Unintentionally Unsympathetic characters from DC Comics.
- This was a major reason for the quick cancellation of the original run of Hawk and Dove. The intent was that Hawk was the tough guy who thinks Violence Really Is the Answer and Dove was the Technical Pacifist who sought peaceful resolutions, and the comic would be about them figuring out their differences. However, the creative team couldn't agree on which one was supposed to be right, being that they were a Fad Super duo that appeared during The Vietnam War (Steve Skeates was anti-war, Steve Ditko was pro-war), and their issues with compromising leaked into the page. The result was that Hawk came across as a violent Jerkass who mostly made things worse, and Dove came across as a whiny little wimp who was constantly on the verge of tears, and neither character was likeable.
- This proved to be a huge problem with the character Magog in DC Comics. When introduced in Kingdom Come he was a caricature of the worst part of 90's heroes, and was fairly popular for it, as he seemed so pathetic and remorseful. When he was brought into the main DC Universe he was given a huge push and eventually added to the Justice Society of America and later given his own series. He was shown to be a war veteran with PTSD, but proved to be so unlikable and mean to his teammates that he was eventually killed off in Justice League: Generation Lost.
- Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal: Ever since the events of Justice League: Cry for Justice, Roy Harper has lost his arm and his daughter, and the miniseries is about his efforts to come to terms with the pain of both. Yet DC managed to bungle one of the easiest ways to score sympathy for someone by having him conduct himself as a Jerkass in the worst way throughout. Black Canary repeatedly tries to be there for him, but he instead insults her for being infertile and thus could never understand his pain, ignoring that she had previously lost her adopted daughter and thus knew exactly what he felt likenote and as well, her infertility was caused by being captured and invasively tortured, which also resulted in her losing her powers, so she more than understands his grief for his arm, too. Donna Troy tried to gently explain that his grief was not an excuse for jerkassery, and he turned around and called her a whore for not being there when her son died, and called her a bad mother, ignoring that she had been denied custody by her Jerkass ex-husband; before that, Mia Drearden, the second Speedy, tried to apologise for his daughter dying when she was taking care of her before she died and all Roy did was physically attack her, lash out at and guilt-trip her further, reducing her to tears and having to be restrained from doing more. The fans might have forgiven him for those things if he hadn't acted like a complete tool the rest of the time as well, pushing away everyone who tried to console him, Wangsting that none of them understood his pain and turning to drugs and painkillers to fix all his problems rather than accept it from his friends. Instead he just turned most people off.
- "Legion of 3 Worlds": Cosmic Boy's self-martyring attitude about his decision to return as Legion leader is demonstrated as him acting like he's sacrificing his personal life so Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad don't have to bear the brunt of leadership and can be a family outside the Legion. This includes him giving up his relationship with Night Girl, who forlornly looks on as Cosmic Boy talks about all he had to abandon. What makes this hard to sympathize with is the knowledge that historically Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad had no issues in their marriage when she went back to active duty and he stayed home to watch the kids. There's also the fact that Night Girl herself is an active Legionnaire working alongside Cosmic Boy. Ultimately, it just makes Cosmic Boy come across as an Attention Whore whining about sacrifices he didn't have to make.
- Supergirl (2005) story arc Day of the Dollmaker was meant to make readers feel sorry for Catherine Grant, the Daily Planet journalist who spent one year carrying out a smear campaign against Supergirl. It was intended to remind us that Kara Zor-El behaved as a brat early on, and Cat, who had lost her son, hated starlets who waste their young lives. Trouble is, it was well-established that Cat was also motivated by petty reasons such like resentment (Supergirl accidentally got Cat's right eye bruised while rescuing her once, and later accidentally revealed Cat's boobs were fake), jealousy and a thirst for fame. In order to get even with Supergirl, Cat spent months obsessively spreading lies and slander, bad-mouthing Supergirl and complaining about her skirt's length. When she heard Kara's father had been murdered Cat couldn't care less. Her slandering pieces and interviews were taken advantage of by madmen who schemed and carried out a genocide. Even so Catherine didn't stop and even blackmailed Supergirl into helping her. When Supergirl called her out on her behavior, Cat Grant claimed her actions were fully justified and it was all Supergirl's fault anyway. Even after Supergirl saved her life, she was unable to apologize or acknowledge she made anything wrong, albeit she wrote an article stating Supergirl "might" deserve a second chance. It's real hard to feel sorry for her in such circumstances.
- Superman:
- In the story arc The Great Phantom Peril, Lois Lane tests a pressure point on Steve Lombard, and the story expects readers to cheer on her because Steve was being a loud-mouthed, sexist idiot... except that Steve hadn't harassed, bullied or done anything to Lois, whereas she physically assaulted -and hurt- a co-worker during a public work meeting only because she was finding him annoying.
- Superman (Brian Michael Bendis) features an In-Universe example with Superman accusing Jor-El of portraying himself as the victim of the Circle's treason, when Jor-El helped them control the fates of countless planets and likely ordered their deaths and now, Jor-El has the gall of feeling betrayed when they turned their backs on Krypton.
- Superman: Grounded: The woman who slapped Superman and started off the comic. She's angry at Superman for not saving her husband from an inoperable brain tumour with his x-ray vision. Nonetheless, she does not explain why Superman's heat vision is superior to all medical technology for the purposes of removing inoperable brain tumours, or why she is chewing Superman out when there are other heroes with abilities perfectly capable of removing the tumor, and she also dismisses the fact that Superman was preoccupied with events of New Krypton that concerned millions of lives -which would include said husband-, making the woman come off less sympathetic and more selfish.
- In "The Super Dog from Krypton", Superboy is meant to be understandably angry when he berates Krypto, since Krypto had been making trouble for him, but he comes across as unlikable since he is complaining about his pet dog being "super-trouble" instead of "super-fun", as if Krypto was a toy instead of a living creature who he is responsible for (and who spent fifteen years trapped in a rocket thanks to his father).
- Teen Titans:
- Deathstroke's mercenary team of Titans were described by writer Eric Wallace as being bad people, but it's clear that the majority of the team was supposed to be seen as tragic and sympathetic due to their horrible backstories and the recent series of traumas that pushed them into the team. This included Cheshire and Tattooed Man losing their respective child, Osiris being haunted by the man he accidentally killed to protect his sister, and the years of sexual abuse and Survivor's Guilt Cinder suffered from. However, any sympathy these characters might have gained was instantly crushed by the team's first actual appearance when they brutally slaughtered Ryan Choi, a beloved Ensemble Dark Horse and one of the few Asian heroes DC had, followed by Osiris's gradual transformation into a self-centered brat and Cinder stupidly letting a serial child rapist free because she rushed her attempt to murder him. The only member of the team who managed to retain any sense of sympathy from fans was Roy Harper, who was not a part of Ryan's death and had the distinction of being manipulated by both Deathstroke and Cheshire. It helps that readers were still majorly pissed off at how poorly Roy was being handled after Justice League: Cry for Justice and Rise of Arsenal.
- Another Titans example would have to be Cassandra Sandsmark and Tim Drake during the "One Year Later" storylines. Understandably the two are still reeling from Superboy's death, but Cassandra began to sorely grate the nerves of the readers because she Took a Level in Jerkass and became an insufferable, bitter asshole. Tim came across as more sympathetic in his grief especially since the writers were deliberately ignoring parts of his backstory (like the stepmother who was nowhere to be found after his dad died), but then he became involved in a Wangst fueled on/off relationship with Cassandra that ultimately went nowhere. But what ultimately made the two unsympathetic was their constant zigzagging with Rose Wilson in the Titans, either accepting her as one of their own or viewing her as the team's token psycho and badmouthing her behind her back. In fact, Rose left the team and briefly allied herself with the new Clock King when she heard Tim and Cass profess she was a lost cause. This is all despite knowing very well that Rose's Face–Heel Turn was not of her choosing, but because her father pumped her full of drugs and drove her insane
- Yet another would be in the New 52. In an incident that was obviously supposed to garner sympathy for the character, Bunker used his psionic bricks to slam an Ungrateful Bastard against a brick wall, because said bastard was ungrateful for being saved by Bunker and Beast Boy, because they "looked like a bunch of..." While Bunker was pissed that he was going to use a homophobic slur (Bunker is gay himself), literally nothing implies he was. So instead of Bunker attacking someone over a slur, which still would've been a little much, he's attacking a guy over something he didn't even do, with no implication that he was going to do it.
- This was perhaps the biggest flaw about Tom King's run in Batman (Tom King), post-Issue #50. After the aborted Batman/Catwoman wedding, Bruce went under Sanity Slippage and started a downward spiral that saw his relationships with the rest of the Bat-Family deteriorate. It later turned out that Selina had been manipulated into calling off the wedding by a vengeful Bane. Obviously, we were supposed to sympathize with Bruce. The problem with this scenario is two-fold: first, it was Bruce that was causing these rifts in outright contrived and frankly abusive and neglectful waysnote He effectively abandoned Dick after he got shot in the head by KGBeast and got Easy Amnesia, he beat Jason to near death after Jason shot the Penguin and then exiled him from Gotham (and that was after Jason had just watched his teammates seemingly die too, for extra Jerkass-ness), he alienated Kate from the family after she killed Clayface to protect Cass, etc. After he punched Tim in Issue #71, the fans were thoroughly sick of it, which leads us to the second reason: this was not the first time Bruce has lashed out at them. The Franchise Original Sin of having Bruce lash out at his loved ones after a personal loss started with Jason's death three decades back and has been recycled as recently as a couple of years ago with Damian's death. The difference is, when those incidents happened, the characters understood and were sympathetic but still recognized he was out of line and chewed him out for his behavior. That was not the case with Tom King's Batman. On top of not being called out for his behavior or apologizing for it, the reason why Bruce was acting so much worse than the previous two instances was because Selina left him at the altar. That
implied that Bruce was more devastated by being ditched by his girlfriend than he was by the deaths of two of his sons. This, combined with the aforementioned Franchise Original Sin, painted Bruce as an abusive, self-centered Designated Hero who was toxic to the people around him because of his sheer refusal to go through meaningful emotional growth and learning to cope with his trauma and losses in a healthier manner. Many fans even went as far to disown this Batman because he was that unsympathetic. - The Flash: Barry Allen, since his revival, has struggled with this. After decades of having his Origin Story be about him being an idealistic Ascended Fanboy (which was made a running theme with the Flash legacy), he got a new backstory about his mother being killed by a time-travelling Reverse-Flash and his father being framed for it. While this should make readers sympathise with Barry, Barry is shown to be completely unable to process this grief in a healthy way, first resulting in Flashpoint and the New 52 reboot, which rewrote reality in a way that made everyone in the DC Universe more lonely, traumatised, and miserable, with the biggest victims of this being his own surrogate son, Wally West, and the extended Flash Family, who are first Exiled from Continuity, only for the former to return with splintered memories and struggling with trying to rebuild his life in a world that forgot him. This is joined by Barry repeatedly demonstrating an insufferable tendency to believe only he can save the day, pushing away others and not trusting them to save the day, to the point of hiding the missing speedsters crisis from Wally West, despite this being something that Wally would have had a much better chance of solving. He also neglects Wally, who begins to develop suicidal depression and eventually has a mental breakdown after Barry sends him to a poorly constructed rehab facilitynote which, after several months of being there, Barry apparently never visited him that made his problems worsen. During that time, Barry still neglected to help find the other speedsters, and continued to push away his friends and family, until he accidentally found them when dealing with a Grand Theft Me situation. Despite this repeated tendency to treat his loved ones like crap, Barry is still touted as a Nice Guy because he feels bad when people call him out, and because his dead mom angst makes him so sad, that it's expected he should just be forgiven for his mistakes, no matter how many people he hurts. This eventually got an Author's Saving Throw in Joshua Williamson's run with the reveal that Professor Zoom had been manipulating him subconciously to separate him from his loved ones.
DC Infinite Frontier hasn't helped with this with the Passing the Torch scene meant to show Wally back as the Flash, as it felt like Barry was ignoring that Wally was already the Flash for years after his original passing, that he was patronizing Wally, and anger-inducing for fans after (as mentioned above) that Barry felt he needed to give his blessing to Wally after it was Barry's own actions that caused Wally's life to implode. - This is the problem with Mandy Koriand'r, the main heroine of I Am Not Starfire. The book goes through pains to show that Mandy has a seemingly terrible life, living under the shadow of her popular and super-powered mother, seemingly belittled by her peers because of Starfire's popularity and how Mandy is nothing like her. However, Starfire is portrayed as a naïve yet very well-meaning mother who only wants the best for Mandy and a lot of Mandy's problems comes from Mandy's own attitude as she embraces being a complete Jerkass. By the end of the story, not once does Mandy apologize for her own actions as she's given the respect and admiration she desired and everyone treats her as some sort of star.
- Injustice: Gods Among Us:
- Superman, who has gone off the deep end and become a tyrant, has discovered a group of young people called the Joker Underground who are rebelling against him using the Joker, Superman's first kill, as their face and idol. Superman then incinerates everyone assembled. The book and the characters treat this as a horrific atrocity that shows how much of a monster Superman has devolved into, but here's the thing: Joker is the one who took everything from Superman with the exact intention of corrupting him in the first place. Even if they didn't know Joker's motive, that still isn't rebellious, that's an utterly despicable desecration of the memory of the innocent citizens of Metropolis Joker murdered with no remorse. Injustice Superman does kill a lot of people in his increasingly-warped idea of a utopia that the readers can draw sympathy towards, but it's significantly harder to dredge up sympathy for the members of the Joker Underground.
- Injustice Batman is meant to be The Paragon, yet he comes across as unlikable, partly because of the overplayed Evil Superman AUs in DC Comics in general. His own actions in the comics as an incompetent General Failure are also hard to respect, since Batman clings to Thou Shalt Not Kill even when he's in a war situation rather than a vigilante one, and ends up leading many of his fellow insurgents to their deaths. Some argue that Batman is even responsible for escalating the conflict, and wonder if Superman would have turned out so bad if Batman hadn't opposed him in such petty ways at every step, since Clark is in such a vulnerable position that he's seeking some kind of emotional support; without Batman, he turns to Wonder Woman and later Sinestro, who only cement his dictatorial tendencies.
- Injustice Harley. Despite helping nuke Metropolis, showing no remorse for helping to cause Superman's Start of Darkness, killing cops, instigating a breakout at Arkham that leads to the death of Dick Grayson, torturing the Flash for no reason, kidnapping Billy Batson, sexually harassing Billy Baxton (who is 12!), and threatening to murder his friends unless he fights her as Shazam, the series treats her as though she's a character who is earning her redemption because of her eccentric and zany personality. One point often brought up in-universe is her mention of her daughter that she loves dearly and has kept secret from the Joker as a redeeming quality. However, Harley's reaction to finding out Lois was pregnant when she died was one of stark indifference, leading readers to question why they should have sympathy for her child when she had no sympathy for Lois'.
- Thanks to inconsistent writing over the decades, Cheshire from Teen Titans is either written as a remorseless psychopath who nuked a country to prove she could or an assassin with scruples who only wants to have a life with her children. Fans are still debating about what's the natural progression of Jade's characterization or what's shoddy, racist demonization. The trouble is that even when writers have attempted to make Jade sympathetic it ends up not working because of lack of perspective, and she only comes out looking worse than when she's written as a Hate Sink.
- Eric Wallace included Cheshire in Deathstroke's bastard Titans, and fans already had little sympathy for Jade after she helped slaughter the Atom in cold blood. Wallace meant for Jade to be seen as tragic because this was just coming after her daughter Lian was killed. It was eventually revealed that Jade's been subconsciously suicidal during her time with Deathstroke, regretful for Lian's death, and deep down hoped he would kill her so she could be with her daughter again. The problem is that there's zero mention of Cheshire's other child, Tommy Blake Jr., whom she conceived with Catman when she was on the Secret Six and whom she thought had died too (he wasn't, but she didn't know Tommy was alive). Keeping in mind Tommy was conceived as Cheshire's Replacement Goldfish in case anything happened to Lian, that Wallace made no suggestion of Jade mourning both her children makes it hard to sympathize with her grief.
- DC Infinite Frontier shockingly revealed Lian was still alive, and her death had been faked by Jade. Festival of Heroes confirmed Lian was actually "Shoes," a homeless teenage pickpocket working for Catwoman in Alley Town. Jade apparently left an amnesiac Lian in a church in Gotham City and allowed everyone to believe she was dead, thinking this would be safer for the girl. Trouble is, Jade only ensured that Lian grew up alone with no family and no support, having to steal in order to survive. Alongside cutting Lian off from her loving and devoted father Roy and her extended family (the Titans and the Arrows), it only makes Jade look neglectful, shortsighted, and apathetic for giving her daughter an adolescence almost identical to Jade's own horrible upbringing.
- Unstoppable Doom Patrol has the Doom Patrol clash with Batman and the Green Lanterns Kyle Rayner and Guy Gardner. The narrative blatantly tries to make the reader side with the Doom Patrol by painting Batman and the Green Lanterns as authoritarian bullies whose methods in dealing with metahumans only exacerbate the growing persecution faced by the metahuman population after the events of Lazarus Planet, but disregards that many of the super-powered beings Batman and the Green Lanterns deal with are deliberate and unapologetic menaces who deserve to be locked up to keep them from harming innocents (both Kyle and Guy have lost loved ones to the superpowered villain Major Force, who not only showed no remorse whatsoever for his deeds, but also enjoyed that his actions made Kyle and Guy suffer), in effect making the Doom Patrol come off as unreasonable assholes. Not helping matters is that Crazy Jane's "Chief" persona dismisses the Justice League as not being good metahuman allies solely because the majority of them are not metahumans (and condemns the Flash as not being in touch with his fellow metahumans' problems because his super speed enables him to run away from his troubles, ignoring that Barry Allen had to put up with his enemy Professor Zoom going back in time to murder his mother when he was a kid and not being able to prevent her death without turning the DC Universe into a Crapsack World, while Wally West was trapped in the Speed Force during Dr. Manhattan's meddling with the DC Universe prior to DC Rebirth and went through a major Trauma Conga Line during Heroes in Crisis when he was institutionalized for being unable to accept the disappearance of his children and supposedly killed other patients of Sanctuary during a psychotic break before later turning out to be blameless because Savitar actually caused the deaths while Professor Zoom hypnotized him into covering the murders up), making her look like she is unreasonably prejudiced towards non-metahumans, unwilling to acknowledge that anyone besides metahumans can have problems of their own and tone-deaf to the issues faced by metahumans who superficially appear to have things better for them than other metahumans.
