xparrot | would you like a little RAGE with your RAGE?

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would you like a little RAGE with your RAGE?

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.

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I think GERO needs to get laid. Also, Keller did NOT say she loved Rodney unconditionally, she just repeated his own declaration of love back to him and as a result it came off as kind of fake and jokey. Not cool. You don't TELL someone you love them unconditionally, you SHOW them that. Which is pretty impossible to do in such a short time.

Wait, let's focus on why you love Rodney and shouldn't give up on him? Because he's arrogant and pushy, but sweetly vulnerable? And he's not good with people, but seems to have no trouble when he's surrounded by his team? And he plays dumb boy games with John? And he falls for Ronon's jokes EVERY TIME? And he's brave, and he loves his sister, and he looks really good in a t-shirt.

That episode sucked for me on many levels, because I actually like Keller, or like her when she's written a certain way (which seems to happen less and less now, but the way she was in the beginning - shy and geeky yet smart and with some hints of hidden snark) and this epi kind of trashed both characters, for me.
So, I decided that actually, this was the return of the mist beings, only now they're teamed up with the sentient nightmare-inducing crystal, and someone(s) were having a particularly sucky nightmare. The kind of where you even know on some level that it is just a dream, but you cannot wake up and begin to fear that you'll remain trapped in it.
It's the only way I can reconcile that with the rest of the SGA, because IMO, the characterisation was really crappy, for both Rodney and Keller (I know Keller has been all over the spectrum, 'cause the TPTB just think *drool* when they look at Jewel - not that I can blame them a lot for that-, but Rodney - it was as if there had been none of the past five years. WTF??)

Edited 2008-11-25 06:43 (UTC)

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.

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!

Ugh - yeah, the entire thing about how unconditional romantic love is the only worthwhile kind of love, forgetting about all the other instances where the team demonstrated their love for him, and how he demonstrated his love for them. Does Rodney really need to hear "I love you" from Keller in order to get that he's loved? Does none of what happened in the past 5 years matter? GAH!

I'm focusing on reading fic, because I get the feeling S5 is not going to end well for my fannish love of the show.

Look at it that way - in the other future, Sheppard saw that Keller died once they got together. So, there's still hope. Because, yeah, some things didn't happen, most of them John prevented with his simple presence. The one that happened despite him being there, ended the way he saw in the future - Michael spreading the Hoffan drug, Woolsey becoming the leader of Atlantis... So...

And as I said before, I want my scifi back, not Danielle Steele on repeat *rolls eyes*

Oh, and on NCIS, do you mean the "Tony burning the letter" ep?

I totally get why Rodney being told, "I love you," would be a high point in his life. I adored in Tao when Elizabeth said that they all loved him and Rodney's little, "Really? All of you?" about killed me. I also get why the next logical step in his mind would be to be told that by a romantic partner.

I even get why being told that by Keller would make him light up because she is everything that he's ever wanted in a woman. Or, at least, that he's been upfront about wanting in a woman. She's smart, courageous, capable, beautiful, blond, etc. She can also 'handle' him and his cantankerous moods, which he knows by experience that many people, especially girlfriends, can't or won't.

However, I really don't like the fact that the times when we've seen her most attracted to him he's not been himself. I find Rodney wanting to better himself admirable. I find Rodney wanting to better himself just to get a girl sad. I find Keller knowingly enabling this behavior as potentially disastrous.

Rodney's, 'I love you,' to her before we ever really saw them alone together for any length of time was waaaaaaay too farfetched for me to handle, as is Keller's, 'I love you,' to him in this episode.

If it had been Rodney saying, "I really like you and I've been hoping for a while that we could be something more," and if they had ended this episode with Rodney saving her, hugging her (maybe, possibly a kiss) and then them sleeping next to each other on the plane, her head nestled on his shoulder, I would have bought it.

But for some reason they keep wanting to fast forward through the relationship parts, the building of the friendship and the move into something more, and those are the parts we (or maybe just I) like the best. Those are the parts that make me squirm in my seat and delight with a huge grin on my face. Often times, admittedly, I end up yelling at the screen, "JUST KISS HIM!" but I don't need the kiss because the small show of love is many times more poignant than the grand gesture. I do, however, need the small gesture. I need to know that something's there beyond the fact that she's a pretty girl and he's a hot guy and it's possible that they have some chemistry.

And I think that's one of the reasons why I like slash so much because with the slash couples I like, it's all those parts. It's the big gestures and the small ones, the happiness and the sadness and the things in between and it's so easy to say, "Okay, so they have this great relationship, let me see if I can build on that."

And it all goes back to the basic writer's tool: show don't tell. We're told that Rodney and Keller are in love, but we've only been shown that they have the potential for a lasting friendship. We were shown that Rodney was loved unconditionally by his friends for three and a half seasons before we were ever told it, and then we were continuously shown afterwards as well.

The answer to why the second one is more believable is ludicrously simple.

*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.)

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.)

I just had this realization that if McKay really wanted unconditional love he needed to get a dog not a girlfriend...I'd like to think that a parent's love for a child is unconditional but there are way too many abandoned children...

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.

Edited 2008-11-25 08:16 (UTC)

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.

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 ...

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.

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.)

How could there not be conflict *g*? Neither of them is very demonstrative, neither of them likes to communicate and their conflicting career goals would force them to compromise... which neither of them likes to do. It's a gold mine for Mills-and-Boon break up plots (the ones where they get back together years later and have grown up enough to work for it instead of walking as soon as it gets hard), but ones that are actually rooted in reality instead of fake misunderstandings.

I think Gero made a comment about how it was his last writing/directing gig for Atlantis, so I'm not 100% sure how much he did/didn't do (but he did just direct a movie, so...), but I think that's probably a main cause of the narrative dissonance: he didn't see the need to explain/show the relationship further because it was so clear in his head.

I just don't want to see this argument progress any further, TBH. I've already lived through this once with the Jack/Sam, Jack/Daniel canon-vs-fanon ship wars in SG-1 and it was extremely unpleasant. Can't we all just get along? *g*

*facepalm* I just read the whole article from MGM - this was Gero's first time directing an Atlantis episode. No wonder it was less-than-legendary.

I just don't want to see this argument progress any further, TBH. I've already lived through this once with the Jack/Sam, Jack/Daniel canon-vs-fanon ship wars in SG-1 and it was extremely unpleasant. Can't we all just get along? *g*

I'm definitely having flashbacks. D:

I think that's probably a main cause of the narrative dissonance: he didn't see the need to explain/show the relationship further because it was so clear in his head.

That's actually a fantastic insight! And I wonder how much it explains the problems that people had with the episode? One of the recent discussions I was involved in (maybe at sga-talk, I can't remember) had to do with unspoken assumptions in fic, and the fact that a lot of John/Rodney fic relies heavily on the assumption that most of the readership expects the characters to get together, so the writer doesn't have to do much work to sell the pairing. This is fine for people who are already on board, but it makes the stories very jarring and somewhat OOC for people like me, who still need the groundwork to be laid.

If one has proper groundwork for an episode like "Brain Storm", most of the problems evaporate (well, leaving aside the plot-level problems, of course). I mean, if it takes place within an established relationship, then Keller's declaration of love at the end doesn't come out of the blue at all.

SGA has always been a show where most of the emotional arcs take place offscreen. Carson and Cadman appeared as a couple *once*; Teyla and Kanaan weren't even hinted at until the episode where her pregnancy was revealed; John and Rodney's game-playing was retconned three seasons into the show. I think people tend not to complain about retcons that fit with how they want to see the characters, but do notice it when the retcon jars their semi-canonical, semi-fanonical idea of how the characters supposed to be. (Like "Game". I *do* remember people getting upset about "Game", but the ones who objected to it were those who didn't see John and Rodney as close friends, maintained that they did not hang out off duty -- which, up to that point, had never really been seen in canon -- and were upset when their impression of the characters was retconned by canon. Something vaguely similar is happening with Keller/Rodney here, I think.)

I've hum... loved you... for a while now...

Do you feel my love when I say this ? Do you feel we're going to get our happy ending ? DO you feel it's time to propose me sex so I'll just shut up about it ? -_-

Yeah, Gero, big disappointer you are, you and all you friendly team of writers, I'm laughing in advance at the disaster that SGU is going to be... oh no I'm sorry, the 13 years old will love it as much as they seem to love the current episodes of SGA (excuse me while I go vomit somewhere). Yeah, younger audience, definitely... (brighter ? I'm not sure they're going to ever get better than the SGA audience).

Blah, I'm ignoring every episode that contains even one bit of McKeller, they are obviously AU's in a messed up world.

I desperately want to read more stories where John and Rodney *weren't* madly crushing on each other from the first moment they met. My husband and I took four years to get around to our first date, and even that was a coincidence because we happened to bump into each other on Valentine's Day. Where is the realism??

I'm still trying to figure out my thoughts and feelings about this ep; McKeller in general; life, love, and relationships IRL and in fiction of various sorts; and what I can say to people to make them stay in the fandom through January and beyond.

And, really, I've got very little.

A couple of thoughts, based on what little I could read of the Gero article, this post, and the comments:

(1) There's really no such thing as unconditional love, except, if you're lucky, what you feel for your children when they're not actively poking you with sticks, IME.

(2) How Jennifer treats Rodney? That's "I love you, now change." Nothing unconditional about it. BTDT, didn't work, ever.

(3) Slash vs. friendship fic vs. smarm vs. ?: My big issue w/ slash (and romance in general) is that, in it, love, actually fixes anything. And, it doesn't, or not much. The thing is, friendship doesn't really, either. But that doesn't mean that life isn't full of moments of grace, courtesy other people; those are what I most like to read; well, when I'm not gobbling up slash or gooey smarm.

(4) There *is* something more to a sexual relationship than it being merely the logical extension of another sort of relationship, else people would have a lot more sexual partners concurrently than they tend to.

(5) Rodney and Keller are welcome, in my book, to do whatever on the plane they want. I don't think it's going to much affect how I write team!fic into the future, unless TPTB manage, in the next four episodes, to convince me that there's something fundamentally there.

(6) A lot of the fun of fanfic, for me, is taking the illogical bits - like, why DIDN'T McKay try harder to stop the bridge? - and making them make sense, even if it comes down to, people just aren't always on top of their games, or maybe someone was pumping in stupid!gas.

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!

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.

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.

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would you like a little RAGE with your RAGE?

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