#so he's got at least 5 sexyman points lmao

[narastories]

Tell me this isn’t even a little bit gay.

Harry about Ortega’s looks: “I just stared at the man beside me as recognition dawned. He was of average height and slightly heavy build, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. He was dark-complected, his black hair neatly brushed, his grey-and-silver suit stylish and tasteful.“ And about his character: “Dedicated, honorable, courageous, self-sacrificial loonies are absolutely the worst people in the world to go up against.“

[fontasticcrablettes]

Tales Sexyman Poll Results

The Sexyman poll is now closed! I did consider leaving it up for most of the 14th, since I originally said the poll would run through the 14th, but in the past few days, responses have significantly slowed down so I decided that anyone who wants to vote probably has already.

That being said! We ended up 260 responses! Wow! I'm glad so many people are invested in determining the sexiest dude in Tales.

32 people will be included in the final bracket. I decided to reserve the last 5 spots for write-in votes, because someone going out of their way to write a name in shows a lot of passion.

I'm not going to reveal the final numbers for the characters who made it into the bracket, because I think the voting will be more fun if everyone doesn't already have the numbers on who is generally more popular. But, I will give you the numbers for those who didn't make the cut, and some of my favourite write-in responses.

Those Who Didn't Make It

While I'm sure all of these men are very sexy in their own way, they just weren't sexy enough to make it to the bracket. In order, they are:

Veigue Lungberg (21)

Asbel Lhant (20)

Hisui Hearts (19)

Stahn Aileron (19)

Kongwai Tao (19)

Reid Hershel (17)

Ricardo Soldato (16)

Garr Kelvin (12)

Rassius Luine (12)

Karyl Sheeden (11)

Barbatos (11)

Eugene Gallardo (10)

Kunzite (9)

Will Raynard (8)

Gall Gruner (7)

Max (5)

Bruiser Khang (4)

Bisley Bakur (2)

Let's give them all a round of applause. Except Bisley, who remains Unfuckable.

However! It was pointed out to me that I completely forgot to include Heldalf on this poll. He definitely should have been on the list, because he is the final boss of a mothership Tales game, but I forgot. Despite that, poor Heldalf did not receive a single write-in vote, or a single lament in the tags of the post that they wanted to vote for him. I would say "It makes sense, because he's a cat person," but Eugene Gallardo is also a cat person, and he got 10 votes, so there is at least some furry representation here.

Based on this evidence I think Bisley may have to pass the crown of Least Fuckable Tales Man to Heldalf.

The Winning Write-Ins

103 people wrote-in suggestions to add characters to the poll. The five write-ins with the most votes have been added to the bracket. I may note, though, that a single survey response can only vote for a character one time. To my friends who wrote their faves names many times, I appreciate the passion but they still only got one vote from you lmao.

The 5 winners are...

Vicious (24)

Yuan Ka-Fai (14)

Richter Abend (12)

Julius Kresnik (8)

Peony (7)

Coming up close behind, the contenders who didn't quite make it are, in order, Aegis, Dist, and Wingul tied, Shigure, and Orwin and Shigure tied.

Largo, Philip Reston, and Gaspard Herbert all got 3 votes each. Jiao, Zephyr (Tales of Link), Yeager, Alexei, Raoul, Botta, Abyssion, Lucien Dufaure, and Edouard Rouquier all got recommended by at least 2 people.

2 people also voted for Mikleo as he appears in the epilogue, at which time he is old enough to qualify for the Sexy Man poll. I do have to wonder how the main results would have shaken out if I'd thought of that and added Epilogue Mikelo to the main roster to choose from! Perhaps someone in the future should run a Handsome Boy tournament to give all these teenage heroes a shot at glory.

I do not have the space to list every other character who was written in once, but here's a round up of some of my favourite responses:

Wonder Chef. Oh hell yeah, he is heating things up in your kitchen. I must know, though, which Wonder Chef? We might need a "Sexiest Wonder Chef" poll in the future to determine the answer!

Milla Maxwell. As the voter points out, she is not a woman! While "not a woman" and "man" are not the same thing, there really are not enough nonbinary characters in Tales to support a Sexiest Nonbinary Character contest, so you're right, anonymous voter. We should have the option to vote for Milla in both Sexyman and Sexywoman tournament as a compromise.

Victor Kresnik. I know it's not the same, but will it help to know that Ludger is in the tournament?

Lloyd Irving, DotNW era. Under the same rules as Mikleo above, this vote also counts. Good for you, Lloyd.

Reigen Arataka. Oh no. We are not doing this.

[pochapal]

I hate doctor 11 but ive never been able to explain why in like words lmao. He feels like such a mary sue character imo and like theres something about his characterisation that was always just really ineffective (like the stuff about fishfingers and custard or whatever it was). Imo i'd love to hear you give top 5 worst things about the 11 era because i rlly just love when it gets torn apart

i hold nothing but a seething contempt and loathing for that man. every time he appeared on screen i felt ready to snap like a riled up chimpanzee in my enclosure. i am frothing at the mouth and overcome with a desire to start flinging heavy objects. this might be incoherent and inconsistent but i started this rewatch in feb 2020 and only finished this week so i got through 11′s episodes last august/september time and i refuse to revisit it to jog my memory or fact check anything i’m saying here because this man does not deserve the space in my mind for that.

the first thing is i can’t fucking STAND the quirky whimsy timey wimey bit he has going on all of the time. i can’t even say this is because this is a kids show and i was a teen and then adult when i first properly watched him but actually!! when i was eleven years old i’d sleep over at a friend’s house most weekends and it always coincided with the airing of a new season 5 episode and i remember we watched the finale with the dumb time hopping to get out of the box prison that was never explained and didn’t make sense and i thought at the time “this is really stupid”. and before that my only other doctor who exposure was watching the david tennant christmas specials with another friend and throughout childhood my only opinion on doctor who was “this is a tv show that is not for me but is one that all the boys i am friends with like so i will put up with it to maintain our friendships” but at least those episodes were both suspenseful and engaging enough to keep me watching all the way through. like who the fuck does an end of the world sci fi plot and approaches it with an “oopsy woopsy i am a funny little alien man who is going to stop you all by making you do a hecking silly” like it’s unneeded and self-parodies an already cheesy show to the point where it becomes unwatchable and makes it impossible to ever take this man seriously.

next thing that downright sucks ass so badly is the stupid fucking overwritten constantly escalating plotlines. like everything from season 5 up until his regeneration at the end of season 7 is meant to be this grand interconnected cosmic plot about how...the doctor trying to bring back his planet will end the universe or something so all the top powers across all of reality tried again and again to stop him from doing that except he doesn’t know what’s going on so he keeps thwarting these people who supposedly mean good?? i mean i sure don’t fucking know what they were trying to say!! like for some reason we never get the doctor suddenly becomes this superdemon that threatens everything so these people (whoever they are) decide to, in sequence: suck him through a time rift to erase him from existence, trap him in a prison and remake a universe without him, take his companion’s baby and turn her into a perfectly trained doctor killer, form two(!!) secret societies to hunt him throughout history that are only stopped by his companion splintering herself across his personal timeline to protect him, and repeatedly cause reality collapsing events because it’s a kinder outcome for the universe than what he will do. this grand and terrible event turns out to be...he spends a few hundred years chilling by a rift that leads to his home planet and protects a few generations of children from monsters which convinces them to give him infinite regeneration power then fuck off back to their pocket universe. and it’s like!! what is the point of anything that happens in this man’s era when everything is always “the darkest moment” or whatever the fuck!! i don’t care!! we never get a compelling reason to believe this bumbling clown of a man could ever be a universal threat!! the whole thing is so dumb i hate it!!!

thing number three i hate is how the eleventh doctor is ALSO characterised as this abrasive egotistic male supergenius to the point where he becomes genuinely indistinguishable from bbc sherlock. genuinely who enjoyed seeing this guy constantly tell people their tiny human minds can’t comprehend what he’s doing and then basically just wave his magic wand to solve whatever problem each episode is facing. 2012 is the year of human sin because this fucking shitsmear character archetype somehow became both a redditor role model AND a tumblr sexyman and it’s like!! nobody is enjoying this stop making this seem cool! him saying timey wimey thing any time he does anything is frustrating and dumb and locks the viewer out of giving a fuck about anything that is happening! smartest man in the room syndrome is a disease and the eleventh doctor is terminal with it. like remember how they established river as an accomplished scientist (when she wasn’t being a child soldier or a time paradox or whatever the fuck) and every time that came up mr doctor eleven man was like “oh this thing is obvious because i’m a genius and you didn’t realise because your brain is tiny so get out of the way and let the grownups think” or that time it turned out amy had been replaced with a slime clone for half the season and the doctor chewed rory (audience surrogate) out for somehow not realising this fact we didn’t know right from the start and like. this served no purpose other than to draw into severe question why the doctor is also this super beloved magical figure implicitly trusted by all children everywhere like. mr steven moffat is totally allergic to writing and solving mysteries in his tv show and fuck you for wanting to figure things out as you go along based on the new evidence you uncover at strategic plot intervals just let this asshole man use magical thinking to reveal he knew the answer all along and you’re a fucking idiot for not also realising this thing which had no basis or precedent anywhere else in the show.

speaking of dumb things let us not forget the absolute shitshow that was minority representation in this era. i’m not even talking about the low hanging fruit of how genuinely unironically sexist amy and clara were written where each episode moffat either seemed to loathe them or was incredibly horny over them and they had no character growth or arc or fucking anything. i’m talking about how fucking shit terrible the incidental representation was. god remember how every single fucking gay person who appeared in this era was written as one incredibly fucking stupid joke and how the women were all either sexy dominatrix, feeble girl in love, or Mother (or all three in some really terrible cases) and i’m not qualified to talk about this but also how incredibly white this era was and how on two separate occasions we had monarchs reimagined as sexy girlbosses with a gun played by black women who the doctor leched over. nothing about any of this was good ESPECIALLY coming off the back of rtd who was surprisingly forward thinking for 2005 and did a really good job of positing travel with the doctor as queer allegory. in comparison moffat gave us THE MOST heterosexual shlock i’ve ever had to endure. amy and rory could have been interesting characters were they not hemmed into this domestic bickering young straight married couple bullshit that was in no way changed or altered by traveling with the doctor except for the quasi incestuous river song reveal that was dumb and bad and stupid.

the last major mega gripe i have with the series is moffat’s fucking jingoistic boner for british military aesthetics. this carried over throughout his entire tenure as showrunner but was super terrible vomit inducing in eleven’s era. the unironic admiration for ww2 britain and winston churchill is downright wretched. are you incapable of telling a second world war story outside of churchill’s london and plucky blitz fighters. shit gives me hives so badly. and then!!! that weird church owned army that features in the future that end up being bad not for the concept of what basically amounts to an imperialistic intergalactic rendition of the fucking crusades but because they’re part of the nonsense go nowhere puzzlebox narrative that says the doctor is a not good man who will do bad things to the universe :(. remember how rtd’s doctor was a freshly traumatised man hot off the war criminal press who time and time again vehemently refuses to engage in military violence, but who tragically inadvertently turns every one of his companions into soldiers in his own personal army, and he has this moment of complete horror at the realisation and it is this which causes the downward spiral that ends in 10′s regeneration. and then how there’s this cringe line about how there’s a force of people who are “the doctor’s army, always ready to fight his battles when he’s not around” or some shit and then it turns out this is actually massive literal military operation and we’re meant to celebrate this. fuck off.

bonus round because this needs to be said but i have never hated anything like i hated that fucking human tardis episode. everything about it induced violent anger in me from the sickening overindulgence of that softgoth dark whimsy helena bonham carter tim burton aesthetic to the bafflingly terrible evil carny stereotype of those junk scavengers to the overblown sudden tragic shipbait romance of human tardis and the doctor. every word out of her mouth was trite shit and the fact that the death of her body was presented as this super emotional dramatic scene despite there being no buy in or incentive to care and the fact that every single person on tumblr in 2012 ate that shit up like it was fucking gourmet. i loathe every single thing about that episode so much.