Apparently I have a whole lot of feelings

It's Day Twenty-One of the fandom meme:

U: Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

I have a lot of favourite characters, so limiting myself to three is hard.

I love Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. She is my default icon on Ao3 and Dreamwidth, and I wrote a gushing post about her for another meme a while ago. Rather than write everything out again, I'll put what I wrote about Una in that other post behind a cut, because it explains why she's my favourite ... at length.

( A lot of words about Una )

The second character I'll list here is Mai, from Kate Elliott's Crossroads series. I've spoken a bit about her in an earlier post for this meme, and I also wrote about her at length in an older post for another meme. Again, I'll repost what I wrote behind the cut:

( More on Mai )

And the final character I will talk about is my beloved Pagan Kidrouk, the narrator of the first three of Catherine Jinks's wonderful Pagan Chronicles books, who is probably my favourite fictional character of all time. Weirdly, I don't think I've actually ever written down all my thoughts about him and why he is my favourite, but in brief: he is a dispossessed refugee who has to make a life for himself in a land where he knows no one (in his case, he is a Christian Arab who leaves Jerusalem in the twelfth century and ends up living in Languedoc), he is a literate person in a world where most people he encounters do not know how to read, he is traumatised and alone and has to build his own found family, and he uses words as his strength and weapons to make sense of situations where he is frequently at a massive disadvantage, and, slowly, over the years, he builds a new home for himself in the strange land in which he ends up.

Generally, for characters to be my favourites, they need to be at least one of these things:

Immigrants or refugees who find a new home and a sense of home and belonging in other people

Women whose heroism lies in their talents at quiet, unglamorous, unnoticed 'women's work'

Women who almost always read situations correctly and know the right actions to take, but whose advice is often ignored

Characters who are soft-hearted and sentimental and dismissed as being weak because of this

Characters who are hyper-observant of other people's moods, bodies, behaviour, reactions and perceptions out of grim necessity, for the sake of their own survival

Competent, maternal older women

Women who have survived trauma and reacted in certain ways which I find hard to summarise/articulate here

( The other days )