67 Best Fictional Characters That Start With D, Ranked

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

We’ve ranked 67 of them, from the heavy hitters like Darth Vader and Dracula 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.

D is the letter of the dark side. It owns cinema’s most famous villain, fiction’s original vampire, and the Merc with a Mouth, then keeps going through Duckburg, Westeros, and the Grand Line. It’s also a surprisingly strong letter for anime and gaming, which the older version of this page ignored, so we’ve fixed that below. If you’re playing Scattergories, trying to remember a character name, or just seeing how deep the D-list goes, this should cover it.

Start at the top, or jump to what you need using the table of contents. This is one letter of our full A to Z set, so use the navigation below to jump to any other letter.

Our Top 10 Characters That Start With D, Ranked

Darth Vader is the most iconic villain in film history, and the case for the top spot barely needs arguing. When he strode through the smoke of a boarded Rebel ship in 1977, black-caped and breathing through a mask, he became an instant piece of the culture, the silhouette and the sound recognisable to people who have never seen a Star Wars film. James Earl Jones’s voice, the mechanical breathing, and John Williams’s Imperial March combine into perhaps the most complete villain design ever assembled.

What lifts Vader above a great costume is the tragedy underneath it. The prequels, however divisive, reframed him as Anakin Skywalker, a gifted, frightened boy seduced into evil, so that “I am your father” lands as a family tragedy rather than a mere twist. Rogue One’s corridor scene reminded a generation exactly how frightening he is, and Obi-Wan Kenobi mined the guilt beneath the armour.

He is redeemed in the end, of course, throwing the Emperor down a shaft to save his son, which is the point: the most feared figure in the galaxy was a father the whole time.

The obvious number one, and the reason half the planet can hum a villain’s theme.

Dracula is the character every other vampire is a footnote to. Bram Stoker did not invent the vampire in 1897, but his Transylvanian count fixed the template so completely that more than a century of fiction has been unable to escape it: the castle, the cape, the aversion to sunlight and garlic, the aristocratic menace. He is one of the most portrayed characters in film history, rivalled only by Sherlock Holmes.

Each era has remade him in its own image. Bela Lugosi’s 1931 performance gave him the accent and the widow’s peak that stuck; Christopher Lee made him a figure of sensual dread across Hammer’s run; Gary Oldman turned him into a tragic romantic in 1992. He has been a horror, a heartthrob, a joke, and a metaphor for everything from disease to desire, and he survives all of it.

That endurance is the achievement. A Victorian villain has become permanent shorthand for the undead, feeding an entire genre, from Buffy to Twilight to What We Do in the Shadows, that could not exist without him.

Second on the list, and the oldest monster on it by some distance.

Deadpool is the character who talks back to the reader, and right now he is one of the hottest properties Marvel has. Created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza in 1991, Wade Wilson is a disfigured mercenary with an accelerated healing factor and no filter whatsoever, forever breaking the fourth wall to comment on his own comic or film. He started as a wisecracking antagonist and became the rare comics character defined mostly by attitude.

Ryan Reynolds fought for a decade to get the R-rated 2016 film made, and its enormous success rewrote Hollywood’s assumptions about superhero content. Deadpool 2 doubled down, and 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine finally united him with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine for one of the biggest films of its year, dragging the character into the centre of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The appeal is the honesty. Deadpool knows he is in a story and refuses to take it seriously, which somehow makes the genuine moments hit harder. He is crude, chaotic, and weirdly sincere underneath.

Third, and the loudest character in the top 10 by a wide margin.

Donald Duck is one of the most recognisable characters ever drawn, and in many countries he is more beloved than Mickey himself. Debuting in 1934 in a sailor suit and a bad mood, Donald built his whole persona on a single brilliant idea: a hero defined by his temper, forever losing the fight with his own frustration. That relatability, a good soul with a short fuse, made him a global star, and Clarence Nash’s semi-intelligible voice is one of animation’s great creations.

His reach is genuinely staggering. In parts of Europe, particularly the Nordic countries, the Donald Duck comics are a dominant part of childhood, outselling almost everything else on the newsstand. DuckTales expanded his world with Scrooge and the nephews, and he remains a fixture of Disney parks and merchandise ninety years on.

There is a reason he has endured while flashier characters have faded: everyone has felt like Donald, one small inconvenience away from completely losing it.

Fourth, and the most globally recognisable face in this half of the list.

Albus Dumbledore is the mentor a generation grew up trusting, and one of fiction’s most quietly complicated wise men. The headmaster of Hogwarts is the calm centre of the Harry Potter series, dispensing wisdom in twinkly half-riddles while quietly orchestrating a war against Voldemort. For most of seven books he is the safest presence in the story, which is exactly why his death lands so hard.

What keeps him interesting is that J.K. Rowling refused to leave him a saint. The later books reveal a younger Dumbledore who flirted with the very ideology he later spent his life opposing, and the guilt of that history shapes every careful choice he makes. Richard Harris played him as gentle and frail; Michael Gambon gave him a sharper, more haunted edge across the later films.

He is the template for the modern mentor: powerful enough to end the story himself, wise enough to know he must not.

Fifth, and the beard the whole franchise leans on.

Daenerys Targaryen defined the cultural juggernaut that was Game of Thrones, and for most of its run she was its most inspiring figure. Emilia Clarke’s exiled princess begins the story as a frightened girl sold into marriage and ends it as the Mother of Dragons, a conqueror freeing cities and hatching the first dragons the world has seen in centuries. Her rise was the show’s most rousing arc, and “Dracarys” became a word millions of people learned.

The character is also the show’s most debated. Her final-season turn toward tyranny split the fanbase and remains one of television’s most argued-over endings, precisely because the character mattered so much to so many. George R.R. Martin’s books, still unfinished, may yet tell it differently.

However her story lands, her image, silver hair, three dragons, is one of the most recognisable in modern fantasy, and she carried a show that dominated the culture for the better part of a decade.

Sixth, and the only entry here with her own air force.

Doctor Strange is Marvel’s master of the mystic arts, and the MCU’s gateway to its entire multiverse. Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1963, Stephen Strange is a brilliant, arrogant surgeon whose ruined hands send him searching for a cure and finding sorcery instead. The arc, genius humbled into wisdom, is a familiar one, but Ditko’s psychedelic dimensions gave the character a visual identity like nothing else in comics.

Benedict Cumberbatch has anchored him on screen since 2016, and the films leaned on Strange to hold the MCU’s most ambitious ideas together: the Dormammu time-loop that ends his first film, the glimpse of fourteen million futures that shapes Infinity War, the spell that shatters reality in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and the multiverse horrors of his own sequel.

Equal parts scientist and mystic, he is the rare superhero whose greatest weapon is being clever enough to lose on purpose.

Seventh, and the reason the MCU can bend reality at all.

Dory is the most quotable character Pixar has ever made, and the emotional engine of two of its biggest films. The forgetful blue tang, voiced with scatty warmth by Ellen DeGeneres, could have been a one-joke sidekick, a fish who cannot remember anything from one minute to the next. Instead she became the heart of Finding Nemo, the relentlessly hopeful companion whose short-term memory loss is played for real poignancy as often as laughs.

“Just keep swimming” is one of the most repeated lines in animation, a genuine piece of pop-culture comfort that has outlived the film it came from. Pixar liked the character enough to give her the sequel, Finding Dory, in 2016, which turned her disability into the whole story, a search for the parents she can barely remember.

Beneath the comedy is a surprisingly tender idea: that kindness and persistence matter more than a perfect memory. Dory just keeps going, and she takes the audience with her.

Eighth, and the friendliest face in the top 10.

The Doctor is one of the longest-running characters in television history, and the cleverest survival trick British TV ever pulled. A time-travelling alien who explores the universe in a police box that is bigger on the inside, the Doctor has been played by a long line of actors because of a single brilliant device: regeneration, which lets the character change face and personality entirely while remaining the same person. That idea has kept Doctor Who alive since 1963.

The character is the rare hero defined by intelligence and mercy rather than force, solving problems with a sonic screwdriver and a refusal to carry a gun. Each incarnation reinvents the part, from William Hartnell’s stern original to David Tennant’s beloved run to Ncuti Gatwa’s recent era, and fans famously hold fierce loyalties to their Doctor.

A note on the name: the character is the Doctor, not “Doctor Who”, which is the show. The question, “Doctor who?”, is the joke the whole thing is built on.

Ninth, and the only entry who can outrun a plot hole in a police box.

Darth Maul closes the top 10 as one of the most striking villains Star Wars has ever produced, and proof that a character can survive being cut in half. Introduced in 1999’s The Phantom Menace as a silent, horned Sith apprentice with a double-bladed lightsaber, Maul barely spoke and was seemingly killed within a single film, yet his design, his acrobatic ferocity, and his duel with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan burned him into a generation’s memory. Ray Park’s physical performance and that crimson double blade did in minutes what most villains cannot manage across a trilogy.

His story should have ended in the reactor shaft on Naboo. Instead, the animated series The Clone Wars performed one of the boldest resurrections in the franchise, bringing him back with spider-like cybernetic legs and a mind fractured by rage, and gave him the arc the films never did: a criminal kingpin, a broken brother, and finally a tragic figure hunting the Jedi who ruined him. Sam Witwer’s voice work across The Clone Wars and Rebels turned a background threat into one of the saga’s most compelling characters.

His wordless cameo in Solo confirmed his place in the wider mythology, and his final duel with an aged Obi-Wan in Rebels, over in seconds and heavy with decades of history, is one of the most quietly devastating moments in all of Star Wars.

Tenth, and the only member of the top 10 who came back from the dead to earn his place.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With D

Deku is the biggest current-generation anime hero starting with D, the earnest lead of My Hero Academia and one of the defining shonen protagonists of the last decade. Izuku Midoriya is born powerless in a world where almost everyone has a superpower, then inherits a borrowed ability, One For All, from the world’s greatest hero and has to grow into a body that can barely contain it. What makes him resonate is the sheer effort: Deku wins through obsessive study, self-sacrifice, and a habit of breaking his own bones to protect people. My Hero Academia became a global phenomenon on the strength of that sincerity, and Deku is the reason a best-of-D list can no longer ignore anime.

Daredevil is Marvel’s blind vigilante and the patron saint of street-level heroics. Blinded by a chemical accident that heightened his other senses to superhuman levels, Matt Murdock fights crime as a lawyer by day and a masked devil by night in Hell’s Kitchen. Charlie Cox’s acclaimed Netflix series turned the character into a byword for grounded, brutal, morally serious superhero television, and Marvel liked it enough to fold Cox back into the main MCU. Daredevil endures because his conflict is real: a devout Catholic who beats criminals bloody at night and defends them in court by day, forever negotiating the line he will not cross.

Dexter Morgan is one of television’s great moral experiments, a serial killer the audience is invited to root for. A blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police by day, Dexter spends his nights hunting and killing other murderers under a code instilled by his adoptive father, which lets the show have its cake and eat it: the thrill of a killer’s ritual, aimed only at people who deserve it. Michael C. Hall played him across eight seasons and a run of revivals, narrating his own emptiness with chilling calm. The character sparked a genuine cultural conversation about antiheroes and complicity, and few shows have made an audience so comfortable with someone so dangerous.

Donkey is the talking, never-shutting-up heart of the Shrek films, and one of the most quotable sidekicks in animation. Voiced by Eddie Murphy at full throttle, the eternally chatty donkey attaches himself to a reluctant ogre and refuses to leave, becoming the friend Shrek did not want and clearly needed. Murphy’s improvisational energy gave the character a motormouth charm that anchored four films and made “waffles” and “we can stay up late swapping manly stories” into playground currency. Underneath the noise, Donkey is the films’ emotional glue, the one who insists on friendship in a story about learning to let people in.

Dio Brando is one of anime’s most gloriously theatrical villains, and an internet immortal. The arch-nemesis of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Dio is a vampire of boundless ego and ambition whose battle cries, poses, and the line “It was me, Dio!” have become some of the most recognisable memes in fandom. His Stand, The World, can stop time itself, and his rivalry with the Joestar bloodline drives the series across generations. Hirohiko Araki wrote him as pure operatic menace, and the character’s over-the-top charisma is exactly why he outgrew his own manga to become a piece of internet furniture. Few villains are this fun to quote.

Denji is the breakout anime protagonist of the current generation, and one of the strangest heroes on this list. The star of Chainsaw Man, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s chaotic hit, Denji is a broke, half-starved teenager who merges with his pet devil to become a chainsaw-wielding monster, then discovers that fighting devils for a living is only marginally better than the poverty he escaped. What makes him work is how low his ambitions are, he wants food, sleep, and affection, not glory, which gives the manic action a genuinely human centre. The anime adaptation made him a global sensation, and he represents a rawer, funnier strain of modern shonen.

Doraemon is one of the most recognisable characters in all of Asia, and a genuine cultural institution. The blue robotic cat, sent back from the 22nd century to help a hapless boy named Nobita, has been a fixture of Japanese childhood since 1969, pulling impossible gadgets out of his four-dimensional pocket to solve, and usually worsen, Nobita’s problems. He is so beloved that Japan named him an official anime ambassador in 2008. For hundreds of millions of people across Japan, China, and beyond, Doraemon is as foundational as Mickey Mouse is in the West, which makes his absence from most Western D lists a real blind spot.

Donkey Kong is one of gaming’s founding characters, and correcting his omission from the old version of this list was overdue. He debuted in 1981 as the barrel-throwing villain of the arcade classic that also introduced Mario, then grew into a hero in his own right through Rare’s Donkey Kong Country games, which redefined what a platformer could look like in 1994. Nintendo’s big tie-wearing ape has been a mascot, a Mario Kart staple, and a Smash Bros. mainstay ever since, and the 2023 Super Mario Bros. Movie gave him a fresh spotlight. It was odd to list Diddy Kong without him; that is fixed here.

Dante is the swaggering face of stylish action gaming, and one of the medium’s most enduring cool guys. The half-demon protagonist of Devil May Cry, Dante hunts demons with a sword, a pair of pistols, and a bottomless supply of one-liners, and the series he headlines effectively invented the character-action genre that games like Bayonetta and God of War later built on. His white hair, red coat, and refusal to take anything seriously made him an instant icon in 2001, and the recent Netflix adaptation introduced him to a wider audience. Dante is what happens when a game character is designed to look effortlessly, obnoxiously cool, and mostly pulls it off.

Doctor Doom is widely regarded as Marvel’s greatest villain, and his moment has arrived. Victor von Doom is the armoured, cape-wearing dictator of Latveria, a genius whose intellect rivals Reed Richards’s and whose ego dwarfs everyone’s, forever scheming against the Fantastic Four and anyone else who slights him. What elevates him above a standard tyrant is his strange nobility: Doom genuinely believes the world would be better under his rule, and he might have a point. Marvel has made him the centre of its upcoming Avengers films, a sign of how much weight the character carries. For decades he has been the standard every other comics villain is measured against.

Din Djarin is the breakout Star Wars character of the streaming era, the bounty hunter who reminded everyone the galaxy was bigger than the Skywalkers. The helmeted lead of The Mandalorian, played by Pedro Pascal, follows a strict creed that forbids removing his helmet, which makes his reluctant bond with the infant Grogu all the more affecting, told almost entirely through body language and a modulated voice. “This is the way” became a genuine catchphrase, and the character revived Star Wars on television and turned a puppet into a global merchandising phenomenon. He is a Western gunslinger in space, and the formula works because he plays it completely straight.

Dream, also called Morpheus, is the melancholy centre of one of the most acclaimed comics ever written. The ruler of the dreaming and one of Neil Gaiman’s Endless, Dream is an ancient, brooding personification of story itself, pale and remote, learning across the series that even a god must change or die. Gaiman’s Sandman redefined what mainstream comics could be, winning literary awards and pulling a generation of readers toward the medium, and Netflix’s adaptation brought Tom Sturridge’s version to a wider audience. Dream is less a hero than a force, and the series is really about whether something that old can learn to be kind.

Doctor Emmett Brown is cinema’s most lovable mad scientist, and the beating heart of the Back to the Future trilogy. The wild-haired inventor of the DeLorean time machine, played with manic brilliance by Christopher Lloyd, is the engine of the whole story, the eccentric genius whose friendship with teenager Marty McFly powers three films across three eras. “Great Scott!” and “1.21 gigawatts!” are permanent pieces of movie-quote culture, and the unlikely bond between an old inventor and a high-schooler gives the time-travel plotting its surprising warmth. Doc is proof that a supporting character can define a franchise as much as its lead.

Draco Malfoy is the schoolyard rival who grew into something far more tragic, and one of the Harry Potter series’ most quietly rewarding characters. Introduced as a sneering, privileged bully, Draco spends the later books trapped, tasked by Voldemort with a murder he has no stomach for, and Tom Felton’s performance found the frightened boy under the sneer. He is not redeemed, exactly, but he is humanised, a child raised into an ideology he cannot ultimately carry out. That complexity has made him one of the fandom’s most discussed figures, and a reminder that Rowling’s villains-in-training were rarely as simple as they first appeared.

Dwight Schrute is one of the great comic creations of modern television, a beet-farming, bear-obsessed oddball who somehow became the most quotable person in The Office. Rainn Wilson played him as a humourless authoritarian with delusions of grandeur, forever angling for power at a paper company and forever undone by his own rigidity, and the character’s total commitment to his own strange worldview made him the show’s comic engine. “Assistant to the Regional Manager”, the beet farm, the Schrute facts: Dwight is a fully realised universe of weirdness. Beneath it, his loyalty and eventual tenderness gave the show some of its most unexpectedly moving moments.

Davy Jones is the finest villain the Pirates of the Caribbean films produced, a tentacle-faced sea captain rendered in some of the most celebrated visual effects of their era. Bill Nighy performed him through motion capture, and the achievement was that a fully computer-generated character carried real menace and real pathos, an immortal cursed to sail the seas because he could not face a broken heart. The organ-playing, the Scottish burr, the writhing beard: Davy Jones is a triumph of design and performance at once, and he gave the second and third films their gravitational centre. Cinema’s most memorable modern pirate villain, and it is not close.

Dominic Toretto is the beating, grease-stained heart of one of cinema’s biggest franchises, and the man who turned “family” into a punchline the audience nonetheless means. Vin Diesel’s street racer began the Fast & Furious saga as a small-time criminal and grew, absurdly and gloriously, into a globe-saving action hero who drives cars out of aeroplanes and through skyscrapers. The character should not work, but Diesel plays him with such total sincerity, all gravel-voiced loyalty and barbecue speeches, that Dom became the anchor of a series that has grossed billions. He is the improbable centre of gravity for the most ridiculous, most enduring action franchise going.

Characters Beginning With D, By Franchise

Disney & Pixar

Marvel

DC

Star Wars

Anime & Manga

Sitcoms & TV

Video Games

Books & Literature

Other notable mentions

Best Characters Beginning With D 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 award double points if multiple words in your answer start with the same letter, and D has plenty of those.

• Darth Vader (Star Wars)
• Dracula
• Deadpool (Marvel)
• Donald Duck (Disney)
• Dumbledore (Harry Potter)
• Dory (Finding Nemo)
• Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones)
• Doctor Strange (Marvel)

For double-letter bonus points (two words both starting with D)

• Donald Duck (Disney)
• Daffy Duck (Looney Tunes)
• Daisy Duck (Disney)
• Dick Dastardly (Wacky Races)

Scattergories is a trademark of Hasbro. This guide is unofficial fan content.

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