Literary crushes

The first crush I ever had was on a fictional character. Nuuskamuikkunen. Or, in the English translation of the Moomins, Snuffkin. The reason was simple. He was a thinker, and I liked that. I wanted to marry him. I must have been four or five years old.

Since then, I think the fictional characters I’ve ‘had a thing’ for have outnumbered the ‘real people’. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I think the reason is simple. We get to know fictional characters, really know them, in a way we rarely know people we come across in day to day life. Isn’t that what happens when you fall in love? You get to know someone so well that their faults and their mistakes make sense to you, because you know their motivations and their history. Sometimes you know them better than they know themselves. That’s what love is. Is it any wonder that we sometimes feel a shadow of it for the characters we know intimately?

Here are a few of my literary loves:

Peter Pevensie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
Teddy Kent, the Emily series by L. M. Montgomery
Matthew, the Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody
Fitzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wintrow Vestrit, The Liveship Traders trilogy by Robin Hobb

I actually began typing out a brief description of each of the characters, and then realized I was saying the same things about each of them: unflinchingly loyal, considerate, immovable on matters of integrity and conscience, confident in his own judgment. (Mind you, a lot of these characters are quite different. They just happen to share all of these qualities.)

I guess the fact that Peter Pevensie makes it onto the list shows that even at age seven I knew that standing for something is hot.