However, it is looking like they’re going to send Prentiss out with a bang – a crazy story arc starring her is brewing.  And anything involving Prentiss is likely to get me to squiggle in my seat with joy and not just because she’s my favourite – she’s also one of the under utilised characters as she doesn’t have a dick is not A) Reid, B) Hotch, C) Morgan or even D) Rossi.  So an entire arc devoted to Prentiss?  Involving her untouched past (other than the abortion-in-Rome-at-fifteen thing) and why the polyglot daughter of an ambassador is working for the FBI (other than to spite her mother)?  I am so in.

Because, honestly?  Why is a polyglot who grew up in international politics working for the BAU?  She is way overqualified – she could be working in any of the other, cooler, policing agencies.  So it makes a hell of a lot more sense that used to work undercover for Interpol.  And a guy she helped catch?  Well, he’s free.  And he’s out to get her so, at the end of this week’s episode, she grabbed her cat and is on the run.  But where did she run to?

But the bigger question remains – is Emily going to survive the season?  I’m unbelievably excited (and terrified) about it – I think this is the first time when I’ve been watching a show where I don’t know the character’s fate.  Either it’s obvious that they’re going to live – plot armour is a wonderful thing – or I’m catching up on old tv and have accidentally spoiled myself (every. single. time).

And Criminal Minds is the sort of show that would cheerfully murder off one of the main characters, and now it’s hit the six season and, well, the quality of the scripts has been declining.

So, yeah, I’m both pumped and terrified of the rest of the season – especially since Joe Mantegna tweeted that episode 618 is even more mindblowing than the 100th episode – you know, the one where Haley, the ex-wife, gets murdered while the son is in the house?  And Hotch has his epic breakdown over Haley’s body?  Yeah.  (Or maybe he was talking about episode 500, where Hotch gets stabbed and probably raped by the unsub mentioned above – either way, intense!)

Unrelated, but Emily got a cat!  A black cat named Sergio!  So adorable – and, hee, way to play up on the Emily the Strange connection.  My inner teen goth appreciates it.

As for why fanfic?  It’s easier to summarise in a couple of sentences.  No need to explain who and where, just what and why.  Also, I want to be writing my fucking comic and not novelling atm – it’s time for my yearly post-NaNo-you-suck-at-life depression.

It should go without saying that everything on this list is a WIP and that the longer the length is, the less likely I am to write it.

The fandoms, if you’re interested, are Castle, Gargoyles, Criminal Minds, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary and Lost Girl.  Every single fic but one (a Castle fic) listed is a crossover.  Yeah, idk, I’m on a crossover kick as of late?

Title:  What Rick Saw
Fandom:  Castle
Characters:  Castle, Beckett, possibly Alexis, Lanie and Martha
Ship:  I… really don’t know.  Castle/Beckett UST goes without saying (you can’t write Castle/Beckett without the UST, of course) but I won’t know if it gets resolved until I write it.
Length:  One shot
Summary:  Set right after Kate’s apartment goes boom and she’s staying at Castle’s.  In short, Castle finds out that Kate’s been writing fic.  I suspect that she freaks out and flees to Lanie’s, which just shapes it up to be a series of one shots, which is SO LAME and hard to read on FF.Net.  Ugh.

Fandom: Castle and Gargoyles
Characters: idk, everyone in Castle?  Well, maybe less of Martha and Alexis.  Manhattan Clan, Xanatos, Fox, Alex, probably Demona and MacBeth because I loves those two.
Ship: Castle/Beckett UST, Goliath/Elisa, Fox/Xanatos, maybe Demona/MacBeth shiptease if they’re there?
Length: Probably really fucking long
Summary: A series of animal maulings, one of which takes place in Beckett’s jurisdiction, cause Beckett and Castle to unintentionally meet the Manhattan Clan.  Elisa and Beckett already know each other.  Semi AU by necessity - the gargoyles aren’t public knowledge, though there were those rumours over a decade ago….

Fandom: Castle and Criminal Minds
Characters: Everyone.  Including JJ.  Will likely be focused on Castle, Beckett, Rossi, Prentiss and Hotch due to my own unabashed character preferences.
Ship: Nothing, apart from the requisite Castle/Beckett UST.  And probably a few shipteases for Hotch/Rossi/Prentiss (any and all combinations) since I (sorta) ship it.
Length: Long.
Summary: Serial killer in NYC (again… for both shows).  Castle calls up Rossi (hey, they’re both authors with a plethora of ex wives!) with a slew of questions and Rossi being Rossi knows that it’s not book research and gets the team on the plane.  Beckett probably fangirls Rossi, much to Castle’s annoyance.
Note: I wanted to write this before any info about the (awesome) Castle two parter last season.  So, yeah, the show itself beat me to the punch and I dislike writing things that I know other people have already written.  Unless they did it horribly.

Fandom: Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary
Characters: HG, Helen, Tesla.  Probably Watson (cuz I love him) and maybe some Griffon too
Ship: It has Tesla.  C’mon, he’s going to be hitting on Helen and HG.  And it’s me – I’m going to be putting some Helen/HG in.
Length: Short.  Probably not a one shot.  Most likely a series of one shots a la the Castle fics.
Summary: Uh, hullo?  I think it’s obvious – HG, Helen and Tesla science (and possibly sex) it up in Warehouse 12 and the original Sanctuary.

Fandom: Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary
Characters: Myka, HG and the main Sanctuary gang (and maybe some Tesla)
Ship: Myka/HG.  Probably HG/Helen UST.  Ish.  They’d've been involved back in the WH12 days.
Length: Long.
Summary: The Regents shipped off HG to the one place where she could be contained (and uncrazied) – Helen’s Sanctuary.  Helen is epic pissed that she wasn’t informed that HG was debronzed, HG is omg Helen’s ALIVE wtffff?, an enraged Myka hunts HG down.

Fandom: Lost Girl and Sanctuary
Characters: Everyone
Ship: Uhhh… none, really
Length: Not a clue.  Probably long.
Summary: AU – Helen gets at Bo before the Fae do.  Madness ensues and the two worlds clash, turning Helen’s world upside down.  Big Foot a spy for the Light (redemption for his un-Light-ish human tormenting), Helen angsts.  The Fae call out Helen for calling them Abnormals, Helen angsts.  Tesla learns that he wasn’t the last vampire, Tesla angsts.  Turns out that Helen’s Sanctuary network is little more than a prison/exile for the undesirable Light and Dark Fae.  Helen angsts.

However, the other day I had read a fandom secret guaranteed to generate wank (aka, my favourite ones to read the comments on) because, apparently, pointing out that tv isn’t exactly female friendly is too harsh a criticism for the uber liberal PC feminist anti-privilege LJ community.  Yeah, idk, but there were some semi-heated comments about the OP being an idiot because the shows s/he listed had plenty of good female characters, though the secret was about how they’re not the main characters and could never carry the show.  There is a difference between having a show with good female characters (Criminal Minds… well, pre season six since JJ got the boot and Prentiss is being cut out and, as awesome as Garcia is, she only has a small role) and a show that is carried by the female characters (Haven or Xena).  Note that without Audrey, there would be no Haven – yes, it is a story about a weird town with weird happenings, but Audrey is at the nexus of it all, and it is her story of self discovery.  And, Xena?  Yeah, it’s kiiinda named after a girl – always a sure sign of a central character.  But Criminal Minds?  I think the show itself just proved that it can chop out the female characters and still keep its ratings.

But, I digress (as always).  The point I’m trying to get at is that an anon (thank you, whoever you are) commented on the secret saying to watch Lost Girl since all of the important characters – the hero, the sidekick, the villain and even one of the love interests – are female.  Needless to say, that little description caught my interest enough to google it, though I was instantly leery when I realised that there wasn’t a link to the wikipedia article on the first page of the search.  One modification to my search later and I found the article.  My first thought? Supernatural crime drama hell yes! My second thought?  The main character is named Bo and is a succubus?  Oh, laaaame.  The leeriness was back on in full force – while anything is better than a vampire (I probably wouldn’t have watched at all if Bo was one), a succubus is almost as bad.  The only saving grace (I had thought at the time) is that the inevitable sex would at least be in character and appropriately horrible for the creature of myth.  But, yes, as a mythology geek, my first thought was ‘oh great, softcore porn ahead’.

And I hate sex on tv.  Absolutely hate it.  And, anyone who, y’know, knows me at all (aka, anyone reading this blog) will know that I am not a prude.  For chrissake, I’m constantly reading dirty fanfic (hell, I wrote some) and have been for so long that I find myself completely unaffected by it beyond giggling at the word choices.  And it isn’t the fact that it is visual smut instead of written – I read comics, guys.  Comics in which smut happens.   Occasionally graphically.

The reason why I hate smut on tv?  There’s no point to it.  It’s why I can’t watch HBO or Showtime shows – every single one I’ve seen (including, to a lesser extent, Stargate SG-1) has, at some point, either graphic sex or graphic violence (or both) just because it can.  There is no point to the sex or the blood beyond hur hur boobies/severed limbs on tv.  It’s like, look at us, we’re edgy.

I hate to break it to you, but, no, you’re not.

You just can’t tell a fucking story worth following.

And, while I absolutely loathe the censorship and the limits placed on network/basic cable shows (c’mon, can we at least have swearing?  There is no way that Jane Rizzoli doesn’t cuss people out), I vastly prefer the shows that come out of those channels.  They don’t (entirely) have the the sex and the blood to sell a show for them – they have to actually (gasp) write something decent and attract viewers based on the show’s storytelling abilities.  Shocking, I know.  And the most aggravating part?  If there was no censor and all shows could have as much blood and sex as they want, people wouldn’t watch the lamesauce lolboobies shows because, hullo, they can get boobies AND a plot over there.

So, yes, I’m tl;dr again, but I really don’t like sex and blood on tv not because I don’t like sex or blood or tv but because I like all three and tv just does it wrong.  Sex and blood both have their places in stories (it’d be pretty hypocritical of me to shun two things that I employ in my own writing), but they should have a purpose beyond the kink.

Needless to say, I wasn’t too optimistic about Lost Girl, especially when I realised that it is a Showcase show – the channel is becoming pretty much Canada’s version of HBO or Showtime.  As far as I’m aware, the channel isn’t as liberal as HBO or Showtime (I don’t watch Canadian channels ever) but it does air a few of their shows.

So, a show about a succubus on a channel that’s geared towards adults.  There is only one conclusion I could draw – sex, sex and even more sex.

But, still, I downloaded the pilot anyway.  It was, after all, recommended for having female characters and my brief skim of the wiki article did not include the dreaded V word.  And, hey, it is a 100% Canadian show – I’ve got to at least pretend to support my country, right?

Fifteen minutes in and I was hooked.  It hit a bunch of my favourite tropes and myths right off the bat (perky goth girl sidekick to the tall, dark and leatherclad heroine, werewolves, urban fantasy, seelie/unseelie courts (well, they call it light and dark sides but that’s just semantics), using the underutilised monsters, an awkward but adorable scientist (the female love interest even!!), living in the slums, etc, etc) and, for that, I probably would have forgiven any excessive sex.

Except, it turns out, there is nothing to forgive.

Holy mother of crap, a show about a mother fucking succubus doesn’t milk the sex demon aspect at all.  Instead, Bo is written as a person who genuinely just isn’t human.  Yes, sex (well, mostly just making out) is how she stays alive and, yes, she is a bit conflicted on that, but, by this point in her life, she’s (mostly) accepted it and has moved on.  It sucks, but she tries not to let it affect her outlook on life.  (Well, either that or Kenzi is really good at cheering her up.)  When she has sex/uses her powers, it is for a reason.  The first person she kills?  A date rapist who, at first, tried drugging her before giving the spiked drink to Kenzi who, idiot thief that she is,  chugs it and the wanders off to a secluded elevator.

See?  Sex (making out) with a purpose – introduces the character and  what she is to both the audience and Kenzi.

And it, and the subsequent sex-for-food, isn’t played for the kink.  Well, your mileage may vary (of course), but, to me, it is played out as nothing more than a meal.  Bo really isn’t that into it – to her, it is a weapon and just a fact of life.  Her partners, on the other hand, go down with a smile.

Of course, sex for pleasure isn’t ignored (in fact, all the actual sex on the show is for pleasure – Bo just plays tonsil hockey to eat people) and, yet, it still has a purpose.  Bo, an ~28 year old sex demon, has never actually had a successful relationship in any meaning of the word.  It is pretty crappy to wake up to a dead body, y’know?

But then Dyson introduces her to the fact that other Fae don’t have quite the same reaction to her powers as humans do.  She is intrigued and more than a little excited – not just for the potential for sex, but suddenly she is faced with the very real possibility of having a relationship with someone.  And, really, it is hard to be more desperate for love than Bo is.

This is, of course, where sex for pleasure not for sustenance comes in.  Again, very easy to go wrong… except it doesn’t.  Every time we see Bo sleeping with the Fae, she’s doing it because she’s desperate for a real relationship and because she luuuurves (as Kenzi puts it – and that’s a direct quote and damn I love that girl) Dyson.  And it can be a plot point for more than just the character arc.  When Dyson is an ass (due to politics and crazy Fae rules) and accidentally leads Bo on, Bo is heartbroken (well, mostly just depressed about being rejected) and Kenzi encourages her to have rebound sex.  Well, a rebound threesome.

Yeah.

And I’m still not annoyed about unnecessary sex – for one, it was played for the laughs (while Bo is getting it on with that Fury and her husband, Kenzi is sitting directly below them eating cereal (or ice cream)… which leads to dust and god knows what else raining down on her and her food).  For two, it contributes to the character arcs – Bo is totally confused and lost when it comes to interpersonal relationships and is generally fairly amiable to whatever Kenzi suggests.  She protests, but she willingly follows along behind her perky sidekick.  And Kenzi, while creative, doesn’t always have the best ideas.  They’re hilarious (let’s go smash some cars and then get smashed!), but probably not the best reaction to being turned down.

For three (and the most important reason)?

The sex was a ruse – the Fury was deliberately using Bo’s succubus nature as a method to get close to her and judge her strength.

Yeah.

Epic win there, in my books.

Of course, we’re only five episodes into the series – with eight more left in the season (and hopefully it’ll be renewed – but if it kept the ratings it got for the pilot (hell, it has plenty of room to drop even), it will be), there is plenty of room to go wrong.  But, honestly?  I doubt it.  Five episodes and a threesome is enough proof for me that this show is on the right path.

So, yeah, ego.  An ego that was stroked for years due to being the one artist and writer in one group of friends and then further fueled by the interwebs.  Needless to say, I’m an excellent candidate for experimenting on creative groups – I have more interest in the numbers and what they represent than how they reflect on my own work.  Hence my current experiment on the Castle fandom regarding review to read ratios, speed of reading and quality of reviews between FF.Net and the castle_fic LJ comm.  I mean, hey, if I’m going to be writing Castle fic like the fantard that I am, I may as well get some data out of it.

Hopefully I’ll be able to rope in some other authors who crosspost between LJ and FF.Net, plus ones that only post on FF.Net or LJ so I can get a proper set of data.

But I digress.

Last week, in a fit of boredom and annoyance, I decided that I was going to enter an OC contest for the #CriminalMindsLovers group on dA.  Yes, seriously, an OC contest.  Yes, I am 21, not 12.  Actually, that’s sort of why I entered.  You see, when I had decided to enter, the other entries consisted of hilarious emo Sues.  Because, yes, the BAU needs another child genius – Reid more than fills that role… and at least he’s in his late twenties, not eighteen with a pseudo-Japanese name.  So I was all, oh fuck you kids, I never created Sues as bad as that, even when I was your age!  (I haven’t – all my Mary Sues were the right age and they never had a ‘special power’ that detracted from the canon characters.  Rather, they were almost complimentary to the cast.)

So I created Ana Novak, a geeky researcher/consultant who spends more time in Quantico than in the field.  Also, she’s in her thirties, isn’t stunningly beautiful or a genius.  She’s just an ordinary person with a fascination with overly violent crimes.  In other words, someone who could actually show up on Criminal Minds, unlike the eighteen year old punks that Hotch somehow allows to dress more extravagantly in the field than Garcia does in her batcave.  Riiight.  You’re representing the FBI (unlike Garcia – she’s a consultant/tech analyst and on a CIA watchlist and, thus, more valuable than the profilers), you’re not going to be allowed to wander around in ripped jeans.

So, yup, I went through the process of hacking up an admittedly bad drawing, submitting it and waiting until Sunday for the results.  They were exactly as I predicted (Sarah will corroborate - she was pretty certain of the opposite outcome) – I didn’t win.  Didn’t place anywhere.

Wanna know what charater won?

A sociopath.

Yes.

A fucking sociopath won a CM OC contest.  Fuck me – it’s Criminal Minds, not Dexter!

Oh!  And to make it even more hilarious?  Hotch doesn’t care that he’s a sociopath and the rest are creeped out by him but not sure why.

Yes.

A team of highly trained profilers, one of whom was involve with starting the fucking unit, wouldn’t notice or care that there’s a potential serial killer in their midst.  Cuz, y’know, it’s not like it is their job to notice these things or not.

dA is special.  I swear to god, fandom is always a dramatastic disaster but dA?  dA takes the cake in stupidity.

(At least the guy who won could draw… in a generic anime style, but, hey, better than nothing.)

PS:  Yes, I really don’t care that I won or lost – it was just a test to see what they were judging based on.  Clearly it was the ‘coolness’ or ‘uniqueness’ factor, not the ‘will this character actually fit in the universe’ category.  Besides, I got more than I expected out of this – Ana Novak actually fits quite nicely in the Caeverse.  She’s going to be the department’s profiler and violent crimes expert.

Buuut I’ll put it under a cut cuz I really hate uncut long articles on blogs.

• House – I’m pretttty sure the perma-stubble gives away the gender of the lead character
• Chuck – The last time I checked, Sarah wasn’t the lead character
• Castle – Third show in a row to be named after the male lead? Niiiice Nikki, niiice.
• The Big Bang Theory – One female character in the regular cast. ’nuff said.
• Fringe – I’m not sure on this one… Olivia is sorta the main character, but Walter steals the screen and Peter is almost as important as Olivia.  It is a bit too ensemble-y with the three leads to really count as a female lead. Getting close, though!
• Criminal Minds – This show has not one, but two male leads
• Bones – Brennan and Booth are equally important, as seen by the title screen with both Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz in the most equal manner possible
• Eleventh Hour – Canceled, yes, but Rufus Sewell (aka, the male lead) is yummy enough for me to watch the show again… and again… and again…. Oh, the science is great too.
• Sanctuary – Amanda Tapping!
• Eureka – Male lead. But, wut wut, the not-Tony-Stark character is on the screen?  Get that sheriff outta my line of sight!
• Stargate SG-1 – While Sam Carter should have been the lead character after Richard Dean Anderson left the show, it was not to be.
• Stargate Atlantis – Ultimately, John Sheppard is the lead character of this series… though Elizabeth Weir and Sam Carter lead the expedition for four seasons and (Meredith) Rodney McKay stole the show with awesomeness.
• Star Trek: TOS, TNG, ENT – Combined cuz I’m lazy and, well, the Captain is male. ’nuff said.  (DS9 is excluded simply because I haven’t had a chance to watch that series yet.)
• Star Trek: Voyager – Honestly?  I find most of the male characters rather boring. But, yay, short redheaded female captains ftw!
• The X-Files – C’mon, there are only two main-main characters (what? I need to separate M+S from Skinner, Reyes and Doggett somehow) and they share the lead pretty well – whilst Mulder will run off without Scully, the weird stuff tends to happen to her, not him.
• Warehouse 13 – It’s in the vein of The X-Files and Bones so Myka and Pete are co-main characters, I guess
• Defying Gravity – Ensemble cast, but the two leaders of the expedition are male

So, yeah, long story short?  There generally aren’t any clearly dominant female leads in the stuff I watch.  This also applies to novels (unless they were written for women), but I’m not going to make a massive list of that because A) I’ve read way too many books in my life time and B) I don’t even remember all the names or the authors of most of the books I’ve read.

And I’m not going to bother listing comics because those are written for men and I expect the lead characters to be male and I half expect that the female characters are going to suck.  Some of them don’t, but I find that male writers tend to have women that are just… weird.  They don’t seem like they’re people, y’know?  Not that I’m dissing male writers – the opposite definitely holds true for female writers.  Seriously, read any yaoi recently?  Half of the time one or both of the characters take on a distinctly feminine feel.  And that’s even in fanfic where the character isn’t canonically girly.

Again, the opposite often is true for men writing femslash.

Naturally, I began wondering why it is this way and, wellll, beyond the ‘women/men can’t write men/women’, I haven’t come up with a good reason.  Of course, I’ve come up with reasons, but my idealistic self doesn’t want them to be true and my feminist self doesn’t believe that they’re good reasons.

Simply put, my other reasons all involve sexism – too many male writers/producers/executives that all believe that men could never relate to a female character.  And, thus, for whatever reason they have decided that lead characters must be male because either A) women don’t count (from a marketers standpoint, that’s technically true since, in some workplaces, women still make a lower salary than men.  Add in the fact that it still seems to be women who leave the workforce to raise children and you have a definite skew towards men making, and thus spending, more money.  Thus, you’d want men to be watching the show and commercials and, thus, buying stuff) or, B) they feel that women can relate to men (or throw in a secondary female character for women to relate to).

Yeah.

You can see why I hope that I’m not right.

For interests of full disclosure, I’m kind of guilty of this as well – my lead characters tend to be female and, in the story that still only has a WIP name (currently Forced Fate), my two main characters are both female and, of my three secondary characters, two are male.  Not a very gender balanced cast, but I’d rather have the cast skewed in one direction over it being dead even because casts with exactly as many women as there are men often seem a little bit contrived.  It can be done, but I don’t think I could pull it off.

Besides, I don’t think about that sort of thing while writing – I just come up with characters and put them together.  If they happen to be male, fine by me.  It really does not make a difference to me.

And, perhaps, that’s just how tv is written as well.

But I doubt it.