Pan bloglodytes

95% Human

[panbloglodytes]

For four years now I’ve been trying to write something about Marvel as a sort of substitute for the real world after 2008— a place which continues on without the fallout of the financial crisis, but where the divergence from reality becomes harder and harder to contain. And I think Wandavision specifically is really interesting in that light, so it would be about that as well.

And it’s finally done, and really long!

[panbloglodytes]

I am a big fan of everyone’s favourite jokester, Klumpee Dee

[panbloglodytes]

Way back in 2008, I read all George Orwell’s essays while addicted to prescription sleeping pills. It’s embarrassing, but until I’d done that I’d not felt in my bones that the past was real— that the Second World War was a real place that young men went to die. They as real as the young men outside my flat who were sensibly going to clubs, while I stayed inside and did this.

Around that time I also got unhealthily obsessed with Doctor Who, and these two things fused together in my mind. I felt that Doctor Who did not always really believe that the past was real: it felt that awful things should be swept under the carpet, in the hope things worked out in the end. “I don’t think things will work out in the end,” I said through the next 18 years. Now people seem to agree with me, or at least they shout at me less.

So a few years back I wrote this fanfic series whose aim was to try and face the world as I thought that it really was. What does the Doctor mean if the future really is terrifying, and history seems to be back? I thought that if you tackle subjects like that you need to make them as wild as possible, so there are evil checkout machines and some people who regenerate into hairdryers. It’s hopefully about learning to live in such a world, instead of shouting that it already exists.

I think it has predicted… an unsettling number of things fairly well? The references to Harry Potter make me uncomfortable now, and the bits about Snapchat feel quaint. But every so often an event happens in the news, and I see the fanfic which seems to resemble it tick up very slightly in kudos.

Anyway. Now that the real Doctor is gone for a while, I thought I should probably say “Hey, I wrote about this one who is not real!” So here are her stories, if you want to give them a go.

[panbloglodytes]

I’ve never really managed to draw the Be Afraid Doctor in a way I was entirely happy with, but I guess this is sort of okay

[panbloglodytes]

This winter, it gets cold enough to build a fleshman.

This hasn’t been the case for quite some time. Global warming is what it is, after all. We’ve been burning up so much, to make this world ours. But towards the turn of the year, the temperature drops. The oil of the rain colagulates and comes firm.

Flesh falls softly over the chimneys and spires. It covers the Earth with its colours. In the night, hailbones come down in hard pellets. The world is transformed in the morning. We remark to ourselves it is beautiful.

And so I gather what I need to build my fleshman— a hat, and scarf, and eyes fresh from the fire’s scuttle. I roll up the flesh as carefully as I can. It is more work than I expected, but I manage.

The work is not as good as I would like. The hair is not in the right places; the nose is wrong. I did not have enough eyes to make sure he had little buttons. I did not find a broom which he could hold.

But all the same, he is the only fleshman I have seen. I have only ever heard of them in stories. And nobody had ever told me he would scream.

He demanded clothes, when he was finished. Not just a hat and a scarf. He covered his little flesh cock with the hands which I had crudely made. Silly, I told him; he was only made of flesh. He shouldn’t aspire to wear clothes, as if he was real.

He won’t want them soon, in any case. Last night, blood fell intermixed with flesh. Soon the rains will come again, will boil the fleshfall away, and the fleshman will melt as everything flesh has to do. He will struggle as if I have made him legs. He will try to escape, and will fail. I hope he will not scream, when this happens. I think that he will.

[panbloglodytes]

A short article on The Prestige, by Christopher Nolan— a film where magic is real, and where nobody really seems to care: https://open.substack.com/pub/robertsaysthis/p/it-doesnt-even-matter-if-its-magic

It doesn’t even matter if it’s magic

On the darkness in Christopher Nolan’s Prestige

[panbloglodytes]

Hasty drawing to celebrate that humanity has recovered yet more details about some kind of “Dalek Master Plan”

[panbloglodytes]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

I’ve finally finished this fanfic, which is technically one featuring the Fifteenth Doctor and the Daleks!

Except it’s also a story where the Doctor goes to a spaceship that’s also a Cathedral, discovers the terrible fate of a Mechanical God, and tells us why he rarely goes to the 61st Century— that time after those great wars of religion, when churches fought with lasered spires across the stars

[panbloglodytes]

Of all the things to become canon also featuring in my fanfic, it’s “Sea Devils is a racist slur”

[panbloglodytes]

The thing I find most difficult in the world is living in a society full of people who don’t believe truly terrible things will really happen, while having the sort of anxiety disorder that convinces me they’ll come along ANY MINUTE NOW. But on balance I think the disorder is the better thing: terrible things can and do happen to whole societies, and not believing they’ll happen to you is a way they might get more likely. This is a fanfic about a Dalek becoming eloquent and people choosing to vote for it, which is obviously the sort of thing that can be incredibly patronising and problematic as a subject. I tried very hard to make it so that the people who’d vote for it were me: they live in an extremely loosely fictionalised version of the city where I am; they get frustrated by the things that frustrate me. There are all sorts of little things that make me and them feel like power is ebbing away from us, and in our weakest moments we have the urge to just burn it all down. If you want to write about the Daleks manipulating people, I think you should always start with how they’d manipulate you— so this is a story about how they did just that, and how it meant that something beautiful in the world became destroyed You can read The Shape of the Dalek here.

[panbloglodytes]

I remember writing this at the Edinburgh Fringe seven years ago— I would walk through crammed alleys full of incredibly loud street performers, and get into the headspace of a Dalek who wanted to destroy humanity. It was very effective as method writing goes, and they may have had a Fringe over on Skaro.

Anyway. This Fringe I’ve been thinking about it again, because it feels very 2025 to me somehow. It felt very 2018 to me as well; that’s why I wrote it in the first place. But in 2025, it’s all more intensely so

[panbloglodytes]

Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with Saturn devouring his Son

A dispatch from the Reality War.

I want to say I reviewed THE REALITY WAR, but I’m not sure this is a review, exactly. I don’t even know what it is

[hypexion]

The thing about Murders at Karlov Manor is that from a story perspective, it couldn't have been set anywhere but Ravnica. And it especially couldn't have been set on New Capenna.

The story of Murders is ultimately about the fallout of March of the Machine on both Ravnica as a city, and on Kaya personally. The motivations for the high-profile deaths that litter the set are tied directly to elements of the Phyrexian invasion. The manner of murder is specifically set up to overcome the barriers Ravnica as a setting provides to a murder mystery. And Kaya only gets involved because of her questionably defined but always present relationship with Teysa Karlov.

Ravnica also comes pre-built with a host of established characters, who conveniently all hate each other. This enabled readers to theorise about whodunnit, as each daily chapter provided more information and more intrigue. People considered all kinds of threads: Could Jace be involved? Might Azor be pulling the strings somehow? How does Judith plan to survive her crazy plan? Lazav?? By the time Proft said "I know who the killer is", you too could get it. (then for some reason they delayed the reveal chapter so they could reveal the killer in a spoiler stream. even when the story is good, the management is bad)

If you move the story out of Ravnica, the whole thing falls apart. You lose everything that makes it work. A new plane would be functional, but a lot less engaging. Fiora is about political scheming, even more so than Ravnica. And New Capenna...

New Capenna is not a particularly well constructed setting. It works as a sparse background for a Magic set, but when you start poking at it, it falls over. Like, one of the nicer ways to describe New Capenna is "discount Ravnica", because you are comparing it to one of the game's most successful settings. And that's what New Capenna is - a city controlled by a number of distinct factions, built out of specific colour combinations. But the New Capenna factions are not as good as the Ravnica ones (and the Obscura are literally just the Dimir). There is crime on New Capenna, but there is no authority against which that crime is committed, which makes things rather hollow. Ravnica, as strange as its laws are, has laws, along with people to enforce them. (note: I am aware of the Doylist reason why New Capenna has no police. Watson is still crying.)

Ravnica being well-developed allows it to function as a backdrop for a different idea. New Capenna's issues do the opposite. In fact, any return to New Capenna would need to reckon with how the setting got completely turned over by the return of the angels. You can't just say "well the crime has punishment now, onto the mystery". You have to actually engage with the big change, or you're just dragging New Capenna into a deeper hole.

conclusion: When the Magic story is good it's because the writer looked at the setting and characters they were given and used them together well. This is only possible if you have a setting and characters that can be used well. Ravnica has that, the crime plane does not.

[panbloglodytes]

These are all great arguments for why if you wanted to make a murder mystery film and set it on one of the Magic: the Gathering worlds, Ravnica may indeed be an excellent choice. But this is not the same thing as creating a set of collectible cards that convey the mood and sense of a murder mystery— which is why I think this set is a horrible mess.

The thing is that you could make it work in a narrative form: in a narrative you control what the audience sees and when. You can make it so by the time we see the bits of the setting that look like a modern police procedural, we’ve forgotten the parts where it’s a 1920s Agatha Christie story, or a late Victorian Sherlock Holmes story, or a Ravnica story. The dark bits exist when you want them to and the funny bits do as well. That’s fine.

It’s not fine when you have them all happen at once in a pack of trading cards, for the same reason that it wouldn’t be fine if a film showed you all these things at once. Everything pulls in different directions— without one consistent setting and tone for the set, it all blends into a strange and dissonant mess.

It also… you can’t tell a twist narrative when a person receives all the scenes out of order? This should be obvious. The killer in the set’s mystery is revealed on a common. The suspects in the mystery aren’t indicated to be suspects on the cards where they appear. You can’t actually tell a murder mystery in this given form because you can’t control when information is received! The whole thing is fundamentally misconceived.

For all we’ve been told that we have to already care about the suspects in a mystery… I think it’s fairly clear the opposite is true. Nobody gives a shit about what Reverend Green is doing once your game with him is over. What is important is to have clear archtypes, which is what real murder mysteries and workable settings in murder mystery games tend to do. The cash-strapped young heir, the twitchy ex-military type, and so on.

I think having a set based around those would have worked a lot better than this? Something like Wilds of Eldraine’s goal that the player tells their own fairy tale every game. It would be much better for the player to be in control over their own mystery.

So: I think this is good reasoning, but the reasoning is applied to the wrong product. I think that’s important to stress because I got the impression that internally WotC did the same— they made decisions that would make for an excellent narrative story, but a confusing and ugly setting to be playing a game in. And I think that means they fairly clearly made the wrong decision, here. It doesn’t feel like this set put the game itself first and foremost.

[panbloglodytes]

This is my firm belief

[terastalungrad]

In 2010, there were Doctor Who fans who hated Tennant's regeneration story. In that episode, regeneration is presented as death, which fans thought would turn viewers against the new guy.

In 2023, there are Doctor Who fans who hate Tennant's regeneration story. In that episode, regeneration is presented as life, which fans think will turn viewers against the new guy.

[panbloglodytes]

Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? In 2010, the idea that regeneration means death in some sense infuriates many people— so by 2023, The Doctor no longer believes it. The face is just a face. He doesn’t know why it came back.

It’s only at the end, once The Doctor has gone off on new adventures, that the face realises otherwise. The Doctor is one entity who keeps on going, and The Doctor is many people, who do die. Two things can be true at once. But the face only gets to know this once it understands why it came back— in order that it could be saved.

I think at the end when Tennant says he’s happier than he has been in his life, or something like that, he is alluding to this. Not “his lives”— his life as Ten and Fourteen, which he now understands to be one and the same. That’s the whole idea behind all these stories; bigger truths behind seemingly incompatible things. I thought it was all very good

[panbloglodytes]

I really liked the Biregeneration, but I interpreted it in quite a specific way:

The Tenth Doctor is strange among the Doctors because he behaves the most like he’s a completely distinct individual— and because he seems more aware of how much power the Doctor truly has. I think he’s the most human Doctor because he is the most likely to try and use that power for good: then to get corrupted, and to fail. And he sacrifices himself in a messy and horrible way.

The Fourteenth Doctor is not like this: he acts like he is just a part of a much bigger life— he sees the face as just a face. But the twist is that this isn’t really true: there really is a person within that face, a person who isn’t able to be the Doctor, who died in a horrible way and was forgotten. This story is about giving that person another chance, at life, just like Donna. It’s about the Doctor leaving both of them, not about them carrying on eternally.

I choose to believe all those trips to Mars and so on the family talk about at the end do not really happen, and that this Doctor will not go on any adventures again. Once Ncuti has taken the Doctor away from David, I think you can see David’s performance change: he’s a bit shrunken, now, there’s less of a swagger. The face has a chance to live without the responsibility or the mythos. That’s why it came back: it came back so it could be saved. The TARDIS gives hope to anyone, Doctor. Even you.

[panbloglodytes]

I think about these lines a lot when I am sad, like now

[panbloglodytes]

Hey, look, the Twelfth Doctor has gone and turned into gold!

But why has he done that? What’s going on with his TARDIS? And what haunting secrets did he discover when he met a confusing old foe?

Find out in THE LOST AUDIENCE— a fanfictional sequel to Ghost Light I have managed to finish at last!