take that moon and wrap it in cellophane

[lotesse]

meme, snagged from astridv:

Name a fandom you know (that you think I know too!) and I'll tell you

1. The first character I first fell in love with
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now
3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t
4. The character I love that everyone else hates
5. The character I used to love but don’t any longer
6. The character I would totally smooch
7. The character I’d want to be like
8. The character I’d slap
9. A pairing that I love
10. A pairing that I despise

Comments

[ex_lionpyh573]

Downton Abbey!

[lotesse]

loved first: Violet, even before I saw the show. I picked it up pretty much on the strength of her alone. She does this amazing thing where she takes advantage of the fact that little old lady = invisible to society, but then uses her class privilege to deliver the smackdown. She's a fascinating exercise in intersectionality and also I have been in love with Maggie Smith ever since Hook, you know.

love more now: Matthew. Maaaaaaaaatthew. One of the things that really sold me on Mary/Matthew is that they do that amazing Lizzy/Darcy thing where they both start off pretty much horrid and then both have to change before they can be deserving of the other. Mary's flaws are such that I fell for her in a hot second - frosty repressed arrogance is something I find attractive in a woman :) and her situation was such that I wanted her to have it all, to buck the system and skew the numbers. Matthew took me longer - I found him sweet but irritating in the first part of s1, because really dude you just got handed everything and not only that but a chance to make a difference in the world and it's a bleeding recession over here so dudes miffing about being suddenly rich = bah. BUT THEN. He was in a UNIFORM and I have a THING about young soldiers at the Somme, I spent my entire adolescence swooning over photos of Tolkien in uniform, it's a thing. And he was so willing to PLAY with Mary, & engage with her sharp edges as well as her graceful curves, and he LIKED HER JUST THE WAY SHE WAS. And his eyes are AMAZING. IT'S LIKE GAZING INTO THE SUN. WHOSE EYES LOOK LIKE THAT DUDE SERIOUSLY I WANT TO FALL INTO THEIR AZURE DEPTHS. I have ~feelings~ about this, okay?

don't get the love: Edith. I mean, I do actually get the love, because Edith is the kind of female character who gets stuck as the Designated Narrative Punching Bag and we all feel bad about those sorts of situations and want to stubbornly love them anyway because it's so painfully clear that no one else does. But I find myself unable to convince myself that I like her. I tend to skip her bits. They do far too good a job making her unlikable for me to be able to swim upstream.

nobody else gets the love: well, I'm not sure the SHOW gets the love for Sybil - or has any idea what her narrative is for. We're just past the heyday of militancy, in the postwar moment when the feminist movement was gathering momentum again. It's 1917. Virginia Woolf just started the Hogarth Press. Alice Paul was arrested in 1917. Sybil needs to be chaining herself to things and throwing bombs, not getting married and having babies.

love less now: Anna, who was really disappointing in the second series. I thought she was great in the first - this young woman, growing older, who's survived by being almost entirely focused on others, on their needs and feelings, who thrives in a classist society by becoming almost a ghost, an emotional prosthetic for both the rich girls she works for and the other servants who share her job. And then she falls in love, and it starts almost another act of compulsory empathy but then she ACTUALLY WANTS SOMETHING FOR HERSELF - and then her whole existence gets subsumed into the Bates Melodrama, and she's just another Dickensian milksop, teary-eyed and tiresome in Support Of Her Man.

kiss: Lady Mary. Oh my god, her neck is everything of beauty there has ever been. The curve of her lips is the perfection of the universe. The sweep of her eyebrows, the sparkle of her eyes, the veil of cool sardonic confidence over passion and uncertainty, the wit, the cynicism, the capacity for love and growth ... this is perhaps why Mary/Matthew gives me so much happy - I'm into both of them to the max, so it's twice the fun

slap: you can't slap people from Downton Abbey, because if they weren't all so slappable you would not love them in the first place.

be: I feel like I'm working on being LESS Anna, and I think probably would sort of benefit from walking around pretending to be Lady Mary, but Sybil is really the one I want to be. There's so much there that is good - totally undeveloped by the narrative, but good.

pairing I love: I have perhaps said enough about Mary and Matthew in this response (HOMG MARY AND MATTHEW) so I'll give kudos to the show for the Daisy/William plotline, which I though was fascinating and complicated and relatively well-executed. Not that I ship it! But that I'm glad that storyline was there.

pairing I don't: ohhhhh I am so tired of Anna and Bates, I just don't care, really no part of me gives even half a damn about any of it. Bates' character type DOES NOT BELONG in that type of melodramatic plot. Anna's transitions, but loses everything that makes it interesting. There is no potential for goodness here. Would have been SO. MUCH. BETTER. if had ended up being about service and perfectionism and repression and work ethics and disability issues. Mrs. Bates a wrong step from the start, I think.