How do you play your characters: Part 2

[dinosaurman.livejournal.com]

A while ago Stephen Maturin-mun wrote up a wonderful post wondering how close characters in Hogwarts_Hocus stick to canon, and how much fanon or personal interpretation bleeds into characterization. Many long essays were written by all.

Time passed, and now we have a lovely collection of new characters, plus older characters that have changed over the months. The question remains: how do YOU play your characters? How much do you take from canon?

Comments

[conriocht.livejournal.com]

Remus has become much less aggressive and snarky since the popcorning of virtually all his antagonists. Constantly dealing with people who hate him and want him dead definitely brought out his mean streak (understandably, I think). He's still pretty snarky - snarkier than canon, I think - but that's been toned down quite a bit. He's much more of a kindly professor now than he used to be.

The ongoing cracktasticness at H_H has brought out several aspects of Remus's personality that I didn't realize existed before. As someone pointed out, he has this ability to take everything in stride, no matter how weird it is. Sirius coming back from the dead? Great! Being turned into Crowley for a day? Sure! Hunting evil clowns? Good times! The only thing that's really thrown him for a loop is James coming back, and even then, he was able to be relatively calm and rational about it.

In a related vein, I've noticed that he seems to actively enjoy talking to the weirder and more incoherent applicants at H_H. Delirium tells him that she "wants to go to Jupiter and eat tinfoil for dinner," and he just humors her and plays along with her - he thinks it's funny. He did that a lot with Cooper, too (until Cooper really started pissing him off), and it's one of his ways of dealing with Sirius as well. I imagine this quality must come from long experience as a teacher interacting with children - even with adolescents, you need to do a lot of smiling and nodding.

In my previous post, I said I was playing Remus as "mostly straight," mainly because I'm a Remus/Tonks shipper and I'm tired of the constant fanon depictions of Remus as being TOTALLY GAY LOL. Obviously, since Sirius's return and the April Fool's incident with Stephen (as well as Dieter's application - hubba hubba!), this plan has fallen by the wayside a bit. ;) I'm still imagining him as being about a 2 on the Kinsey scale, and for those of you who can't be bothered looking that up, that means "predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual." Which means he can have a relationship with Tonks and still have plenty of slashy UST. Works for me....

I've also been working more on playing up Remus's scholarly tendencies. He's a professor, after all, and I imagine him as an intellectual magpie - the sort of person who's interested in everything and has an odd little store of trivia in his head for nearly every occasion. I've heard some fans claim that his range of knowledge would be limited to DADA, but I've certainly met academics who are far more wide-ranging than that. (For instance, my father is an engineering professor, but is also extremely knowledgeable about history, literature, mythology, and other subjects which have nothing to do with the subject he teaches.) This quality is one of the reasons Remus likes Stephen, who not only shares the quality but piques Remus's intellectual curiosity. Remus likes to study things and figure them out, and Stephen's background and complicated personality constitute an intriguing puzzle for him (which he'll probably never put together, but that just makes it all the more interesting).

Finally, there's Remus's music conoisseurship, which is totally self-inserty and not canon at all (unless you count movie!canon, which I try not to). But I do think it's IC for him to be a music nerd - the sort of person who collects first pressings of records and obsesses over discographies and back catalogues. Being a music nerd myself, I've encountered a lot of people like this, and I think Remus fits the bill pretty well. It also allows me to quote my favorite songs and have more entertaining WART broadcasts. ;) Remus's musical taste overlaps my own to a certain extent, but he likes jazz a lot more than I do, and I like noisy rock n' roll a lot more than he does. I imagine that he likes a lot of cerebral, witty music, which is why I always depict him as being a big Kinks fan (and, by extension, a big Decemberists, Elvis Costello, and XTC fan).

So there's some tl;dr for your Wednesday morning. Have a nice day, I'll be here all week, enjoy the buffet!