Meme: February 1: What I like about you. If you are a fandom or fictional character.

I'm doing a give-me-topics-and-dates February meme, and the second half of February is still pretty open, so feel free to make requests!

February 1: alethialia, what draws you to particular characters/fandoms? Are there specific types you prefer over others? Is there a perfect storm of characteristics, so to speak?

For characters, as it says in my DW/LJ user info: The blond is just about always my favorite. The blond, or the regular, good, competent guy who tends to get overshadowed by his freakishly gifted partner/brother/colleague/boss/subordinate/bandmate(s)/etc. Bonus points for smile lines and ~MANPAIN~. As you will note, this means my favorites are essentially always male (I am now having a little Sleepy Hollow crisis, because I have no idea who my favorite is there: possibly Abbie, which would mean I was breaking type in all directions). If there is not an overshadowed regular competent guy, I will take the saddest guy whose sadness is not being satisfactorily addressed in canon or by fandom.

To wit: In Teen Wolf, Derek Hale is hands down my favorite everything forever, because he is sad and neglected and canon really, really does not address his sadness (fandom is of course ALL OVER his sadness, thank you fandom, ilu). If the show were about the grownups, the sheriff would without question be my favorite (he's even kinda blond!) and as it is I am dreadfully fond of him. In Generation Kill I started out having Brad Colbert as my favorite (SO MUCH UNADDRESSED SADNESS) and then after about six months in the fandom my brain shifted over to being a crazed Nate Fick partisan, possibly on behalf of the very sad Nate I carried around in my head or possibly because I read too much fic that I felt was not treating Nate right. In the Vorkosigan Saga I am always and forever an Aral Vorkosigan fan--he may in fact be the archetype of which all other favorite characters are shadows--because he is the saddest, most overshadowed in the narrative, most dazzlingly competent, smile-line-est of them all. My next-favorites are Mark and Ivan, both of whom are sad in their own ways, competent in their own rights, and spent so much time in Miles's shadow that their respective escapes defined the trajectory of their adult lives. Und so weiter.

For fandoms, I usually get into them backward, through fanworks or fandom squee. Tumblr gifsets were responsible for my fall into Teen Wolf and more recently my watching of Sleepy Hollow (and Legally Blonde and The Heat and... a lot of things really). I got into Generation Kill through soulbond fic, into Numb3rs through kidnapping fic, into bandom through hookerfic, popslash through a freedom fighter AU, into Due South through fanart and then kidfic. I even got into the Vorkosigan Saga because it was what my (profoundly idolized) big brother was reading, when he was sixteen and I was twelve, and the X-Files because it was what Iulia was squeeing about during gym class. The only show I can think of that I got into simply by watching the show is Buffy, and I'm not sure that counts either, since I was at a science fiction convention screening when I first saw it. So: I find my fandoms through fandom.