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

[lotesse]

loved first: Will. How could you not? You start by loving him for being a sweet kid, and then you wind up loving him like the lost part of your own heart, and there's nothing you can do about it.

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.