My Three Favorite Characters – Part 1

I’m not sure why, but my three most favorite characters of all time come from visual experiences rather than text. It might be because there’s the written component plus the actor plus the director all the way out through the costumers, lighting people and even props and set who flesh out the characters beyond what my imagination conjures while reading, but I doubt I’ll ever know for sure.

I’ll start with Captain Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly (TV) and Serenity (movie).

Yeah, it helps that I find Nathan Fillion incredibly hot, but there really is a lot to the character of Mal. I did not see Firefly on television. I saw it on DVD and therefore had the luxury of seeing the episodes in order.

And I hated the Captain! To me, in that first episode, the pilot, he was too much of a dickhead and I was kind of disappointed. I wanted to like him. I really, really did. He’s the captain for goodness sake, he needs to be likable to me in one way or another. However, I just wasn’t feelin’ him. I wasn’t understanding him enough to know why he was the way he was and why he said or did the things he did.

Thankfully, that first episode did not keep me from watching the rest of them. I was willing to give Mal and his gang more chances and I ended up absolutely loving his character beyond so many other characters I’ve witnessed.

Yeah, he’s a dick at times, but that comes with the territory of being the commander of a ship—especially one that dallies in illegal activities. He’s got to be shrewd, smart and strong.

But he’s also got a softer side. It’s sometimes hidden, sometimes heroically worn on his sleeve, but always enough to make him human, not some kind of superhero. Often, captains, leaders, and the like are written as human superheroes able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, able to dodge every bullet shot (except of course at the big climactic moment when the script, not his character, dictates it.)

But not Mal. He gets his ass kicked sometimes, ends up humiliated at others, even fails a time or two. And he handles them all true to his roughness around the edges, with either grace or further mishap…sometimes both.

Those are all qualities I absolutely love in a character. Sometimes it’s all in the writing, sometimes in the acting and directing and sometimes it’s in the choice of the less-sung production heroes. In any or all of those cases, it’s what makes the character who he is and how he appears to me on the screen.

For me, though, there’s one thing missing: He’s not immortal, magically inclined or capable of any other paranormal oddity. In fact, it’s amazing he’s even on my list of favorite characters because he’s a pure, un-enhanced human.

The other two fellows…well…I guess you’ll just have to wait to read who they are and why they’re so awesome for me.

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