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Despair Event Horizon
(aka: Emotional Nadir)

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Despair Event Horizon (trope)

"It wasn't just the baby that died that day; something inside Sick Boy was lost and never returned."
Renton, Trainspotting

The line that, once crossed, destroys any last remaining sense of hope. It could be for a cause, a person, a situation, or simple survival. A character has given up on it, and there is no going back. It can lead soldiers to despair — or even suicide, if they don't simply lose the will to live. It can turn an Ideal Hero into an Anti-Hero or an outright villain, or even, in some cases, vice versa. It is a vital element of Tragedy.

Coming near this line is quite common in fiction; frequently, at the end of the second act or the 45 minute mark of a drama or the first hour of a film, the protagonist comes dangerously close to the edge before a Rousing Speech or Deus ex Machina or the like comes along. It makes for a Downer Ending if the protagonist does fall over the edge. Frequently, this is when the What You Are in the Dark test hits him. Alternatively, many stories have a hero "Fighting the Good Fight" and meeting someone who'd been at it longer and lost all hope.

This is often a goal of some wars. Break the enemy's morale, and you can achieve victory even without military success. Also, one of the worst outcomes of an Identity Breakdown is a character reaching this as their despair in not knowing who or what they are (or the despair in knowing exactly what they are) pushes them to the edge.

Related to Heroic BSoD and Heroic Safe Mode, except the hero usually comes back from those. A Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds is often a character who crossed this line long ago (and subsequently crossed the Moral Event Horizon or began Jumping Off the Slippery Slope). It can result in the character entering an Angst Coma, being Dumb Struck or suffering Death by Despair. Often a result of We Used to Be Friends or some variants of Personal Horror. This is often the final stage of the Break the Cutie process. In a video game, often happens during a Bleak Level, and it may be relevant if the game has a Morale Mechanic.

May be preceded with a Hope Spot, just to really twist the knife. And a Downer Ending might follow in really dark stories. May be precipitated by a reference to Thirty Pieces of Silver. Someone may attempt to counter with a "Not Your Fault" Reassurance.

Often a factor in Pater Familicide. May be feigned by critics engaged in a Critic Breakdown. Frequent encounters of Bad Guys Have Better Budgets may inspire such reactions.

May be caused or prevented by an Amusing Third-Party Interjection.

Compare Safety in Indifference, Hope Is Scary (the reason it can be so hard to get back over the horizon), Hope Crusher (someone who enjoys seeing characters give up their will to fight, or even worse, pushes them over the horizon personally), and Died in Ignorance which can initiate this for living characters.

Contrast Heroic Spirit. See also Proof of Commitment.

IMPORTANT: This is about a character permanently losing all hope, not merely getting depressed, upset, or bored.


Example subpages:

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Comic Strips 

    Podcasts 
  • The Adventure Zone: Balance: After regaining the memories of his deceased twin sister, Taako is absolutely crushed. He points the Umbrastaff at Lucretia, and starts counting backwards from ten. After Merle and Lucretia managed to talk him down, he walks off.
    Taako: (quietly) Y'know, honestly... do whatever you want. I don't care anymore.
    [...]
    Magnus: Taako, listen. I know this is tough, but... you found her. Maybe not how you expected to, but when you weren't looking, you found her! That's the connection, that's how strong your connection is to Lup. She's still helping you, you're still working together! And she wouldn't want you to give up.
    Taako: (flatly) I appreciate what you're trying to do. And I'm on board for whatever the plan is. But understand this: I have nothing, and I don't give a shit. The world is ending, and I. Don't. Care.
  • Played for Laughs in the RiffTrax of Twilight. Two girls are having a discussion in the high school's cafeteria, when one mentions, "We're talking Olympic sized." Mike Nelson is right on top of it, chiming in, "High school girls discussing wang sizes. We have officially hit rock bottom, gentlemen."
    • And in the 'Trax for The Star Wars Holiday Special, while watching Harvey Korman debase himself in a miserably unfunny sketch, Mike sighs and says, "Well, Nietzsche was right; dead as a doornail."

    Professional Wrestling 

    Religion and Mythology 
  • In Christianity, Despair is one of the original Seven Deadly Sins, being later replaced by the sin of Sloth. In Eastern Orthodox denominations, it is counted as the 8th Deadly Sin, but it is still present in Roman Catholic theology and others, simply considered to fall under the category of Sloth (or simply as a lesser sin). Despair is defined as the loss of faith or hope (ie. in goodness, in God etc.), and thus is more about giving into nihilism or cynicism (esp. as an excuse to stop being good or to ignore evil) rather than simply feeling sad or depressed about anything in particular; it is counted as Sloth because it is considered to be the sin of "giving up", and its corresponding virtue is (respectively) Hope or Diligence.

    Roleplay 
  • In Realms of Hyrule, this was crossed by almost everyone in Hyrule when Kakariko was revived and Prince Regent Logain was killed trying to defend it.
  • Happens a lot in Survival of the Fittest, more often than not later in the game, but given the premise, is it really that surprising?
    • For example, Jacob Charles quickly shoots into this zone after his girlfriend is killed right in front of him, leading to him attempting suicide. Read it here.

    Theater 
  • From Der Glockner Von Notre Dame, the German Darker and Edgier Musical Adaption of Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo shuts down and cuts ties with all of his perceived hopes of the world and the rest of humanity after being tricked by Frollo into revealing the location of the court of Miracles, which lead to the capture of his only true friend, Esmeralda, and Phoebus, a man he has come to admire, in the song Made of Stone.
    Quasimodo: "And now I'm on my own
    Never Again to Wonder what's out there
    Let it remain unknown
    And my one human eye
    Will evermore be dry
    Until the day I die
    As if I
    Were made of Stone"
    • In the American production as well, as Esmeralda awaits her excecution in a small prison cell. After being hunted, captured, manhandled, nearly raped, and sentenced to death by burning, she breaks down completely in "Someday-" Phoebus sings an entire verse by himself because she's crying, curled into a ball on the ground.
    • And again when Esmeralda dies. Phoebus tries to lift her into his arms, but can't, and breaks down sobbing into her stomach.
      • This however leads to a sweet moment, as Quasimodo realizes that life must go on and places a comforting hand on Phoebus' shoulder, and lifts Esmeralda for him, therefore, while not negating their despair, but allowing them to work through it, and accept one another's friendship.
  • While it isn't strictly called for in the libretto of Pagliacci, it is a generally accepted tradition for Canio to collapse into tears at the end of Vesti la giubba. The song is about him trying to convince himself to go on with a show where he plays a cuckold immediately after finding out he actually is a cuckold, and as it goes on, it becomes clear he just can't do it.
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: When Sweeney realizes he accidentally slit the throat of his wife, who he thought was dead, he's so despondent that he loses the will to live. Some productions even play this up by having him bare his throat so Toby can slit it.

    Web Animation 
  • In The Amazing Digital Circus, the humans can "abstract", which results in them irreversibly turning into a massive feral and vicious roaring black blob of limbs and eyes if they hit such a breaking point. Kaufmo's insane ramblings scrawled on the walls of his room, Zooble equating abstraction to suicide, and Jax's rather vicious rant about what people are like before they abstract all imply it takes a considerable amount of turmoil before they finally snap and change for good.
  • Dreamscape: Dylan crosses it when Keela supposedly betrays him in the Unworld in the flashback in "Tale of the Unworld".
    • He also crosses it in the flashback in "Over and Under" when he finds out about the Overlord of Evil's relation to Ethan and Curien, but his friends pull him out of it.
  • Murder Drones: During her fight with V, J, slightly explaining her reasons for knowingly working with the Absolute Solver after everything it did to them, Tessa and the Earth, bitterly tells V with a regretful expression that it tricked her just as it previously tricked V; following up by angrily yelling at V that they have no chance of escaping the Solver's grip on them even in death.
  • RWBY: Volume 9 deals with Ruby's poor coping mechanisms with the failures brought about by past volumes while traveling through the Ever After. Things reach their nadir when Team RWBY find Jaune and his sorrow at losing a group of creatures he tried to protect, leading to Ruby snapping at them for ignoring her pain and focusing on everyone else. When Jaune snaps at Ruby, she tearfully runs off and into the unwitting arms of Neo, who physically and mentally drives Ruby over the horizon and leading her to drink a special tea seeped with the leaves of the Great Tree to "ascend". In turn, when Ruby is gone, Neo crosses it as she ultimately realized that she had no other purpose beyond "kill Ruby". This allows the Curious Cat to possess Neo after revealing that he had manipulated Ruby into crossing this.
  • In Sodor, Ben hits this when he realises that Bill is to be scrapped due to lack of funds.

    Webcomics 
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl, Lucy when she thought Mike died and shortly after, when she finally confessed her love for him and he rejected her. The first one came with Dissonant Laughter. Chapter 63 is getting sadder and Lucy looks about at the horizon here. She was okay, then Mike ignored her existence. Now...
  • Trudy crosses this in General Protection Fault after seeing Nick, (whom she had loved) propose to Ki, which Ki accepts. She had been starting to regret her actions, but this pushes her even further, and she attempts suicide in the next arc in which she appears.
  • In Goblin Hollow, this is what happens to Penny's best friend, who sadly, is swallowed by the Horizon.
  • Very nearly everyone with a speaking part in Gone with the Blastwave, though it doesn't manifest in quite the usual way. Rather than some grand gesture like falling into an Angst Coma or being Driven to Suicidenote , they've all just become desensitized to the constant bloodshed and are operating on some sort of Heroic Safe Mode.
  • Homestuck:
    • Eridan crosses both this and the Moral Event Horizon in the same scene. He gives up any hope of beating Jack and defects to his side, killing off his unrequited love interest AND his species' only hope for revival in the process. This makes his Sgrub title, Prince of Hope, rather prophetic- it was later explained that "Prince" roughly translates to "Destroyer."
    • Later, Roxy crosses it too after a disastrous turn of events leaves nearly all of her friends dead and Rose, the alternate version of her mother who she had barely met, died in her arms. She later confesses to John that she thinks it would be better if they gave up so that they could be with their friends in the afterlife.
  • In Keychain of Creation, an Exalted webcomic, this is canonically how Abyssal Exalted get created, as shown in Renegade Deathknight Secret's backstory flashback. Her entire village is killed by a demonic plague, she's deathly ill, and just as she's given up all hope of living, the Neverborn show up and offers her Exaltation in exchange for servitude.
  • Kill Six Billion Demons:
  • In No Rest for the Wicked, Claire's Dark and Troubled Past has brought her to the state that she does not even care that the villagers, looking for The Scapegoat, will Burn the Witch! because they think she killed her children.
  • The Order of the Stick has Vaarsuvius crossing the line after realizing the true extent of their earlier Moral Event Horizon.
  • The whole point of Servant Chaos's actions in Sailor Moon Cosmos Arc was to force Usagi to this point to get her willing to merge with Chaos. Having her daughter and husband brainwashed, forced to fight them, accidentally killing the Asteroid Senshi, realizing that everlasting peace is impossible and learning that this is all her fault for unconsciously wishing Chibiusa never woke as a senshi did the trick, eventually getting her to perform a Suicide by Cop.
  • Anna Enfield's from Sire lead a fairly troubled life which took a sharp turn when the sister that she shared a body with used it to murder their beloved uncle. Having seen herself kill someone she loved and knowing that her Hyde half could not do that unless she desired it, Anna turns a knife on herself and tries to commit suicide.
  • Skin Horse: Tip hits this in the aftermath of the "Sure as Your Born" storyline: Normally a metrosexual Wholesome Crossdresser Lovable Sex Maniac, he literally traded his entire wardrobe for the ultimate male power suit, in order to speak in favor of a nonhuman rights bill (without his crossdressing becoming the focus). Not only does the bill fail to pass, but in the immediate aftermath the entire world seemed to come down with some sort of Weirdness Censornote . Which made for a doubly Senseless Sacrifice, causing Tip to spend the next couple of chapters wearing a Beard of Sorrow, a dirty t-shirt and boxers (having given his other clothes away). An attempt at Playing Cyrano for Sweetheart only ending up making things worse. (That and the giant lobster attack)
  • In Snarlbear Flint passes one near the end after losing his hometown, corrupting Daisy, and then losing Daisy's support as well, in the end being left with only money. as a result, he turns into a dragon
  • In Stand Still, Stay Silent the Battle of Kastrup was this for the Danish army. About ten years before the start of the story, they tried to retake part of the Forbidden Zone that used to be mainland Denmark only to have the entire force wiped out in a single night by one of the many threats roaming in the area. After this, they don't even send scouts there anymore.
  • Trapped: Chae-ah hits hers when her ex-boyfriend comes back into the picture and resumes stalking her, to the point she has a breakdown in the rain and makes a deal with Yunsu to get rid of him.
  • True Believers has Spider-Man lose his wife, his home, and his job at the Daily Bugle all in the first 11 pages. As a result, he asks Dr. Octopus to kill him. Unfortunately for him, Death Is Cheap in the Marvel Universe, so not even murder can end his suffering.
  • In "unOrdinary". John Doe teeters on the edge of this off and on throughout the course of the webcomic, but crosses the DEH for good when he discovers his father has been killed by the authorities and his mother has been a lab rat of the state for over ten years. In recent episodes, he has shown even less care than usual as to what happens to him as a result.
  • In Weak Hero, an escalating series of traumas causes Gerard to hit this in his backstory. An agency targets his band for a scam, causing Hyeonjin to quit. Gerard begs him to return, enamored as he is with Hyeonjin's music, only for Hyeonjin to reveal that he never liked the band or the music that Gerard cared for so much. Meanwhile, a bully at school gets so obsessed with Gerard that he beats Gerard's friend into a pulp and then sets their practice room on fire. Gerard leaps in to save Hyeonjin's music, only to get caught in an explosion that hospitalises and scars him. It's because of all of this that he completely loses the will to play the music that he once loved. Fortunately, a year later, he becomes a True Companion to Ben's gang and rediscovers his love of song.
  • What, Were You Raised By Wolves?: The wild girl eventually loses all hope of ever being able to fit in with other humans, after being fired from her third job as a mail carrier for assaulting a woman's abusive husband.
  • Catt, one of the three protagonists of Wonderlab, ends up crossing this twice throughout the entire series.
    • In their backstory, when they catch a senior Agent they greatly admired beating another Agent out of insanity, they proceed to send up coming to the conclusion abandon their human side for the sake of survival in the facility (but not before attempting, and failing, to commit suicide via drowning themself in the water produced by the Bottle of Tears).
    • The second time was in Episode 48, after coming across the mummified corpse of their branch's Manager, who had taken their own life since their holographic assistant, Manual, was unable to reciprocate the Manager's love because of its nature as a machine. This leads Catt to believe that the human heart can't be strengthened or discarded, and that the heart was always doomed to wither. They proceed to undergo a Distortion shortly afterward.

    Websites 

    Web Videos 
  • The Angry Video Game Nerd crosses it after playing Desert Bus, and realizing that other people are playing it (and that someone even made an Atari 2600 version of it). He concludes that all the work he's done to warn people about shitty games has fallen on deaf ears, and that it's all been a huge waste of time, so he decides to retire. He soon changes his mind after playing a Simon's Quest romhack that did its best to fix all of the problems he had with the original, showing that at least someone out there is listening to him.
  • Atop the Fourth Wall's Jaeris crosses it when he discovers that You Can't Go Home Again. What followed was him Drowning His Sorrows for months on end.
    • This was also parodied when 90s Kid saw a scene of Superboy Prime killing a pregnant Lana Lane in an alternate universe. That scene was so un-radical to him, that he didn't think he could ever be hardcore again after seeing something like that. Fortunately it just takes a comic by Rob Liefeld to get his spirits back up.
  • Oancitizen of Brows Held High is driven to this in his Ken Park review. Genocide ensues.
  • In Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Dr. Horrible crosses the Despair Event Horizon after his death ray backfires in Captain Hammer's hands and the shrapnel kills Penny.
  • Escape the Night: Matt accidentally kills Sierra during an exorcism, later realising he had to choose between himself and Sierra, but he didn’t read the instructions and ended up killing Sierra without knowing it. Come next episode, he’s a complete wreck who believes that everything they do is useless and they’re all going to die anyways.
  • The GameSpot video review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is all about reviewer Alex Navarro being broken by an even more broken game (while not saying a word, no less!).
  • In the Mandela Catalogue, this is exploited by the alternates. After their victims cross it, they usually commit suicide, which allows them to take over their bodies.
  • Mahu: In "Second Chance" humanity itself goes through this as it tries to come up with a way to stop or at least survive the meteorite which will surely end all life upon Earth. Only the portal in Istanbul gives them any hopes of survival.
  • As the end of pokecapn's legendary Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) Let's Play approaches, the players themselves slowly slip towards and eventually cross the Despair Event Horizon; this is signified by Kung-Fu Jesus chanting song lyrics in monotone.
    "Because it's Thriller. Thriller night. And no one's gonna save you from..."
  • Yahtzee was on the receiving end of this trope during his Spec Ops: The Line review. Unlike most of his foul mouthed, harsh and fast paced reviews, this one was restrained and it gave off the feeling that the game broke him.
    Yahtzee: *weary sigh* Remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of gaming growing up as our childish fantasies are torn from us, and we are forced to confront consequences in an unfair, uncaring and unavoidable world of hatred, misery, and death. *Farting noises.*

    Other 
  • The Doomer meme centers around someone who, after constant exposure to hardship, personal or otherwise, plunges into a deep depression, giving up on a world they feel there is no hope for, and isolating themselves from society.

Alternative Title(s): Morale Event Horizon, Emotional Nadir, Lose Your Will To Live

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Mawata's Heart

After bottling up her feelings of grief and loneliness for years, Mawata has a tearful breakdown in front of her family.

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