Thirty Days of Fanfiction: Day Three

3 – For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favorite characters to write?

I'll limit the fandoms to those I wrote more than five stories in, because less than that don't really cut it for favourites.

Babylon 5: I started with the Centauri - Londo, Vir, Timov, Adira, Mariel, Cartagia - and of course one Narn, G'Kar - and then branched out to the telepaths - Bester, Talia, Lyta, and in a combination of what interested me most, Centauri telepaths, i.e. the four women serving Emperor Turhan - and eventually the humans (Garibaldi, Morden, Sinclair, Anna Sheridan and Lochley). What surprised me was that I found the human characters, who hadn't been my main focus as a watcher, as easy to write as the characters whose dialogue I could have recited at some point, and that I enjoyed writing them a lot instead of feeling I was just doing my duty for various challenges. This being said: I'd lie if I said Londo wasn't my favourite here as well. Closely followed by Timov and Vir. Their voices were just instantly accessible to me; I never hand a ponder for long what they would say or think, whereas I did that for G'Kar. Oddly enough, my favourite G'Kar pov story is one which features Londo only a secondary character, and Mariel as a main character; I had a blast writing Mariel and her affair with G'Kar which is about many different things for both of them, and none of them involves love. Also, this was where I felt I got G'Kar's darker side which isn't much dealt with in fanfiction because his arc is one of enlightnment. Someone I loved writing nearly as much as my Centauri was Bester, both about from someone else's pov and from his own. Not to mention that he's one of those characters born for crossovers because no matter which universe you put him in, the dialogue almost writes itself, conflicts are inevitable, and plot is guaranteed to happen.

Heroes: Oh, Petrellis. How I used to love you all. Also Bennets. And Hiro. And Molly. And Matt. And unexpectedly, in the second season, Mohinder. And Bob. And Nikki. And... anyway. If I have to narrow it down, my favourite character to write was Nathan (both in the sense of writing about and writing pov), but I had expected that, whereas Nikki, for whom the show writing as shaky for even in season 1, was the character who surprised me most because I had never expected to want to write her, and writing her I did. I first wrote her pov as one of three sections in a post-s1 story. And then when I wrote my Heroes-as-Runaways story which is, depending on my mood, my favourite or second favourite of anything I wrote for Heroes, I need someone other than Peter to talk back to Nathan and (as opposed to Peter) be immune to the big brother treatment, and teenage Nikki was perfect. The last Heroes story I wrote before quitting the fandom was about Bob and Nikki and the curiously affectionate relationship that developed between them (especially in the lights of what Bob did to his own daughter and what Nikki's father did to her), and somehow that fit. I also enjoyed writing Claire a lot, but the memory of one single story - the other one who is either my favourite or second favourite - which was basically my attempt to venture into Gaiman territory, makes Molly my favourite female to write. She was the ideal child heroine to experience the Heroesverse via dreams and fairytales. So: Nathan, Nikki, Molly.

Angel: the Series: Darla and Connor, no ifs, no buts. Most of my AtS stories feature one or the other, and in one instance I'm very fond of, both. Surprise third: Lorne, because I never planned on writing him, but first bimo dared me, which resulted in a Lorne and Wesley tale and then he just had to meet post-Not Fade Away Connor, and then he showed up in my SFU crossover as well, and every time, his lines just flowed to my pen, err, computer.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Quark. Which surprised me as my Quark fondness did, because back in the day like most people I fell for Garak when getting into DS9. And I did and do enjoy writing Garak just as I enjoy watching the character, but somehow Quark snuck up on me and became not only my favourite DS9 character but also commandeered a lot of my stories. Most recently he smuggled himself into a DS9 Yuletide story where the prompter had asked about Worf, Ezri, Jadzia and Julian and stole every scene he was in. I also tend to partially blame him of making me fall for Dax just as he did, and somehow this resulted not only in Jadzia being a key character in several stories but an epic tale about an obscure bit of Curzon (and also Jadzia) backstory, and most recently Ezri. Now I might have written Kira as often as Dax (and Five things that never happened between Kira and Dukat is certainly one of the DS9 tales I'm proudest of), but if we're talking about whom I loved to write more? Dax. And then there was Winn, Winn Adami, Kai Winn, whom I loved writing, too, bless her Renaissance cardinal self. Character whom I didn't expect to love writing but did: Jake Sisko. My two Jake stories came unprompted and unrequested, they simply happened because he talked to me.

Alias: give you three guesses, and the first two don't count. Arvin Sloane. Second favourite: Marshall.

Merlin (TV): I love them all, our regulars (plus Morgause), but I have to choose the hapless Sir William of Deira, because he was such a blast to flesh out, and Kilgarrah, because I have a thing for the wily old beast and could indulge my mythic vein as well as the one for old-and-messed-up when writing the Great Dragon.

Doctor Who: Jooooooooo. I mean, I tried my hand at several incarnations of the Doctor and am told this came across credibly for the regenerations in question, which made me relieved and proud, but writing Jo Grant just was my favourite thing in this fandom ever.

X-Men (Comicverse): Abigail Brand and Hank McCoy. Bet you're surprised. I was a bit frightened to dabble in the comicverse at first because of the decades of backstory, and started with a vignette about Emma Frost, but then basically Brand captured me and never let me go, and Hank is, well, how can you not love (comicverse) Hank? And there was a distinct lack of fanfiction about the former, while the later mostly showed up with Bobby, and not that I begrudge any Iceman/Beast shippers their rich comicverse history, but it wasn't my thing. Hence the call of the muse.

Highlander: The Series: Cassandra. Death and the Maiden is still one of the stories which I think put me on another level as a writer to where I was before, and Cassandra was actually the first case of me falling for a fandom underdog who was hated in wide circles for her attitude towards the fandom favourite. It's a bit like with Quark and Garak - Methos was the character I loved first and certainly expected to love and write about, and he shows up in most of my HL fanfiction, but Cassandra is the one I ended up loving most writing.

Star Wars: Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Well, he did get me into the fandom to begin with, so this is no surprise, though of my SW stories most are actually of another pov; he's one of those characters that work best for me (in a story) explored from the outside, with one exception; the story about the newly renamed, crippled and rebuild Vader experiencing life in his shell.

Battlestar Galactica (2003): I think most of these were crossovers, but a few weren't, and anyway, the answer is Laura Roslin. She did not stay my favourite character - which she was at the beginning - but she was my favourite to write about, either from her or someone else's pov.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy. Most of my few BTVS pieces were disguised meta, more or less, except for City Girls; I never had the urge to write for BTVS the way I did for AtS despite loving both shows equally.

Torchwood: To my surprise, I find Jack is in all my stories, and several of them deal with someone else's relationship with him (Owen's and Alice's, to be precise, which reminds me: too bad they never met. Not that a meeting would have gone necessarily well, but it would have been interesting.) "Surprise" because he never was my favourite character on either TW or DW. But he's undeniably a good catalyst. This being said, I don't think I have a favourite character to write in my stories. (As opposed to having some on the show itself.) Other than Jack showing up (even if just in the sense of being talked about, as in "Backstage Management"), there is no red thread, and they all cover different aspects of Torchwood.

( The rest of the questions )

Poetry broadcasts and musicians celebrating each other

During my visit to London a few weeks ago, I acquired among other things a collection of Ted Hughes' radio essays about poetry (which include, of course, a lot of recited poems, both his and from other poets) which the British Library edited under the title "The Spoken Word". Back in the 60s, he's been comissioned by the BBC to write and present a series of radio programmes called "Listening and Writing". (If you're familiar with the Plath-Hughes saga you might remember this was one of their principal sources of income in the early 60s.) A word about Hughes' theoretical writing in general: he's one of those rare poets who can talk about the craft without getting incomprehensible or condescending, BUT only in his essays. Not, alas, in the big Shakspeare book. Stay away from Shakespeare and the Goddess of Being, which is what happens when Ted rambles on too long and has too much Robert Graves on the brain. However, the essays, both the written ones and now the radio ones, are great. The short form brings out the best in him, and you can tell why the BBC kept asking him back - not only has he a great voice, but he's a good narrator in both senses, and can recite poetry (both his own and other peoples') with the best of them. (By no means that common for poets. I don't know whether you've ever listened to a T.S. Eliot recording of him reading from The Waste Land - it's painful.) Now I have other audio books of Hughes, but they were made in the 80s and 90s, so what surprised me most about those 60s radio programmes is that the voice remained identical. Meaning: other than in the earliest radio essay, "Capturing Animals", still sounding a bit more declaring and ringing as young people do, as opposed to the later broadcasts where he's relaxed more into the medium, you couldn't tell a difference between these recordings and the ones done decades later by voice alone. Apparently he had this deep Yorkshire voice even in his 20s.

Of his own poems, a lot of the ones he recites are the ones written for children, like the Moon Creature poems from The Earth Owl and other Moon People and from Meet My Folks, where there is a lot of humour which there isn't in his adult poems, though occasionally the ones for children have the same intensity. The selection of other poets occurs in the programm titled "Writing about Landscape" (from 1964), and is interesting not only for the content but about what it says re: Hughes' taste: Edward Thomas The South Country, T.S. Eliot Virginia, Gerard Manley Hopkins Inversnaid and Sylvia Plath Wuthering Heights. (He does not let on he had a personal connection to the last in the programm. This was not yet two years after her death, and she hadn't become world famous yet, but he's nonetheless very careful to present her as he does the other authors.)

His own observations about the way poems can be created and what they attempt to capture, as I said, manage to never talk down or be obscure, which is rare in the field, and though you can tell the subjects move him deeply, he's very matter of fact, with the occasional wry aside, like this one from Capturing Animals about his family moving when he was ten: "The cat went upstairs in my bed and moped for a week; it hated the place."

All in all, probably my favourite audio book among those I bought in London (sadly, the DW audios were a bit of a mixed bunch; I'll write about them some other time) and excellent distraction when relaxing after various gymnastics, medical baths, hikings and so forth.

*

One downside of being stuck here in Bad Brückenau is that in Munich I would be able to buy the newest MOJO which, I hear, is all about my favourite Beatle, but a small town in Franconia doesn't have English magazines. Ah well. Maybe it'll still be in the kiosks of Munich ten days from now? Anyway, something they kindly put online is Elvis Costello's essay about Paul McCartney, which is basically a love declaration. (Not that surprising considering what Elvis Costello did last year at the White House, but very enjoyable to read nonetheless. Even without personal bias, I love it when people in the same field are enthusiastic about each other (especially when it comes without the pressure of needing accolades for yourself in return, and while Costello is a rock generation later, he's by now a senior legend in his own right). It's also interesting because critics and biographers declared Elvis Costello among all the people Paul wrote songs with post-John to be the only "Lennonesque" one. (By which they presumably mean he's politically engaged and snarky? And/or wears glasses?) Anyway, two choice quotes from the essay:

"The last song we wrote was That Day Is Done. Again, I had a fair opening statement of it and had all these images. It was from a real thing. It was about my grandmother's funeral. It was sort of serious. He said, "Yes that's all good, all those images." But quite often when you're writing a song about something personal, what it means to you can sometimes get in the way of what it can possibly mean to somebody else. It needed a release. He said, "It needs something like this..." and he just sat down and played the chorus. It was sort of like a moment, like Let It Be, the creation of a semi-secular gospel song. It was quite shocking when he did that bit. Then you realise that's what he does. Then he sung the hell out of it. That's him, really."

And "He's got a couple of voices. He's got that killer Little Richard-influenced voice, and very few people can sing like that. Then that very plaintive ballad delivery like Yesterday or For No One. When you think about it, what other people sound like that? Gene Kelly sounds like that. So does Jimmie Rodgers, except for the twang. It's like all the world is in his voice. When you get down to why people react to him, it's that."

And he likes Ecce Cor Meum, which since I discovered it for myself only a few months ago makes me very happy indeed. In conclusion: aw.