what dread hand

I babbled to Anna long and hard about what I think of the Sylar/Mohinder relationship (in the canon -- no, honestly) and why I like it. Edited so it's mostly me babbling (sorry!) and included below mostly for my own reference.

...but [Sylar]'s not eating brains. The death of Isaac was the final nail in that coffin. Afterwards we get a sweeping look at Isaac's dead body. His head's open and there's a trail of blood from there but no brain anywhere to be seen. Sylar is using the power he just got and his hands are bloody and dripping but there's no blood anywhere on his face or near his mouth. Clearly Sylar's not all that tidy or squeamish about blood so if he were eating people's brains there should've been blood on his face...

...but not a drop to be seen.

*rolls eyes*

This is the same logic which dictates people to argue that things such as murder, rape, torture and so forth never happened in the TV show they're watching, because they mistake "the creators implying something heavily but not showing it because there is a need to go around the censors" for "nothing happened if we don't see it". What idiocy. Should I go pretend that all the prison rape of OZ never happened because I never actually saw a dick in an ass? Right.

I don't think there's canon evidence either way for whether Sylar eats brains or not (and there never will be, because both cast and crew have expressed a desire to keep that elusive), but just to spite this person, I'm going to say that he does. As Audrey (I think it was?) says, what else should he be doing with them -- flushing them down the toilet? For what purpose?

Not to mention how much Sylar eating brains makes sense thematically (I cannot enough express my hatred for people who cannot look pass plot and story and look at character and themes), what with what ritualistic cannibalism actually represented for homo sapiens through history (hint with a sledgehammer: it represents taking on the abilities of your fallen enemies!) and Sylar hinted at being Catholic (another huge hint: communion!). Duh duh duh duh DUH.

I was trying to write a post about why I like Mohinder as much as I do yesterday, but got stuck. I think it's really really simple, why I like him, but it's difficult to think of all the actual canon evidence that supports (so to speak) my view of him.

Basically, I like him because he gets constantly thrown into situations where he is almost expected to submit, to a person or people or organization with objectively more power than him who could crush him instantly, but he is so stubborn and proud and oddly reckless that he never, ever gives in.

I mean Chandra, Nathan, The Company (HRG and later Thompson), Sylar ... they all push him, walk all over him, underestimate him, disregard him, threaten him, hurt him, and what does Mohinder do? He snarks back! He's a rational person in the sense that he only believes what he sees, but on the other hand he's also totally a "acting before thinking" guy that it's almost like he only becomes aware of the threat to his life (such as the gun that HRG had pointed at him) after he's fired off a "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" retort to the person who could easily kill him.

On one hand, this tendency amuses me greatly. He has always had that element of surprise, beginning with that scene where he actually attacks the the guy who was trying to bug his apartment, and I always find myself going "hah!" at the screen when Mohinder completely disregards the potential power (physical, political, you name it) of the guy he's facing and manages to get his way. Nathan? HRG? Thompson? He kicked their collective asses, and I laughed so hard.

On another hand, I think it's totally hot. This is where Sylar comes into the picture, because Sylar pushed Mohinder to an edge that we had never seen him at. Sylar poked, relentlessly, at every weak spot in Mohinder's psyche: his daddy issues, his faith in science, his sense of morals and what is wrong and right. It was almost as though Sylar was taking pleasure in seeing how Mohinder would react, and I was right there with him, gleefully observing every twitch of the eye and expecting, almost wanting, Mohinder to crack. But he didn't. Even hanging at that very edge, Mohinder just refuses to break. And that ... that just makes trying to tear him apart all the much more fun, it makes him all the much more appealing, because it's unattainable and what's sweeter than that? Not to mention how almost naïve and trusting Mohinder can be if you know how to work yourself into his life; how amazingly open he can be with you, like he was with Zane. Personally, if I were Sylar, I'd have been itching to reveal myself just to see his reaction, but also in a dilemma because I would want to savour the deception for just a bit longer ...

Ah, geez, I sound like such a pervert. I guess I identify a bit too much with Sylar when it comes to Mohinder, or at least the Sylar I see in canon, the one shown to be so obsessed with Mohinder that he kept him around for five fucking years to earn his trust, just waiting to break it and break Mohinder with it. I adore these two guys, and I'll gladly admit the ship was what cemented my love for Mohinder.

Yeah. Mohinder. Guh.

(I may do a longer version with references to actual episodes and pics, but probably not before the show is over. I assume the average viewer will be like, "Mohinder kicked Nathan's ass ... when?" Meh.)

"Mohinder is not a doormat. If you tell him to roll over, he'll bite. Mohinder would be a very bad name for a dog."

And this morning I was thinking about this while brewing coffee, and I thought,

"Mohinder is usually not at all nice to people, so I wonder where people get this from.

"He does get duped, but that's because he's sometimes very trusting and naïve.

"But he's only that way when people approach him nicely. If they don't, and expect him to roll over and stay, like Nathan and HRG and Thompson and Sylar, he'll bark and bite back.

"He's only nice to people when they're nice to him and listen to him and accept him and ... and ...

"... oh.

"Oh! Oh, so that's what that is! Zane! Eden! Even Molly? How gloriously fucked up! Oh!

"Why did I never think of it like that before? Mohinder, you've got such issues."

I'm slow sometimes. I always loved it when Mo bit back, but never really considered the times when he didn't.

It's as though you never really realize something until you stumble over a thing which makes you go, "Wait, but that's wrong. But then, what's right?"

Found in a fic: Sylar, damn Sylar, what kind of maniac were you to have made something as complicated as THIS?

When Chandra visits him for the first time in Six Months Ago, Sylar gestures to the timepiece with the SYLAR name on it and says something along the lines of, "I've been working on it for years. The body is standard, but the insides quite something else."

The name SYLAR is on the face of the timepiece, indicating it's not SYLAR which is complicated. What does this say about Sylar, that he chose that name for himself? SYLAR is a vessel, a standard, something regular. However, what's inside of him is an entirely different matter.

What a lovely name he picked.

Why do a fair share of people assume Mohinder would be envious of the people with special abilities?

If anything, it seems more natural that he should resent them. That resent, then, might come out partly from envy, but that wouldn't even be so much of the powers themselves as envy of how these people consumed his father's attention and life. After he has gotten over these issues, however, what is left seems to me merely scientific curiousity.

At any rate, Mohinder seems one of the people in canon the least boyishly fascinated with the pure coolness of it, maybe along with Claire and Nathan. Even when he saw it for the first time with Zane, he didn't fanboy the man (rather the other way around; Zane was creepily adoring of Mo). The other end of the spectrum would be Peter, Sylar, and Hiro.

I guess this characterization annoys me mostly because a large part of what I like about Heroes is the non-superhumans, like Mohinder, Ando, and the Bennets. I like them because they're drawn as more than sidekicks, as characters equally worth of attention as the "heroes", and I believe that part of what stops them from being reduced to adoring sidekicks is their pragmatic attitude to the powers they see. Ando-kun shows this the most, and I luffs him.

Interesting meta connecting the works of Salman Rushdie with Heroes.

I didn't want to comment on the post because it's been years since I last read Rushdie and I never did read The Satanic Verses, but the quotes collected are very interesting. On one hand I think the themes and plot of Heroes are so archetypical that saying they came from one particular source is ridiculous, but it makes sense that they might have made the subtler nods on purpose. It might also explain why the Sureshes are Indian, of all nationalities in the world.

And it makes me think that Mohinder's monologues probably are from a book he will write in the future, as we (and Ramamurthy) have suspected, but maybe not a scientific book like I personally assumed, but rather fiction. Interesting!

ETA: Now that we are at India, "Mohinder" is a variation of "Mahendra", which means "great Indra" in Sanskrit. RG Veda states on this god: "Indra, you lifted up the outcast who was oppressed, you glorified the blind and the lame."

Which, as you can probably imagine, still has me rolling on the floor in fangirlish glee.

I just went to look at my bookshelves to see what Rushdie books I actually own, and next to his Shame, I found Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra. I knew I'd seen that name somewhere before! Now I feel stupid. I never actually read it, though. Maybe I should.

I know this might come as a shock to some of you, but Mohinder is not pretty.

Rest assured I'm not saying this because I dislike Mohinder. I love the good doctor; he's my favorite character on the show and has been since the very early episodes, when he was sprinting from HRG's creepy stalking and knocking people out with elephants.

Please also rest assured I don't mean to say I don't think Mohinder is pretty, since I, you know, have eyes.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Mohinder Suresh on the show, or more specifically, Mohinder Suresh as he appears to the other characters on the show.

Mohinder has never, not even once, been addressed as being "pretty" or "handsome" or "attractive" on the show. The closest we come is Thompson's "cute", but 1) that was in regard to his motivations, not his looks, and 2) uh, this is Thompson we're talking about, and he's weird.

Sylar does not, even once, express any opinion what-so-ever about Mohinder's looks. Neither does Peter. Neither does Eden, or Mira, or Chandra, or HRG, or whoever else Mohinder meets in the course of the show. I personally agree with you that Sylar is deeply obsessed with Mohinder, yes, but much like Thompson's "cute", it has nothing to do with what Mohinder looks like. Mohinder, *gasp!*, has a personality! Odd thought, isn't it.

As Greg Beeman said on the commentary of "Unexpected", isn't it odd that all the people gathered to save the world are ... HOT? This is TV, people. They're all hot, more or less. That doesn't mean they are also hot in the context of the show. Unless characters are referred to as being hot in the show itself, they're just, y'know, passable. What we think of the characters is not what the characters think about each other. That's called the fourth wall. If the creators had intended for Mohinder, the character, to be breathtakingly attractive, they'd have indicated it in the writing.

So could we please stop projecting our own obsession with Sendhil Ramamurthy's pretty looks onto the characters? The occasional reference to pretty curls or white smile or whatever is fine, but when Sylar (or Peter or Thompson or Papa Nakamura or whoever) just won't shut the fuck up about it, it gets really tiresome. Sylar is not a fucking fangirl.

Not to mention I begin to think that's the only thing you like Mohinder for, too.

I've written and said everything below before (though not all of it at once), so you might want to skip this.

I like Mohinder.

I'm one of the few people in the world who liked him from very early on. was the one who prompted me into watching season one, and I remember one of the first conversations I had with her involved my love for (the at that point still highly ambiguous) HRG, the awesome cuteness of Hiro and Charlie, and the hot that is Mohinder.

I liked his conflicting emotions about his father's research, how he wanted to protect it and prove it, but how he was also impatient and angry with himself for still wanting Chandra's approval after all these years. I loved his banter with Eden; to this day, I still think she was his only true "match", a person who would obviously care about and care for him, never dismissing his emotions or issues, but who also knows his stubborn nature, accepts it all, and counters it with reason and humour.

Mohinder cares about people, on a fundamental level, and wants to guide them and save them, and is clearly of the opinion that science is of no use in and of itself, that research is only relevant when it can be applied, and applied for good. This is why he leaves India for the second time. This is why he refuses to experiment with the virus. But he seems to dislike most people he meets, and they seems to be annoyed by him, and it all makes me giggle. It's understandable, of course. At the same time as being kind and helpful on a, what should we say, theoretical level, Mohinder is also impatient, impulsive, rude, stubborn (I've said this one twice now), and at times even smug and superior. I love all of that about him. He wants to help people and he's idealistic, but he has little social skill, has to try very hard whenever he needs to be diplomatic, and isn't actually very nice or open or, God forbid, meek.

Mohinder knows the difference between the general and the specific, between the conceptual and the concrete. He is a scientist, he knows that some species have eradicated and will continue to eradicate other species, he knows this is how evolution works. On some level, I believe he knows there's no way for him to tell whether Sylar is an agent of this evolutionary process, or plain psychotic. But he knows that in this concrete situation, he will kill Sylar. He knows that in that cencrete situation, he will stop Sylar from committing genocide -- even though he himself wrote of the very clear possibility of genocide. Mohinder sees the line between theory and practise, and is highly concerned with what he believes is morally right, over what he might understand to be scientific fact. Mohinder has no doubt about which he will choose, not even as Sylar sees his dichotomy of science and morals and mercilessly provokes it.

The above is how I understand Mohinder as a scientist and man. I also believe this is how Chandra understood Mohinder, hence the "heart of stone" comment. Mohinder can't commit to science alone, it's not in him. Perhaps said in other words, Mohinder would not have made Sylar. Even if he had, Mohinder would have committed himself to stop what he made, not simply distance himself as Chandra did. This is why, in the Sylar storyline, Chandra dies and Mohinder comes to the US.

That leads me to 2x07. But alas, I have no more time; must shower and leave. Wah!

When I read it again it was sort of long and offensive towards Americans, so I hid it. Read at own risk.

But Sendhil wriggling his feet in that Parley Fest Q&A: still so adorable OMG. ♥

I was wanting to write part two of this post before episode nine aired, but um. Didn't get around to.

Basically what I wanted to say was, the reason Mohinder working with/for the Company won't work out is not because the Company is objectively evil, but because it operates in such a way that goes against everything that is natural to Mohinder.

Mohinder does what he believes to be "the right thing" in any given situation. When he doesn't, like when he doesn't shoot Sylar right away but instead opts to experiment on him, this is because he is doing what he believes someone else (in this case, Chandra) would have done, not what comes naturally to him to do. He postponed his own judgement in favour of scientific research which might benefit someone sometime in the future. As we all know, it backfired. In FYG, Sylar nearly convinced Mohinder that killing off the mutated humans were the best option for a better future. Mohinder came to his senses in the concrete situation of killing Hiro or not, because he knew it was the right thing for him to do in that split-second. This is how Mohinder operates.

The Company operates on completely different terms. The Company operates on "if we do these shady things now, it will turn out for the better in the future". They experiment on people and give them drugs and keep them captive, and even plan to blow up NY, because they believe it is for a better tomorrow. Mohinder just doesn't work this way; they are the anti-Mohinder, so to speak, thematically.

This is why working with the Company is wrong for Mohinder. And where am I going with this? I'm trying to say that in the world of story-telling, the most obvious redemption for someone who went against his own nature is death. This is why, ever since Mohinder got a bit too honest with Bob, I've been having a sneaking suspicion that Mohinder could die in this arc. I don't want it to happen, and after the spoilers I've seen of episode 11 I stopped thinking it would, but he really, really needs to get away from the Company.

I like Mohinder.

... I feel like I preface every meta entry on Heroes with this. Mohinder is my favorite character, I would dare say I love him, and everything about him makes me squirm in my seat and alternately want to worship him and cuddle him and torture him. It's all an expression of my pure, unadulated adoration of him, and you guys probably all know this already.

I realize that a lot of people don't like Mohinder. I'm not saying people can't, that'd be silly. People are free to feel whatever they feel about any given character, whether I happen to agree with them or not. Sometimes the reasons they list for disliking him are the exact reason I like him, which is funny, and sometimes I find the reasons unlogical or at least biased, but ultimately, feelings can't really be controlled by logic and neither should they.

But do you know what I wish people would do? I wish people would

STOP FUCKING SHIPPING HIM WITH ANY ARBITARY CHARACTER FOR THEIR FIC AND PORN FIX WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY BASHING HIM

is what I wish. If I see one more person using a Sylar/Mohinder icon, or one more person in the Matt/Mohinder community, or one more person admitting to be a Peter/Mohinder shipper in the same breath as telling Mohinder to stop being so fucking stupid, or even worse telling Mohinder to stop being such a douche because it's ruining their fic and porn funk (yes, I've seen people do this), I will KILL SOMETHING.

What, the only way you can stand Mohinder is if he's having hot buttsex with your favorite character? The only use he has is having chemistry with Sylar? Being cutely domestic with Matt? And you're, what, willing to ever so kindly overlook his faults if you get to ship him, because OMG the ship is sooooo hot and hey, you guess Mo's pretty enough? What. The. Fuck? Do you people even realize that you're treating the man as a fuckhole? (No, I don't care if you have him top; the sentiment is the exact same.¹) And you think it's even a good idea to admit to this? What?

Also, while I don't know about Matt, you people do realize that the reasons you seem to hate him for (he's self-righteous! he always pretends to be doing the right thing! it's so annoying! wah wah whine!) are the exact reasons Sylar is obsessed with him and we're shipping S/M in the first place, right? Right?

I'd rather have no fic or fandom about Mohinder Suresh at all than put up with that. You may hate him, and that's your right, but he fucking deserves better. Stop shipping him if you hate him so fucking much, and get out of my fucking face.

(Wow, that made me feel so much better! Saying "fuck" a lot is so liberating.)

1. But if you treat him like a fuckhole out of love, that's fine. In fact, link me to your fic when you write that.

I don't know why I feel so bitter today, but I do! So let me spew out some vitriol!