Tear Jerker / Dimension 20

This extremely wacky and darkly-humorous show has a surprising amount of tender moments.

Spoilers Off applies to all "Moments" pages, so all spoilers are unmarked.

---

Fantasy High

• Gorgog's miserable word to his parents picking him up. Saying he had a bad day and died. Feeling haunted by going into "hell" briefly, and unable to feel comforted by his parents.
• Towards the end of "Family in Flames", Brennan forces the players to lose half their hit points and then subjects them to rolls determining whether their parents will be fine, be horribly injured, or die. It's genuinely upsetting to see how stressed out the players get.
• Emily Axford breaking character and actually starting to cry when she speaks to Sandralynn after her fight in "Family in Flames" is heartwrenching. It's clear in the leadup to the scene that she's worried, because she gets very quiet. She is halfway through a sentence roleplaying Fig when her voice breaks, as the reality of the situation dawns on her. You can hear Brennan's voice breaking as he acts out Sandralynn's dialogue as well. It's a moment a lot of people hold as the moment that showed them the power of D&D.
  Fig: Look, I'm really sorry that I prioritised my Dads over you. [voice breaking] You're allowed to be a complex person.
  Sandralynn: I love you so much.
  Fig/Emily: [tearing up] 'Kay.
  Sandralynn: You're a good daughter. Everything you're doing now is something I get. I was just like you.
  Fig/Emily: [breaking character, genuinely in tears] Sorry, I thought you were gonna die. I felt very bad.
  [the other players laugh and make sounds of sympathy]
• The death of Bill Seacaster, who dies after successfully fighting off the forces of Kalvaxis. Passing the Torch with his eyepatch combined with a Dying Moment of Awesome as his coat explodes as Fabian catches his sword, silhouetted by the explosion, finally proving himself worthy in the eyes of his father.
• When Jawbone asks Adaine about her tendency to panic attacks, she tears up as she says that her parents left her and that she doesn't know where they are. Her parents were already shown to be horrible, and she'd already confronted them many times about it, but this is the first time we see how much she's been miserable because of them.
• Jawbone's speech towards Adaine, reassuring her, in regard to her anxiety disorder, that she's not a coward, that she's so much more than your disease, and offering to help her with it by giving her anxiety medication, is very touching, and the emotion with which he says it shows.
  • In addition to this, similar to the Emily Axford example above, Siobhan tears up during the speech and can be seen visibly wiping tears away from her eyes afterwards.

Escape from the Bloodkeep

• Episode 5 starts with their Darkest Hour, as the party all plummets towards the Scary Volcano from the now-shattered Skyship.
  • Leiland in particular reflects on his multiple failures as a General, reasoning that he's accomplished nothing.
    • As he's descending, he catches up to one of his Lieutenants, who gives a rather poignant speech about how hard it was to deal with Leiland being the Dark Lord's favorite.
      Miles: What are you supposed to do when your entire soul is devoted to something - and you know that you'll never be in first place?
• Efink rolling two nat ones, causing her spirits to abandon her. The stress of this causes Amy Vorpahl to immediately collapse into tears. Trapp remarks that it "truly can't get worse than this".

The Unsleeping City

• Kugrash is a guilt-ridden old man forced to live as a ratfolk in filth and poverty due to a curse he fully deserved as a backstabbing white-collar criminal who screwed over so many people for his self-interest. Moreover, his older son hates him, and we learn that his ratfolk curse was fully self-inflicted, as we see in Hell that it's his true nature becoming his physical nature, which also means he's slotted to go to Hell, an implication that's confirmed when we see Santa's list. It makes his desire to atone for his sins by taking care of New York's homeless population and his attempts at reuniting with his sons even more heartwarming.
• Pete and Kingston's conflict is truly heartwrenching considering its roots into their respective backgrounds:
  • Pete is irresponsible, hedonistic, and selfish, but as Nods explains, all of these stems from lacking a sense of community due to having to live his formative years detached from any outside love. His father belittles his identity, he lived in a small, close-minded town, and when coming to New York, he had no one there at all. It's telling that 53\/3N, a callous asshole who Pete doesn't even like, was technically his closest friend at the beginning of the campaign. And right after he forms some of the first truly meaningful bonds he's made in his entire life, he finds that Kingston, the first good male authority figure in his life, is fully ready to kill him if he becomes too dangerous.
  • Kingston's life is one that is riddled by sacrifices rooted in his love for his city and the people around him. He's so focused on helping others and detached from his own wants and dreams that he's completely unaffected by Nod's magic, and in fact repels it. With the knowledge that one of his biggest dreams was to have a family of his own, proposing to kill Pete, who was becoming his surrogate son figure, should he become unmanageable was only one sacrifice more for his city.
• When Sofia arrives at Heaven, she has a very unhappy surprise waiting for her there: her husband Dale, fighting a bunch of angels to try and escape Heaven to see her one last time. He fills her in on the situation, notably that he was actually killed by Isabella Infierno for being on her track. It takes Sofia's already sad marriage situation into an even more tragic direction.
• In "Borough of Dreams," while in the Metropolitan Museum of Memories in Nod, Pete chooses to walk through the memories of Kingston Brown, whom he's been in conflict with due to their clashing circumstances and priorities. In seeing all that Kingston has lived through, what he's done for those in need ever since he was a child, and what he has given up (opportunities to truly achieve wealth, success and even a happy marriage) for his community, Pete comes to a deeper understanding of both Kingston and their respective roles as Vox Phantasma and Vox Populi.
• Esther's family curse. She is destined to become the Fury of Sorrow if she ever feels sadness. To ensure it doesn't happen, she represses all of her emotions and refuses to let herself be vulnerable at any cost. We then learned that her mother and grandmother, respectively assigned the Furies of Rage and Despair, have succumbed to the curse already, her mother after being betrayed by Bruce Kugrich and turning him into a rat man, Kugrash.
• "Times Squaremageddon":
  • The American Dream, before passing the threshold of the Golden Gate, takes the forms of each beholder's dream, and we get to see each of the PCs' beautiful dreams, before Robert Moses crushes each of these dreams, and becomes the image of The All-American Boy. Extra tragic regarding the PCs, considering so all of their dreams and lives represented an aspect that is crushed by Robert's ideals.
  • In the final battle between the PCs and the American Dream, as several of their allies have fully died and they are getting weaker and weaker by the minute, Kugrash ingests the Bagel of All Things to find the formula needed to stop Richard Moses' resurrection, sacrificing his corporeal form and barely able to hold on his sense of self for a few minutes. Thanks to Pete's mind link ability, he has a last heartfelt conversation with David, who continues to write his letters to his father, knowing that Kug'll be able to read all of them.

Fantasy High: Sophomore Year

• In "Heartache on the Celestine Sea", Gorgug and Zelda have a surprisingly realistic argument over the phone that ends with Zelda apparently dumping Gorgug. It's not a shouting match but Brennan plays Zelda and her hurt feelings extremely well. Particularly wrenching is how Zelda calls Gorgug out on seeing himself as a loser despite literally being a rock star who saved the world. It's a weirdly real moment after a relatively whimsical episode.
• Fabian, after a particularly awful fight with his father's nemesis, gets all but 3 of his father's followers killed, barely escapes with his life, and has his pride obliterated, stuck in an Heroic B So D. After realising his rash actions have endangered his friends and caused him to nearly die twice, he rips up his Owlbear jersey, a symbol of the things that he deserved through his amazing abilities, and takes off his father's eyepatch, feeling like he doesn't deserve them.
• "Pirate Brawl" is one of the darkest episodes of the entire run, featuring the Bad Kids taking loss after loss to enemies far stronger than them, ending on Ragh's disabled mother possibly about to be murdered by the Shadow Cat. It ends on an extremely depressing note, as the Bad Kids are left to pick up the pieces after learning just how bad things can get.
• Aelwyn Abernant's condition when Adaine finds her is truly disheartening: she's one level of exhaustion away from dying, she's lost the ability to form long-term memories, and is completely powerless. Worst of all, her father, who'd up until this point played Parental Favoritism in her favour, is completely fine with the fact that she's been tortured for months, even denying that this is torture because they haven't directly caused physical harm on her.
  • The relationship between Adaine and Aelwyn moves from simply antagonistic to tragic in this season. After seeing the cruelty that their parents usually reserved for her enacted on Aelwyn too, and that in her broken state, her sister wanted to help her escape, Adaine tries to rebuild their sisterhood. When she cares for her in the hot springs of Kei Lumennura, she uses Detect Thoughts on her, and sees that for all her life, she bore an overwhelming self-hatred for her inaction against their parents' mistreatment of her younger sister, but that the only feeling that was stronger was her fear that they would also direct the abuse towards her if she spoke up, creating a constant feed loop of self-loathing and fear. Her state of mind is, aptly, a bombed out city in ruins.
• Riz's time in Hell outside of the humour of the courtroom shenanigans boils down to a brutal manipulation by first Kalina, and then, unintentionally by his dead father, to destroy the image of his father he never really knew, as he was killed when Riz was very young. Riz crying as he says 'solving clues helps' is, whilst mostly played for laughs, is pretty heartbreaking
  • That said, it makes the reveal about Riz's dad all the sweeter, and their interactions in 'My Green Heaven' all the more heartwarming
• Every living main character's deepest fears are exposed in the Nightmare Forest:
  • Fabian has always expressed the desire to put his name on the face of the world. However, we learn in the Nightmare Forest that he fears more than anything to be helpless, and his friends not even remembering him, leaving the proud half-elf screaming Gorgug's name in fear. Tying into his greatest fear, he then has to confront Chungledown Bim, a living reminder of his weakness. It marked him so much that he hugs Gorgug harder than he's ever hugged anyone before.
  • Riz, just having witnessed Kristen's death, runs out in the forest all alone to chase her killer. The chase cuts short when he meets Baron again, who lays him a verbal beatdown, arguing that they were made up as a lie to hide the fact that he was being left out by his friends, and says that they'll always leave him for somebody more important, as he was nothing more than a ball.
  • Fig has to watch as the Anthropomorphic Personification of her carefree rocker girl facade binds her and abandons her friends to the forest. While walking, it belittles her all the way, and even taunts her with the idea that Ayda will leave her as soon as she finds out "the real you".
  • It's revealed to the audience that Gorgug struggles with the idea that he's still alive, and this isn't some Dying Dream where he gets all these wonderful friends and gets to be awesome and popular. It then goes right into the general impostor syndrome that he's feeling regarding his ability to do Artificer work correctly and his general intelligence. When he's faced by a puzzle in order to advance further into the forest, he struggles to get it right, and for getting help from the sphinx that gave him the puzzle, the latter shows him a vision of his parents casting out their whole family after they express concern over them adopting this child.
    Digby and Whilma's extended family: Will it not break your hearts when inevitably, the child grows to know only rage?
  • Adaine, suffering from an anxiety attack, is too scared of something that haunted her entire life to come back, and represses it. The result is the forest making her believe that she's failed in getting to the heart of the forest due to not accepting to face her biggest fear, and make it seem like she's outside the briar wall, bringing back her insecurity about her worth. Her future self's representation, a lonely elf in widower's garb who has watched everyone she grew close to die of old age at least, shows us that she dreads more than anything else to be alone, incapable of growing new bonds. Future Adaine's trembling voice when she talks about her parents adds even more tragedy to the encounte, like she's just a broken teenager who could never grow up.
    Future Adaine: I don't know why I was so easy to discard ...
• Siobhan, similar to the Jawbone moment from Season One, starts crying when confronted with the fact that Adaine's family abandoned her and possibly didn't love her.
• Ayda's dream. She felt, due to her autism, completely alone, isolated, weird and different to everyone else, and felt a great amount of pressure from her past selves to be like them, having been forced to raise herself. When she met and fell in love with Fig, all that changed. The dream counteracts Fig's anxiety about the front she puts up, by means of the fact that Ayda, isolated from the culture of Spyre, saw Fig for who she was and immediately fell in love with her.
• The above moment, similar to the Sandralynn moment from Season One, makes Emily Axford start genuinely crying, and it's just as heartbreaking.
• After trying and failing to persuade their father into simply leaving Adaine behind, rather than doling out the "punishment" he has planned for her, Aelwyn audibly becomes increasingly torn. Backed into a corner by their father's demands to "scour" Adaine's mind for info, eventually all Aelwyn can blurt out is "[Adaine] is just... she's a baby" to Angwyn's confusion. Apart from the sheer, desperate pleading in this moment, it implies that situations like this have been playing out in the Abernant family since Adaine was very young. And those same moments still weigh heavily in Aelwyn's mind.
• This line, when Aelwyn casts Detect Thoughts on Adaine and sees what the wreckage of her mind looked like before Adaine restored it:
  Adaine: Would you be my big sister? I would really like for you to be my big sister.
• In the epilogue, Jawbone offers Adaine adoption papers so he can become her legal guardian. The moment is so emotional that Siobhan bursts into tears instantly.

Tiny Heist

• This season features the first example of major, permanent player-character death in a Dimension 20 sidequest: Agnes the fairy succumbs to a terminal illness while playing slots during the epilogue. It's genuinely heartbreaking.

A Crown of Candy

• The deaths of the Rocks Sisters, even though they happened years before the beginning of the series. By all accounts, they were all The Aces in their respective field, and as the flashbacks show, they were among the most heroic characters in the world, making them Too Good for This Sinful Earth.
• Amethar and Caramelinda's Awful Wedded Life is already hard to watch when it seems to only stem from the frustation of the latter with the irresponsibility of the former, but takes a fucking nosedive for the tragic when it's revealed that their marriage was just a back-up political arrangement when Lazuli, Amethar's sister and Caramelinda's wife, died in the Ravenous War during a Heroic Sacrifice. It highlights Amethar's insecurities over not living up to his sisters' legacy, and reframes Caramelinda's entire character from a tough, smart queen to a deeply hurt person who had to move on after the death of the love of her life, which has left her bitter and cold, to the point that she can't bring herself to come to Comida, whose creation was due to Lazuli's sacrifice.
• "Chaos in the Cathedral" ends with Preston the Peppermint Pig sacrificing his life in a vain attempt to save Lapin's life. That's tearjerker enough, but then the heretical chocolate chancellor has his head crushed by Sir Keratin, signalling the first player character death of the Season.
• After the Taste Buds get back from Comida, Caramelinda has Amethar explain himself on the subject of his hiding his marriage to Catherine Ghee. The "Reason You Suck" Speech she gives to Amethar after he reveals to her that Lazuli knew but never told her anything is outwardly pure Tranquil Fury, but her tears betray the deep hurt she feels over having been lied to by her one true love.
  Caramelinda: (tears over her stoic face) You not telling me makes sense. Your sisters probably had a plan when they were alive, and when they were dead, you would probably be too scared to figure out what to do. So like a child, you just ... thought it'd go away on its own. Lazuli not telling me that, that hurts. Because Lazuli I loved ... with all my heart, and this is just politics.
• "Safe Harbor" ends with Jet, Ruby, and Liam being ambushed by a dozen of Ceresian assassins, lead by Ciabatta. Despite Liam's best efforts to protect them, Jet falls under their blows, and Ruby ends up on the verge of death herself. After a grueling amount of internal conflict and both her sister and her cousin telling her to run, Ruby resigns herself to run away and seek help, while Liam pulls Jet into a Rope Trick to save her. Sadly, Jet succumbs to the poison and dies in Liam's arms, leaving her heartbroken twin sister Ruby behind.
  Jet: Tell Ruby I love her, and tell her she's done the right thing.
  • Another element of tragedy is the contrast with the other PC death earlier this season. Lapin lived a long life, died to save Liam from Keradin, and managed to be Defiant to the End, while Jet, who was barely 18 years old, was unfairly and cruelly murdered, and only had the time to say to Liam her last message to Ruby.
• Liam and Ruby's descent into darkness over the course of the season. Both of them started so naive and innocent, especially in contrast to Theo, Amethar and Lapin, but near the end of the season, they're the most cold and stonehearted main characters.
  • The death of Preston really affected Liam, and he grows more and more cruel over the course of the series, turning into a full-on assassin, ready to kill anyone who annoys him, even his brother, with a habit of psychologically breaking his opponents before gruesomely killing them. He also seems to have lost the want to live, agreeing wholeheartedly to Swifty's statement that existence is torture.
  • Ruby completely breaks down after Jet's death. They had been together for all their lives, and they each were the person they loved the most, and she has to run away and leave her to die in order not to inflict her the pain she's feeling right now. After this, she becomes cynical, vengeful, and almost paranoid, after having been betrayed by Ciabatta, which causes her to agree to her mother's plan to kill Saccharina during the final battle and even to stop trusting Theobald, who has been nothing but helpful and amiable towards her.
• Saccharina was raised in an orphanage run by Bulbian nuns who constantly abused her, be it verbally putting her down or striking her for any reason they could find. It left Saccharina desperate for a family to call her own, and a deep desire to form connections with others. We get one flashback scene to see how cruel they were at the top of Episode 15, and it is so harsh that the episode gets a full content warning in the beginning, as we are shown that the reason Saccharina lost her connection to the Archmage Lazuli is that she was marked on the chest with a white hot Bulbian symbol. It's also one of Emily's most heartbreaking performances, as well as one of Brennan's most chilling.

The Unsleeping City: Chapter II

• Sofia is still devastated by Dale's death, and after realising that Dale will soon not be able to come back, she tries her hardest to have him stay. When Dale accepts that he won't get to live with Sofia, and that he can't keep escaping from Heaven forever, he gives her the Questing Blade, what allowed him to fight his way out of Heaven, in her sleep, after a particularly tearful goodbye with Sofia, who realised what he was about to do.
  • When she learns that she's pregnant, Sofia refuses to let her and Dale's child grow up without a father, and tries her damnedest to find a way to bring him back. After learning about Heaven's rules in regards to mistakenly taken souls, she hits a dead-end, and asks Kingston if resurrections are possible. Kingston, as gently as possible, tells her that it's not impossible, but that it's nearly impossible. Sofia, weeping, gives up on trying to resurrect Dale, and opts to just tell him about the child.

Mice & Murder

• Mrs. McCabbage has been grieving over her husband's death for months, and is even more heartbroken that Sylvester Cross, the world's best detective, couldn't solve his apparent murder. It's clear that Sylvester is at least a little broken up about it as well, as this is the only case he has been unable to solve.
• The reactions of Squire Brockhollow's family to his murder are heartbreaking; while he may have been a bit of an ass in life, Constance and Jeremy are clearly alarmed by the sudden, gruesome passing of their father, with Constance blaming herself for getting him killed. His sister Lucretia may get the worst of it, because she believed that the plan to fake the deaths of her family and go into hiding is still going off without a hitch and that her brother is still alive.
  Brennan: Lucretia looks up, her eyes fill up with tears, and for the first time in her life, she gose "I don't believe you."

Misfits and Magic

• When we first encounter Evan, he's wandering alone in rural Iowa with nothing but his clothing and his phone, and it later becomes clear that Evan has no family or consistent housing because of his strange magical situation.
• Evan seems near tears when he admits that the first day he met Dream, Jammer, and Sam has been the greatest day of his whole life. Simply meeting three friendly kids his own age who are in a similar situation as him and going shopping for school supplies together is a completely novel experience for him.
• When meeting with the school nurse, Stichnit, Evan describes what a living Hell his life has been because of his powers, almost breaking down in tears when he reveals he could accidentally killed Sam earlier that day, and says he just wants them gone. Stichnit reveals removing one's magic is completely doable... but if he has no magic, Evan can't be at Gowpenny, or anywhere else in the wizarding world, which means no more seeing Sam, Jammer, and Dream. He tearfully explains he has nowhere else to go and says he'd be glad to just get a menial job at the school and earn his keep that way, but Stitchnit sadly tells him that just isn't how it works. Made worse by the fact that the nurse is one of two actually helpful adults the misfits have met thus far, and is truly empathetic and kind to Evan. You can just tell how much he hates having to tell him this.
  Evan: Well, that isn't very fair.
  Stitchnit: Life isn't very fair, son.

The Seven

• During the final battle, Sam is killed instantly by Talura, which is a real Gut Punch after Sam has spent the whole season trying to help Talura.
• The above moment shakes all the players to their cores, but none more than Becca, who is next up in initiative. Overwhelmed, she bursts into tears and says that there's literally nothing she can do in that moment that feels helpful.
• Penny scampering up Talura's arm after she kills Sam, then stabbing her in the eye while shouting "That's my sister!" On a 25 Persuasion, this is powerful enough to cause Talura to have a My God, What Have I Done? moment.

A Starstruck Odyssey

• As much as the lead up is played for laughs, the actual circumstances of Gunnie's life are pretty depressing. With no insurance, he had no choice but to pay out of pocket to replace the majority of his body below the neck. He owes hundreds of thousands of credits, and the Acme-Ashmun company charges extra wherever they possibly can, including charging him per breath. He has to prevent himself from crying because he gets charged for "excess hydration".
  Brennan: You rent the ability to live from the company you bought this from.
• Brennan's rundown of the Red Hot's debts and fees is a crushingly mundane sort of tragic, especially for anyone who's financially struggled and faced difficulties making ends meet.
• While the crew's agreement not to make a big deal of Skip taking over Norman is very funny, on another level it's quite sad that a once-idealistic young man grew into such a misanthropic asshole that there is apparently not a single person in the galaxy who gives a damn he got possessed by a brain slug. Underscored in episode 3, where they meet one of Norman's former colleague. The man acts outwardly friendly but actually hates Norman and thinks he's pathetic—plus, when Skip reacts strangely to the Gargle Blaster the guy buys him, Riva catches the man thinking "it's wearing off" and gets a strong sense of danger. Meaning not only does he have no friends in the organization he gave half his life too, they did something to him.
• Margaret has a tense, fraught conversation with Lucienne that leaves her feeling awful about their relationship and her life choices, and then goes up to the bridge to check on Skip. Skip, who has a loose grasp on the crew dynamics but does recognize from Skipper's memories that Margaret has pretty much been keeping the Red Hot afloat, tells her "you're important", and she's so emotionally fragile from what just happened that a simple compliment makes her burst into tears.
• The whole gambling scene in episode 4 is a low point for everyone involved as Gunnie and Barry lose all their money and their weapons trying to gamble for more money.
• King Prilbus allows Barry Nyne to control the body for just a moment at the request of Barry Syx, and poor Barry Nyne has a full-on emotional breakdown in the five seconds of consciousness allowed to him. Then Prilbus takes control back and smugly asserts that when he gets a new body, he'll leave Barry Nyne somewhere cold so that he'll freeze to death.

A Court of Fey and Flowers

• After the masquerade ball, Binx and Hob have a lovely conversation where they both admit to being hopelessly smitten- Binx with Prince Andhera and K.P. with the Mistrex of Ceremonies themselves, Delloso de la Rue. At first the scene is sweet and encouraging, with Hob encouraging Binx to take a chance and tell the Prince how she feels- the Major is clearly a Shipper on Deck. But when Binx encourages the Major in the same way? He demurs. He’s convinced that Rue’s actions were either mere politeness or friendship, at best- after all, they’re the jewel of the Court of Wonder and he’s a lowly goblin, unworthy of their attentions and (convincing himself) he’s content to have had a simple evening dancing with them.
• While they’re certainly happy tears, Hob’s final approach of Rue to make his declaration of love and propose is certainly not without tears, because he is completely unsure of how his affections will be taken- despite being told of Rue’s affections, with all the politicking, he’s not sure what to believe. But he still goes and lays everything on the line in a very emotional speech.

Neverafter

• While his repeated insistence that everything is fine is played for comedy, it is obvious that Gerard's marriage is disintegrating and he's in denial about that fact. In his flashback conversation with Elody, it's shown that she's trying to keep their relationship afloat but has to balance that with her parents' illness and her kingdom being at war.
• Ylfa returning to her home after a harrowing experience involving a wolf and her grandmother's death, only to discover the door barred to her and her mother refusing to let her in, thinking that she may be the wolf in disguise. While Ylfa does seem to have been changed by her encounter with the wolf, she was still a scared preteen girl whose family was refusing her the one sanctuary she had left. Then her mother seemingly relents and lets her in, only for it to turn out to be a trap.
  Ylfa, starting to rage out: You lured me in with your own love? You fucking scam of a woman!
  • Even more painfully, the family's reaction is completely understandable. There's a wolf on the prowl that can disguise itself and mimic humans perfectly. Their daughter returns from the woods after a wolf attack that no child could have survived, asking to be let in. They have other children, are they willing to risk them on the slim chance that it really is their daughter and not a monster wearing her skin?
• Timothy's Freudian Slip during the otherwise hilarious shouted argument with Ylfa over which of them is the more amazing person.
  Ylfa: I'M A MONSTER!
  Timothy: YOU'RE A GOOD KID! YOU'RE A GOOD KID! YOU'RE NOT A MONSTER! YOU'RE A GOOD KID, JACK—
• Pinocchio trying and failing to negotiate with the Stepmother. You're reminded that he's actually a child, not just child-sized, and that he's in way over his head with someone terrifying. He sounds incredibly young and on the verge of tears as he helplessly repeats "I don't wanna".
  • Pinocchio is also told that he will be unable to reunite with Senator, the ram that he had become attached to.
• The revelation of how the Stepmother got to Pinocchio: Gepetto cruelly said he was a mistake—after Pinocchio saved his life—and the Stepmother appeared to comfort him, claiming to be his real mother cruelly kept from him by the Blue Fairy and and offering to protect him and Gepetto from the Times of Shadow. Before Mother Goose, the only adult who cut Pinocchio any slack was an eldritch abomination who was only doing it to manipulate him.
• When Ylfa talks with the Wolf after rescuing him, she confronts the nature of death, and how she's supposed to cope with the lingering loss of her grandmother. Emily visibly begins tearing up, lip trembling as she tries to keep herself composed.
  • When it cuts to Ally in the middle of the Wolf's monologue, they also have watery eyes, and their voice wavers when they speak.
• The reveal that Elody discovered Gerard's dead body in Elegy. Despite their marital troubles, its clear this devastated her
  Elody: I found your body in Elegy. It destroyed me.
  • Its less dwelled upon, but Henry Hubbard (presumably in a separate incident) found Timothy's dead body in Elegy. Worse still when you realise that he more than likely also found Ylfa, a child he noticeably cares for, dead as well. Henry was truly left all alone in the world.^note Until he was hit by a wagon and died

The Ravening War

• Lady Amangeaux's entire situation: she was married to the king of Vegetania, who by her account she loved, but was unable to give him an heir. His death left her as one part of a succession crisis, status as a queen suddenly in limbo, surrounded on all sides by people plotting against her. Even Karna, one of the few people she trusts, is secretly siding with one of the other contenders for the throne.
  • To make it worse, Episode 2 reveals that she has a baby grape hidden away in Comida, who she can only visit in secret. The amount of love Amangeaux displays for her son and her desperation to keep him safe only makes it more painful when Karna reveals his existence to Tomate, who immediately proves he is very willing to hurt a child.
• The Ambush on the Glucian Road goes from entertaining and awesome to horrifically sad very quickly. Highlights include:
  • The banana rower, an innocent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Colin Provolone’s horror and resignation at being forced to kill him so there are no witnesses is heartwrenching.
  • The reveal of the assassination target as Queen Pamela Rocks of Candia. Her terror and confusion when she recognizes her attacker makes it worse.
  Queen Pamela: De-Delissandro? Wh-why?
  Delissandro: Destiny has been designed.

Dungeons and Drag Queens

Mentopolis

• Conrad Schintz. Dear lord, Conrad Schintz. There’s a reason why every other sentence out of this kid’s mouth is met with a horrified “Jesus Christ”.
• The story of Ichabod Iceskates, which has had long-standing repercussions on Elias' life and mental state. He was one of Elias' interests when he was a child, only to be brutally destroyed when Elias, urged on by his conscience, defended his sister from a boy at the ice rink and the boy attacked Elias with his own ice skates. The event left Elias with scarring on his face and trauma that lead him to suppressing not only his other interests, but his conscience itself, and has allowed his Freeze response to govern his actions for a long time. It's later revealed that Ichabod was Passion's brother, suggesting that ice skating wasn't just a passing fancy, but a deep passion at the time that was then turned against him.
  • This incident has several key parts of Elias’ psyche left reeling or living in squalor years later. To wit:
    • Conrad Schintz, who pushed Elias to stand up for his sister, has never spoken out again for fear of hurting Elias and remains stuck in a child’s form while the rest of the brain grows up around him.
    • Fight, who turned the key to have Elias actually stand up for his sister but was unable to follow through, had her relationships with her siblings permanently soured and lost her job.
    • Freeze has been living incognito as Leon Logic, allowing other key players to run roughshod over him in the hopes that as mayor he can protect Elias from getting hurt again.
    • Pasha N., despite being trained as a forensic scientist, is stuck filing stimuli for the evidence room and has never moved past the tragedy that claimed her brother.

Burrow’s End

• In episode 8, Tula finally gets fed up with Ava. She snaps, on the verge of tears as she tells off her mother, and when the rest of the family hears what Ava had said, they take her to task for her unfair guilt-slinging. And Ava finally opens up a little about her own survivor's guilt.
  Ava: "If [Geoffrey]'d gone out with the rest of the hunting parties, or with other people, or maybe even with Tula, he wouldn't have fallen so far away—"
  Tula: "Why don't you shut up?"
  (rest of family in shock)
  Tula: "Why don't you shut up from time to time? Because I came to you, in the winter— I came to you, when he was gone, and I had no idea what to do. I said 'Geoffrey's dead. I found him in the snow by the meadow.' Do you remember what you said to me?"
  Ava: "I said, 'You should have been there with him—'"
  Tula: "That's right!"
  Viola: "That's not fair."
  Ava: "He was a fool—"
  Viola: "That's not fair!" (tearing up) "That's not fair at all! She just poured her heart out to us, for the first time in forever! Why would you say that to her?! That's horrible, Mama! I don't like that at all!"
  (Ava stammers, unable to reply)
  Viola: "You think he wanted to die? You think he wanted to go out there by himself?"
  Lila: "We never said you should've been with Grandpa."
  Viola: "You won't even tell us what happened to him."
  Thorn: "Ava, that same field that Tula describes, I went there with a whole crew, a team of incredibly well-trained hunters that could sniff out a rabbit on the wind for miles, and that cloudless thunder tore through us like we were nothing but a blade of grass."
  Ava: "Well, there's always something you can do—"
  Thorn: "There was nothing that we could do!"
  Tula: "You are so obsessed with power, obsessed with control, that you have taken this whole family and demanded that every bad thing that has ever happened to us was our fault. If you were really strong, you would be able to be sad when bad things happen! Instead of demanding that there was something we could have done! It is a big, big forest, and we are just stoats."
  Ava: "Well, I— I have to believe that there's something we could do. Because if there's not, then we... don't really have anything to rely on, do we? And you all were relying on me, and— just like Ken. Ken was relying on me, too, and I failed him. It could have been me, it should have been me there."
  Lila: (laying a hand on her arm) "No, you didn't."
  Ava: (stammering) "Well, I— I just— I had to—"
  Lila: "No, you didn't. You didn't fail them."
  Ava: "I don't like thinking that there are things that are out of our hands."

Fantasy High: Junior Year

• Episode 6 has a confrontation between Tracker and Kristen, who have broken up since Sophomore Year ended; Tracker sounds more disappointed in Kristen than anything, and also deeply worried about her, because Kristen is seemingly unable to commit to anything, whether that's being serious, worshiping her gods, or confronting her past trauma about her upbringing in the Church of Helio. Tracker clearly wants to be Amicable Exes with Kristen, but also needs to put up a boundary until Kirsten gets her life together.