The Friend Ranking: A Post Mortem
I knew going in that this would be my most ambitious ranking to date. Most of my other rankings thus far have been music, but with this I wanted to do something special, something involving actual research and experience. I was nervous it would start to feel like work and become unfun, but honestly it barely ever felt that way. I had a blast!
Some additional notes about the ranking:
This is meant to be fun!
Please remember that. I have certainly gotten a few details wrong in the writeups. Please do not get bent out of shape over this. (Some of this stuff was pretty hard to find info about, particularly when the nominator didnt give me anything to work with!) Rest assured that
I gave every single character more than a fair shake
, even the ones from series I didnt enjoy. You may disagree with my analysis but I hope you find it at least a little interesting.
The characters in the ranking run the gamut from cultural icons to series without Wikipedia pages. Video games, movies, cartoons and anime, comics, books. Theres a character from a fanfic. Theres a character from a book written by a member of our community. Theres a character from an opera. Theres
Gritty
. All kinds of surprises await you!
As said in the OP,
I would love it if you read a lot of the writeups
. I worked hard to make all of them accessible to everyone. Every writeup has a little introduction to each character; none of these intros have spoilers, so even if you don't want to read the rest of the writeup, you can get a general sense of the character from the intro. I clearly marked when the rest of the writeup has spoilers with a Beware of spoilers label in the introduction. Each intro also states what I did to familiarize myself with each character (read a book, watched several cutscenes, etc.).
Since I really spent a lot of time on each character and I want you all to linger on each one, Im only going to post 1-2 writeups every day. Theres no rush!
Fun aside: I am surely the only person in recorded history who is familiar with all 75 of these characters. Feel free to predict how well your character (or anybody else you happen to know) will do.
Ill post some fun stats on characters once we get further into the ranking let me know if theres anything youre curious about!
Additional Ranking Notes
There were some ties in the Total Scores. Overall I tried to be objective with the ratings instead of going off what I personally would want in a friend, but to break ties I got subjective and just asked myself but who would I really want to spend time with? and ranked the tied characters accordingly.
Finally, I nominated someone myself: Hobbes. I told myself I would only include my own nomination if it didnt place in the top three (its kind of anticlimactic for me to win my own ranking). Thats the only spoiler Ill give:
Hobbes did not place in the top three
.
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Whew, I think thats it. Stay tuned for #75!