Saturday, February 7, 2015

28 Day Bubblegum Crisis Challenge, Day 7: Least Favorite Main Character

Oddly enough, I have no vitriol for my least favorite character. I liken Linna Yamazaki to Rachel Green from Friends: you know very superficial things about her, like her profession (fitness instructor) or that she likes fashion, and she frequently talks about the various relationships she flits through, but is anything really significant really revealed?

Put simply, Linna is boring as shit. Compared to the other characters, there is very little to keep us concerned with her. Priss' overconfidence in her abilities puts her in positions that Sylia would rather avoid, and poor Nene spends most of her time wanting to stay out of firefights but also feeling inadequate as a Knight Saber.
Can you help me find this image's home?
The second episode, "Born to Kill," is supposed to - I think - give some nuance to Linna's character, when her (spoiler alert) friend* Irene gets murdered by a boomer working for Genom, but honestly, I still felt like I knew more about Irene than I did Linna.

I kind of feel like Linna was sort of forgotten by the writers and wish that they had just narrowed the team down to three characters. The dynamic would have been different, sure, but then it would have been that much more difficult to pick my least favorite main character**. The reboot's decision to turn her into the everyman who led us into the story was brilliant. Not only was Linna refreshingly fleshed out - given a backstory and everything - she had a mission: to join the Knight Sabers and fight boomers like a badass. She's heard about the Knight Sabers by reading about them on "the net" (the reboot was made in the late 90s, give it a break) but has no real knowledge behind them. Huh, kind of like her original character description!

Now, I'm sure that there are Linna fan-kids out there somewhere, but for me, she just doesn't have the complexity of Sylia, the punk rock attitude of Priss, or the naive enthusiasm of Nene, so she gets the Least Favorite Character medallion.


* Is Irene her best friend? Some rando that she met in her aerobics class? I have questions that need answers!
** Actually, that's not true. My next choice would have been Nene, since she is cute but kind of annoying in a Valley Girl way. There's also the 80s jargon that she uses - she describes tiny panties as "radical" - that makes me want to smack her.

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