Woobie / Live-Action Films

aka: Film

It might be worth pointing out that the term "Woobie" perhaps was first used in the 1980's Michael Keaton movie Mr. Mom. And incidentally, Kenny, the boy who owned the blanket he called "Woobie", was played by Taliesin Jaffe, who eventually grew up to write and direct numerous Superlative Anime Dubs, including both TV and OVA versions of Hellsing, and to play a demon-possessed gunslinger on Critical Role. The boy with the Woobie can be credited with the creation of both Jan Valentine's dialogue and No Mercy Percy.

As for movies with a character who is a woobie... well, see the examples below.

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Subpages:

• Marvel Cinematic Universe
• Saw
• Scream
• Star Wars

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Franchises with their own folders:

The Dark Knight Saga

Even for an epic action-superhero film, this saga is not immune to the woobies.

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• The people of Gotham in general, who have had to put up with a police force under the mob's influence, and a high crime rate partially causing and partially resulting from the above. Then Ra's al-Ghul, the Joker, and Bane come along...
• Bruce Wayne/Batman. Imagine seeing your parents murdered in front of you at what is clearly a single-digit age.
• James Gordon Jr. (James Gordon's son) from The Dark Knight, is not really the Ax-Crazy Serial Killer maniac that we know in the Comic Books. On the contrary, he is one of the biggest Woobies in the film. At his young age, he is living very traumatic events such as the attempted murder of his father, the kidnapping of his family and the attempted murder on his life by Two-Face.
• Harvey Dent/Two-Face. The novelization of The Dark Knight goes into his tragic backstory (Harry Dent was a crooked cop who also beat Mrs. Dent until she divorced him—then one day Harry came back and all anyone knows is that one of them killed the other and then committed suicide). Then, after what the Joker puts him through...
  • His predecessor, Carl Finch. Just when he's finally able to do something about the corruption in Gotham, he's shot dead.
• Also Rachel, due to her final fate.
• Talia al-Ghul from The Dark Knight Rises was a Woobie during his childhood, and probably Bane. Then, they became into Woobies, Destroyer Of Worlds years later.
• Henri Ducard, a.k.a. Ra's al-Ghul, is another Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. This is hinted in Batman Begins, but we aren't given the story until The Dark Knight Rises.

DC Extended Universe

• Clark in Man of Steel. As a child, he was frequently overwhelmed by his emerging powers and regarded as a freak by his peers, had to constantly hide his powers for fear of either hurting someone or putting himself at risk, learns that he's not just adopted but also that he's an alien, and had a Parting-Words Regret argument with his adoptive father, all before he turns eighteen. As an adult, he discovers that he is the last survivor of his home planet, only to soon learn that there are other survivors - and they're a bunch of bad guys who want to rebuild Krypton by wiping out humanity. He is able to stop their plan but only after nearly half of Metropolis got destroyed and he was forced to kill Zod. He needs every hug he gets in this movie.
  • It's then taken to a whole new level in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which takes place two years later. Clark has almost completely embraced his new career as Superman, is in a steady relationship with Lois, has a job, and everything is generally good. However, it's steadily revealed that Superman is either worshipped as a a deity by his supporters (which causes him no small amount of discomfort) or hated and feared by his detractors. Oh yeah, also he dies sacrificing himself to stop Doomsday.
• Martha: She had to raise a child with unique needs and issues, watched her husband die minutes after said son, in a fit of anger, called them both out on 'not being his real parents', leading him to run away from home and travel around for several years. When he returns and happily tells her about how he found his birth culture, she looks like her heart broke but wants to keep a brave face since he's so happy. Of course, any doubts she might have of her adopted son's love for her are put to rest when she sees General Zod threatening her is Clark's Berserk Button.
• Barry Allen as revealed in Zack Snyder's Justice League. His mother was murdered and his father was falsely accused and convicted of killing her. Barry has since been working multiple jobs trying to become a forensic analyst so he can clear his father's name. He's also thrust into some pretty scary situations, including his first battle, up to and including nearly getting pummeled by a Resurrection Sickness-afflicted Superman and getting shot at. He also doesn't have many friends, which is why he Jumped at the Call for Bruce's offer.
• Victor Stone, aka Cyborg, grew up feeling like his Workaholic father Silas cared more for his work than for Victor himself. He also loses his mother in a terrible car crash, which leaves him horribly disfigured on on the verge of death. Silas, in a desperate attempt to save him, uses the Mother Box alien technology to give Victor a new cybernetic body... which isn't just painful for Victor, but also drastically changes his appearance, driving a further wedge into their relationship. It takes a long while before Victor is able to accept himself, make peace with his father, and embrace his abilities.

The X-Men Film Series

For a movie series about outcasts shunned and hated by humanity, there are bound to be dozens of the woobies.

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• Rogue counts as one, especially in the first movie.
• Teenaged Cyclops in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Poor little guy. Awwwwwwww.
  • Plenty wanted to give him a hug during X-Men: The Last Stand And then Jean killed him.
• X-Men: First Class:
  • Charles, Raven, and especially Erik.
  • Hank McCoy; he gets "outed" as a mutant in the most awkward way possible in front of his boss, is teased and disrespected by his fellow mutants even when his inventions help them improve their powers, loses his potential love interest when he can't accept her for her true appearance, and then accidentally enhances his mutation to the point where it becomes impossible for him to hide it!
• X-Men: Days of Future Past:
  • Charles. His whole world has collapsed around him, and he is very clearly in need of major hugs.
  • Everybody in the bad future. They've clearly been through hell. Especially Bishop, since he's usually the one who goes back in time to warn the rest of them after a Sentinel attack. It gets into Nightmare Fuel territory when you think about how many times he must have had to hear his friends being brutally murdered behind him while hoping that he and Kitty will be fast enough to alter the timeline.
  • Future Magneto when he holds Xavier's hand as he's dying and laments that they wasted so many years fighting each other when they should have been working together all along.
  • Raven, who has had many former friends killed, sees what they were put through For Science!, and wants to kill Trask for it, and still shows herself to be very conflicted and uneasy about doing it.
  • Wolverine. His life has been one tragedy after another. Despite Past!Charles being in a terrible place, his reaction to reading Logan's mind is one of shock and sympathy.
    Charles: You poor, poor man.
  • Thankfully, however, several of these tragedies are undone when the Bad Future timeline is erased.
• Wolverine is arguably most pitiful mutant who lives a life of constant pain and misery. Every time he pops out the claws, he cuts open his hands and they hurt. His Healing Factor means that he can't kill himself and has to live with trauma from all the deaths he witnessed. Even worse is that he blames himself for the death of his surrogate family whether it's mercy-killing Jean in Last Stand or failing to save Charles in both Last Stand and Logan. By the events of Logan, he's a broken man who is slowly dying from Adamantium poisoning and lost everyone he cares for except Charles and Caliban.

Individual examples:

Individual Examples

• 28 Days Later:
  • Private Jones. Endeared to the viewer by wide-eyed hopefulness, youth and — most importantly of all — the ability to play scullery maid to a base full of soldiers, on less than quality rations whilst wearing a frilly pink apron. Talked out of suicide by officer-and-a-gentleman Major West, he goes on to cook, clean and generally be utterly endearing. He narrowly escapes a mauling by the zombie in the yard, by hiding in a cabinet — also looking like he's about to cry — and when he ventures out of his hiding place, he's impaled with a bayonet by the very human Jim. Soft-hearted women and slashers in the audience go into spasms of grief. The final straw that sends Major West straight through 'irritated' into 'Roaring Rampage of Revenge'. Rare instance of a survival horror woobie. Of course, the woobie factor of Private Jones is pretty much evaporated just before he dies, as he didn't seem to have a problem with the soldiers executing Jim, and he also wasn't trying to stop the other soldiers from trying to rape the women.
  • Jim, if anything, is an even bigger woobie. He wakes up all alone and naked in an Abandoned Hospital and things continue to go downhill for him from there. He finds his home city is completely wiped out, gets chased by the raging infected loons, is mistreated by Selena, finds that his parents committed suicide, gets attacked and chased by the infected some more, is forced to kill an infected child and almost forced to do the same to Frank, and then almost killed by West's depraved soldiers who are about to rape Hannah and Selena. After all of this abuse, it's not suprising to see Jim snap the way he did.
• A Wedding (1978):
  • Tulip's husband mistreats her to the point where she contemplates having an affair, she has to go through a lot of grief and stress involving her daughters in the final act (including thinking that Muffin has died in a car crash), and she ultimately calls off the affair due to feeling that her scare was God punishing her.
  • After fter his mother-in-law forbade him from discussing his past and contacting his beloved family, Luigi has been mistaken for a mobster after marrying an Uptown Girl who has since become a drug addict.
  • Bridesmaid Rosie Bean is one of the better-adjusted characters in the movie, but her husband is having an affair with her best friend, and the ending scene hints that she may suspect this.
  Rosie: Yea, I think [my wedding] was the happiest day of my life. But you're right, when it's over it gets real sad.
• About a Boy: Marcus. When a character's first line is "There are some people who had a good time in life. I was starting to realize I wasn't one of them", you can tell it's not going to be a happy film for them. Fiona also counts due to her struggles with depression.
• Adam (2009): Adam goes through a crapton because of his Asperger's Syndrome. His father dies, he gets accosted by cops, he gets publically humiliated, he loses his job, and his girlfriend Beth dumps him twice. Truth in Television, many real life people with the condition qualify.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: David is a robot kid meant to serve as comfort to a mother whose child is in a coma. After the child gets better, David is disposed of, but his love for the mother endures and he does everything he can to get back to her. He ends up at the bottom of the ocean desperately wishing to a statue of the Blue Fairy to make him a real boy. He is fished out by transhuman robots thousands of years later to discover that humanity has gone extinct and he cannot become human. The robots help him reunite with the mother, but it's a reunion that can only last for a single day. The movie ends with David lying beside the mother he can never meet again.
• Aliens: Newt has been orphaned and traumatized by an alien attack and continues to be antagonized by the monsters throughout the movie.
• Almost Famous: Based on Cameron Crowe's childhood, the movie shows a brilliant 15-year-old kid (named William) getting dumped on by everybody he encounters, many of whom are, of course, plenty nice to him at first.
• The Apartment: The two leads, but most especially C.C. Baxter. He's the sweetest, most good-natured guy you've ever seen (played by Jack Lemmon, natch), and he spends 120 minutes getting kicked around by nearly everyone, but is always there to clean up, put things in order, and even cover up for them when the neighbors complain. The last five minutes or so might make this a case of Earn Your Happy Ending, but for the previous 120 minutes it's a Crapsack World and you mostly just want to give the poor guy a hug. Also sorely in need of a hug is Fran Kubelik, the heroine, who spends half the film wandering around with tears in her eyes and even attempts suicide.
• Balibo:
  • Juliana. She's a sweet Cheerful Child who loses her family and is left traumatized by the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.
  • The Balibo Five are a group of kindhearted men who genuinely want to help East Timor, and as a result are brutally killed one-by-one by the TNI.
• Ben X is a Flemish film about an autistic teenager who is mercilessly bullied at school because he does not know how to stand up for himself. The film is pretty much all about his misery and self-pity and does not explore anything else about his personality.
• Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Poor Casey. She is the loneliest member of the Carrie Nations due to her shyness and lesbianism, gets insulted and harassed by Porter Hall, and never seems entirely comfortable or happy even when the band becomes a hit. Her friendship with Harris is strained after an ill-advised sexual encounter under the influence, making her pregnant, and the ensuing abortion is traumatic for her. She finally finds some fulfillment in her relationship with Roxanne, only to die horribly in Z-Man's rampage.
• The Boy in the Plastic Bubble: Todd growing up in incubator doesn't really build social skills.
• Boys Don't Cry: Brandon Teena, a trans man who gets raped and murdered by his "friends" when they discover he was assigned female at birth. What's worse is that this movie was based on the true story of one of the most notorious hate crimes of The '90s.
• Braveheart
  • William Wallace, as a kid, watched his father and brother get killed by the English, his wife was killed in a fight over Droit de seigneur, and he gets tortured and killed in a public display by Edward I to break the Scots. Eventually Robert the Bruce takes over the cause, and the Scots get their freedom, but Wallace will never experience it, since he died, yelling out freedom. Woobie to the end.
• Brothers: Sam Cahill is deployed to Afghanistan, only for him and his best friend to become prisoners of war after this helicopter crashes, with his whole family believing he's dead. He is then given a Sadistic Choice to either kill his best friend, or be killed himself. He reluctantly chooses to kill his best friend, only to return home to his wife and young daughters. Upon returning home, he is ridden with PTSD, and becomes suspicious that his wife slept with his brother, and his daughters (the older one especially) resent him, and yearn for their uncle to be their new father. Then during his younger daughter's birthday dinner, the older daughter shouts straight up to his face that she "wished that he stayed dead," and that he's "just jealous that mom would rather sleep with Uncle Tommy." Poor Sam just goes through hell and back, only to have it continue on, it just makes that viewer want to reach out and comfort him so badly.
• The Butterfly Effect has a Trauma Conga Line for a fair number of characters.
  • The protagonist Evan is molested by Kayleigh's pedophile father, accidentally kills a mother and her baby, lost his best friend (who couldn't cope with the guilt and eventually became a chronically depressed recluse), loses his arms in another timeline and sees his girlfriend connect with the best friend instead until Evan tries to commit suicide (which fails), he suffers repeated brain damage every time he resets the timeline until he's nearly hospitalized as a vegetable, and that's just a selection of his crappy, crappy life.
  • Evan's girlfriend Kayleigh (along with her brother Tommy) were also molested by her father, and she went through most of the other hardships that Evan faced. In one timeline she becomes a drug-addicted, self-loathing, streetwalker. In another her boyfriend beats her psychotic brother to death in front of her. This is later subverted when Evan ensures that she and her brother will live a happy life being raised by her mother, with no memories of the alternate timelines.
• Byzantium: Noel. A man so desperate for some semblance of affection in his life after the death of his only family that he goes to a prostitute. And promptly breaks down crying in front of her. Then takes said prostitute and her "little sister" off the streets out of kindness. He doesn't really seem to care if he's being used, he just wants some companionship. And then he dies accidentally.
• Carrie (1976): Okay, so Carrie killed about a hundred people, but it wasn't her fault, she was abused 'til she went crazy and it caused her psychic powers to go haywire. And then her own mother stabbed her. Look at her cringing in the corner trying not to look at her mother, don't you just want to give her a hug?
• Chicago has two, who happen to be the only good people in the movie.
  • Amos Hart. His wife cheats on him, expects him to take the fall for her when she murders her lover, calls him unfaithful for finding out she was cheating, makes him look bad in her testimony, and in general is awful to him. Even so, he forgives her time and time again, paying for her defense lawyer and even wanting her to come home when he thinks she's pregnant (even though he's fairly sure the baby isn't his). How much of a Woobie is Amos? His lone musical number is about how he feels completely invisible, and seems to think he deserves it.
  • Katalin "Hunyak" Halinski. Arrested for a murder she didn't commit, she is unable to take advantage of the flawed system the same way the guilty girls do because she only speaks Hungarian and no one gets her a translator. Then she becomes the first woman ever hanged in the district.
• Chronicle: Andrew Detmer. No, really, no matter how vile he was. Let it be said that Andrew's entire existence in this movie is just sad. In addition, there is a shocking Fridge Horror in himself. So much what if about what he could have been if only he had even a snowball's chance in hell for a good life before the events of the movie.
• Cinderella (2015):
  • Ella. She loses her mother, then her father, and is verbally and emotionally abused by her step-family, and it's even said that the reason she goes along with doing all the chores is because doing so keeps her from dwelling on her sadness.
  • Also, many viewers feel like giving Kit a hug during the scene at his father's deathbed.
• Cloud Atlas:
  • All what Adam wants is to go back home to his wife, but he is sadly under attack from a nasty parasite and the Deadly Doctor who is trying to kill him.
  • Rufus Sixsmith. In the 1936 story, not only is he an active participant in a same-sex relationship (no doubt very much taboo at the time) with Frobisher, but he has to deal with his lover somewhat stringing him along at various times. And yet he stays very much loyal to Frobisher up through the point where he arrives to visit him, only to find he has just committed suicide. Then in the 1973 story, still very much haunted by his old love, he provides Luisa Rey with an expose on the corruption at the nuclear power plant where he works. He then promptly is assassinated by a hit man hired by the plant.
  • Timothy Cavendish get abused by gangsters, his older brother and a sadistic nursing home but because his tale is Played for Laughs, he falls between this and a Butt-Monkey.
  • Sonmi 451 was birthed right from the get go to be a simple servant and nothing more. She witnesses multiple deaths of friends, is on the receiving end of sexual abuse during her previous life at Papa Song's, is imprisoned and interrogated by the Government and by the end, gets executed for her troubles. However, due to her perseverance through her tale, she evolves from this to an Iron Woobie.
  • Zachry is constantly haunted by the death of his brother-in-law, his visions of Old Georgie and the ruthless Kona Tribe. And when he sees the devastation of his tribe at the hands of the Kona, especially Rose, all he can do is fall to his knees and weep.
• The Color Purple (1985): Celie. Let's see... she was raped by her father twice, had children both times and had both promptly taken away, her mother died yelling at her, she was forced to marry a man she didn't even know, let alone like, who abused, raped, and forced her to do all the work around the house, including taking care of his bratty kids, who literally made her bleed the very first day she came. When her sister, who was the only person who actually cared about her came to stay, Celie's husband made his move on her, and when she refused, made her leave and kept her letters from Celie, making her think she was dead! And this is the first half hour, people...
• Cries and Whispers:
  • Agnes is dying a painful death from cancer and wants the comfort of her two sisters, but they have various hang-ups (one of them is a Jerkass Woobie in her own right) and can't bring themselves to get too close to Agnes, whose condition causes them to feel revulsion towards her. Agnes also angsts over their dead mother, whom Agnes loved very much but showed clear preference for the youngest sister and often acted distant and cruel towards Agnes.
  • Anna, the maid, is the only one able and willing to comfort Agnes in her time of need. She also lost a young daughter sometime in the past. The other two sisters thank her for her years of hard work by treating her with indifference or callousness and unceremoniously fire her after Agnes dies, leaving Anna to fend for herself.
• Daddy's Little Girls: Monty. His ex gets custody of the kids simply because they've never been able to prove her boyfriend is a drug dealer. Her boyfriend beats the youngest one because she has Age-Appropriate Angst. Not only that, but he was falsely imprisoned for rape when he was 18 because the girl lied about her age and cried "rape" her dad caught them. Lastly, Julia, the woman he is madly in love with, angrily ends their relationship because of the rape charges she found out about. All he wants is to take care of his daughters and protect them from their mother and her boyfriend! Poor guy.
• Dancer in the Dark: Selma is a poor single mother with an degenerative eye condition that will soon turn her blind. She pours all her savings into a fund for her son to get operated so he won't have to suffer from the same disease as her. That fund gets stolen by a man Selma thought was her friend and she kills him in self-defense. She gets charged with murder and is set to be executed, but not before being given a Sadistic Choice to use the hard-earned money to pay for a lawyer who has proof she's innocent. She refuses to compromise her son's health and is unfairly executed.
• Dead Poets Society:
  • Todd — his parents prefer his older brother to him, he doesn't have the same confidence or self-assuredness that most of his friends seem to, and his best friend kills himself toward the end of the movie.. It helps that he's perpetually cute and vulnerable-looking. The scene when he's showing Neil the desk set that his parents gave him for his birthday two years in a row, probably because they just didn't care enough to give it more thought, cements both Todd's woobie status and Neil's as the best friend he could possibly have. Fortunately, he gets a good deal more confident and sure of himself by the end.
  • Neil has dreams of pursuing a career in acting, but his father doesn't care and wants him to become a doctor, even by force, even though Neil does just about everything to please him. After failing to convince his father, Neil ultimately commits suicide.
• The Deep (1977): It's hard to deny that Gail (who doesn't want anything to do with the treasure hunt in the first place) goes through a lot. She nearly drowns in a moray eel attack in the opening scene. She's subjected to a Pervy Pat Down and a Shameful Strip after being kidnapped by Cloche and is clearly uncomfortable about both. Then, she is attacked in her hotel room, her clothes are cut off with a knife and she's painted with animal blood for a Hollywood Voodoo ritual. David arrives to find a sobbing Gail in a Troubled Fetal Position afterward.
• The Descent: Sam. It wasn't enough for Neil Marshall to traumatise The Cutie, he went ahead and killed her brutally. In front of her loving, maternal, protective older sister, too. Although individual cases could be made for each of the other women too. Anyone want a go?
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels: Janet Colgate is, by all appearances, the ultimate Woobie- having won a chance sweepstakes for $50,000, she selflessly spends almost all of it on Lawrence Jamieson and Freddy Benson's scam to get Freddy to "walk again" after a "tragic accident". In the film she's giving, kind, naive, and trusting... until it is revealed at the end of the film that she knew what Lawrence and Freddy were up to all along and had been scamming them.
• Disturbing Behavior: Gavin who spends most of his time trying to warn people about the mind controlling program that’s happening in his town and is ignored, has to watch most of his friends lose themselves and then turn against him and if that isn’t enough he’s also sold out by his own parents and is fully aware that there’s not a damn thing he can do about it! Paranoia Fuel indeed!
• Donnie Darko:
  • Donnie Darko. On the one hand he has a loving family, but on the other hand he experiences mental illness, unrelenting paranormal apparitions, a moronic and restrictive education system, puberty (and its associated existential angst), assault at knifepoint (twice), and the tragic death of his girlfriend (which drives him to second degree murder). And after all that he elects to be fatally crushed by a rogue jet engine in order to protect his family, girlfriend, Frank and possibly the rest of Earth's population, according to which hypothesis you subscribe to. And after all of that his sacrifice remains ultimately unsuspected. On top of that, he is portrayed by (a teenage) Jake Gyllenhaal, whose cuddly face and baby-blue eyes render him an Extreme Hardcore woobie, aesthetically if nothing else.
  • To say nothing of his sister. Seeing her at the end, you just want to hug her brains out.
  • Gretchen, whose abusive step-father tried to kill her mother, and the school bullies cruelly mock her for what her step-Father did causing her to flee in tears, then she is killed by Frank (the demonic rabbit) on Halloween night.
• The Double: Simon is somewhere between this and The Chew Toy. While many of the film's funnier moments stem from the fact that he cannot catch a break, his constant suffering can be quite heartbreaking as well, so it really depends on the scene.
• Downfall: Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge. The scene where Minister of Armaments Albert Speer chillingly infers the fate of the Goebbel children leaves Traudl in tears and denial. Made all the worse by Speer's refusal to show emotion. In real life, Speer was quite close to the Goebbels, as Speer and Joseph allied themselves against Goering.
• Edward Scissorhands: Edward loses his "father" and his only hope for a normal life all in one moment, his attempt to please Kim (who won't return his affection) turns the town against him, and although she comes to see how sweet he is, her Jerk Jock ex-boyfriend Jim makes matters worse out of jealousy and spite. Edward's eventually forced to retreat to his castle, and while she follows him, so does Jim. Edward kills him in the ensuing fight, sealing his own fate — only if the lovers part can he survive. And he accepts this without question. Even worse, you want to hold poor afflicted Edward... but he can't.
• Elephant (2003): Michelle. It's hard to not draw parallels between her, Eric, and Alex, but for choosing to persevere through the bullying she endures, she's simply the first to die. Not that anyone expects Eric or Alex to survive the day.
• The Elephant Man: The eponymous character is John Merrick, a man whose severe deformities have made him an attraction at freakshows. Even though he is kind, intelligent and educated, most people can't see past his physical appearance; at best they point at him, at worst they abuse him, making it impossible for him to live a normal life outside an institution. Knowing this, he calmly decides to commit suicide.
• Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Credence Barebone is regularly abused by his mother, mocked with disdain by the Shaws, and only receives any sort of affection from Mr. Graves. Turns out, it isn't Graves at all, but Grindlewald in disguise, who is only using him to find the Obscurial, and then promptly throws him away when he thinks Credence is no longer of any use.
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!: Linda. She sees her boyfriend beaten and murdered in a very cruel way by Varla, then she gets kidnapped by her and her posse, is used as a pawn in a heist, nearly gets raped several times, and the only person who might be able or willing to help her doesn't even believe her at first.
• Fear Clinic: All of the clinic's patients barely survived a horrific mass-shooting and have been plagued by horrible nightmares and supernatural forces ever since.
  • Caylee is particularly broken, as her little brother died in the shooting, she has some suicidal tendencies, and her boyfriend dies at the end of the film.
  • Dr. Andover himself is a tragic figure due to how his patients are continuing to come to harm despite his best efforts, and he is also menaced by the fear creature.
• The Fighter: Micky. He's the family's unfavorite, his mother mismanages his boxing career (even nearly getting him killed so his family can get paid), his crackhead brother is usually getting him into trouble, his ex-wife treats him like a failure and when he becomes happy by finding a new girlfriend, his family tries to take that away from him. This guy seriously needs a hug.
• Four Brothers: Jack Mercer. He is not impulsive nor malicious, just seems to follow his brothers and is likely to have been a good person, were it not for his childhood or his life on the street. In addition, he is more calm and sensitive than his brothers, and it is implied that Jack had experienced a very traumatic childhood before Evelyn adopted the brothers. He even is constantly mocked in some deleted scenes. Not to mention he is the only character in the main cast to die in a tragic way.
• Friday the 13th: Jason Voorhees is often seen as one. The kid was born disfigured, drowned by bullies, watched his mother killed, and just wants to be left alone. True, he does this by killing anybody who disturbs him, but 90% of Friday the 13th fanfiction involves him being reformed by somebody. Played up intentionally in Freddy vs. Jason. Amazingly, it works. You just want to give the big guy a huge when you see what Freddy does to him.
• The Frighteners: Milton Dammers. He is a mass of phobias and nerves, highly-strung to the point where he seems on the verge of pain. We find out that his early FBI assignments all involved going undercover in satanic cults, where he had to tolerate intensely mentally-damaging experiences, as well as physical and sexual trauma. When we see his bare chest, it is covered in ritual scars and his nipples seem to have been burnt off. It's hard to watch the movie without wanting to wrap him a blanket and massage his temples.
• From Beyond: Crawford Tillenghast gets attacked by inter-dimensional monsters, his mentor's head gets bitten off, he gets framed for the murder and is sent to a mental institution, he gets sent BACK to the house, he gets attacked AGAIN, his mentor returns and tries to kill him and his new friends, his love interest brings the monsters back, he almost gets eaten, he ends up bald and slimy, a tentacle pops out of his forehead, he eats his psychiatrists' brain, his love interest bites the tentacle off, and he gets eaten by his mentor, who is now a giant slimy monster. You feel like you should be squicked, but instead you just want to wrap him in a fleece blanket and give him a juice box. Maybe it's because he wears a giant fluffy sweater.
• Ghost World: Seymour. Unusual in that he has an aggressive trait (road rage), but his self-loathing and romance woes easily makes up for it in Woobifying him. They filmed two separate versions of the fight scene in the convenience store — one in which he wins, and one in which he ends up in the hospital. Guess which one made it to the finished version?
• Girl, Interrupted: Daisy Randone is a victim of sexual abuse by her own father, and after she is released from the hospital is bullied relentlessly by Lisa Rowe in her own home, which leads her to commit suicide the next day. On top of it, Lisa shows no remorse for her actions and even says that Daisy was "stupid" for killing herself, right before taking money out of her hanging corpse's pocket. Poor Daisy really didn't deserve any of the cruelty she encountered by either her father, or by Lisa.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla (2014): Joseph Brody had to manually lock down the Janjira facility with his wife inside, who had followed his suggestion to investigate the facility in the first place. He is overwhelmed with guilt by this, which costs him a stable relationship with his son, much of his sanity, and respect from the scientific community, leaving him to suffer fifteen years of bitter loneliness as he searches for the truth. And when it seems like he could actually save thousands of lives with the knowledge he's attained on the Muto, he dies.
• Halloween:
  • Doctor Loomis. Never mind that he is one of the few characters who doesn't get horribly murdered, does anything good ever happen to him? The final scene in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers cements his woobie status, making everyone watching the film want to wrap him in a big hug and tell him everything's going to be ok.
  • Jamie Lloyd. Her parents are dead, she is bullied by all the kids at school, and her uncle is a serial killer who wants her dead.
  • Halloween (2018): After years of being made to train harshly for Michael Myers's return, Karen Strode had since grown apart from her mother and treats her with contempt. This would lead to her daughter Allyson nearly getting killed by Myers. Burying the hatchet between herself and Laurie, Karen assists her mother with putting an end to Myers's killing spree by pretending to be defenseless before promptly shooting two of Michael's fingers off.
  • Laurie Strode is one of the few victims who managed to escape the clutches of Serial Killer Michael Myers. Originally a babysitter in the original film, Laurie loses her friends to the murderous Myers before being made Myers's next target to direct his rage towards. While the timeline diverges onwards, the one constant is Michael pursuing Laurie or any family she had. Having confronted Michael numerously regardless of the timeline, Laurie Strode helped to codify the Final Girl trope common to a Slasher Movie, and richly earned her actress the status of the Scream Queen.
    • In the 2018 sequel set 40 years after the events of the first film, Laurie had secluded herself to the woods, having been deeply traumatized by her experience with Myers so much so, she never changed her hairstyle. Fearing Michael's inevitable return, Laurie trains her daughter from the moment she learned to walk and speak with using guns and other weapons as preparation. After losing her daughter to social services and suffering through two divorces, Laurie was made an outcast by her own family. When Myers returned to Haddonfield, Laurie proves to be not only more agile this time around, she was on equal footing — or possibly even above — Myers having survived getting thrown out a window and swiftly disappearing from Myers' sight. With her determination at putting an end to Myers's reign of terror, Laurie holds the honor of being the one to destroy the Bogeyman by setting him and the house ablaze.
• A Hard Day's Night: Ringo Starr. It gets even worse when you find out that his "acting" in some of the shots wasn't actually acting—the poor kid was hung over and legitimately depressed.
  "It's Paul's grandfather. I can tell he doesn't like me. It's because I'm little."
• Harry Brown: Marky is pretty close to being The Woobie. While he is admittedly a bit of a dick, it seems to be mostly an attempt to blend in with the other chavs, who are far more inclined to savagery than he seems to be. Considering that he gets sexually abused by his uncle, kidnapped and tortured by Harry and then used as bait by Harry before getting shot in the head by one of his own mates, it's hard not to feel at least a little bit sorry for him.
• Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth: Terri, who comes across as both cute and sad in her desperation for what essentially amounts to friendship and/or love.
• Hocus Pocus 2: In-universe, Gilbert views the Sanderson sisters as this due to the historical persecution they would have faced before turning to evil. He's convinced that if they were brought back in the modern day they would have no need to continue to kill. Not only do the sisters need to murder at least one child to survive past sunrise, which Gilbert somehow didn't hear about, but they have no intention of dialing down the evil.
• The Host (2006):
  • Park Gang-du. Massive, massive Woobie. His father was always too busy to raise him properly, so as a child he was always left alone to fend for himself, and the lack of protein he got from seo-ri made him grow up into a clumsy, stupid man whose younger siblings look down on him and even his daughter gets annoyed with him. Then when his daughter gets captured by a giant monster and he learns that she's still alive, the authorities refuse to believe him. In one notable scene, an American doctor finally seems to believe him, but asks him why he didn't tell the police, the military or a human rights organization, causing Gang-du to burst into tears and insist correctly that nobody ever listens to him.
  • His missing daughter, Hyun-seo, is just as much of a Woobie, especially when she's trapped in a sewer by the creature, cold, wet, filthy, hungry and scared.
• The Hurt Locker: Specialist Eldridge. First, he has to watch his mentor get blown up, and live with the knowledge that if he'd acted more quickly, he could have saved him. Then, he has to watch as the therapist who's helping him get over the the above trauma gets blown up as well. And then his mentor's Jerkass Blood Knight replacement gets him kidnapped by insurgents, and accidentally shoots him whole trying to rescue him.
• Inception:
  • Robert Michael Fischer. You will cry when you see him crying over his dying father's accepting last words in Dream Level Three, which is all he ever really wanted. However, since it's quite literally All Just a Dream, he may or may not have gotten that acceptance after all and it may have only been a projection of what he wished his father's final words have been. Poor guy...
  • Dom Cobb. I mean, holy crap look at what that poor guy went through. His wife committed suicide because he incepted her into believing the world wasn't real and they needed to wake up, only she was so insane she ended up framing him for murder so he would die with her so they could be together, and thus he has to flee the country and leave his kids behind. Plus the fact that the closest thing the movie has to a real villain is his projection of his own guilt in the form of his wife constantly sabotaging his missions makes it even worse.
• Inland Empire: The Lost Girl. She was married to an abusive man who turned into The Phantom when she dared to look for affection in a better man. The Phantom obtained supernatural powers, killed her lover and trapped her in a room where she would be forced to relive those horrible events for all eternity. Thankfully, Nikki rescues her.
• In the Line of Duty 4: Witness: Almost every scene involving Luk Wan-ting (Yuen Yat-chor) introduces some new misfortune for him, his friends, or his family. (He's attacked by a gang, he's a witness to a murder, his friend is killed in an attack by assassins, he has to give up his green card, his mother is kidnapped...)
• 'The Interpreter: Silvia's parents and sister were killed by land mines years before the movie started, she is targeted for death after stumbling into an assassination plot, and she eventually learns that her brother and ex-boyfriend have also been murdered by someone she once admired.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Bernie. She's constantly mocked by the other kids, except Winnie, and has no friends starting out. Then we learn she'd also been abandoned by her dad and has a negligent mom too, just to top it off. It turns out she'd even planned to kill herself on Christmas. The poor girl. However, at least Winnie and she bond, even now seemingly being girlfriends by the end, so things are at last looking up for Bernie.
• It's a Wonderful Life: George Bailey's life, hopes, and dreams are utterly destroyed in the initial scenes of the film, and when he manages to scrape together a happy family anyway, Uncle Billy accidentally hands eight grand over to Potter, putting the Building and Loan and George personally at risk. When you need Divine Intervention to show you what you're worth, you are a textbook Woobie.
• James Bond: The eponymous character himself, in the Daniel Craig era, is pretty much a Woobie. He has several emotional issues, is orphaned at an early age, has a penchant for revenge, generally looks unhappy even when he smiles, has a grim outlook on his job and still regrets over losing his loved ones, especially Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006), René Mathis in Quantum of Solace and M in Skyfall. In Spectre, it's even revealed that Franz Oberhauser/Ernst Stavro Blofeld's father adopted him after Bond loses his own parents, but Franz kills him out of jealousy. Franz even gleefully belittles him, telling how he was behind all of Bond's miseries throughout the years, and even manages to put Bond and MI6 briefly out of business. Near the end of Spectre, Bond's frantic efforts to rescue Madeline Swann, especially the way he cries out her name, as he races through the old MI6 building while searching for her, is very touching. It also shows that he's really, really fed up with losing people that he cares about and is determined that it will not happen this time. Given what he has been through over the years, and with little of a life he has outside of MI6, it's quite sad to say that the man does really need a big hug.
  • The World Is Not Enough: Both of the villains qualify to an extent. Renard the Anarchist is a brutal terrorist, yes, but he's also in the process of dying a horrible death (a bullet slowly migrating through his brain; he's already lost all sensation of both pleasure and pain), and he's completely an utterly in love. His scenes with his significant other are among the closest this series gets to being totally heartwarming. His partner in crime, and the aforementioned significant other, Elektra King, meanwhile, was kidnapped by terrorists as a teenager (with there almost certainly being a sexual aspect to her captivity) to extort money from her oil-baron father. You know what he does? He leaves her there. You know who told him to leave her there? The frigging Big Good. Fortunately for her, Renard was one of the terrorists, they fell in love, and he helped her escape. It's thus easy to see why they plan to nuke Istanbul, cutting off the main center of the petroleum trade between East and West, allowing Renard to go out with a bang and Elektra to corner the oil market as a final post-mortem (Renard saw to that earlier) one-finger salute to Daddy Dearest. Unfortunately, they still have to die; they are plotting to kill millions, after all.
• Joker (2019): Arthur Fleck, especially before he became dangerously homicidal. The man has been through such horrible things that it's impossible not to feel sorry for him. He lives in perpetual poverty, suffers from a mental illness, has been beaten, humiliated, and bullied throughout his life on a regular basis, was constantly tortured by his mom's boyfriend, and all he wants is to bring laughter and joy to children and people in an environment of economic recession. Before the climax of the film, he runs out of money, therapy, medicine and, as if that wasn't enough, he was possibly adopted and Murray invites him to his show to tease him on TV. It is no wonder why Arthur ended up becoming The Joker.
• Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead: Melissa. During a road trip to her wedding, her fiancee is kidnapped and tortured, while she's sent on a twisted cat-and-mouse game to rescue him that involves being forced to strip down to her underwear in front of a stranger (who posts a video of this online) and seeing her sister get murdered.
• Jupiter Ascending:
  • Aleksa Jones. Maybe not at first, but think about it: she loses her husband at the very beginning of the movie, then her daughter gets kidnapped and for most of the movie she's worried sick about her. She and the rest of the family then get kidnapped and almost killed by Balem, and in the end her mind gets wiped after Jupiter saves her, so that she doesn't remember anything that happened over the past few days. To say she goes through a lot would be correct.
  • Caine. He's born the runt of his litter, is essentially considered genetically defective even among other Splices, who are treated horribly by the human ruling class, manages to claw his way up to legendary soldier status only to be dishonourably discharged for attacking an Entitled, then spends an uncertain amount of time in the Deadland before being sprung to find Jupiter. Poor guy needs a hug.
• Kingdom of Heaven: Balian. His son was stillborn, his wife committed suicide (which meant that, according to Catholic dogma, her soul was damned to Hell), he kills his brother which forces him to flee his home and his father dies mere days after they met for the first time. As the movie progresses he becomes de-woobiefied, though.
• King Kong (1933) may well be the tropesetter in film. In production, they literally cut out less flattering footage of the monster's monstrosity when preview audiences cheered Kong's swatting a plane down on the Empire State pinnacle. It's rare to see attention to public opinion that strong, so not only is the mythic megagorilla possibly film's first Woobie, he's likely the first official Woobie.
• The King's Speech: Bertie/George VI. As he tells Lionel after the death of George V, the reason he stammers is because of an abusive nanny, a teasing older brother who was egged on by his father, the brother that he was closest to died young, and he was forced to wear painful splints to treat his knock knees.
• Knowing: John spends the entire film drinking to dull the pain of his wife's death, and witnessing gradually more horrific disasters. He is clearly traumatised by this, and by the end of the film he just curls up in the rain and cries himself to sleep.
• Lars and the Real Girl: Lars. Mother died giving birth to him, father blamed him for it and became emotionally distant, older brother (probably the only stable person in his life) skipped town for several years and left him behind. He's so traumatized from his past that he feels physical pain when touched by others. He cannot have a normal relationship with the opposite sex (despite a co-worker practically throwing herself at him) and is so self conscious that the only one he can bring himself to connect with is a rubber sex toy. Yet, despite all that, he's still the sweetest, most innocuous guy ever.
• Let Me In: Owen. To start with his life was a living hell at the beginning of the film. He lives in a run down apartment complex with a self-pitying alcoholic mother, he has no friends and he is horribly abused by bullies at school. The closest thing to peace he has is when hes on his own in his bedroom or playing with puzzles in the freezing cold at the jungle gym of his apartment. Then when he finally meets a friend it turns out she's a vampire who nearly kills him.
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Mr. Tumnus. He was plenty of one in the book, but the movie really ramps it up with James McAvoy's performance. There's also the matter of an added scene in which he meets Edmund in the White Witch's prison and it's made rather clear that he's being starved and beaten. Even then, his only concern is that Lucy is safe. Oh, and when the Witch gleefully tells him he's only there because Edmund ratted him out, the look on his face is heartbreaking. Even more so considering the Witch technically lies; Edmund had no idea he was turning Tumnus in, only mentioning his name as a side comment when explaining how he arrived in Narnia.
• Little Shop of Horrors has two Woobies living in a Crapsack World called Skid Row: Seymour Krelborn and Audrey. Seymour was an orphan, raised by his boss, Mr. Mushnik, who treats him like dirt and forces him to sweep the floor. Seymour was in love with Audrey and would do anything to win her heart, and that's where Audrey II came in. Meanwhile, Audrey was in an abusive relationship with Orin Scrivello D.D.S., a crazy and sadistic dentist, but she actually has feelings for Seymour.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • As in the books, Faramir from the movies personifies Woobie as he rides out grimly on a suicide charge to please a father who can't be pleased.
  • And there's Frodo, who in the book was less woobieish than Sam, but when combined with Elijah Wood's enormous blue eyes becomes angst incarnate.
• Maleficent: Aurora, who was the Sleeping Beauty of Disney's own 1959 film. She's cursed like in the original tale, but this retelling also portrays her as nothing more than an innocent caught in the crossfire of her father and Maleficent's war (which itself serves as a microcosm for the overall hatred between humans and The Fair Folk). This version also subjects her to an Adaptational Angst Upgrade, with her actually learning about her curse and breaking down when she realizes that the woman she loved and saw as her Fairy Godmother was the person who cursed her to begin with.
• Me, Myself & Irene: Charlie Baileygates. He gets taken advantage by everyone, even his own wife, Layla, who remarries to a black dwarf limo driver. All that sadness Charlie has and being taken advantage by everyone years later lead to Split Personality Hank to appear.
• Minority Report: Agatha. She was born to a neuroin addict, and had the gift of precognition- specifically, she had visions of murders before they happened. Pretty bad, right? Well, then the government get wind of this, do all sorts of unmentioned -but implied to be nasty- experiments to her, and the precrime system is set up- meaning that she is forced to stay in a drugged stupor, wired to a machine having endless visions of murders so that the cops can use her premonitions to prevent crime. And when her mother tries to save Agatha from this? The head of precrime has her murdered to ensure Agatha stays a Forsaken Child, which thanks to her gift, means that she has to witness her mother's death and watch as everyone ignores it. When she's kidnapped/rescued from the facility, she's been left so unstable that she can barely tell the difference between the present and her precognitions.
• My Own Private Idaho: Mike Waters is a gay narcoleptic prostitute whose father is also his brother looking for his mother. He doesn't find her. He goes all the way to Italy and finds out she's just left. For much of the movie the only person looking out for him is his friend Scott (a rich guy who's just being a prostitute for fun) who he is also in love with, possibly in an unrequited sense . His narcolepsy means that often he collapses just about anywhere, and falls asleep; Scott is there to pick him up until Scott decides to go back to his respectable family and get married, essentially abandoning Mike to his fate, literally leaving him by the side of the road even though he KNOWS Mike loves him. The film ends with Mike falling asleep on a road in the middle of nowhere, all alone. Some people come along and steal his bag and shoes. Also he's played by the incredibly woobietastic River Phoenix. Seeing him cry will KILL you.
• Next of Kin (1982): Linda Stevens. By the time it's all over, she's been through so much pain, loss, and betrayal - much of it at the hands of her Evil Aunt Rita - that you wish you could somehow reach into the screen and give her a hug.
• Night of the Living Dead (1990): Barbara. Especially in the scene when zombies eat a corpse, she is pretty disgusted, horrified, and with a realization of Squick, enough to feel sorry for her.
• Night of the Demons 2: Melissa lost her Cool Big Sis in a mysterious accident that caused her parents to commit suicide. After being sent to an orphanage, she suffers from horrific nightmares and is bullied frequently. She's forced to go to the house her sister died in for a Halloween party and is tricked into thinking she's going to be sacrificed to the Devil as part of a cruel and traumatizing prank. Then she's nearly sacrificed to the Devil for real, by the corrupted spirit of her own sister, who uses their past closeness to lure Melissa into a false sense of security.
• No Country for Old Men: Carla Jean Moss is completely innocent, has a jerkass husband who orders her around without telling her anything, and a useless old mother with cancer. Her husband is killed because of his hubris, her mother dies of cancer, and she is finally killed herself by Chigurh.
• Not Okay: Rowan. God, her life sucks. She's left traumatized by the school shooting that killed her sister and is easily triggered by almost anything. Then she puts her trust in a liar and is called a liar herself. By the end she has severe trust issues and her life isn't any better than when the film began.
• Oblivion (2013): Victoria comes over as this, especially when Jack realises Julia is actually his wife. It is implied that she also retained some of her original self's memories and knew who Julia was, but lied to Jack because she had a crush on him. She also seems to have genuinely believed the Tet's lie about their mission, right up until she realises the Drone was aiming its weapons at her.
  • Victoria even more so considering that this potentially means there are dozens of versions of her in a relationship with Jack, who all while was pining for another woman! Which is incredibly damn depressing, when you stop and think about it?!
  • Julia awakens from her Delta capsule to discover the Earth gone to hell, the rest of the crew (to not mention most of the human race) dead, and these facts given to her by alien-created clones of her husband and another crewmember. It's no wonder she can only afford to cry a Single Tear before fainting from the shock.
• Paddington (2014): Poor Paddington loses his uncle and his home in a earthquake. Due to this, he's forced to go to a new country and hope for the charity of others to help the poor soul survive.
• Pan's Labyrinth: Ofelia epitomizes this trope while her mother and Mercedes aren't far behind, to say nothing of the various unnamed extras. And the worst part is that, unlike many of the examples on this page, these things actually happened. Maybe these specific people didn't technically exist, but Ofelia represents any number of children living through the Spanish Civil War.
• The Phantom of the Opera (2004): The Phantom, whose murderous and possessive streak can be explained in that he was paraded as a freak show when he was a kid, and almost everyone has denied him genuine love. He even had a woobie song (which was ironically cut from the film) called "No One Would Listen". Awww.
• Phantom of the Paradise: Winslow Leach. Sweet and woefully naïve, not only is his precious cantata stolen, but he's also beaten up, framed and sent to life imprisonment, has his teeth extracted, his face mangled by a record press, signs away his soul unwittingly, endures his cantata being mangled by a mediocre pop band, is rejected by his love and loses her to his nemesis, and unsuccessfully tries to kill himself. Then he dies, sacrificing himself for his love.
• Pleasantville: Bill the malt shop owner. If you don't want to hug him and tell him it's gonna be all right when the greyscale mob destroys his diner and his art, you ain't human.
• Psycho: Norman Bates. His mother isolated him from the outside world, making him totally dependent on her, and then mentally abused him. No wonder poor Norman goes a little mad sometimes. He practically exudes neediness and awkward sweetness. Plus, he's played with boyish charm by the handsome Anthony Perkins. He's in even more need of a hug in Psycho II, where the vulnerable Norman has to tolerate gaslighting. Counts as a Jerk Ass Woobie as well, since he murders a couple of people in the first movie alone.
• Rambo: Last Blood: Gabriela goes to Mexico to find her Disappeared Dad, only for him to tell her in no uncertain terms that he left simply because he never loved her and her mother and that he never wants to see her again. Then it turns out that Gabriela's "friend" used her dad's contact info to lure her down to Mexico in order to sell her to Human Traffickers. When Rambo's first attempt to rescue her fails, her captors show her proof of it, carve an "X" into her face, and single her out for exceptional cruelty just to spit on the man who stood up to them. By the time she's finally rescued, she's been enslaved in a brothel for most of a week and pumped full of drugs to keep her subdued, leaving her just lucid enough to break down in fear at the slightest human touch. Then, as a final Gut Punch, she dies of an overdose from the forced drug use as Rambo is driving her home.
• The Remaining: None of the characters have it easy as The Rapture commences, but Skylar could give the others a run for their money. Her parents drop dead on her wedding day. She gets stung by a scorpion demon and spends almost a day in constant agony. She also reveals that she felt peer-pressured to go to church for most of her life but it still made enough of an impact on her that she feels hurt and confused about being left behind.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera: Nathan Wallace. Yes, he's been poisoning his daughter to keep her from leaving him and he moonlights as an organ repo man, but he's also spent the past seventeen years having the guilt for his wife's death constantly beaten into him by the guy who's really responsible. He's just so horribly broken that it's hard not to feel at least a little sympathetic.
• Rosemary's Baby: Rosemary Woodhouse. Pretty much everyone around her is manipulating her into giving birth to the fucking Antichrist. This includes her very self-absorbed husband Guy, who agrees to help them arrange it so that she's raped by Satan in exchange for a boost to his acting career. Then the pregnancy is terribly painful and makes her very sick and malnourished, and her neighbors, her husband, and her doctor all assure her that it's perfectly normal and will stop soon... And do their very best to cut her off from anyone who might tell her otherwise. Adding to both the Woobiedom (and the frustration) is the fact that Rosemary actually does know that something's wrong for most of her pregnancy, but is too meek and unsure of herself to outright stand up to Guy or the others. And she's so teeny and sweet and nice...
• The Secret Garden gives us a dream sequence of a toddler Mary being abandoned by her mother in the jungle, and crying piteously. It's pretty heartbreaking.
• A Serious Man: Larry Gopnik. An everyday, average Jewish man in 1967 suburban Minneapolis who suffers one moment of despair after another. He tries the be the best person he can, despite: (1) his wife leaving the marriage for the whale like Sy Abelman, (2) getting dunning phone calls from a record club he's never heard of, (3)a brother, who is more of a wreck than he is, (4) living with an anti-Semitic neighbor who frequently encroaches on his property, (5) living with two children who are too self-involved to think beyond their own needs, and (6) getting anonymous letters assailing his moral turpitude as a physics teacher in school." His only dubious relaxation is listening to bass Sidor Belarsky's rendition of Yiddish song "The Miller's Tears".
• Shaun of the Dead:
  • By the end of the film, Shaun desperately needs a hug. He watches his hardass stepdad Phil turn into a zombie shortly after the old man finally makes peace with him. Then he has to put down his zombified mother. Then his best friend Ed gets bit and becomes a zombie in the end. His entire life is turned upside down, even if it wasn't much of a life and he came out a better person in the end.
  • Dianne is Liz's friend, she's a failed actress, she watches a lot of people die around her over the course of the movie, and she is painfully aware that her boyfriend David is really in love with Liz and just using her as a Replacement Goldfish so he can justify hanging around Liz all the time. The DVD commentary reveals that while she actually survived being enveloped by the horde outside the Winchester at the end, she moved to another city and became a recluse. Can you really blame her?
• Shoot to Kill: Berger the jeweler. A kidnapper takes his wife and maid hostage and then kills his dog to intimidate him into robbing his own store. He's an emotional wreck every second he's onscreen, and his wife and maid are killed anyway.
• Short Circuit: Johnny Five gets the crap beat out of him by a gang of thugs in Short Circuit 2, which evokes a great deal of Woobie reaction from the audience (it made me cry as a kid). Cathartically, though, Johnny rebuilds himself into a robo-punk (complete with a leather "jacket" + mohawk) and gets his revenge with Bonnie Tyler blaring in the background... God, the 80s were awesome.
• A Single Man: George Falconer, a gay man whose partner of 16 years dies and he can't openly show his grief because it's The '60s and all.
• Sixteen Candles:
  • Sam. Her entire family forgets about her 16th birthday because they're focused on her older sister's wedding, and she's in love with Jake Ryan, who doesn't even know she exists.
  • The disabled girl with the neckbrace (played by Joan Cusack) is portrayed as nothing more than comic relief, even though she clearly has a hard time being able to drink any of her fluids, barely speaks, and hardly has any friends.
• SLC Punk!: "Heroin" Bob. Although he doesn't get as much attention in the movie as Stevo, his story unfolds piece by piece until the end. When he and Stevo were kids, they were both geeks, getting picked on. However, while Stevo was from a fairly normal family, Bob had no mom and was living with his alchoholic, insane father. Later, he tries to visit his father for his birthday and brings him a present, but the old man chases him out with a gun, after not recognising his own son. After Bob falls in love with Trish, he admits to Stevo that he actually feels happy with her and he's willing to give the city they both hated for so long another chance. Finally, in the end he spills his guts to Stevo, saying he wants to marry Trish and revealing that all this time he's had doubts whether he's ever been a good son and if he hadn't let his father down. And to top it all, he dies the next morning. If that doesn't make you tear up and want to hug the guy, nothing will.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): At the start of the film, Sonic watches in horror as his adoptive mother, Longclaw, sacrifice herself to save him from a pack of murderous echidnas and casting him across space at the age of five. By the time he comes to Earth, Sonic has been on the run for ten years, forced to live in hiding and unable to make friends for fear of someone hurting him to exploit his powers. His angst eventually leads to him accidentally causing an EMP that knocks out power throughout half of America, which attracts the attention of the military — and Dr. Robotnik — and nearly forces him to escape from the planet that he called home for most of his life.
• Spider-Man Trilogy:
  • Harry Osborn, son of Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin. Harry's in the comics, too, but woobification seems to have eluded him there: not only is he portrayed, prior to his death, as an abusive husband and father, occasional drug addict, and all-around nasty piece of work (albeit not entirely unsympathetically), he's also drawn to look significantly less attractive than James Franco.
  • Mary Jane Watson comes from an abusive household (whose father even calls her "trash"), is continually the "damsel in distress" throughout the trilogy, and in the third film she has the worst of luck in what appears to be a Trauma Conga Line; First she gets bashed by critics for her Broadway performance- and gets replaced by someone else onstage, then she is hurt when Peter (as Spider-Man) shares a kiss with Gwen Stacey during the Key ceremony (the exact same one that she shared with him in the alley in the first film), is later violently blackmailed by Harry to break up with Peter, and is eventually hurt once again by Peter in the Jazz Club- both emotionally and physically (while he's under the symbiote).
  • Sandman from Spider-Man 3. He just wants to cure his daughter from some mysterious illness but since he doesn't have the money for medical care, in desperation he is forced to commit crimes. In one of his robberies he accidentally killed Uncle Ben, a mistake that would haunt him. When he got his super powers, he decided to use them in order to get the money, but not before visting his daughter, giving her the postcards he had written for her but wasn't allowed to send. After the final battle with Spider-Man, in which both Harry and Eddie die, he's obviously in deep regret of the situation he played part of that went out of hand and the last scene has him asking Spider-Man for forgiveness for the pain he had caused him.
• Stand by Me:
  • Gordie has been neglected by his parents his whole life and truly believes that he should have died instead of his brother (who was the only member of the family to care about him). At least the end sequence shows he has a good relationship with his own son.
  • Chris comes from a troubled family, is bullied by his brother and gets taunted by a Sadist Teacher. He truly believes he's worth nothing. And just when he makes something of his life, he dies stopping a mugging.
• La Strada: Gelsomina is one of the classic examples in film history. The contrast between her wide-eyed innocence and the hell she goes through can be hard to watch at times. She's even regarded as one in-universe, with the other circus performers and the nuns taking pity on her.
• The Strange Thing About the Johnsons: Sidney Johnson is a successful poet and the husband and father of Joan and Isaiah respectively. When Isaiah develops an incestuous obsession for him, Sidney is subjected to 14 years of sexual abuse at his hands. Whilst writing a memoir as a recollection on the abuse, Isaiah threatens him with much worse after discovering it. After getting viciously raped by his son in the bathtub, Sidney mentally breaks down and escapes the house only to then get run over by a van.
• Street Fighter: Zangief. He's a genuinely good but genuinely stupid man who's been convinced that M. Bison is a hero fighting a terrorist organization known as the A.N. And he doesn't even get paid. At least he gets a Heel Realization, Big Damn Heroes, and Redemption Equals Life all in the span of about 30 seconds near the end.
• Sucker Punch:
  • Babydoll loses her mother, is almost raped by her stepfather, shoots at him in self-defense which accidentally kills her younger sister, and is taken to an asylum that just screws more with her already tenuous grip on reality.
  • Blondie becomes quite a big one as her tough facade breaks quite easily once Blue reveals he's onto them. When she breaks down sobbing, it's a very sobering moment from a character who was a Deadpan Snarker beforehand.
• Super Comet: After the Impact: Fernando Martinez. He fails to find his family (who are implied to be dead), the dogs he looked after abandon him, he runs out of food and water, and his journey ends with him breaking down in despair at the impact crater before dying alone.
• In the first Christopher Reeve Superman film, Christopher Reeve manages to create a moving Woobie moment. It's when Clark Kent is at the Daily Planet elevators, having just been brushed off by Lois Lane, ignored by nearly everyone and treated rudely by the one person who does notice him. At that moment, Clark is a lonely nerd who can't seem to get a break. All the more powerful when you know that Lois' helicopter is about to crash and Clark's awesome moment as the Man of Steel is about to begin.
• Talk to Me: Max, Mia's dad. First his wife commits suicide, then his daughter grows distant, then at the moment he tries to reconnect with her she attacks him and later kills herself.
• TRON: Legacy:
  • Tron and Quorra. Tron got rectified into becoming The Dragon for Big Bad Clu. Quorra is the last of her kind, an breed of emergent AIs who were deemed "imperfect" by Clu and dealt with. Kevin Flynn rescued her from one of Clu's extermination squads.
  • Heck, Kevin Flynn too. All he wanted to do was help improve/make a better world, but ends up trapped in it for what was essentially thousands of years, while his old partner-program Clu took over and majestically buggered up Flynn's work. To make it even worse, he thought TRON died helping him escape, and was stuck with the knowledge that he'd probably never see his son again.
• The Truman Show: Truman Burbank. He was abandoned as a child and everything in his life, including his family and friends, is staged and manipulated for the entertainment of others.
• Vamps: Goody. Watching her stare at ancient pictures of her children is heartbreaking, watching her dance with her lost love while seeing him as he was when he was young is heartbreaking, watching her bittersweet joy at finally tasting a pretzel and seeing one last sunrise before she crumbles to dust would make a rock cry.
• The Velocity of Gary: Kid Joey, a young drag queen (who is hard of hearing) gets mugged upon his arrival in the city when a gang of thugs find out his sex, then falls in love with a hustler (who comes to his rescue after being mugged)only to have his heart broken by said man, and is soon killed after he is hit by a car when trying to reach a phone booth across the street during an emergency.
• The Wolf Man (1941): Lawrence Talbot. Poor guy gets bitten by a monster, catches The Virus, involuntarily kills a bunch of people, and gets beaten to death by his own father. And in the sequels, he escapes from the grave, learns he can't stay dead, kills his own Love Interest in a moon-mad rage, and spends most of the rest of the series as a fugitive from the law and/or the insane asylum, vainly seeking the means to commit suicide and/or destroy the wolf within. Definitely a guy in need of a hug.
• The Wolfman (2010): You can't help but feel pretty crappy for Lawrence after his time in the asylum. You feel pretty crappy for him for most of the movie!
• The World's End: Peter was once beaten up so bad his eye popped out of the socket, was so bullied he'd hide for hours in the toilets, and even in the present he seems pretty easily intimidated.
• 2 of the 3 leads in My Blue Heaven qualify for this trope. While FBI agent Barney Coopersmith was keeping an eye out on troublemaker Vincent "Vinnie" Antonelli so that he doesn't get in trouble, Barney's wife leaves him for a younger man, one of the reasons being how Barney eats his pancakes. Woobie #2 is policewoman Hannah Stubbs, who appears to be having a worse life than Barney. She and her husband are divorced, but he still visits her and their kids. At some point in the movie, it proves that being a Woobie is what Barney and Hannah have in common, and they have a romantic attraction to each other despite how they first met.
• The film version of 1408 consists almost entirely of John Cusack's character suffering woobiliciously. Poor thing. And his daughter dies (several times) of Old Movie Disease.
• Pirates of the Caribbean fans seem to either accept James Norrington or Ragetti as their Woobie. Except, of course, if they are Jack Sparrow fangirls.
  • Will Turner, definitely.
  • He inherited it from his dad. Literally nothing nice happens to Bootstrap until the end of the third movie.
  • Syrena in On Stranger Tides.
• Speaking of Depp, the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). The trauma of the Red Queen's takeover has turned him from delightfully mad into being somewhat traumatized and broken underneath his cheery demeanor.
  • The look on his face when he realizes that Alice is going to leave him just makes you want to cuddle him.
  • A lesser-known Depp role which qualifies is Don Juan DeMarco. Poor lost manchild, abandoned and adrift, in desperate need of a father-figure. And just look at those eyes.◊.
• Sadako (Samara in the remake) is such a Woobie that she even wins the sympathy of protagonist Reiko (resp. Rachel)... until the full extent of her curse becomes clear.
  • Even worse in the prequel, Ringu 0, where you see Sadako before being cursed, as a shy introverted girl with uncontrollable powers that terrify her. And she's bullied by people in her theater crew. You just want to hug her the whole movie, and all the sequels that came before it.
• Broken Sword of Hero (2002) qualifies as one, having scenes in every retelling of the story in which he gets run through with a sword, usually by his own lover.
• Tracey Berkowitz from The Tracey Fragments. The entire film is about Elliot Page in a shower curtain having a mental breakdown.
• David Spritz from The Weather Man. The poor guy constantly tries to make things right for people other than himself, and rarely gets thrown a bone.
• Dr. Robert Neville from I Am Legend certainly qualifies for this, having witnessed his wife and daughter killed, then later having to strangle his diseased dog which was his only companion for three years in an apocalyptic world.
• Cameron Frye of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He might qualify as the Chew Toy or the Butt-Monkey were it not for the fact that most—if not all—of his woes are either within his ability to change or exist wholly inside of his own head, and it is this inability or unwillingness to recognize his own self worth that results in his uptight, paranoid hypochondriac persona (resulting in his also being The Eeyore of the film). He doesn't fit perfectly into the Loser Archetype because he doesn't really make any attempt to rise above his current situation, but you still get the impression that he could benefit from a good hug.
  • Then again, Cameron's home life is notoriously terrible—his parents don't love each other and his father cares more about restoring a car than he cares about his wife and son. Part of the reason Ferris takes him along for the ride is that he feels sorry for him and wants to show him a good time.
  "Cameron has never been in love. At least, nobody's ever been in love with him."
• An interesting example can be found in Midnight Cowboy. Rizzo starts off as a sleazy jerkass, but he slowly devolves into a woobie. This is mostly due to his Incurable Cough of Death.
  • Even moreso in the book, where he's more or less woobie from the very beginning and also seems to take advantage of it when deceiving guillible fools like, well, Joe Buck.
• Despite him not really having major problems, lots of people want to hug Chekov every time he's on screen in Star Trek (2009). It's probably the facial expressions, especially when he fails to save Spock's mom. And the big, sad eyes... the accent tips him over right into Moe territory, though.
  • Spock also qualifies as the Woobie. Losing his captain, witnessing the destruction of his home planet and death of his mother, being accused of not having loved her ...
  • Also Spock Prime, who blames himself for not being able to save Romulus, and was forced to watch a past version of his home planet be destroyed because Nero thought he didn't even try.
  Billions of lives lost, because of me, Jim. Because I failed.
• Goddamn, John Nash was a woobie in A Beautiful Mind.
• Steve Wiebe of the documentary King of Kong. He blows the big game in high school, gets laid off on the day his family signs the contract on their house, and plays his heart out at Donkey Kong only to be repeatedly denied the recognition he deserves. He even weeps on camera.
• E.T. Who would not be willing to shelter the poor alien from the government? And who doesn't cry at the end?
• Serial Mom:
  • Poor Dottie is tortured with obscene phone calls (even after changing her number twice) and is framed for breaking a mutual friend's prized possession just because she unknowingly took a parking spot Beverly wanted.
  • Eugene is a decent Family Man who has to deal with his wife murdering many of their acquaintances and the knowledge that she'll either go free when she's guilty or be sentenced to death.
• Cameron James from 10 Things I Hate About You.
  • Kat falls in there too, after she finds out that the only guy who was not afraid of her and appreciated her for who she was only went out with her because he was paid. This led up to her reading the titular poem and crying as she did so. Oh, and she wasn't supposed to cry, the actress just teared up as she read.
• Bub from the original Day of the Dead (1985). An undead creature hungry for human flesh has never been more sympathetic. The masterpiece of Dr. Logan's experiment of mental conditioning of zombies, his affection to his "trainer" is both genuine and touching. You really just want to hug him when he screams and cries after realizing that the good doctor is dead and is not coming back.
• Huge Woobie played by Tobey Maguire in Wonder Boys. A decent writer who is first shown getting dumped on by fellow pretentious writers in one of the college classes he's taking, and is then shown to be obsessed with celebrity deaths or death in general, and possibly suicidal.
• Harry's character descends even further into the depths of woobiedom in the film version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, even more so than the book. Any of his scenes with Sirius (especially being comforted by Sirius), or having painful visions, or writhing on the damn ground possessed...
• Somehow, JCVD manages to turn Jean-Claude Van Damme into a Woobie.
• Trainee Obara in the Japanese war film Ningen no Joken (The Human Condition)
• The hunchback Ephialtes in 300 starts out like this.
• Dwight Frye's Renfield is absolutely adorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOOYzlMT23g
• Tom Bardo from Stuck. The poor guy has lost his job, become homeless, and spends most of the film either stuck in the broken window of the car that hit him, or crawling around in agony. And no, none of these are spoilers - it's all in the trailer.
  • The fact that he's played by Stephen Rea, with his hangdog face and big sad eyes, also helps.
• Maurice and Clive, from E. M. Forster's Maurice. At least in the book version, which detailed how confused and alone they felt in regards to being gay. However, Clive turns into a bit of a Jerkass so you don't feel too sorry for him forever.
• Rosencrantz from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He goes throughout the movie totally confused as to what the heck is going on. He is being manipulated by forces he cannot understand and keeps having his inventions and scientific breakthroughs torn down by the only person who cares for him. He doesn't do anything wrong and yet his fate is already sealed. This troper couldn't watch the scene where Guildenstern makes him cry without wanting to give Rosencrantz a big hug. Yes, ladies and gentleman, Gary Oldman, is playing a woobie, and oh so well.
• Poor little Danny from Zathura.
• Alex Russo, in the first half of the Wizards of Waverly Place movie. Though she's usually a Jerkass throughout most of the series, it's easy to relate to her situation-she just wanted to go to a party, and just when it looks like she's about to finally make her mother change her mind, Theresa discovers Alex's plan, and fed up with her refusal to give up, grounds her for two months, which leads Alex to cast a spell that accidentally threatens her family's existence. The fact that Alex wanted to go to that party so badly but couldn't make amends does make you feel sorry for her. At the end of the movie after everything is resolved, she finally agrees to let Alex go for a little while, but Alex, having realized how important her family is, decides to stick with them, and the movie ends with the five family members together.
• Requiem for a Dream. Seriously, try to watch the final scene without wanting to give every character a big squishy hug.
• Tennessee from the live-action version of The Country Bears really seems to fit this trope, considering how depressed he is in the movie.
• Who doesn't want to hug Kirk when he is forced to blow up the Enterprise in The Search for Spock? Or thought he was going to die in The Final Frontier?
  • Or, for that matter, when he sees the Enterprise for the first time in The Motion Picture. The man's face just lights up.
    • Why didn't you hug him when you could, Scotty?
• Jim Prideaux, in the eyes of the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy fandom. Being shot in the back, captured, and tortured would be quite bad enough, but the true extent of his woobiness falls into place at the end of the movie. The Mole turns out to be Jim's best friend, former partner, and possible ex-boyfriend. And Jim kills him.
  • And Peter Guillam, at least in the movie. When Smiley tells him to clean up any loose end of his own that might get him in trouble, Guillam goes home and breaks up with his boyfriend - because that was still illegal in mid-70's Britain. Watching Guillam break down in tears as the man leaves is just heartbreaking. The whole scene serves little purpose beyond reinforcing a theme: be a secret agent, and your life will be depressing as hell.
• Poor Dolores Guerrero from So Young, So Bad. Laughed at by other kids because her family couldn't speak English, history of running away and now mentally unstable. On top of that she gets sent to a reform school that's little more than a prison. Just when you think the girl is going to be okay thanks to the kind hearted psychologists, the cruel matron cuts off her hair which prompts her to hang herself in the dormitory.

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