nineveh_uk | Fandom meme

From:

clanwilliam

Mary-Lou Trelawney!

From:

legionseagle

Harriet Vane.

From:

nineveh_uk

I shall try to restrain myself to a reasonable length...

How I feel about this character

I started the Wimsey books with Gaudy Night and spent the first few chapters wondering who on earth this woman was, why the book wasn’t about Peter Wimsey, when would he turn up, and what was all the backstory about. And also falling completely for Harriet, a state which has never left me.

I absolutely love Harriet, and I think she’s a brilliant character. I don’t think that she is perfect, and she isn’t always a nice person; she can be very judgemental, has a snobbish streak, and is not always a terrific judge of character.* But she has a great deal of intelligence, humour, courage, integrity, a realistic assessment of her literary output, and I find her refusal to be crushed by circumstances, or other people’s assumptions about her circumstances, wholly admirable.

I don’t see her as an author avatar – DLS’s “I want to be my character” is Peter Wimsey. Harriet Vane is what she’d have liked in a husband - someone competent and interesting who cares about making you happy.

Once again one admires Annie Wilson’s acute grasp of psychology in choosing as a victim the student that Harriet dismisses as a shop girl with a common accent despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a person being in that place at that time.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Peter Wimsey! I am not averse to a bit of Peter/Harriet/Bunter, either. She is not very susceptible to shipping otherwise (or even this-wise most of the time), on account of being judgemental and having an inferiority complex.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

I wish we knew more about the friend of the European trip. They spend a long time together, so it must have been a good friendship to still be talking at the end of it! (Or perhaps they aren’t).

I like Harriet/the Dean, the way it has transitioned from a student/teacher relationship to one of equals, and the way they evidently find one another’s company fun. I have no idea what the shirt-popping scene was actually like, but I love the idea of the two of them getting into one of those awful situations when you can’t stop laughing with a conspirator.

My unpopular opinion about this character

I have mentioned (twice!) Harriet as judgemental. This side of her personality is certainly disliked personality on the Lord Peter list, but personally, her acerbic (and private) reflections on the appalling clothes of her fellow Shrewsbury students was one of the things I really liked about her on first reading, because it is exactly the sort of thing a lot of people (including me) do, and it was funny with it.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

That there was more! I wish, wish, wish that Sayers had completed Thrones, Dominations, complete with massive post-honeymoon row mid-book.

An oddity about Harriet in canon is that we like quite a few biographical details: when did her mother die, when did her father die, what did she do to earn a living immediately after university/before she published her first book. I suppose we might have got more of this had there been further novels and it been relevant.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon

I think she was/is a more enthusiastic Bohemian than she sometimes comes across as. Five years after Strong Poison she’s still closely enough involved to be going to parties and being told all the gossip, even if she’s not in the mood for it at that point (and some of the dissatisfaction there I think comes from an increasing feeling that she should be doing more with her own work). We simply don’t see it because for all their faults, the young artists of Bohemia are a law-abiding lot when it comes to violent crime and blackmail.

I suspect that while she enjoys having her children, Peter probably does quite a lot of the emotional work with them.

Edited Date: 2014-05-28 03:24 pm (UTC)

From:

white_hart

I must get hold of a copy of Eustacia Goes To The Chalet School and write the European-trip crossover I've been mulling for years.

From:

nineveh_uk

You must! There is an absolute dearth of fic about what Harriet did in Europe, and the Chalet School and Eustacia would make a great crossover.

Have you read "Stacie at Shrewsbury"? It's unfinished, and is Stacie/Saint-George, but it's quite nicely done: http://www.sallydennylibrary.co.uk/viewstory.php?sid=180

From:

white_hart

It's a bit cruel, really, to make Harriet part of a search party which finds a girl "to all appearances dead" and clinging to a rock so soon after Wilvercombe, but it just seems to fit.

I think I read some early instalments of Stacie at Shrewsbury but then forgot to check back for more. Must rectify that.

From:

nineveh_uk

Cruel, but as Peter might have put it, what does it matter if it makes a good fic?

From:

nineveh_uk

A further "unpopular opinion" I forgot – much as I like Impey Biggs, he was a really terrible choice as the defence barrister.

From:

legionseagle

He was the right choice if you believe your client's guilty (and only as good as his instructing solicitors, of course). But I agree; because he's a sort of Norman Birkett, the judge is going to assume he's chosen for that reason.

From:

nineveh_uk

The judge's comment about his 'eloquence' is pretty damning. But I also think there's an implication (for which the solicitor may be partly to blame) that he simply doesn't understand - perhaps even can't understand, because it is so far outside his experience - where Harriet's coming from. I can't help suspecting that a less experienced man with a less well-known man, but who could bolster his arguments with appreciation of Harriet and Boyes' environment, might have been more convincing, or asked the right questions of the solicitors that got the helpful answers out of H.

Though in fairness, he does get the first undecided verdict - it isn't nothing.

From:

legionseagle

I've explained before that I think Sayers was shockingly bad about either lack of research into or blatant handwaving away of facts about legal procedure and etiquette (for example, in Strong Poison Miss Climpson blatantly breaks an oath, with no-one remarking on it at all) and one of the odd things about the first trial is that apparently no attempt is made to put forward a substantive argument about what Boyes could have done to get the arsenic into himself. It's all dependent upon them arguing that the Crown hasn't proved Harriet did it.

From:

nineveh_uk

Yes, it's not as if they don't have any alternative options. Ryland Vaughan is adamant that Boyes didn't do it himself, but it's hard to imagine that he would come across well in the witness box. He's so obviously vindictive towards Harriet, and he's spoken openly about being able to supply Boyes with poison, that it oughtn't to be impossible to make him appear at best totally unreliable and just trying to get at H, with an added suggestion that he might well have done it himself.

From:

legionseagle

I can see why Sir Impey might not have run that line of defence, but portraying Vaughan as a jealous and unreliable bloke with a crush on Boyes you could see from space who might have done in Boyes in an "If I can't have him he's nobody's" sort of move would have been my approach.

From:

nineveh_uk

It would at least cast a bit more doubt in the jury's mind than eloquent pleading seems to have done. Could there have been concern that by saying "these are the sorts of people Boyes hung about with" that the jury's opinion of Harriet would have been blackened further (except that she obviously didn't hang out with Vaughan herself).

From:

legionseagle

It would explain why she refused marriage.

From:

nineveh_uk

How I feel about this character

The Mary-Lou we meet in Three Go to the Chalet School is a delight, and one of my favourite EBD characters. She’s fun, independent, a little odd due to her odd upbringing (like the other Two), friendly, and generally a nice girl. It is a pity that the brain transplant that had to be carried out after her Accident was such a poor match. The other explanation for late Mary-Lou is that she is in fact a vampire, bitten by Mr Carey who picked up vampirism in the Amazon jungle. I once read a fic in which she had a disastrous time at Oxford because she related to everyone as the Chalet School had let her, and of course no-one stood it.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

While I never really see Len/Reg as portrayed in The Chalet Girls Grow Up, it’s certainly fair to say that they deserve each other. I would enjoy a fic in which she has an affair with Indiana Jones – in that case her bumptiousness would meet an entertaining target.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

I like her early friendship with Clem Barrass. It’s a pity that her same-age friends were a colourless bunch like Vi Lucy (Verity doesn’t start as such but becomes so) and so we don’t see this sort of relationship in which she is fun continue.

My unpopular opinion about this character

I suppose really not liking her later incarnation is unpopular to those who have a more reverent approach to the spirit of EBD than I do.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon

Someone told her where to go. That is, Joey and Miss Annesley and co. managed a rather better balance of encouraging natural leadership abilities in a pupil that didn’t also involve letting her do as she liked all the time and then punishing anyone who did something similar.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon

That she really does suffer in her early years from not having her father around to balance her mother and Gran’s rather different approaches to child-rearing, and that Trelawny pere (who is obviously an officer and a gentleman) might have made a better job of helping her to channel her energies effectively.

From:

clanwilliam

I also wonder how much she suffers from Gran's death.

It's Gran and Clem who rein in the worst of Mary-Lou's excesses, really, when you look at the earlier interactions.

I remain appalled by the actions of the Chalet School and Jo in Mary-Lou of the Chalet School, where she is returning, having just lost Gran, and is promptly made dormy prefect, form prefect, and has Jessica dumped on her too. It's like as soon as Gran died they rushed to encourage those exact tendencies that Gran was very good at disencouraging.

From:

nineveh_uk

Good point on the timing of that. I haven't re-read those early Switzerland books in a while, but a lot of important things happens in them. Gran certainly exerts a certain kind of squashing that's important - it isn't oppressive or denigrating of genuine talents, but it puts a damper on self-importance and leadership-through-bullying/control rather than leadership-through-influence.

From:

legionseagle

Also, Ilya Kuriakin.

From:

nineveh_uk

Alas, I have only seen a couple of episodes of MFU, and read a small amount of fanfic. I like what I've seen of him so far, however!

From:

antisoppist

Ekaterin

From:

nineveh_uk

How I feel about this character
Komarr was the first Vorkosigan book I read, or the first after Shards of Honor (I can’t remember) – anyway, I liked Ekaterin a lot. In many ways she’s a fairly conventional person, one who lives comfortably within the system except for the problematic detail of her husband. Had the man Ekaterin married aged 20 been a better person, I can see her being perfectly comfortable in her Vor spouse lifestyle. But then there’s Tien, a man with no redeeming features whatsoever, who doesn’t even get to claim his genuine love for his son as a good thing, because that is outweighed by his putting his own vanity ahead of Nikki’s health. That Tien drives a person like Ekaterin to leave him is the ultimate condemnation. I sound rather grudging in my liking for Ekaterin here, which isn’t fair. It isn’t as if I have abandoned all my home comforts to devote myself to [studying polar bears]. Ekaterin is a nice, fairly ordinary person, who thrust into extraordinary circumstances, reacts well, first by deciding to leave Tien (which really is her rebellion), and secondly in her confrontation with the Komarr rebels. Though the latter doesn’t make her more extraordinary – it is, as she herself says, what is expected of someone of her class.

I wish that Ekaterin had got her Have His Carcase story. It would make me like her marriage with Miles more.

All the people I ship romantically with this character
Miles, I suppose. That is, it is the canon ship, and it sort of works. It just disappoints me rather.

Someone needs to write a fic in which Ekaterin doesn’t marry Miles, stays at university, and marries (because in a few years’ time I can see her actively wanting to marry again) an academic of her own age who is competent to appreciate her professional talents and encourages her career, which includes terraforming the Vorkosigan district. Basically, I want a Barrayar campus novel.

My non-romantic OTP for this character
Ekaterin/plants ;-) Actually, I really like her relationship with Aunt Vorthys. It’s one of relatively few relationships between women that we see depicted in detail in the series, and it’s interesting that it seems to be much more open than her relationship with her parents, even when she was younger – perhaps because Aunt Vorthys, by virtue of her profession and her living in Vorbarr Sultana*has a more cosmopolitan outlook on life.

*Is anyone able to take that name seriously?

My unpopular opinion about this character
I see two possibilities in Ekaterin’s marriage to Miles. The first is that they live happily ever after together, but that it reinforces those tendencies that both possess towards a certain conservatism. The second is that it does Ekaterin a lot of good in providing her with a place to develop, the children she has longed for, and access to a world and opportunities she’s never had before – and that after ten years or so she leaves him.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
As above – a book in which we saw Ekaterin come into her own before marrying Miles, rather than ultimately ending up with him rather earlier than she’d wanted a relationship with anybody.

Her actually appearing on the page again in a significant role other than cheering up Miles between awkward diplomatic moments, but doing the cool stuff off-screen. How about giving her a significant role in a Sergyar book, where Miles has had to stay on Barrayar for an investigation/Council of Counts business, and Ekaterin has gone off to consult, or just learn as a student, on something about terraforming, and she stumbles over [a dead body on a rock].

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
She would probably get on quite well with Harriet Vane. She hasn’t got a fantastic education, but I can see them being annoyed about a lot of the same things, and she seems like she would be an interesting person to talk to, once she stopped being self-effacing all the time. Unfortunately, Harriet and Ekaterin wouldn’t talk to each other at the point it would be most useful, because then they aren’t talking openly to anyone.

From:

castiron

Amanda Fitton.

From:

wellinghall.livejournal.com

Charles Parker

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

How I feel about this character
I am rather fond of him. He certainly has his faults – Unnatural Death, Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and Strong Poison form a sequence in which he is prejudiced by one young woman, makes bad mistakes based on prejudice about another couple, and ultimately (hopefully!) learns from that – but he is sincerely fond of Peter , and of Mary, and I like the passage in Whose Body about trying to do his job well and the social value of it. He’s quite serious, but not without a sense of humour. He also seems to deal pretty well with negotiating relationships with the Wimseys that his background hasn’t prepared him for and despite the insecurities we see in the first half of the series.

All the people I ship romantically with this character
Mary. I like Charles and Mary as a pairing, and they seem to be good for each other. Even though they need a bit of help to get past the stalemate of “I can’t ask her/him”, the hiccup in the first place comes from their respect for one another (albeit in Charles’ case with a bit of class consciousness in the mix).

I can also see a one-sided, probably unacknowledged even by himself, Charles/Peter, with Peter having a sort of dubious glamour for the boy from Barrow-in-Furness. Charles, however, is clearly not Peter’s type on any front whatsoever.

My non-romantic OTP for this character
Charles/Peter as friendship. Also Charles/Police. It can come across as stodgy at times, but I like his genuine sense of social duty, and I think it serves as an example to Peter in taking what he does seriously.

My unpopular opinion about this character
Are their popular opinions about Charles ;-) I think his marriage to Mary would improve him. Yes, they are a conventional couple in many ways, but his main hang-up seems to be about independent and sexually-active women, and as a woman who is undoubtedly independent and sexually-active before marriage, Mary might give him another perspective!

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
I’m sorry that we don’t get so much of him after Harriet arrives on the scene. I’d like to see a case of Peter’s that starts as non-police, and that Peter has to call the police in on because it needs a different kind of approach. MMA does this a bit, but it is more two cases coming together than Peter handing his on.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
He didn’t see active service in the war. We don’t get his age precisely, but perhaps a year or two younger than Peter and older than Mary seems to work. That would mean that by 1914 he had joined the police, and I can see him as a serious and religious young man being told by an older superior that the police too have a duty in way on the home front, and that to rush to join up for personal reasons or vanity would be weak rather than brave. Later, he might have some military police involvement (there’s space in WB for him to have been in France at some point with Peter), and he probably gets shipped down to Scotland Yard in the course of the war, but he never actually joins the army.

From:

wellinghall.livejournal.com

Thank you! :-)

From:

elmey.livejournal.com

Bunter!

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

How I feel about this character
Bunter is great, and the series wouldn’t be the same without him. The perfect servant, but also witty, clever and good-looking, he’s a total fantasy as much as Peter; the person who would run our lives so smoothly we wouldn’t notice it happening unless we wanted to, Jeeves with our own interests at heart rather than his own. But if, like Peter, he starts out as a fantasy, like Peter he rapidly becomes more so. One of the main things I like about Whose Body is the large amount of Bunter in it. Peter’s nightmare scene doesn’t just humanise him, it humanises Bunter in his stripy pyjamas with ruffled hair and his “Bloody little fool!” over Peter’s bed.

If I were fantasy casting a TV series, I would have him played by an early forties Colin Firth. Whoever plays Peter, Bunter needs to be taller and better-looking.

All the people I ship romantically with this character
Not Hope Fanshaw. It isn’t that I couldn’t like Hope as a character, it is that she is so obviously introduced by Paton-Walsh to tie off what she feels is the awkward loose end of Bunter’s emotional relationship with Peter. Hope as a character independent of Bunter, even Hope as Bunter’s LT girlfriend, I might buy (there’s no way that he’s been living a celibate life for the past 20 years!), but not Hope who comes along and gets Bunter safely into a heterosexual relationship and out of the house. For someone who so evidently dislikes Helen, it’s striking home much Paton-Walsh thinks the same way as her here ;-)

Anyway, Bunter/Peter/Harriet is obviously a much better way of sorting out those little challenges of married life.

I am quite fond of Bunter/Saint-George, which is less of a crack pairing than it ought to be, once you consider that SG looks like a younger, hotter, version of his uncle with the huge benefit of not being Bunter’s employer, and Bunter is part of the mature sophisticated (in his mind) life that Peter has that SG would like access to. I suspect it’s mostly/entirely sex, though, and probably a bad idea even then. I really must get back to that fic…

My non-romantic OTP for this character
Peter/Bunter. They’re obviously tremendously fond of one another and important to each other throughout the series, with a deep sense of loyalty and trust. We know that Bunter has risked his life for Peter a couple of times, and in Ali Baba, daft as it is, he’s one of the few people that know the truth – as well as being actively involved in, and thus at risk from, Peter’s investigation if he is found out. I hope that he gets the flat in Peter’s real will, too. He certainly pays him a lot - £200 a year in 1922 is more than Peter earns in MMA a decade later, and Bunter gets his board and lodging as well. It’s certainly enough that by the time of Gaudy Night he could have saved enough to go off and set himself up in business or something if he didn’t want to be a servant any more.

As for whether there’s a romantic ship involved, I certainly think there’s a good argument for reading elements of the text as supporting unrequited BunterPeter, particularly Busman’s Honeymoon, and readers of my LJ know that I will often do so. However it’s hard to see that much good could come of it for either of them if it went anywhere, and it’s impossible for Bunter to try anything. I’m not sure whether Peter knows, but tactfully gives no sign, or is genuinely oblivious in a Jack Aubrey sort of way.

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

I went over the character limit!

Pt 2.

My unpopular opinion about this character
I want dark!Bunter fics! Given his powerful personality, high intelligence, and the level of influence he exercises over Peter’s life in the early days after the war in particular, dark!Bunter has a tremendous amount of potential. Though it might be argued that dark!Bunter already exists in the form of Jeeves.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
I love the very few bits of narrative from his perspective, and I wish there were more. I like his rather sardonic take on Harriet, but also the way that his letter to Peter in HHC is so expertly crafted (unlike Parker’s) as something that (a) Peter can show to her and is partially directed to her, and (b) actively tries to present Peter to her in a human light. Bunter has spotted, even if Peter hasn’t, the inferiority complex that needs countering with a display of Peter’s weaknesses, and he merrily lays them out. In fact, there aren’t nearly enough letters from Bunter to Peter. The one in Whose Body is also a masterwork.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
Harriet’s post-trial recovery would have gone a lot better had she met Bunter at a Bohemian photography party and had a one-night stand with him.

Edited Date: 2014-05-29 08:18 pm (UTC)

From:

tree_and_leaf

it might be argued that dark!Bunter already exists in the form of Jeeves.

I saw a post on fandomsecrets the other day where the OP was berating themselves for shallowness for not shipping Jeeves/ Wooster because they didn't fancy Stephen Fry. My reaction was along the lines of "Well, yes, that is a bit shallow, when the main reason not to ship them is that it would be as creepy as hell...."

Harriet’s post-trial recovery would have gone a lot better had she met Bunter at a Bohemian photography party and had a one-night stand with him.

It would, though it might have made things rather awkward later on!

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

Indeed. I love the Jeeves novels, and the TV series is great, but No, No, No as far as shipping goes. It's abuse of power whichever way round you look at it!

it might have made things rather awkward later on

"Dear Peter, I have a case to put to you, but before I do so I think it is only fair to tell you that I have slept with your valet."

From:

alitheapipkin.livejournal.com

Apparently I am curious as to your views on Sirius Black today...

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

I really must re-read the Harry Potter books. Especially given the WIP.

How I feel about this character
First of all, I have to remember to separate my Black family headcanon from FictionAlley Park days, with Sirius Black the canon character. Actually, that probably says a lot about him – I read Sirius Black as a member of his family and I can’t separate him from that, as indeed neither could he. He’s informed by them, his life is one long reaction against them, and he never gets away from that. In that sense, he really is the mirror image of Snape, an embittered man who can’t escape from a loathing of his own background, and never manages to move beyond that (though in fairness he might have done better had he not spent a decade in Azkaban).

All the people I ship romantically with this character
It is difficult to see Sirius as an ideal romantic partner ;-) Still, I have a certain sympathy for the good ship HMS Wolfstar. I’ve never really gone for James/Sirius, I see James much more as the idealised brother/family that Sirius never had.

My non-romantic OTP for this character
See above re. James. I think that Sirius could probably under other circumstances been a good family for Harry, but circumstances weren’t other.

My unpopular opinion about this character
He is the classic lady who protests too much. His dislike for his family’s values is sincere and not without courage, but his rejection never gets beyond revolted and appalled that would stop him behaving like them but at other targets. He might well (see above) have done so had it not been for Azkaban, but by his early twenties he either hasn’t, or regresses.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
I really would have liked some canon – possibly historic – Remus/Sirius. Or, something that wasn’t going to happen in a Harry-centred series, more about his relationship with Andromeda and her family.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
He is far more like Bellatrix than he would ever admit (not just physical resemblance, though that’s explicit in the canon). They were very close as young cousins, despite the age difference, with a connection as fellow eldest-siblings. It starts to go wrong when Sirius goes to Hogwarts, is sorted into Gryffindor, and falls hard for the magic James Potter. He also has no tact whatsoever, something that seldom goes down well with an older teenage girl. A rather odd connection is that both of them are appalled by Andromeda’s marriage for relations that relate less to the facts of the case than to their own sexuality and emotional life.

From:

alitheapipkin.livejournal.com

Fascinating insights :) The only HP fanfic I've read much of is Moonie's Remus/Sirius stuff so it's totally head canon for me. I agree about James & Sirius too.

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

I think I might be in the mood for some nostalgic re-visiting of HP fandom.

From:

executrix.livejournal.com

Fanny Price

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

How I feel about this character
Poor Fanny Price, winner of the “Least Favourite Jane Austen Heroine” award for 150 years running. I read MP first aged 20 as part of my degree course and loathed it, but then I was really not in the mood for anything of the period that term and it annoyed me that OF COURSE we’d get the least fun Austen to read. I read it again some years later and found out that it is in fact really, really funny as long as you can jettison the bizarre idea that Fanny Price is meant to represent some Austenian ideal of womanhood.

*pause for laughter*

One of the pleasures of reading MP in without this perspective is thinking what Fanny might mean in other ways. I’ve had some great conversations about her. A friend believes that she is Austen deliberately setting out to write a heroine who is good by contemporary standards and showing the horror that results if you actually succeed in bringing up a girl like that. Personally, I see her as a typically flawed Austen heroine, the flaw in this case being a sterile virtue, that keeps itself clean, but is powerless to influence others – the comparison being with her sister Susan, untaught and messy, but who can change people for the better in a way that Fanny doesn’t.

All the people I ship romantically with this character
I find it impossible to ship anyone with Fanny. But for her sake I am glad she doesn’t marry Henry (not that it would have done him any good, either) and Edward is similarly dull and deserves her.

My non-romantic OTP for this character
Fanny and the Rules of Righteous Conduct? They are, inevitably, childfree.

My unpopular opinion about this character
See above! Fanny isn’t good! At least, she is good, but it doesn’t make her happy, it doesn’t set an example, and it doesn’t make anyone else happy. A better person would have joined in with the Am Dram, but exerted positive influence and got them to do a much less dangerous play.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
I do feel sorry for little Fanny, away from her home and unable to cope with Mansfield Park. Despite above complaints about her not being a better person, perhaps she would have been one had she been happier. I suppose it is technically possible that she becomes one, but since she and Edmund have the multiple livings, the signs are not good.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
I don’t think that I have any Fanny headcanon. I shall have to make some up. OK, because Fanny does try to be good, she genuinely feels sorry for Maria, and writes regularly to her in her Exile. Naturally, Maria never answers, but Fanny assumes that this is because she is too insignificant for it to matter, and she continues to write anyway. Maria, while blaming Fanny for her own Misfortune, nonetheless comes to depend a great deal on her letters and news from Mansfield – well you would, living with Mrs Norris.

From:

executrix.livejournal.com

Thanks!
Personally, I like Fanny (although I would like to read Mary Crawford's further adventures as written by someone who is not constrained by contemporary norms of propriety). I don't think it's her job to make all those big Losers around her into better people.

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

It's not her job to make them better, but she seems to me kind of the opposite of the people on tombstones that are all about "Despite her quiet life spent mostly having twenty children, everyone who knew her was influenced by her excellent character and way of life". She makes the things she stands for unattractive - the opposite of Mary Crawford with her dubious glamour.

From:

executrix.livejournal.com

"She lives for other people--you can always tell the other people by their haunted look"?

From:

eglantine-br.livejournal.com

Horatio Hornblower or Sam Vimes

From: (Anonymous)

Con Maynard (I'm rereading the Chalet school series :))

From:

nineveh-uk.livejournal.com

How I feel about this character
Of the whole Maynard – and extended Bettany – family, Con is the one I like best. She might be pigeonholed as dreamy, moony Con, but she’s far and away the most normal and down to earth in many respects. I hope she gets away and founds her own life. Now it occurs to me that I might see her as a reflection of one of the Exclusive Brethren girls at school – sort of going along on an even keel, but not achieving nor really being encouraged to achieve her potential.

All the people I ship romantically with this character
No-one in the books at all, none of them, ever, ever, ever, definitely not a doctor, definitely not a Richardson boy. She can take her pick from the rest of the planet, but not someone on the Platz, please!

My non-romantic OTP for this character
Con/stories! Also, Con/hair gel.

My unpopular opinion about this character
She ought to have been head girl ;-) OK, maybe not. But she is done a serious disservice by the categorisation of her sisters as the responsible one and the naughty one, leaving Con in arguably the worst place of all as the boring one in the middle. She can never be as good as Len nor as bad as Margot, but that doesn’t let her be herself, either. I feel rather sorry for her.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
She doesn’t marry a doctor. I can make no greater prayer. Also that she finds literary success that is different from her mother’s, and that she isn’t always known as “Josephine M. Bettany’s daughter, you know”.

Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon
She is a great deal more intelligent than her school or family give her credit for, surprises them all in public exams, and unlike Len (who gets a Second) gets a First at university. Obviously Con is known to be bright, given that she’s in a form a long way above her age, but I don’t get the impression that she is considered very intelligent so much as a well taught and reasonably clever person who applies herself (why on earth is she told that she’s rubbish at maths, as opposed to a very strong average for her age??). I’d like to see her in a different intellectual environment, meeting its challenges.