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Role Models
Dec. 19th, 2013 10:32 amVia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asakiyume: What characters in fiction or elsewhere have been role models for you? Do you continue to collect new ones?
I have a collection, but probably the biggest one is Sara Crewe. I first read A Little Princess when I was fifteen, and I still remember having this epiphany - that kindness and strength are not necessarily antithetical qualities, because Sara’s kindness (and her imagination) are the source of her strength. They give her something to live for beyond survival: they give her the strength to remain Sara despite Miss Minchin’s sustained effort to break her down.
I’m not sure how I managed to miss this message in my earlier reading, including the Protector of the Small quartet, Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil, and the collected works of Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I suppose sometimes we just don’t hear things until we’re ready to.
Kel and Elana are also in my pantheon of role models. I don’t know that I would pick any of Snyder’s characters as role models, per se… I would have loved to be exactly like Libby from Libby on Wednesday, but I didn’t think it would make me better in a moral sense.
I think it’s partly a matter of character design - Snyder’s characters tend to be relatable rather than aspirational (not that these are mutually exclusive) - and partly a matter of the kind of stories they’re in. Snyder’s heroines don’t have trials as severe as Sara, Kel, and Elana do: I couldn’t point at a moment for any of them and say, “If this happens to me, I hope I can respond with that much grace.”
(In that vein, I also have a real-life heroine: Sophie Scholl, a German university student in 1943 who, with her brother and some friends, wrote a series of anti-Nazi pamphlets, simply because they couldn’t stand to be silent anymore. They were discovered and executed.)
And I do continue to collect new heroines, even though they don’t roll in at quite the rate that they used to. I think the most recent is Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket.
***
However, these are all good role models. I also have a collection of terrible role models, who I still adored and still feel the pull to emulate, like a drowning undertow, in all their prickliness, their belief that their brilliance and talent make them better than everyone else, and their conviction that the world is out to get them but they can face it down alone.
Dairine Callahan, who doubtless changes in later books, but starts off High Wizardry intending to know everything on the grounds that the world will hurt you if you don’t.
Ashley Wyeth, of Claudia and the New Girl, who doesn’t talk to anyone but Claudia because she’s not interested in non-artists, and in fact is so laser focused on art that she can’t understand why Claudia won’t give up her other hobbies/friends in order to devote herself to art.
And of course the aforementioned Libby, who kicks off her story by inveighing against the fact that she has been sent to school to be socialized. I found this plaint so compelling that I gave it to Julia, the main character of the novel I wrote when I was sixteen, who is also being socialized against her will - socialization consisting, naturally, of learning that she is not actually better than everyone else.
asakiyume: What characters in fiction or elsewhere have been role models for you? Do you continue to collect new ones?I have a collection, but probably the biggest one is Sara Crewe. I first read A Little Princess when I was fifteen, and I still remember having this epiphany - that kindness and strength are not necessarily antithetical qualities, because Sara’s kindness (and her imagination) are the source of her strength. They give her something to live for beyond survival: they give her the strength to remain Sara despite Miss Minchin’s sustained effort to break her down.
I’m not sure how I managed to miss this message in my earlier reading, including the Protector of the Small quartet, Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil, and the collected works of Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I suppose sometimes we just don’t hear things until we’re ready to.
Kel and Elana are also in my pantheon of role models. I don’t know that I would pick any of Snyder’s characters as role models, per se… I would have loved to be exactly like Libby from Libby on Wednesday, but I didn’t think it would make me better in a moral sense.
I think it’s partly a matter of character design - Snyder’s characters tend to be relatable rather than aspirational (not that these are mutually exclusive) - and partly a matter of the kind of stories they’re in. Snyder’s heroines don’t have trials as severe as Sara, Kel, and Elana do: I couldn’t point at a moment for any of them and say, “If this happens to me, I hope I can respond with that much grace.”
(In that vein, I also have a real-life heroine: Sophie Scholl, a German university student in 1943 who, with her brother and some friends, wrote a series of anti-Nazi pamphlets, simply because they couldn’t stand to be silent anymore. They were discovered and executed.)
And I do continue to collect new heroines, even though they don’t roll in at quite the rate that they used to. I think the most recent is Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket.
***
However, these are all good role models. I also have a collection of terrible role models, who I still adored and still feel the pull to emulate, like a drowning undertow, in all their prickliness, their belief that their brilliance and talent make them better than everyone else, and their conviction that the world is out to get them but they can face it down alone.
Dairine Callahan, who doubtless changes in later books, but starts off High Wizardry intending to know everything on the grounds that the world will hurt you if you don’t.
Ashley Wyeth, of Claudia and the New Girl, who doesn’t talk to anyone but Claudia because she’s not interested in non-artists, and in fact is so laser focused on art that she can’t understand why Claudia won’t give up her other hobbies/friends in order to devote herself to art.
And of course the aforementioned Libby, who kicks off her story by inveighing against the fact that she has been sent to school to be socialized. I found this plaint so compelling that I gave it to Julia, the main character of the novel I wrote when I was sixteen, who is also being socialized against her will - socialization consisting, naturally, of learning that she is not actually better than everyone else.
