What fictional characters would you actually want to be friends with?

[Linty_Fresh]

Gotta resurrect this thread, because I’ve just started watching Da Vinci’s Inquest again, and I have to say that Dominic Da Vinci is the man. I could easily see myself hanging with this guy. He looks like he’d be the best friend you could possibly ask for.

I think I’d get along with Chick Savoy, too.

And I would happily throw rocks at Det. Angela Kosmo, just to get her to slam me to the ground and cuff me. Hard.

Da Vinci’s Inquest is my favorite show in a long, long time, and it’s all because of the characters.

[BrainGlutton]

Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy!

From The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, by Avram Davidson – a collection of short stories set in the 19th Century, in the mythical southeastern European state, the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania (modeled, clearly, on the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The hero is Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy, a brilliant and largely autodidact polymath of the minor nobility – urbane, broad-minded, gentle, temperamentally cheerful, philosophical yet practical, endlessly resourceful. He works (when he is working at all, and not alone studying) as a kind of detective, but unlike Sherlock Holmes he has no fear that his mind is like an attic, of limited storage capacity; he studies everything. Even magic. (Many of the stories include supernatural elements; and phrenology is crucial to his solving a mystery in “The Tell-Tale Head.”) His personal motto is, “Often pause, and turn aside.” He is also kind and respectful, for the most part, to his social inferiors (which includes most people) and his intellectual inferiors (practically everybody, including the emperor). Kind, and endlessly patient.

From “The Autogondola Invention”:

Incomparably less large and vast than the Russian Empire, incomparably less powerful than the German Empire, incomparably less sophisticated than the Austro-Hungarian Empire – still Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania, its mere name a subject for risibility elsewhere, was his empire, his native land. It may not have functioned very well? so much the more was he pleased that it functioned at all. Its Secret Police was a joke? so much the more he too would enjoy the joke; no one laughed at the Secret Polices in the other empires. Its many languages rivaled Babel or Pentecost? let them: at least here no schoolboy was flogged for praying in whatsoever minor mother tongue. One empire had already, fairly recently, gone from the political map of Europe; and although the name of Bonaparte still rang like a tocsin here and there, it was uncertain that the Prince Imperial would himself ever ring it successfully.

Day by day others asked, how fared their country’s wheat compared with Russian wheat, its butter with Danish butter, its timber with Carpathian timber, its tar with Baltic tar, its cloth with English cloth? Day by day the same spokes of the universal wheel flashed by: love, sorrow, terror, death, success, failure, hunger, joy, growth, decay, weakness, strength: the wheel turned and turned and turned: nothing stayed the same, no one bathed twice in the same flowing water for the water had flowed on and flowed away. There is no star at the pole of the universe, young Dr. Eszterhazy recollected the ancient astronomer; and if there was and long had been but blankness in the comparable area of his own country, then might there not be a space and place for him? What he hoped for, others did not even think of; what others did not think, might he not think of?

And after thinking, do?

From “Writ in Water, or the Gingerbread Man”:

The Scotch had not conquered the English nor had the English conquered the Scotch in order for one sovereign to become King of England and King of Scotland and – eventually – King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. What had brought it about was, firstly, the Scottish marriage of King Henry’s sister, and, secondly, the not-marriage of King Henry’s daughter: The Queen of Scots hath a bonny babe and I am but a barren stock. Neither had any wars at last united Scythia or Pannonia; the Pannonians at a certain point historical had no Crown-Prince? Well, neither had they any Salic Law; the then-Crown-Prince of Scythia was wedded to the then-Crown-Princess of Pannonia; both being tactful enough to die before their conjoint-grandchild, said grandchild became Sovereign of both Scythia and Pannonia – and what school-child anywhere did not know that the people of Scythia were (principally) Goths and that the people of Pannonia were (principally) Avars? What an occasion for the erasure of frontiers, the unification of armies, the abolition of customs and octrois! There were, however, also all those lesser, minor territories, of which the new Sovereign was Prince of one and Duke of another . . . in the Scythian Line of Descent . . . Grand Hetman here and Chief Boyar there . . . in the Pannonian Line of Descent . . . and so on . . . and so on . . .

What to do about them, these not-quite-nations already becoming obsolete in an age where every political entity was felt to require a prime minister, a general staff, a set of postage stamps, a – What was done was perhaps cleverer than students of political science realized, for all these “Hegemonies,” as they were called, from Ritchli to Little Great Dombrovia to Hyperborea, and including Vlox-Majore and Vlox-Minore, were not absorbed by either Scythia or Pannonia, but were autonomously united to form Transbalkania.

And now the cheese of Poposhki, the smoked sturgeon of the Romanou, the brined-pork and the brawn of the Slovatchko Alps, appeared . . . untaxed! . . . on the market-stalls of Bella – Avar-Ister – Apollograd – and everywhere else in the fourth-largest empire in Europe. (The Turks were only fifth. Served them right.) Also the wheat of Scythia, and the beef and mutton of the wide Pannonian plains. And, as Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy composed this paean in his own mind and looked at the ever-thronging streets of what, once a walled town, was now a world capital (yes, it was a small world), he considered the role which he himself would play. Which he had intended he should play and had designed (and re-designed) his own life the better to play it. You can’t catch me, said –

And, my own invention from this thread:

Eszterhazy had long made a habit of keeping several enquiries in progress, in some manner or other, simultaneously, hopeful to inoculate himself against the sense of ennui and listlessness that often ensued upon the successful conclusion of an enquiry. And on this morning, while attempting to concentrate his mind on the far more pressing (indeed, to be sure a matter of national security and international tranquility) matter of the theft of the Cyprus Regalia from the Crypt of St. Sophie, he found his attention inexplicably but inexorably diverted to the mystery of the Chicken Who Crossed the Road. It would appear to the casual observer that the worms and corn were as abundant upon the Hither Side of the road as upon the Thither Side, the gravel bits as bright and appealing, the hens as plump and complaisant. Yet Eszterhazy, he more than many others, could readily empathize with the creeping restlessness that could make the near and comfortable side of the road appear stale through familiarity, the unknown far side an inviting field of discovery and possibilities. Just so, but it would be an error of sophomoric dimensions to assume, without more evidence, that a course of action appealing to Eszterhazy might be similarly appealing – or appealing for similar reasons – to a Gallus gallus. As he selected from his humidor, clipped, lit, drew, and meditatively puffed upon a Trichonopoly cheroot, Eszterhazy ruminated (ruminated? aviated? gallicated? brooded? nay, not brooded) upon the words of the so-called Baconian Addendum to the Malleus Maleficarum: “The mind of a chicken is not the same as the mind of a man.” And that, indeed, might well be the answer. But, Eszterhazy wondered, to which question?

One curious void appears in Eszterhazy’s character and is never even obliquely commented upon, by any character in the stories nor by the author’s narrative voice: Eszterhazy has no love live or sex life of any kind. He is by no means prudish, but he seems to have no interest whatsoever in sex or intimacy in any form. There is nothing at all to suggest he is homosexual, either. He seems, rather, to be simply asexual.

Just once I would have liked to see Eszterhazy in love.* Great pity Avram passed on in 1993.

*Legend has Elizabeth I once expressed a similar wish regarding Falstaff, and Shakespeare obliged her with The Merry Wives of Windsor. But, as Judy jones and William Wilson noted in An Incomplete Education, “If so, the monarch got short weight. This is Falstaff bereft of his wit, and he’s not in love, or even in lust, just prodded by vanity and greed.”

[Sunspace]

In high school, I always wanted a smart weird female friend like Podkayne of Mars. I think that would have made a positive difference in my life.

I felt like I could come home and be welcomed at the Weasleys’ as well.

[Linty_Fresh]

@Sunspace

I felt like I could come home and be welcomed at the Weasleys’ as well.

Good choice. I like the Weasley’s, too.

Joker from Full Metal Jacket seemed like a cool person to hang out with.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

I think that Daria Morgendorffer would make a fine SDMB Member.

Or Moderator.