Ok, I'm un-appropriating Last of the Time Lords right now

[owl]

angua9 made an interesting post a couple of days ago about appreciation vs appropriation of canon. (Briefly, appreciators enjoy it as is and if it stops being enjoyable, they wander off, while appropriators become attached to one aspect of it, or to the fanon, to the point where the canon disappoints them and the post screeds of complaint, or in extreme cases, wed Snape on the astral plane.

I fear I may have slightly appropriated Doctor Who recently, or in other words become one of a new breed of rapid Martha fen. Or possibly Last of the Time Lords was a complete stinker of an episode, down there with Love and Monsters.

Things in LotTL that I'm throwing out of my personal canon:


Aged!Doctor. It is necessary that he be hors de combat in order for the Doctor-in-training to come into her own, but turning him into Gollum is just embarrassing. And the hundred-year-old prosthetic isn't as good as they think it is, either.

I can't buy that the only thing the Doctor and the Jones would think of in a whole year is a plan that was useless. Not to mention the underuse of Jack. Hey, if the problem is solved by shooting the paradox machine, why didn't Jack try it months ago? He doesn't exactly have anything to lose.

I like the idea of Martha fighting with words instead of weapons, but not floating glowing Doctor. I'd have Martha's stories breaking Archangel's psychic field, or turning it against the Master, but not the believing in the Doctor business, that's not going to be good for his God complex. And her elaborate ruse to get aboard the Valiant was unnecessary-the plan, such as it was, would have worked perfectly well with Martha sitting on a beach in Brighton.

The Doctor standing in silence when Martha said she wasn't second-best. After a series of unrequited rubbish, it wouldn't have killed him to say something more than "Yes" "OK" and "Is this going anywhere?" I have little hope that this will be fixed later, either.
And I hated that Martha's real reason for leaving was because the Doctor wouldn't wuv her, as if that's so much more important than her family or her career.

Normally I'm more of an appreciator than an appropriator, or, as the Harmoanians or Draco-in-leather brigade would call me, a sheep. I mostly ship with what I think is the canon, and my fanfics are mainly fill-in-the-gaps, might have happened off-screen shorts.

However, I've just noticed that I'm more of an appropriator when the canon is many-authored: Lord of the Rings (book) or Harry Potter I just read and discuss, I don't even fanfic much, whereas with a TV series like Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica it seems much easier to say "I'm going to quietly ignore episode X-after all, the writers dropped plotline Y and forgot about it two series ago." Also, the quality of TV series varies much more than a series of books by the same author. Films, like Potc, are somewhere in between, and Star Wars is a bit unusual: all the six films are canon (and I don't care that much when Han shot), but I throw out the books except for any interesting world-building I want to use in fic, and I've written a long original character fic that 's happening just off-screen. I suppose I appreciate the Skywalkers' story, but I've appropriated their world.

New Who is especially easy, because in a way it's fanon: Rusty and Co are fans who have got the opportunity to make a giant fanvid of the original series, complete with Mary Sues.

Comments

[white_hart]

Bizarrely, aged-Doctor-in-a-cage was one of the bits my mother mentioned particularly liking. I was pretty ambivalent.

I think that my one major bit of appropriation for Doctor Who is that in my personal canon he didn't love Rose, either, not like that; but unlike Martha, she never worked it out.

[owl]

Yes, me too, definitely. Nine, yes,he needed her, though not to have sex with. I can never see it with Ten. He loves everybody. If he'd had his way the TARDIS would be stuffed with HUMAN WOMANZ.

[white_hart]

It would be. And they'd all be in love with him, and he'd love all of them, but not in that way, and he wouldn't understand why they all kept trying to corner him against the console while the others were out of the room. It would be like something out of a Carry On film, or possibly Benny Hill.