The 11 Star Wars Characters Whose Writing Did the Most Damage, and Why Rey Tops Jar Jar for Worst of All

Star Wars gave us Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo. It also gave us some of the most frustrating characters ever put on screen, and I'm counting down the 11 worst in the franchise's history. This is a judgment of the characters and the writing, not the actors playing them. Some of these were annoying, some were completely wasted, and a few did actual damage to the story around them.

11. Ziro the Hutt looks like Jabba redesigned to be louder and less intimidating

Ziro feels like somebody looked at Jabba the Hutt and asked, "What if we made him louder, more irritating, purple, somehow less intimidating, more annoying?" He's a giant purple Hutt covered in tattoos and jewelry who just doesn't land. Every second he's on screen feels like Star Wars wandered into a parody of itself. The problem isn't that Ziro is flamboyant, since Star Wars should have weird characters. The problem is that nearly everything about him is designed to make you want the scene to end.

His plot is a mess in the worst way: he betrays Jabba, works with Count Dooku, gets thrown in prison, escapes with help from Sy Snootles, and then gets killed by her after revealing he kept a diary containing dirt on the entire Hutt Council. That sentence sounds like a rejected soap opera subplot because that's basically what it was. Ziro earns the opening spot because he represents the worst kind of Star Wars comic relief: loud, distracting, and nowhere near as funny as the writers seemed to think he was.

10. Kaz from Star Wars Resistance panics his way through a role built for competence

Kaz was supposedly recruited as a spy despite having the subtlety of a malfunctioning protocol droid falling down a staircase. The show keeps telling us he's a talented pilot, but most of his personality is built around panicking, yelling, falling over, and accidentally surviving situations that should expose him immediately. There's nothing wrong with starting a hero as inexperienced or immature. Ezra Bridger and Ahsoka both began that way. The difference is they stayed interesting enough to carry their stories while they developed.

Resistance had a genuinely good setup: a young New Republic pilot secretly investigating the First Order shortly before The Force Awakens. That should have been an easy win. Instead the show often felt like it was actively fighting against any chance to let Kaz become competent, and he was frequently the least compelling person in his own series. He eventually improves, but by then a lot of viewers had already checked out of the Colossus.

9. Trace and Rafa Martez derail Ahsoka's final Clone Wars arc at the worst possible moment

The final season of The Clone Wars had 12 episodes, and four of them were dedicated to Ahsoka getting dragged into a spice smuggling disaster with two sisters who made the worst possible decision at nearly every opportunity. Trace dumped an entire shipment of spice into space because she panicked. Rafa repeatedly manipulated both of them, trusted obviously dangerous criminals, and then acted shocked when those criminals behaved like criminals.

They were supposed to show Ahsoka how ordinary people viewed the Jedi, and there was real potential in that idea since their parents had died during a Jedi pursuit and received the coldest, most useless condolence speech in galactic history. That could have added weight to Ahsoka's decision to leave the Order. Instead the story stretched a couple episodes of material across four, right before the Siege of Mandalore that everybody had waited years to see. Trace and Rafa weren't evil, they were just trapped inside a painfully slow detour at the worst possible moment.

8. Captain Phasma's chrome armor hid a character who barely existed

Phasma is maybe the single greatest example of incredible character design being used to hide the fact that there was barely a character underneath it. The chrome armor was awesome, and Gwendoline Christie had the presence to make Phasma terrifying. Marketing positioned her like the sequel trilogy's answer to Boba Fett. Then The Force Awakens had her lower Starkiller Base's shields after Finn threatened to throw her in a trash compactor, and in The Last Jedi she returned just long enough to fight Finn, fall through a burning floor, and die again.

Two movies, a mountain of merchandise, and maybe five useful minutes of screen time. The books and comics tried to give her more depth, but a movie character shouldn't require homework to become interesting. Phasma could have been Finn's personal nemesis, a living reminder of the soldiers he left behind. Instead she became shiny background decoration who kept showing up in trailers because the studio knew the armor was cooler than anything she actually did. She ranks this low because she wasn't aggressively terrible, just almost frustratingly wasted.

7. Young Anakin Skywalker's chosen-one checklist buries the tragedy underneath cute catchphrases

Jake Lloyd was a child doing the job George Lucas gave him, and the way people treated that kid was not okay, it was absolutely disgusting. This ranking is about the character as written, not the actor. The tragedy is that The Phantom Menace needed us to fall in love with Anakin and believe this sweet, hopeful child could eventually become Darth Vader. Instead Lucas wrote him like a nine year old chosen one checklist: he built C-3PO, was apparently the only human capable of pod racing, won the Boonta Eve Classic, then accidentally flew into space and destroyed the Trade Federation control ship while yelling "Now this is pod racing."

He doesn't feel naturally gifted, he feels like the universe is bending over backwards to prove how special he is. Add in "are you an angel," multiple "yippee" moments, and a romance setup with Padme that becomes uncomfortable once you remember where it was going, and young Anakin becomes more irritating than emotionally powerful. There are good moments, his goodbye with his mother works, and the fear underneath his excitement matters later. But the writing buried those moments under cute catchphrases and accidental heroics, and half the audience wanted him to stop talking.

6. Reva Sevander's revenge plot overloads a story built around Obi-Wan and Vader

Reva had the pieces of a great Star Wars character. She survived Order 66 as a child, infiltrated the Inquisitors, and spent years getting close enough to Darth Vader to take revenge. On paper that's fantastic. In execution she becomes a character whose plan only works because everybody around her temporarily forgets how anything works. She kidnaps Leia to draw out Obi-Wan despite somehow knowing Bail Organa has a secret connection to him, screams her way through the Inquisitors, survives being stabbed by Vader, and then teleports to Tatooine badly injured to threaten Luke for reasons that barely connect to her original motivation.

The show treats her decision not to murder a child as if it erases the mountain of bodies behind her after years of hunting Jedi and helping the Empire hurt innocent people. Moses Ingram brought real intensity to the role, but the writing kept demanding Reva be the smartest, angriest, most important person in every room without earning it. Her story also pulls attention away from the confrontation the show was built around, Obi-Wan and Vader. Reva wasn't a bad concept, she was an overstuffed character forced into a story that already had its emotional center.

5. Sabine Wren in Ahsoka gets rewarded for ignoring every warning she's given

This is specifically Sabine Wren as written in Ahsoka, because the Sabine from Rebels was a capable Mandalorian, an artist, a weapons expert, and a genuinely interesting character. The live-action series took that character and made almost every important decision she faced revolve around doing the exact thing everyone told her not to do. She steals the star map after Ahsoka explicitly tells her not to, loses it, and later hands it to Baylan Skoll knowing it could lead to the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn because she wants a chance to find Ezra. She knowingly risks an entire galaxy for one friend, and the series never gives that decision the consequences or confrontation it deserved.

Then there's the Force storyline. Rebels already established that Sabine struggled with the darksaber because she was emotionally blocked by guilt over her family on Mandalore. Ahsoka reframed her as someone training to be a Jedi despite showing almost no natural Force ability, until the finale suddenly decided she could pull a lightsaber and launch Ezra across a giant gap. Sabine could have been the grounded Mandalorian counterpart to Ahsoka. Instead the show stripped away much of what made her unique, made her reckless beyond belief, and then rewarded her for it anyway.

4. Vice Admiral Holdo could have prevented most of The Last Jedi by explaining her plan for 30 seconds

Poe Dameron asks what they are doing while the resistance fleet is slowly being destroyed. Valid question. Holdo refuses to tell him anything, insults him, lets morale collapse, and then acts surprised when he organizes a mutiny. People defend this by saying Poe was recently demoted and didn't have clearance, and fine, but when half your surviving crew believes you are calmly waiting for everyone to die, basic leadership requires more than staring mysteriously out a window.

Her secret plan was to evacuate everyone onto unnamed transports and slip down to Crait, but because nobody told Poe, he sent Finn and Rose on a side mission. They trusted DJ, and DJ exposed those transports to the First Order, wiping out nearly the entire resistance. Yes, the hyperspace sacrifice is visually incredible, one of the most beautiful shots in Star Wars. But one great death does not fix a character whose primary purpose was to manufacture conflict through information that sensible people would have just shared.

3. Rose Tico gets buried under speeches after one of The Last Jedi's strongest introductions

Rose begins with one of the strongest introductions in The Last Jedi. Her sister sacrifices herself during the opening battle, Rose is grieving while doing her job, and then she catches Finn trying to escape. There's a real character there, a maintenance worker who idolized the resistance, lost her sister to it, and now has to confront what heroism actually looks like or costs. Then the movie sends her to Canto Bight, where she spends most of the film delivering messages to Finn and the audience about war profiteering, animal cruelty, and saving what we love.

None of those ideas are inherently bad, but the dialogue is so heavy-handed that Rose stops sounding like a person and starts sounding like the director's notes walking around in a resistance jumpsuit. Her worst moment comes when Finn is about to sacrifice himself to save everyone on Crait. Rose crashes into him at full speed, somehow doesn't kill either of them, delivers the line about saving what we love, and kisses him while the First Order cannon blasts open the base behind them. Finn's sacrifice may not have worked, but Rose had no way of knowing that, and from her perspective she stopped him from trying and left everybody else to die. Kelly Marie Tran deserved far better than the abuse she received, and she also deserved a far better character. Rose had a meaningful foundation, but the movie turned her into a collection of speeches, and Rise of Skywalker practically erased her from existence.

2. Jar Jar Binks wrecks the tone of The Phantom Menace every time he's on screen

You knew he was coming somewhere. More than two decades later, it's still impressive how badly Jar Jar wrecks the tone of The Phantom Menace every time he enters the frame. The Trade Federation is invading Naboo, people are being rounded up, the Jedi are being hunted, and right in the middle of it Jar Jar is stepping in poop, getting farted on, numbing his tongue, and accidentally defeating an army by falling over. He was designed to make children laugh, but even as a kid there was a good chance you were wondering why this screaming orange amphibian had hijacked the entire movie.

Then it gets worse. In Attack of the Clones, Padme leaves Jar Jar as her representative in the Senate, and he is instantly manipulated into proposing the emergency powers that allow Palpatine to create the clone army. Jar Jar is indirectly responsible for helping turn the Republic into the Empire. The greatest Sith Lord in galactic history needed decades of planning, political manipulation, and a secret war, but he also needed Jar Jar to stand up and say "Mesa propose." Ahmed Best did exactly what George Lucas asked of him and endured years of cruelty for it, none of which was deserved. But the character himself was so aggressively irritating that he became the symbol of everything people disliked about the prequels. Putting anyone else at number one would have been impossible, until the sequel trilogy happened.

1. Rey Skywalker never gets one coherent answer about who she is across the sequel trilogy

Rey begins with potential, a lone scavenger abandoned on Jakku, surviving inside the wreckage of a war she never experienced, convincing herself her family would return. Daisy Ridley gives her warmth, toughness, and vulnerability. Then the story starts handing her every ability she needs before she has a reason to have it. She pilots the Millennium Falcon through a Star Destroyer wreckage despite apparently never leaving Jakku, resists Kylo Ren's mind probe and immediately turns it back on him, performs a Jedi mind trick roughly five minutes after learning the Force exists, and defeats a trained dark side warrior in her first lightsaber fight. Kylo was injured and emotionally unstable, sure, but the movie still establishes a pattern the trilogy never escapes: Rey struggles briefly, discovers another power, and wins.

The bigger problem is nobody knew who she was. The Force Awakens treats her parents like a massive mystery. The Last Jedi says they were nobodies, which could have forced Rey to build an identity without a famous bloodline. Then Rise of Skywalker panics, makes her Palpatine's granddaughter, gives her Force lightning and the ability to heal fatal wounds, and has her defeat the resurrected Emperor by crossing two lightsabers. Finally she travels to the Lars homestead, buries Luke and Leia's lightsabers, and declares herself Rey Skywalker, despite having barely known Luke, spending much of their time together arguing with him, and being trained primarily by Leia. For some fans that felt symbolic. For others it felt like a slap in the face and the last thing the story handed her without earning it.

Rey is number one because Jar Jar was an irritating supporting character, while Rey was the protagonist of an entire trilogy, and the lack of unified planning for her identity affected everything around her. She wasn't allowed to fail meaningfully, wasn't allowed to grow consistently, and never arrived at one coherent answer about who she was. She became whatever each movie needed her to be. That doesn't make Daisy Ridley a bad actor, the opposite is true for me, I think she's an amazing actor and I like the character Rey. There was enormous potential that was failed by three movies pulling her in different directions.

So which of these did the most damage, is Rey really worse than Jar Jar, and did Sabine or Holdo deserve to rank higher or lower on this list?