The Woobie Cleanup

Mmm... Reading that, I'm going to switch to Stoic Woobie for that case.

I'll finish Steppenwolf's writeup later. In the meantime, new Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds candidate!

What's the work?

Midsommar is the recent directorial effort from Ari Aster, director of last year's Hereditary. The plot follows a group of college students flying out to Sweden to visit a pagan commune where Pelle, the Swedish member of the group, was raised.

Who is she?

Dani is the girlfriend of Christian and the eventual Villain Protagonist.

What is her predicament?

Oh, where to start? She starts off just being The Woobie, and it's heavily implied she suffers from a mental illness of some sort, probably bipolar (which her sister had) or depression. At the beginning of the movie, she gets a disturbing email from her sister:

i cant anymore - everything’s black - mom and dad are coming too. goodbye.

She rings Christian, her useless and obliviously abusive boyfriend who tries to convince her that it's just a ploy for attention, and she manages to accept that to some extent until she gets a phone call and finds out that her sister has killed her parents and herself by flooding the house with carbon monoxide from the garage. It goes without saying that Dani goes into hysterics at this point. From that point on, she has frequent panic attacks.

A while later, Christian plans a trip to Sweden without telling her and gaslights her into thinking he did. She talks him into taking her along, and once there, she takes shrooms with her friends and has a bad trip where she runs into the outhouse and sees a creepy face. Later on, she witnesses the gory ritualistic suicide of a couple of older members of the cult, and goes into Heroic BSoD.

Over the next few days, her friends start disappearing, and she's brought into the Maypole dance ... which she ends up winning and becoming the new May Queen, all while Christian cheats on her with a girl who's been lusting after him. And when she discovers that, it sends her overboard. Then she's given permission by one of the elders to decide Christian's — who is paralyzed by a drug — fate, all while looking extremely unhappy. She finally decides to have him burnt in the temple with the rest of her friends and a couple of cultists, and a smile slowly creeps up her face.

Can she defend herself/is she a jerk?

She never really has any need to defend herself, so I can't say for sure. But given how prone she is to panic attacks, it seems a little unlikely. And for the most part, she's the nicest person in the movie, sans the cultists. At least until she loses her marbles.

Sympathy standard?

Almost all of Christian's friends were jerks in one way or another, harping on him for letting her "abuse" him by venting, or distracting him from his thesis, and repeatedly disrespect for their hosts (not that they're especially good people). The only exception is Pelle, who lost his parents in a fire before he was nurtured by the cult, but he's a case of Angst? What Angst?

Terri, her sister, is never shown onscreen except for her dead body, so we don't get to know much about her beyond being mentally ill.

While the fate of Christian might have been Disproportionate Retribution, he was still abusive and an approved Hate Sink.

Verdict?

for Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.

Edited by Stellarvore on Jul 29th 2019 at 9:51:14 AM

Sure to Dani.

I'd even say she could be a vanilla Woobie because none of her friends are sympathetic and it's more of Then Let Me Be Evil. But yes to Dani Phantom.

Dani.

As for Jidan's Not So Stoic moments, he frantically screamed "Lennon!" when a collision with the ship caused the child to fall in the middle of the Interdimensional Sea. I'm sorry to forget that scene in "Lennon's True Identity".

Edited by IukaSylvie on Jul 30th 2019 at 1:50:16 AM

Dani.

Wheel Chair Woobie: Alan Hamilton in Recovery. The symptoms of his brain damage mean that it counts as a "visible impediment". He is not exactly bullied, but yelled at by both his father, wife, son and a customer at his job. We see him curl up in a ball of pity twice in near succession, the second time involving him clutching a pillow marked with his wife's name and stating his wish to turn off his brain. We see him sobbing about three times, once in a flashback.

Edited by TheTimelessChild on Jul 31st 2019 at 6:50:22 PM

Please do an effort post.

I think you can find a template on page one.

So....you want to clean up the Woobie section because you don't agree with certain entries on that list. Isn't that the reason it's a YMMV trope? YMMV has been created because the tropes that go there are debatable and not everybody may agree with them. So why this extra hurdle tropes must take for adding The Woobie to a page?

But since apparently we have to do this the hard way now, I want to defend the following entries from Requiem for a Loud:

• Lincoln, most of all. In the span fo the story he goes from being told that he will die in 2 weeks’ time, to finding out how a series of freaky coincidences lead to him being in his current condition, to having to watch his sisters sink into a depression because of this sad news, to having his girlfriend break up with him due to a misunderstanding, to feeling he should be the one staying strong for everyone else's sake instead of the other way around; the universe really has it out for him. At least that second last one gets rectified once Ronnie Anne realizes her mistake.
• Adrien, a boy Lincoln meets in the hospital, also qualifies; He has been fighting a losing battle against leukemia for a year and a half already by the time we first meet him. Plus, the years of traveling around the world with his mother (his only close relative apparently) made it impossible for him to get any friends, which means that only his mother will truly remember and mourn him after his passing, unlike Lincoln, who has a large and loving family plus at least one true friend.
• The Loud sisters, once they get to know the truth (first only the elder sisters know, but the younger onces learn about it later). Knowing that they're going to lose their one and only brother at a very young age, one shouldn't blame them for being absolute wrecks (Lori and Lynn especially; the latter perhaps takes it the hardest since she initially believes that she caused Lincoln's condition by hitting him with a soccer ball).

Edited by BoukenDutch on Aug 2nd 2019 at 8:26:09 PM

It's subjective yes, but we want some ounce of professionalism. And I think we're all in agreement that Lotso does not count as a Woobie especially fot reasons stated in the movie that he abandoned his owner and not the other way around.

Anyway, its been a while. Yes to everyone I missed.

I have a question, how do we categorize characters who have tragic backstories, but are really creepy?

Like DCUA Toyman, who's father was used as a patsy by a gangster, then went to jail, so Toyman as a child went from foster home to foster home, but grew up to be a creepy psychotic villain.

Or there is the movie One Hour Photo, where a character named Sy Parrish is a creepy stalker, but its heavily implied he was messed up by being sexually abused as a child.

Yes to all the candidates I missed.

The problem is that we can't include groups unless they are a family or a species.

Dani

This is an example correlated to my two examples for Complete Monster seen at Romani Mythology.

Who is she

Ana is the queen of the Keshali, who was fancied by the king of the Loçolici (humans cursed by Satan). She refused him, prompting him to hunt down her people and devour them. To protect her people she agreed to marry him, but still had some dignity and did not have sex with him. The king cirumvented that fact by drugging her and raping her, producing the hateful Melalo, a two-headed bird responsible for all rape and murder in the world.

Melalo goaded his father into raping Ana more times, each time she bore a monstrosity that embodies a specific disease. She was also tricked into impregnating herself with more disease demons by Melalo; for some idiotic reason she trusted her son to help her, and for her troubles a mouse gnawed its way inside her and a beetle crawled up her vagina, producing the gods Lolmischo and Minceskre respectively. All these rapes are extremely humiliating and she ends up suffering from her own children infecting her body.

Eventually, with Ana's fellow Keshali having attempted on the king's life, he allowed her to divorce him... but only if she kept herself immortal, drinking the blood of three of her kin for all eternity. As soon as she dies, all Keshali will belong to the king and will be killed.

Now Ana lives as a recluse in the mountains, killing any encroachers with avalanches. Fortunately she does her best to protect her worshippers from the evils that came out of her snatch.

Can she defend herself

She could at first, but not after being drugged and raped so many fucking times. Once she emancipated herself she can now at least avalanche any intruders, but is powerless to stop her ex from taking his revenge should she croak.

Sympathy Standard

Rape victim to the point of explicit trauma and even willing to help people. Noble and altruistic, she didn't deserve that happened to her.

Veredict

?

Ana as The Woobie. How could the Romani people think of such sickening things...?

Ana as The Woobie.

When you're on the road and nobody wants you (plus at the epicenter of paths plague spread across Europe) you're bound to think the world is unfair.

Sure to Ana as The Woobie.

Here's Olrik's writeup (since I have other Echoes candidates, I prefer to EP them all and then deal with all of their write-ups at once) :

Blake and Mortimer: The colonel Olrik, of all people, went through a lot in The Septimus Wave. Not having recovered from the late Septimus's brainwashing in The Yellow "M", he found refuge in Miss Sing's Chinese establishment, where only morphine injections prevents him from completely going insane. The four Big Bads and Mortimer's activities with two Telecephaloscopes (one of Septimus's machines) doesn't help him : he has visions of a horde of Septimus wanting him back, only increasing his mental instability. The main antagonists then kidnaps him, with the intention of brainwashing him again. The aforementioned Septimus horde actually exists and wants to capture him at all costs, forcing him to make an alliance with Mortimer. Desperate to get rid of the Mind Rapes for good, Olrik even accepts to take over the Mega Wave to end the phenomenon, despite risking to permanently lose his sanity on the process. At the end, he hasn't recovered from his experience and is reduced to repeating a Madness Mantra in Bedlam Hospice. Despite being the arch-nemesis of Blake and Mortimer, Olrik's weaknesses are heavily present throughout the book, making him a surprisingly sympathetic character.

Please add it to the The Woobie Drafts.

~Bouken Dutch, please don't add an entry not approved by the thread. Please make an effort post if you want to add someone. You have been warned.

to Ana as The Woobie.

And I'm also warning you. Against the ongoing decline of TV tropes. The Woobie is a YMMV trope, for crying out loud. Of course not everyone will agree with the choices. What you are doing here goes against everything tv tropes is about. We're not Wikipedia. There is absolutely no need for all this red tape or making it so hard to add a trope to a page.

How long before all YMMV tropes are outlawed unless approved by a handful self-appointed censors? Heck, next you're going to lock tv tropes from being edited by anyone who doesn't pledge loyalty to you first.

This isn't just one person's opinion, it's the majority's opinion.

Did the draft.

Extending from my post, do you think the Keshali count as a woobie species since they were genocided and eaten by the king and then will be the subject of mass murder again once Ana dies?