4. Tyrion
The sharp tongued dwarf everyone loves to love is unlike many characters and certainly like no one from The Lord of the Rings, not even the mentally vacant Gollum. He's a Lannister so every instinct you have tells you to hate his guts and dream of all the various ways he should die. But hold on; he's funny, he's smart and he appears to be the only Lannister whose heart beats blood, not vitriol. Then again, he's devoted to his family who are a bunch of cruel assholes. It's this type of back and forth that Martin, the creators of the show David Benioff and D.B.Weiss and actor Peter Dinklage, play with so well to make a morally grey character become, by the end of Season 2, a bigger hero in many respects than Robb Stark. How could anyone not love the only character who has the balls to slap Joffrey around like the spoiled brat that he is? Who can compare to the dwarf who beds more women than all the characters in the Lord of the Rings put together and comes up with lines like "The Lord of Light wants his enemies burnt. The Drowned God wants his enemies drowned. Why are all the gods such vicious cunts? Where is the god of tits and wine?" That's right, nobody. Rings is very clear cut when it comes to who is good and who is bad and Tolkien's world doesn't really have any women in it let alone prostitutes and real debauchery for characters to let themselves have some fun with. In Game of Thrones on the other hand, someone like Tyrion can be the degenerate dwarf with a giant's heart that he is while outwitting everyone around him and making viewers root for him, all the while asking themselves if they should.