Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 343
Cool link of the day: The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

[Icon by chiroho]

Seema is concerned about my plans to take the shippy, fanon approach to Stargate, as opposed to the serious, canon/adventure route. That’s how I started writing VOY (three years ago this month), because it was the summer and I had far more access to fic than to canon. Shipper themes are universal and accessible, while technical details (such as which planet is which and how many Stargate movies there have been) require more knowledge of the show. I’m working on a base of approximately two episodes here, so I’m going to read Sam’n'Jack until I get a clue.

Jerie was kind enough to recommend some authors and awards sites, but she was sleeping when I gave up VOY in the middle of the night and went looking for fic. So I found the Stargate SG-1 Fan Fiction Awards on my own. I read the required three paragraphs of a few award-winning stories before I hit on one I liked enough to finish. I’ve always thought it would have been cool if I’d kept track of all the VOY fic I read over the past three years. One of the benefits of finding a new fandom is doing it right this time, so here it is, the first SG-1 fics I read:

Something Worth Hiding by Sally Reeve
Ship: Best Romance and Ship: Best UST, Stargate SG-1 Fan Fiction Awards 2002
The thing that kept me reading this story when I’d given up on several other award winners was the flow of the writing. Though it took quite a while for anything to happen, there was enough motion and description to keep my attention through Sam and Jack’s constant UST musing. I thought Daniel’s car metaphor was clever, though capitalizing it made it a bit awkward. The scene in the bar [note to self: learn name of bar] was lovely, and the story holds this momentum through the end.
Knowing close to nothing about the show, I can’t speak to whether the characters were in character. I did find the premise, that Sam and Jack hadn’t smiled, laughed, or looked each other in the eye for a year since some sort of alien-induced “Resolutions”-style confession of true but forbidden love, hard to swallow. [Note to self: if there was an Angry Warrior speech involved, find new fandom fast.] I suspect this overlong year timeframe has something to do with when the fic was written. I would have preferred more live examples of non-eye-contact, and fewer inner dialogues about it, but that’s the genre so I can’t really complain.
My blog entry title and the story’s title have to do with the resolution of the fic, which I won’t spoil but will say it’s a perennial yet underused plot in UMST (unresolved military sexual tension) fic. Plot is king in genre fic, long may it reign.

Semiprecious by SuzVoy
Suz is always good for a romp of a plot. Here Jack gets turned to stone and Sam and company try to fine a cure. At first I thought it was a bad sign for the fandom that someone could carry out an entire Sam/Jack fic with Jack as solid rock, but of course Suz came through with a comic plot twist and the power of sex conquers all (without any actual sex). “Semiprecious” is classic fanon that tells me exactly where matters stand in the fandom, with a smattering of fanon tropes that I [note to self] will eventually have to figure out. Suz has a little trouble with capitalizing dialogue tags that shouldn’t be, and a heavy reliance on the one-liner paragraph.
Of course, I’ve been known to do the latter myself.

Today I also watched my first episode as a fan, and my third (more or less) overall. I have to say that so far, the fic has been better:

48 Hours, 5.14 (#102)
Teal’c gets stuck in the stargate, leading to all sorts of arcy stuff with Russians, a government conspiracy involving Q and a missing Gou’ald, and a scientist who spends the whole episode insulting Carter. There is less than no Sam/Jack chemistry and no cool new planet (unless you count the one Teal’c was leaving when he got stuck, and I don’t).
I’m a little concerned about Jack. He seems a bit…stupid for Sam, but probably not much worse than Chakotay compared to Seven or Janeway. He’s also the strong, silent type, but not because the writers can’t fit him in. That fanfic year of not speaking to Sam is looking more credible now. Needless to say, I haven’t been overwhelmed with episode coda ideas, but I am thinking Teal’c would make a good muse.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2003 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Stargate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.