Your Annoyance Annoys Me
EW has picked Dawn Summers as one of their "20 Most Annoying TV Characters Ever". (Speaking of annoyances, what's with the compulsion to append the word "ever" to all these TV lists? We know you don't mean the 20 most annoying characters from 1971-1978.)
Personally, I don't find Dawn annoying -- my ranking of the most annoying characters on Buffy would be something like: 1. Riley; 2. Riley; 3. Angel; 4. Riley; 5. Kendra's Accent -- but what really gets me about this is that any of the Buffyverse characters are marvels of depth and subtlety compared to the average crap on TV. I guess I'm looking at this from more of a Doylist than a Watsonian perspective, or something; I only get genuinely annoyed when characters act in a way that's bland, nonsensical, cliched, contrary to their previously established motivations, etc. For a teenage girl who's perpetually overshadowed by her superhero older sister to be a little whiny and develop a shoplifting problem fits none of those criteria. And Dawn's character developed significantly over the scant three seasons she was on the show. Would I want to live with, say, S5 Dawn? No, but neither would I want to live under perpetual threat of vampire attack, or cook meth with Walter White. I don't judge characters by how much I'd like to have a beer with them, but by how "true" they are emotionally. By that standard, I'll rank Dawn over the entire casts of most other shows.
Personally, I don't find Dawn annoying -- my ranking of the most annoying characters on Buffy would be something like: 1. Riley; 2. Riley; 3. Angel; 4. Riley; 5. Kendra's Accent -- but what really gets me about this is that any of the Buffyverse characters are marvels of depth and subtlety compared to the average crap on TV. I guess I'm looking at this from more of a Doylist than a Watsonian perspective, or something; I only get genuinely annoyed when characters act in a way that's bland, nonsensical, cliched, contrary to their previously established motivations, etc. For a teenage girl who's perpetually overshadowed by her superhero older sister to be a little whiny and develop a shoplifting problem fits none of those criteria. And Dawn's character developed significantly over the scant three seasons she was on the show. Would I want to live with, say, S5 Dawn? No, but neither would I want to live under perpetual threat of vampire attack, or cook meth with Walter White. I don't judge characters by how much I'd like to have a beer with them, but by how "true" they are emotionally. By that standard, I'll rank Dawn over the entire casts of most other shows.