Omg

I've just saw THIS and can't stop screame... Because I already had a headcanon about John's ancestor who looked exactly like John and also be a pilot (and met young Todd, of course, and they have a history, and Todd let him go at the end, and 10 000 years later…), but my idea of name was just "sounds almost like John", while THIS is great and so suits to him, aaaah. Also last night I have a dream about SGA Ancient Greek-AU and there are wraiths being a medusa gorgona's relatives. And now I think about history in which Icaros fall from the sky to medusa's island…

Rewatching SGA has taught me two things about Todd:

1. He's really good at getting imprisoned and

2. he's really bad at keeping a Hive ship in one piece.

Politeness level: Todd

Stargate Atlantis "The Queen"

*sigh*

Whoever will play Reed, he should look SMART and thoughtful, and... cant't a find a word... subtle, maybe? And Doom should look invincible and powerful, and handsome like actor of old cinema. And among all versions of who it could be, I have not seen anyone suitable((

Made it just to admire my favorite character and actor

WOW!!!

https://twitter.com/TansuYegen/status/1541459351537426432

Just agree with every word

Ok, the time has come for me to write out the whole thesis that’s been bubbling away in my head for years about how deeply uncomfortable I have always been about elements of how Rodney McKay was handled as a character.

I’m sure there’s more I should say, and everything will be off the top of my head, cuz I’m not looking up episodes or plot points today. But here goes

McKay is introduced as an arrogant, deeply unpleasant man, who basically exists to clash with Sam, cause drama and tension, (and also make Sam look good). Then Atlantis started, and he became a main character. I think that was a really interesting choice, and overall a very good one, because it’s sets up an incredible character arc. A regular leading character (who is one of the “good guys”) cannot be as universally hateable as Rodney was when he was just a one (or two)-off character. But you can’t just scrap who he was when you introduced him, so how do you give him the kind of growth that makes him interesting and someone people want to root for? 

In many ways Atlantis did a great job of that. The show took him way out of his comfort zone, and put him under great stress, so that he had to up his game. It isolated him long term with a limited number of people, so he had to learn some basic people skills. And in doing both those things, it pushed him to the edge and showed us (and him) that McKay had bravery and a good heart and love for his friends and the willingness to risk himself for others. He’d covered all that over with an incredibly thick layer of ego and cowardice and boorish behaviour, but when against the wall, that awfulness could be broken through and the nobler side of him could start to come out. And that was primarily made possible because the show surrounded him with people who called him on his bullshit. For the first few years especially, all the main characters held him to account and made him behave and become better.

So given that I’ve praised him so much, why am I so uncomfortable with McKay?

Two reasons. There are a few important areas we did not see him grow significantly, and at a certain point the show stopped challenging his behaviour to the same extent.

First point first: ways he kept being horrible. 

He was a ghastly boss/coworker to the science team throughout. From the first episode to the last, he refused to learn his people’s names, he belittled them and mocked their ideas and used them as scapegoats when things went badly but never gave them credit when things went well. Occasionally he feels bad about that, but usually only after someone he treated badly has died a horrible death. The show clearly wants us to feel bad for these people - especially poor Zelenka - but Rodney’s never held to account for it, and never improves. Zelenka complains about his treatment, Rodney makes a snarky joke, and we move on, feeling the scientists’ frustration, but clearly just supposed to roll our eyes and be ok with it. The overall message sent is that it’s ok that Rodney treats people badly because he’s brilliant and he’ll save the day. It’d be nice if he’d treat people better, but we have to make allowances somewhere. Honestly, Atlantis probably would have been better off without Rodney, because with him there you have one really smart person getting things done but crushing everyone around him in the process, whereas with him gone you might not have that individual star, but you’d have a lot more very smart people who could actually work properly and achieve things as a team.

The other thing that never changes is his treatment of women - he’s a serial sexual harasser. He sexually harasses Sam the first time he appears on SG-1, and it’s gross, but he’s meant to be gross then. But he keeps doing it through every single season of Atlantis. Sam alone gets harassed by him so many times - even when she’s his boss! In the sunken jumper episode he hallucinates up Sam dressed a way she would never dress, behaving a way she would never behave, and the way he talks to her makes my skin crawl. And yes I know she’s not really there, and he has a head injury, but his creepiness is played for laughs. And then Sam takes over as commander of Atlantis, and then there’s the episode where they fall down the hole. First he tells Sam to flash the boys to bribe them to help - gross - and then he tries to convince Sam and Dr. Keller to strip under the pretense of making a rope out of their clothes. Again, it’s played for laughs, and it’s just fucking gross. Sam is his BOSS. Dr. Keller is his coworker. And all three of them are in extreme danger. And he is sexually harassing both women. 

That story is also my big example of how the show starts letting him off the hook. In that episode, Rodney repeatedly sexually harasses every woman in sight. He’s so desperate to puff his ego that insists he is more competent at something he has never done before than Sam the professional soldier who does things like that every day and actively sidelines her. In doing so, he also further endangers them, starting a gas fire (that Sam has to risk injury to put out), and pulling in more dirt when Sam tells him to stop. He repeatedly tries to get out of doing the actual hard work of saving them and instead spends his time being snarky and trying to prove how smart he is. And after all that, the narrative rewards him. He’s the hero, because he got rope burn but didn’t leave Sam to die. People admire him. He gets a date with Dr. Keller. We’re just supposed to shake our heads affectionately at all of his grossness and go “Oh McKay…” 

In summary, the narrative bought into the idea of making allowances for exceptional men. He’s dreadful to his coworkers, but he’s a genius who saves the day so we’ll let him get away with that. He gets pushback for treating the main Atlantis team like that, but his non-field colleagues are apparently fair game. He’s a serial sexual harasser - and here nobody is safe, not even the main characters or the soldiers or the [insert category here], because we are consistently meant to find his sexual harassment funny, or at worst an irritation on the level of bad breath. And it’s not. And finally, while the show did a good job of calling him out for the first few seasons, after that it started letting him off the hook, and buying into the glorification of Rodney McKay, no longer treating his unpleasant attributes as things to be worked on as part of a long character arc, but instead merely quirks that should be accepted. 

A deeply flawed character like McKay is an interesting challenge, and when they write him well I really enjoy him. But I can never overlook or forget about these really gross decisions that were made in writing him.

"It is kind of arrogant for the Lanteans to assume that they are closer to the Ancients than anyone in the Pegasus galaxy" - yes, I also drew attention to this moment. And now I have a headcanon that the Genii are the direct descendants of a certain group of the Ancients, who separated due to some disagreement. About Ascension, perhaps. I think they considered they couldn't leave the material world as long as there was so much they had created that they should be held accountable for it all. And we see echoes of this in the modern Genii with their ambitions to rule the entire galaxy… And their lack of a ATA gene is explained by the fact that after the destruction of their confederation by the Wraith, there were too few of them left and they had to mix with other peoples in order to avoid closely related ties. (God, I hope, my English not so bad and my thoughts not so difficult to read as it difficult to me to put them into words)

Season 1: Episode 10 (The Storm)

NOTE: Spoilers ahead!!!

I’m going to be honest. I love this episode. So. Much. Therefore I have lots of comments. 

Here’s are my thoughts:

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Michael, honey, you're just not Colonel Sheppard's type))) and you also tried to kill Teyla and steal her child, which I'm sure Todd would never have even thought of)))

If I was Michael, I'd be SO mad that Todd ended up being the Atlantis humans' Go To Wraith

Just imagining him finding out about their "friendship" with Todd and writing in his Wraith diary with tears in his eyes like

"I'M supposed to be their off-putting and untrustworthy friend! I was the Wraith that worked with them first! They kidnapped ME!!! What does he have that I don't????!!!!!????"

“And remember: the sky is the limit! You can be anything you want to be!”

“Thank you. I want to be a secretary.”

That stopped them short. “What?”

“A secretary,” she repeated.

“But…” they trailed off, dumbfounded. “Why? You could be a CEO, a scientist, a law–”

“I don’t want to be a CEO,” she said. “I want to be a secretary.”

Another idea for fanvid...

...catch me unexpectedly. I was just listening a song that I know and love for a long time - "The Devil Within" Digital Daggers - and suddenly I thought about Michael and Teyla...

Just imagine

Todd finds out that Sheppard was going to deal with the superhive by sacrificing himself... I think this would be the second time in all their communication that Todd had yelled at him! And Sheppard would have stood there in shock and tried to embrace the mind that Todd seemed to be really worried about him...

cry from the heart

Returned to fandom after long time and see that there are still no AU where Atlantis catch Todd Instead of Michael with all the ensuing consequences especially for John... No, I can't write it myself, but I sooo want to read story like this! And also I sooo want more fanvid about Todd and John... Recently I heard a song Rammstein "Amour" and it sound so like Todd, I can't stop think about it. But I am also not a vidder! Т____Т

This should have been real!

If Christopher Heyerdahl were featured in the opening credits of Stargate Atlantis.