanked it post-movie as him being a trans-USSR TCK of some description who just exists in his own ethnonational bubble, becuase otherwise...headsplode.

[thistlerose.livejournal.com]

Scotty IS the best thing ever! (Except possibly for Bones, but Star Trek always makes fixing stuff look harder than fixing people, so I might have to give Mister Scott the edge.)

Scotty!!!! ♥ ♥ ♥

[fadagaski.livejournal.com]

1. Yes.

2. I buy it. I'd love to see the reasons for the differences between Prime!Scotty and nu!Scotty.

3. I suppose they were trying to keep the same kind of jokes going, like calling Spock a hobgoblin. Xenophobic in a really literal sense.

In fact, I'll go one step further and say the tone of the movie was a little lighter than it perhaps should have been. The first 10 minutes is a beautiful picture of death, darkness, despair, etc., followed by suicidal 11 year olds and racial hatred against a minor. And then we get ... humour. It's fun, but I still find the juxtaposition jarring in a notgood way.

/babble

[annikah.livejournal.com]

The IMDB goofs page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796366/goofs) for Star Trek XI attempts to explain Checkov's accent:

'Chekov's Russian accent is sometimes perceived to have a major flaw in it. In Russian, there is no "W" sound, but there is a very, very common "V" sound (although heavily rounded with shades of "w"). As a result of this, his labored way of transforming his V's into W's might seem incorrect, but when speaking English, native Russian speakers will sometimes transpose V's and W's, e.g. "Ve are wery happy to be here".'

I actually haven't known any Russians to know if this is true, or not. Hm. I've been rewatching TOS eps, and young!Chekov's accent seems to be more over the top. The computer, at least, should have been able to understand him.

Hooray 1 & 2! I fail to see how they are unpopular.

[marymac.livejournal.com]

I've heard Poles do it, cause Polish reverses the two sounds, but not so much Russians.

Put it down to stress?

[tieleen.livejournal.com]

What! Scotty's awesome. Who would dare say otherwise?

(Not quite entirely as awesome as his little alien friend. But very nearly.)