There might not be anything more frustrating for a pop-culture fan to run into characters they love, relate to, connect with, and have a great emotional stake in... and for that character to be completely wasted or shafted by the narrative.
When you spend time getting invested in a story, the main thing you want is a satisfying emotional payoff. You want to see the heroes win, the lovers get together, and the orphanage be saved in the nick of time. You want to have your time and interest rewarded. Most works try and achieve a payoff in order to achieve a certain emotional reaction, not always a happy one, but a reaction nonetheless. After all, what's the point of art, but to make someone feel something, think about something, care about something? Of course, we all prefer to see the characters we care about make it out okay. There's a reason why character death can make people cry buckets- even if we don't know the character all that well. Having a connection means we have an emotional stake in what happens, and that makes it easier to get upset at misfortune and, thus, even more invested in the story.
But what happens when that investment isn't rewarded properly? What if the climax ends on a whimper, rather than a bang, and if the characters we grew to love are left in an unsatisfactory state? It can be outraging to a fan to see a character they like get tossed to the side and left unexplored at the end. Even if they are explored over the course of the story, an ending that doesn't satisfactorily resolve those issues can be just as upsetting.
For some fans, this means taking matters into their own hand, and reinventing the story through fanfiction. As someone who writes her own (often over-ambitious) fanfictions, I can vouch for the need to "fix" story mistakes with my own passion for the subject. When it comes to characters, it's especially tempting to turn the underappreciated into protagonists that get validated at end, or to do a deep-dive into their psyche in a way the original work wouldn't, or even to rewrite the story so the character plays a bigger role in all things. For as much mockery as the medium and its fans receive, fanfiction can be a decent way of getting catharsis, reaching out to other fans, and exploring something you love in a way that satisfies yourself. But, of course, a good fanfic can only go so far if the original work wound up being a disappointment. It'll just end up reminding you that these ideas will never be canon, and that you'll never truly get to see your favorite character be as good as you think they should have been.
For me, there's two characters in particular who I feel had serious wasted potential, despite receiving tons of previous development and being in a good position to shine at the end. Incidentally, these characters are also similar in a lot of other aspects, right down to their hair colors and nationalities- Donna Noble of Doctor Who, and Patricia Williamson of House of Anubis. Being that it's the more famous show of the two, people are more likely to know about Donna, and anyone who does can see where I'm going with this.
Donna had everything going for her by the end of her season. She was funny, brave, smart and heroic, but also a character of great depth and potential. Her arc focused on her deeply-rooted insecurities and troubled homelife, starting to emerge as soon as her spider-alien ex-fiance tore her down for being "stupid" and "dull" in her introduction, and culminating in one of my favorite episodes of the show, "Turn Left", in which we saw the horrifying alternate reality that would've existed if she'd never met the Doctor. For a brief moment in "Journey's End", she saved the entire universe and was even dubbed the most important woman in it... and, then, had all her memories of the Doctor wiped.
See, due to absorbing Time Lord Meta Crisis energy, she became as smart as the Doctor and was able to stop the Daleks; however, this same energy and knowledge was too much for a human, and for her own safety, she was reverted back to the woman she was before and sent back to Earth. And, while the Doctor did call out her mother for never treating her as important, we didn't get any greater resolution to Donna's arc, nor did we ever get to see her return to her character development or even get to enjoy feeling useful for once. Even when she appeared in "End of Time", her role was reduced to fainting during the Master's takeover and then getting married to her new, thankfully non-evil fiance, getting rich thanks to the Doctor giving her a lottery ticket as a wedding gift. And, that was it. No grand return to heroics, no more scene of DoctorDonna, and not even any interaction between her and the Doctor- her best friend and partner in crime for an entire season.
Patricia is a similar case, except for a few important differences. She was one of the main characters of the show since the first season, being the original deuteragonist next to Nina and having an entire subplot about her own half of the mystery. The show was always very subtle about representing her deeper emotional turmoil and backstory, as even when we met her twin sister Piper, their conflict was resolved in a few episodes, and we never got to the bottom of where her insecurities truly stemmed from. She had romantic drama with Eddie, introduced in the second season, and protagonist of the third, but despite this, she wasn't given enough focus to have her own obvious development or to explore the root of her problems. She didn't even play an active role during the finale movie "Touchstone of Ra", instead being there mostly for a running gag and to be jealous about Eddie's friendship with Sophia. Even when Sophia turned out to be the main villain of the movie, Patricia didn't get to be validated or have a role in defeating her, and instead stood by while Eddie sacrificed himself to save everyone else.
Whereas Donna is part of a show with a massively divided fanbase, and thus cannot really be called "popular", Patricia was the fan favorite character in a show that had and still has a dedicated cult following. In both cases, though, fans were turned off by how the characters got treated compared to how much potential they had to work with. Donna will forever be remembered as the companion who lost all of her agency in her last episode, and Patricia will forever be associated with jealousy and her infamous temper.
But both of these characters are and could've been so much more, and that might just be the thing that hurts most of all.
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