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Forum - View topicWhat makes an anime character interesting?
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Little Flower
 Posts: 25 |
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I feel a character is interesting when you can feel with the character, and when their emotions stand out. I find it also good when a character has a secret of some sort or a sad past.
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Cecilthedarkknight_234
 Posts: 3820 Location: Louisville, KY |
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what makes anime character interesting, well that's not to hard people it needs to be somebody that you can relate to within the series.
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TitanXL
 Posts: 4036 |
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If they're fun to watch.
I can't really relate to a 9 year old girl seductress lesbian who beheads people with a puppet, but I can sure enjoy watch her kick ass and do funny stuff. |
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Stark700
 Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
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For me, it would be personality, character style, history/background, skills, and last but certainly not least appearance. Anything unique that is outside the box also makes any character interesting tbh
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Chagen46
 Posts: 4377 |
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Having even the slightest depth in their personality.
That alone would make them more interesting than 95% of the characters in today's soul-less anime. |
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Cecilthedarkknight_234
Posts: 3820 Location: Louisville, KY |
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not enough darkness going around.. i agree on some levels. Even though some might disagree I think misaka from index/railgun is recent/decent example of strong female character a female fan from 12-16 could relate to. Making a character have depth.. well I would take Tomoya from clannad. Even if you hate this series he acted more like a normal person than anyone I have seen in years for a male lead. This is what drew me into the series because I could connect to him on a personal level of troubled past, dead beat father etc. Then still having a cynical yet caring attitude towards life and those around him. |
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Eruanna
 Posts: 451 Location: Canada |
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For me, what makes a character really interesting is growth as a character. Does the character undergo changes to their ideals, perspectives, outlooks over the course of the series? The characters that stand out in my mind the most are always the ones that demonstrate some dramatic change of mind/heart thats really well handled.
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Splitter
 Posts: 1276 Location: Knockin' on Heaven's Door |
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Characters are interesting in direct proportion to how they grow socially, mentally, and emotionally throughout the story. I mean, take a character like Hachi from NANA. I loathed her at the beginning and thought she was shallow, vain, and an annoying pain in the rear. Seeing how Hachi has learned and not learned from her various mistakes, and how she copes with the events of her life emotionally has made her a phenomenal character on the whole and a large part of why I love the series.
The opposite is also true. No growth equals a complete lack of interest. This is a very big part of why I despise most tsunderes. |
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Stark700
Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
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One of many reasons why NANA is one of my favorite animes that I've seen and probably the only music anime that I enjoyed personally. |
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anime racket
Posts: 314 |
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Oh? But a lot of fans like and are heavily interested in characters that don't change really at all from beginning to end; like Light Yagami from Death Note. Listen Little Flower; whether or not a character is interesting depends entirely on your opinion of that character and if you find him/her/it interesting. It's almost entirely subjective. Now, that's not to say it doesn't require work to make an interesting character; but no one can just take a list of things people find interesting, create a character out of them, and expect everyone to find them interesting. |
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Little Flower
Posts: 25 |
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I agree. I was just wondering what other people find interesting. |
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Tris8
 Posts: 2114 Location: Where the rain is. |
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The characters I usually find the most interesting are the ones I despise. Characters I hate as people (Naraku from Inuyasha, Drosselmeyer from Princess Tutu, Johan from Monster) I usually find fascinating. If they're just one-dimensional evil then that's boring, but if they're complex evil I find that really interesting. What makes them evil, why are they doing this? What makes them tick, and how do they benefit from the evil they have wrought? Most of the answers to these aren't obvious or immediately answerable with complexly evil characters.
They are also almost always loners, and with humans that can be detrimental to social standing, gaining wealth, power etc. So if a person's goals in life are completely selfish ones, the smart thing to do is a lot of networking because a lot can be gained from who you are friends with (at least pretending to be friends with). Yet most complexly evil characters do not do this (the perfect counter argument being Light). This leads me to ponder "are they loners because they are evil, or are they evil because they are loners?". There are many cases of each in anime. Gaara from Naruto became an emotionless killer because of his gross neglect, but on the other hand from what we are shown of Naraku he was always evil and chose to isolate himself. |
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Hypeathon
Posts: 1176 |
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I think what makes a anime character interesting is more or less what makes any character in general interesting. I can't help but want to borrow what makes a character interesting based on a recent episode of the Paper Wings Podcast titled, "How to Write Comics that Engage Your Audience". Chris and Lora were basically sharing a checklist of 5 things most required in a story. The first was a compelling character, the second being to provide an ocean (basically a challenging obstacle) for your character to cross, the third being structure, the fourth being an ending to the story, and the last one being an anchor (which is referring fantasy/fictional ideas to something in real life. Grounding a fictional idea to reality).
With the first thing mentioned by Chris and Lora being compelling characters (which if you need to, you can skip to 10:00 in the episode to get that inromation), they said that what makes characters compelling are basically what would make real life people compelling. There would need to be something about them that makes you want to hang out with them, look up to them, admire them. Chris went on about how a great value in screenwriting is a great character needs to be passionate about something and that passion can be contageous. The audience doesn't need to share that same passion with the character, but they just need to be attracted to that charcter who expresses a passion and are good at it. Chris also mentioned about a lightning bolt, a conflict that would threaten the character's passion, which I think would add on to the ocean, the obstacle the character needs to cross. Last thing he said for a compelling character was that he/she needed to have an experience in the story that would connect to the audience deeply and emotionally enough. Though I don't think it means that character's experience has to make you cry or that it has to be that heavily dramatic like in Clannad or Madoka Magica (Chris even said that it could apply to any genre). It just needs to make you engaged enough in a character through his/her experience. With all of that being said, I frankly think what Chris and Lora mentioned about compelling characters along with the other essentials in creating a story make a lot of sense to me and help clear some things up. I'm pretty much one of those people Lora mentioned in the beginning who are visual artists and understand at least to an extent that there are guidelines and principles in art and practice them, but not in storytelling. This is why since my first year in college, I've been hesitant to write a story and have found it hard to just shut off my self-awareness of everyone in my school and online being critics about stories in any form of entertainment. What they say regarding compelling characters does contain a lot of truth and are probably why I really like the shows in anime that I like and stick around with them and others either I don't like, or I watch and sort of like it, but can't wrap my head so much around what others saw in that show. Some wold argue there's more of a subjectivity behind all of that, which I would agree to an extent. I think for minor reasons, some people will like a character in a show more than others and you'll get love/hate divides between characters. However, for the sake of telling a story, the audience would need to generally agree tobe interested enough to want to see how a main character moves that story along and completes it whether they're totally in love with that character or not, which I think is why the need for a passion from that character is so stressed on. Thinking about that, I cannot help but refer to Puella Magi Madoka Magica and one of the few hang-ups I have with that show. I'm not saying the show is bad at all. It's a great shown and the praise to some extent is definitely deserved. However one thing about the show that I feel was overlooked, regardless of the reasons for it, regardless of it supporting the shock-twisting of the show, was that of the main cast, Madoka was the most passive. Everyone else had some kind of passion based on being a magical girl and had their own reasons for it. But it still bothers me despite how great the show is that main character Madoka doesn't express much of a drive and is more-or-less going along for the ride. It's like when a teenager secretly goes to a fellow classmate's party and he/she is not sure about being there, but goes because his/her friend wants to go and would likely get peer-pressured to drinking whatever alcohol is at the party. That's not to say that's what Madoka would do at all, but my point is that Madoka takes a while in the show to develop something she cares about enough to want to take action. Everyone else, Mami, Sayaka, Kyoko, and Homura, already developed a passion about something that moved along the story. |
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anime racket
Posts: 314 |
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The characters I find most interesting are those who, while
having good intentions, aren't afraid to stop at anything to win; Lelouch from Code Geass for example is my favorite character. After watching that show I usually can't stand most movie heroes especially in Hollywood films. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19151 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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For me there's not a universal answer to this question. Showing tremendous growth and/or complexity are big factors, as is offering something beyond the norm. Having a lot of personal charisma can also do it, although this is something very hard to deliberately manufacture.
To provide some examples, Light Yagami from Death Note was a character who fascinated me because he was something different: a protagonist who didn't think twice about shedding morality in order to accomplish his goals. Youko from The Twelve Kingdoms fascinated me because of how much she personally grew over the course of the series. Most of the cast of Toradora! fascinated because there was a lot more to all of them than initially met the eye. Wakaba from Cross Game fascinated because she's a tremendously charismatic character; had she lived to grow up, one has to think that she could've had her way with the world. And, honestly, there are occasional characters who fascinate just because of the pairing of their character designs and personality traits. Shiro from Deadman Wonderland is one of the best recent examples of that. |
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