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A sad McShep post
MermaidMayonnaise posted this last night and it makes me so very sad. Our little fandom really has grown quiet. That makes sense, what with canon being closed and all new Stargate content about new characters. Maybe I should read the comics and post about those? They're supposed to be a continuation...
Anyway, in the link I provided, I mentioned how fun it'd be if we suggested changes to episodes and discussed what would happen. Maybe we could give that a try? It's okay if nobody's interested, but I miss connected with my McShep friends and feeling the excitement and love. It's lonely out here.
So: what do YOU think would have happened if John's mother had been alive when he went to his father's funeral?
A lot of fics have John's mother's death a point of contention between John and his father. It's possible to say that John had a falling out with his father over being gay, and/or joining the military. But we could always twist things further. John's mother lives. She forces her husband and her son to find common ground. John keeps in sporadic contact. He decides to go on the Atlantis mission because he's always been a geek at heart, daydreaming about living in Star Trek. And spacehips exist! Aliens are a thing!
Maybe he flips a coin on whether to tell his family that this particular mission is a bit more dangerous than his usual.
Maybe he doesn't send a video home in Letters From Pegasus because he's worried about how his family will react. Because saying goodbye is even more difficult when you care.
It's even more fun to think about John returning for his father's funeral with Rodney in tow. What would Mama Sheppard make of Rodney McKay? Rodney doesn't make a good first impression. It could go terrible. Or she could see right through Rodney's prickly exterior to the soft center. Maybe she's like John and finds him funny. Oh my gosh, imagine the boys on vacation and they have to split their time between Jeannie's house and John's childhood home. Rodney gleefully going through photo albums, bright eyed at the thought of embarrassing childhood stories.
Maybe when things go wrong and John desperately needs a break, he has someplace earthside to go. With John gone the whole team goes on standdown, and maybe they go with.
Maybe John gets to keep his family, all of it.
Anyway, in the link I provided, I mentioned how fun it'd be if we suggested changes to episodes and discussed what would happen. Maybe we could give that a try? It's okay if nobody's interested, but I miss connected with my McShep friends and feeling the excitement and love. It's lonely out here.
So: what do YOU think would have happened if John's mother had been alive when he went to his father's funeral?
A lot of fics have John's mother's death a point of contention between John and his father. It's possible to say that John had a falling out with his father over being gay, and/or joining the military. But we could always twist things further. John's mother lives. She forces her husband and her son to find common ground. John keeps in sporadic contact. He decides to go on the Atlantis mission because he's always been a geek at heart, daydreaming about living in Star Trek. And spacehips exist! Aliens are a thing!
Maybe he flips a coin on whether to tell his family that this particular mission is a bit more dangerous than his usual.
Maybe he doesn't send a video home in Letters From Pegasus because he's worried about how his family will react. Because saying goodbye is even more difficult when you care.
It's even more fun to think about John returning for his father's funeral with Rodney in tow. What would Mama Sheppard make of Rodney McKay? Rodney doesn't make a good first impression. It could go terrible. Or she could see right through Rodney's prickly exterior to the soft center. Maybe she's like John and finds him funny. Oh my gosh, imagine the boys on vacation and they have to split their time between Jeannie's house and John's childhood home. Rodney gleefully going through photo albums, bright eyed at the thought of embarrassing childhood stories.
Maybe when things go wrong and John desperately needs a break, he has someplace earthside to go. With John gone the whole team goes on standdown, and maybe they go with.
Maybe John gets to keep his family, all of it.
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What if she does show up at Patrick's funeral just to spit on his grave, so to speak? What if Rodney is there and picks a fight with her for abandoning her son? <3 <3 <3 What if John falls head over heels all over again for his fierce, adorable boyfriend for being so protective and awesome?
I'm just sayin'. :D
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OMG, I can completely see this... (Warning: Disrespect for the dead ahead)
~*~*~
Rodney and John pull up to the cemetery and, hand in hand, slowly make their way to a crowd that seems to be thinning out. "Let's just wait here a second," John says, and so they hold back under the shade of a mountainous pine tree and decades-old graves, headstones littered with pine needles.
When the crowd is gone, and only a couple of workers remain behind to cover the casket, John nods to Rodney and they finally make their way to where Patrick Sheppard's coffin is being covered with dirt.
John lets go of Rodney's hand just long enough to reach into a pocket of his black jeans and pull out a couple of bills. Rodney had no idea where he'd gotten them since they hadn't been back on Earth all that long. "Can you guys give us a second?" he asks the confused workers, then adds, "He was my father. We were...estranged, you could call it."
Based on everything Rodney's heard John say about Patrick Sheppard, estranged didn't even begin to cover what the elder Sheppard had done to John.
With the workers now retreated to a respectful distance, John turns to Rodney, a wistful smile on his face, and then back to the partially covered coffin six feet below them. "Hey, Dad," John says, his voice barely above the whisper of the wind. "I know we had our differences and everything, but I just wanted to say two things. First of all," he turns to Rodney and kisses him on the cheek, "this is my partner, Rodney McKay. Not that you cared. You only wanted me in your life if I met your requirements, and being gay wasn't one of them."
Rodney flushed. John's talk about his family was quite sparse, and while he figured John being gay might have been part of it, it was something else to hear the words.
"Your requirements for being loved," John continued, the scorn in his voice not hidden at all. "Who the hell puts qualifiers on loving their children? Well, let me tell you what I think of your ideas of love, Dad."
Rodney watched John's hands undid his belt and heard the buttons escape the buttonholes of the thick denim material. He looked over, shocked, as John pulled his dick out of his now exposed boxers.
The short-lived silence was broken by the sound of urine splashing over the top of a fancy coffin, half a dozen feet below. He stood there, mostly in shock, although a little bit of him expected it, until the sound stopped and John tucked himself back into his jeans.
"I could use a drink," John said, then took Rodney's hand in his own and turned them back around to where the car was.
"And I could use some hand sanitizer," Rodney replied, though he never let go.
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I love this, Squidge, totally a John Sheppard move.
If I had a dick, there would be a few graves in the future I'd piss on.
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Ahhhhh I love the idea of Rodney getting all protective and angry on John's behalf <333
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"HUGS"
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"HUGS"
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I like your ideas and esteefee's. Other things I've seen in fanfics are John's mother as an alcoholic or using pills to cope, often as the marriage to Patrick was a disaster.
There's potential for hurt/comfort fic if she wobbled into the funeral, drunk, and then made a scene. Dave would be swearing under his breath because her minder/paid companion was supposed to keep her out of sight of the guests. Maybe John tries to get her to come away even though it hurts him to be around her when she's like that. Maybe she says something hurtful to him. Eventually, Rodney gets John to leave, and takes him back to their hotel where comfort ensues.
Or...she's also a mover and shaker like Patrick, and they divorced years ago when John was a kid. Patrick made her give him custody and avoid the boys as part of the divorce settlement, which was in the millions, and which she used to set up a rival company. She turns up at Patrick's funeral and announces that she's bought Sheppard Industries and Dave now works for her. She and John quarrel about her abandoning them and putting her career first. Rodney intervenes with some well-chosen words, and later comforts John.
Or there are the fics where she's actually an Ancient!
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Ooo, I do like your idea of Rodney comforting John when his mother appears, drunk, at his father's funeral. Or Rodney getting snippy with her when she shows up all in-charge and controlling. Neither of which has been done before.
John DIDN'T want to send a message to anyone. But maybe he didn't want her to worry, or thought receiving a video after he's died would be too painful.
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My headcanon is that she's dead and her death fractured the family irreparably, but then again maybe she was a deadbeat mother who bailed the first chance she got.
It's good to have somethings not addressed in canon cause it gives us a lot of leeway to create something when we write fics.
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lol yeah, Stargate doesn't always explore the character's personal lives, which gives us a ton of room to do so. Which I like, to be honest. They didn't always write relationships well, anyway.
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I think, I hope, there is still SGA interest. That's why I'm doing Romancing McShep again after all. Plus there was a decent turnout for SGA Santa. (very cool. thank you for hosting it again)
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I find it interesting that even in AU's, John's mother is dead or absent. I can only think of one AU fic with John's mom alive...
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So maybe this is that transitionary period for SGA? I don't know, I hope so. *hugs*
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How active IS the dS fandom these days? I'm rewatching it with a friend and exploring the fic on ao3. I don't belong to many ds communities, maybe that's why I don't see much?
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The dS fandom is pretty kickin' when you consider the show recently turned 25 (the pilot aired April 1994). It's very slow--there's gifsets and occasional meta still going around tumblr, depending on who you follow, and there's still the big bang and the dSSS every year, so there's still a good deal of things going on, just...really slowly. :) People still write fic and meta, there have been a couple of newer fans who have taken up vidding, etc. On DW the action is a lot slower to see, but the ds_noticeboard and the ds_virtualbar are both good places to get community information. I've started a comm for digging up old dS fic that's not on AO3 (though it is not a recs community) called ds_ficminers, and I'd like to start a comm for non-F/K recs. (I love them, but there's a lot of fic out there that isn't F/K and I want to read the good stuff.)
So there's still things going on. I've kept an eye on the AO3 feeds and we still get a trickle of people posting new fic outside of the BB and the dSSS. It's not full-on, a hundred fics a day kind of posting, but it's a lot steadier than one would expect. And it's not all F/K, either--there's lots of Fraser/Vecchio and Fraser/Thatcher mixed up in there.
*cough* TL;DR--It's slow but still around! Including me, if I can ever finish a fic. *sigh*
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I also have a notion of her as leaving when John was very young, when she was very young herself, to get away from Patrick. It's a tragic idea, having to leave her child behind, but without Patrick's money, and with no skills, she couldn't support herself let alone John. So she goes off to college, gets her degrees in math!!! and ends up teaching a budding young Canadian genius at Northwestern. Rodney figures it out years later ("I knew you looked familiar!"), reunites John and his mom, some angst, but happy endings. (Pods, I need to write this story!)
I read the Tumblr post and I'm terribly sorry you all weren't here for the Fandom That Ate Fandom. I got into SGA in '06, I think, just as it peaked. Tons of new stories everyday, so many you just couldn't keep up, new art, new meta, picspam, the works. It was wonderfully exciting to come home every day and find fantastic new stories to read. I'm still finding them, all these years later, the ones I missed the first time around. I guess it's why I'm something of an archivist; I want to save it all to read as I have time.
If there's one moment I wish you all could have experienced, it was the day "Written by the Victors" by Spenanza was posted. It was, frankly, the watershed moment of SGA. If you go to her DW or LJ and read the comments, maybe you can capture a little of the excitement and amazement that work engendered.
I too wish it was still as big as it used to be, but I'm enjoying all the new faces of fandom as the years go by. I'm glad you're all here, keeping the fun going.
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One thing I find interesting is that even in AU's, John's mother tends to be dead or absent. I can only think of one AU fic where she's still around...
I hear about how so many stories were being posted you couldn't keep up and it sounds like HEAVEN. You know, I'm not sure I've read every mcshep-match story, or every John/Rodney sga-santa story. So there's still old stuff to explore. And there's enough fic to continuously cycle through. It's the discussions and meta that I long for.
I confess I'm not a big fan of Written By The Victors. Oops?
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Re: John's Mom, yeah, Aphorism is about it for her being around in any way. If there's anything else out there, I don't recall it. I really need to get back to writing. The ideas are there; the motivation not so much.
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I didn't really like Victors, kind of slugged through it. I'm probably the only person in the fandom that isn't into it. I totally see how it's an exceptional piece of literature, I just didn't enjoy reading it.
I'm enjoying reading through the AO3 McShep fics chronologically. I've only gotten to May 2007, it's probably going to take me years. There's so much talent there.
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As for Victors, as I said above, it was a love it/hate it fic but such a game changer! Speranza really is one of the best writers in any fandom.
What a fantastic idea, reading the McShep fics chronologically. I should go back and do that, even knowing how many just aren't up on AO3, which is a shame. And yes, I've been here for 14 years and still haven't read everything. What a great way to spend a little time every day. :D
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The works by Speranza that I do like are some of the best pieces of ff I've ever read.
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I always write John's mother as deceased, because I think that adds another level to Patrick Sheppard's character. At least for me. Usually life is pretty good before, but after he's so grief-stricken that he withdraws from his sons in all the important ways and that's why he and John end up so estranged. It humanizes Patrick, which is important for me.
In the 'verse where John is a hobby musician, and Rodney teaches music, I represented his mother as a free spirit songstress who chose to be on the road all the time instead of with her family, and the toll that took on Patrick even before she died.
On a side note, why do all of my main OTPs have daddy issues and no moms? John Sheppard - absent mom, estranged and now dead dad. Jim Ellison - absent mom, estranged dad. Steve McGarrett - absent and deceitful mom (possibly dead for real now?), estranged and now dead dad. Seriously.
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I admit I do love fics that explain that Patrick dearly loved John's mom and her death made him withdraw in a way that was detrimental for his relationship with John. Because yeah, it humanizes Patrick.
On the other hand, I also find it interesting that John's mother never shows up in AUs. I can only think of 1 fic where John's mom is still alive...
I'm really glad you're still in the SGA fandom, bb. It'll be a sad day when you go :(
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Someday I'll write a John's mom is alive fic, once I find an angle I like.
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