Suspicious Likenesses III

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.)

I find this very disturbing. I've said before that I thought Axl Rose was trying to look like Allen (at least, aiming for a style similar to Allen's, since he couldn't have heard of the character yet) in the wedding scenes of the 'Cold November Rain' video. The official Nobuteru Yuuki fanbook accompanying the Escaflowne movie, which features development sketches of all the character designs, furnishes us with this evidence that... Allen tried to look like Axl. The headscarf. Oh God. Nob' even took this idea to the extent of making a colour sketch. This is a very bad thing. Now I am stuck with the mental image of Allen wearing a kilt and singing 'Live and Let Die.' That's not something I can easily handle. I reproach Nob' for doing this. But at least he came to his senses before the cameras rolled. Also, movie Dryden was nearly blond. You heard me. *^.^; Spooky pictures courtesy of Webmistress Lizzard. *** Mmmmm... donuts. Dude! It's Amano-sempai! Actually, it's Andrea Casiraghi, eldest son of Princess Caroline of Monaco and the late Stefano Casiraghi, but isn't this one of the most extraordinary real-life resemblances to an anime character that you've ever seen? Seventeen-year-old (as of 2001) Andrea isn't a sprinter, but he is a long distance runner and plays soccer. On the downside, he smokes and has been known to go to discos with his aunt Stephanie, the woman who defines Eurotrash. But maybe the right girl could break him of all that *^.^* Andrea clearly has his Amano impression *down*, and needs only a few feet of hair, some lemon juice and some sunshine to be the perfect Allen clone. If you want to bag a cute European prince but despair of getting anywhere near William or Harry, go for this one. You'll have to beat Yukari to it, though. You'll just have to ask yourself, do you really want to hook up with a boy whose family has been under a witch's curse since the late thirteenth century, whose aunt has eloped with a circus elephant trainer, and who plays African drum music in his spare time? *** This one comes from one Beidy Yin, who writes, 'Their personalities are totally differant, but I think Eledore Massis from Gundam 08th MS Team could *totally* be Allen if he grew his hair about three feet. ^_^ I mean, they even have the same 3-inch lift! Eledore is the smart-ass Hover Truck operater for the 08th Mobile Suit team. He's the comic relief who knows he's the comic relief...*grins, remembering her favorite quote* "The Commander's got the least experience, which makes him the most expendable." He's a slack-off who thinks that his real calling is in the music industry...' Like Nelson? *^.^* Thanks, Beidy! He is indeed Allenesque! *** Our latest addition comes from Haunted Junction, the show that lends new meaning to the term 'school spirit.' This little slice of heaven is Red Mantle, one of the many ghosts infesting Saito High. He's a sort of male counterpart to Toilet Hanako, a seductive schoolgirl spook who haunts - you guessed it, a toilet. (It will be observed that Saito High has a higher, or at least sexier, class of toilet ghost than Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.) Red Mantle's speciality is making the ladies' hearts flutter (reputedly, he can put an 80-year-old grandmother in a fever for three days), and it tends to be in this capacity that he is summoned by the leader of the Holy Student Council when there's trouble in the school. When they were invaded by a gaggle of familiar-looking sailor-suited heroines out of a comic book come to life, Red Mantle was deployed to distract them while the school chairman tied them up - wearing a top hat, which he objected to, and no wonder! He could get hat hair! He then held them captive by holding an auction of his cast-off socks. Heck, Allen could do that! (Although I would wait to bid on the underwear.) His other role is to change scenes by whisking across the screen with a cheery 'Red Mantle Wipe!' He has the same voice actor as Sailor Moon SuperS's Tiger's Eye, another favourite preposterous cutie of mine. The only woman immune to his charms is the student council's Asahina Mutsuki, owing to her unstoppable Shouta Complex. Being more than 12 years of age, he's too old for her. Keep her away from Chid at all costs. Why does he wear the mask? If he took it off everyone who laid eyes on him would fall desperately in love with him. (Even Asahina.) Also, it gives him a headache. *** I would like to apologise to the several well-meaning people who proposed Sephiroth to me as a lookalike, only to be pooh-poohed. Then the biggest Allen fangirl I know stumbled across him in a yaoi doujinshi and she was like 'Are you on crack? He's Allenlicious!' So here's Sephy. He's a villainous chap from the outlandishly popular video game Final Fantasy VII. According to my correspondents, he's a sort of anti-Allen, who runs girls through with a longsword instead of rescuing them and causing them to develop big gooey crushes on him. I know like zilch about him myself as I've only really seen him in yaoi doujinshi, not being a video game fan. Being a pervert, though *^.^* Anyway, Sephy's hot, ice-cream's not, that's all you need to know. *** Here is Legolas, as played by Orlando Bloom in The Fellowship of the Ring, a rather good movie from New Zealand. He's an elf. To apocryphally quote C.S. Lewis while reading the manuscript of Lord of the Rings, 'Not another f---ing elf!' While not a Tolkien fan, I quite enjoyed this movie and certainly enjoyed watching Orlando run around looking like Allen with his hair in hippychick braids doing engagingly lethal things with a bow and arrows. I'm an archer myself so I always cheer for 'em in the movies. Legolas has no memorable lines in the movie at all, in contrast to his opposite number Gimli, who gets the immortal speech 'No-one tosses a dwarf!' Later on in The Return of the King he got to say 'A diversion!' and made me laugh. It should be noted that while Legolas is an Allenalike, Orlando Bloom in his civvies is not - his hair is really brown and curly/wavy. *** Ah, it's Allen with glasses, a sneer and a crucifix, right? Nope. It is, however, a knight - but a female one. Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing, great-granddaughter of Dr Abraham van Hellsing, the funny little Dutchman who kicked vampire arse in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, is a character from the anime Hellsing and was recommended to me by Miss Utena. Integra leads a modern day paramilitary organisation founded by her ancestor to do something about the vampire problem we've all been noticing in England. She belongs to the Royal Order of Religious Knights, which I guess could be a brother organisation to the Knights of Heaven, and is a very tough cookie. She dresses in men's suits, finds happiness in a good cigar, and has a difficult relationship with Hellsing's secret weapon, the super-vampire Alucard. (You may very well notice what that is backwards.) I find it very interesting that Integra is an androgynous character, not just because, as Miss Utena remarked, 'When I first saw Hellsing, it took me three episodes to get used to the fact that Integra was female. Escaflowne had taught me that people who look like Allen are men,' but because in the original novel, Dr van Hellsing praises Mina Harker for having the sensibilities of a woman but a mind trained like a man's - kind of an unusual thing to find in a Victorian novel. It is this quality that makes Mina effective as part of the Scooby Gang led by the good doctor - indeed, the only reason that she falls victim to Dracula is that he underestimates her ability to cope with the wiggy and makes her stay at home in bed while he and his boyz investigate Dracula's hideout at Carfax. Asleep and alone, Mina is easy prey - her emotional vulnerability, if she'd gone on the snoop mission, would actually have been less than her physical vulnerability when underestimated just because she's a girl. Not having seen Hellsing yet, I can't say if these facts might have influenced Integra to become the mannish woman she is, but having read Dracula recently and avidly I find it fun to think about *^.^* Integra also gets Plausibility Points for being a serious Christian. I've always thought it's kind of stupid how Buffy the Vampire Slayer dances around the fact that crosses and other Christian paraphernalia are bane to vampires, without addressing the idea of where their power comes from. I'm not saying the anti-vampire mission is solely a Christian one (I believe people of every religion, or none at all, have a responsibility to combat the forces of bloodsucking evil, and I say that as a Wiccan), or that Buffy needs to be a Christian to be effective as the Slayer - it just seems daft that they can have Willow doing a deal with Osiris to bring Buffy back from the dead, implying that the Ancient Egyptian pantheon is real, and Angel interfacing with apparently non-religiously-affiliated Powers That Be, and they wave all these crosses about without anyone ever saying the name 'Jesus.' Without the association of Jesus Christ, a crucifix is just an instrument of execution. The Romans crucified an awful lot of people who didn't start their own religions. You might as well hold up a model of a gallows or an electric chair, and I've never heard of those being vampire-repellent. With that said, if you've got, as Buffy has, tangible proof that Jesus is real and his divine mojo is what makes Spike and Angel go ow!, shouldn't you give him some kind of credit? Hey, this has got me wondering: the stylised fish picture is an alternative symbol for Christianity. Can you ward off a vampire with a fish bumper sticker? And is it invalidated if it's got 'Darwin' written inside it, and little legs? Oh dear. I've gotten woefully sidetracked, haven't I? Anyway, there's a spiffy Hellsing shrine you can visit if you're curious: Hellsing Headquarters. *** All the ads will tell you that new anime series Heat Guy J is the work of 'the team who brought you Escaflowne: the Movie.' And it becomes evident when you look at the art of the series that Nobuteru Yuuki is re-using the style developed for that movie, albeit in a more straightforwardly futuristic, SF rather than fantasy setting. Fair enough; when you find a style you enjoy drawing in you want to use it for more than just one project. But he didn't just recycle a style... he parted Allen's hair on the side, gave him glasses and a business suit, and sent him onstage to play police bossy person Shun Aurora. Shun's voice, I hear, is also done by Miki Shinichiro. I don't know if he's recycling his Allen voice too, as I haven't seen the series yet. Believe me, I want to. Damn, Allen looks good in a suit that doesn't have puffy sleeves. I am imagining some kind of scenario in which Shun and Integra off Hellsing walk past each other in a department store, each thinks the other is a reflection and there is an elaborate mime-mirror scene before they figure it out. Mutual 'thinks' bubble: 'I don't know if that's a boy or a girl, but it's kind of hot.' At the time of writing, with HGJ a new release, it is blimmin' difficult to find useful character pictures (or any insightful character commentary) online. The only non-commercial sites I can find about it are in Japanese and the Japanese don't seem to be as fond of image galleries as Occidental otaku. But I managed to find these images of Shun-chan (I revel in calling people -chan inappropriately) at Heat-Guy.com. Incidentally, you could get the impression from promotional art that J is the spunky-looking blond kid who strikes me as pretty much what Prince Chid might look like if he survives puberty. No, that is Shun's kid brother Daisuke, and despite his very youthful appearance he's a full-grown officer of the law. (And sometimes has to shave every second day instead of every third!) Daisuke's partner (in the professional, police sense of the word) is J - the guy who looks like somehow Balgus Ganesha and Jet Black had a kid. I suspect Nob' of having access to some kind of Anime Genome and doing naughty things with it. *** Oh dear. It is Allen of Borg. Well, shoulda known he couldn't stand up to that foxy slimy Queen for long. But did she have to tie a doily round his neck? She didn't do that to Data. Well, really it's Maximilian Pegasus from Yu-Gi-Oh!, yet another anime based on a card-collecting game but not as cute as Pokémon so I don't care, do you hear me, I don't care. Pegasus is the shadowy inventor of the monster-duelling card game of which everyone is enamoured. Ancient Egypt, yada yada, apparently a perfect gentleman, bla bla, ocular implant is called the Millennium Eye - hang on, isn't that the big Ferris wheel in London? I learned about him purely by chance, because the kid sitting next to me in an internet café loaded up a Yu-Gi-Oh! page and I was like 'Al-Len-Oh!' at one of the images, which leapt out in my peripheral vision. But I contained myself and didn't frighten the kid. It is absurdly hard to find a decent picture of Pegasus (he's not as cute as Chibi-Usa's Pegasus, is he?) but I dug up this one at Yugioh-Extreme. I don't get Yu-Gi-Oh!. This is how I know I'm getting old. *** Back to Suspicious Likenesses   **Home