1. Dorian Gray from The Pictures of Dorian Gray. He’s obsessed with his looks and truly believes that beauty and sensual pleasure are basically the only point of life, so you can’t exactly imagine this guy being there for you when you’re on your period and just consumed multiple packets of Oreos.
2. Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre. Yeah, yeah, Jane and Rochester have a beautiful love story, if you ignore the part where he lies about being previously married and hiding his wife in the attic of his house. His solution when she *shocker* finds out? Asking her to live in France with him even though they can’t get married. Jane, girl. You deserve better.
3. Tyler Durden from Fight Club. If his masturbatory talk of anarchy isn’t enough to woo you, consider how he sleeps with Marla but treats her like trash. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t realise he’s Tyler Durden the whole time — the guy is still a dick and represents the worst of 4-Chan bros.
4. Nino Sarratore from My Brilliant Friend. He’s obsessed with sounding smart all the time and turns mansplaining into an art form, always turning any and all academic debates into mostly a monologue about his own thoughts. He seems sensitive and artistic but is so unfaithful and emotionally cruel to women that he has his own Tumblr page dedicated to just how terrible he is (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT, obvi).
5. George Wickham from Pride and Prejudice. He flirts with Lizzie, then runs off with her younger sister without actually intending to marry her (which would prove to be a huge scandal, if Mr. Darcy didn’t pay off all his debts in exchange for the two marrying). He continues to mooch off Darcy and the Bennets for money and career advancement, though to anyone who doesn’t know him, he seems perfectly charismatic and romantic. The OG scrub.
6. Daniel from Bridget Jones’s Diary. As this book was inspired by Pride and Prejudice, Daniel is a reimagined, contemporarily awful Wickham. Equally charming, he assumes the role of Bridget’s boyfriend and spends every weekend with her, only to have her eventually find an American woman sunbathing on his terrace. BOY, BYE.
7. Henry Crawford from Mansfield Park. Another Jane Austen fuckboy, this piece of work tries to get Fanny (who he wouldn’t initially consider marrying due to her status) to fall in love with him, just for funsies. After she refuses him and he does fall for her for real, he keeps trying for a while, until he decides to sleep with a married woman and not marry her when her husband leaves her. Bullet dodged, Fanny. Bullet dodged.
8. Yunior from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Yunior talks about sex all the time in general, cheats on his girlfriend (despite being in love with her), and always rags on his girlfriend’s brother for being a virgin who’s into comic books. Anyone who assigns that much importance to sex is def in the fuckboy zone.
9. Hamlet from Hamlet. Aside from the fact that he kills Ophelia’s dad (NBD), he’s also so unnecessarily callous to her pretty much constantly, including the time he blows up and yells at her for being immodest. Yikes.
10. Jude Greene from Sula. He’s married to Nel for a long time and then suddenly has an affair with Sula the moment she comes back to town, not even bothering to go through the crippling self-doubt of pre-infidelity. He just goes for it! And, to top it all off, leaves Nel as a result.
11. Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. He’s a super-wealthy, super-arrogant Yale jock who has an affair with Myrtle but is enough of a hypocrite to fault Daisy for loving Gatsby. Enough said.
12. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Sure, he’s gone through some stuff re: the whole not being able to marry the woman he loves because of his status thing, but marrying a woman and then forcing their son to marry Cathy’s daughter purely for the sake of revenge is a very elaborate fuckboy move.
13. Toru Watanabe from Norwegian Wood. After his best friend commits suicide, he develops a romantic attachment to his girlfriend, Naoko. But because she is a complicated person who is also grieving the loss of her boyfriend, he starts dating the “opposite” of her — Midori, a bubbly girl from his college. This is a guy who would rather emotionally cheat left and right instead of *gasp* take a breather and just be on his own for a while.
14. James Potter from Harry Potter. OK, he really did only have eyes for Lily, but it took him years to get her to like him because he was such an enormous dick to everyone around him, between hexing random students just because and relentlessly bullying Snape. People don’t change that much.
15. Christian Grey and Edward Cullen from Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight. Grouped together because they are literally the same person (as Fifty Shades originated as Twilight fan fiction). They are both the same boringly broody, possessive dickheads that they don't even deserve their own sections.
16. Dracula from Dracula. This guy will literally drain the life out of you. If him sucking Mina’s blood and controlling her with a curse isn’t the most apt metaphor for that guy who keeps reeling you in with 1 a.m. “I miss you” texts, I don’t know what is.
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