Fictional Characters I Would Not Like to Meet

First the status update: The news for the private Internet connection is discouraging. I'm online from McDonald's. The hiatus will still be indefinite.

It's a little late for the Long & Short Reviews link-up, but why not answer the question anyway? Here are ten fictional characters I would not like to meet. Once again, I'm consulting my memory in more or less chronological order, so I will not be surprised if all of these come from children's literature, and forget about "diversity" in publishing--it didn't exist when these memories were formed.

Though the characters are certainly diverse...only a small majority of them are even meant to be human.

1. Maleficent from Disney's Sleeping Beauty

In the original, real version of Sleeping Beauty that made Disney's name, I'm told, parents objected that Maleficent's shift into dragon form was too frightening. They said "for the children" but they meant for themselves. I'm not surprised. I came along in time to learn to read from the four-volume set of printed Disney movie stories, and in the book the still picture of Maleficent in angry-humanoid form looked bad enough...even though a little later I learned that all it took to defeat her and her hedge of thorns was the Bible (Disney garbled a reference to the book of Ephesians). Maleficent is a personification of the Deadly Sin of Envy. She's meant to teach children how we do not want to grow up. She is where the "let's start everyone with equal state-dependent poverty so we can have equal outcomes" line of thought leads. It pretends to be compassionate, just as Maleficent tried to seem pretty and polite in her first scene, and then it turns into the dragon that is a personification, or alien-ification, of the Evil Principle.

2. Aunt Sarah from Disney's Lady and the Tramp

Cruella de Vil was too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a villain. Jacques Lebeau was probably not ridiculous when he was written, but he seemed ridiculous by the time I was reading about him. The villain of Disney dog movies was Aunt Sarah, who moved into Lady's home with her cats and blamed the poor little spaniel for everything the cats, not to mention the stray dogs, did wrong. Even as a preschooler I knew that things like Aunt Sarah happen in the real world and need to be avoided. 

3. Miss Minchin from Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess 

By the time I read the book I'd met many other fictional adults who were just not kind to the fictional children in their stories. Miss Minchin was especially awful because she kissed up to Sara as long as she could send Sara's father the bills. That made her seem easier to dislike than, e.g., Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer, who (1) had understandable motives for the bad things he did, and (2) was safely dead at the end of the book.

4. Rob McLaughlin from Mary O'Hara's My Friend Flicka, and from its sequels, and the prototype published later, Michael from Wyoming Summer 

They tried to sound like my Drill Sergeant Dad and they never seemed as if they'd even earned the right to it. Conceited, bossy, spoiled brats...and their author didn't even seem to realize how unlovable they were.

5. Sterling North's Rascal 

Sterling North convinced me that he liked having that raccoon follow him around everywhere. And that I wouldn't have liked it. All the animal ever did was make trouble. Rascal seemed very similar to Aunt Sarah's cats, who seemed worse than any real cat I ever met.

6. Nellie Oleson from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie

She was literally too unpleasant to have been real. In most ways the books seem to have told the truth about what was mentioned in them--they merely left out a lot of things, and quite properly--but when it came to Laura's and Mary's encounters with other children, they changed things to avoid lawsuits. All the unpleasant aspects of everyone the Ingalls girls knew were compiled into the fictional Oleson family. No one person could have been as annoying as Nellie and Willie and their parents are in those books. The Olesons seem almost to stalk the Ingalls family through the books, although they're annoying in different ways. Simply blurring the details of real stories about different people created uniquely unpleasant fictional characters. 

7. Judy Blume's Deenie

The girl whose biggest concern about having to wear a back brace was not about its sticking to her in hot weather or interfering with anything worthwhile she wanted to do, but about its discouraging boys from groping under her clothes in movies. Ick. None of Judy Blume's characters sounded like anyone I would willingly have talked to twice. Deenie was the worst, until Blume started writing about alleged adults who were as boring as her worst child characters.

8. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Little Prince

Nobody that naive should be talking to unfamiliar adults without parental supervision.

9. The Health and Safety Brownie in the Brownie Girl Scout Handbook

The fey oldfashioned brownie of my childhood was later replaced with a humanoid cartoon called "Suzy Safety." Either way, simply listing precautions is reasonable, but putting them into the mouth of a know-it-all character is annoying. No one would want to meet a character like that in real life.

10. Miss Lucinda Lark in Mary Poppins and sequels

The voice of stuffy social climbers everywhere, Miss Lark got what she deserved when her spoiled dog started barking back and insisting that she adopt his buddy the stray mongrel, but I can't imagine her ever taking her mind off the impression she's making long enough that anyone could stand her company.