Other What ruined a character for you?

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I'll go first,
Emberlynn (helluva boss): The fandom shipping her with Blitz
 
The fans mischaracterizing Sephiroth mostly trying to redeem him with his past and given what he did in the original Final Fantasy 7 game and crisis core. Yeah, he can’t be redeemed he’s too far gone to be good
 
When they changed Luke Skywalker into a leftist weirdo.

When they made all the stormtroopers clones and then later not clones?

When James Earl Jones played Darth Vader through the hole damn Star Wars Series, and when they took off the mask, the face of Darth Vader was a white actor? Because Luke was white, he couldn't have James Earl Jones as his dad? Because he was black?

When they showed John's face.
They made John Spartan one one seven gay, yet he has a thing or relationship or partnership with a female AI.

In Star Trek they talk about Commander Data wanting to be more human, and they decide to change that so it never happens and instead puts him against his evil brother.
 
what ruins characters is mostly dependant on the potential for that character being squandered just because the writer/s were too incompetent to realize what they could have had instead of what they chose.

one character that stuck out to me in this sense was Isaak Sirko. such a demanding presence on screen and he got a great death but i felt like he was ultimately let down from what he could've been.
 
I was significantly disappointed in how Asuna's character was handled in SAO. She was originally set up as a very well-written female protag! But then the 'romance' plotline with Kirito just... turned her 180* into a dependent, flat, character. All complexity was taken away and she was hollowed out. Makes me really sad to see.
 
I was significantly disappointed in how Asuna's character was handled in SAO. She was originally set up as a very well-written female protag! But then the 'romance' plotline with Kirito just... turned her 180* into a dependent, flat, character. All complexity was taken away and she was hollowed out. Makes me really sad to see.
Lol!

I liked the sword art online, and the dot hack video games better then the SOA anime for that very reason.


Also I hated how boring SAO is in the beginning. Nothing like the games. If you ask people who the main character is, you get people saying it's Alice. Because both Crunchyroll and adult swim starts there on season three. The the storyline was its own thing, and tes season one and two introduce one character as brave, and then the romance comes and he becomes a coward? Then there is another character who is the administrator and is monitoring the SAO world, and then he just gives up and gives everything her learned to the first elected official, who ends up in the next season, season 3, abusing that authority by making knights and locking people into slavery by not allowing them to log out.
 
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Not a specific character (I don't want to go into that atm). but some things that I hate to see and are often the culprit in messing up characters I like.

Too many characters when it isn't a 200-300 episode series.

Also the dumbing down or tropification of characters that started out with depth and potential. Having one trait either the writers or fans notice/like a lot and playing it up to 11 from then on.

Making a series less unique and reducing risk so that it is more marketable.

These issues often run side by side.
 
Most of the time, it's shipping that ruins characters for me (sometimes content and fandoms as a whole). There are the cases where incompetent writing is responsible as well (I'm looking at you, RWBY) and/or corporate meddling (The Legend of Korra would've been better without it). Then, sometimes, a character like Luther Hargreeves comes along and I don't know exactly why, but I just hate them to my very core and it's absolute misery when they're the focus.
 
I was reading a manwha, and it was going fine. However, at some point, they included non-con. I have no issue with non-con at all being in a story, but it just DID NOT fit in this plot. It's like they threw it in there with no real reason. It was already full of red flags, but where the relationship was and how it was going - it was just... out of character!
 
I know people have mixed thoughts on Game of Thrones but the constant character assassination of Jamie Lannister gives mental whiplash. Spoilers, but he gets captured, has this whole journey with Brienne of Tarth that develops his character and makes the audience root for his growth. Then, for some reason the writer's decided to do a 360 and have him force himself on his sister next to his son's corpse, and then in the end he leaves Brienne for Cersei....It was a large part that ruined the show for me, the inconsistency.
 
Hoyo.

For me, the biggest thing that ruins a character, regardless of genre or any other internal factors, is when the fundamental basics of humanity are stripped from them, and they're turned into caricatures or parodies of themselves.

A good example which has been covered already in this thread is Luke in The Last Jedi. Ryan Johnson took the character of Luke and literally threw away everything that made him who he was in the original trilogy and turned him into a parody of himself. In the original trilogy Luke was an optimist and always tried to see the good in others like his dad. In the new trilogy he's a cynic who's basically given up on the good in others and ended up trying to kill his own nephew because he could sense that Ben was vulnerable to and exhibited traits leaning towards the Dark Side. Rather than trying to help guide Ben back to The Force, he tried to kill him. The humanity that governed Luke's every thought and action in the original trilogy was thrown away.

Bad writing, and stripping Luke of his humanity, completely ruined him.

Another example I can think of is the recent Joker sequel. Arthur underwent a change in the first film and became the Joker by abandoning the weakness of Arthur Fleck and embracing the chaotic strength and security of The Joker. Twisted though it may sound, this was his humanity. Rejecting his weaknesses and embracing his newfound strengths and confidence. Even if we don't agree with the end results on the outside, we can all understand and empathize with that kind of change and searching for strength journey that he underwent. The new film regressed him back to the weak Arthur Fleck he was in the beginning of the first film and completely failed to re-establish the strength of The Joker persona he adopted by the first film's conclusion. By stripping him of the humanity he'd found for himself they ultimately castrated The Joker as a character in their own established world and made him a far weaker and inferior version of himself by the sequel's conclusion.

When you strip a character of their humanity, whatever "humanity" may mean for them as individual characters, you leave them as a shallow, empty shell of a character who exemplifies bad writing practice.

Even villainous characters have humanity which helps to make them who they are.

Big Jack Horner from Puss In Boots: The Last Wish is an example of a purely evil and irredeemable villain. He doesn't have a sad backstory. He doesn't have a tragic event that turned him evil. He's just evil for evil's sake. And he enjoys it. And yet, buried beneath that veneer of pure evil is a humanity to his every thought and action. Selfishness. Even though it's a negative human trait, it is nevertheless still a human trait and part of his humanity. If that were to be stripped from him and a sympathetic twist on his story were to be shoehorned in its place it would completely ruin his character. He wouldn't be scary. He wouldn't be likable as a villain. He'd be another empty shell character exemplifying bad writing practice wherein which the audience wouldn't be able to take him seriously.

The best written characters in the world, even if they're of an alien race or a machine like the T-800 from Terminator 2 onwards, are irrevocably human at their core when it comes to themes and purpose. The less humanity the character has, be it positive or negative humanity, the less real and less human they feel. And the less human they feel, the more the audience perceives them as the product of bad writing practice.

Cheers!
 
Well, some of the fans for one. For example, the shipping of Sam and Dean together in a romantic way. Yeah, okay...
Then there's the
Terrible writing, 1 dimensional, no growth or flip flop. It's okay for a character to be static but only if they are written properly.
 
Joey from friends . He started off as an interesting York’s character but by the end was completely infantilised and lost all sense of individuality other than being the stupid one
 

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