so here they come, the sound of drums...
So, this post on female characters in fandom by fabu came up on metafandom, and I read it and it's very interesting and well-thought out and inspired that thing I do every so often where I examine my own biases in fictional characters.
There are exactly two fictional characters that I outright hate. That's Dylan Hunt (Andromeda) and Ana-Lucia Cortez (Lost).
There's a longer list of characters that I dislike or am actively disinterested in. (Is that possible? To be actively disinterested in someone?) Anyway: Rose Tyler (Doctor Who, dislike), Jack Shepherd and Kate Austen (Lost, disinterest), Peter Petrelli and Claire Bennett (Heroes, disinterest), Liz Parker and Max Evans (Roswell, varies depending on the episode), Monica Reyes and John Doggett (The X-Files, disinterest), Gwen Cooper and Owen Harper (Torchwood, disinterest towards Gwen, dislike towards Owen).
...wow, this is the first time that I realized I tend to dislike characters in pairs. And apparently, usually couples that are either canon or popular fanon.
Anyway. Now I'm looking for patterns. Starting with my two top-hated characters, Dylan and Ana-Lucia. What do they have in common? Well, they're both leaders (nominally, anyway). They're both assertive. They both heap verbal and occasionally physical abuse on their support team are verbally aggressive. Draw.
Dylan's sexually promiscuous and irresponsible. (*cough* Mad to be Saved *cough) Ana-Lucia, on the other hand, is sexually confident but I wouldn't call her promiscuous or particularly irresponsible. She does sleep with Sawyer, which isn't the smartest move in the world to make, but others have made the same mistake before and after her, and it's not like Sawyer's incapable of saying no (unlike, say, Angelika...I really do loathe the episode MtbS). Which makes Dylan worse.
Ana-Lucia is overly reliant on guns. Dylan is overly reliant on forcelances kickass warships who are smarter than he is forcelances. Also guns. Draw.
Ana-Lucia killed a character I love (namely, Shannon) and failed to show any particular remorse about it. Dylan offered to help save Earth, failed to actually do anything about it, and failed to show any particular remorse. Draw.
There are superficial alt-gender parallels drawn in the text for both of them. Beka could be considered a female Dylan with fewer moral compunctions. The reason this doesn't hold up is that Beka, while sexually confident and certainly more promiscuous than Ana-Lucia, has never slept with someone who was incapable of saying no, and usually manages to find a better way of comforting Harper than "Well, lots more people are dying and it's all your fault LOLS." Ana-Lucia has often been referred to as the female counterpart of Sawyer, and that's a much closer comparison. It falls down, of course, when you realize that Sawyer is presented as a criminal with a dubious moral compass, and Ana-Lucia is presented as a cop who presumably understands the difference between right and wrong. This bothers me. I think if Ana-Lucia had not been a cop I could have understood her killing that guy in flashback more. Anyway, that's a draw.
Which works out to Dylan being worse than Ana-Lucia. Which means either a) gender plays no role in my anticharacter biases, b) I'm predisposed to dislike men more than women, or c) Dylan was written worse. Reading metafandom tells me that it's unlikely to be a if I was raised in 20th century USA, which I was. metafandom also tells me that b is unlikely. So it's probably c.
That's fairly straightforward, right?
Now, the characters I dislike/am disinterested in.
Rose Tyler (dislike): I could tell you it's because the rabid, batshit part of Rose's fanbase turned me off her, but the truth is I dislike Rose because she was mean to Mickey and I overidentify with Mickey, so she was therefore mean to me. And I'm twenty and I hold grudges.
Jack Shepherd and Kate Austen (disinterest): They're so...generic. I don't actually know. Jack is Well Meaning Doctor Who Had Demons In His Past. Kate is Well Meaning Fugitive With Heart Of Gold. Or something. Kate particularly feels inconsistent to me, especially when placed against Claire, Shannon, and Sun, whose personalities I actually understand? Sun deciding to cheat on Jin because he had changed since their marriage felt human to me. Claire deciding to give up her baby because she didn't want to be a single mother was understandable. Shannon losing out on all her dreams and turning to conning Boone for revenge on Sabrina was sad but it made sense. Kate deciding to kill her stepfather because OMG he's actually her biological dad and I CAN'T STAND SHARING GENES WITH YOU!!1!...um...not so much with the understandable. Jack doesn't have anything that ridiculous to excuse, but his only motive seems to be to fix people because he can't fix himself which...doesn't sit well with me, because people should have more complicated motives than that.
Peter Petrelli and Claire Bennett (disinterest): Again with the generic. Also, Peter is emo and rarely seems to accomplish anything, while Claire is your basic cookie-cutter Cheerleader With A Secret.
Liz Parker and Max Evans (varies): When Kyle and Tess (or Alex and Isabel, or Michael and Maria) are doing something interesting/awesome, then I am disinterested in Liz and Max. When Tess is asking "What happens now, Max?" or Kyle is stalking Liz or Maria and Michael are whining about how they want to be Max and Liz, then I actively dislike them. Because the rest of the characters are fairly awesome (and OMG why did they make Emilie de Ravin leave???) and Max and Liz are...generic Romeo & Juliet with alien angst pastede on yay! And Romeo and Juliet were stupid teenagers who let themselves be ruled by hormones. Not one of my favorite character templates.
Monica Reyes and John Doggett (disinterest): Plain, simple, what-happened-to-the-show-I-signed-on-for? I actually never gave Doggett and Reyes a shot on their own terms, and I can admit it. I also never really intend to. I signed on for Mulder, Scully, the Gunmen, and aliens. Not Reyes and Doggett.
Gwen Cooper and Owen Harper (disinterest towards Gwen, dislike towards Owen): Gwen is a fairly personality-less template character. The Heart Of The Team Who Humanizes Them. Aside from her affair. Cheating on Rhys was possibly a sound dramatic choice to make, as it gave her a dimension outside of The Heart Of The Team Who Humanizes Them, but c'mon, Rhys is nearly as awesome as Mickey and deserved better. Owen I actively dislike because...first of all, the alien pheremones in the first episode. Date rape jokes are not funny, and the fact that he never got any dramatic comeuppance drives me crazy. And then there's his heartlessness towards Tosh (Need a hand getting it up? If I did, I wouldn't ask you.) and Tosh I adore. And then he rips open the Rift for someone he barely knew, who left him of her own free will, as opposed to, say, Ianto/Lisa, Gwen/Rhys, or Tosh/her mom. This vexes me.
Um. *rereads* The only pattern I really see here is that I tend to be disinterested in generic template characters who don't get developed past being that. And that aside from Rose bloody Tyler, they tend to come in male/female pairs. This is interesting, I hadn't realized that second part about myself before.
(And yes, I know that there are fans of all the characters I mentioned on my flist. Except Dylan. There aren't any Dylan fans on my flist, are there? Anyway, just to note that these are all personal anticharacterkinks and I don't really expect anyone to agree with me, etc. Except about Dylan. Who should have died by the end of the series.)
I use Chronicle icon because there is NO character in The Chronicle who I do not love unconditionally. Except for very minor characters, and even then I don't often actively dislike them. Truth.
There are exactly two fictional characters that I outright hate. That's Dylan Hunt (Andromeda) and Ana-Lucia Cortez (Lost).
There's a longer list of characters that I dislike or am actively disinterested in. (Is that possible? To be actively disinterested in someone?) Anyway: Rose Tyler (Doctor Who, dislike), Jack Shepherd and Kate Austen (Lost, disinterest), Peter Petrelli and Claire Bennett (Heroes, disinterest), Liz Parker and Max Evans (Roswell, varies depending on the episode), Monica Reyes and John Doggett (The X-Files, disinterest), Gwen Cooper and Owen Harper (Torchwood, disinterest towards Gwen, dislike towards Owen).
...wow, this is the first time that I realized I tend to dislike characters in pairs. And apparently, usually couples that are either canon or popular fanon.
Anyway. Now I'm looking for patterns. Starting with my two top-hated characters, Dylan and Ana-Lucia. What do they have in common? Well, they're both leaders (nominally, anyway). They're both assertive. They both heap verbal and occasionally physical abuse on their support team are verbally aggressive. Draw.
Dylan's sexually promiscuous and irresponsible. (*cough* Mad to be Saved *cough) Ana-Lucia, on the other hand, is sexually confident but I wouldn't call her promiscuous or particularly irresponsible. She does sleep with Sawyer, which isn't the smartest move in the world to make, but others have made the same mistake before and after her, and it's not like Sawyer's incapable of saying no (unlike, say, Angelika...I really do loathe the episode MtbS). Which makes Dylan worse.
Ana-Lucia is overly reliant on guns. Dylan is overly reliant on forcelances kickass warships who are smarter than he is forcelances. Also guns. Draw.
Ana-Lucia killed a character I love (namely, Shannon) and failed to show any particular remorse about it. Dylan offered to help save Earth, failed to actually do anything about it, and failed to show any particular remorse. Draw.
There are superficial alt-gender parallels drawn in the text for both of them. Beka could be considered a female Dylan with fewer moral compunctions. The reason this doesn't hold up is that Beka, while sexually confident and certainly more promiscuous than Ana-Lucia, has never slept with someone who was incapable of saying no, and usually manages to find a better way of comforting Harper than "Well, lots more people are dying and it's all your fault LOLS." Ana-Lucia has often been referred to as the female counterpart of Sawyer, and that's a much closer comparison. It falls down, of course, when you realize that Sawyer is presented as a criminal with a dubious moral compass, and Ana-Lucia is presented as a cop who presumably understands the difference between right and wrong. This bothers me. I think if Ana-Lucia had not been a cop I could have understood her killing that guy in flashback more. Anyway, that's a draw.
Which works out to Dylan being worse than Ana-Lucia. Which means either a) gender plays no role in my anticharacter biases, b) I'm predisposed to dislike men more than women, or c) Dylan was written worse. Reading metafandom tells me that it's unlikely to be a if I was raised in 20th century USA, which I was. metafandom also tells me that b is unlikely. So it's probably c.
That's fairly straightforward, right?
Now, the characters I dislike/am disinterested in.
Rose Tyler (dislike): I could tell you it's because the rabid, batshit part of Rose's fanbase turned me off her, but the truth is I dislike Rose because she was mean to Mickey and I overidentify with Mickey, so she was therefore mean to me. And I'm twenty and I hold grudges.
Jack Shepherd and Kate Austen (disinterest): They're so...generic. I don't actually know. Jack is Well Meaning Doctor Who Had Demons In His Past. Kate is Well Meaning Fugitive With Heart Of Gold. Or something. Kate particularly feels inconsistent to me, especially when placed against Claire, Shannon, and Sun, whose personalities I actually understand? Sun deciding to cheat on Jin because he had changed since their marriage felt human to me. Claire deciding to give up her baby because she didn't want to be a single mother was understandable. Shannon losing out on all her dreams and turning to conning Boone for revenge on Sabrina was sad but it made sense. Kate deciding to kill her stepfather because OMG he's actually her biological dad and I CAN'T STAND SHARING GENES WITH YOU!!1!...um...not so much with the understandable. Jack doesn't have anything that ridiculous to excuse, but his only motive seems to be to fix people because he can't fix himself which...doesn't sit well with me, because people should have more complicated motives than that.
Peter Petrelli and Claire Bennett (disinterest): Again with the generic. Also, Peter is emo and rarely seems to accomplish anything, while Claire is your basic cookie-cutter Cheerleader With A Secret.
Liz Parker and Max Evans (varies): When Kyle and Tess (or Alex and Isabel, or Michael and Maria) are doing something interesting/awesome, then I am disinterested in Liz and Max. When Tess is asking "What happens now, Max?" or Kyle is stalking Liz or Maria and Michael are whining about how they want to be Max and Liz, then I actively dislike them. Because the rest of the characters are fairly awesome (and OMG why did they make Emilie de Ravin leave???) and Max and Liz are...generic Romeo & Juliet with alien angst pastede on yay! And Romeo and Juliet were stupid teenagers who let themselves be ruled by hormones. Not one of my favorite character templates.
Monica Reyes and John Doggett (disinterest): Plain, simple, what-happened-to-the-show-I-signed-on-for? I actually never gave Doggett and Reyes a shot on their own terms, and I can admit it. I also never really intend to. I signed on for Mulder, Scully, the Gunmen, and aliens. Not Reyes and Doggett.
Gwen Cooper and Owen Harper (disinterest towards Gwen, dislike towards Owen): Gwen is a fairly personality-less template character. The Heart Of The Team Who Humanizes Them. Aside from her affair. Cheating on Rhys was possibly a sound dramatic choice to make, as it gave her a dimension outside of The Heart Of The Team Who Humanizes Them, but c'mon, Rhys is nearly as awesome as Mickey and deserved better. Owen I actively dislike because...first of all, the alien pheremones in the first episode. Date rape jokes are not funny, and the fact that he never got any dramatic comeuppance drives me crazy. And then there's his heartlessness towards Tosh (Need a hand getting it up? If I did, I wouldn't ask you.) and Tosh I adore. And then he rips open the Rift for someone he barely knew, who left him of her own free will, as opposed to, say, Ianto/Lisa, Gwen/Rhys, or Tosh/her mom. This vexes me.
Um. *rereads* The only pattern I really see here is that I tend to be disinterested in generic template characters who don't get developed past being that. And that aside from Rose bloody Tyler, they tend to come in male/female pairs. This is interesting, I hadn't realized that second part about myself before.
(And yes, I know that there are fans of all the characters I mentioned on my flist. Except Dylan. There aren't any Dylan fans on my flist, are there? Anyway, just to note that these are all personal anticharacterkinks and I don't really expect anyone to agree with me, etc. Except about Dylan. Who should have died by the end of the series.)
I use Chronicle icon because there is NO character in The Chronicle who I do not love unconditionally. Except for very minor characters, and even then I don't often actively dislike them. Truth.