Stargate SG-1: Born a Queen: A Queen to Build an Empire

AO3 | DW

Fandom: Stargate SG-1
AU: Born a Queen
Series: The Travel Collection
Word Count: 505
Characters: Baal

Baal, from learning of the tau’ri to his decision to create Lilith.

When he’d first heard of the tau’ri, he’d been glad to know they’d destroyed Ra, and then seemingly vanished.

When they’d turned Apophis’s First Prime, and taken no few undesirable hosts to whatever they deemed safety, he’d been intrigued, and curious about who they were.

His spies had brought him information each time the tau’ri ventured out into the galaxy, a little at a time, painting a picture of an interesting team. The traitor j’affa Teal’c, who provides them more information about the System Lords than they would have without someone who’d had as much power as Teal’c once had possessed. The weak-visioned and soft-hearted one called Danyel Jackson, who had greater strength than his warrior friends, and might possess as much knowledge as Teal’c, if in a different manner. The leader, older and experienced in war, who looks out for everyone he calls his own – which seems to be more than just his team or the tau’ri – is called O’Neill.

And the last of the four, a woman with fair hair and pale eyes, is named Carter. She is a warrior, but she is more than simply that. She is an engineer and a scientist, forever asking questions and creating solutions to the technological problems the tau’ri face. Someone of strength and intelligence, though he doubts she’s without flaws.

But it is not her flaws that he first hears of, nor is it her flaws that leave him trying to push away an old and worn grief. Memories of a fierce smile and flashing eyes, standing at his side when he’d been little more than a youth still in the shadow of goa’uld with more power and skill. A woman who he had called his queen, though neither of them had the power for it, and who’d done as much as he to create plans that would bring them power.

She had died too far from a sarcophagus to be saved, bleeding out from a wound that had been meant for him. Laughing and telling him to leave, because she would not have him die. The place where she had died has been a crater for centuries, the blast enough to take out the army of their enemy. Never having spawned, never having given him the larvae who would give him control over j’affa.

And now, with the whispers of freedom that spread from Teal’c and the tau’ri, he needs more than control over their lives to keep his j’affa loyal. More than fear. He needs someone for them to rally about, as once an army had rallied around Anat. So he pushes aside the grief for the woman he’d called his queen, and sends his spies to get some of Carter’s blood, or more.

Once he had that sample, he could create that figure he wanted. A girl, a princess who could grow into a queen. His queen – not his wife, as Anat had been, but the woman who could build an empire the tau’ri are already trying to tear apart.

Stargate SG-1: Born a Queen: Never Stop Wanting Home

AO3 | DW

Fandom: Stargate SG-1
AU: Born a Queen
Series: The Travel Collection
Word Count: 682

Characters: Baal, Daniel Jackson, Jack O’Neill, Lilith (OC), Sam Carter, Teal’c

She never stops longing for home. For her father, for his stories, for the palace she lived in, for the j’affa who guarded her.

She never stops longing for home, even when she (barely) accepts she’ll never be allowed to see it again. Never stops wanting to see her father’s smirking face again, telling her stories of vanquishing his enemies. To see the rich gardens of the palace, the gleaming armor of the j’affa who guarded her.

The isolated cabin, the lake, the silver-haired warrior who’s been named her new guardian – none of this makes up for everything she’s lost. Some days she misses it with such a fierce ache, she can’t do anything but run as far as she can, kicking and screaming when the warrior catches up to her. Crying herself to sleep, curled around the stuffed toy that is all she has left of her old life.

One day, she’s taken back to the place she’d first arrived on this wretched planet, where others wait. The shol’va Teal’c, the blond woman who she’s been told is biologically her mother – stolen genetics, combined with her father’s, and she doesn’t believe a word of it – and the scholar-warrior who speaks goa’uld with her when he visits. Dan’yel is the only one who’s tried to understand her, but even he can’t take her home.

“Lilith.” Dan’yel smiles, and she skips over to him, ignoring the exasperated sigh from the silver-haired warrior. “I hear you ran away from Jack’s cabin again.”

She shrugs. “I want to go home.” It’s her answer every time someone asks her why she runs away, or why she spends weeks refusing to talk to anyone, or ends up in the hospital because she’s refused to eat. Looking over at the chappa’ai, she smiles hopefully. “Are you taking me home today?”

“Not exactly.” Dan’yel crouches down, the same way the silver-haired warrior does when he’s trying to talk to her. “We’ve been asked to bring you with us for a ceremony. I need you to promise me something, though, before we go.”

“What?” She watches him suspiciously, her smile fading into a frown. The demand of a promise is not a good sign – has never been a good thing.

Dan’yel smiles again, a strange sadness in his eyes, and reaches out to tuck a stray strand of hair back behind her ear. “Promise me you’ll stay near me or Jack at all times while we’re on the other planet.”

And waste a chance to escape, and return home? She scowls, crossing her arms as she glares at Dan’yel. How can he ask her to do such a thing?

“Why?”

“If you don’t, the general isn’t going to let you go.” Dan’yel holds her gaze, and she wants to scream with rage. So close to a chance to go home, and if she doesn’t make a promise she knows she will regret, she’ll be trapped here forever.

Turning her glare to the bald man in the window, she waits a long moment before she nods once, sharply. “I will stay where you can see me, Dan’yel ibn Jak.” It’s not the concession that any of them really want, but she refuses to stay so close to silver-haired warrior, and if she can explore without them thinking she’s running away, she will take what she can.

It is, though, enough, because the chappa’ai begins to spin, chevrons lighting one by one until the blue that had spelled the end of her idyll shimmers in a circle. The blue that might mean a chance to return home.

“SG-1, you have a go.” The voice is that of the bald general, and she has to restrain herself from bolting for the blue, instead walking docile beside Dan’yel through to another world. It is a hall familiar and welcome, though not home, and there are others waiting for them there.

Among them, a very familiar and welcome face. She ignores the shout of the silver-haired warrior as he comes through, ducking away from the grabbing hands of the woman and the shol’va. Ignoring the men and women in drab who try to stop her, ducking around and through them until she can throw herself into her father’s arms.

norcumi:

Mmkay. There’s this post floating around about Obi-Wan’s
characterization (link coming up in a minute). I want it on the
record that I am all for people characterizing fictional characters
however they want, on whatever criteria they have including “because
I was in the mood for it,” ‘cause going ‘there’s only one
true interpretation’ is totally a dick move.

Nonetheless this post has been slowly driving me bonkers so I’m
trying to do the polite thing and make my own post deconstructing it
rather than adding to theirs.

Hell, it starts off with “Please can someone explain to me why
there’s this fandom thing where Obi Wan is nothing but angst and
sads for 20 straight years on Tatooine?”

You betcha.

First off, OP is basing character assessment on the Myers–Briggs
Type Indicator. Look. I enjoy personality tests as much as the next
person, but that thing is just as useful to behavior prediction as a
Facebook quiz about which Disney Princess you are. Here’s a nice
convenient article about why which a minimum of digging on Google
netted me. MBTI presents archtypes that are sometimes useful for
casual commentary, but that is not a diagnostic tool.

So let’s take a look at Obi-Wan, as we see in the movies (and
Clone Wars), just after Revenge of the Sith. We have a man who is
anywhere from 33 to 38 years old (depending on your version of
canon), who has spent the last three years overworking himself at the
heart of a hideous civil war that he was essentially drafted for, and
oh yes, his side lost. Not only did his side lose, but it got
massacred. Yoda was able to feel the death of the Jedi Order as it
was happening, do not tell me that Obi-Wan had no idea what was going
on too. Meanwhile, Obi-Wan was also dealing with the betrayal of his
closest friend (his brother), who tries to kill him. Meanwhile, said
brother does kill his wife (pregnant
wife) who is a close friend of Obi-Wan’s, right there in
front of him. All this leads to Obi-Wan doing the unthinkable:
mutilating and then killing his brother – or worse, not being able
to kill Anakin, leaving him in torment for another two decades.

There is so much PTSD fodder here, and that doesn’t even touch the
betrayals from the clones, nor the question of ‘did he feel the
psychic backlash from the chips kicking in and twisting the clones’
minds?’, nor the mental trauma from The Phantom Menace wherein he
was replaced, failed his teacher who died in his arms but only after
saying ‘that kid what replaced you, you need to train him now,’
and then 10 years of raising a kid when he was literally just
sorta-kinda-not-exactly declared an adult himself. He was not
prepared for that.

So once Obi-Wan’s handed over Luke
(the last remaining link to his brother, who he is now not allowed
any contact with since Luke expresses he’s never really met Old
Ben) – that’s the first time he’s had to really stop and
breathe in over 13
years. Ten years to raise a responsibility he never asked for, was
not prepared to handle, and was a reminder of his greatest failure.
Three years of running at least a literal third of a galactic war
that was stacked against him (did he realize that by the end? That
they were being played, and could never have won?).

Yeah, he’s got 20 years to work at
recovering from that, but without a skilled therapist that I don’t
think you’re going to find on Tatooine, you’re going to be lucky
to be functional. I know that Star Wars as a whole doesn’t concern
itself with mental health (seriously, mind healers are becoming one
of my most cherished additions that Re-Entry brings to the table).
That doesn’t mean ignoring it will get you a good character assessment.

Depression and PTSD isn’t going to
make someone “a sad,
bitter, lonely man” nor
does it mean that one will metaphorically “be playing All By Myself
on repeat for 20 straight years while sobbing into a cup of Bantha
milk.” Depression expresses
itself in any number of ways. It can mute things, so that while you
laugh and even enjoy life, that joy doesn’t linger, or pales
quickly. It can add a haze to everything, so you feel numb and
distant. It can make someone who once expressed themselves
exuberantly seem calm instead of manic. It doesn’t have to affect
one’s wit, or habits of cracking jokes even if those jokes might
feel flat and hollow to the speaker.

Sometimes
it just leads to going through the motions of living, how one would
have approached things Before – but it’s just empty motions.

PTSD
can express itself as flashbacks. It can look like nothing until it
is
reactions to a different time and trauma instead of what is now and
present. It
can be a person haunted by their past, it can be explosive, it can be
quiet and turned inwards. There are days when it doesn’t hit you,
there are days when it’s so heavy on your shoulders that it feels
like all you can do is sit, stare at a wall, and hope your brain
shuts off. Then there are the days when despite that weight, you
still need to go get groceries, or make dinner, or fix a vaportator,
or fight off wayward Tuskens or something.

Nothing
says that depressed and traumatized Obi-Wan wouldn’t sometimes take
delight in lightsaber play, or practical jokes. I just don’t think
that it would overtake the depression and PTSD.

On
top of all of that is what
you get when
you take a look at the EU. Obi-Wan’s been traumatized since he was
a kid. He was bullied through his tweens. He was rejected by the ONLY
teacher he could hope to have until the Order booted him to the
AgroCorps, at least a week before the official deadline. Then that
shuttle crashed, and he saw his first major battle which led to
approximately FOUR HUNDRED dead.

At
not quite 13. Over the next year (probably less, but let’s be
generous), he had to deal with: kidnapping, enslavement and hard
labor, an attempted mind wipe, an actual war accompanied by
abandonment by his teacher, and
his teacher’s prior student trying to blow up his home. By the time
Phantom Menace rolls around, we can include: several more wars, 6
months to a year on the run across war-torn Mandalore trying to keep
a teenage Satine alive, taking responsibility for the death of
Qui-Gon’s Love Interest – and that’s just what’s off the top
of my head.

Y’know
what’s interesting? During Attack of the Clones, what I see is a
man just barely holding his shit together. That scene in Dex’s
Diner breaks me, because all I can think of is my time doing food
service while going through my own PTSD and depression – and I
recognize that empty smile he has for Dex. I know it’s all
interpretation, but I can’t help but think he’s faking that
smile. That sure, he means it: he’s happy to see a friend, he wants
to reassure him, but that doesn’t change the hollow inside that he
knows if he lets go and falls into it, he will never climb out.

The
war provided an alternative focus. It gave him clear, concrete goals:
beat back enemies here and here, keep as many of these people alive
as possible, here are resources and here are the end goals. He could
legitimately bond with brothers in arms who could grok black humor,
who wouldn’t look askance at someone covering long-standing grief
and discomfort with banter and flirting, “who
winked and witticized his way out of death and imprisonment a million
times, who always found something to laugh about or make fun of even
in the most difficult situations” – regardless of how inappropriate or relevant that might be to the circumstances.

Sometimes,
that laughter is all that keeps you from breaking from all the pain.

Yes,
people heal. Yes, he had 20 years to
work through
that trauma and injury. He’d
also be doing it alone, with a legacy of stoicism and philosophies
about releasing his emotions into the Force. The last major
friendships he had ended in betrayal in death, and people he depended on tended to either die or betray him.

That’s
not something you blithely overcome to play pranks on the locals
while watching over the kid of your best friend what you almost
killed as he was trying to kill you, like he killed most everyone
else you knew and loved. There is so much trauma and pain he’s had to see over the last 20 plus years, and Tatooine is the first time he ever gets to breathe and react.

If you want to write trickster archtype Obi-Wan, I applaud you. Without any sarcasm or mockery: you do you.

Meanwhile, I’ll be writing traumatized Old Ben.

(Many thanks to @morgynleri and @elegantmess-southernbelle who provided brilliant points and conversation, though I suspect I
phrased it with much less grace and coherency than they did)

Hugs for EVERYONE*

morgynleri:

*hugs you all* Because today is a day for hugs, and I’m going to run out of spoons if I go putting hugs in everyone’s ask box.

Feel free to reblog this to give a hug to every one of your followers.

*who is comfortable with being hugged. If you do not like hugs or are uncomfortable with physical contact, or even just prefer not a hug from someone not a mutual friend, cookies or other snacks suitable for your dietary needs and restrictions.

I know this blog has been really empty lately, and it’s not likely to get any less empty of new stuff for the next while. Part of it is brain weasels, part of it is doing things to cope with brain weasels. I just. Need to continue the break from tumblr that I started back in… March? I haven’t done all that much checking of my dashboard since then, and lately, I haven’t even done a huge amount of checking individual blogs. And it helps not to have the distraction that takes a lot of focus, at least for some things.

I make no promises of when I’ll be back, just that I don’t intend to abandon my tumblr altogether.

Hugs for EVERYONE*

morgynleri:

*hugs you all* Because today is a day for hugs, and I’m going to run out of spoons if I go putting hugs in everyone’s ask box.

Feel free to reblog this to give a hug to every one of your followers.

*who is comfortable with being hugged. If you do not like hugs or are uncomfortable with physical contact, or even just prefer not a hug from someone not a mutual friend, cookies or other snacks suitable for your dietary needs and restrictions.

Huh. I think the current experiment is working. I mean, I’m still feeling tired right now, but it’s a “I’m in pain because I was foolish, and also brain weasels being irritating” tired, not a “I made lunch, time for a nap before I eat” tired. Amazing what happens when there’s enough iron in the system to actually make enough blood.

(I stopped trying to donate blood because I’ve only once had enough iron to do the donation thing, and that was the last time I was regularly taking iron supplements.)

In related news – I moved two stacks of heavy bins from the kitchen into the room used for storage, sorted a basket of clean laundry, picked up the dirty laundry piled on the floor, emptied the dishwasher and put dirty dishes in it, and finally tossed the old and no longer useable litter box outside (it’s only gotten to the deck, rather than to the trash, but still). This. Is more than I could have done in a week before I started taking the iron again.

Hugs for EVERYONE*

morgynleri:

*hugs you all* Because today is a day for hugs, and I’m going to run out of spoons if I go putting hugs in everyone’s ask box.

Feel free to reblog this to give a hug to every one of your followers.

*who is comfortable with being hugged. If you do not like hugs or are uncomfortable with physical contact, or even just prefer not a hug from someone not a mutual friend, cookies or other snacks suitable for your dietary needs and restrictions.

Requiring dysphoria is harmful. It’s damaging. Requiring dysphoria implies that for someone to truly be the gender they are, they need to want the societal stereotypical parts of the gender they are. We cannot be happy with our bodies. Requiring dysphoria, especially genital dysphoria, implies women cannot happily have penises. Men cannot happily have vaginas. Non-binary people cannot happily exist ever, due to how society dictates and enforces the binary. This idea that dysphoria is necessary to exist as a trans person reinforces the outdated notion that the only ‘true’ trans people are those who wish to have genitals that stereotypically conform to the societal notion of what being a man/woman is. It removes non-binary people from existence, yet again, through this notion.

–Dysphoria Not Required

Say it with me folks: DYSPHORIA IS NOT REQUIRED TO BE TRANS.

No, I will not debate this.

(via hertendief)

It’s also white supremacist – most cultures outside of the west prior to western influence have not placed emphasis on body parts when it comes to gender variant people – and all the gender identities indigenous to those cultures, to my knowledge, have been nonbinary

(via theroguefeminist)

theknightlyrealist:

historical-hatred:

argonauticae:

beautifuloutlier:

prokopetz:

sarahtypeswords:

wetorturedsomefolks:

memejacker:

several-talking-corpses:

memejacker:

caligula had anime eyes

wait romans painted their marble sculptures

it looks like a cheap theme park ride mascot

yep

here’s a statue of Augustus

and here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored

i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art

“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”

And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues – often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process – because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.

Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.

(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way – because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)

There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.

a couple of general points:

1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:

(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example:

and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced this

just, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea.

2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.

Many sculptures from antiquity were defaced during the early Christian period. During riots, Christian mobs would smash the noses off of ‘pagan’ sculptures, as they usually depicted pagan gods, or emperors, and depending on the sect, any depiction of a person could be considered ‘graven’.

The hotbed of Christian zealotry was Egypt. Throughout its time as a Roman, and then ‘Byzantine’ province during its early Christian history, the province proved practically unmanageable due to its Christian theological riots, with the majority of the population not following Constantinople’s doctrine and theological orders.

This Roman bust of Germanicus at the British Museum was defaced – nose smashed off – during a riot that would have taken place in late antiquity in Egypt, so, 400-500AD [also, note the cross etched into forehead]

Probably the most known example of this is the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum, a vast temple complex in Alexandria, Christian mobs tore the temple apart, destroying and looting, tearing it down brick by brick.

Another example, outside of Egypt, is the Nika Revolts in Constantinople. On its creation as a co-capital of the Roman Empire, an unfathomable amount of art and sculpture was brought to adorn the New Rome, and during the revolt, for the most part this cream of the classical crop was destroyed, again, by theological mobs.

After Egypt’s conquest during the Arab-Islamic conquests, this practice would have continued. In fact, theologically, many of Egypt’s Christian sects were more in line with Islamic theology than what became mainstream Christianity in both ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Catholic’ doctrine.

Basically, if you want to know what happened to sculptures from antiquity, Abrahamic faiths happened to them. We divorce classical and ancient sculptures from their meaning – we see them as history or art, but to the new faiths, they were graven images, they were pagan, and they were destroyed or defaced.

I like this version of the thread. It has actual history in it not just “Victorian assholes” did it (which this thread also seems to be the only thing I ever see about Victorians removing paint from statues).