Fannish 5: Five Annoying Child Characters
5) Pollyanna Whittier (Pollyanna series by various authors).
Pollyanna has an irksome habit of being relentlessly cheerful and optimistic when there is no reason to be. She even manages to be cheerful (following an all-too-brief moment of despair) after her spine is injured in a fall and she needs to learn to walk again using crutches. She's never angry, scared or unhappy; she is simply "glad" all the time. She runs the gamut of emotions from A to...well, A.
To be fair, I think that the original author, Eleanor H. Porter, felt that there was a great deal of strength in hope and optimism. But, for me, Pollyanna went overboard. She was too one-note to be real.
4) Heidi (Heidi by Johanna Spyri).
Now, to be fair, I did like parts of this book. I liked the bits in Frankfurt the best, because there Heidi didn't know how to behave properly and was always getting into trouble, like a normal child. But then she came back to the mountains with all of this wisdom that she'd supposedly acquired in the big city, going from illiteracy to child prodigy in six months...and suddenly Heidi was, basically girl-child Jesus.
And that's not an exaggeration. Here's a bit that particularly annoyed me as a child:
Heidi shouted for joy at the thought that grandmother would never need any more to eat hard black bread, and "Oh, grandfather!" she said, "everything is happier now than it hasever been in our lives before!" and she sang and skipped along,holding her grandfather's hand as light-hearted as a bird. But all at once she grew quiet and said, "If God had let me come at
once, as I prayed, then everything would have been different, I should only have had a little bread to bring to grandmother, and I should not have been able to read, which is such a comfort to her; but God has arranged it all so much better than I knew how to; everything has happened just as the other grandmother said it would. Oh, how glad I am that God did not let me have at once all I prayed and wept for! And now I shall always pray to God as she told me, and always thank Him, and when He does not do anything I ask for I shall think to myself, It's just like it was in Frankfurt: God, I am sure, is going to do something better still. So we will pray every day, won't we, grandfather, and never forget Him again, or else He may forget us."
"And supposing one does forget Him?" said the grandfather in a low voice.
"Then everything goes wrong, for God lets us then go where we like, and when we get poor and miserable and begin to cry about it no one pities us, but they say, You ran away from God, and so God, who could have helped you, left you to yourself."
"That is true, Heidi; where did you learn that?"
"From grandmamma; she explained it all to me."
The grandfather walked on for a little while without speaking, then he said, as if following his own train of thought: "And if it once is so, it is so always; no one can go back, and he whom
God has forgotten, is forgotten for ever."
"Oh, no, grandfather, we can go back, for grandmamma told me so, and so it was in the beautiful tale in my book--but you have not heard that yet; but we shall be home directly now, and then I
will read it you, and you will see how beautiful it is."
The "beautiful tale," by the way, is the story of the Prodigal Son. Heidi just loves reading Bible stories. Oh, and reading hymns aloud to a blind woman.
Keep in mind that she has just returned to the mountains...and is thus about eight years old.
Yeah. I hated that.
3) Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger).
We had to read Catcher in the Rye in high school. I hated it. Holden was like every other whiny overprivileged kid at my high school, and as far as I was concerned, it was bad enough having to go to school with whiny overprivileged kids without having to read about another one.
Another problem I had with Holden was that I couldn't empathize with him. Yes, grownups lied and were often phonies. I'd known that since I was eight and had a teacher who a) favored boys over girls and b) decided to fail me because a story I wrote was, in her opinion, "too good for a third grader." (The fact that I was reading on a tenth-to-eleventh grade level did not count.) I'd got beat up on playgrounds and seen teachers turn their backs so that they wouldn't see it and therefore wouldn't be obliged to stop it.
Holden, on the other hand, was seventeen--and yet seemed to just be discovering that adults lied and pretended and were hypocrites. I wondered where the hell he'd been all this time.
So...yeah. I was completely unimpressed by Holden Caulfield. I did enjoy Salinger's short stories and found his characters compelling even if I didn't like them. It was just Holden that, for some reason, I couldn't connect with.
2) Robert Arryn (A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin).
Robert Arryn, sometimes called "Sweetrobin" in the book series, is a spoiled brat of six when we first meet him. And when I say "spoiled," I mean that his mother is still breast-feeding him at six and allows him to sit in judgment on accused criminals. Robert likes "seeing people fly," i.e. ordering people flung out of his family's mountaintop castle and watching them fall to their deaths. He also screams, bites, punches, flings food and frequently throws tantrums despite the fact that the tantrums often lead to violent grand mal seizures and everyone in the castle knows this, including him. He's like Veruca Salt's brattier little brother.
Martin is known for killing off characters. I hope he kills off Robert Arryn. I wouldn't mind one bit.
1) Renesmee Carlie Cullen (Twilight series--do I really have to say who wrote it?).
Renesmee--I refuse to dignify her with the nickname of the Loch Ness Monster--is odious. Mere seconds after her birth, she's able to think like an adult and communicate telepathically with her family. Her mother doesn't even need to feed her or change her, for she grows at an accelerated rate; by the time that she's a couple of months old, she looks and acts as if she were three or four. By the time that she's seven, she will look seventeen. According to Stephenie Meyer, this makes it perfectly okay for Jacob Black, who was interested in Renesmee's mother before fixating on Renesmee about five minutes after she was born, to fuck her. Because LOOKING seventeen is completely the same thing as being seventeen. And fucking a seven-year-old who looks seventeen isn't creepy at all. [sarcasm mode]
Did I mention that Renesbait, as a newborn, thinks of her mother's ex as "my Jacob"? Or that everyone in the entire world seems to feel a compulsion to protect her and give her exactly what she wants? Or that she's immortal?
Pollyanna has an irksome habit of being relentlessly cheerful and optimistic when there is no reason to be. She even manages to be cheerful (following an all-too-brief moment of despair) after her spine is injured in a fall and she needs to learn to walk again using crutches. She's never angry, scared or unhappy; she is simply "glad" all the time. She runs the gamut of emotions from A to...well, A.
To be fair, I think that the original author, Eleanor H. Porter, felt that there was a great deal of strength in hope and optimism. But, for me, Pollyanna went overboard. She was too one-note to be real.
4) Heidi (Heidi by Johanna Spyri).
Now, to be fair, I did like parts of this book. I liked the bits in Frankfurt the best, because there Heidi didn't know how to behave properly and was always getting into trouble, like a normal child. But then she came back to the mountains with all of this wisdom that she'd supposedly acquired in the big city, going from illiteracy to child prodigy in six months...and suddenly Heidi was, basically girl-child Jesus.
And that's not an exaggeration. Here's a bit that particularly annoyed me as a child:
Heidi shouted for joy at the thought that grandmother would never need any more to eat hard black bread, and "Oh, grandfather!" she said, "everything is happier now than it hasever been in our lives before!" and she sang and skipped along,holding her grandfather's hand as light-hearted as a bird. But all at once she grew quiet and said, "If God had let me come at
once, as I prayed, then everything would have been different, I should only have had a little bread to bring to grandmother, and I should not have been able to read, which is such a comfort to her; but God has arranged it all so much better than I knew how to; everything has happened just as the other grandmother said it would. Oh, how glad I am that God did not let me have at once all I prayed and wept for! And now I shall always pray to God as she told me, and always thank Him, and when He does not do anything I ask for I shall think to myself, It's just like it was in Frankfurt: God, I am sure, is going to do something better still. So we will pray every day, won't we, grandfather, and never forget Him again, or else He may forget us."
"And supposing one does forget Him?" said the grandfather in a low voice.
"Then everything goes wrong, for God lets us then go where we like, and when we get poor and miserable and begin to cry about it no one pities us, but they say, You ran away from God, and so God, who could have helped you, left you to yourself."
"That is true, Heidi; where did you learn that?"
"From grandmamma; she explained it all to me."
The grandfather walked on for a little while without speaking, then he said, as if following his own train of thought: "And if it once is so, it is so always; no one can go back, and he whom
God has forgotten, is forgotten for ever."
"Oh, no, grandfather, we can go back, for grandmamma told me so, and so it was in the beautiful tale in my book--but you have not heard that yet; but we shall be home directly now, and then I
will read it you, and you will see how beautiful it is."
The "beautiful tale," by the way, is the story of the Prodigal Son. Heidi just loves reading Bible stories. Oh, and reading hymns aloud to a blind woman.
Keep in mind that she has just returned to the mountains...and is thus about eight years old.
Yeah. I hated that.
3) Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger).
We had to read Catcher in the Rye in high school. I hated it. Holden was like every other whiny overprivileged kid at my high school, and as far as I was concerned, it was bad enough having to go to school with whiny overprivileged kids without having to read about another one.
Another problem I had with Holden was that I couldn't empathize with him. Yes, grownups lied and were often phonies. I'd known that since I was eight and had a teacher who a) favored boys over girls and b) decided to fail me because a story I wrote was, in her opinion, "too good for a third grader." (The fact that I was reading on a tenth-to-eleventh grade level did not count.) I'd got beat up on playgrounds and seen teachers turn their backs so that they wouldn't see it and therefore wouldn't be obliged to stop it.
Holden, on the other hand, was seventeen--and yet seemed to just be discovering that adults lied and pretended and were hypocrites. I wondered where the hell he'd been all this time.
So...yeah. I was completely unimpressed by Holden Caulfield. I did enjoy Salinger's short stories and found his characters compelling even if I didn't like them. It was just Holden that, for some reason, I couldn't connect with.
2) Robert Arryn (A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin).
Robert Arryn, sometimes called "Sweetrobin" in the book series, is a spoiled brat of six when we first meet him. And when I say "spoiled," I mean that his mother is still breast-feeding him at six and allows him to sit in judgment on accused criminals. Robert likes "seeing people fly," i.e. ordering people flung out of his family's mountaintop castle and watching them fall to their deaths. He also screams, bites, punches, flings food and frequently throws tantrums despite the fact that the tantrums often lead to violent grand mal seizures and everyone in the castle knows this, including him. He's like Veruca Salt's brattier little brother.
Martin is known for killing off characters. I hope he kills off Robert Arryn. I wouldn't mind one bit.
1) Renesmee Carlie Cullen (Twilight series--do I really have to say who wrote it?).
Renesmee--I refuse to dignify her with the nickname of the Loch Ness Monster--is odious. Mere seconds after her birth, she's able to think like an adult and communicate telepathically with her family. Her mother doesn't even need to feed her or change her, for she grows at an accelerated rate; by the time that she's a couple of months old, she looks and acts as if she were three or four. By the time that she's seven, she will look seventeen. According to Stephenie Meyer, this makes it perfectly okay for Jacob Black, who was interested in Renesmee's mother before fixating on Renesmee about five minutes after she was born, to fuck her. Because LOOKING seventeen is completely the same thing as being seventeen. And fucking a seven-year-old who looks seventeen isn't creepy at all. [sarcasm mode]
Did I mention that Renesbait, as a newborn, thinks of her mother's ex as "my Jacob"? Or that everyone in the entire world seems to feel a compulsion to protect her and give her exactly what she wants? Or that she's immortal?