Character meme!

[vulgarweed]

It's still music festival season, so I've hard hardly any quality time to spend with the new addition to the household. It doesn't even have a name or a wallpaper pic yet.

So I'll do a meme. (I've been tagged for another great one; I'll do that later.) This one I ganked from a bunch of people on the f-list.

1. Comment to this post with the name of a character that I have written in fic or RP.
2. I will comment telling you the following:

a. What initially prompted me to like the character enough to write about him/her.
b. One of his/her best traits.
c. One of his/her worst traits.
d. How easy/difficult I find it to write the character.
e. The story/chapter/paragraph/phrase where I feel that I truly captured the character.
f. My plans (if any) to write the character in the near future.

And/or: Ask me anything fandom-related, and I will probably answer honestly.

Comments

[dreya-uberwald.livejournal.com]

Erm... how about Snape?

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

a. He was the first of someone else's characters that I really devoted myself to writing, so my desire to write Snape is inseparable from the history of my desire to write fanfic at all. I think fandom itself helped me love him; here is someone who's nasty, bitter, and canonically rather ugly (this is important!) and yet with that je ne sais quoi. I've loved/hated (mostly loved) him since we first meet him in the books.
b. Ruthless intelligence.
c.. Bitterness. Utter poison, that. I'm sure he's good with poisons because he's done it to himself for so long.
d. Difficult and easy at once - his voice comes fairly naturally to me, but I always wonder if my infatuation makes him too nice. I imagine him reading my accounts of him and rolling his eyes and being utterly vicious about my writing talent or lack thereof, and that helps me get it closer to right. :)
e. Again, I don't know if I ever have. But I still like this exchange between him and Hermione (whom he's shagging, passionately and thoroughly unethically), after she's just killed someone with Dark magic for the first time:

"When you...back when...when you were..."

"When I was a Death Eater?" He said it impatiently.

"Yes. Did you...?"

"Yes."

"It was a long time ago," she said. "You were a different person then."

"Yes and no."

"Have you ever felt...like you were back to sort of what you were like before it all happened?"

"Of course not, that's absurd. You can't ever take back an experience."

Her glass was empty, and he refilled it, nearly wary of her hungry eyes.

"Did you ever...get over it?"

"I haven't the faintest idea what that means," he said coolly. "Please clarify your terms."

"Get over it," she said, deeply gulping wine. "I mean get free of it. To feel normal again, like there's not some kind of monster festering inside, that every time you pick up a wand you're not capable of....anything."

"But you are," he said evenly. "Subject to the laws of magic and limits of your own power of course."

"That's not what I mean! I mean - do you ever feel clean?"

He laughed as he refilled her glass. "Oh, that's what you mean? No, Miss Granger, honestly I don't, ever, and I never have. Clean? No. Souls aren't - they're dirty complicated things. But I don't think it's going to do you a damn bit of good dwelling on how rotten you are when you're still a slightly soiled lamb ripe for slaughter if you're not careful." He sighed and shifted, stretching out his long legs toward her, and surely the way his robe fell away from the scar tissue of his Dark Mark when he slung his arm across the back of the couch could not have been accidental. "What do you really want me to say? Do you want me to say you'll never have to kill again? I won't - Trelawney might if you ask her nicely."

f. I shall, yes. :)

[dreya-uberwald.livejournal.com]

I really like your answers. I've never been quite certain as to why I like him so much (aside from the fact that he's one of the more complex and fascinating characters in the books), but I definitely agree on the ruthless intelligence and bitterness. I suppose I have a thing for snarky bastards.

[mybrokenlocket.livejournal.com]

You know, if someone asked me in what passage I thought you had best captured Snape, I most likely would have given the same answer. I don't know if there's any character in HP fandom who can be interpreted in so many different ways and still be, essentially, canon. There are a thousand Snapes out there. It's all a matter of taste.