the Internet is for memes
Dec. 6th, 2012 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI grabbed this one from lettered and lotesse .
Pick a character I've written and I'll list the top ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing them that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.*
*I don't think it follows that if other people don't have those concepts in mind they're inaccurately depicting them. For what it's worth.
lettered and lotesse .Pick a character I've written and I'll list the top ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing them that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.*
*I don't think it follows that if other people don't have those concepts in mind they're inaccurately depicting them. For what it's worth.
no subject
on 2012-12-06 09:12 pm (UTC)Some/any/all of the rest of the Skywalker clan (by blood or marriage) whom you'd enjoy thinking about!
no subject
on 2012-12-07 02:50 am (UTC)(1) Anakin was a slave, then brought up in a severe monastic order.
(2) Anakin's attachments don't just accompany his morality. They pretty much are his morality.
(3) Anakin does not want to personally dictate order to the galaxy, he wants to expedite someone else doing so.
(4) But he's still powerfully focused on the need for order.
(5) Anakin's personal nightmare is separation from the people he loves, with death as the ultimate separation. He lived this nightmare for most of his adult life, believing all the while that it was his own fault.
(6) Anakin has nerves of steel coupled with a reckless, impulsive temperament. The combination is explosive and gives the impression that he's both fearless and inexorable. Neither are true, but the impression is what matters, especially as Vader.
(7) He's an idealist and a dreamer, naturally, which is where a lot of his restlessness comes from; beyond personal attachment, that's what mostly drives him through his life.
(8) Anakin is a raging Gryffindor, and spawned two more, but he tends to form his closest ties to people who are either Hufflepuffs (Padmé, Threepio) or Slytherins under a Hufflepuff-like exterior (Obi-Wan, Palpatine).
(9) He has extremely black and white thinking. (This probably helps him deal with the war, but otherwise serves him very, very badly in sorting through the tangle of loyalties and duties in his life, and choices that can only come down to wrong and less-wrong.)
(10) He doesn't give up, ever.
no subject
on 2012-12-09 04:28 am (UTC)...possibly my favorite part was the... line of similarity... drawn between Obi-wan and Palpatine. I will be fangirling that forever! Because Obi-wan would HATE it even before he knew that Palpatine was Sidious.
no subject
on 2012-12-09 07:54 am (UTC)LOLOLOL, at first I was just Hufflepuffs and Slytherins, but then thought that Obi-Wan was a consummate Slytherin (one of the things I always liked about ANH was that you had a clear Gryffindor type in Vader and a clear Slytherin type in Obi-Wan and it's honestly pretty rare to have the villain and mentor go that way) but had some Hufflepuff traits. And then that Palpatine is basically faking it, so they're both Hufflepuff-coated Slytherins in different ways. Obi-Wan would hate it, lol - and of course, Obi-Wan presenting that way out of genuine institutional loyalty and dedication and being the good soldier boy that he is is different from Palpatine just pretending, but there's a parallel there. And I have no doubt that Palpatine found him very useful.
no subject
on 2012-12-10 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-01-04 09:51 pm (UTC)(1) Luke is idealistic without being particularly optimistic. I know a lot of people regard him as extremely optimistic, but I think we definitely see a strain of fatalism in him. At the same time, however, he's a dreamer who longs for more, an idealist who is clearly itching to fight for a noble cause, and does so faithfully (not just in the first flush excitement or whatever).
(2) Luke is impulsive and reckless. He's not naturally patient; he has to work at it, and work hard, to get to where he is ROTJ, and it still snaps under pressure. (Lots of pressure, because he's done a good job! But still, it's not that he was born like that, or for that matter, left Tatooine like that.)
(3) Luke has lots of sheer nerve. He prefers negotiation and persuasion to direct confrontation, but he's really pretty happy with both, and easily bold and daring. It's also not a sort of thoughtless bravado - he knows what he's getting into. Sometimes the courage that's called for isn't about going in with guns blazing, and he has that too.
(4) Luke is very dutiful. He'll try to talk his way out of something he finds disagreeable, but once he's accepted a duty (or had one foisted on him), he does his best to stick with it. (We see this early in his arc, when he rejects Obi-Wan's offer, which might as well be custom-tailored to what he desperately longs for.) And he has to come to terms with the tug between his sense of duty and his intense personal loyalties.
(5) Luke is extraordinarily loving and kind-hearted. It's easy to think of this as a virtue and it generally is - particularly when it comes to his father - but his personal affection can and does overpower both his sense of duty and his basic ethics. There are few lines he's not willing to cross for the people he loves.
(6) Luke is clever and resourceful, and this is one that I really do think is overlooked. He persistently thinks of the practical side of things - no, we have to wait morning because of the Sand People, yes, it's brave but what does it achieve, that sort of thing. He's able to manipulate Han through a motivation that makes no sense to him and is so foreign to his worldview that he can hardly process it, he comes up with a plan to take out the walkers on the fly, and of course there's his elaborate plan in ROTJ. When Han says Luke is the brains of the party, it's snide, but it's also pretty much true.
(7) Luke has a short fuse. This is really, really, really clear in the movies, but ... idk. Anyway, he has plenty of rage, and though he's capable of calm and zen serenity and all, it's a struggle. Unlike Leia's similar moments, it's usually not about comforting someone else but self-control.
(8) I've referred to it in some of the others, but Luke is not actually all that confrontational (though he doesn't back away from them). His first instinct is to placate his opponents, to talk people into his perspective. He's perfectly capable of being assertive and demanding, however, and switches between the two styles fairly easily (I think he tends to be more placating with enemies/people he registers as dangerous, and aggressive with allies).
(9) Leia is far and away Luke's most important person; they have a natural affinity, are temperamentally similar (and heh, have similar fashion tastes), and are, well, telepathically linked.
(10) Luke doesn't really meet standards of heterosexual masculinity and does not care. Despite his occasionally self-effacing manner, he's actually very comfortable with himself, and only gets more so as he grows older. In interpersonal terms, he's gentle, supportive, wholly non-threatening, and easily expresses and accepts affection. His most important role ends up being as a child, he's deeply respectful of others' autonomy, and his identification with his father and desire to live up to/negotiate his legacy is the closest he gets to any kind of masculinity issues.
no subject
on 2013-01-04 10:21 pm (UTC)And I love how so many of these are... reflections of his upbringing, I guess, is the best way to put it. How he's learned to deal with being a farmbrat, how he works with his aunt and uncle--- it's a more subtly complex version of how Garion is always a Sendar at heart even after he's Belgarion.
no subject
on 2012-12-07 12:23 am (UTC)I have to go with Darcy.
no subject
on 2012-12-07 08:00 am (UTC)(1) He's reserved. This seems really basic and general, but it gets overlooked sometimes, especially in the shy arguments (both in meta and fic!). Darcy is outspoken and self-assured rather than shy: yes. But he is also genuinely and massively introverted. He really is uncomfortable at parties, he really hates dancing, he's really ill at ease around strangers, he really has trouble catching the tones of conversation or faking emotions he doesn't feel, he really is stiff and awkward and a bit inept, socially.
(2) At the same time, he's very articulate - intelligent and well-spoken. (This obscures the extent of his awkwardness, I think.)
(3) He is not merely "a good man" in a fairly generic, decent human being way, but deeply principled and moral. His perception of himself as a highly ethical, scrupulous, right-acting, high-minded person is the very core of his identity.
He isn't rakish or predatory or sexually exploitative in any way, and in fact leans faaaaaar in the other direction, with a sense of delicacy and propriety well in excess of the usual or necessary, angsting over raising expectations he can't meet by ...*gasp* speaking to a girl. There's also the extratextual description, too, per my icon - delicacy as well as love and pride making him all DO NOT WANT at his wife's portrait hanging in a public gallery.
(4) Magically!changed!Darcy at Pemberley is how Darcy always is at Pemberley - or around his personal circle of family, friends, servants, and various dependents (when not around other people). This is the point of Mrs Reynolds' testimony, and this is why Colonel Fitzwilliam says that he's "generally different." Darcy's behaviour at Pemberley is nothing special; what's special is that he's acting that way to Elizabeth and the Gardiners, and that he continues to do so around the Gardiners when Elizabeth isn't even there. But he acts mostly like his old self at Longbourn, later on, because he's uncomfortable and dislikes most of the people there. (He tries to restrain himself during their engagement, but it's a struggle.)
(5) Darcy is generally very intelligent, very rational, very analytical, making him an excellent judge of character. He's also fairly flexible, in that he makes snap judgments but is not particularly attached to them, and fairly easily adjusts his thinking when faced with new evidence. This is largely why he thinks his emotions don't affect his judgment. He is a terrible, terrible judge of other people's emotions, however.
(6) Darcy is socially progressive for his time, despite his snobbery - probably more so than any other character in the book, given that he is literally the only person who thinks Lydia might be better off single and ~ruined~ than respectably married to a douche. And even by modern standards, his actions after the Hunsford fight are pretty much a flawless model of Doing It Right: he leaves with his best wishes, the very first sentence of his letter is an assurance (however bitter) that he's not questioning her rejection, he does not pursue her in any way, and when they do meet again, by pure accident, he tries to make it clear that he still cares about her while making a point of not being pushy or making her feel uncomfortable or pressured (he also tries to keep her from feeling any pressure over his Lydiagate heroics). I think a lot of people overlook just how respectful of consent he really is.
Especially people who compare him to Henry Crawford.(7) Darcy really is a snob, but less of one than Elizabeth assumes. Mrs Bennet's manners, and generally being-a-horrible-person, bother him much more than her birth. (In fact, his snobbery likely only persists because of the weird combination of being fairly flexible in his thinking and classist in a mild way - he's adaptable enough to make exceptions, and his snobbery is weak enough that the exceptions don't shatter his worldview.)
(8) Darcy is a Ravenclaw, with his always buying books and 'let's argue about books! :D :D' and flirtation by philosophical debate and also, more books and just generally being a clever, cerebral person. But if it came down to Gryffindor vs Slytherin, he would totally be Slytherin. He isn't a decisive, commanding man of action, he's a schemer like Emma Woodhouse - but unlike Emma, he's got a genuine knack for it.
He has to think through every decision he makes before acting on it, sometimes for months on end, but even with urgent ones he sleeps on it, and makes contingency plans. And he's often seen as this domineering, forceful person who gets his way with a kind of overbearing charisma. In fact, he relies on persuasion. And he's really good at it. He can be pretty sneaky, too. Also, he tends to monologue, lol. I've said it before, but my most basic idea of Darcy comes down to "evil mastermind, minus the evil."
(9) In his personal relationships, Darcy is intensely, loyally devoted. This is sometimes at odds with also being extremely principled. When push comes to shove, however, loyalty seems to take precedence. At the same time, he's not very demonstrative at all, and expresses affection through things like ... interior decorating! The people who love him understand this, but he can seem very cold to outsiders.
(10) Darcy is genuinely arrogant on multiple levels. He's not vain. He doesn't need or want other people to suck up to him, he doesn't care if they like him, and their opinion of him is generally a matter of supreme indifference to him. Flattery mostly just bores and irritates him - and at this point, he's gotten a lot of it.
no subject
on 2012-12-08 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-12-09 07:57 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-12-09 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-12-09 07:45 am (UTC)Haha, I actually wrote a cracky version of that scene, because I, too, have always wanted to see it.