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It occurs to me, after having found myself in a couple of conversations about the buttons — one of which got pretty animated — that it might be worthwhile to post about them in a more intentional way than to just go, “Hey! I was totally the button guy!” and then fail to offer any real commentary about them beyond that.
Whether this will affect the nature and volume of animated discussions on the topic is probably up for grabs, but…well, honestly? I’m the guy who ordered a bunch of buttons with the above slogan on them and gave them away at Gallifrey One. I spend enough time on the Internet to know going in what I’m getting into, more or less.
(Note: people already in the fandom already know a lot of this, but for maximum clarity and intelligibility for friends who will have no idea what this is all about, I’m going to step through the thing in a way that will hopefully be coherent to someone on the outside.)
Context: Act One
Torchwood. It’s a spin-off (and anagram for) a British science fiction show called Doctor Who. Conceived as being more of a grown-up kind of affair, it’s basically about the last remaining cell of an organization founded by the widowed Queen Victoria after her own run-in with monsters from outer space.
That cell, operating out of Cardiff, works from a base situated on top of a rift in time and space. Their job: to protect the Earth from whatever that Rift spits out.
Or, at least, that’s where it starts.
Thing is, when you’re a five person team going up against some of the nastiest flotsam and jetsam that the Universe has to offer, and when your boss is actually a) immortal, b) from space, and c) has a bit of a history, life gets difficult. And short.
And pretty soon you’re a three person team. And that’s around the time something happens that the government would really prefer didn’t become public knowledge. And did we mention that your boss has a bit of a history? Governments tend to own explosives and crack teams of assassins.
Call it a workplace hazard.
The trouble with being a hero is that heroism requires a situation in which failure is a real possibility. And in the Doctor Who and Torchwood universe, failure is lethal.
The Ballad of Ianto Jones
We meet Ianto Jones in the very first episode of Torchwood. He’s young, he’s clever, he looks good in a suit, and he is most definitely banging his immortal boss, Captain Jack Harkness.
He has a history of cheating death. We are told he’s a survivor of the Battle of Canary Wharf, an apocalyptic alien showdown that destroyed Torchwood’s main office in London. He also survives when his efforts to rehabilitate his cyberized girlfriend result in the near destruction of the Cardiff office (and his execution by the aforementioned boss/romantic interest). He also survives being captured by cannibals, various explosions, being shot at, Abaddon the Destroyer, bad people who came out of a camera, a phenomenally awkward wedding (not his), and Jack’s ex-boyfriend.
We watch him go from a terrified office boy to a man who can shoot death in the face without flinching, and look good while he does it. Ianto Jones becomes the sort of man who will face down impossible odds. He does what he does because Torchwood are the only ones who can.
In the end, that’s what gets him killed.
“Chwarae troi’n chwerw, wrth chwarae gyda thân.“
When Ianto Jones died, it was kind of a big deal.
It’s not that we hadn’t seen death on Torchwood before. Gwen Cooper joins up to fill the void left by Suzie Costello’s suicide. Owen Harper dies twice, the second time joined by Toshiko Sato in their effort to save Cardiff at the end of the second series.
A lot of people identified with Ianto. They liked him. They liked his relationship with Jack, which was unlike a lot of things on television. He was the sort of character that people get attached to. It probably didn’t help that the road to Torchwood: Children of Earth was long and fraught, and that it showed all in one week. Fandom had a lot of eggs in that basket.
When his character died on July 9, 2009, things kind of exploded. People mourned. Within twenty-four hours of the episode airing, people were leaving notes and flowers in front of “Ianto’s door” — in reality a prop door built into the quayside. It’s become something of a shrine. People still leave things. The local authorities had to affix a sign explaining what it’s about so that people won’t get confused about who Ianto Jones was.
And this is where it all gets a little bit weird.
Big Trouble In Little Torchwood
Torchwood fandom got very polarized. Some of us liked Children of Earth. Some of us didn’t. If there was middle ground, it kind of got lost in the fray.
Of those who didn’t like it, some chose not to accept Ianto’s death, and chose to protest it with letter writing campaigns. Some chose to inundate the writers with angry letters. Some made threats. While the worst of this seems to have tapered off, there is still a devoted cohort who continue to send letters, tweets, and e-mail demanding that Ianto be returned to the show somehow.
There are still a lot of fans who have strongly negative feelings about Children of Earth, Ianto’s death, and are vehemently against any iteration of Torchwood which may not include him. Some of them are sufficiently invested that they actively try to persuade people to join their cause, or criticize people who disagree with them.
The net result is that Torchwood fandom is still a bit of a minefield. If you like Children of Earth, or at least accept its events and are interested in the forthcoming fourth series, there’s a whole culture of people who can make that really uncomfortable. Likewise, for people who still miss Ianto, or think Children of Earth was a mistake, it can be hard to engage fandom at all.
And, because of a really noisy minority of fans, it can be really hard for people on either side of this whole situation to be civil, because both sides are really used to getting yelled at, blamed, and otherwise traumatized, even when the individuals involved don’t really have any sort of agenda.
Context: Act Two
Several centuries ago, there was a Zen — well, Ch’an, because he was Chinese — monk named Linji. Well, not in that orthography, and because I am a) modern and b) American, probably not at all the way I say it either.
The thing about Linji is that he was an iconoclast. He said a lot of really inflammatory things. He yelled at people. He hit people with sticks. If the stories are anything to go by, though, he was effective enough at getting his students to work things out via the whole surprising people with sticks and noise thing that they named a school of Zen for him. In China, it’s the Linji line. In Japan, Rinzai.
For the record, I probably don’t pronounce Rinzai correctly either.
In any case, one of the really inflammatory things that Linji is reputed to have said is also oft repeated in various corners. Maybe you’ve even heard someone say:
Now, the way I’ve been taught to understand this — bearing in mind that this is surely not the only way to understand it, and is in fact not the only explanation I’ve seen — is that one makes a thing sacred and clings to it, that thing becomes a new obstacle. It blinds us. Conversely, if we break down attachments to the sacred, we more easily see the world as it is, without obfuscation.
Or, at least, without that particular bit of obfuscation. That’s the funny thing about the world. It is chock full of distraction.
Jokes are less funny when you have to explain them.
We have erred, as a fandom, in making Ianto Jones sacred.
Note that I did not say we have erred in loving him, or in following his journey, or in glorying in his victories. We have not erred in mourning him. We have not even erred in feeling whatever it is we may feel about his fate, or the exact nature of his relationship with Captain Jack Harkness, or the things we discovered about his family and the stories he told about himself. And believe me, there are a lot of different ways to feel about all of this.
It’s when we make him a cause and not a man that things go wrong. How can it be good for us to make something we love into a thing that makes us afraid of each other? That turns play and community into pissing contests and flamewars?
Saying to kill Ianto Jones is ridiculously taboo. Deliciously so. Foolhardy even. It’s practically begging the wrath of an organized, persistent group of people who have been dedicated hundreds of hours to undoing his death. But god, what a relief it is to make that statement. To actually laugh about Ianto Jones, and smile about him, and enjoy him as he is very serious thing that will get you shouted at if you say the wrong thing in the wrong room.
Because, gods, after twenty months of being tense? Plugging his name into a wild Zen aphorism is hilarious. Maybe a little insane, but hilarious.
Well, at least it is to me.
“It was good, yeah?”
It’s other things for me, too. As someone who watches Children of Earth and feels like Ianto’s choices are both heroic and in character, I feel like tearing these things down gives these things back to him. I feel like saying his death wasn’t good enough because of the mistakes that lead to it does him dishonor.
I think, as someone who hates the letter writing campaigns, that we do our writers (and the people who give them the materials to make the show) a disservice by treating them badly.
I like my friends’ reads on it, about how it reminds us about the terrible sacrifices Jack has to make. I like the idea that if we meet Ianto Jones on the road now, it means that something has gone horribly wrong with time and space, and how killing him may be the only way to preserve the timeline.
I like that people laughed. I like that one writer I gave one to made another writer come over and take one. I like that someone with a Save Ianto lanyard not only took one but pinned it to her lanyard and had a good laugh with me about it.
I like that I’ve had distant friends ask me to mail them some. I like that there were Ianto cosplayers wearing them on their suits at Gallifrey One.
I like that nobody punched me.
I like that they seem to say a lot with very few words, and that everybody sees a little something different in them.
Epilogue
So yeah. That’s pretty much it. I don’t know if people are going to read this, and if they do, how they’ll react. I like to think it’s possible that people will like it, and will find something useful in it.
It’s also possible I’ve been a little premature in the “not getting punched” department.
In any case, those search strings have a place to go now, and I’ve more or less put everything down I feel like saying. So.
This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com
