what may or may not be hard reality

11 TV Characters I Love More Than Anything - Really, I just wanted an excuse for another meme. And every once in a while I list my top 10 hotties, but I did that not too long ago, and then AfterElton had a thing about 'TV characters you wanna marry', so I thought about that, but I realized that really, most of my favourite TV characters I don't necessarily wanna marry, so 'love more than anything' in this case mostly refers to how much affection I feel for them, how much watching them be awesome makes me all warm and fuzzy, how sad it makes me when they're miserable (tho of course there's a huge overlap with hotties and favourite shows etc). It's crazy how much I love these characters. Pictures under the cut!

( 11 TV Characters I Love More Than Anything )

Title: Blood Magic
Author: fallon_ash
Fandom: The Dresden Files (TV show) / Valentine
Pairing: Bianca St. Claire / Grace Valentine (Aphrodite)
Rating: Mature
Word Count: 1557
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: "There are two bullet holes in her chest sluggishly leaking dark blood, and the remnants of a broken mirror behind her, and there is no way she would be getting up right now if she were mortal."
Inspiration: Dresden: "You sound like a 30s gangster's moll." Bianca: "I was a 30s gangster's moll." - The Dresden Files 1x05 Bad Blood
Author's Note: The vampire mythology is taken best I could from the TV show, and then filled in with random details I've stolen from other vamp myths – therefore quite inconsistent with the novels; I haven't read them and it seemed too daunting a task to get it right just from reading summaries online. Might as well create my own.

***

( Blood Magic )

***

So uhm... you know, playing gay or not is not the be-all end-all of actress crushes, but sue me for liking it when my crushes do! :P Awesomely enough, most of my actress crushes have played a lesbian or two over their careers, but the closest I've seen Joanne come so far was Bianca the omnisexual vampire on The Dresden Files (which is of course completely awesome!) but she's still mostly getting it on with Dresden. (Has anyone seen Going the Distance? There's a brief moment in the trailer where she's holding another girl's hand in a vaguely gay way. :P Why yes, I wear slash goggles? I'm pretty sure I've had lasik surgery to permanently imprint them on my lenses.)

Which brings us to Diamonds, a little miniseries about the diamond trade from a bunch of different interconnected viewpoints, wherein Joanne plays Stephanie Dresser, a geologist who specializes in looking for diamonds in the Congo. Now, there's absolutely no conclusive evidence that Steph is gay, but the circumstantial evidence is piling up real thick. I couldn't resist making a pic!spam out of it.

( Stephanie Dresser ♥ Sarah Cameron a whole lot! Pics and quotes! (Uhm, and spoilers.) )

So it went something like Jaime Murray >> Julie Benz >> awareness of No Ordinary Family, and then it went Joanne Kelly >> guest starring on NOF >> Jaime's BFF's show! and together the two led me to give the show a try last week, and I really enjoyed it, which lead me to mainline the entire season so far in between study sessions. I have some issues with it; there's some annoying gender stereotyping going on*, the show seems afraid to go full-out in any direction be it with the humor or the drama or the action or the geekiness, and it has an annoying way of resolving cliff-hangers by trivializing them in the first 2 minutes of the next episode.

However, that said, it's a cute and funny show with a good heart. No Ordinary Family is definitely the show I look forward to most each week, at this time. (Until Sanctuary returns in April, and Warehouse 13 and Rizzoli & Isles in the summer.) If they can keep from going crazy, they can be sure to count on me to watch it as long as they're on. And since they've got an action/mystery aspect, I hope they'll be able to keep from degenerating into soap-opera land like so many other shows that I liked for the first season and that then just got crazy.

And Julie Benz's hair was *really fantastic* for the first 10 episodes. Speaking of, Julie Benz is really pretty. The fact that her storyline with Dana Delaney on Desperate Housewives was one of the cutest lesbian storylines I've seen in a long time totally helps. I really really don't want her for a new obsession, though, because I really don't wanna sit through 4 seasons of Dexter - especially knowing how it ends. I have seen a handful of Jaime's scenes from her season and... it's just not my show.

My issue with Julie Benz's hair is this, though. See, you all know I have a thing for hair. I even have a thing for curly hair. But nothing turns me off faster than a styled appearance that makes no sense, and that certainly won't be around the morning after. There was some famous actress, but I can't for the life of me find the quote again, who said something like "They're so excited when they go to bed with [stage name], but then they're so disappointed the next morning when they wake up with [family nickname]". And I kind of have a thing for the things that will still be there in the morning. Sure, I love naturally curly hair on a lady, but what I love the most is a lady who looks natural. (Yes, I know I shouldn't be using that word.) I know TV is just a massive suspension of disbelief, but some things bother me more than others. Anyone who's spoken to me this last week will have heard me gush about Steph's lovely straight hair, in a world of TV ladies that look like they spend an hour with their curling iron every morning.



And then we had Joanne Kelly guest starring this week... sadly she spent all of her time in Jim's storyline and never met Steph, and she spent most of that time chained to a pillar or ( spoiler ), so she didn't really have that much to do. And she wore a skirt, which I'm not a huge fan of. But she was still pretty! ( And there's a screen cap under the cut, here! )

*Moms with careers will never be happy unless they can make time to cook, clean, keep house, and look after their kids even when they have a wonderful loving supportive husband who has a great relationship with the kids, so let's give her super-speed so she'll be able to do those things. Dads who *went to artschool and love art* feel like inferior men if they work as artists because that isn't a properly manly thing to do, and they really wish they could go out and be more heroic instead of being at home and having a good relationship with their kids, so let's give him super-strength so he can go out and risk his life a be a hero like a real man. The kids are less obvious, but they still gave the girl the emotional power and the boy the scientific one. Now, the mom is clearly a very gifted scientist as well, and she gets plenty of chances to show off, and there are plenty of ways in which the show is progressive as well, and it's not at all a reason not to watch the show. And it should definitely be mentioned that the characters they've created are good and dynamic, and the actors play them well, and there's nothing at all wrong with the believability of the characters as such, but where they fit into a larger pattern is a little sad.

Icon chosen because Calleigh is so pretty! As for its relation to this post, it's somewhat misleading...

( Joanne on CSI: Miami - 9x08 - Happy Birthday - spoilers )

( and a couple of screen caps... )

Ok. That time again. New obsession post. At first I sort of held back a little because, you know, it wasn't really an obsession, it was just that I kinda liked them, and it was really just the one show, and... suddenly I found myself watching obscure episodes of shows I don't actually like for split-second glimpses of them when they were young(er) and being too busy tracking down 10-year-old articles to update LJ. You know how it goes.

Joanne Kelly. Jaime Murray. Joanne has these dark brown thick *curls* and really cool blue/gray/brown eyes and shoots rifles and watches nothing but sports (preferably hockey) on TV and *swoon*. (The sport-watching is not something I would ever do, but is a trait I approve of in a lady actress.) Jaime (yes, it's spelled like that because she's named for the Bionic Woman. The BIONIC WOMAN.) has long thick black hair and amazing dark eyes and an awesome British accent and a bit of a vicious sense of twitter-humor and *swoon*. It was mostly their hair that made me fall for them, though. Long. Dark. Glorious. On any given day I'll be a little bit more into one than the other, and it switches at the drop of a hat. They're both born in the late 70s, which makes them 10 years younger than my usual crushes (but gives me hope that one day I will fall for someone my own age in RL).

To make everything even better, they're on Warehouse 13 together, with subtext like I haven't seen since Xena. (I had the W13 vs. R&I discussion a way back.) They play characters who are really really cool, and who pass that Bechdel test as well. Now, as for HG's investment in Myka, I will admit to selective interpretation - BUT, selective interpretation means it's *there* and it's not the way it usually is where you have to wear slash goggles and man-blinders in order to conjure up the remote possibility that the women are even aware of each other.

Other things they've done include Jaime's fantastic show Hustle which is objectively brilliant in all kinds of ways. Joanne has done the Jack Hunter miniseries, which *I* like, because it has gorgeous vistas and cool artifacts and reminds me of Relic Hunter, and she also played an insanely sexy vampire on The Dresden Files and the most adorable little actress on Slings and Arrows. And Most Awesome of All Things Awesome - Jaime will play Lucy Lawless's bosom buddy on the upcoming season of Spartacus, which is a fandom-collision that's up there with Lucy on The X-Files and Marlee on The L Word.

Today is a Myka day. I just watched 1x09 - Regrets and so much angsty!Myka and so many pretty closeups and and and... MYKA!

Friday was a Jaime day. (Yesterday never happened.) Jaime had these... interesting moments in some of the Hustle interviews where I have to admit that while she is a fantastic actress, I was worried that her personality wouldn't quite meet my high expectations of awesomeness (I've had a good trend lately, Christina with the sarcasm, Amanda with the hilarious, Chely with the gay and articulate, and Joanne has proven her dorky awesomeness in interviews with Eddie: "This dude is gonna lose his mind and kill us all!"); case in point, a lot of moments LIKE THIS, Adrian making some intricate character point, Jaime in the background absentmindedly chewing on a thumbnail and staring off into the sky... But then on Friday Julie Benz signed Jaime up for twitter which gave us all these fantastic awesome slightly vicious 140-character banter. *SWOON*

( A few awesome twitter exchanges under here!! )

( And some pictures of the lovely ladies under here! )

( ...and a couple of YouTube clips for good measure! )