Okay, I have 5 asks (more than half of which have 2 characters) so will be working on these bit by bit. But I'm putting work into it.
The ask meme is "Pick a character and I will try to dissect the core lie that they believe about themselves"
My beloved asks me for Veralidaine Sarrasri from Tamora Pierce's Tortall series (specifically The Immortals quartet) and Susan Sto Helit from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series (specifically the DEATH anthology).
Both are mortal descendants of gods who discover their heritage after their parents die and they find themselves torn between the world of mortals where they were raised and the immortal world of divinity that they feel alien from.
Let's hit them one by one
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Name: Veralidaine Sarrasri or Daine for short.
Daine is a wild mage who was raised by her mother and her mother's family, not meeting her father until her late teens. As a young child her village was attacked by bandits and her family was killed. She was already looked down upon by the community for being a bastard and her preference to spend her time with animals instead of humans. The orphaned child was labeled as mad and repelled from human society. She went to live with wolves and her mare, Cloud.
Daine can speak to animals. She is excluded from the world of humans and much of the first half of The Immortals Quartet is her finding a place within human society, particularly in her connection to Numair, an absurdly powerful mage trained in the warring nation of Carthak.
During her childhood Daine's family constantly tested her for The Gift, her ability to use magic and was always disappointed when she was displayed as not having it.
So early on in the books we have some overt lies that she believed. That her wild magic was not magic because she was constantly tested and rejected for not displaying more traditional and detectable forms of magic.
That she was mad.
That she did not belong with humans.
Then you have moments like when her caregivers in the first book tried to get her to open up about her life, she believed that being honest would cause people to reject her and push her away. That being undesirable would ensure people exiled her, as happened in her village.
Later still she had it displayed that not being in control of her emotions would lead to disastrous effects and people she cared about being hurt. She also takes a lot of responsibility in trying to keep her animal family from getting involved in human politics and pushes herself to exhaustion in trying to avert her two worlds colliding.
I feel it is a bit of a cheat to say it but Daine's core lie is "I am responsible for the bad things that happen to/around me" at every avenue she, an orphaned child, is attempting to assert her agency while refusing aid and mistrusting others because of the way that she has been treated.
Her first book begins with her as a homeless young teenager who is regarded as a wild child. She is not domesticated in the slightest and it takes several books worth of continued kindness and care to get her to let go of the reigns and allow someone else to take care of her for a change. In her second book she is asserting herself as responsible for brokering an end to the conflict between her wolf family and the noble who was disrupting the habitat and building power to make a bid for the crown of the kingdom.
It's a lot more nuanced, but I'm trying to be brief.
It's this core which allows the relationship between Daine and Numair to blossom because Numair is a man who is teaching her magic and allowing her to control the wildness of both her magic and her heart.
Daine is not quite a lone wolf (unlike our next contestant) but she is prideful and refuses to be coddled.
Tamora Pierce is exceptionally gifted at writing the connection between mage apprentice and tutor. It shines in this saga (though I understand if you disagree with the outcome in this quartet) and helps Daine overcome that all encompassing need to control every single situation. Though I fear she may still struggle with it, she tends to live a quiet life after The Immortals War. Well... she at least does not become central enough to The Plot to be a focus on any book after her quartet and seems to live a happy life in Tortall in service of the king. She is still a reckless creature with a tendency to be wild. But a lot of her abilities are used for spying and training horses.
I'll note that the entire conflict of her final book is that she is unwilling to be patient and wait for a safe passage back home because she fears that if she is not able to return immediately then the worst will happen.
I would argue that she never overcomes her core lie. She just builds better support systems to help her cope.
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Name: Susan Sto Helit
Susan is one of our favorite characters in all of fiction.
Susan is the daughter of Ysabell (Death's adopted daughter) and Mort (Death's apprentice) and thusly is the grandchild of Death. The grim reaper.
There may not be blood involved but when we are dealing with Anthropomorphic Personifications of aspects of reality concepts hold a much higher degree of power than genetics.
She is Death's granddaughter. She is part of Death's lineage.
Much like Daine she discovered her divinity in her early adulthood after her parents died and struggled with reconciling the oddness of unique experiences. Also like Daine she has a prideful streak that causes her to reject the privileges that her lineage offers. Within the mortal world she is the Duchess of Sto Helit and within the metaphysical world she is untouched by the concepts of time or death.
Yet she insists on living as normal of a life as she can manage. In Hogfather as a nanny (Goth Mary Poppins) and in Thief of Time as a teacher (Goth Ms. Frizzle).
She doesn't want to be special by birthright.
That's not the lie though. Because she knows she is not normal. She knows that she cannot maintain the lifestyle that she meticulously attempts to hide within.
She views adults as pointedly silly and unserious and views Concepts as ridiculous and bothersome.
She loves her grandfather but rejects him continuously. She doesn't want to be involved in the family business. She does not want the family oddity ruining her sense of normal.
I feel the lie with Susan is complicated and is entirely built around the second half of our favorite book of all time, Thief of Time.
Susan constantly asserts that cold harsh pragmatism is the only way to handle situations. That silliness is a distraction and a weed upon her life and attitude that must be rooted out. When she finds Lobsang, literally the only person in all of reality who could understand who she is and what she goes through, she takes a mentor position and assumes him to be her equal. She attempts to coach him on being a pragmatic bastard to get results and to not try to be a hero because heroes end up dead.
She learns that she was misguided as the situation evolves. In the timeless war between death and taxes (Death vs The Auditors) she is taught the same lesson two times.
To be human is to be guided by belief. To be lead by emotion. To be irrational. Because faith and love are what make humans human.
In Hogfather we get this through the iconic speech
(The full scene has Death describe that small fantasies are required to sell the big ones like justice, mercy or righteousness being aspects of the universe and not just human inventions to make sense of the chaos of reality)
In Thief of Time we get her witnessing the madness of Moira LeJean/Unity and seeing how the concept of self was the thing to save the disc from The Auditors and that Unity, a soulless facet of The Auditors found individuality enough that when she committed suicide by diving into a lake of chocolate, Death was there to collect her. Something that none of the other Auditors wearing human skins were granted the right to.
Unity was a direct proof that Susan's core belief is a lie.
Susan's lie is one that is repeated in dialogue often. that she is "mostly human", that she is not a member of humanity. That she is neither human nor god. That she is alone in being rational and sensible, things which humans are not. That she is exempt from silliness and irrationality and emotion.
Something she proves wholly untrue when she devours an entire tray of chocolate ammunition during the climax of Thief of Time.
She is quite capable of being a silly human, because she is a silly human. She views herself as excluded from both humanity and her place within her grandfather's family. She sees herself as neither human nor deity.
The final page of Thief of Time she, within the only other person who has the same background between humanity and divinity that she does, learns that silly little things like love are what make life worth living.
She's quite human. She is also a demi-god in the line of Death. She just doesn't internalize it.
She is both.
She is. She is a member of both families. Humanity and Death.
My hope is that with Lobsang (who is Time by the point of that scene) they get to enjoy being both. Even if Lobsang is more god than human and Susan is more human than god.
Bruce Banner (Hulk) and Jesse Faden (Control)
Elliot Alderson (Mr. Robot)
Evangeline Morgan (Of the Devil)
Juri Arisugawa (Revolutionary Girl Utena)
Master Aqua (Kingdom Hearts)
Briar Moss and Trisana Chandler (The Circle of Magic)
Rei Ayanami (Neon Genesis Evangelion)
Devil Hulk (The Immortal Hulk)
Beatrice the Golden Witch (Umineko)
The Venom Symbiote (Marvel Comics)
Jesse Pinkman (Breaking Bad/El Camino)
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So. You want to ask about Briar and Tris from Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series.
Two characters we relate to with and love enough that they are included in our Top 25 Characters list?
Briar, the heavily traumatized urchin city boy who identifies strongly with his poverty stricken upbringing and has to adjust to the relative comfort of his new walk in life and has to balance between who he identifies as (past tense) versus who he identifies as (present tense) and also has a sequence where his primary caregiver attempts suicide, leaving Briar to basically pull a "if you go, we both go" gambit?
and
Tris, the steadfast redhead who overheard relatives talk about who she could be pushed onto because no one wanted her. The one who refuses all forms of aid because she assumes it would be "charity" and the one who ripped apart her closest connections because living with them for a few months created such a stark power imbalance between them that pride and a lack of understanding destroyed all good faith and love that existed between them?
Basically you want me to explain what Craig and I's lies are.
...you're mean at times, you know that?
---
From our Core Lies ask meme.
Briar Moss (The Circle of Magic)
Briar was plucked up by Winding Circle during a trial. He was a thief and an orphan and would have either been used up by the gangs of his hometown or imprisoned for his crimes had Niko have not recruited him.
His specialty is in life magic, particularly with plants. Above all others in the circle he latches on to relationships and has by far the strongest connection to both his mentor and apprentice during the books.
He's a bit reckless and gets in over his head, particularly in the 1st series but most notably in the 3rd. The books are released out of order and in the first of the not-yet-finished 3rd quartet he has returned from war a changed man. Suffering extreme PTSD that he refuses to open up about. We don't see what happened to him for another couple books.
Poor boy.
I would say a lot of his character is born from the contradiction of his upbringing in extreme poverty and his current life of middle class comfort. He's caught between worlds and has a fairly unsure sense of self due to it. He sees himself in his apprentice, Evvy, for instance. Tammy Pierce is good at writing the discomfort of those raised in poverty navigating up the caste system. Beka Cooper from the Tortall books also contains elements of it.
On the surface he's an even tempered kid, especially when compared to his siblings. Sandry has her family and is a contradiction when dealing with her orphaned siblings because she has a home to return to. Daja was forced to select between her culture and her new found life at Winding Circle as she cannot be both a trader and a crafter. Tris is bitterly abandoned, knowing she is alone because people did not want her.
Briar was not abandoned or excommunicated and has no "home" to return to. He escaped from a life of being a gang thief. He was rescued. Rosethorn is the only mother he has ever known. It's why he's so attached to her.
The other siblings maintain some connection to their former lives (albeit with Tris it is mostly a chip on her shoulder and bitterness that haunts her), Briar let that past go as soon as he came to trust Winding Circle was legitimate and he had an honest future there.
So... if he's so well adjusted? What is his lie?
I'm not confident on it. But given how he acted in Will of the Empress, I'm going to say that he sees the uneven nature of his relationships with his siblings the clearest (albeit he sees himself fairly even with Tris). In WotE he grinds against Sandry who he feels is acting too much like a noble and is looking down on him.
and so...
Even if it's just a little bit.
"I am gutter trash." lives with him, even long after it has been dispelled. I think he has willed past it, but on some level feels like others still see that in him. That he cannot rise past it. If the lie is not that he believes he is then it is that others see him as it.
---
Trisana Chandler (The Circle of Magic)
Where Briar cultivates life and weaves power in by nurture and care, Tris is flooded with raw power that escapes her as lightning. Her mentor book shows that her primary skill in wielding this raw magical energy is bottling it up.
Shatterglass is a story of glass blowers and where Sandry delicately weaves her magic into her art, Daja pounds it into hers... Tris essentially traps it in glass. Lightning in a bottle, so to speak.
As Dawn wrote in our top 25 characters post:
Magic is emotion, it is passion, it is a connection to life and the world and with Briar his is not giving shape to his creations, it is cultivating the growth of things that cannot be tamed, he communes with the wild of the world and aids it and heals it. Daja and Sandry give their power shape and form as art. Tris tames the raging storm inside and eventually scries the winds to connect with the world without letting it break her, Briar's power is in love and nurture[...]
In the 3rd (and sadly unfinished) quartet she also begins to delve into scrying magic (which mixes in well with her glass blowing for making crystal balls) which is wild and uncontrollable and typically leads to people who attempt it losing their minds.
We often view Tris as a BPD projection character due to this. She overheard her biological family discussing how to be rid of her and took a long time to open up to her family at Winding Circle. On some level she never fully learns to trust. Hence when she moves into Daja's home at the start of the 3rd series she is constantly working to pay her way, do chores to be of use. Tension brews when it becomes clear she is only treading water there until she can find something more permanent. She never feels at home within that house. That she expects to be ejected at any time and is bracing for the fall.
In contrast to Briar, Tris grew up in well to do families and is now orphaned. She takes her banishment from Winding Circle the hardest because unlike the other siblings her magic is not profitable.
She cannot make a living on being a wild lightning child. She views herself as inconvenient. A burden.
She and I share a lie.
"I'm worthless and people do not want me. No one needs me."
Tris just puts a lot of work into trying to shape herself into something useful and needed.
Alas, her book in the 3rd quartet remains unwritten.
---
Daine (Tamora Pierce's Tortall series) and Susan (Terry Pratchett's Discworld series)
Bruce Banner (Hulk) and Jesse Faden (Control)
Elliot Alderson (Mr. Robot)
Evangeline Morgan (Of the Devil)
Juri Arisugawa (Revolutionary Girl Utena)
Master Aqua (Kingdom Hearts)
Rei Ayanami (Neon Genesis Evangelion)
Devil Hulk (The Immortal Hulk)
Beatrice the Golden Witch (Umineko)
The Venom Symbiote (Marvel Comics)
Jesse Pinkman (Breaking Bad/El Camino)
Permit me some self-indulgence to share my Favorite Character Bingo.
For this bingo I favored my fandom tags (17/24 spaces selected from my 25 listed fandom tags) and tried to round out with movies that I adore.
I wanted to diversify my range of franchises to include TV, animation, books, comics and video games and also pick characters that resonated most with each of us, though Camden's influence is felt the strongest. I won't state where the attachments lay but I'm sure those who know us can infer.
Descriptions and reasons under Read More.
Full spoilers for any character featured. Content warning for suicide discussion under cut.
1: Miles Edgeworth - Ace Attorney - Literally the last square filled in and we looked at the remaining 9 fandom tags and thought "which of these 9 have a character that we feel strongly about", it was either him or Alucard Castlevania and both for the same reason, daddy issues. I love the idea of a virtuous child of anime Atticus Finch being raised by a deliciously evil prosecutor to become everything his father would have hated. I love the conflict between two siblings raised in the house of Perfection. I love his dramatic ass (except when he pulls that "chooses death" bullshit. That was unforgivable). Plus I just adore his slowburn romance with Phoenicholas, how supportive he is of their daughter, Trucy, and how the sequel trilogy is sparing enough of him that we always miss him when he's not around. He is our favorite Ace Attorney character by a mile. Plus he's a the straight man (well, he's got his hidden eccentricities, but for comedic purposes he's the straight man) in a world of lunacy. The first game leaned heavy on that joke and it always made me smile.
2: Catra - She-Ra (2018) - Catra is the character in all of fiction I would go up to bat for every time if I saw a debate start up on a Discord I frequent. I'll be straight. She's our (Camden's, anyway) BPD projection character. I adore watching characters with crucial personal failings get swallowed up by dramatic irony. There's something so powerful in being an audience member and knowing what a character wants, what they need, what they should do-- while understanding it's not in their nature to do it. I wanted her to stay with Scorpia in the desert where she was respected and comfortable but knew that it just couldn't be. I loved all the moments where her failings caught up with her. When Scorpia walked away from her, when Double Trouble gave her emergency therapy, the way she struggled with her hair and entire season to force herself to be something she couldn't sustain. I love Catra more than I can measure. I could write essays on how I would do exactly as she did in Season 2 and ruin EVERYTHING for just the chance of a parent proving that they loved her. To be consumed by self-doubts and paranoia and terror of abandonment. Catra is the character we are most like in all of fiction. For better and for worse. Much like her, we're trying to be better.
3: M'gann M'orzz/Miss Martian - Young Justice - Surprisingly I have two Greg Weisman shows on this bingo and no fandom tags for his work, I am using my generic DC tag here. I should change that at some point. M'gann gets so much character development over the 4 seasons of Young Justice. From a starting point of her blue and orange morality of being a Martian not understanding Earth customs causing her to break consent boundaries with her abilities and hurt people (including a fairly uncomfortable angle where she grooms Connor to be her fantasy boyfriend without him knowing what she's doing) to her learning in season 2 that a black and white morality is hardly any better (she mind crushes enemies, thinking that it's good to pacify evil until she does this to someone who turned out to be innocent) to her being a transgender allegory in season 4 (where she meshes the two cultures that she's part of and tries to gain cultural acceptance). There are elements of her story which are under baked, we know that she received a heavy amount of discrimination growing up due to her being a white martian and the arc of her embracing her heritage happens off screen between seasons 2 and 3. Her romance with Connor was well handled, though, particularly as she was not virtuous. In season 2 she was in the wrong (having tried to mind control Connor against his consent) and reacted very poorly to his rejection of her and used a rebound relationship to make him jealous (fortunately Lagoon Boy ended up in a healthy poly family and is doing great. Did I mention Young Justice has good relationship dynamics? Because it does). As with Catra I adore characters who have made mistakes and take a slow road to making up for those mistakes because it begins dialogues about their ethics and every season of Young Justice is about trust, communication, deceit and manipulation and Megan is easily the most complex character when it comes to those themes, particularly as her abilities allow her to blur those lines even in her personal relationships. She's an ethical trainwreck and I love her.
Every character in Young Justice brings something to the table and I think I should note how that deep vein of character driven story telling brings out the best in others. I had mentioned Megan groomed Connor. She was obsessed with an Earth sitcom when she was on Mars and decided to become the main character of it and then when presented with the newly born Superboy decided to start treating him as that Sitcom's love interest who was named Connor. It was a massive violation and Connor was hurt and confused when he learned and it was also in an episode where Megan lied about her racial heritage and Connor, who had been inside her mind, KNEW she was lying and told her outright that she shouldn't fear his judgment. The thing about Connor is that his arc is about finding personal identity when he is defined by everyone else's expectations and impressions. Cadmus and Lex literally programmed him, Superman put him in a box and kept distance from him, the Genomorphs have expectation of him, the team have expectation of him, even his girlfriend is trying to shape him and for much of the show he struggles with it but doesn't reject it. He finds comfort in being accepted in these windows of projection and expectation and I find that him learning who he really is and what he stands for to be one of the more compelling narrative threads throughout the 4 seasons. He and Megan are the main couple in a show about trust and communication after all and I think it should go that the character who typically displays the most raw honesty and vulnerability should be paired off with the most ethically complicated character because they bring the most out of one another while still wanting their relationship to succeed. I know much of the audience dislikes the pair and thinks Connor forgiving and eventually marrying Megan is a bridge too far but I really think they work for one another and even when they don't, from a storytelling perspective it's compelling as shit.
4: Briar Moss - The Circle of Magic - When I started this meme Daja (username relevant, yes) asked if I was going to pick Tris or Briar. They are both "Camden characters" with one being a child who has been kicked out of her biological family and the other being someone who grew up in extreme poverty adapting to moving up the caste system. I went with Briar purely because of the 4 siblings he is the one with the most interesting dynamics with his mentor and student. Evvy sticks around in the main cast while the other apprentices do not hang around and Dedicate Rosethorn is my favorite adult in the franchise easily. Briar is a streetwise kid who has to learn how to trust and rely on people and sadly in the third quartet (pending Tris' Lightsbridge book being written) he gets a painfully accurate depiction of PTSD. I wrote about my reaction to the ending of Will of the Empress a while ago and I stand by my comments. Briar building a safe place as the home he built with his siblings and staying there when he was tortured burned my heart. As did the sequence of him deciding that if Rosethorn was going to let herself die then he was going to follow her. As I'll allude later, I have experience there... and it certainly aided my fondness for Briar.
Much of the fun of the Circle of Magic series is seeing how the siblings adapt to their abundance of magical potential and I love the fact that for 3 of the 4 this is depicted via external means. For Daja Kitsubo and Sandry it is via their art, Daja bends and shapes metal, pouring her power into items where Sandry weaves it into fabric. Briar cultivates his via life. He grows plants and those plants are imbued with his magic. If I had picked Tris this would be where I note that her magic is entirely stored within her, bottled up (literally when she starts glasswork) and too much to contain. Magic is emotion, it is passion, it is a connection to life and the world and with Briar his is not giving shape to his creations, it is cultivating the growth of things that cannot be tamed, he communes with the wild of the world and aids it and heals it. Daja and Sandry give their power shape and form as art. Tris tames the raging storm inside and eventually scries the winds to connect with the world without letting it break her, Briar's power is in love and nurture (which I adores as he is the only member of the 4 with masculine pronouns- as with all Tammy's work, gender is not a box) and it's fitting that his connection to both mentor and student be the strongest due to this.
Also his tattoos are cool.
For a personal anecdote that happened while we were reading Briar's Book. Towards the end there's a sequence where Rosethorn and Briar had an argument in the afterlife and Rosethorn only chose to live again because Briar would have let himself die otherwise. That parent-child suicide gambit--- that's what I was alluding to before. I don't want to type more than is necessary about it. We have experience. It caused a switch and our girlfriend, Daja, is observant enough that she noted the shift in how we typed. Particularly in how we used the word "ain't" which apparently is something specific only to our male part, Craig. Daja was so lovely, kind and caring in accepting him, seeing him and not pressuring him when he was out that it helped us heal a part of our heart that we had pushed away. I'll always remember that whenever I read that book or think of Briar. It's a huge part of why we're fond of the character.
Incidentally if I picked from Tortall I'd have been paralyzed for choice with Numair, Daine, Kyprioth, Farmer, Kel and Alanna herself. Tamora Pierce writes amazing characters.
5: Jesse Faden - Control - Is Control an isekai? It starts with our main character talking about crawling through the hole behind a poster as if it were the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole.
Anyway, there's a fantastic character analysis I read once that spoke about the relationship between the director of the FBC and the service weapon with Northmoor trying to impose his will upon the Oldest House and the items within it and Trench being a turn-key manager who simply filled the power vacuum and spent his career trying to find a suitable replacement. These represent the two extremes of Jesse's potential leadership of the Federal Bureau of Control. She could either go all in and try to claim ownership of the Bureau and impose her will upon the forces that are too strong to control or she could reluctantly attempt to maintain the Bureau without considering herself actually in charge of it. What she actually does is she finds a path of humility. She is the janitor's assistant. Neither king nor steward of the bureau but the custodian of it. She does not seek control nor does she seek to pass on the responsibility. She merely manages the messes and does so as an assistant. Ahti is the most powerful entity in the game by far and by trusting in him and following his direction, Jesse becomes the perfect head of the bureau.
I was predisposed to love her because she has red hair, she was a lot like the tabletop character I took my name from, she's got a queer dynamic with the head of research and technically she's plural. She's wonderful.
Oh and she's an oddball. I love the little hints of just how weird Jesse is beneath her protagonist swagger. I should probably write more about her, particularly as much of her depth as a character is not obvious from a surface read of the material. Maybe I will some day, but I love her.
6: Chidi Anagonye - The Good Place - The Good Place is a sitcom adaptation of Jean-Paul Satre's play No Exit and involves 4 people sent to hell and are utilized to be one another's unwitting tormentors. The thing is that part of the message of the virtue ethics driven show is that in the modern world every action we do or do not do causes additional suffering in the world and the 4 "cockroaches" are not bad souls, they just made choices that made them bad people. For Chidi he is a good and loving person who is kind and heavily believes in virtue ethics. He belongs in hell because he's anxious and indecisive and makes people's lives harder by worrying so much about how to be a good person. I love Chidi because his growth is less about becoming a better person and more about being confident enough in his convictions to know he's a good person. In every reality he will inevitably help the other cockroaches and teach them to be better people because that's who he is. But he's also selfless to a literal fault. It's one of his damnable traits. After everyone makes it to heaven people can enjoy paradise until they're ready to move on and he decides to continue past the point of which he makes peace with moving on because he doesn't want to hurt Eleanor.
The final episode of Good Place made me gross sob so much and a big part of it is the sofa scene where Chidi explains his personal philosophy after countless lifetimes of discussing, teaching and learning philosophy he gives Eleanor one final lesson on their final night and then, on request, disappears while she's asleep. Heaven knows I understand making that request of someone you love.
He's the heart of the entire experience. Truthfully I love all 4 of the cockroaches and it comes down to how I reacted to their final episodes. Chidi's final moments were the most powerful of the show for me. I love him so much and admire him.
Plus he's a philosophy nerd and as a fellow philosophy nerd <3 I love love love him!
7: Allison "Ally" Carter - Sunstone - Every character in Sunstone deserves to be on this list but I went with Ally because (much like with Chidi) when I have difficulty picking between a stacked cast of great characters I go for the love interest of the protagonist because people really shine when the perspective character is in love with them.
Ally is a god damned dork and she's also an incredible domme. Sunstone is a romance about entering the world of kink circles and navigating the troubled waters that come with consensual risks, emotionally charged play and non-standard relationship dynamics. I love the way the story is presented so much that it is my strongest inspiration for Madison/Belladonna stories.
The thing I love most about Ally is that she's not just the amazing dominant that she plays during the spicy scenes. We get to see her freaking out with nervousness, scared about having to host and live up to expectation, we see her be an absolute nerd, we see her in her element while performing.
I've been Ally and the people I love most have been Ally. Being a Top is hard as heck and you can't help but love the dork as she lives up to expectation while trying to be an adult. Seeing her and Alan literally learning the ropes in the recent GNs has been a gosh darn treat!
8: Elliot Alderson/Mr.Robot (Alderson System) - Mr. Robot - What can I say about my dear Elliot that I haven't already said in my DID Representation in Mr. Robot essay? I love him. The whole system. Though I have an affinity for protectors and so Mr. Robot himself is my favorite. He is such a protector that he will attack his host (well, the show fucks up that aspect of DID enough that it's complicated to call the Elliot we see in the show a host) in order to save him from the evils of late-stage capitalism. When pre-show Elliot wants a way out of loneliness and the evils of modern society he fantasizes about taking it all down. The Elliot in the show just wants to make the evils of the world pay, Mr. Robot is perfectly okay killing entire buildings of collateral to achieve his goals. Not because he's evil but because he's laser focused on his mission. I respect the shit out of that, especially as later seasons show that he's not even remotely as capable as he thinks he is.
The scene during the "sitcom" episode where he takes a beating so Elliot doesn't have to was the moment he won me over and then in season 4 he has the speech where he begs Elliot to understand that he is not their father and that he will disappear if it will help him out of the dark hole he's in. Just the fact that, post memory retrieval, he starts by saying "hey, kiddo..." despite that being the reminder of who he is modeled after. Mr. Robot cannot help but be a manifestation of Edward Alderson, it's who he is, it's why he is. Elliot needed a version of his father who was not a monster. I love him deeply. I love the whole system. Even Magda for all her 7 minutes of screen time.
Plus, Elliot summed up the thesis of the show in the final episodes in saying that changing the world is about living and being visible and in not backing down, no matter what.
And then there's the monologue. Fuck I love this show and these dumb hacker boy.
9: "Badeline"/A Part Of You - Celeste - Well, we're on the topic of plurality so let's stay there. Badeline's a fairly subjective character. Celeste's narrative isn't very long and she doesn't even have an official name. Even the DLC chapter refers to her as "A Part of You". But whether she is a living symbol of Madeline's depression, the doubts and fears she holds towards climbing the mountain/transition or is a protective alter in a plural system, I love her. I always have. The fear she puts into thinking Madeline wants to just get rid of her, the fact that she pushes Madeline to move past grieving Granny faster than Maddy is ready for.
Watching the pair learn to loan one another strength and conquer the mountain was lovely and then seeing Baddy try to stop Maddy from hurting herself in the DLC chapter only to be pushed away was heartbreaking. I just want these two to play nice.
I love that the entire objective of Celeste 64 was for Maddy to reach Baddy and say she's going to go on another adventure and soothe Baddy's fears. Climbing mountains is tough (happy trans day of visibility everyone!) and these two are going to continue doing it, so long as it's together <3
10: Laura Palmer - Twin Peaks (Fire Walk With Me) - So first off, read this essay for better words than we have. We could have picked Dale but Twin Peaks is a show about Laura Palmer and the community that failed her. Laura was a victim of abuse from her father and was commodified by the town who all chose to only see parts of her that they could use for sex, charity, kindness, validation etc etc. There's a meme that goes around:
and I think that at face value it's silly, but it's important to know that everyone in Twin Peaks was complicit in her murder because they used her up for all she was worth and the story works best when you consider that she had no one protecting her, no one saving her. This is why, in Fire Walk With Me, she talks about the angels not coming for her and Donna tries so hard to convince her that they can and will, because Donna, of all the people in Twin Peaks including Dale Cooper, does not want anything from Laura but her trust and friendship.
If you watch Twin Peaks and view Laura as "the victim" then you're doing yourself a disservice. She's a nuanced character and a horrifying Lynchian portrait of those who are caught in webs of abuse. But she has agency. She just has no meaningful way of escaping, particularly when by the end of her life she views the whole world as a prison full of users and abusers and when she finds someone who tries to offer her kindness, she rejects them at first and when they refuse to leave or back off, she tries to drag her down with her. It's only when she realizes that she's so far gone that she'll bring Donna into her personal hell that she decides to become the angel for her and save her. The Pink Room sequence in the movie may well be my favorite part of all the Twin Peaks saga. Laura Palmer is such a compelling character. I love her.
11: Lady Bird/Christine McPherson - Lady Bird - Lady Bird is a phenomenal movie and one of my all-time favorites. I'll split this one up into character and then personal attachment.
For the film, Catherine/Lady Bird is a young woman raised in Sacramento in 2002. She goes to a catholic school because her parents are afraid of sending her to the local public school. Well, I say her parents but the movie is entirely about Lady Bird and her mother. In that regard it is a tough movie to watch because the pair clash so much. Lady Bird and her mom are both willful women and care a lot about what other people think about them. They see one another in the other and hate what they see while still loving one another.
The conflict between Marion and Lady Bird typically displays itself in Marion's refusal to refer to Lady Bird by the name she has chosen for herself. In the Opening Scene she says that "it's stupid and it's not your name" and continually talks down to her daughter, saying that she cannot get into a New York college because she couldn't pass her driver's test (which Lady Bird argues was because Marion refused to let her practice). These clashes continue throughout the movie and any time Lady Bird figures out a way to reframe a critique against her mom she just pivots away. Another example is the "Name a number" scene where after being told that she has no idea how much money it takes to raise her and Lady Bird responds by demanding a number so that she can pay her back; Marion just says "you'll never get a job that earns that much money".
All of this squabbling makes the most sense with the scene in Goodwill where Lady Bird confesses "I just wish that you liked me" to which Marion, dodging again, says "Of course I love you" and Lady Bird calls her on it with "But do you like me?"
Marion pauses and says "I just want you to be the best version of yourself you can be" and Lady Bird, hurt and knowing she won't make a connection says "What if this is the best version of me there is" and Marion gives an incredulous look before letting it sink in. The fact is she is trying to be the best mother she can be and is confronted with the vulnerability that maybe neither she nor her daughter is failing to be their best, maybe this is the best and she has to make peace with that.
That's why I love the movie so much. Two women who want the best for themselves and thus each other but are completely unable to understand one another or connect and speak different emotional languages. It's such a powerful and honest narrative about growing up and becoming your own person. I find the conclusion a little too forgiving on the mother's side, but I love Lady Bird. I love how willful she is, I love how cultured she wants to be. I love how she just wants to be part of the world she feels connected to while knowing she is on the outside of it. Legitimately one of my favorite film characters of all time.
For personal attachment. Camden Dawn is the name of one of my OCs, I first wrote her in 2001 but the version I consider "Camden Dawn" started off in tabletop games that began in 2010. Camden was a raised catholic by two parents who were obsessed with optics and how Camden's behavior reflected on her and their household and she successfully emancipated herself from them after managing to get them to fund her to go to college in Chicago. Over the 7 years I wrote that version of Camden she was always special to me. More than I think I could display to my tabletop group at the time. I considered her my "trainwrecksona" the fantasy version of what we would be like if we were allowed to express our anger, frustration and pain. Camden smoked, she had an alcohol problem, she made bad relationship decisions and was a mess. Watching Lady Bird was like seeing a film version of everything that I was trying to do be done by a masterful actor, director and screenwriter. There is no amount of language I can put into how powerful it is to pour so much of yourself into a fictional character you created, enough of yourself that you adopted her name as your own and to see someone take all the passion and soul that you tried to convey through fiction and do it better. It was awe, admiration and connection.
I'm not Camden (the character) and I'm certainly not Christine. But I understand what emotions go into writing a character like that. How can I not love her when she's the culmination of everything I love about my favorite original character?
12: Bill - It's Such A Beautiful Day - Three heavy movie characters in a row. Bill suffers from an unspecified psychological disorder that messes with his perception of reality and his memories. The movie is an outside view of his life and the narrator becomes so attached to him by the end that it cannot bear to let him go. "He lives and lives until all the lights go out." is such a powerful line to end the production with because that's it. That's all any of us get. The world may continue on without us but our capacity to perceive this beautiful trainwreck is only within us and there's no grander design than that. We live and then the lights go out. Even our memories may die before our ability to perceive. The movie talks about how we start looking forward, start looking back and in the end... all we can do is look around.
Which makes the bus ride so unspeakably poignant, long before the titular Beautiful Day. As the narrator says early on in the experience, life isn't the big memorable experiences, it's all of the tiny little things that happen in between. That bus ride, Bill looking at the raindrops and admiring the world. That's far more true than any moment in the film and what Hertzfeld wants the audience to pick up through the experience.
I became attached to him during the runtime. The mundane thoughts of a person who begins the story with the news that he's going to die and ends up finding the sentiment that gives the movie its title.
Hertzfeld does such an amazing job with Bill. The subtle gestures like how he wrings his hands together or the wrinkles under his eyes betraying his fear and worries. He's a stick figure in a world of stick figures and all he has to differentiate himself is his hat. We cannot even hear him speak because the movie is conveyed only by the narration and yet the animation gives him so much personality.
There are so many scenes which just connect so well, like when he meets his father despite both men being so incapable of understanding the relevance of what is happening.
Bill lives until he doesn't anymore and we share the journey of life with him. It's breathtakingly beautiful.
13: Susan Sto Helit - Discworld - Susan is really three characters. Soul Music Susan, Hogfather Susan (goth Mary Poppins) and Thief of Time Susan (goth Ms. Frizzle).
I love her. I love her more than I have words for. Especially Thief of Time Susan.
She's almost human. Part of her will always be a deity. She is the granddaughter of DEATH and much of her character in Hogfather and Thief of Time is attached to her wanting to embrace her human side. But it's in Thief of Time where she learns that what she's looking for is not to be accepted within humanity, but she wants to find someone who is like her. That's why I adore her connection to Lobsang. She puts up a ward of sensible Susan and tries to be practical and put together but she's a deeply emotional woman and she's lonely because no one else shares her experiences.
She loves her grandfather very much but she cannot abide by "the family business", she is kind to him but wants to be her own person and she ends up finding herself more attached to children because they haven't lost their curiosity yet, in many ways she finds they are more sensible than adults because they haven't decided how things are and closed their hearts and minds to ideas outside of what they think and expect.
Susan is important to me. I love her dearly.
14: Ben Reilly - Spider-Man - We're unapologetic in our love of the clone saga. The thing about Ben (and Kaine) is that he's a fantastic character study into the nature and nurture of Peter Parker and the writers had so many fun and cool ideas for how to handle a version of Peter who had 5 years to not be Spider-Man.
One of my alltime favorite moments in comics is when Aunt May died and Peter is embraced by MJ and Anna, he's surrounded by family. Ben is on the roof, alone. Ben's has no one because he's a clone and completely broken off from others. He slowly builds his own family over time and considers Peter (and Kaine) his brother(s) but it takes time.
The lost years are where he exemplified himself in my eyes. We get to see how he grows from finding out he's not Peter Parker until he returns to New York. How he tries to walk away from responsibility, how he tries to live a normal life. He's a tragic character because no matter how much he wants to be a different man, he still has Peter's memories and cannot help but have the drive that makes him Spider-Man.
15: "Sunshine" Joe Fixit (Banner System) - Hulk - So I did two whole essays on Banner's system with the second part entirely about Joe and Betty's relationship. Fact is Joe is what happens when a man is so repressed and ashamed of himself that he cannot act out. Joe is all of the things that Bruce wants, lusts for, desires but cannot allow himself to act out upon. He's capable of lying, cheating, stealing and killing in a way Bruce can never allow himself to believe he is capable of. The period of time that Peter David was writing Joe as the main front of the system gave us some incredible insights into the widening chasm between his morality and Bruce's as well as what Joe finds himself wanting. There was a period of time where changing into Banner was the greatest fear of Hulk(Fixit) and it worked remarkably well to see the two having their day and night battle for dominance.
But what really made me love him more was the Immortal series where he's in Banner's body and needs to keep the body safe the way that only he can. The latter half of the comic Bruce is not even in the system and it's just Joe and Savage against the world. Joe's a reluctant protector. He used to be a hedonist but over time his affection for the system
Look at this page (first panel especially) from a 4 page side-story where Joe is talking to their therapist and briefly remembers Brian Banner beating the shit out of him and how he would take the beating so Bruce didn't have to.
Joe's attachment to Mike was evident in Peter David's run and solidifying that Joe just wants a father figure is such amazing characterization. With both Mr. Robot and Hulk I love how these adults are driven by childhood notions of safety and comfort. I even hint on it a bit with Catra too with how she sold herself out to get a chance of Shadow Weaver's affection. Good trauma representation is showing how a character carries their past into their present and Joe is a manifestation of Bruce's repressed anger and childhood trauma just as much Hulk himself is. Joe just wants what we all want, to be loved and protected in a world where the person who owed him both those things failed to do either. In lieu of being loved himself, he's damned well going to love his inner family, especially the kid.
16: Kimberly Wexler - Better Call Saul - Kim is a phenomenal character in a character driven drama. Again, when surrounded by amazing characters I go for the protagonist's love interest. But here it's different. In the final season Kim is approached by Mike. Mike is the most level headed guy in the canon. He's the one who is objectively right about everyone and has a good eye to who people are. Enough that Season 4 of the show only makes sense if you consider they needed a season long plot arc for why he didn't execute Walter where he stood in during BrBa.
Mike approached Kim because he judged that she was the one who could be trusted with the information that he had about Lalo Salamanca, another incredible character in a show full of them. Kim is headstrong, crafty and hates being talked down to. She is attracted to Jimmy because they are equals and she typically acts up when Jimmy doesn't display the trust and respect that he owes her.
Throughout the show we get glimpses of her childhood and there are some gems with her mom. She refuses to be picked up from school when her mom shows up late and drunk and ends up walking home miles on her own. There's a scene where she steals from a store and her mom picks her up and acts up the punishment she would get only to laugh about the store manager after leaving the scene. Kim had a tough childhood and bad rolemodels and yet still clawed her way up to being a lawyer.
We get to see her realize that the system is inherently broken to its core and no amount of pro-bono work within the system will make a difference, she is reduced to constantly being hit with "did Jimmy put you up to this" levels of disrespect for her agency. Kim is fascinating because she was always the capable one and Mike and Jimmy are about the only people in the show who can see it and even Jimmy can't when his ego gets in the way.
Aren't you tired of being nice? Don't you want to go apeshit?
Kim is best girl and Rhea Seehorn should be given every Emmy forever.
17: Johnny Truant/Pelafina H. Lièvre/The Book Itself - House of Leaves - This one is a total cheat. The fact is I wanted to type "anyone who types in Courier or Dante fonts" but the book is a mind worm and the mere act of trying to communicate about it is a bottomless pit that will make you look like you're in front of a Pepe Silvia wall. The fact is nothing inside of the book House of Leaves can be said to have happened in any meaningful sense. It's a journal of a man reading an analysis of a film of events that likely didn't happen and the person at the top of that narrative pyramid (well, under The Editors, I suppose) is an admitted liar. Which means that I cannot say The Whalestone Letters are true or not. I can say that they are my favorite part of the book and judging from my interaction with the only fandom, this makes me a little unhinged.
Johnny's panic attack at seeing purple ink, the back and forth on whether Pelafina attempted to strangle Johnny as a child or not, why her secret decoded message mentions Zampano, how her letters can refer to events after she died... as I said, it's a bottomless pit and the more you think about it the more insane you become. Fact is, Johnny is an interesting character and there's a lot to him and part of that IS the fact you cannot tell if he's lying and that means that if he forged his mother's letters they are his words and if he didn't she's equally compelling in her complexities. We have an unknowable psyche of someone who is both inviting us in to see the innards of his soul AND pushing us away so we can not know him, see him or judge him. It's brutally honest AND guarded. Deceptive while bearing everything. I tend to feel strongly for characters if they go through something I've been through because I get to see someone else deal with the thought processes I went through, I don't need to see myself reflected in that, just empathize with the fact they're dealing with it. A parent being put away in a mental care facility is fucking tough shit and as I saw Johnny's trauma unfold through his journals I cared more about him and wanted to understand him more.
Which brings us to the end of his portion of the narrative and his big "fuck you" to the reader.
I'll admit it. Upon first reading I was hurt by Johnny's betrayal of the reader and then I realized, much in the same way HBomb's described during his analysis of Pathologic, that I knew the entire time I was reading a book and Johnny wasn't real, that by feeling betrayed and hurt by his lies it just showed I cared and that he had made me care. No character has ever violated the attachment I form with fictional characters in such a way that really made me understand how one-sided and false that connection was and it was a unique experience. Certainly one that makes me love the character, for all I know they are an unknowable wreck and I cannot ever truly understand them. House of Leaves is a mirror and it reflects everything you put into it and that's why I love it so much. The experience of reading that book is mine and mine alone. My relationship with the book and its characters is unique. It cannot be replicated. It can barely be described.
18: Puck/Owen Burnett - Gargoyles - Seems I posted without writing about Puck! Better edit it in. I LIKE FAE AND BUSINESS MAN OWEN AND I'LL EDIT THIS IN LATER I PROMISE!
5/4 edit: okay, I promised. So here's the thing about Greg Wiesman's writing. He sometimes is fixated on his internal consistency to the detriment of story. I love Gargoyles, I love Spectacular Spidey and I love Young Justice. But they are flawed works and their flaws are Greg shaped.
I love them, though, because in the 90s, only a few years after Twin Peaks brought long-form storytelling out of Soap Opera and into drama, Gargoyles had consequences and growth which at the time were not really things. Gargoyles was essentially Disney's version of the 80s TMNT cartoon and by all rights it should have been a pale imitation. With Turtles the archetypes were baked into the DNA and the growth typically came from new toys being added to the line. So my "too young to remember watching but young enough to imprint and rewatch a ton of times as an adult" mind was spellbound when Eliza is shot and takes months in universe to recover. Xanatos is imprisoned from corporate crimes and serves a 6 month sentence in show that opens the door to new plots. Brooklyn's or Lex's reaction to Demona's or Fox's betrayal inform how they treat people and situations throughout the show. Broadway's hatred of guns. Hudson's illiteracy slowly being worked on.
The show rewarded you for paying attention in a time when such things didn't exist.
So why is Owen my favorite?
Well, as stated above. We love Fae. Dawn considers herself to be Seelie and though the show is actually really bad with sourcing its folklore and mythology, famously placing the Norse pantheon under Shakespeare's interpretation of Fae lore (the lengths of "all worldwide culture is sourced to The Bard's depiction of Celtic/Gaelic folklore" is actually kind of Ancient Aliens levels of xenophobic to my adult mind), their depiction of Faerie was deeply enjoyable.
Owen is Puck. The same guy who rides on Kratos' belt in the latest God of War games. He's a trickster and a magician and the supreme master of Keyfabe. There are big damned twists that are introduced in shows that you wonder "when did they know?" And for this one I really do think it was from the start which is ambitious as heck. If not from Season 1's 13 episodes then from day one of Season 2's 50+. When Preston Vogel is introduced the similarities between Owen and Preston are apparent instantly. When Demona turns NYC into stone she binds Owen in iron and calls him "the tricky one."
It's a fair mystery in what may be the first ever kids cartoon to do long-form storytelling. It may not be easy to work out the specifics but it fits so perfectly. With most of these other characters my love comes from who they are, what they are allegories of or how I relate to them. I could have picked Demona and just had her be Proto-Catra. But Owen was the first time I was shown a character who had all the puzzle pieces for a big twist that made sense and was fair to an audience. It taught me how to tell stories and how to reward those I tell stories to. I owe him a lot for that. Plus I want to make out with him. Human or Fae form. He's hot.
Also, also, love the addition of his stone fist. The loyalty to plunge his hand into the cauldron and the continuity to just keep him with an unbreakable/unmoveable stone fist was just awesome.
19: JJ MacField - The Missing ((JJ Macfield and the Island of Missing Memories) - Beating this game made me come out the closet. I'd known I was trans for almost 20 years before playing it but when I beat it I told the support network in my life at the time that I couldn't stay in the closet any longer and began formally socially transitioning.
The Missing is about two girls going to an island. JJ and Emily. Emily tried to initiate intimacy and JJ pulled back and soured the mood, when she wakes up the next morning Emily is gone and JJ has to puzzle solve through themed areas of the island to find her. As you progress text messages fill you in on JJ's life.
So. Being honest? I thought it was a game about being a lesbian. I thought that it was about JJ coming to terms with her sexuality, even when her mother is controlling monster (literally in terms of the game) and sent her to conversion therapy. Nope. Turns out JJ is trans and I didn't see it. I didn't know.
I played the game on release day and just... didn't figure that out.
JJ is a cutie who loves donuts, she loves her stuffed plushie, she loves Emily, she loves flowing fashion. The game sadly is a nightmare from her trying to kill herself and being saved.
The thing is, though, the game's aftercare is so healing. After beating the game you have the opportunity to play the game without JJ's "idealized" dream form. You can play as socially transitioning JJ with her developmental voice, change her wig, let her experiment her look. Here's some gallery items showing the differences between first run and second run versions of JJ.
and I think it's beautiful to show her as being the same person no matter what she appears on the outside. Because she's JJ. Voice, wig, eye color and outfit do not change the fact she's a sleepy donut gremlin.
I could write more. Like how the themes of the game are the amount of pain one must endure to actualize as their true selves and how learning to live with that helps you pull yourself together and become endure more (not to fetishize suffering, but well, learning to endure pain can be virtuous if you cannot avoid it) or how the player becomes the final boss themselves and lashes out against Emily to show how her attempted suicide was a harmful act.
The thing I adore most though is that the final secret in the game, the reward for everything is photographs of JJ and Emily going clothes shopping and buying the outfit that JJ wears during the game.
Fuck that story makes me so happy. Especially from the perspective we were in when we were closeted.
As a sidenote, I own a F.K plushie and love it very much.
20: Korra - The Legend of Korra - Running low on steam but I'll be quick and say "Avatar is the story of a normal little boy finding out that he's the chosen one and having to learn how to save the world. Korra is the story of the chosen one who was raised to save the world learning to become a normal woman."
I find the latter so much more compelling than the first. Especially when season 4 spends so much time on her rehabilitation after Season 3 left her disabled. The depiction of both recovering from a severe injury and the PTSD was well handled.
Anyway. She's rad.
21: Hal "Otacon" Emmerich - Metal Gear Solid - He's the spiritual child of Dr. Strangelove and The Boss. Huey was a sperm donor and nothing more. Hal's an idiot. He's a geek. He's a hopeless romantic who makes dumb mistakes. He's also Snake's husband and Sunny's father and he saved the world. I love him.
But really the single 10 minute recording from Strangelove in MGSV where she outright explains that Hal is the true heir to The Boss' will is what elevates him. In a world of war, he is peace. Yes he's a dumb otaku who built a nuclear battle tank that could destroy the world but he truly and dearly believes in peace and spends his entire life being better and being kind and being compassionate. In time he turns from Snake's failwife to the savior of humanity.
Hal is a good father, a terrible heterosexual and a cute lil' guy.
22: Adonis "Donnie" Creed/Johnson - Creed - Gosh I wish I wrote about him when I had more in the tank but I'm 22 characters in, the end is in sight and I'm tired. The Rocky franchise is a special series of movies. We get to see the same man through 50 years and even in the first film they were talking about him being past his prime. I chose Donnie over Rocky though because Creed is my a contender for my favorite movie of all time. Ryan Coogler said about it
"[My father] used to play [the Rocky movies] before I had football games to pump me up, and he would get really emotional watching the movies. He used to watch Rocky II with his mom while she was sick and dying of cancer. She passed away when he was 18 years old.
And so when he got sick he was losing his strength because he had a muscular condition. He was having trouble getting around, having trouble carrying stuff. I started thinking about this idea of my dad’s mortality. For me he was kind of like this mythical figure, my father, similar to what Rocky was for him. Going through it inspired me to make a film that told a story about his hero going through something similar to kind of motivate him and cheer him up. That’s how I came up with the idea for this movie."
"If I fight, you fight"
It's about a father being a hero, it's about being strong enough to live up to legacy, it's about passing down knowledge and inspiration from one generation to the next. Donnie is a conflicted character. On one hand he is the foster care kid who got into fights in juvie. On the other hand he is the son of world famous Apollo Creed and raised in a mansion. He is Adonis Creed and he is Donnie Johnson. Both of these are true and that conflict burns within Donnie because he burns for a father he never got to meet and connection to a world he's not part of anymore. In being rescued from his group home situation by Mary-Anne he left behind all he knew. We learn more about his childhood prior to juvie in Creed III. Point is, he's hurting to make a place for himself and prove he belongs. The armor piercing quote in the first movie is when he says "I gotta prove it - That I wasn't a mistake."
I cried when I first saw that scene and just loved him. Rocky movies are about underdogs putting their heart into what they do and overcoming the odds and winning the moral victory. Donnie isn't a perfect person. He's kind of an arrogant jerk at times, but I adore him.
The second and third movie are heavily about his growing relationship with his wife, Bianca, who is the star of her own movie that should exist too, about becoming a performing music artist while her hearing is fading. His daughter is born deaf and he has to adapt to her hearing loss. Watching Donnie learn ASL and just exist with his family is one of the highlights of the movies because though there's a brief scare in Creed II where Rocky asks if he's going to love his daughter if she's born deaf, the franchise never treats Bianca or Amara's disability as anything more than a part of who they are.
Creed movies are the best. I hope Michael B Jordan makes them as long as Stallone hung with the Rocky franchise.
23: Parker - Leverage - She was a side character who became the star of the show. Parker is brilliant. A foster kid who tangled with a brilliant gentleman thief and learned to be the best there ever was. She's autistic, she's brilliant and she's an oddball. Her relationship with Hardison was the emotional backbone of the show and throughout the entire show her need for a family is one of the threads that ties seasons together. Season 4 includes an episode where she needs to learn to dance from Hardison and he says "I've got you, I've always got you" and prepares an escape route for her at the end of the episode only for the finale to have a callback where she saves him on an elevator wire with the "I've got you". If you watch Leverage through the lens of her rising to become the new mastermind you have a 5 season show (and ongoing revival) about a girl who never fit in everywhere, prickly and defensive and unable to understand other people creating a family for herself, building a better world and being the best version of herself she can be.
Also she really hates it when people are mean to kids and I love that about her.
I love Parker. Häagen-Dazs!
24: Asuka Langley Sohru - Neon Genesis Evangelion - Why did I leave her until last? Asuka prides herself on being the best EVA pilot. She is not the best EVA pilot.
She wants Kaji, a grown man who will never be with her.
She wants her mother to have not succumb to mental illness and projected all her maternal affection onto an inanimate doll who she hung alongside herself, leaving Asuka alone in the world and so thoroughly rejected that when her mom killed herself she took the effigy of her daughter with her on the way out.
Asuka doesn't get what she wants.
Instead she gets Shinji. Someone who, while complaining the entire time about how much he hates and doesn't want to do it, is a better EVA pilot than she is. Who in End of EVA...
Well.
Y'know.
Asuka is a cautionary tale of what happens when you pin all of your personality, your reason for existing, your pride and passion onto a single thing that you do not control. It can be taken away from you and it will leave you with nothing.
Asuka needs to put others down to feel good about herself because the source of her self-esteem is in her ability to perform a task that may not always be there, that others may surpass her in. She needs to learn to create worth from within, not from external praise and validation. Shinji shares that flaw.
EVA is a show with a lot to say about isolation and connection. About drive and purpose. About the reason why we exist and what we do with our the time we're given. Hopefully through looking at the other 23 entries and seeing the themes, you'll see it's pretty clear she's just my type of character.
I love her.
BONUS
Because I didn't do all my tags, here's the remaining tags with my favorite characters:
POTO - Erik
Castlevania - Alucard
Umineko - Beatrice
Sonic - Fleetway Super Sonic
Persona - Aigis
Sailor Moon - Makoto Kino/Sailor Jupiter
Scott Pilgrim - Kim Pines
Pathologic - Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky (the fact I do not have to justify this down here is a big reason he's not on the bingo)
What are some of your best/favorite/most memorable media moments/segments you've experienced recently? Why those moments?
I'm just going to gush about the Emelan/Circle of Magic books by Tamora Pierce for a while.
This post contains full spoilers for the Emelan series, particularly Circle Reforged and Will of the Empress.
@daja-the-hypnokitten (name not a coincidence) got me interested in reading Tammy's work after we started dating last year and I burned through all of Tortall in a matter of months.
I haven't read this much in my life. Normally 2-4 books a year was me at my peak. So far I am on 25 and I'm still working on another 2 at the moment and am preparing to tackle another 3 if I have time before the next Numair book.
In recovery I have read Shatterglass, Will of the Empress and Melting Stones.
I also just finished Cold Fire days before the surgery.
I'll focus all my thoughts on WotE though. Because it is the culmination of the series (and also it's been a few months since I read Briar's Book).
The Circle of Magic series is about 4 traumatized children who for reasons are without family and are raised in a monastery dedicated to natural magics. Each of the 4 have ambient magic and after the first book a deep psychic connection to one another that causes them to bleed in to one another.
One of the 4 is as blatant of a BPD allegory as can be (albeit Daine is still my BPD projection character for Tammy's works) who was expelled from her family and overheard conversations where she was treated as an unwanted *thing* to be gotten rid of and one grew up in extreme poverty and is defined by the class divide between his roots and his current circumstances.
So I see a lot of myself in them. I'm not always one for reading books as a mirror, but if they're going to show me a character who has deep seeded abandonment issues because her parents literally kicked her out then I'm not going to turn my nose up. Especially if she has red hair.
This book involves the 4 of them returning from their travels in the prior quartet, bearing scars of further trauma as each of the Circle Opens books involves them being up against literal murderers and being forced to grapple the ethics of justice. Daja brutally incinerated a man she thought of as a friend *as a kindness*, Sandry performed corrupted magic and killed 3 people who may not have deserved to die. Briar's trauma runs so deep that we do not even get to learn about it for another 2 books. I still haven't read what hurt Rosethorn's boy so badly, though I can imagine it pretty well after seeing him grapple with his PTSD.
They are wounded. Hurt and defensive.
And the home they wished to return to, a monastery cottage, turns them away for being over 16 and no longer pupils. 4 orphans out on their ass, hurting deeply and feeling completely abandoned in their suffering-- worried that their Family, the 4, would reject them should they open up about their experiences.
Which brings me to the first of the 4 scenes I wish to talk about.
The first chapter of the book was hard for me. Daja was the first to find out that she was no longer welcome at the place she called home. Her teacher was foolish about how he handled it and Daja went cold and stoic. I've been Daja in moments like that. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes when something you cannot process is coming you simply don't think about it and reject it when it comes about.
Daja ends up buying a house, something her mastery of Smith magic allows her to do, because she needed to have something... some*where* that couldn't be taken from her. She expected her siblings to live with her when they returned. Over the course of 2 years Tris and Briar do return but Sandry remains with her uncle-- all 4 of them have closed off their psychic connection from one another. Sandry is being emotionally immature because she felt abandoned by her Family and expected them to go back to How It Was. Tris, who has found herself unable to make money, hates the idea of charity and insists on acting as a maid and Briar is dealing with trauma and keeping everyone at distance and cannot handle the chaos of the household and the flying green thing is creating constant chaos.
The events of 6 Cheeseman Street broke my heart in the most beautiful way because for a chapter of this book I saw all these people I cared about broken beyond the ability to reconcile. I understood all 4 of them deeply and wanted them to feel better but knew it just couldn't happen. The first chapter takes place over 16 months and the dysfunction doesn't improve because none of them are capable of working on their issues or bonding closer together and the more any of them pushed the more broken things became. 3 of the 4 were living together, they had freedom, agency and respect but in the end it just was a proud and closed up artisan, an anxious and mentally unwell plant boy and a bitter red head who felt like an imposition (with flying green cutie) all suffering within a bond that couldn't open up again.
I contrast that with the ending.
Through the book's events Sandry and Daja opened up their connection and Briar opened up to Tris. The scene where Tris dryly opens up to Sandry and reminds that they are family actually had me crying.
The end of the book is when all 4 are finally connected and they go in through Briar's connection to the roof of the house they all grew up in together, Discipline Cottage. Briar says that he had spent time in a brutal war being tortured and he created this place in his mind to escape to and he was now inviting his siblings to be there with him.
The four just opened up. Shared their traumas, their fears, their pains and they reforged the connection which had been broken and felt one another's presence inside their hearts and minds again and became whole. Which just.
I cry easily, okay... and I just got back on Estrogen 2 weeks ago!
I joked to Daja afterwards that the dysfunction, the opening up, the safe space and all 4 of them sharing a common mind and needing to feel their connection to be able to be a better whole while still maintaining their individuality kind of made it accidentally better DID representation than 99.9% of the stories I've read that actually are about the condition.
Anyway...
I've been enjoying the books a lot. They helped me survive the rough half of my recovery cycle.
If you (each of you? all of you? y'all get to decide how to interpret this) could pick any one piece of media - book, movie, TV show, musical, etc - to be adapted to another form, what would you pick and why? (optional - what changes, if any, would you want made to suit that new media form)
This question brought to you by the number of people I hear talking about Wicked.
Goodness, my love, you do not make this easy, do you?
Fine. I shall do my best to answer all for myself and maybe let the others reblog with their own thoughts if such things occur later. Particularly with how volatile we have been today in terms of switching.
Book - This may be because of the question we got from Jaime but Hulk is on the mind so an adaptation of either Immortal Hulk or just getting to see Joe in live action would be all I could ask for. You know us, we love Ben Reilly and Joe FIxit more than the heroes that they splintered off of. It'd be good to see a movie/TV Show (or animated series, but Animated Marvel hasn't been good since Earth's Mightiest Heroes) with my favorite trans rights shitty sunshine man.
Cammie wants you to know, my love, that we didn't forget Tortall and she would burn every comic we have ever owned (rude, Sweetling, but I'll allow it) if it meant getting Alanna animated.
Movie - Spiderverse tie-in video game in the same artstyle as the movies. This is non-nonnegotiable. I'm right. Everyone needs to be on my level with this. Easter Eggs in the Insomnia game cannot sustain me. I want a Liv boss fight as Gwen.
TV Show - I'm still waiting for the official Mr. Robot comic to be released. Any day now.
Musical - Hmm... this is a tough one. There are a litany of shows we like that haven't had film adaptations (Pimpernell, Secret Garden, Chess, Next To Normal to name a few)
Game - We learned our lesson with the Persona adaptations and NieR:Automata. A game doesn't translate well into other media. I'd watch the shit out of a Heaven Will Be Mine or Pathologic anime regardless of quality though. I'd also read fan-fiction if any existed for certain games I shall not name.
Music - Rush deserve a rock opera. It's not fair that Queen, Billy Joel and Michael Jackson got them and Rush didn't.
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it should come as no surprise that Tris, Daine and Briar are characters who first you reminded me of and now remind me of you, love <3 (I'll have to think more on who Cammie and Dawn make me think of; for all Cammie earned Sweetling as a nickname, she isn't really all that much like Daine most of the time)
The fact you knew it'd be me reading and replying to this is amazing as always, love.
Tris, Daine and Briar are really good picks. I associate heavily with Daine, as you know and I'm more Tris coded than I care to admit, particularly with how she was at the start of Will of the Empress.
Yesterday I shared a post that was "[looks for you in everything] [finds you there]" and I'm truly fortunate you were willing and able to see reflections of me in the books you love so well.
Obviously I can see you within those pages too, but that's not hard when they are the books that helped shape you. Daja, Tris, Sandry and Kel all have so many lovely little traces of the person you grew to become and the person I love.
I followed you for the hypno stories, I stayed because you share a love for Tamora Pierce. Also thank you for the new knowledge that there will be a Protector of the Small graphic novel, because I now know what to get my own little page for their 11th birthday.
Thank you, anon. Happy to be of service on both counts. I'm deeply fond of Tamora Pierce's works (thank you to @daja-the-hypnokitten for introducing us) and I am overjoyed to see the new GN. I'll have a copy on release for sure.
Kel is such a wonderful role model and I hope your little page enjoys her adventures.
Thank you for the Ask, it put a huge smile on my face.
