fannish5: name the five most annoying characters ever

[selenak]

With the usual caveat that one woman's source of fannish annoyance may be another sentient being's source of fannish pleasure, etc.

1.) Chakotay from Star Trek: Voyager.
Why is he annoying?

Comments

[wee_warrior]

Hee. Poor Chakotay. In the actor's "defense," he seems to have been ragingly unhappy with the lack of plot he had, which might explain any somnambulant performances. (Also, does it make me a Trek geek when I know gossip about those parts of the franchise I didn't even watch

[selenak]

Chakotay: no sympathy from Robert Beltran for me. As Julia Houston (who wrote some of my favourite TNG fanfic and was a big Voyager fan, writing reviews for the show that I found worth reading even after I had stopped watching) put it when Beltran had his first public outburst ca season 5, it's a give and take between writers and actors. Just look at the first one and a half seasons of TNG, during which the writing often was at best mediocre, for everyone. But the actors still gave their best, often adding little silent quirks to enliven scenes like Picard pulling his uniform straight, and you could tell the writers responded and came up with more challenging and interesting stuff. Or, she said, take Guinan. In theory, "bartender who listens and sometimes makes cryptic remarks" sounds incredibly bland. But Whoopi Goldberg made something so memorable of the role so that by the time we got to season 6 and the episode where Guinan is one of the four characters changed into a child, a child actress was able to do a convincing impression

[wee_warrior]

Chakotay: all that you said, and I find there is a certain bad taste in ranting about how much your own show and your writers suck, no matter how right you might be. It's still the people who put food on your table.

Thanks for the impressions on Caprica. I might be tempted to check it out for Paula Malcomson and Polly Walker. (And I've heard that that certain character sucks before, it seems a pretty general expression. Maybe they'll tweak her in the series. There is supposed to be one, right?)

[violaswamp]

Word on Lila. Especially since so much of her most repulsive traits were sexualized. Everything from her worst dishonesty (the lie about Angel raping her) to her most annoying behaviors ("pardon my tits") was about sex. She was so obviously the Whore to Rita's Madonna, and the season finale was about killing the Whore.

[selenak]

Which simply isn't true for the male antagonists. Sigh. As I said to Nicole below, the family-killing cop this season is a great example of how to do a female villain right - she got to be more complex in a single episode than Lila got to be in an entire year of screentime, and her death wasn't designed to induce that squicky "kill the bitch" reaction from the audience.

[violaswamp]

That's so true, especially since Zoe the Bad Cop did the most "unwomanly" thing ever: killing her husband and her KID. She violated the holy maternal instinct, ohnoes! It would have been easy to make her The Bitch. But the show didn't do that at all. They made it clear that she's a bad human person, emphasis on the human.

[greenygal]

Minor point: The scorpion and the frog is apparently a real fable, though not a Native American one.

[selenak]

I stand corrected, though I wish they had linked to that 1570 translation, because that's the only pre-Orson example they give in that article.

[greenpear]

The entirety of Voyager suffered from the quick integration of the crews. So much potential/so little plot usage.

Adama did start to annoy me a bit. He began the series, bigger than life and ended up a whiny old man. Of course, he wasn't the only character to degrade like that.

I could have really done with some character development of Lila besides being nothing more than a one-dimensional whore...

[selenak]

No, Adama wasn't the only one, but then my selection is highly subjective, as such a top five must be. *g* So Adama it was for my BSG example.

Lila: As Nicole puts it below, "i annoys me that the biggest female villain was driven by her love/obsession with Dexter, when the others had their own agendas... it's not that they were less evil, but they had more complex stories that didn't revolve entirely around him."

[nolivingman]

I have not yet watched Crusade, but I find nothing more annoying than a woobie full of manpain.

[selenak]

To be fair - and bring up something I haven't mentioned in my rant - Galen also, like Marcus, gets to crack a lot of jokes, which is one of the reasons why he's so popular. But this doesn't balance the other things for me. I think Andraste put her finger on why Galen's cracks still don't endear him to me when she said: Galen, like Byron, is one of the few characters JMS at no point makes gently fun of. Completely leaving aside Londo and G'Kar who get to do the full range between comic relief and tragic heroes all the time, this isn't even true for Sheridan and Delenn. Delenn gets to have a bad hair day. Sheridan gets to annoy Ivanova when he's doing the strike-for-unpaid-quarters thing. In short, there are situations where we're supposed to be aware these people have their ridiculous side, too. This is also true for the entire Crusade crew - except for Galen. While we're supposed to smile when he says something funny, he himself isn't given any absurd side, and that, together with the woobieness and the high-handed behaviour just