Jacy from The Last Picture Show. She deserves the biggest slap of them all.
Cybil Shepherd actually manages to make her kind of sympathetic in the movie, but in the book, she’s the biggest bitch that ever walked the face of the earth.
Sorry, I have to lower the highbrow nature of the posts (Heathcliff? Puhleeze! :D) to include JarJarBinks in this list.
I also wanted to slap the crap out of Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. Most everyone I know was SAD when Cary Grant came to her at the end of the movie and she wouldn’t tell him of her disability. I was just annoyed. He LOVED her, for crying out loud. She simply didn’t want to even give him a chance.
Xander Harris from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at least once a season, sometimes more. He’s a pompous dork.
Luke Skywalker in the first half of Star Wars. What a whiner.
Harry Beavers in Peter Straub’s Koko (which I am reading right now). Caused not one massacre but TWO by his supercilious self-aggrandizement.
Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-- but if I did slap her, she’d probably have part of my brain removed.
Sansa Stark in George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean.
J. Alfred Prufrock, from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Just ASK her already!
Though I love him, Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. I mean, for god’s sake, just call Jane Gallagher, go home to your parents, and get some therapy already.
Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. Way to be an egotistical jerk who ruins the lives of all of his family members.
Brutus from Julius Caesar. What a whiny, honor-obsessed, asshole he was.
Phil Green (Cary Grant’s character) in Gentleman’s Agreement. I have seen that movie over two dozen times, and every single time he turns down brilliant, luminescent Celeste Holm to stick with the anti-Semitic witch played by Dorothy McGuire. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I know one of the reasons I keep watching that movie over again is that I’m hoping against hope that just once it will have a different ending.
In other news, I still love Jenny Fields, Garp, and Deborah Kerr.
I agree with Luke, but Xander rocks, so get off his ass! I’d like to see you be half as loyal as him. But since we are on the topic of Buffy, I would love if it Dawn just went back to where she came from…a big ball of energy, or something. She is sooo stupid! In the last episode she went vampire hunting without a stake! How moronic can one girl be? Sheesh!
Upham, from Saving Private Ryan. How many guys died because of his whiny, snivelling, pretentious stupidity? And poor Private Mellish! Had a knife slo-o-o-owly slid into his ribs, and all Upham had to do is take three steps and pull the trigger ONCE!
Christ. I fucking HATED that guy.
I’m reading The Sound and the Fury right now and I hate everyone in it. I hate Benjy, I hate Quentin, I hate Jason, I hate Caddy. And more than any of them, I hate the mother. Gaaaah!
Tom Sawyer at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
“Jim’s already free, I was jes’ fuckin’ wit’ ya!”
In my version Jim would pick him up and start smacking.
smack
smack
smack
smack
smack
smack
smack
One week later…
smack
smack
smack
smack
smack
smack
smack
Tess Darbyfield. Gods and goddesses, what a moron. I had to read that book three times for English classes (10th grade, 12th grade, and freshman Brit Lit) and it just kept getting worse. Oh, and all the men in the book, too for just making it even more painful.
The two upper-class twits (can’t remember their names) who pick on Malvolio in Twelfth Night I also wanted to smack around a bit.
In less highbrow litearture, I kinda want to simultaneously shake Rincewind (from the Diskworld novels) silly and give him a big hug and a cup of soup and tell him it’s all gonna be okay . . .
All the grown-ups in Ender’s Game deserve a good slap.
I’d say I want to slap Jar-Jar, but if I did I probably wouldn’t ever stop, and he’d keep protesting in that voice, and it would just get really bad. Actually, I really want to slap Yoda a couple of times, hard - if he’d just taken Anakin as a padawan himself, he could have easily prevented the whole tragedy from ever hapenning, but nooooo . . .
George Bailey in Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Nobody made his life a misery except himself; nothing was stopping him leaving town except a lifelong committment to being a doormat.
Nina, heroine of “Truly, Madly, Deeply”: her whining is exasperating, given that every person she meets is nauseatingly supportive about her bereavement.
Sophie in “Sophie’s Choice”. What does the nice guy narrator see in her if she’s too stupid to see that he’s a better bet than an outright psychotic?
PS My wife agrees with Madame Bovary - and adds Sue Bridehead from “Jude the Obscure”, not to mention Angel Clare from “Tess of the Durbervilles”.
Just about every character in the book Of Human Bondage. I had to stop reading the book, they were all so pathetic. (And yes, I realize that was the point.) If ever there were a book to make all of your hopes and dreams seem hopeless, that’s the one.
I’ve forgotten most of The World According to Garp, but I vividly remember wanting to slap everybody from the Ellen James society. Which, again, was the point. So I want to slap John Irving for manipulating me so ham-handedly.
And Snapes from the Harry Potter books. They’re not subtle books, but still I felt myself getting so frustrated and angry along with the kids. Even after he turned halfway sympathetic.
And Ambumax, I don’t think that it was a hijack; videogame characters are fictional too. My vote would go to the lead character from Final Fantasy VIII. Why are you supposed to want this guy to survive, again? I had to stop playing that one; there’d be a long, beautifully-animated cutscene of him being an asshole to somebody, and then a fight sequence where he’s one of the characters. And of course I’d just let the monsters wail on him for payback.
Captain Archer, from *Enterprise{/i].
And I’ll second Romeo and Juliet.
Omorka:
Twenty-twenty, hindsight is.
The word that is the very epitome of self abnegation - Pollyanna. Just inciting people to treat her as a doormat.
That passive-agressive act doesn’t fool me one bit. Grow some spine, child.
Prince Paris of Troy. Starts the disastrous Trojan War, and then sits back and idles around with Helen while his brother Hector desperately fights to defend their city from invading Greeks. I always want to give him a good swift kick in the balls.
Achilles could use a good swift 2-by-4 to the head as well.
Add me to the list of people who want to smack Heathcliff and Catherine up.
I also think Emma Woodhouse would have benefitted greatly from being spanked as a child.
And on the anime side of things, I would really love to wail on Miaka from Fushigi Yuugi. DO. SOMETHING. BESIDES. WAILING. FOR. TAMAHOME. PLEASE.
Oh. And Reverand Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter. On. Fire.
I love that this comes from someone with the user name “Mame”.
You tell 'em, Auntie.
Have to agree with Heathcliff & Catherine. Slap, Slap. But don’t forget Ivanhoe. We read that in high school English & no one in the whole class could understand why he picked the dopey blond over the intelligent brunette - other than that one was Jewish. Aargh.
Holden McNeil, from Chasing Amy, because he spends the last 30 minutes of the movie being a complete dipstick and ruins two good relationships.