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"You'd think I'd be used to it by now. But they keep finding new angles to torture me with."
So, your character is angsting. It seems that his dog just died in a freak accident. That accident involved his kindly uncle, who didn't swerve in time to avoid the poor puppy. However, he did swerve in time to go off an embankment and hit a bus full of high school students including your character's girlfriend who'd just said yes to being taken to the dance. Unfortunately, the shock of the news caused the protagonist's kindly old mother to have a heart attack, which left his father without any will to live. So daddy hanged himself and... Wait, what? Isn't this a little overboard?
Deus Angst Machina is something of the polar opposite of Wangst in terms of cause, but can come across as no less frustrating. Simply put, the character in question has every reason in the world to retreat into himself and become a brooding, angsty person because his life really does suck as much as he thinks it does. However, the circumstances seem entirely too contrived. This is a step beyond the coincidences that most stories tend towards to build up drama, as the character seems to have provoked some sadistic god who is now dedicated to making his life as miserable (and angst-filled) as possible. Sure, anyone would be miserable in his situation, but when said situation is less likely than being struck by lightning, it can seem to be outright ludicrous.
A common pitfall for those who think True Art Is Angsty yet are wary of falling into Wangst (although, given the nature of the trope, they generally end up falling into it anyway). For the comedic version, see The Chew Toy. Commonly experienced by those who have heard the writing advice "conflict is drama, so the more conflict, the more drama", but who don't quite get that conflict is about more than just angst. Remember... any writer who thinks happy people are boring isn't trying hard enough.
Different from Diabolus Ex Machina in that it's many separate and unlikely events conspiring to create angst instead of a Downer Ending, but can still overlap at times.
The Sadist Show will play this trope for laughs, and others may end up doing so unintentionally. If the story appears to be building up to something, only to ultimately end up going nowhere or sputtering out, then it may be a case of Shoot The Shaggy Dog.
Not to be confused with Tragedy. See also Trauma Conga Line.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Used in an interesting fashion in Trigun. Not only does Vash actually have someone out there living and breathing solely to make him as miserable possible, he's also very good at it.
- Nina and Johann's childhood in Monster. Then there's Nina's and Tenma's adult years...
- YMMV, especially since angst is really not a point the story ever focuses on.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion is
perhaps the king of this trope. Most characters only seem to get characterization so that they can angst over it. But the trope is played to the hilt with Shinji, to whom almost anything bad can and will happen so he can angst about it. Potential replacement mother figure sucks at the job? Angst. Dysfunctional fellow pilot is a world-class Tsundere who emotionally abuses him? Angst. Same girl is then telepathically mind raped from orbit? Angst. Girl finally snaps and goes catatonic? Angst. Permanently maims one of his friends (or in the manga, kills) without knowing about it until after the fact? Angst. Potential love interest nearly dies? Angst. Said girl then turns out to have been a science experiment, and an aquarium full of clones of her get diced? Angst. New friend, who is like a male version of the creepy potential love interest, starts acting gay? Angst. Said friend turns out to be The Mole and Shinji has to crush him to death so he won't set off The End Of The World As We Know It? Angst. Rocks Fall Everyone Dies? ...uh, you get the picture. Angst, angst, angst! Is it any wonder he finally mentally self-destructed and decided to just end the world?
- At least four main cast members have a Heroic BSOD or a Villainous Breakdown before the show is over. Asuka arguably has two. And you could fill an entire debate thread arguing how many Shinji had.
- Even worse, the other characters tend to give him relentless hell for angsting, which gives him even more reasons to angst. And when something angst-inducing happens, Neon Genesis Evangelion plays it straight and brutal- if it would get worse, it does. And then gets even worse than that.
- The part I find funny is that fans give him even more hell for angsting. To the point that if they could, they'd literally be lining up to punch him. One would hope that at that point, the sheer ridiculousness of it all would make it less angst-inducing and more WTF-inducing.
- Sadly, considering the subject matter, it will only make Shinji angst more. All Consuming Light Devouring Void of Angst anyone?
- Gunbuster: Well known for its proper depiction of time dilation, this series also seems to only display such well-researched science when it can make the main characters angst. Prime example? Jung making a careless comment to Noriko regarding the loss of her father because it's been months from her perspective but only hours from Noriko's.
- New Mauve Shirts are usually introduced just so they can die and make Noriko emo.
- Parodied and averted in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. The title character engages in Wangst to the extreme over ridiculous hypotheses and tiny coincidences. Meanwhile, Kafuka, the happy ball of sunshine who continues to announce that life is wonderful every single day, often mentions in passing that her father repeatedly attempted suicide, her mother was possessed by a demon, she appears to be in the Witness Protection Program...
- They're waiting for her to crack. It'll be any day now.
- Of course she won't. Because that wouldn't be funny.
- That's right, it wouldn't be funny. It would be hilarious..
- Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, the sequel to the first season, shows that Kafuka has indeed cracked. She's just really good at hiding it. And yes, it is pretty funny.
- In Blue Gender, the universe is out to get Yuji and Marlene. This is not a supposition, it is a fact supported by Word Of God.
- Subverted: Hayate in Hayate The Combat Butler can never seem to get a break. He's got deadbeat parents who steal his money and are willing to sell him to
the Yakuza some 'very nice people' to clear their gambling debts, and after becoming Nagi's butler, he keeps getting into situations where everybody wants him dead. Hell, he's the greatest, most gentle kid in the world, and Santa won't even give him presents! The only thing that keeps this anime from becoming a tragedy is that Hayate is used to crap like this happening and that some twist of fate usually occurs to make it so that things aren't quite as bad as they seemed at first.
- ...And, of course, that most of these events are played for comedy. And succeeds.
- This probably works because the protagonist in question has the mental fortitude to match his physical constitution (getting hit by a speeding car, falling off a clocktower without so much as a bruise etc.)
- Which means that instead of being all wangsty about his troubles, he usually mentions them offhandedly and cheerfully, as if they were something minor. Other characters, however, are visibly disturbed when they learn of them and Hayate once had his grade school class and the teacher in tears when he cheerfully and obliviously reads a report showcasing his crapshack of a home life.
- Fay from Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is literally cursed, and more than once: He had a twin, which in his world was considered a bad omen, so both little boys got imprisoned separately. Still as a kid, the Big Bad promises to have someone set him free if his brother dies, and then he curses him. Twice. If he ever meets someone more powerful than him, Fay will have to kill them: this means stabbing Sakura, the heroine, whom he loves as a daughter. The other curse? He must kill the king who rescued him from prison, or else his world will implode. The king knows this and kills most of his people just so Fay would kill him in turn... but Fay still refuses, someone else kills the king, and the world implodes. Oh, and to get Fay out of the imploding world, Kurogane gives up one of his arms. It also turns out that Fay still wished to revive his brother, and found out the hard way that it was impossible. But wait, there's more! The kid that Fay loved as a son turns out to be a soulless clone who gouges out Fay's eye and eats it for its magic! And to survive, Fay gets turned into a vampire! And he can only feed from the man he loves!
- This series really showcases CLAMP's ability to lay it on thick. Sakura and Syaoran seem to have had to rebuild their relationship from scratch several times already, due to various plot twists that keep reversing any progress they make towards a confession and a formal romance. Kurogane's past is only not-angsty by comparison with Fay's, and his character has to go through quite a bit in the course of the story, including having to watch the man he loves deal with all the above crap.
- Fai really does give meaning to the term "angst it up like a CLAMP character"
- Being as it sits on the very far right of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, Bokurano can feel very much like this trope. Not only are the kids tricked into playing a deadly "game", but the one who pilots the mecha will die whether he/she wins or loses. If they lose, their universe is destroyed, but if they win, they destroy another universe and everyone in that universe will die. The series seems to go out of its way to make everything as tragic and depressing as possible, as most of the children have tragic backstories on top of having to play the "game"; for just one example, see the pilot who turns out to be pregnant, and whose baby dies along with her after her battle.
- Poor Joe Asakura in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. To explain everything here would take forever, just see for yourself
 .
- Orihime in the last arc. Can't fight, has to go to the Hollow's world to avoid getting her friends killed, is mind raped over and over by Ulquoirra, sees her plan fail as all her friends come for her (which makes her sort of happy eventually but...) sees them get brutally injured but then they finally get to her. Ichigo gets maimed, she heals him so he can fight Grimmjow, which he barely wins. Nnoitra kicks his ass again. Ichigo gets better again and starts to fight Ulq. After briefly matching him he then gets owned repeatedly while his opponent is clearly holding back, and then his opponent goes even more badass and blows a giant hole through his chest, killing him. She somehow manages to revive him... as a mindless berserking monster with the only thought being to protect her. Good job, Orihime. You broke Ichigo. Oh, and then Ichigo stabs Ishida, so she feels responsible for that too. Luckily, it probably won't get much worse in this arc because Ichigo is probably going to kill every other living thing in that entire world that dares show the slightest hostility unless he snaps out of it soon, which seems a bit unlikely. There's already nobody (evil) left who can come close to matching up to him.
- Ulquoirra of all people snapped Ichigo out of it with one last parting shot.
- Lelouch Lamperouge gets some serious deus angst machina in Code Geass at a few points, especially in R2 episode 19 after Nunnally 'dies', especially combined with the fact that C.C. has lost her memories and he just caused the destruction of Tokyo and Shirley died and....
- This trope is the story of the entire R2 season.
- Parodied in the fourth episode of Slayers Evolution-R where drama inducing events make no sense at all. For example a character becomes a delinquent and another is revealed to have a terminal disease. It all happened for no reason in an instant. They where both happy walking fish kids before.
Comic Books
- Since Tim Drake became Robin: His mother was poisoned, his girlfriend Darla was killed, his dad was killed by a boomerang, another girlfriend, who had replaced him as Robin, Stephanie Brown, was tortured, and "died", his stepmother was most likely killed via a nuke in Bludhaven, his best friend Kon-El was killed, his other best friend, Bart Allen was killed, Batgirl went insane, his one Tim friend, Ives has cancer and Batman just supposedly died but Steph did come back only to start helping one of Tim's enemies in order to push him to become more efficient, on Batman's order. The writers joke about giving him a puppy so they can kill it too. Tim's response to all this? To emotionally deaden himself and go the Jerk Ass route.
- On the other hand, we have Stephanie Brown. Grew up the child of a physically and emotionally abusive convict and a (now-rehabilitated) drug addict. Suffered attempted sexual molestation by her piano teacher at age 11. Almost had her face melted off by her own father with an acid capsule on her first foray as a vigilante. Set up for kidnapping and murder by her own father again several months later. Becomes pregnant by a boy who abandons her without even stopping long enough to learn that she was pregnant. Carries the child to term, then gives him/her/ up for adoption in a complete Tear Jerker of a moment, not letting herself even know her baby's sex or naming him/her because otherwise she could never force herself to let go. (And for extra angst points, almost dies of complications during the delivery.) Father (apparently) dies while trying to reform, leaving her entirely conflicted on the issue. Tortured grotesquely by Black Mask for hours. Upon returning from her faked death and one years' isolation in Africa, immediately ordered by Batman to betray her ex-boyfriend "for his own good", leading to complete alienation from him. Given the absolute minimum of support and validation in her superhero career, even by her own boyfriend, throughout. Subjected to active discouragement from pursuing a superhero career by virtually everyone. Depending on whether or not its Canon Discontinuity yet, possibly still carrying the guilt for setting off a destructive gang war that killed hundreds. And her response? Total refusal to let any of this crap get her down. With arguably as much to angst about as her ex-boyfriend Tim, there is not one panel of her whining or indulging in self-pity available in the sixteen years the character has been in Bat-Comics. Steph entirely shares Commissioner Gordon's awesome immunity to PTSD or Wangst.
- Well, she gets an issue of Robin dedicated to a few of her really crappy life experiences after her dad died. That's it.
- The current Spider-Man "Brand New Day" storyline is nothing but Deus Angst Machina, mixed in with a healthy serving of non-stop Wangst. Every conceivable thing that can go wrong does. Twice. In a single issue. Just to remind us Spider-Man's deeper and more dramatic now! This editor half expects Peter Parker to find a lost puppy, just so the Green Goblin can eat it in the next issue. It seems Spidey can never catch a break.
- It's worth noting that "One More Day" / "Brand New Day" represents a 'back to basics' move on the part of Marvel's editorial team, as an attempt to get Peter back to his roots - the classic Spidey had lots of things go wrong for him in his early days as well. However, they seem to have forgotten about all of the good things that used to happen to him at the time as well - his life was never unremitting misery and failure.
- This is also slightly justified, as BND was the result of a Deal With The Devil, and don't those generally have unintended, horrible consequences?
Film
- The movie Crank had, as its theme, that every character from minor to major had the biggest bad luck day possible on the day that Chev was poisoned.
- The short film Six Shooter was basically based on this trope. It starts with the main character on the train home from the hospital after finding out that his wife has died in an accident. He strikes up a conversation with a young man, who reveals that his mother had been murdered the night before. Over the course of the movie said young man ends up causing the suicide of a young mother who'd just lost her child, is found to be the murderer of his mother, and dies in a shoot-out with the police (still on the train). The main character picks up the discarded gun, which has two bullets left. He takes it home intending to commit suicide. He remembers his wife's rabbit and, being merciful, shoots it first so it doesn't have to starve. He then drops the gun, which fires its last bullet, and so he can't kill himself anymore. The last line? 'What a day.'
- Mel Gibson's character, Benjamin Martin, in The Patriot only decides to fight in the Revolution after his eldest son was captured and sentenced to hang and his younger son was shot in cold blood by the over-the-top evil Tavington, who had just walked in to the Martin's home and murdered several wounded Colonials in their beds, even though the Martins were also caring for British wounded. That's when Benjamin gets out the hatchets.
- Played for humor in My Cousin Vinny when Lisa nags Vinny about getting married:
Vinny: “Lisa, I don't need this. I swear to God, I do not need this right now, okay? I've got a judge that's just aching to throw me in jail. An idiot who wants to fight me for two hundred dollars. Slaughtered pigs. Giant loud whistles. I ain't slept in five days. I got no money, a dress code problem, AND a little murder case which, in the balance, holds the lives of two innocent kids, not to mention your [stomps his foot] BIOLOGICAL CLOCK - my career, your life, our marriage, and let me see, what else can we pile on? Is there any more SHIT we can pile on to the top of the outcome of this case? Is it possible?”
Lisa: [pause] “Maybe it was a bad time to bring it up.”
- Parodied in Mel Brooks' "Robin Hood: Men in Tights"
Robin Hood: Blinkin, listen to me. They've taken the castle!
Blinkin: I thought it felt a bit drafty. Cor, this never would have happened if your father was alive.
Robin Hood: He's dead?
Blinkin: Yes.
Robin Hood: And my mother?
Blinkin: She died of pneumonia while... oh, you were away...
Robin Hood: My brothers?
Blinkin: There were all killed by the plague.
Robin Hood: My dog, Pogo?
Blinkin: Run over by a carriage.
Robin Hood: My goldfish, Goldie?
Blinkin: Eaten by the cat.
Robin Hood: [on the verge of tears] My cat?
Blinkin: Choked on the goldfish.
- Don't forget the clincher:
Blinkin: Oh, isn't it great to be 'ome, Master Robin?
Literature
- Pick a character in Animorphs. Almost any character. Fans tend to think Tobias wins at this particular kind of angst, but a careful reading of the series reveals that he has some pretty serious competition. (Consider the backstories of the Auxiliary Animorphs, and how they wound up being used in the end. Dang.)
- Like the final quarter of the last book in the His Dark Materials trilogy is a ridiculously convoluted justification for why the Hero and Heroine can't just get married and have a happy ending.
- Harry Potter — every single male parental figure in the title character's life ends up dead, one by one. (Sort of Voldemort's plan).
- Except Arthur, who was supposed to die in the middle of book five. But even JKR apparently thought that was too much.
- Instead his son, who was one half of a pair of identical twins, is killed. That's apparently too little.
- Stephen R. Donaldson loves putting his characters through hell so he can watch them suffer.
- The revised ending of Stephen King's The Mist, in which the main character kills all the other survivors, including his ten-year-old son, runs out of bullets, and tries to get a monster to kill him...just in time for the cavalry to arrive — this in Portland, having come all the way from Bangor with no sign of fellow survivors. The audience literally broke down laughing at his angst when this contributor saw this film in the cinema.
- Then it would seem that the people in your hometown lack souls.
- By the end of this movie, this troper and his friends had lost any hope of watching a decent movie and started calling out that the army would come and save him after he killed everyone. As soon as it happened, we stopped laughing. It only seemed funny in concept. On screen... it just seemed forced.
- Even the Black Stallion series goes for this one. Jockey Alec Ramsey, having undergone a pretty eventful life already, falls in love with a bewitching free spirit named Pam in The Black Stallion and the Girl. She leaves him to continue her wandering ways, but at the beginning of the next book, The Black Stallion Legend, her bus plunges off a cliff, killing her and everyone else on board. Alec finds out about this through a newspaper account and goes quite mad. He recovers eventually.
- A Series Of Unfortunate Events is a (darkly) humorous take on this.
- Is there an "uplifting" chick-lit novel, Lifetime Movie Of The Week, or Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that doesn't do this to its heroine(s)?
- Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet, arguably. Two young teens being desperately in love with each other but separated by the feuding of their families is a realistic situation, but that ridiculous farce of a dual duel misunderstanding? Tybalt tries to challenge Romeo, Romeo refuses so Mercutio fights in his place, and is killed by Tybalt, causing Romeo to kill the offender in a fit of pique. And on top of this, the Friar's messenger just conveniently fails to reach Romeo to warn him of Juliet's fake death, causing Romeo to drink poison mere moments before Juliet awakens, who then proceeds to stab herself with a dagger, promptly dying. So the actual tragedy of the story, the lovers' demise, could've been avoided if Romeo had waited a bloody five minutes before committing suicide, or even if the messenger had succeeded in delivering the message in the first place.
- Soul Of The Fire, the fifth book of the Sword Of Truth series is made of this. For starters, it takes place in a country where more than half the population is convinced they're inherently evil (think about if Hitler somehow managed to convince the Jews they deserved to be exterminated, and you'll get the idea). The one person in this group who wants to change it has his head unceremoniously broken in half. His would-be girlfriend sees her entire regiment (made up of fresh-faced girls) either slaughtered, raped, or both at the same time before running for her life and likely suffering the same fate. A good friend that a major character had known years ago is burned at the stake. And the hero's wife is beaten to death (but saved with the kiss of life) and loses their baby. Singularly the most depressing book in the whole series.
- Turin from JRR Tolkien's The Children Of Hurin. His little sister died when he was 5. When he was 9, his father went off to war and was captured by the Big Bad, who cursed his entire family. (Turin didn't know about it and thought his father died.) He then leaves his pregnant mother behind to seek shelter from the Elf king, so he wouldn't be enslaved. When he was 20, he accidentally kills an Elf who attacked him verbally and physically. Believing the king would punish him, he exiles himself. The king forgave him when he found out the truth, and let Beleg, a good friend of Turin, search for him. Turin joins a band of outlaws and becomes their leader. He is captured by orcs and tied up. Beleg finds him at night and cuts his bonds, but his knife slips and wakes Turin up. Turin jumps up and kills Beleg. Later, his mother and the sister that was born after he'd left, Nienor, goes to the Elf king to look for Turin. Obviously he's not there, so they go look for him. Glaurung the dragon puts a spell over Nienor so she forgets who she is. She goes running crazy into the woods until Turin finds her. They fall in love and get married. Eventually Turin goes to slay Glaurung. He fatally stabs him, but the blood makes him pass out. Nienor finds him and thinks he's dead. Glaurung tells her that she's pregnant by her brother and dies, thus lifting the spell. Nienor remembers everything and jumps off a cliff. Turin wakes up and and goes home, where he is told about Nienor from her Stalker With A Crush. He commits suicide by impaling himself on his sword which apparently talks to him.
- Tolkien makes the subtle point that most of Turin's troubles can be traced to his angsty self-absorption. As somebody - Beleg? - points out, other people have their problems too. Given that the War Against Morgoth is being lost, that is something of an understatement!
- This series of events is supposed to be abnormally unfortunate, as Morgoth's punishment of Hurin (Turin's father) was to give Hurin the ability to see everything that happened to his family and then to curse said family. Considering that Morgoth helped make the world, it is to be assumed that his curses would actually come true.
- Don't forget how, when he goes to Nargothron with Gwindor, Gwindor's fiancee falls for him, whilest he remains oblivious and he ends up destroying Nargothrond by persuading its inhabitants to fight. Gwindor dies wishing he'd never met Turin and Finduilas dies because Glaurung hypnotises Turin into letting orcs drag her off.
- Robin Hobb loves to use this trope, Fitz from "Farseer" never seems to get an even break. Every time he appears to achieve or be about to achieve anything events conspire to dash his hopes and often make things much, much worse. Possibly justified because all the bad things that happen are the natural result of the setting and event transpiring around him, but included because he always seems to get the short end of the stick.
- Spoofed in the "Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan" stories within Daniel Pinkwater's Young Adult Novel:
So here was Kevin, a thirteen-year-old alcoholic, pusher, and thief. His mother would never get well, his father certainly wouldn't, and sister Isobel was turning tricks on State Street. It seemed to Kevin that there wasn't a chance in the world that he would ever get his life straightened out. And he was right. So we hit him over the head and fed him to the pigs.
- In Sophocles' "Antigone", after a bloody battle for Thebes and the mutual slaying of the two heirs to the throne, Creon, the self-proclaimed new king condemns his niece to being buried alive for having buried one of the two aforementioned heirs. On finding that his son Aimon, her betrothed, has killed himself, however, he repents and goes to set her free. Unfortunately, Antingone has hanged herself in the meantime -tombs were very spacious back then-. Then, the never-before mentioned character of Eurydice, Creon's wife, appears in a scene and declares she's going to hang herself. Creon ends the play a broken man.
- Voltaire's Candide is an entire book of this. Despite his assertions that we live in the best of all possible worlds, Candide is kicked out of his idyllic home for kissing a girl who is apparently his cousin (although this is never brought up by any of the characters), is tricked into joining the Bulgarian army, is flogged until he has no skin on his back and begs for death, sees horrific death and destruction caused by the war, has a chamber-pot emptied on him, finds out that his beloved teacher has become a beggar hideously disfigured by syphilis, learns that his childhood home was utterly destroyed and his love interest and her family have been murdered (after brutal mass rape), and the ship he's on is beset by a storm... in the first four chapters. In fact, every character in Candide suffers from this trope—it's hard to find a character who hasn't been enslaved, raped, flogged, or lost all their worldly possessions.
- In Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Universe, where Arab terrorists destroy a big chunk of Denver with a nuclear weapon and almost succeed in provoking a global nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, Japan threatens the U.S. with nuclear weapons, a madman pilot does a kamikaze attack with a Boeing 747 into the Capitol and kills the President and most of Congress, and Iran then attacks the US with biological warfare (see following entry)... and after all this, Clancy decides to still include the events of September 11, 2001 in this world. In this troper's opinion, what already happened was bad enough; the last one was truly unnecessary piling on.
- You forgot Iran funding terrorists to launch a biological attack and try to kidnap the President's daughter, which started a short war in the Middle East; Japan invading US territory (the Marianas); a war with the US and Russia on one side and China on the other, which culminated in China launching an ICBM at Washington D.C. that is shot down at the last possible minute; a small battle between US and Russian forces in Berlin after the nuke in Denver, which almost lead to nuclear war (again); and a few more things. The weird thing is that the events of September 11, 2001 have more or less the same impact in the Jack Ryan Universe as they did in ours. One wonders how people could care about regular terrorism when, in less then two decades, there were no less then five instances where nuclear warfare was a real possibility.
- You're right, I either missed those (I haven't read all of Clancy's books) or forgot some of them. And I agree, why would people be that concerned about terrorism after the almost-nuke incidents. I mean, I was living in Northern Virginia at the same time as both the anthrax attacks and the Beltway Snipers (Mohammed and Malvo) and at times I started to wonder if I was living in a Tom Clancy novel.
- Considering the fact that the nuke in Denver exploded in the Super Bowl Arena, during the Super Bowl, killing at least 50.000 people in the audience, including the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, some 3000 people should not be that important.
- In The Last Herald-Mage trilogy from the Heralds Of Valdemar books, the title character Vanyel has no abilities at all and no friends. He gets his arm broken by his weapons trainer in an attempt to "toughen him up". His one true love goes insane when his twin brother dies, plans a complicated revenge, suffers a massive breakdown, and ultimately commits suicide, but not before flooding Van with a massive torrent of magical energy that forcibly awakens all of his magical gifts. Van is left in such emotional and psychic pain that he attempts suicide twice before starting to recover.
- And that was just in the first volume! In the second volume he's mostly just lonely and a bit sad, but in the third volume he gets gang-raped, because apparently he didn't have enough angst in his life already...
- Tycho Celchu can be seen as one of these. He was born and grew up on Alderaan and was a very good pilot for The Empire. When the Empire blew up his homeworld, it was his birthday, and he was in a full-holo conference celebrating it with his entire family and his fiancee. When the holo failed, for several hours he thought it was just another spontaneous failure and planned to rib them about it, since his family owned the station and had been suffering similar failures. Later, having switched sides and serving the Rebellion, he got kidnapped by Isard, the Empire's mistress of intelligence and brainwashing. She failed and transferred him out of her secret prison into one from which he was able to escape. Since he told his superiors that Isard had kidnapped him, they believed he had been brainwashed - all previous brainwashed people hadn't been able to tell anyone - and restricted what he could and could not do. Since the head of Rouge Squadron trusted him, he was allowed to fly an unarmed shuttle into combat to rescue downed pilots, but he had a guard at all times. Later he got framed for Corran Horn's apparent death, and his friends and allies were forced to clear his name. Throughout this Tycho was unfailingly portrayed as incredibly calm and noble. His situation certainly got better later, but damn.
"I am Tycho Celchu, son of Alderaan, now orphan of the galaxy. I have come to this place of my birth to pay homage to who I was and those I knew. And those I loved and love still. It is my wish that when life abandons me, I am returned here to be among you, so that for eternity we may be together as we should have been in life. These gifts are but insufficient tokens of the love for you all that still burns within me. This fighter is another. It bears the colors of the Alderaanian Guard and transmits their code. It is my pledge to you—not of vengeance but of vigilance. I hope you rest well knowing you will rest alone, because it is my life's work to see to it that no one else suffers as you have. I won't rest until this quest is complete. Rest easy. I miss you all."
- A later book lampshades it a little when Adumarians dub him "The Doleful One". He's not sad, but he always looks sad. So sad that Adumari ladies want to comfort him. He could probably comfort them about wanting to comfort him.
Tycho: *frowns* I'm not sad.
Janson: No, but you look sad. Makes the ladies of Cartann's court want to comfort you. They're so sad about wanting to comfort you that you could comfort them.
Hobbie: And Tycho's the only one of us with a successful relationship with a woman. Missed opportunities, Tycho.
- Leafpool in Warrior Cats. In Twilight, her mentor dies (and she blames herself for her death), she has to give up the love of her life, and she essentially becomes isolated from the rest of the Clan. She seems to have been able suck it up, but then in Sunrise it is revealled that she was actually pregnant and had to give up her kits to be raised by her sister, she can no longer be a medicine cat (pretty much the only joy in life she had left), she gets insulted by the aforementioned love of her life, her own daughter tries to kill her, and she apparently blames herself for Ashfur's death. The ending makes it difficult to tell exactly what is going to happen to her now. All this isn't really a Contrived Coincidence though, since it all just originates from one bad decision... and another bad decision to cover up the first one...
- Alonso Quixano in The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Almost everybody he encounters takes advantage of his delusions for comedy value. Don Quixote attributes all misfortunes to his mysterious, non-existant enemies, which are exchangeable, and consist of a sorcerer.
- Push by Sapphire has received criticism because of this. Precious Jones, the protagonist, is a completely illiterate 16 year old in the 8th grade. Her father raped her and caused her to get pregnant twice, the first time she was 13. The baby from the first pregnancy(Little Mongo) has severe Down's syndrome. She is currently pregnant with the second. When she was in labor with Mongo, her mother was kicking her on the floor. It Gets Worse(and a little bit better). By the end of the book, she is a semi-literate HIV-positive teen mom living in a homeless shelter.
- Any Jodi Picoult book. It would be a Tear Jerker, except that she puts it on much too thick at times.
- Kurt Vonnegut 's success is based on laying misery down on his characters, but special mention goes to the book Deadeye Dick. The main character, Rudy Waltz accidentally shoots and kills a pregnant woman at twelve years old. His naive, pampered father takes the blame for the killing and both he and his son are imprisoned, where they are tortured and humiliated by the police. Rudy is stricken by grief and dedicates his life to making up for his actions he never does, at least to his satisfaction. Consumed by grief he shuts himself off from all worldly pleasure and lives life as what he calls as an asexual "neuter." His hometown knows him as almost an urban legend and derisively refer to him as "Deadeye Dick." He spends the remainder of his parents' lives as their effective slave because they have no idea how to care for themselves after losing their enormous wealth. When they die, he becomes an expatriate in Haiti until he hears his hometown has been obliterated by a neutron bomb to open the city up for real-estate sales. And that's the end of the book.
Live Action TV
- Law And Order Special Victims Unit often falls into this. Granted, a Cop Show about victims of rape and other sex crimes isn't exactly going to be all smiles, sunshine and cartoon bluebirds, and there's going to be fair bit of angst at times, but they really do tend to lay it on a bit thick. Often occurs whenever one of the characters gets into an Its Personal moment, which is roughly every episode.
- Daniel Jackson in Stargate and Stargate SG-1. Loses both his parents in an accident, loses his foster parents in another accident, has his scientific discoveries rejected and mocked... then, just as everyone thinks he's going to live Happily Ever After on another planet with his new wife, she is promptly taken away by the Big Bad and implanted with a Goa'uld symbiote. After he spends three years fighting the Goa'uld, with the hope of seeing her again being his only motivation, he's forced to see her killed by Teal'c, one of his best friends. He recovers, only to have another love interest taken away by another Goa'uld. Not even death stops the chain of unfortunate events: after ascending, he's quickly frustrated with his inability to intervene, and finally kicked from the ascended plane after trying to stop another Big Bad from dropping a planet's worth of bridges on Abydos... and failing. The most amazing thing is how he eventually gets over all this...
- All the main characters of SG-1 have tormented pasts and presents, perhaps not contrived when you take into account how often they tempt fate and win.
- In the Canadian teen drama series Degrassi The Next Generation, just about every awful thing that can happen to a teenager has happened to one of the characters. There's been a school shooting, a stabbing, at least one rape, self-mutilation, eating disorders, and multiple drug addictions and pregnancies (if this troper has been keeping track correctly, the girls who have been pregnant now almost outnumber the girls who haven't). All the while, nobody seems to notice that Degrassi might not be the best place to go to school...
- Ahh, Degrassi. As this troper's friend pointed out about Snake, "Canadians are funny when they have cancer!"
- As repeatedly noted on this site, Buffy during season six of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The last couple of episodes stick out though: After having her mentor/father figure leave town, seeing the marriage of two of her best friends fall apart at the altar (causing one of them to revert to being an evil vengeance demon), having her ex-boyfriend come back to town happily married and disappointed in seeing her working a dead-end job at a fast food place and dating a vampire, then barely avoiding a rape by said vampire, then having her best friend's girlfriend shot by a random bullet meant for her, then having said best friend go Psycho Lesbian and on a killing spree with her magical powers, then having her little sister attacked by demons enroute to the Psycho Lesbian causing the end of the world... who could blame Buffy for wishing she had stayed dead at the end of season 5?
- Of course, the seasons of Buffy before this one weren't exactly over-brimming with happiness either. But it was never quite this bad.
- A Saturday Night Live sketch featured Mike Myers as a British WWII soldier recovering in a hospital, who goes through one of the worst cases of this ever but refuses to lose his cool. Turns out the nurse he is engaged to is already married and only pretended to be in love with him to keep his hopes up. And the mission he just flew didn't result in the death of Hitler as he had been told. In fact, he blew up an orphanage. And he can't go back and play football for his favorite team because the doctors had to amputate his leg. And his team lost anyway. Because their opponents team had the nurse's husband kick the winning goals. And when he comments that such a great player must have three legs, it turns out that he does. Because that's what they did with the leg they took from him. And then the husband shows up and It's Hitler! Myers comments that at least nobody has hit him over the head with a pipe today. Guess what Hitler does.
- East Enders. Just... East Enders. Most soaps have a bit of inherent angst involved, but in that one, whatever can go wrong is guaranteed to go wrong — and then, whatever can't go wrong will also go wrong, just for good measure.
- Oh, lord, Supernatural. With it's numerous break the cuties, abusive parents of all kinds, a kill em all fetish, characters that can jump from a jerkass to a jerk with a heart of gold, applies rule thirty four and mood whiplash in spades, numerous death wishes, deals with the devil that twist and break the other characters, episodes where incest would actually be more acceptable, a penchant for Downer Endings and festering issues, you have to wonder how anyone on the show hasn't checked into therapy yet or put a bullet in their brain (although Dean was close in Season Two). This might seem like the rest of the shows on here but you have to remember; this was supposed to be a show with no chick-flick moments and the basic premise of two pretty-boys brothers hunting down demons with rock salt.
- Pretty much everyone in Xena, but Calisto in particular: Her sociopathic/homicidal tendancies stem from witnessing her parents' deaths. Upon attaining Goddess-hood she has the chance to save them via time travel... and kills them in front of her younger self to ensure she becomes the person she is.
- The modern Doctor Who veers hard into this country, to the point that Wangst has replaced gratuitous kidnapping of a companion as a source of cheap drama. See the endings of Journey's End and, depending on your interpretation, Forest of the Dead for some particularly gratuitous examples.
- A more egregious example would be the Doctor, a pacifist being forced to fight in the biggest war ever, The Time War, having to destory his planet and kill his entire species in order to end it. But the Daleks still manage to survive, again and again. He finds love in Rose Tyler, but she is sucked into a parallel universe, never to be seen again. He discovers another of his kind still alive - but it's The Master, who takes over the entire Earth and subjects the Doctor to ritual torture humiliation for over a year, and showing the Doctor that his precious humans are capable of cannabalising themselves, turning themselves into mutants strapped into cold metal shells, and coming back in time to murder their ancestors "because it's fun". And then when shot, the Master chooses to die rather than regenerate purely to spite the Doctor and make him suffer. In the most recent finale, he is reunited with all his past companions, even Rose, but one by one they all leave him, and he even has to wipe Donna's mind of all her memories of him, right after she saved the world and gained self-confidence for the first time in her life. For a fluffy children's program, the show ain't half depressing sometimes.
- To say that House's life has been unbelievably crappy so far would be a huge understatement. He was abused as a child by a man who turned out to be his non-biological father and the events leading up to how he got his limp were horribly unfair (as if having a blood-clot in your leg wasn't painful enough). But, in the show itself, it's Stacy who starts the real downward spiral; after a long bout of The Masochism Tango, he gets her to leave because her crippled husband is willing to do anything to keep her around and he isn't, her leaving brings him more psychosomatic pain and a heartbreaking, disturbing scene involves him being reduced to begging Cuddy for some morphine and in the Season Finale, he gets shot twice and Hannibal Lectured by his shooter-slash-conscience throughout the whole episode. When he gets the ketamine which magically regenerates his thigh muscle, he seems to be changing for the better (no drugs, running everwhere, getting upset when a patient's wife thanks him and he can't even feel pleased) but this obviously cannot last so the pain comes back in full force, he's back on the drugs and Wilson and Cuddy have just decided that this would be a brilliant time to teach the poor bastard some humility. And then there's the legally and ethically insane Tritter arc and then there's the depression/trying to find ways to relieve the pain and then it's the Cottages leaving (and Wilson mindfucking him into thinking he's hallucinating them) and this is taking way too long. Suffice to say, all of this has been mostly accepted because he still remains a snarky, funny Jerk Ass and because Hugh Laurie's sad blue eyes and his mad acting skills can make anything work but most fans probably wouldn't be too surprised if he just broke one day and curled up into a angst-ridden ball on his office floor.
- Not to mention House's guilt over his involvement in the events that led to "Cutthroat Bitch"'s death at the end of the fourth season. Wilson subsequently dumping him as a friend even though he didn't blame House for what happened didn't help anything. He followed Wilson around for months, trying to get him back.
- He nearly got brain damage in trying to save her too. Then again, Season Five too is one big angst fest.
- A stellar example: the all but forgotten Disney Channel original movie "One Magic Christmas". It is a... loose reimagining of "It's a Wonderful Life", sort of. And it sits uncomfortably between this trope, Narm, Tastes Like Diabetes, Inept Aesop, Glurge, and Nightmare Fuel (the latter especially due to the violent Mood Whiplash). Bonus points for having many of the same Unfortunate Implications as "The Christmas Shoes," as pointed out by Patton Oswalt: "What a horrible f***ing God!!!". The whole things seems like it was designed to scar children for life.
- The Filipino drama Eva Fonda is one of the most horrific examples this troper knows of. The show starts off it's first episode with the main character being raped by one of the richest men in town. Then she goes home after the rape to find out that the love of her life was sleeping with her best friend when she was being raped! The show then continues with her trying to confront her rapist's father, only for him to try and rape her! After she stabs him in self-defense and is taken to jail, one of the police officers try to rape her during her interrogation! During her time in jail she find out her sister dies, and later on finds out she's pregnant with her rapist's child (which, by the way, she decided to keep and miscarried). She ends up escaping jail and living on the lamb from the police and her now even-more-obsessed rapist, and the show isn't even over yet.... Deus Angst Machina indeed.
- Torchwood is veering into this after killing half of its main cast within a few episodes of each other.
- Not to mention everything Jack goes through in season 3 alone: First we learn he has a daughter and grandson, neither of whom really want anything to do with him. Then he gets blown up and feels it, comes back to life screaming with all of his skin still burned off, gets drowned and trapped in concrete, is thrown off a cliff while in the concrete, has his daughter and grandson taken hostage, and learns that he is partially responsible for the latest alien threat. Then, just when it looks like he might be able to stand up to the alien threat, Ianto (the man he is in a relationship with and almost certainly loves) is killed and dies in his arms, something Jack blames himself for. Then, to finally save the world from the alien threat, he has to kill his grandson in front of his daughter. Understandably, he doesn't stick around on Earth too long after that.
- Little House On The Prairie is fairly notorious for this. If anything good is happening to anyone in the Ingalls family and / or great plans are being made, expect something to go horribly wrong soon. The absolute worst case was with Albert, who found out he was terminally ill just as he received a full scholarship for medical school. To make matters worse, this was not long after he overcame a morphine addiction.
- Hawkeye- Hawkeye, Hawkeye, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H. The writers seemed absolutely determined to do anything they could to break his spirit (going so far, in one episode, as to instill an army point system- which in real life, hadn't actually been in effect since WWII- so that Colonel Potter could tell Hawkeye the army had raised the number of points needed to get out of the military), until he's finally nearly beaten in the show's finale when he unintentionally causes a mother to suffocate her own child. I mean, c'mon...
Music
- This troper always associates one particular Tear Jerker from the Tin Pan Alley era, "The Fatal Wedding," with this trope. The song tells the story of a man's attempted wedding to a second wife while still married to the first, and its end when his wife bursts in with their baby. The baby then dies in her arms, and that night the husband commits suicide (which makes sense, but still the baby's sudden death in the church during the titular wedding is a bit unlikely).
Professional Wrestling
- A bizarre mix of real life and storyline trauma afflicted Jeff Hardy during the end of his latest run in the WWE. First, his beloved older brother Matt's appendix bursts and he nearly dies from an infection. Then for several months he can't quite manage to get over the hump and win the WWE title, though he's coming closer than he ever has. Then he fails a Wellness test and gets suspended for two months, including Wrestlemania, at which he had been rumored to win a high-profile match. While he's suspended, his house and everything he owns burns to the ground, and his cherished dog is killed in the fire as well. Then once he returns, he's set upon by a malevolent GM and still can't quite make it to winning the title. Finally, finally he wins it, but his brief run is marred by a mysterious person making repeated attempts on his life. His title run ends when his own brother turns on him in favor of Edge, who was at the time both of their most mortal enemy. Matt then reveals that not only did he do that, he was the one repeatedly trying to kill Jeff, he was the one who burned his house to the ground, and he was the one who killed Jeff's dog, and he then goes on to soundly trounce Jeff in all but the very last match of their feud. After all this, he wins the title again but loses it within a few minutes to CM Punk, who then goes on to rail at Jeff about his drug issues and keeps the title from him through many underhanded tactics. And when things are finally looking up for Jeff...he's made peace with his brother, he'd won the championship again, all was just starting to look up, bam, he loses it and his job thanks to CM Punk. The sad thing is, there's probably some more things that got missed in all of this. Can't blame the guy for wanting to go home and lick his wounds for a while now, can you?
- Of course, after he finally does go home, he's arrested for possession of obscene amounts of drugs.
- And even THAT is rumored to be the result of a piss-poor attempt by the police at a sting operation, which, if true, will end up being entrapment and will mean he went through all this misery because of some overeager cops.
Close Professional Wrestling
Video Games
- Technically, he brought it all on himself, but to the player of Planescape: Torment it sure seems like the entire world is against him. First of all, you're cursed with immortality as well as amnesia. Your only guide is a floating skull who is a compulsive liar. Meanwhile, strewn about you are the people whom you've hurt and pissed off in past lives, and they just love to get their revenge by screwing you and manipulating you for their own gain. Half your companions only join you because a past version of you enslaved them. You are haunted by the ghost of a woman who claims to love you, but is too confused and heartbroken to give you any useful information (also, it turns out you murdered her, and she still loves you anyway). Worst of all, you come to realize over the course of the game that you are a real asshole, and you absolutely deserve everything you've got, which would make this more legitimate angst than Deus Angst Machina, except for the fact that you can't remember doing any of it.
- Torment does this very well, though, as a means through which to examine morality and humanity and all that good stuff, and ultimately to answer the question: "What can change the nature of a man?" As all these past deeds and their consequences make themselves known, it becomes clear that one of the best answers is "regret."
- Fortune in Metal Gear Solid 2. Her father was sunk in the game's prologue, causing her mother to kill herself, her husband died in prison, and the grief caused her to miscarry. As Snake explains, in the six months following her father's death, she lost her family and everything that mattered in her life . When she tries to commit suicide, she discovers that she's gained a flukish ability to escape death or injury, allowing her to wield experimental weapons and fight battles which would otherwise be impossible.
- And then Ocelot drops the hint that these were not accidents, but orchestrated by The Patriots.
- As said by Fortune to Raiden in hiimdaisy's MGS 2 parody Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again, "What was that? I couldn't hear you over my TRAGIC PAST."
- And don't forget The Woobie Otacon from the same game, who turned out to have had deep layers of sexual trauma all this time that were never mentioned at all before the point he revealed them. Also the only person in the whole wide world that he loves who hasn't died horribly yet is Solid Snake, and he's a self-destructive killer who happens to be ageing prematurely into the bargain. And apparently, some people on this page have managed to get their hands on spoilers implying he may go stark raving nutso and turn evil. Unless these are fake spoilers, Otacon may be the world's biggest Butt Monkey.
- Not true. He does find love with Naomi Hunter, but then she dies of cancer. And Snake is pretty much on the brink of death himself, but Otacon won't even get the chance to say goodbye to Snake in person because Snake's FOXDIE virus has mutated enough that it is lethal to anyone who inhales it.
- Big Boss tells Snake that the new FOXDIE virus is overtaking the old, now-contagious one, meaning that Snake will not create a massive epidemic. In fact, at the end, Otacon makes a resolution to live with Snake up to his last days as a family with Sunny.
- It's not like everyone will learn this though. Those are some LOOOOONG fucking credits mang.
- Arguably, Shion from the Xenosaga series falls into this trope, though the full extent of this isn't revealed until XS 3. (Someone else fill out the spoilers for the two lolis, parental issues, world destruction, etc: I don't really understand how spoiler tags work.)
- Hoo boy, where to begin? Shion was a pretty sweet little girl, who loved her parents and flowers. Then the plot happens—her mother Aoi comes down with a strange illness that leaves her a vegetable, causing Shion's father to distance himself away from Shion and putting his comatose wife in a treatment institution, and Shion's brother Jin spent nearly all of his time in the military. Second Milita gets caught up in a battle over the Zohar, and someone lets loose an army of crazed, cannibalistic Realians, a few of them killing and devouring Shion's nanny Febronia while Shion watches. The guy who saves her stays behind to fight them off, instructing her to escape into the city where her mother is, only to get cornered in her mother's room and forced to watch as both her father and mother are brutally murdered by another brigade of berserker Realians.
- (cont.) The Heroic BSOD Shion falls into is what ultimately unlocks the gate to the imaginary realm, causing innumerable swarms of Gnosis to enter the human realm. Shion is saved by Jin but from then on, resented him for not being there when he "should" have been. From that point she pretty much repressed all the horrors she experienced, joining the Vector company to work on the KOS-MOS project, focusing solely on her work. Oh and she witnesses her fiance Kevin get killed by the prototype, and forced to blow its head off. And, as revealed in Ep. 3, Shion is some sort of reincarnation of Mary Magdalene's (the godly primal force's soul that was planted within KOS-MOS) attendant/daughter/whatever, and she is suffering from the same illness her mother did, due to encountering the game's "higher power", because KOS-MOS herself draws power from it, and the exposure is slowly killing Shion. And as such, to Wilhelm, Shion's only a key to awaken Mary so they can activate his Doomsday Device to literally hit the Reset Button on the entire history of the universe for eternity. Yup, Shion's got problems.
- Every single one of the Beauty And The Beast unit in Metal Gear Solid 4. Laughing Octopus had her entire village's population killed by octopus-eater-hating cult members while she was a child. That is, they killed all but her own family and friends, whom she had to torture and kill herself. Raging Raven grew up in a war-torn country, and was captured as a child by soldiers, who beat her and the other kids regularly. Eventually, she and the other children were left by the soldiers, and the rest of the children were eaten by birds. Crying Wolf also had her village slaughtered, but escaped along with her baby brother. Whom she smothered to death in order to escape notice from soldiers. And then carried the rotting corpse around to a refugee camp, where she went mad from the crying of children, and killed all the children there. Screaming Mantis guess what? That's right, her village was burned to the ground. When escaping, she wound up hiding in a the corpse-pit beneath a torture chamber, and was locked in there, while villagers were tortured above. She stayed there for weeks, surviving by drinking bloody water and eating off of the corpses. Being utterly insane by then, she was taken in by Liquid Ocelot, who eventually brainwashed her own psyche out of her brain, and put in Psycho Mantis' instead.
- Kratos finds his own, murdering his wife and daughter in blind rage, then having their ashes permanently fixed to is body. When asking the gods to make him forget his crimes, he is forced to live through it again at the hands of Ares. When he has killed Ares, and the gods tell him they lied to him to get him to do their dirty work for them, he tries to kill himself - and is instead given immortality, an eternity with his memories. No wonder he made a beast of himself to get rid of the pains of being a man (lot deeper than you thought, eh?)
- Orsted, one of the heroes from the SNES game Live A Live. As his chapter starts, he wins the tournament which names him the greatest hero in the land, as well as the hand of the beautiful princess in marriage. As the two make wedding plans, a monstrous demon sent by the Demon King appears and kidnaps the princess. No matter, this happens in video games all the time. Orsted and his best friend Straybow the magician, as well as two older heroes who defeated the Demon King years earlier, set off on a quest to get her back. And then... The group is barely able to reach the Demon King's palace before one of the heroes is killed. And then the palace collapses, and they are forced to leave Straybow behind. And then, when Orsted returns to the palace, he finds the Demon King there and slays him... oops, that was actually an illusion, and his would-be father-in-law is now dead. Orsted is arrested for murdering the King, and the other elder hero is tortured to death as an accessory, barely able to summon enough strength to help Orsted escape. Orsted flees the kingdom, every citizen in it who once cheered him now calling him a traitor and murderer, and makes a heroic solo effort to take the Demon King down. When he finally reaches the villain... it turns out it was his old friend Straybow all along. Orsted is forced to kill his best friend, and the princess appears. A bittersweet ending? Nope. The princess tells Orsted that she loved Straybow, not him, and commits suicide. Poor Orsted. Is it any surprise to find that the Demon King that the other heroes battled was Orsted himself, embracing the darkness?
Web Comics
- Speaking of furry comics, the side comic Abel’s Story from Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures. Basically, if Abel cares about a character, they're screwed, and it’s not even a plot point. After an old friend’s funeral, two of Abel’s newfound friends are slaughtered by a group that includes his old kindergarten teacher, his dad suffers a ‘heart attack’ before turning back into his true form, an evil incubus, and then proceeds to severally beat Abel’s mother, kill his best friend via slicing her into pieces, and spirits him off to the ‘cubi academy, all within a few hours. This results in a long-lasting BSOD.
- Jay Naylor's Better Days seems to have been written to be one long string of these, functioning under the two classic errors that "bad things happening" is the same thing as "Character Development," and that "bad things happening" is always good writing. For actually good writing (or rather, terrible writing, but done intentionally in a hilariously ingenious way), try "Nay Jaylor's" edits of Better Days strips. "Hey guys look how far I can suck in my face." *FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF*
- In Roomies and Its Walky, David Wallis' habit of dropping the Drama Bomb meant that his characters often had to suffer through copious amounts of extremely unpleasant and traumatic things happening to them all at once (when they weren't angsting about things that had happened long ago, that is). His latest strip, Shortpacked, is relatively free of this in comparison.
- Order Of The Stick: The recent arc to this point can arguably be summed up as Vaarsuvius' Bad Day. Nearly every single twist in the plot, the timing and the contrived coincidences seem as if they were engineered with the explicit, deliberate purpose of breaking Vaarsuvius in mind and spirit. Or, to put it a bit more optimistically, with the purpose of bursting V's bubble and inducing crucial character growth.
- Similarly to the Better Days example above, this was one of the major failings of The Broken Mirror, together with no real character development from this "character development".
Web Original
- Subplott's backstory in Life In A Game: He finds out he's a prince, but then an evil wizard brainwashes his father, the king, killed his uncle, kidnapped his sister, Zelda, and banished him, then, to top it off, erased Subplott's Pokedex.
Western Animation
- Spoofed on Futurama, in an episode of the Show Within A Show "All My Circuits":
Calculon: Give it to me straight, doctor. Don't sugar coat it.
Doctor: Very well. Your entire family died when a plane, piloted by your fiancee, crashed into your uninsured home... and you have inoperable cancer.
- Frank Grimes from The Simpsons hated his life and his whole set of circumstances. Everything he tried to accomplish backfired on him, he lives in an apartment sandwiched between two bowling alleys, and his arch-nemesis, Homer Simpson, seems to have a better life than him. Frank's Hell is thought of as Heaven by Homer, but the final attempt to shame Homer for life (by having him win a children's model building contest) imploded spectacularly, and thus, he went crazy. And electrocuted himself. And as a final little insult, Homer fell asleep during his funeral and loudly ruined it by yelling "Change the channel, Marge!" in his sleep, to the amusement of everyone else attending. The producers later attempted to rebut criticism that they went a bit over the top torturing Grimes by claiming that it demonstrated that a 'real' person couldn't survive in the Simpsons universe, but even this explanation is a little unsatisfying considering the sheer amount of misfortunes piled on top of Grimey is way over the top.
- And then there's old Gil.
- Then there's Kirk Van Houten's divorces, where his wife is shown as inherently right despite the divorce obviously coming from mutual resentment and disrespect, he's fired from his job for being single, and apparently got nothing out of the divorce settlement so he ends up straight in low-income housing, and it's one of the few times the show defies Status Quo Is God by keeping it this way. All of this just to deliver a Broken Aesop to Homer about respecting his wife that he'll forget by the next episode.
- Wellllll... At least his firing was credited to the fact he worked for his FATHER IN LAW and he, actually, was a useless crapbag.
- But in that same episode, she talks about having to borrow money from her sister, which raises the question: If Kirk wasn't making enough to support the family at the cracker factory, what the fuck was Luanne doing about it? She didn't work, and if she borrowed money from her sister I find it hard to believe she wouldn't have asked her father to help them as well. And useless crapbag? Where's that ever alluded to?
- How is Kirk getting fired for being single a wallbanger? Crackers are a family food. Happy families. Maybe single people eat crackers, we don't know. Frankly, we don't want to know. It's a market we can do without.
- And let's not forget Hans Moleman.
- Zuko from Avatar The Last Airbender spends his childhood being mentally and somtimes physcially tortured by his sadistic sister, gets a fireball thrown into his face by his own father and banished for speaking up in a war meeting and suggesting a tactic that could save the lives of more of his country's soldiers, and is constantly humiliated in his attempts to capture Aang to regain his family's respect. Eventually he's even declared a fugitive for his continued failure and has to live off the land for the first time in his life. His Day in the Limelight episode features him befriending a family of farmers and taking care of the corrupt soldiers harassing them, only for them to reject him afterwards because he revealed his identity in the process. Is it any wonder he takes to screaming at the sky, demanding to be hit by lightning? And it fails to happen?
- You forgot to mention that his mother, the one person other than Iroh who loved him unconditionally, was banished/presumed dead when he was ten years old because she (probably) murdered his grandfather to protect him, who in turn had ordered Ozai to murder his son as a "lesson". Of course Ozai, being parent of the year, said "Sure, no problem." Presuming Social Services operated in the Fire Nation, It seems the Fire Lord's Palace was beyond thier reach.
- Pixar's Up arguably is this. The protagonist Carl Fredricksen meets the girl of his dreams who is as much of a Fan Boy of their idol the explorer, Charles Muntz, as he is. They grow up, get married, move into their club house and build it from being a run-down shack to a beautiful home and get jobs they enjoy. The trouble starts when they try to have kids and find out that Ellie is incapable of having kids, start saving up to go to Paradise Falls where Muntz was last seen and fulfill Ellie's childhood dream, and have life constantly get in the way in the form of Carl breaking bones, car trouble, the house being hit by a falling tree in a storm, etc. then finally once they are both retired and in their golden years he decides to splurge and buy the tickets to go to Paradise Falls only to find out at a romantic picnic to give her the tickets that she's terminally ill and doesn't even manage to tell her about his plans. And that's just the first ten minutes. By the end of the movie after flying the house to Paradise Falls and landing it he opens the adventure book she had kept since childhood and given to him just before she dies. He looks in it and sees all the pictures she had of them enjoying life, calling it her greatest adventure and asking him to fill up the pages with his own adventures after her death. He then realizes he was wallowing in his self-pity and she wanted him to live his life for himself after she was gone and realizes he probably didn't need to fly his house off to Paradise Falls in the first place. He could have found adventure without having to become a hermit and fly off to an unexplored jungle in his house carried by thousands of helium balloons. He is improved by the experience but that kind of setup makes you wonder who he pissed off.
- As if all that wasn't enough, Carl eventually meets his childhood hero, Charles Muntz... who turns out to be a murderous psychopath obsessed with finding and killing the Snipe. And who then tries to kill Carl and Russell because he's paranoid that the pair will steal his Snipe-capturing thunder.
- The titular character of DannyPhantom has an evil version of himself from an alternate time stream. Why did he turn evil? Well, he gets pressure from all sides to do well on a test and has the test answers fall into his lap... but when he decides to cheat, he inadvertently causes the death of his family, best friends, and teacher, has to go live with his Arch Enemy, gets the humanity ripped out of him, and ends up murdering his human half and pretty much destroying the world. So Yeah. When time-traveling Young Danny sees all this... it kinda falls right in this trope.
Other
- Fan Fic writers absolutely adore this trope. It's most commonly found in romance (especially slash) and Mary Sue fics; in the former it's used as a means of getting the OTP together, in the latter it's used in lieu of actual Character Development.
- Parodied in an Urban Legend: "Your Dog is Dead" - I've got some bad news: your dog died... from eating charred horse flesh... they died in the fire... started by the candles from the funeral... for your mother who had a heart attack... after she found your kid who drowned in the tub... because your wife slipped on the stairs and broke her neck.... [and on and on].
- This Troper has seen it as a comedy sketch, with the punchline being that the mother died from a broken heart because she found out the guy's wife was cheating on him with the groundskeeper... The guy interrupts: "Wait a minute, you're my groundskeeper!" Cue guy chasing storyteller off-stage.
- Real Life example: A man was digging his own grave, when he had a heart attack and dropped dead. Then his wife died of a heart attack after hearing the news.
- [citation needed]
- Excuse me, sir... Citations are NEVER needed.
- Excuse me, sir... you misunderstand the page you link to. It says there is no minimum threshold for notability on TV Tropes. Requesting a citation is about verifiability. Two different things.
- This troper remembers a short story a classmate wrote for a creative writing class which was made of this. In fact, it went one further: Not only were contrived coincidences making the heroine's life a living hell, but it seemed that all the characters but one were actively making her life hell. The apex was probably a scene where, while the heroine was waiting tables at a restaurant, an adult patron trips her for no reason whatsoever, and her boss fires her on the spot for being tripped by a Jerk Ass customer.
- Real life example: * In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's autobiographical "Little House" books, things are looking up for the Ingalls family as they've scored themselves a fine field for raising wheat on, with a nice house that they plan on paying for with the first harvest...hey, what's that funny looking cloud? Oh wait, that's not a cloud, that a swarm of grasshoppers big enough to block out the sun, who descend on the land and devour every green thing for miles around. (just to rub salt in the wound, there are so many hoppers you can actually hear them eating the wheat from inside the house.) Okay, we've been through worse, we can raise a good crop next year...hey, why are the grasshoppers squatting down on the dirt like that? Oh...they're laying millions of eggs over every square inch of the country, so you have NO chance of raising a crop next year. Talk about Fate pulling the rug out from under you...
- About 18 years ago, this troper's mother's best friend's brother, an alcoholic, was crushed under a truck while drunk driving, shortly after his wife walked out on him.
- This Troper has a friend who were kicked out by his parents because he choose to use his money to help his elderly grandma out, instead of giving it to them for eh-hem other purposes. Later on, he's declared independence from his family, living on his own when he looses his financial aid at to a local 4-year school.
- This troper's father announced that he was leaving his wife of 32 years as he was driving her to the hospital for an emergency hysterectomy. Stay classy, dad.
- Zinaida Volkova, Leon Trotsky's daughter.
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