I agree with everything you say here - I think it mostly is unconscious racism, just as you say, a conflation of "non-white" with "exotic/foreign/alien" that means TPTB always are casting non-whites as aliens, combined with the writers' complete inability to write other cultures (either real or invented) and characters from other cultures, with any sort of depth. (And they also have trouble writing women, so Teyla gets doubly shafted. Though I still like how her pregnancy arc worked out - of everything in SGA, that is the one thing that I will actually argue the show did well, better than most of the rest of the genre. I wish we'd gotten more of it and her this season, but at least they didn't do anything to spoil what they did do.)
That being said - I do think it's unfair to hold fandom accountable for those flaws in canon. Fandom does work sometimes to mitigate flaws in the original text, but that is not fandom's duty, and when John & Rodney have gotten the most screentime and character development, you can't be upset with the majority of fandom latching on to them as their favorite characters, and caring about them more than other characters. I have nothing but sympathy for those fans who do love Ronon or Teyla best and have been shafted by the show/this season, and I totally agree they have reason to be disappointed. But their disappointment is the show creators' responsibility, not fandom's.
--Erm, sorry. I'm not responding to you specifically here, but more a general trend I've seen in several different spots around the fandom that you just happened to articulate at a point I had the time to rant. To clarify, I'm not saying you should just shut up and enjoy the show for all its very questionable trends; you're totally justified in that, and talking about it, too; I think these things are important to bring up.
But I get a little tweaked by the suggestion that to fan on a series with such trends is to condone them, or that to like or dislike one character over another is to be inherently racist or sexist. A McShep fan excited about the John & Rodney interaction in "Vegas" does not mean that the fan was excited Ronon & Teyla were absent; more likely the fan was disappointed in that absence, but still was given something they wanted. A Ronon or Teyla fan is totally justified to be disappointed because they did not get what they wanted (and to be disappointed to be in a minority, because that's always frustrating), but to hold fandom responsible for not liking Ronon or Teyla as much as they do, rather than blaming TPTB who didn't try hard enough to make them more appealing to more fans - it's putting the blame in the wrong place. It's like blaming gen fans for liking gen instead of shipping, or for blaming a heterosexual woman for finding men more attractive than women.
--And to a certain extent, this applies to the show writers as well, because they're just writing what they want/know how to write; however I do think they have a greater responsibility, because they're writing to a larger audience (rather than the very specific audiences most fanfic is intended for) and television has more cultural impact...and it was their responsibility to hire more diverse actors, and if they didn't know how to write women or non-whites, to bring in women writers, or non-white writers; to deliberately diversify. We fans don't have that option - we're reactive, not productive, for all our fic and such; it's *hard* to get a lot of non-white fans into genre scifi, because the canons themselves are so marginalizing.
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That being said - I do think it's unfair to hold fandom accountable for those flaws in canon. Fandom does work sometimes to mitigate flaws in the original text, but that is not fandom's duty, and when John & Rodney have gotten the most screentime and character development, you can't be upset with the majority of fandom latching on to them as their favorite characters, and caring about them more than other characters. I have nothing but sympathy for those fans who do love Ronon or Teyla best and have been shafted by the show/this season, and I totally agree they have reason to be disappointed. But their disappointment is the show creators' responsibility, not fandom's.
--Erm, sorry. I'm not responding to you specifically here, but more a general trend I've seen in several different spots around the fandom that you just happened to articulate at a point I had the time to rant. To clarify, I'm not saying you should just shut up and enjoy the show for all its very questionable trends; you're totally justified in that, and talking about it, too; I think these things are important to bring up.
But I get a little tweaked by the suggestion that to fan on a series with such trends is to condone them, or that to like or dislike one character over another is to be inherently racist or sexist. A McShep fan excited about the John & Rodney interaction in "Vegas" does not mean that the fan was excited Ronon & Teyla were absent; more likely the fan was disappointed in that absence, but still was given something they wanted. A Ronon or Teyla fan is totally justified to be disappointed because they did not get what they wanted (and to be disappointed to be in a minority, because that's always frustrating), but to hold fandom responsible for not liking Ronon or Teyla as much as they do, rather than blaming TPTB who didn't try hard enough to make them more appealing to more fans - it's putting the blame in the wrong place. It's like blaming gen fans for liking gen instead of shipping, or for blaming a heterosexual woman for finding men more attractive than women.
--And to a certain extent, this applies to the show writers as well, because they're just writing what they want/know how to write; however I do think they have a greater responsibility, because they're writing to a larger audience (rather than the very specific audiences most fanfic is intended for) and television has more cultural impact...and it was their responsibility to hire more diverse actors, and if they didn't know how to write women or non-whites, to bring in women writers, or non-white writers; to deliberately diversify. We fans don't have that option - we're reactive, not productive, for all our fic and such; it's *hard* to get a lot of non-white fans into genre scifi, because the canons themselves are so marginalizing.
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