Trauma Swing

"One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader..."

— Free Catch All ad placed by Hazel and Augustus, The Fault in Our Stars

A popular way to illustrate that someone suffers from a trauma of some sort is showing them sitting alone at a children's playground, usually on the swing, often at dusk or night. In most cases, the trauma in question is related to a childhood experience, although the person in question can be of any age (child or adult).

If the person is a child, it may imply Parental Abuse or other family troubles, or simply having no friends; if done with adults, it can show how they still suffer from said childhood experiences.

It's common for another character to come out and offer some words of consolation while sitting on the other swing.

Not strictly related to Swing Low, Sweet Harriet, which usually occurs during positive times.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: After running away from home in embarrassment over Rentarou witnessing her family's antics, Karane is found sitting on a swing in a deserted park.
• Angel Tales Chu!: After running away in embarrassment when everyone makes a big deal over her first period, Momo is found sitting alone on a swing.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan: After Nobita's repeated attempts at running away from home backfires and nobody, not even Doraemon, wanted to have anything to do with him, he's shown sitting alone on a swing looking rather forlorn. And then Gian, Suneo, and Shizuka suddenly show up, all of them having their own problems and intending to leave their homes too, and asking Nobita if they could join him.
• The End of Evangelion: Came up in flashbacks of Shinji's childhood. It is also used in a scene during Asuka's extended Mind Rape sequence in the Director's Cut version of episode 22. Asuka is sitting naked in the Troubled Fetal Position in front of a swing set and is confronted by a younger version of herself clutching a Creepy Doll (which she has a phobia of).
  • The swing motif in the film is a little more bizarre than that: it shows up repeatedly during several of the more psychedelic sequences, and the jury is still out on what exactly it means.
• Naruto sometimes uses a swing to illustrate Naruto's lonely childhood, especially when he sits on it, watching all the graduates get congratulated by their parents while he was the only one who failed. Naruto's swing became a meme within the fandom due to the anime's frequent use of it as Stock Footage. Gaara is also shown sitting on a swing in his childhood.
  • "Then, when I was slightly older, I had a bear. And I hung out on swing sets. Cause that's apparently what you do when you're a depressed child in Naruto, you hang out on swing sets."
• Ranma ½: After being conclusively rejected by Ukyou, Tsubasa Kurenai is found on a swing, disguised as/inside a trash can for good measure. Female Ranma tries to comfort Tsubasa, saying that there'll be someone else... an act of kindness that makes Tsubasa fall for Ranma instead.
• CLANNAD: After his father goes to prison, Tomoya and Nagisa sit on the swings while Tomoya vents about his hatred for his father and for his home.
• My-HiME: Mai does this after she discovers she's destined to fight and kill her friends in order to save the world, has a fight with her best friend, and finds out that the sickly brother she has worked so hard to take care of has realised how dependent he is on her and doesn't want that anymore. On top of all that, while she's sitting on the Trauma Swing, the boy she likes and the Clingy Jealous Girl walk by and kiss in front of her (although he does not know she is watching). The end of the episode shows her lying in bed, realizing, "I've lost everything." And things still found room to go downhill from there.
• There's a shot of Haruhi Suzumiya as a child sitting on a swing while she is telling Kyon in the present day why she acts how she does.
• In Slam Dunk, Sakuragi and Ryota are seen sitting on swings in an empty playground at night, discussing their love problems.
• In Chobits, Shimbo finds Takako Shimizu sitting on a swing, lonely and desolate after her husband has locked her out of their house.
• Hayate the Combat Butler:
  • Young Hinagiku is shown to be alone on a swing in an image after her parents have abandoned her.
  • Although he's not on the swing in the scene, Wataru is shown to be standing in front of a swing set when receiving the papers that will allow him to skip grades with his friends from Sakuya.
• Kotonoha has one of these towards the end of the School Days anime.
• Hino does this in episode 16 of the La Corda d'Oro anime.
• One of the Dark Spore children is first shown alone on a swing, while other children play nearby, in Digimon Adventure 02. Archnemon and Mummymon are also shown hanging out on a swing set when they begin questioning Oikawa's motives and their own existence since Oikawa created them using his own DNA ("I can't help but remember that conversation with BlackWarGreymon. He's a Digimon, and Oikawa's a human, so what are we supposed to be?")
• Natsume's Book of Friends: Natsume does this in one of his flashbacks. The loneliness and isolation of being the only one to see Youkai and being dismissed as a Creepy Child and passed around from family to family, none of whom really want him...
• In Daily Lives of High School Boys, Mitsuo did this in High School Boys and Mitsuo-kun's Worries when he has a BSOD after his parents discovered his Porn Stash.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Minmay is shown swinging in a playground at night shortly after Kaifun deserted her.
• In Cardcaptor Sakura, Sakura tells Syaoran about Yukito rejecting her Love Confession when she's sitting on a swing. She then says that even when she does not regret wishing Yukito well and encouraging his feelings for her brother Touya, the whole deal still stings, and then she starts crying...
• In Sailor Moon R, episode 84, Chibiusa is sitting on a swing in a battle-damaged playground and reflecting on traumatic memories of the attack on Crystal Tokyo by the Black Moon Clan when she's approached by Wiseman.
  • Minako broods by herself on a swing in an S episode when thinking of quitting her life as a Senshi
• In MegaMan NT Warrior, Yai sits in one after she loses her fortune. When her friends try to console her by giving her her favorite yogurt drink, she drinks it...and immediately spits it out from her nose and gags because it's not the expensive one she likes.
• The Quintessential Quintuplets: At the end of her date with Fuutarou, Yotsuba takes him to an Abandoned Playground with a couple of swings, revealing that she usually comes here when she feels lonely or sad. In Chapter 90, she's shown using the swing as she muses to herself how her sisters recognize Fuutarou's good-hearted nature and that she will support them, despite her feelings for him. It is evident that as a Stepford Smiler, Yotsuba is using the swing as a coping mechanism to hide her own uncertainties about her self-imposed role in helping her sisters at her own expense.
• I Had That Same Dream Again: Nanoka sees a forlorn-looking man sitting on a swing in a local park on a couple of occasions, then learns that it's Kiryu's father when she runs into the two of them together.

Fan Works

• Miraculous: The Phoenix Rises: Morgan goes to one while reflecting on life before Moof arrives as well and the two have a heart-to-heart on they both have a Dark and Troubled Past.

Films — Animated

• Toy Story 3 has Big Baby sitting upon the playground swing staring at the moon.

Films — Live-Action

• Americana (1981): A vagrant war veteran, who supposedly suffers from some kind of PTSD, wanders from town to town to come across an abandoned playground in some rural area. He sets his mind to fix the merry-go-round there, it is old, completely broken and people around him do not understand why he is so determined to repair the thing. There can be many interpretations but one thing is known for certain - there is a trauma, and there is a playground, and perhaps fixing the playground will eventually fix the trauma.
• Chasing Amy: Holden is seen alone on a swing set following a huge argument with Alyssa. (The same swing set they had the "what is sex" discussion on earlier in the film.)
• Children of Men: Kee, about to have the first baby after all women have become sterile, uses the swing on an Abandoned Playground, not knowing whether her baby will survive or how it might change things after she gives birth.
• The Game Changer: The female lead is shown on an ornate swing and humming a lullaby her father used to sing for her as a kid, after her father's funeral. Even though he only faked his death.
• Inverted in Ikiru: Watanabe dies at night, in the rain, sitting on a child's swing set. But the mood of the scene is peaceful and even a little bit triumphant: he is enjoying being in the park he dedicated his last days to building.
• It Follows: Jay discovers that the titular killer entity which Hugh said he's attached her to is real when she sees it pursuing her in her own house, while she's still dealing with the fallout of Hugh engaging in sex of questionable consent with her before he tied her up and revealed he wasn't who he told her he was, no less. Running away from her house and the entity to a nearby playground at night, Jay is reduced to sitting on and quietly using the swing. On top of Jay's trauma relating to the entity and to what Hugh did to her, the film drops some hints that her home life with her alcoholic mother and now-dead father wasn't idyllic when she was growing up.
• Little Children: Ronald McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley) does this at the end.
• The poster for the 2018 Iranian film The Lost Strait has a soldier in a gas mask sitting on a swing.
• In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Scott sadly sits on the swing set he and Ramona visited on their first date.
• An eerie variation appears in Serenity, in which the staging of a scene shows River framed by a swing engulfed in flames.
• The Sixth Sense: The surviving daughter of the Munchausen's-Syndrome-by-Proxy mother is shown on a swing during the funeral.
• Super 8 opens with the kid hero sitting alone on a swing mourning his mother's death.

Literature

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: After an argument with the Dursleys, Harry retreats to one, brooding on his PTSD-driven nightmares, scar pains, and the lack of anyone to talk to or real information from his friends. (The film version starts with Harry on the swing, looking forlornly at children who still have parents.)
• The Sugar Skull: Scout is rather perky while visiting the local playground and spending some time on the swings, but her backstory gives the visit elements of this. She tells Eve that she remembers her mom pushing her and her younger brother on the swings, but also admits that it might have been a scene on television instead. Considering she spent most of her time caring for her younger brother, who had an unspecified developmental disability, then ran away after years of rape at the hands of her mother's boyfriend, it probably wasn't an accurate recollection of her childhood.
• In Battle Royale, Mitsuko sits on a swing after disposing of her mother's dead body.
• In The Fault in Our Stars, Gus is so attuned to the traumatic symbolism of Hazel's depressing old swing set that he helps her sell it on the internet.
• In The Stand, Larry Underwood eats his supper while sitting on a swing in an Abandoned Playground.
• In the anthology Whispers in the Dark, published by Rowanwood Publishing, there appears a short story, "The Girl", featuring a picture of the character sitting on a swing looking forlorn.
• The plot of The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten starts when protagonist Amane Fujimiya encounters his schools prettiest, smartest, and most athletic student Mahiru Shiina sitting on a swing set alone in the rain crying to herself and he offers her his umbrella to keep. Mahiru is actually masking feelings of deep loneliness and she presents a social and personable front at school to mask her issues with her emotionally distant parents.
• Digging To Australia: Thirteen-year-old Jennifer discovers a disused playground near her home, and often retreats to it for solitude. A key moment she does this is when she sits on the swing, and reads an important letter from her mother Jacqueline, who disappeared when Jennifer was born, leaving Jennifer to be brought up by her grandparents.

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development had a depressed Buster and GOB sitting on swings at the local playground. Then GOB started half-heartedly pushing Buster on the swing and Buster got really into it.
• Batwoman (2019): In "An Un-Birthday Present", a sane Beth from an alternate universe somehow survives the collapse of The Multiverse, only to find no one on this Earth knows who she is, including her twin sister Kate Kane who attacks her under the belief that she's Beth's insane evil alternate self, Alice. Kate eventually realizes her mistake and tracks Beth down to a park they used to go to as children, where Beth is sitting on a swing trying to cope with how she's been unpersoned.
• Supernatural: A flashback shows a young Bella sitting on a swing set after being molested by her father. A demon in child form exploits this low moment to offer her a Deal with the Devil.
• In Treatment: Oliver does this after running away from the therapist's office, and asks the therapist if he can come live with him instead of his parents.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Ted": Buffy is seen sitting on a swing set after her problems with mother's new boyfriend.
  • "I Was Made to Love You": Warren's Sexbot dies while sitting on swing. Just about as sad as it gets.
    • Oddly, both of these are in episodes involving Human-like robots.
  • A different take on this trope occurs after Dawn finds all her memories of the past are false. Walking through a playground at night, she has a memory of her sister pushing her on the swing.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation: The episode "Standing In The Dark" has Darcy break down and tell Manny about being raped on a swing.
• About once a month, someone angsting in EastEnders chills out at the playground to sulk until they're found.
• This PSA against child abuse shows scenes of a playground while a narrator talks, and at the end, a child is shown on a swing.
• In a Comedy Central Presents stand-up special, one comedian mentioned a woman had approached him at a bar because she said he looked like the loneliest person she'd ever seen. He incredulously asked the audience, "What, was I sitting alone on a swing set?"
• The Sarah Jane Adventures series 1 " Warrior of Kudlak" after thinking he caused a classmate to run away Luke runs off Clyde finds him later sitting on a swing
• Castle: In the Season 4 finale "Always", Kate Beckett is seen sitting on a swing in the rain after surviving an attempt on her life and being suspended/resigning from the force
  • This same swing is featured in the Season 4 premiere "Rise", where Beckett explains to Castle the wall she had placed around her heart after her mother died, making this a bookend, as the scene in "Always" is when the wall finally comes crashing down.
  • The swing is revisited in the Season 5 finale "Watershed" and the Season 6 premiere "Valkyrie", as the site where Castle and Beckett become engaged.
  • The swing has become a favorite spot for Castle and Beckett; they are seen on the swing again in the Season 7 finale "Hollander's Woods", when Beckett tells Castle that she had aced her captain's exam, but Keith Kaufman wants her to run for the State Senate.
• Inverted in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. The de facto leader of Bugsters, Parado, is standing on a swing while dealing the trauma to Emu. Namely, that he is the pediatrician's Enemy Without and among other things killed people because he knew Emu won't ignore him anymore after that.
• Uchu Sentai Kyuranger: Balance/Tenbing Gold is sitting on a swing while mulling over the earlier events, mainly his best friend Naga betraying the team for the dark side and the fact he (Balance) needs to nearly kill him if he wants to get him back. The scene wouldn't be any sadder if he was crying his heart out instead of just sitting there in silence, utterly defeated.
• Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patranger: Good Striker is seen sitting on a swing (being a tiny plane-shaped machine, he pushes himself on the swing with his thrusters) while mulling over the promise he made to his creator, Arsène Lupin, to protect his collection. He had previously stormed out on the Lupinrangers when they called his commitment to retrieve the Lupin Collection into question.
• Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger: Kaito sits on a swing during his Heroic BSoD in #26. Then he is joined by Juran and they discuss his inability to fight Stacy seriously. Kaito wished that their earlier fight had ended in Defeat Equals Friendship and tried to appeal to the Hidden Heart of Gold he knows Stacy has due to his earlier slip ups. Unfortunately, Stacy is hell-bent on opposing Kaito just to spite him and simply doubled his efforts to kill him.
• The Office (US): In s05e15 Michael visits a playground and sits sadly on a swing after being traumatized by the roast from his co-workers.

Music

• The video for the Blue Öyster Cult's "Joan Crawford Has Risen From the Grave" uses imagery derived from Christina Crawford's autobiography about living with her allegedly psychotic mother, Mommie Dearest. The video ends on a teenage girl playing the Christina role, sitting crying and despondent by the swimming pool; the scene is shot in muted washed-out light with autumn leaves swirling around and landing in the water, conveying the idea that summer is gone, it is cold, she is alone, innocence is dead and symbolic of emotional and physical abuse: this visual image conveys exactly the mood of the Trauma Swing using a different analogy.
• In the Vocaloid song "Hocus Pocus" by shikemoku, Gumi finds Miku sitting on the swings and realizes that she's been abused by her parents, and subsequently brings the younger girl home.
• If you want to include photos, there is a truly haunting shot of Fairport Convention's Richard Thompson looking lost on a swing, holding a mug of tea for dear life. And seeing as that shot was taken, just a few months after the M1 minibus crash that took the life of his girlfriend and also the drummer of the band, who can blame him for looking and Word of God feeling lost and lonely at that time?
• Korn: The cover for the band's debut album depicts a little girl on a swing with a sinister humanoid shadow looming over her, alluding to the album's themes of childhood trauma, particularly that of frontman and child sexual abuse survivor Jonathan Davis.
• Steps: Faye sits on a swing during the sad song One for Sorrow.

Newspaper Comics

• In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin once did this at school recess after the bully made him give up his toy truck. There's some Lampshade Hanging from another boy next to him: "Hey, kid, are you going to use that swing or what?"

Video Games

• Genshin Impact: One of Nahida’s idle animations has her conjure up a swing for her to sit on. It represents how she spent five centuries of her life in isolation because of how the Sages of the Akedemiya refused to acknowledge her as Sumeru’s Archon after Rukkhadevata‘s death.

• Tales of Xillia has this happen to Alvin, with Elize coming to cheer him up. It was likely the very same swing he used to play on as a kid, considering the location.

Visual Novels

• Lux-Pain has Yayoi Kamishiro in this classic pose when the protagonist finds her again in episode 7, her mind having succumbed to a Silent infection. She was actually going to kill herself there if Atsuki hadn't shown up in time.
• In Tsukihime, when Shiki meets Arcueid for the second time (the first one involved killing her and dismembering her body), she sits on a swing at an empty playground. Later on, it becomes apparent that despite being Really 700 Years Old (and a vampire, to boot), Arcueid is more or less a child at heart, plagued by the fact that the game's Big Bad corrupted her and made her kill the entire rest of her vampiric race.

Webcomics

• In El Goonish Shive, during Ellen's Second Life dreams, Ellen notices Tedd sitting alone and when she invites him to play with her and her friends, he tells her he is "no good".

Web Original

• One Hundred Yard Stare: Episode three has a scene with a trauma swing.
• Ask That Guy with the Glasses has done this twice, once when he was miserable over his marriage to the GPS falling apart, and the second time was when he mourned his pipe that snapped in half.
• Since the location that came along with her to Ink City includes a swing, Ichigo has done this a few times, such as after her best friend Dot suddenly vanished from the city.

Western Animation

• Showed up in a few Rugrats episodes.
• As Told by Ginger: Whenever Ginger was troubled over something, or just lost in her thoughts she would sit on the swing set in her backyard.
• The Simpsons:
  • In an episode, Homer visits Heaven and meets God who gives him a tour of the place. At some point, they pass by Jesus, who is shown sitting on a lonely swing with a Thousand-Yard Stare on his face. God mentions that he has been like that ever since he visited Earth.
  • In an earlier episode, Homer and Ned sit on the backyard swings and talk about how Ned Never Got to Say Goodbye to his recently-deceased wife.
  • Subverted, a new girl comes to school, and everyone is already doting on her that she won't fit in. She is then sitting on the swings alone, Lisa comes in and offers to be friends with her, then the girl slugs her!
  • Variation: when Luann Van Houten forbids Millhouse from playing with Bart, whom she thinks is a bad influence, we get a quick scene of Millhouse in his backyard, sitting alone on one end of a see-saw, dejectedly pushing himself up and dropping back down.
  • In the episode "Lost Verizon," Marge uses Bart's new cell phone to track his movements around town and is able to prevent all his mischief before it starts. After several days of this, Homer, monitoring the screen, wonders aloud why Bart seems to just be spinning in place, while outside the window Bart is miserably riding in a tire swing.
• Justice League Unlimited episode "Epilogue": Ace is shown like this. She's dying of a brain aneurysm due to her powers evolving. Batman then sits down on the swing next to her to comfort her until she passes away; his presence calms her enough to die peacefully, which prevents a massive psychic backlash.
• Daria: in "Dye! Dye! My Darling" Jane and Tom's breakup scene takes place on a swing set.
• Played With in Gravity Falls: in “Dreamscaperers”, a broken swing set can be seen outside the Mystery Shack of Grunkle Stan’s mind. As the last shot of “Not What He Seems” reveals, it symbolizes the loss of his estranged twin brother.
• Recess: In "Bonky Fever," Mikey regresses to kindergarten-age behavior over the stress of his upcoming tenth birthday. After his disastrous party, he retreats to his backyard swing set, and his mother comes out to comfort him. They have a heart-to-heart about Mikey's fears while sitting on the swings, which helps him feel better.

Real Life

• Truth in television. Children who're bullied, ostracized, etc. will commonly be found by the swings because it's an activity on the playground that doesn't require a playmate.

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