Is this finally a conundrum that CAN'T be solved with helicopter theft?

[minxy]

Heh: T-Rex On Hidden Talents.

First time, standing apart. Walking the line of sex buddies and something more emotional, with an exit clause. Plus points for sneaky and effective use of tense changes: Something Guys Do from princessofg, who continues to provide wonderfully fresh, new Jack/Daniel. Hard R. S4ish.

From the Teyla ficathon, a darker femmeslash: strong women, surviving and finding that gives them more in common than they have with anyone else. Do No Harm, Teyla/Cadman, R, from alizarin_nyc.

kellifer_fic's entertaining drinking fic: It's the Firewater That Gets You. I love Ronon. I'm just saying. John & Rodney, G rated, humor.

Long, plotty Sam & Jack with a great premise: What if, one day, Sam just lost it and snapped and went a bit AWOL. Frankly, I'm stunned it hasn't happened, but it was with great foresight that Jojo had Maybourne approach her with a proposal in a story that played right into Season 5's Desperate Measures. It also does that thing where characters are allowed to have faults, and make mistakes, and accept consequences, and drive their friends to the edge. Daniel and Teal'c exist in this very nicely and importantly and as players in relationships that stand on their own and are as important as the great unspoken thing between Sam and Jack. And when they're pushed to the edge, you do find out exactly what it would take to get them to talk. Crisis, by Jojo, PG-13.

There was one about Rodney being insomniac. In fact, I think I read a DVD commentary on that one. Seems appropriate. I'll just go look for it for a moment... Oh, here is is: Solutions by teaphile, with DVD commentary here. John/Rodney, first time, cliche/kink challenge. NC-17.

And now, some brief meta, for I have not been sleeping well do to impending dissertation defense. Sure, it's in over a month, but there are deadlines and administration and there's work to do and advisors to badger and inconsistant people who must come through for me though there really isn't much precident... and I am sliiiiightly insomniac. But I'm working on it.

As per discussion with princessofg, using a hard POV in a fic is something that's a choice of the author, but is it a strength of fanfiction that T.V. or performances can't do as well? It seems to me that the camera's eye on screen is by default an omniscient POV, although I remember in bits of Ascension where the camera quite deliberately took on the POV of a floaty alien Orlin. In writing fanfic, I remember getting the first piece of beta advice alerting me to some alarming head hopping, and while omniscient POV in fic doesn't put me off, it's something I don't do well and try to deliberately avoid in my own writing.

There is a interesting side effect of hard character POV, though, and that's that if your character is unreliable or doesn't notice something or isn't there, you really can't get that information to the reader without telling your character or being very sneaky. T.V., on the other hand, can switch A to B storylines quite easily, and has been known to even jump clean away from our heroes and show wacky stuff like the badguys hanging out together, which is probably a more efficient way of doing things, but automatically filters the reactions through the audiences opinions rather than a characters opinions. I really like the intimacy of a hard POV, though, it's a direct and immediate way to access emotions and show how they're thinking by what they're registering. It's the anticipation of a first time when you really don't know how the other character is going to react, vs a foregone conclusion. Not that that is the only kind of tension, but it's an interesting kind.

I do suppose the camerawork itself is a (literal, har,) lens into the onscreen scene, and a director might suggest more intimacy with a two shot or aggression with a low angle, but even then, it's the directors POV you're getting.

Has Stargate ever followed just one character's POV in a hard way? If a hero is on his own, I suppose. Say, Daniel in The Summit/whateverthesecondepwascalled, but in a snap, they'll pull back to the Tok'ra planet and show stuff Daniel knows nothing about, and not particularly commit to Teal'c or Sam or Jack's POV there. In Alias early seasons, there was a significant commitment to Sydney's POV, and she carried you into and out of every scene, but apparently it almost flattened Jennifer Garner into exhaustion, so by S3 they'd introduced the idea of scenes that don't include Sydney, and there was much grumbling amongst the fans.

Anyway, insomniac inability to remember the scathing conclusion I was going to draw here, so tell me moments in fanfic where you thought a character's POV really changed the way the story unfolded (I really enjoyed writing Daniel as an unreliable narrator in Like No One is Watching, for example), or instances where omniscient POV made it a better action fic or something (do you find the omniscient POV better lends itself to fanfic that feels like an episode? That might have been my whiz-bang conclusion.) Any times when you remember canon committing to a hard character POV?

Maybe Beneath the Surface? Because we do get reintroduced to the characters, and don't follow Daniel until he's introduced to us through Jack...

Or the Changeling, which might be the best example, since Teal'c is effectively in a series of AUs and dreamscapes, so he more than many other episodes, is the standout hero of his dreams, and his is the only POV that matters. It isn't until he is discovered and at least partially stabilized at the SGC that the audience hears any other opinions other than Teal'c's, and even then, he's still in the room.

But then, Teal'c stories don't often overlap well with the other heroes, since he is a bit removed.

Thoughts? Ideas? Coherent arguments? Bring it.

OMG, I need to sleep. How do people handle this for a lifetime? I've only missed out on less than my normal 8 hours for a couple of nights in a row and I'm loopy. Of course, I'm not sleeping due to panic, so that could be causing the loopiness.

Comments

[orca-girl.livejournal.com]

First, let me say: Jojo is one of my two favorite 'ship writers; the other is SuzVoy. "Crisis" is really cool, and Jojo wrote a few other Sam-centric fics, one of which I think was a giant AU-mirror epic, that I really enjoyed. And Suz wrote a long plotty bleak UST drama, as well. One of the things I liked best about both of those writers, aside from their humor and their handling of the voices of both characters, (and that they'd include Daniel and Teal'c sometimes), was that they sometimes wrote RST but also wrote UST.

Second, let me say that in general, I *love* "unreliable narrator", and it's one thing I would point to that I love about the crossover concept, although you don't always see it done well. I love crossovers (not everyone does, I realize), because they allow the reader to see one world/set of characters from the unreliable viewpoint of another set of characters/worldview, and there is a lot of fun to be had with that. (Recent stellar example: LTLJ's "Retrograde" series, crossing SG1/SGA; another example would be Martha's "Lovely" and especially its sequel "Tatters", crossing SG1/TS/ATS.)

I think that the best "hard" or limited-POV SG1 ep I can think of -- aside from the already-mentioned "Changeling" -- is the bulk of "Absolute Power", which of course is limited for the same reasons as "Changeling" was. IIRC, the camera departs from Daniel to be "in" the jail when Jack is talking to Sam, but then it shows us that Daniel is indeed watching that exchanged, so it "fits" in with the conceit of the dream.

This caused me a lot of problems, actually, when I was struggling with my story for the ficathon -- I actually hadn't *thought* about the limited-to-Daniel POV of the dream and so on, and for various reasons wanted to do the story from Jack's POV. (I wanted his thoughts, and also I felt a little more comfortable with his narrative voice right at that moment.) Then, with like 48 hours before it was due, I freaked out because I suddenly realized what a problem that was. How can Jack *have* a POV within the AP dream? aaigh.

But then I figured out a few ways to fanwank it, and readers haven't questioned it or protested it -- which is interesting, too. Not that I'm quite sure whether *I* would question it, as a reader, either. In fact I'm *pretty* sure I've read fanfic before set during the AP dream that was from Jack's POV and I didn't think twice about it. Now that, to me, would be an interesting thing to get people's thoughts on. Is their willingness to accept Jack's POV within that dream merely because they hadn't really thought about the POV issues, hadn't noticed consciously the way the ep itself is careful to stick to Daniel's POV? Or is it because they have a conceptual fanwank for it? Or is it because they are willing, for the purposes of fanfic, to treat the "dream" as more of an AU, with a life/reality of its own? (I came up with a fanwank for it, rather than just deciding to treat it as its own reality, but in discussing it with some people, they've indicated that they sort of think of it as the latter.)

The same thing sort of goes for "Changeling", actually -- at least, in that I have always felt that I would *LOVE* to see someone write a significant exploration of that as an "AU" (i.e. fireman!Jack/psychiatrist!Daniel.) Though I have read one story that is more set within the "dream" but that allows Daniel a POV because you can argue that he is a visitor *within* Teal'c's dream and therefore could have a POV of his own. Hmm.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_minxy_/]

I had no problems at all with the idea of Jack's POV in Daniel's dream, actually. I think you totally got away with it, but it makes me happy that you considered the fact, and I don't think having it pointed out will detract from rereads of the story, either. Go you!

I'm wondering why Abyss and Grace aren't being discussed as often as the Changeling and Absolute Power, and I'm thinking it's because the limited POV isn't used to withhold information in a mysterious way in the same way. The Changeling and Absolute Power are somewhat unreliable narrators because we don't know why they are there and we only have their wacky, uncharacteristic behavior, which is fascinating, but is all driving us to an explanation of what, where, why, how. Abyss and Grace, on the other hand, give us a plausible set up from the beginning and explain clearly that Jack is in enemy hands and Sam is injured and left behind on a ship; while they both become increasingly unreliable narrators, those facts aren't likely to be called into question very sincerely. From there, there's some tension about will they get home and the details of how they got into the situation to begin with, but really the story is all character moments from the moment the set up is over on out. And we've been so well trained as an audience to have faith that everything will work out fine that the 'how will they get home?' question isn't nearly as driving as 'wtf is going on?' Despite cool use of unreliable narrators in all cases.

[orca-girl.livejournal.com]

I had no problems at all with the idea of Jack's POV in Daniel's dream, actually. I think you totally got away with it, but it makes me happy that you considered the fact, and I don't think having it pointed out will detract from rereads of the story, either. Go you!

Thanks. :) Once I thought of it, it bugged me a lot, because I *don't* really regard AP as a sort of AU. The work-around I decided on that allowed me to go on writing it was that since it was a teaching dream given to Daniel from Shifu, it's possible that Daniel could have been shown others' POVs within the dream itself. Because it seemed as if the Daniel in the dream wasn't aware of anything going wrong with himself. It struck me that it would have been effective of the dream to show real-Daniel others' perspectives on dream-Daniel.

I don't think that's what the ep intended, though. I think it intended real-Daniel to derive lessons from the dream only upon waking and being able to remember the dream, and thus getting an "outside" perspective on evil!Daniel that way. I think the ep is still just a very limited-POV while Daniel's within the dream, and there's no suggestion of other POVs in canon. But the idea was enough to work for me. :)

I'm wondering why Abyss and Grace aren't being discussed as often as the Changeling and Absolute Power, and I'm thinking it's because the limited POV isn't used to withhold information in a mysterious way in the same way.

*nods* I think you're right. Unreliable narrator can have many uses. In Abyss and Grace, there's no mystery; the POV is still very interesting, but the audience never questions its unreality.

Whereas, with both AP and Changeling, on first viewing the audience spends time going WTF? Is this "real" in some way? Especially since the show has already established ways for what we are seeing in those eps to sort of be "real" -- AU, reality-warping tech, future-glimpse (or possibly something we hadn't seen yet).

In the case of AP, the mystery of it, the possibility that what we're seeing is real, is bolstered by the previous example of "2010". While it would be a weird narrative technique to advance the story so quickly (the show never does "one year later" in reality), even then it was possible that we were seeing a possible real future that had to be fixed in a way like the 2010 future was fixed.

With Changeling, I think there's much less scope for thinking "this is somehow real", and it's more just *WTF*??? But the nice thing about Changeling is how it strings the viewer along with regard to expectations about what is "real" (i.e. there's an SGC-dream as well as the fireman-dream, and then there's reality). It *ought* to be obvious that the fireman-dream isn't real -- even if it was an AU, how do you get a human Teal'c in there? But it's not like Sam's dream/hallucinations in "Grace", where they are just overlays on a recognizable reality and where in various ways they are clearly dreamlike (occasionally dream-versions of characters act in ways they wouldn't, or probably wouldn't, in real life). The fireman-dream is its own self-contained reality that doesn't really involve its analogs of familiar characters acting weird or OOC (with the exception of Teal'c himself, perhaps). Therefore, I think that because the viewer starts out granting it the possibility of reality, even though that is soon dispelled, and due to its structure, it's easier later to think of it as having its own "life", as it were.

I think that "2010" is another interesting example of WTF, along with "Beneath the Surface". But I feel as if those aren't good examples of very-limited POVs like the above four eps are. The only limited POV in them is that of the audience, actually, which is being constrained as to the information it receives, with which to evaluate what it's seeing. The audience becomes an unreliable POV, in other words, and I think in both cases is "stranded" along with the characters, to follow along as they figure things out. (Well; in "2010" the characters are less stranded than the audience, actually; and I have other rants about "2010", but that's a different discussion.)

[orca-girl.livejournal.com]

By the way, in reference to a comment above: I can think of one other rare example of a writer using second-person narrative, in SG-1 fandom this time. The writer is Delilah, and she wrote the short (5-story) blind!Jack series, that switches off between Jack in second-person, and Daniel in first-person.

http://brothersinarms.tvheaven.com/delilah/sgslash.html

Weird. But I've always liked it. I don't think it's something I would like to read a *lot* of, but I could handle it in those. (Something else you were saying above: I don't have a phobia about it, but I'm not *fond* of first-person. I prefer tight-third.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_minxy_/]

You know, I might have to stop joking about that quite so fascetiously, people seem to be actually listening to things I say... As it is, it's not genetic or anything, just, as you say, a strong preference.

That said, I'm finding some fascinating uses of second person now we're on the subject. Firefly, Inara/Simon (which I never thought about before but worked seamlessly) in second person: Planetfall (http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/0/planetfall.html) by dirty_diana. Maybe PG-13.