Annoying Fictional Characters

RetroFan

Literotica Guru
Joined
May 5, 2014
Posts
1,281
Almost everyone has encountered a fictional character that annoyed them, or in their experience writing wrote a character that irritated readers.

To clarify, I don't necessarily mean unlikable characters. For example, Grand Moff Tarkan from Star Wars is a loathsome villain, an evil and ruthless Imperial warlord who with the calm, cold command to his Death Star subordinates of 'You may fire when ready' is willing to destroy whole planets populated by millions of people. But while Tarkan is without doubt unlikeable and was written as such, few if any people would class the character as 'annoying' or 'irritating'. The same would apply to other characters like Nurse Ratched from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', O'Brien from '1984' or Curly from 'Of Mice and Men'.

From the entire world of fiction - movies, TV shows, books, animation, stage plays - and any genre, which characters did you find irritating, and what is your experience with annoying characters on Literotica either as a reader, writer or editor?

In recent times, the most irritating character I have encountered would be Mindy Meeks-Martin in Scream 5 and Scream 6, a sort of 'meta' character like her late uncle Randy in the earlier Scream movies. Lacking any sort of tact or the ability to keep her mouth shut, the obnoxious Mindy proves to be more a liability whenever a Ghostface killer attacks, yet has survived two Scream movies and is soon to appear in Scream 7 set for release next month. Go Ghostface, or if you can't finish the job, please outsource to Pennywise the Dancing Clown!

Back in the past there is Willie Scott from 'Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom' in 1984 but no doubt others will nominate her so I won't say any more about her. I will nominate Jackie Peters from Jaws 2 in 1978 however. If you don't remember her (but if you've seen Jaws 2 you probably will), the cousin of a girl from the older Brody son Mike's group of friends, from New York City and very much out of her element in the coastal New England town of Amity where she is visiting for the summer. Jackie is the one who encourages Mike to break his father's curfew and go sailing, and the others to go out further than normal in their sailboats. Then when trouble strikes and the shark attacks, she starts screaming, sobbing and panicking and continues to do so throughout the rest of the film, putting everyone else in danger and one guy losing his life saving her when she becomes even more hysterical. And at the end of the movie, Jackie survives without so much as a bruise or scratch.

On Literotica, I thought when writing my 'Spoiled Princess Hates Camping' series that readers would find Madison, the titular spoiled princess, very annoying. But nobody has ever commented to that effect, but did find the young Australian guy who winds up banging her very annoying and saying so.

What are your experiences?
 
I like Tarkin very much, what are you talking about!?

You aren't Barney from the sitcom 'How I Met Your Mother' by any chance? I remember there was an episode where it was revealed that Barney 'supports' the villainous characters in movies without realizing he is doing so, and when the others in the group mention Star Wars he reveals that when watching it he was supporting Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkan.

Jokes aside, I agree Tarkan is an awesome character and well written and portrayed, I just mentioned him as an example of a character people may not like due to his evil and ruthless personality, but who you wouldn't class as annoying.

Villains can be classed as annoying, and sticking with Star Wars Kylo Ren from the new trilogy could be considered annoying.
 
In IronHeart, I found the lead character and everyone else aside from the 3 main villains, to be pretty annoying.

Most of the blame for this is due to the cast.
 
The most recent book-character I was deeply annoyed by is Stark from the extremely bad romantasy novel Direbound. There is a piece of information that is super ultra mega critical. The entire plot hinges upon this piece of information and the female main character not knowing it. However, the information is cursed, and cannot be spoken aloud. Stark knows the piece of information because it is in a book that has been handed down through the generations.

He doesn't write the information down or show the FMC the book. He waits for the villain to reveal the information in his ~dramatic monologue~. The entire novel could be skipped if he wasn't a moron. (Though in fairness all the other characters are equally stupid and annoying; it was a book club hate-read. The novel's got no real redeeming factors; it's not even original by the standards of a genre where everything is derivative of everything else. It's almost a beat-for-beat copy of the big TikTok viral sensation Fourth Wing.)
 
The Crimson King in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. I mean, so, so lame. Big bad at the end of The Dark Tower, the ultimate villian, source of evil, and it's such a letdown how uninteresting he/it is and how the interaction with Roland goes. RF is much, much better.

Also, all the humans in Jurassic Park. The movie, not the book. The book was really good.
 
Romance novel where the FMC's way of experiencing love is getting ridiculously jealous of anybody female in the MMC's vicinity, to the point where she gets flashes of rage seeing him wrestling with his sister in the dojo where he teaches martial arts. I think it was supposed to be Romantic but it just felt toxic and petty.

Also the MMC, whose way of dealing when the FMC breaks things off with him is to show up at her work spamming her with bouquets instead of respecting her decision.

Also the FMC again for rewarding that behaviour.
 
I'm gonna highlight two characters that were appropriately annoying.

Donkey, from Shrek. He was supposed to be annoying, and he is! Eddie Murphy nailed it, making him irritating without making you hate him completely (YMMV). I'm not a huge fan of the Shrek series, but Donkey is great, and that series led to the newest Puss in Boots movie, which was unironically amazing.

Ruby Rhod, from The Fifth Element. Annoying AF on purpose, again for comic relief. He worked, for me. He took a lot of the doom and gloom out while helping to build the tension -- kept it an action-comedy without making it just a comedy. The tension by the end of that movie is really good, and Chris Tucker's character is crucial to the building of that tension.
 
Kyle Ren. This guy wants to be the heir to Darth Vader, but every time he shows up he gets his ass kicked by a bunch of fucking amateurs.
 
The narrator/main character Theodore Decker from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

For some reason, Donna Tartt likes to write novels from the point of view of completely unlikeable, borderline sociopathic, young men. She did that years ago with her first novel, The Secret History. It's an interesting artistic choice. I find the POV tedious after a while. I want her narrator to get his comeuppance, to get beaten up and left in a gutter somewhere.

The character perfectly embodies the term "annoying." Grating. I don't know if I've ever read a long, first-person novel that so steadfastly made me think "This narrator annoys me."

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye is an annoying narrator/main character, but he is rendered so skillfully by the author that he's more sympathetic, and Holden's disaffected perspective spoke to a lot of people who saw their voice in his voice. I don't think that's true with Decker.
 
Kyle Ren. This guy wants to be the heir to Darth Vader, but every time he shows up he gets his ass kicked by a bunch of fucking amateurs.
He's such a whiny emo. It's like he wants to rebel against his parents for being goody-two-shoes. I can just imagine him shouting, "You just don't understand my suffering!" And storming off to his room and slamming the door. And then playing with his Darth Vader action figure.
 
Phoebe from Friends. Totally annoying, though a lot of people disagree and say she's endearingly ditzy or kooky, which I think are synonyms for 'annoying but I'd shag her anyway'.

And over-saintly characters, especially if they're only there to enable some moralising. The Victorians were bad for this - Beth in Little Women, and especially Dora in David Copperfield. I tell people thinking of reading DC that the first 200 pages are pretty good, and the last 200 are an excellent scathing takedown of Victorian society, but if you get to Dora turning up and then flip to where she finally dies, then it's a great book.
 
Some other memorable "annoying" characters I can think of:

Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It

Mr. Collins in Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Jar Jar Binks and Anakin Skywalker in the three prequel movies. A thousand deaths aren't enough. These two characters are "annoying" in a different way from the first two I mentioned. The first two are annoying as characters but they are expertly drawn and serve valuable dramatic/comic purposes. These two characters, on the other hand, are IMO colossal artistic misfires, and are annoying in part for that reason.

Uriah Heep in David Copperfield.

Jake Spoon in Lonesome Dove.

John Self, the lead character/narrator of Martin Amis's Money. This is a good example of a basically unlikeable narrator whose unlikability works for the novel and what it's trying to do, which is offer a satirical look at the materialism of the 1980s.
 
One of my "favorite" annoying characters from a TV series is Jack Bauer's daughter, Kim Bauer, on the show 24, whose role on the show is to do exactly the stupidest thing one can do at exactly the wrong time, so Jack has to take time out from saving the world and save his stupid daughter instead, thereby creating a completely contrived subplot. I watched the episode where she escapes from a psycho and runs down a hillside and just happens to encounter a mountain lion, and my sons and I just burst out laughing while watching it. We were rooting for the mountain lion.
 
Percy in The Green Mile. Privileged, entitled little prick. Of course it was intentional and integral to the story. Still, ya just wanted to bitch slap the guy.
 
Back
Top