Woobie / Marvel Cinematic Universe

It's practically a job requirement in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In fact, when you look over a lot of their behaviours and actions, it becomes very apparent that almost everyone, at the very least the leads, tend to have some form of depression or mental issues.

Films

• Avengers: Infinity War

The Avengers

• Where do we even begin with Steve Rogers? At the beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger, he's desperate to help in the war effort, but his terrible health blocks him from entering the military. Then things get even worse for him as he witnesses the supposed death of his best friend, loses the chance to be with the woman he loves, and wakes up after a crash almost 70 years later completely alienated. Things don't get much better for him in the sequels either, since the Winter Soldier turns out to be his best friend Bucky: who instead of dying, was kidnapped and brainwashed for decades into being a killing machine for the very organization they were fighting against in World War II. The love of his life is still alive, but very old and eventually dies of Alzheimer's. Steve finds new allies in the Avengers, but their ideological differences over the Sokovia Accords and the matter of what to do with Bucky tears the group apart, and drives a serious wedge between him and Tony Stark. Steve's team winds up becoming fugitives, and Bucky chooses to be put back in stasis until they can find a way to undo Hydra's brainwashing. Once Infinity War comes around, he ends up losing his two closest friends, Bucky and Sam, to Thanos's fingersnap. Come Endgame, although both friends return, Steve loses two more friends for real Tony and Nat.
• The fact that Bruce Banner has been at the mercy of the government, SHIELD, and Loki. The poor guy can never catch a break.
  • Brought up in Age of Ultron: Bruce is, as always, dealing with the horrible strain of living with his condition, and over the course of the film, he's left overwhelmed by trauma and guilt after the Hulk's rampage through Johannesburg, copes with his inability to maintain a relationship with Natasha despite clearly being attracted to her, and in the end, he can't even bring himself to stay with the Avengers, choosing to go on the run alone again after Ultron is defeated. He is last seen brokenly sitting alone in the Quinjet after rejecting Natasha's request to come back.
  • Even the Hulk himself earns Woobie points, especially in Thor: Ragnarok. He's constantly being feared and hated by everyone no matter what he does, and even Banner himself saw the Hulk as a curse at worst and a mere attack dog at best. When Thor in a moment of rage shouts that the people of Earth does hate him, the Hulk was clearly hurt by the remark. he gets stranded on Sakaar as The Grandmaster's champion, he's finally treated with adoration and respect by its people. But then, he's forced to leave it behind in order to help his friend Thor, whom he comes to befriend.
• The Winter Soldier AKA Sgt. James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes. He was tortured and experimented on by Zola, then thought dead after he fell from a Hydra train. He survived and was captured by Hydra, who brainwashed him and programmed him to be an assassin. For the next 70 years he was either in cold storage or defrosted to kill Hydra's enemies. He was so thoroughly brainfried that it takes Steve saying his name to send him into a BSOD. When he returns to base and begins to break down, he is slapped by Pierce and told to undergo a mindwipe: which he doesn't fight despite being able to destroy dozens of SHIELD agents at once. When he fights Steve again, he's completely falling apart.
• The Maximoff twins, of the jerkass variety. They start out as villains with an Irrational Hatred for Tony Stark and the Avengers, but they have a very good reason for turning out this way, having lost their parents and nearly died themselves after Stark Industries weapons destroyed their home during the civil unrest. The entire reason they volunteered for Baron Strucker's experiments in the first place was to get the power to protect their country from such attacks in the future. Pietro in particular is haughty, snarky, and aggressive, but he's had a rough life that's clearly impacted him, and ends up being brutally killed by Ultron.
  • Wanda Maximoff. Loses her parents at age ten, buried in rubble along with her brother for two days immediately after, undergoes near-fatal experiments at HYDRA's hands to get the power to protect her country, is deceived by Ultron, suffers a Heroic BSoD in the final battle out of both sheer terror and guilt for her part in Ultron's creation, and loses her brother, the only family she had left. And as the movies continue, she gets heaped with more and more suffering. She enters a relationship with Vision after Ultron's defeat, but then accidentally gets a bunch of Wakandans killed while trying to stop Crossbones' suicide bomb, leading to power-hungry politicians to impose new legislation meant to regulate the Avengers, leading to infighting that tears them apart. And on top of that, Vision is on the pro-Registration side, she's against it, and the couple goes to blows, and in the end they separate, with Wanda siding with Steve going into hiding in Wakanda. Somehow they manage to go over that and rekindle their relationship... only for Thanos' men to attack them because Vision has the Mind Stone and the only way to prevent Thanos for obtaining it and spell doom to the universe is to kill Vision... and only Wanda is capable of doing the final touches. After much contemplation and with heavy heart, Wanda did the deed and kills off yet another beloved person in her life... and yet Thanos uses the Time Stone to undo her work, rips the Mind Stone from Vision in front of her for himself, and then he dusts her as she'd cradling his lifeless corpse. Then when she's undusted, she finds that S.W.O.R.D. has taken Vision's remains and are illegally experimenting on him, and Tyler Hayward refuses to let Wanda take his body for a proper burial. In her grief, she ends up creating a false reality based on the American sitcoms she watched as a child, oblivious to the amount of pain she's causing the residents of Westview, in which she lives with a facsimile of Vision and two sons. When she eventually takes the Hex down, she has to sacrifice her new family in the process and go into exile. Then, she becomes Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
• Ultron is a Jerkass Woobie: He enters existence confused, disoriented, and fully aware, giving him no time to acclimate to the world. His skewed perspective on his mission, "peace in our time", makes it impossible for him to understand that his actions will destroy humanity. His interactions with the Twins, and state after they leave him, show that deep down, he's lonely and wants friends. His Despair Speech even indicates that he wanted to be something that could bring hope to people, but losing his chance for that sends him way off the deep end. In the end, he acknowledges that he's something of a disappointment compared to what he was made for, and Vision picks up on his fear of dying shortly before killing him. Vision even recognizes that Ultron, as dangerous and genocidal as he was, was unique and in pain, and regretted that destroying him was an inevitable necessity.
• Tony is another Jerkass Woobie, especially after Ultron's creation. He may go on stubbornly believing that he was right about the need for something like Ultron, but that comes from his crippling fear of Earth coming under attack by the Chitauri again, and the Avengers failing to stop it, fears that Wanda drags to the forefront with her powers. As the movie goes on, he has to deal with Ultron apparently killing JARVIS, as well as his guilt over the carnage that Ultron causes.

  Tony: I'm the man who killed the Avengers.

  • Even before Ultron, and especially after, Tony has serious issues in regards to feeling responsible for a lot of death thanks to his past as a weapons developer, his "Well Done, Son" Guy issues with his father, as well as repeated traumas throughout the films, throughout which its made clear Tony has little self-worth, being incredibly self-destructive, to the point he makes multiple Heroic Sacrifice attempts that its clear Tony has a Death Wish. Than at the end of Infinity War he has to watch as Peter Parker, a teenager he brought into this mess die, along with many of his other friends and allies, with no clear way on how he and the survivors are going to undo it.
• In Avengers: Age of Ultron, all of the Avengers, save Hawkeye, become woobies after suffering from the hallucinations caused by Scarlet Witch. Everyone is completely shell-shocked, with Natasha being nearly catatonic in the aftermath.
  • Natasha's Dark and Troubled Past gets brought up here, where it's shown that she was trained and conditioned to believe that she has no place in the world, was forced to kill a helpless and unarmed man to complete her training in the Red Room, was surgically sterilised as a "graduation ceremony", is left nearly catatonic after her Scarlet Witch-induced nightmares, considers herself a monster for the crimes she's committed in her past, and, despite her burgeoning relationship with Banner, she loses him when he decides to leave the Avengers to keep her and everyone else safe from the Hulk.
• Spider-Man: Homecoming: Peter's life has become incredibly complicated and busy since Civil War, but he is more than willing to show Tony that he has what it takes to be an Avenger. Unfortunately for Peter though, he is treated as a minor annoyance at best and completely ignored at worst. The only time Tony even talks to him directly is when he messes up. Not to mention that doing the right thing and stopping the Vulture results in him losing Liz. Infinity War only twists the knife when he becomes one of Thanos's victims, with him slowly crumbling into dust in his mentor's arms. His breakdown adds to the tragedy, as it only goes to show that he's still a kid who's afraid of dying. Though he is brought back to life, but he has to see his mentor Tony sacrifice itself to stop Thanos. After his death he is pressured to continue his legacy and ends up accidentally giving a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of a madman who he believes is a superhero. And then he accidentally kills said madman, who even after his death manages to expose his identity and frames him for his murder. While he avoid legal trouble, his life and the one of his friends becomes so screwed up that he goes to Doctor Strange to make him cast a spell that would delete everyone memories, but ends up bringing visitors from other universes. And then one of them kills aunt May, his only relative still alive, and in order to save the universe he has to make everyone forget his existence, ending up being completly alone, without any friends or family.
• Thor becomes a massive Woobie once he goes through a massive Trauma Conga Line in both Thor: Ragnarok and Infinity War. Thor already had to cope with losing his mother and apparently his adopted brother in Thor: The Dark World, only to discover that Loki had faked his death and replaced Odin, causing him to finally give up hope that his brother could be redeemed. He reunites with Odin, only for him to die. Immediately afterwards, his evil sister Hela promptly destroys Mjolnir and leaves him stranded on Sakaar, where's he's forced to be made a gladiator and had his head painfully shaved. In the final battle against Hela, he loses his eye, the Warriors Three and his home. Not long after that, however, his people's ship was attacked by Thanos. This leads to his brother, best friend (Heimdall), and half of his remaining people being killed. Then after nearly getting himself killed in hopes of getting a weapon that could kill Thanos and save everyone else, he lands a blow that only wounds the villain and gives him the opportunity to finish his plan. As a result, his failure indirectly enables half of the universe's population being erased from existence.
• Clint Barton becomes a Jerkass Woobie come Avengers: Endgame- his entire family turned to dust in Thanos' snap, while they were all enjoying a summer's day together (during his time of house arrest). This in turn causes him to lose his mind in despair, and become a homicidal Ronin. And on top of that, he is forced to watch his closest friend Natasha sacrifice herself for the soul stone.
• Westview Vision in WandaVision. He is recreated by Wanda with almost no memory of who he is and what life the real version of him had before Westview. He is forced to live out a script that he increasingly realizes is nothing but fake, is forced to question the morality and earnestness of the woman he truly loves, on top of having to be a father to two rapidly-growing children. He's scared by the fact he doesn't know anything outside of his life in Westview, yet when push comes to shove he does everything in his power to save the people in it, up to and including willingly tearing himself apart. And when he gets informed on what his wife has gone through in order for all this to happen, he immediately rushes back to her side despite the fact he himself at this point has arguably gone through just as much. When he fades away following the Hex's dissolution, he quietly accepts his fate as he bids farewell to Wanda.

Guardians of the Galaxy

• Peter Quill lost his mother to an unknown disease as a child and in a moment of panic, failed fulfill her last request to hold her hand as she died, all before being abducted by aliens on same night and raised by the (well meaning) Space Pirate, Yondu who repeatedly (half-jokingly) told Peter that he was the only stopping the rest of the crew eating him, not knowing how damaging that could be. Later in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Peter is reunited with his biological father Ego The Living planet and is at first thrilled to finally get a chance to bond with his father, only to find out that Ego is actually an Omnicidal Maniac who fathered him only to use as a tool for his Assimilation Plot, before murdering Peter's mother to keep her out of his way and has only been trying to bond with Peter to get him to go along with his plan. When Peter makes it clear that that isn't happening, Ego forces him to do his part and crushes the walk-man Peter's mom left him, out of spite. And if that wasn't enough, after being forced to kill Ego, Peter is forced to watch as Yondu, his remaining father figure sacrifices himself to save him. Then, in Infinity War his girlfriend Gamora is murdered, and his grief-driven actions inadvertently cost the heroes a potential victory over Thanos. Not long afterwards, he helplessly watches as his surrogate family gets wiped out one by one before he fades away as well. And when they are brought back, he has to deal with the fact that while Gamora has also been brought back by Nebula, she's from an alternate timeline where she never met him.
• Drax the Destroyer lost his wife and daughter, after they were murdered by Ronan the Acuser and is left so devastated by their loss, that he recklessly throws himself at any chance he gets at killing him, which eventually leads to him receiving a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Ronan and almost dies, after being left to drown to death, before he realizes that he almost got everyone killed for nothing, after Groot saves him.
• Rocket used to be a regular raccoon (like alien), until he was given sapience as a result of inhumane and painful experiments performed on him. Though he does act like a Jerkass most of the time, it's largely because he's the only one of his kind that he knows of and he constantly has feelings of loneliness and inferiority because of his species, which often leads to him lashing out and pushing away the few friends he does make. Then at the end of the first film, Groot, his only real source of companionship, before he met the rest of the guardians sacrifices himself to save them, leaving Rocket heartbroken, until he's able to revive Groot. But at the end of Infinity War he's left as the only surviving member of the Guardians at the moment.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 somehow turns Rocket's Woobie level from a 10 to a 100. Not only did we get to see his experiments, his very first words has him stating how much those experiments hurt, and Nebula even states that what Thanos did to her pales in comparison to the experiments Rocket went through. He was told by the High Evolutionary that he and the other three animal experiments back then that Rocket formed a bond with would visit "the perfect world" together, but after Rocket managed to solve a problem that the High Evolutionary couldn't figure out, the High Evolutionary changed his mind, and would rather see Rocket and his animal friends die out of sheer jealousy. And just when Rocket found a way for them to escape, all of his animal friends died before they could escape along with him.
• Mantis is an orphan who was "rescued" and taken care of by Ego. She has lived her entire life without any meaningful interaction and watching Ego kill his own offspring for who knows how many years. You can feel the poor girl's fear and helplessness as she's basically Ego's slave.
• Kraglin is left shocked and ragged with guilt, after he attempts a What the Hell, Hero? speech on Yondu for putting his personnel interests before the crew, which ends up sparking a mutiny, where he and Yondu are forced to watch as the crew members that refused to take part in mutiny are sadistically Thrown Out the Airlock one-by-one, as the mutineers celebrate.
• Carina, The Collectors slave, who he abused and threatens until she was pushed into committing suicide via grabbing the Power Stone, which violently destroyed her body.
• Nebula is a Jerkass Woobie. She was abducted by Thanos as a child and raised to be a killing machine, all the while constantly being treated as The Unfavorite. Whenever she loses to Gamora, Thanos would replace one of her body parts with cybernetics in an excruciatingly painful manner, causing her to grow up resenting her adoptive sister. Come Infinity War, she gets tortured by Thanos once again in order to make Gamora reveal the location of the Soul Stone. To make matters worse, Gamora whom she had finally reconciled with in Vol. 2, was killed by Thanos. By the end of the movie, she's left a broken wreck.
• Meredith Quill, who believes she finds her one true love, not knowing that it is he who eventually puts the cancer cells in her brain- which eventually kills her. In her final moments, she asks for her young son Peter to take her hand, which he can't even bring himself to do, out of devastation.

Other

• Loki from Thor is one of the jerkass or "destroyer of worlds" variety. He's been abandoned by his biological father and left to die as an infant, and was a Black Sheep in his adoptive family. While he's the villain, it's out of a desire to step out of the shadow of his adoptive brother and please his father. But when he crosses the line, Odin rejects him and Loki ultimately chooses to let himself fall to his death. In Thor: The Dark World, for his crimes in both Thor and TheAvengers, his father disowns him and he's left to rot in the dungeons where he's not allowed to see Frigga, the only person who treated him with love and respect. He's truly devastated when he hears that Frigga is dead, becoming little more than a broken mess until he gets the chance for revenge. In Thor: Ragnarok, after all what's happened his father says he loves both of his sons moments before dying, leaving Loki Trying Not to Cry. At end of the film Loki finally makes a Heel–Face Turn by coming with The Cavalry to help and save the remainder of Asgardians from Hela, and makes amends with his brother, but victory costs them their home. And in the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, Big Bad Thanos homes in on their location because Loki took the Tesseract before Asgard was destroyed, kills half of the survivors and murders Loki in a gratuitously graphic fashion after Loki attacks him in order to save his brother whom he once resented.
• Erik "Killmonger" Stevens from Black Panther is massive Jerkass Woobie. While he is a Psychopathic Manchild and Black supremacist, Killmonger faced years of racism, poverty, and discrimination. As a child, his uncle, King T'Chaka, killed his father Prince N'Jobu, leaving him orphaned and forced to endure years of racism in the slums of Oakland. Even as an adult, he still misses his father and is disillusioned how the Wakandan government left Africans like him to suffer just to protect its Hidden Elf Village status. During his final battle with T'Challa, he even shows signs of becoming a Death Seeker or having thoughts of suicide since, he laments how the world took everything and everyone he ever loved, and chose to kill himself after being defeated by T'Challa.
• T'Challa is a Vibranium woobie with his life being one long Trauma Conga Line. In Civil War, he witnessed his father die from a car bombing and it only goes downhill for him. In Black Panther, his admiration for his family is shaken, when he learned that his father killed his uncle N'Jobu and abandoned his cousin Erik in the slums of Oakland, who grows up into the villainous Killmonger. During the waterfall duel with Killmonger, he is forced to watch Killmonger murder his honorary uncle Zuri before getting beaten into a coma and thrown off the waterfall. Although he manages to reclaim the throne and save Wakanda, he has to watch Killmonger kill himself, thereby losing another family member. Yet in spite of this, he never loses hope and keeps on fighting to right the wrongs. And due to Chadwick Boseman's passing, it's also implied he died of unknown causes shortly after being restored by the snap, bringing his story to an even more tragic end.
• By the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming, Liz Allen is probably more of a woobie than Peter as she is not only abandoned by her date during homecoming dance, but her dad is found out to be a super-villain and imprisoned, and she now has to leave her life and friends because she's moving to Oregon after the fallout of her father's arrest.
• Even Thanos is one, albeit of the Jerkass Woobie type. He was ostracised in his early life for his deformity, and outright denounced as "mad" for proposing a potential solution to his homeworld's Overpopulation Crisis (albeit one that was outright genocidal, in spite of it being the only truly viable option). He then loses his homeworld, thus becoming the Last of His Kind and has to cope with Survivor's Guilt for failing to save his people before his world's destruction. Thanos is then forced to become a Galactic Conqueror to save the universe from Titan's fate, and becomes outright hated or feared by every being in the very universe that he sought to save. Then, when he finally enacts his plan to collect the Infinity Stones, he's forced to sacrifice Gamora, the only being he ever truly loved for the Soul Stone, and his followers were later killed as well. Even when he finally comes out as the victor by accomplishing his life-long goal, he's left with no one by his side to truly feel satisfied.
• Harley Keener in Iron Man 3- a lonely, bullied child, whose father abandoned him and his mother at a young age. While trying to help Tony during a rough spot, he is also sadly brushed aside by him, is even held hostage at one point, and eventually loses Tony- who was like a second father-figure to him.
• Ghost from Ant-Man and the Wasp qualifies; as a child her parents were killed in a freak accident caused by an experiment gone wrong. That same experiment gone wrong gave her the power to become intangible, except it also caused her constant pain and, by the time of the film, she was days away from fading out of existence entirely. She clearly doesn't want to hurt people, but is so desperate to avoid death or a Fate Worse than Death that she thinks she has to. It's hard to not feel bad for her when her adoptive father pleads for her to not take actions that would cross the Moral Event Horizon, but she goes through with them anyway because she truly thinks there's no other option. It also really helps that Hannah John-Kamen's big expressive eyes and beautiful yet gaunt face make one want to hug her even more. She finally catches a break at the end, not only surviving but also being forgiven by the heroes.Or maybe not, since, if she survived the snap, she may have died due to Scott and the Pyms no longer being there to cure her.
• Shuri becomes one especially going into Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; first off her father is killed by Helmut Zemo in Civil War, then after her cousin Killmonger defeats T'Challa for the throne, Shuri assumes she had lost her brother though it turns out he was fine and well, then like her brother she's killed by Thanos for 5 years before being brought back to life By Hulk, by this point it seems everything is fine and well, only for her to find out that her brother is suffering from an terminal illness, she tries the best she can to re-create the heart shaped herb in hopes of being able to use it to heal her brother, only for T'Challa to die while she was working on his cure, causing her alot of grief and one year later she's still not been able to move on from T'Challa's death and when Namor attacks Wakanda, her mother ends up being killed, losing the last surviving member of her family in the process and she goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, fully intending to kill Namor to avenge her mother, but much like her brother she's realizes that vengance is consuming her and lets go of her desire to kill Namor and forms a truce with him and Shuri is later able to finally overcome her grief for her brother's passing.

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