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.
