return (of me, Gintama, and Who)

[xparrot]

Back from Japan! Visited some of my favorite places, and while we were mostly staying in Kansai we went to Tokyo long enough to confirm is in fact still standing, mostly unscathed (though the lack of tourists feels weird) - went to the lovely Ghibli museum, gawked at Sky Tree already dominating the skyline and took the DRRR!!/IWGP tour of Ikebukuro (and dropped by Otome Road on the way, to refresh my doujinshi collection). And back in Kyoto we saw sakura on the Kamo river and climbed up to the monkey park at Arashiyama and on the last day we wandered down to Toji and lucked into a flea market.

More than anything it's great to know that I can go back to Japan and even if I forget most of my words (oh man...I can still understand basic Japanese but speaking it... orz) but I still remember how to use the trains, and Kyoto Station is still bogglingly enormous, and the Loft off Shinkyogoku has moved but the little Manraku used book shop and the Sanjo-Keihan Book Off are still right where I left them, and FamilyMart still sells FamiChiki (mmm grease!) Even if I've been gone a few years, Kyoto is still my city.

Also got to see naye (<3!) and shayera in Tokyo, and a bit of crashtestskater - not all together, so not quite a Saturday-nights reunion, but we did spend Saturday night watching stuff (note: gathering four Gintama fans in a small room to watch the latest episode is an ill-advised evening activity in a nice quiet hostel. Especially if it's the second ep of the 2-years-later arc (anpan-huffing! XDXDXDXD)

(Really, though, the new eps, ZOMG!!11!! Gintama in gear makes me laugh/giggle/hysterically shriek about as hard as any show I've ever seen...)

So, yay Japan, and have almost recovered from the jetlag!

In unrelated news, new new Who has started up - Moffat's in fine form, really bringing his A-game! Mmm, twisty time-travel shenanigans and spooky aliens (kind of reverse Angels, aren't they - or a variation on that quantum theme, anyway; the dangerous instability of the unobserved). And I think Moffat does better working with the established chars; his one-shot chars tend to be less sympathetic than some so it's easier to get into his stories when they're focused on the leads. Also helps that the major new char is played by Mark Sheppard, who is made of so much awesome it leaks out of his ears; it's hard not to enjoy any Mark Sheppard char, even with a jarring (if convincing!) American accent. (And casting his father to play his elder self, hee.)

Rory is adooooorable (being the voice of rarely-heeded reason, never the easiest position - and I love that the common-sensical one is a boy, rather than the usual responsible girl)(tsukkomi to the Doctor and Amy's boke? Really, Rory and Shinpachi would get along so well...) and Amy + Rory are so awfully sweet. And I do like Eleven - he's simultaneously more immature (in his "look at meeeee~!" showing-off) and more ancient than Ten, and Matt Smith does a good job of conveying that there's always more going on in his head/heart than what shows, even if you're never quite sure what that is.

Could really have done without the Doctor/River innuendo - or, well, if I thought it was just joking innuendo that'd be fine, but I'm pretty sure it's getting set up to be an explicit relationship and having the Doctor's potential asexuality denied will be a big blow. One I've been resigned to since I heard Moffat was taking over, though, so I'll deal. And River herself is growing on me more with each appearance (though I'm trying to figure out how they're going to handle her timeline, if she's supposed to be getting younger...?)

Plus LOL Nixon. And "They're Americans!"

Am curious about one thing - they're determined not to tell the Doctor about his eventual death, okay...except that the future!Doctor pretty clearly knew he was going to die, so, erm, why exactly do they need to keep it secret, when they know he has to find out sooner or later anyway?

Comments

[nijibug.livejournal.com]

Missed you! Welcome back and glad you had a great time!

While you were gone, my laptop burnt into a charred heap and my sleep schedule remained unaltered. 8D

Right now it is 4 AM and I am staying up to watch the livestream of Gintama 205 and tweet a wall of ANPAN, so I guess it can't be helped! It's clearly Gintama that refuses to let me rest or be a productive member of society, so I'll stop blaming it on your fic! ♥

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Thank you - had a marvelous time in Japan, though it is good to get back online~! *^^*

Ack, your laptop!! That is tragic indeed - hope it gets fixed/replaced soon! (the sleep schedule, now...well, sadly I don't have any fic currently in the works to screw you up, but I'll have to see what I can do to fix that :P)

Waaiii~ Gintama, so cannot wait! (I haven't so much as glanced at the anpan chapter, so am dying to know what's going on with POOR POOR POOR Yamazaki...!)

[nijibug.livejournal.com]

Livestream's over here, in case you didn't already have it: http://www.livestream.com/gintama_stream

Starts in half an hour~~~ > 3

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Ahhh no don't tempt meeeee - I'm going to be good and wait to watch it with my bro (he's got work so needs to go to bed now, and it's always more fun to have someone to laugh hysterically with!)

[nijibug.livejournal.com]

Ahh you have more self-control than I! I've been up the last 3 hours torturing myself with perusing food blogs, and my self-control's entirely depleted! :'D

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Ahahah I can't read food-blogs! Even Cake-Wrecks makes me hungry ^^; (mmm frosting~!)

[sholio]

Hee, I just watched Who, too - and posted about it! Moffat does such awesome creepy-spooky stories - exactly my kind of mild horror, where it's not super-gory but it's wonderfully, spine-chillingly creepy.

I'm not sure why the Doctor-River innuendo isn't bothering me more. Normally I would be all RUN AWAAAAAY (we're currently watching Fringe and the UST between the leads is driving me batty), but the little "What's going on?" "Nothing! She's just a friend!" thing, I found cute rather than annoying, so ... I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm generally pretty much okay with established relationships and they kinda brought it on as an established relationship (well, for one of them *g*), so I've got it filed that way in my head? I don't know. But it's working for me in a way that this sort of thing usually doesn't. (I think you can kinda fanwank it to work with the Doctor's asexuality/alienness, too, if you just file River as a Companion that he's really hung up on, a la Rose, and most of the weirdness is that he doesn't know how to relate to her, either ...?)

Rory is so awesome. I just want to pet him. I do feel kind of bad for him that Amy appears to be telling the Doctor that she's pregnant before telling her husband, though ...

... okay, one thought that just now occurred to me as I typed the above -- I had assumed as I watched the episode that Amy was getting sick because she was trying to reconcile her memories of the aliens with their mindwipe thing, especially since the same thing happened to River. But it's kind of implying at the end that she was sick because she's pregnant? So, uh, there are three possibilities, I guess:

1- The alien memory thing is also making her (and River) sick, either unrelated to the pregnancy or at least a contributing factor.

2- River is also pregnant - was pregnant to begin with, that is. (Which, er, might be a major problem with the asexuality thing, unless someone else was the father.)

3- The aliens are either making women pregnant - EW EW EW - or making people THINK they're pregnant as some sort of covering-up-the-fake-memories distraction technique. Hmm.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hee, excellent timing of posts! And yes, Moffat does the only kind of horror I can genuinely say I like, where it's all about the jumps and not about the cover-my-eyes gore. He's so good at it, too.

The Doctor/River - ehhhh the weirdish thing is that for me it's really only about the asexuality. I'm fine with her being an extra-special Companion - he's had those before (I never actually minded Rose!) and will again; the Doctor falling in love I'm reasonably okay with. It's the suggestion that he's sexually attracted to her that irks me. (FWIW I always read him as in love with Rose but not physically attracted to her like that?) And so far I can read his thing with River as asexual on his part - that it's something he/they joke about rather than anything genuinely felt - but I got the strong impression from this ep that it's going to be made into more than that, and that's...well. Sigh. Oh well. It's not like I expect any chars to actually be canonically asexual; I just hope sometimes...

(oddly, it isn't exactly UST, is it - at least not if they actually do it, because if they do than for River it's already "resolved"...though perhaps the fact that River flirts but doesn't actually try to get physical with him could imply that their relationship isn't like that? Hmm...)

(And not so weirdly, if they *did* actually make it clear that they don't ever hook up like that, then I'd like River/Doctor about 100% more...I just really doubt that's going to happen.)

As for the Amy-pregnancy thing - someone else on my flist (forget who!) was speculating that the pregnancy thing was a sort of psychological redirect - not that the aliens deliberately do it, but Amy subconsciously invented that as an explanation for the important-but-forgotten thing she had to tell the Doctor. Both she and River getting sick is suspect, and I rather doubt it's that River is pregnant (considering she wasn't last time we saw her, nor was there any mention of a child, and that was probably her future, as I understand it?)

[sholio]

(considering she wasn't last time we saw her, nor was there any mention of a child, and that was probably her future, as I understand it?)

Except there's no way to know how much time is passing for River. I'm not entirely sure she's the age she looks, considering the technology that her people obviously have - actually, we don't even have any way to know for sure that she's human. Especially since they hint that she's been a lot of places, and been on the TARDIS quite a lot as well ... it would not surprise me to find out that, say, ten years pass for her between one time we see her and the next time (and then, the next time could be five years earlier for her -- I'm pretty sure it's not a strictly linear progression by any means).

My main guesses for the pregnancy thing are either "alien mind games" (basically a psychological redirect, like you said), or that the aliens are incubating something in the human women. I really hope it's not the latter, though! My entire flist seems to be assuming that Amy's pregnancy is real, which was what I assumed at first, but the more I think about it, the less I believe it. River getting sick under the same circumstances is far too coincidental to actually be a coincidence.

(And not so weirdly, if they *did* actually make it clear that they don't ever hook up like that, then I'd like River/Doctor about 100% more...I just really doubt that's going to happen.)

I don't know. My assumption all along is that they're never going to explain it in much detail -- I could turn out to be wrong (actually, with Moffat at the helm, I may well turn out to be wrong >_>) but thus far everything about River has been very thoroughly shrouded in mystery, and I keep expecting that her relationship with the Doctor will remain likewise. Though this episode made it harder to cling to my illusions ... *clings stubbornly* XD In my case, it's not so much that I'm dead-set on the Doctor remaining ace as just that I like the mystique and ambiguity of it all. I like that we don't quite know who River is or what she is to him, or if the Doctor even experiences emotion on a human level at all**, and I don't really want to have the veil ripped away ...

** Er, not that I'm trying to imply sexual attraction = human emotion, obviously. ^^;; It's just that one thing about Doctor Who, all along, is that there's a huge element of ambiguity in terms of just what, exactly, his relationships with other people actually are -- he's mysterious and alien, and he appears and disappears and never forms attachments for very long, and that's a big part of what I like about him. I was originally rather antithetical to River's character because I didn't want to see her turned into the Doctor's One True Love (TM), and I still don't want to see that. At the very least, even if they imply romance/marriage, I hope they leave us with enough of a veil around them that it's possible to read different interpretations into it.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Except there's no way to know how much time is passing for River. I'm not entirely sure she's the age she looks, considering the technology that her people obviously have - actually, we don't even have any way to know for sure that she's human

Hmm, good point. Though if she actually had a child, I'd have expected some kind of reference, and there wasn't, so...am still going to assume she's not knocked up, and from that that something else is going on. Maybe!

I was originally rather antithetical to River's character because I didn't want to see her turned into the Doctor's One True Love (TM), and I still don't want to see that. At the very least, even if they imply romance/marriage, I hope they leave us with enough of a veil around them that it's possible to read different interpretations into it.

All of this, yes - and I too enjoy the ambiguity of the Doctor's relationships, and hope that is maintained with Doctor/River. It's just...I'm not quite sure what it was; last season I actually started relaxing about it (partly because Eleven is so alien, more than Ten was), but then this ep made me all apprehensive again...

...Ah, watching TV can be such a fraught experience! XP

[naye]

Hello! I wish I had time to write awesome long episode review squee things! Leaving aside the Doctor/River thing for now (I'm at the point where I've resigned myself to the fact that no matter what happens, someone I want to be happy with the show is going to end up disappointed. Ah, TV) - pregnancy!

My own reactions went something like, "Hmm, in any other show, 'putting on weight' + 'sudden sickness' would = pregnancy..." and then "THE ALIENS SCARE ME D:" and then back to "So... she's pregnant except wait...!"

I think the psychological redirect makes a lot of sense! Especially if she and Rory have been trying to get pregnant? Which we don't know.

It's weird, actually, if you think about where they were when they got the Doctor's invitation - we don't know why they were back living their normal lives; we don't know when they said goodbye to the Doctor; we don't know why they said goodbye. Obviously it happened under better circumstances than any of the previous (modern) companions, but... Yeah. There's a lot we don't really have any idea about, with those two. So if babies have been on Amy's mind, the symptoms and the memory wipe thing the aliens have done more to her than to any of the others might coalesce into believing she's pregnant?

I really, really hope she isn't. Not that I'd mind Amy and Rory having a baby or anything, it's just... sci-fi pregnancies are never just pregnancies; babies are never just babies. I just want them to have awesome adventures without worrying about an unborn child/small baby.

I hadn't even thought about the possibility that the aliens might be messing with impregnation - EWWWW. Yeah, no, really hope that's not what's going on. D:

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm hoping she's not pregnant for the same reasons - even if they didn't do a "scifi pregnancy" having a baby now would rather curtail their adventuring. And they're pretty young to be having a kid already anyway...?

I don't think it's the aliens actually impregnating them, because how would Amy know if it were just that? But otherwise...guess we just have to wait and see!

[spacealien-vamp.livejournal.com]

As for the Amy-pregnancy thing - someone else on my flist (forget who!) was speculating that the pregnancy thing was a sort of psychological redirect - not that the aliens deliberately do it, but Amy subconsciously invented that as an explanation for the important-but-forgotten thing she had to tell the Doctor.

I actually thought Amy was pregnant way earlier than the sick feeling. After all, one of the first things out of the Doctor's mouth when he sees her is "you've gained weight." That seemed like code for "pregnant" to me.

Of course, it could just be due to less exercise, what with not constantly running with the Doctor...

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Ahh, that is a good point...so either that was a red herring, or else River's sickness was...hmmm, need the next episode~!

[hyoutan.livejournal.com]

I...wasn't going to comment anything beyond "whee, new who!" but then...Shinpachi + Rory. OMFG, yes!~

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hee, they really would have so much sympathy for one another...!

[ladykarasu.livejournal.com]

I was there at the same time, but was sick for part, and
forgot to catch up with naye... ;_;

Ah well, glad you had fun. ;)

[ladykarasu.livejournal.com]

(Unrelated news: I am fighting SO HARD not to read the Dr Who bit, because I haven't caught up in this season yet... oh temptation... everything good so far? I've heard mixed reports.)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Ah, darnit, sorry I missed you! Hope you weren't sick for your whole time there, anyway (how long a trip did you have?)

As for Who - hmm, I've mostly been enjoying it but for a couple of reservations. If you liked the end of last season then you'll probably like this one; at least so far it's very much in the same vein!