Fannish Friday: we were so close! (feat. ironic icon use)

[lirazel]

I was thinking earlier this week about Bones from ST: TOS and how close he comes to being a favorite character of mine. I think DeForest Kelley is great in the role, and I like a curmudgeon!

But omg, I hate how he's constantly space!racist to Spock, who is, always, my number one priority! Why??? did the writers do this??? It keeps me from loving Bones completely and it also keeps me from OT3-ing him with Spock and Kirk. I can imagine a world in which Bones is still gruff and grumpy and skeptical but not a bigot against Vulcans, and in that world, I would adore him! In that world, that OT3 would be one of my all-time ships! But we, alas, do not live in that world!

I'm also thinking of Becky Chambers, whose worldbuilding I find so very, very fun and who is a very good writer who actually writes alien main character! I feel like, on paper, she is a writer who I should absolutely adore, and yet her books are lacking something to make me love her. I told Jessica it was because they're lacking the messiness of real life, and I do think that's part of it, though there's something else I can't quite put my finger on.

So tell me about your near-misses. Is there something out there--a character, a show, a book, a ship, whatever--that you could have loved wholeheartedly if just one small thing had been done differently?

Comments

[sawthefaeriequeen]

Honestly? Noah apparently getting erased from the gang's minds in The Raven Cycle is what's keeping me from trying out the Dreamer Trilogy. It won't be canon if I don't read further! Lalala!

But yeah, I love the series in its flawed glory except for that. Memory erasure is one of my most disliked tropes.

[ruuger]

Interestingly, my issue with Becky Chambers is kinda the same as your issue with Bones. There are elements to her worldbuilding & characterization that felt to me super toxic/disturbing, but which she clearly had meant to be neutral or even positive.

And I have soo many near misses. In general, if something is recced to me as "just like [thing that I love]" it's usually a miss, because often the thing that is similar is not the thing that made that canon interesting to me.

The most recent near-miss is probably Andor, which I should have loved (and expected to love), but which I think I would have liked better if it had been a true ensemble show with Andor just one of the many people working for the rebellion instead of making him a nexus.

[evewithanapple]

That one thing in Crooked Kingdom. You know the one. Of course, I think it's a manifestation of these books/the author's larger issues around fantasy nationalism and militarism (war has good guys and bad guys! The good guys are cool and groovy and sex positive and the bad guys are boring prudes! If you're scared of magic users who can kill you with their brains, that's racism!) so it probably would've surfaced some other way, but ehhhhhh.

[chestnut_pod]

Well, this "one small thing" is "the entire medium in which it was presented," but Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, which was delightful in every single respect except for the fact that I am congenitally incapable of keeping up with television shows.

[sophia_sol]

you're so good at asking interesting questions for these posts!

I think it's pretty rare for me for there to be just one small thing that keeps me from loving something; if it's just that one thing then I'm pretty good at just pretending it doesn't exist :P like with the issue with Bones you discuss above! yes his anti-Vulcan bigotry is an issue, and I just kind of mentally erase it, most of the time. it's only when there are too many issues, or the one issue is major or central, that it becomes too much to simply not accept the things I don't like in my personal canon.