Awesome Characters: Elena and Raphael - Guest post by Kat Ellis

Today I have the happy privilege of presenting you with Awesome Characters: Guest Post Edition! My CP Kat Ellis is here to tell you about two awesome characters who I am definitely going to check out and you probably should too!

Check out Kat's blog and Kat on twitter. She's brilliant.

First of all, thanks so much to Bridget for inviting me to write a guest post for the Awesome Characters series.

I’ve chosen two characters from my all-time favourite series: Elena and Raphael from Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series. I also have to say at this point that Nalini Singh is my favourite author, and if you enjoy PNR/UF and haven’t read any of her books, DO.

This is the blurb for ANGEL’S BLOOD, the first in the series, on Amazon:

“Vampire hunter Elena Deveraux knows she's the best - but she doesn't know if she's good enough for this job. Hired by the dangerously beautiful Archangel Raphael, a being so lethal that no mortal wants his attention, only one thing is clear - failure is not an option . . . even if the task she's been set is impossible.

Because this time, it's not a wayward vamp she has to track. It's an archangel gone bad.

The job will put Elena in the midst of a killing spree like no other . . . and pull her to the razor's edge of passion. Even if the hunt doesn't destroy her, succumbing to Raphael's seductive touch just may. Because when archangels play, mortals break . . .”

The story begins with Raphael – the Archangel of New York – hiring Elena to track a rogue angel on a killing spree in his territory. Elena is a Guild Hunter, a tracker with scars in her past and a natural ability to hunt vampires – not angels – and she is at first put to the test by the Archangel to see whether she is up to the job.

The first scenes where Elena and Raphael meet are just electric. She has a healthy fear of the powerful Archangel, and isn’t stupid enough to think she can beat him if she tackles him head-on, so uses her cunning and lots of verbal sparring to get her own way.

Raphael is ruthless, cold, and the sexiest character I have ever read about. Every word he says is deliberate, calculated and meaningful, and it makes it all the more exciting seeing the two main characters clash mentally as well as physically before the sparks flying between them become an absolute inferno.

I won’t spoil the ending to Angel’s Blood, but I will say that throughout the series Elena becomes even stronger as she develops and continues to do battle against various enemies alongside the Archangel. And that’s a key point – they fight together, and Elena holds her own even when in the company of much more powerful beings.

This is the only book I own which has become dog-eared, because I keep recommending it and lending it to friends. I hope you read it and fall in love with Raphael and Elena as much as I did.

Awesome Characters: Heero and Relena

Today's Awesome Characters spotlight shines on Heero Yui and Relena Darlian from the anime series Gundam Wing.

Gundam Wing is, in literary terms, a YA science fiction. It premiered in Japan in 1995. The main characters are all teens who end up with incredibly important roles in a near-Earth space war (roles which are rather implausible for real life teens to have but do we care? No :D This is YA gold.) As usual, there are spoilers ahead.

The setting is Earth in the future. People have built space colonies at the Lagrangian points. There is political friction happening between the colonies and the Alliance--the centralized government on Earth. A group of scientists have constructed gundams, a special kind of "mobile suit" aka giant robot weaponized space suit, which are superior to any possessed by the Alliance, due to the fact that gundanium must be tempered in space. They send five teenagers to Earth each in a gundam, each having no knowledge of the others, and all with the intent to sabotage OZ (the Order of the Zodiac) a group hidden within the Alliance military who plan to stage a coup.

The series opens with Heero's descent to Earth. On the way, he sees a civilian shuttle and unwittingly contemplates killing Relena who is on board with her father, Vice Foreign Minister Darlian. There is a theme toward the beginning of the show that no one who sees a gundam may live to tell about it. Before he has the chance to decide, an Alliance patrol intercepts him. Zechs is aboard the Alliance ship and he and Heero have their first of many battles, which Heero loses even though Zechs is in one of the mook regular mobile suits. Heero falls to Earth and lands in the ocean. He flees his gundam and washes up on shore only to be discovered by none other than Relena, who goes to school nearby and has called him an ambulance. He knocks out the ambulance crew and steals the ambulance, leaving Relena surprised but intrigued about him. They meet again when Heero enrolls at her school as his cover. Relena tries to invite him to her birthday party but he rips up the invitation in front of her. She is distraught and demands to know why with tears in her eyes. He wipes away one of her tears and leans in to tell her that he's going to kill her, then abruptly walks off. Relena finds out more about Heero from Doctor J, the scientist who built Heero's gundam, who rescued her after OZ had her father assassinated. Doctor J says that deep down Heero is actually a kind hearted person, and Relena says that she already knows he is. However, Doctor J also warns her that Heero is single minded about his mission and will do whatever it takes, so she would be better off staying away from him. Relena is not deterred by his words, nor by Heero's death threats, and on multiple occasions she insists to him that she wants to be in on his secret mission. Even when he has a gun pointed at her and one of the other gundam pilots shoots him in the arm, she takes Heero's side and tends to his wound. She may be a little crazy, but I think she's cute. :3 She ends up dancing with him at her birthday party after all, which is attacked by OZ who considers her a loose end after she had witnessed the assassination of her father. Heero, despite his protests that he also considers her a loose end and plans to kill her, saves her from OZ with his gundam. He himself is shocked by this and he runs away.

Relena has some major character development, she goes from being a whiny (though brave) schoolgirl to a major political figure. Part of this comes about after it is revealed that Relena Darlian, daughter to a vice foreign minister, is really Relena Peacecraft, the long lost princess of the Sanc Kingdom, a pacifist fictional European nation which was sacked when she was a child. It is also revealed that Zechs, right hand man to Treize, the leader of OZ, is really Milliardo Peacecraft, her older brother, creating an interesting dynamic between Relena, Zechs, and Heero.

At one point in the series, Relena speaks in front of the Romafeller Foundation, the group that had been backing Treize, the leader of OZ, and she speaks out against OZ. Heero shows up in the wings and is going to assassinate Relena because her death would be more politically useful than her ineffectual speech making. Relena even agrees with him, she spots him with the gun and closes her eyes, accepting, but they are both shocked when the Romafeller people give her a standing ovation. This marks a serious turning point in her political career and Heero sees her differently than he had up until then. Relena also goes from being vengeful (she tries to shoot the woman who assassinated her father) to being a total pacifist (when she takes her role as being leader of the Sanc Kingdom before she has to surrender again) and finally toward the end of the series she renounces total pacifism and takes a more balanced view of working for peace.

Heero is a complex character. He has been trained to act emotionlessly in battle, to care nothing about his enemies. Yet his philosophy in regular life is to live by his emotions. He also seems to have little regard for his own life and takes failure hard. He considers his initial defeat by Zechs a failure and after another gundam pilot helps him escape an Alliance facility they jump but Heero doesn't pull his parachute, he wants to die. However, he suddenly hears Relena call his name and without thinking pulls his parachute, saving his life. Later, when it's a choice between self detonation and handing over his gundam to OZ, he chooses self detonation and is in a coma for a while. He carries the guilt of accidentally killing a little girl and her dog who had befriended him while he was waiting around during the day, casing an OZ facility. He was fighting OZ even before he acquired his gundam and in this case he had planted explosives at the OZ facility. Something went wrong with the explosion and some of the OZ equipment smashed into the adjacent area where the little girl was. During the last arc of the series he is fighting another gundam pilot who had temporarily switched sides, despairing that an end to war is even possible, and Heero demands of him "When does it ever end? How many more times do I have to kill that little girl and her dog? Tell me, Wu fei!" He also shows extreme remorse when OZ tricked him into destroying a shuttle full of Alliance peacemakers who opposed OZ. He went around to all the members of the peacemaker leader's family, handed them a gun, and told them what he had done. Being a family of peacemakers, they all spared him. To cover all of Heero's interesting moments would require explaining a lot more about the other characters and plot than there is room for here, but he has a big impact on the lives of many of the other characters in addition to Relena.

An image toward the end of the series that best sums up the progress in the relationship between Heero and Relena is when Relena is boarding a shuttle on her birthday, Heero sneaks on board and leaves her a birthday card and a teddy bear. Relena spots him out the window, he looks back at her, and she rips up the birthday card, mirroring the time he ripped up her birthday invitation. Another image is when Relena is giving a speech and Heero is again in the wings, this time just watching her speak. At the very end of the show (mini series which happens a year after the end of the original show) Heero breaks into the compound where Marimeia, the supposed daughter of Treize, is holding Relena captive. He pretends to shoot Marimeia and says "I have killed Marimeia Kushrenada, I don't have to kill anymore" and collapses into Relena's arms. Killing Marimeia's power was enough, he spared her life.

Gundam Wing is a very well thought out anime. Heero and Relena are great characters, and not only that, but there is a whole cast of other great characters which I've barely touched on here. I highly recommend this show to any fans of YA science fiction who are interested in anime.

Awesome Characters: Genjo Sanzo

Today I'd like to talk about Genjo Sanzo from the manga/anime Gensoumaden Saiyuki. It is a story based on the classic Chinese tale "Journey to the West" but drastically alters the characters and plot. The "west" mentioned in the title is India. The story has the characters making their way from Sanzo's home temple in China to a location in India where dark forces are trying to resurrect an ox-demon king. Sanzo is actually a title, rather than a name, it's the highest rank of buddhist priest, but his group of fellow travelers call him that like it's his name.

Sanzo isn't what you would expect from a priest, he swears and smokes and is almost always in a bad mood. He has a revolver known as a banishing gun which works significantly better than a regular gun on youkai. The English translation of youkai is often demon, but they're not creatures from hell, they're kind of like evil elves, they're just another race that lives alongside humanity and is generally more powerful than humanity. There was actually peace between most of the youkai and humans until the experiments to resurrect the ox-demon king started. It sent a "minus wave" out that causes youkai to lose their minds and go on murderous rampages. Sanzo's group is constantly battling crazed youkai on their way to India.

Sanzo is a complex character. His motivations are mixed. On the surface, it looks like he's going on the trip to India because he's a priest and the Three Heavenly Aspects ordered him to go, but he's only a priest because his mentor, Koumyou Sanzo, found him as an orphan, raised him, and when Koumyou was dying, he made him the next Sanzo. Sanzo is determined to avenge him and take back the seiten scroll the enemy youkai stole, which was supposed to be passed on to Sanzo along with the maten scroll which he still has and which the enemy wants. He's pretty obsessed with his goal and pretends like he doesn't care about anything or anyone else. But along the way, he does end up saving a lot of people from crazed youkai, and though he won't formally lecture as a priest, he does drive home some philosophical points to people when they need some sense knocked into them.

His fellow travelers is another area where appearances are deceiving. Despite the fact that when the group meets someone new, Sanzo will refer to his three fellow travelers as his servants, the reality is, they are his friends and he cares about them, and they have no obligation to follow him at all. He also respects them because all three of them are badass enough to take care of themselves. In fact, it's pretty common for them to have to rescue him. That's another thing I like about him, he's an aloof badass, but he's not over-powered.

Really, the dynamic between the four main characters is one of the best reasons to watch the show. They joke, they fight amongst themselves, they back each other up, they help each other deal with issues (each of them has a dark past of course) and they kick a lot of ass together.

I've realized writing this that Saiyuki is hard to explain in a few paragraphs, but I hope that was another interesting Awesome Characters post regardless. Sorry it's been like a month. :)

Awesome Characters: The Doctor

I've decided to make Thursdays my Awesome Characters day. Today I'm going to talk about the Doctor from the BBC TV show Doctor Who. Specifically, the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. (You might be thinking "but there are a million people out there who've already talked about the Doctor," and you're probably right, but I'm going to anyways :D ) As usual, Awesome Characters includes spoilers.

The Doctor is the epitome of a complex character. He's a scientist, he's a romantic, he's a hero, he's someone who carries a deep pain that never really goes away. One of the Doctor Who spinoff novels put it well when they described the Doctor as having a Tigger side and an Eeyore side. Add in a righteous fury side and you've got a basic description already.

In the new 2005+ series, the Time Lords have been sealed away in a "time lock" so that their war and all the crazy shit that had come down on their home planet couldn't destroy the rest of the universe (see the last Ten special for details). The Doctor is the one who did this. This gives him a lot of mixed emotions, to say the least. On the one hand, he saved the universe, on the other hand, he essentially destroyed his race. So you might think he'd be Eeyore-Doctor all the time, but he's not, he copes and he moves on to the best of his ability. His profound sadness comes out from time to time and reminds us that he cares so deeply about people.

One of the best attributes of the Doctor, for me, is his ability to see the universe with wonder and joy, even though he has already seen so much of it and already knows so much about it, and has a lot of good reasons to hate everything, he is still able to revel in the beauty of life. It isn't limited to conventional beauty either, he sees a werewolf and thinks "you beauty," he sees a crazy clockwork robot and thinks "you beauty," he's the quintessential joyful nerd. This is his truer Tigger side. He has another Tigger side which is more his version of a misdirection attack on whoever he's dealing with. He acts sort of crazy to distract the person from whatever he's actually doing. This also comes out in his tendency to act like he is in charge of everything which gets people used to taking orders to do what he says.

Righteous fury Doctor is just what you'd expect: he's a hero. He won't put up with aliens endangering the Earth, or cruelty, he doesn't like to kill and he's ready to sacrifice himself to save the day. He's also a nerd hero in that he saves the day with science-y shenanigans instead of combat (most of the time).

Another interesting facet to the Doctor is that he needs people. This is where Nine and Ten are mirror images in a way. Nine is born alone at the end of the war and he becomes happier when he takes on Rose. He dies happy saving her. Ten, on the other hand, is born happy, surrounded by people who care about him. But Ten walks a path of loss and the more alone he becomes the more unbalanced he becomes. He dies unhappy and alone. (Don't worry that's not the end, there's still an Eleventh Doctor after all :) )

The Doctor is so multifaceted that even this description is just the beginning. I can't recommend enough that anyone who wants to write awesome, complex characters, especially in genre fiction, should watch the 2005+ Doctor Who.

Awesome Characters: Naruto and Sasuke

I decided my blog was too boring with just random status updates about how my writing is going, so I'm going to try to implement some other segments to spice it up. One of those segments is Awesome Characters, where I will discuss, well, characters who I think are awesome. :)

Today's characters will be: Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke. (That's surnames first, for those not into Japanese) from the anime Naruto. A google image search will show you plenty of examples of what they look like. Note that the series has a time skip, so there's a kid version and a teen version of both.

I don't know how I could possibly talk about them without including some spoilers (no ending spoilers however--it's not over!), so if you've decided you want to check it out without knowing anything more about it, leave now.

Ok then. Naruto is the main character of the show which is about ninjas. He starts out as a little brat who staves off his loneliness by pranking the village by doing things like painting goofy doodles onto the Mount Rushmore-like carvings that hang above the village. Really, he's just a lonely kid who's not that great in ninja school and for reasons he doesn't understand yet, he's an orphan and no one in the village wants anything to do with him. Even his homeroom teacher initially treats him with coldness. However, the reason for this is because on the day that Naruto was born, the Nine-tailed Fox was unleashed on the village and the people suffered great losses, including Naruto's teacher, who lost his parents that day. The Nine-tailed Fox was sealed up inside of Naruto, so he is what's known as a jinchuriki, a carrier of a tailed beast. This is basically like being a walking weapon of mass destruction, so the villagers are forbidden to talk about it, so they end up just giving Naruto the cold shoulder constantly and he has no idea why.

However, his homeroom teacher sees that Naruto has a good heart and is really just an ordinary kid, and warms to him. This sets Naruto on a happier path, he still deals with feelings of resentment toward the villagers who treated him so badly, but he channels his feelings into a positive goal: he's going to become Hokage (leader of the village) one day, and make all of the villagers recognize him as a great person. Little does he know at first, but his father was actually Hokage, and his parents sacrificed their lives to save him and the village on that fateful day, his mother was the Nine-tails jinchuriki before him, and they sealed the Nine-tails inside of him not as a curse but because they had faith that he'd be able to handle it, and they are right. Throughout the series, Naruto matures from being a brat to a real hero. His personality is so complex and real that sometimes I get this odd feeling like I KNOW him, like he's a real friend of mine somewhere out there. Like, his personality doesn't shift unbelievably far, he continues to be something of an airhead in some ways, but his heart and spirit just grow stronger and he strives for peace in situations where anyone else would not be able to resist taking revenge.

Speaking of revenge: enter Sasuke. Naruto and Sasuke are paired up in a three-man-cell along with a girl named Sakura after they graduate from the ninja school. Sasuke is the opposite of Naruto, he has excellent grades and a cold personality. He was created to be Naruto's foil and rival. Naruto is blond, Sasuke has black hair, Naruto wears orange, Sasuke wears blue. Naruto is energetic and loud, Sasuke is aloof and laconic. There's one thing they have in common: they both lost their parents. The difference is, Sasuke wasn't an infant, he was a child who remembers having a family, and they didn't die defending the village, his brother slaughtered his entire clan and left Sasuke alive, claiming that he "wasn't worth killing" and that Sasuke should "hate him and come and find him if he wants revenge." Sasuke latches onto revenge so hard that it consumes him. Instead of something like Naruto's dream to become Hokage, Sasuke's only intention in his ninja training is to become strong enough to kill his brother.

The thing that makes Sasuke's story so tragic (up until now at least, like I said, the series isn't over, I don't know his ultimate ending) is that he almost finds happiness with his team. The pivotal episode comes when they are confronted with his brother too early, Sasuke's still just a kid, and yet his complete and utter failure when he attacks his brother shatters his happiness. That, combined with his jealousy when he sees Naruto is starting to become stronger than him, convinces him that he'll never achieve his goal if he stays with them, and when another enemy presents him with an opportunity to desert his village and become powerful, he takes it.

Even then, Sasuke isn't completely evil. We see him on team evil, but he doesn't kill his enemies, he just incapacitates them. He claims it's because his brother is the only person he wants to kill. However, he descends into real evil territory after he makes a shocking discovery. His clan had been planning a coup against their village, and his brother was given the choice to slaughter his entire clan (with some help from someone you meet later) for the good of the village and he took it. Peace at any cost. Sasuke is enraged at the village for forcing such a choice onto his brother, and once his fury is redirected at his home village, he loses the mercy he had been holding onto, and starts killing (or at least trying to kill) even people he considered his closest friends.

Meanwhile, Naruto is the opposite. His compassion for Sasuke is absolute, even after Sasuke tries twice to kill Sakura (their third team mate) Naruto is still convinced he's going to save his friend, or at the very least, die with him and be friends with him in the after life, because Naruto so easily could have gone the way Sasuke did if he hadn't had positive influences in his life.

I'm unsure where the author is going with them, and a lot of my feelings still hang in the balance, wondering how he's going to resolve things. (Are they really both going to die at the end??) But the fact that I care so intensely about the outcome just shows how well crafted they both are.

Did you read my little talk about Naruto and Sasuke? Was it interesting? Leave me a comment and I'll write about more awesome characters that I love. :)