Living Emotional Crutches in Visual Novels.
- In Air Pressure, Leigh is this to the PC. This is not portrayed as healthy in the slightest, as Leigh turns out to be most likely a metaphor/stand-in for drug addiction and "getting closer" to her results in the PC waking up in the hospital and being told that he nearly died but choosing to stay with Leigh anyway because he can't imagine living without her.
- Double Homework:
- Deconstructed with Johanna. She uses the protagonist for her entire emotional well-being, and it kills her when she finds out that he and Tamara are fooling around behind her back, because it means that she gets left out. This is made all the more painful by the fact that the protagonist and Tamara both have abilities in school and athletics that Johanna does not, and Johanna always thought she couldn’t measure up to them.
- Surprisingly, Tamara becomes this in the end, which is brought glaringly to light if the protagonist decides to break off his relationship. She takes the breakup badly, snapping that her whole summer was a waste.
- Extra Case: My Girlfriend's Secrets: Brucie points out that Marty lost his family and only friend in a car accident, which means Sally is all he has left and that he can't live without her. In endings where he and Sally break up, he's never able to most past her, and he goes insane in any ending where she dies. In the final ending, Marty is willing to hide the body parts of Sally's previous boyfriends in order to protect her from the law and prevent public opinion from turning against her.
- In Fate/stay night Shirou is a crutch for Sakura, though this is not immediately evident. He's the only one she'll let kill her, even after she loses it completely.
- In the prequel Fate/Zero, it turns out Irisviel (and Illya) were this to Kiritsugu. It's not a coincidence that when the Downer Ending comes (as Irisviel has died, he had to kill a realistic illusion of Irisviel and Ilya to prevent the Grail from causing mass destruction, the Grail ends up causing mass destruction anyways), this mantle is handed over to Shirou once Kiritsugu rescues him. And just to really twist the knife, Fate/Grand Order reveals that if Kiritsugu wasn't hired by the Einzberns (and thus never met Irisviel), he would've become a Counter Guardian like EMIYA, depressed and emotionally shutdown enough that he rejects any attempt to emotionally reach out to him, even from Irisviel's alternate self, who loves him despite his not being the Kiritsugu from her world.
- Ikemen Sengoku
- Nobunaga is this for Hideyoshi due to Hideyoshi having extremely low self-esteem caused by a lifetime of being constantly rejected and shunned by others solely because he was born a poor vagabond. He had basically given up on ever bettering himself until Nobunaga inspired him to turn his life around, and he subsequently bases his entire self-worth on serving Nobunaga and is willing to give up his entire life for him in a heartbeat.
- On Kenshin's route, the female main character becomes this to him. His heart has already been so bruised by his first love's tragic death that he lives in constant fear that the MC will leave him too and resorts to extreme measures to keep her close to him. When she becomes severely injured, he snaps and goes on a suicidal Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the entirety of Japan that ends only when she recovers enough to talk him down. Not only that, but one story event has him psychologically suppress all his memories of her when she gets critically injured a second time in front of him.
- Katawa Shoujo:
- Shizune is one for Misha, as seen in Shizune's route. Misha has unrequited feelings towards her best friend Shizune. When Hisao begins dating Shizune, Misha becomes overcome with the fear that Shizune'll leave her. It's implied she ends up suicidal due to that combined with her own self-consciousness. It's explict in an earlier version of the arc. In it, Misha outright kills herself at the end of Act 2.
- Hisao becomes one for more than one of the girls in their respective routes. Also viceversa, as in Lilly's route he comes to emotionally rely on her. Deconstructed in Hanako's route: he aims to become this to Hanako so he can protect her, which will end up alienating her if you keep it up.
- Emi keeps people at arm's reach to avert having someone become this. And specially, to not suffer if she loses someone else she loves, as happened with her father...who died few days after the accident that took her legs.
- Little Busters!: Kyousuke (and to a lesser extent, Kengo and Masato) are this for Rin and Riki, who are so shy and fearful of strangers or so passive and worried about the outside world respectively that they are very dependent on them. In fact, the main driver of the plot is Kyousuke's attempts to break them away from this, as a bus they were travelling in crashed, leaving everyone but Riki and Rin with fatal injuries, and Kyousuke knew they couldn't survive on their own.
- Ryo serves as this for Hibiki in Lux-Pain. Hibiki crossed the Despair Event Horizon in his backstory and it was Ryo (and the nurse Honoka that brought him back to almost complete health...only for it to shatter when Ryo gets a new, beautiful assistant who Hibiki gets jealous of as she serves as a better caretaker of his best friend than him. And of course, Ryo being unaware of his best friend's feelings also makes him completely lose it. Once you beat the game again and you get the cutscene where Ryo tells him not to disappear on him again, you can see that Ryo is what keeps Hibiki from completely going insane. Ironically the normal ending implies that they serve as an emotional crutch to each other as in the normal ending when Hibiki is killed by a crazed Honoka, you don't get to talk to Ryo anymore as the game implies he locked himself in the library shocked that he lost the last person that was important to him.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice for All. Adrian Andrews suffers from totally-played-straight Dependent Personality Disorder. Initially appearing as a well put-together career woman who needs no one and prefers being by herself, it is later revealed she is actually the exact opposite in hiding. Her codependent nature is such that it's eventually discovered that she attempted suicide after the death of her mentor, Celeste Inpax, later modeled her external personality after her in an attempt to cope, and she'll stop just shy of anything for people to not know that she tried to kill herself; Edgeworth takes advantage of this by threatening to tell the court about it if she doesn't testify about her knowledge of the crime scene and how she manipulated Juan Corrida's body. By the end of the case, though, Matt Engarde being exposed as the person who helped drive Celeste to suicide, and his conviction for the hired killing of Juan Corrida, landing him in jail for the rest of his life, takes a huge load off Adrian's psyche, and she sports a genuine smile when telling Phoenix and Edgeworth that watching them work together in the pursuit of justice has made her feel like she has the power to take on the future. When we see her in the next game she's noticeably warmer, if not still pretty anxious in general, and is very thankful towards Phoenix, Maya, and Pearl for all they did for her.
- Played very darkly in Saya no Uta. The main character suffers from a severe case of agnosia which causes everything he sees, hears, touches, etc. to be utterly repulsive (everything's covered in or made out of Meat Moss, people are disgusting amorphous creatures who bellow nigh-unintelligibly at him, etc.) Saya, the only person who appears normal to him, quickly becomes his only reason to keep living. Unfortunately, having an Eldritch Abomination as an emotional crutch doesn't exactly do wonders to your sanity, and while he may be happy in his madness, he also ruins the lives of everyone around him in spectacularly horrific ways. The lives of every human, anyway. From the Eldritch Abomination's point of view, he's a godsend.
- Like its anime adaptation listed above, School Days has multiple examples. Makoto becomes this for Kotonoha, to the point that she is homicidally insane if they're not together. On a less batshit crazy level, Setsuna fills this role for Sekai; the reason Setsuna is pushing Makoto towards Sekai so hard is to get him to fulfill this role for Sekai, since Setsuna is about to move to France.
- When They Cry:
- Higurashi: When They Cry has Rika and Satoko (mostly wih Satoko as Rika's crutch), but it isn't noticeable until the "answer arcs". Rika is so overcome by the abuse Satoko takes in certain worlds she would rather die and be taken to the next Alternate Universe than see it anymore. On the other hand, Rika has no issue brutally beating Satoko up with a chair in Saikoroshi-hen, a world where they aren't friends.
- In Umineko: When They Cry, Beatrice Castiglioni was this to Kinzo. Her Death by Childbirth caused him to cross the Despair Event Horizon, so much so that he eventually raped their own daughter after convincing himself that she was her mother's reincarnation.
