67 Best Fictional Characters That Start With F, Ranked

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

We’ve ranked 67 of them, from the heavy hitters like Frodo Baggins and Freddy Krueger 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.

F is a letter of heroes and horrors. It gives you the hobbit who carried the Ring, the most feared tyrant in Dragon Ball, and the burned man who hunts you in your sleep, then keeps going through the Shire, the Grand Line, and the wasteland of Fury Road. The older version of this page had no anime at all, which for the letter of Frieza is a genuine oversight, so we’ve fixed it below. If you’re playing Scattergories, trying to remember a character name, or just seeing how deep the F-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 F, Ranked

Frodo Baggins is the character who carries the single most important object in all of fantasy, and he takes the top spot as the definitive F protagonist. The hobbit of the Shire, handed the One Ring by his uncle Bilbo, sets out on a quest to destroy it in the fires of Mount Doom, and the weight of that burden, physical, moral, and spiritual, is the beating heart of Tolkien’s saga. Elijah Wood played him across Peter Jackson’s trilogy, one of the most acclaimed and awarded film series ever made.

What makes Frodo endure is that he is not a warrior. He wins nothing by strength; his heroism is pure endurance, the refusal to put down a burden that is slowly destroying him. The Ring corrupts everyone who touches it, and Frodo’s tragedy is that carrying it costs him the very home he saved. Even at the Cracks of Doom he fails, and the quest is completed almost by accident, which is one of the bravest choices in the genre.

He earns the top spot on sheer cultural weight. The Lord of the Rings is the foundation of modern fantasy, and Frodo is the small, frightened figure at the centre of it.

The obvious number one, and proof the smallest hero can carry the largest story.

Frieza is one of the most iconic villains in anime history, and the single most important character the old version of this page was missing. The galactic tyrant of Dragon Ball Z, Frieza is a planet-broker and genocidal emperor who wiped out most of the Saiyan race, and his arc on Namek remains one of the most famous and influential storylines in all of anime. The moment he transforms and warns that this “isn’t even my final form” became a phrase that outgrew the show entirely.

His duel with Goku is a landmark of the medium, a battle so long and so escalating that it defined the shonen genre’s whole approach to power and stakes for decades. Toriyama wrote him as cold, polite, and utterly merciless, a villain whose calm made him more frightening than any snarling brute.

Frieza is so beloved as an antagonist that Dragon Ball keeps resurrecting him, most notably in Resurrection F, because no other villain in the franchise carries the same weight. He is placed this high deliberately: a best-of-F list without the emperor of the universe is not serious.

Second, and the most feared name in the top 10.

Freddy Krueger is one of the defining horror villains of all time, the burned, razor-gloved child-killer who murders his victims in their dreams. Wes Craven’s 1984 masterstroke gave the slasher genre its most terrifying idea: a monster you cannot escape by staying awake forever, who kills you in the one place everyone is helpless. Robert Englund played him across the franchise as a cackling, wisecracking nightmare, a villain who taunts as he kills.

That combination of genuine dread and dark humour set Freddy apart from the silent killers of his era. Where Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees stalk in silence, Freddy performs, delivering one-liners as he drags teenagers into surreal, deadly dreamscapes. The striped jumper, the bladed glove, and the melted face are among the most recognisable images in horror.

He remains one of the most enduring figures the genre has produced, a monster who tapped into the most primal fear of all: that you are never truly safe, not even asleep.

Third, and the reason a generation was afraid to close their eyes.

Frankenstein’s Monster is one of the most influential characters in the history of fiction, the stitched-together creature who effectively invented modern science fiction and horror at once. Mary Shelley began writing him in 1816 at just eighteen and published the novel in 1818, and the creature assembled from dead flesh and rejected by his own creator has haunted the culture ever since. He is the tragic template every artificial being since, from the Terminator to the replicants of Blade Runner, descends from.

The great misunderstanding, that “Frankenstein” is the monster rather than the doctor who made him, is itself a testament to how completely the creature eclipsed his story. Boris Karloff’s 1931 performance gave him the flat head, the bolts, and the lumbering walk that fixed him in the popular imagination, but Shelley’s original is far more articulate and heartbreaking, a being who only turns to violence after the world meets his need for love with horror.

More than two hundred years on, he remains the definitive story of creation and responsibility, and one of the few characters to genuinely change how we think.

Fourth, and the oldest and most literary monster in the top 10.

Forrest Gump is one of the most beloved characters in modern cinema, the good-hearted, slow-witted man who stumbles through half a century of American history. Tom Hanks won his second consecutive Academy Award for the role, and the 1994 film swept the Oscars, taking Best Picture on the back of a character whose defining trait is uncomplicated decency. Forrest runs, fights in Vietnam, captains a shrimp boat, and meets presidents, all without ever quite grasping his own significance.

The film’s genius is that Forrest is a still point in a chaotic era, a man whose simplicity becomes a kind of wisdom. “Life is like a box of chocolates” and “run, Forrest, run” entered the language permanently, and the image of Hanks on a park bench with a suitcase is one of the most parodied in film.

Whatever you make of the film’s politics, its central character is undeniable: a portrait of goodness moving through history untouched by cynicism. Forrest endures because he is kind in a way the world rarely rewards, and the film rewards him anyway.

Fifth, and the gentlest soul in the top 10.

The Flash is one of DC’s most important heroes, the scarlet speedster whose 1956 debut is widely credited with launching the Silver Age of comics. Barry Allen, the police scientist struck by lightning and doused in chemicals, can run faster than the speed of light, and his powers have made him the engine of some of DC’s biggest stories, most famously the reality-shattering Flashpoint. On this list he is the real Flash, kept distinct from the various namesakes the letter attracts.

His screen life has been busy: Grant Gustin anchored a long-running and much-loved television series across nine seasons, and Ezra Miller carried the character into DC’s films. But the comics remain the character’s home, where the Flash’s speed regularly rewrites the fabric of the DC Universe itself.

Barry endures because his power is the most purely joyful in the genre, the simple thrill of being fast, married to a decency that makes him the moral centre of the Justice League as often as Superman.

Sixth, and the only entry here who could lap the rest of the top 10.

Fox McCloud is Nintendo’s flagship space pilot, and the gaming anchor this letter needed. The leader of the Star Fox team, an anthropomorphic fox who flies the Arwing against the forces of the villainous Andross, Fox has been a Nintendo mainstay since 1993, when Star Fox pushed the Super Nintendo into polygonal 3D for the first time. Star Fox 64 refined the formula into a classic, and gave gaming one of its most quoted lines in “do a barrel roll”.

His enduring fame owes as much to Super Smash Bros. as to his own series. As one of the fighting game’s most popular and highest-tier characters, Fox introduced himself to millions who had never flown an Arwing, and remains a competitive staple decades on.

Fox is the rare mascot-era character with genuine staying power, a confident, capable hero whose blend of aerial dogfighting and Nintendo charm has kept the Star Fox name alive even through the series’ quieter years.

Seventh, and the only pilot in the top 10.

Princess Fiona is one of animation’s most subversive heroines, the fairy-tale princess who turns the whole genre on its head. Introduced in 2001’s Shrek, Fiona appears to be a classic damsel awaiting true love’s kiss, until the film reveals she transforms into an ogre by night and, in its boldest move, has her choose to stay an ogre rather than become conventionally beautiful. Cameron Diaz voiced her across a franchise that redefined what a mainstream animated film could be.

Fiona matters because DreamWorks used her to gently dismantle the Disney princess formula that had dominated animation for decades. She is capable, funny, and physically formidable, dispatching a band of Merry Men in a single kung-fu sequence, and her happy ending is an act of self-acceptance rather than transformation.

The Shrek films became one of the most commercially successful animated franchises in history, and Fiona is a large part of why: a princess who taught a generation that the fairy-tale rules were there to be broken.

Eighth, and the only member of the top 10 with two forms.

Furiosa is one of the great modern action heroes, the one-armed warrior who quietly became the lead of a film with Max’s name on the poster. Charlize Theron introduced her in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, George Miller’s near-universally acclaimed action masterpiece, as the war-rig driver who defies the tyrant Immortan Joe to smuggle his captives to freedom across the wasteland. It is her story more than Max’s, and the film is widely regarded as one of the best action movies ever made.

Furiosa endures because she is competence and rage in equal measure, a fully realised hero whose grief and fury drive the whole picture without ever tipping into cliché. The 2024 prequel Furiosa, with Anya Taylor-Joy taking on the younger version, expanded her into a saga of her own, cementing her place as a modern icon.

She is the timeliest addition to this list, and the proof that the wasteland’s most compelling figure was never the man it was named after.

Ninth, and the fiercest driver in the top 10.

Freddy Fazbear closes the top 10 as one of the defining horror icons of the gaming generation. The animatronic bear mascot of a haunted pizzeria, Freddy is the face of Five Nights at Freddy’s, Scott Cawthon’s 2014 indie sensation that became a full-blown phenomenon among younger players. The premise, a night-shift security guard trapped in an office as possessed animatronics hunt the halls, spawned a sprawling series, a deep and much-theorised lore, and a level of fan devotion few horror franchises reach.

Freddy’s cultural footprint is genuinely large. The games dominated a certain era of online video content, the lore inspired countless deep-dive theories, and the 2023 film adaptation became one of the biggest horror releases of its year, bringing the character firmly into the mainstream.

He earns his place as the letter’s gaming-horror heavyweight, a childhood-nostalgia mascot twisted into something genuinely unsettling, and the rare recent character to achieve icon status this quickly.

Tenth, and the only entry in the top 10 who is technically a robot.

More Iconic Fictional Characters Starting With F

Frank Castle is one of Marvel’s most morally uncompromising figures, the ex-marine who wages a one-man war on organised crime after his family is murdered. Unlike almost every other superhero, the Punisher kills, and that single choice has made him one of comics’ most debated characters for fifty years, a grim mirror held up to the genre’s usual restraint. Jon Bernthal’s acclaimed portrayal across Daredevil and his own Netflix series gave the character a raw, wounded gravity that fans consider definitive. The skull on his chest has become one of the most recognisable and contested symbols in comics. Frank endures precisely because he is uncomfortable, a hero the genre keeps arguing about.

Frieren is the breakout anime character of the last few years, the title heroine of one of the most acclaimed series of its era. An elf mage who lives for millennia, Frieren watches the human companions she once adventured with grow old and die, and the story follows her decades-late attempt to understand the friendships she took for granted. It is a quiet, melancholy meditation on time and memory, unlike almost anything else in the medium, and it made Frieren an instant fan favourite. The series swept awards and topped critics’ lists on its release. She would rank higher still if she were not so recent, and will likely climb on future updates.

Franky is one of the most beloved members of One Piece’s Straw Hat crew, the cyborg shipwright who runs on cola and builds the ship the whole story sails on. Introduced in the Water 7 arc, Franky is all bravado and blue hair, a self-modified engineer with cannons in his arms and an unshakeable sense of the dramatic, and his backstory is one of the most emotional in a series famous for them. As part of the biggest manga franchise on earth, Franky carries enormous reach, and his over-the-top “SUPER!” pose is instantly recognisable to the series’ vast global fanbase. A deep-cut favourite made mainstream by One Piece’s sheer scale.

Faye Valentine is one of anime’s most iconic characters, the sharp-tongued, morally flexible bounty hunter of Cowboy Bebop. A woman with a mysterious past and a gambling problem, Faye is all attitude and self-preservation on the surface, hiding a genuinely tragic story of a life stolen by cryogenic sleep. Cowboy Bebop is one of the most acclaimed anime ever made, a jazz-scored space Western that served as many Western viewers’ gateway to the medium, and Faye is central to its cool, melancholy appeal. Decades on, she remains a fixture of anime’s canon, and a benchmark for the complicated, self-destructing antihero.

Fozzie Bear is one of the most beloved Muppets, the well-meaning, terminally unfunny stand-up comic whose terrible jokes are the whole point. Performed originally by Frank Oz, Fozzie is the eternal optimist of the troupe, bombing on stage night after night with his “wocka wocka” and refusing to give up, and there is real sweetness in his hopefulness. His double act with the heckling Statler and Waldorf is a comedy institution, and his friendship with Kermit gives The Muppets much of its heart. Fozzie endures because he is the purest expression of the Muppets’ gentle spirit: a performer with no talent and boundless love for the craft.

Fred Flintstone is one of the most important characters in television animation history, the Stone Age everyman who anchored the first animated sitcom to air in primetime. Debuting in 1960, The Flintstones essentially transplanted the working-class sitcom into prehistory, and Fred, the loud, lovable, perpetually scheming quarry worker with a heart of gold, was its Ralph Kramden. “Yabba dabba doo” became one of the most famous catchphrases in cartoon history, and the show proved animation could hold an adult primetime audience, paving the way for everything from The Simpsons onward. Fred remains a foundational figure, the bellowing bedrock of the primetime cartoon.

Sam Wilson is one of Marvel’s most significant modern heroes, the winged Avenger who took up the shield to become Captain America. Introduced in the comics in 1969 as one of the first African-American superheroes, the Falcon spent decades as Cap’s most trusted partner before inheriting the mantle outright, a transition the MCU dramatised through Anthony Mackie’s portrayal across the films, the Disney+ series, and his own Captain America movie. Sam’s appeal is his groundedness: no super-serum, just a man with a jetpack, a moral compass, and the courage to carry a symbol that was never designed for him. He represents one of the genre’s most meaningful passings of the torch.

Fred Weasley is one of the most beloved characters in the Harry Potter series, one half of the inseparable, irrepressible Weasley twins. Alongside his brother George, Fred provides much of the series’ comic relief, running a joke-shop empire out of Hogwarts and later Diagon Alley in defiance of every rule and authority figure, and the twins’ loyalty to Harry never wavers. James and Oliver Phelps played them in the films. Fred’s fate in the final book is one of the saga’s most devastating losses, precisely because he embodied so much of its joy. He is proof the series’ lightest characters could carry its heaviest emotional blows.

Flynn Rider is one of Disney’s most likeable modern leads, the roguish thief who talks his way into Rapunzel’s tower and out of his own cynicism. Born Eugene Fitzherbert, Flynn is the wanted criminal whose smoulder gets him nowhere and whose reluctant partnership with Rapunzel becomes the emotional spine of 2010’s Tangled. Voiced by Zachary Levi, he helped usher in a wittier, more self-aware era of Disney animation, the male lead as charming scoundrel rather than bland prince. His arc from selfish thief to genuine hero, and his willingness to sacrifice everything for Rapunzel, gives the film real weight beneath the humour. One of the studio’s best-written rogues.

Frozone is one of Pixar’s most quotable creations, the ice-generating best friend of Mr. Incredible in The Incredibles. Voiced with effortless cool by Samuel L. Jackson, Lucius Best can freeze water from the air to skate and build on, and his brief appearances steal the film, none more than the immortal “where is my super suit?” exchange with his unseen wife, one of the most quoted scenes in Pixar’s catalogue. Frozone is the rare sidekick who feels like he has a whole life outside the frame, and the easy friendship between him and Bob grounds the superhero spectacle in something human. A supporting character beloved out of all proportion to his screen time.

Ferris Bueller is one of the defining teen characters of the 1980s, the charming truant who turns a skipped school day into an odyssey through Chicago. Matthew Broderick played him in John Hughes’s beloved 1986 comedy as a fourth-wall-breaking force of pure charisma, a kid so effortlessly cool he orchestrates an entire city day off while outwitting a vengeful principal. “Life moves pretty fast” became a generational mantra, and the film a permanent fixture of the teen-movie canon. Ferris endures as a fantasy of freedom and confidence, the friend everyone wished they had, narrating his own legend directly to the audience with a wink.

Fry is the heart of Futurama, the dim-witted, good-natured pizza delivery boy cryogenically frozen in 1999 and thawed out a thousand years later. Voiced by Billy West, Fry navigates the 31st century with cheerful bewilderment, and his hopeless love for the one-eyed Leela gives one of animation’s smartest comedies its surprising emotional core, most famously in the gut-punch episode “Jurassic Bark”. Matt Groening’s follow-up to The Simpsons built much of its warmth around Fry, a fish out of water whose stupidity is forgiven because his heart is always in the right place. A landmark of adult animation, and a strange omission from the old version of this list.

Uncle Fester is one of the most memorable members of the Addams Family, the bald, pale, cheerfully macabre uncle who can light a bulb by holding it in his mouth. Created in Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoons and immortalised on screen by Jackie Coogan and later Christopher Lloyd, Fester is the family’s gleeful agent of chaos, delighting in explosives, torture, and the general ghoulishness that makes the Addamses so lovable. His childlike enthusiasm for the morbid is the character’s whole charm, and the 1991 film gave him a genuine emotional arc. Fester endures as the perfect embodiment of the family’s sunny, unbothered relationship with the grotesque.

Mr Fox is one of Roald Dahl’s most enduring creations, the clever, charming chicken thief who outwits three cruel farmers to feed his family and his community. Dahl’s 1970 book is a small classic of children’s literature, but the character reached new heights in Wes Anderson’s 2009 stop-motion film, which turned Mr Fox into a study of midlife restlessness, voiced with roguish self-regard by George Clooney. Anderson’s meticulous, autumnal animation and dry wit made the film a modern favourite, and gave the character a wit and melancholy Dahl only hinted at. Mr Fox is the trickster hero at his most charming, a wild animal who cannot quite give up being wild.

Frank Reynolds is one of the great comic monsters of modern television, the depraved, money-grubbing patriarch of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Danny DeVito joined the show in its second season and transformed it, playing a former businessman who abandons wealth and dignity to live in squalor with the gang, sleeping on a pull-out couch with Charlie and embracing every scheme, no matter how vile. Frank is gleefully amoral, and DeVito’s fearless commitment to the character’s degradation is a large part of why the show became the longest-running live-action sitcom in American history. A late addition to a cast who somehow became its filthy, unhinged centre of gravity.

Faramir is one of the quiet moral heavyweights of The Lord of the Rings, the younger son of Gondor’s steward and the brother of the fallen Boromir. Where Boromir was tempted by the Ring, Faramir’s defining moment is his refusal of it, declaring he would not take the thing even if he found it lying by the road, a purity of character that makes him one of Tolkien’s most admirable figures. David Wenham played him in the films, which controversially complicated his resistance before restoring it. Faramir endures as a study in decency under pressure, a man who does the right thing precisely because it is hardest, and who wins his happy ending by deserving it.

Fleabag is one of the most acclaimed television characters of the last decade, the unnamed, fourth-wall-breaking heroine of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s era-defining comedy. Turning to camera with a raised eyebrow and a devastating aside, Fleabag lets the audience in on jokes and secrets she hides from everyone in her life, until the show’s second season weaponises that device to shattering effect. Waller-Bridge’s creation swept the Emmys and reshaped what a half-hour comedy could do, mixing filth, grief, and Catholic guilt into something genuinely profound. Fleabag endures because she made the audience her confidant, then made that intimacy the whole point. Few characters have used the camera so brilliantly.

Characters Beginning With F, By Franchise

Disney & Pixar

Marvel

DC

Star Wars

Anime & Manga

Sitcoms & TV

Video Games

Books & Literature

Other notable mentions

Best Characters Beginning With F 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 F has plenty of those.

• Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings)
• Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street)
• Frankenstein’s Monster (Frankenstein)
• Forrest Gump (Forrest Gump)
• The Flash (DC)
• Princess Fiona (Shrek)
• Fred Flintstone (The Flintstones)
• Fozzie Bear (The Muppets)

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

• Fred Flintstone (The Flintstones)
• Freddy Fazbear (Five Nights at Freddy’s)
• Fix-It Felix (Wreck-It Ralph)
• Fantastic Mr Fox (Fantastic Mr Fox)

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

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