Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Top Ten Tuesday - Ten Characters I Just Didn't Click With

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at The Broke and the Bookish.

This week's topic is Ten Characters I Just Didn't Click With.  Most of these are from books I ended up not clicking with... which shows how important it is to have relatable characters.

Ten Characters I Just Didn't Click With:

Angel from Neverland by Anna Katmore

Angel turned this retelling of a classic story into a giant *facepalm*.  She's dim enough to come across as much younger than her seventeen years, and yet she spends the last quarter of the book doing nothing but making out with Captain Hook... who's now a smoking-hot, nineteen-year-old kid with a hook tattoo and the exact same speech patterns as the heroine (except he uses lots of 21st-century swears).  You end up in a magical place where nobody ages, where people can fly, where fairies and mermaids exist... and all you want to do is play tonsil hockey with some guy you've just met?

Bella from Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

Bella was almost insufferably boring for the first three books in the "saga", but I really didn't get her in this one.  She's listened to Edward's moping for years about how it sucks to be a vampire (presumably because he hadn't had much luck in the last one hundred years in luring high school girls into his bed), and she's still going with the "Please turn me into a vampire!" crap.  And then we get to see her as a pregnant woman, going on and on about her little "nudger" and drinking blood like it's going out of style.  I don't know how any of that is supposed to be relatable for the target audience, but... whatever.

Bridget from Here Lies Bridget by Paige Harbison

I couldn't connect to Bridget because she was just so awful.  I mean, most of us have done stuff we're not proud of, or have treated people badly at some point.  Hopefully, we felt some remorse or regret for those actions.  Bridget, though?  I'm convinced she's got some sort of pathology going on.  Narcissistic personality disorder, or maybe sociopathy.  I'd hoped to find a nice mean-girl-learns-a-lesson type of story here, along the lines of what we got in Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall.  But Bridget never seemed to learn a thing... except maybe how to sort of make amends for her own benefit.

Cora from Basajaun by Rosemary Van Deuren

And I thought Bella was bad for wanting to be a vampire.  This kid wants to be a rabbit.  Never mind that they have incredibly short lives and she'll probably get eaten by a predator by the weekend.  She wanted to be a rabbit so she could mate with her rabbit buddy.  Oh, yeah... and she was twelve.  I guess Basajaun the bunny was a bit of a pedophile.

Hazel from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

I didn't click with any of the characters in this book, but Hazel was the worst because she was the narrator.  I don't know of any teenagers who talk the way John Green's teenage characters talk.  It's like they're all middle-aged philosophers masquerading as kids.
Kaitlyn from Freak of Nature by Julia Crane

This cyborg just didn't make sense to me.  She supposedly had some emotions -- we're repeatedly told this -- but she comes across as so flat and emotionless most of the time... and yet when she does show emotions, they're just a little off.  Her thought processes also made no sense.  Her parents believed that she was murdered... and yet she decides that it's best that she never contacts them again, because it would be cruel for them to find out she's alive!  Yeah, Kaitlyn, I'm pretty sure your parents' reaction to your aliveness would not be, "How dare you?  We want to keep believing you're dead.  Go away."

Lily from Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

Lily is the reason I couldn't finish this book.  I hated her.  Hated, hated, hated her.  Seriously... what teenage girl goes around shrieking at strangers who give them compliments?  Especially a teenage girl who's supposedly mature enough to roam New York City on her own.  Sounds like somebody needs a babysitter.
Scarlet from Scarlet by Marissa Meyer

This character was just so... blah.  As I was reading her sections of the book, I kept wishing they were over so we could go back to Cinder's chapters... and I'm not even the biggest fan of Cinder, so that's saying something.

Sophie from The Explosionist by Jenny Davidson

Sophie was another one of those characters whose emotional reactions made no sense.  She cries for no apparent reason, then apologizes to her friend for no apparent reason.  She goes to all the trouble of solving a mystery, and then withholds the information (even though it could save her friends from being lobotomized into man-serving drones) because one of the girls told her to.  She also comes across as about ten... but she's supposed to be fifteen.

Sunday from Enchanted by Alethea Kontis

I really disliked Sunday's character.  She was completely unlikable, and yet I think we were supposed to like her.  I disliked all of her sisters, too; the whole gimmick with their personalities going along with the poem was just silly.  (And I still don't get how their mother managed to time her births to the days of the week.  Maybe Sunday was actually born on a Wednesday; she certainly had the whole "woe is me" thing going at times...)


What are some characters that you didn't click with?


6 comments:

  1. I didn't have Hazel on my list this week, but I really didn't click with her or any of the characters in TFIOS.
    My TTT: https://jjbookblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/top-ten-tuesday-20/

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    1. Me, neither. But I felt like it would be cheating to include more than one character from that book!

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  2. Completely agree with Bella - she made My TTT this week too!

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    1. I have a feeling she probably made a few lists this week...

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  3. Yes, Bella made some interesting choices...

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