Thoughts 1.2: And He Dared To Feel
A long time ago, when I was much newer to this fandom and LiveJournal was something I'd never even heard of, I read a fic that portrayed Ianto as a cancer survivor. The author stated in their notes that they were working from personal experience, although, once I read the fic, it was painfully obvious this note was unnecessary. The story explained
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Characters have three dimensions
Do they? Or do they exist in four? (fourth dimension = time) The way that a character reacts, feels, thinks about something will be different depending on what point in canon you're using. For example, if you're using as your "in" with Ianto that he's the quiet, ignored, background one, it may very well be valid at points, but does it still hold true by the end of series 2?
And have you noticed I only talk about Ianto here? That's because finding an 'in' with Jack is like kicking a brick wall
*hugs Gwen, Tosh and Owen, "those other people"*
There's more power in someone's fingers shaking sometimes than there'll be in, "I'm scared." That said, for some characters (oh hai, Jack Harkness), saying it aloud is the harder of the two by far.
I... yes and no. Because if you can create the sense that they'll show it far more easily than they'll say it, then having them then say it is extremely powerful. Jack - in Torchwood - doesn't show fear. He's the leader, he's in command, he's the man with the plan. So when he is scared, when he says there's no hope, it's terrifying - End of Days and Stolen Earth are good examples of that.
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And yes, all right, there's more people to Torchwood :). But I can hardly claim to write much about them, can I?
And, yes. That was what I meant by the second bit. Sometimes, the power is in the showing, and sometimes, it's in understanding when a character not knowing what to do and admitting that can freak others out.
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(because sometimes answering "why don't you?" is as interesting as "why do you?")
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Gwen -- dude, I like Gwen as a person, but she's miles removed from me. She touches people and cares and hugs them and argues the point and... she's nothing like me. I don't, and probably never will, understand a "normal" outlook on life. (re. our conversation last night)
Tosh -- yeah. She never came alive for me. She's very contrarily written, on screen, and although there was a glimpse of her in Greeks that I liked, it came too late for me. I watched series 2 before series 1, and she'd never stood out until that point. And I don't feel like I can make the pieces of canon fit around her to make her a rounded character.
Owen -- I don't like him. He's a jerk. He makes other people miserable because of his own pain, and I get that he has that pain for a reason, that he, truly, had the most miserable life of all of them, that he's the most fucked up, but I can't bear to work with that sort of bullying attitude.
I am a romantic, but I write plenty of character stuff wrapped up in romance, so you're right. I love Ianto, because he's like me. I love Jack, because he's damaged and too knowledgeable for his own good, and again, like me.
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I only added the "don't say it's cos you're a romantic" because I have asked you this question, sort of, before, and that was your answer last time. And that's the easy answer that doesn't tell me much.
Tosh impressed me, when I went back to watch series 1. There's underlying layers of snark there, and a suggestion of this relationship with Owen that NM and BG play out well, and there was this promise there, yet she just disappears off the screen series 2.
Owen, well. I don't like him.
And as for Gwen, well, that sort of surprises me. Because, up there *points* you talk about being a woman in a flat who's never encountered any of the horrors of Torchwood and the closest you've got to cannibals being a car crash. Which, surely, is series 1 Gwen.
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Well, yes. And on paper, you're right. But Gwen is sane and well-adjusted, and worries about whether or not her sergeant will respect her if she brings him coffee. And I'm nuts and fucked-up and worry about the state of the world, but don't do anything about it. Gwen and me? We could be friends, but I could never be her.
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Gwen, for me... she's normal, and I'm perhaps not. But she expects the monsters to be worse than the humans, she expects to be alive at the end of the day, she plans for the future and she gets horribly, unreasonably frustrated when people don't see things her way. And - on that level of normal - I can connect with her, whereas with the others, not so much. The mundane and trivial and thinking "what do I want for tea?" at lunchtime 'cos I'm bored.
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I think maybe you've put your finger on why I shy away from writing Gwen where I can, because I don't know that we would be friends; I have enough trouble understanding the Normal People in one of my knitting groups (not that I don't like them, just... I've never lived in that world where life was 9-to-5's with paperwork and baby showers on the weekends, to someone who was Raised By Artists it's almost like hanging around with aliens sometimes), and Gwen's aggressive Ordinariness is so far from matching up with my experiences that we'd end up staring uneasily at each other over a coffee and eventually wander off wondering which of us was crazy. (Her. ;) )
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