(no subject)

[camwyn]

milliways_bar is a breeding ground for memes, as y'all know by now and are probably tired of hearing about from me. The most recent one to hit, however, actually required considerable thought about my characters on my part. You might be interested- or not, 's up to you:

What about your characters makes you want to continue to play them, what brings you joy from them. Not what originally drew you to them, but what makes you keep them through all the purges, dramatic moments, nervous breakdowns, late assignments, finals week, thesis/research projects, etc.

Uff da. Let's start from the minors and work our way up. I'm not including Annie Wells in this because she's been in the Bar all of three days.

red_mare- Jah-lila is someone I play, despite the fact that she's hardly ever involved in plot, because I like having a non-human, non-demihuman character about. One who will STAY that way. Jah-lila is a unicorn who used to be a horse, plain and simple. She is from a civilization that has only recently discovered the making and control of fire, after four hundred years of speculating about it and the prophesied hero who would bring that secret to them. I play her because it's fun to watch her adapt, or try to, and to see the giant conceptual gaps between her and other Bar patrons. I do not know if she will ever understand the Bar itself, or many of the things people have told her, and I kind of like it that way. The non-human perspective goes a long way towards countering the mostly-white, mostly-middle-class, mostly-late-twentieth-early-twenty-first-century one that my characters are often guilty of. I like seeing adaptative struggle, what can I say?

fire_of_mahal – Although I don't bring him in as often as I should, I play Gimli because I like hearing John Rhys-Davies' voice in my head. There. That's the big reason. It's a motivator to see how true to movie or book canon I can keep the dwarf, given everything else happening around him. I keep him around because I dearly love the Professor's work, especially the dwarves, and because I want to prove to myself that it is possible to play a Tolkien character in a setting like Milliways without wandering away from authorial intent.

twoeyesonthesky - I stick with Quinn, even though he's fairly new, because it's fun to pry his head open and see what makes him tick- and through him his world. Quinn is an exercise in world-building in and of himself, thanks to a canon that only vaguely sketched its own universe and that left enormous plot holes for me to paper over or fill in with more sensible stuff. Besides that, Quinn is a perfectly ordinary mortal with none of the powers or training that other characters have (even characters played by the same actor!), and he's another exercise in adaptative struggle. To see how someone with twenty years' worth of flame and trauma carries on a normal life is fascinating; more so when he's suddenly thrust back into a world very like the one he's lost. Quinn, more than any of my other characters save Jah-lila, is more concerned with his world than anything to do with Milliways or Millipatrons' worlds. Watching him look at the people at the Bar and realise just how far removed his experience is from everyone else's is practically a psychological experiment. On top of that, there is the fact that he's been through hell and does his best not to let it warp him; he's never been the sort to let depression alter his behavior, even if he ever had time for that. Which he never did, really.

milkbonesoldier – I apped Harry Wells originally to make John Preston go 'OMGWTF?' at actor-twinning (Sean Pertwee having played both Wells and the dictator of Preston's world). Wells grew on me really fast, though. He's a solid, dependable individual who went through a lot of crap, and is still very, very close to that experience. I'm not sure it'll ever go away, either, since his lycanthropy is essentially incurable and will probably keep the memories of Scotland fresh. Wells has also turned into an outlet for a lot of my political frustrations; in his canon, good soldiers died because they were lied to about their mission, and their lies were based on faulty intelligence, and ultimately the whole thing could only ever end in blood. Sound familiar? . . . anyway, that's just part of it. Wells is a good man who was betrayed and is paying the price for it. In his canon he died in the same explosion that scythed the werewolf pack off the map. You have to wonder, really, what a good man does if he lives through something like that. Movies end before they tell you. The horror movie ends with people dying and one person walking away, and the action movie ends before the hero's consequences can really kick in. Wells is all about the consequences of both genres. I want to find out what happens, so I keep him around.

Also, Wells drops the F bomb more times in a single thread than I normally do in a year. Playing someone who curses as much as he does is fun!

gone_byebye - Ray is my geekboy and I love him dearly. Ray is my link to the movie and the cartoons that shaped most of my sense of humour as a kid. Ray is 'what happens if a comedy character has to develop, and how do you keep them recognizable as essentially comedic'. Ray is a walking ball of squee. How can you not keep someone like that around? It's the comedy aspect that keeps me coming back for more; science fiction is all right and I love the genre, but comedy presents more of a challenge. How the heck do you tell adventure stories, or horror stories, or survival stories and keep them funny? How do you get someone through some of the worst events that can happen to them and bring them out the other side still recognizable as themselves? It's easy to do drama or tragedy. The hard part there is not to overdo it. Comedy is hard, because you have to show that you take your subject matter seriously and still make people laugh. That's what I've loved about the Foliage Census arc I'm doing with him at the moment. People's responses tend to be along the lines of "AUGH HOW AWFUL I have to laugh now." That means I'm doing it right. I have to be careful about timing, of course- go on too long and it stops being funny- but walking that lovely, lovely tightrope was what Ghostbusters was all about from the start. Scare them, technobabble them, lightning-gun them, and make them laugh. That's his original canon in a nutshell, and that's why I come back: because I want to be able to do the same thing, over and over again.

Comments

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

It's impossible not to love Ray. Really, it is. And you get serious points for appreciating Gimli.

The other canons, alas, I do not know.

[camwyn]

The Firebringer Trilogy is a young adult fantasy trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce; it's about unicorns. We are not talking the pretty white magical sparkly kind, though. We are talking the sort of unicorn who consider themselves at war for four hundred years, albeit because they are in exile and cannot yet engage in active battle to reclaim their lands. Jah-lila is a secondary character from the books, but fairly crucial nonetheless, and one of three unicorns who have ever encountered human beings as of the end of the series.

Reign of Fire is the Movie That Could Have Been Better. Post-apocalyptic flick in which human civilisation was destroyed by re-awakened dragons that spawned madly and burned everything in their path, and the human military technology used to try and take them out. It could have been a very good speculative post-apocalyptic flick about Christian Bale's character, Quinn, if it hadn't been turned into OMG BIG DAMN MALE ACTION MOVIE by the introduction of Captain Ahab an obsessed American military commander and his crew.

Dog Soldiers is the best damn werewolf movie ever, or close to it. Six British soldiers on a routine training exercise ifnd out the hard way that werewolves are real and ordinary bullets don't do squat against them. Harry Wells is their commander.

[vivien]

I've got Reign of Fire on my list of things to watch ;) (Tom's going to a market tomorrow - expect a parcel o' goods soon)