TV Characters that suffered from horrendous writing? In your opinion of course.
 

Basically not your worst characters (because worst character & worst written can be two totally different things) but characters that personally never really made much sense in the writing department, and you may have also felt like they never quite fit the Show that they were apart of.

For me I'm following on from my rant in TWD thread and will go with these.

In no particular order:

Negan (TWD)
Spike (Buffy The Vampire Slayer)
Monroe (Revolution)

All three of them suffer from similar issues to me, bad redemption arcs that made zero sense, with plot armour thicker than what any Superhero could achieve.

Here's my other ones (some will be anime related)

Yagyu Kyubei (Gintama) In fairness to Yagyu Kyubei there's far more offensive characters on TV than her for me, but also in fairness she serves almost no real function to the Anime imo, and she did have a very flimsy debut arc imo that was unusually poorly constructed by Gintama's writer imo. Plus she doesn't have many dynamics on the Show either.

Gabriel (TWD) - I'm sure a fan of TWD will correct me when I say this but has Gabriel ever really brought anything to the Show? It always seems to me like he was brought in just to bring in a religious audience to the Show (which there's nothing wrong in that) as long as the guy serves a function in the Show that's gonna be interesting to watch.

Sasha (TWD) - I honestly don't mean to keep picking on TWD here, but what did Sasha ever really do on the Show? Don't get me wrong I found other characters to be more annoying than Sasha on the programme, but I honestly don't understand why the character was created when she didn't do anything of note.

Nina (Berserk) - I love Berserk as a series, it doesn't really do many things wrong imo. But without meaning to disrespect the dead here when I say this, but wtf was Nina? Her writing was annoying and made absolutely no sense whatsoever. As I've already said I really love the Berserk series (I even enjoyed the 2016 Anime which gets a ridiculous amount of hate unfairly imo) and the Conviction Arc was great, but Nina really tried to drag that arc down with an iron fist.

Euron Greyjoy (GOT) - Euron is not my worst character on GOT (that would be Jon Snow's fan fiction) but I really struggled to understand why he had to be on the Show? His scenes felt fairly pointless (bar the one thing) which was executed so poorly that it almost feels ashame to count it as important. But yeah I never understood why his character was created.

The whole of Hellsing Ultimate - The story is very wafer thin imo with 1D characters.

Roundtree (NCIS: LA) - The last one on my list don't worry (I could be here all day) and it's gonna be very controversial what I'm about to say about Roundtree but I've already said my main issue with Roundtree to Oliver W on another thread, but here it goes.

I feel like Roundtree's only real purpose on NCIS: LA is to not be funny, or have interesting dynamics, or even be particularly likeable. To me Roundtree's only real trait that they seem to play on is him being black, they never delve into his hobbies or anything on the Show, it's just all BLM type of stuff with him, which is okay if Roundtree actually had other types of dynamics and interests on the Programme but sadly that isn't the case. Also their rare attempts at trying to make him funny are to make him like Patrick Star from SpongeBob, which is obviously out of whack with LA's tone & style imo.

Anyway I am interested in seeing who you guys think suffered from really bad writing.

And of course which characters do you disagree with me about.:laugh:

All female characters in Lost.

(By season 6, all characters who weren't Jack or Kate were ignored. But they were all victim to horrendous writing).

Spike was at his best when he was the big bad.
Making him fall for Buffy was a big mistake.
So out of character. There's no way the old spike would have done that!

The best of "no soul Spike" was before the Buffy obsession, and the best of post-soul Spike was when he moved on over to Angel and forgot about Buffy. Simp Spike was ridiculous.

Yes, I loved Angel and Spike sparring :joker:

Oh god I hated Spike on Angel.

He was decent in the finale though.

Lost had some great female characters. Like Juliet,vfir example.

Angel, I love that show!

Gabriel has had one of the biggest and best character developments on TWD, third only to Carol and Daryl imo. He went from being this pathetic and cowardly man to this badass, gun-wielding, one-eyed preacher who balances both mercy and justice. Rick would be so proud of him.

Sasha did sacrifice herself to stop Negan. That distraction allowed Rick and his people to open fire on Jadis and her people after they double crossed them and aligned with Negan, so there's that.

Daenerys in S8

Fair enough with Gabriel.

Sasha's stuff is more of a plot device to remove her from the story rather than great character development imo.

Daenyrs or however it's spelt. Her final season was beyond awful

All of the Dorne characters were pointless in GOT (apart from Ellaria Sand and her husband that got his skull crushed - the rest literally had no purpose, the daughters and Prince achieved nothing as Ellaria killed Cersei’s daughter which was the whole point)

Tokyo in Money Heist - such a bad character

TWD’s Andrea - she was written as a strong woman in S1 and S2 that didn’t do the laundry and other “wife duties” as the other women, yet in season 3 she just played wife to the governor all season and did nothing of note

Nate in Gossip Girl - he literally had the same storyline over and over again, was so dull to watch. Even Vanessa drove the plot line more than Nate (and that’s saying something)

Shannon in Lost - she was a spare part, they didn’t seem to want to give her a storyline, even with the death of her brother so they just killed her off (Lost also struggled with keeping interesting characters around - Ana Lucia was an example of this, she had a lot of personality and was quite a good relatable villain, whilst being a strong leader that was heavy flawed. In just half a season she showed more personality than half the cast, yet they decided to kill her off, she wasn’t meant to be likeable, not everyone on a tv show should be)

Oh I agree. A great majority of the cast were fantastic.

But the female characters were badly let down by horrendous writing. Juliet was a good example of a great character reduced down to a plot device in a male character's story.

I love Lost but the show has so many problems.

Deb in Dexter- the whole story of her being in love with Dexter Bleh and she would never have murdered for him or covered for him we knew that from multiple seasons before.

Dexter- was trying to stop his son from becoming a serial killer like him so he leaves him with his serial killer girlfriend??? No

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Interestingly, Andrea in the graphic novels is basically post-S3 Michonne in the show. She doesn't die during that storyline, it's her that gets together with Rick eventually, and she has loads of other storylines that were merged into the Michonne character. Apparently the actress expected to be staying on for several more years and wasn't too happy when they changed it in S3 and killed her off :umm2:. Much like poor Chandler Riggs (Carl) who remained a major character throughout the graphic novels and expected to be on the show until the end... and even picked his University and bought property based on the filming location... :worry:.

Ana Lucia was killed off because Michelle Rodriguez only wanted to sign on for one year maximum, so they agreed the character would be killed off before she even started filming. I agree she was one of Lost's better characters, and probably their best female character, but there's not much to do when the person you've hired doesn't want to stay on (and made that clear from the start).

Besides being out of character it was just GROSS. The mechanism that makes siblings not be attracted to each other is social not biological - i.e. someone is much more likely to find themself attracted to a blood relative they've never met and don't know they're related to than they are to be romantically attracted to a non-blood-relative they've grown up with in a sibling relationship.

In other words, Deb suddenly being in love with Dexter - who she grew up with 100% as a brother - is just plain "psychological incest" even though they're not actually blood siblings. It's just messed up. Terrible writing and written as "it's cos he's adopted". Just not even psychologically accurate.

Regarding Carl and killing him off, I hated Carl all through the seasons and was literally just starting to warm to him. Such a bad and bizarre choice to kill him off. They should never have killed off that many original characters. There's just Carol and Daryl left now (if my calculations are correct)

Yeah absolutely. And there were no signs at all, all the way through, it was always a very sibling like relationship. How they thought it was a good idea was beyond me. I loved Debs character and they totally ruined her

Yeah, the others "closest to" being originals would be the Farm group - of which only Maggie is left - and the prison/post-prison group of which only Rosita and Eugene are left. There was also Michonne* and Tara until recently but Michonne left and poor Tara got her head on a spike.

I've grown to like some of the newer characters - actually more on a full rewatch than I did originally, which is interesting. I think because you know who is going to be sticking around rather than expecting them to die as zombie-fodder at any moment. But it's a shame to have so few originals.

Speaking of bad writing - Michonne... leaving Judith and RJ behind to wander off across America in search of a vague hope that she might find Rick. Ludicrous writing :joker:. And not in peace-time, oh no no, they were in the middle of the Whisperer war! We're supposed to believe that she just took a 9-year-old's word that it was all sorted and LEFT, having no idea if they were actually OK. Come onnn.

Especially when her "life before" story had her losing her son too. It's just not believable that a parent would leave their young children behind when there's every chance they'll be killed while you're away. At the very least she would have brought them with her imo

Exactly - we know that Judith is quite skilled so slightly more believable (not much, but a little) but her son who was around RJ's age was killed by walkers, and she just leaves RJ behind... in the middle of a war... featuring a horde of walkers... it makes zero sense at all. She would be a constant ball of anxiety.

It's another change from the source material, too. I was reading yesterday that in the graphic novels, Michonne's "current storyline" for where the show is on the timeline, is that she's one of the group that goes along with Eugene to the Commonwealth. It's her (not Yumiko) who sees a picture of herself on the "missing people" board.

Interesting but that would make so much more sense. That's where the show ****s things up though, I don't know why Michonne left (was it to be in the feature films or the actor wanted to leave?) but whichever the reason they needed to write her out and it was never going to make sense in a proper realistic way it was just because they had to

1. Jean Slater (EastEnders). I understand why they had to tone down her darker edge that we first saw from her when she became a more regular character but most of the time from Santer onwards she came across as someone with special needs rather than bipolar disorder (she was good during Stacey’s stories in 2009, though). Kirkwood made it ten times worse.

2. That annoying character trope where they take the slightly ditzy/goofy character and progressively turn them into a complete moron as the show goes on is something else that really pisses me off. Chelsea Daniels (That’s So Raven) is the most notable example.

I think she wanted to leave to do other things, but I suspect she will also be in the Grimes films in some capacity, though I suppose not necessarily the first one if the plan is still to do three. Interestingly though she asked to be written out back when the show had no definitive end date. I wonder if she would have stayed on if she’d known there was only a season and a half left? Although this final season is significantly longer than previous ones (24 episodes) so I guess it’s still a pretty big commitment.