The Woobie - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Woobie

All together now: Awwwwwwwwwwww.

A woobie (named for a child's security blanket) is that character you want to give a big hug, wrap in a blanket and feed soup to when he or she suffers so very beautifully. Woobification of a character is a curious, audience-driven phenomenon, divorced almost entirely from the character's canonical morality.

The Woobie's appeal lies in how it allows the audience to experience catharsis. The Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that tragedy is popular because it allows people to experience and let out their negative emotions, "cleansing"

themselves. The Woobie is popular for this same reason. A story with The Woobie allows the audience to vicariously experience relief from some pain by fantasizing about relieving The Woobie's pain. (No, not that way! Well, okay, sometimes.)

Woobification can tie into a disturbing hurt/comfort dynamic, in which fans enjoy seeing the Woobie tortured, if only for the chance to wish the hurt away. This is often made manifest in the curious form of the Hurt Comfort Fic.

A properly executed Woobie inspires deep fannish devotion. A poorly executed Woobie earns scoffing and mockery, perhaps at the same time. The difference between the Woobie and such Sickeningly Sweet characters as the Littlest Cancer Patient is that the audience actually finds the Woobie compelling rather than pathetic. Where you draw the line is sometimes a matter of opinion.

Sometimes a Woobie goes Omnicidal Maniac and seeks to destroy the world in a bid to make the pain stop, in which case you're dealing with a Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds. Sometimes it's possible to bring such a woobie back from the edge, but other times, only his or her destruction in a Shoot The Dog moment will stop things, and is usually a Tear Jerker when done well.

In Lighter And Fluffier fiction, The Woobie can sometimes earn his happy ending via Loser Gets The Girl.

In many versions there is also something about the Woobies suffering that is notably heroic or noble. In this case the character is an Iron Woobie.

See Jones The Cat and Troubled But Cute. In anime, The Woobie makes up a large part of Moe Moe characters. Part of their appeal can come from them constantly striving against their chains. Can be taken to the point of Break The Cutie, and if the amount of misfortune seems too great it may result in Deus Angst Machina.

Please note that The Woobie is a specific type of character that is supposed to draw the audience's sympathy. If the character is the Chew Toy, Butt Monkey, or is a Jerkass he is not The Woobie (unless the character is also meant to be sympathetic). If the character doesn't let bad events faze him, he is not The Woobie. Also note that when adding an example, it should be kept concise. We don't need every bad thing that happened to them, and we don't need a summary of the entire series.

Contrast the Chew Toy. If in your opinion the character desperately needs to die, that's likely Damsel Scrappy. Should not ever be confused with Butt Monkey. A Butt Monkey is essentially a Pollyanna that is constantly abused. A woobie is a character who gets tortured badly and sometimes even cries and complains about their situation.

Not to be confused with a species of hairy bipedal humanoids that inhabit the planet Kashyyyk.

, or a Linux installer

Examples:

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Theatre

Eponine from Les Miserables, especially in the musical. She's abused by her parents, is always alone, and falls in love with Marius, who doesn't love her back. After she visits the middle of rebellion to see him, he asks her to deliver a letter from him to the girl that he does love. She ends up taking a bullet during the fighting and dying (although she dies happy because he's there comforting her).
- In the book, she's much more of a Stalker With A Crush, although she's still quite sympathetic. Though that does NOT give her fans white card to bash Cosette for either *daring* to get Marius's love or for being girlier than Eponine (or better said, the Possession Sue they make out of Eponine).
- You've got to hand it to Cosette, too, when it comes to woobiedom. First, she gets separated from her mother. Then she gets berated, teased, overworked, starved, beaten, and deprived of adequate clothing by the Thenardiers. At one point, she wraps a small knife in rags and sings to it, pretending that it's a baby doll. Things do improve considerably for her, but still.
- Jean Valjean himself. Granted, he dies happy, but throughout the course of the book, all his suffering (and there's a lot of it) is derived from his desire to simply help other people. The man spends nineteen years in jail because he was trying to feed his sister's family (granted, fourteen of those years are his own damn fault) and only gets the law back on his trail because he saved a man's life.
- Bung a vote in for Fantine, too... Falls in love, gets pregnant, man goes off and leaves her as a practical joke, ends up sending the child to be looked after, loses her job because she's trying to look after the kid, so she sells everything she has (including her hair and teeth), and, finally, her body. Gets helped out by Valjean, but dies before she ever gets to see her daughter again.
- What, not the Barricade Boys? The fact that they all die helps. Mostly a fanon development, as though they do have personalities in the novel, they aren't explored in huge depth. Extra woobie points go to Grantaire, who's cynical, hard-drinking and emotionally wounded, as well as pretty much enamoured with Enjolras.
- Really, it's right there in the title that most of the characters fit this trope in one way or another.
Erik (the Phantom) in The Phantom Of The Opera. He has huge issues about his physical appearance, exacerbated by being put in a freakshow and beaten by his captors. He eventually escapes and is able to compose his music underneath the Paris opera house until he falls in love with, and gives lessons to, a beautiful young singer who isn't repulsed by him, but, in the words of Cleolinda, "prefers the Missing Hanson Brother to [him]." Granted, he's a bit crazy and kills people, but he has a Freudian Excuse. And he's sexy.
- He's only sexy in the movie version with Gerard Butler. In the original novel, the Phantom is ugly as sin and even more psychotic... but still can come off as rather sympathetic.
- Although when it comes to Woobiefication, even Andrew Lloyd Webber can't beat the take on the character in the Arthur Kopit/Maury Yeston musical, who literally has lived his entire life under the Opera House, lost his beloved mother at an early age, and only starts getting nasty when an incompetent manager and his shrill-voiced wife start messing things up.
While its merit otherwise can be debated (and it being canon is... questionable, to say the least), The Lord Of The Rings musical managed to woobiefy Gollum—or, more specifically, Smeagol — largely owing to actor Michael Therriault's performance. Smeagol actually wants to change for the better and physically fights with himself over whether or not to kill Frodo and Sam in their sleep, to the point of holding a sword to his own throat instead of allowing Gollum to stab them, then collapses, sobbing "We changed!" to Gollum's accusation of cowardice, and finally curls up to sleep by Frodo's feet. All made sadder by most of the audience knowing that he will eventually lose out to Gollum... about thirty seconds later.
Yonah from Stephen Schwartz's Children of Eden. Her song "Stranger to the Rain" is especially anvilicious. "I'm a daughter of the race of Cain/I am not a stranger to the rain."
The title character of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes.
Jack Point in Gilbert And Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard.
Tobias Ragg from Sweeney Todd. A Victorian orphan, possibly mentally handicapped depending on the production, abused by Signor Pirelli until he's taken in by Mrs. Lovett, for whom he develops a deep and sadly misguided devotion. When he discovers just what's been going into those meat pies of hers, he literally goes mad from the revelation.
- The movie version makes it even worse, since the depictions of Pirelli's physical violence were so much more extreme (and bloody) than it generally is in stage productions. Not to mention the fact that in the movie, Toby really looks like a little kid, whereas he's generally played by a guy in his mid- to late-teens or early twenties on stage, since it's really not child-appropriate material.
Elphaba. Born into circumstances beyond her control, discriminated against since birth, had about 3 people in her whole life (Glinda, Fiyero, Dr. Dillamond) who cared about her, tried to do the right thing and got persecuted for god-only-knows how long for it.
Tracie Thom's portrayal of Joanne in the on-stage version of RENT made the character into more of a woobie than she had been previously. It's probably her sweet face. In general, Joanne is more of a Woobie in the stage version than in the movie, simply due to some of the dialog removed from the film as well as because of her helplessly annoyed stage play-only solo "I'm Okay".
Everyone in Spring Awakening, no matter how much of a Jerkass they seem to be or how much teenagerly Wangst they show, makes you want to run down onto the stage and give them a hug. Lots of 'em. It certainly doesn't help any that some of the conflicts of the more minor characters aren't even resolved.
It's certainly very debatable, but depending on where you stand, Malvolio of Twelfth Night might well be this, despite having likely been written as a Butt Monkey (understandably, considering how unpopular puritans were at the time). If you're sympathetic to his conservative social views (which really don't seem unreasonable in practice), in particular, you'll likely see him as a very loyal, if somewhat dour, butler who was simply doing his duty in reprimanding his mistress's blatantly rude jester and arrogant drunkard of an uncle...and he gets rewarded by being humilated in front of his mistress, locked up in a mad house (notoriously horrible places at the time, of course), and victimised by his tormentors. And even after his innocence comes out, no one seems willing to offer him any real apology for any of this. May also depend somewhat on how serious or comical the particular production plays his character, but still...
- Similarly, many productions make an effort to play up Sir Andrew Aguecheek, another Butt Monkey and the plucky comic relief, as one of these, the key often being his line 'I was adored once, too', combined with an emphasis on the abuse he recieves at the hands of Sir Toby. Some of the darkest and edgiest adaptations have managed to crank him up to an all-out tragic character.
Go see Chicago some time. When Amos finishes singing "Mister Cellophane", listen to the crowd (and probably yourself) as they go "Awwww!". Pure woobie.
Depending on your interpretation, Harry Beaton of Brigadoon. Forced to stay within his hometown for the rest of his life, can't go and get a university degree and make something of his life, and is forced to watch the one girl he likes marry another man. It's no wonder why he snaps.

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Web Original

The title character of Sailor Nothing. Let's face it, when one's happiest moment in her life is realizing she no longer is tempted to slit open her wrists with her dad's razor when she wakes up, she needs a hug. Badly.
A lot of abused/outcast characters tend to get this treatment among the users of Survival Of The Fittest. For example, in v3 Matthew Wittany tends to receive considerable sympathy from a number of SOTF handlers, primarily because he's just such a complete Buttmonkey and treated harshly by so many of his classmates when he's mostly just looking for friends on the island. Nanami Nishida from v1, despite being insufferably annoying and nearly killing fan-favourite Madelaine Shirohara, got looked upon this way (if posthumously) in retrospect and after people realized just how hard she had it living in Madelaine's shadow. Especially when killing her caused a Heroic BSOD for Madelaine.
Dr. Horrible. He needs lots and lots of hugs.
- Does he ever! That was exactly my reaction to watching the Blog. Poor guy...it's almost made worse because, even though he's nominally a villain, none of it was really his fault. He has idealistic motives (at least did in the beginning... who knows, now?), doesn't want to kill people, only tries to kill his arrogant jerk of a nemesis when he has to kill someone... and everyone hates him.
All characters in Ruby Quest, more or less, but Tom is a special case even among them. Poor kitty's the sweetest, kindest, the most innocent character in the game by far, and yet he has so far had his arms mutilated in an accident, received two new mutated arms when they healed, got himself betrayed and murdered by the woman he thought he loved, forgot about everything until now, had an arsenic poisoning, lost his eye, was rejected by his crush, and finally discovered things of his past he wouldn't have wanted to, including that this new companion of his was responsible of his messy death a while back. Thankfully, he has gained liberal amounts of hug therapy, and all this doesn't seem to bother him as much as it should.
Andrew Tinker had his dad die, his cousin and first friend leave with no explanation (and harsh enough words that he repressed memory of ever knowing him), at 14. Not to mention said cousin, Desius, being an even bigger woobie who had a... horrific childhood, that ended when he got adopted by Andrew's uncles before having to leave, and forcing himself to deliberately hurt Andrew so as to keep him from getting hurt following him. Let ALONE what happens later in life.
- Chic Geek counts as well, especially with recent developments. Note that she's Cousin to Andrew and Desius- seeing a theme?
Arguably, Strong Sad from Homestar Runner jumps between this and being The Chew Toy.
- Don't forget Coach Z, no doubt thanks to his Flanderization from a well-meaning, but somewhat quirky coach into a colourblind, forgetful, perverted moron who thinks he's a mother. In Decemberween Short Shorts, it's been shown that he spends Decemberween locking himself in his locker and drinking nothing but Listerine. Just wait until you see Baby Coach Z.
  - The 2009 Halloween 'toon has Strong Sad alternating between wishing horrible dooms on his "friends" after not being invited to any of their parties, and staging a surprise party for himself with cardboard cutouts of them. However, even he can't come up with a doom for Coach Z besides being Coach Z. "No sense in beating a dead horse."
- Reynold from the Cheat Commandos might fit the bill also.
- Parodied with the Strong Bad-created character Lil' Brudder. Explicitly designed to be as Woobie as possible— a hard-working, optimistic, unipod dog "with the heart of a champion"— so Strong Bad can abuse others with tales of suffering. However, even Strong Bad feels sorry for the guy. His catchphrase is "I can make it on my own!"
Erika Swanson is someone quite a few fans have mentioned their desire to hug, though she has elements of The Chew Toy at the same time.
Talesof MU includes the character of Two, an emancipated Golem who, despite her ostensible free will, enters the story with an incredibly flat affect - a sign of severe emotional damage. The cause of this eventually becomes clear; most golems are freed with a full if inexperienced personality but Two was given only one fundamental drive - she wants to do what she is told, whether she likes it or not. This makes her the victim of a horrifying array of abuses, the full extent of which is only implied. Since falling in with some of the kindlier inhabitants of Harlowe Hall, she has gotten better. Still desperately needs hugs, though.
From the SCP Foundation, SCP-231-7. Saying anything more here would just ruin how bad it is for the girl. Read it yourself, and understand what the true meaning of The Woobie really is.
- ...I hate you now. *cries*
Agent Blue Photon from Protectors Of The Plot Continuum. His girlfriend is killed because she knew too much, he has to flee the PPC in the Reorganization, and some years later, he mistakes a loyal Agent for an enemy and is killed.
- Tadkeeta. She has outlived her parents and all her siblings (she learned of her last surviving brother's death less than two weeks before her wedding), a Mary Sue strung her along on a quest to steal Caspian X from Ramandu's daughter, on the way to Cair Paravel she was almost raped, and she was marooned on a Year Inside Hour Outside world for (from her perspective) six years.
Alice from The Sims 3 blog Alice And Kev. She just needs a nice loving family to let her sleep on their couch without kicking her out.
- What makes it worse is that she's incredibly selfless, giving her paycheck to charity rather than spending it on, you know, food.
Frances J. Worthington III from the Sims 2 story Strangetown, Here We Come is the epitome of woobie. Especially when he is rejected by his crush Tank Grunt, who he had secretly been pining over for months, and has a huge emotional breakdown.
- It's even worse because of his eyebrows (Okay, so he's Maxis made- but the author puts them to good use!) which make him look perpetually sad.
- Nervous Subject too. Personality-wise, his name pretty much says it all; that, and until Olive sets their house on fire, killing them, the people he lives with make a point of subjecting him to pretty much the worst living conditions they can possibly dream up.
Charlie from I Am Not Infected sealed his status as a woobie when he spent almost an entire episode with the Confession Cam crying.
Felicia Day's character, Codex, in The Guild.
Severin from Fragile. When he confesses his love to Page, Page - who is at this point quite homophobic - rejects him and accuses his love of being lust, even though Severin is later found out to be asexual}}. And then of course there's his incurable insanity and later admittance to an insane asylum. All the while, he has some kind of undiagnosed mental disorder that impairs the way he views the world and reacts to it (Page says that he spent most of the time he knew Severin feeling sorry that he could never be normal). To make the situation much worse, it is revealed in the sequel Perpetual Change that he was sexually abused regularly by his sadistic aunt starting when he was a child, which led him to develop masochistic tendencies and emotionally scarred him, possibly causing his later psychological problems. It's also heavily suggested that it was an episode of abuse from her that caused his mental breakdown. His psychologist, Dr. Mangum, is also revealed to have given him medication that she knew would only increase his problems. As you can see, a lot of bad things happen to this guy. It's rather difficult not to be sorry for him in some way.