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

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm getting a little burned-out too...as I've said, I find such analysis fascinating, but if I peer too closely into the black box of my own tastes I tend to impede my enjoyment of them...

I think I get confused when SGA-fanning with you because you have been shifting like that - sometimes you come across like a team OT4-er, sometimes you want more, and I keep trying and failing to pin you down! ^^ I'm more used to approaching a fandom from one perspective or another, and if I decide I want something else, I'll just find a new fandom to satisfy my new craving. So with SGA I do like the interdependency aspect (though I like some other relationships too, e.g. I'm really enjoying Woolsey's interactions with them this season, and I love that Teyla got to keep Torren and Kanaan) - but then I also love Doctor Who, which doesn't have any constant relationships, but a lot of shifting characters. I don't have any Who OTPs, which is why I've never been inspired to fic for it, but I enjoy the heck out of watching the show, enjoy meeting new characters and watching their relationships develop and change.

--I really should've thought about Who sooner, because a lot of what you say you like - characters parting and coming back together, getting lives on their own and changing their relationships because of them - is exactly what so appeals to me about the characters in Who. I didn't particularly like that Rose hadn't moved on, and I like that Martha is; and I loved Donna & the Doctor being platonic and didn't want any sex between them. So a lot of the kinks I talk about aren't general or consistent, but specific to particular fandoms; I relate to different characters/relationships in different ways, depending on...I have no idea what, actually! It's a puzzlement...

ETA: (I gotta stop mulling...) I think you and I might see "co-dependency" a little different, too...when I talk about my OTPs, I don't meant a relationship that means everything to the characters, that all they need is each other to be happy and they cannot be at all happy apart. Rather, I like two people being something special to one another, who are something to one another that no one else can be. Unhealthy relationships, where the characters need to be together at all times, like those mated-for-life gazelles that never stray more than ten feet apart - those can creep me out (sometimes I'll like them, but as sort of a dirty kink, not a happy ending...) I ideally want my OTPs to be healthy and happy, which means that sometimes they'll fight and sometimes they'll do their own thing apart, have their own friends and their own jobs and their own hobbies. But I like the idea that if they lost the other person, they're losing something irreplaceable; that no one else could quite be the best friend/lover/whatever that the other person is to them, and they're always going to miss them on some level, even if they're mostly happy otherwise.

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[sholio]

Ha, that's probably why I *am* hard to pin down, and it's not even something I'd thought about, but I do move back and forth between the two extremes in SGA to a much greater degree than in most of my other fandoms. My first big fandom, Trigun, for example, was very definitely a "fanning on changes" sort of fandom, and even my stabs at cheerful, fluffy fic in that fandom were fairly dark and weird.

SGA, though -- it draws me both ways, and I find that after I've been focusing on one thing for a while, I'll get burned out and swing back in the other direction ... but still within the same fandom. I guess this is where it's really coming in handy that the fandom itself is so huge, because it is possible to find gloomy apocafic, or non-con, or really dark torture-fic, or fluffy teaminess, or cheerful, goofy slash ...

I *have* noticed that, for its size, it's really not as diverse as you'd expect (the majority of fic in the fandom is one pairing and kind of self-similar in tone), but it's SO huge that it's usually possible to find something in almost any style, with almost any characters. And it seems to lend itself to more diverse possibilities for writing than any other fandom I've been in. AUs work fantastically well, especially since they're technically canon. You can do star-spanning epics, or quiet little set-pieces; you can build societies from the ground up, or set a story on Earth if you want to. Stylistically, you can do it as a space western, as a comedy of manners, a farce, a gloomy metaphor for Western colonial ambition, a complicated tale of political espionage, a happy romance, a frontier society-building tale, a murder mystery; you can even introduce quite a lot of fantasy elements before you get outside the realm of canonical possibility, considering that telepathy, psychic healing, and dead people coming back to life are totally canonical. You can also cross it over with pretty much any show set in present-day Earth. As far as the range of story possibilities, it's kind of hard to beat.

But I know what you mean, about wanting different things from different fandoms; SGA is just a bit unusual for me in that I seem to be able to do the mental twist required to get the show and/or the fanfic to supply my different needs. I'm not able to do that in most fandoms, and I suspect it's probably more me than the show itself. I don't blame you for not wanting to view the characters in the fandom from certain perspectives, though, because it's probably the same reason why I'm not that interested in reading your slash (and, fyi, you're not the only gen author whose slash I don't read -- I hadn't thought about it, but I can think of a couple of others, too, who write both, and I seem to prefer sticking with one or the other view of the characters from them, and not getting both from the same author).

(And, wow, are we ever off topic now!)

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[sholio]

I started my answer before you added your ETA. ^^

I think you might be right about "codependency", though from everything you've said about character relationships that you fan on, I do think you like them more entwined than I do. But having said that ... I think that our tastes in that area are probably closer than they seem when we talk about it, as evidenced by the fact that we often fan on the same things...

As you know, I definitely do fixate on characters who are tremendously important to each other, and I like to see their relationship as somehow unique -- which is one of the big things about Sheppard and McKay that appeals to me, because "brothers" is about the closest word I can think of to describe how they act, except they're not related so they don't have the shared family history and other weirdness that goes along with being flesh-and-blood siblings; it's a very unique, hard-to-pin-down relationship, and even if they aren't each other's everything (which I actually prefer them not to be), if they ever lost the other, it would be impossible to find someone else with whom they could have a similar relationship. (Actually, in their specific case, that's one of the reasons why slashing them does change the relationship to something that's less special to me, because suddenly all the indefinable weirdness collapses into a relationship that *can* be described and easily qualified -- "boyfriends" -- and that makes it less interesting to me than when it's this extremely odd something that even they don't seem to know how to define.)

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

I've said it before, but I do think if I stayed in SGA as long as you have, that I probably would switch, would be able to view it as either type of fandom. Though I don't know - I think it's more likely I just won't keep it that long, or at least not this invested. I'm already cheating a bit with NCIS, and though SGA still satisfies me as that and most other fandoms don't, and I see myself coming back to it, I don't know how much longer I'm going to stay...(I'm not OTP myself with any fandom! XP)

(Actually, in their specific case, that's one of the reasons why slashing them does change the relationship to something that's less special to me, because suddenly all the indefinable weirdness collapses into a relationship that *can* be described and easily qualified -- "boyfriends" -- and that makes it less interesting to me than when it's this extremely odd something that even they don't seem to know how to define.)

Hmmmm - I hadn't really considered this, but it's true for me, too. "Uniqueness" is one of the defining features of an OTP for me, and that explains why I particularly like McShep in which their relationship is something unique even if they are having sex - I don't exactly go for "they're not gay they just love each other," but I do tend to like stories in which it's their first gay relationship, or their first real relationship (John was married but it went so badly, and while I don't see Rodney as a virgin I tend to see him as mostly inexperienced with sex)...that "boyfriend" for them is still is a weird and inexplicable relationship. Same as you can define them as "teammates" or "best friends" and it describes what they have for the most part, but not quite. John & Rodney are both so weird about relationships - all relationships, friendships or romantic - that adding sex would either not change much or would complicate things; I don't see it as simplifying anything, at least not right away. Sleeping together would not make them any better at communicating, at least not right away (though yeah, I have read slash fics that it does, but those always seem OOC to me...put it this way, I've got my one slash fic that's about 50K words now, with long-term established McShep, and neither of them have actually said "I love you" to the other in the course of the story yet. But then, gen h/c fics are often about the characters coming together and expressing that they love each other platonically, so much gen, too, has the characters moving towards defining their relationships.)

And that's why I wouldn't want to see McShep go canon, because these writers are not good at subtle, and the only reason they write John & Rodney as well & interestingly as they do is because they don't really know what they're doing; they don't have it figured out. And sometimes it does seem to be played almost sexually/romantically...I sort of feel that saying their relationship is strictly platonic, that there is no subtext, is as limiting and qualifying as making them boyfriends; it's denying some of the mystery! (Which is why some of my favorite fics are those gen-ish stories which don't make a point of it one way or another, that don't try to define their friendship as romantic or platonic but leave it open to anything.)

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[sholio]

Hmmm... let me see if I can explain this. While I *do* see what you're saying about defining the mystery, on a totally illogical level (which is, of course, the level where we're operating when we fan *g*) it's usually profoundly uncomfortable for me to write or read sex in the context of a relationship that gives off a strong family vibe for me; it trips my incest squick like whoa. I don't have a moral problem with consensual incest and I can even write it if I try (there's canon incest in two of my original stories, actually) but it's still something that squicks me, and though I know "adopted" siblings aren't the same as flesh-and-blood siblings, it still trips the same wires in my head. I've dealt with it in SGA by trying not to overtly think of them as family when I'm reading ship fic ... in fact, come to think of it, I think that's why I've been downplaying the "family" thing in general over the last year or so, both in my fic and in my head -- my preferred mental model for them used to be family/siblings, but it's more like dorm-mates or roommates these days. I can do family; I can do sex; I can't do family having sex with each other, at least in anything other than a profoundly messed-up kind of way. And I've been reading a fair amount of pairing (in different combinations) and OT4 with the team. Innnnteresting ...! Maybe that does explain it, actually, because I had kinda wondered about that; when I typed "brothers" for the John/Rodney relationship, above, it reminded me that back in season three, I used to *love* thinking of them that way, and I really don't/can't anymore. I think this is directly attributable to reading slash; it means that "family" is no-go territory for me now with them, at least in a warm-fuzzy sort of way rather than a weird/screwed-up way.

And I know that this is irrational and just a matter of the sort of boxes where I put things in my head, but when it comes to gut-level emotional reactions to things, it doesn't matter.. Maybe that's one of the big reasons why it's really hard for me to relate strongly to a couple on both a gen and sexual level at the same time.

But your saying this about sex being part of their strangeness makes me think that it might be very interesting to write them that way -- if occasional sex was just more of their weirdness and the undefinability of their relationship; in other words, they'd still be seeking relationships with other people, but also having sex with each other, and trying to explain *that* to people outside the relationship ... I'm very intrigued by that possibility, actually.

Re: Part 2 (edited)

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Yup...I can get this to an extent; I think the difference is that "family" has multiple meanings to me. So I love siblings, and sibcest can squick me (though I sometimes like it as a twisted kink; I can't see it as warm & fuzzy but as a fucked up obsessive relationship I sometimes go for it.) But for me, an important part of family is the parents: marriage (or the equivalent thereof) is at the foundation of a family.

This, definitely, has a lot to do with internalized definitions of "family"; my experience with happy marriages means that I see them as, if not absolutely necessary to a family, then at least a common element. So I can see chars as brothers sometimes, but if they're not actually related I'm just as likely to see them as a married couple. And, as mentioned, I see a happy marriage as a best friend + sex relationship, so it's not that far a mental/emotional jump for me to make. (and probably why I tend to prefer happy-fuzzy McShep slash, as I see their relationship as pretty healthy to begin with, for all they're weirdos...)

in other words, they'd still be seeking relationships with other people, but also having sex with each other, and trying to explain *that* to people outside the relationship ... I'm very intrigued by that possibility, actually.

Hmmm. I'm intrigued by polyamorous relationships in general, though I admit I have a hard time seeing it with John & Rodney - mainly because I don't see either of them as having particular strong sex drives; the "Kirk" reading of John always strikes me as OOC, and I read Rodney as the kind of guy who wouldn't really get much out of sex outside of the context of a close relationship; he's not interested in sex itself so much as the intimacy (that's just my personal fanon take, not anything canonical!) (And that's another reason why I don't have trouble slashing them; I don't see sex as that important to their lives. At the same time, it helps to slash them in that I do see them as sexually compatible - "my" John is borderline asexual, and Rodney likes sex on occasion but is easily distracted by other things...