Response to Cebr1979’s post on my Public Domain Super Heroes talk page.
First off, thank you for the praise. It’s good to know my contributions are appreciated.
My impression from looking at many pages of this site is that the great majority of the characters, if not true superheroes, fit into one of the two categories, either being super without necessarily being heroic (or villainous) (e.g., supernatural characters from fantasy stories), or being heroic (or villainous) without necessarily being super (e.g., action, adventure and western heroes, particularly from popular periodical fiction like comic books, pulp magazines, dime novels and story papers). The oldest characters on this site embody that distinction, falling rather clearly into only one of the categories, divided into fairy tale/folkloric characters on the one hand, and adventure/western heroes or spies/detectives on the other. So it indeed sounds a tad hypocritical to question characters from fairy tale settings when PDSH is positively littered with them, as well as with nursery rhyme characters like Mother Hubbard and Simple Simon that do not even have supernatural or fantastic elements to them (beyond Hubbard’s dog qualifying as a “funny animal”). Also, many of the fairy tale characters I have added or want to add are non‐folkloric and have known creators, and first appeared in periodical fiction, which I imagined would give them a bit of a push, but even the folkloric ones get a visit to Wikipedia and Comic Vine from me to check what exploits these characters may have had in other, particularly super‐heroic, fiction (like the aforementioned Fables category).
My justification for Benjamin Button and Gregor Samsa, for example, is that they are undoubtedly supernatural characters from public‐domain fantasy stories, unheroic though they may be, and that their tremendous popularity might prevent current creators from realizing that the characters are available for use. The inclusion of Robinson Crusoe and characters from The Tempest on this site suggests that other Robinsonade characters, like the Swiss Family Robinson, are sufficiently heroic to qualify, not to mention the fact that they were the inspiration for the Space Family Robinson and Lost in Space series. So these are my rationales given my understanding of the characters included on this site; let me know if my interpretation is wildly off the mark.
And the character Simba that I hope to add when I finish reading the novel is quite a different one from the Fiction House character. I guess we would need a disambiguation page with the characters’ getting article names of “Simba (Fiction House)” and “Simba (Sampson Low),” or “Simba (1940)” and “Simba (1873),” or “Simba (lion)” and “Simba (human).”