Underrepresented

I said before that Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians and the like as well as actual African nationalities are painfully underrepresented in American ACG media until recently, but even then it’s kind of hard naming an Estonian character in either DC or Marvel who’s not a background extra. If because there’s really none at all, and there still isn’t one to this day. Senegalese characters are in short supply in DC and Marvel, but they might as well be similarly nonexistent. The same can be said of Latvians, Georgians (as in those coming from Georgia the country), Lithuanians, Armenians, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Tajiks, Krygyz, Ghanaians, Zimbabweans, Ugandans, Liberians, Angolans, Gabonese, Congolese (and Kinois), Mozambicans, Ivorians, Rwandans and so on.

It’s kind of hard naming any prominent Czech, Hungarian or Slovak DC or Marvel character because there’s really none at all, none to begin with and still none today, like if you want real Czech, Hungarian or Slovak representation you might as well persue and peruse Czech, Hungarian and Slovak media instead. Romanians might as well be vampires and not ordinary people like everybody else, Estonians could easily be mistaken for Russians, and many Americans would think of Georgia as a US state, not a separate country somewhere in the Caucasus. So whatever Georgian mutant that shows up in the X-Men canon will mostly probably come from Atlanta, not somewhere like Tbilisi for instance. Who cares about Moldovans, they might as well be Romanians all along.

Ditto Croatians, Serbians, Bulgarians, Bosnians and Slovenes unless if they appear in Joe Sacco’s comics, and unfortunately Joe Sacco seems to be one of the few US cartoonists who do bother putting Yugoslavs in his comics. It’s even odder still to think that despite DC rebooting its canon every now and then, Slovaks and Latvians have yet to show up there even when it’s now possible to do so, or for another matter making existing characters like Terra and Vixen belong to actual nationalities this time. Terra being a Slovak woman and Vixen a Zimbabwean woman, DC writers could be free to grandfather a Congolese nationality onto Bwana Beast. Marvel’s no different to some extent, yet not a single Marvel writer bothered to retcon both Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver into being Romani Slovenes.

Making Victor von Doom Croatian would be nice but it destroys the illusion of plausible deniability if he actually came from somewhere in Croatia himself, who knows what would happen if somebody like Shuri were to be retconned into being a Bamileke Cameroonian herself. It’s even wilder to think there are practically no Namibians, Botswanans and Nigeriens in Marvel, there is some Botswanan representation in DC but he’s just a bitplayer. Just a character to be saved by Superman and nothing more, Superman being the resident All-American hero at DC Comics. There are really no Botswanan superheroes in either the DC or Marvel canon, not even a recurring Botswanan supporting character like what Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen are to the Superman canon.

Botswanans are cannon fodder to DC and Marvel writers alike if they ever show up at all, Storm is pretty much alone in the entire US comics canon as the best known African character there. One would be hard-pressed to find any Kazakh characters in DC and Marvel, because they’re practically nonexistent there. You’d have to find Armenians in DC and Marvel in vain, even when Armenia’s no longer part of the Soviet Union at this point. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are all part of the European Union now, but there’s not a single Baltic superhero to this day at either DC or Marvel. Not even a Baltic supervillain at that. Supposing if someone made a story involving an Estonian man named Ilmar Tuglas. He doesn’t just generate and manipulate strings, but also emeralds.

He also works as a financial adviser, despite having harbouring pro-socialist sentiments every now and then, come from a family of communists and fur farmers and lives somewhere in Ahja, Estonia, with family somewhere in Saaremaa (an Estonian island). He’s based on Kakyoin Noriaki from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure right down to his fashion sense and personality to a large extent, JJBA being a Japanese comic involving superpowers by the way. Let’s say that his author isn’t from Estonia themselves, and this character shows up in a North American comic or video game, he may not be a Marvel or DC character. But it does speak volumes about how strangely underrepresented Estonians are, despite Estonia being an EU member at this point in time, but I guess US writers could rather pay more mind to America’s longer-standing allies instead.

Estonia might not be that poor either, compared to say Georgia for instance, but it’ll often be overlooked by DC and Marvel. Especially when it comes to having a particularly prominent superhero of its own or more, compared to long-standing US allies like South Korea, to the point where Estonia might essentially serve as cannon fodder to US superheroes instead. Estonia had been thoroughly influenced by Russia before, around the time South Korea was created to contain the spread of socialism throughout the Korean peninsula, Russian influence was already years deep in Estonian culture. South Korea kind of inherited the showbiz culture from America, both K-Pop and K-Rap are evidently derivative of American popular music. It’s not that a showbiz culture is nonexistent in Estonia, but that it would’ve resembled Russia’s own instead.

It’s kind of astonishing to think that Russia was at some point the only other major superpower in the Cold War, but it never got its own Hollywood even when it had all the other communist allies around, or at least nowhere near the scale Hollywood does for America. As South Korea is a longer-standing US ally than Estonia is, it would’ve inevitably inherited the American showbiz culture. To the extent that US publishers are more willing to represent South Koreans than Estonians, because of the residual feeling that South Korea is really on its side, despite Estonia being a western country itself and it was a US ally for quite a while in recent memory. You could also say that South Korea has K-Pop, but then again K-Pop is derivative of American popular music in many ways, so it’s going to be more palatable to US and US ally tastes.

That’s why Marvel has Luna Snow, a K-Pop musician who moonlights as a superheroine, even if Estonia’s currently capitalistic at this point but it’s still going to have the suspicion of being a Russian ally despite appearances to the contrary at this point. That’s why Netflix, a US streaming service, has KPop Demon Hunters. Even if Estonia was for a long time a Swedish colony, then a Russia colony and now a ceritified member of the European Union, South Korea is a US ally from the get-go and its exports are going to be more compatible with American and US ally tastes, than with their Estonian counterparts (if they exist at all). So Estonians as well as Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians and Moldovans are going to be this underrepresented in DC and Marvel, or for another matter Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bulgarians.

A common thread with many of these countries is that they’re all former socialist countries, as to be conflated with Russia especially if they’re European countries at that. I suppose if somebody were to substitute Latveria, Transia/Trasnia and Sokovia for Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary, it could still run into problems but if they got represented in Cold War era stories, their characters would either serve as antagonistic foils to US heroes or join US teams if they’re heroic, which Natalia Romanova is both of these things and she’s Russian. From my personal experience reading US comic books and the like, the only times actual Yugoslavs get any representation at all in is Joe Sacco’s nonfiction works. But these highlight a strong disparity between Yugoslavs and their fictionalised proxies, because Joe Sacco’s a journalist who uses cartooning to talk about social issues in other countries.

Similar things can be said of the differences between the way actual African countries are portrayed in nonfiction as opposed to say the DC and Marvel canon, where in the former they actually show up and sometimes realistically so. But in the DC and Marvel stories, most actual African countries are nonexistent. There are practically no Angolans, Cameroonians, Ugandans, Namibians and Rwandans in either the DC or Marvel canon, which gets really weird because these two are no strangers to retcons and reboots that at any point where a writer could’ve grandfathered a Cameroonian nationality onto Black Panther and Shuri, this never came to pass. DC’s no stranger to reboots and the opportunity to make Vixen Zimbabwean never came to pass either, you might as well tell me to make my own characters so I did.

Fabrice Tientcheu is a Cameroonian forensic scientist who has the ability to soften things, is very high-culture himself (he likes reading books on sciences like astronomy and chemistry, as well as books by Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus), owns cats because his father’s afraid of dogs (Cameroonian rapper Mink’s is afraid of dogs himself as well) and is actually based on another Jojo character, Trish Una who also has the same ability herself. He lives somewhere in Cameroon, whether if it’s Bamendjou or Bafang. But these are real places in Cameroon and also Africa, you could go there if you want to. He has a twin sister named Yvette, a seamstress who’s in love with his colleague and the resident detective Jean-Louis Lumiere.

Nigerians do get some representation in Marvel, via the character of Temper. But she’s not as well-known as Storm is, so Storm’s practically alone in the entire US comics canon as the best known fictional African to come from a real African country. If the adage the more, the merrier works; then it serves to have another Nigerian character around in the form of Tifeoluwa Babatunde Olatunji. He works as a lawyer and lives somewhere in Lagos, he sometimes gets into joking banter with Fabrice over rice and other foodstuffs. Even odder still over at DC is how and why there’ll never be an Elseworlds or Imaginary Story featuring an Icelandic Fire and a Chilean Ice, but I feel it kind of ties into stereotypes about Latin Americans and Scandinavians. Not just in terms of ability, but also personality.

From what I’ve read, Beatriz da Costa (Fire) is shown to be brash and flamboyant but Tora Olafsdotter (Ice) is more mild-mannered. That’s not to say there aren’t any Brazilians who act like Beatriz nor are there any Norwegians who act like Tora, but it still wouldn’t fit into the way they actually see themselves as. Supposing if there are characters with abilities similar to these two, but Fire is Scandinavian and Ice is Latin American this time. Sometime as early as 2010, I came up with an Icelandic male character who is Fire and manipulates volcanism himself, and Ice is a Japanese woman. This time both characters are female, thus further paralleling their DC counterparts. Linhildur Solveig Arnleifsdottir is analogised to Beatriz da Costa, though she has red hair and often at the receiving end of her husband’s affairs.

(She’s also a natural redhead to boot.) She comes from somewhere in Iceland, more specifically Reykjavik and she works as a government official. That’s not to say there aren’t any Scandinavian redheads out there in American ACG media, but it seems Age Of Mythology’s the rare instance of this unless if Jimmy Olsen counts (he’s obviously of Scandinavian descent himself). Dark-haired Scandinavians in DC do exist, but particularly in the form of Pieter Cross. Marvel’s Loki could also count in a way, because he’s based on Norse mythology. That’s not to say all Scandinavians are dark-haired (or red-haired or blond-haired either), but it still wouldn’t reflect the way they see themselves. Linhildur being a redhead reflects on the fact that Iceland does have a good number of redheads itself, then come Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

It seems within the Marvel canon, if foreign redheads do exist they’re usually more likely to come from either Scotland or Ireland. Not that redheads are nonexistent in both places, but it still wouldn’t be how they see themselves as. Quite frankly, I’m unable to name a famous Scottish or Irish redhead in music. People like Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, Ronan Keating and Nicola Cloaghan are all Irish blonds, though with the last one you wouldn’t guess this until she stops dyeing her hair red for Bridgerton. The rest of Boyzone and Altan all have dark hair themselves, everybody in Clannad has natural dark hair (until lately as they’re getting older) and the same can be said of everybody in the band Capercaillie. Sinead O’Connor had natural dark hair. Nightcrawlers’ John Reid had natural blond hair when he was younger, Kevin McKidd’s also blond.

Karen Gillen are Moira Shearer are both the only natural Scottish redheads that I can think of, but since natural red hair’s rare so it’s to be expected that it would be easier naming blond and dark-haired Irish and Scottish celebrities instead, especially in my case. Moving over to England, I could name some natural redheads there. You have Mick Hucknall, Patricia Hodge when she was younger, Newton Faulkner, Ed Sheeran, arguably David J from Bauhaus when he was younger and Jess Glynne, even if red hair’s not stereotypically considered to be an English trait. Marvel’s Elsa Bloodstone could count, but in her earlier appearances she had blonde hair. Betsy Braddock’s also a natural blonde and so is her brother, though you could say that I’m very much wrong in here.

But it still reinforces a message that rufosity’s the domain of Irish and Scottish people, especially in the Marvel canon. Even if not all redheads are Scottish or Irish themselves within Marvel itself, it still reinforces a particular view about these people. A view that some Irish and Scottish people internalise themselves, not that they’re any less red-haired either. It’s likely why outside of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic media, redheads are rarely ever Scandinavian in American media. I’m thinking in the lines of things like Age Of Mythology being the rare instances where you can find Scandinavian redheads in any way, the other one being God Of War when it comes to its own version of Thor. Ditto Latin American blonds, even when Cameron Diaz is a thing in real life.

Despite Cameron Diaz’s prominence and moreso when she was younger, given her father was Cuban himself, whenever Latin Americans show up in American media they usually tend to have dark hair. Beatriz da Costa might be the only instance that I can think of in American fiction who’s not dark-haired herself, one would wonder why there are so little to no natural Latin American blonds and redheads within DC and Marvel. They do show up in Latin American media, both nonfiction and fiction, but they’re very rare in DC and Marvel, if they show up at all. I do know that white Latinos exist and characters like Julio from X-Factor reflect on this in a way, even if natural blond and red hair aren’t necessarily common in Latin America either, but the fact that these two traits show up in Latin American comics among fictional characters acknowledges their existence.

The character I came up with is Piedad Franulic Kristof, a Chilean woman of Croatian and Hungarian descent. She’s analogised to Tora Olafsdotter in that both of them are light-haired women who manipulate the cold, but she’s also based on Nijimura Kei in that they’re resentful towards the people they serve (the Orvilles in Piedad’s case) and Kei also manipulates the cold herself. Piedad more specifically has mousy blonde hair which can also be regarded as light brown hair just the same, though it’s lighter than that of Colin Sallow. I feel it’s easier to think of Latin Americans as not only commonly dark-haired, but also somewhat darker than that of white Americans is the way the latter views the former and vice versa at times, when it comes to othering one another. Like if the prototypical American’s of either Western or Northern European descent, then the prototypical Latino’s of indigenous descent.

Blond hair’s more commonly found among countries like Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, even if not all Britons, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are necessarily natural blonds, let alone for life. Like I said John Reid had blond hair when he was younger, Liam Howlett had blond hair when he was a young boy. But this is also where most white Americans come from, so to the prototypical white American resembles the prototypical Northern European. The prototypical Latin American is someone who’s either of indigenous or Spanish descent, and the Spanish are often assumed to be dark-haired themselves. Not that the Spanish are any less dark-haired in reality, but the way Americans conceptualise both Latinidad and Spanishness is different from how these people view it in themselves.

It should be noted that there are Latin Americans of Polish, German, Dutch, Croatian, Hungarian and Ukrainian descent, Piedad is a Chilean woman of both Croatian and Hungarian descent. So it reflects on this in a way but perhaps outside of Latin American fictions, this is very nearly nonexistent in US media. There’s a version of the Babysitters Club where one of the blonde characters got made into a dark-haired Latina, but I feel this is one of the few instances that kind of reflects on it in their own respective ways. But I feel when Latin Americans are in the US themselves, whether in real life or in fiction, they will be othered in a way they aren’t back in Latin America. Even if not all Latinos are practising Catholics or even Catholics in general, if being American means being Protestant, then the othering’s bound to happen anyways.

It wouldn’t be the case in countries like Ireland, Poland, Croatia, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic and France, where Catholicism’s part of the cultural mainstream there. Not so much in countries like America, Britain, Canada and Finland where Protestantism’s part of the cultural mainstream there instead, so even white Latin Americans would be really othered in those places. It may not always be the case within DC and Marvel, but being American institutions, it’s going to play a role in some way. It’s not hard to see how and why Latin Americans, real or not, are going to be othered in American culture. It’s not that the Baptist church, Methodism, Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are nonexistent in Britain, Finland, Latvia, Canada, Sweden and Norway, but America has been the hotbed of world Protestantism until recently.

If because due to Christianisation, the African countries are catching up real quickly here. Especially places like Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, though they’re not without considerable Catholic populations to boot. But even if denominations don’t always get factored into the equation, Latin Americans are still going to be othered in America in other ways. So that’s why Latin American superheroes like Beatriz and others are portrayed the way they are in American ACG media, the portrayal’s not always racist but there’s a kind of implicit othering in some cases. Central Asians are weirdly very underrepresented in US fictional media in any capacity, given they don’t neatly fit into American boxes regarding not only both East Asia and West Asia, but also Eastern Europe.

This becomes particularly the case with both Kazakhs and Krygyz, because although many of them look East Asian, they also aren’t from somewhere further east like in both Indonesia and Malaysia, speak Turkic languages and actually have a degree of Western Eurasian DNA themselves, so they don’t neatly fit American prototypes for what Muslims ought to be. Both Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmens may fit American conceptions of Islam in many regards, but sadly they remain underrepresented in the American imaginary. Instead of actually representing Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmens this time around in both DC and Marvel, DC creatives like James Gunn and Greg Weisman would rather use proxies like Jarhunpurians and those from Qurac instead. Ditto Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and even Palestinians to my knowledge.

There are Marvel writers who do kind of represent those coming from Lebanon in a way as it is with Sina Grace, but then again a good number of Marvel writers like Chris Claremont are Zionist, to the point of portraying even the worst Jewish character like Magneto more sympathetically than he would with an Arab like the Shadow King. David Haller, when he initially appeared, was the illegitimate teenage son of Charles Xavier and an Israeli national, who got possessed by the Shadow King. So with the combined efforts of Xavier and somebody else, David Haller finally got exorcised. But I don’t read comics that often, much less the DC and Marvel variety at this point, so I’m going by what I recall reading. But it kind of insinuates a message that Arabs are ought to corrupt minors like David Haller, well at the time so.

And more recently in Absolute Superman, West Asians Ra’s Al-Ghul and his daughter Talia have invaded the US. Even as a Christian it’s kind of telling that it plays into a kind of xenophobic sentiment, but aimed specifically at West Asians regarding their supposed ability to ruin and undermine western civilisation (as represented by DC’s quintessentially Midwestern town Smallville). Palestinians are very underrepresented in US fictional media, especially when the US itself has a strong Zionist streak, that it’s this easy to demonise them. Even weirder still is that Palestine actually houses the world’s oldest Christian community, coupled with that there are some Israelis like Paul Wexler suspecting them to be the actual direct descendants of the ancient Israelities in a way Ashkenazi Jews aren’t.

Arthur Koestler, a Jew, was one of the earliest to point out that Ashkenazis aren’t related to the ancient Israelites as much as they are to the Khazars, a long-lost Turkic people. Even studies pointing out that Ashkenazis are the descendants of Judaised Caucasians, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Iranians and East Asians (who may be Mongols, the folks who were close to the Turkic tribes) would still bring up the Khazar ghost in some way, given the Zionist insistence on the idea that Ashkenazis are the direct descendants of the Israelites. Actually Ashkenazis being more closely related to Slavs seems more plausible, not only because their folkways are more Slavic than West Asian, but also because they lived in Slavic lands far longer than they do in West Asia, as to be Slavicised over time. Mr Wexler even said that Yiddish really is a Slavic language with a heavy Germanic influence.

Not helped by that Ashkenazi Jews lived in Slavic countries like Slovakia, Poland, Belarus and Russia for so long, that they’d inevitably be fluent in Russian, Polish, Slovak and Belarusian which would’ve further Slavicised Yiddish despite having Germanic influence too. And Yiddish sounds like a Polish speaker trying to speak German themselves, or sing in my case since I listened to a duo singing the song ‘Tumbalalaika’ which seems like a German song with a Polish accent. (This is what you get for finally listening to something in Polish.) The profound Zionist streak that a number of DC and Marvel writers exhibit is likely why there are practically no Palestinian superheroes in both the DC and Marvel canons, why somebody like Kitty Pryde gets away with the very thing that got a Native American like John Proudstar into trouble and so on.

It’s as if being Jewish is enough to automatically absolve somebody of their wrongdoings, which reflects in the way the western world continues to support Zionist Israel at any time. It’s kind of also like this in something like Power Mark, where a number of characters who aren’t Biblical characters who get to be flawed are a Russian boy, a Chinese woman (Power Mark’s sister) and a Latin American girl, but the Jewish boy’s portrayed as rather flawless. I feel as if western countries readily support Zionism is partly because Jews are a kind of model minority’s model minority, if you know what I mean, as opposed to the way the Chinese, Indians and others are regarded as such, especially if they’re not only Gentile but also significantly more numerous and oppose western values themselves in some manner.

This might explain the orientalist othering these people often get in western fictions, where a westernised East Asian like Jubilee is considered a good guy but not the Mandarin. Or for another matter, characters coming from former European colonies like Vietnam (Karma) and the Philippines (Galura, Wave), which kind of insinuates the message that western countries are the gold standard for what’s good and progressive. Even when both China and India were far ahead of the west when it comes to women wearing trousers, West Asian countries and Russia having more women in STEM, China having had women play ball games in ancient history, Japan continuing to have a solid tradition of and industry for female readers of comics and so on.

Or even the odd fact that Japan’s ahead of the west when it comes to publishing professional M/M fiction out in the open, Patalliro being an old anime that features a sympathetic gay couple at the front. I’m getting off-topic but when it comes to media like DC and Marvel as well as their writers, being westerners they often promote western worldviews, sympathies and preferences, sometimes deliberately but more often than not unconsciously because of what they’re socialised and exposed to for years. The underrepresentation of other former communist western nationalities like Estonians and Latvians has to do with conflating them with Russians proper, even when at this point Estonia and Latvia are currently capitalist, that it shouldn’t be a stretch to actually introduce Estonian and Latvian superheroes right now.

Maybe not as America ended up alienating these two, them being staunch European Union members at this point, but I feel it’s possible to create an international media franchise that features actually Estonian and Latvian characters at the front and centre this time. It’s kind of obvious that as a lot of DC and Marvel writers are Americans, they’ll inevitably and usually have pro-US sympathies, sentiments, mindsets and sensibilities that get reflected in the stories they write about. Whether if it’s the othering of nonwesterners like Africans, West Asians and East Asians, the continued underrepresentation of certain nationalities and ethnicities (Latvians, Estonians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Slovaks, etc), or the propagation of western values and sensibilities, it’s there with many DC and Marvel writers for years.

Although the character of Linhildur might play into the redhead with fire powers stereotype in a way, she also represents a kind of Scandinavian character not commonly represented in US fiction stories. So far the only Scandinavian character with a fire ability is Karl Hansen from the Wildcats stories, whereas Norwegians like Sigrid Nansen and Tora Olafsdotter both have ice-based abilities. And even if Norway has glaciers, so does Chile and Chile’s close to Antarctica. It’s not a coincidence that both DC and Marvel writers habitually give fire-based abilities to Latin Americans, as if they’re so hot-tempered they’ll burst into flames anyways, when it comes to characters like Dante Pertuz, Firebird, that tattooed guy and Beatriz da Costa, even if it’s not true for all of them. Magma could also count in a way, as she has power over volcanism herself.

And she’s also a Brazilian citizen by the way, though similar things can be said of Iceland too. But it still plays into a kind of American conceptualisation of Latin American nationalities and countries, regardless if countries like Argentina and Chile both beg to differ as they’re closer to the South Pole as to get cold and dark around June and July, that Chile has glaciers says a lot about the missed opportunity to have a Chilean version of Ice this time. Sunspot being able to manipulate solar energy himself plays into the American belief of countries like Brazil having nearly constant unlimited daylight hours, but even if it were true and the same can be said of a certain Peruvian Overwatch character (I think), one would wonder why there’s no Argentinian character at either DC or Marvel who manipulates darkness themselves because it gets dark in Argentina every June and July.

It’s kind of depressing to think that in 2025 there are still no Namibian, Uzbek, Tajik, Kazakh, Armenian and Georgian superheroes and even supervillains at either DC or Marvel, when it comes to Georgians these characters come from somewhere in Batumi, Tbilisi or Gori. Not somewhere in Savannah, Atlanta or Douglasville, Georgia here is a country in the Caucasus. Latveria is real but not Slovakia, Transia is real but not Slovenia. So logically Wakanda is real, but not Cameroon. Qurac is real, but not Syria. What I’m saying is that Latveria, Transia, Qurac and Wakanda are treated as if they’re real countries in Marvel and DC, but for some reason their real-life doppelgangers are nonexistent in their place. You could actually travel to Ljubljana and even stay there for long after acquiring EU citizenship, but Transia will take its place in Marvel stories instead.

Singapore is so nonexistent in the Marvel canon that Madripoor takes its place instead, even when you could actually go there to Singapore yourself. Some of my relatives have done this more than a decade ago, you can even access to Singaporean websites too. Singaporeans speak English like Americans, but Madripoor is used in its place in Marvel. You should get an idea of how underrepresented Singaporeans are in Marvel, or for another matter Malaysians and Burmese since I can’t name a single character from either Malaysia or Myanmar in both DC and Marvel. Ditto Laotians, Cambodians get some representation in the forms of Rose Wilson and Sweet Lili. But I suppose no such equivalent exists for those from Kazakhstan, even to this day that Kazakhstan might as well belong in the world of Elseworlds and What If.

But countries like Qurac are serious business, despite being technically nonexistent in the real world.

Nootaikok et la colère froide

One Inuk character I made a year before and he’s very much based on Jojo’s Ghiaccio, oddly enough both of them embody or personify the peculiarly French idiom ‘colère froide’ well. If because both of them manipulate ice and have very hot tempers, colère froide is a Francophone idiom that refers to a type of anger that’s either self-controlled, bitter or implicit. Nootaikok’s anger is also partly coloured by the fact that he doesn’t like it whenever people criticise his culture, lifestyle and stuff as well as him raging at people who mispronounce Inuk words, especially Jemima Szara, whom he often insults and berates. Also his way of manipulating ice involves him getting literally warmed up, whilst freezing something or anything at the same time.

Much like Ghiaccio, he also ice-skates. But that’s got to do with him freezing his surroundings, that he really needs something to get around without hurting himself. In the case with superhero stories proper as done by both the DC and Marvel schools, it’s surprising why cryokinetic characters’ way of getting around things is to just slide on icy platforms, without regarding for them falling off because they never seem to wear ice skates at all. Well most of them do, with the exception of Golden Glider at some point. Actually a cryokinetic character that ice skates is the more realistic case because if you’re walking on ice, you could slip and hurt yourself so you need to wear something to get around it. So Ghiaccio’s stand White Album (which is really a suit that gives him cryokinesis) is well-thought out.

Golden Glider was originally an ice skater gone bad whose backstory is like the inversion of the infamous women in refrigerators meme where it’s a man’s death who motivated her, women in refrigerators wherein female characters are victimised to motivate the male characters. Since her ice skates made ice, it’s pretty natural for her to continue doing like this, up until the early 2010s reboot. Ghiaccio ice-skating whilst manipulating ice at the same time is really a more realistic way of going around cryokinesis, since it would be impractical if a cryokinetic wore shoes that’ll endanger them whenever they walk on ice at all. Though I wonder if it’s easier to push for something that looks/seems great, instead of something that’s actually more plausible but less amazing.

A cryokinetic who skates on frozen ground doesn’t seem amazing compared to a character who effortlessly walks on an icy platform they made whilst getting across something, even though the former is a more realistic outcome really. Perhaps this is possibly why Golden Glider was drastically reimagined in the later stories, going from a criminal ex-athlete whose ice-skates generated ice for her to skate on to someone more ethereal. Regardless if the former portrayal seems far more plausible when it comes to moving on ice at all, than becoming an ethereal being due to being comatose. There is a difference between Phantom Girl and Golden Glider, the former moves through surfaces whilst the latter’s powers take on an disembodied form due to being comatose.

Like as if she can’t be that interesting when she actually moves around in her own body, attacking people whereas most stand users have the excuse of having their stands (powers/battle familiars really) do the fighting for them whilst still being conscious. Not to mention that if you hurt the stand, you also hurt the stand user too. So there’s really a corporeality to most stands in a way it’s not with Golden Glider at this point (I don’t read comics much so bear with me), in that they actually function as a proper extensions of their users. Whether as superpowered doppelgangers of sort doing the dirty jobs for them, or in Ghiaccio’s case where his superpower is also his costume. This may not be true for all stand users, but they still feel like they’re organic extensions of their users.

Especially whenever they’re presented as arguably separate from their users, but still inseparable when both of them get injured. Whereas Golden Glider’s powers and consciousness seem weirdly disembodied from her body, in that the body gets injured but her soul goes largely unscathed for some reason. Jojo, for all its faults, does a better job at portraying disembodied powers better in that even if stands appear to be separate from their users, they’re still inseparable on some level because both of them get injured or harmed together. Wherein their disembodiment still feels like proper extensions of their users, instead of functioning very differently from them as it is with Golden Glider at this point.

Here comes another one

Anatoly Sidorov

A Russian mafia hitman whose ability is rooted in nuclear fusion, but since quantum tunnelling/phasing is part of this, as well as probability alone, so it makes sense that he doesn’t just manipulate thermonuclear radiation but also goes through surfaces and the like. He’s actually based on Marvel’s Kate Pryde, where he even has a snake named Mikoyan (hers is a dragon named Lockheed, considering that dragons are actually based on snakes). He has the same skills with the katana as she does, excellent in stealth and unarmed combat as well. He even shares her hot temper and defiance, which also got him into trouble before. He also dresses like her, the whole black and blue clothing thing.

Though his outfit also resembles what Michael Hutchence wore in a fashion show, Michael Hutchence being the fallen frontman of the band INXS. Though he seemed to have it all at first, he actually battled depression and lost. INXS is an Australian rock band by the way, I remember listening to its music before on the radio and also on Channel V (I think). It even had a reality show on that channel where its surviving members went out to find a new singer for the band, this resulted in the song called ‘Afterglow’. Before that, they even had Sanandra Maitreya (Terence Trent D’Arby) onboard for awhile. INXS never seemed to have much luck finding a new vocalist for long.

Anatoly Sidorov has black hair and brown eyes, there are some Russians who look like this. There are also red-haired Russians, like Katya from the duo Tatu. Thankfully, things like Marvel Comics kind of reflects this in a way. Colossus, one of Kate Pryde’s former boyfriends, has black hair. Natalia ‘Natasha’ Romanova is red-haired, so they’re in really good company then. Anatoly’s own mother is Armenian, whilst his father is regular white Russian. So he’s probably from Krasnodar Krai (especially Sochi) then, or somewhere near it in some way and then he got picked up by the Russian Mafia. The rest is history and why he’s out for revenge in Canada.

More inspirations

Edward Hadlund

Based on Sale and his stand Kraftwerk, he has the ability to manipulate an object’s kinetic energy by not only freezing it in place but also adding more kinetic energy to it, thus intensifying the attacks and impacts they have on something or someone. He’s also a vegetarian like John Zelensky (well from time to time, as he’s usually a vegan), despite or rather because of his allergies to cats and phobia of dogs. So he gets Fabrice’s disdain for the latter, though he’s less disdainful of them for most of the part. He also doesn’t like Jean-Louis’s habit of hunting, finding it annoying and a major waste of time. As for his appearance, well I’m going to tell you something: he’s like a masculinised version of Linda Evangelista.

Well, facially speaking. Another male character based on a female model, just like what Hamish Gallagher is to Freja Beja Erichsen, it’s kind of strange to say this but the late George Perez also did something similar to one DC character. I forgot their name but I do remember that he based them after a woman he knew, so he’s in really good company here (Tommy Heikkinen is based on Nina Hagen by the way). He kind of dresses like Sale, a bit more punk rock, but you could see the similarities. Well his fashion sense could be changed should he actually get to appear in a video game himself, if this ever comes to fruition at all. This has happened to Overwatch’s Mercy before where she was going to be a black man, get this she was going to be a black man.

An angelic black male doctor, that could be an inspiration to young black men around the world in search of better, less stereotypical representation. Somebody on DeviantART commented that African Americans do lack representation, especially if occupation options seem limited and certain occupations aren’t always welcomed by their community. Regardless if it makes certain African Americans feel less left out this way, that I feel a game featuring a black male doctor would help them a lot. In Eddie’s case, it’s got to do with something that might be more conventionally appealing, since certain people in games would demand people to redesign a character to be more commercially viable. So Eddie wouldn’t be punk for long when he appears in a video game for real.

Yvette Tientcheu

Fabrice’s twin sister and a seamstress who went to Canada to be closer to her brother, though she ended up falling in love with Jean-Louis. Considering that Jean-Louis is based on David Bowie, so Yvette is logically his Iman. Iman being David Bowie’s last wife and true love in a way Mary Angela Barnett isn’t, (not) helped by that she had an open marriage with him. So they went about cheating on each other a lot, whilst coming to raise their son for as much as they can remain together for his sake. She actually doesn’t mind his interests in hunting and dogs, though she finds it baffling to raise the latter since she only grew up with cats. Again their father is deathly afraid of dogs and will always be leery of them in some way or another, leading to conflicts with his would-be son in law.

She was based on Emma Lavenham but as I came to write a story featuring the latter, she developed a habit of cheating on her spouse (Adam Dalgliesh) whenever he’s away from her, drinking a lot at pubs. So the character more closely based on her at this point is Emma Havisham, also a literature professor and one who slept with Akosamesew, despite forbidding her son to be with his friends. Yvette being more like Iman helps her stand out from her in some regards, being very accepting of her boyfriend’s habits and mannerisms. I have to reiterate that both Yvette and Fabrice are twins, fraternal twins at that. She loves him deeply and tries to be there for him, and he for her but sometimes due to their occupational demands it doesn’t always go as expected.

She’s also the one who has to mediate between her brother and her boyfriend, especially concerning dogs as the former attempted to poison the latter’s dogs (and nearly got killed by him). And sometimes she had to mediate between her father and her boyfriend, again involving dogs because her family never raised dogs due to their father’s cynophobia. Jean-Louis being a touchy dog lover, Fabrice and his father being somewhat suspicious of dogs and Yvette being clueless around them. Though in a gesture of authentic kindness, Jean-Louis has given her books about cats and a plush cat toy to keep her happy. Jean-Louis is more than happy and willing to treat her well, whilst Yvette usually lets him do his own thing for as long as he’s not a jerk.

Some inspirations on the characters

Jemima Szara

She’s based on both Jemima Shore (her namesake by the way) and Nancy Drew, as they’re both amateur detectives with strawberry blonde hair. Jemima Szara tends to work as an investigative journalist, but because she tends to report crime that she often works with the police. She has an uncannily good sense of direction, sort of like a GPS device, which is good for finding out criminal cases in addition to her own intelligence. She’s had relationships with other men before, though she’s currently dating Maurice Lu (who’s also her best friend). She also had something of a girlhood crush on Richard Sorm, whom she also dated before moving onto other men and eventually Maurice.

There’s also some Marianne Faithfull in her because she dated a guy named Nick Hunter (Mick Jagger), despite being married at the time and eventually miscarrying their child. One of her aunts is a major misandrist, stemming from being raped herself. Faithfull’s grandmother was a misandrist due to being raped herself, one that had negative consequences for her in her formative years. Jemima has a younger brother named Nicholas, who works as a newspaper cartoonist, and their only surviving parent is Bonifacy Szary. Her middle name is Ewelina, the Polish form of Evelyn (Marianne’s middle name is Evelyn). She has a white cat named Sneg and a dog named Lome.

There’s a bit of Yasuho Hirose in her, especially in having a similar ability. Except that Jemima often uses this in investigative journalism, as well as assisting police officers find criminal offenders and their victims. It’s something that I don’t think not a lot of writers have considered, concerning the use of such abilities for noncombative purposes. In the case with both superhero stories and ability battle manga, there’s a tendency for writers to resort to depicting characters indulging in creative ways of attacking each other, instead of creative ways of solving cases, cooking and the like. Jemima being an investigative reporter with an uncanny sense of direction works in this case.

Fabrice Tientcheu

A Cameroonian forensic scientist with the ability to soften items, he’s based on both Trish Una and her stand Spice Girl, considering he went undercover as a janitor to find Colin Sallow. Considering that Spice Girl is actually based on cats, whilst it’s not particularly obvious at first, it does leave claw marks (something Killer Queen hasn’t done to my knowledge). Fabrice actually has cats himself but that’s because his father is afraid of dogs (there’s also a real Cameroonian musician named Mink who feels the same way too), so he’s got them instead and is more used to those than he is with dogs. It’s not that strange when there really are African cat owners out there, I’m part of a group called ‘Kenyan Cat Lovers’.

In Tientcheu’s case, his father’s wary of dogs so they got cats instead. Not particularly perfect but it’s something they got considering his father having cynophobia, Fabrice also looks like a younger Maxim Reality. As in he’s one of the surviving members of the band The Prodigy, alongside Liam Howlett, since Keith Flint passed away and the other two (Leeroy Thornhill and Sharky) left for certain reasons. Despite being based on Maxim, he’s also based on Freddie Mercury. Especially considering his outfit being reminiscent of Freddie’s own, but with the colours reversed (white coat, yellow shirt). He even likes cats too, so there’s some commonality between the two.

He’s even got Freddie’s boxing skills too, though he’s not shown engaging in combat that often. As for the Trish Una connection, he’s shown to dress in clothes with a numbers pattern like hers. Well not so often, but to show you that the fruit doesn’t fall too far from the tree. In his case, it’s as if Spice Girl’s connection to cats has been made explicit, given the stand doesn’t seem to resemble a cat at first. But it’s done something Killer Queen hasn’t done, to my knowledge that perhaps the similarities have more to do with its actions than its overall appearance. It seems unlikely at first but since Hirohiko Araki said it, so it’s going to show up however unlikely it appears to be.

Graham Knightley

As opposed to Fabrice Tientcheu, his connection to cats is implicit. He does dress somewhat like Yoshikage Kira’s stand Killer Queen, having the same fingerless gloves and boots and there’s an embroidered leopard patch on the left part of his jacket. And he’s been caught dead wearing a floral shirt, referencing Stray Cat being a cat that controls plants. He has the same power as Killer Queen, the same motivations as Yoshikage Kira at least when he first appeared (he’s no longer a serial killer in the later Jojo stories). Why is his surname Knightley? Because there’s somebody in the real world named Keira Knightley, so the connection to Yoshikage Kira is also based on wordplay.

He also shares the latter version’s interest in bondage, what no better way to communicate by that he wears bondage trousers himself. It’s like how some cartoonists communicate the idea that a female character is promiscuous by the way she dresses, so it’s only fair to do the same to a male character. He’s so kinky that he’s going to be open about it and Jemima even dated him before, despite being married to another woman. He’s not just a salesman but also the son of somebody who’s both a member of the British gentry (like Jemima and also an immigrant to boot) and a billionaire, he’s very much the epitome of eat the rich. As in he’s both contemptible and rich as to warrant getting attacked by humbler characters.

It’s not surprising given the growing distrust of multibillionaires like Elon Musk that it feels fit to have the son of a billionaire be an actual serial killer, since there’s somebody else saying that really rich people think of themselves as above the law. But I suppose for some people, the idea that the very rich indulge in crimes themselves feels kind of unthinkable, though this means that they’re not any better than poor people doing the same thing too. This makes him pretty relevant in some way, perhaps it’s no surprise why Absolute DC’s Batman is an engineer who can afford to make his own stuff without relying a lot on wealth to do it. Advancements in technology have made it easier to get something, without relying on much money when it comes to piracy.

Colin Sallow

Like I said elsewhere that he’s based on Dio Brando, despite also coming from a dream, right down to the fashion sense and ability. Except that in this case, both spacetime and gravity are interrelated as they are in reality. So if he lowers gravity in a localised area, he also slows (or if you will, stops) time too. This is convenient for not only literally stopping people in their tracks, but also for escapology and it’s going to be tough tracking him down at all. He’s also based on Tadzio from Death In Venice, well Tadzio as represented in the 1970s film, even dressing up as a sailor but only undercover to kill somebody else with. He kind of comes from a political family and is groomed for a life in politics, but he’s also a serial killer who’s weirdly loyal to his father.

So much so he killed the son of his father’s rival, he does this because he honours his father so much that he’s not going to let the other one win. Just as Fabrice Tientcheu is based on Maxim Reality, Colin Sallow is also based on a younger Liam Howlett. The two surviving members of the band the Prodigy, effectively a duo at this point, perhaps save for live members showing up in concerts. So there are really only two original members of the Prodigy left, Keith Flint’s no longer with us and Leeroy Thornhill and Sharky have gone on doing something else. So befittingly there are only two characters based on these two musicians, the other one being Fabrice. The same guy he ended up attacking, well Colin is usually pretty cool-headed and good-tempered.

This makes his capacity to murder all the more shocking, given he seems so nice and well-mannered. Maybe he’s got something nasty in his closet, despite contrary appearances. Not to mention he’s also based on the cinematic version of Tadzio, the unlikeliest inspiration for a fictional murderer. As for his father’s rivals, they’re also based on the real life Medici family. They went from being a plutocratic family, whose wealth came from banking/usury, to becoming a proper aristocratic family serving the Holy Roman Empire. The Medici did inspire some characters in Skull Girls, some fighting game in the 2010s, but it would be interesting to use one such incident in their family history as the inspiration for a mystery/puzzle game.

Akosamesew Kanewopasikot

He is based on DC Comics’s Cassandra Cain but I feel transposing a number of characteristics associated with her personality and upbringing would read differently when grafted onto a Native American character, because it kind of becomes triggering considering the history Native Americans have with white people upon colonisation. Especially where they find every bits of their culture (and even their languages) stripped from them in a bid to assimilate into white settler colonial cultures, that I feel an indigenous Cassandra Cain would be far more tragic given the context. Akosamesew is capable of speaking, though not particularly well in Cree as he should be.

But due to colonisation, it’s not uncommon for Native Americans to be this fluent in English. So he’s not as fluent in Cree as he wishes and wants to be, considering he puts every effort into learning it as much as possible. He’s also been trained to be something of a living weapon, though it’s something he wishes he’d unlearn or at least wouldn’t be reminded of daily. Due to his uncanny ability to read body language well, he’s considerate but also very conscious, fearful to the point of being timid and tries very hard to be polite. He does strive to be more outgoing, but he feels the need to not hurt or offend anybody. He’s also good at catching criminals this way, leading to an interesting confrontation with Colin.

He’s also based on a historical figure known as Poundmaker, who also has dreadlocks like he does and is also of nearly the same ethnicity. Maybe not so much in the personality side of things, but mostly in the way they look. When it comes to the world of anime, the first dreadlocked Native American character would probably be Gat from Saiyuki, which is based on Journey to the West. Then comes Mink from Dramatical Murder, which is based on a really graphic video game. Though there is a precedence for dreadlocked indigenous people among the Cree, or so it seems to be, it’s not something you see often in the media. Mostly because it’s usually seen as something black people wear.

Jean-Louis Lumiere

Based on David Bowie though he still has his own idiosyncrasies that make him his own person to a decent extent, this character emerged in 2016 alongside Maurice Lu though neither of them have names yet. To go further with the David Bowie comparisons, he also has natural blond hair. He dyed it red and cut into a Ziggy Stardust mullet, he even dresses like him and has a loving black girlfriend in the form of Yvette Tientcheu, Fabrice’s twin sister and seamstress. He’s also the game’s main detective by the way, though he can be rather ruthless when dealing with criminals. He has the ability to manipulate light, which he uses to render something, someone or himself invisible, create holographic illusions, glares and lasers.

He’s also good at unarmed combat, not just in savate but also primarily wrestling. Both freestyle wrestling and Greco-Roman wrestling, he’s done them both when he was younger whilst training to be a detective under Richard Sorm. Having been orphaned at age 19, he not only looked up to his uncle but also to Mr Sorm because he’s his mentor. In a sense he’s also his successor, despite the differing abilities. Despite the fact that Jemima Szara is based on Jemima Shore, Jean-Louis has a black dog named Minuit just as Jemima Shore’s black cat is named Midnight. The other thing keeping Jemima Szara tethered to her namesake is that she’s sometimes attracted to married men, though the latter is probably already married herself at this point.

Whereas Jean-Louis has a schizophrenic cousin just as Bowie had a schizophrenic brother, even if Jean-Louis still isn’t exactly like David Bowie in other regards. He also seems to share Bowie’s love for dogs, whom he takes out for hunting every early morning. Anyways Jean-Louis enjoys hunting with his friends and dog, reading (just like Bowie himself), writing, playing football/soccer and fishing, he’s kind of rustic in some regards having been brought up in a Quebecois countryside. His girlfriend is Yvette Tientcheu, though he sometimes gets into fights with their father over dogs. Their dad is deathly afraid of dogs, Fabrice’s suspicious of them and Yvette doesn’t know what to do with them, so conflicts happen.

John Zelensky

Named after Volodimir Zelenskyy (oddly enough), but parts of his life are based on that of River Phoenix. River Phoenix was the older brother of Joaquin Phoenix, having played a younger Indiana Jones before. River Phoenix also played music when he can and could, having done some recordings with his sister. Just as River spent his formative years in Venezuela, John spent his own in Mexico. He’s kind of nostalgic for Mexicana, often planning on going there again in years. He knows some Mexican Spanish, which he uses to communicate with others online. He has thoughts of acquiring Mexican citizenship one day, though this might put his career into jeopardy.

Much like these two, he’s of Jewish descent. In the case with River Phoenix, he’s in some regards the farthest from what you expect young Jewish men to be. In the sense that you’d expect Jewish men to be respectable, kind of square sort of people. But River Phoenix did drugs in private, until they got the better of him. You’d expect Jewish men to be nerdy, studious and stuff, but River Phoenix was no big nerd. He seemed to be more comfortable with rock music, than he would with acting and he would’ve gone on as a musician anyways had he lived. John Zelensky also doesn’t seem to be a particularly nerdy man either, being more into Goth and punk rock. Well, he’s in good company really.

Especially when you rope in some members of the Ramones and Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell being Jewish, that you begin to see where I’m coming from when it comes to something like a Jewish rocker. They really are present in rock music in some way or another, whether if it’s Gene Simmons from the band Kiss (I was made for loving you), or somebody like the late Hillel Slovak who was a member of the band Red Hot Chili Peppers. Coincidentally, River Phoenix was a friend of Flea (one of the members). It’s not that strange really and some of them are really prominent, but it’s easier to fall back on Jewish stereotypes, especially if your point of reference is really narrow and limited.

Ellen Wachak

Renamed from Ellen Tonkawa, she has the ability to magnetise things like Mariah and her stand Bastet in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. She often calls it telekinesis, because it’s like she moves things with her mind. She still does it to this day. She’s also based on Kate Miskin, except that she actually loves her grandmum. She’s also based on this woman from the nonfiction book Women In The Martial Arts, because she’s also part indigenous and part East Asian. In her case, she’s part Dene/Chipewyan and part Korean. She knows some martial arts, particularly gungdo as she has a particular affinity for projectiles/marksmanship. It’s not that there aren’t any mixed race indigenous people, either in fiction or in real life.

But in the case with the west, it’s easier to relate back to white people than to consider the possibility of indigenous people who’re also descended from black and Asian people, probably because I feel it makes them too foreign in some way. Whiteness feels more approachable and familiar, making an indigenous person part Asian (though it’s always possible if this book is any indication) makes them too foreign and alien for some people. The one prominent mixed race indigenous character who’s not part white that I can think of is Eliza Maza from Gargoyles, she’s actually part black and admittedly it’s a long time I watched this programme. But it wouldn’t hurt to have an indigenous character who’s part East Asian.

Ellen Wachak might not be the first example of one, as there are likely others before her in fiction, though they are mostly in the minority. Aside from this, she enjoys collecting soft/plush toys and dolls. It’s not that there aren’t any doll collector type characters before, one example would be Alice Margatroid from Touhou, but I kind of suspect that such a character would come off as childish for some people. Especially if they’re an adult, despite that adult toy collectors (not that they collect sex toys) exist in the real world. It would be nice to have a mixed race officer who collects and plays with dolls in her spare time, though this involves humanising her a lot more than one usually would.

Hector Yang

Based on Jobin Higashikata in terms of manipulating heat without causing fire, though he also has albinism (pallor and a degree of vision impairment). Not that these characters never existed before, though it’s not pulled off often due to semantic connotations. The one video game character who’s comparable to him in any way would be Touhou Project’s Mokou no Fujiwara, who has white hair and manipulates fire. Whilst these characters personify the phrase white hot very well, it’s more common to associate the colour white with the cold, which is kind of understandable.

But the funny thing about heat is that in the case with flames and heated up items, the more energetic they get the more whitish or bluish they become. This is because shorter wavelengths are more energetic, with something reddish being relatively cool and something blue being really hot. Blue skies are often going to be warm and bright, because that’s where light is at its most energetic. Red skies tend to be cooler and dimmer, for the same reason but in reverse. Mokou seems to be the only truly white hot video game character at this point, if because she has white hair and manipulates fire. Not necessarily so unique, but not particularly common either.

It should be noted that the word for albino in Tagalog is ‘anak araw’ or ‘sun child’ because they’re so pale as to be reminiscent of sunlight, ironically the very thing that hurts them. The sun is hot and bright, but it kind of fits in a way. Snow also reflects a lot of light and can easily blind somebody if they’re not careful, though I don’t think it’s particularly common to associate white-haired characters with light. The only ones that do fit the bill are both versions of Amaterasu (one of them is from The Five Star Stories), Marvel’s Dagger at some point and arguably Mokou no Fujiwara, even though it’s kind of logical because there’s such thing as white light and white reflects all the colours. I’m misremembering the other one, but it kind of fits.

Mary Stilfox

Based on Aya Tsuji and her stand Cinderella, she has the ability to generate implants which she uses to replace someone’s organs with them. She actually works as a plastic surgeon so she’s often called upon to do surgeries of any and every variety, so her ability is perfect for this and why almost nobody has ever considered this. She’s also a Scottish immigrant who moved to Canada with her husband and has two sons or daughters (or maybe two sons and a daughter) there, ever since Jean-Louis got orphaned that he started seeing her as a kind of mother figure. (Jemima has hers in a housekeeper named Molly, yep another Nancy Drew reference.)

I feel there’s an argument to be made for Aya Tsuji being a surgeon because her ability’s convenient for it, like say you want a smaller nose and she could easily do that whilst operating on you. If somebody wants bigger breasts, she could’ve just practically the same thing too. Though it does make one wonder if there are anybody in comics out there who have been interested in plastic surgery at some point or another, well I was into this sort of thing before when I was younger. Considering that cosmetic surgery is such a big industry that Aya Tsuji could’ve been very much in demand for it, it’s no different with Mary Stilfox and why she’s the most in-demand plastic surgeon in town.

Mary Stilfox doesn’t mind Jean-Louis’s habit of hunting in his spare time, if because not only do some of her relatives back in Scotland do this (primarily for pest control), but that one of her most trusted friends is into hunting herself. She has some knowledge of hunting and she sometimes helps out Jean-Louis whenever he’s out to get those pesky vermin and game when he feels like it, since she’s no stranger to helping her own relatives whenever they do the same thing too. When she brought along her own cousin, that’s when he introduced him to ferreting–that’s hunting with ferrets. Predictably, she gave Jean-Louis tips on looking after ferrets, when she gave him one.

Patricia Kyenge

In terms of ability, she’s derivative of an earlier version of Josuke Higashikata as both of them restore things to where they were, but in her case she uses this often in nursing as well as doing everyday repair work for others. It’s something not a lot of people have considered or realised, since you could have characters with fantastical abilities yet refuse to use them in combat, especially if they see no point in doing it. There’s something of a missed opportunity for this version of Josuke to grow up using this same ability in medicine, whether as a nurse or doctor, but it makes perfect sense for him to do just that.

Oddly enough the character who got to be a medic is Yoshikage Kira in Jojolion, even though he’s ill-suited for medicine unlike Josuke I. There’s also a bit of Trish Una in here (Trish–Patricia), like her boyfriend Fabian she also likes cats. Considering that she’s a Congolese nurse who moved to Canada, there are Congolese people who actually have cats as pets (well, primarily for hunting rodents) and there’s one account of a Congolese chemist that has a cat do just the same. Since Patricia also has a relative who doesn’t like dogs much either, in fact that’s actually a grandparent, so she understands why Fabian’s father’s like this.

Patricia Kyenge is also named after Cecile Kyenge, a Congolese woman living and working in Italy. While Italy didn’t colonise the DRC the way Belgium did (it conquered Eritrea and Libya instead), it does attract immigrants from anywhere else in Africa. There are Italians of Nigerian and Ghanaian descent, one notable example being footballer Mario Balotelli who got adopted from a Ghanaian family. Though Italy’s no stranger to African servants at some point (I think), its relationship with African colonies happened more recently than that of the Netherlands, Britain, Portugal and Spain. So it never trafficked Africans to work in its American colonies, the way these four did.

Rose Marie Gaultier

The inspiration for her is Kate Bush in the music video ‘Wuthering Heights’, similar appearance but dissimilar personality and life. There’s a character in Italian crime fiction who has the ability to talk to the dead, just like hers, but I forgot their name though I do know they exist. It’s not that both superhero comics and video games lack women wearing dresses, but so far with the former there’s a tendency to make the dress either skimpy (Supergirl, Mary Marvel and Nightshade) or with thigh high slits (Raven), mostly to emphasise sex appeal.

It would be interesting to portray a kind of superheroine in a video game wearing a more modest dress, it can be pulled off. She dresses like a younger Kate Bush, similar preference for flowy and romantic dresses. But I feel considering that since there are video game developers who especially don’t do dress-up games (and also superhero cartoonists), so they wouldn’t be particularly inclined towards making their female characters dress stylishly. Or in a way that where their fashion sense tends to be more romantic than sexy, it may not be sexy like Dead or Alive or Soul Calibur but I feel there’s a tendency to play up sex appeal more.

Even if it’s something that’s not appealing to all women, especially if they’re really disgusted and/or alienated by this sort of thing. Maybe not necessarily a more romantic fashion sense, but rather a less sexualised way of dressing. I feel this would also extend to other female characters in this game I’m proposing, maybe not exactly like Rose but in the lines of less sexualisation for all of them. Given how video games get flak for sexualising female characters a lot, it would be nice to do the opposite direction for all the female characters here. Many video games at this point are currently desexualising female characters, but the more the merrier.

Nootaikok Alakannuark

Based on Jojo’s Ghiaccio in personality, ability and appearance, he embodies and personifies the peculiarly French idiom ‘colère froide’, which refers to lingering anger that borders on bitterness and resentment. It’s also a passive aggressive sort of anger, it’s not apparent but it’s there on some level. How does he manipulate the cold? He heats up whenever he creates something cold, like temperatures get transferred or they lower as his body temperature raises. So he absorbs heat and he has a hot temper, sort of makes sense on some level too. Many of the same things can also be said of Ghiaccio himself, he too embodies and personifies this French idiom well.

It’s one of those things that make sense in some other language, like colère froide in the case with these two. They manipulate the cold and they get angry real easily, in the case with Nootaikok he’s grieved by racism every time. He gets angry whenever people mispronounce Inuk words, especially whenever Jemima does it and goes so far to either scold or insult her for it. He also gets angry at others for doing the same thing too, sometimes getting angry at others whenever something bad happens. I feel Ghiaccio might not be the only character who’s like this, but he’s part of a minority of characters who’re like this. Even if the way he acts perfectly aligns with the French idiom colère froide real well.

And for another matter, Nootaikok Alakannuark too. Aside from that, both of them ice-skate. Both of them wear ice-skates, which is something you don’t see cryokinetic superheroes doing the same. Regardless of the risk of hurting themselves from slipping at any time, I feel the use of cryokinetic characters moving on icy platforms without wearing ice-skates looks cool. But it’s also weirdly impractical considering the possibility of slipping, so Ghiaccio wearing ice-skates while manipulating ice is appropriate. In some regards, it’s also good character design because this involves thinking through things. This may not be true for all the JJBA stand users, but it’s something to consider regarding cryokinesis at all.

Maurice Lu

His outfit’s actually based on what Andrew Eldritch (he’s from the band Sisters of Mercy) wore at some point, which is a yellow-apricot long coat worn with a black shirt, black shoes and black pair of trousers. But since he manipulates weather and many of these characters are based on their Jojo counterparts, so he could easily be analogised to Weather Experince. His shirt has a dragon motif, since in Chinese culture dragons are associated with weather and water. His long coat is actually a peacock blue beizi, a kind of Han Chinese long coat by the way, worn with a black shirt, black Han Chinese trousers and black shoes. He’s sort of like the Azure Dragon from the Four Celestial Beasts, so it could be said that Jean-Louis is the Vermillion Bird by then.

The Azure Dragon’s cardinal direction is east (Maurice’s actually from the Philippines, part of the Far East) and its element is wood, so the Vermillion Bird’s cardinal direction is south and its element is fire (while Jean-Louis doesn’t manipulate fire per se, his photokinesis comes close in a way). Logically Nootaikok could be analogised to the Black Turtle because its cardinal direction is North (he lives in Arctic Canada) and it’s associated with both water and the cold, so befittingly Nootaikok manipulates ice himself. Also Maurice is Jemima’s boyfriend and early on, her biggest male friend around. He gets jealous easily whenever Jemima flirts with some other guy, so he often tells her to stop immediately.

That’s not to say there aren’t any Asian guys who get into romantic and marital relationships with non-Asian women, whether if it’s Australian white women going out with Balinese gigolos, African women getting into relationships of sorts with Chinese men and Brazilian prostitutes having a thing for Filipino sailors, these kinds of relationships do happen. Francis Manapul is married to a white woman himself, he even has a family with her. It becomes even less strange why some white women are attracted to Korean men, earlier on in the 21st century this would’ve gone to Indonesian gigolos instead. It was such a phenomenon as to warrant getting mentioned often in the press and also in academia.

Alvin Kwame Boateng

He has the ability to run preternaturally fast (though he’s really just as fast as a moving vehicle), which he uses to cause serious fires as a way to keep criminals from attacking people any further. He’s also based on Usain Bolt, who’s a sprinter, football fanatic and avid gamer. Alvin also enjoys and plays football, and video games in his spare time. He’s particularly fond of puzzle games, football games and adventure games. There are black people who do work in video games, play video games and think about video games. Alvin could easily represent them, since they don’t seem to appear often in fiction. Maybe not as little as I made it out to be.

But it’s not hard to see how representation or the lack of it affects people, like if they’re only exposed to certain portrayals and preconceptions surrounding a certain ethnicity, then it becomes the baseline for what they expect them to be. The prototype for what they expect certain people to be, to the point where others internalise it and think of others as not conforming to their idea of their given identity. Like in the case with African Americans, there’s not much diversity in their portrayal on television until recently. The other black peoples more underrepresented than them, especially outside of African media, would be sub-Saharan Africans. They’re not necessarily this underrepresented.

But they’re much likelier to be kind of detached from who they are in reality, since I feel the prototypical black person in American media is most likely to be African American. Kind of makes sense that some of the most well-known black people in this day and age are more likely to be African American themselves, whether if it’s singer Beyonce Knowles or rapper Jay Z. But this would mean that black Africans are kind of underrepresented on the international stage, maybe not entirely so underrepresented, but not exactly often showing up in American media outside of certain preconceptions and African media. Both Fabrice and Alvin are black Africans working in Canada, though the former is a forensic scientist.

Hamish Gallagher

Because he’s based on Secco whose stand is called Oasis (the Gallagher brothers, his namesake, were part of the band also called Oasis), Hamish also has the ability to liquify solid ground as to cause potent shockwaves and augment his punches as to kill his victims. Despite sharing the same surname as the Gallagher brothers, he looks like a masculinised version of the Danish model Freja Beha Erichsen. His fashion sense is kind of punkish and traditional Goth, like he wears a black suit but with a moon print tie and combat boots. It’s also pretty practical to wear, given he liquifies anything solid. It’s kind of rock and roll, but also practical to wear when standing on liquified ground.

I guess when it comes to character design and clothing, it would be much easier making the character look cool, instead of making it actually practical when it comes to something. Not necessarily always practical in the sense of how it’s often conceptualised and actualised in live action superhero productions, but in the sense of being suited to the task and activity. Characters like Maurice Lu and Hamish Gallagher endure muddy, wet ground so wearing combat boots would be more practical for them, whereas somebody like Jean-Louis who’s given into wrestling would wear wrestling shoes instead. Not so much looking kind of tactical as it tends to be in live action superhero productions, but more in the lines of what somebody else would actually wear to something.

Not to mention he comes from Edinburgh, the same place where Mary Stilfox came from. When it comes to Scottish characters in American comic books, if Rahne Sinclair’s any indication, they’re oftentimes shown to come from somewhere rustic and parochial. Not that there aren’t any Scottish people who don’t live in the countryside anymore, but considering that Scotland actually has cities it’s kind of surprising why there’s not a single Scottish character that I can think of who comes from any Scottish city themself. Unsurprisingly, the most nonstereotypical portrayals of Scottishness come from actual Scots themselves. Especially stories by Irvine Welsh, as to give you an idea of how a Scot would come up with their fictional counterpart.

Cyril Darkholme

He has the ability to manipulate darkness from transducing and absorbing energy (especially electromagnetic energy), though the sort of darkness he makes is only restricted to force fields and solid constructs. That’s really about it though he uses those in very inventive, creative and lethal ways, something like creating a force field inside something to explode it. He also kind of looks like Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys, but with more sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes and serious eyebags that make him look older than he really is. (He’s about the same age or nearly so as many of the characters here, being in their early thirties or late twenties.)

He keeps his hair naturally blond, whereas Jean-Louis dyed his red. It should be noted that the character of Eve Eden, a Charlton (and then DC) heroine going by the stage name of Nightshade, is actually blonde herself but wears a black wig to fight crime or something. Another one would be Rumia from Touhou Project, but never wears any black wigs at all. Cyril would be in good company in this regard, because he’s also another blond-haired darkness manipulator. So there is some precedence for him in both comics and video games, though another one would be Marvel’s Darkstar. Not to mention, he’s basically something of a criminal and a serial killer. His lackey was the late Scott Nygaard, who could only move through shadows.

It’s sort of like how in comic books where darkness manipulation tends to be portrayed as a rather ghostly ability, it may not be true for all characters but it’s not uncommon to have them phase through things and stuff, especially shadows. But since poor old Scott is a mini boss, so it makes sense for both darkness manipulation and shadowmelding to be treated separately. If time manipulation and gravity manipulation are usually treated separately in fiction, so can both shadowmelding and darkness manipulation, which works in Scott’s advantage as he travels through darkness, but Cyril’s useless in the dark. Also Scott tends to be timid and cowering in Cyril’s presence, since the latter tends to be really mean and irritable.

Tommy Heikinnen

Some man of Finnish descent, he has the ability to nullify gravity (which also speeds up time) which he uses to assault his victims using centrifugal projectiles. Sort of like what Lang Rangler does through his stand Jumping Jack Flash, Tommy’s surname is taken from a writer reporting about feral rabbits in Helsinki. His face is a masculinised version of Nina Hagen’s, the latter being a German rock singer. He dresses like what Cinamon Hadley wore in one photograph, Cinamon was also the inspiration for the DC Comics character Death. She comes from the magazine series The Sandman as written by disgraced author Neil Gaiman, she also shares some traits with Terry Pratchett’s version (being the older relative of other characters and also friendly).

Mind you, Terry Pratchett was a good friend of Gaiman’s. But for most of the part, Tommy Heikinnen is practically a separate person from all the real world people who inspired him. Two of them being women, especially appearance wise. It should be noted that both Tommy and Colin are blue-eyed, something neither Nina Hagen nor Liam Howlett are, despite being the inspiration for these two. Also Tommy tends to be blond and usually keeps his hair braided, given there are instances where it’s worn loose and flowing. Conversely speaking, Colin Sallow has the ability to stop time in a localised area (which also increases gravity) and usually keeps his hair loose, but has it tied in a ponytail from time to time. Tommy could be feisty, whilst Colin’s often calm.

As for fictional Canadian characters of Finnish descent, they certainly do exist and already have. I haven’t read any stories featuring them, but this is pure speculation here. So Tommy Heikinnen is in good company here, a Finnish Canadian criminal if there ever was one. He’s also a competent fighter, being kind of well-versed in kickboxing and while he’s not an escapologist like Colin, he’s athletic enough to do physically challenging activities a lot. Like sprinting fast enough to track down his victims, being able to lift something heavy with ease and so on. Colin’s also kind of athletic too, having somewhat decent boxing and fighting skills though he tends to be an escapologist.

Richard Sorm

He has the ability to preternaturally replay events as to solve cases, or so he did at his peak since Jean-Louis is now the main detective of the department. He’s something of a recovering alcoholic, because he’d drink as to calm himself down or make himself happier, however destructive this habit tended to be. He also suffers from depression, basically if Leone Abbacchio and Adam Dalgliesh are one and the same person. I actually wrote an unofficial story involving the latter turning out to be not only depressed, but also negligent towards his family. His wife Emma Lavenham would cheat on him whenever he’s away, yet she often prevents their son Mick from hanging out with his friends for long.

They never really divorced, but often lived apart from each other. You could say that despite AD falling in love with her, they ended up in a rather loveless marriage. Especially later on in life, after begetting Mick together that it’s shocking why Adam never divorced her or vice versa. Richard’s the same way with his own son Ian and his own wife Emma Havisham, except that Ian’s allowed to hang out with Jean-Louis but it makes one wonder if both parents did a bad job at parenting him. Jean-Louis feels more like his father than his actual father ever was and is, going so far to attend hunting expeditions together and stuff. Not to mention, Jean-Louis often saw Richard as his father after his own parents died.

He was his mentor and role model, so his methods of investigating resemble his even if their abilities differ. Much like Adam Dalgliesh, Richard Sorm has a habit of writing. He wrote poems, though they’re often very morbid, having attempted suicide multiple times before. Well, all roads lead to Finding Adam, where Adam Dalgliesh has attempted suicide before and often gets hospitalised for it. A man who seems to be a brilliant detective is actually a trainwreck as a parent and spouse, a real basket case behind closed doors. Richard Sorm is no different, having failed relationships before and stuff. While Richard was still a detective, Jean-Louis was the one who found Jemima trying to solve a case herself, though he had her sent back because she was intruding on his turf.

Trần Khôi Mạnh

A notorious criminal with the ability to create zippers as to not only make an escape but also to conceal weapons and trap people with, basically Bruno Buccellati if he’s a Vietnamese Canadian murderer on the run. When it comes to the way the Asian diaspora are seen in the west, one way is to portray them is to depict them as a model minority. The baseline for what other ethnic minorities should strive for and aspire to be, regardless of the former’s own struggles with racism and the like. The film Turning Red, as directed by the Canadian Domee Shi, depicts a girl who gets into loggerheads with her mother. Both of them are Chinese Canadian, where it turns out that the daughter in question wants to do things her parents disapprove of.

This might not be the only one to delve into cases where Asian westerners do rebel against their parents, another instance would be Simu Liu’s autobiography which got him beaten up by his own parents. Trần would be one such example where what appeared to be desiring a better life has taken on a turn for the worst, because he’s become a terrible serial killer on the run. One who’s even a gangster, well just like Bruno Buccellati. That’s not to say there aren’t any Asian western criminals either in fiction or in real life, but given the model minority stereotype it’s going to be hard thinking of them as actually indulging in criminality, let alone without the dog meat stereotype. One would wonder why nobody gets mad at Germans for poisoning dogs, even if it’s a big problem in German-speaking Europe.

Well, it’s something that plays into the othering of Asians in the western imaginary. Whilst they are upheld as an example to aspire to, they’re not necessarily fully trusted because they’re often treated as opposites of white westerners in some regards. So alien they might as well not be human, apart from white westerners and humanity in general. So to counter this, Maurice Lu actually keeps dogs and likes them. So does Hector Yang, though that’s because he’s legally blind and needs a dog to guide him whenever he’s out and about. Tran also keeps dogs, though he also uses them to attack his victims with. (Well, white boy Cyril does the same thing too.)

Alice Buquid

Another female character based on a male Jojo character, this time it’s Tsurugi Higashikata. Both of them have the same ability, that’s to find ways of unsettling people after folding something by proxy. She’s also the younger cousin of Maurice Lu and works as a seamstress, especially back in the Philippines where she acts as the main breadwinner since her own sister became a widow. She’s also kind of timid towards westerners, finding them rather strange upon arriving in Canada. She did make friends with Jemima and Patricia, though she pretty much prefers the Philippines more. She’s much happier in the latter than the former, mostly due to the racism she receives.

Now onto Asian seamstresses and the like, they do exist in fiction as they do in real life. But I feel outside of Asian media, they might as well be nonexistent in western media. It should be noted that whenever Asians get jobs in western media at all, they oftentimes work in STEM despite the existence of Asian westerners in the garment industry in the real world. At other times, it speaks to a narrow point of reference. Sometimes it’s due to holding onto preconceptions, regardless of the contrary facts being given (confirmation bias). So this is probably why it’s easier to portray Asian characters being into STEM, than say anything else that they’ve been caught dead doing in the real world.

Whether if it’s football like Maya Yoshida, or fashion in the case with one of my aunts, it’s going to be hard naming Asians who are into anything else if you either hold onto preconceptions or know so little about them that it’s going to play out the same for you. Other than that, it would be nice having a seamstress character in video games. This may’ve happened before and particularly in some dressup games, though this is largely hypothetical. But it’s not bad to have another seamstress character in video games, given the potential to explore what’s like to make clothes for a living, how to sew garments and stuff. One could have done an interactive fiction game with a tailor/seamstress in it, to teach people what’s like to make clothes for a living.

John Birdwhistle

The traitor of the department who’s in fact a spy sent to kill people, considering he has the ability to spread a virus that kills its victims instantly. Basically Pannacotta Fugo if Hirohiko Araki went with the idea without feeling bad about it, he even looks and acts like him but older (definitely a real adult). There were a few others leery of him, considering that he’s something of a serial killer who brutally attacks his victims. But the fact that he seemed to be on the side of good makes it easy for others to trust and overlook his faults, however detrimental they may be in the long run and in reality. In the case with characters who infect people to death, they certainly do exist but it’s not always well-thought out or well-done.

One particularly early example would be Infectious Lass from DC Comics, her ability’s potentially really deadly if you consider how infections can risk killing people in due time. Something that could’ve been played up at any point in the actual stories she may’ve appeared in, though I don’t think it’s used often because the consequences are going to be grisly. Even with less censorship restrictions, I feel writers generally shy away from it. If you have a character who could infect somebody to death, there’s no getting around how deadly and disgusting, even horrifying it is. Something like Resident Evil plays up this idea, though it’s something DC Comics may’ve considered but largely shy away from.

Since Resident Evil’s all about surviving a world where people get infected and become terrifying creatures to be defeated, this easily lends itself to macabre atmospheres and sentiments. Not so much with a superheroine that while it could be pulled off, the consequences are hardly ever going to be nice. I suppose making the character a villain would make things better, though making them a good guy may’ve already worked before in video games since Pannacotta Fugo did appear in a video game adaptation of Golden Wind. It wasn’t released internationally because the characters’ stands are often named after bands, albums and musicians, though they’re being renamed these days.

William Raube

The game’s very own Cioccolata and has the same ability (and occupation) as he does, he’s a surgeon gone rogue with the ability to spread a fungus that rapidly decays its victim. He is Mary Stilfox’s first boyfriend who’s incredibly cruel with an obsession with recording his victims’ deaths, no wonder why he’s on the run from the police. Both local and international, considering that Jean-Louis is Canadian. His ethics are very questionable, even early on in his career and the worse they got, the more Mary broke up with him. It’s not that there weren’t any Scottish villains before, one such example would probably be DC’s Doctor Alchemy.

Though having him be a rogue Scottish surgeon is an interesting development, one that makes him an evil parallel to Mary Stilfox in this regard. Or at least someone who ended up choosing the wrong path and ethos in life, someone who was involved in Mary’s life and were friends turned lovers for a while. Until he did sick experiments onto people that she got fed up with him and moved onto somebody else instead, to get back at her he did this to one of her male cousins and had her fuming with serious rage. I kind of feel that given Jojo’s tendency towards foreboding and the macabre, owing to the author’s love of horror, it would be befitting to adapt a chunk of it onto something mystery-related.

If because I feel mashing up Jojo with straight up superheroes kind of feels wrong, because Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure tends to have a rather foreboding atmosphere. One that’s more at home in a Roald Dahl story than it would with DC and Marvel, tonally speaking at times, but then again I read Roald Dahl a lot before. Maybe not wrong all the way, but I feel Jojo doesn’t consistently feel like its stories would belong in DC and Marvel. When I mean by foreboding, there’s often a feeling of looming misfortune and mishap happening at any point in Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. Something bad would happen at any point, something disgusting will happen at any point. Again Hirohiko Araki’s a horror fan and it shows.

Scott Nygard

He can be considered analogous to Pesci in that both of them travel through shadows, in the latter’s case through his stand Black Sabbath. I’m misremembering things but since this is a video game where the main boss is Cyril Darkholme, a character who transduces energy into darkness but is useless in the dark, so it makes sense for his ability to be separate from darkness manipulation proper. It’s like how in fiction it’s common to treat time manipulation as separate from gravity manipulation, even though they’re interrelated in science and reality. So it’s only fair to treat darkness manipulation and shadowmelding as separate, which works to Scott’s advantage as he’s a miniboss.

He also tends to cower in Cyril’s presence, since he often gets mad at him and makes him do things when he threatens him. So he does whatever Cyril tells him to do, though sometimes he does things at will. I feel when it comes to darkness manipulation in fiction, it’s often treated as a rather ghostly ability. Maybe not always consistently so, but in the lines of being kind of eerie and supernatural. Sort of like the thing with DC’s Obsidian, he doesn’t just manipulate darkness but also make himself intangible and stuff. But since darkness manipulation is separate from shadowmelding in this game, so Cyril only makes shadow constructs from transducing energy while Scott goes through shadows.

That’s really what both of them only do respectively, one only makes shadow constructs from transducing electromagnetism and the other only moves through shadows. Sometimes I feel it’s still kind of convenient to treat darkness manipulation as a rather ghostly ability, something that encompasses shadowmelding yet time manipulation’s treated independently of gravity manipulation. Even if both of them are interrelated in reality, or for another matter light manipulation and invisibility from time to time. Considering that Jean-Louis manipulates light himself, he’s shown to make someone, something and himself invisible. In addition to creating blinding glares, lasers and holographic disguises and illusions.

Based on true stories and celebrities

As I said before about Jean-Louis Lumière, Yvette Tientcheu and Margaret Mirren is that all three of them are based on David Bowie, Iman and Angela Bowie respectively, I have listened to some of David Bowie’s songs (most notably Fashion, Cracked Actor and Dodo) as well as being kind of sympathetic to him on some level, especially regarding his fashion sense that it’s a big inspiration to the way I created Jean-Louis, even if he’s not exactly nor entirely like him. Jean-Louis actually enjoys hunting in his spare time, whereas David Robert Jones doesn’t do this at all. Yvette is Cameroonian and the twin sister of Jean-Louis’s colleague, Fabian.

Iman is Somali and has several more siblings, Margaret Mirren is brunette whilst Angela had dark blonde hair in her youth. But many other details correspond to each other, especially in the way Jean-Louis had something of an open marriage with Margaret before dating Yvette. Much like the real life Angela Bowie, Margaret Mirren gets emotional real easily. She’d cry, whine and pout, much like how Mary Finnigan described Angela and why David called her a blowtorch. Though Angela and David were together as a couple and family for some time, they undermined it with their many affairs.

Angela would go on having affairs with several men, just as David did his with multiple women and disturbingly some underaged girls. They even had extramartial affairs with others on a bed they called the Pit, likewise Jean-Louis and Margaret did the same thing despite not calling theirs the Pit. Whilst Jemima Szary is also based on Marianne Faithfull, she didn’t date Jean-Louis when he was married to Margaret despite having some affairs herself. But because Jemima was brought up in a strong Christian household, that she reaped the consequences of her affairs.

Her husband died and eventually had a miscarriage herself, later on she dates Maurice Lù and plans on marrying him. In the case with Jean-Louis Lumière, he had affairs because he can’t stand how mean Margaret was to him. How she’d throw fits and weep a lot whenever he messes up or something, that she’ll scold him day and night for hunting. He would’ve preferred a woman to support him in whatever he does without criticism, which he finally got with Yvette who doesn’t mind it at all and is shown to help him out whenever he has hunting excursions.

His father figure (ever since he became an orphan) and mentor, Richard Šorm, had a wife who had affairs behind his back whenever he drank when depressed. His ex-wife, Gemma Havisham, had a son with him together but would cheat on him whenever he left her for the bar to drink. This is taken from a story where I portrayed P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh and Emma Lavenham doing the same things as they did, not only that but Gemma would even date Jean-Louis’s friend and colleague Akosamesew. This was at a time when Jean-Louis grew to resent Margaret so much for her having an affair that he eventually divorced her.

Later on, Richard would do the same thing. Except that he never got a new wife or girlfriend, he’s content with being a single father and he’s doing his best to mend ties with his newly legal age son. Both of them have forgiven Akosamesew since that moment happened, though Richard’s son is kind of leery of him for what he did to his mother. With the exception of that Adam Dalgliesh story that I wrote, Jean-Louis’s relationships with Margaret and Yvette largely mirrors that of David Bowie’s own with Angela Barnett and Iman. Jean-Louis may not have affairs with teenaged girls, but most of it resembles that of Bowie’s.

Say it in broken English

Though Jemima Szary is based on both Antonia Fraser’s Jemima Shore (who she got the name from) and Nancy Drew, she’s also based on Marianne Faithfull who is still alive and kicking. She is a musician who debuted in the 1960s and while she dated Mick Jagger, she also cheated on him by dating Keith Richards. I remember reading somewhere in one of her autobiographies that she didn’t just desire people, she was desired by other people too. Not just that but she also said that she grew up in a household where her own immediate relatives never drove cars, got teased or mocked for this in school and had an aristocrat for a grandmother or something like that.

So Jemima Szary also grew up in a household where her own father never drove a car, so she either took the bus or walked her way home. Which helps because she has an uncannily good sense of direction, that’s without relying on maps and GPS devices to do it. Her own maternal grandmother and aunt (as her own mother died) were members of the British gentry, though she’s particularly close to her father’s childless sister growing up. She got mocked in school for being one of the few pupils who didn’t have their own car, despite being better than most of them in looking for directions without even trying. By the way, her own maternal relatives are part of the Blount family, an actual British gentry family but it’s fictionalised here.

Her side of that family moved to Canada in search of greener pastures or something like that, her mother met her father while studying whales in the Atlantic. Her mum was something of a marine biologist, so Jemima looked up to her and wanted to become one herself but got sidetracked into doing investigative journalism instead. Her own father worked in the Canadian Navy, his name would be Bonifacy Szary and he’s the son of Polish immigrants. Well, Marianne Faithfull is the scion of continental European immigrants by the way somewhere in her family tree. Some of the parallels aren’t precise, but present on some level to point to the source.

Not to mention Jemima Szary dated both Mick Hunter and Keith Reynolds at the same time, the latter even had a wife (typical Jemima Shore fashion). She was even engaged to an art director, whom she was going to marry. By the time Jemima got a miscarriage, she had to stop dating other men for a time being until she met and began dating Maurice Lu later in life. Let’s not also forget that both men were suspects, though she got carried away by those two so she ended up dating them.

Also she kind of resembles Marianne Faithfull physically as well, though the strawberry blonde hair reveals her basis in both Nancy Drew and her namesake, Jemima Shore.

She’s an angel of the night

Margaret Mirren is pretty much based on Mary Angela Barnett, David Bowie’s still-living ex-wife and mother to his son Duncan Jones, though with darker hair and having moved on from Jean-Louis Lumiere (the David Bowie analogue of the game) with a butch lesbian lover at this point. But for a time being when both of them were in their early to mid-twenties, they were engaged and have considered marrying at some point. The only problem is that neither of them were truly committed to one another as they had an open relationship at the time, with Jean-Louis hooking up with married women and Margaret finding lovers of any gender.

Margaret Mirren is bisexual with a preference for blonds, she got attracted to Jean-Louis because he had blond hair at the time (he still has blond hair, but dyes it red these days). This is also the same reason why she tried to seduce Jemima Szary, who is no stranger to premarital (and extramarital) sex herself when it comes to American vigilantes, but she outright refused this and left before it ever comes to fruition the way Maggy would’ve seen it happen. These days Jemima Szary has stopped hooking up with random men after facing consequences and is committed to only one man, Maurice Lu. Likewise Jean-Louis has experienced the same and is devoted to only one woman, Yvette Tientcheu.

Margaret’s current lover and wife is the very butch (and blonde) Cate Hemingway, their son Duncan is brought about through artificial insemination. Well it’s another David Bowie reference alright, though one wonders if a Lexie Zahra would come about. David Bowie himself went from being married to Angela Barnett, though not without the frequent cheating, to being married and devoted to Iman. It’s not hard to see the parallels between Jean-Louis Lumiere and David Bowie, since the former looks like the latter during his Ziggy Stardust days. Even if Jean-Louis isn’t exactly like Bowie in other regards, given one of his hobbies involves hunting, but enough to see where the inspiration’s coming from.

The Manhattan Men Members (and additional characters)

As I said before, all of them are based on the Backstreet Boys. Both their actual selves and their fictionalised presentations in The Backstreet Project, even if it’s not an exacting copy the similarities are there for those who know.

Howard Docherty

Born to a Puerto Rican mother and a Scots-Irish father (his ancestors came from Antrim), Howard Docherty has the ability to create and manipulate illusions which he uses to make an escape and distract people with. But because he’s also classically trained in music that later on in his vigilante career, he decided to focus on music more and became a very successful one at that. He has many successful concerts and tours over the years, that for other people it’s hard to believe that he was once one of America’s premier vigilantes.

No wonder why The Manhattan Men continued as a foursome or quartet, Howard realised that his power can accompany his singing career and it worked the way he wanted. At this point he’s finishing the North American tour of his career, having sang in Toronto, Ontario and will eventually perform in Montreal, Quebec. Jemima Szary knows him secondhand because her friend, Patricia Kyenge, is into him since she was a teenager. Unfortunately as she accompanied her dear friend, she got distracted by his ability to cast illusions that she found herself really immersed in it despite trying to write a report on one of his colleagues’ crimes.

She had to put herself together again upon realising that Howard is guarding a terrible secret from her, the one that she feels might ruin the Manhattan Men’s reputation regarding one member’s habit of killing women. So it was something that she had to uncover, well with the police’s help, that there must be something wrong with the Manhattan Men that Howard tried his hardest not to disclose. Unsurprisingly, people like Akosamesew Kanewopasikot and John Zelensky had to interrogate him, with the feeling that he’s hiding one member’s secret from the whole world even if the clues are there for others to see and uncover.

To further enhance his illusion casting, he regularly takes psychedelic or entheogenic drugs like DMT, LSA, peyote, psilocybe mushrooms and nutmeg. To any cartoonist and game illustrator who’re going to depict any comic or artwork featuring him at all, take cues from artists who actually partook in tripping on any of these hallucinogens. You could get an idea of how hallucinogenic the Legion of Super-Heroes actually were, especially in the 1960s which would’ve coincided directly with the rise of the hippie movement. One of them is Princess Projectra, who even has the same ability as he does.

Michael ‘Mick’ Carmen

Trained in ninjutsu, assassination and kendo Michael Carmen is a formidable swordsman and the team’s go-for hitman when dispatching criminals, unfortunately he’s been suspected of raping and killing women over the years. His latest victim is none other than his own wife, since he doesn’t want his affair with a younger woman to be found out. It was something Jemima Szary knew, judging from the smell and what else with others eventually confirming her suspicions. She knew his wife was probably dead due to the smell, even if she sometimes doubted it herself. But the fact that she assumed there was a corpse somewhere had her conclude that Mick could’ve killed his wife.

He was hardly with his wife over the past few days since she investigated it, she wanted to know what happened to her and no matter how hard Mick lied to her, she knew his wife was probably dead due to the smell and her being missing for a few days. With the help of the Canadian super police, especially with Jean-Louis Lumiere finding her corpse in a box, that her suspicions were confirmed. They’d eventually arrest him for killing his wife, something he tried very hard to hide. But even when he tried, there’s little he can do about it when Jean-Louis intervened and caught him in the act. Michael Carmen really is a notorious murderer of women.

He murdered an autistic woman by stabbing her to death, the day she accused him of raping her when she was younger and when she tried to file a lawsuit against him. This is what prompted Jemima’s investigations of him, his whereabouts and his victims as well as finding ways of stopping him. Both she and Patricia could’ve been victims if it weren’t for the Canadian police’s interventions, good thing they got saved in time just so they can do the work. The time Michael threatened to stab her with a sword, her boyfriend Maurice Lu got her out in time. He and his team had to personally confront him, with Hector Yang raising the temperature to the point where Michael got a serious nosebleed.

(He also did this to both his sword and James McQueen’s guns.)

David Richardson

He’s as strong as a gorilla just as Alvin Kwame Boateng’s as fast as a car, he’s another one of the Manhattan Men and the one who helps Mick Carmen hide any evidence of the victims he’s killed. But that would mean he’s just as responsible for them as he is, especially when it comes to his habit of destroying not just physical evidence of the crime but also the victims themselves. Get this: he rips them in half and pieces. He also does this to living people whenever they question what both he and Mick are doing, which isn’t good and something that both Patricia and Jemima were spared from in time.

His cousin is Jack North, a man with the ability to generate balls out of nowhere, both of them have been close since childhood and both have an equally bad habit of defending Mick Carmen from any detective and police officer wary of his habits, if because they enable him themselves to varying degrees. From the outset, he seems like a loving father to two sons. But given his habit of using super-strength to destroy victims as a way to minimise any evidence of Mick killing them, that it’s not just that he’s his henchman but that the Manhattan Men don’t want any dark secrets to be found. They have this public image that makes everybody trust them a lot.

Regardless of the bad things they’ve been doing behind the scenes, since they know or feel might ruin their public image and relationship with the public if it gets revealed at all. Pardon if this is going to offend any lifelong Backstreet Boys fan but if somebody in that band were to get outed for beating up his wife a lot after his affair’s been discovered, then you should really know who the Manhattan Men were really based on. That and another one being outed for sex trafficking into porn and prostitution, something that will really tarnish the band’s public image when this comes out along with martial abuse.

James McQueen

The group’s resident marksman who has a preference for pistols and revolvers, he even kind of dresses like a cowboy himself to top it all off. He has two daughters and had been divorced from his wife over the past few weeks, like Mick he also hides a very dark secret that clashes with the team’s public image. He actually traffics women into prostitution rings, pornographic videos and sexual slavery, which goes against his team’s popularity with women. Which is really about the same as Mick’s habit of killing any woman who accuses him of rape, as if the team’s been hiding serious misogynists in its ranks.

That’s not to say there aren’t any characters who don’t use firearms, but in Canada those who do tend to be criminals like Zachariah Campbell. It can also serve as a dig at America’s love of guns, not that there aren’t any other nationalities that use firearms. But Americans have a habit of glorifying and even deifying firearms in a way other nationalities don’t do to the same extent, which gives you an idea of how ridiculous they come across to other people. That Americans are secretly in love with outlaw heroes is one possible reason why the superhero genre began in the United States, even if antecedents exist elsewhere.

Especially when it comes to the glorification and mythologisation of vigilantes as superhuman figures, sometimes literally so that they get to have preternatural abilities says a lot about how they’ve embraced vigilantes in a way both European countries and western British Commonwealth countries don’t get to. That the Manhattan Men house a gun-toting cowboy-dressing vigilante says a lot about how other nationalities view Americans and American culture as at times, since I’m a Filipina and I really don’t get the American love for guns.

Jack North

He has the ability to generate balls from his hands and has aspirations of becoming a basketball player, but he got sidetracked into a life of vigilantism when he joined the Manhattan Men. He has very clever ways of using balls, including hitting balls with the aim of taking advantage of people’s weak spots and to distract them with. He’s done this to distract people from finding out Mick Carmen’s murder spree, because if his secret were revealed to many people it would tarnish the group’s female-friendly image. Given John Zelensky’s electrical telepathy and Akosamesew’s body-reading skills, they found out a way to foil his plans and interrogate him.

Despite his outspoken faith in God, he and his colleagues have the audacity to dress up as demons for somebody’s birthday party. As he’s based on Brian Littrell, though it’s not obvious based on the name, I have this foreboding premonition that the Backstreet Boys will show up as demons in a concert in Mexico. Quite contrary to Brian’s outspoken Christianity, one would only wonder where his deepest loyalty lies speaking as a Christian. It would be super-disappointing if he himself has the audacity to appear as a demon onstage next month, because that would mean he’s not loyal to God and the Backstreet Boys will face more scandals in the coming weeks.

Whether if one member gets outed for cheating on his wife and then beating her up a lot or another for sex trafficking, that will really ruin the Backstreet Boys’ public image despite some fans’ possible attempts at denying this. What one reaps is what one sows, so it is true for Brian Littrell’s inability to stop his fans from making an idol out of his band. Not to mention it would be shocking for him and his band to realise that they are the inspiration behind this two-faced vigilante group hiding a group member’s misogynistic murderous secret, something that will ruin its public image if revealed at all.

Some additional characters who are part of the police force and more female characters in general:

Rose Marie Gaultier

Her overall appearance is inspired by a young Kate Bush as she appeared in the music video ‘Wuthering Heights’, she has the ability to talk to the dead which she uses to investigate murder cases a lot. She tends to be rather sarcastic and biting, at other times very hot-tempered, but she’s not without a tender heart towards animals. She’s even adopted rez dogs and stray cats before, though she’s not particularly fond of children in any way. This character kind of floated in my head before, but I had to bring her out since I feel the superhero police force of the game’s too much of a sausage fest.

So I have to add more female members to it, with Rose with one of the first to be brought up. Actually there were two female members of the police force in some way, most notably Christina Skroce and Erin Tohlakwang, but a third one’s not that bad given there were far too many men in the earlier post. She’s also kind of harsh to some of her male colleagues, most especially somebody like Jean-Louis whom she sometimes sees as a rival. Whereas Erin has something of a crush on him, Rose can’t stand him given his habit of hunting animals. (His attitude to Jemima Szary tends to be brotherly.)

She knows some unarmed combat herself, maybe not to the level that both Jean-Louis and Akosamesew enjoy, but enough to keep up with them as much as she can. Realising that she’s not always the best at unarmed combat, she will do anything to get better at it even if this involves asking help from them. She’s on good terms with Jemima Szary, often offering her advice when it comes to investigating crime scenes as the latter works as an investigative journalist herself. She’s not that close to Erin but she does help out from time to time, doing the same as she does with Jemima.

Macy Thaws

The newest recruit to the police force, she’s in her late teens/early twenties. She has the ability to generate and manipulate strings, which she uses in very creative and inventive ways. She even dates the Chinese-Canadian Andrew Sui, so both of them are two more Jojo references. I could bring her up more often if the company I’ll be working for will bring up a Jemima-Szary centric game, but she could have her use and role beforehand. As I said, she has a way with strings that she uses to trap criminals with and protect the innocent. She even uses them to retrieve belongings, as a way to further investigate them.

Macy Thaws isn’t just based on Jolyne Kujo in terms of powers, but also resembles her sartorially as well. She has a marine biologist for a father and she looks up to Jemima Szary as an older sister figure because of that and Jemima took up biology in university, so it’s easy for her to befriend her and they often talk about ocean animals together. She tends to be something of an outsider in school, given she doesn’t share her classmates’ interests and she tends to befriend older people more. I also think the way she’s written and portrayed would make her something of a role model to young black women.

When you think about it this way, while there are black women in medicine and law enforcement they don’t seem to show up often in fiction. Most likely due to the criminal stereotype, where characters like Monica Rambeau (who’s into law enforcement herself) and Marcy from Jumpstart are all the more remarkable in the comics world. The latter even works in healthcare, any black woman aspiring to work in medicine would see herself in her as well as Patricia Kyenge. Macy Thaws would be relatable to any black woman who don’t fit in easily, since there’s almost no other character like her in fiction.

Andrew Sui

Macy Thaws’s boyfriend who’s a repairman and has the ability to restructure things from the inside out, going so far to change it into something else when doing so. Yep, another Jojo reference. But he uses Diver Down’s powers for repairing and changing something, so he’s another example of a superpowered civilian since he’s a character type we don’t see often in fiction. It’s like how in the world of superhero comics where any character who gains superpowers automatically becomes either a do-gooder or a criminal, but not somebody who channels their powers in something else altogether.

It could be something low-key like repair work in his case, but we also don’t see that much working-class Asian-Western characters that often in fiction. While working-class Asian characters do exist in fiction, they don’t exist outside of Asian fictions and media in detectable numbers. It’s due to the model minority stereotype where the East Asian diaspora in the west is supposed to be economically successful enough to integrate into western society, despite the disparities that exist between each ethnicity. In Andrew’s case, he has a power convenient for repair work.

Some superpowered characters really aren’t cut out for either superheroics or a life of crime, so they could always parlay their abilities into something else altogether. Sort of like how Legion of Super-Heroes have or perhaps had Yera, a shapeshifter who works as an actress. It’s really not that bad an ability since she’ll always use it to either impersonate well-known figures (she did this to Shrinking Violet, but against her will) or literally become somebody else altogether, she’s also a character we don’t see often in the world of superhero fiction due to the genre conventions.

Beatrice Lumiere

Jean-Louis’s cousin, who’s something of a sister to him, since they were raised together at times and have grown much closer since the passing of both his parents. She’s bipolar and pretty much jobless for a long time, she studied linguistics before but due to stress and the like that she has slid into a more vulnerable situation. Admittedly I could be describing one of my siblings, so Beatrice is based on her in a way due to my experiences with the latter. She even accused him of rape before, which caused him to blast something into oblivion out of anger.

Though he does his best to be kind to her, he’s also uneasy around her especially whenever she mentions him as she rambles on and on. She still lives with her father (and his uncle), Gaston Lumiere, whereas Jean-Louis has the decency to live in the suburbs to relax and hunt when he feels like it. It also helps that this suburb’s right next to the woods, enough for him to carry out his hunting trips with his friend Akosamesew when he has the time to. As Jean-Louis lived with Gaston in his late teens and early twenties when he got orphaned, he spent a lot of time with her in urban Quebec.

This meant that by the time he moved back into the suburbs, he’d wake up early to get to work as soon as possible. Beatrice briefly had a job as a translator and worked for a publisher before on translating some stories, but her mental health got the better of her and she has been jobless ever since. Jean-Louis would do anything to make her work as much as she can, though who knows if she’s really ever going to work again due to the severity of her illness. She’s also been on conservatorship ever since, especially under the thumb of her father that Jean-Louis will do anything to make her more independent.

Due to his own experience with Beatrice and that both of them have blond hair, so Jean-Louis often sees Jemima in a more sibling like manner. Jemima is stronger than her, but he tends to treat her as if she’s his sister or something.

Our Dear Officers

John Zelensky

Don’t blame me that I gave him the surname of Ukraine’s current president (this will change in the future), but that this guy is pretty much a Goth-punk with electric powers. He does moonlight as a keyboardist for a certain band from time to time, but since Jean-Louis thinks this job doesn’t pay much so he usually works as a police officer instead. (All the superheroes in this game are police officers or actually involved in law enforcement so.) It sounds strange to give a Goth-punk musician electrical powers but then again Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures has done something similar before, though there is a good precedent for the sort of character he is.

Let’s not also forget that there seems to be an overabundance of magical Goth characters and if you believe Kai Decadence, an overabundance of Goths who don’t really listen to Goth music in any way. That and an overabundance of female Goth characters, at least in animation as what he pointed out. So John Zelensky’s an antidote to this in some ways: he’s not magical in any way, he actually listens to Goth and punk music and plays Goth music and he’s a guy. One other similarity he has with Arrow’s Felicity Smoak is that both of them are Jewish, but in John Zelensky’s case he actually listens to Goth and punk music in addition to dressing the part.

One would only wonder if Arrow writers listen to this sort of music and if they don’t, then their attempts at making Felicity Smoak quirky and unique (the whole not like other girls part) seem like a superficial attempt at making somebody who isn’t mainstream in any other way. In the sense that she just dresses the part but doesn’t really listen to alternative music, let alone Goth-punk music that it’s clear she’s written by somebody who was outside of the subculture or at least never really listened to that kind of music growing up. Trust me, I actually listened to Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees as a kid. Then I got into Ausgang, Sisters of Mercy and Skeletal Family.

Then we get to the part that John Zelensky is a Jewish punk rocker, no different from the likes of the late Joey Ramone of the Ramones. The latter’s real name is Jeffry Hyman and was the tallest of the Ramones, he fronted the band Sniper and there’s some surviving footage of this band somewhere online. Then we get to Perry Farrell, frontman of Jane’s Addiction and he himself used to front a Goth band called Psicom or something. So there you have it, John Zelensky is a Jew the same way Perry Farrell is and Joey Ramone was. Not to mention, John Zelensky’s a raging vegan and animal rights activist who sometimes gets into fights with Jean-Louis Lumiere.

While there’s something of a Goth vegan character somewhere in Nickelodeon, otherwise known as Sam Manson from Danny Phantom, but it would be nicer still to have a Goth vegan character who actually listens to Goth and punk music. Well it does prove my point that these kinds of characters are made by outsiders to such subcultures, like they go headfirst into the fashion and not so much with the music these people listen to. Admittedly, this isn’t always the case as there are those who dress normally who actually listen to this kind of music. But it does give you an idea of the way Goth characters are portrayed and why they’re surprisingly not into this kind of music.

Akosamesew Kanewopasikot

One character who’s based on DC’s Cassandra Cain, but in the sense how her inability to talk could’ve been recontextualised or reimagined to be being unable to talk in a non-western language, if because said language has been stigmatised and forbidden by racist people like say her own father. In Akosamesew’s case, it’s got to do that he got kidnapped and brainwashed into doing something and part of it has to do with somebody making him not speak and use Cree (his mother tongue) in any way he likes. So he ended up internalising it as he got older, that’s why he struggles to speak Cree fluently. At this point in his life, he’s doing his best to get better at it. He’s not there yet but he does everything and anything to get better at it, in addition to learning Cree he’s learning Blackfoot (which is his mother’s language by the way). Acculturation really does a number when you’ve been divorced from it at a young and malleable age, no wonder why he got brainwashed in his formative years and why he’s trying to do his best to undo it.

To go a little further with the similarities between him and Cass Cain, he used to wear a gimp mask to work when he first started training to become a police officer/superhero. It didn’t go as expected and ended up crying for a single hour, only to be comforted by his mother, friend and father. I suspect the gimp mask is there to reinforce how Cass Cain is supposed to be quiet, even if there are other quiet characters who don’t wear full-masks and very talkative characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool who do. It’s not that she can’t be quiet but it seems really degrading to make a quiet character like her wear a gimp mask, like as if they can’t trust readers to focus on her facial expressions to do the job.

It is a really strange design choice of the cartoonists when they first created her or something, given there are other quiet characters who don’t wear masks like that. If you have a mask that fully obscures her eyesight, then it makes it harder for her to read human body language if she’s wearing something that complicates it. It’s not a well-thought out character design from a practical standpoint where her biggest skill is reading body language, but she’s wearing something that obfuscates it. As a result, Akosamesew doesn’t wear a mask because he got humiliated from wearing it and that he needn’t a gimp mask because it’s unnecessary and unhelpful for his ability to read body language.

It also doesn’t help him breathe comfortably either, so it’s something that got excised immediately in his career. He’s extremely good at reading body language, having been trained at this when he was younger (and brainwashed). So he’s good at understanding how other people feel, that’s other than John Zelensky who reads minds (or brains giving off electrical signals or something). Whenever Nootaikok Alakannuark starts loosing his cool, he’s the first to find ways to make him calm down so they talk it out together. He’s generally not that judgemental, mostly due to his excellent ability to read body language. No wonder why he’s so polite. That and being an excellent martial artist (okichitaw and savate, among others).

Nootaikok Alakannuark

Another character based on his Jojo counterpart, Ghiaccio, right down to both his powers and personality. Just as Ghiaccio gets mad at people for misusing words, especially whenever it pertains to the Italian language, Nootaikok loses his temper whenever people mishandle the Inuit language and especially Jemima Szary. She has a habit of mispronouncing Inuktitut words, so Nootaikok endlessly berates her for this. He also loses his temper whenever people insult his culture, insult him anytime and every time and so on and so forth, like he takes things too personally or something.

He may not wear a helmet like what Ghiaccio does with his stand White Album, but he does have a habit of wearing skates when moving on ice. That’s something many superhero cryokinetic characters don’t do and wear, for all their habit of making themselves move on ice they never wear the very shoes needed for them to move easily on ice and at any rate when they don’t they could easily slip. Nootaikok always wears retractable ice skates, so that he can easily alternate between walking on ice and walking on land. Not to mention he swears those Inuit visors or something that keeps ice from blinding him.

Inuit superheroes aren’t anything new in fiction, the earliest surviving example would be Nelvana. Then there comes Canadian television’s Super Shamu, complete with the Superman lines. Then there’s another one over at Marvel, as created by Jeff Lemire who also created Equinox over at DC Comics though she is Cree. So in here we have both a Cree police officer and an Inuk one but the latter has a really bad temper, despite what his icy power would suggest. Like I said before, he’s based on a Jojo character who acts a lot like him. At other times it would be wiser to give Nootaikok to an Inuk writer and Akosamesew to a Cree writer, as they have the lived cultural experiences to bring these out in them in a way somebody outside their cultural backgrounds wouldn’t. DC and Marvel are getting better at this.

So much so that Marvel had to hire black writers to write Riri Williams stories, it’s wiser and better this way than if she was written by white people because I feel for most of them no matter how sympathetic they are they didn’t grow up with that culture. So it would be just as wise to let an Inuk write cowrite a story featuring him as well, that’s something to consider given the controversy over the new live action Avatar series not casting Inuk actors to play Inuk-coded characters (the waterbenders). Because the waterbenders are based on the Inuit, it would’ve been wiser to have Inuit writers and actors onboard to get it right.

Anyways, good non-stereotypical Inuk representation is nice and nicer still if you have an Inuk character who feels the need or desire to vent out his frustrations over non-Inuit people misunderstanding and misconstruing things, at least he could act as representation for many Inuit people to relate to his feelings. Not to mention he does know how to hunt, since his father used to hunt and sell seal meat to support the family. However he got mad at Jean-Louis for not looking after his dog after it killed the seal he was going to eat, as expected since he really does have a hot temper despite his icy power.

Jean-Louis Lumiere

Our dear detective and the one who’s based on David Bowie when it comes to appearance, especially during his Ziggy Stardust days, and to an extent, his personality and personal life. He’s not an exacting copy of David Bowie, given Jean-Louis is given to hunting, weightlifting and playing football/soccer in his spare time. Things the late David Bowie never did, as far as I know about him. But he does have some things in common with him, such as a love of reading books and fashion, owing to his late mother being a seamstress. Actually both his parents died in a car crash when he was in his late teens/early twenties, so he spent part of his time by himself and part of his time staying in his uncle’s house.

There he grew close to his cousin, as if she became more like a sister to him. Of course, the real elephant in the room has everything to do with his appearance. Much like Bowie himself when he was younger Jean-Louis is a natural blond who not only got a haircut like Bowie (it’s really the Bowie mullet), but also got it dyed red with the help of henna and that’s how he’s presented in the game. It’s only when he was a late teenager that you realise he’s a natural blond all along, though here he resembles a younger Bjorn Andresen. This man was made famous by the film ‘Death in Venice’ and experienced fame in Japan, but came to withdraw from the spotlight as he got older. Until recently when he appeared again in Midsommar.

Not to mention, his usual superhero outfit is a sleeved wrestling leotard resembling Bowie’s own ‘woodland creatures’ leotard but where the crescents and stars replace animals. With regards to his skills and abilities, he has the superhuman ability to manipulate light. He uses this to render himself invisible, save for his eyes to keep himself from going blind. He can also render something invisible to sneak on his suspects and to know what’s going on when he investigates, create lasers to destroy things and cause fires with and create glares to not only light the way for himself and others and find clues but also to blind criminals with.

If going invisible risks blindness, then he can create holographic mirages instead. He not only does this to keep himself from getting detected by others, but also play tricks on John Zelensky from time to time. He’s not only good at detection and tracking, but also stealth as a way to sneak on his suspects with. As a fighter, he’s primarily skilled in wrestling and especially Greco-Roman wrestling. That’s the sport and martial art he was trained in and enjoyed doing so when he was younger, but due to the influence of his colleague and best friend since high school (Akosamesew Kanewopasikot) he also got into savate.

He has a black dog named Minuit, a dog that actually came from a reservation, which he often takes to hunting expeditions together. Fabrice Tientcheu’s father, Jules, isn’t just afraid of dogs he also dislikes them a lot that Jean-Louis told him to get lost when he said that. This is likely why Fabrice told him that he has cats to hunt rats, if because his father doesn’t like dogs much due to said phobia. I remember reading this article on Camerounweb that there’s this Cameroonian musician who said that he’s afraid of dogs, there’s another one and an academic study at that where some Cameroonians really don’t like dogs for whatever reason. So Jules isn’t alone in here.

Despite this, he dearly loves Fabrice’s sister Yvette and is currently dating her. He’s also in good terms with Maurice Lu and Fabrice, but clashes with John Zelensky at times due to the latter’s veganism and animal rights stance. But the colleague he’s closest to and the one who’s truly his best friend is Akosamesew Kanewopasikot, whom they’ve known each other since high school. It was Akosamesew who gave him his dog, because he wanted a dog for hunting so he got one from a Cree reservation that Akosamesew grew up in. Jean-Louis also learnt savate from him, as I said before but that’s because the latter is based on Cassandra Cain. I’ll expound on him later on but for those who know her (at least the comics version of her), she’s something of a prodigy in martial arts since because her best friend is Stephanie Brown so her influence would’ve rubbed off on her. People pick up things from others they’re close to in one way or another.

So it’s logical that from being best friends with him that he not only learnt savate from him, but also new hunting techniques since both of them share this hobby together. Because Akosamesew was forbidden to speak Cree as a kid when he got kidnapped and brainwashed, he spent much of his time learning French from him. Admittedly Akosamesew’s struggles are best left to a Cree writer, since I’m not Cree and neither do I learn Cree myself. But it’s not hard to see where I’m at, because people learn something from somebody they’re close to in one way or another. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously or incidentally.

Maurice Lu

A Chinese-Filipino immigrant working for the police department with the ability to manipulate weather phenomena, he tends to wear a teal beizi (a kind of Chinese outerwear or coat) with a black shirt that has a dragon motif (as dragons are linked to water and the weather in Chinese thought) and tight ku trousers. Yes he does wear hanfu or the original folk clothing as worn by the Han Chinese before the Manchu took over China, this is the clothing you see in earlier Chinese art and is recently revived and worn in substantial numbers enough to sustain and justify an industry with. The way hanfu cut is different, in which there are front and back seams and where the sleeves are cut midway rather than around the armholes.

I actually came up with characters similar to Jean-Louis and Maurice before in 2016, sometime after David Bowie died so these two are the earliest characters to be created. Maurice Lu was also going to be a pure Chinese aristocrat and was going to be known as Mauricio Locsin too, so he got renamed the more I started refining my idea of him. Just like Jean-Louis, he plays football and lifts weights in his spare time. However, he’s highly skilled in boxing and is a fairly competent combatant in his own right. He also shares Jemima Szary’s interest in cats and dogs, so this is where they started a relationship together. She’s open-minded enough to show an interest in Filipino and Chinese cuisine, the more she got exposed to his culture and people.

The closest real life equivalent to this, as this game or story takes place in Canada, would be between Francis Manapul and his wife. He’s even Filipino himself, so Maurice Lu’s in good company with a real life person. Another example that I can think of is that Joni Tada is married to a Japanese-American, I don’t know his name but she evidently got the surname from upon marriage. I was interested in Balinese gigolos before, where Australian and European women would go to Bali, Indonesia for romance (to put it politely). That and Chinese men leaving out of wedlock children in Uganda and Ghana, or Filipino sailors having dalliances with Brazilian prostitutes suggest that East Asian men are far from sexless.

Another reason why Jemima grew very romantically attracted to him and vice versa isn’t just a shared interest in animals, but that Jemima’s own father was involved in the Canadian navy. She recalls having a dog named Teddy Bear and seeing her father care for the ship cats, ship cats were a thing before strangely enough. Maurice Lu’s uncle was a sailor who fed the ship cat every now and then, so they have enough common ground and love for each other enough for a relationship to develop. That he tends to be really supportive and protective of her is how much she loves her a lot, he’s always the first to rescue her in time.

He’s also the first to defend her from would-be attackers, so he’ll do anything to be there for her when she’s at her most vulnerable. He got incenced when Jean-Louis went incognito into a hotel as ‘Jeremiah Shore’, as if he’s mocking his girlfriend and also gives away the character she’s based on—Jemima Shore. As for his family background, Maurice Lu is the son of a Chinese emigre and a Filipina mother. His cousins are Gabriele and Alice Buquid, as I have mentioned before. Their father is his uncle, so it could be said that they are his maternal cousins. He tends to support them and most especially Gabriele as she lost her husband, so he often sends balikbayan boxes when he does. Despite differences, he’s on good terms with Jean-Louis and close to Akosamesew and Fabrice.

Fabrice Tientcheu

A police officer with the ability to soften items as to render them elastic enough to cause a backlash, he’s also based on a Jojo character and this time it’s Trish Una. To the extent that he wears maths themed clothing and has a cat named David because her stand, Spice Girl, is based on cats and one of the Spice Girls married David Beckham. He tends to keep cats because his father is deathly afraid of dogs, so he often makes them hunt rats instead where Jean-Louis suggested to him a dog. There are Africans who actually keep and own cats for hunting vermin and also as pets, it would be strange to westerners due to their own expectations of them.

But if you read up on African media and the like pertaining to cats, African cat owners do exist and sometimes they exist in substantial numbers enough to be kind of unremarkable. Even if not all Africans like cats, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any African cat lovers and owners. I’m part of a Facebook group for Kenyan cat owners, so you should understand where I’m coming from. There are African academic studies that mention Africans owning cats, including Cameroon where he comes from, so this should give you an idea of the person who he is. There was also a report or interview on Camerounweb about a Cameroonian celebrity who’s afraid of dogs.

There’s another Cameroonian study but taken in the 1990s where it mentions Cameroonians who don’t even like dogs for whatever reason, so it could be said that not all Africans like dogs even if there are African dog owners. But that would mean Africans are people like everybody else, so their attitudes to cats and dogs would vary as well. In this context, Fabrice’s father distrusting or fearing dogs isn’t unique to him as it’s shared by some real-life Cameroonians as well. Sometimes the mistrust is due to superstition, even if not all Cameroonians share this either. But that would mean Cameroonian and to an extent, African attitudes to dogs are more diverse than one realises. Depending on the religion, country, community and lastly the individual, while the 1990s study didn’t mention ethnicity but it did show that Cameroonian attitudes to and uses for dogs are pretty diverse.

Despite this, Jean-Louis does value him well. He’s a reliable forensic chemist and police officer who always attends to any case that’s been given to him, he often strives to do the right thing and follow what people tell him to do. That’s why he’s very well-liked and trusted by everybody in the police department, though he’s only human so he sometimes messes up. He likes and dates Patricia Kyenge that he’ll do anything to protect and defend her from people who’ll harm her, he’s always the first to rescue her when she’s in peril. He also comforts her whenever she cries and she also tends to his wounds and everybody else’s, given her background in nursing and her restorative power.

They even bond together over cats since Patricia understands his father’s distrust of dogs, due to that one of her cousins got attacked by a dog before. So it’s unsurprisingly that even if she has/had dogs in Kinshasa, Congo she had to hide them to avoid traumatising them, even though her own father has dogs to hunt game animals with and cats for hunting snakes and rats per this study on Basolongo people. He’s also very good friends with Maurice Lu, Jemima Szary, Alvin Boateng and John Zelensky, while he only has a business like relationship with Jean-Louis Lumiere. With Maurice, they bond together over football. He also spends his time stargazing.

Hector Yang

He initially had the power over volcanism, but since that would be too destructive so I settled with making him store heat in objects and the like instead. That’s also a Jojo reference, particularly Jobin Higashikata. Both of them have the ability to not only store heat, but also raise temperatures enough to destroy or harm something and somebody. This makes him a very valuable police officer when taking down criminals, for instance he doesn’t just confiscate weapons but also heats them up that they become too hot to handle. He did this to not only Zachariah Campbell, but also to both Mick Carmen and James McQueen. No wonder why he’s well-respected by his peers.

He also has albinism but it’s not just that he’s unusually pale for an Asian, he also has vision problems and tends to wear glasses when he has to read something. To keep him from being really desexualised, he also has a supportive girlfriend. He also supports her too and saves her whenever somebody is going to attack her, just like the other men in this story. When he’s not working, he plays baseball and billiards in his spare time. It’s not that there aren’t any characters with albinism in fiction before, but portraying them as people or even admirable role models is pretty rare. Rarer still if they have the lived experiences of those with albinism such as blindness and sunburns.

Lady Death may appear to have albinism, but unfortunately she doesn’t get sunburns despite being so scantily-clad as to warrant dressing more modestly to minimise this. Somebody pointed out the problem with the way redheads are portrayed in fiction is that they don’t have the lived experiences of actual redheads, they don’t get sunburns nor do they turn red whenever they get upset or something like that. I said similar things about those with dwarfism and albinism, where with the former there’s no way they can comfortably go up to something without struggling and hurting themselves in the process.

As for those with albinism, they suffer from vision problems and sunburns when exposed to the sun. Sometimes in the worst case scenario, they even get skin cancer. But that’s realising how and why Lady Death really doesn’t represent people with albinism that well, she doesn’t have their lived experiences so she can’t really speak to them. Hector Yang reads glasses when he has to read something, sometimes he reads large print documents and that he gets sunburnt whenever he’s exposed to the sun for too long. That is a character who has the lived experience of somebody with albinism, he’s also one of the guys and sometimes hangs out with other people with albinism. So he’s not the only one with this condition, he’s not a token and he’s very much a human being like others.

I guess it sometimes sucks or hurts if there’s not enough realistic representation of somebody with a disabling medical condition like albinism or dwarfism, not to mention disabled people tend to be really desexualised and infantilised that portraying Hector as fairly self-sufficient with a girlfriend would run counter to these portrayals and attitudes. He could even act as a role model for those with albinism to look up to and relate to, given the dearth of characters with albinism, let alone realistic ones at that. Representation matters a lot these days, so a realistic and positive character with albinism would be one surely needed example.

Alvin Kwame Boateng

He’s as fast as a moving vehicle, so to take down criminals he sets fires to keep them from harming people. He’s also real good at tracking down criminal activity, saving people in time (often by just grabbing their heads) and criminal investigation. Not to mention that he’s real good at escapology, especially whenever people threaten to attack him so he tends to escape in time or ahead of it. When it comes to a character like Barry Allen, despite being formally a forensic chemist he doesn’t get too involved in forensics for this long. It’s even more surprising why nobody makes him an excellent escape artist, given he could easily run away from attackers when it’s needed.

I feel this speaks to a lack of imagination and outside references that a good number of Flash writers tend to have, like if you have a really speedy character escapology would be really convenient for them. They could easily make an escape in a way other powers wouldn’t do, so it’s something many Flash writers don’t really bother writing about or depicting in any way that I know of. When it comes to writing the Flash at all, ways of expanding his skills tends to involve tangentially related abilities like phasing/quantum tunnelling and time travel. But not so much running so fast as to cause a fire, since friction goes hand in hand with heat when it comes to fast-moving molecules or something (my physics fu is bad).

Barry Allen could’ve easily started a fire as to make a quick escape whilst taking down bad guys at the same time, also when it comes to how velocity and force are linked that not only should Barry be careful with lifting somebody or running into them lest he causes a roadkill like incident when running it’s surprising why nobody in DC Comics figured out a way for him to undermine Captain Cold’s schemes. Especially if he can apply enough force to destroy Captain Cold’s icy creations as to easily foil it, that it’s something almost nobody in DC Comics has ever considered. He could have done the same to ruin Gorilla Grodd’s machines, if he ever builds them himself.

In this case, Alvin Kwame gets into trouble with Nookaitok, especially whenever he runs by accident without knowing that he accidentally undermines his attempts at catching criminals. So he tends to be rather chilly to him out of fear, given Nookaitok’s sharp tongue and hot temper. He’s also fond of playing football and from time to time he plays football with his colleagues, pardon me that I always use football to mean soccer so bear with me here. He’s also skilled at cricket, which is kind of like baseball but also not quite like it. He particularly enjoys playing video games if he has the time for it and when he does, just like Usain Bolt for instance.

That’s one of the details I remembered in reading Usain Bolt’s autobiography, even if it’s ghostwritten but with Mr Bolt likely dictating things to his ghostwriter that they might as well be describing what he said to them. Just like Jean-Louis, he also enjoys hunting with dogs. Though the way he hunts with dogs differs from what Jean-Louis does, but unsurprisingly they get along real well. Like Jean-Louis, he has a tendency to prefer mixed-breed dogs over purebreds. Though in Alvin’s case, it’s a matter of doing things he can afford within his budget. He tends to be really stingy so he tends to spend when he feels is necessary or something. That’s why he tends to play freemium games.

Guilherme Nagamura

He’s skilled in capoeira but his first love is ballet and that’s what got him into dancing when he was a teenager, though he’s also skilled in other disciplines such as forensic investigation and badminton. His family is Japanese Brazilian and they emigrated to Canada when he was young, so he’s pretty much an Asian Latino. He tends to respect and admire his colleagues a lot, though sometimes he relates to Maurice Lu, Jean-Louis Lumiere and Fabrice Tientcheu. Mostly because he was the odd Catholic schoolboy in a Protestant school that only Jean-Louis shared with, so it must be really weird for them to come from culturally Catholic families and end up in an Anglican Evangelical community.

He doesn’t have hard feelings towards Anglicans in particular, as much as he adopted Anglican habits despite being ostensibly Catholic. To be honest, I went to a Protestant school before despite the Philippines being a Catholic-majority country. So I’m pretty much projecting my own experiences onto them, just as I have done the same with some of the female characters. Now as for Brazilian characters as well as characters of Brazilian descent in his case, there’s the risk of getting Brazilian culture and Brazil wrong. For starters, Brazil is a Lusophone country not unlike Portugal, Mozambique and Angola. The three countries were colonies of Portugal and to my knowledge, Brazil seems to be the only country in the Americas to have a monarchy.

Dom Pedro made himself emperor of Brazil or something, so that’s why Brazil ended up the way it did until it became a republic. Brazil sometimes does the things America wishes it had, something like a proper royal family with Dom Pedro. America only has a presidential family, especially with the Kennedys. Brazil had a proper king or emperor in Dom Pedro, America only has a series of presidents. Not to mention, Brazil’s actually home to a very substantial Japanese diaspora within the western world. Guilherme Nagamura is even named after a Brazilian footballer of Japanese descent, though I forgot his personal name by now.

I actually considered coming up with a Japanese-Brazilian character before, but this one was going to be female and the one that I’m going to bring to a game is male. Even then, it’s nice to have Asian Brazilian representation especially when it’s outside of Brazil itself. When it comes to the way Latin Americans are portrayed in media outside of Latin America, they’re almost always either mixed with indigenous people or white, sometimes black (especially when it comes to Marvel’s Miles Morales) but rarely if ever Asian. Street Fighter seems to be the only non-Latin American media property to have any Asian Latinos around, especially Sean and his sister (I forgot her name).

Another Asian Brazilian is nice, let alone somebody who’s also in the Brazilian diaspora. His girlfriend is Beyhan and both of them share a similar dance background as well as being religious outsiders in an Anglican school. In her case, she’s Muslim. To be fair though, both DC and Marvel are getting better at incorporating more Muslim and Middle Eastern representation. Some of the most internationally renowned superheroes to be created in the 21st century are Muslim, one of them is Kamala Khan and she comes from Marvel Comics. I had a Muslim schoolmate before and he came from Pakistan, so looking back it’s my personal experiences bleeding into these characters again.

Edward Hadlund

Yet another character with a Jojo counterpart, in his case it’s Sale and his stand Kraftwerk. Much like Sale, he has the ability to manipulate an object’s kinetic energy. Not just by freezing it in place but also adding more kinetic energy to it, making it move again (and hit something real badly) and he can use this ability both defensively and offensively, which he does this by tapping on it. This also makes him a very good marksman, on par with Jean-Louis Lumiere really. Like Patricia Kyenge and Fabrice Tientcheu, he also resembles Sale in other ways. Not only is he calculating and ambitious, he also dresses like Sale too though his hair’s darker.

Edward Hadlund has red-brown hair, but for most of the part he’s pretty similar to him. Edward Hadlund’s actually going to be fat and come from Nova Scotia, just like how Maurice Lu was going to be pure Chinese. So he got changed halfway and he’ll change even more if he and his gang are ever going to be officially included in a game at all, but what remains is that he (like a number of other characters) are inspired by their Jojo counterparts. They may not have anthropomorphised superpowers, this being a world where the superheroes are the ones in law enforcement but it is there to a good extent when it comes to the powers, characters and ways they use them.

He has done shot-putting before in school and still does in his spare time, which gives an idea of what he was going to be. He’s also not particularly fond of drinking alcohol in particular, he’s tried drinking before but he doesn’t like the taste of any alcoholic drink. This is taken from the late cartoonist and inker named Gerry Alanguilan, who pretty much felt the same way too. Edward also prefers reading nonfiction to any form of fiction, something that he shares with Jean-Louis though he’s not always that close to him. Especially given the fact that Mr Hadlund isn’t so hung up on hunting the way he is, his family owns a petting zoo so the colleague he’s closest to is John Zelensky.

Also Eddie’s family come from a line of farmers and veterinarians, so he doesn’t have the same attitude to animals the way Jean-Louis Lumiere does. He admits he really doesn’t get why would people hunt animals if they like animals, not that he’s stupid but it’s something that’s pretty foreign to him. A sentiment that he shares deeply with Mr Zelensky, even if he himself isn’t so big on veganism. He’s allergic to cats and also afraid of dogs, just like Stephen Pastis of Pearls before Swine fame. His most favourite animal is the pig and he actually keeps a pet pig inside his house, whom he spared from being slaughtered.

Because he’s afraid of dogs, he also gets why Fabrice’s own father doesn’t like them either. Or at least is kind of leery of them, since he feels the same way too and finds comfort in herbivores. He also enjoys visiting gardens, especially when he has the time to. He even partakes in gardening and crofting himself, since he finds it really relaxing. He also enjoys visiting the woods, though as I said before, he has no interest in hunting whatsoever. He’d rather just camp and watch the wild animals than hunt with a dog or even a cat for another matter.

Erin Tohlakwang

I actually considered coming up with another female member of the police force, but this time she’s based on Mariah from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (as always) and like her, she has the ability to magnetise something but here she calls it telekinesis. (She even magnetises criminals to subdue them.) A physicist pointed her out that she actually manipulates magnetism, but that doesn’t stop her from calling it by what she thinks it is. While telekinesis and magnetism are separate in most cases of fiction, but strangely enough in reality anything can be magnetised. It’s something not many writers consider, even if it’s always possible since water can be magnetised too. She tends to have confirmation bias or something like that, not to mention she is part Korean and part Dene. I actually have (or perhaps had) this book about female martial artists, there’s this chapter or section mentioning a woman who has a similar parentage.

It’s not entirely unheard of but something that’s barely if ever attempted in fiction, most likely because I think many writers don’t bother reading anything else even if it could give them the ideas they’ve always wanted. I might be wrong in here but I do think my point still stands, especially when it comes to coming up with new characters and stories that you really need to be inspired by something else if your creative well dries up. Or if you yourself have gotten repetitive in some ways, that something else is needed to refresh something or even create something else altogether. Well, it looks like we have another indigenous police officer here.

As for her personal life, Yvette was going to be the one who collects dolls. But I’m going to give this to Erin, in all honesty I don’t know a single female superhero comics character that collects dolls in her spare time. Maybe not ones that I know of and recognise, maybe not ones that I remember in any way. But the fact that a good number of adult women collect dolls, both soft toys and fashion dolls, is something that doesn’t get reflected much in superhero comics. While the female readership for superhero comics is growing, it still seems to be a genre that appeals to guys a lot so whatever that interest other women gets underrepresented in comics could deter them from enjoying any further.

I don’t think characters like Kitty Pryde actually collect dolls, let alone for life, that it’s something I’ve never seen in superhero comics that much. Let alone if it’s coming from a woman that there are women out there in the real world who collect toys and create toys themselves, some of these women aren’t buying toys for their young relatives or any youngster. But rather for themselves and I think it’s about time to have a superheroine who’s an unapologetic toy collector. Additionally she’s also based on Kate Miskin, who’s a PD James character and they’re the same age. She has feelings for Jean-Louis but it’s something she’s only ever admitted to her grandmother.

Like Miskin, she has a habit of caring for her grandmother. But she does this out of love and she will do anything to support her family, even if she has a habit of buying dolls for herself but that doesn’t matter as her family doesn’t mind it. I guess when it comes to the way some writers, both male and female, write female characters there’s a tendency to leave out the other things women are into. Maybe it doesn’t interest them much but come on, female toy collectors are a thing. Not so much in a not like other girls sort of way, but that there are grown women out there collecting and making toys.

Reginald Šorm

The police detective that Jean-Louis and others worked under when they were in their late teens and early twenties, he has the power of retrocognition but this manifests as reenacting past events with exacting precision which aids him in investigating criminal cases. Akosamesew was mistaken when he believed that not only did Jemima Szary share the same surname as he did, but also his younger cousin when he didn’t have any. He was however shocked to see that this same young woman that Akosamesew was mistaken about bothering to do criminal investigations without being formally trained in police training, given she tended to have a sort of GPS/radar sense not unlike that of Yasuho Hirose (ha! Jojo references!).

It’s surprising to him why she never became a police officer, since she went on as an investigative journalist who works closely with the police when it comes to criminal cases. He was something of a role model to Jean-Louis Lumiere, whose style of investigation was partly influenced by his given he has rather different powers from him. Reginald does his best to support others when he can, even if he’s baffled by other people’s choices. He did give Jemima some forensic training, though she was formally studying mass communications and biology at the time. He could still be the one Jean-Louis and his colleagues work under, being their manager or boss or something like that.

Given a good number of characters here are based on their Jojo counterparts, he could be construed as the equivalent to Leone Abbacchio and his stand Moody Blues. An earlier version of him is named Ghislain Monkam but I could revert to this version if it’s not ethnically diverse enough.

Kwaku Acheampong

A Ghanaian officer with the ability to manipulate plants and air to some extent, he uses plants as a way to ensnare criminals with and he’s not going to let them get away. He can even summon trees to block them from attacking him any further as well as to make an escape, he can manipulate air as a way to choke criminals to restrain them with though usually with plants’ aid. He tends to be a very pragmatic person, which influences the way he manipulates plants. If something lacks a cooling system, then both he and Nootaikok will work together to lower ambient temperatures. He also does this when Nootaikok is not available, though at times he can also be pretty generous.

He’d even give fruits and vegetables to people who are hungry or in need of something, so he’s always best friends with John Zelensky because he’s a vegan. He even helps out Mamadou from time to time when it comes to cooking foods together, he is also a decent hand to hand combatant but he’s been shown to fashion weapons out of plants. It also helps that he got some training in weaponry before, so he’s able to utilise plants in really interesting and offensive ways. He’s also been shown to care for Fabrice’s cats, as a nod to Tama being the plant controlling cat.

Yet another Jojo reference in some way.

Tim Qwastiltete

He has the ability to manipulate life by turning inanimate objects into organisms, the better to foil criminal attacks on him. He’s also shown to use this ability to save others from disaster, he’s done this to his colleagues and strangers a lot. Another indigenous character based on a Jojo character like Erin and in his case, it’s Giorno Giovanna and he’s also another indigenous police officer. When it comes to indigenous representation, there doesn’t seem to be that many nonstereotypical indigenous characters in the media. Let alone a Canadian indigenous character until recently other than Jay Odjick’s Kagagi, over at DC there’s Miyaabi Marten and Marvel has Snowguard.

Only one of them’s created by an actual indigenous author, so we’re definitely going to need the input of indigenous creatives in bringing these characters to life. Marvel has done this with Marvel Voices, we can do the same with the video game’s comics adaptation if it ever gets one at all. I actually follow one Inuk artist and their blog’s called NotDayle. They’re not Haida like Tim Qwastiltete, but you should get my point right. We could always hire Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas to work on this comic, concerning Tim Qwastiltete since he’s also Haida despite being fictional. So it’s necessary to have Haida talent coworking with us to better give a more authentic sensibility.

It wouldn’t be easy but necessary for the sake of representation done right.

Kosal Koy

Although he’s proficient in fencing and swordsmanship, his superpower is to switch souls which happens when somebody is forcibly made to sleep. He has done this to save the lives of somebody he cares about, though sometimes if somebody’s awake it induces terrifying mutations. Which means he could turn somebody into something else, which is why he doesn’t use his power that often. So he resorts to weaponry and unarmed combat instead, since using this power is very risky and life-altering in a bad way. He’s shown to be bad-tempered and impulsive at times, though also good-hearted and kind.

Not another Jojo reference! But this time he’s based on Jean-Pierre Polnareff, he tends to be more intuitive though perfectly capable of logical solving and deduction. Admittedly I created him as I feel I’ve created too many Asian female characters for this game and story, given there’s a tendency to associate Asianness with femininity and vice versa for blackness. It’s like how in social sciences that the prototypical East Asian is expected to be female and the prototypical black person is male, which means that both East Asian men and black women are going to be underrepresented.

Well the more, the merrier.

Ghislain Monkam

He was going to have the same power as Reginald, but he could have Rohan Kishibe’s powers instead. That is to turn people’s faces into notebooks where he can write any action that they’ll eventually do, he also works as a forensic artist and a would-be cartoonist for a local newspaper. It’s not that there aren’t any black people involved in the arts, let alone outside of music and acting but black characters who draw, paint and write surely need to be represented. Especially to black people who can’t relate to the musician and athlete images shown in the media, nor do they aspire to become either one of those or both. At present, we have Archie’s Chuck.

He’s also the only example in western stories that I can think of in any way, a black forensic artist is possibly even more underrepresented. Black forensic artists are probably a dime a dozen in African nations, but they’re also the same characters who don’t get depicted much in fiction. Even if there are Africans who are into drawing, painting and writing I don’t see these same characters in most western fictions, even if there might be those who aspire to be like them in some way. Jamal Igle is one well-known example of an African American cartoonist, another is Kyle Barker and then there’s Canada’s Jamal Campbell. If not all black people aspire to be musicians and athletes, then this character could give them hope.

That’s if they’re into drawing and painting that perhaps they yearn for a character who’s like them, does the things they do and so on that they’ll latch onto him when they see him at all.

Akbar bin Paryono

He has the ability to make objects disappear into a void by swiping, which he uses to withhold items from criminals and suspects. He has a strong desire to uphold the law as much as possible, with his ability to preternaturally withhold or confiscate items that he’s valuable to the police department. Another Jojo reference where this time he’s a character based on Okuyasu Nijimura, where instead of being a delinquent schoolboy he’s a police officer. I actually think his power’s convenient when it comes to confiscating offending materials.

He’s done this to a number of criminals such as murderers, rapists and other sex offenders, though he’s not as merciless as Jean-Louis Lumiere gets. The latter even had Anatoly Smirnoff get surrounded by a fire to keep him from harming Jemima Szary, even though she told him it’s cruel of him to do that. Also I don’t think there are a lot of Asian police officers in western media, they’re possibly plentiful in Asian media but outside of it, not so much which is some real underrepresentation. There might be more of them in fiction, but not enough to gain any real public cognition. That and more Asian-diaspora criminals.

He also tends to have something of a temper and has gotten mad at others a couple of times, though he’s also very outgoing and charismatic.