February: fandom, fic, recs

[fignewton]

Here's what happened in the Land of Fig in February!

We celebrated SG-1 Gen Fic Day again, complete with Allies Alphabet Soup. The roundup for Gen Fic Day is here; the complete anthology for the Soup is here. I was very happy with this Soup, although I'm less than halfway through the alphabet in actually reading all the contributions! Still, it was wonderful to see so very many different allies being featured, from big names like the Tok'ra and the Asgard to semi-recurring allies like the Tollan and the Nox to smaller, one-off allies like the Byrsa and Madrona. My thanks to all those who participated! :)

I contributed two pieces to the Soup: I is for Ideology and E is for Edora. The first is a conversation between Ledora of the Land of Light and Drey'auc; the second is SG-9 on the job in the aftermath of 100 Days, working on that treaty for naquadah.

This month's recs were all Five Things, for some reason. You all know the drill by now: they were recced at stargateficrec and archived at figs_sg1_rec. The Master List of Fic Recs is updated through January.

Five Solitudes, by Nanda (PG)

Six Times General Hammond Almost Retired..., by Thothmes (PG)

Five Things Jack Loved and Lost, by Chocolate Kettle (G)

T is for Team, by Rachel500 (PG-13)

Five old 'war stories' O'Neill tells that feature Kawalsky, by Sid (PG)

Till Death Us (All) Do Part, by Sally M (PG)

~insert usual encouragement to sign up to rec at stargateficrec here~

There's a nice crop of reccers for this coming month (yay!) but hey, there's always room for more! Right now we have five SGA reccers and two SG-1 reccers (not including me). And with Pesach coming up, my own random recs will be sparser than usual, so...

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Do you know, is there a Dreamwidth feed for the stargateficrec comm?

Thanks for the update!

[fignewton]

Yep! It's right here.

[princessofgeeks]

Thank u!

[ivorygates]

I have a question that's always bugged me, so I'm going to ask.

How does a reccer find stuff to rec?

[What you do with it when you find it is another matter.]

[fignewton]

::grins:: I've wondered, sometimes, if people might be interested in that process.

I can't speak for all reccers. I can only tell you what works for me.

First of all, when I read a fic I like, I check that author's fic list - on AO3, a master list on DW, their own site, whatever - and read everything that has an interesting summary.

Second, there's Debrief! \0/ I've found a good fic or fifteen that way.

Third, there's... stargateficrec. :) It doesn't happen often - and it's rarer of late, with so few gen SG-1 reccers these days - but I will sometimes follow a rec to a great story (and author!), and mark it down to rec myself. I will also check out fancake sometimes, although stuff recced there is very rarely gennish.

Fourth, I occasionally browse various archives. Yes, even FF.net has some gems on occasion. That's how I first discovered Magistrate (<lj user=magibrain), and fell in love with Beneath a Beating Sun as a WIP and nagged and begged until I was technically made beta and got to read most of it before it got posted. :D There's also ficathons! When I'm in the mood to rec a certain type of fic - this happens less, since I dropped the "rec by category" thing and started reccing at random - I'll look through ficathon archives to see what was submitted there. Admittedly, I've usually recced at least half of those already. :) I keep track of recs I plan to make by saving the links of delicious. I've learned the hard way that it's not always wise to save a rec for a long time, though, as authors move on, change websites, or remove their fics entirely. Hope this answers your question!

[ivorygates]

A lot of it, thank you! Basically, I was wondering how/where you went to look for fic, since there aren't a lot of other gen-based rec sites, just for starters...

[fignewton]

No, there isn't really, is there? Except for Stargatefan, which I devoured when I first discovered Stargate. Only there's a pretty high proportion of Saint Daniel and not-quite-anti-Sam fic in the older archives - not to mention outright hate-Jonas fic - which sadly did color my perceptions a lot at the beginning. Since I read tons of fic before I actually watched the eps, it took a while for me to ignore such one-sided fanon for the sheer joy of the real thing.

...And that, I suppose, is one of the reasons why I started writing canon vs. fanon in the first place. Huh.

[ivorygates]

AND OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL SO GLAD YOU DO.

I seem to focus more on the "How Can This Possibly Be Canon" side of things. The Jaffa, Host Toasties, and our friends the Tok'ra are next on that list. Which reminds me: did you ever do a CANON VS. FANON about Goa'uld/symbiotes? I've looked, but I'm not finding it, if so.

And okay, my last question is: when you find something you want to rec for Stargate Gen Rec, say, how can you know if it's been recently rec'd? Do recs kind of "age off", so the same piece could be rec'd if it was over a year after the previous time?

Okay, back to housework!


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[fignewton]

:)

Er. Host Toasties?

I love how very nuanced the Tok'ra are (Anise aside, and it's not her fault she's written that way, poor woman). I love how stultified their society is, by its very nature, and how very Goa'uld-like they can be at times. I love how they just don't know how to handle non-hosts who expect to be equals, yet they have seriously come through for the SGC on many occasions. Now that is something that I intend to include in a c vs f, some day (should I ever write another, sigh): how Jack's understandable fury re Kanan notwithstanding, the Tok'ra have been, for the most part, pretty decent allies.

I haven't written anything on the Goa'uld/symbiote - just sarc use. What fanon are you thinking of?

Not sure what you mean by "Stargate Gen Rec." :) If you mean sg1genrecs, then I'm pretty blase about multiple recs - I mean yes, I wouldn't want the same fic recced twice in a week, but I don't really expect people to do a search to see if a story has been recced already.

If you mean stargateficrec over on LJ, the rule there has been that there can only be one rec for any one fic within a certain category. That means that if a story was recced once under, say, Daniel Jackson, there's nothing to stop anyone from reccing the same fic under Humor. You can check if a story has been recced in a certain category by looking at the comm's memories. I will add that I've tweaked the rules there a little bit and given recs a five-year expiration date (hey, being new owner hath its privileges!), so if something was recced before 2008, it's fair game even in the same category. If you're curious for more details, the rec FAQ is here.

Regarding Stargatefan: I'm sorry, I should've been more clear! Stargatefan has been around for a long time. The original old archive is where you've been poking, and that's where I first started reading. I can tell you that many of the links led to stories that were not actually on the site, and the majority of those are definitely no longer valid.

At that time, everything was (I think) uploaded manually - you can imagine what a nightmare that was! Then, around 2007 (?) the site upgraded to efiction (I believe that's what it's called - the standard format for many fic archives) and that's the current and active version.

So... just to clarify... :)

The old archive, the one which I first explored and is no longer current, is here.

The new archive, which is current and still relatively active (quite often by me, heh), is here.

Both of those have links to the other, but it may not be immediately obvious. Sorry for the confusion!

[ivorygates]

Thank you for the clarification!

Although, having just read the Shau'nac transcript, I am more than a little boggled by the thought of the Tok'ra as "nuanced and helpful". I mean, except for Jake, which, *duh*. One thing about that ep is the throwaway about apparently a bunch of Goa'uld have gone over to the Tok'ra side over the years, which.... wuh? How come there is no fic about that?

"Host toasties" - post extraction hosts. But in general, I'm wondering about canon for stuff like: how long does it take for a symbiote to implant? How much can a host fight back? Does a symbiote have access to all a host's memories? Does a host have access to any of the symbiote's memories? What does a host remember after the symbiote is extracted?

[ivorygates]

I've just spent an hour over on http://www.stargatefan.com/

Most of the links are broken, and it looks as if nobody's touched the site since 2005. Clicking random story links generally gets me a 404. (That might be my voodoo internet rather than the site, I admit.) So it kind of looks like it might have been abandoned?