HAI TORCHWOOD FANDOM

[stuffphile]

I've been watching Torchwood since I first followed Jack there from Doctor Who, and I loved the first two series completely. It's only this past few months that I've begun to be interested in the online fandom. Like nearly everyone else, my favourite character is Ianto, followed by Jack (followed by Gwen). I am a Jack/Ianto shipper, but with

Comments

[lawsontl]

I completely agree with you, especially on the death joke. My one exception would be when Jack's released from the concrete (and I know I'm in a minority on this one). I think, at that point, he has to be The Captain for his own sake. He's confirmed visually that everyone is OK, and he just has to be flip and forge on. If he did anything else for the first few minutes, I think, honestly, he'd have broken. He's cried, he's raged, but he's never been so utterly vulnerable emotionally as when he's looking at the car driving up, and you can see him wondering if it's his captors back, ready to take him down yet again.

But after that? Yeah, there should've been SOMETHING. It all seemed so out of character. Check my LJ or Verastein's LJ for much agreement on this subject :)

[stuffphile]

I don't think I'd could be half so angry about this if it wasn't for the death joke. When I heard it, I actually said to myself, "That's it, then. The rumours must be false. If he was going to die, they'd NEVER." Oh, but they did. Crude mockery of the character's death in ep 1, good way to undermine the big romantic death scene in ep 4. Does the show hate Ianto, or am I just a crazy fan?

It's true, Captain Jack would be flip. He probably wouldn't fall to his knees in relief or anything. Maybe he could have, I don't know, blinked in acknowledgement. :D

It just happened too fast for me. Like you said, we see him wondering if more trouble's coming, which was actually really great... but then the reaction when he sees it's the team was unequal to the build up. ANTICLIMACTIC.

Yes, yes. Actually now that I've delurked I'll be by to leave some feedback on your fanfic. Thanks for your comment!

[a_blackpanther]

But they didn't just change the focus from the characters to the story, they completely hanged the characters too.

The Jack that said "Just you watch" was, maybe the same Jack that met Rose in The Doctor Dances, but he was not the Jack that came back to Torchwood after the year that never was, or the same Jack that told the Doctor he had to return to Torchwood after the whole Daleks drag Earth to another place in the galaxy thing. Gwen wasn't ever the one to just give up. The fact that she was willing to accept that "it's all over" was completely out of character. And the whole thing about Ianto not telling his friends the truth about his father, and just yelling "you didn't know him at all" was completely unnecessary. Would have been an interesting plotline if he was still alive, but useless and mean when he's dead.

RTD just picked up some characters and wrote them into the COE storyline. They weren't anything like what we'd seen the previous two seasons of Torchwood. It's about RTD destroying his characters.

[stuffphile]

I didn't really get into that, but you're right, they did. Well, I'm not really 100% confident on pronouncing about this, but I don't really buy Jack hoarding his secrets and leaving the team in the dark. He went through that in series 1 and we saw how it turned out. It seemed like he had made an implicit commitment to trust them more when he returned in series 2.

The REAL Ianto would never have lost the SUV and we all know it. 'Nuff said.

I'll only disagree on one point, and that's Gwen. I recall how she initially reacted during the disaster in Exit Wounds when Jack was lost, and I think it happened to her again. Only this time, Rhys had lost hope right along with her, so he wasn't able to talk her back into the fight, I guess.

Thanks for commenting.

[lefaym]

I agree with just about everything you say here, except that RTD does have a long history of portraying in-depth m/m relationships, so I don't think he was nervous about that. I think that as a writer, he simply wasn't particularly interested in developing J/I further, even though he should have done so. Torchwood has shown proper relationship development between two men before, after all-- there are a few scenes J/I scenes in S2 that do this, and of course there's Captain Jack Harkness. Honestly, I think that they just got slack with J/I in CoE (and in some parts of S2).

[lawsontl]

Of course, RTD didn't write the CJH episode, or, in fact, most of the episodes that developed J/I. And, as we've been recently reminded, he didn't actually develop Jack, either, Moffatt did. So maybe it really is as simple as it looks. He developed Torchwood as Gwen's story but needed Jack's popularity for a spinoff. Now that Gwen is sufficiently established, Jack can leave the planet and get back to being the occasional companion to the Doctor he originally was.

[lefaym]

Oh yeah -- I mean, part of it is that I think RTD just wasn't that invested in Ianto as a character, in spite of the fact that hardcore fandom was (is). But I don't think it was fear of portraying m/m relationships, because even though he didn't write CJH or those other eps, he DID approve all the scripts, and he did do Queer as Folk.

As for Jack in the future... well, we can only see. I guess it depends a lot on whether or not S4 gets commissioned (which seems pretty likely).

[dkwilliams]

RTD also has a history of writing what I (and others) have thought are very dysfunctional and unbalanced relationships and thinking (and saying) that they are the height of romance. It could be that he thought he was truly presenting the Romance of the Century and doesn't understand why we are all so unhappy - hence the comments about us just wanting sex scenes. Like many writers, he is confusing sex with intimacy, when it's the latter we wanted to see.

[as1mplegirl]

I think it might be showing a reluctance on the part of the show creators to commit to portraying a same-sex relationship.

I agree. It's been sexual innuendo (often blocked by someone else's being there) and not a lot else. When I watched cockblocked by beans I thought. Not this shit again. They've been totally unwilling to give the relationship any emotional depth or development beyond that despite the fact that it involves what to many people is the star of the show. When you compare it to the development of Gwen and Rhys that goes double. I think they like the praise for the SciFi hero in gay relationship where the gayness isn't an issue but a) don't want to spook the audience so aren't nearly as brave with it as they pretend to be b) see having the relationship there as a tickbox they've ticked in the sexuality doesn't matter checklist and don't feel there's any need to actually bother about how the relationship itself is actually portrayed.

Instead, the team gets back together, and Jack is more interested in getting in

[stuffphile]

As you say. It makes wonder if they'd have done a better job if Ianto had been the one to get the Risen Mitten plotline in series 2, since the relationship back then was less far along and couldn't have been expected to be as deep.

you prat.

Yep, he's a bastard. I totally think it's the type of thing Jack would do, by the way, only the Jack I remembered from Torchwood would have saved the world first. :D

[xel1980]

Oh, I completely agree on everything u wrote... definitely...