vilakins | Thoughts on the characters I like

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Thoughts on the characters I like

On selenak's journal, there's an interesting discussion about gender: why there are more men than women on bulletin boards, and more women than men on LJ and in fandom RPGs, and whether gender is a factor in the characters one likes. I didn't get into the LJ/BB discussion (I think there are greater differences between individuals than the sexes) but some very perceptive comments from alara_r made me think about the characters I go for.

Like alara_r, I like to have female characters in my original fiction (most of which is still in my head). Actually, I like to cast characters gender-blind as I do with OCs in fanfic, but the main character, from whose POV the story unfolds, is almost always a female and usually an outsider, often a trickster or in a position of military command (e.g. a general).

As for the characters I like in my fandoms, up till now I thought I'd always gone for aliens (Spock, Data, the holograhic Doctor, Seven, Garak, G'Kar, Londo, Vir) but along came Vila three years ago and bowled me over. I didn't think he fit the pattern because he's so very human. However alara_r's remarks about preferring certain archetypes most of which are cast as males, opened my eyes. It's not that they're aliens, it's that they're all outsiders, including Vila. Vila and Garak are also tricksters, another archetype I'm attracted to. I also like childlike, humorous, and often damaged characters like Vir, Vila, Wash, and Stark.

Another type I go for is the geek, and geeks are usually cast as male. Kaylee and Willow are pleasant surprises and I like them both a lot, but in the case of Buffy (I'm still in S1) Giles is my favourite. alara_r described him as a the mentor type, but I actually see him as much more a geek, but in a very non-tech way; he's a scholar--unlike Avon. Avon has a lot of geek attributes but somehow for me, his self-confidence (whether apparent or real), sarcasm (wonderful though it is) and affinity with hand-held ordinance outweigh that. He does geeky things on occasion, but I'm not sure he's really a geek.

I also like some strong and independent characters like Picard and Janeway, I think because they're also very intelligent and somewhat isolated by the chain of command (hmm, the geek and outsider again).

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I have always wondered why on earth Doctor Who is such an overwhelmingly male fandom. (*And* with such a high percentage of gay fans, which is interesting). Being at my first Who con with 300 male and four-five female attendees was a weird experience to say the least.

I have no idea why that is. I know lots of female Dr Who fans, but maybe they can't be bothered to get to cons. Star One was about 50-50 I think, as is the SF club here in Auckland and the multi-fandom cons they run.

B7 fandom has always seemed at least 50/50 male-female or even 65% female to me, which is interesting.

Female DW fans are not to be found on the usual Internet forums either. They seem to be out there but just not actively fannish. Could be that they're sick of the dick-measuring flamewars on the newsgroups, I sure as hell got fed up with them and don't go to Who forums anymore. I don't think any fandom has such viciousness and flaming (and yes, I've seen several flamewars in loads of fandoms). I think there's a certain type of scary, hostile absolutist personality that the Who fandom attracts, the sort of people who are obsessive *and* full of hatred and anger towards anything they percieve as a threat towards them. (And unfortunately I dated one.) I can only think of one or two people in B7 that are like that.

That's very odd. I can't imagine what it is about DW that attracts people like that. Or is it the media--BBs and forums? I don't like the B7 ones: far too many idiots who can't spell, compose a decent post, or even say anything intelligent in some cases. After an initial foray, I decided to avoid them. Mailing lists seem much more civilised and educated, and LJ is great because you can talk OT as much as you like. :-)

I hate BBs and Web forums with a passion, but it's mainly because I find the interfaces so irritating; much prefer mailing lists and LJs and newsgroups. But with Who it's mostly not the media, there are annoying folks everywhere. The ones I know on LJ are more civilised, but then most of them don't frequent the newsgroups anymore. *grin*

I just wondered if the medium made a difference, as each one seems to have a different culture. Hey, there's something for someone academic to research. :-)

I was surprised to read an essay (maybe by Richard Dyer?) saying that "Dr. Who fan" is the same kind of euphemism as "friend of Dorothy."

Ah, so now I know what the latter euphemism means. I think. Do I?

Yup!

Would that have arisen post-Queer as Folk (UK)?

No, that's been the cliche in the UK far longer than QaF's been around; it was incorporated into QaF because the writer knew the cliche from being in Who fandom, rather than vice versa.

Ah, thanks!

Good question, but I'm not sure. Sorry!

I've always gone for "outsider" characters, from the very earliest days of my proto-fannishness, or at the very least from the moment when I first encountered Mr. Spock. :) I've certainly always been drawn very strongly to the alien Trek characters... And in many ways, my favorite of the Trek shows was Deep Space 9, which I once heard someone describe as being different from the other Treks in that, rather than featuring one "outsider," it had a cast composed almost entirely of outsiders of one variety or another. (And, of course, my favorite far and away was still Odo, the most outsider-ish of them all.)

And, hmm, I hadn't thought of this before, but that's consistent with my obsession for Stark, too, really. That show's characters are all exotic aliens who are also alien to each other (even the human, really), but even in that context Stark stands out as an outsider.

Geeks, of course, are always attractive, too. Heck, my favorite Buffy character, after Giles, is either Andrew (possibly the ultimate epitome of geekiness) or Willow (classic girl-geek, especially in earlier seasons). In addition to the characters you mention, I'm also very fond of Harper from Andromeda (or was, before I stopped watching it), and I quite like Fred from Angel. Although my favorite Angel character, of course, is Lorne: not a geek, but very much an outsider. (Poor guy. The dimension where he can't walk down the street without attracting disbelieving stares is actually the one where he feels at home.)

In my case, really, it's outsiders, geeks, and cuddly wounded souls. Fortunately for me, those are all pretty common in SF shows, and often occur in conjunction with each other. :)

Your last para pretty much sums up my likes; you're so good at being concise. :-) And yes, Harper was another favourite before Andromeda jumped the shark and I gave up on it. The strong and capable characters I like must have one or more of those other attributes; the ones I'd write in my original fic certainly do.

I do like strong and capable characters, too, of course. And I have great admiration for resourcefulness and resiliency... The "wounded souls" who sit around and angst constantly in a broody, self-conscious, oh-poor-me-I-must-pay-for-my-sins sort of way (e.g. Angel) are far less appealing to me than the ones who suck it up and deal (e.g. Avon, although he's not quite the kind of "wounded soul" I was thinking about when I made the remark) or who have emotional breakdowns and keep going despite them (e.g. Stark).

And, to get back to the gender question, which I realize I addressed not at all, yeah, those characters are male more often than not, particularly in older shows where most of the really complex and interesting characters tended to be male. I do like the fact that that seems to be changing these days, though.

Btw, I just looked at the post in question, and saw the comment where you asked why people dislike Janeway... Personally, I loathe the character, and it's certainly not because she's a strong and competent woman. It's because they constantly told us what a strong and competent woman she was while, IMHO, more often than not portraying her as incompetent, inconsistent, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. Oh, man, don't get me started on Janeway... :) Honestly, there's an art to writing believable leaders, and the Voyager writers did not have it down...

I agree with you about wounded souls. When Vila doesn't deal, like in Stardrive (except for the drunk scene) where all he can do is moan and suggest running (and not even wittily), I just want to slap him one and give him a good shake.

I liked Janeway, and thought she had an interesting relationship with Seven, a favourite character (and despite her looks too). I had problems with Voyager in general, esp the predictable plots and the huge numbers of caves they found themselves in.

Actually, thinking about it, I feel like I want to draw a distinction between angsty characters, and "wounded souls." The latter are a subset of the former, and not one I really want to put Avon into. It just occurred to me that I find Avon interesting because, IMHO, he's a very strong person with a core of vulnerability buried deep down in the middle. But I find characters like Vila and Stark both interesting and personally appealing, because they're very vulnerable people with cores of strength deep down in the middle. Hmm. This has been my Interesting Insight for the Day. :)

I did like Seven, actually, and I really expected to hate her when she was first introduced, in large part because of the catsuit. I've often said that I'd've been happy if they chucked the rest of the crew out an airlock and turned the show into The Adventures of Seven and the Holodoc. :) The sad thing is, I think Janeway had the potential to be a good character, but I just couldn't get past the inconsistent way she was written. Her attitudes would change to fit each episode's plot, y'know? It was bad writing, and it sadly hurt the character. But, ahem, I'm not doing that rant. Really, I'm not. :)

Eh. They did the same with Picard. Look at that time he wanted to let a whole planet die because of the prime directive. I shouted at the TV, "Hey, isn't everyone dying a slightly more damaging to a culture than saving them?" I really disliked him in that ep.

Oh, I like that analysis of Avon and Vila. Too bad I can't nick it for the

b7friday 'opposites' challenge. I'm still stuck on that.

Picard's characterization wasn't necessarily always perfect, true. And that episode bothered me a bit, too, though I rather liked the exploration of the moral dilemma, and I could actually understand where Picard was coming from. It's "Do we ever have the right to play god, even with the best of intentions? And isn't it better to have a hard and fast rule that keeps us from doing harm, even when it prevents us from doing good?" Those are questions worth asking, and Picard's eventual answer, after all, was IMHO the morally right one, even if it took some prompting from Data. (Compare to the Enterprise ep where Dr. Phlox -- a character I actually liked, which made it worse -- campaigns to let an entire species suffer and perhaps face even extinction because it's wrong to interfere with what's natural. Well, shit, here I thought that's what doctors did. Gaaaaah!) Anyway, in Janeway's case, it seemed to me much more egregious than any inconsistencies we ever saw with Picard, or any other Trek captain, for that matter. And a lot of her attitudes just rubbed me the wrong way. I really disliked the way she treated the Holo-Doctor, for instance.

OK, OK. I have Janeway issues. :)

Oooh, if you can do something fic-ish with that thought, please do! You have not only my permission, but my encouragement! :) Me, I got hit with an interesting little plot bunny involving Zen while watching "Time Squad" yesterday that might do, but I'm not sure if I'll manage to get it written in time, or how well it'll end up fitting the category if I do. Eh, we'll see. This particular challenge is kind of difficult, isn't it? Mea culpa...

Oh yeah, I remember that Phlox ep. I've only seen S1 of Enterprise and he was a favourite character too, but for that ep. You're quite right--helping people survive what nature can do to them is indeed what doctors do. The holodoc never cared: he introduced opera to more than one culture.

As for the challenge, I think I'll go with the original idea I had, even though it's not very good. :-(

Whereas I seem to be the one person on earth who thinks the Holodoctor was rather tedious. Definitely well-played and given some great stuff, but he didn't have many redeeming features as a character. So I think he really deserved anything Janeway did to him. :)

What can I say? I have an unreasonable bias towards AIs. (I could attempt to figure out how that falls in this makeshift categorization scheme we've been discussion, but my brain is shutting down and I need to sleep, so fortunately we've both been spared. :))

No, no, there's two of us. But then, I'm not big on treating AIs like people, anyway.

As you'll find out in later Buffy seasons, Giles has problems of his own, but I love him dearly.

As Angel S5 shows, in many ways Lorne fits in better *in LA* than anyone else in the team.

Even pre-Evil, Willow started to annoy me because she hadn't changed her little-girl affect, and (up to Objects in Space, where she kind of got to me) River, like Fred and Dru, always annoyed me--the floaty Ophelia type bugs me.

I find that apart from my Bulletproof Kinks (smart, sarcastic, coded AC/DC) I tend to like characters in proportion to how easy it is to write dialogue for them. In principle, I detest Jayne, but it's (frighteningly?) easy to hear his voice.

And if I like a character, they don't always do the right thing in my stories, but I always grant them agency--i.e., I've written a damn sight more stories about things Avon *does* than about things that *happen* to him.

I haven't seen enough Buffy yet to form opinions about some of the characters, though I know Cordelia (stab, stab) changes into someone human. River annoyed the hell out of me till her spacewalk. I still haven't seen all of Firefly yet though--all those Farscape and Buffy DVDs plus House of Cards trilogy and Edge of Darkness and other cool BBC series. And B7 S2 about to arrive... Lucky there's so little on TV.

I enjoy watching and writing smart sarcastic types like Avon, but that's not the same as liking them. I loved Seinfeld but all the characters were absolute bastards I wouldn't want to meet. Mind you, this helped a lot as I could laugh at them without any complicating sympathy.

I find River fascinating, in a slightly scary sort of way. (And man, oh, man, I want some Stark-River crossover fic. Yes, I surely do.) OK, add "crazy" to the list of characteristics that appeal to me. :)

I agree with you about Avon, though. There's a big difference, for me, between characters that I love to watch on the screen because they fascinate me intellectually, and characters I like in the sense that I'd actually be happy to be in the same room with them. Avon is the classic example of someone who's in the former category but not the latter. I like watching him from the nice, safe, distance of a completely different universe. :)

And I have no idea why I feel the need to get all verbose in your LJ tonight. Possibly because I am avoiding doing other, more productive things. :)

Yeah, me too. I really don't want to go out and return library books and buy groceries. But I should; we need something for dinner and I don't want to cook.

Me, I think I'm gonna give up on doing anything more productive tonight, and go take a bath...

Good luck with the food thing. :)

Am I the only person in this fandom who actually finds Avon restful? Sad. But then, I do well with that prickly, hostile sort in real life. Mind you, I'd like to give him a good solid fwap every now and then for stupidity.

Hmmm. I can't say I find Avon restful, even though I identify with him. As for interacting with him in real life, I don't think I could have dealt with him well when I was younger -- his first cutting remark and I would have withered like a dead leaf -- but now, I think that I could deal, if we didn't get off on the wrong foot. If he thought me a fool, I'd still wither; if he respected me like Cally or Vila or Blake, then I'd just put the cutting remarks in the "don't take it seriously, it's just him" basket, and possibly even repartee in kind if my brain was fast enough.

But then, now I'm about his age (assuming he was something like 35-40 in the series), wheras then, even when I was a twenty-something, I probably was the fool he would have thought me to be.

It was a Nova story that crystallized it for me. In "Five Easy Pieces" an Original Character describes Avon as Blake's "charming friend" and Blake is astonished that anyone could think that Avon was charming, but I do, and I find him much more likeable than Blake (and also think that overall people being out for themselves tend to cause a lot less damage than idealists with pan-global Visions).

A ship_manifesto essay described Firefly's Simon as "a spoiled pretty-boy with a core of steel" which fits in with this thread. He's somebody who is extremely competent in some areas and entirely lost in more commonplace ones (as I have Vila say of him, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth) and he's also very brave but not violent, which certainly makes him a fish out of the particular tank of water where he finds himself.

Been thinking and thinking about this. I too go for outsiders, people with difficulties and issues, especially difficulties relating to others, but I think it's often because they are easier to write about. When Tolstoy said "all happy marriages are alike" what he really meant was they're all impossible to write more than a paragraph about.
It could also be that you go for people you can relate to, which would be why I like bolshie, prickly characters. I think both Illya and Avon would irritate me excessively in RL, though I'm shallow enough to forgive both for their looks. And of course "like" isn't the same as "fancy" or "identify with". I came to the conclusion long ago that I liked Blake (and, among minor characters, Bellfriar), identified with Vila (like Rimmer, he is more or less made to be guiltily identified with) and fancied Avon, Carnell and Renor.

Oi, Vila's likeable unlike Rimmer!

Vila gets all three from me: I like him, identity with him, and fancy the pants off him too. I like Cally and Gan and, usually, Blake, and identify with Jenna for the piloting (I always wanted to fly a spaceship, or failing that, a WW2 fighter). I am very entertained by Avon while liking him in S1 and S2 only, but I don't fancy him at all. Carnell now, is quite delectable, but I don't particularly like him. :-)

Yes, snarky and bolshie or otherwise flawed characters are fun and easy to write. I do amateur acting and it's exactly the same there. I specialise in accents, comedy, and eccentric supporting characters including evil ones. They're fun to play, but the hero or a good person is very hard to do without coming across as bland or boring or sanctimonious.

Hmm, I wouldn't say I go for archetypes so much as characters. I favour male characters because very few female characters in media appeal to me in terms of people I know. This relates both to the people I socialise with, and the way women are portrayed in the media.

Thinking about my original characters (and omitting Richard, Andrew and James because they all started as avatars of specific media characters, even though they have all gained personality traits from elsewhere and evolved as I've written them) there are very few female characters like Marianne, or even Imogen in the mainstream. Marianne fits a type seen in certain types of lesbian fiction, but I'm really surprised that I can't think of a parallel for Imogen in the mainstream (possibly Jenny Calendar in terms of her family ties, but I can't seen Jenny giving up seven years of her life to caring for an ill sibling).

I like Imogen though, she's ended up playing a much more central role than I expected, just because I found that I liked the idea of someone breaking away from the role of carer and finding her feet in the world she always wanted to be part of.

Gina

I don't go for archetypes without liking the characters for themselves--there are lots of outsiders I don't like. I just like certain people and was looking for a pattern and felt I'd found one. I do like your Marianne a lot, and would love to see someone like her on TV. Actually, some of the strong women in my original fics (maybe I'll write some one day) are more that type.

I like Marianne far too much, which is one reason why I went completely in the opposite direction with Imogen.

Gina

Have you found that your tastes change as you get older. For example, when Thunderbirds was first broadcast I went for John (poor thing stuck in that space station on his own all the time) recent repeats and Jeff is obviously the one.

I'll have to ask Greg if that's true for him; I was never a fan, but he still is. I always liked Spock best in Star Trek but liked Kirk a lot more as a kid. In B7 it was Vila and Cally. I was very upset when they killed Cally, and inconsolable at the end. When I watched again, I still liked Cally, but mainly when she was being warrior Cally; Vila was way out in front. I was, however, surprised to find I liked S1 and S2 Avon as I'd hated the bastard by the end.

There is a gap of forty years between the two viewings. And the twenty five years between B7 will be why I now see Vila in a more favourable light.

Oh, how could you not have liked poor Vila? Never mind, I made up for all the people who didn't, and I still do.

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Thoughts on the characters I like

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The THREE Weapons of the Spanish Inquisition Are...

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