Well
folks, I am sorry for the boys, but this page was made for us, women that love
manga and anime.
The
Western cartoon and comics world was until very recently dominated by
productions made by and for men. We, girls, had little chance of putting out our
"fan side" and to droll and fall in love for bi-dimensional people.
While boys feasted on characters such as Wonder Woman or the Cat Woman (just to
mention some of them) and could identify themselves with charming Clark Kent or
witty Spiderman we were reduced to just fool sadly around because superheroes
are... well, super! You can not even think of trying and hitting on them or
to droll on them just for fear of that serious demeanor and that
guilt/suffering/duty/etc. complex they carry around (maybe that explains the
success of Spiderman among women, since he is kind of more
"lighthearted".
But
do not get frustrated, girls, our time has come! Shoujo manga and anime
(made for and most times satisfy the most diverse and demanding tastes: in those
works, characters come in several sorts: very young or a bit older, classic or
modern, handsome and refined or rude and displicent, machos and... well, not so
much macho... There is enough for everyone!
Besides
that, even characters of shonen series (made for boys) look more
accessible to women that the usual superheroes (just look at how Bulma and Videl
got Vegeta and Gohan in Dragonball Z...). Even the "bad guys" have
their charm, since the Japanese villain is usually not a totally deranged
creature (as are the archenemies of most superheroes), but someone that has lost
his way in life (see more about that in the page about Good
and Evil) - and what can be most appealing to us, women, than the
mission of saving a lost lamb, specially if he happens to be gorgeous? (Maybe
that is the subliminary though that attracts us to androgynous characters...).
Eye
Candy
Just
as actors in the movies or TV are very often chosen by their looks, in manga and
anime the characters are created and drawn according to the public they are
supposed to reach and the feelings they are supposed to arise. When women are
considered to be a (bigger or smaller) part of the public, character design is
influenced by it. Just as in shonen manga and anime we can find what is
called anime babes (girls with big breasts and scanty clothes that
show around their "exuberance") we also have in the shoujo
series what we call eye candy, that is, beautiful men and boys that are
put there on purpose to make girls sight... and follow the series and buy cards
and calendars with their pictures on them, surf the Net madly for pictures of
them to use as wallpaper for their computers...
Well,
eye candy is a term that can be applied both for male as for female
characters. The important thing is that both the author and the public know that
they were created to be positively irresistible and just too good to be true...
(sigh). But, as I have already said, the boys will have to build their
own eye candy gallery, since this one is dedicated to male characters only!
For
all tastes...
After
some years reading manga and watching anime we notice that there are some
recurrent kinds of male characters (and female ones, too, but I will not speak
of them here! ^_^) that appear in many different series. Thus I decided to put
on this "typology", that is neither complete nor definitive.
The
several kinds were "categorized" according to their look and/or
personality traits, and also whether they usually act as "good guys"
or "bad guys". However, this last classification of kind of fluid,
since many "bad guys" could be considered "good ones" and
there are many "good guys" who actually do not behave so well... And I
personally do not consider all those listed here as eye candy (as, for instance,
is the case of Vegeta), but I know many people think differently and, after all,
it is a matter of taste and there is enough for all.
Well,
let's go to the important thing. As this page would have too many pictures and
would take a lot of time to load, I decided to put here only the categories and
some examples of names of characters that belong to them. Click on the links for
a more detailed description of the categories and to see the won-der-ful
pictures of the guys!
(Note:
As eye candy, many pictures of the "boys" can be found in yaoi
sites (yaoi is a genre of manga/stories about male homosexualism written
and read by women). In my site you will not find any "daring" picture,
but the links to the pages they came from may lead to yaoi sites. Just be
informed of that.)
