There's a thing floating around about character archetypes, or which types of characters you're usually drawn to, etc. My own meagre contribution: the characters I *like* are pretty wide-ranging (e.g., Giles, Ray Kowalski, Frank Pembleton, BobbyHobbes!, C. J. Cregg, Krycek, Joe Dawson, etc.) but tend to have in common the traits of (a) competence and (b) a certain degree of painfully-acquired life wisdom (which is to say, they are not shiny kids, they've been smacked around by life and hauled themselves up off the mat and struggled on).

But the characters I *love*--the ones who've compelled me enough to make a serious effort to move into their heads and write from that vantage point--are three in number: Mulder, Methos, Fraser. And what these three have in common is -- they're aliens. Not the overt sort of pointy-eared or be-tentacled aliens, but rather human beings just like us (well, leaving aside the Immortal aspect, with Methos), who look like us, walk and talk and suffer like us, but who are essentially *different* in their understandings of life, love, work, and the various daily-bread conventionalities that hold most of us together. Their passions are not our passions, they're not about happiness or security or a reasonably fulfilling marriage or living a "successful" life or whatever. But their alienness is not about "Oh, I'm going to be an unconventional rebel, tee hee," it's just them being who they are, who they have to be. They are *different.* They're my people.

( And then a few musings on House... )

And it has been a very very long week, and I'm wobbling off to bed.