Jaded Washout

Al Bundy at work. It gets worse for him.◊ And this isn't even his main job.

Mr. Barber: Homecoming King in '91. They still got my picture hanging in the auditorium.
Stan: How's that working out for you?

— I Am Not Okay With This

The Jaded Washout, the guy (or sometimes gal) who never made anything with their life.

Sure, they had promise back in high school, when they were the popular captain of the football team, or the ruling Alpha Bitch, but they clearly never planned for what would happen after graduation. Now that those Glory Days are long gone, they're middle-aged nobodys, running on what little social inertia they can still muster.

They're cynical, jaded, world-weary, disrespected by family and friends, underpaid in a humiliating dead-end job and struggling to achieve basic goals and recognition.

May often be heard complaining about not getting justly rewarded for all their effort, though closer inspection may show them to be a profoundly uninspired if not outright lazy worker and angrily resentful of those who've matured beyond them.

Compare with Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, This Loser Is You, I Coulda Been a Contender!, Future Loser, Hates the Job, Loves the Limelight, Loser Protagonist, White-Dwarf Starlet, and Former Child Star. Contrast Best Years of Your Life, Jaded Professional and Small Name, Big Ego.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Downplayed with Retsuko from Aggretsuko. She didn't turn mean or anything, but 5 years have done their job of sucking up her hopes and dreams about her job to the point where she continuously flirts with skipping it.
• If his brief flashbacks to his rugby days are any indication, Akira from Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead had a blast in his college years and was popular enough to get bentos from his underclassmen. He also did well enough in school to land a job at a prestigious production company and seemed to be set for life... until said company turned out to be a a horribly abusive black company. Three years of all-nighters and horrible deadlines later, he's jaded, spent, and not even sure why he's still working there in the first place.
• Weevil Underwood and Rex Raptor in Yu-Gi-Oh! were once champion-level national duelists but after losing repeatedly to Yugi, Joey and other characters, they are now seen as small fry compared to the more serious threats. Their fixation of their old glory days and their inability to let go of past grudges results in their careers and reputation never fully recovering.

Comic Books

• Spider-Man: To some extent Peter Parker falls into this. He has great skills and ambitions but he is not able to apply himself out of his responsibility as a superhero, as a family man and is often regarded skeptically by his friends for not always being there. He's one of the top scientific minds on the planet, yet even as an adult he normally ekes out a living from selling photos to Jameson instead of pursuing a career that puts his genius to use.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage): The Turtles are portrayed as this in the months following Return To New York and the death of The Shredder, leaving the Turtles adrift and frustrated with no purpose, growing worse until it culminates in the City At War storyarc, where the Foot have plunged into a massive gang war that is consuming New York. It's only by helping Karai end the war and stopping the Shredders legacy once and for all that they're able to find a measure of peace.
  • It's not just the Turtles either, Splinter, April and Casey all suffer the same issue, and end up leaving New York entirerly, going their separate ways. It's a year before the cast all reunite again to try and rebuild their lives.

Comic Strips

• Peanuts: Charlie Brown has, time after time, been portrayed with at least some of the descriptions given by this trope. In fact, there are some who had speculated that he will grow up to become either Homer Simpson or former Trope Namer Al Bundy, who ended up marrying The Red-Haired Girl.

Films — Animation

• Bob Parr from The Incredibles, post Super Registration Act. His job at an insurance company isn't just soul-crushingly monotonous, but he's expected to deny the claims of policyholders in order to save the company money, even if they are entitled to money. No wonder he Jumps at the Call. His family life, while a bit shaky, is stable compared to the other examples of this trope.
• Peter B. Parker from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Middle age, his aunt's death, and his split from MJ have not been kind to him, and his morale, physique, and career as a superhero are on the ropes. He's even described in-universe, and not inaccurately, as "the janky, old, broke Hobo-Spider-Man". Ouch. By the end of the movie he rediscovers meaning through mentoring Miles and is able to reconcile with his wife.

Films — Live-Action

• Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite, who does nothing but lament over his failed pro football dreams, which weren't even that good to start with.
• Walt in Gran Torino, depending on the interpretation. In one, he's genuinely badass, and while his family doesn't pay him much attention or respect, the rest of his neighbourhood comes to like and respect him. Another interpretation is that everyone knows Walt is a Jaded Washout except himself: His wife asked their priest to watch after him after her death because she knows that he has no connection to his sons. Everyone thinks he is an old crazy man. Only after Walt realizes his racism is a flimsy excuse to feel better at the expense of others can he be a hero.
• Sonny Koufax (Adam Sandler) in Big Daddy appears to be heading in this direction, as at the beginning of the movie he's a law-school graduate who never took his bar exam and leads a semi-slacker lifestyle thanks to a cash settlement he received when a taxicab ran over his foot. He eventually does get his act together and is admitted to the bar.
• Charles Billinglsey in Friday Night Lights. Once a star player in his high school days, he is now a violent alcoholic angry at life and himself for not living up to his potential, taking his self-hatred out on his son Don.
• Female example: Mavis Gary in Young Adult is a former Alpha Bitch prom queen who's now in her thirties, divorced, and ghostwrites teen-lit novels in order to recreate her high school Glory Days.
• Back to the Future Part II: The future Marty McFly is very miserable, having given up on his rock'n'roll dreams after injuring his hand in a serious auto accident in 1985 because he got called "chicken", and is in an unhappy marriage to his girlfriend Jennifer working a menial job, which he gets fired from after trying to show Needles he's no chicken by running his credit card on an insider trading scam which fails. In Back to the Future Part III, Marty avoids getting into the auto accident and learns to better control his temper, thereby erasing this Bad Future and putting a better future in play.
• To hear her tell it, Ms. Hannigan from Annie (2014). She was apparently part of C+C Music Factory and almost part of Hootie & the Blowfish but they kicked her out before she could become a star.
• Molly Ringwald satirizes herself as this in her cameo in Not Another Teen Movie. After her Glory Days, she's working as a flight attendant to get by.
• Burn After Reading: Ozbourne Cox, the mid-level CIA analyst who quits in a rage when called on the carpet for his drinking. It's clear to everyone but him that his time in espionage wasn't half as significant as he remembers.
• Simpatico: Vinnie (Nick Nolte) made some money on a horse racing scam in his youth and thought he was going places. Cut to about twenty years later: he's unemployed and living off his successful friend Lyle's (Jeff Bridges) charity. Vinnie spends his days stumbling around town drunk, watching old tapes of himself during his glory days, and trying to impress the locals by claiming to be a private investigator.
• Sky High (2005): Coach Boomer. He, as the Commander puts it, "never made the big time" as a superhero, so now he works as a coach at the titular superhero school, passing judgment on the kids of other heroes by arbitrarily deciding if they are "hero" or "sidekick" material after a brief demonstration of their powers, and giving an earful to those who object.
• By the start of Yes-Man, Carl has become one thanks to his wife leaving him and years of being passed over for promotion as a low-level loan officer at the same bank. It's no wonder he tries to avoid his old college buddies who've made something of their lives.
• At the start of Pokémon Detective Pikachu Tim seemed to be on the path to becoming this despite only being 21; he gave up on his dream of being a Pokémon Trainer after the death of his mother, worked a menial job as an insurance salesman, and was implied to still live with his grandmother while all of his friends left town to become Trainers. By the end of the film he's found his calling and decided to follow in his father's footsteps as a detective.
• Star Wars: Luke Skywalker himself has become this by the time of The Last Jedi, after, in a moment of weakness upon sensing the growing darkness in his nephew, Ben Solo, he comes dangerously close to killing him, at his new Jedi academy, causing Ben to protect himself, destroy the academy, slaughter his fellow students and become Kylo Ren. This incident, combined with learning of the Jedi Order's most unsavoury actions during The Clone Wars and Luke's own guilt and regret about nearly murdering his beloved nephew left Luke so utterly furious and disappointed at the Jedi, not unlike his late father, that he decided to willingly cut himself from The Force and leave the Galaxy on a self-imposed exile on the oceanic planet of Ahch-To, where he spends his day pathetically waiting for his death, drinking Thala-Siren milk and eating the fishes of the planet's sea under the missguided belief that the definite extinction of the Jedi is for the greater good of the Galaxy. It ultimately takes the visit of a certain short, green, elderly and pointy-eared Force ghost to convince Luke that, while the Jedi may have committed many mistakes that led to their downfall, perhaps a whole new generation can finally set things straight.
• In Jojo Rabbit, Captain Klenzendorf. Formerly a highly decorated soldier for Nazi Germany, Klenzendorf lost an eye and was demoted to the point where he's stuck training the Hitler Youth. He's completely disillusioned with the Nazi Party, to the point that he risks his life by deliberately lying to the Gestapo to save a Jewish hideaway, and he's entirely abandoned any hope of the Germans winning the war.

Literature

• Eric Flint's 1632 had a younger version of this: Chip. A football star in high school, dating the head cheerleader (Julie Sims), after high school he was outraged that his girlfriend actually became interested in someone else, and began to fight him with a pool cue. Unfortunately, the "someone else" was an excellent swordsman and a blooded soldier who promptly initiated a saber duel, fully intending to kill Chip. Eventually the duel was called off, and Chip's friends roundly criticized him, telling him to grow up, and specifically invoking this trope ("you'll be flipping burgers the rest of your life").
• In Lucifer's Star by C.T. Phipps, Cassius Mass used to be an Ace Pilot and The White Prince but a Trauma Conga Line resulted in him becoming this. Notably, Cassius isn't actually that upset about it as he believes he deserves obscurity after serving as a soldier for The Empire and getting so many of his friends killed.
• Former star agent Quill Kipps of Lockwood & Co. is well on his way to becoming this, as his psychic Talents fade and he is Kicked Upstairs and given difficult, demeaning assignments. Leaving the Fittes agency and gaining equipment that allows him to use his Talents again sets him back on track, and by the end of the series he's happily doing consultant work with the protagonists. Still cynical, though.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Robert Baratheon somehow manages to pull this trope off while being the king of the Seven Kingdoms. He hates his job, is trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman he despises, he constantly pines for the Glory Days of his youth before he got saddled with the king gig and still hasn't gotten over his childhood sweetheart, Lyanna. He almost entertains the notion of abdicating and running away to Essos to become a sellsword if it wouldn't mean putting his son on the throne.
  • Merrett Frey was, in his youth, a tough squire and contemporary of Jaime Lannister on his way to knighthood. Then he suffered a head injury which left him in constant pain and unable to fight.
  • Willas Tyrell is a subversion. After spending his childhood dreaming of becoming a knight, but losing the use of one of his legs in a tournament accident, Willas has re-invented himself as an intellectual, a political prodigy and one of Westeros' finest experts on falconry. It's quite telling that Willas is the only one of her grandchildren Olenna has any respect for.
  • It's downplayed, but Sandor Clegane has more than a passing familiarity with this trope. He could have been a knight (he certainly has the skills), he could have earned himself a keep of his own as a cadet Clegane in service to the Lannisters, he could have found means to marry... There are many coulds. But, he was born the younger brother of Gregor Clegane. And, that reality put paid to any hope of achieving a brigtish future he could ever have had. Jaded doesn't begin to describe him.
• Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road was once a respectable cotton farmer, but gradually fell into squalid, shiftless poverty, with his house rotting apart and his family on the brink of starving to death.
• Tracy Flick Can't Win finds the former student council president in her forties, a law school dropout, and working a dead-end job in a New Jersey high school. History Repeats as she applies to be the new principal and her opposition is an empty-headed jock running on popularity.

Live-Action TV

• Pete Hornberger from 30 Rock is implied to be this at home. However, 30 Rock is a Work Com, not a Dom Com, so we never actually see Pete at home and don't see much of his wife, either.
• Arrowverse: Malcolm Merlyn started out as the Big Bad of Arrow, able to best Oliver in physical combat, and even managing to manipulate his way up to being the new leader of the League of Assassins by the end of the third season. However, the fourth season showed his fortunes taking a major dive, losing his position as the League's leader thanks to Oliver (and losing his hand into the bargain after Oliver bested him in combat), losing any shred of love his daughter had left for him due to his self-serving ways, and even becoming a minion of Damien Dark. In the second season of Legends of Tomorrow, he is fully aware of how far he's fallen, having joined the Legion of Doom in hopes of changing his destiny. Eobard Thawne even refers to him as a "washout" at one point.
• The Big Bang Theory
  • Wil Wheaton plays a version of himself that straddles this and Former Child Star. In one episode he claims to suffer recurring bouts of crippling depression, and is ecstatic to get a callback for a bit part in Sharknado 2
  • Penny (for the early seasons at least, until Bernadette got her a job in pharmaceutical sales). She often talks about how popular she was back in high school, getting straight A's from a P.E coach "who liked her a little too much", and moved to Los Angeles to follow a career in acting...only to fail miserably at getting any good acting jobs, stuck in a dead-end job as a waitress, has trouble keeping up with her bills and is overly reliant on "Nerds", (the kind of people that she used to look down upon and victimise in high school) to feed her and help with her financial problems.
• Walter White at the beginning of Breaking Bad. A brilliant chemist who once had a bright future ahead of him, he sold his shares in a company that would've made him millions, resulting in him watching his former best friend and college girlfriend become wealthy and successful while he's stuck as a disrespected high school teacher and part-time car washer, struggling to support his wife and disabled son. It's not until entering the meth business that he finally earns the wealth and respect he feels he's entitled to.
• Buffyverse:
  • Angel: Happens to Wesley in slow motion. Wesley is basically the same guy from before the Watcher's Council fired him. On the other hand, he's not eager to rejoin those officious windbags, even when bribed. Over the course of years, he grows so detached from his old values that the demolition of the Council building doesn't even upset him.
  • Buffy herself has become one by the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, having resigned to the fact the responsibilities of being a Slayer have destroyed any chance of her own happiness.
• Cobra Kai:
  • A Sequel Series to The Karate Kid, set 34 years later, the series follows Johnny Lawrence, who has fallen hard from his position as the leading Jerk Jock and star of John Kreese's dojo to a tired, vaguely alcoholic odd-jobs man.
  • Funnily enough, Daniel has shades of this too. In spite of having dragged himself up by his bootstraps and owning a chain of car dealerships and auto repair shops, and having a loving wife and daughter as well as a comfortable upper-class life, he still seems to consider his victories in two consecutive All-Valley karate tournaments to be his life's high point. He still prominently displays the trophies in his home, plays up his karate champion status in his adverts, and from dialogue implications still discusses the tournaments in the breakroom at work.
• Robert Baratheon from Game of Thrones. He is stuck in a job he hates, trapped in a loveless marriage to a woman who wants him dead, still hasn't gotten over his high-school (or whatever the quasi-medieval equivalent is) sweetheart, is nostalgic for the Glory Days (considering that his glory days were in the middle of a civil war, he takes a lot of flak for this), and contemplates faking his death and abandoning his responsibilities. The only part of his character that doesn't quite fit is the fact that he rules the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Of course, it's Lonely at the Top.
• A one-off character from Home Improvement was an old college buddy of Tim's who came into town one day. Much of the story is the guy trying to relive their glory days and Tim having to recognize those days were not superior and was growing apart from his friend. While they parted ways amicably, the breaking point was Tim having to choose between family night and going to a bar across town. Tim himself outright says that he liked his college days but right now was pretty good too, with a family who loves him and a job he adores.
• In an episode of House, Foreman and Taub end up high and locked in the hospital records room, where Taub finds and reads Foreman's personnel file. Foreman is revealed to have struggled in med school, because he had to claw his way up trough the public school system and state college unlike his prep school and Ivy League educated peers, and even admits to cheating on a test. Taub desperately tries to stop Foreman reading his file, but when he does he finds to his surprise that Taub's academic record is excellent and asks why he tried to hide it. Taub replies that he's ashamed of wasting his potential: he could have been a brilliant medical genius like House, but followed the money into plastic surgery instead; and when he lost his practice he basically had to start over again as a lackey to the person he could have been. He then tells Foreman that he should be proud of his background because "at least your life is trending up".
• On I Am Not Okay With This, Stanley tells Sydney that this is why he likes watching the high school's football games. He believes that most of the players are destined to turn out like this, saying that they're the ones who will attend the Class Reunion in five, ten, and twenty years because even those who go on to middle-class success rather than burning out will still wind up as mediocrities who look back on their high school years as their Glory Days. He compares high school football to a Shakespearean tragedy in that the players, at the peak of their lives, have nowhere to go but down. Stan is likely likely speaking from experience, given that his father was the homecoming king in 1991 and turned into a layabout drunk.
  Mr. Barber: "Still got my picture hanging in the auditorium."
  Stan: "How's that working out for you?"
• Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia somehow manages to become this without ever having glory days. He thinks he did, frequently claiming to have been at the top of the food chain in high school. However, in the High School Reunion two-parter, it's revealed that he was just as pompous and pathetic in high school as he is now, with the actual popular kids reacting to his antics back then with confused amusement at best.
• The record producer in the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Rock Star" was a man still living on his past glories of being a hit in the 60s and having the third-longest set at Woodstock. When he tries to bring up the impact he had and his musical talent, Nichols shuts him down by telling him that his band was terrible, he was on the stage at Woodstock so long because they wouldn't get off the stage in spite of the crowd's negative reaction and even declared his Grammy to be a joke, stating how even Milli Vanilli has one.
• Mister Herkabe from Malcolm in the Middle is an academic version of this. He's a former Child Prodigy who gained advanced degrees from Princeton and Harvard and became a self-made millionaire, then lost everything in the Dot Com crash, and was forced to take a low status job teaching at his old middle school. His only remaining achievement is an award for highest ever GPA in the history of his high school, and his only joy in life is tormenting his students.
• Al Bundy from Married... with Children was the former Trope Namer. Once Polk High's most notable football player ("...scored four touchdowns in one game"), now a pathetic shoe salesman married to another Jaded Washout—former mean girl and high school bicycle Peggy Wanker—with two hell-raising children and a shiftless dog. Much of the humor and popularity of the show came from the depression of suburban life, as anyone who worked in a degrading, low-paying, miserable, menial, service-industry job may find him less of an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist than others (work a job where you are regularly abused by customers for a few years and Al Bundy will be your patron saint). Although a chauvinist, a loud mouth and a loser, Al Bundy himself isn't without his virtues. He genuinely loves his wife and family though he won't admit it outright, regularly sacrificed for his children and his wife, is quick to protect his kids, and would never cheat on his lazy, bonbon-eating, whiny, sex-starved wife Peg (though he does go to the nudie bar and reads porno mags like Playboy and Big Uns).
• The Mighty Boosh: Howard Moon. Only without the "past glories" part. Any time he makes reference to any kind of former triumph, you get the distinct impression he's either wildly exaggerating or just lying outright. This makes Howard a bizarre combination of the Jaded Washout and Small Name, Big Ego since he varies between thinking he's a smooth-talking, artistic, dark, brooding genius, with the understanding that he's utterly pathetic.
• Jay Pritchett (no-so-incidentally played by Ed O'Neill) of Modern Family is an interesting subversion. He's very wealthy — and otherwise plays this trope straight-up. He often comes off as very jaded, constantly ignored and disrespected by his friends and family, or at least constantly worries about it, especially regarding his current wife, and in spite of his wealth feels he falls short of achieving his goals and recognition. He's also been shown on more than one occasion to overly rely on past glories or attempt to revel in current glories such as, again, his current wife. A lot of fans consider him either a more financially-successful Expy or Alternate Character Interpretation of Al Bundy.
• Georg Bjarnfredarson from Naeturvaktin clings desperately to his memories of the happy young adult life he had in a Swedish leftist commune and routinely trots out his five university degrees as proof of his superiority. He is a sad middle-aged man with serious personality flaws that make him unemployable in anything above the most menial positions.
• "Pistol" Pete Disellio from Parks and Recreation is an inversion. He's a former high school basketball star who won the Big Game with a last-second dunk, and the entire town adores him for it decades later. However, he is the only person who doesn't care anymore and is sick of being considered a hero for something he did when he was seventeen and just wants to move on with his life. In every appearance he hypes up the mundane details of his adult life the way a stereotypical former high school athlete will constantly talk about his Glory Days.
• Due to the complaints of parents groups and his marriage to Rita Repulsa, by the end of the second season of Power Rangers this has happened to Lord Zedd of all people. Right down to his father-in-law's evil empire stated to be conquering Zedd's former territories in a throwaway line. The Zedd of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers season three and Power Rangers Zeo was even called "Al Bundy Zedd" by the writing staff at the time.
  • However, it was also subverted — he and Rita working together actually led to both of them getting results — for the majority of season 3, they actually had the Rangers on the defense! The season started with the Rangers' powers and Zords being destroyed (forcing them to seek out new powers), and ended with them absconding with the Zeo Crystal and blowing up the Command Center. If it hadn't been for the Machine Empire deciding to randomly invade Earth (forcing Rita and Zedd to flee to Master Vile's territory for much of the season), they probably would've won. As it was, they came back and not only managed to create the nigh-invulnerable Impursonator monster, but also blew up the Machine Empire leadership in revenge at the end of the season.
• A villainous example appears in Peacemaker, Peacemaker's father, Auggie Smith, is a former supervillain and white supremacist known as the White Dragon. It's stated multiple times that in his prime, the White Dragon was a trained killer and a feared supervillain. By the time of the series though, he's well past his prime and spends most of his time watching right wing talk shows. When he decides to get back in the game, he's quickly disposed of once his armor is disabled and his henchmen killed off.
• The Ranch: Colt fits this to a tee. He's screwed up his football career and gone home to live on his dad's ranch.
• Ted and Peter, the washed-up snooker players turned commentators on That Mitchell and Webb Look. They tend to spend most of their time drinking lots of pints of bitter, eating junk food and gossiping apathetically about the players they're watching rather than offer commentary on the games. While they do have some hints of Glory Days in their past, they don't appear to have been that glorious.
• Jack Malloy, from the MWC-inspired sitcom Unhappily Ever After. A used car salesman divorced from his wife and living with a rabbit doll that talks to him.

Music

• Debbie, the protagonist of the song "1985" by SR-71 (later covered by Bowling for Soup), is a rare female example. She wanted to be Hollywood's next big star, but made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a normal, boring suburban life. Now she's stuck in the '80s and refuses to move on, to the consternation of her own children.
• The titular character of "Skipper Dan" by "Weird Al" Yankovic is a former up-and-coming Broadway star whose dreams of fame and fortune passed him by — he's now relegated to working at Disneyland as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride.
• Multiple characters in Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days." The basic gist of the song is a guy visits a bunch of his old high school friends who have become The Alcoholic.
• "Bitter Musician" by Schaffer the Darklord is about a small time local musician who is angry that he never broke big. The end of the song implies he went on to become Schaffer himself.
• Mike Posner's "I Took a Pill in Ibiza" has the singer present himself as feeling unfulfilled with his life since his career as a pop singer crashed and burned after only one hit song six years prior (ironically, this song would become his second hit). The song's title refers to a time when Posner did ecstasy at a party to impress Avicii, who only got famous in the years after Posner's career flopped. Posner still found modest success as a songwriter for other artists, but admits in the song that the money, women, and fancy cars can't make up for what he feels he lost.
  I'm just a singer who already blew his shot
  I get along with old-timers 'cause my name's a reminder of a pop song people forgot
• The narrator of the Indigo Girls' "Cold Beer and Remote Control" is so burned out from years of "two jobs and showing up for school" where "the world comes in just to take things away" that they only care about zoning out drunk on the couch.

Theatre

• Zero from The Adding Machine can't even boast of any past glories other than having worked twenty-five years at the same job without missing a single day. His ignorance, intolerance, and total lack of both imagination and achievement mark him as a failure of the first order.
• Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman makes this Older Than They Think. Willy is a salesman who used to be better at his job (but never as good as he thought). Unfortunately, he's started to become undependable on the road and eventually is Driven to Suicide.
• Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire, mostly because she is insecure about her Spinster status.
• Fences: Troy Maxton, once a promising baseball player who ran up against the colorline and never made it to the major leagues. Now's he's a struggling garbage collector who controls every aspect of his family's lives, and crushes his son's dreams of playing football.

Video Games

• Michael from Grand Theft Auto V plays it straight, at least in the beginning of the game. His life of excitement is over after he sells out his gang and goes into witness protection, and he's stuck with a wife who cheats on him and two kids he can't connect with. Eventually, he meets Franklin and gets his spark back when he realizes there is someone he can teach his skills to and pass on a legacy. Before then, he was a former high school football player whose chance to go pro was cut short due to an injury as well as anger issues, which led to him turning to crime.
• Like a Dragon: Hiroki Awano from Yakuza 0 secretly views himself this way. He was a strong as a bull yakuza who had the potential to rise to the top but then he saw guys like Kazama who outclassed him by order of magnitudes so he resigned himself to be a family lieutenant and indulge in hedonistic pleasure to hide the fact he was too scared to take his shot.
• Persona:
  • From Persona, Reiji Kidou and Yuka Ayase are less successful in their life after the event of the game. Reiji is seen in Persona 2 as a door-to-door knife salesman who scares away his customers because his Persona that previously made him a major badass still exudes an intimidating aura. Yuka in her high school was known to be a heartbreaker, lost her love rivalry against Maki for the Protagonist's heart, went on to marry a salaryman as a Gold Digger and never to be seen again despite the other characters appearing in their school reunion.
  • Tohru Adachi of Persona 4 is an uncharacteristically young version of this trope, at 27 years old. Throughout his S. Link in Persona 4 Golden, he confides in the main character that life didn't turn out as well for him as he once imagined it would. At one time, he was at the top of his graduating class at the police academy but got stuck in the boonies, where he struggles to prove himself. He talks about how lonely he is, having early on sacrificed personal relationships for the betterment of his career. Because of his early successes in life, he comes to believe he is owed things from society; namely, love. Later on, this entitlement complex becomes a motivating factor towards him kidnapping (and murdering) Mayumi Yamano and Saki Konishi.
  • A downplayed example is Sae Niijima from Persona 5. While she initially possessed a strong sense of justice, she has been worn down by being Promoted to Parent in the wake of her father's death and being overshadowed by her male colleagues at the prosecutor's office; by the time of the game's beginning, she's nothing but a cynical, bitter, borderline Amoral Attorney who only cares about winning cases no matter what, and resents her younger sister Makoto, viewing her as a burden and being jealous that Makoto has the freedom to choose what to do with her life while Sae herself is stuck in a dead-end job where sexism is holding her back. She grows out of it thanks to Character Development, rediscovering said sense of justice and deciding to become a defense attorney.^note It's worth noting that the negative traits are amplified only when Sae is under stress, and she has excellent motivations for the negative traits: she wants to win because she's trying to get ahead so she can provide a better life for Makoto; she resents that Makoto has the freedom to choose her own life, but works hard to give Makoto that freedom because she wants her sister to have the choices she didn't; while there are implications that Sae would consider fabricating evidence or a confession, she never actually does it, and in fact her methods of interrogating Joker are nothing but reasonable throughout. She only starts to lose her grip when she comes under extreme pressure to catch the Phantom Thieves. Her boss threatens her by saying that failure will result in her termination, which she can't afford. She's also never actually subjected to a change of heart, which means she wasn't anywhere near the point of villainy like the other Phantom Thieves targets.
• Star Wars Legends: Mical from Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is a Downplayed example. When the Exile meets him, he's doing a little "light" reading in some creature-infested ruins. He introduces himself as a historian working for the Republic Navy. This is only partly true since it's obvious he knows way too much about Jedi, even for a historian. He was once a promising Jedi apprentice, but when the Mandalorian Wars hit, many of the younger Knights (including Exile) left to fight, meaning he had no one to train him and came of age without reaching Padawan rank, meaning he was kicked out and left to fend for himself. He's really a Republic Intelligence agent Carth (or Cede) has employed as a spy on the Exile's vessel. Depending on the Exile's path, and if Exile chooses to train him as a Jedi, he ends up as a Grandmaster of the rebuilt Jedi Order or a Republic Senator.
• Harvest Town has Julia Allen, a vain woman who was once an object of affection to many suitors. She chose to marry the aristocratic horse farmer, but becomes bitter when she finds out that he's not as wealthy and glamorous as initially assumed. She's now a jaded middle-aged shrew stuck in a disappointing marriage to a "fraud", with two children who despise her.

Webcomics

• Questionable Content: In high school, Brun delivered a Breaking Speech to a Jerk Jock posse that threatened them with this future.
  Renee: I looked Jed up a while ago and nowadays he's a pro wingsuit glider and motivational speaker. You gave that dude a complex.

Web Originals

• Channel Awesome:
  • The Nostalgia Chick knows she's a waste of space deep down. When Dark Nella is about to end her pitiful, nerdy, judgmental, shut-in existence, she's only really upset at being called nerdy.
  • The Nostalgia Critic had a year-long Story Arc where he was getting more and more miserable about his job, involving bitching at other contributors for doing it better than him and trying to invade a country because he was desperate for some kind of power.
  • With Ask That Guy with the Glasses's ongoing Humiliation Conga, we get to watch the process of how someone can go from cool and collected to almost completely pitiful.
• Bridget Tice from The Most Popular Girls in School is only twenty-seven but is this already. She still lives at home, has various health issues, still wets her bed, no men are attracted to her besides her older manager at Pizza Street, and her cat recently died. There's no wonder she's so sarcastic and aggressive towards her annoying sister.
• Harry Potter and the Ten Years Later has both Harry and Ron ending up as this, stuck in unhappy marriages, and suffering from a lack of purpose with no Dark Wizards to fight.
• In Monster Island Buddies, Godzilla himself and many other kaiju have long retired from the movie making business and are now lazy, alcoholic overweight slobs with a pretty negative outlook on life. Thankfully, as the series progressess, the Big G and his friends go back to being awesome fighters that can efficiently protect the planet from threats.
  Godzilla: I don't know. Look at me...I used to be the king. Now I'm a fat, old, fat joke. When I was young, I could have won this fight easily.
• The Hard Times: "It Gets Worse" Organization Aimed at Popular Kids Post-High School. The organization is led by a divorced, overweight, middle-aged former quarterback, and aims to teach popular kids social skills that will help them later on in life.

Western Animation

• The Small Name, Big Ego page mentions a couple of high-school-jock types (Dash from Danny Phantom, the Bradster from American Dragon: Jake Long) who are actually prototypical Jaded Washouts—completely aware that, lacking any real redeeming features, these are their Glory Days, and they're keen to milk the time for all it's worth, before they flunk out of college and spend the rest of their lives pining for a time they spent making sure the unpopular kids would be too resentful to show up to the high school reunion.
• Simon Trent, the typecast actor who played the Gray Ghost, years after the show was cancelled, in Batman: The Animated Series. It's a more sympathetic portrayal than most, as he's shown to be a decent man who's fallen on hard times. He eventually does get out of his slump after some inspirational words from Batman, and decides to don his old costume and helps stop the bomber threatening Gotham.
• The protagonist of Bojack Horseman, as described by the credits song, was in a very famous TV show in the '90s. Now he's simply a washed-up actor obsessed with his past success and stuck bumming around with his deadbeat roommate. However, throughout the series, his career goes through a series of ups and downs as he gets cast in various films and TV shows.
• One episode of the Dilbert animated series indicates that Wally used to be a talented and energetic programmer (in the original newspaper comic, there's no indication that he was ever anything but a lazy cynical time-server).
• Futurama featured Zoidberg's uncle Harold Zoid, a silent hologram film actor whose career went down the tubes the day they invented smell-o-vision. Zoidberg helps him through a series of events involving Calculon and Bender and rigging the award show to get him an Oscar.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Shadow Weaver had so much promise back when she was Light Spinner, but she became so ambitious for more power, that not only has it disfigured and turned her even more power hungry, all her potential ended up going to waste. After losing her power crystal in Season 1, she's become something of a has-been who has nothing left but to settle scores and the best she can do to is throw curveballs whenever possible.
• In some episodes of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson exhibits this trope — particularly in the spoof of the 49up series of documentaries, in which Homer was dissatisfied with his life in general. This is occasionally played semi-sympathetically, as when flashbacks reveal Homer to have been an accomplished gymnast in high school and such, but that his father's cynical comments about him destroyed his confidence. Homer has plenty to regret in life but is usually just too lighthearted to let it get him down. He always admits at the end that he also has a lot to be proud of.
  • Other episodes point out that Homer has had a far more interesting life than most: he's been to space, won a Grammy, and met more celebrities and former presidents than he can count.
• Star Wars Resistance: Tamara Ryvora was working her way up the racing circuit when she had to bet on her ship's value in the next race to pay for repairs, and then lost the race, leading to her working as a mechanic for Yeager to try and earn enough to either fix up the Fireball or buy a new ship. She has a very cynical attitude as a result, which informs a huge amount of her personality.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Rusty Venture was a Former Child Star, these days he's a bitter, cynical, pill-addicted has-been — thanks in no small part to his amazingly-traumatic childhood. Rusty's attempts to emulate his father have led to his son, Dean, well on his way to this end. Ironically, son Hank also endured that upbringing, and is quite happy with his life.
  • Most every adult character on The Venture Bros. qualifies to some degree. The creators have called the show their tribute to "glorious failure".
• Recess: Vince briefly becomes one of these after being struck out in a game of kickball by one of the Ashleys, which rattles him so badly he starts losing at everything, and then descends into a depressed lump who just sits around eating junk food, watching videos of himself playing sports, and yearning for the Glory Days. Mikey points out those days were last week! It takes him kicking a ball literally out of the atmosphere before he snaps out of it.
• Legends of Chamberlain Heights: Grover's older brother Montrel was once the best basketball player in the history of Michael Clarke Duncan High School, and was set to go to Duke University on a full athletic scholarship. Then he had his first taste of weed in his senior year, and his life ever since has revolved around doing nothing except sitting on the couch, smoking weed and playing video games.
• Frank of F is for Family. Once upon a time, he had dreams of being an airline pilot and was very close to making them a reality. In the present (The present of the show anyway) those dreams died after conscription into the Korean War, and getting Sue knocked up. Now he's a bitter wage slave eking out a middle class existence.

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