I'm working on a project that will take a long time to finish, but a bulk of the work was finished recently, so I want to share a little bit about it. I'm building a census of the billford tag on AO3 (with the intention of eventually expanding to ff.net, etc).
So far, I've collected every single fic into a spreadsheet, and I'm going through and reading all of them to collect data on different tropes and trends. The goal is to eventually have enough information to do some interesting social science and statistics about the culture of the tag.
Anyway, I'm still working on getting everything organized, but here's a little preview. This is the percentage of billford fics containing different forms of Bill by year:
Some notes on this:
Human Bill refers to cases where Bill has his own human or humanoid body. If Bill is possessing someone else (who isn't Ford), then it's classified as "proxy possession."
No Bill means Bill was not actually present in the story; he was only mentioned or alluded to.
Other includes cases where Bill is an animal/plant or is possessing an object. It also includes cases where there isn't enough description to determine what form Bill is in.
This chart does include overlap. So, fics where Bill appears as both a triangle and a human, for example, are represented in both lines. Eventually, I do plan to disentangle these stats, but for now, this gives an interesting picture of the trends.
I haven't completed the Bill Type dataset for 2022-2026 yet, so that's still forthcoming.
Some things I'm going to be investigating:
How redemption narratives portray Bill and what kinds of tropes/trends correlate with them
Bill's relationship to gender identity and how it correlates with sexual behaviours like topping/bottoming, BDSM, etc
Perspectives on Ford's mental health (especially as related to neurotypes like autism, NPD)
How trauma, abuse, and PTSD are being explored
Human Bill, what he correlates with and whether he's actually been tagged (fun fact: so far, depending on the year, 30-75% of fics that feature a humanized Bill are not tagged as human Bill!)
and more!
Anyway, is there a trope or trend you've noticed in billford fanfiction that you're curious about? Please tell me about it in the replies or send me an ask/DM or whatever so I can investigate it for you!
I’ve been in my apartment for five years. Every year, I spend approximately 23 minutes looking at other apartments online, get frustrated, and renew my lease. The current apartment has its quirks, sure. The water heater sounds like it’s trying to escape the confines of the wall, the porch is crooked, and the kitchen floor gets dirty ten seconds after it’s been cleaned—but overall, it’s a great apartment (cheap, it’s cheap). After I renewed my lease this year, I looked around and thought about how the apartment didn’t really look or feel like mine.
I’ve always loved curating spaces. In my LRP role, I often have the opportunity to help craft the look and feel of a room. Most notably, I think of XV last winter and getting to turn a skeletal basement into a Cougar-worthy evening affair.
I have a knack for this kind of visual production. So that’s why it struck me how little effort and care I’d put into my own apartment. I’d cobbled together hand-me-down furniture and hung some things on the walls. It was tidy, but not really all that personal. I decided that I’d do some work. I’d stay in the affordable apartment, but I’d finally update my home.
This meant lists—so many lists. This meant spreadsheets for budgeting and measurements, color palette collages, and online shopping.
Throughout 2017, I’ve been going through the rooms in my apartment one by one and removing clutter, swapping the old for the new, and rearranging my belongings. I love the way it’s turned out so far, but I’ve loved the process more. Getting to stare at a space I see every day and think with intention and purpose about how I really want that room to function and feel is rewarding. Plus, the spreadsheets make it just plain fun.
At this point, I’ve got just one room left: the study. Funnily enough, most of the floor space in there is taken by unused decorations from XV.
Here’s something that I figure some of you will enjoy: a sheet chronicling the Doctor’s adventures, what years he visited, and the companions he travelled with. Some comments after the cut:
-I started this when I was just getting into Doctor Who. I figured it’d be fun to keep track of what years he visited, and who he travelled with. Having only seen one season of classic Who and three of modern Who at the time, I had my sheet together pretty quickly. Since then I’ve added any episode or audio I watched/listened to shortly afterwards, and it’s grown to enormous size featuring all 13 Doctors.
-Since I add whatever I watch/listen to, there’s a ton of stuff that’s not on there. The books in particular are very rare; the only one I’ve ever read is Engines of War.
-Multi-Doctor adventures are placed in the timeline of each Doctor present. Obviously that involves a lot of guesswork for where it takes place for the past Doctors.
-Speaking of guesswork: most adventures that clearly take place in the future but never mention anything close to a date are basiclaly dated to whatever year I felt like. I dated most that feature a powerful human empire, whether rising or decaying, to around the year 4000 (The Dalek Invasion of Earth), ones that feature isolated colonies often get dated in the second half of the third millenium, stuff that features humans with massive galactic empires and no mention of Earth goes far into the future. There’s a couple more clusters of dates where I felt stories from different parts of Doctor Who fit together fairly well.
-Some episodes take place on a distant planet with absolutely no relation to the date of earth, or feature people that could be either distant descendants of humans or aliens that just happen to look like them. In both cases, I tend to just keep the adventure a the date of the previous adventure.
-I didn’t even try to make a sensible chronology for the Time Lords and the Daleks. Adventures on Gallifrey or Skaro also simply use whatever date the previous adventure had. There’s plenty of stuff obviously out of order as a result, but hey. It’s timey-wimey.
-The adventures are in order from the Doctor’s point of view. For tv-episodes, this is pretty straightforward. For Big Finish, it’s not, so there tends to be some amount of judgement calls involved you may disagree with.
-Speaking of judgement calls: I pretty much play fast and loose with companions on the sheet. There’s a bunch of people on there I probably shouldn’t have put on it in hindsight. The same goes for what counts as a companion temporarily leaving the Doctor and what doesn’t. This last one gets a bit weird when it comes to UNIT especially.
-All the Clara copies are simply called Clara on the sheet, including the Time Lady we saw in The Name of the Doctor. Hence why she appears all the way at the start together with One and Susan.
-I headcanon Two’s presence in pretty much all multi-Doctor adventures in season 6B. I know The Black Hole tried to explain season 6B away, but I actually rather like it, so instead I put The Black Hole in season 6B as well.
-Joshua is a Third Doctor companion mentioned in Leela’s companion chronicles. A handful of places and dates he and Three visited are mentioned, so those got recorded on the sheet as well.
-Three is listed with two Sarah Janes during The Five Doctors because Sarah Jane is from his personal future (after she stopped travelling with Four) in that episode. The reason the Sarah Jane he’s still travelling with in his own timeline is still listed as well, even though she doesn’t appear in the episode, is mainly that putting breaks within companion’s travels makes the sheet look ugly. (see Peri’s time for that)
-Four didn’t actually travel to the past with Romana II in Luna Romana, so the sheet probably shouldn’t follow her point of view, but... uh... Well, Romana is cooler than him anyway. Yeah, let’s go with that explanation.
-I see The Watcher as a timey-wimey reflection of Five, so he’s listed as Fifth Doctor.
-Omega and The Burning Prince are implied to take place during the brief disappearance of the TARDIS (from Nyssa and Tegan’s perspective) at the end of Waters of Amsterdam.
-Kamelion is not a companion.
-I headcanon Five’s other solo adventures during the time he leaves behind Peri and Erimem in The Veiled Leopard. Five’s timeline is kind of odd in that way, as on tv he’s constantly accompanied, so his solo adventures need to go into weird little niches like that.
-I listed the locum Doctors trilogy for both the original Doctor who would have experienced them, and for the Doctor who ended up replacing him.
-Amy from the Key 2 Time trilogy is listed as Abby because Amy Pond. She apparently goes by that name in Graceless.
-Circular Time: Winter takes place during Fivey’s regeneration, and features Nyssa in a big enough role I wanted to list her. Since the connection was portrayed as so powerful, I figured Fivey’s other companions who appear in the actual scene in Caves of Androzani would have a similarly powerful connecton with him, so listed all of them.
-Davros is mentioned to take place while Peri is off at a botany conference, so I put it pretty early.
-Sixie leaves Peri near the end of The Reaping, before eventually discovering what happened and picking her up again. Since the episode implies some time passed for the Doctor and I know Peri travels with both Peri and Six in the comics, I figured I’d put The Holy Terror and Maltese Penguin in between there. Sixie travels with only Frobisher here for a while in my headcanon.
-I used The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp, and Terror of the Vervoids to refer to the adventures we see during Sixie’s trial. Trial of a Time Lord refers to the trial itself. The Ultimate Foe I used for the point where Mel gets taken out of Sixie’s timeline. I assumed she’d be returned shortly after (from her perspective) The Wrong Doctors.
-The Wrong Doctors clearly takes place shortly after Trial of a Time Lord for past!Six. Since future!Six still has cake Evelyn made and misses her a lot, I consider him to be from just after she left. I put Evelyn just after past!Six returns Mel to her own timeline.
-I figure Six spends some time on his own after Evelyn leaves, so a lot of his solo adventures go here.
-The order Peri - Evelyn - Charley - Jamie - Flip - Peri again - Constance - Mel makes the most sense to me for Six’s companions.
-I headcanoned the reason Six checks in on his past self and Peri in the Piscon Paradox was that he was reminded of her by Her Final Flight, went over all the times they shared, and discovered the gap in his memory. Putting these two adventures just before he meets up with Flip als explains why he misses Peri so much during these adventures and mentions her so much.
-If I followed The Widow’s Assassin correctly, Six spends five years in Peri’s court disguised as four different characters, hence why the date bounces up and down.
-Elizabeth Klein from the alternate timeline created in Colditz is listed as Klein, Elizabeth Klein from the main timeline is listed as Elizabeth.
-The black TARDIS and white TARDIS arc is a little complicated to list.
-I headcanoned Valhalla as the first episode of Seven’s solo adventures because he is so very sad and melancholy in it. I headcanoned it as the result of Ace leaving or dying after many, many years as his companion. Frozen Time is second, because in this adventure his clothes rot away. I headcanon that as the reason he switches from the question mark jumper to his movie gear.
-Frozen Time, Orbis, The Time of the Doctor, and Before the Flood all feature the Doctor going linearly through centuries, millenia, or millions of years. Since listing every single year he lives through during these would be impractical, I listed them a little differently.
-The Wormery, Master, and Project: Lazarus all contain strong hints they’re near the end for Seven. The flashback in The Eleven is implied to happen just before he gets handed the Master’s ashes.
-I decided to use the name The Enemy Within for the movie.
-I know The Company of Friends is meant to take place in other media’s timelines (and the same goes for Bernice’s other adventures with the Doctor), but I rather liked the idea of Eight still travelling with Bernice, Fitz, and Izzy early on.
-Gemma and Sampson are early companions of Eight’s, mentioned a few times, most prominently in Terror Firma.
-Time works differently in the divergent universe, so I listed the year as ???
-I put future!Eight in Mary’s Story as being from the Time War because that seems to fit him.
-Seasons of War
.-Ten is a hundred years older than War in The Day of the Doctor, but we saw only a few years pass. I decided this century made the most sense to put during the disappearance of Nine at the end of Rose (just before he comes back to tell her the TARDIS travels in time as well). I stuck the historical pictures of Nine and him delivering the letter to Peri and Erimem in The Kingmaker in here.
-I listed Tentoo as “Tenth Doctor”. I used a similar notation for the Six clone in Project: Lazarus and Unbound!Three in 100 days of the Doctor.
-Picnic at Asgard isn’t an episode, but gets mentioned so much I figured it’d be fun to list, especially as Moffat confirmed it was with Ten.
-Sexy is the name of the human TARDIS.
-I decided against listing all the Doctors for the scene in Day of the Doctor because it’d stretch the companion field. I did pick a point in each Doctor’s timeline to put htat scene though, so it gets listed 13 times.
-For Heaven Sent I simply noted the year the final Doctor, the one who escapes and who we follow from then on, teleports to.
