Bodie and Doyle ride again...

Hmm. Looking at latest reports on the remit of the new agency (though it's actually been going for a year already) of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

Soca amalgamates the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), and investigators from Customs and the Home Office's Immigration Service.

...Doesn't that sound somewhat like CI5 to anyone else? A fusion between MI5 and coppers sounds awfully like CI5 to me. Memos may have to be sent out to the agents about innapropriately tight trousers, perms, and bonnet rolling on cars.

original characters

I try not to put any of these near my fanfic, unless you count the Mary Sue that we do not speak of. Most of them inhabit fics that are merely scenes, no definite storyline, several resembling bad romance fic. But anyway. I was looking at the trend for them. Several are spies, yes. A couple are in the Peninsular War.

Most of them have been around for years. Occasionally I re-write them and their stories. For the most part, they're snarky, practical people. Some are psychos, some are duty-tangled, some are fairly normal people, and some have been around so long that they've morphed beyond recognition.

Seriously. I was writing a couple of snippets about two of the spies, (MI7, Weird Happenings Organisation - yes, I know this has been used many, many times. By several different fandoms, interestingly enough) and decided to stick in as a supporting character one of my oldest OCs. Who has had parts of her split off to become different characters. She was originally an ultimate Mary Sue. Really and truly. She started as me as I was then transported into an alternate dimension's me's body. (which was of course fitter, better looking, powers, immortal, etc, etc) You can't get much more Mary Sue. Due to having gone through a few incarnations and having the backstory re-written several times, she was completely unrecognisable. And I realised as I was writing her as part of someone else's story, she was not likeable in the slightest. Cold, hard, paranoid, with a very distinct mean streak. I knew her exact motivations, character, how she'd react and so on, and meep. I dug out some of the earlier incarnations, when she'd stopped being me in the slightest, and I could find tiny, tiny traces of this new person, but still, a bit of a shock. Part of the unlikeableness is almost certainly partly because I'm currently writing her as a periphery supporting character - one of the team, but not one of the characters who's the main drive of it - so you never see her motivations. But still.

Odd.

... What's disturbing is that the character I wrote from the beginning as having very little empathy and a distinct and obvious psychotic streak is actually much more likeable.

Off to ebay comicses.