Woobie / Psychonauts

In a world where psychics are painfully aware of mental issues, it should come as no surprise that there are a lot of characters that need hugs. Be warned, there are spoilers for the games on this page.

Razputin Aquato

The main character of a franchise about diving into people's minds and helping them with their traumas is, of course, going to get a folder all to himself.

• In the first game alone, when he starts to talk to Ford about how he thinks his Dad hated him and tried to distract him from his powers and/or kill him with endless training, it's hard not to feel sorry for him. This is temporary though, because by the end of the game we find out it was all a misunderstanding/misinterpretation.
• Rhombus of Ruin has him trapped in a chair, forced to bodysurf across various minds in the ocean, and desperately trying to save his new friends. Then he realizes his kidnapper is none other than the mad dentist antagonist of the first game. At the end, as everyone is running toward the jet, he mistakenly believes they left him behind in the self-destructing base.
  • This game also him unsure if he is Lili's boyfriend at the beginning, something that runs into the Psychonauts 2. It's clear he cares about her, but he's not sure if it was a 'thrill of the moment' thing, and he's too shy to directly address the issue with Lili.
• Raz gets knockdown after knockdown in Psychonauts 2. His family is still very upset he ran away from home, they're very passive-aggressive about his psychic abilities, the Hand of Galachio menaces him every time he gets near water, and he's still not sure whether his Relationship Upgrade with Lili is official. And that's just what's carried over from the previous games. Things that happen to him in this one:
  • Raz gets (reasonably) shunted to the Intern program instead of being a psychonaut agent like he expected, goes through a humiliating hazing which makes him late to class, leaving Forsythe to be dismissive of him. The interns are also pretty mean, hazing him by tricking him into giving up his clothes and forcing him to make a traversal to Sasha's lab in his underwear.
  • Then he gets goaded into messing with her mind and—despite immediately regretting it and actively working to undo his mistake and make up for it—is given a Disappointed in You speech by his personal hero Sasha; even Forsythe remains a little upset with him for the rest of the game, though she does forgive him for his mistake.
  • And then, while trying to warn Lili that she might be accused of being the mole, she mistakes it for Raz actually accusing her and rushes off. He doesn't even have time to process that before the Grand Head of the Psychonauts tells him that the fate of the world is in his hands and he can't trust anybody. A lot of pressure to put on a ten-year-old...
  • And as if that wasn't enough, upon repairing Ford's mind he learns the Awful Truth that his Nona, the woman he's seen as his grandmother all his life, is in fact his great-aunt Lucrecia that Ford brainwashed to think she's his dead grandmother. Why? Because she's also Maligula, the war-mongering psychic who drowned his father's home country, and Ford couldn't bear to kill her because he loved her. The poor boy runs through the woods in the middle of the night, almost making it to his family's camp before Ford catches up to him.
  • The final levels center around Razputin diving into Lucrecia's mind to help Ford undo all the damage and make sure Maligula can't threaten anybody else. Of course, everything goes wrong, and he's forced to fling himself into a watery tornado and a Battle in the Center of the Mind to free his grandmother from an insanely powerful mass-murdering manifestation of her Flight or Flight instinct.
  • And all this, plus the events of the previous games, happen over the course of just three or four days. Let's hope the Psychonauts offer free therapy...

Lili Zanotto

Lili is something of a fiery personality, but she holds a lot of pain behind her rage.

• It's subtler in the first game, but Lili has a few moments. There's the subtle ways she reacts to Raz's speech and his talk with Dogen- ("Back home your powers make you an outcast. A loner." and "Punished... for having powers I never asked for.") the fact that she calls friendship bracelets stupid^* "Why? So you can unbutton it and take it off when you get tired of being friends with me?", but still wears one, how jaded she is about the Psychonauts, and the fact that Raz and Dogen are the only two campers she talks to. Then at the end of the game, she hears her dad was kidnapped.
• Psychonauts 2 has Lili very worried about her father; even after being rescued, he isn't entirely there. She tries to help him, but after Raz shows her evidence that might connect her to the people who did this, she angrily runs off to her private garden and basically mopes there for the entire game. She isn't even aware that the man's faking his coma to avoid detection... or that he isn't actually her dad, right up until he starts acting weird in the endgame.
  • In addition, due to a miscommunication, Lili mistakenly thinks Raz, her boyfriend, is accusing her of being The Mole. That has to hurt.

Whispering Rock Campers

Every kid seems to be a woobie to some degree, judging from Raz's speech and how they react to it.

• Dogen Boole: Small, runty, picked on by the other kids at camp, terrified of everything, barely able to control his own psychic powers, the first to lose his brain to Dr. Loboto, and even those who are generally his friends (Raz and Lili) still take occasional pot shots at his expense. While some are annoyed by him, others find him somewhat sad. Psychonauts 2 reveals his grandfather is one of the founding members of the psychonauts, implying that he is singled out for attention just because of his famous family.
• Milka Phage. In the actual game proper, the player doesn't get to interact with her very much, due to the fact that she goes invisible whenever Raz shows up. But her Campster account goes a bit further into her backstory. The reason she likes to turn invisible so much is that her mother used to make her because looking at her face upset her, due to the fact that she took after her father. She used to pretend to run away from home by going invisible for long periods of time - once even for three days. She enjoyed doing this because it meant she could hang out with her mom without her saying "mean things" to her.
• Bobby Zilch. He is a stereotypical bully, but there are fine details a player may miss. He has a distant father, who is probably a raving psychopath, his clothes are as tattered as Raz's (indicating he's dirt poor), and it's strongly hinted he's bullied at home. He has quite the inferiority complex, to the point at which getting Raz to say Raz thinks he's superior to him for not having his brain stolen is a triumph for him.
• Poor Crystal and Clem. Behind their obnoxiously peppy attitudes, they both have suicidal tendencies and Clem is heavily implied to have an abusive father. If there's anyone that needs a hug and some therapy, it's those kids.

Psychonaut Agents

There's a lot of painful memories in the modern Psychonauts.

• Sasha Nein: Lost his mother when he was just a baby; his only encounter with her comes from his telepathic readings of his father's mind, which were... erm, colored in the way you might expect a man's thoughts about his wife to be. Also, borderline emotionless. Does he just need a little wub to heal?
  • Either that or lots of Brain Bleach
    • Sasha's father can qualify too—lost a wife he dearly loved and drove his only child away, probably without ever realizing how. The heartbroken look on the poor man's face through the whole reel just makes you want to hug him.
• Milla Vodello: Used to take care of children... until they all died horribly in a fire. Still has little bits of that nightmare locked up in her mind. While she seems to be all better now, many fans seem to think she's still haunted and deeply troubled by her past. Even if she's coped, it's still pretty darn tragic...
  • This also probably has a lot to do with why she works with kids. The fact that it's a summer camp that involves pyrokinetic skills is probably another factor.
• Oleander. Regardless of how bad his dad might have been, he wasn't allowed to love the rabbits as a child, and was rejected from his dreams of the military for his height. You can't help but feel like he's a man with nothing but failed dreams that were out of his control, it's hard not to understand why he would want to take over the world.
• Poor Forsythe. Her backstory has her invent a revolutionary medical technique... and then have her boss steal it, renaming it after himself. She understandably tries to change his mind psychically, but accidentally drives him crazy, leading to Truman having to come in and undo the damage. And now, as the Lesser Head—or as she prefers, Second Head—of the Psychonauts, she has to juggle budgeting, assigning missions, training the interns, and sniffing out the mole. And then Raz accidentally inflicts her with a gambling addiction the same way she warped her former boss's mind... There's a good reason she goes on vacation in the post-game.

Thorny Towers Inhabitants

An abandoned insane asylum is filled with sad souls.

• Boyd Cooper: A former security guard who burned down his former place of work after being fired, he had an alternate personality known as "The Milkman" implanted into him by Oleander, turning him into an Unwitting Pawn. A look in his mind shows that he's extremely paranoid, believing that literally everything and everyone is against him somehow, a mindset that clearly hasn't done his mental state any favors.
• Gloria: While the rest of the inmates have somewhat goofy histories, Gloria's is genuinely sad: she spent much of her childhood at a Boarding School of Horrors, dreaming of the day her parents would arrive and take her home. While she shot to stardom, she abruptly crashed when she found out that her mother had committed suicide. Sure, she acts funny, but she is clearly deeply troubled.
  • Even more upsetting when you consider and combine the events of the "Tragedy" plays; her mother committed suicide because she never got a letter back from Gloria while she was in the Boarding School... because the letters she was sending never got sent by her agent.
• Fred Bonaparte: Originally just a Nice Guy who worked at the asylum as an orderly, he attempted to reach out to Crispin Whytehead, an incredibly withdrawn patient, by playing a board game named "Waterloo-O" with him. Crispin repaid this kindness by repeatedly beating Fred at the game, crushing the poor guy's self-esteem so thoroughly that he developed a split personality of his ancestor, Napoleon Bonaparte, who also constantly berated him for his lack of fighting motivation. When Raz first meets Fred, the former orderly has become a patient in the same asylum he worked in, and Crispin has basically stolen Fred's position. Thankfully, after Raz helps him, Fred is able to get some good old-fashioned retribution.
• Edgar Teglee: A talented artist who is unable to finish a painting without covering it with the same scene of a bull and a bullfighter, much to his immense frustration. In his mind, he is tormented by a rampaging bull called "El Odio", which prevents him from overcoming his bullfighter rival, Dingo, and reuniting with his love, Lampita. In truth, Lampita and Dingo are romanticized versions of Lana and Dean, Edgar's high-school girlfriend and the male cheerleader she cheated on Edgar with, and El Odio is actually Edgar transformed by the rage he has for them. Once Edgar has it spelled out to him that he's wasted a lot of time and energy being hung up on people who don't deserve it, his resulting depression lets down his teammates, losing the Wrestling Finals.
• Sheegor: Dr. Loboto's beleaguered assistant, she lives in fear of him and what he might do to her pet turtle, Mr. Pokeylope. He abuses her constantly, and she has a childlike mind. When you use Clairvoyance on her, she sees Raz as Jesus an angel, come to save her from her torment.
• Poor Loboto. As Rhombus of Ruin revealed, he was a psychic as a child... and his parents hated psychics so much that they gave him a botched lobotomy. And in Psychonauts 2, it turns out the mastermind terrified him enough to implant horrible visions and psychic traps, preventing the Psychonauts from figuring out who employed him. The damage is bad enough that even Milla feels sorry for him, and he spends the rest of the game laying on a table in Sasha's lab. Also, he left his kid at camp, leading to fridge logic regarding his relationship as a father...

The Aquato Family

The Aquato Family in general has its fair share of woobieness. They're refugees in what is clearly worn clothing, bearing a curse from a psychic, and they have to deal with the fact that Raz, the middle child, ran away from home to join the Psychonauts—despite the family actively distrusting psychics beforehand. There's a lot of barely restrained resentment and anger, as well as strain in their relationship with Raz, and Hollis tells them to set up camp in the nearby abandoned tourist trap. Of course on top of all this, they each have their additional stresses.

• Augustus has to deal with the knowledge that he alienated Raz with his aggressive training. And now that he's exploring his own psychic abilities, he's putting strain on his relationship with his wife. Then, at the end of the game, he discovers some of his memories are fake...
• Donatella is a mother whose child ran away out of the belief that his family would hate him. And it's clear that she is struggling to accept this new paradigm, not having processed how she feels about this. It doesn't help that her husband is psychic, and apparently hid it his whole life.
• Dion is pretty much a teenager forced into a stressful situation as he watches his family fall apart, and quite reasonably blames Raz, functioning as a Big Brother Bully. When he goes too far in his comments, though, he immediately shows regret; it's clear that for all his anger, he is hurt that his little bro ran away.
• Frazie is a secret psychic herself, not willing to admit to her abilities even now that her father has started to explore his own psychic powers. She gets mad at Raz for suggesting it's all okay now, and spends most of her time hiding away from her family.
• Mirtala and Queepie are too young to really be angry about the situation, but they can understand that something is wrong and Raz is related to it. Queepie expresses vague coldness at Raz, running away whenever he comes to talk, while Tala obliviously practices her acrobatics like nothing is wrong. (Both still view Raz has heroic, and when Queepie meets one of the interns, everything is okay again between him and Raz.)
• And then there's Razputin's Nona, a charming old woman that's tragically losing herself to senility, often mistaking Raz for Dion or Queepie, and who is at the center of Psychonaut 2's major plot twists...

The Psychic Six

The battle in Grulovia left its mark on all of the Psychic Six, and all of them blame themselves to some degree for how terribly the whole thing went. That would automatically qualify them for Woobieness, but some have it worse than others. To wit:

• Otto Mentalis got off the lightest, but has to deal with being the most functional founding psychonaut left. In fact, at the start of the game he and Compton are the only two of the original Psychonauts that are still part of the organization, and arguably the only one that could be called 'active'.
• Compton Boole suffers from extreme anxiety and hypersensitivity, often locking himself in the psychoisolation chamber to avoid the perceived criticism of his colleagues. Whether or not that criticism exists, it's clear from his mental world that it affects even his day-to-day activities. In the past, he accidentally killed a roomful of animals due to suffering a psychic sensory overload while trying to rescue them.
• Cassie O'Pia has wandered off to Green Needle Gulch, unable to handle the modern-day Psychonauts and becoming trapped in her own mind as one of her archetypes fights to control/protect her. When Raz meets her, she's very friendly and polite but terrified of the "queen" that won't let her go. Even before the battle, her past wasn't exactly a happy one: abandoned by her parents at a counterfeiting factory and forced to work under the abusive criminal boss Fanny Flats, and suffering brutal interrogation from cops who, her mental figures imply, were working with or bribed by Flats. She only escaped this horrible situation by secretly publishing a book that turned out to be a worldwide hit.
• Bob Zanotto has fallen into deep alcoholism in an attempt to bury the pain of losing his mother when young, his husband Helmut at the battle of Grulovia, and his job after his alcoholism forced his nephew Truman to fire him. It's so bad that his plants quietly beg Raz to intervene.
• There's good news! Helmut Fullbear is alive! He's just a disembodied brain that has been languishing in Otto's lab for the past twenty years, but unable to communicate because every time he tries to reach out psychically, his memory of Maligula taunts him that Bob is dead and everyone's abandoned him, to the point he retreats into his own Memory Vault to live in a coma-like state.
• Ford's mind has been shattered... but not, as the world believes, by a powerful psychic duel. No, he did it to himself to hide the fact that he didn't kill Maligula, but instead brainwashed her and hid her away. He's deeply ashamed once Raz brings his mind back together. The fact that Ford is the most adorable, nice, caring adult in the entire game makes it downright heartbreaking.
• And then there's Lucrecia Mux, the forgotten seventh member of the psychic six. Her mind was altered, abused, warped, and brainwashed so many different ways over the course of the story, you can't help but feel for her. Also she accidentally murdered her own sister (and a bunch of other people), which is what made her snap and become Maligula in the first place.