... Or maybe not.
WARNING - this is appallingly about *me*, so feel free to switch off now.
But I did get to think some more about what it is that *makes* me more interested in the characters, as well as the odd things I seem to burble about on the lists (apart from My Darlings). Things like "how did they manage to miss the Treasure room for four months?" "How do Zen's food processors work?" (you will notice I don't give a damn about the guns or bracelets, but the food and who does the sewing? Oh yes ...) And anyone who's read my little Christmas story in Star Four may have noticed my fascination for the minutinae of these people putting together the bits and pieces of a ancient festival ...
I am fascinated by just that story of detail. As I've mentioned, I'm a history student, and will read just about anything in that line (I am still trying to explain the $140 book on Jacobean funerals to my family :-)) whether it be on labour relations in Interwar Europe, the rise of fascism, the history of women's rights, the Lives of the Queens of England ... you name it. But none of those can hold the sheer enthralled fascination that an old box of 1940s knitting patterns, cut out from magazines, that I spent a 6 hour train journey absorbing one time (and I don't knit). I read old cookery books *for fun*. I wouldn't know one end of a modern tractor from another, but I'll go to a field day to study the decrepit 1920s hand tools.
Does this all make sense? I like delving right into other people's everyday lives, the things they do and own and take for granted, and I do tend to carry this over into my character junkie-ism. There's far more to it than just this (as anyone who sat through my part in the Star One discussions knows) but I really am more interested in whether Avon might have made the computers deliver decent coffee - and if the wardrobe room carried fresh undies and what on earth they did if it *didn't* - and what Our Heroes talked about over the dinner room table - than the underlying philosophy of the people who made the series, or the significance in modern terms of their pre-suppositions built into the series. It;s not that the latter *isn't* interesting, it's just that the former is *fascinating* (even if we don't have many clues to go on mutter grumble).
So *of course* I'm a character person. How can I help it?
And yet I don't like soap operas. Go figure.
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