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Comments 31

rigel_7 April 4 2008, 12:25:16 UTC
Wait, what?

*boggles at that second paragraph*

Chalchi?

AHAHAHA! (Please tell me you were kidding about that!)

Man... I've got a bajillion of the Star Wars tie in novels (and some of those definitely read as crack!bad fic... "The Courtship of Princess Leia", I'm looking at you here!)

But that one sounds like it would be entertaining in the *throws book against the wall, hard* kind of way. But I just know it would have the potential to hit my Sam/Jack smooshy kink and I'd be all over it like a romance novel that had pirates (and a Duke)

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 12:39:43 UTC
Chalchi is the goddess's nickname (short for Chalchiuhtlicue, which you know Jack would never, ever say). I think it's cute. :) He only calls her that once, which is probably good, because it has the potential to get irritating quite quickly.

I picked out all the Sam/Jack cliches because it was entertaining as to how many they'd put into a novel that supposedly follows canon, but to be fair, there was more to the book than that (exhaustive historical details - kind of heavy-going for a fandom book). Whilst they have all those cliches, they don't actually follow them through as much as someone writing fanfic would do. Conserving body heat doesn't lead to kissing, hot springs don't lead to sex, posing as married gods doesn't make Jack and Sam turn into embarrassed teenagers...

Sadly, though, it suffers from a lack of pirates. :( But there is Aztec gold!

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rigel_7 April 4 2008, 12:54:02 UTC
Heee! Although I'm sure that's a legit-esque Aztec name it sure looks like the author just bashed away at the keyboard there. :D

In fact that's a great idea for coming up with obscure alien names:

ofdshosdfer
powqpo4
alepoelpo
djksjtrpwoert

add a few random apostrophes and presto! Instant culture :D

Aztec gold! (There better be some kind of curse associated with that!)

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 13:20:30 UTC
They're absolutely legit names. I have a notebook for my British Museum fics, and coincidentally, I already had a lot of the names from this book noted down, amongst other Aztec and Mayan god names - Huehueteotl, Xiulecuhtli, Tezcaltlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, Toatiuh... I'd even made a note of Chalchiuhtlicue, but none of them had stuck in my head because I hadn't managed to mentally pronounce them. I kept sounding them out aloud when reading this book. "Chalchiu...htli... oh, sod it, Chalchi."

How does one pronounce "powqpo4", then? *g*

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vickyocean April 4 2008, 12:34:11 UTC
I despair at the fact that we don't have a bookstore near where I work, 'cause you can be sure I'd be picking that up at lunch. I was just thinking that I needed a break from the somewhat dense and heavy books I've been slogging through lately. This sounds ideal. : )

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 12:43:19 UTC
Hah. You should see the amount of times I had to go back to review the history the author had spent pages explaining. "Teotihuacan is a place, Tzcatlipoca and Tonatui are at war... or... something..."

Aztec names are hard to read, yo!

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vickyocean April 4 2008, 13:05:59 UTC
That's okay. All those strange names will just get muddled and my mind will just gloss over them anytime they appear. Hmm, that's probably why I wasn't so great at learning foreign languages.

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 13:12:19 UTC
I did exactly that. But the names KEEP appearing. All the time. It made the plot quite hard to understand, because it took me ages to establish who was posing as who and who they were fighting and why.

I'm not trying to dissade you from reading this - I'm just giving you fair warning. ;)

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shutthef_up April 4 2008, 14:46:46 UTC
Heh! I forgot about the hot springs part!

Yeah, I think the names made it harder for me to keep track.

My boggle? Daniel and the Marines (or whoever the SG Team that accompanied them was) dressing in feathered costumes - which they then continued wearing for much of the rest of the book! I wondered if Daniel was wearing a loincloth too, which *should* have been a cool visual? But really wasn't - it sounded really silly.

Oh, and the little dog.

The whole book sort of felt a bit... strange.

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 15:10:53 UTC
Yeah, the little dog, that Jack kept carrying around in his pocket. Heh.

I liked the idea of the team in costume, complete with Marines as jaguar guards, myself (although I wondered how they'd put the costumes together so fast...). It kind of tickled me. :) It did seem odd that Jack was still wearing his feathered cloak when they got back, a week later. I mean... this is Jack we're talking about.

My mental image for the loincloths was that they were wearing those trouser things that cover their legs, like chaps, and with a loincloth over the naughty bits. I didn't want to picture them in just loincloths. It lacked... dignity. *g*

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eregyrn April 4 2008, 15:07:38 UTC
I dunno if I agree with the "well-written" part, just the "badfic" part ( ... )

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 15:29:30 UTC
Mm, I did kind of mean "well-written" as far as fandom novels go... I've read much worse. :)

It was the anviliciousness of the S/J-cliches, plus, the dumb!Jack. I cannot forgive dumb!Jack that feels *genuinely* dumb to me.Yeah? There was one bit that pinged me that way (when he was talking about something he'd seen on the History Channel), and the inability to pronounce a single name got kind of irksome, but aside from that, it didn't feel to me like he was being especially dumb!Jack. He was pretty professional for most of it, I thought ( ... )

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eregyrn April 4 2008, 18:59:32 UTC
To be honest, it's been so long since I read that book (when it came out; never wanted to reread it) that I'm ill-equipped to get into a discussion of specific things that pinged me in it and made me dislike it (or dislike, say, the portrayal of Jack ( ... )

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holdouttrout April 4 2008, 15:24:14 UTC
Oh, man. This novel sounds adorably terrible.

*reads through the rest of the comments and snickers*

God. I HAVE to buy this book.

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 15:34:18 UTC
It's not to be taken at all seriously. And possibly needs to be read with notes as to who everyone is. But I liked it. I think you'll be okay, being that you're a S/J shipper and enjoy some of the same badfic cliches that I like.

:)

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holdouttrout April 4 2008, 15:36:01 UTC
I also have a little bit of introduction to Aztec-y and Central/South American myths, so I read some of those names and go, "Oh! I know that one!"

It's quite exciting.

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pepper_field April 4 2008, 15:39:42 UTC
*g* Yes, that would totally help. I recognised Quezalcoatl, but that was it. Shame on me, seeing as I did go and "research" one of my British Museum fics in the South American rooms.

And now I probably have a completely misleading idea of who these gods are and how they're related to one another...

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