Dark And Troubled Past / Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus: Implied with Pomni and the five other souls she’s trapped with, as the show’s official synopsis states they’re tormented by Caine and "their own personal traumas".
• Anon: Dani, Hunter, and Tucker.
  • Dani fell pregnant at 16 and was forced by her mother Amy to have an abortion, scarring her for life and causing a lot of resentment between Dani and Amy.
  • Hunter had a sex tape filmed without his consent and leaked online. To save Hunter's education, Antonio forced Tucker to take the blame and get expelled instead.
• All four main characters in Broken Saints, despite coming from vastly different backgrounds, all have less than pleasant life stories:
  • Shandala was orphaned at infancy, and although her life among the Fijian Islanders is peaceful, when she was a young girl, her adopted mother was horrifically mutilated and murdered by white men under the direction of — and possibly including — her biological father.
  • Oran's father was killed during a bombing assault on Baghdad during the first Gulf War.
  • Kamimura was taken from his home at a very young age to become a monk, leaving his family behind to be killed in the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki in World War II.
  • Raimi has arguably the most mundane, but no less heartbreaking. After his father left, his mother died from what is implied to be cancer.
• Arguably, every character in Card Players. Nuff said.
• Don't Walk Home Alone After Dark: In The Worm, this is Averted. The psychologst mentions that Sparrow had a completely normal and happy childhood, making her suddenly snapping and committing the act that got her institutionalized even more strange.
• DSBT InsaniT: Martha was abused as a child by a man with a whip, as explained in the Special Info Episode.
  • Killer Monster wasn't always evil, but after being banished to a fiery realm for 10,000 years, he became the killer monster he is now.
• One of the De Noirs from Dusk's Dawn gives us an Info Dump about how his father is missing and how "illusions can't help."
• Minilife TV: Heavily implied with Emery Rose. Whatever horrible things happened in her past, Goshua seems to have wiped them from her mind and Monty tries to cover it up to ensure her happiness in the present.
• Arguably, Church from Red vs. Blue. While he doesn't remember it for the most part, the original Church is what you get when you brutally torture an AI into splitting into pieces, even to the point of using parts of its own mind against it (Gamma and Omega). The result is a constantly angry person who doesn't even understand why he's so angry all the time. Epsilon!Church probably remembers more about the torture, but chooses to suppress it to keep from going crazy.
• Considering that one of RWBY's themes is War Is Hell, the majority of the cast have their burdens from the past to shoulder.
  • Blake is a Faunus, a race that faces abuse and oppression at the hands of humans. She was born into the White Fang, and fell in love with an older member who became an abusive, anti-human, murderous psychopath. She ran away from the White Fang when she could no longer take their violence.
  • Weiss grew up under the thumb of an emotionally abusive father, who regularly took his anger out on her and tried to force her to abandon her own dreams and ambitions, all while her mother became a withdrawn, depressed, alcoholic to cope with being trapped in a loveless, abusive marriage. She'd watched family members and friends die at the hands of the White Fang.
    • Her siblings, Winter and Whitley were also subject to their father's abuse and their mother's emotional absence.
  • Ruby lost her mother to mysterious circumstances when she was a very young child, and was raised by her father and half-sister.
  • Yang's birth mother abandoned her for reasons unknown, her stepmother presumably died, and her father suffered a prolonged Heroic BSoD following these events, leaving Yang to raise herself and Ruby. She'd nearly gotten herself and baby Ruby killed trying to find her birth mother.
  • Nora was a street rat in Ren's hometown, abandoned there after her mother ran from Grimm. Ren himself was orphaned when a Nuckelavee Grimm attacked the town, killing everyone save for those two.
  • Emerald was a street rat, resorting to thievery in order to survive, and had nobody to care for her or love her.
  • Mercury grew up in an abusive household, with no mention of a mother, and a father who beat him. He'd ended up killing his own father prior to aiding the main villain.
  • Ozpin admits to Ruby that he's made more mistakes than anybody in Remnant, though it isn't specified what he's actually done (until Volume 6, that is).

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