Tia is a character with seldom any distinctive or noteworthy physical trait. She is a blue-eyed blonde with short hair with one of the plainest designs one could find for most of her life, with the notable exception of that one time when she had people around her to push her out of her comfort zone. As a result, she looks like any other blonde tomboy, which brings comparison with the most notorious of them out there.
The character who has been mentioned to me the most as a possible inspiration for Tia is Aya Brea, from Parasite Eve. There are good reasons behind that. Aya is also a blue-eyed short-haired blonde, and, as a badass cop who wrestle against pseudo-scientific threat, she does hit some of the same story beats as Tia, at least on a superficial level.
I say on a superficial level because Aya and Tia do not have much in common in term of attitudes and personalities. Aya is a well-liked level-headed cop who do well under pressure while Tia is antagonistic and impulsive. Aya overall does surprisingly well in adapting to the extraordinary happenings in her life, and to the changes she goes through herself, while Tia is an underdog, barely able to keep up and often at odds against her own body.
All this to say that, despite the superficial similarities, Aya was actually never an inspiration for Tia despite some similarities. Where it counts, which is they personalities, they are quite different. That is not to say that I dislike Aya, of course, I am quite a big fan of the first two Parasite Eve games, in fact, and remember being quite fond of all the personal comments she would have on everything you examine in the second game. Quite a nice way to breath some life in an otherwise rather subdued character.
Tia can be easily compared to another well-known survival horror blonde, and one that I am rather fond of, too: Heather Mason, from Silent Hill 3. Heather is a pretty cool character in no small part thanks to her jaded attitude which gave birth to quite a few iconic lines. I love heather, she is great, but, once again, not a character that inspired Tia, nor a character who shares many traits with her if you look past the surface-level stuff. Tia can definitely act jaded at times, but I would argue that Heather is a good deal more apathetic than her, it’s a big part of the character and why you get these funny one-liners from her, whereas Tia is much more likely to ruffle your fathers instead. In the end, we have gone over two characters to basically say the same thing, that they did not inspire Tia. There is probably a reason, somewhere in the depths of my subconscious, that could explain why Tia is the blonde tomboy that she is. But the truth of the matter is that I cannot relate her design to any specific character. Still, these two ladies are pillars of the survival horror genre, so Tia does not suffer by comparison when someone assumes that she was inspired by either of them. So while Tia looks like any other blonde, she is not really like any of them.
In the next post, we will look at another tomboy who might not look like Tia, but shares quite a few personality traits with her!
