#otp: the little palace hasn’t been the same without you | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sethnakht · 7 years ago

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tagged by the lovely @azalea-scroggs (forgive me for this incredibly late response)

Rules: choose any three fandoms (in random order) and answer the questions, then tag 10 people you want to know better

Three fandoms:

Star Wars

Coco

Harry Potter, if only because it lends itself to this meme

The first character you loved:

Luke (in childhood) - mostly, I think, for his moments of Extra, such as: a) the choice to take death-by-abyss over Vader’s offer, b) his black outfit, with its aura of faux-mystery (the product of brooding over Vader, it seemed), c) the fact that he Force-chokes his way into Jabba’s palace d) and that his solution to killing the Rancor is to send a barbed gate into its windpipe, e) the showiness of his flying kick on Jabba’s barge, f) how he reaches for Vader’s hand not long after having chopped one of them off

Mamá Coco - the beauty and dignity of great age, all of the implied little acts of resistance she’s hinted at having taken throughout her lifetime, strewn throughout the house

Harry - I think what instantly endeared me to him is his resilience, what one might even call spite - the way his hair grows back after Petunia cuts it shorter than he wants, for instance, and then the sheer nerve, the cheekiness of some of his responses to adults - the constant presence of repressed or unacknowledged wells of emotion beneath the calm surface. I learned a lot about what I like in a narrator from him, because he’s highly observant but completely unreliable, often coming to realizations with great belatedness

The character you never expected to love so much:

Leia - I remember seeing ESB in theaters as a child and being inexplicably drawn to the shot of her watching the blast doors close, to her eyes - feeling a sense of such longing it almost hurt. But I didn’t like her romantic subplot and totally lost interest after her bikini scene. It took far sharper eyes than my own to realize just how complex she can be, and years to recognize in her grief, in her struggles, in her determination, in her resistance just what it was that had sparked that initial response

Imelda - she reminds me almost uncannily of my real Dominican grandmother, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about her too closely at the beginning. But she’s emerged to me as That Kind of Character I love to write about - headstrong, resentful, masked, walled on the outside; she’s open to many metaphorical readings as well. Cheech, Victoria, and Elena have also grown on me to a surprising degree

one of the great joys of Potter is that nearly every character has a remarkably skewed perspective. I kind of love the cast as a whole - from weirdos like Aberforth and Filch and the Lovegoods to the worst-ever purebloods to Lily and the Marauders - and over time have found the adults especially fun to think through, not least because of how settled-in-their-ways and batshit some of them have become

The character you relate to the most:

I’m going to rephrase this as “the character perspective you find most rewarding to write”, because that’s how I relate to characters --

Vader - because anger! and a journey! because he’s a sad but hilarious murderbot! have explained the fascination a bit here

Héctor - he’s a trickster, immensely changeable and fluid, and yet also caught in something of a traumatic loop, one both of his own making and not. He's in some way the character who can cross every boundary but the one he wants to cross, or rather who has to cross all kinds of boundaries, who keeps crossing boundaries despite being denied passage to the one place he wants to be by an apparatus that regards him as an outsider. There’s lots one can also do with him to think about class relations, about the history of the twentieth century, about time more generally (time in music, time in poetry), about language (he’s a poet). And on a psychological level, he’s got all the baggage I love: guilt, shame, persistence in desperation, a particular form of good-natured obliviousness that has a way of getting in the way of clear communication on his end and also of setting him up for betrayal

Snape - he’s a miserably depressed, endlessly spiteful, hopelessly guilt-ridden young teacher who can’t keep his anger or his tongue in check, is ridiculously partial to the sort of rich prat who helped ruin his life in the first place, is obsessed to the most obsessive degree with Harry and his parents, is probably on a whole bucketload of potions to get through the day, is physically a total mess, and gets to wield some of the most cutting sarcasm in the books - of course his perspective is a riot

The character you’d slap:

other than Anakin? or Padmé? probably Obi-Wan pre-ROTS. Which is not to say that I don’t love him (love his sass especially); more that there are things he does in TPM and AOTC that remind me too much of real people - of bad teachers I know. Much could have been avoided without his grudge in TPM, with a franker acknowledgement of the fact that his charge looked up to him as a father and not as a brother and was vulnerable to predation from those who could see the disconnect. The difference a sharper ear for tone ( “I do my best, Master”) might have made . . . not unlike Snape, he’s a poster-boy for bad teaching, and in a very different way from Snape, he’s arrogant and fairly privileged at the same time. That he’s never called out on his behavior until it’s far too late is harrowingly realistic

Ernesto - boy becomes a media star and yet has never heard of communication, apparently. if he’d simply asked Héctor to write him songs from home, the entire mess might have been avoided

Snape deserves to be in this category, but I think the character I’d want to actually slap is Draco Malfoy - just - i mean

Three favorite characters (in order of preference):

Vader, Leia, Ahsoka or Aphra

Héctor, Imelda, Coco

Snape, Harry, pretty much everyone but Voldemort and Draco

A character you liked at first but don’t anymore:

I still love Luke, so this isn’t quite the response being asked for, but I also don’t seek him out, don’t want to write about him. As a kid, I devoured pretty much every Luke-Vader story out there; now, when encountering Luke-Vader, I confess I struggle to muster interest if Leia (or Ahsoka, or some other female character) isn’t present

this movie hasn’t been out long enough for that, I think . . .

Hermione is a character I adore still, but as with Luke, she’s no longer for me what she was as a child, when she was my role model - idk, I love a lot of the qualities in her that tend to be overlooked in fic, her brutality for instance, her more hidden impulses - how much she wants to belong, how much her marriage says about her structural needs and wants (love Ron, btw, another totally under-appreciated character). I think she’s super interesting, if not in her prescribed role as the know-it-all ex-machina. As the character used to always playing that role and under pressure to remain in that role, however, she’s fascinating

Three OTPs:

Leia + Vader gen, of which there is not nearly enough in this world - Vader spends two films chasing / capturing her, Leia spends two films escaping / defying him, he doesn’t want her dead because she can lead him to things he wants, she absolutely wants him dead and is driven to lead by her hatred for him, they’re extreme versions of each other and understand each other extremely well as a result, possibly are even drawn to each other, if only to really hurt each other - you bet I want to see this dynamic further explored

Héctor/Imelda - guilt-fest, psychological drama ahoy, plus they’re musicians, connected through time and language

aside from the stuff I somehow avoid like the plague (H/G, Drarry, anything with Voldemort), I’d read pretty much anything with an interesting narrator. Rarepairs are where it’s at for me in Potter, tbh

I tag @glompcat, @marythegizka, @chancecraz, @songofthesstars, @force-scream, @cyberdyke-industries, @thewillowbends, @babycharmander, @lloronadeazulceleste, @pengychan

#fandom meme #meme #long post

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