They have to be characters you like so much you wish they're real so you can go out with them or whatever.

I don't need to hear about your fantasies regarding said character; I ask in order to see what makes a character endearing to that degree. You must write good reasons for why you're attracted to said character. Great T&A is not a good reason, because any drawn character can have great T&A.

I was going to include literary characters, but then I remembered Twilight is a book so I thought better of it... Well, as long as it's not Twilight, you can name a literary or movie character (NOT THE ACTOR, the actor must not be a factor).

Let's see if we can mutually improve our understanding on how to create/write characters which engender such reader/viewer attraction, via giving examples and reasons.

If this thread gets going, I'll provide my own examples too.

Carmen Sandiego from the animated series.
-Because she's an intelligent, smart, sexy, clever woman with waves of thick black hair, a slightly exotic look, a stylish red coat, gloves, and a sexy red hat.



Woman is hotter than lava... WOW O_O
Cartoon crush.

I never watched it. Does the cartoon actually give her a personality or devote screentime to her? Or is she just an unseen target for the hero kids?

She's in there, never enough, but she was there.
Her personality:
She was benignly bad, very cool, intelligent, commanding, and in control. Like a female James Bond without the sleaze.

What a cool thread idea! I'll have to start thinking.

Ozone, you have great taste in fictional women.

TSNADE the fifth hokage from Naruto! she's so sexy. strongest ninja in the village despite being a woman! as hokage ,she's in charge,so i think i can see some dominatrix thing happening. i know, i'm sick!lol

I'll add one of a different archetype:
Revi, of Black Lagoon.

Design-wise, typical babe with guns. Badass, amoral, borderline unhinged, dangerous psychological issues.

Attraction Factors:

1. Sexy look and hard-drinking tomboy demeanor. I personally don't accept that she's "Chinese American from NYC." There's another chara who is supposed to be "Chinese from Taiwan," and the 2 girls look completely different. Revi looks anime-ish, while the other looks stereotypically Chinese.
I'll always think Revi is Brazilian. One, Brazil is 50 times the hell-hole NYC is. Two, only Latino chicks can be as crazy as Revi.

2. Tsundere factor. It's not as blatant as most other anime, but it's the basis of the romantic undercurrent between her and the male lead. She goes out of her way for him that she would not do for anyone else, even though her version of "nice" and "considerate" is pretty relative. Her deep issues give her the one hairline crack of vulnerability which allows the male lead to act as "the man" (very, very infrequently).

3. Lastly, the male lead is a wussy Japanese salaryman. This gives readers/viewers the launchpad of wish-fulfillment, thinking that an average Joe like themselves can get a badass hottie like Revi to cry on their shoulder and let them comfort her on her insecurities. LMAO. Ironically, I don't think the author would ever make Revi do that even with the male lead in the manga.

That's my take on Revi's attraction. Bad-Girl tsundere psycho-hottie wish-fulfillment.

Tulip O'hare from preacher.



She kicks ass.

okay Steve Dillons art doesn't make her look super hot, his art isn't great from a TA point of view. Thing is you know she is a hotty regardless and that she could kill you. Also she is the most convincingly written tough women I have read anywhere (not that I have read everything, obviously) despite her capability she is still just a person who makes mistakes and gets angry, depressed etc. Just like real people.

Correct, for the purposes of this thread, the art style is not the main factor why you are attracted to the character.

I mean, look at Revi. She's pretty much a Lara Croft clone. Yet I detest Lara Croft (or at least feel nothing for her whatsoever). It's about the writing of the character, her demeanor, the voice acting, etc.

For how to draw an attractive woman/man to complement one's writing... that's a different topic and a lot of art classes.

You know, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Wolfwood. :swoon:

And Harry Connick Jr's character (Dean?) in Iron Giant. But that may have more to do with Harry than anything else.

And... literary? I guess Locke Lamora, he's pretty rad.

I guess that gives you an idea about my 'type of character skoolmunkee finds attractive' although I will be a boring party pooper and say I don't think I've ever thought of fictional characters in terms of 'crush' or 'wishing they're real'... but there are some male characters I strongly prefer over others. :]

There's only one cartoon gal for me:



Edit: forgot the good reasons - skinny ladies don't usually float my boat, but Olive has a kind of scrawny annoying quality, with that irritating voice, ridiculous footwear and the sense that she's quite happy to walk off into the sunset with whoever comes out on top that day. In short, she's exactly like the girls I went to art college with and I love her for it.

Hayley Smith from American Dad. It's something about the forceful pro-activeness of her personality, even though I don't necessarily agree with all her expressed opinions. Just wish she wasn't so unstable. I could see myself liking her as a friend.

I kind of had a thing for Daria (in her own series) back in the day. Intellectual and dead pan. Yes!

Dana Tan from Batman Beyond.
Revi from Black Lagoon.
Kiva Andru from Megas XLR.
Stripperella from...Stripperella
And Kathy Duquesne from Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman

Granted, there's a lot more but I don't think feel like posting Anthro's and other background characters I remember from old cartoons. :)

I distance myself from this completely (of course!) but in - ummm ... "other" circles, there seems to be a lot of love for Family Guy's Lois Griffin. (Which just goes to prove it's not all about the looks!)

Also, whilst not one of my favourite "hotties" in any other sense, Kim Possible's Shego must surely have one of the sexiest voices on TV. It's just so ... dirrty!

a dirty voice goes a long way.

Genejoke
a dirty voice goes a long way.

Oh yes, the English VA for this character absolutely nails that requirement:

Lust, of Full Metal Alchemist. Rowrrrr.

I like the 1st series for its better characterizations/origins for the Homunculi.

I distance myself from this completely

Hah, I find that assertion disingenuous from any artist/writer. Who would bother writing/drawing any memorable characters if he/she can't immerse himself in bringing those characters to life (in his mind)? Just as there's nothing wrong (or practical) with worshipping actors/ actresses/ models (who are all fictional airbrushed edited representations), there is nothing wrong with admiring/ hating/ lusting after fictional people. This one is older than dirt; look at Pygmalion & Galatea.

mlai

I distance myself from this completely

Hah,

*sigh* The web really needs an "irony" emoticon! ;-)

Glitter

From Kidd Video. For sheer ridiculousness.

She's a fairy. From the 80's. In legwarmers. Oh, and she gets super-strength from sneezing. Personality-wise she's the typical fairy world-guide, but when the day is done: SHE IS A FAIRY IN FREAKING LEGWARMERS. The reason why this is awesome is because while completely off-the-wall, remember that the aerobics outfit is very similar how faeries get dressed anyways -- that is, in tights. Throwing in legwarmers isn't much of a stretch.

Plus, she's cute. I'm a sucker for cute. Ask my wife.

The only super heroine that I have any sort of attachment to would be Kitty Pryde -- mostly both because she was the most normally drawn of the bunch, and she was more down to earth than the rest of the vapid lot she worked with.

For the bad girls, I like Harley Quinn & Poison Ivy. I appreciate the 'big sister' dynamic as it really fleshed out an otherwise two-dimensional Ivy. Harley was just fun, bubbly and full of energy (while being just psychotic enough) and the fact that all the other villains in Batman's rogue's gallery were charmed by her too was entertaining. Few have combined "sweet" with "psychotic" in a way that works out as well as Harley.

Finally... I'm partial to the "bitchy outside, squishy inside" types of female characters. Not that they necessarily have to be nasty, but I like the types that have a certain kind of deceptive armour to them, and underneath it all they have a good soul. Not that they're soft -- they're still tough -- but they have that soft-hearted core. They're usually the characters most people dislike immediate but intrigue me.

I've also tried to write male characters for sex appeal to the ladies. The most popular one was a high-energy character. While he was handsome enough, the main part of his appeal was self-confidence combined with a sense of humour and a big smile. I'm only including that in case some ladies would like to comment on the approach.

it's been a while since i had any huge cartoon crushes, but, i think i have gotten a little crush on Achilles from the iliad. i know, i know, it doesnt get much more geeky than that, and the dude has some problems.but he's a fucking wrecking ball! could he be kinda high n mighty? eh...sometimes, i dont think as much as people say so, even when he was angry, he treated his friends well. but he's just such an equalizer. that's what i like, i think, more than "good guy" qualities or "bad guy" qualities.not to mention his extreme bad assness. that bad assness has survived for centuries and was an example our bronze age ancestors praises like the bible....gotta love those red heads.im actually listening to the Iliad again for the 3rd time. my favorite book, for alot of reasons.



and a NICE ass.....

--snip--

Damn, Pitface already read my post.

I really shouldn't rant against characters other ppl find hot, in a thread dedicated to characters that ppl find hot. That was just immature. I'm sorry. My post deleted.

I'm not saying we can't discuss character flaws, etc. But my post was just a stupid rant against a fictional character. Don't know what I was worked up over.

I guess it's because I find Hector a likeable guy.

heh heh, well i was expecting this a little bit to tell you the truth, alot of people do hate his guts. some dont. yeah maby your opinion would change, maby not, it's all in the interpretation.yeah totally entitled to it. i will say the Iliad is heavy, monotonous reading for a high schooler.

i for one think he was valid in his anger and was totally ready to die once he re-entered the war. Brad Pitt did do a nice job in the role, but there were ways the character was written in it i dont like as much. the movie made alot of the characters so good/evil, when this wasnt done in the book, and i liked it when it wasnt done like that. In the movie, they just made Achilles an all out bad ass rebel without a cause type guy. he treated his peers like shit, and dishonored the gods, not true in the book.he spoke with respect to everyone, except Agememnon because, well, he was really, REALLY pissed at him.

He was an EXCELENT warrior who fought very hard in the 9 years of the Trojan war, sacking 12 cities. as thanks, Agememnon took Achilles's war prize, Briseis, which is basically like the president shitting on a four star general and smacking him in the face. He re-entered the war KNOWING he was going to die because it was profisized when he was born that if he avoided war, he'd live a long peaceful life, but if he went to war, he'd die young. He goes anyways to avenge his friend, so is an arrow through the ankle a kinda shitty way to die? yeah, but he took it as well as he gave it. and hell, completely invulnerable characters can be so boring.

About the only character i didnt like in it was Paris. all through, he never seemed at all remorseful that his own people were fighting and dying for YEARS for shit he started. Helen even stoped loving him.Hector even yelled at him a few times cuz he wasnt fighting.

no saying you have to see it the same way i do, i just like a chance to talk about The Iliad when i can get one. there aint as many people who i can do that with. :D

Genejoke
Tulip O'hare from preacher.



She kicks ass.

okay Steve Dillons art doesn't make her look super hot, his art isn't great from a TA point of view. Thing is you know she is a hotty regardless and that she could kill you. Also she is the most convincingly written tough women I have read anywhere (not that I have read everything, obviously) despite her capability she is still just a person who makes mistakes and gets angry, depressed etc. Just like real people.

aw, just started reading The Preacher a while ago (finally) and i love it! at first i wasnt to found of her character, but i dont know, she grows on ya. she actually becomes kinda relatable!

PIT_FACE
alot of people do hate his guts. i will say the Iliad is heavy, monotonous reading for a high schooler.

Sorry, regardless how I feel about Achilles, it was extremely bad form for me to rant against him in a thread meant for talking about favorite characters (a thread that I created, d'oh). My original post is now deleted.

Yeah, the Iliad was definitely very dry compared to the Odyssey, which I (and probably any middle schooler even remotedly interested) devoured. But as I age, I find that I can read dry old works with more enthusiasm. Probably because my mind can fill in the blanks better. I read the entire 1000 pages of Le Morte D'Arthur, for example. I'd say 950 pages of that book was utterly boring, objectively speaking.

Brad Pitt did do a nice job in the role, but there were ways the character was written in it i dont like as much.

Haha, you actually speak positively about Troy. Not many do. Personally I liked the movie. Except for the part where he romances the princess. Is that even in the book? Hollywood was too scared to make Brad gay, I think. It's really unfair for gay men.

Off the top of my head I can't think of many gay Greek/Roman fictional heroes. I only know Achilles. Didn't Hercules have a "boy sidekick" too? But Hercules also had a family.

Well, Alexander was gay. But he's Macedonian. And real.

the movie made alot of the characters so good/evil, when this wasnt done in the book,

What I hated most about the movie was that they killed off Agamemnon right in Troy. Give me a break! The man is supposed to meet a gruesome death back home, and Hollywood just assumes we're all high school dropouts who are classics-illiterate but demand instant gratification.

In the movie, they just made Achilles an all out bad ass rebel without a cause type guy. he treated his peers like shit, and dishonored the gods, not true in the book.he spoke with respect to everyone,

I didn't get that feeling from the movie. I could tell he had no respect for authority (personified by Agamemnon), but he treated his battalion well.

About the only character i didnt like in it was Paris. all through, he never seemed at all remorseful that his own people were fighting and dying for YEARS for shit he started. Helen even stoped loving him.Hector even yelled at him a few times cuz he wasnt fighting.

Yeah, I do kinda remember Paris being whiny and spineless. But when the author portrays a negative character negatively, I actually like the character. I think it hit a nerve of mine when the author portrays a negative (IMO) character positively, i.e. Achilles.

i just like a chance to talk about The Iliad when i can get one. there aint as many people who i can do that with. :D

Don't remember much of it, tbh. :D
It was just so dry, I forgot it as soon as I finished reading it. :/

regarding the change in reading material, i notice the same thing happening to me too. i fell in love with the writing in the Iliad, and really liked it in the odyssey, when i was younger i just didnt get it because well, i had no desire to "get it." i think that's typical though. i've been reading Paradise Lost, little by little, and i woulda given up on that thing a while ago cuz it's kinda difficult to follow, and im a pretty good reader.ya become more interested in the overall story and how things slowly unfold.

The movie served it's purpose as an action flick i think. there were some cool things in it, i liked alot of the fighting choreography. and before i say this, i'll say that i dont usually like to harp on a movie being different from the original because directors have their own artistic licence. it's not the fact that it was different from the book that bugged me, it was that the differences were made so there'd be a box office hit, and so you can see brad pitt's butt. that's probably part of the reason why the didnt make him gay. i suppose it would have been a little awkward in the theater. or maby progressive, who knows! and i was pretty dispointed that they killed menalaus right away like that too. i really wonder why they did that.and yer right, he wasnt that bad to his comrads in the movie, i thought about that later.

im not so sure that he was gay. i think it depends on what versions you read. the vesion i've read the most is Fitzgerald's interpretation. he never mentions Achilles and Patroclos being lovers, and explains their closesness as being friends from a very young age, i forgot the exact details. but yeah he had a family. he seemed to miss briseis when she was gone, not just because she was a trophy to him. some other stories include some other kinda..well...weird, very Greek love interests of his including an amazon woman he falls in love with after he kills her in battle, and a very "beautiful" man he chases down and kills after the guy wont go for him. i dont know whether they ment beautiful as in he was womanly or that he was just a good looking guy. like i said, Achilles DID have some definate hang ups, lol. i dont know where alot of these stories came from cuz those things were never in the iliad. hell, maby he was gay, or at least bi. either way, eh...... (goes back and re-examines my taste in men. :D )

he did have a son that was off somewhere else. When Odysseus (sure i missplet that) goes to hades to asks for directions home, and meets all those people that've died like agamemnon and patroclos and a few others. they all start asking him questions about their homelands and their loved ones and basically how life's gettin on. and then he sees Achilles, whose become commander of the army of the dead, and i guess Achilles isnt entirely thrilled about it, he goes to Odysseus and asks about his son and odysseus tells him that he's basically kicking ass and taking names and doing very well. proud and satisfied, Achilles turns and walks back into the legions of the dead. there's something about that imagery that i just loved. it gives me goosebumps.

and ya didnt have to delete yer post man, i wasnt offended, like i said, it gave me something to discuss, i actually liked Hector alot too! I'm glad Homer gives a little into his family life, like when he visits his wife and baby back in Troy. he was just a dude in war, like everyone else in the book, and that's one of the reasons i liked it so much, the book made all the soldiers, even Achilles, just basically men caught in a long brutal war.

...holly crap, i can go on....

Well Pit, it may interest you to know that there is an archaelogical site of Troy which shows that it was a large city destroyed by war (or natural disaster) in around 1300-1200 BC, which coincides with the mentions of recorded astronomical events by Homer. Troy being real is not disputed in archaeology.

Ha, the movie even mentions Mount Ida in Turkey, which is basically SE of actual Troy.

The ancient Greeks and Romans all regarded the Iliad as actual history, and its characters to be non-fictional.

mlai
Haha, you actually speak positively about Troy. Not many do. Personally I liked the movie. Except for the part where he romances the princess. Is that even in the book? Hollywood was too scared to make Brad gay, I think. It's really unfair for gay men.

Off the top of my head I can't think of many gay Greek/Roman fictional heroes. I only know Achilles. Didn't Hercules have a "boy sidekick" too? But Hercules also had a family.

Well, Alexander was gay. But he's Macedonian. And real.

From what little I know about this, I don't think any of them were "gay", not as we think of it now. "Gay" in modern times evokes ideas of same sex exclusivity and men who behave in a slightly feminised way. The Greeks, if anything didn't think in terms of homosexuality so much, love was love and sex was sex, the gender of the partner wasn't as big a thing as it is for us in the modern day Christianised west.
Culture changes a lot and concepts don't always translate well over time.

I've never heard of Hercules having a sidekick except in that silly TV show.
Macedonians were as Greek as any other group. The modern day country of that name and the people who're now called Macedonians are quite different to the ancient Greek version.

Yeah, Greeks/Romans are more like bi rather than gay, and yes even then their concepts of that are different. And I guess you can say pedos, but that's just even more based on an arbitrary age the contemporary West slapped on a law book.

This kind of derails into Christian hypocrisy. All demonizing Islam about how they abuse women and unbelievers etc, while they want to prohibit abortion and homosexual rights. They take those POVs for granted as if it's "the natural order", but really it's just the ancient customs of the Hebrews. Why is the world subject to the customs of dead Hebrews?

Anyways, Herc definitely had one for a while. He was so distraught over the boy's death, he left the fellowship of the Argonauts. I think.

oh yeah! i was watching something on Troy possibly being found a little while ago. there were a few other disputable finds as well. i've realized lately that im starting to think at least some of these people werent entirely fictional, though their lives and history could have been altered. The Iliad was written a while after the Trojan War was actually supposed to have taken place, if those facts are correct.

and though i havent read a whole lot about Hercules, i do remember who yer talking about i think, from the Ray Harryhausen production of "Jason and the Argonauts" (which i loved as a kid and i think was a big role in sparking this whole Greek fascination thing.)According to the movie, the guy's name was Hilas (sp?) and he gets flattened by Talos and Hercules leaves the argonauts to look for him. Though the movie never paints them as lovers, more just comrads, though, like we were talking about before, i'm sure they coulda just chosen to leave that detail out of the movie.

Whenever it's the ancient Greeks/Romans, and we're talking about an older dominant man being "comrades" with a younger, subservient man... it's pretty much a given that they're bed buddies but the contemporary West just likes to leave out that detail.

Like Ozone said, that's their culture and they had nothing against it. It's not as if the young men got traumatized or anything.

mlai
Whenever it's the ancient Greeks/Romans, and we're talking about an older dominant man being "comrades" with a younger, subservient man... it's pretty much a given that they're bed buddies but the contemporary West just likes to leave out that detail.

Like Ozone said, that's their culture and they had nothing against it. It's not as if the young men got traumatized or anything.

i wasnt saying i was for or against it. i was just stating the extent of my knowledge on the subject of Hercules having a boyfriend. it doesnt really matter to me or hell, i probably wouldnt of been such a big fan of Achilles in the first place.