Character Connection: Amy

Don’t you just love larger-than-life characters? The ones who jump off the page and grab you? Whether you love them or hate them, you can’t be indifferent to them.

I would love to know about the characters who just won’t leave you! Most of you will probably post about how much you love (or loathe) each character, but this is a great place for the more creative ones among you to let go and have fun! Write yourself into a scene with Anne and Diana. Write a love poem in elvish for Aragorn. Draw a picture of Harry obliterating Voldemort. The possibilities are endless.

Be sure to post the book’s title and author, and be very careful not to give away spoilers while talking about how much you love your characters.

Mr. Linky will be posted here on The Introverted Reader every Thursday.

I had a rough day at work, so I’m going to take it out on a character I hate.

Her name is Amy and you can find her in Scott Smith’s The Ruins. She’s one of a group of young Americans on vacation in Mexico who find themselves trapped in a horrific situation in the jungle.

Okay, it’s horror. Horror can sometimes rely on stock characters, and that’s pretty much what Amy was. The little individual personality she had left me wanting to smack her, wring her neck, you name it.

She’s the girl who causes the whole problem in the first place but then blames everyone else. She falls apart under the stress of the situation. She steals rations when no one is looking, thinking that her need is greater than everyone else’s. She’s willing to pick a fight with anyone and everyone. If someone comes up with some sort of idea or solution to try, she’s the first to shoot it down and ridicule them for thinking that an idea like that could ever work. It’s been a while since I read this, but I want to say that she even manages to stir up some old love triangle crap.

But then she swings around from being angry to being hopeless. She plays the helpless female to the nth degree, and that’s insulting to thinking women everywhere.  She runs around like Chicken Little, waving her hands helplessly in the air and crying “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” Well, in her case, it’s more like, “I’m too young and pretty to die! Waaaahhhh! Waaaahhhh! Waaaaaahhh!” That’s her in the picture, clutching her head and screaming while her bff is bleeding.  Yeah.  Real constructive stuff there, Amy.

This book irritated me a lot in general, but Amy in particular was just horrible. There was a movie by the same name, and I can imagine that it was actually decent, but reading this character in a book just put me in a little too close proximity to her for entirely too long.

Now that that’s out of my system….

Who did you connect with this week? Link your post on Mr. Linky, then be sure to go check out the other Character Connections!

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