Do you prefer realistic or heroic characters?

offmodel said:

I think he was mostly referring to your battle shounen type of hero, but I could be wrong. You're right though, heroes do exist in reality, it's pretty ridiculous to act like there haven't been extraordinary people throughout history.

LunarProxy said:


I never once said they can't be realistic. You just don't often see both in an anime. Just look at the threads. The examples I see are Simon and Batman. I count two so far, and one isn't anime.

TripleSRank said:
Even battle shounen-style heroes that have very few flaws can be realistic character-wise in the right framing, but I don't know of any anime/manga examples. Being good is a lot harder than fiction tends to portray it.

In terms of simple heroic acts, that obviously can be realistic. Police and firefighters could do this, for example.

I don't think I prefer one over the other as is. I'm generally going to prefer the morally good character given an equal amount of depth and/or character development, regardless as to whether they're "realistic" or not. (Again, I don't think characters need a lot of flaws to be considered realistic; their struggles just need to be portrayed appropriately.)

Dragon88 said:
A mixture of both. There are lot of heroic people throughout the World and human history who sometimes got lucky and made it big. You cannot really say a person is heroic and not realistic. To me I like heroic characters with flaws and who grows as the series progress. That is one of the main reason I like mangas because they don't have perfect characters, the characters grow over time and become better and stronger such as Naruto and Luffy as oppose to superheroes like Superman who is already like a perfect person from the beginning.

And you don't have to be average joe's to be a realistic character. There are exceptional people in the World and that is reaistic.

LunarProxy said:
If you're gonna answer, even if it's both, try actually giving some sort of reason why you chose so. 1-2 word answers are pointless and nobody cares. I don't care if you think the poll is stupid, express it with words if you need to post at all.

LunarProxy said:
I guess 'realistic' isn't the best word, but I mean that they're very relatable, make mistakes, and so forth, while the 'heroic' characters tend to achieve the classic Good vs. Evil, and grow stronger after they fall. These heroic characters are quite common in battle shounen.

Of course, the distinction can be blurry, but the two categories are usually kept separate. The most common blur between these is when a round character rises to a challenge, but this can be decided by whether it was for the greater good of many, or a personal issue.

Some things to consider are the bad examples of heroic and realistic characters. Invincible heroes and their plot armor can be annoying or uninteresting, while realistic characters could instead come off as having a lack of personality.

For me, I absolutely love heroic characters as long as it's established and practiced that heroes aren't invincible. However, when realistic characters fall into moral dilemmas, such as in Jin-Roh, it can be extremely interesting in a different way. My vote goes for heroic.

Please give an explanation as to why you had chosen one over the other, as otherwise your answer isn't very interesting. You don't want to be a boring person, do you?