#alex rider crocodile tears | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

eliotquillon · 12 days ago

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alex rider for the ask game :3

my favourite female character:

wow there’s just so many women in this series i can’t possibly choose! jk lmao.

for me it is sabina. my diva, my queen, the only character to consistently call alex on his shit and point out that for all his protests he keeps agreeing to do ‘one more mission’….i will never understand why people hate her (other than misogyny lmfao). i will forever be mad about that weird era of crocodile tears—never say die where ahorz turned her into a bit of a wet wipe because skeleton key/eagle strike sabina is so funny and headstrong and willing to give as good as she gets. i think she is one of the most realistic characters in the series (pun name aside) and her refusing to believe alex in eagle strike doesn’t make her evil or a fake friend…it makes her a teenage girl who was being gaslit by an intelligence agency. from sabina’s perspective the story is basically a horror movie: her best friend is being blackmailed and forced into putting his life at risk over and over, and there’s nothing she can do. there was never anything she could do. he chose danger and adventure over wanting to stay safe with her and her family and there was never any point in trying to change his mind because he is always going to be a little bit out of reach. i love her, and i think she balances alex out so well. forever mad that the tv adaptation didn’t have the foresight to realise that introducing kyra (who i love btw don’t get it twisted) and keeping her as a series regular was going to create some balancing issues with sabina, so they just turned tv sabina into a spineless caricature of all her worst traits because they didn’t need to worry about making her likeable like they did with kyra. book sabina i will love you forever.

my favourite male character:

am i allowed to say ‘the ghost of john rider that is perpetually haunting the narrative’. because to be clear it is the ghost of john rider that is perpetually haunting the narrative.

in all seriousness this is so difficult…i genuinely do love whatever the fuck is going on with the unreliable portrait of john that gets drawn throughout the series, but given that his only real appearance is in russian roulette (a book so filled with continuity errors/unreliable narration that for my own sanity i HAVE to assume that yassen is deliberately lying in at least parts of it) i don’t know if he sincerely counts as a ‘character’. although for what it’s worth i do fundamentally think that whoever john really was, he wasn’t a cut and dry ‘good person’ like we keep being TOLD to believe (too much contradiction going on with him for that).

it’s probably either general sarov OR alex himself. general sarov is cut and dry my favourite villain, is in my favourite book, and i could talk about his decision to shoot himself instead of alex (when sarov was 100% on the edge of victory!) forever. he’s such a tragic figure and i always find myself wishing that we’d gotten more villains like him…characters who genuinely weren’t cut-and-dry evil, whose motivations were actually kind of reasonable apart from the fact that the endgame/means to get to it were all wrong. but since i’m probably gonna talk a lot about skeleton key anyway i’ll put a pin in that. ALEX in the meantime…i love him so much. i love his smug one-liners, i love his fits of bad temper, i love that he never does what he’s told. and i also love how wistful he is. there’s a lot of moments, especially in the earlier books, where it’s clear that alex was actually already pretty fucked up from the simple fact of not knowing his parents. he’s been grappling with that big gnawing question of ‘who am i, really’ for a long time. he has so much guilt and shame. killing is for grown-ups and he’s still a child. i never really got into any of the other ‘teen spy’ novels when i was a kid and i think the reason why i latched onto alex rider specifically is because he is such a good protagonist. as an adult he is still so interesting because it becomes so much clearer how scared and insecure he is a lot of the time. i love him.

my favourite book/season/etc:

my fave season of the show is s1 fyi. ANYWAY.

as previously mentioned my fave book in the series is skeleton key. it is so many things. it’s a coming of age story. it’s a reverse whodunnit. it’s a story about grief. it is so, so uniquely of its time. alex continuously tries and fails at playing happy families (the pleasures, troy and turner, sarov) and never quite hits any of the right notes in any of them because he doesn’t know what it would look like. sarov would rather burn the world than admit that he sent his son to die in a useless proxy war and that it was his fault. it is the last book that was published before the war on terror started in earnest. i know it doesn’t really add to any of the overarcing stuff going on (no scorpia and no rider family drama) and nor does it have many of the other popular elements of the series (again, no scorpia and no rider family, but also no k-unit, no yassen, no julius, barely any whump, alex is basically beaten fair and square by sarov at every term) so i know this is probably an unpopular opinion. but there’s something so gentle about it. it’s so heartbreaking. it’s the point of no return - this is the first time alex chooses to do mi6 a favour instead of strictly being blackmailed into it. sarov killing himself even though he’s on the precipice of victory just because alex has made it explicitly clear that he will never be his son, that he can’t ever really turn back the clock, just fucking guts me. i don’t think this is necessarily the best-constructed book in the series (scorpia is, objectively, the best IMO), but it is my favourite.

also the american edition is totally different to every other edition and features a completely different version of the cia scenes, primarily to make the special agents more sympathetic and less like they fucking hate a child. which is just so cool. i mean the censorship stuff isn’t cool but the difference in editions is fascinating.

my fave episode (if it’s a tv show):

i can’t remember if it’s ep7 or 8 of season 3 but the tv show’s take on what happened at albert bridge. that episode. it was so, so good. i cannot imagine a better way to film it. i loved the interspersing of present with past and they cast john rider SO fucking well. i have a lot of mixed feelings about season 3 (i thought the decision to veer right back into being very book accurate after doing a pretty good job of making it explicitly clear that this was a retelling/its own distinct spin was…confusing) but that episode was perfect. i also really like s1ep8 (because i’m obsessed with kyra).

my fave cast member:

if we’re talking about the show again: marli siu as kyra. she is so fucking cool. and also adding kyra to the show, for all it opened up a can of worms, was the best thing guy burt ever did. i adore kyra so much.

if we’re using cast member to mean ‘recurring main character who isn’t one of my two named favourites’: i have a bit of a soft spot for crawley. i have no idea why, but something about him consistently being described as looking like a second-rate private school teacher forever tickles me. he’s just some guy but he cracks me up for some reason.

my favourite ship:

across the whole AR multiverse of madness, it is probably alex/kyra. i blame them for my sudden het ship renaissance tbh. i was rooting for them like i have never rooted for any heterosexual couple before (although arguably neither of them are het LOL). i think i fainted when they finally kissed in s3.

but if we’re doing book-only (since most of my answers have skewed that way)…hmm. i think i will have a forever fondness for sabina and alex’s invisible string thing they have going on. not friends not lovers but a secret third thing. i also like the toxic yaoi of john/yassen a lot because the fuck is going on THERE. i don’t fuck with alex/yassen because it personally icks me, but like i very much see the vision of yassen recreating the dynamic he had with john but with alex (and the roles reversed). john/yassen most toxic mentorship of all time spread the word.

a character i’d die defending:

sabina pleasure lol. i have in fact made some very snippy posts in the past because like…listen. obviously you are allowed to dislike her. you can dislike any character for any reason. but she has been DISPROPORTIONATELY hated on by the AR fandom. it is pure misogyny. her existence is not ‘getting in the way’ of making any other alex ship canon because sabina/alex isn’t even canon! claiming you dislike her because of ahorz’s bad/inconsistent writing is fair but you cannot say that and then, at the same time, praise the likes of ben daniels (whose identity has been swapped multiple times as a result of bad writing) as your fave character. she reacts badly to the truth in eagle strike but this was not her fault! she was being gaslit! if alex forgave her then i think maybe the fandom can let this go! she is one of the only shreds of normality left in his life and one of her chief functions is to call out alex’s shit and serve as a reality check to him. she did nothing wrong for REAL!!

a character i just can’t sympathise with:

i think it goes without saying that we’re not really meant to sympathise with a lot of these characters, so let me be controversial: mrs jones!!!!

like listen. i’m sorry to hear your kids got kidnapped yeah i actually am like obviously i’m gonna be upset about that innit yeah and tulip you know the only thing is yeah is that no-one can force me to be your mate or anything yeah and i don’t want to be mates wiv you alright? i know mrs jones is meant to be the ‘softer’ option to blunt. i know we are meant to believe, especially in the reboots, that she is better than him. but she isn’t. she talks a big game about how making alex work for them is wrong and that she’s against it, but she is never willing to put her money where her mouth is. she’s the one to goad alex into going to cairo in scorpia rising. in a lot of ways, i think her softer coating makes her a lot more insidious than blunt. this is one of the reasons i kind of went off the tv show towards the end: they made show!jones WAY too nice and sympathetic, and that’s just not who she is.

and don’t get it twisted: i think she’s fascinating. i love her character and her different faces are so, so interesting in a series that tends to stick women in the whore or mother box respectively. but i do not sympathise with her. i like her character, but i don’t like HER.

a character i grew to love:

am i allowed to say sabina again. because it is, genuinely, sabina. it took me YEARS to come around on her and then when i finally did it it was so worth it. but maybe i can’t say sabina for three different answers LOL.

this is genuinely a difficult question because there are a lot of characters in this series that i don’t LIKE but i LOVE in the sense that i find them interesting. i think jack has genuinely grown on me over the years, mostly as a result of the secret weapon short stories. it didn’t seem like it when i first read the series as a kid, but she’s so young, and she is functionally helpless—she wants to look after alex, but she’s an illegal immigrant with no blood relation to him, who at best is another way for mi6 to exploit him and at worst is a way for scorpia to exploit him. i have a lot more sympathy and respect for her now. and on a similar (yet wildly different) note: i hate ian rider, but he has slowly grown into the alex rider character i think about the most. what the fuck was up with him. what was up with him and john. did he know what he was doing when he raised alex to be a child soldier? is there a reason why yassen killed him but spared alex despite both of them being john’s blood relatives? i’m just so!!!

my anti otp:

sorry guys…it is yalex, i’m afraid. like i said: i can see the vision, but i can’t personally get past them meeting when alex is 14 and yassen is in his 30s. even in aus where they meet as adults i still get squicked out. honestly wish i could get over my aversion to it (at least a little) because i have read some FANTASTIC fics that had background yalex rumblings and i’m almost definitely depriving myself of a bunch of amazing fic by not really being willing to read anything where they’re at the forefront, but it’s just not for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#alex rider #asks #sabina pleasure #this was so fun. thank you #alex rider tv

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