lizbee's Literary Character Crush Meme

[rj_anderson]

So here's my list of the literary characters I crushed on, roughly in the order I encountered them:

- Peter, Caspian, and Rilian, from the Narnia books
- Will Stanton and Bran Davies, from Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising
- Ged, from Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea
- Mary Stewart's versions of the youthful Merlin and Mordred (and most of the heroes of her suspense novels too, come to think of it)
- Sherlock Holmes
- Johnson Johnson, the portrait-painting, bifocals-wearing spy/sleuth from Dorothy Dunnett's mysteries
- Remus Lupin (but only in canon, not in any fanfics I've yet read)
- Gregor Vorbarra, Duv Galeni and Simon Illyan from Lois McMaster Bujold's SF novels

I just know I'm leaving out somebody important*, but oh well.
--
*No, not Wimsey -- I like him just fine, but I never crushed on him. And believe it or not, Snape is not one of my crushes either, at least not in the same way as the others listed here...

Comments

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

How?

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

So bloody elder-brotherly. Grr.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

And this is a bad thing in your opinion, I take it. :)

I liked Peter because he seemed so... centred. Responsible. Mature. But not a jerk about it, not supercilious, just a decent guy trying to do the right thing. Plus, Pauline Baynes's illustrations, particularly of grown-up Peter, didn't hurt either...

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

Hmm. He always struck me as a bit sanctimonious, but hey.

Still most bitter about Susan's lapse into the evils of lipstick. Thanks for that one, Clive... It bloody would be Susan, because of course pretty girls are inherently bad. Grr.

They tied Rilian to a chair, on the other hand. Now that was nice. Was clearly a warped child that my teachers were right to fear.

Probably had crush on Lucy. Ho hum.

"The evils of lipstick"

[(Anonymous)]

I suppose Lewis' depiction of Susan never troubled me all that much because there *was* a Susan in my life, and she was just like that--all fascinated with growing up too quickly and losing all sense in being "boy crazy" and being totally absorbed in makeup, clothes, etc. From the time she was eight she was busy trying to pass as eighteen. Lewis' Susan merely seems copied from life, to me. 8-)

And my alarm bells were going off about Susan before it was even really established that she was considered the "pretty" one of the family, because the first words we hear from her are that she thinks Professor Kirke is "an old dear" and then she's busy telling the younger children that "it's time you were in bed"--to which Edmund quite rightly snaps back that she needs to stop talking as if she were their mother.

Mary Anne

Re: "The evils of lipstick"

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Lewis says positive things about Susan -- just off the top of my head I recall him saying she was kind-hearted, plus he gave her the chance to outshoot Trumpkin in the archery contest (which to me proves that whatever he meant to imply with Father Christmas's line about battles being ugly when women fight, he did not mean that they would be ugly because of the women's incompetence).

But there are signs in the early books that all may not be right with Susan either -- in fact, the foreshadowing of her eventual rejection of Aslan and Narnia comes way back in Prince Caspian, where after the debacle in the woods she admits to Lucy she "really believed" and even "knew" that Aslan was leading Lucy in the other direction but consciously rejected that knowledge because "I wanted to get out of the woods and -- oh, I don't know". To me, it's that tendency in her, only temporarily checked in Prince Caspian by the shame of having been proven wrong, which leads to her apostacy -- not the "lipstick and nylons and invitations" which are only symptoms of or excuses for that choice.

I think Susan's being pretty is, if anything, irrelevant when it comes to her deciding not to be a friend of Narnia. The problem goes far deeper than that. And yes, it sucks because we liked Susan (which proves Lewis didn't slander or stereotype her -- we could hardly have cared about her fate if she'd been unsympathetic or flat). But I have met, loved and lost people like Susan in my own life, and though that scene in The Last Battle is painful to read it also strikes a realistic chord which is, I think, meaningful and not gratuitous.

Judging from past discussions on this subject, I do not expect many people to agree with me on this, however.

"The evils of lipstick"

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

I liked Edmund. Given how cloying he could have been, he was rather good.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

He always struck me as a bit sanctimonious

Judging from your immediate mental connection to Susan, I suspect this is a case of shooting the messenger more than anything. I can't think of any point in the books during which Peter behaves in a supercilious or self-righteous fashion. He takes the lead among his siblings, but then he's the oldest -- plus Aslan basically puts him in charge anyway. But he delivers the bad news about Susan, so everybody resents him for it.

If you look at that scene, however, Peter is very grave as he says "My sister is no longer a friend of Narnia," and in fact that's all he does say -- it's evident he would rather not talk about it because it grieves him. It's the women -- Jill and Polly -- who jump in and give us the details and the criticisms of Susan that everyone dislikes so much, not Peter.

*hugs Peter* My poor defamed woobie.

[edithmatilda.livejournal.com]

Not a mental connection, fear not. I didn't like her either, it just peeved me that she was such an obvious Lapser Into Worldliness. In fact, she was considerably more appalling than Peter, I'll grant you, but it was so damn contrived.

And Aslan as the Patriarchy - hurrah...