I'll charm the chicks! - Hey, are those things real? Ha!

[essbeejay]

You can always tell when sbj's rl is less crazy because then I'm here, wasting not only my time, but everyone else's.

Hey there was a meme I totally forgot to mention yesterday! But whatevs, I'm doing it now and I totally stole it from somebody awesome (juxtaposie).

Comment with the name of a female character and I'll tell you why I love her.

Since this lj is pretty much exclusively PpG and that isn't fair, here is a list off the very tip top of my head of female characters I love/have loved unfailingly in my fannish lifetime. (Besides the obvious, of course.)

Toph (Avatar - not that shit movie, mind you)
Mizuno Ami/Sailor Mercury (DUH)
Tiffany Aching (from The Wee Free Men series/Pratchett's Discworld universe)
Granny Weatherwax (Discworld universe)
Zoe (FIREFLYYYYY)
Daria Morgendorffer (MTV's Daria)
Hiiragi Kagami (Lucky Star - I fucking LOVE this girl)
Kanzaki Hitomi (Vision of Escaflowne)
Lola Bunny (Space Jam YEAH I'M FUCKING SERIOUS)
Liz Lemon (30 Rock)
Susan (Death's Granddaughter from the Discworld universe)
Midori (Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood)
Sawachika Eri (School Rumble)
Takano Akira (School Rumble)
Nagato Yuki (Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya)

What the fuck, why is there so much anime/manga on this list D: I keep going through things I love in my head, but then I'm all Oh wait, my favorite character in that one is male, so damn... which, interestingly enough, most of my favorite characters in western animation are male characters. Maybe there is an interesting reason behind this...

There are probably about 8 bajillion more that I cannot remember for the fucking life of me, so if someone occurs to you that I might like try asking and I'll see what I have to say :B

Comments

[essbeejay.livejournal.com]

No apologies for rants or long posts! They are interesting! They fire up the brain!

I swore to God and believed up until the last hair-shredding moments of Avatar that Katara was not romantically interested in Aang in the least, and it still rankles me, much in the way Harry/Ginny did (I summarized my thoughts about the way-too-neat-and-tidy-ending much more succinctly here (http://junsui-chikyuu.livejournal.com/174021.html?thread=15813#t15813), ages ago, in case you are curious).

As for Mai, I think I have a habit of liking characters who would very honestly bug the shit out of me irl. Mai to a lesser case here; certainly the Brick in my head (or any of the Rowdyruff Boys, for that matter) would make me want to set his/their face/s on fire, but because they're fictional and I don't have to actually engage with them they are okay! Same thing with Toph - she is awesome, but she is kind of a brat, and I'd probably want to shake her REALLY REALLY HARD if I knew a real life Toph. And then run away before she killed me. Mai herself actually didn't bother me that much, but maybe that's because I tend to like the deadpan Goth!girls, without the cliched Goth!makeup or Goth!wardrobe.

Haha, I actually really dug Mai's response to Zuko! Reason being? There were so many emo!Zuko moments in Avatar (SO MANY), and I really tend to not go for the emo!boys at all. Like, remotely. (Pretty much the only one I ever fangirled HARDCORE was Van from Vision of Escaflowne, and I was younger then anyway.) I much prefer boys who start off all set in their ways and then have humanizing semi-emo!moments later. (Hence why I adore male characters like Syaoran and the Beast from the Disney version!) So more often than not I sit around kinda wanting to... slap the emo!boys around a bit, because I get sick of their whining and bitching. Now, I really actually liked Zuko more than I usually like the emo!boys, but there were still plenty of moments where I was all BITCH SERIOUSLY POP A PROZAC OR SOMETHING. So hearing Mai deliver that line was kind of like !!! 8DDD wish fulfillment for me, in a way (though part of me was also thinking "Okay so they are basically setting Mai up as the bitchy shrew of a girlfriend and priming Zuko to get with Katara, yawn," then imagine my delight when they allowed Maiko to work). I think yeah, Zuko was going through some shit, and Mai could've been a more supportive girlfriend there, but being in a relationship isn't always about coddling your significant other. Sometimes you got to put your foot down and tell the bitch to man up and put on their big boy britches, or just diffuse the McEmo!Serious moments with a playful, snarky remark - which is what I read Mai's response and attitude as, rather than the belittling, emasculating sort of comment that would've come from Zuko's father or sister. Anyway, in its own way, Maiko wound up taking me by total surprise and really worked for me in the end!

Something that probably hurt Katara's development as a Waterbender for me was the fact that I didn't see any Avatar until they had started airing S2, so I basically watched all of S1 in one go. Without the luxury of having to wait weeks for new episodes, Katara's skills seemed to advance unreasonably fast to me; I would've liked to have seen her struggle a little more with Waterbending (particularly when facing a SEASONED VETERAN), considering that for all her natural skill, she never actually had someone to point her in the right direction. Like, if I'm self-teaching myself piano, and then I go up against a professional musician who's been playing for years and come THAT CLOSE to outplaying him/her...? I can read all the books on music theory and listen to all the classical music I want, but frankly, that ain't going to happen. Unless I'm a prodigy, which you could argue Katara is, but I personally would've had an easier time buying it if they'd made her work a little harder for it.

(cont'd, this comment got stupidly long!)