kalpurna

So, general consensus seems to be that the lemon thing on SG1 = HILARIOUS ANTICS! Uhm, or, alternatively, that it = a deep and lasting betrayal of Rodney by John, in a horrible attempt to get an in with the cool crowd (Mitchell).

Interesting.

See, to me? This echoes a whole lot of other fandramas, in that it really depends on how you choose to look at the show.

There are two basic ways, to my mind, to approach events within a TV show, and people tend to blend these to varying degrees. The first is to look at stuff within the context of the show's attitude: assume that facts are colored by the way the characters and narrative seem to react to those facts. The second is to look at stuff within the context of the larger world: what do WE, as viewers, know about these facts, in our own lives, and how then should we interpret the show. Again, I'm pretty sure you have to have at least SOME of both going on in order to appreciate television as entertainment. But when different fans have different mixes, then things get a little crazed.

Uhm, I'm being totally incoherent and technical, aren't I. OK, I'll try giving some examples – from Buffy, just for laughs.

Let's take the plural of apocalypse.

Within the context of real life, if someone said the world was ending, you might very well PISS YOUR PANTS. This would be a huge. fucking. deal. And yet, on Buffy, imminent mass destruction is met with a quip and a cute hair toss. And we couldn't appreciate the show at all if we didn't accept that as BuffyReality. So us fans, we're used to that. We can cope with a false gloss on reality, because it rings true in other ways. Fine.

But some things aren't as easy to accept. For instance? Let's take Spike.

Spike was, canonically, an unrepentant mass murderer. THIS IS TRUE. And yet, the show portrayed him as a charismatic, interesting, sexy, nerdy person who wasn't that bad a guy. Mischievous, bastardly, an asshole, sure. But an actual fucked up psychopath? Come on. RARELY. And so fandom became somewhat divided between people who said OMG, guys, he's a serial killer, and people who said BUT HE'S REAL CUTE. (Just to be clear? I fall in the latter camp.) And the SHOW encouraged us to have that problem, by using two different levels of storytelling to convey two different layers of information. It was a problem. You could either believe the character you were told about, and occasionally saw glimpses of, or you could believe the character you saw living his life.

This whole lemon thing is an issue, to my mind, mainly because too many of us have outside information on how serious food allergies can be. And you know what? If what we are told in canon – that Rodney "is deathly allergic to citrus" – is true, then what John did is unbelievably cruel and out of line. That shit is fucked up.

But that's not what the rest of the show is telling us. The rest of the show, the part that isn't straight-up, real world verifiable facts, is telling us that everyone laughs about this. Rodney laughs about this. And there really isn't that much canon support for Rodney being genuinely fucking freaked about having maybe eaten citrus. He just doesn't act like a guy with death lurking in every meal. He's way too banter-y about it. There's just no way I buy that within this show, a citrus allergy is something around which to build a betrayal. It's not that the angry fen are wrong! It's just that, well, we're looking at a different set of data.