The Miller
supporting · human · the one who could not bear a pause
Not a bad man. A man who cannot leave a silence alone, standing in the worst possible room.
How we meet them
Being described as somebody who talks too much, immediately before he proves it in front of a king.
Personality
Talkative, eager to be liked, and catastrophically bad at knowing when to stop.
What they want
To be interesting for ten more seconds.
How they change
From a harmless boaster, to a man who hears himself say something irreversible, to somebody who thinks about it for the rest of his life and is never once asked to answer for it.
How they speak
Whatever will make the other person look at him.
How the story treats them
The story is unusually gentle with him. It says plainly that he is not a bad man, and then shows exactly how much damage that kind of not-bad man can do.
One surprising thing
He never appears again after the first page. His daughter is locked up, threatened, married off and hunted for a year, and he is simply not in the rest of the story.
If they were real today
He would tell your new boss an embarrassing story about you within four minutes of meeting them.
Key moments
He heard himself say it
The king says nothing in the particular way important people say nothing, the pause goes on a beat too long, and a sentence comes out of him that he cannot take back.
“She can spin straw into gold.”
The rest of his life
He had no idea why he said it, and the story notes, without any comment at all, that he thought about it for the rest of his life.
Who they know
The Miller's Daughterfamily
He says one sentence about her and then vanishes from her life entirely.
Characters like The Miller
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