Tag Archive: favorite characters
Veronica Mars movie green-lighted thanks to fan donations, and a new era of filmmaking begins
Filed under: Retro Fix, TV — Leave a comment
borg.com readers may remember Veronica Mars as one of our favorite characters of all time. In its three seasons Veronica Mars became one of the best series on TV. As borg.com writer Elizabeth C. Bunce wrote, "Complex, smart, independent, and vulnerable–with a kickass cool job–characters don't come much better than Veronica Mars." More than 2 million viewers tuned in each week for its first two seasons on UPN and its last season on the CW Network between 2004 and 2007. Yesterday the biggest Kickstarter campaign ever resulted in an amazingly fast accumulation of donations–more than $2 million in 11 hours–enough to green light the Veronica Mars big-screen movie, now scheduled to film this summer for an early 2014 release.
Series creator Rob Thomas launched the project. Series star Kristen Bell has signed on as has Veronica's dad Keith, played by Enrico Colantoni, and Veronica's pals Logan (Jason Dohring), Wallace (Percy Daggs III), Weevil (Francis Capra), Mac (Tina Majorino), Dick (Ryan Hansen) and Piz (Chris Lowell), according to the Kickstarter website. Unlikely to return, unless they come back in flashbacks or as ghosts, are the ill-fated Les Miserables star Amanda Seyfried as Lilly, CW Network's Cult star Alona Tal as Meg, Jaime Ray Newman as Mindy O'Dell, or Ed Begley, Jr. as Principal O'Dell. But why not bring back Dallas star Julie Gonzalo as Parker, New Girl star Max Greenfield as Leo, Teddy Dunn as Duncan, The Anchorman's Paul Rudd as Desmond Fellows, Unstoppable's Jessy Schram as Hannah, Just Shoot Me's Laura San Giacomo as Keith's girlfriend Harmony, Spin City's Paula Marshall as Keith's other girlfriend Rebecca, The Following's Aaron Ashmore as Troy, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Charisma Carpenter as Dick's stepmom or Alyson Hannigan as Trina, or director Joss Whedon as the car rental guy or even Clerks' Kevin Smith as the creepy convenience store clerk?
Tags: Aaron Ashmore, Alona Tal, Alyson Hannigan, Amanda Seyfried, Charisma Carpenter, Chris Lowell, Chuck Kickstarter, CW Network, Dallas, Ed Begley Jr, Elizabeth C. Bunce, Enrico Colantoni, favorite characters, Firefly Kickstarter, Francis Capra, Jaime Ray Newman, Jason Dohring, Jessy Schram, Joss Whedon, Julie Gonzalo, Kevin Smith, Kickstarter, Kristen Bell, Kristen Bell Kickstarter, Laura San Giacomo, Magnum Kickstarter, Mars Kickstarter, Max Greenfield, New Girl, Paul Rudd, Paula Marshall, Percy Daggs III, Rob Thomas, Rob Thomas Kickstarter, Ryan Hansen, Teddy Dunn, Tina Majorino, Unstoppable, UPN, Veronica Mars, Veronica Mars Kickstarter, Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign
Top five characters of all time – friends
Filed under: Comics & Books, Con Culture, Fantasy Realms, Movies, Retro Fix, Sci-Fi Café, Superheroes, TV — Leave a comment
By Jason McClain (@JTorreyMcClain)
Ok, here I am looking at a list of twenty characters that I have to cut to a quarter of that for this list. I didn't even go crazy thinking about everything I've watched or read to find that one person that stood out above the rest. I just really looked at my bookshelf, which should contain most, if not all, of my favorites. But, is it everything? Do I have everything I want to own in pop culture circles? (No! I don't own Firefly or Stalag 17 or every appearance of the Legion of Substitute Super Heroes!)
That problem aside, at least I had an idea from the beginning to focus the list. When thinking of my favorite characters, I chose good friends. I chose characters that support their friends and family, though sometimes it takes a little personal growth to do so.
To help narrow down the list, I made a choice not to include any of the characters from a previous borg.com essay on characters to make it more of a challenge.*
* Side note, the list I made then had three characters not on the list I made now. I bet I could make this list every day and find five new favorites. Eliminating Sam Gamgee and Hermione Granger though, those were tough blows to a list about supportive friends.
I then eliminated childhood favorite comic book characters since I know I'll probably mine that idea for future essays just devoted to them.
That eliminated ten names. I still have to eliminate five more. Well, one actor played two parts so I'll eliminate one of his. Nine. Picking one character from Doctor Who (or from Buffy, I can't believe I forgot Buffy) seems unfair, so I have to lop them off. Eight. Ditto for Community** and The Simpsons. Six. Lastly, I have to get rid of Supes from Kingdom Come because as much as I love the friendship between him, Wonder Woman and Batman, it's not about any one of them, it's about how they approach things differently and yet work well together (eventually).
** Though I will say that I have to write a little about eliminated choice Britta Perry. She's a hippie, she mispronounces things and she can be a bit awkward (though can't they all be a bit awkward.) So, in those small ways, I can see a female me. The similarities start to fail once you realize that I don't want to sleep with Jeff Winger. Now, if there were a Jennifer Winger…
So, without further ado, here are my top five characters*** in no particular order:
*** As of January 2012. It could change by February and I may put back in some of the eliminated ones. A good list is just a product of its specific moment in time.
Frank Cross – Scrooged****
Niagara Falls. Every time I watch Scrooged I always know I'm going to cry at the end. I can just think of little Calvin Cooley tugging on Frank's sleeve and I start to get a little misty. Yes, it probably has everything to do with Bill Murray's portrayal as he makes every scoundrel he plays lovable. But, for this role, you get to see his choices that led to being a scoundrel. It's not like they are bad choices, just everyday choices that he doesn't want to admit were wrong. As a friend, well, he's not much of one until the end, but I think it was always there as a possibility. He just didn't have an outlet for it until the ghosts showed him what was out there for him like Claire, the folks he meets at the shelter, the Cooley family and last, but not least, his own family. The S.S. Minnow, James, the S.S. Minnow.
**** He was the actor with two characters, though about any of his characters would probably qualify for a part on a list. The one I eliminated was Bob Harris from Lost in Translation as temporary friends we meet when we travel can be very powerful in our memories. I almost think I should go back and include Bob. Maybe summer camp and travel friends are a separate list. It would give me a chance to go back and look at Meatballs and Wet Hot American Summer for great characters. As an additional aside, I also think that credit should be given to Charles Dickens for his original creation of Scrooge that I feel Murray was born to play.
Jaye Tyler – Wonderfalls
Jaye. Hmmm. A good friend? Maybe? Well definitely, but not intentionally, which I think may be one of the points of the show. You can do all the things that a good friend should do and still not be a good friend. On the other hand, if you think you're crazy and toys, stuffed animals and coins speak to you and you just do things to get them off your back, you can be a good friend by accident. You stop thinking of yourself and how it works for you and instead you put yourself at risk for embarrassment just long enough to do something good for someone else. The fact that it's unintentional, does it mean it is any less good?
The Sundance Kid – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
I think Sundance embodies the evolution of friendship. At the beginning of the movie, Sundance defers to Butch because Butch is the smart one coming up with plans. By the end, Sundance realizes that he's the smart one that knows Spanish and Butch is helpless and he wonders why he ever believed anything different. Still, they're friends and have been for many a year. You don't abandon something like that and at the end, as they hide, injured and desperate, Sundance has to have regrets, but I don't think that their friendship is one of them. Not going to Australia on the other hand looms large in the pantheon of regrets.
Rorschach – Watchmen
He's crazy, but there's one person that mitigates that crazy and that's Nite Owl and I think that Rorschach knows that. He's at his best when he is with Nite Owl and he goes as far as to admit it, in a way. He talks of the days that they used to patrol together as a team and he misses those days. If Butch and Sundance would have made it to Australia, I think Butch would be like Rorschach and longing for the time that they were a team. Without the tempering influence of Sundance, Butch's plans would be left unsaid, festering into crazy at their unrealized potential to make his world better in his mind. The friendship for Rorschach and Butch might be gone at that point, but it never really leaves, it just becomes a different form. You can't go back to going out night after night and fighting crime, the body and mind is not built like that. Eventually the friendship matures and you find new ways to enjoy it.
Vladimir – Waiting for Godot
This one is personal. Yes, the existentialist play is about two friends trying to pass the time and on that level it's a fantastic look at all the aspects of friendship. What elevates it to top five status for me is that I can't think of the play without thinking of my good friend Jason Vivone. We did an excerpt from it for a duet scene in high school. We saw a touring company version of it performed in Lawrence, Kansas. We performed the whole thing as adults in Kansas City. It's about friends and I will always associate it with a good friend. I've known Jason for over thirty years and no matter what, when I talk to him it's like we've seen each other every day over that time.
The reluctant friend, the unintentional friend, the friend who knows your faults and still hangs out with you, old friends that you may not ever be as close to again and the mature friendship that will never go away are all different ways to express friendship. Believe me, there are many other ways out there as well and the good characters find ways to make that universal feeling we have with our fellow humans feel fresh again. Like writing about characters and friends with the characters and great friends that contribute to borg.com. See you next time.
Next up tomorrow–Art Schmidt's favorite characters.
Tags: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, favorite characters, Frank Cross, Jaye Tyler, Rorschach, Scrooged, Sundance Kid, Vladimir, Waiting for Godot, Watchmen, Wonderfalls
My five favorite characters – protectors and defenders
Filed under: Comics & Books, Con Culture, Fantasy Realms, Movies, Retro Fix, Sci-Fi Café, Superheroes, TV — 1 Comment
By C.J. Bunce
Yesterday we started in on what makes a great character, and who and how we determine our favorites, mentioning dozens of favorites from different genres and different media. The challenge? Come up with your top 5 favorite fictional characters from anything. When I was finished selecting them, I was surprised what they all have in common: a desire to protect others and defend the good against the bad. I went through a ton of characters to whittle it down to five. Most of my favorites I see as having some trait I want for myself, or guys I want to be like. Along the way I carved away Boba Fett, the obscure but coolest of the "men with no name" anti-hero Western archetypes, and opted instead for another Star Wars character. I lost Steve McQueen's too cool cop Lieutenant Frank Bullitt for another cop that made the list and had to cut the other coolest guy (other than The Fonz), the no-named drifter from They Live. I lost Thomas Magnum, the TV show private investigator, that, along with Batman, is up there at the top of my Sherlock Holmes influenced characters. I cut big life-long heroes like the Six Million Dollar Man, Luke Skywalker, Tron, and even the awesome A.A. Milne creation Eeyore. No room for Will Riker and Captain Dathon from Star Trek. I love Dana Andrews' noir detective Mark McPherson in Otto Preminger's Laura. Fred Gailey, who defended Santa Claus (successfully!) in court in Miracle on 34th Street, hung to the list almost to the end. A top 10 list would have been far easier!
After a lot of soul searching–and this is not an easy exercise (try it for yourself!)–here is where I finally ended up.
When we first meet Uncle Ben "Obi-Wan" Kenobi, played by Sir Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars, he was an old man. A miser living out beyond the Dune Sea. Luke thought he was long dead. Then he comes out of nowhere in the desert at just the right time to barely save our story's hero. Ben doesn't remember the droids he supposedly owned a few decades ago. Is he a bit absent minded? Has the desert gotten to him? Without Uncle Ben, Luke Skywalker would be dead, and he saves Luke's life six times: first, from the Tusken Raiders in the desert, second, from an alien in the cantina's hive of scum and villainy, third, from the Empire by getting Luke out of Mos Eisley, fourth, by releasing the Millenium Falcon in the Death Star, fifth, by guiding Luke from afar to destroy the Death Star in his X-Wing Fighter, and sixth, by keeping him alive after he is mugged by a snow beast on the frozen planet of Hoth. Kenobi was part samurai warrior, part medieval wizard, part mystic, a monk, a veteran of the last battle of the Jedi. And later we'd learn he was the reason Luke and his sister survived at all: he'd saved Luke as an infant by bringing him to the remote planet with twin suns. He doesn't have much time to mentor Luke, but what he does counts for a lot. Kenobi proves nothing is more powerful than wisdom and experience. Ultimately he sacrifices everything to save the galaxy by using his knowledge of the force to convert into a spirit, the only time this ever happens in the original Star Wars trilogy, so he can assist Luke along the rest of his journey. Later on Ewan McGregor put a very nice spin on the character for the prequels, but the original played by Guinness can never be beaten and Guinness received the only acting nod from the Academy for all the great actors of the series.
DCI Gene Hunt was a cop, a cop played by actor Philip Glenister. A good cop that blurred some of the rules of British law enforcement, but who was a product of his times, which was 1973 in the BBC TV series Life on Mars, and 1982 in the series Ashes to Ashes. He is brash, rude, and mouthy. He is kind. He is crude and speaks in local colloquialisms that make non-natives have to rewind and view the closed captioning to understand what the heck he just said, and sometimes you still can't tell. He protects his team. More than anything, this guy has angst. Yet he wants to help others. He wants to do the right thing. He believes in justice. He believes that sometimes a cop has to break the rules to get to the right result. To find the criminal. To protect the innocent. He's willing to stop and help a woman having an emergency birth. He falls for a co-worker who herself is a mess and desperately lost. He tolerates his bizarre group of subordinates, as he prefers them to everyone else, and he'll join them for a drink at any time of day. And he always drives a cool car. He's like a British version of Steve McQueen's Bullitt, but with more layers and a lot more problems. He becomes so involved in everyone else's affairs that he ultimately forgets who he is. I have seen Philip Glenister in little else, and wonder whether I like Gene, or I like Gene because Glenister played him. Either way, nothing is as it seems in Manchester and Salford police departments. And that leaves Gene to rise above it all and become the best cop in the best cop series ever made.
In the western movie Silverado, at the beginning of the film, Paden is dead. At least he is left for dead, like real-life Beck Weathers in Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Paden is played by Kevin Kline. You can't start much worse off than Paden, prior to being rescued by Scott Glenn's character, Emmett. All Paden has to his name is his 1800s long underwear. He was trusting, befriended some cowboys who turned on him, stole his horse, his saddle, his hat, his ivory-handled Colt. The whole rig. But he really missed the bay horse the most. They were laughing when they left him. Thought it was real funny. He walked for a little while but there was no use, so he gave it up. Figured it was just bad luck. He lies down to die. And he gets a second chance. But he's not so much about revenge as looking out for the little dog one of his fellow riders mistreats. He's trying to find his place in the world, which just so happens to be managing the affairs of a saloon. And you never know what Paden will care about. Even if that means he must stop looking the other way. He is a hero so he must act. If that means risking his footing in a new town to defend a man against a racist saloon operator, so be it. And if that means killing the men who run Silverado and the sheriff himself, his old friend, well then so be it. Kline plays Paden as funny, serious, smart. Sometimes warm, as when he is taking care of new friends, sometimes cold, as when he has to shoot a man. Sometimes puzzling, like when he flirts with a woman the night her husband is shot dead. Sheriff Cobb is using Stella to get to Paden. "I don't want you to get hurt," Paden says. Stella responds: "He can't hurt me… if he's dead." Paden is a complex guy who changes his luck in a time when getting by was good enough.
I've read everything I could get my hands on related to Oliver Queen, aka Green Arrow, as re-developed in DC Comics' silver age, from 1971 forward. Queen was a billionaire who lost it all. He became "everyman." He ended up fighting crime as a vigilante and donned the outfit of Errol Flynn's Adventures of Robin Hood and took his bow and arrow as well to fight crime. He's a bit like Batman, a sleuth in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. He became a force for social change and fell in love with a beautiful woman, Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary, and they ended up together in Seattle running a floral shop. They were members of the Justice League and rubbed elbows with the best superheroes around. Oliver always was outspoken, sometimes offending everyone around him, yet everyone around him always respected what he had to say and they often took his lead. He always fought for the underdog. My favorite incarnation is my first revisit to comic books, Green Arrow written and drawn by Mike Grell, but O'Neil and Adams' version is a close second. In his first scene of the modern era, he must convince Green Lantern that he needs to stop protecting a slumlord and instead protect the tenants. With his on-again/off-again, fiery relationship with Dinah, he became part of the only crime-fighting superhero couple, together ridding the streets of every kind of baddie.
The only one of the five of my favorite characters listed here that never veered from my #1 spot is Captain Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce. As the leading character in the TV series M*A*S*H over the course of eleven seasons, Alan Alda became the best actor on any TV series, and soldier/doctor Pierce became my favorite character. He is defined by triage. Triage in his job as he must discriminate between who has a chance to live and who won't live. Triage is his circumstance as he must decide to make the best or worst of being stuck in a place no one, even the local Korean refugees, wants to be. His tools consist of scalpels, forceps, alcohol, and humor. He takes the most depressing of dramatic situations and makes everyone laugh, and when the brilliant writing team gives us a serious story, he leaves us silent. He gives us gut-wrenching performances, via a simple salute to Radar O'Reilly as he leaves for home to take care of the farm, to his reaction to the death of Colonel Henry Blake, to his interview responses for Movietone news. He makes us laugh at his unending supply of practical jokes, against Hot Lips, Frank, Winchester, or B.J. He is a hero, he'll save the life of a North Korean soldier without flinching, and at his worst he freaks-out, asking those questions everyone wants to ask in the middle of a war, but doesn't. Why can't we all just get along, as bunkmates, as co-workers, as Americans, as humans? And he is calm when he needs to be. Even when he is being bombed while trying to save lives after hours without rest. With more than a dose of inspiration from Groucho Marx, Alan Alda conducted a one-man band of chaos in the middle of a stellar cast of characters. It's hard to believe M*A*S*H was a 30-minute show. Never before or since has anyone come close to packing so much emotion, drama, comedy, and energy in such a small period of time, for so many years. Although the writing of his character bottomed out in the last episode, what came before is what matters, and it explains why the series finale was the most-watched show ever.
Editor's note: Tomorrow… we will take a day away from our favorite characters and Jason McClain will run down his recommendations to the Academy for the Ten Best Picture nominees, who will be announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Tuesday, January 24. Come on back Tuesday bright and early for Jason McClain's top five favorite characters, followed by Art Schmidt on Wednesday and Elizabeth C. Bunce on Thursday.
Tags: Ashes to Ashes, Beck Weathers, Ben Kenobi, Boba Fett, Bullitt, DC Comics, DCI Gene Hunt, Eeyore, favorite characters, Fred Gailey, Green Arrow, Hawkeye Pierce, Into Thin Air, Kevin Kline, Life on Mars, Luke Skywalker, MASH, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Oliver Queen, Paden, Philip Glenister, Silverado, Six Million Dollar Man, Star Wars, Thomas Magnum, Tron
Books, TV, and film — A matter of character
Filed under: Backstage Pass, Comics & Books, Con Culture, Fantasy Realms, Retro Fix, Sci-Fi Café, Superheroes, TV — Leave a comment
What makes a great character? The USA Network has used "character" as its marketing focus for the past few years, even using it to make advertising dollars by making their character of the week the Priceline Negotiator when William Shatner was guest starring as the father of Maggie Lawson's character Juliet O'Hara on the TV series Psych. In genre fiction, especially in popular sci-fi vs serious science fiction, whether it is in TV or film or books, sometimes character gets swallowed up by setting. More than anywhere else, in science fiction or fantasy or mysteries you need a good balance between character and place, but if you don't have characters that grow and change you probably have a weak story altogether.
So what makes a great character a favorite? Is it their job? Their passion? Something they did? Their reaction to their environment? Beyond what makes him or her, or it, great, what makes a character something you form a personal attachment to? How do you determine who your favorite characters are?
Maybe you're drawn to favorite archetypes. A lot of what I watch on TV and in movies are detectives to some extent or another. Is there a more long-lived and admired character than Sherlock Holmes, for example? My favorite incarnation of all the film versions is the current Sherlock series on BBC starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. This is followed second closely by Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law's Sherlock Holmes movie series. But Holmes has been injected in other incarnations, too. Batman is Holmes in a cape with crime-fighting gadgets. Hugh Laurie's Dr. Gregory House on House M.D. is Holmes as a modern genius of medicine. Psych's Shaun Spencer is Holmes as master sleuth posing as a psychic.
We like Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, and Jaime Sommers, the Bionic Woman. Why? Are they really just modern versions of Frankenstein's monster? Same for Robocop? These characters challenge what it is to be human. More than any other character in sci-fi, Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation sought out his humanity, but even he was a modern version of Pinocchio, a puppet trying to be a real boy, and Mr. Spock, who was part Vulcan, part human, had the same struggle discovering who he was. Maybe we just like them because, like the Fonz, they are just plain cool to us?
Characters all fall into the classic struggles, of one or more conflicts, of a struggle between man and himself, between man and other men, or between man and society. Is it that struggle that grabs our attention?
Popular characters get made into books, TV shows, movies, franchises. Like Batman, Superman, James Bond, Doctor Who, Jack Ryan, John McClane, Buffy Summers, Indiana Jones, Alice in Resident Evil, Lara Croft, Harry Potter, Hobbits. Other characters you might just get a glimpse of, but then you're hooked and they become your favorites for life. Like Boba Fett, Tron, Yoda, Gimli, Johnny Fever, Chewbacca, Theoden King. And your favorite characters may not be humans or even human-like. Maybe they are animals, like Benji or Lassie. Or something not exactly human or animal, like Grover from Sesame Street, or Cookie Monster, Eeyore the long-eared donkey from Winnie the Pooh, Calvin (or Hobbes!) from Calvin and Hobbes, Ferdinand the Bull, E.T., Snoopy from Peanuts, Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Foghorn Leghorn, Scooby Doo. Some characters have the classic hero role, like Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Dorothy Gale, Captain James T. Kirk, Scarlett O'Hara, Hiro Nakamura, Captain Kathryn Janeway, Ivanhoe, Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, Snow White, Eowyn, Mace Windu. Some favorite characters serve as villains, often villains we love to hate, like Darth Vader, Maleficent, Sark, the Wicked Witch of the West, Colonel Nathan Jessup, Sauron, Commander Kruge, Willie Stark, the Joker, Lex Luthor, Khan, the Terminator, The Borg. Maybe they are hard to fit into any category, like Billy Pilgrim or John Casey.
What makes a character your favorite? As opposed to the question "Who is the greatest character in any genre work?" what is your "favorite" is purely subjective. Maybe there is little great to be said about your personal favorite. Maybe your favorite is a well-meaning screw-up like Al Bundy or Homer Simpson. Maybe it's someone clueless, like Cher, Alicia Silverstone's character in the movie Clueless. Maybe it's someone who can't get a break, like George Bailey or Joan Wilder or Clear in Final Destination 1 and 2. Maybe it's someone as innocent as can be, like Buddy the Elf in the movie Elf, or purely good, like Santa Claus, or Fred Gailey, the lawyer who represented Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street. Or maybe it's people like Fred who protect and defend others, like Ben Stone or Archie Goodwin or Inigo Montoya or Jack McCoy or Thomas Magnum or Frozone or Robin Hood or Atticus Finch.
Who are our favorites? Starting tomorrow and for the next four days we'll ask the borg.com writers to reveal their top five favorites from genre fiction, from any media, books, film, TV, or anything else with characters they can come up with.
Check out the Editor's picks here.
Check out Art Schmidt's picks here.
Check out Jason McClain's picks here.
Check out Elizabeth C. Bunce's picks here.
Tags: favorite characters
A Storm of Swords – When bad things happen to favorite characters
Filed under: Comics & Books, Fantasy Realms — Leave a comment
IF YOU PLAN TO READ THIS SERIES OF NOVELS, GO NO FURTHER. SPOILERS ABOUND.
Ok, maybe not "spoilers" but just a spoiler, still, you don't want to know. It will spoil the surprise.
At some point in the last third of A Storm of Swords these exact words hit the page, "His axe took her in the back of the head." The Dog, Sandor Clegane, hits Arya Stark in the back of the head with his axe.
I immediately put down the book. Then I picked it right back up and leafed through it until I saw one simple word heading up a chapter over 100 pages away.
"ARYA."
Then, I knew I could continue reading.
I'm not sure if there has been a character that I've read about quite like Arya. George R.R. Martin creates quite a few interesting narrators, fills them with traits that make them interesting to the reader and at times makes them frustrating. I love to hear all of their sides of the story, except for maybe Cersei, but I'm sure there will be a payoff for her in A Feast for Crows . However, Arya is different. I don't know why, but she is the character that I care about most. We can see that she's scared, but we also see how she screws up her courage and presses on. Maybe it's how she treats others with honor – she's her father's daughter and before he died, Eddard was pretty damn cool. However, 11-year-old Arya is learning more about the world than he ever knew and how duplicitous it can be.
What makes a character a favorite? Think about it. Who are your favorite characters from literature, from television, from movies? Off the top of my head, let's go with Butch Cassidy, Yossarian, Sam Gamgee, Hermione Granger, Mr. Incredible, Yorick Brown, Inigo Montoya and The Dude. I'm sure you could come up with some different people. (I bet the folks of borg.com could each come up with their own list and they'd be pretty different.) Just looking at the list, it's not like there's a common quality, but follow me as I jot down what I consider to be the overriding characteristic of each character:
Butch Cassidy : Adventurous
Yossarian : Hatred of bureaucracy
Sam Gamgee : Faithful
Hermione Granger : Intelligent
Mr. Incredible : Familial love
Yorick Brown : Dreamer
Inigo Montoya : Vengeful
The Dude : Easy-going
I'm sure you could probably find different characteristics for each of them and I could agree with you. Still, I bet that even if you did come up with a different description, it would have something in common with this list.
They are traits we all aspire to have.
We want to jump off a cliff, even if the fall will probably kill us. We want to fight against stupidity in all its forms, though it is much like tilting against windmills. If our friend is going through a tough time, we want to be right there with them, giving them all the help they need. We want to be the first in our class. We want to know that deep down, no matter what obstacles we face, if our family faces danger we can rise up and face any danger. We want to chase our dreams. We want to be sure that there is justice in the world for those that are evil. We want all of that and then roll with a clear head on league night because what has happened has happened and there's nothing we can do but bowl.
I look at Arya and see someone I would aspire to be. Yes, there is danger ahead and winter is coming, but I will figure out a plan and no matter the obstacles, I will try to see it to its end. If something gets in my way, I'll adjust. I'll keep trying even as I'm scared to death.
So, you can understand why I freaked out a bit when I read those words about Arya and the axe. If she couldn't succeed, it would sadden me. Heroes die in the real world. I don't like to see them die in fiction as well.
Tags: Arya Stark, favorite characters, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, Storm of Swords