The best kind of nitpicking

I am dangerous to things I love. The more I love a film, TV show, or book, the closer I'll be looking for flaws. There's lots of reasons for that; it means I can defend it better when someone (if we could all just take one concerted look at my brother at this point, that'd be great) inevitably tells me it's rubbish because this... It also means I get to pry open its narrative ribcage and have a poke around at the little problems inside. In the good old days this meant an awful lot of fanfiction to fix the plotholes and the dodgy characterisation and the glossed-over developments. These days it tends to mean I prod one tiny little aspect that doesn't quite sit right (this female character is irritating because with her background she should clearly have reacted in this way... this scene is great on the action but they should have escaped using this clever method... this male character has completely changed his attitude for plot's sake and obviously this must have happened offscreen to make that work...) and unspool a whole new idea from it. Switch up the setting and the surrounding plot and boom, future project.

That's how Hanith started life in entirety, after all. And it's where a lot of bits and pieces in most everything else came from. I tinker. I try to fix things.

This does mean watching films/TV with me has become, occasionally, a little tiring, I'm sure. If talking is permitted (never with my brother, usually not if I'm watching something for the first time, definitely not if I'm watching something for the first time and am desperately interested in it - this is partly why I try very hard to see everything I want in the cinema, so there's no chatter and missed dialogue if it's all new) then I have a tendency to point out these little flaws and discuss with whoever's watching with me. (Oh dear heavens, the ecosystems in My Little Pony, the briefings in the waiting room of Quantum Leap, the skeevy morality and ethics and potentials of the technology in Dollhouse...) And I have definitely got worse at that after hanging around with far too many people (you know who you are) who do the same, profess not to mind, or actively encourage it.

In totally unrelated news (honest, really... No, I didn't think you were going to fall for that) my friend down here in Cambridge and I watched X-Men: First Class this evening. Oh, my love for X-Men knows no bounds. It's just such a beautiful setup, to enable so much fun and such variety among your characters. I'm sure it had quite some influence on the fantasy world I created with twenty magics. (Really, precisely. I can probably still reel off the list. At some point I will go back to that and rewrite the plot and characters with the benefit of a dozen more years' writing and some nice clear hindsight.) I've always liked that kind of smorgasbord of power. A huge ensemble with different abilities, and the real fun kicks off when you team up unexpected combinations. It's just glorious, and I will forever, eternally, be distraught that I didn't come up with it first.

I do love Marvel for that. The films are doing a grand job of taking lots of different characters with defined skills, and smashing them together in fits of glee and beautifully CGI-ed explorations of how they can bounce off each other. Sometimes literally.

You go, Black Widow, illustrate my point.

That's definitely one thing I try to stick to in my writing - people have different abilities, and they work together in different ways. I am long, long past the days of the single overpowered has-every-skill-and-every-power-available characters. Power down and partner up, my dears. Even Dryden, ridiculously powerful as he is, needs other people to do what they're good at.

Anyway, yes. That's the thread I pulled most happily from X-Men. Power team-ups are just plain fun and there should always be more of them.

So, next time you see me apparently tearing something to pieces over a small flaw, bear in mind it probably means I love said thing to pieces, and am trying to dissect its problem so I can fix it forever. Or at the very least pull out its still beating heart and transplant it into something new and wonderful, to live on in a glorious, beautiful new form, with stitches around the forehead and bolts in the neck and that pure, perfect core hidden safely away inside.

Because I love it. So I will preserve it and pass it on.