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

[lazyclaire.livejournal.com]

Buffy's first death activated Kendra's slayer powers and thus passed the Slayer Lineage onto her. She became the Chosen One, so when she died, Faith's powers became activated. Faith was the new Chosen One and so a new slayer could only have been activated by her death. Or a spell by Uber-Willow, as seen in the Grand Finale... Either :)

Buffy still had her powers, because if she didn't, the series would have been much much shorter, but her second death didn't activate a new Slayer because she wasn't the Chosen One per say anymore. Her first death + rebirth created a glitch in the pattern and basically messed everything up :)

Also, while walking in North London, I saw a graffiti of a Dalek which looked a lot like Banksy's and that said 'Obey!' under it. It was probably not a real Banksy, but hey, it made me happy :)

For your fandom meme, please tell me about your Unpopular Buffy Opinions! Or New Who. Or both. As you please :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Aha, thank you. So in short: the second one didn't count. Heh. Worth it, so we could have Faith.

My unpopular Buffy opinons!

1. Spike = dull. Oh, so dull. I had a theory that Buffy's boyfriends only were interesting when they weren't with her - so Angel was cool on his own series, and Spike was interesting before the whole Buffy/Spike thing, and Riley never got to be interesting at all.

2. Giles should never have left. He was my favourite. :)

3. Aaaand, for the big one: The Gift should have been the series finale. I mean, Once More With Feeling and Tabula Rasa were awesome, but other than them, and maybe Storyteller, I think the first five seasons were all we needed, really.

[lazyclaire.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I do really like Spike but I don't like his relationship with Buffy. I can get behind what you say about him being more interesting before, although I wouldn't make it into a theory, because I didn't see any of Angel. Also, this whole "Buffy loves men who hurt her" thing is so damn fishy!

But, how true, Riley is LE annoying and Giles = <3 !

[fyrdrakken]

Much agreement on all of these points. I made a special point of not buying any BtVS DVDs past the first three seasons, since I felt it really lost its way after they graduated high school.

EtA: Oh, and speaking of SF genre tropes, the Tabula Rasa plot? Who are we and what are we doing and what happened to our memories and how can we get them back?

[osymandias.livejournal.com]

You beat me to it...