Protagonists you just can't stand.

[ABLb0y]

Ok, this is coming from a bloke who liked most of the protagonists of Final Fantasy 13... Just that little disclaimer should show you just how dreadful the main character of the dreadful comic strip series Sonichu is.
The bloke has his psychic friend constantly watch everyone in his little dictatorship to make sure none of them are having gay thoughts, traps hundreds of innocent people in a building so they can't escape when he collapses it and beats a defenseless elderly prisoner to the point where she's paralyzed for life... And that's not even the most disgusting thing this douche does.
Worst of all? He's the author's idealized self. WE'RE SUPPOSED TO LIKE THIS TWAT.

 

[Kajin]

I'll start: the protagonist from Sword Art Online. A clasic case of the wish fufilment character, that particular Marty Sue is the strongest person in the game the characters are trapped in because... well to be quite honest they never even try to explain it in adiquet detail. Hell, given the logic of how an MMO runs, he would be one of the weakest players since he did all of 2 missions with other people in 2 years, and soloing in an MMO is the slow way to level up. I could go on listing things I dislike about the character, like the Deus Ex he pulls every battle, but I think you get the point.

So, what protagonist, regardless of medium, can you not stand?

Kirito's being OP is sort of justified in that he managed to get a good head start as a beta tester, being solo so he doesn't have to split any loot or gold, and the fact that he pretty much grinds the toughest monsters he can nonstop to compensate for not working with a team. There's also the fact that SAO relies more on your actual combat ability and your reflexes than a traditional MMO and Kirito is stated as having the fastest reflexes of anyone in the game. I also hear that he's a lot more tolerable in the books than the anime because the anime cuts out the entirety of the internal dialogue he has going which supposedly makes him funnier I guess?. But yeah, there are better anime heroes out there than Kirito.

My most hated protagonist of all time. Ichika from Infinite Stratos. He is the most dense person, no. The most dense thing that exists on earth. Seven girls have feelings for him, and at several times making it painfully obvious. Every time he just goes "huh?" and gets a dumb look on his face. This picture describes the show perfectly.

Spoiler

Edit: Picture should be fixed.

Ah, Infinite Stratos. Terrible harem anime with excellent CGI and fight scenes. Cut out all of the character dialogue and any scene that doesn't have fighting and you'd have a pretty watchable anime. As far as the harem itself, I'm a fan of the idea that Ichika is voluntarily dense. When the girls in your harem are all wielding weapons of mass destruction, the last thing you want to do is break any of their hearts by picking one of them over the others. But since I doubt the authors intended for that to be a possibility... Bah.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Henry Hill from Goodfellas. It's the whole point of his character, but he's still an insufferable, idiotic douche.

Tidus. Tidus. Tidus. Tidus! Tidus! TIDUS!! TIDUS!!!! TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS TIDUS!!!!!!! TI-MUTHA-FUCKIN'-DUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shinji fucking Ikari. I know, it's a dead horse, but it's practically an obligatory requirement in these threads. I like him in the manga though.

Also, for a bit of a curveball... the Israel from the Bible. Moses, Joshua and all the rest, the whole people. They're supposed to be the chosen people, but they're a horde of murderous raving fanatics who loot and pillage at will.

 

[Marchiato Siracusa]

Also Patroklos from Soul Calibur V. Fuck that guy.

But that's exactly what makes him a good character. He's so detestable, and that was the point.
Story would've been better if it had finished where he just killed the very reason he set out on his journey, then eventually realised he doesn't really have anything else to live for after that "Malfested must die" adrenaline wore off.
SCV's story annoys me... It would've been a decent arcade mode had they been able to get everything done... :/

Anyway...

If I have to hear this non-dimensional fuckwit say "Bring 'em on!" one more time I'm going to painstakingly find a way to make him a real being so I can rip his fucking throat out with my bare, nail-less hands.
What kind of a name is Edge Maverick anyway?

My first name is Maverick...

 

[Seracen]

I don't really understand all the Kirito hatred. The arguments against SWO's protagonist are valid, but only if one is willing to damn practically every protagonist in more than half the anime and visual novels out today.

In good conscience, if I disliked Kirito, I would have to use the same logic for hating Shirou from Fate. I happen to like both, however.

As for characters I CAN'T stand, I truly revile Kratos from GOW. I don't think I've ever rooted as hard against a protagonist, whether hero, anti-hero, or villain.

 

[Hunter Hyena]

The main character in The Kite Runner. Had to read that in my last year of high school and we all agreed that he was one of the most hated characters in a book we had read. Even at the end when he "redeems" himself, it's not really enough to make him worth it.

I never liked the character from the second Assassin's Creed game either (not Desmond, Ezio I believe). Nothing he did ever made me feel he was really worth playing as. Throw in that all his best stuff ended up being made by Altair and that adds up to me having even less reason to like Ezio.

 

[tranceformat]

I cant bloody bear to listen to Dante in DMC3 - its supposed to be like that and I cant stand the general kind of that shit but come on! Its so bad,I cant even get excited about it,just plain ruined almost the entirety of the game for me,thank fuck for the gameplay.
People say the new Dante is shit but I only very vaguely remember perhaps once or twice thinking "this guy should get a bowling pin up his arse" compared to DMC3.At least the swords are sensibly proportioned,the unplayable bombastic action scenes are kept to the very bare minimum and well,at least hes wearing a bloody shirt this time around(dirty wifebeater>shirtless imo,sadly).
Cowboy slacks.

 

[SKBPinkie]

Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: HR.

But that's only because of his voice. Everyone around him sounds fine (except for that one awful racial stereotype - you know the one), but he sounds like a car engine trying desperately to make a coherent sound. It completely destroys immersion to hear a dude who sounds like he's got level 30 throat cancer.

 

[MetalShadowChaos]

oops - doublepost

 

[MetalShadowChaos]

The guy from Binary Domain is the one who comes into my head. In general Binary Domain was a weird one, becuae it had some pretty above average gameplay, a plot with a lot of interesting directions, some pretty great writing, yet some very VERY unusual morals.

Your protagonist, and quite a few others as well, seem incredibly aggressive against the robots-posing-as-humans for no particular reason. There's a particularly disturbing scene in which someone is revealed to be one himself, having no knowledge of it of course, and goes a but mad. He threatens to shoot the mob boss who just burned a cigarette in his eye as a sign of disrespect, after him and his mob friends talk about selling him off for spare parts or as a slave. He has very valid reasons to go insane. He just had his entire life torn apart and reduced to nothing. He ends up shooting himself after you and company threaten him with more weaponry and, paragons of justice that you are, explain how terrible he is at gunpoint. And to paraphrase your protagonist's response to this:

'fucking robots.'

And this is considered acceptable in this world. And what's worse is that he gets close to a reasonable realization near the end. 'But they aren't even doing anything! They aren't hurting anybody!' Yes! Finally! Someone sees sense! But no, this revelation is completely ignored. By the end of the game, everyone still seems to think that all the people who are robots but don't know it are scum of the Earth. Protagonist essentially decides that he loves love interest 'even though she's a robot.' Which is weirdly resembling of someone loving someone 'Even though they are black', which we can all agree is pretty fucked up as far as morals are concerned.

So yeah, I hate the guy. And I highly recommend Binary Domain as it is a pretty damn good game with an interesting, if possibly accidental, exploration of the acceptance of racism, as well as some pretty interesting trans-humanist and metaphysical concepts. Just don't expect to like your player character.

 

[Coakle]

Shinya Kougami - Psycho Pass

I really liked Psycho Pass. It contains one of my favorite utopias, and the action was top notch. Unfortunately, the character meat got neglected in favor of world building and philosophical musings. This is pretty common in sci-fi, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I appreciate the emphasis on examining ideas and exploring new settings.

It's just a side effect, that the genre can create some really grating characters.

Spoiler

This guy tries to kill a girl whose mental state was unbalanced because she had been raped a minute ago and saw her rapist's head explode.
As he raised his gun to kill her, main girl temporarily paralyzes him.
Then we get to see Main girl feeling bad for this asshole later. He even gets a heartfelt apology, where she has to justify herself to him.
Oh wait, he has a change of heart. He agrees that protecting people is his job.
He then indulges in some self pity.
Main girl is super grateful toward him because of this decision.
Does that mean he wouldn't have tried to kill the victim now? *shrugs*

He's go a real bad attitude throughout the show and it never gets called out.He's a awful person, but all the other characters show him grudging respect or outright admiration because his detective skills are supernaturally good and 'He's seen some shit.'

It's not all his fault. The writers just kept using him as the focal point whenever they wanted to explicitly point out flaws with the current system. Also was used as a contrived method to move the plot along.

 

[1Life0Continues]

Well, I'll bring out the usual suspect for me. Could be a shocker, I know.

Ezio Auditore in Assassin's Creed 2.

He's a brash, loud, uncouth moron that didn't deserve the mantle of Assassin. For the love of all that is good, his first assassination HE TELLS THE WORLD HE DID IT! And then, to make it worse, the writers forget this little idiocy and somehow he maintains his anonymity. Talk about plot convenience. After seeing this, I saw more of the problems in the game that broke my immersion even further. The fact Ezio is the only person in Black in a town of green, and yet the guards can't find him in a crowd of three people. The sheer stupidity of the series was revealed to me through the willful oversight of the writers.

Ugh. Screw Ezio Auditore and screw the Assassin's Creed franchise.

 

[King Aragorn]

I also despise Ezio. He's the perfect goody two shoes Italian womanizer, and he's just so boring. Connor is leagues ahead of him in terms of a good protagonist and I find it disheartening how Ezio had 3 games and Connor got 1.

 

[an annoyed writer]

Jason Brody, from Far Cry 3. I'd be killing bears and tigers and shit with flamethrowers and high-powered sniper rifles as him, and then a cutscene would happen and he'd whine and sob through it like he forgot how much of a badass he just was. If you want to talk ludonarrative dissonance, that's a prime example right there.

 

[game-lover]

I'll start: the protagonist from Sword Art Online. A clasic case of the wish fufilment character, that particular Marty Sue is the strongest person in the game the characters are trapped in because... well to be quite honest they never even try to explain it in adiquet detail. Hell, given the logic of how an MMO runs, he would be one of the weakest players since he did all of 2 missions with other people in 2 years, and soloing in an MMO is the slow way to level up. I could go on listing things I dislike about the character, like the Deus Ex he pulls every battle, but I think you get the point.

So, what protagonist, regardless of medium, can you not stand?

In defense of this... the reason for this is that he's basically has an extra advantage. He'd already played through a good portion of the game before the show started. Beta tester and all that. This means he knows just about every awesome secret that didn't just get added. Probably got a bunch of secret items and who knows what. At least that's my thoughts on the whole situation.

My answer: I've got lots. In anime form, there's that Shiro guy from Fate/Stay Night. I hate his guts. He's in the category of stupid men that try to be chivalrous but either for the wrong reasons or because stupidity. For God's sake, he's weaker than Saber! Weaker! She's supposed to be protecting him! But he keeps idiotically nearly getting his ass murdered. Trying to protect her as if he could be any more useless. GAAAAAHHHHH!

About half the characters I hate are in this category. Putting themselves at risk when they can't do shit except be walking burdens. A lot of heroines in these damn urban fantasy novels are this way.

 

[debtcollector]

Fucking Marcus Fenix. I mean, I am picking the protagonist I can't stand from a game series I can't stand, so I'm really just bullying it right now, but seriously. His voice sounds like it's trying to be a parody, he looks like a scowling refrigerator, and communicates solely by shooting testosterone bullets from his surrogate dick. Man, I can't stand Gears of War.

Okay, enough of that. Um....Lelouch from Code Geass is pretty awful. For a guy who's supposedly a tactical genius, he's pretty fucking stupid. As I've heard before, it's impossible to write a character who's smarter than you are, and clearly the writers of Geass are pretty stupid.

Now for the shotgun round:
Tony Stark in his movies post-Iron Man 1
Harry Potter
Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker
Everyone from How I Met Your Mother
Vaan from FFXII
Hope from FFXIII
The Entire Cast of Now You See Me
Nathan Drake
Sonic the Hedgehog
Chai The Beef in Transformers (he was actually pretty good in The Greatest Game Ever Played, that one golf movie you've never heard of)
Danaerys Targaryen
Sterling Archer
Kratos
and Eren Jaeger

There's probably more, but I don't feel like thinking anymore.

 

[Xan Krieger]

Oooh, this thread! Finally!

Does anyone remember the protagonist (name is up to the player) from Front mission 3? This nutter is a thorough nat, a twit and a moron with no sense of moral fortitude, common sense or even basic arithmetic.
Case in point:

His sister is working inside an army base within Japan; the protagonist is a citizen and soldier of that country. Following a sudden fight, he starts wondering whether or not his sister is safe. How does he find out? Pick up a phone and call her? Ask at the main gate?
No, he instead hijacks a secret prototype weapon and forces his friend to do the same (thus making them both traitors to the nation), breaks into the army base while killing at least a half-dozen of his fellow soldiers, wrecks the base and proceeds to drag his sister (whom he has sworn to protect) into a war zone and then forces her to kill fellow soldiers as well- thus making her a traitor too!

I cannot call this fool a moron often enough.

Firstly I love you for bringing up that awesome game. Secondly he did try, he went to the gate and asked to see her but kept getting denied. It was only after the guard made it clear that he couldn't get in that he took a wanzer to bash his way in.

As for my own choice, the eldar in their campaign in Dawn of War 2 Retribution. They're basically space elves so I hate their own race anyway, the only one who I liked was the sniper because he was unbalanced as hell.

 

[Zechs]

Micah from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. I cannot give any symathy for her since she acted her nation did no evil deed, sure I cna get her nation was suffering now in the aftermath of the war but it was her nation (well the king) that cause it in the first place! Not only that but she also view Ike (the hero of the previous game) to be the villain which was the final draw on why should I want her to suceed?

Whoa whats wrong with Micaiah? She saved her country from an occupation force causing tons of suffering on civilians. She also never wanted to fight Ike or another war but was blackmailed to do so.


On topic the main character from school days is the worst a human being can get within the limits of the law.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Jason Brody, from Far Cry 3. I'd be killing bears and tigers and shit with flamethrowers and high-powered sniper rifles as him, and then a cutscene would happen and he'd whine and sob through it like he forgot how much of a badass he just was. If you want to talk ludonarrative dissonance, that's a prime example right there.

Definitely Jason Brody. When you've been killing people left, right and center with a bloody explosive bow and arrow. It gets pretty fucking ridiculous when he starts crying over the guilt.

 

[TheRiddler]

I hated Meursault in Albert Camus's (Camus'?) existentialist novel The Stranger. The guy lacks empathy and self-awareness. The only people he socializes with are his girlfriend (who he treats with indifference) and a pimp (who is violent to his own girlfriend). Meursault shoots a Middle Eastern man for no good reason, and is nearly deliberately obtuse when questioned (both by authorities and his "friends") why. Seriously, I might have been missing something, but yeah. Total dick.