I Never Talk About These Things But I Can’t Remain Silent.

I always thought this shot in Age of Ultron looked familiar. The picture on the bottom is the closing scene of John Wayne’s film “The Searchers”, which ends on a rather bittersweet note with his character Ethan Edwards standing outside while everyone else is inside. The similarity isn’t just in how the scenes in both movies were shot, however. 

“Ethan Edwards is a throwback to an older time, a more violent age when the frontier was still wild. He’s a loner, a desperado who’s broken his fair share of laws and isn’t above shooting a man in the back. He isn’t cut out for family life like Martin, and now that his mission is over he’s outlived his purpose.”

Aziraphale’s and Crowley’s discussions are interesting in Good Omens simply because their such utterly different approaches to them. Now I really enjoy Crowley’s points but right now I’m focusing on Aziraphale’s side because despite the several years he’s lived on Earth and the books upon books he’s read he falls back on one simple reason for everything that happens.

Ineffability,

And maybe that reason works sometimes. And it certainly does; it leaves just enough wriggle room, just enough doubt, that his opponent can’t definitely say that he’s wrong. After all, in Good Omens God is real even if He hasn’t been seen or heard from in a few millennia. Crowley can’t say that there isn’t a Higher Plan.

But what he does do is learn how to counter-argue the Ineffability reason.

It seems to me that at this point Aziraphale is using the Ineffable Plan as an excuse. It’s like hearing all the churchgoers out there when questioned about God’s existence or why bad things happen to good people they simply reply, ‘You have to take it by faith, that’s all.’ Take it be faith, take it for Ineffability.

Which of course leads to Crowley’s logical rebuttals. That’s the key difference, I think, when looking at their conversations. Aziraphale relies on the possibility of the Ineffable Plan, while Crowley has taken the time to learn how to perceive an argument on all sides and come up with a counter argument for everything the angel says. His reasons make sense, which only highlights how desperate Aziraphale’s Ineffable argument sounds sometimes.

Which just makes it all the more brilliant when he uses the Ineffable argument to run circles around Metatron and Beelzabub later on in the story.

Wriggle room always wins an argument. He must have learned it from Crowley.

The Irony of Chris Chibnall for me is not the fact that he is my favorite television/film writer. A lot of television and film writers are people you can fall in love with. It’s the same with books. Reading specific authors I never tire of Tolkien or Rowling or CS Lewis. I love Gene Roddenberry (of the original Star Trek franchise) and his creativity mixing science with a flair of myth and legend and the wonderings of the yesterday and how the past fit in with the Enterprise’s crew and their respective futures as such.

But Chris Chibnall is just plainly ironic for me.

I’ve only ever really watched things he’s written if they’re tied up in my David Tennant obsession (but really, is that really that impossible?) but starting off I honestly had no idea who Chibnall was. I started off in the Doctor Who franchise and lo and behold my favorite Tenth Doctor episode of Series 3 was ‘42′. I was impressed by the way the writer had written the Doctor so vulnerable and frightened and in such a spot that it fell to Martha, his companion, to do the saving.  It was a surprising and refreshing change from the normally stoic and triumphant Doctor.

Then I watched ‘United’ on Netflix shortly after I’d finished with David’s seasons of DW. United is one of two of my absolute favorite films ever written (and my favorite DT project to date). I love history but I fell in love with United because of the emotions felt throughout it all. It’s a quiet believable movie with terrific acting but most of all believable writing. Chibnall, I feel, makes you love these young boys who nearly all lose their lives in the plane crash that nearly cripples Manchester United. It’s writing perfection in my opinion.

Then I came over to Broadchurch and holy crap I was blown away within fifteen minutes of the first episode. Everything about the show drew me in: the characters, the scenery, the acting, the MUSIC, and of course the writing. Chibnall is able to blend humor and darkness, secular and religious, discovery and heartbreak, and weave them all together to make devastating beauty.

It was only after I had watched all of Broadchurch and had watched United again that I realized all that I had actually seen had been written by the exact same man. The writer I had been so impressed with since the beginning even though I would never have guessed he had written my favorite Tenth Doctor DW episode, favorite movie, and favorite tv show was shown to have written them all after all.

Chris Chibnall impresses me as a writer because he seems to understand humanity and how we work as a species. He can write pain and love and loss and make characters that stand out and stay with us. And of course that’s helped along by the wonderful and talented actors and actresses who play those characters, but it was Chibnall who created/built on them to begin with, and that’s why I love him so much.

It just still makes me laugh at the irony that I would have already loved so many of the projects he had done without ever realizing that he was the one who wrote them.

Donna: hang on, I’ll handle the diplomacy this time

Donna: *turns to large angry alien*

Donna: hello there you big fat bone-bag. this is My Fist, lemme introduce it to your-

Doctor: do you have any idea what diplomacy is

Chris Chibnall. For God's sake you need to give us a meeting between the Thirteenth Doctor and her daughter Jenny.

But why fanfiction?

I got asked again recently why I write fanfiction and not ‘proper books’ (I’m pretty open about my fic writing, I’m not ashamed). I told them what I’ve told everyone else - I’ve done both and this is so much better. 

I self-published a YA novel a few years back, the plot of which I was super proud of, and I even have ideas for two sequels, but they’ll never see the light of day. I just have no motivation to write them, and world building is hard and that amount of effort just doesn’t seem worth it.

See, everyone I knew wanted to read my novel, but no one wanted to buy it. Probably about 40 people read it but I only sold 16 copies, and for the effort to format text into a publishable format, the cost of ordering proof copies only to find it was wrong and to do it all again, and the stress of the whole process was just so not worth those few dollars that I made. But I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to be one of those fairy tale stories of an unknown author suddenly becoming a sensation overnight. The story was too obscure, set in Western Australia and wasn’t an ‘outback romance’ which is the only ones that seem to be popular in this setting. I’m more than okay with that because I have fanfiction now.

The difference? I have thousands of people reading my stories, and not just reading them, but I get feedback from some of them (never enough, we authors are fickle creatures who always want more comments, more interacton, more discussion). The thing is though, fanfiction gives me an audience that I will never have from my YA novel. That audience already exists, it’s out there, and they’re hungry for the story to continue. Not all fanfiction is successful - the people who read it aren’t a mindless mass; they have expectations, standards, itches that need scratching. Quality matters, but not just the quality of the writing but of the idea. It’s not just formulaic bullshit that a ghost writer can churn out, change the names but the plot is the same and then throw a big name author on the cover and it’s instantly a bestseller. We’re forgiving of small mistakes if the plot makes us want to keep reading until dawn lights the horizon, we’ll salute the authors who write in English when it’s not their native language and will gladly offer help with those phrases that they’re not sure of, and best of all, we stick together to protect and support each other from annon hate so those ideas have a safe place to grow. We’re a community, a family.

Fanfiction has also given me a platform to improve my writing. Looking back at the standard of my work at the very beginning (and even in my novel) I cringe now at how terrible it was. I’ve written over 1,200,000 words of fanfiction and I’m forever improving. I know how to properly punctuate dialogue tags now, my vocabulary has expanded, I’m not afraid to use adverbs just because some twat said ‘show, not tell’ is better. If an adverb makes the story flow better than three extra waffly sentences then I’ll damned well use it and be proud of it. I’m more confident in my writing and that shows in the quality. I would never have gained that confidence by selling fifty thousand books to ‘silent readers’. It’s the interaction, the feedback, the community that fanfic has that has made me a better writer.

So that’s why I prefer to write fanfic over ‘proper books’ and I will fight anyone who says that we’re not real writers. At the end of the day, people read fiction to be entertained and if I can honestly say that thousands of people from all over the world have been entertained by my fanfiction, that makes me a real bloody writer. 

In s2 of Broadchurch when Sharonville Bishop was trying to paint the picture that Alec and Ellie deliberately framed Joe to get him out of the way, couldn't the prosecution have fired back with the footage of Alec telling Ellie it was Joe? Of course Alec had turned off the voice recorder but there ARE surveillance cameras in that room, right?!?! Body language is more telling than words anyway so wouldn't Ellie's distress clue them into the fact that she genuinely didn't know?

My older sister is really getting into Outlander now, I think.

Only the Master would kill a future self, and only both versions of the Master would laugh about it.

On another note, I freaking ADORE Missy.

This right here is my favorite exchanges in Good Omens. In their discussion it took Crowley THREE YEARS to come up with a counter-argument.