A Whole New World

It's a strange world out there. From fetishes about eyeball licking to the career of Billy Ocean, there's something for everyone. And so it doesn't come as much of a surprise that pretty much any man you care to ask who will be honest about it will admit to fancying a cartoon character at some point. Most lads' first crush is a cartoon character.

I'll be ridiculously honest here and admit that I still kinda fancy some cartoon characters. We've moved on from She-Ra, Princess Of Power and Ariel the Little Mermaid and we're now on Lois Griffin from Family Guy, Hayley from American Dad and Cortana from the Halo games.

Actually, that one is even more disturbing because she's not even human(ish). It's like that episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Ashs To Ashes when a supposedly dead crew member comes back to the ship having been transformed into an alien. And as an alien she's a babe (I think it's something to do with the contact lens they have her wearing) but as the Doctor helps her revert to her human appearance, she gets less and less appealing. There's something about alien babes, which is kinda like fancying cartoon characters because there's an added air of artifice. So, step up Trance from Andromeda, Chiana from Farscape and Illyria off of Angel (stretching the definition of alien, being that she's actually a God, but the principle remains) and that's leaving off those alien babes who are superficially human like Deanna Troi and Seven of Nine and Aeryn Sun.

The question is why?

It's not a question I feel comfortable with answering because I can only speak for myself and it's a can of worms (issues of the fact that they aren't real and therefore pose no actual threat of hurting/abandoning me and my whole obsession with adventures in the male gaze starting with my first crush being She-Ra, therefore every woman will be compared to something that is blatantly unrealistic leading to something approaching a Mother Complex but wearing golden armour and carrying an enchanted sword (Good God, now we're on to phallic symbols, next I'll be talking about how Castle Grayskull, which is the Sorceresses bastion of power is a vagina dentata and that Skeletor (literally a walking bone) is constantly trying to penetrate it) and then we get into whole tracts of psychoanalysis dealing with my reluctance to deal with the real world - I'm a writer for fuck's sake, avoiding reality is something I do on a day by day basis - which is really a subject I should be saving up for my trip to counselling next week). So let's just leave it at that and I'll say that as soon as I hit puberty, I transferred my allegiance to a combination of Kimberly, the Pink Ranger from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All (and then later Sabrina when Melissa Joan Hart became legal and started wearing ridiculously shirt skirts) and Clare Buckfield in 2.4 Children.

Peace out.