Five Characters Meme
I haven't had any real spare time for surfing lj-wise lately, but one meme I did see (I think gacked from jenoofer?), rather intrigued me, or at least I've been thinking about it on and off for a week, in odd (very odd) spare moments. That was the one where, iirc, you take five characters that fascinate you most, from any medium, and discuss them. Mostly it seems to be plot I come back for, but five characters over my whole life, should be able to do that...
Firstly though, chronologically anyway, Jo Bettany, from the Chalet School books. Actually I started typing 'Famous Five' there, and that's because she's very much part of that literary (or, er, not so literary) heritage. George from the FF, Nancy from 'Swallows and Amazons', all the tomboy heroines of countless school stories. Really I loved them all, swallowed them whole as a kid, George first, but all of them, from five to thirteen, (and, possibly kinda still). My Mum had all the FF books, all the S&A's, and Fontana? Armada? re-released the Chalet School books in the late eighties/early nineties. I think I chose Jo, because she had the tomboyism without the athleticism, and I could never compete on an athletic front, too clumsy, too allergyish. They tended to betray you in the end, because they grew up (and George gets so lame, and Julian and Dick so bossy in the later books), but you can go back and read the early books, where they're forever young and rebellious, and they can do anything, and have fun doing it; their lives don't revolve around boys and clothes. I grew up reading books thirty, fifty, seventy, a hundred years out of date. Whether this world ever existed, where kids, teenagers, were just kids, I don't know, but compared with my childhood with all those little girls so desperate to grow up into this false world of their expectations of perfect dates, I wanted this past. Theoretically my time was better, less sexism, and the attitudes to the non-English in those books made me cringe even then. Yet it always seemed so much freer. Jo herself, in the early books, was always ready for any excitement, she was the rescuer, she had adventures, yet she cared about things and people too. She just contrasted so much with the shallow girls of my primary school of the time. So basically I wanted to be her, which I suppose is fairly typical for the age, if a rather odd heroine.
From the first to the most recent: Andrew. You knew he was going to be on there, right? fabricatedvoice has already written a very good essay on Andrew: Behind the Camera: The Story of Andrew Wells, which, to a large extent, reflects my views of him, so that gives a better precis of him than I can, if you need to get up to speed. Why he's the character that filled about a year of my obsessing, and hasn't been replaced by any character since, is, well actually, probably because I'm weird. I like him. Of course it's partly that he reflects a dark side of my personality - the ability to disappear into fantasy, at the expense of reality. It's also because Tom Lenk is hot. He is - so there! Mostly it's because Andrew is always playing a sick game with his life. He gets played by Warren of course, but only because he lets himself be played. It's all a huge computer game to him, not just about the inability to separate fantasy from reality, but that he has no desire to do so. It's like he exists in this alternate universe of one: the reason Warren can play him is because fantasy Warren is so different from real Warren. Nobody, not Warren, not Jonathan, no-one is real to him. To me that's fascinating because that's decadent, obscene, a complete reworking of a rejected world tangled in his mind into something that can be recoded as he goes. The real world pokes through occasionally too - where we see he is human, he does have a conscience, but Andrew acts in the real world like someone else playing a computer game: a more violent level may shock him at first, but ultimately it's just a game, if people die, it's not real, they're not real. Only Andrew is real. The fact that he eventually, more or less, comes out of this, is why I love him. His path to redemption is harder than Spike's or Angel's because his only enemy is internal; theirs is external. That he can learn to grow up, to exist in this world, makes him something special. Buffy needed her friends to do it for her. Andrew has no friends, just some people who tolerate him, and yet he still manages to grow up. So, in the end, I admire Andrew: perhaps, on a personal level, because I'm no longer scared of growing up.
Oddly, R_Daneel, from Isaac Asimov's robot books is the next that sprang to mind. I think I read these in late primary, or early high school. I think Daneel provided something I needed. I remember being fascinated by all the positronic robots, the structure, the logic behind their programming, but Daneel was something more. Perhaps, iirc, it was the corollaries to the laws of robotics, which I can't actually remember - one was not permitting humanity to come to harm, but the other has vamoosed. I'm obviously due for a reread. It's annoying because I was fascinated by Daneel, but my memory betrays me, senile in my twenties. Shocking. I suppose he's a forerunner of Spock in a way. Roddenberry must have read Asimov?
The Doctor Who companions throughout my childhood, and the Doctor himself, with both fairly constant repeats, and the New Adventures around, but I can't decide on Ace or Turlough. Ace because, I suppose with Ace I've really covered it above, loud explosions, brave girl thing. Turlough's harder to explain, but I was always intrigued by him. Let's see: slinky, ruthless when necessary, but essentially cowardly, and kinda gay. Hmm, okay scratch the stuff about Andrew above, I think I've worked out where that comes from. I was too young for it to be the schoolboy's uniform... I must have liked the ambiguous characters very young. He obviously intrigued me because I was never quite sure that he was going to be on the Doctor's side. I also remember being very pleased that Turlough was going to be travelling alone with the Doctor, and remarkably annoyed when stupid Peri immediately replaced him. Er, apparently Doctor/Turlough slash, anyone?
I've just skimmed the books on the nearest bookshelf, and To Your Scattered Bodies Go caught my eye, and since I was talking about ambiguity, I'll go one step further, and admit that, in my teens, Philip Jose Farmer's Goering intrigued me. I never liked him, I'm not sure I even wanted him to reform, because that betrayed all the people he'd harmed, both in the series, and historically before he died. He made my gorge rise, but I was indubitably intrigued to the nth degree by him, because he was such a contradiction. He could genuinely believe he was a good man, and every now and again he did do the right thing, and yet he was, pretty much evil. Actually the contradictory element basically sums up all my favourite characters - including ones I haven't mentioned, like Snape, Bel Thorne, and many others - they all have this essence of contradiction in them, more strongly than most people, they can be nasty people doing incredibly good, brave things, or cowards who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for what they believe in. Yeah, or they just like rebelling against authority and proving girls are best. So, I'm not that mature...
Also, having analysed various characters to death, in spare time I don't have, I have one other thing I should say: er, housekeeping thing. I don't have much time lately, so I've trimmed my friendslist a bit - I want to try to comment a bit more (admittedly some of my lousy commenting habits are due to lack of confidence, but time is a factor), and I don't really even have time to read it all at the moment, so I've cut a fair bit: hopefully only people with whom I've had a mutual diverging of interests, and thus won't care, or people who haven't got me friended anyway, who will care even less... Basically, though, this would be a good time to defriend me if you've been thinking you'd like to, but didn't want to hurt my feelings. I don't necessarily want anyone to, but yeah, it's the best time.
So, over and out - and don't watch the Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, Robert Carlyle mini-series - it is bad, bad, bad!
Firstly though, chronologically anyway, Jo Bettany, from the Chalet School books. Actually I started typing 'Famous Five' there, and that's because she's very much part of that literary (or, er, not so literary) heritage. George from the FF, Nancy from 'Swallows and Amazons', all the tomboy heroines of countless school stories. Really I loved them all, swallowed them whole as a kid, George first, but all of them, from five to thirteen, (and, possibly kinda still). My Mum had all the FF books, all the S&A's, and Fontana? Armada? re-released the Chalet School books in the late eighties/early nineties. I think I chose Jo, because she had the tomboyism without the athleticism, and I could never compete on an athletic front, too clumsy, too allergyish. They tended to betray you in the end, because they grew up (and George gets so lame, and Julian and Dick so bossy in the later books), but you can go back and read the early books, where they're forever young and rebellious, and they can do anything, and have fun doing it; their lives don't revolve around boys and clothes. I grew up reading books thirty, fifty, seventy, a hundred years out of date. Whether this world ever existed, where kids, teenagers, were just kids, I don't know, but compared with my childhood with all those little girls so desperate to grow up into this false world of their expectations of perfect dates, I wanted this past. Theoretically my time was better, less sexism, and the attitudes to the non-English in those books made me cringe even then. Yet it always seemed so much freer. Jo herself, in the early books, was always ready for any excitement, she was the rescuer, she had adventures, yet she cared about things and people too. She just contrasted so much with the shallow girls of my primary school of the time. So basically I wanted to be her, which I suppose is fairly typical for the age, if a rather odd heroine.
From the first to the most recent: Andrew. You knew he was going to be on there, right? fabricatedvoice has already written a very good essay on Andrew: Behind the Camera: The Story of Andrew Wells, which, to a large extent, reflects my views of him, so that gives a better precis of him than I can, if you need to get up to speed. Why he's the character that filled about a year of my obsessing, and hasn't been replaced by any character since, is, well actually, probably because I'm weird. I like him. Of course it's partly that he reflects a dark side of my personality - the ability to disappear into fantasy, at the expense of reality. It's also because Tom Lenk is hot. He is - so there! Mostly it's because Andrew is always playing a sick game with his life. He gets played by Warren of course, but only because he lets himself be played. It's all a huge computer game to him, not just about the inability to separate fantasy from reality, but that he has no desire to do so. It's like he exists in this alternate universe of one: the reason Warren can play him is because fantasy Warren is so different from real Warren. Nobody, not Warren, not Jonathan, no-one is real to him. To me that's fascinating because that's decadent, obscene, a complete reworking of a rejected world tangled in his mind into something that can be recoded as he goes. The real world pokes through occasionally too - where we see he is human, he does have a conscience, but Andrew acts in the real world like someone else playing a computer game: a more violent level may shock him at first, but ultimately it's just a game, if people die, it's not real, they're not real. Only Andrew is real. The fact that he eventually, more or less, comes out of this, is why I love him. His path to redemption is harder than Spike's or Angel's because his only enemy is internal; theirs is external. That he can learn to grow up, to exist in this world, makes him something special. Buffy needed her friends to do it for her. Andrew has no friends, just some people who tolerate him, and yet he still manages to grow up. So, in the end, I admire Andrew: perhaps, on a personal level, because I'm no longer scared of growing up.
Oddly, R_Daneel, from Isaac Asimov's robot books is the next that sprang to mind. I think I read these in late primary, or early high school. I think Daneel provided something I needed. I remember being fascinated by all the positronic robots, the structure, the logic behind their programming, but Daneel was something more. Perhaps, iirc, it was the corollaries to the laws of robotics, which I can't actually remember - one was not permitting humanity to come to harm, but the other has vamoosed. I'm obviously due for a reread. It's annoying because I was fascinated by Daneel, but my memory betrays me, senile in my twenties. Shocking. I suppose he's a forerunner of Spock in a way. Roddenberry must have read Asimov?
The Doctor Who companions throughout my childhood, and the Doctor himself, with both fairly constant repeats, and the New Adventures around, but I can't decide on Ace or Turlough. Ace because, I suppose with Ace I've really covered it above, loud explosions, brave girl thing. Turlough's harder to explain, but I was always intrigued by him. Let's see: slinky, ruthless when necessary, but essentially cowardly, and kinda gay. Hmm, okay scratch the stuff about Andrew above, I think I've worked out where that comes from. I was too young for it to be the schoolboy's uniform... I must have liked the ambiguous characters very young. He obviously intrigued me because I was never quite sure that he was going to be on the Doctor's side. I also remember being very pleased that Turlough was going to be travelling alone with the Doctor, and remarkably annoyed when stupid Peri immediately replaced him. Er, apparently Doctor/Turlough slash, anyone?
I've just skimmed the books on the nearest bookshelf, and To Your Scattered Bodies Go caught my eye, and since I was talking about ambiguity, I'll go one step further, and admit that, in my teens, Philip Jose Farmer's Goering intrigued me. I never liked him, I'm not sure I even wanted him to reform, because that betrayed all the people he'd harmed, both in the series, and historically before he died. He made my gorge rise, but I was indubitably intrigued to the nth degree by him, because he was such a contradiction. He could genuinely believe he was a good man, and every now and again he did do the right thing, and yet he was, pretty much evil. Actually the contradictory element basically sums up all my favourite characters - including ones I haven't mentioned, like Snape, Bel Thorne, and many others - they all have this essence of contradiction in them, more strongly than most people, they can be nasty people doing incredibly good, brave things, or cowards who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for what they believe in. Yeah, or they just like rebelling against authority and proving girls are best. So, I'm not that mature...
Also, having analysed various characters to death, in spare time I don't have, I have one other thing I should say: er, housekeeping thing. I don't have much time lately, so I've trimmed my friendslist a bit - I want to try to comment a bit more (admittedly some of my lousy commenting habits are due to lack of confidence, but time is a factor), and I don't really even have time to read it all at the moment, so I've cut a fair bit: hopefully only people with whom I've had a mutual diverging of interests, and thus won't care, or people who haven't got me friended anyway, who will care even less... Basically, though, this would be a good time to defriend me if you've been thinking you'd like to, but didn't want to hurt my feelings. I don't necessarily want anyone to, but yeah, it's the best time.
So, over and out - and don't watch the Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, Robert Carlyle mini-series - it is bad, bad, bad!