" ... if you're like me, you just keep chasing the storm." (VERONICA MARS)

Quick note to start:  my blog has a Facebook now.  Please come visit & Like it!

www.facebook.com/fourcolorprincesses

And now, the article -

Anyone who's even a little familiar with this blog knows that my chief focus is on writing about the heroic women who inspired me when I was younger.  A few times, though, I've talked about characters who came into my life in more recent times, and this article is one of those pieces, while also serving as the second in my "Women of Mystery" set of pieces.  

The heroic character is one Veronica Mars.  Yes, this piece was originally going to be about Daphne Blake, with Veronica to follow - but with the amazing Veronica Mars Kickstarter Campaign breaking world records, I felt it was appropriate to pay a visit to Neptune instead of Coolsville.  Next time, Daphne.  

The year was 2004.  I was 32 years old.  It's crazy to me to realize it's been nearly a decade since Veronica took on her first televised case.  Nevertheless, facts are facts, as any detective will tell you.

2004 was a year of a weird sort of stasis in my life.  I was in the process of fully recovering from a deep depression that had marked the change in centuries, and I suffered from an illness that put me in a situation where I couldn't go out much beyond working at my unfulfilling job.  I was no longer depressed - I'd worked out those issues - but my physical capabilities were so limited I was forced to stay indoors and relax to try to recover as much as I could from a lot of physical pain.

So I sat around the house, when I wasn't working.  My body was grateful for the respite from activity outside of work, but my mind was constantly at work.  One of the many down sides of my particular variety of Asperger's Syndrome is that it's very difficult - if not impossible - for my brain to truly settle down and relax, to keep from thinking about everything I see.  I think about everything I experience, even to this day.  I've learned tools and techniques to be as mellow as possible, but I still take in every bit of information I observe and store it, analyze it, keep it in the active part of my memories.  It can be pretty annoying - not only to me, but to others as well who have to deal with me.

On the other hand, it's great for solving mysteries.

And solve them, I did.  I rekindled a lost fondness for mysteries that year, and started reading various mystery stories to keep my brain occupied while I was sitting around doing nothing.  And that's when Veronica Mars came into the picture.

I'm reluctant to really talk about the details of the story lines of the show in this blog entry, because I really don't want to spoil things for people who've yet to discover the series.  As a result, I won't talk much about plot details or the interactions between Veronica and her supporting cast of characters.  Discovering the twists and turns of Veronica's cases - that's part of the great joy of the show, as I discovered in September when the program premiered and I immersed myself in the world of Neptune and its varied inhabitants. 

But what I do want to talk about is what Veronica herself meant to me as a character, and how she helped me find further strength in my own life - because of Veronica's nature as one who doesn't just survive, doesn't just endure; she recovers from whatever life throws at her.  I'll try to elaborate as best I can without ruining the actual experience of watching three amazing seasons of Veronica Mars.

We hear a lot of women who have dealt with life's darker struggles talking about surviving and enduring things.  In talking about a television show, and my own life - where I consider myself to have been so fortunate in so many ways - I don't think it's proper to really get into details of people who are legitimate survivors of real-life traumas, or to try to relate my own minor suffering in comparison to people who've had their lives torn apart.

That doesn't mean, however, that I can't find inspiration in seeing someone deal with fictionalized versions of those traumas and find my own strength to not let even lesser traumas ruin me.  Surrender doesn't appeal to me, but there are times - even now - when I feel like giving up about so many issues, where I don't feel like I can continue dealing with certain elements of my life.

And that's when I think about Veronica.

Now, to the matter of avoiding spoilers - while I can't pretend a fictional character could give me an idea of what it must be like to deal with certain things happening in my own real life, in the real world, I can certainly admire the traits that make a character worthy of praise in how they deal with those issues - and Veronica Mars is one of those characters, to me.  

How's that for being vague about spoilers?  I apologize if anyone not familiar with the show finds what I said above confusing in any way.  It's the best I could do to address my feelings without being specific, to introduce general ideas.  Here's hoping the message is clear, because it's important to me.

With Veronica, what I admire most about her is not simply the act of surviving and enduring, as I said - it's the way she takes the darker elements of her life and turns them around, turns them into strengths, turns them into a fuel that drives her determination to accomplish what she sets out to achieve in her life - for all the right reasons, too:  for doing justice for people who've for whatever reasons lost the ability to seek it themselves.

Veronica is tireless in this pursuit, and that's something else I admired about her then and still do, when fatigue gets to me.  I try to think about people like her, who are so beaten-down that they must surely be exhausted.  But Veronica not only maintains her sense of self and her identity, but she maintains what appears on the surface to be a glib disregard for her own traumas but which isn't a mask - is rather a refusal to let those dark elements of her life hurt her, because she can't.  

She cannot be fatigued because she won't let herself, both for herself and for others.  That stubborn refusal to even acknowledge the darkness' power in her life really gets to me, because it's an admirable trait I strive for in my own life, to find a sense of humor instead of a sense of rage, to try to channel energies that make me want to scream into making me want to create.  

This blog, in and of itself, is part of that effort - to try to create something positive out of something negative.  Recognizing that heroic women in media are harder to come by than they ought to be, I sought to channel that energy into giving a voice both to those characters who've been lost or forgotten or simply disregarded - and also to give myself a voice, and by so doing give a voice to other people who've dealt with some of the things I've dealt with in my life.

But the fact that Veronica's efforts to channel that energy aren't just for herself means a lot more to me than just the simple idea that she "does right by other people."  Rather, it's the idea that she takes the energy created by people doing wrong to her and transforms that energy.  She's like a conduit to me.  People throw negativity at her, and she responds with that glib refusal to acknowledge that they've hurt her and then harnesses the force of those attacks into doing the right thing for society itself, and not just herself and her friends.  That's the difference to me that I find so inspiring and unique about her character:  hurt her, and she'll change that aggression into positive change for the world.

Of course, Veronica's struggles in the series usually start on a personal level; it's not always about big worldly issues.  But the writers are never content to simply make the show about trivial matters alone, and that's a crucial difference for me that makes Veronica a fascinating character.  Veronica's cases matter and have consequence, yes, and involve digging up old metaphorical skeletons and exposing them.  That, in and of itself, isn't an uncommon plot device in mystery stories. 

What makes Veronica different is what we see of her motivations, from the parts of her thought process we're privy to throughout the series.  Because of some outstanding writing, we get a fully-developed female character - rare in and of itself - who deals with her own problems by making the entire world better, sometimes consciously and sometimes by happenstance.  We get to know her, and we get to understand her over the course of the series.  The writers don't keep Veronica at some vigilant distance, and the intimacy with which we're brought into Veronica's world make us feel the vulnerabilities she suffers, and so we can follow her through her troubles and realize the tough decisions she has to make throughout the series when it comes to other people - when it comes to doing what's the most right thing, and not just the right thing for the moment.  That, in particular, is a tough lesson for me to learn.

You see, legacies are a huge part of the story of Veronica Mars.  They're a huge part of the story of Veronica Mars, too.  Throughout the show, there's a consistent element in the storytelling:  what we do matters.  

Every choice, every decision, obviously has consequences when it's the real world.  But, too often, in the forget-what-happened-last-week venue of televised detective dramas, the immediate quest for one story line's justice means there's no sense of the broader world, the broader community.  That's not true in Veronica's world.  

What we see over and over in Veronica Mars is that every choice not only affects us, but everyone around us - and can have disastrous consequences if we take the path of least resistance, the easiest one for us.  To me, that's what's strongest about Veronica's recovery.  She could seek vengeance on the people who wronged her, or on the people who wrong those she protects.  But she's always one step ahead of that kind of thinking.

Veronica's recovery from the dark elements in her life, she knows, aren't going to be solved by the quick fix, the immediate justice.  In this way, she's got a tremendous amount of commitment to her own recovery - she's unwilling to sacrifice her greater mental health for the immediate satisfaction that might make one night go a little easier, and she makes those kinds of decisions in the series again and again, sometimes even to her own tremendous regret.  In the moralistic world of detective fiction, there are many characters who make the quick, immediate choices like this. Veronica isn't one of them.  She's not perfect, and she falters in this - but, ultimately, recognizing when one has made a mistake can sometimes be just as important as having the wherewithal to avoid the mistake in the first place.

I admire Veronica, therefore, because she thinks globally and acts locally, to coin an overused phrase.  I've only seen a very few real people who can behave with that kind of consistent benevolence toward the world, and I've seen almost no fictional characters who manage it.  Veronica inspires me to try to keep my thoughts broad, which is also important for my autism, in that I can become so narrowly focused on what I'm dealing with immediately that I lose sight of the bigger picture of the world and the people in that world.

Put simply, Veronica teaches me to exercise myself.  She teaches me to strive on a physical level not to let difficulties in my life get me down too much.  She teaches me to work on an emotional level to see others' situations and accept what empathy tells me about other people's lives.  She teaches me on an intellectual level to celebrate my own intellect and trust my own skills of observation.  

  

In closing, I'd like to address what positivity can do, and how it really can be as simple as everyone helping each other help themselves.  I'm a die-hard Marshmallow - that's what fans of Veronica Mars call ourselves.  I sent a Mars Bar to the studios when the show got cancelled the first time.  I wrote to the studio asking for them to give us the Veronica Mars: FBI series so many of us wanted.  It was all to no avail.

But fans of the show - and of the character - refused to give in to negativity, while at the same time trying to keep the character alive - and the cast has been so wonderfully receptive of this that it defies the tradition of actors hoping to avoid being typecast.  Kristen Bell, in particular, has been amazing about the fan appreciation of her work on the show and the inspirational power of her character.

As I write this, the Kickstarter I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry has raised enough money to greenlight a Veronica Mars movie that has been hoped-for by fans of the show years now.  It's proof to me, as the show was, and as the character is, that sometimes the good guys really do win.