The Standard of Comparison
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Standard of Comparison |
| Author(s): | agentotter |
| Date(s): | |
| Length: | |
| Genre(s): | slash |
| Fandom(s): | Stargate SG-1 |
| Relationship(s): | |
| External Links: | The Standard of Comparison, also The Standard of Comparison |
Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Standard of Comparison is a Jack/Daniel story by agentotter.
Reactions and Reviews
The One That Shows Us That There Are Some Things You Just Can't Share, No Matter How Much You Might Want To. (And Totally Improves by Approximately a Million Times on an Episode of SGA.) The Standard of Comparison, by agentotter. Stargate: SG-1, Jack O'Neill/Daniel Jackson.
The thing is, SG1 has a lot of stories I could have picked for this set. I was totally spoiled for choice. (Partly this is because I can handle sadder stories in SG1 than I can in other fandoms. Partly this is just because the world ends an awful lot in this fandom, and any story in which the human race is extinct at the end is probably going to fit in an unhappy endings set. At least if you’re human, and I tend to assume, perhaps unfairly, that most people reading this LJ are.) I mean, I thought of this story right off the bat, as soon as I'd read dorothy1901's request, but I decided to do Important Research. So I re-read approximately 5 million SG1 stories, sniffling many times over each, and finally decided to go with my first instinct.
What can I say? It's another one that has stayed with me. And I love the way the unhappiness just unspools from the ending. It's not just that it ends unhappily, it's that things are definitely going to get worse. Jack and Daniel are stuck in a bad place, and the only solution to the problem is worse than the bad place. But they can't just choose to stay there, either.
Because I am that kind of person, I usually spend a few minutes writing a sort of mental fan fiction for any story I read that I really liked. (I've doing this since I was a kid. I wanted to know what happened to every single person in a book from the ending until forever. And then I wanted to know about their kids. It drove me nuts that the authors just left the characters there, when clearly there were unresolved questions! Like what they had for dinner the next day, and what happened when they grew up, and if they got a dog and what they named that dog. I think I was a fan fiction reader born, not made.)
But I can't do that with this one. It hurts too much. I'd rather leave Jack and Daniel in limbo forever than imagine what has to come next for Daniel. And for someone who was deeply, sincerely resentful of Charles Dickens for not going into sufficient detail, that's saying something.[1]
Oldskool classic fic! This is intense Jack and Daniel friendship, with a typically Otterish twist that you will not see coming... even if, upon rereading, you realize that all the clues were right there.[2]
Sorry, another painful fic. In less than 3800 words, Otter paints a picture of what-could-have been in a mission-gone-wrong.The story starts with Daniel doing his thing on what Jack would call "another dry, dusty planet -- and why are we here anyway?" But there's another team in charge and we don't know where the rest of SG-1 is.
And Daniel's not doing well, in spite of Jack's support. So they go back to Earth and Daniel -- to Jack's dismay -- says he's not ready to be in the field.
A dream that night revisits what happened...
Which makes the ending even more devastating.[3]
References
- ^ rec by thefourthvine, June 30, 2009
- ^ "The Standard of Comparison, by Otter (PG), August 15, 2017 Livejournal". Archived from the original on 2023-03-13.
- ^ "Post by goddess47 to stargateficrec". Archived from the original on 2023-03-13.