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doctornolonger · 1 year

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Thoughts on the Vashta Nerada? In general I mean. I think they’re interesting. Though probably very hard to write for. In my mind (that hasn’t stopped Big Finish from trying, idk). What do you think?

If I wanted to write a story about living shadows accompanied by spooky people with skeleton faces, I'd just do another Faction Paradox!

In The Ghost Monument, there's a scene where the camera focuses on a normal-looking pool of water and the Doctor explains that it's full of "flesh-eating microbes, millions of them." This line may have ruined "microorganism swarm" villains for me permanently. Come to think of it, it's the same as midichlorians (The Phantom Menace's intracellular organisms which explain Force sensitivity). Something was undeniably lost when the Force stopped being – to abuse a term – ontologically simple: understood as a monolithic entity rather than something composed of parts. To give George Lucas some credit, I do believe that he would have redeemed midichlorians if the overwhelming fan backlash hadn't prevented him from elaborating further.

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But I digress. In Silence and Forest, Moffat stops just short of "flesh-eating microbes". He's too much a poet for that. The Vashta Nerada are "microspores", an "infestation", a "the dust in sunbeams." He's combining ideas here, multiple angles for the old childhood terror / "familiar made uncanny" attack.* And – okay, he also says they're a "man-eating swarm". You can't win them all.

From a purely materialist perspective, a shadow isn't a thing in and of itself. It's the product of an object and a light source, and it cannot exist independently of either of those things. You might say that your shadow is "holding" something, but really that's just shorthand for "I am holding an object, so the shadow I have cast appears to be holding the shadow cast by the object in my hand." It's literally a trick of the light.

But in Peter Pan, shadows are objects in and of themselves. In that story they function not as they exist in material reality but as humans understand them: entities in their own right. Not a "light-object-patterns", a shadow. And in this lens, nothing stops them from existing separate from ourselves. This pivot from reality to the mind's understanding of reality – so to speak, from territory to map – is how ritual works across human societies, and it's what Faction Paradox is all about. In the territory, there were no days between 2 and 14 September 1752. In the map, there's enough to build an Empire.**

Even within the constaints he's built for himself, Moffat can't stop himself from having it both ways. On one hand, Vashta Nerada are allergic to light and hide in the shadows; on the other hand, they can actually encroach on the light and cast shadows themselves for spooky effect. The Doctor tells us, "Count the shadows" – a line straight out of Peter Pan. Or Interference.

*The FP series uses the same "familiar made uncanny" approach in the development of its mythology, but rather than the dust in sunbeams, its targets are the core elements of Doctor Who itself, and science fiction more generally.

**In fact, this is the only sense in which Faction Paradox can be said to be Faction Paradox. Lawrence Miles insisted that the Faction isn't interested in paradoxes at all; it chose the name Paradox not because of what paradoxes are in the territory but because of what the word means in the map: the opposite of the Great Houses' ideology of organized cause and effect.

Both of these bullets are actually the same point, and they're at the heart of what I tried to say in "Crimes Against History"…

***Apropos of nothing, a theory I'd forgotten I posted 6 years ago:

Or, since Faction Paradox may have been wiped from time at the end of the War, are the Vashta Nerada their now-person-less shadows?

#ama #faction paradox #the ghost monument #vashta nerada #idk what to tag this to capture what i'm saying here #silence in the library #steven moffat #interference #crimes against history #midichlorians #effortpost

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the-lincyclopedia · 2 years

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🔁📚💖

Thanks for the ask, @jonsaremembers!

🔁 A fic you’ve re-read several times

Okay, I answered that here, so I feel like I should pick a different fic, and I will. I also feel like I should pick a different author, but . . . see, angsty fics by @fozmeadows have somehow become my comfort food. When it comes to the Scar Tissue series, the recordings by @khashanakalashtar have specifically become my comfort food. My phone doesn't keep track of how many times I listen to downloaded audio tracks, at least not anywhere I know how to access, so I don't know how many times I've listened to the end of "Scar Tissue (That I Wish You Saw)" or the middle of "Lick Your Heart (and Taste Your Health)," but please know it's many, many times.

What the series is about: Kent Parson was abused as a kid (it's really bad; mind the tags). Now he's in his mid-twenties, sort of maybe kind of coping, and a bunch of things happen in quick succession that turn his life upside down but ultimately lead to him facing his demons and getting to a much better place. That's super vague because I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but Foz does such a good job (here and elsewhere) at going from very heavy angst to very earned hope and goodness, and I also appreciate Foz's choices in this series about where to write a redemption arc and where to definitely not. (In case you're worried by abuse and redemption arcs being mentioned in the same paragraph, the redemption arc is not for the abuser, I promise.)

📚 A fic you wish you could display on your bookshelf

Okay, this feels a bit like cheating, because I someday WILL get to display this on my bookshelf, but: "Like Real People Do" by @xiaq. This fic is fantastic, and I am so proud of xiaq for finding a publisher and writing an original version! (The link will take you to the AO3 page for the fic, but the text of the fic is no longer there because a version of the fic is being published. If you haven't read it, I, uh, definitely can't help you with that. Nope.)

What it's about: The story follows an OC named Eli who was Bitty's childhood best friend and is now attending college in Las Vegas, where he meets Kent Parson. After quite the meet-ugly, Eli and Kent become friends, fall in love, etc., etc.

💖 A drabble that made you want 100K more words

I take it we're using "drabble" here to mean anything short-ish, rather than something that's exactly 100 words (since the Check Please fandom isn't, to my knowledge, abounding in true drabbles). I've got three answers to this one:

Anything @weneedtotalkaboutfic posts on Tumblr but not on AO3, including all those headcanons and bullet-point lists. (Maybe literally not every single one, but most of them, by far.) I'm including @parvuls in this list item as well, because Lau and Pav seem to feed off of each other sometimes (and Pav has excellent headcanons of their own!), particularly when it comes to those soft dom!Bitty ideas. (Note to anyone who likes the soft dom!Bitty idea and likes/doesn't mind PB&J: the series you're looking for is Directionverse by Khashana.)

"all i need is a life in your shape" by @zimms. It's a short Olliewicks fic where they're both NHL players (and didn't go to Samwell) and they get together during the 2020 COVID pause, and I told Abby in my comment that I would read the fuck out of a companion piece from Wicks' perspective. But also, the fic is basically made up of several vignettes that take place over the course of a few years, so there's plenty of room to flesh it out even more.

"Without Expectation" by @alocalband. It's a short Zimbits fic about Bitty's checking issues translating into issues with physicality in his relationship with Jack. It's so painful and lovely (Jack, especially, is so lovely) and I'm not sure what a much-longer version would look like, but I would read it.

Get in on the ask game!

#mine #ask game #check please #omgcheckplease #omgcp

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