sam_storyteller (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 11:15 am
sam_storyteller) wrote2005-07-17 11:15 am
Entry tags:
Second City Torchwood: Story Notes
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
City of the Big Shoulders:
Poetry by Carl Sandburg, naturally.
Hey look!
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laurab1 made me some awesome manips!Notes on Second City Torchwood
There are a lot of references in this story which are passing, but which might be confusing for non-Chicagonos. To my mind the most important of these is actually one of the biggest throwaway lines, where Ian asks Gwen, "Sox or Cubs?"
In the two-stadium city, generally speaking, southsiders root for the White Sox and northsiders root for the Cubs (yes yes, I'm sure I'll get all kinds of comments calling me wrong, but in general this is accurate). The territorialism can get vicious. Ian and Gwen are representative of this -- Gwen is a southsider and Ian is a northsider, and they relate to each other across the cultural gap that causes.
Another throwaway line concerns Devil in the White City, a best-selling book about the Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer who stalked in it, Dr. HH Holmes. It's sort of de rigeur reading for Chicago history buffs, and fairly popular even for those who aren't. Come to think of it, the description of the horse in the drinking water may have been from The Pig And The Skyscraper, another nonfiction book about Chicago, but it's not the kind of book many people would voluntarily read (though an excellent primer on Chicago's history and socioeconomic context).
A couple of mentions are made of Halsted; Halsted is a major street on Chicago's northside, which runs through the heart of the Boys Town neighbourhood. As the name may imply, it is a heavily gay-friendly area and Halsted has a great many gay bars on it. It also has Gaymart, which sells remote-controlled Daleks. Trufax.
The Music Box Theater, where Jack takes Ian on their first date, is a real indy cinema not very far from where I live, actually, and it is awesome. Byron's, mentioned by Edgar van Scyoc as one of the main reasons he is against the downfall of American civilisation, is a Chicago restaurant chain (though I use restaurant in the loosest sense of the word, since they don't have, you know, tables or waiters). While they are famous for their hot dogs, and rightly so, Edgar like myself prefers their hamburgers. Pizzeria Uno, the analog to Jubilee Pizza, is a Chicago chain credited with inventing the deep-dish, though others also claim the distinction. I don't like deep-dish, but there you have it.
Torchwood Red Line Station does not exist; in fact, if a Torchwood station did exist, it would be on the blue line which runs almost directly under Daley Plaza in the heart of the downtown "Loop". The red line is cooler, that's all. The entry to the Torchwood Red Line Station in the photo is actually the entry to the above-ground Sheridan Red Line station, which is my stop (and also Ian's) in Wrigleyville.
Daley Plaza itself is a real place, of course; there's a giant Picasso sculpture located at the north end of it, analogous to the fountain in the Plass in Cardiff. On holidays, Daley Plaza often has fairs, the Christmas Village and Chicagoween being the most well-known. In October they dye a nearby fountain orange for Chicagoween, which is not a good look.
The Torchwoods in America all have counterparts in canon; Torchwood One is New York, of course, and Torchwood Two is a very strange man in Austin, Texas. Torchwood Three is naturally Chicago, and the missing Torchwood Four is/was located in Las Vegas. They are loosely allied to USPAT, the United States Paranormal and Alien Taskforce, the equivalent of Doctor Who's UNIT. Jack has been lobbying for decades to get them to change their beret colours from yellow to red.
There are several People Who Are Not Real in this fic, of course, or even More Not Real than the Not Real characters. James Ragtime is a made-up name for a jazz trumpeter that Jack is fond of. Edgar van Scyoc is faced by Alexis Denisof but is likewise fictional, and of course anyone familiar with my HP fic will recognise Ellis Graveworthy as a recurring non-person.
When I ran the idea of American Torchwood past Junie, including the name "Ian" for Ianto, she asked me if Ianto was too weird a name for Americans. I told her it wasn't that it was too weird; it was that it was too Welsh. I could have named him something generic, like Ian Smith, but I wanted to give him a heritage, and in Chicago there are plenty of heritages to choose from. So, I gave him an incredibly Italian name and a bland nickname that he goes by, in order to point up that Ian is still very young and in something of the throes of an identity crisis. It's also a sly jab at every fanfic ever where Jack calls Ianto "Yan".
One of the least-explored and most-interesting facets of American Torchwood, to me, was the Doctor. Plonking Torchwood down in Chicago as-is made no sense because there was no cultural context of Doctor Who to guide the plot -- it's difficult to watch Torchwood without understanding a lot about the last four years of Doctor Who. The Doctor's actions caused Lisa Hallett's death, not to mention Jack's disappearance, Martha existence and thus her visit to Torchwood, and Jack's immortality. I had to make Torchwood the basis for the Doctor instead of the other way around, which gave me a great deal of leeway in how I treated the Doctor.
Torchwood America's Doctor is not Great Britain's Doctor. He is much younger -- only in his second incarnation, though that incarnation has been kicking round the galaxy long enough to earn him the title of Lonely God. He is relatively fresh from the battle of Arcadia which killed his entire race and most of the Daleks; he's an angry, unhappy, and deeply troubled man. He's not supposed to be a good guy; he's ambiguous and creepy and he has no problem using a sonic blaster to get his way (it came in a set with the screwdriver). In the American spinoff, Doctor Who was supposed to chronicle his growth from this person into someone more like our Doctor: ruthless but pacifist, desperate for love but often afraid to accept it, childlike with wonder but also childish in his occasional self-absorption.
The Doctor Sings minifeature, of course, is a send-up of John Barrowman's Anything Goes performance for Torchwood. I'm not actually positive that the Fats Waller version of I Would Do Anything For You has the lyrics I used (my recording is from the New Zealand Dixieland Jazz Band) but I believe it to be so.
As for the fans...well, if you're a regular reader of
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torchwood_three, you'll recognise the "type" of fanfics I was presenting -- angstfics, songfics, Mary Sues, a little hint of Twincest courtesy of the HP fandom's crazy, lots of gay porn, a handful of AUs, some Real-Person fic, and some darkfic. Torchwood_El is meant to be the major hub for American Torchwood fandom, but of course that means that it attracts all the crap as well as all the cream. Most of the usernames are made up, but a handful are people I invited because I knew they'd get a kick out of it. And of course you'll see my name in there. I'm not sure what level of meta that brings me to; me writing about a fictional me writing non-canonical stories about a fictional television series written by me which is a non-canonical story about a television series. Which is not written by me.
The End.
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