Even more/disturbing

More disturbing news on the slash front:

I'm a big fan of the show "Stargate Atlantis," and especially of the character Rodney McKay, the über-brilliant, über-obnoxious scientist who always comes through for his team when the chips are down. So one day, out of idle curiosity, I punched a query into Google about McKay's romantic history. I knew the character had a big following, so I thought this was the sort of information that might be out there somewhere in the tangle of the Web.

Well, maybe it was the wording of my query, but I didn't find what I was looking for. What I found instead was something I could hardly believe existed: a Rodney McKay/Sam Seaborn crossover slash fanfic. I mean, what?!?

Sam Seaborn, of course, is the bright, idealistic, and extremely good-looking deputy communications director in the Bartlet administration during the first three seasons of "The West Wing," played with éclat by Rob Lowe. Who is, indisputably, pretty hot. And David Hewlett, who plays McKay, isn't so bad either. But there is nothing--I mean, nothing--about these two characters that would make me want to see them together. There's nothing about the way either of them is portrayed to suggest they'd have any chemistry together on any level--nor, for that matter, to suggest that either one of them swings that way, even slightly.

Out of a sort of perverse curiosity, I read a bit of it to see how it was. Bizarre, is how it was. The setup is basically that Rodney is sent to Washington to ask the Bartlet administration for more money for the Atlantis mission, and when Sam rejects his request, Rodney decides to offer him--an additional incentive. This just does not work on so many levels. For starters, only an idiot would send Rodney on any kind of diplomatic mission. And it's not remotely plausible that Sam would have the authority to approve funding--he's not even involved with budget decisions, and he probably doesn't have high enough security clearance to even know about the Stargate program. (In the second-season episode "Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail," Sam reveals that he doesn't have code-word clearance, which he would need to view an NSA file.) The idea that Rodney would think to use sex as a bribe is not at all consistent with his character, and the idea that Sam would accept a bribe of any kind is even less consistent with his. But it was really the idea of those two characters together that was just...too...weird.

The whole experience was so odd and vaguely disturbing that I can't even bring myself to post a link to the story. But I have to admit, the nature of my objections to it goes a long way to show just how big a fangirl nerd I am.