I promised Taf I would come join the discussion, though will probably just end up cutting and pasting the contents of an email that I sent her. :)
I am approaching this story, I'll admit, with a willingness to make allowances for any story that offers me a dark, trippy ride.
Interesting. I was thinking about this today...I'm not good with allowances when I read fic. I suck at supending my disbelief. And these days I'm short on time on top of that, so 95% of the time, the first moment I'm thrown out of the story, I'm gone. So that's the angle I'm coming from. I liked the plot and story of this, but as an Atlantis fic, I thought the characters became a bit problematic in order to hold that plot.
He's gone to the place where smirky, wise-cracking, charming John is subsumed by the John who killed all those Genii, who shot down the unarmed Wraith in the cage, who'll do whatever it takes to save his people.
I love this John, and definitely believe he exists. But whether Rodney would notice him, and keep on noticing enough to keep bringing it up, I wasn't sure. Because it is a Rodney POV story, and Rodney's pretty self-involved. Pre-Trinity, anyhow. As well as about to die. So to have this characterisation of John draw as much attention as it did distracted me. And I also kinda wanted to be trusted, as the reader, to get where she was going.
And this is pretty much verbatim what I told Taf:
Rodney, mostly, not so much the others - did and thought a lot of things to serve the plot that didn't strike me as being really, really Rodney-ish. It's hard to put my finger on, because I hate when he's portrayed as a terrified blushing virgin, but hers went pretty far in the other direction, and he was telling me things that I needed to know, but not necessarily things that I think Rodney would think. Too self-aware, I think, more outwardly in tune with other people's feelings that Rodney generally gets to be. Shep has a couple of hitches too, I think, cause he's dark, but that other flyboy side he uses to hide the darkness never shows up. I don't know if she was just aiming for that as a characterisation, or if the idea was that the encounter with the aliens burned that out of him, but I think that either way we could have used the contrast, one to make him truer but two, to up the stakes, make us care that much more about the fall.
What I wonder most, I suppose, in regard to how others see this story, is whether the sort of emotional hinge-pin moment, the one where Rodney and Teyla decide to go forward with it, works for others, too.
Hmmmn. It's hard to say, because I was already distracted - I hadn't 100% bought the set-up. And as such, this wasn't necessarily the dealbreaker. I'd have to think to decide what was. But it occurs to me as I check my previous paragraph that this story may be about Sheppard to me more than it is to other people - he's the one who seems to end up somewhere different than where he started. So I think my dealbreaker may have been Shep's reaction - would he really punish them like that? He's got a dark side, yeah, and he's just had to fight a lot of aliens and that makes him cranky, but is it making him hurt the people he kills to protect? If he doesn't think he's hurting them, what does he think he's doing?
I did keep reading, so I must have been more there than not, but I'm still not sure.
no subject
I am approaching this story, I'll admit, with a willingness to make allowances for any story that offers me a dark, trippy ride.
Interesting. I was thinking about this today...I'm not good with allowances when I read fic. I suck at supending my disbelief. And these days I'm short on time on top of that, so 95% of the time, the first moment I'm thrown out of the story, I'm gone. So that's the angle I'm coming from. I liked the plot and story of this, but as an Atlantis fic, I thought the characters became a bit problematic in order to hold that plot.
He's gone to the place where smirky, wise-cracking, charming John is subsumed by the John who killed all those Genii, who shot down the unarmed Wraith in the cage, who'll do whatever it takes to save his people.
I love this John, and definitely believe he exists. But whether Rodney would notice him, and keep on noticing enough to keep bringing it up, I wasn't sure. Because it is a Rodney POV story, and Rodney's pretty self-involved. Pre-Trinity, anyhow. As well as about to die. So to have this characterisation of John draw as much attention as it did distracted me. And I also kinda wanted to be trusted, as the reader, to get where she was going.
And this is pretty much verbatim what I told Taf:
Rodney, mostly, not so much the others - did and thought
a lot of things to serve the plot that didn't strike me as being
really, really Rodney-ish. It's hard to put my finger on, because I hate when he's portrayed as a terrified blushing virgin, but hers went pretty far in the other direction, and he was telling me things that I needed to know, but not necessarily things that I think Rodney would think. Too self-aware, I think, more outwardly in tune with other people's feelings that Rodney generally gets to be. Shep has a couple of hitches too, I think, cause he's dark, but that other flyboy side he uses to hide the darkness never shows up. I don't know if she was just aiming for that as a characterisation, or if the idea was that the encounter with the aliens burned that out of him, but I think that either way we could have used the contrast, one to make him truer but two, to up the stakes, make us care that much more about the fall.
What I wonder most, I suppose, in regard to how others see this story, is whether the sort of emotional hinge-pin moment, the one where Rodney and Teyla decide to go forward with it, works for others, too.
Hmmmn. It's hard to say, because I was already distracted - I hadn't 100% bought the set-up. And as such, this wasn't necessarily the dealbreaker. I'd have to think to decide what was. But it occurs to me as I check my previous paragraph that this story may be about Sheppard to me more than it is to other people - he's the one who seems to end up somewhere different than where he started. So I think my dealbreaker may have been Shep's reaction - would he really punish them like that? He's got a dark side, yeah, and he's just had to fight a lot of aliens and that makes him cranky, but is it making him hurt the people he kills to protect? If he doesn't think he's hurting them, what does he think he's doing?
I did keep reading, so I must have been more there than not, but I'm still not sure.