#vmhq

Hey friends! The next chapter of Murder We Wrote, by the wonderful @mysilverylining​ , is coming, but it won’t post tonight. Keep an eye out, and as soon as it’s done, we’ll put it up on the blog!!

Day 1: Favorite Character:  Logan Echolls

I love Veronica more than words could ever express, but Logan is my HEART. 

Everything he does makes perfect sense to me, because I was also a fiery, passionate teenager who lashed out and self-destructed spectacularly whenever I felt rejected or unloved.  

The aching sympathy and compassion this character inspires in me gave me the ability to bestow that same grace upon myself.  He’s come a long long way since high school, and so have I.  

Every series starts out with “a Logan” - there’s a reason Veronica calls him the obligatory psychotic jackass - and OUR Logan comes by it more naturally than most. 

His home life is a nightmare amalgamation of physical trauma, emotional warfare and neglect. He’s deprived of parental love, but showered with material possessions, which, alongside his father’s celebrity, are supposed to make him “better” than everyone else. At the same time, he’s regularly being gas-lighted by his father.  If he wasn’t such an entitled brat, Aaron wouldn’t be obligated to beat the shit out of him. His parents are in and out of town, presumably, leaving him in the care of “the help” (those same people his mother dehumanizes). Nobody protects him. The dominant messaging is ‘don’t make us look bad’ vs. ‘be a genuinely good person’.  

If a “How to be a Bully Handbook” existed, it would be Logan’s nightly bedtime story. 

Every school has an obligatory psychotic jackass. Decades later, most of them still are.  For every CEO raping the environment and destroying the economy to funnel money into their million dollar bonus checks, for every politician hysterically screaming over a woman to keep her from reading a letter, every Supreme Court justice who just really likes beer and sexual assault, there’s somebody who knew them in high school. Somebody who could say “They’ve always been this person.”  That’s how it works.  Bullies grow up and find new ways to bully.  

Nobody watching early season 1 for the first time would be surprised to hear that Logan was still the psychotic jackass fifteen years later.  Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, after all.  

The true surprise is that he ISN’T.  

Logan chose to reject that path. He rebelled against seventeen years of parental programming telling him he was both unworthy of love and better than everyone else. The glittering pageantry, the fame, the notoriety, the insincerity. He rejected his father’s example of hurting others to make himself feel better. 

And he did it all on his own.  

At the worst point of his life, when he’d lost everything - both parents, his lifelong best friend, the girl he adored. At a time when the town wanted his head and an MC gang wanted him dead, nobody would be surprised if Logan only wanted to spiral. To drink, to get high and numb the pain and forget about everything he’d lost. Or worse.  

Instead, he....went to high school.  

He kept going to high school, he did his homework, he graduated.  All on his own. No parental figures. No mentors. No help.  Sure, there were some backslides, some foibles.  It wouldn’t be realistic if there wasn’t.  But he’s extremely self-aware. He acknowledges his mistakes, learns from them, reassesses, and keeps moving forward. 

He chose a career where he was almost guaranteed to fail.  For every 1000  applicants to the Naval Academy, 3 will become fighter pilots*.  Logan beat the odds, put in the time, focus, and dedication required to achieve his dream when so many others fail.  

Logan Echolls is indomitable. 

He’s decent and kind. He’s loves joyfully and whole-heartedly, despite his near-constant heart break. He’s not afraid to be vulnerable, even when his vulnerability has been weaponized against him in the past. He’s fiercely loyal, regardless of the loyalty shown to him. He’s nurturing when he’s never been nurtured. He’s a stabilizing influence when his upbringing was anything but stable. 

Logan Echolls is a brilliant, snarky, world-weary, force-of-nature in orange. 

He’s the most layered, fully-realized character I’ve ever encountered, and the fictional love of my life.   

Do I honestly have to dignify this with an answer?

Character(s) who deserved better.

Yeah. Um. Pretty much if you were female on the show and not the titularly named heroine, you deserved better than what happened to you.

Special shoutouts:

Meg Manning, for being turned into a human incubator whose only purpose was to serve as a way to write a male character off of the show and then die.

Jackie Cook. Who, to this day, gets an unending amount of hate from fandom because she was an outspoken woman of color. We love Veronica despite her.... prickly nature. Why is it all of a sudden the worst thing ever when Jackie gives as good as she gets? 

Favorite Romantic Scene

This was... Surprisingly hard? There are a lot of romantic scenes that I like in the show. Most are between Logan and Veronica, like their first kiss and their hand holding in A Trip To The Dentist, but there is also the dance between Keith and Alicia and some of the scenes between Jackie and Wallace. For love, there’s also their second kiss, the Epic speech,... So many good scenes!

But I’m going to go with the dance. I remember thinking that it was more than time for the show to give us something concrete between them. However, it’s not just about that. At that point, Veronica is trying to get Logan away from Gia. To protect Gia’s feelings, yes, but quite possibly also to save Logan’s sanity (Veronica is Logan’s knight in a shining armor you can’t change my mind). I love how slow the scene is, and how much tension is radiating between them.