OMG SONGFIC!
Feb. 18th, 2006 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityofoneI always get nervous when I see author’s notes to the effect of, “Based on a song by [insert band here, the more emo the better].” I will be the first to admit that this is entirely hypocritical and unfair, as I have based at least three SGA stories on U2 songs, and just spent all afternoon working on one based on “The Ocean.” I realized that I could go through my (extensive) U2 catalogue and come up with cracked story ideas based on a bunch of songs in no time at all. So (since I don’t have anything better to do, like, I don't know, write the essay I'm supposed to be working on) I decided to do just that.
A Day Without Me - This is a song about suicide, but it is the world’s JAUNTIEST song about suicide, so I would have a hard time writing something depressing to it. Maybe I could do some sort of It’s a Wonderful Life thing, where anangel Ancient thinks Rodney is depressed and suicidal, and Rodney’s like, “No, it was just that bad chilli I had for lunch,” but the Ancient WON’T HEAR IT, and makes Rodney see what the world would be like if he had never been born, and everything’s a mess and people are dead and John’s hair looks flat, and Rodney’s like, “Ha! I KNEW IT! You can send me back now.” And the Ancient’s like, “Crap, now I’ll never get my wings Ascend,” but then it has a threesome with John and Rodney so everything’s fine, and Elizabeth goes to Carson for more meds because she keeps thinking she hears bells ringing.
Another Time, Another Place - This song is about two people not being able to find a private place to have sex. So in this story, John and Rodney cannot find a private place to have sex. But then they do. And they do. The end.
Babyface - John is a fashion model, and one day Rodney’s in the supermarket buying, um, bread, and he’s waiting in line, staring at John’s picture on the cover of GQ or something, and then he turns around and JOHN IS RIGHT BEHIND HIM. Also buying bread. The SAME BRAND. So then they have a very sputtery, very cute conversation over coffee (and bread). And this of course leads to sex, and Rodney is like, “Wow, this is like all my best masturbatory fantasies COMBINED,” and John’s all, “Thanks for that,” but secretly he is TOUCHED, and the relationship gets more and more serious and Rodney’s sometimes afraid that John’s going to leave him for someone “in the business,” but John hasn’t had this much intellectual stimulation in years and at night he buries his beautiful face against Rodney’s neck, and in that moment, Rodney believes that it’s real.
Discothèque - I don’t know, something to do with a gay club and dressing up like The Village People. Rodney wears chaps.
Electrical Storm - All I know about this story is that it’s really angsty and there’s lots of sliding out from between dirty, sweat-stained sheets to go make out in the rain, and lightning ripping the sky, and bodies pressing tightly together as the waves crash over and under and around them. And possibly, John is a mermaid.
Exit - John thinks Rodney has been killed and goes medieval on some alien people’s collective ass. It’s really nasty and dark and frankly, I don’t want to go there.
Fast Cars - Definitely someone is a race car driver.
Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me - For some reason, this plays out in my mind as either 1) SGA meets Gypsy, with John as Gypsy Rose Lee, or 2) a story in which John and Rodney are diamond thieves or something. In both versions, I believe there is sex in the back of a limo.
If You Wear That Velvet Dress - PWP. Someone’s in a dress. I think it’s Rodney. I think it’s Human Vacillation-verse. And I think I might actually write this. *shame*
Lemon - Rodney/Sam. Rodney pining. Painful irony. I am emotionally fourteen, and I want this story written SO MUCH.
Stories for Boys - AU where John and Rodney grew up together in some sort of idyllic middle-America that exists only as nostalgia and in certain stories by Ray Bradbury or Stephen King. There’s lots of running through fields, fighting epic battles with sticks, and hiding in a disused hayloft and reading comic books as the rain pours down. There’s also an undercurrent of innocent longing, painful but filled with the promise of a possible future... This is the most emotionally manipulative story EVER, and I LOVE IT.
The Ground Beneath (His) Feet - Because I can never tire of Rodney playing Orpheus.
Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World - Drunk!fic. Earthside leave drunk!fic, preferably with the bloody nose and the sunrise both, and Rodney holding John’s head in his lap and stroking his hair when he finally comes home, because I guess if Rodney is Orpheus, in this one John gets to play Odysseus.
Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad - The one where John is a tired, world-weary lounge singer and Rodney is, um, his new accompanist, yes, HIS NEW ACCOMPANIST WHO BRINGS JOY AND VERVE BACK INTO HIS LIFE. Verve, people. Yes.
Van Diemen’s Land - It’s the early 19th Century, and John and Rodney are both transported for different—but equally unjust and angst-filled!—reasons to the penal colony in Tasmania. In this hostile, harsh new clime, they find strength, love, redemption—and each other. Possibly, this story would make a good controversial new BBC miniseries. Or the pornier version could be an indie sleeper hit!
Wild Honey - John is a monkey and Rodney is the tree that...okay, no. Just no.
Yahweh - Rodney is God. No, seriously: why hasn’t there been any ‘Rodney is God’ fic yet? Get with the program, people.
Now watch me actually go and write one of these, because I am honestly THAT INSANE.
A Day Without Me - This is a song about suicide, but it is the world’s JAUNTIEST song about suicide, so I would have a hard time writing something depressing to it. Maybe I could do some sort of It’s a Wonderful Life thing, where an
Another Time, Another Place - This song is about two people not being able to find a private place to have sex. So in this story, John and Rodney cannot find a private place to have sex. But then they do. And they do. The end.
Babyface - John is a fashion model, and one day Rodney’s in the supermarket buying, um, bread, and he’s waiting in line, staring at John’s picture on the cover of GQ or something, and then he turns around and JOHN IS RIGHT BEHIND HIM. Also buying bread. The SAME BRAND. So then they have a very sputtery, very cute conversation over coffee (and bread). And this of course leads to sex, and Rodney is like, “Wow, this is like all my best masturbatory fantasies COMBINED,” and John’s all, “Thanks for that,” but secretly he is TOUCHED, and the relationship gets more and more serious and Rodney’s sometimes afraid that John’s going to leave him for someone “in the business,” but John hasn’t had this much intellectual stimulation in years and at night he buries his beautiful face against Rodney’s neck, and in that moment, Rodney believes that it’s real.
Discothèque - I don’t know, something to do with a gay club and dressing up like The Village People. Rodney wears chaps.
Electrical Storm - All I know about this story is that it’s really angsty and there’s lots of sliding out from between dirty, sweat-stained sheets to go make out in the rain, and lightning ripping the sky, and bodies pressing tightly together as the waves crash over and under and around them. And possibly, John is a mermaid.
Exit - John thinks Rodney has been killed and goes medieval on some alien people’s collective ass. It’s really nasty and dark and frankly, I don’t want to go there.
Fast Cars - Definitely someone is a race car driver.
Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me - For some reason, this plays out in my mind as either 1) SGA meets Gypsy, with John as Gypsy Rose Lee, or 2) a story in which John and Rodney are diamond thieves or something. In both versions, I believe there is sex in the back of a limo.
If You Wear That Velvet Dress - PWP. Someone’s in a dress. I think it’s Rodney. I think it’s Human Vacillation-verse. And I think I might actually write this. *shame*
Lemon - Rodney/Sam. Rodney pining. Painful irony. I am emotionally fourteen, and I want this story written SO MUCH.
Stories for Boys - AU where John and Rodney grew up together in some sort of idyllic middle-America that exists only as nostalgia and in certain stories by Ray Bradbury or Stephen King. There’s lots of running through fields, fighting epic battles with sticks, and hiding in a disused hayloft and reading comic books as the rain pours down. There’s also an undercurrent of innocent longing, painful but filled with the promise of a possible future... This is the most emotionally manipulative story EVER, and I LOVE IT.
The Ground Beneath (His) Feet - Because I can never tire of Rodney playing Orpheus.
Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World - Drunk!fic. Earthside leave drunk!fic, preferably with the bloody nose and the sunrise both, and Rodney holding John’s head in his lap and stroking his hair when he finally comes home, because I guess if Rodney is Orpheus, in this one John gets to play Odysseus.
Two Shots of Happy, One Shot of Sad - The one where John is a tired, world-weary lounge singer and Rodney is, um, his new accompanist, yes, HIS NEW ACCOMPANIST WHO BRINGS JOY AND VERVE BACK INTO HIS LIFE. Verve, people. Yes.
Van Diemen’s Land - It’s the early 19th Century, and John and Rodney are both transported for different—but equally unjust and angst-filled!—reasons to the penal colony in Tasmania. In this hostile, harsh new clime, they find strength, love, redemption—and each other. Possibly, this story would make a good controversial new BBC miniseries. Or the pornier version could be an indie sleeper hit!
Wild Honey - John is a monkey and Rodney is the tree that...okay, no. Just no.
Yahweh - Rodney is God. No, seriously: why hasn’t there been any ‘Rodney is God’ fic yet? Get with the program, people.
Now watch me actually go and write one of these, because I am honestly THAT INSANE.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 08:32 pm (UTC)Last Night on Earth might make a really interesting (and different) Elizabeth fic.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 08:41 pm (UTC)Make this a minificathon, like
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 09:31 pm (UTC)There are lots of ways of organising ficathons, and many of them send their organisers mad. However, I suggested
I would say that you would do it by:
1) saying "I want to hold a ficathon! Here is a poll, tell me if you would play."
2) emailing everyone who wanted to play with a U2 song. You would probably want to narrow the possible list down; pick as many songs as participants, and try to avoid giving people things that don't really lend themselves to fic. Or that could be part of the challenge. It would have to be fairly vague - they can write a story as close to the song as they like, or as distant from it, so long as it had some relevance. You could set word-limits (minimum of 1000, or whatever), or other criteria if you wanted, but it's probably not worth it. You could also make it open for art submissions - manips, drawings, desktop collages, icons, whatever. And a deadline - give people time to write, but don't leave it too long.
3) people would post their stories and comment on your LJ with a link to the story.
4) You close it on the deadline, and post a master list of all the links,
Ta-da, instant ficathon!
Of course, you can get as complicated as you like, but this would be quite simple and probably you'd get more people playing :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 05:08 pm (UTC)So you can look forward to my freaking out at you then!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 05:14 pm (UTC)(and also? yay U2-inspired SGA fic! This is gonna be good!)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 09:14 pm (UTC)"Last Night on Earth"--Elizabeth, eh? 'Splain. (I, for one, cannot entirely separate it from the fabulous video: U2 survives the apocalypse! They take a road trip! To Los Angeles! Edge steals a car! It is SO COOL.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-18 09:25 pm (UTC)(also, I blame you for the fact that I just had to spend, like, twenty minutes explaining to myself that I am already overdrawn and just had to cancel the Amazon order I'd placed (SGA season 1! :( Boy! :() because I have NO MONEY and therefore that buying The Complete U2 is a Really Bad Plan even if it does "only" cost $179 or whatever it was.)
Last Night - well. It's kind of twisted. But the song is all about how "she's" living like it's the last night on Earth, and Earth is slipping away... Too many slipping away. The world turns and we get dizzy Slipping away. and feel the ground is giving way
But she thinks we're better off that way.
The more you take, the less you feel
The less you know the more you believe
And it seemed to me that there was a potential for a really screwed-up Elizabeth running away to Atlantis - in the kind of mindset that you sometimes see people suggesting for John. I think it would have to be an AU of sorts. So she's possibly suicidal and definitely not normal and it's all going weird and she's going to Atlantis, and who knows what might happen?
It wouldn't be canon!Elizabeth, but it might be interesting.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 05:17 pm (UTC)Also, I feel the need to vent and you're here -
I just saw someone's icon, and it said something along the lines of: "Sheppard/Weir has no chemistry?" (sequence of images moving down one of the S1 promo shots of Torri Higginson and Joe Flanigan) "What was that you were saying?". And I want to cry at the lack of logic. It was a promo shot! There were millions! It in no way proves anything at all about the relationship between the people photographed, let alone their "chemistry"!
*weeps*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 05:26 pm (UTC)ANYWAY, the main reason they amuse me, I think, is that they remind me of me--about seven years ago, when I first got into fandom. Because I was all MULDER/SCULLY 4EVA OMG!!! and I was all weird and defensive about it, and the slashers scared me. So whenever I see things like the icon you just described, I get these bizarre urges to ruffle someone's hair: "Oh, just give yourself time, dear!"
OTOH, I have to hope that I never would have seen any chemistry between John and Elizabeth...BECAUSE THERE ISN'T ANY.
Ahem. In my very humble opinion.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 05:51 pm (UTC)Well, I do have trouble seeing much in the way of chemistry between John and either Elizabeth or Teyla. But I know I'm biased. But still.
It's like the whole "sense of entitlement" thing. My experience in Enterprise fandom was that the het shippers were a lot worse than the slashers on the whole entitlement issue, because the slashers knew that they were never going to be canonical, whereas some of the Archer/T'Pol shippers, in particular, were utterly convinced that that pairing was going to happen. I couldn't see them ever going with anything other than the Trip/T'Pol they actually did, but a lot of people got really het up about it. Like the
batshit crazystuff that was coming out of Harry Potter over the "Harmoniums" or whatever they were called.On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that TPTB are pushing Sheppard/Weir, so I don't know why people feel defensive about it... Sheppard/McKay ain't going to happen on the show, so we can't be a threat!
But it wasn't even the shipperishness of it (although that makes baby
...am rambling excessively. Sorry.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-19 06:20 pm (UTC)As for the "sense of entitlement" thing...yeah, that IS fucking annoying, and I think we've actually been pretty lucky to have not encountered too much of it in SGA. I mean, from what other people have told me, the Stargate-verse is pretty gen-oriented anyway (like, I know that SG-1 had some Sam/Jack leanings, but it never actually happened), which is fine by me, since I know that my ship is never, ever going to happen. (On screen, I will have to hold out hope for Rodney/Teyla or Rodney/Cadman or Rodney/some other cool female, for the love of God, PLEASE. Hey, the third one might happen. Maybe.) 'Cause as far as I can see, even if TPTB are pushing Shep/Weir, they aren't pushing very HARD.
Of course, I live in my safe little McKay/Sheppard bubble, so...
Hey, maybe that's the solution! Bubbles for everyone! Yay!