Welcome back my fellow degens! Whether you’re here due to curiosity, here to judge, or here to revel I welcome you. Last week we began our descent into madness, today we continue on with #7-5, and let me tell you these are some spicy picks. If any of you are personally familiar with these picks I’ll be surprised as only one of them is from something well known. We got lots of simpin’ to do, so lets not waste any time!
#7- Annie Leonhart from Attack on Titan/Shingeki No Kyojin
Some of you Attack on Titan fans may be surprised that my favorite isn’t Sasha, Hange, Historia or Mikasa. While I will admit that Sasha is a really close 2nd for me, in the end there are a few things that put Annie above her. I remember watching this show as a teen and being so intrigued by Annie. Sasha was a funny and endearing character, but we get to know almost everything there is to know about her from her intro. However every scene we saw Annie in I was curious to learn more and more about her. How did she become such an ass kicker? Why is she so withdrawn? What does she really want out of life? Once we learn about her villainous acts we also start to wonder what she could possibly be gaining from destroying humanity. A little intrigue can go a long way in making me interested in a character, and she was shrouded in it. Also she’s responsible for a scene with this absolute giga-chad, and yes I made this gif personally because I love it so much.
I’m also a fan of the art style for the women in AoT. Outside of Historia they, most of them aren’t the traditional type of beautiful, or maybe that’s just how I view it. Mikasa, Annie and even Freckled Ymir have more masculine features to them, Hange has a somewhat androgynous and lackadaisical way of styling herself. I’m a big fan of the Tomboy style, so naturally Annie is highly appealing. Also… I’m just gonna say it. I find the idea of a woman that could ‘beat my ass’ hot. Can’t fully explain why. Maybe it’s the power dynamic it creates, maybe it has to do with the aesthetics that tend to follow women that are badass, maybe it’s the fact they can protect themselves (and me). Maybe it’s just something weird and kinky. Either way I won’t deny that it really ticks my boxes. I just love me a good badass.
Annie’s expression 90% of the time is lacking in emotion and entirely apathetic, but there are a few times we see her express emotions. During military training we see Annie slacking off on the hand to hand combat training, as she views it as entirely worthless. When Eren and Reiner harass her for slacking off, she looks pissed off and immediately squares up and beats their asses. After that we see her second showing of emotions, however her emotions are only shown in the manga. The anime makes lots of changes that make a large amount of improvements to the show, but one of only two bad changes involves removing this showcase and instead having her angry/hostile when Eren shows interest in learning her fighting style. It does a lot to remove a layer of depth to her character (though even if I didn’t know about this she’d still easily make the list). Maybe I’m weird, but I always like seeing characters that cut themselves off from showing emotions or growing attached to others finally break their act for a moment and give us a glimpse at who they are beneath it all, so I love what these scenes add to Annie.
Like I mentioned earlier, I like the depth to Annie’s character over the course of the series. Whilst Sasha is great she has very little depth to her. She’s a lovable and simplistic character, and that’s not a bad thing. However I like the layers of contradictions, inner strife and complexity we find in Annie. Her upbringing is absolutely abysmal, she’s indoctrinated as a child and beaten by her father to teach her how to fight. Then she undergoes intense military training and is eventually sent as a living weapon into enemy territory all before her 12th birthday. She doesn’t fully buy into the indoctrination of Marley though, she’s just doing the mission because she wants to return home to her father that she loves in spite of the abuse. It’s easy to write her off as a cold hearted and heartless murderer over her actions in the first season, but we see lots of signs of remorse, regret and fragments of a good person inside her. We see early on during the fall of Trost that she cares, even if she would tell herself and others otherwise. She risks her neck to save Connie when he fails to take down a titan indoors (with no 3DM Gear). Later on she shows remorse as she sees the dead bodies of other cadets, and is especially so about Marco’s fate. This in no way, shape or form makes her actions okay, but one of AoT’s strengths is how clearly it shows a world where people aren’t good or evil but simply acting based on the situation they find themselves in. If we had followed Annie and the warriors instead of Eren we would see their acts in a much different light, and that’s the point. We see many of the main characters slaughter people just like the antagonists do, but we don’t think too much about it because we understand why they did it. The last point I want to make is that if this face doesn’t convince you she’s waifu material, then I can’t possibly hope to change your mind.
#6- Alice/Alipheese Fateburn XVI from Monster Girl Quest
If you thought the last entry was spicy for someone to include on their list, boy howdy do I have a surprise for you. Alipheese Fateburn XVI, or as she prefers to go by Alice, is a companion character in the hentai VN/RPG Monster Girl Quest. Yes you read that right, she’s a character from a hentai. One centered around monster girls at that. However don’t let all of that fool you. Monster Girl Quest has an absolutely amazing story with amazing character arcs for all of the main characters we get to know. In fact its plot is so good that is renowned in the hentai/porn community for just how perfectly it fits the “Came for the porn, stayed for the plot” meme/tag. It’s a game where the porn is just a bonus, and that if asked to play with all lewdness removed I would still play without hesitation. Its story is seriously that damn good. However enough about the game and its potential controversies, lets get into the meat (if you know, you know) of what makes Alice so great.
We’ll have to discuss bits of the plot to understand her as a character, so you know the deal; spoilers ahead. The world of MGQ takes place where Monster Girls live and are for the most part substantially stronger than humans. Outside of Heroes blessed by the Goddess, Illias, Monster Girls are easily capable of overwhelming your average human for a vast multitude of reasons depending on the species. Slime enemies are practically impervious to most human weapons, beast type monster girls are physical power houses, Vampires on top of their enhanced physiques are experts in magic, the list goes on. Humans are also their main food group (or at least a certain part of humans are), so they are constantly at odds with them. Strongest of every monster in each generation is the Monster Lord, the one who all monsters fear and respect due to their power. In MGQ you play as the boy Luka, the son of a Hero who journeyed to defeat the Monster Lord in the past. Your goal is to find and defeat the Monster Lord, however it’s for different reasons than most others. You believe in co-existence between humans and monsters, and believe that if you can defeat the Monster Lord then all the monster races will accept co-existence. After all, you’re only around 15 years old (it never fully states Luka’s age), and your naivety leads you to believe co-existence will be easy to achieve. The day you begin your journey, you meet Alice who falls from the sky unconscious. However you don’t try to attack or kill her, and she wakes up and questions you about it since it was the perfect chance to kill a monster. Luka tells her that he didn’t know if she was good or bad and that there’s no way he could just kill someone like that. This intrigues Alice, as he doesn’t view monsters as evil or enemies unlike most other people. She ends up following Luka around as he travels and gets stronger, teaching him how to fight better but not directly interfering in any of his own fights. Luka also initially struggles to fight monsters because he doesn’t want to kill them, so she gives him a ‘special’ blade that seals monsters when he hits them instead.
So understanding all of this, what makes her so great? Well there are several key factors but first and foremost it’s the fact that you spend so much time with her. You spend hours seeing her banter with Luka, getting a read for her personality, likes, dislikes and views. She chides Luka for his naïve ideals initially but she believes in similar goals to him, albeit with a more experienced and less optimistic viewpoint. Over the course of the story an extremely natural, convincing and wholesome romance between Luka and Alice forms. There are also lots of parallels that get established between Luka and Alice over the story. They both find themselves in some ways enslaved by the actions of their parents. Luka’s dad started an extremist group that commits terrorists acts against monsters and perpetuates the hate between the races, and Alice inadvertently undid her mothers sacrifice by defending her. Alice’s mother believed that if a hero killed the Monster Lord that it would go a long way to bringing peace between them and befriended some heroes before telling them to kill her. When Alice walked in on her mother dying at the hands of humans, as hesitant as they were, she flew into a rage and killed them. Only realizing the truth of the situation later, she decided she needed to atone for undoing her mothers sacrifice by replicating it; part of the way she travels with Luka is with the hopes that in the end he would kill her and bring peace. You do end up fighting her at the end of part two, and she takes away Angel Halo from Luka to get him to kill her. However thanks to your time together you convince her of the error of her ways. There is a bad end though where you kill her, and as you loot her treasure chest you find a small ribbon you bought for her inside and it’s an omega gut punch.
She’s also extremely badass, being one of the strongest beings in the story. Obviously she is also an extremely attractive character as well. Even if you aren’t into lamia’s/snake girls, she also takes on a human appearance when you enter cities to blend in that’s quite attractive. Really Alice is simply an extremely compelling character from an extremely engaging story with a rich and rewarding romance plot tied into it. It’s easy to fall in love with her character at the same rate that Luka does throughout the game, and when you end up teaming up to take on a literal goddess gone evil and her plans to wipe out the world it’s a great bonding moment. Even when both of you are de-powered with your backs to the wall you press on together, and it makes the post game scenes with you and her traveling the free world you saved together it feels like a sweet cherry on top of the delicious pie that is MGQ.
#5- Rin Tezuka from Katawa Shoujo
Another character from a Visual Novel, up next is Rin Tezuka. I’ve written about Katawa Shoujo in the past but to briefly summarize it you play as a recently physically impaired individual named Hisao and end up at an academy that specializes in teaching people with disabilities, and you find love in one of five girls. I’ll be honest, this is going to be the hardest entry for me to write in my whole list. Not because I’ll find it hard to discuss her, it’s quite the opposite. It’s difficult for me to write because thinking back on Katawa Shoujo gets me extremely emotional. I won’t spew details, but I played through this game when I myself was recently suffering from a new life-long disability and a lot of messages and arcs in the game really hit me emotionally. I think this game is phenomenal and has an amazing message that everyone should learn; it helps us to see people as who they are rather than as what they are. It’s really simple on paper but difficult in practice, if you see someone who’s blind it’s hard not to let that change or even entirely inform the way you view an individual. Katawa Shoujo is seriously a master class in its writing and its ability to help you realize things about yourself, and I can’t recommend it enough if you haven’t played it.
In the opening chapter you have your introductions to the main characters of the story and they all do a great job of setting up what to expect whilst hinting at something more for the characters. For Emi you quite literally run into her (or rather she runs into you), and Rin’s introduction is absolutely perfect. You’re getting supplies from the art room after school when you stumble across a strange girl eating food using a fork between her toes. The reason is evident, as she has no hands, but there is a long pause of neither party knowing what to do before she just goes back to eating rather casually. Where you hold back on asking her about her food.
Yet that isn’t the strangest part, as talking with her reveals her strange way of talking and overall demeanor. She is blunt, straightforward and treats the whole situation much more casually than Hisao, casually joking and make strange leaps of logic. Juxtaposed by this is Hisao who is scrambling to figure out the right way to approach the strange situations. After they both say their ‘hellos’ she says, “I won’t shake hands with you, but at least we know who we are now,” in a completely deadpan manner. She also comments on his looking ‘normal’ and figures his problem must be internal, thinking out loud what it might be before ending up saying, “The problem must be in your pants!,” and as Hisao reels back and is dumbfounded she exclaims, “So I was right! There’s something wrong with your tackle, isn’t there?” It’s so jarring for him that he blurts out that he has Arrhythmia, something he has struggled to tell anyone else so far. The intro does a great job of getting us used to her strange personality as well as her difficulty communicating ‘normally’ with people, which is a major theme in her route and the cause of most of her and Hisao’s difficulties in it.
Throughout the route with her you get to learn about her life and why she paints the way she does; specializing in abstract pieces. She paints emotions and thoughts she can’t find the words to convey into art in the hopes that others will see them and maybe understand her better. To her despair though no one, not even Hisao, seems capable of fully understanding her or what she is trying to convey. In truth her and Hisao are not all that compatible and constantly have trouble conveying their feelings to one another. It’s a bit heart-breaking seeing her begin to break down after feeling misunderstood for so long. I’m sure all of us have had several situations where no matter how hard we try we can’t explain to others what we’re feeling or others entirely misconstrue what we meant and it ends up causing problems. Troubling for her she has a bit of an ‘artists block’ partway through her preparations for an expose of her art, and this causes more frustrations for her as that was how she attempted to communicate. It leads to her trying crazy ideas in the hopes that they’ll help her, such as ‘destroying’ herself by doing destructive things like smoking and staying up late. Seeing the journey she’s going on greatly endears her to me, and her eventual happy end as she begins to look toward the future always makes me feel great.
Like I stated with Annie, I’m a big fan of the Tomboy look. Rin has a Tomboy appearance but it’s out of necessity more than anything else and really fits her character. She has short hair because she can’t manage long hair with no hands, and she wears a boys uniform because a skirt would be… problematic given all the things she has to do with her feet. I also love her hair and eyes, and even her more ‘plain’ (as described in KS) face I find to be beautiful. Her way of speaking I also love as it manages to be both extremely descriptive yet abstract. She clearly describes strange ideas vividly and it makes all her lines almost feel like a fun puzzle. As strange as it may sound, the fact that Hisao is able to make it work with how incompatible the two are also gives me great hope that if I were in his shoes I’d be a great match for her. I also just can’t help but feel a strong desire to just.. hug her. To let her know that things will be okay, that even if she doesn’t understand even her own feelings that we can learn together.
And… that’s a wrap! This week we had quite an array of choices, and next week we’ll be discussing the next three entries before our honorable mention and final girl gets an article to herself! Until then though I hope I’ve inspired you to think more on what makes a waifu great and that I’ve opened your eyes up to playing/watching any of the media I discussed. I’d love to know some of your favorites! Until then, thanks for reading, and stay healthy!
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