LJ Interests Meme

I have been tagged by dragonsquee to explain some of the interests in my LJ profile, so here they are:

Alone time: I am a firm believer in the value of time alone. I'm a pretty introverted person, so being social, even if it's with people I like and I'm enjoying myself, drains my energy. I need time by myself to recharge, or I start getting twitchy and irritable. Fortunately most of my family is pretty good about understanding that.

B movies: I love cheesy B-grade movies, especially cheesy B-grade sci-fi/fantasy movies. Red Sonja. Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Clue. Big Trouble In Little China. Weiss Kreuz, which is basically a cheesy B-grade anime series. Mystery Science Theater 3000. And the A-list movies that pay homage to B movies by just not taking themselves too seriously, like The Fifth Element and A Knight's Tale. They're just fun, and I ♥ them, because entertainment does not have to be all serious business all the time.

Damaged heroes: As mentioned in my last post. My favorite heroes are broken. I do not know why this is, really. Maybe it's something about how a genuinely flawed character is more interesting to watch than a character who's got it all together; the broken hero has more to overcome. He (or she) isn't just struggling against the antagonist; he's got to struggle against himself too. I like them emotionally and socially retarded, because while emotionally balanced, socially adept characters will mostly follow socially accepted patterns, each damaged character will come at things in his or her own damaged way, and we get to watch them learning to overcome their damage as they go along. Plus, watching emotionally stunted characters trying to figure out their own emotions is just neat.

Magnetars: It's a musical instrument! It's an alcoholic beverage! Actually it's a star with an immensely powerful magnetic field. No, really. And by immensely powerful I mean ridiculously powerful. Could strip the information from a credit card's magnetic strip from more than 190,000km powerful. Stretches hydrogen atoms into spindles powerful. This is relevant to my interests because I play Magno of the Legion of Super-Heroes on The Brave and the Bold, but what makes it really entertaining is that the name they used is so fantastically lame. Magnet - star - magnetar. It's so lame it's epic. And to make matters even better, when I tried to use "Magnetar" as a character name in City of Heroes, it was already taken! I have no idea who else would voluntarily be that lame, but I would really like to know.

Rinoa is awesome: Because she is. She's practically the antithesis of a Mary Sue: she's intended to be kind of annoying. She's immature, inexperienced, and pushy, but she's also idealistic and highly motivated; her biggest flaws and her biggest strengths are ultimately sides of the same characteristics, and yes, she's naive and a bit overbearing, but she's seventeen years old and grew up sheltered and wealthy and she voluntarily abandoned that to join a resistance movement against her own home nation, and that's pretty damn cool. And it puts her in direct contrast to the other major characters, who are mercenaries less concerned with right and wrong than they are with getting the job done and getting paid. She dovetails beautifully with Squall's damage - she's an optimist, he's a cynic; she lives in the now while he dwells on the past and works to plan for the future; she's motivated, he's apathetic - and they both have the same sense of responsibility to other people and the same fundamental refusal to give up once they've set their mind to something, and most importantly of all she gets him and she tells him what he needs to hear as no one else does. And yet she gets almost no respect in fandom and it makes me sad. Thus the inclusion in my interests. Rinoa is awesome. I have preached it.

Spike Spiegel school-of-repair: AKA percussive maintenance, AKA "my ship works better when I kick it." The way Spike Spiegel of Cowboy Bebop fixes everything. I find it amusing.

Unconventional love stories: Closely related, no doubt, to my love for damaged heroes. I don't like pat love stories nearly as much as I like the ones that are skewed somehow. Reversal or twisting of standard gender roles is a big A+; I have a firmly established weakness for relationships in which the guy is the more emotionally needy and/or submissive partner. Complicated power dynamics are also for the win. Endings don't have to be tied off into a tidy happily-ever-after bow. It's better when it's messy.

If anyone would like to expound about some of their LJ interests they may comment and I will pick some out from their profile for them to explain.