5 Most Annoying Game Of Thrones Characters, Ranked

There are, to put it lightly, a lot of characters on “Game of Thrones,” the massively successful HBO adaptation of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels penned by George R.R. Martin … to the point where it’s legitimately hard to keep track. Across the prominent “houses” of Westeros and its seven kingdoms, you have Northern houses like Stark, which includes major characters like Sansa (Sophie Turner), Arya (Maisie Williams), and Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), and the house’s alleged bastard Jon Snow (Kit Harington).

Then there’s the super-powerful and cunning Lannisters, led by patriarch Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance) for most of the series as well as his children, twins Cersei (Lena Headey) and Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and their younger brother Tyrion (Peter Dinklage). Then you’ve got the Targaryens, primarily represented by the house’s surviving heir Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), though there are some other secret Targaryens in the mix (which is, honestly, its own thing entirely).

You get it, though. There are just so many people in “Game of Thrones,” so now let’s ask an important question: which of them are the most irritating to watch on screen? A disclaimer: pretty much none of the show’s main characters, including Arya, Jon, Daenerys, or Tyrion is on this list (and neither is Sansa, even though she’s a little irksome in early seasons, because she grows up very quickly under pressure). From horrible royal bastards to a mother-and-son duo who just had to be on this list to one of the show’s absolute worst eleventh-hour additions, here are the five most annoying “Game of Thrones” characters in the entire series, ranked. Oh, and just in case: spoilers for the whole series follow!

There are a lot of irritating villains on “Game of Thrones,” but some of them, like Iwan Rheon’s deeply sadistic Ramsay Bolton, are too overtly evil to be truly described as “annoying.” Joffrey Baratheon, however, fits the bill pretty well. Played to awful perfection by Jack Gleeson, Joffrey is the heir apparent to his alleged father, King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), but as Stark patriarch Ned (Sean Bean) discovers in Season 1 of the series, Joffrey isn’t Robert’s son; he’s actually the illegitimate bastard borne of a secret incestuous relationship between Jaime and Cersei Lannister, the latter of whom is Robert’s queen.

After Robert dies (in an accident fully orchestrated by Cersei and the rest of the Lannisters), Joffrey takes the throne and promptly beheads Ned for the crime of discovering his true parentage and blowing the whistle on the whole thing. This execution starts what’s known as the War of the Five Kings as Ned’s son Robb (Richard Madden) rallies forces against the Lannisters, and when even the deeply vengeful and evil Cersei thinks the idea of killing Ned for “treason” is a bad one, you know you’re making a stupid call.

Joffrey is, to put it bluntly, a whiny, sadistic, sniveling little coward who isn’t fit to rule a toy castle, let alone King’s Landing and the seven kingdoms of the realm. After he torments his first fiancée Sansa and then ditches her for the beautiful and wealthy Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), all while terrorizing sex workers and servants, it’s an enormous relief when Joffrey is poisoned at his royal wedding to Margaery and chokes to death so violently that he turns completely purple. Joffrey is deeply evil and twisted, but worst of all, he’s just totally annoying.

Carice van Houten is a genuinely stunning performer, but unfortunately for her, the Red Priestess Melisandre was just a completely irksome presence on “Game of Thrones.” Introduced in Season 2 as a loyal and dangerous ally to Stannis Baratheon — Robert’s brother and actually legitimate heir to the Iron Throne played by Stephen Dillane — Melisandre believes in and serves R’hllor, also known as the Lord of Light, and you learn that pretty much immediately because she won’t shut up about the Lord of Light.

Convinced that Stannis is the all-important figure from a prophecy known as “Azor Ahai” who, for lack of a much-longer and thorough explanation, will save the world, Melisandre aligns herself with him. Unfortunately for quite literally everybody, Melisandre is super wrong bout this, and it takes Stannis burning his own daughter Shireen (Kerry Ingram) at the stake as a human sacrifice to R’hllor and Stannis’ wife Selyse (Tara Fitzgerald) dying by her own hand for her to figure this out. Stannis’ armies fall, and Melisandre flees.

Even though she does a few helpful things, like resurrecting Jon Snow after he’s killed in the Season 5 finale and assisting during the arduous and difficult battle of Winterfell against the White Walkers in the eighth and final season, Melisandre is just a total drag. Also, as a reminder, she sacrificed a kid for no reason. Even without Shireen’s blood on her hands, Melisandre is irritating to watch on-screen, rarely moves the plot along unless she’s causing some sort of easily avoidable disaster, and spends a lot of time staring into the middle distance and saying ominous gibberish. No thank you!

Played respectively by Kate Dickie and Lino Facioli, Lysa and Robin Arryn are, without question, two of the absolute worst characters to ever appear on “Game of Thrones.” Some context: Lysa is the widow of the never-seen Jon Arryn, who served as Hand of the King to Robert Baratheon and whose death (and alleged murder) sets off the initial events of the series (specifically, Ned being called to King’s Landing to replace the late Jon as Hand and getting his head eventually chopped off by Joffrey).

In Season 1 of the series, Ned’s wife Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) kidnaps Tyrion after she suspects he tried to kill Bran; she’s wrong, but he gets dragged in front of Lysa, Robin, and their tribunal anyway (Lysa also happens to be Catelyn’s sister). The fact that Robin is breastfeeding at a point where a child should absolutely no longer be breastfeeding is, to be honest, a bad sign right from the jump.

Tyrion ends up calling for a trial by combat and walking away from Lysa and Robin unscathed, but unfortunately for the show’s audience, that isn’t the last we see of this awful mother-son duo. After Sansa escapes King’s Landing in the wake of Joffrey’s murder — aided by her evil “protector” Peter “Littlefinger” Baelish — she seeks safe harbor with Lysa, only for the woman, who marries Littlefinger, to jealously accuse Sansa of trying to steal her new husband. In retribution, Littlefinger murders Lysa, but Robin, another sniveling whiner, remains to annoy another day. It’s a huge, huge relief when, in Season 8, we only see Robin for a second and he doesn’t open his mouth.

There are plenty of disgusting and reprehensible characters on “Game of Thrones,” but Walder Frey is worse than all of them. Played to slimy perfection by David Bradley (known for also playing the creepy, weird Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch in the “Harry Potter” franchise), Walder Frey is a small, petty lord who happens to control the Twins, an area that straddles the Green Fork River; as a result, the location of Walder’s castle means that anyone hoping to cross the river safely has to contend with him and his armies. Because of this, Robb and Catelyn decide to align themselves with Walder Frey, a long-standing ally of House Tully (the house Catelyn was born into before marrying into House Stark), and in return, Walder wants one thing: for one of his many, many daughters to marry Robb.

Robb does something foolish here — he marries a healer named Talisa (Oona Chaplin) for love, who ends up pregnant with a Stark heir before long — but foolish or not, he doesn’t deserve what Walder does next. That would be the infamous “Red Wedding,” where Walder slaughters Robb, Catelyn, Talisa, and a whole host of Stark soldiers and allies in cold blood as the daughter he intended to marry Rob weds Catelyn’s brother Edmure Tully (Tobias Menzies) as a consolation prize. (They even behead Robb’s beloved direwolf Grey Wind, which is just too much.) Later in the series, after she attends face-swapping murder school in the free city of Braavos, Arya returns to Westeros, steals Walder’s face, and kills him and his entire family by poisoning them all, which is genuinely the least she can do after the massacre Walder committed against her family. (She also feeds Walder pie containing his sons’ remains before killing him, in a nice ode to Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”)

There is, truly, no worse character on “Game of Thrones” than Euron freakin’ Greyjoy, played by Pilou Asbæk. The younger brother of King of the Iron Islands Balon Greyjoy (Patrick Malahide) and uncle to Balon’s two legitimate children Theon (Alfie Allen) and Yara (Gemma Whelan), Euron first shows up in Season 6 of “Game of Thrones,” and the first thing we see him do is kill Balon and steal his throne.

This sort of thing is pretty standard when it comes to “Game of Thrones,” but Euron shows his terrible true colors when Yara, Balon’s only true heir at this point — because, by Season 6, Theon has been tortured into oblivion and borderline madness by Ramsay Bolton, who also castrated him, effectively disqualifying Theon from claiming any thrones — challenges him to be the ruler of the Iron Islands. Basically, Euron wins the favor of the residents of the Iron Islands and then makes his nonsense everybody else’s problem once he’s king.

Euron is just … so annoying. All he does is make weird profane jokes about which women he’s going to, uh, “seduce” (that is not a word he uses, ever), growl at everybody, wear too much eyeliner, and attempt to “romance” Cersei Lannister in the seventh and eighth seasons of the show. The only purpose Euron serves is to irritate the hell out of audiences, and even his death is annoying. After a knife fight with Jaime near the docks of King’s Landing, Euron basically looks into the camera and says he’s the guy who finally killed Jaime Lannister, the legendary knight; problem is, that’s not even true (Jaime dies shortly thereafter, but it’s not because of Euron). Euron is … the worst, and there’s no getting around that. (Apologies, Mr. Asbæk.)

“Game of Thrones” is streaming on HBO Max now.