Suspicious Likenesses II

It's been bugging me
I vaguely seem to recognise your face...

- The Exponents, 'Who Loves Who the Most?'

Here are even more people from anime, manga and beyond who strike me as Allenesque in appearance. No paternity suits should be filed as a result of this webpage *^.^* It may very well contain spoilers.

N.B. Candidates who have been suggested but not struck me as sufficiently Allenesque, so you can save your time and not send them in again: Marron Glace from Bakaretsu Hunters, Hotohori from Fushigi Yuugi (even though Allen has worn his hair in a similar ponytail), some Digimon thing with long white hair. (I forget the name.)

There was a picture of Nakago here but it spontaneously combusted. How sad! Then rats ate the ashes. Then the rats got sick and puked them up. Then elephants walked on the rat puke. I don't like Nakago. Nakago - NO! I refuse to include Nakago from Fushigi Yuugi in a list of Allen's lookalikes - it's not that he doesn't look anything like Allen, because he does a little, but that he's a sadistic asshole with a bad layered haircut that would be mocked even by the cast of Jem. (C'mon - admit you remember Jem.) He doesn't deserve to be on any lists except the list of those who'll be first up against the wall, come the revolution. However, just imagine for a moment how differently Fushigi Yuugi would have turned out if poor Yui had been rescued by Allen (or someone like him) - well, she certainly wouldn't have wasted her time falling in love with Tamahome! *** Gourry Gabriev - come on, I couldn't leave Gourry out! He's my other favourite blue-clad, blue-eyed, blond-haired swordsman. Gourry is the endearingly stupid sidekick (the term 'dumb as a box of hammers' comes to mind) of Lina Inverse, the sorceress anti-heroine of the excellent comedy series Slayers. That's her glomping him there. He is adorable. And I can't think of a lot else to say about him right now. C'mon, you want good looks and complexity? Apart from in Allen, I mean? To quote Lina (admittedly when she was possessed by a ghost), 'I love 'em big and dumb.' *** Touga Kiryuu - the first time I unwrapped my Revolutionary Girl Utena box set and saw this guy on the outside (I actually scanned this picture off the box, rather than scamming it off someone else's website), I thought 'Oh. They traced Allen and coloured his hair red. I wish I earned lots of money working hard as an anime character designer.' *^.^* I really, really don't like Touga, so I refuse to say much about him, but I will concede that he is very comely and definitely cast in the Schezar mould. (It may be cracked, but they obviously never broke it.) I will just say that I can never love a man who is cruel to kangaroos. I am a friend to all marsupials, so Touga is no friend of mine. Let us leave it at that. *** Captain Harrison Love - despite my earlier comments about, uh, not including sadistic assholes, I still want to list this villain, played by Matt Letscher, from the excellent swashbuckler movie The Mask of Zorro. He does look like Allen to me (especially in his blue cavalry uniform, and wielding a sword) and real life anime resemblances are too rare to pass up. I would've liked him better if he didn't keep severed heads in water jars in his office, but hey, no-one is perfect. And someone had to have cool fancy sword-fights with the very spunky Antonio Banderas. I got the picture from the Mask of Zorro official webpage, but it appears to be gorn. *** Nelson - specifically, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, whose claims to fame, other than being twins whose band was sort of popular in the early nineties, are being descended from Ricky Nelson (WOO! I love Ricky Nelson! In a battle of the singing Rickies, he would kick Ricky Martin's arse) and looking as much like Allen as you can while still being three-dimensional. At least, they did in the early nineties when this photo was taken. They've had their hair cut since then. Nothing lasts forever. Anyway, my friend Kevin's mum liked Nelson, and my other friend Lizzard has met them, so I figured I'd give them a spot even though they are technically only ex-Allen-lookalikes. Want to visit the Nelson Brothers' official website? Go on then. *** Zechs Merquise - the following is a contribution from one Tamara Evans, because I confess I don't know jack about Zechs. (Except his name sounds like Sex if you pronounce it carelessly.) 'Another Allen lookalike that I was very surprised you overlooked is Zechs Merquise, from the anime Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. Attached is a picture of him. I also found similarites in their personalitites, both of them being dedicated soldiers who are respected superiors among their peers. They both have long, flowing, shiny, drool-worthy blonde hair that glimmers in the sun and you just wish you could braid or touch or wake up next to in the mor- oops, did I get carried away? Anyway... where was I? Oh, yes, personalities. They are both ladykillers, though Allen I'd have to say is definitely more explored with love intersts in Escaflowne then Zechs is in Gundam Wing. But either way, their similarities in appearance are too apparent to ignore!' She adds: 'Oh, and if you could also mention that they are both orphans who lost and then later found their younger sisters, I think that would also help.' Ta, Tamara! In fairness, I should say that a couple of other people had suggested Zechs to me as a lookalike before, but I hadn't yet seen a picture that convinced me. (I don't have access to Gundam Wing, so I have to rely on what people can show me.) Important difference: Allen doesn't go around wearing a stupid-looking helmet that stops me appreciating how cute he is! As for the hairplay, I devoutly agree *^.^* Interesting fact: 'hairplay' is a term coined by Mattel's designers to describe one reason why little girls like to play with the Barbie doll. Do not underestimate the power of hairplay - it shifts serious units. *** Sexton Furnival - I saw Sexton long before I knew about Allen, and it wasn't until I recently re-read the book in which he appears that I noticed the resemblances. That book is Death: the High Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman, a spin-off from his classic Sandman series of graphic novels. Sexton is one of the main characters, a boy in his mid-teens, and as you can see, he looks a lot like Allen did in his mid-teens. Sexton has more in common with the adolescent Allen than his looks; he, too, is a boy whose father let him down (in this case, by running off to be a slimy Hollywood lawyer), and a boy 'in a hurry to die.' In the first pages of the book, we find Sexton writing a suicide note on his computer, in which he seems to be saying his chief motive for ending his life is disillusionment, with a side of ennui. How very Gen X of him. 'I don't want to live in the same world as the World Wrestling Federation and the Home Shopping Network.' But he's so apathetic he can't quite get round to killing himself yet. At their lowest ebb, both Allen and Sexton meet someone who turns things around for them. Allen meets Balgus. Sexton meets... Death. To be more precise, he meets Didi, a human incarnation of the anthropomorphic personification of Death, who spends one day as a mortal every century, to keep her in touch with how it feels to live and, at the end of her day, what it's like to have to die. She manifests as a cute Gothette with an unbelievably perky attitude, given to statements like 'It's no harder to be nice than it is to be creepy. And it's way more fun.' Sexton, initially very unwillingly, becomes entangled in a strange adventure involving Didi, a centuries-old vagrant known as Mad Hettie, an ancient and grody occultist called the Eremite, and a jerk named Theo who calls him 'Sex-bomb.' It's a wild and sometimes terrifying ride, but he emerges from the experience persuaded that life is worth living, if only to see what happens next. The top picture is from the start of the first of the three comic-book issues that make up the story. The bottom is from the end of the third. What's interesting is that Sexton's hair gets progressively more Allenesque as time goes by - that is, the artist started to draw it more Allenesquely, because the story takes place over just a few days, so it doesn't have time to grow that way. The comics came out in 1993, so this seems to be a case of parallel evolution, rather than a direct intertextual influence. Isn't that neat? I think it's neat. *** Back to Suspicious Likenesses On to Suspicious Likenesses III   **Home