Thank you for the rec! I'm currently reading quite a bit of short fic, but it's primarily AO3 where I've been poking around, and I haven't actually found anything long that looks interesting. :D (Though my fic-reading time has been taking a serious hit from the fact that we're currently mainlining LOST to the tune of about 5 episodes a day; we've watched a season and a half in, um, five days? MY BRAIN.)
I was gonna say 'me either' but I just realized that I really don't like Hohenheim. Weirdly enough I've just been starting to wonder whether I have a problem with father figures in fiction... during the hate-of-fictional-women debate I was trying to think of characters I have a knee-jerk dislike of, and remembered that that is very much the case for Gibbs' mentor on NCIS as well as Dad Winchester on SPN, and I can't even say why.
Hee! You know, now that you bring it up, while I wouldn't go so far as to say I dislike Hohenheim, at best I'm kinda indifferent to him. Ditto for John Winchester on SPN! I think my problem in John's case, specifically - and this may also be true of Hohenheim - is that an absent father-figure is much better for the main characters' ability to solve their problems on their own. (See also: Dumbledore in Harry Potter.) Once a powerful, wise mentor character is introduced, they almost have to be killed off (Obi-Wan Kenobi, say ... or John Winchester) or they just kinda hang around solving the main characters' problems for them.
I don't think I had that problem with Gibbs' mentor because he typically caused more problems than he solved. *g* For me, I don't think it's the mentor/father-figure type that bothers me so much as the fact that I'm just not really all that fond of well-adjusted characters in general, especially if it goes hand-in-hand with being super-powerful, or extremely competent in the main characters' field. I like characters who are slightly messed-up, and while I can certainly jump on board the character-love bandwagon for someone who actually is an emotionally healthy person (in fact, there are a few characters that I like just because of that, since, in the sort of thing I typically watch, they tend to be islands of sanity in the midst of chaos *g*), they become a really hard sell for me if they're also ridiculously badass at the same time.
(Though I just realized as I typed the above that John Winchester is a TERRIBLE example of a well-adjusted individual, isn't he? But he definitely provides an emotional pivot for the boys, as well as falling into the "too competent for his own good" category -- I felt like it was a mistake for the show to bring him into the middle of the action as quickly as they did, and I thought that killing him off was really the best thing they could have done with that character at that point.)
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I was gonna say 'me either' but I just realized that I really don't like Hohenheim. Weirdly enough I've just been starting to wonder whether I have a problem with father figures in fiction... during the hate-of-fictional-women debate I was trying to think of characters I have a knee-jerk dislike of, and remembered that that is very much the case for Gibbs' mentor on NCIS as well as Dad Winchester on SPN, and I can't even say why.
Hee! You know, now that you bring it up, while I wouldn't go so far as to say I dislike Hohenheim, at best I'm kinda indifferent to him. Ditto for John Winchester on SPN! I think my problem in John's case, specifically - and this may also be true of Hohenheim - is that an absent father-figure is much better for the main characters' ability to solve their problems on their own. (See also: Dumbledore in Harry Potter.) Once a powerful, wise mentor character is introduced, they almost have to be killed off (Obi-Wan Kenobi, say ... or John Winchester) or they just kinda hang around solving the main characters' problems for them.
I don't think I had that problem with Gibbs' mentor because he typically caused more problems than he solved. *g* For me, I don't think it's the mentor/father-figure type that bothers me so much as the fact that I'm just not really all that fond of well-adjusted characters in general, especially if it goes hand-in-hand with being super-powerful, or extremely competent in the main characters' field. I like characters who are slightly messed-up, and while I can certainly jump on board the character-love bandwagon for someone who actually is an emotionally healthy person (in fact, there are a few characters that I like just because of that, since, in the sort of thing I typically watch, they tend to be islands of sanity in the midst of chaos *g*), they become a really hard sell for me if they're also ridiculously badass at the same time.
(Though I just realized as I typed the above that John Winchester is a TERRIBLE example of a well-adjusted individual, isn't he? But he definitely provides an emotional pivot for the boys, as well as falling into the "too competent for his own good" category -- I felt like it was a mistake for the show to bring him into the middle of the action as quickly as they did, and I thought that killing him off was really the best thing they could have done with that character at that point.)