melannen | 100 days of enemy recs: 91. SG1

Stargate:SG1 is not really a big fandom for enemy ship? Jack O'Neill/Harry Maybourne really should have been, by all rights, but it always turned up more in background than actually being shipped. (Maybe Maybourne's actor wasn't sufficiently hot? It's always tragic when that happens.) And Daniel/Vala counts, I guess, but that era of canon always had a weird overlay of echoes of Farscape, and I didn't know Farscape enough to decode them. There were plenty of other possibilities really, but none of them went anywhere.

Maybe it was something about the timing, SG1 falling square into the LJ era, when mailing lists and hand-rolled archives were on their way out in favor of social media, AO3 wasn't around yet, and there wasn't really a space for small pairings to build a community? Or maybe Jack/Daniel and Jack/Sam just used up all the air in the the room.

So really this is on the list for one specific fic but it is one of my favorite fics of all time, it has all the best things in it, and I have read it lots times. Lots.

Conflict of Interest (5631 words) by Maraceles
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Ba'al/Jack O'Neill
Series: 2 parts
Summary:
Jack and Ba'al get thrown in a Goa'uld prison together. Despite whatever else is between them, they're still enemies. They can work with that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oooo.

Definitely a bridge too far for me.

Jack/Maybourne was a good one though!

There are less than 5000 words *total* of Jack/Maybourne on AO3, and most of it isn't even Jack/Maybourne. Most of my other oldfic-finding tricks aren't turning it up either. There must be some? Somewhere? Surely? Maybe it was just a lot of references in Jack/Daniel fic to Jack's last boyfriend....

Maybourne was so Jack's last boyfriend. I used that bit of fanon myself.

I think it's one of those where everybody thought it was true but nobody actually shipped it, which gave the impression of being much more of a ship than it was!

It's interesting back in that period people felt like they had to amass canon evidence that someone was really gay, via things like fanonical old boyfriends (and bad fashion choices.) Now we just go "he'd messed around with boys in college*" if we even bother with that much!

*And then reveal that it was Maybourne later, if we feel like being evil.

*Nods*

I have only been reading slash since 2003 but I read a lot of 90s fandoms at that time, and it's been fascinating to see how the depictions of m/m relationships have changed since then. In those old shows there was absolutely no mainstream expectation that the male characters could be gay unless they were absolutely depicted as such and as you know the Hollywood approach to gay characters back then was pretty awful.

Nowadays there is such understanding that it's an option and that there is not an expectation of heteronormativity and so we feel much less obligation to justify how in the world we could see a certain relationship as a gay one.

And you also now see the total audience impatience with teasing subtext, like happened with BBC Sherlock, and the change in how gay characters are depicted.

The cultural conditions of fanfic have changed so much in the last 20 years. It is really amazing.

To answer one question, yes, Jack/Daniel (and Daniel in life and death) sucked *all* the slash air out of the room. The woobie wars were epic.

Another obvious but almost entirely neglected enemies slash pair is Jack/Teal'c. They struck an instant-allies dynamic in the pilot episode, but they were commanders of opposing military forces, and opposed cultures.

Jack/Daniel were sort of a ship in need of a shipwar, weren't they.

That's true! Canon also tended to forget for long periods of time that Teal'c was an enemy commander. There was some Jack/Teal'c out there though! I just poked around on AO3 a little and of the little that made it there, not much of it seems to deal with that aspect at all.

(I always got tired fast of the Teal'c fic that was all about fish-out-of-water Teal'c among the Tau'ri, which was most of it - he was a Jaffa commander! He knows about other cultures! Most of what he did with that on the show was clearly trolling anyway!)

Indeed.

I suspect you don't see O'Neill/Maybourne for the same reason you don't see anyone shipping Dolores Umbridge with anyone in the Harry Potter fandom: he's the kind of villain that people hate in real life. He's a slimeball.

I don't know what I expected when I read the header, but Ba'al/Jack was sure not it hahaha! I'm excited to read it!

Maybe Maybourne's actor wasn't sufficiently hot?

aww - that's sad, b/c Tom's v nice. like, so the opposite of Maybourne (which is a common theme for some popular 'bad guys').

i wanna say there was more Jack/Maybourne around... b/c i remember ppl talking about it, but wasn't my 'ship, so i don't know

100 days of enemy recs: 91. SG1

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject