Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 1130

This is an old meme that Jerie dug up out of her blogspot blog. I’m completely unqualified to do it because I’ve only seen a few episodes, but she claims she was as ickle as I am when she filled it out.

How long have you been a fan of Stargate SG-1?
I’ve been a fan wanna-be since Voyager went off the air, but I didn’t get to see any eps until July of this year. That’s also when I wrote my first drabble.

What was the main reason that you became a fan?
Voyager went off the air, Buffy went off the air, and Enterprise put me to sleep. I needed a new show. I needed the fanfic inspiration you can only get from new, never-before-seen episodes in an open-ended canon.

The ONE Stargate SG-1 episode you think is the best they’ve done, that you can watch forever?
I doubt I’ve seen the best they’ve done. I think “Singularity” was very well done, and I could watch “Enigma” forever just for Narim.

What is the ONE Stargate SG-1 episode you think could be timeless–as in always be played on the TV years from now?
Again, from my restricted frame of reference, I’d say “1969″ because humor never loses its appeal. It’s also a very approachable episode for someone who doesn’t know the show.

When was Stargate SG-1 at its best?
When it’s funny and when the sci-fi is really cool - the quantum mirror is my favorite plot device.

Who is the ONE character on Stargate SG-1 who you can’t get enough of?
Jack. I adore the snark.

Your favourite B-storyline (underlying thread) of Stargate SG-1?
Definitely the development of the abilities and memories Sam inherited from Jolinar. I love that clueless look she gets whenever a new one pops up.

What’s your favourite line from a Stargate SG-1 episode?
“Hail Dorothy.” –Jack in “Seth.”

What’s Stargate SG-1’s best season out of all their seasons?
I have no idea. I haven’t seen any of the seasons that are considered good.

How many Stargate SG-1 conventions have you been to?
None.

Do you think you are a fan of the show for its content or for the actors?
The content. I don’t know a thing about the actors. I don’t think any of them are especially good-looking, either, except for Narim of course.

What is your favourite show of all time that’s NOT Stargate SG-1?
I would have to say Star Trek: The Original Series. I’ve really enjoyed writing Voyager fanfic, but my main interest in the show was as fodder for fanfic, not the other way around. And TOS has Khan, so it must be the Superior Trek.

Favorite pairing of characters on Stargate SG-1?
So far, it’s Sam/Narim. Sam and Jack are cute together, but they haven’t really become a pairing yet in my mind. Maybe later in season 3…

Word count: Shh, I’m editing.

I was going to do the Seema thing and honor the day by omission, but I have updates to report. Hail, Dorothy is my new drabble addition to the episode “Seth.” Several new terms have been added to the Repository.

I read some fic by Denise, pretty much at random. Most notable of my choices was Fini, a post-apocalyptic Sam fic coauthored by Adi. I thought the Sam abuse was egregious, but her reaction and recovery were interesting. There was also plenty of Sam angst in Fractured Reflection. You can tell from the title what subgenre it was, but I won’t reveal which Sam was involved. The tension between a Sam and a Jack was good.

In non-Stargate news, I just discovered that there’s a Khanfest going on. Non-smut and non-slash are allowed. I made a button:

Word count: 1175

The Repository has undergone some major additions. Many minor characters have been added from the credits of the episodes I’ve seen, as well as a few unexpected spellings from the credits: Jaffa and N.I.D. Also, rdanderson.com has been added as a reference and used to clear up all the unsubstantiated spellings I had, most notably Tauri. A few of the spellings there are incorrect, for zatn’kitel, McKenzie, and naqahdah, so the Repository is in no danger of becoming an rdanderson.com shill.

I even read a Stargate fic, The Matchmaker by Roxie, which was posted to TheGenGate. It’s a fun little farce that’s perfect for Intergalactic Hussy Week, and is marred only by Teal’cized spellings.

Word count: 100

The SG-1 tab has been expanded and now includes Repository: A Stargate Spelling Dictionary. Finally, we have hard evidence for naqahdah.

Submissions are welcome, but please provide a source.

Word count: 100

As the word count indicates, I have a new drabble up: We Call Them Angels, for the first-season episode “Enigma.”

“Enigma” was wonderful - now I know that the movement is in full swing. If I were the obsessing type, I’d be googling Garwin Sanford right now. Instead, I’ll just contemplate future Sam/Narim fic.

Word count: 1010

Yet another drabble is up, Pheromones, based on the episode “Hathor.” I’ve seen “Hathor” before; though it’s not quite a Fish Story, there was a gratifying amount of cheese.

I was surprised at how quickly Hathor ran away from a fight. My theory is that the Goa’uld are too lazy and cowardly to take over a planet when there’s effort involved and they might, say, break a nail from overuse of the mortal-whomping ribbon device.

Or it could just be the cheese…

Word count: 100

When the 2003 Stargate SG-1 Fan Fiction Awards came out, I ignored the warning on Queen of the Amazons by SelDear telling me not to read the fic. I didn’t understand all that much of it. I was mainly attracted by the title, and I figured humor was universal, or at least that I’ll never get it if I don’t read more.

I’m finding that watching the show is more satisfying than reading the fanfic. I was worried for a while there that Stargate was just too good to fic - fanfic flourishes best in a cheesy atmosphere. My worries ended with “Fire and Water” - you can’t go right with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, character death, and unreasonable demands for information available for free in any public library.

While researching my forthcoming drabble, “Fish Story,” I found a cool Stargate mythology site, The Truth Behind Stargate SG-1, which had a random link to this Ninja mask lesson. I was unable to determine the connection to Stargate, but it’s funny.

Word count: 7

Moving into the present, I read Vigil by Nanda, but didn’t know the context so the effect was somewhat lost on me. A little bird also told me to read Things We Say (Prologue) by Gunfodder. The formatting was too wide to read comfortably, but I persevered. That was some highly coordinated UST, I must say. The writing was good, but the simultaneous thoughts, angst and tears were harder to swallow. Perhaps I should ease into the shipfic more gradually. I’m not ready for simultaneous angst.

So I tried some action - Sleepers by…well, I’m not sure. The site has this funky two-lights scheme, but no name on most of the pages. [Note to others: Put a “by so-and-so” under your title so the clueless newbies know it was you.] After extensive research, I did find a name on the graphics page - Alli Snow. No wonder I saved this fic. Unfortunately, the fic was exported to HTML from Word, so the file size was more than doubled by moronic and gratuitously incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications. I wanted to change the font to something more readable than grey Courier on white, and that meant nuking every egregious font and span tag. The things I do for fic…

The work was worth it. The plot of “Sleepers” was an excellent combination of weird planet (a ghost planet), SGC politics (damn Ruskies!), and episode coda (post traumatic possession-torture-death syndrome). [Note to self: figure out what episode that was. Sounds messy.] The plot twist was extraordinarly effective - one of those so that’s what’s been going on moments. I did think the story started off slowly, with a lot of post-trauma introspection surrounding Jack and related canon-dropping (citation of canon events about which your ickle newbie knows nothing), compared to once the action got going. The conclusion was also drawn out past the resolution of the main plot, yet the new question raised at the very end wasn’t answered. Is there a sequel? Inquiring minds want to know!

Word count: 597

I took at look at the SJD’s lists by date for 1998. I Want To Believe by Vanessa Nichols had Jack trying to negotiate with the Goa’uld in Sam [note to self: figure out what episode that was] and was a bit too angsto-introspective for my tastes, but not technically bad. Dream by Vanessa Nichols had enough dying-together-on-a-snow-planet action (apparently taken from an episode called “Solitudes”) to balance the angsto-introspection. Punched by Vanessa Nichols again was a good example of the spiked-punch and mistletoe themes that pervade winter shipfiction. I skimmed some other stories with similar plots but this was the best one I found. Is getting Teal’c drunk some sort of SG-1 winter sport? I think I need to walk away from the 1998 archives and find some action-adventure.

In the Famous Last Words category, I’ve already written my first Stargate fic. I’ll link it as soon as the SG-1 section of the site is set up.

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.