It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but the life of a bug is not easy...
Moment Subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.
- In Snakemouth Den, when the Spider attacks Vi & Kabbu, the former abandons the latter, and he's left to fight the Spider all by himself. He can't, and the Spider wraps him up in webbing, and he says his last words... Fortunately, Vi comes back."Everyone...I failed. I really was just a rookie in the end..."
- Think one of the members of Team Snakemouth would have a Tragic Backstory or is a straight-up Woobie? How about all 3 of them?
- Vi's relationship with Jaune, and by extension, the Bee Kingdom, is extremely strained. She was bullied and harassed by the other bees for wanting to be an explorer rather than wanting to work in the honey factory. The worst of it came from her older sister, Jaune, who openly mocked and insulted her for this, thinking that she had no chance of doing anything meaningful. Queen Bianca only noticed something was wrong when Vi ran away, and felt extremely guilty for letting it happen.
- Kabbu traveled with 2 other partners to get to Bugaria: His master and his best friend Bit... but only he survived the adventure. His friends were both killed by the Beast in the Wild Swamplands, and he felt that he didn't deserve to live and be an explorer because of his failure to save them.
- Leif... Oh boy, where to even start? Leif died years before the events of the game, and his body and memories were inherited by a Cordyceps Fungus, making him a Parasite Zombie. Not only this, but his partners abandoned him, and he left a family behind that wouldn't live to see him again. When he meets his descendants, he's haunted by the fact that one of them is a dead-ringer for his late wife and can't bring himself to face them until he learns the truth about his past.
- In Queen Elizant's war room, Leif discovers that an old friend of his is still alive, only for it to turn out that her mind's slipping due to her old age and she doesn't remember him at all. It's a small detail, but it really adds to Leif's tragedy as a Fish out of Temporal Water.
- Queen Elizant II is frequently compared unfavorably to her mother, Elizant I. Although she puts on a stern and commanding appearance, in reality she is worried that she cannot live up to her mother's legacy, as she was a Universally Beloved Leader.
- When the Wasp King invades twice, both times she's barely able to fight him off because of his Fire magic, and on the second time, is forced to give up the Ancient Artifacts that will lead to the Everlasting Sapling. She almost gives up her position as queen because of this.
- It's not just the heroes who had it rough, the Wasp King's backstory is an incredibly sad one too. As a baby, his parents abandoned him in the hellish Dead Lands before he even spoke his first word, meaning that he had to spend his childhood desperately fighting for his life against the horrific Dead Landers. Somehow he survived and when he made it to the Wasp Kingdom, for one reason or another nobody liked him and he spent his time as a garbage collecting loner before abandoning the kingdom altogether. Nobody missed him. It doesn't come close to justifying the atrocities he committed in pursuit of the Everlasting Sapling, but there's still something profoundly sad about the way his obsession with having some form of control or power in his life utterly warped him into such a horrific monster.
- Word of God adds a sad new angle to the death of his parents. They didn't abandon him because of malice or apathy, but because it was the only way they could possibly protect him from the Dead Landers. They loved their son, which adds another tragic angle to the Wasp King: he did have people who cared about him, and one can't help but wonder if he would have gone down the path he did if they survived, or if he at least knew of their sacrifice.