Tear Jerker / Battle Angel Alita

• Battle Angel Alita can be seen as a series of Tear Jerkers tied together by comedic scenes. Even so, a few stand out (Unmarked spoilers ahead):
  • One of the earliest, and arguably the harshest, was the death of Alita's first crush, Yugo. After a long struggle to save him from the consequences of all the crimes he committed in his desperation to get to Zalem, it all ends with the two of them standing on one of the cords leading up to the forbidden city in the clouds. Just when Alita finally manages to get over his obsession with Zalem and start considering a life with her, one of the security rings comes down and slices Yugo right in two. Ending both of their dreams in one swoop.
    • What makes it hurt more. Once the story actually shows Zalem, we realize just how utterly pointless Yugo's dream was. All his desperation to get out of the Scrapyard and into Utopia. But even if he somehow did make it, all he would have found was more of the same.
  • The fifth volume of the original manga, at the conclusion of Alita's battle against Berserker-fied Zapan. Before the fight, a mob gathers to coerce - then later beg when Alita proves beyond their capabilities - her to give up her life to Zapan, which will stop him from rampaging through the Scrapyard. Though she knows she has little chance, she goes anyway, engaging Zapan in a brutal slugfest that she barely stops from becoming a total one-sided loss by sacrificing bits of her body to escape each time she is pinned. It ends with Alita, torn almost to pieces, shakily crawling to a sprig of sweet pea - a sprig she planted with Koyomi at the beginning of the volume, and seemingly dying. It was shown not to be exactly the case in the next volume - though very close - but it did bring forth tears.
  • Hell, Zapan's backstory qualified as a Tear Jerker. He's a repentant Jerkass who had finally started to turn his life around and find happiness...and then unwillingly destroyed it in a fit of Unstoppable Rage.
  • Everything about Sara will make you weep. Which is remarkable since she only appears on a few pages. Accidentally killing a being of pure good was just too much for Zapan and proof he was not a sociopath after all.
  • Everything about Zapan's rage-fueled rampage through the Scrapyard is a massive kick in the heart for the audience. In a single instant, multiple named characters who have been there from the very start are unceremoniously killed, most of the few friends Alita has left beg her to sacrifice herself, and after using a gun to take Zapan down, Alita is then branded as a criminal for breaking Factory Law and branded a criminal, before being forcibly inducted into the TUNED project, and then it was all down-hill from there. In a short series of events, Zapan quite literally tore the status quo into pieces and sent Alita down on a further spiral into misery and pain, and nothing ever goes back to being normal.
  • When Alita after years of searching for Ido finally finds him... she learns he had willingly had his memory erased. He will never know who they were to each other, and how much she sacrificed to find him.
  • And the next day she runs into Zwei (AR-2), gets betrayed by Bigot and takes the beating of a lifetime. This completely breaks Alita's will and makes her accept her incoming defeat. Only Lou's sacrifice saves her.
  • We eventually learn what happened to Koyomi (the baby mascot of Kansas) after Zapan destroyed everything. Koyomi's adoptive father couldn't cope with everything and became a mean drunk, making her run away and become a lying, manipulative little con artist who is constantly getting stuck with the wrong crowds, and a little desperate for a family to call her own.
    • A little bit of Heartwarming. Koyomi's adoptive father catching her when Den drops her, crushing his legs from her weight in the process. All this despite having become a drunken mess, which was the reason she ran away from him in first place.
    • In chapter 124 Ido's patching Walsh after a semi-botched installation of prosthetic legs, as well as sobering him up, with his following, making up with Koyomi and his decision to restart Kansas anew is a major Heartwarming Moment.
  • In the ninth volume of the original series, Alita is trapped in Desty Nova's Ouroboros program. She is forced to have to kill Ido... or so she assumes. The first time she handles it somewhat stoically. The next time, not so much. Her breakdown is very heartbreaking.
    • Eventually, Alita is saved from the Ouroboros program. But not before the simulated years start to actually get to Nova and he starts to soften to her, and question his motives for the first time. It ends with him attempting to perform a Self Sacrifice to save her in the simulated world. Then, well, they wake up...

• Last Order makes sure to pick up the pain train where Battle Angel left off.
  • Alita finding out the fate of Lou in Last Order. Her brainchip was disassembled and her body thrown into a biological garbage compactor. This is followed up by a moment later in the series when she encounters her original brain based self in the simulated world the original brains live in.
  • Then, the ninth volume of the Last Order storyline has its finale, when Caerula almost breaks down upon seeing how ruthless and bitter Arthur Farrell became in the years since her near-death. Apart from trying to make him see reason, however, she also visited to give him a gift: half of his fiancee Haruka's flute, which had been broken when Caerula's lover, Victor Byron, bit and ultimately killed her. While only minutes earlier he appeared as entirely a remorseless tyrant, his face immediately softens as he gently reaches into his coat...and pulls out the other half of the flute, which he had kept immaculately preserved. As he presses the halves together, he holds the completed flute to his head and murmurs "My Haruka..." It was a terribly humanizing moment, full of bittersweet thoughts of what might have been. Cue the waterworks.
  • Haruka's death itself. It is of a cruelty that goes beyond anything humanly possible. Byron can rant all he wants about how badly humans treated him, but from here on out, he has proven himself to be far, FAR worse.
  • The AI Arthur reminding a broken Alita of all the people who she encountered as friends, enemies or just as normal people and how their lives are connected to hers. This is visualized by ghost versions of many important characters from the original and Last Order standing around her.

• And Mars Chronicle doesn't lift the pedal off the metal either.
  • Alita and Zazie had separated in Last Order as Fire-Forged Friends... But when Alita arrives on Mars is after someone impersonating her tried to kill Queen Limeira, leading to Zazie flat-out loathing her former friend.
  • Erika's childhood is nothing short of horrific. Her father was a deserter turned alcoholic grave robber, who sic'ed the family dog on her entirely for entertainment, and her mother was a psychotic prostitute, who once clawed her eye out with a fork, so to escape from her suffering she invented herself a perfect family based on a billboard ad visible from her room. As for her real family, she once lured a pair of bandits into her house. They then shot her father and gravely wounded her mother, whom Erika later doused with gasoline and burned to death. The scene where Finch finds her former home (and she remembers everything) is heartwhrenching.
  • Baron Muster maybe evil and turned many women into status for his own amusement and is trying to make Erika into a worse villain than he is, but seeing his origin story and knowing what he went through you can't help but to feel sorry for him.

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