Well Dawn made the list...

[frelling_tralk]

21 Most Annoying TV Characters Ever


I never got what people found annoying about Dawn in season 5 really, I thought that Real Me was an awesome intro for her character, but I've seen so many people talking about not being able to stand her from the beginning. Honestly I think that some people just hated the whole concept of a 'cute younger character' being added, they were coming at the idea from what they'd seen in other tv shows, and so were already predisposed to find Dawn annoying?

Hmm how would people have corrected the writing of Dawn if you were working on the show, or did you think it was fine just the way it was? I might have changed her age and made her more obviously younger, instead of 14/15/16 over the course of the show. I always thought that was waaay to close to the age that Buffy had been at the start of the series to then make such a big deal about how young Dawn was and how she needed babysitting. If they wanted to write her as such a little sister then I think it would have been a better idea to at least introduce her as 12 or 13 years old, it's not like the other actors were playing their ages either.

Also I think season 5 was Dawn's best season because she was such an important of the main plot, so maybe they could have done more with her powers as the Key after season 5, instead of immediately making her a normal teenage girl?


Oh and I really think her screaming is overstated, she yelled 'get out' just twice. I'm not saying that it wasn't high-pitched and annoying, but from the way people talk you would think she had been screeching like that at least every 4-5 episodes!

Comments

[12-12-12.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with the writing for Dawn was that there was a disconnect between what we were told was the other characters' level of investment in her--as far as they could remember, they had known her their entire lives and had a whole lifetime's history of memories and emotional attachment to her--and what the audience viscerally felt was OUR investment in her, because she just showed up on our screens and we were expected to respond to her not as if she were a new character, but a character who'd grown up along with Buffy and the Scoobies. But the show had never cultivated that investment in us the way it had with the other characters, through us getting to know them from S1-S4. In retrospect I can enjoy her more as a character and as a storytelling device, but I think at the time much of fandom rejected her because of this, because she was supposed to be important to us but the show hadn't bothered to make her important to us.

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

Hmm that's a good point, I know there was several times when I felt annoyed at the canon of the show being changed as we had previously understood it