Except I never would have gotten all inspired if I hadn't gotten all feelings-hurt

Actually, as I recall, that bitching set off a wave of really fun experimental stories. I would never have written my second-person future-tense story without it!

On the broader issue, there is one kind of bias that is not so easily quantifiable, and it's the only one that somewhat troubles me in SGA fandom. (Mostly I think a certain degree of fannish segregation keeps us all sane, and since all my close friends in SGA are either highly multiship-tolerant or don't care about pairings at all, I don't suffer.) This is the tendency to make disparaging or nonsensical *remarks* about another pairing, beyond merely having a preference.

I'm a little reluctant to go into this, because I think whining about how your pairing or character doesn't get love is unattractive and counterproductive, but this isn't about the lack of love for [x] pairing per se. When someone creates a fanwork in a small pairing and gets a response in her own damn LJ like: "Normally a die-hard slasher (or at least squicked by most het with John) But this manip makes me wish that the idea of John/Teyla didn't make me go 'eww!'" (and, let's face it, just by the numbers the odds are that this slasher is a John/Rodney fan), people who *like* the pairing can feel, ah, a tad disgruntled. And, since John/Rodney is by far the most common pairing, it can be particularly irritating. I used to keep track of these anti-John/Teyla or anti-John het remarks, but it annoyed me so much I had to quit. And, really, some of the "why John can't be het" meta I've seen offers up such ludicrous arguments (I mean, crazy stuff like "John can't be with Teyla because he's her commander [but Rodney's okay!]" or "John can't be with Teyla because he's fifteen years older than her!", not genuine differences of opinion on how to analyze the character's preferences) that I'm a little embarrassed for the people writing it--if I was suffering from that much self-loathing, I'd keep it to myself. Or you will get people who will come into a discussion about [nondominant pairing or character] and turn it into a discussion about John/Rodney or Rodney; I had to ask sga_newsletter to stop linking to my meta posts because I was sick of dealing with people who while maybe not meanspirited seemed genuinely incapable of recognizing why every discussion *shouldn't* be about John/Rodney or Rodney.

In the end, that kind of stuff can be very wearying to wade through when you're already having to make the effort to represent for a minority pairing or less-loved character. There isn't a huge amount of it in SGA fandom, but it doesn't take a lot of it to put you off. And, unfortunately, even though acting this way is hardly unique to the slashers, it's *more* grating when it comes from people supporting a pairing which is 85% of the fandom. I think people tend to assume that they're among only the like-minded when they post in pairing comms or their own LJs, and that leads to real carelessness about how they discuss opposing opinions. I wish people would get past *that*.

But then, I've never quite been able to grasp "shipping" as a purely partisan phenomenon. I really don't ever want to see John/Elizabeth on the show, because I can't imagine a way it wouldn't undermine Elizabeth (especially when written by those writers), and also I truly enjoy them as friends and suspect they'd mess it up horribly as lovers. But I don't regard John/Teyla (or Elizabeth/Rodney--there should be more!) as in some kind of *competition* with John/Elizabeth... because I'm not a socially-retarded twelve-year-old. There's considerably more J/E than J/T fic, and while that doesn't suit my *tastes*, it doesn't *hurt* me either. Let a hundred flowers bloom! And if canon gets it "wrong," well, that's not because one fan faction *won* and one fan faction *lost*, either. It's just something we all have to live with, and may they do it better than I think they would.