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

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.