Who Ya Got?: Which Modern Characters Will Live Forever?

“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.” -- Hector (just before getting his ass kicked, real bad)

What do these names have in common?

Gilgamesh.  Hercules.  Perseus.  Odysseus.  Achilles.

Answer: they are fictional* characters who were created at least 2,500 years ago that I just

77 years old

thought of off the top of my head.  And that you instantly recognized.

Think about that for sec.  Forget for a moment that their true origins in songs shared around hearth fires may be too murky to trace, and allow that their stories were each, at some point, recorded into a more lasting medium, a scroll of papyrus or perhaps a stone tablet.  

74 years old

Now move forward in time to between 0 and 1000 A.D.  How easy is it to name five more such characters (off the top of your head, no googling)?  I’ll do it as I type.  Go.

Beowulf.   Well… that's one.  And you can tell I'm not cheating.  These were the Dark Ages after all…  Let’s see, Aeneas just misses the cut because Virgil was a smudge B.C.… So...um… 

at least 2,700

Alright, let’s skip to the next 900 years.  1000-1900 AD.  Now we're in a post printing press world, when the production of fiction went through the roof.  So it should be a lot easier.  Go.  

Arthur, Merlin, Don Quixote, Hamlet,  Romeo and Juliet, Quasimodo, D'Artagnon, Ivanhoe, Oliver twist…. okay, stop.  There's a lot.  Shakespeare characters alone could keep us going  for quite a while.   

Pushing 400

But here's where it gets interesting.  How many of these characters will anybody remember in 2,000 years (baring the apocalypse, of course)?  I mean, does anybody think that Mr. D'arcy or Sydney Carton will have the shelf life of Helen of Troy?  Cuz I don’t.  Scrooge?  Yeah, maybe.  

In the modern era, 1900-to the present, with the arrival motion pictures, television, comic books, video games, the internet…  production of fictional characters has exploded into the realm of who the f- knows how many. 

I've been thinking about it and I don't think there are many in that soup that will last forever.  But what do you think?

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What character (not story) created since 1900, will exist in the hearts and minds of people and even be known off the top of their heads, in the year 2513?**

Who, if anyone at all will be our time’s contribution to the pantheon of fiction?  Peter Parker?  Tom Joad?  Scarlett Ohara?  Captain Kirk?

I think the number is between zero and one.  But I'm not saying which one just yet.  Who ya got?  

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*Yes, I know… some were possibly actual people.  But surely the versions of them born of gods and nymphs were fictional.  Geez.

**Yes, I know…  the earth will be ruled by Apes by then.  Just play along and don't be such  a smartass.  Geez.