Characterization, what is that?
5/25/11 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kateLeaving for Massachusetts tomorrow so I need to get all my work done today, but of course, I've got things on the brain. So, dwircle, let's chat about characterization.
I ask because I've got to write an AU fic that I owe for an auction. And I was thinking of possible things for John Sheppard to do, because the person wants a complete AU. And the thing is, I love complete AUs and there are a number of them on my SGA McShep comfort recs list, but there's a couple similarities to most of them.
One, Rodney is usually a physics professor or a physicist. Sometimes he's a professor of other things other than physics, sometimes he's another kind of scientist, but it's a pretty common thread to Rodney characterization. Now, there are AUs where he's a writer and an accountant and an inventor (But Wait, There's More! series bylavvyan, OMG), but that's the thing about Rodney. He's pretty recognizable as anything as long as you make him smart, competent, arrogant, and bad with people. There are varying degrees on all those things (and to make a sympathetic character, you have to play on the smart/competent part and also show that he has a heart and that he can grow (when SGA was good, they did this well - when not, welllllll...)), but Rodney's pretty easy to pick out, whether he's a cat or an ice cube. I don't worry about his characterization because I think there's plenty out there to make him recognizable, no matter what profession he's in.
Two, John is usually ex-military or current military or ROTC or a pilot. Do y'all see that as a sort of inherent part of his characterization? I mean, I get that, and it's not that I don't write the hell out of that when I write canon (and some AUs, too). But without it, is he still John Sheppard?
Especially the flying thing - can you imagine a John Sheppard that doesn't fly*? The thing is, I have a couple of AU John Sheppards that just can't have had the military background - it's not possible for that to have happened for where he got today. In one of them he's a pilot anyway (recreational); in another, his profession is analogous to the flying. In the one I'm contemplating right now, though, he'd just be a normal guy that went to college to do something he loves and now he's doing it.
There are other things that make him John Sheppard. I think there are themes that come out in any portrayal of him. A partial list:
~He's a fuck-up (to varying degrees - and usually for a noble cause).
~He's smarter than your averagebear human, though he's usually lackadaisical about it.
~He's special in some way (usually this relates to the ATA gene; sometimes it's skipped altogether).
~He has family troubles, and by extension most fics about him tend to include families of choice, whether it's a conscious theme or not.
~He is able to make the hard choices, and he is able to sacrifice (himself especially) - this can be missing in a lot of fics (especially AUs of this type because they just don't require the kind of situation that makes this characterization come to the fore - and it's only every spottily displayed in the canon).
And then we get into parts of his characterization that I find interesting. He has a couple of modes of operating, and some people tend to pick one end of the spectrum and stick with it. Other people make him as fluid as the show itself does (which is probably bad writing on the SGA writers' part, but it offers a lot of variety).
~He sometimes acts like a twelve year old (when he's happy or annoyed) and sometimes acts like he's responsible for the world (when there is something on the line - usually other people). This is interesting because if you take either side of this equation to the extreme, you get what I would think of as a remarkably OOC John Sheppard, but a little of either side (or a fairly large helping of both) and you get what I sort of think of as quintessential John Sheppard.
~He can seem remarkably well-adjusted, but it's made clear to us in canon that he isn't. How well-adjusted he is in fic varies wildly.
~He can be charming, but he is reticent about having real conversations. These two are not mutually exclusive to me, but I often see one side played up and the other side played down, in both directions.
~He seems to have an ease with casual relationships yet he never sees it coming (and in later seasons seems almost asexual (though this could be the stress of his life/job as military commander of Atlantis) and he has been married). There are several parts of this that are often used to show that John is in fact gay (a fair interpretation, I think, though not the only one). Characterization runs the gamut on this, from asexual to ladykiller to super-romantic to just bad with people he cares about. Honestly, as long as the rest of the puzzle that is John Sheppard fits together and the author sells me on his sexuality/relationship tendencies, this part doesn't bother me much.
There are others I'm missing in this section, I just can't think of them right now. I find this section is the reason that John Sheppard is so wildly diverse in fic; there is just a lot of leeway, and a dearth of information about his background, so we're freer to fill in the lines with whatever cocktail of John Sheppard traits we like.
Do you have a particular John Sheppard recipe? I can look at that laundry list and tell you what dials I turned up to 11 and what items I toned down for any given story of mine (and most of them are different from one another). I can also look at that and tell you THIS is why I'm having trouble feeling John Sheppard in Impromptu (and gives me a nice, easy way to go back through and strengthen his characterization, yay). John is not a given for me; his characterization is all over the place. Rodney is more stable but not completely unchanging. There are aspects of his personality that I will highlight that aren't always what most people think of as typical characterization. I'm curious if you have multiple John Sheppards or just one, and how you came to your current ideal, if it's just the one.
Also, since I'm thinking about how to make this AU work so I can get this auction fic off my plate, if John isn't military (present or past) or a pilot, what would you need to be sure it's him? Not just the hair and the drawl, but the John Sheppard cocktail. If he has a family of choice and has adrenaline-junkie hobbies, sleeps with a lot of people but doesn't get attached to any of them, is charming and laid-back except when you want to have a conversation about him, would that be enough to make it really feel like him? Does he also have to be a twelve year old about things that get him excited and have a heroic streak a mile wide, even for complete strangers? Am I missing some vital part of John Sheppard that would make him seem OOC for you?
*Though I think that for all the initial super-pilot stuff they pushed on us in the beginning about Sheppard, that's not what he's really about. A lot of early fanon characterization was built on this because it was pushed pretty hard in the first season, but it dropped away pretty quickly when it became apparent that he wasn't going to save the day by flying shit all the time. You get the feel in Rising that Sheppard would have done anything to keep flying, but once he has Atlantis, that feeling goes away. And interestingly, later characterizations do tend to shift that impulse - the characterization of 'John Sheppard will do anything to fly' became 'John Sheppard will do anything for Atlantis.' So I think, while I said flying up there, what I really meant was his raison d'être - at first, flying, then Atlantis, and maybe mixed in with Atlantis, his family of choice (team and/or Atlantis personnel as a whole). Back to top.
I ask because I've got to write an AU fic that I owe for an auction. And I was thinking of possible things for John Sheppard to do, because the person wants a complete AU. And the thing is, I love complete AUs and there are a number of them on my SGA McShep comfort recs list, but there's a couple similarities to most of them.
One, Rodney is usually a physics professor or a physicist. Sometimes he's a professor of other things other than physics, sometimes he's another kind of scientist, but it's a pretty common thread to Rodney characterization. Now, there are AUs where he's a writer and an accountant and an inventor (But Wait, There's More! series by
lavvyan, OMG), but that's the thing about Rodney. He's pretty recognizable as anything as long as you make him smart, competent, arrogant, and bad with people. There are varying degrees on all those things (and to make a sympathetic character, you have to play on the smart/competent part and also show that he has a heart and that he can grow (when SGA was good, they did this well - when not, welllllll...)), but Rodney's pretty easy to pick out, whether he's a cat or an ice cube. I don't worry about his characterization because I think there's plenty out there to make him recognizable, no matter what profession he's in.Two, John is usually ex-military or current military or ROTC or a pilot. Do y'all see that as a sort of inherent part of his characterization? I mean, I get that, and it's not that I don't write the hell out of that when I write canon (and some AUs, too). But without it, is he still John Sheppard?
Especially the flying thing - can you imagine a John Sheppard that doesn't fly*? The thing is, I have a couple of AU John Sheppards that just can't have had the military background - it's not possible for that to have happened for where he got today. In one of them he's a pilot anyway (recreational); in another, his profession is analogous to the flying. In the one I'm contemplating right now, though, he'd just be a normal guy that went to college to do something he loves and now he's doing it.
There are other things that make him John Sheppard. I think there are themes that come out in any portrayal of him. A partial list:
~He's a fuck-up (to varying degrees - and usually for a noble cause).
~He's smarter than your average
~He's special in some way (usually this relates to the ATA gene; sometimes it's skipped altogether).
~He has family troubles, and by extension most fics about him tend to include families of choice, whether it's a conscious theme or not.
~He is able to make the hard choices, and he is able to sacrifice (himself especially) - this can be missing in a lot of fics (especially AUs of this type because they just don't require the kind of situation that makes this characterization come to the fore - and it's only every spottily displayed in the canon).
And then we get into parts of his characterization that I find interesting. He has a couple of modes of operating, and some people tend to pick one end of the spectrum and stick with it. Other people make him as fluid as the show itself does (which is probably bad writing on the SGA writers' part, but it offers a lot of variety).
~He sometimes acts like a twelve year old (when he's happy or annoyed) and sometimes acts like he's responsible for the world (when there is something on the line - usually other people). This is interesting because if you take either side of this equation to the extreme, you get what I would think of as a remarkably OOC John Sheppard, but a little of either side (or a fairly large helping of both) and you get what I sort of think of as quintessential John Sheppard.
~He can seem remarkably well-adjusted, but it's made clear to us in canon that he isn't. How well-adjusted he is in fic varies wildly.
~He can be charming, but he is reticent about having real conversations. These two are not mutually exclusive to me, but I often see one side played up and the other side played down, in both directions.
~He seems to have an ease with casual relationships yet he never sees it coming (and in later seasons seems almost asexual (though this could be the stress of his life/job as military commander of Atlantis) and he has been married). There are several parts of this that are often used to show that John is in fact gay (a fair interpretation, I think, though not the only one). Characterization runs the gamut on this, from asexual to ladykiller to super-romantic to just bad with people he cares about. Honestly, as long as the rest of the puzzle that is John Sheppard fits together and the author sells me on his sexuality/relationship tendencies, this part doesn't bother me much.
There are others I'm missing in this section, I just can't think of them right now. I find this section is the reason that John Sheppard is so wildly diverse in fic; there is just a lot of leeway, and a dearth of information about his background, so we're freer to fill in the lines with whatever cocktail of John Sheppard traits we like.
Do you have a particular John Sheppard recipe? I can look at that laundry list and tell you what dials I turned up to 11 and what items I toned down for any given story of mine (and most of them are different from one another). I can also look at that and tell you THIS is why I'm having trouble feeling John Sheppard in Impromptu (and gives me a nice, easy way to go back through and strengthen his characterization, yay). John is not a given for me; his characterization is all over the place. Rodney is more stable but not completely unchanging. There are aspects of his personality that I will highlight that aren't always what most people think of as typical characterization. I'm curious if you have multiple John Sheppards or just one, and how you came to your current ideal, if it's just the one.
Also, since I'm thinking about how to make this AU work so I can get this auction fic off my plate, if John isn't military (present or past) or a pilot, what would you need to be sure it's him? Not just the hair and the drawl, but the John Sheppard cocktail. If he has a family of choice and has adrenaline-junkie hobbies, sleeps with a lot of people but doesn't get attached to any of them, is charming and laid-back except when you want to have a conversation about him, would that be enough to make it really feel like him? Does he also have to be a twelve year old about things that get him excited and have a heroic streak a mile wide, even for complete strangers? Am I missing some vital part of John Sheppard that would make him seem OOC for you?
*Though I think that for all the initial super-pilot stuff they pushed on us in the beginning about Sheppard, that's not what he's really about. A lot of early fanon characterization was built on this because it was pushed pretty hard in the first season, but it dropped away pretty quickly when it became apparent that he wasn't going to save the day by flying shit all the time. You get the feel in Rising that Sheppard would have done anything to keep flying, but once he has Atlantis, that feeling goes away. And interestingly, later characterizations do tend to shift that impulse - the characterization of 'John Sheppard will do anything to fly' became 'John Sheppard will do anything for Atlantis.' So I think, while I said flying up there, what I really meant was his raison d'être - at first, flying, then Atlantis, and maybe mixed in with Atlantis, his family of choice (team and/or Atlantis personnel as a whole). Back to top.
For easy organization later:
no subject
on 5/26/11 12:09 pm (UTC)I think you can make a case for Sheppard having a 'false self', stemming from his messed-up childhood and/or adolescence. Depends when you want to imagine he lost his mother, who isn't mentioned in canon really. If he lost her early he's going to potentially have some quite dysfunctional defences and maybe have a veneer of coping when things are good, that can fall apart to soem degree when bad stuff happens. If he lost her later, say early teens which seems to be fairly popular in canon (and had a good r/ship before then), he might be less fundamentally fucked-up but with some neurotic oedipal issues and issues about losing people he loves, worsened by his father's attidue to him (invalidation, trying to force him into the company, not seeing who John really was).
The seriously messed-up Sheppard would have the potential to appear highish-functioning, and to have learned to behave that way as that's what people around him want and what gets him what he wants, but internally to be pretty mistrustful of close relationships, and to tip over into paranoid projection when stressed. I'd see him as being pretty schizoid and avoidant in close relationships. He'd dislike himself and be insecure, fundamentally, while maintaining the false social self which would alter depending on what the person he was with wanted him to be (like sports and Bud with the guys).
Even if you buy the above (and I don't know that I do, although it makes a nicely dark AU), I would still see his physical and military competence as a core redeeming and mitigating feature and as a positive defining factor in his sense of self. Without it I really think he'd fall apart into self-destructiveness or despair. He might have been attracted to the military for some messed-up reasons (outlet for rage, acting out via risk-taking in fighter jets, giving Dad the finger) but the structure of the military probably 'held' and helped him to a degree, despite the need to repress aspects of his character. And again, the need for a false self for the military, and another for Nancy (which didn't work), and another on Atlantis at first when he's thrust into being military commander and literally has to fake it. I think we see him growing once in Atlantis - his 'specialness' to the city would have boosted his self-esteem, and then there are the developing real relationships esp. with his team - the real 'reparenting' experience for him that allows him to become more integrated and whole. I don't think the writers really followed this through at all consistently of course, as they needed him to go on being the slightly mysterious loner/hero who never gets the girl, for the purposes of maintaining the series. They do show his developing closeness to the team especially, although I think his relationship with Elizabeth is more neurotic - a mix of idealisation and treating her as another authority to rebel against. Teyla is the real Mom for him (with interesting oedipal hints of attraction there of course, huh, wonder if his reaction to her pregnancy could be read as sibling rivalry? *g*), and Rodney and Ronon are the brothers he never had (yeah, us slashers all write incest-fic!), given the fucked-up real relationship with Dave. Interestingly, the older male figures are all negative like his real father - Sumner he rebels against then has to kill (oedipus!) and Kolya is perpetually the bad father - controlling and sadistic. Woolsey isn't portrayed as strong enough to be a real father figure although he's definitely benign. I like good fic where Woolsey has that role more for John - a good-father, reparenting figure, like in 'Slide'.
Oh - the flying. Re all the above, I'd see it both as a (mostly functional) escapist defence against the bad stuff, and as a real competence that helps hold him together as a person. He probably sublimates repressed sexuality into the rush of flying, and it would express his need to rebel and get free from controlling authority figures. His dorkiness/nerdiness is also a more functional defence - a small rebellion against his Dad's conservatism which becomes a real part of his core self (humour, quirkiness, competitive games).
And now I'll shut up with the psychobabble!
no subject
on 5/26/11 02:06 pm (UTC)Even if you buy the above (and I don't know that I do, although it makes a nicely dark AU)
Actually, that's the read I get on canon itself sometimes, and some dark canon stories. And I like it and can buy it, too - I think there's enough support in canon for it.
Interestingly, though, my AUs are generally not dark. AUs are my ridiculous, fluffy, happy place, and thus I think why I put so much stress on the military and his choices being the reason he's dark-ish in canon. I can see the other interpretation, but for AUs I don't want to (for the most part). Interesting.
I think his relationship with Elizabeth is more neurotic - a mix of idealisation and treating her as another authority to rebel against. Teyla is the real Mom for him (with interesting oedipal hints of attraction there of course, huh, wonder if his reaction to her pregnancy could be read as sibling rivalry?
Oh, you REALLY hit on some of my issues with John and women here, you pretty much explain my reaction to Elizabeth and why John/Elizabeth just really doesn't work for me; there's such a maternal vibe to the way they interact that it squicks me out. Not all the time - the rewatching I did made it obvious where John/Elizabeth shippers draw their inspiration, so that was kind of nice to see (even though it's still not going to be my ship). For Teyla (and this is because of the nature of my own familial setup), I've always thought of her as the older sister, guiding and kind and seeing through his bullshit, but never really having to be the authority figure (that was on Elizabeth). I always read the kiss between John and Teyla as being completely separate from their friendship. The virus was making him more animalistic and Teyla is an attractive woman, one John has feelings for. Not being able to separate platonic love from physical attraction feels like it's an issue of the virus, not some long-held back longing for Teyla (which is never really indicated in any other situation, that I saw in my rewatch, anyway). And that bit about sibling rivalry for how he treats her during her pregnancy? I think that's genius, and even though it's probably not what the writers were going for, I think it really does explain his bizarre behavior.
Oh - the flying. Re all the above, I'd see it both as a (mostly functional) escapist defence against the bad stuff
Ah, interesting. I think, if I had gone beyond my initial analysis of 'John loves flying. It's part of who he is,' this is the explanation I would have come out of it with.
and as a real competence that helps hold him together as a person. He probably sublimates repressed sexuality into the rush of flying
And both of these read as absolutely true to me too, though I wouldn't have thought of them.
it would express his need to rebel and get free from controlling authority figures
This one never occurs to me, and always makes me look sideways at things. I can get it, I mean, I can objectively see where it's coming from, but it doesn't resonate with me for some reason (even though clearly Sheppard has a problem with authority figures). I'm guessing that's just my personal bias coming in there, something I'm lacking in experience for, so there's nothing for the idea to resonate with.
I love your psychobabble, feel free to come on over and do it any time!
Also, on a complete tangent: I've been listening to a bunch of podfics lately, and I have to say that several of your readings are on my faves list. I'm going to do a rec set soon and you will most definitely be on there. :D