Top Ten Tuesday - Favorite fantasy characters

Top Ten Tuesday is a regular feature on the Broke and Bookish blog. This week's list is a look at the top 10 favorite characters in X genre. I've picked Fantasy, but for some interesting reading I highly recommend heading over to their blog - they collect links from more than a hundred other bloggers with their own lists,a nd the things that draw people to particular characters can be fascinating.

1. Neville from the Harry Potter series - I liked him from the first book, and by the time the series was over he was one BAMF. He had bad things happen to him in his life, but he always carried a sort of innate desire to see good in people and not to rock the boat unless it was important. His interaction with his parents in Book 5 just broke my heart, but I loved how well that scene encapsulated him - the compassion and unconditional love for his parents, his willingness to take his grandmother's barbs without comment, and then the steel underneath when he realizes Harry and co. have seen it - that absolute certainty Harry has that he won't brook anyone laughing at what they went through.

2. Jehane, from The Lions of Al Rassan - This is not my favorite of Kay's books, but she is definitely my favorite of his characters. I love her no nonsense attitude. I love her devotion to her patients. I love that I could relate to almost every step of her story, that at no point was there a decision she made that I could look at and go "why?" I loved the way she tried not to love, and the way she eventually surrendered to the feeling without surrendering her own autonomy or subverting it and becoming just a love interest. she was fantastic.

3. Sam Vimes of the Night Watch Discworld books - His frustration with life and society and the world in general makes for a fantastic bit of snark, but his position also allows him to see the entirety of society as a web, and this knowledge seems to be some of what breaks him early on. I love the way he can cut through all that bullshit when the moment counts though. He can think of the rich and the poor in the same exact way, and while it may pain him to do it, he almost always drags himself back from the precipice of going too far when any number of others might have gone over. And it's always a struggle for him, which I think makes me like him all the more. :)

4. Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle - She's all business and has no time for frivolous things like love or, occasionally, politeness. She sees herself as having a particular role in her world, and there was something both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the way she insisted she was stuck in that role while at the same time defying it. The relationship with Howl is probably one of my favorite character relationships in all of fiction. 

5. Eddie from the Dark Tower books - Even when he was a junkie focused on his brother almost to the exclusion of all else, there was something steely and sarcastic and fascinating about Eddie to me. He went at even the most hopeless situations with an almost manic sense of humor, and he didn't always do the right thing, but that just made him feel more real to me. King's good at that in general, but I really found Eddie to be a grounding force in the series.

6. Molly from The Last Unicorn - From the moment she gives her speech to the unicorn when they first meet, I knew this would be a character who would stick with me. The magician may know more of the world as a thing, but Molly knows about people and emotions, and she's a source of staid wisdom and a sharp tongue, each depending on the need of the situation. Her clear love for Amalthea shone through a lot of the murkiness and heaviness in the plot around her.

7. Quentin from the Toby Daye books - There's something I and I think a lot of other people find compelling about a character with a fairy-tale view of honor having to come to grips with the realities of life in a world which is decidedly not a fairy tale. Quentin's idealism doesn't get ripped out from under him as it if some so many characters like him - but the slower pace of his adjustment to reality I think makes for a much better story. In a series filled with incredibly interesting characters, he just barely edged Toby as my favorite.

8. Breeze from the Mistborn trilogy - He was never really a main character, but I loved the gray morality of Breeze - the way he insisted on the finer things in life, the way he pretended he didn't really care and was doing everything for the money, but the way he always showed that he really DID care, when the chips were down. The way he'd put his life on the line despite not really having any useful offensive abilities. I thought he was one of the most interesting in a varied and compelling cast.

9. Sansa from the Game of Thrones series - I know a lot of people hated her for being so weak-willed, but I always thought she was a very strong person - just also a very young one. She displays an adaptability and a fortitude that a lot of other characters might not have managed even had they lived past their stopping point. Sansa endures and she learns. And in the world of GoT, those can be some of the most powerful abilities a person can have. But most of all, I just really felt bad for her - a child who was allowed, for a time, to retain her childhood and who was ripped out of it at a much older age and reacted accordingly.

10. Toby Daye from the series of the same name - I said earlier that Quentin just barely edged her for my favorite character, but I still like her enough to make an overall top ten right now. :)  I love her determination and her ability to make do with less magical gifts than the people around her often have. I love the way she's so devoted to children especially - it makes sense  in the world of Faerie, but it seems with her it's even more pronounced. I love how she can both embrace her feelings and completely misread them. I always look forward to the next book she's in with great gusto!