would you like a little RAGE with your RAGE?

[xparrot]

So Martin Gero made some comments on the most recent episode of SGA.

"For five years, we didn’t even know it, but all [Rodney] wanted was for someone to tell him that they loved him in an unconditional way."

I want to...I want to kick Martin Gero's head in with a big spiky boot. OF LOVE.

So the love of friends and family (because doesn't Jeannie love him, too? or was she lying when she said "I love you" in "Miller's Crossing" and faking her tears in "The Shrine"?) counts for snot, because it's not romantic, sexual love.

And unconditional love is quoting a guy's own brain-damaged love confession back at him (six months later), and then offering him sex on a plane to make him shut up.

I have no boyfriend! I HAVE NO LOVE! What do I do??? My life is empty! Meaningless!

*cue total fucking mental breakdown*

Okay, now I'm going to do my best to forget this episode ever happened. There's been other eps I haven't enjoyed, but this is the first one that's seriously in danger of spoiling my fanning. It pretty much ruined Rodney's character for me even when I was ignoring the McKeller (I swear, I'd've been almost as outraged if the ep had gone the same way only with John instead of Keller, though at least then I'd have some McShep making out), and now that I am meant to think that banging Keller on the plane is the most significant and important event of Rodney's life in the past five years - yeah. Someone tell me how to hold onto my SGA love, because I don't want to lose this fandom, but the show seems pretty determined to use its dying breath to drive me away.

ETA: I gotta say, SGA these days is really making me appreciate NCIS. NCIS has one s5 ep that is explicitly the 100% opposite theme as this.

Comments

[sholio]

Okay, I swore I wasn't going to comment any more on this topic, and I kind of danced around this at Cate's journal, but since I know you well enough that I can just flat-out say this and I won't offend you:

HOW is this any different than what slashers do?

Because, yes, it pisses me off the way that our society and our pop culture is geared towards sex and romance being the be-all and end-all of relationships. But that's what slash is, and that's why reading slash very often leaves me feeling a little bit ... bruised, because what it's saying, either implicitly or openly, is that the platonic relationships I so adore are ... nothing, compared to romantic love.

Yeah, it doesn't make me happy to have pro writers come right out and say it, but there are SHELVES full of romance novels at Barnes & Noble that express the same sentiment. There are archives full of slash fic that are basically mini-theses whose topic is what Gero just said. And I'm looking around at the anger and wondering where the hell it's coming from, when I had to learn to wall up my own frustration and hurt all these years just to get along in fandom without feeling like people were tromping all over my heart all the time. Goddamn it, I worked my ass off to not be resentful of slash for breaking up my friendship OTPs, and slowly I learned to read and enjoy it and even to write it. I have been working hard to come to terms with romance in general, to like and appreciate it so that I can work it into my own writing and appreciate it in other people's writing.

I can't believe that I feel this strongly about this, but I'm actually sitting here crying because I'm so hurt and angry that now, now everyone's getting upset about Gero pissing in their cheerios, when they've been happily pissing in mine for the entire time that I've been in fandom, and I've been working so fucking hard to get to a mental place where I can not only appreciate it but thank them for it.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hon, I've talked about this with you before, so I don't know how I can explain it better to you. But I'll try. Sex matters NOT AT ALL to me. I don't care about sex by itself. I only care about sex as another tool to show pre-existing affection. To me, John & Rodney having sex is an extension of them playing cars on the pier. I don't see slash - the slash I like - as trumping friendship; I see it as extending friendship. I read gen and slash and I don't prefer one to the other; I don't care if John & Rodney never hook up sexually, as long as they're friends. If they do hook up sexually, I still see them as friends first, and lovers second. It's not the sex I'm responding to; it's the love - the friendship love, the family love.

That's not most slashers; that's me personally. I'm not a normal slasher; I can't speak for them. But that is how I see it.

I do not see any pre-existing affection in Rodney/Keller. I don't see any friendship there. I see them having nothing in common, nothing to talk about, nothing to do together that they'd mutually enjoy, except sex. And that, to me, is a pretty meaningless relationship. So I deeply resent the implication that all the love Rodney has gotten from other people over the years means nothing, and that Keller telling him "I love you" while never showing anything of the sort, except for sex, means more than all the loyalty his team and his sister have shown him.

--oops, gotta go to work, will e you more later. This is a fundamental difference in how we see relationships and sex, so it's really hard to explain, but I'm willing to try!

[sholio]

*hugs you* I know, and I'm sorry for venting in your comments. This has been building all day, and I think I had to do it somewhere before I exploded. I'm feeling much better now.

I also know that you and I have very fundamentally different views of romance and marriage, and I think it probably in large part goes back to our upbringings and the sort of couples that we were exposed to as role models. It's not that I'm categorically opposed to romantic love and marriage and pair-bonding in general. But there's not really much I can do about my emotional reactions to it.

I think that Rodney/Keller is very non-threatening to me as romance goes, because I don't see a lot of evidence of intense pair-bonding. Theirs would be a low-key relationship in which they maintain separate groups of friends and largely separate lives. That is, to be honest, my romantic ideal and the one that I find the easiest to accept in fiction. It doesn't threaten any of the other relationships in Rodney's life because it doesn't cross over into the same territory, and I don't see the same intensity that I do in his friendship with John.

And I'm perfectly happy with that. It obviously doesn't match how the writers see it, but, well, that doesn't really surprise me, because I gathered all along that they thought they were writing some kind of grand, fated-in-the-stars romance and it just doesn't read that way. But I'm perfectly fine with that, because I hate grand, fated-in-the-stars romance, full of passion and giving up your previous circle of friends and spending all your waking hours lost in another person's eyes. (See: Twilight.) And I like low-key romance that doesn't preclude a person's ability to continue to have individual friendships with other people. Regardless of what the SGA writers meant to deliver, that's basically what I see, and in honesty, the less that Rodney and Jennifer have in common, the less their relationship is likely to interfere with the existing relationships in his life. Don't get me wrong, I want them to like and appreciate each other;, I don't want them to be unhappy. But like I've said to you before, I find the whole idea of a couple who are each other's everything to be claustrophobic and unpleasant. And the idea of Rodney having his team, and Jennifer having her job, and the two of them being satisfied in their individual, professional and personal lives and yet still having each other to curl up with at night ... I find that incredibly appealing, really the best of all possible worlds.

(In other fandoms, there's a reason why I enjoyed writing Bulma and Vegeta so much, and found myself identifying so strongly with Bulma, because in large part, that *was* my ideal marriage -- a loving but mostly-absent spouse, a satisfying career, and lots of time alone to pursue one's own hobbies or friendships.)

[amalthia]

I wish I'd read this post first before posting a comment to your earlier remarks. This sheds a lot of light on where you're coming from.

[sholio]

Not a problem. :)

And I definitely agree with you that the show has been blatantly guilty of telling, not showing -- with this, and with a number of their other storylines. I also agree with you that calling any kind of human love "unconditional" makes me twitch -- whether it's Jennifer's love for Rodney, or John's for him or anybody else's. On the other hand, I can totally believe that Rodney is looking for unconditional love; it totally seems in keeping with his character that he'd have this abstract ideal no one can live up to. Which might make a rather interesting story, come to think of it ...

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

**Because, yes, it pisses me off the way that our society and our pop culture is geared towards sex and romance being the be-all and end-all of relationships.*** bows down and worships friendshipper's shoes.

I so totally agree with you and I couldn't have said it better myself. This is one reason I tend to be a gen writer than anything else. Unless there is an established relationship, I will generally stir clear of anything remotely romantic. Not that I am against romance in any way, but to centralized your whole existence around it is not only very short sighted, but it atrophies a person's ability to see and have relationships that are not romantic in nature.

I see this phenomena in fanfiction a lot. It baffles me how people go out of their way to pair up EVERYONE in that fandom. As though their not having a romantic relationship diminishes the possibility of being actually happy and satisfied with their lives. I have to practically hours just searching fandoms for friendship or gen stories.

Not everything has to be about sex, people, there's all sorts of relationships that can be perfectly platonic and still be interesting. And don't even get me started on incest.

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[sholio]

I'm aware that my views of romance are probably not the healthiest ever. I don't know that I've ever talked about my family much, but my father's basically an abusive, alcoholic con artist (his most recent shenanigan last year was trying to literally drink himself to death while calling me and my sister periodically to give us weepy, self-pitying progress reports on how his suicide was coming along). The happiest times in my childhood tended to be when he wasn't around. And, growing up, I got to watch my mother trying to be her mate's be-all and end-all, first with him and then with a series of other users and manipulators. Now my brother's married to an abuser and manipulator of his own, whose inability to rein in her spending forced him to join the Army to pay off her debts. (Long story. Long, frustrating, "gonna choke a bitch" story.) My maternal aunt's husband is in jail for DWI; my paternal aunt's husband is a religious fundamentalist and control freak who doesn't let her go anywhere without permission; and my grandfather physically abused his daughters before being institutionalized for insanity!

I seem to have bucked the trend by managing to become happily married myself, but to someone who's as independent and private and as much of a hermit as I am. We have separate bank accounts, take mostly-separate vacations, have our own sets of friends and tend to conveniently absent ourselves when the other spouse's family comes to visit. And we've been together for 13 years, so it must be working! I think actually, the longer I'm married, the easier it is for me to see romantic love as a positive thing rather than a destructive force, but it's awfully hard to fight off the "love destroys" meme that I picked up as a kid.

I'm not trying to whine here, just ... trying to explain, really. There are a lot of reasons why romance doesn't appeal to me and this is only part of it, but I can't help thinking it's most likely a big part, especially why I prefer romance that isn't played out as the grand love story of all time. I like romance that's understated and doesn't upset the existing relationships in a character's life, and I like unhappy romance that screws everything all to hell, especially in fanfic. This is not to say I can't be sold on something else, but ... it's harder. And, like I said, I've made a conscious effort to be more tolerant towards romance of all types, because it does make it easier to get by, in fandom and in life, when you're not feeling kicked in the gut every time two characters kiss.

But I think the way people are feeling towards Gero's statement is very much the way I feel when I read a slash fic that explicitly has John and Rodney realize that sexual attraction is why they spent so much time together and enjoy each other's company so much (yes, there is a line to that effect in ACaDL, and I'm the one who wrote it, and it felt like twisting a knife to do so), or read fan-squee that puts a slashy spin on statements and actions in canon that I read in a gen way. I don't get mad about it because, well, there's no point really; it's not like it'd change anything, and I'd be mad all the time. Besides, who am I to tell other people how to fan. I certainly don't want to stomp around harshing on other people's squee. But I often feel as if the majority of fandom is focused on a particular reading of canon that invalidates my own, and I am seeing a lot of my own gut-level emotional reaction to that in the way that people are reacting to this particular statement from Gero.

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[ariadne83]

I agree actually. You've articulated why I didn't have the rage response to that post that other people seem to have had. I didn't like the episode that much, but I think it was more a victim of Gero trying to wear too many hats. I like his writing but I really think he needed someone else to direct - it's like betaing your own story.

I don't believe in soulmates or destined romance, and I got married knowing that it might not work out but I want to try, more than for any other reason. I deliberately maintain some separation from my husband's friends, not because I don't like spending time with them but because I don't have the common interests he has with them, and I think it's healthy for him to have his own space. I wonder if that *is* a function of upbringing; my parents' relationship is a watered-down version of yours, because my father is a functional alcoholic - he can get emotionally abusive when he drinks, but it's relatively rare.

One of the reasons I like McKay/Sheppard as a romantic pairing is because of all the things they *don't* have in common. I don't believe it's a pairing that's destined in the stars, and I think they'd have to really work at it to stay together in the face of all the pressures they're under. I don't see it written that way very often, but it's how I envision it.

To cut a long story short, I'm sorry you've been feeling isolated, and I may not know exactly where you're coming from but I can relate.

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[sholio]

Thank you. :) I think my preferred reading of McKay/Sheppard is similar to yours -- two very different people who are going to have a rough road ahead of them, but can make it work if they try. In fact, if you tried to pin down my favorite character relationships (the ones I like to read, and the ones I like to write) to one common theme, more often than not the commonality is two people having a rough go of it, but surviving anyway.

I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say that I feel isolated; it's more like the awareness that you're one of the only vegetarians at the party, so you have to either be prepared to defend your beliefs every time someone passes the chicken hors d'ourves, or just buck up and eat the damn chicken. I'm learning to develop a taste for chicken. *g* I don't think it's too different from any of the other little coping things that we have to do in order to get along with a non-homogenous group of people; it's just that the Gero comment and fandom's reaction to it happened to touch a nerve. And I really do appreciate the sympathy; thank you. :) I think just getting it out in the open is helping me feel less upset about it. (Which I'm sure is true of people venting about Gero's statement, too. And I agree with you, on the "beta'ing your own fic" problem. I had no idea he'd directed the episode as well as writing it.)

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[xparrot.livejournal.com]

See, this explains a lot, it really does. (and wow, I appreciate your frankness, I get a lot shyer talking about such things online! but it does help to see where it's coming from.)

I was raised by an unusually happy married couple, so I'm coming from the completely opposite angle - romantic love isn't the be-all to me, but family is. Really, I'm not fundamentally a slasher or a romantic - rather, it's that I have a family kink approximately a million miles wide. Marriage is part of how families are created. And for me, "true love" isn't about sex or flirting; it's about settling down with someone, having someone to come home to and share stories with, knowing someone is always there for you, knowing you're there for someone.

I tend to follow the romantic lead because in modern society, a sexual relationship is about the only such relationship that is accepted in the long-term. Roommates or teammates don't usually stay together forever (the "forever" thing is a kink of mine that I can't explain, but considering the cliche of "happily ever after" I'm not alone in it.) If they can, I'm totally happy with them like that; I don't need to have sex to bond them. But with most people - fictional characters and in real life - the expectation is that however close friends they may have, eventually they're going to find love and settle down.

Back before I slashed, I used to get very upset about romance that "broke up" my favorite friendships - in, say, The Sentinel, the idea that Jim or Blair might eventually marry the right girl and move out of their apartment and stop sharing their lives broke my heart. But by most society standards, if they didn't eventually marry and settle down they'd be something of misfits, rejects, and considered to be lonely and unhappy. Slash provided a neat solution to the dilemma; it gave them the fulfillment of a romantic relationship that didn't break up the friendship.

And SGA appealed to me because most of the show seemed to be about how family and friends can be as fulfilling as any romantic relationship. The characters had a family in each other, marriage/slash optional. Now s5 is flying in the face of that. If Rodney didn't have anyone else important in his life, if he didn't have any other kind of love, then I'd be totally fine with him getting romantic love and finding it life-changing. But he's getting family love and friend love, and that Gero would think that utterly unimportant - it burns!

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[wneleh.livejournal.com]

Were you a Sentinel fan pre-TSbyBS?

I got into TS after it had been off the air a couple of years, and my impression has been that a lot of fans felt very burned by the first cancellation, after S2P1, and never really warmed to the fourth season. Whereas I think of the implausibility of the "resolution" in TSbyBS as a great gift, one I've written dozens of stories off of. And I'm thinking maybe I'll feel the same way about any end-of-S5 resolution they hand us for SGA.

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[xparrot.livejournal.com]

About SGA in particular:

I think that Rodney/Keller is very non-threatening to me as romance goes, because I don't see a lot of evidence of intense pair-bonding.

If I could see McKeller as a low-key, friendly but not all-important relationship, then I'd be a lot better with it. But the writers are so determined to make it more than that that I have a hard time accepting it like that. Especially because Keller has no life except her job and her relationship with Rodney. If she had other good friends, I'd be better; but now it looks like that even if Rodney has other friends, Keller has no life instead of him. He's her everything. And according to Gero, she's Rodney's everything. And that's what I'm flipping out about.

It's not that Rodney's going to have sex with Keller that bothers me. It's the thought that next time "The Shrine" happens he's going to forget John and run to Keller's door; that John and the team will become meaningless to him in the face of his love for Keller. I will pick family/friendship love over romantic, every time, but the way SGA is playing now, the way Gero is writing it, Rodney wouldn't, and that gets to me.

(which is why I loved NCIS's ep "Family" so damn much, because it's all about choosing the former over the latter...)

when I read a slash fic that explicitly has John and Rodney realize that sexual attraction is why they spent so much time together and enjoy each other's company so much (yes, there is a line to that effect in ACaDL, and I'm the one who wrote it, and it felt like twisting a knife to do so)

Umm. To be honest, I didn't like the McShep of ACaDL as much as a lot of other fic, because they didn't have as solid a relationship as I like. The love confession at the end wasn't totally out of the blue, but it wasn't as satisfying to me as a slash relationship based on a firm friendship. I do not like slash that undermines the friendship - it's just that I don't see most slash as doing so.

[sholio]

To be honest, I didn't like the McShep of ACaDL as much as a lot of other fic, because they didn't have as solid a relationship as I like. The love confession at the end wasn't totally out of the blue, but it wasn't as satisfying to me as a slash relationship based on a firm friendship.

Hmmmm~! It would be really interesting to compare notes with Naye on the thought processes that led us to decide, independently but simultaneously, that the story would work better as slash -- and I wonder (though I *really* don't want to attribute thoughts to her that might not be her own, since she's not here to defend herself) if her opinions on romance/marriage might not be more closely aligned with mine than yours, at least when it comes to writing it. I know that for both of us, the story was simply not working as friendship, and when we flipped the switch to "John and Rodney are physically attracted to each other", suddenly everything made sense (which is why I incorporated that line at the end, even though it kinda flies in the face of how I see their relationship in canon). I think you're right that the friendship in the fic isn't as deep as it is in canon (it just hasn't really had a chance to become so, since we started at the beginning) so in order for the characters to be acting the way we wrote them, there needed to be a motive other than friendship there. Adding physical attraction turned out to be just perfect; suddenly behavior which was unconvincing and slightly nonsensical in platonic friends who don't know each other very well made perfect sense for two people dancing around a burgeoning physical attraction.

(Although everyone's mileage varies on this; I remember getting one reaction -- though I can't remember if it was in a review to the story or just something she said afterwards -- from a gen fan who felt that the story was 100% gen up until the last scene. Whereas I had thought that we were writing them very different from how I normally write them as platonic friends, and that the attraction was being blatantly telegraphed! But obviously, different people see different things when they read.)

And I know, intellectually at least, that friendship and romance are not mutually exclusive, but I do think they engage me in very different ways. I relate differently to a relationship if I know it's meant to be romance and not friendship (see below with my comment about your Shrine tag). I have noticed that the characteristics I most enjoy in friendships are, often, characteristics that either fail to engage me or actively turn me off a romantic pairing. Classic example of that: I really dislike bickering, mutually antagonistic couples -- which is why I so thoroughly hated Tony/Ziva on NCIS when I thought the show was going in a romance direction with them -- but I really like that particular dynamic in a friendship. So, if you offer me a clip of two people having a fight, I'll relate to it very differently if I think that it'll end with the two of them in bed, or going out for coffee as platonic friends.

Like I said in another comment, I write romance in order to engage with the characters in different ways than a friendship story lets me get away with. It's not necessarily that I feel the romantic emotions I'm writing are stronger or deeper; in fact, I think a lot of the romance that I write carries the implicit assumption that the nonsexual relationships in the characters' lives are actually more fulfilling and long-lasting than their romances. (I think this is especially true of my original fiction.)

Eros and Filios

[sholio]

If I could see McKeller as a low-key, friendly but not all-important relationship, then I'd be a lot better with it. But the writers are so determined to make it more than that that I have a hard time accepting it like that.

And see, this is one of those cases where what they say is so obviously different from what they're writing that I don't have any trouble ignoring what they're saying. ^^ For one thing, it seems very obvious to me that Gero is using love in an exclusively "romantic love" sense (as many people do). This isn't jarring for me because a lot of people use the word "love" to mean romantic love and don't use it for friendship love at all; in fact, "Tao" is one of the only times that I've ever heard "love" used in a non-sexual way on TV, except perhaps between parents and children.

I think it would be a lot harder for me to work around this if it were explicitly stated in canon, like Rodney's "best friends" comment about Carson, which did kinda throw me for a loop. I also had trouble with Jason Momoa's comment about Ronon and Rodney's friendship because I do see what he said as being generally borne out by canon. And if Rodney had said "You are more important to me than anyone else" in canon, or made a choice between, say, saving Keller's life or John's, or confiding in Keller vs. John at an emotionally unstable moment, that'd probably weird me out just like the "best friend" comment did. But considering this is a statement that doesn't really seem to be borne out by what I'm seeing in canon, and it's also coming from a guy who's written his last episode of the show, it just doesn't really affect anything, does it? I'm having trouble getting worked up about it, because I'm just seeing the same use of "love" to mean "romantic love only" that so many people use -- he doesn't really say ANYTHING about Rodney's past relationships with anybody, unless you see the overriding feature of John and Rodney's relationship as being their romantic love. So in that sense, yes, he's putting them down. But as far as love goes, he's talking about eros, not filios. (Stupid English language, having only one word for love!) Most people in the modern day consider eros (sexual love) a higher calling than filios (friendship love) and in fact use "love" to mean eros only, but the Greeks valued filios more highly. And the show's writers write incredibly deep filios, which totally resonates with me; even if their intent is to show eros as being superior, I don't think they've conveyed that in the text, so in this case I'm happy to take the text and leave authorial intent alone.

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[horridporrid.livejournal.com]

I will pick family/friendship love over romantic, every time, but the way SGA is playing now, the way Gero is writing it, Rodney wouldn't, and that gets to me.

Aha! And now things clear up for me. :) I go for a true romantic partner over family. Family gets distracted, has their own lives, things going on. They're there for you if you need them, yes (as well as they can be, and if they're not tangled up in something themselves). But they don't know you like your romantic partner does, and they can't be there for you like your partner can be. That's my experience and so I totally get what Gero was saying. Rodney was looking for someone for himself. (His sister has her family, for example.)

(I can see any member of the team becoming a romantic partner for Rodney within fanfic, and frankly canon has enough for me to see John as a romantic partner for him. But whomever became that romantic partner would raise above team for me.)

So a Rodney with just team strikes me as a lonely Rodney. Especially as his team finds their own loves and lives. (John is the wild card here, I'll admit.)

Of course... this gets complicated by the fact that a romantic partner becomes family...

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[xparrot.livejournal.com]

(three replies for the win!)

Reading these comments over again - I wish there was some way to assure you that all slashers are not out to deny John & Rodney's friendship (or any other character's). I can tell you that from my perspective, McShep does not invalidate John-Rodney friendship. When I give a scene between them a slashy reading, I am never, ever trying to imply that if they didn't have physical attraction, they wouldn't be as close.

And I've said this before, I know...it just makes me weirdly depressed to think that when I started writing slash, you were forced to conclude I didn't care about John & Rodney's friendship anymore; that every slash fic I've written is pissing on their friendship, for you. For me, slash works just as h/c does; it's a short-hand way to get the chars to express the depth of feelings between them. (The original slash fic, to my understanding, was like this - people were writing Kirk/Spock in outrageous h/c scenarios to get them to confess their love, and then someone decided to just cut to the chase and have them express the love in a more traditional way.)

I think the problem is the social construct of "love" - "true love" is supposed to be romantic; "as a friend feels about another friend" is kind of a joke because friend love is not supposed to be as meaningful as romantic love (heck, most friends rarely even use the word "love" and especially among male friends it's usually treated as a joke when they do). Yet fen are constantly shown male-male friends with bonds more intense than any of their canon romantic bonds. At the same time, we have the social construct of the romantic "ever after"; there are almost no stories that put friendship above romance, in the end. You pretty much can't write a "happily ever after" that doesn't involve romantic love & marriage; there's no formula for it.

Slashers circumvented this, found the escape clause - make the friendship into romantic love, make it an acceptably complete happy ending. A lot of the early slash was the infamous "we're not gay, we just love each other" - the point wasn't homosexual love, the point was the love between two male friends. The point of slash isn't to deny friendship; it's to preserve it in the face of social expectation.

I understand your perspective on romance, that you find the traditional "happily ever after" emotionally disturbing and anything but happy. And I know you can't just switch your feelings around. But as threatened as you feel by slash, most slashers are honestly not trying to threaten you; most of the McSheppers I know absolutely love that the boys are best friends, and that's a large part of why they slash them.

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[(Anonymous)]

"At the same time, we have the social construct of the romantic "ever after"; there are almost no stories that put friendship above romance, in the end. You pretty much can't write a "happily ever after" that doesn't involve romantic love & marriage; there's no formula for it."

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I just realized why I even read slash. I just like the "happily ever after" and nothing-ever-coming-between-them thing so much. On a sidenote, friendshipper is nearly the only author that I know of who manages to do that without writing slash (there are a few others, including the owner of the journal I´m now trespassing in, but she´s the best (that´s a purely personal opinion, of course.) Somebody once called it friendship romance, I think - that´s even better than slash.)
And, well, sorry for replying here anonymously and with nothing to say, but I don´t even have an account and I just wanted to thank you for the insight. So, thanks again.
LG
akn

[amalthia]

I think the main difference is Martin Gero is a writer on the show and what slash, gen, and het fans do has nothing to do with what the show creators do. At least that's how I view it.

I also think the message he's sending out reaches a much broader audience than any fan fiction ever written could reach.

He's basically saying the love of Rodney's team, family, and his accomplishments just weren't as important as romantic love and sex in an airplane?

Though I am conflicted on this issue. I am married and in love and I do think romantic love is very important and can add to a person's life. My husband is my partner and best friend. And I really don't begrudge the writers of the show for wanting to give McKay that sort of relationship.

I think from what I've read around and my own feelings is if they were going to go this route in the show I'd really love to have seen McKay and Keller becoming friends first and then discovering they love each other. SGA took the storytelling shortcut of telling us they are in love not actually showing it.

However I haven't really been invested in SGA since Irresponsible so I actually enjoyed the episode and don't feel at all upset by Gero's declaration that all McKay really wanted was unconditional love. (though personally if Gero really thinks that he should have gotten McKay a dog not a woman.)

[velocitygrass.livejournal.com]

I wanted to thank you for making me aware of my own pre-conceived notions.

While I know that other people don't think like me, it's most apparent on subjects where I'm explicitly aware of that. Like how people can't understand that I don't want to get a driver's license or don't drink alcohol or in fanish things, that I never saw romance between Jack and Daniel on SG-1, while obviously a lot of people do/did.

The notion that you'd want your romantic partner to be your best friend as well was something that I never really questioned. It made me positively giddy when Obama introduced his wife that way and it's how I prefer my ships, but now I realize that this isn't necessarily how everyone feels. I've been mystified by huge fan following for couples that don't seem to have anything going for them but a superficial attraction and in particular that didn't seem to share a deep friendship, but now I see that for others this might simply not be a requirement for a romantic relationship.

I'm really sorry that you feel so frustrated by this and that you (sometimes) feel that the slash breaks up the friendship.

For me the friendship between John and Rodney is the basis of their relationship. If you don't have it, you've got nothing. I absolutely hate fics that have them go at it in one closet or another but otherwise have them be indifferent to each other. It makes no sense to me.

The reason I slash them isn't because I think they love each other so much it has to be more than "just" friendship. I think the friendship that we've seen the develop between them over the years is one of the most beautiful relationships I've ever seen on screen. I enjoyed the few friendship fics that I read a lot. And in SG-1 I enjoyed all the friendships on the show without shipping anyone (and I think I was a happier viewer because of it).

But on SGA, my personal reading is that there is more between them. And by this "more", I should clarify, I do not mean more love, but a different (romantic) aspect of love. In particular there's the jealousy they display-which I wouldn't naturally expect from a platonic friendship which shouldn't interfere with a romantic relationship-and my subjective impression that John is gay and pining for Rodney.

I have to admit one thing I'm not quite clear on is how you perceive slash as breaking up the friendship. I don't know of fics where they stop being friends, in fact often the fear of losing the friendship plays a factor in not attempting romance.

Or maybe you mean the element of "finally" when they kiss or have sex for the first time as if everything before that didn't mean anything. I don't think it is meant that way, although now that I think about it, it might appear so.

For me John and Rodney getting together is keeping a wonderful friendship and adding something else that had been missing from their life (not that you can't be happy without a girl/boyfriend, but we've seen attempts in that direction from both so I think it's safe to say that they wouldn't mind or even actively wish for a romantic relationship). Of course you could have the same by having John get together with Larrin or someone else and what we now have between Rodney and Keller. For Rodney's part I could actually be happy for him to have John's friendship and Keller as a girlfriend. But unfortunately with John, I cannot see him as anything but in love with Rodney and to me that means that in addition to the friendship he longs to express his romantic feelings for him. What I'm trying to say, I think, is that when John and Rodney get together you could see it as not all that different from McKeller and John/Larrin happening, in that both would leave their friendship untouched. (And for those of us that like the friends become lovers theme, it's even more fulfilling.)

Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for your insight and wanted to explain where I'm coming from in this.

[sholio]

Thank you for the explanation -- and, for my part, I really do want to apologize for my snappiness and intolerance in the comment you're replying to. I have no right at all to criticize how other people fan, and I really do co-exist happily with slash/ship, most of the time (and I do often enjoy reading and writing it).

And let me preface the following by saying that I know human relationships are so complex they can't be easily packaged into neat categories, even in fiction -- and some of the slash authors I most enjoy reading (like auburnnothenna) are those whose stories capture that blurring and shifting of categories, the ambiguity of life.

But having said that, the real crux of the problem is that "friendship" and "romantic love" exist in my head in separate boxes -- not to the extent that I think one relationship can't exhibit both, but the specific things about friendship that make me fan on it are more or less mutually exclusive with sexual love and the particular set of societal and personal expectations and prejudices that go along with it.

If that makes any sense.

I guess it's hard for me to conceive of a friendship staying the same once it become sexual, and the changes that tend to happen are ones that lead it away from the aspects that drew me to it in the first place. It doesn't have to go that way, but I am inclined to think that for it not to do that would be unusual enough that it would need to be dealt with in the story. And, again, this can be done; it's just that the majority of slash doesn't deal with the negotiation of those sorts of details. When the curtain goes down on "... and then they consummated the relationship", every reader's brain fills in the future details, which is great if you believe in happily ever afters, but I don't. My brain (see one of the comments above for a capsule history of my family that probably explains a lot of my negativity towards sexual relationships) fills in the blanks in a fairly negative way. I am not saying that I'm so far gone as to believe that merely getting involved in a sexual relationship is suddenly going to turn John into an abusive alcoholic. *g* But because my view of sex and romance is pretty dark, or at best kind of ambiguous, I think that I need to see John and Rodney negotiating the troubled waters of a relationship rather than assuming everything will be hunky-dory after the first sex act and they'll still be playing with remote-control cars and relating to everyone around them, and each other, the same way they always have.

The first five years or so of my relationship with my husband were one problem and fight and negotiation after another -- figuring out how to deal with jealousy, with mutually incompatible future goals, with differing opinions on religion and politics and children and sex. All this stuff never seemed too important before we were in a committed relationship, but suddenly took on huge significance when we tied our futures together. Because that's my experience, and many people in my family have had much worse experiences as the first blush of love faded and they figured out who and what they were married to, my default assumption is that adding sex and commitment to the mix will uproot and distort and change the friendship. No matter how well you think you know somebody, there's always that moment when you realize that you're going to have to come up with a compromise on [x] mutually incompatible belief and suddenly you never want to speak to this idiot who holds this stupid belief that you're going to have to bend and accommodate.

I actually like watching fictional relationships go through that process, and grow and change over time; I tend to gravitate towards slash that deals with precisely this sort of thing. But in the process, things will be gained and lost; what they end up with is not what they started with in the beginning.

Which brings me to part 2, because I can't squeeze into one comment!

Part 2 (edited)

[sholio]

Okay, the gist of part one is: sex changes people, changes relationships. That's kind of fundamental to my understanding of sex, really. Just like near-death experiences, having kids, and traveling to another galaxy changes people. You can't go through it and still be exactly the same person, with the same relationships, that you were in the beginning. Which is okay. You often end up with something that's better than you started out with.

But it's not the same.

And I agree with your assessment of John and Rodney's friendship. I love it; they're complex and funny and they obviously care about each other, and it makes my heart bounce. And that's where the problem comes in, because I don't want to see it change (even though I know that it inevitably would), and I can't believe that it wouldn't change if they were having sex. So bringing sex into it, in my mind, automatically would change it, and, well, here's the really subjective part: because most slash treats sex as a good thing that benefits the relationship, my fundamental belief that it's going to change the relationship makes me feel as if the writer is implying that there must have been something wrong with it before.

I think a lot of this is because of the weight that our culture places on romance -- all of our cultural baggage about sexual relationships being the pinnacle of human achievement. (See: Gero comment. *g*). We're steeped in this. Our families expect us to grow up and get married and have kids. Our popular entertainment is full of romance, even as background accompaniment to movies and books in other genres. Fandom is full of it. Everywhere you look, sex is where it's at; and while I'm fond of sex, and I would have to say that I strongly support sex *g*, I resent the way that non-sexual relationships are downplayed in the popular media and in the culture in favor of sexual ones. And that is what I see in slash, because slash doesn't happen in a vacuum; it's happening against a backdrop of pop culture that makes sexual relationships the be-all and end-all of existence. Going the other way (from romance to platonic friendship) isn't as hard to for me to take because it doesn't have the same weight of cultural expectation behind it. (It's also a lot rarer to see in fiction, even though my general experience is that it's not all that rare in real life.)

And there are enough slash stories out there that specifically treat the relationship as being "better" afterwards, or spin canon events in ways that are contrary to my view of them (subjective, subjective, I know), that I generally tend to approach slash on the assumption that the writer is working from that point of view that the friendship is inadequate without the sex, and that ending in a romantic way is a much better ending than not taking it to that place.

The thing is, I can totally see the appeal of what xparrot was talking about above (and you too, I think): adding sex to the friendship and keeping everything the same except that now they're bonded together for the rest of their lives. I do see the appeal; I just don't believe in it. I believe in an equally unrealistic ideal of lifelong platonic friendship instead. *g* And even though I know my own romantic fantasy is no more believable, it doesn't change the way that I relate to it on a gut level.

I hope all of that makes sense. And let me just be clear that I really don't mean to put down your way of viewing the characters or imply that mine is better or more true. It's just, maybe, less mainstream in fandom.

Thank you again for the very lucid and polite explanation, and I'm sorry for my long-windedness here!

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

(ahh, I lose internet for a day and lose track of the conversation!)

The thing is, I can totally see the appeal of what xparrot was talking about above (and you too, I think): adding sex to the friendship and keeping everything the same except that now they're bonded together for the rest of their lives. I do see the appeal; I just don't believe in it. I believe in an equally unrealistic ideal of lifelong platonic friendship instead. *g

That`s the thing for me - I`d love to believe in that lifelong platonic friendship ideal, I just have a hard time doing so. I don`t actually know of any friendships that last unchanged forever; I know people who stay best friends in spirit, but never in practice. They move apart, they find lovers and get married, and then they call each other once a month and see each other once a year. They still are friends but they have less in common as time goes on, and they both will get other people more important in their lives, no matter how close they once were. In　my experience, that`s how friendship changes over time; that`s how it goes. Maybe not always, in all cultures, but in our present society that`s the way it works.

While as I do know married couples who stay together all their lives, who get closer over time. A happily ever marriage to me isn`t just a hopeless ideal, because I know people who have them; I know it`s possible. So to me, slashing a friendship, making it go romantic, is the only possible way to save it, to　preserve it, unless you buck or rewrite the conventions of society (which you can do, and I love stories that do pull it off, but I don`t expect most fanfic to be complex enough to manage that...)

It`s not that I think friendship is inadequate without sex, but rather that as far as I can tell, everyone else does - and I go with the flow, rather than fight it. Though when I write slash myself, I try - at least I think I do - to make the sex less important to the relationship than the shared interests, and talking, and h/c - all the friendshippy stuff I really enjoy. The sex is there as an excuse to maintain the friendship I want to preserve. Which, yeah, maybe isn`t realistic, but it's the happiest compromise I've found!

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

--I am typing on a Japanese keyboard, so if the formatting's weird, that's why!

Additional comment - this whole conversation has been really illuminating to me!

I generally tend to approach slash on the assumption that the writer is working from that point of view that the friendship is inadequate without the sex,

I actually think many slashers are working from the exactly converse assumption: that as much as they might like romance and sex, and want their favorite characters to have those relationships, fundamentally they feel that sex is inadequate without friendship. Many slashers slash because they want romance based in friendship, relationships with a solid foundation that includes sexual attraction, but other elements just as important.

THAT'S why Gero's comment made so many slashers flip their lids, because he was in essence saying that sex is more important than friendship. While as many slashers are, not choosing eros over filios, but rather blending eros and filios, blurring the lines. Gero was delineating them, and putting eros in the highest position, and all the slashers who see them as equally important and crucial to a meaningful relationship resented the implication that the filios they so prize is being entirely overlooked.

[sholio]

One more thing ... I thought I'd come up and add this to my comments to you, since I had kind of a (maybe quite obvious) mini-epiphany farther downstream in the comments thread, on narrative kinks and looking for things in stories that they never promised to provide. I think this is what I've been doing, unconsciously, when I read slash -- behaving like a non-SF fan watching SF and getting too frustrated with the details of how the handwavium works to see the wonder that SF fans see in it.

I do really appreciate your explanation and that of other people in the comments; it helps me see what other people are seeing when they read and write romantic fic, as I'm coming from a different place and I never really "got" that in quite that way before.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Wanted to say thank you for this - you explained a lot of what I feel, too. I come from the same place of automatically assuming that you'd want to be best friends with your romantic partner - I don't think that everyone wants a romantic partner, or needs one to be fulfilled (I'm a happy single myself) - but if you do have one, I'd think you'd want to be close friends as well, and in my hardcore 'ships, my OTPs, are pretty much always BFFs as well as lovers (sometimes instead of lovers - I have gen OTPs; sex is optional, BFF required!)

Also, Obama introducing Michelle as his best friend thrilled me to pieces!

(also also, I don't drink alcohol myself, for no particular reason except I don't see the point. I *did* see some potential for romance between Jack/Daniel, I must admit, though nothing like J/R... ^_^)