I Heart Characters! #13: A Unique Kickass Character I’m Thankful For

I Heart Characters! is a weekly meme hosted by Dani at Perspective of a Writer to share our love of great characters. Each week, Dani will assign a topic/type of character that we must find examples of in the various media we consume (books, TV shows, movies, comics, podcasts, etc.).

Since I often skip a week, (this time I skipped three — been busy y’all) I mash the character types Dani assigns into one to create a bonus character type that I include at the end of the post. The title of this post indicates the bonus character type I’ll feature at the end. But for now, here are the topics Dani assigned for November so far.

November 1 topic:

A Unique Character

No prompt will ever fit this character because they are so creative, different, or rare!

Liveship Paragon

Liveships in general is the answer because I find them such unique beings. Liveships are sentient ships in Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders epic fantasy trilogy. These ships come alive after a certain number of its captains have died on the ship’s deck. Usually such ships would have a painted figurehead that comes alive — looks and acts like a real person — when the ship becomes fully sentient. I think that’s such a cool concept for a character.

I chose to feature Paragon because he is the most unique among the the liveships in how conflicted and complicated he is because of his past. He was a very interesting character.

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November 8 topic:

A Kickass Who’d Have Your Back 

A character you super admire for their abilities! Share with us when and why you think they’d have your back.

Thor

I just wanted to feature Thor. 🙂

But to answer the prompt, Thor would have my back if he perceived that I needed protecting, like if I were being attacked and he was nearby or something. His badassery increased in Avengers: Infinity War. Before that, I wasn’t too much of a fan. The first Thor movie was okay, the others were meh, liked him in Avengers, and then Infinity War came along and… I think I shed a tear at those moments when he gained some depth.

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November 15 topic:

A Character I’m Thankful for Because…

Did you relate hard? Did they help out a favorite MC? Whatever your reason, we want to know about this character!

Marjorie Agyekum & Soledad

I chose two female characters who I deeply relate to: Marjorie Agyekum from Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Soledad from Angie Cruz’s Soledad. I’ve featured both in a similar question in the Shiver Me Timbers Pirate Book Tag (which I highly recommend you do if you’re looking for a cool book tag).

As I said in that tag post, “both [characters] are immigrants and both experience feelings of displacement, as if they don’t fully belong to the culture/country they were born into or the one they adopted when they immigrated.” That’s how I felt and sometimes still feel since I am an immigrant living in the U.S. I feel as if I’m always and probably will always be in between. I appreciate that I was able to meet these two characters in these novels because they reflect some of my experiences and feelings.

Soledad is a novel about a young Latina woman who returns home to care for her mother who has fallen into a coma. The story is about how Soledad adjusts to this change while trying to learn more about her mother’s past. Homegoing is a historical fiction novel about the descendants of two sisters from West Africa. It’s one of my favorite novels and I highly recommend it.

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Bonus!

Mash-up character type:

A Unique Kickass Character I’m Thankful For

Jane McKeene

Jane is such a badass! 😀 She’s from Justina Ireland’s YA historical fiction, slight horror novel Dread Nation that’s set shortly after the Civil War in the U.S. Basically, minority teens are used to fight ZOMBIES!!! 😀 😀 (I love a zombie story!)

Jane is a student at Miss Preston’s School of Combat in Baltimore, a finishing school that teaches girls to protect high society members from zombies. She’s unique because she’s the protagonist of this story and she’s Black and a smartass and a straight up kickass who gives zero fucks about what the authorities think. She’s intelligent and she doesn’t make unnecessary stupid decisions…not really. I so enjoyed reading about her. Can’t wait for the next book!

Let me know which characters you would choose for these topics.

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