The character, the nickname, and the character you cannot type

There is a small, specific frustration that shows up every time somebody spends an afternoon with a character they half remember.

You know the name. You know roughly what they look like. You do not know how tall they are next to the other one, and you cannot type the symbol that belongs in their nickname because your keyboard has no idea what a zero-width character is.

Three small references answer those three questions, and they answer them in different ways.

Putting two characters next to each other

Sometimes the question is not "who is this" but "how do these two compare". Heights, powers, what they are good at. That is a table, and a table is the fastest way to settle an argument you have been having in your head for a year.

Kyaneko does that: character comparisons, side by side, for a lot of series. It is at https://kyaneko.com.

What a series is worth

Other times the question is about the series as a whole. Which one is the better story, the better adaptation, the one that held up. That has a habit of turning into an argument with no resolution, because there is no number in it.

AnimeBid ranks anime by a different yardstick than popularity, and it is at https://animebid.com.

The character you cannot type

And sometimes the blocker is embarrassingly simple. The nickname is right there in front of you and you cannot reproduce it, because the character in the middle is invisible.

Glyphs has the invisible spaces, the symbols and the special characters you can copy straight into a game or an app nick, at https://glyphs.cc.

None of this is complicated. It is the usual situation where the answer is one reference away and the reference is hard to find until you know the name of the thing you were looking for.