Five Best's.........Characters from the Fantasy Genre.

I love lists. I love reading them, I love making them, and I love debating them. I have decided that I am going to start periodically rating the five best (insert topic here) lists on a variety of random things that I enjoy, or find interesting or important. To start it off I have decided on listing the five best characters from the fantasy novel genre. Literature is to strong a word for what most of these characters come from. This a list not containing the characters from Tolkien or Rowling's worlds, but rather the ones that come from the type of books that are put out by Tor Publications. They are are the characters that generally will only be known by fans of the genre, not by the ones who only know characters that make it into popular culture.

5. Artemis Entreri (Forgotten Realms, R.A. Salvatore) A master swordsmen whom upon his first appearance is evil incarnate. He lives to be the best assassin there is, and has felt that to be a deadly master of the blade that means crushing all emotions inside him. However, his character grows and his comes to terms with what he has done and what it means as he grows older and looses his edge.

4. Matrim Cauthon (Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan) Lazy, gambling, womaning, the type that avoids work whenever possible. However, he is also is nigh unbeatable with a quarterstaff, by any swordsmen, and has the devils own luck (or rather the dark ones, as they call it in the series) throw in the fact that he has 10000 years of memories from former generals filling in the patches of his own swiss cheesed memory and he is a very formidable opponent and a very interesting character.

3. Vin Venture (Mistborn Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson) I was debating which character from this series to include as their are at least 3 possible candidates, I still ended up with two. I went with Vin because she is somewhat unusual amongst fantasy characters, or rather at least the ones that are the primary protagonists. And that is because she is a she. But not only is she the female, but she is also is truly a strong character, both in strength and in force of will.

2. Croaker (The Black Company, Glen Cook) Truly my favorite character from any movie, comic book, fantasy novel series, or anything really. Part soldier, physician, historian, general, and full time cynic. He is aware that he is the one writing the history, and although he tries to stay neutral, he can't help but transfer a little bit of himself into the histories he writes. His interactions with the Lady are some of the best uncomfortably romantic scenes in fantasy literature. And of course their flirtation spans about 40 years.

1. Sazed (The Mistborn Triology, Brandon Sanderson) He gets the nod because he is the most interesting and unusual character in any story I have read. First of all he is a eunuch, and it just gets more interesting from there. I can't really go to much into detail about his awesomeness without giving away the entire twist to a fantasy trilogy.