slinkling | Character meme

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Giles (BtVS), Jeremy (SN), and/or Simon (Firefly.)

:-)

Gosh, do you by any chance have a thing for geeky men?

Giles and Jeremy are in progress, but for now, here's Simon Tam:

1. He is not jealous that his little sister is smarter than him. Truly he’s not. He got used to it when they were children, and he’s always been proud of her brilliance. If he relished his chance to shine, once she’d gone off to the academy, well, chalk it up to sibling rivalry, and anyway he missed her. All things being equal, he’d rather have had her at home, overshadowing him like she always did.

But there’s a part of him, a tiny shameful part that he hopes River can’t detect, which gets a little thrill out of rescuing her and caring for her. Because that means that *he* is the capable one, the clever one. She might be the genius, but now she’s also unstable and dependent on him. And he really doesn’t want to think that he likes her better that way.
***

2. If you had asked him, before he became a fugitive, what he’d miss most about his life, he would have said the freedom. The thoughtless privilege of going wherever he wants for whatever purpose he chooses. But now that he’s actually been a fugitive for a year, he can see how naïve this answer would have been. There are a great many things that he misses, but he’s learned to separate the real from the illusory. That freedom he prized, he never really had.

No, what he misses the most about his old life are his friends. A handful of people he’d known since university, stayed up all night with, fallen in love with, gotten drunk with, talked about the meaning of life with. Truly good people he’d loved in his way, and now he can never contact them again. He worries about them; the Alliance has a reputation for leaning on the known associates of criminals. He can only hope his actions haven’t endangered the people he cares about.
***

3. As a boy he liked reading books of stories from Earth-that-was, and in particular there was a book of old seafaring adventures that he adored. He loved the details of life on those old ships: the creak of the wooden masts, the rocking motion of the rolling waves. When he first came aboard Serenity, he was pleased to discover that the language of seafaring had been adapted to these newer vessels. Yet Serenity doesn’t rock or creak; she hums, and she vibrates ever so faintly. Lying in his bunk at night, he can’t help but be a little disappointed.

Gosh, do you by any chance have a thing for geeky men?

Who, me? *g*

And this is utterly gorgeous. I love these insights into Simon -- they seem entirely correct to me, and yet my picture of him hadn't been fleshed-out in these ways. #2 especially resonates, for maybe obvious reasons, but I quite like all three of them.

Jeremy Goodwin:

1. Ever since puberty, he’s had a defensive prejudice against people who are too attractive. When he went into broadcast journalism, he expected the on-air talent to be a little vapid: pretty talking heads who needed behind-the-scenes thinkers like him to make them look smart. His first few weeks working at Sports Night, it threw him every single time Dan or Casey made an unscripted erudite remark – which basically meant that he was thrown constantly.

One night after a show they were all at the bar, and he’d had a few beers, and he found himself explaining to Natalie his carefully cultivated theories of attractiveness and its inverse relationship to intelligence. He was just getting to the part about how Dan and Casey kept undermining his theories, when Natalie looked at him like this was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. “Get over it,” she said, and went to get another drink. That’s when he knew he was going to fall in love with her.
***

2. There are only three dishes he knows how to cook: lasagna, broiled chicken, and steak with roasted potatoes. His mother taught him all three when he was in high school, and he’s been using these dishes to impress girls ever since. The fourth time Natalie comes to his place for dinner, he has to buy a cookbook. He feels good about this, as it seems to represent a tangible step into adulthood.
***

3. He’s a film-noir buff, which he happened into wholly by accident. In college his roommate took him to a late-night showing of Casablanca, and he liked that so much that he started seeking out other movies with Humphrey Bogart. And then he kind of liked The Maltese Falcon, so he read everything he could find by Dashiell Hammett. And then he watched all the Thin Man movies, and saw one in a revival house where he met this girl who thought it was cool that he knew so much about classic cinema. Except he didn’t know so much, really, and he didn’t want to give a false impression, so he bought a couple books about films of the 1930s and 40s, and began renting videos methodically, studying up. So now he is a walking treasure-trove of information about a specific style and period of American film, and he is waiting, just waiting, for the day someone asks him about it.

Oh, man. These are all so Jeremy.

I'd never really given him that much thought, actually, but this makes him make so much more sense to me.

That’s when he knew he was going to fall in love with her.

Oh, Jeremy.

*bounce*

I'd never really given him much thought either. That's part of what I'm enjoying about this meme; every character I've done so far is outside of my usual fandom, and therefore is someone I've never taken the time to think about in this way. It's kind of fascinating how the mind fills out a characterization when it's required to.

I'm glad you've liked these. :-)

It's been ages since I've watched SN, and I never gave the character of Jeremy much thought, but I think these are absolutely perfect. I'm especially in love with number 3, and I kind of want to be the one who asks him about film noir. Maybe during a discussion of Veronica Mars and Angel as contemporary film noir. (And I will spare you the rest of the details of the Marysue this has set off in my head).

Okay, that's just adorable. And you've just renewed my desire to check out both of those shows.

Like I was telling kass, I'd never given Jeremy much thought either. Though to be honest, I don't think I'd given any of the SN characters terribly much thought; I loved the show, and have seen it in its entirety more than once, but I've never been fannish about it, in the sense of analyzing the characters' motivations and investing energy in thinking about their backstories or extra-canonical activities. This whole meme, really, has been a fascinating traipse through fannish playgrounds I'd never visited before (as well as previously untried sections of fannish playgrounds I do know pretty well). I kind of love it.

Rupert Giles:

1. It took him a long time to reconcile himself to the strictures of being a watcher. The sacred responsibility which must take precedence over everything else, the vigilance which cannot be relaxed until one’s slayer is dead. It took many years, but finally he was ready to set childish things aside and embrace his duty. When he was assigned to his slayer, he set off for America filled with disciplined enthusiasm for his task.

To say that he was dismayed by Buffy’s attitude when they first met would be an understatement. Yet over time, he found himself more and more grateful for the ways in which she failed to resemble the slayers he’d read about. Those girls had scarcely seemed human; they were tools which the Watchers’ Council deployed against the enemy. Buffy was completely, complicatedly human: uncouth, unpredictable, and capable of rousing the most contradictory emotions. She was nobody’s tool, and she’d be the first to say so.

And when, exactly, had Giles become a tool? This would have troubled him, but for the fact that it was no longer relevant. Training with the Watchers’ Council, he had learned to love his duty. Training with Buffy, he re-learned to love life.
***

2. He is a very rational, very civilized man – and he still gets an illicit charge out of violence. Using weapons is fine but it can’t compare with the visceral high of beating someone up with your fists. His favorite part is the shock in their eyes, when they see Mr. Stodgy Librarian can bash their face in. He seriously mistrusts this side of himself, and only lets it out when he must.
***

3. Giles used to wonder, why teenage girls? If one needs to select a warrior against the forces of darkness, a sixteen-year-old girl is hardly the obvious choice. The Council’s library contains several writings on this subject, most of which intone piously about the potent symbolism of the pure vs. the impure. Some intone even more piously about how women are inherently sinful, and therefore a fitting adversary for vampires.

After some years as a high school librarian, though, he comes to see that these authors missed the point entirely. Teenage girls, all of them, possess a certain fierceness which the boys around them simply lack. He looks at the girls he knows, sizing them up as potential slayers (it’s an instinct by now), and is astounded at how many of them could do the job if called upon. Cordelia would decimate a nest of demons without ever mussing her hair. Amy would be haphazard, but staggeringly effective. Willow would be simply deadly. Xander or Oz, by contrast, would get themselves killed inside of a week.

He wonders now if any of the prior watchers had noticed this phenomenon and failed to record it; the fact is strangely absent from all their diaries. He doesn’t write it down either. Somehow he can’t imagine the Council approving of such an observation.

Oh oh oh.

These are all excellent, but #1 just knocks me flat. Yes -- that's Giles' journey in a nutshell. Wow.

(This makes me even more exasperated that I know soon we'll be entering the Giles-less zone of Buffy S6...)

I'm glad these worked for you. I had some problems with the wording of #1 -- the ending feels schmaltzy to me -- but I tried for a while to think of a cleaner way to say that and wasn't getting anywhere, and eventually decided I didn't need to work so hard on a meme. (Yes, I obsess over language in LJ comments. Doesn't everybody?)

Oh, wow. These are great, but number 3 is spot-on in its observances about teenage girls!

Thank you! I can only imagine Giles sometimes feels a bit adrift in a sea of teenagers. It does, though, allow him to make some anthopological observations about them.

S&A? Oh my, I'd love to hear your thoughts on Geoffrey and/or Ellen. *claps*

Okay, these were totally fun. I should spend more time thinking about this show. I should also get some S&A icons. But anyway, Geoffrey:

1. During the come-down from being crazy, and the much lengthier coming-back-up, Geoffrey had plenty of time to think about how his life had gone wrong, and he made a plan. Part one consisted of never getting onto a stage, ever again. Part two was never, ever to fall in love with an actress again. Parts three and four were to stay the hell away from theatres generally, and to not fall in love with anybody until he was absolutely sure he could handle it.

He actually did a good job of sticking to this plan for the better part of three years. He worked at a series of quiet little temp jobs, and in his spare time he read books or took walks. He tried cultivating a hobby of some sort, like train-spotting or bird-watching, something that would occupy his time while keeping him safely away from actresses, but it didn’t take. In fact he found it stultifyingly dull. But aside from being bored, things were going okay. He was stable, and if he wasn’t all that happy, well, he wasn’t miserable either. So far, so good.

Until one day on a walk he spotted a flyer advertising a performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, one of his favorite plays, being put on by some fringe theatre company he’d never even heard of. And he’d been doing so well with the stability thing, and was so mind-numbingly bored, that he decided to risk it.

Six months later, he found himself directing a production of Death of a Salesman. A year after that, he’d somehow become this fledgling company’s new Artistic Director.

Well, at least he wasn’t bored anymore.
***

2. He first got into acting while he was in high school, and at the time it was just a thing to do; it was fun. It became more than that when, in his first year of college, he was cast as Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Somehow during those rehearsals he started to really inhabit the role, to feel that in speaking O’Neill’s words, he was expressing himself in a way he’d never tapped into before. In performances, he felt vividly alive for the first time in his life. This is when acting became an addiction for him.
***

3. After a certain night of drinking with some starving-actor friends, Geoffrey walked home alone and found himself having a conversation with his black trenchcoat. “It’s just you and me, pal,” he said to it, and giggled. He stopped giggling upon realizing that his trenchcoat had been with him for longer, and cared for him more reliably, than most of the people he knew. His black trenchcoat was, in fact, one of his best friends. So he named it Johnno, for reasons which made perfect sense at the time, and in the years since he’s often chatted with it familiarly. “It’s been a hell of a day, Johnno,” he likes to say, and as often as not this comes out in an Irish accent. “What do you say you and I get ourselves some whiskey and a bit of something to eat?” He tries not to have these conversations out loud, but every once in a while he slips. The first time he hung up his coat in Ellen’s house, he muttered, “What a long road it’s been, Johnno,” and she heard him.

“Who’s Johnno?” she asked.

“Old drinking buddy,” he replied.

Johnno is a little the worse for wear these days, but what kind of friend would Geoffrey be if he just replaced him? When Johnno finally does succumb to fabric fatigue, Geoffrey plans to send him off in style. He’ll make a little speech, probably beginning with “Well done, thou good and faithful trenchcoat,” and he’ll bury Johnno at sea, since Johnno always did enjoy getting wet.
***

I can really see all three of these being true. Especially about acting being an addiction for him, and that he wants to walk away, but in the end, he can't. And I LOVE Johnno. HEEE. Oh, Geoffrey. *pets him* You're so sentimental.

(also, I'm just really happy that you know the joy that is S&A!)

Yay! I kind of love Johnno too, I must admit. He wears that coat all the time; it's just too easy to imagine him anthopomorphizing it.

Well, at least he wasn’t bored anymore.

Bwee!!!

Ellen:

1. She has a routine for opening nights, a strict regimen to keep nerves at bay. Starting when she gets up in the morning, every part of her day is ritualized: what she eats, what she wears, what kinds of exercises she does, everything, up to the vocal warmups in her dressing room. She does this every for every opening without fail, and has come to believe that if she misses any part of her routine, she will forget all her lines or fall off the stage or something equally disastrous.

The only time she has ever forgone her rituals was that ecstatic season with Geoffrey; he convinced her that the dangers of spontaneity could only enhance her performances. So for a few months she set herself free from superstition and embraced the impulse of the moment.

Onstage, she was brilliant. Offstage, it didn’t work out so well.
***

2. There are myths of goddesses who take young men as lovers in order to feed on their youth. Ellen knows these myths, and while she doesn’t consider herself a goddess, she does find a certain resonance in the stories. Not that she’d ever admit that to anyone.
***

3. Ellen has become unintentionally pregnant twice. Both times were with men she’d already gotten rid of before she discovered the pregnancy; both times, she took herself off to have an abortion with a minimum of fuss. She refused to get emotional about something she’d never wanted in the first place. Bodies are messy and can’t be trusted, just like the rest of life, and that’s that. Each time, she allowed herself exactly one night of drinking wine and eating expensive chocolate and being maudlin, and the next day she went back to work and tried to forget about it.

She’s never particularly wanted kids, but if either of her little accidents had been with Geoffrey, she’s not sure she could have dispensed with it so easily.

Ohhhh. Great insights, seriously! And this: Bodies are messy and can’t be trusted, just like the rest of life, and that’s that. That's just very much Ellen. ♥

Ooh, yay! And since no one has asked for him yet, definitely Lex.

1. Lex has a nearly photographic memory. Once he sees a thing, especially if it makes an impression, he will always remember the details of it. Yet he learned from his father that knowing the facts is not enough; all through his childhood, if he wanted to persuade his dad of something, he had to present him with tangible, irrefutable proof. The habit persisted, and this is why he collects the evidence of Clark’s abilities in his secret room – not because he needs to preserve the information for himself, but because someday he might need to show it to someone else, to convince them he is not crazy.

After Clark finds the room, Lex realizes the pitfalls of this method: tangible proof can also be used against him. Only later does it occur to him that his father knew this all along, and his insistence on proof to back up Lex’s arguments was in fact a long, slow set-up.
***

2. As a teenager, Lex occasionally made rude gestures behind his father’s back. He knew it was infantile, but he couldn’t help himself. When Lionel goes blind, the temptation to make such gestures to his face is nearly overwhelming. He resists, because he has more self-control now than he did at seventeen, but one night he confesses the temptation to Clark, who listens sympathetically.

A few days later, they’re playing pool when Lionel barges in. The old man makes patronizing conversation; Clark answers him politely, delivering his responses in a calm voice while crossing his eyes and thumbing his nose. Lionel remains magisterially oblivious. Lex shakes so hard from suppressed laughter that he throws the pool game, but it’s totally worth it.

In bed that night, Lex considers that this is one of the awesomest things anyone has ever done for him.
***

3. When he was a boy, he learned to play the piano because his mother played it, and he wanted to be like her. He took lessons for eight or nine years, and his teachers said he had a natural gift for the instrument. After his mom died, he kept it up for a while, though he didn’t practice as often as he knew he should. But through his late teens and early twenties, he still played from time to time. It was peaceful, and it made him feel closer to his mom. Besides which, he did love the music, and he likes doing things he’s good at.

He has not touched a keyboard in over a year now. In part because he just doesn’t have the time anymore. In larger part because he’s come to have a better understanding of who his mother was, and he’s not sure he wants to be close to her.

#2 fills me with glee--I can totally picture it happening, too. And #3 breaks my heart.

I'm kind of happy about #2 too. I mean, you just know that Clark would never be rude enough to make faces at a blind guy ordinarily, but if it's Lionel, and if it's going to make Lex laugh a little, when god knows Lex needs to laugh... I'm just so nostalgic for early-seasons Clark & Lex, and the friendship they used to have. *squishes them*

These are brilliant! #1 works perfectly, #2 is ADORABLE and #3 is tragically believable.

Lois Lane (SV)

This one was an interesting challenge for me, as Lois has always been the SV character for whom I've felt the least affinity. (At least, since the days of Pete.) But I've kind of enjoyed getting into her head for a while:

1. Being an army brat has its disadvantages, but it also has a lot of perks. Lois lived in seven different countries before she was 18, and she was never the type of kid who was content staying on the base. At 22, she can say with some confidence that she is one of the world’s best travelers. She speaks a smattering of German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and French. She can’t write in any of them, but she can make herself understood. She can get along in just about any culture; there is no kind of food she can’t eat, and no kind of liquor she can’t drink. Drop her into any city in the world, and within an hour or two she’ll have some good friends, a free place to stay, and she’ll know where to find a spectacular hot meal for less than $3.
***

2. Another side effect of her itinerant youth: she has a love/hate relationship with domesticity. There were times she longed for nothing more than roots. She pined for a true home, a physical spot on the earth that she belonged to and that belonged to her. And yet, at the same time she couldn’t imagine how anyone could stand being tied down like that. A couple times in her teens she was invited to stay in friends’ ancestral homes, places that had been passed down through the generations, and when she went to places like that she simultaneously felt a frisson of envy and a shudder of revulsion.

On meeting the Kents, she both wanted them to adopt her and wanted to run like hell in the other direction. When they offered to take her in, she said yes without hesitation; she told herself it was because she was desperate, and this was her chance to see how the other half lived. In dealing with Mr. and Mrs. Kent, and Clark, she kept zinging back and forth between coveting their lifestyle and pitying their provincialism. Consequently, her conversations veered unexpectedly between sweetness and rudeness, and she really never knew which would come out of her mouth at any given time. She hopes that she came across as charmingly unpredictable, rather than just plain odd.
***

3. When she was a kid, and she and her sister would play make-believe games on rainy days, Lucy was always the beautiful damsel in distress. Lois was always the dashing hero who braved great peril to rescue her. In retrospect, this explains a lot about the people they both grew up to be.

Great work! I love the idea of jet-setting Lois: that will stand her in good stead for her future career. #2 seems very true, and I think #3 is perfect--couldn't agree with it more.

Thank you! I think Lois is very close to realizing that her awesome travel-fu could be a great asset as a journalist. She just needs to do some more serious writing, to get to the point where she can envision going to other countries on assignment.

I LOVE your answers so far--Giles's in particular. You have a real flair for this.

No-one's asked for Clark yet--surely they will?

I'll save my vote for Faith (BtVS).

This took me a long time, and I'm not sure why that is. I just couldn't find my way into Faith's head for many days. But once I got there, my Three Things kind of turned into this little ficlet of their own, so I've put it up in a new post, over here (http://slinkling.livejournal.com/29816.html).

\o/

I'll ask for Clark. *G* I'd love to know your Clark perspective.

This has taken me way, way, way too long. I think I was just not in a SV headspace for a while there. But having done this, I'm now thinking of all kinds of other things I can do, so you may have sparked a little SV fic renaissance for me. (Of course, it's also possible I won't get around to that renaissance, but if nothing else it's fun to think about.)

Anyway, at long last, here's three things about Clark:

1. Clark reads as much as he can about human psychology. Sometimes he just thinks of it as “psychology,” but other times the word “human” creeps into the phrase, unbidden. He used to read self-help books but he’s graduated to heavier works: Freud, Jung, all the biggies. He wants to understand how people think, and how a normal person’s emotions work, and he doesn’t think he’s going to get to that understanding through experience alone. Because everything HE thinks or feels, he has to wonder, does he feel that way because it’s a normal reaction to whatever’s happened? Or is it just him, is it something unique to his make-up or his situation, both of which are distressingly singular? There are days he feels like the word “alienation” was invented specifically for him.

2. Growing up, he always loved the farm but it felt too small for him. Even as a kid, he just felt like he was meant for bigger and grander things than plowing and harvesting, and the same old cycles year in and year out. Obviously his abilities contributed to this feeling, but it seemed to go beyond what he could do. He didn’t think in terms of “destiny” at the time, but in retrospect, that’s definitely what it felt like.

In the last six years, he’s learned things about the world and about himself that he could never have conceived of before. He’s traveled farther, and done more, and faced greater challenges, than he ever imagined were possible. The scope of his world has broadened exponentially, and it’s become blindingly obvious that he was right: he wasn’t meant to stay on the farm all his life.

Most days, he would give up everything he has and knows if he could only change that. He hasn’t had a moment’s unqualified happiness since he found out where he came from. A small and humdrum life seems to Clark like the most blessed existence imaginable.

3. He imprinted on Lex in all kinds of ways, but the one that seems the most dangerous to him now: Lex taught him everything he knows about desire. How to be the object of it, to feel it rippling over you like sunlight, and the power that confers. How to be consumed by it; what it feels like to want something so much you ache down to your core. How to pursue it, and how to just stand by and watch the things you long for, knowing you can never have them. How to envy, to covet what someone else has. How to have gifts beyond measure and still not have enough.

Maybe if Clark were immune to desire, he wouldn’t feel bound to Lex the way he does. But Lex doesn’t ever let go, and Clark knows that he can’t let go either. He’d like it if he could say this is all Lex’s fault, but it isn’t. For too many years, Clark followed Lex, kept coming back to him, wanted to be more like him. He wanted to be part of him. And now he is.

1. OMG! Yes. You've just articulated the Essence of Clark.

2. Okay. I started sniffling here, then tears fell, then I was sobbing and I had to stop reading and calm down. NOT FAIR. You've eloquently stated Clark's desire for normalcy. Once I'd calmed down enough to think about it, I'm not so sure I agree that post-"Labyrinth", Clark's greatest desire would still be 'normalcy'. It could be and hasn't been categorically shown otherwise because we haven't really seen much of Clark's desires in S6. But, I have to wonder post-Ollie, the Zoners, and Mrs. Luthor, what he's feeling now.

3. *g* Perfect. "Imprint" is right. It really speaks to something that Clark will always take with him.

Re #2 -- I don't think that Clark still wants *his* life to be normal and humdrum. I don't believe he has any hope of that, and he's got too much sense of responsibility to take it now even if it were offered. I do think, though, that he'd be tremendously jealous of anyone who doesn't have some huge terrifying destiny, who could just live a quiet life without worrying about the fate of the universe. He must think those people are incredibly lucky. That's all I meant.

I'm glad these worked for you, otherwise. :-)

Ohhh, very interesting!
#1 is so interesting--you've taken his self-help book thing and developed it. Of course it's also interesting that even in the pilot they showed him struggling towards that. *g*
#2 is also very interesting--it's a mature!Clark perspective, and explores his 'destiny' drive but also the way that a simple life is romantic to Clark.

I love the last one best of all--it sums them up perfectly.

Thank you so much! It's kind of amazing how much this has unleashed in my brain; I've got all these ideas for new SV fics now, which I don't really have time to write but I might just have to play with them anyway. And here I'd thought I was all over Clark and Lex...

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Geoffrey

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