Meme!

[grundyscribbling]

As seen at sulien

Give me a fandom and I will tell you

1. the character I least understand
2. interactions I enjoyed the most
3. the character who scares me the most
4. the character who is mostly like me
5. hottest looks character
6. one thing I dislike about my fave character
7. one thing I like about my hated character
8. a quote or scene that haunts me
9. a character I wish died but didn’t
10. my ship that never sailed

Comments

[sulien]

Star Trek. :)

[grundyscribbling]

All of it, or would you like me to narrow it to one series in particular? (Original/TNG/DS9/Voyager/reboot movies?)

[sulien]

Your choice. Go with your favorite, or the first series you watched regularly, perhaps?

[grundyscribbling]

First series I watched regularly was TNG.

1. Troi. How on earth does she function, dealing with everyone else's emotions on top of her own? (As many people as are on that ship, how is she not stark raving mad?)
2. I started to say Worf and Data, and then realized Q. Q and anyone. It doesn't even matter who.
3. Lore.
4. Probably Geordi.
5. Picard. (Never quite got the appeal of Riker. And Worf's forehead ridges weird me out.)
6. Worf, chill out with the 'good day to die' thing. It'll happen eventually, no need to hurry.
7. I didn't really hate any characters, so I'll go with 'most disliked'. Pulaski was a pretty good doctor, even if her manner rubbed me the wrong way.
8. There's quite a few. I may need to rewatch the whole series to pick just one... Let's go with the episode "Measure of a Man". There was a lot of good stuff in that one.
9. Barclay.
10. Picard/Crusher

[sulien]

It's good to hear that I'm not the only one who wondered about Deanna Troi. Talk about building up mental shielding, that had to have been difficult, considering her half-human biology.

The Measure of a Man was definitely one of the best episodes of the entire franchise. Gene Roddenberry and the many great writers who worked for him came up with some significant and truly affecting stories, but Darmok is my favorite.

[grundyscribbling]

The whole 'half-human' part confuses me too. I get species that are not too far away from each other on the same planet/evolutionary tree being able to produce viable offspring, but two species on totally different planets that developed from completely different evolutionary trees? How does that work at all? How are their brain structures even remotely compatible? (Or any other major body systems? Do Betazoids just happen to have near identical circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems to humans?)

[sulien]

They sort of explained that in the great archaeological chase episode The Chase, in which the galaxy was seeded with life by an an ancient species. There's an interesting time loop type crossover of that episode with Stargate SG-1 around somewhere.

[dawn_felagund]

Silmarillion (or Tolkien in general ... whichever you prefer :)

[grundyscribbling]

1. Thingol. Seriously, pretty much everything that went wrong in Doriath was down to Thingol making really bad decisions. And it's not like there wasn't someone right at hand to give him good advice...

2. Elrond and Maglor/Maedhros. Actually, Elrond in general. Admittedly, it may help that we get a lot more actual dialogue for him than we do for others, but he manages to be chill about an awful lot that most people would NOT be calm about. Foster dad has a Silmaril addiction? Elrond doesn't hate him. Wizards running around with ideas like 'hey, do you mind putting up these rowdy dwarves before I send them off to fight a dragon?' and 'I left the One Ring with a halfling who has no clue'? Elrond takes it in stride.

3. Sauron. Morgoth may be malicious as hell, but he wasn't much of a planner. Sauron, on the other hand, did long-term planning.

4. Eärwen. "Ya'll go do whatever crazy thing you want to do. I'm going to go take a walk on the beach and stay out of trouble."

5. Maedhros. I mean, elves are good looking by default, so Nerdanel has to have named him Maitimo for a reason...

6. Ok, so this is in no way his fault or within his control, but I do not like that Elrond gets such an awful deal. His parents leave him. His foster parents leave him. Most of his relatives end up dead, including his twin brother who chose to die. He's Middle Earth's greatest healer but can't help his own wife - she has to sail without him. Somehow he still finds the strength/masochism to foster the children of Isildur's line throughout the Third Age. His own daughter decides to marry one of them and accept mortality. How is he not curled up in a whimpering ball of misery by the time he gets to Mithlond??

7. Honestly, I tried really hard but I can't think of anything about Turin I like. I get that it wasn't his fault. But I still can't stand him. Moody little emo brat. Wait, he made his band of outlaws behave a little bit better. I like that.

8. "They came at unawares in the middle of winter, and fought with Dior in the Thousand Caves; and so befell the second slaying of Elf by Elf." (If you don't believe this understated sentence is haunting, consider that the man who wrote it was in WWI and saw trench warfare.)

Although if we're going to include Lord of the Rings, the departure of the Fellowship when Elrond is insistent that there is no oath or bond on anyone accompanying the Ringbearer to go further than they will is also pretty haunting.

9. Like I told sulien, this is not really a problem the Silmarillion fandom has. Pretty much the only ones still standing by the end are Elrond, Galadriel, and the elves who never left Aman in the first place. I feel like there should be a special variant of this question for the Silmarillion/Tolkien fandom: who do you wish died sooner? (In which case, toss-up between Fëanor and Hurin. Both in a 'let's minimize the damage' way. Actually, no, strike that. Someone stick a sword through Turin. Mim, maybe.)

10. Caranthir/Haleth

[dawn_felagund]

I love this! (I'm using one of my favorite hot!Nelyo icons made for me by rhapsody probably more than a decade ago now, just for you! :D) I agree with all of them. Except #4, I'd be right in the thick of things, probably making elaborately painted protest signs and convincing Feanor he wanted me to build a website for the cause. And #10, the ship did sail for a me a few times because I had a friend in my early fandom years who shipped them, so I wrote them a few times as gifts for her.

Re: Thingol ... when I started my research on historical bias, I really came to see how many passes Thingol is given by the narrator. Turin too. But Celegorm belches or Maeglin takes too long before getting a tissue and suddenly the downfall of Middle-earth is on their shoulders.

[grundyscribbling]

Nice, I like the icon! :)

#4 is an honest answer. I spent my teenage years generally being the voice of reason. ("What?? No, that doesn't sound like a great idea, it sounds like an idea that ends with all of us in the ER!") As such, I couldn't see myself joining the 'leave Aman' movement.

In fanon, I am still sailing the good ship Caranthir/Haleth, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. In canon, yeah, that probably wasn't what Tolkien meant when he said Caranthir was married. (Then again, he didn't say it wasn't, either...)

Thingol must have been amazing in bed is all I can say, because I don't understand Melian sticking around otherwise. It's like he fell out of the bad decision tree and hit nearly every branch possible on the way down.

I've got thoughts about Maeglin (I'm writing some Maeglin as part of my Buffy/Tolkien crossover verse) and are they ever not pretty. I mean if nothing else, you would think Maeglin should get more sympathy on account of his youth. He was only 190 when he died, which is what, 25 in elf years? And in his short life, he lost both parents, his grandfather, and an uncle, not to mention people under his command at the Nirnaeth. His life was a mess, and that's before he was taken to Angband and apparently persuaded to betray everyone he knew. Because it makes total sense that Morgoth wouldn't have double crossed him and killed both him and Idril anyway... (Not that this is one of my pet peeves or anything.)

[sulien]

Thank you! I never could figure out how on earth Tolkien saw Turin as a great hero worthy of being the savior of the world in the final battle! Was he a tragic figure pushed to his limits? Absolutely. Did he bring a pretty good share of the problems down on his own head? Yepper, he sure did.

Also, I love your answer to #4. Good way to be!

[grundyscribbling]

Exactly - Turin made a lot of his own problems. And while he got a pretty tragic fate, I don't think he deserves the 'kill Morgoth' hit more than others who also suffered and did little/nothing to bring it on themselves!

#4 is the most real answer I could come up with. I mean, it's all well and good to claim you'd be Galadriel or Finrod or someone else heroic, but I just can't see myself leaving Aman in the first place, even before Alqualondë.