There’s two types of favourite character: those who you love as part of their setting, whose d

There’s two types of favourite character: those who you love as part of their setting, whose dynamics with other characters pique your interest and keep you massively entertained, who you’d love to see in other stories to get more of them…

And then there’s the character who, as soon as you lay eyes on them, you’re consuming the story just for them, waiting for them to reappear again in a new scene because there’s something about them that’s got you hooked. Everything else about the story pales in comparison and if someone told you there was a sequel that didn’t star them, you wouldn’t even watch because their absence would make the story dull. These are the male and non-binary characters who fit that bill for me. I’m going to do another one of these for female characters as the archetype that hooks me is very different and hyper specific

Severus Snape from Harry Potter: I started reading Harry Potter when the series was only up to book 4. Snape hooked me from his first scene: why is someone so cruel, so nasty, so obviously evil, working under such a Good wizard as Dumbledore? It was obvious that Harry had read the situation RE Snape completely wrong and i wanted to know more about this clever evil man. Severus Snape was my gateway into fanfiction.net and for that I’ll never forgive him.

I haven’t read the series in a very long time because it went downhill so badly in those last books. I was so bitterly disappointed when it was revealed that Snape didn’t betray Voldemort until after Lily’s death warrant was signed. That completely killed his character for me; a nasty man with still just enough integrity to act as double agent playing both sides for years is an amazing character, an fascist incel is not.

Dilandau Albatou from The Vision of Escaflowne: This little shit is the reason I’ve been calling myself Dilly in fandom spaces since 2008. Spoiler: he likes to start fires. It was his voice that hooked me the first moment he spoke: Minami Takayama was forcing her voice down to a sly contralto, I couldn’t tell from his character design if he was a boy or a girl, and I was caught. He’s a delight, a vicious flamboyant unbalanced delight of a horrible little person who’s got some massive tragedies in his backstory.

The quality of Dilandau’s voice in the show is my sole determinor for whether I like an Escaflowne dub. Japanese original? Godly. 90′s English dub that everyone on this site seems to be fond off? Terrible Dilandau, terrible dub. Recent English dub everyone on this site seems to hate for replacing their favourite? Decent Dilandau, decent dub.

Lelouch vi Brittania from Code Geass: The only main character on this list. Code Geass is a flawed show, I won’t lie about that, but it’s also an over the top dramafest that goes full throttle and Lelouch is in the middle being the flamboyant dramatic manipulative hero of the people. Personally I love his costume best when he’s emperor, it’s his most flamboyant final form and you know the lad made it all himself.

TenSoon from the Mistborn series: These books are fairly standard fantasy with a good plothook: what if the Dark Lord had won? I enjoyed them! But it wasn’t until book two when TenSoon the kandra made his appearance that I was properly hooked. Who doesn’t love an ancient slime creature who eats corpses and uses their bones to puppet itself along?

The Buckkeep Fool from The Farseer Trilogy: My forever blorbo! My love! The character against whom all other favourite characters are measured. This trilogy is amazing, absolutely gripping and heartbreaking, but it’s the Fool I live for. They’re a stranger in a strange land, driven by visions that have wracked them since childhood, wearing a mask of frivolity and hiding depths beneath their jester’s smile that our main character spends a lifetime trying to comprehend. Again, I think the subsequent trilogies went way downhill, but the Farseer Trilogy and its followup the Liveship Trilogy, set in the south and featuring The Fool wearing a new face, are some of the best and most unique fantasy you’ll ever read

Gabriel from Constantine: yes, that movie version of Hellblazer starring Keanu Reeves looking handsome and acting like a plank of wood. This movie introduced me to both Hellblazer (far superior) and to Tilda Swinton (androgynous goddess). Gabriel’s just what I like - ambiguous gender, inhuman, powerful and clever and not at all nice.

Komui Lee from D.Gray-man: He’s a side character, older brother of The Girl of the shounen gang. He comes across as a scatty terrible boss, too distracted by his own inventions to do the basic tasks his role requires, but as the series goes on he reveals hidden depths of seriousness to him. This is a man who gave up his home, his dream, his language, his culture, to chase after his sister who’d been kidnapped, and ended up becoming one of the people working for that sinister organisation that took her because there was no way to rescue her from something so powerful.

Fujimoto from Ponyo: Ponyo is such a cute cartoon, so lovely, but the second I saw Fujimoto walking about with his little pump spritzing water on the lawn I was taken by him. He just wants to live with his giant wife and his thousands of tiny fish-daughters, making sea-magic!

Elim Garak from Deep Space Nine: Sly and flamboyant lizard-alien spy? The lone member of the Evil Alien race that’s left on the station after his people were driven out? A man who claims to be a simple tailor, an exile, but surely must be more than that? He’s everything for me.