Stiltzkin

Does anyone know of any good examples of book/stories/movies/shows whatever where the protagonist antagonizes (makes worse) his/her predicament, and where a side character or side characters are actually the ones working harder than the protaginst him/herself to fix the protagonist's situation? My example would be <u>The Star Beast</u> where John Thomas Stuart makes his trouble worse by running away from the authorities when his pet Lummox gets into a heap of trouble, and then we have Mr. Kiku who works his ass off to save John Thomas Stuart from pissing off an alien race of super-intelligent beings with 8 appendages. Whew, long sentence ^^. I'm writing an essay on this book because I love it, but I want to cite some other examples of this sort of thing happening. Thanks!

__________________
The most important thing in this world is love.