Your Top Five Heroes and Villains

Your Top Ten Protagonists and Antagonists might have been a more precise title, but it doesn't sound as nice. But as the title suggests, here's a place to list your five favorite heroes and five favorite villains. Also includes anti-heroes, anti-villains, and all that jazz.

But lists by themselves are no fun. Tell us why you enjoy these characters. What about them makes them warrant a position on your top five list? What characteristics, actions, or contributions to the story make them so special to you? Show the rest of us why these characters are so special!

Well, I guess I'll be your guinea pig, Parable, and post first.

So uh, I guess spoiler warning for all this stuff? I can't figure out how to make the spoiler tags work for ten different indents, and everything spoiled here is at least three years old, too. Also these are in no particular order.

• Pretty Much Everyone in Farscape: The whole crew of Moya (and hell, Moya herself) are such interesting protagonists I can't really just choose one. John is always hilarious with his ever-increasing craziness, Chiana offers a dose of crazy, Aeryn is a great fish-out-of-water when it comes to things not blowing up, and that sadistic bastard Scorpius switches sides so many times I don't know what category to put him in. A lot of live action shows have good casts featuring a team of misfits who butt heads with each other as much as they do the bad guys, but Farscape is my favorite implementation.
• The Prince of Persia: I know a lot of people think the Prince is probably a pretty flat character, and he gets way 2edgy4u in later installments, but I loved the original Sands of Time game. It's really hard to pin down a specific reason, but he was the first main character of a platformer who really felt like like a character to me in a way that Mario andthe like never did. He fights through hell and back, falls in love with the Princess, loses her, goes back in time, and wnen she has no memories of their time together, he leaves her in peace knowing she's alive (Well, not without stealing a kiss, first).
• Luke Skywalker: He didn't go in with his crazy magic space kung-fu and save the day by cutting everyone in half. He beats Vader, but stops, realizing that he's not so different from his father. There's a moment where he looks at his hand, the mechanical one in the black glove, and then looks down at Vader's own severed mechanical hand. It's just so powerful how he understands that if he uses his hate to kill Vader, the Dark Side wins and he'll just be another pawn in the scheme of things. I love when he looks at the Emperor dead in the eyes and bets it all on one line. "I'll never turn to the dark side. You've failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me." Also I don't want every entry on my list to be from Star Wars, so I'll just give a shout-out to Kyle Katarn as a close runner-up for my favorite SW hero.
• Raymond Reddington: A total 180 from Luke is Red. Since this is from a relatively new show, I'll avoid any spoilers and just say that I love how Red gets the job done by being three steps ahead of everyone, figuring out how to use situations to his advantage, and yet still being human enough that he's been caught off-guard a few times. Plus, James Spader is a terrific actor, so that helps.
• Sousuke Sagara: One of my favorite anime heroes, Sousuke is a practically raised-by-wolves kid who doesn't know anything outside of the military. When most anime are about some typical loser high schooler spending his days failing to get girls until he finds out he has super powers or something, and gets thrown into a fantastic new world of adventure, FMP turns that on its head and thrusts a guy who was born on a battlefield and should in theory be an alpha male into a completely mundane environment for us to watch him fail. I can watch any episode and always get a laugh out of it, mainly because of his chemistry with Kaname. What's even better is that unlike a lot of protagonists, you can see how he gradually develops (though that's more in the novels since the anime and manga only go through like the first four out of ten), watching as his instincts are at war with his mind as he tries to force himself to understand things aren't always out to kill him, instead of remaining static throughout the whole series.

Antagonists

• Yourself: Planescape Torment was such a good game, and it tried its damnedest to throw most convention out the window. The Transcendent One was a great villain, even though you don't even know he exists for a good chunk of the game, and you don't know his name until like thirty minutes before the game ends. What I love about him is that he's the mortality of the original you, a bad dude who realizes all the bad stuff he did has condemned his soul, and tries to fight his fate by making other people die in his place until he can figure out what can change the nature of a man. I could easily have made the Nameless One one of my favorite heroes, since defeating so that you can go to veritable hell instead of causing other people to die for you is pretty cool too.
• Kreia: First a little background. Way back in A New Hope, Vader says "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." But for most Star Wars games and books and whatnot, you never really see that (Note: I haven't read a ton of the EU books, so if there's something in one of the hundred books I haven't read, I'm sorry). The first KOTOR gave you glimpses of that, but KOTOR II was where it really took off. Kreia showed you how the galaxy itself could bend to the will of the Force, and how her apprentices like Nihilus being able to wipe out a planet in a single hand motion was child's play. And then after showing you how insanely powerful the Force could be, while being super manipulative the whole game, she steps it up again and reveals that her goal was to either prepare you to go off and face the real evil threat, or else her only option would be to destroy the Force itself. I think that's super cool.
• Lex Luthor: Superman is an alien war machine who can fly, move planets with his fists, look at things so hard they burn, freeze things with his breath, is indestructible enough to shrug off nuclear blasts, and his only vulnerability is a small fragment of super rare green rocks from half a galaxy away, yet by employing the sweat of his brow, capitalism, and the American spirit, somehow Lex always gets thiiiiiiis close to winning.
• Arch-Curate Vyrthur: I'm not gonna lie, this guy isn't super popular and I never remember his name so I have to look it up on Google. But what I always remember is his plans. Like Lex Luthor, he doesn't just have a simple task. Vyrthur wants to get revenge on the biggest, toughest god around. So he comes up with a plan to destroy the sun, plunge the world into eternal darkness, have vampires kill everyone, and ultimately get his revenge on Auriel since he'll have gotten rid of his power base. I really hate when villains have a stupid generic destroy-the-world plan because they serve no point most of the time and are usually just doing it for teh evulz. But this guy, it's great because he isn't just doing it for shits and giggles, he's trying to do the impossible and #rekt a god out of spite. I liked him a lot more than Alduin, since while Alduin was doing what was foretold, this guy went out and wrote his own future.
• Andrew Ryan: This guy gives off a great Lex Luthor vibe, deciding to push things to the limit and spouting all sorts of Ayn Rand ideas at every corner. I could write a whole page on him, but since I figure everyone already knows who he is, and will probably be on tons of people's lists, I'll avoid wasting time writing more about him.

edited 31st Dec '14 4:22:17 PM by nman

The only ones I know are the versions by The Beach Boys and The Apples In Stereo. But, I nean, if y'all know other good ones...

Heroes

Sonic The Hedgehog

Squall Leonhart (FFVIII)

Jean Valjean

Simon (TTGL)

Shinji (NGE)

Madoka Kaname

Villains

Kuja (FF 9

Dr Eggman/Robotnik

Javert (not really a villain but eh, still an antagonist)

Gendo Ikari

King Dedede (not really a villain but eh, still an antagonist)

Heroes:Super Mario's...Mario, FMA's Edward Elric, Kenshin Himura from Ruroni Kenshin, Johnny Joestar from Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure

Bad Guys: FMAB/Manga Wrath, Yoshikage Kira from Jojo, Nakamura from Aku No Hana, everyone from Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money, and Yukishiro Enishi from Rurouni Kenshin

It's a tie for Dead Money's cast, since they're the absolute best and most interesting Fallout characters in the entire Franchise. They're capable of some nasty things, and are always a hair away from killing themselves but are ultimately these broken, and pathetic messes destroyed by their own obsession. Nakamura, I like, because she sends chills down my spine. I like how she breaks people like it's nothing, and we never ever get an explanation as to why she's such a wreck; just have to piece it ourselves. Yoshikage Kira has one of the coolest powers in fiction (Anything he touches explodes, which is more fun and creative than it sounds) and his arrogance, cold cruelty, and crazy luck make him fun as hell to hate; which makes his ultimate downfall all the more awesome. Yukishiro Enishi because he's a great example of raising the stakes without raising the power level, and he's sympathetic, pathetic, frightening, and madmadmad at the same time. Wrath I like because he's awesome and that is about it.