Well, you’ve been reading my blog, and assuming you have read all of the other entries before you got to this one, we know each other pretty well at this point.

    So now I am going to take the plunge and reveal myself as a hopeless, pathetic sci-fi fan girl.

     I was a “Trekker” before I could read (I read late, started around third grade).  I was a hopeless Babylon Five “Babbler”, and now I am a Stargate freak.  I would also be a Firefly freak if there was such a thing as Firefly anymore…ditto Jeremiah…but we in fandom know that there is a chance that any good show could rise again, so I live in hope.

     But back to Star Gate.

     I am hopelessly, passionately, and yes…disturbingly in love with Daniel Jackson.  I say disturbingly because he is, after all, a fictional character.  Anyway, Daniel is cute as a Raphaelite angel , smart, sensitive, thoughtful, capable of kicking serious ass, capable of telling when ass needs kicking and when it doesn’t, loyal, loving and kind.  He’s also incredibly rational and ethical.

     Whenever I see him, my brain turns to a big mushy pile of butter.  I know that Daniel Jackson would be in love with me too, if he were a real person, knew I existed, and if our reality collided with the Bizzaro universe.

     Be all that as it may, I am going to actually talk about a different character in the series:  Lt. Colonel Samantha Carter.  Not only that, but I will be demonstrating one of the more annoying traits of fan-boys and girls everywhere; talking about a fictional story as if it is real and applying it to real life as if it were relevant.

     Sam is currently in the middle of three plot points involving males being in love with her.  And why not, she the female version of Daniel.  She’s every woman I’ve ever wanted to be (including thin, blond-haired, and blue-eyed).

     As far as we know, there are three surviving males that are in love with her (men who fall in love with Sam tend to die, or at least get sucked into trans-dimensional vortexes). 

     Love situation number one is Brig. General Jack O’Neill.  He’s in love with her. She’s in love with him.  They can’t be in love, though, because he is her commanding officer, so they just act like it doesn’t exist.  They are very proper and ethical and everything, and it makes them both miserable much of the time.  Jack knows who he is, and he knows who Sam is, and he knows that there are no circumstances under which they can have a relationship and continue to be their best selves, so he restrains himself from following his feelings where he knows they will lead.

     Love situation number two is a young cop that Sam met through a mutual friend.  They went on a few dates, he noticed she was acting weird, and investigated her.  During the course of the investigation, he found a number of things the REALLY didn’t add up, and started tailing her.  During one of the times he was tailing her some alien shit went down, and he found out about her life at Stargate command.  He has recently asked her to marry him, and she has accepted.  I don’t remember the characters name, but he’s played by a DeLouise, so he’s as cute as a chipmunk, and I like him.

     Love (and I use the word loosely) situation number three is with an alien named Fifth.  He’s actually a very complicated character.  He’s obsessed with Sam, and she is not in love with him…but she played on his naïve and trusting nature to get him to help her, and then later betrayed him on orders from Jack due to circumstances beyond her control.  Fifth recently showed up again, found Sam, kidnapped her, and tried a number of techniques to get her to love him…some of them were very painful and not at all nice.

     Now, a number of fans call what Chipmunk Boy did stalking.  I disagree.  Chipmunk boy is not a stalker, but Fifth is…and here’s the difference as I see it:

      Fifth doesn’t see Sam as having a right to her own independent sense of reality and her own independent feelings.  To Fifth, the correct state of things is Sam being in love with him, and he will move heaven and earth, and literally create whole artificial realities to try to get Sam to love him.  He will torture her to change her mind.  He will deceive her to change her mind, and he will hold her indefinitely if that’s what it takes to find a way to change her mind.

     He is convinced that he just has to find the right combination of actions and circumstances that will unlock in her the response that he wants, and then all will be right with the world.  He wants to change who she is to make her the person he thinks she is in his mind.

     Chipmunk Boy is not a stalker because he had an idea of Sam in his mind, and he found out some things that didn’t jive with the idea in his head…so he tried to find out more in order to reconcile the dissonance.  The more he found out, the more dissonance, and he had to resort to more extreme measures to get the information he needed for a resolution.

     Yes, what he did was wrong.  He invaded Sam’s privacy, and to a certain extent violated her trust…but he wasn’t stalking her.

     He was not trying to bring her into line with his idea of her…he was trying to bring his idea of her into line with her.  He succeeded, and now they are engaged.

     Of course, as Rocky pointed out to me recently, literary symmetry now dictates that Fifth will have to show up again and Fifth and Chipmunk Boy will have to have a confrontation where one kills the other…because that’s just the way these things are done.  Or, because it is Stargate, and Sam is Sam…she might have to kill Fifth in order to save her fiancé…only to have him die in the line of duty later.  Any way you slice it though, Chipmunk Boy is dead, because nobody loves Sam and lives.

     I’ve had a couple of stalkers in my life…what modern woman hasn’t?  One guy was a friend of Rocky’s.  It started out with him just hanging out at our apartment all the time, and then progressed to him hanging out where I worked all the time, and then moved on to him sending me letters professing his undying love; asserting his argument that Rocky didn’t know who I was, didn’t appreciate me, and it was only a matter of time before he started abusing me; and reminiscing about things that never happened between us, or things that bore only a tangential resemblance to reality.

     I wasn’t really scared of him because he was a wimpy, mousy little nothing of a man, and I knew I could kick his ass five ways to Sunday.  Knowing what I know now about roofies and tazers and such stuff, I’d probably be a little more worried, but luckily the bloom is somewhat off the rose, and it is unlikely that I will be subjected to any more obsessive situations.  There is some benefit to being old and overweight…don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

     The other stalker was a tall, pale, bony specter of a man that came to the University of Minnesota cafeteria that I worked at.  He had wild-looking, buggy eyes and was well over six feet tall.

     He would sit for hours chain-smoking and staring at me as if I was the most hateful thing he had ever seen.  He would draw obscene pictures and write strange Bible-esque things about how God made women for men, and so rape is OK.  He would drop the papers near me as he left, or would leave them sitting on the table.

     My good friend Odin was so creeped out by it that he made sure he was always there when I was getting off of work, and walked me to my bus.  Mr. Freaky Cakes (as I came to call him) had taken to waiting around until closing.  He would sit and sit as if he were prepared to wait as long as it took for me to be alone.  I would have to tell him several times that it was time to go.  It really seemed that it was Odin’s presence alone that made him finally leave.  Eventually, he just disappeared.  I don’t know if he found someone else to obsess over, got arrested, picked up by his mothership…or what.  I was just glad that it was over.

     Wait.  I forgot one.  I don’t know how I could have left this out…I guess because it was a woman and two men, and they weren’t really stalking me…their behavior toward me was actually a side-effect of them stalking a friend of mine.

      This was the year I attended Bemidji State University.  My friend was dating this psycho girl.  He’s got a history of that, but that’s another story.  Because we were friends and I’m that kind of a person, I bluntly told him several times that he was dating a psycho and that he should stop it.

     Strangely enough, she was threatened by this.  She was in Campus Security, and had a couple of friends who also worked there.  One of these guys was also a computer guy hacker…so I got untraceable threatening messages in my e-mail account, people would enter my dorm room while I was gone and either trash it or leave threatening notes.  I got threatening and harassing phone calls at all hours of the night, sometimes several times per night.

     One night they jumped me and roughed me up a little knocked me to the ground, pinned me there and told me I’d better watch who I associated with or I could get myself in real trouble.  The message was perfectly clear.

     What do all of these cases have in common?  Irrationality.  Unrealistic views of the world.  Belief that one’s ideas about the world are somehow more real and valid than reality, and the application of effort, social engineering, intimidation and/or force to try to bring reality in line with the personal concept of how reality should be.

     People should really try to be a little more careful about that…

     …says the girl who’s obsessively in love with a fictional T.V. character…