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0. Preramble (permalink)

Characterisation is a highly magnetic word in creative writing: definitions and connotations atrract like iron filings. We say we want to create interesting, memorable characters, with complex interiority, who say and do interesting things. Human. Plausible.

I could sit here and dither on the myriad facets of characterisation and never get to the point. But we’re here to choose sides, and make choices, even if they’re flawed. So, let me start with three general maxims for characterisation, and work my way backwards. They all come from Matthew Salesses’ wonderful book on craft, Craft in the Real World:

  1. Characterisation is that which makes characters different from each other;
  2. Characters are fictional beings that require meaningful choices.
  3. Character arcs show how a character or the world around them changes over time – and/or how they fail to change.

“Meaningful choices” are, in my mind, those that readers identify as having a substantial effect on their interpretation of the text. It may not be the writers’ intention to create a token character, but if said character’s only difference is that they’re black, brown, or queer (for example), they are undeservedly undercooked. Keeping our definition of characterisation as simple as Salesses’ makes such characters very easy to spot.

Likewise, characters do not have meaningful choices that you haven’t yet given them. Not unlike “Country X” from last week, they are flat outlines that ask for details. Or, as Brandon Sanderson puts it: every character starts out as a stereotype plus an archetype:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHTYFX24BgQ&list=PLSH_xM-KC3ZvzkfVo_Dls0B5GiE2oMcLY

Returning to map analogies: you’ve started by plotting a point, and you want to explore and see who that character is.

Granny Weatherwax didn’t like maps. She felt instinctively that they sold the landscape short.

Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

But how are you supposed to know where to go if your character hasn’t developed a moral compass yet? We’ll see what the writers have to say later, but for now, I want to come at the problem from a different field of study: anthropology.

1. Characterisation as… Structural Analysis (permalink)

In my opinion, the late anthropologist David Graeber was one of the best to ever do it. Tucked away in his 2015 book on bureaucratic violence, The Utopia of Rules, is a passage on the praxis of “structural analysis:”

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/permalinklibrary/david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules#toc2

Structural analysis has been out of vogue for decades, sure – “passé” – but Graeber defends it:

A well-nigh foolproof technique for doing what any good theory should do: simplifying and schematizing complex material in such a way as to be able to say something unexpected.

In summary, for our writerly purposes: “Let’s reduce a fictional character to a set of meaningful choices, invert some of those choices, and find other characters to compare them with.” Homologies, inversions, and negations. I’ll recount two of Graeber’s examples here, to give you an idea – one with monster tropes, another with specific characters.

Take vampires. All-time classic Western horror monsters, but you will also see them brought up as an allegory of rich, powerful people, detached from the great unwashed. When encountered, they’re charming hosts who have an uncanny, psychic dominance over other beings. They’re only active at night, and reproduce by biting people.

Graeber asks: what other classic Western monster could stand as the opposite of a vampire? He picks werewolves.

What do werewolves and vampires have in common? They are active at a specific time – night; they reproduce by biting people.

Where are they inversions of each other? Vampires are aristocrats, landowners who retire to their estate during the day; werewolves are vagabond roamers, in either form. Vampires are charming hosts who control others; werewolves are feral beasts who cannot control themselves.

Finally, how do the two negate themselves? Negations include (but are not limited to) how the monsters are undone. There’s a million different answers here, but Graeber sticks to the classic methods. A vampire is killed with a wooden stake, a blunt, plebeian instrument you can find by taking apart any fence; werewolves are killed with silver bullets, a precious metal that has most likely been refined from valuable objects (like the family silver).

What about James Bond? London-based, professional secret agent and crime stopper, prone to distraction by girls and alcohol. A bona fide pop-culture legend. Graeber argues his opposite number is Sherlock Holmes: Asexual, coke and opioid addict, extremely disciplined (to the point of autism, I should add – ask me how I know). Holmes seeks out information for past acts of violence in his country, Bond goes abroad, and fumbles to stop future acts of violence.

By writing down lists of binary opposites like this, we look at what fictional characters symbolise in relation to each other, and how they are different. Betwixt and between comparisons of two or more characters are nameless characters that stand for neither. You could, for example, identify the aromantic private investigator, disciplined in their job, yet messy in their home life, who works towards stopping future acts of violence outside their country, but who starts by solving small crimes, first. They may be based on Bond and Holmes, but you have decided some meaningful choices that will make them different.

If you are the sort of person who plans your characters in advance, structural analysis will be a useful tool for when you take inspiration from authors you’ve read, but want your character (and their character arc) to do things that haven’t been done.

It is, however, quite an intense introspection. You do need to have some degree of media literacy to compare characters this way. I don’t know about you, but if I had to develop a set of relations like this, it’d probably take me an entire afternoon. Fortunately, I’m not on my own…

EXERCISE (20 mins): Together, we’re going to agree on a popular fantasy figure to start our analysis with. Let’s make a list of their attributes. Who is this character – their job, their appearance, their personality, their voice? What is their role in the plot (e.g. seeking information about past acts of violence)? If they are allegorical, what do they stand for? How are they negated? To keep things simple, let’s limit the list to six or seven items.

Once we’ve got our list: who is this character’s structural inversion? Ideally, we’re thinking of someone who is not in the same fictional universe. What do they have in common? Where are they inverted?

If Character 1 is the thesis, and Character 2 is the antithesis, You can get an outline for your character by mixing and matching items in the list. There’s plenty of room for further inversion, too. If both characters are homologous in that they’re both wizards, that could be inverted by saying Character 3 is an ordinary person. And if you’ve decided that, in your world, magic is a rare talent most people aren’t born with, that’s interesting. Suddenly, Character 3 is an exception.

1½. *I move away from the keyboard to let Future Me edit* (permalink)

As Past Me is about to touch on, I had the students read Jingo for this week’s seminar. None of them had ever read Terry Pratchett beforehand. We decided to start the above exercise with Sam Vimes. Here are the points that we settled on:

  • he’s a cop;
  • in a position of power (Commander of the City Watch);
  • hates and avoids paperwork;
  • tends to profile people at a glance (being a cop);
  • a bit of an insomniac;
  • the sort of fella who may realise he’s done wrong, but not necessarily what, and he won’t give you an explicit apology straight away.

From these points, one of my students compared Vimes to Former Cohort-Broker Bander, from Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds – a book I’ve never read. We absolutely could’ve compared Vimes to Carrot1, but I thought it’d be a better test of my skill as a teacher and writer to let the student direct us, and give us evidence for Bander’s homologies and inversions.

  • she’s a military nurse;
  • in a position of some power, but not at the head of hierarchy;
  • indifferent about paperwork, but won’t miss a chance to make little errors to fuck with other characters;
  • prone to profiling but doesn’t act upon it;
  • knows she does and strives to do better, and yet keeps repeating mistakes (a fact of life)

In the spirit of treating my students as co-investigators of knowledge, I wasn’t going to be pedantic about what I believed about Vimes’s character, and I trusted my student to answer my questions about Bander to the best of her knowledge. Gathering data was what mattered. From this information, our Guy™ appeared: they had no name, but here’s what we knew:

  • they’re a double agent, acting as a quartermaster with miscellaneous middle management roles;
  • excels at sabotaging logistics by their own inconsistent judgment (rather than profile people, they profile supplies, and over/underestimates what is needed)
  • really, really does not want to be involved in the war that’s coming, wants to go AWOL;
  • highly strung.

It took a good few minutes for us to hit our stride. As a teacher, not everything I put into a lesson will go to plan, and I need to be prepared for that. Applying structural analysis in this way treats media literacy as a form of play. The class didn’t know much about Vimes beforehand, and I, the teacher didn’t know much about Bander. Nevertheless, we created a character together, and in so doing, each of us overcame our gaps in knowledge through dialogue. This, I believe, is teaching as action, as Paulo Freire described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Of course I’ll tweak a few things here and there, but for a first trial, I’d consider this experiment a success.

Thanks, David…

2. Characterisation As… Discovery (permalink)

With structural analysis, you’re never not thinking about how characters are different from each other. There is, however, one teeny, tiny, limiting feature: we’re thinking about characters in a vacuum. Having identified our PI fellow as a messy fellow at home, we now need to put them in a situation where their messiness can be distinguished.

Perhaps you consider yourself a pantser sort of writer, and you can’t even begin to hack the idea of planning. Or, perhaps you are worried that, if you do plan, you might not stick to them, and end up having your character do or say something you didn’t anticipate – dare I say, “out of character.”

If I’m honest, I have only experimented with structural analysis a few times, and while I plan some of my characters, much of my discovering of them happens off the page. I am a filter feeder of current affairs – when an interesting Situation comes along for me to Monitor, I like to ask how one of my characters would react. Sometimes, I’ll put them in writing exercises and see where the scenario takes them. When I remember to, I’ll also participate in hashtag games on Mastodon and Bluesky, such as #WritersCoffeeClub, #ScribesandMakers, and #WordWeavers. Though the question of the day is not always about characterisation, they’re great for externalising my thoughts on craft, as well as signalling to other writers that I exist. But I digress.

Truth is, fictional characters, like real people, can and will act inconsistent. Those who do good one day can be absolute arseholes the next. If you show your cat-loving protagonist having an exceptionally dogshit fortnight, that peaks with them kicking the stray cat they’ve been feeding, you have shown a character changing over time, and thus we have adequate context to sympathise (there’s a reason, and not an excuse).

3. Characterisation As… Meaningful Choices (permalink)

For this week’s seminar, the students and I am going to read two early scenes from Terry Pratchett’s Jingo:

  • When Commander Sam Vimes assembles the entire City Watch on the even of war, for a major briefing on what it means to be a copper in wartime;
  • Later that night, when Vimes dives into a Klatchian takeaway to put out a fire – a suspected arson attack.

Every single Discworld book is an in situ study of characters built up through many, many meaningful choices. I chose these two scenes because, in isolation, they establish Vimes and Carrot as foils of each other. When you’ve got foils, meaningful choices are easy to see. But there are other meaningful choices beyond the two characters, that will make for good discussion. So, with that in mind:

Q: What sorts of meaningful choices characterise Vimes in these scenes? What about Carrot? What can we say of Goriff, the owner of Mundane Meals?

Now, I’m writing this post in the past, and I’m not sure where this topic’s going to start, or end. We could talk about the narrator first (narrators are characters unto themselves, y’know). Maybe someone wants to lock in on word choice; Vimes’ attitude to paperwork; the passage about how coppering used to be. What follows is what I can only describe as a lightning round of things that might come up:

3.1 Dialogue and Its Functions (permalink)

‘Direct, quoted speech,’ said the MFA student, ‘is not the only form of dialogue in literature.’

If you’re writing in the third person, as Pratchett does, character dialogue can be given indirectly, as something said internally – not externalised with quotation marks:

At such times you could just… sort of hunch your shoulders like this and let your head pull in like this and you became a little hutch of warmth and peace, the rain banging on your helmet, the mind just ticking over, sorting out the world…

I must have been going in there for years, [Vimes] thought, as he splashed through the darkness. And I know how to say ‘vindaloo.’ And… ‘korma…?’ Carrot’s hardly been here five minutes and he gargles the language like a native.

Or, as summary, to get to a point without going through a great big flashback:

Waifs and strays, Colon had said once. Waifs and strays, because normal people wouldn’t be coppers.

But usually, when writers want a discovery or decision to change something about our characters, and we want our readers to experience it, whatever that may be, quoted speech acts as the catalyst:

[Vimes] leaned sideways to Captain Carrot. ‘Who’re all these people?’
‘Watchmen, sir. You appointed them.’
‘Did I? I haven’t even met some of them!’
‘You signed the paperwork, sir. And you sign the wage bill every month. Eventually.’

Dialogue externalises something internal. Not only do we learn that Vimes is sloppy on paperwork (he and Carrot both know this), we watch, in real time, his shock at how many new recruits there are. You could rewrite this exchange as pure indirect speech and summary, from Vimes’s point of view. But we wouldn’t get Carrot’s patter. Pratchett’s narrator is omniscient – it could get right into Carrot’s head if it wanted to, then and there. It chooses not to. Curious…

3.2 Changing the Font? (permalink)

Changing the font for a single character is certainly a interesting meaningful choice, and not one you see in “adult” fiction every day. Vimes is supposed to be the POV character whose perception informs us of the world; if he doesn’t speak Klatchian, then we shouldn’t be privy to Carrot’s conversation with Gorriff. But the author shows his hand here, and lets us understand what they’re saying, to make a bigger point: being in the line of duty is no excuse for being an ignorant bastard, and Vimes ought to know better. If it’d been any of his other regular eating haunts, he’d have recognised the owner on the spot. It lays bare the too-common, white-coded, banal bigotry of not learning who someone is because they are not like you.

3.3 Point of View and Narration (permalink)

Why are these important for characterisation? What does the third person narrator have to do with who Sam Vimes is, as a person?

You could ask the same of Charles Dickens with Scrooge. Pre-modernism, to drop yourself into the middle of the story, as a character, was the fashion:

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

That ‘I’ is the sole person who is telling the story, and he is Charles Dickens, and he is the one in the story who now decides how characters are different from each other. It is not from Scrooge’s own POV that we learn that he likes darkness, because it is cheap. Dickens (the narrator) has deposited that assertion into our heads, and we must trust the benevolent dictator’s word is true.

In the worldbuilding workshop, I started with this fact:

No place in fiction can exist independent of an observer… Someone is always noticing something.

The extent to which a fictional character’s meaningful choices can be truthfully conveyed depends on who (or what) the narrator is. If you’re writing in the first person, then you only get that person’s version of events. You cannot learn anything about any character beyond ‘I’ that isn’t filtered by ‘I.’ Likewise, with an ‘omniscient’ narrator – voyeuristic though it may be, we trust it to reflect the views and opinions of whichever character is the main point of view:

It wasn’t the clap used by middlings to encourage underlings to applaud overlings.* It had genuine enthusiasm behind it which was, somehow, worse.

I mentioned it previously, but ‘omniscient’ narrators have not been truly all-knowing since the modernist period. Ursula K. Le Guin, in Steering the Craft, prefers to call this form of narration the ‘involved’ narrator. What involved narrators tend to do these days is act as a vessel to hold the primary point of view in a given scene (assuming said scene involves one or more characters). If this isn’t the first character to be introduced, then usually it is the character whose inner thoughts are shown the most. Or, if there aren’t any characters, the involved author might report on the setting. (After all, we’re fantasy writers, and those broadstrokes, camera-eyed views of our world have to go somewhere.)

In Discworld, the only time ‘I’ appears outside of dialogue is when we’re in a character’s head. Sometimes, that formless narratorial voice will offer a bit of setting, or get us to focus on something that the POV character can’t perceive, but on the whole, readers are left to experience the story as the POV character experiences it – not as the author’s self-insert dictates. For these two scenes, it is Vimes who’s telling the story, though he doesn’t realise it. Were we to enter these scenes from Carrot’s more enthusiastic, less cynical POV, we would learn very different things about himself, Vimes, and Goriff.

If you want to write with an involved narrator, then changing POVs changes what you can show about your characters.

3.4 Actions and Body Language (permalink)

Unashamed, I’m going to steal a question directly from D. S. Black’s Deadstar Logbook:

Q: What can the body say that speech would otherwise diminish?

https://logbook.deadstar.black/p/cathedral-of-silence

We’ve set up a whole world for our characters to live in, it’d be a shame to render them as talking heads that never interact with the environs. What we’re looking for here is more than just the motions we put before or between lines of dialogue:

[Vimes] leaned sideways to Captain Carrot.

What Black refers to is movement building on movement, leading us temporarily out of story and into what I’ll distinguish as ‘discourse2.’ They call it ‘body language as architecture,’ but I think we know it as something else…

The young man ripped off a salute – at godsdam three in the morning, Vimes thought – that would have brought a happy tear to the eye of the most psychotic drill sergeant.

It’s incluing. We can use body language to clue people into the dynamics of a scene before a single word is spoken. Think of silent films: besides the odd dialogue card, actors had to rely on (and exaggerate) body language to convey information to viewers:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_High_Sign_(Edward_F._Cline_and_Buster_Keaton,_1921).webm

If dialogue offers the potential of discovery, then using body language to inclue character dynamics adds weight to said discovery. I can’t hate a guy like Carrot, but there is a type of cheery, peppy attitude that clashes with the 3am vibe and sets my teeth on edge: I bet you’ll see me again at six, and make three hours’ worth of beauty sleep look like a week’s holiday.

This sort of incluing is longer than a brief aside, and tells us more about the character than a certain emotion washing over them, or sparking down their back. Is this necessarily better than dialogue-heavy prose? No. Can it go wrong? All I’ll say is, just as you’d use a few details to stand in for a room’s description, there comes a point where describing a character’s every involuntary twitch makes passages sound like micromanaged stage directions:

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/what-not-reading-does-to-your-writing

3.5 Thoughts (permalink)

If a character is in thought, they don’t tend to reflect on what they already know, as real people might. They usually work through problems, or speculate on what is going to happen next. You can use thoughts for irony: they show the reader what the POV character really thinks; the internal is kept internal.

‘Oh, you know how it is [said Carrot]. You come in here on night shift for a hot caraway bun and you just get chatting. You must have picked up the odd word, sir.’
‘Well… vindaloo, maybe, but…’
[…]
I must have been going in there for years, [Vimes] thought, as he splashed through the darkness. […] Carrot’s hardly been here for five minutes and he gargles the language like a native.

Vimes knows he ought to know, but he could never, ever admit that to Carrot.

3.6 Appearances (permalink)

There’s types of middle/upper class British people who know how to divine a person’s status from their appearance. Love to. I’ve had family members tell me to steer clear of men who wear turtlenecks (they could be serial killers – fuck knows why). Someone I met through the Uni once told me that undergrads have a distinct ‘look’ compared to postgrads. Maybe they dress sharper? Who knows. Some people will watch a busy street over a coffee, lock on to a random passerby, and try to fill in their secret history from attire alone. I’m not saying that characters can’t have a strong “look,” but do keep in mind the second maxim: ‘Characters are fictional beings who require meaningful choices.’ They should not be your only meaningful choices.

Appearances matter less than a character’s thoughts, words, and actions. Hell, some writers intentionally choose not to describe a character’s appearance in explicit details. We never really learned what the Pellargonia teens look like, but I’ll bet you remember people from secondary school who were like them.

3.7 The Other and Schismogenesis (permalink)

Anthropologists have, for decades, been actively proving that race is not based on genetic difference, or biological, or even cultural. But it is created through culture:

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/race-scientific-taxonomy/

Speculative fiction, however, has to answer what would happen if we humans found ourselves having to coexist with sapient lifeforms who are unlike us in varying ways: fairies, trolls, goblins, dwarves, orcs, elves, talking animals, vampires, werewolves, golems, eldritch horrors, the list goes on.

Litfic writers have it easy. If they want to explore the struggles of sex workers in Amsterdam’s red-light district through fiction, they can interview those sex workers to gain their insights (and you should – some don’t). We can’t interview a goblin.

But suppose the writer’s goblins have long crooked noses. Suppose – and “this is just their culture,” says the writer, the goblins are dab hands at finance – a bit short-tempered, but their word is good as gold upon ‘Change. Suppose – and my word, we’re supposing a lot today – suppose that in the writer’s world, it is common parlance to call a person in the act of thieving a goblin, because (“as everyone knows”) the goblins are a secretive clique. Have these goblins undergone a substantial transformation from their origins in European folklore, or has the writer introduced a race that embodies a centuries-old antisemitic stereotype?

That fantasy is an escapist genre does not excuse you from real-world responsibilities. Fantasy is metaphor, and there are always implicit comparisons to our own world to be made. Try as you might to make it clear in your story that you, the author, think the Torment Nexus is a Bad Thing, along comes a pasty, barely media literate billionaire who thinks the Torment Nexus is the coolest thing ever, actually.

So, try this on for size. In the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the word ‘schismogenesis’ to describe the tendency for humans to define themselves against one another. Nowhere on this planet is there a group of people that aren’t fractured along some dividing line (or lines). It only takes a single argument to show the cracks. Which brings us back to David Graeber:

Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide – even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances. […] They start out as moderate social democrats[…]; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

Politics is just the tip of the iceberg. Suffice to say, whether your characters are carbon or silicon, alive or undead, they are people, at the end of the day. For example: city-dwelling vampires may decide to define themselves against the ‘old ways,’ give up drinking blood and manipulating people, and obsess over new vices. Zombies argue whether it’s right that they should be expected to work night shifts (on account of not needing sleep), and what’s the most ethical way of keeping pests at bay, like flies and raccoons. Humans against trolls on insulation: the former need to stay warm during the winter, the latter need to stay cold (it helps them to think).

When someone – and this amorphous ‘someone’ is white, more often than not – adds a new race to their fantasy world, why do they feel the need to run off and find inspiration in the exotic? Assuming good intentions, of course they want to make their world diverse, and all who live in it. But here, once again, does G. K. Chesterton come shambling up the path, with his lens, muttering something about a man in a frock coat…

Mr. [Rudyard] Kipling’s school advises us to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a far greater compliment than his taking off his hat.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tremendous_Trifles/Chapter_I

We are all the man in the frock coat. We ought to look at ourselves. Not navel-gazing, mind – like the anthropologists, we should make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.

Q: Is there any element of your cultural background that you find strange, but that everyone else from your cultural background takes for granted? Or, the opposite: things that are normal to you that everyone else finds strange?

Where to begin with strange Scottish things? I’ll keep it brief:

  • If ‘gravy dinner’ is ‘meat in a savory sauce, plus a staple carb,’ then I’m sorry, but I don’t know how anyone can enjoy the watery sulk that is mince and tatties in comparison to lasagna, or chicken balti, or chili con carne. Yes, I’m calling those gravy dinners, unalive me;
    • As far as I know, garlic is a recent addition to our culinary palate. I’ve got older family members who won’t tolerate even a sniff of it, which I find wild;
  • Haggis – the posh Englanders down south who like to cosplay as Scots on Burns’ Night can keep it. And as for the future holidaymakers out there: yes, the haggis creatures are absolutely, one hundred percent real, and not a recent invention of fake folklore;
  • Pizza crunches – why;
  • Deep fried Mars bars are a thing, but not as widely eaten as you may think.
  • Americans’ attempts at spelling out our dialect phonetically will never not be amusing. Strange, but amusing; on the other hand, if I text in Scots, spelling is not usually important.
    • Goes without saying, but there’s certain words I only ever hear in my local area, and nowhere else.
  • I was under the impression, having read Robert Burns, that a ‘cutty sark’ was a witch. Imagine my surprise when an older person in the area had to correct me – in her day, a ‘cutty sark’ was a seagull3.

Perhaps one of my characters is part of a community of people that, as a part of their culture, change their spelling and grammar based on other people’s typos, for a laugh. Are they all mince and tattie eaters? No – in fact, very few of them do, and it’s a pejorative stereotype put upon them by a wealthier, more privileged group of people.

I have absolutely not covered all the bases for what makes characters different from each other. I know there wasn’t much focus on character arcs. But I hope it’s enough food for thought.

Looks like plot’s in the cards for next week. If you think characterisation is mercurial in its meaning, then hoo boy. Shit happens with plot, and so much more. I’m going to have to call in some help for this one…

  1. They are foils of each other, after all. But that felt too easy. Fraudulently easy. ↩︎
  2. If a lengthy series of actions can be summarised, or a brief series of actions lengthened, that is what Anne Keesey describes as discourse:
    https://brologue.net/2025/05/04/form-is-emptiness/
    It’s another piece of writerly jargon. While it doesn’t have much room to breathe here, we will definitely have time to go over it when we get to plotting.
    ↩︎
  3. The conversation was about old dialects dying out and not being spoken anymore. I did not call her a witch. ↩︎
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