Every week The Broke and the Bookish host a meme for literary/book blogs to participate in! Top Ten Tuesday is a great way for all of us to share our opinions and come together and share ideas.
This week’s topic is:
Top Ten Most Frustrating Characters Ever
Now, I took this to mean the “frustrating in a bad way” type of characters, NOT the ones you love so much that they frustrate you…but the ones that are so impossibly irritating that you contemplate why the author even created them in the first place! (Harsh, I know.) So I could only come up with 3.
1. Bella Swan from the Twilight Saga
– I feel like this might hit on some nerves for some readers, but I could not find Bella a sympathetic character at all. She very rarely took action (although part of that was the plotting of the novels) and when she did, she always managed to get everyone into a very bad situation. Not only does she base her entire world around the existence of one boy (cmon, moms, you really want your daughters to idolize a girl who literally sits around doing nothing for MONTHS just because her boyfriend broke up with her, and who moans and complains about the weather more than she does her homework. I understand that it is a love story, but Bella is such a flat character in comparison to the male characters…Edward and Jacob, that I felt she was utterly undeserving of the narrating position in the novel. In addition, there are just so many things that we never learn about Bella. Even when there is a conversation between Edward and Bella…she barely answers any questions, preferring to defer to him and thus leaving us thinking she is passive. I do know that there is a large fight and etc, but she is the most frustrating character I think I’ve ever read.
For more fun things about Twilight and Bella Swan, please refer to my favorite rendition of Twilight: Alex Reads Twilight.
2. Edgar Linton from Wuthering Heights
–For me, Edgar Linton isn’t much better than Bella Swan. He is passive, whiney, and a spoiled little rich brat. Part of this could be because I sympathize with Heathcliff a bit, but still. Linton is a weak boy, and he was always sickly. Indeed, I would much rather him to have died than *SPOILER ALERT* Catherine, because then maybe life on the Moors would have started to look up.
3. Shay from the Uglies Series
– I get it, Shay is the reason that Tally refused the Pretties process and found the Smoke, blah, blah, blah. Shay is also the reason that there are countless negative things going on it the Uglies series. One, even at the beginning of Pretties, Shay continues to hold everything that went wrong against Tally, going so far as to call her out and what not. In was also Shay’s idea to flaunt their past at the smoke by dressing up and friviously mocking their former life. Then, Shay joins the Specials and leads the fight against Tally and the Smoke even up until the end of the third book. Overall, Shay just continued to frustrate me because she kept saying that her and Tally were best friends, but that has got to be the worst best friend relationship I’ve ever read.
Overall, those are the only 3 characters that completely irritated/frustrated me. Remember, these are characters that were involved in storylines that compelled me enough to be so irrationally frustrated.
What are some characters that really frustrate you?
Moving! 