It is quite obvious which fandom I'll be going for here: the amazing
Heroes has just started its second season run in Malaysia(months after it finished airing in the states,making the Internet a very dangerous place for anti-spoilers folk like me). In any case,this is a little meme I found on a random LiveJournal blog(I told you I practically live there these days) and it seemed like a fun little piece to tackle. Most importantly I'd get to play around with
PICTURES! And it satisfies self-indulgent bloggers(is there any other kind?) to yammer on about stuff they like regardless of whether anyone else is interested. If you're reading this you had better be freaking
interested, that's all I'm saying.
1. The first character I fell in love with.
Peter Petrelli. It's hard not to,when he's indulging in all these dramatic poses on top of high rise buildings in New York, and having cool clairvoyant dream sequences, and being all emo-ish and "It's
my turn too bee
somebodee now,
Nay-
than!" Seriously though. Peter,in my opinion,is impossible to dislike. Look past his initial tendency to be just a tad whiny,and you'll love the guy for his tenderness and his sensitivity and his genuine compassion for others, and his gentleness and empathy and utter selflessness. To be willing to die for the sake of a complete stranger,only knowing that it simply must be done,is either saintliness or pure stupidity. Either way, you'll find yourself going "Aww..!" at him,and wanting to throw your arms round him to shield him from the big bad ugly world that will taint all that is pure about him and shatter his childlike,touching faith in humanity.
Or maybe that's just me.
Also,it doesn't hurt that Milo Ventimiglia happens to be excessively pretty.
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now.
Noah Bennet.Not my fault,since for the best half of the season he was being portrayed as the shady-not-so-evil-dude but still a dude-with-bad-intentions-dude.And we didn't even know his name until the last episode! Actually,he was being positively mean to everybody,including his own daughter. All those shady business trips he took, plus his knack of turning up in places he shouldn't be turning up at, and not to mention some pseudo-villainney dialogue, hardly worked in his favour. He made horn-rimmed glasses the most sinister thing in the world,next to ticking clocks. However as the season wore on,we began to see how misrepresented Mr.Bennet was (camera angles and scary music really make the villain,you know).
But Mr.Bennet,despite having no powers to speak of,apart from those of a very good psychologist, is one of the real heroes of the show. The ordinary man who will willingly take a bullet and allow his memory to be wiped for the sake of his daughter's safety ain't no villain in my eyes.
3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t.I'm not too sure about this one. I do not particularly dislike anyone on this show,to be honest. There is a level of moral ambiguity that avoids characters from ever being labelled totally evil or purely good. So any dislike I may have for a character is based entirely on how much they piss me off at any given time. And based on that I say I dislike Niki/Jessica Sanders.
She's not bad or anything. It's just that I'm so blah about her. She could get her head ripped off and not get a bat of an eyelash from me. I can't understand why there are people out there in Heroes fandom that do like her. To me she's a character who is just there to fill up holes in the plot. Who's gonna sleep with Nathan Petrelli? Hmm...oh! No problem,we'll just make Niki/Jessica do it.
She scared the hell out of me at the beginning,actually. To look in the mirror and see a reflection that isn't you,to black out for hours and wake up with bludgeoned corpses in your garage with blood on
your hands... You're either insane, or that's how your power works,or both.
4. The character I love that everyone else hates:I love Sylar.
But who doesn't really?It's the Quinto factor. You're supposed to hate the guy,or at the very least, dislike him.
But he's the
villain. That makes him mucho
cool. He gets all the cool villain dialogue. He gets to cut people's heads open and steal their powers.He sometimes gets to wear really cool black trench coats. He has revealing conversations with the good guys and they never know who he is. When you think he's
gotta be dead this time, he always comes back to life. Such is the coolness of Gabriel "Sylar" Grey. The coolest part is that he used to be super nerdy(but hot) watchmaker. Now he's a super evil(but still hot) super villain. Plus the fact that he's completely screwed up mentally,thanks to his demanding mother, who somehow warped his abilities to think and function like a normal human. So his madness has a great deal to do with his mother messing up during his crucial formative years in childhood and adolescence, and yet,at the end, you have to blame him for the choices he made. He actually tried redeeming himself towards the end,Sylar did. But he was always doomed to succumb to his insanity. A poor,misguided,psychopathic(but hot) bad guy.
Me likey.
Very muchy.
5. The character I would shag anytime.
Peter,but he's a very honourable good boy.He would never shag inappropriately. Sure,he screwed Simone Deveaux without much of a second thought,but that was diffferent. He was genuinely in love with her (*pukes*) and had been for a very long time. I suppose the next best option would be
West Rosen,who is also very pretty,thanks to Nicholas D'Agosto's genetic endowments(biology really counts on this show). But if he starts spewing his alien/robot philosophy at me, he's g-o-n-e, gone.
6. The character I'd want to be like.I have never really thought about this one. It's much more comfortable just watching them die and get hurt and stuff. The coolest power to have,in my opinion,is Hiro Nakamura's teleportation and time travel thingie. It would make my life a heck of a lot more interesting. I wouldn't even need a bloody passport.
Claire Bennet's ability(rapid cellular regeneration) would also be cool,meaning that I would be effectively immortal. But who wants to live forever,really?
7. The character I'd slap.
Also depends on
who pisses me off the most at any given time. I have felt like slapping virtually every single character at least once in the course of 24 episodes. Peter,for running away from help and being full of way too much angst and emo, and Nathan, for being such a politician, and at the moment Claire,for being such a hormonal wreck,with her talk of wanting to be "who i truly am". The entire Petrelli family,basically.
But to be fair, they really are a very good-looking family.
8. A pairing that I love.
I'm not too interested in romantic pairings within the show. The entire plot is far too fascinating and complicated to be wasted on who-is-crushing-on-who-subplots. Heroes isn't a bleeding soap opera,you know. Romantically speaking though, I did get the warm fuzzies for the brief but disgustingly adorable relationship between
Hiro and Charlie.
They had the cuteness factor going full speed,like there was no tomorrow.
Unfortunately Charlie got her head sliced open by You-Know-Who.
That was the end of
that.
9. A pairing that I despise(d).
That of
Peter Petrelli and Simone Deveaux. I
hated Simone. She had everything going for her,and she had to be a wreck all the time. Plus she had to go sleep with Peter.
My pure,innocent Peter. I wouldn't actually have minded her so much,but she was so fickle! She kept going between two men, breaking both their hearts and abandoning one or the other at 10 minute intervals and then acting the victim. Then she had to let poor Isaac(who honestly loved her madly) shoot her dead,and that screwed him up even more(drugs and psychic paintings included). But that was one of my favourite episodes. When Simone got a bullet right through her. It felt good.
I detest this scene from the bottom of my soul.
10. Favorite character(s).*
Noah Bennet
*Sylar
*Angela Petrelli
Those three are so mentally screwed up,they are liars and manipulators and top class thespians. They deal in secrets 99% percent of the time. They do the sickest things,but then you remember that their love for the family is what motivates them at least part of the time. It is impossible to hate them for being evil, and equally impossible to love them for being good. They are,quite simply,a caricature of humanity.
Moral ambiguity rocks.
11. What are your favorite things about your fandom?I love the plot,simply. That it is original and so unlike anything else on television today( you could say the same about MTV's Super Sweet Sixteen,but bear with me,yeah?). That it has the power to keep me hooked and watching every episode,something no show has done since way back in the days of the X-files (still the best show ever).
Also that the writers do not insult the viewers' intelligence. The storylines get so complicated sometimes, you fear that something
must surely go wrong,and you actually sit down and sketch a rough plot to see where the mistakes were made,but then you get a headache and go watch Spongebob Squarepants instead. At least you don't have to think too hard about why starfish feel the need to wear shorts.
And it may sometimes be reminiscent of The X-men crossed with Days Of Our Lives,or something, and the science behind the show is usually far from accurate(but pretty accurate) and the dialogue gets cheesier than cheese,and the pseudo-philosophic monologues may grate("Sometimes questions are more powerful than answers. How is this happening? What are they? Why them and not others? Why now? What does it all mean?". You're not making
sense! You're
not making sense!!) but what it never fails to do is to tug at ye olde heartstrings, jerk a few tears, rip out your soul,tear it into little pieces, make you all emo and angsty for a couple of hours, and feel all tender and deeply connected to the rest of the human race( until the next time your neighbours start setting off fireworks for Chinese New Year's).
12. What are your least favorite things about your fandom?
I refuse to answer this. Refer to question 11.
13. What is your deep, dark fandom secret?
Until this very day, the first thing I say when I see a cockroach is "
Sylar!" and then I make my mother kill it and then we discuss the representative symbolism of a cockroach in terms of Sylar's failure to ever die, and Mohinder Suresh's theory of God being a cockroach due to its being the most highly evolved species on the planet,even ahead of humans.
Also sometimes I daydream about Milo Ventimiglia being topless.
There.
Done!
*beams*
This wasn't exactly taggage,but I'm going to tag a few people anyway.
Grace
Hannah
I.Mastermind(kikistrike?)
and anybody else reading this,of course.
Just do what I did,pick a fandom,any fandom,and have fun with it! It can be anything you're a fan of, anything off TV,a movie franchise,a book,quite literally anything you want. I'm sure you people are going to come up with stuff more entertaining and kick ass than mine,so I look forward to that!
In the meantime, I plan to finally get my copy of Brokeback Mountain from my aunt,and actually watch it after all these months.
Rest in peace, Mr.Ledger.
