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Other Characters
Other Characters
Madame Ko
- The Chessmaster: One rumour Juliet hears is she caused a stampede to distract a trainee. With elephants no less.
- The Mentor: To the Butlers, unwillingly.
- Never Mess with Granny: She's implied to still be a capable fighter in her old age.
- Old Master: A rare female version thereof.
Jerbal Argon
- Chekhov's Gunman: Almost literally, as it's less the character himself than his psychological skills that end up important in book four, as they help house Opal Koboi.
- Punny Name: J. Argon.
The Eight Fairy Families
The Eight Fairy Families
In the Artemis Fowl Universe, Fairies are divided in seven (eventually revealed to be eight) families:
- Actually Not a Vampire: With the Sprite that Artemis first encounters being contained indoors, centuries old, with mystical powers, and most importantly can be poisoned by Holy Water, you'd be forgiven for thinking she's a vampire. It turns out Eoin Colfer added other vampire traits to the fairies such as the hypnotic mesmer and the fact they Must Be Invited into a human dwelling (because they'll experience severe nausea otherwise and will lose their magic if they enter uninvited too much).
- The Fair Folk: The Fairy People who are divided into eight families.
- Must Be Invited: If a fairy with magic enters a human dwelling without permission, they'll experience severe nausea; if they do it too much, they'll lose their magic entirely, which is why Mulch doesn't have his.
- Underground City: The majority of their civilizations are underground, with the most notable being Haven City.
Elves
- Jack of All Stats: They aren't the most powerful at magic, that would be the demons. They aren't the physically strongest, that would probably be goblins. They aren't the best at infiltration, that would be dwarves. They aren't the most intelligent, that would be pixies or centaurs. They aren't the best flyers, that would be sprites. But while elves don't seem to overachieve in any particular area, they are the most balanced and all-rounder of the fairy races.
- Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Going by one passing comment in the first book, they can have children with gremlins. They can also interbreed with pixies to make "pixels".
- Our Elves Are Different: They are closer to the traditional short elves that are closer to fairies, rather than the tall Tolkien elves. But otherwise they still have a lot of stereotypical traits frequently seen in modern portrayals.
- Pointy Ears: They've all got pointed ears.
Dwarves
- Bizarre Alien Biology: They unhinge their jaws to eat through the earth, they have Prehensile Hair, their pores suck in water, and they have Super Spit which is a fast-hardening, faintly luminous, anesthetic.
- Improvised Lockpick: As demonstrated by Mulch, a strand of dwarven beard hair makes an excellent lockpick, as inserting it into a lock causes it to mold itself into a shape matching the tumblers, and plucking it causes it to instantly harden.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: A new dwarf talent seems to get revealed each book, usually through Mulch.
- Our Dwarves Are All the Same: No they are not, being one of the most drastically different depictions of dwarves in fiction. They are a whole species of Tunnel Kings with an incredibly large number of unusual abilities allowing them to adapt to many situations. They're about as close as you can get to being an earthworm while remaining a nominal hominid.
- Super Spit: Their spit hardens in contact with air so it becomes like rock. The spit is also luminous and has sedative properties.
- Tunnel King: By unhinging their jaws, they can tunnel by eating dirt, crapping it out behind them as they go.
- Wall Crawl: One quirk of dwarven physiology is that if they go without water for long enough, their pores will start sucking up moisture. Some take advantage of this by making themselves really thirsty and then using their pores as suction cups to climb walls.
Gnomes
- Hufflepuff House: They are rarely discussed.
- Our Gnomes Are Weirder: The only details given about them is that they have comically large behinds and are very fond of tacky jewelry.
Pixies
- Amazing Technicolor Population: An Atlantean subspecies with blue skin exists.
- Cute Is Evil: Pixies are described as being very cute compared to other fairy subspecies, with their large heads and child-like facial features. The major pixie characters we get in the series range from the Axe-Crazy Opal to her Punch-Clock Villain minions. Even the one named pixie character who isn't an outright villain started out as a smuggler before abandoning crime and becoming a private eye.
- Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Can breed with elves to make pixels.
Goblins
- Bizarre Alien Biology: The Fowl Twins specifies that their fire-breathing isn't magic and is allowed by various biological quirks including a fireproof throat.
- Genuine Human Hide: A harmless version. Since they shed, they have the habit of using their own old shedded skins to make clothes. Other fairies still find this habit pretty disgusting.
- Our Goblins Are Different: Short, squat, green-skinned, large-eared, sometimes profoundly stupid and — in a break from typical goblins — able to spit fireballs.
- Playing with Fire: They're able to conjure fireballs in their hands, inhale them and breathe them out as jets of fire. They themselves are almost entirely fireproof.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Goblins are described as descending from reptiles, and all those we get to see in the books are at best thugs.
- Running on All Fours: They're normally bipedal, but revert to all fours for speed.
- Tattooed Crook: Some goblin criminals have been known to get tattoos on their eyeballs.
- Too Dumb to Live: While their stupidity tends to be rather exaggerated in-universe, there have been several incidents where it directly led to the demise, or nearly so, of goblin characters, mostly criminals — one, for instance, was incinerated by a magma flare because he flew into a magma vent without bothering to think of grabbing more safety gear than a thermal suit, while a gang of goblins nearly killed themselves by deciding to break out of a prison vehicle by turning it to slag...which would have killed them even through their normal heat resistance.
Centaurs
- Our Centaurs Are Different: For starters, they are super-smart.
- Properly Paranoid: They are well-known to be a bit paranoid, but considering their species was nearly driven into extinction by humans, who already exterminated their unicorn cousins...
- The Smart Guy: They apparently are the most intelligent tribe.
Sprites
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Not as ridiculously as dwarves, but water sprites have gills, and they are mentioned to have a lot of blood vessels in their wings, so a sufficiently grave injury in them can be lethal if not treated quickly.
- Smug Super: Apparently, they take great pride in having wings.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: Water sprites have gills and as such can breath underwater.
- Winged Humanoid: The only known subspecies of Fairies to have retained their wings.
Demons
- Alien Fair Folk: Demons are descended from single-celled organisms that evolved on the moon, and that arrived on Earth when a chunk of the moon broke off and crashed into the ocean in the Triassic period.
- Cursed with Awesome: Warlocks never get to turn into adult demons and stay imps all their lives, but on the bright side they are the only demons to develop magic powers.
- Horned Humanoid: Zig-zagged. They don't actually have horns, despite what the covers portray them as, but have keratinized ears that develop a number of prominent points as they age and eventually became very visually hornlike.
- Lunacy: They have an exceptionally strong connection to the moon and — by association — silver. Nº1 speculates at one point that it was believed demons were capable of levitating when under a full moon.
- Metamorphosis: One of their major characteristic is that they don't grow up gradually. Instead, they stay imps, then at some point in their life suddenly turn into cocoons, from which they later emerge as full-grown demons. Imps who never grow up will instead develop magic abilities and become warlocks.
- Our Demons Are Different:
- They are creatures evolved from micro-organisms that came from the Moon, and it only gets weirder from there.
- They are more binary when it comes to magic. Most demons have no magic at all and have to rely on their tough hide and teeth, whereas the few demon warlocks are much more powerful than the magicians of the other races.
- Our Imps Are Different: Imps are infant demons; when they're ready for adulthood they undergo a metamorphosis that grants them tremendous strength and physical prowess. Although most can't use magic, a rare few imps that do not metamorphose are known as warlocks and have the potential to become the greatest mages of all fairykind.
- Proud Warrior Race: Justified. They are more barbaric than the other tribes because they were forced to live outside of time under the influence of a megalomaniac. They start changing their ways after being reunited with the other Fairy families.
Gremlins
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: They are never mentioned after the first book, but appear in the first three graphic novels.
- Little Green Men: They are slightly more than half as tall as the average elf, with green skin, bug-like eyes and green or orange manes. Unlike most examples, they come from underground rather than outer space.
- The Medic: The ones we see mainly work as LEP medical warlocks.
- Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Going by one passing comment in the first book, they can have children with elves.
