Haven Update: Newsletter Index updated

[selenay]

The Newsletter Index has been updated with five newsletters. Possibly of most significance to many on my f-list is the fact that there is now an active (updated every day) newsletter for the Torchwood fandom!

As always, feel free to pimp this around anywhere that might find it interesting and if anyone knows of newsletters that I haven't included, drop me a line with the LJ user name and I'll get it added.

Comments

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

Hee! Thanks sweetie. :)))

[selenay]

I was thinking of you when I noted the Torchwood newsletter :-)

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

Awwww, thanks. *beams*

Was looking over the resulting fic from Countrycide. ::heavy sigh:: I'm gonna end up writing something between Jack and Ianto that *doesn't* result in some sort of suicide pact or Daddy!Jack/Baby!Ianto nonsense. However, I still don't have Ianto down yet. Your comments helped immensely though, letting me see more into him than I had. Though my personal view matched yours, I couldn't have put it better. :) Ianto is a bit of an over-thinker, except when it came to Lisa. That episode was just... weird, but I can't find fault exactly because up to Cyberwoman, there wasn't much of Ianto's character to examine. That episode gave us one. But it still bugged me that, given his past experience, he'd risk Torchwood just to save his girlfriend. For Ianto's "think first, act later" personality, it didn't make sense for him to be so completely blind.

However, it did set him up as someone who's ignored a lot of the time, which is why I think they brought him along on this latest mission. But like you, I would have preferred a little bit of dialogue on the reason he was included. :)

[selenay]

Was looking over the resulting fic from Countrycide.

I haven't had time to look yet, but I can imagine the kind of drivel that's appearing *sigh* Can't be worse than the drivel post-Cyberwoman, though, can it? ::is hopeful::

gonna end up writing something between Jack and Ianto

*cheers*

That episode was just... weird

It was weird, but I agree with you about at least giving Ianto some character to work with. My thought is that when Ianto's heart is involved (and it's difficult to deny that he loved Lisa deeply) he stops thinking clearly. Or possibly, the way he was thinking became distorted and he was able to rationalise Lisa to fit into his normal thought processes. Certainly we saw in Countrycide that he can act on instinct, going against his nature, if a situation is desperate enough to overwhelm that over-analytical mind-set.

My thought is that he couldn't think Lisa was a danger - throughout the episode he couldn't admit that she wasn't Lisa anymore. When he looked at her, he wasn't seeing the expression in her face or the cyberparts, he was seeing the Lisa that he remembered from before the battle. In his mind, he wasn't endangering Torchwood. He was trying to cure his innocent girlfriend from something that he couldn't accept was incurable. He wanted her to live more than he wanted anything else in the world at that point so he ignored everything else.

It was only when she transplanted her brain into a fresh body with no cyber-bits and she was still being "The Cyberwoman" that he started to realise that he wasn't going to get his Lisa back. Even the death of the doctor didn't pursuade him - he seemed to realise at first that she wasn't quite right, but within a minute he'd blanked that out and seemed to have rationalised it in his mind in a way that left Lisa blameless.

I think that Lisa was his blind spot. He didn't stop thinking, but he blanked out doubts and logic so that he could keep believing that what he was doing was right. Transporting her, building the conversion unit, finding the doctor who might cure her showed an incredible level of ability and intelligence - keeping her existence a secret for so long must have involved so much careful planning and logistics. That's something that we already know is one of his skills.

Possibly what I'm trying to say is that I think he analysed everything in his way, but his feelings for Lisa and his blindness to what had happpened added flaws to his analysis.

At the same time, I think that there was a voice inside him pointing out that this might not be right - otherwise he wouldn't have hidden her away. It's amazing how hard people can work at ignoring those kinds of warning if they're desperate, though.

Of course, this is mostly my way of rationalising some of the contradictions in Ianto's character and you might have different ideas completely :-)

But like you, I would have preferred a little bit of dialogue on the reason he was included. :)

Yes. I was able to extrapolate from Cyberwoman as to why he was on the mission, but it would have been nice to have something concrete. Even just a line from Jack would have cleared that up :-)

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

Of course, this is mostly my way of rationalising some of the contradictions in Ianto's character and you might have different ideas completely :-)

Not really :) Your ideas pretty much gel with mine. I'm analyzing his state of mind, looking at him from a PTSD pov. He became hyper-vigilant and compartmentalized the rights and wrongs to what he was doing--hiding and covering. When a person suffers from hyper-vigilance, they can see(or hear) things that aren't there as well as completely ignore what's real. He couldn't see Lisa was lost because he refused to. His mind couldn't accept it. Cybermachines? Co-opting bodies? That's just not something he could handle, I think. Monsters, aliens, no problem. His logical brain can place them in their proper boxes and name them. But to have his lover taken and used like that did not compute. He saw only that she was somehow just "kidnapped," that she was still in there somewhere, waiting to be rescued. In that way, I think that perhaps Ianto is a lot more complicated than we have been shown thus far and the last two episodes show that out of the "office," he's more an emotional core being who can't think first/act later. He has to act first, think later, and that's what he did where Tosh was concerned(and thus, I'm agreeing with you about his not exactly thinking about what would happen to him after Tosh got away). Certainly makes him a very interesting character, that's for certain. :)

I also forgot about Jack's time being a Time Agent. ::facepalm:: That would explain the torturer experience. I hope. ;)

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

Additional --

I didn't *look* at the fics for Countrycide. ::sheepish:: I saw the titles and went, "Oh no."