Creators Pet / Literature

• Cassie from the Animorphs. She's the stated favorite of writer K. A. Applegate, she is the only character in-series to win the Superpower Lottery (being both an estreen and a temporal anomaly) and she is usually praised and defended by the narrative even when it's completely unwarranted — take for example Megamorphs #02, when Marco privately compliments Cassie for going on a whiny rant about killing a Triceratops, or #53 The Answer, when Tobias harshly criticizes Jake for excluding Cassie from the war council despite the fact that he had extremely good reason to (that reason being that she betrayed the whole team by allowing the blue box to be seized by the Yeerks, and all for a 'gut feeling' that she's lucky to see pan out). She criticizes the others from start to finish, puts the whole team at risk on multiple occasions to justify her extreme sense of morality, and she is the only character to never learn or grow in any way. This even extends to the epilogue, where she is the only Animorph that Applegate spared from the Bolivian Army Ending.
• Everworld: April is endlessly self-righteous and, out of the main cast, she's the only one who never has to undergo any major suffering because of her own character flaws, which are glossed over or ignored.
• Karen Brewer from The Baby-Sitters Club. She's annoying, rude, and a know-it-all prone to causing trouble because of it... but rarely gets called out on her behavior because she's a self-admitted Author Avatar, being the kind of the bright, imaginative kid the author had always wanted to be. Thus, Karen even gets her own spin-off series, which also got its own spin-off. Except apparently the author was pretty much alone in her desire; it'd be hard to find even one fan of the series that actually viewed Karen in a positive light.
• Renesmee from Breaking Dawn. Everyone who meets her loves her, despite the fact that she hasn't done anything other than be Edward and Bella's half human/half vampire daughter with psychic powers. Many fans loathe her for hijacking the story away from the Official Couple. Others hate her for her very existence defies biology and is a direct contradiction to previous Word of God. And of course, Team Jacob fans hate her for other reasons... It certainly doesn't help that it's obvious this is a motherhood fantasy with how, thanks to her vampire nature, Renesmee's super-smart and beautiful and loved by everyone who meets her, but Bella doesn't have to deal with any of the gross/boring/hard parts of being a parent. Not only that, it looks very much like she and children who were turned into vampires have a supernatural ability to make people love them, but it's entirely accidental. The reader is supposed to take it as a given that vampire and half-vampire children, Renesmee especially, are just that lovable.
• In the Casson Family Series by Hilary McKay, Rose Casson gradually gets revealed as this over the course of the series. At first they seem like an ensemble series, with each book focused on a different member of the family with the others getting their own subplots... but then Rose not only gets more books with her name in the title than anyone else, she also starts taking over the books of OTHER characters, so much so that Caddy is basically a minor character in her own book. Especially blatant evidence of McKay's Rose favoritism is that every time Tom is mentioned, it's in relation to Rose—despite him being established as INDIGO'S best friend in the first book he appeared in.
• Rudi frakking Mackenzie in the S. M. Stirling's Emberverse series. Almost universally disliked by fans but apart from card-carrying villains, and one solitary romantic rival who conveniently self sacrifices no one in universe has anything less than gushing praise for him. He is the best fighter, best general, most handsome, most kind and generally all round best person on the entire Continent. He literally has no flaws and is uniformly above average at everything and excellent at most. Every decision he makes is correct, or at least works out that way no matter how stupid it might have appeared at first. Every friendly character we meet is happy to sacrifice their interests for his up to and including subordinating whole countries to his High Kingship without visible dissent. No wonder he turned a lot of people off the series.
• Maximum Ride:
  • Angel is widely disliked by the fandom for being an obnoxious, useless and unsettling little brat. Despite this, she constantly gets more powers and starts hijacking the plot, culminating in her getting her own self-titled book.
  • Dylan barges into the plot six books in, well after Fang and Max have admitted their feelings, and flat-out announces to Max that he's been genetically engineered to be her perfect romantic partner - a fact which the other characters constantly reassert - and they're destined to be together, right down to throwing a violent fit when he catches Max and Fang together. Oh, and he's also better than everyone else in every possible way, especially Fang, according to the narrative, when in reality he is blander and less interesting than Fang in essentially every conceivable way. This went over with shippers and non-shippers alike about as well as you would expect, especially when he temporarily takes Fang's place in the group.
• Karen Traviss rears her head with her contributions to the Halo novels, this time with Admiral Parangosky and Serin Osman. Usually, anything they say is right and is a mirror to Traviss' own beliefs, at the cost of shattering canon relationships, butchering how psychology works, and ignoring the military chain of command.
• In S.D. Perry's Novelizations of the Resident Evil series, she took plucky little Rebecca Chambers and made her into her go-to hero, even receiving a spinoff novel all to herself — Resident Evil: Caliban Cove, which itself received a sequel in Resident Evil: Underworld. Basically, if something is happening in the plot, Rebecca is doing it; if something is not happening, the characters described will be going on at length about how wonderful/resourceful/intelligent Rebecca is. (It's kind of like the films except focusing on Rebecca, not Alice.)
• Every Star Wars Expanded Universe author has favorite characters, usually their own creation, but some are more beloved than others:
  • Kevin J. Anderson has Kyp Durron, a slave raised on the penal colony of Kessel because his parents were Rebel sympathizers. Han Solo finds him, and discovers that he's more powerful than Luke. He then becomes Luke's brightest student, but The Paragon Always Rebels and he does so in a big way, rending Luke's soul from his body and stealing an invincible Imperial planetkiller that he stole from the Empire in the first place, and turning it on a system with an Imperial training academy. He then demands to see his brother, but they can't find his brother, so he blows up the star. And they find his brother and release him to Kyp, but he doesn't get to the Sun Crusher in time to be protected. And when Luke recovers, after The Power of Friendship destroys the evil Sith Lord influencing Kyp, the New Republic grants him the power to determine Kyp's fate, and Luke forgives him. Although, after I, Jedi pointed out the massive problem with this (among other decisions Anderson made), rare was the appearance of Kyp where someone didn't point out "Dude, you killed a solar system".
  • Jude Watson has Ferus Olin, a padawan who is pretty much just Anakin without the background of being born into slavery as well as the negative bias the Jedi Council has towards him. He regularly acts arrogant, frequently bad-mouths Anakin to other people, including Obi-Wan, yet is said to be so perfect in everything that he tries that everybody (save for Anakin) admires him, even the Jedi Council who regularly praises him in meetings. After Order 66, not only does Obi-Wan want to keep in contact with him during the Clone Wars (which breaks one of the Order's rules about attachments as Ferus had left the Order by then), but Palpatine wanted to turn him to the Dark Side because, supposedly, Ferus was more powerful than Anakin, the Chosen One. Watson eventually tried making Ferus a more flawed character, but by then, the damage was already done in the eyes of his critics.
  • Kal Skirata is a Mandalorian mercenary who worked with Jango Fett on Kamino. He's regularly shown to be an emotionally abusive Manipulative Bastard towards his "sons" and sexist towards the women in his "family", yet the narrative can't stop singing his praises about what a wonderful man he is. When he finds out that Etain is pregnant with her and Darman's son, he not only vows to take the baby away from her after she gives birth (even going as far as to name the baby himself), but he dumps her on a backwater planet with no good medical care to speak of to "punish her". Unsurprisingly, she nearly miscarries the baby and is in incredibly poor health by the time anybody wises up and checks on her, earning Kal a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Darman... yet Kal faces no real consequences for this. He also regularly insults Etain's appearance and capabilities, yet Traviss seems to believe he's the paragon of greatness.
• Parodied in To Be or Not To Be: That Is the Adventure, where the Lemony Narrator treats Ophelia as his pet character, depicting her as an amazing Action Girl who kicks ass and never mopes about anything. Attempting to make her act like she does in the play pisses him off, causing him to accuse you of sexism and of ruining the character. Do it enough and he throws a hissy fit and refuses to let you play as her anymore.
• Anne McCaffrey:
  • Lord Jaxom from the Dragonriders of Pern series. His high levels of seeming perfection were barely acceptable in The White Dragon. But when he was made the focus character in All The Weyrs Of Pern - which featured the resolution of F'lar's dream of removing the threat of Thread permanently - the fandom turned on Jaxom en masse.
  • Todd Reeve in "Decision at Doona". An anti-social six-year-old who knew everything. Once he got out of the over-populated corridors of Earth and into the wild of Doona he was such a "natural genius" he was practically a Messiah. It was pretty blatantly clear that the author adored him, as he was talked up by everyone (except his father!) as being spectacular. Perhaps not coincidentally, he has the same name as the author's son.
• The Wheel of Time has Faile, a young woman who often tops fans "most disliked character of the series" lists. Unlike most other characters who seem to appear as normal parts of the world when the main POV characters bump into them, Faile just appears in the story having nothing to do with the existing plot and forces her way into the group despite none of the characters particularly liking her at the time. She seem to have preferential author treatment by getting Character Shilling from Loial just a short time later ("Nooooo, she was so free!") and also becomes instant friends with two female Aiel characters with little reason given despite their cultural differences. She's often disliked by fans for her manipulative, capricious, and abusive treatment of Perrin, but also because she's heavily associated with two plotlines most fans despise: the pointless romantic rivalry between her and Berelain, and the never-ending plotline where she is captured by the Shaido. On the flipside, she does at least force Perrin to take a greater role in world events despite his "I'm just a simple blacksmith" moping routine.

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