I think Agnes is more just sickening, rather than sickeningly good. She was obviously written to be a complete waste of flesh.
Strike that - I was thinking of Dora. My bad. I’ll leave this up here anyway.
Sara Crewe in A Little Princess. I didn’t notice when I first read the book as a very young girl, but as I got older I saw how nauseatingly perfect Sara was and it repelled me a bit.
Then again, I don’t know if I would’ve had as much sympathy for her had she been less perfect.
That’s who I was going to mention, too. Little Nell, Mr Pickwick, John Jarndyce, Mr Brownlow…
Paladin from Have Gun Will Travel. In one episode he stumbles into a ranch in his underwear, having been ambushed. By the end he has taught the cook gourmet cooking, out poetried the widow owner of the ranch and of course caused her to fall for him, did forensic accounting to prove the foreman was ripping her off, and of course beat the snot out of the bad guys.
In other shows he judged a wine contest, reduced a chess grandmaster to a quivering heap of frustration (while Paladin read the paper) showed how to hunt tigers, and fed Oscar Wilde most of his most famous lines.
I’m happy to say that the writers were well aware this was funny.
A lot of retro TV Moms are portrayed as nearly perfect.
June Cleaver
Mama Walton
Ma Ingalls
Back in the time of the Korean war/police action/freshman mixer, “Negroes” was considered the POLITE term for that particular segment of the population. It was far more common to refer to them as coons, niggers, and other similarly delightful names.
Wesley Crusher
א is almost too sexy, but π is just obsessed over and abused to such a horrifying degree by its fans that I’d call it too perfect.
D&R
Well, there’s Captain Awesome from Chuck. That’s why they called him Captain Awesome.
Are you referring to the character of Doug Ross from ER? The man was a reckless, self-centered, insubordinate, impulsive, self-destructive philanderer, and one of the least “perfect” characters on the show; his dedication to his patients was just about his sole redeeming quality. I suspect you may have been blinded by Clooney’s good looks.
The main character in Chocolat - fortunately, I don’t remember much of this movie, but she was so vomit-inducingly good to everyone that it stuck in my mind.
DAMN ! you just see right through my he man persona !
I’m flogging that closet right now !
It’s a Mary Sue if it’s seen as an author insertion character, mostly, whereas Pollyana is more generic, I think. One is a subset of the other, almost.
The Vampire Lestat always struck me as this.
Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) in “Casablanca”. And Henreid knew it, reluctantly taking the role because it would cast him as a stiff forever.
That pretty boy from Criminal Minds. Has the worst of Wesley Crusher’s “oh, I just happen to have an encyclopedic knowledge of this thing that is required at this exact moment”. He has the same half assed flaws as the protagonist of Twilight.
No a Mary Sue is usually an author insertion character, but need not be. A Pollyanna is just a girl (or character, regardless of gender) who’s overwhelmingly, sickeningly optimistic regardless of character flaws or the world around them. Half the characters in Candide are Pollyannas (that’s practically the premise – it’s a deconstruction of a philosophy that essentially promotes being a Pollyanna), but very few of them are “too perfect” or Mary Sues/Marty Stus.
Different trope, actually.
I thought Esther Summerson in Bleak House was the most sickeningly sweet of the whole lot.
Steve McGarrett from Hawaii Five-Oh. After a while, you wish he’d take a day off and go play the ponies. And his hair! You just wanted to reach through the screen and muss it up!
The Hunger Games has Prim, Cinna, and, to some degree, Peeta.
Tara from “Buffy.”
Did she have any flaw that was not meant to make her endearing?