What are we but our friends?

1. Comment on this post and ask for a letter.
2. I will give you one.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter, and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

oursin cruelly gave me "z", so here we go.

Zoe Alleyn Washburne (Firefly): Of Joss Whedon's ass-kicking women, possibly the one who is least undercut by his taste for angst, even after the tragic developments of the cinema spin-off film. Practically everyone in the fandom seems to adore her and the grace with which she handles her professional and personal lives. Not an uncommon character type, but one who's very rare as a woman, and her sardonic sense of humour just adds to the wonderfulness.

Zoe Herriot (Doctor Who): Most notorious in the fandom for her sometimes outrageous dress sense, especially the famed Shiny Shiny Catsuit worn in The Mind Robber and parts of The Invasion, but she's far more than a clotheshorse. First companion specifically created as the Doctor's intellectual equal or greater, but like all companions created as having talents in their own right she suffered from inconsistent writing and lazy scriptwriters who reduced her to a generic decorative sufferer of peril. But there's still a great deal of awesome there, in particular in The Invasion where she blows up an irritating reception computer by confusing it, in a scene which comes across as even more pleasurable in these days of automated telephone menus, and programs missiles to destroy Cyber battlecruisers while squaddies ogle her bottom. And if The Mind Robber can be trusted, she's the most fully-fledged geek companion, with an unquenchable love of crap old superhero stories. The worst aspect of the Season Six B theory is that, if you view the Two parts of The Two Doctors as being set post-War Games, the Doctor went back for Victoria, one of the few companions to explicitly quit because they were fed up with the violence and bloodshed, and ignored the mindwiped Zoe, who enjoyed herself so much more...

Zack Allan (Babylon 5): The Everyman of B5 and one whose near fall into fascism provided much needed nuance to the Earth Alliance political story. Otherwise, best remembered for his clothing difficulties and his hopeless romantic interest in the utterly-out-of-his-league-and-also-doomed Lyta Alexander. In an age where much TV and cinema seems devoted to telling utterly worthless male losers that they are entitled to have intelligent and competent women fall in love with them by the sheer intensity of their yearning, it's bracingly unsentimental that his hopes are crushed by an interaction in which he completely fails to notice that she's possessed by aliens, which might provide an argument as to why it wouldn't have worked out. Also, Jeff Conaway reputedly pulled a knife on the Gallagher brothers a few months ago after the vile, pig-ignorant, talentless, artistically and politically reactionary, homophobic, misogynistic has-beens mocked the state of his career and his physical health problems. Which adds a huge amount to his ranking in my personal estimation, balanced only by my disappointment that he didn't actually inflict any injury.

Zack (Goodnight Mister Tom): First sympathetic character who died by tragic bad luck in a story I was personally invested in. Goodnight Mister Tom is a sentimental but adorable children's novel which would sadly be impossible to publish nowadays given the likely interaction between its subject, the quasi-father-son relationship between a reclusive and misanthropic country widower and an abused London boy who is billeted with him after wartime evacuation, and current PEEDO!!! hysteria. Its most memorable moment, for me, remains the incident early on in which Tom angsts in shock at the implied depths of human depravity when he realises that Willy, the boy, is expecting to be burned with the poker that Tom is poking the fire with while upbraiding him for a minor boyish offence. Zack is Willy's closest friend among his fellow evacuees, who is Jewish, though not a great deal is made of this, and who is killed by bombing in the final stages of the book to make the ending not saccharinely happy.

Count Zodiac (recent novels and stories by Michael Moorcock): Zodiac, aka Reinhardt Von Bek, aka Ulrich Von Bek, aka Monsieur Zenith, aka Crimson Eyes, is Moorcock's twentieth-century-Earth avatar of Elric, his high fantasy hero. Zodiac is essentially an aristocratic Gentleman Rogue who is a bit more nasty than the traditional mid-twentieth-century Gentleman Rogue, in that he's also a psychic vampire who sucks out the bad guys' life-force instead of just shooting them. Still fun to read, though. Rose Von Bek is strongly implied to have shagged both him and Elric, which considering the peculiar and indistinct mindmelding/roleplaying situation between alternate selves in Moorcock's work may be either a romantic triangle or just trying out different costumes.