PERSONALITY
Rodney’s personality is one of rights and wrongs, blacks and whites. He’s very uncomfortable with the gray nebulous spaces between the two and the emotions that might live there. Any ‘improvisation’ he does is based on combining and recombining the facts as he knows them, and taking leaps of faith is something that does not come naturally, though he has become more comfortable over time with risking himself when action is the most right choice. He considers himself a good person—but to be right is to be good and to be good is to be right. Obviously being right is the correct way to be.
This very polarized way of interacting with the world informs pretty much all of his strengths and weaknesses.
Of all of Rodney’s traits, he values his intelligence the most. He also values the achievements he’s secured with that intelligence, sometimes to the point of irrationality. They are proof that’s he’s smart, that he’s beaten the odds, that he’s beaten them (whoever they are), and that outside authority considers him right even if he would never admit that he cares what others think. Case in point: he has a scare with a degenerative brain parasite and deliberately calls himself ‘Mr.’ McKay rather than doctor. He’s very proud of his two doctorates; he greets everyone he meets with the detail even when irrelevant.
Attendant to his smarts is his mastery of the eleventh-hour triumph. While in no way graceful, he performs well under pressure, and can adapt his technical know-how to nearly any dire situation. The caveat to this adaptability is that it still falls under his black and white thinking. Rodney, as a child, learned to play the piano, but was advised to quit because he was described as a clinical player (all technical mastery, no emotion). Which would make sense with a child who given a chance will always choose to be right (and correct and technically perfect) and doesn’t understand why that is not also good. Carrying this through to his subsequent career in science and technology, both his interactions with Samantha Carter of SG-1 as well as his own dialogue later in the series tell us Sam is better at the business of saving people (he calls her ‘wiser’ since he can’t quite call her smarter) because she can make those intuitive, instinctive leaps that require the ability to think in the gray areas that Rodney cannot access on his own.
Unfortunately, because he only makes choices that are right (as part of his self-definition), he’s always right. This inherent rightness means he’s usually absolutely one hundred percent certain about any belief he carries. This applies to his hypochondria (unfortunate) to his technical expertise (frustrating) to his social interactions (painful). Certainty like this also means that he’s impatient and unafraid to express that impatience. He’s right, just accept it and try to keep up. His behavior in this instance is more a matter of efficiency than arrogance, although it definitely comes across as arrogant pretty much all of the time.
And his focus on “let’s not waste time because I make sure I’m right so why are people questioning me” ties firmly into his ability to focus on projects to the exclusion of both others as well as himself (he likes MREs and eats frozen dinners frozen, ffs). His intelligence and what he can do with it will take priority to the point where physical comforts become irrelevant.
Though I mean he is actually arrogant, too. After all, he’s right, right? Which means that sometimes actual morality isn’t...really a thing for him. If something is the right thing to do in a situation, it’s the right thing to do period. And right could mean ‘most expedient,’ or ‘saves lives,’ or ‘specifically benefits the one person and/or group he is focusing on at this point in time, i.e. usually me.’ Whatever his specific ‘win condition’ is at the time, that becomes the determination of what is right and correct. His most contentious decisions all follow this principle—and afterward when things blow up in his face, the course itself wasn’t wrong, the results just didn’t align with his expectations (and that’s just how science is, sometimes).
However! (And sometimes in direct contradiction, because human!) Rodney is absolutely derailable when he’s contradicted by proof (and he likes arguing because then they’ll all be right at the end if they can come to a conclusion). His certainty is usually rock solid, but when caught and forced to think about his opinions and facts, he is able to reevaluate. He even has an ‘oh, recalculating’ face that happens when he’s caught off-balance. It’s actually very important to him that he has all the facts, so if proven wrong he won’t cling to his wrong opinion so much as be disgruntled that he was wrong and then somehow revise his past so that he was right all along but with an actually correct opinion. Regardless, if he believes he’s right and someone else is not, he’ll be insistent.
Which brings us firmly to people. Rodney is blunt and careless of others’ opinions and emotions, and his social filter extends only so far to weed out the majority of what’s actively offensive—likely through trial and error more than because he quite understands why some things are offensive. Being friendly to people in any sort of active manner isn’t even on the radar, not with how much time he spends inside of his own head. People and their nebulous needs don’t register to Rodney as classifiable things, and so he often does not bother to care about them.
As such, he sucks at talking to people. He needs their emotions spelled out for him because he can’t pick up on their cues. He’ll inform people he’s interested in them (as well as how he’s interested in them) while not actually thinking of them as a person who has to interested back. He will declare people wrong (and that he’s right), often at volume, and if they’re also insistent on their (clearly wrong) conclusions he will add that they must be somehow stupid. (Because, of course, to Rodney, being right is part of being smart.) Plus, he’ll also badger people until they acquiesce to what he needs them to do, often by foregoing an explanation of why he might need their assistance (unless he’s trying to be ‘nice’) in favor of autocratically arranging them so they don’t waste time.
Regardless of his social ineptitude (or perhaps because of), he greatly values the relationships he does manage to build. He becomes genuinely interested in these people’s welfare and their presence in his life. They become in some manner ‘his’ people and he carries a deep loyalty toward them that inspires some of his most heroic and selfless acts. If they’re in trouble, he will assist (he even delivered Teyla’s baby?!), and if something is important to them, he’ll apply his brain to the problem on their behalf, even if he wouldn’t otherwise care or thinks it’s stupid. People and his desire to keep them safe and alive—and his sense of responsibility as The Smartest—is actually what drives him to stand off against the enemy or throw himself into danger. These are the points at which he’s made the determination that he needs to act, and not even his own fears and insecurities are going to prevent him from doing what is right.
And oh boy is Rodney insecure. It usually doesn’t rear its ugly head in day to day activities, because those are exercises in which Rodney can’t be proven wrong. They’re safe. However, most of his insecurity comes from the idea that he thinks he’s missing something, some aspect that he can’t factor into being right or wrong that would make him wrong without knowing it. Usually this pertains to emotions and his interactions with others. One of his greatest illustrations of insecurity is when he meets a ‘cooler’ version of himself from an alternate universe and is forced to confront the idea that he might be isolating him from people he cares about through his own actions.
Partially as an extension of his insecurity and his consuming desire to be right and good and partially its own horrible multidimensional construct, anxiety also dominates many of his actions. He’s constantly in a both-rational-and-irrational miswired state of fear and paranoia—of his own body and its many betrayals (hypocondriaciacal or otherwise), of his choices and moments of inaction, of the uncaring horrors of an infinite universe filled with Body-Snatching Snakes and Space Vampires and Glowy Assholes all pretending to be gods, and of bees and lemons and pretty people he wants to actually like him. He often jumps immediately to ‘doom’ in situations where death is a possible outcome (it’s a defense mechanism; relief is all the sweeter if you’re a pessimist), and when his anxiety is really snarling at his heels in stressful situations, he lashes out with orders and insults in an attempt to reclaim control.
Beyond that, his insecurity and anxiety both make him self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing, because he needs the external acknowledgement of his achievements in order to make them a reality. These in turn feed into his arrogance and pettiness, and he has a hard time acknowledging others because his quest to make sure they acknowledge him sucks up all of his focus. Then too, he’s easily jealous and competitive, following with the idea that he needs validation on the big things that don’t quite fit into his black and white worldview, but that he’d gone done anyways.
The amazing and terrible part is that Rodney at 40 is in a much better headspace with a greater ability to interact with both himself and others than he was five years prior.
Even considering that being one of the main characters in a TV show ensemble equals a character arc, Rodney’s time on Atlantis represents the most affecting five years of his life. He hit the Pegasus galaxy aroundabouts 35 years old—well set in his ways and extremely difficult to work with for many and varied reasons (a.k.a. his personality). Previously exiled to Siberia and empirically convinced he stands alone and assailed atop the tower of his intellect, he’s suddenly surrounded by individuals with strong personalities and misaligned goals and all of them unwilling to take his shit or abandon him. He’s in charge of the lives of not only his own subordinates (as Chief Science Officer of a one-way expedition) but of the entire expedition when the only remedy for certain destruction is frantic science. These ridiculous people round off the sharpest of Rodney’s edges by simply being themselves. Defensive walls: cracked. Insecurities: eased. Emotional maturity: baby-steps taken.
Of course, he complains constantly as a way of sharing-is-caring under the assumption that his state of being is important information, he latches with a careless strength and intensity onto the small circle of people who actively love him and don’t just tolerate him, and when under stress, a lot of his hard-earned emotional maturity goes straight out the window in favor of deeply ingrained defensive mechanisms, but he’s also humbled and/or struck speechless when shown care and actively tries to connect with people in sometimes horrendously awkward ways when he knows he’s not going to be shot down for not being an expert at human interaction.
Essentially, Rodney is a bundle of anxieties, passions, and compassions tucked alongside stunning feats of brilliance and cringe-worthy acts of careless cruelty. He’s never going to be suave (even when he’s acting, and he’s a surprisingly good actor on account of all the fake plastered over his insecurities) or popular, and his pettiness and competitiveness are baked into his personality, but he tries to be a good bean even if his methods could use work.
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doubledoctornocitrus
