A handful of John/Teyla recs

[tielan]

Fic
"Adrift" by beatrice_otter in the sg_rarepairings ficathon.

Vids
Rihana's "Unfaithful" by obfreak:
Really spiffy editing, slightly angsty, clever interpretations, and some incredible John/Teyla shots throughout. I've played it about six times in the last week - that's a lot for me, since I don't go for vids.

Embrace's "Nature's Law" by tray_lord:
Again, cool editing, nice shots, the ratio's a little odd (stretched vertically), but it's still a very enjoyable vid.

As always, if you like John/Teyla, I recommend leaving feedback.

There should be at least two more John/Teyla entries in the ficathon - allisnow and jeyla4ever are definitely writing John/Teyla (one because I swapped assignments, and the other because it's my assignment).

--

If the john_teyla_fic entries aren't in by Christmas, I'm thinking of asking the organisers to assign me a pinch-hit for the new year.

The only thing I hate more than pinch-hitting is watching people receive nothing in ficathons - I've had it happen to me, and I've done it to others before.

The only thing I hate more than pinch-hitting in a ficathon, is seeing half the entries still undone (especially for a 'pet' pairing of mine).

The only thing I hate more than seeing half the entries undone is writing a ficathon entry for someone who doesn't at least say 'thank you'.

Sure, the entry's not always what you want - geeze, once I asked for a Wes/Faith story in a ficathon and got Wes/Illyria in script format with zero plot because the writer was either too lazy or too mediocre to actually try - but at least say "thank you for trying!"

I've been given assignments that made me go WTF!? And then I sat down and tried to write something that might fit/satisfy the person I'm writing for. I can't guarantee that the person will like it, but I can guarantee that I've done my bloody best to produce something that I can be proud of, and the person who requested the story can say, "Okay, not what I expected, but I admire your pluck/ingenuity/insanity/ability to BS" or some such shit.

All things considered, I'd rather not have to pinch-hit.

There's something infinitely satisfying about sitting back and reading good fic about a favourite couple that you don't have to write yourself or pester other people to write for you. People who ship popular pairings are incapable of comprehending this simple pleasure, because they might have a lot of crap writing in their pairing, but there's also a correspondingly higher ratio of good fiction.

This is one of the big reasons why I hassle my f-list and ask for John/Teyla fic: because I like to read them and there's just not enough of it about. I try to write the pairing as much as possible, to rec it, to encourage the people struggling for feedback whose stories I like. It just seems that nobody writes John/Teyla stories for the joy of writing stories about them. It's only on request or for ficathons, or because someone's forcing them to do it.

Which is, once again, depressing.

And even I'm not doing so well on the writing front. The muse has been holding a P-90 to my head all night to no avail. "Not tonight, honey, I have a headache."

Frankly, I don't care about the P-90. I just loathe being this little lonely island out in the middle of nowhere which all the major shipping lanes (unintentional pun) completely ignore, and to which half the weekly trips out by small charters just get cancelled anyway.

Comments

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I like. It just seems that nobody writes John/Teyla stories for the joy of writing stories about them. It's only on request or for ficathons, or because someone's forcing them to do it.

That seems to be a general trend though. Or at least something I see in a lot of fandoms and in a lot of pairings.

I wonder how much of it is natural fannish progression. You watch a tv show, it totally hits you, you are brimming full with sparkling new ideas, you rush to write them all down on paper and ... and ... then they are gone. And people slowly start slumming along with ficathons, prompt communities gift fics and the like.

Which makes me wonder, errr, what about the time pre-livejournal, I'm pretty sure people were writing without those tools then (though I'm guessing they probably had themed challenges and the like as well). So what changed?

Sometimes it seems that writing for ficathons/communities/challenges/gifts makes it easier for people because maybe it gives them a reason. Like if anybody (even just in their own minds) were to question them *why* they wrote a fic it might be easier to say "Well, I wrote it for this friend/prompt/ficathon, it wasn't meant to be successfull" than to say "I wrote it because I thought it was awesome and the world didn't necessarily agree". With a requested fic, it can still turn out awesome and popular and when they don't turn out, well, no harm done. You are still a success because you have fullfilled what was asked of you (the prompts that a friend gave you, write 100 fics with a pairing, answer a challenge).

If you are (or claim to be) less ambitious about your fic it means that you are putting yourself out there less [innerself: Bullshit! Being ambitious with what you set out to do is a *good* thing!]. And livejournal is a very public place. Where everybody can see your success or not success, everybody can see how many comments or what kind of comments you get.

Or maybe it really is running out of ideas. Or maybe especially with lesser pairing the contact with the other people who like it is so much more important that writing personalized fics forges (or is supposed to forge) a tighter bond.

Maybe the next challenge of some challenge community should be "Go home, spend one week away from the internet and come up with a completely new and independant plotbunny and write that. Or write that story you secretly always wanted to write (and then cry and get depressed if you don't get enough feedback for it)."

[tielan]

I dunno - I'd disagree. There are dozens of McShep stories posted up everyday, a handful of Shweir, people even spontaneously write Liz/Ronon.

But my favourite J/T writers (or any J/T writers, really) haven't produced anything spontaneous for months.

You might have something about the bonding aspect - in a discussion I had in sgatlantislight's LJ, I noted that the J/T section of fandom is splintered. There are schisms all over the place. Some people won't talk to others, the people on the forums and mailing lists generally disdain the LJ writers, and there are 6 or 7 communities for the pairing with the same 60 people subbed.

There's no cohesion, no interaction, very little friendliness - and any attempts to bring cohesion or interaction seem to end up blunted or left by the wayside.

And yeah, it's very depressing to write something I think is awesome, and have 99% of the people reading this journal disagree. I don't really get a choice about writing, plotting, or planning, though - it just happens and the characters rarely let me escape to other stories or ideas. My brain just pumps out the story ideas.