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.)