Ten influential characters (and some apologies) · 6:36am Jan 13th, 2014
So here's the deal. I said I'd post something every two weeks. That was four weeks ago now, and the next update was meant to be the completed next chapter of Human. You may have noticed that it hasn't materialised yet. I'd like to give a reason for that, but it's nothing that hasn't been going on for a while now anyway. In truth, I just really dropped the ball. I'd planned to have it out today (Sunday), the first two weeks of no updates just being a one-off incident of laziness that I'd excuse myself for due to the whole Christmas/New Year's furore. But that's passed now, and I still have nothing.
I know I said I wouldn't use updating twice in a week as an excuse to do less work later anymore, but I'm glad that I did at least update twice last time I did update. And I'll do it again next time I do as compensation for the wait. So a new chapter of Human, and probably a new chapter of Courier's Journal or House of Chaos at around the same time too. After that, I'll hopefully keep to a strict schedule for the rest of the year. I'm saying this now on public record so that I have to hold myself to it. If I fail to keep THIS promise I don't know what I could ever possibly have do in recompense. Probably disembowel myself on-camera.
Since I have nothing else for you guys at this exact moment though, I thought it'd be fun to at least do an interesting blog. So for this one, I decided to talk about characters. No, not talk about characters. This isn't one of my ramble blogs. But rather, I thought I'd do a top ten sort of thing, and speak about ten characters that are very special to me.
In what way exactly? Well, it's hard for me to define. They're not my favourite characters of all time, though there is a lot of overlap. If they were, this list would probably be dominated even more by one or two particular series. In fact, some of them aren't even my favourite characters in the context of the series that they're from. Nor are these characters what I would call the best, because even just counting characters from media that I've viewed, objectively I know that there are better characters. In perspective, I'd probably call this a list of the ten most influential characters to me personally.
These are the guys that most affected me as a writer and storyteller, and as a member of an audience. They helped me formulate most of my opinion of fiction. And the funny thing is, a lot of them aren't even from my childhood. The movies I watched, games I played and books I read as a kid actually had comparatively little effect on my young psyche. But maybe that's because it's only in recent years that I became a writer at all. Either way, this is my top ten.
10. The Terminator, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
I'm gonna start with a nice, easy, uncontroversial one. I have no memory at all of when I first watched Terminator 2. What I do remember is that I watched it because I saw James Rolfe (the guy who does Angry Video Game Nerd) review the movie for Spike TV. He had a lot of nice things to say about it, and he especially praised the movie's characters. Maybe that coloured my opinion going in, but I agreed with him absolutely.
Terminator 2 was amazing in how it handled characterisation and character development. Everybody has an arc and everybody changes in that movie. Whether it was Sarah Connor learning to trust a machine and have hope for the future again, John becoming less of a little shit, or even Miles Dyson becoming aware of the weight of his actions and his responsibility to mankind. But the character that changed the most was the Terminator himself. The one played by Arnold, anyway. He's an emotionless killing machine that actually learns that value of human life and willingly sacrifices himself to protect it in spite of his orders. That's amazing, and inspiring as well.
I've learned a lot about character development over the years, and how to do it exactly was something I picked up from a number of sources, but T2 was the movie that made me realise how important it is, and the Terminator himself was the most well-developed character of all of them in that film.
There's another reason I picked the Terminator specifically for this list, but I'll get into that later.
9. John Marston, from Red Dead Redemption.
This guy. Oh, THIS GUY. This guy right here captured my heart, and tore it still beating out of my chest. I'm not going to spoil anything for RDR, but if you've played it, you fucking know why.
John Marston, if you haven't played Red Dead before, is a cowboy living in the final days of the old west. A retired outlaw who went to raise a family, the main story of the game follows him as he is forced by the proto-FBI to hunt down all the remaining members of his old gang. If he can capture or kill them all, then all his past crimes will be pardoned and he can finally return to his beloved wife and son again. That's his sole motivation in a quest that has him doing everything from entering a horse and cart race with a snake oil salesman to overthrowing the goddamn Mexican government. He's dedicated, he's determined, he's a badass, and he does it all in the name of redemption and his family.
I'll also admit that I had a lot of attachment to him as a character because he does greatly remind me of my father, who is a big fan of westerns and actually shares a lot of mannerisms with Johnny boy, such as being similarly scary when angered. I swear, every time he interacted with his son in this game, I almost couldn't stop imagining myself as Jack. And then... something... happened... Oh, fuck this game. I love it and all, but FUCK this game. I cried little bitch tears. I'll admit it.
And there's another thing that I took away from RDR and John Marston's character: This guy was actually a fairly big inspiration for Howard. Not so much in their personalities, of course. Second is such a bastard that it's almost comical. John Marston is practically a saint and I will hear no bad words about him. But along with another character on this list, John Marston is the main reason that I like writing older characters.
I'm still a teenager myself, so I obviously mean no offence to the rest of you young whipper-snappers when I say this, but people our age haven't lived yet. Our experiences are all still ahead of us and we aren't yet done becoming the people that we'll be for the rest of our lives yet. Characters like John Marston though, well into their forties and fifties, are characters shaped by a lifetime of experiences, who have seen and done things that have changed them and moulded them into distinct personalities. When you write a character of that age, you have to have their entire life worked out in your head so that you know how they got to that point, and if you write a character with an entire lifetime of experiences in mind, then you can't help but write them with nuance and depth, even if you are writing a character like Second who is a complete fucking psycho.
8. Gordon Freeman, from the Half Life series.
Oh man, Gordon Freeman! What a clown, am I right? I could just fill this page with a list of his most memorable quotes, but Something Awful already beat me to making such a list, and also to this joke. But yeah. To call Gordon Freeman a character is a little misleading. He's a completely silent protagonist with no personality beyond what we project onto him, but he's the sort of character that never really needs to say anything. Whether you subscribe to the belief that he's implied to be taking part in these conversations too, or if he's an in-universe mute like Chell, his actions can't be understated.
He is pretty much just a normal guy, but he became a legend through sheer force of will and determination. Okay, the armoured suit helped, but Gordon wasn't the only one with protective armour, and bear in mind who his enemies are. The first game had him fighting off hundreds of trained marines alongside an invading army of monsters from another world, and from the second game onwards he's actually leading a revolution against an inter-dimensional alien empire. The man completely deserves his reputation just for his ability to survive such an onslaught. The fact that he not only does that, but actually manages to annihilate multiple armies in the process, is just something awesome to think about. Especially considering that it's not just a story element. You the player perform all these actions yourself through organic gameplay, and that's amazing to me.
But what's more amazing is what I said at the start of the previous paragraph: He's just a normal guy. And this comes back to another trope that I really love. I'm a big, big fan of underdog heroes. This won't be the last time that this will come up on this list, but there's nothing that I love more than seeing a hero vastly outclassed by their enemies who overcome them anyway, whether it be through extensive planning and tactics like Batman, cleverness and fast thinking like the Doctor, or indeed, just being a hardcore motherfucker like Gordon Freeman.
And this is again something that inspired me in Human. Yes, our protagonists in that story have the Elements of Harmony and the alicorn princesses on their side, but they're up against omnipotent elder gods that are limited only by their imaginations and the narrative itself. And those elder gods are in turn going up against even more powerful entities above them. Those are the most interesting stories in the world to me. Put a mouse in a sealed room with a lion, and work out a way for the mouse to win the fight. You can't say it won't be a spectacle.
And that's why Gordon Freeman is awesome to me. He is the mouse to the Combine's lion, and he jumped up and tore its throat right out in front of everyone.
7. The Major, from Hellsing Ultimate.
This is the character that made me realise that I might technically be a Nazi sympathiser.
Kidding! But I'll tell you what the Major definitely is: He's delightfully demented, incredibly sadistic, unbelievably over-the-top, and he steals every scene he's in. The guy leads an army of Nazi vampires and launches an attack on London that kills millions, and he does it for no other reason than just because he likes it. If you've not seen it before, you need to check out his "I like war" speech.
When I first saw this, I was actually kind of irritated. I was like "Yeah, the Nazis were pretty evil. I know. Get on with it." But I came to understand this character more as the series went on. The point of the speech wasn't that "Nazis R bad, mmkay," but that this guy in particular and his army are fucking psychos even by Nazi Germany's standards. The point of the speech is to showcase the fact that we aren't just dealing with a Nazi here, but possibly the most evil man to ever live, yet at the same time one with internally consistent logic and principles that makes sense in his head.
The attack on London and the Nazis killing its people in the streets was honestly tough to watch the first time I saw it. Having lived in London myself for a time, and knowing how badly World War Two affected the people there and what the real life Nazis did, it just made it gut-wrenching to see them come back and actually start winning.
But it achieved an effect. It did something for me that I don't normally experience. It made me genuinely fucking hate the villains of this series. Almost every other villain in any piece of fiction I consume, even if I do hope for them to lose, I tend to like them. The Joker in The Dark Knight was a monster and I was glad to see Batman take him down, but I still found him interesting and entertaining and was always happy to see him on-screen. The Major though was one of the few characters to ever really make my blood boil in seething hatred, and his death at the very end of the series was one of the most satisfying moments of all ten OVAs.
On repeat watchings, my anger has died down and I'm able to enjoy the Major as a villain in the same way I enjoy other villains, even if I do still find him especially despicable, but I will always remember those emotions that he brought out in me. This guy is a truly heinous villain, and one of the most malevolent characters ever written, and I do kind of love him for it.
6. Dracula/Alucard, from Dracula and Hellsing Ultimate.
I'm kind of cheating with this one. Hellsing Ultimate IS based on the original Dracula novel, and Alucard IS meant to be the count himself under a different name, but they are admittedly very different characters. I couldn't justifiably say that Dracula as played by Lugosi is the same character as Alucard. But fuck you, it's my list.
I'm going to be straight with you guys here. A lot of the classic iconic characters like Macbeth, Darth Vader, Charles Foster Kane and Batman I mostly just appreciate on an academic level. I'll admit that they're great characters, and if I've read the stories that they're from I'll also probably admit that those stories are great stories. I'll probably enjoy those stories and characters too, just like I enjoy most fiction and fictional characters. But not a lot of them really affect me in a massive way though. Star Wars was pretty good, but I don't often catch myself thinking about Star Wars in otherwise unrelated situations, and I don't really count myself as a... whatever the Star Wars equivalent to a Trekkie is. Whatever. I'm not a part of it like I'm a part of the brony fanbase, I'm trying to say.
Dracula though left a lasting impression on me. I only ever read the book once, and I've only really seen a few of the movies based on it (including 1931 film and Nosferatu, both my favourites so far), but it's still something that I remembered forever. Dracula MADE the vampire mythos as we understand it today, just like Tolkien made modern fantasy, and every vampire story I've ever seen and liked owes its existence to Dracula. And Dracula himself was just cool. A powerful, evil force to oppose the protagonists who oozed personality, and he also had superpowers before comic books were even a thing. He was an incredibly original creation (even taking into account Carmilla...) and he was just a very entertaining character.
Now as for Alucard from Hellsing Ultimate, he's a different monster altogether. He's awesome in a completely different way, and basically IS just something out of a comic book. A Japanese comic book. Literally. Hellsing Ultimate is an adaptation of a manga. But it's heavily inspired by Dracula, and the novel is mostly canon to the events of the series. It could almost be called an unofficial sequel to Dracula, really. Just one with a completely different tone and setting. And it's animated. And it's got Nazi vampires.
Okay, it's probably as far removed from Dracula as it can get, but what do you want from me? It's fucking awesome, and Alucard is technically Dracula, so I feel no shame in having them share a place on this list.
5. Revolver Ocelot, from the Metal Gear Solid series.
This guy is another of my all-time favourite villains. Ocelot has been a major character in almost every game in the MGS series since the original Metal Gear Solid when he was introduced, and he probably changed and evolved more than any other character. We saw him as an inexperienced but still skilled rookie during the 60's in Metal Gear Solid 3 and witnessed how his meeting Big Boss would later make him into the man we know. We saw him in MGS1&2, where he was a masterful manipulator playing all sides of every conflict. And then there was MGS4, where he was seemingly possessed by a spirit and became another character altogether called Liquid Ocelot, because Metal Gear Solid is kind of a weird series.
Right up until the day he dies you're never quite sure what his deal is. In fact, he betrayed and backstabbed and manipulated people so frequently in the series, it's literally not until after he's already dead that you find out who he was ACTUALLY working for this whole time, and it's really not who you expect. It's not who I expected anyway. But he was a clever character, he kept you on your toes, and he was just fascinating to learn about. Fuck Romeo and Juliet. OCELOT is a character that I could write a five page essay on, mostly just because I'd need at least three to explain his entire history because it's so complicated. But I like complicated characters.
Ocelot I can also say I like because he combines a lot of what I like about many of the other characters on this list. Like the Terminator he experiences a lot of character development. Like Gordon Freeman and the next character on my list he's actually a relatively normal guy in a world full of much stronger entities. And like John Marston, his greater age means that he has a lot of history, life experience and thus character nuance to him. I also liked that his age was no impediment at all to him being a formidable villain. You don't face him in direct combat all that much, but he puts up a fight you do, and even outside of your confrontations, he continues to be a throbbing pain in your side for most of the series. He's pretty much solely responsible for every horrible thing that happened to Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4.
And that was another big inspiration for Second in Human: Ocelot was the character that taught me not to fuck with old people, because despite his age, Ocelot could be a nightmare when he wanted to be.
4. Solid Snake, from the Metal Gear Solid series.
I have less to say about Snake than most others on this list because most of what I have to say about him applies to other entries on this list. Mostly I like to liken him to Gordon Freeman.
Now, Snake isn't exactly a normal guy. He is still a clone of the greatest soldier that ever lived. But it's all about context. This is the Metal Gear Solid universe. This is a world where psychics, ghosts and mediums are real and employed by the US special forces, where cyborg ninjas are the chosen method of conventional warfare in the future, where people can just be born with things like a healing factor or a supernatural ability to have bullets swerve around them, nanomachines can do almost anything, and the greatest sniper in the world was a hundred-year-old guy who could photosynthesise. Snake is living in a world of superpowered freaks that would not be out of place in the Marvel or DC universes, and the fact that he consistently comes out on top is a testament to his abilities.
He's like the Punisher. He has no superpowers of his own; he's just well-armed, trained and skilled enough to compete.
Just in terms of sheer amount of shit he's been through, I'm putting him on the list here instead of his daddy, Big Boss. I like Big Boss more, but we played as Snake first and he's the truly iconic one in the series. Though for all intents and purposes, anything I say about Solid Snake can also be applied to Big Boss.
3. Professor Abraham Van Helsing, from Dracula.
Did I mention yet that I fucking LOVE Dracula? Because I DO. I like Dracula a LOT. It makes my DICK hard.
And if you've been paying attention at all so far, you know why this man is up this high. Yet again, this is an underdog hero character. It takes some serious stones to go up against Count Dracula, but Abraham Van Helsing did it. Look at that old bastard! He's a normal human being, well into his sixties by the look of it, and that is the face the man that killed COUNT FUCKING DRACULA, pictured here cowering in fear as Helsing approaches him with a cross. There's a reason why all the looser adaptations of this story (including mine) turned Helsing into an action hero or vampire-hunting specialist. It's because he's got balls the size of coconuts, and Rambo and John McClane WISH they were this hardcore.
In reality though, the original Van Helsing was not an action hero. My own story and the movie Van Helsing would both lead you to believe as such, but Abraham Van Helsing in Dracula really only had three things going for him:
1. He was open-minded enough to figure out that Dracula was a vampire.
2. He was clever enough to to know what Dracula was weak to.
3. He was strong-willed enough to resist Dracula's attempts to hypnotise him.
That's all. That's all it took, and that's all the good professor needed to take down the vampire that all other vampires aspire to be.
It's even more insane if we get into the Hellsing Ultimate version of Abraham. In that continuity, well... Let me quote TV Tropes here.
It's never explained or even glimpsed (for all the massive Flashback) of how Abraham managed to defeat and enslave Alucard. All that is stated is that Alucard went all out, was imprisoned, and Abraham managed to put such fear (and respect) in Alucard that he haunted his nightmares for hundreds of years and made him weep blood...
Yikes.
2. Discord, from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
I don't think I even have the power to articulate all the ways that I love Discord. He's got a great design. He's funny. He occupies an interesting place in the mythos. And he's got such character and personality that it permeates his very being. Even just thinking about what must go on in his head intrigues me. The psychology behind Discord's thinking is probably a subject that could fill several books. As a being of pure chaos, I couldn't even begin to make a definitive statement about what his mind must be like. We can only speculate from what we've seen of him. Discord is as Discord does.
And a very important thing about him is how we've seen him as both a hero and a villain now and he works so well for both roles.
As a villain, he was menacing and malevolent, and his incredible power made him a seemingly unstoppable force, giving that underdog hero effect that I love so much, in which he needed to be outwitted and it was his own overconfidence that was his downfall. They couldn't have taken him in a straight fight like they did with the changelings. But it did seem pretty weak how he did let himself get trapped back in stone again, right? What a dumbass. Heh...
Then there was his reformation, allowing him to stick around as a semi-regular character now, which did a lot to humanise Discord and make him more relatable while still keeping him chaotic and unique in his own Discord-y way. And despite ostensibly being a good guy now, he's still aloof and a sarcastic bastard, and definitely not on good terms with the main six outside of Fluttershy. And it's also while he was reformed and free that we learned about how he planted the seeds that the Everfree vines came from. He did it just before he was trapped in stone the first time, and they were seemingly meant to kill the Tree of Harmony. Presumably this would have... set... Discord free...
Huh. Well, would you look at that? Discord actually created a scenario in which his escape was inevitable from the very beginning, and if Princess Celestia hadn't ordered his early release and reformation when she did, Equestria may have been completely fucked.
DO YOU SEE WHY I LOVE THIS GUY?!
1. The Doctor, from Doctor Who. (I guess he was technically in a few episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures too).
You know, I don't think I really need to say anything here. The Doctor is one of the most complicated characters in TV history with over fifty years of backstory from the show and expanded universe, and the sheer number of adventures he had, experiences he's gone though, and personality types he's had through his many regenerations throughout the years means that nothing I can say about him will do him justice. He's a many-layered character. Specifically he has thirteen layers and each one is composed of a lot of bits from the ones underneath it.
Better men have explained the Doctor better than I ever can, so I'll just leave you with this.
And now, over to you:
So, I just spilled my guts to you guys about my influences and what I really like in a character. I admitted some probably very personal things that I wonder if I'll regret telling you guys later. But now I think it's someone else's turn. I want to hear about some of the characters that have impacted your lives in a significant way, whether it be as a writer of stories yourself or just as a consumer. What are your influences or all-time favourite characters? Tell me in the comments if you wish, or you could make a full length blog like I've done here. I'd actually be really interested to see more people, authors especially, make blogs like these and talk more about what they like in a character and what inspires them.
Hint hint, Rissie.
That's all I got to say for now though. I'm fucking tired and going to bed. Goodnight.
Hey, I got one for you.
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Ben, from The Walking Dead game. If you haven't played it yet, then,
SPOILERS
Never before have I seen a character with so much controversy in a game. Here's what I mean: I have a friend, he and I were pretty alike with our choices in the game. At one point, you have the option to kill Ben. I felt bad for him, being just a teenager, and saved him. However, my friend killed him. He did this because Ben was a complete fuck up.
Then I realized, that Ben was the most talked about character besides Lee, Clementine, Kenny, and Carley. He was talked about so often, because people either cared, or hated him so passionately. In my eyes, he was a fuck up with good intentions. He wanted to prove himself, but never could. In other people's eyes, he was a liability that needed to be removed. And they were right, but this is what the entire game is about anyway. Do you follow your brain, or your heart? I think of all the characters, (Once again, besides Lee and Clementine) Ben was the one that people spent the most time deciding his fate. When given the option to kill him, every mistake he's made flashes in front of you, and all you have to do is push a button to let him die.
I think this scene describes the player more than any other. With other scenes like this, it was always a choice between two people, or something of that nature. But here, it was a simple yes or no.
I'll be waiting....
Real talk, Danny, this isn't a job you are getting paid for. (to my knowledge anyways) Don't sweat it so much. I might want a Human chapter every other day but that doesn't mean I won't wait for it. Take your time and don't make it into work until FimFic shares a piece of the ad revenue with ya.
I'll go back to silently waiting for the next installment of my favourite Friendship is Magic Fan Fiction.
Let me just say, I know exactly what you're talking about with John Marston and HOLY SHIT THAT GAME IS SO NOT OKAY!
I guess while I'm at it I can talk about a couple of characters that mean a lot to me.
Agent Washington, Red vs Blue:
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If there's any show/series I can write an essay on, it's Red vs Blue (instead, I'm writing a ponyfic about it, but details). That show is very near and dear to my heart because it is so full of fun, entertaining characters who all go through significant amounts of character development as they face truly dark shit that no other comedy series would really be able to pull off so effectively. There are literally dozens of characters from the show I could be writing about here, but Washington is definitely one of my favourites.
Washington comes around at the point where the series changes from an existentialist absurd comedy into a thing with an actually dark plot. His serious, no nonsense attitude creates a wonderful juxtaposition to the whacky hijinx of the reds and blues and he plays off of them really well. Also, his own brand of dry wit is just awesome.
Throughout your own blog post, you mentioned "underdog heroes." Agent Washington is a textbook example of that. For those not familiar with the show, Washington is a special agent in something called the Freelancer program, where soldiers are equipped with A.Is and armour abilities ranging from invisibility to the ability to manipulate time itself. As far as we as an audience can see, Washington doesn't have an ability (at least not one that he has a use for often) and he doesn't use an A.I because... well, I'll get into that later. It's also established early on that ol' Wash here is definitely not the most skilled agent in the program, and is even implied to be one of the worst. Yet, he still manages to be a goddamn badass who succeeds by fighting smart (like that time he brought down a gunship using only his rifle, a gravity lift and an explosive barrel).
What makes me really love Washington is his character arc. In the prequels, we see that Wash started off as an inexperienced rookie who was the goofball kid of the Freelancer agents. Then, Project Freelancer collapses and Wash changes when the A.I they implant him with goes insane and commits suicide inside his head. To say he's pretty fucked up afterward would be an understatement. When we're first introduced to Wash in the present day storyline, he's a cold, bitter soldier with nothing but revenge on his mind. When he meets the reds and blues, he treats them like dirt: their goofiness and inexperience is nothing but a burden to him. Ironic, considering who he was in the prequels.
But throughout the series, as Wash's choices send him spiralling further and further down through moral ambiguity all in the name of justice for those that destroyed his life, he finds himself accepted into the reds and blues odd little "family." Eventually, Wash is able to let go of his anger and need for revenge in favour of simply existing with his new family, to the point where he was willing to stand up to his old CO from his Freelancer days to keep her from harming the reds and blues in the name of the very revenge he once sought out himself. Washington has pretty much been on all sides of the moral spectrum, and yet he turns out to be a genuinely good guy.
Albert Wesker, Resident Evil:
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Most people know this guy as that horribly broken Capcom character in Marvel vs Capcom 3. To me, this magnificent bastard is one of my favourite villains of all time. Wesker is a lot like Revolver Ocelot, in that he is an absolute enigma. He's been manipulating all sides of the events of every game in the series towards unknown ends (until Resident Evil 5, which finishes his story arc). Like Ocelot, Wesker's also just a lot of fun to watch. His calm, calculating demeanour compliments his rather narcissistic personality well. He's incredibly diabolical and he knows it and owns it for all it is worth.
You also don't want to mess with him in a fight. Seriously:
(Spoilers to like, a 15 year old game here) In the original game, he doesn't appear to be anything more than the Captain of your elite special forces team sent in to investigate a mansion full of zombies. Later on, you learn that he's actually a double agent working for Umbrella: the sinister corporation that created the zombie virus. Wesker makes it clear though that he has his own agenda and plans on turning on Umbrella as well. Then, the super-zombie he's been working on turns on him and he ends up dead... OR DOES HE?
About four official games later, we learn that not only has Wesker survived getting impaled by a giant zombie but his death in the first game was actually PART OF HIS PLAN ALL ALONG. The guy is so sinister and calculating that he actually planned to die so that he could be brought back by an experimental virus and continue his plans. Oh yeah, and he kind of also gained superpowers from said virus, but that was just a bonus to him.
What I love about this character is that he manages to pull off being absolutely pure evil and yet somehow make it seem believable if you really think about it (bad bad acting of the older games aside). In his conversation with the founder of Umbrella - Oswell Spencer - in Resident Evil 5 during what can be said to be the apex of his character arc, we learn that Wesker has been with Umbrella his whole life. Think about that for a moment: ever since childhood, this guy was brought up at a corporation where he had to lie, manipulate and murder to get anywhere and where morality was viewed as an inconvenient obstacle to greatness. In that way, his whole life was "manufactured" by Spencer: he's an ambitious, sociopathic genius as a result of Spencer's experiments. It's no wonder he wants to commit xenocide by the point of Resident Evil 5.
Hmm. Okay, this is going to seem really weirdly specific, but if pressed, I'd still have to say that one of the most influential characters on my own life and writing has been:
MetalSeadramon, from Digimon Adventure.
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(That guy.)
Digimon Adventure is the kind of show that I absolutely refuse to watch a second time, because I already know that it would never measure up to the way my childhood brain remembers it. I tend to go on for pretty much ages about it at the drop of a hat, so for the purposes of this review I'll cut it down to just this guy. In the final arc of the original series, the main cast returns to the digital world to find that it's been warped and corrupted almost beyond recognition and is under the control of four Dark Masters, the first of which is MetalSeadramon. This monster is the largest in the entire series (with a couple exceptions depending on who you ask) and, unusually for the show, he's not defeated in a single fight within one or two episodes. Instead, the cast has to spend a good chunk of the arc just running away. The entire mini-arc is spent with him chasing the group from island to island, killing for real anyone who tries to help them and even his own minions. Basically, a massive, totally unstoppable BAMF.
The reason this was so influential to me was that it was the first time I can recall watching something where the outcome seemed genuinely hopeless. Even early on, at a pretty young age, I'd figured out the formula for this show; bad guy shows up, monsters turn into bigger monsters, bad guy gets beaten up. If the monsters aren't big enough yet, they go out and find the thing that lets them get bigger, then come back and fight again. This time, they tried that, and it didn't work. For once, I was presented with a villain who couldn't be beaten by being stronger than him, or braver than him, or smarter than him. Sometimes, all you can do is run. And even though they do eventually win by exactly the means you'd expect, I learned that if done right, taking such a villain and proving that they can be beaten makes the victory all the more satisfying. Since then, I've always tried to go big with my villains, even the simple ones, since if the audience knows right from the start how the situation is going to be resolved, there's no point. In fact, I realized recently that one of my most current villains (this being something outside of fanfiction) basically just is MetalSeadramon, adapted to swim through land instead of water.
Oh, and then there's the Nightmare King from Little Nemo. Man. I either needed to watch more TV as a kid or less, I don't know which.
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Thanks, bro.
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Agent Washington really was the best part of that series.
And OH MY GOD, I KNOW, RIGHT?! HOW COULD THAT HAVE DONE THAT?! Bear in mind what I said about how I involuntarily related to Jack, and then remember what happens when... When you're on the horse, and... I mean, JESUS! I was just like "OH FUCK, WHAT IS HAPPENING?!"
And then the fucking end credits song later on. It very nearly killed me.
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Weirdly specific, maybe, but that's a good answer. Certainly a unique one. I can kind of see it, too. Your fics are nothing else if not a never-ending downward spiral into hopelessness and despair. I actually feel uniquely privileged to learn that it came from such an odd source.
1715093 You know, a lot of people tell me that my stories are about hopelessness, but I like to think they're about hope. For me, the point of MetalSeadramon isn't that he can't be beaten, but that the protagonists have to earn their victory instead of having the hero's right to it. The darker the world, the brighter the hope spots shine. Of course, I can't actually make a proper argument in my defense because I never finish a story. I should really get on that.
But yeah, it's funny how the smallest things can affect us in such far-reaching ways. Even thinking back over Human, I can detect bits and pieces of all these characters in it. (At least, the ones I'm familiar with.) Makes you wonder what kinds of characters MLP's actual target audience will create, having grown up with this show in their minds.
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Link, he was basically my Gordon Freeman. He's always just a normal kid who manages to stop fucking demon kings, laser-shooting spiders larger than a house, and giant lava dragons. He progresses through the game mostly through solving puzzles and utilizing what he has on hand. Any problem that he faced, no matter how large, had a solution to it if you just thought it out.
Legend of Zelda games were a tremendous part of my childhood, so there's no denying that Link has had some influence over me. I'm not precisely sure what it's done, but maybe it's why I agree with you that underdog characters who have to face a seemingly insurmountable challenge make for a really great story.
Also, I saved several quotes from this blog. It was a really great read.
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I think it doesn't help that you used the term "hope spot," which actually means a brief moment of hope in all the darkness that is soon crushed again.
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This is all going to turn up on your stalker document, isn't it?
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I prefer the term "personal archive", but yes. It is going on there.
Here you go Danny, I'm commenting. Be happy.
Why the hell do you want me to tell you about the characters that inspire me, anyway? You think I'm gonna write your name there or something?
PREPARE TO BE SADLY DISAPPOINTED.
Or something.
We'll see. This seems to be an undertaking that takes up a lot of thinking, and I have to use that very sparingly at the moment because most of it is taken to make sure I don't devolve into a pile of gibbering gibbons thanks to constantly fighting off the cloud of medication.
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Your brain is probably already rotting even without the medication, what with all those fish and chip shops you have in Singapore that the English like to periodically infect with flesh-eating diseases for giggles. You might as well use the remaining cells for something constructive. Like writing more of your stories, or making a blog like this one. Otherwise you're just wasting time until the parasites assume direct control and you become another of our sleeper agents.
Not that becoming a sleeper agent is in any way a bad thing (for you will be an instrument of war that will fight and die in the name of our glorious Empire), but I'm just saying, you might want to get your affairs in order before that day comes.
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You know, I did only JUST release 20k words of a fic that no one will read in a place that doesn't help my self-esteem.
... brb, suicide.
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No, no, no! Suicide attempts will only make it angry! It's like a fucking chest-burster when it's angry, except it doesn't even kill you when it's done!
Doctor and discord, also my fav characters
I looooove the discord episodes and the ones where the really explore the elements of the doctors, past, abilities, how he thinks, etc