hth | ruminations of a personal nature, or: On Viewing the Back Half of SGA s3

ruminations of a personal nature, or: On Viewing the Back Half of SGA s3

Warning: all of the attached is, um, slightly mental. I think it's sort of about SGA, and sort of about wtf is wrong inside my brain? Whether you like the show or not, you're almost guaranteed to decide, after reading this, that my relationship is completely fucking unhealthy, and you would not necessarily be wrong.

So it is SGA time again, with the new episodes and the new squee, and for me this means – the new self-doubt and confusion and uncertainty and existential angst.

Because there is this thing called Stargate:Atlantis, and there is this thing called Me, and if someone had deliberately set out to do it, they could not possibly have constructed a show more poorly suited to me. Like, if I like a thing? The show avoids it at all costs.

Continuing narrative with arc and character development? Fuck you, Hth.

Moral and emotional complexity with characters I can both identify with and look up to? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Reasonably evolved politics, with female characters sharing space with male characters as equals and, you know, problems that are solved by ways and means other than blowing the living shit out of stuff? Surely you jest!

A universe where shit makes sense and responses logically flow from actions, so as to allow me to imagine that it might exist in my actual reality? No, and quit calling me Shirley!

And yet, and yet, and yet. Somehow, every Friday, I find my lizard brain going eeeee, it’s Stargate night!

Actually, the thing is – what I think I’ve realized as I watch my new S2 DVDs and ponder life, is that with the critical exception of maybe half a dozen episodes which are so egregiously bad and offensive that they make me consider indiscriminate violence – with those exceptions, almost any given episode of SGA is something I would be willing to pass along to a friend and say, “Hey, watch this, it’s pretty cool.” I mean, the episodes do not, individually, suck, as a general rule, although there is often a wtf? moment here or there (like, I mean, seriously, why doesn’t John read the note in Epiphany? Why, why, why? What human person would carry that backpack five miles down the mountain and never look inside of it?) But by the standards of free entertainment, it’s an okay show.

It’s just that, somehow, when you put them all together, the show somehow becomes less than the sum of its parts for me. I keep waiting for it to all come together somehow, to show a narrative spine or a common theme or something that makes it anything other than This Random Week In Space, and the absence of that thread is – guys, it’s like physically painful for me. Because that’s what I do fandom for. That’s what media fandom MEANS to me. These shows are gloriously, luxuriously, deliciously GIANT, LONG STORIES that go on for ages and have all the time in the world to stop and play on their way to the last chapter. And I’ve never figured out what the plot of SGA is, and it drives me batshit insane. It’s this mad, Godot-esque exercise in throwing fistfuls of clever or shiny or suspenseful or pretty things at us like fish to seals and seeing how much of it we’re willing to bite down on.

Because it seems like all TPTB give a shit about is that we keep swallowing something. Anything. Whatever they can get us to go for, whatever it takes. And it’s hard to take something seriously that even the people who create it...don’t take seriously. You know how people in fandom say “Don’t put in your headers This probably isn’t any good and I didn’t get a beta, it’s my first time!!1!, because then I just assume it does suck and I hate you and I don’t care anymore?” That’s me, every week with this show. They’re that girl.

And I realize that many of my fellow fandom stalwarts are right now giggling in their sleeves and going, Dude, come on, I lived through Highlander/Sentinel/Smallville/whatever crazy, mostly crappy fandom you come from, and...yes. Okay. SGA is not the worst show in the history of ever, by a long shot.

It’s just the worst show I’ve ever loved.

Because much as I love the fic and much as I love the wild creativity of fandom, I’m not a fandom-centric fan. I’m a fan OF stuff. My love is for the source material – my shows in particular, and the strange brew that is television in general – yes, I said it, okay? I’ve been here for ten years because I love nothing else in this world like I love good television. I love it the way reasonable people love, I don’t know, books or Italian cinema or what the fuck ever reasonable people invest their love in. Fandom is this crazy, gorgeous thing that I accidentally stumbled onto because I had an internet connection and the total willingness to think about nothing but the X-Files for months on end.

And in the last ten years, I’ve found – I don’t know – maybe twenty or thirty shows that I felt something for, that strange, possessive sort of affection and willingness to accept it, even momentarily, as real and important to me. That’s not bad odds, all things considered – enough to keep me hangin’ on, as they say, even when tv breaks my heart again and again. And of those twenty or thirty shows, I’ve found four that I loved – that I love, in a way that is mystical and irrational and heart-stopping and perverse, that I love in ways that reasonable people will only ever love their spouses and their moms. (Arguably five, if you count pop culture as a tv show – and I often think that you should. But that’s a bit meta for this conversation. Let’s say, four.) And the first one was X-Files, and the second and third (chronologically, they are hard to disentangle) were Due South and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And the fourth is Stargate:Atlantis, and even lo these many years later, I can’t get past my what the fucking FUCK? about that.

Because XF had its many and varied madnesses – it was basically a giant, dangerously tilting gothic structure, this mad fin-de-siecle marriage of Lovecraft and Bradbury, of rage and cynicism and faith and desire – but what still impresses me about it most was what a quantum fucking leap it was beyond what I or anyone I know had even imagined a network tv show was capable of doing. X-Files kicked the fucking wall down. X-Files was too fucking crazy to know what it couldn’t get away with, and it was infuriating and spectacular and I think I may not see its like again, I really do.

And Due South had its little failings, its minor disappointments, and it never had time to get to the point where all shows inevitably fall apart into apathy and despair and midlife crises, but in its own small way, it was practically fucking perfect. It invented its own little narrative language, its own pacing, its own weird little garden path between reality and fantasy, and it did it all with pacing so tight it hurts to watch and, better yet, with this oddly abandoned sense of joy, like everything it did was done for the kind of addled but rock-solid love that you can never explain to your friends. Any given thing that Due South did, you could love or hate, but it was so organic and so native to what that nutty Due South thing was, that ultimately you had to shrug and come to the realization that, love me, love my bad puns. Due South was a person like that. Due South was all people like that.

And Buffy, oh, Jesus God, don’t get me started on Buffy. Someday I’ll tell you all about BtVS, and growing up and getting hurt and love and jealousy and suicide and defiance and happiness and power and identity and revenge and time and this show that seduced me into believing the things I wanted to write about were right there, right there, waiting for someone to stand up, waiting for someone to believe it enough to write it. Also, it was a really objectively good television show. It just was.

So, you know, what the fuck do I do with SGA? I sit here, week after week of new episodes, day after day and month after year of this irrational, frustrating, heartbreaking emotional response to this show that sometimes, in my darker moments, I think actually hates me, like the worst abusive unrequited love affair I’ve never actually had. And I keep knocking out story after story trying to – I don’t know what I’m trying to do. Get there. Understand it. Understand me. Because something like this, I mean – the others, I got this thing from them; I changed, or I found myself, or something. And I feel like there’s this piece of me that’s trying to make noise, my red-headed stepchild, the SGA gene, and I don’t get it, and I don’t know what it wants from me, and I have this weird little irradiated thing in my hands, like a simultaneously adorable and horrifying two-headed tree frog, and I don’t know what to do with it.

Like XF, dS, and BtVS, it makes me want to say something. I just...haven’t figured out what, yet. Or why it matters so much that I do. I just know that as much as SGA wears me the fuck out, I can’t let it go because I’m not done with it yet – or it’s not done with me.

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Well, I just hug you is all. Almost everybody I know has SOME version of this problem, though it normally doesn't hurt as much as yours hurts. But it's--the show's a MESS, and it's like, hard to figure out how to attack it, what to do with it, how to make sense of it. It might take some time, you know; it's meatball surgery. But there's something there that's just gorgeous and shiny and promising and it gives me seizures of joy. I'm writing a giant thing right now, trying to get a handle on it, and I feel like I've pretty much resigned myself to hanging out for the next few years making sense of it, organizing it, cleaning it up, finding it's potential, learning how to build a positive outlet for my great and vast love for it.

It may be a long few years for us, my friend! *g* Seriously, I get great joy out of watching you travel your own road through the mad jungle that is this fandom. I'm pretty sure that in any number of ways (more, even, than all the usual ways! *g*), what you're in search of and what I'm in search of are very different things. Nobody could have better company on the long, strange road. *hug*

This Random Week In Space
heee

You know, I did a whole big burst of meta at the beginning of season 3 trying to make sense out of the story arcs and character arcs and themes of this show, then every week the episode was like an etch-a-sketch someone had shook and had nothing to do with anything else and--I gave up. I just watch for the random bits of glee, and try not to think too hard.

But then, my very first fanfic (written before there was an internet to post on, thank god) was freaking Power Rangers, so clearly good source material is not one of my fannish requirements. But oh how I love it when the show is actually good. It's like getting double chocolate fudge cake instead of a twinkie.

It really just is not worth the effort to try to meta about this show; I hit that wall late in 2nd season.

And I don't eat Twinkies, either *g* I always figure, if you're gonna consume useless calories, there are so many worthier ways to do it.

I think you summed it up rather well here kind of how I feel about SGA.

It's nice to know I'm not in my own boat entirely, here....I think. Share my pain!!! *g*

Oh, man. I empathize with you, I really do. Part of the problem, I think, is that SGA is written in a different language than I am used to reading, and sometimes, it's really tough to figure out. Take for example 'teasing = affection'. It's a rule that underlies almost all of the character interactions, and there are all sorts of implications to that rule that we are not used to thinking about. Such as: no one is held accountable for anything that is a true joke, because all teasing is affectionate. It's part of the fabric of the universe, and that is such an alien concept to me. I think there are jokes that aren't really jokes, but in SGA, that situation does not exist. Adapting to that idea it tough, as so much of my reading is spent looking at the subtext, and to run smack dab into the wall of 'all teasing is affectionate' just...throws me for a loop. I am not used to seeing that.

That's an interesting perspective! I grew up in GuyWorld, you know -- that's who all my friends were, etc., so I do instinctively "get the joke," in a sense, with the teasing sequences. I'd never thought of the dissonance that might come up if you don't, but yeah, I can see the issue.

It's just that there are other 'universe constants' like that which pop up in unexpected ways. For example, there is a corollary to "all teasing is affection" which is "anything done out of affection has no negative consequences." So, since all teasing is affection, and all affection has no negative consequence, John can give Cam a lemon to use on Rodney and it's okay. Or Rodney can slip John a mickey and get him to clean his room without anyone getting really upset. or, you know, the team can disobey orders and return to Pegasus without approval, and everything is fine in the end. It's really quite Romantic, and that romanticism underlies everything. It's hard to make realism stick.

This is a marvelous post, to me, though I realize this might be an odd thing to say, but we're all sort of in this together, hey, so what the hell. It's TOTALLY This Random Week In Space.

I'm sorry y-our show is actively hurting you! I enjoy the results of your flailing very much, selfishly... I understand the ginormous question mark quality, yeah. I guess I'm lucky I have escaped the part of the love story where things are painful (for now!).

And long may you escape it! No one should feel my pain. *g*

Ha! I know exactly what you mean. I've tried telling my friends why I adore SGA and find myself stalling when I try to explain why it's objectively good, rather than just telling people how much I like it when Sheppard and McKay bicker - seriously, that was the best I could do.

When it was Buffy and X-Files and due South (is there some common thread that's made us love the same shows?!), it was easy to get my friends to sit in front of that first episode and get hooked. With SGA, I just have to play the 'look, I can't explain it. Just give it a go' card. Which only works on a limited number of people.

It's not painful to me - I've accepted that it's not a ~~obsession~~ hobby I will share with my friends. I've become a bit reclusive and hide away at my computer a lot... but that doesn't make SGA a harder fandom to be in.

Honest.

When it was Buffy and X-Files and due South (is there some common thread that's made us love the same shows?!)

No other reason than that we are awesome!

And my issue isn't so much that I can't explain to other people why I watch the show -- that was just kind of an example. It's that I can't explain it to *myself.* That's the thing that bothers me.

SGA = my series of Tintins, my series of Nancy Drews, my series of Thieves World

Not: my Tolkiens, my Discworlds, my Vorkosigans.

Possibly my XF love predisposed me, because it's really, really painful when a tilting gothic monstrosity falls on you. (*lies in its grave dramatically*) Whereas SGA is just my space h0. Tore a skirt again? Have another one. Run along now, and don't get dead, revival isn't cheap.

Oddly, I'm the only person in the world who didn't really agonize about the utter destruction of XF. I mean, sure, the last couple three seasons are mostly to completely unwatchable, but I was always relatively blase about it. I would a million times have rather had those first six seasons than not, and if the later crap was somehow necessary, so be it. I mean, given my choice, they'd have put it down with dignity earlier, but my mad love for the show in its heyday WAY outpaces the disappointment I felt later on.

It's that damned cockeyed optimism of mine again! *g*

when you put them all together, the show somehow becomes less than the sum of its parts for me That was beautifully phrased! :)

I really feel with you on the absurd love. I think in my time in fandom I haven't loved a *show* as much as I'm loving SGA ecept for my very first fandom, Buffy. Like you, I can't explain it (though you come pretty close with the...and the...), so I just stay with it. Unlike most shows I watch right now, where I'm desperate to see more eps in a row (and will purposefully withhold new eps from myself in order to get that immersion experience), SGA is great watched in pieces, watched one ep at a time.

Then again, I am a fan of fandom, so whatever gaps *are* there, I know some kind soul will fill them.

But you're definitely not alone in the slight puzzlement of finding yourself madly in love with what you really, really shouldn't be....

SGA *is* great in pieces! (Well. For relative values of "great.") I'm enjoying my s2 DVDs.

Sadly, fandom isn't a panacea for me in that sense -- because in this case it's not that there are gaps to fill; it's often that what *is* onscreen is them being so stupid or vicious or arrogant or offensive that... I mean, fandom can do many wonderful things, but it can't unmake canon. We can pretend they're not the kind of people who would really act like that, but when push comes to shove, they really kind of are, because they *did.* We can tap dance as fast as humanly possible and entertain each other so much that we become willing to ignore, obfuscate, inviegle, and deny...but that's different from making it not true. *g*

On the other hand, the dancing is *beautiful* at times, I do admit.

SGA is the kind of show that makes it good to be a fan of fandom, no doubt about it. I watch the eps not so much for themselves as for how they are as ingredients: oo, look at that shot, it'll make a great icon! oo, look at that plot hole, how can we explain that! oo, look at that bit of characterization, what kind of backstory can we invent to go with it!

Yes, this isn't the same minor fall and major lift as a *good* show (e.g. Buffy, Babylon 5), but it can't burn down, fall over, and sink into a swamp like X-Files, either, leaving a whole generation embittered.

And for me, one of the things I watch SGA eps for is to anticipate what *you* will make of the ingredients they provide. It's almost like a cooking contest show, where I wouldn't necessarily want to *eat* what the contestants make, but where I can get ideas about how to put those same ingredients together in a way I would actually like.

Not to pimp, exactly, but I've started watching Supernatural and it's just amazing to see actual character continuity on screen. But I still love SGA for the variety of the characters, and their essential joyfulness, and more and more for the OT4 and how many shiny sparkly facets it has.

SGA is the kind of show that makes it good to be a fan of fandom, no doubt about it.

It makes me mad jealous of those of you who are, definitely! The grass looks so much greener over there.

but it can't burn down, fall over, and sink into a swamp like X-Files, either, leaving a whole generation embittered.

I'm the last unembittered X-Files fan! I mean, yes, the last three seasons were well nigh unwatchable, but the pain they caused me was infintessimal next to the joy the first six brought me. It's kind of like -- slightly weird analogy, but my grandmother has had Alzheimer's for a few years now, and while I hate seeing her like this, so strange and warped out of her normal shape and mean and scared so much of the time -- that's not what I think of when I think of her. She'll always be this other person to me, my real grandmother, and these last years are just this sad thing that happens to a lot of people. I think of X-Files like that, like those last seasons were just a long illness that could never begin to really take a way what the reality of my show was.

Damn, now I have to watch some XF!

one of the things I watch SGA eps for is to anticipate what *you* will make of the ingredients they provide

That's such a great thing to say! I appreciate it very much.

Re:Supernatural -- I've watched it since the beginning; Mary is way into it. I enjoy it, but there's something about it that just doesn't ring my fannish bells in the slightest -- some kind of, I don't know, flat-footed quality. It always comes off for me (much like SG1 does) as yeomanlike and reliable; when I watch SPN, I always know to expect a SPN episode, and that is exactly what I recieve -- better or worse quality depending on the week, but never surprising. And I need that element of surprise, I think. Hell, maybe that's half the key to my SGA thing: you never really fucking know wtf will be up this week, and maybe I am a little bit addicted to that in some way. Hm.

I have nothing for you except sympathy.

I quit watching SGA because while I could watch the show by reorienting myself to think of the SGA as criminals, I couldn't flip the switch to think of them as smart or clever, and I need smart criminals.

And yet, I am a fan of fandom, as well as source, and I still like the fandom, so I'm warily dipping my toe into the source.

I just have to focus on Rodney and Ronon's interaction and muddle my way through the rest of, well, everything on that show.

Well, that's the thing! They're just so fucking dumb. And I wish I had the powers of denial that some fans do, but I am chained to canon in deep, reptilian ways, and I know that, deep down, they are shallow and -- were you the one who said this? I think, maybe... -- dumb as a bag of hair.

One thing I realized back in my roleplaying days is that the thing about trying to write or play a character is that no matter how hard you try, you can't create someone smarter than you are. You can create someone tougher than you are, prettier than you are, more powerful than you are in any number of ways, heck, even funnier than you are (*all* my characters are way funnier than I am), but not smarter. Your limits are your character's limits, in that respect. And I think the SGA writers? Are a bunch of stupid boys who have fetishized a level of intelligence that they will never possess.

But Rodney and Ronon do make everything *so much better.* This is an objective truth!

See, I would think that the writers being really dumb was the problem, but so often a third character says, "Hey, this plan we are planning will not work out." and they do it anyway, and then the plan doesn't work.

So, no, they don't posess the technical knowledge that they imbue Rodney and Carson and Zelenka with, but they also ignore the practical constraints of their world.

I think the problem may be that they don't know how to construct villains whose plans are basically sound, but who are still defeatable. I almost wish they would just think about the villains' problems and then construct the "heroes'" storyline around that, because I can deal with our opposition being dumb.

SGA is like the embarrassing show that I'm madly in love with. And while it's not the abuse boyfriend to me, it's the neglectful one that I'm doing everything I can to get it's attention. It was the show that I tried my hardest not to like. It's the show I have to admit in fannish arguments that also don't like what they're doing with the female and minority characters or what they often say about the native peoples, not to mention narrative flaws.

I have to say that I'm kind of glad that I also adore BSG. Though it's always SGA that I come to for fandom and that I've written far more stories in.

I'd be less embarrassed with it if I could just figure out the mechanisms of my love! I'm so rarely oblivious to my own motives; it's frustrating as hell for me. *g*

And yes, there is that sense of relief at the back of you mind when you watch the Really Good shows and think, "Thank God, I can still tell the difference! I'm not, like, *broken.*" For me, that show is Friday Night Lights, but the theory is the same.

I'm really glad you posted this, because yes, SGA is all that and more. Or do I mean less? At least you can say that almost any given episode of SGA is something I would be willing to pass along to a friend, but I can't even say that. I adored XF and spent a few years viewing life through a scrim of XF, and still think it was the best thing on TV. But SGA? No fucking way. It's horrible in myriad ways that I work hard at not thinking about or I'll go even crazier.

And for me there's an additional pain. As I recently told

queenofalostart, SG1 is the show that broke my heart, ran it through a shredder, and then pissed on it. So I approached SGA reluctantly and with enormous trepidation. In fact, even though I love science fiction, I never would have tried it were it not for Rodney McKay, who stole my heart with his first appearance on SG1.

So not only is SGA, as you say, This Random Week In Space, it's also little sister to SG1, and oh dear fucking lord do I dread S4. But maybe that will be the push that frees me.

In sum: you have my sympathy.

Ouch, with the double burden of SGA being, you know, SGA, and also the spin-off of another show you have issues with. I was never an SG1 fan, only a casual-to-regular viewer, and I never really felt anything for it. Therefore, seeing it devolve into fucking insanity is just sort of interesting to me, like watching an ant farm. (Seriously, with the CGI dragons? *Seriously?* A whole room full of writers sat there and collectively went, "yeah, great idea, let's do it! Get on the phone, have them whip us up a dragon!" Seriously, SG1?) But if it meant something to you, I can fully imagine what that long, slow process must have felt like.

For whatever it's worth, I'm glad you're still with us. You're one of the relatively few people in this fandom that I feel like is genuinely interested in the same elements of the canon that I am. I mean, if you look at your work and mine in this fandom, it's by no means redundant, we've each very much done our own stuff, but it seems to bear a closer family relationship than, frankly, either of our stuff does with the bulk of the fandom, you know what I mean? I always feel -- in a myriad of geeky ways! -- that I'm in some kind of secret club with you, or whispering in the back of the classroom *g*

To wit: please stay!!

And I’ve never figured out what the plot of SGA is

I don't think they know. I think they keep changing their mind. That's the problem. I fell dreadfully in love with the S1 narrative and now..I'm all confused.

I started writing a comment in response to this. It got too long for a comment box (http://puritybrown.livejournal.com/319509.html).

I've only recently become enamoured of the show, and I'm aware enough of the positive and negative buzz around it that my expectations aren't that high -- plus, I've always found SG1 deathly dull in a "dear God make it stop it is draining my will to live" sort of way, so the bar wasn't set too high to start with. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed it. To sum up my post, I would say: the show's full of ideas and character moments and interactions that are inherently attractive and wonderful, which the writers don't do half as much with as they could, and it sticks hooks in my brain because of its incompleteness, because of its flaws; because they don't seem to know what they're doing, and they're accidentally throwing up wonderful things without realising it.

I can definitely see there being an element of that -- it *shouldn't* be good at all, *why* is it even sometimes good, let alone sometimes a little tiny bit freaking brilliant? Maybe the way you can never *quite* pin down where it falls on the sucky-to-genius-ometer has something to do with why it keeps pulling me back in.

One thing SGA does have in common with all those other shows is the ability to catch me utterly by surprise.

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ruminations of a personal nature, or: On Viewing the Back Half of SGA s3

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it's just a question of format

Re: it's just a question of format

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