There's a thing with German-Americans, too, where they are far more what we think of as German than actual Germans.
I think the Germans we know have inherited German sensibilities from the 1800's--they were stern, hard-working people who told their children stories about how the woods and witches and evil monsters want to destroy you in your sleep or will get you if you are bad, and who basically inherited the tribal ideal that a hero is only a hero if he dies in battle, and even anything you spared from the void in your lifetime will be sucked back in the second you aren't around to fight anymore.
Then you meet actual kids from Germany and the boys are all kind, frail mama's boys who and everyone is really sweet and generous and disturbingly American! So basically, the Germans do a terrible job of being the sort of Germans we think they should be.
I love all your ideas. How about the Benefactor as the subterranean guardian of the lodestone? What is relationship to Farthington, who has absolutely no authenticity?
What happens when a vacuum of authenticity and the most authentic Detroiter ever collide?
You know, I don't think Berry Gordy sat around trying to prove he was more Detroit than anybody else. I think when he went to LA, he worked at being LA. But really, he probably spent most of his time being Berry Gordy. It's funny in a way that Eminem doesn't just talk about Detroit roots--he needs to prove that he is somehow still relevant to Detroit--to cultivate that same sort of thing Bruce Springsteen has, where people think he works for $5 an hour at a car wash in some New Jersey ghost town on the weekends. Hendrix never seemed to go in for that sort of territorial nonsense.
If anything, he tried to show he was from space.
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