January meme: Jan 16

[cahn]

luzula asked about first fictional crushes, "assuming you've had any." (I'm going to assume "fictional" refers not only to books.)

Ahahahaha. In fact I make a new fictional crush every year or so. My first fictional crushes, I think, were Sherlock Holmes, Spock, and MacGyver. (As a kid, I tended to crush less on literary characters, because I'd more identify with them -- Will Stanton, Ged, Peter Pevensie -- than actually crush on them.) Uh, yeah: when I was a kid, I was guaranteed to fall for any character with analytical problem-solving skills, ideally with an unemotional exterior hiding a deep capacity for friendship, if not love. Nowadays I tend to go for either quiet unselfconscious competency and integrity -- Simon Illyan, Costis -- or lots of shades of moral grey (Cary Agos, Nicholas Rush, Garak). Not sure what this dichotomy says about me. (I do note that the moral-grey characters tend to be from TV and movies, whereas in books I'm almost always drawn to the competent ones. It's hard to do moral-grey in books in a way that makes me fall for the character. I do crush on TV/movie competent characters as well, though!)

MacGyver was clearly the biggest crush. (And Murdoc, the assassin who is obsessed with MacGyver. Yup, I had a crush on him too, although not the same kind -- I mean, MacGyver was the kind of guy you'd want to date, and Murdoc was, well, not.) I can't believe I am admitting this in public... somewhere between elementary and high school, I wrote -- years before I had ever heard the term "fanfiction" -- an angsty MacGyver epic that was many thousands of words long (twenty thousand? forty thousand? It was Many Double-Spaced Pages, that's all I'm saying). Yes, complete with self-insert who all the other characters thought was incredibly smart and attractive etc., although even at the time I drew the line at constructing the self-insert as a major love interest. However, there, uh, may have been a noble angsty self-sacrificing revealing death scene reminiscent of Eponine's. (I had read and watched Les Mis at that point, and it showed.) There was even a time-travel super-conspiracy involved, in which Murdoc turned out to be Tragically Misunderstood (or even better, Tragically Intentionally Misunderstood For the Good of Mankind). This was epic, I tell you.

(There may even be a copy of this great work extant somewhere in my parents' house, but no one except my sister -- who was the intended audience, at the time -- is ever going to be allowed to see it.)

Comments

[luzula]

Hee, I didn't want to assume. : )

But anyway, I always enjoy hearing people's answer to this question. Probably my earliest fictional crush was Luke Skywalker? Not very original, I know.

[cahn]

Well, it's good not to assume! :) And it's a neat question, probably my favorite that was asked -- thanks for asking :)

(From K)

[(Anonymous)]

Hahahahahaaa.... Um, wow. Not that I'm terribly surprised, given your scriptures. But still, I'm grinning rather widely. So, speaking of being focussed and working independently on projects, it seems to me that you're thoroughly guilty in certain cases :)

Also, why Peter and not Lucy?

Re: (From K)

[cahn]

The things you learn about me here! :) (I imagine that you never knew about it because a) it never came up in conversation, and b) I probably wanted to you to retain at least some image of me as not a totally weird person. But, yeah, I figure now it's years too late for that...) And, okay, make that: how do you stay focused on projects like learning multivariate calculus rather than writing MacGyver fanfiction :PP :)

Of course I identified more with Lucy (and with Tenar as well) -- but I was trying to think of the characters I would tend to have a crush on, and Peter seemed like the most likely candidate. (I can't think of a female in literature that I've had a crush on, although I haven't thought really closely about it. They are much less likely to push those particular buttons and much more likely to push the "identify" button.)

[ollipop]

Spock! Simon! Sherlock! We have the same taste in characters. :D I can appreciate your distinction between the moral-grey and quietly noble ones, and agree that somehow it's easier to lean toward the grey ones in visual media? It's interesting to think about the differences there. But so often I fall in love with a character, not a character type. And sometimes these days my feelings on a character get swamped with base lust--no less valid but maybe less fun to analyze.

I love that your MacGuyver novel got written down! My brain did similar things when I was a kid, but I locked it down and admitted it to NO ONE. Reading your reminiscence makes me want to know more about your sister.

[cahn]

Ooh -- examples where you fall in love with a character rather than a character type? I have some of those too -- Julian Bashir in DS9 doesn't fall into either of those large categories, but I love his whiny super-smart arrogant extremely-attractive self :)

I think I just didn't have anyone telling me that writing MacGyver fanfic was a weird thing to do! My parents thought it was a little strange, probably, but it kept me out of trouble and was vaguely academic-ish, so I don't remember them ever saying anything about it. (It helps that they are both nonnative English speakers, don't read very much in English, and so never read it. They... might have thought differently if they had.)

My sister is awesome and I think you'd like her a lot. She's, hmm, how to describe... she's a pediatrician doing the research portion of her fellowship right now. I consider her more bubbly, more social, more generous, more able to get stuff done, and more emotional than I am. If you want to get an idea of her, she blogs here. :) (I will say that our taste in books does not always overlap, although she's usually spot on when she tells me I won't like a book and vice versa.)

[ollipop]

Hmm. Looking back on my young crushes, I'm embarrassed to say that by far the longest running was Cmdr. Riker on ST:TNG. I don't know why... maybe it was the smugness, the inability to sit down like a normal person, the total sense of conviction. Also Hubert Hawkins in "The Court Jester" (the Danny Kaye character, in the movie) stole my heart with his sheer goofiness. Those are the only ones I remember deeply from my childhood that were coded as "romantic". I was also really fascinated by Catherine in "Father Goose", but that was in a way that my brain didn't code as romantic or sexual for another... fifteen years? Nobody told me any different. Nowadays, I think my biggest crush would probably be Bel Thorne from the Vorkosigan saga, in terms of pure deep character love. Fanfic has twisted my fictional crushes lately. I think I'm rounding more characters up to what I wish they would be, instead of working strictly from what I see on the page or the screen (cough, Sherlock, cough).

You had an entire language to yourself that your parents didn't read? (Or, sounds like they could have read, but didn't really exercise it.) WOW, my life would have been really different if that had been the case. I always self-censored, or located ridiculous hiding places, or wrote in code in order to avoid my parents. I loved the Sherlock Holmes story about the Dancing Men; I thought if I could re-create the whole alphabet I could write whatever I wanted in privacy. I never quite pulled it off, though.

Ooooooo, I am going to go lurk on your sister's page for a while! She seems like good people, from a literary point of view.

[cahn]

Wow, that's so interesting, I never imprinted on any of the TNG cast at all (probably because I'd already super-imprinted on TOS). I think Simon and Galeni are my two big crushes from the Vorkosigan saga. And maybe Cordelia in the later books some... in the earlier books she codes more to me as "identify" rather than "crush."

...Yeah, I think my life was VERY different because they never checked up on my reading. I read a LOT of things that my parents would have found unsuitable if they'd also read it, as well as things that *I* find unsuitable now as an adult. (*cough*Piers Anthony*cough*)...But I'm so very glad I was allowed to find my own way, even if that way included Piers Anthony -- Ursula LeGuin once said that children consume (literarily) a lot of trash, and it's good for them. I'm a big, BIG proponent of letting kids read whatever they want, as a result, even if sometimes I cringe at the sort of stuff my kid's likely to want to read. (What am I going to do the day she brings home Twilight? ...grin, bear it, and maybe someday bring up how stalking is not a healthy relationship behavior.)

Then again, I'm pretty sure my mom knew I was getting into the (sometimes quite steamy!) romance novels she'd hidden in the closet, that summer I was really low on reading material, so it's possible they wouldn't have cared even if they were native English speakers. They have always been very pragmatic: the kind of parents who worried a lot about my academic performance and pretty much not at all about what was going into my head (as long as it didn't translate into action... e.g., premarital sex: Not A Thing). Which... was probably not ideal in some ways, but in others was quite nice.