Name: Constable Benton Fraser
Door: Right
Canon: Due South
Canon Point: End of canon
Age: 37
Appearance: He looks like Superman in a Mountie outfit.
Here's his Wiki page, which has several images.
History: Fraser grew up in the North West Territories, raised mostly by his incredibly tough librarian grandmother, worshiping his distant father, who was rarely home, but who was a hero of the RCMP. As a child, Fraser learned a comedically overblown set of survival and tracking skills from various Inuit and First Nations members of his community, and comedically courteous manners from his grandmother. All this served him in dubious stead when he joined the RCMP as an adult. He was extremely effective at solving crimes and making genuine efforts at community outreach, but even fellow RCMP members used to life in the Territories found him incredibly weird. The perfect caricature of what a Mountie should be. He’s just too polite, too stubborn, unwilling to let anything go and capable of tracking criminals through the frozen wilderness to a degree that seems practically supernatural.
All these traits served him in even more dubious stead when his father was killed, and he went to Chicago on the trail of the killers. After solving that case (and somewhat disgracing himself within the political hierarchy of the RCMP in the process) he chose to stay, attached as a liaison with the Canadian Consulate. Partnered with a Chicago PD detective, Fraser spent the next four years solving crimes, being unspeakably Canadian, confronting his past demons and occasionally being literally haunted by the ghost of his father, accompanied by his deaf wolf Diefenbaker. The series ends with him and his (second) partner (who took the place of his first when the first went deep undercover with the mob) heading off into the wilds of the Canadian North to seek the hand of Franklin (the explorer). They leave behind their former lives and head into the unknown, towards adventure and an absurdly improbable goal… together.
Personality:
- Courteous: In the pilot, he ends up walking from the Chicago Airport into the city because he keeps holding the door for people indefinitely and giving up every taxi until there are none left. When yell things like, "This man knows nothing about law enforcement! Get him out of here!" He responds, "Thank you for your time, gentlemen." He's unfailingly polite, except when he has amnesia.
- Stubborn: In S2E8, “One Good Man,” he launches into an hours-long filibuster at the City Council. It’s for a good reason, but he’s… just… like this. About everything. Once he pursues a man across thousands of kilometres, destroying two light aircraft and several boats, because he suspects him of littering (well, illegal disposal of large amounts of waste, but still). When the guy asks why he can't just let it go, Fraser responds, "It's not in my nature." And that about sums it up.
- Passive Aggressive: In S1E22, “Letting Go,” Fraser is recovering from being accidentally shot by his partner, Ray, and spends pretty much the entire episode passive aggressively declaring he’s not mad while clearly being mad and oh-so-politely snarky and disconnected rather than having an honest conversation until the very end, when Ray literally takes a bullet for him and he feels they are even.
- Repressed: For most of the series, he seems to have some kind of mutual attraction with his boss. He overcompensates by only calling her “Sir.” He responds to things like being kissed on the cheek by going silent, clearing his throat and adjusting his collar. Sometimes when people are attracted to him he goes, "Oh, dear." He gets even more old-fashioned and ridiculous in his speech patterns when talking about his own relationship or sex life, even obliquely, and starts turning up terms like "crackerjack".
Powers and Abilities:
- Tracking anything, anywhere
- Remaining shockingly tidy regardless of conditions
- Police skills
- Hypnotism
- Mentally conducting symphonies
- Wilderness survival
- General handyman/construction skills
- Basic cooking
- Exhaustive knowledge of Canadian legislation
- Fluent in English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin, American Sign Language and quite probably Inuit and Yupik as well
- Equitation
- Sharpshooter first class
Inventory:
- Diefenbaker (a deaf wolf)
- Homemade pemican
- A hunting knife
Samples:
-
An example of how he communicates.- An example of how he thinks:
Fraser looked around the room at the other participants in Duplicity's orientation. An extremely diverse set of individuals. If nothing else positive could be gained from this admittedly appalling experience, he could at least look forward to an unparalleled opportunity in cultural exchange!
He was afraid. Afraid and ill-prepared, which was unsettling in and of itself. He was a Mountie! He ought to be prepared for anything. But, realistically, how could anyone be prepared to be transported to another... world, to a social experiment this extreme, this impossible. It had occurred to him that perhaps he was simply dreaming, or mad, but his surreptitious attempts to induce lucid dreaming convinced him that he was awake, and... well, how would he know, if he were mad? So he had decided to simply take the situation at face value and respond to it as he would to any other mass injustice: with patience and dedication to solving it, and a realistic view of how his own influence might not be enough.
He realized almost immediately that one of the most difficult challenges facing him here would be the conflict of his deep respect for following and upholding the laws of any given locale, with the fact that the laws here do, in fact, go into the bedroom. He would have to do his best to balance his own sense of justice against the rules of the society to which he had been inadvertently introduced.