Black Dog Blog

SPOILERS FOR: Christmas, Eragon/Eldest by Christopher Paolini, Resident Evil 4, The Sally Lockhart Mysteries by Philip Pullman.

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

Anke, possibly foolishly, gave me the letter S. However, because I'm not feeling contentious enough to follow either my obvious first impulse to mention Satan, or a fleeting idea of mentioning Susan Pevensie because frankly she has no character beyond an Enid Blyton caricature of The Worried One Who Tries To Be Grown Up, so we're safe on the atheist score.

So.

1 Santa. Or, well, as an English gent I do not, of course, use the vulgar Americanism "Santa Claus" (ha ha! Most of my audience alienated. Result. Imagine me sneering as I write this with an ostrich quill pen). Saint Nick, anyway. Father Christmas. Kris Kringle or Joulupukki if you prefer. Anyone reading Terry Pratchett's Hogfather will come away with a nuanced picture of the old winter saint/god/penate/children's character, full of blood and hair and desperation and struggling and darkness. Father Christmas is also an interesting example of how otherwise honest atheists will lie to their children. I doubt it's a conscious attempt to jade the child to promises of supernatural gifts. The very same tradition can backfire in nominally Christian households after the child finds out Santa isn't real and doesn't answer his/her prayers or accept the family's ritual sacrifices, and yet is still expected to believe in Jesus.

Oh, sorry. It appears we're not safe on the atheist score after all.

2 Saphira, the dragon from the Inheritance Trilogy. She is poorly written and not very interesting as a character or as an aspect of draconity. Her little crush on the older dragon was quite cute. The book's Stu-ish aspects ruin any chance she has of becoming interesting, and all in all I'm rooting for Galbatorix, because that name in itself used up Paolini's requisite stroke of genius. I was a little more curious about Saphira's namesake, truth be told. Oh, and we'll not mention the film. I can accept The Lion King's rushed and yet tasteful growing-up sequence. This was not that.

3 Salazar from Resident Evil 4. As castellan to a cult of parasite-worshipping monks (Llllloooorrrdd Sadddlerrr!), his sanity is already questionable. He is also extremely short, dressed as Napoleon, accompanied by two silent tentacled bodyguards and possessed of a dreadful Spanish-esque accent. He turns up in a few scenes to taunt the player character; in one of these you get to turn the tables on him and, if you're quick, throw a knife at his hand, causing him to whimper wonderfully and run off. If only the diary pages you find of his were better written, they would add depth to him. In the end, Salazar makes the classic mistake of every survival horror villain and morphs into a monster too big to leave the room he's in. My fellow Evil Overlord List readers: never, ever do this. Internalise Rule 34 (no, not that one): Be a coward. Stick to cutscenes. As soon as you hand control to P1, you will without fail acquire a repeated, predictable attack pattern, and you will die. Remember he can load the game. You can't.

4 Sally Lockhart from Philip Pullman's series of Victoriana steampulp. Perhaps I'm too jaded for Sally. She's a Victorian heroine who can OMG! shoot as well as a man, and OMG! balance a ledger and play the stock market, and OMG! investigate mysteries. She ticks all the Mary Sue boxes. To be fair, she also has great difficulties and gets OMG! pregnant out of wedlock and suffers realistic consequences and stuff. Her life is certainly interesting and enjoyable to read about, and I like the books, I just don't really give a crap about Sally herself.

5 Simon the Sorcerer. Now, don't get me wrong. I love playing adventure games through the eyes of Guybrush Threepwood, hapless, innocent and friendly pirate. I adore Tex Murphy, the basically good, honest, witty, somewhat thick-headed 21st-century detective who tries to pattern himself after Raymond Chandler's books. But I also really love Simon, the misanthropic, cruel and occasionally downright physics-warping title character of the Simon the Sorcerer games (of which I've played the first two; I was scared off by the 3D title). He's your typical teenager in a lot of ways: he's obsessed with girls, he immediately and consistently abuses his powers, he makes things a lot harder for himself than they need to be because he just can't bring himself to be polite to people, he doesn't give a stuff about what some bearded bloke mumbles about destiny and he does not learn his lesson by the end.