Childhood, Redux

"Utopia" has to be the best DOCTOR WHO episode of the new series, if for no other reason than it made me feel like I was twelve again, jaw dropped in awe of all the levels of awesome!

I'd always thought more of David Tennant's episodes were more good than bad, but there was something that didn't click the way Christopher Eccleston's run did. I think it has something to do with age. Not mine, but the actor's. To me, the image of the Doctor as this older, adult figure went hand-in-hand with his being a 900 year-old traveler in time and space. Whereas David Tennant is just over two years older than me. Not that his Doctor isn't all manner of awesome; it's just that some of the edge was taken off. Eccleston, on the other hand, has almost a decade on me. His Doctor, and his episodes, still held a bit of that larger-than-life gravitas for me. I enjoyed his run while fondly remembering the old childhood nostalgia.

But watching this last episode, I was right back there! Eleven or twelve years-old on a Saturday night with the lights out watching the only thing that PBS was good for (at the time, to me), getting my geek on.

I Can Buy This

Pretty, Fizzy Paradise: For Want of a Hero...

But the thing is. Anti-heroes don't mean anything without a heroic presence to offset them. There needs to be a voice of conventional, approachable, relatable morality to make the counterbalance and contrast mean something. There needs to be a hero.

Again, thinking back to the one story anyone's bought so far (I won't link it, because it's depressing that I'm the only reason the link pops up on my Technorati watch list anymore) which features an anti-hero of sorts, there is another character who provides that conventional, approachable, relatable morality.

This is also the reason, I believe, that a current project I'm working on is flailing right now. The main character is an anti-hero surrounded by scum. And I'm running--actually, the main character is running--into this wall...

An anti-hero doesn't have to make the tough decisions, to choose their heart's desire over an innocent child's life, for example. Anti-heroes CAN'T make those tough decisions because once they're faced with them, they can't be anti-heroes anymore.

So, it's clear what needs to be done, but how? In any case...

"The one about the regenerating assassin..."*

4,160 / 5,000 (83.0%)

*(This is a project title; I haven't even been able to think up a working title yet.)

You Thought I Was Being Paranoid

...when I said: "I started to get worried though when I started noticing that the blog was coming up in search results for some of the more "classic" stories, Babel's "My First Goose," for instance. And these visitors would spend more than enough time to copy and paste, too."



Do your own damn homework! ;)