10 Characters Who Don’t Deserve All the Stuff That Happens To Them

I don’t know about Xander… Tara got it worst….

Faramir, oh my creys forever

I have a complex relationship with Dr Daniel Jackson (another thing I’d like to set my Facebook relationship status as…). On the one hand, he reminds me of my stepdad, whom I detest. On the other, he reminds me of my favorite English professor, whom I love, and he’s also played by two reasonably attractive dudes. I’m so confused by Daniel. My lady bits don’t know what to make of him. 

Miles O’Brien was way unluckier than Geordi LaForge.

This article is kind of bloated with manpain.

You cannot mention Jason from True Blood without mentioning Tara from True Blood. Girl got it WAY worse, considering that Jason got himself into a bunch of these messes because he’s a horndog who doesn’t have much of a brain, Tara started off as one of the smartest characters and turned into one of the biggest victims of the series. There was an entire arc of her just being kidnapped and raped by a psychotic vampire! Girl got it baaaaaaaad. 

TRUTH. God, Tara’s storylines were terrifying and awful.

The Final page of Astonishing X-Men 23, “To me, my X-Men”, That’s how everyone should look at Cyclops.

Yeah, this is 10 Dude Characters Who blah blah. It’s pretty typical in mainstream media to see a list of men without a gender signifier, but I really expected better of The Mary Sue.

Seconding this so hard.

Whedon’s run of Astonishing was the first to make me like Cyclops even a little (sorry Claremont). And I fucking love love love that panel. Summers still isn’t a character I’m very interested in, but that page is in my top ten of all time.

I just paid $ 23.86 for an iPhone and my girlfriend loves her Dell laptop that we got for $ 38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 42 inch LED TV to my boss for $ 665 which only cost me $ 62,81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, GrabPenny.com

Also, Daniel Jackson died like 5 times. That sucked for him! (Is that a spoiler? Because I heard jokes about Daniel “always” dying before I watched the series.)

Now, be honest. It didn’t say “stuff” when you first wrote this, now did it…

Ok, so totally different genre here, but Lavender Brown gets unceremoniously dumped by Ron Weasley eventually eaten by Fenrir Greyback in HP7. I kinda feel sorry for her….

How many times has Kenny been killed? He deserves honorable mention.

How could you forget either of the Winchester brothers on Supernatural? They both get shit on repeatedly by Hell, Heaven, Demons, Angels…everything. And both have died multiple times! And it’s all because of a deal their mother made before either of them were born.

Ash? worse, his friends?

Xander goes on to become one of the baddest watchers ever…

 At least she didn’t get murdered so unceremoniously in the books?

Yeah, I had to stop watching that show because I just felt sorry for them about how much their lives sucked after the, like, 7th apocalypse.

I always feel bad for Rory in Doctor Who and the way Amy treats him (…not to mention the whole “getting wiped out of space and time and not existing for a bit” thing he went through). I think he’s kind of cute though, so that probably a pretty big factor in my sympathy for him.

Faramir is quite possibly my favorite Lord of the Rings character behind Sam, and no less an illustrious personage than Stephen Colbert agrees that he was robbed in the movie version. Of course, I think Colbert also said he *was* Faramir on one of his recent shows. Lord, he’s a nerd. I love him.

I can name, like, 50 more characters on this list, but I really think Rory deserved to be here.
*Spoilers*
He’s been killed at least 4 times, and it’s likely Moffat’s not stopping there. His fiancee, the one he’s loved since childhood, runs off and falls in love with an alien the night before their wedding, and yet, despite that, he waits 1,000 years for her. Then his wife got knocked up by him and didn’t even let him know, only it turns out she’s just a copy and he hasn’t seen the real her in months. Now his new daughter, who isn’t entirely human, has been kidnapped and possibly being trained to kill said alien. 
All that’s got to count for something.

Gambit? Really? No one wants to be Gambit. Everyone and I mean everyone wants to be Wolverine. Everyone. What school were you attending? Wussy Elementary?

Relevant: http://jgustar.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/gender-signifier-womensignifier-men/

Not to mention Anya.

Thanks for the link, but I’m not sure that is relevant. In most news/blog stories, the signifier only exists if the person or group in question is not male – e.g. woman/female doctor, etc. I’ve seen headlines about medical studies saying “Studies Show X Affects People in Y Way” but the only “people” tested were men, whereas studies on women are always reported as “X Affects Women.” In our culture, men are the default, so we are meant to assume that “characters” is men, and if they were women they’d be “woman characters.” That contributes to the gender binary and the perception of men as normal and women as other. The Mary Sue is usually very conscious of these things, so for this list, they should be using a gender signifier to denote that only men are qualified for this list. Otherwise they left a whole lot of much more qualified women off the list.

I think you got it all wrong with Faramir – It’s
Boromir who doesn’t deserve his fate – all he’s trying to do is save his
people. He’s only human (unlike almost everyone else in the story).
Just because he falls under the influence of the ring, does he really
have to pay for it by being shot full of orc arrows? Faramir is a
goody-goody who, as you point out, is never tempted, so what’s the big
deal?

Ok, got it now.

Poor Tara. Fridged just to artificially create sympathy for Willow’s descent into ~dark magic~ after Willow already mind wiped her and essentially raped her within that very season. I feel for Xander, but damn, Tara had it way worse in terms of actual events and the narrative’s disrespect for her.

If we’re committing to a list this dude-heavy, I’m pretty surprised not to see one of my own favorite buttmonkeys on here — Peter Petrelli. He does everything right in the first season, even going as far to enlist Claire and Noah Bennet to kill him rather than let him explode, and he still loses everything. Then he loses his memory, nearly destroys the world with Adam, loses his girlfriend in the future (whoops), and his father metaphor rapes him. And that’s before his brother betrays him (again), he goes on the run, his brother dies, and then SYLAR takes his brother’s place. Dude’s life sucks.

Claire’s does too, on that note. Quite a bit. Least she got a girlfriend out of it, though.

How is Severus Snape not on this list.

Severus Snape, the man who loved. *creys*

And you could say the same for practically every character that tries to do the right thing in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Brienne comes to mind especially though. And maybe Tyrion too. Actually, yeah, oh god, poor Tyrion.
And Bran. And Rickon. And Ned, even though he didn’t handle himself particularly well. And THEON, I didn’t even like Theon, but nobody deserves THAT, and–
Well, like I said. That whole cast is stuck in a spirally pit of doom and despair.

I argue that Faramir’s decision in the movies makes him a stronger character in the long run.  He’s human enough to at least consider it and even almost follow through with it…but in the end, he doesn’t and he lets Frodo and Sam (even Gollum) go free.  Fans found it disrespectful, but I found it respectful that they thought enough of Faramir and the audience to give him an actual arc.

tinyurl.com/2df4ccp

tinyurl.com/2df4ccp

neville longbottom anyone? 

tinyurl.com/2df4ccp

DIB <3

I would have to go with Helo as number one, he was a categorically good guy(great husband, father, soldier and friend.)  There were a handful of other from BSG who got shit on pretty hard, including some women. People like Dualla, Gaeta, Chief tyrol & Cally, Billy kekia(?), Racetrack, Hotdog and pretty much any secondary soldier.  But then again the plot was focused on everyone being fucked over by the cylons.

Cyclops made out with a scantly clad busty blonde on his wife’s grave. He deserves no sympathy. =p

“And most of them are, well… guys. We didn’t consider a single
female character for this grid. For some reason, it seems that writers
are simply not as comfortable kicking female characters around as they
are male ones”

Torchwood’s Gwen says hi. Hell, -any- female lead from Torchwood says hi. Tosh? Vera?

 Kind of irritated you didn’t even consider any female characters for this list, wtf is that? I’m damn sure they’re out there, and Gwen isn’t the only one. Hell, what about Kushiel’s Legacy’s Phedre? Granted she turns it around, but I’d say she’s fucked over enough.

There are loads.

He also ended up spending a year dead for tax purposes, during which he was replaced by Jonas Quinn, played the guy who played Parker Lewis. Jonas, being the replacement Daniel, ended up with more than his fair share of bad things happening to him, too.

My first time here and I pretty much love you guys, just for including Faramir.  You’re right, poor guy was screwed from the get go, but, thankfully, Tolkien made it all better by end of the book.  Agree with you about the travesty of the bloody movies.

Even before the abuse she went through in season 6, I think she had it as rough or more so than Xander. She lost her mom when she was a kid, grew up in an abusive family that convinced her she that her soul was full of evil, didn’t have any friends until she met Willow, was an outsider around Willow’s friends until her abusive family came back to kidnap her, was a target of every other baddie that passed through Sunnydale, and of course had her brain invaded by Glory and spent half of season 5 reduced to a badly written child-like mental case.

Rory Williams? he died 5 times and is mostly looked down by amy…

 Always liked Cyclops because he is the one that keeps things together.

I liked the movie depiction of him.   When Wolverine retracts all but the center claw in Scott’s general direction, Scott just smiled a cool smile (“yeh whatever” kind of feel) and walked on.  Thought that was well played.

 Parker Lewis was on Stargate?    Coolness, need to watch Stargate now.  :P

 Wow… I think anyone who has had the experience and skills for a job only to watch a parade of people get it before you can relate to that poor guy.

 I kinda picked up on that plot.  Stopped watching the show about four episodes in as that quickly got old.

 I think the writer of this thread was unaware of Rory.

When I saw this I thought for sure Tonto of the Lone Ranger would be mentioned.   First off how could the Lone Ranger (as cool as that name sounds) even apply if Tonto was always there?   Tonto was a great back up calvary, and great punching bag to advance the show.    I loved the way Bill Cosby talked about Tonto…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEEIyvl0PlM

Actually, Xander deserves all of the crap he gets because of Anya.

Xander Harris is fucking awful tho

TBH Phedre kinda likes what she does. Not that she’s had much choice in the matter. I think Janelle from The Dark Jewels has it worse.

“And most of them are, well… guys. We didn’t consider a single female character for this grid. For some reason, it seems that writers are simply not as comfortable kicking female characters around as they are male ones when he finds out is[...]”

Seriously?

Tara from Buffy. She has it way worse than Xander. Xander is mostly a dick up until S7. He is hanging out with Anya basically because he wants Buffy but can’t have her. His reaction to when he finds out Spike and Buffy are having sex says a lot about his character.

Drusilla from Buffy. I mean, she is basically driven mad by what Angelus does to her.

Fred from Angel. She finally gets the guy (and the guy gets her) just in time to be possessed by an overpowered demonic entity. Not to mention the whole slave thing.

For that matter Buffy herself. The list of sh*t that happens to this girl is too long to enumerate.

As somebody else pointed out: the Torchwood girls. Any of them.

Tara from True Blood. Jason might have it bad NOW, but he’s always been loved and looked after. Have you SEEN Tara’s Mom? And that’s the TV version. In the books Sookie doesn’t have it easy either. Basically every supe out there wants a piece of her, and they have no problems guilt tripping her into doing what they want.

These are just the ones that I can come up with as I’m writing. Pretty sure I could find some more given more time.

A year has gone by and no one mentioned that Helo DIDN’T shoot is wife in the head, like the article states?

You should have a next button at the top so if someone wants to skip they don’t have to worry about scrolling through spoilers. I would have kept reading the article and gone through all 11 pages, but I stopped on the first character because I didn’t want to have to deal with scrolling a lot to avoid spoilers.

Enjoying the list, but….

Scott Summers, really? The man who abandoned his wife and baby in the middle of the night the second he found out Jean Grey was alive? And then resumed his relationship with Jean without telling her he was married and a father? Not on, man. Not on.

Xander had it coming and then some. I don’t understand why people always forget that he was the one who summoned the Once More with Feeling demon. And spent the whole episode pretending to have no idea what was going on while people all over town incinerated to death. Oh, and then there was the episode where he gets Amy to cast a love spell on Cordelia (granted, it backfired), which is all kinds of unethical.

The least relevant of all pain!

Well, this is an old post but; Peter’s father metaphor rapes him? Wait, what now? Who and when?

They set up parallels between having a character’s power taken and rape in V3, starting with Sylar’s attack on Claire. It was portrayed as a rape from beginning to end, including Claire’s reaction. Then when Arthur takes Maya’s power it was highly sexualized. She was strapped down to a table with her legs spread, completely unnecessary to the way things actually go down. So then when the exact same thing happened to Peter, with a pre-emptive freak out merely at the idea of seeing his father, a lot of fandom just followed the metaphor through. It’s all interpretation and may not be deliberate for Peter’s side, but I think it was definitely deliberate for Claire and Maya.

Oh, when you said “father metaphor” I was thrown as the only thing that fit the rape metaphor was the power high jacking, and Arthur IS his father >_<

I was clearly having a stupid day. Thanks.

And I agree that it was a rape metaphor for Claire and Maya and probably was intended to be for Peter. The probably had to be a little more subtle.