state of the gate

So I'd planned to be more active in the fandom when the back half aired here in the US, but in reality I seem to be just -- I don't know, burned out or just still cocooning or whatever. After over a year of pretty faithfully reading a good 75% or more of everything I saw come across sga_noticeboard, I'm just in a place right now where I kind of don't care what's going on in my fandom. I'm sort of over here in my little hobbit hole, watching eps and writing my bizarre kabillion-word Ronon/OFC, and I don't have the slightest idea what's going on, or what the fan reaction has been to the back half, or really anything. I've kind of been debating taking noticeboard off my friends list and just keeping tabs on sga_newsletter, but that's kind of like admitting that I'm never coming back, and I'm not to that point yet.

I did, however, decide to challenge myself to read all, I dunno, ten thousand and nine nominees for the DiversiFICation awards (at sgdiverse_award ), which will probably take me until long after the voting period has come and gone, but so far it's been really cool. I am, however, stalled in the Beckett/McKay/Sheppard category -- not because there are more nominated stories there than anywhere else, but because -- dude, these girls? The Beckett/McKay/Sheppard girls? HOLY SHIT, but they love their massive multi-part epics! I've spent probably over a week reading Aleatoric Life and Alone In Your Mind and Life Without, all of which are awesome and recommended, but all together they took me a week to read, and I have an English lit degree, for which I routinely knocked out Victorian novels in two days. According to Mary, now I know how other people feel when I post things -- "It's really that long? Really?"

I sort of wish that Beckett/McKay/Sheppard were my pairing, because this is clearly where all the really juicy stuff is going on -- "Aleatoric Life" has actually come to rival the ridiculously addictive "Being An Anchor" (fandom=Sports Night, author=Lanning Cook) for my favorite rape-recovery wallow (I used to think I really wanted to write a schmoopy rape-recovery epic, since I love reading them so much, but then I realized that Ronon is kind of my permanent rape-recovery fandom -- he's already canonically dealing with the long aftermath of surviving a brutal, dehumanizing assault that stripped him of his sense of security and upended his life and gave him intimacy issues, so I mean, I'm kind of not hurting for chances to write about the exact same stuff I probably would have written in my theoretical rape story). "Alone In Your Mind" is hot and full of interesting stuff in the Ancient Artificats You Really Wish You'd Never Picked Up subgenre so it kind of, you know, feels like real science fiction, which I always appreciate. And "Life Without" is fucking amazing, and I almost can't say anything at all about it, because the suspense leading up to a few key plot turns is too juicy to be missed -- but it's just, it's complicated in the way I want all my multi-player relationships to be, with lots of emotional backstory and a searingly realistic blend of domesticity and hurt/comfort post-Atlantis, and I can't believe how deftly the authors navigated several different layers of AU story-building and laid them out bit by bit through the course of the story for you to piece together what the hell happened to Atlantis. I can barely hold one plot thread in my head all the way through a story! It's also kind of the love child of the previous two series in a way that -- well, if you read them all together, you'll see perfectly well what I mean, and why the three of them kind of triangulated nicely together and made my week well-spent.

On the canon tip, like I said, I've been feeling kind of drained and not so keen to do long episode recaps like I'd half-planned to, so let me sum up the back half thus far, in my humble opinion.

( O Hai, Iz U Back From Hiatus? )

Aquarium commentary -- 3.15, "The Game"

( Helper Cat is NOT HELPING )