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International Blog Against Racism Week
Clearly no one consulted my schedule when they picked this week to open up one of the most interesting topics currently relevant in the first world. No, because I had a major deadline yesterday and today and last week, and there was another major deadline earlier last week, and I was out of town over the weekend and stuff.
But I really can't blame anyone else for signing me up to rec at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
stargateficrec for the first time this month. So.
In celebration ofibarw (yes! This week has it's own comm! Lots of fascinating linkage over there, so wrastle your liberal white guilt or rage or pain or whatever and go do some learnin') I've been reccing Teal'c at stargateficrec with a rec a day.
So far, I've recc'd None But Ourselves (the Redemption Song remix) by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cofax7 and Incredible Luck, Annoying Charm by ana_grrl.
And I'm totally miffed thatabyssinia4077 and rydra_wong recc'd Water Moon, Almost a Statesman, With the Dying and Speak the Living over there before I could. *sulks*
So,rydra_wong suggested a meme for this week, titled Grab Your Character of Color and Pimp Liek Whoa.
Rules: Just grab the Character of Color/Colour of your choice, and then pimp like whoa. Dedicate a post to telling everyone why this character is hot/cool/angstful/interesting/awesome and should be getting more fannish love.
Feel free to use any means at your disposal: picspam, essays, fics recs, vid clips, interpretive dance - whatever works for you.
We can always use more celebration of the diversity of characters out there, and it's hard to go wrong with squee.
So, to no one's surprise (though I'm considering chatting about some other CoC at some point this week) I'm going to talk about Teal'c.
In an effort to avoid telling, not showing, how OMG Not!Racist I am, I'm going to talk about fanfiction and Teal'c. I am going to celebrate our beautiful man, and I will count it a win if you find yourself thinking about something... Teal'c-y, and thinky, and perhaps writing a story about him (I shall enable with links at the end.)
To begin with, I've updated my Masterlist of Teal'c Recs. It's substantial anymore, and not just because I'll include any story on there that includes Teal'c in a notable role, even in a team fic, even if the POV is another character's. It's valid, I think, though I absolutely do not feel the need to do that with the other teammates.
So, I have meta'd on Teal'c before, and you can find that here: On Teal'c, backstory, my stories, freedom, owning choices, poetry, hobbies, voice and the all encompassing question: why is Teal'c underloved by fandom?
This is what I wrote at the time:
"Why is Teal'c underloved by fandom? The million dollar question. I don't know the answer. Maybe it's the unusual speech patterns. Maybe it's identifying with a character we have very little in common with (at least on the surface). Maybe it's a race issue, maybe it's Teal'c's inability to fall passionately into someone's arms after a melodramatic saving of him out of some dire somefink somefink... I don't know. I do know that I have been encouraged by a disproportionate number of 'Scapers, predisposed, perhaps, to see the amazing potential of an alien discovering freedoms and emotions for the first time."
This is why I think Teal'c should be fascinating to fanfic writers: (rydra_wong has a brilliant, bouncy, beautiful picspam to the same effect here.) The man is eloquent. He's tacturn, but his vocabulary is *brilliant* and he uses it. He's emotionally intelligent in ways, frankly, none of his teammates are. He does not shy away from hard subjects either emotional or physical. He can be incredibly sweet and gentle and then turn around and be That Scary Ass Guy. He's got upwards of 100 years of backstory you can play with, so where I really wouldn't believe you if you tried to tell me that Sam took a few years off in between thousands of hours of airtime, pilot training and getting her degrees to go off and find herself in Europe, I would totally believe that Teal'c could have gone on a mission that saw him more or less stranded on a far off planet, away from his wife, for years. Maybe it was before he was first prime, maybe after, but I'd love to know what the mission was about, who he was close to there, whether they survived, if that was a nail in the coffin of his faith in the Gods or if he was still a believer at that point.
Then, there's the finale. I was talking tojenlev about this, and the finale really has profound implications for Teal'c. I mean, you have a man with a deep sense of honor, and great remorse, and a past with such depth of evil and love and sadness and loss and joy that it's incredible to think about. (This is a side note where I insist everyone who hasn't read Speak the Living go off and do it right now.) Teal'c was the right hand man of some serious evil, right? Serious. Evil. He rose beyond it, he found a lot of redemption in the 10 or so years we've seen him, but I don't know that he has ever, ever found peace with it. Macbeth once memorably said "I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." (III, iv, 136-138) which is, you know, exactly what Teal'c *didn't* do, but to acknowledge his past, to even attempt to apologize for it, takes a HELL OF A LOT OF STRENGTH.
Much like dealing with racism, really, if you are a member of the oppressing party. It's a thoroughly different kind of fight if you're of the oppressed, which Teal'c also is, actually. It's amazing he has his head on straight. One wonders how he finds the time or energy to deal with pesky humans at all.
But I was talking about Teal'c, and the finale, and stages of acceptance. If the Kuebler-Ross stages (of dealing with catastrophic news, which may or may not be entirely appropriate) are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, then we might be able to categorize Teal'c by season.
Denial: Oh, come on, the early seasons are all denial. Every time Teal'c tries to easily explain that hey, he *totally* doesn't even LIKE Apophis any more and thinks it's really that easy, that right there is denial. The pilot in particular sees Teal'c realize that not everyone is going to deal with him the way that Jack deals with him, and in particular, there are people who aren't going to follow Jack's lead even.
Anger: This is a little murkier, but I would set the anger phase as everything between season 2 or 3 and, roughly, when the Goa'uld fell. I'm not saying it was in the least bit inappropriate to hate the Goa'uld, actually, but Teal'c held a lot, a LOT of anger: toward Apophis, toward Kronos, toward every single Goa'uld ever. He had levels of anger and modulations of it: when Ishta is chomping at the bit to kill every Goa'uld they can get within spitting distance of and Teal'c is advising patience, that's quite a level anger there. There are also definitely Jaffa Revenge Things in which there is not so much reasoning involved in the rage or fury (Talion comes to mind, though that is not in the season arc I've described). Their fall was a spectacularly cathartic event that way, but it wasn't the end of his emotional journey.
I really think Teal'c's anger is also compounded by being oppressed as well as actually being the bad guy. I do not know that the stages of grief can be analytically applied to 'how one stops being downtrodden' or 'dealing with evil being directed toward you, and can you really only blame the Gods?' I think the aspects of slavery that are the most tangled are the betrayal of your own people carrying out the oppression, and in Teal'c's case, he's looking right at himself when he tries to blame other Jaffa for things they have done. I suspect that the anger phase for Teal'c lasted so long because hating the Goa'uld is pretty clear cut: they are an easy target. The aftermath of the end of the actual oppression, the freeing of the Jaffa, the new laws that make it okay to be free... in some ways that's the journey you can see, those are the paths that are blazed, if overgrown. It's the dealing with embedded thought processes, the intrinsic oppression, the class issues that have become inextricably tied in--that's blazing a whole new trail through thick jungle.
It took 8 years to overthrow the Goa'uld. The Civil War was shorter. If the laws oppressing African-Americans in the States are the Goa'uld and all human beings are the Jaffa... then Teal'c and his people have a long journey ahead of them. If we take this back to Teal'c, though, his anger towards other Jaffa who acted on behalf of the Goa'uld and his anger at himself would be the only things left once the Goa'uld fell, and maybe it took long enough to win the war that the anger burns less bright at the end, but it can't come to any good to hate yourself indefinitely.
Bargaining: I see this as the Statesman phase, but it has tendrils in seasons not 8. I think Teal'c's deep obsession with duty to the free Jaffa, and obligation to them, is a way to compensate for all the battles, and slaughters, and orders, and suicide missions for an unworthy cause. The Jaffa have a straightforward sense of honor complicated by a long history of dishonorable slavery and associated responsibility; Teal'c's emotional health and intelligence is sometimes nothing short of heroic. I think the bargaining phase was a long time growing deep within Teal'c, but he's fortunate to find himself so deeply unsuited for politics, because it clear that was not his path before he committed himself to something so unhappy-making.
Depression: The why bother with anything phase. I think this is the phase where Teal'c tries to move off-base and fails and gives up. Where he tries to lead the free Jaffa nation, finds himself unsuited for it, and resigns (fails). This is a Teal'c who begins to drop traditions, like shaving his head, loses some ties and isn't sure there really is a point to any of it. This is the point where Teal'c needs a HUG.
(It is also the point where he meets Cameron Mitchell. I'm sure that's not relevant at *all*, though, because, unlike Rydra, I feel no need to own my biases.)
Acceptance: To my mind, we have never seen acceptance from Teal'c. Not until the finale. It took him fifty years to get past being a soldier and a politician and an orphan to become just Teal'c. Just a guy who can express the loss of people he cared about even as he looked right at their younger selves; and to do that without that loss being complicated by the bigger picture of guilt for every single wrong he's ever done. I am so, so curious about what we would learn about Teal'c if we had a chance to spend more time with him. (Fanfiction writers, I'm looking at you. Voices in the head, YES I CAN HEAR YOU THANKS.)
Of course, the entire Free Jaffa nation didn't have the luxury of 50 years of contemplation on amountaintop spaceship. So most of what we've seen from them is cathartic working together to overthrow a common enemy, then dissolution and infighting as they can't seem to find a new common enemy to hold them together. People as a group are a different monster than individuals, and the Jaffa Nation have made some strange choices. It does seem as though their xenophobia is a step towards coalescing, that they are loosening ties with Earth and the Tok'ra just to take a good look at themselves. It will likely take a long time to get over the innate prejudices that are now inherent in sub-groups of Jaffa, but everything does take time, and not everyone has time machines to facillitate zen acceptance of difficult things.
I seem to be out of steam for the moment, but I am tempted to post a sort of tongue-in-cheek Know Your Jaffa Voice! translation post, but that will wait for another day.
If you are even mildly interested in considering some prompts, I suggest you check outchoc_fic, which has oodles of prompts going right now, and various deadlines for them in September. The idea there is that there will be fic and art posted throughout the month, all celebrating characters of color on every single day. There's been an extra-special extension of the deadline to allow for IBARW, so limited time, etc.
There's also anna's probably just a little tacky post-kerfluffle multifandom inter-racial ficathon or rydra_wong's supplimental Emergency "Brother From Another Planet" Fic Challenge (because Anna's interracial pairings are limited to same-species, and some of us have a little too much love for Cameron/Teal'c.)
Folk are also encouraged to postpostPOST for IBARW, and I think a Teal'c story would be an excellent kind of thing to post. (Shut UP, voices!)
But I really can't blame anyone else for signing me up to rec at
stargateficrec for the first time this month. So. In celebration of
ibarw (yes! This week has it's own comm! Lots of fascinating linkage over there, so wrastle your liberal white guilt or rage or pain or whatever and go do some learnin') I've been reccing Teal'c at stargateficrec with a rec a day.So far, I've recc'd None But Ourselves (the Redemption Song remix) by
cofax7 and Incredible Luck, Annoying Charm by ana_grrl.And I'm totally miffed that
abyssinia4077 and rydra_wong recc'd Water Moon, Almost a Statesman, With the Dying and Speak the Living over there before I could. *sulks*So,
rydra_wong suggested a meme for this week, titled Grab Your Character of Color and Pimp Liek Whoa.Rules: Just grab the Character of Color/Colour of your choice, and then pimp like whoa. Dedicate a post to telling everyone why this character is hot/cool/angstful/interesting/awesome and should be getting more fannish love.
Feel free to use any means at your disposal: picspam, essays, fics recs, vid clips, interpretive dance - whatever works for you.
We can always use more celebration of the diversity of characters out there, and it's hard to go wrong with squee.
So, to no one's surprise (though I'm considering chatting about some other CoC at some point this week) I'm going to talk about Teal'c.
In an effort to avoid telling, not showing, how OMG Not!Racist I am, I'm going to talk about fanfiction and Teal'c. I am going to celebrate our beautiful man, and I will count it a win if you find yourself thinking about something... Teal'c-y, and thinky, and perhaps writing a story about him (I shall enable with links at the end.)
To begin with, I've updated my Masterlist of Teal'c Recs. It's substantial anymore, and not just because I'll include any story on there that includes Teal'c in a notable role, even in a team fic, even if the POV is another character's. It's valid, I think, though I absolutely do not feel the need to do that with the other teammates.
So, I have meta'd on Teal'c before, and you can find that here: On Teal'c, backstory, my stories, freedom, owning choices, poetry, hobbies, voice and the all encompassing question: why is Teal'c underloved by fandom?
This is what I wrote at the time:
"Why is Teal'c underloved by fandom? The million dollar question. I don't know the answer. Maybe it's the unusual speech patterns. Maybe it's identifying with a character we have very little in common with (at least on the surface). Maybe it's a race issue, maybe it's Teal'c's inability to fall passionately into someone's arms after a melodramatic saving of him out of some dire somefink somefink... I don't know. I do know that I have been encouraged by a disproportionate number of 'Scapers, predisposed, perhaps, to see the amazing potential of an alien discovering freedoms and emotions for the first time."
This is why I think Teal'c should be fascinating to fanfic writers: (
rydra_wong has a brilliant, bouncy, beautiful picspam to the same effect here.) The man is eloquent. He's tacturn, but his vocabulary is *brilliant* and he uses it. He's emotionally intelligent in ways, frankly, none of his teammates are. He does not shy away from hard subjects either emotional or physical. He can be incredibly sweet and gentle and then turn around and be That Scary Ass Guy. He's got upwards of 100 years of backstory you can play with, so where I really wouldn't believe you if you tried to tell me that Sam took a few years off in between thousands of hours of airtime, pilot training and getting her degrees to go off and find herself in Europe, I would totally believe that Teal'c could have gone on a mission that saw him more or less stranded on a far off planet, away from his wife, for years. Maybe it was before he was first prime, maybe after, but I'd love to know what the mission was about, who he was close to there, whether they survived, if that was a nail in the coffin of his faith in the Gods or if he was still a believer at that point. Then, there's the finale. I was talking to
jenlev about this, and the finale really has profound implications for Teal'c. I mean, you have a man with a deep sense of honor, and great remorse, and a past with such depth of evil and love and sadness and loss and joy that it's incredible to think about. (This is a side note where I insist everyone who hasn't read Speak the Living go off and do it right now.) Teal'c was the right hand man of some serious evil, right? Serious. Evil. He rose beyond it, he found a lot of redemption in the 10 or so years we've seen him, but I don't know that he has ever, ever found peace with it. Macbeth once memorably said "I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." (III, iv, 136-138) which is, you know, exactly what Teal'c *didn't* do, but to acknowledge his past, to even attempt to apologize for it, takes a HELL OF A LOT OF STRENGTH.Much like dealing with racism, really, if you are a member of the oppressing party. It's a thoroughly different kind of fight if you're of the oppressed, which Teal'c also is, actually. It's amazing he has his head on straight. One wonders how he finds the time or energy to deal with pesky humans at all.
But I was talking about Teal'c, and the finale, and stages of acceptance. If the Kuebler-Ross stages (of dealing with catastrophic news, which may or may not be entirely appropriate) are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, then we might be able to categorize Teal'c by season.
Denial: Oh, come on, the early seasons are all denial. Every time Teal'c tries to easily explain that hey, he *totally* doesn't even LIKE Apophis any more and thinks it's really that easy, that right there is denial. The pilot in particular sees Teal'c realize that not everyone is going to deal with him the way that Jack deals with him, and in particular, there are people who aren't going to follow Jack's lead even.
Anger: This is a little murkier, but I would set the anger phase as everything between season 2 or 3 and, roughly, when the Goa'uld fell. I'm not saying it was in the least bit inappropriate to hate the Goa'uld, actually, but Teal'c held a lot, a LOT of anger: toward Apophis, toward Kronos, toward every single Goa'uld ever. He had levels of anger and modulations of it: when Ishta is chomping at the bit to kill every Goa'uld they can get within spitting distance of and Teal'c is advising patience, that's quite a level anger there. There are also definitely Jaffa Revenge Things in which there is not so much reasoning involved in the rage or fury (Talion comes to mind, though that is not in the season arc I've described). Their fall was a spectacularly cathartic event that way, but it wasn't the end of his emotional journey.
I really think Teal'c's anger is also compounded by being oppressed as well as actually being the bad guy. I do not know that the stages of grief can be analytically applied to 'how one stops being downtrodden' or 'dealing with evil being directed toward you, and can you really only blame the Gods?' I think the aspects of slavery that are the most tangled are the betrayal of your own people carrying out the oppression, and in Teal'c's case, he's looking right at himself when he tries to blame other Jaffa for things they have done. I suspect that the anger phase for Teal'c lasted so long because hating the Goa'uld is pretty clear cut: they are an easy target. The aftermath of the end of the actual oppression, the freeing of the Jaffa, the new laws that make it okay to be free... in some ways that's the journey you can see, those are the paths that are blazed, if overgrown. It's the dealing with embedded thought processes, the intrinsic oppression, the class issues that have become inextricably tied in--that's blazing a whole new trail through thick jungle.
It took 8 years to overthrow the Goa'uld. The Civil War was shorter. If the laws oppressing African-Americans in the States are the Goa'uld and all human beings are the Jaffa... then Teal'c and his people have a long journey ahead of them. If we take this back to Teal'c, though, his anger towards other Jaffa who acted on behalf of the Goa'uld and his anger at himself would be the only things left once the Goa'uld fell, and maybe it took long enough to win the war that the anger burns less bright at the end, but it can't come to any good to hate yourself indefinitely.
Bargaining: I see this as the Statesman phase, but it has tendrils in seasons not 8. I think Teal'c's deep obsession with duty to the free Jaffa, and obligation to them, is a way to compensate for all the battles, and slaughters, and orders, and suicide missions for an unworthy cause. The Jaffa have a straightforward sense of honor complicated by a long history of dishonorable slavery and associated responsibility; Teal'c's emotional health and intelligence is sometimes nothing short of heroic. I think the bargaining phase was a long time growing deep within Teal'c, but he's fortunate to find himself so deeply unsuited for politics, because it clear that was not his path before he committed himself to something so unhappy-making.
Depression: The why bother with anything phase. I think this is the phase where Teal'c tries to move off-base and fails and gives up. Where he tries to lead the free Jaffa nation, finds himself unsuited for it, and resigns (fails). This is a Teal'c who begins to drop traditions, like shaving his head, loses some ties and isn't sure there really is a point to any of it. This is the point where Teal'c needs a HUG.
(It is also the point where he meets Cameron Mitchell. I'm sure that's not relevant at *all*, though, because, unlike Rydra, I feel no need to own my biases.)
Acceptance: To my mind, we have never seen acceptance from Teal'c. Not until the finale. It took him fifty years to get past being a soldier and a politician and an orphan to become just Teal'c. Just a guy who can express the loss of people he cared about even as he looked right at their younger selves; and to do that without that loss being complicated by the bigger picture of guilt for every single wrong he's ever done. I am so, so curious about what we would learn about Teal'c if we had a chance to spend more time with him. (Fanfiction writers, I'm looking at you. Voices in the head, YES I CAN HEAR YOU THANKS.)
Of course, the entire Free Jaffa nation didn't have the luxury of 50 years of contemplation on a
I seem to be out of steam for the moment, but I am tempted to post a sort of tongue-in-cheek Know Your Jaffa Voice! translation post, but that will wait for another day.
If you are even mildly interested in considering some prompts, I suggest you check out
choc_fic, which has oodles of prompts going right now, and various deadlines for them in September. The idea there is that there will be fic and art posted throughout the month, all celebrating characters of color on every single day. There's been an extra-special extension of the deadline to allow for IBARW, so limited time, etc.There's also anna's probably just a little tacky post-kerfluffle multifandom inter-racial ficathon or rydra_wong's supplimental Emergency "Brother From Another Planet" Fic Challenge (because Anna's interracial pairings are limited to same-species, and some of us have a little too much love for Cameron/Teal'c.)
Folk are also encouraged to postpostPOST for IBARW, and I think a Teal'c story would be an excellent kind of thing to post. (Shut UP, voices!)
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I love what you've said about the way he became "just Teal'c". Makes me totally anticipate where he will go in the two movies. I can't wait.
And I'm thinking of Teal'c spending time with the rest of SG-1 knowing what he knows, what he's learned over those ten years. And how they might all respond to him based on that.
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I seriously need to write it.
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And just imagine that first conversation between Teal'c and Jack afterwards.
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Having trouble getting a handle on the tone of the story though; haven't started writing yet. Thinking, though.
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And yet, sometimes I think he's just a leeeettle too intimidating for some fen.
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Loved that prompt.
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(I misspelled beatrice_otter's handle in the recs. I R silly.)
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Glad you liked the post. It's not often that I meta, but once I get over feeling like I have nothing to say, I find myself hiccuping 1,000 words into a post and... it turns out I have a lot to say. *sheepish*
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Brillian post :-)
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I've tried to *say* how I think one writes Jaffa voice, but I suspect the translation post will be a lot sillier. That said? I find the idea very entertaining and I just might hop on it. Hee.
(thanks, again)
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Anyway thanks a lot!