It's Always More Complicated

From crossedwires

1. COMMENT WITH A MYSTERIOUS COMMENT OF YOUR CHOICE.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters and your thoughts on each.

First up, Brush the Wandering Hedgehog from the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley, about whom I have expatiated heretofore and whose likeness (by Margaret Tempest) features in my current default icon.

I couldn't choose between these two, because, really, they go together like going-together things: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, which is a (possibly pernicious) example of the 'they hate each other so really they're in lurrrve' trope that actually works. And how is awesome Beatrice in any way not awesome?

I did wonder about Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, but since she changed her name once within the novel and is in prospect of changing it again (in both cases to names that Victorianists can spend many hours debating the correct pronunciation of), I decided to go with her uncle, Mr Brooke, who is a wonderful character study though, do admit, one would hate to live with him and he was hardly the man to provide adequate guardianship to his orphaned nieces. Brilliantly done by Robert Hardy in the TV version.

The entire Beetle family in Cold Comfort Farm: the patriarch Agony Beetle, his sensible and forthright wife (''Tes flying in the face of nature!' - 'All the same, it might be worth tryin'.') who is not from darkest Sussex, their daughter Merriam the hired girl at the farm, with her fatal habit of succumbing to seduction when the sukebind blooms, and her four offspring, who are being brought up to be a jazz-band in one o' they West End nightclubs.

And the very uncanonical Belinda in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (though Purcell clearly has a casual attitude to canonicity generally, with the witches in Dido and Aeneas and the numerous interpolations into A Midsummer Night's Dream, and let's just not go there with what he did with King Arthur). I was wondering: what happens to Belinda after Dido dies of grief following Aeneas's abandonment? She seems a sensible type (if perhaps failing to see what a bad idea Aeneas was as a lover for Dido), so I don't see her doing an Charmain-and-Iras act. Maybe she takes up the reigns of state in her competent hands? Maybe that was the plan? - Dido generally moping around was perhaps not the best thing for Carthage. I think there's a story there.