Cool characters in fiction aren’t new. They have appeared in detective stories, fantasies, psychological dramas, etc. for a long time and while we remember Sherlock and Moriarty, who seem to have struck the perfect balance, many characters and their “coolness” are quickly overlooked and forgotten. by those who meet them.
Which seems odd given that even a mediocre action-based character can still be pretty entertaining as long as he hits things hard enough (and the audience cares why he’s doing it). So why are smart characters harder to write and make them work well for the audience? Click here to know more about this article.
Chance aside, earlier this week I ran a Twitter poll to find out who my followers thought was the best intelligent anime character. Despite Lelouche gaining an early lead, Light came back in the end and stole the win by the skin of his teeth. Although I will point out that there was a lot of feedback for Senku and then for Yang Wen-Li.
The reason I recently started thinking about this issue again is my recent viewing of Moriarty the Patriot (Yuukoku no Moriarty), where I found Moriarty to be a very well written character that I quite enjoyed, but the anime as a whole suffered due to the efforts made. to make him seem so much smarter than everyone else. The characters Moriarty interacted with and manipulated were sometimes blindingly stupid or, at the very least, incredibly naive.
One character in particular, who had already killed someone, simply took Moriarty’s advice on next steps without thinking anything of it for himself. And while you could argue that the character in question was distraught over the events that had unfolded, a more appropriate reaction might have been to simply stab Moriarty (which would have greatly upset his overall plan).
Similarly, other characters follow the plans seemingly without even considering their own actions and while I’m willing to accept that given the general lack of educational standards of the era, hardly anyone in anime acts with what one would consider an average amount of thought. ; and all so that Moriarty could really stand out and shine with his incredible intellect that seemingly predicted all manner of events, circumstances, and human psychology.
Part of this is probably because, let’s be honest, most perpetrators aren’t super criminal geniuses. While they do have the benefit of pre-planning and controlling all the narrative variables, ultimately the ploys and plans delivered by these great characters were concocted by someone who was probably just hoping they wouldn’t trip over their own logic and tangle their narrative in a knot. .
What I found particularly interesting about Moriarty the Patriot is that he ultimately uses the same device as the Death Note to ensure there is some balance in the cast (although realistically Moriarty was always going to give him literary inspiration). That is to say, both animes feature a character role to ultimately oppose them in order to provide a sense of conflict in the story, and both animes end up having a genuine friendship, or at least respect, forming between the two characters despite their opposing moral positions.
Jennifer Calderon 