He spends all afternoon hunting the moon
I don't feel it should be a controversial opinion that not all favorite characters are figures of identification or representation nor should they be treated as such, but I finally managed to articulate to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch why the expectation to the contrary bothers me so much, aside from the normal number of times since childhood that I have had to fend off people taking statements of narrative interest as a kind of personality quiz: especially these days, it feels like an extension of personal branding, this idea that your clothes and your reading material and your writing music are all advertisements of your ethics or politics or allegiances—assertions, not even reflections, of your identity—and everything you like must be recognizable as a you sort of thing as opposed to sometimes just the most interesting writing in the book or acting on the screen. Yes, everything tells you something about a person. No, it's not the TAT, and it's especially not the weighing of the heart. I hadn't had any dust-ups with purity culture in fandom lately, so I wasn't sure why the subject was on my mind, but it turns out that today was the twenty-year anniversary of my beginning to keep a list of favorite characters in literature and media whenever I ran across them. I did it to find out if there were patterns. I wondered at the time if my tastes would have changed entirely in twenty years. The answer turns out to be a relatively solid "no," although it interests me that in some cases I could still produce a short essay on the character in question and in others I barely remember their source material or why they appealed to me. More aggravatingly, it reminded me how much I miss live theater. Some of these people I can revisit, but that opera from the Yale School of Music in 2005 or that play from the Trinity Rep in 2009 are memory alone. I can tell from the dates when I started really watching movies.
spatch why the expectation to the contrary bothers me so much, aside from the normal number of times since childhood that I have had to fend off people taking statements of narrative interest as a kind of personality quiz: especially these days, it feels like an extension of personal branding, this idea that your clothes and your reading material and your writing music are all advertisements of your ethics or politics or allegiances—assertions, not even reflections, of your identity—and everything you like must be recognizable as a you sort of thing as opposed to sometimes just the most interesting writing in the book or acting on the screen. Yes, everything tells you something about a person. No, it's not the TAT, and it's especially not the weighing of the heart. I hadn't had any dust-ups with purity culture in fandom lately, so I wasn't sure why the subject was on my mind, but it turns out that today was the twenty-year anniversary of my beginning to keep a list of favorite characters in literature and media whenever I ran across them. I did it to find out if there were patterns. I wondered at the time if my tastes would have changed entirely in twenty years. The answer turns out to be a relatively solid "no," although it interests me that in some cases I could still produce a short essay on the character in question and in others I barely remember their source material or why they appealed to me. More aggravatingly, it reminded me how much I miss live theater. Some of these people I can revisit, but that opera from the Yale School of Music in 2005 or that play from the Trinity Rep in 2009 are memory alone. I can tell from the dates when I started really watching movies.
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It is indeed much worse now.
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Confirmation appreciated. Argh.
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He's great in Midnight Special (2016), which is where I first saw him.
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But my favourite character by far, the one whom I found most sympathetic, turned out to General Hux, so I'm no one to talk about dodgy character preferences either...
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What do you like about him? (I have seen none of the sequel movies, but do not care about spoilers at all.)
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(b) I sympathise with the trials of an honest bureaucrat trying to do his job, get things done, and conquer the Galaxy (as one does), while being stymied at every turn by his barking-mad space-wizard bosses. Having to work with someone like Kylo Ren, not to mention Snoke/Palpatine, would drive me up the wall too, though hopefully not to the point of blowing up whole planets...
(c) I did like the way that even though he had to die ignominiously to do it, everyone who had ever injured or abused him or indeed crossed him seriously in any way (his father, Snoke, Palpatine, Kylo Ren, Admiral Brookes, General Pryde, the Sith Eternal, the First Order, the Final Order, Leia Organa) lived to regret it, though in many cases not for very long. I think Finn and Poe and Rose were the only ones who survived, probably because of being too small fry to bother with. And assuming that both the New Republic and the Resistance promptly fell apart into anarchy five minutes after the last film ended, he could probably count those kills too. Not bad for a Force-null 34-year old.
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I thought I hadn't seen Domnhall Gleeson, but it turns out I have seen him in several things where he did not leave much of an impression, so clearly I just need to find the right role.
I sympathise with the trials of an honest bureaucrat trying to do his job, get things done, and conquer the Galaxy (as one does), while being stymied at every turn by his barking-mad space-wizard bosses.
I'll just leave my feelings about Admiral Piett here.
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I was very amused in The Force Awakens to note that Starkiller Base did in fact have safety railings on its walkways-above-the-abyss.