#yeopsmith

Honestly, any of the big bads.(Note that I haven’t started watching season 5 yet so I dunno about the deathsthere.) Simmons, you had it coming. Rather, his death felt so satisfying, sonever mind. Actually tbh most of the deaths are either extremely traumatizingor extremely schadenfreude-like, so…

a character i wish died but didn’t: Why oh why was Samaritanallowed to go online.

hottest looks character: Eh……??? I dunno, probably Shirou? Erii’s pretty hot too, though.

one thing i dislike about my fave character: We’ll go with Rea for this,and…she will throw herself under a bus for her friends every single time. Whichis just agonizing when she’s my precious daughter. (At least the true end isher end, ha.) She can at the same time though be really ambiguous and hard toread, and then you have how she lived in the church her whole life and knowssome weird stuff’s going on, but never got any answers about any of it…grantedwhen they could all kill her that’s another matter, but…this game was slow withsome of the reveals, let me tell you.

one thing i like about my hated character: …………………………………Why are youmaking me say I like something about Rusalka? No. Nooooo. No. No no. She iscompletely not my type (psychotic loli who loves torture and getting off ontorture), and I don’t care what broken backstory she had. Granted, I am gladshe killed her entire village. Some things are even more unforgivable.

a quote or scene that haunts me: There’s a Ren/Rea scene that you ironically can’t get if you’regoing for the true end (such was the case with the guides I used, anyway),where Rea’s just resigning herself to her fate and berating herself for even wantingto hope for something happy and – well that was when she got sent careening tothe top of my favorites list, so. You know.

a death that left me indifferent: Most of them. >_> Hey Imean the Thirteen are all meant to fall against the protagonists eventually, so>_____>

a character i wish died but didn’t: Everyone dies on at least oneroute or another, so haha… Hell, there were times I was surprised that acharacter either a) lasted so long on a route or b) literally died right afterstarting the route. Would’ve been nice if Rusalka died before the start of Rea’strue end, though. *angry grumbling in caps*

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Rea - Precious child that must be protected at all costs. Really though, I have a thing for characters who have hit that pitch black pit of despair - they’ll keep going because they have to, but deep down...you know. It kills me because I want them to find the light somehow and usually they’ve had all these unfair things happen to them through no fault of their own whatsoever, so it’s just...CHILD, PLEASE SURVIVE AND BE HAPPY. Sigh.

In all seriousness though, I never...really...care about the female characters in galge. I don’t know why. I hate the moeblob art (which really makes me uncomfortable in h-games most of all...just, gross, sorry. call me a feminazi all you want I don’t give a shit), and I just...never end up really caring for them? Their character designs, individual storylines, importance to the main plot...pretty much zero interest on my end. So it amazed me that my love of Rea, which I definitely had not started with, just kept climbing the further I got into the game. Also, any character stuck in the god-tier power level universe of Dies Irae without fighting abilities who nevertheless tries to manipulate god-tier individuals who have lived 10s/100s of years longer than them to get a better outcome for themselves and the ones they want to protect always gets kudos, so - good job, tough daughter of mine.

Also she’s OTP with precious son (that scene that most people don’t see in Amantes Amentes where Ren sees Rea and not Rusalka while locked up in the basement, where they tear down each other’s carefully crafted walls that they erected to survive - still my favorite scene of anything ever), which leads to...

Ren - It really helps that Masada’s prose is so good. Ren’s pretty snippy for a VN protag (yeah, I tend to like the male protags in galge rather than the route girls...well, it’s really just the holy trinity of Ren, Shirou, and Caim, though). And his internal thoughts etc are just fantastic and belie how he is an insanely smart individual, what with all of those literary/English references. He’s a perfect determinator - not too unrealistic, but will do everything he can for his loved ones.

And he’s not an honest narrator, especially about his feelings - which I love with VN protags. It also helps with keeping all of the pairings on each route plausible, but yeah. Also...again, child, PLEASE SURVIVE AND BE HAPPY. Triple sigh. (Was the torture scene he had to go through that sent him careening into precious child must protect territory for me, so...fuck you, [you know which character’s name goes here].)

Machina - Another character that suffers a lot and sees no way out, though is still fighting to get to said way out. I always seem to go for the chars who are described as though they look like they’re dead inside (literal term always used: “eyes of a dead fish”), ha ha ha. Ha. Also back when he was war buddies with Ren!clone...I really liked the end of Amantes Amentes, but we all knew that already, right?

Shirou - was one wild ride from start to finish. Started out thinking “what the hell is wrong with this guy he’s a poisonous friend of the highest caliber,” and then things kept happening, and then it was just oh god the degree to which he would sacrifice himself for his best friend.......................alksjdg? aldskjgljsg. Also he’s the most badass normal out there and he doesn’t hate his best friend for actually sort of being the inadvertent tangential cause of that and. I ended up really respecting him a lot at the end. And/or being swayed by his utter badassness.

Erii - We need more female characters like Erii. I don’t just mean ones with “tough” qualities, though how she quite frankly doesn’t take shit from anyone while keeping her own brand of cool snark rolling is definitely awesome. I also like that she doesn’t have to have anything to do romantically with Ren (though she does crack jokes at times). What an amazing concept.

Her relationship with Shirou is also nice - they probably definitely are romantically involved, but their relationship’s just more......something, than that? Not disparaging romantic relationships or anything, but - if you played the game, you know what I’m talking about. When else are you going to find two devil-may-characters willing to put their lives on the line (knowing that at least one of them will lose it, corporeally speaking) the way they did?

Also Kai’s awesome but I erm haven’t actually...read...Verfaulen Segen yet (I got stuck on the post-Marie route story and then dropped them all weep) so I’m going to refrain from commenting on him for now. Maybeeee I should...go back to...those cough. gdi I really can’t stand a few key chapters of Marie’s route and that’s why I’m stuck in both the drama CDs and the translations, grrr

...Also I am amazed that two female characters from a galge even made my list. Which goes to show you how awesome Dies Irae is. (Samiel also needs a mention because she’s fantastic sob - there’s just not enough room on a list of five okay)

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Okay, Type-Moon:

Shirou - What can I say? He’s precious son, and I’m alarmingly like him in certain ways. (If you can’t tell at all, it means you’ve never interacted with me outside of my persona.) He’s utterly selfless, has no real feelings of self worth at all, will sacrifice everything for other people without even really thinking about it, etc etc etc. And, especially in the VNs at least, he’s a really sharp snarker...though he tends to keep it all in his head. C’mon, son.

And then:

Lancer: Always going to rank him high because 1) he has a shit Master yet still adheres to his own principles, and 2) what he heroically did in UBW. Ty for existing, Cu.

Rin: ................mostly for the OTP interactions. I am not going to lie here.

Archer: I mean, yes. I am a fan of snarky cynical snark knight characters with backstories like his. This is no secret. ...But I think there are other snark knight chars that appeal to me way more for various reasons, which is why Shirou will always rank above Archer in my favorites.

Shiki (Kara no Kyoukai and Tsukihime): I...oh god, I don’t really know what to say here. It’s been a while since I watched or read either of these and...I’m juts generally okay with Tsukihime and KnK? The latter was visually amazing and that was about it for me. I don’t know. I’m so sorry. I liked the two but I can’t really go into an essay on them that wouldn’t go any further than “yeah, they’re cool.” 

...I’m so sorry; I’ve really, really soured on Type-Moon (re: Nasu) in the past few years. It’s amazing how much I loved UBW when I first played it at a far younger age, but now...prose sucks even worse than I remember, character designs aren’t particularly all that interesting, plot isn’t as imaginative as I remember any more, and god the shitty things he does to a female character one per work (seriously, one per work) because he’s such a shitty storyteller that he only knows the gross ways to break a female character and drive them to the limit - I’m sort of done with Nasuverse, really.