Buttercup

Buttercup is the household cat of the Everdeen family in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games novels, first published in 2008. Narrator Katniss makes no secret of her feelings on their first meeting: she describes him as an ugly, muddy-yellow tomcat with a squashed-in face, admits she tried to drown him as a kitten, and maintains a running mutual hostility with him throughout the series. He belongs, heart and soul, to her gentle younger sister Prim, and tolerates Katniss only as the person who keeps the food coming.

Despite that prickly introduction, Buttercup survives the war that consumes the trilogy, and it is precisely his ordinariness — an ugly, bad-tempered, entirely un-heroic cat — that makes his role in the ending so affecting. In the final book, his return to a grieving Katniss becomes the trigger for one of the saga's most emotionally raw scenes, as the two of them, who never liked each other, share their loss over the sister they both loved.

Because of that ending, Buttercup is often held up as an example of how a minor animal character can carry disproportionate emotional weight. In the blockbuster film adaptations he was played by more than one real cat, and readers who spent three books being told how unlikeable he was tend to remember him with startling fondness.