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]

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!