Entry tags:

collaboration, creative impulses, fandom: stargate atlantis, fannish hangouts

Or: we smoke crack so you don't have to.

1. There is nothing more awesome than coming back from class + long day of class + other class and meetings and things to awesome thinky comments on a post. However, I now have to spend time doing class-related things, so. More thinky later.

2. graycastle and I got together to watch "Travelers," right, and we were meeting at a cafe. I actually saw her on the way there, though, walking a half block behind her. "graycastle!" I called. No response. "graycastle!" Nothing. "John is a robot!" She turned right around, though she swears she couldn't consciously understand what I was saying.

3. Alsoalso: here is the danger of hanging out with graycastle: cracked out story ideas. These now include:
- The one where John's father is an itinerant tuba player living in an apartment in the Castro, and John walks his two ten-years-younger half-sisters to school all the time and ties his sister's Punky Brewster shoes. Also, John has tres gay next door neighbors named Davinia and Robert, and he bakes cookies with them. Also, Davinia does his hair and helps him pick out his peg-legged ripped jeans. Rodney and Ronon have to go back in time to save teenage John's life from time-traveling Genii spies, and so they take the apartment across the hall. Rodney teaches math at John's high school, and John thinks he's stalking him and tells Davinia, just in case; Ronon discovers leather stores, buys many assless chaps, and discovers marijuana. graycastle has declared this a TOTALLY sensible and reasonable story idea, not AU at all, and part of her personal canon. She swears that every story she writes from now on will have this as a quiet background.

- The one where Rodney's mother is a Lacanian and his father a Jungian therapist. His homework included Lacanian algebra and a dream journal. (He's kinda screwed up.)

- The one where they get turned into pineapples. (Prompted by my despair at drawing John accurately in the margins of my notes: I don't get the hair spiky enough! I said. And then I try to make it more spiky! And then he looks like a pineapple!) John gets his wristband stuck on one of his fronds. Also, he likes to roll down hills. He and pineapple!Rodney must escape the villagers who want to eat them. They move by rustling their greenery. Rustlerustlerustle.
- Aside: The one where they all get turned into plants. (Rodney, fyi, is an apple tree.)

- The one where John is wounded and stuck in the infirmary and then he and Rodney begin playing crazily competitive cribbage on an Ancient board that rearranges statistics in favor of the winner. (For example, Rodney is thinking that he wants a pudding cup when he wins, and the next thing he knows one of the cooking staff with an ATA gene brings him an extra pudding cup! And the more they concentrate on the cribbage, the bigger the things they get! Like, the ancient pegboard thing makes Zelenka's database search algorithm turn up a bone-healing device for John. Etc.)

- The one where we manage to turn John into one of the members of graycastle's dissertation committee, whom she describes as "kinda a robot." Me: "oh, like John!" *pause* "Can we turn John into him?" Of course we can! See, Teyla's in a relationship with Kate Heightmeyer and doesn't know why she can't talk about it, and finally Kate just gives up all exasperated and tells Telya look, read this gender theory. And Teyla, being Teyla, reads it carefully and seriously, perhaps taking notes, and then returns the ten books to Kate all "this is all fascinating! and I feel that I understand your people better, and also I understand why John must act the way he does. Though I do not think it is a good thing. But I still do not understand these references to Derrida." (bad aca-joke alert!) Anyway, she then continues to read Earth philosophy and theory -- Kate starts her off, at that point, with Kant, and then Hegel, which she apologizes for, but who Teyla finds much more comprehensible and straightforward than Kant. And then John is forcibly outed, see, and as he's being hauled off Atlantis Teyla rushes up to him, and hands him Epistemology of the Closet and says "you must read this now, John!" and of course John does, because he misses Teyla, and then he reads some more, and then he becomes an angry grad student writing about the Air Force and the queering of homosocial space, and then he becomes a robot on somebody's dissertation committee, the end.

- The one where Zelenka is sekritly teaching Ronon Science throughout season four, and Ronon is teaching Zelenka, like, lyric poetry or something, and then Rodney's "I can't get it finished in time! I don't have enough hands! Colonel, hold this -- no, that -- no, god, can't you -- stop moving!" And then Ronon just sorta shoulders in all "not a problem, McKay, I can reverse the polarity of the neutron flow while you swap crystals." HOT.

And also, a random tangent sent us of on the set of silly transformational fiction:
- The one where they all get turned into DIFFERENT animals, thus queering the text even further! John is an easily-startled gazelle. Rodney is a badger. Teyla is a mink. Or maybe a mongoose. And Ronon we couldn't decide. Rhinocerous?

- The one where they all get turned into REPTILES, then! Where, naturally, Rodney is a turtle, John is a snake (graycastle said "boa constrictor!" I said "then he's hugging people all the time!" she said "yes but they're bad hugs!" and we decided to agree to disagree), Ronon is a Komodo dragon, and Teyla is a lizard.
- Digression: the one where they get turned into Lisa Frank folder-cover type animals in a far corner of Atlantis (John and Teyla big-eyed cats, Rodney and Ronon floppy-eared dogs, all, of course, appearing in a magically-created pink converse high top). Then they reenact An Incredible Journey to get back to the control tower. They ford rivers! They run up flights of stairs! They are attacked by strange ancient machines! Big-eyed-black-and-white-cat John jumps on little-golden-retriever-puppy Rodney and bites his ears! etc.

- The one where they're not even all organisms! Teyla's a dolphin, Rodney's a unicorn, John's a rainbow, and Ronon's a breeze. Everyone tells John and Rodney that they can't get together because they're, hello, a rainbow and a unicorn, and sometimes the rainbow has to shine somewhere else. It is sad. Woe. (NOTE: This now exists. No, really.)

- The one where they're all items at a Pier One store. (See previous SGA-related post.) John is a red velvet throw pillow with tassels at the corners and a gold thread border. Rodney is a nice simple square chair. Ronon is a round wicker table. And Teyla is an elegant and understated table lamp. DUH.

- The one where they're all nineteenth century literary figures. (Teyla is George Sand.)
- This also led to:
- The One Where Teyla is George Sand And Wears a Top Hat Because That Would Be Hot, and Ronon is Chopin and Plays Awesome Piano Because That Would Be Hot.
- The one where Rodney is Henry Fielding with his authorial insert thing. (Possibly John is Tom Jones. HA.)
- The one where Ronon is James Joyce and Rodney is T.S. Elliot
- The one where they're all 60s drug culture figures. (This features John as Ken Kesey, Rodney as Timothy Leary, Teyla as Neal Cassady, and Ronon as Hunter S. Thompson. We agree that Neal Cassady is perfect for Teyla.)
- The one where Teyla is Shakespeare and John is Christopher Marlowe (who, for the purposes of this story, was OF COURSE a spy who faked his death in the bar brawl.)
- The one where Teyla is Gabriel Garcia Marquez.