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i created this google spreadsheet to facilitate some hard-hitting extremely mathematical and methodical analysis. ~Y means kind of and counts for a half-point. categories for easier reading:

competent/smart: 87%
loyal: 76%
tormented/whumpy: 74%
take-no-bullshit: 61% (100% F)
tsundereisms: 47%
gay/lesbian: 47%
in love with best friend: 29% (81% M)

basically, this can be extrapolated into:

UNIVERSAL
— competent but tormented/repressed
— deeply loyal to their own detriment
— gay preferred but i come in with an open mind

FEMALE
— no-nonsense no-bullshit normal guy

MALE
— pathetically in love with best friend

i actually had a few characters in my list that i ended up removing, not because i don't like them anymore but more because they're less relevant to me now, either because of later-season writing or my own personal growth... for example matteo from druck is less Poignant to me now that i'm 27 lol but i still love my depressed loser blorbo. then for characters like jackson marchetti and brad bakshi, i still have a lot of love for their early-season writing (s2 for jackson specifically), but both of their shows just ended soooo poorly that i'm kind of over them which is a shame. nevertheless i have adequate examples to make this list with 💗

i've always known that i very deeply like tsuns, especially prickly black-haired tsuns in anime, but it's kind of a specific archetype with other various nuances that i thought deserved deeper exploration. repression is a big theme for me (especially when the character is gay), because i love when someone is psychologically tormented and must grapple with the weight of their own truths that they have no interest in acknowledging until narratively or physically obligated to.

i realize though that this manifests in different ways between my common favorite female characters vs. male characters... it's not that i think only men are allowed to be pathetic, because trinity santos is objectively pathetic, but i feel like a lot of these female characters have more external strife than the male ones who struggle majorly with their self-acceptance. of course max chapman diverges here because that's a key aspect of her narrative, but just generally... while none of these characters are perfect, i like female characters who are somewhat unassuming on the surface but also highly competent and capable of combatting all sorts of bullshit in their lives and are adept at dealing with other people's problems. and according to the numbers are less likely to be pathetic pining fools!!!

in that vein, it's like... vigilante is really less gay and more of an asexual psychopath who thinks having threesomes with his best friend is a bonding opportunity, but he's also basically still in love with and deeply devoted to peacemaker, so that's why he was given those points. edwin/benji/nico are the real Tragic piners, benji especially... what makes benji interesting here compared to a lot of characters is that (which i forgot to mention) i like characters who are morally good on a whole, i like characters whose loyalties relate to a sense of justice and who are usually already on the right side of the equation when it comes to moral quandaries etc. but benji's loyalty in the first book is actually tested wrt the moral inverse. ugh he's really the most tragic little blorbo of them all...

donna is a great example of just like a quietly, understated competent character whom i love sooo much. she and nalini are also the Hot Milfs subset (not on this list but dot from fargo is another fav), and even though their origin shows are highly different you can still say that their brand of torment/whump is obviously not on the same level as like... more fantastical pieces of media, but it's really just a subjective category. they have familial struggles, work issues, are grappling with grief, etc., which is maybe not as extreme as viktor becoming an eldritch horror or whatever but these are all relative to their own respective universes so it still makes sense as far as i'm concerned. i think gregory is the only one whose universe really doesn't have Any Capacity for whump, like obviously abbott has some conflicts but it's still a lighthearted comedy at the end of the day LOL. and adrian is just incapable of experiencing tormented emotions for longer than 5 seconds

obviously speaking of whump, no one has ever suffered more in the history of the universe than spider-man has, which is why tony stark and peter parker are the most popular characters in the Whump tag on ao3. like they didn't invent whump but they basically kind of invented whump. i also put spider-man variations separately as a misc character because i just love... spider-man as a concept/a superhero identity and i always have, especially because the miles morales run was the first marvel comic i ever read in high school, so this includes 616/1610/mcu/spider-verse etc. spider-man is an archetypal favorite character because it is usually embodied by someone smart and competent and inquisitive and thoughtful who is constantly beat down by the world but stops at nothing to make it better despite the hardships they have to face. the quintessential people's hero!!!

ok my thing with albus is that i've actually never read cc and have no intention of doing so, but my consumption of his character has largely been via a quick summary rundown of his canon and then future fanon explorations of scorbus, which unfortunately is like the platonic ideal of a ship to me. and you can't really be like Did you know that they recently-ish condensed cc into one act and removed all the straightbait in it to made scorbus pretty much explicitly queer without sounding facking insane, but like they did do that. and the thing is that jkr was definitely already minimally involved with original cc inception and most likely had nothing to do with the rewrite, but obviously she still benefits greatly from the productions, so like... yeah. of course i do not still consume hp content, but i have an unfortunate lasting awareness that their canon setup is all of my favorite things in one (diametric legacy children who choose each other every single time despite being shunned for it, son of hero resenting his father vs. son of villainesque character having a healthy family dynamic and loving the world deeply and earnestly despite it never loving him back, etc.). albus is the only character where i don't really care whether he's competent because he's more interesting in the sphere of rebellious tsundere whump wherein Not being good at things is actually what drives his character development.

also trinity is really the perfect tsundere and that's why it makes me so sad that people think she's mean because she's sooo loving and kind and speaks with her actions and i think that's what i like in a character, someone who is always showing the ways in which they will sacrifice themselves for others even if it's not appreciated. like an annoying nickname speaks volumes less, TO ME, than trinity taking the hit for samira in front of langdon despite being way less established than her and gaining absolutely nothing for doing it. and she has so much internal conflict that she just holds down until it bursts...

she is less of an ~understated competence~ character than some others on this list, but i think despite her bravado she still operates under a huge amount of earnestness and that's why i like her. LOYAL AND EARNEST. that's what matters.

but more on liking characters who are competent in an understated way... i think kleya is the best example of this. well donna and nalini are too but their narratives have a pretty large motherhood focus that kind of obfuscates this, whereas kleya's main "familial" struggle is through the pseudofather relationship she has with luthen, who is obviously a very complicated and morally grey character. but it's soooo fucking good because luthen is literally symbolically like the palpatine mirror of the rebellion, he's the puppeteer and mastermind behind all the early tactical moves and just the general assemblage of the rebellion as an organized faction, and then it's like well behind HIM is the girl who actually holds him and the network together. like in a way she's even colder, more ruthless, and more committed than he is, but she does so by working within an even more constrained persona than luthen is forced to. it's really about being sooo much bigger than you're assumed to be but also knowing that creating something big means playing a small part and not having scruples about it. i really enjoy the sense of sacrifice of like i just want to be a guy who's part of something and i will make it work / which i think trinity and ads both have.

much to think about...

ok next post will be australia log. i promise. bye