magibrain

Yeah, but half the fun of bringing in a new person is that I get to do things like this:

She'd been given a briefing on the SGC. She wasn't unaware of what went on here. But she'd thought that it might not filter down to her except in the abstract – that the Stargate Program, like the Space Program, was one of those things that was breathtaking in the grand scope, staggering in its implications, and completely prosaic on the level of detail. Putting men on the moon had been one giant leap for mankind, but it was still a small step for a man. The rocks they brought back had been carried down from the heavens through the ocean of space, but they were still rocks. She expected that after the novelty of going through the Stargate the first few times had worn off, everyone's expectations of the universe would adjust to the universe's new scope and they'd find that going to an alien world and fighting alien enemies had mostly the same threat, tedium, and psychological effects as being deployed overseas.

Then she'd read halfway through Colonel O'Neill's file and noted the words "infected with and used as a conduit of communications for the bacterial entities living within the alien ark," and noted the running tally of deaths and revivals (the official report shied away from calling them resurrections) by various causes for all of SG-1, and there was something about a time loop in there for two of them, and by the time she got to the words "ascended to another" (the official report shied away from calling it a higher) "plane of being", she set the files aside, let her forehead hit her desk, and started laughing.

Which was probably not the right reaction, there, but apparently all the rules were being thrown right out the window today.

Then, after a minute, she got up, got herself a mug of coffee and a fresh sheet of paper, and divided it into halves, neatly labeled What I know and What I don't know. Then she went ahead and crossed the entire What I know half out.

It helped.

...

You know who I want to see get a sympathetic treatment in fic? Kinsey. Because he's such an obvious straw-man, and I always feel like that's a cop-out. As is the whole "There are legitimate concerns to be raised about things here. Lets put them in the mouth of someone thoroughly despicable so that we can disregard those concerns along with this entire person!" trope, which I feel like Kinsey was made for. It's just a cheap way of dealing with complexity. Tsk, tsk.

Also, humanizing Kinsey would be one heck of a challenge. Because there's so little in his character you could even work with. And, you know, for all his evil despicable greedy two-facedness, he does occasionally bring up that there are issues with dumping craptons of money into a program which has yet to provide any benefit for the people footing the bill for it and has in fact put Earth in quite a lot of danger, and you can't just brush that stuff under a rug and go "But these are our heroes and thus beyond critique! EVERYTHING they do is right and justified!" Oh, series, no.

...

Maybe one of these days I'll write that Jonas-reinvents-sociology-to-fit-the-SGC fic and have cameos from all the people who never get on camera. Because he would go rub elbows with them.

...

Felger was just a bad character concept. Beginning to end.