I really dislike Mrs Weasley.

[cockneysalad]

She is an awful character, she seems to prefer Harry to Ron and is mean to Fleur. She is also a bit of a stereotype, the apron, the knitting, the homemaker etc. Which literary characters annoy you and why?

@gumball37

Harry is actually my least favorite. He's arrogant while acting as though he isn't. Most issues tend to stem from his inability to trust anyone even though they've given him no reason not to.

Yeah. He’s a tosser basically. And the way Radcliffe plays him is even worse. E.g. his smarmy final confrontation with Voldemort. I was wishing Voldy would kill him tbh.

I can't stand Lord Peter Wimsey. Full of himself and not nearly as clever or wonderful as he thinks he is.

I really liked the way JKR had Harry realise gradually that Lily and James weren't perfect and had treated Snape very badly indeed. Part of growing up to see that your parents aren't perfect, but you can still love them. He moves on a long way from the Mirror of Erised at that point.

Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Ugh.

@iamapixie pardon the pun - my subconscious wit 😂. It’s been 25 years and I’m still enraged for Tess. Those bastards!

@mbosnz

I hate Hardy.

You and me both. Just utter yuk, from go to whoa.

No, no, no, no, no. He is brilliant. There is no discussion to be had. though the Hand of Ethelberta is a bit crap

They won 700 galleons and spent nearly all of it on a holiday.
Ron's second hand dress robes for the ball- a bit of a joke.
Think one of the twins say they have to buy five sets of new books. Why not just use from the older kids?

She does cook well though and sends him jumpers!

@MarieIVanArkleStinks YES! I was so disappointed with that character choice. It's minging and unexamined and frankly lazy. I actually fuckssaked out loud when I got to the bit about him smelling her hair. Malcolm was so promising in the first book and now this! Sub-par, Pullman. I actually found a lot of the second book annoying but that is a whole thread of geekery.

Also @Yester my friend is a psychotherapist and he has Things to Say about Big Nutbrown Hare and toxic masculinity

I think possibly the most chillingly hateful character I have ever read is Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, though obviously George Eliot wrote him (fucking masterfully) to be so. I would absolutely have shoved him out of the boat and pushed him down with an oar.

I can't stand Emma Woodhouse.

Girl in the shopaholic books. Read the first one but I couldn't but up with an entire book series of her. Shame as that's the sort of book I like.

Scarlett o'hara in Gone With the Wind is just a cow. I know she's supposed to be but Christ almighty

As the books go on Lily and James Potter get worse. And you realise that Snape has a point

I never quite understand the household accounts of the Weasleys. Yes they had 7 kids but by the time the books start. 2 have left school got lives of their own, Arthur has a decent job. Ron's dress robes in Goblet of Fire annoy me. Ok they don't have to be designer and by all means get second hand but they are hideous. Surely there was some
nicer ones available somehow.

I’m going to stand up for Frodo, I think he’s the ordinary guy who gets dealt a shit hand by being given the Ring and tries to do his duty. Sam’s more interesting and heroic but FFS can he stop being so bloody feudal with all the ‘Mr Frodo’ stuff.

I really dislike Luna Lovegood or rather I dislike the way she's written.

But I hate the way we're encouraged to spend ages laughing at 'ooh, she's so odd, radishes for earrings'. Then suddenly Harry and his friends decide to like her, and it's Very Uncool And Possibly Discriminatory to mock her.

But because Rowling wants her to be both genuinely annoying and genuinely a potential friend for her second-tier characters, she ends up just .... being fucking irritating.

Bill, also. Bill is not 'cool'. I cringed reading that. You can so hear it's a middle aged woman trying to picture a cool young man, not Harry. Harry sounds as if he has a crush on Bill, and Harry doesn't have the emotional capacity for an interesting bicurious phase.

Outside Harry Potter, the dad in Tiger Who Came To Tea can fuck off, with his 'I've got a very good idea'.

Anne Elliot in ‘Persuasion’

I just don’t get why Captain Wentworth would be so obsessive to show her he’s worthy of her. All the book’s other characters praise her constantly when she is being a martyr/too timid to do anything except keep the peace (except Sir Walter and Elizabeth do not which is by Austen’s design I’m sure) but my god, she makes me zzzzzz.....
I find myself hoping he marries one of the Musgroves just to spite her! I mean have some self respect man, stop pining after a woman who has already said no and embarrassed you enough.

The ITV version with Rupert P-J also got her character down to a tee and she annoyed me perfectly 😂

Why was bill cool? Because he had an earring? It was the 90s I suppose.

It was indeed the 90s.

But yes. He was cool and ... worked for a bank.

She really, really didn't think that through.

Julian, Dick, George and Anne from the a famous Five are all arrogant entitled dicks - not to mention racist and sexist.
I listened to a Famous Five audio book recently with DC and was shocked at how unpleasant they all are!

@Toddlerteaplease, that was kind of the point of "writing a heroine than no one but myself will much like."

@LilacSloth - ditto. She and Tom were vile and Fitzgerald showed them for the careless parasites they were.

Most of the Wuthering Heights characters are horrible. Gothic fiction is riddled with vile characters. Jane Eyre extremely so.

I love Mollie Weasely. Yes, she's flawed but she loves her family, she works hard to care for them and she's taking no one's shit.

Hamlet's a dick.

I'm fond of wicked Becky Sharp but can't tolerate anyone in Little Women. Even the title makes me grind my teeth.

I love this thread so much, it has led to a brilliant discussion with DS which then moved onto TV characters that we like or dislike.

I think Raoul de Chagny from Phantom of the Opera is one of my most loathed literary characters. Whiny and entitled, has no interest in Christine when she grows up after being friends with her as a child, because she wasn't grand enough. Then when she becomes successful, he is all over her, tempting her away from rehearsals and jealous of her relationship with the Phantom, who has been there for her since she joined the corps de ballet. He then tries to kill the Phantom, because he knows Christine is still fond of him. He is then unhappy that she goes back to visit the Phantom at his friend's house after the fire at the Opera House. She definitely chose the wrong one.

I am only page 1 and I'm irrationally angry because my dog is called Frodo 🤣

Ha, GretchenWieners, dd2 was having to write a piece for GCSE Drama the other day about what she liked and didn't like about a play or show she'd seen, and she decided to write about how Raoul is shallow and dull and Christine should've stuck with the Phantom .

Oh yeah that bit with Bill is really cringey- something like ‘Bill was, there was only one way to describe it, cool’

Captain Phoebus in hunchback of Notre dame. It's been a very long time since I read it but my blood still boils at how Disney rewrote him as a hero. How anyone thought that book would make a great children's film i do not know.

Yeah why ain’t Charlie the cool one - he is outdoorsey and hangs out with dragons
I can’t believe I never noticed this

Think one of the twins say they have to buy five sets of new books. Why not just use from the older kids?

Tbf it is mentioned specifically that Lockhart and Hagrid set their own book lists so they may not always be able to reuse books from previous years.
Doesn't explain why their stuff is tatty though, when magic could surely fix that (maybe the magic clothing stores enchant their clothes so that they can't be fixed, so that people have to buy new ones. Or maybe I'm thinking about it too much).