Man it’s weird, reflecting on the Stargate franchise’s 17-season multi-movie television juggernaut now, in the context of the 90′s, the 2000′s, 9/11, military imperialism, and cultural shifts through the years.
Like, the original SG-1, at least up until season 8 or so, is in retrospect so obviously a Cold War narrative. The main thematic conflict the whole series is founded on is the idea of negotiation vs violence: when can we talk it out and when do we shoot? How can we keep our people safe in the face of overwhelming danger, when we know, the stronger we get and the harder we fight, the more we might provoke the enemy? What is it even ethical for us to do with and to and for another culture? There are fair-weather allies that become enemies that become allies again, there’s the literal Goa’uld scare of they could be anyone, and how would we even know?, and our biggest Earthside antagonists are either a shadowy three-letter government spy agency, or Russia. Cold War. It gets more complicated as seasons go on, as your biggest Goa’uld threat turns out to be Ba’al who looks like a legitimate businessman right here on Earth, as the Lucien Alliance starts putting itself together like the Russian Mafia in the aftermath of the fall of the USSR.
SGA on the other hand is 100% about the Iraq War/Afghanistan, starting when our intrepid band of protagonists roves off to another galaxy in search of power sources and weaponry they can claim for their very own. The entire Daniel Jackson ‘let’s talk it out!’ goes out the window–Wraith don’t negotiate, period, ever, and also nobody on our gate team particularly cares to try. Instead, our whole main thematic conflict is, how do we deal with the legacy of our forebearers’ mistakes, and also our own, which is absolutely a cornerstone question of the whole Iraq conflict. Every single recurring enemy in SGA was either created or made much, much worse specifically because of something our protagonists do, from Michael to the Asurans all the way back to waking the Wraith up in the first place. Most of the problems around the Pegasus galaxy were caused by the Ancients, who the natives call ‘the Ancestors’ and various members of the Atlantis team can literally claim as their own ancestors, screwing around and interfering and making a mess and then fucking off to let everybody else deal with it. I could probably write an entire essay. There is a massive essay to write.
And, right, in both of these shows, the military are the good guys!!! In SG-1, they need to be tempered by Daniel and his ‘hey maybe don’t shoot the first people we meet on a new planet’, but fighting the Goa’uld is good and right and even if we’re not going to kill them all, it’s better if we prove we can kill them all, just in case. There’s a lot of the warm-fuzzies of ‘we’re taking down genocidal Cold War dictator-proxies!’, which is very nice. There’s a whole lot less of ‘and then, the Vietnam War.’ There’s definitely reference to how the planets our heroes pick to draw their line in the sand often suffer for it far worse than Earth does, but it all kind of gets glossed over–it’s fine, bad things happen but it’s fine, it’s just the price of freedom. Which makes a lot of sense in a post-Cold War context, when the show is drawing from decades of tension and conflict that are over now. In 1996 and 1997, when the Cold War was over but everybody still remembered it, and good sci-fi about the threat of planetary nuclear annihilation or possibly getting taken over by aliens/communism was really appealing in a ‘and the good guys win!’ way. So we can pick the parts that make for good TV and admirable heroes, rewrite the history so it’s not as scary, and tweak it a little more to make the good guys always good.
SGA actually does a lot less skimming over of ‘hey here are all the reasons our protags are actually pretty awful!’ They’re explicitly responsible for pretty much every bad thing in the Pegasus Galaxy, and it comes up and gets talked about. Which makes a ton of sense in the context of 2004-2009 when the show aired, as the Middle East kept exploding and almost settling out and then exploding again, and probably it was all the US’s fault in the first place–the idea of a military that fucked up and created their own worst enemies was very much in the public consciousness. Which makes it even more interesting that SGA somehow managed to keep the military, and their various civilian and occasionally native allies, as the good guys. The ethic of the show seemed to be, ‘okay we fucked up, and every time we try to fix it we usually fuck something else up even worse, but at least we keep trying.’ The last guys who screwed Pegasus up said ‘the hell with it’ and took off, leaving Wraith and ruins and all sorts of gene-locked booby traps behind them, so our protags get all the credit for trying to stick it out even though they’re fundamentally operating on a really sketchy foundation of imperialism and would-be genocide.
It’s just really interesting watching these shows now. The early seasons of SG-1 feel so culturally distant, from the way they try so hard at feminism (and they are very sincere in trying very hard!) to the way the whole show is simultaneously so pro-military, and unabashedly, joyfully pro-science and discovery. Early 2000′s SG-1 goes out of its way not to even admit anything’s going on in the middle east at all, which is part of why it’s such a departure when John Sheppard shows up straight out of Afghanistan. Comparing Jack O’Neill and John Sheppard, and what rank and duty and obedience and insubordination mean to each of them in the context of the very different wars they each fought before they ended up among the stars, is super illustrative and super interesting. Comparing any of it to the world of 2018 is interesting, too, because I don’t know what a Stargate franchise would have to look like today. What war are we fighting any more? What war could we feel good about fighting? You don’t see a ton of sci-fi these days when the good guys are the government.
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character – let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred – you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different – perhaps wildly so – story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity – not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit – the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters – and fic readers – the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse – or even the same ficwriter in different AUs – can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why – it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
This is such an awesome conversation, but I think there’s
even another layer here that makes ‘fic’ its own genre. And it is the plot.
Everyone who’s experienced in reading fic has their little ‘trope
plots’ we are willing to read or even prefer in order to spend time with our
favorite characters. We know how it’s gonna end and we genuinely don’t care,
because the character is the whole point of why we’re reading. And that is
unique. That’s just not how mainstream media publication does things.
But there are also hundreds of thousands of fics people
might call ‘plot driven’ and they have wonderful, intricate plots that thrill
their readers.
But they’re not at all ‘plot driven’ in the same way as
other mainstream genres.
The thing about ‘plot’ in fic is that it tends to ebb and
flow naturally. There’s not the same high speed, race to the finish you’d get
from a good action movie. There’s no stop and start of side plots you get in TV
genre shows. The best fic plot slides from big event to restful evening to
frantic activity to shared meals and squabbles and back, and it gives equal time and attention and detail to each of these
things.
Like @earlgreytea68 said, “There’s this huge obsession with
plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into
plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot
doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us
of that.”
Fic plot moves at a pace similar to the life of whatever
character it’s about. Not the other way around. There’s a fundamental difference in prioritization in fic.
I think this only adds to the case of ‘fic’ as its own,
distinctive genre. Stylistic choices of writing that would never work in
traditional, mainstream fiction novels work for novel-length fic. Fic
adventures spend as much time fleshing out the little moments between romances
and friendships as they do on that plot twist. The sleepy campground
conversations are as important to the plot as the kidnapped princess, because that’s
how the characters are going to grow together by the end of the story. It’s not
a grace note, it’s not a side episode or an addition or a mention – it’s
integral and equal.
That’s just accepted as fact by fic writers and readers. It’s
expected without any particular mention. And it gives a very unique flavor and
pace to fic that makes a lot of mainstream stories feel like stale, off-brand
wonderbread. They are missing something regular fic readers take for granted
(and it isn’t just the representational differences, because we all know that’s
a whole different conversation). There’s a fundamental difference in how ‘fic’
is written, detailed, and paced that is built on its foundations as a ‘character
driven’ genre.
And it isn’t only action/adventure/mystery plots that have
this difference in fic. Those ‘everybody’s human in today’s world’ AUs, those ‘friends
to lovers’ slow burn stories have it too. They have a plot, but it’s the life –
the grocery shopping, the dumb fights and sudden inescapable emotional blows, those
moments of joy with that person you click with, managing work and family and
seasons – that’s the whole plot on its own.
And that’s almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t
really experienced fic as a genre, who’s used to traditional person A and person
B work together/overcome differences/bond to accomplish X. In fic accomplishing
X might be the beginning or the middle, not the end result of the story, and A
& B continue to exist separate from X entirely. X is only relevant because
of how it relates to A & B, not the other way around.
Fic is absolutely its own genre and it has a lot to do with plot. I’ve been calling this ‘organic
plot’ in my head for months, because I knew something felt different about
writing this way, how long fic plot ebbs and grows seemingly on its own
sometimes. ‘Dual plot’ could be another option, maybe, though the character plot and
life experience plots aren’t really separate. Inverted plot? Hm. I’m sure a good term will develop
over time.
OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THIS.
I was always fond of saying, about my own fics, that my plots show up about two-thirds of the way through, because it takes me that long to figure out where I’m going, and then I would lol about it, because, ha, wouldn’t it be great if I organized it better.
And now I read this and I’m like, WAIT. YES. THAT’S WHAT’S HAPPENING. IT’S BEEN HAPPENING ALL ALONG. I NEVER REALIZED IT. The idea that the primary importance is the throughline of the characters, and that’s what we’re following, and the plot is what’s dangling off the side of their story, that is SO IMPORTANT. You’re right, that usually we’re told as writers to construct stories from the plot outward. “Here are the beats your plot needs to hit, here’s the rising action to the climax to the falling action, now make sure your Character A makes this realization by Point X in order to get your plot into shape for Point Y to click in.” It’s *such* a plot-centric way to write and I am *terrible* at it. And I’ve always said, whenever I sit down to “outline” a story, like, How do you this? How do you know where the characters are going until they tell you where they’re going???
But it’s not that I’m “bad” at this, which is what I’ve always thought, it’s just that I’m coming at it from the opposite angle. I can’t plan the plot before the characters because I’m sticking close to the characters, and the traditional “plot” is secondary to whatever’s going to happen to them. And that’s not a wrong way of writing, it’s just a different way of writing. And it’s wrong of me to be thinking that my stories don’t get a “point” until they’re almost over. THEY’VE HAD THE POINT ALL ALONG. What happens when they’re almost over is that the characters come to where they’ve been going, and then the traditional “plot” is what helps shape the ending. The traditional “plot” becomes, to me, like that epilogue scene after the biggest explosion in an action movie, where you’re told the characters are going to be okay. I spend the entire movie telling you the characters are going to be okay, and then my epilogue scene is tacked on “oh, p.s., also they saved the day.”
There is so much here that I want to say I don’t even know where to begin. @earlgreytea68 you’re not alone. Hit me up. I’ve studied plot and structure forever. Fics are pure, uncut, internal-motivation-drives-everything storytelling and they are so very different from the monomyth that drives most commercial fiction these days that they almost have to exist in a liminal space like fan fiction. I could go on…
LET’S BE FRIENDS.
Hahaha, this is my week to just want to be Tumblr friends with everyone, all the FOB people, all the fluff people, all the fandom anthropology people, LET’S ALL BE FRIENDS.
❤ ❤ ❤
@earlgreytea68 and @glitterandrocketfuel and OP and everyone else who contributed – this is beautiful, and I’m saving it to read and consider again later. probably with a glass of wine or something. ❤
Smart idea. 😉
Somebody make Six Characters in Search of an Author the new AU style
a due south thought to develop: today while despairing of my attempts to rhyme (my current paid work involves rhyming and i am bad at it) i was watching some old due south interviews/documentaries on youtube, and… paul gross talks a lot about the show as a modern fable, and he stresses that it’s obviously not realist, or meant to be taken literally as something that could happen. which is fine; i think realism is an overrated mode anyway.
it does make me think a bit of they eat horses, don’t they? – and this bit of dialogue:
RAY: You know what really annoys me? Why am I covered in crud and you look like you just got back from a hand laundry? FRASER: I don’t know. I’ve always been this way.
and the way that fraser is this total nexus of weirdness. he’s a reality-warper; he’s a supernatural being dropped into a world that operates on a different level of reality. sarah monette talks about pararealism vs contrarealism and i don’t really understand the terminology, which is a shame – i think the levels of reality at which characters operate is a key thing at play here, and throughout the show.
and also, if it’s a fable – the show has lots of morals that it’s illustrating, and sometimes they’re tough and sometimes they contradict each other, which is in part why i think it endures. but why else? well, i think the strange ending – the strange varieties of ending. the show neither ends at a point where we can imagine all of the characters happily continuing their lives in the same manner, nor in such a way where we understand easily what the ultimate “moral” or message is. it’s a kind of mystical, mysterious thing – except that i guess we know it’s about change, and love, and accepting that things always change and end.
there’s also something about fraser as this archetypal stranger-comes-to-town figure, a magical kind of fish out of water… who changes everyone he comes into contact with. this is both a key part of how fraser operates – he makes everybody better – but it’s also true about how the show ends. we see all these characters who gain something that they originally lacked (except, i guess, harding welsh, who was pretty satisfied at the start)… and you don’t have to like where the characters end up to see the weird epilogue as a kind of odd series of wish fulfillments or characters that have somehow been mystically changed, that have been through trials and come out – with some kind of reward. whether or not you think they work particularly well as rewards, i think that’s how they’re supposed to function. they’re silly because they’re magical. if they were less silly, it would be less clear.
and then, because this is me, we get to the ending for fraser himself. fraser starts the show as a lone stranger in a strange place – and he ends it as a partner, acting as a guide to his partner, in a familiar place which is made strange through another’s eyes. the roles are reversed. and while fraser started out alone, he was never unsure of the place around him, the place he wanted to be. in a way his story is about personal growth/learning from other people in order that he can go back. and he learns and changes in different ways throughout the show – he learns how to be a friend, how to work with other people… and in the arc with ray kowalski, he learns about partnership and trust. so fraser, who starts out alone, ends with a partner. he’s back where he started physically, geographically, but everything has changed personally.
whereas ray kowalski’s story is about being unsure of himself and everything around him, the stuff that makes up his life. he’s a loner, his identity has been pinned to a lot of signifiers that have changed, that have been pulled out from under him. when we meet him, he’s lost. and in only the second episode he’s in, he has the big… symbolic rebirth moment. but he also can’t help going back; there are multiple episodes where he fixes mistakes he made in the past or has to confront what he can’t fix and has to move on from. chicago is a place full of baggage for ray; in orde to move forward, we get the sense that he might have to go away, or everything will keep getting dredged back up.
so what does he gain from his trial by fire, from working with fraser, the reality-warper? he gains a partner, and a place with him – a place in his life, but also a diferent place, a different journey – physically, and geographically, as well as emotionally. this is part of what i think the metaphor of their search for the hand is about; it’s about purpose and rebirth as well as adventure.
I’d be curious to know what you thought of the originally scripted ending in which Fraser returns alone to the north? (http://lipstickcat.livejournal.com/446602.html, though the pics have died, damn. I have ‘em somewhere)
omg so i have seen mention of a different scripted ending existing before, but i didn’t realise that fraser went BACK HOME ALONE. ok so the ending with fraser & ray kowalski going off together is very important to me, granted, and the images aren’t there so i haven’t read how it plays out, but just the idea of it severely hurts my feelings.
i guess to me the idea of having it end with fraser and other characters almost back where they started totally changes the nature of the show – which to me is about a kind of mystical transformation through closeness with others. through love and trust, i guess.
. and also i like thinking about the show through this angle so i find it interesting that this ending was written but then changed… that they thought of leaving fraser relatively untouched by his adventures in chicago, but decided against that.
anyway this is just based on your comment above & the discussion at the lj post – not the script. if you do find the images, please send them my way! i would love to have my feelings further hurt by this.
(Pics from lipstickcat’s LJ, borrowed only to save them from oblivion)
So these took some finding – and I don’t want to re-read them because it makes me sad to think of Fraser having learned nothing/thrown away whatever he *has* learned about partnership and the value of cooperation and the inherent problems of isolationism. (And treating RayK and RayV equally badly isn’t a plus point, imo). I’d love to know at what point the ending was changed and by whom.
missionlameturtle 