Okay everyone. Put down your pens, excercise is done.
(EDIT: reference really honestly not intended while typing, but then I saw it)
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Nobody has mentioned Thorin yet. His singing about gold at the most awkward moments and reluctance to part with the totally useless small golden key should not be forgotten so easily.
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I have still so much to learn about IF. For example: Is there a Tolkien IF? (Because you wrote about Thorin.)
Quite a few. But Iām talking about the very first one, which has legendary status because of its tremendous impact on IF pop culture:
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Prince Quisborne?
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I would recommend buying+reading 50 Years of Text Games. You can catch up on a lot of famous games like The Hobbit without playing them.
-Wade
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Many of the characters from Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxy?
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The thread title is interesting, because a āstarā, even a fictional one, rings a bit different for me than just an iconic character. If a star is what we are looking for, then Iām sorry, itās Stiffy Makane. No contest.
The Grue, Floyd, Perry Simm, Violet ā these are all iconic characters for one reason or another, but Stiffy Makane appeared in multiple, wildly different types of works, over decades, and arguably as different characters, like an actor.
Granted, he may be a āstarā less in the way Chris Hemsworth is a star, and more in the way the guy from Tiger King is a star.
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More of an asteroid than a star, as far as celestial bodies go, but hey ho.
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Ah, Nitocris and her ever-changing backstory.
Iād also love to nominate Helen Tsakis from Best of Three and Emrys Tisserand from Never Gives Up Her Dead.
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Dr Sliss (Rogue of the Multiverse) might be somewhere on the list.
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I see what you did there.
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There are games based on Tolkien stories, several of which are IF games.
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A lot of these characters are cool, but the fact that people need to reach for possibilities, that no strong contenders immediately leap to the front of the line, seems like itās exposing a gap in the medium. Where is the Mario or Pikachu or Samus Aran or Cloud Strife of the IF world?
Stiffy Makane might seriously be the best contender. Bell Park and the Little Match Girl (Ebenezabeth Scrooge) also fit the mold, but they donāt have the same gravitational pull. Primo Varicella, maybe, but heās in a niche within a niche. The Magpie, perhaps.
If more iconic characters were developed, it could help with IF outreach. Not that developing an iconic character is a walk through the parkā¦
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I think that Floyd fills those shoes. But maybe itās because Iām old.
ETA: Black from Jigsaw!
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The obvious barrier to creating iconic IF characters: the most recognisable thing about them is usually their appearance. Mario wears his red overalls, Sonic is a blue hedgehog, Cloud Strife has spiky yellow hair and a huge, awkwardly-shaped sword. How do you create that immediate recognition in a text-only medium?
(Before anyone says that Pikachu is defined by his ability to shoot lightning rather than his appearance, let me get in there and say that if thatās all that mattered then weād see more people confusing him with Emperor Palpatine.)
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Oh noes! Ahab, Dracula, the Creature of Frankenstein and a gazillion other books icons would disagree. Pennywise the dancing clown. Edmond Dantes, Achilles and Hector, Don Quixote would disagree.
(Well maybe Dantes in my mind. But the rest sticks)
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If you asked a hundred people for a description of Dracula, how many of them would give you one informed by Bram Stokerās novel and how many of them would give you one informed by Bela Lugosi or Christopher Leeās movie portrayals?
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Well, thatās fair. But the rest stands, I believe. A character can be iconish even with no appearance. This is a hill I will die on.
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A tradition of self-insert protagonists has probably limited the field. So far as visual representations of characters, there probably isnāt a ton of that in parser games. Though most of my favorite choice characters lack visual representation, too.
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