Do you ever wonder how your opinions develop throughout an evolving TV series? Does your taste in characters change throughout the show or does it stay the same? Whether one’s taste differs or stays stagnant throughout the season, it’s interesting to see how a favorite character develops over time.
My sister and I developed a tradition of creating a list of our top ten favorite characters after watching a season of any show. We initially started this with lists of general fictional characters for fun, but we made the tradition more. We assembled our top ten with characters from a specific show during a single season. My Hero Academia was our first project. The goal was to keep us motivated to finish the show while keeping track of who our favorite characters were. This activity has persisted throughout any TV series we watch, both together or on our own time. Typically, the character ranked the highest stays constant and seldom changes, but the remaining personalities are often rearranged based on their likeability. This tradition has succeeded in keeping us more invested in the show and characters. It has also helped us monitor how our taste can change over time.
We use a template to put pictures of the characters. the #1 character goes in the bottom right, so it counts down from 10 to 1 starting in the top left corner. This template also allows us to change things up whenever a season of the show ends. There are times when we alter our lists drastically after watching more episodes and discussing, but a couple of strong characters consistently stay on our lists. One of the few “rules” we employ in crafting our lists is that each spot must go to a named character. Other than that, we can add whoever we want as long as they are part of the current or previous seasons.
The top ten lists and follow-up discussions they inspire allow us to store information about the show in our memory. They promote a deeper look at the content and characters. We ended up introducing this tradition to a couple of friends and formed a Top Ten Club where we now post our lists over Discord. Though my sister and I still discuss shows in person when we are together. A huge plus about creating these lists is the boost of enjoyment they provide when we view these shows. We always have something fun to look forward to even after finishing the season.
Making a list of your top ten favorite characters for a series offers a timeline of the progression of your taste: you get to see the similarities and differences between your preferences at the start of the show, through the middle, and at the end. As the show goes on, the characters will grow and change and so may your taste in them. We like to see how our tastes change as time goes on while keeping the characters close to our hearts. Our taste has changed many times. I adore making lists of my top ten favorite characters because it generates so many good memories of time spent with my sister.
I couldn’t think of watching a show without making the little lists and talking about them. In addition to keeping track of what we have seen and who our favorite characters are, making the lists have helped me realize patterns in what kind of figure I tend to choose as my favorite characters. In fact, these patterns make it easy for members of The Top Ten Club to guess each other’s favorites before the show has ended. My favorite characters tend to carry a serious-headed persona. They are hardly ever the main character, but there are many other character types that tend to be common. I also like characters that are a little sad as well as the random background characters whose names are known. Every once in a while, we make a least favorite character list, but that is not a regular part of this tradition.
We recently formalized the Top Ten Club with a couple of friends after I introduced the practice to them. It’s interesting to observe how our thought processes change as we think about and discuss these lists. It is a lot more fun to engage in stimulating discourse than to just watch the show for the sake of watching.
It is nice how something seemingly simple and mundane can become such a large part of how I now enjoy media. I can think about a season and remember it from my curated list if I happen to take a break from the show. Making these lists has helped me form a deeper appreciation for my favorite characters. I have also come to appreciate the shows I watch more as a result of the characters within them.
Characters are intrinsically tied to a story and carry the heart of many shows. What would TV series be without the characters that viewers form attachments to? I found a way to appreciate how this aspect of a story can become much greater and how thoughts progress along the way. In a way, these lists are an expression of our opinions. In another, they are a way to show how much we appreciate stories and characters. It solidifies the show-viewing experience into something totally different. We pay even more attention because we are constantly trying to figure out the rankings of our lists later on. Rather than subtract from the experience, this practice adds to it.
