Misam (Aug. 2023)

Sharona Misam really just started out as "what if the cat alien was a boy this time" and "what if the scientist guy was silly", but he really got interesting to me once I decided he'd be a religious person as well - particularily the Protestant churches that I'm familiar with. I'm someone who's not that religious, and not really spiritual at all, but I still feel an attachment to it that's hard to describe. A lot of alien religions in sci-fi are really specific to their one culture, and I like thinking about a space creature who starts following an Earth religion instead, especially one as mundane as mainline Protestantism.

There's some old church ruins in South Carolina that have somehow become associated with him in my mind. It wasn't even the main parish church and it's been ruins longer than it was ever intact. It's now believed that it was just taken apart for material after the war. I think he would see it as a vivid illustration of his view of the church - how a lot of what the church does is by, and for, people living in the present day, and necessarily temporary, but that there's still value in things even when they aren't divinely ordained and don't last forever.