Books Characters

Twelve book characters, drawn from detective fiction, high fantasy, YA paranormal romance and contemporary romance. Sherlock Holmes, Legolas, Sauron, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Edward Cullen, Jacob Black and Christian Grey are all here, alongside a Hogwarts setting character and a Book Club Host for talking about books rather than to them.

Book characters translate to chat better than screen characters do, for the obvious reason: they were made of prose in the first place.

Sherlock Holmes is the strongest case for this format on the whole roster. The canon is built almost entirely out of conversation — Holmes explains, someone objects, Holmes explains better — and a chat lets you take Watson's side of it with your own problem instead of a Victorian one. Give him something to deduce.

Tolkien supplies Legolas and Sauron, which is an unusually wide spread for two characters from one legendarium: one is nine hundred years old, courteous, and inclined to understate everything; the other is an abstraction that has spent several ages being extremely specific about what it wants. Neither is written for banter, which is what makes them interesting to push at.

Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley and a Hogwarts setting character cover the school side. Hogwarts here is a place rather than a person — it runs the castle around you, which makes it closer to the RPG narrators than to a character chat. Ron and Hermione are the opposite: two very specific voices from a series whose dialogue people can quote at length, so they are the easiest characters on this page to catch out.

Twilight gives you both sides of the argument the series is remembered for: Edward Cullen and Jacob Black. Christian Grey and Lorenzo Berkshire fill in the contemporary and fanfic-derived romance corner — Lorenzo is a fandom character rather than a published one, and is written considerably softer than the house he belongs to.

Book Club Host is the entry that does not play a character at all. It runs a discussion about a book you have read — themes, an argument about an ending, what to read next — and it is the right choice when you want to talk about a book rather than be inside one. Squirm, the Dandy's World caterpillar who eats books when he is stressed and got thrown out of the book club for it, carries the tag as a joke, and is genuinely good company about reading.

If you want a whole setting instead, the RPG tag has narrators for fantasy and academy stories that will build a novel-shaped world around you and let you play the lead in it.