On the unexpected wealth of Dr Who/NCIS crossover fic

You know how sometimes you have an urge to re-read something you only vaguely remember? And I mean very vaguely, like you don't even remember the title.

Well, now we have the internet and nostalgia can get a but funny. Many moons ago I remember reading a very odd but very good fan fiction in which Fitz Kreiner (from the late-90s/early-2000s Doctor Who novels) gets dumped by the Doctor during the Time War and ends up living in the modern US, but here's the twist, as a side character in NCIS. I vaguely remember Torchwood turning up and Fitz hooking up with Tony DiNozzo but that's about it. I don't remember much else but I do remember enjoying it.

So it turns out that there are 146 stories that come up on AO3 when you search “Doctor Who NCIS”, obviously not a search term helped by the fact that “doctor” and “who” are both regularly occuring words but it turns out there are a fair number of stories legitimately crossing the two over.

A lot of them seem to have Abby Sciuto as a companion. Not that I blame anyone for wanting to write Abby Sciuto as a companion or wanting to write Abby Sciuto in general, she's probably my favourite character on NCIS and not just because Pauley Perrette is absolutely gorgeous. Okay, a bit because of that. Fine, a lot because of that, its not actually that interesting of a show watched episodically.

Moving on...

The fact that a lot of different writers have thought these two series have enough in common to mask them together is... oddly fascinating. Its not a pairing I ever would have considered (and this is coming from a man who, somehow, is of the opinion the Chloé Bourgeois/Alya Césaire tag is desperately underpopulated at only 29 works) and the very fact its occurred to so many people is oddly heartening.

And the Chloé/Alya things is totally going to be the basis of a post, I should think, its just too petty of a complaint not to get some entertainment out of. 

The process of reading fan fiction at work

Funny thing, technology.

Archive Of Our Own (henceforth AO3) has the option to download stories as .mobi files which can be read on a Kindle. Usually I download them in the .pdf and read them on my laptop but the other day I decided to give the e-reader version a try.

So, there I say, reading a fan written story downloaded from the internet onto my laptop and transferred by USB cable to an e-reader. The odd additional step, qualifier and lack of financial transaction aside that's exactly the same process as any other book on my Kindle. The most astonishing aspect, for me, is how portable fan fiction becomes under these circumstances.

Up to now my own personal stash of fan fiction has been a series of increasingly labyrinthine folders on my laptop divided by series, ship or whatever other method occurred to me at the time, sometimes in open contradition of one another. To be honest, aside from a rather sizable folder of Weiss Schnee/Blake Belladonna stories (shut up, I like me some Love Across The Barricades enemies to lovers action, add in the high probability of Jacques Schnee getting slapped and I'm in) there isn't much sense of order there.

The important here, though, is that its all on my laptop in a format my Kindle makes impossible to read because of screen size and the laptop is actually rather unwieldy. Now, I can simply save these files as .mobis and transfer them to the Kindle at need.

And there's a practically unlimited supply, for free. Payment will be offered, of course, in the form of comments and praise. This process feels, from my rather ostentatiously luddite perspective, very much like magic and anyone who benefits from magic without paying the price is rightfully doomed.

Plus, if the format of the one I downloaded to test the system is any indication they include the archive warnings at the beginning of all the .pdfs so I won't find myself reading something unexpectedly explicit in public. 

How my brain works...

I could have just posted this nice picture I'd never seen before of two beloved, much missed actors, but no. No, I had to have an idea. And not just a joke, either, I've got a plot for this thing. I've been thinking of doing some fan fiction to get the old writing muscles working again and now there's this.

Not sure of all the details yet, just that maybe the Brig wakes up after one of those infamous UNIT Christmas Parties to find his moustache gone and there ensues an epic odyssey to recover the thing.

I have insomnia again...

(Made using picfont,com)

Positive Things: Really Good Fan Fiction

Image supplied by the Scottish Tourist Board.

Don't you just love it when a fan author does something fantastically unexpected with a character you love? Not unexpected because it's out of character (though that can be fun) but because you yourself had never really considered it.

Last night I read The Festival Of The Moon by Kathkin on Archive Of Our Own. It's a Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie story where the four accidentally gatecrash an alien marriage ceremony and have to get married to each other or die. After that minor moment of jeopardy the story becomes a brilliant little character piece for Polly as she and Jamie they wander the festival bound together at the wrist.

What I like about this story are two things. First, that Kathkin eschews the more traditional romantic pairings (Two/Jamie and Ben/Polly) to concentrate on Polly and Jamie as friends. She's a Swinging Sixties secretary! He's a Jacobite rebel! Together they fight crime!

(No, not really.)

But it is sweet. Doctor Who in Season Four didn't really do character pieces, in fact it's probably the nadir of the series' engagement with writing character. As seen on TV the four leads are a set of tropes in a blue box largely saved by good acting (great acting in Troughton's case). As Polly and Jamie wander the festival and Polly introduces him to concepts like kites and 20 Questions, as they both realise they have no idea how two men can have sex (this being a matrimonial festival of the liberal future) and as they discuss whether they really want to go home one day, it becomes clear what could have been done with these characters with better writing.

And this is genuinely one of the best Doctor Who short stories I have ever read and I would never have seen it if not for the miracle of the internet and how it has opened up the world of self-publishing. Yes, this means there's a lot of drivel out there but there are some genuinely fantastic creative voices to enjoy.