Question: What do the Guardian characters remind you of?

[mekare]

Or: how have you been primed via previous characters to fall for them?

For me it definitely was the dynamic between them that made it inevitable to fall in love. It reminds me so strongly of two previous (and current) fandoms:

Batman/Superman
Benton Fraser/Ray

Aka duty,justice,reservedness, loneliness, sacrifice tendencies, quasi-superpowers + sunny nature, quick wit, big open heart, Notice Me behaviour/wheedling

With both parts partly hiding behind masks, personas.

What about you?

Btw, Guo Changcheng reminds me so strongly of Sailor Moon in the first episodes. And Zhao Yunlan's sprawling reminded me strongly of John Sheppard.

Comments

[rheasilvia]

This is a very interesting question! Unfortunately I'm going to have to be rather boring in my answer, since in all honesty, they don't remind me of anyone. It may simply be that I don't generally draw a lot of comparisons between characters cross-canon.

I definitely do see that they have some characteristics that other characters I've loved share. On the whole I still see them as pretty unique, though.

Now I will have to go think about why I am so odd. ;-)

[trobadora]

Actually, I'm with you on that, so if you're odd, we both are!

(They share traits with other characters I love, of course, but they don't remind me of anyone else - they're too much themselves to me.)

[rheasilvia]

They share traits with other characters I love, of course, but they don't remind me of anyone else - they're too much themselves to me.

Yes, that's exactly it. And it's not just in this fandom, either. Characters I love(d) in other fandoms have also been so much themselves to me that I never really felt reminded of other characters. Of course there are similarities, but I never think things like "he is so much like X from Z canon" or "this character seems to be much like Y from Q, so I may like him, too".

On the other hand, I do sometimes think about what characters from one fandom would make of characters from another - how they would react to each other, what they would think, things like that. :-)

[trobadora]

Yes! It's not that they're all so unique, it's just that I don't look at characters and think "oh, they remind me of X" unless it's a really, really blatant parallel. I do sometimes think "oh, X is totally Character Type Y, so I'll probably love them", though.

It's a different way of approaching characters, I suppose.

[mekare]

I definitely do see that they have some characteristics that other characters I've loved share. On the whole I still see them as pretty unique, though.


They certainly are unique! I only meant is as them sharing a lot of characteristics with previous characters. Obviously they have additional ones that make them different.

[rheasilvia]

Yes, absolutely. Even characters who do share a lot of traits with others are unique - or definitely should be, at any rate. ;-) It'd actually be impossible to create a character who didn't share many traits with others!

Still, I think that similarities to other characters are just not something I look for in the way you describe. Regardless of how many traits characters who've caught my eye share with others, they won't actually remind me of anyone.

I've been trying to think of an instance where I've thought "oh hey, character A from B is a lot like character Y from Z", but literally the only cases I can think of have been in CLAMP canon crossovers where the authors re-use characters as alternate universe versions of themselves. :-)