This looks like a fun meme
Apr. 27th, 2017 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Pretty much everyone's been posting this meme, so I figured I might as well give it a go myself.
Comment with one of my fandoms and I'll tell you:
the character I least understand
interactions I enjoyed the most
the character who scares me the most
the character who is mostly like me
hottest looks character
one thing I dislike about my fave character
one thing I like about my hated character
a quote or scene that haunts me
a death that left me indifferent
a character I wish died but didn’t
my ship that never sailed
If you don't know my fandoms, feel free to ask: my Ao3 profile might also be helpful.
Comment with one of my fandoms and I'll tell you:
the character I least understand
interactions I enjoyed the most
the character who scares me the most
the character who is mostly like me
hottest looks character
one thing I dislike about my fave character
one thing I like about my hated character
a quote or scene that haunts me
a death that left me indifferent
a character I wish died but didn’t
my ship that never sailed
If you don't know my fandoms, feel free to ask: my Ao3 profile might also be helpful.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 07:05 pm (UTC)Though I'd appreciate it if you could maybe keep it spoiler-free for book #2 and #3, which I'll get round to reading, eventually. Thanks.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 08:10 pm (UTC)the character I least understand
Probably Sulien. I mean, Romanitas is a series with a huge emphasis on characters' interiority, so it's not as if I don't know what he's feeling and thinking, and what motivates him. But it always baffled me that he wasn't angrier about what had happened to him, and how oblivious he was to the fact that he was a slave, and that everyone around him viewed him as such, and how uncomplicatedly cheerful he was all the time, given his backstory!
interactions I enjoyed the most
Unsurprisingly, I love, love, love every moment Una and Marcus interact. I love their tense, prickly awkwardness. I love Una's initial scorn for him, and the fact that she never lets him off the hook for his privileged existence. I love that both are intensely private people who find it hard to talk to others, hate being touched, and are just incredibly introverted, and the sense of common ground they find with that.
the character who scares me the most
Drusus. He absolutely terrifies me.
the character who is mostly like me
I identify a lot with Una, although obviously I've never been through anything as terrible as she's experienced. I also sympathise a lot with Makaria's prickliness, and her desire to just be left alone on her island, but I feel I'm a bit more emotionally expressive!
I also feel like I have elements of Varius and Cleomenes, especially their tendency to look on ruefully and in horror at the various disasters they're dragged into by Marcus, Sulien and Una. I get the feeling Cleomenes would just like a quiet life, but his conscience won't allow it!
hottest looks character
I don't know? I have very strong mental images of the characters, but I think the ones I think are attractive are only in the later books.
one thing I dislike about my fave character
She, like me, tends to be very controlling, because she doesn't trust anyone else to get things right to her exacting standards. I guess it's understandable, given she spends most of the first book fleeing for her life, and then hanging out with others who are hiding in fear for their lives, and then stopping a conspiracy — the stakes are so high!
one thing I like about my hated character
Ummmm, Drusus is very good at being the fictional embodiment of everything I hate and fear, so he's the absolute perfect antagonist?
a quote or scene that haunts me
The moment when Marcus saves Una from kidnapping in Wolf Step, and her gratitude is all bound up with complicated feelings of shame and contempt. Also the scene in the greenhouse — it's just so beautifully written, such an evocative scene that you can almost feel the steam and the water (and ever since I've wanted to go swimming in a greenhouse).
a death that left me indifferent
I don't really think there were any? Maybe the spy sent to find the camp at Holzarta, who Una and Dama drive away and trick and kill? He's a bit of a plot device, so that readers can witness Dama's ruthlessness, and we don't know enough of his personality to really feel much when he's gone.
a character I wish died but didn’t
This is kind of a spoiler...
my ship that never sailed
The only thing I ship in the first book is Marcus/Una, so I don't really have an answer for this question, since the ship I love intensely get together by the end of the book!
For once my Una icon is fandom-appropriate for the comment to which it's attached!
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 08:27 pm (UTC)I think maybe Mel? He always seems to be just waiting patiently on the edge of the narrative (and kind of at the edge of Sunshine's life, if I'm being honest), and I've never really understood what's making him stay, because Sunshine seems so indifferent to him, and he seems to exist on the margins of things, only appearing when Sunshine remembers he's meant to be her boyfriend. I guess I've never really understood relationships like that — they just seem so distant to me.
interactions I enjoyed the most
I love every scene with Sunshine and Con, but I especially enjoy reading all the scenes where Sunshine interacts with her landlady Yolande. Yolande is so blunt, and Sunshine is so cagey, and Yolande's every response seems to be horrified, bemused shock at how unprepared Sunshine is for everything she's facing.
the character who scares me the most
None of them, really. The world — the little hints at dystopia, the idea that it's hovering on the brink of destruction, that there's a war going on slightly off-screen, and the humans are losing — frightens me a lot more than any one character.
the character who is mostly like me
Sunshine's way of using food and feeding people (and cooking elaborate meals for others) as a marker of love is very, very like me, but her intense independence is nothing like me — I hate being alone (although I'm introverted) and find the idea of relying on myself alone absolutely terrifying.
hottest looks character
I think Con's meant to look like a reanimated corpse, but I just love vampires so much, so I kind of ignore this...
one thing I dislike about my fave character
I don't really have a favourite character in this book, so I'm not sure I have an answer for this.
one thing I like about my hated character
I don't really hate any of the characters either. I'm not the biggest fan of Mel, but I don't feel anything as intense as hate, either.
a quote or scene that haunts me
The entire first few chapters, from the moment Con and Sunshine are thrown together, the terrifying tension while they're trapped in a situation that could cause both their deaths, until they make the decision to form an alliance, and she leads him outside through the daylight, shielding him from the sunshine that could kill him.
a death that left me indifferent
For an urban fantasy novel about vampires, this book is weirdly low in terms of its death count — the only one I can really remember is Bo's, which is obviously extremely significant for reasons of plot, theme, and character development, so it didn't exactly leave me indifferent.
a character I wish died but didn’t
These are such mean questions! I can't think of any character in the book I would wish dead!
my ship that never sailed
I suppose technically Sunshine/Con, but pretty much the entire corpus of Sunshine fanfic goes about remedying this, so I don't feel too let down by where McKinley chose to end things. I do wish she'd written a sequel, though.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 08:42 pm (UTC)...a sequel would be the best.
(And the meme is super mean! I'm cheating on all my answers and just talking more about things I find interesting rather than giving actual straight answers.)
no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-04-27 08:53 pm (UTC)I actually find most of the characters and their motivations really easy to understand. The one who has always struck me as a bit of a blank slate is Cho Chang — she sometimes seems more like a plot device than a fully three-dimensional character, and I always feel like she deserved better. I guess that's the limitation of the story mostly being told from Harry's point of view — if Harry doesn't think much about another character's motivations and interior life, the reader isn't going to get access to these things either.
interactions I enjoyed the most
I love every moment McGonagall is on the page. All her interactions are a joy, no matter her interlocutor.
the character who scares me the most
Umbridge scares me, because her character is all too plausible. Of all the villainous characters, in fact, she's the one who seems closest to real-world villainy.
Dumbledore scares me a lot, too. His ruthlessness, the way he seems to feel genuine care about other characters, but manipulates them to his own ends nonetheless and so on really chills me, when I stop to think about it.
the character who is mostly like me
Like a lot of geeky women, I see a lot of myself in Hermione, especially the intense desire to succeed academically, the eagerness to please authority figures, and the obliviousness to the effect constantly attempting to answer every question in class would have. I'm definitely not as brave as her, though. I identify a lot with Molly Weasley's strong sense of hearth and home, and her sense of care and protectiveness towards those she views as her family, but I find her character narrowminded at times and hope I don't possess that quality.
hottest looks character
I'm not really sure how to answer this. Although I read the earliest books in the series several years before the films came out, my mental image of the characters has now become so tangled up with the way the actors look that I can't really separate them.
one thing I dislike about my fave character
Is it weird that in such a character-driven series, I don't really have a favourite? I guess if I really had to pick one, Ron would be my favourite, and he has flaws aplenty! To pick just one thing I dislike about him, he can jump to conclusions (usually the wrong conclusions) very quickly, and make bad decisions based on very little information. He's also very prone to jealousy.
one thing I like about my hated character
I guess the one thing I like about Umbridge is that she unites the fandom (which generally disagrees about everything) as a character that everyone agrees is awful. I don't think I've ever met a Harry Potter fan who liked her.
a quote or scene that haunts me
I cry every time I read the part where Harry walks towards death, and he is afraid, and the spirits of his parents and parents' friends walk with him and try to give him strength.
a death that left me indifferent
Most of them, to be honest. Other than Dobby, I've never really felt that Rowling wrote deaths particularly well — at least not in a way that provoked strong emotional responses. I cry a lot when reading books, watching TV or watching films, so in this case I think the problem is with Rowling, not me.
a character I wish died but didn’t
None. I think Rowling — for all my griping in the previous question about her inability to write emotionally affecting deaths — picked exactly the right characters to kill off to press the right plot, thematic, or characterisation buttons.
my ship that never sailed
I never really shipped anything in Harry Potter, but the fact that there were no canon, on-page queer relationships is just ridiculous. (I say this not as, for example, a bitter Remus/Sirius shipper or anything like that. I just really feel that, in Rowling's cast of thousands, pre-canon, only-confirmed-in-an-interview-but-never-actually-on-the-page gay Dumbledore is not enough, and not good enough.)