John Hughes’ 1980s high school movies do this all the time, like Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful. Main character has an oddball best friend, oddball best friend has a crush on the main character, but the main character ends up with a good-looking popular student instead, even though the oddball friend is by far the more interesting person.
Very true. I was foreseeing a Harry / Luna romance at the end of Order of the Phoenix.
Scarlett O’Hara is a much more complex character than the whiny harridan she is portrayed as in the movie. GWTW is a fabulous movie to watch the downfall of an entire era and world; you don’t get that much of the characters’ mindsets that way though. Her and Rhett were perfectly matched. She just never realized it, being far too immature and constraining herself in one way or another - first the perfect Southern belle, then for the love of money, then for the sake of her independence and pride. She represents the South in that book* - too proud to bend, and is ultimately broken. Rhett is a tragic character but Scarlett has her aura of tragedy around her, too.
*Please don’t be offended, Southerners! I speak only of the book and have nothing to say about the real South.
I also hated MJ and Winnie Cooper. MJ because admittedly I have only seen the movies and she is a flighty little bitch and anyway I never liked spidey anyway.
I also got annoyed with Kaylee when she would get irrationally angry at Simon. I hate that characterization of women as flighty, empty little things - even perfectly sensible women as soon as they fall in love lose their frickin minds. Sometimes I’d like to see someone in a love story go, “Oh, he said that, but he’s just clueless like that, I know he didn’t mean it.” And find it endearing. I mean, girl, Simon’s got a lot on his mind - he has one crazy woman on his hands already. He doesn’t need another.
And Skald knows how much I LOATHE Superman’s girl Lois Lane. Ugh! She should fall off a cliff. Here, I’ll push.
I just remembered another one. In Great Expectations (Dickens), why does Pip keep on running after Estella, who makes no secret that she’s not interested in him? His childhood friend Biddy was the woman for him. Though Biddy ended up with a better guy - good for her!
This seems to be the obvious answer, but does it count when the whole point was she was a five-star man hater?
Came to say. Only I’d adjust it this much: I agree with Angel being completely boring (and Riley) for Buffy, but in the case of SPike and Buffy, she wasn’t good enough for HIM. (Spike rules. Forever.)
Have you forgotten his attempted rape of Buffy?
I haven’t. And while I can say that, post-soul, he can be … well, not excused, but maybe forgiven for it, it’s not something I’d forget. I’m sure that would not have been his first rape, which is only one of a thousand reasons pre-souled Spike (and Angelus) deserved nothing but a stake.
In fact I think you nailed Mitchell’s intent. Hopefully Sampiro will see this post and correct us if we’re wrong.
When I was watching the 2nd Spider-Man, in the scene when MJ gets her fiance to kiss her upside down, it struck me what a needy little trollop she is; without meaning to I whispered it loud it enough for the girl beside me to hear, and she broke out laughing and agreed. So you’re not alone there.
Movie MJ is incapable of being alone. Note that in the first two movies she cheats on whatever boyfriend she is with whenever she is upset, and that she is incapable of being alone for any length of time. She’s practically Rose Vibert.
Yeah, that always bugged me. Though Simon was more the sinner than the sinned against in that relationship, if Kaylee had been a bit more emotionally mature (or had listened to the counsel I am sure Inara and Zoe were giving her behind the scenes), she’d have seen that Simon could never be with her while he had to focus on his mad sister – and that it was selfish of her to expect him to.
I am going to pretend I didn’t see this. 
Though in fact I think Lois is often odious; it just depends on the version. Just as pre-crisis Batman was not a jackass while post-crisis certainly is, TV & movie Lois tends to be a whiny twit while other continuties make her quite likeable.
Except that, at the end, she has learned wisdom and she and Pip are going to have a relationship.
I guess Pip deserved it. Of all of Dickens’ main characters, he’s probably the one I like the least.
But if you read that scene carefully, you’ll see that Harry pitied Luna. I love Luna, but pity is not a good thing to feel for a potential romantic partner.
I guess I should confess that I’m a Harry/Ginny fan but I do have to admit JKR didn’t put much depth to them in the books. I just like to read between the lines and imagine that Ginny’s ordeal in Chamber of Secrets was very influential in her development, and that she’s actually a bit darker character than what we see in the books, which makes her able to relate to Harry better.
Would you rather her end up with Piz? Not only was the show canceled before its time, it ends with her with him? Ick.
It took me a long time to get this, too. A couple of read-throughs of the book, actually, which is an amazing novel. It’s like a 1200 page trainwreck - you’re living in the current time so you know what happens but you can’t stop. In the center of everything is Rhett and Scarlett, burning up with love and passion and pride and anger and broken dreams and hunger, and all around it is Atlanta and the Deep South, burning up with all of the same things (and some literal flames, of course). Sometimes I think even more telling about Scarlett’s character than the moment she stands in her ruined garden eating turnips out of starvation and says the famous line, is her marrying Fred. By god, she won’t go hungry, even sacrificing her pride and her autonomy to get a husband if that’s what it takes.
Ahem.
Sorry, I got derailed there. Can you tell I really admire this book?
I had to look up Rose, but yes you said it. And it is supposed to be romantic when a woman runs from her wedding altar with music swelling and everything happening, and all I can think of, she’s a coward if she can’t face up to the man whose life she’s about to ruin and tell him before she lifts her skirts and runs off. You asked once - do we call women skanks or sluts? And I said, mostly, I refer to the behavior - I’ll call someone’s behavior skanky or slutty. Well, I think movie MJ has some pretty skanky actions.
And NOPE, Ginny is a pretty little red-headed Mary Sue. Harry and Luna had the better relationship. I know all he wanted was safety and security, but he had that in the Weasley family. I just saw no sparks between them and all of a sudden they were a canon couple. I was like 
But I cannot change the books and I have no interest in reading or writing HP fanfic so I shall just sit in the corner and pout.
Buffy seems to have gotten over it. It was pretty weak, anyway.
And you’re wrong… Spike was ten thousand times better than Angelus: he CHOSE a soul! He CHOSE it!
I cannot stand that a stud like Jim Rockford got stuck with a wet blanket little rummy like his attorney/gf Beth Davenport. On the Rockford Files.
Best wishes,
hh
Pretty in Pink has got to be one of the worst cases of this, ever. There is literally no reason for Molly Ringwald’s character to be in love with Blaine. The sum total of their ‘relationship’ was him taking her on the most awkward date ever, letting his snooty friends insult her, and then dumping her for not being good enough for him. Then he shows up at prom and she runs into his arms and we’re supposed to CHEER for them??
There’s a scene in PiP where Blaine is talking to his asshole friend Steff that reveals what a spineless little shit Blaine is. Steff is busting his balls for going out with Andie (Ringwald) and *he actually calls her trash to Blaine’s face *and all Blaine can manage to defend himself is, “Well, so what if I like her?” John Hughes could’ve salvaged the whole movie right there, if he’d had Blaine stand up to Steff and say something to the effect of:
“Wait, wait, wait, you just called the girl I care about ‘trash’. Listen, you cokehead little shit, Andie is a special, wonderful person and she makes me happy. I don’t need your approval to date Andie, and I sure as hell don’t want your opinion. If you EVER call Andie any sort of derogatory name again, you can consider this friendship to be OVER, got it?”
Steff would’ve pissed his preppy shorts and I could actually have rooted for Blaine and Andie to end up together.
However, I don’t support the alternative ship of Andie/Ducky. I think a big part of the movie was about how Ducky, whatever his feelings for Andie, is simply too immature to be with her.
I don’t particularly disagree with anything you said, but Andie wouldn’t be the first girl to fall for a rich, good looking, popular guy who was kind of a dick.
Besides, that was downright romantic for a John Hughes film. I still can’t get over the way the love interest acted in Sixteen Candles. “Hmm, my girlfriend is kind of a bitch, so I think I’ll trade her unconscious body to this creepy guy and go date Molly Ringwald.” And this is the guy the teenaged girls are supposed to swoon over. He’s the type of guy women should run away screaming from.
I feel I dislike the main character’s love interest quite often, but I can’t think of any specific examples aside from those already mentioned by others!
I am okay with Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley as a couple, but I don’t think their relationship was very well developed. Harry/Hermione might have seemed better if only because Hermione is a much more significant character and the reader knows a lot more about her personality, but then Ron/Any Other Girl would have had the same problems as Harry/Ginny. Harry/Luna doesn’t strike me as a match made in heaven or anything, but she was at least a memorable character and seemed to play a greater role in the overarching plot than Ginny did. (I can’t see Ron/Luna working, he would have been too weirded out by her.)
I do give Rowling credit for giving Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny all some opportunity to play the field a bit before they wound up with each other. Hermione in particular was shown to have options aside from Ron (or Harry) – she could easily have wound up with Quidditch star Viktor Krum long-term, but she just wasn’t that into him.
This movie came out when I was in college, and I saw it at the campus theater one Friday night. At brunch in the dining hall the next morning it seemed like we were all talking about how we couldn’t BELIEVE William wound up with Jocelyn instead of Kate. I wasn’t really impressed by the movie anyway, but I was honestly expecting that by the end of the second act William would decide he was better off with Kate. I wondered briefly if it might even have been originally written that way and changed late in the game, but I’ve never heard that this was the case.
Pretty in Pink is a case where the ending actually *was *changed after test screenings. Originally Andie and Blaine don’t get back together in the end (she winds up with Duckie), and I always felt like the rest of the movie is obviously leading to an ending where Andie realizes Blaine wasn’t good enough for her.
In the IMDb trivia section for this movie I see that Molly Ringwald also reportedly felt that she didn’t have romantic chemistry with Jon Cryer, he was more like a brother to her, and that if Robert Downey, Jr. had been cast in the role as originally planned the Andie/Duckie ending might not have been changed.