Writing Spoiled Characters

'As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves and haven't got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don't you know. I mean to say, ever since then I've been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.'--P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves
Fiction is full of characters who are somewhere on the spectrum of spoiled. For the purposes of this post, it's a character who combines access to social perks and Nice Things with the attitude that they're entitled to those goodies and a complete disregard for the have-nots around them. 
That said, there are a lot of spoiled characters in fiction who inhabit the annoying brat zone when the author intends them to be a sympathetic-- or even heroic-- protagonist. Usually it's because the author ignored a simple rule: that there exists a strong inverse relationship between how nice the character in question is, and how long the story can go before whacking them with a clue-by-four. I chose Bertie Wooster for the page quote because he embodies a character who can be utterly clueless about his own privilege, and yet be liked by the audience. Frances Hodgson Burnett took the inverse approach in The Secret Garden, and wrote the protagonist, Mary, as a mean, bratty character who is hit head-on by reality in the first chapter, and is forced to go through major character development from the get-go.Another piece of the puzzle is awareness. As I mentioned when talking about characters with offensive views, a behaviour is more forgivable when one sees how it was shaped by the environment. Someone who truly doesn't have a sense of actual deprivation comes off better than someone who knows what the less fortunate are going through and doesn't care.