Monday Meditation: Why I Love that Alec Loves His Orange Soda

[enitharmonwept]

...or How I Learned to Embrace All of Me

This post by rawles so eloquently and succinctly clarified so many things I've been feeling but hadn't articulated about the discussions surrounding Uhura's characterization in ST:TOS and ST:XI that I felt compelled to add a bit of my own thinking on one of my new fandom favorites: Leverage's Alec Hardison.

Comments

[gorengal]

I enjoyed this very much, and I most likely will comment later at greater length...but I wanted to take a quick minute now to say that Parker also has moments of self-doubt. The whole 'Alice White on jury duty' plot was full of self-doubt.

[fourzoas]

Oooo--thanks for the reminder (I still have to rewatch that one to write that prompt from that meme...)--I'd forgotten Parker's insecurities, as well as the ones Nate sometimes displays. I think, though, that what strikes me about some of Hardison's insecure moments is that they are directly tied to his area of expertise; for Parker, that fear is related to doing something she's not a pro at, where there are moments where Hardison is afraid/concerned that he can't do what he's supposed to be best at doing (like the solution in The Mile High Job). Still, food for thought!

[gorengal]

You're right: Hardison's insecurities always manifest as doubt in his abilities. But, I believe insecurities almost always stem from self-doubt, regardless of how they manifest

WordyZoas are Wordy, pt. 1

[fourzoas]

Hardison's insecurities: yes, I do think that in general they manifest from the self-doubt that we have, and that doubt may come from many quarters. When I look at his self doubts, though, against the other characters', it strikes me that his come from a place of doubting his abilities to do the job he's supposed to be great at, not from a sense of doubt about something he's clearly not good at (like Parker making friends). That's where that whole affirmative action thing kinda kicked in for me--not that I'm suggesting that he's brought into the group for that reason, but that as a black woman who lives in a world where that exists, self-doubt about that which I'm meant to be good at is a tacit part of the trade-off for the AA policies. It's not unusual to doubt your abilities, but the existence of AA compounds the reasons for that doubt

and Part 2

[fourzoas]

And I'm rambling again, so I'll get to the point: perhaps they called her that because that's how they made sense of her choices to be other than what they thought she should/ought to be--or perhaps was before she decided to follow different interests/paths.

Orange soda: a stereotype (see discussion with ebbyzone below).

*and if I'm missing anything, I blame my lack of total canon-viewing, as I have yet to watch a great deal of older Who.