Stolen from incandescens

[camwyn]

Check my fandoms, my favorite characters, the pairings I like the most, my kinks, my fictional crushes, anything. Now, in a friendly and possibly teasing way, point out the obvious and not so obvious trends or fetishes you see in my tastes. Maybe I'm nuts for all vampire stories, or have a thing for men in glasses, or I'm fond of kick-ass women, or scary-ass geeks. Let's point out all of those you've noticed I tend to squee about during our friendship.

Comments

[paradisacorbasi.livejournal.com]

You like science.
You like mad science.
You like cute geeks.
You like werewolves.
You like tentacles, apparently...which goes into also liking the cthuloid mythos, somewhat.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

What indigoskynet said.

And looking at Ironhide and John Constantine, you also like characters who are both genuinely temperamental and abrasive, and genuinely in possession of functional moral compasses.

Speaking of which, any plans for the latter? I miss the way you write/wrote him in Hellblazer: Hogwarts. *indulges in a moment of quiet nostalgia for the days when I was new to LJ*

[camwyn]

Every so often I consider the John Constantine stuff, and it keeps coming down to 'I didn't really like the level of cynicism and corrosiveness he brought to my psyche'. He's there now and he's waiting, but I don't know when I"m going to be willing to invoke that deliberately... although given the course of this election year I have a suspicion that there's going to wind up being John stuff by November.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Huh.

Yeah, I can understand that (http://truth-sometimes.livejournal.com/). Not that it stops me from playing him; I guess I just think somewhere deep down that I can play the character through enough development to get him out of some of the traits that make him uncomfortable for me, without compromising his basic nature too badly. That'd probably be a lot tougher with John.

[camwyn]

The thing with John is that I don't really play John by going 'okay, what would John Constantine do?'. I play John by going 'okay, in this situation, if you took my conscience, chained its hands behind its back, beat it senseless, threw it down the stairs a few times, and locked it up with some corrupt cops, what would I do?' and then making it British. So writing John is, for me, a deliberate application of the unwholesome parts of my psyche, even though John's trying to turn the unwholesomeness to the good in one way or another.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I think there's a little (or even a lot) of that in how I play House, but he's just generally less of an asshole than John, so it's easier for me.

And wow, I did not ever expect to utter the sentence "House is just generally less of an asshole than ___".

[camwyn]

I have a friend who insists that House is what happens to my psyche when I drop the social conscience in the toilet, so it's not really a surprise that the two are accessed the same way.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

It's not just dropping the social conscience in the toilet, for me. To House, assholishness is an active pursuit, which is the only part of him that is genuinely one hundred per cent foreign to the way I operate mentally. So when I play him, I have to prod my goals around a little.

Which leads to beautiful cracks like (whitetexted for a very special kind of TMI) and there's a certain amount of malevolent glee inherent in coming up with those that frankly scares me when I think about it. Not because he'd actually follow through on that implication, but because he sees nothing wrong with joking around that he would. He finds it funny and gratifying, and after playing him, so do I. At least in part.



Incidentally, allow me to say I like you because you make me really think about my RP. Which is something I need to do more often. :D

[camwyn]

Heh. In my case it's really that I know perfectly well that I have the power to be an absolutely enormous asshole by default if I don't consciously control it, rather like the way Vulcans on original series Trek weren't so much 'I have no emotions' as 'I have enormously powerful and destructive emotions and so I practice a philosophy of logic to keep them from causing problems'. It only takes a little encouragement to get active pursuit of sphinctrosity going from there.

Aw. Thank you.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Whereas I seem to be a genuinely nice person who can become a genuinely gleefully ruthless bastard by hitting a switch (insofar as House is gleefully ruthless, which is a whole 'nother few paragraphs' worth of discussion). I'm not entirely sure which is scarier.

Welcome! *beams*

[camwyn]

Not to rely too heavily on anything Terry Goodkind says, because the man has some wacko ideas that make the rest of his work kind of suspect for me, but he did point up one thing with the Mord-Sith (aka the BONDAGE TORTURE WOMEN IN HOTT HOTT LEATHER from book 1). Namely, the most empathic and kind-hearted people were the ones who made the most incredible torturers, because bastardry is the act of looking at kindness and decency and the urge to do it and going 'mmm... no' as hard as you possibly can.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Yes, I remember the Mord-Sith from the days (long past) when I respected that man as an author. And you make an interesting point.

Note to self: never become a raging bitch. You might take over the world and/or cause the Apocalypse. Neither would be beneficial.

[camwyn]

Yeah, and if you cause the Apocalypse I'm going to have to ride out and I'd really rather not do that, because I have no freakin' clue where to find a white horse on short notice.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

*grins* Which Horseman?

[camwyn]

Conquest. Pestilence only came into the picture as the possible identity of the White Rider after the Black Death struck Europe. Before that, the White Rider was generally acclaimed as either Conquest (separate from War) or the Antichrist himself.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Hilariously, I nearly responded to this with my House journal.

And awesome! Conquest would be such a cool rider...ness...thing. *waves hand* Need breakfast for workings of brain.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

On a note of random, because I forgot this earlier, active pursuit of sphinctrosity is an AWESOME phrase. *beam*

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

Given the pups you play in milliways_bar, I'd say you have a thing for characters who are immortal or nearly so.

[camwyn]

Yeah, this I knew about, although with Bee and Ironhide it's kind of secondary. One of the long-running plots of some of the stories that live in the back of my head but never actually get written down because they exist to entertain me and only me is something to the effect of 'lost space colony that got knocked backwards in time- oh, and there's one or more members of the original crew who for some reason never actually died, and they're the only reason the colony's descendants remember where they came from and when and how to make contact with Earth again'. The continuity of culture in the form of the individual is a big thing for me sometimes.

[leeshajoy.livejournal.com]

...isn't that kinda the plot of the first ElfQuest story arc?

[camwyn]

Li'l bit, except that Timmain wasn't there to keep the cultural continuity going for the Wolfriders, so the only ones who were there from close to the very beginning were the Blue Mountain elves and Savah. Lord Voll was a Firstborn, if I remember right, and Savah's mom was either a High One or a Firstborn- I think a Firstborn, but it's been ages.

Overall, that might explain part of why I reacted with such interest to the Elfquest story arc when I first encountered it, since I had the idea in my head before I ever picked up Wendy and Richard Pini's stuff.