A day late, but no less sincere! This was for December 6.
For
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
torch:
three characters in three different fandoms from your past that you have known and loved, max three paragraphs each (and minimum three sentences, I hope *g*). Pics would be lovely, of course. :)(Sorry, no pics! I forgot, woe)
So many fandoms, so many characters! I was trying to figure out how to choose, and decided to sort of go by decade. I also discovered doing this that I tend to think in pairs, not individual characters, which I hadn't quite realized before. But I could separate out a few, at least:
Dan Fielding, Night Court (1980s)Dan Fielding was a mammal. Wait, no, that's the eulogy. Okay, so, the thing is, Dan Fielding is skeevy. He just is. He's a brown-nosing suckup to anyone he thinks has power or authority; he's rampantly sexist and chauvinistic, and mostly only likes women when they're naked; he's a greedy, money-grubbing, manipulative prick; he's coldly indifferent at best to anyone he sees as beneath him (which is a lot of people).
And yet at the same time, I kind of really adore him. Almost all of that (except the "will sleep with anyone, anywhere, any time" part -- he's one of the most highly sexed characters I've ever seen) comes from fear and a desperate attempt to protect himself. He was raised dirt poor by dirt farmers (as he put it [paraphrased], "No, really. They farmed
dirt.") who loved him dearly but never understood him; he was smart, ambitious, driven, and desperate to get away from them, down to completely denying his upbringing (until they actually showed up one day and he had to admit to it). He spent his youth and young adulthood scrabbling furiously to fit in with the moneyed class he so wanted to be a part of, and which scorned him. His parents were decent people that he wanted no part of, so he learned to be indecent at the same time he learned how to be proper. It's a weirdly compelling combination.
And over the series, as he learns to trust Harry and the rest of the courtroom staff (but mostly Harry), bits of his decency start shining through. He hates to let anyone know about it, but it's there. He's the only person who has the guts to tell Harry off when Harry goes self-indulgently off the rails. He's there for Roz when she has a really scary diabetic episode. He finds ways of connecting with all kinds of people he thinks he can't stand for one reason or another; he just can't maintain his masks 24/7, no matter how much he wants to believe those masks are the truth. And he loves Harry, so very much, even if it's hard for him to say. ♥
Ray Vecchio, Due South (1990s)Oh, Ray. <3 I fell for him in the original CBS pilot movie for Due South, and that just never changed. He's another one who's soft on the inside and hard on the outside, but not in a clammish way; he's more like a porcupine, all sharp spiky spines sticking out all over to protect his soft underbelly.
He's sharp, sarcastic, cranky, easily annoyed, brash, endlessly generous, boundlessly loyal, utterly devoted to the people he loves. He's got a smile that just melts me. Watching him take care of his family, take care of Fraser, make sacrifices over and over to help (crawling out of a hospital bed to fly to Canada to help Fraser take down his father's killer; killing his beloved Riv to help Fraser, after giving up his longed-for Florida vacation also to help Fraser; handing his new-Riv money out to total strangers to support Fraser's filibuster in hopes of saving a building; mortgaging his house to pay Fraser's bail...) -- he's just amazing, and he hides it all behind that brash sarcasm, because he doesn't want anyone to know that he's a sweetie at heart.
I don't even know how else to explain him. I could have watched any number of seasons with him, snarking his way through all his deep affection for people, and never gotten tired of it. (And he loves Fraser, so very much, even if it's hard for him to say. *g*)
Bobby Hobbes, Invisible Man (2000s)I almost didn't include Bobby Hobbes here, not because I don't love him like crazy, but because I named one of my cats after him. It starts to make it weird to type his name and not mean the furry one. *g* But I will just stick with Bobby here. Because Bobby is awesome. <3 <3
You don't think, when you're watching the pilot, that he's the guy you're going to fall for. He's kinda short, he's balding, he's kinda pudgy, he's not very articulate, he's awkward and uncertain and insecure about a lot of things. And yet at the same time, professionally? He's confident, assured, and absurdly competent, and that starts taking over. When he's in a place where what he wants is for people to like and respect him, he goes all wobbly and unsure; when he's in a place where he needs to be able to determine an assailant's location by the sound of the shot whizzing past, he's the best there is and he knows it. He's so self-assured that you think it's idiotic overconfidence -- until no, it isn't, he's
really that good.
He comes pre-loaded with more issues than anyone should have to deal with; he's been kicked out of job after job as a result of those issues until he's scraping the bottom of the government-agency barrel by working for the Agency. He's known and mocked among other agencies because of his mental health issues; he's on medication and has been for a long time, and it doesn't seem to have always worked for him. But he tries! He sticks to therapy, he takes his meds, he knows the signs to watch out for. And even his deepest issues are about wanting to take care of people, to do good: he gets terribly, obsessively, outrageously, protectively paranoid for the people he loves. To the point that he stalks them to make sure nothing bad will happen to them. Which is not good, and he knows it's not good, and he tries hard to channel all of that into appropriate venues. But it means he's incredibly loyal and devoted, and when he loves someone he really, really loves them. And when push came to shove, when he'd been given a chance at what he considered true greatness, he gave it all up to save Fawkes's life. Because he loves Fawkes, so very much, even if it's hard for him to say. *g*
---
Full request list here, still open!
