#fandoms and faves | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

meshkol · 2 years

Note

Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Thanks....

Hello there! I absolutely don't mind this question. I love this question, actually, and I've never...actually answered it before, at least not on this blog in an open forum with all my favourites. So this is actually cool and made my brain go oooooooooooooh. Thank you so much for this ask <3

I've answered this briefly on fandoms and faves, specifically just listing them by names, but haven't really gone into why I love these disasters, mostly because I'm long-winded af and English isn't my first language. This is the tip of the iceberg and do not include real-world individuals (that would have to be a different post entirely). Anywho, here goes, I suppose, and I apologise in advance for the length LMAO. Seriously, this is, like, 5k. (It’s also formatted weird because tumblr doesn’t like paragraphs in bullets, but it still looks a little wonky to me??)

Anyway, here are my ten favourite fictional characters and why I love them, in order. Actual content is beneath the cut because it is long.

(1) Thranduil Oropherion [Tolkien's Legendarium]. My first introduction into English was Tolkien's Legendarium. I had read The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings in French and had them read to me as a bedtime story before I could even read myself, but it was literally the first series of books I picked up myself when I was a tiny little thing and was like “I’m gonna figure out what all of these weird little letters mean in this weird bizarre language so I can read it in its intended language by Professor Tolkien!” So yeah, literally my first introduction into English, before I was put into official tutoring, because I was so hyperfixated by this legendarium. This fandom is still my One True Fandom to this day.

The Sindar in general were my main focus of study and fixation, even though Tolkien had a gigantic hard-on for the Ñoldor (literally and figuratively, probably, considering Galadriel, but I digress), and even though Thranduil wasn’t even named in The Hobbit, I distinctly remember tunnelling on his parts as a toddler who couldn’t even fucking read yet and asking to hear his portions of the story instead of the dwarrows. He is the sole reason why I hyperfixated on the Sindar despite the criminal lack of content on their kind, and why I started to learn English long before I was required to do so for education’s sake.

He was just so kind and generous and understanding and brave and wary and tired and strong – nothing like what the films did to his character, don’t get me fucking started on that utter rot, the films did Thranduil dirty...though Lee Pace played him dishy af and I still enjoy the films as a separate entity from the books, kind of like how enjoy the MCU as a separate entity from the comics – and I needed that in my life. The elves in general were those things, but Thranduil was my first introduction to that, and he was a hell of a first imprint to my young, impressionable mind, especially in the environment I grew up in. I needed a father like he was, who was kind and generous and understanding and brave and wary and tired and strong, not the father I had, which was pretty much every other father Tolkien described in the books lol. I latched onto him to an almost extreme amount of insanity and that has persisted to this day. I love him so much that it’s damn near pathetic. You don’t see it much on this blog but whew, on my other blog(s) back before LiveJournal, FFN, and the overall internet imploded?? Yeah, it was nuts. So much fanfiction, I swear. Probably published about two to three million words before the purges on private servers and LJ. I will never stop being bitter and devastated about that. ao3 is king, all hail ao3.

(2) Tony Stark [Marvel]. So there’s a lot to say about this disaster of a human being and I don’t even know where to start, because there’s a lot of baggage associated with the beginning of my love for him.

There’s an echo of my English beginnings with him too, since I practised my English with those comics, and that’s tinged with some bittersweetness too. So for some background that is open knowledge on this blog: I hate my biological father with a burning passion. He’s an awful person and I hope he fucking dies a horrible, painful, awful, embarrassingly humiliating death. But weirdly enough, despite the extreme conservative household he ruled over with an iron fist, he...liked comics?? He hated that I loved Tolkien – my maman, before they got divorced, read those stories to me – but when he realised I was beginning to read things in English, something that was heavily encouraged in our household because "English is business" as he liked to say, he actually would give me Iron Man comics to practise reading with. Not Batman and Superman and Captain America (he hated Captain America LOL the height of irony) and Spider-Man, but Iron Man, a C-list-at-best superhero. It was probably because Tony was a billionaire industrialist who saved the world and my father was gamely ignoring the multitude of issues Tony has, but whatever, I latched onto Tony like a leech nonetheless because of those multitudes of issues Tony has.

I think my father liked to think that he either was similar to Tony or could be like Tony one day – they were both businessmen, after all, and were both outwardly pompous pricks to the public. My father was very pleased when I adored Iron Man/Tony Stark and clearly expected that I would start being amendable to him because of that adoration, except I started waxing poetry about how Tony was so much more than those surface-level masks. He was complex, and full of survivor’s guilt and just plain-old-guilt, and hated his father, and loved so deeply, and cared so deeply, and wanted to change the world for the better instead of destroying it, and he was a socialist, and he believed in women’s rights and was probably bisexual and got pegged by Gamora and-and-and—

Yeah, my father didn’t like Tony Stark very much longer LOL, especially once I got old enough to understand what socialism really was. Worked out for me because I got to nick all of his comics when he tossed them all out in a rage, and a lot of them are worth loads of money now that the MCU is a thing. But anyway.

It's kind of funny, actually, especially since I’m taking something that my biological father weirdly enjoyed despite his extreme conservative puratism and writing extreme BDSM porn about it all the time. I find it very therapeutic and a fun little Fuck You™. What can I say, I’m a spiteful queer. <3

But anyway, I really love Tony for a lot of different reasons, even if the origins for it are a little bittersweet and come from a place of spite lol. He’s just...very complex and I just feel him on a very deep, personal level. Tony is the only character on this list that I can empathise and sympathise with on almost every aspect of his person: he had a horrible and abusive father, had problems with drugs and alcohol, has crippling self-doubt and anxiety, is almost certainly neurodivergent, masks on a daily basis, deals with survivor’s guilt, etc-etc. The only thing that I can’t empathise with is the liking-vagina thing (I am way too queer for that sort of thing haha, though I’d be alright with a woman if she had a prick, hence why I identify as ‘queer’ instead of ‘gay’; trans and NB people are sexy af) and the RT (arc reactor for you MCU fans), but then again, half of my rib cage is metal and my leg is full of pins so...meh??

(3) Hatake Kakashi [Naruto]. My first real introduction into Japanese fandom lmao. My brother and I had watched Dragon Ball with a few classmates but outside of that, I’d had no real exposure to anime or manga because my father banned that sort of thing from the household, and I’m too old for what the younger kids these days are exposed to, like ATLA and Yu-Gi-Oh and all that. I ended up getting a translated sub of the Naruto anime from someone online when I was in university, watched it for the lulz, and ended up tunnelling on the weird half-masked dude who went batshit when his lil baby students were threatened. As you do.

Another one of those events where my lovely little ND brain went nuts. By the time that I had discovered the fandom, Shippūden was just starting to air, but I am incredibly impatient, hate filler episodes, and also hate American puritan bullshit, so I just...decided to scoff the anime and read the manga instead because I read faster plus new languages! Didn’t really anticipate how hard Japanese is though LMAO. Mercifully, translations come out pretty quickly, but I still sort of threw myself into language courses and study and so this fandom is sort of credited for me learning a new language. Can’t really speak it very well, since I never bothered to focus on that avenue and I still haven’t watched the anime haha, but I can read it (albeit with the occasional glance at unfamiliar kanji when I come across it, cos there’s a lot of fuckin kanji holy shit) very well. Language is weird.

Anyway. Kakashi is just awesome and gives off lazy does-not-give-a-fuck energy until someone fucks with his peeps, in which he goes to 9,000 in about half a second flat and decimates everything that moves. And I think that’s very sexy of him. I also have a thing for angst and tortured backstories, in case that wasn’t completely fucking obvious by my everything, so when I tunnelled on him within the first six seconds of watching that first episode and began researching his character, obviously I was like, “Ah shit, this one is gonna be fascinating to read and write fic for, think of all the whump possibilities.” Especially in the Naruto universe, where they send literal toddlers to war, which is batshit crazy and fucking nuts to the extreme – to be able to dig into that sort of worldbuilding and find out how characters would adapt, grow, and develop resilience in that sort of environment is like crack to an angst and smut demon like me, and combined with a backstory like Hatake Kakashi (and Uchiha Itachi, who’s coming up soon enough)?? Yeah, it was inevitable.

Doesn’t exactly help that he also gives of hurt/comfort vibes with all his charges too, and I also tend to gravitate towards those types of characters just as much as ethically grey but morally good characters and/or people with fucked-up backstories. You combine all the above with an aesthetically attractive character and you’ve got yourself a real winner lmao. I’m predictable af.

(4) L Lawliet [Death Note]. L is batshit nuts, let’s just throw that out there early. The manga and manga had been released fully by the time I had registered its existence and, if I recall correctly, I had only picked it up because I saw a piece of fanart on tumblr back in...shit, it must’ve been late 2009, since I started writing my first DN fic after the new year and published the first chapter soon after (that remains my most reviewed fic to date by an obscene amount lmao; don’t even look or check reviews anymore because I’m old and bitter now, but ten+ years ago?? That sweet, sweet validation before fandom imploded and ao3 sprung into existence out of pure necessity and self-preservation by fandom?? Yeah, that was a hell of a time to be alive).

Saw a creepy-looking, but also paradoxically attractive-looking frog man eating sugar cubes and cake like it was covered in bacteria in a ridiculously well-done piece of fanart circulated on the wild-wild-west tumblr, because I’ve been on this hellsite since forever on various blogs (and I’m never fucking leaving it, no matter how hard staff tries to implode it or how many pricks inhabit it, fuck you staff and pornbots and gay-men fetishisers who flood my ask box asking for nudes and shit, go get a therapist). Anyway, as a person who went to school for a stupidly long period of time hyperfixating on parasites, infectious diseases, and pathogens, and how human beings act and respond to said things, I immediately was like, “Oooh, frog man looks like he’s got germaphobia, that sounds like something that is aligned with my interests, what’s this from??”

Did a cursory search and here lies a fandom of a psycho teenager with a g-d complex who quickly enters university (because I generally do not fuck around with secondary school shit, that squicks me out hardcore) after finding a magical notebook that just straight up murders motherfuckers, who is being hunted by a mid-twenties detective who does have germaphobia and autism (like me!) and probably scoptophobia and is probably riding the line of ethical legality with his investigation practises, and oops, looks like I’ve entered Death Note hell.

Like I said, I like ethically grey characters with a firmly good moral code, and L’s doubly interesting because he’s an orphan with a semi-established backstory, which means that you can take liberties with his character to flesh it out to your whims. Which I did. A lot. With a lot of angst and gay, because obviously. There isn’t anything too deep about why I love him like the other three, and there’s probably a lot of fanon and headcanon interpretation that colours why I love him as much as I do, but that’s about the extent of it. I think of L Lawliet and I think of my mammoth story I wrote for him, and all of the love I received for that story, and during a time when fandom was going through a massive upheaval, it was a bright point that I really needed.

(5) Uchiha Itachi [Naruto]. Aesthetically attractive character? Check. Ethically grey and morally good character? Check. Tragic backstory? Check. Hurt/comfort with his charges? ...er, not so much, because his brother is a tool and I hope that psychopathic, abusive, whiny little bitch dies in a fire. But anyway, that’s kind of why Itachi doesn’t rank higher, to be honest lmao. Love this little freak a lot though (especially when he’s getting it on with Kakashi and/or Sakura, but whatever, I have my OTPs in this fandom and I’m old and tired enough to be pretty blasé about the purity police in American shipping culture, which is hilarious considering Naruto worldbuilding because did they even read or watch the manga?? That shit is fucking awful). He’s very queer-coded, like most ‘villains’ are even in Japanese media, and that obviously is of high interest to me, being queer myself.

He also has the demanding father, high expectations on his shoulders, and was understandably insane before he died, but somehow was loyal to averting war and maintaining peace and prosperity?? If I had been him, I would’ve either retired to the sea or watched the world burn so seriously, he deserved so much more than what he got, which was being murdered by his brother (seriously, fuck that bastard). He was also extremely shrouded in mystery even despite the major reveals within the manga, anime fillers, and novels so it was fun as fuck to flesh out his character in fic, not to mention it was obscenely interesting from an epidemiological prospective to dig into his illness in an effort to identify what it was.

Additionally, Itachi is also certainly neurodivergent too, which was obviously relevant to me, and it was also a very unique portrayal since it wasn’t the ‘uwu smol bean who’s good at mathematics or piano awwww’ or the ‘non-verbal, screaming savant’ autism that is so pervasive in media. He was straight-up brutal and violent on occasion, massacred his clan to save his village and brother, and was the consummate spy and master of mind-fucks, and yet he was kind and generous and did everything in his power to stave off something worse, though he ended up failing in the end because of matters out of his hands and because he was only one man. I don’t know, I have a lot of feelings about this man.

I’m still unimaginably bitter about the truly insane amount of fic and meta about him that I lost during the various purges – though I shudder to think about the plethora of anon hate and comments/reviews I’d probably be flooded in today’s purity culture, though admittedly a chunk of my Naruto fic was written in Japanese and, in a smaller number, French so it wouldn’t have had to deal with as much bullshit from American audiences – because the vast majority of it was about Itachi and/or Kakashi in the Naruto fandom. But what can you do?

(6) Draco Malfoy [Harry Potter]. Oooooh boy, where to even start with this arsehole. So. Despite the fact that I want Joanne Rowling to get lost in a distant galaxy and take her bullshit elsewhere, and despite the fact that Strikethrough/Boldthrough and the shipping wars still give me metaphorical nightmares, I have a lot of fond memories of the HP (and Drarry) fandom, and still obviously write for and read that pairing myself. Harry’s alright, I suppose, but Draco’s got a special place in my heart, mostly because I both see myself in him and see what I could’ve been at the same time, if that makes sense, so my love of him is very personal.

He grew up wealthy and privileged and I grew up like that too, albeit Jewish and brown instead of white and magical like Draco is. He grew up with a demanding shit of a father who wanted him to have a wife and an heir, and I grew up with a demanding shit of a father who wanted me to have a wife and a child. Draco was supposed to be exactly like his father, walk the line and talk the talk, follow the doctrine and never step a toe out of his father’s approved line, never think for himself and to think lesser of anyone who was considered weaker or poor or what-have you, and Draco eventually realised (through self-preservation, ambition, and good old fashioned fear) that he needed to pull his head out of his arse, stop parroting his father’s racist dogma, and go against the grain if he was going to survive. I did the exact same thing. Sure, Draco did it through war and I did it through...a very different type of war, but it was the same sort of concept in my head, and I connected to him in a very visceral way when I was younger.

It was a double hit to the gut when I learnt that his wife died post-books (i.e. post-school), because my husband died post-school. But anyway.

But we both also could’ve turned out just like our fathers if things hadn’t gone tits-up, y’know. If the Wizarding War hadn’t happened and Draco hadn’t been forced to choose between saving his mother and his honour as a human being, Draco would’ve probably been a carbon copy of all the Malfoys before him. If I hadn’t gone through what I’d gone through because I’d been born queer and autistic, I would’ve probably been a carbon copy of my father and his father before him. It’s a very sobering and humbling thought.

He’s not perfect, that’s for damn sure, but none of us are, are we? We all have to unlearn shit that we internalise or are indoctrinated to accept as normal when we are children. Draco Malfoy is kind of my little comfort bastard that I get to use as therapy, because in a way I get to live vicariously through him and expunge a lot of nasty shit I am still unlearning, and I’ll always love him for giving me the opportunity to play around in that sandbox in a safe, fictional environment, just as I love playing around with all my other favourite characters in safe, fictional environments regardless of the fucked up, batshit crazy situations I put them through lol.

(7) Viktor Nikiforov [Yuri!!! On Ice]. Viktor is an interesting conundrum, because he’s an infamous ball of sunshine (with the occasional glimpse of serious melancholy or depression, however rare that may be) and that’s not my usual M.O. of favourite characters LMAO. But I am figure skating trash and when Yuri!! On Ice came out, I was on-the-fuck-board with watching that shit for sure. Like. I have a few major, life-will-hit-a-standstill hyperfixations and figure skating is one of them. So when there was a fucking figure skating anime coming out?? Yes please and thank you very fucking much.

I think the reason I love him so much – outside of the fact that he’s aesthetically gorgeous, that is – is because when the anime was airing, I was kind of in a transition phase in my life and was writing a fic I was getting a metric fuck-tonne of hate for, with pretty much zero support system, so I needed a comfort character who was just...really supportive?? Viktor is really supportive, understanding, and patient with Yuuri, who is a fucking anxious disaster of a human, and I guess I just latched onto that at the time. It also helps that his past is a complete blank slate, so it’s absolute fun to headcanon any sort of angsty shit I want. Or kinky shit. It’s really easy to project myself on him because he is the definition of a blank slate, and he’s down for pole dancing and exhibitionism and all sorts of really fun stuff. I just love a guy who’s up to whatever lmao. (Also, I’ve read so much good fic that has just cemented my love of him, seriously, there is some good shit out there, like woah.)

(8) Hermione Granger [Harry Potter]. Hey look, a woman on this list! No, but seriously, listen. Listen. I love her so fucking much. She’s the only member of the Golden Trio that doesn’t drive me bonkers on a regular basis – I love you Harry and Ron, I do, but seriously, I want to strange both of you on the reg – and she might need to learn tact sometimes but she’s the only one who I think has anything resembling common-fucking-sense in that whole damn series. She’s smart, she’s brave, she’s clever, she’s a badarse, she’s stellar at everything she puts her mind to, she doesn’t give a fuck what you think, she’s passionate, she’s willing to be vulnerable and doesn’t think that makes her look weak, and she’s pretty much the only one keeping those two dumb idiots she calls best friends alive most of the time. She’s an interesting case where she grew up ‘normal’, in the sense that she had well-adjusted parents and a well-adjusted home life, but then got thrown into an absolute shitshow of war and all that, particularly a magical war where her best friend was the main target and she was also a main target just because she was Muggle-born.

Muggle-borns were targeted just because they existed, to be tortured and exterminated, and that makes it even more personal for me because I’m Jewish. Almost my entire family was exterminated during the Shoah (Holocaust) and the Occupation of France – I still remember listening to my grand-mère’s story and the tattoo on her arm is seared into my brain to this very day. I still remember all the stories, from her and all the others, some still alive but most gone now. Knowing what my people went through during the Occupation, what my countrymen went through during the Resistance...it is chilling and humbling to think of the parallels of what Muggle-borns like Hermione must’ve experienced and lived through during the Wizarding War, when they were being rounded up and tried in a mockery of a court, sent to prisons and tortured and murdered. How that must’ve weighed on her, the fear of her life and Harry’s life, her parents. I feel that fear every day even now. The parallels of the Shoah and the Wizarding War are very therapeutic to write about, and it’s a way to get my grand-mère’s story out too, because she’s gone now and there’s no one to tell her story to because no one cares to listen anymore. I get to write justice and victory and closure for her people because my family doesn’t get to have that peace – they’re in mass graves and gas chambers and labour factories where influencers and tourists with selfie sticks grin at their iPhones where my people died.

Anyway, Hermione Granger deserves the world, and that’s the fuckin’ tea.

(9) Sebastian Smythe [Glee]. This follows a lot of the same themes as Draco Malfoy, tbh: grew up with privilege and money, was a bit of an arse, blahblahblah, then had a world-changing moment in their life and altered their life for the better. The difference between the two is that Sebastian isn’t as fleshed out as Draco is – there are seven books and a lot of official and unofficial canon material for HP whereas Glee just had Sebastian for about twelve seconds. Still, Sebastian allegedly lived in Paris, which is gross as a person from southern France but is nevertheless France. In addition, he was also canonically gay, canonically kinky (at least verbally but likely in practise too), canonically promiscuous, and canonically unashamed about all those things, which was fucking insane in primetime television about high school students that was hugely popular amongst mainstream audiences in the United States. Seriously, Glee was massive in America.

I never read or wrote any fic centred around secondary school shit because again, that squicks me out, not really because of age stuff but because fuck secondary school, I hated that time of my life and I don’t want to revisit it even in fiction lol. Also, I didn’t go to ‘high school’ in the U.S. and the idea of doing copious amounts of research on the American high school education system is exhausting, ngl, especially since it seems like every single state and every single country and every single district does it differently. You lot are confusing as fuck. Anyway, I like the idea of taking what little we do know about Sebastian and fleshing out his character based off my own experiences growing up in France – though I grew up in superior half because fuck the north and especially Paris – and then making it more angsty lol. A lot of my love for him is because of self-projection, the ability to headcanon and fill in gaps, and because fanon exists, I guess. It’s kind of funny because I don’t particularly find Grant Gustin, the actor, attractive at all, but I find the character attractive, if that makes any sense. I dunno. Anyway, I ship him with Kurt and they can have a lot of kinky sex in between affectionate bickering and sarcastic bitchfests. Those are the best kinds of dynamics imo

(10) Haruno Sakura [Naruto]. Another woman! LMAO. Nah, but seriously, I love her, despite the epic amount of hate she gets in the Naruto fandom (and the horrible treatment she got in the actual source material, don’t get me fucking started). Forgive the crudeness, but I’m a cis guy who’s into sucking prick or getting reamed by said prick, so I don’t usually focus on women in the media I consume, but there’s something about Sakura that I really jived with when I was getting into Shippūden. She was admittedly annoying as hell and airheaded for a boy in the first arc because she had been essentially brainwashed to think that was what girls were supposed to do (g-d, I hate how girls are practically tailored and bred for boys, it’s awful, as a guy I can tell you that we’re all a bunch of morons) but then realised that she needed to pull her head out of her arse, take matters into her own hands, and protect the people around her as well as start cracking skulls open because men are stupid. Which, again, is true.

Sakura is amazing, hands down, and she is absolutely a one-hit badarse. She gets a lot of flak because shippers of their “faves” don’t like that she’s in the middle of their gay ship and that’s literally the only reason they hate her, which is fucking gross as a queer man who’s sick and tired of being fetishised. She cuts a lot of motherfuckers down with her fists, heals the sick and wounded, is wicked smart, doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone, and is just plain cool as hell. Another one of those interesting cases like Hermione in which Sakura comes from humble upbringings, then ended up on a team with a bunch of fucked-up misfits and got thrown in the middle of drama and then a huge war that she was a cornerstone of, and I love being able to dive into what that does to someone like that. It wasn’t as debilitating as Hermione’s situation was, since the entire cornerstone of the Fourth Shinobi World War was about the jinchūriki (like Naruto) and not people like Sakura herself (in contrast to the situation in HP), but it’s still delicious to writers and worldbuilding angst-monsters like me.

I also like fix-it fics, like, a lot, and I hate Sasuke, like, a lot, and the canon material did Sakura dirty by ruining her character development in one sweep by hooking her up with a psychopath who’s canonically an abusive and a megalomaniac, so. I have a lot of fun with that, despite the sheer amount of flames and death threats I get for writing it. Y’know, because people don’t understand nuance or the Three Laws of Fandom, and clearly haven’t read/watched the fucked-up source material that is the Naruto manga/anime. If they had, they’d chill tf out and find another hobby.

Anyway, that's all for this post, and this is the only the tip of the iceberg as to why I love these (fictional) characters. IRL people is a different post altogether. And this also turned into a novel. And personal. Oops. I hope this answered your question at least somewhat...possibly?? It’s a really difficult question and I don’t really connect with a character unless there’s significant emotional and personal attachment, so it kind of goes hand-in-hand, therefore it’s a long response and a bit TMI and Extra™. I’m also-also sorry for any spelling and grammar mistakes; I have to start getting ready for work so I don’t have time to go over it again, English isn’t my first language, and I am in the middle of writing a figure skating AU for stevetony (it’s already at almost 70k and I’m only on chapter two of nine and I’ve only been writing for two months, please send help).

Toodles!