Everyone really, but a few characters deserve special mention:
- Helen from the webisodes.
- Sophia. She was raised with an abusive and potentially pedophilic father, witnessed the world ending and the dead coming back to devour the living, been on the run as everything fell apart, living in mortal terror every step of the way, and then things went From Bad to Worse.
- Lori. Her husband was shot and in a coma when the walkers hit, she thought he was dead, she and Carl had to leave their house, and then found out that Atlanta had napalm dropped on it. And then, once they find the camp, even that's not perfectly safe, Shane's started going off the deep end, and then, she finds out Rick isn't dead, and when she breaks if off with Shane, he tries to rape her. And then their safe haven, the CDC, which they were supposed to be able to stay in, explodes. And that's just Season 1. And she still just kept going until her death, to take care of her family.
- Carol is also a big Iron Woobie. She spent years being abused by her husband physically and emotionally, and then she loses him in a walker attack in Season 1. In Season 2, she spends a few agonizing days waiting for her daughter Sophia to be found and she knows she can do nothing for the search... and then, in the mid-season finale, Sophia walks out of the barn as a walker and is shot in front of her. In Season 3, she watches T-Dog get eaten by zombies and her best friend Lori dies in the same day. Carol cries a lot but she never has suicidal tendencies and all the tragedies she experiences never affect the way she functions in the group. She's also one of the most positive members in the group, happily taking care of Lori's daughter and being the de-facto mother of the group. And then when she's banished from the group by Rick after she admits to murdering Karen in an attempt to keep a flu epidemic from spreading through the prison. Once she returns to the prison she finds it destroyed from the Governor's attack and she's shown to not have a great track record with kids with Sophia, Lizzie, Mika and Sam dying due to some of her contributing actions. She also is forced to kill a reanimated Tobin, someone who she was in a brief but healthy relationship with. And just when she finally has a loving relationship with Ezekiel and an adopted son named Henry she finds him beheaded on a pike along with nine others; this, along with the collapse of the Kingdom, leads to Carol and Ezekiel separating. Someone please give this woman a hug.
- Backpack Guy from "Clear" is just an unnamed survivor trekking alone through the zombie-infested wilderness who desperately begs help from a passing car. Unfortunately, that car contains only ruthless pragmatists Michonne, Rick, and Carl, so they not only drive past him without a second thought but actively struggle to leave him behind when they get temporarily stuck. Then he gets torn apart by walkers off-screen, so on their return trip they just casually grab his pack of supplies and drive off, not even caring this is all their fault.
- Clara from the Season 4 premiere; even Rick feels sorry for her despite her attempt to kill him.
- Sasha, who loses both her boyfriend Bob and brother Tyreese only a few weeks apart, causing her to undergo severe Sanity Slippage. Once she is able to recuperate and forms a relationship with Abraham, he is killed by Negan just a few days into their relationship. And then she poisons herself, reanimates, and tries to take out Negan (which fails and leads to her death).
- Tyreese in "What Happened And What's Going On". It's very hard to watch someone who did their best to keep the group's humanity in check die a slow, sad death throughout the episode. On top of the fact that his group recently lost Beth they lose him too.
- Maggie just cannot catch a break: first, she watches half of her family die before Rick's group arrives. After that, she witnesses, in sequence, her father die at the hands of The Governor a couple seasons later, finds out about her sister's death a season after that, and finally, after everything seems to be going well for her with her expecting a child with Glenn, she watches him die at Negan's hands at the beginning of Season 7 — while the group is on a mission to get her to an obstetrician because of complications with the pregnancy. How she still holds up at all is damned impressive, especially since she was the first of the group to get up after the Saviors left and immediately declared war on them. At the end of the season, she also loses Sasha, who is one of her closest friends, and is forced to put her down. At the end of the war, Rick chooses to honor the late Carl's wishes and spare Negan, leaving Maggie devastated.
- As of "Some Guy", Ezekiel can be added to the list. He goes from reveling in his group's multiple victories to losing almost his entire fighting force in about 5 seconds. The majority of his group is gunned down trying to save him by snipers, and when he comes to, they all start to reanimate and he's forced to put some of his former soldiers down to get away since his leg is so damaged that he can barely walk even with his cane. When he finally runs into a survivor, that man is gunned down within a minute by a hidden Savior who then captures him and taunts him for his failures and tells him that he's full of shit and nothing without Shiva. Things start to look up when he's saved by Jerry and Carol and eventually by Shiva... who promptly gets eaten before their eyes while Ezekiel screams helplessly, unable to help her. The icing on the cake is when he finally returns to the Kingdom with an injured leg looking like shit, missing the bulk of his army, and has to face the widows and children of all the people he lost. Ezekiel is so broken he can't even bear to face them. All in just one episode. And then in Season 9 his son Henry dies and shortly after that he has to abandon his home and he and Carol separate. It's gotten so bad for him that he fears that Daryl will steal Carol away from him, contemplates suicide by jumping off a ledge and when he kisses Michonne after being talked out of it she gently rebuffs him due to her still grieving Rick (which he calmly accepts but still...).
- Gabriel. Two seasons after becoming a fully qualified badass he tries to save Gregory after the AHK fighters' first attack on the Sanctuary, only for Gregory to take his car and leave him behind with a huge herd of walkers. Desperate to stay alive, he takes shelter in a trailer, only to be stuck with Negan. After they escape, he ends up becoming ill due to covering himself in walker guts to evade the walkers and captured by the Saviors, before he decides with Eugene to escape the Sanctuary and escort Dr. Carson to Hilltop. It's then discovered that he's slowly losing his sight from said illness. Just when he and the doctor manage to find a working car, they end up being spotted and recaptured by a group of Saviors. When Carson tries to escape, he is shot right in front of Gabriel, leaving him devastated. He's then driven to work at Eugene's outpost and Eugene shows him no sympathy, despite that fact that Gabriel's clearly broken and traumatized. He eventually gets better after the end of the Savior war but the he loses both Jadis (who he clearly loved) and Rick (who he greatly admired).
- Aaron, despite being one of the most badass fighters of the Alexandrian outpost and in Rick's group, has it rough. From being punched, knocked out and tied up by Rick to having a mother who was abusive to him because he was gay, to being wounded by the Scavengers, suffering a severe beating from the Saviors, being dragged by walkers in a lake and nearly being killed, being ambushed by the late Oceanside leader Natania when he was trying to recruit them to fight the Saviors and losing many friends and allies (most notably Abraham, Glenn and his beloved boyfriend Eric). And then even after the war ends he loses his arm after it was crushed by a log and just when he strikes a friendship with Jesus, he loses him to the Whisperers right in front of his eyes. To top it off, Negan has the audacity to blame him for the death of Eric despite it being caused by his group.
- Morgan. At the start of the apocalypse, his wife comes back as a walker and he is unable to put her down, which eventually leads to the death of his son Duane at her hands. From this point on, Morgan is never quite the same again: he undergoes a massive Sanity Slippage, turns King County into a dangerous, trap-laden fortress and kills/robs anyone who crosses his path, convinced that he must "clear". He is unable to bring himself to commit suicide, even begging Rick to do it once they reunite. He is temporarily able to find peace thanks to a man named Eastman, only to inadvertently cause Eastman's death. He then goes on a quest to find Rick and succeeds, but the threat of the Wolves and especially the Saviors (after they kill his protege/son figure Benjamin) forces him to go crazy again. He eventually leaves the group again and ends up in Texas.
- Siddiq due to the guilt he has from Carl dying after he helped him and took him to Alexandria. If that wasn't enough, he gets heckled by a doctor at Hilltop and its implied that Rick has a bit of a grudge on him for Carl dying even though it wasn't his fault. And then he gets captured and beaten by the Whisperers only to witness 10 other people (including his protege Enid) die trying to fight back leaving him the only survivor who is now constantly struggling with PTSD from the experience. And when he finally finds someone who can relate to him about suffering from PTSD he's murdered by him after finding out that he was a Whisperer planted in Alexandria.
- Enid has watched her family being torn apart by walkers, is clearly heartbroken by Glenn's death and, after getting in a relationship with Carl, is left utterly devastated by the news of his death. Additionally, the two adults who care about her most in the wake of Glenn's death, Sasha and Maggie, die and leave her behind when they depart the community, respectively. And then she gets killed by the Whisperers just as she starts forming a relationship with Alden. The poor kid can't catch a break.
- Woobie Species: The walkers. The show really likes to show us that they were all once normal human beings before becoming tragic monsters with the primal urge to kill everything. All they can do now is eat and wander the Earth without their humanity or a purpose in life due to their souls being lost forever.
Jerkass Woobie
- Merle is a racist Jerkass, but once he's handcuffed to a pipe and left to die, crying and admitting to God he's been bad as zombies try to break through the door, you can't help but feel a little sorry for the guy.
- Another family trait, as Daryl seems to veer into this territory. He gets more likeable as the series progresses.
- Many fans feel it was inevitable that Shane snapped considering how much crap he had to put up with from Lori and his Survivor Guilt over leaving Rick in the hospital. They feel that, while he did become too ruthless for his own good, you can't put the blame solely on him.
- The Governor is far from the nicest guy, but its hard not to feel for him when Michonne kills his zombified daughter despite his desperate pleas. Then there's "Live Bait", where he's left broken and alone. Sure, it's all his own fault, but he's still rather pitiable and even acquires a Morality Pet. That is until he betrays Martinez, brainwashes his new group, and kills Hershel in a final attempt to seize the prison and all sympathy is gone forever.
- Mary is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who was also the Team Mom of a clan of gluttonous cannibals, but it's hard not to empathize with her in particular since she seemed like an otherwise nice older lady and suffered some truly horrific events during the siege of Terminus.
- Jadis, the leader of the Scavengers, a morally questionable group of survivors living in a junkyard, have double-crossed both the Saviors and Rick and his group (twice) but it's hard not to feel sorry for her after Simon and his group massacre the rest of the Scavengers right in front of her (leaving her utterly traumatized), and leaving them to reanimate, having Rick and Michonne leave her behind in the Junkyard despite the fact that she's desperate to escape and eventually forcing her to lure her undead friends into a meat grinder.
- Dwight. Sure, betraying Daryl and robbing him of his crossbow and bike was a bad move of Dwight's own volition as well as his other actions such as killing Denise, tormenting Daryl on indirectly causing Glenn's death, getting Dr. Carson killed by Negan despite the fact that he was nothing but nice to him and constantly tormenting Rosita about Abraham's death, but losing his wife and half of his face to Negan definitely earns him a spot here, and he only becomes more sympathetic once he decides to switch sides and help the allied communities take down his former boss. Even better is that after Negan has been defeated, Dwight profusely apologizes to Daryl while assuming that he'll kill him only to be spared and kicked out of the AHK communities with Daryl threatening to kill him if he comes back. He's now currently looking for his missing wife Sherry and ends up in Texas with Morgan.
- Negan after his downfall at the end of Season 8. He even tearfully begs Maggie to kill him so that he can be reunited with his dead wife. He becomes even more of one in "Here's Negan" when we see that at one point he was a devoted husband who tried to help his wife beat her cancer and made an effort to be a better man than he was before the apocalypse. Then he returns from a scavenging mission to find her having committed suicide (meaning the trip he made to retrieve her medication was All for Nothing), forcing him to put her down and sending him on the path to villainy. While it doesn't pardon his horrible actions, it does make it difficult not to feel at least a little sorry for him.
- Randall from Season 2 can be an odd case of this. Your mileage may really vary on this one. Prior to meeting with Rick's group, he was a member of a group of bandits who had members who gang-raped two teenage girls, he at the very least sat back and did nothing to stop this. After encountering Rick's group, he goes through Hell for the rest of his time on the show. He gets his leg impaled on a fence pike and is abandoned by his friend, he's later Bound and Gagged by Rick and Shane twice, who left him to fend for himself the first time, gets held prisoner on the Greene Farm, tortured by Daryl, and nearly hung before Shane finally kills him as an excuse to lure Rick away to do the same to him. Because of this, we never get to see how huge of a threat he truly was.
- Lydia. A member of the Whisperers who attacked Daryl while imprisoned and was about to attack Henry when he foolishly decided to let her out. But considering that she has Alpha for a mom (who killed her father and lied about it to her for years and is abusive towards her), is illiterate, and strikes up a romance with Henry only for him to be killed by her mother leading her to beg Carol to kill her, it's hard not to have some sympathy for her, especially when she fully defects from the Whisperers and stays at Alexandria.
