[Discussion] Flawed canon and "bad" characters

[anenko.livejournal.com]

Who are your favourite "guilty pleasure" female characters? The ones who aren't good examples of what can be done with female characters, but who you deeply love anyway?

Have you spent hours creating backstory for a female character whose sole purpose in canon is to provide eyecandy for fanboys? Do you feel wildly passionate about a woman from a badly written, sexist series? Is your OTC a woman who died in the first episode of a new series, before the opening credits even began to roll?

Comments

[acaciaonnastik.livejournal.com]

I am a huge fan of Diana Villiers, from Patrick O'Brian's novels. It's not quite as bad as what you describe, but she is the Other Woman, the Faithless Hussy, over whom the central pair of guy buddies nearly come to blows. She'll occasionally get a bit of sympathy, but mainly she exists to give Stephen Maturin even more excuses to angst, she blows hot and cold over him as plot and author's whim require, and she's only doing "good" when she abandons her own goals in favor of his emotional well-being. Ultimately, she gets a bridge dropped on her (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DroppedABridgeOnHim) when she crashes a carriage and dies, despite how wonderful a driver she'd always been before.

And I love her to pieces. I love the way she doesn't immediately go mushy over her Designated Love Interest. I love the way she knows what society expects of her but would rather just run around India in her silk trousers and shoot things. While having as much casual sex as she can get away with.

[gelliaclodiana]

I adore Diana! I have little sympathy for people who do not adore Diana, really.

I have this whole rant about O'Brian and his attitude toward her; what I suspect is that she's a character who got away from him, so he killed her.

[acaciaonnastik.livejournal.com]

Yay! Another fan! I used to write pages-long essays in her defense on this forum I went to. I was going to do a fanmix for her for this, but I lack sufficient applicable songs.

I think that's pretty much spot-on. He did have that nasty habit of assessing the value of women solely on the basis of their treatment of their men- even docile chaste Sophie comes in for that. I was always a bit puzzled by the way the sympathy level sharply dropped... I can't help but wonder if POB had a bit of Creator Breakdown around that point? I recall he also killed Bonden, who was never anything but puppy-dog loyal...

[gelliaclodiana]

I suspect that all the things I really love about Diana -- her complete resistance to commitment, the way she's all about pleasing herself and completely ignores every social expectation for as long as she can -- were things that O'Brian did not mean for me to love. (I also find it interesting that apparently in his real life O'Brian was something of a bolter -- IIRC he abandoned his family at one point -- but that's the behavior he puts onto Diana. Which I know is crawling with bad biographical interpretation, but it's hard to resist.)

I do suspect that he ran out of things to do with Diana -- after 21 books and the long year! -- because he couldn't let Stephen be happy with her. Which just seems odd to me, because it did seem to me that both characters had reached a point where that made sense for them.