Sam and his Stupid Car

[hmpf]

I just stumbled upon this description of SUV users from a market report by the automobile industry:

"They tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities."

Now, I'm not 100% sure if Sam's car really counts as an SUV, but it certainly rather looks like one - and the description fits him rather well...

I need to print this out and tack it to the wall above my screen when I'm writing Sam, because I tend to write him far too nice (misled in my mental image of him by the not all that infrequent moments in his 1973 life in which he's *not* acting like an asshole, damn those inconsistent LOM writers *g*). I'm certainly writing him rather too nice in the 'private' fic I'm writing at the moment - although that's partly justified by its being a sort of epilogue to mindfic, i.e. the 'end result' of a much longer story in which he has plenty of time and opportunity to change.

Comments

Well, I wouldn't be so tempted to write him as a nice guy...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

if he didn't have nicer elements to his character - I may idealise the men I'm attracted to, but there's usually *some* basis in fact for that idealisation. (I don't get attracted to unredeemably unpleasant people, generally speaking. Conflicted, contradictory ones? Yes. But never real 'bad guys'. I don't really get the 'bad boy appeal'.)

But it's striking that we only ever see a nicer side to Sam in his fantasy world, and that both of the framing sequences from his actual/primary reality show him in a very different light than his fantasies do. Also, it's at least noticeable that while Sam does care about people, he's often shockingly bad at recognising and acknowledging their actual needs and desires, and at reading and responding to human behaviour in general - a bit of characterisation that is somewhat at odds with his supposedly being a very able police officer, incidentally. So, I think he has definite deficits in the interpersonal department (possibly somewhat along the lines of my own deficits there - I, too, care deeply about people in general and my friends and family in particular, yet am almost completely unable to maintain normal human relationships; I'd say I probably fall somewhere on the margins of the autistic spectrum. And so, probably, does Sam.)

Re: Well, I wouldn't be so tempted to write him as a nice guy...

[neuralclone.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have similar tendencies (and certainly rate high on "introversion" on most personality tests).

Re. Sam - I was packed off on a management course at work last week, and one of the interesting things we discussed was the difference between "managers" and "leaders". Interesting not only in itself, but because I immediately recognised Sam as one of the "managers" (concerned by process, ruling by virtue of his official position, concerned with allocating blame) while Gene fit equally easily into the role of "leader" (leading by personality, concerned with goals and preferring to fix things rather than allocate blame). The thing is, both types are fairly necessary if an organisation is to run smoothly.

(As for Sam in the 21st century - I think a major flaw in the series is we didn't see enough of it! The ending, for example, might have been more palatable if we'd been given more detail as to what lead up to it.)