#maculategiraffe

All right, last week @maculategiraffe​ tagged me for this delightful meme, and now I’m finally getting around to it!  I’m going to follow her excellent example in not merely listing but also rhapsodizing somewhat about each of my faves.

Rules:  Name your top ten favorite female or nonbinary characters from different fandoms.  Tag ten people.

I think Joss Carter held first place on my list for a similar meme a while back, but I can’t help it, I still love her.  She didn’t bend.  Her entire life story was of repeatedly colliding with unjust and broken systems, from the US Army to her own marriage, and refusing to accept their failings.  Of course, since this was Person of Interest, her workarounds weren’t always legal, but Taraji P Henson always made me believe that it was in service of some higher standard, some blazing better world that was yet to be.  She always snarked with the best of them, too.

Kate Reed of the short-lived USA series Fairly Legal was just as tenacious but far less organized, a female counterpart to countless male protagonists who break every rule and social norm, but with a disarming smile, so of course they end up winning in the end.  She starts the series out grieving, half-divorced, and having just launched on a major career shift, but she's as undaunted by her own pain as she is by any other obstacle, determined to slip past or scrabble over top it in order to find the happy ending she knows is almost within reach, and that’s what makes her unforgettable, for me.

Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy is populated almost entirely by nonbinary characters, most of whom are human, but as much as I love Breq’s stoic relentless Breqness, for this meme I’m going to list Mercy of Kalr, the spaceship who saw Breq and wanted her for a captain -- even though no one asks ships their opinions about these things -- and combines all of the virtues of ships (polite, restrained, tactically passive-aggressive) and, ultimately, of citizens as well.  My favorite cinnamon roll ever to fly through space, by far.

Annalise Keating of How to Get Away with Murder is a terrible person, and I love her desperately.  She’s manipulative, compassionate, vulnerable, implacable.  She juggles a dozen disasters at any given time and keeps more of them up in the air than anyone else ever could.  She gets to ignore repeated warnings and give voice to her outrage and, despite being a black woman in America, still win.  She is the center about which the show revolves and without which it could not possibly exist.  And it doesn’t hurt any that she’s also proof that Viola Davis deserves every damn award.

Eleanor Shellstrop is an asshole, plain and simple.  She might or might not be the first to admit it, but if she wasn’t, she would defiantly agree just to make sure the first person realized that noticing that pretty obvious fact didn’t give them any kind of hold over her.  She’s selfish.  The only reason she even tries to change is to avoid punishment.  But she does change.  I love her because she loves herself, and because Kristen Bell is kind of a genius, and because of the genuinely beautiful things The Good Place says through her progress.  She’s fantastic.

Do I even need to speak in praise of Joan Watson?  She, along with a refreshingly empathetic iteration of Sherlock Holmes, is what makes Elementary Elementary.  I love that she’s both principled and pragmatic, that she’s compassionate and dispassionate at once.  I love how many times she’s reinvented herself, and how driven she is, no matter what she does, to do it well.  I admit I’m a little confused about why the show has decided to give her an adoption storyline, but at the same time, I love every single thing about it so far.  I love that the life she lives is exactly her own.

Faris Nallaneen is the protagonist of Caroline Stevermer’s novel A College of Magics, and she breaks my heart.  Heir to a small Ruritanian polity and sent by her wicked uncle to the titular college, she is sardonic, iron-willed, passionately devoted to her people -- and living in a world that is so much bigger and more terrible than she is, and which she will fight with everything she has in her to save what is hers to defend.  Looking only at its outline, her story could have easily been silly or slight.  It is neither of those things, and she’s strong enough to bear it -- even though, at the same time, she is so young.

Sulla Pinsky of O Human Star is even younger, and as a humanoid robot in a world whose human population is still adjusting to the existence of artificial intelligence, she’s got her own share of struggles.  Making friends after a life lived in secret, for example.  Or deciding which secrets to keep for fear of being rejected, and which to share so that she can be loved as who she really is.  She’s by turns enthusiastic and shy, skittish and utterly brave.  She has that wisdom of youth that sees what is wrong in the world and meets it with unflagging hope.  I love her so much.

Kel Cheris of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series... what do I even say about Cheris?  Absurdly brave, but that’s Kel for you.  Absolutely brilliant at math, but it’s not like the story gives concrete examples, or like I could have appreciated them if it had.  She’s kind to robot servitors.  She’s kind to the ghost that takes up residence in her mind.  I could say that she does her best in a world of terrible cruelties, and that’s true, but I also feel like that’s missing the point in some strange way; hers isn’t really the kind of story you can tie up in an inspirational bow.  But I love that she is kind.

And then there’s Murderbot, of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, who is probably the most relatable of any of these characters.  I’ve only read the first novella so far, but Murderbot leaves a hell of an impression:  part bot, part organic, and 100% socially anxious media fan.  Why do these humans keep wanting to talk?  Why does plot keep getting in the way of binge watching the best drama of all time, Sanctuary Moon?  Murderbot is intensely awkward, chronically cranky, occasionally heroic, and really doesn’t want you to take that last as an excuse to try and interact.  I could not ask for more in a protagonist.

I recently read an awesome series and left an ode to the author’s amazingness in the comments. I get annoyingly anxious about leaving reviews sometimes, but I commented on next few updates as well because I had a lot of feelings to scream about.

Now, though, I feel like I have to keep it up or the author will think I stopped liking it.

So now my anxiety will force me to do something my it’s stopped me from doing in the past 😏

Aww, what a lovely meme!  ♥

1. Spending time with non-human animals that enjoy human attention.  Not because they don’t have expectations or opinions:  they definitely do!  But it lets me take a break from Languaging and Personing and connect with another living creature on a different wavelength.

2. Talking with humans I like and who like me.  When you’re both smiling at each other, whether face to face or through the mysteries of the internet or anything, that’s such a beautiful feeling.

3. Those moments in stories that expand my awareness of possibility.  It doesn’t have to be something huge, although it can be – but anytime I find something new to incorporate into my idea of the world, that’s amazing.

4. Seeing an important truth (and most truths are important) expressed so well that it feels like the quiet after a rain when the air is washed clean and you fill your lungs with it.

YESSSS OMG I just read most of it over the last few weeks (How Life Goes On, The Way It Does) although I’m trying to save the current WIP until it’s finished. We’ll see how that goes. 

But yes, SO GREAT, anyone who would like to read a really actually mostly optimistic vision of a post-apocalyptic irradiated world, and family-finding and community-building and figuring out the transition from war to peace to a just society.