What daft things have characters done in books, and you think why!?

Othello and the damned handkerchief. Really?!

Fosco is a villian but he's a more interesting and complex character than Sir Percival Glyde who is a straight out bad un. He is urbane and intelligent and Marian says he has "interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him" so the attraction goes both ways.

Dickens wrote insipid heroines but all of Wilkie Collins' female leads are strong and intelligent characters as were plenty others in Victorian literature. What about Maggie Tulliver or Jane Eyre or Becky Sharpe?

Fosco admired her as he understood she was brave, independent and very intelligent. Also - remember, he is portrayed as uber-brainy but also really strange and mainly negative character.

For some reason, Marian reminds me of Lila from Futurama )))

I came on to tell Dr Galloway to get a bloody grip as well! When will she learn? Michelle is just as daft.

I've just read an entire crime series in which the hero continually waves off his sister/female colleague/ girlfriend so she can nip home to get her lip balm when a murderous nutter is on the loose. You'd think he'd notice after a while that it leads to mayhem every single time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold one of the characters deliberately gets pregnant even though she has a serious heart condition and knows the pregnancy will kill her and leave her child motherless. Nobody sensible would do that, they would adopt or use a surrogate or just not have a child.

Her 'ugly' face is mentioned once by Walter at the beginning after a long description of her attractive body. Count Fosco is very attracted to her and her relationship with Walter is very close and more like a modern loving marriage than his relationship with Laura. If you remember Wilkie Collins lived with one woman and had 3 children with another, with both women aware of each other, it's not unreasonable to think we are suppose to surmise that Walter had a sexual relationship with both Laura and Marian at the end. The last chapter is ambiguous about the nature of their homelife (and the readers at the time knew about the authors love life, it was well known).

This always annoyed me. He threw away a supposed relationship of a lifetime, when she could have been looking after a friend’s kid for a few hours. Made no sense.
In the da Vinci code, why didn’t the grandma- who actually knew everything anyway- just hop on a plane to France and introduce herself to her granddaughter. Would have saved a lot of hassle…..

The usual one - Jo marrying the professor instead of Laurie!
I think Laurie was too young and immature for Jo at the time he asked her. He needed to go away and get a job and do some growing up, then maybe.

Yes that one

The usual one - Jo marrying the professor instead of Laurie!

🤣
Heard film critics talking about Frankenstein on the radio. For a basic plot they've redone that story a shed load of times.

Frankenstein creating a monster and then being surprised and alarmed that he created a monster. Wtf dude?

In 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin', why didn't Captain Corelli come back the female character (whose name escapes me)? He claimed he came back and saw her with a child and assumed she was married and went away again. But that explanation never really convinced me. Surely he would have at least said ,"Hello', and met her husband/family and re-assured her that he had survived.

I once read a TV review that talked about the ESM - the essential moment of stupidity, necessary for so many shows.

I used to follow a book review site which referred to heroines as 'TSTL' - Too Stupid To Live.

And there are the characters in crime novels who think they have a crucial piece of information, but put off telling anyone until they too get bonked on the head. Even Dame Agatha is guilty of this at times.

Our House. The husband whose name I forget, essentially don’t really understand why he did any of what he did. But mostly, if he was going to kill himself anyway then why sign the paperwork that fucked his wife and kids over in the first place?

Came on to say this.

Ha yes, and it's usually one person telling another person some really useful information and the other person dismissing it. Eminent comet-specialist: "We've got to leave now or we'll all be killed by the falling comet!" Person who knows nothing about comets: "What, nah, don't be so stupi....." Splat.

OR - person finds out other person is a baddy and tells obviously (obviously!) shady and crooked in-on-it Big Boss. Big Boss strokes chin. "In-ter-esting....and, er, who else have you told?" "Only you".

I once read a TV review that talked about the ESM - the essential moment of stupidity, necessary for so many shows. I now look for the ESM in films, books and TV shows. They are very common.

Have you even read the book?
As a pp said, they know all about hogwarts -petunia even wrote dumbledore a letter asking to be allowed in when she was a child. They know magic exists they just don't like it.

The whole point is that they didn't say "sure you can go" - they literally left their house and rowed to a tiny island to try and escape the letters. They reluctantly let Harry go because a) they don't like him and it actually benefits them for him to he out of their house for most of the year - if Hagrid had tried to take Dudley presumably they would have put up much more of a fight! And b) they were scared of Hagrid!

And Harry agreed to go because his life was so miserable that the "dodgy bloke" was one of the first adults who had been nice to him in his whole life - plus Hagrid offers a credible explanation for otherwise unexplained events.

I think the child believes "themself" to be transgender in the story. Which is generally so preposterous I couldn't finish it..

I mean why doesn't she just get on and drive to NY like she said she would? It was important to her! She was letting people down!

Why does she just stick in that pitiful dreary hotel? Why does the nice young chap from the garage keep going to see her? Why does the interior designer take any notice of her , and walk in and redecorate a hotel room that clearly did not belong to her client?

The whole thing seems absurd and baffling, and to my mind sleazy and icky too. I mean I know it's not meant to be real but it just felt dirty to me as in a bit grime encrusted - as opposed to the other sort of filth...

Perhaps I m not the target audience...

Jude sleeping with Arabella in "Jude The Obscure ".

FGS, Jude, you are highly intelligent, obviously not using rudimentary birth control and want to go to Christminster.

Stay away from her wiley ways!!!

In All Fours the narrator refuses to’gender’ her child, referring to the prepubescent boy as ‘they’ .

I don't know why Hermione married Ron.

Because Marian continuously described as having an "ugly face" - and was way too "masculine" in a sense she was too clever which was a big no no for a romantic heroine in those days. Drippy fainting whining ladies were all the rage in literature. I actually think it was not the case in real life and she would have been popular with guys. Especially as she is described as having great figure.