me me:

[lotesse]

Name me a character from a fandom I have known, and I will tell you:

* How I FEEEEEL about this character
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
* My non-romantic OTP for this character
* My unpopular opinion about this character
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon

Comments

[anghraine]

Luke Skywalker! :D

[esteven]

Jack Aubrey?
*hopefuls*

[paian]

Daniel Jackson

[executrix]

St. John Rivers?

[anehan]

Susan Pevensie!

[ilthit]

Minerva McGonagall?

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

Daine!

[lotesse]

* Luke is the darling of my heart. I want to swoop him up and schnorgle him and kiss all his sorrows better and then possibly make out with him but I'd settle for just tucking him into bed. Um.

* I ship Luke with any variant of the Core Three: Luke/Leia, Luke/Han, Luke/Leia/Han, whichever. I'm happy for anybody to love on him!

* ha! Insofar as Luke&Vader is pretty much the emotional core of my reading of the OT, does that count? Luke's lurve melts his heart! "Come with me"! God, SKYWALKERS, anyway.

* I really kind of hate the idea of Luke reforming the jedi order. I don't want him bound down to the old institutions - they're wrong, anyway. The representations of the jedi order in the OT are Ben and Yoda, and they're both dead wrong about how things eventually go down - they completely miss the fact that Luke's love is, in fact, the greatest power in the universe. He knows better than they do; he should build his own thing, and somehow I don't think that thing would involve anything as permanent or inflexible as a temple.

* I wish Luke would talk to Han about things! It drives me nuts that, canonically, we can't be sure that Han knows about his hand, much less about his daddy. And Luke's so very much in need of the grounding that Han gives him - I can't even articulate how much I want a scene in RotJ where they could actually TALK.

[lotesse]

* Oh god Jack Aubrey. I want to marry him. I want to tear all his clothes off with my teeth. I want to braid his hair. The first time I read the Aubreyad I was living on a sailboat with my family, and I can remember lying up in the forward berth reading Post Captain and absolutely wriggling with stifled passion - I really wanted a computer to squee into, and instead I had to soberly discuss the book with my dad. Not the easiest thing in the world!

* Jack is such a darling little manwhore that I can ship him with just about everyone. Jack/Stephen, obvs, and Jack/Sophie - but I've also got a major thing for Jack/Queenie. I will confess to not shipping him with Diana Villiers, because Jack being in romantic competition with Stephen makes me desperately unhappy.

* Jack/his boats. If ever there was a man in love with his ship it's Jack Aubrey - not Kirk, not Jack Sparrow, not nobody is having sex with their boat more than Jno. Aubrey. And boats are good things to love!

* Hrm. Do I have one of these? I get the feeling sometimes that much of POB fandom is composed of Stephen!girls, and I'm very much Jack's, which can occasionally cause characterizations mismatches. I tend to give Jack massive amounts of credit, and to read him in the most generous way possible.

* everything happens in this canon - it's why it's so much fun! If I were really to confess to my own id, I might say that I wish we got canonical Jack!torture that was as deliciously ott as Stephen's experiences at Port Mahon - but that's a very very selfish wish.

[lotesse]

* Daaaaaaniel. He's just so ickle and has the biggest eyes ever and how on earth does he love so much so quickly? But I regret Daniel as often as I coo over him, because he has to let go of so much - and I'm an academic, and I have such a hard time dealing with the way that he increasingly has to leave intellectual pursuits behind. I want things for Daniel, and he never seems to get them.

* Jack/Daniel is the obvious otp, but I dunno how hard I'd actually ship it in a vacuum. It's all the lovely fanwork that sells me on it! Daniel/Teal'c is, imo, fundamentally sexier. I really, really want the Teal'c and Daniel show, without the SGC at all. Sam/Daniel is sweet and dear, but doesn't give me the same kind of fire. I wish that there were more to Sha're, so that I could say I shipped that.

* Daniel/Egypt, with linked Daniel/Stargate. I maintain that the show made a mistake when it abandoned its close connection to Egyptian mythology - that's what originally set it apart from genericized sf, what made it shiny. Egypt is Daniel's heart-home: it means parents and childhood and safety and family. Daniel studied Egypt as a means of keeping some connection to everything he'd lost, some connection to his mother and father and home. When he lost his academic standing he lost Egypt; the Stargate gave it back to him, more purely than he ever could have had it on earth. Abydos is every dream he's ever had of a belonging-place. Look at his faaaace with Hathor - standing in front of the embodied subject that's nourished his mind for as long as he can remember. Sometimes the dreams turn into nightmares, but there's still a fundamental consonance between them and him.

* I think I'm a lot more stubborn about the shift in Daniel's characterization over the course of the show than a lot of folks are - I don't always handle change well, and in Daniel's case they changed him away from archetypes I like towards ones I don't. I am not entirely accepting of Daniel the Badass Paratrooper, and I get sad about the increasing buffness and lack of spectacles and dorky enthusiastic hand-talking.

* For Daniel to get to keep something, even just once? For Daniel to be allowed to have research interests? *sigh*

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, thank you for this. I admit that Jack/Queenie had not occured to me because I have this vision of a little boy being brought up by the neighbour's daughter.

But since they are only seven years apart, they could well be together later on...you would not like to write that?

I'm very much Jack's, which can occasionally cause characterizations mismatches. I tend to give Jack massive amounts of credit, and to read him in the most generous way possible.
*nods*
I am completely of your mind. I feel Jack is much undervalued very often.
*sighs*

I might say that I wish we got canonical Jack!torture that was as deliciously ott as Stephen's experiences at Port Mahon - but that's a very very selfish wish.
Yesyesyeses. Unfortunately we do not even get fanfic Jack!torture or at least Jack!hurt-Stephen!comfort because Stephen is just the pits when it comes to bedside manners...

Thank you.

[esteven]

Sorry, the anon Jack Aubrey reply wuz me. :D

[paian]

::happy sigh:: Beautiful thoughts, beautifully articulated. I so hear you about Daniel and research, Daniel and Egypt ... Daniel and things-perforce-left-behind in general. Thor's Hammer, Heliopolis, Atlantis -- things slipping out of his grasp just as his fingers make contact.

Thanks for doing this!

[princessofgeeks]

i totally agree about the egypt thing. sigh.

i find it very hard to ship daniel/teal'c, because of the whole sha're thing. i would love to hear you say more about that because i am open to it, but it just seems way too fraught.

maybe in an au???? *ponders*

thank you for this.

[lotesse]

I think this one might be up to a ymmv - as a reader/writer, I don't have a lot of problems with adultery. It doesn't read as partner betrayal to me, esp. when there's some sort of extenuating circumstance.

Fidelity is not a big deal to me in my personal life. Secrecy and sneaking upset me, but I have a very poly/open mindset when it comes to longterm sexual partnerships. It's not Daniel's fault that he and Sha're are not together, and if they could be he'd go to her, but since they can't I got no trouble with him finding solace or happiness elsewhere.

[lotesse]

(to talk about St. John I have to talk about Rochester as well - in my head they work as a structure)

* I really, REALLY don't like St. John, but immediately on the heels of that negative feeling comes an awareness that I'm being unfair, irrational and weird - because I ADORE Rochester, and am willing to make all sorts of excuses for him, and I know rationally that St. John isn't a worse man, really. But he just sets me off! St. John withholds love, which is a cardinal sin in my books.

* St. John Rivers should not have sex. At least until he can stop thinking that strength and lovability are opposite things. I could read him as queer, I guess, but who on earth could you slash him with?!

* On the other hand, I do love his relationship with his sisters; he's shown to his best advantage in Moor House. Part of why I want him removed from sex for a while!

* Does Jane Eyre fandom have a mainstream? Not sure how to answer this!

* I do sort of want the one where St. John gets the fuck over it, and removes the stick from his ass, and can marry Rosamond Oliver. But there's also something deeply gorgeous in the flawed imperfection of his canonical ending, wherein he's both transcendentally wise and fundamentally stupid at once.

[lotesse]

* I love Susan and I fear her. Susan's story, for me, was always a warning about self-betrayal: she essentially chooses being cool over being nerdy, and there was a lot of pressure on me as a kid to do the same. It's easy for Lucy to be Different, and it doesn't seem to hurt her, but Susan wants to fit in and be popular and she can't quite hold on to her own selfhood in the process. I don't blame her for this, and never did, but even as a little girl I felt sad for Susan, who ends up imo a girl victimized and rendered inauthentic by patriarchy.

* Susan can have sex with whoever she wants, baby! It's all good.

* The Pevensies as a group fascinate me, and Susan in particular is interesting in the context of her siblings. Susan strikes me as someone who takes kinship connections very seriously, and has deep feelings of duty surrounding concepts of Family. Sometimes I feel like she tries much harder for them than they do for her; I can get very angry at the other three for not missing her more at the end of LB.

* While I understand the centrality that the Problem of Susan has for a lot of Narnia readers, it doesn't have huge amounts of emotional weight for me. I was raised in a nonstructured vaguely Transcendentalist spiritualist faith, and when I read Narnia as a kid I never thought of it as bound to Christianity. Aslan was a Sacrificial God, and so was Christ - but then again, so was Baldr, and so was Osiris, and many others. Christian prejudice against femininity didn't enter into my understanding of Susan's end - it was that she abandoned her dreams, not that she was a dirty slut.

* ... buuuut on the other hand, oh man do I want her to get to smack Rabadash down! Come on, girl, don't let your brothers have all the fun!

[lotesse]

* McGonagall is totally badass, and I want to be her when I grow up. Scottish witches ftw!

* I do rather ship her with Trelawney, both because of the potential for hilarity and because they're oddly touching together. And dark historical McGonagall/Tom Riddle has infinite potential for badwronghot.

* non-romantic McGonagall/Hermione. Seriously, honey, this is how you work your power - why do we not get more of a connection between them in the books?!

* I'm too long out of this fandom to know what's popular/unpopular. Hm. Everyone seems to ship her with Dumbledore and I don't get it?

* iiiiif I'd read the seventh book I'd feel much more sure of my answer to this.

[princessofgeeks]

i'm sorry -- i wasn't clear. not that daniel would be cheating on sha're.

that teal'c chose her to be a host for a goa'uld and later killed her. that's what i can't get around when i think about daniel/teal'c.

[ilthit]

I drew Trelawney/McGonagall once, as I recall! I think it was for a challenge of some sort.

I am out of the fandom too. You can't really have McGonagall/Dumbledore, though, since Dumbles is canonically gay (not bi), but they did have the kind of a closeness I might AU-ship.

Figure the seventh book would be too traumatic, or are you waiting to see HP7 p.2?

[anghraine]

*glee*

I ... um, mostly love all of this (somebody gets it! yes!). Luke needs cuddling! And the OT3 of Most Obvious Subtext Ever, and God, SKYWALKERS, anyway is pretty much the best summary of the whole saga ever. I'd love to see Han and Luke talking about Things. (Han-Leia too -- I think there's a lot that Luke and Leia might not be able to say directly to each other. But definitely Han and Luke.)

I honestly never thought of the issue with the Jedi Order -- as exclusively in the OT, I mean. I think Luke is fully committed to the Jedi Order, but hopefully to something more than recreating their Order.

[lotesse]

No - by the time Book 7 came out I was in the "I don't ever want to see you again" stage of the breakup, and since then I just honestly haven't had the interest. I occasionally revisit early potterverse texts/fanworks, but I'm really happiest pre-Three-Year-Summer.

[lotesse]

Oh - see, that's what I like about it, that Teal'c is so hopelessly sewn up in Daniel's family tragedy, and vice versa. It has a very formal, structural sort of symmetry to it - my only love born from my only hate, you know, that sort of thing. All the inescapable weight of classical tragedy with modern trappings.

[lotesse]

* I like Daine really a lot, mainly I think because she offers me an easy proxy. She's sweet and smart and can get the work done. She's not terrifyingly perfect, the way Alanna can sometimes feel to me, and I like that she's relatively femme for a Tortall protag.

* So I ship Daine/Numair? Like, passionately? Like, oh my god when I was thirteen years old and I read that bit at the end of Emperor Mage I think I sighed gustily for about a quarter of an hour? But one of the nice things about Daine is that she has a whole life before all that, and there are a lot of other folk I can ship her with in the short term: Miri or Evin Larse or Kaddar or even Perin.

* Onua! Onua Chamtong is bloody well amazing, and she's strong and she doesn't take any guff and she's been there for Daine from the first, and they're really more alike than anyone else in those books. I love the way their relationship defies conventual sex/kinship descriptors - not mother, not lover, not sister, but nevertheless intimate and essential and right.

* I don't care even a little bit - even at all - about the D/N age difference, or about the fact that he was her teacher. (I also am not sure, as someone who is a teacher, that I would define their early relationship with that word. He doesn't seem to hold any systemic power over her, for one thing - it's not like she gets grades, or like his evaluation of her will have impact on her future.) If she's old enough to fight beside him, she's old enough to have sex with him. Magically speaking she's more than his equal, and I almost feel like that matters more - I have more discomfort with the magical power differential between Numair and Varice, frex, than I ever have with the D/N age diff.

* I HATE the secondhand canon for Daine in the Trickster books - I hate what happens, and I hate that it happens offscreen. I really wanted the story about how Daine Sarrasri didn't get married and had a family anyway - it galls me crazy hard that she has to get married because of an impending baby. I'd love to have seen that negotiation of patriarchy and desire firsthand, to have been privy at least to the whys and wherefores of their decision, instead of having the whole affair brushed off as obvious.

[lotesse]

I love him SO MUCH, my GOD. The last couple of years, every time I rewatch the OT I get more and more heart-clenchy over him.

[lotesse]

No no no, I want someone ELSE to write Jack/Queenie, so that I can read it! I'm specialized in the wrong century, I'm afraid.

[princessofgeeks]

i can see that from a distance, which is why i wish you would say more about it. because it really totally doesn't click for me, but i want to grok it!

[ilthit]

Aubreyad was something I read because Gilly was nuts about it, and she was always a Jack girl.

They're really good books, in a lot of ways! I loved the subtle fourth-wall breakage, humor, and especially the way the novels were constructed to read like real-life accounts rather than adventures with strict form, beginning, middle, end and a point, if you know what I mean. Fantastic characterisations too, though I never thought O'Brian wrote women half as well as men. So, I enjoyed them, but for some reason never really engaged much with it fannishly, except under pressure. It's funny what draws one's fandom love and what doesn't!