Siegfried Collecting

[kalloway]

I keep bumping into characters named Siegfried in different games I play, many of whom have similarities in appearance. So now I'm curious-

If your canon has a Siegfried, could you let me know what they look like?

(Mine are from Fate/, Crusaders Quest, Knights of Avalon, Valhalla Gate, and Granblue.)

Comments

[cimorene]

I'm sure they are all inspired by the iconic Siegfried from Wagner's Ring Cycle!

Which of course draws on Niebelungenlied, a medieval German poem, and on Norse mythology, but the opera is by far the most famous (especially when it comes to its visual language) in western culture, and is largely responsible for a lot of popular portrayals of Vikings (even though the people in it aren't actually Vikings) - and the popular culture notions of Vikings are probably responsible for some of the similarities in Siegfried-design you're seeing, I guess?

[kalloway]

Actually, sorting through the herd, multiple are tangled up in drunk Arthuriana, which is part of why I'm curious about other canons~! And the most common design is younger/handsome, with grey/silver/white hair-

[cimorene]

That's funny - I don't recall any character names similar to Siegfried in Arthuriana that I've heard of! Although it does have a sort of... Age of Chivalry/Medieval Romance style and setting in common with Arthuriana, so I suppose crossover isn't too unlikely. Legendary heroic knight who goes on quests and kills dragons etc - he would probably fit in well enough! But the name being so very German when all the characters in Arthuriana who don't have a British folklore origin seem to have French names... and he would certainly have a bit further to travel from anywhere with German naming traditions (or Viking, if you want to assume someone has translated his name from 'Sigurd' at some point).

There's so MUCH Arthuriana though that it's plausible he made a crossover appearance somewhere and stuck in people's memories.

[melannen]

Yeah, there's a general "Medieval Heroes" canon that has Arthur and Charlemagne and Siegfried and Beowulf and friends; they've all been crossing over with each other since at least since Spenser and Ariosto in the 1500s.

[cimorene]

Charlemagne! But he was a real person! 😂

That makes sense given how fandoms typically act. It's sort of like the Age of Sail fandom cluster or something.

[melannen]

Are you claiming Arthur and Sigurdr weren't??? :P

Charlemagne's court has a whole cycle of chivalric romance, 'The Matter of France' that is about as true as Arthur's, anyway. Roland, Oliver, and Ogier the Dane are more likely to cross over than Charlemagne himself.

[cimorene]

OH, see, I'd met all of them and I didn't realize they were connected to Charlemagne (or that Matter of France was about him)! Now I'm curious though...

[melannen]

I met them via Poul Anderson and L. Sprague de Camp's published fanfic and followed the threads back up to Charlemagne, but I know a lot less about that line than Arthur's or Sigurd's too.

[kalloway]

I honestly don't know much about Arthuriana, playing Knights of Avalon has led me to a lot googling to figure out names and who characters are based on, and that combined with other games where Siegfried is wandering around with Lancelot and Percival, or in a highly-French setting, etc. made me stop and go 'wait, someone has gone wandering here', lol.


(Siegfried in Knights of Avalon is also a woman, which makes her having many of what seem to be the archetype-traits really fun.)

[cimorene]

Definitely was not a female name, but I suppose one can always spackle an individual exception.

[kalloway]

Knights of Avalon is fun like that. It's impressively drunk Arthuriana that rejiggers the gender balance in unexpected ways... I did a little write-up about it a few weeks ago and since then have mastered many more jobs and gotten an entire story with Siegfried helping kill some sort of non-dragon rampaging beast~

[melannen]

I *am* curious about the relatively large number of Siegfrieds in Japanese canons. Does Japan love Wagner?

[cimorene]

That's a good question! I have no idea. But perhaps there could be some other popular text with a Siegfried in it that inspires them?

[melannen]

No, I guess it was Wagner!

[cimorene]

Ah, interesting.

[kalloway]

Ha! Well that's good to know.

[polarissruler]

Well, there's the Fat... Oh, you've mentioned him. There's also the one from Shadowverse, but knowing how Cygames work, there's 99% chance he's the same one as from Granblue.

But there's also the Siegfried from DxD, who looks like this:


And the Megaten Siegfried who looks like this:


And of course, they're most likely based on the original Siegfried, but the other comment has already spoken about him.

[kalloway]

I feel like I'm not being paid enough/drunk enough to sort out Cygames stuff so basically I'm going to go with 'probably all sprang from the same base character/concept' and leave it at that. *weeps*

But thank you for the others~

[polarissruler]

Yeah, the problem with Cygames is that most of the early lore and characters are coming from Rage of Bahamut which is A) only in Japanese, and B) discontinued (if I remember correctly)

Which means that finding half the lore is an extensive task which requires browsing a bunch of JP wikis and most likely using Google Translate. And I'm not that invested in the characters, unfortunately.

Even in Oz and she's one of my faves.

[kalloway]

Global RoB is gone, and JP RoB is teetering. They've basically announced no new events but they're going to start re-running old events/make old events permanently playable, iirc. (I play! Let me check the notice... yeah, it sounds like they're done adding content but they'll make more stuff available. It's probably cheap to keep running so they'll leave the servers up but basically in ascended-maintenance mode for the most part.)

[hoarmurath]

The Witcher's Siegfried is a blonde white dude from an order that fights the elven rebels in said game.

[melannen]

Mine is named Siegfried Farnon, looks like Robert Hardy, wears tweed and rubber boots, and spends most of his time elbow-deep in cows. His brother Tristan looks like the fifth Doctor Who. :D

Bonus to Sigurd from Marvel Comics, who is the most glorious of bastards, and had probably gone by Siegfried at some point.

Also Siegfried Sassoon from 'Gay British poets' fandom, although I like Owen and Spender better.

(I have a similar collection of Hannibals- the real one, the serial killer, the one from Benjamin January, the one from Pacific Rim, and the one from My Brother Louis Measures Worms.)

[kalloway]

Fantastic! ^_^

I probably have more than a couple of Sigurds around, too, but I suppose I was going with the specific spelling for *handwaves* reasons.

(Here's mine, from Romancing SaGa 2, an excellent guard to his Empress.)

[melannen]

Yeah if you add in Sigurds, Sigurðrs, and Sigfrids, the list gets a lot longer, but the Marvel one is the myth character who uses all the names, so I'm keeping him. :p

[minoanmiss]

I was about to mention your first Siegfried. ;)

[melannen]

The best of Siegfrieds!

I feel like I've read a fanfic where he occasionally goes out and slays dragons, but maybe I just imagined it.

[kalloway]

Ah, I've never played VI (somehow), but good to know~ Looks like he turns up in Record Keeper, though, so I'll have to watch for him.

[kalloway]

I feel like I've heard about this. Hmm... (Maybe when the pixel remaster comes out I'll finally get to playing VI.)

Yeah, I don't think I've seen him but I don't always pay a ton of attention either. ^^;;

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I mean Mytho from Princess Tutu is really named Siegfried. He's a dandelion-headed anime waif with big golden eyes. He spends so much of canon going by Mytho though that I didn't know he was named Siegfried until I went digging for trivia after watching the show.

[kalloway]

That's a surprise to me, though it's been some time since I last saw Princess Tutu. He does visually fit most of my pattern though~

[i_wish_to_remain_nameless]

I mean I don't remember when (or even if) he gets called that in canon though if you asked me to guess I'd say probably either Fakir's backstory episode or near the end of the series.
Weirdly enough I think Mytho might be named after the Swan Lake Siegfried rather than Ring cycle Siegfried.

[kalloway]

Yeah, he probably is, given Princess Tutu is pretty much an adaptation with some Nutcracker thrown in for flavor. Though OG Swan Lake Siegfried might be named for the myth...