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This ate my brain. This, the procedural of procedurals. Nine seasons on (and let me tell you, 9th is not the best), come on, see the pretty pic, don't you want to know what all the fuss is about...? OK, it was not this particular pic, but... last series I saw because-of-a-pic was Lost. This is much less fantastic. Well, the pic is fantastic!























One hundred and fifty three hours after, devoured in ... well, they devoured my life, ask *them*, I am left with a sense of... irony, I guess.. *Sigh* If anyone has read good meta on "why NCIS works", I would thank them; I have gorged, and now I must somehow digest this into something coherent.

Sue me. I love it. I have been converted, let's go, resistance is futile!

"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." Glorious, if not specially articulated, trademark phrase of one John McClane, a police officer with talent for barely surviving over a pile of other people. Bad people, of course! He is, of course, the main character in the Die Hard saga.

I’m sure the image above is self-explanatory, but anyway, meet the middle age image of John McClane. He 1.82, dirty-green eyes, smiles like a cat –mischievously– but does it sparingly, as he is mostly pissed off at the world because, hey, the world hit first and where’s *that* fair? Probably because of his fuming temper, his hair finally migrated away, and he also has a tendency to lose clothing, so a formerly white tank top, now dirty with sweat, grime and blood, is his charming default canon look.

John McClane is not an action hero per se, but probably what happens when a hardboiled detective turns action hero. Perhaps a pulp action hero is as likely as him to kick ass and take names, but nobody *hit* Doc Savage; John McClane is hit, and hit, and hit again, and yet manages to survive absurd levels of punishment. They call him badass, but when they did the all-badass movie, they almost left him out. He also is a wise cracking, astute bastard,which again sets him apart from the action hero, always a little short on humor because he has more important and dramatic things to do. McClane has a very present inner monologue, that puts you directly on his mind, like in: “I promise I will never even think about going up in a tall building again. Oh, god. Please don't let me die.” And he’s just the same with others: “Cobb: Have you been drinking, McClane?/McClane: No, not since this morning.” Or this one: “Matt: You just killed a helicopter with a car!/McClane: I was out of bullets”. Unsurprisingly, people get very pissed at him.

So is this how it is? Boys like him because he kicks ass, and girls like him because he is vulnerable? Nope. Everyone likes him… because he feels real. He convinces us he is mostly an average guy trapped into an impossible situation. He is one of us, at our best and worst, and what would we do in his place, mhh?

We usually admire in a Tough Guy hero his larger than life qualities, his dedication, his purpose that will not consider the possibility of losing. But… we also like the hero that will defend beyond reason, endure beyond hope, and perhaps one day walk away from his defense over the remains of all his attackers. So what recognize and admire in McClane is that he endures. Enduring is a necessary virtue of life, one we can understand, because his starting position is not a noble purpose, is defeat: when life deals you a bad hand, you must somehow *deal*.

Just to be clear, McClane did not went out looking for trouble! But our dear John has that innate talent to be caught in the worst possible situation: his rivals have all the purpose, the means, the minions, the dastardly plan. He has just enough will and rage and humor to endure one minute more before folding. He would rather fold, actually, it’s just that there’s no option: the situation has gone FUBAR and he has been left holding the bag. He must do something, key word *must*, key concept there’s no one else to do it.

In his own words: “Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. Pat on the back, blah blah blah. That a boy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. [I do this] because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so [I'm] doing it. That's what makes you that guy."

The dialogue is from DH4, when the series got to meta itself, and brilliantly show the other side of the coin: saving the day was *not* good for McClane’s life plans. He wanted the average, the family, and if he was a cop –a notorious one–, that was all he wanted to be. He did not want to be *there*. He really, really, did not want to be there. We are convinced of it. But he is that guy, and that guy always meddles, and so McClane had to be a cop, has a problem with authority, a tendency to vigilantism –also known as taking justice in his own hands– problems with alcohol, problems with his family and problems with the world, which brings us back to the beginning; the world hit first and where’s *that* fair? By the time DH3 came around, he was suspended, by the time of DH4, he was an unusual senior cop, and a survivor.

John McClane has the weirdest of luck and well, he survives where he should not, time an again. I am glad he has that, and I am glad he survives, because someone should. Someone should have the last minute lucky score that allows the good ones to win. I like him in DH4, because the flash is gone and only the rock remains, for the irresistible forte to punch against. “Just another day in paradise.”, he says. Anything but, McClane, anything but.


Where to find him? Guess. Die Hard (1988), as I just read in a review “one of the best Christmas movies of all time”; Die Hard 2 (1990); Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) and Live Free or Die Hard (2007). The second one is supposed to be the weakest; I looked at the Box Office Mojo, and it was interesting: by lifetime grosses you have DH1=83m, DH2=240m, DH3=383, DH4=366, but DH1 is the only one were domestic is bigger than foreign. Word spread, foreign TVs showed the movie and soon all the world was asking for more McClane; it has never stopped, and there are pleasant rumors of a fifth installment, to be probably called called A Good Day to Die Hard; we’ll see.
Where to find another side of him? There are several videogames (shot’em up, of course), and a prequel comic book, Die Hard Year One, featuring… hair. Didn't specially like it...
If you insist… Hehehe. No one had *imagined* this, I think, until Mac appeared. Sorry, until Matt Farrell appeared and our hero acquired a sidekick; a dynamic much like Batman and Robin was seized upon and you can find plenty of it here and here.
The guy who looks like him... Is Bruce Willis. ‘Nuff said.

I've had so much fun following this meme that I absolutely need to contribute to it. Because, you know, Moriarty was real :)



Now if only this actually *works*...

“Once you moved free in the world, but now your body is pliant, like wax in my hands. But I will never praise you because, as a predator, I am too proud of my possession…” That’s Kōji Nanjo on a *regular* day, playing with his beloved and with chains in the dōjinshi Zodiac. On a *bad day* he is more over the top. As the author of Bronze, Minami Ozaki, rarely draws him full and complete unless he’s wearing a Nazi uniform (!), it is difficult to see him in all his glory, but well, you get the idea.

Bronze is one of the most famous yaoi mangas, although it’s neither the earlier, nor the better and definitely not the most , eh, artistically successful. On reading yaoi you often get both the story and the meta: transference, gender divide, roles, sublimation, emancipation, porn, history, creation,l evolution, classification, shonen ai… *yawn* Ahem. It *is* a fascinating subtext, but when I first read Bronze, I had not yet started to wonder what were girls doing creating boy’s love adventures: it was just a “boy meets boy” story, and what followed was an impossible romance.

Anyway, meet Kōji Nanjo, rising rock singer, idolized by the masses, so brilliant a star that when he gets on stage and starts to jam, catharsis is the very middle form of what happens to his devoted audience. He is so famous he can have anything, and he avails himself of all of it, without shame and without restrain, his excesses shaming his dysfunctional traditional family much to his delight. He is a large man with large hands –stereotype for masculinity– pale as a vampire, with and a riot of whitish blond hair, imperious, capricious, usually elegant, happy with extreme choices in his wardrobe… and well, he looks great in uniform. Minami Ozaki’s art is often more impressionist than descriptive, so it’s a wonder how well she communicates what Kōji looks like, but in a word, if he enters a room, everyone notices.

Like any good and tragic rock artist, Kōji does not expect to live forever: “give me everything, give me nothing, kill me”, he sings, and he would burn himself up in a spiral of self destruction, if only he wasn’t in love. His object of desire is a little remote: someone he saw for an instant years ago, a long haired and bronzed lithe form running under the sun after a soccer ball. Kōji was at the time shocked into love and, and often wondered about this inexplicable crush that had reached him, man of many women as he is. Except it was not a girl: enter Takuto Izumi, bronzed, dark haired, brown eyed, handsome, a great soccer player. And enter the romance, as Takuto opportunely faints and Kōji brings him home; in case someone did not get the reference, he brings a puppy, too (forget the dog; he will not survive the storyline). And suddenly, Kōji does not care if Takuto is a boy, a girl or a statue: he is, from that moment on, everything to him. He wants to have that person that means everything to him, and he needs to be just that to such a person.

So Kōji starts following Takuto around and getting involved in his life, and Takuto acquires a supporter, a classmate, a roommate and in fact a tall, blond stalker, and his life soon gets out of hand. Kōji has his career, which he tries to quit, the paparazzi that follow him around, a formal girlfriend, a disastrous family –in the words of the author, Kōji’s family is “without any doubt cursed… the metempsychosis* of curse”– and, of course, an non reciprocated love interest. Takuto has absent parents, dependent brothers, a tragedy in his past, a sports goal and a propensity for falling ill, and mostly does not know what to do with Kōji’s affections. Everything else is over the top: Kōji attacks Takuto’s girlfriend in mad jealously, Takuto’s mother kills herself, Koji’s family live up to their destructive description; at some points, both declare their relationship impossible, idiotic and mad. It is! But Kōji wants to surround himself in Takuto, wants to possess him –nothing platonic in that–, and Takuto… mostly, Takuto surrenders to the hurricane, but he does it with fury, with violence and without actually declaring that he is surrendering. Quoting the author again, for Takuto: “the worst misfortunes occurred to him, even though he was not involved, just because he took in someone he should not have... In fact, Kōji is the source of all his troubles. Come on, do something, Kōji!” The only difference between them… well Kōji is the forceful one, no doubts on roles in this pairing. But he surrendered first to absolute love, with all his endless passion, and never asked for terms.

In stories of extreme love the tragic flaw must be a sort of selective blindness to all but love (Romeo and Juliet must both be blind to their surroundings and to consequences, or there’s no play). So Kōji, who is a barely functioning man with an impossible background, is blind to anything but Izumi, and Takuto, who is a traumatized survivor of his own life and trusts no one, finds out that he can actually depend on that incredible attachment. The y both suffer terribly for their blindness: the story offers tremendous up and downs, an obsession with injury and illness, forays into extreme play. It truly lives up to the "no climax, no point, no meaning" part of y-a-o-i. Love surrounds all, but no one actually says “I love you”: it’s more a question of need, desire, lust, jealousy, sacrifice, raw emotion, over the top declarations, destruction, rising from the ashes and, it seems, an attempt to determine if two people can really… fuse into one.

Kōji never expected to live forever, but after much drama, loss o health, dreams and body parts (not *that*), both manage some closure – appropriately called “Drown from love”. Let us by all means write yet another meta feast on the peculiar Japanese idea of what constitutes an ending, because in this case, if you want to hear “I love you”, it happens in a dōjinshi, post-series! The most incredible ending à la japonaise for me would be Ai no Kusabi [**spoiler], but in Zetsuai… this love is so destructive it requires their bodies, careers, sanity, everything. Such intensity of feeling is hard to sustain, but I think a part of the success of this story is precisely his no-excuses extreme relationship. “Zetsuai” means, after all, “absolute love” (or “desperate love”, or “everlasting love”), and in this story is what Kōji feels, but is much less love, and much more like a terrible, tragic destiny. Love, curse, love.

* Metempsychosis means transmigration of the soul, but in this case, the author implies is the “embodiment” of cursed.
[*spoiler Both characters die in love and with some peace in the middle of a rain of destruction that destroys their world; that’s about the first time those two emotions are felt by both at the same time.]

Where to find him? On Minami Ozaki’s Zetsuai 1989 (5 volumes published between 1990 and 1991), and on its sequel Bronze-Zetsuai since 1989 (14 volumes published between 1992 and 2006). There are a series of ‚”official dōjinshi” by the author, who started as a dōjinka and never quit, because her extreme love play was not suitable for mainstream magazines. Those dōjinshi are a long and complex story (see here Sadomina’s comprehensive list –at the merchandising tab–, and here the Bronze ones). If you are like me and prefer to understand the dialog even in the very explicit ones, the scanslated ones are Teikoku Juurin (1996), which gives you an incredibly detailed, eh, blow by blow, eh, adult interaction; Kreuz ID 373 (1999); Zodiac and Ai ni Obore, Ai ni Shisu ("Drown from love, Die from love", 2006) that will give you much needed closure. Birth is supposedly around somewhere, but I have not found it. Follow the links at Baka Upates to find the goodies. Also, this year, Bronze: Zetsuai Gaidan Kaendan-Shō - Tenshi Kōtan, a short story, appeared on Chorus magazine; for what I’ve seen scanned, it could be either a prequel or a posquel… confuse much? As the name indicates, it's an AU/paralel/extra story. Artbooks and merchandising can still be found around.
Where to find another side of him? On the anime, of course: you’ve got Zetsuai, a 45 minutes OVA (1992); you’ve got Bronze-Zetsuai Since 1989, another 45 minutes OVA (1996), and if you fall in love with Kōji, you have Cathexis, 30 minutes of music videos released in 1994. Just in case you are wondering‚ yes, Kōji Nanjo has an extensive discography available (look here). Find the raw data about Minami Ozaki at AnimeNewsNetwork. And there's some fandom around, even if this series is a little old.
If you insist... I’m drawing a blank. I’ve never looked beyond the 3.000+ pages of canon, except to explore more yaoi with the virtuous, scholarly purpose to find if insane love was catching.
The guy who looks like him... Would have a body proportion of 10 heads, a too small head, hair enough for three people, charisma enough for ten and an endless wardrobe. The mind boggles; much better to stay with the graphic representation. A kinder image of Kōji is below, a pencil from volume 10: the text that went with the image was something like “What is cruelty? What is irreplaceable? And what is love?”

“I’m an internationally known art thief and tonight I am here to rob you - cheers!” Add a smile to that entrance, and Neal Caffrey can get away with it. The quote is from Out of the Box, the pic from Free Fall, and he is one of the main characters in White Collar, the story of a con man, forger and master thief turned FBI asset to avoid a prison term.

Neal is slight of frame, quick, fit, blue eyed, dark haired, with an unending repertory of wit and smiles, all pleasant but only one sincere. A good conversationalist, a cultured man, alternates from three piece suit to regular ones, keeps his suitable ties well at hand, accessorizes with restrain... and when he dresses down, he’s a feast. Oh, I like pretty as much as the next girl, but in this case, well, he is just *fascinating*. Dont' belive me? Look.



There, you have been distracted. Charm is the best weapon of a conman, best paired with a quick mind for spinning a lie into the appearance of truth. That pretense of sincerity requires perfect control of every word, every gesture. Pack it in the form of a man so handsome he is naturally distracting –genetic luck he enhances with the most careful grooming–, and you’ve got Neal Caffrey, man of mystery, who led the FBI on a merry chase until he landed in prison, where he almost managed to finish his four year sentence. But he escaped –love madness– and was recaptured, and obtained –or conned– for himself an alternative to another four years of dread by becoming an informant. A conman plays the game, the game is life, and Neal is just the best player around, capable of dealing any card that comes his way to his advantage. The play, the long con, the truth, has bitten him back, and now the question presented is if a man can truly change, from the inside out. In Peter’s words, “You can either be a con or a man, you can't be both”. A con man always has a way out but for this choice, Neal is trapped, and must choose.

So there you have our Neal, unexpectedly bound to the fight for good, restricted by a tracking anklet to a four-mile radius at the heart of New York and also restricted by the terms of his parole to the whim of his handler, agent Peter Burke, the only man that seems capable of keeping a step ahead of him. Because, make no mistake, our charming lover of art and the good things in life is an unrepentant thief and a compulsive spinner of lies, and like any dealer, he is looking for the card that’s so high and wild he’ll never need to deal another (yes, that’s from a song*). Neal is proud of his *alleged* accomplishments, feels there’s nothing wrong with what he did for a living and he does not even need the complex anti-system rationalization that pervades the thinking of his friend and mentor Mozzie, the one that drills him in the does and don’ts of proper con men.

Poor Mozzie needs to drill him time and again because Neal has never mastered perfect selfishness, and so tends to break the rules: a good con man does not form attachments and lives in the present. No attachments, says Mozzie, but Neal invariably cares, for the victims in the cases he handles, for his loves –Kate and Sarah–, and, despite himself, for Peter. And with Peter comes the rule of law, and if Neal will probably never understand that one except as a new rule to *play* with, he can agree with Peter fully if the quest is for justice, so much the better if it is Robin Hood style.

In truth for Neal conning was perhaps just the means for an end. He loves art for art’s sake, and he loves money, but not for the status-and-power usual reasons, but for its pure potential to *buy*. And what does Neal want to buy? Enough that everything that surrounds him is perfect. Witness his shopping spree with other people’s money in Taking Account, and laugh, but rather than buying himself four 20 mil helicopters, Neal would buy himself a paradise of taste and live happily ever after, if only he could convince his Eve to go with him. Of course, the problem with such a paradise is that it's a fantasy, an untenable goal in the real world. Fact of like: you will never be able to buy yourself out of unhappiness. “You live in the clouds”, Sarah said to him, and she was so right it was painful. Wherever Neal is coming from, it must be a horror story to make him so firmly believe in fairytales, and that's why no matter how much he smiles, I always file him as tragic.

Neal fits very badly in the place society has reserved for him, i. e. prison, because when justice is just laws, it’s a waste of possibilities, and in Neal case, of brilliancy. He is so bright a star that if he played by the rules, he would be superb. But for that, he would finally need to acknowledge the existence of… a line somewhere. All this last season, the sensation he stands in the brink of an abyss has been so pervasive it’s beginning to look doubtful this cat and mouse game will have any kind of happy ending. We have enjoyed Neal being a conman, escaping his recklessness time and again, but the end, do you believe he can truly change, even if he decides to do so? Neal fells sometimes as false as a bright, tarnished coin; he looks at Peter like in a mirror but does not understand him. Sometimes he envies him, he believes some days that he is also running himself a con, other that he is a patsy, others that he is just another kind of precious treasure to steal, to preserve… Peter is a new experience for Neal, someone who does not play the game and does not even acknowledge the game exists. Both together, they are, eh, two times as fascinating. Don't believe me?



Ha! White Collar is the only TV show where an innocent meta post always turns into a picspam. Oh, well...

Conmen do not retire, “our smiles just fade away”. I wonder if this is because some day that warped perception somehow changes. But, can it change? Witness this dialogue: "Neal: You need to hit rock bottom before you can change/ Peter: When did you hit rock bottom/ Neal: Never said I did...". Oh, well. The storyline in White Collar is not solved, and has room yet for many a curveball. Neal, the man with no past, might yet have a future, but he often has me believing that bright smile cannot really have it: because change is not in the cards, and perhaps it never was. The dice are rolling.

* The Stranger Song, by Leonard Cohen, fits our guy eh, strangely.

Where to find him? Obviously enough, in White Collar, seasons 1, 2 and 3. More than the big plot episodes, I would recommend the short, intense one episode stories, starting with the pilot, that is a wonderful movie on its own.
Where to find another side of him? There are no derivatives that I know off, so if you want more of it, you are stuck watching Matt Boomer Superman commercials on YouTube... or pretty fanvids, like this one, Freedom Now, by lolilie. I’m in love with the writing on this show, so if you want, you can collect the transcripts at whitecollar_tv.
If you insist... Unavoidably in any series with two male leads, there's a profusion of very interesting stories: just go look at AO3 and well, gorge. What’s not so common is that because Peter's relationship with his wife Elizabeth is so central to his character, tale spinners are not comfortable sidestepping her or AUing her out, and so, there's an abundance of poly-everything stories, summarized in the all famous tag *white collar is for threesomes*. There's also, thank the all, an abundance of gen feasts that work specially well in this fandom where, despite appearances, intelligence counts often much more than good looks.
The guy who looks like him... Is Matt Bomer, the man who is so good looking that when going incognito he has to cover himself in everything –hat, glasses, scruff–, dress weirdly and shave even less than usual. Lose yourself at matboomerfan and at fuckyeahwhitecollar.

Don' have any spirit lately to do more than lurk, but I saw this pretty little guys here and realized just how much I love fandom, as in "being a fan", no matter how, no matter of what. It just gives you many little absurd pleasures, and unavoidably, strange frustrations, such as "why isn't there a cute Xavier to go with the cute Magneto?", absolutely incomprehensible for those not "in the known". Today pleasure won, hence absurd image, bigger below the cut.




( Bigger absurd image with lovely little guys this way. )

Bashir: “So of the stories you told me, which ones were true?”/ Garak: “My dear doctor, all of them were true.”/ Bashir: “What about the lies?”/ Garak: “Especially the lies.” This famous exchange between Elim Garak and Julian Bashir in The Wire is mostly true. The capture is from Tacking Into the Wind; my favorite Garak image is Sonia Hillios’s cover for A Stitch in Time, and shows Garak raising flowers in the ruins of Cardassia Prime; deeply symbolic, all around, but impossible to find in good quality :( This below is the best that I can do.


Of all the Star Trek series and of all their plethora of characters I like, I never thought such a minor one would endure so in my affections. But when I saw his empty clothes in a Trek exhibit not so long ago, I realized they used to be filled with gold-pressed latinum. Re-watching some of the Garak related DS9 episodes turned was a pleasure; I knew there was a reason why I always quote this series as first in my affections... Characters were interesting, and characters evolved.

Elim Garak is *not* a handsome guy, not to human eyes anyway. Like all Cardassians, he is a tall humanoid, gray skinned, with a scaly, rough skin marked by ridges, an ample front and straight black hair. He is good at subtle expressions and he’s usually smiling, as if looking at the world with an amiable disposition; perfectly groomed, perfectly composed, with restrained, controlled manners and an interesting voice. Should he loose his cool... beware!

As he was introduced, through the eyes of a young and innocent Julian Bashir, he was a tailor by profession, “plain, simple, Garak”, the only Cardassian residing at the Deep Space 9 space station after the Liberation of Bajor –the planet was liberated from his own people–, and he was left behind because, by unknown reasons, he could not return to his home world nor go anywhere else without risking his life. Garak was an exile, and the past behind the well-clothed façade was all but peaceful, as was slowly revealed. At first it was sort of a joke: “You don't say! Doctor, you're not intimating that I'm some sort of spy, are you?”. It turned out he was really an “outcast spy”, an extremely capable operative of the ruthless and subtle Obsidian Order, stuck on DS9 as the less likely place to be quietly disposed of.

Garak was a adrift on DS9: to the Bajorans a symbol of their past oppressors, to the Starfleet officers a fountain of mistrust, to the Cardassians a story of failure. So Garak was perpetually cold and blinded by harsh light, half drugged out of his mind and willing to sell almost anything to regain his place in the proper order of the Cardassian world. Knowing this, he was often the mouthpiece and cat’s paw of others. As this return proved neither quick, not ultimately feasible, he worked at styling and hemmed trousers and became by necessity very much a Zen tailor: an observer and occasional doer. He found an island of peace and civilized conversation in plain, simple, Doctor Bashir**. As it turned out that when reality is watched calmly, is a good mirror in which to reflect oneself. When Garak freed himself of the drugs first and of the long shadow of his past later, in a process that was all but easy, what emerged was not a different person, but the same he had been al along, without excuses. Spy operatives don't fail at their missions or make such enemies unless they are *not* very good at their jobs. And Garak was good, nay, superb at any job he undertook, and he played many different roles in the war against the Dominion –Federation crew, analyst, spy, resistance member–, and he did them all well

In truth Garak, said to be the son of a gardener and a servant, was in truth the illegitimate son of Enabran Tain, the all powerful spy master of the Obsidian Order, with said servant. In Cardassia, were family identity and loyalty is paramount and illegitimacy is a social disaster, his father nevertheless sought to make his career by bringing him into his word of shades of gray. He excelled there… until he failed and fell in disgrace. Of the many stories Garak told of his fall from grace, they were probably, as he said, “all truth”. Perhaps his father was always waiting for his bastard to fail, and perhaps he himself expected to fail because of it. Seen with perspective, he saved himself: every variation of his destiny we ever saw of him on alternative realities or futures was a disaster.

The irony, as he said, was that he was "a very good tailor". The truth is he was a man of impressible capabilities, but he was a better tailor than a spy, because he could be all of a tailor, but not all of spy. He explained it himself once. “I once knew a Cardassian, a dashing, handsome young man, with a promising career, but one day, through no fault of his own, he found himself exiled and alone with nowhere to turn. But did he give up? No. He struck upon a brilliant plan. Instead of fleeing for the rest of his life, he sought shelter in the one place no one expected him to go: in the stronghold of one of his people's most hated enemies. There, against all odds, against the merciless logic of the universe itself, he thrived.” / Ziyal: By becoming the greatest tailor in the galaxy! / Garak: And the moral of the story, my dear, is to never underestimate my gift for survival.” This from the man who blew his own shop both as a form of catharsis and as a plot to hide an assassination attempt, and that once defended himself from enraged Klingons with “several cutting remarks which no doubt did serious damage to their egos”. But Garak, uneasy ally, man of mystery, sat at the door of his clothier’s hop until he finally saw the body his enemy float by; regretfully, he also saw the remains of his world float by.

Garak is a good example of a type of fascinating person: someone so smart he cheats himself. Too smart to risk everything, and so more likely to lose; too smart to trust, and so untrustworthy; too intelligent, in a word, to follow blindly. He never was vindicated, because the world whose approval he craved fell around him, and he, the observer, endured beyond it. Presiding over the ruins of his own civilization, he completed his intelligence analysis of himself. For Garak, the quest was for identity, which is a personal but surprisingly obvious need in a society as deeply structured as Cardassia. He would have preferred to fit –he would probably had been happier being a gardener like his adoptive father– but at the Order, his capabilities exceeded the rigid mold, because said mold was too corrupted to accommodate him. "I love Cardassia more", he said once, and at that time he was choosing more than his own selfish interests. If Garak learned something from all his tailoring, was that everyone has a different fit. If you cannot blend into the grey norm, be colorfully different: to carry that well, style is required.

When Garak finally returned to Cardassia, to rebuild after the war, he used all his underhanded capabilities and unusual front to build a different style out of his half destroyed world, new patterns for old Cardassia, new chances. For someone trained in deception, attaining the capability of not deceiving himself amounts to illumination, so despite having lived a tragic existence, such an end makes me smile, because if I think it is beyond happiness, it’s not beyond contentment.

**We viewers were cheated of one of the most interesting onscreen relationships in the series when the Powers That Be declared in their infinite wisdom that DS9 was “a family show”. The story is quite shameful; by the time G&B were exchanging Delavian chocolates and someone got wise to why, it was decided that not only could Garak and Bashir not be involved, they could no longer be friends. In this, ST did not live up to his “infinite diversity” creed –not then, not ever***– and we were all made poorer by it: they did not share screen time, acquired less interesting relationships and, all in all, it was an incomprehensible development for us watchers, as I can declare in first person because, at the time, I did not understand what had happened or why. Read this and this to scratch the subject.
***If you ask me, the Uhura/Spock romance in NewTrek is probably an attempt to forever kill all K/S associations, and a little ironic. I have no problem with U/S, and let canon!Vulcans love where canon!Vulcans will; I just laughed a little… thinking about unexpected threesomes.

Where to find him: Garak appears in 33 episodes of DS9, according to Memory Alpha: SEASON I: Past Prologue; SEASON II: Cardassians, Profit and Loss, The Wire, Crossover; SEASON III: The Search II, Second Skin, Civil Defense, Distant Voices, Through the Looking Glass, Improbable Cause, The Die is Cast, SEASON IV: The Way of the Warrior I&II, Our Man Bashir, Shattered Mirror, For the Cause, Body Parts, Broken Link, SEASON V: Things Past, In Purgatory's Shadow, By Inferno's Light, Empok Nor, A Call to Arms, SEASON VI: A Time to Stand, Rocks and Shoals, Favor the Bold, The Sacrifice of Angels, In the Pale Moonlight, Tears of the Prophet, SEASON VII: Afterimage, Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges, When It Rains..., Tacking Into the Wind, Extreme Measures, The Dogs of War and What You Leave Behind. You can watch them all, you can watch the show; it's a good show. The very best are probably… The Wire, In Purgatory's Shadow, By Inferno's Light and In the Pale Moonlight, but really, it’s just all that good.
Where to find another side of him? The novel A Stitch in Time, written by Andrew Robinson, is a very interesting look at his character, a first person account of post liberation Cardassia as fascinating as you can have it. Kudos to the author for such a brilliant effort.
If you insist... What we did not get on screen, off screen dutifully provided, and G/B is practically a canon pairing for him. If you want to read some good stories, you can begin by this rec list by Mark, this com, or, for instance, Cardassia Sutra.
The guy who looks like him... Is Andrew Robinson, the one, the only. He so interiorized the guy he played he became an expert, and his declarations are interesting as hell. Read this interview and be amazed: “I started out playing Garak as someone who doesn't have a defined sexuality. He's not gay, he's not straight, it’s a non-issue for him. Basically his sexuality is inclusive. But--it’s Star Trek and there were a couple of things working against that. One is that Americans really are very nervous about sexual ambiguity. Also, this is a family show, they have to keep it on the "straight and narrow", so then I backed off from it. Originally, in that very first episode, I loved the man's absolute fearlessness about presenting himself to an attractive human being. The fact that the attractive human being is a man (Bashir) doesn't make any difference to him, but that was a little too sophisticated I think. For the most part, the writers supported the character beautifully, but in that area they just made a choice they didn't want to go there, and if they don't want to go there I can't, because the writing doesn’t support it.”

"You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me." Harry is being a mite ironic in Proven Guilty. The illustration is by cover artist Chris McGrath; I like that Harry does not wear his hat…

I’ve fallen in and out of love with The Dresden Files –Jim Butcher’s tale of a modern day wizard in Chicago– several times, and as I keep falling back in*, I guess is about time to take a look at his main character… lest I be tempted to profile Bob, his talking skull familiar.
So, meet Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, the unlikely offspring of Margaret Gwendolyn LeFey – scion of a powerful wizarding family– and stage illusionist Malcolm Dresden. After the tragic death of both his parents, he was raised first by The System and then by his Evil Uncle until he broke the Laws of Magic by killing him (it was self-defense, *really*) and came under the supervision of his ‘grandfather’ Ebenezar McCoy; he finally grew up and at the beginning of the story, he is Chicago’s residing wizard, and you’ll do well to go to him if you have weird troubles: his card reads “HARRY DRESDEN — WIZARD. Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties or Other Entertainment”. He is a good PI, and the only in the world with a *crazy* faery godmother.

Being a wizard mixes advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, you can do magic, which is fascinating, and you heal well and live long (in the case of Harry, he better, ‘cause he ends up pretty banged up). You must respect the authority of the ruling White Council and their Wardens: so you better toe the line on what magic you do –I’ll have it white, please–, and the line begins, obviously, at being inconspicuous (which means an elaborate version of the old Buffy-verse excuse of “gangs on drugs”); only the guys at the Police SI division know what’s really in the dark. On the other hand, you are bad for electronics, so you better like retro chic in your house and car… and forget about hot showers. Also, if you are born into magic, you live in a particular parallel culture with his rules and Powers, comprising everything from werewolves and vampires (multi flavored) to faerie, necromancers, holy knights and angels. Plus politicians, because *those* are everywhere.

So… in fact, Harry wasn’t born a wizard. Oh, of course he was, but he did not *know* it, and so, he was… mundane for the first key years of his life, before his many traumas. He had only gotten to the “I am so special” part of being a teenager when he had his little contretemps with his uncle, and at present, he is bad regarded or feared by his peers, except the young ones, that mostly admire him courtesy of too many narrow escapes. His word view is very much skewed, probably here’s just one Dresden shaped hole in the world, and it is so unlike anyone else’s that poor Harry sometimes fits badly on his own skin.
Like any good hardboiled magician, Harry is a good first person philosopher. So we get to know him well, as an opinionated man with profound beliefs: he believes in Yoda, he believes that what they serve in Burger King is food, and he believes in people until he is disappointed in them. But then, he believes that “Pain is a part of life.” Pain teaches, and pain leaves you changed, and pain is the dressing on both happiness and sadness, so… Harry is conditioned by his own experiences, but the truth is that he is a pro-active force for good, and that carries his own penance.

Harry operates under the principle that “the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything" and he knows very well that "there are things you can't walk away from. Not if you want to live with yourself afterward." So he rescues kittens and damsels, he messes, he meddles, he investigates and he asks uncomfortable questions to mortals and to merciless superhuman powers. As anyone who looks closer at the world, he is very much aware that it means you better like shades of gray and difficult choices. When Harry grabbed a cursed coin –don’t ask– instead of allowing a child to pick it up, it was unavoidable for him, but others choices have not been that easy, so he pays prices left and right for his free will and his choices, and somehow carries on, with the memory of his successes and failures.
Those memories burn him. At one point in time, Harry became aware of his own very particular flaw. Once he moves beyond fear and beyond pain, Harry is prey to his own murderous rage at injustice. Any menace to those few he has claimed as his own –family, friends– any situation in which he is cornered, and he will forget courtesy and planning and just charge on, pop culture reference and fire magic on hand. Only lately has he been looking at any big picture, consequences, repercussions and he is, frankly, not good at it: just how big has to be the picture for him to swallow that the good of the many, etc.?

"Hell's bells, irony blows," would say a man who knows just how much evil you can attract by calling its name. His better reflection is this one: "Most of the bad guys in the real world don't know that they are bad guys. You don't get a flashing warning sign that you're about to damn yourself. It sneaks up on you when you aren't looking." And for a while, and several times, it has seemed that Harry has seen himself carefully walking on that particular slope. Choice is a bitch.
I doubt Harry will ever cure himself of his rage; because I am guessing his rage is at the world for not being a better place, with less bitter choices. He perhaps envied Michael the knight his family, but in his words, “When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching--they are your family”, and he has surrounded himself with people who return part of his desperate care. But that only means Fortune gets too many hostages, and for a man who trains because he knows he will have to run someday, how will it feel to leave someone behind?
Out of goodness, out of rage, Harry will at last burn himself in he altar of some of his cause, and die a little sadly, because he will get his triumph against all odds, but I doubt he will get his reward: even in the calm after the fire, he will question, and he will judge, and his judgment of himself will always be the harshest.

*I tend to fall out of love with Harry when he involves himself into a crescendo of power while carrying the torch of manifest destiny; in first person narrative it tends to be a little too much; I preferred him more as the wild card and the underdog. But he’s growing old and battered and a better philosopher, so I fall back in: after all, if *someone* must have a manifest destiny, why not him?

Where to find him? There are 13 novels to date: Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White Night, Small Favor, Turn Coat, Changes and Ghost Story, with plans for about “23ish”, ending in an apocalypse trilogy (!); novel 14 is to appear on 2012 and the author is quite nicely regular. They should absolutely be read in order. The short stories volume Side Jobs should also be read with every story on his proper place. Also, if you want to give it a try without compromise, two prequel shorts are on the author’s page: Restoration of Faith and a Vignette. I would invest on the first...
Where to find another side of him… He. You’ve got a short-lived TV series (see trailer)that deserved a better fate. It took some very important liberties with the source material, but it was interesting and rather well done. You also have the comic: to date, two graphic novels, an original prequel called Welcome to the Jungle and adaptations of Storm Front and Fool Moon (not done yet). And you have the audio books, read by James Masters –this is soo double-fannish. And a RPG, no idea if nice or naughty, but full of nice illustrations.
If you insist… Ahem. The author is not opposed to fic, which is nice of him. The casting of Bob-the-Skull as Bob-the-British-Buttler on the TV series generated some interesting tales, but book wise there’s a spread of gangster Johnny Marcone stories. I have no idea where *that one* came from; the series is quite heteronormal and happy with it… I have not looked farther than AO3.
The actor that looks like him… Paul Blackthorne played him on TV, and I quite liked him, even if the description is slightly off. If you want to have a weird fan moment, the look of Nicolas Cage in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a homage (find this weird story here).

“All my life I've had doubts about who I am, where I belonged. Now I'm like the arrow that springs from the bow. No hesitation, no doubts. The path is clear.” Sinclair embraces his destiny in War Without End: the capture below corresponds to that quote.


Until another option presents itself, I would declare Babylon 5 the definitive tale of sci-fi on television: ambitious, epic, well crafted, this series is like a good novel taken with a good wine. When watching Babylon 5 I fell in love with the story and *all* its characters, and it’s a little difficult to play favorites; if I had to pick just one… ah, perhaps between G’Kar and Ivanova? And how to leave Londo and Marcus and everyone else out? As it happens, because J. Michael Straczynski * is an evil man, every one of the poor characters carried his own tragedy, so… why stick with Sinclair? Well, I usually give characters one point for being “fate’s toy”, but I think I should give this man ten.

So between the two commanders of B5 and their strange destinies, I’ll go for the mystic more than the realpolitik man. Sinclair is 39 at the beginning of the story and has lived a lot, which shows on his face, he has spiky-grey hair and clear brown eyes, and when he wants, shows a kind expression and a soft smile; he looks harmless, but he is not. He is a good mix between a diplomat and a soldier and he is above all a fair man, not willing to bend to anyone or to obey easily, and those are, of course, the ideal skills for commanding a crossroads space station. And, perhaps because of his Jesuit training (!) he tends towards being contemplative, and I think a proper capability for looking inside makes you more receptive to the world.

So what did Sinclair do before joining the circu… station? Well, he was a pilot, the son and grandson of fighter pilots, so inevitably he joined Earthforce, where he became a successful squadron leader… or as successful as one could be when fighting a losing war against the Minbari. Sinclair flew on the losing side of the Battle of the Line, the last stopgap before the annihilation of his nice blue home planet (or rather his nice *red* home planet, as he was born on Mars). He lost his entire squadron (“The sky was full of stars, and every star an exploding ship. One of ours.”) and, when his little Starfury was hit, he decided “Not like this!” and set to ram an enemy ship. And that’s the last thing he remembered; a day later he awoke, still on his ship, one of the 200 survivors of a battle were his side lost 20.000 lives… and the Minbari had surrendered unconditionally. An unexpected peace ensued.

So... what happened on the Battle of the Line? No one knew, including war hero Sinclair. Unable to remember and to do anything about it, he had to live on, serving on Mars until 10 years later he was chosen to be the commander of the new Babylon interspecies station… by the Minbari. Interesting? It gets better (if spoilery). Sinclair finally learned that the Grey Council, ruling body of the Minbari, decided to interrogate a human captive mid battle, so they fished him… and discovered out he carried the soul a Minbari, Valen himself. One does not go to war to destroy souls in Minbar, so war stopped.

Sinclair left B5 and became Ambassador to Minbar, but he was more than that: he became Anla'shok Na, Ranger One, and was perhaps the first leader engaged in the battle against the Shadows. The Rangers where ferociously loyal to him, but he became a very distant figure, whose equanimity made him appear remote: “To be with him was to have the strangest feeling. As though he were only visiting this life, and did not want to be overly burdened by it”, said later Rathenn of him, because post-fact foreshadowing is so nice.
In truth, strangest tidings were to arrive in the form of a 900 year old letter, written by himself, to himself. Yep, fate. In the letter he was revealed to be Valen himself, the “Minbari not born in Minbar”, the leader of the Minbari in their first war against the Shadows. He truly was Entil'Zha, “The One Who Creates the Future”, fated to bring the missing-in-time station Babylon 4 station to the past as a battle station against the Shadows, to fulfill his own destiny as the One Who Was, and to use the triluminari to truly become Minbari, a body to match his soul. The first match was equally valid; souls are souls, they don’t much seem to care about bodies.

Always when I think of Sinclair I go there, to that moment when he opened the letter that mapped the rest of his life. What can you do confronting time paradox and no choice? What choice can you have, when you have already decided? Sinclair is both a soldier and a believer, so he accepts the mission and gets on with it, joining the tide of unstoppable destiny.

Sinclair leaves all behind, his Rangers, his lost love**, his name, and goes to fight another losing battle, although it will be a defeat only from the perspective of the present, when the war against the Shadows still rages on. Non-linear existence must always be at its most strange when viewed from inside: Sinclair was one day in the future and the next day his life went on… and not. Sinclair died, Valen was born, forced by fate to become a great war commander. So… what’s the *personal* cost for this enabling of the past to defend a future victory you will never see fulfilled? Sinclair did what was fated to do and, destiny fulfilled, who knows if he achieved a measure of personal satisfaction? Probably he did, as he was ever curious, but every day in the past, he had to refrain from actions that would compromising the future, even if they would save lives, and that was hard. The hero’s choice for him was so unique, so surprising, so impossible to circumvent, that to me, Sinclair’s tragedy is simple imagining what it was like to write such a letter to yourself, at that point that was Sinclair’s past and Valen’s future, knowing that the Flying Dutchman would never, ever, reach home. “My name is Valen,” he says in his testament, “and I have served my people like no other”. It was perfectly true, for a harsh service, and a harsher destiny.

*Creator of The Thing, writer of 92 of the 110 episodes in the series. He published his scripts in what is by now the ultimate collector’s item, retailing from $99 to $125. As there are 15 volumes, this is a lot of money and out of my reach, although I would very much love to read the “Memo describing five-year arc with Sinclair” on volume 15. It was published on 1995; I wasn’t so internetized back then, so I missed it.
**Sinclair’s on-and-off-and-on relationship with captain Catherine Sakai was finally going somewhere when, in a mission for the Rangers, she disappeared in the infamous temporal rift of Sector 14. Past all hope they probably got their happy ending, as Valen’s later choice of wife was supposed to have been a scandal in Minbar.

Where to find him? Guess. You need all the first season of B5, called “Signs and Portents, plus the movies "The Gathering" and "In the Beginning" (nothing new) and three episodes more, from Season II “The Coming of Shadows”, the episode of the same title; from Season III “Point of No Return” the superb episodes "War Without End, Part I and Part II”. It’s not a “recent series”, and perhaps it’s beginning to show, but it’s so worth and adventure I can recommend it whole; I hadn’t seen it since the first time, decided to rewatch some of it to freshen my memories and soon enough I was entranced again.
Where to find another side of him? Mmh… to know more about the B5 Universe, try the Lurker’s Guide, to know more about JMS (if you are even remotely interested in comics, you should) try his page. In B5, by the way, reading the tie-in novels is interesting; Sinclair is featured in "The Shadow Within" and "To Dream in the City of Sorrows", and that last one is great. And because JMS is a comic guy, it’s also worth to give them a read. The ones that give you more are Issue #1, that works like the missing scene “Sinclair finds out” that we never got, and "In Valen's Name", featuring a third visit to B4.
If you insist… And here’s the one I had never considered: to me, Sinclair is so much busy with destiny he had little time for else, and even canon romance seemed an afterthought. He’s not a very romantic character to me… but of course, the internetzs has his own ideas and informs me the proper place to look is Michael Garibaldi. Poor man, he had problems on his own. And yes, there is a unavoidable The One threesome (!) around.
The guy who really looks like him... Is Michael O'Hare; there's some level of mystery about this man and his relationship with JMS, but I've never cared to delve. He just did a superb job on a bad uniform.