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You know there are a lot of characters who develop for the better, whether a submissive character turns into a mother effing badass or they turn from a hero to a villain like Walter White from Breaking Bad or villain to a hero like Loki in the MCU. 

But there are some characters who ended up suffering the worst development overtime. Whether they turn into outright jerks or wimps.

Here are the characters who had the worst development and deserved way better.

Eric Foreman - That 70′s Show

Eric was the protagonist of the series where he was portrayed as a sensible and smart guy of the group. He loved Donna so much and was constantly berated by his father Red and he always tried his best to be better at things. But as the series progresses he ended up becoming a lazy buffoon and a bit of a jerk as he ended up taking a gap year from college and did a lot of random things and wasn’t that good to Donna as he ran out on her on their wedding day because he had cold feet all the while Donna ended up sacrificing her college to stay with him and when he decided to be a teacher in Africa, he broke up with Donna over the phone because “they were going on different paths”. What a tool. 

Rory Gilmore - Gilmore Girls

Rory started off as a young smart girl who is hard-working in her studies and dreams to go to Yale one day. However as the series progressed, she ended up doing a lot of reckless actions like stealing a boat and decided to give up and drop out of Yale just because some asshole said to her she will never be a journalist. Even worse she ended up forcing an already married Dean into having an affair with her and once she finally stood up and become independent and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist, it was revealed she was unemployed the whole time, like why?

Peter Parker - Sam Raimi’s Spiderman Trilogy

Oh oh where to start with this one? Peter Parker in this version first started off as a timid nice guy who wanted to use his spidey powers for good as Spiderman and was traumatised due to the death of his uncle Ben. Later he ends up being possessed by a symbiote which results in him being more aggressive. While at first it was so cool seeing him stand up to Harry and Eddie for their misdeeds, he ended up being a f***ing arrogant bitch who was so egotistical and was shitty to everyone around him, including Gwen and Mary Jane and kept on playing the victim card to get what he wants. And what the hell was “Emo Peter”?

Darlene Alderson and Dominique Dipierro - Mr. Robot

For Domlene fans, keep in mind, I am not slandering their relationship or their own episode “Gone” where they got good endings by finding themselves and what they need to work on. But I gotta be honest about how their characters went before that episode throughout Season 4. Both Darlene and Dom started off as badass characters in their own right. The former was a foul mouthed no nonsense lovable rogue and the latter was an assertive and smart FBI agent assigned to solve the 5/9 hack by fsociety. In Season 3 they were shown to be dealing with a lot of issues at hand and tried to push through it. And when they find they had something in common, their relationship began to slowly flourish, but come the season 3 finale which did a complete 180 on them thanks to the Dark Army. In Season 4, Darlene ended up becoming their Damsel in Distress constantly where she keeps on getting captured or have a hit put out on her in order to get to Elliot and rely on him and Dom to save her and Dom ended up becoming a weak and submissive doormat for them after she got forced into being their mole (though it was pretty cool when she killed that asshole taxidermist). All I am saying is, yes, badass women can be vulnerable and stressed out but do it in a proper way where they don’t become damsels without fighting back (Darlene) or make them a doormat for the majority of the season (Dom).

Dexter Morgan - Dexter

Dexter Morgan is a serial killer who has a Dark Passenger bloodlust that makes him go after the scumbags who got away with their crimes. As the series progressed Dexter figured out that he may have been able to feel things, especially love for Rita, Debra and Harrison and stress when things are not going his way. But time and time again he ended being a bit to reckless and selfish in his actions and ended up having an unwanted romantic arc with Hannah McKay and dragged Debra down with him in his serial killer life, which resulted in her killing LaGuerta to cover up her brother’s misdeeds and later dying from a gunshot wound at the hands of Oliver Saxon. This later caused Dexter to abandon Hannah and Harrison and hide out in Oregon to become a lumberjack! Hallelujah for the reboot.

Cordelia Chase - Buffyverse

That one development which angered the Buffy fans. Cordelia Chase was one of the lead female characters of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the female lead of the spin-off Angel. She was shown to be a confident and badass woman who at first was the queen bee but turned to a tough warrior in her own right. Sadly, due to J*ss Wh*don giving Charisma Carpenter a huge disproportionate retribution for getting pregnant, Cordelia was given a lot of horrible storylines. Like being sent to heaven and then returning to earth as a different person when she sleeps with her own teen son and does a lot of bizzare things and ultimately she is put in a coma off-screen. A true definition of wasting such a great character.

Ross and Monica Geller - Friends

Ross and Monica are siblings who are a bit competitive but still care about each other. Both of them had started off normal with their individual personalities. Ross being a paleontologist who just got out of a divorce and tries to pick himself back up and Monica is a perfectionist who is pressured to make things in control around her, possibly due to her mother making snide remarks at her in the past. But as the series progressed, both ended up getting flanderized in different ways. Ross ended up being too controlling of the women he dates and later his sad sack tendencies ended up playing up to 11 which made him look like a parody of himself and Monica went from a caring Team Mom to an outright competitive Alpha Bitch who had the need to control and compete at everything for the evulz. Like when she was Phoebe’s wedding planner, she went full on Chris Hargensen on her by organising things the way she wants it and not Phoebe’s, which frustated the latter to the point she rightfully fired her. But Monica was left so scorned that she decided to rain down hell upon Phoebe and humiliate her.

Daenerys Targaryen - Game Of Thrones

We all know how horrible it is when us women are physically, emotionally and mentally abused by men. But when a man suffers the same with the woman being an abuser, why is it taken lightly and brushed off? 

For many years, domestic violence has mostly focused on women as the victims and men as the perpetrators. If the domestic violence case involves a man as the victim, it goes unnoticed because men refuse to report it otherwise they will be embarrased, ridiculed or mocked for their struggles. 

Men who report domestic abuse will face a social stigma regarding their lack of machismo and other denigrations of their masculinity. And not just that, they end up being accused of abusing the woman they are in relationship with or they are forced to be separated from their kids if they want to leave their abusive wives.

When men are expected to take responsibility for their actions, no excuses are accepted, but when the women are the perpetrators of the abuse, they are given the excuses such as: stress, menopause etc. 

Why can’t men report abuse?

There are many reasons as to why men can’t file a domestic violence case against their abusers which are:

Fear of not being believed

Fear of not being able to see their kids

Fear of being accused for the abuse due to society prejudices

Fear of revenge by the abuser

Fear of the abuser making fake allegations against him in order to look more innocent.

Fear of being left homeless

There are even long lasting effects of the victims of female-on-male abuse which are:

Low self-esteem

Anger

Depression

Anxiety

Loneliness

Sleeping Problems

Substance Abuse

When Domestic Abuse against Men is brushed off in the media.

There have been countless depictions of domestic abuse in the media, with both female and male victims. But when it’s the female victim, it’s a serious matter, but when it’s a male victim, either people laugh at it or treat it as justifiable or treat the female abuser as some sort of a “ feminist girlboss”.

Mostly in Anime when a female character abuses a man, it’s treated as comedy. Most of the scenarios involve them accidentally walking in on them changing or accidentally crashing into their bodies unintentionally and then they get beaten up for it and are falsely accused of being a “pervert”. The anime Baka To Test To Shokanjuu perfectly sums this up when the lead female characters bullies and humiliates the main male characters. Minami and Shouko are the biggest examples when they are shown physically abusing their boyfriends for smallest mistakes they make.

This happens a lot in TV shows as well, mostly in comedies. Like in Two and a Half Men, which sends a toxic message that “men will be men”, it also shows that Judith is a much bigger bastard like them, possibly a sociopath. She divorces Alan out of boredom, then proceeds to financially and mentally abuse him for sadistic pleasure and frames him for being a horrible father to Jake. She hates it whenever Alan shows a bit of independence and goes out of her way to make sure he will be miserable forever. She does it again with her new husband Herb, who is only flaw is being nice to everyone around him and still misuses his trust and uses him as her personal punching bag. Honestly, I wished the show would’ve ended with her ending up alone and homeless for everything she did.

Another example of this was in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Before there was Amy Dunne from Gone Girl, there was Janet. when Will begins dating his friend Jazz’s sister and while they are at a restaurant, she drops her sweet facade to reveal herself as a tyrannical sociopath who controls Will based on what he eats, where will he go to college and what will he do with his life. When he tells Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv, they brush it off. But one day when Carlton tells her off about what a horrible human being she is, she immediately becomes polite and drawn to him. So the message that they showed here is that it’s the guy’s fault if they don’t stand up for themselves, while his controlling girlfriend gets away with irreversibly ruining the lives of almost everyone who didn’t meet her expectations.

A bigger example of female-on-male abuse in dramatic shows was in the series Mr. Robot.

In the series, Angela Moss is the best friend/crush of the protagonist Elliot Alderson. Her only goal in life is to get justice for her mother’s death at the hands of E Corp and become the most powerful woman in the world. While it’s understandable that she is stuck in a male-dominated workplace and how the E Corp CTO and her ex-boyfriend treated her badly, she begins to misuse her victim mentality and ends up getting brainwashed by Whiterose. She then begins to psychologically abuse and gaslight Elliot in order to complete Stage 2 and not just that, she even emotionally abuses him when he finds out and plays the victim in this entire debacle, she sees not listening to Elliot and Darlene when he tries to warn her about the Stage 2 bombings as her personal “feminist” moment. And then weeks after the attack, due to her clinging onto her beliefs about Whiterose’s machine, she begins to blame Elliot for manipulating her into telling him about Whiterose’s plan when she herself was the one doing the same thing to him. While Whiterose’s manipulation was mostly the main reason for this, another part of it was probably because she was jealous of how Elliot was the “chosen one” in taking down E Corp and wanted to punish him for it and take over the mantle.

Most of the fans saw her actions as “sympathetic” and “justifiable”, with some of them calling her treatment of Elliot, who was nothing but kind to her the entire time, a “feminist girlboss move” and overlooked the fact that she psychologically tortured Elliot and reminded him that he was worthless and nobody was going to love him, not even Angela herself. Even if there were some fans who called her out for doing this and pointed out how horrible it was, others would brush their opinions off as “misogynistic” and “sexist” because “they apparently don’t like seeing a powerful corporate woman.”

Angela even kinda represented a privileged white feminist who believed that she was the only one struggling with issues and had bigger problems than anyone else, overlooking the fact that her friends that were on the lower position than her and brushed them off because her issues were more traumatic than theirs.

It even further showed a lot of double standard of Angela and Elliot manipulating someone to do their job. While both actions were horrible, Elliot got a lot of hate and scrutiny for blackmailing Olivia and drugging her coffee with the drugs she tried to stay clean from, calling it as something he “crossed a line in”. But when Angela almost did the same thing with him and drugged him as well, it was treated as “sympathetic” and “heroic” by the fans and treated her as some sort of a “feminist” for it, overlooking the fact that she was abusing a man to the point he almost lost his self esteem. At some point I even saw someone say that Angela did “nothing wrong” at all and didn’t like how Elliot was in season 3, was it because he was trying to stop her from going through with an attack that could kill thousands? Did they expect him to stay silent, not stand up for himself and let Angela stomp him a lot?

Conclusion

Abuse is something which is extremely serious, whether it’s a female or male victim. Like the female victims, men too deserve to have their voices heard and taken seriously if something terrible happens to them and we should believe them. 

Here are the helpine numbers if you or someone you know is facing domestic abuse:

Central Social Welfare Board -Police Helpline - 1091/ 1291, (011) 23317004

SAARTHAK - (011) 26853846/ 26524061

Nirmal Niketan - (011) 27859158

National Domestic Violence Hotline - 1.800.799.SAFE 

(TW: R*pe and Sexual Assault)

While there are some men who seem to be interesting, let’s not deny the fact that there are most male characters who act like their “toxicity” is cool but honestly, it’s horrible and something not to root for. So here are the toxic male characters who are the absolute worst, excuse my misandry:

Kevin McRoberts - Kevin Can F**k Himself

We had to start somewhere from the bottom of the underworld. A recent entry on this list, Kevin is the lead character Allison’s husband who...let’s just say has the brain of a dumb frat bro who is extremely high on pot and hasn’t recovered since then. While most of the sitcoms in the past would portray these so-called goofy and dim-witted husbands as “big fun” and lovable, Kevin is not like that, at all. In this anti-sitcom nightmare, Kevin literally believes that the whole world revolves around him. He plans such stupid unrealistic schemes to seize the day, recklessly spends the savings on stupid irrelevant sports merchandises and doesn’t even let Allison have her own agency outside of his life. Plus he is so petty and spiteful to the point he destroys one good thing that any of the women in the series have, like Allison’s dream job and Patty’s love life. And that latter was because she didn’t bring him a burger! All of this makes him look less funny and more tyrannical. No wonder poor Allison got spurred into wanting to kill him.

Ross Geller - Friends

Ross may seemed like a “nice guy”, but let’s just agree it was a facade. Ross believes that he knows what’s best for the women he dates in the series and thinks he is superior and is always right about everything. He is seems extremely disturbed over the fact that his ex-wife, Carol is a lesbian and is jilted towards her current wife, Susan and snarks at the latter for it. And then there is her extreme control and jealousy towards Rachel, especially in her career. While Rachel is no saint either, Ross jumps to the conclusion that the man who got her a perfect job wants to sleep with her, then goes out of his way to humiliate and mark his territory on her and even if it’s revealed that the said guy has a girlfriend of his own, Ross still doesn’t abandon his theory, unless he believes that the guy is cheating on his girlfriend with Rachel. And then there is the fact that he joined his student girlfriend on a spring break just to have her all to himself, not caring about the fact that what if one of his students or colleagues would’ve seen him on TV with her and that could’ve put him in a huge scrutiny.

Joe Goldberg - You

The show is basically built around how toxic Joe is, but this didn’t stop him from having his own fanbase apparently, with most of them glossing over his actions. But Joe is not a dream boyfriend at all. Once he sees a woman in front of him, he immediately gets obsessed with her and believes she belongs to him and him only. And to achieve that, he stalks her, he checks everything about her, kills people he believes are harmful to her when he himself is the same and when the woman finds out about him and rejects him, he kidnaps and kills her and the cycle begins again.

Chuck Bass - Gossip Girl

What is it with the teen drama industry’s obsession with the “Bad Boy who can be redeemed with love” trope? Chuck Bass is “the bad boy” of Gossip Girl. If his attempted rape of Serena and Jenny didn’t give fans an indication that how deranged he is, his violent and emotional abuse of his girlfriend Blair cements him as this. He slut-shamed women around him, hit Blair once and even traded her for a hotel ownership and somehow he gets a happy ending with her at the end! What?

Nate Jacobs - Euphoria

Nate is a star quarterback of his high school football team and seems like he has it all, but underneath, he is fucking deranged. His untamed manly rage causes him to physically and emotionally abuse his girlfriend Maddy and blackmail Jules, who didn’t do anything wrong but just sleep with his father, which makes me think that Nate is blackmailing her into lying to the cops about his assault on Maddy when she wasn’t even there when it happened just because it’s fun for him. Honestly, I’d like to see the imagine Rue and Jules had of killing him become a reality someday.

Dawson Leery - Dawson’s Creek

Just because the show is named after him since he is the protagonist, doesn’t justify his actions. Dawson sees himself as some sort of a Nice Guy hero who believes he is entitled to everything. He has this extreme view on women and how they should fulfil his fantasies of his Rom-Com world. He is extremely critical of Jen when he finds out about her promiscuous past and tells her that she should be ashamed of herself for it, and gets jealous when his two best friends Joey and Pacey begin dating. And when he was briefly in the movie business, he was a rookie but was already a primadonna with the director and crew of the movie was working on and insulted a film critic for criticising his movie which was actually bad.

Kilgrave - Jessica Jones

Kilgrave is the main villain of the Marvel-Netflix series Jessica Jones. He becomes obsessed with the titular heroine when she breaks off from his mind-control. Before that, he spent years treating her as his sex slave and raping her constantly, which left her traumatised. He begins to stalker and believe it will be a “lover’s reunion” when he will see her again someday. He manipulates and brainwashes everyone around him to his whim and treats most women as objects but despite all that, sees himself as the good guy of the situation. Even after Jessica finally gives him his just desserts, he still haunts her everyday.

Fernando Vera - Mr. Robot

This spawn of satan is the reason why I decided to write this list in the first place. Where do I even start? He is first introduced into the series when he forces Shayla to go on a date with her and later rape her. This is what causes the misandrist vigilante Elliot to sell him out to the FBI and this apparently turns on Vera and moves his unhealthy obsession to Elliot. He has Shayla killed when he tricks Elliot into breaking him out of prison, then returns to have him all to himself by kidnapping his therapist Krista and forcing information out of her about Elliot so that he could “break him and build him back up”, like a fucked up version of The Taming Of The Shrew. He psychologically abuses Elliot into remembering being sexually abused by his father as a child and proceeds to gaslight him into thinking that he was just helping him. The huge problem with Vera is that he sees himself as some sort of Christian Grey who believes that his abuse towards both Shayla and Elliot is charming. Whenever someone failed his desires, he immediately gets bored of them and moves onto someone else, like when he got Shayla killed and moved onto Elliot. That’s why it felt so cathartic when Krista killed him.

Tate Langdon - American Horror Story

Apparently, he is Tate Langdon and he is...hot?? While most of the AHS fans glorified him due to his emo bad boy nature, let’s not forget the fact that he was a school shooter who murdered innocent students and staff and was in general possessive and toxic towards Violet. So no way he is boyfriend material!

Don Draper - Mad Men

Don Draper was the main protagonist of Mad Men. He was an advertisement and marketing executive who had a lot of vices and did a lot of horrible things such as cheat on his wife and treat almost every women and colleagues like crap.

Dexter Morgan - Dexter

While Dexter might seem like the serial-killer killer, there are a lot of things about him which are unadmirable. He gaslights those he is close to so that they could get off his back, obstructs evidence pointing out to him, captures those who didn’t even fit his victims like Doakes and caused the deaths of LaGuerta, Rita and finally his sister Debra. Yeah I think you should stay away from him.

Walter White - Breaking Bad

(TW: Graphic Imagery, Sexual Assault, Rape)

Hell hath no fury like the angry woman scorned.

Despite having a bad history back then, Angry Women have the right reasons to be mad about and we often root for them to right the wrongs that they’ve been given their whole life. Our whole life girls have been taught how to repress our feelings, but today we are able to express our emotions however we want whenever we want. So let’s take a good look at the Angry Women and how they are a force for change:

History of the Female Rage

Back then, there would be representations of female rage through art. Eg. Elisabetta Sirani’s Timoclea killing her rapist and the famous Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith slaying Holfernes. 

The author Virginia Woolf was also the popular embodiment of refined rage, especially for proper ladies who are taught to be docile. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf showcases the anger in other women’s writing and even depicts her own anger through that history. She sees that anger as a reaction to women’s life as a second class citizen, especially in the works of Charlotte Bronte, a writer so angry, so much so that she wrote the madwoman in the attic and burned down the house.

Woolf’s anger had even found a new form in the mid-twentieth century, especially during the 60s-70s. The angry women have brought in the second-wave feminism and it gave birth to the angry feminist, believing it would help take down the patriarchal society. 

But the issue with the Angry Women is that most of us aren’t taken seriously when we get mad. Most of them see our anger as something when we “overreact” or become a “bitch” towards other people. But when a man showcases their anger over something, people root for them. This was seen in a lot of Angry Men media such as Taxi Driver, Fight Club, Breaking Bad and Joker. But the problem is that most of these examples had depicted toxic white masculinity through the eyes of an angry white male.

How the female/feminine anger is portrayed in the media

Lately, there have been a lot pf portrayal of feminine anger in the pop culture, whether they were treated as a joke, scary or used for good.

It’s even shown through the “femme fatale” trope where most of the times, the woman wouldn’t take it well when a man cheats on his wife/girlfriend with her and then dump her away as he moves on with the former. This was also prominent in the film Fatal Attraction starring Glen Close as Alex Forrest. 

When Dan (played by Michael Douglas) has a one-night stand with Alex, he then tries to ignore her or treat her as a friend. Alex doesn’t take this treatment well, like she says to Dan “I am not gonna be ignored, Dan.” while Alex’s rage is shown to be a bit sympathetic over being treated like a doll and Dan brought this on himself because despite being married and having a daughter, sleeps with Alex, her rage is treated as an obsessive “yandere-like”. Most of the audiences hated Alex so much so they panned the sympathetic ending where Alex committed suicide to punish Dan and instead, were given the one where she attack’s Dan’s wife and ultimately gets killed by her, ending her reign of terror once and for all.

In the late 90s, there were a rise of more sympathetic angry females speaking their own minds. With first being Kat Stratford from 10 Things I Hate About You.

She was shown to be a strong feminist who had an extreme disdain towards men who get away with being “assholes” and being forced into gender norms. Kat was shown to be that kind of female character who was shown to be ahead of her time. She had a lot of feminist values and did not want to conform to any man’s demands. But like in the source of the play The Taming of the Shrew, Kat becomes more toned down and a bit feminine when she falls in love with the bad boy Patrick Verona and gets together with him.

Allie Pressman from The Society represents the ambiguous rage. She has a lot of reasons to be angry and cynical at the world. First she lives in her sister Cassandra’s shadow, then gets transported to the replica of her town, then her sister gets killed and she gets put into the leadership position. She basically the female version of the male anti-heroic power player that we usually see in the past. She can be vindinctive, toxic at times and full of rage burning inside of her. Her toxic rage even depicts that there might be a time when she would snap. While she does whatever she can to control the town into peace and tries to use her anger for good, at time she lets her unbearable rage blind her into making bad decisions, to the point most of the supporting characters need to calm her down and give her suggestions.

There are even examples of the rage being used for good in taking down a patriarchal society that has for long abused and mistreated women. Especially in “rape-and-revenge” flicks,

For example in Gone Girl, Amy Dunne has showcased rage which is understandable but not admirable. Amy becomes angry at the patriarchal society who forces women to fit into their desires. Just like how she says in the “Cool Girl” speech, she had to fill in that role so that she could become desirable to Nick. But when she decides she has had enough and becomes less like a “Cool Girl”, Nick immediately gets bored of her and cheats on her with a much younger woman, which spurs Amy’s anger to the point she begins faking her murder and framing her husband for it.

Thana in Ms 45 gets raped twice in one day, which spurs a vengefulness against abusive and rapist men around her. She gives herself a makeover with dark clothes and dark red lipstick and begins gunning down abusive and rapist men around her. But she ends up misusing her rage as she ends up killing random men as well, who didn’t even have anything to do with the sexual assault Thana faced.

Cassie from Promising Young Woman, after losing her best friend to sexual assault and suicide, won’t accept how people treat violence against women as a norm and takes it upon herself to change the system and bring justice for her friend. Be it taking down possible “nice guy” predators or taking down her friend’s rapist by exposing him posthomously. 

There is also a male variant of the “Angry Woman taking down men” trope, through Elliot Alderson from Mr. Robot. While most of the other female characters like Darlene Alderson and Dom Dipierro end up being docile and passive later in the series, Elliot takes on the “femme fatale vigilante rage” towards the patriarchal society that we feel. When we first meet him, he is shown to be taking down men who are abusers, pedophiles and cheaters etc. He is treated like a female character throughout the series, like constantly attracting Male Gaze from men and hating them. Like the female protagonists of the “rape-and-revenge” movies, he later finds out that he was molested as a child by a male figure, his father. But he doesn’t use violence to take down men and slowly softens up as he realises that finding inner peace in himself through love is the only way to achieve his goals.

Conclusion