History Main / HisStoryRepeatsItself

* At the very beginning of ''[[WarchildSeries Warchild]]'', Jos is abducted by pirates and abused by their captain Falcone. He escapes. Much of the rest of the book is spent showing him coping with that experience and the difficulties he has in trusting people because of it. But you know [[BigBad Falcone]] will be showing up again. Sure enough, in the climax, [[spoiler: he captures Jos yet again and repeats the same pattern of abuse. And this time Jos can't even repress the memory. Unusually, Jos isn't able to face his demon or die by them. He's rescued. Not that it stops him from killing Falcone the third time they meet, when it's Falcone who's been captured.]]

** ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'': Snake's inability to [[ShootTheDog kill Fox to ensure an easy victory]], because he had learned from his mistakes of killing Fox and Big Boss in ''VideoGame/MetalGear2''.

* In Videogame/TheLastOfUs (trope image), a ZombieApocalypse breaks out and Joel has to carry his daughter to safety through a hostile environment. [[spoiler:At the end of the game (20 years later), he ends up having to carry his surrogate daughter to safety through a hostile environment.]]
* An interesting variant happens in ''VideoGame/InFamous''. Cole [=McGrath=] gets superpowers. Later, he married the love of his life, Trish, and they had two daughters. Then the beast came, destroyed absolutely everything (and killed Cole's family), and Cole went back in time, gave Cole [=McGrath=] superpowers, and killed Trish to make sure Cole wouldn't do the same mistake he did.

** Early in ''VideoGame/AceCombat5TheUnsungWar'', Nagase is almost shot down by a Yuktobanian missile but saved when her flight lead Captain Bartlett takes the hit for her and crashes. Bartlett isn't found, dead or alive, for much of the rest of the game, and the whole event weighs heavily on Nagase's conscience. Several months later, Nagase is finally shot down under similar circumstances, with no one to take the missile for her, but survives and emerges from the ordeal a [[InUniverseCatharsis much better-adjusted individual]].

* The ''Franchise/MetalGear'' series deserves its own section.

** ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2'': Subtle one. Otacon loses his father - and almost his sister - due to a drowning suicide by the former. If he had been there, he would have been able to save them - but he was in his room [[{{Squick}} having sex with his stepmother]] at the time, and therefore didn't respond to his sister's cries for help. At the end of the Tanker chapter, Snake calls for Otacon to save him from drowning. This time Otacon saves him by ''riding a boat out onto the sea in a thunderstorm'' just to pull him out of the water.
** ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolidPortableOps'': Big Boss assassinated The Boss, but, when his old friend Python begs for him to finish him off the same way The Boss did, he tries to save him instead.
** ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid4'': [[spoiler: Naomi]] dies in similar circumstances to Sniper Wolf (even the music is the same), and Otacon is overwhelmed. However, instead of grieving, he quotes the line ''Snake'' uttered after Wolf's death ("I don't have any tears left to shed"), and shakily gets on with life.

** In a very meta way, the finale of ''VideoGame/AceCombatAssaultHorizon'' calls back to a particular mission of ''The Unsung War'', where [[spoiler:Chopper]] cannot eject from his crashing plane due to burnt-out circuitry, as you can only helplessly watch him die. In ''Assault Horizon'', Guts takes a missile for you (mirroring ''another'' {{wingman}}'s actions in ''VideoGame/AceCombatZero''), but Bishop (the player character of ''ACAH''), being an even more insane badass than Blaze (the ''[=AC5=]'' PC), puts up a spectacular display of high-altitude marksmanship and ''snipes'' off Guts' malfunctioning canopy with his machinegun in mid-air, so he can bail out into the sea.

* In ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', Scar starts out a member of an oppressed ethnic group, the Ishvalans, wanting revenge on those who nearly wiped out his people, namely Amestris. By the end of the story, he pays an instrumental role in saving Amestris...from the same cabal that manipulated Amestris into its war with Ishval.

* ''Anime/SwordArtOnline'': during the ''Gun Gale Online'' arc, Kirito is faced to confront a player who had survived being trapped in SAO with him who was a member of a player-killer guild, who is now killing players in the real world from within GGO.
* ''Manga/{{Aruosumente}}'' has an intergenerational example. Oracle Kian had to die because he got too involved with matters of the military, after which a rule was established that the Oracle may not have any connections to the military. His son Legna's quest to find the source of the killing intent [[DreamingOfThingsToCome he dreamed of]], however, forces him to investigate more than the Senate would ever approve, and he becomes friends with Lante — the commander of the White Knights — , threatening him to unwittingly repeat what his father did.

* In ''VideoGame/BlazeUnion'', Gulcasa loses a number of people important to him through death and betrayal. He blames this on his own personal weakness (although every circumstance was pretty much out of his control) and vows to gain the power that he needs to really protect his loved ones. Three years later, another large-scale conflict starts; whether or not Gulcasa is capable of protecting his allies depends entirely on whether you're playing ''VideoGame/YggdraUnion'' ([[spoiler:he can't]]) or ''YggdraUnison'' ([[spoiler:he does]]).

Essentially, this trope is parallelism between what happened to a character before the story started and something that happens to them during the story.

* In ''VideoGame/BlazeUnion'', Gulcasa loses a number of people important to him through death and betrayal. He blames this on his own personal weakness (although every circumstance was pretty much out of his control) and vows to gain the power that he needs to really protect his loved ones. Three years later, another large-scale conflict starts; whether or not Gulcasa is capable of protecting his allies depends entirely on whether you're playing ''YggdraUnion'' ([[spoiler:he can't]]) or ''YggdraUnison'' ([[spoiler:he does]]).
* [[TearJerker Tatsuya Suou]]'s history in {{Persona 2}}. He pretty much threw the weight of the world on his shoulders and tasked himself to destroy [[EldritchAbomination Nyarlathotep]]'s plans before they started so his friends wouldn't have to suffer. He failed.

* ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'': Princess Luna suffers from an unusually-literal version of this trope when she inflicts recurring nightmares on ''herself'' in which she turns into Nightmare Moon and (show is vague, but I would guess slays) the Mane Six, just to remind herself never again to give way to the Nightmare.

* An interesting variant happens in ''VideoGame/InFamous''. Cole McGrath gets superpowers. Later, he married the love of his life, Trish, and they had two daughters. Then the beast came, destroyed absolutely everything (and killed Cole's family), and Cole went back in time, gave Cole McGrath superpowers, and killed Trish to make sure Cole wouldn't do the same mistake he did.

* In ''Film/{{James and the Giant Peach}}'', James' parents were killed by a runaway rhinoceros. Sure enough, in the movie version, the rhino reappeared.

->''"Like all the bad things in my life, it started with the death of a woman."''

* An interesting variant happens in inFamous. Cole McGrath gets superpowers. Later, he married the love of his life, Trish, and they had two daughters. Then the beast came, destroyed absolutely everything (and killed Cole's family), and Cole went back in time, gave Cole McGrath superpowers, and killed Trish to make sure Cole wouldn't do the same mistake he did.

Simply put, backstory is a theme. And themes need resolutions. Thanks to the LawOfConservationOfDetail, you can probably bet that the resolution to a character's backstory will involve them facing the exact same or similar event that haunted their past, allowing them to conquer their demons once and for all... or die by them. Such event is guaranteed to be a climax of some sort.

** Early in ''VideoGame/AceCombat5TheUnsungWar'', Nagase is almost shot down by a Yuktobanian missile but saved when her flight lead Captain Bartlett takes the hit for her and crashes. Bartlett isn't found, dead or alive, for much of the rest of the game, and the whole event weighs heavily on Nagase's conscience. Several months later, Nagase is finally shot down under similar circumstances, with no one to take the missile for her, but survives and emerges from the ordeal a much more well-adjusted individual.
** In a very meta way, the finale of ''VideoGame/AceCombatAssaultHorizon'' calls back to a particular mission of ''The Unsung War'', where [[spoiler:Chopper]] cannot eject from his crashing plane due to burnt-out circuitry, as you can only helplessly watch him die. In ''Assault Horizon'', Guts takes a missile for you (mirroring ''another'' {{wingman}}'s actions in ''VideoGame/AceCombatZero''), but Bishop (the player character of ''ACAH''), being an even more insane badass than Blaze (the ''[=AC5=]'' PC), puts up a spectacular display of high-altitude marksmanship and ''snipes'' off Guts' malfunctioning canopy so he can bail out into the sea.

* In ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', Scar starts out a member of an oppressed ethnic group, the Ishvalans, wanting revenge on those who nearly wiped out his people, namely Amestris. By the end of the story, he pays an instrumental role in saving Amestris.

Compare with {{Bookends}} and MyGreatestSecondChance.

* ''Webcomic/ABrokenWinter'': After failing to save his son's life, Kuroda is given the chance to save his best friend's son, Kokkan, which he does eventually. He then raises the child in his son's place, even going so far as to alter public records to keep Kokkan's true identity (wanted son of a terrorist) a secret* ''{{MAG ISA}}'' -- the entire comic is all about the recurring theme of being alone. Both among the protagonists and antagonists.

Compare with BookEnds and MyGreatestSecondChance.

* Juri in ''RevolutionaryGirlUtena'' has in her backstory been in a romantic triangle with Shiori and another nameless boy from the duelling club. The boy was interested in her, Juri was in love with Shiori, and Shiori was uninterested in the boy but interested in hurting Juri and so convinced the boy to go out with her instead. During the Akio Ohtori Arc, Ruka, the former captain of the Duelist club appears, and starts going out with Shiori, although he's really interested in Juri and is trying to make Juri forget her infatuation with Shiori.

* ''Anime/SwordArtOnline'': during the ''Gun Gale Online'' arc, Kirito is faced to confront a player who had survived being trapped in SAO with him who was a member of a PlayerKiller guild, who is now killing players in the real world from within GGO.

* ''Anime/SwordArtOnline'': during the ''GunGaleOnline'' arc, Kirito is faced to confront a player who had survived being trapped in SAO with him who was a member of a PlayerKiller guild, who is now killing players in the real world from within GGO.