What a Character!

If you’re looking for literary excess, Confessions of a Shopaholic’s Becky Bloomwood probably epitomises it. She’s so excessive that she puts herself in perpetual financial peril because she can’t stop shopping. She buys things for the sake of it. It’s not even a case of wanting something: she just does it because it’s there. The most frustrating thing is that she does it in every single book in the Shopaholic series and while you might argue it wouldn’t be true to the name if she wasn’t buying anything, it’d be nice to see some character progression. Instead Becky spends her time maxing out all her credit cards before realising she’s financially fucked up and scrambles to get herself out of the predicament. JOFF ACTUAL TIFF

Guilty of altogether more sinister excess is Game Of Thrones’ Joffrey Baratheon. The boy’s personality is odious and that’s only exaggerated by the glee with which he greets every gruesome execution and death committed in his name. He takes a particular sadistic pride in his torturing of Sansa Stark throughout her time at Court in King’s Landing. Never has there been such a character in all of literature with such astonishing lack of redeeming qualities. The fact he’s a terrible King only exaggerates how horrific a character he is. If I were actually sympathetic to him, I’d call him excessively horrible but it’s so easy to hate him that you don’t really care about his lack of positive personality traits.

And as for excessively negligent? Look no further than Albus Dumbledore. I know he’s great and lovely and whatever else, but really he’s the worst tactician you’ve ever met. (SPOILER ALERT!) Instead of sitting Harry down and telling him literally everything he’d need to know to kill Voldemort, he decided instead that he’d drink something that was likely poisoned and then let Snape kill him. It may have proved Snape’s loyalty but it robbed everyone of strategic leadership and basically made everything in The Deathly Hallows a million times harder for Harry. For shame Dumbledore, for shame.