L ([info]fantasyjax) wrote,
@ 2009-06-20 13:17:00
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Current mood: awake

In the meantime
I tried to this ten favorite characters meme and realized that oh man it's hard. I'm very fond of a lot of characters, but picking up ten that are really my very absolute favoritest is Something Complerely Different. I've managed to come up with a list of ten who are, in one way or another, special to me, but it's like pending revision forever.

They are, sort of in order:

1. Werner Locksmith (Planetes)
2. Romana, both of her (Doctor Who)
3. Feanor (The Silmarillion)
4. The Fourth Doctor (Doctor Who)
5. Roj Blake (Blake's 7)
6. Steel (Sapphire & Steel)
7. Sapphire (Sapphire & Steel)
8. Dominique Francon (The Fountainhead)
9. Hagan Gebicung (Attila's Treasure)
10. Delenn (Babylon 5)

(I'm kind of in a bind about the last two, because I love them, but they aren't special like the others. Don't be asking me what that means.)

... I have no idea what they have in common. Like at all.


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[info]hearts_blood
2009-06-20 12:15 pm UTC (link)
Well, I can only speak for about half of them (Four, Blake, Steel, Sapphire, Delenn), but they all have an almost iron-clad dedication to doing the right thing, even if it isn't necessarily pleasant or expedient.

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[info]fantasyjax
2009-06-20 12:43 pm UTC (link)
ICON LOVE YES.

Hmm... this would be quite true for Hagan as well, and Romana if you look at her in this light... and the other three for a given value of the right thing? Because Locksmith and Feanor are both egomaniacal bastards but that's exactly what makes them miracle-workers... I don't know how Dominique would figure into that, though.

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[info]hearts_blood
2009-06-20 01:19 pm UTC (link)
Hee, I thought you'd like that icon!

For Dominique, doing the right thing is equivalent to doing her own thing. She doesn't want to please anybody except herself, because she knows it's futile. It's not out of greed or lust, but out of inner fulfillment. Them's principles right there.

It looks like all your characters share the same sort of qualities: they're all 'individualistic, objectivist and uncompromising.'

Edited at 2009-06-20 01:20 pm UTC

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[info]fantasyjax
2009-06-20 03:10 pm UTC (link)
Blake is so inherently iconable. It's the rebel passion.

I'm a bit wary of this definition because... well, what protagonist isn't individualistic, objectivist etc.? But it's true that all of them - I think even Delenn and Romana - have an ends-justify mentality. There's no one on this list I see hesitating to make cold choices... though it's hard to apply this to Four? Hmm... lol, I wonder what this means psychologically.

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[info]hearts_blood
2009-06-20 05:49 pm UTC (link)
Actually, I'd have to rescind the 'objectivist' part of the statement... Blake really isn't an objective-thinking person at all. I mean, at all. He's only about very specific parts of The Big Picture.

I think Four is very able to make hard choices (ie Genesis of the Daleks). He's just so outwardly goofy and dysfunctional that the difficulties he faces slip under the radar.

And what does it say about me that find Avon and Travis 1.0 inherently more fascinating than Blake? ;)

BTW, I have some Blake/Jenna fic you might be interested in reading, when you have time... it's not posted anywhere, though, so if you wanted to read it, I'd have to send it to you.

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[info]fantasyjax
2009-06-20 06:28 pm UTC (link)
I think my view of Blake is very much colored by not taking anything for granted about him. For me, he's as broken as any of them, maybe even moreso, his brokeness just manifests in very different ways. I think I might've written something about it... I should dig it up. Avon and Travis wear their problems on their sleeves, as it were, and I've never been attracted to that sort of character, but Blake - he's so beautifully suspended between profound goodness and profound emptiness, he's a great man because if he wasn't he'd go mad, and this sounds all very bizarre doesn't it?

I always thought Four didn't make the hard choice in Genesis, and I really appreciated that, because narratively I expected otherwise. And of course, of all the Doctors, he is the least human.

ALSO YES GIMME. Do you have my email...?

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[info]hearts_blood
2009-06-20 06:52 pm UTC (link)
It sounds blissfully bizarre in the best way because I'm always looking for new perspectives on things I spend far too much time thinking about. I totally agree with you on Blake's inherent broken-ness; it just always seems to me like he's the only one of them that never found a "constructive" way to deal with it, even after he became Rebel Man. I also see a lot of evidence that Blake's privileged background is a handicap in the day-to-day practical operation of a revolution, which is what I've mainly focused on.

And you're quite right: Four didn't make the hard choice--he made the choice that was right for him, the one that he could sleep with at night. I doubt he got that option very often.

I'LL GIVE YOU MY (WIP) STORY IF YOU'LL GIVE ME YOUR 'BLAKE-IS-BROKEN' STORY/ESSAY/THING. And nope, don't have your email.

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[info]fantasyjax
2009-06-20 09:33 pm UTC (link)
... I should totally write you a nice long meta response for this but ack it's half past midnight so I'll do that tomorrow. In the meantime my email is lofmanythings@gmail.com and I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Although mine is just 350 words granted, alas.

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[info]hearts_blood
2009-06-21 02:48 pm UTC (link)
Sented, in case it ends up in your spam box, the subject line is "Big damn damaged hero fic."

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[info]persephone_il
2009-06-20 02:24 pm UTC (link)
Also, seven out of ten are nonhumans in one way or another (Hagan counts as nonhuman, right?)

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[info]fantasyjax
2009-06-20 03:06 pm UTC (link)
Oh wow I didn't realize that that's kind of awesome you know? And Dominique and Locksmith are both absolute freakin' disfunctions as humans.

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[info]persephone_il
2009-06-20 07:05 pm UTC (link)
I think you have a thing for the alien - whether literally or figuratively. Because we who have been aliens in our own society, blah blah angstcakes. (Or maybe I'm projecting. Meh.)

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