Skip to main content

Favorite Shannara Characters: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXV

So I've been doing a lot of gabbing here about the Shannara books and their relative merits as light adventure fiction.  Thus far, there's been plenty of analysis, but very little geek out of pausing to simply enjoy the books as fun stories.  In that spirit, then, I'm going to take a shot at naming my favorite characters from the first seven books and invite you to do the same.  Who are your favorite Shannara characters?  Here are mine (in chronological order?):

1. Allanon:  Tall, bearded, dresses in black, learned, mysterious past, and packing more firepower than half the star fleet.  For me, at least, he is the most interesting character in the first three books.  The little glimpses we get into his thought, history, and struggles blow everyone else away.  I also enjoy watching him age and change from the angry-young-Gandalf of The Sword of Shannara, to the more grandfatherly and sad figure in The Wishsong of Shannara.  We really get to explore what it means to have the world (or at least the Four Lands) on your shoulders with all the limits of an exalted, yet finite being.

2. Garret Jax: Hardcore.  How can you not like a guy who looks like he just walked out of an Akira Kurosawa film?  I love the mystery that surrounds this wandering duelist and there's some real pathos to his death.  This is a pulp character in the great tradition of Haggard and Burroughs. 

3. Walker Boh: Walker is basically a younger version of Allanon who keeps his angst in different places.  I like Walker.  Sure, he can be whiny, but no more so than most late-twenties-early-thirty-somethings.  At that age there's always going to be tension between who you are and where you're at and who you thought you were supposed to be and where you actually are.  Having Cogline as a mentor also helps.

4. Rimmer Dal: The classic evil genius villain -but also a hard-core fighter in his own right.  I think he was the first of this sort of villain that I came across.  Sure, the Operative in Serenity is more sophisticated and Sauron is more mythopoeic, but I just like Rimmer Dal.  He's a great anti-Allanon. and definitely ups the ante in the world of the Four Lands.

5. Wren Ohmsford: She's the first one of Brooks' "tough girls" to come off as a believable and likable character in her own right.  Wren preserves a sense of adventure and wonder at the fantastic world that Brooks has created without seeming sappy or unduly naive.  Her more level-headed drive, and understanding that even the greatest heroes need to rely on their friends puts her cousin Par to absolute shame. 

Alright, so there we go.  If you have a dog in this fight, feel free to jump in!  I'd love to hear who your own favorite characters are from the first seven books.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
4 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more