Cathal Sior

Cathal Sior was a storyteller and wandering philosopher on the celestial frontier during the era of the Frontier stories, either c. 75 or c. 150 AHE, and one of the key characters of the Starlight Cycle.

History of name

The name "Cathal Sior" was bounced around various characters in 2017. In January 2017, Kerry created a blank wiki template he intended to fill in for an existing BHH character, a derata called Cathal Siora; in February, he changed the name to Cathal Sior. In July 2017, he used the name Cathal Sior for an important character in the Evonian Cycle. By September, he was also using Cathal Sior as the name of the main antagonist in the Midnight Hotel.

Personality

Cathal was defined by anarchic creativity, rejection of all authority, and chaotic acquired wisdom. He was unpredictable, erratic, good-natured, and at his worst, crazy and selfish. He entertained himself by doing the apparently impossible — depending on the source, either because he had godlike powers that he could only exercise when not thinking about it, or because he had acquired non-magical but surprising and pointless skills — and he always gave plainly ridiculous explanations to account for his apparently-impossible feats. When played for laughs, his head was in the clouds and he seemed completely detached from reality, but sources that took Cathal seriously presented him as a sharp, witty man whose erratic behaviour was rooted in a conscious rejection of "oppressive" social norms, and whose motives were profound, if not always a safeguard against being inconsiderate.

The extent to which Cathal knew or cared about the impact of his craziness on others varied. While not a cruel character, his attitude towards others varied from difficult and obstinate at best to downright egotistical at worst. Cathal's vocal optimism, particularly about human potential, was irritating, often insensitive, and unceasing, even when he was persuaded to tone down his randomness. He was sceptical about ideas of purpose or end goals. Where he did accept any end goal, he saw it in political terms as a society based on love and egalitarianism, but he believed this could be achieved through individuals applying good ethics (e.g. kindness) in their everyday conduct, without any "purposeful effort to engage in governance".

His spiritual beliefs suggested a vague understanding that he was a character in a story, created by authors who he respected as 'gods', though Cathal also believed that the 'gods' of his religion (i.e. the real-world people who wrote the mythology) were themselves only characters created in the imaginations of the mythology's characters. He was relatively uninterested in cosmology and the mysteries of the Universe, believing science to be linked inextricably with human oppression and destruction of the natural environment, but curious to a fault about humans and human endeavour. He explained that he saw "humanity as the actors, the Universe as the stage, and our lives as a script we write".

Described by Kerry during his creation as "like Elvar, but really drunk", Cathal's physical and verbal mannerisms were reminiscent of someone inebriated, and included swaying, slurring his words, and rambling nonsensically. He drank compulsively from a bottle of clear liquid, usually said to be potcheen (Irish moonshine). He also drank cider to relax and often carried a crate of it. In a minority of sources, his ever-present bottle only contained water and he protested that he was not an alcoholic, with the water-drinking version of Cathal once commenting that he did things "by my own choice, not alcohol's. I would never let myself be trapped by the results of someone else's thinking, or in this case, brewing."

Though most people found Cathal irritating, he was also very persuasive and was considered to have an ironic charm. He also had an "inexplicable" sex appeal to some, especially evil characters. Cathal showed himself able to blag his way into various venues and gain his enemies' trust. However, some who encountered him — particularly minor authority figures — took very badly to him and those relationships quickly became ongoing feuds as he took pride in finding creative ways to piss off those who insisted on "pointlessly restrictive" rules.

Particularly in older sources, a distinctive trait of Cathal's was insisting on introducing himself as "the not-yet-infamous, rather elusive and perennially self-aggrandising Cathal Sior, jack of few trades and master of none", and this was sometimes treated as his name. When he was first introduced as a character, he also used to use a Captain Jack Sparrow style sign-off that went "You shall always remember this as the day that you successfully caught Cathal Sior — and he escaped!".

Cathal had a vaguely nautical theme. He wore a sailor's jacket; he occasionally referred to everyday items in nautical terms; his swaying was sometimes associated with sea legs (i.e. accounting for the floor shakin as a boat rocks); and his golden watch was supposed to appear seafaring.