2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose name starts with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.
deepfryerfire gave me a K. Much can be done with a K when you're in Japanese fandoms. 1. Kucheng, Woxin Changdan
-- Gou Jian's long-time companion. Body servant, chamber servant, aide, fixer, man of mystery. Is there along with Ya Yu when Gou Jian gets the official message that his father is sending him into exile, so-- part of personal household/ 'family.' Is there twenty-plus years later when Gou Jian enters Wu's great Hall with his generals and advisors, so-- part of the king's staff. Trouble in Yue? Get the Queen to deal with it. But how do we go about asking the Queen? Get Ku Cheng to ask her. Howcum Ku Cheng has access to the Queen when the chief ministers don't? See 'household' above, presumably. Should be a eunuch. Isn't. High-ranked, evidently, from the terms of address, thus not(?) commoner servant. So who/ what is he?
2. Iijima Kai, 100 Demons
-- Ritsu's uncle who gets into Bad Trouble by ignoring his father Kagyuu's advice. Returns from Bad Trouble to pose problems for his family. Dry-eyed, is what Ima's view of the family is. Long-lost uncle emerges from Papuan jungles where everyone thought him dead in the war 25 years ago, is there glad reunion and rejoicing? No, there's 'how can we get him married off at his age?' Supposedly the one member of the family most like Kagyuu, which explains why they never got along. Am highly ambivalent about this man. Talented in a field where talent = trouble and the only safety is not to exercise your abilities; opportunist operator, always slightly skeevy, but also a lot more human than his chilly nephew. Unlike Kagyuu, who's made to angst in the extreme about his screwups, Kai just gets on with it and deals; he also just keeps on doing whatever caused the screw-up in the first place, leading to desire to clout over the ear 'ole. Lovely piece of characterization, whatever.
3. Keiki, Twelve Kingdoms
--'upright and lacking in Clue.' Memory vague after three years, but raised by Daoist Immortal handmaids, as all kirin are, except IIRC he stayed longer than usual in that rarefied hothouse court-lady atmosphere. Result is to talk and think rather like a court-lady, and not the Sei Shonagon type either, alas. Beautiful and impossible. One would like to loosen him up somehow, but the 12K ethos works against it. There's something indefinably stuffy and constipated and kimoi about that world. The anime designs are so at odds with what one sees the anime designed characters doing. Feels very male 3K in some ways- no yaoi sensibility, no real m/f sensibility either. Sex is for brothels and we have other things to occupy our time. Well, babies grow on trees there. Sex is not a given, and most characters feel asexual to me. Of course, there's the King and kirin of Han, about whom much might be written, and one rather wonders why Ono chose to write as little of them as she did.
4. Kaname Tousen, Bleach
--in the Shounen Jump train wreck that is Bleach, the one character who stood out as an honest man. As far as I got, an honest man who may have made the wrong choices from an excess of virtue or righteousness or mistaken good intentions. Could equally have been because of cold-eyed realism. Since Bleach is indeed a Shounen Jump train wreck (consistency, plausibility, pah! We follow our noses like dogs let loose in a cow pasture, and as
deepfryerfire once said, come back, tails a-wagging, after rolling in the continuity and smearing it all over our coats, expecting to be patted on the head) I've never cared to find out how his creator retro'd him, or whatever.5. Kanzeon Bosatsu, Saiyuki/ Saiyuki Gaiden
--there's a subtle difference between an authorial self-insert and a character who invokes from within the series the functions of the mangaka who creates the series. One is far more
