An exploration on metaphors and motifs used for Tintin, our beloved #1 world reporter sleuth. (DO NOT COPY OR LIFT THIS.)
The most notable fruit that I compare Tintin to is cherries. He’s naturally sweet. Cherries are beautiful, can easily come apart at a small touch – but so rich it left you dizzy and your lips curl. When you have a conversation with him, his words leave you with a smile on his face yet feeling some kind of way (too gentle to forget). He does take advantage of this when he has to create his convincing [false] webs. He’s a soft enigma that paints you a hazy picture. Look at him and he’s nothing but a dream written in warm tones; gentle, magnetic, and slightly impossible —- a man whose sweetness feels almost like a hallucination but who exists fully in the world. (He makes you ache with recognition you can’t place. His presence warps what you believe you understand.)
Think gentle, like a sunset of a summer day. Like sweetness, he brings warmth. His countenance are golden and shining in the summer light, otherworldly grace in how he carries himself. He’s a sun-drenched soul and something too hot to touch.
iii. Death (or: waltzing with death)
Tintin is always evading death. I talk a lot about how he has a lot of people trying to kill him and have attempted to do so, many times. This created speculations that Tintin is a metahuman. When I mention death, they are metaphorical. His demise never went through. He’s always brushing with death, so much that death is his beloved.
He was hurled into the tumultuous embrace of the ocean, the jagged maw of the sea gnashing at him, yet amidst the turmoil, he danced with an unhinged elegance, a shadowy ballet with oblivion itself. Salt seared his lips and lungs, yet the water wrapped around him, drawing him near as if the world had narrowed to the rhythm of their shared violence. Each wave that tried to claim him became a lover’s whisper, each current a caress that threatened and delighted at once.
Death’s always there for him, she's his shadow-bride. Alas, she never keeps him. She can't. Tintin is always keeping her waiting at the altar… And death is simultaneously following him and puts others near him in danger.
Tintin is a modern-day Tyche. The embodiment of unpredictable fortune: radiant, admired, morally good, and almost untouchable in the way he navigates the world. People look up to Tintin, worship his courage and ingenuity (a running theme is he’s crimson clinging to golden ichor). But because Tyche is mostly a god of luck, the things Tintin sets off can put other people in danger, even if he means well. Like luck itself, his experiences are full of risk and danger. However well-intentioned, his presence stirs the fates around him, creating both opportunity and danger in equal measure. He’s a divine figure who illuminates the world yet shapes destinies beyond anyone’s control.
Golden boy sleuth and glory devourer; he smells like crimson tainted with gold ichor and victory is on his breath. He is the sweetheart over seas. He is an illusion of purity, promise, and [almost] mythic brilliance!
The way Atlas holds up the stars is similar to how Tintin keeps our shared ideas of truth, justice, and adventure from getting lost. Tintin's travels around the world are seen as a holy act of balance, like a story told again in ink (and color). He doesn't bear the world as punishment; he bears it as promise — though they ache, unseen. The world presses down on him, yet his stillness is a kind of prayer. Atlas' shoulders are where myth becomes muscle, and in Tintin they become motion (or: a shrug of a man against the pull of cynicism). Tintin’s shoulders, like Atlas’, are never free… but they make the burden beautiful.
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