The Slow, Lurking Rumblings Of The Mind
In the week that I've been on winter break, I've begun to have those interesting Character Rumblings in the back of my mind again. A character who might, eventually, want to have fic written about him . . .
Of course, being me, I'm immediately looking at a rather less-than-popular angle here. Specifically, I'm thinking about a character from Queer As Folk who is one of the two characters that the entire fandom seems to love to hate: Ethan Gold.
I think I know why Ethan has this bad rap. For a period of roughly twelve episodes, he was the boy who broke up The BrianJustin, and Lord knows we can't have anything standing in the way of dysfunctional, quasi-pederastic True Love, can we? While I agree with the rabid majority that Ethan and Justin probably wouldn't have been terrifically happy with each other had they lasted, I don't think that this is the result of Ethan being the demon spawn of Satan.
(I think it's the result of Justin never having gotten over Brian, despite all his promises to Ethan, or dealt with his Issues from his assault the previous year, and the fact that he's been living with Brian just long enough, at just young enough an age, to have picked up a collection of Brian's least attractive character traits.)
Ethan interests me, in and of himself. First of all, he's Jewish and a musician, and that's already enough to make me warm up to him. He's heavily into the Romantic aesthetic, and I am referring to the full-blown nineteenth-century artiste deal here -- it's no accident that he plays Brahms and Paganini, and that he appears to go no further into twentieth-century music than Debussy and Ravel. He's got this whole "starving artist living in a garret and busking for spare change" thing going, furnishing his garret with sidewalk furniture and yet mysteriously able to hold a candlelit wine-and-cheese picnic on the floor when he wants to. He also has the "I'm a student at a Funky Arts College" image down pat, with his love of black turtlenecks, questionable facial hair, and a circle of pretentious friends whose major excuse for being sophomoric is that . . . well, they probably are sophomores.
There's a lot of unexplored territory about Ethan that suggests to me that the writers didn't know a whole lot about schools of music and weren't interested in finding out. For one thing, the very fact that he's at the Pittsburgh Institute of Fine Art says a lot to me. PIFA (an imaginary school) is pretty clearly a school for visual art first and foremost, with a music program that seems to be an add-on. One wonders why Ethan is there instead of Juilliard, Tisch, the Eastman School, or the New England Conservatory, all of which are major-league music schools dedicated to producing the kind of top-ranked performer that Ethan wants to be. Money? Family issues? Couldn't he get into any one of those schools? Why PIFA?
And if he's such a brilliant performer, why doesn't he ever seem to get local gigs? Why does he busk? This is another question that indicates to me that the writers of the show didn't do their research about music students. In a city the size of Pittsburgh, there are usually plenty of opportunities for a musician of Ethan's caliber to make a little extra money playing local gigs. Musical theater productions, church services, weddings -- hell, I've known school of music undergrads to make money giving private lessons to younger children. It's not only income, it's good experience and it puts you in touch with the wider music world, which is one reason that music students do it. That Ethan doesn't do any of this, instead choosing to spend money on a busking permit (which you should have in Pittsburgh) so he can play a violin outside in freezing weather suggests to me that he's a) doing it for the image, and b) not quite as bright as he appears.
Of course, he does go to a school that doesn't seem to have practice rooms for its music students, since Ethan has to practice in a room intended for ensemble rehearsal rather than solo practice, so maybe the violin faculty just aren't up to snuff on local gigs. Or career counseling, since Ethan makes some very bad decisions in that area with almost no adult input, and the adult input he gets comes from a ruthless advertising executive with a known cruel streak who has very good reasons not to have Ethan's best interests in mind. If he's at the point in his studies where he's giving pre-degree recitals (this is probably what he's doing when we first meet him; we never find out exactly how old he is, but he doesn't have to be much older than Justin for it to actually be a degree recital), and his teacher hasn't hooked him up with gigs or given him some career counseling . . . well, that's a bad choice of music school.
Ethan comes off as somewhat pretentious and wifty, but he is a teenage art school student, so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The writers don't seem especially interested in making him look good, or even in writing logically about his life. He's essentially occupying the same position as County Paris does in Romeo and Juliet; he tries to have a romantic relationship with someone who's basically already (unofficially) taken, and is dumped on by all the major POV characters for the sole crime of not being his main squeeze's main squeeze. Paris isn't a bad guy -- he comes off as pleasant and likeable, though conventional and perhaps a tad dull, and I do try to write him that way, because I like him. Ethan Gold comes off much the same way. He's not a bad guy -- he's charming and open, though perhaps a tad caught up in his own image, as one tends to be at that age. But because he is not Brian Kinney, the fandom hates him.
And that alone makes me want to know more . . .
Of course, being me, I'm immediately looking at a rather less-than-popular angle here. Specifically, I'm thinking about a character from Queer As Folk who is one of the two characters that the entire fandom seems to love to hate: Ethan Gold.
I think I know why Ethan has this bad rap. For a period of roughly twelve episodes, he was the boy who broke up The BrianJustin, and Lord knows we can't have anything standing in the way of dysfunctional, quasi-pederastic True Love, can we? While I agree with the rabid majority that Ethan and Justin probably wouldn't have been terrifically happy with each other had they lasted, I don't think that this is the result of Ethan being the demon spawn of Satan.
(I think it's the result of Justin never having gotten over Brian, despite all his promises to Ethan, or dealt with his Issues from his assault the previous year, and the fact that he's been living with Brian just long enough, at just young enough an age, to have picked up a collection of Brian's least attractive character traits.)
Ethan interests me, in and of himself. First of all, he's Jewish and a musician, and that's already enough to make me warm up to him. He's heavily into the Romantic aesthetic, and I am referring to the full-blown nineteenth-century artiste deal here -- it's no accident that he plays Brahms and Paganini, and that he appears to go no further into twentieth-century music than Debussy and Ravel. He's got this whole "starving artist living in a garret and busking for spare change" thing going, furnishing his garret with sidewalk furniture and yet mysteriously able to hold a candlelit wine-and-cheese picnic on the floor when he wants to. He also has the "I'm a student at a Funky Arts College" image down pat, with his love of black turtlenecks, questionable facial hair, and a circle of pretentious friends whose major excuse for being sophomoric is that . . . well, they probably are sophomores.
There's a lot of unexplored territory about Ethan that suggests to me that the writers didn't know a whole lot about schools of music and weren't interested in finding out. For one thing, the very fact that he's at the Pittsburgh Institute of Fine Art says a lot to me. PIFA (an imaginary school) is pretty clearly a school for visual art first and foremost, with a music program that seems to be an add-on. One wonders why Ethan is there instead of Juilliard, Tisch, the Eastman School, or the New England Conservatory, all of which are major-league music schools dedicated to producing the kind of top-ranked performer that Ethan wants to be. Money? Family issues? Couldn't he get into any one of those schools? Why PIFA?
And if he's such a brilliant performer, why doesn't he ever seem to get local gigs? Why does he busk? This is another question that indicates to me that the writers of the show didn't do their research about music students. In a city the size of Pittsburgh, there are usually plenty of opportunities for a musician of Ethan's caliber to make a little extra money playing local gigs. Musical theater productions, church services, weddings -- hell, I've known school of music undergrads to make money giving private lessons to younger children. It's not only income, it's good experience and it puts you in touch with the wider music world, which is one reason that music students do it. That Ethan doesn't do any of this, instead choosing to spend money on a busking permit (which you should have in Pittsburgh) so he can play a violin outside in freezing weather suggests to me that he's a) doing it for the image, and b) not quite as bright as he appears.
Of course, he does go to a school that doesn't seem to have practice rooms for its music students, since Ethan has to practice in a room intended for ensemble rehearsal rather than solo practice, so maybe the violin faculty just aren't up to snuff on local gigs. Or career counseling, since Ethan makes some very bad decisions in that area with almost no adult input, and the adult input he gets comes from a ruthless advertising executive with a known cruel streak who has very good reasons not to have Ethan's best interests in mind. If he's at the point in his studies where he's giving pre-degree recitals (this is probably what he's doing when we first meet him; we never find out exactly how old he is, but he doesn't have to be much older than Justin for it to actually be a degree recital), and his teacher hasn't hooked him up with gigs or given him some career counseling . . . well, that's a bad choice of music school.
Ethan comes off as somewhat pretentious and wifty, but he is a teenage art school student, so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The writers don't seem especially interested in making him look good, or even in writing logically about his life. He's essentially occupying the same position as County Paris does in Romeo and Juliet; he tries to have a romantic relationship with someone who's basically already (unofficially) taken, and is dumped on by all the major POV characters for the sole crime of not being his main squeeze's main squeeze. Paris isn't a bad guy -- he comes off as pleasant and likeable, though conventional and perhaps a tad dull, and I do try to write him that way, because I like him. Ethan Gold comes off much the same way. He's not a bad guy -- he's charming and open, though perhaps a tad caught up in his own image, as one tends to be at that age. But because he is not Brian Kinney, the fandom hates him.
And that alone makes me want to know more . . .