Stargate fusion 'verse
Nov. 18th, 2013 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI plan space colonies. And the simplest place to put them is the Stargate universe, because many many many planets, often with basically just trees, actual empty land, all in walking distance. But I keep wanting to drop favourite characters from other ‘verses there, so I end up with this epic complex fusion where everyone gets to play.
Sentinel works simple too, they’re just one kind of hok’taur. Some seriously odd abilities are SG1 canon, so enhanced senses is nothing.
But that means marvel mutants fit right in as well. I haven’t read many comics, but I gather Magneto managed to make a mutant homeland, but that only got a lot of mutants in one place to be targets and it went very very poorly. Mutant homeworld might seem tempting. It’s the same problem on a different scale, but at least enemies from Earth have a harder time reaching them.
But then there’s the rest of the Marvel universe. Mixing Asgards is a bit of a problem, and Stargate already has a whole lot of gods.
But translating Clint from Avengers Assemble gets real simple, cause he just got snaked for a while.
And the options for Phil remain just as open in SG1 as in Marvel. They’ve got canon examples of clones, android replicas, alternate universe selves, and resurrection boxes. But if he went through the sarcophagus there’d be no long term physical damage, no scars. On the flip side there’d be actual documentation to say it erodes the soul, so he’d have plenty for him to worry about in the ‘came back wrong’ stakes.
SG1 has so many technologies that ought to be game changers but that they just blow up and leave behind. Part of why I want to write a colony world in the Milky Way galaxy is so they can try being clever with all those neglected plot threads. Like, what would a world be like that has a working sarcophagus? What are the limitations? Can you write within those limitations? Or, better, make the first season arc be about hunting a sarcophagus. You’d start with a collection of people who are willing to risk everything to get the magic heal all box. It’s a compelling motive.
With all the technologies in the Marvel or SG1 universes, let alone a universe that blends them both, disability gets kind of complex though. Like, in the DCU they made Oracle not be disabled any more, because there’s so many miracles lying around they decided it seemed cruel to leave her on wheels. But then there are no disabled people saving the world a lot. But in SG1 there’s the built in limit of the program being secret and concentrating on weapons, so the other applications and implications aren’t explored much. So there are disabled people right now, and then they’ll hear about the new magics and have different attitudes to them.
Blending the more futuristic ‘verses isn’t half as tricky as blending in universes that have actually been referred to as fiction. Like, Star Trek. It would be tricky to have Kirk et al turn up. But on the other hand, once you have Star Trek, you will inevitably have an explorer ship called Enterprise. So it’s paradoxically simple to blend Archer et al. They’re the first interstellar ship of their people; you lose some specifics but most people you can pretty much keep. Some of them would have to be from offworld, but Earth knows a lot of offworlders now. So Firefly gets simple too, because they all left Earth-that-was and now they’re flying around a single system, and it’s not essential to the setup that they had to leave in our future. Also they’d be interesting because the epic culture shock of the variety of life forms from SG1 arriving would be just as big a deal for them as us, even though they have spaceships.
Shows set in the here-now about dealing with the weird stuff pretty much slot together anyway, because they’re all about being so super secret the left hand don’t know what the right is doing, so not knowing about the other other organisations is pretty simples, especially the ones that are only up to half a dozen people in a basement.
So in my head at the moment I have a space colony with Methos, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, Phil Coulson and Clint Barton, Malcolm Reed and Trip, Dr Julian Bashir junior and senior (because he’s interesting at two points in his life, ‘frontier medicine’ baby and grizzled elder veteran of Intelligence ops)… I have a lot of guys in my head, argh… but in my head most of them are some kind of disabled or the kind of different they have to deal with and maybe hide. Like, Phil with a lingering heart problem, Deaf Clint, Malcolm having lost the leg that got pinned to the ship by that mine, Owen with his unhealing and nerve problems after alien tech didn’t quite heal him, Julian academically brilliant but only after a lot of intensive special ed as a tiny and with some kind of learning disorder still. Methos still his Immortal self, which isn’t a disability, but reshapes his life around a series of constraints others do not live with. Ianto as the self made man, having rewritten himself enough times he’s left in fear of it all crashing down around him if someone sees behind the curtain. … I don’t know what’s up with Trip. It occurred to me the other day to make him trans, but I don’t know why. Possibly because there’d be no why and it would be thoroughly irrelevant, except for having to pack sufficient T for however long they’re offworld. But then getting dumped in a sarc, if it reads genetics and fixes scars and makes limbs grow back and all that stuff that others would consider good stuff, it would undo all his surgery so suddenly that would be pretty relevant to his decisions. There’s story there I’ve thought about before but I don’t know why I thought it for him.
Why not?
So doing all this without introducing everyone as their disability would require sensitive and nuanced writing. Or possibly just not mentioning it for the first half dozen episodes. But taking the characters at a particular branch in their story and leaving the consequences in… I’d like to see that.
Cameron Mitchell in a wheelchair is hard to justify in-story because they happily use all the best tech on him. But even then, it was apparently touch and go. So tweak it just a little and we have the epic fanboy with all the mission files memorised, but on wheels, hence not leading SG1. I could bring him along happily, and then someone in-universe has an excuse to know as much as we do from watching. But do I want to branch the ‘verse there and not get the band back together, or have it be a consequence of some later action? I mean, all the fusion elements change the ‘verse substantially already, it seems more natural to let those changes proliferate rather than arbitrarily drop another one in. But it seems like overkill to paralyse a guy twice in one lifetime. Not that he’d stay down. Which would send him out sarc questing quite naturally. And with the political good will SG1 build up the whole thing becomes easier to get moving.
I don’t know, I know how this story starts, I know who I want to bring along, I know it’d be easy to gather more characters (like any women at all zomg brain what are you doing). I don’t know who would want to read it.
.Somehow epic multiverse fusions feel more like cheating somewhere?
Also, there’s the usual problem with xovers, where you feel like it ought to appeal to people who like fandom A and people who like fandom b, but really it only works for people who like A and B, and then the more letters you add the further you shrink your reader pool.
Yet this is how the inside of my head works.
Of course if you steal from enough sources and stir hard enough and tweak every single character, say to the disabled version, then you are getting mighty close to original fic. Or original characters in an SG1 fic. But if I set it somewhere other than SG1… it would actually be one of my other ‘verses of original fic that I worked through the setting of the other year, with not-a-stargate and capertillers that move in to your brain and a combined sarc and suspended animation with brain backups and VR.
So I guess this is one of those times I’m trying to figure if an idea is better as fanfic or original fic, or if they are in fact two ideas for two different stories.
and, also
Date: 2013-11-18 02:38 am (UTC)because, hand.
also because any colony needs laws, hence lawyer.
a lawyer with experience with non-human legal systems can only be a plus
albeit one that takes a teensy bit of explaining.
Actually, no, it's fine if you just accept there was a paradigm shift somewhere around the Victorian era where 'demon' was gradually accepted to be an older term for 'alien'. They arrive through portals, kind of like stargates without the gate part. They're just from other worlds. And those that stick around are part human, which is just plain interesting. It enriches the 'verse and gives it a nightmare background: gods and monsters, both been wandering around on Earth for millennia.
... but still, all men. for why?
... actually, is it because women don't get disabling injuries? I mean, there's Oracle, but mostly I can't think of other women having to do the epic physio montage. Bad things that happen to women tend to be of a different nature, yesno?
Re: and, also
Date: 2013-11-18 07:12 am (UTC)~
Re: and, also
Date: 2013-11-18 11:17 pm (UTC)You're a writer, you can pick someone and injure her.
I was going to say, "Don't ask me, I don't exactly like crippling characters, and am perhaps a little too gallant to look at it much with the women," but honestly, the sort of awful thing that I once seriously considered putting a female character through was being reduced to a weaker partner in an abusive relationship. Maybe that's part of it. Women can be made "weak" without being physically crippled in a strict sense.