Tear Jerker / Intrepid

• Sierra is killed as collateral damage to the gang war and, according to her brother, his parents weren't any help in helping him cope.
• Danny sold his house in order to pay for Taylor's stay in the hospital after the School and Government cut funding to her care, leaving him to stay in a small apartment.
• Neither Emma nor Madison say anything to each other the first time they meet out of costume, partly due to how Madison is unsure if Alan got them off because Emma asked and feeling betrayed when the truth is different. Considering how close they were, it hurts.
  • And we see a subtler example of how Sophia still considers Emma her friend by informing her that Madison's parents were taken, only for Emma to doubt her because of everything stemming from the Locker Incident. The fact that the three of them haven't been in communication at all means that none of them are aware of the changes they've undergone.
• Hearing how close Taylor and Emma used to be, and how it left Taylor with trust issues.
  There had been a time, as strange and wrong as it felt now, when I had eagerly accepted physical contact. I had liked to hug my best friend, and I even enjoyed roughhousing. We would attack each other on the floor of her living room and I would eventually find myself pinned underneath a half dozen pillows while Emma lay on top of them, calling for me to surrender. I had lain beneath the bedding, with her weight atop me, and I had not been afraid. There had been nothing to fear, because Emma was my best friend. I trusted her completely. I knew she'd never actually hurt me. We were linked and we were going to be friends forever, connected throughout our lives.

  Now it was gone. I felt as though I had no trust left to give. I had poured all of it into my bond with Emma, had put the whole of my faith in it. And that bond, that link of trust and belief, had been shattered. Not by an outsider, or by circumstance, but by conscious choice. The person I had chosen to believe in, the girl I had trusted with everything I was, had betrayed me. Emma had willingly and purposefully destroyed the trust that I put in her. She had taken all that I was, all I had been, and shattered it for the sake of a few laughs and a bit of popularity.

  Saying that I had trust issues would be an understatement. I didn't know how to fully trust someone.
• Seeing the brigade collapse in on itself after they think Madison and Crystal have been killed in Fleur's Interlude. One has to imagine if this is how things went for New Wave in canon after her death.
• Anne's Interlude ends with her being turned into a Gargoyle Case 53 and running away.
• Greed's Interlude is pure, distilled From Bad to Worse.
  • It starts off in 2009, where fourteen year old Lonely Rich Kid Elsa Levi is leaving Summer Camp, dejected and saddened that all her attempts to connect with her crush, Taylor Hebert, ended up making her look like an arrogant brat.
  • Her family's elderly driver (who the narration notes is her only real friend) tries to cheer her up but is prevented from doing so by accidentally driving off the road and getting impaled on a branch as the car flips over. Elsa then triggers with powers that help her escape an oncoming train.
  • Fast forward a year, and Elsa has become the hero Momentum, who operates in a small town to the south of Brockton Bay and has been doing pretty well... until the Seven Sins come to said town. In the ensuing fight, Momentum just barely manages to kill Greed... known in canon as The Butcher.
  • Another year later, and Elsa has been conscripted into the Seven Sins and driven to the brink of insanity by the previous Butchers/Greeds, who have all driven her to murder innocents and commit horrible crimes. Overwhelmed by guilt and self loathing, never being given a moment's peace, Elsa is just about to break permanently. Then she is given orders to head to Brockton Bay, and finds solace in the notion of seeing her first real crush living happily.
  She'd go to Brockton Bay with Six. They could look around, and while they were there, she could have a glance at her old crush. That was all she wanted, just to look up Taylor Hebert to see how she was doing. Just knowing that the girl she'd had such a crush on was okay might be enough to give Elsa the strength to fight back for a little bit longer, to resist the influence of the voices on more time.

  It would be nice to see Taylor again, to remember the time of her life before everything had gone so horribly wrong, when the so-called 'worst summer of her life' had just been about failing to connect with her summer camp crush.

  Surely nothing bad could come from that.
• Hax's Interlude shows just why Cherie and her brother became estranged, namely she abandoned him to get away from their father when he tried to retrieve her favorite watch. She wants to make up for it, but it's clear that the abuse he suffered at Heartbreaker's hands for it has left him not too open at the thought.
• In 9.04 Emma not only learns that her sister is now a monster cape, but that her father was responsible and her mother is missing.
• 9-08 has Newter, Spitfire, Fog, and Lightstar killed by the end of the battle.
  • The fallout has everyone grieving in their own way, from Faultline's group being depressed, to Night not knowing how to cope without her husband, and Mr. Dallon's clinical depression only getting worse.
• 9-09 shows just how isolated Sophia is from the other Wards and how Trigger-Happy they believe her to be. They see her emphasizing planning and apologizing as such a Out-of-Character Alert that they put her through Master/Stranger protocols. They work around her presence, leaving her out to training drills (though given her animosity with Grue, that's somewhat understandable).
• In Danny's Interlude, he sits in front of his wife's grave and continues Talking to the Dead about his fears and how he feels he hadn't pushed hard enough to help her, and now she's lost two friends, including the one who helped her get a grip on her powers.
  • Zoe Barnes has spent all her time since finding out what her husband did to their older daughter searching for a way to help Anne using old contacts from when she and Annette worked for Lustrum. She can't find anything.
  • Elsa finds out about what happened to Taylor and proceeds to start a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Mr. Gladly's death. His body was mutilated, with his eyes, ears, and mouth stitched shut while alive. Then he was opened up, his heart removed and his inner organs gone, with plastic-covered cards calling him "heartless" and "gutless". Then his body was dumped behind a fast-food restaurant and left in the garbage.
• Dragon, who is now no longer bound by Creative Sterility, managed to create a semi-daughter with Hero, who she is in a relationship with. Her daughter, Wyvern, was then taken by Coil and reprogrammed into serving him.
• In Laserdream's Interlude a cape masquerading as Shadow Stalker kills Armsmaster, taking away one of the most beloved figures in BB and framing Sophia for it.
  • And when her chapter comes around see that the Frameup is so thorough that the one responsible actually sent messages threatening to out the Wards, her own mother turned against her, and the only reason she escaped was because Vista took pity on her.
    • To make things worse, the chapter opens with her being confused how she feels while reflecting on how Armsmaster approved of Hinder... and then she discovers that he's dead by being accused of his murder.
• What happens to Julia. Elsa approached her in the mall pretending to be her friend, got food with her, than took her into the bathroom. She then punched Julia in the face and stomach so hard she vomited, forced her to apologize to Taylor, and then almost drowned her in the toilet. THEN Julia woke up in a container, with Elsa standing over her arguing with the voices in her head over how Julia should die (Elsa wants her to rot in the container, the butchers want her to die by torture) before being locked in the container and left to die.
  • When Taylor and the others save her, she begs them to take her with them rather than let the police take her because she's so scared Elsa will come back and try to kill her. Even though Taylor admits she still dislikes Julia the sheer horror of what she endured makes it impossible to hate her.
• All the deaths from the Endbringer battle.
• 12-06 reveals that Maidson's parents regressed mentally to children along with others due to the drugs the Merchants gave them, Chronicler's injuries can't be healed, and the effects are spreading to stop others from healing with powers as well, meaning that they won't lift the quarantine.
• In 12-07, Lisa is brought to tears when she sees her brother's alternate-self.
• In 13-02, despite Sophia saving her family from being abducted, her mother holds a shotgun to her head and then tells her to Get Out!. And when Sophia tries to state she didn't kill Armsmaster, her mother tells her she doesn't believe her.
• In 13-03 we get the full story behind the attack in the alley that led to Sophia and Emma meeting. Then we learned that her father and Winslow basically gave her a free pass because of it. And while all of this could be used as an excuse, it ultimately came down to Emma feeling the need to tear down Taylor to build herself back up. Taylor explicitly points out that while she feels sorry that all of that happened, it was her choice to not tell Taylor anything and to bully her to the extent that what happened could never make up for it. They would never be friends again.
  Taylor: "Good. I don't want you to die. Be careful, Emma. Maybe I can talk to you again sometime. But right now, I don't even want to look at you anymore. Maybe you had your reasons. But they were stupid. You hurt me to make yourself feel better. I was your friend, and you threw it away. Maybe you feel sorry now. But you should have felt sorry then. Before it was too late." Emma breaks down crying after Taylor leaves.
• In 14-01, the truth comes out about Elsa being the Butcher and Madison being one of Taylor's bullies. All at once, the budding relationship they had became strained.
  Elsa: "Why did it have to be you?"
  Madison: "I... made a mistake... I was wrong. I was an awful, evil person. I can't take it back. I can't fix it."
• In 14-03, we learn just what Jack Slash did to Riley and why she wants revenge.
  Riley:"Why? Because he killed my family. Because he destroyed my family. He killed my mommy, and my daddy, and my brother. Well...He didn't kill Drew. Not right away. When Mommy and Daddy were dying, I... I knew how to fix them. I tried to fix them. Jack... he wanted to see what else I could do."

  "So he took Drew and me to the forest. There was this hole in the ground with all these dead bodies. Human and animals too. I dunno what they were doing with it, but Jack hurt Drew really bad. He took Drew's arms off, and his legs. And he cut him open and took other things out. Then he threw us down there, in the pit. He told me to save Drew. So I... I started going through the bodies. I found bits and pieces that still worked, so I put them together. I put them together for a suit that Drew could wear, so he'd have arms and legs and everything. I fixed him."

  "Jack made me do it again. But he hurt Drew worse. It was harder. Then he did it again. He thought it was funny. He made me put new bodies together for Drew over and over."
• In 15-11, Sophia ends up losing an arm in the process of saving a baby.
• Madison sums up just how chaotic her career as a hero has been in 17-02 and it.. really paints a depressing picture.
  Not even two months into my career as a superhero, and where did I stand? My parents had the mentality of children, might never recover, and were being kept in a hospital shelter alongside the other patients like them. My brother was actually one of the bad guys, working for Coil of all people. Most of the capes in the city were being held prisoner by one of the most dangerous villains in the entire country, if not the entire world. The girl I had actually started to really like had turned out to be the (unwilling as she was) serial killer who was taking out everyone who had hurt the girl whose torment I had helped ringlead, and now she was back in the hands of that monster, probably already being turned into his obedient little weapon again, all because I had talked her into walking right into his hands. Oh, and that girl I had helped torment was one of the people that I had to work with if we were ever going to beat that son of a bitch and save everyone.

  And last but definitely not least, I had a psychotic monster living inside my head who wouldn't shut up.