Top 5 blorbos? 💖
Thank you, @xserpx!
FitzChivalry Farseer (Realm of the Elderlings) - One of, if not the best Fantasy Protagonist out there, how I love to bully him for his poor-ass choices and cherish him for his better ones. How I love to peel away at his layers, but also lose my brains to incomprehensible noise at just wanting to slap him and hug him and tell him it's all going to be okay, and he'll have a very unconventional family by his side, beloved by so many he won't let close.
Sansa Stark (A Song of Ice and Fire) - There are literally whole passages and chapters burnt into my brain from how many times I've reread her material. Easily one of my favorite female characters in fantasy, just this excellent, fleshed-out take on this classic princess, stuck in the tower, kept by captors in shining armor or with handsome locks of hair, but never losing her idealism in the face of abuse and adversity behind closed doors. I keep coming back to the series, mostly for her. She's worth it, despite what everyone in her surroundings thinks and says about her.
Vick dan Teufel (The First Law) - My broken sweetheart. This unbelievably tormented soul, broken down by the system grinding her up and feeling the only way to endure the cruelty and trauma done to her is through being the boot against the necks of people like her once, only to still have a flickering flame of humanity deep down. She managed to grip my heart from the get-go, and she never let go as she peeled away more layers of her self-delusion and repression of trauma, only to realize sometimes, all a person can do is not settle for what they're given, and instead reach for what they want. That last line of hers lingers in my heart.
Black Calder (The First Law) - I'm always terminally Black Calder-brain poisoned. I just love the journey he took from being a spoiled twat whose first impulse at being given a message is to cut off the messenger's head and send it back to his comrades, to a slippery schemer snake who slithers across political campfires and battlefields without his head nailed down, yet can't slip past his own heart in the end, to an embittered, yet determined father who'll torch most his ambitions, sell his very soul, just to protect and save his son at the very end.
Geder Palliako (The Dagger and the Coin) - Oh gods, this utter trash baby. I want to slap him and his pathetic flaws, so attuned to fascism and the banality of evil that comes with it, this up-jumped fool elevated to too high a castle in the sky, this fucking warmonger who would murder a political prisoner out of spiteful rage and wage violence in the name of making world peace and not think through the implications. Yet, he's also such a mew-mew, so curious about the world, just wants peace and quiet to read his books, just wants friends and will settle for people who just don't treat him like shit. Both virtues and vices so intertwined in the same person, unable to be divided so finely. Which is what's so great and terrible about him.