Follow TV Tropes

This is based on opinion. Please don't list it on a work's trope example list.

Following

Tear Jerker / Stellaris

Go To

  • The Apocalypse release date reveal trailer.
    • A mother assures her son that everything will be fine and she'll be home soon, before going out to join the United Nations of Earth fleet fighting an alien incursion... only for the aliens to win, and destroy the planet. It also established that this attack was first contact with the aliens responsible, effectively implying that this was a Fanatic Purifier.
    • There's also the bit as she tried to pull the Independence Day maneuver, aka 'clogging the barrel'. We're treated to her change of expressions, from Oh, Crap! to solemn closed eyes accepting her upcoming Heroic Sacrifice... which is then subverted with her eyebrows giving a sorrowful expression as if saying "I don't really want to die...". Not only did it fail to stop the superweapon, it fired regardless and cue the above Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Fans on Reddit have studied the video and claim it's possible the maneuver still worked and the Colossus exploded after firing, but a planet was still destroyed, with the death toll in the billions.
    • The above thread has become Ascended Fanon with the release trailer of Apocalypse, "The Response". It was strongly implied that the vow to unleash their Doomsday Device against the aliens' worlds was done by the Commonwealth of Man, considering their red and black color scheme, and has since been confirmed by the Console release trailer.
      CoM Rep: With this attack, we have no choice but to protect our kind, by unleashing our almighty weapon upon them, summoning the Apocalypse.
  • AI have many interesting, terrifying, or hopeful event chains tied to their development. Hidden among them is one dubbed "Tears of an AI" where mysteriously a societal research AI system suffers an apparent catastrophic hardware failure destroying it entirely requiring a new one to be created to replace it. You can let it go but if you go to the trouble of investigating you ultimately discover it calculated an almost certain mutual annihilation in an all out war between your empire and your rivals. It tried to purge its own databanks to erase this information. When the research staff locked out its access to that function it deliberately overloaded several of its capacitors committing suicide. No matter how you feel about AI this particular event is genuinely heartbreaking because it displays that even a primitive AI can undergo an existential crisis but without the means to ask for help.
  • One of the outcomes of the Lost Amoeba event, if you allow it to travel with you. If the amoeba, which you get to choose a name for, ends up getting killed while the scientist who first discovered it lost in a gas giant is still alive, then that scientist, unable to cope with the grief of losing this creature they helped raise, will gain the "Substance Abuser" trait.
  • One archaeological dig site takes place on a tomb world in a ruined star system that seems to have been deliberately designed, with the planet having six moons perfectly spaced out in the same orbit and a planet orbiting at the exact opposite end of its orbit. Investigating will reveal that the ancient civilization that once inhabited the tomb world were master terraformers and basically built the system by moving planets from their original orbits to where they are when you find them. They were fanatic pacifists much more concerned with building a perfect civilization than with warfare. So what happened to them? They were driven to extinction by none other than the nearby xenophobic fallen empire back when they were in their prime and were an expansionist genocidal race who believed the extinct race's pacifistic ethos was a complete anathema to everything they believe. Not only did they completely bomb the race's homeworld into a tomb world but they also rendered the six moons so completely uninhabitable as to be beyond any means of terraforming as well as the world on the opposite end of its orbit whose purpose was really nothing more than to be a wildlife preserve, a virgin mirror of their homeworld's ecosystem. And as if that wasn't bad enough, they left behind one of their warships on autopilot in the system to automatically seek out and kill any survivors that may want to return and rebuild their homeworld, just to make sure they're gone forever. The revelation is so disheartening that it's considered an in-universe tear jerker. So much so that even machine empires are moved by it.
    "Our circuits are saddened."
  • The Endless Expanse and Ix Belén dig sites tell the story of Saariah, a religious leader whose followers purged themselves of sin by extracting the relevant memories. The priestess was wracked by a conviction she had committed a grave sin in the past but couldn't remember what it was. She pieced together her fragmented memories and followed them to Ix Belén, a once-thriving space city now filled with corpses. Saariah had once been a scientist of Ix Belén and had developed a system that extracted unwanted memories and could teach new ones, the use of which became mandatory for all citizens. However she and others tampered with the system until vital skills were deleted from the citizenry, leaving all but Saariah in a vegetative state. Overcome with guilt, Saariah shut off the life support systems to mercy kill the entire populace of Ix Belén and wiped her memories. Having returned to the city thanks to the return of her extracted memories, Saariah realizes the awful truth: If the removal of memories wasn't permanent, the people of Ix Belén could have been saved.
  • The crisis usually leads to a heartwarming moment should the Prethoryn and Contingency push too far, with the Sentinels and Cybrex coming to assist the galaxy. However, it's entirely possible, and particularly on higher Crisis levels, rather likely, for the Cybrex and Sentinels to be overwhelmed and killed. They tried their best and it wasn't enough. Particularly sad if the Cybrex were your precursors.
  • The Baol stand out among the precursors for their peaceful and benevolent nature, a plantoid hive mind whose sole drive was to turn worlds into paradises for all life. Then they encountered the Grunur who for some unknown reason set out on a campaign of genocide against the Baol, destroying entire worlds to wipe out any trace of their race. The Baol had no concept of war and so were slowly wiped out. Many Baol severed themselves from the hive mind, devolving into a pre-sapient state, in order to escape the horror of what was done to them. At the end of the chain the player discovers the ruins of the Grunur homeworld and the last true Baol, kept alive by a stasis field until now. It sadly accepts the fate of its kind and perishes at last.
  • The Ruins digsite has the player uncover the history of a long-dead race who became terrified on detecting a faint alien signal from another planet in their system. With the economy collapsing due to the panic and potential societal collapse approaching, the leaders detonated nukes worldwide to grant their race a quick death rather than chance whatever was planned by the aliens. Investigating the alien signal more often than not will reveal their deaths were pointless - that there was nothing there, a mining beacon placed by minerals, or even an observation post from friendly aliens who had planned to introduce the civilization to the galactic community.
  • Empty galaxies. 1000 stars, 5x habitable planets, no empires, no Fallen Empires, no Marauders, no primitives. Just you and maybe the starborne enclaves. The emptiness of a galaxy with Absent Aliens when you would normally see a galaxy filled with alien polities...
  • The Nemesis DLC adds diplomatic messages you can sometimes receive when you completely conquer an empire. While many of them are Defiant to the End, the majority are as sad as you'd expect:
    Hive Minds: The knowledge contained within our Mind. The experiences... the thoughts... the things we have seen. It will all be gone in a few seconds, and you have no idea. You have no idea.

    Militarists: Tell our warriors there was no shame in our defeat. I... I cannot face them...

    Spiritualists: Where did we fail? Was our faith lacking? Were the prayers not enough? I... I just don't understand...

    Keepers of Knowledge: The gates are smashed... the barbarians have broken through. This is the end!
  • The Story of the Ancient Caretakers. Designed to fight against the Contingency by an earlier civilization, the machines and their living counterparts failed. Their systems include multiple destroyed ringworlds, and of the remaining ring worlds still in their possession, one designed for mass habitation by galactic refugees contains billions of cryopods filled with corpses. Presumably these aliens went to sleep hoping to wake up after the Contingency were defeated, only to be killed while helpless during the war. To make matters more depressing, the behavior of the caretakers can be interpreted as a digital equivalent of PTSD, as they seem to be in denial than anything is wrong with their ringworlds, and given that one of the destroyed ones is called "Central Processing", the possibility is that they're basically stuck in a processing loop without the processing power to overcome it, leaving them physically unable to work through the digital psychological trauma that the Contingency inflicted upon them, and its only the return of the Contingency that allows them to snap out of it, likely by getting them to realize that they've got a second chance to set things right by destroying the Contingency once and for all.
  • The Gray Tempest are implied to have felt regret after centuries in isolation given in their non-Crisis scenarios they are either friendly or neutral to outsiders. The saddest outcome is the Dessanu Consonance, where the nanobots imitate their dead creators, either out of boredom or guilt.
  • Declare war on the Peaceful Traders and their reaction will just be "But... w-why?!". Hope you're proud of yourself, You Bastard!.

Top