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Katsa
The protagonist of Graceling. She is a relative of King Randa of the Midluns who is Graced with killing. Because of this, the king uses her as his most elite enforcer. Katsa herself hates this and how Randa makes her do it, and in her free time has organized a resistance against the tyranny of kings and performs missions for them.
- Action Girl: Due to her Grace, she alone is the equal of a squad of fully-grown men.
- Badass Boast: When leaving Randa, she details how she could kill every one of his guards and then him.
- Blessed with Suck: Her grace is powerful and dangerous, and it also meant that Randa used her as his personal thug for most of her life.
- Mark of the Supernatural: Having heterochromia is the sign of a Graceling. Katsa's are green and blue.
- Murder Is the Best Solution: She doesn't believe this usually, but she does kill Leck because he was about to reveal Po's real Grace. She shut him up via a dagger to the mouth.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Downplayed. She isn't unhappy that she killed Leck, but she is freaked out that she killed him just to stop him from talking.
- Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: She hates most feminine and ladylike things. It's a Justified Trope as Randa used these to control her.
- Superpower Lottery: She's a winner. Her real grace, Survival, means that she can go days without rest, food, or water, can survive extreme temperatures, and is an incredible hunter and fighter.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Zigzagged. In Randa's service, she has killed people and feels guilty about it. However, on her own missions for the Council, she is vehemently against taking any lifes, going out of her way to only knock people out, even if her companions advice her to just kill her enemies to be safe.
Po
The male lead of Graceling. He's the youngest prince of the island nation of Lienid, and Graced with fighting skills. He quickly befriends Katsa and accompanies her on her journey. His real name is Prince Greening Grandemalion, but he prefers 'Po' for obvious reasons.
- Clean Dub Name: in the german version of the books, he is called Bo, as Po as a common word for butt.
- Combat Clairvoyance: The real reason he's so good at fighting- his Mind-reading Grace allows him to sense moves before they come.
- Disability Superpower: His Grace turns into this by the end of Graceling. He's blind, but can sense everything around him with perfect clarity.
- Mark of the Supernatural: His eyes are silver and gold.
- Only Sane Man: He's the only one immune to Leck's Grace, leading to him noticing some very obvious logic loopholes that slip by every other character.
Raffin
Prince of the Midluns and Katsa's Childhood Friend.
- Locked into Strangeness: Because a headache remedy he experimented with turns fair hair blue.
- Nice Guy: Very much a contrast to Randa.
- Professor Guinea Pig: Tests some of his medicines on himself, which is why he gets blue hair.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Apart from his avid medical studies, prince Raffin is also a main supporter of the Council.
Randa
King of the Midluns. Randa's lands are in a very precarious position between three often-warring kingdoms, and balancing that situation has given Randa both shrewd political sense and a very ruthless pragmatism and opportunism.
- Abusive Parents: He's not Katsa's real parent, but he raised her to be his thug. He's very good at manipulating her into thinking that she deserves to be this.
Leck (Unmarked Spoilers)
The king of Monsea. He is a major character in Graceling, a minor character in Fire, and while he does not personally appear in Bitterblue, his actions before and during Graceling cast a very large shadow.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: As seen in Fire, as a small child, he tortured animals to death. Later he moves on to humans...
- Big Bad: Of Graceling.
- Consummate Liar: His Grace, to the point of being a Compelling Voice. Everyone who hears his lies will automatically believe them over all logic and evidence.
- The real kicker is it's contagious; his words are almost as convincing in someone else's mouth as they are in his own, though the effect lessens the further it spreads from the source.
- Death by Irony: The narration points out that in the end, what got Leck killed was almost telling a truth.
- Eyepatch of Power: He wears one during Graceling; Fire shows how he got it. It does a great job of covering up that he's a Graceling.
- Eye Scream: How he came by his Eyepatch of Power.
- The Good King: A fair ruler who's kind to women and animals. Well, at least that's what he makes everyone think.
- Kick the Dog: A lot during his reign.
- Loves the Sound of Screaming: The screaming of women as he forced his advisors to rape them was something he enjoyed a lot.
- Mark of the Supernatural: His eyes are red and gray.
- Parental Incest: Had Ashen locked in her room because Ashen refused to let him rape his daughter Bitterblue.
- Power Perversion Potential: Used to its fullest and most horrifying extent.
- Sadist: Absolutely loves harming others.
- Superpower Lottery: He's absolutely the wrong person to win it as much as he did.
- Walking Spoiler: It's nigh-impossible to list any tropes at all for him without giving away a major twist in Graceling, and basically all of Bitterblue is about dealing with the fallout of The Reveal.
Ashen
Leck's wife, a member of Lienid's royal family. She doesn't appear much in the book, but has quite a role offscreen.
- Hero of Another Story: She resists Leck's control for Bitterblue, and is eventually killed while she and Bitterblue are escaping from Leck.
- Mama Bear: Towards Bitterblue.
- The Power of Love: She resisted Leck because she knew that if she didn't, he'd hurt Bitterblue.
- Small Role, Big Impact: She appears very little, but it's her actions that put the plot in motion.
Bitterblue
The princess of Monsea, who has become queen by the time of Bitterblue.
- A Child Shall Lead Them: Becomes Queen at the age of ten.
- Determinator: Is she ever. A ten-year-old girl with no survival skills, thrown into a living nightmare, who keeps herself together and refuses to falter until her kingdom is safe again.
- Heroic Willpower: Not even Leck can command her.
- Protagonist Title: Bitterblue is named after her.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: She's trying to be this during Bitterblue.
- Wise Beyond Her Years: Very mature, even as a child.
Fire
The last human monster in the Dells. The second-to-last was her father Cansrel, who screwed up the Dells quite a lot before his death. Fire's still dealing with the mess he left behind.
- Attempted Rape: Her monster beauty means she's at constant risk of this.
- Blessed with Suck: Being a monster gives her magical powers and extreme beauty, but it also attracts hatred and monster animals want to eat her.
- Charm Person: As a monster, Fire has power over the minds of others, even beyond her physical attractiveness.
- Last of Their Kind: Fire is the last known human monster to exist. At the start of Fire, she's able to have children, but partway through the book, she intentionally sterilizes herself so there'll never be any more Cansrels.
- Mark of the Supernatural: Fire's name comes form her hair color. Having odd hair colors is a trait of monsters in general.
- Master of Illusion: One of her mind powers.
- Protagonist Title: Fire is named after her.
- Real Women Don't Wear Dresses: Averted. Fire (unlike Katsa) is feminine, likes dresses, and wants children. Unfortunately, she can't have them because human monsters shouldn't exist.
- Self-Made Orphan: She killed Cansrel because of what he was doing to the Dells.
- So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Her monster beauty means she's the constant target of rape attempts (by those who don't hate her), she has to be guarded 24/7 (especially since monster animals hunger for her blood), and she's never going to get as much sympathy as she needs because even when she's at her lowest, she still looks fine.
- Telepathy: One of her powers is reading thoughts and speaking in other people's heads.
Cansrel
Fire's father, and a monster in both senses of the word. He was a royal advisor, and his influence is the reason the Dells are so screwed up. He is dead as of the book's present, killed by one of the monster animals he kept at his castle.
- Bad People Abuse Animals: He kept large predator monsters caged in his castle just so he could taunt them with his blood. This backfired on him when Fire opened one of the cages, resulting in the monster leopard inside killing him.
- Charm Person: Much like Leck, he's the worst person to have such a power. While Fire is restrained with her use of the power, Cansrel wasn't, and he used it liberally to bend everyone he met to his will and to indulge his vices.
- Everyone Has Standards: The one and only line of depravity he is shown not to cross is that of incest, even though Fire's monster abilities effect him just the same as any man. His reaction to having a stirring for her is to quickly warn her not to touch any man thoughtlessly, including him, and spends the rest of that night standing outside Fire's window promising her that he'd never succumb to her powers.
- Posthumous Character: He died prior to the book's beginning, and most of the plot is about fixing the mess he turned the Dells into.
- Power Perversion Potential: He used his position and mind-altering powers to get access to women and children to rape.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: He had no qualms about using his power to get sex.
- Toxic Friend Influence: He was the best friend and advisor of the Dells' former king, and used his monster Charm Person powers to get the king to indulge in horrible depravity with him and neglect the Dells.
- Would Hurt a Child: He would occasionally rape children when adult women got too monotonous for him.
Brigan
The main male lead of Fire, Brigan is the younger brother of king Nash and the leader of the Dell's military.
- A Father to His Men: He treats and pays his soldiers very well and they are fiercely loyal to him.
- Heroic Bastard: His parents are queen Roen and military commander Brocker, not king Nax, and he tries his best to keep the country together and is A Father to His Men.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: He is a prince (making his offical name Brigandell) and the country's main military commander.
