a million times a trillion more (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dolorosa_12) wrote2020-04-23 04:45 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2020-04-23 04:45 pm
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.
Several things about Una stand out to me. The first — and this is down to McDougall's writing — is that the sheer physical and psychological effort involved in being Noviana Una is always emphasised. She feels everything deeply, and the state of living in constant fear, living with constant trauma, and of wanting ownership of her own body and mind takes a heavy toll. Una never seems to rest, even when she's sleeping, and there's a prickly, nervous guardedness about her that's always apparent. I find her fear very refreshing, and have always appreciated that her determination and sense of moral rightness doesn't take that fear away. Una is always aware of the extreme danger of what she's doing, and it scares her.
On a related note, while the trilogy is always emphatic that Una's anger at her experiences, at the injustice of slavery, and that her unwavering desire to change the world are entirely reasonable and justified, the fact that she's right doesn't mean that her path is easy. Even deeply sympathetic Romans like Marcus and his cousin Makaria, the Emperor's daughter, can't quite imagine what it's like to be Una, to be always afraid, and thus can't quite understand her sense of urgency on the issue of slavery. Once she and Sulien are freed by the Emperor at the end of the first book, Marcus and others like him can't quite grasp why that's not enough — and if sympathetic and well-meaning Romans can't understand, you can imagine what an uphill battle Una faces. (I sort of love that by the end of the series, Una essentially gives up on convincing the privileged to grant her and her fellow slaves the rights which she comes to understand have always belonged to them. It's a nice echo back to a conversation she has in the first book with Sulien, in which she contemptuously sneers that she 'doesn't want some nice man to come and rescue' her and own her benevolently: she wants to exist as a person without anyone needing to grant that status to her.)
I love Una's uneasy relationship with her own name. She was not born with the name 'Noviana' — it was given to her in recognition of the fact that the Emperor, of the Novian dynasty, granted her freedom as a reward for her rescue of Marcus, and it makes it sound as if she was at one point owned by Marcus, or by a member of his family. Given that she and Marcus fall in love and have a relationship, that implication of former ownership is intolerable for her. But when she's captured by Marcus's usurping cousin Drusus in the third book and accused of treason, that name, Noviana, becomes a weapon. Drusus strips Una of her freedom, denies her right to the name, and tries to cut a deal with her by which she admits to treason in an open court and will only have to be executed privately (I think by firing squad although I can't quite remember that detail). Una, despairing, initially goes along with it, until she gets to the court and realises by listening in on the crowds' thoughts that she has more support than she suspected. So then she quietly but firmly names herself as Noviana Una, and speaks her truth. I have to admit I danced around the room when I first read the courtroom scene. I have such a thing for women who have suffered injustice and false accusations standing firm and calmly (or furiously) speaking truth to power, bearing witness to injustice.
Two final crowning moments of awesome for Una: she leads the slave revolution/rescue mission from the among the stacks of the Library of Alexandria, which makes my librarian heart sing. Also, the denouement of the series involves Una at the head of an angry mob of escaped slaves and free Romans and Nionians who have suffered injustice at the hands of Drusus, and it's as if the living embodiment of his crimes has come to confront him. I love it.
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:
Mai embodies several characteristics I tend to latch onto in fictional favourites.
We first encounter Mai as a merchant's daughter, living in a trade town that is occupied by a mercenary band led by the exiled noble, Captain Anji. As far as occupations go, it's fairly reasonable, in that the people are able to go about their daily lives without much intrusion and Mai's family is able to retain something of its privileged position under the new regime. Mai is a seasoned market trader, managing her family's stall and very good at persuading people to buy their products. She's also adroit at managing her rather difficult family and carving out a place of calm for herself among the more domineering and aggressive personalities of her relatives. Her talents lie in managing people, keeping a 'market face' on at all times, understanding the needs and desires of others and persuading them gently in a direction that is beneficial to her and hers without people perceiving that they are being manipulated. One thing Elliott does that I appreciate is that she emphasises that Mai's abilities in this area are a skill that she has learned, and that they are valued by those around her. Indeed, the mercurial Captain Anji decides to marry Mai because he wants to embark on a military campaign and recognises that Mai's skills are necessary to smooth his path with the people his mercenaries will conquer.
Once she's married to Anji, Mai does indeed put her skills to use forging ties with the local people by encouraging marriages between Anji's men and local women and helping to establish markets, trade routes and farms. In most cases, especially early on in the series, it's Mai's skills that are more necessary. The region into which Anji moves his army has been wracked by civil war and chaos for quite a while, and the people are quite happy to live under his rule, once Mai's diplomacy has been put to use showing them that they will be able to resume ordinary life, growing crops, building, making crafts and selling them. It's very rare in fantasy novels for talents like Mai's – what I normally term 'mercantile behaviour' — to be presented in a favourable light, and I've always loved the fact that Elliott made them heroic and highlighted their significance.
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
V: Which character do you relate to most?
W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.
X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?
Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!
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.
Several things about Una stand out to me. The first — and this is down to McDougall's writing — is that the sheer physical and psychological effort involved in being Noviana Una is always emphasised. She feels everything deeply, and the state of living in constant fear, living with constant trauma, and of wanting ownership of her own body and mind takes a heavy toll. Una never seems to rest, even when she's sleeping, and there's a prickly, nervous guardedness about her that's always apparent. I find her fear very refreshing, and have always appreciated that her determination and sense of moral rightness doesn't take that fear away. Una is always aware of the extreme danger of what she's doing, and it scares her.
On a related note, while the trilogy is always emphatic that Una's anger at her experiences, at the injustice of slavery, and that her unwavering desire to change the world are entirely reasonable and justified, the fact that she's right doesn't mean that her path is easy. Even deeply sympathetic Romans like Marcus and his cousin Makaria, the Emperor's daughter, can't quite imagine what it's like to be Una, to be always afraid, and thus can't quite understand her sense of urgency on the issue of slavery. Once she and Sulien are freed by the Emperor at the end of the first book, Marcus and others like him can't quite grasp why that's not enough — and if sympathetic and well-meaning Romans can't understand, you can imagine what an uphill battle Una faces. (I sort of love that by the end of the series, Una essentially gives up on convincing the privileged to grant her and her fellow slaves the rights which she comes to understand have always belonged to them. It's a nice echo back to a conversation she has in the first book with Sulien, in which she contemptuously sneers that she 'doesn't want some nice man to come and rescue' her and own her benevolently: she wants to exist as a person without anyone needing to grant that status to her.)
I love Una's uneasy relationship with her own name. She was not born with the name 'Noviana' — it was given to her in recognition of the fact that the Emperor, of the Novian dynasty, granted her freedom as a reward for her rescue of Marcus, and it makes it sound as if she was at one point owned by Marcus, or by a member of his family. Given that she and Marcus fall in love and have a relationship, that implication of former ownership is intolerable for her. But when she's captured by Marcus's usurping cousin Drusus in the third book and accused of treason, that name, Noviana, becomes a weapon. Drusus strips Una of her freedom, denies her right to the name, and tries to cut a deal with her by which she admits to treason in an open court and will only have to be executed privately (I think by firing squad although I can't quite remember that detail). Una, despairing, initially goes along with it, until she gets to the court and realises by listening in on the crowds' thoughts that she has more support than she suspected. So then she quietly but firmly names herself as Noviana Una, and speaks her truth. I have to admit I danced around the room when I first read the courtroom scene. I have such a thing for women who have suffered injustice and false accusations standing firm and calmly (or furiously) speaking truth to power, bearing witness to injustice.
Two final crowning moments of awesome for Una: she leads the slave revolution/rescue mission from the among the stacks of the Library of Alexandria, which makes my librarian heart sing. Also, the denouement of the series involves Una at the head of an angry mob of escaped slaves and free Romans and Nionians who have suffered injustice at the hands of Drusus, and it's as if the living embodiment of his crimes has come to confront him. I love it.
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:
Mai embodies several characteristics I tend to latch onto in fictional favourites.
We first encounter Mai as a merchant's daughter, living in a trade town that is occupied by a mercenary band led by the exiled noble, Captain Anji. As far as occupations go, it's fairly reasonable, in that the people are able to go about their daily lives without much intrusion and Mai's family is able to retain something of its privileged position under the new regime. Mai is a seasoned market trader, managing her family's stall and very good at persuading people to buy their products. She's also adroit at managing her rather difficult family and carving out a place of calm for herself among the more domineering and aggressive personalities of her relatives. Her talents lie in managing people, keeping a 'market face' on at all times, understanding the needs and desires of others and persuading them gently in a direction that is beneficial to her and hers without people perceiving that they are being manipulated. One thing Elliott does that I appreciate is that she emphasises that Mai's abilities in this area are a skill that she has learned, and that they are valued by those around her. Indeed, the mercurial Captain Anji decides to marry Mai because he wants to embark on a military campaign and recognises that Mai's skills are necessary to smooth his path with the people his mercenaries will conquer.
Once she's married to Anji, Mai does indeed put her skills to use forging ties with the local people by encouraging marriages between Anji's men and local women and helping to establish markets, trade routes and farms. In most cases, especially early on in the series, it's Mai's skills that are more necessary. The region into which Anji moves his army has been wracked by civil war and chaos for quite a while, and the people are quite happy to live under his rule, once Mai's diplomacy has been put to use showing them that they will be able to resume ordinary life, growing crops, building, making crafts and selling them. It's very rare in fantasy novels for talents like Mai's – what I normally term 'mercantile behaviour' — to be presented in a favourable light, and I've always loved the fact that Elliott made them heroic and highlighted their significance.
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:
V: Which character do you relate to most?
W: A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.
X: A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.
Y: What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?
Z: Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go!
no subject
no subject
no subject
I'm going to think about this for myself because - after a certain age - I'm not sure if I have book characters who I'd list as favorites. And my old favorites are, unsurprisingly, ones that I saw myself as or at the time were in one way or another aspirational. (Oye, what a bad mix of past and present tense. :P) I'm pretty sure I went through all the March sisters and tried them on as favorite characters. Always ending back with Jo.
In terms of writing, my favorites aren't always the ones I'm interested in exploring further.
Hmm....
no subject
I suspect a lot of my favourites are that way for me. I am in no way like Una (she's so closed off and guarded, whereas I — as you can probably tell from my entire blog, basically have no filter when it comes to talking about myself and my interior life), but I admire her a lot. There are elements of me in Pagan and Mai, but probably more aspiration than reality, as you say.
It's rare that I end up having a single favourite character in new canons, but I often end up liking a handful of them more than the entire ensemble, and wanting to read/write/focus on those characters.