I Just Can't Walk Away

give me a character and i will answer:



Mallory Pike

why I like them
   Mal is a big ol' book nerd who wants to be out of that incredibly awkward stage she's found herself in. I love that she's calm in a crisis (something not all the other Pike kids can claim) and that she's usually pretty level headed in life. She's the voice of reason a lot in the earlier books (before everyone underwent labotomies, I guess) and I like that she stands her ground.
  Mal was also the character I was most like after awhile. Glasses, hair that went insane, and the inability to not make things worse for yourself in social settings after awhile. Also, I too hated gym.

why I don’t
   This is harder than I thought because while I cut Dawn a lot of slack from the ghosties, some of the things I don't like about Mal are also... ghostwriter provided. Mal books tend to bum me out, so reading them is not as enjoyable as say, almost anyone else's aside from Jessi's. Odds are good life is going to kick Mal in the shins and, if it's a SS, she's going to act like a jackass. (I direct you to the entirety of California Girls.)
  That said, I suspect Mal herself is pretty friggin' awesome so... I guess her unrealistic expectations from life would grow tiresome (and have) but she's also eleven so slack must be given, y'know?

favorite episode (scene if movie)
   I'm currently re-reading Hello Mallory so I'm biased (and like I said, re-reading her books isn't my favorite thing to do) but I really like that she's willing to throw away her shot at the BSC if they won't take Jessi, too. She's known Jessi for such a short period of time but already thinks of them as best friends and even though their friendship could've gone bust at anytime, she's still willing to risk this thing she wanted so badly because she would rather have one true best friend over a group of sort of friends.
  I love you, Mal. ♥

favorite season/movie
  Took me a minute, but I remembered BSC #29: Mallory and the Mystery Diary. Better than a good chunk of the actual mysteries once that series got off to a start and Mal is actually shown being pretty awesome. She helps Buddy with his reading (come to life and help Widget, Mal!) and um, I'm a sucker for trunks of mysterious stuff. Two thumbs way up, Mal. Way up.

favorite line:

   "Because the idea of leaving you behind was just as terrible to me as the idea of my leaving is to you!"

  "Inside, I feel as if this is what I've been waiting for all my life. This is my chance to be myself, not just one of the eight Pike kids. Not just one of seven baby-sitters. Not to be Spaz Girl. Not to be anything but myself. I'm not entirely sure who that is, but I feel I'll find out at Riverbend."

  I... if you'll excuse me, I appear to have something in my eye.

favorite outfit
   I can't really remember anyone's from the books (some exceptions made) but cover wise, Mal looks adorable on Mary Anne in the middle, although it's weird for me to see her being short after so many years of her seeming to be taller than a lot of the other sitters.

  Unrelated but why the heck not, I used to think Mal looked a lot like Heather Langenkamp on Mallory and the Trouble With Twins. Which is also not a bad look for her either.

otp
   I really liked Mal and Ben as a couple. I'm not saying she should be saddled with her eleven year old boyfriend forever but they were cute together.

brotp
   Mal and Jessi are superfriends, guys. SUPERFRIENDS. Just when you start to think maybe they were outgrowing one another, you re-read Mal's meeting of Jessi (finally, a best friend!) and how hurt Jessi was that Mal was leaving her and ohmygods, I could cry right now. *cough*
  I am also a big supporter of the Mal/Stacey friendship. I do not think Mal would try and morph into Stacey, especially not after she went off to boarding school because Mal is smart enough to realize that she went down that road already and it did not work out. Why make it her life's work? I like that they started to hang out more than they ever would have without Stacey having moved into the house behind Mal's. The little bits where their mothers became friends or they had a code for whether they'd walk to school? So cute!

head canon
   Mal escaped the time warp and we'll pretend that everyone else did, too. Honestly, I like to think that Mal accomplished her goal of becoming a children's author and illustrator who puts out books that resonate with kids long after they should've outgrown them. By now she'd probably have her own little subsect of fandom where people shriek "ohmyglob, you like _whatever mal wrote_ too? I love that book! I didn't know anyone else did!" and become super excited over this shared interest. Like Mal and Jessi over horse books or me and anyone and BSC/SVH.
  I also see her as one of those authors who is present online but not obsessively so for the most part. Y'know the ones. You wish they would update more, but when their weekly post or whatever pops up, you adore them even more? That's Mal.
   Um, if we're trying to figure out who she married, I'm thinking a geek though I really don't have a grasp on that. *shrug* I just think Mal grew up to be happy with who she is and what she does. I still think she's Jessi's biggest fan and probably one of Claudia's, too. I think she still keeps in touch with her BSC friends, even if they might not be as good as keeping in touch. Maybe a little less so with Logan or Shannon, but who knows?

  That said, I have to admit I do have a fic in which none of this is true.

unpopular opinion
   Y'know, aside from Mal being the punching bag of both fans and ghosties, I'm not really sure what would constitute an unpopular opinion for her. Liking her? Relating to her? I... don't know.
  So, I'll go with the fact that for awhile anytime I would dare to tiptoe into fic, Mal was a slut (wha?) or a total Stacey clone (which somehow also tends to mean slut) and I... don't see either of those as likely.




a wish
   Mal escaped, man. As far as I'm concerned she is the only one to have escaped the time warp. Dawn left the 'Brook but despite the fact that CD should have clearly jumped ahead to ninth grade (and felt like it to the point that the constant 8th grade bits were jarring) she was still mirred in the timewarp. Mal escaped and that is probably the biggest wish one could make for her.

an oh-god-please-don’t-ever-happen
   Uh, what didn't happen to Mal? Seriously, at the rate she was going they would have ended up maiming her even though she already caught mono and eventually Mal would have died. From something incredibly embarrassing because the ghostwriters took such obvious delight in torturing her.
  So, really, no. I do recoil in horror from Mal gets knocked up at 14! fics though. Or younger. Because no. No to such a degree that I cannot type in full, coherent sentences, okay?

5 words to best describe them
  Smart, dependable, author-illustrator, Pike.
   (I threw Pike in because I get the feeling that all the Pike kids tend to take some measure of pride in being a Pike. If ever there was a show of family togetherness, it is the Pike clan.)

my nickname for them
   Mal Witch. Or, y'know, no nickname at all. Malwitch is just what I call my Mallory icon. :P

I asked and you guys delivered, so here's the first of the characters I was given.

give me a character and i will answer:


Dawn Schafer


why I like Dawn:
   I think original!Dawn is fantastic. She's not perfect but she's thirteen so expecting her to be flawless is insane. She loves ghost stories (so do I!) and is open to the idea that there's more to the universe than can easily be explained. For all the crap she gets from fandom, early!Dawn is actually true to herself and accepts that sometimes other people are going to look at her like she's insane but y'know, screw that noise. She's got more important things to worry about than whether or not someone she barely knows gives a flying fig if she brings her lunch to school.
  I like her friendship with Mary Anne and her odd friendship with Kristy. Her relationship with Jeff is actually one of the best sibling relationships in the entire series, no matter where you are in terms of Ann vs Ghosties.
   Younger!me probably coveted her long hair like crazy and older me appreciates that Dawn is one of those characters who seems to be unusual looking. Sometimes this means you get Kristy telling you she's gorgeous and model worthy and sometimes you get someone else telling you that Dawn is pretty but... Which is oddly realistic. Some people in your life are going to think you look one way and other people who see you at the exact same time/place will think "meh."
  Before the ghosties sunk her battleship, Dawn came across as that friend who would stop you before you walked out the door with a piece of something stuck in your teeth and, if you asked, would tell you that she personally thinks that dressing all in red leather is a bad idea but hey, let your freak flag fly if that's your thing, though possibly in the future could you do so without killing an animal only to dye its hide an unnatural color. She'd also be up for sitting around on a rainy day reading ghost stories aloud and then she'd be the one person who wouldn't laugh when you told her that you saw this apparition out by your garage and hey, why doesn't she come look, too?

  Also loves The Parent Trap. DAWN. We would be such good friends! Except at meal time!


why I don’t:
   Dawn got hosed by the ghostwriters. While it was very, very big in the late 80's/early 90's to recycle and learn more about saving the earth, Dawn got cranked up to such painful levels they actually mocked her in the series. Seriously, if you get that bad that canon says "nope" your ghosties should be forced to dial that back before you go so far off the reservation there's no coming back.
  Which didn't happen and away she went. I also don't like how whiny Dawn was in the California Diaries, though maybe a re-read would alter my perception of it. But at the time I hated her books because it was just painful to read what had become of my favorite BSC character.
   Also, Dawn really had it lucky when you consider her parents divorce. While Jack and Sharon obviously had issues (she did move across the country, after all) they did a remarkable job of not putting the kids in the middle and allowing both Dawn and Jeff an insane amount of freedom to float back and forth between them. And Dawn never really seems to acknowledge this even though she's got plenty of friends who showcase just how unfun divorce can be.


favorite episode (scene if movie) book:
   I have two. I am really fond of Little Miss Stoneybrook... and Dawn simply because it was the first BSC book I ever read and I liked that moment when Dawn gets a little (lot) jealous that Mal and Jessi got this whole production and she got a pizza toast and a "hey, wanna join?"
  I also adore The Ghost at Dawn's House. Because what ghost story loving kid wouldn't want to find a secret passage complete with possible ghost story? Plus I dig the Nicky subplot.



favorite season/movie:
   I'm gonna tweak this one and still not properly answer it. Book Dawn trumps TV or Movie Dawn, though I think I prefer movie!Dawn. Hair color aside, she actually comes across as closer to the Dawn I have living in my head. TV!Dawn (and I'm one of those people who does like her) is definitely a bit more on the bitchy side of the fence which works in some cases, but when compared with her movie counterpart? Yeah. I'm siding with Larissa on this one.
  (But crappy wig moments aside, TV!Dawn is shockingly similar to how I would have pictured Dawn as a person who didn't just step off one of the many "wait, is that Stacey or Dawn?" book covers.)



Meet Dawn meet Mary Anne. They meet cute.
favorite line:
   Aside from Dawn's "To me!" during their pizza toast, I don't really have a Dawn quote. I do really, really, really love the BSC graphic novel scene where she and Kristy bond in the barn. It tends to make me a little weepy on the right days because it's sweet and funny.


favorite outfit:
   Dawn and the color war where she's all "look, my socks are yellow, right?" :P Actually, um, no idea. She looks really pretty (bored, but pretty) on the cover of Dawn's Big Date.


otp:
   Dawn + Dawn. Which is to say I don't have a pairing for Dawn. Occasionally I 'ship the good ship Kristy/Dawn but not actively or anything more than "I could totally see that working for awhile." Mostly though, I like that Dawn shows some interest in finding someone, but also realizes that she's thirteen and isn't ready for it. It's one of my favorite things about her.
  So she's content to mail letters to Lewis and just do her own thing.


brotp:
   So, MA and Dawn fight a fair bit, right? But anytime I venture into fic where Dawn and MA aren't friends as well as step-siblings, my heart breaks. I actually have to take a minute, each and every time, and just talk myself up to this reality because no. Just no. My little nine year old heart can't take that kind of rejection, okay?
  Also, somewhere in an AU, Jeff and Dawn are hero support for each other.


head canon:
   I tend to ignore the environmental zealot of later Dawn because I'm one of those people who can still read the books but then dismiss certain aspects as the work of a madman/woman. Obviously Cokie Mason got ahold of part of the manuscripts and did some work that was never corrected when she was kicked out of the office, again.
  I'm not really sure how to answer this one. Some people I have found I do have extensive head canon for and others I go with the flow. Dawn's in the middle, I guess.
   I tend to think that for high school she splits her time, doing two years in CA and two years in Stoneybrook, though I can't quite figure out whether it's an intentional division of her time or if something happens to send her back to Stoneybrook for the last two years (because that's how I see it going down). I think she mellowed back out with age and that maybe her environmental nuttiness was directly tied to the way she was unraveling as she realized that much as she loved her mother, her heart was back in California.
  Only she realizes when she returns home to California that things change and so do people, and maybe the stress of Mrs. Winslow dying and the birth of Grace (and what little else I do remember about Dawn's arc in CD) force Dawn to mature but also knock out her idealization of her childhood home state.
   I'm thinking sometime during one of her stints in California, she'll cross paths with Jessica Wakefield and that's what sets Jessica on her Green way for the weirdness that is SVC. Otherwise it makes even less sense. :P


unpopular opinion
   Other than the fact that I like Dawn and kind of dismiss a good chunk of her crazy eco-terrorism as the work of madmen and women and thus not worth my time to recall? Uh, no. I think that does it. Admitting you like Dawn Schafer in BSC fandom has been, at times, the same as committing social suicide.
  The irony of having to be secure enough in my own awesomeness to admit such a thing for a character known for being an ~individual~ is not lost on me. Nor, I imagine, is it lost on you.


a wish
   Aside from wishing other people loved Dawn? I wish the ghostwriters had been less harsh with her. I'm not even sure I could pretend that they didn't realize what they were doing because after a certain point it becomes increasingly difficult see her exit as anything less than "dude, we screwed this up. Get rid of her!" So I wish she'd been allowed to be more like her original self and not the 2-D mockery she (and the others) became over time. Maybe actually retained some of her individuality and not been so militant in forcing her views on other people since she originally didn't do that and it made no sense for that shift to occur.


How can you not love this face?
an oh-god-please-don’t-ever-happen
   Um... I'm pretty sure the good 'ship BSC has sailed into the sunset, but I do pray that if AMM and company decide to pull a SVC and look into the future for Dawn and company that Dawn didn't end up being an extreme activists and instead, I dunno, chilled out while still remaining dedicated to certain causes. She needs some balance.
  But mostly she already got her "please no" in the form of canon. :P


5 words to best describe them
   Blond sprout-loving California girl.


my nickname for them
   Sunshine, in that same way I am called Sunshine. (I'm a little ray of sunshine and my parents meant that in the most Wednesday Addams like way possible.)

This is harder than I thought it would be. Who knew? Working on the others just as slowly, I'm sure, but they will be done!

  There's a post over on the bsc comm that is basically someone venting the numerous reasons they hate Kristy Thomas. You might recall her as the president of the BSC. You might not. We will assume you do, but if not you can totally fake it out along with the rest of us.

  Kristy was never my favorite character growing up. She was outspoken and sporty. She also had a habit of creating situations that would mean my secondhand embarrassment meter would be forced to kick in at any moment. Thing is, Kristy is one of the two characters to suffer the most under the rule of the ghostwriters. (Dawn would be the other, if you wondered.) This means my more grown up self feels the need to look deeper than my childish self did most of the time. Curse you, maturity!

   She began the series as the girl most likely to say it before thinking it through but also the girl who would meticulously (for a twelve/thirteen year old) plan out her big idea before even sharing it with her best friend. She was unapologetically a tomboy who also looked forward to a one-off occasion to wear something dressy since it was a special occasion. She had to learn and relearn that just because someone's actions hurt you, it doesn't give you the right to hurt them in return, even if it's unintentional. She strives to learn to better control her mouth while still retaining that honest quality that is truly rare in reality. (If you ask Kristy if that dress makes your butt look big, she's going to tell you the truth one way or another, k?)


  And that's all before you get to the sympathy card that is played and overplayed throughout the series. When we meet her, Kristy's just managed to find her footing in her personal life after her father abandoned her family, causing her mother to have to go back to work full time, which caused the older kids in the family to have to step up and lose a bit of their childhood in an effort to keep David Michael's childhood as intact as possible.
  Then her mother goes and throws her world into upheaval with her agreeing to marry Watson Brewer, a man Kristy barely knows (by choice and also, if you count The Summer Before, because Watson/Elizabeth haven't been dating all that long). Kristy's not stupid and she knows that millionaire Watson's mansion is far more likely as their home than their small house on Bradford Court, so she'll be leaving behind the house she grew up in. She'll be leaving her best friend and by the time Kristy DOES move, she's started to lose her best friend to another girl (whether you choose to read more into that than originally intended, it still sucks when you feel replaced in someone else's life) who has things Kristy herself would dearly love. (Namely, Dawn's father actually wants her around.)

   So they're shuffled off to a new neighborhood where Kristy feels completely out of place and isn't exactly welcomed with open arms. To be fair, she reacts in a fairly normal way in that she's not thrilled at the move or the prospect of meeting new people so far out of her comfort zone, so she rejects them before they can reject her. But! But she learns not to do that! Growth, people!
  And then her dog dies. Which, with the time warp, happens the same year that most of the rest of the events of the series happens. Losing a pet at that age, especially one who meant so much to Kristy is traumatic. Hell, it's traumatic at any age.

  So yeah, she goes into a bit of a hyper-controlling tailspin. But it makes sense, given how much her life has been changed without her having a say in much of any of it. I gather some of the other sitters feel the same way as they're forever mentioning the changes in the oft-skipped chapter 2s of the series.

   Still, she attempts to correct the super bossy behavior when called on it. It's fairly believable that someone with bossy tendencies coupled with the extreme changes going on behind the scenes would have to be reminded not to overstep her bounds every so often. She's still a kid and if adults have to be reminded, I really think a thirteen year old girl is allowed to be cut some slack.

  But then... things shift, and for the life of me I can't figure out where the dividing line is. I want to say it's before Dawn leaves the 'Brook permanently but that might just be my line for where the BSC ended for my actual enjoyment of the series in any form. (Sorry, Abbers.) If you've got a suggestion, I'm all ears.

  Kristy goes from being very structured in how the BSC is run to being tyrannical. What starts as a bit of a joke is then turned into Very Serious Business. (The Look, guys. The LOOK.) She's obsessive about the club and possibly it's Stacey's first defection from the group that sets things off for Kristy.
   Again, she's not stupid; everyone else in the club is interested in dating to one degree or another, and if Stacey's going to dump them all for new friends (and she does before even quitting/getting fired) it's not hard to imagine that many of the others would as well. Kristy's left holding on to what little bit of control she feels she has, only since it's never presented as this in the books themselves, she tends to come across as insane. (See: Abby's takeover and the breakup of the band club)

  I'm a little torn on the whole overly inclusive of the kids thing. I think Kristy genuinely likes children and likes to organize events for them. The 'Brook doesn't seem to have a shitton of things for kids to do, and these kids are frequently left in the care of people they aren't related to... so maybe they do need some consistency in the form of Kristy's scheme of the month. Some kids probably don't really care all that much, but others seem to enjoy the various fairs, parades, and other things cooked up for them by the club.
  I'm going to see this as less of a "Kristy's obsessed with small children! Weirdo!" and more of a Kristy's a kid friendly type who occasionally needs to be brought back to reality.

  Anyway, Kristy's negative traits were amplified to such a degree that it was very hard to find her likable when certain ghosties were at the helm. Especially when her positive traits were pretty much obliterated by the loss of subtlety in the writing. When everything seemed to switch to "Kristy is bossy and sporty! Claudia can't spell and likes art! Stacey is mathematically inclined in a Sophisticated way! Dawn is an eco-terrorist in training!" stereotypes, Kristy got shafted.

  She's more than the later books allow her to be and I think you're cheating yourself if you judge her solely on her missteps rather than the whole picture.


Btw, I'm not even going to start on the general fandom's characterization of Kristy. It's about as fabulous as the ghostwriter's depiction of her after Kristy's Worst Idea. Which is to say do not want. Also, her sporty side is mostly ignored in this because I don't care all that much.

Tomorrow we finally share something we love. I'd originally planned on that being today's post, but photobucket was finally up (woo!) and then I got bitten by the desire to defend Kristy. Go figure.