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alt title(s): Heroic Blue Screen Of Death 
Yuno has encountered a problem and needs to shut down. We are sorry for any inconvenience.
"Well, lad, the brain be a funny thing. Sometimes, it just stops workin' right when ye've been through a bad scene."
"Boy looks like he took a shit and found his liver in the bowl."
Heroic Blue Screen of Death: An earth-shattering revelation or horrible event affects the hero or someone he cares deeply about, leaving him flummoxed or shocked to the point of mentally shutting down for a while. Alternatively, if this occurs during a fight with one of the Big Bad's minions, the hero may have a violent outburst, with the ensuing catastrophe killing Evil Minions and knocking his companions in different directions. In the latter case, the hero may disappear into the fog of war and have to be tracked down by his friends and given a heaping helping of Epiphany Therapy.
Reasons for the BSOD vary, but usually involves something that shakes the very core of the character's being. Classic examples include losing a loved one (especially one that the character failed to protect or save), discovering that the character is not who he thought he was, being betrayed by someone the character cared about, being forced to go against a personal code, core belief or deep abiding reason to live, being delivered a nasty Hannibal Lecture by a particularly crafty villain, or failing miserably at something that everything was riding on.
That or they've just realised they've left the oven on.
In any case, the result is a form of non-consensual Ten Minute Retirement. The aftermath may cause the hero to become emotionally comatose, obsessive and guilt-ridden, mute, or in really bad cases, a jaded violent amnesiac. The most literal BSOD effect would be catatonia. Such personality changes may also scare the hell out of people who are now worried the hero is as much a danger as the villain was. If the incident happened before the story takes place, it provides a rationale for him to be the Shell Shocked Senior. Compare Freak Out.
The best thing that can happen to a person suffering from a Heroic BSOD is meeting a friendly Warrior Therapist, or for an extra layer of awesome, getting rebooted with percussive force. Meeting a hostile Warrior Therapist, on the other hand, is the worst thing that can happen to them, as they'd make damn sure that the character crashes completely.
The villain version of a Heroic BSOD is a Villainous Breakdown, which often involves the villain going completely crazy instead of shutting down.
A subtrope of Heroic BSOD is the Angst Coma, which specifically refers to entering a comatose or catatonic state as opposed to other forms of mental breakdown.
Named in honor of the infamous Blue Screen of Death , common term for the Microsoft Windows error that indicates that the system cannot continue functioning has screwed itself big time and must be rebooted.
Compare Heroic RROD. Sometimes inflicted by Mind Rape.
Examples:
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- Pictured above, Yuno Gasai of Mirai Nikki fame does this when she realizes that, due to the rules of the Future Diary game, she will eventually have to kill Yukiteru, the boy she's been working together with and is hopelessly in love with.
- In Robotech: New Generation, Scott Bernard spends an entire episode in this state after the heroes go to join a force of over 6000 soldiers (and giant robots) only to find the entire army completely wiped out. He only snaps out of it to save the helpless amnesiac (who he then names after his dead fiancé. Yeah...).
- Takatsuki from Hourou Musuko seizes up and curls up on the ground◊ when her gym teacher yells at her to wear a bra◊ . Her class thinks it's funny, but being a transsexual, she takes it badly. She gets over it, and does some shopping.
- Peacemaker Kurogane: Quite a lot of characters have several, with Tetsunosuke being the most frequent victim. Also, Suzu after he finds his master Yoshida dead.
- School Days: Sekai has one after Makoto kisses Kotonoha in front of her, and Kotonoha very likely has a permanent one after she is raped by Makoto's friend Taisuke and then dumped by Makoto.
- Kaede in Shuffle has one after her mother dies and another after Rin starts dating Asa.
- Ichigo of Bleach has a very brief one after his friends are almost killed by the arrancar and he was unable to save them because of his inner psycho. After visiting Orihime in the hospital, Ichigo basically shuts down internally because of his failure. Then Rukia kicks him in the head and forces him to handle his problems rather than freaking out about them.
- Right now, poor Orihime is barely getting out of an epic one what hit her in full force after she and Ishida witness Ichigo being pretty much killed by Ulquiorra
- Only to have witness Ichigo turned into... that. Poor girl really doesn't have much luck.
- In Ichigo 100%, Satsuki has one when whe witnesses what she thinks is Junpei out on a date at a movie theatre when he is really showing the new girl the awesomeness that he sees in movies.
- Yomiko Readman suffers a Heroic BSOD late in the Read Or Die manga when she relives the events that led to her lover Donnie's death, and learns that she was the one who was forced to kill him. It gets so bad that she doesn't even want to read books anymore for a good few chapters.
- In ROD: The TV, all of the Paper Sisters, especially Maggie and Anita more so, suffer from collective Heroic BSODs when Joker reveals that them becoming sisters, their powers, and all of their memories from before their joining were all planned.
- Chrono suffers from this several times in the manga Chrono Crusade. The worst is probably after the carnival battle in volume 5, during which he flies into a rage and uses up so much of his power that he nearly kills Rosette in the process. Afterwards, he forces himself into a Convenient Coma to keep from hurting her again. It takes Rosette going into his mind and digging around in his memories before he's prepared to continue on his quest.
- In Mahou Sensei Negima, when the title character is confronted by the true form of Graf Herrman, he goes into an Unstoppable Rage that nearly gets him killed.
- He later has a more traditional BSOD when Jack Rakan reveals how weak Negi is compared to his enemies.
- And has a more comedic one when a series of stressful events is followed by Nodoka confessing her love for him.
- Yue has a dramatic one when she finally accepts that she does, in fact, love Negi; believing that she's betrayed her best friend (the aforementioned Nodoka) by developing feelings for Negi herself when she's supposed to be supporting Nodoka's relationship with him. Nodoka, of course, doesn't look at it that way and has to slap Yue out of it. The breakdown is even more pronounced due to Yue mostly being an Emotionless Girl up to that point.
- Negi has an epic one in the Gecko Ending of the anime, after Asuna dies. He manages to hold it back for a short while, but then he finds one of the bells she used to wear in her hair and completely breaks down. He does eventually find a way to save her.
- Being as Naru Taru is an unapologetically brutal deconstruction of the Mon genre, lead character Shiina Tamai is rather prone to this trope. The first time it happens is after a painful Shoot The Dog scenario, in which her crazed friend Hiroko is killed right in front of her. Several volumes later, she learns at the worst possible time that her Mon companion Hoshimaru isn't actually hers, but instead belongs to her ally Takeo. Finally, witnessing the death of her beloved father leaves her in such a terrible state that her friend Akira - a Shrinking Violet - has to slap her out of it.
- The titular character in Ranma 1/2 all but shuts down when he believes Akane has died. He snaps back to form when he finds out she hasn't, not yet, but is in desperate danger anyway.
- Half the HiME throughout Mai-HiME as their loved ones are eliminated one by one in the "HiMElander" arc (almost the only reason the other half didn't go into Heroic BSOD is because they died. The only ones not BSOD'ing are Yukino and Nao, and even then they don't look good: Yukino is even more of a Shrinking Violet and Nao gets beaten up by the thugs she robbed and humiliated as revenge for her childhood trauma ).
- Mai Tokiha herself gets quite a few of these, even in situations that aren't really that dramatic, but in which a real person would probably react this way. For example, in the first episode, after becoming an unexpected witness of the fight between Natsuki and Mikoto that wrecks her ship to Fuuka, Mai is so shocked that she wanders aimlessly through the garage, nearly catatonic, until Yuuichi rescues her.
- Natsuki suffers a mental breakdown, unable to summon her CHILD for a few episodes after she learned that the story about her mother escaping from the First District lab to save her was a lie, and that she was actually going to hand her over to Searrs to continue her research. Another few traumatic episodes later, it takes a pep talk with Mai to snap her out of her funk.
- Mai-Otome — after the events of the Mood Whiplash Wham Episode near the midpoint of the series, Arika is virtually catatonic.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Asuka after being mind raped, and Shinji during most of End of Evangelion after being forced to Shoot The Dog.
- A far less serious version of this is Dororo from Keroro Gunsou, whose "Trauma Switch" (triggered by feeling ignored, or by a reminder of how Keroro took advantage of him in their childhood) would frequently cause him to sulk in the Corner Of Woe, on the verge of tears. In one episode this became a plot point, where the Trauma Switch got "stuck", and Keroro, Tamama, and Giroro had to enter Dororo's mind to fix things. Ironically, Keroro can sometimes go through something similar when all the pentup remorse from being responsible for Dororo's childhood trauma kicks in.
- In an earlier episode, the Garuru Platoon's invasion is pinned on Keroro at first, and even his best friend Fuyuki doesn't believe in his innocence. Keroro is reduced to an emotional wreck as a result. Cue Giroro's intervention.
- New character Pururu gets something like this as well, shutting down as she quietly babbles to herelf, whenever anyone calls her obasan, meaning 'auntie'. The fact that she's Keroro's childhood sweetheart, and he's possibly a few hundred years old, makes her the oldest female in the show...
- A similar situation happens in Serial Experiments Lain halfway through the series. Lain Iwakura's older sister Mika is shocked beyond description after witnessing all the weirdness caused by Lain. During the rest of the series, she spends most of her time staring into blank space, pretending she's calling someone by phone and murmuring "Bee bee bee... ga ga", imitating the phone sound. If you look closely, this can be explained by Mika's mind slipping into the Wired and getting lost forever.
- Or even better with that she's an imperfect copy that slowly deteriorates after the original was deleted from reality - the episode ends with Mika coming face to face with herself, and then only the other Mika remains. Lain walks past and briefly sees the original Mika's fading ghost with horrified expression on her face.
- A much shorter BSOD also happens to Alice after Lain wipes Alice's humiliation from the memories of everyone they know and then talks to and gruesomely kills the self-declared god Masama Eiri. Lain had to hold the poor girl up or she would've fallen, and hitting the floor probably wouldn't have changed her heartbreakingly blank expression. What a friend, though—Lain proceeded to rip reality a new one to fix Alice.
- More than once in Soukou No Strain.
- Yusuke Urameshi during the fight Dark Tournament finals in Yu Yu Hakusho, where Toguro pretends to kill Kuwabara in order to bring Yusuke's Power Level to his own level becoming a Worthy Opponent Interesting though at this time, his Battle Aura becomes the polar opposite of Toguro's own Battle Aura which killed well over a quarter of the stadium's spectators.
- Yugi in Yu-Gi-Oh was plunged into a near-catatonic state after losing a duel to Seto Kaiba on the ramparts of Pegasus' castle. Kaiba played a desperate and cruel Xanatos Gambit in order to win; he stood on the edge of the castle wall and threatened to jump to his death if Yugi attacked his Blue Eyes White Dragon. Yugi's Heroic BSOD was brought on when he had to stop the Pharaoh from killing Kaiba, which for the first time fully alerted him to the presence of his Knight Templar of an "other self" and made him realize just how dangerous it could be. Anzu half-pulled him out of it after duelling with Mai, but it wasn't until his duel with Mai that Yugi fully recovered.
- Kaiba, of course, takes awhile to recover mentally whenever he loses a duel: "I lost a card game! I no longer have a reason to live!" One of these duels, however, makes it worse: not only he was fighting to rescue his kidnapped brother Mokuba, practically turned into a zombie after his soul is stolen by Pegasus, but he gets his own soul stolen as well when he loses badly against his rival. He also almost had one when he arrived to ancient Egypt and witnessed the tragedy that surrounded the creation of his Blue Eyes White Dragon.
- This troper doesn't recall Kaiba giving any real reaction at all to that.
- Atemu/The Pharaoh has his turn in the Doma filler arc when he gives in to his inner darkness, plays the Seal of Orichalchos, and loses Yugi's soul.
- Judai Yuki in Yu-Gi-Oh GX goes into this state after realizing all the suffering Yubel caused his friends — including forcing a Heroic Sacrifice out of his new Ho Yay partner Johan/Jesse — was because of its twisted devotion to him and ire at being launched into space. Not only is Judai stuck in a catatonic state of guilt soon afterwards, but becomes obsessed with finding Johan alone. Judai's subsequent discovery of his Superpowered Evil Side — the Supreme King Haou — while in this state leaves him in an even deeper BSOD state after his rescue. But unlike Yugi, who recovered within the same arc, Judai never fully recovers. In the fourth season, he's still pissy and emo, even after reconciling with Yubel. Apparently, he's been dueling so long for the fate of the world and/or his friends, that the game isn't fun for him, anymore.
- Never fully recovers? Apparently somebody never got to see the end of GX, where Yuki duels against Yugi. Partway through the duel, he finally gets it pounded back into his head just how fun the game can be, and concedes the duel to the Pharaoh in spectacular fashion: by sending Neos on a suicide charge at a massively-powerful Osiris/Slifer. The series ends with a smile and one last "GOTCHA!" I'd say he recovered quite nicely.
- When the true identity of Deep Blue is revealed, poor Ichigo of Tokyo Mew Mew is shocked into a loss of common sense, attacking her teammates and then refusing to fight, until Minto slaps her back to sanity. We wouldn't blame her; after all, it was her boyfriend and ex Mysterious Protector, Masaya.
- In Rurouni Kenshin, after Enishi defeats Kenshin, he fakes Kaoru's death very realistically , causing Kenshin to go into shock and spend a good few weeks catatonic in Rakuninmura (a village for people who no longer have anything to live for), with his sword chained shut. It takes Yakiho almost being killed to return.
- In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Touga defeats Utena causing Rose Bride Anthy to be engaged to him.Utena ends up wearing a girl's uniform afterwards. Wakaba ends up being the one to snap Utena out of it and seek a rematch with Touga.
- After being forced to kill someone (Legato) for the first time in his life to save the life of his friends Milly and Meryl, thus shattering his long-held pacifism, Vash the Stampede from Trigun has a mental breakdown and spends an entire episode in an emotionally crippled and nearly catatonic state.
- This occurs in Grave of the Fireflies to the main character Seita before he dies, though it is no wonder due to him losing his entire family and everything that he ever cared for in a horrifically tragic manner.
- In Elfen Lied, Kouta, the male lead, suffers amnesia and spends an entire year in an Angst Coma after watching his little sister Kanae and his father get slaughtered right in front of him by Lucy. Lucy herself suffers some pretty bad ones, like...her entire
childhood life.
- This is spoofed in Fullmetal Alchemist, when Second Lieutenant Jean Havoc, after getting soundly rejected by several women, falls into a catatonic state for the rest of the episode, with a simple, yet comedic, whistle-like sound playing every time the camera focuses unto his blank face (which is done three times in the episode).
- Although there is a real one in the anime for Roy Mustang, caused by his participation in the Ishbal Massacre (in particularly his orders to kill Winry's parents) and shown in a flashback.
- In the manga Alex Louis Armstrong, known best for being the Plucky Comic Relief, has a complete nervous breakdown during the Ishbal Massacre, clutching a dead Ishbalan child while crying, and is forced to go home.
- In the manga, Barry confronts Al that he is actually just a construct built by Ed (though Barry just suggested this for laughs.) Poor suit of armor got nervous breakdown until Winry set him up angrily and tearfully.
- Ed gets this too, notably right after the failed attempt to bring back their mother in the manga and the new anime. Hawkeye even notes that he looks lost. Of course, in this series, characters get the BSOD so often, they must be running on Windows Millennium Edition.
- Hawkeye gets one of her own in the manga and the new anime series, after Lust told her that she just killed Mustang, which was a lie, of course, but neither of them knew that until Mustang made his dramatic reappearance.
- Happens to Kazuma in s-CRY-ed after the death of Kunihiko Kimishima. Rather than making precision strikes against his enemies (often for money) he madly swings his fist at anything with a HOLY logo on it until Ryuhou comes out to stop him.
- Chief Ikari from Paranoia Agent, after being fired for his and Maniwa's mishandling of the Shonen Bat case, effectively has one of these, retreating into a Lotus Eater Machine based on how he would ideally like the world to be.
- A significant portion of the main cast of Blood Plus experience Heroic BSODs following Diva's mid-series crossing of the Moral Event Horizon ( raping and killing poor Riku, especially Saya (who attempts to cut herself off from the rest of the cast and become an emotionless killing machine) and David (who spends a timeskip and several subsequent episodes depressed and pretty much constantly drunk).
- Haji had one himself after the events of Vietnam, though it was mostly offscreen. Prequel manga "City of Nightwalkers" reveals that he spent the next several decades slowly starving himself to death, refusing to drink blood out of a combination of fear of losing control of himself and self-imposed penance for having been even momentarily afraid of Saya.
- Gundam Seed: After the climactic battle between Kira and Athrun where Kira's friend Tolle is killed and he realises he caused the same pain to Athrun by killing Nicol, Kira alternates between unconsciousness and hysterical sobbing until he gets a pep talk from Lacus and thinks things over.
- In the sequel Athrun goes through a slow forming one after he realizes that his plan to help Orb by rejoining Zaft to fight that EA just went up in smoke after Orb joined the EA instead and Kira and Lacus went rogue. His skills in combat continue to get poorer and poorer as he find himself fighting against Orb and eventually Kira as well and comes to head when Kira outright tells him that by staying with Zaft Athrun is only causing Orb and his friends pain and isn't helping them at all. After this Athrun freezes up entirely and basically lets Kira defeat him, causing him to mope around for about 10 eps before finally snapping back.
- A slow build over the course of five specific episodes leads to the main character of Ojamajo Doremi, Doremi Harukaze, going into this in the series finale. Her best friends for the past four years are moving or going to a different school, so Doremi locks herself in the Maho-dou on the day of her elementary school graduation. It takes Hana-chan threatening to reveal her identity as a witch to force her out.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann's Simon goes into a big one of these after Kamina dies. However, when Simon reboots, he reboots...complete with several levels in badass.
- In Gundam 00, Tieria Erde suffers a (literal?) Heroic BSOD after his partner and close friend Lockon Stratos is killed. And before that, he had one when VEDA was hijacked and crashed, making him completely lose their connection.
- In the second season, poor Louise Halevy has several of those in different degrees, as a side effect of her medical treatment.
- Freesia in the second season of Jubei-chan engages in psychological warfare on Jiyu; By revealing herself as not her best friend, stabbing her, throwing her off a cliff, and then turning her beloved father against her. This causes Jiyu to reject Ayunosuke and go catatonic, which results in Ayunosuke to turn into a tree. It takes some serious Power Of Love to get everyone back.
- In X, Kamui does this after a REALLY rough day in which his childhood best friend turns murderously insane, impales Kamui on assorted objects, molests him, and forces him to watch as he kills his other childhood best friend. Team mystic Subaru Sumeragi, who once went through an Heroic BSOD himself after his boyfriend revealed himself to be an evil murderer who never cared for him and then killed Subaru's beloved older sister, is called upon to go psychic-spelunking through Kamui's head to find his reboot button.
- For being such a Magnificent Bastard otherwise, Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass goes into one of these nearly every other episode.
- Considering the consequences some of his Idiot Ball moments have had, some Heroic BSOD is rather called for. Not to mention the fact that the show's universe is pretty much designed to screw him.
- Fellow castmate Suzaku suffers one when the Geass command on him causes him to "nuke" Tokyo, killing millions. His response is to stand in the crater for hours, then finally break down in crazy laughter. He gets better.
- Chiko in The Daughter Of Twenty Faces predictably suffers this after Twenty-Faces himself is seemingly killed. Given that she's The Littlest Ninja and still intends to take hold of her destiny as per the advice Twenty-Faces gave her, however, she doesn't take all that long to reboot.
- In Princess Tutu Fakir suffers a brief one after Ahiru digs up the suppressed memories of his parents' violent deaths—that were the fault of his powers.
- In Sentou Yousei Yukikaze, Rei suffers this when his beloved aircraft is destroyed. Somewhat justified that he is a loner, and somewhat a freak at that. Freak as in, he prefers the company of his aircraft (and the titular AI inside it) rather than anyone else, even his unusually very close commanding major. Thing is, the AI uploaded itself into a new aircraft before the old one got blasted, and it seems that the new AI, in the new aircraft, destroyed the old one in what seems as a Mercy Kill. As a result, Rei doesn't trust the new aircraft, even if it contains his old AI. Better not think about this too much...
- In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, Rika Furude, revealed as the true protagonist behind the scenes of the entire series, goes through temporary BSOD every time she inevitably dies in each arc at which point Hanyū Furude, an ancestral victim turned shrine god, resets her. It takes a while, the aid of Hanyu and events that create deja vu, to spark Rika's memory each time, since she lives her live over each and every time until her memories slowly flood back to her. Hanyu herself has gone through an epic BSOD in which she has lost all hope for changing Rika's fate and just goes through the motions of resurrecting her each time. It takes Rika's changes in attitude (which happens as a result of K1's loyalty and hope) to change Hanyu's attitude.
- Rika gets a more tangible and obvious Heroic BSOD moment during Minagoroshi-hen. When Satoko's Evil Uncle Teppei returns to Hinamizawa (a sign Rika usually takes as making a lost cause of a particular world), she's inspired to reach out for help, which she at first gets from Irie and Takano. However, when she's told that nothing can be done because the Uncle is already being tracked by the authorities, which forgoes any interference by the "Institute", she breaks down and curses at each one to die (in ways she knows they die by in past worlds), and then proceeds to drink herself into a stupor serious even by her standards.
- In its sequel, UminekoNoNakuKoroNi, Battler goes through such a bad episode of Heroic BSOD upon the revelation that Asumu is not, in fact, his real mother that he doesn't just stop functioning temporarily - he erases his (meta) physical presence. Don't worry he gets better.
- Grovyle in Pokemon has a Heroic BSOD when he finds out his love interest, a cute and motherly female Meganium, is already in a relationship with his rival. It only worsens when he evolves into a Sceptile, yet loses his ability to attack. It takes Ash almost getting killed two episodes later to rescue Pikachu and Sceptile from Team Rocket to make him get better.
- In the manga, Silver practically passes out after he finds out Giovanni is his father.
- Subaru in the Ryuusei no Rockman anime has one when the villain of the week informs him that his alien partner whom he fuses with to become Rockman killed his father. The shock of the revelation is enough that his body literally forces itself away from said partner and he reverts to normal. Four hundred feet above the ground. Whoops.
- Fate of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha got one in the first season after she discovers what she is, followed by a tirade from her mother, Precia, that ends with her stating how much she has despised Fate ever since she was born. The mind of poor, Love Martyr Fate simply couldn't take it and temporarily shut down in despair.
- Sousuke spends a significant portion of Full Metal Panic The Second Raid in the throes of a Heroic BSOD after he's ordered to cease serving as Kaname's bodyguard and cut off all contact with her. Eventually it gets bad enough that he simply walks away in the middle of a mission and wanders aimlessly around Hong Kong, getting a bottle of scotch and picking up (or allowing himself to be picked up by) a prostitute who looks like Kaname. And then It Gets Worse...
- Tsukasa suffers one in .hack//sign after Morganna tortures him.
- In fact, this was Morganna's plan: to build Tsukasa up and make him feel safe so that when it was "BSOD time" it would be more traumatic.
- To be honest, it's kinda hard not to when you've been Data Drained.
- In .hack//ROOTS, Haseo has a breakdown, then goes on a rage-driven warpath, throughout the last third of the series after Tri-Edge/Azure Kite puts Shino into a coma.
- In Dai Guard, Ibuke shuts down when she learns that her father died in a monster attack, not because he was trying to save the world, but because he was trying desperately to prove his pet theory. Problem is, she shuts down in the middle of a mecha-fight and almost gets her team killed, leading to a Ten Minute Retirement.
- Dio of Last Exile goes into one of these after the ship he's on (the Silvana) is captured by his evil sister Delphine and he believes his friend and companion Luciola has betrayed him. He only snaps out of it right before his Rite of the Covenant. And then it gets worse.
- Luffy gets two of these in One Piece, both under similar circumstances. The first is in the sixth movie when he thinks his crew is dead after witnessing them being absorbed into a life force draining plant. The second happens later in the manga when Bartholomew Kuma vanishes his crew one by one before his eyes. In both cases, he gets better after realizing that they are still alive.
- The second one is a particularly long-lasting one. In both Manga and Anime, the entire crew gets one of these as they simultaneously face off against an Admiral, the admiral's top subordinate (who Monster Chopper couldn't land a single hit on), and a SECOND Pacifista, after they struggled to beat the FIRST Pacifista, and were more tired than they'd been in recent memory, Then Bartholemew Kuma shows up, and utterly annihilates them. in the anime adaptation, it starts off as this at the BEGINNING of the episode, and by the end becomes one of the most heart-breaking freakouts possible when a hero of this caliber realizes he's failed completely, and never stood a chance.
- While his status as a hero is questionable, a recent manga chapter shows that, Squad seems to go into one after realizing how thoroughly the Marines had manipulated him into stabbing Whitebeard.
- Takumi in Initial D goes into one after his Trueno's engine breaks down in mid-race.
- In Cyborg 009, Francoise (003) almost suffers one of these when she witnesses the destruction of a whole city with her powers and is unable to stop it, and Joe (the titular 009) has to talk her out of it. Later, Joe has a full one when he lands into an Alternate Universe where the Black Ghost organization, the group he and his people have fought against during the whole series, have actually won the war and now own the world.
- The Major from Ghost In The Shell has a BSOD at least twice over the course of the anime series. In the first, she's shellshocked after encountering a traumatic memory in Kuze's cyberbrain. Later, she adopts this expression after a rag-tag refugee takes down their super-duper V-22 with fifty dollar's worth of suicide bomb, severely injuring super-hacker Ishikawa and sending Section 9's million-dollar tiltrotor tumbling into a chasm. This is right after a team member has been killed. And all of this occurs in the time span of about one hour. Wouldn't you?
- Gravion Zwei has three people suffering Heroic BSOD in a relatively close time together:
- Leele after finding out that Sandman is her father (no thanks to Touga), right after finding out her real name Leele Zeravire, which means she is connected with the invading enemies, was too much in a shock she goes into a frantic walk that got her slipping off the bridge falling to the lake.
- Then, Touga, based on those events regarding on Leele (and being called out by Eiji), made worse by Eina's Heroic Sacrifice for his sake, eventually fell into one, leaving the castle, hanging in silence in the slums and lets himself be a victim of beating by punks (and here, we speak about some sort of Tykebomb with fighting skills)
- And meanwhile, Sandman, after hearing all the disasters and how his past caught up with him along with how Gravion is losing as well as his brother's coming with Zeravire, finally fell into it. He got reprimanded by Raven or to be exact his lover Ayaka and quickly got back to his composure.
- Madlax completely lost the will to live after her love interest Vanessa was apparently killed. Nakhl and Elenore pointed out that Madlax had specifically promised Vanessa to live, though, and so Madlax was able to carry on until the series' Mind Screw of an Earn Your Happy Ending.
- Naruto has one when his mission to find Sasuke fails after Tobi/Madara spirits him away without leaving a trail, and when he hears about Jiraiya's death. Tsunade has one when Pain destroys most of Konoha. Naruto also gets one again when Hinata is seemingly killed before his very eyes. He then goes into six-tails mode, skipping the 5-tails mode completely!
- Also after Naruto goes four-tails for the first time, he has a brief BSOD when Yamato tells him that it was his (Naruto's) fault Sakura was hurt.
- In Death Note, L has one of these and falls off his chair when he hears about 'Shinigami'.
- And another one after he decides that the Kira power must switch between people, so his investigating is useless. He becomes depressed and loses his will to work. It cumulates in him and Light having a punch-up that breaks vases and overturns couches, and is probably one of the most fangirled-over fight scenes in recent history.
- In Angel Sanctuary, Rosiel seems to have one of these when he kills Katan. He turns even more insane than he already was and breaks down completely.
- That's more appropriately a Villainous Breakdown, given that Rosiel, while he might not be the real Big Bad of the series, is definitely not one of the heroes.
- In the tie-in manga for the Metroid series, a 14 year old Samus Aran rushes back to her home planet of Zebes upon getting word that Space Pirates have conquered the planet, to find her Chozo surrogate family imprisoned, powerless, and fated to die. A confrontation with Ridley and Mother Brain results in them tag-teaming her with taunts, going on about the circumstances under which her family died, how the Chozo will be killed, and culminating in Mother Brain dropping the bombshell on her that she was never viewed as a person by her and possibly the Chozo, she was designed and trained to be nothing more than the ultimate biological weapon, and that as a result, Samus using her suit and everything she was trained to fight in the war was just playing into Mother Brain's schemes. Samus finally has a breakdown, alternately sobbing and looking utterly dead and emotionless as Ridley and Mother Brain continue to taunt her during her breakdown.
- Lina Inverse of Slayers undergoes this briefly at the end of season two. In her defense, a dark lord was killing her love interest and all of her friends like they were nothing, and was about to destroy their souls as well in an attempt to get her to destroy the world by casting a particular spell. No win situation, much?
- ...Of course, one could argue that what happened after she did cast the spell was, in fact, the ultimate Heroic BSOD, as the Lord Of Nightmares completely takes over Lina, pretty much killing her.
- Tamaki of Ouran High School Host Club has a pretty epic (and hilarious) one during one of
Casanova's Bossa Nova's Kasanoda's visits to the music room.
- Vegeta of Dragonball Z gets one of these in the first Brolly movie. Upon realizing what they're dealing with, he goes almost catatonic with hopelessness and actually sits out most of the fight. Then Piccolo grabs him by the hair and tries to insult some sense into him - he just hangs limp, blathering about the pointlessness of it all until Piccolo gives up and tosses him to the ground. He's on his feet and fighting a few minutes later, so apparently it sank in.
- Arguably, the violant rampage varient of this happens when several of the characters become Super Saiyans, particularly Goku's transformation while fighting Freiza, Gohan while fighting Cell, and Trunks in the special about his past.
- Piccolo gets a minor one in the anime version of the Buu saga, when Gotenks' reckless fight with Buu blows Kami's lookout to hell and back. He stands there holding a chunk of the floor, gaping at it and rambling until circumstances force him to... y'know, dodge.
- Gohan has two simultaneous ones during his fight against Cell - first when Cell prepares to blow up the Earth, which he blames himself for, and then when Goku sacrifices himself to try to kill Cell, which Gohan also blames himself for.
- Mai Kawasumi from Kanon has her Heroic BSOD when Sayuri is attacked by the demons that she had been fighting. Said demons are actually manifestations of her own denial of her healing powers.
- Kotomi Ichinose from Clannad has her Heroic BSOD when she thinks that Ryou was involved in the bus accident at the intersection. Justified in that she lost her parents in a plane crash.
- Kouji Kabuto from Shin Mazinger experiences one of these when he realizes that by fighting in his Humongous Mecha, he has accidentally killed dozens of civilians.
- In the original Mazinger Z series, Kouji's girlfriend and partner Sayaka Yumi has another when her Humongous Mecha, Aphrodite A, is destroyed. It's so bad that she almost kills herself by drowning, as she believes that Aphrodite is calling her from a nearby lake
- During the Great Eclipse in Berserk, Guts briefly experiences a Heroic BSOD. Casca, on the other hand, thoroughly experiences hers, to the point of being driven completely insane. Those who have seen the Eclipse in action know that this need not be elaborated further.
- Let's not forget when Guts finishes his assassination on Julius, where he had to kill a kid who very much reminded him of... him.
- And Griffith had one when Guts left the Hawks and defeated him, which would soon lead to worse things to come for him.
- In the Bastard manga, Dark Schneider occasionally experiences Heroic BSOD's for a variety of reasons. Some of them are very minor and short (often triggered by a spat with Yoko in the beginning of the series, when Rushe still matters), but a major one (off-screen) when he finds out that Yoko apparently died, then goes to hell. He's promptly snapped out of it by Porno Dianno by virtue of her wandering all over the place pretty much naked. Talk about priority placement.
- Comedic use in Episode 7 of Haruhi-chan when Haruhi had Kyon go Scavenger Hunting for "A barrier of the heart", and Kyon grabbed Koizumi.
Haruhi: "A barrier to the heart", why him? Kyon: So, Koizumi. I love you. Haruhi: Gack! (insert metaphor for her world shattering) (scene change) Kyon's Sister: Attention! Haruhi-chan has fainted so we're taking a break!
- Pokemon Special: When the comments of a blind girl make Ruby realize how selfish he's been all along, putting the entire world aside so he can pursue his own goals, he has one.
- Ruby's pales compared to Crystal's. She has a rather harsh one after not only failing to catch Suicune, but also failing to confirm why it was at the Tin Tower (their confrontation site) in the first place. And unlike most BSODs, hers came with a driver crash; she lost the ability to catch even the simplest Pokemon as a result of her BSOD. It took a Bright Slap from her mother and a trip back to her old training ground before she completely finished rebooting.
- In Fushigi Yuugi, Tamahome goes into the violent rampage variety of BSOD when he comes home to find his entire family - including his younger siblings ranging in age from five to twelve years old - have been gruesomely murdered.
- At the end of the second episode of Gundam X, Tiffa Addil has a memorable one (screaming and collapsing included), after Garrod fires the Satellite Cannon with her help and she senses the deaths of many people under its powers.
- Joe himself experiences this in the Viewtiful Joe anime adaption after finding out that Captain Blue is the Big Bad. It takes Blue Jr. and people Joe met through Movie Land to get him out of it.
- Takato of Digimon Tamers suffers a relatively short, Shinji-like one after transforming his digital pet into a ravenous monster and watching it lose to Beelzebumon, though he was pretty much out of it from the moment Girumon went monster and his digivice shattered.
- Jeri has one in the same episode after her partner Digimon, Leomon, is killed. Through almost all of the episode after the event, she's staring at her Digivice and not moving, despite the fact that there's a massive fight going on around her that is causing the ground she is standing on to crack in half.
- Earlier in the franchise (the first season) Tai has one. After having been convinced that he cannot die in the Digital World, his carelessness gets Sora captured. He is then told that he CAN die in the Digital World, and when confronted by a dangerous wall he had carelessly passed through earlier, he BSOD's.
- Blade/D-Boy in Tekkaman Blade starts suffering hallucinations and nightmares that cause him to be unable to fight after his corrupted sibling Saber/Evil causes him to overstay his Hour Of Power and suffer a Face Heel Turn. While he was brought back to normal, he almost tore apart one of his friends before he snapped out of it, and things come to a head when the military reveals its new Teknosuits and he gets arrested. He is left an utter wreck until Aki/Star slaps and shouts some sense into him.
- In Yu Yu Hakusho, as Yusuke is getting the tar bearen out of him by Younger Toguro, Keiko, unable to bear seeing her boyfriend go through such unimaginable agony, snaps and becomes completly catatonic for one and a half episodes.
- Played for laughs in Soul Eater, when Death the Kid is taking his exam, crying about not being able to write his name neatly enough...and then rips the paper. Fainting and blood ensue.
Comic Books
- Strongbow the elf archer in Elf Quest loses his shooting skills after being forced to kill an elf who attempted to kill his son (up until this point in the series no elf has ever killed another elf, barring numerous threats and a couple of failed attempts). Only when he is able to commune with his victim's spirit and beg its forgiveness does he return to his old self.
- In Animal Man, Buddy Baker has a BSOD lasting at least several days when an assassin murders his wife and children. This subverts temporarily the normal tendency of Dark Age superheroes to immediately go on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge.
- In Runaways, Victor Mancha, a cyborg, goes into what characters describe as a Blue Screen of Death when he hears three pre-determined questions that conflict with his logic programing and spirituality. As of writing, only one has been used ( Q: Could God make a sandwich so big, he could not eat it? A: Yes, and then he would finish it anyway.. It only works once.
- The quote above from Preacher is taken from the All In The Family Story Arc, where one of the villains comments on the eponymous protagonist's Heroic BSOD, after he saw his lover shot dead right in front of him.
- The titular character of The Desert Peach (Erwin Rommel's brother) suffers one (complete with "Attempting reboot" comment) after some men in his army unit give him some compelling evidence about the implementation of Hitler's Final Solution.
- Nightwing has an enormous BSOD after a series of events including an attack on Oracle, who proceeds to dump him; his circus, which was burned down; his apartment building being bombed that culminates in the death of a certain villain, and he plunges further into mind breakage when he's subsequently raped by his particularly disturbed accessory to the death of said villain.
- Batman has one of these in the Elseworlds series "The Nail" (set in a world where Superman was not raised by the Kents) when he kills the Joker after being forced to witness the Joker's extremely sadistic double murder of Robin and Batgirl (I said it was an Elseworlds story). He makes it back to the Batcave but is catatonic until Catwoman (who did a Heel Face Turn to help him against the Joker) puts on the Robin costume and shocks him out of it.
- Cyclops, in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men run, has a severe one of these when Emma Frost reveals to him that his inability to control his powers is the result of a complex he developed about self-control as teenager, rather than a brain injury resulting from a concussion, as he had previously believed. He spends and issue or two in a completely catatonic state, his powers not functioning. He soon recovers enough to move around and lead the team (perhaps even more effectively than usual, with his self-control issues out of the way) and later surprises everyone by revealing (with a point blank blast in the face of his interrogator) that his powers still work, and that he now has full control over them. At the end of the arc, this control fades as, for reasons this troper still doesn't understand, the "clarity" he got from Emma's intervention wears off. See Status Quo is God.
- The title character has one of these in Cerebus The Aardvark after witnessing what he believed to be the death of his love interest: Jaka. He spends several issues hanging out in a dinner/inn while in a near-catatonic state until somebody pushes his Berserk Button.
- Spider-Man is a master of this. The death of Gwen Stacy is the best and most famous example. In Clone Saga it happens one time after another and the level of his Wangst is just ridiculously big. In Joe Quesada's One More Day it gets even worse.
- In the Super Smash Bros fanfiction Smash Generation, Mario appears to have one of these after finding out that Dr. Mario dies in a year, since they're being visited by their future children. Yeah, it kind of slipped out. It didn't help that they were about to fight the zombie of said doctor. Bonus points to the writer who even referenced the site for the idea.
- In Ferris Buellers Day Off, Cameron seems to have one of these when he sees that the valet took his father's car - his most prized possession, for a joyride. He screams at the top of his lungs for the whole city to hear, then lapses into his BSOD. Ferris and his girlfriend Sloane try desperately to revive him, which culminates with the two of them in a hot tub, and Cameron on a folding chair at the end of a diving board. He falls (or jumps) in, and Ferris "rescues" him, reviving him from his coma in the process. He reveals that he wasn't really BSOD'd the whole time. Sloane then asks if he saw her get changed, which he replies to with a grin.
- Sleepy Hollow used it twice, first when Ichabod first sees the "monster" ("It was a headless horseman. But it was a headless horseman. No, you must believe me. It was a horseman, a dead one. Headless.") and then at the finale: the Horseman brings a woman with him to the underworld, her hand is stuck at the roots of the "tree portal". The hand beckons. Ichabod promptly faints.
- John "Scottie" Ferguson gets one of these in Vertigo that lasts long enough for him to be put in a mental hospital after the woman he loves is killed. She comes back later.
- In Disney's The Great Mouse Detective, Basil snaps after falling for Ratigan's Xanatos Gambit, silently and stoically sits through the To The Pain lecture, and just waits for the Death Trap to go off, feeling completely humiliated, outwitted, and defeated.
Dawson: Dash it all, Basil! The queen's in danger, Olivia's counting on us, we're about to be horribly splatted, and all you can do is lie there feeling sorry for yourself!
- Well, how else would Dawson have been in a position to influence Basil's mind and force him to save the day?
- In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent's blue screen is burnt and scarred on one side. Pretty much all the scenes in the hospital after he finds out what happened are just him on his bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. Of course, you either die a hero, or reboot into a villain...
- Barbossa (arguably this rather than a Villainous Breakdown, given his brief stint as a "hero" in the third movie) has one in the third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, after his plan to save the pirates by releasing Calypso fails miserably. Upon seeing the maelstrom that the Pearl is forced to weather, he just stands on the deck staring at it, before Elizabeth snaps him out of it by reminding that he's needed at the helm.
- Night Of The Living Dead: Barbara has one after seeing her brother killed by a zombie, then being chased across the countryside by said zombie. She recovers almost the whole film later, when her brother leads the mob of zombies that kill her.
- In the Korean action movie Shiri, the main character has a bit of a BSOD when he discovers his girlfriend is in fact a North Korean assassin.
- Ditto the Korean thriller Oldboy, where the main character BSODs hardcore (AND dumps core, AND probably files a cosmic bug report) when he finds out he's been manipulated into sleeping with his own daughter as karmic payback for talking too much about a schoolmate who got his own sister pregnant.
- Done pretty well for a comedy in Tropic Thunder, when extreme method actor Kirk Lazarus is called out for his methods, used because he's afraid of what's deep inside, by a rather insane Tugg Speedman (who's suffered his own BSOD after accidentally killing a panda, then supposedly "found a family"). It takes the Only Sane Man, resident geek, and Promoted Fanboy (of sorts) Kevin to shake Kirk out of it...and, well, he attempted to do so with Speedman.
- Oskar Schindler in Schindlers List breaks down towards the end of the film after thinking that even if he had saved the lives of about 1,100 Jews, he might have been able to save more had he used his money wisely.
- More like if he'd been less greedy with his personal possessions, at least to hear him tell it.
- Sweeney Todd goes into a not-so-heroic one of these after Anthony's colossally bad timing in telling him about Johanna and his plan to elope with her blows his first shot at revenge on Judge Turpin straight to hell. This leads to him launching into the epic number "Epiphany" that marks his transition into full-on Villain Protagonist mode.
- In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Luke suffers a BSOD after Darth Vader's notorious reveal. Which brings us to...
- In the Bollywood movie Pukar, the main character, Jai, goes through this after having been wrongfully accused of treason and facing court martial. Made all the worse that his girlfriend has left him and his family has been shamed. Ironic, that the only one listening is the person who put him in that predicament (though she never thought it would go so far) and her father. He gets better.
- Shilo has a fairly extensive one by the end of Repo The Genetic Opera.
- Nicole Kidman's character in Birth has a BSOD while at the opera. The camera locks on her face for a full three minutes while she shuts down. The result is fairly haunting.
- An early cinematic example occurs in Metropolis when Freder collapses and has a four-minute apocalyptic vision after he (apparently) discovers (Robot) Maria is in league with his father, Joh.
- From the recent CGI movie TMNT, Raphael confronts Leonardo, breaks his swords and beats him for once - leaving him vulnerable when the Big Bads gang up on him and capture him. The realisation that this was all his fault turns Raphael into a babbling, incoherent emotional mess.
- Sarah Connor Blue Screens in Terminator 2 upon seeing a Terminator very much identical to the one that persistently tried to kill her in the previous film. Complete with slow motion, Deer in the Headlights Look™, and lying on the floor motionless.
- Which contrasts nicely with her put-on catatonia earlier in the day after she's shown photos of the Terminator walking around a shopping mall.
- At the end of Warrior King, Tony Jaa has a pretty epic Heroic BSOD when he sees the skeleton of his father's elephant (which he has been trailing all film) behind the throne of the big bad and collapses to the ground, getting kicked in the head repeatedly while he reboots, before unleashing the mother of all Unstoppable Rages on every last motherfucker in the room.
- The character Sarah has one of these about two thirds of the way through The Descent and doesn't come back for the rest of the movie. On the upside, her BSOD is very hardcore, and in all likelyhood it saved her life in the American version with the revised ending.
- During the final battle of Saving Private Ryan, Upham gets one, being only able to walk among the carnage (justified in that he never fought such a big battle before) - and the Germans realize his condition and never shoot him, even though he has loads of bullets around his neck. He gets over the BSOD only after The Cavalry arrives.
- In Space Camp, Katherine (played by Lea Thompson) has one of these after finding the manual override switch. Katherine didn't know whether to pull the switch so they could save their camp counselor Andie (played by Kate Capshaw of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom fame), or not pull it and allow mission control to bring them back to Earth on auto-pilot (they were low on oxygen). It eventually takes Kevin (Tate Donovan) who previously "didn't ask to be responsible" to do just that and pull the switch to rescue Andie.
- This typically happens in the TV movies the Lifetime Channel airs (some they made themselves, others not) when either the main protagonist (or any other character for that matter) discovers some horrible (or otherwise shocking) Reveal in whatever the context happens to be in at the time. It's happened so often that it has now become a stereotypical plot element in such movies.
- In District 9, Christopher is purely interested originally in getting himself, his son and maybe a few others the hell off Earth. However, when he and Wikus raid MNU's lab, he enters this state realizing the horrifically evil things being done to his people. Once he snaps out of it, he is now dedicated to return to both free his people and help Wikus.
- "You Klingon bastards, you've killed my son!"
- Ghostbusters gives us another lovely quote after the team has viewed the transformation of Gozer into the Stay Puft Marshamallow Man.
Peter: Ray has gone bye-bye, Egon. What have you got left?
Egon: Sorry, Venkman. I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.
- It's worth noting that Egon's line here is also Casual Danger Dialog; his tone of voice is completely normal whenever he describes anything negative, up to and including his own BSOD.
- The Hurt Locker, in following an Army EOD team in Iraq, gives us an escalating scale of BSODs through all the main characters:
- James is basically a walking BSOD through the entire film, with some moments shoving him deeper in than others. Arguably, he only manages his reboot at the end of the film when he realizes he genuinly enjoys his ridiculously dangerous job despite his wife and son waiting for him at home, and re-enlists to go back.
- Sandborn is pretty stable, but he eventually swerves right into a BSOD when being around James gets him thinking that if he dies, there isn't anyone in the world who would care except his parents. They don't count.
- Eldridge goes through several traumatic experiences starting from the very first scene, to the point where he has a counselour popping up around him every now and then. Eldridge actually tells him, sincerely, that he appreciates his efforts and that he feels better having someone to talk to. Then the counselour is killed, and Eldridge is indirectly responsible. Then he's shot. He has precious little sanity left by his last scene.
- In Return To Oz, Dorothy manages to endure a lot, including the destruction of virtually everything she ever loved about Oz, but with a lot of hastily-revised plans and some helpful friends, she remains stable. However, when the Nome King transforms the Scarecrow into an ornament and abandons her in a chamber deep inside his palace, Dorothy finally bursts into tears. After a Pet The Dog moment from the Nome King and then a Kick The Dog moment, she falls into a period of despair which she finally recovers when she beats the Nome King at his own game.
- United 93's entire cast (besides the passengers aboard the titular flight) suffers one after United 175 smashes into the South Tower.
- Katherine, the protagonist's love interest in Fury, has one after seeing an angry mob burn her fiance alive. He gets better. Afterwards she's unable to speak, and has a post-traumatic freakout whenever she sees fire (including people lighting their cigarettes).
- Cemetery Man. Learning the rest of the world doesn't exist for you because you're not real could do that to anyone.
Live Action TV
- The Doctor goes into one of these in The Stolen Earth.
- Also in Bad Wolf, when he freaks out after Rose is apparently vaporized.
- As well as in The Waters of Mars when he sees Ood Sigma after his whole 'Time Lord Victorious thing.
- In the season five Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "The Weight of the World", the idea that a moment of doubt had caused her to fail in her mission to protect Dawn caused Buffy to mentally check out for several hours, scaring the heck out of her friends and requiring magic to snap her out of it.
- She has a brief BSOD in season 2 when she realizes that it was her having sex with Angel that caused him to lose his soul and become the evil Angelus once more.
- The events of the Season 2 finale cause her to do the "Walk into the mist" version of this trope.
- Giles has one in the season 2 episode "Passions" after discovering that Angelus had murdered his girlfriend, laid her corpse in the bedroom, and set up everything to look like she had planned a romantic encounter for the two of them. When he comes out of it, he's...a little different for the rest of the ep.
- Let's not forget Willow's BSOD after Tara is killed right in front of her.
- In the first season of Babylon 5, Commander Sinclair is kidnapped, drugged, and interrogated by a bad guy of the week who wanted to know why Sinclair disappeared at the Battle of the Line, the climactic final battle of the Minbari War, which Sinclair blacked out during and has no memory of. While in this state, he discovers what happened to him (kidnapped, interrogated, and brain-washed by aliens), escapes from his captors, and spends some time in a state of drug-induced confusion, evading and fighting against B5's station security as they try to rescue him.
- Londo gets two of them concerning his lover Adira: one when she is poisoned, and the other when he learns that Morden is responsible. Both instances are accompanied by revenge with style.
- Garibaldi has a more literal one after Bester's implanted orders trigger, forcing him to report his findings to the Psi Corps; literal in the sense that his brain really is pretty much locked until Bester releases it.
- He then has a more traditional one after Bester releases him from this state and he is faced with the realization that he just betrayed everyone and everything he cares about and none of his friends are going to believe him or ever trust him again.
- Delenn BSODs when Anna Sheridan arrives and remains in a semi-BSOD state during Sheridan's first death.
- This actually occurs to Dr. Cox on Scrubs, after three of his patients (one of whom he was actually friends with) died due to an error on his part.
- He really has two, although the first is very short. After the first two die, he starts to go into one, but JD snaps him out of it by pointing out they would have been dead much earlier if he hadn't done anything. Only when the third patient (who happens to be both the friend and the one that could have survived for at least a few months) dies does this take effect fully.
- Cox has another Heroic BSOD in season 3, when his best friend unexpectedly dies, causing him to have a breakdown complete with hallucinations.
- Really, Ben just tends to inspire hallucinatory BSOD in people. Remember the episode where JD diagnosed him?
- During the final battle with the Reavers in Serenity, River temporarily goes helpless and catatonic as the Reavers' madness presses in on her mind. It takes her brother getting shot in the stomach to break her out of it. Then she takes them on alone and kills them all.
- In fact, for most of the series, River is stuck in near-permanent BSOD mode as a result of the trauma she received, alternating between schizophrenic emotionlessness, abortive attempts at rebooting, hallucinations, nightmares, post-traumatic stress events, and uncontrolled crying in the corners, all of which tend to render her effectively non-functional.
- Moreover, much of Mal Reynolds' character and development revolves around his attempts to gradually put himself back together after suffering the massive BSOD (caused by the crushing Independent defeat at the Battle of Serenity Valley) shown during the pilot episode's cold open.
- In the season 5 episode "Latent Image" of Star Trek: Voyager, the Doctor is revealed to have done an almost literal (as he's a computer program) version of this (using the Out Damned Spot version) following an incident in which two patients were equally at risk and equally treatable; he chose the one he was better friends with, which was contrary to his programming. The memory was erased from his program, and when it was restored he suffered the same condition, but eventually recovered.
- Why didn't they just put Jetal into stasis until they were done with Harry so both could be saved?
- Janeway had one of these in Equinox when she became obsessed with hunting down Ransom after she found out he was responsible for murdering hundreds of senient lifeforms. She also went a little crazy in Year of Hell and Scientific Method. See Berserk Button and Mama Bear
- Kirk has occasional BSODs, usually triggered by the death of a Red Shirt, which result in him angsting for about fifteen seconds and then getting over it very quickly after a pep talk from McCoy. Spock has a much bigger one in "Amok Time" after apparently killing Kirk, and almost quits Starfleet. He presumably has another one offscreen some time between the end of the series and the first movie, and does quit Starfleet!
- Also, Sisko had a few moments of depression during the Dominion War. Plus a minor breakdown after Jadzia's death.
- Also, he was like this for years after Jennifer's death, only coming out of it when the Prophets told him to stop living in the past in Emissary.
- Trip went into shutdown mode for at least a season after his little sister was killed in the Xindi attack.
- Supernatural loves these and it also loves never really making them better either. John had his after his wife died, causing him to drink and treat his sons like soldiers. Sam had his after his girlfriend died, causing him to be just as obsessive as John was about hunting this demon. And Dean? Someone dies to save him in a Season One episode, John dies to save his life in the Season Two premiere, Season Two completely breaks him down in as many ways as possible and all of it prompts a suicidally guilty breakdown in which, after Sam dies (and gets better), he ends up selling his soul in an incredibly poor and desperate bargain.
- Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica has a huge one after his best friend reveals himself as a Cylon and tells Adama to use him as a bargaining chip during a Mexican Standoff with Cylons. Although Adama has displayed intense emotion over key events before, this time he destroys his office, drinks an entire bottle of liquor and is reduced to weeping nearly incoherently in his son's arms.
- Colonel Tigh has one of these very briefly in the third season while still on New Caprica, immediately after he discovers that his wife has been feeding information to the Cylons. Following all of this, he totally Took A Level In Badass.
- Athena has one when Boomer takes revenge against her for stealing her life. She gets brutalized, tied up, and stuffed in a closet where she is forced to watch helplessly as Boomer has sex with her husband, who can't tell the two apart. Boomer then kidnaps their daughter and successfully escapes the ship. When Athena realizes the full extent of Boomer's actions, she breaks down in Helo's arms only pulling herself together for the rescue mission.
- In Act III of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Dr. Horrible gets a simultaneous dream come true and Villain BSOD, and expresses both in song to carry out the denoument. This inverted Heroic BSOD is appropriate for a show that inverts the very superhero genre by adroitly representing self-proclaimed villain as protagonist, and self-proclaimed hero as antagonist.
- Although he isn't strictly a hero, this trope is the best way to describe what happens to Avon at the end of the last episode of Blake's 7 when he kills Blake.
- Mack, the Red Ranger from Power Rangers Operation Overdrive has one of these upon learning that he is an Android. Shortly thereafter, he turns into the Death Seeker.
- In The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode "Allison from Palmdale", Cameron goes through several of these when her processor malfunctions, and she begins confusing herself with Allison Young, a girl whose personality and appearance she mimicked, and then later killed.
- Happens to Stevie in Malcolm In The Middle when he learns his mother had abandoned him. He also regresses back into speechlessness and refuses to move anything other than his fingers (to operate a text-to-speech machine).
- Boukenger does this with Masumi a few times whenever Yami no Aiba appears to fight him. However none were as bad until the last stretch of the series where after supposedly beating him, the guy still lives and forces Masumi to use the Artifact Of Doom to beat him. This leaves him out of action in heroicBSOD as Satoru disappears in the worse time as well. However they came back just in time to save the world.
- In Kamen Rider 555, Takumi had one when he thought that he was the one who attacked the Ryuseiji on their reunion night and when his friends found out he was an Orphnoch, going as far as almost joining Lucky Clover however he got over it just as Yuji suffered from a permenet one when Yuka was gunned down by police after being tortured and experimented on.
- Then again Takumi didn't want to be Faiz anyway....
- In Kamen Rider Kiva, Wataru has two of these: once when Nago Keisuke brutally attacks him with his own "Garulu Saber" and again when Bishop awakens his Fangire blood, causing him to attack his friends. He got better.
- In a flashback in the Season 1 episode of Heroes, "Company Man," Claude has one right after his partner, Noah Bennett ("HRG") shoots him. He puts his hand to the wound, stares at it for a moment, and then looks back at HRG, who shoots him two or three more times. Suddenly, Claude's present misanthropy and lack of faith in humanity makes a lot more sense.
- In Carnivale, Apollonia is in an Angst Coma after giving birth to Sofie who was conceived via rape at the hands of Justin Crowe, thus bequeathing Sofie an avataric nature, which means her birth is traumatic to her mother, as per the show's mythology. Whew!, and Sofie herself experiences an Heroic BSOD after her mother dies.
- In Generation Kill, Sgt. Colbert goes into a BSOD after he grants Lance Corporal Trombley the authority to shoot what Trombley identifies as enemy combatants. The "combatants" turn out to be kids with camels, who eventually end up at the Marine camp after getting zipped with Trombley's SAW. Also a total Tear Jerker.
- Happens again later. Walt Hasser, also a good shot with a SAW, jumps the gun on firing at an incoming car at the Marines' blockade, aiming for, and hitting, the civilian driver before anyone attempts a warning shot. Colbert wigs out, made worse by the fact that Colbert's "Iceman" reputation would mean something that bothers him at all is really terrible, certainly doing nothing to help Walt's ensuing BSOD over the incident.
- Happens to Dr. Shepherd in Greys Anatomy when he loses a pregnant patient, is sued by her husband, and learns that he's saved fewer patients than he's killed.
- Happens to another "Dr. Shepard" in Lost: Jack goes into a really serious one in the season three finale's flashforward. ("We have to go back, Kate! We have to go BACK!") We only learn that it was Locke's death that caused it in season five.
- Sarah Connor suffers a BSOD when the fact that Derek Reese is dead hits home. It lasts all of six seconds — Sarah's got used to this sort of thing.
- In Being Human, Mitchell has one when he has to turn a small boy who he befriended into a vampire to save his life. This is with the boy's mother's blessing, and seems to prove the Big Bad is right. Mitchell almost does a Face Heel Turn because of this.. In the next episode, Ghost Annie has one when she fails to either scare her ex-fiancee (who murdered her), or warn his new girlfriend. She gets out of it when she learns that Mitchell is in trouble.
- A very understandable one in NCIS, when Gibbs is suffering amnesia all the way back to his Gulf War days, and his Mentor tells him what happened on 9/11/2001.
- Happens several times in House MD to the titular character. In season 2, he admits he loves his ex-girlfriend and asks her to stay, but she refuses and he's upset for a WHOLE EPISODE. Most notably, though, at the end of season 5 when one of his fellows commits suicide and he starts hallucinating a previous fellow applicant/best friend's dead girlfriend, hallucinates sleeping with his boss and then ends up in a mental institution.
- Farscape had one at the end of the Peacekeeper Wars after John stops the wormhole weapon and Einstein takes the wormhole knowledge out of his head. John collapses and Aeryn gets as upset as we ever see her, sobbing over his body. It takes him a while to snap out of it.
- In the NUMB3RS Season Five finale Charlie's usual plot-saving mathetmatical genuis (and indeed his basic coherent function) completely shuts off for a while after Amita is kidnapped.
- Charlie has proven prone to Heroic BSO Ds since the first season when he successfully predicts a bank robbery and his brother is shot at. It is then revealed that he suffers BSO Ds whenever someone near him is close to death, such as when his mother had cancer.
- In Torchwood: Children of Earth, Captain Jack Harkness shuts down twice. The first time is after his defiance of the monster of the week, the 456, results in the release of a virus that kills everyone in the building, including Jack’s lover Ianto Jones. Later, he goes AWOL from England, and ultimately Earth, after he kills his grandson in order to save the millions of children who would otherwise have been taken by the 456.
- Played for laughs in Jeeves And Wooster. Jeeves had built up a reputation for being the Ultimate Fashion Police (albeit some Truth In Television, as valets were primarily in charge of their master's wardrobes) which usually just amounts to a gentle disapproval of one of Bertie's jackets or hats. However, at least two occasions with Bertie's friends upgraded to Heroic BSOD levels. Bingo's horseshoe-patterned tie sends him unresponsively into the kitchen complete with a Hitchcockian score, and Rocky's remarks about never changing out of his pajamas almost makes him cry.
- The entire premise of Monk is Monk's struggle to reboot from a huge BSOD occurring four years before the series begins, when his wife is killed by a car bomb.
- King Henry VIII suffers one of these in The Tudors, when his third wife Lady Jane Seymour dies of childbed fever after giving birth to a healthy son. He spends several days (possibly weeks) sequestered with his Fool, drinking, drawing up impossible plans for palaces, and writing the tenets for the Church of England.
- In Hercules The Legendary Journeys, Hercules lays on the ground for three days in shock after Iolaus is killed by Dahak. When his efforts to get him back fail, he goes into a more violent outburst.
- Hawkeye has a pretty famous one in M*A*S*H ("Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen"), where he has a mental breakdown (complete with a paranoid claim that one of the anesthesiologists was attempting to suffocate his patient with the oxygen mask, and a joyride in a jeep through the mess tent), in response to a traumatic experience on the ride home from a day at the beach a few weeks prior. So determined is his mind to deny what it had witnessed, Hawkeye seems to regress into an even more rambling and manic state than usual. He is only shaken back into reality when he is pressed by his psychiatrist Sidney Friedman to recall the pivotal incident on the bus, at which point he breaks down, remembering now in horror a peasant woman having smothered her own infant son out of the fear of being discovered.
- At least two characters in Band Of Brothers.
- Private Blythe spends the first night after parachuting into France on D-Day lying in a ditch. Later on, during the attack of Carentan, he becomes psychosomatically blind. Finally, he goes into a serious panic during the battle outside the city, until "woken" back to life by Captain Winters. His story doesn't end too well, apparently the man died of shell shock.
- Bud Compton shows some signs of going into BSOD when we hear that his girlfriend dumped him while he's lying in a trench in the Ardennes winter. Then it really sinks in when he witnesses two of his friends hit by an artillery shell later in the battle of the bulge. He's never the same again.
- Tom Quinn from Spooks undergoes a BSOD about halfway through Series 2 after a series of missions that put magnets to his moral compass make him grow deeply cynical. Unlike some BSO Ds, he doesn't recover. It comes to a head when he is forced by his boss to effectively ruin an old university professor's life and put his family in extreme jeopardy by having him pretend to sell explosive materials to terrorists. The end of the episode is something of a heroic reformat as he is fired from the team..
- Angel suffered from one of these when he encountered a powerful demon that seeks out true heroes and terminates them. The demon looked him over and walked away. He is later told the demon did that because it detected Angel's status as a vampire, and assumed he was evil.
- I thought it was because he eats hearts and Angel's heart doesn't beat?
- On Merlin - Arthur, after finding out the truth about his birth, and getting the idea that his father is to blame for his mother's death. He tries to kill Uther. It takes Merlin telling him that it's all lies (which it isn't) to snap him out of it.
Mythology
- Achilles gets two of these. In The Iliad, he mopes around mourning for his friend Patroclus until the ghost of Patroclus has to tell him to snap out of it and burn his body on a pyre. Later in the Trojan War, Achilles kills the Amazon Queen Penthesilea and then falls in love with her corpse. He is inconsolable for a while until he finally burns her body as well.
- The oldest and probably most famous example of this is Arjuna, from the Mahabharata. He stops in the middle of the battlefield, overcome with distress that he is fighting against his own kin, and has to be talked out of it for hours by Krishna, who is his charioteer. This event forms the basis of the Gita, of course. Given that the battle involved approximately four million combatants on either side, that's pretty damn dramatic.
- By some accounts Krishna STOPPED TIME during this occurrence and this is also considered by Hindus the moment where he reveals his divinity.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy IX. After her mother's death — suffered whilst trying to kill her, after finding out that she never loved her and just wanted her powers — Garnet/Dagger spends a good chunk of the later game completely catatonic, unable to talk and just dragged around by her comrades. Oddly enough, she could still join you in battle, though her hit chance went right down, and occasionally, she just gave up, with the notice "Garnet can't concentrate".
- Well, she doesn't become catatonic until her homeland is nearly wiped off the map by an invasion of undead monsters and an incredibly destructive magical attack that had been stolen from Garnet herself. You can hardly blame Garnet for developing post-traumatic stress disorder after a trauma like that.
- Also, during her death scene, Brahne apologizes for it and claims that she did it out of overwhelming (and recently realized) greed, not that she never loved Garnet in the first place.
- Another prime case of Heroic BSOD occurs near the end of the game to Zidane. After finding out his true origins and the morbid purpose of his existence he goes temporarily insane, turning into a raging, foul-mouthed misanthrope who attacks everything in his path both verbally and physically.
- In Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth convinces the hero Cloud that he (Cloud) is not who he thinks he is; that he is in fact an attempt at "duplicating" the real Cloud, who had died several years earlier. The hero is so distraught at discovering he's the Tomato In The Mirror that he gives up the Weapon of Mass Destruction to his enemy. As all hell breaks loose, Cloud disappears, only to be found nearly comatose by his teammates a week later.
- Cloud is really, really good at these in general. He has a spectacular one after Aeris dies, blaming himself for another BSOD during her murder at the hands of Sephiroth. '...But I just let her die.'
- Prequel Crisis Core seems to be gearing up to give poor Cloud yet another BSOD during Zack's traumatic death scene.
- Well, okay, it's more like 'Snaps and starts believing he IS Zack, or at least basing his entire personality on Zack's...(Thus leading into his intro in the original game.)
- Really, it's more of an inversion of the BSOD - Cloud was comatose before this happened (due to having his nearly-lifeless body used as a science experiment rather than the traumatic encounter with Sephiroth that lead up to it), and actually snaps out of it and is in the most lucid state he's been in (or will be in) in a long time right after Zack's death. Of course, this doesn't last long, but that's at least as much the fault of the experiments as the trauma.
- Though his BSODs may pale in comparison to Cloud's, Vincent Valentine deserves a mention. He convinced himself that it was his fault for not protecting his beloved one, Lucrecia. So he lay in a coffin. For three decades.
- Barrett has a good one in Midgar when one of the city's upper plates crashes into the slums bellow killing his friends and, seemingly, his daughter. All he could do is scream and shoot into the rubble.
- This occurs to Kratos from God Of War after he unknowingly murdered his wife and child. He spends all of God Of War 1 and 2 in a constantly enraged state and on the brink of madness (although he may have had this personality even before his Heroic BSOD.
- He has another one on God Of War II, during a Boss Battle, after accidentally killing the last survivng spartan (perhaps he should stop killing people in the dark...) He's so pissed off and distraught, shouting challenges to the gods and lamenting his fate that he completely ignores the giant monstrous Kraken climbing up the tower until it actually grabs him.
- In Fire Emblem, the half-human, half-Dragon bard Nils suffers a Heroic BSOD after his leader and protector, Eliwood, kills Nils' sister, the dancer Ninian, under the control of the powerful Durandal sword. He snaps out of it and returns two stages later.
- Eliwood himself suffers one earlier on in the game, after seeing his father post-torture, and being powerless as he dies.
- Averted in Path of Radiance. After his father's death, Ike seems afflicted with Heroic BSOD which manifests itself as insomnia. However, aside from appearing more tired than usual, the other characters do not notice. It doesn't affect his performance on the battlefield either. When he finally avenges Greil, the narration describes Ike as sleeping well past dawn the next day. A Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.
- Ike went through something similar, but more severe, when he learned about his mother's death. At least, his insomnia that night was more obvious.
- Happens to the main character in Shadow Hearts 3, when he's killed by The Dragon. Effectively, it unleashes a Super Powered Evil Side, and he nearly ends up killing his friends before being brought to his senses.
- Slightly subverted in Suikoden II to the little girl Pilika, whom after watching
her parents Polk get murdered in front of her by Luca Blight, is emotionally scarred and mute for the rest of her life.
- False, she's able to talk after reuniting with Jowy.
- Frank gets one in the best ending of Dead Rising when he sees the helicopter that was supposed to get him and the survivors out of the mall go down and explode. He's so out of it that he doesn't notice the zombie shambling up behind him.
- Looked to me like he was completely aware of the horde of zombies behind him... he just didn't care anymore. Made the ending a lot better in my eyes, especially in a somewhat story-light game.
- Except that isn't the true ending.
- Kyosuke Nanbu in Super Robot Wars Original Generation Gaiden suffers this. Just when he thought he saved his Robot Girl companion Lamia Loveless, he got a bit distracted and that caused a cheap shot to get fired at him and promptly lose her, leading him to think that it's his fault she's dead. Heroic BSOD occurs for about 10 minutes, after the said killer was taken care of, and he vanished from the player's control for several missions. Shortly after he came back in action (or get controlled by the player again), he found out that Lamia is Not Quite Dead and Brainwashed And Crazy. Another Heroic BSOD occurs in Kyosuke for about 10 minutes again after the battle concludes. And in their next encounter, Kyosuke was about to suffer another Heroic BSOD recalling his failure to protect her, until his rival turned good Axel Almer proved otherwise and completely saved her. From thereafter, Kyosuke no longer suffers casual Heroic BSODs, but it's kinda worth noting that in one game he suffers this trope THREE TIMES.
- Calvina Coulange from Super Robot Wars Judgment suffers this in the early portion of the game, though this is justified that she hasn't been piloting for years and fears her skills have deteriorated so it doesn't ensure survival for the imminent battle.
- Ryusei in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 takes it very literally when Hazal destroyed his SRX and seemingly killed Aya. Took about a Time Skip (just several months) and several missions to get him back to fighting state. And since this hasn't happened in the OG Universe... He may get one later.
- Kazuma Ardygun in Super Robot Wars W has one when Blessfield is apparently killed in a Boson Jump accident at the Bloody Valentine. A six-month timeskip later, his family finds him working with the Serpent Tail, seemingly amnesiac under the name of Kite.
- Flint from Mother 3 gets one halfway through chapter one. The good news? The drago tooth his friend found would be an awesome weapon! The bad news? The tooth was found after it went through Flint's wife's heart! Flint literally has to be knocked unconscious after hearing the news and breaking down.
- He gets another near the end of the game, when he finds out the Masked Man is Claus. He snaps out of it in time to take the bullet (well, PSI attack) for Lucas.
- The PC for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness has one when they find out they have to die to save the world. Just when they're starting to snap out of it they have another one over Grovyle taking the hit from Dusknoir for them.
- Laharl from Disgaea Hour Of Darkness suffers his after Seraph Lamington kills Flonne. His only response, after a few seconds of silence, are a series of guttural growls followed by murderous rage. Afterwards, depending on what ending the player got, either Laharl spares Lamington and it's revealed that it was all a test, and Flonne is revived, Laharl spares Lamington... in the sense that he's still BREATHING... and Flonne is revived, though Laharl is so apalled by his actions that he departs, never to be seen again or, finally, flat out KILLS Lamington, only to go completely insane when the truth is revealed and kill himself.
- Also happens to Adell in the Bad Ending of Disgaea 2 after he is forced to kill Rozalin. This being the Bad Ending, of course, things immediately go from bad to worse as it jumps right into a big bloody pool of Nightmare Fuel.
- Lloyd Irving of Tales Of Symphonia does this when he discovers that Colette is giving up her life to save the world and then gets a front row seat to watch her "die", the angel Remiel who had previously acted as a guardian angel for the group is actually evil, and Kratos, who had previously been traveling with them to protect Colette, turns out to be Remiel's boss. Poor boy practically needed a kernel reinstall to get over that, which hidden pseudo-ally Yuan neatly provides.
- Fellow Idiot Hero and Tales Series protagonist, Luke fon Fabre of Tales Of The Abyss, also has an epic one when, after the first part of the game, he begins to realize the gravity of what he's done: killed thousands of people all at once, sunk a huge portion of the world, and refused to accept responsibility for it all until the entire party turns their backs and give up on him. Even his best friend and the love interest. Oh, and by the way, he's a clone, and the party seems to like the original better. He comes out of the BSOD with wide eyes and new resolution, deciding that he'll do whatever it takes to become a better person. Indeed, throughout the rest of the game he completes his transformation from Jerkass to The Messiah. And it's great.
- However, there are several fans who think it was too rushed and unrealistic to be believable. Your Mileage May Vary.
- And others who think that the party was a bunch of Jerk Asses for turning on someone who was post-hypnotically forced to do it by the most trustworthy member of his party, who also happens to be his beloved mentor/father figure, especially when two members of the party withheld critical information from him beforehand, two worked for said mentor's co-conspirator (though neither knew the depths of Van or Mohs' plans at the time, though they both knew the latter was trying to start a world war), and two of them were actually traitors for varying reasons (with one of them being Van's co-conspirator and technical Lord up to that point) and ditching an unconscious seven year old in a poison world in order to go questing with the guy who knocked him out... and also had tried to kill him twice before, had helped repeatedly kidnap Ion, presumably helped slaughter Jade's crew, and created the situation that allowed Van the opening to plant the post-hypnotic command in Luke in the first place.
- Part of the end sequence of Final Fantasy VIII involves Squall trying and failing to make it out of Time Compression using The Power Of Friendship, getting stranded alone outside of time, and having an epic Heroic BSOD complete with hallucinations.
- Mitsuru Kirijo, in Persona 3 gets this when the Chairman betrays the party and murders her father in cold blood, and then, wounded himself, falls off the edge of the tower. During the Kyoto trip, it's Yukari that brings her to her senses. After Mitsuru gains her resolution, her persona ascends from Penthesilea to Artemisia.
- Sera in Digital Devil Saga 2 gets one of these when she watches Heat kill Serph, in a scene that mimicks the scene where other Serph killed other Heat five years ago and threw her into her original BSOD that kinda started the destruction of the world. Unfortunately, watching this reiteration of the previous BSOD causing trauma caused God to decide to finish the job. Whoops.
- Jade from Beyond Good And Evil has one of these. When she returns home to her lighthouse, she discovers that it's been destroyed, and all of her adoptive children have most likely been killed. She breaks down and delivers a heart-wrenching soliloquy (see the quote on the top of the page) about her uselessness. Said soliloquy was so impressive that they even included it on the official OST album under the trackname "Enfants Disparus".
- Adrienne Delaney of the Sierra game Phantasmagoria is a shining example of this trope at game's end, walking away from her former home with an utterly blank expression on her face. Of course, by that point she had personally witnessed visions of Zoltan Carnovash brutally murdering his wives, been raped by her husband Don while he was possessed, lost her cat Spazz and her two new vagrant friends, murdered Don in order to keep him from killing her, and had successfully faced off against the demon who had possessed him, trapping it in a talisman. So yeah, it's easy to see why she'd be so messed up...
- Higashizawa drives Shiki into one in The World Ends With You. The next day, she is quite silent, not even saying her usual run-away-from-battle quips.
- The games end, where Neku realizes that Joshua actually DID kill him and is about to do it again and, subsequently, erase Shibuya. Seriously, to say it with Neku's words: WHAT THE HELL?!
- Alien Syndrome had an early case of the Heroic BSOD when Aileen was searching for survivors on the Kronos, despite finding the survivors, they have all turned mad and tried to kill her (without much success) and when she got back, she entered a stage of Heroic BSOD before getting the pieces together in order to find her boyfriend. Needless to say, she hears of the fateful log where her boyfriend suffers something akin to Prey's second boss later on. It only gets worse as she learns of her roots and how the alien queen is really an young girl who is the sole sentient survivor of her people and she wants to die so she can finally rest in piece.
- Wonderfully averted in Riviera: The Promised Land after Ein's memory block is released and he remembers that he's a Grim Angel who is supposed to destroy the world: instead of angsting about it, he immediately vows to find a better way to defeat the demons, because the Sprites really aren't so bad.
- Jude from Wild ARMs 4 has one after witnessing the deaths of his mother and several of his former neighbors while escaping from the military's base. He snaps out of it after his teammates convince him to keep going and fulfill his mother's wish of seeing the Divine Weapon destroyed.
- Lan Hikari has one of these in Megaman Battle Network 3. Lan has just helped Mr. Match place fire data throughout Sci Lab, resulting in his father's injury. Lan misses school for about three days, even lashing out at Mayl and Yai, and it takes Chaud asking for his help after an "I didn't hear anything" to bring him out.
- It takes three games, but Geo, the protagonist of Mega Man Star Force, finally gets one in the third game when his best friend is seemingly murdered in front of him. Just to rub it in, the villain immediately goes on to the Evil Laugh.
- Geo was having BSODs waaaay before that. In the first game he had a BSOD for 3 years or so when his dad went missing. Then he has ANOTHER one when Pat betrays him. And then ANOTHER one in the second game when he only manages to save just one of his friends from falling in a non-lethal hole of doom. Geo's the king of this trope, no kidding.
- In the course of fighting off an alien invasion, Iji is shaken by the death of her father and sister, and she suffers a Heroic BSOD if she fails to save her brother, which is particularly heartbreaking because she goes on talking to him as if he's still alive. Also note that failing is very probable in the first playthrough unless you've read about it in advance.
- Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Soulstorm. The entire Tau faction has a Heroic BSOD when their Ethereal is slain at the finale of their stronghold mission, and retreat from the Kaurava system thoroughly shamed by their inability to protect them. The Tau Commander even exclaims something along the lines of "NOOOOOO! Noble Ethereal! We have lost you! We have lost all!"
- It happens in any situation an Ethereal dies. And the commander didn't live, he joined the Ethereal in death
- Another case is from the earlier Dark Crusade, when the objective in the Tau stronghold is to kill the Ethereal Aun'El. As Aun'El falls whispering "All is lost... all is lost...", a crisis commander begins to freak out before Shas'O Kais, barely keeping things together, announces "Fall back, now! All forces, fall back. Evacuate the city. We will return Aun'El to T'au for burial. There is nothing left for us here..."
- Worth noting that about half the planet's population consists of Tau when they evacuate...
- Link partially suffers one, collasping to his knees and breathing heavily, in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, after he learns how the Fused Shadows came into existence.
- By Episode 3 of Phantasy Star Universe, Laia Martinez has gone through one after a series of events near the end of Episode 2. First she failed to save the virus-infected young Beast boy who turned into a SEED form, thus having to be purified. Then during an Illuminus attack on the GUARDIANS colony by SEED-infected CASTs, President Dallgun, her adopted father, is forced to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to save the residential area, leaving the rest of the colony (w/Dallgun still inside) to crash into Parum, destroying a city along with thousands of people. The fact that the GUARDIANS have lost the trust of the people for failing to prevent it from happening doesn't help. In the first chapter of Ep. 3, it's revealed that Laia had unceremoniously left the GUARDIANS and has no intention on returning. She gets better.
- Oersted (Orsted in the first translation patch) from Live A Live has one following The Reveal. It doesn't end well.
- Call of Duty: World at War, Sgt. Roebuck suffers this in the last American mission, when Pvt. Polonsky dies from a Japanese fake surrender ambush and they're forced to take on a massive wave of enemy forces. Alternatively Polonsky suffers this is it's Roebuck who dies in the ambush.
- Silent Hill 2 has James do at least 3 (maybe 4) of these: when Maria is killed by Pyramid Head, when Maria is killed by Pyramid Head *again*, when he remembers that he killed his wife, and (arguably) a brief one when the Pyramid Heads kill Maria YET AGAIN.
- Let's not beat around the bush, The entirety of the game is basically James having one massive BSOD. From getting out of the car...to the bitter end, it's all the awful truth catching up to a man in deep denial.
- Mio in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, right at the end of the game in the Bittersweet Ending. After all, she just murdered her twin sister Mayu via strangling to complete a ritual to keep demons away, resulting in Mio turning into a blubbering, disbelieving mess. She follows after the spirit of her sister, crying out that she's sorry and begging her to come back. And this is the canon ending!
- Will has one in Advance Wars Days of Ruin after Cpt. Brenner is destroyed by Caulder's new weapon. He snaps out of it when Isabella tells him that his happiness is her happiness. He then goes on to become the new commander of Brenner's Wolves.
- Isabella has one when Caulder tells everyone his daughters are clones and Isabella is one of them. Being kicked out by the civilians doesn't exactly help her condition. But after the battle on the Great Owl, Will tells her it doesn't matter what she is.
- Zero from Mega Man X 4 gets an exceedingly [[Narm narmtastic]] heroic BSOD after being forced to kill his girlfriend Iris. See it in all its glory here. He continues to wangst about it even in his last breath in X5.
- Kingdom Hearts 2. When Sora learns that his killing Heartless is exactly what the Organiztion wants him to do. He recovers really quickly, after a pep talk from Goofy, which basically boils down to "The Heartless still need to be stopped, because they hurt people."
- Shiki in Tsukihime when Arcueid disappears. Throughout the day he's in a state of total shock and numbness, merely going through the motions at school. He's only at school because it was less effort than dealing with Akiha if didn't. He gets better when after sitting alone waiting for a teacher for several hours, Roa and Arcueid show up and start fighting to the death.
- In Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden quite understandably suffers one hell of a BSOD when Olga is shot by Solidus. Her death was merely the spark which was fueled by previous knowledge that his role as a rookie was a lie... and that he was actually a child soldier with years of experience (and trauma). Add that to one secret after another revealed beforehand, and not knowing of the unbelievable mess that awaited him in the next scene...it's a wonder Raiden even recovered enough to duel Solidus in the end.
- Solid Snake constantly wrestles against the BSOD throughout the series, suffering a literal barrage of conspiracies and mindbenders that could be named by the entire Xanatos index right to the bitter end. Yet somehow, Snake generally manages to keep it together and not crash (though he comes pretty damn close at times in four, when he's obviously reached his limit.). A true blue soldier he is!
- Although...between Metal Gear: Solid Snake (second game) and Metal Gear Solid it's said that a certain event shook him up a bit to the point he disappeared into Alaska for a while. This may be an off screen slight BSOD he suffered.
- Snake can have an on-screen BSOD in Guns of the Patriots; kill around fifty enemies (kill, not just knock out) and he'll have a flashback to his brother Liquid accusing him of enjoying all the killing he does before vomiting right then and there.
- In a sense...at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 Snake has to kind of force Ocelot into a BSOD. I admit this is stretching it though.
- At the end of Metal Gear Solid 3, Big Boss turns his quiet little BSOD at the revelation of his master, the Boss' many sacrifices into one of the most remembered examples of manly tears to ever appear on a gaming console.
- Steve Burnside in Resident Evil Code: Veronica gets a short one when he discovers that his father has been zombified, and he becomes unable to "kill" it. Only when Claire is threatened by the zombie does he finally turn his submachine guns on it, proceeding to drain his entire supply of bullets into the corpse, and his fingers remain locked into the triggers despite the clicking from the drained guns.
- Edge Maverick from Star Ocean: The Last Hope gets a BSOD after he introduced futuristic technology to a 1950's Earth that will bypass that of the nuclear age, therefore avoiding the nuclear war that would eventually nearly cause massive destruction to Earth in the future. However, the scientist he gives it to immediately puts it into a technologically inept reactor, causing the destruction of the entire Earth. While this is an understandable case of BSOD, it has received fan criticism for the shear length and overreaction of his BSOD, refusing to even speak for the subsequent chapter of the game, despite being the main character. Also, his actions create an alternate timeline fate of the Earth, the Earth of his dimension was NOT destroyed when he and his crew returned.
- In La Mulana, YOU, that's right, YOU, after discovering the skimpy swimsuit.
- Much of the entertainment value of the Let's Play videos of I Wanna Be The Guy comes from watching the LP'ers experiencing heroic BSOD's.
- One particular epic heroic BSOD comes from a user who had a complete mental breakdown after MANY failed attempts to kill Mecha Birdo. In fact, he uploaded the attempted fights as a completely separate video in the LP he was doing of the game just to show how crazy he had went.
- Ratchet gets one during the first Ratchet and Clank game after Quarks betrayal. At this point, the only thing keeping him from dumping Clank and packing it all in is a need for mutual cooperation. He does become determined to get back at Quark though.
Web Comics
- In Megatokyo, after a dramatic conversation with Miho, Ping the Robot Girl ends up with all of her emotional statistics jumbled up.
- In Erfworld, when Jillian is unable to rationalize her way around a conflict between Wanda's influence and her loyalty to Ansom, she briefly collapses. She recovers and charges into battle, resulting in a major victory for Ansom's side. This stuns Wanda into a considerably more severe BSOD of her own.
- Later, it turns out that this may simply be backlash from the breaking of Wanda's suggestion spell.
- Parodied in Exterminatus Now! After hearing that an old friend of his is behind an assassination attempt on his boss, Eastwood goes into a trance and spends a few minutes repeating his name. His teammates take the opportunity to steal his wallet.
- Grace kinda has one of these after making Big Bad Damien blow himself up.
- Yeah that's an example. Ellen also went through one of these when she was created.
- In one of the rare dramatic moments of 8-Bit Theater, Fighter has a brief moment of sadness when Black Mage is killed by Lich. He replaces it with a screaming rage though.
- Hanners of Questionable Content has one after learning her underwear was showing while she was drumming-from both of her MALE bandmates.
- Ash from Misfile suffers one during her first defeat at the hands of Kamikaze Kate in this strip.
- Although having his first period might have contributed to that emotional rollercoaster.
- Ash gets it again when Vashiel tells her that Rumisiel won't be able to return to Heaven for another 72 years, meaning he won't be able to correct his misfile mistake until then. Considering the average human lifespan, Ash realizes that she (he?) will have to stay the way she is for the rest of her life. It takes a visit from Emily to snap her out of it.
- Looks like she's about to have another one.
- In Sluggy Freelance, Torg goes through a mild one of these after an Alternate Universe version of Zoe he'd been dating dies, and immediately jumps to Roaring Rampage Of Revenge mode. He never completely stops being his goofy self after the ordeal and returning to his home dimension, but he is a lot angrier and mopier for a while, especially around Zoe.
- Lilah's miscarriage in Ctrl Alt Del forces Ethan to go into Heroic BSOD mode. He spends the next several comics wandering around in a zombie-like state (the lack of sleep might have contributed to that), and was seen trying to get a soda out of a vending machine until moments later, when he says he's not even thirsty and that seeing Lilah inconsolable was far too much for him.
- Dan from Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures experiences one of these in this strip due to a troubling suggestion.
- The innocent titular character in Rice Boy has to travel the harsh wilderness, be dosed with liquid despair, learn cosmic secrets at the cost of other people's lives, see a hundred clones of himself spawned and cut down, and know that he must save the world and die. Suffering a Heroic BSOD he throws himself off a cliff ... into the next stage of his quest.
- Order Of The Stick: "I think we broke Haley."
- Vaarsuvius as well, as the result of what the elf perceives as a great failure back in Azure City and in everything that has happened since, to the point where everything the elf does has the underlying tone of being horrifically, terribly afraid of continuing to fail in new and horrifying ways.
- In Fletcher Apts, Doug often blanks out and mentally reboots when he sees a girl flash her breasts. Like in this strip, he forgot the answer to the homework problem he was talking about, and in this strip his brain literally flashes a BSOD, causing Doug to forget his lesson and possibly the entire week beforehand.
- Lampshaded in Shortpacked! When Ethan realizes how gratuitously evil he's being, his shock and horror causes the strip itself to "crash"—complete with BSOD.
- A comedic version appeared in VG Cats, when Aeris had a major Freak Out on the subject of Donkey Kong's stare.
- In "4our-Calendar Cafe", Cambel and Sara both had a BSOD moment when they heard of Michael Jackson's death in this strip. Although clearly not part of the cannon, the author himself said "pretty much all of us entered a state of Blue Screen of Death when we heard about the news".
- Misho, from Keychain Of Creation, suffers one of these in #220 as a result of his Heart of Tears Limit Flaw.
- Torvald of Dante Residential gets a literal BSOD in this strip after being liked and rejected by the same girl within mere seconds.
Web Animation
- Shandala goes through a serious one in Broken Saints after her adopted brother is killed as result of her own actions. Considering she's also surrounded by mysterious foreigners on a boat half an ocean away from the only home she's ever known, it's even less surprising.
Web Original
- This happens on a number of occasions in Survival Of The Fittest. After the deaths of his entire group, including the sickening deaths of Madelaine Shirohara and his love interest Amanda Jones at the hands of Cody Jensen Adam Dodd of V1 wanders across the island for some days in the throes of a Heroic BSOD - the whole matter getting worse as he gets attacked and is forced to kill classmates more than once.
- A more minor example is with Sean O'Cann, who breaks down after his estranged best friend boyfriend and cousin are killed over the course of a couple of days.
- Madelaine Shirohara goes into one of these as well after she is forced to kill her childhood friend Nanami Nishida following Nishida turning on her and her other friends.
- Vatsy, from the dark-humor webstory Vatsy and Bruno, suffers one of these shortly after receiving the following rejection letter:
To whom it may concern: We do not regret to inform you that this submission is unusable, unintelligent and frequently illegible. We do not regret that your mental seepage, poured in such an ungainly fashion on your half-cent-per-thousand-sheet paper, will not be gracing this or any future publication of the Writer’s Guild World Newsletter. We do not regret that you will—most probably—die alone, penniless, unloved and foul-smelling. We do, however, regret that we were exposed—even through this protective screen of incomprehensibility—to this most unspeakable body of work. We regret that our sanity and our lives can never be whole again after even a brief perusal of your first page. We regret that the stink of hideous purple prose and suspiciously fecal ink will forever saturate our desk space. Most of all, we regret that you had slithered, like a diseased rat infiltrating an unsuspecting granary, into this world on whatever dark day you were born (from the art inherent in your prose, we would estimate about a year ago.) If we ever see the name “Vatsy”—or that name spelled differently, or any name with a superficial resemblance, or anything that even reminds us of you—on any volume, essay, poem, or bill that ever crosses our threshold, we will ensure that you will not survive the night that follows. Wishing you well, The Writers Guild
- Sapphire: When Boris kills Ivanka. He even tries to shoot himself, but backs down before pulling the trigger.
- Phase, at the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, nearly goes catatonic, and spends a week hideously depressed, despite tons of psychiatric help by powerful psis, when powers testing reveals that her screwed-up body is not Gross Structural Dystrophy, but a bizarre Body Image Template, which means that her subconscious fears drove her mutant manifestation into her current shape and hence ultimately she did this to herself.
- Tennyo, in Ayla and the Great Shoulder Angel Conspiracy, is confronted with ghosts of her alien side's ancient past, and 'remembers' the horrific things it did. She doesn't handle it well.
Western Animation
- In WITCH, Hay Lin suffers a Heroic BSOD after believing that her grandmother Yan Lin has started serving Nerissa, and that her boyfriend has betrayed her as well. Hay Lin becomes depressed and nearly catatonic, culminating in a Transformation Sequence where her teammates call out their own elements happily, and Hay Lin just stands there, her head bowed.
- In Toy Story, when Buzz Lightyear finally realizes he's just a toy.
- In an episode of The Fairly Oddparents, Timmy tells the Crimson Chin that he's only a comic book character, resulting in CC going into a Heroic BSOD where he is curled up in a ball crying for most of the episode feeling unimportant. He snaps back to normal when Timmy has a brush with death at the hands of his nemesis.
- Fitz from 12. Oz Mouse goes through a BSOD after his best friend Skillet is killed. He completely gives up on everything, and wanders off to play a game of Pinball.
- Mr. Krabs, in the Spongebob Squarepants episode "One Krab's Trash," has a Heroic BSOD when he hears how much his drinking cap is worth.
- Happens to Leela from Futurama, when Fry jumps in front of her to save her from being impaled on the stinger of a giant killer bee, and apparently dies on the spot. Made much worse by the fact that not only did Fry die for her, but Leela ignored all of Fry's pleas to be careful, as well as all warning signs that their current expedition was a festering death trap, simply in order to appear tough. She spirals into a deep, guilt-ridden depression and loses her mind, becoming more and more deranged and confused as she is shoved through a series of nightmares involving Fry. In the end, it thankfully turns out to be just a dream, as the stinger went right through Fry and pierced her, leaving her in a deep coma.
- Dante Vale from Huntik has a BSOD when he gives up the amulets of power on the offchance that his enemy will save Metz, his mentor. Zahlia has to protect him for most of an episode as he's literally non responsive.
- Kyle suffers one of these on South Park after Cartman convinces him to see [[The Passion of the Christ}}, claiming that it "proves" the Jews butchered Jesus. The Jewish Kyle is horrified at what he sees, to the point where he becomes ashamed of his Jewish heritage, just as Cartman had hoped. The Gentiles Stan and Kenny are less impressed with the movie, with Stan going so far as to declare it a "snuff film."
- Suffered by Leonardo (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003) twice. The first time occurs after he is badly beaten and almost killed by the Foot Clan, which leaves him comatose and melancholy afterwards. The second time occurs after the turtles are handily defeated and have to resort to sacrificing themselves just to stop the Big Bad from winning. This necessity is fortunately prevented, but just the idea that the situation got that bad disturbs Leonardo. As the Big Brother, he blames himself for failing his family and goes into a self-destructive spiral, training obsessively, forcing his brothers to do likewise, and being surly and moody in general. It takes 13 episodes of not listening to Splinter, a literal journey, and a Star Wars-esque "yourself behind the Vader mask" moment to get Leonardo to recover his senses.
- In the episode of Higglytown Heroes 'Kip's Dad Gets a Strike', Kip's Dad has a Heroic BSOD moment when his X-57 bowling ball breaks. And for nearly the entire episode, he sits in his massage chair whimpering over the remains of his shattered bowling ball. Ughh, more like Idiotic BSOD.
- Toki Wartooth of Metalocalypse has had two in the series so far- In season 1 episode 'Dethfam' he spends almost the whole episode pretty much catatonic due to being around his parents, and in the season 2 episode 'Dethdad' he does it again when he learns his father is dying of cancer and has to go home to Norway to see him.
- Avatar the Last Airbender does this a lot, in particular with Aang. When he goes through BSOD, he goes into the Avatar State. The most memerable is when he finds Gyasto's skeleton, surrounded by Fire Nation soldiers
- She isn't really a heroine, but Charlotte of Making Fiends falls into a depression trance after hearing a sad poem about a kitten stuck somewhere high. She gets over it by the end of the episode though.
- In Brother Bear, this trope happens when Kenai finally listens to Koda's story about his mother and realizes it is about the fight he and his brothers had with a bear. Kenai puts the pieces together and realizes to his horror that he killed Koda's mother. At that, Kenai flees the bear gathering in profound fear and shame.
- Nightscream in Beast Machines experiences one upon finding a cave full of fossils and realising that if he wasn't so selfish, he could have saved a lot of Transformers from Megatron.
Tabletop RPG
- In White Wolf's Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Werewolves can go into a state of deep spiritual sadness called Harano. However, overcoming it provides the Werewolf with permanent Willpower.
- If done correctly a GM can even get a player to do this. It's immensely satisfing when it happens.
- An occupational hazard of Astartes and Guard officers in Warhammer 40000. One of the more typical comes from the Primarch Corax: after resorting to desperate measures to rebuild his devastated Raven Guard during the Horus Heresy, he reluctantly and personally executes the horrific monstrosities his orders created, then locks himself in his room for a year and a day, after which he emerges and takes a ship on course for the Eye of Terror, his only word being "Nevermore..."
- In the free Matrix game "There Is No Spoon," the Sick At Heart optional rules model damage to a character's belief system, and reduces their Matrix stat (the stat that gives them their ability to kick serious ass) on a failed Matrix roll when they choose (or are forced) to act in a way that contravenes or works to destroy their beliefs, personal code or deep abiding reason to live, or are severely tortured or have something else extreme happen to them. A character can actually be worn down to no Matrix stat at all this way, making them little more than another mook under the system's rules, and recovery of Matrix points is difficult, as it involves rebuilding the character's faith in themselves. The notes on this particular optional rule says that it should not be used excessively, as this is meant to be an action game, not a dark tale of the fragility of the mind.
- Exalted has a defined set of these as part of the Great Curse afflicting all Solar Exalted. Called "Limit Breaks" (unrelated to the trope except by name), they occur whenever Exalts reach a particular threshold of stress related to their Compassion, Conviction, Temperance, or Valor traits. Effects include catatonia, Unstoppable Rage, wallowing in vice, collapsing in a fit of crying, and plenty more; all are highly destructive, incapacitating, or both.
Real Life
- Slight subversion: Terry Pratchett went into "
an incoherent a frighteningly coherent rage" after finding out he had early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
- Chevy Chase claimed to have suffered something like this after John Belushi died.
- Everyone's had (or will have) at least one, some worse than others.
- Pretty much anyone still alive in Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.
- After 9/11.
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