8th Dec: Cameron Mitchell

tesserae_ asked me "What is it about Cam Mitchell that makes him interesting to write?"

It seems that a lot of people who don't find Cam interesting don't because they see him as the golden boy/never do anything wrong officer, and find that boring. I actually like the good guys who are decent, so that sort of works for me anyway, but also I'm not convinced he's as golden as people seem to think. And really, what, they wanted a younger clone of O'Neill? Pass.

Cam's the kind of character that I find more interesting with someone else, and with a specific set of someone-else's, than on his own - unlike say John Sheppard, who I'll read about with anyone. With Cam it's the other military characters - John, Sam, Lorne (well, and also Carolyn Lam, but that's cos in my head they're awesome queer friends) - because that gives them a history, especially with Sam, and yet they're all more experienced with the Stargate programme than Cam, and arguably more disillusioned with the whole thing as well.

Plus, also, Cam has a series of canon traumas, and I have a thing for military (or quasi-military) characters with canon traumas (Cam, Sheppard, McGarrett from H50, Hawkeye, Black Widow and Coulson from Marvel, Colby from Numb3rs).

And finally, I got into SGA first, then started watching SG1 in Season 9, which was when Cam first joined up, so he was sort of my introduction to the world of SG1, and the one I latched onto because of that. Which meant I was always going to want to write about him more than any of the others, especially since pairing him with Sheppard was really easy (and he's my all-time favourite forever).