Interests meme

[icarus_chained]

Comment and I will pick seven of your interests for you to elabourate on.

Answers for  Ilyena_sylph:

Aliens: not the movie series, although I have to agree with my sister and say that Sigourney Weaver as Ripley was one of the single hottest women I've ever seen in action. But I love the idea of aliens in general. I love exploring the differences, the similarities, the cultures, the way their environments shaped their development, the way we react to them, the way they react to us, the sheer number of *possibilities* they represent. I love trying to see things from the POV of an alien, I love trying to consider all the different ways they might percieve things, the different ways of life that might lead to different, and for them equally valid, systems of belief and morality. Especially that last. I love considering what someone like Q for example, omnipotent and immortal, would consider immoral. Bascially, I just find aliens fascinating.

Codes of Honour: Honour as a concept is one that is very dear to me. Almost indefinable, beyond right and wrong, a way of dealing with the world that strives to be fair, to be just, and at the same time to be true to the person living that life. I love the way different people have different codes, I love seeing, in the blackest of villains, hints of a sense of honour, albeit skewed. I love trying to understand those individual codes, trying to see how they fit into the world at large. And I love that honour is not a perscribed condition. It is not holy writ, or law (though both have tried at times to lay claim to it). Honour is personal, powerful, and a true indicator of the kind of person you are.

Ganimard: The inspector from LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin stories. I've a thing for inspectors, especially ones like Ganimard. Dutiful, smart, a tad obsessive, fair, with a grudging respect for the man he hunts. Lupin's way of life is one Ganimard will never approve of, and the way Lupin escapes him, insults him, then has the *gall* to <i>help</i> him absolutely infuriates him, but Ganimard also makes no secret of his respect for the man, and the unwilling humour he shares with him. I like that.

Grotesques: this one is ... complicated. When I say grotesque, I don't necessarily mean something evil, or horrible. I mean something skewed off normal, something twisted from what it should be, misshaped or wearing a semblance of something it's not. And the reason they entrance me, the reason I love them, is how often a surface twisting, a skew away from normal, reveals a deeper truth beneath. A deeper beauty, or a deeper ugliness. A veil of ugliness, to hide true beauty, or true ugliness finally revealed. Strangeness showing how similar people are beneath, or otherness revealing how much more wide and wonderous the possibilities of our world are. Grotesques are a clouded window, that both show the world around us, and reflect our own image back at us, distorted, perhaps enough to reveal the truth behind our fair seeming. 

P/Q: Picard/Q, from ST:TNG. Firstly, because I fell in love with Q, and later because I realised what the two men did for each other. The depth of learning, the growth made possible by that relationship, in both Picard and especially Q ... it seemed a beautiful, beautiful thing to me. It still does. Besides, I just love watching Picard deadpanning in the face of Q's flamboyance.

Quaternary Studies: I encountered this area of study for the first time this year, and fell absolutely in love. It's because of the pattern. I'm OCD, I'm idealistic, and I'm scientist enough to passionately want to understand how the universe works. Quaternary studies, with its broad sweep of time, with its examinations of the processes that changed the shape of our world over the last fragment of its life, and the intricacies I found contained in it ... For the first time, I found an area of study that delved into the patterns behind the chaos of reality. I got to bounce up and down between scales and processes, see how every little thing in the universe is linked in one way or another, see how tiny things affect galaxy spanning processes, and vice-versa. It was like ... being blind and feeling your way along the underside of some vast, vast structure, and through your minute explorations, getting just enough of a sense of the shape and size of the thing to understand how much you *don't* understand. How much you have left to explore, how huge and tiny and intricate and broad it all is. How utterly beautiful it is, this thing you can't see yet. This thing you might, one day, understand. I loved it. I walked out of every class feeling a sense of euphoria.

Saiyuki: believe it or not, but it wasn't actually for the slash. It was more for the sense of ... family, the sense of four disparate and seemingly mutually exclusive individuals joining on a quest. Being willing to die for each other, without having to understand everything that went into making each other the people they are. I love Hakkai, he of the polite smile and homocidal nature. Sanzo, whose worldview and interpretation of Buddhism I find fascinating. Gojyo, who's almost the most normal of them, and finds strength despite his otherness. Goku, who finds a way to be happy no matter what. Ni Jenyi, who creeps me the hell out, but is cool in a sociopathic kinda way. And all the others. I love the philosophies, I love the action, I love the relationships, I love the tragedy, the hope, the snark. Kazuya Minekura has sucked me into her world. Utterly.