Fictional Character

This question is actually terribly difficult for me to answer, contrary to what I initially thought. Most of my favorite characters seem to have less-than-pristine lives, and even though I love them like I love my friends, living their life would be incredibly hard.

For instance, I love love love Lily Evans Potter. She's bright and kind and spunky and independent and just delightful. She gets the perk of marrying James Potter (and being the mother to Harry!!), but then, just as their picture-perfect life is beginning, she and James die when they're only TWENTY-ONE. (*cue crying*) I could go on forever about Lily, but I'll stop here so as to spare you. Overall, I love her, but being her would be so sad.

Another example is Hazel Grace Lancaster from John Green's The Fault in Our Stars. Hazel is honest and bitingly sarcastic with dry humor--when creating an ad for a swing set, she advocates for "Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children" as the headline. But it's to be noted that she has thyroid cancer. Of course, this doesn't make her any less of a person (as she says, she may be dying but she isn't dead yet and shouldn't be treated that way), but leading her life would be one of the most difficult things in the world. She lives as "that girl with cancer," not as "Hazel, who has a great sense of humor and likes reading, especially poetry." Her personality is overshadowed by a disease that shouldn't define her.

On the other hand, I could never be friends with Natalie Goodman (of the musical "next to normal"), but she is still one of my all-time favorite characters. Natalie is a sixteen-year-old "genius and a freak" whose mother is bipolar depressive with hallucinations. The song "Everything Else" in the musical describes Natalie's outlook perfectly: "You play [piano] til it's perfect, you play til you ache. You play til the strings or your fingernails break so you'll rock that recital and get into Yale, and you won't feel so sick and you won't look so pale...and you know that it's just a sonata away and you play, and you play, and everything else goes away." Natalie also lives in the shadow of her brother--who died before she was born and who her mother sees in hallucinations. She feels that in her family, she and her brother are "Superboy and the Invisible Girl, son of steel and daughter of air."

These are not all of my favorite characters, but you can see that I tend to like the tragic characters. So I decided to look at this post as an actress--after all, with past roles, I say that "I was Colleen in that show" or "I was the Childlike Empress last winter." So technically, if I were cast as, say, Natalie Goodman, I'd be able to say "Yeah, I'm Natalie in next to normal! Come see the show!" Therefore, I could sort of be her. So I pick the three characters above as who I'd like to be, because I'd pay absolutely anything to be able to play any one of them.