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"We have no time for our sorrows, Commander!"
— ...and she never will. Princess Leia, Star Wars
"He doesn't know any better. When you lose your parents, you're supposed to be an emotional wreck!"
How would you feel if you were Trapped In Another World, and could never see your family again? And then it turned out you were the Chosen One and the world depended on you? And you team up with a band of quirky companions, and one by one, they all get killed by the Evil Minions? Except one, who turns out to be The Mole and gets you captured? How would it make you feel?
If you're a fictional character, the answer is probably "feel sad for five minutes, then forget about it." Angst? What angst?
The polar opposite of Wangst, Angst What Angst is when a character has every right to be depressed or Ax Crazy, but isn't, and life goes on. They aren't The Stoic or the Determinator — they aren't supposed to be so strong-willed. And they are not expressing Dont You Dare Pity Me. They act that way because if they didn't, it would ruin the story. Most people don't like listening to real people complain about real problems, no matter how bad those problems are. Due to Angst Dissonance, it is even harder to listen to fictional characters complain about fictional problems, because those problems aren't even real, and most people ultimately would rather watch and read stories about fictional characters dealing with their problems and moving on - or, failing that, where characters don't waste a lot of time bemoaning their problems.
The number one example is children's adventure stories, where the young heroes rarely Freak Out about having to pilot a burning biplane into a T-Rex's mouth. They either don't react much, or they think it's a cool adventure and they wish it would never end. Most real children would react much worse. But it isn't fun for those real children to read about people like themselves screaming in terror as their lives fall apart, so the fictional children don't. Of course, Plot Armor probably helps. Not to mention There Are No Therapists to talk to anyway.
But it doesn't have to be an adventure story; any genre with horrible suffering will do it (except the ones that thrive on the characters angsting, like soap operas). Angst What Angst can lead to huge Fridge Logic moments, especially when the character who has survived killer bees and cancer throws a fit because somebody forget their birthday. But writers will keep on using it, as long as it beats the alternative of Wangst.
In a variant, some stories rarely have the characters angst out loud, but make it clear that they're cracking on the inside and are just putting on a brave face. Other stories, using the Law Of Disproportionate Response, have the characters deliberately overreact to small things and underreact to big things to show how unhinged they are.
Possibly Truth In Television for the more extreme cases. If you're fighting for your life, you don't have time to think about how awful it is. Except for the times when you crack and go shellshocked, maybe. On the other hand if human beings were really as mentally and emotionally fragile as therapists tell us the species would have died out four million years ago - the first time somebody got chomped by a leopard.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- For some reason, despite the fact that he has no family and everyone around him hates him just for existing, the title character of Naruto doesn't have any angst at all. If that's not "Angst What Angst", nothing is!
- Dude, the first arc where they actually do some fighting pretty much spells out that he'd gotten over it after angsting non-stop for several years.
- Also, one of Naruto's teachers steps as a father-figure, mainly because he grew up in similar circumstances.
- And they sort of justify it with the introduction of Gaara, at least in the anime. Naruto, even though the vast majority of people hated his guts, still had a handful of people who liked him. Gaara had...nobody. Even the person who was his Morality Chain tried to assasinate him, and then called him a monster as he died. Needless to say that boy grew up with a heck of a lot of
angst bloodlust.
- To summarize: Naruto ansgted as a kid, but got over it with the help of a surrogate family (and ramen). Gaara had his family (and everyone else) hate and fear him, nonstop, for his entire life. Killer Bee has a loving family and strong social support structure...and still turned out rather quirky. Jinchuuriki side effect? Who knows?
- Except that for Killerbee, the Bijuu is the straight man. More likely, Killerbee's family has dominant Crazy-Awesome genes.
- The Twelve Kingdoms has this trope in spades. Viewers tend to dislike the main heroine for being a whiny doormat before and after becoming Trapped In Another World, while her friend turned rival Sugimoto tends to be liked better for her Genre Saviness and boldness of action. (Even though most of the things Sugimoto does are morally ambiguous.) It isn't until later on in the story, when the heroine gains some confidence that she stops being The Scrappy.
- Painfully, painfully averted in everyone's favorite psycho-giant-robot anime. As part of its deconstructionist nature, the show virtually revolves around all the angst built up in the Chosen One-esque main characters due largely to their experiences piloting the titular EVAs.
- It should be noted that at the time this was a rather shocking subversion. Having any angst in a giant robot show had just been invented, and that was more about the war than the giant robots. In unsaid show, it's shown that piloting a giant war bot, even when you're fighting in-human threats to the entire world and not other people, would itself be bad.
- Mari from the Rebuild 2.0 movie seems to be totally free from angst, genuinely loving her job and responsabilities.
- Meet Ayasaki Hayate. He's worked since he was eight years old to support his happily unemployed parents who enjoy: gambling, stealing his money to keep gambling and selling him to "very nice people" to pay off their gambling debts. He's also constantly plagued by the most ridiculous misfortunes and despite his best efforts things almost never go his way. If anyone has the right to whine about how unfair life is, one would think he does but he simply grins and bears it. Why? Because Santa told him to, of course!
- Or...his parents had already betrayed him in the worst possible way. Via flashback we find Hayate, when he was a child, used to love them and trust them. Take all of the good-naturedness he is now, and put that in the wide-eyed idealism of a child. He defended their honor when it was questioned by Athena and he bet a world of magic and wonder that they would return his faith. And his parents smiled, patted him on the head, and stole it from him to pawn for petty cash. There weren't enough tears in the world. The Messiah did not hate them. He just stopped loving them. And that chills to the bone far more than all the rage or hate or crying would accomplish.
- In the Houshin Engi manga, Taikoubou hardly angsts about anything. Sure, Dakki throws a bunch of humans he was trying to protect into a pit filled with carnivorous alligators and snakes, and he feels a bit bad about that, but he gets over it within a few pages (in the anime, it took a bit longer - around maybe 10 minutes?). The closest thing to angsting was when his best friend Fugen Shinjin was killed, but even then, he quickly changes his attitude to becoming determined to immediately avenge his death (which he does quickly). In the end, when Jyoka causes him to start crumbling and dying, saying, "My last bit of selfishness... please vanish with me..." his reply is to look slightly irritated and calmly say, "Well, fine..." This might be partially due to the fact that he is a Sennin immortal, and most of the horrible violence and happenings occur to humans that he doesn't empathize as much with.
- Considering that a large part of the series revolved around him doing his very best to keep the Sennin out of mortal affairs, even if it involved destroying both Sennin worlds in the process, this seems an unlikely motivation.
- In Magic Knight Rayearth, the girls are summoned to Cephiro and cannot return home to their families until their task is complete —which, for all they know, could take the rest of their lives (if they aren't killed first.) Hikaru and Fuu have very little trouble with this, and Umi doesn't angst, but she whines a lot about missing her fencing tournament and because there's no Häagen-Dazs in Cephiro.
- One Piece: Every single Straw Hat Pirate has seriously angst-worthy moments in their pasts. However, you rarely see them angst about these issues in the present. The exceptions are the female members of the crew when their pasts caught up to them. But their crewmates' willingness to fight on their behalf turned them around.
- Of particular note is Usopp, with some fans finding it quite odd that that he harbors not resentment towards his father Yasopp whatsoever, even though the guy left to go be a pirate when he son was still very young without ever returning while his wife dies a couple years after he left.
- Unfortunately, averted with Zoro on at least one occasion. Something about Tashigi brings his issues roaring back, and he uncharacteristically runs away when he sees her. Although since this is a shonen manga, where running away from problems is often considered offensively cowardly no matter the circumstances, this will probably be eventually remedied.
- In the Black Cat manga, interestingly enough, the series depicts Train's progress of maturity to be going from wangsting about the past to becoming very carefree. In the second half of the series, Train gets over Saya's death and stops stressing about a lot of things (most of which are pretty important and angst-worthy). For example, when shot accidentally by Creed with the Lucifer bullet, while everyone else (including Creed) panics and tells Train that he'll transform into a monster, Train just brushes it off and says he'll handle that when it comes. When Train turns into a kid, everyone stresses about it while he actually thinks it's kind of fun (his more immediate thoughts being whether they can save money on kid's meal and metro ticket prices). This is even lampshaded later by one of his past Chronos superiors, who asks him if he even cares that Creed is trying to bring about the End Of The World As We Know It. Train's answer of course is no, and that he only cares about what's for lunch tomorrow.
- Miaka Yuuki of Fushigi Yuugi shows remarkably few psychological aftereffects from the multiple sexual assaults she endures over the course of the series, although one could argue she expends enough angst over Tamahome that she doesn't have any left to spare.
- It's especially jarring compared to her best friend Yui, who spends half the series thinking she's been gang-raped, and becomes a something of a scrappy from the resulting Angst Dissonance.
- Judau Ashta goes through hell. First of all, he inherits a battle he never had any interest in. Second, he seemingly loses his little sister even when one of his friends promised to keep her alive. Third, nearly every attempt he has at keeping his enemies from throwing their lives away fails miserably. Fourth, his primary love interest is the leader of the enemy faction and he has to not only kill her, but also the fact she deliberately threw the duel. Fifth, he is appalled by the sheer lethargy the Federation suffers from when they had a genuine chance to attack Zeon. He does a very good job getting over the various problems with only short instances of depression, but in the end he finally his the breaking point. Bright Noah uses a reverse Brightslap to get him out of it.
- Edward of Fullmetal Alchemist (manga) fame has relatively little angst in the manga given that at age 11 he lost 2 limbs and was exposed to things man was not meant to know, in an effort to bring one of his parents back to life, which comes out wrong. He half-believes that he has condemned his brother to a fate worse than death, and in order to correct this joins the military, despite knowing that they previously used people with powers like his to commit genocide. That's all in the prologue. Someone like that should be worrying less about angst and more about if they have any sanity points left.
- One of the most significant changes to the first anime version was throwing out this trope, much to the chagrin of many manga purists. To this day, the prospect of whether or not this change was good or bad remains a staple of any discussion between the two camps.
- Saito of Zero No Tsukaima, anyone? Trapped in a world which is the complete opposite of his own, demoted to something akin to a dog, whipped and beaten by his tsundere mistress Louise, for who he gave up his only chance to return to Earth. His reaction? To drool over other girls tits, even though he's been beaten black and blue for it.
- Not just once, either. Practically every episode. He's a little thickheaded, no?
- Does Gohan count? Four years old, kidnapped by screaming crazies twice in one day, learning second-hand that his father was dead, gets abandoned in the wilderness for months, then goes through Training From Hell until he develops what a particularly cruel critic might identify as Stockholm Syndrome. He then loses a father figure in a hideous battle against space aliens, battles some more space aliens in an attempt to revive him, loses biological father again when he gets lost in space and won't come home and doesn't tell anyone why. Biological father finally comes home a year and a half later, they go through three more years of Training From Hell (four, if you count the time chamber) and then Dad dies again and decides to stay dead. This is six or seven years of consistent, repeated emotional trauma, yet Gohan never stops acting like a happy, well-adjusted little nerd boy.
- Borderline case: Allen Walker of D Gray Man. The universe has put him through an incredible amount of crap, including Parental Abandonment, the death of his surrogate father, his turning said surrogate father into an Akuma because he didn't know any better, his freaky left arm going berserk and re-killing Akuma!Mana after he got his face slashed up, getting adopted by an abusive Trickster Mentor who smacks him around and leaves him to pay debts upward of tens of thousands of dollars, and then having to find the Black Order headquarters with absolutely no clue where it was, and of course, no help from Cross, who knocked him out and left so he wouldn't have to report back to his bosses. And that's just the backstory. Despite all this, not to mention the fact that his disfigured left eye makes him see the tortured soul of every Akuma he comes across, he's cute and perpetually cheerful, and while he does get upset about some of what happens during the series, he always defaults back to his usual Wide Eyed Idealist self eventually.
Comic Books
Film
- Luke Skywalker of Star Wars, regarding the deaths of his family. What's that you say? He certainly did wangst about Obi-wan and Darth Vader? No, I don't mean them. I mean Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. You know, the people who raised him from a baby. Okay, he grieved for them for...15 seconds screen time? He seemed over it by the time they reached Mos Eisley.
- Of course that's positively wallowing in it by Star Wars standards. Let's see: Luke has watched a man he'd known for, what, perhaps a week? Get cut down in front of him. Leia has watched her entire planet blown to smithereens before her eyes. Which one of them most needs a blanket put around them and some comforting words? Why, Luke, of course. Leia's only subsequent (onscreen) comment on the destruction of her home, her family, everyone she's ever known, everyone she's never known, all that history, all that culture, all those people is the quote above. On the other hand, there's this thing you might have heard of, it's called repression...
- Of course, Leia probably has experienced this sort of thing before, having been a member of the Rebellion for so long and been hardened by it as a result. Luke on the other hand, has not experienced any real tragedy until the loss of his aunt and uncle (plus, considering Obi-Wan's promise to look after him in Episode III, one can assume they knew each other for much longer than a week). In addition, Leia has already had a certain amount of time to grieve in her cell and force herself to put the matter aside for the time being, where Luke has only just witnessed Obi-Wan's death.
- The Expanded Universe talks about it, Obi-Wan and Luke did knew each other more than just a week, and Leia turns any angst into hating The Empire even more, at one point she flips out meeting an Alderaan Stormtrooper.
- Lois as Leia lampshades this hilariously in Family Guy's Star Wars Homage episode.
- As does Robot Chicken in their own Star Wars special.
- This Troper remembers a joke about this. In A New Hope, when Han says he's just in it for the money, Leia angrily says he'll get his reward, then cuts him a check - from the First Planetary Bank of Alderaan.
- In Star Wars Legacy, Luke finally talks about his Aunt and Uncle's deaths to Cade who's in their old home. More or less, at first he wanted to make the Empire pay but knew he couldn't stop and angst about it. Later, when he become a Jedi, he accepted their deaths and knew they're part of the Living Force now, which they are.
- Averted in the movie version of The Wiz (an update of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz). Dorothy (Diana Ross), a twentysomething woman from Harlem, is terrified upon arriving in Oz and an entire song, "Soon As I Get Home", is about her accepting the journey she has to undertake. She soon learns that not everyone here is mean, but when she's menaced by monsters, the disguised Wiz, and later the Wicked Witch of the West, she's often upset to the point of tears, including when she finds out from Glinda the Silver Slippers could have taken her home all along. The Cut Song "Is This What Feeling Gets?" was about her frustration when she finds out she has to kill the Wicked Witch. The story is about how these trials help make her a stronger person, the point of the finale "Home". Unfortunately, Ross's performance was high on the list of critics' complaints about the film...This is a good example of why this trope is so prevalent — it's hard to pull off realistic angst well.
- Optimus Prime has been criticized by fans for not being particularly mournful when Jazz dies in the 2007 movie, despite the fact that loud public weeping is probably not the way to impress your new comrades. If Cybertronians can weep. (They probably can.)
- Then in the sequel he angsts even less- i.e. not at all- when Jetfire offers him the parts he needs to take down The Fallen and commits suicide before the Autobot leader can reply. Even worse, Optimus casually drops the parts like scrap metal after he's done kicking can. An argument might be made about Optimus having hardly known Jetfire as he himself was quite dead during the latter's introduction but it still comes across as being rather callous compared to what earlier Primes might have done.
- They Live. The hero learns that the world is a vast lie created by aliens in human guise that live among us. So of course he stares one of them in the face and says, "you look like your face fell in the cheese dip back in 1957!"
- Also the time when he ran out of gum...
- Subverted in the TV movie of A Wrinkle In Time. Upon getting home, the protagonist is terrified that her mother is more interested in talking about proper nutrition for kids rather then the fact that her children have disappeared for days to fight evil disembodied brains in another dimension. It's also what makes her realize she's just in a Lotus Eater Machine.
- By the end of Face/Off, the wife has had sex with the ultimate evil criminal impostor, mistaking him for her husband, and the daughter has put a knife into said criminal's body - an act which rarely leaves people unscarred in Real Life. This family really should be falling apart any second now - but we are asked to accept this as a Happy End.
- In Zombie Land Columbus shoots and kills Bill Murray by mistake. He suffers no angst at all about this, but in fairness Bill Murray himself takes it pretty well all things considered.
- A minor problem with Mars Attacks, as the President's daughter is seen at the end, only days after her parents have been killed, presenting Richie with his medal and seems unaffected. She even starts to ask him out. Arguably, Richie himself, who is only briefly affected by the death of his brother.
- In A Kid In King Arthur's Court, Calvin is been transported to Camelot without warning. He spends his first few days in another time period commissioning rollerblades from the local blacksmith and making Big Macs…somehow.
The Nostalgia Critic: Oh my god it just hit me: I may never see my family again, my friends are gone, and I'm in a time period I will never survive in. *beat* Oh well!
Literature
- Two Words: The Outsiders — A gang of boys who get into fights for their life with a rival gang of spoiled rich kids on a daily basis, with no parents, no money, and no angsting allowed. Well, there was a little, but not very much and kept to subtext rather than made blatantly obvious.
- That was actually addressed. Ponyboy starts complaining once, but Two-bit tells him to shut up because life isn't fair.
- And they could angst outside the scope of the story, since we only see what Ponyboy does. Or they could've just gotten used to how badly life sucks, like the other guy said.
- Peter Pan is legendary for this. Pirates and Indians are fun to read about, and some children would want to have adventures with them. But most children would decide enough was enough after the third time they nearly get killed. The Darlings, by contrast, are having the time of their lives in Neverland, and never wanted to go home until they realized their mother was feeling awful. Not everybody would want to be a kid forever, either — the ending suggests that being eternally young isn't all it's cracked up to be.
- In addition, one version of the story has Peter killing Lost Boys whenever they actually grow up, and then forgetting about them entirely.
- Alice In Wonderland is trapped in a World Gone Mad, but she doesn't react as badly as many real people would. It's not fun or interesting to read about going insane in an insane world, so Alice doesn't.
- She's dreaming, you can't expect people to behave normally in a dream.
- The success of certain recent adaptations suggests that some do find it interesting to read or see someone "going insane in an insane world".
- Like American McGee's Alice.
- One particularly dark theatrical (half-parodic) adaptation spun on this by having the Wonderland inhabitants actively trying to drive Alice insane with their antics, remarking to the audience that they were only doing it for Alice's own good and that she'd be much happier when she'd gone mad. They eventually succeed, and Alice becomes more off-the-wall insane than either of them. While she eventually snaps out of it, the ending where she "wakes up" heavily implies that Wonderland wasn't a dream, but rather a moment of clarity on Alice's part — she had a brief moment of sanity where she got to realize that she's always been, and will always be, trapped in a mad world.
- Eragon of The Inheritance Cycle is a poster boy for this. How long does it take him to come to terms with and recover from the revelation of his true parentage (his father is, put lightly, not a nice person)? A chapter? Two? Try three paragraphs. As for how he gets over the loss of the uncle who raised him, see Luke Skywalker, above.
- And then...he is told in Brisingr that his father was really his mentor, Brom, and we get some Wangst.
- And let's not forget everyone's favourite wish-fulfillment girl, Arya, in the first book: in spite of having been, by her own admission, beaten, tortured, and very nearly raped for weeks on end, the biggest reaction we get out of her thereafter is a paragraph of her clenching her jaw a bit as she recounts the events...and after that everything's just peachy. Seriously, it barely even comes up again.
- Bella Swan of the Twilight series angsts on how she doesn't deserve to be with someone like Edward or to have a friend like Jacob. She also gets incredibly depressed whenever Edward leaves her or tries to. And yet she barely gives a thought to the fact that Edward's a blood-sucking vampire who constantly warns her that her life could be in danger if she gets close to him, or the very real consequences that come with becoming a vampire. Uncontrollable hunger for blood? Loss of human emotions? Who cares? All she wants is to be with Edward forever! (It turns out that she doesn't suffer from the drawbacks of becoming a vampire, for some reason.)
- Because that would get in the way of their
infatuation love psychosis.
- What drawbacks are there to becoming a Twilight vampire, exactly?
- Stuck as a teenager. Forever.
- Except Bella wants to be a teenager forever, so she gets exactly what she wants in the end,
- Where does it say that they lose their human emotions? Edward certainly doesn't seem to have lost them.
- To some degree the children in Stephen King's It fit this trope. While they sometimes have trouble shaking things they've seen, there are other times when they see the most horrific things and move on without much thought.
- A good portion of the novel follows the main characters as adults trying to remember what they did to stop It; presumably their subconscious blocked out the memories of the horrible things they saw and went through.
- Yet... how 11 year-olds finally got the courage to fight the monster at the time... Just look it up on Wikipedia... I hate you Stephen King...
- If you're talking about the bit with Beverly where each of the boys takes turns... you know what, Squick is probably the only word for it, they weren't doing that to get up courage, that happened AFTER they confronted It the first time. They had to do that to, umm... strengthen their nakama or something, and... uh... the power of myth... you know what, let's just chalk this one up as a Wall Banger and move on.
- And when one of the kids, as an adult does remember the full horror of IT, he commits suicide in the bathtub. Then, afterwards, we get chapters of his kid/character development. Thanks a lot, King.
- In the universe of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Hobbits have this quality. Their ability to shake their troubles and get past horrible experiences is often mentioned. One example is Merry and Pippin strolling around in Fangorn forest being curious about their surroundings and seemingly with hardly a care in the world. This after they've been abducted for the purpose of torture (and watched their friend die trying to save them), been handled roughly to say the least by the uruk-hai, and nearly been killed in a battle.
- Isn't that the defining trait of hobbits? Mental resiliency? It would explain why Frodo could carry the ring so well. When your brain is made of Emotional Adamantium, corruption takes longer.
- In another Lord of the Rings example, King Théoden is as calm about the recent death of his son Théodred as if it had happened years ago. The fact that The Movie adds a scene of him heart-breakingly mourning his son is considered Adaptation Distillation by some.
- Also, the Rohirrim tend to be kinda Viking about the whole 'death in battle' thing. "Hail the victorious dead!" is again movie continuity only, but its definitely true to the essence of the culture.
- Similarly, in Watership Down it is noted that the rabbits, like humanity, are well suited to weathering disaster and moving on quickly. (As they should be. Rabbits are prey animals. Getting eaten is what they do.)
- In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins's father dies in about the second chapter. This is the last mention of him; from then on Jim's too busy having an adventure to grieve.
- A number of adaptations simply have Jim's father either leave or die before the main story even starts, effectively clearing up that bit of loose end.
- Whenever the children trapped in Narnia far away from their families and forced to save the world (because Aslan is, uh, busy or something), perhaps at the cost of their lives, actually act like children (or anybody for that matter) would in that situation, the narrator mocks and scolds them for their behavior. "I hope you won't lose all interest in Jill for the rest of the book if I tell you that at this moment she began to cry."
- Hardly mocking. It came off to this troper, at least, as acknowledging the fact that this trope was preferred amongst readers.
- In the second book of Sword Of Truth, Richard finds out that his real father is the late mass-murdering sadistic dictator Darken Rahl. He shows a distinct lack of disturbance at this revelation, saying that it doesn't change who he is.
- Jeb Batchelder in Maximum Ride has every reason to angst — his son dies, twice, once practically in his arms, his daughter would gladly kill him if given the chance, and he regularly gets slapped around by his superiors — and yet he never says a word.
- In Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novel Small Favor, Murphy points out that Harry is a basket case for good reason — Lash's Heroic Sacrifice, taking a bullet for him, would be tramatic — and he shouldn't expect to live up to this trope.
Live Action TV
- Companions in Doctor Who run the gamut in how well they cope with their adventures, from Action Girl to The Scream. The companions who freak when they're running from homicidal Daleks would seem to be more realistic than the ones who stand and fight (not to mention saner), but the fans always prefer the ones who don't angst. Realistic or not, which one do you want to spend a half-hour watching?
- Matthew Waterhouse (Adric) thinks this was the reason the show treated much of the universe as a Throw Away Country after its destruction in "Logopolis" - there was no way to deal with the implications of what had happened, and the characters' participation (however unwitting) in it, without derailing the show. (The third option would have been not to have such a huge catastrophe in the first place.)
- Nyssa was from that part of the universe! Couldn't she have at least held a memorial service or something?
- Nyssa is visibly choked up, her voice breaking (or shaking with suppressed rage, its hard to tell which) when watching Traken's destruction. After that, events moved with enough speed and desperation that she wouldn't have had a chance to emotionally break down until the end of the story arc, at which point she presumably did her mourning offstage in the time gap between episodes. It's also entirely in-character for Nyssa to not go around emotionally freaking out... unlike some of the more higher-strung Companions, Nyssa's hat was being the calm and intelligent one.
- There's a fan theory that displays of emotion are discouraged on Traken - note that in The Keeper of Traken, most of the characters are pretty stoic, not even breaking down when their wives are killed in front of them.
- Claire on Lost, after Charlie's death. Admittedly, this is an ensemble show, and there are time issues, but still...
- Not surprising. By then Claire's figured out that reality on the island is very fluid. Plus, no body. Is she becoming Genre Savvy?
- Making worse is that Hurley is given a big emotional scene of reacting to Charlie's death, making this one of the most obvious parts of the writers' determination to ignore Claire at all oppurtunities.
- Fawlty Towers lost a good joke because of John Cleese's unwillingness to do this. In an episode where a guest dies and Basil and Manuel have to carry the body around without anyone noticing, the original ending was that the guest's twin brother arrived, greatly upsetting Basil who thought he was the guest and had been pranking him. Cleese realized that at some point the man would have to catch on that his brother was dead, which would ruin any comedy.
- Star Trek tends to have this as a result of the reset button. In a typical episode, Picard experiences the planet he grew up on destroyed and everyone he loved killed via implanted memories. There's a brief shot at the end when he looks sad, but then it's like it never happened.
- When they averted this after Picard's assimilation by the borg, and he spent an episode mentally recuperating, it shocked viewers.
- Averted, though, in Star Trek Voyager, at least with the overall premise of the series — Janeway, in particular, suffers from Break The Cutie syndrome through most of the series' run, going from a wide-eyed scientist to a hardened warrior in mind-bogglingly short order.
- On Top Gear, the three presenters allegedly have a pact that, should any of them die while filming the show, the remaining pair would appear at the beginning of the next episode, make a mournful comment, pause for a moment of silence, and then say "Anyway," and cheerily continue with the show.
- When Richard Hammond was seriously injured in 2006, Jeremy Clarkson commented that the joke didn't seem funny anymore, but now that he's recovered the pact seems to be back on.
- Being that they're British, I just can't see them doing that without tea on hand.
- A few of the characters of Degrassi The Next Generation have this, but Toby especially. He is consistently picked on, ignored by his unrequited crushes, and has two of his only friends killed by school violence, but seems no worse for wear by the next episode he's in.
Professional Wrestling
- Frequently. Your brother turns on you, destroys your entire life, kills your dog? Some little creep from your past tries to cripple your entire family? Your best friend mauls you to the point of hospitalization and tries to steal your son from you? Some freak with a beard killed your unborn baby? Eh, within a few months you'll have forgotten all about it and probably be best friends again (and again and again).
- Maybe you can even get Beard-Boy to read a poem at your wedding!
Video Games
- Jude Maverick, main character of Wild ARMs 4, prior to his mother's death, anyway.
- Slightly subverted with Polka in Eternal Sonata. There is angst, just nowhere near as much as you'd expect from someone in her situation.
- In Apollo Justice Ace Attorney, Trucy Wright gets over both the disappearance and the murder of her father surprisingly quickly. In fact, Apollo seems more shocked than she is.
- Towards the end it's revealed that she is upset about it, she just avoids showing most people.
- Ann of Jurassic Park: Trespassers does have a few reasonable worries when she realizes she's crashed on Site B—but deals remarkably well with being attacked by a Velociraptor out of seemingly nowhere.
- Two Words: Kingdom Hearts. Sora is worried for his parents (and the rest of Destiny Island civilization) for all of five minutes before setting out to save the world with a big grin on his face. It doesn't hurt that Donald and Goofy specifically ask him not to angst.
- In Sora's defense, many people have a pretty high level of optimism at his age — the old "you're a teenager, you can solve any problem," thing. He does slip into momentary depression throughout the series in response to events (before being cheered up by friends/distracted by task at hand), and it is implied that everything that has happened is slowly taking a toll on him.
- PLUS he's now (subconsciously) carrying Roxas' Angst-laden memories within him as well. If KH3 is just one shade darker than it's predecessor, it will be only a matter of time till this trope stops working on him. Wouldn't be too unusual for a SquareEnix -protagonist.
- Then there's a point in Kingdom Hearts II when Organization XIII member Saïx drops a major bomb on Sora. His practice of wiping out Heartless and releasing hearts is actually furthering the Organization's plans. Sora goes through a short period of "I can't use the Keyblade!", but it takes one statement from Goofy to get him to stop worrying about that and continue fighting Heartless like he always has. Granted, Goofy does have a point; Sora can't just not save people from the Heartless, but you'd think they would at least research some alternate way of subduing the Heartless.
- Aileen Harding from Alien Syndrome has every right to feel relatively down most of the time, but she usually is in good enough shape to not take it too far.
- The protagonist of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance both averts and embraces it - while he strives to go home, he does so in a manner free of angst.
- Zidane of Final Fantasy IX is suprisingly well adjusted for a 16-year-old orphan with a tail that gets dragged along to multiple genocides over the course of the game. To the point where it's genuinely shocking that his true origins can actually cause a Heroic BSOD, which he still gets over rather quickly. Even the adults in this game aren't that well put-together.
- And while finding out his origins did freak him out a bit, he immediately pushed it aside and turned on his creator while citing Powerof Friendship. The BSOD only occurred after said creator apparently ripped his soul out, and it took the rest of the party's Powerof Friendship speeches to help him recover.
- Tidus from Final Fantasy X is also worth note. He woke up stranded in a Strange New Land and later found out his home was destroyed, but he's always cheerful and energetic. Even when he finds out he's a ghost(of a sort) and will fade away once Sin is defeated, he faces his end with a jubilant attitude.
- Were it not for him angsting so much over his father, Tidus would have probably been angsting over his shitty situation.
- Also, to be fair to him, at least some of his laid-back attitude was clearly a deliberate attempt to NOT show angst, because he didn't want to pile any more angst onto Yuna's shoulders. Especially after he realized she was willingly going to sacrifice herself to stop sin, and was spending most of HER time trying not to depress her companions. There was a fair amount of repression going on.
- Mercifully applied to Sonic The Hedgehog after his werehog transformation in Sonic Unleashed. Rather than go all Shadow or Silver on us, Sonic notes his stretchy new arms and goes on more or less unchanged, barring two encounters with Amy.
- Arcueid is the last remaining sane True Ancestor (until the Nasuverse needs more, anyway) and the strongest one ever. Why? Because she's a living weapon. No life experiences, no memories, no friends, no family (except a 'sister' that she does not get along with, and her father the... moon? Skip that one for now) and then we get to the first person she ever really talked to, Roa. Who tricked her into drinking his blood, causing her to kill all the True Ancestors and stole some of her power, then goes around being all vampirey just so she comes and chases him. 800 years later she has so little life experience that she's ecstatic over a simple conversation. Oh, and before that she never spoke to anyone nor had anything she thought of as fun. This isn't even really getting into more than the surface stuff, yet she's probably the sanest/most well adjusted character in the series (except when she goes yandere) apart from Arihiko. She doesn't even really care and is a big goofball all the time.
- Also Shiki, which was intentionally done and is noted upon several times. Presumably it was done in order to contrast him with the likes of Kohaku, Hisui or Ciel who just can't leave the past alone.
- It kinda helps that his memory is Swiss Cheese due to his stepfather's actions, to the point that he doesn't really remember two of the most traumatic instances of his childhood except subconsciously. Though the one time he realized that he was suppressing his guilt over murdering Arcueid, he was completely horrified with himself and immediately began apologizing to her.
- Arcueid might actually be an odd example. During the 800 years that she's hunting Roa and his various incarnations, her mentality is like a machine's. After Shiki kills her the first time, she mentions that what Shiki did caused something to break inside her mind. So it could almost be said that Arcuied went insane, but by going insane she became sane. Or something.
- As long as we're on it, Arihiko himself. Looking at his behavior in the main storylines, you'd never guess that his backstory involved almost his entire family being killed in an earthquake and guilt over wishing that his crushed grandmother would die faster so that she wouldn't cause the rubble to shift while trying to reach him where he was pinned for days in the wreckage.
- Mother 3, anyone? Every single one of the protagonists have royally messed-up lives, and don't angst a bit about it (except Flint and maybe Salsa, but that's a bit hard to tell since he's a monkey). Hell, Lucas was a crybaby before getting an angst-worthy live and then became nice, brave and almost totally selfless.
- Your party in Baldurs Gate is generally made up of either psychos, megalomaniacs, or people with incredibly tragic backstories. Two people in particular have tragic backstories to spare, but won't let it slow them down: Minsc the cheerfully oblivious berserker is briefly saddened by the death of his Witch... And then promptly gets a new one. Despite having her entire party of companions turned into life-sucking undead horrors, Mazzy Fentan just picks up her blade and goes on.
- In Live A Live, Orsted silently bears all the misfortunes his quest throws in his way as it slowly goes from a very generic "save the princess" plot into the depths of It Got Worse territory. He's told that as long as someone's counting on him, he should keep moving forward, and that's exactly what he does. Until said princess tells him she hates him and kills herself rather than be saved by him. Then he, uh... breaks.
- How about Ocarina Of Time? He's blamed for killing the giant tree that protects his people the Kokiri, finds out they aren't even his people because his Hylian mom actually stumbled into the forest before he died, loses his childhood sleeping for seven years only to wake up to a world corrupted beyond all recognition, and then when the Kokiri actually do miss him, they cannot recognize him and he seems incapable of telling them who he is. Then again, Zelda does make it all better in the end.
- Made worse by Fridge Logic, though. Link remembers everything. Nobody else does.
- Link can't speak; how are we supposed to guess WHAT he's thinking? For all we know, he angsted over all of those things up above.
Webcomics
- In the webcomic Misfile, Ash angsts constantly about the problems from his-now-her Gender Bender. But she never angsts (or even notices) that her pre-Gender Bender life was much worse; he had no mother, his father was cold to him, he had a grand total of two friends (or, for that matter, people he even talked to), and so on.
- Worse is up to debate. He (yes, he) was apparently satisfied with his life. You don't need those things to be pleased with your life you know. Particularly if you're as monomaniacal about something as Ash was about street racing.
- You have to keep in mind the intense mental and emotional effect of suddenly becoming the opposite gender and having your entire life and past changed to something you don't even know everything about overnight.
- It takes something major to keep the Sluggy Freelance cast down for long. Justified with Bun-Bun, who is noted for his great emotional resiliance, and Torg, for different reasons
 :
Horribus: Why can't we use his fears against him?
Psyk: The long of it is, he does not explore consequences in depth, so he has no unknown fears to confront. And his memories are limited, so he has no fears from his past. The only things he seems to "fear" stem from simpler things we would not even regard.
Torg: Hey, are you saying I'm too stupid to be afraid?
Psyk: That's the short of it.
- Averted with Angela, who has to be committed to an insane asylum after the "KITTEN" adventure, while the main characters go off to have fun in the sun.
Western Animation
- Avatar The Last Airbender. Aang discovers that he's the Chosen One, every single person he's ever met—heck, all the animals too—have either been murdered or died of old age save for one now-elderly friend and a pet bison (BTW, home? a long abandoned ruin.); his Refusal Of The Call gets him and said bison frozen for a century and leads to him waking up clueless about the fact the world is engulfed in war and he has about nine months to master three elements and save the world from utter doom. Oh, and he's twelve years old. Most twelve-year-olds wouldn't cope very well with all that, and wouldn't be pleasant to watch, either (like real-world child soldiers). The writers dealt with it by making Aang The Pollyanna. In a reminder of why this trope exists, whenever Aang goes through a Rant Inducing Slight, fans complained about how whiny, mean and OCC he was and made cracks about "Aangst," even though he'd dealt with much worse without whining.
- He doesn't dwell on it, sure, but he angsts plenty whenever something forces him to think about. He went into a Heroic BSOD when they found Monk Gyatsu's skeleton.**He is also a reincarnation, so he's sort of been through every possible emotion already, and probably has a better grip on it than most 12 year olds.
- In the Dungeons And Dragons cartoon, a group of preteens barely seem upset at all over being trapped in a harsh fantasy world where everything is trying to kill them and their mentor is unhelpful in the extreme. The one exception is Eric, who is always portrayed as a whiner who needs to snap out of it already. The Complainer Is Always Wrong, even if it's about impending bloody death.
- In one episode, they learn that time in the real world passes differently from time in the fantasy world. So, they can at least take comfort in the fact that they haven't been gone long enough for their parents to be worried.
- Philip J. Fry of Futurama takes all of five seconds to get over the fact that he's a thousand years in the future and all the people he knew are long since dead. He does agonize about it in a few episodes, but since he's not that deep, it usually goes away after a while.
- One of the segments in the film Heavy Metal features Den, who gets snatched from Earth and flung to some far-distant planet, never to see his home again. Of course, the fact that he's turned from a scrawny nerd into a perfect physical specimen who gets to have sex with hot babes sorta takes the sting away.
- In the relatively Darker And Edgier second season of the Legion Of Super Heroes cartoon, Lightning Lad gets his arm fried in battle, only to wake up to find Brainiac 5's replaced it with a robot arm. His response is to shrug "Cool," and revel in his new lightning-cannon powers. Cartoon-Brainiac 5 of all people might have something to say about tossing away human bits of yourself so casually.
- In the Superman The Animated Series "Little Girl Lost" two-parter, Superman discovers Krypton's devastated sister planet Argos, hears the holographic recording of an Argosian woman's detail of her planet's gradual apocalyptic collapse in the face of Krypton's nearby explosion, and finds the woman's family frozen in stasis, and every member but one, Kara In-Ze, has died. Any trauma Kara might have from watching the death of her entire planet and waking up only to lose her family is forgotten with the "Two Weeks Later" card, because now she can fly through the Kansas sky and that's the most awesome therapy ever.
- In The Spectacular Spider Man, one of Peter Parker's oldest friends, Eddie Brock, becomes the supervillain Venom. You'd expect Peter to be very upset over the fate of his "best bro" and try to reason with him, with the hope of redeeming him. Instead, he spends surprisingly little time dwelling on this issue and treats him like just another villain in subsequent fights.
- Of course, it's made fairly obvious that Eddie "chose" to be the villain, and thus Peter a bit less broken up about it.
- That just makes it worse!
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles occasionally acted this way in the most recent series. While they would occasionally angst—for example, during Splinter’s post-“Return to New York” disappearance or Leo’s arc during the first half of season 4—their reaction to stuff like being accidentally trapped in the late Cretaceous or losing Splinter in cyberspace was surprisingly—and sometimes jarringly—subdued.
- The main characters in South Park embody this trope. They never show any emotion, besides their trademark line, when Kenny is killed. This is even noted in the episode 'Gnomes':
- Gnome: "Holy crap, we killed your friend. That's all you have to say?"
- In later episodes, they even say their lines with boredom more than anger. I guess once you've seen the same person die a couple dozen times it stops having an impact.
- Used in Street Sharks. The protagonists get kidnapped by a mad scientist and his two monsters, find out that their dad went missing, nearly die from an injection, and then turn into shark hybrids with possibly no way to turn back. Their first thought? To eat a hot dog stand. Goes even stranger with an out-of-towner named Melvin, who turns into a shark hybrid purely by accident, spends all of two seconds confused when he wakes up, and then decides to go enter a music contest.
- Winx Club fans find it a bit suspect that in the S4 finale, Layla has apparently gotten over the death of her intended in about a day.
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