OMG I have had Bobby McGee stuck in my head all day now LOL

[lunabee34]

After making my last post about Rodney McKay, I got a hankering to re-read some of the McShep classics.



I was shocked to realize when I re-read through my SGA recs that I had never made a formal rec post for Freedom's Just Another Word by synecdochic. I first read the story before I'd seen a lick of SGA; I didn't even know what John and Rodney looked like at that point, but the story read well without canonical knowledge. That knowledge deepens the read, of course, but I have heard other people besides myself say that they'd read this particular story without having much knowledge of the source material and thoroughly enjoyed it. I *was* familiar with at least several seasons of SG-1 when I read the story, so that probably helped.


Freedom is considered a fandom classic and rightly so. It definitely holds up on re-read many years after it was first written. I particularly enjoy that John is never mentioned by name in the fic. It's a story about his absence, but he is absent from the story in name only. It's a story about the life Rodney has without John, a life that Rodney is mostly okay with, and it makes sense for John to float around the periphery of the fic without ever intruding.

I think Rodney's characterization in this fic is really interesting. This is a Rodney who is no longer so easily annoyed, so deliberately rude, so melodramatic. And I completely buy that losing Atlantis, losing John, losing everything the expedition stood for to him changes Rodney and shifts his priorities. He's not as concerned with being right as he is being alive and the people he cares for being alive. He's not so much concerned with fame as he is with being left alone. I don't mean that Rodney has been softened exactly but rather that he has lost the will to be abrasive on general principle and is only abrasive when it really counts.

My only real quibble with Rodney's characterization is that I don't believe he is or could grow to be as psychologically astute and socially savvy is he shown being in his classroom demonstrations. For me, canon!Rodney is hopeless dense about what makes people tick, what motivates them, how they're likely to behave, how he should behave in response, etc., and I don't see that drastically changing over time. That being said, I truly enjoy reading about the classes he teaches; I am reminded a bit of Starship Troopers (although it's been ages since I've read that book.

This is just as excellent read as I remember it being when I first read it, and even more so now that I've lived with the characters underneath my skin for so long.

I did rec Written by the Victors by cesperanza when I first read it: We get most of the narrative here from a variety of scholarly sources about the Atlantis expedition. What these scholars know and don't know, what they misconstrue, their own private agendas--all these combine to make a really wonderful meta commentary on the series. These scholarly excerpts are interspersed with third person narration from our favorite characters and the wonderfully layered tapestry this kind of storytelling weaves is so satisfying to read. This is a story about what happens to Atlantis in the future. It's a sad story and a beautiful story and a story about changing perceptions and allegiances and when it is over, you'll still feel it whirling around in your brain for a long time.

After re-reading Victors, I'd probably describe it in the same way. I absolutely love this kind of narrative that is derived from different sources and is told in different formats. I really love the unreliable narrators and that the story must be pieced together from a variety of storytellers, meaning that ambiguity abounds. I really like well done ambiguity; there's a kind of ambiguity that seems lazy and annoys me as a reader, but the kind of ambiguity in this story is that glorious kind that allows the spaces between to fill with such wonderful speculation.

I don't have any quibbles, per se, with this story on re-read. I don't think I'm quite on board with the characterization of Elizabeth here, but I think that boils down to my interpretation of Elizabeth's character being slightly different than the author's. I certainly don't think Elizabeth is vilified or bashed in any way, and I think the choices she makes in the story can be extrapolated from how we see her depicted in canon. I think for me, though, I can't see Elizabeth leaving Atlantis. I think she feels like Atlantis is home; she's just as depressed and unmoored as the rest of them when they have to briefly return to Earth. She's just as willing to sacrifice her career to rescue Atlantis from the Replicators. I also think she feels a responsibility to the Pegasus Galaxy that she would not lightly walk away from. If nothing else, I think Elizabeth is so bizarrely infatuated with the Ancients and Ascension that you'd have to pry her away from Atlantis with a crowbar. LOL

But I can buy that Elizabeth believes that Earth should be protected first or that she's weary of fighting the Wraith and thinks they can better figure out how to use Atlantis in Pegasus if they're not being interrupted every five seconds by a fleet of hive ships. I also think she probably sees the long term implications pretty instantly and I can believe she wants nothing to do with a war with Earth. I do think that if even if those were her initial reactions, she'd change her mind once all her friends disagreed. IDK

It's a lovely, lovely story that I am very pleased to have spent my morning re-reading.