Random post N.1

[eruthros]

Things that will make me bail on an SGA story: killing off Jack O'Neill in a tossed-aside line. Or, really, any of the other SG1 folks. The author might only watch SGA, but she's got to know that some readers will have been SG1 fans first. That is Jack. That is Jack. Fucking. O'Neill. He gets more than "... and Jack O'Neill was dead, so we had to work with a new guy." NO. For one, Jack O'Neill isn't dead. He's never dead. Not really. If you want to get him out of the way, say he's stranded somewhere or missing or the building he was in exploded and we don't know what happened to him or having to do other work or off in the Asgard home galaxy. For another, I will resent it a lot of you kill of an SG1 character just to make the danger seem "real" to your SGA characters, and don't indicate that said SGA characters are impacted at all by his death. And yet people do it all the time.

I hate it just as much when authors make Sam Carter or other SG1 folks evil, especially since it's usually a clear sign that they haven't seen the source. But usually there are lots of other marks that a story like that will suck, so.

***

Interesting: apparently a French-Canadian publisher accidentally published Highlander fanfiction. Worse: he accidentally published plagiarized Highlander fanfiction. If you read French, you can read about it all here; if not, I'll summarize below.

1. A French fan, Frederic Jeorge, writes a HL story in 2001.
2. Marie-Pier Cote, a twelve-year-old fan rips it off. As La Presse says: "Same characters. Same sentences. Same commas."
3. A not-so-great editor, Michel Brule, publishes it as "Laura, the Immortal." (French-language book.) There's huge hoopla about a twelve-year-old girl writing fiction. So interesting! So precocious! Etc.
4. La Presse is all: um, isn't this kinda like Highlander? And then Frederic Jeorge says, wait, it's not just like Highlander, it's my story.
5. Michel Brule says: okay, I should have "taken precautions" before publishing a twelve-year-old's book. He says: but her mom told me she wrote it!
6. Frederic Jeorge says: um, shouldn't I be getting the royalties here?
7. Michel Brule says: dear Cotes, please give me all my money back. Also, pay me damages to repair my good name. After all, I shouldn't have to check a book before publishing it! I shouldn't even have to read a whole novel! (He didn't read the whole book.)

Interesting, no? Now, I have to say that I think the editor's more at fault here than he is claiming -- editors get lots of manuscripts, and they should be read by several people before they are published. Ideally, one of those several people would've noticed the whole heads-cut-off thing; after all, Highlander was a movie and you don't have to be fannish to know about it. But even so, there is google! It looks a lot like the editor was all "I will get publicity because the author is so young" and didn't even think about it seriously.

Comments

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

Heh. I, too, am awfully protective of the SG-1 folks in what SGA I read. I can theoretically work with having them cast as a sincere adversary, but in practice I usually go "hey! That's my team! Don't you do that to them!"

[eruthros]

Right! I mean, there's "SG-1 is misguided and focused on the threat to Earth," and that's, well, SG-1 is often vaguely misguided and home-focused, so okay. It'll make me cranky taken to extremes, but okay.

But I just read a story by miss_porcupine which really did contain a line like "Well, General O'Neill was dead, so there was no help there." And I'm already a little iffy on her stories, because I like Rodney and she's often writing him as ... a different kind of annoying than I think he is. So that was just it. One sentence in the middle of a story sufficed to kill Jack, stick Daniel in prison at an unknown location, and otherwise dispose of the rest of SG-1? NOPE. That's my team! Jack's not dead, and they will break Daniel out and then they will all go find Jack and then they will save earth the end. Unless it is darkfic. But this wasn't darkfic. Pah!