Character Appreciation Thread (Talk about characters you like)

[Supreme Leader Odyssey]

As the title says, this thread is for talking about fictional characters you enjoy and what you like about them, whether they're well written, inspiring, or you just think they're neat. This is the place to show your appreciation. If the character is from a visual medium then you can include a picture of them as well.

(Your characters can be from any media, not just Mario).

 

[Fantasy Tepig]

Twilight Sparkle and Connie!​

These two characters are my personal favorites from the media they originate from: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Mario & Luigi: Brothership.

Both are brave and nice (and super cute too!) and are heroes. I have yet to get you to Featured Status Connie… I promise you'll get there before 2025 ends!​

 

[Xiahou Ba]

Wow a thread I can post in to completely gush about my newfound favorite character and why I, Ray Trace, or BLOF, just on a whim suddenly themed after Xiahou Ba recently, usurping Ray Trace and Baby Luigi as favorite characters right now, this one animeish dude out of many, many, playable characters from Dynasty Warriors, a series you're all familiar with, with a niche but also very passionate fanbase.

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Honestly, my love for Dynasty Warriors dates all the way back when my brother first played the game on the Playstation 2, namely Dynasty Warriors 4. At the time, my sister and I always loved watching him play the game, it looked like a very funny game to bash characters and a bunch of dudes while playing in an Ancient Chinese war setting (sis and I have a Chinese background...we laughed when characters die they can sometimes drop meat buns as healing items!) We weren't very into it at the time, it was just something we loved watching, so that's how we first became familiar with it and how we had known who Cao Cao (Cow Cow lol) or Guan Yu was for quite a bit.

We didn't get into musou games until Hyrule Warriors was released for the Wii U in 2014 and let's just say my sister and I utterly became engrossed in it; the Zelda IP helped us get interested in the game. The gameplay struck all of the right notes for us. It was a pick-up-and play easy to learn hack and slash where you're basically a one-man army against so many guys, and you feel so powerful and all, it was the ultimate stress reliever and ultimately a great way to just have fun playing games. We already kinda play Super Smash Bros. like this but Hyrule Warriors is practically all about that, and we always love games with so many playable characters and a co-op multiplayer aspect to it, so we've sunk so many hours into the game. We still have yet to complete it but we did double dip on the Definitive Edition for the Switch and also bought Age of Calamity.

Fastforward to late November of last year (2024) and my sister started watching videos of it, especially cutscenes with terrible voice acting in it. We were like, we should play a Dynasty Warriors game at some point, we're sure we would love it; we had been contemplating this for a while, but I finally dipped and got Dynasty Warriors 8: Extreme Legends and that changed both of our lives, and I'm not really exaggerating much.

These days, we live apart, and the Mario franchise has practically left a vacuum where we once played and loved their multiplayer content. We couldn't play together online and so much of the recent output of mutliplayer-oriented Mario games have been very disappointing, especially with how Mario Tennis Aces, Mario Golf: Super Rush, and Mario Strikers Battle League turned out. Mario Party had ditched team play since Mario Party 9 (and Partner Party wasn't all that good in Super Mario Party), also leaving a vacuum. Enter Dynasty Warriors 8 and its co-op functionality with a large roster of varied colorful characters and that immediately filled that vacuum in and got ourselves a new hyperfixation on Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the lore and story surrounding it.

Not only was the game fun, but all characters were also extremely compelling and interesting to us, and the game doesn't even have a massive story focus to begin with. We loved their personalities, we loved their story arcs, and we especially loved how there was always some new, unique, interesting background quirk of a character that's not even heavily apparent in the games. We loved the overarching story despite the story focus not being a thing, because we learned that it was based on an actual, historical book, based on actual events, and so we got to read about and learn about all the cool adaptations and variants of the events and characters, what changed, what remained the same, the little nods and history stuff.

So, in the beginning, I did gravitate towards Zhou Yu because he kinda looked like a Chinese strategist Ray Trace, and he had this awesome bo staff that I loved the moveset of, and we first played Wu. He was this very smart strategist and he did cool things like setting fire to Cao Cao's ships in the Battle of Chibi, and he had this very sweet friendship with Sun Ce that I didn't know he had until I read into it (and Sun Ce just so happened to be my twin's choice in the beginning). However, there was another guy that did caught my eye, and my first exposure of him was through watching a Jim Sterling rant video about how terrible Dynasty Warriors 9 was.

When this character was commenting on you, I thought this character was a girl at first, and it was cool that she was like completely covered in armor, and I don't recall a character like this in early Dynasty Warriors games, at least in 4, so it must be a newer character. First impressions of this character was that she was a badass in armor, she would bravely tear up the battlefield and have some badass quotes. If you know Ma Chao, think of it like him, except it's this character. I looked up this character in the Koei Tecmo wiki and found out, yeah it's a dude (because they wouldn't dress their female characters up like this...), thought that character should have been a girl, we need better girls in these games.

Then...I got the opportunity to play as this character in the Jin story in Dynasty Warriors 8 aaaaaaand...

Honestly? It feels like this character was specifically designed to appeal to my tastes. He's a very short character. Just like my Protectors. He's heavily armored with feminine facial features. Absolutely kawaii face, described as a "baby face". Just like Baby Luigi and the Protectors. He has a higher pitched voice, some may describe it as whiny, I find it adorable. Just like Baby Luigi. His personality? Oh god, he's not this great badass that I initially envisioned him to be. He's a massive sweetheart who talks quite casually (many characters would talk very formally, you know like high ranking generals, he'd be like "All right let's go take that area over there I guess." "I refuse to die anywhere other than the battlefield! ....actually I wouldn't mind staying alive either...."). He's not very submissive or a coward but he lacks a lot of self-confidence (the reason he's heavily armored like this is because he's overcompensating his safety, plus he wears a helmet to hide his face, he has no confidence in his looks). I just love the entire juxtaposition of the contrast between a heavily armored guy and inside is a very kind person.

And his weapon? It's a massive rocket spear! I'm someone who loves rockets and cars and stuff like that. My sister KNEW I would love this guy the moment she saw him carrying that thing on the battlefield. He also wields a great sword, also a ridiculously massive weapon, and it looks hilarious juxtaposed against such a small figure. You'd honestly expect a ripped muscular guy to carry that sort of heavy weaponry but no, it's this cute little guy with a kind heart using it!

His story? Also very compelling and interesting too! While he's no Liu Bei or Zhao Yun, he's still very interesting his own right. I wouldn't spoil too much about him here but he's got a lot of stuff going on, lotta crazy stuff happens in the Three Kingdoms Era. On top of it, I love how he has a variety of different incarnation: by the time he became relevant in Romance, it's the final book and he was like, what, 50 years old? There's so much changes between not just him but basically all characters in the many adaptations! It's just so interesting!

His relationship with his dad is a cherry on top. It's easily the most wholesome father-son relationship out of all characters in the game.

And a lot of this is why he's currently my favorite character now.

So yeah a lot of this basically is a massive explanation for why I like this character in this character appreciation thread. Just had to use it as an excuse to rap my mouth off about my relatively new interest who looks like he just came out of nowhere but damn he's captivated me when I thought Ray Trace and the Protectors of my own OCs would be the ultimate-be-all of my favorite characters. Must take a whole bunch to do something like this to me.

 

[DryBonesBandit]

I read this thread's name with "application" and somehow thought it made sense