Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion

Fanfiction
Title:	Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion
Author(s):	auburnnothenna
Date(s):	2005
Length:
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Stargate Atlantis
Relationship(s):
External Links:	online here
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Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion is a Stargate Atlantis story by auburnnothenna.

It was the winner of two McKay/Sheppard Fan Awards in 2005.

The title of the fic is from a poem by Pablo Neruda.

Podfic

This story was podficced by Jinjur in 2008. See Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion.

DVD Commentary

A fan's 2006 DVD commentary is here.

The Author Comments on Being a Bit Jossed

It's the second story I wrote for SGA, written during the first hiatus, before anyone had seen Siege 3, before we knew what would happen to Ford and long before the introduction of Ronon. That's why Jeannie's husband's name is wrong, she has more than one kid and is in Southern California. Lord, every time I look at it I want to fix all those things, but that feels dishonest. I've contemplated posting both the original and a corrected version, though.

Reactions and Reviews

This is one of the most shattering and breathtaking AUs I've read in this fandom, a heartbreaking look at how the Wraith siege could have ended. I don't ever recall reading a story that so powerfully captures the claustrophobic horror of being trapped and besieged by a vastly more powerful enemy, running out of supplies, watching friends die, with no help coming and no escape. What keeps it from being brutally depressing is its unique parallel structure that twines together two stories, "now" (back on Earth) and "then" (on Atlantis), one moving forward and the other backwards. The question isn't so much who made it out as what happened to the ones who didn't. I definitely don't recommend this story if you're looking for a happy read, but if you like dark stories, and stories about moments of grace and despair when people are pushed to their absolute limits, it doesn't get much better than this.

Mmm, yeah, second this rec whole-heartedly! Legion the Things I Would Give to Oblivion is hard to read but very well worth the effort. It's as well-written & -characterized as you'd expect from one of auburnnothenna's fics, which means that the dark elements are horrifying real but the love & friendship & courage, which are reinforced throughout, are also solid & dependable.

Auburn seems to be trying to traumatize us as much as possible, and she's succeeding. Dark, dark, dark fic, but detailed and gripping. To quote her summary, "The Wraith are many and the Daedalus is just one ship. Things go very, very badly." Yeah. You'll want to reread this a few times, just to appreciate all of the little things (and the huge honking painful stuff) and get everything in order in your head (so it can hurt more). SG-1 makes an appearance, and there's one other crossover that works in an incredibly cool and perfect way. Read it, now, but have happy!fic (see Woobies of Woe above) ready after you finish. Trust me. (Slash/threesome alert, but it's peripheral and not-explicit, really only there to amp up the pain, and succeeding in doing so. Ouch.)

2005 Discussion at The Cutting Board

See the entire conversation at Story Structure and Emotional Impact (now offline); WebCite; another archive link.

[cofax7]: There are a lot of things to talk about in this story: plot, characterization, style, and so forth. I'm going to skip those and focus on the story structure: in particular, the order in which the plot unwinds, and what effect that has on the reader's experience of this particular story.... [MUCH snipped]

So, why did the story work?

It's likely that this outcome: the complete disaster of the Atlantis expedition, and the way in which everyone died, would not have made for a successful story unless it was structured in the way that this one was. The two things that I see making this story so successful are the structure, as described above, and the fact that the story is fanfiction.

Going in, the reader knows these characters, and cares about them. Without that investment, I suspect that the content of the story would turn them away. There isn't enough in the story to make me care about John, Rodney, Elizabeth, Teyla, and Zelenka in the story if that's my only experience of them. Most of them are just names. It's my understanding of who they are and what they mean , both independently and to each other, that makes the scenes in the city so powerful. This is not a flaw in the story, to my mind: it's an element inherent in fanfiction that allows the author to reach for emotional resonance that would otherwise take a lot more time and effort to achieve.

To expand on that point: the reader starts the story knowing John and Rodney survived. That is key to the reader's involvement -- the reader doesn't know what else happened, but they know John and Rodney survived. This is built-in reassurance from the author: See, things aren't so bad -- look at John and Rodney at a barbecue! Look at them squabble about sharing food! Sure, there are ominous undertones to the scene, but the reader starts the story from a place of comfort. (Particularly if the reader is a slash fan: her OTP is safe, yay!) They're alive and together. It's only as the story progresses that the reader slowly begins to realize that holy cow, John and Rodney are the only ones who survived! And by that point the reader is too sucked in by the plot to pull away.

Also, and possibly more importantly, because this is fanfiction, the reader can invest themselves fully in a story that is so incredibly harrowing and painful, and then go on. This is fanfiction, and therefore the reader knows that Elizabeth, Zelenka, and Teyla aren't dead. That Atlantis survives, that John and Rodney didn't go through all that, that O'Neill didn't witness the horror of those thumps against the iris.

The reader can close the story and find another one, a happy fluffy story about penguins or Aliens-Made-Us-Have-Sex. Whereas if this were original fiction, or the canon, and this were the outcome, it would require both more upfront work to engage the reader in the characters, but the bleak and horrifying outcome would be less emotionally fulfilling to the potential readership. It would, in fact, alienate the audience, or many of them. That's one of the freeing things about fanfiction.

But to bring it back around to the major point of this essay. I'm structure's bitch, and I'm enthralled by the way that Legion works on several levels to suck the reader into a story that she doesn't want to see happen. We don't want to see them forget the IDC, and starve to death in the chair room, and destroy the Daedalus. But the story is so well designed that we can't help staying with it until the very end, jaws hanging open, as the pieces fall into place and we see the inevitable disaster. In less skilled hands, this story might not have worked: it's too dark, too grim. It wouldn't have had a broad appeal, because the narrative would have been lopsided and the emotional content is so difficult to read. But structured this way, it works fabulously.

[dzurlady]: One thing, actually, that didn't work for me was Beckett's decision to throw caution to the winds and launch both himself and Elizabeth through the Stargate despite Rodney's protestations. This is a man who we have canonical evidence for being reluctant to travel through Stargates, as can be seen in Poisoning the Well (although this seems to have decreased somewhat in S2, this story is set before then). Thus Beckett's declaration that he and Elizabeth will "take their chances" that whoever is manning the gate at the SGC will open the iris for them seems to me to be out of character.

Apart from that, I really enjoyed Legion. It was horrifying, but very engaging and I adored the structure, which impressively did not become confusing. It also served to add a greater sense of movement to the story - because there was the constant jump from time period to time period it was more interesting to read, not just from an action point of view but also from a detective point of view, so to speak, as you try to assemble clues and work out how the two halves of the story are related.

The point you made about the strength of fanfic - the ability to have previously developed characters so that you have the freedom to write a more streamlined and focused story - was really interesting. I had a moment of 'Oh, yeah, of course'. And, as you mentioned, knowing you can go and read a story where is is all better is one of the aspects that makes this so satisfying. It's somewhat like riding a rollercoaster - exhilarating and scary, yet you know you'll be safe afterwards and can go and ride on the Ferris Wheel. (Of course, this also allows for a much greater flexibility in fanfic - in essence, a global 'Five things' type fic for the show, only it's more like '5000 things'. Yay fandom.)

[carolyn claire]: I felt Beckett's desperation in that moment was evidence of how much the situation had affected him, how much he'd deteriorated, himself--while everyone's eyes were on Elizabeth's downward spiral, Carson was going quietly mad, himself, which is made even more poignant by Elizabeth's final moment of lucidity. Very grim. *shivers*

[thepouncer]: For me, Weir going mad was the only part of this story that didn't work. I felt like there was no lead-up to it, and since the story only featured her as an incidental character her breakdown felt out of the blue and perhaps a little bit too convenient. Ford's actions in Sacrificial Drift hit me the same way, and it's especially jarring because everything else in that story is note-perfect for me. Legion is one of my favorite Atlantis stories, and the structure definitely added to the effect. I told Auburn, when I first read it, that I felt like the ending was inexorable, like gravity pulling me in faster and faster. I was racing to finish the story, to find out what happened, and everything that happened in the last sequences fell into place like it was fate. Very, very effective storytelling, which also added to my understanding of John and Rodney.

[z rayne]: Check out Happily Ever After by Merry. It's a Once a Thief story with a similar structure. It's I, A, II, B, III, C, etc., so not quite the same, but similar, and I think Merry pulls it off very well. Interestingly, Legion is probably Auburn's least effective SGA story for me. Because of the structure—and, from that, the knowledge from the outset that John and Rodney were okay—I wasn't nearly as invested in it as I was in The Taste of Apples, for instance.

[carolyn claire]: I loved this story, loved its darkness and pain and I loved the way she used the structure, made it such an important part of the storytelling. I hadn't considered before what a difference there would have been had the story been told without the time-shifting, and you're right; everything that came after that moment in the gateroom might very well have felt anticlimactic without the shifts. By using the shifts to place that moment at the end of the story, and by approaching it from two directions, gradually seeing how not-okay both the beginning and the ending of the story were, it hit me twice as hard, even knowing that John and Rodney survive. There were so many, "Oh, no, that's why--oh, no!" moments-- the hits against the iris, the dividing of the food, for instance, that had me flipping back and re-reading with more horror than if they'd been told to me using a more linear timeline. So effective, here.

I've used this device in a story (mine was more 5-1-6-2-7-3-8-4-9-10 in structure) to heighten tension, and I liked how it worked. Stories that use this device often strike me the way dzurlady mentioned it felt to her--like a detective story, where the crime has already happened and now we're drawn into wanting to know who and how and why, searching for clues as we go. It's very engaging, when done well, but can be confusing when it isn't, when the author tries to weave in more than two timelines or jumps seemingly pointlessly around in a way that makes things too hard to follow. If I don't know that's what I'm reading, it might take me a section or two to catch on, even when it's done well; if it's too ridiculously twisty, I'll probably give up on it. This one was faboo.

It is a manipulative device, yes, in the best sense, in that it presents the story in a way that increases my appreciation of it, in the elements of mystery it creates, in the rollercoaster feel, those "take a breath" moments interspersed with the horror, the way it pulls me in with evidence that John and Rodney are okay and then whomps me thoroughly with how untrue that is. This is a kind of manipulation I can get behind, unlike the kill-the-puppy-and-play-sad-music manipulations of some movies (argh, I hate that.) This is crafty. It's terrific storytelling.

I like your observations about the nature of fanfic making the dark and grim and horrific more palatable. I think I'd have thought that wasn't true, that our strong attachment to the characters, going in, would work to make the horrific even more so (which is cool but also hard on people), but, yes, the idea that one can pull back and say, "It's only a story, it's not real, like the show is," *g* or find a palate cleanser afterwards is interesting. And we all appreciate the reduced need for world-building, the ability to jump right into the meat of the story with characters and situations we already know, but maybe that does work especially well when the story is as intense as this one is. Hmmm.