Four pages and nobody has mentioned Wesly Crusher? I’ve always hated that precocous, whiny little twerp.
Capt. Jonathan Archer was the sole reason I couldn’t watch Enterprise any more after the first season. He was incredibly effin’ smug, and always managed to humiliate the Vulcans despite the fact this was supposed to be our first deep space voyage and they’d been doing it for years. I don’t know if they ended up making him a much more complex character later or not. I didn’t bother to stick around.
Not to mention that they’re largely interchangeable with each other, and even more interchangeable with the characters in his later books…
Boy, I’m just a big ol’ literary grumble-bum, ain’t I? 
Baron High Ridge from the Honor Harrington series always made my skin crawl. Smug, arrogant and completely uncaring of the consequences of his actions. Not just uncaring in fact but blind; he never saw the inevitable disaster coming. He shoved and schemed his way to power in Manticore, and proceeded to utterly screw up without realizing he was doing anything wrong at all. He alienated his Kingdom’s allies to the point one of them changed sides and led Manticore to it’s greatest military disaster in history.
He’s not fictional, but as portrayed in Into the Wild, Chris McCandless was an arrogant prick who seriously hurt his family for the crime of not being perfect and died because he thought he could take on the Alaskan wild almost completely unprepared.
I’ve never seen it. But you could say almost all of that about Allie Fox (Harrison Ford) in The Mosquito Coast – which is a tragedy precisely because the hero is not loathesome, merely flawed.
All the Desperate Housewives are pretty despicable, but I loathe Felicity Huffman’s character (whose name blessedly escapes me) to the very fiber of my being.
Whines about being overloaded with children and housework. Hires a nanny. Sabotages the nanny because she was being effective and her husband looked at her. Lies that her son has cancer, so she can get into a yoga class. Steals drugs from the medicine cabinets of acquaintances. Thank God her husband grew a pair at the end of last season, and dared her to go back to work.
I don’t know why I watch this show…actually, I do know. My wife likes it.
What a moron! Too stupid to live!
Who takes their shoes off during a trans-Pacific flight through bad weather in the first place? Who doesn’t put them back on when the plane starts to nosedive, lights go off and on, etc. if they did take them off?
Who uses up the battery on his only flashlight the first night he’s marooned?
Who treats the washed-up FedEX packages, which are insured and assumed lost anyway like they were inviolable for days and days on end before opening any to see if they had anything useful in them?
Who takes a rubber ball which could be cut open and used as a rainwater basin and uses it as an imaginary friend? Who deliberately wounds himself to use the blood to draw a face on his “friend”?
Too F!!!ing stupid to live and yet the idiot screenwriter allowed him to do just that.
I loved it when Helen Hunt’s character admitted that she always somehow knew he was still alive, but went ahead and married the dentist anyway. Who wants to be married to such a moronic loser as Hanks’ character, anyway?
He survived four years alone on a desert island using his wits.
I dunno, a guy who isn’t expecting to crash into the ocean??
I dunno, a guy who’s tired and confused, what with all the nosediving and lights going off, etc.??
I dunno, a guy whose upwardly mobile, suburban lifestyle just got slammed into the ocean along with the Fed-Ex plane and who’s now tired and confused and exhausted, and in a life or death situation? What were you expecting? James Bond?
Really? I thought Hanks character’s gumption and will to live along with his ability to tie ropes, make fire, construct and use weapons at least had a part . . . That was a pretty amazing show of courage in what was otherwise a mediocre movie.
Well, Helen Hunt’s character for one. She chased him in the rain, and he had to exercise his considerable character to convince her to go back to her family rather than let her run away with him, which would have been the selfish thing to do . . . not to mention what he would have liked to have done.
I’m curious, Zenith. What about the character’s behavior in any way showed stupidity or ineptitude? It’s not like I enjoyed the movie very much, but his four years on the island actually had me shopping around on the Internet for wilderness survival schools.
Kate in the TV series Lost. I think 90% of her dialogue is: “I wanna come too.” Shut up, Kate. Please. Go away.
Rhapsody in the Rhapsody books. Her attitude drove me insane. The whole I-am-unworthy thing combined with her holier-than-thou attitude. And I just don’t buy that a woman that beautiful can be so oblivious of her own beauty. Especially when she’s supposedly so perceptive of everything else. She doesn’t deserve Achmed!! Ugh.