85 Best Fictional Characters That Start With A, Ranked (With Images)

You’re here for a list of fictional characters that start with A, so that’s exactly what this is.

We’ve ranked 85 of them, from the obvious heavy hitters like Anakin Skywalker and Albus Dumbledore to deeper cuts across film, TV, anime, and games. The top 10 are ordered. The rest are grouped so you can find what you need fast.

If you’re playing Scattergories, trying to remember a character name, or just seeing how far the A-list goes, this should cover it. Some picks are here for cultural impact. Others earned their place by sticking with audiences over time.

Start at the top, or jump to what you need using the table of contents.

Our Top 10 Characters That Start With A, Ranked

Anakin Skywalker is the Jedi Knight who became the most iconic villain of all time, Darth Vader. Prophesied by the Jedi Order as the Chosen One and the one who would bring balance to the Force, he ended up doing it from the wrong side. He wiped out the Jedi and helped Palpatine build the Empire.

He’s the centre of the Skywalker Saga. Six films were built around his arc, and even the sequel trilogy keeps circling back to his shadow. Without Anakin, there’s no Vader, no Luke, no Kylo Ren, and no Star Wars as we know it.

The prequels themselves had a rough first decade. Things shifted slowly through the 2010s as the kids who grew up with the prequels became the adults running Star Wars conversations online. The Clone Wars did most of the heavy lifting on Anakin himself, especially after its 2020 revival on Disney+ gave him the warmth and complexity the films sometimes struggled to land.

What makes Anakin so compelling is the tragedy of his story and forty years on, no other A-name character is doing this much work for a franchise.

Albus Dumbledore is the Headmaster of Hogwarts and the most powerful wizard of his age. He’s the one who left baby Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep, the one who guided him through seven years of survival, and the one whose death at the end of Half-Blood Prince hits as hard as anything Rowling has written.

He’s the moral centre of the Wizarding World. The defeater of Grindelwald, the only wizard Voldemort ever truly feared, and the architect of the long plan that ends with Harry walking into the Forbidden Forest. The films could only ever capture half of him. The books give you a Dumbledore who is wiser, sharper, and quietly devastating in his willingness to send a teenager to his death for the greater good.

The performances have been a saga of their own. Richard Harris played him in the first two films before his death in 2002. Michael Gambon took over for the rest of the run, and split fans down the middle with a more agitated reading of the character. Jude Law has played a younger Dumbledore in the Fantastic Beasts films, with mixed reception across that trilogy.

What makes Dumbledore stick is the long game. Every reread reveals another layer of what he was actually doing. With John Lithgow stepping into the role for HBO’s series this Christmas, a whole new generation is about to meet him.

Aragorn is the rightful heir to the throne of Gondor, raised in secret as a Ranger of the North and known to most as Strider when we first meet him. He’s Tolkien’s blueprint for the reluctant king and one of the foundational fantasy heroes in modern fiction.

The character carries Peter Jackson’s trilogy in a way that’s easy to underestimate. Frodo has the Ring, but Aragorn has the war, the leadership, and the long arc back to a kingdom that hasn’t had a true king in a thousand years. The Helm’s Deep speech, the Paths of the Dead and many more are the moments people quote, share, and rewatch over and over.

Viggo Mortensen is the reason most of them land. He famously broke his toe kicking a helmet during Helm’s Deep, and the scream wasn’t acting. That kind of physical commitment runs through the whole performance, and twenty years on, he’s still the actor most associated with Tolkien on screen.

That’s about to be tested. Jamie Dornan takes over the role for The Hunt for Gollum, the 2027 prequel directed by Andy Serkis, playing a younger Aragorn in the years before the Fellowship forms. Mortensen has reportedly given his blessing, but the recasting is one of the bigger fantasy-cinema gambles of the next few years.

Aladdin is a street thief from Agrabah who finds a magic lamp, frees a wish-granting genie, and falls for the Sultan’s daughter while pretending to be a prince. He’s one of the defining heroes of the Disney Renaissance, and the rare Disney protagonist whose entire arc is about realising he doesn’t need to pretend to be someone else to deserve the girl.

The 1992 animated film is one of the best things Disney ever made. Robin Williams’s improvised Genie absorbed most of the cultural attention, and rightly so, but Scott Weinger’s Aladdin is doing real work underneath. He’s funny, he’s flawed, and his decision to free the Genie at the end instead of using his last wish is one of the cleanest character beats Disney has put on screen.

The 2019 live-action remake gave Mena Massoud a difficult job. He had to step into a role defined by an animated performance, opposite Will Smith trying not to do a Robin Williams impression. The film grossed over a billion dollars globally and Naomi Scott’s expanded Jasmine pulled real weight.

A live-action sequel has been in development for years and has reportedly entered production in 2026, with Massoud, Scott, and Smith all expected back. Whether it lands or not, the original is doing the heavy lifting on this ranking.

Aslan is the Great Lion, the creator of Narnia, and the only character to appear in all seven of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia novels. Lewis himself described him as an alternative version of Christ, what the Son of God might look like if he turned up in another world.

The stone-table sacrifice in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is one of the most quietly devastating scenes in children’s literature. Aslan dies in Edmund’s place, comes back, and the whole moral architecture of the book pivots on it. Whether you read the series as Christian allegory or as fantasy with unusually serious stakes, that scene is the centre of gravity.

Liam Neeson’s voice work across Walden Media’s three films from 2005 to 2010 gave a generation their definitive Aslan. The trilogy lost momentum after the first film, the rights moved on, and the planned Walden adaptations of the rest of the series never happened. Neeson’s performance is part of why The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe still stands as one of the strongest fantasy adaptations of the 2000s outside Peter Jackson.

Greta Gerwig’s Netflix adaptation, currently in production, is the next test. Starting with The Magician’s Nephew rather than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a bold choice. Aslan as creator before saviour. How that lands will define Narnia adaptations for the next decade.

Aang is a 12-year-old monk frozen in an iceberg for a hundred years, woken up to find his entire people wiped out, and asked to end a world war. He’s the protagonist of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the most critically respected animated series ever made, and the rare children’s character who carries genuinely adult weight without ever stopping being a child.

The series itself goes places kids’ shows usually don’t. Genocide, totalitarianism, abuse, the moral cost of war. When ATLA hit Netflix in 2020 it spent 60 days in the top ten, longer than any other show that year, and the audience that drove that wasn’t nostalgia. It was a generation discovering or rediscovering that the show had been wrestling with serious questions all along.

What makes Aang work is his pacifism. By the finale, every adult character has told him he must kill Fire Lord Ozai. He refuses. The show then has to engineer a way for him to honour that refusal, and the energybending solution is one of the most thematically earned endings in animated television.

Avatar Studios’ animated film, currently scheduled for October 2026, brings Aang back as a young adult voiced by Eric Nam. If it honours what made the original series work, it’ll be one of the cultural moments of the year. The Netflix live-action attempt landed somewhere between fine and forgettable, depending on who you ask.

Anna is the younger Princess of Arendelle, the sister who refuses to give up on Elsa even after years of being shut out, and the character whose act of true love (the sister kind, not the romantic kind) saves the kingdom at the end of Frozen.

The trick of Frozen is that it gives you what looks like the protagonist in Elsa, the powerful one, the tortured one, the one who gets the showstopper, and then quietly tells the whole story through her sister. Anna is the audience surrogate. She’s the one who throws herself between Hans’s blade and Elsa, and that moment is the entire emotional pivot of the film.

Disney didn’t fully realise what they had with Anna until Frozen grossed $1.28 billion. Kristen Bell’s vocal performance carries an enormous amount of the film’s emotional weight, and Frozen II gave her more room. By the end of that film she’s Queen of Arendelle, the grounded one, while Elsa has gone full mythic. Elsa gets the merchandise. Anna gets the story.

Frozen III arrives in November 2027, with a fourth film already confirmed and being produced back to back. The synopsis released through Disney China points to Anna’s wedding and a new family member, suggesting the next chapter is hers. Three Disney protagonists in one Top 10 isn’t a coincidence. Anna, Aladdin, and Ariel each anchor a different era of the studio.

Ariel is the Princess of Atlantica, the youngest daughter of King Triton, and the mermaid who trades her voice for legs to chase a life on the surface. She’s the heroine of The Little Mermaid, the film that ended Disney’s 15-year creative slump and started what we now call the Disney Renaissance.

Without Ariel, no Beauty and the Beast, no Aladdin, no Lion King, and no Pixar deal. The studio had been in trouble after Walt’s death, and The Black Cauldron had nearly broken animation as a department in 1985. The Little Mermaid changed everything. Jodi Benson’s “Part of Your World” is one of the most iconic Disney songs ever recorded, and the film’s commercial success gave the studio the runway to make the next decade of animated classics.

The character’s arc has aged unevenly. The “give up your voice for a man” reading isn’t unfair, then or now. But Ariel’s curiosity exists before Eric does. The legs are about wanting the surface. Hans Christian Andersen’s original story ends in tragedy, and Disney’s softened version still gets the longing right.

Halle Bailey’s 2023 live-action remake split critics and audiences, but Bailey’s performance was the consensus high point. The film grossed $570 million globally and gave Ariel a proper cultural moment for the first time in decades. She’s Disney’s lineage-starter, and earning her place in the Top 10 isn’t close.

Ash Ketchum is a 10-year-old trainer from Pallet Town, his Pikachu refuses to live in a Poké Ball, and he spent 25 years trying to become a Pokémon Master. He’s the human face of the highest-grossing media franchise in history, and one of the most globally recognised fictional characters of the last three decades.

Pokémon’s lifetime revenue has cleared $100 billion across games, anime, trading cards, and merchandise such as Enamel Keychains. Higher than Mickey Mouse. Higher than Star Wars. Higher than Marvel. For the first 25 years of that, Ash was the on-screen face of the entire enterprise, refusing to age in any meaningful way as the franchise rolled through generations of new monsters and new regions.

Then in 2022, after a quarter of a century of near-misses, he won the World Coronation Series. The episode where he wins, finally, was one of the most emotionally satisfying anime moments of the decade. The franchise wrote him out shortly after and started fresh with new protagonists Liko and Roy in Pokémon Horizons. That’s a coda most cultural icons don’t get.

Ahsoka Tano is Anakin Skywalker’s Jedi Padawan, the apprentice nobody asked for, and the character who eventually walks away from the Jedi Order entirely. She debuted in 2008’s Clone Wars film as an overeager teenager foisted on Anakin at the worst possible moment, and grew into one of the most beloved characters Star Wars has ever produced.

George Lucas reportedly briefed the Clone Wars team to create a Padawan that fans would resent. The opposite happened. By the Season 5 finale, when Ahsoka leaves the Order after being falsely accused of treason and refuses to come back even after she’s vindicated, she’d become the moral centre Anakin couldn’t be. The white lightsabers she wields afterwards mark her as something Star Wars hadn’t really had before. A Force user who walks neither path.

Her presence retroactively reshapes Anakin’s fall. Watch Revenge of the Sith knowing he’d spent years training a Padawan he loved like a sister, and the prequels hit differently. Rebels then built toward a confrontation between Ahsoka and Vader that the franchise had been quietly setting up for a decade. The payoff lands.

Ashley Eckstein has voiced her since 2008. Rosario Dawson’s live-action debut in The Mandalorian was the soft launch for Disney’s next-generation Star Wars push, and her own series followed in 2023. With Dave Filoni now Lucasfilm’s Chief Creative Officer, Ahsoka isn’t going anywhere.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With A

Aerith Gainsborough is the flower-selling Cetra at the centre of Final Fantasy VII (1997), and the character behind one of the most famous deaths in video game history. Her death in the original game genuinely shocked players who weren’t ready for it, a prominent main character gone in a single cutscene that no one had warned them about. The ongoing FF7 Remake trilogy, with Briana White voicing the role, has been quietly playing with the canonicity of that death. Rebirth (2024) put the question back on the table. Whatever the third part does with Aerith will be one of the most-discussed gaming moments of the decade.

All Might is the Symbol of Peace, the world’s greatest hero, and the mentor figure who passes his quirk to protagonist Izuku Midoriya in My Hero Academia. The 2014 manga and 2016 anime adaptation have made him one of the most recognisable characters in modern anime, voiced by Kenta Miyake in Japanese and Christopher Sabat in English. The “muscle form, true form” duality is the character’s central tragedy. He’s so powerful he’s slowly destroying himself maintaining the symbol, and watching him fall apart across the series is part of why the show works. The “I am here!” catchphrase is one of the most quoted lines in modern anime.

Amy Dunne is the missing wife in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), the unreliable narrator who turns out to have been weaponising every gendered expectation thrown at her. The “Cool Girl” monologue is one of the most quoted passages of 21st-century fiction. Rosamund Pike’s Oscar-nominated performance in David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation plays Amy as a woman whose intelligence is the threat, with the violence almost incidental. The film reframed how Hollywood writes female antagonists for the next decade, and the character keeps showing up in critical reading lists year after year.

Amy Pond is the Eleventh Doctor’s first companion in Doctor Who, the Scottish redhead who waited fourteen years for the Doctor to come back after his crash-landed promise to a seven-year-old version of her. Karen Gillan played her from 2010 across three series of the Steven Moffat era, and her arc with husband Rory Williams gave Doctor Who one of its most emotionally complete companion stories. The Weeping Angels two-parter that closes her run is regularly cited as one of the best Moffat-era episodes. Gillan went on to Marvel; Amy Pond went down as a defining 2010s TV character.

Andy Dufresne is the wrongly convicted banker at the centre of The Shawshank Redemption, who spends nineteen years tunnelling through a prison wall with a rock hammer. Adapted by Frank Darabont from a Stephen King novella, the film flopped on its 1994 theatrical release and built its reputation through video rental, cable TV, and eventually streaming. It’s now sat at the top of IMDb’s user-rated list of all-time greatest films for as long as that list has existed. Tim Robbins’s quiet, watchful performance is the film’s anchor, and Andy Dufresne is the long con personified.

Annie Hall is the title character of Woody Allen’s 1977 film, played by Diane Keaton in a Best Actress Oscar-winning performance. Annie Hall won Best Picture in a year that included Star Wars, which tells you something about how seriously the Academy took it at the time. The menswear-influenced wardrobe, the “la-di-da” verbal tic, the neurotic warmth. Keaton’s performance is one of the most influential romantic comedy turns ever made, and almost every quirky-but-grounded female lead since owes her something.

Annie Wilkes is the deranged superfan who imprisons her favourite novelist after rescuing him from a car crash, in Stephen King’s Misery (1987). Kathy Bates won Best Actress for the role in Rob Reiner’s 1990 film adaptation, the first ever Oscar for a horror film. The hobbling scene, the forced smile, the vacant stare. Bates plays Annie as recognisable, almost ordinary, which is what makes her one of the most frightening figures in horror cinema. The character has cropped up in Castle Rock and various tributes since, but Bates remains the definitive version.

Anton Chigurh is the captive bolt pistol-wielding hitman at the centre of the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Javier Bardem won Best Supporting Actor for the role and the haircut became a cultural artefact in its own right. Chigurh’s coin-toss scenes are some of the most quoted in 21st-century cinema, and the character has become editorial shorthand for cold, philosophical menace. AFI ranked the performance among the greatest screen villains of all time within months of the film’s release.

Anya Forger is the telepathic adopted daughter of a spy and an assassin who don’t know about each other’s professions or her abilities. Spy x Family launched as a manga in 2019 and exploded on streaming when the anime aired in 2022, with Atsumi Tanezaki voicing Anya in Japanese and Megan Shipman in English. Anya’s reaction face has become one of the most-shared anime memes online. The series’ second season and the Code: White film extended her cultural reach. For a character introduced as the comic relief of an ensemble cast, she’s effectively eaten the franchise.

Aquaman, real name Arthur Curry, is the half-Atlantean king of the seven seas and one of DC’s founding superheroes, debuting in More Fun Comics #73 in 1941. The character spent decades as the butt of jokes about talking to fish before James Wan and Jason Momoa rebuilt him as a billion-dollar movie property in 2018. The Aquaman solo film became the highest-grossing DCEU release at the time. The 2023 sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom underperformed, and the future of the character under James Gunn’s rebooted DCU is uncertain, but Momoa’s run defined a generation’s idea of who Aquaman is.

Armin Arlert is the strategic core of Attack on Titan, Eren Yeager’s bookish best friend who gradually becomes the survey corps’ most important tactical mind. The series ran as a manga from 2009 and an anime from 2013 to 2023, and is widely considered one of the greatest anime of the 21st century, with a finale that genuinely divided fans. Voiced by Marina Inoue in Japanese and Josh Grelle in English, Armin’s arc from the kid hiding behind Eren and Mikasa to the character making the hardest moral calls in the series is one of the show’s quiet triumphs. The series’ ending in 2023 cemented him as one of anime’s defining supporting characters.

Arthur Fleck is the failed comedian who becomes Gotham’s Joker in Todd Phillips’s 2019 character study. Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor for the role, and the film grossed over a billion dollars globally, the first R-rated film to do so. The film was genuinely divisive on release, criticised as glorifying violence by some and praised as a serious look at mental illness and societal collapse by others. The 2024 sequel Joker: Folie à Deux split audiences further, but the original’s cultural impact stands.

Arthur Morgan is the outlaw protagonist of Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), a gunslinger watching his gang fall apart while trying to figure out what kind of man he is before tuberculosis finishes him. He’s frequently cited as the best video game protagonist of the 2010s. Roger Clark’s voice and motion-capture work won multiple awards, and the honour system that tracks Arthur’s morality across the entire 60-hour campaign gives his ending genuine weight. His death sequence, high or low honour, is one of the most discussed endings in gaming.

Arya Stark is the youngest Stark daughter, the sword-fighting tomboy who survives the Red Wedding, trains as a Faceless Man assassin, and ultimately kills the Night King. First introduced in George R.R. Martin’s 1996 novel A Game of Thrones, she came to global attention through HBO’s adaptation from 2011. Maisie Williams played her from age 12 to 22 across the series, and her arc was the most consistently satisfying in the show. The Long Night kill divided fans, with some feeling it was unearned, but Arya remains one of the defining characters of prestige TV. A spin-off was reportedly developed and turned down by Williams in 2019.

Asuna Yuuki is the rapier-wielding co-protagonist of Sword Art Online, one of the defining anime heroines of the 2010s. Originating in the 2009 light novel and breaking out with the 2012 anime, she started as the love interest in the original Aincrad arc and grew into a co-lead across subsequent storylines, voiced by Haruka Tomatsu in Japanese and Cherami Leigh in English. The franchise divided critics but won audiences, and Asuna became one of the most cosplayed anime characters of the decade. The series is still active, with Sword Art Online: Last Recollection (2023) and ongoing light novel releases keeping her cultural footprint alive.

Atticus Finch is the principled lawyer at the heart of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), defending a Black man falsely accused of rape in 1930s Alabama. Gregory Peck won Best Actor for the role in the 1962 film, and the American Film Institute named Atticus the greatest movie hero of all time in 2003, beating both Indiana Jones and James Bond. Lee’s 2015 follow-up Go Set a Watchman complicated the picture, revealing an older Atticus harbouring the prejudices of his time. Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 Broadway adaptation, with Jeff Daniels in the role, kept that complexity in play.

Aurora is the third Disney Princess and the foundational template for the asleep-until-kissed archetype Disney has spent the last two decades deconstructing. Sleeping Beauty (1959), with Mary Costa voicing the role, was a financial disappointment on release but is now considered one of Disney’s most visually beautiful animated films. The Maleficent live-action films (2014 and 2019) repositioned her relationship with the witch as the emotional centre, with Elle Fanning playing the live-action Aurora opposite Angelina Jolie. Her cultural meaning has shifted, but her place in the Disney Princess lineage hasn’t.

Azula is the daughter of Fire Lord Ozai and one of the most beloved villains in animated television, introduced in the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005). Where Aang carries the Top 10 spot for ATLA on the side of light, Azula represents everything the Fire Nation became under generations of imperial conquest. The blue fire, the lightning, the breakdown in the final season as her perfectly calibrated control collapses. Voice actor Grey DeLisle delivers a performance that fans still cite as among animation’s best villain work, and the character’s status has only grown with the show’s 2020 Netflix renaissance.

Characters Beginning With A, By Franchise

Disney & Pixar

Harry Potter

Lord of the Rings

Star Wars

Marvel

DC

Anime & Manga

Sitcoms & TV

Video Games

Books & Literature

Single-work icons

Other notable mentions

Best Characters Beginning With A for Scattergories Players

If you’ve landed here mid-game, here’s the cheat sheet. Scattergories scoring varies by edition, but the standard rule applies: your answer needs to be a character whose name starts with the rolled letter, and other players can challenge if they don’t recognise the answer. Some editions also award double points if your answer has multiple words all starting with the same letter, which is rare for A.

Defensible Answers (universally recognised, unlikely to be challenged)

• Aladdin (Disney)
• Anna (Frozen)
• Ariel (The Little Mermaid)
• Aragorn (The Lord of the Rings)
• Anakin Skywalker (Star Wars)
• Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter)
• Aslan (The Chronicles of Narnia)
• Arya Stark (Game of Thrones)

For double-letter bonus points

• Albus Aberforth Dumbledore

For A specifically, locking in a defensible answer fast and moving on tends to score better than hunting for alliteration. A is one of the easier letters to score on character categories, so don’t burn time chasing the bonus.

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Frequently Asked Questions

That’s our take on the greatest fictional characters that start with A. The brilliant thing about a list this size is there’s always one we missed, one we underrated, or one whose ranking will start an argument. Got a Top 10 contender we left out? Tell us. And if you’re working through the alphabet, the B page is where you head next, or browse the characters hub for everything from anime to Disney by franchise.