Meta: John Sheppard: Johnny, Are You Queer, Boy? (Don't Ask, Don't Tell.)

[catwalksalone]

MJ Panel Mod: mrsronweasley

Discussion space - the floor is yours...

WARNING: POST AND/OR COMMENTS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. ALL US-AIRED EPISODES MAY BE DISCUSSED HERE.

Is he or isn't he? What canon/subtextual evidence is there to support either side of the argument?

Comments

Part one.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_divya_/]

Wow, no one's weighed in on this yet? Shock! Okay, here's something, and, as a slasher, I'm being deliberately conservative with this theory. Even if you don't want to see the slash, there's still this:

The scene in The Tower when Mara tries to seduce John. It literally does not occur to him that she's hitting on him until she takes off her dress. In my experience, men are thinking about the possibility of sex all the time. It doesn't matter how unlikely it seems that it actually might happen, they're always entertaining it as a possibility, even if they don't do anything about it. In that scene with Mara, the possibility of getting laid was the last thing on John's mind.

And John has entertained it as a possibility with women in the past, most notably with Chaya (from Sanctuary) and Norina (from Inferno). Then there was Teer (from Epiphany), but he was more middle of the road with her. He not only wasn't deliberately charming, he was really blunt with her. With Norina and Chaya, he seemed more willing to compromise in order to get on their good sides. Teer seemed to be the mountain that he climbed because it was there.

Then there was Perna (from Poisoning the Well) who he seemed interested in (along with the other guys; they all did a double take upon meeting her), but nothing came of it.

He seems respectfully disinterested in Teyla and Elizabeth (as though he would be interested under different circumstances) and wholly disinterested in Allina (from The Brotherhood) which is interesting, because she was interested in Rodney. Yet, when Rodney was interested in Norina (and not vice versa), John was competitive with Rodney.

So, John has this flickering interest in women, but that scene with Mara was the thing that made me go, "Okay, what? That is not the action of a guy who's even a little bit straight." Sure, he's probably a prisoner, and he can get into trouble for having sex with Mara. If he's wired that way, it should still occur to him, no matter how bad an idea it is.

John has four different settings with women. Interested and pursuing, interested and not pursuing, women he works with, and "Oh my God, I didn't notice that you were female." Since all these women are equally physically attractive, this seems like too many settings.

Is all this bad character continuity for John on the part of the writers, this so-many-settings thing? Or... what?

[tbc]

Part two.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_divya_/]

Then there's the other side of it. John and guys. He says to Elizabeth in Inferno, before he goes back to the planet to mess with Rodney to flirt with Norina to... supervise, that he didn't notice what the leader of Norina's people was like because the leader was a guy.

Yet, he has chemistry with male characters. Rodney and Ronon, most notably to my mind, so I'm going to concentrate on those two.

I had a hard time seeing the John/Rodney in the early seasons, but not any longer. And now that I look back, there were little things, like in Hide and Seek, not only were John and Rodney playing with the personal shield like happy little kids, completely unselfconsciously and gleefully, but John later says to Teyla, "Don't tell McKay what I said about hockey not being a real man's sport ‘cause, uh, it's a Canadian thing; a little touchy about it." So he already likes Rodney and considers what the consequences of saying certain things might be. He might not notice guys, but he notices Rodney.

Then there's Ronon, my god. I know it can be argued that John and Ronon have a whole brothers-in-arms thing going, and it might be squicky from a chain of command point of view, but John really wanted Ronon to stay on Atlantis with them, so much so that he hounded Elizabeth about it. He wanted to help Ronon, almost to the degree where he wanted to rescue him, and was willing to be pushy about it. I saw John/Ronon way before I ever saw John/Rodney. If you can see that John and Chaya immediately clicked on some level (which I can), you can say the same thing about John and Ronon. They meet and just know each other, so to me, that's a nice basis for slash.

And once the back half of SGA S3 airs in the US, there's going to be more to talk about.

And that's my two cents.