(no subject)
Sep. 12th, 2008 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leaf* Comment on this post.
* I will give you a letter.
* Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.
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telperion1 gave me 'r'. I found it surprisingly hard to think of people, and failed in my attempt not to pick multiple characters from the same fandom.
1. Remus Lupin. At once a very loveable and a deeply flawed character, but I like him very much, though I have a disquietening suspicion that far too many of his faults are my own (he is - especially in the mess with Tonks - a good illustration of the fact that if one must love one's neighbour as oneself, then it is in fact necessary to love oneself, and also that self-hatred is in may ways the most radically selfish attitude imaginable)... but I'm not exactly reflecting my love for the character here, which is largely inspired by his kindness (except to himself, and by extension therefore to those who love him!), his skill as a teacher, the fact that he felt like a genuine scholar, and that he is very sexy when not in a fit of blind self-loathing funk. I think I may have something of a thing for professor figures, although most of the ones I have had to do with in RL have been too female, too grandfatherly or too batshit to be objects of even distant crushes. This may not be an entirely bad thing, come to think of it.
2. Richard Hannay. Hannay - more often known as Dick - is probably John Buchan's best known protagonist, although given that the films of the first novel in which he appears, The Thirty Nine Steps, are both quite radically different from the book, that probably doesn't mean all that much. Hannay, who we mostly encounter as a first person narrator†is, when we first meet him, an oddly rootless figure. He thinks of himself as a Scot, but hasn't lived in the country since he was a small boy, his father having emigrated to South Africa, where Hannay worked as a mining engineer, kicked about the countryside, was probably fairly tough to work for, and became very good at his job, making a modest fortune and friends with a Boer hunter, Peter Pienaar, who for reasons which are never clearly explained, worked for the British during the Boer war, and who taught Hannay a lot about camouflage, tracking, and playing a role, advice which is later to save his life multiple times. Hannay decides to come 'home' to Britain, but gets tremendously bored of London - he is probably only in his late thirties at the time - and is on the point of going back to Africa when fate takes a hand, and he unwittingly falls foul of a group of German agents - and the British police, who think he's killed his next door neighbour, an American agent who was of course bumped off by the Germans. Hannay flees to Scotland, getting reaquainted with his homeland and trying to decode the cryptic notes his neighbour left in his possession. In the porcess, he discovers a talent for puzzles and low-level cryptography, which leads him to getting dragged into a number of adventures, both during the first world war and afterwards, including helping to accidentally fulfil the prophecy of a Muslim sect, perform a somewhat implausible feat of mountaineering to break a German spy ring, rescuing the brainwashed victims of a kidnapping racket, and dealing with the fall out from a treasure hunt that got spectacularly derailed. In the course of it, he gets married, to Mary Lammington, one of his fellow unofficial part time British agents, and has a son who hates school and games and is passionate about natural history, especially hawks.
Hannay is a more interesting character than he believes himself to be: in fact, he appears to have something of an inferiority complex about his scrappy education, believing himself to be not all that bright, despite evidence to the contrary, such as his puzzle-solving skills and his great gift for languages. He's also very good at understanding other people, even ones he initially dislikes on sight (the classic example being his friendship with the unhappy concienscious obejector Wake in Mr Standfast, probably the best book in the Hannay sequence). He's not perfect, and he is a man of his time - he casually uses language which a modern reader finds shockingly racist. That said, he - like Buchan, though unlike some of Buchan's other characters - is not an anti-Semite, nor a jingoistic patriot; he is cured of a wish of revenge on Germany by the kindness of a German woman when he is sick and escaping from captivity; while he abominates the man's politics, he discovers a sneaking sympathy for the Kaiser, and he becomes friends with one of his opponents during the war (the tremendously likable engineer Gaudian).
He is stunningly clueless in matters of the heart, and while I do believe in his love for Mary, I tend to read him as possibly bisexual, though he certainly doesn't realise it (see his relationship with his best friend, the TE-Lawrence-ish Border aristo Sandy Arbuthnot; he talks an awful lot about how pretty Sandy is, and there's something oddly love-triangle-ish about the Hannay-Arbuthnot-Medina constellation in The Three Hostages*). He makes ineffectual attempts to be protective of Mary, but is frequently forced to admit that she is just as tough and competent as he is. Philosophically speaking he is a fatalist (lingering Calvinism!), and inclided to hide behind a bluff, hearty, thick persona which at times only fools himself (and various adverseries, of course). He loves the Cotswolds, where he eventually settles, but is not quite as contented with life as a country farmer as he wants to be; it's not that he's personally ambitious, but he has a strong sense of duty, and also gets bored. I like Hannay a lot, and keep meditating a fic where he gets stuck with young! emo! post-Barabara! Peter Wimsey in an intelligence operation towards the end of WWI - probably the famous ocassion where Peter walked into a German staff room in disguise - but I haven't got a plot for it, other than that they would both be tremendously suspicious of each other to start with, and Hannay would think he had been asked to nursemaid a suicidal lunatic.
†Though he is sometimes refered to in other stories which are narrated by other people or told in the third person. One of the things I like about Buchan is that a lot of his novels and short stories are set in the same fictional world, so that minor characters will pop up elsewhere as quite important figures.
* If there was a Buchan fandom on LJ, there would be enormous amounts of dodgy d/s dub-con about The Three Hostages - though given the scene where Dominick(!) Medina makes Hannay, who he thinks he has hypnotised, crawl on the floor and bring him a newspaper in his mouth, it's not exactly a stretch from canon. It's like Simm-Master/ Ten, only without the dubious CGI and the deeply unconvincing soteriology...
3. Ron Weasley: he's great. He's flawed, he's insecure, and as Luna points out, while he's very funny, he can be cruel - but all the same, he's a good, loyal friend who can be relied on to do the right thing in the end. He's also a good deal brighter than fanon often gives him credit for.
4. Romana. I am a bad Old Skool Who fan, because I don't actually know all that much about her, even within the TV canon (this has something to do with the fact that Two and Three are the Doctors I know best). However: I've always enjoyed seeing the Doctor with people who can keep up with him intellectually - Zoe, Liz - and Romana, although she's young and has had a sheltered childhood, is actually rather brighter than the Doctor (though the writers didn't always remember it). She's sparky and eccentric (well, she is an alien) and wears hats, which I can only approve of, and she learns from the Doctor and leaves, on her terms, to be brilliant, which is the best ending a companion can have.
5. Roger Walker. The youngest boy in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, which I cannot praise highly enough for their wonderful writing, engaging characters and marvellous portrayals of how imagination transforms childhood, and in someways simply the typical small boy of about eight (he frequently reminds me of my Cubs): mildly obsessed with food, and above all with chocolate, and with an unflagging enthusiasm for gruesome things (such as cannibal crabs), brave, but not without fears (from which he can usually be distracted with chocolate). But he does have a distinct personality - he doesn't share the rest of his family's rather romantic enthusiasm for sail over steam, and in fact is fascinated by engines and mechanically minded. He plays the mouth-organ, badly, and once drew a picture of the battle of Salamis with funnels on the triremes. Incidentally, the real-life child who probably inspired him, Roger Altouyan, invented an early type of asthma inhaler, so one way and another Roger has improved a lot of childhoods.
* I will give you a letter.
* Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.
telperion1 gave me 'r'. I found it surprisingly hard to think of people, and failed in my attempt not to pick multiple characters from the same fandom.1. Remus Lupin. At once a very loveable and a deeply flawed character, but I like him very much, though I have a disquietening suspicion that far too many of his faults are my own (he is - especially in the mess with Tonks - a good illustration of the fact that if one must love one's neighbour as oneself, then it is in fact necessary to love oneself, and also that self-hatred is in may ways the most radically selfish attitude imaginable)... but I'm not exactly reflecting my love for the character here, which is largely inspired by his kindness (except to himself, and by extension therefore to those who love him!), his skill as a teacher, the fact that he felt like a genuine scholar, and that he is very sexy when not in a fit of blind self-loathing funk. I think I may have something of a thing for professor figures, although most of the ones I have had to do with in RL have been too female, too grandfatherly or too batshit to be objects of even distant crushes. This may not be an entirely bad thing, come to think of it.
2. Richard Hannay. Hannay - more often known as Dick - is probably John Buchan's best known protagonist, although given that the films of the first novel in which he appears, The Thirty Nine Steps, are both quite radically different from the book, that probably doesn't mean all that much. Hannay, who we mostly encounter as a first person narrator†is, when we first meet him, an oddly rootless figure. He thinks of himself as a Scot, but hasn't lived in the country since he was a small boy, his father having emigrated to South Africa, where Hannay worked as a mining engineer, kicked about the countryside, was probably fairly tough to work for, and became very good at his job, making a modest fortune and friends with a Boer hunter, Peter Pienaar, who for reasons which are never clearly explained, worked for the British during the Boer war, and who taught Hannay a lot about camouflage, tracking, and playing a role, advice which is later to save his life multiple times. Hannay decides to come 'home' to Britain, but gets tremendously bored of London - he is probably only in his late thirties at the time - and is on the point of going back to Africa when fate takes a hand, and he unwittingly falls foul of a group of German agents - and the British police, who think he's killed his next door neighbour, an American agent who was of course bumped off by the Germans. Hannay flees to Scotland, getting reaquainted with his homeland and trying to decode the cryptic notes his neighbour left in his possession. In the porcess, he discovers a talent for puzzles and low-level cryptography, which leads him to getting dragged into a number of adventures, both during the first world war and afterwards, including helping to accidentally fulfil the prophecy of a Muslim sect, perform a somewhat implausible feat of mountaineering to break a German spy ring, rescuing the brainwashed victims of a kidnapping racket, and dealing with the fall out from a treasure hunt that got spectacularly derailed. In the course of it, he gets married, to Mary Lammington, one of his fellow unofficial part time British agents, and has a son who hates school and games and is passionate about natural history, especially hawks.
Hannay is a more interesting character than he believes himself to be: in fact, he appears to have something of an inferiority complex about his scrappy education, believing himself to be not all that bright, despite evidence to the contrary, such as his puzzle-solving skills and his great gift for languages. He's also very good at understanding other people, even ones he initially dislikes on sight (the classic example being his friendship with the unhappy concienscious obejector Wake in Mr Standfast, probably the best book in the Hannay sequence). He's not perfect, and he is a man of his time - he casually uses language which a modern reader finds shockingly racist. That said, he - like Buchan, though unlike some of Buchan's other characters - is not an anti-Semite, nor a jingoistic patriot; he is cured of a wish of revenge on Germany by the kindness of a German woman when he is sick and escaping from captivity; while he abominates the man's politics, he discovers a sneaking sympathy for the Kaiser, and he becomes friends with one of his opponents during the war (the tremendously likable engineer Gaudian).
He is stunningly clueless in matters of the heart, and while I do believe in his love for Mary, I tend to read him as possibly bisexual, though he certainly doesn't realise it (see his relationship with his best friend, the TE-Lawrence-ish Border aristo Sandy Arbuthnot; he talks an awful lot about how pretty Sandy is, and there's something oddly love-triangle-ish about the Hannay-Arbuthnot-Medina constellation in The Three Hostages*). He makes ineffectual attempts to be protective of Mary, but is frequently forced to admit that she is just as tough and competent as he is. Philosophically speaking he is a fatalist (lingering Calvinism!), and inclided to hide behind a bluff, hearty, thick persona which at times only fools himself (and various adverseries, of course). He loves the Cotswolds, where he eventually settles, but is not quite as contented with life as a country farmer as he wants to be; it's not that he's personally ambitious, but he has a strong sense of duty, and also gets bored. I like Hannay a lot, and keep meditating a fic where he gets stuck with young! emo! post-Barabara! Peter Wimsey in an intelligence operation towards the end of WWI - probably the famous ocassion where Peter walked into a German staff room in disguise - but I haven't got a plot for it, other than that they would both be tremendously suspicious of each other to start with, and Hannay would think he had been asked to nursemaid a suicidal lunatic.
†Though he is sometimes refered to in other stories which are narrated by other people or told in the third person. One of the things I like about Buchan is that a lot of his novels and short stories are set in the same fictional world, so that minor characters will pop up elsewhere as quite important figures.
* If there was a Buchan fandom on LJ, there would be enormous amounts of dodgy d/s dub-con about The Three Hostages - though given the scene where Dominick(!) Medina makes Hannay, who he thinks he has hypnotised, crawl on the floor and bring him a newspaper in his mouth, it's not exactly a stretch from canon. It's like Simm-Master/ Ten, only without the dubious CGI and the deeply unconvincing soteriology...
3. Ron Weasley: he's great. He's flawed, he's insecure, and as Luna points out, while he's very funny, he can be cruel - but all the same, he's a good, loyal friend who can be relied on to do the right thing in the end. He's also a good deal brighter than fanon often gives him credit for.
4. Romana. I am a bad Old Skool Who fan, because I don't actually know all that much about her, even within the TV canon (this has something to do with the fact that Two and Three are the Doctors I know best). However: I've always enjoyed seeing the Doctor with people who can keep up with him intellectually - Zoe, Liz - and Romana, although she's young and has had a sheltered childhood, is actually rather brighter than the Doctor (though the writers didn't always remember it). She's sparky and eccentric (well, she is an alien) and wears hats, which I can only approve of, and she learns from the Doctor and leaves, on her terms, to be brilliant, which is the best ending a companion can have.
5. Roger Walker. The youngest boy in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, which I cannot praise highly enough for their wonderful writing, engaging characters and marvellous portrayals of how imagination transforms childhood, and in someways simply the typical small boy of about eight (he frequently reminds me of my Cubs): mildly obsessed with food, and above all with chocolate, and with an unflagging enthusiasm for gruesome things (such as cannibal crabs), brave, but not without fears (from which he can usually be distracted with chocolate). But he does have a distinct personality - he doesn't share the rest of his family's rather romantic enthusiasm for sail over steam, and in fact is fascinated by engines and mechanically minded. He plays the mouth-organ, badly, and once drew a picture of the battle of Salamis with funnels on the triremes. Incidentally, the real-life child who probably inspired him, Roger Altouyan, invented an early type of asthma inhaler, so one way and another Roger has improved a lot of childhoods.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 10:25 pm (UTC)Also: Hilda von Einmen topping a threeway with Sandy and Hannay... mmmmm
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 11:23 pm (UTC)And the mysteriously vaguely described kinky soft furnishings, we mustn't forget those! (While thinking about beating peope up, probably).
Hilda von Einmen topping a threeway with Sandy and Hannay... mmmmm
An interesting thought (I hadn't actually considered the matter, but it's strangely plausible that H v E was shagging Sandy - she certainly wanted to)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-12 11:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 10:56 am (UTC)If you would like a letter, have T.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 12:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 12:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 07:16 am (UTC)I'll have a letter, please :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 07:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-17 12:14 pm (UTC)- Arthur Dent of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Arathorn II, father of Aragon II
- Aral Vorkosigan, father of Miles Vorkosigan
- Adair, The Hon Ronald, who met an untimely death in a Sherlock Holmes story
- Algernon Moncrieff, from The Importance of Being Earnest.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-17 12:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 08:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:57 pm (UTC)Have 'N'
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 06:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-17 12:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 09:58 am (UTC)I was never quite convinced by Sandy suddenly having a Wuv Interest in The Dancing Floor (was it?); how much of this is due to my intense desire, as a child, to be Sandy is debatable. I do like the Wimsey/Hannay fic idea; they're both such oddballs, and it would be very interesting to see how they'd get on.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:01 am (UTC)Have 'H'.
PS: I wanted to be Sandy too. His wife remains a bit thin and unconvincing, though - unlike Mary Lammington and Janet Raden. Perhaps it's just difficult not to be overshadowed by the Clanroyden?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-13 11:09 pm (UTC)I must read Buchan again. Haven't done so since I was a kid. And Swallows and Amazons is just great generally. They're on my "comfort reading" list, and have been since I first discovered them at the age of nine.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 12:00 am (UTC)I'd definitely encourage you to go back to Buchan, he's really awfully good (especially the historicals. 'Witch Wood' is one of the best, and most underrated, books about Scotland that there is).
Also: if you would like a letter, how about T?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 01:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-14 08:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 06:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-15 02:05 pm (UTC)but I haven't got a plot for it, other than that they would both be tremendously suspicious of each other to start with, and Hannay would think he had been asked to nursemaid a suicidal lunatic.
Sounds like plot enough to me!