• Ender Wiggin (The Ender Saga)
• Gerald Tarrant (Coldfire Trilogy)
• Jon Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire)
• Joscelin Verruil (Kushiel's Legacy)
• Phèdre nó Delaunay (Kushiel's Legacy)
• Quentin Coldwater (The Magicians)
• Legolas (Lord of the Rings)

notes & observations:

I think I have a penchant for geniuses. Because Tarrant is one, and so is Ender. And Quentin was the smartest in his class, second only to Alice. All Geniuses with a moral quandary, some fatal flaw, that they have to resolve.

But look - Bean (Ender's Shadow) isn't on my list. And he is the smartest of them all. Perhaps my first loyalty is to Ender. So no matter that Bean was later re-written in the Shadow Series as the more capable, more intelligent, more analytical of the two of them, no matter that I do not dislike Bean, maybe I even like him... I have always resented him deep down for being cast by Card as the smarter and perhaps better of the two. Ender wouldn't have minded, but I do mind, and I want Ender to be the best one out there in the Endverse. Irrational, I know. Since if Ender was perfect that way, he wouldn't have been Ender at all.

For Quentin: It's a love-hate relationship, sympathetic but not aspirational. I don't want to be like Quentin, I want to be unlike him; his ennui, his dissipation, his escapist tendencies. And yet his story moves me because I identify so much with him.)

But Legolas, oh Legolas... I admit that my liking is more of a crush, his glamor blinds me even today, in all his seeming elf-like perfection. LOTR is full of the beauty of elves, and I lapped up every word that referred to his.

"Only Legolas still stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed; but in the waybread of the Elves he found all the sustenance that he needed, and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world." (p 448)

How does one judge the degree of affection? Perhaps the fact that you can see the flaws of a character, and yet you can still look past them and love the person just as whole-heartedly, if not more so, for being only human.