100 days of enemy recs: 91. SG1

[melannen]

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.

Comments

[melannen]

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.

[princessofgeeks]

*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.