#sha'uri is a badass and I will accept no other interpretation

[kitkatt0430]

So here’s a little rant/list/thing about why Sha’uri from Stargate is awesome and undervalued and why no one had better mess with my revolution leading, kickass, favorite character of the movie.

(I love the show, but what they did to Sha’uri there was unforgivable.)

Inspired by the rewatch I found over on Tor where my lady Sha’uri was maliciously maligned by someone who clearly wasn’t paying any attention to what was happening on the screen when Sha’uri was in frame.  :/ 

"And Sha’uri, with dreary predictability, is confined to the standard female roles of love interest, damsel in distress, and general walking plot device. Sigh."

Yup, definitely not paying attention.  I mean, did we even watch the same movie???

Okay, so first of all, Sha’uri is very rebellious.  Does she walk into a tent to marry Daniel on her father’s orders?  Well, yes.  She’s doing what she thinks is necessary to protect her people from the potential wrath of the gods at any cost, no matter how personal.  It’s really, really brave of her and you can tell in that scene she’s terrified that she’s done something wrong to offend Daniel and that her sacrifice has been for nothing.

And then instead of getting angry and hurting her, Daniel doesn’t take his frustration over the communication barrier out on Sha’uri.  And when she takes her leap of faith on him... that’s when we see her rebelliousness start to shine.

She draws the symbol on the ground.  It’s the small acts that speak the loudest.  Sha’uri knows the gods forbid reading and writing and that to do so is an act of disobediance against everything she’s been raised to believe.  For all she knows, Daniel is testing her devotion to Ra and by drawing the symbol she’ll fail and die and bring punishments down upon her people.  She does it anyway.

Sha’uri then takes Daniel to the caves full of the forbidden history of her people.  She not only corrects Daniel’s pronunciation, helping him to learn the modern version of the ancient language Daniel knows, but she actively learns how to read the symbols of her ancestors.  Sha’uri becomes the first person of her tribe to know the truth of their people in thousands of years.

When Daniel, Jack, and the rest of the team are taken prisoner, there is a powerful and underrated scene where Sha’uri takes her brother aside and tells him that they aren’t going to settle for being slaves anymore.  It’s heavily implied that she’s about to teach Skaara the history of their people and the truth about their so called gods.   

(Let’s just reiterate that that last point for emphasis.)

Skaara doesn’t know what to do.  He’s the younger sibling and he’s confused.  The weird outsiders that he likes so much have been taken by the gods, their people have been punished for helping those outsiders and mistaking them for either gods or emissaries of the gods, and their father can’t explain why this is all happening just that they should keep their heads down and hope it all blows over.

And then here comes Sha’uri.  His beloved sister.  She tells him that what has happened cannot stand.  That they have to fight back.  That in their ignorance they’ve been slaves to people who are not truly gods and that this is an insult to them and to their ancestors and it stops now.

Sha’uri started the rebellion right there in that scene with her brother.  Because of her, Skaara and his friends are able to save the gate team during the execution scene.

One woman’s anger - one woman’s defiance - radically changes the course of history for her people.

All of this tells us that not only is Sha’uri rebellious - seeking something greater than her current lot in life - it tells us she’s intelligent.  It tells us she’s charismatic.  She had to convince not only her brother, but his friends that their religion is a lie and that they must commit an act of rebellion that could lead to their people’s destruction because it’s the right thing to do.  People get killed for speaking that kind of heresy, but those teenagers listen to her and believe her.

So while the boys are off defying the gods in person, Sha’uri makes sure they have someplace safe to hide when they’re done.  She makes sure they have shelter from sand storms and water to drink and food to eat.  A rebellion is nothing, after all, if the rebels starve to death after striking their first blow.  So not only is she the flame that lit the fire of rebellion on Abydos, she’s the one who kept that fire from burning out immediately afterwards.

So yes she’s the love interest and she gets killed so that Daniel can have his dramatic moment bringing her back to life with the sarcophagus on the ship.  And the show treats her so badly that they can’t even get her name right (they call her Sha’re instead of Sha’uri) and turn her into Daniel’s plot coupon that he’s desperately searching for during the first several seasons.  But she’s a lot more than that.  And you can’t take her out of the Stargate movie without having half the plot fall apart.

Sha’uri is one of the most undervalued heroes of the movie.  And she deserves to be remembered for her bravery.