Some of the examples that follow also fall under one or more Death Tropes. Most spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Cynicism Catalysts in Live-Action TV series.
- A flashback scene in Battlestar Galactica's Razor'' shows Cain's sister was taken by Cylons moments before the end of the First Cylon War. The fact that Admiral Cain keeps a folding knife she acquired during this incident shows it was a prime motive for her ruthless actions in the 'present day'.
- In the final episode of Black Books it is revealed in response to Manny's The Reason You Suck speech that Bernard's girlfriend died, triggering his transition into Jerkass Woobie. Slightly subverted in that we are unsure how much of a bastard he actually was before she died and whether he's just using it as an excuse. Also could be subverted with the reveal that she didn't actually die, but he believed she did so it still counts.Bernard: I had a girlfriend once actually, she died....So excuse me if I'm a bit out of sorts sometimes.
- Buffyverse:
- The entirety of Season 2 was like this for Buffy. When her boyfriend, Angel, turns evil right after sleeping with her, he proceeds to terrorize her for the rest of the school year. Needless to say, she never returned to her plucky personality from the first season.
- For Willow and Cordelia, it was when they walked into a room only to find that everyone inside was killed by a bunch of vampires.
- The first episode featuring Gunn (Charles Gunn) who had his little sister become a vampire, forcing him to kill her.
- Holtz's daughter was turned into a vampire, forcing Holtz to kill her.
- The biggest instance of this in the entire Buffyverse is what happened to Wesley. His attempt at saving Connor from a dangerous prophecy ends up going completely awry when he gets his throat slit, causing Connor to be tossed in a hell dimension. Despite everyone knowing that he was just trying to help, all of Wesley's friends ended up shunning him, especially Angel, who tries to smother him to death as revenge. From that point on, Wesley had become one of the most broken, cynical characters in the series.
- Fiona of Burn Notice has a dead little sister, Claire, whose killing at the hands of a British soldier caused Fi to join the IRA. This continues, sometimes subtly, to inform her actions.
- Criminal Minds:
- Johnny McHale, a character from the third season. The episode "True Night," took this trope to the extreme. His moment involves the gang rape and murder of his beloved fiancee, Vickie, the contingent murder of their unborn child, and his own near-fatal wounding at the hands of members of the 23rd Street Killers, a street gang. He suffers a psychotic break and becomes a murdering vigilante intent on exacting his revenge on the 23rd Street Killers, though his memories of these actions remain foggy until he is confronted with them by the FBI team. When Rossi comments that his survival was a miracle, implying that he should be thankful to be alive (a twist on the "This isn't what she would have wanted!" exhortation), Johnny responds by screaming, "You think living was a MIRACLE?" He ends up incarcerated in a mental institution where he spends his days drawing pictures of his dead fiancee and calling her cellphone just to hear her voice on her voicemail message.
- In one episode of the second season, JJ tells Morgan and Reid about how her childhood fear of the woods stemmed from finding the body of someone at a summer camp she worked at as a teenager. Turns out she was just messing with them and there was no real reason.
- The original Dark Shadows has Sarah Collins as the motivation for at least some of Barnabas' angst.
- The new series of Doctor Who introduced the Time War as a Cynicism Catalyst for the Doctor. The exact moment it pushed him over the edge was when a gunship crewmember named Cass refused to board his TARDIS because the Time Lords had become horrible degenerates to the universe and the Eighth Doctor rode the crashing ship to their deaths desperately trying to reason with her. They died crashing on Karn, and the Sisterhood of Karn and its high priestess Ohila revived him and offered to facilitate his regeneration. Cass, however, was beyond help, and the Doctor, feeling worthless and broken, chose to regenerate into a warrior, giving rise to the War Doctor, who would renounce his name "Doctor". He ended the war on his terms but forgot everything except that apparently he was the only survivor. It would be ages before the Doctor learned the true outcome of the war and recover his optimism.
- The Independents' crushing defeat at the Battle of Serenity Valley is presented as this for Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly. Before then, even in the thick of battle, he was always ready with a smile and a quip to his companions (though it's not made clear if it was genuine or a mask he wore to keep morale up for others and himself) and he had at least some faith in God. Their loss at Serenity and the war in general made him a lot more sober and caused him to lose his faith, though he never quite lost his sense of heroism, as much as he might try to deny it.
- In Flashpoint, it was revealed that Sam had a sister who died in a car accident when he was young. When doing a mission, he froze when he saw a dead woman lying on the ground without her shoes, which triggered memories of his sister who had died in a similar position.
- Game of Thrones: Jaime Lannister's was the death of the Mad King Aerys Targaryen II at his hands: Turns out that instead of switching sides at the last minute like his father did, the real reason he killed Aerys was to prevent Aerys from using wildfire to annihilate everyone in King's Landing. One of his most truly noble and selfless acts resulted in everyone derisively referring to him as "Kingslayer". That's part of the reason he's become so bitter and lacking in empathy towards others. Later, watching his daughter die from a slow poison in his arms just after she told him how perfectly happy she was with her future husband has turned him into The Dragon for the Mad King's rightful successor.
- On Heroes, a dead little sister is revealed to be the motive behind Angela Petrelli and The Company, and all the dickishness they've caused throughout the show. Turns out she's not dead.
- Kazami Shiro became Kamen Rider V3 after Destron soldiers murdered his family, including his little sister. It prompted him to hunt down Kamen Rider Ichigo and Nigo, trying to convince them to turn him into a Rider-like cyborg.
- Zero Day was this for Taiga Hanaya in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. He bet everything on saving his patient, failed, and lost his position, license, and sense of self-worth. He used to be a kind soul devoted to his job but feeling betrayed (and loathing himself more than anyone else could) made him the selfish jerk he is in the main story.
- The League of Gentlemen: The Vicar, Bernice, is, not to put too fine a point on it, an utter jerk. The Christmas special implies her catalyst was seeing her mother kidnapped by Papa Lazarou as a child.
- Leverage:
- Nate Ford, whose son died when the insurance company he worked for refused to pay for the treatment that could have saved him. This led to Nate quitting his job, divorcing his wife, and becoming an alcoholic.
- Parker had a brother who died in front of her after being hit by a car. This is found out by a fake psychic doing a cold reading, which Parker, given who she is, has no way of understanding.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power:
- The murder of her older brother by Sauron's hand instigates Galadriel to descent into hardened cynicism and drives her obsessive quest to find Sauron and kill him, even at the cost of her own men.
- Elendil comes to regret saving Galadriel's lives after receiving the news that his son may be dead on a mission Galadriel asked Numenor to take part in.
- In a The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV movie, "The Fifteen Years Later Affair," we learn that Illya Kuryakin left UNCLE after a betrayal by a double agent led to the death of the Innocent (a young woman) during a mission in Yugoslavia. When Napoleon Solo alludes to this while attempting to persuade Illya to come out of retirement, Illya punches Napoleon in the face.
- Annie, Kirby's dead girlfriend in the Masters of Horror episode "Cigarette Burns". She killed herself for reasons that are never quite explained, but her copious drug abuse seemed to have sent her in a downward spiral.
- Miami Vice: The death of Crockett's second wife, Caitlin, is a major contributor to his burnout and depression in Season 5. As Tubbs puts it, "Ever since Caitlin died everything tastes sour."
- Minority Report (2015): Subverted. The team is investigating a terrorist who is violently against any and all genetic engineering, despite having been a prominent geneticist for decades. He lost his wife a few years ago, and they assume that's what radicalized him, but the timeline doesn't match up. When they catch him and interrogate him, he explains his wife's death had nothing to do with it; of course he was heartbroken, but he worked through it and moved on. What actually radicalized him was a genetic experiment he performed on flies. A minor mistake created a genetic disease that killed every single fly on campus in days. That is what convinced him that genetic engineering was too dangerous to continue, and the main characters can't really argue with his conclusion.
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Cate Randa's jaded, rude and cynical personality is due to witnessing first-hand Godzilla's entrance into San Francisco on G-Day when the city was destroyed by him and the MUTOs, where most of the schoolchildren under her care fell to their deaths despite her efforts to save them. Furthermore, her neglectful father, who implicitly was so absent because he secretly worked for Monarch, briefly reunited with Cate in the aftermath of the destruction only to give her tickets for her and her mother to leave the Q Zone and to tell her that he was leaving both of them again for his enigmatic work: this was also the last time that Cate saw her father alive before he was reported to have died in a plane crash. The main plot of the series is about Cate, and her father's Secret Other Family, trying to discover what happened to him and track him down, discovering along the way that he survived the plane crash which was reported to have killed him.
- In NCIS Ziva says that she was revenge-driven and cold for a long time after her little sister Tali was killed in a Hamas suicide bombing. However, she denies Tony's allegation that this is why she joined Mossad.
- Nikita:
- The murder of a rogue Division agent's girlfriend drives him to attempt to kill Percy, Division's leader. This forces Nikita to have to stop him, as Percy has set up several "little black boxes" filled with sensitive information that would bring down the U.S. government, set to be automatically released in the event of his death.
- This trope is what leads to Michael being recruited to Division in the first place: his wife and child were killed in a car bomb meant for him, and Percy promised to help him track down the man responsible. Nikita is the one who eventually helps Michael get revenge, and it is that plus Percy's lies that lead to Michael's eventual defection to Nikita by the end of Season 1.
- The Outpost: The massacre of her village in which her family was murdered set Talon on the path to being a cynical and ruthless Anti-Hero.
- On Person of Interest, Reese's investigation into Root's past led him to discover that she had witnessed her best friend being abducted, never to be seen again, and couldn't get anyone to believe her when she tried to tell what she'd seen.
- Al Calavicci in Quantum Leap. His younger sister Trudy was mentally handicapped and spent most of her life in and out of mental institutions, as was commonplace in the time they were young. When Al was old enough to gain custody of her, he went back to the institution for her but found out that she had died of pneumonia. The anger in his voice when he asks, "How does a sixteen-year-old girl die from pneumonia in 1953?" says a lot about how heavily the topic weighs on him.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine explains Worf's cynicism and stoicism in the episode "Let He Who is Without Sin...": he was rambunctious as a child and, during a soccer game while in school, accidentally headbutted a rival while scoring a goal. While Worf never felt the impact, he had unwittingly broken his rival's neck. It was then that he came to realize that living among humans means reigning in his boisterous Klingon nature. In adulthood, this translates to Worf upholding Klingon virtues while exhibiting precious few of his race's Hot-Blooded tendencies.
- In Star Trek: Enterprise engineer 'Trip' Tucker's sister was killed in the Xindi attack on Earth. This affects his behavior throughout the Season 3 'war arc', most notably in "The Forgotten".
- Star Trek: Picard opens with the reveal that Nero was right to blame the Federation as this is why Picard left Starfleet: The Federation really did leave the Romulans to die and Picard was so disgusted he resigned.note
- Supernatural:
- Mary Winchester was this for Sam and Dean's father John, only John went a lot more off the rails than Sam later did, probably because Dean was only four and not available to do the same level of stabilizing (time travel shows John used to be as clean-cut and youthful as Sam in the pilot—more so, actually, even after Vietnam).
- Sam's Disposable Woman girlfriend Jessica Moore who gets offed in the pilot functions like a less intense variant of this, and the FBI, who believe the boys are serial killers, interpret it as being this straight.
- When Sam, Dean's little brother, dies (he obviously gets better; he's the other main character) this is the event that pushes Dean over the edge to make his Suicide-By-Sacrifice Deal with the Devil at the end of Season 2. When Sam's alive, Dean also tends toward Knight Templar Big Brother, although he is the hero.
- The two several-month periods Sam spends attempting to resurrect and/or avenge his big brother, in "Mystery Spot" and the season break before "Lazarus Rising," see him become Darker and Edgier to the point of Blood Knight. He never actually makes a Face–Heel Turn, but he does start to tolerate a hell of a lot of collateral damage, and then commits the cardinal sin that unmakes any antihero: he was wrong.
- There's also Gordon, with a nasty twist; he tells Dean about how he became a vampire hunter after they got his little sister and it was him who tracked her down and killed her.
- Sgt. Maritza Cruz from Third Watch had a younger, drug-addicted sister named Lettie, who died of an overdose — which caused Maritza to bend the rules even more than she usually did in order to find the dealer.
- One episode of This is Wonderland featured a man trying to get sent to a federal prison so that he could kill the man responsible for the death of his father and brother, but not his sister, who was still alive.
- Torchwood's Jack Harkness had a tortured little brother. He thought he was responsible for this, having let go of his brother's hand while running away from the creatures who tortured him; and (or so we were told) angsted over it ever since.
- Josh Lyman from The West Wing has a dead older sister named Joanie, who died in a fire while she was babysitting him. Josh feels unspeakably guilty about the fact that he ran out of the house and left her behind, even though he was only six or seven at the time.
- The X-Files:
- Mulder's little sister's disappearance providing probably the biggest motive for a large portion of his adult life and career. He's a loner and sometimes exhibits jerk-ass-like behavior in his Determinator ways, trying to reveal The Conspiracy, though he's really one of the very few good guys on the show.
- In Season 4's finale, "Gethsemene", there's an inverted Cynicism Catalyst involving the government and an alien corpse that might have been fake, which causes Mulder to send the whole next season disbelieving in the existence of aliens at all.
