Fandom meme

[nineveh_uk]

This was going round a while ago and I had no time to do it. But now I will!

Give me a character and I will tell you...

* How I feel about this character
* All the people I ship romantically with this character
* My non-romantic OTP for this character
* My unpopular opinion about this character
* One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.
* Something about them I consider true, even though it's only my head canon/fanon

Comments

[clanwilliam]

Mary-Lou Trelawney!

[legionseagle]

Harriet Vane.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[nineveh_uk]

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

[nineveh_uk]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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).

[legionseagle]

It would explain why she refused marriage.

[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.

[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.

[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.