Tilting at windmills Cervantes wrote and published "Don Quixote" during the Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), a revolt by the Habsburg Netherlands to end Spanish rule. In "Don Quixote", the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign
Composite character Composite character In a work of media adapted from a real or fictional narrative, a composite character is a character based on more than one individual from the preceding story. Two or more fictional characters are often combined into a single character in the course of an adaptation of a work for a different medium, as in adapting a novel in the course of authoring a screenplay for a film. A composite character may be modeled on historical or biographical figures. An amalgamation or amalgam, when used to refer to a fictional character or place, refers to one that was