Snowflake Challenge #15: Create a challenge

[enemyofperfect]

I think my challenge has to be to create a piece of meta about something you enjoy, be it fannish or otherwise!

For the purpose of this challenge, I'm going to define meta as any opinion or discussion of something that's more complex than "I love/hate/am indifferent to this thing". So for example, even "I love/hate this thing because..." totally counts! Comparisons between things; explorations of in-story or authorial reasons for things; and speculation of all kinds are other extremely viable forms of meta that I just came up with off the top of my head.

Actually, I don't know if this is going to work at all, but I got so many awesome positive responses to the post where I talked about the joy of discussing characters and playing with what-ifs that I'm going to declare the comments of this post a sort of... meta fest? for sharing and prompting meta and what-ifs of any kind. You can mention a fandom or fandoms you're particularly interested in and/or a subject you'd like to see discussed in a fannish context, and maybe it'll kick off some fun conversations!

Example prompts:

• Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood headcanons!
• Person of Interest, parallels between Shaw and other characters
• What are some of your favorite neurodivergent characters and how does their neurodivergence manifest?
• What one thing would you change if your favorite canon(s) were rebooted, and why?

All of you are so cool and I'm secretly so shy! Won't you come and play?

Comments

Re: Person of Interest, parallels between Shaw and other characters

[felis]

more room there for Finch and Shaw to find common ground

Do you mean in general or regarding rationality specifically? Because I feel like Finch/rationality is a really complicated relationship. But I'd love to know where you see potential commonalities between the two of them, if something is sticking out to you! I mean, my first association was "How much do you know about chemistry?" "Enough." *big explosion*, which is certainly interesting given Finch's thoughts on hammers and scalpels (:-D), but there isn't anything that immediately springs to mind as "I wish they'd explored this potential common ground aspect" at the moment.

Re: Person of Interest, parallels between Shaw and other characters

[enemyofperfect]

Because I feel like Finch/rationality is a really complicated relationship.

Oh, absolutely. (Although I think I wasn't always as aware of that as I am now!) But let's see if I can put into words what I was too tired to articulate yesterday...

Finch doesn't always follow the logic; he has plenty of moments of squeamishness or wishful thinking, and he's clearly very biased in Reese's favor. But I think sometimes he has to reason his way through things that other people might not, and I think sometimes a formal argument will catch his attention where more conventional attempts at persuasion fail to register.

So I feel like there could have been an opportunity to show Shaw breaking something down for him in a language he understands when even Reese might have to take a moment to boggle at Finch's gently alien nature -- or even for her to make blatant appeals to his emotional priorities that are framed very directly, bald of the padding someone else might use. Or in the other direction (is it telling that I imagine Shaw figuring Finch out before the reverse?), I think in cases where Finch wasn't too close to the issue for dispassionate analysis, he'd have the potential to be very effective in communicating with Shaw, and maybe even in getting her to see perspectives that didn't interest her until he was able to highlight a reason why they should.

So I guess what I meant was less true common ground, and more... a mutually convenient location they could use to conduct negotiations in relative comfort?

(I would also love to see them doing dangerous Science together, but that's a mostly separate issue.)