T5W: Problematic Faves

Top 5 Wednesday is a Goodreads group which provides weekly topics and you can find it here.

This week's prompt is your Top 5 Problematic Faves – Characters you don’t want to love, but you can’t help liking.

1. Huntress from DC Comics - The Modern Age Huntress, Helena Bertinelli, is my favorite DC heroine. She’s competent, she’s angry, she has no problem calling Batman out on his foolishness, and she is willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve justice. Just so happens her particular brand of vigilante justice is totally cool to take a Biblical approach. While extrajudicial executions, otherwise known as murder, are seriously messed-up, Helena comes from the world of capes and tights and the world works differently between the panels. So that kinda makes it okay, right? (No, obviously not, but I still love her.) *Alternate: Black Widow from Marvel Comics. - My favorite Marvel Heroine also has her own sets of problems, but she’s a spy so there is a smidge more legitimacy to her lethal activities than Helena’s.

2. Henry Crawford from Mansfield Park - Even though Henry Crawford is Mansfield Park's patented WRONG GUY that inevitably shows up in every Austen novel, I can’t help but root for him. I think part of my affection for Henry has to do with how I feel about his rival, Edmund, whom I loathe. Edmund, the supposed RIGHT GUY, causes Fanny so much pain and doesn’t appreciate her or even really notice her until far too late in the book, imho. Meanwhile, Henry, who was literally trained by his uncle to be a jerk, starts to become a better person because of Fanny’s influence.

Now, as Fanny herself says “it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself”, and she in no way owes Henry her hand or her heart. His behavior in reaction to her rejection is a dick move and inexcusable. I know this. And yet, when the novel states that if Henry had been just a little more patient, Fanny would have learned to love him back and they both could’ve been happy? My heart just breaks. I can’t defend it, but I know whom I would've picked if given the choice between Edmund and Henry.

3. Rhett Butler & Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind – Gone with the Wind is a crazy problematic book just across the board, but when I read it in high school, I loved it. I remember spending the entirety of my Christmas break just luxuriating over Margaret Mitchell’s novel. The book is a brick, so I haven’t given it a reread, but at the time I was enraptured by Scarlett and Rhett, both as individual characters and as a couple. Rhett was a Confederate soldier, a womanizer, a rogue and a cad, and I still counted the pages till he would come back into Scarlett’s life. Like with Edmund and Henry above, I could not understand how anyone in any universe could pick dead fish Ashley over Rhett.

Yet while I found Fanny boring and frustratingly passive, I admired Scarlett, even though she is an objectively terrible person. I was impressed by her shrewd business acumen, her fierce independence, and the fact that she knew her own mind and was willing to fight for what she wanted. None of that changes the fact that she also ran a plantation in the Civil War South and was a cruel, vindictive and conniving individual. Seeing Scarlett and Rhett together also gave me butterflies, but that relationship is super toxic. Many of their “BIG ROMANTIC” moments are just Rhett forcing himself on Scarlett to varying degrees. The implication of the book is that this is okay because Scarlett ends up enjoying his various actions, but it’s not. It’s really, really not okay. At all. *Alternative: Petruchio and Katherina from Taming of the Shrew – Petruchio is an opportunistic exhibitionist, and Katherina is an unkind person to say the least. Petruchio is frequently both physically and mentally abusive to Kate. However, I personally interpret the play more as two outsiders learning to beat society at its own game and less as a domestic abuse comedy. Also neither of the characters enslaves other people, and so Rhett and Scarlett get the call out.

4. Calypso from The Odyssey – When I first encountered Calypso during freshman English, I thought she was just the coolest. She got to live alone on an island, which resonated both with my hermit tendencies and my love of the ocean. She had magical abilities that made her powerful, and she exerted that power over the hero of the story, Odysseus, which made me happy on two counts. One, because a strong, formidable female antagonist against a male hero wasn’t something I’d seen often and two, because I thought that Odysseus was a dick. I mean after his adventures, the guy took his sweet time making a romantic detour with Calypso, leaving his poor wife Penelope (whom I also loved) to deal with all the nonsense that was happening back in Ithaca. And then he had the gall to be pissed with Penelope when he thinks she might have cheated on him? No, I had zero sympathy Odysseus and was all about the powerful Calypso – until I realized that Calypso was using that power to force Odysseus to stay on the island and be her, ahem, companion. Magic powers become much less cool when they are being used for abduction and sexual assault.

5. Gertrude from I Hate Fairyland – Gertrude is pathologically self-absorbed, unabashedly lewd, and gleefully homicidal. She’s hilarious and I love her. I root for her even though she’s an actual dumpster fire of a person. I can’t help it.

Images: Goodreads

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