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Law & Order SVU mini-rant + Haru update
I love crime shows--I watch all three CSI shows, plus the NCIS shows, Bones, Castle, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist, and of course the Law & Order franchise, not to mention a couple of J-drama detective shows on the Japanese language station. (When I write it out like that, it's obvious that I spend way too much time watching tv!) SVU was always my favorite of the 3 Law & Order shows, but lately I find it wearing a little thin.
It seems like Olivia and Stabler always have center stage lately, and Fin and Munch get little screen time, which is really a waste of two good actors (Ice-T and Richard Belzer). My sister was complaining that for awhile, nearly every show was about either Olivia or Stabler's angst. Thankfully, Olivia seems to have gotten over the trauma of nearly being sexually assaulted while going undercover in prison, but Stabler still has anger management issues--why hasn't this guy been sent into counseling? Actually, I love Olivia, and I like Stabler well enough most of the time, but I wish that once in awhile, the writers or producers or whomever is in charge of such things would let the spotlight shine on Fin and Munch. A couple of my favorite episodes were the ones where Fin was trying to reconcile with his estranged son, and had to come to terms with the fact that his son was gay--something that did not sit well at first with macho cop Fin. Belzer has a great sense of humor, and we see a little of that in Munch's conspiracy theories, but he rarely gets a chance to shine on the show.
It was nice that in last week's episode, Dr. Huang had a significant role to play, although it required some suspension of belief, since I found it difficult to believe that he wouldn't have been punished more severely for the laws he broke, even if it was with good intentions. But I like B.D. Wong a lot, so I was willing to let it slide.
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And wow, I was looking at my Haru fics, and I just realized that it's been 2 months since I posted the last one! Just to let you guys know, I am still working on my Kikuchi/Onozuka series--it's just that work has been crazy these past couple of months, and I've been coming home feeling too tired to write most days. Still, I did manage to write about 8,000 words of Kikuchi and Onozuka doing their big love scenes for the movie, when one of those things happened where the characters did something unexpected and the story took a different turn. (I talked a bit about that on my Neil Gaiman post.) Anyway, Kikuchi cracked a careless joke, not meaning any harm, but it set off some of Onozuka's insecurities, and he reacted badly to it when I hadn't originally intended him to. Which would be fine, except that the next chapter of the story, the trip to Okinawa for location shooting, was supposed to have a more light-hearted tone, and I couldn't make the first chapter transition convincingly into the next part. So I ended up having to excise the first chapter and start over with the Okinawa part of the story.
Those 8,000 words haven't been wasted, though--I realized that it would actually work better if I moved it so that it comes after the Okinawan arc. I had been planning for tensions between K&O to increase and build to a confrontation after the trip, so that would actually set the stage nicely for the next part of the series. Anyway, I am still working on the current fic, and am going to try to finish it by the end of the month.
And great news on the Haru front: the final volume (14) of Haru wo Daiteita is slated to come out this month in Japan! I'll have to see if I can special order it, either online or through a local vendor. At the same time, I feel sad knowing that it's the finale and there won't be more Haru coming in the foreseeable future.
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I've bailed out of CSI: Miami, though, don't watch NCIS: LA, only watch about half the new L&Os (though that was my favorite of them for a long time and is still the most realistic depiction of what lawyers do ever on TV, IMO), and may stop watching CI now that everyone other than Jeff Goldlum is leaving. Not that I dislike him, but the writing is going downhill and I will miss Erbe and D'Onofrio, even though I felt D'Onofrio chewed scenery and his character got too much screen time and attention compared to Erbe's.
I love Dr. Huang as well. In my mind, even though it's not addressed one way or another on the show, Huang's sexual orientation is the same as B.D. Wong's: gay. What better way to explode the idea that all gay men are pedophiles (and that all pedophiles are gay) than for the in-house shrink and (former?) FBI profiler to be gay? Also, if/when I ever get around to writing my story about Eiri Yuki and his past, I plan to have the SVU characters be the ones who investigate the rape/murder to save me making up characters and so Eiri can bond a little bit with Olivia and maybe Belzer (I think he'd shy away from Stabler and Tutuola) and for Dr. Huang to tell him that being a rape victim doesn't have a bearing on his sexual orientation. Not that he pays any attention to that (in fact, I think part of the reason he slept around so much afterward was to prove he wasn't gay) but I think that and Dr. Huang's sharing that he's gay could plant the seeds for later developments as well as being cool in and of themselves.
In some ways NUMB3RS is a police procedural too. I just watched the season premiere (I'm months behind; we videotape rather than use DVR) and thought the writing was weak. I guess that's why I think it's run its course; once the writing goes downhill, all the character changes in the world won't help, and I suspect even if Lou Diamond Phillips were available (which he might not have been), his character would have been hard to write in as a regular or even as a more than occasionally recurring character due to his unique skill set. But I agree with you that he would have generated more spark and excitement than Sophina Brown's character.
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I don't really consider the idea a crossover, just using some existing characters for a function I'd otherwise need OCs for. Maybe I haven't bored you yet with my plans to write about Eiri's life starting with his birth and ending after some post-canon trauma, the desire for which came about because Kitazawa got resurrected as a source of conflict between Eiri and Shuichi in the sequel EX and I decided I wanted to write something that would finally put his ghost to rest. Of course that means hitting the blond jackass over the head with a 2x4!
The plan is to write a five-part series starting with Eiri's childhood through his departure for NY (Part I); his time in NY, including the rape and deaths (Part II; this is where the SVU characters come in); his return to Kyoto until he graduates from high school and moves to Tokyo to write (Part III); canon period and some non-canon events during that period, though it will have to cover the highlights of canon (Part IV); and the post-canon events I've already come up with leading to the series' resolution (Part V). One thing that I'm comfortable about telling you will happen is that the question of Eiri's parentage that arose in Part I because of his non-Japanese looks will be resolved, as Mika and Shuichi conspire to get hair or other DNA samples from him and his father and have them tested.
Now all I have to do is actually write the thing! I do have pieces of all parts written, including something like an ending (I needed to write something of a conclusion so I knew where I was headed), and at one point I did start in seriously on Part I, but I've been stymied by questions about POV (I want to write some of it in first person but I can't write all of it that way) and the need to get other things, like
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