We recently wrote a post where people shared the "toxic" TV characters who shouldn't be glorified. In these past Reddit threads by u/TourSignificant1335 and u/Itsmetuan, people called out ~movie~ characters who are also problematic, and it gets heated. Here's what they had to say:
Note: Some responses were also from the BuzzFeed Community from this post.
🚨 Some spoilers ahead! 🚨
1. Allie from The Notebook — "Allie is just as toxic as Noah. She hit him and screamed at him violently. If he did that, people would very much call it out."
2. Daniel Hillard, aka Mrs. Doubtfire, from Mrs. Doubtfire — "As memorable as Robin Williams' performance is, if you think about the story with even an ounce of depth, his character is basically a nightmare stalker ex."
3. Tony Montana from Scarface — "He isn’t a hero. He betrayed everybody close to him in his life. His best friend, sister, and wife all came second to power, greed, and materialism. If anything, the ending is illustrating how meaningless his pursuit of the American Dream was because he traded or lost everything that mattered."
4. Sophie Sheridan from Mamma Mia! — "What kind of prick invites her mother's ex-lovers to her mother's hotel on the eve of her wedding — without telling her — to try and force a situation where her real father will be revealed?"
5. Christian Gray from Fifty Shades of Grey — "He was publicized as the 'ultimate kinky boyfriend,' the best of the best, but he's just an abusive jerk."
6. Tyler Durden from Fight Club — "He’s a misogynistic, controlling, manipulative sociopath."
7. Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite — "He's hilarious and accurate to somebody each of us knows, but he definitely is a bad person. A loser, mostly. Living in the past, trying to make money by manipulating emotions, etc."
8. Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars — "The dark side does change you mentally in a way that the movies don't really get into, like how in Rebels, he doesn't even try to spare Ahsoka, despite being her master and having a great relationship. But even so, in that scene, he still hasn't embraced the dark side yet. You can clearly see that his eyes aren't Sith yellow like Maul's or Sidious's, meaning he really has no excuse for doing what he did."
9. The Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera — "As I get older, I get more and more creeped out by his character but also the fact that Christine thought of him as a father and knew him since she was a child, and he thinks of her...like that."
10. Maui from Moana — "He straight-up doomed the world for selfish reasons and attempted to murder a child on several occasions."
11. Scott Pilgrim from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World...
12. ...and Peter Quill from the Marvel Cinematic Universe — "Both Scott and Peter are meant to be a dissection of the typical male hero archetype. But both are written so audiences can identify with them in a negative way. To see the flaws in the mindsets of these archetypes that the media tends to be pushed as being cool. But it in fact makes them big ol' jerks, to put it mildly. And in both of their stories, characters call them out on it."
13. Dumbledore from Harry Potter — "He manipulated and used people, even literal children, especially poor Harry. Left him in an abusive home for the 'greater good,' and even after that, he didn't tell the kid what the hell was happening in his life."
14. Westley from The Princess Bride — "It just hit me the other day that Westley is a mass murderer. He posed as the Dread Pirate Roberts for years, taking over from the last one, and knowing that the pirate never left anyone alive, must have killed everyone his ship raided — until handing it over to Inigo at the end of the movie."
15. Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller's Day Off — "He's a slimy, manipulative liar and con artist. Probably went on to work at Enron. He is a perfect symbol of everything that went wrong with America."
And finally..
16. Kylo Ren from Star Wars — "I can't stand such awful abusive characters who commit atrocious crimes but it all gets brushed off because they had a 'hard life,' and then decided they loved a woman in the end as if that redeems them."
Who are some other movie characters who shouldn't be glorified? Let us know in the comments below!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.