#my favourite male character of all time is probably vegeta

[girl4music]

So somebody had the nerve to tell me yesterday that all I ever seem to care about is female characters. Strong female characters. That I never care about male characters or other gender identity characters (do they even exist in TV art/entertainment? 🤔)

Look… it’s not that I don’t care about male characters. It’s that I am female and even though I’m bisexual, I still much prefer women-led and WLW storytelling the most because it appears to me to have the least gender stereotyping. I can watch MLM too. I just don’t find anything that delves into the themes and narratives that I want to see in TV art/entertainment. Whereas WLW almost always does because female characters are allowed to be vulnerable and therefore more forthcoming about what they think and feel. Men tend to keep all that vulnerability locked up and buried and it’s just not appealing to see “strength” be depicted in that way for me at all. So I prefer women.

But I mostly do not watch anything that doesn’t have an ensemble main cast in it. And that ensemble main cast usually is a mix of male and female characters.

Can I really help it if the writing doesn’t cater to both as equally? Take ‘Wynonna Earp’ for example. Aside from Doc, Dolls, - possibly Jeremy too - they leave their male characters in the dust. They’re nowhere near as fleshed out as the female characters are. Even the queer ones. There’s so many examples where this happens in other TV shows too unless one of them is a love interest for the lead main female character.

Think of Xander Harris. He might have just as much screen-time as Buffy and Willow but his character representation and development is so poorly written. His backstory isn’t explored anywhere near as much so his motivations aren’t justified all that well either. They shaft him in replacement of the female leads because ‘BtVS’ is primarily a women-led show and people - not just females - really love this about it - so obviously they’re going to be prioritised much more.

I would like male characters in supernatural/fantasy storytelling more if there was actual effort put in to representing and developing those characters well.

And there just… isn’t. So what am I supposed to do?

Cry about it? 😑 I don’t think so. I’ll spend my time and energy focussing on the actually well-written and well-portrayed female characters instead because I love women-led and WLW storytelling too much to cry about poorly written and poorly portrayed male ones.

Maybe give me more Spike’s and David Haller’s instead of Xander Harris’ and Joxer’s and I might start writing more about male characters as I do female.

Give me strong male characters where their strength doesn’t equate to them being always physical because THIS is not appealing to me in the slightest.

I do like male characters and I would write about them much more if their writing and portrayal was as good.

And while you’re at it - write and portray some non-binary and/or gender fluid characters for christ sake!

[yamchaas]

I'm so curious, and not for any reason at all but would you mind giving your opinion on bulma? Just your general thoughts on her?

Bulma, Bulma, Bulma.

Where would I start? I'll be 100% honest I'm not a huge Bulma person (or Vegeta) but I also totally don't begrudge anyone their love of either character because we all see things differently.

First, I love Bulma’s character design, she’s very cute. I love her hairstyles, I love her outfits. I think she was well designed and I do appreciate that the ladies of db aren’t insanely proportioned? I really like that they made her a tech genius who actively enjoys building and experimenting, rather than just making her steal stuff off her scientist dad. She has an inquiring mind of her own. Also I grew up with Tiffany Vollmer as her va and I love how she voiced her, that will always be Bulma’s voice in my head.

Bulma is undoubtedly given the most of any of the DB ladies and I do appreciate that Bulma is just apologetically kind of an erratic person who is very smart but still just does whatever the hell she feels like. In a lot of ways Bulma is given the same leeway that a lot of male characters are, where they make some choices that are kinda shitty and can be assholes without the narrative constantly punishing them. I don’t give Toriyama credit for that though, because I’m kinda certain it wasn’t a thing he purposely did.

Almost every female character in db, other than like Suno and maybe Videl is kinda given the same unrelenting cold personality and I can’t help but to side-eye everyone involved with the writing for that. If we got more of an array of personalities for the ladies like we do the guys I wouldn’t be so annoyed about it, but we don’t. A character like Chichi is fairly well used as a little more than a nag, whereas Bulma gets to do stuff, go on adventures, etc. so it makes sense that people feel more warmly toward Bulma, because she is actually given the opportunity to spread her wings in a way that Launch or Chichi just aren’t. I mean they literally dropped Launch and pretty much never mentioned her again.

My favourite Bulma dynamic is probably her and Goku, I genuinely find their little brother/big sister dynamic so good. She’s so often exasperated by Goku but at the same time has total faith in his abilities and I just really enjoy that.

One of my favourite Bulma moments is on Namek when she comes across the slain village and is genuinely horrified and cradles one of the little kids and is just like how could anyone do this, I appreciate when we get to see Bulma be a little bit soft. I like seeing her as a mum and I appreciate that being a mum did soften her edges but not too much, she’s still sharp. Also Future Bulma invented a time machine? how cool is that? She was very enjoyable in the one off future Trunk’s special and I also love future Bulma’s look.

Ultimately I think a lot of my feelings toward Bulma are sorta akin to burn out, like there is so much love for Bulma and Vegeta, so much content around them, so many hottakes about how they deserve better in the narrative, which just kinda personally confuses me because they have been given better story lines than pretty much every character other than Goku, whereas most the other ogs are totally sidelined. Then theres the whole long running thing of shitting on Yamcha constantly, by both Bulma in the actual story (made a post about that already) and then the Bulma/Vege fans. Fanon bleeding into peoples memories of canon which tries to turn Yamcha into this terrible, shitty person who’s obsessed with Bulma and I’m just a bit tired, like the dude calls himself ‘uncle” to her kids, I don’t think he’s holding a grudge lol

tl:dr my feelings toward Bulma are a mixed bag, I guess? But thanks for asking!

[radmanraditz]

Dragonball Z Asks

{Have Fun!}

Favourites 1. Character - Piccolo 2. Male character - Nappa (Already said Piccolo and another favorite male character will show up later in this list.)  3. Female Character - Android 21 4. Villain - Raditz (and now all my top faves have been mentioned)  5. Transformation - Oozaru 6. Battle - Big tie between Goku’s battle with Piccolo in the last tournament in DB and their team-up against Raditz in Z.  7. Arc - Saiyan Saga 8. Series - Dragonball Z 9. Moment -  When Piccolo is telling Gohan to use the Namekian dragon balls to wish him back to life and it pisses off King Kai cuz he’s doing the thing he said not to do. (This is when I started liking Piccolo as a character the first time I was watching DBZ out of order on Toonami.) 10. Pairing - Krillin x Android 18 11. Duo or Group - The Saiyan Trio aka Vegeta, Nappa and Raditz 12. Technique - Fusion – fusion characters are so fun. 13. Quote - “That’s right boys…MONDO COOL!” 14. Animal - Don’t really have one, but if I had to, I guess Turtle? The one that hangs out with Roshi. 15. Movie - Dragonball Super: Broly. It really amazed me just how well it works as a cinematic movie, and not just as another Dragonball Z movie. And it doesn’t hurt that it has all three of my favorite characters in it. To be fair, I also really enjoyed the last two movies, Battle of Gods and Resurrection F as well. But DBS: Broly was the best of the movies that have come out so far imo. Prior to the new movies, my favorite was The Dead Zone.   A scene that made you… 16. laugh - There’s a lot of them. But when Vegeta starts following Ginyu after he’s turned into a frog and says, “It’s frog stomping time” is one I’ll always remember laughing hard at with my brother when watching DBZ for the first time with him.  17. cry - When Gine cried after she and Bardock sent Kakarrot/Goku away in his pod in DBS: Broly.  18. get pumped up - When Nappa shows up in FighterZ’s Villain story arc. Because I love me some good new canon Nappa content.  Which character is the… 19. smartest - Probably Dr. Gero because look at all these deng androids running around and causing problems throughout all the series? 20. strongest - I could care less who the strongest person is in the series.  21. funniest - I feel like the entire cast gets their golden moments where they get to be hilarious. Including the villains. Which is why I enjoy the series so much.  22. sexiest - I don’t care who’s sexiest either. (But it’s Piccolo.) 23. most overrated - Bardock, Goku Black/Zamasu, and Jiren 24. most underrated - Chi-Chi 25. most annoying - Goku Black/Zamasu for creating a pointless story arc in DBS. Non-Canon Favourites 26. character - I guess Android 21 isn’t a strong part of canon. The story of FighterZ and her backstory is a hot mess that I’m still trying to make sense of. 27. series - I’m holistic with canon when it comes to DBZ, but I guess most wouldn’t consider the Dragonball SD manga very canon even though a good part of it does retread canon story parts.  28. fanfiction - @duhragonball‘s fanfic, Luffa: The Legendary Super Saiyan 29. pairing - Tie between LaunDitz and TurleRad Least Favourite  30. character - There’s a lot but ATM it’s Goku Black/Zamasu 31. arc - Goku Black/Zamasu’s arc in DBS 32. series - The DBS manga 33. pairing - TruMai. 34. technique - *shrugs* N/A

[leafenclaw]

Tag your 10 favorite characters of all time

They can be from every book/movie/TV show/Video game, then tag 10 people.

Tagged by @jamlocked, thank you! :D

But also, oh god. XD

Early on as I was making that list, I encountered three problems: 1 - Most of my favourite characters of all time are actually variations on a single character archetype, with a whole damn lot of them even wearing the same name (or similar enough lol). 2 - Most of the ones that don’t fall under this category are from the same 2-3 source material, unless... 3 - ... they’re from sources that I cannot in good conscience recommend anymore, like for example books from MZ Bradley or OS Card that were extremely significant and shaped who I am, but considering what their authors turned out to be, enough said lol.

So instead of a “my favourites of all time” list, I just picked characters that made a significant and lasting impact on me, even if they didn’t turn out to be my absolute favourite from their media source. I hope that’s okay!

Cut for length, because as usual I got chatty.

In no particular order, aside perhaps for the first two: 

1 - Jamie Moriarty from Elementary. My everything. <3 She’s made of... honestly, pretty much all the archetypes I inevitably fall for, male or female, but somehow she rises above the sum of her parts and I cannot even start expressing how much she means to me. Other characters in the same general type would be of course all the Moriartys, Magneto, Gellert Grindelwald, Red John, Alice Morgan, etc. A lot of those characters are heavily defined by their sky-high intelligence and deviousness, but more importantly by the shapes they leave behind when they aren’t on screen/on the pages or when they’re hiding behind masks and facets that never encompass them as a whole, and by the way they always make a extremely lasting impact on the protagonist. When it’s a TV show or a movie, the use of camera language (lighting, colour schemes, camera plans, etc.) around them is always tightly defined and significant, and when it comes to literature, the same effect is applied through metaphors and symbolism. It makes the layers to those characters absolutely endless and when it comes to storytelling, it’s the one thing that’s guaranteed to hook me straight away. (Jamie is also obviously my favourite from her source material, even though Sherlock comes high in second place, and Watson a close third. And I also have a baffling soft spot for Joshua Vikner that probably deserves a mention lol.)

2 - Vegeta from Dragon Ball. Started a genocidal alien who regularly committed mass murder, ended a devoted, self-sacrificial husband and father of two (three if you count his son from the future). Still the best redemption arc I’ve ever seen (and probably will ever see) in any kind of media ever. (He is also -by far- my favourite from his source material.)

3 - Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter. My fae child <3 Literally the only female character I ever identified with in that whole series. People close to me still regularly tell me I channel her lol. (Favourite from her source material: it’s a toss between Gellert Grindelwald and Severus Snape.)

4 - Jareth from Labyrinth. My (other) fae asshole child found in a trash bin lol. Love of my life before I was 10, kept me sane and believing in magic when I most needed to. I learned contact juggling because of him. (He is my fave, although I love Sarah even when she’s being a dramatic whiny teen.)

5 - Rebecca Anderson from The Mentalist. I have a strong and everlasting love for pretty much all characters in TM, but this one extremely minor character made a chilling impact on me by the fact she’s exactly who I would have turned out to be had I not made one tiny little change at a crucial point in my life. So she makes the list if only for that. (My fave TM character is Lisbon, but the way she acts and reacts baffles me on a daily basis. I understand and identify with Jane much better. Fighting hard in third place would be Lorelei Martins and Madeleine Hightower, I think, but I truly love them all and by this point it’s just nuances.)

6 - Erik from Phantom of the Opera. This one stabbed me with a spoon and ate my heart out lol. I care a lot more for the original Leroux version than the Broadway/movie version, but the absolute top iteration of this character is written by Susan Kay in the pastiche Phantom and I bet every serious PotO fan will agree. (He is -by far- my fave, with the Daroga a distant second.)

7 - Eurus Holmes from BBC Sherlock. This one took me completely by surprise. One of the shittiest character arcs I’ve ever seen, and yet. She’s the one that pulled me out of the meta mindset I had been stuck into since season 2 and gutted me like a fish before I had time to realise what happened. (Jim and Irene share the top spot for their source material, but all three Holmes siblings are fighting for third place.)

8 - Hans from Frozen. The one character that made me realise the storytelling & camera language studies paid off lol (”wtf Disney doesn’t design its princes that way, there’s something off about him!”). I genuinely hated him right off the bat when I saw that movie because he made my gut twist with so many red flags, but the moment he revealed himself as a villain things clicked into place and now I love him lol (I’m so predictable xD). He shares the “hiding behind smoke & mirrors & facets of himself” with the Moriarty archetype, which makes him fascinating to watch and analyse, and for that alone I hope to see more of him in Frozen 2 because I never get enough of that kind of character. (Elsa used to be my favourite, but lately there’s been a disconnect. I’m not sure if I just out-grew her or if it’s a depression thing. As for Hans, it’s a strange kind of love/hate/fascination thing that I couldn’t define.)

9 - Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs. For the sole reason that her fascination for Hannibal and the pull that makes her come back even though she knows he’s terrible for her mental health made me feel seen, and also validated my own fascination and love for villains, which people around me always found strange. (Obviously, my fave is Hannibal. I wish the recent show about him wasn’t so gore. Can’t watch it because I’m too sensitive to on-screen violence and body horror.)

10 - Laure/Mickaël from Tomboy This one is a little harder to explain, and to be honest I’m not sure I really want to. That movie is... questionable lol but maybe you’ll have an idea why that character made such an impact on me if you saw it. (Or maybe not. It’s okay.)

Runner-ups: Link from A Link to the Past, Sheik/Zelda from Ocarina of Time, Jake from The Dark Tower, Scotty Valens from Cold Case, Scar from The Lion King, Billy Elliot from Billy Elliot, Arya Stark from ASOIAF, Garraty from The Long Walk, L from Death Note, and many many others.

I have exactly 10 followers, one of them tagged me, and I tagged 5 of you earlier on something else so I’m not going to harass you people further. XD Steal this if you want to!

[tigerlover16-uk]

So, at what point do you think it was that Krillin actually surpassed Tien? And why do so many people seem insistent that Tien has to be stronger and aggressively push that idea?

If they weren’t already even by the Piccolo Jr saga where Krillin pushed Piccolo to use his full power to defeat him, then Krillin either surpassed him during the one year of training in the Saiyan saga, or if not there definitely when he had his potential unlocked by Guru on Namek.

As for why a lot of people refuse to believe Krillin’s stronger than Tien, it’s mostly a mix of bias and the anime exaggerating Tien’s abilities.

Take the filler in the Frieza saga where Tien, Yamcha and Chiaotzu fight off most of the Ginyu force, whereas Vegeta, Krillin and Gohan had all got their buts kicked by Recoome alone. If we’re being honest that’s baloney, since Vegeta and Krillin were just as skilled if not more so than either of those 3, and with the amount of time they were on King Kai’s planet they really shouldn’t have been able to progress to the point where they were stronger, if we take into consideration Goku’s power boost from training there for a greater length of time.

The anime would also exaggerate Tien’s abilities in a few more cases, like in the scene where he pins Cell down with the Tri-beam. In the manga he didn’t spam the attack that much, and he was only just barely able to slow Cell down long enough for 18 and 16 to escape. But the anime dragged it out a lot longer to try and make Tien look a lot more impressive. And it’s a cool moment in either version don’t get me wrong, I loved it, but point is it shows a trend of the anime exaggerating Tien’s abilities, making him look more powerful than he really was supposed to be at that point in the series.

And there’s also the matter of Tien fighting Future Trunks briefly in the movie Bojack Unbound, even getting him to go super Saiyan against him, whereas Krillin at the same point in the movie was freaking out over the prospect of having to fight Piccolo.

Stuff like that kind of throws people off since not everyone actually reads the manga or watched Kai, and even if they did that sort of stuff still probably leaves an impact that subconsciously colours their perceptions of both characters skill level during Z. Also, there’s this weird perception that I think was also due to something suggested in filler that Tien constantly trains 24/7, but that’s never actually been suggested in canon and as far as we know Krillin and Tien probably train just as much and as hard.

Taking all of that aside though… well, a lot of people are just biased because Tien… basically looks more like a tough guy compared to Krillin.

Krillin is short, designed more as a non-threatening sidekick character, and is generally characterized as fairly sweet, expressive and a generally nice guy, the kind of character you want as your buddy. He’s not exactly a traditionally masculine character in a lot of ways. 

Tien though, he kind of is. He’s tall, buff (Krillin’s no slouch himself, but his musculature is often less defined), and a walking shirtless scene for many of his appearances, especially when he fights. And while he can have his comedic moments (”You can’t tuna fish!”), his personality is generally a lot more straight faced and serious, and often stoic. And there’s the fact that he’s a former assassin and thus a redeemed villain.

So in general, Tien on the surface does come off as a more traditionally macho kind of character, which a lot of DBZ fans latch onto because a sizeable portion of the traditional fandom was obsessed with raw strength and masculinity and rejected characters seen as weak or who show emotion that isn’t stern warrior male or angst at the death of a loved one (Which is probably why Tien doesn’t get mocked for his pointless sacrifice against Nappa, despite dying just one time less than Krillin and both he and Yamcha get flack for being red shirts supposedly). See the rift between people who think super Saiyan 2 was where Gohan’s character hit his peak and everything in the Buu saga beyond ruined him forever, verses more rational fans who appreciate Gohan for who he is for a classic example of this mindset.

And then of course there’s the fact that the fandom has long been taken over by memes to the point many people insist that TFS’s portrayals of the characters in the Abridged series are a more accurate depiction of them than the actual canon, so Krillin being the fandoms biggest butt monkey for years after Yamcha has made a lot of people aggressively refuse to believe that Krillin is in any way capable of being a competent fighter and that he MUST be weaker than all the other characters that aren’t Yamcha!

So, yeah, basically a lot of fans just make really poor assumption on things out of bias. And don’t get me wrong, I love Tien. He’s one of my favourites too, and I want to see him in action a lot more in the future too… but, no. Facts are facts, Krillin is the strongest non-enhanced human being on earth. A level he earned through hard work and a lot of struggle. That doesn’t mean Tien is not also a very impressive and admirable fighter, but it’s also not an insult to acknowledge that Krillin is stronger than him, it’s just the way things are.

[ganba-ray]

Tag Meme #1

@badartforrecess​ @imuffinator​ So, uh, thanks, guys... for... tagging me for this... Because I write a lot this is going to be a huuuge wall of text

Nicknames: If I really needed to pick, I usually go by Ray. If it’s my url or id, it’s usually sushi, sush, or soush Star sign: Gemini Height: I don’t really know my exact height but I think I know I’m a manlet so I’ll probably be around 5′3. Time right now: It’s 11:11~ Last thing you googled: Sing Street Favourite music artist: Lucy Rose, but if it’s K-Pop Kim Taeyeon slays Song stuck in your head: It doesn’t really happy that much but if I had to pick, based from my humming or random singing I’d have to pick Tokimeki Sugar although ‘I’ is also good considering that it’s been my favorite for so long last year Last movie I watched: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Last TV show I watched: Had to watch Dragon Ball Super to wash off that BanG Dream last night What I’m wearing right now: Grey longsleeve over a pink T-shirt. Grey cargo shorts When I created this blog: Hey, story time! It was around September 2016 that I got tumblr. Mostly because Mayah kept egging me on about getting tumblr because there are several fandoms. And ofc, K-On... I decided to get tumblr. If it really wasn’t for Mayah, I probably wouldn’t have met some amazing people. The kind I stuff I post: I’ll regularly reblog shitposts and pics and gifs of K-On. Although, I’m not all that. Every once in a while I’ll end up posting something original, like some fanfics (mostly relating to K-On), or my photography, or a text post like this. There’s also personal journal logs, which are fewer and farther between than my other posts. Do I get asks regularly?: Although having some other asks are nice, I don’t mind not having any. Most of the time, they’re usually just from my friends. Why did I choose my URL?: It’s a bit of a funny story, actually... Again, since Mayah kept telling me to go on tumblr, and my horrible, horrible sense of naming, I chose soushibanana as the third of my urls, and quite possibly the url as of this writing. Only a select amount of people know the last one ‘Soushibana’ the name of a song from Osamuraisan. The song itself is soothing and it kind of invokes some feelings from when an eventful day or something ends. I never really have a designated name for my social media sites, but ‘Soushi’ or well, ‘Sushi’ I’m starting to take a liking to. Maybe I’ll choose another URL sometime... Gender: Male Hogwarts House: Might as well be Ravenclaw... Pokemon Team: Going with my last answer, I’m probably Mystic. Favourite colour: Orange and blue are a nice contrast... kindalikemyblogmiriteguys Average hours of sleep: Around 6-12 hours but usually I sleep at midnight or 1-3 o’clock so it depends if it’s a weekend or not I guess Lucky number: I’m just going to pull this out of my ass but, uh... seven? Favourite characters: Ritsu Tainaka, Jun Suzuki, Nodoka Manabe, Tsumugi Kotobuki, Mio Akiyama, Ui Hirasawa, Azusa Nakano, Yui Hirasawa (In that order) (K-On!) Karate Joe, Muscle Doll, Lumbearjack, Reporter and Wrestler, Kouhai and Senpai, The Manzai Birds (Rhythm Tengoku) Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop) Vegeta (Dragon Ball) Dream Job: Maybe I want to become a photographer in the future, or maybe a musician... Ooh, maybe a writer... Honestly, I don’t really know just yet. But I’ll think of something. Number of blankets I sleep with: Just one, but how thick the blanket is depends on the season, although I like the fluffy ones

So I want @mooyah-wheatup @itsh2ovanoss and @scarecrow-king to join in with the fun so you guys can do this if you want to (I guess...) Don’t reblog this but go and fill out the same things I did... But you don’t have to... B-baka...