Examples of Jerkass Woobie in Fan Works.
- This Is A Wild Game Of Survival: Ji-min is quite spiteful, taking glee in ruining Gyeong-su's chances with Na-yeon, and then insults Na-yeon after she reciprocates her own feelings, unknowingly striking a nerve by calling her 'unlovable'. She is also a gay teenager in a conservative family who risks losing her parents, who she's incredibly close to. What's even worse is that she sees her parents dead from the drone feed, and she blames herself as they came to the school to save her. And then there's her abandoning Hyo-ryung, which she did in a hysterical state.
- Dawn Schafer from When Forever Wasn't Enough. She starts out as the closest thing to an Alpha Bitch the story has, attempts to further drive the already-existing wedge between the former BSC members, and is incredibly self-absorbed the point where she neglects Stacey's growing depression and accuses her of being the self-absorbed one. However, she is also shown to be struggling with self-esteem issues, and longs to go back to California where she feels she belongs. But the part where this trope really kicks in? After Stacey's suicide, Dawn is so devastated that she takes her grief out on the other girls and accuses them of not being there when Stacey needed her (pot, kettle; kettle, pot). While she continues to go through the stages of grief, she grows more rebellious and refuses to acknowledge that she wasn't there when Stacey needed her...until the girls start reading each suicide note Stacey addressed to them, and Dawn realizes that she wasn't there for Stacey when she needed her, which drives her to tears.
- This trope kicks in even more if you've read the prequel, Forever's Promise. In that, Dawn thinks abut how much she wants to be someone's best friend, not the second-best friend or one of the best friends. She thinks she has this with Stacey, but there's a part of her that's doubting and wondering if Stacey's real best friend is Claudia, and Dawn's just a stand in. Think about the suicide note scene in light of that: not only is Dawn realizing that she wasn't there for Stacey when she needed her, but Stacey's note to Claudia, about how awesome she always thought Claudia was and how she wishes they were still as close as they used to be, would seem to confirm Dawn's fears that Claudia was always the friend Stacey really wanted and Dawn was second-best.
- "The Way of All Things
" basically presents Scorponok as this, looking at how he fell from his previous position in Megatron's (comparative) esteem after Inferno joined the Predacons, with Megatron openly praising Inferno's contributions while ignoring Scorponok's more long-standing loyalty to him. Including events such as Scorponok being essentially framed for attempted rape by Blackarachnia and was manipulated by Tarantulas into doing nothing to prove himself to Megatron in the hope of regaining his standing at some vague future date, it culminates in Megatron dismissing the memory of Scorponok after the quantum surge, focusing on the latest battle to the point of threatening to test his new weapons on Waspinator even when Waspinator tried to speak up in defence of Scorponok's memory.
- Hope for the Heartless:
- The Horned King becomes this. Having suddenly been resurrected for a one-shot Redemption Quest, the centuries old lich warlord is as ruthless as before, but the interactions with his prisoner and Morality Pet Avalina make him slowly realize how lonely and miserable he really is.
- Creeper is also this. The cowardly and selfish goblin has for all his life known nothing but oppression and cruelty before Avalina came to his life.
- Let's face it, Chip is very abrasive, cold, stubborn and sometimes even nasty to Dale in the canon but the fanfic What's Past Is Past will make you feel downright awful for him. Especially the third chapter where Dale dies and Chip's angry attitude drives Monterey Jack and Zipper away. The scene where he snaps at Gadget and breaks down sobbing at Dale's grave is downright gutwrenching. This fic will make you want to slap Chip and hug him at the same time.
- In I Will Remember You, Years of horrific abuse turn Ulrich Stern into a scarred, rock-hard bastard named Reese Anders who pushes everyone away and refuses to accept people's company or help. That being said, he is just a boy who has seen too much and been exposed to all the horror in the world and doesn't want to break any more hearts. Even by the end, he hasn't changed much, and it's even more ambiguous if he ever will open up to Odd, Jeremie and Yumi.
- Sherlock Holmes in the season 1 finale of Children of Time's, due to having Taken a Level in Jerkass over the past couple of episodes. On the other hand, his best friend is getting married again (the primary reason for him being like this in the first place: he sees it as losing Watson), and Professor Moriarty doesn't help matters.
- Codex Equus:
- Prince Blueblood appears a boorish Jerkass on the outside... but on the inside, he suffered much since foalhood. His parents, both Canterlot unicorn nobles from House Platinum, were emotionally and mentally abusive, and did everything they could to mold him into the perfect unicorn scion they wanted. Things turned up for him when Celestia adopted and raised him after learning of his abuse. But his idealism and desire to help his Equestrian subjects was later worn down by both reactionary Canterlot nobles, and mares who were either gold-digging socialites or shallowly treated him as a romantic ideal (such as Rarity from "The Best Night Ever"). As a result, he relied on public masks to protect himself and provide a way to help his subjects without getting sabotaged, which worked, but left him feeling he had no choice but to act like an asshole to others because otherwise, he wouldn't get anything done.
- Queen Eclaira is an Alicorn goddess of the Shadowpact Pantheon, the Queen of her own kingdom, and a Vain Sorceress whose huge appetite brought ruin to many kingdoms and realms. What led to her becoming the way she is currently was her completely miserable foalhood in a kingdom that was obsessed with beauty, fashion, and food - because she was born mediocre-looking in a royal family famed for its members' beauty, she was treated as if she was born extremely ugly, with her parents and siblings abusing her for it while doing nothing when their subjects did the same. Little Eclaira resorted to eating to alleviate her misery, but that gave her tormenters another excuse to bully her. Eventually, she became so ambitious to become the 'fairest of them all' that she ran to Overlord Vondur, who adopted her and gave her the tools/knowledge she needed to exact revenge on the kingdom that treated her like an outcast based on how she looked. While viewed as a horrifying villain in her time, her backstory has drawn sympathy from a few heroes, including Princess Winter Opera, who suffered the same as her but for completely different reasons.
- Blacktip, a young scribe from the IDW comics, is a haughty, domineering, and greedy Dragon... except he really isn't, as that is just a mask he put up in order to be accepted by his own kind, because otherwise he would face bullying and scorn from reactionary Dragons who see him as 'fake'. Without that mask, he's a Nice Guy who's genuinely interested and passionate about learning, something that many Dragons look down on due to it not fitting their standards of what a 'real' Dragon is. He spent almost his entire life searching for the truth behind the 'Burning of Amorea' event, so when he finally learns from Prince Arcaniss that the Dragons caused it out of greed and cruelty and twisted records of it to make themselves look more heroic, he is devastated to the point where he believes that Changelingkind is completely justified in their obsession with survival and hatred of his people. Thanks to advice from friendly Dragons like Ember and help from Moon Ray Vaughoof, Blacktip comes to terms with everything and forgives his people, upon which he Ascends to demi-godhood. He is now determined to help Dragonkind break free of its toxic mindset, even though he knows he'll face even more scorn and rejection for it.
- King Aspen is a divine Deer King who is a loving father and good ruler to the kingdom of Thicket, but is also an extremely haughty, puristic, and xenophobic person who was painted in a more heroic light by fanatic supporters as a form of propaganda. He hampered and mistreated the Ponies who tried to help rescue his son Bramble during the 'Well-To-Do Crisis', and willingly took part in (nearly) convicting Blue Suede Heartstrings of false crimes after the latter was wrongfully imprisoned and abused by the Elternteil Deer Pantheon. However, much of his current behavior is rooted in his past - he lost his parents and many of his sisters to a brutal invasion by Hydianite Covens as a fawn, and subsequently became associated with well-meaning yet deeply flawed individuals like High King Irminsul, who imparted hypocritical, toxic, and bigoted lessons onto him.
- Much like King Aspen, High King Irminsul is a deeply unpleasant person whose arrogance and hypocrisy led to him either influencing his children to become as bad as he is, or abusing them for not fitting his standards of a 'good' divine sovereign. He was once a genuinely good King, but fighting Grogar I and losing much of his family and people in the brutal wars left him a broken shell of his former self. He is so haunted by both real and perceived failures that he started believing only a pure and flawless ruler could inherit his throne and look after mortal Deerkind, which drove him to 'purify' his unborn son of his inner evil in-utero after foreseeing him leading Deerkind into a golden age. Unfortunately, his selfishness defiled/killed his son and served as the starting point of his family becoming extremely dysfunctional and toxic. Many of his children abandoned him in droves after learning the truth (and getting sick of his behavior in general), while many benevolent Deer and non-Deer deities/mortals furiously condemned him for what he had done. And while he knows he's suffering and desperately needs help, he is too proud to admit it, dooming himself to even more disgrace and condemnation.
- Temnobog is the Bogolenya Deer god of Darkness, Evil, and Suffering, and is unapologetic about his evil nature... however, his origins were terrible. He was born the living embodiment of the flawed, evil side of Irminsul's unborn son, and for that he was physically and emotionally abused by his own family regardless of what he actually did. Belyolen was among those who truly cared for Temnobog, but years of psychological manipulation and harmful teachings caused Temnobog to assume even Belyolen didn't care for him. Out of spite, bitterness, and anger, he became genuinely evil and antagonized his family, especially Belyolen, which continued long after his brother called out their family for the abuse and left to form the Bogolenya Deer Pantheon. He finally finds some happiness after learning the truth of his existence and reconciling with Belyolen, and even finds love in Ispita... only for Ispita to become a Fallen goddess and betray Temnobog by breaking his family apart and turning four of his children, the Eight Terrors, to destructive Evil. Thankfully, with the amount of support he's receiving from both friends and family, Temnobog still keeps going despite the enormous tragedy and hardship life continues to throw at him.
- In Connecting the Dots, Sasuke spends the first half of the fic with one foot over the Moral Event Horizon, but after an unfortunate encounter with Kyuubi-Naruto, gets a visit from The Spectre who gives him an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech and then strips him of his chakra...In the middle of Gotham City. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
- Last Child of Krypton: Asuka was obnoxious and arrogant because she was abandoned when she was a child. She devoted her life to train and pilot Eva to fight the Angels, but she got beaten in her first battle and reprimanded unfairly by Gendo.
- Shatterstorm from Equestrylvania. He comes off as such a punk to begin with, that when he gets Mind Rape by Death, you... kinda feel sorry for him.
- Caim from Mass Effect: Human Revolution, a survivor of the Batarian slave raid on Mindoir who lost his parents there and discovers that the only way to hold the void at bay... is to kill, and kill, and keep killing. The Templars mould him into a xenophobic Master Swordsman.
- Grover from The Prayer Warriors, (a series that includes Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, The Kane Chronicles, and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic). He keeps getting cloned and coming back from the dead to be killed in many brutal ways. It's almost enough to make you forget that, from his fourth life onward, he's a Prayer Warrior complicit in their atrocities against the non-believers, even if he ends up accomplishing little.
- Thousand Shinji has the next examples:
- Shinji is an utter asshole, but he keeps getting hurt and losing people he cares for.
- Asuka is rude and unpleasant... because she lost her mother, her father didn't care about her, and NERV treated her like a puppet. Then she met Shinji, who actually cared about her and helped her... and then she lost him. Later on, she got him back... right before being murdered.
- In Metroid: Kamen Rider Generations, there are many numerous instances where Mitsuzane turns into a Smug Super Jerkass whenever he interacts with Takeru Tenkuji and company. Due to his Dark and Troubled Past, he has an obvious excuse to joke at anyone's expense to the point he calls himself a Sad Clown. He got better, however.Alain: And your voice of mockery knows no bounds.
- Shadows over Meridian: Caleb and some of his rebels, like Vera Bexley, have sympathetic reasons for their hatred of Phobos and his loyalists, but their refusal to give up on past grudges and consider that trying to fight the Shadowkhan is a likely suicide is leading them to risking their comrades' lives and infighting with their less extreme friends.
- Light in A Cure for Love. He really does care deeply for L and loves him very much but things just aren't working out too well for them because Light is a crazy mass-murderer who wants to be God. Misa as well- she too is very much in love but her affections for Light are not returned and he ultimately betrays and killed her before she can kill L. Also V after learning her tragic backstory. And then there's Mello who is a Jerkass but then his mother and his boyfriend are killed on the same day.
- C Listers:
- Firefly. He's an indiscriminately murderous serial arsonist who's killed a lot of people and something of an asshole in general, but he had a horrifically abusive childhood, and he's subject to a lot of suffering over the course of the fic, including being Mind Raped multiple times, betrayed by his best friend Killer Moth, being nearly killed multiple times, and struggling with his own fear of intimacy.
- Killer Moth. He's a manipulative, toxic asshole, but he's such a failure that it's hard not to pity him.
- Rika Nonaka from the Tamers Forever Series. Oh dear god, RIKA!! She is self-centered and mean, with an outrageous competitive streak. But it is physically impossible to read Silent Sorrow and not have your heart ache for her after seeing what the author puts her through.
- Tangle from Koili's Brother Of Circuits fanfiction series. He's extremely temperamental and has a serious Napoleon complex but it's hard not to feel sorry for him.
- Springtrap is heavily implied to be one of these as well.
- Bonnie can be seen as a borderline case of this after rejecting Freddy's proposal, a horde of angry fans reduced the poor guy to tears and that doesn't even begin to cover what he's been through in the actual fanfic.
- Freddy qualifies as this in the actual BOC fanfic but not so much in the sequel fics and ask blog on DeviantArt.
- Springtrap is heavily implied
- Springtrap from Tony Crynight's Five Nights At Freddy's animation series. Sure, he's a creepy, psychopathic scumbag who tries to force Mangle to marry him and he crosses the Moral Event Horizon with what he does to Foxy but he's also witnessed his best friend die and was banished from the pizzeria. It's easy to see why he acts the way he does.
- "Fix You" makes Emily an even greater example of this when Ross went through with her request to cut off all contact with Rachel to the extent that he moved to London for three years to try and make their marriage work. Things seemed about to improve when Emily became pregnant in the second year of their marriage, but after she suffered a miscarriage one night while Ross was out with some colleagues from work, she and the rest of her family and friends spent most of the next year blaming Ross, until he returned to New York for Monica and Chandler's wedding and was given sufficient encouragement to end his relationship with Emily for good and start to rebuild his life in America. When Rachel learns about the miscarriage, she makes it clear to Ross that even if Rachel regrets what Emily went through, the miscarriage still doesn't justify Emily and her family acting as though Ross was the only one at fault when he was genuinely trying to make the marriage work.
- In Frozen Hearts (Sakume): Hans is one. Their actions in the film are terrible, but the bad things that happen to them here aren’t always the result of their own actions, making it harder to say that they deserves this treatment. In addition to this, their actions weigh heavily on their conscience, causing them to seek out and apologize to those who were wronged, knowing that their chances of obtaining forgiveness are not very good, it will be necessary for them to get anything resembling inner peace.
Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire
- In Purple Days, Joffrey starts as the irredeemable idiot he was at the end of his canonical death... and then he dies, and dies, and keeps on dying. At first it's the kind of laughs everyone can get behind, considering his already extensive rapsheet, but very soon he begins cracking badly as every pillar of stability he's ever known breaks down and every attempt to fix his life turns everything into an even more horrible mess, and begins routinely finding new and horrible ways to kill himself. Break the Haughty is in full effect, grinding Prince Shithead down until he can only hobble to Winterfell's godswood and desperately pray for either salvation or an end. And then a chance comment by Ned Stark gives him the tiniest of lights...
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): San-2/Youngest Brother can be seen as this. He remains aligned with his two brother heads' evil deeds and exhibits no remorse over them, he isn't above cruelly teasing Monster X (although he individually never takes it half as far as his brothers would), and his affection for the Vivienne Graham half of Monster X is described as being more like that for a favorite toy than for a fellow living creature. That being said, he is literally San as the latter was before his Character Development that led to a Heel–Face Turn; and that includes San's Cry for the Devil backstory and eons of abuse by his brothers, San's genuine I Just Want to Be Loved, and the potential for a Heel-Face Turn if San-2 also became lastingly separated from Ghidorah and experienced the right moulding. And what's worse, because Vivienne already has the main San as her brother, San-2 can never experience the same emotional belonging he craves with her that the main San has. It becomes all the more tragic when San-2 pulls a Redemption Equals Death during the climax by helping the heroes kill Ghidorah.
- There's a mildly popular mythos that portrays Bradley Uppercrust III as one. In these fanworks the reason that Bradley is such a bad guy is because he had grown attached to his mother and then lost her and then had to live with his physically and emotionally abusive father until he left for college, apart from other issues. So he's given the family problems of both Max and PJ and has them taken up to eleven. Several people have mentioned that the mythos makes them like Bradley, despite the fact he's not portrayed as any nicer than in canon.
- Orion Black from The Black Sheep Dog Series is undeniably an arrogant, bigoted, and emotionally Abusive Parent who tries to coerce his firstborn into performing his duties as the heir to his family's estate—even resorting to blackmail to keep him in line. But he is not utterly unsympathetic, given how he does care (in his own way) about his wayward off-spring, and that his own father is an even worse Abusive Parent, which even Sirius acknowledges. Not to mention, Sirius himself is not an innocent victim of a Dysfunctional Family, as he often goes out of his way to insult and provoke his father, which hurts Orion far more than he lets on.
- Tristan Winter (a.k.a. Harry Potter) in the The Jaded Eyes Series becomes a genocidal monster worse than Voldemort but he has a sympathetic backstory and it's quite obvious what drove him to this.
- Owl's Hell That Ends Well: Stella still has an unpleasant, hot-tempered and bigoted personality, but a lot of it is a result of severe trauma from her abusive childhood where she was raped by her pedophile mother when she was 10, and believed that her only friend, also a victim of her mother's depravities, abandoned her to her horrific situation to save himself. She also lacks her canon counterpart's most malicious tendencies that were established in the second season of the show. She genuinely loves Octavia, and despite the show she made of hiding it around Hell's cutthroat other nobles, she was just as devastated as Stolas when Octavia disappeared and they couldn't find her. Her relationship with Loona, who Stolas ended up adopting as a pup years after Octavia disappeared, is complex: Stella was at first content to all but ignore Loona's presence, then she spent years going out of her way to make Loona miserable out of rage after she heard subjective proof that Stolas was unconsciously using the hellhound as a Replacement Goldfish for Octavia, then she formed more of a love-hate relationship with Loona after she began opening up to the hellhound about their commonalities; the latter in turn leads Stella to eventually become codependent on Loona's presence and unable to imagine going back to not having Loona in her life anymore.
- In Family Ties and related works England is this- obsessive and, in the past, highly controlling and self centered; however this is shown to be a direct result of his rather screwed childhood including witnessing the murder of his mother and being sexually abused by Rome.
- The doujinshi "From the New World with Love" has this spin on America. Starting out as normal and shocked by the loss of England or so he thinks, he decides "there is nothing left in Europe" for him, so after George Washington makes him promise to stay on his continent, he easily focuses on going westward. Then, inevitably, he reaches the Pacific and during World War One, he gets a letter from "Britannia", telling him there's no need to help out... which America interprets as a plea of help, understandably, given that it's written (or at least signed) in blood. Then he crosses the Atlantic... and things go downhill very quickly. So much, that by the time World War Two comes around, he's ready to let "Britannia"/England DIE, that is, if America gets the Hegemony from him. He takes the Hegemony all right... right from England's body. While saying that now that America took over England's duties as a superpower, England will have less work to do, and asks England to "come home". While he, or at least the monster inside his body, is tearing England apart, the real America seems to be in a dark limbo, desperately trying to call for England and find the way back. With much help from America, England wakes up from his coma in about the Eighties... but America is still Lonely at the Top and he knows that what happened to England, can/will happen to someone else in the future, because his body can't contain the monster forever.
- Karkat, Vriska, and Eridan in the AU Brainbent. Karkat is a self-loathing mass of emotional turmoil and anger management issues. Eridan can be kind of creepy, but he seems to be a terribly lonely person, and there's something kind of endearingly pathetic about how darn awful his amateur fiction is. Vriska is a histrionic troublemaker (the "spread rumors that can ruin lives" kind, not the endearing-prankster kind), but her past was genuinely awful, and she has a lot of emotional problems under her badass facade.
- Gamzee in Hivefled, especially the earlier chapters. He has an Ax-Crazy side he can barely control and does some pretty bad things to his friends (such as half-blinding Eridan), but he's also got a lot of issues and a truly terrible past that makes it hard to blame him for it a lot of the time. He is also at least trying to be better.
- Eridan in Moiraillegiance is Science, from Chapter 4 onward. Granted, he still falls back into Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist territory afterwards, but by the end of Chapter 10, even the author stops finding it funny.
- The Ultimate Evil:
- Shendu. Though he genuinely loves Valerie, his selfish and power-hungry nature prevents him from gaining her fully. He eventually reveals that his mother Tiamat birthed him and his siblings for Typhon in order to gain revenge against the humanity for the death of her first mate and Other Apsu. After the Demon Sorcerers wrought havoc on her behalf, she hid herself out of shame and cut off all communication with her children. When Tiamat starts awakening, Shendu sets out to find her, not for power for once, but to gain answers from the mother who abandoned him.
- Drago. He endured in his own time a tough life which included losing his mother Valerie at the age of ten and not meeting his father Shendu until he was seventeen years old. Nothing he ever did could please Shendu, and now he has mixed feelings about interacting with the mother who hasn't birthed him yet and is working with his enemies. His goal to take over the world with the power of his uncles and aunts' chis is his way to prove something.
- Hisao's friends saw him as this during his hospitalization in Weekend at Hisao's. They acknowledged that his life had changed for the worse and he was going through a difficult period, but they also saw him as hard to be around, which is why they stopped visiting after a few weeks. Thankfully, by the time he hears this, Hisao has gained perspective, as he did late in Shizune's route, and he renews ties with his friends.
- Finding out that Ragyou, in the Alternate Universe Fic Cellar Secrets was mentally ill casts a more sympathetic light on her actions but it doesn't excuse them.
- From Maim de Maim, Ryuko Kiryuuin, as Mommy never quite raised her properly. Sure, she is (or was) kind of an asshole and she's done some pretty messed up things, however, it is clear that she's very much loved and misses her mother and wishes she could have stopped her from going after the OLF, along with the fact that she really hit hard with life, especially the revelations that Satsuki, the one she's fought and tried to kill at least more than once, is her sister, among other things. Unsurprisingly, as we learn in Ch. 22, she's taken to Drowning Her Sorrows.
- Angel, from the AU Roleplayverse Otherborn, is a half-demon who physically, mentally, and emotionally abuses his charge, Namine, who he claims to be in love with. In fact, he's come close to pushing her over the Despair Event Horizon more than once. Things went downhill when he was revealed to have killed his best friend in a jealous rage over the girl they both liked. And then... well, then the author started writing oneshots and revealed that Angel was, actually, so completely broken by this event that he literally went crazy. Namine was the only person who could put him back together again, but the damage done to his psyche was so immense that his demonic instincts began to take over, turning him into the Jerkass he is today. To the point where when Namine's abusive parents kidnap her back to their mansion, Angel goes into a catatonic state where the only thing he is capable of forming into a coherent thought is that he wants to die. The poor guy just seriously needs a hug.
- The Vow:
- The canonical Lord Shen has both the "jerkass" and "woobie" aspect accentuated for the value of being the main character. On one hand, there was no bad blood between him and his parents before his warranted exile, but it's enough to convince him that they didn't love him, giving weight to the jerkass half. On the other hand, he does feel remorse when he realizes how uncalled for his treatment of his Love Interest Lady Lianne has been, prompting him to stop forcing her to marry him and release her.
- There's also Lord Chang, Lianne's father. He initially comes off as a pure jerkass for his superior attitude and being unable to show affection towards his only child and pressuring her to marry and give him a grandson as his heir. It's not until three decades of separation (in his deathbed no less) that he's able to make some peace with her and confess that he was just motivated by what he thought was best for the family legacy.
- Motoko in An Alternate Keitaro Urashima. She's a short-tempered, irresponsible, and violent misandrist who thinks that her skills with a sword allow her to attack anyone she doesn't like. When she goes too far, her life is ruined. She gets arrested, Naru hates her, her fangirls abandon her, and she gets kicked out of the kendo club. Then her sister visits to tell her she's no longer the heir and that she has to come home and attend a co-ed school.
- Anger Management (TLH): Lynn — sure, she wants to anger Lincoln and she does so by doing nasty things like make herself poop to clog the toilet. However, deep down she's afraid that she got beaten by her younger, less active brother, and she gets beaten up badly twice, the second time knocked out, with everyone else showing No Sympathy for that.
- Esau from Stray, who could be described as Adamska's Evil Counterpart. He's a Tyke-Bomb agent of the Patriots who initially comes across as a Smug Snake and does some rather cruel things in his efforts against the protagonists, but his back story is deeply unhappy. And in true Metal Gear villain fashion, his death scene is played for tragedy.
- Scarlet Lady makes Lila much more sympathetic. While she still lies about being besties with Paris' superheroine and tries to worm her way into Adrien's good graces, karma hits her hard and fast. Adrien isn't fooled by any of her efforts, confronting her about her claims... and then Scarlet Lady shows up and throws her into a fountain, humilating her in front of several of her classmates. Her subsequent discovery of just how much of a Nominal Heroine Scarlet is — and the cold she catches from being soaking wet in the middle of December — helps further cement her as easier to empathize with while retaining her usual qualities.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- Pretty much the entire cast of Eyes Without a Face. There are only a few characters who can be chalked up as pure Woobies, but the majority of them do things that make it REALLY hard to like them. Special mentions to Twilight Sparkle, Rose, Crest, and Baritone.
- Mare Do Well from the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Games We Play. Not only is she devious, selfish, and manipulative, but she delights in messing with Rainbow Dash's head as much as possible. She's also a desperately insecure Stepford Smiler with No Social Skills who just wants Rainbow Dash to like her.
- Another example from an MLP:FIM fanfic: Fluttercruel from the Pony POV Series. She is most certainly a Jerkass, but that's not entirely her fault as she was created by Discord and the only thing she came into existence knowing was how to be mean and cruel. Fluttershy manages to guide her from a complete Jerkass to a Jerk with a Heart of Gold (and in the Bad Future where this never happened, she apparently "grew up" into an outright monster). On top of that, due to how she came into being, she just sees herself as a "Fluttershy ripoff" and is physically incapable of having a life of her own, since, no matter what, she's just sharing Fluttershy's body and looks identical to her. She doesn't even consider herself alive. Yes, she's a jerk, but it's impossible not to feel sympathy for the poor girl.
- Sunset Shimmer in Long Road to Friendship. True to her characterization in Equestria Girls, she's still maintaining parts of her Alpha Bitch personality, and any and all attempts to get close to her are met with hostility and flat refusal. Yet, she's been placed under a magical curse that compels her to tell the truth at all times, even when lying would be more advantageous. Sunset also has to live in an abandoned, run-down hellhole of a factory because, as a citizen from a different world, she has no means of getting money and no support network. She gradually and slowly defrosts, but even then, she's The Friend Nobody Likes, and the rest of Canterlot High School doesn't know about her changing attitude. Finally, what little possessions Sunset has get ruined or destroyed, and she keeps struggling with her own feelings in private, knowing that she wants to have friends but can't admit it, and that she sees why the school hates her. It gets to the point where Sunset's feelings of self-doubt and self-hatred won't let her get a good night's sleep, often having a Catapult Nightmare multiple times a night.
- In the sequel, Spectacular Seven, Moondancer takes this role. She's a Spoiled Brat who believes herself to be the center of the universe, has a love for Twilight that becomes a horrible obsession, and she constantly belittles Sunset. Later in the story, she tries to kill Sunset and steal the souls of the other Humane Seven. However, her father neglected her, her mother's soul was stolen by a corrupt sorceress. That same sorceress has forced her to work for her in order to get her mother's soul back, and she does feel moments of guilt for lying and backstabbing her family members. Her battle with Sunset has left her with brutal scars on her face still burn her, she's been placed under house arrest, and she has become more alone than ever. She comes across more as someone who needs counseling.
- Connor, the protagonist of Equestria's First Human, is a borderline case. He is a lonely, self-pitying bullied teenager with only one friend. After a very nasty prank is pulled on him, he is transported to Equestria. Despite his initial friendliness with the Mane 6, his social situation deteriorates since Ponyville basically treat him like the plague, their indifference finally blowing up when he is beat up by a bunch of traitorous royal guards after saving Princess Celestia's life. The jerkass comes when he blows up at the only people who cared for him, even at Fluttershy, the one pony who didn't avoid him, and he was willing to let them die at the hands of terrorists, not to mention his revenge fantasies. Overcoming this attitude is what allows him to become the cool, friendly guy he wants to be.
- This is one of the more popular characterizations of Trixie in fan works, especially after Magic Duel revealed that her entire livelihood was destroyed after the events of Boast Busters.
- Summed up rather well inn The Unchosen One when Trixie tells Twilight a true story about herself at the latter's request. After telling Twilight the story of the first time she fell in love, Trixie apologizes for the ending.
Trixie: "Sorry if it's not a happy story. I don't really have any happy stories about me." - Summed up rather well inn The Unchosen One
- The Bride of Discord version of Discord. True, he's a selfish Jerkass who enjoys causing chaos at other ponies' expense for his own amusement, but he was also orphaned and left as the Last of His Kind at a young age, was ridiculed by ponies for his bizarre appearance and driven into becoming a recluse living out in a cave, where he spent the rest of his childhood and who knows how much of his adult life without social interaction, then Princess Celestia becomes the first pony to ever show him any kind of compassion and offers him a place in pony society in exchange for him using his incredible powers to help other, only to snap at him when his idea of "helping others" doesn't line up with her own. He did not take that well...
- Equestria: Civil War: Thunderbolt is a massive jerk who doesn't think anybody who pulls a Heel–Face Turn is being truthful, treats the Mane 6 like crap because he views their Turn the Other Cheek philisophy as foolishly naive, and he uses RARA to create a Witch Hunt against all former villains. However, it's hard to blame him for his staunch belief that all villains regardless of reformation need to pay for their crimes with The Reveal that his daughter was murdered in the Changeling Invasion during the season two finale.
My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!
- Through The Looking Glass: The Katarina Claes from the game Fortune Lover is unquestionably a bitch and a bully, but she is also a bitterly lonely girl whose parents are at odds with each other, whose fiance barely tolerates her and is increasingly blatantly flirting with another girl, whose brother is (she believes) a living reminder of her father's infidelity, and whose few "friends" care more for her status than for herself. Moreover, Alan points out that Game!Katarina is such a brat in part because neither her parents nor Geord nor anybody else ever called her out on her behavior or encouraged her to behave more decently.
- In the first chapter of Advice and Trust: Asuka explains Shinji that she is rude and overbearing because she lost her mother when she was a child, her father ditched her, and she grew up without friends or people she could trust.
- Evangelion 303: Asuka alternates between being annoying and being very, very pitiable. At the beginning of the history she is constantly boasting over her unparalleled skills and picking on her fellow pilots. And still during that time she is suffering because she feels that her world is falling apart. Then she and Shinji get together and she calms down, shows her softer, nicer side... and shortly after a mission fails, her best friend dies and she spends several months in coma. When she wakes up she behaves incredibly angry, spiteful and abusive with everyone, especially Shinji... and the whole time she blames herself for everything, hates herself and wants to die to find her friend again and stop to hurt people. Finally she runs away because she thinks that she is an useless, wrecked failure and everyone will be better off without her. Fortunately Shinji finds her.
- Once More With Feeling (Crazy-88): In chapter 16, Misato reminds herself that "it was all too easy to dismiss Asuka as a little more then a bitchy teenager with a chip on her shoulder the size of Mount Fuji", but she should know better. Asuka had been forced to be a child soldier after losing her mother and being ditched by her surviving father. Agreed, she was rude and obnoxious, but who could blame her?It was all too easy to dismiss Asuka as a little more then a bitchy teenager with a chip on her shoulder the size of Mount Fuji, but she should know better.
In fact she did know better.
After all, when Asuka had reached the age kids would be starting school, she had already been in full military training to defend the human species from total destruction. When their parents were spoiling most kids rotten, she had been learning how to rely on no-one but herself because she really had no-one else. And at the age children dreamed of being pop stars or princesses, Asuka had known for years that she had no say in her purpose in life... and what the stakes were if she failed. - Scar Tissue: Consider everything what happened in the series to Asuka since her mother's insanity and suicide to her Love Interest trying to kill her again. After Third Impact she is so miserable, frightened and miserable that she starts to torture Shinji physically and emotionally... and still she hates herself for it, feeling sickened with herself after every beating but being unable to stop. Finally she manages to snap out of that vicious cycle, but for then everyone but Shinji hate her. On top of that, her father declares that she is not his "trouble" anymore (for reasons completely unrelated to her personality, behaviour and actions), and she and Shinji are being targeted by hired assassins.
- The Second Try: Asuka was annoying and bratty but bad things happened to her (her mother going crazy and dying, her father abandoning her, NERV turning her into a tool, her parental figures neglecting her, her enemies beating her and mind-raping her...) and kept happening to her even after she matured (her daughter going missing).
- Dodger in Dodger And Company. Much like in the film, he is incredibly snarky and can be a bit arrogant, and frequently butts heads with the rest of the gang; however, his backstory is troubling; as a puppy, his mother, Annie, was forced to abandon him, which she did to protect him from her mate, Duke.
- Monkey D. Madelyn in Marie D. Suesse and the Mystery New Pirate Age! is a deconstruction of a self-insert Mary Sue. By all accounts, she has done some terrible things, such as causing her brother Luffy to get captured and executed by the Marines, resulting in the deaths of several of his crew in the rescue attempt, and the deaths of all the others before long. However, it's later revealed that she did not actually intend for things to go this far, as she only wished to delay Luffy and his crew so that Law, the one she loved, could reach Raftel first; she is consumed with guilt as a result and ends up transporting herself into the real world, marrying and having a child, hoping to leave the mistakes of her past behind. Mar initially despises Madelyn for everything she's done, but after reading her diary and discovering that she's her mother, wonders if there are good qualities to her. Word of God seems to confirm her sympathetic side, in response to a reviewer expressing sympathy for Madelyn.That is indeed one of the main themes of the story neatly summarised. I wanted this to be a more realistic and accurate reflection of what causes a Mary Sue instead of a usual bash-fic, and no, I don't believe that most of them are created to be deliberately malicious in nature. I honestly think most of them mean well but just really don't know any better. As another reader noted, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
- Princess shows Julien with a bit of this. He's still his usual ditzy egotistical self, but he's going through a lot. He's transgender, and nobody around him knows enough about the condition to think of it as a legitimate problem.
- Coeur Al'Aran:
- Arc Royale: The "Fate" iteration of Jaune in the multiversal conflict is bitter, cynical, snarky and abrasive to everyone around him, and he's outright abusive to the "main/default" Jaune; but it's because like in his home story, he's carrying a truly inhuman level of mental and emotional trauma from his "Groundhog Day" Loop, having tried and failed to save his teammates and Team RWBY from dying horribly in every loop over and over again for thousands of years, and he carries a ton of self-loathing which he projects onto his gathered alternate universe counterparts (with the main Jaune standing out because he's literally the same as Fate was before he started looping). Fate is ultimately revealed to be a Tragic Villain in the conflict: seeing the reality-changing wish that the Brother Gods have promised the last surviving Jaune as his only real chance to end his loop and finally save all his friends in his own universe, he's been sabotaging his allies orchestrating the deaths of other iterations in the game, and he's willing to (with great pain and hesitance on his end) cross the one line that he'd never cross in his own universe to ensure his victory: trying to kill his friends.
- Captain Dragon: Yang, recovering from the Fall of Beacon and the loss of her arm, spends the fic fighting a steep uphill battle to overcome her handicap and realize her dream. Much of her previous emotional support is gone as her original teammates go behind her back and hide things from her "for her own good"... but she isn't making things any easier for herself on that front as she constantly lashes out in fury.
- Knight of Salem: Leonardo Lionheart may be a coward and a mole for Salem's faction as per canon, but the fic makes it clear (in the most hilarious way possible) that because of his mole status, every waking hour of his existence is a living hell for him, as he's under constant stress and terror that his cover will be blown and the most powerful man on Remnant will come for him, or that the equally most powerful woman on Remnant will dispose of him without a second thought.
- Null: Blake. She's a huge moral hypocrite throughout the fic, and she's committed a cowardly, cruel and completely vile betrayal of Jaune's trust when she abandons him in Vale to be arrested, killed or recaptured by Chivalric Arms, making Jaune's subsequent fury and grudge against her completely justified. That being said, she's not portrayed as unsympathetic when karma does catch up to her — she's distraught when her past actions have gotten her Beacon teammates horribly maimed and almost gotten Ruby killed by a vengeful Jaune (which in turn leaves both Weiss and Yang justifiably angry at her), and she's quite upset and regretful to see that the hurting boy she remembers and who she betrayed has since turned into a ruthless killer partly because of her cowardice.
- Professor Arc: Jaune may be an elaborate liar and self-serving conman who's exploited a national tragedy to get his job, but his fear of his cover being blown, and his growing guilt for his deceit as he comes to consider the people around him friends, make him sympathetic.
- I Rewrote RWBY Volume 8: Hazel Rainart. As per canon up to the end of Volume 7, he's one of Salem's top enforcers who's been assisting her faction's campaign of terrorism against the kingdoms, just so he could avenge Ozpin's role in his sister's death by Salem's Grimm, but also because Salem promised him that she would resurrect his sister as reward for his services (unaware that Salem can't do that). However, once the Grimm siege of Atlas and Salem's full-scale assault on Mantle are truly underway, Hazel spends much of the rewrite in a state of perpetual horror at the genocide as he fully realizes just what it is that he's truly signed up for. Worse yet, the heroes reveal to Hazel that his sister Gretchen didn't really die on the training mission she disappeared on at all — instead, Salem captured her and forcibly turned her into the Hound without Hazel's knowledge.
- Inkopolis Chaos:
- Summer is pretty smug and arrogant, and was the one who threatened Natalie in the past, but dear god, to say her childhood was utter hell is sugarcoating it. She grew up with quite possibly the worst parents in Splatsville, who brutally beat her daily, even breaking teeth, making her cough up ink and knocking her out sometimes, it's clear her parents saw her as nothing more than a punching bag. She was also starved regularly, which caused her to be short due to malnutrition. She was also gaslighted into hating Octolings, until she realised that they were good. Hell, the reason she acts so smug and goes with the crowd is that she's just trying to fit in with everyone.
- It's not hard to feel bad for Cyalux. Sure, he was a delusional leader of a hate group, but the reason he's the way he is is thanks to his asshole brother, who gaslighted him intensely into thinking the way he did. When Ruby killed him, he snapped, feeling depressed and vengeful from his brothers death, wishing to avenge him, not realising how bad he really was. He ended up betraying his childhood friends, albeit he still didn't want to kill them, as shown by him desperately trying to get them to join him. He may have been a dangerous criminal, but he was simply the result of having a misguided home life and being manipulated as a child, which cost him everything. His friends, his morality, and even his own life. It's easy to see why the heroes pity him.
- In The Brother's Grimm, the Grumpy Passenger is far worse than he is in canon, being outright hostile towards Bernard and hitting both him and Emily with a cane. And yet, it's hard not to feel sorry for him when his assets are frozen and he's evicted from his own house, forced to sleep under a bridge and slowly starves.
- In The Not So Short Second Life of Bree Tanner and its companion piece Ashes through an Hourglass, the offered back story of the Volturi's evil twin enforcers, Alec and Jane, helps rationalize their monstrous personalities in ways that elicit understanding and pity from the readers without undermining their sinister deeds. This more applies to Alec, though, since he has been featured far more than Jane and has demonstrated occasionally redeeming qualities through an amoral lens.
- Luminosity:
- Allirea has a personality-based power that allows her to hide and a Stalker with a Crush who regularly kidnaps her. And, since powers are personality-based, that means that what Allirea probably wants the most is some time by herself. She is not exactly nice, and has few qualms about killing anyone, having subsisted on human blood for most of her life.
- Addy, who is amoral For Science! and a full vampire with the witch power to "borrow" other witches' powers; her main goal has always been to find and train witches, so that she can try their powers and utilize them to their fullest extent, and she sent the "five-year-old" main character to be tortured. (Said five-year-old was a half vampire, and so was essentially a sixteen-year-old... which is only slightly better.)
- Chelsea is a Mind Rapist, and screws up people's relationships regularly. She also has a desperate need to be loved, to the point that anyone she passes who doesn't love her disturbs her.
- Asriel/Flowey from Underfell is this before his Character Development. He's usually portrayed as a jerk and a bully who picks on Chara relentlessly. But the monsters' war was never his fault, yet he shares in the punishment of being trapped underground along with all the other children paying for the previous generation's mistakes. He's also a Lonely Rich Kid who had no friends before Chara thanks to his parents raising him to be just like them, with other monsters either disliking him, fearing him, or both. Then the same awful things happened to him as his canon self (watching a beloved sibling die, being murdered by a mob and losing his body, etc.) Then he's left alone in the Ruins as a flower which the other monsters see as easy EXP, including his own mother. Ouch. After he Takes A Level In Kindness and does his full Heel–Face Turn, he usually becomes just The Woobie.
- Dust in The Corner has Meiko. She's arranged for Miku to be gang-raped because Kaito has a crush on her. Later on, we get a chapter from her point of view. It's not pretty.
Others
- New Dawn: Shuuji Muzoku / Kazeshima. Emotionally reclusive, a bully early on, and does not really say much when him saying something might help. Anf he was abused to an utterly horrifying degree by his father, learned the sister he is trying to save might not even exist, goes temporarily crazy and utterly shuts down, only concentrating on whatever is the biggest threat this week.
- Queen Anathema herself. The Big Bad, yeah, but what she wants is to just make a Utopia, and she has forgotten the costs of this due to grief at her lover's passing, she had to kill her own best friend when he turned against her and tried to shoot her numerous times, calling her a wretched villain for what she did. All she wants is love. Not to mention she is being manipulated by nearly everyone around her, even her most loyal man has betrayed her in the backstory, leading to a violent persona taking over and trying to rule through fear.
- Shira. Raised as a girl to demean him by his psychotically misogynistic father, his mother was always out drinking and when she was home, she and his father always fought and ripped and tore at one another with their bare hands, leading to Shira getting a pretty nasty idea about what love really is. And when he came out as bisexual...it only got worse. Both his parents tried to drown him in a lake, while saying, "We love you too much to let you grow up a faggot." His discovery of his spell core in that very lake resulted in him accidentally killing both of them...and being psychotically devoted to killing, because otherwise he thinks they'd emerge from the lake as ghouls.
- Rai-Dei Kurai. Yeah, he is basically Slenderman or something, annihilating almost everyone who knows about him. This is because he was not always an abomination. He was once a man, but was badly distorted by Stagnant Mana he tried to use to defend his mother and little brother from a murderous mob during the medieval times, as they were thought to be witches. He was haunted by the voices of those who died in the ensuing chaos of his ascent to One-Winged Angel, and wants to believe all the evil in the world can be traced back to him. He believes that the entire world, so inundated with evil due to him, needs to be purged, and is so crazy its no wonder he and Katherine Daille got along so well. He actually started to revert to a normality, but when Katherine was abused more fiercely, he felt that he could not fail a loved one again...
- Princess Morebucks in Poor Princess is just as much of a bitch as she is in canon. The story also starts with her father disowning her because his new girlfriend wouldn't like a Spoiled Brat like her and he'd rather disown her than correct the problem. In her rage, Princess refuses the half a million dollars her father offered her (which he only did because he was legally required to) and suddenly finds herself broke, homeless, and with no real life skills to help her out.
