Trauma Conga Lines seen in Fan Works.
Crossovers
- Ace Combat: The Equestrian War has Firefly, who had a pretty rough childhood, to say the least.
- Ben 10: Unlimited: Ben had a pretty bad one before he ended up in the DCAU. First, a smear campaign led by a journalist who hated Ben turned him into one of the most hated people on the planet (despite him still working to protect it). Then, Vilgax killed his entire family, his best friend, and his girlfriend. Ben was so distressed by what happened that he was attempting suicide when Professor Paradox saved him by creating a portal and sending Ben to the DCAU... during the Thanagarian invasion. Luckily, there he meets the captured Justice League. Once he helps them thwart the invasion, they become a surrogate family for him, and help him to grieve and recover from his ordeal. He seems to be doing well... until he's exposed to Black Mercy and is forced to watch the people he loves most die... again.
- The Bridge: Sci-Twi grows through even more torment than in canon. She is manipulated by the Windigos into being their minion and horribly violates Sonata by stealing her gem. This results in her being chased by the Dark Hunters, and badly beaten by Aria, who goes so far as to break her arms and ribs and choke her out in retaliation. She ends up giving into hate, and is transformed into a more horrific version of Midnight Sparkle. Then after being blasted with the Elements of Harmony, Aria knocks her out cold with several punches to the face. Finally, Wallflower is manipulated by Zephyrus into erasing her memories, allowing the Windigo to possess her when she's just learned, thanks to the Elements, that Zephyrus is a monster who she shouldn't have trusted. The end result is a quivering, crying, and utterly broken girl utterly ashamed for having allowed herself to be misled.
- Children of Time has Sherlock Holmes and Beth Lestrade.
- Holmes is first possessed by a sentient sun, a vicious Break the Cutie experience, and he develops towards Result E. Eventually, he "loses" his best friend to marriage once again, having already been forced to observe from the past Watson falling in love and being unable to do anything about it. Major rift occurs between the two. Holmes finds himself unable to solve a case that has to be solved, and is subsequently kidnapped by none other than his Back from the Dead Arch-Enemy, Professor Moriarty. Moriarty offers Holmes a Sadistic Choice: surrender his soul to him or watch Watson be broken piece by piece. Holmes quickly descends into Result B and has become very thoroughly The Sociopath by the time Beth attempts to rescue him. Moriarty decides to break the apathetic detective until he does have a heart again, and then break that heart into tiny little bits. His most effective weapon is Holmes's apathy to Beth's murder as he tortures him. This does lead to a Heel Realization and Result A for Holmes, as well as a Bittersweet Ending.
- As for Beth...Having been handcuffed, insulted, and threatened with physical harm by her hero, she still comes back to rescue him, only to find that he's done a Face–Heel Turn. Shocked and desperate, she commits a Heroic Sacrifice in a last-ditch effort to save him and wake him up, then dies realizing that he doesn't care. This makes her a Broken Bird once she's resurrected and the memories set in, and it takes quite a bit of effort on Holmes's part to pull her out of Result C. All that effort seems to go right back down the drain, however, when she's kidnapped by Moriarty and sells herself to him in return for the safety of Holmes, Watson, and the Doctor. Like Holmes, her journey towards Result A is slow and difficult, and matters are hardly helped by the fact that she has to return to her own timeline, despite her and Holmes's love for each other.
- The JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Persona 4 crossover A Different Kind of Truth. The main character is Johnny Joestar of Part 7, and it's made abundantly clear that his life sucked as much as it did in canon. At the age of seven his big brother dies, thanks to a white mouse that may or may not have been Johnny's recently freed pet Danny and making Johnny constantly blame himself since. At the age of fourteen Johnny has to hear from his dad that NONE of the awards and achievements he earned since becoming a jockey mattered since he's not his brother, and has never visited even ONE of Johnny's races. Johnny then gets into a fight with and nearly kills his own father (In his older brother's own room, much to Johnny's shame) and has to hear his father say that Johnny should have been killed instead of his brother. Not even a few hours after that Johnny is yearning to feel accepted by someone, even if it's his bitchy date of the week. He kicks a guy out of a club line to prove himself to said date, and gets shot in the back as a result. He then wakes up in a hospital, finds out he's crippled, spends a lot of his time crying and laying in his own filth with neither any of his false friends, date, or his father visiting him. Needless to say, Johnny has a LOT of trust issues thanks to the experience.
- The Dragon and the Butterfly: Hiccup did not have it easy before he left Berk; he lost his mother (or so it seemed) when he was a baby, was raised by a father who was neglectful and emotionally abusive, was bullied by the twins and Snotlout for years (with the other kids ignoring him), and was hated by nearly everyone on the island for his inventing mishaps (the one exception was Gobber, who protected Hiccup when he could and encouraged his creativity and inventiveness). Even after Hiccup managed to find an escape via his discovering, befriending, and training Toothless, the two are discovered by Astrid who reports it to Stoick. The two are captured, with Hiccup locked up in the arena and Toothless taken to be executed. He escapes with Stormfly's help, and they free Toothless... though Stormfly is recaptured while protecting Hiccup and Toothless. The duo leave Berk behind, and have to endure several days of flying through the archipelago with barely any food or rest. Thankfully, the conga line comes to an end when they crash in the Encanto. Despite being feared and distrusted at first, Hiccup's naturally kind and helpful nature (and the people believing that Antonio tamed Toothless) eventually lead to the people of the Encanto accepting him as one of their own.
- Equestria Girls: A Fairly Odd Friendship: Timmy goes through a rough one throughout the back half of the story: the Dazzlings gaslight him to turn him against the Rainbooms, then brainwash him into their servant. After he's freed, they kidnap Cosmo and Wanda and rub their actions in his face. And when he comes to save his fairies, they beat him savagely when he refuses to give in to them, and when they succeed in stealing the fairies' magic, they eat Cosmo and Wanda, plan to destroy everything and everyone Timmy cares about, and make him watch as they rampage with it while telling him it's all his fault.* Fallout: Equestria is no picnic for its protagonist Littlepip—continually shot at, had friends die on her, the works. But its side fics Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons and Heroes extend the Line even further.
- Then, there is what Derpy undergoes through the whole war.
- In Flashpoint 2: Advent Solaris, of all characters to recieve one the one who has it the worst is Darkseid. Yes, Darkseid. In very short order he learns all of his inner circle have betrayed him, two of his sons have died, his enemies have learned his weakness to Radion, his army has been rendered useless when faced with enemies prepared for them, and his only daughter was slain not long after he sent her off-world. And worse for him still is the fact this conga line is far from finished.
- In Fractured (SovereignGFC), a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel, Samantha Shepard gets hit with this. First, Liara and several others end up dying, for which she blames herself. This drives her into depression, making her an easy convert to the ways of an insane admiral, whereupon she engages in some highly questionable missions. Due to her Face–Heel Turn, her now-former friends abandon Shepard, even going so far as to administer a savage beating in order to keep Sam out of the final fight, though she is recovered afterward with severe injuries. Once reawoken, a continuous losing battle against a Force-wielding Siren combined with the arrival of Flood breaks her again, causing Shepard to hang up her uniform. Only some pep talks from Garrus and Wrex combined with the magnitude of what's at stake manage to convince her to step back into the fight. Even then, she initially leaves command to others.
- In Ghosts of the Past, sequel to Child of the Storm, Harry is put through the ringer during the Forever Red arc. Captured by the Red Room and taken to a base in the Nevernever (where subjective time means the few days in the real world pass like months) and repeatedly tortured in an attempt to break him. Then Maddie's well-meaning attempt to help him escape by transferring his mind into his Phoenix feather just leads to his Empty Shell being brainwashed into the super soldier known as the Red Son, the Winter Soldier's Superior Successor, who is then used to commit mass murder and brainwashing in order to recreate the Russian Empire. Oh, and the 'new' Black Widow, Yelena Belova, decides to match and surpass her predecessor by 'recreating' her relationship with the Winter Soldier with the newly christened Red Son, raping him, which Natasha calls her on before delivering an utterly brutal beatdown. When the heroes try to bring the Red Son to heel, the Transmode Virus he was infected with transforms nearly half his body into machinery, which Magneto had to wallop with a vast electromagnetic pulse to subdue, costing him an arm, a leg, and an eye. And when his mind is restored to his body, he's so overwhelmed by suddenly having all this dumped on him that he snaps, becoming the Dark Phoenix (which on the bright side restores his damaged body), going on a rampage before being talked down. Understandably, after all this he's left severely traumatized for quite some time afterwards - especially after he unblocks the memories and starts facing Past Experience Nightmares.
- Celestia begins The God Empress of Ponykind as The Empress, brimming with confidence and ready to rebuild her empire. Then her beloved sister (who has become increasingly unstable due to The Corruption) runs off and nearly gets herself killed in a war, and although Celestia saves her and her army Luna angrily accuses her of being a Glory Hound. Then Celestia is Mind Raped by some of Sombra's magic, causing her to see a vision where She was the one that turned evil during the Horus Heresy. Then, when she tries to make amends with Luna, she finds that her sister has been taken over by The Corruption, starting a civil war that almost tears Equestria apart. Said war reveals that Celestia's oldest enemies, the Gods of Chaos, are still very much alive, and she is forced to imprison her sister in the moon. By the time the war is over, her confidence is replaced by a massive amount of self-loathing which carries over into the sequel, where Celestia laments that everything she cares about ends up being destroyed or corrupted.
- Hunters of Justice: Teams RWBY and JNPR suffer one at the beginning of the story. Over the course of two days, Brainiac invades Remnant, destroys nearly all the major cities on the planet, kidnaps thousands of various ages and other attributes for his experiments, then sends in a massive horde of robots to corral the rest into Vale, slaughtering millions in the process. Not only do both teams have to witness all of this, their worst fear comes to pass when Brainiac kidnaps Ruby to study her eyes. They manage to convince Ironwood to allow them to go rescue her and attack Brainiac head on, but that's when the worst of stretch of it happens; they rescue Ruby, only to learn that Brainiac had actually shrunk and bottled the cities for the sake of his studies. They then attack and try to stop him, only to endure a devastating Curb-Stomp Battle, and watch him do to Vale what he did to the other cities. Finally, they get front-row seats to the complete and utter destruction of their planet, before finally being saved by a Mother Box and sent to Earth. All of those events culminate in a week-long Heroic BSoD when they finally wake up and have enough time to process what happened.
- The Infinite Loops: This trope is the best way to sum up what Cree Lincoln goes through upon Awakening. To start with, her very first loop is a fused loop with The Conversion Bureau, which ends up killing her love for an Expy of the ponies. Even though that is stopped, she then learns that her baseline boyfriend never loved her and their relationship to him was little more than a way to spy on the Teens and then, when trying to do something good by allowing her sister to escape from Grandfather with her friends, she's transformed into a Senior Citi-Zombie. When Numbuh 5 finally confronts her on everything, she's in the middle of a serious Villainous BSoD.
- Justice League: The Spider opens with Spider-Man (Ultimate Marvel) being sent to the Justice League watchtower (DC Animated Universe), swiftly ranting about how he's just lost basically everyone in his life while trying to do the right thing. J'onn plants a telepathic command to make Spider-Man sleep, recognising that the other man has been through a great deal, inspiring sympathy from the rest of the League even before they take off his mask and realise just how young he is.
- The Many Dates of Danny Fenton: Vicky from The Fairly OddParents! gets this at the hands of Danny. Using his invisibility, he throws a sticky bun at Vicky's head, causes her trip over a can, which causes a bucket of paint to fall on her head, after which she falls into a pile of garbage. She throws the can of paint into a pile of bees, which proceed to sting and chase after her after being attracted to the garbage and sticky bun stuck on her body.
- In Thieves Can Be Heroes!, poor Izuku has it rough. He grew up as the only Quirkless kid among his peers, who were all quick to mock him and stomp all over his dreams of becoming a hero like All Might, leaving him without a single person to call a friend after his neighbor Makoto moved away. Just weeks before the U.A. Entrance Exam, he tries to help a woman who was in the middle of being raped by a drunken man, only for said woman to turn on him and accuse him of assaulting her. Not only does this saddle him with a criminal record, but the trial also makes him miss the entrance exam, denying him any hope of becoming a hero. Then he's sent away to live with a complete stranger for a year while serving out his probation. Izuku's new guardian doesn't hesitate to tell him that he doesn't care about Izuku one bit and Izuku's teachers at his new school all treat him like the lowest scum on Earth. Then he's accidentally sucked into the Metaverse, bludgeoned into unconsciousness, and nearly executed by monsters. After all this, he discovers that his new criminal record has been leaked to the student body. His classmates proceed to vilify and spread rumors about him at every turn.
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/BioShock fanfic Vision, Siren's stay in the city has been this. Which is understandable, given that the plot circles around taking a somewhat petty and pampered artist and putting her in Rapture.
- Weight of the World is no picnic for America. He was captured, experimented on, and vivisected by Atlas. Vale's Aura is forced into him piece by piece in a painful and torturous fashion. He is greatly burdened by his unwanted responsibility to save the world. Yang beats him up and shoots him with not a single person stepping in to help him. He is Mind Raped by Vale for weeks and wakes up with amnesia. He travels with criminals who pretend to be his friends but then betray and almost murder him. Raven then slits his throat to "keep him out of Salem's hands". Then he is taken hostage by Tyrian and Emerald. England almost tricks him into performing a ritual that would doom Vale's people and he flees... only to be captured by Atlas once more and whisked back to Remnant. All of this has America teetering on the edge of a Despair Event Horizon, with him suffering multiple breakdowns throughout the series as he slowly crumbles under the pressure.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing is set in a rape survivors' support group, so it's basically made of this trope.
- Blackbird:
- First, Laurel finds out that her boyfriend cheated on her with her sister on the boat trip that (supposedly) killed both of them. Over the course of the following two years, her parents divorce and she suffers emotional abuse from both of them because they blame her relationship with Oliver for what happened. Then she's kidnapped, finds out her sister is alive, and then is betrayed and sold out to a cult of murderers by her mother in exchange for the safety and freedom of said sister, and is forced to commit to said cult or else her entire city dies. She then suffers Training from Hell, and is forced into becoming a murderer herself in order to honor the deal. To say Laurel is a Broken Bird after all this would be a massive understatement.
- Oliver has his canon one, in addition to the above situation with Laurel. While he's handling it well, it's clear that he isn't really any better off than Laurel is.
- Sara doesn't have the trauma of joining the League of Assassins; instead, she has the guilt of living with the fact that her mother traded her sister for her freedom. As a result, she's arguably an even bigger Death Seeker than both Oliver and Laurel.
- In Renegades
, Oliver, Laurel, Nyssa, and Constantine try to restore Sara's soul and are preyed on by astral parasites that force them to see their worst fears/insecurities. Laurel is truly put through the ringer, in short order: preisland!Oliver throws his infidelity in her face and mockingly tells her "you were never enough for me"; her father brings up her addiction issues (she's clean currently for the record) and curses "I can’t believe I had to lose Sara and keep you”; her mother brings up her addiction issues too and dismisses her as a failure; Tommy blames her for his death, also brings up her addition, calls her an Inadequate Inheritor to Sara, The Load to her friends, and reminds her of the night she contemplated suicide, and encourages her to finish the job this time. Interestingly, she's able to bounce back fairly quickly once they successfully restore Sara's soul, but Oliver is deeply troubled by it (he saw everything the parasites put her through), recognizing just how much he failed her.
- Cabin Fever (Southern Hearts): Katara. So much. First, her mother gets killed in a Fire Nation raid. Two, she's captured during the same raid. Three, she's taken to a prison for waterbenders, where she is cooped up in a cage, made to wear prison rags and forced to go barefoot, is only given enough food and water to survive while being severely malnourished and dehydrated, is burned by the guards whenever they get bored, and endures all of this in prison for 3 years. And after she is freed by Hama, she is forced to learn bloodbending. And then she has to amputate one of her patients' legs - while he is still conscious.
- Fractures: Zuko is scarred by his father. When he awakens, he tells his father that he is now going to find the Avatar and fight alongside him. Ozai imprisons Zuko for this, and routinely visits the prison to torture him. After three years of imprisonment, Zuko is finally freed when the war ends... and is then told that he's now in charge of the Fire Nation as the new Fire Lord. And multiple people on both sides either hate his guts, or are suspicious of him.
- Still Stand in the Sun: Katara. At the tender age of eight, she's captured during a Fire Nation raid on the Southern Water Tribe. Then she's taken to a prison for waterbenders, where she is cooped up in a cage, made to wear prison rags and forced to go barefoot, is only given enough food and water to survive while being severely malnourished and dehydrated, and endures all of this in prison for five years. To escape, she has to learn bloodbending all by herself, and she uses it to kill any Fire Nation soldier that she comes across in order to survive and avoid being recaptured and sent back to prison. To top it all off, she has to survive all by herself in the wilderness of the Fire Nation, and she has no way of getting back home to the Southern Water Tribe.
- The Worst Prisoner: If you think canon Zuko has it bad, WorstPrisoner Zuko may just have it a little worse. It starts with getting hit by an arrow in the shoulder, then he almost gets killed by a mob, gets manhandled by Bato and when he sneaks into the North Pole with the Gaang, he is used to train the waterbenders into fighting firebenders. And that's just the first book...
- Uninvited Guests is built out of this trope, but it's played for comedy.
- Fractured Fates: Chapter 2 puts Asuna Izumi through quite a bit of torment. It all starts when her best friend and older sister figure Kaneki Tenmaru is found murdered, and Asuna herself is the first one to find her body. Then, through a series of bad decisions and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, she finds herself as the prime suspect in the murder. It gets to the point where she is nearly convicted as the blackened, only saved through Hana's unwavering belief in her innocence. As if that wasn't traumatic enough, evidence reveals that Kaneki was not the killer's intended victim- it was Asuna whom the killer was targeting. Not only did Kaneki find out about this, but she attempted to thwart the killer's plan and was murdered as a result, essentially taking Asuna's place as the victim. Finally, the end of the trial reveals that Kaneki had been living with an immense amount of guilt and sadness stemming from an incident in her past, something that Asuna was completely unaware of despite being Kaneki's closest friend. Needless to say, it's hard to wonder why Asuna loses it somewhat come Chapter 3.
- The postseries fanfic arc Redeemer by CocoaCoveredGods lays this on Light like woah. Being stripped of his identity as Kira was only the beginning- so far, he's been killed multiple times, buried alive, tortured, raped (again, multiple times), suffered two mental breakdowns and been attacked by an axe-wielding psychopath in a scene that even L found difficult to look at the aftermath of. And some of this at the hands of people he loves. It's no wonder he's a gibbering wreck by the start of the fourth fic.
- True Elision by Ezan, another post-series fanfic. Having been given a second chance to have a proper afterlife and avoid being transformed in a Shinigami, Light is forced to face a Trial from hell and battle his worst nightmares (which include [[spoiler:being torn apart by the thousands of people he directly killed with their bare hands while being unable to move and having a handful of hair forcefully shoved down his throat. Multiple times. And that's just the first level...).
- Dodger And Company treats our favorite street dog like a giant chew-toy. Abandoned by his mother as a puppy, watching his mother get gunned down in front of him, getting swept up in a war between rival street dog gangs and being betrayed by his childhood friend are just some of the things he gets put through.
- Ditto his mother, Annie. The world seems to go out of its way just to pick on her; her relationship with her Duke-Dodger's father-reeks of domestic abuse, she loses most of her pups, and abandons the only surviving one, Dodger, knowing that Duke would probably target him as well; years later, when she reunites with her adult son, he continually turns down her attempts to apologize, even after she gives birth to a new litter of pups-no doubt you can guess who the father is.
- Kimberly T's Gargoyles series introduces the character of Anne Marsden in the story Unsolved Mysteries, and reveals that she has gone through a significant amount of trauma through collateral damage of Xanatos's actions; her husband was killed in the Lost Nights as one of Demona's victims, and during the Big Sleep, her best friend died in a car accident and the daycare centre where she worked was destroyed when a truck crashed into it, forcing Anne onto the streets with her two-year-old daughter Bethany because she couldn't afford a place to live. However, after Anne ends up living in the Labyrinth while Xanatos tries to find everyone there jobs as part of his plans to reform himself, Xanatos vows to ensure that she gets top priority when looking for job opportunities even before they realise that Bethany has Fey heritage from her father's side, prompting Owen to suggest that Anne be hired as the Xanatos' nanny so that he/Puck can teach Bethany while teaching Alex.
- Used for a few chapters in the The Princess and the Frog fanfiction A Son for a King. Charlotte's banker husband demands sex from Tiana in exchange for giving her a loan and for not asking for the money back, and when she refuses, he tells Charlotte that Tiana tried to bribe him with sex so as not to have to pay back the loan. Charlotte then goes to Tiana's house and yells at her, and breaks off their friendship. Tiana's mother then persuades her to go on a date with a man she has no attraction to, and on the date, he is stabbed by racists and has to be taken to the hospital by Tiana where it turns out he has lied about his name, as well as the fact that he is married to a woman who then arrives at the hospital and chases Tiana around the hospital room, calling her a tramp and screaming at her for sleeping with her husband (which she didn't do). Once she gets back to her mother's house, it's revealed that her house and restaurant have been set on fire by the Ku Klux Klan. She then collapses on the floor, yelling, "I've been a good person my entire life. I followed all the rules. Why do these things keep happening to me?" It's all quite hilarious.
- Bethany Hawke gets put through her fair share of trauma in her source material. The fanfic Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium takes the canon trauma and adds to it everything she suffers as the Inquisitor, not least losing both of her brothers. Varric, in one scene, sums up everything she's survived to that point and then adds that in spite of all of it, "you're still the sanest and sweetest person I know."
- Little Brother has Gladstone Gander go through a painful Backstory in the form of the titular younger sibling never actually hatching. He also endures this by sacrificing his luck in some unspecified way for love, only for said sacrifice to prove pointless.
- Just about everything that happens to the old miner in The Blessed Disaster. Dead parents, dead brother, awful job. Then the Pale Girl shows up...and dies. You do not Earn Your Happy Ending more than this guy did.
- The Beauty of Life series is this for Sam Braddock. He already had a fair amount of trauma in his canonical past, but this takes it to the next level and then some.
- At the age of nine, his sister is killed by a drunk driver right in front of him, note and a series of misheard and misunderstood remarks lead him to believe his parents blame him for the accident.
- Following the attack, he ends up not being able to return to his family home because he has a panic attack every time he passes the location where his sister died, and as such he has to grow up at the military training base while his father works, separated from his mother and surviving sister and also isolated from other civilians. Making matters worse still, at one point his father has to return home due to his wife (Sam's mother) having a medical emergency, and with Sam still unable to return home, his father has no choice but to leave him at the base, and one of the men he entrusts Sam's care to turns out to be a violent pedophile who abuses Sam.
- When Sam is finally able to move back home in his late teens, he is attacked on his first day back in school because a jock thinks Sam is trying to steal his girlfriend. He ends up running away to live with his godmother (one of the few breaks in his Trauma Conga Line).
- He enters the police force only to end up in a nest of crooked cops; he becomes their victim himself when he refuses to cover for them, and then his fellow officers turn on him for crossing the "blue line".
- He quits the police force to join the Army, only to find that many people automatically resent him and make assumptions that he must be spoiled and propped up by nepotism just for being the son of a General, despite all the evidence to the contrary staring him in the face.
- He becomes the pet Butt-Monkey of an arrogant, self-centered major who believes that Sam's father's success is responsible for his lack thereof and torments Sam to hurt his father. Among his more vile acts are arranging for Sam to be kidnapped and tortured to death by the enemy. Sam obviously doesn't die, but is left with extreme mental trauma.
- Having failed in his previous attempt to kill Sam, the Major then arranges for him to kill his best friend in a supposed Friendly Fire accidentnote , thinking Sam will commit suicide out of guilt. The series also lays it on incredibly thick about how significant Sam's bond with his friend was, just to make the incident as traumatic as possible.
- Devastated, Sam leaves the army and tries to rejoin the police force, but the unit he's assigned to usually selects its own members and they initially hate Sam because he was forced on them note . Though the unit members are among those that he manages to win over and develop a positive relationship with.
- Throughout the series, he is forced to contend with old enemies seeking revenge (in many cases for petty grudges) and a penchant for running into new trouble. It's almost more remarkable if he isn't in danger.
- On top of all this, every time one of his many incidents hits the news, there is someone (usually a minor but significant character) who is convinced he is the guilty party. Some eventually come to see their error, but others continue to insist he is a Karma Houdini no matter how much he is seemingly vindicated.
- On a minor level, even when he's not in serious danger, it's a Running Gag that he's an injury magnet. It's so common that the author even lampshades it with a mostly-humorous compilation story of Sam's bizarre injury incidents.
- Forward does this to most of the crew, especially for River. Aside from being kidnapped and tortured by Niska, she's also undergone multiple mental breakdowns due to her insanity, she's been nearly eaten by Reavers, and has been repeatedly Mind Raped by another psychic escapee from the Academy. Not a single "episode" in the story passes without River being repeatedly punched in the gut.
- In The New Retcons, Michael goes through a horrific one just as he's making a clean break from his family's issues: John tells him that he's not his son; his biological father Stan Watson wants little to do with him due to Elly using The Baby Trap to conceive Michael; Deanna miscarries for the second time; Robin is diagnosed with autism along with his other issues and Michael cant handle it, resulting in him regressing back into a Workaholic. Deanna ends up divorcing him and Taking the Kids. And then his repressed bisexuality comes out and Elly is murdered, resulting in a suicide attempt and the realization that she never loved him. He does heal, but not for several years.
- Steve goes through this in Hawaii Five 0 Obsession as he was already dealing with a breakup he then deals with a high school flame, Becca, who is trying to force him into a relationship again, then she kills Shauna, who he was in said breakup with, stabs Danny, Steve finds out he and Becca have a son that he had no idea about and then finally she herself is killed when she tries to kill Steve.
- What Lies Beneath: When he was young, Stoick told Hiccup that he wasn't going to train him because he was a late-bloomer and wasn't ready to begin training, responding to Hiccup's reasonable assertion that that was the whole point of training with a Because I Said So. Later, Astrid breaks off her friendship with Hiccup after Finn is killed by the Flightmare and Snotlout and the twins beat him up because they think he was the reason she ran off upset, being banished from going anywhere near any of them the next day.
- I Ain't a Doll, This Ain't a Dollhouse: Johanna goes through outright hell throughout chapter 2. First, she finds out that her fiancé Dio had poisoned his father and was plotting to do the same to her father George even after he took him in as his son and heir, on top of the disappointment in finding out that his "love" for her was nothing less than the desire to possess and control her rather than true affection. Then, when Dio is about to use her blood to activate the Stone Mask and become a vampire, her father pushes her out of his grasp only to be killed in the process. Johanna then has to send her best friend Speedwagon through a space-time rift with the Holy Corpse Eyeballs for his safety while the brainwashed Avdol and Iggy chase after him, leading Johanna to spend days fighting against Dio, his zombies, and Diego until Robert returns with reinforcements in chapter 6.
- Lost Boys, its sequel Broken Heroes, and (probably—it's still being written) its second sequel Shattered Saviors gives each character a run for their money, but mostly the worst stuff happens to Sora, Aqua, and Ventus. Sora keeps getting hurt mentally and physically. One breaking event after the other. He loses his home at the age of four thanks to Venitas, grows up on the streets of Traverse Town with Riku, has several moments where he either becomes engulfed in rage or loses himself to despair, has Ventus die just after he finally thinks of forgiving him for destroying his home, and gives himself up to Xemnas to keep Kairi and the rest of his friends safe. Aqua comes back from the Realm of Darkness only to have Ventus die, then die AGAIN shortly after she revives him. When she finds Xemnas, she clings to a hope that he's still Terra, only to find out that answer is no. She gets completely broken by the fact that, despite her efforts, Terra and Ven are pretty much long gone. And then Ventus. He spends his time feeling EXTREMELY guilty of destroying Sora and Riku's home, and being flat out abused by an extremely wrathful Sora. Then he dies. Horribly, brutally, and flat out MURDERED by Saïx, who gives zero fucks over killing an old friend of his. That is without going into every little detail, because, in short, someone gets hurt at least once a chapter.
- Over the course of The Vow, Lady Lianne, Lord Shen's Love Interest, goes through a troubled life. Her otherwise content childhood is marred by his ambitious father's inability to show his love toward his only child. As soon as Lianne's womanhood blossoms, her father foists suitors after suitors upon her so that she'd birth a grandson as the family legacy's heir. When she eventually has had enough and confronts him, she's punished by being sent to live for a year with Gongmen City's nobles whom she doesn't know. Though she warms up to Shen and his kindly parents, she goes through a brief kidnapping experience. When she gets a word that her beloved mother has fallen ill, she rushes home where her father intends to continue pressuring her into marriage. Then Lianne's mother dies and Lianne is grief-stricken, but she admits her love toward Shen and agrees to marry him. However, the blissful wedding is interrupted with the revelation that the man Lianne is about to marry has committed mass murder. Shen is banished from Gongmen, leaving Lianne to rule Gongmen competently but unhappy. When Shen returns thirty years later and takes over Gongmen City, he imprisons Lianne (killing a friend of hers along the way), intending to conquer China and forcibly make her his queen. For the following weeks, Lianne struggles with having to see the depths the man she still loves has fallen into, trying both to stop him and make him come to his senses. After she marries Shen out of her own will yet is driven away by him, she returns to her birth home and makes peace with her estranged father just before he passes away. Right after that, Lianne hears that her husband has apparently died. After getting a final confirmation of it, she's ready to die and only her pregnancy prevents her from doing that. Fortunately, Shen returns to Lianne and they manage to live together with their son.
- This is Deadlock's intention in The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn. She intends to inflict one on Spyro and Cynder because she suffered one that she blames them for. Her own included having her mate and unborn children killed in front of her and apparently having her adult children killed by Dark Cynder.
- Mad World: Lauren's entire time with the Fae has been this largely as a result of her being a Cosmic Plaything. Trick uses his powers to write that the Garuda will be defeated by a champion (who turns out to be Bo). The Garuda is aware of this, and knows that Lauren will be involved. So it and Thane utterly destroy her life trying to prevent it. Thane murders 19 of her colleagues/friends, murders her, she is then brought back by the Fae, forced into slavery to them, and then Thane returns and subjects her to Mind Rape and horrific torture. She spends most of her time as a Type A (said torture briefly sends her into full on Type C). In the sequel however, she is beginning to be a Type E both because she is sick of her life being a Trauma Conga Line, and because it's heavily implied she's now possessed by the Garuda.
- Notably, in the sequel she calls Trick and The Ash out for their roles in it. Trick for setting events in motion without considering the consequences, and the Ash who despite claiming to view Lauren as friend, is still using her as pawn. The fact that neither one of them seems to understand that the Fae destroying her life is pissing her off, just makes her even angrier.
- Brokenhearted: has this happen to Adrien on emotional levels, but it's no less painful.
- First, he finds out that Ladybug is dating another boy, finally killing his dream of winning her heart. When he tries to move on with Kagami, she dumps him, declaring that she refuses to be second in love — as she recognizes he loves Marinette, something he only realizes afterwards. But Marinette is already dating Luka, meaning he missed his chance. Adrien tries dating other girls, only to break up with them due to No Sparks, leaving a trail of heartbroken girls in his wake that Hawkmoth happily akumatizes. This leads Ladybug to see him as a shameless playboy who doesn't care about the pain left in his wake. He eventually confides in Marinette, who tries to comfort him... then kisses her, immediately regretting it for fear of ruining their friendship. The final blow comes when he notices Ladybug sharing a loving look with Luka, making him realize how much he'd completely blown his chances with the girl he loved. Unable to spend any more time around her, he returns his Miraculous and leaves school. All of this happens in the first chapter.
- Things only get worse for Adrien in the coming chapters. Luka confronts Adrien as a favor to Marinette, only to end in a brawl after Adrien confesses his love for Marinette. Then he discovers his father is Hawkmoth, and his mother has been in a coma and kept under his house the whole time she's been missing. Thinking that this might be his best chance to have someone to love him to fill the void left by Marinette, Adrien agrees to be akumatized and steal the earrings and ring so he can bring Emilie back;
- Things aren't going much better for Luka. Even though he finally got Marinette to be his girlfriend, she’s constantly distracted by missing Adrien after he cuts off all contact with her and their friends. He tries to confront Adrien to convince him to come back, only for the model to declare his love for his girlfriend, telling Luka that he kissed her. They end up in a fight, and Luka leaves. When he confronts Marinette about the kiss, it's clear that she is still harboring feelings for Adrien. And even though he was chosen to be the new Chat Noir, Plagg is indifferent to him at best, missing and preferring Adrien to him.
- Dad Villain AU: After his father rewrites reality with his selfish Wish, Adrien relieves his whole life from the moment of his birth haunted by strange dreams of the original reality. He gradually comes to realize that his mother Emelie treats him more like an adorable accessory than an independent child, deliberately raising him to be utterly dependent upon her Condescending Compassion. He learns from his cousin Felix that he's actually a sentimonster, and when he meets Marinette, discovers that her mother died from a condition that sounds uncannily like the one his mother suffered in his "dreams". Then he's present when Marinette suffers an attack that makes him flashback to witnessing Emelie collapsing in similar fashion, and gets akumatized into Caspases in order to save her. Then comes the charity ball, where he learns that his father was Hawkmoth and gets to watch him bragging about the nature of his reality-altering Wish: Revenge by Proxy of targeting Ladybug and her loved ones. Forcing Adrien to realize that his creation was partially responsible for Sabine Dupain-Cheng's death. And just in case all of that wasn't bad enough, it all comes coupled with him being hit by the backlash of Emelie using the Peacock Pin to become Mayura, because Marinette — Ladybug — cares enough for him to count as one of her loved ones.
- Weight Off Your Shoulder plays with this in a rather dark fashion. Adrien thinks that he's going through one when Ladybug makes clear that she won't put up with Chat Noir or Chloe's antics anymore, telling her partner that their job protecting Paris is Not a Game while publicly exposing Chloe's betrayal of the heroes. He gets very upset at how none of his classmates agree with him about how unfair it is that Chloe's Karma Houdini Warranty has run out... and then Ladybug reveals to him that she intends to take the fight to Shadow Moth. Adrien disagrees, attacks her, and triggers an actual trauma conga line: Ladybug strips him of the Ring, then uses the Fox Miraculous to create an illusion of her attacking Shadow Moth's base and destroying the capsule Emilie is in. Gabriel then publicly transforms into Shadow Moth and attempts to akumatize Adrien himself using the shock his son feels from the reveal. About the only upside is that this spurs Adrien's Jerkass Realization.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- In Actually, I'm Dead, Trixie dies after taking off the Alicorn Amulet, only to be revived as a Lich like creature that cannot feel anything, has to wear a cloak outside, because the very ponies whose attention she used to crave mistake her for the Grim Reaper, and her body is still slowly decaying. And when it looks like things are finally looking up she dies AGAIN and is brought back as more animalistic monster. Owe, and that is not even getting into her backstory.
- In Featherfall: Sunset loses her friends, realizes that Canterlot High never truly forgave her for her transgressions, is brutally attacked and nearly killed, and wakes up to learn she'll likely remain paraplegic for the rest of her life. Despite Gilda being there for her, Sunset can't help but not cry over all she's had to go through.
- Loved and Lost, an extended retelling of the second season finale, tortures just about all of the heroes:
- Princess Celestia, the Mane Five, Shining Armor, and Spike have their reputations tarnished by Prince Jewelius, who uses their canon mistakes that contributed to the Changeling invasion to not only frame them as traitors and arrest them, but also banish them from Equestria (with the Mane Five and Shining Armor being enslaved). They return to Canterlot one week later to clear their names and make amends with Twilight, only to be angrily rejected by her in retaliation for their treatment of her at the wedding rehearsal and arrested again. As the now demoralized heroes rot in their cells in the 11th chapter, they learn a terrible secret: not only is Jewelius the true mastermind behind the Changeling invasion, but he's also a heartless manipulator who's intending to exploit both Twilight and Canterlot's citizens more than he already has. Unfortunately, the now-discredited heroes are unable to convince anypony to believe them about this terrible truth and are instead publicly shamed by the citizens of Canterlot, who all feel themselves betrayed by their former protectors. Luckily, some major short-sightedness on behalf of Jewelius proves them right and provides them a chance to reconcile with Twilight and set things right.
- Princess Celestia gets a special mention. Not only does her nephew Jewelius usurp her by using her mistakes against her, but he also turns the utter adoration her faithful student and Canterlot's citizens felt towards her into seething hatred. She finds out, much to the horror of both Shining Armor and herself, that while they were in exile, all the royal guards who remained loyal to them were ordered to be murdered while they were in the infirmary. She very nearly becomes publicly hanged, and only by giving her former subjects and Twilight a heartwrenching apology speech does she manage to trigger forgiveness in all of them before Luna rescues her from being choked to death. By the time she and the others find refuge in Ponyville, Celestia has become so demoralized that she starts to lose hope of Twilight coming around and helping them against Jewelius (whose capability for such cruelty still shocks her), to the point that Cadance needs to urge her not to give up on her faithful student yet.
- On top of being brainwashed by Queen Chrysalis and the wedding being cancelled, Shining Armor is stripped of his title as Captain of the Guard and mercilessly beaten by Commander Hildread. After being bitterly renounced by his own little sister, he endures a brutal public flogging for disgracing the guard and learns that not only have many of his friends in the guard been murdered, but also that his sister — emotionally manipulated and deaf to his warnings — is engaged to a sociopath who'll kill her should he find another powerful unicorn mare to seduce.
- After all the suffering she endures due to Queen Chrysalis as per canon, Princess Cadance is unfairly exiled as well from Equestria by Jewelius, her favorite cousin and surrogate little brother. After she returns to Canterlot with the other heroes, she's attacked, tortured and planned to be killed by Jewelius who's revealed to have not only hated Cadance simply because of her popularity for years, but also convinced Chrysalis to go through with the Changeling invasion on Cadance's wedding day. Though Cadance accepts that Jewelius is truly a monster, she's still sad for him after his karmic death.
- After what she goes through canonically, Twilight is emotionally manipulated to lose all love and trust toward her brother, friends and mentor for how they shunned her at the wedding rehearsal, becoming unhappy yet accepting of Equestria's new questionable ruler who has all along faked being her friend and possible love interest as well as used her in stealing Equestria's throne. She accepts his proposal, unaware that Jewelius only wants her to birth powerful heirs to continue his legacy and is open to the possibility of killing her "accidentally" and marrying a more powerful unicorn mare should he meet one. Once Twilight realizes the truth, her utter mortification with herself leads her to seek out her loved ones and reconcile with them so that she can help them set things right.
- Princess Celestia, the Mane Five, Shining Armor, and Spike have their reputations tarnished by Prince Jewelius, who uses their canon mistakes that contributed to the Changeling invasion to not only frame them as traitors and arrest them, but also banish them from Equestria (with the Mane Five and Shining Armor being enslaved). They return to Canterlot one week later to clear their names and make amends with Twilight, only to be angrily rejected by her in retaliation for their treatment of her at the wedding rehearsal and arrested again. As the now demoralized heroes rot in their cells in the 11th chapter, they learn a terrible secret: not only is Jewelius the true mastermind behind the Changeling invasion, but he's also a heartless manipulator who's intending to exploit both Twilight and Canterlot's citizens more than he already has. Unfortunately, the now-discredited heroes are unable to convince anypony to believe them about this terrible truth and are instead publicly shamed by the citizens of Canterlot, who all feel themselves betrayed by their former protectors. Luckily, some major short-sightedness on behalf of Jewelius proves them right and provides them a chance to reconcile with Twilight and set things right.
- Solitary Locust is centered around one for Twilight Sparkle, starting with her accidentally turning herself into a changeling.
- Summer Days and Evening Flames: Poor, poor Iron Bulwark. From June to August, he's torn between his griffon girlfriend and best friend who hates griffins, both of whom are guards under his command, and then has to deal with his best friend attempting to murder his girlfriend and then a violent breakup with said girlfriend. He takes to drinking for a few weekings, and then when things are finally looking up after reconciling with both Gilda and Starfall, his mentor, Sherry, starts a gang war that gets two dozen of his officers killed, and his girlfriend is nearly killed in said gang war. When confronted, Sherry assaults Iron and runs off to join the Mafia, and gets Iron fired through her connections when Iron puts out her arrest warrant, and Iron is remitted to the guard as a mere sergeant. Eventually, things get better as he and Gilda grow closer and he comes to enjoy his new position, but that was a long way to fall.
- Conference Wives: The author has Charlie Eppes having a child with lesbians he knew from grad school, except he rarely gets to see his son for the first few years of his life because they live on the East Coast and are paranoid about homophobic reactions from Charlie's parents, since their own parents reacted that way when they each came out. One of the mothers dies in a car crash orchestrated by her father, who runs a hate group; the other mother was in the car at the time and is heavily implied to have been beaten to death by the father's hate group cronies. Alan has a homophobic freak out (which is OOC for him & therefore purely inserted for its Break the Cutie angst value). Charlie is kidnapped and tortured by Marshall Penfield twice, including being raped by him and having a Pi symbol carved into his back. And the author does all this with Charlie suffering almost none of the psychological damage that this would inflict and what damage is done seems to resolve itself in nothing flat. A definite Result F scenario.
- This Bites!: Cross gets put through a serious wringer during the Sabaody Revolution arc. First, he's forced to give Saint Charloss an interview on the SBS, during which he has to pretend to admire all the morally disgusting actions that the Psychopathic Man Child is bragging about. Then, right after successfully engineering the archipelago's slave revolution, he's Mind Raped by Doflamingo who gloats that he'd been manipulating Cross all arc. And finally, Kizaru shows up to reveal that despite all of Cross' efforts, Ace is still slated for execution, with Kuma showing up shortly after to make clear that he's still planning on scattering the Straw Hats for two years, giving them only a few hours until he does so. By the end of the arc, Cross has been thoroughly broken.
- I Think We'll Be Okay: In just the second chapter, Kosuke's parents are killed in a car accident, which leaves her as the only caretaker to her two much younger siblings. She's absolutely devastated, but has to get back on her feet to be the sole adult of the house. This means taking care of her siblings twenty-four hours a day, which results in all her plans of going to college being dashed. Not long after, her boyfriend breaks up with her, which she had been expecting before but was prolonged by her parents' unexpected demises. After this, her best and only friend has to move far away, and the two of them slowly lose contact. She does find new friends in Haruhi and Tamaki, but just as she reaches an unhappy-but-stable state, things get worse: a Loan Shark turns up on her doorstep, demanding that she pay back a debt that her father left behind. Failure to comply leads to their front gate being broken and her place of employment having its window smashed, so she agrees to fork over more than half of all their money over a period of time. Absolutely desperate to not end up penniless, she looks for a quick cash grab and goes on a compensated group date. The whole thing is highly uncomfortable for her, but she gets out alright...until one of the clients drunkenly asks her to come home with him, grabbing her when she resists. Kosuke gets out of the situation safely, but realizes that the money she got from the date will only cover slightly more than one week's pay to the loan shark.
- Love Covers All Sins, As opposed to The Adventure of the Dying Detective, the fic goes into great detail about how horrible the events of Culverton Smith's arrest were for Watson, who Holmes left in the dark as he didn't trust the doctor's acting. To start with, he receives a call from Mrs. Hudson that Holmes has gone into a sudden downward spiral and will probably die before the day ends. Then Holmes insults his skill as a doctor when he tries to get his friend to permit treatment and sends him after Smith, claiming he has more confidence in him than in Watson. Afterwards, he has to hide himself and listen to the villain's Evil Gloating, and to add insult to injury, Holmes appears to have forgotten he was there and shows no remorse over putting him through all this.
- Mortality (and its series as a whole) is one long trauma conga line for Sherlock Holmes. Right from the prologue, we know that he's in major trouble, then we go back in time a month or so to find out how he gets to this point. Starts out by getting infected with a mutation of a deadly Asian disease, which is only cured just in time (though not before putting him through a stomach-churning conversation with a Serial Killer and getting himself in trouble with his best friend). Less than a week later, he's kidnapped (quite brutally) and Locked in the Dungeon, therefore being subjected to all manner of Cold-Blooded Torture. He almost hits the Despair Event Horizon but wills himself away from it. Even after being rescued (while half-dead), Holmes deals with fever, frailty, Flashback Nightmares, and Survivor Guilt. He ends up with a Result A, although his actions in the sequel do beg the question of just how well he learned his lessons.
- Another Sherlockian example is A Study in Regret. First, Holmes watches as Moran shoots Watson; next, he's Locked in the Dungeon and subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture for well over a month and does hit the Despair Event Horizon. (If any of this sounds familiar, it's because the fic was inspired by Mortality.) Even after being rescued, his physical and spiritual recovery is long and painful, and it's seriously one Tear Jerker scene after another (Survivor Guilt and Flashback Nightmare included). It gets worse when Holmes realizes that Moran intends to kill Mary and her baby in order to achieve the ultimate revenge on Sherlock Holmes. Eventually, Holmes tries to commit suicide to spare Mary and the baby, and Inspector Lestrade stops him. The woobieness, however, continues. If left to himself, Holmes would go for Result C, while his adoptive family are constantly pushing for Result A — and it's slowly but surely working.
- In the time loop fic Purple Days, Prince Joffrey Baratheon undergoes a massive and continuous one as the crux for his Character Development. After realizing he is effectively immortal because of The Purple continuously sending him back in time after death, he attempts to kill and/or punish those who he knows or at least thinks pose a threat to his reign in the future. His poor planning ability and lack of martial prowess lead to these plans backfiring and result in him getting killed out of revenge for his actions. Before he comes to a Heel Realization he is...
- Poisoned by the Strangler after trying to trick Tyrion into drinking poisoned wine, which Tyrion reverses onto Joffrey
- Stabbed to death by Jon Snow after ambushing and killing Robb with a crossbow in Winterfell's armory
- Beaten to death by Robb Stark after torturing Ned Stark to death and inadvertently killing Sansa and Arya and prompting the North to go to war against the Lannisters
- Burned alive by Stannis and Melisandre after trying to fight for his life in the Battle of Blackwater Bay
- Forced to repeat every action he took in his first life to steer events in the way in which he remembers to avoid being poisoned at his wedding to Margaery Tyrell, only to poisoned by a back-up bottle of Strangler-laced wine anyway when he made it to the bedchamber to consummate the marriage.
- This all takes a severe toll on Joffrey's psyche to the point where is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he goes to Winterfell for the umpteenth time. He is sent completely over the edge into insanity however when he discovers that his mother Cersei and Uncle Jaime are lovers, leading him to realize that he is in fact an incest-born bastard and that all the suffering he endured on the basis that he was in fact the trueborn son of King Robert Baratheon (something he believed without a shadow of doubt) was based on a lie. Joffrey snaps, leaps out of a tower to his death, and spends the next several lifetimes trying to end the "Groundhog Day" Loop as painfully and horrifically as possibility before he complete gives up and undergoes a Villainous BSoD
- Even after he starts making progress to become a better person over his next few lives, Joffrey still suffers several traumatic experiences made more heartbreaking by his Character Development.
- He can only watch helplessly as Ned Stark, who had become a mentor and father figure to him in his efforts to help Joffrey out of his Villainous Breakdown, is killed by Littlefinger's Goldcloaks when Joffrey attempts to proclaim Ned the Lord Regent of the Seven Kingdoms
- He is helpless to do anything but drown himself when the crew of the Eastern Winds, a Braavosi sailing crew that have taken Joffrey in, are murdered in the night by Euron Greyjoy and his crew, the Silence
- He witnesses Jon Snow and Sandor Clegane, who had become his best friends in a later loop, get killed in an effort to save him from the soldiers of the Reach sent to detain him by King Renly
- He forms a brotherhood bond with the soldiers of the Five Forts of Yi-Ti, but can't do much to save them as the Zombie Apocalypse of the White Walkers' invasion reaches the country and utterly destroys their army
- He is forced to kill Robb Stark, Theon Greyjoy, Jon Snow, and several members of the North's nobility in a war against the Iron Throne once King Robert dies and Ned and Bran are killed during the former's coup
- He witnesses Sandor and Tyrion get killed by a dragon in the ruins of Old Valyria when the three go searching for the Lannister ancestral sword, Brightroar.
- All of this culminates in Joffrey learning the shocking truth that he is a Human Weapon created by the Purple to save the world of the living from The Long Night, by all rights an Impossible Task that Joffrey is utterly unequipped to handle, and that he won't be able to end the "Groundhog Day" Loop and truly die until he finds a way to do so.
- Tsali's backstory/Start of Darkness in Sonic X: Dark Chaos was a conga line of epic proportions. First, his home planet is annihilated and his family was killed when he was only ten. The Seedrians rescued him and then Cosmo's father Luke decided to use him in a demented attempt to defeat a Demon invasion of their homeworld. Tsali gets turned into a combat android powered by Dark Chaos Energy—very painfully—and Tsali promptly goes completely crazy from rage once he finally breaks out. He ends up slaughtering the entire Seedrian race before getting several dozen nuclear weapons dropped on him by Cosmo's mother Hertia. He barely survives by making a literal Deal with the Devil—becoming a pawn of the very same person who destroyed his home planet—and is forced to fight a brutal one-man war across the galaxy for revenge against the Metarex... yeah. And just to rub it all in, he hired a group of mercenaries to help him, one of them being his (still living) younger sister only for them to eventually betray him and force him to murder all of them. It's telling that when Dark Chaos begins thirty years later, he's been so utterly brutalized by his experiences that he considers disemboweling children to be a source of cheap entertainment.
- Queens of Mewni:
- Febe the Red One was the first queen to be crowned due to the untimely death of her predecessor, her mother died from a venereal disease likely passed to her by her philandering husband, her sister died from the same disease not long after her coronation, not long after her marriage beasts start attacking Mewnians, her husband is assassinated in an attack meant for her, and her retaliation causes the first conflict with monsters since the Mewnipendance. She was even Driven to Suicide at one point after her husband's death, and was only stopped when she realized he left her Someone to Remember Him By. Fittingly, when her descendant Vesper discovers the Alethiometer's Spell, which can foretell the future using a system based on the cheek marks of the queens, the symbol of the Eclipse-Febe's cheek marks-foretell bad omens and overcoming tragedy.
- Celestia, Queen of Winter, had her mother Helia die the very day Celestia was to be married and crowned, Helia's death caused No Ontological Inertia to kick in and the gold and silver fruits Helia used as a pledge toward her debts vanished, Celestia's haste to try to pay off that debt caused her to botch a spell and create the Endless Winter that defined her reign, countless Mewnians died, including her father, grandmother, and best friend, her marriage fell apart because of her paranoia and rumors he was cheating on her, her husband was killed by monsters, and, even after the winter dispersed when the wand passed to her daughter, Celestia was so traumatized by the ordeal of her reign that she spent the rest of her life paranoid that the winter would return.
- Eclipsa, Queen of Darkness believed her first daughter and husband died in a fire, she was forced into a Marriage of Convenience with Shastacan, runs away to start a new life with her Second Love and daughter only for Meteora to be kidnapped, possesses Globgor's body to get her revenge on Mewni only to find her first daughter alive, installed as Queen, but is unable to talk to her because of said possession. She's imprisoned for 300 years in crystal, has her memory of her first daughter erased from her memory because said daughter was ashamed of being Eclipsa's daughter, and was freed just in time for the canon events of the series to occur. Then she, Globgor, and Meteora are killed in the War for Two Worlds that was a result of Star and Marco cleaving Earth and Mewni together.
- The Stargate SG-1 fanfic Guilt Undone puts Samantha Carter through a series of emotional blows; first she feels guilty over leaving Daniel Jackson broken-hearted when she turned down his request for a date by saying that she only saw him as a brother, then feels even sorrier when Daniel asks to be alone on their next mission, only for things to go as wrong as they could go when Daniel's attacked and killed by the planet's natives, with his last words being to weakly 'assure' Sam that it's not her fault she doesn't love him back. Sam spends the next month feeling increasingly guilty about how she caused Daniel so much pain before he died when all he wanted was a date, and it becomes even worse on the one-month anniversary of his death when she realises that she was in love with him all along. Even when she's given the chance to hit the Reset Button and go back in time to save him, Sam still has a breakdown when Daniel (who naturally has no idea why she's so upset over a 'dream' she had last night) thanks her for always being there for him, and nearly has an even greater breakdown when Daniel is still injured on the mission that caused his death before Jack confirms that Daniel survived his wound.
- The Zombie Apocalypse fanfiction Respawn of the Dead tortures just about every member of the team, but a special mention has to be given to The Medic. Over the course of the fic, he gets the crap beaten out of him by The Soldier, has to leave The Heavy behind to be devoured by zombies, and after recovering from the Heroic BSoD caused by that, he has to Mercy Kill his Morality Pet, the Pyro. Yeah.
- Turtle Kittens: After Tang Shen witnessed her brother-in-law kill her husband, he would go on to capture and rape her before revealing that he drowned her infant daughter. After escaping, she tries running to her family for support, only to reveal that the Shredder and convinced them that he was her husband and that she had disgraced them all, forcing Tang Shen to flee to New York alone. Before she could properly start over, she is then mutated by the Kraang by accident and is forced to flee.
- This trope sums up the core of Courtney and the Violin of Despair, as befits the Revenge Fic setup. Courtney continues to behave normally for the most part, but she begins to lose her love of music. She just as gradually begins to rediscover it after she is freed of the curse.
- Imperfect Metamorphosis has Rin Satsuki, whose backstory starts with being kidnapped as a child by slavers and only gets worse from there. Over the course of the story itself she is attacked, brutalized, betrayed, at one point her mind is literally shattered, and nearly everyone in Gensoukyou wants her dead. It is no mystery whatsoever that she becomes a Death Seeker.
- In the Bayverse fic Property Of, most of the human characters go through a minor one, as before coming to Cybertron they had been captured, drugged, separated from their loved ones, and spend an amount of time in a pet shop, waiting to be sold. Some humans, however, get a full dose of this trope:
- Annabelle Lennox had already been separated from her parents when they went to try and fight the Decepticons invading Earth. She was captured and processed, then sold to a mech who couldn't effectively take care of her, and spent her first few weeks off Earth scared out of her mind. Keep in mind that Annabelle's only four. Luckily for her, she gets taken in by Ironhide, who does his best to keep her happy and safe.
- Miles went through the same capture and processing ordeal as the other humans, but his TCL really started when he was purchased by a neglectful, abusive Decepticon. He was deprived of food and water for days at a time, tortured for the amusement of his owner and other Decepticons, and eventually thrown out and left to fend for himself. This led to him trying to survive on his own for over a week while other mechs tried to catch him. He was finally caught by Prowl. Even though Prowl means him no harm (and is disgusted that Miles was mistreated), Miles' fear of mechs keeps him from letting his guard down for days until Sam, Mikaela, and Bumblebee get him to see that not all mechs are bad.
- Attelus Kaltos of Secret War. His whole life seems to be this, from one horrible thing after another: as a teenager his whole planet was embroiled by war, his city bombarded from orbit and he was one of the few survivors. For months he lived alone and was eventually forced to cannibalism to survive. But before that it's heavily implied his mother did something horrible to him as a child, this isn't elaborated on. In Secret War, the girl he loved tried to kill him. Then when he finally professes his love, she's immediately killed, then her body stolen and taken off world, this after, during their fight, she dealt him a horrific scar across his cheek which will be there forever to remind him of this constantly and it only gets gets worse, far far worse from there. He's so far type A but is very close to losing it, and becoming a full on type D.
