I’m rewatching season one of Witcher, and being reminded of how awful the character of the Bard is; he makes me not want to keep watching. It made me think about other characters who are so utterly useless, aggressively so, that their tolerance by other characters is so wrong that it counts as a plothole: there is absolutely no way, to my mind, that the character of the Witcher, as developed in the story, would tolerate the character of the Bard, as developed in the story, beyond the time it takes for him to sing one song.
It brought to mind the characters of Pippin and Merry in the LOTR movies, whose dangerous stupidity leads to many of the worst obstacles the Fellowship must overcome. Yes, they move the plot along, but that’s a consideration outside of the fiction: I can’t imagine how such dumpster-fire balls and chains would be tolerated by a group whose mission is so very important. Again, their toleration is so unlikely it reads as a plothole.
JarJar.
Every misogynist-cliche screaming female sidekick whose gasps and screams give away the hero’s location.
To me these are plotholes; or at best weak points in bad scripts.
Let’s be honest, about 80-90% of ‘comedic’ sidekicks in movies and TV shows fall in the this category. They’re normally some easy stereotype: fat male/female, dumb (almost always female) blonde, kid, non-white, or a mixture of the above. Sometimes this applies to the ‘love interest’ as well, where they’re a vehicle, as @lissener said, just to move the damn ‘plot’ along.
Short Round from Indiana Jones being one of the stand out combos mentioned above, but dear God, Temple of Doom had to go for Multiple sidekicks, making it a terror of a flick.
Yeah i fear i muddied things by referring to cliche sidekicks, who are merely annoying without actually being fatal to to suspension of disbelief. I mean the ones that are so antithetical to the sense of a narrative and its characters that they qualify as a plothole. The most egregious of these at the moment, for me, is the Bard in Witcher. Not just because you’ll never convince me that the Witcher would tolerate him for a second, but because he sings in that ridiculous American Idol / modern Broadway style that is entirely unnatural and specific to late-20th-century America.
Then I nominate Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop (original more than the Netflix version, but both). Someone who repeatedly robs you, stabs you in the back, and endangers your for her own selfish reasons is past the point of the ‘bad friend’ you tolerate.
She’s not alone in this category, as there are plenty of Bad/False friends or repeated betrayers that are still, somehow, kept around in movies and TV. Sometimes storytellers will keep them on so they can die repenting in a ‘dramatic’ moment, but why bother? The first time someone betrays you, especially in a ‘gritty’ world, especially for selfish reasons, get rid of them, don’t let them do it to you again and again (and sometimes again!).
Mr. Smee from Peter Pan. Why does Captain Hook keep that guy on the payroll when he keeps fucking up all of his plans? I have always found the “incompetent assistant of the bad guy” trope super-annoying.
Sheldon Cooper. Nobody is going to put up with a “friend” who treats other people the way he does for any length of time. Why he wasn’t smothered in his sleep and his body dumped down the elevator shaft is beyond me.
In Harry Harrison’s Deathworld II a character, Mikah, kidnaps the protagonist, Jason. They end up crashing on a primitive planet, and hyper-religious Mikah, in the name of all that is Good and Holy, attempts to thwart Jason in every thing he does to get themselves rescued, even to the point of self-contradiction (I guess it is an attempt to show the hypocrisy of bible thumpers?).
Despite Mikah’s ever-frustraing interference, Jason manages to get them off the planet. Is he thankful? Nope! He tries again to kidnap Jason.
But, in answer to the thread title, Mikah actually became literally too awful to exist, in the last sentence of the book. Jason’s girlfriend answered the existential question once and for all.
He wasn’t invited, and there was no place for him to go. Their only options were to outright kill him, or to leave him behind on some planet, effectively killing him. So he wasn’t really tolerated so much as endured.
Right, I think you’ve missed the concept. He was the romantic lead in a great, if tortured, love affair. Without him, no story at all. He doesn’t just move the plot, he is the plot. If there is someone dispensable between the two main leads in that story, I’d vote for Cathy, a fundamentally stupid woman who can’t figure out the thing that her father tried to teach her, that class and privilege are meaningless compared to true human values like love.
I gather this is more about annoyance than evil. In which case, I’ve gotta go for two recurring comic relief characters from Miami Vice who make me want to throw something at the screen whenever they come on, the fingernails-on-a-blackboard walking ethnic sterotypes of “Noogie” Lamont and “Izzy” Moreno. Con artists and frequent informers for the show’s leads, every scene with them just grinds the episode to a halt.
The mention of Izzy from Miami Vice reminded me of the episode killer from the 70s.
I give you: Angel Martin.
I don’t understand why Rockford didn’t push him off a pier or something. He conned Jim as much as he conned other people. Why is it when I try to watch a random episode, it always seems to feature Angel? According to imdb, he was only in a quarter!
eta: The actor sucked the life out of the Magnum episode he was in, as well.
