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Jennifer Keller: An Apologia
I meant to finish writing this in time for Meta Month of May or my own recent Stargate Extravaganza, but the lethargy of pregnancy got to me. :) Thankfully, newborns don’t do much more than eat, sleep, and poop, so I’ve had plenty of downtime for writing since my younger daughter has been born.
I don’t think it’s a secret that Jennifer Keller and her canonical romantic relationship with Rodney McKay are roundly disliked by a significant portion of SGA fandom. I like her character very much, and I’ve always been puzzled by many of the reasons I’ve seen given for that dislike. Since the Keller antipathy is pretty inextricably tied up with antipathy for the McKeller ship, I want to address a couple of the most commonly given reasons I’ve seen given that Keller is bad for McKay and by extension just bad news in general. I’ll close out with a brief discussion of one aspect of the accusation that Keller is a Mary Sue.
Keller only falls in love with McKay when he’s losing his mind, and that’s icky and weird. His intellect has to disintegrate in order for her to be interested in him romantically.
This one always boggles *my* mind. “Trio” and “The Last Man” pretty explicitly indicate that Keller and McKay are romantically interested in each other a full season before “The Shrine” airs. Keller doesn’t just randomly start expressing an attraction for McKay while he’s drooling down into his space hospital gown; the show has already established a burgeoning attraction between the two of them.
I do think that Keller enjoys the extra attention McKay pays to her in the first stages of the disease, but I don’t think that means she can only love him when he’s a different person. I think it means that she’s excited that someone she’s interested in romantically is reciprocating her feelings. This seems normal to me, yes? One of the things that many people do in the courtship stage of a relationship is work to impress their prospective partners; in fact, a very common complaint after a relationship has finally been started is that once the deal’s been sealed, one or both of the partners stops trying so hard to impress the other because the chase is over. Why shouldn’t Keller respond positively to increased attention from her love interest?
Keller tries to change McKay in ways that make him miserable. She forces him to change his behavior and issues unfair ultimatums, and Sheppard never does that. Keller just doesn’t respect Rodney at all. Asking someone to change in a relationship is a big no-no.
I want to address the last part first. Relationships are transformative. My sixteen year relationship with my husband has made me a different and better person than I was before, and I think that’s true for my husband as well. A relationship is a negotiation, and anyone suggesting that a relationship of True Love means one of zero growth and stasis has a very different idea of what being in a relationship means than I do.
I fully acknowledge that certain kinds of changes cannot and should not be demanded of a romantic partner. I also acknowledge that beginning a relationship with the requirement that someone make fundamental changes to his or her personality is a great way to destroy that relationship and deeply unfair. I don’t see any evidence, though, that Keller is doing either of those things. So let’s break this accusation down a little further.
Does Keller ever demand that McKay change or actually succeed in changing his behavior? This complaint seems to center around one episode, “Brain Storm,” which is the only episode out of many in which Keller appears in which she asks Rodney to behave differently. I suppose it’s fannish nature to extrapolate, but I was shocked when I rewatched all the episodes with her character and realized that this particular criticism is based on a single episode.
In “Brain Storm,” McKay is upset by the lack of respect he gets from his peers, and Keller seems not to understand to begin with just how important that is to him. While at the conference, she says: “Is this what the whole day’s going to be like? Are you going to be in a bad mood?” She wants him to enjoy what he can about the event they’re attending and not focus on the negative.
This reminds me so much of the difference in the way that my husband and I handle issues like this. I get so angry and pissed off and butthurt when I don’t get the respect I deserve or when people who don’t deserve respect get it for dubious reasons; I have an extremely overactive sense of justice that makes it hard to live in the real world sometimes. LOL It galls me when good work isn’t rewarded and bad work is instead. I’ve talked before about how I think the meritocracy of the educational system ill prepares students for the way the world works outside the classroom, and I believe McKay probably falls victim to that false impression. In school, if you work hard enough and you’re an exceptional student, you win! You get the awards and the accolades, and what you’ve done *matters.* It counts. Outside the educational system—not so much (not consistently anyway). It was a bit devastating to realize the paradigm I’d lived in for nearly thirty years as a student does not translate to my career, for example. So I totally understand where McKay is coming from. My husband agrees with me that these injustices suck, but he lets stuff roll off his back. From his perspective, if I’m in a bad mood, I’ve let the assholes win. The assholes will be with us always, so I have to find a way to deal that keeps me mentally healthy. Keller is offering Rodney a more healthy way to deal with his feelings, which is pretty much what I expect out of a partner.
Keller also points out that one possible source of McKay’s anger at his peers might be that he wants them to like him, and they don’t. I think this is a valid suggestion on her part, especially since it doesn’t seem to have occurred to McKay as the root of his dissatisfaction. He’s not just pissed off about the lack of professional respect; I think he also wants some personal respect from these people. McKay canonically demonstrates a lack of self-awareness of the way his behavior is perceived by others (see every interaction with Sam Carter ever). Keller is pointing out an underlying motivation that might help McKay handle the situation better.
Keller is willing to heckle the presentation along with McKay, and she breaks into Dave Foley’s (LOL) office with him (even though she’s clearly uncomfortable with doing so). She’s far from unsupportive of Rodney during this episode, and she never delivers any kind of ultimatum to him here or in any other episode.
At the end of the episode, Keller asks McKay if it really matters that he can’t get recognition for his work, and he says that it does. She offers him a solution—quitting the SGC and working in the private sector so that his work will be unclassified and therefore publishable—and he suggests that he’s been flirting with quitting the SGC for awhile. Unfortunately, the episode ends here before they can talk further, but to me, this is the moment when Keller figures out how important recognition, respect, and competition outside the SGC are to McKay, and I would extrapolate from the episode that going forward, she would keep that in mind. To refer to my own relationship experience again, this past semester, something happened at work that made me feel very slighted. Worrying about it and being angry it about wouldn’t change anything, and yet I couldn’t help myself. My husband would have shrugged the situation off and he urged me to do so, but he also knows me and understands that this emotional reaction is something I couldn’t help. He recognizes how important my professional standing is to me, and he understands that this isn’t a part of me that’s going to change. So he accepts it. Although I am entering the realm of personal head canon here, I can imagine that Keller accepts this aspect of Rodney as well; after all, she already accepts his abrasiveness and his arrogance and his occasional mean-spirited-ness.
How are the few times Keller criticizes him different from Sheppard’s criticisms of McKay? Sheppard corrects McKay’s behavior frequently—brusquely telling McKay not to panic on missions, making fun of him on a regular basis, and frequently engaging in competitive behavior with McKay. In “Brain Storm,” Keller tells Foley and McKay to cut out their arguing in a scene that is very reminiscent of every time Sheppard tells Mckay and Zelenka to do the same. In fact, the relationship dynamic between Keller and McKay is remarkably similar to the one between McKay and Sheppard (especially in contrast to McKay’s relationship with Katie Brown). Keller teases McKay and calls him on his shit and stands up to him much like Sheppard does.
Keller is the worst doctor ever! She should never make light of McKay’s hypochondria.
Keller mentions McKay’s hypochondria to Carter, which I have seen bandied about as evidence that she’s an awful doctor who should be paper-cut to death with copies of a HIPPA agreement. First, the show has already set a precedent with Carson who also alludes to McKay’s hypochondria and much more frequently than Keller does. Secondly, anyone with eyes and ears *knows* that McKay is a hypochondriac as the man is not shy about broadcasting his many and various suspected ailments across Atlantis. McKay’s behavior is ridiculous and eyerolly and out in the open for all to witness. Carter is also the military commander of Atlantis, which means that she gets to know everything about everyone including medical histories. In my understanding of the way that the SGC works, nobody gets doctor-patient confidentiality period because of the potential risks.
Keller is just a Mary Sue. She becomes this badass by the show’s end, and that’s not the way she’s written to start with.
Here’s a description of the way that Keller is portrayed near the beginning of her tenure on the show. To quote myself:
"The Missing" is such a fantastic episode for a lot of reasons but mostly because I love the way Keller's character is portrayed. I love that she's not a badass. I love that she's a competent and gifted doctor and that she possesses the sense of adventure and bravery required to leave her home planet and serve on a dangerous expedition in another galaxy but that those qualities don't translate to badass. We already have so many extraordinarily gifted badasses on the show--Ronon and Teyla and Sheppard (all covered with sexy bruises and knife wounds from which he almost instantly recovers LOL) and even McKay (whose brains are definitely a kind of badassery)--and since a great deal of the expedition is composed of people who are not soldiers and have minimal combat training, it's really nice to have a character with realistic limitations. Jennifer's afraid (OMG, that scene right before they take her out of the cage to be tortured and she starts crying--Jewel Staite knocks that out of the park), and she isn't a fighter, but she's not dead weight either, and she's willing to stand up for what she believes in, even to Teyla. I also really like Teyla's irritation with Jennifer; she's used to being surrounded by the other badasses after all, not coaching one of us regular Joes through a life and death situation. I also like her fierce desire to protect Jennifer, and the respect Jennifer earns from her during the ordeal. Just a great episode all around.
By the time we get to “Tracker,” Jennifer has picked up some basic combat skills. She stabs a Wraith and hits another Wraith a few times with a stick. She doesn’t knock him down or do anything overly heroic. She distracts the Wraith for a matter of seconds. In “First Contact,” Keller can shoot a weapon and says she has practiced on the range. I hardly see this as evidence of untoward badassery on her part, and I can’t really find any other examples of her engaging in behavior that would be described as badass. I also have a hard time understanding why anyone who was faced with her own mortality in the way that Keller is in “The Missing” wouldn’t learn some basic survival skills. I can easily believe that she initially thought she’d be mostly out of danger on Atlantis, that she’d always have people around to protect her, and that her lack of combat readiness wouldn’t be much of a problem (especially since she wasn’t CMO to begin with). Once Keller realizes she’s wrong, she rectifies the situation. I don’t understand why that’s perceived as a negative for her character.
So to recap, I don’t understand some of the criticism of Keller’s character, and this is my take on the specific critiques that don’t, in my opinion, have a canonical basis.
I don’t think it’s a secret that Jennifer Keller and her canonical romantic relationship with Rodney McKay are roundly disliked by a significant portion of SGA fandom. I like her character very much, and I’ve always been puzzled by many of the reasons I’ve seen given for that dislike. Since the Keller antipathy is pretty inextricably tied up with antipathy for the McKeller ship, I want to address a couple of the most commonly given reasons I’ve seen given that Keller is bad for McKay and by extension just bad news in general. I’ll close out with a brief discussion of one aspect of the accusation that Keller is a Mary Sue.
Keller only falls in love with McKay when he’s losing his mind, and that’s icky and weird. His intellect has to disintegrate in order for her to be interested in him romantically.
This one always boggles *my* mind. “Trio” and “The Last Man” pretty explicitly indicate that Keller and McKay are romantically interested in each other a full season before “The Shrine” airs. Keller doesn’t just randomly start expressing an attraction for McKay while he’s drooling down into his space hospital gown; the show has already established a burgeoning attraction between the two of them.
I do think that Keller enjoys the extra attention McKay pays to her in the first stages of the disease, but I don’t think that means she can only love him when he’s a different person. I think it means that she’s excited that someone she’s interested in romantically is reciprocating her feelings. This seems normal to me, yes? One of the things that many people do in the courtship stage of a relationship is work to impress their prospective partners; in fact, a very common complaint after a relationship has finally been started is that once the deal’s been sealed, one or both of the partners stops trying so hard to impress the other because the chase is over. Why shouldn’t Keller respond positively to increased attention from her love interest?
Keller tries to change McKay in ways that make him miserable. She forces him to change his behavior and issues unfair ultimatums, and Sheppard never does that. Keller just doesn’t respect Rodney at all. Asking someone to change in a relationship is a big no-no.
I want to address the last part first. Relationships are transformative. My sixteen year relationship with my husband has made me a different and better person than I was before, and I think that’s true for my husband as well. A relationship is a negotiation, and anyone suggesting that a relationship of True Love means one of zero growth and stasis has a very different idea of what being in a relationship means than I do.
I fully acknowledge that certain kinds of changes cannot and should not be demanded of a romantic partner. I also acknowledge that beginning a relationship with the requirement that someone make fundamental changes to his or her personality is a great way to destroy that relationship and deeply unfair. I don’t see any evidence, though, that Keller is doing either of those things. So let’s break this accusation down a little further.
Does Keller ever demand that McKay change or actually succeed in changing his behavior? This complaint seems to center around one episode, “Brain Storm,” which is the only episode out of many in which Keller appears in which she asks Rodney to behave differently. I suppose it’s fannish nature to extrapolate, but I was shocked when I rewatched all the episodes with her character and realized that this particular criticism is based on a single episode.
In “Brain Storm,” McKay is upset by the lack of respect he gets from his peers, and Keller seems not to understand to begin with just how important that is to him. While at the conference, she says: “Is this what the whole day’s going to be like? Are you going to be in a bad mood?” She wants him to enjoy what he can about the event they’re attending and not focus on the negative.
This reminds me so much of the difference in the way that my husband and I handle issues like this. I get so angry and pissed off and butthurt when I don’t get the respect I deserve or when people who don’t deserve respect get it for dubious reasons; I have an extremely overactive sense of justice that makes it hard to live in the real world sometimes. LOL It galls me when good work isn’t rewarded and bad work is instead. I’ve talked before about how I think the meritocracy of the educational system ill prepares students for the way the world works outside the classroom, and I believe McKay probably falls victim to that false impression. In school, if you work hard enough and you’re an exceptional student, you win! You get the awards and the accolades, and what you’ve done *matters.* It counts. Outside the educational system—not so much (not consistently anyway). It was a bit devastating to realize the paradigm I’d lived in for nearly thirty years as a student does not translate to my career, for example. So I totally understand where McKay is coming from. My husband agrees with me that these injustices suck, but he lets stuff roll off his back. From his perspective, if I’m in a bad mood, I’ve let the assholes win. The assholes will be with us always, so I have to find a way to deal that keeps me mentally healthy. Keller is offering Rodney a more healthy way to deal with his feelings, which is pretty much what I expect out of a partner.
Keller also points out that one possible source of McKay’s anger at his peers might be that he wants them to like him, and they don’t. I think this is a valid suggestion on her part, especially since it doesn’t seem to have occurred to McKay as the root of his dissatisfaction. He’s not just pissed off about the lack of professional respect; I think he also wants some personal respect from these people. McKay canonically demonstrates a lack of self-awareness of the way his behavior is perceived by others (see every interaction with Sam Carter ever). Keller is pointing out an underlying motivation that might help McKay handle the situation better.
Keller is willing to heckle the presentation along with McKay, and she breaks into Dave Foley’s (LOL) office with him (even though she’s clearly uncomfortable with doing so). She’s far from unsupportive of Rodney during this episode, and she never delivers any kind of ultimatum to him here or in any other episode.
At the end of the episode, Keller asks McKay if it really matters that he can’t get recognition for his work, and he says that it does. She offers him a solution—quitting the SGC and working in the private sector so that his work will be unclassified and therefore publishable—and he suggests that he’s been flirting with quitting the SGC for awhile. Unfortunately, the episode ends here before they can talk further, but to me, this is the moment when Keller figures out how important recognition, respect, and competition outside the SGC are to McKay, and I would extrapolate from the episode that going forward, she would keep that in mind. To refer to my own relationship experience again, this past semester, something happened at work that made me feel very slighted. Worrying about it and being angry it about wouldn’t change anything, and yet I couldn’t help myself. My husband would have shrugged the situation off and he urged me to do so, but he also knows me and understands that this emotional reaction is something I couldn’t help. He recognizes how important my professional standing is to me, and he understands that this isn’t a part of me that’s going to change. So he accepts it. Although I am entering the realm of personal head canon here, I can imagine that Keller accepts this aspect of Rodney as well; after all, she already accepts his abrasiveness and his arrogance and his occasional mean-spirited-ness.
How are the few times Keller criticizes him different from Sheppard’s criticisms of McKay? Sheppard corrects McKay’s behavior frequently—brusquely telling McKay not to panic on missions, making fun of him on a regular basis, and frequently engaging in competitive behavior with McKay. In “Brain Storm,” Keller tells Foley and McKay to cut out their arguing in a scene that is very reminiscent of every time Sheppard tells Mckay and Zelenka to do the same. In fact, the relationship dynamic between Keller and McKay is remarkably similar to the one between McKay and Sheppard (especially in contrast to McKay’s relationship with Katie Brown). Keller teases McKay and calls him on his shit and stands up to him much like Sheppard does.
Keller is the worst doctor ever! She should never make light of McKay’s hypochondria.
Keller mentions McKay’s hypochondria to Carter, which I have seen bandied about as evidence that she’s an awful doctor who should be paper-cut to death with copies of a HIPPA agreement. First, the show has already set a precedent with Carson who also alludes to McKay’s hypochondria and much more frequently than Keller does. Secondly, anyone with eyes and ears *knows* that McKay is a hypochondriac as the man is not shy about broadcasting his many and various suspected ailments across Atlantis. McKay’s behavior is ridiculous and eyerolly and out in the open for all to witness. Carter is also the military commander of Atlantis, which means that she gets to know everything about everyone including medical histories. In my understanding of the way that the SGC works, nobody gets doctor-patient confidentiality period because of the potential risks.
Keller is just a Mary Sue. She becomes this badass by the show’s end, and that’s not the way she’s written to start with.
Here’s a description of the way that Keller is portrayed near the beginning of her tenure on the show. To quote myself:
"The Missing" is such a fantastic episode for a lot of reasons but mostly because I love the way Keller's character is portrayed. I love that she's not a badass. I love that she's a competent and gifted doctor and that she possesses the sense of adventure and bravery required to leave her home planet and serve on a dangerous expedition in another galaxy but that those qualities don't translate to badass. We already have so many extraordinarily gifted badasses on the show--Ronon and Teyla and Sheppard (all covered with sexy bruises and knife wounds from which he almost instantly recovers LOL) and even McKay (whose brains are definitely a kind of badassery)--and since a great deal of the expedition is composed of people who are not soldiers and have minimal combat training, it's really nice to have a character with realistic limitations. Jennifer's afraid (OMG, that scene right before they take her out of the cage to be tortured and she starts crying--Jewel Staite knocks that out of the park), and she isn't a fighter, but she's not dead weight either, and she's willing to stand up for what she believes in, even to Teyla. I also really like Teyla's irritation with Jennifer; she's used to being surrounded by the other badasses after all, not coaching one of us regular Joes through a life and death situation. I also like her fierce desire to protect Jennifer, and the respect Jennifer earns from her during the ordeal. Just a great episode all around.
By the time we get to “Tracker,” Jennifer has picked up some basic combat skills. She stabs a Wraith and hits another Wraith a few times with a stick. She doesn’t knock him down or do anything overly heroic. She distracts the Wraith for a matter of seconds. In “First Contact,” Keller can shoot a weapon and says she has practiced on the range. I hardly see this as evidence of untoward badassery on her part, and I can’t really find any other examples of her engaging in behavior that would be described as badass. I also have a hard time understanding why anyone who was faced with her own mortality in the way that Keller is in “The Missing” wouldn’t learn some basic survival skills. I can easily believe that she initially thought she’d be mostly out of danger on Atlantis, that she’d always have people around to protect her, and that her lack of combat readiness wouldn’t be much of a problem (especially since she wasn’t CMO to begin with). Once Keller realizes she’s wrong, she rectifies the situation. I don’t understand why that’s perceived as a negative for her character.
So to recap, I don’t understand some of the criticism of Keller’s character, and this is my take on the specific critiques that don’t, in my opinion, have a canonical basis.
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(Sound arguments, but wasted in this fandom.)
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I am so glad I had such a positive experience in this fandom. Everyone on my flist and circle is pretty awesome.
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I also just love how McSheppers now are trying to rewrite the past, make it sound like there wasn't that much Keller hate among McSheppers and it didn't originate there. Uh, nice try but I was there; there was and it did.
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Honestly, I don't care to hear about anyone's hate of her and their totally rational reasons for it. I overdosed on that hate. It's the reason I left the fandom and make a point of staying away from everyone who took part in it.
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I'd also like to point out that Jeannie Miller gets none of this treatment, and my theory has always been because she's McKay's sister, not a threat to the main McKay romantic ship.
Just, all of this. Yes. (And I hear you on the career slighting. Let me tell you, that can burn and never die.)
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I've just always been mystified by a lot of the Keller hate because many of the given reasons just don't make any sense; they just don't track with what we see in canon.
I think it's pretty obvious the bulk of the hate is shipping oriented like you say which is probably why Jeannie isn't roundly disliked too.
(OMG, nobody told me that finally having a for reals grown-up job was going to kinda suck. LOL)
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Thank you, darling.
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I felt Brainstorm was one of the weaker episodes, but that had nothing to do with Keller, and certainly it wouldn't have been made a better episode by replacing Keller with Sheppard, as people had a habit of doing in fanfic. (Actually they're sort of proving the irrationality of their position by doing so: if you could take out Keller and swap in Sheppard, keeping all else the same, and make it "better", aren't they objectively proving that it's a ship-war thing and/or a misogyny thing, and nothing to do with the character or the episode at all? GOOD GRIEF.)
Which is not to say that there aren't areas that one could talk critically about. In particular, there's something uncomfortable about the way that "girl next door" or "everygirl" characters on TV are almost invariably presented as a certain kind of physical type -- young, white, thin, pretty, and often blonde. The vanishingly small handful of exceptions I can think of are also treated differently within their canons from the blonde, white Everygirls -- Astrid from Fringe is a great example, I think, because she was very much the same kind of character (young, sweet, a little naive, and kind of an outsider to the weird goings-on in the show) and ended up being sidelined and ignored rather than foregrounded. So there ARE certainly issues there, and I also get frustrated with TV handling romance in a certain kind of way -- but SGA is far from the only offender there, though, nor is it the worst by far. So ... it's kind of like ... I almost think the criticism could have had a valid basis except it veered so quickly out into Crazyville and Misogyny Country and The Magic Land of WTF Are You Smoking that it was pretty obvious there were other things going on.
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Personal preferences are extremely subjective, and by no means am I suggesting that any individual fan’s likes and dislikes are indicative of some sinister –ism. I do believe, however, that when negative reactions to a character seem systemic and pervasive in fandom, the collective reasoning is worth examining a little more closely. And like you, I really can't find a reason for the pervasive Keller dislike beyond McShep.
Which as we were discussing before on your journal--I love McShep. I read a lot of McShep. I *write* McShep. Some of my best and most popular stories have been McShep. I have nothing against the ship at all. And most of the people in fandom with whom I personally interact are multi-shippers so I didn't see a lot of the Keller hate up close and personal.
I wonder how much of that antipathy stems from the similarity between the McKeller and McShep dynamic. Like maybe some people felt irritated that a het version of their ship was being portrayed instead of the slash ship that was never going to make it to the screen? I can kinda see that although it does not excuse the vehemence of the antipathy.
I also agree with you that there are valid critiques to be made about Keller's character (or any character on the show), but they're swallowed up by these complaints that, as you say, are not reality based.
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IMO, most of the Keller hate is irrational and based on her 'getting in the way' of McShep. Which isn't to say that she didn't get hate before the McKay/Keller thing started because she did. She got hate the moment she arrived because she wasn't Carson. But that hate increased when McKay/Keller became canon.
In fact, the relationship dynamic between Keller and McKay is remarkably similar to the one between McKay and Sheppard (especially in contrast to McKay’s relationship with Katie Brown). Keller teases McKay and calls him on his shit and stands up to him much like Sheppard does.
THIS! It's extremely similar and that's probably the reason why McKay/Keller doesn't work for me. I don't dislike it, just as I don't dislike McShep, but neither pairing does much for me. That being said, I fully approve of people who call McKay on his crap the way Sheppard and Keller do. It's especially great coming from Keller, as someone's love interest should always call them on their shit, at least imo.
I've never understood why people pointed to Keller's behavior in Brain Storm as the reason she's so 'awful'. Why, because she doesn't let McKay wallow in self-pity and act like a child? Do we honestly think Sheppard would've behaved any differently? And she NEVER gave him an ultimatum or forced any kind of change on him, in that or any other episode. She simply wanted him to be less sulky and pointed out the legit reasons why he was so ticked off at his peers. IDK...I actually think this was the episode in which McKay/Keller worked best as a canon ship because they learned a bit more about each other and still wanted to be together. Their experience strengthened their relationship and I thought that was cool.
I fully admit to being biased because I ADORE Keller but I also think a lot of people put hate on her for reasons that just don't gel with the actual canon. Yes, people interpret things differently but you also have to consider that we sometimes interpret things the way we WANT to. So if you go into seasons 4/5 disliking Keller and McKay/Keller, you're going to spot things that back up that dislike.
Also, there's nothing wrong with admitting that you don't like McKay/Keller because you prefer McShep. I prefer Ronon/Keller or ff Keller ships and there's nothing wrong with that. I don't particularly agree with hating on a character because they 'got in the way' of your ship but if that's the reason, own it. It's better than making up reasons because you don't want to admit to shipper-bias.
Also, this is fabulous and I adore it so thanks for writing it :)
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I tend to be an outlier in that I like the all characters in my fandom sources, but recently I started getting into NCIS and found that I really don't like Abby's character as much as I thought I would. I find her frenetic and somewhat infantilized behavior a bit annoying. This is weird for me. LOL
Personal preferences are so subjective, and I don't think that any individual's likes or dislikes are indicative of anything sinister. I do think, however, that when dislike of a character is pervasive and systemic within a fandom that it's worth a further look.
I completely agree with you re: Keller and McKay's chemistry as a mirror of his chemistry with Sheppard. I also think McKay's relationship with Sam functions in much the same way (although I think Sam is even more willing than Keller to call McKay on his shit given that their initial interaction was very tense and adversarial).
Edit: whoops; included a response to a different comment here. :)
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:)
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(Especially since I, ah, may have an unfinished Jennifer/Jeannie drawerfic sitting around. I can't help but wonder if that's me sort of trying to warp McKeller to work for me - even though Jeannie is decidedly not her brother, a lot of the same dynamic would remain. Also, my fondness for John/Jennifer/Rodney, for the same reason. Like my brain is trying to scrub the taint of Gero off the pairing.)
But Jennifer herself is fucking awesome, and the people who dislike her, well. They remind me why I've never spent much time in SG-1 fandom (Sam is my favorite for all time and forever).
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I totally get that. It's hard not to let stuff like that influence how you react to a show. I like learning that the cast of my favorite show is BFF in RL; learning that an actor is a douchebag or a showrunner is an asshole--not so much. I'm sorry an outside source ruined the ship for you. :(
I adore Sam too. I'm doing an SG-1 rewatch with the kidlet, and I'm having such fun rediscovering how much I like her character. I think Sam and Rodney's interactions are pretty similar to the dynamic we see with Rodney and John and Rodney and Keller. Rodney clearly earns Sam's respect and a grudging affection by the time we get to SGA, but she also calls him on his shit and teases him as well. I loved that AU moment in SGA where we find out that they were married in another life.