Mad Larry's Birthday Present

Ah, in a gesture of bloggosphere solidarity, Lawrence Miles gave a half-decent post for once (rather than saying that Matt Smith is Jar-Jar-Binks and we're all fools). Larry's post, one of the ones likely-to-stay-up, concers a new Doctor Who monster. To be honest, given the sheer contempt for the franchise he shows (even in this imaginary scene, he insists the only way for "dramatic impetus" is to have the exposition shouted while the Doctor rewires something), I dunno why he bothered. But he has a brand new monster, to rival his previous efforts:

• Faction Paradox, some pretentious 18th century emo goth wankers who thrive on the ability to be clever about stuff no normal people give a shit about
• the Remote, some amoral pretentious wankers who are just photocopies of ordinary people and exist only to get into moral arguments with people
• the Cold, some Lovecraftian monsters that never would do much
• the Babwyns, a bunch of angry baboons who are defeated by being invited to the Doctor's wedding to a hooker he's shacked up with
• the Quiesence, a bunch of of Skeksi-style space vultures who talk like Jerzei Balowksi and are based on the evil Steven Moffat's "power pats"
• the Drudges, a bunch of mute zombies wholesale stolen from the last season of Buffy when they were called the slightly-more-ominous "Bringers"

All of them, curiously enough had the shock reveal THEY'RE REALLY HUMAN BEINGS and not proper alien monsters at all. Got kinda old, to quote Larry's favorite line from A Christmas Carol.

Added to this not-so-much-carnival-of-monsters-but-sideshow-of-gits, is a new villain.

THE SEMANTICORE!!

Sounding like a cross between the generic evil chemical company from The Secret World of Alex Mack and being a pedantic git with no sense of humor, the Semanticore are an evil from the dawn of time!

Yes, another one.

They are sentient nightmares!

Yes, another one.

They exist in human language!

I know, I know, but something's bound to be interesting...

They take the forms based on grammatical errors and spelling mistakes!

...

Yes, basically, this monster is nothing more than an excuse for the Doctor to turn to people and correct the entymology of the words "nightmare" and "pandemonium". Because, retards who spell the latter "pandamonium" will find themselves attacked by Stephen King's It... if It was a panda.

I quote verbatim:

But here they come, out of the abyss of the misspelt mass-mind. Eyes as black as the pit, blunt teeth that chew bone oh-so-slowly, almost as if it were bamboo. Why the big paws...? So they can rip out your soul. Imagine that rage, the schizophrenia of being pitied (pitied...!) for your inescapable doom while being mocked (mocked...!) for your failure. The horror of imagined impotence. In all of our dreams, nothing else has become such a symbol of despair. So loved and given so much contempt. A golem of hatred and muscle that was only ever treated as a punchline.

As an animal, near-extinct. As a demon, a living, shambling scream.

Now is the age of the on-line. Language evolves, faster than ever, and so do all Semanticores. Combine this with humanity's increasing sense of wrongness, a guilt-fear that injustice has been done to All God's Creatures, but an equally-balanced guilt-fear of doing anything about it. The result is inevitable.

Prepare for pandageddon.

...so basically, we've got a generic rampaging alien monster.

That, because of poor spelling in useless chavs of today, looks like this.

BEWARE THE SEMANTICORES... YOU WEAK, SPINELESS DOGS!

Ah, Larry, a monster that looks shit and it's canonically all the audience's fault.

Where were you when JNT needed you to save the Myrka, huh?!

Next up are...

THE KILQUEREEN!!

Yes, they are Raxicoricofallapatorians... but a different colour!

They're blue!

See, blue blood? Aristocratic, crime families, funny, little bit?

And they've got really big heads!

And, yes, no doubt Mad Larry would be the first the diss the SJAs when they tried something a bit similar with the Blathereen, Raxicoricofallapatorians that were orange. And had an inordinate amount of pride in their crime family heritage. And they also had monkeys on their back in their uncontrollable addiction to alien Krynoid-lite weeds.

But Mad Larry, a bloke who gets "subtlety" the way I get Kath and Kim, isn't prepared to waste time with metaphors.

The Kilquireen have giant pineal glands on their head that control their brains with the most base of drives and emotions. A bit like drug abuse, but only pissy little kid shows with no imagination would do it. It's much better to have evil tumors on their heads that MAKE them evil. And when one of these blue bastards is in a skin suit, they take the form of someone giving their kid a piggy-back, and the kid is in fact the evil monster controlling them.

Fair enough, but the fact that Larry introduced the monsters thus:

No, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I'm going to present these shoulder-childer as parasitic aliens, controlling the minds of the ones they straddle. Not at all.

I dare say Terry Nation did something similar.

Nazis in mobile tanks? Not a bit of it! There's no anti-fascism at all in these Daleks, not at all...

STOP LYING TO YOURSELVES! THEY ARE PURE EVIL!!!

And while the Semanticores are there are to piss off linquists and make people think of pandas as evil monsters, the Kilquireen are there to make us hate new dads proudly carrying around their children. Only vile chavs that abandon their parental duties are safe!

Men; fathers; young fathers, especially. They walk the streets with their offspring on their shoulders, toddlers with fat little legs wrapped round their dads' necks, a tower of generations that somehow never topples. In prehistoric times, a man would be satisfied with the task of re-purposing mammoths for food. The modern male needs reassurance that he can make his fatherly duties look macho and look twenty-first-century at the same time, and will therefore let his child (usually a son) ride bareback on his head. These men stalk the cities, occasionally pointing at things that look interesting but not too feminine, shouting "what an enormous bridge!" while secretly thinking "see, I'm lifting my own child's weight, that proves I'm sensitive yet strong."

Getting a bit broody, Mad Larry? Did you get lucky and now fear possible consequences? Oh well, you're better off childless. There's only room for one psychotic temper-tantrum-throwing attention whore in your life, right? Plus, the ungrateful little bastard would probably be an open-minded, friendly individual able to show a bit of restraint in polite society. Not worth the hassle mate.

So, basically, Mad Larry's new monsters are Carrionites and Slitheen with new names. What an imagination that man lacks. And a quick round up of things Doctor Who is apparently supposed to demonize:

• pandas
• people who make basic spelling mistakes
• single fathers
• small children
• anyone of aristocratic decent
• the mentally ill, in particular schizophrenics

Charming.