The protagonist in Memoirs of an Invisible Man. He was just too stupid to live.
Jenny Fields from The World According To Garp. I hated her and when Glenn Close brought her to life in the movie, I hated her even more.
I second Dr. Frankenstein. Never has a character, before or since, made me so furious.
Claudio from Much Ado About Nothing, and to a lesser extent, Hero, too. The jerk believes the worst about her more than once on some very flimsy evidence. And she takes it! And she marries him in the end! Arrrgh!
thi6
My first post in a year, and I’m going to hijack a thread. Great.
As a giant video game fan, there are about, oh, twenty thousand characters that I would like to slap to a frenzy.
** Squall **a.k.a. Whiney McMopesalot from Final Fantasy 8 takes the biggest slap award, as he does basically nothing but whine throughout the story. Of course the protagonists from all of the Final Fantasy games after 6 fit in that description, but Squall is the worst.
** Serge **From Crono Cross. Okay, he’s not that bad as a character, owing to the fact that he hardly ever speaks. However the game was a sequel to one of the best CRPGs ever, and it was terrible, so I hate the guy. What can I say?
And I just realized that I was about to rip on Squaresoft for the next 30 minutes, so I’ll just cut myself off here.
Peggy Hill is certainly deserving. Ooh the things she does, the lives she ruins.
Lisa Simpson deserves one too.
I also think that M. Bovary deserves a good red mark on her face. I absolutely hate it when people are too stupid, too blind to see what’s right in front of them. She’s definately one of the least likable characters I’ve ever read about.
And Squall too, I want to like the main characters in a game. (side note I couldn’t remember any point in the game with him wanting to be called Squall, not Leon)
Horatio Hornblower, C. S. Forester’s self-flagellating protagonist. I don’t care if he was the inspiration for Star Trek, his personality still sucks and he never changes.
Oh, good one! Especially Claudio – he’s such an insufferable little prat…
Also, the four lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but this is more of a performance thing – if you have the wrong actors their scenes can be exquisitely painful, and not in a good way. (I’m thinking especially of the 1935 film version, which is also notable for Mickey Rooney’s Puck, the most irritating creature ever to be committed to film, after Coily the Spring Sprite I mean.)
Other people’s reactions that I don’t necessarily share but are worth mentioning:
I have a friend who sees Othello not as a tragedy but as a testimony to human stupidity. And I should also share my sister’s reactions to some of the great speeches from Richard II: “Okay, will he just die now?” (Although, in fairness, a. you’re supposed to want to smack him, for most of the play, and b. It might have been inspired by my acting rather than just the material. ;))
As a side note, I believe you’re also supposed to want to smack Victor Frankenstein. And, departing from Shakespeare for a moment, I’d like to smack pretty much everybody in The Great Gatsby. Bleargh.
Never mind Heathcliff – I’ve always wanted to slap Catherine a 1000 times more because she’s such a pretentious spoiled little twat!
Bridget Jones irritates me to no end. I wouldn’t want to slap her, but just shake some sense into her…
First one that comes to mind is 24’s Nina Myers. Killed JAck’s wife, kidnapped wife and daughter, plus all the stuff she’s done this season.
Carol, from Mamet’s Oleanna is so incredibly unsympathetic. Not that that makes the play’s brutal ending any ore satisfying.
The lead from In the Company of Men- the one who gets his friend to court and dump a woman with him because they’ve both been dumped. In the end, it turns out he is still with his girlfriend and was manipulating his best friend.
(stupid “m” key)
In The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, i want to slap the narrator and that gal he loved deeply…the one who went out with all those other men. I can’t remember her name for some darned reason, but at the end of the book both the narrator and her complain about them not being able to love each other. Granted i paraphrased a great deal, but I JUST WANTED TO REACH OVER AND SLAP THE LIVING CRAP OUT OF BOTH OF THEM!
Two words:
Wesley
Crusher
Her name’s Brett Ashley.
She was a nymphomaniac. He was impotent. Ergo, their complaining…
Rabbit Angstrom from Rabbit, Run. That’s the only one of Updike’s “Rabbit” series I’ve read, so I don’t know if he becomes more sympathetic later.
Daisy, from The Great Gatsby. So, so dumb. Amazingly, Mia Farrow made her even more annoying in the film version.
Impotent? I thought he’d had his balls shot off in the war.
I want to nominate anyone with a rank higher than Lieutenant in Catch-22. Also, Dawn Summers.
She is pretty annoying, but Garp is worse. He’s stupid and annoying.
Also, every single character is The Hotel New Hampshire is a self-absorbed nitwit. They deserve a big gang slap.
Peggy Hill on King of the Hill.