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Fictional Crushes

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Paul Whybrow

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I finished reading Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage last night, in which a benign witch called Tilda Vasara makes a timely appearance. She casts a spell of invisibility that cloaks two child protagonists, and the baby they're protecting, meaning their pursuers can't see them. Tilda only sticks around for four pages, but her presence influenced my dreaming.

Trapped in a tedious dream about filing and form filling, undoubtedly caused by sending off four queries to fussy literary agents that evening, I was thrilled to see the witch from His Dark Materials trilogy, Serafina Pekkala fly into view. She appeared as played by actress Eva Green in the film adaptation, which was a bonus, but stayed for only a moment, saying "It'll soon be over," before zooming off on her broomstick. I presume she was referring to querying, which I should finish tonight.

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It was nice to see one of my fictional crushes, and over breakfast it made me think about which other fictional female characters I fancy.

Lisbeth Salander, from the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson is a wildly unconventional anti-hero, a mix of vulnerability and sociopathy. Not an easy person to be around, she might well scare the living daylights out of me!

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Lastly and less frighteningly, is Bathsheba Everdene from Thomas Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd. She's passionate and spirited and beguiling. Her determined independence is attractive—not just to me—I've known several recently-divorced women who chose her as a role model.

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As for my man crush, it'd be Aragorn, from The Lord Of The Rings, as played by Viggo Mortensen in the films. He'd better be gentle with me! :rolleyes:

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In my own writing, my crush would be for a character called Alice from a novella called Is It Her?, who only appears in retrospect, mainly through the memories of her husband who accompanied her to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland for an assisted suicide to end her suffering from cancer. She also makes herself felt through a loving and practical email she'd time-delayed to be delivered a month into her husband's widowhood.

How about you?

Who's your crush?

If they've appeared in a film adaptation, were they well cast?

 
Apart from Heathcliff, seems a bit too wild for my tastes, (Emily Bronte) I could have a fling with all of the Bronte's and Jane Austen’s male protagonists, especially, Mr Darcy. And to think I watched the TV series (Pride & Prejudice) perched on a desk in a convent, every Sunday evening- The only time I remember watching TV at the novitiate. Strangely enough I’m not too keen on any of Shakespeare’s male protagonists, no, not even Hamlet, who is my favourite in absolute and I certainly wouldn’t look twice at that infantile jerk of Bertram whom Helen sets out to capture- frankly I just couldn’t figure out what she saw in him! (All’s Well…) I guess with Shakespeare, it is the language that grabs me, not the men!

Maybe it's because male writers don't somehow do justice to their male protagonists, but there are some horrid specimens from Henry James, E.M.Forster- (apart from Aziz the lovely Indian doctor), Dickens fares better and I must admit D.H. Lawrence does quite a good job, though I think his female protagonists excel above their male counterparts, but with him it's the relationship that sets the beat- if the relationship is strong both MCs are strong and vice-versa irrespective whether they are male or female- and that is quite hard to achieve, I think.
 
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