5 Worst Harry Potter Characters, Ranked

The Harry Potter books and movies feature a colorful cast of characters, many of whom are well-developed and vivid. However, given the scope of J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, there are bound to be some personalities that come out a little underbaked. They aren’t necessarily the most evil or annoying, and a few of them are even fan-favorites. Yet they all have one thing in common: they never quite reached their full potential. 

A great character is multidimensional and nuanced with clear motivations. They reveal layers of themselves as the story progresses and usually serve a greater purpose in the plot, structure, or protagonist arc. For example, Severus Snape is famously one of the most well-written characters in the series as he creates intrigue and instills fear before he’s ultimately revealed to be a hero driven by his love for Lily. However, not every character can be a Snape, or a Dumbledore, or a Neville, or even a Harry, and we’ve pored over the pages to sniff out the five worst. 

5) Cho Chang

Cho Chang is the perfect example of a character with immense untapped potential. In her earliest appearances in the Prisoner of Azkaban book, Cho is a confident and popular Ravenclaw Seeker. In the fourth, she’s supposedly the apple of Harry’s eye, though we get so little time with her it’s hard to understand why he’s so obsessed. By Order of the Phoenix, she’s reduced to little more than a grieving love interest whose scenes fall flat. Her entire arc pivots around Cedric’s death, Harry’s fumbling courtship, and a breakdown that leads to her exiting the story altogether.

To make matters worse, her name, which is infamously a mash-up of Chinese and Korean surnames, is bad even by 90s standards. There’s no exploration of her culture, her background, or even her ideals, despite her being the only notable East Asian character in the series. Cho Chang could’ve been a layered foil to Hermione or Ginny, a brilliant witch grappling with grief. Instead, she’s reduced to a device for Harry’s first heartbreak.

4) Mad-Eye Moody

Admittedly, Mad-Eye Moody is one of the most iconic figures in the series, but as fun as he is to hang out with in Goblet of Fire, he’s a bit of a disaster narratively speaking. The biggest problem is that most of what we know and love about him actually comes from his impersonator, Barty Crouch Jr. The “Moody” we spend the most time with is ultimately revealed to be a Death Eater in disguise. So do we even know Moody at all?

What’s frustrating is that his personality doesn’t change much once the real Moody returns. It feels almost as if Rowling wanted to have her cake and eat it too, by developing Moody’s character in Book 4, then revealing him not to be Moody at all. It’s difficult to believe that Crouch is really that fantastic of an actor. So what we ultimately get is Harry interacting with Fake Moody for an entire year, then barely exchanging a conversation with the real one before he’s killed off in Deathly Hallows. Even his iconic catchphrase, “constant vigilance,” which is quoted by Hermione after his death, is actually attributed to his imposter. 

3) Tonks

Nymphadora Tonks was introduced in Order of the Phoenix as a Metamorphmagus Auror with neon hair serving as a mood ring. Fans immediately loved her as the funny and fiery new kid on the block. Then Book 6 came out, and suddenly she seemed to be a shell of her former self, hopelessly pining after Remus Lupin. This shift wouldn’t be a problem if her love for Lupin were layered in with her other traits, but she seems to get lost entirely. Her powers as a Metamorphmagus are rarely shown or utilized. Instead of fleshing her out as an individual, Rowling paired her with an older character and rushed them into an equally underdeveloped romance and family arc.

Tonks deserved better than being an emotional footnote to Lupin’s guilt. Her death in the Battle of Hogwarts, should have been as devastating as Fred Weasley’s for all her dedication to the cause, but without proper development, it feels like a cheap kill. It’s mostly depressing because she dies before getting the chance to come fully alive on the page. 

2) Crabbe & Goyle

Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle are one character, split into two bodies. They’re essentially interchangeable henchmen that are mostly described in the books as “flanking” either side of Draco Malfoy. For six and a half books, they’re essentially there for jokes about overeating and low IQ. To be fair, most fictional worlds have NPCs to fill out the environment, but the biggest issue comes with their sudden, rushed development in Deathly Hallows, when Crabbe tries to murder Hermione in the Room of Requirement using Fiendfyre. Then, almost immediately, he dies by his own spell.

By Half-Blood Prince, Draco Malfoy is shaken by his family’s entanglement with Voldemort, but we get virtually zero inner conflict for either Crabbe or Goyle. In Book 7, they suddenly abandon their loyalties and have all this agency that wasn’t earned or properly motivated in the story. They were never previously shown to be ambitious or particularly evil, so where did the sudden thirst for blood come from? Not to mention, they are so interchangeable that the films killed off Goyle instead of Crabbe, and it makes virtually no difference. 

1) Peter Pettigrew

Peter Pettigrew is, by far, the most frustrating character in the entire series because of how epic his initial introduction is. Revealed to be hiding out as Ron’s pet rat while Sirius takes the fall for betraying the Potter family, his Prisoner of Azkaban appearance is complex, and arguably one of the best in the series. In Book 4, he is Lord Voldemort’s right-hand man and key resurrector. After that, his story seems to lose its intrigue and sort of peter out. For one, we never really understand why he betrayed the Potters besides fear for his life; after all, he was under the protection of Dumbledore and other powerful good wizards of the time. If he’s simply spineless and weak, with wavering loyalty, then it’s a little hard to believe he would be chosen as Voldemort’s number one.

His brief appearances in the final books do little to deepen his character. We don’t get any real backstory, and in Deathly Hallows, he dies from his own enchanted hand after hesitating to kill Harry. His characterization is inconsistent, and his true motivations never quite crystallize, which is infuriating because he is one of the most consequential characters in Harry’s story. Without deeper character development, he ends up feeling more like a plot device than a real human being.

Which Harry Potter character do you think is the worst? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

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