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

[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.