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alternative title(s): Whangst
 | Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope.
Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab. | |
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Angst can create compelling drama, Character Development and interesting psychology when done well; many acclaimed works use it to a degree and the appeal of The Woobie is based on it.
But like all other good things, angst can be overdone or clumsily handled. Wangst, a portmanteau of "whiny" and "angst," (also Whangst if you pronounce the H) is essentially angst gone wrong. The intended Woobie becomes a pathetically whiny character who insists on crying (often loudly and repeatedly) about a Dark and Troubled Past or event instead of, you know, trying to deal with it and stop being depressed all the time. Especially if said "trauma" doesn't come across as nearly tragic as the character thinks it is, making his lamentations seem way out of proportion. People who constantly talk and rant about suicide don't get much sympathy, because others will be likely to tire of this, give up in their attempts to understand, and think "why hasn't this guy killed himself yet?"
Note: However, though Wangst is most frequently associated with characters whining over petty "tragedies", Wangst is not merely sadness or angst; it is poorly written sadness or angst whereas it comes off as unjustified due to poor writing, lack of an explanation, or over-exaggerated, it's not necessarily the scale of the tragedy that the character is reacting to that's the problem, but the way it's handled.
There are some scenarios even in fiction where it is appropriate for the characters to feel sad or depressed and act accordingly. After all, if a tragedy was happening to you in Real Life, chances are you would be pretty upset as well. Events that would be genuinely devastating in Real Life can become melodramatic Wangst if the sufferer's self-loathing is too loud and drags on for too long or is used as a plot device so often that it becomes irritating. Likewise, events that the average person wouldn't worry over can be a great way to show a character's unique fears and weaknesses, and maybe even make it clear that he really is blowing it out of proportion and deserves to be mocked.
It all boils down to quality and personal tolerance level; what is grating and unrealistic to one viewer can be genuinely heart-rending for another.
You will notice an inherent Double Standard involving this trope - people are much more likely to be crying "Wangst" to a male character than they are a female character.
This perspective also often occurs in series where characters are expected to be badasses: see also What Measure Is a Non-Badass?.
Wangst is a favorite of Emo Teens, Sympathetic Sues and characters Cursed with Awesome. Any kind of Despair Speech (especially by nihilists) is also often considered as this. See also Emo, Narm, Angst Dissonance. To deal with the wangsty kind, people will usually say " Get A Hold Of Yourself Man!".
Compare Deus Angst Machina, which is about having too many sources of angst for Willing Suspension of Disbelief rather than too much response to sources of angst. For both in-universe and meta-examples, see Muse Abuse, a frequent Real Life and in-universe cause of Wangst. The "wangst" equivalent for entire stories is when Darkness Induced Audience Apathy is caused by too much True Art Is Angsty. Contrast Angst? What Angst?, and Stoic Woobie.
Not to be confused with angst resulting from a lack of sexual relationship.
Called Bathos, in literary circles.
When including an example, try and establish why the example belongs here. In real life, we also have the issue of Clinical Depression, which is serious and should not be dismissed as this trope. Therefore: No Real Life section, please.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- This often happens with the X-Men, especially during the mid-90s; some writers are better at the soap-opera style that made the team popular in the Bronze Age than others.
- They actually parodied it once, in an issue of WHAT TH', in which the team interrupted a training session for an angst-break.
- Batman constantly teeters on the line between angst and wangst, as writers vary their emphasis on his parents' death. "MY PARENTS ARE DEAD!!!
 MY SIDEKICK IS DEAD!!!" etc., etc.
- This could also be said of Barbara Gordon, aka Oracle, aka the first Batgirl. The Joker paralyzed her, and as such, she became an extremely good hacker and source of information for Batman. However, you might not know it from the fact she never shuts up about how it's so hard to be in a wheelchair.
- Spider-Man is usually pretty good about dealing with his problems, but mediocre writers send him into bouts of wangst from time to time.
- This tendency is very much pronounced in the Sam Raimi films, as Spidey's main wangst-fighting weapon, his constant joke-cracking, has been removed. The reboot is avoiding this problem, judging by early reports.
- Marvel Zombies satirizes the Spider-Wangst phenomenon by having the other zombies routinely lose patience with Spider-Man's bitching. Amusingly, he is only wangsty when he's not hungry. This isn't helped by the fact that the first people he killed after becoming a zombie were Mary Jane & Aunt May.
- In The Clone Saga and One More Day, Spidey angsts like hell. Justified, considering the circumstances.
- Carlie Cooper, Peter's post-One More Day love interest had such a hard upbringing, that Peter couldn't possibly understand. For clarification, Carlie's tough upbringing was "My father was a dirty cop" & she's saying this to Peter Parker.
- Speedball, after his transformation into Penance (a.k.a. "Bleedball"), drives headfirst into all-Wangst-all-the-time territory, without as much as a rest stop in between.
- A flashback issue of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane sees Mary Jane, who has just broken up with her first boyfriend, indulge in a pretty epic bout of Emo Teen self-pity in which she starts wearing all-black and comes out with pearls such as "I just don't think I was ever meant to be happy." It's established, however, that this is pretty out-of-character for MJ, her friends repeatedly point out how silly she's being (including a fellow Emo Teen who is just as wangsty) and make numerous efforts to try and cheer her up, and to her credit it doesn't last very long; she quickly wises up and realizes how self-indulgent and ludicrous she's being, particularly after she encounters Peter Parker, who is dealing with the recent death of his beloved uncle and father-figure in a much more restrained and mature fashion. She's also helped by the recent debut of new superhero Spider-Man, whose bravery and spirit inspire her (even if she's unaware that the former and the latter share a common link).
- Given that it's essentially a Teen Drama set in the Spider-Man universe, the series itself does a pretty good job of avoiding Wangst; it partly manages this by making Mary-Jane (the main character) something of a Stepford Smiler Woobie who tends to bottle up her insecurities and unhappiness rather than indulge in moaning about them. It also helps that when it is angsty, it's at least well-written.
- Way back in the 60's, when Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four's girlfriend Crystal was separated from him by a practically unbreakable dome, he practically angsted about it in every issue between then and their reunion. The difference was that he actively tried to find solutions to get through. On the other hand, nearly half of them were suicidal.....
- They fell deeply in love, for the two minutes they were together.
- Another Fantastic Four example: She-Thing. Sharon Ventura was angsty enough in her early days (having been a rape victim, though they couldn't use the word), but she became wangsty when she was exposed to the same cosmic radiation that gave the FF their powers. She becomes much like The Thing, super-strong, orange, and lumpy. She immediately tries to kill herself. Repeatedly. And when she finds out she can't because her skin is just too tough for the rather uncreative ways she's trying to kill herself, she weeps and moans for issue after issue. Sure, being orange and ugly sucks, but come on! Still, it was almost worth it when several issues into the mope-a-thon, she whines to the wrong person. Beast from the X-Men was suffering from a condition that was slowly destroying his brain, slapping her down (metaphorically) and reminding her some people have real problems. Her problem put in perspective, she calms down and becomes less gag-inducing. She eventually decides she rather likes being She-Thing, which, unfortunately, triggers another wangst fest when she's re-humaned... and then she unceremoniously vanishes from the plot.
To provide some context; Ben Grimm, the Thing, underwent the exact same thing as Sharon Ventura and was himself not adverse to loudly bemoaning his condition. And even he thought she was taking things too far.
- For that matter, Ben Grimm himself could often dance around this trope. While his situation was undoubtedly crappy (and to his credit he never plummeted to the depths that Sharon Ventura did), he did spend a lot of time loudly complaining about things.
- In fairness to Sharon, Ben's Thing form is inhuman but still kind of weirdly appealing in a roly-poly way. Sharon's She-Thing form was downright repulsive, particularly for looking completely genderless (bald, flat-chested; she literally looked like Ben's early lumpy form, but in drag). Imagine going from being a strikingly beautiful woman to looking like an oversized, horribly deformed man. Most folks would do a lot of angsting about that.
- Superboy Prime. Goodness gracious, Superboy Prime. His universe was destroyed, he was trapped in a paradise dimension, breaks out, and will not stop whining about his original universe was so much better than everywhere else. A good example of this is in Countdown, where, while he is flying through DC's 52 universes, exclaims "This universe isn't as good as MY universe." What's ironic is that when Prime finally manages to get back to his "perfect universe", he finds it's just as shitty as the 52 universes he just escaped from. This is because Earth-Prime is, for all intents and purposes, our world and anyone can pick up and read Infinite Crisis, Sinestro Corps War, and Legion of 3 Worlds and see that he was a freaking sociopath. Prime is reduced to a DC troll living in his parents' basement, wanting to get back to the Multiverse, because... well at least there, he had superpowers.
- Exemplified nicely by all his Fan Nicknames: Superbrat-Prime, Emoboy-Prime, Superbitch-Prime, Superboy-Primadonna, Cryin' Prime, Spasticboy-Prime, Emopunch-Whine, Superdick-Prime, Super-Manboy-Asshole-Prime...
- Todd McFarlane's Spawn. Wanda moved on. Maybe you should too.
- Strongly justified in Daredevil - he has very strong reasons to angst and every time he looks like could overcome them, writers give him new ones.
- Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner as written by Judd Winick. When his long time girlfriend was murdered brutally he felt sad and angry but was ultimately motivated to become a better superhero. When he spent a thousand years dead before spending a short time undead then being brought back to life, he was fine. When he was Ion and experienced all of the darkness of humanity, he was fine. When he battled a physical manifestation of his own dark side, it made him a better person. But when his new assistant was beaten and hospitalized because he was gay... he had to leave the planet.
- In The Sandman, Dream begins lamenting to his sister, Death, that after successfully regaining all his power and enacting vengeance on all those who wronged him, he feels sad and empty that this quest is over and he no longer has a purpose other than his job. Death seems the caring sister, but then hits him over head with a loaf of bread. She then yells at him saying that if he's upset that he has no purpose then he should go search for a new one instead of doing nothing but childish whining.
- Many of the characters in Teen Titans display examples of this, particularly Cyborg and Robin.
- Many of the superheroes did nothing but this in JLA: Act of God. All they did was mope about what they had. They couldn't function without having powers.
- Special mention goes to Superman, who becomes a drunken bum, and Kyle Rayner, who becomes an obsessed, tantrum-throwing freak who refuses to change out of his Green Lantern uniform for months. Incidentally, these are the two characters least likely to wangst about power loss, as Clark Kent has one of the most well-adjusted civilian alter-egoes in the DC universe, and Kyle Rayner only had his ring for a few months at the time of the series' publication.
- Of course, this is just so several of those same heroes could later gush about how much better Batman is better than them.
- No matter where he appears, you can count on Morbius to keep wangsting about his need to drink blood/kill or have flashbacks to when he killed his best friend and wangst some more. And though these are legitimate causes to angst about, in some series whining is basically his defining trait.
- Captain America, especially in his early appearances in the 1960s, as he tended to lament about failing to save his sidekick Bucky before getting sent into suspended animation until Rick Jones (who was acting as Cap's sidekick at the time) bluntly told Cap to get over it and quit his complaining.
Fan Fic
- Musical: Things Change and The End. The author makes Beast Boy wangst constantly after his Love Interest Terra decides she wants a normal life. He neglects his duties, stalks Terra, and whines about how no one can understand his pain. Later, he kills himself and comes back as a villain and tries to destroy the universe while whining about his horrible life and Terra leaving him.
- SailorMoon Neo Trilogy. Although the epic itself isn't too bad, there are several characters who's sole purpose seems to be as whiny as possible. Neo Mercury and Neo Saturn are two particularly good examples. While both characters have good reasons to be depressed, both are so incredibly hateful and annoying that all sympathy is lost as soon as they appear. Both are cruel and whiny Jerk Sues, and they really distract from the story whenever they wangst about how HORRIBLE their lives are, despite not even remotely having the only bad lives—in fact, almost all of the other characters have similar cruddy lives at some point of the story.
- Ebony "Enoby" Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way of My Immortal takes this to ridiculous extremes, slitting her wrists about once per chapter. (Or at least, it felt like it.)
- Ebony consists entirely of Wangst! In one of the scenes, she's about to get screwed by one of her boyfriends, but suddenly begins to cry because she's So Beautiful, It's a Curse.
- Basically every character in My Immortal has slit his wrists at least once and became goffic. Special mention goes to Draco for killing himself because Ebony hasn't told him that Voldemort has told her he's going to kill Draco unless Ebony kills Vampire. Damn, his girlfriend is terrorized by an evil wizard and he kills himself because she misused his trust or what?!
- One Warhammer 40000 fanfic has the protagonist wangst after his home planet was hit by an Exterminatus. He was a Dark Angel.
- Warhammer 40000, the only fictional setting where getting your home planet blown up is not sufficient reason for wangst.
- Wing Fic as a rule tends to be full of this. The character who ends up spouting the wings almost always becomes full of much Wangst, and gets told by their lover "But Your Wings Are Beautiful". It seems to be a requirement of the genre.
- There is a Touhou hentai-doujinshi in which Patchouli and Remilia (youkai-magician and vampire respectively, both Really 700 Years Old) wangst about their respective Mayfly December Romances with Marisa and Sakuya. While having sex with each other. (Now, if it was one or the other, it would be straight-up hentai or straight-up Your Mileage May Vary Melodrama, but ...)
- For that matter, a human magician becoming a youkai and living to Really Seven Hundred Years is a well-documented phenomenon in-universe, and there have been hints in various sources (i.e. All There in the Manual) that Marisa may be going down that path already, so non-human characters really have no excuse to wangst about her. Especially Alice, who has already undergone the process.
- Averted and lampshaded in A Very Special Arthur. In Chapter 2, Arthur's father worries that Arthur, having become mentally retarded, will face one misfortune after another until he ends up homeless or institutionalized, and his wife tells him "Dear, stop worrying about Arthur and making this whole fanfic sappy and just go to sleep."
- In Bart The General,
Homer Omarn spends most of the series in a Heroic BSOD, and a good portion of that crying in the fetal position after Toadfish moves into his neighborhood, forces him from his house and has an affair with Marge. He even seemingly contemplates familicide, until Toadfish leaves the house and he gets back together with Marge.
- Hogwarts Exposed is full of this when it's not going to the opposite extreme, partly because of the author's inability to grasp that a tragic past alone is not sufficient to make us care about a character.
- In Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, Naruto constantly wangsts about Ronan being better than he is from the moment he is revealed to have survived the blast that killed Sasuke and Kakashi. After being caught having sex with Sakura, Naruto decides to commit suicide because he thinks Ronan and Sakura don't like him (arguably justified, since Ronan doesn't really care what happens to him), Ronan is better than he is, and because he has a small penis, and then after inexplicably surviving, joins Madara. To be fair, though, Naruto gets called out on his wangsting by Ronan's narration and Madara, so while Naruto is blowing petty issues out of proportion, we are not meant to sympathize. The author himself wangsts quite a bit about issues such as his stepfamily, family vacations and being separated from his Internet access for any reason or length of time.
- Takeru Takaishi in the Tamers Forever Series calls himself out on this:
I wish we could switch places. If my death could save the world, I'd gladly give my life. I have nothing left here. Not anymore. But you're still so young. You could be so happy…you would make her so happy. But I can't. You're the one who has to die, and I have to stay and live this empty, meaningless life. And I'm a bastard for feeling sorry for me when you're the one who I should worry the most for. You're the one who is going to die, but my heart cries for my living. I'm worthless.
Film
- Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequel trilogy spends a lot of time crying and flipping out. Don't, just don't, make us spell it all out for you.
- In Van Helsing, Big Bad Dracula is introduced with a wangst about how he can feel no emotion. It's actually quite cool, for certain reasons.
- Although how he can Wangst without emotion is anyone's guess.
- In 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula Dracula's whole motivation for becoming a vampire is this. While having his wife commit suicide over a false report of his death is tragic, The Count's reaction comes off more like a childish temper tantrum than an act of grief.
- The third Spider-Man movie does this, probably deliberately.
- So does the second one, with the exception of the first 10 minutes, and the last 15.
- It's not just Peter Parker doing it; Harry has a serious problem with it.
- Mary Jane also has quite a bit of it in the third film. This was particularly jarring to viewers since she'd previously shown No Sympathy toward Peter when he was having problems of his own, and their relationship nearly crumbles when he starts to do the same to her.
- Interview with the Vampire's first two acts are nothing but Louis and his wangst, first about the death of his wife and unborn child and then about becoming a blood thirsty vampire. He finally gets over it by the third act after the death of his child vampire lover Claudia.
Lestat: I've had to listen to that [whining] for centuries!
- Clerks Dante Hicks. While some of it's justified due to his being Surrounded by Idiots, he just takes it too far. However, he gets called on it on almost every instance, though, to the point where it's even expected of him—Katlin Bree comes back because she knew Dante would be flipping out over her engagement announcement in the tabloids and Randal uses it as the centerpiece for his "The Reason You Suck" Speech at the end of the film.
- He's better in the sequel, having finally decided to do something with his life rather than simply waste it away; the problem, however, is that what he's decided to do probably isn't the thing he should be doing. It's actually Randall who's more Wangsty in the second film.
- Pretty much averted in the film Django, but the theme music basically consists of a singer telling Django to shut up and get over himself, at times sounding somewhat cruel.
- Although the two Bratty Teenage Daughters in Dan in Real Life do have deeper underlying issues to cope with (such as the death of their mother and a super Overprotective Dad) that arguably affects their behaviour, given that these issues tend to express themselves in nonstop and somewhat irritating whining and sulking about (in one case) not being allowed to drive the car and (in the other) being separated for a couple of days from a guy who is sort-of-but-not-quite-kinda their boyfriend by a family get-together, they arguably fall here. They seem to spend the entire movie sulking about one thing or another.
- Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer The scene where the gorgeous super-powered wealthy woman complains about her life to the blind black woman. Normally, such a woman could at least complain about all the unwanted attention she gets but this one can turn invisible and protect herself with force fields.
- Many of Woody Allen's films could fall here, given that they're frequently focused around slightly pretentious and self-obsessed people constantly complaining and angsting about their lives. Fortunately, Woody Allen is fully aware of this and always pops their bubble to show how pretentious and self-obsessed they really are. See Manhattan, Hannah And Her Sisters, and so on.
- Pumaman. Tony Farms. Good God, Tony Farms.
Mike: Are pumas known for their whining?
- The Room. Johnny's breakdown at the end of the film. Also, let us not forget this little moment of cinematic brilliance:
"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!
- Note that this is before he even suspects Lisa of cheating on him.
- Jeff in Saw III. This is actually the point of the character, since the movie is about Jigsaw "helping" him get over the death of his son. He has been brooding over his death for far to long at the exclusion of everything else, including his surviving wife and daughter.
- In Goodfellas, Henry Hill is last heard loudly bemoaning the loss of the cosy high-life he used to live thanks to The Mafia and complains that he doesn't get any respect or influence any more, as represented by the fact that an order he placed in a restaurant during his witness protection in Seattle for spaghetti with marinara sauce resulted in him getting egg noodles and ketchup instead. Considering that Hill is complaining about this having been part of The Mafia, accessory to crimes such as murder and armed robbery, a drug dealer, various minor assaults and battery, has beaten his wife and ratted out all his friends and colleagues, managing to escape into Witness Protection with only this relatively minor karmic comeuppance from either the Mafia or the justice system to punish him for his wrongdoing, it's hard to feel too sorry for him.
Literature
- A defining characteristic of Twilight. The blank pages in New Moon are a particularly narmy example* . After Edward pulls his "we must break up because you are in danger" stunt, there are approximately ten pages that show how utterly bleak and hopeless and miserable and empty Bella's life is without him. By having absolutely no text except the names of the passing months.
- In New Moon, Bella Wangsts over her birthday, of all things. And then she Wangsts more when the Cullens throw her a birthday party and have the audacity to give her some sweet gifts.
- Bella whines about everything. In the first book, she whines about her father getting her a car. She whines about the weather. She whines about sharing a bathroom with her father. She whines about people being nice to her, etc.
- The movie of New Moon makes the "blank pages" thing even worse by turning it into a montage of Bella's moping during those three months...including screaming in agony every night! It also makes it pretty hard to ignore the effect this must be having on her father.
- Similarly, the main character of The Host goes on and on about how awful life as an invading alien who has spent thousands of years stealing the bodies of others.
- Characters in Gone with the Wind whine about how awful is to let slaves free and cook your own meal. Heartbreaking. Somewhat justified because that's all they really know.
- The heroine in Quincey Morris, Vampire by P N Elrod is a spoiled Jerk Sue who is never satisfied with her life as one of the wealthy, successful people of Victorian London.
- Harry Potter has moments of this in The Order of the Phoenix — but then, that's just how teenagers are, as Phineas Nigellus explains. Harry largely gets over himself at the end after his wangsting causes a major screwup that results in his godfather's death.
- Parodied in the Potter Puppet Pals sketch "Wizard Angst".
- Moaning Myrtle, anyone? Although her incessant gloominess may just be simple insanity caused by being dead in a bathroom for half a century.
- Getting Shapeshifter Mode Locked definitely wouldn't be fun, but Tobias earned the Fan Nickname "Emohawk" from some fans because he kept whining abut it for the first year's' worth of books! Consider this: the form he's stuck in is pretty badass (indeed, quite a few people think hawks are cute). Plus, he can fly, his life as a human was pretty terrible, neither of his estranged guardians notice he's gone (!?), and he could have always been trapped as a louse or something. Even more significantly, consider that he and his friends have been reeled in as fighters in an interplanetary war and yet everyone seems to be dealing with that pretty well!
- Then when he regains his ability to morph, he often complains about his human morph's inferior eyesight and hearing compared to his hawk form. You can't win.
- Max from Maximum Ride. She does have actual reasons to be upset, and her life until book four sucked a TON of ass. However, she never fails to remind readers how much every single second of everything sucks! And what's really funny is when Fang, the designated "goth," gets a few chapters in book three, he rarely complains about anything.
- The Elder Scrolls Novels - In The Infernal City, Attrebus begins to wangst after The Reveal. Then Sul turns around and whips it into a Crowning Moment of Awesome when he chews him out. Attrebus starts developing as a character after that, becoming much like the hero he thought he was.
- Although all of the characters from Ordinary People exhibit wangst (because failure to communicate is the main topic of the novel), Beth is the character that most exemplifies wangst: she's only upset about her son's suicide attempt because it exposed the facade she built of the perfect family, she does not appropriately express this anger, and most importantly, she never resolves it. Instead of tackling her conflict, she simply divorces Cal and suddenly leaves the family. Her inability to look beyond her emotions in the moment and be rational keeps her from developing, and makes her a queen of wangst.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh: While Gilgamesh is wallowing in his loneliness after Enkidu's death and putting himself through all kinds of stress to find the secret of eternal life, one character after another tells him to just get over it already!
- Making it pretty much literally the Oldest One in the Book.
- Speaking of the oldest ones, in the Mahabharata, Arjuna suddenly having a panic attack about having to war with his relatives in the middle of the war is the setup to the Bhagavad Gita, which is several chapters of "oh, just do your duty already" from Krishna mixed with an explanation of Hindu cosmology.
- Played for laughs in The Belgariad, where Garion occasionally sinks into this... and is promptly told by the entire universe (sometimes literally) to grow up and get over it. Eventually his chief lament ("Why me?") becomes a Running Gag.
- Prequel novel Polgara the Sorceress proves that this is a hereditary trait. Polgara eventually got very sick of hearing generations of sandy-haired little boys ask that question.
- At least Garion really did have the weight of the world on his shoulders. All those other sandy-haired little boys were just expected to live their life without drawing attention to themselves and to father children at some point - which is to say, their destiny was to be just like most people in their world. Unless you really have a craving for glory, that's really nothing to whine about.
- Played for knowing laughs in The Malloreon. By this time, Belgarion has started catching himself as he drifts into wangst, and cutting himself off as he starts to say "Why me?".
- It's particularly amusing when 'Zakath starts asking "Why me?" and Belgarion is the one who has to explain things to him.
- It's even funnier when Belgarath of all people asks it. Silk wangsts about beans for a bit, but it's again played for laughs.
- Terry Brooks, at least in the earlier Shannara books, has such a habit of repeating his characters' thoughts on their character development. Since a lot of them seem to think they can fight fate, this comes off as Wangsty real fast.
- Deliberately invoked in The Voyage Of The Jerle Shannara. That Grianne is a myopic bitch obsessed with her own suffering and oblivious to the damage she does to everyone around her is the entire point of her character.
- Victor Frankenstein of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein never stops complaining to the reader about his miserable fate and how depressed he is, despite the fact that his creation is far worse off and doesn't whine half as much. This may be done intentionally as a form of dramatic irony: the monster is a far deeper and more relatable character than the one-dimensional humans (except Frankenstein himself, who is quite well developed — albeit not very sympathetic).
- It isn't "dramatic irony" ("dramatic irony" is when the audience perceives irony the character doesn't, because the audience knows something the character doesn't), it's just plain old irony, that the guy who caused the mess runs away, making an even bigger mess, and then complains about how wretched his situation is, when the true victim tries to cope the best he can, and complains very little.
- Stephen R. Donaldson's characters, especially Thomas Covenant, are frequently accused of this; Donaldson loves to put his characters through hell so he can watch them suffer, but sometimes they just Wangst because they can.
- Covenant does backslide a bit in the Second Chronicles because a whole new crop of bad stuff happens to him, and new protagonist Linden Avery gets into it a bit as well. Of course, Lord Foul seems to like deliberately cultivating Wangst in people as a means of pushing them past the Despair Event Horizon, and both Covenant and Linden get over it for good in White Gold Wielder. Not that there's not angst in the Third Chronicles, mind- it's just not as intense as it was earlier, and therefore is more bearable and relatable.
- A vast quantity of Shakespearean characters:
- Romeo in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is first introduced wangsting over Rosaline dumping him and being told by the other characters to snap out of it, with mentions of him shutting himself up entirely in his room and closing the windows. And the Star Crossed Romance that leads to suicide is not even an issue yet!
- The award for Self Obsessed, Mopey Git has to be shared between Duke Orsino of Twelfth Night and Antonio, the Merchant of Venice.
- The black-clad Hamlet at the start of the play: you can barely turn a page without someone telling him he's not the first person to lose a father and to just get over it already.... all this before any mention of murder. Cheer up, melancholy kid. Hamlet is upset not because his father is dead, but because the people who should miss him most (his widow and his brother) are instead married within a month of the funeral. However, there's plenty of wangst in Hamlet's relationship to Ophelia - "I never gave you love letters. Wait, yes I did. You're dumping me? Not if I dump you first! WOMEN ARE WHORES!" Then, at her funeral, "I miss her more than anyone else possibly could! Including you, Laertes! How dare you get offended that I'm directly responsible for the death of your father and sister!" Granted, he's been through a lot of stress up to that point, but one would hope a thirty year old prince would be a bit more composed when dealing with relationships than a hormonal teenager... oh, right.
- Considering the dim view of the Danish shared by the English at the time the play was written, it's suspected that Hamlet really * is* supposed to come off as whiny as he does now and that the entire chain of events was a Take That on the Danes.
- Hamlet's mention of 'antic disposition' in Act 1 Scene 5 also makes this more understanding when you realise he was at least partially acting crazy so that his Uncle/King wouldn't suspect him of plotting murder. It didn't work.
- He's probably emotionally stunted
- Rand al'Thor in The Wheel Of Time books (the earlier ones anyway) acts like this a lot. What he angsts about? Women dying because of him. Never mind that the women in question are soldiers and that they themselves don't mind risking their lives. It would be far less annoying if he would angst over the many things that he would be justified in dwelling over in such a fashion. Maybe he focuses on the lesser reasons to angst to avoid thinking too much on the mountainous problems and depressing path in front of him.
- The titular character of the Dexter books sometimes toes the angst/wangst line with his internal monologues about his inability to feel emotions, the idiocy of the human race, and the trials he is forced through by those around him. For the most part, however, his dry sense of humor and lack of actual grief (see also his inability to feel emotions) keep him from straying.
- Parodied in Don Quixote, when the titular ingenious Hidalgo decides to express his lovelorn grief by going crazy in the wilderness for several days. This is a homage to Orlando Furioso, who previously did the same thing (also parodically), though at least Orlando the character was being genuine. Quixote just thought it would be a pretty good idea.
- In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, romantic, emotional Marianne Dashwood's response to her woes in love (which are at least genuine, if partially her own fault and resulting from her own headstrong nature and lack of restraint or moderation) is to loudly and frequently bemoan how pained and unhappy she is, which makes her come across as wangsty and self-obsessed, especially in contrast with her sister Elinor's much more restrained, dignified and rational-minded response to her own equally genuine romantic misfortunes (which eventually prompts a rather barbed condemnation on this point from Elinor when Marianne makes the mistake of criticising Elinor's 'lack of feeling' once too often). Marianne eventually comes to realize that her wangsting is merely self-indulgent and unhelpful, particularly after she almost dies from a dose of pneumonia received after a wangsty, self-pity induced walk in a rainstorm, an over-dramatic response she realizes with shame would have done nothing but brought pain to those who love her.
- Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series has a nasty habit of this. To be fair, things really are pretty bad for the characters and the world they are in. It wasn't too bad until the very latest installments, where not only did several characters (* cough* Seren Pedac * cough* Nimander Golit * cough* ) complain all the time (sometimes just to themselves in their heads, but still) but they repeated each and every problem every time the characters reappeared in the story. We get it already! SHUT UP for gods' sake!
- Somewhat lampshaded with the Tiste Andii, who are explicitly said to have Wangst as their Hat. But the lampshading is (perhaps unwittingly) subverted, since the Tiste Andii turn out to be no more Wangsty than everybody else.
- Lestat in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series. And Rice herself when a number of Amazon.com reviewers dared criticize Blood Canticle.
- And then she found God. (And yes Lestat wangsts but nowhere near as much as Louis. Dear god, Louis... In fact Lestat even lampshades the fact that he acts like a petulant spoilt child a good deal of the time and thoroughly enjoys doing it (note that he has the most optimistic point of view of all the vampires... which says a lot)).
- Garth Ennis brilliantly parodied the Wangsty Lestat in Preacher.
- Flinx, the main recurring protagonist of Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series, has developed a number of character flaws that may be irritating to long time readers of the novels. Foremost among these is his habit of indulging in bouts of near suicidal depression over the fact that he's not a normal human. That and his gradual conclusion that Humans Are Bastards, a Love Interest he was forced to leave behind, half of the known universe seeking to arrest or kill him, the other half trying to make him into a Chosen One to combat an Ultimate Evil, and most recently, the revelation that he doesn't have a real genetic mother or father. These things might make anyone a bit depressed, but he luxuriates in it to the point where one sometimes wishes the author would wrap up the series just to stop the whining. Even his ship's computer tells him to lighten up.
- A Song of Ice and Fire has Dolorous Edd, whose habit of lamenting about how awful things are is played for laughs. It's funny cause it's true.
- Although he doesn't angst so much as display his cynicism: "We'll fight till the last man standing!" "Probably me."
- Jon Snow in Game of Thrones embodies this. He'd really like to tell you about his miserable childhood and his mean step mom. Then he learns that he had it much better than 99.9% of Westeros and grows up.
- Many fans also feel that Catelyn Stark is guilty of gratuitous wangst, as she spends a lot of time in Book 2 and Book 3 reflecting on her grief and sorrow.
- To be fair, as far as she knew her husband and four of her five children had been murdered. And she was powerless to enact any sort of vengeance.
- Lilly Bart from House Of Mirth. Seriously, after three hundred pages of uninterrupted self-absorbed wangsting, many readers are so irritated that they actually cheer her on when she finally gets around to offing herself.
- Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion is a being who is repeatedly incarnated in different worlds and times, fighting a never-ending battle to maintain the Balance of the multiverse; doomed to never rest, to never cease fighting, to see his friends and loved ones die or worse (often by his own hand), and to never know any lasting peace as he wades through rivers of blood. Mercifully, most if his incarnations are blissfully unaware of this destiny; and therefore their angst over their grim and brutal lives is generally justified, if somewhat enhanced by gothic levels of pretension. One incarnation however, John Daker aka Erekose, is fully aware of his destiny and every single one of his incarnations. While this could be considered justification for epic levels of whinging, being Cursed with Awesome (or Blessed with Suck depending on how you look like it), he turns it Up to Eleven.
- In The Great Divorce, many of the damned are wangsty—it's that self-centered wangst that keeps them from looking outside of themselves for redemption. The Tousle-Headed Poet sees himself as a misunderstood genius whom the whole universe has it in for, the Dwarf-And-Tragedian ghost has a long habit of wangsting for emotional blackmail purposes, and there is a grumbling ghost who may be redeemable or may be no more than a perpetual motion wangst machine at this point — we never find out.
- Heavily lampshaded in Lirael. Depending on who you ask, Sam, Lirael, or both can be viewed as wangsty. However, Lirael has bite scars from the last time she started contemplating suicide, since the Disreputable Dog was not amused. Sam just had to cope with absolutely caustic sarcasm from Mogget when he got too obnoxious.
- Most of the works of Lord Byron. Manfred is a particularly whiny example, and gets even worse if you know the Reality Subtext behind his (literal) Byronic Hero.
- Don Juan manages to avoid this, although once again, knowing the Reality Subtext may spoil a bit of the ultra-cynical satire.
- The titular protagonist of Honor Harrington novels tends to Wangst a lot about the fact that War Is Hell and the burden of responsibility she carries as a commander. You expect, that 14 volumes of interstellar carnage should be enough to develop a more detached attitude, or even - considering, how often her subordinates tend to die horribly around her - outright sociopathy and hatred towards the enemy. But no.
- Anita Blake goes on endlessly about her father remarrying after her mother's death, mostly because the new stepmother was blond and she and Anita's blond dad made some blond children, so poor dark-haired Anita looked like she didn't belong (this being the reason adult Anita has a pronounced aversion to blond women which is -subjectively- obvious despite her refusal to admit it). Also Anita insists that her stepmother didn't like her because she looked like her mother.
- The series Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing has this. In the second book, Peter (repeatedly) threatens to run away, first after being told that his mother's pregnant, and second upon being told they're moving to New Jersey for a year. Somewhat justified in that he also has to put up with an Annoying Younger Sibling on a daily basis. And the fact that, well, he's nine years old.
- Eragon of Inheritance Cycle Wangst's quite a bit about Murtagh joining the enemy. And when he is told in Brisingr that his father was really his mentor, Brom.
- Sara in My Sister's Keeper does this a lot. All she ever talked about from when Kate was diagnosed to when Anna sued them was how sick Kate was. Lampshaded when her sister Zanne says, "You can't be a mother all the time," and Sara mistakes her for saying "You can't be a martyr all the time."
- The main character from Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, a backbone of the German literary canon, is infamous for his extreme wangst (the wangst has its source in a love triangle, and, in the end, leads him to commit suicide).
- While wangst is the second-most common element in most Orson Scott Card books, Ender Wiggin takes the cake. Any less than completely purehearted action he takes, no matter how minor*
like being rude to Bean or justified * Like killing Bonzo in self defense , causes him to fret for days that he's just like his sadistic sociopath older brother, Peter.
- The main character from A Great And Terrible Beauty becomes this. The main character complains about everything: her mother died, her father is addicted to laudanum and she can't be with her romantic interest because she's cursed with being nobility. she's then shipped off to a boarding school for girls, the headmistress is domineering, she discovers she has magical powers, she and her friends accompany her on a series of dangerous adventures through a fantasy world, all before returning to school in the morning. Whines all the while.
- The new book Shatter Me, and the taglines aren't afraid to tell you that.
Live Action TV
- In season 1 of Smallville, Lana seemed incapable of getting through a scene without mentioning her pancaked parents. Actually, both Lana and Clark seem to suffer from perpetual Wangst in recent seasons as well.
- Recent seasons? That implies there was a season when they weren't suffering from perpetual Wangst. It's low-grade most of the time, but then Clark gets an opportunity to stare soulfully at Lana, and without him even saying anything, the Wangst just starts dribbling out of the screen. Makes a real mess on the carpet.
Chloe: Gosh, Clark, I didn't realize super-whining was one of your powers.
- Lex Luthor runs on this. At first he was a Jerkass Woobie, but eventually his use of "my dad was mean to me" as an excuse for some pretty horrible crimes wore very thin. Even after becoming a pure evil supervillain, he still tries to put the blame for his actions on other people. Its Never My Fault when you're Lex Luthor, boys and girls.
- Which is actually a pretty good deconstruction of the comicsverse Luthor's Magnificent Bastard-ness. In the comics, Lex continually lays the blame for his own evil on Superman, claiming that if Clark/Supes wasn't around to "distract" him, he'd be able to use his genius to lead mankind into a utopia. In 52 (i.e. a year where Superman was nowhere to be found), it turns out to be Blatant Lies. Lex is still just as evil. Of course, Lex tries to explain this as well by claiming that Superman has "ruined" him.
- Malcolm in Malcolm in the Middle.
- Pretty much every character in New Zealand teen series The Tribe seems to have a "Wangst" moment... Trudy being the worst, but Bray and Amber also lay it on pretty thick. Admittedly everyone's parents have died, there are various tribes attacking/trying to take over, Trudy herself has most likely got PND, and they are all a bunch of hormonal teens forced to live together, but the things they tend to dwell on are who's sleeping with who and whose turn it is to do the washing up.
- Whip-Snap in the second season of Who Wants To Be A Superhero was constantly going on and on about how hard her real life is and how much pressure she's under. Eventually the rest of the contestants grew tired of it, and Stan Lee finally eliminated her for not being able to get over it and deal with the situation.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel sometimes (or often, depending on just how unsympathetic you feel) wobbled into 'wangst' territory - this is largely down to every single character suffering through miserable family lives AND unhappy romances, main characters dropping like flies throughout, and a great emphasis placed on how the main characters were either Blessed with Suck or Cursed with Awesome, thus raising the question at times of whether any of the main characters were capable of experiencing joy (in fact, one character was incapable of experiencing true joy lest he turn evil. Hoo boy.). Season Six of Buffy in particular is often criticized because of this.
- Lampshaded in one episode of season 7 when Faith and Buffy talk about their "curse" of being slayers and Faith ends the discussion by commenting that they're currently complaining about being "two hot chicks with superpowers".
- Somewhat averted by Xander Harris. He frequently alludes to members of his family being dysfunctional, neglectful, and argumentative but he always does this humorously.
- Doubly impressive when you consider that one scene of a dream sequence suggests that his father is violently abusive.
- Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. In the final season of Highlander: The Series, no doubt many fans were rooting for the Big Bad Immie to take Duncan's head and put them out of his misery.
- It might have helped if the writers had stopped kicking his dog. Like accidentally, and partially through his own foolishness, ending up beheading a young man he loved like a son, for instance. Perhaps the real reason the show was canceled was that with his personality (read: tendency to internalizing blame) they couldn't keep kicking him forever without having him go round the twist and lose the will to live. Several characters on the show were canonically worried that this exact thing might happen.
- Amber in Big Brother 8 was really going into this. It is worth noting that she actually was a former meth-user (You know, that stuff inflicts permanent brain damage) but still, she did have a tendency to cry over everything.
- The Cartoon Network live action movie The Haunting Hour had the main character, a goth, sit in her room and listening to depressing music for hours while staring off into space because she dropped food on herself at school. Later, when she's asked to take her brother trick or treating, she sulks while the soundtrack plays the lyrics Walking down the street alone. Everything I've ever loved is gone gone gone.. Perhaps one of the most extreme examples on this page.
- Every teen drama ever made has Wangst as its bread and butter.
- Played for laughs in Being Human, when we find out that George and Mitchell really, really love The Real Hustle. So much so, that one wonders about their sanity even as one is laughing about it. Cannot be described, has to be seen to be experienced.
- The new series of Doctor Who has been accused of this trope, particular with regards to the Time War and the Doctor's trauma resulting from it. This is an example where Your Mileage May Vary greatly; on one hand, he did wipe out his entire race, thus making introspective angst a reasonable reaction to such a trauma. On the other, the series does tend to linger on it quite a lot, and this is quite a drastic shift in attitude from the old series (which tended to adopt more of an Angst? What Angst? approach), which can make it irritating and distracting for those who don't care for this approach.
- A shipping version arguably occurred in season three, in which the Doctor remained hung up on the loss of Rose and Martha obsessed over his lack of interest in her. Averted by the end of the series, however, in which Martha accepts that she's a rebound companion and leaves without bitterness to sort herself out; later appearances suggest that she's over the Doctor. The Doctor, for his part, is also much better about it, though he also got a chance to properly let her go at the end of Series 4.
- The Tenth Doctor's final moments in "The End Of Time" have also been accused of this trope (again, as with what seems to be a lot regarding this Doctor, it's a Your Mileage May Vary thing). On one hand, the Tenth Doctor was a very popular Doctor who arguably deserved a big final send-off, like the one he got. On the other, it’s been suggested that his send-off was still a bit melodramatic, contrived and emotionally manipulative. On yet another hand, it's his own death he's facing — and the fact that he receives a brief Hope Spot beforehand It's not, as he thinks, the returning Time Lords that end up doing him in, but the fact that his companion Wilf accidentally lets himself get locked in a radiation chamber that the Doctor can't release him from without getting himself killed — doesn't help matters, which would make anyone upset. On still another hand, his previous selves had — by this episode’s logic — also faced their own deaths and yet managed to do so with less overt and loudly expressed self-pity and angst. On still yet another hand, they didn't have as long as Ten did to have to face the fact that they were going to die... the argument goes back and forth over this one and isn’t likely to be resolved soon. *
- Likely as a result of a new show runner, this is quite consciously subverted once the Eleventh Doctor shows up. He sees the Time War and other assorted wangsty subjects as something that happened literally a lifetime or two ago and which he's ready to move past.
- Perhaps a better description, at least into season 6 at least, is that the Doctor is still deeply hurt and angry at himself for what he did, but he acts with less moping, but a Stepford Smiler act, and taking anger out on others. Matt Smith said that he had to act happy and cheerful and "put on a silly hat, otherwise he'd hang himself."
- Said show runner has form for parodying and subverting this:
Kathy Nightingale: What did you come here for anyway?
Sally Sparrow: I love old things. They make me feel sad.
Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad?
Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.
- In Red Dwarf Arnold Rimmer's constant Wangst is used to underscore what a generally unsympathetic and unlikeable character he is; he's constantly heard whining about his past (about how his parents didn't love him and everyone picked on him or held him back, how he never got the right breaks in life, how girls didn't like him, how he's dead, etc), but whilst there are some elements of his past for which you can't help but feel sympathy towards him about, it's immediately clear to everyone around him that Rimmer's complete refusal to shut the hell up and get over it, even after his death, is just an attempt by him to use his wretched past as an excuse not to deal with any of his failings, even those that are entirely his own fault. Furthermore, his past is never used to excuse his cowardly, snide and self-serving actions in the present, and he is justifiably despised by almost every character on the show as a consequence.
- Rimmer's wangst is most clearly juxtaposed against the existence of his alternate self, "Ace" Rimmer (what a guy!), who had exactly the same background that Rimmer did except for one key element and yet ultimately became a noble, heroic, successful, attractive, likable and modest individual — Rimmer's exact opposite, in fact. True to form, Rimmer used this as an excuse for yet more bitter whining about how that this was a clear illustration of what he could have achieved had he received the 'break' his alternate self had received, unaware that the 'break' was actually the alternate Rimmer being kept down for a year at school, when Rimmer himself was allowed to move up:
Ace: By his terms, he got the break. But being kept down made me. The humiliation. Being the tallest boy in the class by a clear foot. It made me knuckle down, fight back. And I've been fighting back ever since.
Lister: While he's spent the rest of his life making excuses.
Ace: ... Perhaps he's right. Perhaps I did get the break.
- The first Red Dwarf novel states that much of Rimmer's problem is that he is/was trying to become a successful ship officer like his siblings have all become. The core of the problem is that he simply has no aptitude or even real interest in doing so. He just keeps trying because it's what he think he has to do - partially because his mother was so proud of his siblings. If he'd chosen a different career he'd likely have ended up happier and more successful.
- This may also be a subversion or at least a hard ball play upon this Trope. Remember, these very qualities are the very reason Rimmer was chosen to be Lister's companion as opposed to, let's say, Kristine Kochanski.
- Then again, Rimmer was chosen after a probability study performed by an AI who'd spent 3 million years effectively alone, and by all accounts (his own included) had gone computer senile. And in the novelisation we find out that he hadn't even made said probability study, and merely lied to Lister when he asked about it.
- Parodied on The Young Ones - it's not entirely clear why Neil, the whining, sullen and passive-aggressive hippy with a martyr complex and suicidal tendencies is so miserable all the time (although the fact that he's the house's dogsbody and whipping boy doesn't help), but he's constantly found moping around the house complaining about his lot in life - and not one person sympathises with him (or even pays attention most times). He's also determined to make sure that his housemates know that out of all of them, he has the most wretched life; typically, his response to the news that both parents of one of his housemates had died in a sudden accident was to moan "You think that's bad?"
- The Naked Brothers Band uses this constantly. Honestly, no 9-year-old boy would be that melodramatic.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a tendency to labour over the personal issues of the detectives with the crimes they're investigating roughly every episode. Granted, investigating sex crimes isn't exactly going to be fun, but for all the angsting that the characters seem to do about it, you really start to wonder why they haven't just decided to transfer out for the sake of their own sanity, since every single character seems to have a special and personal reason to angst about almost every single case they'll ever come across. At times this also makes you wonder why they haven't been forcibly reassigned, as there are practical and reasonable ethical concerns about having detectives investigate crimes towards which they feel a significant emotional attachment to. The show also has a tendency to lay it on thick, as well.
- IRL, agents assigned to the FBI's serial killer unit are regularly rotated out to work on other categories of crime for a while before being rotated back in, for precisely this reason.
- Depending on your point of view, Supernatural can veer into this territory an awful lot of the time. Despite being hailed as a show about two brothers who hunt down demons and promising "No Chick-Flick moments", it's actually got two leads with two entirely different flavors of massive daddy issues, with the potential to cross the line between justifiable violence and just plain nastiness (especially to each other), an intense to the point of being unhealthy belief that the other is the only person they can count on being there, and a whole heap of different problems not to mention often-suicidal, martyred natures. Talk about false advertising, huh?
- Of course, this is something that TPTB carefully monitor. After hearing too many complaints about how one of the lead characters was wangsting (for being depressed after suffering 40 years in Hell, 30 of them unending torture), they brought in a new character to tell him to buck up. The fans who had complained about the "waangst" were quite pleased, right up until we discovered that this new character was brought in as a 'villain' who didn't understand humanity and was generally a jackass. Nice parallel to make, huh? And now two seasons afterward, Dean and Sam have developed into bonafide jerkasses to offset their waaaangtsy-ness, though at least Sam has an excuse. When the TPTB said they wanted the Winchesters to go back the way they were in the beginning, no one thought they meant back to being jerkasses. Perhaps the wangst would have been preferable. Or not.
- To be fair, they seem to have accomplished the feat of returning them back to their old selves as of Season 7. After years of suffering, the Winchesters have reached the point where they feel like themselves again, with Sam back to being the Luke Skywalker figure to Dean's Han Solo. Explicitly stated by Sam in one episode.
- A couple characters on Heroes do this. By far the worst offender is Claire Bennet, her ability is regeneration, and she cries about it nearly all throughout season one, mourning how she's the freakshow of the cheerleaders, despite the fact that nobody except for a very select few friends, and family knows about her ability, nor is her ability all that apparent. Then in season two, it gets even worse, because she cries that she can't go around showing her ability and how restrained she feels. Nevermind the fact that the only way to show her ability to others is by injuring herself. Nevermind the fact that all she has to do in order to avoid suspicion is lay off her masochistic tendencies. Then she cries the company might find her, because they'll run tests on her and stuff, poking and prodding her. She cries about this too, even though it seems that's all she wants to do to herself, seriously if you find an episode with Claire in it that doesn't involve a suicide attempt or self mutilation, you get a cookie.
- In Spaced, Tim's angst about his selfish, adulterous girlfriend dumping him and kicking him out of the flat was often comically amped up to Wangst levels, as he was at times almost ludicrously self-pitying and miserable about the decline of a relationship that was, by all evidence, doomed to failure from the start. He gradually gets over it in the first season and, when given the chance to get back together with her, decides to move on instead.
- Brian's entire character is also pretty much based on this, as is his entire motivation for his art; he's constantly in a state of brooding, wired angst, but it's never actually certain why. It even seems that overblown wangst is his muse, since when he's happy and dating, he finds his inspiration drying up.
- Played for laughs in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, in which Marenghi's character on the show is frequently described as a 'brilliant but troubled doctor'; the (deliberately) poor quality of the writing means that this usually translates to him constantly wangsting about something or other, and since he's the Canon Sue everyone else falls over themselves to accommodate him.
- As one would expect soap operas live off of this trope. One particularly notable example was Belle Black from Days of Our Lives, who seemed to have wangst about everything, even events in storylines that only remotely affected her. One notable instance of Belle's wangst was when her father's best friend Abe Carver was presumed murdered: Despite previously being the show's poster child for abstinence (even having a purity ring) she suddenly became determined to lose her virginity out of fear that she would die before ever having sex. Her issues seemed trivial compared to the grief that others were experiencing over Abe's death. Eventually, Belle's wangst was lampshaded in a fantasy that Belle's mother Marlena had in which Marlena shot Belle's then boyfriend (now husband) Shawn:
Marlena: (to Belle) Stop it, Belle, stop it! Stop whining! Ever since you were a baby your whining drove me crazy!
- Thirtysomething was about Baby Boomers. Wangst abounds out of every pore.
- Everyone who loses on American Idol. Nuff' said.
- Applies to most other countries' Idol programs, too. There was a joke in Australia that (runner-up) Shannon Noll had done a (dire) cover version of What About Me because he lost. After swearing up and down that he would be bankrupt and on the street if he lost, he's now become moderately successful despite being almost universally despised by critics.
- Andy Millman in Extras, particularly in the second series and the Christmas special; okay, the television show he'd dreamed about writing and directing ended up being riddled with ill-advised Executive Meddling and broad humour that he didn't appreciate, but for someone who was quickly catapulted into wealth and celebrity, he sure spent a lot of time whining about it. This was increasingly lampshaded throughout the show, however, with one of his less successful friends pointing out that the show and fame he spent so much time bitching about had enabled him to buy a nice big house and made him a household name, so it wasn't that bad; he ignored her at the time. A certain degree of hypocrisy was also noted by some characters, with it being readily apparently that for all his whining about having to sell out to be famous, he was quite happy to sell out even more in order to become more famous. By the end of the series Andy decided to get over himself.
- Kate, from the BBC's Robin Hood, is still wangsting about her dead "bruthah" long after everyone else has ceased to care. Made especially irritating considering it was her own stupidity that directly led to his death, and because two other outlaws (Allan and Djaq) also had their brothers killed by the regime/war. However, they only ever discussed their grief with each other, in private.
- The amount of angst on Lost concerning the Jack/Kate/Sawyer/Juliet love quadrangle can get a bit ridiculous at times, especially since these characters are facing worse situations daily while being stranded on a desert island with hostile natives and all they can do is mope around like hormonal teenagers. Television Without Pity summed it nicely in the recap of the season three episode "I Do", after Jack sees Kate and Sawyer together on the Others' security monitor:
It's kind of funny to me that this seems to be the worst thing that's happened to Jack on this island, like, "Must escape from Others' prison, and... wait, no way! Kate and Sawyer?? Oh, f** k!"
- Not to mention Sawyer himself. Most members of his (pretty justified) hatedom point out that despite everyone on the island having some horrifically tragic past, Sawyer is the only one who whines and bitches about it constantly.
- Chuck is pretty much the epitome of this trope. In every single episode he whines about how he has to do some minor task to save the world because it gets in the way of him having a normal life or a girlfriend.
- Most of these "minor" tasks have the potential, if they went wrong, to get him captured, tortured and/or killed, to be fair.
- The real source of Wangst on Chuck in the eyes of many fans were the seemingly-endless scenes in Season 2 and ESPECIALLY Season 3 where way too many episodes would end with Chuck and Sarah, who still hadn't gotten together despite their attraction to each other being obvious to everyone and their mother, staring mournfully at each other from a distance while any of several virtually-identical songs (generally featuring a whiny singer crooning over a painfully-slow acoustic guitar riff) played solemnly in the background. Then one of the two would turn away from the other and walk away, giving up yet another chance to get together and put the Strangled by the Red String plot to an end. Needless to say, when Chuck and Sarah finally got together, it was most definitely an And the Fandom Rejoiced moment for many reasons.
- In Medium, the husband character wangsts it out all the time. Almost every single episode, he blows up at Alison about how life is so hard and confusing because his family feels the need to act on dreams and premonitions that are, in this universe, totally true. And every single time, logic pwns his whining.
- He's justified in the fact that it's got to be hard knowing that you children are constantly dreaming about people being murdered.
- Besides, Allison constantly blows him off or upends her responsibilities onto him whenever something else comes up, despite the fact that he has a job too.
- If ever a character's griping, in the history of TV spouses, is justified, it's his.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sisko did some borderline wangsting over the unfairness of the Dominion War, even going so far as to consider resigning from Starfleet. Ok, sure all of that would really suck, but whining a lot wasn't going to stop the war. Same thing with all his complaining about being Emissary.
- Also on Deep Space Nine, the Bajorans had a legitimate reason to be angsty, as their victimization at the hands of the Cardassians was nothing short of a Holocaust. However, when practically every Bajoran that walks across the screen spews a combination of angst and sense of entitlement, it gets to the point where the viewer cringes every time a character pops up sporting nose ridges.
- On a similar note, in Voyager Harry never shut up about getting home and how much the Delta Quadrant sucked.
- To be fair, Harry was the show's Butt Monkey and tended to be killed or almost killed every episode.
- On Gilmore Girls, Rory spent a few episodes Wangsting over wanting to be in a relationship with Handsome Lech Logan Huntzberger. Yes, the relationship eventually happened but it was so out of character for her to even pursue Logan, who she hated upon meeting. This is after she completely derailed Dean's marriage and then left him without a second thought.
- Meredith Grey in Grey's Anatomy does this all over the place. She whines to no end about her boyfriend "cheating" on her with his wife and throughout that very long storyline continues to act like Addison has wronged her and not the other way around. Nowadays she finds time feeling incredibly sorry for herself because she has to do such things as * gasp* go out to dinner with her husband, or show up for a brunch held in his honor.
- Okay, arguably there is a whole freaking truckload of wangst in Grey's Anatomy, but I wouldn't name Meredith as the biggest offender by any stretch of the imagination. If memory serves, she's friends with Addison by the end of season 3 (and she and Derek were separated in season 1 (because she slept with his best friend)). She certainly does wangst but so does everyone on this show, and she isn't the worse by a long shot.
- It depends on the season. Every character on Grey's Anatomy is an emotionally stunted teenager, so it's hard to judge who is the worst. Certainly Meredith got pretty wangsty when she couldn't sleep after breaking up with a guy and sort of/maybe/kind of tried to commit suicide. She's gotten a lot better.
- In an excellent aversion, despite a dysfunctional childhood, an absent father and two failed marriages, Castle is sweetly upbeat about everything. And his Action Girl, Atonement Detective partner and love interest Beckett is remarkably un-wangsty too. This show is often compared to Bones - on the wangst stakes, Bones is much, much worse, despite the characters sharing similar problems. Brennan and Beckett both suffered the death of a mother and the neglect of a father, but while Beckett deals with it, Bones goes all No Social Skills on our asses.
- Rachel Berry from Glee. Although she had every single female solo, she quit the Glee club in the fourth episode because one song as given to another girl, and then claimed that "Everyone else is getting something by being there. Except me."
- Also, in another episode, Rachel wants to sing "Defying Gravity", but Will makes her audition when Kurt, who has never had a solo before, also wants to audition for it. Rachel then accuses Will of doing this just to ruin her life.
- This could be intended, in that the show clearly establishes her character as being a notably highly-strung prima donna and drama queen. And, of course, on top of that she's a teenager.
- Degrassi does just about everything you can do with this trope.
- Ally McBeal oh so very much when it comes to the love life of any of the main cast members.
- Parodied in Blackadder, where the great poets of the Regency era — Byron, Shelly and Coleridge — are shown to be a group of maudlin proto-Emos who spend their time moping around Mrs. Miggins' coffee shop pretending they're dying.
- Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks really takes this Beyond the Impossible. The man is mourning the brutal murder of his daughter, which happened only days ago, and he's still so over the top about it (running around a dance floor begging someone to dance with him as he'd planned to do with his daughter, for one of the more notable examples) that you constantly want to tell him to get the hell over himself.
- Spoiler: In retropsect, once you know that he killed her, but while he was possessed by an evil spirit, you don't know what is really happening in those scenes. You don't know whether he is still possessed by the spirit, who is trying to act out appropriate fatherly grief, but really doesn't know what he's doing, or whether Leland has some memory of his body physically killing his daughter, without being entirely aware of what happened, and it's making him literally crazy, so he's acting crazy— not just grief-stricken, but crazy.
- Torchwood had instances of this with Owen. The final story arch in season one was driven by Owen's angsting after a Girl of the Week who had dumped him. And even though he has legitimate reasons to angst in season two (undeath), he responded to this by being particularly nasty to people that cared for him and were trying to reach out to them, and whom were treated pretty badly to begin with.
- Then there was Ianto, who earned a lot of hatred early in the first season for keeping his cyberwoman girlfriend in the basement, and then bitching about the fact Cap'n Jack had to kill her for several episodes afterwards. He got over it eventually, but there were a lot of people wishing he'd just STFU for a long while.
- Emma and Cleo in the first season of H2O - Just add water. They whine all the time about being mermaids, Emma complaining that it's ruined her career as school swim champion and Cleo because she can't go to a pool party. Rikki calls them out on this in the second episode.
Rikki: You two are unbelievable. Look at yourselves. (To Cleo) You're drinking water from mid-air! (To Emma) And you just made an instant ice-pop. Anybody else would love to do that. You've both got these amazing powers and all you do is whinge, whinge, whinge"
In Cleo's case, it's a little justified since she has a fear of water and can't swim. She gets over it pretty early in the series but the majority of Emma's plots are her whining about how being a mermaid sucks for her. And she was the one who loved swimming so much in the first place.
- Prue slipped into this a lot in Charmed. Most notable was when the Angel of Death showed up and Prue became convinced she was meant to stop him and started wangsting about her mother's death when it happened years ago and she'd never bitched about it before. Then there's all her daddy issues.
- Piper fell into this as well in later seasons but she had a better reason than Prue given that her husband was forced to leave her, she was raising two children by herself and had demons attacking her every other day.
- Boy Meets World had some of this when it got more serious in the later seasons, mainly from Shawn. While Shawn had a lot of bad things happen to him over the course of the series, he still got quite whiny sometimes during this period, especially over his relationship with Angela in season six. He gets over it, though.
- Played for Laughs in Friends after Ross's second wife leaves him. He briefly hooks up with annoying recurring character Janice, only to whine so much that even SHE can't stand him. This ends up snapping him out of his funk.
Music
- Simple Plan. Dear LORD, Simple Plan.
- Seriously, here are the rest of the lyrics to "Welcome to My Life." Alas, we will never know why the guy in that song is hurting so deep inside, because the most specific it gets is when he asserts that "you" won't understand because "No one ever lied straight to your face, no one ever stabbed you in the back." Really? REALLY?
- This Tropers mom has described their songs as "La la la, my life sucks, la la la, I hate everything, la la la!"
- Almost every song by the band Linkin Park pre-Minutes to Midnight can be summed up in six words: "WHY DIDN'T YOU LOVE ME DADDY?!"
- Kelly Clarkson: Most of the songs she's done are break up songs, or you don't love me songs, or please love me songs, or you haven't loved me enough, or why did you let me be the other women and go back to your estranged wife songs.
- Avril Lavigne: Particularly in Under My Skin she borderline whinges
- JoJo. Evident in her first singles off her albums, always a song always about a break up. Borderlines on Creator Breakdown and Strictly Formula.
- "Fairy Tales" is worst, she was 12 when she recorded a song about how she shall never love again and her entire faith in aforementioned fairy tales is shot. She was 13 when it was released. Most 13 year old don't even think seriously about relationships, never mind the "Ooh one relationship is blown, I shall die alone" melodramatics.
- Thank goodness for They Might Be Giants, who usually play this sort of thing for laughs. Listen to the Lyrical Dissonance of They'll Need a Crane or Narrow Your Eyes and you'll see what I mean.
- TMBG still manage to have some very dark, disturbing, and/or depressing lyrics in their happy, boppy songs. Museum of Idiots probably takes the grand prize: "Chop me up into pieces, if it pleases, if it pleases. And when the chopping is through, every piece will say 'I love you'." Squickworthy.
- As does "Weird Al" Yankovic, most notable with "Angry White Boy Polka".
- There's also "Why Does This Always Happen To Me?" where he complains at length about being temporarily inconvenienced by other people's misfortunes. By that we mean, "My friend was decapitated in a car wreck. Now I'll never get back those five bucks he owes me!"
- And British comedian / musician Bill Bailey, who often skewers the 'self-pitying whine' inherent in much rock music today, as such:
You picked me up from school
You attended all my sporting functions
You bought me a car
Gave me use of a credit card
But how can I feel pain,
How can I feel pain,
How can I feel pain
When you're being so supportive?
- And Ben Folds' "Rockin' the Suburbs". "Don't ya'll know what it's like being male, middle class, and white?"
- Tim Minchin's song "Dark Side" both mocks and deconstructs this. The bridge section in particular:
Daddy never came to my ball game.
Where were you, daddy?!
Daddy never came to my ball game.
He never loved me!
- Dashboard Confessional. Consider the following passage from the song "Hands Down".
"My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me, so won't you kill me, so I'll die happy...my heart is yours to fill or burst, to break or bury, to wear as jewelry...whichever you prefer."-Chris Carrabba, wondering why he never has any luck with women
- And this is one of his happier, less wangsty songs!
- Lucy Simon's musical version of The Secret Garden gets very wangsty, especially anytime Archibald is on stage.
- Every or almost every Enka song ever written, in particular onna uta (women's songs) and songs about sake. "Sake Yo" by Ikuzo Yoshi, tells of a guy whose lover deserted him, and so he's become an alcoholic who talks to his sake as if it were his girlfriend.
- Shakin' Stevens did a lot of wangsting over women in his songs.
- Tons of metal lyrics, when they are not about hating the world, are chock full of wangst.
- An example is power metal band Blind Guardian. Almost every song includes one or more of the words "sorrow", "misery", "pain", "despair", "tears" and so on. Especially notable because the wangsty lyrics contrast with the (by metal standards) relatively happy sound of the music itself.
- Hansi Kürsch does seem to enjoy angsting and hating the world on the behalf of the screwed-up characters of fantasy and mythology, both with Blind Guardian and Demons & Wizards; however, the prize for power metal wangst goes to Sonata Arctica. While most of their songs are depressing love songs, one of them appears to be about how Celebrity Is Overrated. They're a reasonably popular heavy metal band.
- Metallica slips into this from time to time, usually when James Hetfield writes songs about his childhood. The whole Unforgiven line of songs is an elongated whine about... something, "The Day That Never Comes" appears to be about how his father hated him and the entire St. Anger album is a therapy session turned into music.
- Tom Lehrer addresses this after one of his songs.
"One problem that recurs more and more frequently these days, in books and plays and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love: husbands and wives who can't communicate, children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books and plays and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." - Tom Lehrer
- Alice in Chains. Songs like "Down in a Hole", "Would?", "Angry Chair" feature a rather dry brand of this. However, they did occasionally play it for (very dark) laughs. Reportedly the band members found the song "Dirt" hilarious, with lyrics like "I want you to scrape me from the walls and go crazy like you've made me."
- The Offspring's song "She's Got Issues" plays wangst for laughs in an attempt to make fun of people who blame all their problems on external influences and don't try to get over them.
- "Institutionalized" by Suicidal Tendencies is a parody of this.
- Several songs from Counting Crows's latest album, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, particularly the "Sunday Mornings" part. In fairness there were some real-life reasons behind this - and as many songs in "Saturday Nights" amount to "life sucks - let's party!".
- A lot of the criticism directed towards My Chemical Romance is because of this. Mostly because one or two songs will be wangsty and a suicide victim may have owned a copy of their album, however, some people will only read the song names without listening.
- Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has made a career by milking the teen angst bullshit for all it's worth.
- His later work is decidedly less wangsty and more aggressive, and a fair bit more contemplative as well - he got better.
- Reznor cites Depeche Mode as a major influence during his early days. That's probably where a lot of it came from. They were criticized as early as 1983 for overdoing the teenage angst act. They went the same way as NIN, though, and matured significantly after singer Dave Gahan's suicide attempt and subsequent drug rehab.
- While Michael Jackson's childhood was fraught with overwork and abuse, and he literally did have no real privacy up to the end of his life, it didn't justify his whining about it at length and may have contributed to his career downturn. Much of the second disc of 1995's HIStory, recorded after 1993 allegations of child molestation, consists of this — particularly "Childhood", a sugary defense of his Adult Child behavior complete with such lyrics as "No one understands me" and "Before you judge me/Try hard to love me".
- Pick a song, any song, by The Smashing Pumpkins. While their songs don't tend to be along the lines of 'My daddy didn't love me so now I'm a priiiick', they're usually about how depressing it is being a popstar worth millions of dollars. The Smashing Pumpkins were made fun of for this in an episode of The Simpsons where Billy Corgan says to Homer, "We envy you, Homer. All we have is our music, our legions of fans, our million of dollars and our youth."
- Note that not all Smashing Pumpkins songs turned out like this. Some examples would be "Lily (My One and Only)" (A love song about a CAT), "Cupid De Locke" (Straight up 'Star-crossed lovers' dirge), "1979" (Nostalgic look back at your teen years), "Tonight Tonight" (Joyous celebration of being in the moment). You have to remember, just because a song sounds whiny, doesn't mean it is whiny.
- Some consider Radiohead or The Smiths to be this, but Your Mileage May Vary - with Radiohead it's usually either vague or justifiable, and Morrissey's humor keeps The Smiths from the excessiveness of other bands named.
- The members of Brand New take this trope to an at-times criminally insane level.
- Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)": Guy gets stood up at his wedding. OK, that's pretty bad, but bad enough to kill your belief in God and lead you to contemplate suicide? Then the narrator tries to reach back to find other tragedies in his life, but all he can come up with is that his parents died.
- "You Found Me" by the Fray features a suicidal narrator finding God and calling Him out for ... Letting his girlfriend break up with him and not making a personal appearance before now. Point 1: If God didn't let your girlfriend break up with you, it'd be a horrible infringement on, oh, I don't know, free will. Point 2: God's appearing to you now, Mr. Whiny Pants!
- Phil Collins. Yes, your first wife cheated on you. We get it. Get over it, please.
- Jonathan Coulton tells a girl to just get over herself in "Someone is Crazy". The song's attitude toward wangst is best summed up in the line, "You're all alone? Well, maybe that's because you're so unpleasant."
- Bob Segar's "Turn The Page" - being a pop star can't be the living fantasy some make it out to be, but surely it can't be so dirge-inducing?
- Staind has built a pretty solid career based almost exclusively on wangst based songs.
- Steve Perry of Journey. Yes, your mother died. Your girlfriend left you. You suffered burnout after Raised On Radio. You want to tour so badly. We heard you. Put out the next album already.
- Pink Floyd, especially when Roger Waters exerted complete control over the band's artistic direction.
- Personally, Chop Suey always seemed pretty damned wangsty to this troper. (Why have you forsaken me, in your eyes forsaken me, in your thoughts forsaken me, in your heart forsaken me?! Trust in my self-righteous suicide!)
- According to the band, the song is about the way people are perceived differently depending on how they die. The "Why have you forsaken me?" part is an extrapolation of one of Jesus's sayings while on the cross, along with the previous lyric, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit". So this is actually an aversion. Now, something like Lonely Day, on the other hand...
- Nirvana. Seriously, how can we forget? 99% of their songs are really just about wangst, with lyrics like "I'm worse at what I do best" and "throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back".
- Soundgarden, sometimes. Song titles like "Let Me Drown" and "Fell On Black Days" are pretty self-explanatory.
- Many songs from John Frusciante's solo works fall in this category. Your Mileage May Vary though, given the hard times he had to face in the 90s while he was an addict.
- Good Charlotte. Seriously, pick a song. With the possible exceptions of "We Believe," "Hold On," and "Emotionless" (which is actually too depressing to be wangsty) every song they sing is whining, whether about their own lives or the state of the world.
- Evanescence's songs rarely express any emotion other than over the top, melodramatic angst.
- Bruno Mars, his singing voice is rather whingy on it's own. Grenades "Why were you're eyes open". "Talking To The Moon" about a mans delusions about the end of a relationship and how he's left "Talking to the moon" and "Liquor Store Blues" about alcoholism. He just has this "Why don't you love me wahh" vibe in most of his singles.
- The Veronicas, in a strange Tropes Are Not Bad way. They're angsty teenagers/young adults and most of their songs are of the Break Up/Sanity Slippage variety, but their issues are real and they never do the "Why Don't You Love Me" thing. They never beg and always fight.
- Lampshaded when they wrote a song "Heart like a boat", which brought them joy after a while of apparently writing heavy heart break songs.
- Explained with having twice the relationships any solo musician/lead songwriter could have. Being twins and all.
Professional Wrestling
- WCW/ECW wrestler Raven dedicated his life to destroying the career of Tommy Dreamer, simply because, when they were kids, Tommy was a Jerk Jock and stole his girlfriend at summer camp. "What about me? What about Raven?!" Diamond Dallas Page had the best response ever to this brand of Wangst: "What about you?!" To be fair, though, Raven was rather consistently shown as a psychotic, misanthropic bastard who probably would hold a grudge that long.
- Bret Hart, in Kayfabe and later for real when the WWE Dropped a Bridge on Him, wangsted about getting screwed over by everyone. Someone should really tell him that wrestling isn't real.
- Mankind, before the Face Turn and Flanderization set in.
- Matt Hardy, post-Edge/Lita affair. Seriously, look at his videos on YouTube and say that I'm wrong.
Video Games
- Final Fantasy and, to a lesser extent, its sister series Kingdom Hearts are some of the best examples of just how subjective this trope can be. Both series' tendency to focus on their main casts coming to terms with their (usually severe) problems can lead to vastly different reactions from the fans as it is, due to differing levels of sympathy for the characters, and the altered characterization that tends to circulate as Fanon certainly doesn't help. Nevertheless, there are several examples which legitimately could fall into the realm of wangst:
- Cecil in Final Fantasy IV during the introduction chapter about how he killed innocent magicians for a MacGuffin, and it pisses his girlfriend off. He continues to Wangst in the DS version, though, thanks to the system that let the player to read his mind.
- He's supposed to have gotten over it when he accepts his past (instead of trying to kill it) to become a Paladin.
- Prince Edward, to the point Cecil has to uppercut him at one time.
- Vincent Valentine from Final Fantasy VII doesn't actually angst much during the game itself - however, he's found in a coffin, which he had locked himself in for several decades out of guilt. While he actually did have legitimate problems, the action itself could easily be seen as over-the-top. He also spends a good deal of time brooding in Dirge of Cerberus and he's still unsociable in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, though both show him getting over it.
- The original game's reason is because of him being a secret character plus the limited two partners head count for the party, which limit his angsty potential. He loves to put depressing things in your head when you're talking to him on the airship, though.
- Cloud's characterization in Advent Children could also be taken this way, since he spent most of the movie feeling guilty over things that had happened years ago. Tifa even takes him to task for this in the movie itself, though, and it's suggested that this is a side effect of the Cloud's Geostigma. (Considering the fact that the Geostigma is caused by JENOVA cells invading the body makes this speculation probable, as that would mean that Sephiroth could've been mentally torturing Cloud from beyond the grave.) The movie also focused more on one specific event in the game as opposed to the events he had explicitly been shown to get past. He gets over it.
- In Advent Children Complete it's brought up that Cloud's guilt is also due to him being unable to find a cure for Denzel's Geostigma, and his fear that if he can't even look after himself then he's not worthy to look after Denzel, Tifa and Marlene. So it's not just the events of the original game that's screwing with him.
- Squall has Freudian Excuse coupled with amnesia to give him an extremely anti-social personality. However, he never burdened anyone with his problems and rather than invite everyone to a pity party, he just kept them at arms length. For some players, this came off as making him so anti-social as to be unlikable and his justifications unworthy of much sympathy for his malaise. Ironically, the entire point of the game was convincing him that it really was okay to express his emotions and problems to others - though this trope would suggest that most players would find that even worse. The game also makes a running habit of other characters ribbing him for his habit of internal monologues, something the players see all the time.
- The Squall in Dissidia: Final Fantasy toys with this, though his motivations for being a loner here are ultimately proven to be more practical than simply emotional.
- Dagger in Final Fantasy IX could be a rather meta example - while going mute might be a legitimate reaction to failing to prevent the destruction of one's entire kingdom (let alone the other traumatic events she suffers through), the possibility of failing to carry out commands in an RPG is probably the fastest way to cause a "just get over it already!" reaction from the player.
- From the same game, normally upbeat hero Zidane has just one moment of true angst, after finding out what he really is, and it's played quite over-the-top and once he gets over it, it's never brought up again anyway.
- Tidus from Final Fantasy X certainly has a lot to feel legitimate angst about, his home city being destroyed by Sin, being thrown a 1000 years into the future, losing everything and everyone he's ever known, and later the fact that he's a dream of the Fayth and will disappear once they wake up after defeating Sin. He doesn't show much angst about these things, however he certainly manages to wangst about almost everything else.
- Hope in Final Fantasy XIII continues the trend of feeling sadness which is immediately declared Wangst by American and European players. Poor Hope would have been accused of wangst simply for being 14-year-old and not having slightly less emotion than Rambo. Ignoring that his mom died, he's wanted dead, the only people he's safe around are people he hates, and he's still maturing....but that's not a feasible excuse for committing the terrible crime of being 14 years old and having more than three emotions.
- Riku in Kingdom Hearts Chain Of Memories tries to actively avoid this by fighting the darkness in his heart rather than mope about it (a decision helped along by Mickey Mouse's encouragement.) However, in the end he accepts his darkness, and it causes him no end of grief. In Kingdom Hearts II, he spends the entire game missing until the end, where it's revealed that accepting the darkness has made him look like Ansem and that he's been deliberately hiding from his friends because he was convinced they wouldn't like him anymore, which naturally turns out to be completely false. And then we get the interquel between Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II, where he gets to say lines like "You could say I'm...the biggest nobody of all", with his voice now sounding remarkably similar to Cloud's...
- Sims have often been known to do this, and sometimes even mirror Real Life with how subjective this trope can be. A sim can break down and start sobbing about how they found cockroaches in their home, while another sim who sees the same situation may simply think "...it's smashing time!" and deal with it.
- Aerie of Baldur's Gate II seemed to alternate between this and a more tolerable scarred-but-workable mood, really more annoying for the arbitrary bipolarity than for the actual whining.
- Some lesser examples in this game include Jaheira, who'll have some light wangst about having to fight her former allies, the Harpers, and Anomen, who'll throw a proper hissy fit if he's not allowed to join his beloved Order (which may or may not happen depending on the actions of the player thus far).
- Averted with CHARNAME and, to a lesser extent, Imoen. Despite the fact that no one could actually blame them for wanting to curl up and die, they spend very little time moping and a lot of time getting even.
- Saruin from Romancing Sa Ga, you would think the God of Destruction would be more fear inducing, but after hearing his dialogue, some of the Heroes start considering: Why do people even fear him? Sif, Hawke, Gray, and Claudia.
- In the third chapter of Tales Of The Abyss, Luke fon Fabre begins to whine incessantly about being a replica of Asch. He develops an inferiority complex that becomes increasingly more crippling every time he runs into Asch (it doesn't help that Asch doesn't even call Luke by his name; he just calls him Replica) and has lost any and all self-confidence he once had after his atonement for being such a Jerkass in the first chapter.
- In his defense, his confidence was from that he and his group were doing something, and they were succeeding. He was changing, and they were able to help people. But the confrontation with the Big Bad at the end of the second chapter has him questioning things because he's the guy Luke looked up to for his entire life and looks down on him as dirt; indeed, his final words are along the lines of "I never thought I would be defeated by such a failure..." and ominous hysterical laughing. Then Luke's cooped up in a manor being able to do nothing for a month other than letting things stew over while everyone else is out doing something for people, and all of a sudden the things he'd thought they'd fixed aren't so fixed and are falling apart now. That makes a guy feel great.
- Addendum to the above. Most people miss this, but if you talk to the maids near the doors in Fabre manor before talking to Duke Fabre after defeating Van at Absorption Gate, most of them react towards Luke with fear and disgust. Why? Because he's a replica. So in addition to that being able to do nothing for a month, he was actively surrounded by a mostly toxic environment of people who treated him like a freak, imposter, or wild animal poised to attack. That'd do wonders for a guy's self-confidence too.
- Almost every character in Tales Of Symphonia dips into this at times, although it can be justified considering what they face, but hell, even a lot skits are depressing and they tend to show up repeatedly in a row.
- Although it comes from a lineage which has usually handled drama well, Raiden and Rose in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty were pushing it. It's nicely deconstructed in the third act though (along with everything else), giving us a disarmingly realistic look into a relationship struggling with a dark secret. In the finale, they're not rolling in clover, but ready to start putting their lives back together.
- After revealing that all the terrible things that happened to Fortune were a set-up, Magnificent Bastard Revolver Ocelot mocks her: "You were hamming it up as the tragic heroine thanks to the script that the Patriots wrote for you. Pure self-indulgence, absorbed in your own misfortune - you couldn't get enough of the drama."
- In the forth game Raiden manages the impressive feat of transforming himself into an awesome badass while STILL being incredibly wangsty. His truly epic line "It even rained the day I was born!" is already well on it's way to a meme.
- In the first game, Solid Snake had a terrible habit of using the phrase "On the battlefield, [something wangsty and nihilistic goes here]", even when it had very little to do with the actual conversation. This can at times introduce a Narmy Russian Reversal effect to the anime wangst machine. It's just mean.
- But don't worry, he's doing much better for himself in the sequel.
- Mathias Cronqvist (who later became Count Dracula) shows a considerable amount of Wangst in Castlevania Lament Of Innocence regarding his dead wife, Elizabetha, whom he obsesses over to the point of being bedridden. What's worse, his friend noble Bad Ass Leon Belmont is forced to take his beloved's life, yet he still continues his resolve for revenge. To make it even worse, it turns out that Mathias, proving himself a Diabolical Mastermind, orchestrated Leon's wife's death in an impossibly elaborate Gambit Roulette that ends up sacrificing his humanity and the lives of countless people, all just to make himself feel better by "SPITING GOD".
- Mega Man X during the seventh game. Sure, he was a bitching pacifist before, but X7 takes it to epic levels with almost every cutscene showing him wangsting over the amount of bloodshed in the world. This is all the more jarring when you consider that the first Megaman X game had X coming to terms with the fact that he has to fight for peace.
- X had a somewhat necessary personality snap after about two hundred years of seemingly constant warfare. There's only so long that you can reconcile a desire for peace with the ability to kick ass.
- Further compounding the problem, in the ending for Mega Man Zero, X lamented that the most dreadful moment for him was when he "stopped caring about fighting enemies".
- In Mega Man Star Force, Geo Stelar became very wangsty after finding out that Pat sent out Anti-Brother waves and stopping him in the junk yard. As a result, he stopped trusting all his friends and broke off their Brother Bonds fearing that they would be like Pat despite Pat having a Hyde that made him do those things and being flat out told the fact before the wangst fest happened. If that wasn't bad enough, Tom Dubius was going through trust problems much earlier in the game and it made much more sense, because a man became "Brothers" with him just to steal his ideas.
- Well, to be fair, in Star Force 1 Geo hadn't really gotten past the disappearance of his father yet. And to put things in perspective, at that point in Geo's personality, asking someone to be his Brother was the equivalent of freaking proposing. Besides, Geo does get Character Development, and is significantly less wangsty in Star Force 2 until Sonia, his very first Brother betrays him.
- And by Star Force 3 Geo has completely lost all of his angst, to the point he can rally his friends out of their Wangst when Luna dies.
- Shion Uzuki. So much as imply her dead fiancé ...
- Even bigger is when you compare her to her brother Jin, who has had no less a spectacularly sucky life and he deals with it with almost masochistic amounts of Stoic.
- Really comes to a head in the third game, where her levels of Wangst somehow manages to reach critical mass It's All About Me levels despite her having legitimate reasons to mope.
- Your wingmen in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War can get really teeth-gritting. Every 5 minutes, in violation of any NORMAL Air Force's policy regarding radio discipline, someone in your flight decides to broadcast their views about how war sucks, and how wonderful it would be to fly with the enemy in peace. You'd think such rabid pacifists would find a different line of work.
- Well, they were pacifists. There hadn't been a war in almost fifteen years in Osea, so signing up for the Air Force was a way to fly, not to fight. Once war actually broke out, they sucked it up and killed people, but that didn't change their beliefs.
- You forgot Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War and your first wingman Pixy will fit the above description a bit and then tosses in a Heel Face Turn at the end of the first war and joins a terrorist group. For a damn cynic on the war he does hold up to a twisted idealist cause. The Belkan war series felt like a political statement there.
- This is one of the reasons that Shadow The Hedgehog is still hated by at least half the fandom. He's mostly gotten over it in recent games though. Does that change people's interpretations of him?
- In Super Robot Wars Original Generation Gaiden, when you learn his purpose, as Kyosuke Nanbu said, Professor Wilhelm von Juergen was just a man who fell into a massive Wangst after the death of his family by the aliens. The result was his wangst was radically changing the ODE System, which was formerly a dandy network system for auto piloting... into a sentient system that kidnaps living humans and use them as live cores, which eventually comes to bite him on the ass by absorbing him as well.
- In Rainbow Six Vegas 2 the terrorist mastermind's Motive Rant is filled with this. He reveals that he teamed up with radical terrorists and drug-dealing human traffickers and started a plot to blow up multiple areas in Vegas, flooded a gymnasium full of civilians with poison gas, betrayed the Rainbow organization, and was going to sell US government secrets on the Black Market, because Bishop and Six passed him up for promotion in favor of Logan Keller. Fair enough, except for the fact that reason why they did this was because the mastermind disobeyed orders and got a hostage negotiator killed. How the hell could someone that unprofessional and inept even get into a secret antiterrorist unit?
- Overlord brings us the elves of Evernight, whose race was long ago completely wiped out, reducing them to telepathic ghosts. Much of their dialogue is spent lamenting their cruel fate and whining to their Mother Goddess. Their constant Wangst has rendered them completely useless, to the extent that when an important religious relic of theirs is stolen, their first reaction is to come crying to you and start mourning.
- ...And of course being a Evil Overlord, you can kick them and steal their stuff.
- Niko Bellic in GTA IV lays it on rather thick. Yes, alright, the universe has screwed you over. Nearly Everyone you meet betrays you, dies, or is several kinds of stupid. Your irritating cousin constantly pesters you with requests to go bowling, the bastard. But constantly complaining about your miserable lot in life sits very poorly with walking around richer than Croesus, armed to the teeth, and capable of surviving a high dive from a helicopter (if you land in water, completely unscathed; if you pancake on the tarmac, a small loss of money and respawning at the nearest hospital).
- There's a reason Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream are the two biggest Scrappy's in World of Warcraft. They absolutely despise the opposite faction for no apparent reason other than Fantastic Racism and to hold the Conflict Ball and utterly brain drill any chances of peace between the two factions if the two are involved in the negotiations.
- But while this can certainly be said of Hellscream (who is arguably a two-dimensional and poorly-handled character in his own right), the same is not entirely true of Wrynn. You have to remember, this man's earliest childhood memories include seeing his country put to the flame by the Old Horde, his countrymen slaughtered in droves, and his own father murdered by a supposed friend, who was actually a double-agent, working for the other side. Wrynn was actually willing to look past a lot of this, but the final straw came with the battle at Angrathar The Wrathgate, which saw hundreds of both Horde and Alliance forces, as well as Bolvar Fordragon(a man Wrynn considered family and who raised Wrynn's son while Wrynn was indisposed), murdered by a treacherous splinter of The Forsaken, a faction within the Horde. Given the incidents described above, it's a little easier to see why one might react in the way that Varian Wrynn does in World of Warcraft.
- Garrosh starts out quite wangsty, being extremely pessimistic and unwilling to take action against the various threats on his village in Nagrand despite being leader, because he believes his father was evil, making him unworthy to lead, and because Greatmother Geyah is dying.
- It's indicated in the story, "Heart of War", that Garrosh, not having experienced the Second War, assumes the Alliance is not justified in hating the Horde. He, like many of the other younger orcs, thus cannot understand why Thrall would settle for the harsh land of Durotar (to atone in a sense for their crimes against the world, and because it makes them stronger as a people) instead of seizing land in Ashenvale.
- Carth Onasi in Knights Of The Old Republic has some bona fide reasons to have angst, considering what's happened to his family and his homeworld, but he's so damn whiny about it that it becomes very hard to care, very quickly.
- Absolutely standard for Bioware male romance options. Carth, Anomen (BG 2) and Alistair (DA:O) are probably the worst for it. Aarin (NWN), Sky (Jade Empire) and Kaiden (Mass Effect) get about an even balance of toughness and wangst on average, but in each case are still wussier than their female counterparts.
- Parodied in Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse, which gives Sam a Film Noir Heroic BSOD after his partner is murdered. Sam gains a button in conversations which makes him give incoherent monologues about living in a Crapsack World and how miserable he is. None of the other characters take him seriously, and after it wears off Sam looks back on it with embarrassment.
Web Comics
Web Original
- Comes up so much in Survival of the Fittest that it's impossible to list all of the examples. One particularly noticeable character suffering from this is Damien Carter-Madison (my mother hates me! sob), who was pretty much angst-central for v2.
- Mackenzie, the half-demon main character in Tales of MU, comes close to Wangst with her continuous self-loathing and belief that her tainted blood makes her innately evil, despite being a more decent person than most of the people around her.
- Somewhat justified, in that you'd expect someone who spent nine years living in her grandmother's basement and being continually told that she's and evil abhorrent abomination barely worthy of existence to have some major psychological issues, and that's before you take into account the fact that God literally hates her, and burned her mouth when she tried to pray to him.
- The Legion Of Net Heroes deconstructs this. In ANGST: An Amazing Medical Discovery, Doctor Stomper explains the difference between Low-Density Angst, which takes up a lot of space but never gets resolved and ends up as pointless brooding, and High-Density Angst, which is more concise and actually leads to Character Development.
- Fun experiment. Go to WeBook and find a random work. There is a 90% chance that it will be chockful of it.
- Venom of the Axis of Anarchy in The Guild. Endlessly. Mostly as a parody.
- Keri in Sims Big Brother 6, who was stated to be a very emotional woman who cries a lot (Given that she is shown to be crying over the crew running out of toilet paper at one point), but it's mostly played for laughs. Also, it's shown as a sign of Character Development, as she's actually not quite as emotional by the end of the series.
- Patrick and Emily on The War Comms live and breathe this, to the point where even if what's happened to them is genuinely bad, you want to strangle them on principle.
- The Nostalgia Chick has a Running Gag of mocking this, by pouting and tracing a finger down her cheek like it was a tear. In her Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas review, this was accompanied by Simple Plan's "Untitled".
- While many of the Stories on the website "FML" do genuinely suck, a great deal of the stories boil down to simple wangst, and people feeling sorry for themselves.
- Almost everything that appears on the blog White Whine, which collects various examples of people going on Facebook, Twitter or some other social networking / online site to whine about some trivial and inconsequential, usually as if it was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Seriously, if only we all had the 'problems' some of these people face.
- You don't understand! YOU ALL UNDERSTAND! I mean, don't understand! YAAAUUUGGGHHH!
- Similar to the Nostalgia Chick above, Linkara, when criticizing poor characterization and unsympathetic attempts at angst and drama in bad comic books, narrates the Wangsty characters' lines in the distinctive "Superboy-Prime voice", an over-the-top, grating, tearfully whiny tone first used for the bratty, tantrum-throwing Omnicidal Maniac / Psychopathic Manchild / Villain Sue Superboy-Prime in his landmark review of Countdown to Final Crisis. Often, after a character wangsts at length he also adds "Everything was better on MY Earth!", Superboy-Prime's meta-catchphrase.
- Endemic to this very wiki.
Western Animation
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