best_enemies | Discussion Time: Now With A Bit Of A Project/Anon Meme Update 6

Quick Reminders:

* To those newcomers who have yet to make an intro post: it'd be really awesome if you did, especially as we're grown a fair bit recently and it's comfier for everyone/interesting to know who's around. Thanks!

* To those who have already written up such a post--it would be cool, if you ever felt so inclined, for y'all to say hi to new people. The point of intro posts is, after all, to introduce you to each other. If no one ever checks up on them, then it is a bit silly of me to ask people to make them.

* One more week before the Five/Ainley!Master challenge wraps: if you want beta help, have lingering questions or need something clarified before you can dazzle us with your slash opus, here's the place to ask!

Discussion Questions:

The Rules: Be freely off topic and respond to any you feel like! Or none! Or just write comment crack/porn, since I had a lot of fun reading that last time and maybe you did too?

Think these questions are lame? I'm running out ~~and we never talk about the actual questions anyway~~. (Well we didn't used to,

gritsinmisery, but if you're going to call me on it... :p) Feel free to offer up some of your own in the comments and I'll edit the posts accordingly.

Let me precede this weeks questions with a bit of explanation. You may or may not be familiar with the big multi-fandom community

ship_manifesto. It's pretty much what it says on the tin. And I quote:

"Shipper's Manifesto: a public declaration of fannish love for a particular pairing or ship... This community's goal is to provide readers with a detailed listing of pairings, insight into the characters behind the pairings, and contextual understanding of what makes the pairing work. This community will also provide newcomers with a starting point for further exploration. We have *harassed* fans from every fandom to compile essays that focus on their pairing. Detailed analysis of the characters involved, the pairing itself, and the current state of fandom surrounding them has been provided. In addition, recommendations have been made concerning fanfiction, videos, graphics and links."

Basically it would serve as a good introduction into a very historied pairing for newbies, a sort of sampler for non-Who watchers who might not know they'd love it, and a resource for people who already know they like D/M.

Five/Turlough folks, Doctor/Romana, hell, even Doctor/Reinette have manifestos, and Doctor/Master just gets mentioned in Five/Turlough in, like, one footnote as a sort of fait accompli. Predictably the Doctor/Rose people have two: I'm not hating on them, but damn, what a call to get organized, as we've clearly had years longer to ship.

I snagged the right to do a write up, because clearly This Must Be. While I may need to call upon your awesum meta powerz re: Evidence, History and Pairing Dynamic at a later point, I think I'll try and get an idea of what I'm writing up before I toss you questions. Though I would of course appreciate any help! We could farm out sections or collaborate on them via discussion as it comes? Or any other idea, if you've got one? Many hands make light work and all, and obviously something we produced en masse would be of superior quality to what I could blather on about alone. It's due July 15th (though I'll probably finish and post it before then), so we have some time.

Specifically, for this week, I was thinking about the Recommendations section of the manifesto. That extends to fic, art, vids, and maybe, given that we're a peculiarly verbose pairing, particular examples of great meta. I know little about fanart or fanvids, so I could really use some help there: if you could comment with REC in the subject line, a link and a quick snippet as to why it's amazing, that'd be great.

When it comes to fic, I run into another problem. I would really like to offer a Greatest Hits selection from the bigger categories fic could fall into (Theta/Koschei, Three/Delgado!Master, Five/Ainley!Master, Ten/Simm!Master, and Other), but I am but one woman in a rather ficful pairing, and I wouldn't feel capable of making an assessment of what to recommend not just dictated by personal taste. I think it'd be better for us to rec fic titles here, with specific pairing(s) and, again, REC in the subject line, a link and a sentence explaining why it rocks. I can then cull this list down to something manageable for

ship_manifesto readers, but link them back here for Yet More Faves.

The fics in question should be finished. My definition of incomplete does not apply to 'Blah!User promised us a sequel/epilogue/coda/pony, and it's not a finished fic until I am riding my damn pony to the fair,' I just mean that to introduce new people to the pairing I don't want to have to send them to WIPs that cannot be read as complete works. ALSO I'd like to represent a variety of style. By that I mean I want to include fluff, smut, thinky character pieces, comedy and Darkest Torture Pr0n without being overwhelmed by a glut of the latter two (or a slew of Ten/Simm!Master to the exclusion of other incarnations--I know there's more of it, but I want to give a total picture of the pairing, not just recapitulate that imbalance).

...also I know to rec New Dawn Fades, so you can delete the sentence you're in the middle of typing into the reply box. :p

Take your time, of course, but I'd really, really appreciate your input on this!

1) Whatever happened to sour the friendship or more-than-friendship of Theta and Koschei, we know that at some juncture Theta aged and did whatever eventually produced a Susan before fleeing Gallifrey (unless you think 'Grandfather' is just a kooky nickname). How do you reconcile this with the timeline of their Rift(tm)? Does Theta run screaming from Gallifrey as a young man, come back and spawn like a salmon, only to flee again, or what? Does Koschei get rejected/burned and leave Gallifrey and Theta behind? Has Theta been out in the universe for a while, only stopping by Gallifrey to pick up Susan and leave again, or is the initial flight from the planet right before Unearthly Child? Does Koschei stand idly by while Theta marries Some Woman out of love or obligation, has a kid and then has a grand kid, only to Go Evol later for reasons unconnected to all this? Alternatively, I joke about the crack idea that Theta and Koschei were married, and that Delgado!Master shows up for the alimony and Susan!custody, but, er, were they? And does he? And where IS that fic?

2) Indiana Jones would be an amazing companion. Not a question, yet True (And clearly Jones, the Doctor--oh, Three'd be good-- and Captain Picard would make one rockin' Team TARDIS). ...yeah, I am too tired to think of something good.

3) I always assume that you have to earn your definite article title (the Doctor, the Master, the Rani, the Meddling Monk, the Charted Accountant, etc.) through doing something super-awesome, as not even High Council members of the President seem to necessarily have such titles, and that it's some post-Rassilonate system of recognition (thus we don't get the Omega, etc.). But there's no canon proof of that, and the fact that people we see with titles are brilliant, gifted exiles/outlaws suggests it could just as easily be a stripping of the name for crimes committed (though they seem to wear them with a lot of unquestioning pride, and if that's the case, I'd think their relationship to title would become more complicated/you'd see them offer proper recognition back to renegades in the course of Five Doctors or something). Equally it seems unlikely to me that the Deca kids would all choose to go by aliases if it were a pure, idiosyncratic act of self-definition without reference to some culturally accepted thing--the Rani seems anti-wacky nicknames to me. So what do you think is going on with definite-article names?

Neil Gaiman makes a point in his (half-charming, half-exasperating...wait, that's all Neil Gaiman ever...) essay on War Games that the titles 'the Doctor' and 'the Master' serve to define them by function--what they do rather than what they are, titles not names--and to approach the vastness of the characters' capabilities on a semantic level, but I'm kind of wanting an in-universe (

selenak would say Watsonian rather than Doylist, I think) explanation, here.