Oh god, I'm laughing so hard at this but I have to keep it quiet because my boss is also in the same office and my stomach literally hurts.

I should clarify my comment on your last entry, haha: while I think Doctor/Master was MORE obvious, I still think Holmes/Watson is pretty damn obvious too. There is definitely love there, and it was probably what I enjoyed most about the series.

Tropewise, my favourite thing in the world is the "dear enemy" dynamic. Nemeses, frienemies, rivals, the lot. I love it. The best way I can think of to describe why is... kind of odd, not going to lie. Basically, I view mutually mushy romantic relationships in media kind of like hugs, or kissing, or something along those lines. When you're hugging or kissing someone, you're not really seeing much of them. A little hair, bit of a shoulder, blurry impression of some eyelashes and pores, but that's about it. Frienemies, however, are always at arm's length, grappling and throwing punches and ducking, and they're watching their opposite so hard they barely let themselves blink.

You know the old canard "love is blind?" I kind of see it like that. Romantic love is very intimate and big on trust, but that trust is necessary because you can't see your partner all that well. A real nemesis, on the other hand, should know you better than absolutely anyone else, because if they don't they'll never win. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Know thy self, know thy enemy; a thousand battles, a thousand victories (Sun Tzu). He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy's life (Nietzsche). In the moment when I truly understand my enemy , understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him (Orson Scott Card, who is indisputably a bit of a douche but on this occasion hit my kink with pinpoint precision). I could go on.

I just never get tired of watching people who are on opposite sides of conflicts but have great respect for each other do that strange and elegant antagonistic dance around each other.

My second-favourite thing is nonsexual friends who know each other so well they're practically psychic and are completely comfortable with each other on every level, especially if they're really touchy-feely and don't give a crap if anyone gossips about them because of it. "A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words" (source unknown but pretty much exactly what I mean).

“There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself - an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.” -Antisthenes

In order to create the perfect story for me, the hero should have one of each of these, and present me with a gorgeous and complex OT3.

My other favourite element in my media is dream logic and/or surrealism. Pretty much the best way to get me to watch something is to tell me it makes people wonder what the makers were taking when they created it. This extends to things like postulated spirit worlds and the afterlife, as well as high fantasy and the weirder edges of sci-fi.

I also love it when stories deliberately don't tell me who the bad guy is, and make me grieve for both sides (Hellboy II, oddly enough, is one of my favourite examples of this; "We die, and the world will be poorer for it.")

Lastly, I pay a lot more attention to backgrounds than most people do, so I will love something forever if its backgrounds are beautifully done even if its story kind of sucks (or even if it doesn't have one, like Iblard Jikan).

/massive, massive tl;dr, so sorry

Nothing to add here, everyone else has already captured in words my precise slack-jawed expression of horror at the racism thing.

If I may add a weird note, though: I'm kind of surprised you think the homoromanticism here is super obvious but never mentioned the Doctor and the Master (in both the S3 and S4 finales). I personally thought they were kind of a lot more obvious than Sherlock and Watson. Stuff like this:

(in Time Crash)
Five: Does he still have the beard?
Ten: No--Well, he's got a wife.

And from an interview:

Euros Lyn: "Why doesn't the Master just kill the Doctor?"
RTD: "Because he loves him. Honestly I think he does."

And a quote from my friend, who is a Whovian of the highest calibre:

So that's evidence for the Master side of things. For the Doctor side, you have "I forgive you," and "REGENERATE!" and all the hugs he forced on the Master in Last of the Time Lords, and well....THE END OF TIME.
"Get out of the way."

So I'm just curious how you read them in comparison to Sherlock and Watson. For myself, I read Sherlock as asexual (though that may be my own bias as an ace) and Watson as caring about him but not interested in the romantic sense, whereas I read the Doctor and Master as (probably nonsexually, what with the gonad-stealing wizards in the apocrypha, depending on which canon you believe) completely in love with each other's minds -- enemies because of conflicting beliefs and circumstances but soulmates on the level below them. (I use "soulmate" because RTD also used it, though my friend can't find the exact quote and neither can I.)

I realize that ~shipping~ is a really subjective thing, but I felt like Doctor Who gave me more literary permission to ship Doctor/Master than Sherlock gave me to ship Sherlock/Watson, if that makes any sense. Sorry if this comment is even half as odd as I think it probably is, I've got about a gallon of hydroxyzine and other antihistamines swimming around in my system and they're making me a bit drowsy. ^__^;;

YES.

Fun trivia time:

1.) The alternate Jamie was Frazer Hines' cousin, according to my roommate's research.

2.) Please note that in Tooth and Claw (S2 of Nu!Who, the one with the werewolf), the Doctor puts on a Scottish accent and introduces himself as "James McCrimmon." Also, "John Smith" is a name Jamie gave him on the spot when he needed an alias. Even though he almost never talks about past companions, it's clear that he doesn't forget them (and Jamie might have been a bit special anyway, they were... close).

3.) Frazer Hines was only supposed to be in six episodes, but they kept him on because his dynamic with Patrick Troughton was so amazing.

4.) This is an excerpt from an interview I believe was conducted some time after Troughton's death, and just kills me:

Q: Do you have any favourite memories from working on ‘Doctor Who’?

A: Yes, working with Patrick… I tried to get him into ‘Emmerdale’, but the producer said ‘Oh no, I’ve heard about you two’. At conventions, people say ‘How can you remember so much?’. I think if you’re having happy times, you remember, if it’s a sad time, your memory tries to erase it. I had such happy times. Never once did Patrick and I, or Wendy or Deborah, have a cross word. Those three years in ‘Doctor Who’ were the happiest years I’ve had in acting. Sixteen years in ‘Emmerdale’, sure, but those three in ‘Doctor Who’, working with Patrick, were the happiest. And Patrick, God bless him, in a book said ‘The happiest time I’ve had in my life was working with Frazer Hines’, which brought a lump to my throat.

SO BASICALLY even though I started out with nu!Who and have only seen a few episodes of Two's run with my roommate, they're "my" Team TARDIS. Two ties with Ten for my favourite Doctor, edging out Four and Eleven by an extremely narrow margin.

I watched this serial with my roommate and loved it so, so much. I'm so glad you enjoyed it too.

I'm really sad about how much hate this episode is getting in the comments, but I guess it must just be a love-it-or-hate-it sort of thing. Personally, I love it to death and beyond, and will never, ever apologize for that. As a professional editor, I also think the writing was beautiful. RTD aimed for the spot on our hearts that hurts the most. For some people, he hit the bullseye. For others, that failsafe tear target is located somewhere else and was therefore missed entirely.

Really, what I want to say is that I'm glad you enjoyed it. I would have been very sad if RTD missed your personal target, because I've been looking forward to this since you first started watching. :)

Words cannot express my love for Cinna. There are none up to the task, in any language.

The moment in this episode where they pause in the middle of running for their lives to squee about werewolves and hug is one of my favourites in the entire series. I rewatch this episode a lot.

I usually skip over or stop before the part where the refracted light somehow has enough physical force to lift the werewolf off the ground and pin him to the wall with its sheer lightyness, because my dad is an astrophysicist and while light does technically have force (see: solar wind) it certainly doesn't work like that. >_>

Or wait, fuck it, TEAM CINNA. FUCK EVERYONE ELSE.

YES

I love Katniss so much that I kind of suffered my way through her whole love triangle nonsense because while both Gale and Peeta are pretty decent guys, neither of them actually seem to get her the way Cinna does. And I felt like she deserved someone who actually made an effort to understand who she was. Buuut that's just me.

On the non-romantic front, when I was at this point in the books my thought process was similar to yours: wait, where is this going? I had a vague idea of where things should probably go next (which proved to be pretty accurate), but things just moved so, so fast that I couldn't keep up. Reading these books fast is really an experience -- eventually I just had to give up trying to see ahead and take the punches as they came. I hope you have time to give them a quick readthrough after you're done going through them chapter by chapter.

The particular oddness of people like Katniss and myself, I've found, is that in general we're quite good at reading people... as long as they're not feeling those things about /us./ I don't know if that's true for you, but I'm very good at understanding people's relationships as long as I'm not one of the people in question.

I'm a bit sad that you're so unhappy with Katniss's characterization, because she's really a lot like me. I'm very pragmatic and aromantic despite also being responsible and caring a lot about my family and the select few I call my friends. I take care of people. I don't get gushy over them.

I honestly wouldn't assume someone was in love with me until they said so outright (and I also wouldn't have trusted Peeta's confession before the Games, because it could be construed to be under duress, since he needed any advantage he could get). I do experience emotion, obviously, but not usually all that strongly, and when traumatic things happen in my life I go into a kind of hyperfocused emotionless Get Shit Done state that can last a really long time. And if I were in her position with something as traumatic as the Games going on, emotions would be dead last on my list of important things to pay attention to. Peeta putting emotion above survival would not make sense to me, so I would put trying to figure that out on the back burner until the really important stuff was taken care of. So it didn't bother me at all that she doesn't "get it." I wouldn't either. It's only as an outside observer without the pressure of survival to focus on that it seems obvious.

Katniss's teaspoonitude made perfect sense to me and I really enjoyed reading about someone whose mind made sense to me. I can empathize with more emotional characters, but they never feel quite as real to me.

I can understand why she doesn't resonate with you. I'm just sad that you're not enjoying her point of view as much as I did. Don't mind me. :P

ETA: This comment is a mess because I'm sick and can't string sentences together to save my life.