Inventory: 8 characters who rock

Star Wars is full of odd little aliens on the periphery, but perhaps none are as odd (or as peripheral) as the big beautiful boulders that are the Vintians. First introduced in Claudia Gray’s YA novel The High Republic: Into The Dark with the navigator/punchline Geode, this race of rock guys have one of the highest rock-to-guy ratios on this list, in that there is nothing even semi-sapien about them. They just look like big ol’ rocks. No eyes, no limbs, no mouths with which to scream. Just six-foot-tall slabs of flinty alien stone who can think and apparently fly spaceships. At least that’s an easy toy to manufacture. [JO]

Pokémon omnibus

Don’t let their many weaknesses fool you, Rock-type Pokémon are some of the series’ most iconic. Of course, there’s Geodude and its evolutionary line, which goes on the inspiring journey of transforming a simple rock with arms into a funky boulder-turtle-man. Then there’s Onix, or more specifically, Brock’s Onix, which once managed to lose a fight to a Pikachu despite being immune to lightning. They’re not the strongest monsters, but they’re earthy and classic. Rock types sum up the charm of Ken Sugimori’s early Pokémon designs, which asked “What if real-world objects and/or wild animals were your friends?” Take a stone and stick some arms on it. Boom, that’s a Pokémon. Back in the day, the series was all about picking your favorite little guy and power-leveling them until they could take down Lance and your little shit of a rival. Rock types were a popular choice because, weaknesses and good moves be damned, kids love rocks. It’s an appeal that’s kept a recurring detail of the series going across its endless iterations; while many of the original 151 have fallen by the wayside, a new generation is always happy to journey with the latest pebble-turned-killing-machine GameFreak has cooked up, ranging from Roggenrola to Rolycoly. [Elijah Gonzalez]

The Rocks In The Universe Where Everybody Is Rocks (Everything Everywhere All At Once)

Almost certainly the cheapest effects shots represented on this list, the “Rock Universe” from Everything Everywhere All At Once—the Daniels’ “one good movie carrying the sins of a whole trend” multiverse-hopper—isn’t a universe where rocks evolved sentience, or where people look like rocks, or anything fantastical like that. It’s just a reality where life never evolved, and so the planet contains… Rocks. Just rocks, two of which end up getting inhabited by the minds of Evelyn Wang and her daughter-from-sort-of-another-mother Jobu Tupaki when they start flagrantly jumping through realities near the movie’s climax. Motionless, in a film of almost constant motion—with the conversation between Mom and Daughter represented by silent text on the screen—the peace of being rocks allows Evelyn and Jobu to take a (non-existent) breath, slow down, and actually connect for the first time. Sure, the thing they connect on ends up being nihilistic self-destruction, but what are you gonna do? They’re just rocks! [William Hughes]

Gorons (The Legend Of Zelda)

In a series full of monsters trying to kill you, Gorons have always been a welcome sight in The Legend Of Zelda games. First introduced in Ocarina Of Time, the sentient stone people are the locals of Death Mountain, where they find themselves under siege by Ganondorf until Link stepped in to help. Despite their beefiness and strength, the Gorons are quite gentle and are one of the only groups that haven’t been hostile to Link at some point. (Sorry, Zoras, we haven’t forgotten the pot shots in the 1986 original.) Born from stone like Tolkien’s dwarfs, Gorons are usually portrayed as hardy and reliable—evening fought alongside Link as sages and champions, facing off against villains like Ganon and Different Ganon—but there have been a few that buck conventions, like the coward-turned-leader Yunobo, who gave these guys a bit more texture. Link could even transform into a Goron in Majora’s Mask, wreaking destruction after curling up into a stone ball; if there’s a universal truth across video games, it’s that it’s fun to roll around and smash stuff as a big ball. Gorons may be pretty simple, but when you’ve been running away from ReDeads for hours, you’ll be craving Goron City’s familiar tune. [EG]

The Rockbiter (The NeverEnding Story)

For a giant man who both eats, and is, rocks, Fantasia’s resident Rockbiter doesn’t actually do much in the plot of 1984’s The NeverEnding Story. Possibly because the gorgeous puppet suits used by special effects director Brian Johnson and his team weren’t exactly crafted for mobility. But he does do a wonderful job of setting both the tone, and the scope, of Wolfgang Petersen’s unlikely children’s film, towering over its opening scenes and delivering some key exposition about the Nothing that’s coming to devour the world of imagination. Later on, the Rockbiter reappears to get gobbled up during the quest’s darkest hour, with veteran voice actor Alan Oppenheimer—who also voiced the movie’s canine luck dragon, and its lupine predator Gmork—bemoaning to Noah Hathaway’s Atreyu about how little this absolute unit managed to accomplish with his “Big, good, strong hands.” [WH]

Sandman (Spider-Man)

To quote Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, sand “is just tiny little rocks.” Using the transitive property, Marvel’s Sandman, Flint Marko, may not be the first rock character that comes to mind, but he might be the rockiest, at least in terms of quantity. One of several sandmen stalking around the comic panels, Marko is the only who is a literal man made of sand. Introduced by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in Amazing Spider-Man #4, he suffers from the classic Marvel mishap of science going wrong and turning him into a freak. But while the part-man, part-sand attributes made him a great and imaginative villain, it also played neatly into Lee’s metaphorical writing style. Made up of thousands of tiny rocks, the sympathetic Sandman has eventually graduated to the role of antihero. He also has the distinction of being the best part of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, which allowed Thomas Hayden Church to dig into the inverse of Peter Parker’s origins in a more satisfying and nuanced way than Venom could. Here’s a character who gains infinite power to help the people he loves, but true happiness always seems to slip through his fingers like, well, a bunch of tiny little rocks. [MS]