I have always felt a deep, emotional connection towards characters I admire and idolise. When I was a kid, suffering from nightmares on a near regular basis, I learnt to fall asleep imagining I was someone else, somewhere else. At the time, it was always Peter Pan in Neverland. As I grew up it became the Doctor, somewhere fantastic. Sherlock Holmes, in his rooms in Baker Street, Sirius Black in the Gryffindor tower.
Recently it became Bones on the Enterprise, trying to catch some sleep between shifts.
I used to play games in school, before I moved to my current forced home habitat, where I was
always the Doctor in my group, or Freddie from Scooby-Doo (we were probably eight years old, and I stand by that Freddie is the best in the gang, I loved him). I kept up my role as the Time Lord when me and my best mate used to play in the quarries near my house just a few years ago. We created entire worlds for our versions of these characters, entire plots.
The point of this nostalgia is that being my heroes has forever been a passion of mine. It's why I love dressing up, why I never turn down an opportunity to write stories about them when it is offered to me. A couple of weeks ago I got involved with a bit of verbal sparring with my friend Ivan because he can do a passable Bones accent, coming from the same state, and it was one of the best spent hours I can remember
not including all my time with Moony obvisly.
As well as that, I feel like the characters deserve this level of commitment. You can ask anyone, I'm incredibly invested in minor characters as well as the main heroes. Colin Creevey and Oliver Wood from Harry Potter being prime examples. I feel like they don't get enough attention but there's so much about them that can be explored. What's Colin's home life like? Is his dad the kind of muggle that is just as excited and baffled by the wizarding world as he is, or is he mostly confused by it? Did he buy Colin that old camera or has he always been interested in photography? And where's his mum? Other than Dennis, does he have siblings that might also have magical blood and what side did that blood come from? And what the hell is Dennis really like? Okay, maybe that's more than anyone has ever really wondered about him, but it matters to me because there seems to be so much there to learn.
To some people, characters are just there to find attractive or to watch without any real investment. But to me, the only time I'll ever feel satisfied with my emotions towards a character is when I can
be them. Until I know them like I know myself.
It is because of this that I write as them, dress up as them, impersonate them, why we got the Star Trek video game so that we could be Jim and Spock fighting of the Gorn and saving the galaxy. And even though we completed it yesterday,
we're going to play it again.
I guess the reason I'm writing this isn't to go on about my childhood, or to give you all a better insight as to the kind of person I am, because I hope that comes across with all my posts, given that I try my best to be as honest and personal as I can.
It's because some characters deserve more recognition. Some people need to better understand just how complex characters can be in well-written narratives.
This started because of a conversation I had with Ivan today, regarding our personal portrayals and thoughts towards Leonard "Bones" McCoy and Mr Spock. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing this, but it pretty much sums up what I have been trying to say this whole time. And is one of the reasons he means so much to me.
'The characters mean a lot to me. I get attached. We sit in my head and share secrets and life stories. I like to learn them as intimately as I would any real person, because they deserve to be portrayed as the round, full, complex characters they are. They're supposed to be people, after all, and people are so much more than what you can show of them in a show or a movie.'
While I'm here, this seems like a nice place to mention that
this lovely guy has a blog where he's willing to write with anyone that's interested in trying it out. He's a lovely person, honestly.
It's like what my parents used to say, something that never really got away from me. They told me that I could have been an A* student, could have got into Oxford and Cambridge, if I hadn't let my obsessions rule me. But the thing is that I've never let my concentration on my studies really slip, and school just got more difficult. It's a common problem, that sixth form is always more difficult than kids expect, and we don't heed the warnings we are given. But I need the characters I love to keep me going. The amount of times I've used the incentive that 'this is what they would do', or 'what would they do' as a way to motivate me, to convince me that I'm doing the right thing. I sometimes wonder where I'd be without them.
Some people need to fall in love with characters, and to become them in order to better understand themselves. I'm just one of those people.
