“Anime character that gets on your nerves”
There are two entirely different ways I could go with this. Do I name someone who’s just plain annoying because of running gags that aren’t actually funny? Or a character who keeps making bad decisions so often I want to slap them? Maybe one of each.
Annoying running gag first:
This duo from Pokemon. Now, in the original series, I liked Brock; he was generally the mature and level-headed one of the group, but this tended to leave him whenever he saw a pretty girl literally any girl or woman close enough to his own age (except Jessie).
The problem is that the last bit developed into increasingly stupid running gags, culminating in the typical scenario in the Diamond and Pearl series, which is this:
- Brock goes head over heels the instant he sees some young woman
- Before he gets a chance to even get a response from her, Croagunk uses Poison Jab on Brock’s rear end, then laughs about it.
- Nobody seems to care what a sociopath Croagunk is, and only once did anyone say Croagunk had gone too far.
I’m pretty sure there were at least 50 episodes where this was essentially the only thing Brock did.
And now for the one who actually does things that get on my nerves on a different level:
Shinn Asuka, the protagonist the anti-hero the rival a character from Gundam SEED Destiny.
Okay, the way I see it, Athrun is the actual protagonist of the series no matter much Shinn and Kira tend to do more than him. But Shinn is the hero or anti-hero at first. One thing that never changes is that he’s a jerk to almost everyone (except Stella) almost constantly. Things he does that really annoy me:
- He essentially hates his home country for having been attacked.
- He hates the Freedom Gundam because it was “causing confusion” in the battle where Heine dies, but doesn’t hold any grudge at all against Stella for actually killing him.
- He disobeys orders to help Stella, which sounds more like a good thing, except he’s returning her to the enemy and trusting an enemy officer he doesn’t know to make sure she isn’t forced to fight again…and of course she’s put in the cockpit of the Destroy almost immediately after that.
- He hates Kira even more for stopping the Destroy, because Stella (who’s there because of Shinn) dies in the process.
- He happily tells Athrun that shooting down the Freedom was revenge for him too when, in addition to that obviously not being among his actual top few reasons, he already knew that Athrun didn’t like the idea of Shinn and Kira fighting.
- In spite of having already proven himself willing to defy orders to do what he thinks is the right thing, he does obey the order to kill friends and comrades of his who have been framed without even asking for evidence of their guilt
- And he still fights on Durandal’s side even after the Destiny Plan is revealed
I also want to call out Lunamaria; somehow the fact that she thinks Shinn just killed her sister seems to bring them closer together instead of driving them apart. Romance does not work that way!