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i'm glad there are episodes in the next generation where data gets reprogrammed/possessed/we meet his evil twin/etc, because as much as brent spiner is amazing as data, his real talent is playing weird little freaks
my sleep paralysis demon at 3am
this line is literally canon and he delivers it with such gusto
I'm just curious about how many you have loaded up. Doesn't matter if you made them yourself or got them from someone else. Doesn't matter if they're half-complete or kind of broken. Doesn't matter if you actually use them. I'm just wondering how many site skins people tend to keep around at any given time.
(in case anyone gets inspired to look up skins)
me when i find a new fandom to obsess over vs me when the characters start tormenting my mind
1x02 Diefenbaker’s Day Off // 2x08 One Good Man // 2x13 White Men Can’t Jump to Conclusions // 3x01 Burning Down the House | Normalized
due South does a main character re-casting better than any other show on TV, and they do it by playing with television's own accepted meta-narrative.
Recasting a character has a long tradition in television, creating a viewership that knows and understands the storytelling short form at play. As viewers, we realize that sometimes actors aren't available to reprise a role (or simply aren't interested in it anymore); but, for the sake of the story, sometimes the show needs that character to come back. So we lean hard into suspended disbelief and just go with it. After all, the characters in the show accept the parareality of it—why shouldn't we?
Of course, the most famous example of a character recast would be the Dick/Darren disaster on 1960s sitcom Bewitched, when Dick York was unceremoniously replaced by Dick Sargent in the role of Darrin Stephens. ("The Dick Wars" would have gone absolutely insane).
it was... not successful
But they weren't the only ones to do it. Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince, Becky from Roseanne, Daario Naharis from Game of Thrones, Greg Serrano from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (pain, agony)—recasting characters but maintaining the fiction is a storied tradition in TV. New actor, same character; totally normalized.
And shows continue to do it, even today, with a—uh—similar dedication to fucking it up doing it poorly.
why must we be punished like this
due South even engages in this trope itself in season 2, when hard-hitting investigative journalist Mackenzie King is recast and they don't even try to find an actress who looks similar. In 1x02 Diefenbaker's Day Off, she's played by brunette Madolyn Smith-Osborne; in 2x08 One Good Man, she's been replaced by blonde Maria Bello, and nobody talks about it.
yeah i'm absolutely the same person, obviously
Everyone diegetically (within the world of the show) is just like, oh yeah, that's hard-hitting investigative journalist Mackenzie King. Totally. Only non-diegetically (outside of the world of the show) does the viewer go "No, that's not the same person." Internally, the fiction proceeds as usual.
So what would happen if, say, Samantha Stephens turned to Dick Sargent and said "You're not Darrin," when everyone else in the show continued to treat him as though he was? Or if Jaskier told Geralt that he knows he's not actually Geralt, and everyone treated him like he was delusional?
Or if Fraser, even, had recognized Mackenzie King as someone entirely different, and everyone treated him like he had a hole in his bag of marbles because of it? Of course that's Mackenzie King; even her boss knows it. No, she's never been a brunette. What are you talking about?
And that's exactly what happens in Burning Down the House.
the rays vecchio
Diagetically, everyone else treats Callum Keith Rennie's character as though he is Ray Vecchio. "Oh, good, you found him," says Det. Huey. Elaine, Franchesca, literally everyone else both at the station and outside of it treat Callum Keith Rennie Ray Vecchio as though he is David Marciano Ray Vecchio. They're acting exactly as any other TV character would in the face of a recasting: as though absolutely nothing had happened.
Except for Fraser.
Fraser's specific brand of parareal Canadian plot magic means that he's immune to the recasting blindness; he's acting as an agent of the viewer, voicing our non-diegetic concerns. Fraser is (as he so often is) a character with one foot outside of the narrative. He's just always been like this and he doesn't know why.
oh this man is infuriating and hot, fuck. shit.
And for a character who already thinks he is likely insane (he sees the ghost of his dead father! He communicates with his deaf half-wolf! He is instantly committed to a mental institution upon voicing the actual true story of his life!), this is very extremely distressing. Fraser thinks he's actually lost it this time, because everyone else in due South is acting like a TV character, and Benton Fraser is acting like a viewer.
This is so brilliant on so many levels. They just fully lampshade the damn thing. It allows our protagonist to speak for disgruntled or confused viewers. It engages at a postmodern level with television as a medium with a storied history (and due South is incredibly postmodern; nearly every episode is or contains a reference to another piece of media). It's written from the perspective of someone who loves and is knowledgeable about TV tropes.
And it gives us an entirely new Ray while still maintaining respect and loyalty to the original, something no other straight (lol) recast could ever do.
Genuinely one of the most clever, witty, well-crafted hours of television ever made. I could write essays about so many different parts of it. And I guess I will!!!!!!
It’s Burning Down the House week in our dS Stacked Rewatch!
In February, we upgraded Ruby and Rails to their next major versions. In between those large upgrades, we made a variety of small bug and performance fixes all around AO3.
would you read a fanfiction au set at your job? i.e if you're a barista would you read a coffeshop au for any media, hospital au if you're a doctor (?? i guess??? you get the point)
yes and i've actively sought it out
i wouldn't mind it but i'm not seeking it out specifically
no my job is boring and/or wouldn't work as a setting
no i hate my job and don't want to think about it in my spare time
it's nuanced
unemployed button
nothing scarier than being a fan of a fic and then becoming mutuals with the author. like hi shakespeare. big fan of your fake dating au
He's in timeout
worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard
everyone in the notes we are all holding hands. everyone who hasnt worked on a wip in weeks or months or years, its okay. we are going slow but we are going
my favorite scene in LotR as a kid was when Sam started miserably freestyling in the tower of Cirith Ungol and the only reason he ever found Frodo was because he deliriously tried to join in
…i did read some of the novels, but i couldn’t get through them entirely…
…and so i genuinely have no idea whether or not this is serious. coz i mean, obviously, it could be a joke. but it could also have legitimately happened. people who have only seen the films underestimate the amount of random things that happen in the books that could come off as utterly silly and ridiculous if removed from their context.
Haha, well, it is pretty much what happens. Sam is looking for Frodo in the tower of Cirith Ungol and is despairing that he will ever find him. He sits down and does what any self-respecting Tolkien character does during their moments of hopelessness and bursts into song.
It’s a really good song (ten year old Ship had it memorized) and as he begins the refrain a second time, he hears Frodo’s voice answering weakly from above. Frodo is poisoned and despairing and beaten but he is still a Hobbit and cannot resist a singalong even while on the brink of death.
I just have to reblog because it makes me laugh EVERY TIME
Ceaseless watcher turn your gaze upon this wretched lightswitch
have you ever shipped something so hard that you become irrationally happy and make a sound akin to steam escaping from a kettle everytime they so much as stand next to eachother
[grandma voice] back in my day, sonny, we called it “squeeing”.
