Woobie / The Umbrella Academy (2019)

• Collectively every single child adopted by Reginald Hargreaves (Umbrella and Sparrow alike) is a Jerkass Woobie by way of being adopted by a cold calculating abusive man who was only ever grooming them as cattle for slaughter in order to reset reality to get his wife back. They are all fundamentally screwed up and barely functional but can you blame them?
  • Luther is a Control Freak Leader Wannabe who locked up Viktor thinking he knew what’s best for everyone, but was actually the one that helped along the world's (first two) destructions. However it stems from a desperate attempt to assure that his Undying Loyalty and devotion to the Umbrella Academy, when all the other siblings had left, wasn’t All for Nothing. But it was. He stayed behind and stayed loyal to Reginald only to get mortally wounded, the cure to which transformed him into a gorilla-human hybrid. Reginald then sent him to the Moon for years for no real reason other than to guard his wife’s dead body. Luther then gets humbled in the hardest ways as the love of his life, his foster sister Allison (another messed up aspect of his family life) drifts further away from him do to his conflicted actions. No one respects his status as Number One for good reasons. After accepting that he and Allison weren’t meant for each other and finding a new, more appropriate and meaningful relationship with Sloane, he’s mind raped and almost actually raped by Allison who’s been slipping into villainy after loosing everything. And just as he’s found happiness with Sloane at the end of the world, he’s murdered by Reginald as a way to bait the other siblings into doing what he wants. And when he comes back after the world is reset, Sloane is nowhere to be found and he’s last seen in season 3 going off to look for her in an unknown world without his powers and only Klaus looking after him.
  • Diego is pretty hostile and standoffish to most of his siblings when the series begins, especially Viktor and Allison. But he probably has more daddy issues than even Luther – he just went the opposite route. While he went off on his own, he still played hero trying to prove himself to Reginald. He’s not living great when the series begins but things go even more downhill after his ex (whom he still has feelings for) dies while saving his brother, and he’s wrongfully accused of her death. He was closest to Grace and he head to watch her programming become less and less functional, something akin to a child watching their parent go through dementia. He’s also the one who looks after Klaus, watching his brother relapse and also suffer from PTSD. He’s then thrown back into the 60s and put in an asylum for trying to stop the Kennedy Assassination. His lover turns out to be a spy. He’s put down by a past version of Reginald and instead of stopping Kennedy Assassination he goes down in history as a conspirator.
  • Allison in Season 3 really slips into villainy, doing some truly abhorrent things, (committing Mind Rape and almost actual rape on Luther, killing Harlan, treating Viktor terribly and betraying her family), but until then she had been the sibling that held it together the most. She was abused just like her siblings, and had to deal with being forced to rumor Viktor as a child by Reginald. When she found family outside of the Umbrella Academy, she ended up losing it (albeit through her own actions). Allison went through a Trauma Conga Line consisting of getting her throat slashed by Viktor, getting thrown back in time and dealing with 60s racism without her powers when she could have used them and also thinking the rest of her family was dead for two years, then having to leave her loving husband so she can reunite with her daughter… only to find out her daughter’s been erased from existence. Finding out that Viktor lied to her about Harlan is the last strow that turns her into a cold, callous and vindictive individual, completely unrecognizable from the person who stood in Viktor’s corner even after he slashed her throat. It’s heartbreaking to watch her descent into someone so detestable.
  • By the end of the third season, Sparrow Ben is this. He’s a raging asshole Leader Wannabe till the end, but he suffered the same abuse the Umbrellas did, and now he’s lost all of his siblings, including Sloane, and he’s stuck powerless in a new universe with a bunch of people who prefer the original version of him. That’s rough and even with all his extreme assholish behavior, he didn’t deserve that.
  • Reginald Hargreeves. He's a terrible person, and his Freudian Excuse doesn't even begin to make up for his actions, but you gotta feel for the guy who was so broken by his wife's untimely death that he literally moved Heaven and Earth to be reunited with her.