Trauma Conga Line / Literature

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• Age of Fire: The Copper, one of the three protagonists, has a rough life right from the start. As per dragon traditions, as he and his brothers hatch, they fight to the death, and while the Copper lives, he still loses and is cast out by his family, with nothing but a permanently broken front leg to show for it. Then, after months of scrounging for food to survive, he's captured by dwarves, who trick him into selling out his family's location (after breaking his tail For the Lulz) so they can kill them all, succeeding in the cases of his parents and one of his sisters (namely, the one who was the only family member to show him kindness), and as a parting gift, their dragon-hunting mercenary gives him a wound that guarantees one of his wings will never grow in properly, denying him the chance of ever flying. And then his surviving sister, on running into him shortly after, nearly gouges out one of his eyes as revenge for his treachery, leaving him practically half-blind. Things start to look up for him after that, as he finds his way to the Lavadome and starts a new life there, but he carries his wounds (both physical and psychological) for the rest of his life.
• The Beginning After the End:
  • The end of Volume 7 is a major one for the protagonists, in particular Arthur and Tessia, as The Bad Guy Wins, their loved ones are killed off or put through great suffering, and Awful Truths are revealed. First, Arthur's father Reynolds is killed while defending the Wall from the horde of Alacryan mana beasts which causes a rift between Arthur and his mother and sister. Then, Tessia's parents Alduin and Merial learn from Agrona himself that the Beast Will Arthur had given Tessia has given him control over whether their daughter lives or dies. After giving them a Sadistic Choice over whether he lets Tessia die or they let in his forces into the Council Castle to kill Virion, they choose the latter. While Arthur, Tessia, and Virion survive, the Dicathians to abandon the castle and go into hiding. On top of that Arthur is forced to face Cadell, the Scythe who killed his Parental Substitute Sylvia many years ago, which reigniting his childhood trauma. In the aftermath, Tessia sets out on her own to try to rescue her parents, only to find out once that both they and the Glayders have already been executed to mark the end of the Alacryan conquest. If that weren't enough, in the ensuing battle Arthur and Tessia come face to face with Elijah, who has seemingly been Reforged into a Minion as one the Scythes after having been kidnapped during the attack on Xyrus years ago. Elijah then reveals to Arthur that he is in fact Nico Sever, his former childhood friend from his past life as King Grey, and that he has been working with Agrona willingly out of a desire to exact revenge on Arthur for killing his fiancée and their shared Childhood Friend Love Interest Cecilia. What follows is Arthur and Sylvie being forced to hold back Cadell, Nico, and the Alacryan army in order to buy time for the Dicathians to escape. In the process, Arthur overexerts himself using Sylvia's Beast Will which nearly tears himself apart and it is only through Sylvie performing a Heroic Sacrifice to save him that prevents him from either dying or being captured.
  • The trauma does not stop there, as it continues all the way through Volume 8. In the aftermath, Arthur is presumed dead by the Dicathians which itself is traumatic to his mother, sister, and Tessia. However, he had in fact ended up in the Relictombs, a dimension completely alien to him with no apparent way out. He finds out shortly afterwards thanks to the second message Sylvia left for him the truth about the war - that Kezess and the Indrath Clan from which Sylvia and Sylvie hail from had committed genocide on the ancient Djinn which led to Agrona and the Vritra Clan's Start of Darkness and thus the war itself. He also finds out that his mana core was damaged beyond recovery due to him overxerting Sylvia's Beast Will, and he is forced to go incognito among a group of Alacryans while finding a way out and a way to Re-Power himself. At the end of the Volume, he witnesses Tessia getting captured when she returns to Elenoir by the Alacryans and turned into the vessel for the Legacy, who he realizes is Cecilia reincarnated. He then witnesses Windsom and Aldir arrive in order to eliminate the Legacy, followed by the latter destroying Elenoir using the World Eater technique. Effectively, the volume ends with Arthur being able to do nothing as his friends, family, and homeland are put through severe trauma at the whims of cruel and callous gods as he is stuck in an unfamiliar domain in the company of people he considered his enemies. Though the end of the volume has Arthur finally being able to make a comeback, and a rather cathartic one.
  • After being forced to destroy Elenoir using the World Eater technique, Aldir's loyalty to Kezess is shaken as he has a My God, What Have I Done? moment over having committed another genocide in Kezess's name, one which ultimately failed in its objective in eliminating the Legacy. Then he is confronted by Seris, who not only brings it up to his face how Kezess and Agrona are two sides of the same coin, but that Arthur had managed to survive the war and has the potential to upend it. This leads him to defy his liege's orders by redirecting the Lances to the Djinn sanctuary where the Dicathians are hiding to stop Taci from exterminating the populace at Kezess's command. In the aftermath of Taci's death, Windsom catches on to the fact that Aldir had disobeyed Kezess's orders, to which Aldir decides that now is the time for him to leave Kezess's service and depart Epheotus altogether. However, before he is able to leave Windsom arrives to apprehend him along with a group of Asuran soldiers that Aldir himself had trained. Aldir is forced to kill all of them but Windsom in self-defense, in the process destroying whatever reputation he had left in Epheotus and rendering him Hated by All as a murderer, traitor, and madman. When Arthur meets with him in the Hearth, Aldir is completely broken from the turn of events he has been subjected to and no longer has the will to fight.
• Alex Rider's parents are killed when he's an infant, he's raised by his housekeeper as his guardian is either away or training him to be a spy, his uncle dies and he is recruited into taking his place, he witnesses enormous horrors and is scarred for life. And then there's Jack's death, which destroys Alex.
• Happens to basically everyone in An Outcast in Another World, but Rob especially. Their determination in the face of tragedy is a main tenet of the story.
• Black Dagger Brotherhood: Zsadist has this in spades. He was abducted from his family as an infant, sold into slavery, and then the moment he became an adult his mistress began raping him. Often she'd let her other male slaves watch, or even have them join in. He was sometimes kept bound to a pallet on the floor, flat on his back, for days at a time—y'know, so he'd be in the right position when the mood struck her. She'd often neglect to feed him or give him the blood he needed, and liked to beat him when he offered any form of resistance. (His back is a mass of scars because of this.) It took more than a century for his twin to track him down and rescue him, and in the attempt his mistress' enraged husband scarred Z's face with a sword. Oh, and later on his girlfriend is kidnapped and tortured by vampire-slayers.
• Lois McMaster Bujold has explicitly stated that she generates her plots by asking herself what the worst possible thing she can do to the hero is. For example, in Memory she begins by having interstellar superagent Miles notice he is suffering from seizures from injuries sustained in the last book. Next he makes the bad decision to personally lead a prisoner rescue mission anyway and ends up having a seizure in mid mission. While having the seizure he accidentally saws off the legs of the prisoner he was rescuing with a plasma gun. Then he lies about the seizures on his After-Action Report because he is afraid of getting a desk job. This gets him cashiered. And this is just the plot setup in the first few chapters! Miles, fortunately, always manages to achieve Result A.
  • Later on she refined her philosophy to "the worst possible thing that the hero can still learn a useful lesson from." For example, despite the political trouble the circumstances of Tien Vorsoisson's death caused Miles in A Civil Campaign, a far more thorough and protracted torture could have been produced for Miles simply by not killing Tien off in Komarr and letting Miles suffer for years knowing that the woman he loves is married to someone else and thus condemning them both to suffer nobly, unrequited, for years. (That Ekaterin was going to leave Tien anyway cuts no ice — both Miles' and Ekaterin's honor would never have allowed them to remotely act on any mutual attraction so long as her husband was still alive). However, since going this route would have been dramatically pointless, Bujold didn't. So very occasionally, her characters do actually get cut a break.
• Candide is the lord and master of this trope. Almost every single character falls victim to this.
• Chinese Cinderella, full stop. The main character is blamed for her mother's Death by Childbirth and mistreated by her birth siblings and Wicked Stepmother. Her father disregards her to the point he can't remember her birthday or name. She adopts a duckling that her family feeds to the guard dog. Her friends at school throw her a surprise party, earning her a vicious beating from her stepmother. She's separated from her beloved aunt and grandpa, then sent to a boarding school in the path of Communist uprisings. After her family moves, she's sent to a different school, but still neglected and then bullied by her peers. She wins a writing contest, but her grandfather dies immediately after. The closest the book comes to a happy ending is that her father notices her grades and sends her to college. And this was all based on the author's real life.
• Heroines in Catherine Cookson books are born to suffer, and spend much of the novel(s) having all sorts of angst thrown at them. They don't necessarily get a happy ending either. They very often settle for a life that's not quite as miserable as the one they've gone before. Example: One girl became a mistress to her rapist (and father of her child) when she decided he was actually quite a nice man. He had undergone some character development, but even so...
• Danger: Boober Cooking, a picture book based on Fraggle Rock, is based around this trope, albeit in a Lighter and Softer way that won't upset its target audience of young children. While trying to put together a celery souffle, poor Boober gets chased by a Gorg, gets drenched in pond water and catches a cold, falls down the Smelly Pit and breaks his arm, and breaks a leg trying to gather wompus root. By the end, the souffle is made, and seems to taste alright judging by the other Fraggles' reactions to it, but Boober is so worn out from his escapades, he ends the story by going straight to bed.
• The title character of The Dresden Files. His mother died in childbirth, his father died when he was a child, he had to kill his adoptive father when the latter tried to mentally enslave him along with his first girlfriend, he spent the next decade or so living under a "one-strike-you're-out" death penalty by his fellow wizards, his next girlfriend got turned into a half-vampire, terrible things keep happening to his friends, he can barely make rent, and there isn't a single book in which he isn't beaten, shot, burned, knifed, and/or just plain tortured. And then came Changes...
  "Typical. Even when you're dead, it doesn't get any easier."
  • And he was right. After all he's gone through in Changes, Ghost Story cranks it up beyond eleven.
  • It says something that compared to Cold Days, Ghost Story can honestly be described as a Breather Episode.
  • The author, Jim Butcher, has flat-out said that dropping pain on Harry is an integral part of his creative process.
• A few of the characters in The Emigrants go through this, but perhaps Kristina more than anyone else. Her infant baby dies, her three year-old dies a rather painful death, she almost dies from scurvy on the journey across the Atlantic while pregnant, nearly loses her only surviving daughter on the shores of the Mississippi, Indians point a loaded gun at her, she goes through a hard and drawn-out delivery, spends the second half of her life longing for friends, family and places she can never go back to, for all intents an purposes loses $4000 (a lot of money in the mid-19th century), goes through a severe crisis of faith, miscarries her baby, finds out she can never be intimate with her husband again and...dies before she's forty.
  • Robert is a pretty good contender as well. His master hits his ear so hard he gets tinnitus and chronic pain, his master whips him with a branch for something that wasn't his fault, he gets lost in the desert with his best friend and has to watch him die a slow, agonizing death, loses several teeth, gets conned, tends to his dying master, comes home to his brother sick with yellow fever and completely disillusioned, finds out he's been conned and traded his gold for counterfeit money, his brother accuses him of knowing the money was fake all along and the last time he sees his brother Karl Oskar punches him in the face. Then he dies from his illness all alone by a stream at the age of 22.
• The Empirium Trilogy: At age five, Rielle killed her mother inadvertently. This turned her once loving father against her to the point of being emotionally and verbally abusive. He and her mentor, Taliesin, essentially ignore her wants and desires under the guise of keeping her safe, both her from the public and the public from her. They force her to keep her powers suppressed and hidden from everyone, even her best friends, one of whom is a prince. This blows up in all of their faces (in more ways than one) when she saves the prince from assassins but winds up killing innocents in the process. The King has her then undergo a series of grueling trials in order to determine if she's the menace her father keeps telling her that she is. (Between two trials, a noble tries to assassinate her and she only survives thanks to her unique powers.) The last trial she ends up doing has her essentially relive the night her mother died. At first, it seems to go well until Corien takes over various soldier's minds, turning the vicinity into a veritable bloodbath, during which she watches her other best friend get thrown off a cliff. Then it turns out that this friend actually died years ago and the person she's been talking to since the beginning of this whole affair is actually an angel, a being that humans have feared and hated for centuries. And all of that is only the beginning.
• In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag by the end has had his secret work for La Résistance discovered and smashed, his wife killed, his friend and mentor "disappeared", and been forced to burn down his own house, all the while his Magnificent Bastard of an opponent laughs about how they're not so different. It's a relief to see Beatty meet his Karmic Death and Montag eventually get at least a Bittersweet Ending; the play makes it a Happy Ending.
  • Except, that Bradbury wrote the story for the text-adventure sequel, and he cheerfully gives Montag and Clarisse a Bolivian Army Ending.
• Nearly everyone—hero, villain, or otherwise—in the GONE series by Michael Grant. It would actually be easier to name the EXCEPTIONS, Brianna and Albert being the only characters out of a cast of 400 kids who don't get tortured every book. And even Brianna got radiation poisoning and even Albert was robbed and shot in the leg. These are the lucky characters. Here are the most noteworthy examples of characters undergoing the trauma conga line, though, you could make long examples of every character;
  • Brittney Donegal had to watch her little brother get eaten by coyotes, before she herself is tortured by the boy responsible for her brother's death, then, Edilio mistaking her for dead, she's buried underground fully conscious (because of her sucky power of immortality), and has to dig her way out. Then she discovers she has to share a body with the boy who murdered her and her family. Then she's tricked into becoming a slave, and is tortured various times; and because of her sucky power she just keeps coming back for more torture—decapitation, getting shot 9 times in the face, you name it. She probably wishes she didn't have her power so she could curl up in a ball and die.
  • Hunter was attacked by his racist, bigoted "best friend", before being framed for a murder that wasn't his fault and being kidnapped and hung half to death by said "best friend". He doesn't die, but is permanently brain damaged and deformed as a result of the torture, and is then exiled from Perdido Beach for the murder he hasn't committed. Then, his body is infested by flesh eating bugs who chew on his brain and further deform him. Then he's burnt to death in "mercy". Fun times for Hunter.
  • Ooh, Diana. The last few books haven't been kind to you have they? First, being tortured by your worst enemy and nearly dying from internal wounds. Second, starving to death for months to the point where you're driven to eat human flesh. Shortly followed by a nearly-fatal plunge off a cliff, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and a Teen Pregnancy cultivating in your boyfriend, the only person you've been able to trust this entire time, saying that you repulse him and he wants nothing to do with you anymore. Then you are forcibly kicked out of your home, and with no choice but seek refuge in your enemies' terrain whilst you suffer the indignities of everyone knowing about your fall from grace. Next up? You're kidnapped and tortured by the boy who nearly killed you while heavily pregnant, as you are forced to walk miles across sandstone with no shoes whilst suffering contractions. You are whipped, psychologically tortured, threatened, humiliated and at one point forced to crawl in the mud on your belly. Then, when you give birth at 15 years old in a steaming hot, pitch black mine with no medical assistance, congratulations! It's a baby...monster. Queue becoming a slave to your own child and suffering pretty extreme postpartum depression. Oh, and great news! Once you outgrow your usefulness to your daughter, she or Drake will probably kill you, and it's implied you're going to be raped by Drake. Laser-Guided Karma for all the heinous things she did just for malicious glee, or Disproportionate Retribution for a girl who in reality was just a bit of a snobby bitch?
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry James Potter himself. Nearly every adult authority figure either despises Harry and tortures him, or is killed protecting him. He also is the witness to several of his friends and loved ones being murdered. If your family was murdered while you were a baby and you bear a scar from that event the rest of your life, and it WASN'T the worst thing to ever happen to you, you have a seriously messed-up life.
  • Also Sirius Black , who grew up in a neglectful and unloving home, was disowned by his family for refusing to join Voldemort, lost most of his close friends in the First Wizarding War, was framed for the murder of two of them, spent 13 years being subjected to the torture of Azkaban, and finally escaped only to have his chance to gain a real family snatched away at the last minute, lived off rats while on the run, and had to spend most of his remaining time confined to the home he hated as a child. Frankly, Bella gave him a Mercy Kill.
  • Remus Lupin didn't fare much better. It started when he was bitten by a werewolf, meaning a lifetime of excruciating changes and social ostracism to go along with it. When he got to school, he made three good friends in spite of all that - and then had to watch them all die or turn traitor one by one. After he and Tonks got together and had a child, they were both hit with Too Happy to Live during the final battle.
    • He doesn't just lose his three best friends, he loses them all within a twenty-four hour period. Twelve full years later, he gets one of them back when he finds out that Sirius was innocent all along, but that's still a horribly long time to dwell on those losses. He also learned that one of his other best friends not only wasn't dead, but was the Death Eater who sold Harry's parents to Voldemort and would go on to murder Cedric and resurrect Voldemort. Not to mention the fact that he then witnesses Sirius' actual death two short years later. It's not terribly surprising that he had something of a breakdown at the beginning of the seventh book after marrying and impregnating Tonks.
  • Luna has it pretty rough—her mother died in front of her when she was nine, she's ostracised and bullied by other students at Hogwarts for being weird, and it's only after the Golden Trio, Neville and Ginny start talking to her that she has any friends, and then she gets kidnapped by Death Eaters when her father shows too much support for Harry in The Quibbler during Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
  • The entire life of Merope Gaunt, introduced in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, sucked, to put it simply. She was the target of constant abuse by her father and brother, is one of three named British kids in the series who never got to go to Hogwarts ^note  her, her brother Morfin, and Ariana Dumbledore (either because she was believed to be a Squib or her father hated the outside world so much) and fell in love with a man she knew would never want her. She used a Love Potion to make him fall in love with her and have her child, but stopped using it after a while, hoping he had genuinely fallen in love with her. He ran away from her instead, causing her to fall into despair and die giving birth to their son.
  • Andromeda Tonks (née Black) has to endure harsh trials despite only physically appearing briefly in one book. She was disowned by her family when she married a Muggle-born wizard. Because she looks similar to Bellatrix, who joined the Death Eaters and participated in countless horrific acts, she was presumably shunned by other wizards, despite having nothing to do with them. Then her favorite cousin was captured and imprisoned upon false charges and was murdered two years after he escaped. Not even two years later, she is tortured by the Death Eaters because she dared to host Harry Potter. Her husband runs away to escape the Snatchers, but is killed anyway. Finally, her daughter and son-in-law die in the Battle of Hogwarts, leaving her to care for her newborn grandson.
• Vanyel Ashkevron of the Heralds of Valdemar series. He starts out life hated and abused by his father and brothers for the sin of being gay, which they deliberately try to keep him from figuring out. When he finally gets a Love Interest, he's Driven to Suicide. The earthshattering magical powers Vanyel gets as a result only serve to make him the go-to guy for every problem Valdemar has, to the point where he can't take a break for five minutes without the kingdom falling apart. Then, just when he makes up with his family, someone starts picking off his friends one by one. This nearly causes him to break his oath as a Herald as he storms off on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, only to walk into a trap in which he's serially raped into a Heroic BSoD. After recovering from that, he's forced to give up his new Love Interest in order to deliver a final Heroic Sacrifice to save the kingdom. To top it all off, the Aesop appears to be Comes Great Responsibility.
  • Mercedes Lackey has a basic formula to give her characters Angst: Drop a mountain on them. Let them recover slightly. Drop another mountain on them. Repeat.
• The entirety of The Howling (1977) is this for Karyn. First she is violently raped in her own home and has a miscarriage. Then she moves to a remote town that is terrorised by a bloodthirsty werewolf and turns out to be populated entirely by werewolves, her husband ends up becoming one of them after cheating on her, her new friend Inez is murdered by the werewolves trying to save her and her dog is killed.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Peeta Mellark is routinely beaten by his mother, falls in love with Katniss, is thrown into an arena to fight her to the death, nearly dies of sepsis, loses his leg, finds out the girl of his dreams only faked loving him back, goes back into the arena to fight her to the death again, has a heart attack, gets left behind when Katniss leaves, is tortured to the point of seemingly irreparable insanity, is present while everyone else on his squad (save Katniss) discuss killing him, and never stops having insane outbursts. Ouch.
  • And Katniss: Her father is killed in a mining accident, she nearly starves to death, she goes to The Hunger Games, she is forced to fake love to someone who really loves her during and after the Games, she goes back into the Games, she watches her close friend being beaten before her eyes, she accidentally becomes the face of a rebellion, she watches the boy she loves get beaten on live television, then realizes everything she does to help the rebellion leads to torture for him, he then tries to strangle her when they reunite, she goes into a battlezone and watches her sister explode. Not to mention her breakdown after she shoots Coin.
  • Invoked by the Capitol for all victorious tributes. As children they are put through Deadly Games, where they are forced to kill or be killed not only by other tributes but also by most of the things in the arena. These experiences are enough to make most of them Shell Shocked Veterans, but the Capitol doesn’t leave them alone even then, and puts them through even more suffering for the rest of their lives, making sure There Are No Therapists to help. They can't even fight back, with the lives of their loved ones on the line and are Forced to Watch as people they know participate in the same Deadly Games. If that was not enough, then victors are faced with a possibility of coming back on the arena and having to kill people they’ve became friends with. At the end only seven victorious tributes remain (out of 50), because both Capitol and rebels target them to make sure they can’t support the opposite side.
• Inheritance Cycle: Murtagh. The main article describes his life as a series of people kicking him in the balls. As of the ending of the 2nd book, he's well on his way to becoming Type B.
• Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle): None of the characters have a good time in Hell, but Carpenter's tribulations get an especial first-person focus. Over the course of the novel, he breaks most of his bones on a number of occasions, is pelted with fire from the sky, has to wade through boiling blood, has his belly sliced open, burns off his own hands, and has his eyes frozen shut and then open. Every time, the Healing Factor of the damned in Hell fixes him back up so that he can be hurt again. The narration is very graphic about this, describing his sensations, such as the all-pervasive agony of immersion in boiling liquid or the feeling of smelling your own burning flesh, in some detail.
• Knight and Rogue Series: Michael gets dragged through one in the first two books, consisting of multiple abductions, use as a test subject, and ostracization. He spends the second book a little broken but manages to come out in almost as good shape as he was in the beginning, by means of lots of distractions and help from Fisk.
• A Legacy of Light: Tutankhamun's parents, grandmother, and five of his sisters died before he'd turned nine, and before he was nineteen, he and his wife had lost two infant daughters. Furthermore, the Pharaoh has mobility issues requiring the use of a cane, and suffers from daily pain in his foot. As the trilogy progresses, he rides into battle, comes home with two broken legs, and later develops malaria.
• The Martian: Author Andy Weir cheerfully admits that this is exactly what he was doing when he wrote the book. He started with the premise of an astronaut accidentally left behind on Mars, trying to survive until the next expedition from Earth arrives, and then made a list of every disaster he could think of that might happen to the poor guy. For each disaster, he then tried to come up with a way that Mark Watney could overcome the problem and soldier on. If the answer was "Nope, this would definitely kill him", then that disaster was dropped from the list. The result is a story in which Watney endures every possible disaster that he has any hope of surviving, and triumphs over them all.
• This trope can sum up the second Neogicia novel. It starts with the protagonist getting kidnapped, then getting a Mercy Lead that gets followed by a series of From Bad to Worse and Out of the Frying Pan situations, even after a rescue party reaches her. Dealing with the new situation always spends more physical and mental energy than what she managed to recuperate after the previous one, to the point that her Post-Victory Collapse becomes more of a Post Victory Several Month Long Coma.
• Happens to protagonist Bobby Marks in One Fat Summer by Robert Lipsyte over the course of the titular summer. It culminates in Bobby winding up stripped naked on an island in the middle of the lake his family is staying at by the bullies who've been harassing him. As the rain begins to soak him, this proves less a breaking point and more a turning point, with Bobby resolving to not merely lay down and accept what's happened, but push on to try to get himself out of the situation. The resolve becomes necessary later when he has to confront the leader of the bullies who has since become deranged and is threatening Bobby with a gun.
• Beatrice Löwenström in Simona Ahrnstedt's Överenskommelser becomes a type G example in the end. She's smart, competent, and tough, but life has been really hard on her. Not only did she lose her mother when she was only six years old and her father when she was only fourteen years old. But she also has to live with her tyrannical uncle, who abuses her for five long years, forcing her into a marriage with a man, who's like forty years older than her and treats women like dirt under his shoes. Beatrice's relationship with Seth, her love interest, is also complicated to say the least. And just when she thought that things would turn out good between them, cue her sadistic cousin ruining everything! Not to mention that she was brutally raped and almost killed on her wedding night...
• Most of the main characters in The Power go through this:
  • Mafia Princess Roxy Monke witnesses the murder of her mother by a rival gang of her criminal family. She temporarily has to move in with her father and her stepmother who has never wanted to consider Roxy a legitimate member of the family. Her half-brother Terry is killed when they confront the rival gang to avenge her mother. Another half-brother, Ricky, is assaulted by a gang of women with skeins. Soon after, Roxy learns that her father was the one who orchestrated her mother's death after finding out her mother was The Informant to a rival gang. Finally, her father and third half-brother Darrell trap her and forcibly transplant her skein into Darrell so he can rule their criminal empire instead of Roxy. This procedure almost kills Roxy in the process. Roxy ends up being a Result A from these experiences.
  • Allie is a foster child who has been passed around from one abusive family to another. Her last family is a neglectful wife and a physically and verbally abusive husband. When she kills the husband with her skein in self-defense, she is forced to go on the run and eventually ends up in a convent with other girls with similarly tragic backgrounds. Allie starts out as a Result A but slowly edges toward Result B as she gets corrupted by her position of power and authority.
  • Jocelyn Cleary is a Shrinking Violet who is horrified when she accidentally sends a male classmate to the hospital with her skein powers. She struggles to consistently control her power, which makes her a target for teasing by other girls. She falls in love with a rare boy possessing a skein, but her mother manipulates her into breaking it off with him. She also accidentally murders a man with her skein abilities protecting a North Star camp. Near the end of the book, Jocelyn is attacked by a newly-skein-powered Darrell and suffers severe injuries, the book ends with her fate unknown. Jocelyn is a Result G in the book.
  • Tunde goes from being a celebrated journalist to being on the run in a country at civil war, with a fake notice of his death being manufactured and released by a former ally, Tatiana, so nobody will come help him because nobody knows he is still alive. While hiding out and on the run, he is nearly actually killed by many women with skeins, and survives mostly due to being protected by Roxy.
• Queen Mary I goes through this in The Queen's Fool. First she loses her sister's love, then her first child, then her husband (who never even loved her, but she fails to realize this), then her second child.
• Seyonne in the Rai-Kirah books. He's been a slave for sixteen years by the time we're introduced to him, and is basically just waiting to die. Then things get worse. He spends a good chunk of the second book in hell being arbitrarily tortured, and the third book ends with him stripped of his powers and about half his memory...and those are just a couple of the highlights.
• Pretty much every character in Rick Riordan's works has a trauma conga line of a life.
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians
    • Percy Jackson spent the first twelve years of his life living in abject poverty, never knowing his biological father, and with an abusive and alcoholic stepfather. He's never able to last a full year at a single school because of events out of his control, and he has to deal with dyslexia and ADHD. He witnesses the apparent death of his mother, is thrust into a world of gods he had no idea existed, and is betrayed by someone he thought was a mentor. And that's just the first book! Throughout the rest of the story, he goes through things including: almost dying countless times, watching his fellow campers (most of them under 20 years old) die, losing his memory, being sent across the country against his will, having to go through Tartarus (aka super hell) with noone but Annabeth for help, and a whole lot of other pain.
    • "Her name is Sally Jackson and she's the best person in the world, which just proves my theory that the best people have the rottenest luck." This is how Percy's lovely mother, Sally, is introduced to the audience. Her bad luck started when she was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her parents. She was sent to live with an uncle that didn't really care about her, and had to dropout of high school in order to care for him when he got cancer. At 19 years old, she got pregnant with her son while working a minimum wage job. She married Gabe Ugliano, a man so smelly that monsters wouldn't even come near him, in order to protect her son. For years, she put up with his abuse to keep the monsters away until she finally was able to get rid of him with Medusa's head. She briefly got stuck in the underworld, lost her son for months, and only then was allowed a peaceful ending with Percy, her new husband Paul, and their daughter Estelle.
    • Annabeth Chase grew up in a home that never felt like home. Her father was always too busy to take care of her, her stepmom clearly didn't want her there, and every morning she'd wake covered in spiders. She ran away at only seven years old, and joined Thalia and Luke as they made their way to camp. She watched Thalia, the closest thing to a sister she'd ever had, get killed by monsters and turned into a tree. For five whole years, she stayed at camp, not allowed to go on a quest to prove her worth. When she was finally allowed to accompany Percy on his quest, she came back to Luke, her adoptive older brother, turned into a traitor. She spent years trying desperately to convince herself that Luke was still good inside, that he'd come back and be her brother again, but it never happened. Eventually, Annabeth had to watch Luke kill himself with the dagger he'd given her years ago. She lost Percy for months, thinking he was dead only just after the two had finally confessed their feelings. Her own mother continually called her a dissapointment, and fell into Tartarus after finally proving her wrong.
    • Luke Castellan's home life was never ideal, either. As a baby, his mother was cursed by the Oracle and he spent the early years of his life with a mom who was never fully there. He ran away at a very young age, and joined up with Thalia and Annabeth, who became like his sisters. He watched as Thalia died and was turned into a tree, and never forgave the gods for letting something like that happen. He saw life at camp as meaningless, and after his quest, he snapped. He started serving Kronos, who put him through endless torture. Eventually, though, he came to his senses and was able to stop Kronos for god by killing himself with the dagger he gave to his little sister years ago.
    • Thalia Grace's mom was a mess. She was a big Hollywood actress who never wanted Thalia, only Zeus, and spent the early years of her daughter's life pulling crazy stunts to get his attention. This left Thalia with nothing to hold onto, no stability at all. When her brother Jason was born, Thalia had to act like his mom at only seven years old because their mom was still obsessed with Zeus/Jupiter. After her mom gave her brother to Hera, telling Thalia only that he was gone, she finally left. She spent years on the run with Luke and Annabeth, the closest thing to a family she'd ever had. But, when the group finally made it to Camp Half Blood, Thalia was killed. She spent years unconscious as a tree, not knowing what was going on around her. When she finally was turned back into a human, she found that in her absence, Luke had started serving Kronos. She joined the Hunters of Artemis, and years later discovered that her little brother had been alive the entire time. But not for long. Only about a year or two after they'd been reunited, Jason was killed.
    • Nico DiAngelo spent the early years of his life with his mother and sister Bianca in the 1940s. When WW2 ended, Zeus killed his mother. He and his sisters' memories were wiped and they were forced to stay in the Lotus Hotel until finally emerging in present day. Immediately after finding out that the two were demigods, his sister abandoned him for the Hunters of Artemis. When she went out on a quest, he made Percy promise to protect her. He wasn't able to keep that promise, so when Percy (who he was starting to crush on and didn't know how to handle it) returned to camp without Bianca, he couldn't take it. He ran away and was soon manipulated to be under the control of a long dead king in order to get his dead sister back. He spent a year doing his bidding, spending time in the Labyrinth as an outcast from camp, until finally shaking off his control and helping to win the final battle against Kronos. But even after all of that, he was still an outcast just like his father, Hades. He tried to go to the underworld to bring back Bianca, but she'd already been reborn into a new life. But he didn't come out completely empty-handed. He found Hazel, his half-sister, in the Fields of Asphodel, and brought her up to the surface with him. There, he became the only demigod to know about both Camp Half Blood and Camp Jupiter, though he was ostracized from both. He went through Tartarus completely alone and spent weeks stuck in a jar with nothing but a few pomegranate seeds to survive off of, all the while dealing with some serious internalized homophobia. When he was forcibly outed by Cupid, he had only his friend Jason to turn to. Eventually, he was allowed at the camps as a normal camper and was able to find happiness with his friends Jason and Reyna, his sister Hazel, and his new boyfriend Will. The happiness wouldn't last long, however. Jason soon died, Reyna left to join the Hunters of Artemis, and he'd once again lost people that he cared about.
  • The Heroes of Olympus
    • Leo Valdez's life didn't start out miserable, but it didn't take long for it to turn that way. His entire family saw him as a freak, not knowing that he had the ability to control fire but understanding that something was strange about him. The only person he had was his mother, who died in a fire started by Gaea that Leo blamed himself for. None of his relatives wanted to take him in, so he spent years being shuffled around foster homes and running away. Eventually, he ended up at Piper's school. When he discovered that he was a son of Hephaestus, the god of forges and fire, he discovered that even other Hephaestus kids thought that controlling fire was odd, so he had to keep it quiet again. He was the one who got possessed by the venti to fire on Camp Jupiter, so everyone blamed him for starting the war between the camps. He ends up on Ogygia with Calypso and they fall in love, but he's forced to leave her behind. Since he made a deal with Nemesis to help him figure out Archimedes's spheres, he blamed himself when Percy and Annabeth fell into Tartarus. Later, he finds out that one of the lines from the prophecy means that either he or his best friend Jason has to die to defeat Gaea, and chooses to sacrifice himself. Even when he comes back to life and is reunited with Calypso, managing to get her of her island, his happiness is tainted by the fact that Jason died before he could see him again.
    • Poor Hazel Levesque. For starters, she was born black in the 1920s. That part's self-explanatory. She was born with the ability to summon jewels and precious metals from beneath the earth because her mother wished for riches, but there was a catch. Anyone who used those riches for selfish means would be cursed. Since her mother exploited her gift, things never went well. Her mom always refused to take responsibility for the curse, saying it was because of her father Pluto alone. Everyone at school called her a freak because they thought her mother was a witch, and she only had one real friend. His name was Sammy Valdez. The two would sneak into pastures to ride horses together, and they at one point shared a small kiss. But that small bit of happiness was short-lived. To get away from the gods, Hazel was forced to move to Alaska. The last time she ever saw Sammy, she accidentally summoned a diamond near him. Despite her protests that it would bring him bad luck, he insisted that anything related to her couldn't possibly be evil. After moving north, she never saw him again and was told by Gaea that he had died young because of her curse. Alaska was out of the gods' control, so Gaea was able to corrupt her mother and force the two to help her raise her son, Gigantes. After learning that she would need a human sacrifice to raise him, Hazel immediately destroyed the cavern she'd been forced to build to welcome the giant, killing herself and her mother but delaying his return. For almost seventy years, she wandered the Fields of Asphodel alone until her half-brother, Nico Di Angelo, found her and brought her back up to the surface to Camp Jupiter. There, she was blackmailed by Octavian to help him become praetor and was shunned by most of the camp. She had frequent blackouts where she would remember aspects of her old life. Soon, she met Leo Valdez, her childhood crush's great great grandson who looked nearly identical to him. She eventually learned that Gaea had lied to her, and that Sammy had lived a long and full life in spite of the curse but had never forgotten his old friend.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: We get a number of hints in the first three years of the series that Oliver Horn has a lot of trauma buried in his past, but his full Backstory, once revealed in volume 10, is nothing but round after round of suffering for a half-dozen years on end. His happy life with his parents was shattered by her falling-out with her Gnostic Hunter comrades: Chloe was murdered and Ed and Oliver fled to Seek Sanctuary with her powerful, estranged relatives. Turns out, she was the family Black Sheep: when the remnants of Chloe's soul settled with Oliver, his great-grandfather used him to play back her murder from her Ghost Memory, forcing him to relive her Rasputinian Death in first-person. Seeking revenge meant years of repeated Training from Hell to the point of death so that he could perform an unnatural Merger of Souls with his mother, the only hope a Master of None mage like Oliver had of posing a credible threat to a Kimberly Magic Academy professor. Then his great-grandfather had him drugged into a hyperaggressive state and unleashed him on his gentle cousin Shannon, hoping to impregnate her with a child with progenitor ancestry. Shannon forgave him since he was Not Himself, but Oliver's only hope of redeeming his guilt over the rape was scuttled when their daughter was stillborn—leading him to subconsciously conclude that he was destined to suffer forever. All this was capped off when Oliver murdered both his maternal great-grandparents for their actions, and his father committed suicide, both to cover it up and out of guilt for being unable to stop the rape. Good God, Bokuto Uno...
• In Ripper (2014), this applies to the Serial Killer Big Bad's early life. In infancy, he was abused by his biological parents. A nurse kidnaps him and raises him as her daughter, teaching "Lee" that "girls are good, boys are bad". One day the nurse dies but her ID is stolen. By the time authorities identify her and learn that she is a mother, her child has been left alone for weeks and is close to death by starvation. And that is before child protective services intervenes, inflicting even more trauma.
• The Baudelaire children in A Series of Unfortunate Events endure this throughout the series. Their parents are dead, they have no close relatives to live with, the main Big Bad wants to gain their family's fortune by any means necessary, any good relatives they find are killed, they lose their only friends through even more tragic circumstances, and they have no one to rely on. These kids really deserve a hug.
  • Lemony Snicket's entire life is basically just one long trauma conga line, even the bits detailed in Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography. First, he's kidnapped as a baby into a secret organization, and grows up within VFD, likely never allowed to leave even if he wanted to. He says something that pisses off one of his enemies, gets framed for the crimes they committed (including several murders and arsons), and has to go on the run and later fake his own death. Then, he learns that the love of his life, who married someone else, has died in a fire, leaving her kids orphans. He resolves to record the story of the Baudelaires, and while writing the books, learns about the deaths of Monty and Josephine, people who were in VFD with him and that he knew personally. Then, he learns about the death of his brother, Jacques, likely only while researching for A Series Of Unfortunate Events, as it was never reported. After that, he learns about the death of his sister, Kit. At the end of The End, he’s lost his friends, his siblings, the love of his life, and is still on the run for crimes he’s never committed. The only bright spot for him is that ten years later, his sister’s daughter shows up in his life, and he finally gets some closure on what happened after The End, as he was never able to find out.
• The protagonist Camille from Sharp Objects is a prime example of a Result G. She was born The Unfavorite to a Disappeared Dad and an emotionally and verbally abusive mother, Adora. At thirteen, her beloved little sister Marian died as a young child from a mysterious illness. Around the same time, Camille is gang-raped by a group of football players at a party. These early traumas leave Camille The Alcoholic and a chronic cutter, and she eventually has to check herself into a psychiatric hospital for her cutting problem. While there, she forms a close bond with her teenage roommate, but the roommate tragically commits suicide by ingesting bleach from the cleaning person's supplies. When her hometown has two unsolved murders of little girls occur, Camille is assigned by the newspaper she works at to cover the town's reaction, and she has to go stay with her abusive mother again while she does this. She finds a mutual attraction in the out-of-town detective summoned to investigate the murders, but it doesn't work out as she sleeps with a teenage suspect and he is also repulsed by the scars from her cutting. She eventually finds out her mother has Munchausen by Proxy and poisoned her sister Marian to death, but not before her mother almost poisons Camille to death as well. Her mother is eventually charged with the murders of Marian and the other two little girls. Camille then takes custody of her youngest sister Amma, moving the girl back to Chicago with her, only to find out that Amma was the killer all along when one of Amma's new school friends ends up dead in a very similar way as the other two little girls in her hometown.
• Sidney Sheldon was awfully fond of this trope too. What's worse is that he often likes to cap it off with a Scenario B or C ending.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin is this and nothing but this for the whole way through, because the reality occupied by the characters is designed by the Lord in White to be as miserable as possible.
• This happens to most of the characters in Sometimes A Great Notion, but the one who gets it worst has to be Hank. He loses his father, who dies of blood loss after losing his arm in a logging accident; he fails to save his cousin Joby from drowning while trapped under a log from the same logging accident; his half-brother Leland tells him he was having an affair with Hank's wife Vivian and then blames him for driving Leland's mother to suicide by having sex with her, even though she was several years older and it would count as statutory rape - and says all this immediately after leaving their father's deathbed; his wife Vivian leaves him; and the whole town gangs up on him for refusing to join their logging strike. All in the same day.
• A Song of Ice and Fire is one big conga line for several characters, but the ones inflicted on Arya and Sansa Stark, starting with their father's death, are especially brutal.
  • Not to mention the brutality of pretty much everything that happens to Theon Greyjoy in A Dance With Dragons
  • Heavily implied that Littlefinger, perhaps the closest thing to the Big Bad in this series (besides The Others), went through this when he was younger, leading to Result B with a splattering Result D. From what we know, he was always mocked for being the lowest lord in the realm, as well as being physically weak in a culture that prizes strong men. Then, when he challenged the betrothed of the woman he loved, he was beaten, nearly killed, and then, while still weak from his injuries, raped by his love's sister.
  • Tyrion Lannister's life takes a sharp nose-dive in A Storm of Swords including a ghastly facial injury, being denied credit for his accomplishments, betrayal from people he was starting to think of as friends, being falsely accused of murder again and being convicted, and discovering a past betrayal from his family. He finally snaps from this abuse, commits two revenge-fueled murders, and flees Westeros vowing to return someday to take his revenge. And then it gets worse in A Dance with Dragons.
  • Jaime Lannister's adventures as a prisoner of the Boltons.
  • In the backstory, Rhaenyra and her son Aegon III are particularly sad figures. Rhaenyra loses her mother to childbirth when she's young, then loses her lover, first husband and close friend/sister-in-law in quick succession. Loses her father and has her half-brother usurp her throne. Then as the civil war continues, she slowly loses 5 of her 6 children and then it's capped off with her second husband dying and Rhaenyra herself being fed to a dragon as her son, Aegon III, watched. Aegon III never recovered from the shitshow that was the Dance plus he lost his first queen when she was 11 due to suicide/murder. His one bright spot was discovering his brother, Viserys, was still alive.
• For someone whose books are geared towards women, Danielle Steel tends to employ this with disturbing frequency. One of her books starts off with the protagonist's mother dying from cancer, then killing her father after years of him sexually abusing her (which her mother has told her that she must submit to, as she can no longer fulfill his sexual needs). Then she's sent to jail for murder, where she's nearly beaten by her fellow inmates. After her release, she starts to rebuild her life—and then she's viciously attacked and beaten on her way home from work and left unable to have children. Then after she's married a wonderful man and built a life with him, revelations about her past come out and nearly destroy her marriage, etc. The only redeeming factor is that ending is always Scenario A.
• Stoneheart has Edie, whose backstory is horrifying (especially for a children's book) and whose role in the actual story isn't much better. Because most of it happens in backstory, it's unclear what Edie would have been like without it, but she seems to become more generally badass as the series goes on, though not without a touch of woobie thrown in. What makes all this even worse is that she's only twelve.
• Thomas Hardy tends towards this, especially in his later novels. Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure in particular are just one bad turn after another.
• Captain Lawrence in the Temeraire book Victory Of Eagles. He starts the book off under a death sentence for treason and ends it sailing off in exile to Australia, on the books as a prisoner. In between, he has to put up with half the Aerial Corps despising him as a traitor (many of those who think he did the right thing are too ashamed to look him in the eye themselves), his commanding officer/lover chewing him out for his Lawful Stupidity that gained him traitor tag, the husband of a former love interest he'd treated badly getting killed helping him on a a covert mission, and his personal fortune getting wiped out by a lawsuit. And did we mention Napoleon has invaded England while all this is going on?
• Almost every major character in There Is No Antimemetics Division lives this to some extent, but Adam has a particularly great time of things. Over the course of two years, his two children are presumably murdered, his wife of two decades erases his memories of her and effectively destroys his life in the process, most of his right hand is chopped off, he’s possessed by an Eldritch Abomination that forces him to kill people and commit all sorts of atrocities for months while he’s conscious and alert the entire time, he regains control and his memories of his wife just in time to watch her die, he’s mindraped to make him get over the aforementioned death of his wife, he spends months traversing post-apocalyptic North America while slowly losing his vision and suffering constant debilitating migraines only to realize he’s been looking for the wrong place and has to go all the way back in the opposite direction, and ultimately sacrifices himself via an agonizing, drawn-out death by mnestic drug cocktail in order to help undo the apocalypse.
• What is it with people named some variation of "Henry"? In The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry has no control over what he can and cannot time-travel to. Want proof that someone has it in for him? He time-travelled to his mother's death more times than we can count. And hasn't been able to do a damn thing to stop it.
• J. R. R. Tolkien specialized in these: the plot of The Silmarillion is basically driven by a series of Heroic BSODs brought on by excessive disaster; and occasionally, excessive disaster brought on as a result of a Heroic BSoD. Probably the best example is Túrin (a hard E, followed by a C), whose whole freaking life was one; others include Fingolfin (result D), Húrin (possibly B, then C), the Sons of Fëanor (all over the spectrum, excluding A) Fëanor himself (D), and Tuor (a rare A).
• Violeta:
  • Miss Taylor. She starts out as an orphan at one of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, goes to work for a man who rapes her until his wife puts an end to the situation. In Chile, she endures surgery for a tumor that leaves her infertile. She loses her lover to cancer.
  • As a centenarian Violeta has had her share of suffering: her father's suicide, the Death of a Child, Juliáno’s abuse, her son and Torito going missing during the time the country is under a dictatorship (Juan Martin ends up OK; Torito does not), and the loss of other loved ones.
• Warrior Cats: SkyClan gets this a lot: originally they lost most of their territory due to Twolegs and began to starve, and then were driven out of the forest by other Clans; when they found the gorge, the remainder of the Clan was either killed by rats or split up. Special mention goes to their situation in Hawkwing's Journey: First they lose Duskpaw in a fire, then are unable to figure out the meaning of the prophecy Echosong received: when they try to follow it, cats (including Billystorm) die. The Clan is also attacked by raccoons at least twice, killing at least one and injuring others. Then Darktail's allies attack the gorge, forcing the Clan to flee. Several cats are killed in the battle (and one drowns in the river during their flight); several others go missing. The Clan decides that their only hope is to leave to find the other Clans, and several of their cats stay behind. SkyClan ends up running into trouble in Stick and Dodge's city and an apprentice is taken hostage, although at least SkyClan makes it out without losing anyone. Two cats leave to stay with Barley in his barn. During their journey, the pregnant Pebbleshine is kidnapped by Twolegs, and cats are frequently injured. They think they've found their new home by the lake, but the Clans have never lived by this particular lake, and the area proves to be too dangerous after multiple encounters with a hawk, dogs, and Twolegs (during which several more cats are captured by Twolegs, including a medicine cat apprentice.) A couple cats more decide to become kittypets. Then SkyClan falls ill with a sickness while the medicine cat is away, which kills a few more. They are in their darkest hour, saying that SkyClan is over, when finally a few missing Clan members find them, they are able to cure the sickness, and Echosong receives a new prophecy, leaving a spot of hope.
• Given the Crapsack World (or possibly World Half Full) setting of The Wheel of Time, it's probably not surprising this happens to quite a few of its characters. One example is Morgase, queen of Andor, who is brainwashed and raped, then forced to flee her country, then tortured and forced to Abdicate the Throne and probably raped again. Until one of the Deuteragonists comes across her, basically everything that happens to her is immensely traumatic.
  • Rand, the pivotal character and The Chosen One, doesn't have it easy either. He finds out that he is adopted while his father is near death from an infected wound, he is slowly (or rapidly) going insane because that's what happens to all males who are born with the ability to channel, and, due to him being a channeler, he is alienated from pretty much all of his family and friends, many of whom later view him chiefly as a force of nature that needs to be controlled and/or manipulated. This is one of the factors that makes him decidedly paranoid...or justifiably suspicious, considering all those assassination attempts by everything from sentient mist to normal people out for glory or money. He's also suffering from a wound that won't heal for the longest part of the series, giving him a physically exhausted look and a twisted relationship to pain. There's more, but needless to say, he adopts the maxim; "Duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather" from Lan, to explain his relationship to the whole "save the world business".

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