January Meme: Favourite Loyalty Relationships

scintilla10 wanted to know about my favourite loyalty relationships.

If you are a long term reader of my ramblings, no prices for guessing what my favourite fictional loyalty focused relationship of all time is. If you are a more recent friend: It's Londo Mollari & Vir Cotto from Babylon 5.

Now, since I have a new B5 watcher in my circle and it's impossible to talk about what makes the Londo & Vir relationship so great for me, and why it hits all the right loyalty buttons, without gigantic spoilers, I shall employ a discreet cut. ( You still have your heart, and your heart is a good one. )

Another loyalty heavy relationship which pushes all the right emotional buttons for me is that between Craig!Bond and Dench!M in their three movies together, which got to me so much that it inspired me to write Bond meta, God help me: The Queen and her Knight in the Underworld. (It's not that I don't like other Bonds, and other Ms, but it had to be this particular combination for me to really feel strongly about freaking Bond movies in the way I never did before or after. There are some shared traits to Londo & Vir above - strong loyalty to each other and to something greater than them, which if push comes to shove even supercedes - but is also different, and yes, in a way that's not interchangable, gender wise, and made me realise I have a thing for "lady and loyal knight" combinations but only under very specific circumstances. Hence, for example, Lennier & Delenn not pushing those same buttons for me. Both Craig!Bond and Lennier would die for these women, but I can't see Lennier ever calling Delenn a bitch. (I can see Delenn giving the order M does at the start of Skyfall if she thought it absolutely necessary, but her instinct would be to afterwards dress it in emotional denial and/or "prophecy demanded..." type of reasoning, not saying "I did" unless massively pushed.) Or take Lennier's "Delenn sees a better world" speech to the other Minbari mid s4. Bond would never have said that. He is loyal to M - specifically this M - beyond her capacity as his superior, but he doesn't have her on that kind of pedestal, and lord knows she is very aware of all his flaws. It's their battered cynicism in combination of the loyalty that makes it so appealing to me.

Now, there are a lot of other relationships in various other fandoms where loyalty in an important factor in what I like about them - last year's concluded Farscape rewatch reminded me of Scorpius/Braca again, and certainly the "my loyalty is to Scorpius!" - "So is mine" scene from "Incubator" was what really sold Braca as a character and made him interesting to me (i.e. not that he says it, that his loyalty to Scorpius means being willing to risk Scorpius dead or crippled if that means achieving the goal Scorpius wants to achieve, which is indeed exactly the type of loyalty Scorpius wants. And having watched with some interest the first season of Wheel of Time, there's plenty of promising loyalty fodder there, especially Moraine & Lan. But so far these two above are definitely my favourites.

The other days