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More thoughts on the best friend thing...
I'll admit that (being the Sheppard & McKay friendship freak that I am) I got a pretty severe twinge at the "... closest thing to a best friend" line in "Sunday". But the more I thought about it and discussed it online with various people, the more I came to realize that I'm taking a much too narrow look at human relationships. Here's a distillation of some of the random thoughts I've been having over the course of the day ...
Someone (alas, I forget who) in a recent comment said that it's entirely possible for someone to have more than one best friend. This is totally correct ... and you can also have a network of close friends without having any one specific friend who lays claim to that title.
As much as I adore the whole concept of "best friends", to some extent I think the idea of a One True Friend is as much a media invention as the idea of One True Fated Love who fulfills all your emotional needs ... and about as likely.
How many people in real life have one True Best Friend and no other particularly close friendships in their life? Damned few of them, I would guess! It might work on a show like Sentinel or Supernatural where the characters don't really seem to have much of a social life outside each other, but in real life, that's a pretty darned lonely way to live your life. One of the things that's really neat about the Atlantis ensemble cast is the way that each character has their own unique network of friends, and not just one or two people that they always hang out with. In fact, "Sunday" specifically pointed this out in Ronon's case, when Sheppard asks him if he ever hangs out with anyone but Sheppard and Teyla after a year and a half. That's a very narrow social existence, and the show recognizes this. Even Sheppard, who's not exactly Mr. Social Intelligence, recognizes this.
Thinking about my own life, there are four different people that I think could reasonably lay claim to the title of "my best friend" -- my sister, my husband, and two close friends of different genders who aren't related to me -- but I don't specifically think of any one of them that way. I talk to my sister on the phone almost constantly, and cherish the infrequent visits that we have (she lives very far away from me), but we tend to start seriously annoying each other when we're together for more than a few hours. My husband ... I spend almost all my waking hours with the man and can relate to him on some topics (political debates, for example) much more readily than to my touchier sister -- but he has no clue about certain areas of my life (fanfic, for example). So which one's better, which one's closer? Neither one -- they're both important to me, I couldn't choose. And these are just the people I can think of that might fit my definition of "best friend" in various ways, not to leave out all the other ones I love or respect or argue with or enjoy the company of -- my parents, my brother, my close friends at work, my online friends, my slash-fan friend who was wonderful as a confidante during a very difficult time in my life several years ago.
What's the definition of a best friend? Is it the person you confide in, the person you hang out and pal around with, the person who knows you best and longest, the person you love most who doesn't know you well at all? Those could all be different people.
The fact that SGA has captured this sort of ambiguity in human relationships while still displaying the obvious closeness of the characters is really wonderful to me. And strange as it seems, of all the people that we know on Atlantis, Rodney's probably got the most wide and varied group of friends. Rodney telling Carson "You're the closest thing I have to a best friend" doesn't belittle his relationship with Sheppard -- it just means that Carson is the person who most closely fits Rodney's personal definition of "best friend". So maybe he doesn't give his friendship with Sheppard that particular status in his own mind. But that doesn't change the *reality* of his friendship with Sheppard, the strength and depth of it that's repeatedly been shown through three seasons. And, conversely, just because he seems to spend much of his time with Sheppard, doesn't mean that his other friends aren't important to him -- something which is all too easy to happen in fanfic, where the writer tends to play up their favorite relationships at the expense of others.
I don't know about the rest of you, but something that seems to happen to me a LOT is the conscious realization that I've been neglecting one or another of the important relationships in my life. Maybe I've been spending all my time on the phone to my sister, but haven't called my brother in weeks. Maybe I'll realize that it's been a long time since I called up my closest friend from college and his wife and asked if they want to have lunch. The characters on Atlantis, with their many and varied relationships, have to strike this balance too. And in Rodney's case, obviously it took losing Carson for him to realize that he hasn't been spending as much time with Carson lately as he should have been. This doesn't mean he regrets spending time with Sheppard or Zelenka. It's just that not everybody can get equal shares of our busy lives.
It's not all or nothing.
Someone (alas, I forget who) in a recent comment said that it's entirely possible for someone to have more than one best friend. This is totally correct ... and you can also have a network of close friends without having any one specific friend who lays claim to that title.
As much as I adore the whole concept of "best friends", to some extent I think the idea of a One True Friend is as much a media invention as the idea of One True Fated Love who fulfills all your emotional needs ... and about as likely.
How many people in real life have one True Best Friend and no other particularly close friendships in their life? Damned few of them, I would guess! It might work on a show like Sentinel or Supernatural where the characters don't really seem to have much of a social life outside each other, but in real life, that's a pretty darned lonely way to live your life. One of the things that's really neat about the Atlantis ensemble cast is the way that each character has their own unique network of friends, and not just one or two people that they always hang out with. In fact, "Sunday" specifically pointed this out in Ronon's case, when Sheppard asks him if he ever hangs out with anyone but Sheppard and Teyla after a year and a half. That's a very narrow social existence, and the show recognizes this. Even Sheppard, who's not exactly Mr. Social Intelligence, recognizes this.
Thinking about my own life, there are four different people that I think could reasonably lay claim to the title of "my best friend" -- my sister, my husband, and two close friends of different genders who aren't related to me -- but I don't specifically think of any one of them that way. I talk to my sister on the phone almost constantly, and cherish the infrequent visits that we have (she lives very far away from me), but we tend to start seriously annoying each other when we're together for more than a few hours. My husband ... I spend almost all my waking hours with the man and can relate to him on some topics (political debates, for example) much more readily than to my touchier sister -- but he has no clue about certain areas of my life (fanfic, for example). So which one's better, which one's closer? Neither one -- they're both important to me, I couldn't choose. And these are just the people I can think of that might fit my definition of "best friend" in various ways, not to leave out all the other ones I love or respect or argue with or enjoy the company of -- my parents, my brother, my close friends at work, my online friends, my slash-fan friend who was wonderful as a confidante during a very difficult time in my life several years ago.
What's the definition of a best friend? Is it the person you confide in, the person you hang out and pal around with, the person who knows you best and longest, the person you love most who doesn't know you well at all? Those could all be different people.
The fact that SGA has captured this sort of ambiguity in human relationships while still displaying the obvious closeness of the characters is really wonderful to me. And strange as it seems, of all the people that we know on Atlantis, Rodney's probably got the most wide and varied group of friends. Rodney telling Carson "You're the closest thing I have to a best friend" doesn't belittle his relationship with Sheppard -- it just means that Carson is the person who most closely fits Rodney's personal definition of "best friend". So maybe he doesn't give his friendship with Sheppard that particular status in his own mind. But that doesn't change the *reality* of his friendship with Sheppard, the strength and depth of it that's repeatedly been shown through three seasons. And, conversely, just because he seems to spend much of his time with Sheppard, doesn't mean that his other friends aren't important to him -- something which is all too easy to happen in fanfic, where the writer tends to play up their favorite relationships at the expense of others.
I don't know about the rest of you, but something that seems to happen to me a LOT is the conscious realization that I've been neglecting one or another of the important relationships in my life. Maybe I've been spending all my time on the phone to my sister, but haven't called my brother in weeks. Maybe I'll realize that it's been a long time since I called up my closest friend from college and his wife and asked if they want to have lunch. The characters on Atlantis, with their many and varied relationships, have to strike this balance too. And in Rodney's case, obviously it took losing Carson for him to realize that he hasn't been spending as much time with Carson lately as he should have been. This doesn't mean he regrets spending time with Sheppard or Zelenka. It's just that not everybody can get equal shares of our busy lives.
It's not all or nothing.
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