stupid little revelations
So, I've said that my favorite character is the one who is perceived as something completely different than what he actually is -- the character whose demeanor is a polar opposite of his nature. Usually, that's the character who is perceived as evil but who is actually working toward a noble cause, or has a legitimate reason for his actions. I've loved this sort of character since I was a little kid, when my cousins, Joe and I would LARP (without knowing what it was we were doing) and I would always happily play the villain whom the good guys would fight, then I would reveal my moral and noble aims just before dying, plunging the "heroes" into guilt-ridden grief for killing me. The first character I ever loved was Vegeta (yeah yeah, DBZ, so shoot me), then I think Mulder from X-Files, then nothing until Itachi, L, then Kurogane (to a degree, can't seem to focus on the manga), Dexter and Dean. Probably some others I forget. It's not enough for the character to be mysterious (Kakashi's mysterious, but I don't really give a shit); they've gotta be good at pushing people away and/or building impenetrable mental walls. There are plenty of shows and manga that are awesome in their own right, but if my character's not there or underdeveloped, I'm not going to adore it.
On another point, the type of character I like usually has no chemistry whatsoever with any other character in the story. This is why anything I could possibly ship would be a crack pairing or nothing at all. Sam/Dean and Kurogane/Fai are the only exceptions thus far.
But there's something else I actually just realized. I was ranting at Ivan about bad shoujo anime (seriously, how many high school girls are actually goddesses of distant worlds and are the only people who can save a bunch of aliens?) and it kind of dawned on me that I don't generally like high school anime/manga, and I can't ship kids under 18 years old. I've tried, I don't have a problem with it at all, it's cool ... but for some reason I just can't be excited over SasuNaru or Fruits Basket as a whole. I kind of hated the movie Titanic because Rose was supposed to be 17 at the time. I don't know why. All the characters that I've ever really liked -- even in stories where children were the main characters -- have been older. Honestly, if Sasuke and Naruto were, say, 25, I'd give more of a shit, as crazy as it sounds. Maybe it's a maturity thing. Maybe I just can't bring myself to believe that people younger than me could know more about love and life than I do. Maybe that kind of pisses me off. Maybe not. I dunno.
All I know is I read the entirety of Nameless Magery under the assumption that Lisane was something like 24-30, and then realized very, very late that she was only 17. If I had read the first sentence of the book properly (in which it states she's 17), it honestly might have killed the book for me. I continue to ignore the fact that she's only 20 at the end of the book. How lame is that?