First time at this blog? Check out Home for details on the project and the Character Index for more of an overview of the characters.
Sandy Rivers (57)
Project: Comedy film (Western Road Trip)
Known as: Sandy
Real name: Maybe Sandy Rivers – though it sounds fake
Group affiliation: Trip’s protectors.
Physical description: Sandy is an older Chinese American woman of indeterminate age. She is grizzled and wrinkled but in no way frail. She wears biker leathers complete with chains, a necklace of small silver skulls, and has a tattoo of a water buffalo on her arm. She looks like the toughest person you’ve ever seen, while also being small for an adult.
Personality: Despite her attire, Sandy is unfailingly polite and well-spoken. She is loyal to a fault and would do anything for her few friends. She is smart, but not in a showy way. She is relatively quiet; it is not that she avoids speaking but more that she enjoys listening and observing more. She is extremely resourceful and remains calm/logical in crises.
History: Sandy is a bit of a mystery when she shows up in the story. Cruising on a badass chopper, the way she is dressed she looks like she might be a small demon looking for souls to steal. Sun notices her a suspicious number of times on their journey (enough that it becomes implausible that she is just heading the same way). But he also notices her helping them out in small ways.
Eventually she talks to them, needing to warn them that a biker gang they had angered earlier in the film are planning an ambush. Sun senses no malice in her (the opposite in fact) so he allows her to travel with them (she usually rides ahead of or behind White Dragon Horse). Trip loves her. She is exactly the type of person he felt like he was missing out on in his sheltered life. Easy to judge one way, but beneath it not what you expected. Her politeness and intelligence puts her on par with Trip, and they become fast friends.
It will eventually be revealed that her presence is not simply coincidence. She is a former colleague of Trip’s parents (having been a literature professor). Willing to do about anything for a friend, she agreed to shadow Trip on his journey (good old Find a Friend kept her from having to stay too close). It turns out she has an additional reason for the trip, as she has recently lost her husband and Trip’s parents thought the journey might distract her from her suffering.
Role in the narrative: Sandy is here to defy expectations. She is a biker and at times seems like she might be an antagonist. The more the travelers interact with her, though, the more layers she has. It’s not an accident she is a literature professor (don’t judge a book…). She is also the one who cares most about Trip; while Sun and Hawg have more selfish motivations.
Abilities: Like all of Trip’s protectors, she is a gifted individual. She is a surprisingly adept fighter but is most striking in her resourcefulness. She is smart and caring and can tell stories extremely well.
Inspirations: Sha Wujing from Journey to the West. I opted to gender swap the character, which has been done before (the TV show “The New Legends of Monkey”). I was on the fence about this, but I’m not sure I’ll add Guanyin to the story so I wanted another female (aside – Guanyin seems maybe a little too revered for me to use; that and in the narrative she is the ultimate safety valve that can swoop in at any time to solve any problem, a character I want to avoid). In the original story, Sandy agrees to protect Tripitaka for redemption and to avoid punishment (he’d get stabbed by swords from the sky daily unless he hid in a river until he agreed to help Tripitaka). Sandy was also probably the most loyal to Tripitaka, so my Sandy is overtly on the journey to protect Trip but is also using the trip to avoid suffering.
100 Characters Blog 