In honor of Gaia... fic departing the fandom.

[icarus]

As you all must have heard by now, gaiaanarchy is posting her last unfinished SGA fics and leaving the fandom. Usually when I read dramatic departures, well, I remember my friend Red who left an old forum of mine. Annually. But Gaia I believe because her motivating forces are pretty strong (a 29,000 word story and only one review? Ouch). And she's also putting her WIPs out on the front lawn as a sort of SGA yard sale -- without the tags that read "50 cents or best offer."

I'm not departing the fandom but I do have a WIP to put out on the front lawn. Or rather, part of a WIP. But it is complete. In a way. At least... you have the ending. It's been in front of you the whole time, like that Easter Egg that's in the most obvious place that no one ever finds.

A year ago I wrote a story called Last Port Of Call. It was only the first part of a (roughly) 24-part long fic. There was a storm of controversy at the time with a lot of interesting feedback that would probably make my year if I were doing a thesis in Psychology and Gender Relations. I had enough material for a guaranteed A, I'm sure of it.

I never told anyone (well, okay, I told auburnnothenna) but at the same time I posted it (and by same time, I mean the same day), I also posted my story outline for the rest of the story.

Yep. That's right. I gave away the rest of the story. Without telling anyone that's what I did.

You see, when I told people that I knew that they'd like Last Port Of Call as a whole once it was complete -- I really knew. Because the same people who hated the first part loved the story outline. Yes, I do know, because you reviewed it and you told me you loved it. (ETA: It took a tremendous amount of discipline on my part to not point this out to you guys at the time, to put the story first before winning an argument. But I'm writer first and foremost and I'm not going to spoil my own reveal, no matter how tempting.)

The story outline was About 10 Days Before The Wraith Attack.

I even used a little of the same dialogue. I thought for sure that would give it away.

Part of why I posted the outline was that I was afraid the story was so big, and so difficult, that I would never finish it, and I wanted everyone to know the end. At the same time, I didn't admit it because I still wanted to give Last Port Of Call the good ol' college try. After I posted them I thought, "Okay. I'm going to have a little fun with this." I planned to post Last Port Of Call as a WIP and see who figured it out. (There was one person who did just from what I posted, noting with tongue-in-cheek that it was the same premise with even the same dialog. Ding-ding-ding, you win a prize, you smart cookie.)

It was going to be cool because About 10 Days Before The Wraith Attack was John's perspective with 20/20 hindsight, his gloss of events, while Last Port Of Call was the LP of what really happened. Both were going to be written from a very tight John viewpoint. It started to turn into an interesting exploration of memory and how we re-write it in hindsight.

But after the storm, I found that the story had changed in my mind. There was a fierce demand to write Rodney's point of view and I felt a need to defend the story rather than writing it as I intended. I wrote a second chapter... and it came out from Rodney's point of view, which really wasn't the story but rather an answer to the unhappy women who criticized it. It had changed and... wasn't that exploration of memory any more. It shrank and became just what people wanted. It made people happy. Gave those who needed to see Rodney's perspective what they wanted. But I'd lost the structural integrity of the story.

So here you go. Here's the ending of Last Port Of Call.

Comments

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

This has all been so fascinating I don't know if I can get it all of my thoughts and reactions in one comment. I hope you don't mind me rambling on, because I've spent the larger part of the day thinking about this, and I'm really coming up with a lot of interesting ideas on how I, as a woman, view sex and relationships -- in particular, pointing out blind spots that I'd never been aware of, but which I really SHOULD be as a writer!

I had never read "Last Port of Call" (I cycle in and out of interest in slash, and especially, back in my earlier days in this fandom, I wasn't reading much at all -- which means there are a lot of older stories I've missed) so I've only read it just now, and of course, therefore, I get the benefit of 20/20 hindsight -- having read your post above, I went into it knowing that there had been a fuss about it, and curious to see what the fuss was about.

Basically, I thought it was a really brilliant story, and the sort of story I've been craving lately (which is also why I wanted to check out gaiaanarchy's, since I recalled that she writes that sort of thing) -- stories that deal with the darker, more broken elements of the SGA-verse. There are a lot of things in conventional (i.e. fluffy and romantic) SGA fic that have deeply creepy and dark repurcussions, as canon does also; one of the things I've been wanting lately is to see stories that really deal with those issues in a serious and consistent-with-reality kind of way, rather than, say, sweeping the non-con issues of "[x] made them do it" stories under the rug.

So, yes, this story -- my first reaction is "WTF? That wasn't date rape!" I really did love it, even though it left me feeling unsettled rather than happy at the end; it was a really fantastic exploration of the ways that people respond to pressure -- painful and aching and sad, but also very real, very consistent with the ways that John's intense personality might react under pressure.

But ... now here's where the interesting analysis crops up, because then I went and read the other story, the one that gives them a happy ending -- and that was when I got the "OMG, I'm feeling very skeeved now" sort of feeling. The original story works great for me as something dark and kind of broken, something that would probably break the friendship and leave them much more distant towards each other, and maybe have other negative fallout for both of them down the road. It works for me as something dysfunctional, and leaves me with a good feeling about it as a story; but it doesn't work, for me, as the prelude to a happy relationship, and in that context it makes me feel unsettled in the way that I feel skeeved by stories in which a character falls in love with their rapist (even though I don't see what John did in the story as rape ... manipulative, but not forcibly coercive).

So all day long, I've been analyzing why that might be, and really coming up with interesting conclusions regarding the way that I react to sex, as it's presented in fiction -- knee-jerk, gut-level things that I don't think I was even really aware of.

The thing is, the way that I saw John's behavior in "Last Port of Call" wasn't really OOC, and it wasn't rape, but it was very manipulative and very inconsiderate. It was John wanting something specific, something that he could get from anybody, but targeting Rodney (when his first choice didn't go for it) and then using the insider knowledge of Rodney that he'd gained as his friend to manipulate him into having sex. After getting to know Rodney so well, John already knew the buttons to push, and rather than trying to find someone who *wanted* sex, he pushed them in order to goad Rodney into doing something that he didn't want to do -- something that would shake Rodney's self-image to the core, and maybe, ultimate, break him or drive him out of Atlantis, if they survived the Wraith. But the (very likely) negative effects on Rodney weren't important to John; I get a really strong vibe from John of "I don't care what happens to you or our friendship, I want this thing from you and I'll get it from you by convincing you that you want to give it to me".

Okay, so, not gonna fit on one comment apparently ...

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

So John's behavior towards Rodney was, honestly, quite reprehensible to me, and something which is likely to kill a friendship, but with only ten days to live, I could totally see John (and a lot of people in Atlantis, actually) developing a sort of apocalypse mentality where consequence, to themselves and others, didn't matter much anymore. So, for me, this story was kind of apocalyptic and sad. It was a John who'd, understandably, decided that he'd had about enough of giving things without getting things in return, and was out to get one last damn thing before he died; it was the story of an Atlantis on which people were preparing to go down in flames, and were being forced into all the terrible and beautiful things that are done by people about to die. It sucker-punched me in the gut and made me think about the way that good, but flawed, people break under strain, and break others in the attempt to heal their own cracks.

But reading the other story, where this was the prelude to an ongoing relationship, actually made my stomach turn. And while "10 Days..." didn't really end on a perfectly happy note, my thought after reading it was that it probably WAS going to end happily, eventually, or at least was on track to that, and given how John had blatantly manipulated Rodney into bed and then talked him out of all of his objections once he'd gotten him there, this hit me like about 10 different kinds of WRONG.

And then I started asking myself "... why?" Because why *does* "Last Port" work for me as a tragedy, but not as the opening act in a romance? Why does John's occasional callousness and manipulativeness towards Rodney work so well (for me) in a platonic relationship, but trips off my dysfunction-o-meter when he's doing the same thing to him in bed?

I really dislike most romantic movies, of the Romancing the Stone/African Queen type, in an irrational way I can't quite explain, but when you take the exact same sort of bickery, mutually-verbally-abusive relationship and transplant it into a platonic friendship, I'm all over it. And I've never really sat down and analyzed that; I always just took it as gospel that I am willing to accept different things from (fictional) romances than from friendships, while not really asking myself what those differences ARE, and why they seem so fundamental to me.

Unfortunately I can't come up with anything more profound than "... because at heart I am a big quivering puddle of GIRL, and I don't want my guy to manipulate me and put me down, and I don't want to see lovers do that to each other either -- at least not as part of a positive, healthy relationship." And I had never really *seen* it that way before -- that, while I'd never really noticed myself doing so, maybe I AM projecting myself into what I read on a really fundamental level; and once the characters make the jump from "friends" to "lovers" suddenly I'm having trouble sorting out what is right and appropriate for John and Rodney from what I prefer for me. I can handle it just fine as long as, in the context of the story or at least in terms of the way the story ends, it's clearly *bad*. And by this, I don't mean I want the author to come out and give the characters the Great Karmic Smackdown for being bad people; I just mean that I want to feel as if the actions that the characters took in the story had, or will have, the same sort of emotional repurcussions that they would in real life, including negative fallout (emotional or otherwise) for physical/emotional abuse. It skeeves me to no end when that doesn't happen. I always say that I have squicks regarding non-con and torture and that sort of thing, but actually, I think the squick is not for those things by themselves -- it's for those things being presented in the context of the story as good things: as something that the "victim" character has to be forcibly "taught" to like, or as a prelude to a happy romance.

... sigh, carrying on to YET ANOTHER comment; sorry!

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

While I do have to be in the right mood for it, I think I can take quite a lot of darkness in my fic as long as the other characters' reactions read, to me, as appropriate for that. So, I can take John coercing Rodney into bed as a dysfunctional and unhappy act, but not John doing it as the first step to Rodney realizing that he really *needed* a little bit of dubiously-consensual lovin' in order to loosen him up and find true love with John. (I realize that I'm grossly oversimplifying and possibly misrepresenting the plot of "10 Days..." here, but the foregoing is the level on which I reacted to it.)

But reading through the DVD commentary and the original discussion for "Last Port" made me consider that I'm really viewing the original story through a distorted lens, because I'm a girl, and John and Rodney are guys, and what seems to ME like a heinous act -- that of manipulating another person into bed -- probably isn't for them. I mean, that's an oversimplification again; as your story discussion pointed out, part of the fundamental tension in the story is that Rodney can't quite get his mind around sex-without-love (not to overgeneralize, but something that's a characteristically female trait), while that's *exactly* how John sees it in this particular case. I still have trouble seeing Rodney NOT being deeply hurt by that, but I can't really tell how much of that is just my, well, girlyness projecting me into the story and then reading *myself* as the "traumatized" character. Rodney, on the other hand, is Rodney -- he's abrasive, emotionally blunt, and somewhat manipulative himself, and while my initial reading of the story is "what a horrible thing to do; that's probably going to break the friendship", I've started thinking that maybe I was just suffering from a massive case of over-identifying with the charaacters. I'm still having a really hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of Rodney being able to get past it enough to have a deep and meaningful relationship with John afterwards, but again, I can't figure out how much of that is just a failure of imagination on MY part.

Anyway, I'm still thinking about it and analyzing it, but if this is accurate, it means I've been approaching writing about male gay relationships from a really flawed perspective that I wasn't even aware of -- that is, I'd anticipated some of the grosser differences such as the elimination of the cultural power imbalance between the two parties, but I'd never even THOUGHT that the whole heterosexual relationship dynamic would be totally thrown off because both people in the relationship would be GUYS. I know that sounds horribly obvious, and maybe it is to everyone but me, but there are all of these unconscious expectations for relationships that I'm carrying around with me as a female, like "sex equals affection" and "manipulating other people for sex is wrong" -- and now I'm trying to imagine a relationship in which that female perspective is totally absent, and wow, my brain is just doing FREAKY canniptions trying to visualize it!

So, I'm sorry for inflicting this appallingly long comment on you, but I'm really incredibly glad that you wrote the story, and then called attention to it here (because otherwise I'd have missed it), and now I'm thinking in ways I never thought before, and that's just awesome!

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

It goes both ways. Men don't get women's take on sex either. Right at this moment I'm watching this incredibly annoying depiction of a lesbian couple having trouble -- written by a man. The one lesbian woman (man projecting himself onto a woman) is frustrated at the lack of sex in her relationship, then hits it off with a woman at a baby shower who comes on to her sexually, teasing (man projecting how gay relationships start). Then the sexually frustrated lesbian woman goes to visit the flirt, they talk (at least he got this much right), and then they run off and have sex together immediately afterward (man projecting his own way of dealing with relationship problems). Then lesbian woman comes home to her lover and is uncommunicative and distant (man projecting how he acts after an affair).

Augh. So totally wrong.

First off, if it's two women, the sex might be an issue but the women never complain about the sex -- they complain about the reasons behind the lack of sex and psychoanalyze each other. To death. Then, yes, she meets someone at a baby shower -- but it's someone safe. A flirt will be avoided because that would seem predatory when she's feeling vulnerable in her relationship. But, no, she'll have a new best friend.

No, they would not fuck after the first talk. Instead they'll talk for months, and her new best friend would be the one she goes to every time she has a relationship problem -- and they'd joyously shred her girlfriend together. Eventually their friendship will be so tight that the girlfriend is practically moved out onto the porch, figuratively speaking. The girlfriend will rail against this, but that will only give the other two more to talk about. (There will fights, reconciliations, attempts to break off the friendship because it "bothers" the girlfriend, etc.)

At last they figure out they're in a deep meaningful relationship. Then, and only then, is there sex.

But the man who wrote this doesn't get women at all. He thinks -- much like a lot of slash writers -- that men and women have similar attitudes about sex.

Sex, for men, is much more casual than it is for women. For Rodney, the issue wasn't that he was pressure into sex. His attitude if you said that to him would be, "Huh? What?" His problem is that it's gay sex. And that it's Sheppard is another issue.

Icarus

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

*winces* Oh dear, that sounds terrible ... and, yet, it's no more "off" than the way a lot of women write men. Slash writers especially. It's interesting, but even though I'm quite familiar with the male species (being married to one of them, and all) I'd never really gotten, from the inside out, how drastically the courtship dynamic would change if both people are guys rather than just one of them being so.

On the other hand, there's certainly variation within the gender as well -- I've known plenty of women who've had one-night stands, casual-sex-only relationships, or cheated on a spouse. But there seems to be a lot of guilt and weirdness that goes along with that for women, which isn't so much of a problem with guys ...

I think that reading quite a bit of slash has made me less, well, inclined to notice the way that men in slash relate to each other very much as idealized women. I remember that when I first started reading slash, about 90% of it was way too saccharine for me. Lately that hasn't been nearly as true, but since the little spate of blathering that I subjected you to above, I've swung back that way again; I'm noticing the feminization again, where I'd started ignoring it because it's so prevalent that it had stopped even registering on my radar.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

The way I learned the male attitudes towards love and sex was from this book:

My First Time (http://www.amazon.com/My-First-Time-Describe-Experience/dp/1555837697), edited by Jack Hart.

These are first hand accounts by various gay men of various ages about their first sexual experience. It's very hot, but mostly it steeps you in guys' attitudes towards sex and relationships. Some of these first times were romantic, some of them were traumatic, some of them were "peanut buttery," some were omes with their wives and a guy -- there's a huge variety.

I struggle to explain the differences between the way guys' approach sex and women do. I think that women slash writers need to read it to discover what they're projecting onto their male characters, because for every slash writer it'll be something different. Their own personal attitudes will vary. We need to see for ourselves what surprises us.

What surprised me was that the vast majority of these first time experiences were casual. The guys went straight from sexual interest to sex. The other thing was how fast it was, even between teenage boys. The other thing that surprised me was that the guys never expected a relationship, either before or after the sex. Not that there weren't relationships, there just was no expectation. The other thing that surprised me was that when it was with a friend, it was often a one-time thing and they were both relaxed about it afterward and the friendship continued even if one didn't want to do it again. If one or another of them freaked out it was always about rejecting being gay rather than feeling rejected that there was no committment.

I'm not sure of the reasons for this. I have vague theories about our culture and attitudes women imbibe, the risk women take both of societal censure and pregnancy, and then the psychological vulnerability of having someone inside you (very few men's first times were anal), the feminine narrative of sex being a "pinnacle" experience, while the male narrative is one of virility. I also think the fact that society tends to, um, not encourage relationships between men (to put it mildly) it's not an option on the menu. For gay men, the relationship is the risk, while for women the sex is the risk. Plus men can have the relationships they want -- with women. What's missing is the sex with men.

Icarus