Round Robin: Heroic Toys

It's Round Robin time again, and this week we're doing "Favorite Toy" as the topic. Hey! That's one of mine! Now, what did I have in mind when I first suggested it? I've no idea. I do, however, have some toys to show you. After photographing some of them, I realized that several were hero-related. So that's my hook for this entry: heroic toys.

My sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor's.

From my Picasa album Round Robin Photo Challenges

First off, here's my actual current favorite toy. I've had it for a year or so, and it's still on my desk, in case I should need at at any moment. The "real" one on Doctor Who can unlock doors, light candles, repair barbed wire, increase the power of various devices and do lots of other marvelous but unlikely things. But what does mine do?

The sonic screwdriver in action!

Taa-dah! It lights up! It makes two different, entirely canonical noises! Also, there's a UV pen nib buried under the tip at one end. This can be used to write messages on the second toy that comes with it, the psychic paper. The latter is a piece of white plastic in a leather wallet, a replica of the Doctor's all purpose flimflam for showing people invitations, fake ID or whatever else he wants them to see. Shine the sonic on the message you wrote, and the writing appears, much like the messages the Doctor occasionally receives on his psychic paper. Hooray!

As much as I go on about Doctor Who and its heroic title character, the Doctor, one might think he's my only fictional hero. Au contraire! There's also Sam Beckett, and Sherlock Holmes, and Zorro. Zorro? Si! El Zorro! And here he is!

The bold renegade, El Zorro!

Now, I do like George Hamilton's Zorro, The Gay Blade, but for me the definitive Zorro will always be Guy Williams from the 1957-1959 Disney tv series (plus a few stories on The Wonderful World of Color through 1961). Guy's Diego de la Vega and black-masked alter ego add up to one great character: clever, brave and principled. I love the way Diego can think and talk his way out of almost any situation, even as Zorro does all the swashbuckling stuff. I have had my toy Zorro with me at work through my jobs with First Magnus and Beaudry, a reminder of the value of ethics, cleverness, and having the courage to fight for what you believe in. I haven't had occasion to battle injustice as an accountant, but I'd like to think that my little plastic hero would stand with me, encouraging me to do the right thing.

Zorro and his horse Tornado.

The last of my toy heroes is the only fast food premium to have a place on my desk. I expect you'll recognize him:

Snoopy, still writing about that dark and stormy night.

I have a few things in common with Snoopy. I live in my head a lot, not so much becoming a flying ace and other heroic figures as imagining the lives of heroes and writing down some of their adventures. (I actually need to do much more of this.) And like Snoopy, I have unsold novels, with a daunting number of rejections but a need to keep trying.

Now let's go see everyone else's favorite toys!

Linking List:

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted!
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Connie - Posted!
Far Side of Fifty Photos
http://farsideoffiftyphotos.blogspot.com/

Marina - Posted!
Milepebbles
http://milepebbles.blogspot.com

Em Dy
Captured Beat
http://intentiontotreat.blogspot.com

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Suzanne R - Posted!
SuzyQ421's Photo Blog
http://suzyq421sphotoblog.blogspot.com

Marie - Posted!
Photographs & Memories
http://photographsmemoriestoo.blogspot.com/2008/12/round-robin-challenge-favorite-toy-this.html

Linda **Welcome new member!** - Posted! 12/28
Mommy's Treasures
http://www.mommystreasures.blogspot.com/

Sherrie - Posted!
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com/

Molly - Posted!
Return of the White Robin
http://returnofthewhiterobin.blogspot.com/

Gattina - Posted!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com/

Terri - Posted!
Ways I See the World
http://teelgeephotos.blogspot.com/

Valerie
Rosemary's Other Baby
http://rosemarysotherbaby.blogspot.com

And remember, you're welcome to join in, too, even if you're a day or two late. See the Round Robin Photo Challenges blog for details!

Karen

The Major Malfunction Theory of Character Development

"What is your childhood trauma?"
- Cordelia to Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Well, this weekend has gone by in a blink. I've been editing and shopping, watching Doctor Who, tweaking articles on Wikipedia, and reading John Scalzi's books. It's more than enough to fill a weekend, I suppose, but it doesn't seem like it.

I've started in on The Last Colony, having finished reading The Ghost Brigades last night. I'm going to wait until I finish reading the Old Man's War trilogy before writing about it in any detail (if I do it at all), but I do have a few thoughts about the protagonists of the first two books, as they relate to other characters I've read or written about.

Old Man's War is narrated by John Perry, an eminently likable example of the class of heroes I like to call "the smartest man in the room." (Somehow I haven't seen many female renditions of this character type.) Perry is the kind of guy who can improvise a solution to nearly any problem, and figure out hidden truths that elude others. This puts him in the same class as the Doctor, Don Diego de la Vega, Sherlock Holmes and Gregory House, among many others. But whereas the Doctor, Holmes and House are clearly seen as extraordinary people, Perry has a large dollop of Everyman mixed in. He's smart and funny and capable, but overall he's just the high end of the Bell curve labeled "average Joe" - as average as you can be as a 75-year-old green-skinned supersoldier.

I can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, having John Perry exist on the fringes of ordinary, with neither extraordinary abilities or extraordinary character flaws. Let's look at the other "smartest guy" characters I named above. Holmes is a drug addict, at least marginally, is apparently incapable of romance, and doesn't get on all that well with other people. House is extremely rude and manipulative, torturing friends and colleagues for the intellectual pleasure of proving himself right about them. The Doctor is an alien who both admires humans and distances himself from them, sometimes failing to understand something as basic as a companion's feelings toward him. Of the lot, Diego is the most like Perry; he's universally acknowledged as clever, but not considered all that amazing. It's a front, though, because at night Diego puts on his black suit and mask, and rides off as Zorro. Perry is a hero, too, but he is eventually acknowledged as such under his own name.

Now, there is no reason why heroes should all be cast from the same mold. Even the ones I name above come from different heroic traditions despite this one similarity. But one thing nearly every hero seems to have is one or more character flaws, or at least major problems to work through. Holmes and his modern-day counterpart, House, are not nice people. The Doctor has any number of faults, depending on which Doctor it is, and the underlying problem of being a rootless wanderer who can never have a single companion to share his life for the long haul, because they will age and die and he will not. Diego drives people crazy with his apparent frivolousness and lack of heroics, and cannot be himself, either with or without the mask.

And if I can jump to my own characters for a moment, they are pretty much all flawed or damaged in some way. Rani can't accept his tengrem side, which keeps him from being the person he wants to be. Carli is impulsive, and falls in love with the wrong woman. Cathma lacks tact. Darsuma is arrogant and dogmatic. Fayubi is deceptive and silly. Li is insecure and corruptible. Wil is too pragmatic, Talber too secretive. By the end of Mages, all of them have suffered, and been changed substantially by their experiences.

But John Perry doesn't seem to have any major faults or traumas. Yes, he misses his dead wife, loses friends in combat and lobs jokes at people who don't always appreciate them, plus he works for a morally questionable military force. But none of this seems to phase him very much, and as faults go, joking around isn't much of anything. He has a character arc, but it's a subtle one; green skin aside, he doesn't change all that much.

There's a type of character called a Mary Sue, male equivalent Gary Sue or Marty Stu. There's more to the concept than this, but basically a Mary Sue is an idealized character, the smartest, most beautiful, most competent person in the room, utterly without flaws but usually misunderstood and put upon. A Mary Sue is an author's fantasy stand-in, an impossibly good version of the author herself. The term comes from fan fiction, where Mary Sues are common, but is sometimes applied to professional fiction as well.

Is John Perry a Marty Stu? I don't think so, but he's not all that far off from it. His Everyman quality mitigates against it; one can't be high-end ordinary (within the context of an extraordinary milieu) and too-perfect at the same time. And really, I much prefer likable characters over the mean and miserable ones, so I like John Perry a lot. But I do hope he has more serious issues to deal with as a character in the third book - faults to confront, and serious personal problems to overcome.

The second book, The Ghost Brigades, is about an entirely different character, who does have the damaged quality I'm looking for. Jared has a major malfunction, as do Homes and House and the rest: there is a large part of himself he doesn't know about, which affects both the way people treat him and the difficult decisions he has to make once his hidden second personality starts to manifest. It's good stuff, once it gets going, the only problem being that it takes abut 75 pages for the character to show up on the page in person.

And yet I missed John Perry while reading The Ghost Brigades, which mentions Perry only in passing. I'm glad he's back to front and center in The Last Colony. Maybe that's what matters about a character: not whether he is flawed or damaged, or what heroic traditions apply, but whether you want to read his adventures.

Karen