This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
From You Know That Thing Where:
Ununnilium: Character type: A location with a mind. Usually has some control over its own form. Comic book examples: Mogo, the Green Lantern who's a planet, Krakoa the Living Island, Danny the Street. Non-comic example: Unicron from Transformers. Spaceship Girl may be related.
Gattsuru: Perhaps something along the lines of Place with Personality, or Mars likes You (from the webcomic Miracle of Science). It seems a fairly popular trope. Scifi hits the Planet with a personality: Babylon 5 smacked on it with the Great Machine, as I'm sure Star Trek has once or twice, in addition to the above mentioned examples. I think it'd take forever to list the horror examples where a building or forest is out to get the main characters.
Chrome Newfie: I can't believe you're overlooking Brain The Size Of A Planet, despite the source not actually being a sentient world.... ;)
Ununnilium: I like Mars Likes You, but it doesn't really fit here. Perhaps Place Person?
Gus: Living Landscape, Landscape Alive, Living Site, Site Alive.
Thomas The Rhymer: Talking Shop, World Consciousness, Environmental Psychology, Deep Ecology, Undying Land, The Walls Have Eyes, Higher Place.
Chrome Newfie: The Hills Are Alive?
Looney Toons: <Max the Blue Meanie voice> Wit' de sound of muuuuuuuseek! </Max the Blue Meanie voice> Why not name it after an example, as we have with many other characters, and call it Danny The Street?
Chrome Newfie: The only reservation on that specific example is that it's a comic book example from a series best known by comic book fans. If we can come up with a TV example, or at least a better-known one, all the better. If not, it works. // Additional suggestion: Genius Loci? The "spirit of a place" seems dead on, and Latin is cool. ;)
Ununnilium: After googling it, I like Genius Loci.
Looney Toons: Not that it matters by now, but yeah, that's perfect.
Harpie Siren: A transvestite street? Do I even want to know?
Ununnilium: Gun shops with pink curtains and lace, that sort of thing. ``v Bright pink steam coming out of manhole covers.
Harpie Siren: Please tell me your joking!
BT The P: He isn't. Doom Patrol is a very tongue-in-cheek book sometimes. One of the team's members is a woman with multiple personalities, over 100 of them, each with her own superpowers and appearance. In current continuity, Danny expanded himself to be an entire parallel world, "Danny the World".
Chrome Newfie: For those that are interested despite themselves, our ever-lovin' big brother
to the rescue. You think that one's weird, follow the link to Flex Mentallo....
Harpie Siren: I see it, but I still don't believe it... Wasn't the Grant Morrison run on that comic really ... surreal?
Chrome Newfie: Wasn't Grant Morrison's run on anything pretty surreal? Though I still highly value my excellent condition hardcopy of Arkham Asylum.
Ununnilium: Wonderfully so. I would have his babies despite lacking both a womb and the ability to reproduce by budding.
Seth: But still we fight for your right to have babies.
BT The P: Biology is on the march!
Thunder Phoenix: Where would a haunted house fit into this trope, if at all?
Lale: If the house was an intelligent being like in that film Monster House (?) and directly attacking the characters, not just full of unpleasant supernatural entities.
Ununnilium: Took out "Or vice versa, or whatever", because it didn't add anything and made the opening less snappy.
Ununnilium: Why not Cybertron, Scrounge? Primus definitely counts.
Later: Oh, it's already on there. Dur~
fleb: I added Hill House as an example, but I changed my mind about adding this quote next to Katara's. It just lacks punch. So in case I need to find it again:
- "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone." —The Haunting of Hill House
Sciatrix: Fiddled with that bit about "singular: genius locus" so that it actually makes some kind of sense. "Genius" means "spirit," while "loci" is "of the place." To pluralize it (genius loci is already singular), it would be genii loci.
Ununnilium: Ah, okay, so the change was the mistake.
- Its not a Genius Loci, the hive mind just named itself after its planet.
A hair-splitting difference.
Noaqiyeum: Fixed the Latin plural. "Genii Loci" is "spirits of a place", which would not be an accurate description unless, for example, your castle is schizophrenic.
Does anyone else think the Thorian and Zhu's Hope from Mass Effect count as one? It wasn't so much a spirit of the place as it was an alien controlling it and hiding in it.
AtmanRyu: Out of curiousity, doesn't Dungeon Man from Earth Bound count?
Tropus: I reckon that Athel Loren from Warhammer probably counts as one of these, what with being a sentient forest that actively attacks anyone intruding on its personal space.
—- cde: Would Farscape's Moya actually fit this trope? It's a living ship, not place. If so, every bio-ship would count.
That picture is very pretty. What is it?
It's by Maxfield Parrish. Don't know the title.
Georgie: Does anyone else think this would be a brilliant way to spend an afterife?
