The Millstone / Literature

The Millstone in Literature.

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• In Animorphs, it is implied that the main thing holding the Yeerk invasion back is actually Visser 3, thanks to his extreme ego, lack of knowledge about Earth, and tendency to kill anyone who brings him bad news. On several occasions, mooks discovered the Animorphs' secret but deliberately avoided reporting it out of fear of getting eaten. That said, he's still an incredibly dangerous enemy and for the majority of the series the Animorphs are having to repeatedly risk their lives foiling his plans. It's just implied that if Visser 1 had been in charge of the invasion instead, they wouldn't have had a prayer of stopping the Yeerks.
• Talked about in Around the World in Eighty Days where Aouda fears she was Fogg's Millstone delaying him on his trip so he missed the deadline. However, Fogg firmly denies she was any problem and any concerns she may still have are dispelled by the fact that she is then instrumental instead in saving the day.
• The Stephen King novella The Body, later adapted into the film Stand by Me, has the wimpy kid, Vern. He's got no useful skills to help the kids find the body, and seems to be The Friend Nobody Likes among the four boys. On the way, while crossing a railroad bridge high over a river, Vern nearly gets himself and Gordie killed because his fear of heights leads to a staunch refusal to get up and run across the bridge.
  Vern: I'm gonna fall!
  Gordie: We're gonna die!
• In The Darksword Trilogy, Lovable Traitor Simkin cheerfully ruins his companions' plans at every opportunity. The other heroes scream at Joram to Just Eat Gilligan already, but Joram insists in violation of all reason and common sense on trusting Simkin. In the end, Joram's faith proves to have been the right choice.
• Manny Heffley in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series is often shown screwing things up for Greg and sometimes even the entire family across the entire series. This came to a head in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul where he's a hindrance to the family's vacation plans and road trip at many points throughout the book. (Forcing the family to skip several stops they wanted to make because he throws a tantrum whenever his naps are interrupted, constantly trying to run away to find a pig they had won at a fair and were forced to give up, etc.) It isn't until the end of the book that he finally manages to vindicate himself by getting the family out of trouble by way of his surprisingly fluent Spanish...even if it was just to go back to a petting zoo where the Heffleys had left the aforementioned pig.
• In George R.R. Martin's first novel, Dying of the Light, this role could actually be used to describe the protagonist at best, or almost all of the named characters at worst. The plot is largely driven by the main characters inadvertently making things worse for everyone around them as well as themselves, with first place going to the Protagonist, and second place going to his love interest whose jaw-droppingly bad lack of communication sets up their backstory and prolongs the plot. It also doesn't help that there's a character that seems to be an early version of Littlefinger pulling some strings, but at least he's trying to cause issues.
• The titular Don Quixote is a Mad Dreamer who Thinks Like a Romance Novel; he's read a ton of Chivalric Romance books, and is convinced that the world works that way. However, when he tries to live the life of a Knight Errant, he just makes any situation he inserts himself into even worse. He steals a barber's basin because he's convinced it's some kind of magical helmet, he attacks people bringing someone's corpse home because he thinks they killed the guy, and inserts himself into a messy marriage situation with Dorothea and Don Fernando, only to nearly get a bunch of people killed and ruin an entire inn's supply of red wine. It gets to the point that several people encourage Don Quixote's behavior because they think it's funny to watch him fail.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: Benji's over-eagerness combined with his incompetence cause a great deal of trouble. It's his fault that Final Shield was destroyed and its city was invaded.
• In The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater is more of a hindrance than a help to his friends throughout the journey to Fillory, not helped by the fact that he's determined to play the hero — despite having next to no instinct for fighting or even doing the right thing. He ends up as the last of the team to be of any use in battle, the most determined to spur them on into progressively more dangerous stakes, and the one to use the magical horn - not only summoning the Beast into their midst, but giving the bastard a quick route to his real goal. If Alice hadn't stepped up, Quentin's blunder would have gotten everyone killed. It ends up costing Alice her humanity and Penny his hands.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has so many characters in it, it's unsurprising to find a few Millstones in the lot; some straighter than others.
  • Joffrey "Baratheon" is as completely evil as a 13-year-old Royal Brat can be... but this is NOT his family's biggest problem. It's his utter stupidity and cluelessness which first causes a war and then slams constant thorns into the Lannisters' politics. Several times. All of his family members around him, who vary in terms of both intelligence and conscience themselves, spend half of their energy trying to knock if not morality, exactly, then at least some sense of Pragmatic Villainy into him; to no avail. In fact, Joffrey's very life ends because some people finally decide that working around him is simply impossible.
  • Cersei picks up where her son left off, and it becomes perfectly clear where he got it from in the first place. While Joffrey at least had Tywin and Tyrion attempting to run interference, Cersei eventually doesn't have anyone keeping her (and her alcoholism) in check. Her tendency to fill her council with Yes Men and her petty feud with her daughter-in-law Margaery Tyrell end up delivering control of King's Landing to armed zealots who lock her up in a cell and the creation of a brand new pirate fleet (consisting of ships she bankrupt the Seven Kingdoms to build). Even Littlefinger is shocked by her incompetence. He fully expected her to run the Seven Kingdoms into the ground, true (and planned around it)... but, not that quickly. He's had to speed things up on the fly.
  • Merrett "Muttonhead" Frey is also a wonderful example: almost any venture he's touched hasn't gone well, dating right back to being a young teen (he once tried to bully the Squire, Jaime Lannister — which went as well as you'd expect). As is Ryman Frey... given that he is one of the heirs to the House, it's almost a relief for readers to learn that the vastly more competent and ruthless Black Walder is widely considered by the other Freys as being likely out to kill him (and others) to gain the lordship. Politically smooth and savvy the gormless, stubborn jackass isn't (he's smart enough in his own way, just not a socially acceptable soul by both Westerosi and Freyish standards). Which explains why no other Freys are moving to defend him against Black Walder and/or anybody else within or outside the family.
  • Subverted/deconstructed ones come in the shapes of Lord Edmure Tully and Lancel Lannister: others treat them with varying degrees of contempt, having pre-judged them to be Millstones. Which becomes clear is the actual root cause of problems they get blamed for when they are put in situations they just couldn't win even if there were cheat codes available. Blaming them for not acting on things they were not aware of or not thinking of things they couldn't know about or going to people they shouldn't because you never told them important information because you decided they were too dumb to fully trust, yet you still used them to do vitally important things...? Who is actually the Millstone, here?
  • The absolute and undisputed star of the Millstones, however, is a Big Fancy Castle rather than a person: Harrenhal. Ever since its fall to the Targaryens, it is reputed to curse the person who commands it and any family that holds it for long. While there appears to be something to this, even if this is just legend, the reputation is enough for cautious men to hand it off as soon as they possibly can. Additionally, being in a fairly strategic location means others will try to bring the current commander to ruin in wartime, so there's that, too. Almost every family and military commander given the castle has gone — often in remarkably over-the-top, horrific ways, even by Westerosi standards. Those that haven't completely died out have become, at best, poor, divested, bit-part players in the Game as a direct result of trying to run the best-used-as-a-quarry-of-ready-dressed-stonework as a going concern.
    • The current lord of Harrenhal is Littlefinger: he owns it, but is smart enough to neither stay near it, nor waste resources refurbishing it until he has the gold to tear it down. He is currently staying in the Vale, while letting other people take the immediate fallout.
  • Fire & Blood has Aemond "One-Eye" Targaryen, for the Green faction during the Dance of the Dragons, being directly responsible for the outbreak of open war when he kills Lucerys Velaryon, a teenaged ambassador, in revenge for the incident that cost him his eye. He spends much of the war not being much help to his side, either militarily or because he's chasing after his uncle Daemon, who exploits this to keep Aemond away from places he and his dragon could be useful. Much as his mother and brother loved him, they probably did breath a sigh of relief when Aemond bought it, just because he wouldn't be around to screw things up for them any further.
  • Meanwhile, the Blacks have Lord Bartimos Celtigar and Mysaria. Between the two of them, with Celtigar's idiotic taxes and Mysaria's pointless cruelty, they manage to completely nuke any support Rhaenyra might've had among the lords and smallfolk.
• The Troublemaker: The last seven ships Sneat served on are now the seven lowest rated ships ships in the fleet. At least one of them was once one of the most popular ships in the fleet but had the entire crew go into debt over late deliveries within a couple of months of hiring Sneat as a cargo-master.
• The Twelve Chairs: Ippolit Matveyevich "Kisa" Vorobyaninov first is an employer to his Magnificent Bastard companion Ostap Bender, then becomes The Load... and then, when they almost buy the titular jewel-stuffed MacGuffin, not only does Kisa get drunk and spend all the cash, he completely screws any possibility of them buying the chairs ever and causes the chairs to be sold separately. Throughout the story, he degrades morally and ends up killing Ostap in his sleep (luckily, he got better) right before going for the final chair, only to discover that the treasure was already found and taken away due to stupidity.

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