12 Days of Christmas – Day 9 – “Life After Death” by Notorious B.I.G

2012 was the year of Jojo, in more ways than one. Even before the show got announced, I started putting in the effort to catch up to the ongoing manga. That’s a lot of ground that needs to be covered, and I’m still nowhere near finished the series. I’m up to the beginning of Part 6 at the moment, so I felt I should spend one post talking about a noteworthy moment I read. I would discuss the anime, but I’ll be talking about it in the Anime Awards I’ll be putting up later and this would just be a copy/paste of that. So I chose this moment primarily because it relates to the anime, but at the same time doesn’t.

Your Ideal Anime/Manga Cast

I don’t feel the need to explain exactly how stock characters work, because they’re so omnipresent all throughout fiction. It’s almost impossible to write a character without it falling into quite a few major archetypes. However, despite how familiar many of us are to certain stock characters, we can all name some series in which they work much better than others. Maybe it’s some subtle changes, or maybe just better writing, but for whatever reason some of these characters just manage to work where others might not. So I thought about it, and I decided to find out what kind of characters work the best.

But of course this isn’t the sort of project I can do by myself. I know so many people who have their own favourite characters and their own thoughts on why those characters work. Everyone gets to select whichever archetypes or characters they feel belong in their ideal series and write about how they work. I could mention quite a few myself, but I think it’s best to start off simpler, so I’ll be going by the TvTropes definitions of the Five Man Band and the Big Bad.