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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Which I think is pretty normal.
I'd think twice about mentioning, say, my interest in Punch and Judy to some people in case they thought I was a raging misogynist.
I feel you do not exactly broadcast "MRA in the making," but I understand your point. That's the thing where not everything is a T-shirt logo, but people behave as though it is.
Holmes was an early hero of mine but I wouldn't want to hang out with him.
I would totally hang out with Holmes! I just wouldn't share a flat with him, because I have enough difficulty living with people as it is and the last thing I need is a flatmate who requires the household to run on his weird case schedule as opposed to my weird sleep schedule. Watson at least signed up for it, but I have great sympathy for Colin Jeavons' Lestrade who is doing his best to catch a nap on the sofa in Granada's "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" when Holmes bursts in with a cheerful cry of "Eleven o'clock, gentlemen, on your feet!" and that's grounds for murder right there.
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That sounds like an excellent compromise. I had been going to say, and has the additional benefit of keeping a person outside the flat while Holmes is conducting his chemical experiments inside it, but I really did spend the better part of a school year growing slime mold in my basement and the bacteria to feed it on, so I don't really have much moral high ground here that isn't sticky.
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I was probably a bit harsh there - my comment would have been a bit longer but I had an incoming call from a friend. I couldn't share a flat with him; I wouldn't mind being some London eccentric with a shop of curiosities who Holmes taps up for some recondite knowledge and a smoke. It'd also depend on who was Holmes. Brett, Merrison: yes. Cumberbatch is completely stabbable.
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I can see it. You might also run a very fair line in obscure books.
It'd also depend on who was Holmes. Brett, Merrison: yes. Cumberbatch is completely stabbable.
I don't know Merrison's Holmes at all. Radio?