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]

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