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

(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.)