Fannish Argosies

I'll agree with you there. They're really not the ones who should be in charge, and I don't feel Shep has any business being in Atlantis at all. I've never liked this sort of "bucking authority" type, but there's something about Sheppard that...yeah. Ugh.

You should find this amusing, then. It's the start of a silly!fic I started in protest over all the Shep badfic out there. It pretty much sums up what I think of John's character:

Once upon a time, in the lost city of Atlantis, there lived an Air Force Major named John Sheppard.

John was rather tall for a pilot. He was not, however, particularly skinny and did, in fact, have an ass. He had brown hair that he spent about as much time on as any other military officer while under threat of eminent attack from life-sucking aliens, which is to say, not much. His eyes were plain, ordinary brown.

As a pilot, John's job should have been providing transportation and air support to Atlantis personnel. Instead, he found himself in charge of a reconnaissance team whose job was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no Air Force officer with automatic weapons and absolutely no training in first contact protocol had gone before.

Of course, his superiors really shouldn't have been all that surprised when most of his missions turned into complete clusterfucks.

I do like the guy, when the writers let him be more than just a bad Han Solo clone. John should be less of a rake and more of a dork. That's when I like John the best, when the actor manages to let his Inner Dweeb shine. And don't get me started on Carson! I hatehateHATE what the writers do with him, because it directly contradicts how the actor plays him. This is a guy who makes you tea and natters about the snails in his mum's garden, he doesn't whip up deadly biological agents without even a thought to the consequences.