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Despair Event Horizon / Web Original

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  • The Angry Video Game Nerd crosses it after playing Desert Bus, and realizing that other people are playing it (and that someone even made an Atari 2600 version of it). He concludes that all the work he's done to warn people about shitty games has fallen on deaf ears, and that it's all been a huge waste of time, so he decides to retire. He soon changes his mind after playing a Simon's Quest romhack that did its best to fix all of the problems he had with the original, showing that at least someone out there is listening to him.
  • Atop the Fourth Wall's Jaeris crosses it when he discovers that You Can't Go Home Again. What followed was him Drowning His Sorrows for months on end.
    • This was also parodied when 90s Kid saw a scene of Superboy Prime killing a pregnant Lana Lane in an alternate universe. That scene was so un-radical to him, that he didn't think he could ever be hardcore again after seeing something like that. Fortunately it just takes a comic by Rob Liefeld to get his spirits back up.
  • Oancitizen of Brows Held High is driven to this in his Ken Park review. Genocide ensues.
  • Happens to cup in Channel101's "2 girls, 1 cup the show". Unlike most of the cases in this page, the result is hilarious.
  • In Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Dr. Horrible crosses the Despair Event Horizon after his death ray backfires in Captain Hammer's hands and the shrapnel kills Penny.
  • Dreamscape: Dylan crosses it when Keela supposedly betrays him in the Unworld in the flashback in "Tale of the Unworld".
    • He also crosses it in the flashback in "Over and Under" when he finds out about the Overlord of Evil's relation to Ethan and Curien, but his friends pull him out of it.
  • Escape the Night: Matt accidentally kills Sierra during an exorcism, later realising he had to choose between himself and Sierra, but he didn’t read the instructions and ended up killing Sierra without knowing it. Come next episode, he’s a complete wreck who believes that everything they do is useless and they’re all going to die anyways.
  • Discussed in Freeman's Mind.
    "But yeah, I was expecting to look down there and see this giant eyeball looking up at me, angry at me because I blew off its eyelashes or something, then the whole building starts shaking and I guess I'd ball up and cry, because what do you do when something that big wants to kill you?"
  • In Funny Business, Jeannette crossed this trope in a flashback after realizing that she had abused her Reality Warper powers as a toddler, to cause real harm to people and has remained in this state for more than seven years.
  • The GameSpot video review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is all about reviewer Alex Navarro being broken by an even more broken game (while not saying a word, no less!).
  • In the Mandela Catalogue, this is exploited by the alternates. After their victims cross it, they usually commit suicide, which allows them to take over their bodies.
  • Mahu: In "Second Chance" humanity itself goes through this as it tries to come up with a way to stop or at least survive the meteorite which will surely end all life upon Earth. Only the portal in Istanbul gives them any hopes of survival.
  • The Onion: "Newborn Loses Faith in Humanity After Record 6 Days".
  • In The Pirates Covered in Fur, Michum crosses this at the end shortly after Tully dies in his arms. Knowing he can't save the city, he goes back to the skate park his friends hung out at and calmly waits as several bombers destroy the city, and him as well.
  • RWBY: Volume 9 deals with Ruby's poor coping mechanisms with the failures brought about by past volumes while traveling through the Ever After. Things reach their nadir when Team RWBY find Jaune and his sorrow at losing a group of creatures he tried to protect, leading to Ruby snapping at them for ignoring her pain and focusing on everyone else. When Jaune snaps at Ruby, she tearfully runs off and into the unwitting arms of Neo, who physically and mentally drives Ruby over the horizon and leading her to drink a special tea seeped with the leaves of the Great Tree to "ascend". In turn, when Ruby is gone, Neo crosses it as she ultimately realized that she had no other purpose beyond "kill Ruby". This allows the Curious Cat to possess Neo after revealing that he had manipulated Ruby into crossing this.
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-1385 ("The Mistake Ring") is a ring that grants its wearer Fertile Feet and Prehensile Hair (although in somewhat impractical ways). Its creator had tried to create "a conjuring ring", but nothing seemed to work. In the end, he made the SCP but gave up after it still didn't meet his expectations.
  • As the end of Pokecapn's legendary Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) Let's Play approaches, the players themselves slowly slip towards and eventually cross the Despair Event Horizon; this is signified by Kung-Fu Jesus chanting song lyrics in monotone.
    • "Because it's Thriller. Thriller night. And no one's gonna save you from..."
  • Happens a lot in Survival of the Fittest, more often than not later in the game, but given the premise, is it really that surprising?
    • For example, Jacob Charles quickly shoots into this zone after his girlfriend is killed right in front of him, leading to him attempting suicide. Read it here.
  • In Takotsubo: The story of a superhero, the prologue is treated more like a Downer Beginning than a Superhero Origin. After the Chinese-American Cord Cai loses his fiance Roland Fujii in a carjacking, the police force utterly fail in dealing with it. After a suicide attempt, Cord tracks the murderer down through gang connections, shoots the murderer in the head, and becomes a gangster because he thinks this is his only choice. The worst part is that Cord and Roland were trying to leave the street life, and it's implied he views Roland's death as punishment for getting above his station. Being a Genre Deconstruction of superheroes—and specifically, the lack of Asian-American heroes—Cord's tangled up in Internalized Categorism, and the main script is stated to be Cord's journey of coming back from the horizon.
  • Surprisingly enough, Ganondorf went over this in There Will Be Brawl upon finding the pure evil that is Ness and Lucas. He questions how heroes can even exist when such evil does.
  • In Worm:
    • Taylor crosses it after failing to prevent The End of the World as We Know It and witnessing the devastation caused by Scion's rampage, which killed her father. She would have killed herself if not for Tattletale.
    • At the climax of the story, Taylor invokes this against Scion by taking away his hope of reuniting with his counterpart, and he allows himself to be killed.
    • Scion also invokes it against Eidolon, by suggesting that Eidolon was responsible for creating the Endbringers. Whether this was true or not, the mere possibility was enough to utterly break Eidolon's will, and he ceases fighting back at all.
  • Yahtzee was on the receiving end of this trope during his Spec Ops: The Line review. Unlike most of his foul mouthed, harsh and fast paced reviews, this one was restrained and it gave off the feeling that the game broke him.
    Yahtzee: *weary sigh* Remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of gaming growing up as our childish fantasies are torn from us, and we are forced to confront consequences in an unfair, uncaring and unavoidable world of hatred, misery, and death. *Farting noises.*
  • In the Creepypasta The Lamp (which was based on a true story that happened to the author), realizing that his life was a dream made the main character fall into a deep depression that lasted years, and looking at the original Reddit post, he was still depressed when he wrote the story.

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