I would be interested to know which characters you liked, if you aren't like me and willing to fall in love with them. For some reason, most of mine begin with the letter A First, there was Aragorn (Lord of the Rings) but I was only six then so it hardly counts. I grew older and came across Mr Darcy (I cried like a baby when I first read Pride & Predjudice) but then Artagel (Steven Donaldson "The Mirror of her Dreams.") drew my imagination, not sure why as he was meant to be thick. Perhaps it was his crooked smile :-$ Arithon (Janny Wurts "The Curse of the Mistwraith") was a favorite for a while, until he anguished over everything for one too many books and fell in love with someone else. But the writer who draws my heart every time is Guy Gavriel Kay. I fell in love with the Prince in "Tigana" and wept too (my highest compliment to a writer, I am a hardened reader.) The Lions of Alrassan left me with a screen name that caused me to receive so much racial abuse that I was forced to change it, and pretty much every strong male character in his books is a mental pinup for me. Who stirs your soul?

This is an interesting question which has caused me to think, and now that I think about it, there are not a great many female characters in the books that I have read (which is really quite a few, although here in recent years there seems to be an overabundance of tech manuals cluttering my shelves) that were developed to the point that I could fall in love with them. There are many male characters that I have admired, but the "hero" does always seem to be a guy which sort of kills the idea of a prospective relationship for me:>) The only one I can actually think of would be from the Belgariad series(David Eddings) which I read in middle school, Ce'Nedra, Queen of the World. Hey, with a name and title like that I just couldnt help myself!(And I just knew she had to be the cutest thing on 2 legs!)

and the shortest I seem to recall!

Legolas has always been my favorite character, I used to spend hours imagining a relationship with an elf. Can't say that I do that much any more especially since I've found the perfect guy in real life:)

There's a few in Sci-Fi, though I haven't been as moved..and old stick in the mud am I..;)I've got a soft spot for Heinlein, who's done a few female characters, though he's not so 'PC' nowadays..when Dickens was publishing his novels in the mid-19th century, they were serialized in magazines, and folks would head to the wharf to see if the latest installment had come in. There was a campaign to save, I think, 'little Dorrit? Dora?', and folks were crushed when she died..so it's nothing new..;)

I think the only character I ever really "fell in love with" was Becky in Tom Sawyer, when I was about nine. :-) There have been several women I strongly admired and throughly enjoyed as characters. Some that come to mind are Boudicca in The Eagle and the Raven by Pauline Gedge, and Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers by Willa Cather. jon