Oooh let’s see here, I guess I’m going to have to follow the same path that I did when choosing my least favorite female character – i.e., I’m going to choose the character that I hate the most, not the one whose characterization I dislike.
To be honest, there are no male characters that immediately pop into mind as being quite so despicable as, say Umbridge, but there is one who consistently made me grind my teeth every time he appeared in the books: Zacharias Smith.
Oh, sure, he was part of the DA, but he sure as hell didn’t display any sense of common purpose with the other students in it, and it was obvious that he never really bought into the deeper meaning behind it. He came to the first meeting of the DA simply to interrogate Harry about the return of Voldemort, acting completely oblivious to the sensitivity of the issue. During his Quidditch match commentary, he heckles the Gryffindor team despite working closely with most of its members during the DA meetings. But none of those things really serve to do anything other than annoy me – the thing that pushed me over the edge was the moment when Smith shoved his way past younger students in order to reach the evacuation point prior to the Battle of Hogwarts. Maybe it was just the tense anxiety of the scene, but it made me so furious because every other member of the DA remained behind to fight (to the death in many cases), and it’s obvious that Smith held no real convictions beyond saving his own ass. When the going got tough, he decided to turn tail and run (throwing others into danger’s path in the meantime). Ugh. Sure, he’s not evil – he’s no Voldemort, he’s not even comparable to the Hallows version of Crabbe – but he is a miserable, snarky, rude, self-interested lowlife, and that’s enough to make me despise him more every time the git shows his face.
