"Doctor Who" and that crappy Titanic book

[apocalypsos]

My one-sentence Doctor Who review is as follows:

Oh, holy fuck, that was creepy as hell.

*

So, yeah, that Titanic romance.

You know when sometimes you read, say, CW RPS, and the author's obviously read all the articles and knows all the anecdotes about Twizzlers and pets with one testicle, and then she wanted to write a very serious true-to-life fic with Very Serious Issues, and then you start reading and find out she made Jensen a toddler-humping douchebag who sets puppies on fire and Jared a lethargic slug who never feeds the dogs? This is kind of like that, which you figure out by the time you get to the section where Captain Smith and Boxhall celebrate being ready to leave Southampton by scoping out hot chicks at the dock. (But only the first-class ones, because Captain Smith's attitude about third-class girls is that he doesn't like girls he has to scrape off his shoe, which is ... uh, nice of him.)

So far I'm about thirty pages in, and I pretty much want to throw most of these women overboard. See, the book is about four women. The first two are Smoke and Swan (yes, that's their real names), who are sixteen-year-old twins in first class. Swan is pretty much everything I hate in a teenage girl. She likes boys. She likes boys a LOT. Not enough to actually have illicit sex with them or anything, just enough to write down every guy who lusts after her in a notebook and show it to all her friends. "This is all of the boys I've made horny! Aren't I awesome?" I just ... I don't even know.

Anyway, Smoke is even more annoying, which is great because so far she's the one whose POV I've gotten to read. God only knows if Swan's going to get to do anything other than flirt with the violinist and disgust Smoke by acting like a moron. Anyway, Smoke is a complete snot. And yes, okay, a teenage girl whose family's going first class on the Titanic ... probably not the most humble girl around. I can handle a snob. But she's a snot, no question. She wants to be a sea captain when she grows up, which I might respect if her attitude were less that she's entitled to be one because her family are part-owners of the ship. My favorite part is when she tells how she had to write to a male pen pal for a school assignment, only for her to tell him that she wanted to be a sea captain and have him respond enthusiastically with mathematical equations, which she greets with the 1912 equivalent of, "Ew, math," before proceeding to ignore a guy who apparently wanted to have an intelligent discussion with what he assumed was a smart independent woman. (For the record, the guy in question is named Dexter Poindexter Lloyd, because apparently Dorky McNerdy Klutz was taken.)

The best is when she spends pages, literally about five pages, going on and on and ON about how the violinist Swan is going to meet up with on the ship is clearly beneath them and gross and uneducated and, if his letters are any indication, functionally illiterate, and then only after seeing that he's hot as hell does she consider the possibility that he's a fortune hunter. And yes, for the record, the combination of "functionally illiterate" and "hot as hell" has made him look like Jensen Ackles in my head. Heh. Stupid wank.

And then there's their mother, who's paranoid her husband's going to go broke. Or something. It's really the most boring plotline of all of them, so ... yawn.

Oh, oh, I almost forgot! I'd completely blanked on the storyline with the forty-two-year-old woman who married rich and is terrified that when she has the baby she's really ridiculously pregnant with she'll be found out for passing herself off as white. Yes, it's just as uncomfortably written as you can imagine.

Ooo, and did I mention that when Smoke is going on and on and ON -- people do that a lot in this book; the purple-prose-laden exposition dump is your friend! -- about rumors she's heard about people on the ship, it comes up that she's heard that Mr. Astor (possibly not the one on the ship, but a Mr. Astor nonetheless) "made wee-wee" in someone's fireplace. Made wee-wee. Well, with terminology like that, it must have been when he was a fucking toddler, so I don't know what the upper crust is so shocked by. Unless rich babies pee Cristal and fill their diapers with caviar.

So yes, this is picking me up immensely, because I can write waaaaay better than this.

Comments

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

Well, with terminology like that, it must have been when he was a fucking toddler, so I don't know what the upper crust is so shocked by.

I read that as "fucking a toddler". That would have given the book a certain tone.

[writerrising.livejournal.com]

I read it as that too, and didn't notice I'd read it wrong until I saw this comment.

What has fandom done to my poor brain?

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

At a rough guess, pretty much what we thought that gentleman was doing to the toddler?

[sabra-n.livejournal.com]

Doctor Who forced me to delay going to bed by an hour, because SCARY. Usually it's Moffat who brings the terror, and the trailer for this episode looked like crap, so it was all totally unexpected, too. *shudder* Damn you, RTD.

-blue

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Okay, now I *have* to find a copy of this book. And Dexter Pointdexter Lloyd is officially the best nerd name I've ever heard.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Let me guess, one of the twins is going to sacrifice themselves for the other, only after the violist proves that steerage passengers aren't evil for being poor.

[acetal.livejournal.com]

Are you sure Mr Astor's real name wasn't James Gordon Bennet? Because the author of that story is likely basing that on an incident that actually happened.