Written by the Victors
While I'm sure I was the last person in all of SGA fandom to finally read Written by the Victors, now I have, and OMG. Wow. I read it on the train home today, and then took another few hours of the trainride just to begin to think about it. The impact is kind of overwhelming, to the point that I so far seem only able to approach thinking about it tangentially, and sat staring out the train window contemplating for a couple hours rather than moving on to the other (non-fannish) stories I'd brought. I'm still processing, but now that I won't be spoiled by them I'm dying to read all of my friends' initial reviews, which I of course dutifully avoided so as not to be spoiled back when you all first posted them. So please, if you've written one, linky? (Or just let me know I should go back and look for it.)
I think the thing that bowled me over the most is just the immense depth of feeling this story was able to evoke in me. If I hadn't been in public on a train, I think I'd have wept openly by the end, even though it does end happily. What hits me the most there is that there never was a reconciliation, that Earth remains so misguided, that John and Rodney and everyone else who remained on Atlantis will forever be misunderstood by their homeworld, that humanity appears irrevocably to have forked. I'd have hoped, I guess, that Earth might come to its senses in the future, even though the Earth histories made it clear there hadn't been a contemporary reconciliation. But Pegasus flourishes without Earth at all, and directly because of the loss of Earth - and I don't disapprove of that, by any means, I just find it heartwrenchingly sad. It's sad to think of Earth becoming just a legend to Pegasus just as Atlantis is to us. It's sad to think of our segment of humanity being so unable to grow that an alien culture, to survive, had to expel us.
It's odd, but it almost hurt to see the language of the epilogues (so brilliantly finally from the Pegasus historians' side, the true victors) move gradually and then completely away from English. It just drove home that the people of Atlantis did truly become alien, become not of Earth, and that it is Earth that's the worse for it. I also found it both glorious and bittersweet that our team become the founders of a great galactic civilization, and then fade to legend, great figures of history rather than the warm flesh and blood people I've come to love so deeply in both canon and fanon. Not that they became legends, which of course they deserved, but that so much time passed, that in the end what future generations could know of them would only be able to be shadows of who they really were. And that that, of course, is how it is for all of us, even the most heroic, even for those who changed history most profoundly. I guess it was a huge opening of perspective, to consider the future of Atlantis and of Pegasus not in terms of the lifetimes of the characters we love, or even their children, but in terms of the evolutions of societies and languages and the fading of Earth - my home if not the Lanteans' - into such a deep past. And when something you've read pushes you to relocate your sense of perspective that way, it can't help but change you, even once you've gone back to your everyday world and sensibility.
I don't think I can make any more sense of my reaction quite yet, but I suppose that since I'm publicly reviewing a fic for the first time in over two years, that should give some idea of the degree to which this story impressed me. No, impressed doesn't cover it. This story crept up on me and took root in places quite deeper than I expected, even knowing how everyone else had reacted and how amazing a writer Ces is already. It's just something utterly, wonderfully else.
I think the thing that bowled me over the most is just the immense depth of feeling this story was able to evoke in me. If I hadn't been in public on a train, I think I'd have wept openly by the end, even though it does end happily. What hits me the most there is that there never was a reconciliation, that Earth remains so misguided, that John and Rodney and everyone else who remained on Atlantis will forever be misunderstood by their homeworld, that humanity appears irrevocably to have forked. I'd have hoped, I guess, that Earth might come to its senses in the future, even though the Earth histories made it clear there hadn't been a contemporary reconciliation. But Pegasus flourishes without Earth at all, and directly because of the loss of Earth - and I don't disapprove of that, by any means, I just find it heartwrenchingly sad. It's sad to think of Earth becoming just a legend to Pegasus just as Atlantis is to us. It's sad to think of our segment of humanity being so unable to grow that an alien culture, to survive, had to expel us.
It's odd, but it almost hurt to see the language of the epilogues (so brilliantly finally from the Pegasus historians' side, the true victors) move gradually and then completely away from English. It just drove home that the people of Atlantis did truly become alien, become not of Earth, and that it is Earth that's the worse for it. I also found it both glorious and bittersweet that our team become the founders of a great galactic civilization, and then fade to legend, great figures of history rather than the warm flesh and blood people I've come to love so deeply in both canon and fanon. Not that they became legends, which of course they deserved, but that so much time passed, that in the end what future generations could know of them would only be able to be shadows of who they really were. And that that, of course, is how it is for all of us, even the most heroic, even for those who changed history most profoundly. I guess it was a huge opening of perspective, to consider the future of Atlantis and of Pegasus not in terms of the lifetimes of the characters we love, or even their children, but in terms of the evolutions of societies and languages and the fading of Earth - my home if not the Lanteans' - into such a deep past. And when something you've read pushes you to relocate your sense of perspective that way, it can't help but change you, even once you've gone back to your everyday world and sensibility.
I don't think I can make any more sense of my reaction quite yet, but I suppose that since I'm publicly reviewing a fic for the first time in over two years, that should give some idea of the degree to which this story impressed me. No, impressed doesn't cover it. This story crept up on me and took root in places quite deeper than I expected, even knowing how everyone else had reacted and how amazing a writer Ces is already. It's just something utterly, wonderfully else.