There’s a Twitter thread made by somebody where he said that the most iconic cartoon characters of the 2010s were actually from Internet memes, though I might add the rage comics characters since they appeared in the early half of the 2010s and later half of the 2000s. This got me into thinking which sort of fictional characters (in general) and celebrities are more iconic to the general public, the normies among us geeks. I have a relative who didn’t know who Harley Quinn is until recently, so it’s not a stretch for other people to not know who Felicity Smoak is either.
Harley Quinn is a clown-themed villainess while Felicity Smoak is a hacker and computer programmer, I suspect that since most people (including myself at times) don’t regularly follow and consume superhero media especially as time passes either they don’t know them, mistake them for another character (my father did this with Jon Lane Kent, Superman’s son when he came out as bisexual) or pretty much forget about them. While it could be said there are celebrities that also get forgotten with time, except that when it comes to regular exposure you’d have to guess who still makes the headlines when they hit them.
They might be relevant for all the wrong reasons, like whether or not Johnny Depp abused Amber Heard, but they still carry far more weight than whatever Stephen Amell’s up to. More people have watched Johnny Depp’s movies (including Pirates of the Caribbean) than they do with Arrow, so more people know who Depp is than they do with Mr Amell. As for fictional characters, if we were to exempt memetic ones like Pepe, Forever Alone, Virgin and Chad, we’re left with the likes of Dracula, Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. They belong to the upper echelon of iconic fictional characters.
Felicity Smoak’s way too cult to ever achieve Miss Marple’s heights, no amount of piracy will make her anywhere as famous as Marple is. The Winchester brothers of Supernatural are nowhere as iconic as Hercule Poirot and the Tuppence couple are. Most people don’t watch Arrow, let alone on a daily basis and obsessing over it that much and if they did have something to obsess over it would most likely be either a popular celebrity (like say Dua Lipa for instance) or something in general that’s popular with the masses. It could be football for most countries, it could also be any other popular sport.
I still don’t think Felicity Smoak’s anywhere as iconic as say Miss Marple is, well perhaps outside of her fandom and even then the number of Felicity Smoak fans is smaller than the number of Agatha Christie fans. While piracy does lead to greater accessibility, now with the Internet it’s possible to find a pirated copy on the go but when it comes to media that are proven bestsellers, blockbusters and ratings hits there will be more people who know those stories better than they do with something that’s not that popular. Online piracy helps but to an extent since there wouldn’t just be books that lack readily available pirated copies and not just due to copyright laws.
But also because sometimes the books that become bestsellers are also the books that get pirated a lot and that there will be things people prioritise over, it could be personal preference but sometimes it’s got to do with having something important to do. It might be possible to take a break from parenting and having a job, even two jobs, to watch something like Arrow but even then not everybody has the time for Arrow. They don’t the time to stream Arrow or pirate it in any way, even on YouTube they’d watch (or listen to) something else instead if they ever did. So Felicity will never be as iconic as Miss Marple is.
While there are characters who are iconic to some people, only a handful are truly iconic to many more. Sometimes they might not even have a single creator/author and they may even have anonymous authors like any memetic cartoon character around.
fynm 