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How I fell into SGA fandom
I wrote this up for a comment over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
abyssinia4077's LJ -- and it ended up being horribly long; I didn't mean to spam her LJ quite as badly as I did! But I figured I'd post it here as well -- I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone but me, but I've never sat down and really thought about the chain of events that got me here.
I watched the original Stargate movie when it came out, when I was in high school. I found it horribly disappointing for a very specific reason. Back then, even though it would still be years before I discovered fanfic and fandom, I was just the same h/c "friendshipper" that I am now, with a particular fondness for May-December friendships. Jack and Daniel had all the potential to be exactly the sort of friends that I adore, but in the movie, they just never connected -- I remember being especially frustrated with the climactic scene where Sha're dies and Daniel brings her back, because I wanted that to be Daniel and I wanted it to be O'Neill bringing him back; the parallel between Daniel and O'Neill's dead son was so very, very close to being there, but the movie just didn't go that way. Oh well...
Then I went off to college, and didn't have a TV for awhile, but around the time I got out of college, I started seeing promos for the Stargate show. My memories of the movie weren't warm and fuzzy, but on the flip side, I used to have a massive, MASSIVE crush on Richard Dean Anderson in MacGyver -- my first and biggest fan crush, in fact. In the late 80s/early 90s, I taped every episode I could (and wore out the tapes watching them), joined fan clubs, wrote fan letters to him (augh, so embarrassing!) and pretty much behaved exactly as every pubescent girl does with her big fan-crushes.
I was over the crush for the most part, but I still wanted to see what he was like as a different character. But since I wasn't that interested in the show, I poked around online for awhile and found some episode transcripts and clips. (Which I downloaded over dial-up! The pain!) This was about the time that the show was in the middle of season 2.
After finding bits from "Serpent's Lair" and "Need" and "Fire & Water" (the one where Daniel is presumed dead?), I was in fangirl HEAVEN. It looked to me like the show had done exactly what I had been so bitterly disappointed that the movie hadn't done, and taken the Jack and Daniel friendship right where I wanted it to go. I watched all the episodes I could get in syndication on my crappy, tiny little TV in the apartment I shared with my roommate, and the others I found on a website which might have been the precursor to Gateworld -- I remember that for a while, until the studio caught them, they had all the episodes as really crappy-quality WMVs (they were like, 20 Mb each for a whole episode!).
Besides Stargate, the other thing I was significantly fannish about at the time was various anime -- my friends in college had introduced me to Ranma 1/2, and my current roommate had a friend who had a ton of anime on VHS tapes. It was anime that had gotten me started on poking around online fandom and fanfic, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even thought about looking for that sort of thing for Stargate .. but with Stargate it really took off -- I believe that I read every gen fic on Heliopolis, although in 1998 it really wasn't *that* big.
I was all about the Jack and Daniel; I liked the rest of the cast fine, and I enjoyed team fic, but it was Jack and Daniel h/c that I was really after. I first discovered slash in SG-1 fandom, and I was completely freaked out by it -- it doesn't help that the first slash story I ever tried to read was a Teal'c/Daniel in which the symbiote gets involved; I think it would creep me out NOW!
I kept watching SG-1 through getting married and moving across the country, but I was falling out of fannish love with it, as other, shinier things took more of my interest. I've always been sort of a fannish butterfly -- in fact, my involvement with SGA fandom is probably the longest that I've been actively fannish about something since I was a teenager. I still remember, vividly, the last SG-1 fanfic I ever read, the one which not only burned me on SG-1 fanfic but on fanfic in general for awhile. It was a Daniel-whumper, and it was one of the ones where the hurt and comfort and more hurt and more comfort just drags on and on and on and ON with no end in sight. I'd already lost a lot of my fannish interest in the show, and I reached the point on that fanfic where I sat up in my chair thinking, "There is no POINT to this." I think that was the first time I ever realized that what gets me with h/c is the push-pull of never quite going there -- like with many people's approach to romance in TV and movies, if you actually get the resolution to it, then it's no fun anymore. This fanfic was like that for me, and it made me realize that to some extent, ALL fanfic is like that ... you can write whatever you want, push the characters whereever you want them to go, so what's the point?
I was losing interest not only in SG-1 but in online SG-1 fandom. This was around the season 4/5 area, and it was a nasty vicious time for the fandom -- ship wars galore, and het/slash wars, and massive amounts of fannish resentment of TPTB. At this point in the series, there was a significant segment of the fandom that believed TPTB had "distanced" Jack and Daniel in season 4 as a direct reaction to slash, cutting back on their interaction to avoid giving the slashers fodder. The gen people were pissed off about that and blamed the slashers for it. Meanwhile, Michael Shanks was unhappy with the way his role on the show was shaping up, and he wanted to leave -- so not only was the fandom unhappy, but the behind-the-scenes on the show was unhappy too!
I quit watching the show after Daniel died. I watched sporadic episodes in Season 6, but I really didn't care about it anymore.
When SGA premiered, I had just moved again, and I was living alone for the time being since my husband was still finishing up his degree in the state we'd left. Even though I still didn't have any interest in getting back into SG-1, I was vaguely curious about the new spin-off (actually, my thoughts were more like, "I wonder how much this is going to suck?") and I asked a friend who had the Sci-Fi Channel to tape it for me.
So I watched Rising and didn't like it. The only character who interested me at all was McKay, and I found him sort of annoying. Oh well. Move on.
Couple of years later, I was back to being actively fannish online -- which is sort of cyclical with me. I had started thefriendshipper LJ so that I had a place to be fannish; I just didn't really have a fandom. I'd gotten back into "Forever Knight" for awhile (a fling from my teenage years), re-watched the series on DVD and read all the fic I could find, and I was looking for something new. At the moment, I was doing this by downloading vids for shows I was curious about, because I wasn't just looking for something to watch; I wanted something to fan on. This is how I found derry667's vid page and watched her Sheppard & McKay fanvids. And oh, I LOVED them! Between the bouncy, happy vids and the talking clips at the beginnings of the boys mouthing off to each other, it looked like I might've dismissed the show too early. And I had just seen the first season at Blockbuster, so I bounced off to rent it.
Rented out.
Dammit.
We rented "Dead Like Me" instead (very good show, but I *wanted* SGA!). In the meantime, I poked around for fic to see what the fic was like, and stumbled upon Tipper's Failure to Communicate. Well, that did it. I was head-over-heels with fan-love at the very idea of this show -- if it was anything like the fic, I wanted it bad! We finally got our hands on the first disc of Season 1, and while the premiere still didn't do much for me, "Hide & Seek" and "38 Minutes" did it. I was gone.
And that's the point where I met most of the rest of you ... *g*
What are your stories?
abyssinia4077's LJ -- and it ended up being horribly long; I didn't mean to spam her LJ quite as badly as I did! But I figured I'd post it here as well -- I don't know if this will be of interest to anyone but me, but I've never sat down and really thought about the chain of events that got me here.I watched the original Stargate movie when it came out, when I was in high school. I found it horribly disappointing for a very specific reason. Back then, even though it would still be years before I discovered fanfic and fandom, I was just the same h/c "friendshipper" that I am now, with a particular fondness for May-December friendships. Jack and Daniel had all the potential to be exactly the sort of friends that I adore, but in the movie, they just never connected -- I remember being especially frustrated with the climactic scene where Sha're dies and Daniel brings her back, because I wanted that to be Daniel and I wanted it to be O'Neill bringing him back; the parallel between Daniel and O'Neill's dead son was so very, very close to being there, but the movie just didn't go that way. Oh well...
Then I went off to college, and didn't have a TV for awhile, but around the time I got out of college, I started seeing promos for the Stargate show. My memories of the movie weren't warm and fuzzy, but on the flip side, I used to have a massive, MASSIVE crush on Richard Dean Anderson in MacGyver -- my first and biggest fan crush, in fact. In the late 80s/early 90s, I taped every episode I could (and wore out the tapes watching them), joined fan clubs, wrote fan letters to him (augh, so embarrassing!) and pretty much behaved exactly as every pubescent girl does with her big fan-crushes.
I was over the crush for the most part, but I still wanted to see what he was like as a different character. But since I wasn't that interested in the show, I poked around online for awhile and found some episode transcripts and clips. (Which I downloaded over dial-up! The pain!) This was about the time that the show was in the middle of season 2.
After finding bits from "Serpent's Lair" and "Need" and "Fire & Water" (the one where Daniel is presumed dead?), I was in fangirl HEAVEN. It looked to me like the show had done exactly what I had been so bitterly disappointed that the movie hadn't done, and taken the Jack and Daniel friendship right where I wanted it to go. I watched all the episodes I could get in syndication on my crappy, tiny little TV in the apartment I shared with my roommate, and the others I found on a website which might have been the precursor to Gateworld -- I remember that for a while, until the studio caught them, they had all the episodes as really crappy-quality WMVs (they were like, 20 Mb each for a whole episode!).
Besides Stargate, the other thing I was significantly fannish about at the time was various anime -- my friends in college had introduced me to Ranma 1/2, and my current roommate had a friend who had a ton of anime on VHS tapes. It was anime that had gotten me started on poking around online fandom and fanfic, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even thought about looking for that sort of thing for Stargate .. but with Stargate it really took off -- I believe that I read every gen fic on Heliopolis, although in 1998 it really wasn't *that* big.
I was all about the Jack and Daniel; I liked the rest of the cast fine, and I enjoyed team fic, but it was Jack and Daniel h/c that I was really after. I first discovered slash in SG-1 fandom, and I was completely freaked out by it -- it doesn't help that the first slash story I ever tried to read was a Teal'c/Daniel in which the symbiote gets involved; I think it would creep me out NOW!
I kept watching SG-1 through getting married and moving across the country, but I was falling out of fannish love with it, as other, shinier things took more of my interest. I've always been sort of a fannish butterfly -- in fact, my involvement with SGA fandom is probably the longest that I've been actively fannish about something since I was a teenager. I still remember, vividly, the last SG-1 fanfic I ever read, the one which not only burned me on SG-1 fanfic but on fanfic in general for awhile. It was a Daniel-whumper, and it was one of the ones where the hurt and comfort and more hurt and more comfort just drags on and on and on and ON with no end in sight. I'd already lost a lot of my fannish interest in the show, and I reached the point on that fanfic where I sat up in my chair thinking, "There is no POINT to this." I think that was the first time I ever realized that what gets me with h/c is the push-pull of never quite going there -- like with many people's approach to romance in TV and movies, if you actually get the resolution to it, then it's no fun anymore. This fanfic was like that for me, and it made me realize that to some extent, ALL fanfic is like that ... you can write whatever you want, push the characters whereever you want them to go, so what's the point?
I was losing interest not only in SG-1 but in online SG-1 fandom. This was around the season 4/5 area, and it was a nasty vicious time for the fandom -- ship wars galore, and het/slash wars, and massive amounts of fannish resentment of TPTB. At this point in the series, there was a significant segment of the fandom that believed TPTB had "distanced" Jack and Daniel in season 4 as a direct reaction to slash, cutting back on their interaction to avoid giving the slashers fodder. The gen people were pissed off about that and blamed the slashers for it. Meanwhile, Michael Shanks was unhappy with the way his role on the show was shaping up, and he wanted to leave -- so not only was the fandom unhappy, but the behind-the-scenes on the show was unhappy too!
I quit watching the show after Daniel died. I watched sporadic episodes in Season 6, but I really didn't care about it anymore.
When SGA premiered, I had just moved again, and I was living alone for the time being since my husband was still finishing up his degree in the state we'd left. Even though I still didn't have any interest in getting back into SG-1, I was vaguely curious about the new spin-off (actually, my thoughts were more like, "I wonder how much this is going to suck?") and I asked a friend who had the Sci-Fi Channel to tape it for me.
So I watched Rising and didn't like it. The only character who interested me at all was McKay, and I found him sort of annoying. Oh well. Move on.
Couple of years later, I was back to being actively fannish online -- which is sort of cyclical with me. I had started the
friendshipper LJ so that I had a place to be fannish; I just didn't really have a fandom. I'd gotten back into "Forever Knight" for awhile (a fling from my teenage years), re-watched the series on DVD and read all the fic I could find, and I was looking for something new. At the moment, I was doing this by downloading vids for shows I was curious about, because I wasn't just looking for something to watch; I wanted something to fan on. This is how I found derry667's vid page and watched her Sheppard & McKay fanvids. And oh, I LOVED them! Between the bouncy, happy vids and the talking clips at the beginnings of the boys mouthing off to each other, it looked like I might've dismissed the show too early. And I had just seen the first season at Blockbuster, so I bounced off to rent it.Rented out.
Dammit.
We rented "Dead Like Me" instead (very good show, but I *wanted* SGA!). In the meantime, I poked around for fic to see what the fic was like, and stumbled upon Tipper's Failure to Communicate. Well, that did it. I was head-over-heels with fan-love at the very idea of this show -- if it was anything like the fic, I wanted it bad! We finally got our hands on the first disc of Season 1, and while the premiere still didn't do much for me, "Hide & Seek" and "38 Minutes" did it. I was gone.
And that's the point where I met most of the rest of you ... *g*
What are your stories?
no subject
Well, I might stay in this one for awhile! So far, SGA has done a really amazing job of hitting all my fannish sweet spots. I love the show, love the characters, love the fic, and the fans are really awesome too! This is probably the most socially engaged that I've ever been in fandom; previously, my social interaction was mainly on message boards or mailing lists devoted to a specific show, and I was really more of a lurker than a participant. There are only a couple of people that I'm still in touch with from my earlier fandoms. This time around, I suspect that I've made friends I will probably stay in touch with even after I leave the fandom.
It's telling that I've probably written at least twice as much fic for SGA as in all of my previous fandoms combined! Prior to this, I'd written exactly two really long (~100,000 word) stories in two different fandoms. I'm well beyond that for SGA! In fact I'm starting to need a better organization for my fic page because there are so many stories on it! I just can't seem to get tired of writing in this universe; if the characters fail to hold my interest, or if the show covers territory that I would have covered in fic (honestly, what's left to do with Sheppard and McKay at this point?), then the universe itself is so fascinating that I can wander off to explore one of the alien cultures instead. This may, of course, change in the future, but right now I can't see myself getting tired of it unless I need to put a damper on the fic in order to work on my original stories.
no subject
I admit, the reason I was able to stay in M7 for *so long* is that there were seven main characters and a couple of minor characters who were all wonderful! There was really only one that I didn't care to write for, but you could spend a fic on each character, then write six more fics on the other characters interactions with that character, then write stories that were "Team" oriented...seriously, it was a bonanza. It's hard to get bored with that much potential character interaction to write.
And, I think, for me, that's why SGA has clicked for me too. Since, like you, I pretty much love everyone. Sure, McKay and Sheppard are my favorites (all my season one stories were pretty much just them), but I love Teyla and Ronon eps too, and I'm guessing I'm going to love Keller eps now (you were so *right* about that). So, at the very least, that's five people to explore and grow and have interact! Moreover, as you say, you can create the universe! Places, people, cultures...I've never had this much creative freedom with respect to setting. Do I want a desert? How about a water planet? Or a jungle! Or a ruined city! Or the middle of deep space...When NT asks me to challenge her, I try to make her write a setting she has never done before (industrial city, space station, etc). She has to write a New England forest next (in the fall), meaning it has to be *dry* and colorful. All her forests are wet and green. Pacific Northwest for ya. LOL!
So, I figure, until I get tired of coming up with new settings, I'll probably be here for a long time.