Happy Women's Day, girls!
I kind of thought I'd try to catch up with all of my comments (and all of the posts you all have written over the past month) before I wrote a new entry, but I think Women's Day is a good reason to break the silence, don't you? ^-^
Anyway, as my contribution to the day, I offer you:
Kegom's List Of 7 Female TV Series Characters That Influenced Her While She Was An Impressionable Young Girl
Disclaimer: I own none of the pictures I posted here; they were all acquired through Google because I don't have the series in question on my PC and thus can't take screencaps. If one of the pictures belongs to someone reading this and they wish for me to take it down, leave me a comment and I will.
am was in my youth'>
1.)
April O'Neil - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Okay, I realize that on the TV series, April O'Neil had to play the damsel in distress disturbingly often, which really wasn't fair considering her kick-ass personality in the comics. (Which I don't actually remember a lot from, because while there were comic stores around in the Eighties/Nineties in Germany, most of the stuff accessible to children was French comics or Donald Duck/Mickey Mouse comics, but I do remember her actually fighting as well as the guys in one of the comics I read.) But still, even in the series she was sassy, she was able to put up with a bunch of teenaged boys in turtle form, but well able to shut them up when she needed to, she referred to them as her journalistic break, but never betrayed her ethics and their confidence by giving away their secret, and she defied typical female stereotype enough to usually wear a yellow jumpsuite instead of distinctively feminine clothes. As a nine or ten year old girl, I wanted to be like her and hang out with the (oh so cool to me back then) Turtles and go on adventures with them.
...I also wanted her to marry (or at least get together with) Michelangelo and I remember spending quite some time imagining how she would decorate his sleeping place, but I blame that on my inherent domestic streak (I hate cleaning, but I love cooking and decorating the house and stuff) rather than on the series' portrayal. ^^"
2&3.)
Eliza and Angela - Gargoyles
Anyone else here remember Gargoyles? It was my favourite series EVER for around three years, or so. I just loved the characters and the story so much; and I especially loved the two main good girls, Eliza (who was there from the beginning) and Angela. I remember that I wanted to be Angela's best friend so badly. She was just cool! And she and her family could take me on flights through the air! (This was before my utter fear of heights really kicked in, of course.) And she also had a special status, because she was Goliath's daughter and the only girl in that family of guys, but that kind of 'special' never translated to 'needs to be coddled and protected and is there mainly as a love interest for all the other guys', thankfully.
...Of course, she was the love interest for the three younger guys in their clan - at least until she told all of them to stop being stupid and that she'd choose her own lover, in her own way and her own time. Still a teenager in the series, and already so awesome!
- Speaking of being a teenager, I just had a look at the broadcasting dates for Germany and the first episode aired on the day I turned thirteen (...I can't remember having watched that on my birthday, but I must have, because I remember watching the first episode after I'd seen it advertised as a new series) and I think one big thing that I loved about Angela was that she was a teenager who didn't always get along with her father. ;P According to my mother, when I was around thirteen there was a period of nearly a year when I was an unholy terror and fought with my father practically every day. ^^" I don't even remember all of the fighting anymore - my father thinks we both suppressed that period of time out of sheer trauma ;P - but I do remember that puberty-wise, thirteen was the hardest year; after that I actually didn't fight with my parents all that often anymore. Anyway, so that was definitely something that made me identify with Angela a lot, her being a teenager who fought with her father... and then talked about the things in her life with Eliza, which means that after the time Angela joined, the series totally would've passed the Bechdel test, because I can distinctly remember conversations between Angela and Eliza that were not about men.
Speaking of Eliza: She is one of the few TV series characters who I realized later on was actually much more awesome than I had thought at first. (Normally, it tends to be the other way around.)
Eliza is half Native American (Wikipedia says probably largely Hopi) and half Nigerian, with her father being a detective like Eliza, and her mother being an anthropologist specializing in African cultures. And - I am not completely sure about this anymore, because it's been pretty long since I've watched the series, but I think her ethnicity actually became a topic later on in the series? At least I remember there being episodes about her family and her mother being in Africa, or something. ...Oh, and Wikipedia (there's an article on Eliza here) says that I don't misremember, there actually were episodes that dealt with her family. ^-^ (Also Wikipedia says that her mother was voiced - voice-acted? - by Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek series! It's a small world, really.)
So yes, for once a female companion to some male heroes isn't white. She also isn't constantly in need of help, because Eliza is intelligent, tough and well able to care for herself. In fact, rather than her being the one who predominantely needs to be rescued by the hero, she's actually the one who helps Goliath and his clan adjust to the modern-day world and she's the one who keeps an eye on them when they turn to stone during the day time and are completely vulnerable to enemies.
I didn't identify with Eliza the way I did with Angela, but that was because I was a teenage girl and Angela was a teenage girl, while Eliza was a grown-up woman. I did love and admire her a whole lot and I thought that it would be just as great to be friends with Eliza as it would be to be friends with the Gargoyles. And I'm pretty sure that now as a grown-up, I'd identify with Eliza more than Angela, which makes me think that Eliza is a pretty great example of the fact that a heroine (or hero) does NOT have to look the same as the majority of the intended audience for them to be able to identify with her (or him), no matter what those producers might think.
Also, Eliza/Goliath is still my Gargoyles OTP. ;P
4&5.)
Captain Kathryn Janeway and B'Elanna Torres - Star Trek: Voyager
Even at the age of twelve, I knew that Captain Kathryn Janeway was how I wanted to be when I'm between 40 and 50: Compassionate but capable of making difficult decisions, mostly cool-headed and even when upset willing to listen to reason, a strong female leader who never has to resort to acting "like a man" to get her authority across, and dignified without being too distanced. Of course I realize now that I'm probably never going to be like her - I'm not the type to be dignified, for one ^^" - but the admiration for her still remains. She's the one who ultimately kept the Voyager together, who taught Seven Of Nine to be human, who integrated two different crews - from enemy ships, even! - into one strong, capable crew, she was the one who accepted the Doctor, a hologram program, as a sentient being, and she was the one who turned what had been a ship on a military hunting mission into a generation ship. Actually, one of the episodes that I remember best is the one where a crew member becomes pregnant and she has to think about reassigning quarters and making a ship that wasn't meant for families (unlike the Enterprise, the Voyager, which was considerably smaller than Enterprise and other generation ships, hadn't been thought to stay out in space for too long and thus the personel weren't supposed to bring their families with them) as child-friendly as possible. And her friendship (*cough* - as a slasher I see their relationship a little bit differently today... but that's half of the fun of being a slasher, isn't it? ;P) with Seven is really one of the most important emotional ties in the whole series; to the point that the otherwise so rational and level-headed Janeway completely loses it and starts getting NASTY when Seven is kidnapped by another human ship. I actually don't like her that much during that time (which means I basically ignore it, which is something that's pretty easily done in Voyager, because their timeline is tentative at best anyway), but I still think it's great that they decided to explore her darker side when her best female friend is threatened.
(This series definitely passes the Bechdel test, btw, even though there are actually only three to four important female characters in the mainly men dominated cast. But those women really have better things to do than talk about men all the time!)
B'Elanna Torres is pretty much the opposite of Kathryn Janeway: Quick-tempered, rash in her decisions, passionately opposed to the Starfleet at first and not the one to see the need for diplomacy, she sometimes isn't the easiest person to get along with. But she's also loyal, intelligent and an amazing Chief Engineer with more than enough knowledge to run the Voyager's technical systems, despite the fact that she hadn't encountered the very modern engines that the Voyager sported before. (Female engineers for the win, yay! Seriously, if you watch the other Star Trek series, it's really noticeable that not only the Chief Engineers are men, but that also a majority of the other engineers in the background are male, so a prominent female engineer is pretty amazing.)
I also remember that as a child/teenager, I really loved her for being the rebellious and out-spoken one and I was absolutely in love with her friendship with Harry Kim, the young ensign (another favourite character of mine in Voyager when I was young). It was so cute, because he was so gentle and she was much more dominant than he, so my impression was that a lot of their interactions basically consisted of her ordering him around, which I thought was hilarious. XD
And of course there's the infamous scene in which Chakotey mentions that she's the only person he ever knew who was introduced to her spirit animal and immediately tried to kill it... (Awesome, I tell you!)
Looking back, one of the things that I didn't really fully realize as a child, but which I really like about her character now is the on-going struggle she is shown to have with being bi-racial. Most of the bi-racial (bi-species...?) in Star Trek struggle with their heritage in some way, of course, but what I really like about Torres is that this is a struggle that actually continues throughout the whole series, from the first season to the very last. Over the course of the series, she really shows a lot of growth, and one of the ways in which her growth is shown is the way she eventually comes to terms with being who she is.
6.)
Jadzia Dax - Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Jadzia Dax is quite an interesting character - as one fanfiction author put it, she's "half woman, half slug", because the (female) humanoid Trill (= name of her race) harbours a (...sexless? bi-gendered? how do alien slugs procreate anyway?...) slug-like symbiont in her body. This symbiont's name is Dax, the humanoid female's name is Jadzia, together they make Jadzia Dax, one entity that basically negotiates two brains in one body.
The symbionts generally live a very long time (several hundred years) and, when their former hosts die, they take all of the memories and personality traits with them into their new host body.
So the one person (in appearance) Jadzia Dax is actually = female Trill Jadzia + symbiont Dax + six (or however many, I can't quite remember) other humanoid personalities that entered Jadzia's body together with Dax. Talk about multiple personality disorder... ^^"
(And, no, the whole Go'auld business in Stargate really wasn't as original as people might have thought... But then, neither was the whole "stranded on a station in a far-away galaxy without an idea how to get back" business in Atlantis. ^^" Of course I liked it precisely BECAUSE it was basically a mixture of Voyager and Deep Space Nine.)
What I remember finding interesting about this whole Trill/Symbiont business even as a teenager was that the symbiont Dax could decide whether it wanted to be put into a female or a male host; and while the host before Jadzia had been a man, Dax overall seems to have preferred female hosts. Even back then it made me think about what it would be like to freely choose a gender and what would make one gender preferable to the other.
Also, this was a little bit before I'd ever read "The Left Hand Of Darkness" (one of my absolute favourite books EVER, when I first read it when I was sixteen it changed my outlook on gender and sexuality forever), but I think the whole Dax business started a certain interest in fluid gender and sexuality in me - especially after the episode with Dax' old love. (Story: a female Trill comes onto the station who carries a symbiont that Dax, in one of his former hosts, was married to. The other symbiont also had another host at that time, but through Jadzia and the new other Trill host, they rekindled their relationship, even though it was forbidden, which lead to the first same-sex kiss on Star Trek EVER.) It was, for all appearances, a lesbian love story, except that in the former life it had been a heterosexual romance, except that it had actually been at least in part a love story between two symbionts, who don't even have genders like humanoids do (as far as I know), and who hadn't even really had contact with each other, so all in all it the thing was a homosexual, heterosexual, asexual, polyamorous relationship between four aliens.
...Now that's a complicated romantic relationship for you. I'm pretty sure it beats even a Bollywood romance in terms of complications. ;P
But apart from the whole interesting gender business, a reason I really love Jadzia Dax (and kind of hated Ezri Dax) is the way she always seems to know more than everyone around her - and is endlessly amused by the way people behave. My personal canon includes her being completely aware of the way Garak flirts with the oblivious Julian Bashir (GARAK AND BASHIR, my first slash pairing ever, because the actors were so completely unsubtle that even an innocent fifteen year old was able to realize they were flirting) and secretly approving of Garak's interest, but showing nothing but her slightly unsettling Sphinx-like smile when she sees them, which actually unsettles both Garak and Bashir, though for different reasons.
8.)
Jessica Fletcher - Murder, She Wrote
Jessica Fletcher, that awesome old lady with the mystery-solving abilities. You know how above I said that I admired Captain Kathryn Janeway, but knew I couldn't be like her?
...Honestly, I still have hopes that someday when I'm old enough, I'll turn out to be as awesome as Jessica Fletcher. &hearts
(I'm definitely nosy enough.)
I love how Jessica Fletcher is always so genteel and friendly and harmless, living in this nice house in this nice little sea-side town, but actually has a core made out of steel when it comes to catching perpetrators and a huge knowledge of the things that happen int he world out there.
Definitely, definitely someone I wanted to become like as a teenager - and just as definitely someone I still want to become like in thirty to fourty years' time. &hearts &hearts &hearts
(And "Murder, She Wrote" is still one of the coolest titles for a TV series, EVER.)
And, since this is really short, let me rec to you THIS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME STARGATE:ATLANTIS / MURDER, SHE WROTE CROSSOVER, in which Jessica is Rodney's aunt and scares the living shit out of him.
So amazing, seriously - go and read it now! It's got bonus John Sheppard / Rodney McKay and it features the summary: "In Rodney's opinion, anybody who thinks that Jessica Fletcher is sweet clearly just isn't paying very close attention.". How can you resist that?
I had originally planned to do this with characters from literature, but then I realized that I spent a huge portion of my youth reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Swordsister" anthologies and huge amounts of other novels from at least two centuries, which featured great heroines, and I would have far too many characters to choose from, so I decided to keep it to TV characters (I didn't watch that much TV, so that was manageable); and I have to say, I'm quite pleased with the end-result. It really showed me just how much those characters influenced me.
And, of course, I'm curious, m'loves. What heroines influenced you when you were growing up?
Anyway, as my contribution to the day, I offer you:
Kegom's List Of 7 Female TV Series Characters That Influenced Her While She Was An Impressionable Young Girl
Disclaimer: I own none of the pictures I posted here; they were all acquired through Google because I don't have the series in question on my PC and thus can't take screencaps. If one of the pictures belongs to someone reading this and they wish for me to take it down, leave me a comment and I will.
am was in my youth'>
1.)
April O'Neil - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Okay, I realize that on the TV series, April O'Neil had to play the damsel in distress disturbingly often, which really wasn't fair considering her kick-ass personality in the comics. (Which I don't actually remember a lot from, because while there were comic stores around in the Eighties/Nineties in Germany, most of the stuff accessible to children was French comics or Donald Duck/Mickey Mouse comics, but I do remember her actually fighting as well as the guys in one of the comics I read.) But still, even in the series she was sassy, she was able to put up with a bunch of teenaged boys in turtle form, but well able to shut them up when she needed to, she referred to them as her journalistic break, but never betrayed her ethics and their confidence by giving away their secret, and she defied typical female stereotype enough to usually wear a yellow jumpsuite instead of distinctively feminine clothes. As a nine or ten year old girl, I wanted to be like her and hang out with the (oh so cool to me back then) Turtles and go on adventures with them.
...I also wanted her to marry (or at least get together with) Michelangelo and I remember spending quite some time imagining how she would decorate his sleeping place, but I blame that on my inherent domestic streak (I hate cleaning, but I love cooking and decorating the house and stuff) rather than on the series' portrayal. ^^"
2&3.)
Eliza and Angela - Gargoyles
Anyone else here remember Gargoyles? It was my favourite series EVER for around three years, or so. I just loved the characters and the story so much; and I especially loved the two main good girls, Eliza (who was there from the beginning) and Angela. I remember that I wanted to be Angela's best friend so badly. She was just cool! And she and her family could take me on flights through the air! (This was before my utter fear of heights really kicked in, of course.) And she also had a special status, because she was Goliath's daughter and the only girl in that family of guys, but that kind of 'special' never translated to 'needs to be coddled and protected and is there mainly as a love interest for all the other guys', thankfully.
...Of course, she was the love interest for the three younger guys in their clan - at least until she told all of them to stop being stupid and that she'd choose her own lover, in her own way and her own time. Still a teenager in the series, and already so awesome!
- Speaking of being a teenager, I just had a look at the broadcasting dates for Germany and the first episode aired on the day I turned thirteen (...I can't remember having watched that on my birthday, but I must have, because I remember watching the first episode after I'd seen it advertised as a new series) and I think one big thing that I loved about Angela was that she was a teenager who didn't always get along with her father. ;P According to my mother, when I was around thirteen there was a period of nearly a year when I was an unholy terror and fought with my father practically every day. ^^" I don't even remember all of the fighting anymore - my father thinks we both suppressed that period of time out of sheer trauma ;P - but I do remember that puberty-wise, thirteen was the hardest year; after that I actually didn't fight with my parents all that often anymore. Anyway, so that was definitely something that made me identify with Angela a lot, her being a teenager who fought with her father... and then talked about the things in her life with Eliza, which means that after the time Angela joined, the series totally would've passed the Bechdel test, because I can distinctly remember conversations between Angela and Eliza that were not about men.
Speaking of Eliza: She is one of the few TV series characters who I realized later on was actually much more awesome than I had thought at first. (Normally, it tends to be the other way around.)
Eliza is half Native American (Wikipedia says probably largely Hopi) and half Nigerian, with her father being a detective like Eliza, and her mother being an anthropologist specializing in African cultures. And - I am not completely sure about this anymore, because it's been pretty long since I've watched the series, but I think her ethnicity actually became a topic later on in the series? At least I remember there being episodes about her family and her mother being in Africa, or something. ...Oh, and Wikipedia (there's an article on Eliza here) says that I don't misremember, there actually were episodes that dealt with her family. ^-^ (Also Wikipedia says that her mother was voiced - voice-acted? - by Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura on the original Star Trek series! It's a small world, really.)
So yes, for once a female companion to some male heroes isn't white. She also isn't constantly in need of help, because Eliza is intelligent, tough and well able to care for herself. In fact, rather than her being the one who predominantely needs to be rescued by the hero, she's actually the one who helps Goliath and his clan adjust to the modern-day world and she's the one who keeps an eye on them when they turn to stone during the day time and are completely vulnerable to enemies.
I didn't identify with Eliza the way I did with Angela, but that was because I was a teenage girl and Angela was a teenage girl, while Eliza was a grown-up woman. I did love and admire her a whole lot and I thought that it would be just as great to be friends with Eliza as it would be to be friends with the Gargoyles. And I'm pretty sure that now as a grown-up, I'd identify with Eliza more than Angela, which makes me think that Eliza is a pretty great example of the fact that a heroine (or hero) does NOT have to look the same as the majority of the intended audience for them to be able to identify with her (or him), no matter what those producers might think.
Also, Eliza/Goliath is still my Gargoyles OTP. ;P
4&5.)
Captain Kathryn Janeway and B'Elanna Torres - Star Trek: Voyager
Even at the age of twelve, I knew that Captain Kathryn Janeway was how I wanted to be when I'm between 40 and 50: Compassionate but capable of making difficult decisions, mostly cool-headed and even when upset willing to listen to reason, a strong female leader who never has to resort to acting "like a man" to get her authority across, and dignified without being too distanced. Of course I realize now that I'm probably never going to be like her - I'm not the type to be dignified, for one ^^" - but the admiration for her still remains. She's the one who ultimately kept the Voyager together, who taught Seven Of Nine to be human, who integrated two different crews - from enemy ships, even! - into one strong, capable crew, she was the one who accepted the Doctor, a hologram program, as a sentient being, and she was the one who turned what had been a ship on a military hunting mission into a generation ship. Actually, one of the episodes that I remember best is the one where a crew member becomes pregnant and she has to think about reassigning quarters and making a ship that wasn't meant for families (unlike the Enterprise, the Voyager, which was considerably smaller than Enterprise and other generation ships, hadn't been thought to stay out in space for too long and thus the personel weren't supposed to bring their families with them) as child-friendly as possible. And her friendship (*cough* - as a slasher I see their relationship a little bit differently today... but that's half of the fun of being a slasher, isn't it? ;P) with Seven is really one of the most important emotional ties in the whole series; to the point that the otherwise so rational and level-headed Janeway completely loses it and starts getting NASTY when Seven is kidnapped by another human ship. I actually don't like her that much during that time (which means I basically ignore it, which is something that's pretty easily done in Voyager, because their timeline is tentative at best anyway), but I still think it's great that they decided to explore her darker side when her best female friend is threatened.
(This series definitely passes the Bechdel test, btw, even though there are actually only three to four important female characters in the mainly men dominated cast. But those women really have better things to do than talk about men all the time!)
B'Elanna Torres is pretty much the opposite of Kathryn Janeway: Quick-tempered, rash in her decisions, passionately opposed to the Starfleet at first and not the one to see the need for diplomacy, she sometimes isn't the easiest person to get along with. But she's also loyal, intelligent and an amazing Chief Engineer with more than enough knowledge to run the Voyager's technical systems, despite the fact that she hadn't encountered the very modern engines that the Voyager sported before. (Female engineers for the win, yay! Seriously, if you watch the other Star Trek series, it's really noticeable that not only the Chief Engineers are men, but that also a majority of the other engineers in the background are male, so a prominent female engineer is pretty amazing.)
I also remember that as a child/teenager, I really loved her for being the rebellious and out-spoken one and I was absolutely in love with her friendship with Harry Kim, the young ensign (another favourite character of mine in Voyager when I was young). It was so cute, because he was so gentle and she was much more dominant than he, so my impression was that a lot of their interactions basically consisted of her ordering him around, which I thought was hilarious. XD
And of course there's the infamous scene in which Chakotey mentions that she's the only person he ever knew who was introduced to her spirit animal and immediately tried to kill it... (Awesome, I tell you!)
Looking back, one of the things that I didn't really fully realize as a child, but which I really like about her character now is the on-going struggle she is shown to have with being bi-racial. Most of the bi-racial (bi-species...?) in Star Trek struggle with their heritage in some way, of course, but what I really like about Torres is that this is a struggle that actually continues throughout the whole series, from the first season to the very last. Over the course of the series, she really shows a lot of growth, and one of the ways in which her growth is shown is the way she eventually comes to terms with being who she is.
6.)
Jadzia Dax - Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Jadzia Dax is quite an interesting character - as one fanfiction author put it, she's "half woman, half slug", because the (female) humanoid Trill (= name of her race) harbours a (...sexless? bi-gendered? how do alien slugs procreate anyway?...) slug-like symbiont in her body. This symbiont's name is Dax, the humanoid female's name is Jadzia, together they make Jadzia Dax, one entity that basically negotiates two brains in one body.
The symbionts generally live a very long time (several hundred years) and, when their former hosts die, they take all of the memories and personality traits with them into their new host body.
So the one person (in appearance) Jadzia Dax is actually = female Trill Jadzia + symbiont Dax + six (or however many, I can't quite remember) other humanoid personalities that entered Jadzia's body together with Dax. Talk about multiple personality disorder... ^^"
(And, no, the whole Go'auld business in Stargate really wasn't as original as people might have thought... But then, neither was the whole "stranded on a station in a far-away galaxy without an idea how to get back" business in Atlantis. ^^" Of course I liked it precisely BECAUSE it was basically a mixture of Voyager and Deep Space Nine.)
What I remember finding interesting about this whole Trill/Symbiont business even as a teenager was that the symbiont Dax could decide whether it wanted to be put into a female or a male host; and while the host before Jadzia had been a man, Dax overall seems to have preferred female hosts. Even back then it made me think about what it would be like to freely choose a gender and what would make one gender preferable to the other.
Also, this was a little bit before I'd ever read "The Left Hand Of Darkness" (one of my absolute favourite books EVER, when I first read it when I was sixteen it changed my outlook on gender and sexuality forever), but I think the whole Dax business started a certain interest in fluid gender and sexuality in me - especially after the episode with Dax' old love. (Story: a female Trill comes onto the station who carries a symbiont that Dax, in one of his former hosts, was married to. The other symbiont also had another host at that time, but through Jadzia and the new other Trill host, they rekindled their relationship, even though it was forbidden, which lead to the first same-sex kiss on Star Trek EVER.) It was, for all appearances, a lesbian love story, except that in the former life it had been a heterosexual romance, except that it had actually been at least in part a love story between two symbionts, who don't even have genders like humanoids do (as far as I know), and who hadn't even really had contact with each other, so all in all it the thing was a homosexual, heterosexual, asexual, polyamorous relationship between four aliens.
...Now that's a complicated romantic relationship for you. I'm pretty sure it beats even a Bollywood romance in terms of complications. ;P
But apart from the whole interesting gender business, a reason I really love Jadzia Dax (and kind of hated Ezri Dax) is the way she always seems to know more than everyone around her - and is endlessly amused by the way people behave. My personal canon includes her being completely aware of the way Garak flirts with the oblivious Julian Bashir (GARAK AND BASHIR, my first slash pairing ever, because the actors were so completely unsubtle that even an innocent fifteen year old was able to realize they were flirting) and secretly approving of Garak's interest, but showing nothing but her slightly unsettling Sphinx-like smile when she sees them, which actually unsettles both Garak and Bashir, though for different reasons.
8.)
Jessica Fletcher - Murder, She Wrote
Jessica Fletcher, that awesome old lady with the mystery-solving abilities. You know how above I said that I admired Captain Kathryn Janeway, but knew I couldn't be like her?
...Honestly, I still have hopes that someday when I'm old enough, I'll turn out to be as awesome as Jessica Fletcher. &hearts
(I'm definitely nosy enough.)
I love how Jessica Fletcher is always so genteel and friendly and harmless, living in this nice house in this nice little sea-side town, but actually has a core made out of steel when it comes to catching perpetrators and a huge knowledge of the things that happen int he world out there.
Definitely, definitely someone I wanted to become like as a teenager - and just as definitely someone I still want to become like in thirty to fourty years' time. &hearts &hearts &hearts
(And "Murder, She Wrote" is still one of the coolest titles for a TV series, EVER.)
And, since this is really short, let me rec to you THIS ABSOLUTELY AWESOME STARGATE:ATLANTIS / MURDER, SHE WROTE CROSSOVER, in which Jessica is Rodney's aunt and scares the living shit out of him.
So amazing, seriously - go and read it now! It's got bonus John Sheppard / Rodney McKay and it features the summary: "In Rodney's opinion, anybody who thinks that Jessica Fletcher is sweet clearly just isn't paying very close attention.". How can you resist that?
I had originally planned to do this with characters from literature, but then I realized that I spent a huge portion of my youth reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Swordsister" anthologies and huge amounts of other novels from at least two centuries, which featured great heroines, and I would have far too many characters to choose from, so I decided to keep it to TV characters (I didn't watch that much TV, so that was manageable); and I have to say, I'm quite pleased with the end-result. It really showed me just how much those characters influenced me.
And, of course, I'm curious, m'loves. What heroines influenced you when you were growing up?