Dark And Troubled Past / Literature

Dark and Troubled Pasts in Literature

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• 17 and Gone gives Luaren one from a traumatic incident with her babysitter, Fiona Burke, who left her alone during a house fire when she was 10.
• The Alice Network: Eve is a war veteran who went through hell and lost many of her friends. And that's just part of what makes her past so awful...
• In All for the Game, the Foxes tend to have these. The team is set up as something of a halfway house to give promising athletes second chances.
• Burke from Andrew Vachss' books. Born to a mother (strongly implied to be a teen prostitute) who promptly abandoned him, brought up through a variety of foster and juvenile homes, and experiencing the worst that humanity has to offer is a very succinct description of his past.
• Animorphs:
  • Tobias. His natural father had to leave, and he was given a fake father, who then left himself. His mother was in an accident and didn't even remember him, besides being blind. He was bounced among aunts and uncles who didn't really care about him and became a bully magnet.
  • Marco. The disappearance of his mother and the subsequent split of his family caused him to become more cynical and, in effect, more ruthless and pragmatic and less attached to romantic, idealistic principles. To make matters worse, one of the Big Bads has possessed his mother.
• Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World: Each of the members of the party, there's a reason why they eventually pick "Survivors" as their group's name.
  • Nick was an orphan who was mentored by his father-figure, Argus, only to be kicked out when another member of the party they were in accused Nick of stealing funds to cover up his own crime. The worst is that Argus seems to think he's doing Nick a favor, feeling him to be too smart to be an adventurer.
  • Tiana is a trained mage whose fiancee was stolen by a girl from another noble family. Said family used their influence to get Tianna kicked out of the Magic School they were attending and disowned by her family. She's now stuck working as an adventurer while struggling with a gambling addiction.
  • Sem was a former priest who was falsely accused of sexual assault by a girl under his care, a Stalker with a Crush whose love turned to hatred. After three months in prison, he's since developed a thing for hostess bars and indulging his "carnal desires", leading to his being defrocked.
  • Karan is a member of the "Dragon Race" who ventured into the outside world and joined an adventurer party who didn't mistreat her for being a non-human. Then they betrayed her and left her at the bottom of a particularly dangerous labyrinth.
• While the Aunt Dimity series is generally upbeat, many characters have had brushes with insanity, tragic accidents, serious diseases, major injuries, even war and murder. In some cases, coping with the fallout occurs over an extended period (often carrying over from one book to the next). The fates of other, more minor characters are addressed in the epilogue that closes each novel; they typically go about rebuilding their lives, and are usually better off after all is revealed.
• In Baccano!, there's Czeslaw Meyer, a young boy who, when his grandfather and caretaker died, was taken in by his grandfather's alchemy student, Fermet. A few years later, they become passengers on the ship the Advene Avis. Cue both of them becoming immortal. Fermet's true nature begins to shine through, and he starts experimenting on Czes, claiming it's for science. This torture continued for the next two hundred years. The torture and abuse is only ended when Czes finally manages to kill Fermet, in a way that causes Czes to gain all of Fermet's memories. This means that Czes now has both his own memories of being tortured and memories of sadistically enjoying torturing himself. Because of all this, the kid now has intense trust issues.
• In Barber Black Sheep, the protagonist Oliver Winslow is tormented by the loss of his infant little sister as well as spending his twenties in a Hell Hole Prison due to his kleptomania. His love interest, Kittie Wilson, has had a similarly rough go at it, having grown up so poor that her family couldn't afford medicine to save her father's life and having been physically abused by a former employer.
• Noir, from the web serial Barkwire, a dog who "has buried more secrets than bones."
• Colin Whisterfield, in Alan Garner's novel Boneland. It is progressively revealed throughout the book that before he was thirteen, he:
  • was possibly abducted and sexually abused by a man and a woman;
  • lost his parents to a plane crash;
  • lost his twin sister in mysterious circumstances - she went horse-riding by night, and only the horse was found; it is assumed she was thrown in the waters of a lake and drowned;
  • was struck by lightning while alone in the hills, suffering brain damage that went undetected until an MRI scan in later adulthood.
• Trini in A Brother's Price is an Ice Queen, and eventually revealed to have been tortured and raped by her late husband. Who convinced her elder sister that it was entirely Trini's fault. Her sister in turn convinced Trini of this before their mother came home. Fortunately, the husband, Keifer, died in an explosion not long afterwards ... along with several of Trini's sisters. Which gives all the remaining sisters a dark and troubled past. The only ones who are not really affected by it are the young ones who were babies or toddlers at the time.
• A Certain Magical Index: Short version: Everyone. Academy City is built on advancing powers no matter the cost, so nearly everyone has had terrible things happen to them, especially the most powerful.
  • Kamijou Touma has an Anti-Magic right hand which also has the unfortunate side effect of negating his own luck. He was derided as cursed his entire childhood, which is why his parents sent him to Academy City, where such superstition was frowned upon. On the one hand, he wasn't ostracized for his luck. On the other hand, he got constantly dragged into a variety of extremely dangerous situations due to his hero complex, culminating in him gaining complete amnesia at the end of the first arc.
  • Index, due to her Photographic Memory, was forced to memorize countless forbidden magical tomes, which filled up her mind so much that she had to have her memory erased once a year or go insane from information overload. Except that was a lie; the truth was that people were just afraid of how powerful she would become if she had all that knowledge and no limits. The fact that her "name" is Index is a big hint for how much she was dehumanized.
  • Accelerator. Due to his seemingly invincible powers, he's been attacked ever since he was a child by people who either wanted to "prove their strength" or by people who thought he was too dangerous to let live. He survived all of this without a scratch, but having that much violence directed at him all his life has left him rather messed up. And if people aren't trying to kill him, they're trying to use him in inhumane experiments. When he's introduced, he's willing to do just about anything to make sure people never attack him ever again.
  • Shokuhou Misaki has a loooong list of terrible things in her past. She and her friends were part of a lab that would supposedly make them all Level 5; actually the researchers knew from the start that Misaki was the only one with the potential to reach Level 5, and everyone else was just fodder. The experiment eventually went out of control, killing the Motherly Scientist and damaging all the test subjects. Misaki also got called in to pretend to be friends with a girl to keep her stable, only to find out she was going to die soon after she actually became friends with her. Oh, and the researchers at that lab just wanted to replicate her powers and were planning to murder her the second they got what they wanted. And then when she finally found a friend who could keep up with her, she fell in love with him but he received brain damage and lost the ability to ever remember her.
  • Misaka Mikoto is initially unique among high-level espers in that there doesn't seem to be anything terrible in her past; she wasn't put through especially terrible experiments, she didn't lose any friends to the city's horrors, and she's even still on good terms with her parents. Then she finds out that she was tricked as a child—researchers asked for her DNA map so that they could use her electromaster powers to help children with muscular dystrophy. But they actually used it to clone her twenty thousand times so that the clones could be systematically murdered to level up Accelerator. By the time she finds out about the experiment, over nine thousand of the clones have already been murdered; she spends a few sleepless weeks desperately trying to stop the experiments with absolutely zero success, turning her into a Death Seeker who comes up with a Suicide by Cop plan that almost certainly wouldn't have worked anyway.
  • And of course Mikoto's clones. 10,031 clones marched to their deaths without blinking because they were repeatedly told that they were nothing but living dolls designed to die to level up Accelerator. Despite bonding with Mikoto, they are initially baffled that anyone would want to save them, and flashbacks show that the researchers would casually order them to clean up the massacres of their own murdered Sisters. Oh, and due to being a Hive Mind, every single remaining Sister remembers being brutally murdered 10,031 times. Their stoic natures makes it hard to tell, but it's implied more than once that they're seriously traumatized.
• The Chaos Cycle: Kai the werewolf has a terrible past, as he reveals. Due to his mother's Tartar heritage, he and his family emigrated from Russia to Canada due to fears of prejudice. His parents eventually died and he ended up with a guardian who passed away later as well, leaving him alone and with a very antisocial personality.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa:
  • Joslyn was sold into slavery with her older sister by their own father. She was owned first by a family who didn't mistreat her (any more than slavery entails inherently), but then was sold again to a man who'd tortured her by burning Joslyn's breasts and genitals. It's also strongly implied he raped her. After getting free, she joined the Imperial Army. The recruiter though decided to have the male recruits all attack her with intent to kill. Luckily, she was skilled enough to kill and wound most, with the rest yielding.
  • Linna has a similar background to Joslyn. Double shamed as a salvik (a Terintan term for people who have mixed ancestry) born out of wedlock, her mother had sold her into slavery as a result. However, she suffered less, and was freed after Tasia was given her by Linna's owner.
• Wang Sau-leyan in Chung Kuo. He was ugly, fat, clumsy, and treated as a poor sequel to his brothers while he grew up. This is not presented as an excuse for his behavior, but it helps explain it.
• In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society,
  • Mallory. She has no memories of before she was six and came to Cloak, despite telepathy efforts to get past her trauma; she has been told that she killed her parents with her powers. Actually, Cloak murdered them and erased her memories.
  • Kirbie and Kyle are less troubled, because of the Parental Substitutes they had in the Rangers. Nevertheless, when Kirbie recounts how their parents had brought them to the city on a vacation, left them in a park on the pretense of getting ice cream, and never returned, it was still clearly painful for her.
• A large part of Damnatio Memoriae is the reader waiting to find out what happened in Enim's past that had caused him to become so withdrawn and troubled. It's then revealed that his mother jumped off a bridge, survived but is now in a vegetative state being kept alive by his uncle, and Enim could have stopped her. Oh, and she had schizophrenia and Enim most likely has it, too.
• Gillian Flynn's Dark Places has Libby Day, who saw her mom and two sisters murdered when she was seven years old. She then testified against her older brother, Ben, who got life in prison. Then she grew up being bounced around distant relatives and foster homes, eventually alienated her aunt Diane (the only close family she had left), never got a job or got over the murders, and "grew into a deeply unloveable adult."
  "Draw a picture of my soul and it would be a scribble with fangs."
• In Sarah A. Hoyt's Darkship Thieves, Kit's wife died, and it looks like he murdered her, and he refuses to clear his name out of, it turns out, fear that other dark elements of his past will turn up.
• The Dragon Business: Sir Dalbry is a former nobleman who sought to be a fair and generous provider to the needy after his father died, only for con men and False Friends to deplete his treasury, kick him out of his castle, and cut down his beloved family apple orchid for siege engines.
• Sajag from Dragon Queen killed a guy and then had to go into exile away from his family.
• Harry in The Dresden Files. Never knew his mother, his dad died when he was a kid, bullied at an orphanage, adopted by an abusive Evil Mentor who tried to turn him to The Dark Side, had to kill him in self-defense, arrested by the White Council, barely escaped the death penalty for violating the Laws of Magic, and is still under the Doom of Damocles and being stalked by an Inspector Javert at the beginning of the series. None of this is what makes him a woobie; he is one because, taking into account the things that happen to him during the actual series, his backstory isn't depressing so much as it's "a very small taste of what's to come.''
• In Devon Monk's Dead Iron, Cedar's brother Wil dragged him west after the loss of his wife and children. Then they went on the wrong land and were cursed into werewolf form. Cedar came to find himself at the end of a bloody trail, and backtracked to find his brother's wolf corpse, its throat torn out by himself.
• In Robin Jarvis' Deptford Mice trilogy, Thomas Triton is haunted by feelings of guilt for being responsible for the death of his friend Woodget Pipple. In the prequel book Thomas, which describes the incident in detail, it is revealed that the villainous Ma Skillet put him into a trance, causing him to throw Woodget (who could not swim) into the ocean. When he awoke from the trance, he realised what he had done and was filled with remorse. However, unbeknownst to him, Woodget was rescued by a siren whose song gave him amnesia. He was brought to the City of Hara in India and became their new sadhu.
• In The Dinosaur Lords:
  • As a child, Karyl saw his immediate family being eaten alive by a wild dinosaur. As if that wasn't traumatic enough, soon afterwards his aunt kicked him out of the country to take over his family lands, leaving hism with nothing but a pair of trousers and his pet allosaurus Shiraa. He managed to climb out of it, though - he spent years serving as a mercenary on Shiraa's back until he amassed an army of his own and took his country back.
  • Falk's father is said to have been extremely abusive, to the point that Falk still has nightmares about him and has o tell himself that the man can't hurt him anymore. He ended up pushing his father off the stairs, killing him, on orders of his mother, who's equally abusive, although in a different way.
• Vulpie in A Fox Tail has a particularly dark one, almost to the point of parody, beaten and shot by his birth father at 5, raped by a priest at 12, beaten by another foster parent for being gay... A psychologist strongly believes that it's his reason for hacking the known universe, but Polar helps him grow out of it.
• In Gene Stratton-Porter's Freckles, Freckles does not remember his dark and troubled past, but knows it happened:
  Does it seem to you that anyone would take a newborn baby and row over it, until it was bruised black, cut off its hand, and leave it out in a bitter night on the steps of a charity home, to the care of strangers? That's what somebody did to me.
• Séraphine Francq (Fiancée du Vent): lost her mother at a young age, her father died from the experiment that gave her her powers, was gang-raped by schoolmates, and consequently beat them up so hard that one of them is stuck in a wheelchair for life, giving her remorse...
• Both Greg and Emma from the novel Fort Hope have troubled pasts. They come to find out their dark and troubled pasts are linked. Of course, in that book, almost everyone is related somehow.
• Nikita from The Girl from the Miracles District has spent her entire life running with her mother away from her insane father, all while dear old mom had her assist with assassinations and training her to be a killer - on pain of not getting any food if she failed a task. And when Nikita's father got to her, he kidnapped her, tortured and cut off two of her fingers, just because.
• Phyllis Hatherley's past is not only mysterious but also shady in The Ghost Writer. One of story's major plot points is her son's attempts to discover her past right from her childhood.
• The Marquess from The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making has a very troubled past. She stumbled into Fairyland when she was 12, lived there for many years, fell in love, became a heroine and queen, and became pregnant. Then she was snatched back into the human world, stuck in a 12 year old's body and with her alcoholic and abusive father, no husband, no child, and no Fairyland.
• Both main characters of Gives Light. Skylar had his mother murdered in front of him when he was five. Her murderer realized he was in the room and slashed his throat. Skylar didn't die, but now he's irreversibly mute. To top this all off, his one dream in life is to be a singer. And then you have Rafael, son of said serial killer. Everyone equates him with his father and he has no friends. Until he meets Skylar.
• Kieran Trevarde of The God Eaters has a dead mother, some degree of rape and child prostitution, as well as drug addiction in his past, and a dead lover on top of all that at the outset of the novel.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry had both parents murdered before his eyes at age one, nine years living with abusive guardians, being bullied at school by his cousin and his cousin's friends, his Godfather was wrongly imprisoned for a crime he never committed, and the most evil person in his world has a connection to him, a life and death battle every year, and sometimes his friends turn their backs on him.
  • Dumbledore, who went through the following events in his lifetime: 1) his sister was rendered magically unstable due to being attacked by three Muggles, 2) his father was sent to prison for attacking said Muggles, 3) his mother was accidentally killed by his unstable sister, 4) he then neglected said sister and spent all his time planning a takeover of the Muggle world ‘for the greater good’ with his crush Gellert Grindelwald, and 5) he might have accidentally killed his sister in a three-way duel with his brother and Gellert Grindelwald. (Rowling says that what he did while infatuated with Grindelwald turned him asexual).
  • Severus Snape: the neglected and emotionally abused child who fell to The Dark Side at school and then devoted the rest of his life to Dumbledore's cause. That, or he's been a double agent for Voldemort the entire time. It's not really clear until the very last book confirms that he was loyal to Dumbledore.
  • Neville Longbottom also deserves a mention. Lives with his grandma because his parents were tortured into insanity by Death Eaters and feels that he can never live up to them and has no self confidence at all. He also thought for a long time that he was a squib and only discovered his magical ability by being dropped out of a window.
  • Sirius Black, who had (let's count!): 1) a dead best friend, 2) a dead brother, 3) abandoned (disowned) by parents, 4) spent 12 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit (for bonus points, this jail employs Dementors as wardens) , 5) been betrayed by former True Companion.
• In Heart's Blood, Anluan’s entire family history, all the way back to his great-grandfather, Nechtan, who had an evil summoning spell go VERY wrong.
  • Caitrin’s isn’t exactly bright and cheery either. Her father’s dead, her sister married and left her, and a distant relative took over the house and allowed her son to beat Caitrin when he felt like it.
  • The members of the host are all souls from Purgatory. Some of them seem to have particularly violent pasts.
• In Heart of Steel, both Alistair and Julia have their own traumatic pasts, over which they ultimately bond:
  • Alistair—back before he was Alistair—was in a car accident that left him badly mutilated and his girlfriend in a coma. Because he was a robotic genius even then, he rebuilt himself out of metal parts over the course of five years, only to discover when he went to visit his girlfriend that her parents had had to take her off life support the week before. Cue psychotic break.
  • Julia was attacked at the hospital where she worked and nearly killed by a deranged junkie looking for drugs. The incident left her with PTSD, unable to go back to work due to panic attacks.
• Hostile Takeover (Swann): Klaus and Jonah Dacham were raised by an abusive mother, who often threatened them with their absent and nameless father. They joined the secret police to escape her, and were groomed to commit atrocies, peaking in Jonah's massacre of 35,000 rebels and innocent bystanders on Perdition.
• Oreg from the Hurog duology could be the poster child for this trope. He is something like a ghost, but does have a body, which can feel pain. He has also been a slave to generations of men from a family whose members are known to be frequently violent or insane, or both. Think about the implications. His current owner Ward also comments that Oreg is "a pretty boy", and he knows what this would have meant to some of his more unsavory ancestors. He also notices that Oreg experiences flashbacks, fueled by magic to be more realistic than the mundane version. Of course, Ward had no happy childhood either, he eventually had to pretend to suffer from braindamage after a beating, as his father would have killed him if he had presented a threat to his father's keeping the power. Ward's younger sister didn't have a happy childhood either, and he helped his brother escape after said brother tried to commit suicide because he couldn't bear it. Their mother is The Ophelia. Many other people in the story don't have happier pasts, but if there were a competition, Oreg would win, as his dark past is longer than any of the others'. And more mysterious.
• The In Death series:
  • Eve was abandoned by her mother, raped by her father (who impregnated her mother with the sole intention of selling her to child molesters), killed him in self-defense, and then had to handle at least one abusive foster parent as she grew up in the system.
  • Roarke was regularly beaten up by his father and non-biological mother, had to steal for his father, and even though Summerset took him in, they lost Marlena, Summerset's daughter, to a group of rapists.
  • Dr. Mira watched her parents divorce, her mother remarry, and was sexually abused by her stepfather to the point of being Driven to Suicide (fortunately, she survived). Boy, these three had it rough, didn't they?
• The reason Rosalie in I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level is a Cute Ghost Girl falls into this. Her family fell into financial troubles and her father decided the best way to do that was to sell her to prostitution, under the guise of marrying her off to a rich man. Rosalie discovered the truth and hung herself before it happened.
• The Infernal Devices: Jem Carstairs. A demon who had a grudge against his mother tortured him in front of his parents, injecting him over and over with a drug that made him hallucinate vividly.
• James Bond: 007's parents were killed during a climbing accident in the French Alps when he was eleven.
• James Herbert:
  • The Dark: Parapsychologist David Bishop's five-year-old daughter Lucy's death from pneumonia drove wife Lynne to a psychiatric shelter.
  • The Jonah: DC Jim Kelso, orphaned from birth, spent his first six years in an orphanage. Throughout his life, uncannily recurrent, sometimes fatal, misfortune plagues him and those around him. It's caused by the solidly manifest ghost of his crazed twin sister.
  • The Magic Cottage: Illustrator Midge Gudgeon's parents untimely deaths left her grief-stricken and falsely guilt-ridden.
  • Sepulchre: Anglo-Irish bodyguard Liam Halloran, at the age of eight, saw his father shot dead by IRA terrorists.
  • In Haunted (1988), psychic David Ash, traumatised by accidentally aiding his bullying older sister Juliet's drowning, seeks to disprove ghosts. In The Ghosts of Sleath, he helplessly watches Grace Lockwood brutally murdered by the ghosts of Human Sacrifice victims. By Ash (2012), he remains wearily cautious.
• Jane Eyre:
  • Mr. Rochester was betrayed by his greedy father and brother to marry a woman they knew was insane just to get her money, and all the man ever wanted was to find someone to love.
  • Jane had one, too. She was orphaned, put into an unloving and abusive home, and sent to an unsanitary boarding school that could barely feed its students. The first friend that she made there died shortly after she arrived, as did most of the other students in a typhoid epidemic.
• Journey to Chaos:
  • Eric's initially low self-confidence and self-esteem is due to his past but it is mild compared to some of the people he meets.
  • Kallen Selios is a survivor of the Siduban Chaos Explosion and her parents were not. She was adopted by her mom's business partner because her remaining blood family was afraid of her mutation. Since then she has faced discrimination for being a demon and a "labrat".
  • Zettai's parents were abusive, and after they died, she was homeless and vagrant. She traveled constantly to evade Ceiha's secret police because she was a courier in the magical black market. Then they eventually caught her and bad things happened to her behind bars. When Nolien shines an Illumination Orb over her at night, her automatic response is to shout "I'm innocent! Please don't arrest me!"
• Just Juliet:
  • Juliet started drinking and doing soft drugs to numb the pain of her mom's death. It ended with her being arrested for vandalism, after which she got into rehab.
  • Lakyn's parents were abusive to him, so he was raised by his uncle. We later learn that he attempted suicide in the past, after losing his aunt (a surrogate mother), and has many scars on his torso from past abuse.
  • Scott was caught in his house with his boyfriend when his parents came back from vacation early. He hasn't spoken to his dad since, while over time his mom's accepted him.
  • Ben James, Juliet's dad, was best friends with a trans boy growing up, who killed himself over troubles with other people regarding his gender. He still won't talk about it, years later.
• Fisk from the Knight and Rogue Series. He took up crime to support help support his sisters after they lost both parents to disease. When his oldest sister marries someone who could take care of them, he decided Fisk alone couldn't stay, becuase he didn't want to be associated with a criminal. And that's ignoring everything involving Jack Bannister.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: All of Kthonian Knights have one; the three girls were kidnapped and raped by truly evil men and the guy had his hands cut off and left for dead for deserting the Leondian army. All of them function as a Freudian Excuse except for the last one. The only thing his past does is make him angst about how he can no longer truly embrace his precious little sister.
• In A Legacy of Light, main character Tutankhamun's parents, grandmother, and five of his sisters died before he'd turned nine, and before he was nineteen, he and his wife had lost two infant daughters.
• The protagonist of Lone Huntress has this in spades. Her entire tribe was slaughtered by the same Space Pirates who then kept her as a badly abused "pet" for the next year. A bounty hunter catches them while they're in the middle of torturing her to death, one piece at a time. Her response to all of this: learn to become a predator to the people who prey on the innocent.
• The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali: Rukhsana finds out from her diary that her sweet, loving grandmother had a traumatic past, with domestic abuse from her husband and his mother, along with regular rape at his hands. Then when he'd begun raping their daughter too (Rukhsana's mother) she couldn't stop him except by inspiring a friend to kill her husband. It also applies to Rukhsana's mother by the same token.
• Most of the main characters from Loyal Enemies haven't lived a life of roses so far:
  • Veres was a skilled, talented mage on the verge of handing in his thesis and becoming an archmage. Then the love of his life was suspected of being a crazy necromancer and he refused to be interrogated, believing her to be innocent. He was tortured for information for days, left the prison as a functional cripple, was banished from the capital, had all of his possessions confiscated and his career thus ruined. To top it off, his lover Tairinn was killed by a werewolf a week later. If not for his friend Gloom, he'd probably have died right there and then. The worst part? Tairinn wasn't innocent at all and never loved him, faking her own death.
  • Werewolf Shelena has her share of bad memories. Among others, her first child was lynched, she had to leave a man she loved behind because he despised the wolf side of her and wanted her to kill it with an elixir, and she was once captured by an Ax-Crazy monster hunter and tortured for days before being left to die. That's not mentioning all the times she had to leave everything behind because people found out she's a werewolf.
  • Rest, Veres' apprentice, was thrown out of his home and by several masters he was apprenticed with, often for no good reason other than that they didn't want to feed another mouth anymore. Veres found him on the verge of dying from falling into the lake in the middle of winter beneath a flight of stairs, while his drunk father was about to beat him for falling in.
  • Virra is a seven-year-old half-elf girl who, due to her clan who all have the killing touch, is being shunned by both elves and humans. She lost her family to vicious bird-reptile monsters and has been told so often that she's a monster and worth nothing that she's started to believe it.
• Francis Crawford of Lymond in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. He's got almost everything: rejection by his father, didn't fit in as a child, betrayed by his early—perhaps first—lover, framed as a traitor, physical and perhaps sexual abuse as a galley prisoner, self-hatred because he blames himself for his sister's death, and pretty much everyone he cares about dies as a result of knowing him.
• Vin from Mistborn. Born the daughter of a skaa (peasant) woman and an Imperial nobleman (a death sentence from the get-go), her earliest memory is of her insane mother killing her little sister and performing Hemalurgy to transfer some of her soul to Vin, before being rescued by her older half-brother. Said half-brother genuinely cares about Vin, but he's a cynical, abusive Jerkass who hammers into her head the idea that she can't trust anyone because everybody is selfish and manipulative. They spend the next several years working as petty thieves on the lowest rung of society, until the half-brother runs out on her, though it turns out that he was actually captured and executed, leaving Vin without a protector in a den of scum. Of course, from there, she gets recruited by La Résistance, finds out that she has supernatural abilities, and takes a level in badass, but still. Is it any wonder the poor girl spends most of the trilogy wrestling with crippling paranoia?
• Jace Wayland from The Mortal Instruments, saw his father, Michael Wayland, murdered in a pool of his own blood. That was staged, of course. And Michael Wayland was never his father.
• Murder for the Modern Girl: Guy Rosewood/Peter Buchanan's mother died giving birth to him and while he had a loving father, he was bullied and discriminated by others due to his shapeshifting abilities. During one incident, his father tells him to hide as he goes to defend Peter from the people harassing him. But Peter goes outside, ends up in a confrontation with some boys, and loses control over his shapeshifting abilities, leading to him fleeing and getting his foot stuck in a train track. Peter's father pushes him out of the way so he can get hit by the incoming train in his place. Peter ends up blaming himself for his father's death and takes on the identity of Guy Rosewood to separate himself from his past.
• Kvothe from The Name of the Wind had his entire troupe die, lived homeless for three years, got kicked out of the only place he felt he belonged after the death of his troupe...and that's just what we know so far.
• Samantha Cataranes from The Nexus Series has a particularly unpleasant past. It is strongly implied during the first book that her experiences drove her to revile "Transhuman" technology and join the ERD as soon as she was old enough.
• There are eight main characters in Of Fear and Faith and each one has experienced either a crappy, abuse-filled childhood or a life-altering, emotionally scarring tragedy. To put it in perspective, the character who lost his father when his hometown was destroyed probably has the least depressing backstory.
• In the Nightfall (Series), Prince Vladimir's entire human family was killed as a result of a rebellion gone wrong. However, he never uses it as an excuse for his evilness and is unapologetic about what he has done to humanity.
• Everyone in The Pale King, but Toni Ware especially. She spent her childhood in perpetual poverty as she and her sometimes-crazy mother drifted around the country. She also saw her mother murdered right in front of her.
• In The Precipice, the concept is played with and deconstructed. Grace comes from a loving home, has a great relationship with her parents, and clearly has a bright future ahead of her. However, it is all but outright stated that the expectations placed on her by her many opportunities have left her emotionally and mentally vulnerable, and the pressure eventually produces cracks. The emotional fallout of her One Bad Day leaves two dead and her life in tatters.
• Presidential: Emily's father was murdered and her mother wounded along with her sister in a shooting which she had witnessed.
• Since all of the princesses of The Princess Series are based mostly on the Grimm Bros. version, they all have this, though some more than others.
• Tenjou from Qualia the Purple. As a child, Tenjou fell off a jungle-gym, getting her body fatally wounded. And that's when the traumatizing part begins. Completely conscious, she then watches her best friend replacing her "damaged body parts" with jungle gym parts. This obviously still doesn't sit well with her for long years after. This is why she acts like a jerk toward Yukari.
• In Rama II, this abounds. Nicole failed to win a beauty pageant because of racism. After she won an Olympic medal in sprinting, she hooked up with the prince of France, who abandoned her when she became pregnant, possibly due to the same issue. She then had to move in with her father. Although he allowed her to raise Genevieve with him, Genevieve's parentage still haunts her public life. Francesca was sexually adventurous very early and some scarring past experiences left her callous enough to use everyone and every thing in the present. Richard's father who abused him and his mother, due to being unable to cope after he lost his job as an engineer and suffering a case of Intelligence Equals Isolation. This lead young Richard to feel very isolated. Adultery from his girlfriend when in college pushed him over the edge, almost driving him to suicide. Only math and Shakespeare saved him. As a father in the present he is intellectually excitable but distant emotionally; and that was before he was kidnapped and probed by aliens. Other characters are not generally shown to have explicitly traumatic pasts, but Brown was the cause of one for his wife, a former PhD student whose scientific results he stole, and cosmonaut Janos is implied to have been forced to suppress homosexuality and political involvement from his youth, in order to join the astronaut academy. For the world's best and brightest they are not without their issues.
• In River of Teeth, Houndstooth used to be a hippo rancher, the most talented at breeding hippos in all of the United States. He'd worked for fifteen years to save up the money to buy his own ranch. It was burned down by Cal Hotchkiss who was working for Travers by that point and was eager to impress Adelia Reyes. Houndstooth had to watch dozens of his beloved hippos burn alive, which set him on a downwards spiral until he met Archie and decided to live his life for his sole remaining hippo Ruby.
• Many of the women The School for Good Mothers have tragic stories, but Meryl stands out. She was sexually abused as a child and her mother didn't believe her. She ended up dropping out of school and getting pregnant. It is hinted her mother was abusive and in turn, Meryl abused her own daughter, which is why she ended at the school.
• Camille from Sharp Objects suffers from this. She grew up with a Disappeared Dad, an abusive mother, and a Delicate and Sickly little sister who died when Camille was only thirteen. She also got gang-raped at thirteen by a group of football players. She's been a cutter since childhood, and shortly before the book starts the problem got so bad she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. While there, she witnessed her roommate, who she had grown close to, kill herself. In the present day Camille is still a cutter, and a Broken Bird and The Alcoholic to boot from these experiences.
• In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Bridget's mom committed suicide when she was a child. Her father and twin brother cope with this loss in unhealthy ways, and much of Bridget's flighty and impulsive nature comes from leftover trauma she has surrounding her mother.
• Literally every character in The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin, but it's by design. The villain creates their reality for the express purpose of making them miserable.
• All the main characters of Six of Crows have this.
  • Kaz came to Ketterdam at the age of nine. Almost immediately, his brother is tricked into signing away all of their money, they become homeless, a plague kills his brother, he is left for dead on a barge full of dead bodies, and he returns to shore using his brother's corpse as a float. No wonder he became the Bastard of the Barrel.
  • Inej was just an acrobat with her family before being kidnapped by traffickers and brought to Ketterdam, bought, placed in a "pleasure house", and forced to have sex with horrible men before Kaz purchased her indenture and made her a spy instead.
  • Jesper's Grisha mother died because she pushed herself too far, his father encouraged him to stop using his powers (likely causing mental illness), and he ended up with a gambling addiction, working as a sharpshooter for a gang, after dropping out of university.
  • Wylan was absolutely tormented by his wealthy father due to his dyslexia, and ended up nearly being murdered by men his father hired before making it into the Barrel and being taken under the wing of the Dregs. To top it all off, his beloved mother who he had been told was dead turned out not to be dead after all, but locked away in an insane asylum so his father could control her money and assets.
  • Matthias discovered that he had essentially been brainwashed by trusted adults and was imprisoned to fight in an arena, repeatedly.
  • Nina was captured by enemies and nearly killed for being a Grisha, before escaping thanks to a shipwreck, rescuing one of said enemies, falling in love with him, and being forced to label him a slaver and get him arrested in order to save his life. Oh yeah, and this tops off being trained at a young age and experiencing a civil war as a young child.
• A lot of characters from A Song of Ice and Fire because Westeros truly is a Crapsack World. Among many other examples, Sandor Clegane killed an innocent peasant boy and laughed about it, but the fandom forgave him as soon as he confided that his older brother Gregor had burnt his face as a child.
• Jez from the Spaceforce (2012) series, a space vampire whose entire race was almost totally wiped out in a genocidal uprising by their own 'bloodservants' when she was a teenager. The remnants were exiled from their homeworld, and now face fear-based prejudice in a supposedly liberal galactic Union.
• Almost every character in Space Glass.
  • Bob's parents killed each other in front of him while he was still a child.
  • Amy's brother was badly injured in the war, ending her happy childhood.
  • Ratroe's family was plunged into poverty after their father abandoned them.
  • Bagok was considered a freak everywhere he went.
  • Reeva was thrown out by her family after slaughtering several people in self defense.
  • and finally, the Marauder was being used for target practice.
• The Spirit Thief: While all three main characters have some degree of this going on, Nico takes the cake. As a young child, she was kidnapped by slavers and sold to the Dead Mountain cult, where she grew to be Master's worshipper by the way of Stockholm Syndrome. She was eventually implanted with a demonseed and sent out to murder everything - until the League of Storms beat her within an inch of her life and the Master abandoned her, took his powers away and told her she's a failure and should die. If it wasn't for Josef appearing at a fortunate moment, she absolutely would have.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Han Solo Trilogy:
    • Xaverri's husband and children were killed by the Empire, inspiring her vendetta against them. She declines to go into details on what happened, saying recounting it might kill her.
    • Han's past also counts — he was a street urchin recruited by a criminal into working on his behalf as a beggar, con artist and thief. Before that, though details aren't revealed, it's implied that his parents were murdered and he wound up on the streets with his memories of them erased for an unknown reason.
  • Shadows of the Empire:
    • Dash Rendar's family, it turns out, were once wealthy Corellian merchants, and he was in the Imperial Academy. Then his brother accidentally crashed into the Imperial Museum on Coruscant flying a ship, dying in the process (it had been sabotaged by Xizor, because they wouldn't sell their company to him). In revenge, the Emperor had Dash expelled and exiled his entire family from the Core while seizing all their property, ruining them. Since then he's been a smuggler. It's brought up by a Rebel to appeal for his help as he has good reason to despise the Empire, but Dash still doesn't join them full on.
    • Xizor, although the villain, also has one. After a deadly virus escaped from a lab in a city on his planet, the Empire destroyed everything within a hundred mile radius to contain it. This resulted in the deaths of his parents, siblings and two uncles, along with over a hundred thousand other people. It's implied he really did love them, and wants revenge against Vader (who ordered the virus project) due to this.
• In Andre Norton's Storm Over Warlock, Shann Lantee was a Street Urchin. The only affection he got during that time was from a pet bird, that died in pain. He was at least once tortured with an Agony Beam by a bully. And he saw people under mind-control — a fact which he blurts out to Thorvald; that deeply embarrasses him, because it underscores how unlike the standard Survey team member's life his has been.
• Survivor Dogs:
  • Lucky was abused by his previous owner, which caused him to become a stray dog.
  • Alpha was ostracized by his wolf pack due to being the offspring of a dog and a wolf. This led to a lot of bullying growing up.
  • Sweet was a neglected racing Greyhound who was abandoned after she became "too old".
• Sword Art Online: Shino Asada was a happy child, until a trip to the post office with her mother took a turn for the murderous when a robber held up the office. When the robber turned his gun to Shino's mother, the eleven-year-old girl wrested the gun away and killed him in self-defense. Sadly, this led to Shino being ostracized by her classmates and her own mother, plus PTSD so severe that she can't hold a toy gun or even have someone point at her without suffering a severe panic attack. She tries using the VRMMO shooter Gun Gale Online as a form of self-help, but with minimal success.
• Both Tailchaser and Roofshadow have similar pasts in Tailchaser's Song. They're both the Sole Survivors of their families. Tailchaser's mother and siblings mysteriously vanished several months ago when he was a kitten. Roofshadow's trauma is even worse. She came home to find everyone in her entire clan either vanished or savagely torn apart (including her favorite brother and Only Friend Snufflenose).
• Tasakeru's primary characters, the Outcasts, are shining examples of this trope, it's pretty much a prerequisite for being one. One is a runaway Samurai suffering from Survivor Guilt, one was disowned by her family for being a mage, one grew up in poverty and had to steal to survive...
• Maggie of Trail of Lightning was orphaned in the Big Water and raised by her grandmother, who was then murdered on Maggie's sixteenth birthday by cannibals. The trauma triggered Maggie's clan powers and adoption by Neizghání who spent eight years training her in combat. None of this has prepared her for healthy social relationships.
• Most of the vampires from The Twilight Saga seem have dark and troubled last minutes of their human lives; the terrific pain of the transformative venom doesn't help matters.
• In Wen Spencer's Ukiah Oregon series, Ukiah was abandoned in the woods to run with the wolves before that, Magic Boy was brutally murdered, eventually creating Ukiah and Atticus. Atticus Steele was another foundling. The foster parents who would have adopted him died in a car wreck and he was passed from foster home to foster home throughout his childhood. Max Bennett's wife disappeared mysteriously while he was on a speaking tour, only to turn up at the bottom of a lake from a car wreck.
• Barbie, from Stephen King's Under the Dome, has a greatest failure in the time he allowed his military unit in Iraq to torture and kill a prisoner for no reason. He regrets this for the rest of his life, and his remorse thinking back on it is bad enough to get an Energy Being who sees him as an ant to show pity on him.
• Villains by Necessity:
  • It's revealed that Sam grew up in poverty with his mentally ill mother, the pair squatting inside an abandoned warehouse to survive. He had no idea who his father was or where he'd gone, as his mother couldn't remember. Then he walked in once to find that she'd been raped and beaten by a random drunk, dying from her injuries. He killed the man, with the building catching fire when the lamp fell over. After he escaped, the assassin's guild recruited him.
  • Valerie is the only one of her people left, as the rest were all slaughtered by the Verdant Company. She only survived due to being left for dead. Valerie lost her husband, daughter and unborn son in the genocide. She has sworn vengeance on the Verdant Company's commander, Prince Fenwick, for this.
  • Kaylana was Forced to Watch everyone she knew and loved as they were killed when she was just a girl. After that, she lived alone for over a century.
• In Violeta, Miss Taylor was an orphan in Ireland who was put to work in the infamous Magdalene laundries in the hopes of being adopted. At 12, deemed to old for adoption, she is sent to work as a servant to a married man who rapes and abuses her. Fortunately for her, when she's 17 the man's wife finds out and sends her away to work for her mother, who trains Miss Taylor to speak and act like a proper English young lady, suitable to be her companion. After the woman dies, Miss Taylor eventually makes her way down to Chile and ends up becoming Violeta's tutor.
• In the Warrior Cats series, there are many:
  • Bluestar's mother died when Bluestar was only an apprentice, and her father never really paid much attention to her and her sister. Her sister died as a young mother, and Bluestar felt guilty for her death because she'd convinced Snowfur to leave the camp for a little while. She had kits with a RiverClan cat (a forbidden relationship), but had to give them up in order to become deputy instead of the bloodthirsty Thistleclaw, and one died.
  • Crookedstar sustained a disfiguring injury as a kit. Because his shallow mother couldn't stand having such an ugly kit, she neglected him, favored his brother, and renamed him Crookedkit for his injury. After he rejected his Evil Mentor, she cursed him so that he would outlive everyone he ever loved, completely helpless to stop it.
  • Yellowfang, a medicine cat, had kits with the Clan leader (another forbidden relationship). Two of them died, and the one that lived became cruel and bloodthirsty, killing his own father and taking leadership, breaking the warrior code by stealing kits from other Clans, and even murdering kits from his own Clan and framing Yellowfang.
  • Scourge was bullied by other cats, including his own siblings, for being small, with one cruelly telling him that he would get thrown in the river. When he was only a kit, he was savagely attacked and nearly killed by Tigerpaw for accidentally walking onto ThunderClan territory.
  • Mapleshade had a forbidden love affair with Appledusk, a RiverClan tom and had his kits. When her Clan found out, she and her kits were banished. Mapleshade desperately tried to take her kits to their father's Clan, but they fell into a flooding river and drowned, despite Maplshade's best efforts to save them. Blaming her for the kits' deaths, Appledusk rejected and humiliated Mapleshade in front of RiverClan, and took another mate to hammer it in that they wee through. Consumed with grief and rage, Mapleshade went on a [1] that caused her to be sent to Cat-Hell when she died, where she would plot revenge for all eternity.
  • Darktail was rejected by his father, Onewhisker, and subsequently raised by his mother, Smoke, to hate the Clans. This lead him to grow up to become a brutally ruthless tyrant with a single purpose; to destroy the Clans.
• In Where Are the Children?, Nancy's past is filled with tragedy and horror. Her father died suddenly of pneumonia when she was in her teens. Then when she was eighteen, her mother also died suddenly in a car accident. A few years later, her two children went missing and were found deliberately smothered; Nancy was unjustly put on trial for the murders, initially found guilty and sentenced to death, only to be released after the judge declared a mistrial. Her first husband committed suicide, believing she was guilty, and Nancy quickly moved to the opposite side of the country to escape people's scrutiny. Her past is even darker than many people realise when it comes out that her first husband was extremely manipulative and abusive towards her and their children, nor was her mother's death an accident.
• Niall from Wicked Lovely: 1. Cold-Blooded Torture, 2. Rape as Backstory, 3. both were orchestrated by the one he loved above all others, 4. inadvertently responsible for the deaths of several mortals. That's not even counting what happens to him during the series. He is The Woobie, indeed.
• The Witchlands:
  • Iseult has ran away from home shortly after Corlant started taking unhealthy interest in her mother, and nearly died when she was discovered by a Carawen monk. She had to leave the monastery as well, and then almost died again before Safi saved her and they became Threadsisters. All the time, she had to manage the copious amounts of Fantastic Racism that all Nomatsi face — in the Dalmotti Empire, they're considered animals.
  • Aeduen apparently used to live in a Nomatsi settlement before something happened that made him terrified of fire, killed his mother and caused him to flee. He was found by a Carawen monk and joined the monastery, but was ostracized there for being a Bloodwitch. At some point later, his father roped him into his schemes and convinced him that Aeduan should accept being a demon other people see him as.
  • Cam grew up in a gang, and his brother wanted him to become another gangster. Adding to that, he's biologically a woman, and everyone in the Nines think that he's just pretending to be a boy for laughs. He joined the Navy to escape the life of crime, but it caught up with him anyway.

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