"Who is your favorite fictional character and why?"
There's a lot of great characters in fiction across every genre and every medium. I have a particular soft spot for Tyrion Lannister's cripples, bastards and broken things. I like the monstrous Walter White, the increasingly unhinged Rick Grimes, Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist and Lord Vetinari from the Discworld series.
But my favourite character has to be Roland Deschain of Gilead, from Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series. Roland is a Gunslinger, the last of an order of knights that once stood for everything good in the world.
Roland walks through his dying world on a quest for some kind of redemption. As one character tells him "You will wear out a thousand pairs of boots on your march to hell."
The fall of Roland's world took much of Roland's humanity with it. In his youth, he was forced to watch as his first and truest love Susan was burnt at the stake. He then became a matricide, tricked into turning his own guns on his mother.
Is he a hero? That's a good question. Having already endured so much loss, Roland will sacrifice everything and everyone in his path in order to reach the Dark Tower that haunts his dreams. Love, friendship and even laughter are considered obstacles standing in the way of his duty.
Over the course of his journey, Roland discovers that reaching the Tower will mean nothing if he doesn't forgive himself for his sins. Like Walter White in reverse, we see the humanity slowly return to him. As Roland gathers new friends to him, they make him accept that they will follow him as far as they are able...maybe even to the Tower itself. It's not a happy story by any means. The return of Roland's capacity to feel comes with a cost, when he realises that Fate has made him into a walking poison. To love Roland and walk with him on his path is to invite a death sentence.
"So much you did; So much you did and so much more you would have done, aye, and all without a check or qualm, and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure."
Roland is actually very relatable. There are unexpected depths to him...over the course of his journey his companions see that he is so much more than the sum of his parts. He is capable of profound insight and has an almost frightening intelligence. He makes mistakes that he doesn't just pay for, but that will haunt him forever.
But the flaws are what makes Roland my favourite. Roland continues to stand up for right even when the odds are overwhelmingly against him. At the cost of his sanity and his love, Roland will quite literally crawl to the Dark Tower if he has to in order to save it and himself and his world. There's a nobility or maybe a selflessness in him that isn't often seen in fictional characters.
That's the true nature of the hero and why Roland of Gilead is my favourite character.
