(no subject)

[camwyn]

Oh, this looks like fun.

Name either a character or a relationship between characters (not necessarily romantic) from canons I know and/or Milliways and I will a.) give my rambling opinion of him/her/it and b.) tell you one thing I really like about him/her/it.

Comments

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Ray and Garion.

[camwyn]

Garion was one of the first victims of a Ray Explanation to not have his eyes glaze over, I remember that quite well. Garion's ability to take something monstrously complex and distil it down to something amazingly simple, yet still essentially accurate, meant that Ray could talk with him about all kinds of things and not have to worry that he was leaving him behind, the way he does with so many other people- including Peter. (No offense to Dr. Venkman, but if ever there was a line that summed up their conversational gap, it's the silence followed by "You never studied." in the first movie.) Garion summed up Ray as a sorceror without sorcery at their first meeting, with the 'first I have to understand it in excruciating detail, then I can make it happen' thing that Ray has about nearly every facet of life, and he's really pretty dead on there. So the fact that Garion understood the guy right from the beginning meant that if the meeting had occurred when Ray was any younger and more callow he probably would've squee'd like a chibi at the prospect of another shiny new friend.

Ray is also deeply thrilled by the prospect of someone from another world with a lower tech level and Magic and Powers and Gods and Destinies who nevertheless looks around him and says 'You know what we could really use? A MUNICIPAL WATER SUPPLY AND INDOOR PLUMBING.' The Laws of Time are one thing, but Garion's world isn't on Ray's timeline so far as he knows. The Prime Directive would really be the only thing that applied here and Ray's generally considered the Prime Directive a bunch of bupkis, since the course of a cvilization's development is always changed and interfered with by its interaction with outsiders. Garion's a smart leader who looks after his people and Ray is as thrilled to be part of helping with that as he is to be at the forefront of discovering the truth about the afterlife and the spirit world in his own reality.

The cartoon has Ray considering the other three Ghostbusters as the brothers his parents never gave him, but as far as Ray is concerned Garion qualifies too, and that's always a good thing. It always helps to have friends and relations beyond the ones we see onscreen in canon, and the prospect of a brother-level bond with someone who doesn't wear a proton pack is something I had wondered about for the man. So it's cool.

[sdelmonte]

Angua and Carrot.

[camwyn]

Hnh. I admit, I tend to look at this relationship and sympathize more with the Carrot side of things than the Angua one, if only because I tend to be the careless sort of person who assumes that saying it once means that it's still valid until something actively changes it. I can appreciate Angua's caginess and her reasons for it, but it's still a case of 'look, you know who you're dealing with and you know what he's like, you would be well advised to at least try and stomp on the urges to think of him the same way that you think of other men you've interacted with on this level'.

Still, wolves are shy and tend to be almost as skittery around humans as feral cats, so I can appreciate that being part of her nature. It's just bloody annoying no matter how realistic it is, and it kind of reminds me of why I have a low opinion of most romantic gambits and situations. STOP PLAYING GAMES, PEOPLE, IT'S TOO IMPORTANT FOR THAT.

As far as the thing I like about it goes, I'm always a big one for undying loyalty, romantic or otherwise. "There's a word for a wolf who lives with people" sums up... quite a lot, really.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

If you feel like indulging my narcissism, Ray-Tilda. If you don't, Ray/Romana.

[camwyn]

Ray has remarkably little capacity for differentiating between his expectations of adults and his expectations of children, a thing I think is borne out by the 'ungrateful yuppie larvae' comment in Ghostbusters 2. Most of those kids probably didn't even remember the Gozer incident or the run-up to it. That was one case where treating kids and adults the same bit him in the butt, even if Milliways Ray didn't go through the events of the sequel. Tilda, on the other hand, responds remarkably well to his approach; he doesn't have to adjust anything upwards or downwards other than his physical posture when he talks with her, which is better than he can say for some interactions with adults. She's a good kid and she not only reminds him of him, but she's helped save his butt. That's a big thing. He's glad for that as much as for the interaction of equals or near-equals.

On some level I think he appreciates his friendship with Matilda because it makes up for his sister's overall reluctance to deal with him and all the weirdness that he represents.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

D'aww.

That's sweet. :D

[minkhollow]

Carl and Whistler.

[camwyn]

Whistler's personality is very much that of an archetypal little brother, in the 'does this bother you? I'm not touching you, does this bother you?' sense. Such little brothers are annoying until they locate someone else who can be their partners in crime, and then they become downright terrifying. Carl and Whistler are a feedback loop, with a lot of 'I dare you to do X' being slung back and forth even if neither of them actually says it out loud. It feeds off the different areas of expertise the two of them have and the desire to see what the other guy can pull off/get away with. It's fun to watch.

[steahl.livejournal.com]

Ray and Foxtrot...cause I never did track down all the history on that one...

[camwyn]

H'okay. Ray isn't really all that used to being fanboyed at, whether by people who've seen the movies/cartoons or people who know him from his own everyday life. Foxtrot's initial reaction to him bowled him over some, and I don't know that he's ever entirely recovered. He likes Foxtrot, though, and it's a case of two geeks who can pretty much always count on each other to be geeky at each other; that, and for all his flighty appearance at times, FX can be damned reliable- and dangerous. On some level the personality he's dealing with seems to him very much like the Val Kilmer character in Real Genius, which is why he boggles so much about the fanboy thing; it doesn't seem like someone in FX's position ought to be going that wild around him. As far as the god thing goes, Ray just sort of things that Foxtrot's taken the bit in his teeth and isn't going to be able to be dissuaded. He's going to do his best to make sure that FX doesn't expect anything of him that he can't pull off, but beyond that it's just not worth trying to change his mind.

Mind you, if anybody hurt FX or gave him real trouble, Ray would be more than happy to get involved and give them trouble right back. FX is a friend, even if he's a strange one, and Ray doesn't like people treating his friends poorly.

[genarti]

Sgt. Harry Wells.

Just in general, really, but I do like the relationship musing, so I will amend that to Harry-Andrew.

[camwyn]

Uff da. Well, let's see.

Harry Wells, as I saw him in the movie, is a solid, thoroughly decent individual. His objective in life, up until things went all to hell, was to do the job he got handed by his superiors, and to do it well even though it sucked- because that's what you do when you're Army, that's what you do when you're a sergeant. You've got your men and your mission and you do your best by both of them. When things started unraveling he tried his best to keep to that plan of action, and then the claws came out and everything fell apart. And he still tried to keep things together, even going so far as to make the squad hand-off as clear-cut and official as possible when he knew he was in no condition to do anything else. Once he was on his feet again he went right back to his duty, even though the knowledge of what was happening to him terrified him beyond rational thought- and right up until the end he held onto that. I honestly think that's what kept him in the kitchen at the end, and what kept him on his course of action with the gas cooker: a lifetime's sense of duty, directed at the memory of his men. His last words in the movie were an order to get the truth out, after all. I got him out of the movie alive because I always wonder about movies like Dog Soldiers- what happens once they're done? What does the secret conspiracy do? What does the survivor do? How do they regroup and go on? And while the Dog Soldiers credits included newspaper photographs and articles from the next day, I realized that there was no way Cooper could have gotten back to civilization in time for those pictures and articles to appear alongside the ENGLAND 5 GERMANY 1 headlines, so I felt free to discard those and write up my own set of consequences. I couldn't get to thinking like Cooper in the movie, but I've known enough people who've been fueled by duty, whether to their country or their family or their children or their friends or to some other cause, that I felt I could get inside Wells' head.

What happened that night and what's happened to him since have forced him out of the comprehensible world he knew, the kind of place that a career NCO could handle, and into something wider and more unknown and more dangerous. He's had to draw his own limits and hold them as best he can, and he's had to redraw them as events have forced his hand. His country betrayed him and his men, but he's still fallen back on protecting them, even if he had to start by threatening to expose their secrets to the world. That part still galls him and he wishes he didn't have to do it, but he knows there'll always be men who'd just as soon see him and other inconveniences dead. That protection is all he can give his family. The rest of what he does, he does because he's always served his country. He can't step out of the traces and leave that duty to other people, because if he doesn't have that to define himself with- that duty, that service- then what the hell is he? In a very real way it's that sense, more than just the vegetarianism and other conscious decisions, that keep his monsters in check. There is something far more important than the urges of a monster and by God it is going to stay that way. That applies equally to the urge to go GRR ARGH and kill things as it does to the urge to impose standards and controls on others. He's seen Father. He's seen what a man who could be him did when left unchecked. He's more afraid of becoming an unchecked tyrant than he is of becoming an unchecked ravening beast, because the beast at least is acting out of instinct, whereas bringing power down upon other people's heads is a deliberate act supposedly being done for some sort of greater good. He doesn't want that at all, and he's had more nightmares of Father than he ever did of the wolf.

[camwyn]

As far as Harry-Andrew, Wells has always been part of an extended family. His ancestors were of the 'breed early, breed often' philosophy. Andrew was a bit of a surprise, but he figures he's probably got other cousins he doesn't know about, too. The thing with Andrew is that he represents a link to the bizarre and uncontrollable world that was first thrown open on the night in Scotland. More than that, Andrew is living proof that there's a chance- as much as Angua was living proof- of getting things to make some sort of sense. He likes Andrew. He's glad Andrew exists. He'll probably always treat him as one of the younger generation, small surprise there, but he also respects that Andrew was an authority on the weird long before Harry ever knew it existed, and that makes him more than merely family. (And yes, he thinks of Andrew as family, not pack. Pack is closer, and thinks more alike. Andrew is different, for all that they share blood and name and circumstance.)

[genarti]

I didn't mean to make you answer both -- but, you know, I'm entirely delighted to read all of it, so I am not so much complaining here.

And I do love Harry. All of that makes perfect sense. (And makes me really, really want to see Harry-Vimes sometime, but oh well.)

[camwyn]

Hee. Thank you, I'm glad of it. And no problem on the both thing, either, I'm good with that.

I think they might possibly have met at some point, but I honestly don't remember. I'd have to look through the tags.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

Am I too late? am I too late?

Preston.

No srsly, I wanna know why you like the guy. :D

[camwyn]

Preston is... well. I've always harboured a quiet fondness for the idea of the Bad Guy Enforcer Who Changes His Mind And Becomes Good. Somewhere in the dim and misty past of DOS 3.Somethingorother, I have a PFS Write document that's something like forty pages long that was the story of a member of the Thought Police (who I hypothesized were actual telepaths; the telescreen network existed more to give them a line of sight on their targets, thereby making the mental scans something that could be done at a distance rather than in person) who got shafted after he lost his telepathic ability to a head injury. Instead of taking his assignment to infiltrate the proles he wound up sympathizing with them and leading a rebellion against Big Brother. That was back when I was in, mmm, freshling year of high school or something- so 89, 90 or so, something like that. The idea's been in my skull a very long time, is the point.

Come a few years ago, and I see a Penny Arcade comic that has the ads for Equilibrium in the background and some commentary on the movie that I don't understand because I haven't seen it. Come a little while after that and OH HAI NETFLIX. So I rent the movie, and there he is- the bad guy enforcer, very nearly the Thought Policeman, who turns around and gives Big Brother the finger. Add in the fact that he has the gunkata moves and there is no power on Earth that can pry me away from this movie. Ages later, when I have Ray attempting to train his muscles not to do anything stupid so that he can safely wield a lightsaber later on, the memory of the shots-in-the-dark sequence is there in my brain and so I say that Ray's watched Equilibrium too. Several times. And discussed it at great length with Winston. It's all there.

And then, a few months after I've written that into Ray, Preston walks through the friggin' door.

Watching Preston develop as a character is like watching a human being hatch out, and sometimes it's like that line from Dilbert- "What was that grinding noise?" "A paradigm shifting without a clutch." It's like someone who's been a child all their life- literally, since he's gotta run around doing whatever Father tells him- suddenly have to do all his adolescence and teenage years and growing up in the space of a few months. If that. Probably even less. The movie didn't give the poor man half the time you'd need to make that kind of change without blowing all his gaskets. Milliways did. It was bloody fascinating to watch and I still keep wanting to see more of him, how he's adapting when so much of his life was spent grinding down anything that might've otherwise made him adapt... he's just fascinating that way.

[md_donighal]

Myself, whether as established in the gamebooks or as I've developed inna bar, and/or my interactions with those of your characters I'm privileged to call friends.