As a kid I watched a lot of tv, because when no one wanted to hang out with me what else was I going to do? Therefore I found a love for a lot of characters in the shows I watched, and I want to go through some of them and explain how my love of them has changed as I’ve gotten older. Lets start with a series that most people know, Star Wars, but not the movies or the Disney Plus shows (obviously) but it’s one cartoon show made by Cartoon Network, that being Start Wars the Clone Wars: The Animated Series. The show follows the Jedi, mainly Anakin and Obi-Wan, but I’m not going to talk about either of them, yes the show helps develop both of their characters, with Anakin with emotional conflicts that the Jedi claim he should not have, and how the show reinforces Obi-Wans commitment to the order by showing us he was in love and had the chance to run away with his said lover, but chose not to, staying true to the Jedi order. But one of my favorite characters from this show is a person they chose to bring back after 9 years of everyone think him dead, Darth Maul, or just Maul by the time we see him, as a kid I just liked him because his design was cool, his new robot legs were cool and he had a cool voice. But as I have gotten older, I have realized that Maul was a complex character whose life was driven by revenge and abandonment, wanting to kill The Emperor for leaving him for dead and later killing his brother, and hunting down Obi-Wan for cutting him in half by killing Obi-Wans once lover but eventually dying at Obi-Wans hands. Plus, after the release of the final season, and his fight scene with Ashoka on Mandalore, he’s just very cool.
Moving on to a very different character, Marceline from Adventure Time was hands down my favorite character in the whole show, as a kid it was because she was a vampire and a musician, and I also used to think that her character existed to make Princess Bubblegum jealous of her relationship with Finn. But now that I’m older and more educated on things, and after spending around 3-4 months binge watching the whole show during quarantine, I have grown a new love for her character. Now, I like her for her surprisingly complex backstory, which is littered with reoccurring events of abandonment, making her more closed off when we first meet her, and how her relationship with Bubblegum changes over the series, with hints to their ex-romantic relationship changing to a confusing friendship, then coming back around and getting together again. I also still like her because she’s a vampire and a musician, and a lot of her music in the show is very good, if only her songs weren’t so short or always getting cut off, plus vampires are my favorite kind of monster.
I could go on forever about characters I loved as a kid and still love now, Ash from Pokemon, or Soka and Zuko from Avatar The Last Airbender, I could go on forever about this. But as this is already getting too long I’ll leave it off here, for now at least.
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Star Wars The Clone Wars was the literal pinnacle of cartoons at the time, like you said it did so well to flesh out prequel characters. Maul was just so well written compared to the silent sith assassin of the prequels like you said and the Death Watch was awesome. I also completely agree that Marceline’s songs were too good for how short it was, by far one of the best music ever written for a cartoon.
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