Top Ten Tuesday: Most Frustrating Characters Ever

Posted January 29, 2013 in Uncategorized / 2 Comments

Today is Top Ten Tuesday, a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish! Every week they post a new top ten list and everyone can join in and share their own picks. If you’d like to take part, hop on over to the blog and sign up with the linky. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to post your answers in the comments.

This week’s topic is: Most Frustrating Characters Ever.

Here are my top ten:

1) Bella from Twilight.

Of course. How could she not be top of the list? Now, I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy Twilight, because I’d be lying. I enjoyed the new take on vampire and werewolf mythology, and really liked some of the characters (Charlie and Jacob particularly). But Bella is just such a ‘Mary-Sue’ that I find her really annoying. Firstly, she’s just so pathetically weak. She follows Edward around like a lost puppy, lets him boss her around and control her without standing up for herself, and when he’s gone she just collapses into a miserable wreck. I prefer my heroines with a bit more fight in them. Secondly, she’s too annoyingly perfect. I was really hoping she’d turn into a vampire and go on a mad killing spree, but it just didn’t happen. Her amazing self control just makes her seem boring to me. Finally, she makes such terrible decisions that I can’t feel sorry for her. I mean, she chooses a skinny, pale and deathly cold sparkly vampire over a warm-blooded, tanned wolf-boy? Is she mad? She’s also horrible to her dad, never showing any enthusiasm or gratitude, and she puts herself in stupid, risky situations so she can be the damsel in distress. What a silly girl.

2) Tris from Divergent.

 I really like Tris, but at times I want to shake her. Like Bella, she makes a lot of bad decisions. Maybe it’s because I’m more of a quiet-night-in person than a dare-devil, but I couldn’t understand why she would go through some of the painful and humiliating Dauntless trials. I admire her bravery, but I don’t know how she could stand by and watch some things happen (like people getting beaten up or killed and forced to do things that terrified them) without having some sort of moral objection. I guess it’s just because I’m more Amity than Dauntless. Tris does seem to develop more of a conscience in Insurgent, but it just annoyed me that it took her so long to wake up.

3) Rhine from Wither.

Rhine is so passive to begin with and I just don’t understand how she can accept her fate so calmly. After the trauma she goes through at the start of the book, she is suprisingly forgiving and actually starts to feel sorry for her captor. Okay, I get that Linden is also a victim in a way, as he’s merely his father’s puppet and doesn’t know any better. But he keeps wives like possessions and impregnates a thirteen year old girl, all the while claiming that he loves Rhine. Er, if he really loved her he would not behave like that! Rhine makes all sorts of excuses for him, and takes way to long to try to escape. I would be fighting to get out the first day as I’d rather be dead than live like that to be honest.

4) Adelice from Crewel.

Adelice is another prisoner that accepts her fate much too calmly. If I was kidnapped and my family captured or killed, I hope I would show more resistance than Adelice. I know she’s drugged when she first gets there, but even after the drugs have worn off she doesn’t seem that angry or upset about what has happened to her and is very slow to realise she needs to do get out of there. She also flirts with two different guys and leads one of them on quite a bit by kissing him and then avoiding him while she kisses the other one, which annoys me a bit.

5) Pia from Origin.

Like Rhine and Adelice, Pia is another brilliant character than frustrates me because she takes so long to catch on to right and wrong. Fair enough, she’s been brought up in isolation in the Amazon rainforest by a group of amoral scientists and she knows no better, but it’s still frustrating to see her turn a blind eye to cruel animal experiments. She’s so brainwashed by the other scientists that at first she doesn’t even question the morality of what they’re doing at Little Cam and doesn’t see that she’s a prisoner there. Each time she sneaked out of the compound I was yelling at her in my head: “Run! Just run away and never look back!” but still she kept returning willingly to her cage and letting things carry on.

6) Katniss from The Hunger Games.

Let me start by saying that I love Katniss. I think she’s a great character. She’s a lot braver and smarter than Bella and isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. I admire her knowledge of the outdoors and her self-sacrificing nature. But some things about her just frustrate me. Like the way she treats Peta and Gale, sort of playing them off between each other. She’s also slow to catch on to points that seem obvious, like Peeta’s feelings for her. Sometimes when she’s responsible for a death (either directly or accidentally) she comes across as a little heartless, and is instead more worried about what her stylists will do with her hair and makeup.

7) Dumbledore from Harry Potter.

Oh Dumbledore, you are my favourite wizard ever. But why on earth didn’t you tell Harry everything much earlier? You would have saved him so much time and energy if you were just honest with him to begin with instead of sending him off on a wild goose chase, sigh. But then I guess it would have been a pretty short series of books if you had.

8) Pip from Great Expectations.

I feel sorry for Pip, but at times he’s such a dimwit. He’s in love with Estella and lets her walk all over him but she’s a stuck-up little witch. Man up, Pip!

9) Romeo and Juliet.

Oh, you poor lovesick kids. Romeo and Juliet are so frustrating because they make such silly choices. It is so not a good idea to run off and get married without telling your parents after knowing someone for about three days, and then pretend to be dead without ensuring the message gets to your lover on time. They act like typical teenagers- so dramatic. Everytime I read or watch the play I wish for a different ending.

10) Hamlet

Great play, frustrating character. He spends so long pondering what he should do that he misses his chance to do anything other than mess everything up. He suspects his uncle murdered his father, so he takes the only logical course of action: he pretends to be insane. Um, what? First he’s into Ophelia, then he’s not, then he is again, but it’s too late-she’s gone off her rocker and killed herself. Oops! And in his passion he stabs someone else by mistake when he meant to kill his uncle. Double-oops! His bumbling causes an awesome bloodbath at the end of the play.

What do you think of my picks? What are your top ten most frustrating characters?

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2 responses to “Top Ten Tuesday: Most Frustrating Characters Ever

  1. Great pics for the most frustrating characters. I have a tough time with wimpy characters who stand by and let things go bad all around them. For some reason I had a little more sympathy for Tris – I thought the hardest dauntless trial really was about being able to stand against the heartless bullying and kept waiting for her to take it on.

  2. Yeah me too. I prefer characters that take action quickly instead of standing around moaning about their situation. That's an interesting take on the Dauntless, I never thought of it that way.

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