User blog comment:Berryleaf/Zoey: A Bad Character or Just Poorly Written??/@comment-1037137-20151129214317

A large part of why Zoey sucks is because of Mike, yes. They put so much focus exclusively on their relationship drama that everything else took a back seat with them, what little else there was.

But the big reason why Zoey sucks is because they never established her as her own character. A lot of what we know about her and her motivations are boring, and she does not live up to the Indie Chick label at all. That could've at least helped in lending her some funny quirks, but they didn't give her much that made her anything interesting to watch. Sure she's nice, but that's literally all there is to her. You need more than that to work with. She's clearly designed to be one of the heroes but is one of the least compelling in that role, and one of the most ineffective as clearly demonstrated by how she was written in TDAS. Nobody wants to hear a character go on and on about her boyfriend and only her boyfriend and nothing else, that obviously has to get old fast. And her lack of interaction with anyone outside of Mike and Cameron (And I guess Gwen now) doesn't help in introducing anything new about her personality. And her interactions with Dakota and Dawn ended up going nowhere, and her interactions with Scott or Anne Maria fell out of focus by TDAS.

Mike has served as the major barrier to anything new being introduced of her character, and to see that plot repeated across two seasons is ridiculous. But even at that they had plenty of chances to give Zoey something else to work with but no effort at that was made. Seemed like they were too content to limit her to her Mike drama either because they couldn't think of anything else or because they figured that was "enough". At least in the other relationship dramas, those involved were already established as their own characters and remain popular or at least interesting characters within and outside those dramas. But this? Not the case here. They started off these two on their lovesick drama and they have been carried almost exclusively by that ever since. How much did we really learn about Zoey as a person or her history in the few times where Mike was not a factor? Too many of her interactions came back to Mike or became irrelevant after a brief time.

And I haven't even touched on her lack of intelligence, in ROTI she was naive, in TDAS she was just plain stupid. And how even in the face of such stupidity she somehow was the best playing contestant in TDAS. How is that possible? Perhaps another reason she sucks is because the suspension of disbelief was tested beyond its limit by that.

Mike's the big obstacle to why Zoey comes up so short as a character, but the big problem is she was given virtually nothing else outside of that even as they played her up as the big damn hero the longer she stayed. I doubt people appreciated that when they quickly found they were not the least bit enthralled by her.