Ask My Fandom Opinion

*sad* This is my last day of leave. Actully, today I was supposed to go in, but I woke up still having problems with dizziness. I have never in my life looked forward more to getting off medication.

But anyway.

Gakked from amireal and cereta.

Ask My Fandom Opinion

Ask me one fandom-related question in the comments. This can be fandom specific, general, or about fandom/lj stuff/fic writing/etc. in general.

Just one question, please, but it can (and perhaps should) have sub-parts.

Question can be as wacky as you want. Ask me about tv shows, characters, fic in general, anything about any of my stories specifically. Whatever you want.

Fandoms: Hmm. Anything I've written in, anything you know I watched.

Comments

[loligo.livejournal.com]

John's characterization on the show is so open-ended, it allows for wildly different versions of him in fandom that are all plausible in their own way. If you had to stick to one favorite version of John, what would it be? Either describe, or point to the fic that captures it best.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

ltlj or miss_porcupine tend to have, to me, the clearest and most accurate John characterizations in the entire fandom. Any of their fics pretty much conceptualize how I see the character. I'd also go with samdonne as another one that writes a devastatingly accurate John Sheppard, able to balance John as both a person who has some fucked up in his life with someone who is canonically very competent and intelligent. A lot of fandom, to me, puts a lot more value in wahtever they are reading into John's issues than the character himself.

But one story for John characterization--Retrograde by ltlj

Um, okay, for slash. Hmm. Closest I'm going to be able to get is cesperanza, but then, she feels like one of the few slash writers who genuinely likes John. She tends to hit me right most of the time, and even when she doesn't, she's good enough at building the story that I buy it completely while I'm reading it.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Just this morning, I was thinking that two excellent recently released vids ("Maybe Sprout Wings" by harriet_spy and "I am/Lamb" by lim) paint very similar pictures of John, and it's a picture that's proportionally under-represented in fanfic -- but the stories and authors you've listed here are among the ones that I was thinking match it most closely. Interesting.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I need to watch those soon then.

It's not that I mind when someoen wants to drag out the character issues--but there's an overwhelming majority of writers who want to make it the entire character. It would be like defining me by my claustrophobia as the only salient personality point. And I get that the angst level is far easier if you start off making your character already screwed up, so it's a lot easier to write a story, but--that doesn't match canon, even a little. I mean, totally go for uberangst, I loev when writers explore, but these days it's shortcutted so much that there's no context--we're supposed to walk into a fic that seems to give the impression that John isn't competent to tie his own shoes and that? Pretty much defines badfic for me, even in the well-written ones.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Oh, the vids have angst a-plenty (much is made of the footage from the Asuran mindprobe), but what sets them apart from a lot of fanfic for me is that John really feels like he's pushing forty -- grown-up, complicated, self-contained. And I'm not sure if that's just inherent in the visuals (you can see the wrinkles!), or if the vidders worked hard to put that reading there, or if the lack of interior access to the character just lets me put my favorite spin on the character, regardless of what the vidders intended.