(she/her)
Does this page need to be cleaned up? I'm looking at the qualification at the end to describe which characters should be here, and which characters should be The Scrappy instead: "Note that this trope is for characters who are annoying to the other characters, not just to the audience."
Many, many entries in here are for characters that are annoying to the watcher, and the watcher only. For instance, there was little indication that Cedric the Owl was annoying to Graham in King's Quest V. He was super-annoying to the game player, but that makes him the Scrappy, not the Small Annoying Creature. Similarly, the non-combat pets in World of Warcraft have no real in-game presence to other characters, they affect players only. Cait Sith from Final Fantasy VII gets treated like a regular character in game, and the criticisms in this page are that he's a cute element in a dark game, and his limit breaks suck. All true, but should he be in this particular page if the qualification for inclusion is that in-universe characters find him annoying?
So we have this qualification that "this trope is for characters who are annoying to the other characters, not just to the audience," but that doesn't seem to be something that immediately comes to mind when people add characters to this list, nor does the trope name bring that qualifier to mind. What does everyone think?
Besides the huge ZCE problem, Happosai isn't much of a sidekick to anyone. He's a nuisance (an annoying as hell nuisance), but his past and present antics drive several plots, and he's the old master who taught both Genma and Soun. Happosai can kick serious butt when he cares to -it's a big deal when Ranma can better him.
The sandmurks were never meant to be sidekicks -in the book "The Dragon and the George" and the movie, they were meant to be a threat.
Edited by Candi Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett