(no subject) [nekare]

It sometimes weirds me out how fandom tends to allocate its book-love into characters that were never really called that, even if they could fit the profile - it was done to Remus, the apparently Shakespeare lover that was never really seen reading something that didn't involve magic (and that on the whole seemed to be more into magical creatures and magical theory), and fandom is doing it again to Arthur from Inception, which wasn't even seen holding a book throughout the entire movie.

I get that it's just filling in the blanks, but do we really want it so bad for our favorite character to be like us? And we are bookish people, on the whole, it takes a kind to actively read and write fic passionately. I don't mind it, exactly, for I too love books, and have been known to judge people on what they read. It just seems a bit odd, wanting to see ourselves in the characters we write and love - would it be the mildest way of self-insert?

How much of ourselves are we leaving behind when we write someone lovingly caress a book's spine and adore that old-book smell? Is it comparable to people writing Hermione be a Evanescence fan? It's an interesting thing to think about, in any case.

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I agree that it's a strange phenomenon! It's never bothered me particularly though -- if it's self-insertion, it is, as you say, the mildest way, and fairly harmless. I mean, so much of fandom is sketching in our own interpretations of a character anyway, so if it's built in the character in a way that makes sense, then.

It's interesting when it happens fandom-wide though. In the Inception fandom in particular, the general depiction of characters seems to have taken on a life of its own. I feel like 75% of the characterisations of Arthur and Eames can't be traced back to the original movie characters in any way, which isn't necessarily a bad thing because canon =/= fanon and all that, but it's strange to see it happen on such a scale. Like, where did repressed!Arthur even come from?!

Arthur as a reader makes no sense to me, though, unless it's in AUs. I can see Eames as a reader, because I interpret him as someone who's actually quite academic and well-read based on his comments while planning out the job in the movie.

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Eames is totally a voracious reader in my head. Or at least, a voracious researcher. He has to be, otherwise, he won't be able to do the job.

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Yes! Based on the little dialogue in the movie, he actually seems the most academic (well, humanities-academic, not science-academic or architecture-school-academic) out of everyone on the team. I think that he's probably good at processing other types of knowledge, too -- seems pretty essential to his skillset as a forger, which involves reading bodies as texts, imitation, etc.
/ramble ;)

I sort of got the impression Eames was in one of the first inception attempts (he describes the military and what they did with attempts which makes me think he was a sort of military liason), and I got the impression he was upper middle class, private-school educated. Very likely he had a few leads in the school plays. ;)

A good sense of the humanities just fits with his character. Arthur's all action-action-action. When he fights, it's choppy. He never comes across as academic. Knowledgeable, yeah, because he's Cobb's right hand man, but never academic.

Arthur... a bookworm!?

OK, at least Remus is seen reading books in some capacity, but Arthur never mentions any inclination towards reading. At all.

I think these fanon facts exist in every fandom. As if there're things that just stick after one or two fics. It's rather funny considering how much people read into canon and how much fans tend to argue when someone messes with canon.

[Nods] Like Remus loving chocolate or having "amber eyes", for example. There's no evidence in canon for either of these*, and yet, for quite a while, you couldn't read an HP that didn't include these bits of fanon.

*Remus does have chocolate in his pocket on two occasions in PoA, but both occasions were when he and students would likely be encountering dementors or a boggart-dementor. He's never seen eating the stuff.

I've always found Remus's purported book-love perplexing as canon-Remus is almost anti-book. His approach to teaching is an hands-on, learn-by-doing method, not "a read about it and tell me what you read" method. In the very first class he has with Harry & Co., he tells them to put their books away and to take out their wands, and then they troop off to defeat a boggart. His final exam for the class? Is it a fifty-inch essay on what they've learned that year? No, they have to go through an obstacle course in which they must do what they've learned.

Personally, I'd love to see a fanfic in which Remus has dyslexia or something.

Now, Sirius, on the other hand, must have done quite a bit of reading while researching the animagaus transformation. (See icon.)