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Alaska, she is cold
50 below zero in Fairbanks this morning, and supposed to stay that way all week. Killer weather. We put a heat lamp in the chickens' coop; we'd had a hundred-watt light bulb in there for extra heat, but it wasn't really enough for this kind of cold. They were getting sluggish and unhappy. Poor tropical jungle fowl.
The ice fog has really socked in, too. ... for those who aren't familiar with it, when it gets this cold, the moisture in the air freezes into a dense fog of ice crystals. It's much worse in town, with all the ambient moisture from cars and houses and so forth, than out in the intensely dry valley where we live, but even we have a smoggy drift of it. In town it's pea-soup-thick, "can't see the taillights in front of you" fog. Going to work on Friday was a miserable experience. Right now I'm only working two days a week, and my university-employed husband is off until the students come back, so neither of us has to be anywhere until Thursday and we don't plan on attempting it. This is "hunker down and stay warm" weather.
I've been thinking about doing a "year in review" fic post, because I'm enjoying going around and reading other people's, but I'm just not really motivated to. I am bitter, bitter towards the show at the moment *g*, and I really don't want to dwell on having lavished love on it last year.
Edit: Massive "Vegas" spoilers in the comments.
The ice fog has really socked in, too. ... for those who aren't familiar with it, when it gets this cold, the moisture in the air freezes into a dense fog of ice crystals. It's much worse in town, with all the ambient moisture from cars and houses and so forth, than out in the intensely dry valley where we live, but even we have a smoggy drift of it. In town it's pea-soup-thick, "can't see the taillights in front of you" fog. Going to work on Friday was a miserable experience. Right now I'm only working two days a week, and my university-employed husband is off until the students come back, so neither of us has to be anywhere until Thursday and we don't plan on attempting it. This is "hunker down and stay warm" weather.
I've been thinking about doing a "year in review" fic post, because I'm enjoying going around and reading other people's, but I'm just not really motivated to. I am bitter, bitter towards the show at the moment *g*, and I really don't want to dwell on having lavished love on it last year.
Edit: Massive "Vegas" spoilers in the comments.
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You have an excellent point that most ensemble shows aren't equally balanced between *all* of the leads. There are usually a couple of characters who are more 'main' than everyone else.
But it's not hard to find shows that do the ensemble thing better than SGA does. There's SG1 -- while Teal'c tended to often get the short end of the stick story-wise, all four of the leads usually got at least one good, solid spotlight episode per season, and a decent amount of face-time in an average episode. There's NCIS -- I can't remember if you watch that one, but while Gibbs and Tony are by far the leads and get most of the A-plots, there is usually a spotlight episode for each of the other characters each season, and I don't think there are *ever* any episodes in which the less-main characters either don't appear or don't have anything active to do in the plot. Lost had at least a couple of seasons in which it did a fantastic job of rotating the spotlight through a very large (and multiracial) cast.
SGA started out fairly strong (if kind of flawed in their character concepts), then totally pushed Ford, Teyla and, to a lesser extent, Ronon aside in seasons two and three, and has never really recovered from that, though they've done a better job over the last couple of seasons. There are a bunch of episodes in which Teyla and/or Ronon either don't appear or only act as a foil -- standing around in the background and occasionally giving John and/or Rodney someone to bounce conversation off of. The fact that, due to TPTB's casting choices, these are the only two regular characters of color on the show makes this even more uncomfortable.
Kind of like with SPN's race and gender issues, I totally scoffed at the whole idea the first time I ran across a post complaining of Teyla and Ronon's lack of face-time in season three. But the more of the show I watch, and the more I think about it, the more I'm seeing ample justification for the complaints. Teyla and Ronon really *do* get regularly pushed aside, given nothing to do but mouth platitudes and point weapons, given much less development than most of the other characters. I think Woolsey got more development in the first couple of episodes than Ronon did in his first two seasons.
I don't think this is due to any sort of deliberate racism on the part of TPTB. But I *absolutely* think it stems from a creatively lethal combination of a) having subconsciously racialized ideas of what sorts of roles are appropriate for people of certain appearance, and b) having a much easier time writing nuanced plots and dialogue for certain kinds of characters as opposed to others. It's not as if TPTB sit around thinking, "Ronon's a big dark-skinned guy, we can't write him as a three-dimensional character!" but the end result is much the same if they always think of dark-skinned actors when they cast "brawn" and if they can't seem to write anything but cliches for "brawn" characters.
It's pretty clear after five years that TPTB are really *not* good at writing nuanced character development for non-Earth "aliens". They are not good at giving these characters technological skills, which is a must in order to play an active role in the mostly-technological plots that they tend to write. And then they concentrate actors of color in these roles, perhaps because dark-skinned, somewhat ethnically ambiguous actors look "exotic" to them. The result is that these characters stand around with nothing much to do a lot of the time. And they don't seem to be good at all at casting black/Asian/etc. actors in the roles of scientists, politicians and doctors (with one of the rare counter-examples being the Chinese IOA diplomat who sparred with Woolsey; I liked seeing her). So you have white actors heavily concentrated in those roles -- and then you get episodes like "Vegas", where excluding the Pegasus cast means that suddenly the show is entirely composed of white characters.
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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.
Comment limits ARGGGH!
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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.
Nnnnnnn ... I will agree with you on this up to a point. I *do* think that the more developed characters, and the ones with more screentime, get more fic and more fan-love in general, though it's far from the only factor that goes into the equation (we've discussed Psych and the weirdly skewed proportion of Shawn/Gus to Shawn/Lassiter fic, haven't we?). And I do think that a fangirl is entitled to whatever makes her squee, without having others expect her to justify it.
But you *can't* completely divorce your fannishness from your social responsibilities as a human being. You just can't. You're entitled to what you like, but not to enjoy it without having at least some awareness of how it fits into a larger context. (Well, okay, sure you can -- but not any more than, say, your behavior at work or anything else ... it's not as if fannishness has some kind of special dispensation.) I don't blame anyone in fandom for latching onto John and Rodney as their objects of squee, but if it goes along with marginalizing and/or belittling fans of other pairings, I think it's totally justified to critize that.
And I think what's happened to me is that I've been finding it harder and harder to divorce my fan-self from my social conscience. I don't think that's a bad thing. For a while, I was really loving the fact that SGA fandom was, generally, coinciding with the characters and tropes that I most enjoyed reading about. But the more that I've been dealing with my own social privilege issues, the less I've really had in common with mainstream SGA fandom and its concerns ... and it shows, I guess, in what I'm comfortable writing and reading, 'till it's gotten to the point where I just can't see much to like in the show anymore.
it's *hard* to get a lot of non-white fans into genre scifi, because the canons themselves are so marginalizing.
... You know, I don't think this is particularly true. I guess it depends on what you mean by "a lot". I mean, yes, it *is* a barrier and my discussions with people have confirmed this, but I know quite a few genre fans of color. I don't doubt that it's much harder to be a genre fan who isn't white, because genre TV really *sucks* at race and so, quite often, do SF fans themselves, but it's not as if there are no SF fans who aren't white -- not at all. It's more like TPTB have a false perception that their audiences are overwhelmingly white and the white audience wouldn't sympathize with non-white characters, which is NOT TRUE. At the risk of making a spurious comparison, it's vaguely similar to saying that genre audiences are overwhelmingly male and women wouldn't be interested in SF because there are no decent female characters for them to sympathize with. It's simultaneously true and yet very, very not-true.
I'm less and less willing to let TPTB off the hook with "they didn't know any better" or "... but they did very well for their time period", because damn it, at some point, that has to stop being good enough ...
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I agree with this, definitely. Especially when it comes to belittling other fans, or deliberate squee-harshing - that is totally uncool and really should be criticized. What's been disturbing me is...hmm, how to explain - when the majority is assumed to be marginalizing the minority, simply by being the majority. It's the difference between (to use a non-racially-charged example) never writing or reading a McKeller fic because you're not into that pairing, and reading a McKeller fic and telling the author they really should be into a different pairing because McKeller's dumb. Both do happen, and the latter is problematic behavior; but the former is just personal taste. And the line is blurry. But there's a difference between not writing Teyla because you're not interested in a woman-of-color; and not writing Teyla because the character as written in the show doesn't interest you. The former is racism/white privilege/what-have-you on the part of the fan; the latter is racial issues on the part of the show.
Which is a major problem, but one pretty much all shows have; the only choice I can see is boycotting almost all TV!
it depends on what you mean by "a lot". I mean, yes, it *is* a barrier and my discussions with people have confirmed this, but I know quite a few genre fans of color.
So do I - but I know a heck of a lot more white fangirls. Though this is partly because fanning is largely a middle-class activity and in most of the Western world the middle-class is white by a great majority, so...(actually in anime fandom there's a lot more Asian-American/Canadian fangirls, but most of those I know aren't actually into that much Western stuff. Of those I know personally I don't think the lack of Asian characters is the reason they're not into Western shows, but maybe it plays a part? Hmm...)
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What's been disturbing me is...hmm, how to explain - when the majority is assumed to be marginalizing the minority, simply by being the majority.
I waffle on this, because *every* fandom (at least every one I've been in) tends to be dominated by a popular pairing or popular character(s), while others get little love. I tend to wander out of fandoms quickly when my favorite character(s) are the ones who are being ignored -- Torchwood, for example, where I'm all about Owen and Tosh, and the fandom is totally about the Ianto/Jack. But I don't feel like the fandom's done me wrong; it's just the luck of the draw, and sometimes you happen to resonate with the popular character or couple, and sometimes you don't.
But fandom also tends to be fairly predictable as far as what pairings and characters are the runaway popular ones, and a lot of it is heavily racialized and imbued with other kinds of badness. Someone awhile back -- I wish I'd mem'd this -- came up with a slightly tongue-in-cheek "point" system for predicting character popularity, where, for example, being black scores negative points, a younger actor scores positive points compared to an older actor ... in other words, a character can, theoretically, be black and wildly popular, but they'd need to have a lot going for them in other areas in order to compensate for the audience-perceived "handicap" of not being white.
Some of it is just poor writing, and can be laid directly at the feet of TPTB. Teyla is definitely a less developed character than Rodney, say, and it's not surprising that the fandom would focus more heavily on the character who's been given much more screentime and storylines. But there are these sweeping patterns that are true from fandom to fandom -- for example,
It's counterproductive to sit around feeling guilty about preferring John/Rodney to John/Ronon or Sam/Jack to Sam/Teal'c. What we respond to, viscerally, is more or less out of our control. But I don't think that followers of the dominant pairing or character(s) seem to realize that it is intimidating to not belong to the dominant branch of the fandom. I'm pretty sure that I can trace my decline in interest in participating in SGA fandom to the reception that my Ronon/Jennifer/Rodney fic got -- my loss of interest in the show is something slightly different, but it was *definitely* a joy-killer to realize that every time I posted a story with a pairing that wasn't John/Rodney, I was either going to have to turn off comments (like I did on the Camelot one) or brace myself to be deluged by disgruntled John/Rodney fans.
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But see, I argue that's misleading - Teal'c and Spock share some traits in common, but not necessarily the ones the fangirls latched onto with Spock. For one, Teal'c didn't have the strong character relationships that Spock did. Spock's best episodes are those he's relating to Kirk and McCoy; Teal'c had a connection to Jack that was largely unexplored (at least in a h/c medium), and nothing really good with Daniel or Carter for seasons. It's not just screentime and storylines that draw in fangirls; it's also what sort of screentime.
It is true that black tends not to be equated with "pretty boy" in many fangirl minds, which is a handicap - though again I'd argue that's a large part the show creators' fault; they tend to cast black actors more as the muscle or the goofy sidekicks and rarely give them the glamor shots.
I do agree that black seems to be a handicapping trait, but I wonder if that's in part due to a lack of black characters truly equivalent to white characters, and thus TV has established a prejudice in fans. For instance, many fangirls are very resistant to new female characters - and while I've seen a lot of arguments as to why, I swear a lot of it is just we have all been burned by badly written, unrealistic, romantic interest female characters on TV, such that many of us expect nothing better
But I don't think that followers of the dominant pairing or character(s) seem to realize that it is intimidating to not belong to the dominant branch of the fandom.
It's definitely intimidating (I've been on that side before), but it's not the fault of the majority as long as their behavior doesn't get out of line. You will get fissured fandoms - slash pairings on one side and het on the other and crossing between the two is tricky - but that's pretty much inevitable in larger fandoms anyway; everyone has to split off into communities or else it's overwhelming. In smaller fandoms there tends to be a lot more crossover. (In One Piece, Zoro/Sanji was the dominant pairing, but I wrote that and every other possible pairing as well as gen, and never got anything but positive response to any of it.)
And shit...I really owe you a huge apology - I was the kill-joy deluge (well, me and Trysting, but mostly me...) We were the ones who responded negatively to the R/J/R story, and I'm so very sorry that response is part of what's driving you from the fandom. Not to mention other arguments...I am so sorry for getting you down, I wish I could make it up to you. I did promise I wouldn't so respond to any of your other stories, and I wouldn't have, so really, you didn't have to turn off comments!
part 2. to the part 1. ARGH!
I definitely agree with this - as I said, I don't want to let TPTB off the hook; I don't think fandom as a whole ought to be turning a blind eye to such concerns. I think it's important to raise them and discuss them.
At the same time - is fanning on a show "letting them off the hook"? Or can one enjoy parts of a show while criticizing others? Is squeeing about certain elements while ignoring other things you don't like tacitly condoning those elements you're ignoring? Maybe it is...I don't know. I didn't like that Ronon & Teyla weren't in "Vegas" but I liked the John & Rodney interaction of the episode. If I squee about the latter, am I condoning the former? I'd hope I wasn't - I want both, really. But maybe I am. (And this gets trickier when you've got such bad writing, when sometimes I'd rather they wouldn't write Ronon at all if they're going to write him as insultingly dumb or barbaric - do we praise them for remembering Ronon exists or criticize for not doing it better?)
For that matter - easy as it is to overlook, John/Rodney in itself is subversive and socially critical; in fandom slash is largely accepted, but in the wider context homophobia is still alive and kicking, and while a lot of slashers are just doing it for the porn, quite a few slash fans are very aware of that social responsibility (and many are part of that minority, getting even less representation on genre TV...)
But the more that I've been dealing with my own social privilege issues, the less I've really had in common with mainstream SGA fandom and its concerns ... and it shows, I guess, in what I'm comfortable writing and reading, 'till it's gotten to the point where I just can't see much to like in the show anymore.
This I completely respect, and there's not much I can say to it. It might be as simply as you've outgrown SGA, and if your tastes have changed, then there's definitely shows out there that handle these things better, if not perfectly. I've been having a similar thing myself, in a different area - I've recently become a lot more sensitive to female characters, and what I want to see in female characters and their relationships, and it's informing what shows I latch on to more than it used to (e.g. when I just watched Merlin, though I enjoyed the wildly obvious Arthur/Merlin stuff, I find myself getting into the Morgana/Gwen subtext just as much or more.) It's not the most important element for me in a show (not yet, anyway) but it's a different perspective for me, so I can understand how a change in your own perspective has made SGA (show or fandom) so unsatisfying.
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A big part of why there is a
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(And at the same time, as a white middle-class Western citizen myself, I feel awkward writing more diverse characters; it's hard to get out from under the shadow of cultural appropriation...I've written anime fic with Japanese casts, but if I were writing original Japanese characters I'd get judged for it.)
(And then, too, the reason the major heroes of SGA are white North American guys is because the intended audience of the show is white North American guys, same as in almost all anime the hero is a black-haired Japanese guy and in Doctor Who the Doctor always has a British accent, and while it's nice to see that status quo shaken up sometimes, one can't really expect it. Which means it sucks to be in a minority demographic with no shows intended for you, but the only real solution to that in a capitalist entertainment economy is to make your own shows...)
And I...uh...have entirely lost my thread here. To be honest I don't think you're out of line for being disappointed with fandom, for wishing fandom might make greater efforts to repair all the troubling things in SGA, it's just...fandom does make some efforts, and I feel that it does improve on the original overall, and I'm more comfortable being angry at TPTB's failings, while appreciating fandom for doing whatever it does to mitigate them.
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Okay, I get that, but at the same time, I don't think it's a good reason not to try. Yes, you will screw up; but at the same time, it's *more* of a screw-up not to try at all. Trust me; I've screwed up massively. But that's not going to stop me writing diversity into my casts. I think that to some extent, my efforts are an apology for when I *haven't* gotten it right -- I feel bad about the times I've messed up, and my reaction to that is to try that much harder the next time around.
Which means it sucks to be in a minority demographic with no shows intended for you, but the only real solution to that in a capitalist entertainment economy is to make your own shows...
So what the hell happened between the 1970s and now? Because one thing I've been struck by, watching shows from the '70s and '80s, is how actively they tried to add diversity to the cast. Yes, it was heavy-handed and clumsy and often badly done, but they were trying their little hearts out. Shouldn't we be doing ever so much better now? And we're not. I think this is where a lot of my recent cynicism stems from, because we really ought to be doing much better than we were in 1990, and while in some ways we are (I think TV is much more casually accepting of female bosses, for example), in other ways we are so thoroughly NOT.
What you say about the unfairness of white-dominated capitalist culture is true (and I don't mean that in an anti-capitalist sort of way, at all), but at the same time this culture wants to sell the idea that we're in a post-racial world where individuals are judged solely on their merits, and there's a rather fundamental conflict there ... I think one of the big problems stems from the idea that we're not supposed to believe that there *is* a disconnect between what the (white, majority-dominated) TPTB are selling and what the (much more diverse) audience wants to buy ...
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Oh, that I feel awkward doesn't stop me from doing it! Primarily because I find all-white single-culture casts hideously boring. (...and to be honest, a little weird these days. Putting aside that half my friends are ESL speakers, I've lived in Japan long enough that I actually find it jarring when I go back Stateside - "Why is everyone here blond?")
And I don't think it should stop anyone else, either, though I do admit to having some sympathy for those shows which do have non-white characters and then get criticized for being overly PC or following stereotypes or whatever...the concerns are legitimate, often enough, but I want to give some credit for trying?
But, yeah. Some trends do seem to have gone backwards and I don't know why, and it's really frustrating. It's just...I don't want to quit fanning on TV just because so many show creators suck. It's not Rodney's fault (or David Hewlett's for that matter) that he's a white man; I don't like the character because he's white, I like the character because he's Rodney, who happens to be white. Ditto Tony DiNozzo, ditto a hundred others - I have precious few black characters on my favorite character list, which totally sucks and irritates me, but it's not because I'm racist; it's because the kind of characters I like are almost never cast as black actors. (Which is one reason I loved Hustle, because Mickey Bricks is totally my type of slick genius!) (For that matter I have few enough favorite female characters, and I have finally realized that no, that's not because I'm misogynist, that's because most female characters in genre fiction do not have those elements that appeal to me. Leaving it up to me to write some women that do - but while lately a lot of my ideas for original fic have centered around female chars, in TV shows I'm still more interested in the male chars who have what I like...)
And I'm losing my point again - I'm not trying to change your mind; I sympathize with your feelings. I don't know how to work this out in my own head or fannish heart, really; what do you do when a show gives you gold in one hand and shit in the other? Refuse it all on principle and hope that someday you'll get offered gold shit-free? Accept what you like and ignore the rest? Take both and spend your energy converting the hated stuff into something good? I really don't know...!
(--I also will confess a weird hope I had when Obama was elected - that if the majority of Americans - white Americans, even - can accept a black man as their representative to the world, then maybe TV and Hollywood could accept a person of color as the hero, as a character that everyone is intended to relate to even if their skin color doesn't match. We'll see, I guess...)
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