Zen meeeeeeme
HAVING MISAPPROPRIATED THIS MEME FOR MY OWN NEFARIOUS PURPOSES HERE GOES.
KONOKA was never the character I thought I was going to app -- that was Negi. In fact, in my first readthrough, I thought that Asuna and Negi were the coolest things ever and that Konoka, while super cute and made me flail lots in the Kyoto arc, didn't really ping me as hard as Asuna. Then Asuna got apped and I betaed l-lol and I thought "hey, I could app Negi!" This ... didn't happen. I liked Negi but not enough to app him. I knew I was going to app a Negima character and Konoka had always sort of hovered in the back of my mind, but I hadn't really properly decided. Then Kyou commented asking for a Konoka for a double app and I went "BITCH SHE'S MINE". I went back and reread the canon and I realised just how adorable Konoka was. She's sweet and dizzy and she's a stabilising force in the Asuna-Negi dynamic.
One of the things I really like about her is that she genuinely likes everyone and is friendly with everyone. She likes people! She likes to giggle, she likes to explore, she likes to top people with kindness and love and healing magic goodness. And it's not a conscious I MUST TOP YOu thing that comes across as aggressive or needy. It's just who she is and she's comfortable with that. Konoka is very comfortable with who she is and where she's going. It's really nice to have a character who is so zen about things.
Also. The relationship with Setsuna and how it's so complicated. They're teenagers and they're hormonal and there's this blur between whether their relationship is romantic or platonic. But they love each other and it doesn't really matter so much to Konoka what the relationship is, so long as Setsuna is there with her. And that sort of devotion gets me and I flail over them and how so very special they are. I actually kind of hope that we don't get a conclusive answer for their relationship because I love the ambiguities and how they sort of blur relationship categories and how for Konoka it just doesn't matter. And how it shows off Setsuna's closeted nature and wah. I love them okay. :(
FUUKA was a character who I suspected I would love from looking at wikipedia. Honest, I PMed Juri telling her I would love the tech girl before I got the game. This is a sign of how well I know my own pings. And initially ... I hated Fuuka's voice actress. I really did. Heck, half the time I still do! (I'm told that FES is a much better version and if that's true then I so want). But I was interested in her backstory and that she's resourceful enough to survive in a hostile environment for ten hours without any weapons or any idea of what's going on other than there were a lot of powerful things around her and she couldn't do anything about it. She didn't curl up or crumple, she stayed alive long enough for the party to find her.
And then we get her with Natsuki, the girl who bullied her and locked her in the school for a night and it would be totally human for her to think "well, you deserve to get hurt". Except that Fuuka never does think that. She steps out and shields her and then summons her persona for the first time. She's a complete noncombatant and she's trying to protect someone who made her life hell. And I went "I want". And over the course of the game she goes from someone who is kind of withdrawn and bullied into someone who does what she believes is right, who draws strength from her friends and wants to keep in touch with them but she's also willing to stand against them because she knows that friendship is more resilient than that.
And okay, she has to be told that you do not have to give your friends gifts for just being your friends. :'(
But I can understand her, because she's very human in a sense. She doesn't have horrible parental emo, but instead two parents who push her to succeed as she's the only child. She doesn't have a horrible backstory, just being bullied and disliking the traits she has while envying the skills she wishes she did have. She's very relateable because her issues are ones that a lot of teenaged girls go through.
RENA was a character I thought was okay in the early chapters. She's kind of tsundere and I do like tsunderes who are capable of stepping up and kicking ass and taking names. That said, there wasn't really a lot that made her stand out to me in my head as something special. She just seemed like your typical tsundere who needs the love of her soulmaaaaate and then she will learn to love again and be open.
Then SPOILERS HAPPEN and Rena's utterly devastated. She stares in shock and then flips out. She's screaming and crying and throttling Riku and it's the most emotional reaction we get from her. I read that and PMed Youhei's applicant and went "Right, I'm in". Because after that, no-one was going to prise her from my fingers.
The story's ongoing and I wouldn't want to spoil too much of it for you, but Rena's showing more depth as the story progresses and Riku understands her better. She's a tragic figure who never let on to anyone just how deep the tragedy goes and she's self-reliant to the point of absurdity and she doesn't get people especially well. She's turning herself into a weapon and even then the mask slips. She's not as untouchable as she thinks and when someone gets through, they get through. Her relationships with Neene, Riku and Youhei are so complicated because she makes them so and closes them out but she cares. And I do love the difference between the mask she wants people to see and who Rena actually is. She doesn't need the love of her soulmate. She needs human contact at all because she's so damaged. And I love that she is so damaged and yet has this unflinching view of justice. She may be fucked in the head but she will protect the weak. She will do her duty to save humanity and don't you dare get in her way.
Ahhh, I love her. :(
RENO is ... not the type of character I normally like! I mean, the first time we see him he's dropping a plate on a settlement, killing lots of people! HE'S NOT AT ALL A NICE PERSON. But as the game progresses, you learn that yeah, he's not a nice person at all, or a good one. But he's oddly endearing despite the fact that he's a truly horrible person. He has rules for when he will do things. He won't do anything off hours. He'll kill a crime boss because he's messing with one of their own, even if they've been messing with her previously.
And then there's Advent Children where they do stupid shit in the background like trying to sneak off after Tifa starts arguing with Cloud. And then they're absurdly loyal to Rufus Shinra. And the Turks are never going to be good or nice people. That's not what they are. But they can do things for the greater good and they can acknowledge! That the greater good is sometimes more important in order to get what you want. And they realise that yeah, Sephiroth is bad! Destroying the Planet and the Lifestream is bad! They go looking for Zack after he's disappeared and they can't find him.
Reno's not a nice person. He's not a good person. His moral compass is so screwed up. He does horrible things. But he's doggedly loyal to the Turks and to Shinra. You never doubt that he wouldn't step in if one of them needed it. I don't normally like lawful evil characters but I can make an exception of Reno.
Also, my wife said she was apping Rude and I couldn't work out how to app Tseng.
RONAN is a character who I adore because he's so multi-faceted in the text. All the YW characters are, which is why I love the series and have since I was nine. But we get presented with this angry Irish boy who is so dissatisfied with the world and how it runs. He's argumentative, he's opinionated and yet he's bizarrely cheerful about it all. He has this facade of being the grim badboy and every so often he slips up and he is utterly delighted with things. Then you find out that he's a wizard and a pretty powerful and talented one at that. He's smart and quick witted and good looking and athletic and popular and incredibly charismatic and he's a fundamentally good and self-sacricing person. It would have been such an easy thing for him to be such a Mary Sue character and be utterly unlikeable.
Except he isn't. He flies into tempers. He's incredibly impatient because he wants you to keep up with him. His sarcasm can be quite cutting at times. He's afraid to die. His nationalism borders on absurd at times -- in fact, the Powers had to test whether his nationalism would overcome his innate love of everything! He freaks out about things getting too big for him to cope with. He's too afraid to tell his parents about his wizardry because he doesn't know how it will go. His stubbornness is as much a horrible flaw as it is a positive trait.
And then there's the Defender. Ronan cops a lot of flak for this in the fandom because "why wouldn't you want to be a Power?". Except that Ronan's reaction is very human and one of the reasons why I love him. He's horrified. He's miserable. When he talks about it he's trying not to cry because it completely overwhelms him that he's fifteen years old and he's being asked to die or be driven insane. And there's nothing he or anyone else can do. It's a possession of the most disturbing and visceral kind and he reacts in the only way he can. He hates it, and he hates what's been done to him, but he goes out and gets stuff done. And then he loses the Defender through killing himself and he never once lets on what he's going to do until after he does it. He's badass and complicated and complex. I love him a lot and squeed with utter glee when it turned out he was going to be in the next book too.
STEPHANIE is a character that I was topped into. I'm looking through my old logs and Tim pimped the canon out to me in October because there weren't many players in camp who she could squee about Tim with and about Robin. I was a newbie comic book reader and so I was not aware yet of my apping patterns re: comic books. So I started to read the Dixon issues of Robin and I loved Tim. Tim was such a dork. And then there's this hot blonde girl who has chemistry with him. And she's completely badass in her own right -- she wants to protect first her mother and then all of freaking Gotham. She loves being a vigilante, loves helping people and the adrenaline and jumping off buildings.
And that love of life comes through in everything she does. She manages to convince Tim to go to a movie in costume as a date, because hey when you go and see a sci-fi cult movie? Everyone's in costume! She manages to get Tim to lighten up and do retarded things like hang her upside down off a building. She's had some really shitty times and she gets back up and refuses to stay down. She's got a streak of justice a mile wide and she's recklessly brave and she's determined to earn Batman's recognition -- which is a pretty big deal given that it's Batman. For a series that could be grim or drag or be generally reasonable dark, she's a relative breath of fresh air. I honestly really liked it when Dixon brought her back because seriously she is an awesome character in her own right.
And then there's her thing with Cass and how she basically earned Cass's respect by being completely outclassed and yet never staying down. She's tenacious and determined and a really good teenaged friend for Cass. And they play homoerotic tag.
Also, she bricked Tim in the face the first time she met him.
TRACI is...inconsistently written! Pre-Crisis, she's a magical hooker who exists to be fanservice. It is creepy. Post-Crisis, she gets in on two awesome series with writers who make something more of her than just tits and ass. In Tales of the Unexpected she's irrelevant and flippant, teasing and genuinely loves her father without being a daddy's girl. She's fun to read because it's clear that while she's going through some stressful times, it's pretty clear that she loves every minute of being involved in this whacked up life.
I liked her then. I loved her in Blue Beetle. She shows up and is this combination of teasing confident superhero and vaguely awkward teenager. She meets Jaime and there's immediate chemistry. She's more than his match and it's pretty bloody clear that she thinks she has the best job in the world. She loves her job, she loves travelling the world, she loves meeting strange people and she loves teasing her dumbass jesus boyfriend. She's a free spirit who is far more open than most of her brethren, she's incredibly hot (what! SHE IS), she's sarcastic without being cruel and she loves every minute of her life.
I just want more of her. GIVE ME MORE, STURGES. Come on, we need more antics like Jaime trying to take her to his school formal or her popping into the car while Jaime's taking driving lessons and his freaking out.
KONOKA was never the character I thought I was going to app -- that was Negi. In fact, in my first readthrough, I thought that Asuna and Negi were the coolest things ever and that Konoka, while super cute and made me flail lots in the Kyoto arc, didn't really ping me as hard as Asuna. Then Asuna got apped and I betaed l-lol and I thought "hey, I could app Negi!" This ... didn't happen. I liked Negi but not enough to app him. I knew I was going to app a Negima character and Konoka had always sort of hovered in the back of my mind, but I hadn't really properly decided. Then Kyou commented asking for a Konoka for a double app and I went "BITCH SHE'S MINE". I went back and reread the canon and I realised just how adorable Konoka was. She's sweet and dizzy and she's a stabilising force in the Asuna-Negi dynamic.
One of the things I really like about her is that she genuinely likes everyone and is friendly with everyone. She likes people! She likes to giggle, she likes to explore, she likes to top people with kindness and love and healing magic goodness. And it's not a conscious I MUST TOP YOu thing that comes across as aggressive or needy. It's just who she is and she's comfortable with that. Konoka is very comfortable with who she is and where she's going. It's really nice to have a character who is so zen about things.
Also. The relationship with Setsuna and how it's so complicated. They're teenagers and they're hormonal and there's this blur between whether their relationship is romantic or platonic. But they love each other and it doesn't really matter so much to Konoka what the relationship is, so long as Setsuna is there with her. And that sort of devotion gets me and I flail over them and how so very special they are. I actually kind of hope that we don't get a conclusive answer for their relationship because I love the ambiguities and how they sort of blur relationship categories and how for Konoka it just doesn't matter. And how it shows off Setsuna's closeted nature and wah. I love them okay. :(
FUUKA was a character who I suspected I would love from looking at wikipedia. Honest, I PMed Juri telling her I would love the tech girl before I got the game. This is a sign of how well I know my own pings. And initially ... I hated Fuuka's voice actress. I really did. Heck, half the time I still do! (I'm told that FES is a much better version and if that's true then I so want). But I was interested in her backstory and that she's resourceful enough to survive in a hostile environment for ten hours without any weapons or any idea of what's going on other than there were a lot of powerful things around her and she couldn't do anything about it. She didn't curl up or crumple, she stayed alive long enough for the party to find her.
And then we get her with Natsuki, the girl who bullied her and locked her in the school for a night and it would be totally human for her to think "well, you deserve to get hurt". Except that Fuuka never does think that. She steps out and shields her and then summons her persona for the first time. She's a complete noncombatant and she's trying to protect someone who made her life hell. And I went "I want". And over the course of the game she goes from someone who is kind of withdrawn and bullied into someone who does what she believes is right, who draws strength from her friends and wants to keep in touch with them but she's also willing to stand against them because she knows that friendship is more resilient than that.
And okay, she has to be told that you do not have to give your friends gifts for just being your friends. :'(
But I can understand her, because she's very human in a sense. She doesn't have horrible parental emo, but instead two parents who push her to succeed as she's the only child. She doesn't have a horrible backstory, just being bullied and disliking the traits she has while envying the skills she wishes she did have. She's very relateable because her issues are ones that a lot of teenaged girls go through.
RENA was a character I thought was okay in the early chapters. She's kind of tsundere and I do like tsunderes who are capable of stepping up and kicking ass and taking names. That said, there wasn't really a lot that made her stand out to me in my head as something special. She just seemed like your typical tsundere who needs the love of her soulmaaaaate and then she will learn to love again and be open.
Then SPOILERS HAPPEN and Rena's utterly devastated. She stares in shock and then flips out. She's screaming and crying and throttling Riku and it's the most emotional reaction we get from her. I read that and PMed Youhei's applicant and went "Right, I'm in". Because after that, no-one was going to prise her from my fingers.
The story's ongoing and I wouldn't want to spoil too much of it for you, but Rena's showing more depth as the story progresses and Riku understands her better. She's a tragic figure who never let on to anyone just how deep the tragedy goes and she's self-reliant to the point of absurdity and she doesn't get people especially well. She's turning herself into a weapon and even then the mask slips. She's not as untouchable as she thinks and when someone gets through, they get through. Her relationships with Neene, Riku and Youhei are so complicated because she makes them so and closes them out but she cares. And I do love the difference between the mask she wants people to see and who Rena actually is. She doesn't need the love of her soulmate. She needs human contact at all because she's so damaged. And I love that she is so damaged and yet has this unflinching view of justice. She may be fucked in the head but she will protect the weak. She will do her duty to save humanity and don't you dare get in her way.
Ahhh, I love her. :(
RENO is ... not the type of character I normally like! I mean, the first time we see him he's dropping a plate on a settlement, killing lots of people! HE'S NOT AT ALL A NICE PERSON. But as the game progresses, you learn that yeah, he's not a nice person at all, or a good one. But he's oddly endearing despite the fact that he's a truly horrible person. He has rules for when he will do things. He won't do anything off hours. He'll kill a crime boss because he's messing with one of their own, even if they've been messing with her previously.
And then there's Advent Children where they do stupid shit in the background like trying to sneak off after Tifa starts arguing with Cloud. And then they're absurdly loyal to Rufus Shinra. And the Turks are never going to be good or nice people. That's not what they are. But they can do things for the greater good and they can acknowledge! That the greater good is sometimes more important in order to get what you want. And they realise that yeah, Sephiroth is bad! Destroying the Planet and the Lifestream is bad! They go looking for Zack after he's disappeared and they can't find him.
Reno's not a nice person. He's not a good person. His moral compass is so screwed up. He does horrible things. But he's doggedly loyal to the Turks and to Shinra. You never doubt that he wouldn't step in if one of them needed it. I don't normally like lawful evil characters but I can make an exception of Reno.
Also, my wife said she was apping Rude and I couldn't work out how to app Tseng.
RONAN is a character who I adore because he's so multi-faceted in the text. All the YW characters are, which is why I love the series and have since I was nine. But we get presented with this angry Irish boy who is so dissatisfied with the world and how it runs. He's argumentative, he's opinionated and yet he's bizarrely cheerful about it all. He has this facade of being the grim badboy and every so often he slips up and he is utterly delighted with things. Then you find out that he's a wizard and a pretty powerful and talented one at that. He's smart and quick witted and good looking and athletic and popular and incredibly charismatic and he's a fundamentally good and self-sacricing person. It would have been such an easy thing for him to be such a Mary Sue character and be utterly unlikeable.
Except he isn't. He flies into tempers. He's incredibly impatient because he wants you to keep up with him. His sarcasm can be quite cutting at times. He's afraid to die. His nationalism borders on absurd at times -- in fact, the Powers had to test whether his nationalism would overcome his innate love of everything! He freaks out about things getting too big for him to cope with. He's too afraid to tell his parents about his wizardry because he doesn't know how it will go. His stubbornness is as much a horrible flaw as it is a positive trait.
And then there's the Defender. Ronan cops a lot of flak for this in the fandom because "why wouldn't you want to be a Power?". Except that Ronan's reaction is very human and one of the reasons why I love him. He's horrified. He's miserable. When he talks about it he's trying not to cry because it completely overwhelms him that he's fifteen years old and he's being asked to die or be driven insane. And there's nothing he or anyone else can do. It's a possession of the most disturbing and visceral kind and he reacts in the only way he can. He hates it, and he hates what's been done to him, but he goes out and gets stuff done. And then he loses the Defender through killing himself and he never once lets on what he's going to do until after he does it. He's badass and complicated and complex. I love him a lot and squeed with utter glee when it turned out he was going to be in the next book too.
STEPHANIE is a character that I was topped into. I'm looking through my old logs and Tim pimped the canon out to me in October because there weren't many players in camp who she could squee about Tim with and about Robin. I was a newbie comic book reader and so I was not aware yet of my apping patterns re: comic books. So I started to read the Dixon issues of Robin and I loved Tim. Tim was such a dork. And then there's this hot blonde girl who has chemistry with him. And she's completely badass in her own right -- she wants to protect first her mother and then all of freaking Gotham. She loves being a vigilante, loves helping people and the adrenaline and jumping off buildings.
And that love of life comes through in everything she does. She manages to convince Tim to go to a movie in costume as a date, because hey when you go and see a sci-fi cult movie? Everyone's in costume! She manages to get Tim to lighten up and do retarded things like hang her upside down off a building. She's had some really shitty times and she gets back up and refuses to stay down. She's got a streak of justice a mile wide and she's recklessly brave and she's determined to earn Batman's recognition -- which is a pretty big deal given that it's Batman. For a series that could be grim or drag or be generally reasonable dark, she's a relative breath of fresh air. I honestly really liked it when Dixon brought her back because seriously she is an awesome character in her own right.
And then there's her thing with Cass and how she basically earned Cass's respect by being completely outclassed and yet never staying down. She's tenacious and determined and a really good teenaged friend for Cass. And they play homoerotic tag.
Also, she bricked Tim in the face the first time she met him.
TRACI is...inconsistently written! Pre-Crisis, she's a magical hooker who exists to be fanservice. It is creepy. Post-Crisis, she gets in on two awesome series with writers who make something more of her than just tits and ass. In Tales of the Unexpected she's irrelevant and flippant, teasing and genuinely loves her father without being a daddy's girl. She's fun to read because it's clear that while she's going through some stressful times, it's pretty clear that she loves every minute of being involved in this whacked up life.
I liked her then. I loved her in Blue Beetle. She shows up and is this combination of teasing confident superhero and vaguely awkward teenager. She meets Jaime and there's immediate chemistry. She's more than his match and it's pretty bloody clear that she thinks she has the best job in the world. She loves her job, she loves travelling the world, she loves meeting strange people and she loves teasing her dumbass jesus boyfriend. She's a free spirit who is far more open than most of her brethren, she's incredibly hot (what! SHE IS), she's sarcastic without being cruel and she loves every minute of her life.
I just want more of her. GIVE ME MORE, STURGES. Come on, we need more antics like Jaime trying to take her to his school formal or her popping into the car while Jaime's taking driving lessons and his freaking out.