melannen | oh crossover, my crossover

So, this afternoon, feeling the need to write, and having been lured by

cathexys into reading SGA fanfic, I decided to pull out what I'd started six months ago on my Stargate:Atlantis/Highlander Crossover of Doom, now that the season's over and I have a chance of finishing at least one bit of it before it gets contradicted by canon.

Atlantis is the first TV show *ever* (unless you count sort-of Voyager back in the day) that I've actually followed from the beginning as it was on the air. (And as it is I think I've missed at least five-and-a-half episodes so I'm probably not qualified to write the fic anyway. Oh well.) In some ways, it's really irritating to be working with new canon coming out all the time. In some ways, though, it's *really cool*.

You know what I realized while going over my old plot outline in light of the SG1 season finale?

Jack O'Neill was SO VERY MUCH Methos' first Teacher.

In the original plan I was just going to have Methos visit the holy library at Saïs (Plato's supposed source for the Atlantis legends) in order to learn all the stuff he needs to know for the story.

But now. Daniel would so *know* about the sanctuary at Saïs, and he would so take the others there after the rebellion, and they would hang around the sanctuary with the last Unascended Ancients and their Immortal priests, and teach Methos about important Methos-y things like tactics, and dirty tricks, and geekery, and snark, and being five thousand years out of time, and the joy of a pond with no fish in it.

I'm almost tempted to write that instead of just using it as background for the original HL/SGA crossover of doom, except that it would entail actually doing historical research and reading the Critias and such.

(I'm also trying very hard to resist the temptation to write Katamari/Amber crossover, after

dreamsquirrel had me playing Katamari Damacy last week. Luke: Merle, you've gotta come talk to this kid! It's brilliant! Merlin: Luke, are you stoned again? Luke: No, I've just been playing PS2 and drinking Mountain Dew for the past twenty hours straight. That's *not* the point. Listen, this is the *best* Shadow of the Patternfall War I've ever found.)

(... and in trying to confirm that I had Luke's name right, I stumbled on SG1/Amber crossover fic. Oh dear.)

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Skree! La-LAA La-lalalalalala (Katamari Damacy is extremely addictive.) I don't know what Amber is, but I could so see some Katamari-fic. :D

The Books of Amber are this really awesome sf book series by Roger Zelazny, where basically you have Oberon, who is the King, and very annoying, and one day he decides to go wild and basically breaks the Cosmos. And then he tells his sons, Okay! I've decided to go on vacation! You fix this! Except you're all completely useless so I'm sure you can't really do it, but I'll let you flail around on Earth for awhile for awhile trying to, because it's fun to watch and make snarky comments! (Or something like that, anyway. Don't want to give you too many spoilers. q:)

Plus the King and his sons have the ability to travel between universes, which makes it very convenient for crossovers, since at one point Luke trips on LSD and loses control of the ability and accidently ends up stuck in a psychedelic version of Wonderland, and the Katamari world basically *is* Amber on LSD (and 'shrooms, of course), so it would fit right in.

You should read them. :)

Gosh... they *are* similar! I think I do have to read these "Books of Amber".

(I tend to be a Katamari nut. )

i lured you??? cool!! (i never lure anyone, so this makes me very happy!!!)

have you checked out sga_flashfic? if not, i have a bunch of great fics you need to read!!!!

oh, and do you need any eps? i just got the entire set sent to me and could burn you the ones you're missing...

Oh, and I missed Childhood's End, The Eye, The Defiant One, Hot Zone, and most of Letters from Pegasus. But I'm actually missing all the eps, because I'm doing this the old-fashioned way, where you just watch them once or twice on the air and have to go by what you remember and what other fans are saying. It's fun! I was planning to catch the ones I'd missed in re-runs this spring. Plus I have this thing where if I have recorded eps, I just put off watching them in favor of reading fic *anyway*. But thanks for the offer!

To be fair, all it really takes to lure me into a new fandom is to dangle a few shiny things in front of me! But yes! Actually, I think I've pretty much read all the decent SGA fic on lj and I'm currently working through this list (http://www.livejournal.com/users/lucia_tanaka/39553.html). In the week since you last posted about Transcendental. Alas, it used to be it'd take me at least a month to exhaust a new fandom. (; It doesn't help that half the active authors are people I've loved in other fandoms already. (Although if you know of any McKay/Zelenka fic other than what's on that list and what's on

sga_flashfic, I will love you forever!)

i know...but the good thing is that there are great people in it and that they are writing!!!

no mcKay/zelenka other than julad's stuff, sorry...

but there might be a fic or so here (http://d4nvers.users.btopenworld.com/recs/sga.html) that you haven't read. the recs are pretty sound.

and have you looked around pegasus-b? i like the concept more than the execution, but it has some hot stuff...

so, what did *you* think about transcendental??? did you read the debates??? *still baffled*

I did not read the debates. My meta thoughts about Transcendental are limited basically to "I keep calling it 'Transfigurations' in my head, and - whoa - there's probably a good reason for that, because I really have exactly the same great plotty love for it and some of the same problems with it that I had with that story."

Looking those debates over now though ... I'm beginning to think it should worry me that I had no moral qualms at all about Rodney's strategies, right up until he promised to blow up the planet. And actually I thought Dr. Weir's suggestion of just locking them up for awhile was a lot less justifiable morally than what McKay and Sheppard did, *including* the planet-killer bomb.

That might have to do with my overarching theory of Why I Love Stargate So Much, which is that the SG leaders treat *everybody* as complete equals on every level, no matter their level of development or culture, and that is what *gives* them their moral high ground over basically everybody else in the home galaxy, and what has allowed them to fit in to Pegasus so quickly. So I am much more comfortable with carefully giving the Genii a chance to earn trust and learn respect than with grounding them for a month like naughty children, because Rodney's way treats them as *equals*.

i do too...and just like one dragged me into HP the other dragged me into SGA...then again, i consciously chose those fics as my firsts...

some of the same problems with it that I had with that story OK, now I wanna hear :-)

I couldn't understand the debates, b/c I totally could see those characters in the fic...but it's hard to overcome one's own characterizations, i guess...maybe it's the fact that i'm not a writer that makes it less of an issue for me?

Actually, reading through the debates, it strikes me that some of the people who had the worst problems with it-- Rodney's 'superhero' characterization especially-- didn't finish the whole story. It's like they've never heard of the idea of 'unreliable narrator', and never stopped to think that maybe John's perceptions weren't entirely accurate. There was a point there where I was thinking Rodney was going too far Mary Sue, but by the end it was pretty clear that he'd just been *pretending* to be that competent at everything, and that's totally part of the Rodney we see on the show. But I tend to be very lenient about characterization anyway.

My common problems with them? Well, especially on first reading, I got the impression that the slash-was-pastede-on-yay-- that it was just sort of thrown in as an excuse to write hot sex when the story would have worked just as well or better as a gen friendship. (Not that the McKay/Sheppard power play in Transcendental *wasn't* incredibly hot, and quite well done by the end, I just felt like it hit out of nowhere: much as I'd like to believe that three hours coding perl makes guys so horny they'll jump the nearest warm body.)

Also that to some extent it seemed like some of the plot and new technologies, cool as they were, were -- too easy? Or maybe that I felt like they were thrown in as an excuse to write really hot *characterization* porn rather than because they worked with canon. That you could whip up an unbeatable remote-control iris for somebody else's stargate in a couple weeks, and yet nobody's ever thought of that before, considering how incredibly useful it is? That they just happened to stumble across dozens of baby zeds, lying around unguarded, which can do everything they need to do -- except, of course, get them home? That they went three months without ever facing a serious threat from the Wraith, when they're lucky to go three weeks on the show? (Or translate those to equivalent problems with Calligromancy and power-sharing.)

oh crossover, my crossover

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