December Semi-Daily: SGA

wychwood, "Something about SGA! What's the one fic you're sorry you never wrote? What was your favourite episode? Do you still love John/Rodney? How gay WAS John Sheppard? Where in Atlantis would you live if you could pick any room you liked? Pick one or a topic of your choice."

A RL friend of mine recently shared a not-yet-published het fanfic crossover she wrote, and it was hilarious the difference between her characterization of John Sheppard and the one that this community seemed to agree on.

Her John Sheppard was strong, silent, sarcastic, and sexually dominant -- not in a negotiated kink way but like a romance novel hero from the seventies, the kind of guy who pins his lover's hands with one hand while he rips her shirt off her with the other, and she swoons because he's so forceful, and then in the morning he slips out of her bed and leaves her sleeping and it's because he's a Loner who Goes It Alone.

Fandom's John Sheppard was goofy, socially awkward, boyish, and deeply closeted. If he slipped out of a bed and left a lover sleeping, it was because he didn't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with how he felt, and the story would end with the lover chasing him down and forcing a confrontation of the kissing sort. I loved it that he was earnest with women who were teammates or bosses but fairly indifferent to women who were supposed to be love interests, that he really seemed to want a friend, that he was a guy who couldn't quite connect with humans and then an alien city fell in love with him.

Probably neither of those characterizations is 100% canon-accurate -- it always seemed to me that the writers and Joe Flanigan were envisioning the character quite differently -- but I sure like ours better than hers.




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December Semi-Daily: gifts

isabellerecs, "What Christmas present had you wanted badly but never received as a kid?"

I had some sort-of-cousins (not really related by blood but might as well have been) whose parents were a lot less suspicious of television than mine were.

I had a lot of lovely things as a kid (my father was one of eleven, so I could never complain about not getting enough gifts) -- but these kids always had That Great New Thing. They had Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots and an Easy Bake Oven and one of those toys where you poured the rubbery liquid into the mold and made a bunch of tiny rubbery monsters (boy, I remember so vividly how that liquid smelled), and those big inflated things you sat on and hopped, the whole giant three-story Matchbox garage, Velvet and Crissy ("with growing pretty hair!" said the commercial, which even in first grade I could tell was a weird adjective order) and the Barbie giant makeover head. And a rock tumbler.

Oh, I longed for a rock tumbler. My semicousins polished me a whole batch of rocks -- by that time they were sick of the thing themselves, and mostly wanted to watch TV and run shrieking around the house -- and they gave me some of the cheap jewelry findings it came with so I could make ugly too-big necklaces out of them; I remember that one rock I found in the yard polished up to look a whole lot like the inside of a Snickers bar after you've nibbled off all the chocolate.

A generation later, someone gave the kidlet a rock tumbler. My god, the endless roaring noise the thing made! It took about 72 hours to put the rocks through all the stages of polishing! Even the basement wasn't far enough away. It ran the last day of its one and only cycle in the garage.





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