Oh No, It's My Only Copy, Don't.

Watching The Good Place! I'm up to episode 2.03, although technically I've already seen some of the episodes that follow it; I just haven't watched the whole thing from start to finish before.

The main thing that distinguishes The Good Place, I think, is that it's a sitcom with an interesting plot. I'm not sure that's something I've ever come across before. Plot certainly isn't a requirement for a sitcom - my favourite sitcom of all time is Community, in which almost nothing significant ever actually happens - but it's pretty cool! It's rare for my drive in watching more of a sitcom to be 'what happens next?' rather than just 'this is fun'.

The flaw in The Good Place is that, at the moment, I'm only really interested in two of the characters: Eleanor and Chidi. 'Selfish but struggling not to be' and 'catastrophically neurotic' are fun characteristics! I'm less interested in 'insecure namedropper' and 'just not very bright' as comic character types.

I do have a fondness for Janet, I'll admit. And there are aspects of Tahani I enjoy. There's one point at which her namedropping is used to great effect: when she namedrops in front of the lie detector cube and they avoid the obvious joke in favour of something much funnier. And the relationship between Eleanor and Tahani took me by surprise, in a good way. I assumed they'd be permanently at odds! I wasn't expecting them to be friends!

Also, Tahani and Chidi are holding hands when they're waiting nervously in 'Mindy St Claire', and it is cute as hell. The Good Place generally seems to have a fair bit of everyone/everyone support - to varying degrees it's hinted at Eleanor/Chidi, Tahani/Jason, Eleanor/Tahani, Tahani/Chidi, Eleanor/Jason and Jason/Janet - and obviously everyone/everyone implications are a bit of a weakness of mine. (But I need to develop more interest in the characters in order to fully appreciate their 'shipping potential!)

I weirdly enjoyed Trevor, flirty scumbag dude from the Bad Place, and I'd be up for more of him being a flirty scumbag.


( A few notes with spoilers up to 2.03, 'Dance Dance Resolution'. )

Even if the humour and the characters can be a bit hit-or-miss for me, The Good Place is good fun! And I do enjoy Eleanor a lot. Even if she looks disconcertingly like my brother's girlfriend, who is also named Eleanor.

But There's Tacos There.

Oh, hey, The Mentalist now qualifies as one of my major fandoms by my 'at least ten thousand words across at least three fics' rule! I suppose I should give it a 'my fandom history' writeup.


The Mentalist

I got into The Mentalist at the age of twenty-one, as a direct result of being into Derren Brown. All I really knew about it was 'a Derren Brown ripoff solves crimes with the actress who plays Veronica in Prison Break'. I posted an entry going 'hey, should I watch The Mentalist?' and all the comments went 'NO, WATCH PSYCH INSTEAD' and I went 'well, I've got the pilot of The Mentalist right here, I'll just watch a couple of minutes.'

I fell in love instantly. I was fascinated from the moment Jane wandered into a crime scene to make himself a sandwich. It's easily the fastest a television series has ever captured my attention. And, although I could definitely see the Derren Brown inspiration in Jane, I was surprised by how quickly I started to love him on his own merits. (And demerits.)

The Mentalist never entirely went in the direction I wanted it to - it had some fascinatingly dark ideas it never really followed through on, and I dropped it at the end of season six when I realised it was probably never going to explore consequences in the way I hoped for - but it did do some really interesting things, and I love the characters so dearly. Both Patrick Jane and Teresa Lisbon are amongst my all-time top ten fictional characters; Jane might actually be my all-time favourite character, bar none.


Favourite character: No secrets here; it's Patrick Jane, the smug, charming, cowardly, petty, childish, playful, loving, guilt-ridden, horrifying, fucked-up moral disaster of a human being. Poor Teresa Lisbon would have been my favourite character in any other show, because I love her; she just has the misfortune to share screen space with my possible favourite character of all time.
Favourite pairing: 'Patrick Jane/the entire Serious Crimes unit plus Hightower in some weird asexual denial-ridden unspoken arrangement' is not technically a pairing, but I don't care; it's my answer. I wish more people wrote fanfiction for it, although I realise it's a fairly specific desire. I'm very pleased that I've been writing so much on the theme lately.
Number of words written: 15,636.

Snippet: The CBI team have a picnic, to make up for the TERRIBLE EPISODE where Jane goes 'let's have a picnic!' and they NEVER GET TO HAVE THEIR PICNIC because there's a murder. I always sort of wanted to expand this and post it properly, but I suppose there's only so much you can do with the concept 'everyone has a nice picnic'.


( The Mentalist unfinished snippet. Team picnic, 2009. )

The other unfinished Mentalist fics on my computer: the Silent Hill crossover, which I've already posted as my Silent Hill unfinished snippet, and the Final Fantasy XIII crossover where Jane's family turn into monsters and he just keeps them locked up in his house. It's a concept I like, but there's no market for a Mentalist/Final Fantasy XIII crossover, alas. FFXIII has such interesting ideas, but crossovers with it are so inaccessible; there's so much jargon involved (l'Cie, fal'Cie, Cie'th, Focus...). Actually, might as well post what little I have of that here as well.


( The Mentalist unfinished snippet. The Mentalist/FFXIII, 2012. )