through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered . . .

O HAY Yuletide reveal. Yeah, that kind of got lost for me in the last few days. I wrote "All of Denmark", a modernized Hamlet AU set at the beginning of WWII and drawing a little on actual events in Denmark at the time. It was fun to write and I thank my recipient for explicitly giving me permission to go for AUs or modernizations, so that I felt comfortable getting a little out there and settling on a premise that was a bit of a reach.

In the spirit of the thing, have that fic meme that's been going around!

( Cut because I talk a lot. )

As I'm sure many of you have done, I have lost multiple chunks of my life to TV Tropes. The most recent chunk was at the Wild Mass Guessing page, which is a gathering of pages on different fandoms discussing fanon theories from the sensible to the insane. Many of them have an "X is a Time Lord" guess, and since Dollhouse, there are a lot of "X is a Doll" guesses popping up, too.

So! In my idleness, I have decided to pose this - I don't know, meme I just made up to you guys.

Name me a fandom I'm familiar with, and I'll tell you who's a Time Lord, who's a Doll, or both (probably both) and why.

Feel free to swipe and use this yourself, if you could stand to kill some time.

Right, so, in a total one-eighty from my random gen crossover, have some Fix fic. (Even gen Fix fic, which this decidedly is not, would, I suspect, be a total one-eighty from your usual genfic. I'm not sure gen Fix fic is even possible.)



TITLE: "Just like Everything Else"
AUTHOR: Cathryn (catslash)
FANDOM: The Fix
WORD COUNT: Approximately 1600.
RATING: R
PAIRING: Reed/Grahame
SUMMARY: Reed is bored. Grahame is a convenient target. Harvard-era fic; prequel to "All Downhill From Here."
WARNING: Still not warning for incest in this fandom.
DISCLAIMER: The Fix was created by John Dempsey and Dana P Rowe. I take no credit and make no money.
NOTES: I thought for sure someone would want to know exactly how Reed managed to work his magic on Grahame so fast in ADFH. Nobody did, but I wrote this anyway. So, uh, here's the answer to the question no one asked.



( Someone should do something about that. )

Occasionally, as an English major, one gets the chance to write something incredibly ridiculous. On Tuesday, I got to write and pass in a paper comparing Hamlet and The Fix. (This was my justification for paying actual money for that bootleg: "It's okay, it's for SCHOOL!")

I think my flist contains a few people as geeky as I am who might be interested in reading this paper, so I figured I'd throw it up here. It's not as thorough as I'd like - it came out to six and a half pages for a five-page assignment, and that was after skipping the comparison of Tina and Ophelia - but I think it's a decent overview. And it does contain a brief summary of The Fix (an incomplete one, but it has what you need to know for the paper), so if you're not familiar with it, it's okay.

( A closer examination, and strong familiarity with both plays, makes it clear that The Fix is in actuality an aggressively cynical retelling of Hamlet. )

My two favorite things about writing this paper:

* Srs Scholastic Discussion of fictitious gay incest

* The fact that my Works Cited contains a website entitled "Zombie Prom (A New Musical)." Guys, when you are writing about a work as obscure as The Fix, you take your outside sources where you can find 'em.

My two least favorite things about writing this paper:

* As you may have gathered, my professor has a Thing about the Oedipal complex theory; we read Hamlet for his class after reading Oedipus Rex, and also he teaches a class on Freud. I HATE the Oedipal complex theory as applied to Hamlet SO GODDAMN MUCH, but it happens to work in favor of my argument, so I went with it.

* This is my third paper on Hamlet in two semesters. (It should be my fourth, but I never did get my shit together on that assignment last semester.) Good thing I love Hamlet, right? Now can I please have at least another year before I end up studying the fucking thing again?

Swiped from sotto_voice

Pick a pairing from my fandoms, and come up with a location and/or situation, and I will write you between 50 and 250 words about the kiss that happened in that context.

You can even throw some crossovers at me if you want. You guys pretty much know my fandoms; check my tags and interests if you're not sure. No baseball, plz. I'm too out of touch this year to do any new pairings and I feel like I've done the old ones to death.

MY BRAIN. Is a muddle. Here is what my day has contained.

* The Torchwood audio play. Yes, yes, I know I have very loudly quit Torchwood, but I have a weakness for audio stuff. And I knew it would be hilarious. And I was not wrong. I'm going to have to listen to it again soon. CANDYFLOSS.

* As per a deal I made with maggiesox, I am listening to Les Miserables in its entirety, start to finish, for the first time. Ever. I know quite a few of the songs, because we sang a medley in chorus when I was in eighth grade (mmm, uplifting) and I was still young enough then so that I now, eleven years later, still know every word. I even bought the Broadway soundtrack at that time, but being young and free of any sort of taste in music, I didn't really care much about any of the songs I didn't already know.

So. I mentioned that in Maggie's presence, and a deal was brokered: I would listen to Les Miz if she would finally listen to The Fix. I am holding up my end of the bargain, which is not exactly a chore, because I am of course enjoying it immensely.

And I just HAPPEN to have the recording with Philip Quast as Javert. Quast also plays my favorite character in The Fix, one Grahame Chandler. Total coincidence, really!

* And then there is the paper on Hamlet. We're reading Hamlet in my literary-analysis-or-whatever-the-hell-it's-called class, and had to do a "close reading" of a selection, which basically means "write at least three pages on ten to fifteen lines." I picked one of Claudius's, because I have a weakness for sympathetic villains. (See above in re: Grahame Chandler. Also, I bet we can all guess who is going to be my favorite Les Miz character.) (Incidentally, I believe Philip Quast could play an excellent Claudius. Grahame practically IS Claudius, just with polio and being in love with his nephew instead of his sister-in-law.) (See what I mean about my brain being a muddle?) Plus, it happens to contain one of my favorite selections in the play: "Do it, England/For like the Hectic in my Blood he rages/And thou must cure me." Grahame is so not the only one with a thing for his nephew.

(And yes, I managed three pages out of eleven lines effortlessly. I talk too much. If you had not noticed this, then hi, I'm Cathryn, nice to meet you.)

Also, somewhere in all that, during my play analysis class, was some brief discussion of Augustus Wilson's The Piano Lesson, which I saw last year for my Intro to Theatre class and you should totally go see it if there is a production in your area, because it's pretty awesome.

But anyway. Torchwood and Les Miz and Hamlet and too many parallels with The Fix in both casting and theme and if I DON'T have seriously strange dreams tonight, I will be very disappointed in my brain.

So I guess this was inevitable. All I could do in the end was try to go the slightly less predictable route.

Torchwood/The Fix. It was GOING to be a drabble, but Jack wouldn't shut up, so it ended up being two and a half drabbles instead.



( 'Eerie, isn't it? Captain Jack Harkness.' )

This is KILLING ME, people. KILLING ME. SO MUCH TEMPTATION. Less than a day to go (I hope) before I can see the Doctor Who finale, and I'm glad for more reasons than one. Trying to avoid even the slightest hint of a possibility of a vague spoiler requires skipping over everything I would normally read. There are THREE DW wank reports up at Fandom Wank. THREE OF THEM. And I don't dare touch them.

I know it'll all be worth it. But damn.

In other, equally geeky news, I've been listening for the last couple of days to the soundtrack of a play called The Fix. I'd only ever heard of this play because the original cast had John Barrowman, but that's not why I bought it. I bought it because it is a political satire musical, which is just one of those combinations you don't expect and the second I read the blurb at Amazon, I had to have it. And I am really, really sad that I hadn't heard of it years ago, because it is awesome and it is something that should have been in my life long before now. What happens is: the front runner Presidential candidate dies in the midst of screwing his mistress, so his wife and brother decide that her drug-addict son will go into politics and eventually become President instead. Naturally, it all turns into a huge mess, and the songs are great, and the performances are wonderful, and why did I only hear of this play because one of the actors in it happened to end up on a couple of shows I like? How many other awesome musicals am I missing out on?

(Mind you, in terms of my Doctor Who fandom, I'm not sure this didn't turn out for the best. Because my first DW eps were the Empty Child two-parter, and the second I figured out who was playing Jack I would have been all, "OMG it's Cal!" and probably have viewed the entire thing rather differently. Casting can be funny that way.)