30 days of TV meme, day 4
May. 16th, 2014 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit4) Favorite recurring character
No S3 spoilers here.
unsurprisingly, Nathan Ingram is my favorite. He can perhaps seem a little superficial when we first meet him ("that idiot in the tuxedo," as Denton Weeks later calls him), but his long, deep friendship with Harold shows that there've got to be depths, and as POI goes on we see more and more of them. He's the one whose conscience keeps troubling him even while Harold is successfully suppressing his own, and that conscience eventually goads him into risking his own life to help the "irrelevant" people and then to (try to) expose what the government has done to keep the machine secret.
The Harold Finch that we see on the show, the one who cares passionately about saving individual people because everyone is relevant to someone--that man only exists because of Nathan, and because of Nathan's death. *sobs*
And I love that POI dared to show us a male friendship that involved so much real intimacy and emotion. There were missteps, including an attempt to retcon away some of that relationship's importance in favor of Harold/Grace, but in the end we saw without the slightest doubt how much Harold and Nathan mattered to each other. Now, male friendships of the shallow kind, or of the heavily macho, "let's shoot things together" kind aren't exactly rare in on TV, but really loving, caring male friendships are. POI actually gives us two (with Harold & John's friendship sharing certain traits with Harold & Nathan's--it's no accident that Harold calls John "Nathan" once), which is pretty impressive.
I ship Harold/Nathan, of course, and I don't think doing so "devalues" their friendship, but that's an argument for another day.
No S3 spoilers here.
unsurprisingly, Nathan Ingram is my favorite. He can perhaps seem a little superficial when we first meet him ("that idiot in the tuxedo," as Denton Weeks later calls him), but his long, deep friendship with Harold shows that there've got to be depths, and as POI goes on we see more and more of them. He's the one whose conscience keeps troubling him even while Harold is successfully suppressing his own, and that conscience eventually goads him into risking his own life to help the "irrelevant" people and then to (try to) expose what the government has done to keep the machine secret.
The Harold Finch that we see on the show, the one who cares passionately about saving individual people because everyone is relevant to someone--that man only exists because of Nathan, and because of Nathan's death. *sobs*
And I love that POI dared to show us a male friendship that involved so much real intimacy and emotion. There were missteps, including an attempt to retcon away some of that relationship's importance in favor of Harold/Grace, but in the end we saw without the slightest doubt how much Harold and Nathan mattered to each other. Now, male friendships of the shallow kind, or of the heavily macho, "let's shoot things together" kind aren't exactly rare in on TV, but really loving, caring male friendships are. POI actually gives us two (with Harold & John's friendship sharing certain traits with Harold & Nathan's--it's no accident that Harold calls John "Nathan" once), which is pretty impressive.
I ship Harold/Nathan, of course, and I don't think doing so "devalues" their friendship, but that's an argument for another day.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-17 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-17 10:18 pm (UTC)(ETA: Also because I've read a couple of Jo Graham's books and don't love them, and in particular I objected to the way I felt the male/male relationship in the book with Bagoas was devalued at the end.)
I assume you are reading The Order of the Air--what do you think?
no subject
Date: 2014-05-18 03:44 am (UTC)As far as the Order of the Air books, the F/M/M relationship is in the past, and the male character who was the point of the V in it, is dead at the time of the action of the books.
The F character from that F/M/M relationship moves on and marries someone else, and remains very close and friendly with the other surviving M from that polyamourous relationship.
So in short, the echoes of the past F/M/M thing are important to the characters, but don't really affect the current action except in terms of nostalgia and a certain weight of back story.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-21 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-21 08:19 pm (UTC)For me, they were features not bugs, but everyone's mileage varies.