I decided to draw my top 5 favorite literary characters and talk about them, but I couldn't make up my mind which ones to pick, so I split it up into top 5 female characters and top 5 male characters, but even then I couldn't make up my mind. So, without further ado, my top 6 favorite female characters (i'll draw the dudes later):
(and I know these pictures are crap and so is my photography of them, so i kind of want to draw a couple of them again).
6- Ayla of the Zeladonii, formerly of the Mamutoi, daughter of the Mammoth hearth, friend of horses and wolves, from the Earth's Children series by Jean M Auel.
Ayla isn't really anything that amazingly special outside of the context of the book. But in the story, she is by far the most amazing character (and thusly why it's her story). She inspires so much love and hate from those around her (really, everyone either loves her or hates her, there is no in-between) because of all of the things she can do and how her upbringing was so different from anyone else's (and she can't always tell them how).
5 more under the cut:
#5- Catriona O'Hanlon, from The Huntress, by Susan Carroll.
(the more I look at this picture the more I think it doesn't do her any justice)
Cat is really something. In a book series about mystical French healer women on an island, along comes the 4th book and who is the main character? An spirited Irish chick who drinks whiskey and can really use a sword and a bow. And she bares her breasts while fighting to distract her opponent. And she got her heart broken as a teenager when she slept with a guy who stopped talking to her after, and she punched him later on at his wedding. In other words, this woman kicks ass!
#4- Juniper Mackenzie, from the Dies the Fire series, by SM Sterling.
Another Irish chick. Except this one is Irish in every way except that she isn't from Ireland. XD
When all technology gets destroyed and everyone in the whole world has to go back to living in the Middle Ages, Juniper and her friends and her daughter start a farming village, in which Juniper becomes Clan Chief, and makes Wiccan festivities the norm, keeps everyone safe, and wears a frickin' tarton! She isn't much of a fighter by herself, but what I admire about her is her ability to be in charge of her whole village and be a mother to 4 kids by the end, while dealing with alliances with the other people not in her same clan and basically dealing with all the wars and whatnot going on in Oregon.
#3- Astrid Larsson, from the Dies the Fire series by SM Sterling.
Astrid and her siblings started out as spoiled rich kids before all technology stopped working, but, as a Tolkien fanatic, she became reliant on her archery skills and eventually founded a village of Dunedain rangers who live in the middle of the woods and speak Sindarin and sign language all the time. She is basically the kickass elf warrior chick kind of character who never showed up in Lord of the Rings.
#2- Karigan G'ladheon, from Green Rider.
I was too lazy to make this picture at all good, because my picture of Karigan in my mind is so specific that it can't be used for any other character, and therefore she has to look totally different than anyone else I draw. That alone should say how well-rounded of a character she is. I somehow get a perfect picture of her in my mind, without there being much more of a description of her than that she has brown hair. XD
With every book in this series, we get more of a glimpse of who she is, what some more of her childhood was like, what her thoughts are, etc. She has so many crazy experiences in these books that by the end she isn't the same person as she was at the beginning.
#1- Alanna of Trebond, Pirate's Swoop and Olau. From, well, Alanna, by Tamora Pierce.
Why is Alanna number 1? Because she basically made me who I am. I read Alanna for the first time when I was 10 years old, and holy crap. Basically, it's your classic girl-dressed-as-boy-to-become-a-knight story, but there is a lot more depth to it than that. I learned so many valuable lessons from her that basically shaped who I am. Stuff like dealing with each problem as it comes instead of worrying about it all at the same time when some of it might not even happen, and do lots of good things to make up for the bad ones (because Alanna has healing magic that she wasn't allowed to use as a child and now has to use it to make up for all of the killing she has to do as a knight), for instance. Ana read the books about Alanna's daughter Aly before reading the ones about Alanna, whereas I read the Alanna books first, and she is more like Aly and I am more like Alanna. It's weird.
and just for fun, some drawings of Xena as a Valkyrie, and Gabrielle.