December Meme: Favorite Female Characters
Dec. 6th, 2013 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quarter_to_fiveI am loving this meme. If anyone wants to hear me ramble about anything else, drop me a note. The second half of the month is pretty weedy. Anyhoo:
Favorite Female Characters
I capped it at 3, both because I started running out of time, and because, while there's many, many female characters out there I love and celebrate and think are awesome and want to win at everything forever...these are some of the ones I find really fundamentally compelling. They're not necessarily all that awesome, or badass, or even strong all the time, but they're tangled and knotty and human, and I'm all over that.
Mellie, Scandal - I simply cannot look away from her. She's brilliant, vicious, magnificently bitchy, furious, ambitious, self-destructive, disciplined, passionate, desperate, lonely and basically a horrible person, but that does nothing to make her a whit less sympathetic. I love her. A woman who embodies all the hypocricies and the lies about what women are supposed to be, who chafes under them until she's raw but ties her own knots all the tighter, because this is what she set out to do and she will never, ever, surrender.
The moment I really fell for her? When she's ranting, gloriously, about everything she's sacrificed for him - her ambitions, her career, her home...she had his children for him. It's not so much that I loved her for being a mother who admitted she perhaps never particularly wanted children, it's that she never particularly wanted children and she had them anyway. For him, for his career, for his ambitions, so they could look right on the campaign trail. How amazingly insane is that? Who does that? How much do you have to want it, to tie your life together like that for someone? What have you been taught, what do you believe about what you can do yourself, not as someone's wife that you will turn every single aspect of yourself over to a man's political ambition, that you would make that ambition the core of your being?
And yet. She's not a doormat. She's not a victim of her praxis. She lies and cheats and steals and fumes her way through life. Sometimes she's all soulless, loveless political ambition, looking at her husband's long-term mistress with sneering contempt when she isn't good enough at being his mistress, and then she's this vast, dangerous operatic storm of a person, begging him to at least pretend to love her. At least in public. She'll do the rest.
Amy Farrah Fowler, The Big Bang Theory - Amy makes me really, really acutely uncomfortable, but in a good way. Assuming there is a good way. (I have kind of zero tolerance for sentimentality, so I take sitcoms really seriously and have a blast.)
She's a stunningly vulnerable person, and she's a stunningly vulnerable character. She's not pretty. She wears garish clothes and clumpy shoes. She's not nice and she never catches a break. She's confident, rude, weird, condescending, inappropriate, really, really smart...and apparently the loneliest person on earth. I love all the contradictions of her, how they add up. How she dives into friendship and romance and sociability like an elephant into a china shop. She just has this ridiculous, raw courage, I think, where she'll stand up and just say I think I want this now. Be my friends, be my lover.
At the same time, that gives her such vast capacity to be hurt, and the show doesn't shy away from it. Watching her play with femininity like it's a new toy she's taken out of the box and suffering for it, is uncomfortable and subversive. Watching her fixate her affection on someone who is probably incapable of ever returning it is heartbreaking. Watching her managing to wrest bits of dignity and intimacy out of the molasses-slow wreckage of it all is sometimes kind of sublime.
Laura Holt, Remington Steele - Ok, Laura is badass, and awesome, and strong all the time. And she has an excellent collection of hats. She is, first and foremost, just cleverer and braver and by and large better at almost anything than almost anyone else, and it appears to be driving her crazy.
She's a brilliant detective and she has this almost absurd physical courage - she regularly jumps in front of moving cars, drives like a maniac, gets into fights, breaks into houses, climbs fire escapes in heels - whatever needs doing. The show makes no particular fuss about it, it's just the way she is.
Laura is after...everything. Some perfection of life - career and romance and glamour and ambition. She'll be a beautiful woman celebrated for her brains, with a man who's perfectly masculine and perfectly supportive on her arm, all at the same time. She is going to solve every question ever raised by feminism single-handedly, before lunch, while wearing heels. If she needs to will it into existence, than that's what she will do. She spends the whole show running up hard against the fact that it isn't perfect. That other people aren't perfect. That they will go their own way and do their own thing, and that they will love her in their way, with their own quirks and their own caveats.
Favorite Female Characters
I capped it at 3, both because I started running out of time, and because, while there's many, many female characters out there I love and celebrate and think are awesome and want to win at everything forever...these are some of the ones I find really fundamentally compelling. They're not necessarily all that awesome, or badass, or even strong all the time, but they're tangled and knotty and human, and I'm all over that.
Mellie, Scandal - I simply cannot look away from her. She's brilliant, vicious, magnificently bitchy, furious, ambitious, self-destructive, disciplined, passionate, desperate, lonely and basically a horrible person, but that does nothing to make her a whit less sympathetic. I love her. A woman who embodies all the hypocricies and the lies about what women are supposed to be, who chafes under them until she's raw but ties her own knots all the tighter, because this is what she set out to do and she will never, ever, surrender.
The moment I really fell for her? When she's ranting, gloriously, about everything she's sacrificed for him - her ambitions, her career, her home...she had his children for him. It's not so much that I loved her for being a mother who admitted she perhaps never particularly wanted children, it's that she never particularly wanted children and she had them anyway. For him, for his career, for his ambitions, so they could look right on the campaign trail. How amazingly insane is that? Who does that? How much do you have to want it, to tie your life together like that for someone? What have you been taught, what do you believe about what you can do yourself, not as someone's wife that you will turn every single aspect of yourself over to a man's political ambition, that you would make that ambition the core of your being?
And yet. She's not a doormat. She's not a victim of her praxis. She lies and cheats and steals and fumes her way through life. Sometimes she's all soulless, loveless political ambition, looking at her husband's long-term mistress with sneering contempt when she isn't good enough at being his mistress, and then she's this vast, dangerous operatic storm of a person, begging him to at least pretend to love her. At least in public. She'll do the rest.
Amy Farrah Fowler, The Big Bang Theory - Amy makes me really, really acutely uncomfortable, but in a good way. Assuming there is a good way. (I have kind of zero tolerance for sentimentality, so I take sitcoms really seriously and have a blast.)
She's a stunningly vulnerable person, and she's a stunningly vulnerable character. She's not pretty. She wears garish clothes and clumpy shoes. She's not nice and she never catches a break. She's confident, rude, weird, condescending, inappropriate, really, really smart...and apparently the loneliest person on earth. I love all the contradictions of her, how they add up. How she dives into friendship and romance and sociability like an elephant into a china shop. She just has this ridiculous, raw courage, I think, where she'll stand up and just say I think I want this now. Be my friends, be my lover.
At the same time, that gives her such vast capacity to be hurt, and the show doesn't shy away from it. Watching her play with femininity like it's a new toy she's taken out of the box and suffering for it, is uncomfortable and subversive. Watching her fixate her affection on someone who is probably incapable of ever returning it is heartbreaking. Watching her managing to wrest bits of dignity and intimacy out of the molasses-slow wreckage of it all is sometimes kind of sublime.
Laura Holt, Remington Steele - Ok, Laura is badass, and awesome, and strong all the time. And she has an excellent collection of hats. She is, first and foremost, just cleverer and braver and by and large better at almost anything than almost anyone else, and it appears to be driving her crazy.
She's a brilliant detective and she has this almost absurd physical courage - she regularly jumps in front of moving cars, drives like a maniac, gets into fights, breaks into houses, climbs fire escapes in heels - whatever needs doing. The show makes no particular fuss about it, it's just the way she is.
Laura is after...everything. Some perfection of life - career and romance and glamour and ambition. She'll be a beautiful woman celebrated for her brains, with a man who's perfectly masculine and perfectly supportive on her arm, all at the same time. She is going to solve every question ever raised by feminism single-handedly, before lunch, while wearing heels. If she needs to will it into existence, than that's what she will do. She spends the whole show running up hard against the fact that it isn't perfect. That other people aren't perfect. That they will go their own way and do their own thing, and that they will love her in their way, with their own quirks and their own caveats.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-06 11:45 pm (UTC)Also I agree on the meme, I love the questions people are asking me to answer and rambling is fun.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-09 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-08 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-09 12:15 pm (UTC)I can't seem to find any good clips on youtube, but some good soul made a supercut of Steele talking to Laura, which seems apropos for the meme...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ONpGNAydmg
no subject
Date: 2013-12-09 12:45 pm (UTC)Aww. ♥ Well, there's a feeling I know only too well! I can't promise anything, though - stuff like Hulu is pretty much inaccessible to me at the moment and buying DVDs is something I need to stop doing. Still, who knows? I shall keep an eye out for it...
no subject
Date: 2013-12-09 01:46 pm (UTC)Watching this show and finding no one to talk to about it was what drove me back to fandom after years of pretty much just using the internet to talk politics :-) It's just so...it makes you need to stand up on a chair and point and yell "Look! Can you see it! Can you see it too? Look at what it's doing!"