I Shall Tell You a Tale...

[strina]

This is the part where I confess that mine is a fickle heart.

I tend to come into fandoms sideways.

I started out in Inuyasha, because I was hooked on the show and found fanfiction when I went trolling for spoilers (it'd gone to an extended hiatus on a cliffhanger). Then I found HP fandom in the wait for the fifth book and things snowballed from there.

I have poor self-control; I found it impossible to resist reading stories by authors I loved, even if those stories happened to take place in fandoms of which I had no prior knowledge. This has, in fact, become an occasionally embarrassing habit with me. A habit, in fact, that has led me down the primrose path to popslash, bandslash, actorslash, historical RPS, and such media fandoms as The X-Files, Jeeves & Wooster, Once a Thief, The Professionals, and The Sentinel.

And Stargate SG-1.

When I began reading SG-1 fic (Jack/Daniel, of course), I had no idea what the characters even looked like. I actually decided to watch the show because surely these people were kidding about all the pouting (btw, yeah, totally were not).

Imagine my surprise when I realized I had seen the show before. Seen it, and mocked it.

Why do I even bother to mock anything anymore? I mock and then I unwillingly love. It's a pattern. A damnable, damnable pattern. Fanfiction. Slash. Buffy fandom. Popslash. SG-1.

So. I fell in love, with the show and the fandom. I read obsessively, watched the weekly marathons on Sci-Fi, had a this-close-to-OTP (I am a pairing slut, so this was big for me)...

Then I heard about this spin-off.

I watched the premiere of Stargate: Atlantis live and fell in love with it, too. I loved Elizabeth and her freckles, and John and his insouciance, and Rodney and his...everything. I even loved the strange new villain, the Wraith (you know, the goth-catfish space vampires).

But it was a little love. I watched the show every week and I checked out the fanfic a little. This was back in the early days of the fandom, when hardly anyone was there, and the slash was almost exclusively Sheppard/Ford. I couldn't really get into the pairing, so I went back to my Jack/Daniel (and, of course, my innumerable other pairings in other fandoms, but that's not what we're talking about now).

A few months later, I had renewed love for SGA, and went back to looking for fic...And oh my good and holy lord, had things changed.

You guys know what happened. The Great Fannish Convergence happened, where eleventy-billion authors and artists and vidders all fell in love with the show at the same time, and then they all fell in love with each other and the way that they loved the show. SGA became, as thefourthvine put it, the black hole of fandom.

And the black hole had a new favorite pairing.

McKay/Sheppard.

And anyone could have told you I'd be all over that. I love me some geek-love. Wesley, Hermione, Seth, Abby, Daniel.

So yeah, the love grew. And then I found the really good fics, like Intersections and the Geeks'n'Goons series, and the love kinda began to experience exponential growth.

Cut to now.

I yearned for some SG-1 fic, and I read this story. Jack and Daniel ride off into the sunset together; I should be happy, right?

I wasn't happy. Because they were riding off to Atlantis.

I don't want any member of SG-1 near Atlantis. I want to protect the Atlanteans from the SGC, and everyone else who wasn't there for that first year. I want Weir and Sheppard and McKay running the show, and if Jack, Daniel, or Sam showed up, that dynamic would change.

I realized I wanted to smack Jack around for so blithely taking Weir's command and Sheppard's power.

So I have to say this: SG-1. I love you. You are beautiful and vast, and your fans are both geeky and gleeful, which translates into some fine, fine fiction. You embrace who you are (a genre show) and where you come from, and that makes you endearing (yes, we're cliched! but we have fun with it!).

But I'm totally leaving you for your hot younger sister-show. Atlantis is prettier (mostly) and she has a better sense of humor; she is quirky and adorable and her characters are not epic, archetypal heroes, but misfits who seem to save the day by accident, bitching the whole way. I love her like I have never loved before, and I felt I had to confess this.

But, as I never have been and never will be a monogamous fangirl, I will totally still have the occasional hot fling with you.

Damn me for a fickle whore.