Entry tags:
take that moon and wrap it in cellophane
meme, snagged from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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
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
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love more now: Riza, who was underdeveloped in the first anime run, but who was a wonderful surprise in FMA:Brotherhood. I'm pleasantly surprised at the fact that not shipping Roy/Riza doesn't impede my liking her at all - she's written as a character independent of that romance, and that's something bloody special.
don't get the love: The Briggs crew, with the exception of Olivia. I don't know why, but I haven't been able to access a lot of narrative interest in them. Something about the timing, maybe?
who do people hate in this fandom? Um, gotta take a raincheck, I've no idea.
love less now: Probably Al - I was much more into a sort of insular/Elric-centric reading of Hagaren at first than I am now. I have a Thing for Crazy Space Incest style ships, and Ed and Al got slotted into that - but then I fell hard for Roy Mustang, and the landscape of my affections shifted somewhat :)
kiss: ROY. ROY ROY ROY COME ON OVER HERE BABY AND LET MAMA GIVE YOU SOME HOT SWEET SUGAR. CAN I HAVE TWO, AND THROW MAES HUGHES IN AS WELL? BEING A PANTS-MELTINGLY GOOD DADDY AND ALL-AROUND BOSS? Ahem. Yes well.
be: Izumi Curtis, who is badass but still compassionate, driven but loving, absolutely in the right and able to forgive anyway, scary as hell and don't you forget about it. Best. Rolemodel. Ever.
slap: fucking Hohenheim. I really hated that smug bastard in Brotherhood - lecturing Ed like he had some fucking right. Shut up and go away, old man.
pairing that I love: Ed/Roy. It's just soooo goooood, I don't even know why, it is like good drugs & sweet candy. Something about the - the breathlessness, the fervor, the passion.
pairing I don't: Ed/Winry. Winry deserves better - she's smart and awesome and together and could do way better than someone as fundamentally freaky and messed up as Ed is. The only way it could work would be to normalize Ed - as canon does - and that makes me sad because I LIKE Ed weird best!
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love more now: Teal'c. It took me a while to notice Teal'c - the show sidelines him, and then whenever it centers him it's to give him an unconvincing romantic relationship with a non-central character and - sigh. But every time I watch this show through, it's like the part of my brain that's always engaged in chanting "Teal'c Teal'c Teal'c" is getting louder :)
don't get the love: not a character, but in general the episodes I've watched from the latter half of the show's run completely and utterly fail to do anything for me. I guess I'm glad most people don't feel the same, for their sake?
nobody else gets the love: weirdly, I really enjoy Ke'ra. I have no idea. God help me, I think they're *cute.*
love less now: Sad to say, gotta be Jack O'Neill. A lot of this is due to shifts in writing and characterization over the show's run, and so is not entirely his fault, but - oh, I wish this show developed in a different direction!
kiss: Daniel. Dat mouth, baby, dat mouth.
be: movieverse Shau'ri, who is badass and literate and knows when she's found the right guy :)
slap: Jacob Carter, for not putting his allegiance to his family above his allegiance to the Tok'Ra, for not doing anything about the ridiculous way the Tok'Ra end up abusing the SGC and its people.
pairing I love: Jack/Daniel, for the way it shifts the narrative trajectory of the thing into a direction I can bear.
pairing I don't: any relationship ever given to Sam Carter? Not in theory - in theory she should be hooking up with hot dudes and/or chicks all over the place - but I don't find a one of her love interests satisfactory, and yes that includes Janet. Not enough spark!
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I'm with you on so much of this, and I don't think you're alone in your feelings about the second half of the run. I do like a lot of S5 through S8, but they killed my team (offstage, in a line of dialogue) in 'Moebius,' and the series that won my heart was that first half; I know that a lot of fans came on board in the last two years, or found passion for a show they were getting tired of, and I'm glad for them too, but I pretty much did nothing but bitch and moan during S9/S10, and most of those episodes I've never watched a second time. So I'm also glad there's enduring love for the original team, and for the Daniel-who-was.
Oh, also, I never considered Jacob Carter that way, and you make an excellent point about him and the Tok'ra. Food for thought!
I'm happy to see below that people asked for Prydain and Downton Abbey. Yay for meme!
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love more now: Queenie, who it took me a while to find - she's kind of dispersed through the text, so you have to patch her together, but now yeah I'm pretty sure she's the coolest!
don't get the love: Diana. She RUINS EVERYTHING by making it all dark and ambivalent and complicated, and damn it I'm here for debauched sloths and Jack's puns and the constant endearments, I don't want things to be dark and complicated! And I don't find Diana cool enough as a character to pay for the loss of easiness and cheer she causes - yes, yes, gorgeous remote impetuous brunette plays games with hearts, yeah sure whatever. I find Sophie and her sisters much more interesting, and think it's a shame we don't see more of them, but Diana Villiers I could really do without.
nobody else gets the love: the flipside of the above, poor Sophie, who I find charming and sweet. She's the more outwardly femme of the two characters, and for this reason is too often dismissed as a wetblanket or a nursemaid or a ninny. I would love it if she were not relegated to land but let to come to sea, the way Diana does - if she were allowed more into the meat of the story. Now THAT I could OT3: Jack/Sophie/Stephen anyone?
love less now: hrm. do I love any of them less? I do not think I do!
kiss: TAKE ME NOW JACK AUBREY, TAKE ME LIKE THE LUBRICIOUS SEAMAN YOU ARE.
be: I AM NOT AT ALL CONVINCED OF THE WISDOM OF ATTEMPTING TO BE LIKE ANYONE IN THE AUBREYAD.
slap: Jack Aubrey, until his bottom is nice and red :P
pairing I love: Jack/Stephen. They are just too cute for words. I love how much they bitch; I love how little the bitching means, most of the time.
pairing I don't: Stephen/Diana. I don't TRUST HER, it's not SAFE, NOTHING GOOD WILL COME OF THIS.
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Has not astolat written something in that line? :D
Queenie is a great character, even in RL. Have you ever read the diaries of Fanny Burney?
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love more now: Jane Drew. I lumped her in with her brothers as a kid, & was very impatient with the three from the track - I was riding high on Old Ones and their delicious delicious angst, what were these three mundies doing in the mix? But now I like Jane for her proximity to magic - not enchanted but close to enchantment all the same - and for her ability to empathize with things and persons very different from herself. She doesn't need to steal glory from legend the way Simon and to a lesser extent Barney try to do. She can just be Jane, and have that be enough.
don't get the love: thinking ... thinking ... yeah, no, I think I always get the love!
nobody else gets the love: this seems to me like it might be a moment to go on a bit about Paul Stanton. I mean, I've never seen anyone hating on him, but the quantity of love he gets is not equal to his awesome. Paul Stanton = ftw. That bit with him in the church is my favorite someone-finds-out scene.
love less now: Hawkin. As a child-reader I sympathized with him tremendously & fumed inwardly about the injustice done to him. Now - well, I find myself sort of abstracted from the whole thing. I no longer believe that the world offers everyone a fair chance, you know? What happens to Hawkin sucks, but so does poverty and rape and racial injustice - and he's in no way innocent. I can't muster up the same levels of indignation on his behalf that I once could.
kiss: Bran Davies. Will thinks Welsh babies must dribble a lot - I just want big wet Welsh kisses. Bran needs kissing, and badly. He's a closed bud, and I want to see him open and bloom.
be: well, I already AM Will Stanton, so there's that. This, I think, is the reason why I glommed on to these books so hard as a child - Will expressed something about my child-self's alienation that she didn't find anywhere else. My great sorrow as a kid was that everyone treated me like a child - but I wanted to do REAL things, to talk about big subjects, to have work to do that MATTERED. I was a bright kid who found her best friends in adults not children. Finding the internet was a joy forever, because at last I felt that I was free of the shackles of appearance. People treated me like an adult online because I wrote like an adult, and nobody knew I was a thirteen-year-old girl. So Will let me both feel good & Special for that, and explore the attendant loneliness and alienation, and even now I find that these books have important things to say to me about knowledge and solitude that really strike home.
slap: John Rowlands, but only sometimes. It's not totally his fault - Will sells himself as the impervious Old One a little too well - but John could use a reminder that he's also only a child, and certain things don't need to be said aloud in front of him, ie all the business about the coldness at the heart of the light. Talk like John's gives Will the pretext to actually believe that he himself is cold and remote - which he's not - which is foolish. He withdraws on his own choice, of course, but I wonder how much of the originary impulse doesn't come from the way everyone expects him to always already have done so.
pairing I love: Will/Bran, because it makes virtues out of sorrows. Because the first fucking thing Will thinks about Bran is that he wants to ease his hurts and dismantle his defenses. Because Will actually tells Bran things - things that he doesn't tell anyone else, not even Merriman, things not about abstract concepts but about his own feelings and hopes and fears. Because Bran watches Will's back and warns the Drews off from making things too hard for him. Taking that away from both of them was the cruelest thing any author has ever done, damn it. Of all the terrible endings, this one might be the worst, perhaps save only Narnia.
pairing I don't: while I can enjoy shipfic with the Drews, and have written Will/Bran/Jane myself, I don't ultimately find them necessary in the same way. I see them as impermanent, these children that Will & Bran & Merriman interacted with for a while and then let go on the currents of time and space. And somehow that part doesn't feel sad to me.
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love more now: Fflewddur, whose steadfast unassuming companionship and good mentoring heart I didn't value at near its worth until I grew up enough to be able to look at Taran and Eilonwy as the children they are, and marvel at Fflewddur's patience with them. I love the way he falls into step behind them, yielding dominance without a peep. It takes a great man to be able to follow where children lead.
don't get the love: truth told, Gwydion. He's great and everything, but my loins are not aflame.
nobody else gets the love: who do people not love in this series? Everybody gets loved!
love less now: Dallben. I used to think he was funny, now he actively hacks me off. It's the gender ideology - he's the only one who pushes that line of bullshit, and it's just so stupid and unnecessary and shut UP, Dallben, sheesh. We don't need to be told about the Big Essential Differences between girls and boys.
kiss: Taran, because you know he'd mean it with all his heart and body :)
be: what does it say about me that my first impulse is Achren? :) She can actually be fun to channel, if you need an infusion of badass in your mojo. More seriously, probably Adaon - but that might be why I never liked the guy all that much. He's too clearly designated as The One Y'all Should Strive to Be Like.
slap: I would do violence to Magg all day long, and lo it would be glorious.
pairing I love: Taran/Eilonwy, but increasingly for what it could be rather than what it canonically is. There's so much between them that canon doesn't resolve that's essential to the ship - I mean, the power dynamics alone!
pairing I don't: Achren/Gwydion seems to be a happy place for a lot of folks, but it leaves me cold. ymmv!
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loved first: this comes down to a tie between Rose and Alec, and really it's the both of them together - those opening scenes of EC are too sweet and lovely and dear for words. I loved her first for her bad spelling and him first for loosening her belt, and the sweet way they're both open about how strange their relationship is for both of them, the way they share that uncertainty.
love more now: the plotline in RiB with Charlie. I never shipped it, so as a kid found it somewhat tiresome, but now -! What a depiction of patriarchy! From the way Charlie manipulates Rose to her feeling of moral responsibility for him, the way people expect her to Change Him With Her Love, the way her love cools into responsibility and boils away into shame - ultimately leading to the resolution that you can't change men with love, you have to change the society that screws them up and protect your own heart. It's breathtakingly radical even now.
don't get the love: continued from the above somewhat - Charlie. Charlie was never attractive to me, I don't know why, but it seems like a lot of the fanwork I find for these books is either trying to redeem him or enjoying his wickedness. Yeah, I'm just not there. Never was, don't think I'm ever likely to be.
nobody else gets the love: FOR MAC! I mean, the author does, so I can't complain too much, but seriously y'all Mac is a mensch.
love less now: Aunt Jessie. I find now that she mouthpieces for all Alcott's positions that I don't share - opposition to slang, for one thing! Interesting that the male mouthpiece (Alec) gets the good lines, the female mouthpiece all the ones that police pleasure & so put me off.
kiss: Either Mac or Alec, depending on what book we're in :)
be: as above with The Dark is Rising, Rose is a character I've always seen myself in, the reason why I love these books best of all Alcott's work. Rose represents something you don't see that often in girls' lit - a nice prettyish girl who isn't a tragic figure or an outcast, but who still has to struggle to find out what she wants to be, how she can fulfill her ideals, what the right choice is and what the wrong, how to balance social expectation with individual growth. She's not a shocking beauty, but she's also not an ugly duckling - and she's a blonde who isn't a Barbie. As a character, Rose helped me come to terms with the fact that even blonde girls with loving families are allowed to have problems, to feel unsure or alienated, to struggle. That girls who aren't geniuses can still be smart and good, that ordinary virtues can and do matter.
slap: Aunt Clara? Prince Charlie - particularly in the affair of the ear-rings? A horrid spiteful part of me always wants to fly up at Aunt Peace for being a Dickensian angel in the house without any of the charm that Beth March brings to the part.
pairing I love: Mac/Rose. Many a lamplit evening have I spent poring over the last chapters of RiB, many a gusty sigh have I vented. It's everything I want in a box, wrapped up with a bow.
pairing I don't: Archie/Phebe. I mean, I think I could like it, but as written it has this odd feeling of slow inevitability that isn't at all attractive to me. Either more or less?
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love more now: Luke. I think I needed to stop being a teenager before I could really love Luke properly, because he's such an inelegant ode to the importance of being earnest & true. A lot of what I find so damn lovable in Luke is his willingness to assume the position of the child, to surrender the power of adulthood and become abject and passive. Luke adopts childishness as his armor - AND IT WORKS - but when you're a child yourself, desperate to grow up and be taken seriously, it rankles when your heroes act like nothing more than kids. Luke has a fascinating relationship to backwardness and melancholia - he realizes that he has most affective power as Vader's child, and totally surrenders himself into that role. But he's also the one who refuses to move on, grow up, who keeps dwelling on the past and old wounds and old losses.
don't get the love: Boba Fett. The hell, fanboys, I do not understand your thought processes. wtfpolarbear. Also slave!Leia, because I can't imagine looking at that and seeing potential fap material rather than the torment, exposure, and shaming of a character that I adore. I'm really, really glad that Han was blind for those scenes; if Lucas had him cracking wise, I might've had to bust out a boomstick and deal some retribution.
nobody else gets the love (except yoooou): Luke! Although I can totally see why people are uncomfortable with him and try to dismiss him as a whiner - as above, I think you can read a really powerful critique of western patriarchy in Luke's story, and a lot of this fandom is nothing if not masculinist.
love less now: Yoda. which makes me sad, but. I'm increasingly frustrated with the failure of the galaxy far far away to deal with the fact that Yoda is wrong about pretty much everything. He teaches Luke a path of paranoid passivity where secrets are okay and sacrifices are noble and then Luke goes out and actually PROVES THAT THIS IS NOT THE CASE, that love is stronger than fear, that human bonds and connections of the heart are all that really matter, that acting in love is better than waiting in paranoia, that you can be the change you seek in the world. And then nobody ever mentions that, and the film still presents Yoda as some sort of real guru, and I just facepalm. The Yodapuppet is a wonderful thing, and I love the little guy's lines as much as anyone, but he was wrong in some really fundamental ways and with that not acknowledged he kind of comes off as an ass when you stop and think about it.
kiss: well, okay, if we're going for pure animal attraction Han Solo pretty much wins the day. He can make the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs :P
be: haha lol Mon Mothma - the other only woman in the universe!
slap: Obi-Wan Kenobi, you stinker, I'll get you yet. You are a manipulative lying jackwipe and you totally SET THAT KID UP to get emotionally blindsided and killed yourself in front of him in a passive-aggressive move to get him to commit patricide and WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU ANYWAY the whole time Luke was growing up COME ON DUDE YOU KNOW YOU SHAME.
pairing I love: my heart belongs to the OT3, but I'm really pretty happy with any combination of the Core Three. That said,
pairing I don't: Han/Leia as all too often written by TPTB/the EU/fanboys. I think sometimes that Han/Leia is only good due to an accident of edition - it's lolarious but all the Han/Leia cut scenes are pretty much sexism fests. As a ship it steers perilously close to the kind of sexy!rape you get in Gone With the Wind style romance - "could use a good kiss," ect. It's only cute as long as Leia's absolute right to control and choice is a given for all parties involved, and canonically Han doesn't ever contest that, not really, but it's soooo easy for other people to put it there that I'm very very cautious when engaging with Han/Leia content.
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And there's that melancholy and backwards-looking, too - he's often described as invariably hopeful, but he strikes me as more often fatalistic. I get a much stronger sense of "I have to try even though it may very well turn out badly" than "everything's going to be fine!"
And the discomfort with him being tied to the nature of the fanbase - that makes perfect sense, too. And it makes sense of things like - I recently saw a discussion of the "I am a Jedi, like my father before me" moment where at least half were complaining that he throws his lightsaber away, that was stupid, he could have kept fighting why is he giving up, omg he's such a wimp etc etc. Even knowing what the fandom is like, it was pretty much ... holy comprehension failure, Batman! But it does come down to that masculinism, I think.
Also: ditto especially to stepping very carefully around Han/Leia. It's obviously based on Rhett/Scarlett, and canon barely avoids straying over the line into squicky consent issues (mostly because of ROTJ). A lot of the other stuff dances right over it. (And ditto for Obi-Wan. In ANH, you can actually see him timing his death for maximum psychological trauma, wtf.)
(And also that a lot of the discomfort with Yoda is that the text doesn't call him on it, as it does Obi-Wan - when he's the one who specifies that he didn't think Vader would ever tell Luke, making it possible that they'd NEVER have told him what he'd be doing if Vader himself hadn't acknowledged him, never mind that it also implies a ludicrous level of not-getting-it re: Anakin/Vader. And - okay, I think I agree with everything.)
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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.
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love more now: these books. I read the complete works of Lloyd Alexander as a little kid, and bounced off of these at the time. I had the same relationship to them that I would eventually develop to Dune and Brave New World and Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, where I could tell that there was something weird and important and maybe grown up going on but couldn't put my finger on it, and so read them again and again without relaxed pleasure, with a sort of watchful puzzlement. They were too significant for me to trust them enough to look away, but I just didn't understand. I was too little. Now, I know what it is that's so important - these books are about war and dreams.
don't get the love: Justin. I've never been able to figure out a narrative purpose for Justin - someone for Theo to be jealous of? That seems thin.
nobody else gets the love: AHAHA THERE ARE LIKE THREE PEOPLE IN THIS FANDOM, WE ALL GET THE LOVE.
love less now: Sparrow. I liked Sparrow really a lot as a kid, because I thought a girl water rat was a pretty groovy thing, but I find now that I really don't love the relationship she has with Keller, the degree to which she's subsumed in him.
kiss: Florian is the hottest revolutionary in the bunch - but it'd be extra fun if a girl could have him and Zara as well :)
slap: Lloyd Alexander, for not playing by the rules of children's literature this time, and giving me pain!
be: oh, Mickle, no question. Mickle might be the strongest Strong Female Character Alexander ever built - maybe Vesper Holly's better, but Mickle is so solid and powerful, she comes from such nothing to such badassitude, she holds it all together, she's got a CONSORT and he's cute and everything but she's the queen here, buster, don't get any big ideas.
pairing I love: I'm a sucker for Standard Alexander Male Lead/Standard Alexander Female Lead, so Theo/Mickle makes me mighty happy - but Theo/Florian also has its delights, and I refuse to pick just one of 'em.
pairing I don't: Sparrow/Keller and Justin/Florian.