We’ve looked at the characters you adore and even those that you first fell in love with, but who is on the flipside?
I have a lot of opinions, and thus a great many characters who annoy or disappoint me for Reasons, but in thinking about my own answer to this question the answer was immediate: Dolores Umbridge.
It’s hard for me to even type the name “Dolores Umbridge” without wanting to recoil from it. This pedantic Ministry of Magic bureacrat—that’s Madam Undersecretary Professor Dolores Jane Umbridge to you—was installed as Harry Potter’s Defense Against the Dark Arts professor during his fifth year, a.k.a. The Order of the Phoenix. She later serves as Hogwarts High Inquisitor (gotta love a lady who styles herself after the Spanish Inquisition) and later as Headmistress. Umbridge is every kind and flavor of awful.
She’s a cruel, sadistic, terrible person, but what makes Umbridge so scary and hateful to me is that she does it all with a polite smile on her face. She is the ultimate manifestation of the reality that villains are not easily identifiable by sight or outward behavior; she is the fictional embodiment of every corrupt politician and heartless authority figure who gets off on other people’s misery and is unwilling or unable to look beyond their own rigid ideology.
Umbridge wears pink clothes and velvet bows in her hair and owns many plates that feature frolicking kittens, but make no mistake—she is an Inquisitor, and she will torture you at school until you bleed and scar. There is only one time I have ever physically thrown a book across a room, and it was while reading the scene described below:
Her love of power is apparent and completely disgusting: when she has Harry in detention, she makes him write, “I must not tell lies” over and over with a Blood Quill that makes his hand bleed. When she inspects his bleeding hand, she smiles and tells him to come back for more the next night.
Yes, Dolores Umbridge caused me to launch a book through the air, I was so infuriated by her ingratiating sycophancy and perverted brutality. Even Minerva McGonagall openly dislikes her, and it takes a lot to shake Minerva McGonagall.
“False hope?” repeated Professor McGonagall, still refusing to look round at Professor Umbridge. “He has achieved high marks in all his Defense Against the Dark Arts tests—”
“I’m terribly sorry to have to contradict you, Minerva, but as you will see from my note, Harry has been achieving very poor results in his classes with me.”
“I should have made my meaning plainer,” said Professor McGonagall, turning at last to look Umbridge directly in her eyes. “He has achieved high marks in all Defense Against the Dark Arts tests set by a competent teacher.”
Brought to life in the movies by the great Imelda Staunton, Umbridge is as horrifying in the flesh as she is on the page. And she continues to be an important lesson: we should not allow people like her to attain positions of authority over others, nor be fooled by their false congeniality. When I went looking for a picture of Staunton-as-Umbridge, it turns out that just recently she commented on the parallels between her character and the Trump Administration, per Yahoo:
“I think abusing your position of power, which [Umbridge] definitely did…[Americans] have someone doing that on a daily basis. That’s what’s shocking.” […] “Those people shouldn’t be in power, and she certainly shouldn’t have been in power,” she said. “You’ll find those comparisons in every century, in every decade there’ll be someone like that. It was a wonderful piece of writing that J.K. [Rowling] put in those books. These teachers, on the whole, they were great to the kids, but this was one who absolutely should not have been there.”
Umbridge is a reminder of the real abusers who continue to rise through the ranks while smiling and glad-handing their way to the top. While not every hateful fictional character sees such a modern-day application, it’s often the case that the characters we despise represent some important aspect of humanity that should be looked more closely at.
Who are the characters that get your hackles up, and why? Do you have an Umbridge?
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
