i found that episode to be pretty much horrifying. they so completely lack anything vaguely resembling a moral code. in that way, the show is somewhat more realistic than it could be, i suppose. but also it makes me like them all a little less.
hi! i'm going to dig into the cadman fic today. it's number one on my list of things to do and i'm excited about it. sorry it's taken me this long.
Phineas! Cadman fic! Are you still onto it??!! I had given up on you! I was planning to post this last night but then we went out to dinner instead with impromptu babysitter here so now I was going to post it tonight (this is in about five hours my time) but if you're going to take a look, I may hang on and wait! How long will it take you, you think???? I don't want to pressure you but I'm so happy that you're still willing to look at it! But if it's at all a problem, don't worry because I've had two other betas on it. One did a very thorough grammar and punctuation job so you needn't even worry about that, incl. typoes and so forth. The fic now has a title: Contraflow.
oh, god. i'm sorry you'd given up on me. with other stuff going on, i wouldn't be done 'til tomorrow morning, i think. i'm absolutely willing to do it and it wouldn' t be a problem at all, but if you're anxious to post, of course you should.
very sorry. i knew i'd be crazy through the end of my paper but i didn't realize how long my recovery would take. :)
I will wait! I just watched football and in 15 minutes I want to see 'Line of Beauty' which starts on TV tonight so I don't think I'll have time to post tonight, anyway. :-) And your comment gives me the last push not to, *g*. So I will wait until tomorrow (lucky Thursday... *g*). When you say tomorrow morning, what time zone is that in??
ok. i'm about half way done. with very few comments and mostly just a lot of swooning. i am loving this.
i am in the ridiculous mountain time zone. so... what? 7 or 8 hours later than you? bleh. i will be done by noon my time. maybe sooner, but the people who are selling our house are kicking me out at 10 and the place has to be clean-ish. so that interrupts my reading time.
I had the same issues with "Critical Mass." There's a moral skeeviness to the characters that I don't feel like is quite addressed and that I suspect may be part of the reason I pulled back from the show a bit. If I think about the characters on the fannish meta level I usually do, I don't like them very much - in a different way than I don't like characters who are supposed to be morally questionable or conflicted and are consistently presented that way by the narrative. Those characters, I may not approve of their actions, but I still like them, in a fannish way.
I was actually thinking that the show does address the moral issue to some extent, maybe because it's Canadian and they can afford to dig deep enough for viewers to make the connection to the real world, should they so wish. They actually gave Michael a number of rather thoughtful lines. But then the sci-fi plot took over.
The moment in Michael where we see John through Michael's eyes -- on the video tape, holding him down, the "how about we call you Mike" -- remains one of the fucking creepiest moments ever. Because I knew that level of disturbing was there, in John. I knew -- I'd seen it as far back as early season 1. But like every character on the show, I'd started to buy John Sheppard's own press, just like he has, and having my nose rubbed in it like that was just fucking creepy.
Aha, this is interesting. I hadn't even realised John Sheppard had a press and that he believes in it himself. So do you believe that Sheppard has a deep dark sadistic side to him? He is always so deadpan, never gives anything away, always so dry and wry. I, of course, came to canon via fanon so never saw any of this. I'm only just starting to peel away the layers of fanon love and trying to see the actual canon characters. Hm. And what is it with Sheppard and wraith? It's like his personal vendetta.
See, I think that dry, witty, devil-may-care, I'm-just-a-laid-back-flyboy attitude John projects is exactly that -- a projection. I think he's got a dark streak a mile wide, and he papers and plasters over it and smiles pretty at everyone, because he learned early on that if he disturbs people, they look more closely at him, and the last thing he wants is attention.
I actually have a long theory about John's psychopathology, fully supported by a therapist friend of mine, that gets summed up quickly as "little Johnny Sheppard went off to war and never came back". The long form includes "deliberately self-induced schizoid personality disorder as a valid and viable long-term coping mechanism" -- I think there's something broken in the guy's head, and he's learned a lot of ways to cover for it, and sometimes the cover slips.
(And the really interesting thing is that it's not there in the text. There's a bit of it, but not a tremendous amount; the writers give John a bit of disturbing, but the lines as written could be played as disturbing or funny, and Joe Flanigan goes for disturbing almost every time. He's a subtle, subtle actor -- far more subtle than a lot of people give him credit for -- but like you, I'd been reading fic for a while before I saw S1, and when I did, I was baffled at what I saw on the screen, because it was nowhere near the happy-go-lucky guy I'd read about in fandom. John Sheppard's true disturbing nature comes out not with the text, but with the performance.)
But, yeah, John's got this kind of charisma -- using it in the original sense of the word, "fascination" not "attractiveness" -- that makes people either immediately love him or hate him. Some people want to fuck him, some people want to be him, some people want to punch him, but he evokes this sort of strong visceral reaction from people. And he has learned "charming" very well over the years, and he uses that charming to lull people into believing that he's harmless. (Which he's so not.) And everyone on Atlantis has bought that act, even though they've seen evidence to the contrary, and I can only hope that TPTB will have the balls to follow through with it, because really, the boy's just Not Well.
God, this is such a dark picture of Sheppard you paint! And of the other Atlantis team members because they have 'bought' the act. You can dupe some people some of the time...?
Otoh, this feeds into my current ficlust which is Sheppard/wraith and someone this dark goes well with the wraith; I knew my instinct was right in picking Sheppard straight off to be my wraith partner. He hates the wraith, of course, which makes it all the more piquant, and he half-turned into one once. And he keeps giving them names and wanting to know their names -- because wraith, too, have charisma in your sense of the word!! :-)
The true answer to that is a half-hour soapbox lecture rant, but the really short version is: I was educated by a bunch of HTML snobs back in ... oh, 1995 or so, right when the HTML 2.0 spec had been released, and there was a huge, internet-wide passionate and ugly flame war about whether HTML should be structural ("this item is italicised, this item is bold") or semantic ("this item is emphasized, this item is made strong"). I belong to the camp that says HTML should be semantic, because then the browser or other screenreader device gets to interpret how it'll handle it. (My side eventually won, too. *g*)
The really really short version is that according to internet standards, <em> is technically correct, and <i> is only supported due to legacy browsers. :)
Okay, whoa, this is TMI of the html variety. Now, I can sort of understand the structural vs semantic argument (although I had to think about it for a bit, heh) but: i and u and b are simply faster to type than em or strong. I mean, 'strong'! That is a total pain to type!! And do some people set their browsers so that strong gets interpreted as italic or allcaps or something? Or is strong always bold, in which case why not type b? But I can see that this is something that inflames the hearts of html buffs so I leave you to it... :-)
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 02:31 pm (UTC)hi! i'm going to dig into the cadman fic today. it's number one on my list of things to do and i'm excited about it. sorry it's taken me this long.
<3
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 06:13 pm (UTC)very sorry. i knew i'd be crazy through the end of my paper but i didn't realize how long my recovery would take. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 01:39 pm (UTC)i am in the ridiculous mountain time zone. so... what? 7 or 8 hours later than you? bleh. i will be done by noon my time. maybe sooner, but the people who are selling our house are kicking me out at 10 and the place has to be clean-ish. so that interrupts my reading time.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 02:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 01:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 03:15 pm (UTC)These guys, not so much.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 05:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 08:05 pm (UTC)I actually have a long theory about John's psychopathology, fully supported by a therapist friend of mine, that gets summed up quickly as "little Johnny Sheppard went off to war and never came back". The long form includes "deliberately self-induced schizoid personality disorder as a valid and viable long-term coping mechanism" -- I think there's something broken in the guy's head, and he's learned a lot of ways to cover for it, and sometimes the cover slips.
(And the really interesting thing is that it's not there in the text. There's a bit of it, but not a tremendous amount; the writers give John a bit of disturbing, but the lines as written could be played as disturbing or funny, and Joe Flanigan goes for disturbing almost every time. He's a subtle, subtle actor -- far more subtle than a lot of people give him credit for -- but like you, I'd been reading fic for a while before I saw S1, and when I did, I was baffled at what I saw on the screen, because it was nowhere near the happy-go-lucky guy I'd read about in fandom. John Sheppard's true disturbing nature comes out not with the text, but with the performance.)
But, yeah, John's got this kind of charisma -- using it in the original sense of the word, "fascination" not "attractiveness" -- that makes people either immediately love him or hate him. Some people want to fuck him, some people want to be him, some people want to punch him, but he evokes this sort of strong visceral reaction from people. And he has learned "charming" very well over the years, and he uses that charming to lull people into believing that he's harmless. (Which he's so not.) And everyone on Atlantis has bought that act, even though they've seen evidence to the contrary, and I can only hope that TPTB will have the balls to follow through with it, because really, the boy's just Not Well.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-21 03:50 pm (UTC)Otoh, this feeds into my current ficlust which is Sheppard/wraith and someone this dark goes well with the wraith; I knew my instinct was right in picking Sheppard straight off to be my wraith partner. He hates the wraith, of course, which makes it all the more piquant, and he half-turned into one once. And he keeps giving them names and wanting to know their names -- because wraith, too, have charisma in your sense of the word!! :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 07:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 08:13 pm (UTC)The really really short version is that according to internet standards, <em> is technically correct, and <i> is only supported due to legacy browsers. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 08:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-20 03:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-17 10:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 10:40 pm (UTC)