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persiflage_1:
Which Elements haven't you cast yet, and want to?Something I hadn't thought about for a long while! When I first watched
Sapphire and Steel and fell headlong in love with it and all its weirdness, I also became obsessed with other Elements.
I still don't see how you can
not be - the four we know are all fascinating, inhuman, very different to each other and completely mysterious. They are even, we learn in Assignment Three, something of a mystery to each other. (While Steel speculates on Silver's unknown origins, Sapphire replies that she wonders much the same about him & we definitely get the impression that they were quite different.) So, how could I help but be intrigued by the others we hear about - the list in the opening credits, Copper (who is always having trouble with Silver, & in the audios, whom Silver nevertheless defends as being incapable of betraying them), Jet (who sends her love to Steel) and Mercury, who is a technician like Silver. There's always a sense of how important they are to each other, even if often accompanied by fear/mistrust of some kind. In addition, in the audios, we meet Gold and Ruby (even if I have still not yet met Ruby). And I forget what the exact number was stated to be, but there are well over 100 of them, and then there's the possibility of Elements who defected or who were lost/destroyed - and maybe Elements are still being 'made' (or found, or chosen, or whatever it is)? If, of course, 'Elements' is even the proper name for them, whatever they are.
So I obsessed and obsessed about it all, home alone and ill, and then generated a shiny list of 100 Element prompts for Sapphire, Steel, Silver and Lead and any other likely Elements and wrote lots of them. I made a post of my ideas about these other Elements once before,
here (as I'd been asked) and included casting, because Elements are so - I don't know the best word - but visual? sensual? something? - anyway, it seemed to make sense to have a physical base for the character. (I notice that quite a lot of people who've also written original Elements seem to have done the same thing.)
I hunted up a further list of prompts I'd made and saved on my PC (what? 100's not many...) and according to that, it seems that these are the 'Elements' I was contemplating back in the day:
Zinc, Quartz, Tin, Emerald, Opal, Jasper, and Amber.
I assume that in my periodic table/alloy/jewel/whatever obsession I'd come across some interesting properties of these but it was so long ago now I have no idea, unfortunately, but that was generally where it began, if they weren't in the list from the intro - I browsed through Wiki looking for stuff that had interesting aspects for an Element. I hadn't got as far as casting yet, though! I hadn't even really written Mercury, who I'd had in mind for ages, let alone some new ones. I probably thought it was time to try and be sensible (and no doubt then got into something even more obscure, very likely
Public Eye.)
But... fellow S&S fans (I know there are a few) how about you? I am seriously obsessed with Elements. Please tell me if you made any up and who they were and if you cast them and what your thinking was! I love how completely open the canon is and that I can write Copper and then read and enjoy someone else's totally different take on Copper - or Jet or Diamond or the Transuranics (they're unreliable and can't be counted, says Steel). What thoughts do other people have?
So, you see, I just love Elements. I
made a masterlist of all the OC Element fic I could find. When I listened to the commentary for the last episode, PJ Hammond said that the thing he was sorriest about was that they didn't get to meet the others, Copper and Jet and the rest, and I was just: oh, me too, PJ Hammond, me too! (So, maybe I wouldn't hate a remake - if it was properly cool and weird and mysterious and had
new Elements just every once in a while, the way they had Silver and Lead before.) I love Elements! I wanted
more!! (Even if I really hadn't got around to any more casting.)
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