Meta: From Ten Seconds of Screentime to Ten Thousand Fanfics: Secondary Characters

[catwalksalone]

From Ten Seconds of Screentime to Ten Thousand Fanfics: How and Why Some Secondary Characters Take On a Life of Their Own

Modded at muskratjamboree by shihadchick and shayheyred; modded for rat_jam by the_antichris.

Comments

[the_antichris]

I think some secondary characters have a connection to canon (the main characters or the world) that gives them more oomph than their screen time would suggest - to take Damien Kowalski as an example, he gets only a few minutes total on screen, but he has so much potential to tell us about Ray's earlier life that he's really intriguing. And Lorne and Parrish have the potential to show us what life's like in Atlantis for the everyday people, as opposed to the heroes - though why Lorne and Parrish instead of two other secondary characters, I can't tell you. But the new angle on Pegasus, different from what we see on the show with the running around Canada getting shot at but intertwined with it, is really appealing. This works even more for closed canons, too - it can be hard to find a new angle on the canon, so a secondary character can be your way in.

And Mark Smithbauer - Fraser's personal history is such a blank slate that we're casting around for any scrap of canon to build backstory out of, and Mark Smithbauer's handily right there, as are Innusiq and Steve. (Plus, hockey is hot, the end.)

I'm trying to think of what it is that appeals to me about Frannie and Welsh - Frannie it might be that she's a wonderful character who gets a bad deal in canon, so I want to do a fixit. And I think I generally start to like secondary characters because of their relationship to my main pairing, so maybe Welsh is appealing as the older, more cynical version of the Chicago cop, something not too distant from what Ray might become if he stays in the job?