The Load / Western Animation

---

• Adventure Time:
  • Lumpy Space Princess usually hangs out in episodes or scenes that call for a larger cast. She rarely contributes much when she does. However this is likely done on purpose, given her whole routine is to be like a spoiled teenager.
  • Jake was this in one episode when a witch stripped him of his magical fur that gave him his shape-shifting abilities, hampering Finn's mission to help regain his powers. It wasn't until Finn was in mortal danger that he finally snapped out of it.
• Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender feels this way, at least sometimes, because he's the only non-bender on the team. Toph regularly jokes about this and Sokka also admits to viewing himself as this trope. But while in some situations, Sokka's lack of bending makes him less threatening, he's often had great success with his boomerang, and it's basically his intellect that drives the other characters from Point A to B for pretty much the entire series' run. And he only gets better after he gets his sword (see Took a Level in Badass).
• Archer: Sterling Archer is this whenever he is on a mission, and does something that compromises him and Lana, or leaves his weapons behind on occasions. Whenever main cast members are all in on one mission, at least one of them does something to make things worse.
• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes:
  • It is actually Iron Man who is somewhat the load of the team. This is highlighted when Captain America confronts Tony about his combat tactics which usually involve blasting a target or simply tackling it, making Tony very predictable and ineffective despite all the power his armor should be capable of. Steve even offers to train Tony in hand-to-hand combat, which if Tony had agreed to, would've probably made him the most effective team member.
  • Subverted in the case of Sue Storm when there was a breakout from the Skrull's ship and Madam Viper advises Captain America to leave they behind, since they would only be dead weight in their power-drained state. Captain America refuses and the so-called load would later protect the latter from an attack.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Veronica Vreeland. Despite being a friend to Bruce whom he cares about, she tends to cause more trouble than she does anything to help a situation, lacks any sort of useful abilities besides being wealthy, helped ruin the Penguin's chances of reforming, and usually tends to become the pawn of some villain (Mad Hatter and Poison Ivy) or gets kidnapped by a villain (Penguin and Harley) while needing Batman to rescue her. The only time she did anything to make a situation better was when she dropped the kidnapping charges against Harley but most of the time, she causes more problems than she contributes solutions.
• In Ben 10, the Omnitrix was never intended to be used as a weapon but rather a tool for diplomacy and as a result contains the DNA of over a million alien species. For obvious reasons we usually only see the ones useful in combat, and sometimes even those fall flat.
  • Alien X is a Reality Warping Physical God, the most powerful being in the universe. The problem is that Ben has to get a majority agreement on the tasks at hand with two other personalities within the alien. But seeing as they can't agree on anything, and are only slightly more likely to agree with Ben, the form is literally dead weight that Ben will use only if there is absolutely no other option...such as the causal destruction of the universe.
  • Fasttrack is basically just a worse XLR8, with a lower top speed and lacks the Required Secondary Powers to stop quickly. Because of how lame he is, he's Put on a Bus in Ben 10: Omniverse. To take it even farther, the creators made several joke aliens behind the scenes such as the other speedster Skidmarx, and stated that even he was better than Fasttrack.
  • Walkatrout was a Plucky Comic Relief alien that Ben would accidentally transform into, having no powers and just being a large fish with legs. A Running Gag would be Ben requiring assistance to do anything in this form.
• The Bob's Burgers episode "Best Burger" reveals that Gene Belcher's family believes him to be this when it comes to any mildly important task. Gene finds out, and he reacts about as well as anyone would when told he's viewed as this by his loved ones — his self-esteem plummets to an all-time low, and his normally-bubbly self is replaced by his belief that all he does is make things harder. For his part, Gene's father Bob feels like absolute crap when he realizes this, and at the end of the episode he takes the time to reassure Gene that he's a good person who doesn't need to be so hard on himself.
  • Even though Gene did, in fact, spend almost the entire episode making things worse in ways ranging from honest lapses that could happen to anyone, to staggering incompetence that should merit medical evaluation.
• In the pilot movie for Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, the Squeeze Toy Aliens are shown to be loyal and competent engineers under normal circumstances. But once the artifact that powers their species' Hive Mind is stolen, they can hardly function.
• Ma-Ti from Captain Planet and the Planeteers often feels this way. After all, What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? And being just 12 years old when the other Planeteers are over the age of 15 doesn't help, either. This may be subverted, as his powers have saved them countless times from being eaten by flesh-eating predators. Even more frustrating when it's explicitly stated that he has the best power out of all the Planeteers, and just doesn't use it properly most of the time.
• Code Lyoko:
  • Aelita might count in the first two seasons, where her only form of defense, "Creativity", costs half of her life points, and she will die if she runs out of Life Points. She's only useful to stop XANA from attacking by deactivating towers he is using. In the third season, she no longer dies when she loses all her Life Points, and she has an attack that is actually more powerful than those of the rest of the group.
  • In the real world, Sissi can either become troublesome if she gets involved in the action, or surprisingly helpful. She's unpredictable like that.
• This is more or less (Ernest) Penfold's role as Danger Mouse's assistant.
• Nearly everyone in Dragon Booster, thanks in part to how overpowered Artha and Moordryd happen to be.
• Family Guy: In "Road to Germany", Brian, Stewie, and Mort the Jew are stuck in Nazi Germany. During the travel to England, Mort is nothing but a burden attracting Nazis and getting in trouble. There is a deleted scene where he refuses to walk and Brian has to carry him while he whines and complains.
• Futurama:
  • In "The Series Has Landed", where they get stuck in a crater's quicksand on the moon, Fry says, "It's no use! Every man for himself!", jumps out of the cart, gets stuck, then cries, "Help me, Leela!"
  • Cubert in his first episode. They even disguise him as a hump on Fry's back at one point to sneak into a place.
  • Nearly everyone except Leela doesn't serve much of a function as far as the ship's missions are concerned. Whenever they each have a special episode, then it changes
• The Hollow: Kai is this for the first few episodes due to a lack of any discernible skills and general cowardice, but he shows surprising technical expertise in the desert and learns he has pyrokinesis later on, further subverting this.
• The Great North: In "Judy Presents: The Staircake, on a road trip to Ham's cake competition to New Fork, Wolf, Honeybee, and surprisingly Beef ends up being a burden during the trip:
  • Wolf and Honeybee chose to go dressed as Shrek and Fiona so they could go to what they think is a Shrek convention but was actually an orgy. Their costumes made it impossible for them to do anything useful during the trip, like hold Ham's cake steady or drive the bus; and when they have to stop for a pee break, their inability to take off their costumes costs them a half hour of drive time.
  • Beef is the only one who cares about Ham's cake competition and he does his best to ensure the trip to New Fork will go smoothly, and he's typically the The Reliable One. That is, that was his plan, but because he binge-watched a show about fixing cakes the night before the trip in order to help Ham, he ends up too sleep deprived to be useful to Ham and the first thing he does before the trip is show up one hour late for the trip to start and crashed the bus into a tree stump when he fell asleep at the wheel. He spends most of the trip asleep and sleep screaming and he later accidentally frees the muskrats from the bathroom and cause chaos on the bus. Once he finally has enough time to sleep, he becomes helpful again by dealing with the muskrats and talking to Ham about his problem.
• Korporal Kretinus/Fugg in Insektors. How he manages to keep his job when he happens to be fairly thick is anyone's guess.
• Inspector Gadget toys with this. The overwhelming majority of the time, the brainless detective is clueless to Claw's plan, spending most of his time bumbling or accusing the wrong guy while Penny and Brain do all the work for him. A fair few occasions however, his well-timed clumsiness actually helps them along the way.
  • There has also been a few episodes where he has actually learned that Penny was in trouble, and abruptly turned from The Load into an unstoppable force to be reckoned with. This led to the popular fan theory that Gadget was once extremely competent yet suffers extreme PTSD from becoming a cyborg, and seeing Penny in danger reverts him to his former self.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Pepper Potts got this criticism a lot during the first season due to her tendency to get captured and need rescuing. This does fall into Ron the Death Eater territory though as she proved herself useful in other areas (particularly in motivating others to help or coming up with other solutions, or providing distractions), and while she got captured a lot, she was never the only person captured in those instances (typically, Tony, Rhodey, and/or Gene would be with her), making her less The Load, and more the Non Action Girl who rubbed people the wrong way.
• Alexandra from Josie and the Pussycats. She mainly exists to cause trouble for everyone else. She isn't a band member and doesn't seem to have a job or an actual reason to hang out with them (and no, chasing Alan the roadie doesn't count).
• Mostly averted with the sidekick Ron Stoppable in Kim Possible. Despite the fact that he sometimes does screw up the missions or needs to be saved, history has shown that he does save the mission more times than he screws them up, has Rufus in his pocket who saves the team every time the writers are too lazy to figure out a more clever way, and the first movie showed that Kim was practically a loser without Ron as her sidekick. Aside from the few times late in the series when Ron's intermittent monkey-theme superpowers kick in, his contributions are less than obvious, because they're almost entirely passive, but are actually quite important. Most notably, he does two things: transport Rufus (who's nearly as useful as Kim) to where he's needed, and keeps Kim inspired by his presence, and motivated by his being usually in some danger. The latter is usually only very weakly implied, but the aforementioned movie, and similar scenes in a couple serial episodes, made it very explicitly clear: in Ron's significant absence, Kim's effectiveness drops by a wide margin. The villain of the first movie arranged for them to be separated for precisely this reason. Another aspect of it is that his apparent incompetence makes him completely unpredictable, so no matter how good the villain's plan is, Ron can ruin it just because it could never have foreseen him.
• King of the Hill:
  • Almost all of Hank Hill's friends and family are Loads on one level or another (and sometimes he himself is a Load to them!), but his wife Peggy really takes the cake with her raging ego and uselessness.
  • Bill is so much of The Load that Hank, Dale and Boomhauer will literally work him into their plans as the load. In the episode where the 4 are challenged to a paintball match with teenagers, Hank's plan is to use Bill to draw the teenagers' attention since teenagers will always go for the slowest, fattest, most pathetic individual they can find.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Three of Dave forms are completely dependent on a care taker. He's not much use is a fight outside of his Prime Adult stage, but that tends to be unreliable at best.
• Gump often causes considerable problems for the Little Wizards, with two episodes in particular standing out.
  • In one episode, he runs away into the Wooly Woods and gets himself kidnapped by gnomes, forcing the other Little Wizards to come and rescue him. When they find him, they discover the gnomes actually believe him to be a prophesied leader, "The Wise One", thanks to his Voluntary Shapeshifting powers. The only problem is that he's expected to marry the gnome princess as part of his position... and if he refuses, he'll be outed as an imposter and fed to the giant Gormalu. Neither option is desirable, so the gang decide to sneak away at dawn the next morning. The only problem is that Gump smells the gnomes starting to cook breakfast, and when he is told they can't stay to eat, he howls so loud in anger that he wakes the village, causing the gnomes to give chase.
  • In another episode, he breaks Phineas' magic staff by accident, and to avoid getting in trouble, attempts to get a replacement staff from the Petrified Woods... and he does so by stealing one from an evil witch who lives there. This sets up first for Phineas to accidentally imperil Dexter and one of their animal friends, a bear named Bertha, because he doesn't know that he has the wrong staff, and then for the evil witch to nearly steal all of Phineas' magic.
• Scott and T-Bob from M.A.S.K. only exist to give the youngest viewers someone to relate to. Unfortunately, their main role in the series is getting into trouble and needing to be rescued by MASK, either because of Scott's impulsive nature or because the villains just happen to be at their location. In several episodes, MASK could almost apprehend the agents of VENOM, but had to abort the chase because Scott was in trouble. T-Bob kind of redeems himself by being instrumental in solving some of the missions MASK is on.
• Megas XLR: Coop pilots Megas while Kiva provides technical and tactical support. Jamie brings nothing to the table besides snarky criticism (which Kiva also provides along with her own contributions) and the number of times he does something useful can be counted on one hand. He is overall a useless coward who is often the first to suggest fleeing when things get too tough. Cartoon Network's old profile for Jamie even says so outright ("Jamie's contribution to the team is... well, nothing").
• Metalocalypse has Murderface, who actually turns out to be a subversion. He's the bass player, and by far the least popular and likeable member of the crew, to the point that he's been described as "almost a member." He doesn't write the songs, his bass lines often get removed from the recordings, and he's been known to leave his instrument unplugged during concerts (which nobody notices). However, one episode shows that when Murderface briefly quits the band, the remaining members find that their songs lack the negativity needed to work as metal; essentially, without Murderface around, they can't channel their dislike of him into their music.
• While the main cast of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are well-rounded and capable characters, on occasion one pony's weakness will drag the whole team down.
  • Fluttershy's clumsy nature sometimes has a tendency to make things worse, but she also regularly fixes things later or even saves the day. An basic example of this would be "Dragonshy", where her fear of dragons makes her a burden to everyone else throughout most of the episode. In the end, she's the only one who can tame the dragon. Interestingly, in episodes where she's the load or millstone throughout ("Dragonshy", "Power Ponies", "It Ain't Easy Being Breezies", to name a few) she tends to come through in the end and save the day.
  • Spike plays the role more straight, being a baby dragon, he has yet to gain much physical prowess and so is often useless or requires protection once a physical threat appears. In the role of Twilight's assistant however, he is thoroughly competent, so proves himself rather useful in emotional or intellectual manners at least. Spike's physical weakness was explored in "Power Ponies". When he and the others are teleported into a comic book world, all the ponies gain impressive superhero personas while Spike... becomes the Plucky Comic Relief. Despite being perfectly convinced he will be no help, his Genre Savvy wits manage to help the other ponies (who are completely incompetent using their new powers at first) and later saving them from the supervillain using elaborate wits alone. Though it should be said that when Spike actually does step up and save the day, well, if "Badass" was a quantifiable energy source his would light our cities: he saves the Crystal Empire, saving Applejack's life from a massive monster, saving an entire stadium of spectators from a falling block of ice, being the first to trust and befriend a changeling (which went on to make their entire species pull a Heel–Face Turn and save Equestria), and making peace between the Equestrians and dragons.
• The Octonauts has Peso, the penguin medic of the team who becomes this sometimes, but considerably more than his team. He is usually the member who is in trouble most often, by being taken away by storms, trapped, chased by predators, his bandages or medical kit being taken by thief creatures, scared, the crew explaining to him step-by-step some activities, and despite being the crew's medic, he ignores the biology of some creatures and only bandages them, with Shellington patiently explaining him sea creatures' names or biology. However, he becomes brave if someone needs medical attention, and in one episode he drives (with some help and tips) the Octopod.
• In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Asteroid Belt Space Race", Zerk proves to be this towards Eggplant. After learning a little bit about the asteroids from Sean and Sydney, Zerk believes that he is now a complete expert on the asteroid belt even though he's really not, and mixes up the directions in the process. This is later subverted, as they did win the race thanks to a device installed in Eggplant's saucer.
• In the earlier episodes of Scooby-Doo included Scooby-Dumb (yes, that is his name), Scooby's inbred, hillbilly cousin. He is literally too dumb to be scared, and had to be dragged away from the various monsters. It takes something to make Scooby look smart and Scrappy look useful.
• The Simpsons:
  • Milhouse was this to Bart and Lisa in "Das Bus" when the Springfield elementary kids are stranded on an island and Milhouse earns the group's wrath for (apparently) stealing their food supplies. During the chase Milhouse eventually tires out and says "Go on without me...and carry me!", and when they come to a chasm he swings across on a vine, but refuses to throw it back for Bart and Lisa while claiming "There's no time!"
  • Lisa Simpson could arguably be considered this to her family due to a combination of her Soapbox Sadie personality and Inferiority Superiority Complex. As shown in Nice Job Breaking It, Hero she's repeatedly ruined Homer's chances at success by convincing him to start talking about what she cared about instead of what he cared about. She has done the same thing to Marge and Grandpa causing them to give up things they enjoyed because she felt they were wrong. Finally, she has outright sabotaged both Maggie and Bart’s chances at success because of jealousy. Disturbingly, "Barthood" shows that Bart can't be successful or develop a good relationship with Lisa unless he completely shuts her out of his life.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): Antoine. He is incredibly cowardly and almost never contributes anything of value, yet for some reason, the Freedom Fighters frequently bring him along on action missions.
• Mysterio temporarily becomes a villainous example in the Villain Team-Up in Spider-Man: The Animated Series. He has no powers to contribute to anything, only crates of stuff their quarry can knock down to block the villains' way when they are chasing a de-powered Spider-Man. He is eventually Killed Off for Real, and replaced with Vulture.
• Shorty becomes this in Season 2 of Tangled: The Series. He basically only stows away on the gang's road trip to make drunken non-sequiturs and occasionally save the day by doing something stupid in the right place at the right time.
• All the Channel 6 News Crew have become the Load at some point in the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, but Vernon Fenwick is usually the biggest Load. He seems to exist just to make April O'Neil look like the more capable reporter, judging by the number of times he's fainted, run away, whined about getting a hard reporting assignment, or gotten captured by the Monster of the Week. It's no surprise that the Turtles can't stand him.
• Total Drama:
  • Owen (sometimes, more in Action than in Island or World Tour), and in early episodes Courtney (though this changed once she got more competitive). Owen's nature as The Load is made worse in Action by the fact that his team always forgives him for losing challenges or slowing them down.
  • Noah, ironically enough, until the episode of his second elimination, where he managed to step up.
  • Ezekiel was this in Total Drama World Tour for Team Victory, to the point where he cost them the first challenge by feeding their reward to a crocodile, leading him to being the first contestant to be eliminated again. After he was booted, DJ filled this role to an absurd degree.
  • Total Drama Revenge of the Island has Cameron take his place in "The Enchanted Franken-Forest", complete with lampshade hanging from Zoey, who is forced to save him from mutant plants and pitfalls at every turn.
    Zoey: (confessional) Is it just me, or am I doing everything while Cameron acts as mutant bait?
  • From Pahkitew Island, Leonard, to the point that his team, Waneyihtam Maskwak (the Confused Bears) didn’t lose a single challenge after eliminating him.
  • From the same season and team, Beardo, who spent his sole episode making weird noises instead of contributing to the team. The only reason Leonard even made it to Episode 2 was because Beardo was even more incompetent.
  • Also from the Pahkitew Island season, nearly everyone on Pimâpotew Kinosewak (the Floating Salmon) was this.
    • Amy was more obsessed with bossing Samey around and even stole the latter's credit for her accomplishments.
    • Max, who was usually carried by Scarlett, made zero contributions to the team and even screwed them over in his attempts at Chronic Villainy.
    • Rodney was this during the Truth or Scare challenge due to being unable to answer his Truths repeatedly.
    • Topher spent most of his time trying to show off for the camera and make Chris look bad, especially in the episode where he got the boot.
  • From the 2023 reboot, Millie is this for Priya. The most glaring example is when she drinks all their water on their morning jog, then forces Priya to carry her back to camp (keep in mind that Millie is much more heavyset than Priya), costing Priya the challenge later that day when she passes out from dehydration.
  • While she wasn't uncooperative on her team, Julia doesn't contribute much outside of that and is more invested in her phone than the competition itself. This changed post-raptor incident when she Took a Level in Badass and became more than capable of winning challenges by herself.
• Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race has Taylor, a snobby Rich Bitch who is constantly chastising her mother Kelly for failing to keep up her end in the challenges, despite her doing all of the work through Taylor's relentless complaining. Meanwhile, Taylor is completely helpless in every "effort" she makes to play the game seriously, which finally lands her on the receiving end of an epic grilling from her frustrated mother who admits that Taylor has never distinguished herself in anything in her life and that all of her alleged awards were simply bought and held no meaning whatsoever.
• Transformers:
  • Cheetor in Beast Wars, but on an intermittent basis. Cheetor's relatively small size/firepower, impetuousness, immaturity, and lack of specialized skills can even verge on The Millstone. On the other hand, his speed and enthusiasm commonly enable him to fill a solid supporting role. Equally, he starts out as the load (and the resident trouble magnet), but throughout the series get powered up and matures into the Cheetor we see in Beast Machines. He's still fast, he's still impetuous but hell, he's scary good at what he does.
  • Almost the exact same thing could be said of Animated Bumblebee, for all his charm and humor. While he is okay at fighting human supervillains he is utterly useless when fighting Decepticons on his own, as his one weapon (nodes that shoot out beams of electricity) are too weak to even make any of them flinch. Well, until he gets the limiters on them taken off and they become the most powerful weapon on the entire team.
  • Averted with Sari who is somewhat of a liaison between humans and the Autobots as well as having a key empowered by the Allspark.
  • In Beast Machines, Rattrap takes over this position at the beginning because he has trouble transforming and, even when he does, doesn't have any actual weapons in robot form. The other characters, who previously viewed Rattrap as mildly annoying but a good guy to have on your side, start treating him increasingly as The Load. When Optimus is temporarily put out of commission and can't head off the other characters, they get downright hostile. Then they're surprised when Rattrap takes drastic measures to get some firepower.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Miko has this bad, possessing all the survival instincts of a lemming with nothing left to live for. Not even months of experience is enough to teach her that, no, she can't be of much help on the battlefield, and no, it is not safe for a squishy human to be around giant robot fights. Surprisingly, the other two Team Pet human kids are actually helpful, one in an information-providing capacity, and the other having actually slowed down or temporarily defeated Decepticons once or twice. Though she's getting better in recent episodes.
• The plot of the Visionaries episode "Feryl Steps Out" hinges on Feryl feeling that he is "too much of a liability" and leaving the Spectral Knights as a consequence. Even though he later single-handedly rescues Leoric from Castle Darkstorm (and thwarts Darkstorm's plan to invade New Valarak) he continues to doubt himself until Leoric sets him straight:
  Feryl: I feel like such a fool, Leoric. Getting you into trouble.
  Leoric: I got into trouble on my own, Feryl, and you got me out.
  Feryl: But I'm such a failure. I'll never be like you, or Witterquick, or...
  Leoric: And we will never be masters of vehicles such as you are. Think of it, Feryl — your ability saved me.
  Feryl: Yeah, I guess it did.

---