My personal SGA canon.
Nov. 1st, 2007 01:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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graycastle started it. Potentially more to follow later, but these were the things that occurred to me right off the top of my head. If you've read my stories, you can plug all of this into the background of any one of them (with the exception of Unidentified, though #1 and #3 still hold there) and not be wrong.
1. Rodney's attracted to both men and women, and he's been involved with them in fairly different ways.
1.a. His relationships with women have involved long and awkward courtships, where he tried to balance his urge to just push things straight through to whatever it is he wanted from them (sex, companionship, a stable care-taking semi-domestic-yet-independent relationship of the kind that popular culture really insisted was supposed to happen to you sometime in your late twenties or early thirties, provided you were intelligent and moderately eligible -- it varied from woman to woman and at different points in his life) against his really crude understanding of the social script for initiating sexual/romantic interactions. The results varied greatly -- he's had salads thrown on him half an hour into date #2, threats of restraining orders, tepid three month coupledoms where the thrill was never in the building to begin with, knock-down drag-out breakup fights exploding out of nowhere after eight months of something he thought had been going fantastically, and hints about prenuptuals and taste in home furnishings that were dropped on him with increasing force until he belatedly got a clue and flailed madly for the hills.
1.a.i. Honestly, his thing with Katie Brown is the best he's managed yet, and it genuinely is pretty good. She does get him, and she knows that he really wants to get her.
1.b. His involvements with men, on the other hand, have all been unpremeditated on his part. I think a lot of them happen when he somehow ends up getting a beer or dinner with some guy he knows vaguely -- distant coworker, fellow student, someone in another department. The conversation's surprisingly good, and they're talking, and then they're leaving the restaurant or bar and still talking as they walk, and then the walk ends up at someone's front door, and then things quiet and off-kilter for a second as Rodney suddenly gets the sense that there's something happening that he's totally missing, and then all of a sudden they're inside and whoa, hands under his shirt and kissing and someone's thigh pressed up against his dick. He's had a couple one-night stands, but more often things go on for a month, maybe a little more, of sex occurring on a variable but semi-frequent basis. A lot of the time, he actually does like the guys, but the whole thing is like living in the haze right after you abruptly walk into a tree branch or a door frame -- did that just happen? -- and he can't figure out what to do or if he's supposed to do anything at all. He doesn't have a script. When the sex stops happening (and that's how Rodney knows it's ended, the sex stops happening), he's sometimes regretful but mostly still just totally confused.
2. John's also been involved with both men and women--
2.a. --but with a few exceptions, women don't really light his fuse. To borrow Margaret Cho's hilarious sexual-preference-as-restaurant-dining metaphor, if John's dinner shows up and it's not what he ordered, he's not the kind of guy who'll make a fuss and send it back just because there was something else he'd rather be eating, because hey, food is food, and this still tastes pretty good. He's been pursued by women, and flirted his way into accidental pursuit, and both roads usually ended up with him going along for the ride as his unfortunate girlfriend got increasingly frustrated and confused and eventually irate. He's almost never the one to actually break things off, mostly because if he rides it out long enough either she'll do that for him or he'll get deployed again.
2.a.i. There have been some women who did do it for John -- they're mostly cocky, wry, a little competitive, and perfectly ready to go round-for-round with him, fight dirty and laugh hard when he goes down, and then buy him beers afterwards while they mock him gently for complaining about his black eye and bruised hip. His involvements with them tend to be one-night-stands or longstanding friendships with a shorter, scorchingly hot section of no more than two or three months where they're pretty much hurling each other down onto the nearest flat surface (vertical or horizontal) at any opportunity. These women never become John's girlfriends, mostly because they're all savvy enough to suss out that women don't generally light John's fuse.
2.b. His involvements with men have been greatly varied (in terms of length, casual vs. serious, purely sexual vs. messy and emotional vs. fueled off unfulfilled lust). Anything longer than a one-night stand usually turns out complicated, because there's nothing about being a career combat pilot under U.S. military codes that would simplify things.
3. John is as emotionally retarded as Rodney is, just in a different way. Rodney wants many things to distraction, and he tends to beeline for the cookie jar and at best manage a not-at-all subtle redirect to smotheringly close orbit at the last second. John wants things with great intensity, but most of the time he can't even name what it is he wants, let alone break through his own imposed rules enough to go for it.
4. The team has frequent movie nights, probably once a week or close to it. Early on, John managed to insinuate a run of his favorites and, to Rodney's total disgust, twisted Ronon and Teyla's developing tastes towards horror classics and action/adventure flicks with infuriatingly awful science made between the years of 1977 and 1993. Both John and Rodney have learned to steer away from fantasy adventures (Wizard of Oz, The Princess Bride, Princess Mononoke) because it turns out that anyone's fairytales are disturbing and trippy when viewed by someone from another culture. Also, rapid-fire pop culture references and long, philosophical/metaphorical dialogue sections tend to be impenetrable.
4.a. Predictably, though, all four of them love Firefly and enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica, though watching episodes of either tends to lead to long arguments where they start comparing each other to various characters.
4.a.i. I started to summarize and then realized I'm better off just writing the actual arguments someday. Suffice it to say that John is extremely annoyed when the other three start mockingly calling him Starbuck (because he really does think he's Mal), Ronon just stares at Rodney until he starts backpedalling on comparing him to Jayne, and everyone agrees that Teyla is totally Zoe but the implications of that make everyone queasy when discussion turns to whether Rodney is more Simon or Wash, until John saves the day by raising an eyebrow and pointing out that actually, he's really sort of Gaius.
4.a.ii. Inevitably, these arguments are settled when one interlocutor manages to prod, poke, thwap, elbow, or smack the other(s) into submission. There's a strict ban on throwing snacks, because they all know the value of popcorn and also, Rodney will get extremely pissy.
What's your canon?
graycastle started it. Potentially more to follow later, but these were the things that occurred to me right off the top of my head. If you've read my stories, you can plug all of this into the background of any one of them (with the exception of Unidentified, though #1 and #3 still hold there) and not be wrong.1. Rodney's attracted to both men and women, and he's been involved with them in fairly different ways.
1.a. His relationships with women have involved long and awkward courtships, where he tried to balance his urge to just push things straight through to whatever it is he wanted from them (sex, companionship, a stable care-taking semi-domestic-yet-independent relationship of the kind that popular culture really insisted was supposed to happen to you sometime in your late twenties or early thirties, provided you were intelligent and moderately eligible -- it varied from woman to woman and at different points in his life) against his really crude understanding of the social script for initiating sexual/romantic interactions. The results varied greatly -- he's had salads thrown on him half an hour into date #2, threats of restraining orders, tepid three month coupledoms where the thrill was never in the building to begin with, knock-down drag-out breakup fights exploding out of nowhere after eight months of something he thought had been going fantastically, and hints about prenuptuals and taste in home furnishings that were dropped on him with increasing force until he belatedly got a clue and flailed madly for the hills.
1.a.i. Honestly, his thing with Katie Brown is the best he's managed yet, and it genuinely is pretty good. She does get him, and she knows that he really wants to get her.
1.b. His involvements with men, on the other hand, have all been unpremeditated on his part. I think a lot of them happen when he somehow ends up getting a beer or dinner with some guy he knows vaguely -- distant coworker, fellow student, someone in another department. The conversation's surprisingly good, and they're talking, and then they're leaving the restaurant or bar and still talking as they walk, and then the walk ends up at someone's front door, and then things quiet and off-kilter for a second as Rodney suddenly gets the sense that there's something happening that he's totally missing, and then all of a sudden they're inside and whoa, hands under his shirt and kissing and someone's thigh pressed up against his dick. He's had a couple one-night stands, but more often things go on for a month, maybe a little more, of sex occurring on a variable but semi-frequent basis. A lot of the time, he actually does like the guys, but the whole thing is like living in the haze right after you abruptly walk into a tree branch or a door frame -- did that just happen? -- and he can't figure out what to do or if he's supposed to do anything at all. He doesn't have a script. When the sex stops happening (and that's how Rodney knows it's ended, the sex stops happening), he's sometimes regretful but mostly still just totally confused.
2. John's also been involved with both men and women--
2.a. --but with a few exceptions, women don't really light his fuse. To borrow Margaret Cho's hilarious sexual-preference-as-restaurant-dining metaphor, if John's dinner shows up and it's not what he ordered, he's not the kind of guy who'll make a fuss and send it back just because there was something else he'd rather be eating, because hey, food is food, and this still tastes pretty good. He's been pursued by women, and flirted his way into accidental pursuit, and both roads usually ended up with him going along for the ride as his unfortunate girlfriend got increasingly frustrated and confused and eventually irate. He's almost never the one to actually break things off, mostly because if he rides it out long enough either she'll do that for him or he'll get deployed again.
2.a.i. There have been some women who did do it for John -- they're mostly cocky, wry, a little competitive, and perfectly ready to go round-for-round with him, fight dirty and laugh hard when he goes down, and then buy him beers afterwards while they mock him gently for complaining about his black eye and bruised hip. His involvements with them tend to be one-night-stands or longstanding friendships with a shorter, scorchingly hot section of no more than two or three months where they're pretty much hurling each other down onto the nearest flat surface (vertical or horizontal) at any opportunity. These women never become John's girlfriends, mostly because they're all savvy enough to suss out that women don't generally light John's fuse.
2.b. His involvements with men have been greatly varied (in terms of length, casual vs. serious, purely sexual vs. messy and emotional vs. fueled off unfulfilled lust). Anything longer than a one-night stand usually turns out complicated, because there's nothing about being a career combat pilot under U.S. military codes that would simplify things.
3. John is as emotionally retarded as Rodney is, just in a different way. Rodney wants many things to distraction, and he tends to beeline for the cookie jar and at best manage a not-at-all subtle redirect to smotheringly close orbit at the last second. John wants things with great intensity, but most of the time he can't even name what it is he wants, let alone break through his own imposed rules enough to go for it.
4. The team has frequent movie nights, probably once a week or close to it. Early on, John managed to insinuate a run of his favorites and, to Rodney's total disgust, twisted Ronon and Teyla's developing tastes towards horror classics and action/adventure flicks with infuriatingly awful science made between the years of 1977 and 1993. Both John and Rodney have learned to steer away from fantasy adventures (Wizard of Oz, The Princess Bride, Princess Mononoke) because it turns out that anyone's fairytales are disturbing and trippy when viewed by someone from another culture. Also, rapid-fire pop culture references and long, philosophical/metaphorical dialogue sections tend to be impenetrable.
4.a. Predictably, though, all four of them love Firefly and enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica, though watching episodes of either tends to lead to long arguments where they start comparing each other to various characters.
4.a.i. I started to summarize and then realized I'm better off just writing the actual arguments someday. Suffice it to say that John is extremely annoyed when the other three start mockingly calling him Starbuck (because he really does think he's Mal), Ronon just stares at Rodney until he starts backpedalling on comparing him to Jayne, and everyone agrees that Teyla is totally Zoe but the implications of that make everyone queasy when discussion turns to whether Rodney is more Simon or Wash, until John saves the day by raising an eyebrow and pointing out that actually, he's really sort of Gaius.
4.a.ii. Inevitably, these arguments are settled when one interlocutor manages to prod, poke, thwap, elbow, or smack the other(s) into submission. There's a strict ban on throwing snacks, because they all know the value of popcorn and also, Rodney will get extremely pissy.
What's your canon?