Woobies are everywhere in the cast of Heretical Edge, and it is not hard to see why.
- The story behind Flick’s Missing Mom. County Sheriff Joselyn Chambers up and abandoned her family one day with some random guy she pulled over for speeding when her daughter was seven years old. Flick’s last memory of her mother is when she was hurriedly packing her bags and promising that she would be right back.
- Later chapters make it even worse when they reveal just how loving the Chambers family was. Flick’s dad Lincoln left behind his life in Los Angeles to move to Wyoming for his wife and still wears his wedding ring ten years after she left. Flick absolutely adored her mother as a child and basically changed her name from Felicity (the name Joselyn gave her) to Flick after Joselyn’s disappearance because she didn’t want any reminders of “the bitch who had made [her] father cry when he didn’t know [she] was watching.” She even developed a compulsive need to periodically check the driveway so she could see her father’s car to reassure herself that she still had a parent who loved her enough to stay.
- Flick later discovers that her mother was a Heretic, which raises enough questions about the disappearance to throw her feelings on the situation out of whack as she’s forced to acknowledge the very real possibility that Mommy Had A Good Reason For Abandoning Her. Or that Joselyn is evil and whatever happened will make Flick hate her even more. She hopes it's the former.
- As it turns out, Mommy Did Have A Good Reason For Abandoning Her. The guy who took her, Ammon's father? His intended target was actually Flick, but Joselyn convinced him to Take Her Instead. Which means that Flick has spent the last ten years hating her mother for saving her from a life of slavery. This is not lost on Flick when she learns the truth. Oh, and the deal Joselyn made has a loophole to abuse. Fossor can come for Flick when she turns eighteen. He fully intends to do just that.
- According to Word of God, Fossor has not only been clear to Joselyn about his intention to come back for Flick as soon as he can, but has also approached Flick often enough in the meantime to learn how much she hated Joselyn for leaving, and made no secret of that either.
- Hannah Owens’ Dark and Troubled Past deserves a mention. Her mother suffered Death by Childbirth, and her father became a violently abusive drunk as a result. He beat her with regularity until she was eleven years old, when a Stranger happened past them while running away from a Heretic and viciously attacked them both, leaving them with mortal wounds. It takes a turn for the better when the Heretic in question gets there in time to drive the Stranger off and gets help from an Eden’s Garden Heretic named Seller, who takes Hannah to his school and saves her life. Then it gets worse years later when Hannah is sexually assaulted by an Entitled Bastard who had been her friend in the past. She killed him in self-defense, and is forced to flee from the best home she ever had.
- Then, after being adopted by Gaia Sinclaire and renamed Avalon upon her request, she’s taken to Crossroads Academy, where she’s forced to deal with prejudice from people when they find out she was a student at Eden’s Garden. Up to and including being accused of murder by other students and even outright assassination attempts.
- And just as the cherry on top, her father, who the Heretics had left for dead, ended up being saved by a passing vampire that turned him into another vampire. He's now out to kill his daughter. She reciprocates.
- When Scout was a little girl, she survived a Stranger attack that claimed her mother’s life. It was traumatic enough that it rendered her almost mute, and she hasn’t been able to stand being called by her birth name, Sarah, ever since.
- That's not the entire story either. The attack happened when Mrs. Mason was introducing Scout to a Stranger friend of hers and explaining to her that Strangers are not all evil when a second, actually evil Stranger attacked. in the ensuing struggle, the friendly Alter allowed herself to be taken by the Nocen in order to save Scout. Scout's been hiding this for years because she's terrified of how her father and sister will react to it.
- The mental anguish experienced by Shiori Porter when she discovers that her biological mother is a vampire. The hard-line stance Crossroads Academy takes leads Shiori to aggressively Internally Categorize herself. She can't bring herself trust any of her classmates, teachers, or even her own adoptive brother Columbus with the information because she’s terrified that she’ll be killed if it gets out. And in many cases, she's probably right.
- This is made even worse by the knowledge that Shiori’s vampire mother Jiao and half-sister Asenath are not monsters, but decent people (who happen to be vampires). Shiori has no real reason to feel this way beyond what Crossroads propaganda tells her. The sheer stress over the situation pushes Shiori further and further to the edge, leaving her exhausted and on the verge of a total mental breakdown.
- Asenath the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire had to say goodbye to her father Tiras when she was eight years old. He promised that he would be back as soon as possible. In 1803. Needless to say, she hasn’t seen him since.
- The break up of Vanessa Moon's family when she was a child. Her father, mother, and twin brother were split up and separated across multiple worlds, and nobody believed Vanessa when she told them what happened until the Heretics came for her as a teenager.
- Later, we meet her twin brother, Tristan, who has Laser-Guided Amnesia and can't remember exactly what sent him away from earth, or even his sister's name. On top of that, he's trapped on that world. He's been sent home three times, and just appeared right back on the planet each time.
- A Heretic named Joselyn Atherby (Flick's mother), was forcibly separated from her baby twins and imprisoned by her enemies at Crossroads. She spent decades like that, denied the chance to know her children as they grew up without her before she was banished, forcing her to forget that they even existed along with all her memories of the supernatural. And it happened again when Fossor came to kidnap Flick, leading to everything at the top of the page. The poor woman just can't catch a break.
- And it's not just that she was seperated from the twins, it's how they were separated. Gabriel Ruthers had them snatched right out of their cribs to use them as leverage to stop Joselyn's revolution so Crossroads could go back to indiscriminately slaughtering Alters.
- The fate of the Meregan race, who were a thriving, advanced people until the Necromancer Fossor came to their world and started killing them in droves in order to use their nine foot tall corpses as weapons. By the time we first see their homeworld, they've been pushed to the brink of extinction.
- Later we find out that the only survivors avoided the slaughter because they were in space at the time, crewing a ship called Binsayeac, which means "Friend-Finder". It's entire purpose was to go out and find other races to establish peaceful contact with in the hopes of building an interstellar community. Now they're almost extinct.
- Interlude 8 - The Girl In The Arcade, features a Djinni who has finally escaped from slavery to a long line of cruel masters and built a peaceful life for herself, only to run into a Heretic. What follows is a desperate, terrifying chase as the Heretic pitilessly calls her a vile, disgusting beast while it's made very clear that she is in fact a total innocent who is so unused to violence that she doesn't even know how to hurt people. At one point she even avoids running into a crowd of people because she's concerned for their safety and doesn't want to take the chance that the Heretic might consider them acceptable losses in order to kill her.
- In arc 13, Koren Fellows has what can only be described as the worst Thanksgiving ever when she is attacked at home by a Stranger who inserts her arms into her mother's chest cavity and somehow turns off the woman's heart, forcing Koren to manually pump her own mother's heart to keep her alive. The poor girl is in the process of breaking down when help arrives. And then things get worse when the Fomorian, the Hiding Man who terrorized Koren as a child and has been stalking her for seven years, casually reveals that he murdered her father days ago, speaking of Kenneth Fellows as if he were no more important than a bag of trash. All Koren can do by the time she and her mother are separated from the Stranger is tearfully beg Flick to do something, anything to save her mother.
- Pace's real backstory. The psychotic Heretic Werewolf that Flick's been fighting? That's NOT Pace. That's a 'defective' Seosten possessing her. Pace was a perfectly nice girl who figured out that the anti-Stranger propaganda was bullshit ... and then had the world's worst luck when she stopped a couple of Heretics from torturing a Werewolf and it turned out to be possessed by said defective Seosten. A girl who was basically Jocelyn 2.0 has spent a year trapped in her own body while it runs around doing all the terrible things we see.
- In 26-05, most of Flick and company break down when they realize their friend (and, in Shiori's case, brother) is possessed by a Seosten.
- Flick near the end of chapter 27-03. After stoically enduring Charmeine's Evil Gloating about all the horrible things that are planned for her and her friends while she's trapped and helpless to do anything about it, she just starts breaking down in terror when she's left alone. Fortunately, she's not as alone as she thinks...
- We finally find out why Lies is so crazy in Interlude 31-A. It's because her mother, Kushiel, experimented on / tortured her constantly growing up. Among other things she'd let Lies befriend someone, then force her to possess them and kill them if Lies couldn't end the possession, which is impossible for her. At the end of one of these sessions Lies simply broke.
- It gets worse in Interlude 32-B. Apparently Kushiel thought that if Lies wasn't screaming, she wasn't doing enough to try and force her daughter out of a body. Lies ended up torturing herself with various instruments at night to get used to the pain so she wouldn't scream and bother her mother during the experiments, but that just made things worse for her. In the end she taught herself to act like she was in agony because she thinks that if people don't see her in pain, they'll think something isn't working.
- As adorable as Tabbris is, her general situation and most interactions with her are tinged with this. She's spent her entire life hiding in Flick, to the point that moving in her own body is disorienting to her. For her whole life she's had no one to talk to or comfort her, spending all her time observing Flick's life without being to act on her own. The most she's ever done was sneak out at night and climb into Flick's dad's bed so he'd cuddle her in his sleep, all because she was just desperate for some kind of affection. Even after she revealed herself to Flick and Flick made it clear she accepts Tabbris, she's constantly apologizing for just about everything because she's afraid Flick will hate her. On top of all of that, her mother is trapped in a breeding camp and she doesn't consider herself to have a father, leaving her parentless. Flick's doing her best to show the kid affection and help her resolve some of her more deep-seated issues, but it's surprising she's not even more messed up than she is.
- Avalon falls apart at the end of Interlude 33B after finding out that Flick is possessed. Watching her worry herself to pieces is heartbreaking, especially knowing that her fears are ultimately unwarranted.
- Mini-Interlude 68: Olympian Origins. Not for the scene itself - but because we already that this ends in tears, blood and civil war. Watching Manakel alone welcome Sariel and Apollo to the crew of the Olympus, knowing they'll be bitter enemies and that she'll possession kill him is just heartbreaking.
