SGA - How to lose me from reading your story in less than 30 seconds ...

[patk]

Have Teyla address John as "Sheppard" and Rodney as "McKay" right there on the first page and I'm *out*. That's simply not her voice. It's either "John" or "Major/Colonel Sheppard" and "Rodney" or "Dr. McKay" - depending if she's talking to them in person or referring to them when talking to a third party.

And if an author doesn't manage to make her sound right on *this* small thing - when this is what you can hear/learn by simply watching the episodes and paying attention to how she speaks - then I really don't trust this author with the rest of the characterization, being it Teyla's or anybody else's. (And *this* is the minimum of what a beta-reader should actually catch. It's not only about typos, really, really not.)

It's perfectly possible that I'm misjudging the story based on this alone, but when I find this kind of flaw right at the start I just assume that the rest of the story also suffers from more flaws in characterization.

It's too bad, it was a long story and I actually looked forward to try it but after having stumbled over this right in the first minute of reading - just no.

Comments

[patk]

That was actually something that I wondered about when watching SGA. John calls Rodney "McKay" at times (for various reasons) and I would have actually *expected* that John would have used Ronon's surname in a similar matter in canon. But we never heard that. He's always calling him Ronon, I can't actually remember that he used "Dex" (aside from introducing him as "Ronon Dex"). Makes me wonder why.

[gaffsie]

One of his dead buddies from Afghanistan was called "Dex". Maybe that's why.

[helenkacan]

Besides what gaffsie said above, I blame TPTB for a huge mess concerning characters' names. And such laziness. As if they couldn't see the problem of repeating names: first-name Dex from Afghanistan; first-name Mitch from Afghanistan (which reminds us of Cam Mitchell from SG-1).

Let's add forgetfulness or lack of continuity about the introduction in S1x01 of Teyla Emmagan, "daughter of Tagan" who reveals in S5x01 that she's named her son after her father, Torren. Mind you, a lot of fans created their own back story that Athosian names appear to be matrilineal (which is eminently practical IMO) so that Tagan was Teyla's mother's name.

And, finally, let's not forget how negligent TPTB were in not giving some characters a last name. Poor Chuck. Either Sergeant or just Chuck. It's no wonder we started thinking of his character's name as being identical to his real name. And I may be recalling where someone accidentally called the nameless gate tech "Chuck" while filming so they had to at least keep it instead of reshooting. ::rolls eyes at all the inefficiency and lack of respect:: It's one thing to not name hordes of Wraith extras, but not people who are on screen on a semi-regular basis. Which reminds me, what was Dr. Simpson's first name? I'm sure there are others (but I'm too tired to think right now).