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Just rambled a bit (in a comment) about what, recently, I've gotten obsesssive about and what I haven't, and you know what? Even after twenty-odd years of observing and analysing this in myself, I still can't say what the common factors are in all of the things that got me intensely interested in my life. It's strange. There is no one theme, no one character type or ship, no one genre, no kink, not even a physical type (and sexual attraction is really only present in a fraction of these, anyway)... There's a certain cluster of themes I tend to be interested in, some characters I like tend to have *some* traits in common, but really, nothing reliably predicts obsession. The only universally common factor, "angst", is so general that it's practically useless as a distinguishing characteristic. It's also present in a zillion texts I've consumed and *not* gotten obsessively interested in. And it comes in so many different shapes, even in the texts I'm interested in, that I'm not even sure you can say it's a commonality between all of them.

Things, texts, characters, and people I've been strongly obsessive about, somewhat chronologically, over the past 31 years, a by no means exhaustive list:

Twin Peaks (Cooper)
Lord of the Rings (Frodo; Frodo and Sam; Frodo, Sam and Rosie; hobbit members of the Fellowship in general)
Highlander (Methos)
Deep Space Nine (almost everybody had stuff going on, there, that I was deeply interested in. Also, group dynamics & politics.)
Farscape (John Crichton, most strongly, but also very much the whole Moya family)
Remus & Sirius of Harry Potter (never interested in the books or the world of the books, in particular, just these two, mostly as fanon had them, ca. 2002/2003)
Life on Mars (Sam)
Hellblazer (John Constantine)
Doctor Who (the Doctor, esp. Nine and Twelve)
Radiohead (Thom Yorke but also the whole band and its collective dynamics - and let me tell you, this entire thing threw me for a loop, because I don't get obsessive about people, only stories, or so I thought. But of course the media image of real people *is* a story.)
Terra Ignota (Mycroft, I guess? But entirely in a "wtf" kind of way. Yeuch.)
The Laundry series (Bob; also Bob & Mo)
Donjon (Herbert & Marvin)
Steven Universe (mostly Steven, I guess, but really the whole family dynamic there. But Steven is the nexus of that, of course.)
Foreigner series (Bren)
12 Monkeys (show, not movie, though I loved the movie. Ramse; Ramse & Cole; Cole; also absolutely everybody and their twisted conscience and even more twisted, shifting relationships)

There's some things that crop up a lot here, like trauma, like mass murder, like falls from grace, like discrepancies between internal identity and external presentation and perception... but none of these can be generalised.

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I'm as disturbed as anyone by the fact that the list below is basically all guys, btw. And also confused, because as I said, there's a lot of things there where I'm pretty sure that erotic attraction plays no part at all in my interest (there's a freakin' anthropomorphic *duck* on the list! Although I gotta admit that there's one artist on that comic series that draws him in a disturbingly sexy way, which always confuses the heck out of me. I'm not sure I *want* to be attracted to a duck, not even for the duration of a few pages. :D But that's small fraction of the series, and for the most part, he's a stylised duck with noodle limbs.)

Also, anyway, I'm bi, I've been attracted to women, in real life, as often as to men (more often, really) - which is to say, still very, very rarely, haha. So I'm wondering if this lack of women on the list of my past obsessions has something to do with the kind of stories that get told about male characters vs. stories that get told about female characters.

(I thought about whether to put Aeryn on the list or not, and it was a close call. But I had to be honest, ultimately, and admit to myself that although I do love Aeryn, and find her a lot hotter than John, my *obsession* was mostly centred on John, although all the central group of Farscape characters have lots of moments where I get strongly interested in them, which is why I love the show so thoroughly and enduringly.)

Recently, there've been a few books and book series, btw, that I think would have me obsessively interested in their (female) main characters if they were tv shows or longer series. I think one thing about obsessive interests is, they need a somewhat sustained source, a certain amount of material, which is why there's so few single books or short series or standalone movies on that list. (Terra Ignota is the exception, mainly because the wtf factor *and* the density of chewy ideas is so intense there that those alone were enough to fuel obsession, for me.)

So, honorary mentions:

Baru Cormorant (I forget what the series is called but all the books have her name in the title)
Cheris (Hexarchate/Machineries of Empire)
Essun (Broken Earth trilogy)
Gideon and Harrow (Locked Tomb)

Now, the similarities between these four/five (and also some of the guys on my previous list!) are somewhat obvious...

I also really like - this feels too obvious to say, really, for someone of my generation - Ripley and Sarah Connor. (Did like the Terminator tv show, too, but somehow not *quite* strongly enough to fuel an obsessive interest. I'm still slightly confused by this, because I kind of would have expected it to.)

And Furiosa, of course.

But yeah, none of these interests ever reached obsession level. (I have read my share of Terminator fic, though, and that's probably the thing, out of the ones listed above, that got closest to actually being a fandom for me. Probably not a coincidence that it's also the one with the most canon material.)

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I think this is not the first time I've thought about these things on this blog. I'm also pretty sure I haven't really gotten any further in understanding what's going on there, since the last time.

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(Deleted because I was probably wrong about that.)

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I still haven't even figured out if this is an attraction thing or an identification thing (or both? Can it be both? I think in some cases it is.) And I was wondering about that in 1998 already, when I wrote that Methos essay.

ETA: Maybe it's the one for some, the other for others, both for yet another subset, and something completely different for yet another subset?

What the fuck is the essence of "obsession-worthiness", to my subconscious? (ETA2: Is there one? Or has it always been many different things?)

It's gotten even less clear, if possible, over the years. Most of the early ones at least had an attraction component that I could identify, but a lot of the recent ones had no attraction component whatsoever (Herbert and Marvin - the aforementioned duck and a dragon; Bob - a narrative voice, and not even a particularly attractive one; Steven freakin Universe), but the identification element is at best extremely indirect, too.