#ugliest child ever. capable of such evil. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

linkspooky · 5 years

Text

Thanks for the tags @jeanandthedreamofhorses

Rules:

Name your top 10 favorite characters from 10 different fandoms and then tag 10 people.

I’m gonna tag @kenkamishiro @inumaqi @bloodycarnations @kaibutsushidousha @desmondneedshisscalpel @harostar @cirrocumulus-cloud @coromoor @sir-argues-a-lot (list your top 10 buff dudes conspic)

Hello my name is link and my faves for each series can be divided into two strict categories, white haired bastards, and black haired bastards. Blonde is just white haired bastard LITE. Herre are ten of my favorite bastards.

1. Kumagawa Misogi - Medaka Box

My favorite character of all time, Kumagawa Misogi is a fantastic character because he embodies every bad victim stereotype. He’s aggressive, he lashes out, he blames other people for his problems, he has a bad attitude, he’s pessimistic, he’s ugly, he’s mean. He has every single character trait that people traditionally consider bad, and yet underneath it all he’s still a good guy. By playing the bad victim (which is intentional act on his part because Kumagawa is very self aware especially of his own flaws and weaknesses), he makes the point that all victims even the ugliest ones are still human underneath.

Like the reason Kumagawa is a bad person isn’t because he’s selfish, or because he doesn’t care about other people’s pain. He cares. He cares way too much, to the point where his emotions are so deeply ingrained in him and so illogical that he almost always acts on those feelings above everything else. At his heart he’s a person who wants to save others, especially those who are weaker and those who have been abused, but it always manifests in the most negative ways and his good intentions always go wrong.

Yet through all of that we see Kumagawa continues living, and that’s the most important part of his character, even as the worst person ever, even completely useless, even as a disaster for everyone around you, you have to keep living and keep struggling to be better. Kumagawa finds identity in being a loser, and he comes to accept himself the way he is because that’s the only way for him to move forward. Not only that but Kumagawa is clever and genuinely subversive, not only is he capable of outwitting people because he’s so good at bluffs, lies, and he’s just so used to surviving every situation that his brain is stuck in permanent survival mode, but he also subverts the whole ‘weak character has to become stronger to protect the people around them’ trope. Because, Kumagawa is still weak but that never stops him from helping others. He never thinks becoming strong is the solution, and his character development is him leaving the mindset that it would be better if he was the one hurting others rather than being hurt by them.

2. Enoshima Junko - Dangan Ronpa my favorite Junko is not actually her appearance at the end of DR1, or in DR3, or in DR2 as alter ego though all three of those are fanastic and fun to watch. My favorite reading of Junko is how she’s represented in Dangan Ronpa Zero, as this like, girl who has this incredibly overactive brain who literally makes a plan where she lobotomizes herself because the only way to stop herself from getting bored is to erase her own memory so she constantly forgets everything, and even THAT DOESN’T WORK.

I’m not saying Junko is a tragic character in any way, but the fact that she can never escape her own head no matter how desperately she tries is what makes her interesting. Even her obsession with despair fails her in the end, because she was getting too bored of a world that was exactly what she wanted, pure chaos. If you read her that way there’s a lot of interesting subtext with her character and her actions.

The best part about Junko is she’s not what is considered a fictional psychopath in a traditional sense, she actually has the ability to make connections with people and genuinely care about them. However, with Junko that just means you’re going to be worse off then if she did not care about you at all. Junko’s motivations are so simple, she really is just trying to enjoy the life everybody else does, but she can’t because her brain is a supercomputer. And she’s trying to feel something about the world, or create some meaning about the world, some reason to continue living in it and she’s willing to break the world and all her toys to accomplish that.

3. Dazai Osamu - Bungou Stray Dogs No Longer Human, and The Rising Sun two of Dazai’s works are in my top ten favorite books of all time. Bungou Stray Dogs understands the writings of Dazai when they personify him in this character.

What makes Dazai so fantastic a character is that he’s genuinely mentally ill and traumatized, especially from the way he acts he’s been suicidal since he was a teen and a person is not born that way. Yet, at the same time he’s also a bad person. Which is a fantastic bit of nuance. He’s not bad because he’s mentally ill, he’s bad because he runs away from responsibility, he abused Akutagawa as a way of venting his feelings for the port mafia then completely abandoned him, he doesn’t trust people and goes out of his way to manipulate and control his own allies.

Dazai struggles the most with seeing people as people, and part of this is for what I call Junko Reasons when a character is smarter than everybody around them and therefore, can read them to a certain extent that they become predictable and boring and cannot relate to them in any way. Part of this however is also Dazai’s own fear of loss, which makes him want to control everything.

Rather than an adult, he’s more like a child that’s far too smart for his own good. He is smart enough to predict and control situations far in advance, and yet he’s so emotionally vulnerable that just the idea of experiencing loss itself makes him scared to ever be emotionally invested in anybody. And Dazai will spout philosophy all day to make it seem like he’s simply too smart to have friends, but his one sincere friend was just an average person that became his friend because he treated Dazai like a normal human which is what Dazai wants ultimately. The human failure wants to be human and his story is his slow journey to that state.

4. Shigaraki Tomura - My Hero Academia Horrible. Terrible. Baby. Infant. Shigaraki Tomura is a character I have loved since his introduction. Just like Kumagawa he’s a character always violently lashing out at the society around him. Also like Kumagawa, he’s always taking in victims of trauma around him who aren’t ‘acceptable’ or ‘good’ victims and giving them an outlet and genuine friends.

Shigaraki Tomura has scars that reach deep under his skin all the way to his bones. One of the most interesting things about his character is how much of a subversion he is from the way he’s originally presented. All Might reacts to Shigaraki like he’s a psychopathic manchild who does not care about a thing and destroys things for no reason. That is also what All for One raised him to be, someone who exists to be a symbol of destruction and fear and nothing else.

Yet, we eventually learn why he is this way and how little sympathy the hero system has for a victim like Shigaraki. He’s a man-child because he was literally raised in All for One’s basement, only for the purpose of becoming a villain and nothing else. He’s deeply angry at heroes because he knows deep down none of them would save him, he’s a bad victim, and only the good looking victims get saved.

Despite having every reason to turn into a heartless symbol of destruction, Shigaraki is very, obviously, not. He’s trying desperately to be All for One, but he can’t be that person, because Shigaraki cares about people too much. He wants validation, he wants freedom, and he wants the same for the people under his protection and that keeps him human and stops him from turning into the monster he was raised to be.

5. Norman - The Promised Neverland so the exact opposite of a villain who cannot help but be good, we have Norman an undeniably good person who chose to become a villain instead because otherwise he was powerless and that was the only means of accomplishing his high ideals.

Norman is the smartest of the gracefield children, and admired by both Ray and Emma and yet in spite of all of this, his self esteem is incredibly low. He has always put Emma on a pedestal and declared her a good person, and himself the bad person. Due to that he has almost no dreams of his own, and desires almost nothing for himself, putting absolutely everything into making the ideal world that Emma envisioned come true.

Norman regularly denies that he is a human being, a common trend on this list, because to be human is to be fallable and make mistakes. He puts far too much pressure on his shoulders, and that turns sensitive, kindly Norman, into a card carrying manipulator that plays high risks games with people’s lives in order to get the best result. He is at the same time, an angel someone wanting to martyr himself for heavenly ideals, and a devil someone who wants to commit evil so Emma’s hands can stay clean and Norman is so complex because he’s simultaneously both at once.

6. Orihara Izaya - Durarara!! Sometimes you just grow up and become an Izaya stan, and you reflect back and regret every single choice you made in life. Orihara Izaya is interesting not because he’s a card carrying mastermind, but because he pretends to be.

Izaya’s image as someone who can manipulate all of Ikebukuro is something that far outstrips who he is as a person, which is just a very sensitive and lonely child. Izaya is basically too sensitive to love anybody as an individual, or even be an individual himself, so he denies the personhood of all of humanity and instead decides to love humanity. Because accepting everything about humanity and being happy no matter what the result is easier for him than having to deal with individual hardships. He basically wants to become an observer to everybody, and wants to no longer have a body, or be a person, or have to have feelings that aren’t a bemused smirk.

Izaya is however, extremely transparent in his actions to the point where several characters can see through him. It’s interesting to have a mastermind-type character whose actually not that much of a mastermind, but still because everybody sees them as one things generally go their way. Izaya is great at lying, bluffing, and playing speed chess but he never really has the city in his palms as much as he claims.

Another interesting quality about him is how complex he thinks and all these little rules he sets up for himself. Basically his only friend is Shinra because, Shinra is guaranteed never to love Izaya because he already has Celty, and yet at the same time Izaya also gets mad that 1) Shinra will always choose Celty over him and 2) Shinra is too detached to love anyone as a person. Even though, he also envies that detachment because Izaya is too sensitive basically to live. In short Izaya is petty. Petty, petty, petty, petty, petty, and he has to follow his own petty little rules to the letter.

7. Takizawa Seidou - Tokyo Ghoul: Re he starts as a lovable, but repressed bastard who has all this resentment for his life, and the people around them, and constantly blames them and takes it out on them. Overall though, he’s someone you can see turning into a better person if he just grew up a little.

Then instead of getting better, he gets way worse and hits absolute rock bottom. All of the ugly emotions that Seidou was repressing come to the surface and he turns into a monster who makes other people suffer to take out his long held resentments about the world. Not only that but all of the flaws he shows as a ghoul were there to begin with, he always had an inferiority complex, he always resented others, he always lashed out, it was just they were brought to the surface instead of being repressed.

Seidou however after hitting rock bottom gains awareness, and also the realization that even after he’s crossed the point of no return a long time ago, he can still continue to live and do improve himself. Not only that but it’s his resposnbility to improve himself for the sake of the others around him.

One of my favorite parts about his character is he used to be an example of how great Ishida was at not playing Good Victim Bad Victim because Seidou is introduced to us as this monster who went insane because he was ‘weaker’ than Amon who stayed righteous despite being ghoulified. Until we learn that actually, Seidou went insane because he took a chainsaw to the face, and Amon was just saved by other people and never endured the same, and therefore never even attempted to come to terms with himself as a ghoul either.

One of my reasons for liking bastards is because they are all objectively terrible, but most of them also have such a deep sense of self understanding so that the ones who have positive arcs, actually feel like they’re very honest about who they are as a person and grow from there. They just genuinely accept who they are and live as who they are not in denial about anything. Rather than following a narrative blindly laid out for them they break free and create their own.

8. Kiryu Yoshiya - The World Ends With You If there is a death game for some reason I always end up liking the mastermind the most. Kiryu Joshua is this child, who is just, too smart, too creative, too much for the world. When he’s pretending to be human that just turns him into a pretentious tool. When he’s the demigod of Shibuya, that means he might destroy the entire city because the people aren’t growing in the way he wants them too.

Joshua is very unique because he’s basically the closest to what I call a “Junko Enoshima for Hope” he places people in terrible death game like circumstances, and shows little empathy at all for the ones who lose, but at the same time his intention is to give a second chance for people who have died, and also to steer people in the right direction.

In a meta sense Joshua will basically force you to have character development. The fact that he sees himself as the author in other people’s stories means he has to control everything. It’s a unique character trait to have a god complex when you are a literal god.

Despite his good intentions, he’s also very flawed especially in the way he treats people around him, even the ones he likes like Neku and Sanae. He enjoys pushing their buttons, and pushing them to their limits far too much, and makes attempts to control them like any other piece on the board. Joshua is also, suicidally depressed and a lot of his musings about the world in general are some of the most tragic but insightful thoughts I’ve ever read. The fact that Joshua changes his mind at the end, is basically just as impactful as watching someone give life another chance when they wanted to die, because for Joshua, Shibuya is his life.

9. Jack Vessalius - Pandora Hearts it’s another mastermind yay. The fun thing about Jack is unlike most of these characters who are like, halfway broken, Jack is just this extremely broken person whose far beyond the point of no return. Not only that but he’s not interested in living as a person anymore anyway, even if he were given the chance to come back.

Jack has worn masks his entire life, to the point where it’s made him an incredibly selfish person who is never genuine in any situation. A child who has told lies all of his life. At the same time Jack is not the one who got himself started on this path, he’s a victim to the cruel and uncaring ways of the nobility, as a bastard being raised with his mother destroying any sense of identity he had by only seeing his father in him. Jack is in a way for them, a reckoning.

Except Jack does not care about any of that, because his entire goal is to go to extremes, and make the most convoluted plan in history, because he wants to find a reason for himself to keep living. When the person he was using as a reason to live dies, he decides to destroy the world for basically no reason at all, because the act of trying to destroy the world gives him something to do and a reason to keep on living.

Jack needs to find identity in something, otherwise he’s entirely empty on the inside and he’s exactly the tool the nobility raised him to be. Which is why he ends up doing all of these things for basically no reason, because that is his reason. He wants to feel things like a person. He wants to desire things like a person. He wants to know who he is, and what he wants. And yet, he’s also so terribly afraid of being a person that he does not let anybody get close to being able to understand him.

In the end one person accepting Jack as a person in spite of all of his lies, and saying they were happy to meet him is enough for Jack to give up all of his plans and instead offer his body up to others.

10. Accelerator - A Certain Magical Index Accelerator is such a fave for me that I will literally go out of my way to read a series that I’m not even a fan of because Accelerator is in it.

What I like about accelerator is he is pretty much past the point of no return, and he knows he’s never going to be forgiven for what he’s done and yet that doesn’t stop him. He’s not doing this for atonement. He killed 10,000 sisters and he’s going to save the other 10,000 that are remaining. And he knows he should have done that from the start, but it’s too late to take back a single thing he did.

Accelerator is just this fantastically messy character. He plays the villain, but secretly nobody desires more for heroes and justice to exist in this world than Accelerator himself. We see him finally motivated to help others, because even if he’s a bastard, and will always be a bad person marked for what he’s done, that’s no excuse not to do something when somebody innocent needs help in front of you.

He’s also, genuinely traumatized, and also genuinely disabled. He goes from this untouachable character to like, someone who is very desperate, with a very fragile sense of ego whose constantly reliving his trauma and having flashbacks in the middle of fights. Accelerator is so genuinely plagued with guilt for what he’s done it almost destroys him several times. And he’s never going to stop feeling that way. He’s never going to stop being broken. And still he fights.

11. Jacopo Bearzatti - House in Fata Morgana I know this is cheating but sssh, I wanted to talk about Jacopo. He’s the best bastard on this list because he’s not even a bastard.

Jacopo is someone who breaks himself into fragments because he’s not good enough. He’s always born in an incredibly low position in life, and is always trying to make something worthwhile of himself. He views himself as a person lower than dirt, whose only good quality is how hard he can work. One of them is going to break, either the world, or Jacopo himself.

Jacopo’s heart is either made of stone or glass and it’s impossible to tell from an outsider’s perspective, because he’s able to commit himself to doing incredibly heartless things, but at the same time Jacopo is far too kind and emotional and it’s something that destroys him over and over again. Jacopo is someone who always takes far too much responsibility, which means he will forgive other people who have betrayed him, see the humanity in his friends when they turn knives against him, but because of that he ends up being hurt over and over again. Jacopo kills his own heart not because he’s unkind, but because he’s too kind and empathic, and it’s something that will literally get him killed unchecked.

However, the amount of responsibility that Jacopo takes is ultimately what turns his character from a tragic downfall to a redeeming one, because reincarnation Jacopo is willing to take responsibility for two lifetimes worth of mistakes that were not even his. Ultimately Jacopo does genuinely want to do right by the people around him, which means if they do not want him he would force himself to let go because it’s not just about his atonement but the victim’s feelings as well, but if they wanted him he would spend the rest of his life working for the sake of both of them. Jacopo’s realization at the end of this story, because I want to see it too. Is one of the most touching things I’ve read in all of literature.

Honorable Mentions: Reiner - Attack on Titan, Akechi Goro - Persona Five, Subaru Natsuki - Re: Zero, Emiya Shirou - Fate Stay Night, Kaworu Nagisa - Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ryoji Mochizuki - Persona 3, ii-chan -Zaregoto, Squall Leonhar - (FF8)

#spooky speaks #kumagawa misogi #enoshima junko #osamu dazai #takizawa seidou #shigaraki tomura #orihara izaya #norman tpn #accelerator #jack vessalius #joshua kiryu #top ten list

79 notes · View notes