Stories that annoyed you more than they should have

[EricMontreal22]

I love Lorraine Broderick. And some of her more out there stories, I am pretty sure were suggested by networks (Mrs Clause, which at least gave us some really fun performances, the zombie stuff)but I have no idea why anyone thought any of the Tanner Jordan story was good for the show or the characters--unless it was just ABC's fetish to have another Aussie hunk on their show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiH6gfUJVSs

I always had a soft spot for Powell--so that's prob my bias, but I hated this whole storyline.

[EricMontreal22]

This is one of the stories I found most offensive during Higley's run. Childhood sexual abuse is something I know about, and I think it's important to bring up and could be a powerful soap story. Having it told as Vicki's alter, who had been shown in past storylines to be very aware of how abuse affects children, taking off with nobody seeming to realize how crazy she was, to bars where she allowed her daughter to be filmed in kiddie porn.... Jesus. And then to have scenes of her and Clint watching those videos?

[Melroser]

Shane's marrow transplant on OL made me absolutely hate Rex/Gigi for the rest of their run.

I also never liked the character of Shane on AW with Robert Kelker Kelly. I think we were supposed to like him in the Shane/Vicky/Jake triangle but I found him sleazy. It didn't help that they changed his back story several times and then tried to say he had Ryan's eyes....literally.

[cassadine1991]

Not only that but all throughout Jessica's childhood we never saw that happen at all, didn't see always have babysitters and Niki never harmed Jess... why didn't they just have little Megan's death be the cause of her DID

[ellabelle]

The un-abortion was so massively offensive to me as a pro-choice woman, and it was such an enormous violation of Erica's bodily integrity, which upset me even further because she was a rape survivor. If they wanted to bring Jeff Martin back to town, they could have brought him back and had him fall for Erica without the absurdity of an unabortion. Heck, they could have had Jeff and Erica talk about how she'd been raped at 14 and been forced to bear that child against her will, and retcon a bit and have her talk about how that affected her decision to terminate the pregnancy conceived with Jeff. Jeff still could have worked as a vehicle to break up Jack and Erica, but without the awfulness of the unabortion. There were so many better ways to give Erica a son.

I quit watching for a while during the Jonathan Kinder storyline when they had a drugged up Erica have sex with Jonathan. She literally had no clue who she was with - she thought it was Dimitri and was so out of it that she didn't realize it was Jonathan until after the fact. I could have dealt with that, but it was played off as "Erica is a drug addict, and therefore this is her fault" instead of "Jonathan Kinder supplied a patient with drugs and then raped her while she was under the influence." That it wasn't played as rape really bothered me. And yes, I understand that they'd just been through the whole rape thing a few years earlier with Kendall being Erica's daughter, but I just found it really offensive, especially when Dimitri was shaking Erica and screaming at her for what she'd done and telling her that it wasn't the pills, it was her fault.

The other Erica story that bugged me was the whole mess with Maria's baby. I was massively bitter about Erica's miscarriage, especially when it looked to everyone that Maria would get to have Dimitri's baby instead. Erica losing the baby was bad enough. Dimitri saying "oh we'll just adopt" after ONE miscarriage was massively offensive. I understand Erica's motivation in holding onto Maria's baby - Dimitri saying the baby was better off dead and Maria just standing there and not punching him in the balls for being a total jackass and Erica thinking the baby would grow up unloved by her father as she had - but it was still a crap story. Erica knew what it was like to have someone judge you a bad parent and take your child away, and it felt so massively out of character for her.

[ellabelle]

Also, I hated the Satin Slayer storyline and Zarf/Zoey. Satin Slayer felt like one giant prop up for Zach + writers cleaning house with the cast and trying (and failing) to tie it to one decent storyline. The whole hiding Babe in the casino and pretending she was dead bit was awful. Killing off Simone broke my heart because she was such a great character.

Zarf/Zoey was just a hot mess from start to finish. Bianca is attracted to a male-to-female transexual rock start-turned-whatever he/she was at Fusion who is not remotely her type (Lena, Maggie)? The actor did the best he could with that mess, but it was awful. It was like someone at AMC sat down and said, "You know, we got a lot of good press and attention for having a lesbian character. Let's have a transsexual too!" And then everyone was all, "Oh yeah, sure!" It could have been a compelling story IF they'd had an existing character who was already on the canvas struggle with his or her sexual identity and decide to live openly as the other gender. I had no reason to care about Zarf/Zoey. There was no emotional connection there. I just found myself annoyed by him/her, and the teachable moments in the show felt incredibly forced.

[greens_dupres]

This was the only soap scene I have ever turned off because I was uncomfortable/disgusted by it. It was not handled with an iota of sensitivity and it did not fit with the happy Jessica childhood that we saw play out where she was constantly surrounded by Clint, her brothers, Cord, Tina, Asa, Renee etc- there way no way she was hanging out in bars with Niki. If they wanted to give her DID, they should have played up that she started showing signs of having emotional issues when her baby died. The whole sexual abuse angle was absolutely offensive and unnecessary.

[electrorat]

Days in the mid-late 90's with what I not so affectionately refer to as "The Eileen Davidson Extravaganza". I liked Kristen when she appeared in '93. Liked her a little less when she lost her mind, though I admit that ED did a good job with it. Susan made me laugh at times. Had it stayed at just the two, I could have handled it. It was when Sister Mary Moira, Penelope and Tommy(?) were added in and it was almost all ED all the time, that I lost patience. Couple that with Fake Jenn & Fake Jack running around and the only thing I watched on Days for quite some time was Sami/Lucas/Austin/Carrie et al.

My dislike of ED grew so great that it took me a decade to be able to watch her on Y&R without hitting ffd. Needless to say that when her return to Days last year was announced, I was not a happy camper. Couple that with the loathing I feel for EJ, Daniel, ejami etc. and I feel no overwhelming need to tune into Days.

[DRW50]

Kinder raped Erica? I was never paying close enough attention to the story. I thought he made her think she'd had sex (not that this is any better). Just nasty. And Broderick used the same story six months later with Tanner Jordan and Hayley.

[ellabelle]

IIRC, they had sex, and she was so out of it that she thought it was Dimitri on top of her, and she didn't realize otherwise until later. He also stripped and got into bed with her when she was passed out cold because he knew Dimitri would find them and it would look like they were having an affair.

ETA: went back and checked the recaps, and yes, he injected her with a drug, and they had sex, during which she was talking to him as if he was Dimitri. When she saw the syringe on the nightstand afterward, she realized what had happened, and she freaked out and went looking for Dimitri. She was still under the influence when she crashed her car into Maria's while headed to the hunting lodge.

[DRW50]

The show never went into enough exploration of how much Erica suffered that year. When she took Maria's baby there was a lot of talk about how this was done so Erica would learn a lesson, and then some fans said oh that's just typical Erica, etc. but it was in large part a psychotic break for all the hell she'd gone through. It's a shame this was overlooked.

[ellabelle]

YES. The early-to-mid 90s were absolute hell for Erica: being forced to relive her rape and confront her rapist, dealing with pyschotic Kendall, Dimitri's stabbing and the trial, Mona's death, her fall, her drug addiction, the awful things Kinder did to her, the damage the addiction did to her relationship with Bianca. She FINALLY got her life back together, was engaged to Dimitri again and was pregnant with a baby she desperately wanted, only to lose it and then find out that her sister-in-law was the one having Dimitri's baby. And Dimitri's response to Erica's miscarriage was a bland "well, we can just adopt." Then she was accused of not doing everything possible to save Maria's baby when her car went over the bridge, and when she did find the baby and get her away from Esther, the first thing she did was attempt to bring her home, only to hear Dimitri tell Maria the baby's 'death' was for the best! I can absolutely see why she had a psychotic break and thought she was doing the right thing by taking Sonya/Maddie home with her. It was brought up as a defense in the kidnapping trial, that she had a severe episode of postpartum depression after the miscarriage, etc., but I felt like they did a poor job of emphasizing what a violation she suffered at the hands of Jonathan Kinder and how everything sort of snowballed on her until she was just lost emotionally.

[greens_dupres]

I didn't think taking Maria's baby was at all typical Erica. I really liked the initial beats of that story especially Erica deciding to return the baby until she misheard a conversation where Dimitri told Maria they were better off without the baby. But then it became bad Erica v St. Maria

[Susan Hunter]

Days - Sami/Eric and John

I think that relationship was sort of glossed over. I get why it made better story for Sami to be TeamRoman, but I think it was a total whitewashing of the fact that John raised Sami and Eric. Roman 'died' when they were babies, Why would they be so devoted to a stranger?

[JtSmarts]

Pretty much every story with EJ Dimera since December 2006. I hate EVERYTHING about that character and how he has taken over the canvas, and I really can't get past it.