Top Ten Tuesday: Most frustrating characters ever

As taken from Broke and Bookish! Here's a list of the characters that just made me want to throttle someone or throw a book across the room.


1. Margaret Lea from The Thirteenth Tale - One of my least favorite characters of all time, from one of my least favorite books of all time. I finished reading this and was hard pressed to think of a single decision this character made, a single action they took other than the completely banal, that didn't make me long, YEARN for a different and better protagonist. Her endless whining about her lost twin, her drifting through her investigation, even her decision to do the autobiography in the first place left me wanting to claw furniture.

2. Felicity from Changeless/Blameless - In the first book, she was a flighty socialite with her eyes on the prize - not my favorite thing, but an interesting counterpoint to her sister, our main character. But when we get into the second book and thus far in the third (I am about 15% done) she has made a hard turn at being-a-jerk-ville. She's needlessly nasty to those around her, undercutting others just to spite them while never really seeing to have any goals of her own. It makes her frustrating and bothersome.

3. The male leads from the Vampire Knight manga - I can't believe I got 9 volumes into this series. It was completely the background characters that kept me engaged - if I'm actually said my piece to the leads, espeically the two blokes, I would have been forced to say "You're acting stupid" or "That was foolish" or some variation roughly every five pages. It was like they were trying to out-angst one another in some strange Olympic-level self-defeating competition.

4. Horace Slughorn from Harry Potter - Now this character I actually quite liked, but I kept hoping he would actually grow a backbone and do something instead of hemming and hawwing and trying to deflect blame for his own mistakes on others rather than admitting to the knowledge he'd given Riddle back in the day.

5. Perrin Aybara from the Wheel of Time books - When this series started, I really loved it, and I found a lot to like about most of the cast, but Perrin.... eh. And you'd think him becoming a wolf brother would help, but ... eh. You'd think Faile, a perhaps divisive but certainly interesting woman, coming to be part of his story would help, but... eh. I just found his internal conflict completely lacking in impact and emotional connection. and in a series as wordy and retready as this one got I had a LOT of time to ruminate on him, to the point where he frustrates me more than most characters of this type normally would.

6. Romeo from Romeo and Juliet - I despise the main couple in this play, but out of the two, I find myself frustrated with Romeo a bit more. Juliet at least had the excuse of this being her first love or lust or whatever. Romeo had all the information to help him realize he needed to take a step back and ask himself if maybe he wasn't going a little overboard since his emotions seemed to pretty much just transfer to a new woman. Gah!

7. Thomas from Eyes of the Dragon - I get why he turned out the way he did. Flagg is a powerful persuasive force. but there were so many moments - SO many moments in this story I wanted to reach in and throttle him while screaming "Thomas! Look at your life! Look at your choices! You are better than this!"

8. Superman - I'm going to come out and say it - I don't like Superman. It feels like the DC world is separated into people who like Batman better than Superman and who like Superman better than Batman, and I am definitely in the first category. He works best when he is being an ideal, a person for us to strive to emulate, but those same traits that work best on him are also some of my least favorite. I've read stuff with him in it I enjoy, and there are objectively a TON of fantastic Superman stories, but of all the characters in all of comics, he's probably the one whose name being on the cover is most likely to give me second thoughts.

9. Marco from The Night Circus - This one is a little like Thomas, in that the frustration came from wanting and expecting him to be better than he ever was. He used people, looked down on them in a detatched way, messed with their minds and almost never seemed to have an inkling that maybe he was behaving poorly.

10. Bella from Twilight - I think she doesn't belong at 10 based on annoyance factor, but since I didn't actually finish the book, I didn't feel right putting it any higher. As for the reasons, there's a whole internet worth of people who have articulated it well and at length. No need to be repetitive.