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NOBODY UNDERSTANDS!
Speaking of love, 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, That Was The Year That Was
Angst can create compelling drama and Character Development when done well; virtually all acclaimed works use it to a degree and the appeal of The Woobie is based around it.
But like all other good things, angst can be overdone or clumsily handled. Wangst, a portmanteau of "whiny" (or "wanker," depending on who you ask) and "angst," is essentially angst gone wrong. The intended Woobie becomes a pathetically whiny character who insists on moping (often loudly and repeatedly) about a tragic 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.
However, though Wangst is most frequently associated with characters whining over petty "tragedies", 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. Events that would be genuinely devastating in Real Life can become melodramatic Wangst if the sufferer's self-loathing 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.
There are some points that can be agreed on, though: Giving more than one character sources of angst and then picking one of them to be dramatic about his suffering (bonus points if you choose a character who has less reason for self-pity than others) will not make the audience sympathize with him over the other characters who handle their own troubles with more restraint and dignity. It only makes him look like a self-obsessed jerk. Also, True Art Is Angsty only goes so far — miserable and conflicted characters who are poorly-written are not automatically more interesting than happy, well-adjusted, and well-written ones. Angst/Wangst is not a crutch for drama and Character Development; good characters are defined by factors other than their Dark And Troubled Pasts.
Wangst is a favorite of Emo Teens, Sympathetic Sues, and characters Cursed With Awesome. See also Emo, Narm, Angst Dissonance. 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. Contrast Angst What Angst.
Note: This page is not here so that you can complain about characters or shows you don't like. Try and use the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judgment. If you can't think of at least one solid example of wangsty behavior in canon, then chances are it's not something that should be on this page. The subjective nature of the trope does not mean that the entries should be vague.
Important note: the mere fact that a character is sad does not itself indicate Wangst. There are some scenarios even in fiction where it is appropriate for the characters to feel sad and depressed and act accordingly; after all, if the same thing was happening to you in Real Life, chances are you'd be pretty upset as well. Wangst is a problem not because the characters are sad, but because their sadness is poorly-written or inappropriately drawn-out and exaggerated. When including an example, try and establish why the example belongs here. Note also that some Wangst is also played deliberately, usually for humour - plenty of creators see the comic potential in ridiculing the over-angsty.
Examples
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Anime
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.
- In a more recent example, Icarus from New Mutants/New X-Men would constantly bring up his dead girlfriend in every appearance. Made even more Wangsty, since they only dated for a week before she ended up killed.
- 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.
- 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 movie adaptations, as Spidey's main wangst-fighting weapon, his constant joke-cracking, has been removed.
- Spider-Man angsts a lot during Marvel Zombies. Even as a overpowered cosmic being he angsts and angsts. When he doesn't angst he jokes, and he jokes because he angsts.
- Considering that his first act as a zombie was to eat the two people he cared most about, he has at least some justification for angsting.
- In Clone Saga and One More Day Spidey angsts as hell.
- 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.
- 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 mention 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.
- "I'll kill you! I'll kill you to DEATH!!"
- Todd Mc Farlane'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 coud overcome them, writers give him new ones.
Fan Fic
Film
- Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequel trilogy spends a lot of time crying and flipping out. Though most of us figured Darth Vader was a troubled youth, it was more of the Damien what are you doing with that tricycle? kind. 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 it does bring up the question of how he can be sad if he has no emotions. Though yeah, it is deeply fun to watch him strolling across the ceiling shouting about how he can't feel anything.
- 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.
- Brian Bendis told an anecdote about how he agreed to write some lines for the first movie and pissed off one of the producers because he wanted to add a few jokes.
- 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.
Literature
- The defining characteristic of Edward Cullen in Twilight.
- And the primary characteristic of most of its fans.
- Characters in Gone with the wind. Margaret Mitchell makes these spoiled vermins to whine how awful is to let slaves free and cook your own meal. Heartbreaking.
- Heroine in Quincey Morris, the Vampire by P N Elrod. Spoiled Jerk Sue never satisfied her life as one of wealthy succesful people of Victorian London. .
- Harry Potter 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.
- Getting 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 years' 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!
- For awhile he also complained about having to kill mice to eat... as opposed to, you know, killing cows and pigs and other animals to eat as a human. (Generally, humans don't kill said cows or pigs themselves and eat them raw, but...)
- He didn't just complain, the first time he ate a mouse he had a major freak out and would have committed suicide by plowing into a glass ceiling if Marco hadn't been there to break the glass before Tobias could smash into it. Major overreaction.
- 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.
- Your Mileage May Vary. In the early books, Tobias actually states that he feels his life improved as a result of his becoming an animorph and a hawk. His initial angst at being trapped in the body of a hawk was the result of feelings of uselessness on missions because being Mode Locked prevented him joining his friends on dangerous, life-risking missions. Moreover, since becoming an animorph gave him a sense of family and purpose that he had never had before, it's only natural that he would feel intensely guilty and hypersensitive whenever a mission rendered him safe and comfortable while the others cheated death, especially when the trauma that often resulted from life-risking missions could and sometimes did alienate his relationships with the others. Lastly, in the first book told from his perspective after he regains his morphing power, he discover out that the father he never knew was actually none other than Elfangor, the badass Andalite Warrior who gave the kids their morphing powers in the first book. Far from angsting over the fact that he had lost, gained, and re-lost a new father in a short space of time, or having a bout of fresh grief over having watched his father die, or anything else to that effect, Tobias celebrates this discovery of his badass roots by chowing down on birthday cake with Rachel, his sort-of-but-not-really-girlfriend because hawks and humans can't mate. Not much sign of an "Emohawk".
- Not to mention the others don't adjust all that well in the long term. Jake puts on a heroic face because he's the leader, but doesn't much care for it and eventually loses it after the war because of What He Had To Do. Marco gets by with the same dark humor he used after his mother "died", while not-quite-concealing how much he'd like reducing every Yeerk in existence to a fine powder. Rachel starts out as a major loose cannon, and gets worse. Cassie, meanwhile, hates how they have to kill and eventually leaves the group over it (temporarily).
- 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 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!
- 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 'Zathak starts asking "Why me?" and Belgarion is the one who has to explain things to him.
- 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.
- 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 is done intentionally as a form of dramatic irony.
- The book is ironic to the point in which the monster is a far deeper and more relatable character than the intentionally uni-dimensional humans (except Frankestein himself, who is quite well developed — albeit not very sympathy evoking).
- 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.
- I'd argue that Thomas Covenant is deliberate Wangst by the author- the whole point is that the readers want to slap him round the face and shout, "GET OVER YOURSELF!" Getting towards the end of the third book, I was gratified to discover that, in fact, he does. (Haven't got any further than that yet, so he might backslide a little.)
- 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 relateable.
- 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 mentionings 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!
- Ironically, things would have ended much better for everyone if he had taken a little longer to get over it.
- The award for Self Obsessed, Mopey Git has to be shared between Duke Orsino of Twelfth Night and Antonio, the Merchant of Venice.
- Antonio's angst gets not only more bearable but more understandable if you pretend he's the same Antonio as in Twelfth Night. Try it sometime.
- 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.
- Rand Al'Thor in the Wheel Of Time books 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 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, though at least Orlando 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.
- Mostly the entire plot of New Moon. If you need a specific example, though, the blank pages. After Edward pulls his "we must break up because you are in danger" bull, 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.
- The other books in the series have more than their fair share as well.
- Stephanie Meyer says she listened to Linkin Park all the time to help her write those scenes. Which would explain an awful lot.
- 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.
- Garth Ennis brilliantly parodied the Wangsty Lestat in Preacher.
- Ashfur in Warrior Cats. Of course, in the real world, his grievences are relatively legitimate (but completely overblown by his fans), but in series just filled with angsty kitties, he comes out as average...-ish, and the fact that he uses his past to justify trying to kill the main characters doesn't help either. It makes liking him in general possible only if you can try to sympathize with his wangst.
- Leafpool has a habit of blaming herself for other cats deaths (Cinderpelt, Heavystep, Ashfur, etc.), but in A Dangerous Path, Firestar turns it into an art form. He blames himself for Swiftpaw's death because he tried his hardest to get Swiftpaw to be made into a warrior, but he failed, causing Swiftpaw to go out into the forest to prove himself, where he got ripped to pieces by the dog pack.
- 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 Songof 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.
- Lilly Bart from House Of Mirth. Seriously, after three hundred pages of uninterupted self-absorbed wangsting, many readers are so irritated that they actually cheer her on when she finally gets around to offing herself.
- MichaelMoorcock'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 pretention. One incarnation however, John Daker aka Erekosse, 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. 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.
- Sort of toyed with in Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, where Arthur Dent tries to process the thought that the entire Earth had just been destroyed. He tried to think about how his parents and sister were dead, but it didn't work. He then tried to think about how everyone he was close to was dead, but that didn't work, either. Instead, what made him break down was the fact that a random person who was behind him in line at the supermarket was dead.
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.
- Listen up, Smallville writers. This is why Lex is a compelling Woobie and Lana isn't.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Cartoon Network live action movie (we're already getting into Wall Banger territory here) 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.
- A combination of the Doctor's incessant brooding about the destruction of the Time Lords — which, as much as being a self-inflicted Last Of His Kind as the result of a terrible war would certainly be devastating, he seems actively determined not to get over — and an increased focus on how lonely and immortal he is sees the new series of Doctor Who often dance around this trope. This is heavily reflected in the frequency of scenes of the Doctor moping in the TARDIS by staring into space as a sad orchestral track plays on the soundtrack as a result of either factor. The fact that every series revolves around something just guaranteed to force those wounds right back open, including the fact that the Daleks, who caused the aforementioned war in the first place, just will not die, doesn't help matters.
- 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.
- Despite it's lack of focus on the emotional lives of the characters, the classic series also fell into the wangst-trap — especially during the 1980s, where efforts to inject increased conflict between the Doctor and his companions was increasingly interpreted by less-than-stellar writers into 'endless scenes of the characters standing around whining non-stop about relatively petty things and getting into trivial bickering matches with each other'. See most of Peri's interactions with the Sixth Doctor, or most of Tegan's interactions with anyone. This had the effect not so much of generating interesting conflict between the characters as prompting the audience to wonder why these people who so obviously couldn't stand to be around each other and were clearly not having a good time insisted on travelling around space and time together.
- 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 failings 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, likeable 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.
- 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 And 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 fixation on each other as 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?
- 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 suspiscion 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 Marenghis Dark Place, 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.
- I actually wrote the lyrics to a wangst version of the song for Shannon Noel.
- Interestingly enough, the word "dire" accurately describes pretty much everything else Shannon Noll has ever done.
- Since we're bashing Shannon Noel, I swear to God, if you believe in him, that he was wangsting that he would be bankrupt and on the streets in a week because he didn't win. Of course now he's become so much more successful than...um, that other guy who did win.
- We, the people of Australia, have made Shannon Noll successful. May God have mercy on us all.
- 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 brother long after everyone else has ceased to care. Made especially irritating considering it was her own stupidity that directly led to his 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!"
- 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. In fact, I would submit that he takes the abundance of life-threatening situations he gets thrown into seemingly every week much better than most real people would.
- 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.
Music
- Two words: The Cure
- Simple Plan. Dear LORD, Simple Plan.
- Almost every song by the band Linkin Park can be summed up in six words: "Why didn't you love me, Daddy?"
- 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 ther 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, 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.
- 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?"
- 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 slip into this from time to time, usually when James Hetfield writes songs about his childhood. The God That Failed is about his mother dying from cancer after refusing treatment, 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
- Roger Waters in The Wall and especially The Final Cut. As if he were the only one ever to lose his father in a war or to feel alienated from other people. He got better, though.
- Alice in Chains. Songs like "Down in a Hole", "Would?", "Angry Chair" put bands like Linkin Park and Dashboard Confessional to shame. Though unlike those two bands, Alice in Chains has justified angst. Layne Staley's life was a giant Deus Angst Machina and he had major drug issues and depression on top of it.
- So Chester Bennington's own drug addictions and sexual abuse don't count for anything?
- The real difference is that Staley isn't irritating. That's what makes angst not wangst.
- If that's the case and they're aren't playing this trope for laughs, then why are they even here?
- They had real angst but 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."
- So, this would be a rare example of Wangst that's both done right and a completely Justified Trope. I thought that was impossible.
- Tropes are not bad. This applies even here.
- 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.
- Likewise, the subject of the song "Self Esteem" is a loser wangsting about how pathetic he is for for being unable to dump a girl who is constantly cheating on him and using him and generally treating him like a doormat.
- One feels it's about time Maynard got over his mother's long illness and early death and stopped making Tool do constant songs about her... (The last album was *named* after her, so maybe he'll be able to let it go, finally.)
- "Institutionalized", as recently re-popularized by a brief scene in Iron Man, smacks of this. Particularly the singer concluding by deciding it all doesn't really matter, on account of the fact that he'll probably be hit by a car. Yeah, that's... real conducive to dealing with your problems.
- I've always been under the impression that the song wasn't meant to be taken seriously. "All I wanted was a Pepsi and she wouldn't give it to me"? I mean, come on!
- 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!".
- How did we get this far with no mention of My Chemical Romance?
- Example, please?
- The name of the band is "My Chemical Romance" and you're asking for examples?, Aside from the fact that dang near every song is titled "Cancer", "Dead", "Desolation Row", "Famous Last Words", "I Don't Love You", etc? If My Chemical Romance's entire discography DIDN'T qualify as Wangsty, then what, pray tell, might? If nothing else, Gerard Way's repeated cries of "You don't understand, we're not emo, we're not, we're not, emo sucks, we're so not emo, damn your eyes, you don't understand our music" should qualify them wholeheartedly just for Way's repeated Wangsting about the classification of his band's music. Being from New Jersey probably doesn't help either.
- Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has made a career by milking the teen angst bullshit for all it's worth.
- Music + This Trope = Emo. Simple enough.
- While Michael Jackson's childhood was fraught with overwork and abuse, his 1995 song "Childhood" comes across as a whiny defense of his Adult Child behavior...especially coming so soon after he was first accused of harming children himself.
- Pick a song, any song, by Radiohead, The Smiths or Smashing Pumpkins. While they don't tend to be songs like 'My dady didn't love me so now I'm a priiiick' They are songs 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."
- The members of Brand New take this trope to an at-times criminally insane level.
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 "The Hitman" 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.
- But apparently being contractually allowed to dictate when and where you drop your title, and being reassured beforehand that the owner guy would let you peacefully relinquish the title on live TV before leaving for WCW, only to be legitimately lied to and cheated out of the title afterwards, is real. Locker-room Papa Wolf the Undertaker reportedly got in the boss's face about it, and Bret himself supposedly slapped Vince Mc Mahon.
Close Professional Wrestling
Videogames
- 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:
- 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 anti-social in Advent Children, though both show him getting over it. Advent Children cracks a joke about it.
- Cloud's characterization in Final Fantasy VII 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. 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. The real irony comes when people forget that he was also like this in Final Fantasy VII itself. As he does not collpase into a quivering ball of tears and insanity at any point in Advent Children, he's actually better than he was in the game.
- 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 FF 7 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.
- 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...
- Aerie of Baldurs 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).
- 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.
- Oersted from Live A Live, though in his defense he was tricked into committing regicide, was forced to battle his best friend to the death, and saw his bride-to-be commit suicide before his very eyes.
- Kratos from the God Of War series, fell into this trope after learning that Zeus destroyed Sparta.. He gets over it by killing things. Lots and lots and lots of things.
- 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.
- I could deal with Lukes sadness and depression the first few times, but after the second time you see Asch he degenerates into filling his wangst-y statements with the messages of "everything would be better if I hadn't been born" or "My existence is useless". Ironically, many of Tears character development scenes happen when she tells luke to get over it and that he won't help the world by drowning in self-hate. He does improve by the end however.
- Although it comes from a lineage which has usually handled drama well, Raiden and Rose in Metal Gear Solid 2 were pushing it. It's nicely deconstructed in the third act though (along with everything else), giving us 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.
- Zone of the Enders tipped right over the edge, putting a prepubescent boy through the anime wangst machine. It's just mean.
- Mathias Cronqvist (who later became Count Dracula) shows a considerable amount of Wangst in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence regarding his dead wife, Elizabeth, 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 Xanatos 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.
- 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.
- Your wingmen in Ace Combat 5 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 hated by at least half the fandom. Lately he seems to have mostly gotten over it.
- 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 it's revealed via Motive Rant that the terrorist mastermind teamed up with radical terrorists and drug-dealing human traffickers and started a plot to blow up multiple ares 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).
Web Comics
- Its Walky fell victim to this trope on several occasions; David Willis' habit of dropping the Drama Bomb meant that a lot of the time, when the characters weren't reeling from the latest over-whelming assault of carpet-bombed unpleasantness to hit their lives, they were angsting profusely about things that had happened long, long ago or blowing relatively small things out of proportion in order to angst about them. Sal in particular was guilty of this.
- Ash from Misfile has now reached this level. Her bemoaning how bad her life is since she got turned into a girl rings increasingly hollow, especially since it's been pointed out she is a lot happier whenever she forgets to remember this.
- She really needs to get laid.
- The "Ask Ash" segments where readers get to send Ash questions has lampshaded this several times, with questions along the lines of "Would you really want to forget everything that's happened and go back to being a boy? (list of awesome things that have happened)" and the answer is inevitably "yes". Said answer is getting increasingly difficult to take seriously.
- Somewhat justified in that Ash's bent gender is a metaphor for the plight of transgendered persons IRL, who often seem to feel similarly about what they'd trade to feel right in their own bodies.
- In Dominic Deegan, Luna Travoria sometimes berates herself for her Wangst moments.
- Spoofed by Young Haley in Order Of The Stick.
- Faye in Questionable Content. She's working on getting better, but she continues to look at everything that anyone does in terms of how it affects her.
- Parodied in Homestuck with John Egbert's angst towards his father's unfailing love and support towards him. This comic has Rose call him on it... not that she's any better herself. (Keep Clicking)
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, Molly, who is normally very upbeat, can dip into Wangst when she is in X Men fangirl mode.
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 abhorant abomination barely worthy of existance 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.
- This is reversed when she fails to "feed" her demon half and it comes to the surface, causing a massive change in personality, to a truly demonic outlook, thus showing that she is at least partially justified in her belief.
- 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.
Western Animation
- Meg Griffin does this often.
- To be fair, she gets so much unwarranted abuse from everybody that it's kind of understandable.
- Which makes it all the funnier to see her get kicked even more.
- In the 1990s Fantastic Four cartoon, Johnny falls in love with Crystal over the course of an episode and a half, and when a barrier seals her and the rest of her fellow Inhumans in their city, Johnny spends literally every episode for the rest of the series' run angsting about it.
- Made even more amusing/ridiculous/something by the fact that he spent a considerably longer time drooling over Medusa, Crystal's older sister. It turns out she's married to Black Bolt, Johnny gets over her like that, spends a couple hours with Crystal... and spends the entire final season in a pit of Wangst.
- Quite a bit of stuff Prince Zuko says in Avatar The Last Airbender, particularly in Season 3. Aang also got a bit "aangsty" in Season 2 during the period when Appa was missing.
- Fairly Odd Parents-the song "Not On The List". They didn't get want they wanted for Christmas and sang an entire song to complain about it whereas some (not all) characters on the show with bigger problems don't complain that much (or at all) about their problems. However, its probably justified considering most of them singing were kids and one was a teen. Also, the people that were singing the song were some generic kids, Timmy's friends, his parents and Vicky. But even if it is Wangsty, its still an OK song. The Aesop of course, was that the people were being Wangsty about it and should focus on what they can give, not what they didn't get.
- In Transformers: Beast Wars Optimus Primal mourned for every ally's death, but he remembered he was in a war he needed to win. Series ends, he gives a prayer for the fallen who helped his victory and heads off. Beast Machines comes around and he cannot stop complaining over the cost of war and how little morale he has(though the fact that Megatron had basically conquered the entire planet may have had something to do with it). Even Cheetor, who formerly looked up to him, basically told him to snap out of it.
- In Transformers Armada, Starscream's story-arc is generally considered to be fairly well-done. But even some of those who teared up at his death have to admit that his angst was more wangsty when you consider that he's a high-ranking soldier in a military known for wrecking havoc and that the fact that Megatron hasn't killed him yet is probably the biggest sign of favor anyone will ever get from the mech. His back-and-forthing thus comes off less as conflicting beliefs and more "He'll miss me when I'm gone! DX" There's a reason why some call him Emoscream.
- Curtis Calhoun, a character based on G. Brian Reynolds from the obscure Christmas special Up on the Housetop.
Truth In Television
- Ever wonder about the things former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson says about himself? Now you know.
- Far too common on certain internet forums, where you will find obnoxious users whining about problems that are serious only to them.
Close Truth In Television
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