Friday Confessional: Kissed By the Pride of an Outlander

Since I totally blew it on Friday and did not, in fact, get up my latest Confession, I decided to give you all a treat and make a slight adjustment to this week's posting schedule. 

So, without further ado, I do hereby confess:

I routinely fall in love with men who do not exist. 

I'm not talking about the usual, "I'm dating this guy but he's kind of a skeezball but I know that deep down he's really great and if I could just make him see that it's OK that he still thinks it's funny to pants random strangers and that I don't really mind that he'd rather play Call of Duty than spend some time doing the horizontal mambo, and no I'm NOT trying to change him because I know deep down in there somewhere is the man of my dreams!" -type schtick. 

No, I mean men who really don't exist, outside of some paper, ink and the images of them I've created in my mind (or, in #2's case, that the BBC has created in my mind for me). I love books of all genres, ranging from romance to mystery, and everything in-between. As almost any girl who has lusted over the badassness of Dean Moriarty or marveled at the romance of Romeo can tell you, it's not particularly hard to fall for characters who, if you had to deal with them in real life, would most likely make you want to claw your eyes out. 

 

The following three men, though -- they're time-tested, and are the ones I'd like to hang out with in REAL life, ifyouknowwhatimean. ::wink, wink::

# 3: Tristan Carruthers 
Kissed By an Angel by Elizabeth Chandler

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As an 11-year old, I was loathe to accept my mom's opinion on anything (my, my, how some things never change). Which is why, when she approached me at Barnes and Noble with a thin little tome from the Young Adult section, I barely glanced at the cover before making a face and going back to my perusal of The Babysitter's Club shelf.

Thankfully, my mom bought it anyway, and the guy pictured on the cover was cute, so I read it. I wish there had been a less-cheesy tagline and that the writing was a little bit better ("After he's gone, will the spirit of his love protect her?" That's the best Simon and Schuster could do?!). Then again, it's a book for pre-teens and young adults, and it's not like it's of Stephanie Meyer proportions of badness. Ivy is a bit flighty and whiny, Eric makes my skin crawl to this very day and Suzanne is a self-absorbed brat. Despite her moments, though, I came to love Ivy, because she was just a regular girl. Don't even get me started on the emotional angst I felt right along with Lacy.

And then there's Tristan.

To my pre-teen mind, Tristan Carruthers was the literary embodiment of all that a girl could ask for. The dude was a hot commodity student-athlete, did whatever he had to as a way of finally getting Ivy to go out with him, waited around the limbo of the after-life just to make sure that she didn't go getting herself KILLED and was blissfully ignorant to everything that didn't have to do with his beloved. Plus, I mean, come on; he put shrimp tails up his nose to get a laugh out of an 8-year old.

To my adult mind, Tristan is a good kid who caught a raw deal when he accidentally got murdered. Having re-read the entire KBAA trilogy a thousand times (and owning not one, not two, but three separate releases of it, including two of the first, broken-up edition, because I kept losing Soulmates), Tristan HAS lost a bit of his appeal, mostly because I get so annoyed at his single-minded quest to save Ivy. I'm not going to give away plot points (even now, I'm not ashamed to tell people that KBAA is my favorite book and that Tristan was my first great love, so I encourage everyone to go buy it and read it, despite the horrible, rip-off packaging of the newest addition, which my loving boyfriend bought me at Target), but eventually, the passiveness grates on the nerves.

I don't care, though -- Tristan will forever hold a place in my heart as the first literary man I ever fell in love with.

Moving on....

#2: Fitzwilliam Darcy 

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

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Does this one even need an explanation?! The man has an entire mini-genre of books devoted to him. He's dark. He's broody. He wears a cravat. What is there not to love?

Also, I first saw the BBC Film when I was a 17-year old Junior in high school, and even then, I recognized that Colin Firth is possibly the most accurately cast human being on the planet in this role, and anyone who thinks otherwise is nuts -- that's all I have to say on this subject.

Which leads me to my current literary obsession...

# 1: Jamie Fraser 

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

One of my best friends, Batman (to my Robin), started disappearing on me for weeks on end -- despite living 2 hours away, we are usually pretty good about texting every so often just to say hi. When I saw her for my birthday and asked where the hell she had got off to, she confessed that she was having an affair with the Outlander series. Fast-forward a few months to me in an airport sans book, and soon I, too, was disappearing from my regular life because I was so caught-up in Pre-Jacobite-Rising Scotland. Claire is a fantastic protagonist with a lot of spunk (and yes, I have found myself yelling, "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!", although if my Nana ever heard me I'm sure I'd be dead by now), but my ever-growing obsession with manly, kilt-wearing Jamie Fraser is the real reason I sped through the first book.

Like Mr. Darcy, Jamie is broody and has an accent -- or rather, a hot Scottish brogue. Like Tristan, he's a total studmuffin and has a weird, paranormal contact with the female protagonist, after she  falls 200 years into the past after touching a bunch of rocks in the Scottish Highlands. What makes Jamie unique, though, and thus the current front-runner in my list of Top 3 Fictional Men I Would Want A Free Pass For, is that he is so passionate.

And he's a ginger, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't always secretly expect myself to end up with some hot-tempered dude who looks good in a kilt. I'll have to settle for the red that appears in A's beard during the summer months. But I digress.

Jamie isn't perfect -- he's somewhat arrogant, proud to a fault and stubborn as a mule. He's also unbelievably loyal, to his country, to his clan and to Claire. Of course, there are points where I just want to slap him (and then I remember he's not real). But there are more times when I just want to shag him. He's smart, he's cheeky and he's willing to do anything, including DIE, to protect those he holds most dear.

Not surprisingly, most of those attributes fit A, too. I think that might be part of the reason I've decided to keep him around so long.

Well, and the fact that he's an actual person, who happens to let me convince him to dress up as a saloon owner for Halloween. But whatever. ;)


So,  which literary characters have you found yourself swooning over? Heathcliff? Lancelot? Mitch Albom? Team Edward or Team Jacob? (I promise I'll get around to that Twilight-post... I have very complex opinions on the subject). I've spent hours of my life casting both Tristan and Jamie in the movie-in-my-head; who would you want to cast as your favorite leading literary men?

TV TIMEOUT --- I was just googling for pics of the original, 3-book edition of KBAA and stumbled upon the fact that a 4th book was released YESTERDAY, after, well.. at least 15 years because that's when I first read the originals. I don't even know what to do with myself and am trying to figure out if I can make it to a Barnes and Noble on my lunchbreak and then spend an entire night finding out wtf happens. I love it and hate it all at the same time. If I disappear, please tell the cops not to worry and I'm just trapped in a glass cage of emotion.