This is a really interesting character analysis! :D I'm far more familiar with one of these characters than the other - actually, since I've seen exactly one episode of The Mentalist all the way through, it's fascinating to compare my reactions to the character with the way that you analyze him (especially since, at the time I watched the episode, I had just convinced my mom to watch White Collar and was right in the middle of watching the first season with her, so I was comparing Jane to Neal all the way through anyway).
The episode that I saw was the one you referenced in the meta where Patrick gets the team back together by conning the other cops. It left me with an impression of Patrick as an unpleasantly ruthless and much less, hmm, people-oriented person compared to Neal - I guess that what I kept thinking about, watching the episode, is that I can't imagine Neal doing something like that to people on the good guys' side, or Peter letting him get away with it if he found out about it. It's not that Neal doesn't con the FBI sometimes, but not in that specific way - tricking them into, say, furthering his music box investigations is definitely not a good thing to be doing, but it strikes me as a different caliber of manipulation that manipulating them emotionally, making them fight and dislike each other and so forth. That left a bad taste in my mouth. I thought it was a good point at the end of the episode that Other Cop Guy is inadequate to be Patrick's handler because he can't control Patrick and keep him from doing things like that, but on the other hand, I didn't really like the things that it showed about how far Patrick is willing to go to get what he wants.
Having had this as my first impression of Patrick, it's interesting to read that he's willing to manipulate people into actually being killed, because again, it's hard for me to imagine Neal doing this deliberately. I'm not saying Neal's a saint, or that some of the things he does aren't potentially dangerous for other people - I really don't want to be making this comparison so much at Patrick's expense, especially since I'm not that familiar with the character *facepalm* - but, I guess, the thing that makes me like Neal despite his manipulative ways is his sweetness, the sense that he would go so far and no farther, and I never really got that feeling from Jane. On the other hand, though (am I running out of hands yet? *g*), I really haven't seen enough of Jane to make a fair assessment of him.
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Date: 2012-03-28 03:02 am (UTC)From:The episode that I saw was the one you referenced in the meta where Patrick gets the team back together by conning the other cops. It left me with an impression of Patrick as an unpleasantly ruthless and much less, hmm, people-oriented person compared to Neal - I guess that what I kept thinking about, watching the episode, is that I can't imagine Neal doing something like that to people on the good guys' side, or Peter letting him get away with it if he found out about it. It's not that Neal doesn't con the FBI sometimes, but not in that specific way - tricking them into, say, furthering his music box investigations is definitely not a good thing to be doing, but it strikes me as a different caliber of manipulation that manipulating them emotionally, making them fight and dislike each other and so forth. That left a bad taste in my mouth. I thought it was a good point at the end of the episode that Other Cop Guy is inadequate to be Patrick's handler because he can't control Patrick and keep him from doing things like that, but on the other hand, I didn't really like the things that it showed about how far Patrick is willing to go to get what he wants.
Having had this as my first impression of Patrick, it's interesting to read that he's willing to manipulate people into actually being killed, because again, it's hard for me to imagine Neal doing this deliberately. I'm not saying Neal's a saint, or that some of the things he does aren't potentially dangerous for other people - I really don't want to be making this comparison so much at Patrick's expense, especially since I'm not that familiar with the character *facepalm* - but, I guess, the thing that makes me like Neal despite his manipulative ways is his sweetness, the sense that he would go so far and no farther, and I never really got that feeling from Jane. On the other hand, though (am I running out of hands yet? *g*), I really haven't seen enough of Jane to make a fair assessment of him.