I just realized tonight all those years as a kid coming home from school to play Warcraft3 and, in it, Jaina Proudmoore being the relateable girl a little older than me had profound effect on me. I hadn’t even really thought about it until accidentally generating an image of her tonight, realizing i’m really attached to her, looking at my childhood realizing 90% of my free energy was in warcraft3 with jaina the one relateable character, and refreshing myself on her history a bit to realize there are parallels between her story and mine in all sorts of areas and that i turned out highly magical with a tendency to leadership just like her. lots of me tonight being like ‘omg im basically jaina’
anyway, i realized tonight jaina was my main childhood rolemodel. who was yours? do you see their effect on you like i do with jaina?
Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and maybe Gary Cooper in Beau Geste, but really I was smitten by that whole story there rather than one character. Both stories are about gallant men and nasty villains.
In high school, I switched to idolizing Kurt Vonnegut and thought maybe I should be a writer, but I don’t have much talent for it. I never lost the general sense I got from all three: one must stand up for the poor and helpless in a world where the powerful will treat them with cruelty.
As an adult, I understand that the movies are both flawed on that message in that Robin Hood turns out to be the very sort of noble doing the oppressing (but he’s one of the good ones, right? Right?) and all of Beau Geste is about excusing an upper class Lady’s crime and fighting natives who don’t ‘appreciate’ colonization. I still love Vonnegut as an author, but have some criticisms of him, too.