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

[fyrdrakken]

The clone-or-other-duplicate trope (possibly said duplicate is in fact an android). Sometimes part of a universe-jump plot, to give multiple copies of the same character from slightly different universes interacting with each other. (SG verse does this a lot. But a fanvid I found myself with a download of not too long ago is basically all about duplicates from various fandoms. Doctor Who, BtVS, Farscape, SG1 and SGA, maybe some others I forget.)

ETA: Also, I think the genderswap thing may be more common in anime -- at least, I seem to remember there being at least one anime in which the main character turns into a girl every time he gets wet or something like that. But, wow, such a glaring omission, that such a popular fanfic trope hasn't made it onscreen when even mpreg shows up as a plot point on occasion. I can remember a movie called Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde but that's the only direct genderswap I can remember that wasn't bodyswap-with-incidental-gendershift.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Yes! Yes, that's a good one. SG-1 does it twice, if I recall - "Tin Man" and "Fragile Balance".

I think gender swap is rare because it's hard to do on live action television - easier in print.

[fyrdrakken]

SG1 also has an AU!Carter coming for a visit in an early season, brings back the android SG1 team (and promptly kills them all off), and has an episode in the 9th or 10th season where a rip in the spacetime continuum leads to hordes of AU!SG1s showing up at the SGC. And SGA gives us an AU!McKay in one ep and a set of replicator-created clones in IIRC 4th season (who, like O'Neill 2.0, were created by aliens who wanted to experiment on SGC people without their absence being noted and initially thought they were the originals).

Well, see, gender swap shouldn't be any harder than casting for juvenile versions of main cast members for flashback episodes. And in some cases there's bound to be a cheat option where the actor in question has an opposite-gender sibling with a strong resemblance. (I'm reminded of a story I heard from the filming of X-Men 2, where Hugh Jackman's sister came to visit the set one day and for a joke they put her in a Logan outfit and gave her the Wolverine hairdo and sent her on for a take instead of her brother. Apparently the resemblance was so strong that it took a few minutes for the crew to notice.)

I'm starting to consider that you may have hit on something where fandom is interested in something that live action programs aren't all that keen on touching. You see lots of transvestite comedy, or angsty serious indy flicks about transsexuals, and I can remember one movie of the died-but-sent-back-to-earth-for-final-chance-at-correcting-unfinished-business where the individual in question was given the last-minute handicap of being sent back as a woman instead (I can't remember the title, but Ellen Barkin played the woman he wound up becoming), but I'm thinking the genderbender plot is verging on serious!issues territory in filmic terms, and hence not as likely to show up in SF/fantasy TV.