Angst? What Angst?

"We have no time for sorrows, Commander."

Screenwriter: So they're gonna have this crazy chase scene where his daughter almost gets killed several times and sees multiple people die.
Producer: Oh my god, that's horrible. That's definitely traumatizing for a child.
Screenwriter: No, she's like, "That was awesome!"
Producer: Oh, she liked when the people were killed and she almost died. Okay, good.

— Screen Rant Pitch Meetings: Day Shift

Imagine you found yourself Trapped in Another World, far removed from everything you know with no promise you could ever go back. And just as you started to come to grips with that, you discovered you were The Chosen One and that this world depended on you. And then your band of quirky companions, who had been your support, started to disappear one by one, leaving you alone with The Mole. And then the person you thought was your last friend betrayed you to the Big Bad, who threw you into his dungeon and promised to execute you at dawn. As you sit there in your chains, how do you feel?

Well, fortunately for you, you're a fictional character, so you get right to work on befriending the magical talking mice who know where the keys are kept. Turns out they know where to find a cool enchanted sword, too! Being in a story is awesome!

Angst? What angst?

The polar opposite of Wangst, this is when a character has been given every reason to fall into depression or become more violent, but... just doesn't, and life goes on. They aren't the Determinator; they aren't holding off their real feelings by an effort of will. Nor are they putting on a brave face because they can't endure pity. They're just sort of rolling with it, riding out the adventure as it comes and looking ahead to the next plot event.

This appears frequently in children's media, particularly adventure stories featuring young heroes who never Freak Out when piloting a burning biplane into a T. rex's gaping maw. These protagonists take everything in stride. If anything, they think it's all impossibly cool and wish it would never end. Standard children would be forgiven if they burst into hysterics, but it isn't fun for usual children to read about other kids screaming in terror as their lives fall apart. So fictional children don't. That said, it doesn't have to be an adventure story or a work specifically aimed at children, as any genre with horrible suffering is a good environment to show this off (except the ones that thrive on the characters angsting, like soap operas).

Given how disliked Wangst is, you'd think this would be preferable, but it can be mishandled. A fictional character shrugging at trauma that would reduce a Real Life person to emotional collapse — or at least a few honest tears — can definitely strain the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief (and disturb the in-universe characters too). Someone who does not react to suffering at all can come across as cruel and uncaring — hardly what it's meant to express. Of course, it can be used for laughs as well, or even for drama, especially if the lack of any emotion is used to imply that something is seriously mentally "off" with the character in question.

If it's later revealed they were suffering angst over it then that's Cerebus Retcon, and Salvaged Story if it was done in response to complaints about their lack of angst.

Possibly Truth in Television for the more extreme cases. If you're fighting for your life, you don't have time to think about how awful it is — not at that very second, anyway. Afterward, all bets are off. Also in some cases, it could be presumed that mourning did happen, just offscreen.

Contrast The Stoic, Emotion Suppression, Conditioned to Accept Horror, Too Broken to Break, Seen It All, and Unfazed Everyman for when their lack of angst is justified by their character or experiences; and The Sociopath and Lack of Empathy for when they're treated as wrong or callous for it. Also contrast Stepford Smiler, Heroic Safe Mode, and Tough Leader Façade for when they try to act like this hiding that they are feeling appropriate angst; and Law of Disproportionate Response for when their underreacting to big things and overreacting to little things is used as comedy or to show how mentally unstable they are.

Compare Plot-Powered Stamina, where characters shrug off physical (rather than emotional) trauma and stress like it's nothing.

In many examples of Merchandising the Monster, this seems to be present.

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Examples:

• Western Animation

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Anime and Manga

• 07-Ghost: After having had his country invaded and everyone he knew, including his adoptive father, murdered while still a small child, being made a combat slave and forced to kill people daily during training for years and seeing his only friend die after having been possessed by the man who killed his father, Teito Klein holds himself remarkably well. He still angsts once in a while, but who wouldn't in his place?
• In Assassination Classroom, there seems to be a narrative event horizon between the major action parts of the story and the rest of it. No matter how many times or how seriously the kids are threatened with death, they shrug it off afterwards with nary a mention.
• BNA: Brand New Animal: In Episode 4, Michiru spends some time missing her parents. After that, she never thinks about them again.
• Basquash!: Sela took her father's murder surprisingly well. It's kinda creepy, even.
• In Black Butler, Finny's backstory includes him being locked in a stone room and experimented on for an undetermined amount of time. The amount of times he complains about this? ZERO. Every character with a Dark and Troubled Past is subject for this except for Ciel. Ciel's other servants are a mild example, as well as Madam Red and the circus kids.
• In Black Cat, interestingly enough, the series depicts Train's progress of maturity to be going from wangsting about the past to becoming very carefree. In the second half of the series, Train gets over Saya's death and stops stressing about a lot of things (most of which are pretty important and angst-worthy). For example, when shot accidentally by Creed with the Lucifer bullet, while everyone else (including Creed) panics and tells Train that he'll transform into a monster, Train just brushes it off and says he'll handle that when it comes. When Train turns into a kid, everyone stresses about it while he actually thinks it's kind of fun (his more immediate thoughts being whether they can save money on kid's meal and metro ticket prices). This is even lampshaded later by one of his past Chronos superiors, who asks him if he even cares that Creed is trying to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. Train's answer is no, and that he only cares about what's for lunch tomorrow.
• Blood Blockade Battlefront:
  • Dog Hummer is surprisingly cheerful and polite despite how, even though he's an innocent man who has to be confined within the most secure prison in Hellsalem's Lot because he was forced to share a body with a serial killer. This is on top of the fact he’s still being held despite being able to control him for the most part.
  • The residents of Hellsalem's Lot in general are rather apathetic to all the chaos around them when they aren't directly being threatened. One episode ended with a giant tank being destroyed, with debris causing massive destruction. In a voice-over narration, Leo casually states that hundreds of thousands were killed from it while a light jazz tune plays in the background. And it never comes up again.
    • This is hilarious on a meta level because Helsalem's Lot is Manhattan after it became a place that connected to alternate dimensions, and New Yorkers are famous for shrugging off and ignoring the odd behaviors of their more colorful fellows.
• Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card: In the manga, Sakura doesn't seem particularly bothered that the Sakura Cards have gone clear and lost all their power. Compare to how upset she was when the Clow Cards were losing their magic in the second season of the original anime and this becomes very odd. This was fortunately corrected in the anime, where she updates Yue and Eriol about any new cards she has captured, and shows concern over the Sakura cards.
• It seems that every high school student and elementary school kid in Case Closed is completely unfazed by witnessing grisly murder scenes almost every day. Even bystanders and single-arc characters who would logically be less desensitized to trauma have often just lost someone and tend to describe horrific personal events with uniform slightly worried faces.
  Sera: That reminds me, you said that the victim had a lot of things going on earlier. What did you mean by that?
  Math Teacher: Tanba-sensei and my little sister were planning to marry... but his father was against it... But in the end, only my sister killed herself by jumping into the ocean to drown...
• In Cells at Work!, the transfused red blood cells remain cheerful and are quick to assist despite from their point of view, they had been kidnapped by a strange alien device, put through a centrifuge and then frozen to sleep before they awakened in the new body with no recollection of where they are.
• Chargeman Ken!: In episode 53 of the memetic anime from the 70s, Ken's sailor uncle, Yamada marries a woman named Yoshiko. Literally a day after the marriage, Yoshiko is revealed to be an alien in disguise and a spy, leading to her getting killed by Chargeman Ken. Immediately following the scene of Yoshiko's death, the episode jumps to Yamada cheerfully taking in the news that his newlywed bride is a dead alien spy, leading to an "Everybody Laughs" Ending when his brother suggests finding a new girl.
• Essentially the premise behind Cheerful Amnesia by Oku Tamamusi. A girl gets into an accident and loses her memories of the past three years, which includes meeting and getting to know her current girlfriend. The girlfriend herself is initially worried that she might be rejected, considering that having a female lover in the first place might be a huge surprise. Luckily for everyone involved, the amnesiac girl falls in love immediately after meeting her again. She spends the rest of the manga completely unfazed by the fact that she forgot three years of her life, instead being happy that she gets to experience some things for the first time again.
• Played with in Cyborg 009. The cyborgs tend to make quite a few jokes even while in the midst of dangerous situations and few seem troubled by the knowledge that there's no way to return to their previous lives. Granted this is justified for most of them, but it's kind of odd that 003 never shows much interest in finding her brother again. When the group is first escaping from the Black Ghost, they generally seem fine with the fact that their bodies have been drastically changed. Joe himself seems more concerned that he's been kidnapped for a week rather than the fact that he's now not entirely human (his reaction to a diagram of his modifications is just a "Woah!") 004 does show angst on and off over his dead fiancee and extensive body modifications, 008 briefly goes into a Heroic BSoD over Gilmore upgrading his body to be covered in silver scales without his consent, and while most of the team handles their upgrades and prosthetic replacements well enough in God's War, 003 breaks down completely upon receiving her new eyes and hand.
• Doma from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is an example of this. He lacked compassion since birth, and was entirely unfazed when his mentally unstable mother stabbed his father to a bloody mush, then committed suicide right after.
• Digimon Adventure tri.:
  • Following the reappearance of the Digimon Kaiser — that is, the trauma-induced world-conquering persona taken on by one of their old friends — the Chosen take no substantial interest in the state of the missing 02 kids and Ken in particular; at most they only get around to asking the Kaiser "what's wrong?"
  • In Confession, the only one who appears to show any legitimate grief over the death of Leomon is Meiko. The other chosen, and Sora in particular, seem more interested in comforting her.
  • During Loss, tri. at least partly realized it had run out of wiggle room, and went through a lot of emotional developments with comparative lack of articulation. With the sole exception of Sora and Pyocomon, each of the Chosen quickly adapt to their partner Digimon's loss of identity and by the fifth film the only real hiccup is that the Chosen have to explain about the pocket dimension in Koushirou's computer when the Digimon need to be hid.
  • In Our Future, Daigo pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice to save Taichi and the 02 kids. Yet the Chosen Children don't seem to mourn his death after the battle, as if treating his death as an afterthought.
• Digimon Fusion: Taiki and Zenjirou don't seem too upset about being stuck in an entirely different world away from everything they hold dear. Akari, on the other hand...
• Digimon Tamers: Ryo is pretty cheery, considering that he is forced to whip his Digimon partner to stop him from attacking everything in sight and that because of him he had to travel through the Digital World, without seeing any other human being, for at least a year. If you interpret his Ambiguous Situation and Continuity Snarl to mean that the Tamers and Wonderswan incarnations of Ryo to be the same character, he also has a long and extensive backstory that involves at least one Sadistic Choice and a Stalker with a Crush.
• Dinosaur King: Rex is bizarrely fine with being uprooted from everyone and everything he's ever known and dragged back to the future by his birth parents.
• Allen Walker of D.Gray-Man. The universe has put him through an incredible amount of crap, including Parental Abandonment, the death of his surrogate father, his turning his surrogate father into an Akuma because he didn't know any better, his freaky left arm going berserk and re-killing Mana after he got his face slashed up, getting adopted by an abusive Trickster Mentor who smacks him around and leaves him to pay debts upward of tens of thousands of dollars, and then having to find the Black Order headquarters with absolutely no clue where it was, and no help from Cross, who knocked him out and left so he wouldn't have to report back to his bosses. And that's just the backstory. Despite all this, and the fact that his disfigured left eye makes him see the tortured soul of every Akuma he comes across, he's cute and perpetually cheerful, and while he does get upset about some of what happens during the series, he always defaults back to his usual Wide-Eyed Idealist self eventually.
• Dr. STONE starts off with a strange light petrifying every single human on the surface of the planet. Most people's consciousness fades away pretty quickly, but the two lead characters, Senku and Taiju, are determined enough to force themselves to stay conscious for over 3,700 years. Although similar conditions of immobilization and sensory deprivation can cause severe psychological trauma after only a few days (in fact, hallucinations can start happening after as little as 15 minutes), they eventually emerge from their stone shells feeling just fine, with absolutely no mental health issues whatsoever. This is doubly impressive, considering how by the time they manage to break free from the petrification, all traces of human civilization are long since gone, and the fate of most of their loved ones is uncertain at best, yet no one seems to have any major issues with being torn from the comforts of modern life and forced into a survival situation.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Goku provides multiple examples, which are lampshaded In-Universe:
    • In the first Deagon Ball arc, Bulma asks Goku how he can be so happy when he tells her that he was abandoned in the woods, his grandfather died, and he was left alone for several years.
    • In the Android Saga of Dragon Ball Z, while everyone else is worried about the Cell Games and the possible end of the world, Goku is very chilled and chooses to spend his time hanging out with his family instead of training. This, naturally, has everyone worried.
    • In Dragon Ball Super, Beerus continuously lays into Goku for his willy-nilly attitude towards the universe's possibility of being erased if they lose the Tournament of Power. He orders Goku to panic or emote something other than excitement.
  • Gohan's screentime can be summarized thusly. Four years old, kidnapped by screaming crazies twice in one day, learning second-hand that his father was dead, gets abandoned in the wilderness for months, then goes through Training from Hell until he develops what a particularly cruel critic might identify as Stockholm Syndrome. He then loses a father figure in a hideous battle against space aliens, battles some more space aliens in an attempt to revive him, loses biological father again when he gets lost in space and won't come home and doesn't tell anyone why. Biological father finally comes home a year and a half later, they go through three more years of training (four, if you count the time chamber) and then Dad dies again and decides to stay dead. This is six or seven years of consistent, repeated emotional trauma, yet Gohan never stops acting like a happy, well-adjusted little nerd boy. ...Except for that whole "Saiyaman" phase, which was noted as being weird and unhealthy.
  • Android 18 is a minor example; after what is basically being physically Swallowed Whole by Cell's tail and enduring who knows what horrors inside his body and then later getting spat out, she shows no signs of being remotely traumatized upon waking up, seemingly being more concerned with learning Gohan beat Cell than the fact that she was Eaten Alive^note Though learning that the one responsible already faced his comeuppance may have helped her a little.
  • Videl as well, who just tapped into her ki during the World Tournament Saga and got a taste of the super human strength, speed, and durability the Z-Fighters took for granted. Yet her torture at the hands (Or under the foot of) Spopovich didn't give her any lasting mental health issues.
• Saito of The Familiar of Zero. He is trapped in a world which is the complete opposite of his own, demoted to something akin to a dog, whipped and beaten by his tsundere mistress Louise, for who he gave up his only chance to return to Earth. His reaction? To drool over other girls' tits, even though he's been beaten black and blue for it. This is eventually, partially, justified in the novel: the familiar's seal Saito was given suppressed his inclination for homesickness. When Tifania removes the seal, his reaction was all the Angst bottled up for about a year. He does get better.
• Flint the Time Detective: Rocky's life has been a veritable conga line of Nightmare Fuel, but you'd never know it by speaking to him.
• In Fly Me to the Moon, Nasa isn't at all upset when his apartment burns down while he and Tsukasa are seeing his parents, and his first thought is to ask if anyone got hurt. It's largely justified, since he had prepared for something like that happening, he and Tsukasa find a place to stay before long and Tsukasa notices that he's the sort of person who puts others first, but one would think that he'd at least get somewhat upset.
• In Fruits Basket, Tohru is usually extremely cheerful and amiable, despite having a dead mother, working to pay for her own tuition and having been ostracised by her peers from an early age. She has a few lines, especially in the first couple of chapters, which reveal she's forcing herself to be strong because her mother wouldn't want her to be sad. As it turns out, it's justified; she is hurting inside and had closed up everything in a box that she didn't want to open, continuously happy so she can make other people around her glad. The 2001 anime adaptation, which only covers a third of the manga's plot (and therefore never touches on Tohru's hidden insecurites or her later Character Development) makes her more of The Pollyanna as a result.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Edward has relatively little angst given that at age 11 he lost two limbs and was exposed to things man was not meant to know in an effort to bring one of his parents back to life, which comes out wrong. He half-believes that he has condemned his brother to a Fate Worse than Death, and in order to correct this joins the military, despite knowing that they previously used people with powers like his to commit genocide. That's all in the prologue. Someone like that should be worrying less about angst and more about if they have any sanity points left.
  • His brother Alphonse as well. To sum up: His father leaves, mother dies, and they decide to bring her back. This fails, and he's temporarily trapped in the screwed up body that they ended up making and loses his body to the Truth. Al then blocks the Truth from his memory out of shock, taking away the good (clappable transmutation) that was supposed to come with the bad. His brother manages to bring back his soul and attach it to a suit of armor, leaving him unable to sleep, eat, feel, and all around keeping him from leading a normal life. Al blames himself for all of this. Now, once we start on the main storyline, well, let's just say that things didn't get any better from there.
  • Winry shows signs of this in the 2003 anime. An early episode had her kidnapped and nearly brutally murdered by Barry the Chopper. Such an event would mentally scar even the toughest women, nevermind a barely teenage girl. She never shows any problems afterward (besides crying directly after the kidnapping).
• Miaka Yuuki of Fushigi Yuugi shows remarkably few psychological aftereffects from the multiple sexual assaults she endures over the course of the series, although one could argue she expends enough angst over Tamahome that she doesn't have any left to spare.
• Future Diary: In her introduction, Hinata is manipulated by her father, who uses her desire for his love to do so, into becoming a serial killer, betraying her new friends, having her closest friend almost die, and then having herself almost die, only for her father to then reveal he was lying to her the whole time, after which he is promptly shot dead. None of this is ever referenced again, and Hinata carries on as a normal girl who shows no sign of stress or trauma from that experience.
• Kagura Tsuchimiya from Ga-Rei. Even after her sister figure betrayed her and her peers, killed her father, and became an evil spirit dead-set on destroying Tokyo, she still maintains an upbeat attitude and is a fun-loving girl, as Kensuke can attest.
• Gundam:
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, Judau Ashta goes through hell. He inherits a battle he never had any interest in, he seemingly loses his little sister even when one of his friends promised to keep her alive, nearly every attempt he has at keeping his enemies from throwing their lives away fails miserably, and his primary love interest is the leader of the enemy faction and he has to not only kill her but also the fact she deliberately threw the duel. He does a very good job getting over the various problems with only short instances of depression, but in the end, he finally hits the breaking point. Bright Noah uses a reverse Brightslap to get him out of it.
  • Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam: Tobia Arronax continues the tradition in the UC 0130s, being one of the more well-adjusted characters in the Universal Century. As an interesting sidenote, Judau as Grey Stoke also makes an appearance around this time period and seemingly unchanged from his ZZ days, although there are signs that he hasn't quite gotten over some of the trauma.
  • Paula Sis of After War Gundam X. For context, she lost her parents when so young that she cannot remember their faces, and has been raised by what amounts to an armed rebel group. After this group is wiped out, she sheds a few tears but almost instantly bounces back to her usual cheery self. One would think she would react a bit more strongly to the loss of everyone she had ever held dear in her life.
  • Gundam: Reconguista in G: Bell gets over killing Dellensen pretty quickly, judging by the absolute lack of moping in the following episodes.
• Most of the cyborgs of Gunslinger Girl have their memories or their pre-Agency lives erased in order to remove the pain of past traumas (or make them easier to control, if you're cynical). Rico is unique in that she has full recollection of her time before she was given over to the Agency - which was not in itself a happy experience, with years crippled by birth defects and beset by quarreling parents - and is not at all troubled by years wasted in a hospital bed or being possessed by the Agency and used as a killing machine.
• Hayate the Combat Butler brings us Hayate Ayasaki, the titular butler. Pretty much the first thing we see of him is him getting into a terrible bike accident due to his atrocious luck and shrugging it off like an everyday thing. Then he gets fired from his bike courier job because his parents revealed he lied about his age to get the job. He didn't even get to collect his last paycheck because his parents ran off with it and lost it all gambling. Hayate finds this out by a note they left for him that also stated he was going to pay the Yakuza back for all of the debts they owed...with his organs. And all of this happened on Christmas Eve. And he's been so plagued by horrible misfortune and terrible parents that he doesn't even bother to scream or rage at how unfair all of this is.
  • The original manga makes it clear that Hayate is just used to all of this and he does occasionally (maybe two or three times in over 10 years of publication) lament that his life kind of sucks. But he is always remarkably chill about the horrible things his parents have done to him and tends to bring others to tears when he nonchalantly talks about his childhood. The audience finds out soon enough that this is really because he just plain lost all love and faith for his parents a looong time ago. The first anime makes him more The Pollyanna and far more delusionally optimistic than manga!Hayate, although subsequent seasons followed the manga more closely and Hayate is noticeably bitter and cynical but nevertheless puts up with everything the universe throws at him with little more than a sarcastic jab.
• Seras Victoria from Hellsing. She's unnaturally cheerful, upbeat, and goofy for someone who's had all of her police partners killed, was nearly raped and killed by a vampire, and then is actually turned into one. Also, during her childhood her father was murdered by burglars, her mother hiding her in a cupboard to protect her, and her mother was immediately murdered and raped (in that order) by them. It was because of this that Alucard had the interest in turning her into a Vampire, that she would still wish to live even after being through all of that.
• Justified for being Played for Laughs, but the nations of Hetalia: Axis Powers shrug off being shot in the head, tortured, abducted, and having the shit beat out of them pretty well. This is very much the case in Paint It, White!, where the nations are clearly upset at the sight of their major landmarks being attacked by the aliens, but promptly begin bickering when they try to fight together. Also, while they were all very panicked and upset while being turned into Noppera, upon being turned back, they act like the entire thing never happened.
• Highschool of the Dead:
  • Alice witnessed her father's murder, and is stuck in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. Considering this◊ is her default expression, she's taking it very well.
  • The same can be said of Shizuka, who was nearly raped by Shimada. Yet, from the next chapter onwards, she's back to her usual self as though it never happened. In fact, the only one bothered by it was Rei, having nearly been raped, herself.
• In Hoshin Engi, Taikobo hardly angsts about anything. Sure, Dakki throws a bunch of humans he was trying to protect into a pit filled with carnivorous alligators and snakes, and he feels a bit bad about that, but he gets over it within a few pages (in the anime, it took a bit longer - around maybe 10 minutes?). The closest thing to angsting was when his best friend Fugen Shinjin was killed, but even then, he quickly changes his attitude to becoming determined to immediately avenge his death (which he does quickly). At the end, when Jyoka causes him to start crumbling and dying, saying, "My last bit of selfishness... please vanish with me..." his reply is to look slightly irritated and calmly say, "Well, fine..."
• The manga version of Kanamemo starts with Kana's grandmother dying and her running away thinking she is going to be taken away like the furniture. After the first chapter, it doesn't really get mentioned again. The anime throws a realistic amount in though.
• Satsuki Kiryuin of Kill la Kill very much qualifies for this after her Freudian Excuse is revealed. It's quite unbelievable and rather superhuman that an eighteen-year-old young lady can have her father and sister killed by her own mother, and spend a good chunk of her life being physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by her mother and come out of it relatively unscathed.
• In Koroshiya Yametai, Father Shirafune and Benika don't really react to the fact that Archbishop Ildebrando, the former's superior and someone the latter trusts and respects, not only is responsible for organizing an armed revolution of refugees, but personally betrayed both of them by sending a church assassin to retrieve the rosary even at the cost of Father Shirafune's life, and tricking Benika into wearing a remote-detonated bomb.
• Kotori's mother in Love Live! at the end of season 1 seems perfectly at ease with her daughter ditching her plans to study abroad for a promising fashion career at the very last minute (as in, while in the airport waiting for her flight with her escorts) to rejoin her fellow idols. During the concert on the same day that Kotori was supposed to leave, Mrs. Minami can be seen in the background with a warm, sincere smile on her face. You'd think she'd be a little angry, if not outright furious, given the preparations, costs, and faculty talks she went through to ensure a prosperous future for her daughter.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Fate, rather than being emotionally devastated by her mentor and mother figure Linith disappearing as a result of fulfilling her contract with Precia, feels mostly gratitude toward her, and Fate only regrets that her training was the only thing Linith could do for Precia. Unfortunately, this marks the point where Precia goes from being cold and distant to actually physically and emotionally abusive.
  • Several protagonists have Dark and Troubled Pasts, but they tend to have very little angst in the present. Dark Magical Girls like Fate and Lutecia overcome their tragic circumstances and become much happier after being befriended. Nanoha herself loves being a magical girl, despite how dangerous and difficult it is. No matter how daunting the opposition, she never once wavers or bemoans her situation, and the only time in the series she broke down was when Vivio was kidnapped. Even then, she didn't let it affect her performance.
  • Vivio was introduced to the franchise dragging herself through a sewer in rags and was later kidnapped, tortured, and forced into a fight to the death with her mother. At no point in any of the later seasons does she let the memory of this affect her, to the point that Rinne mistakenly believes that she never underwent any hardship in her life (since everything related to her trauma was classified by the TSAB).
• In Magic Knight Rayearth, the girls are summoned to Cephiro and cannot return home to their families until their task is complete — which, for all they know, could take the rest of their lives (if they aren't killed first). Hikaru and Fuu have very little trouble with this, and Umi doesn't angst, but she whines a lot about missing her fencing tournament and because there's no Haagen-Das in Cephiro.
  • In the TV series, however, one episode is dedicated to how Umi actually angsts about her situation, which led her to be trapped in her own self-made Lotus-Eater Machine and finally resolves to stop angsting.
• Genki in Monster Rancher is often like this, combining it with Sand In My Eyes in some cases. He breaks down in the season 2 ending.
• In My Lovely Ghost Kana, the titular character killed herself in a gruesome manner more than a decade before the start of the story, Daikichi lost his job, home, and over half his possessions, before the only place he could find to live was a haunted apartment, considering suicide himself, and Utako went through some horrible tragedy before she showed up. By all rights, could be a freight train full of angst there. But with the help of Kana forgetting her reasons and being so happy to be around others again, they rise above and find a happy way to live without it.
• Naruto:
  • Even though Naruto has no family and everyone around him hates him just for existing, he doesn't seem to have any angst at all, and further displays this in regards to being the jinchuriki of the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox, expressing little angst over the matter after he initially found out. Probably the most shocking instance is in an event where he is confronted with the villain that's the direct reason he grew up an orphan and had the fox sealed inside of him. Considering his reaction when he had the chance to talk to his father about it, one would expect him to be angry, but he treats it the same as every other fight. However, as to the former, the first arc where they actually do some fighting spells out that he'd gotten over it after angsting non-stop for several years, and one of Naruto's teachers steps up as a father figure, mainly because he grew up in similar circumstances. Kakashi suggests that Naruto must have gotten tired of crying about his plight, and decided to instead work toward being acknowledged.
  • Fellow Jinchuuriki Killer Bee embodies this even more than Naruto himself. His relationship with his beast is actually quite friendly and his brother is genuinely protective and caring.
  • After The Last: Naruto the Movie Hanabi seems pretty okay for a girl who was kidnapped and had her eyes temporarily removed.
• Now and Then, Here and There takes this to its logically absurd extreme, but probably for the better. Shu is quickly abducted from his world and his main beef with the new world is its war. For eleven episodes, his abduction doesn't faze him in the least and any mention of "Earth" is mere background information or due to the introduction of Sara Ringwalt. He returns to Earth in episode thirteen and—that's all. Fortunately, almost everyone else in the show balances out his vacuous optimism.
• One Piece:
  • Usopp, with some fans finding it quite odd that he harbors no resentment towards his father Yasopp whatsoever, even though the guy left to go be a pirate when his son was still very young without ever returning while his wife dies a couple of years after he left. It probably helps that his wife told him to do it, and Usopp thinks being a pirate is the greatest thing in the world.
  • Shanks. He takes his arm being bitten off very well, being mainly glad that Luffy is safe.
  Shanks: (regarding his arm after thinking about Luffy): I gave it up for... the sake of the new era.
• The fact that the protagonists in Peacemaker Kurogane manage to be as cheerful as they are is actually quite impressive especially considering how the terrorists they're fighting kill their friends, are trying to destroy their capital, and yet actually believe in all the same ideals as them. And that Okita's dying of tuberculosis. And that the three executives and Okita had to assassinate their founder because he used his power for racketeering, a mere year before the first part of the series. And the fact that, for them, the penalty for any violation of the Shinsengumi rules or Bushido in general, was ritual suicide.
• Pilot Candidate: Erts seems to care little about his brother's death. But he's kind of emotionless to begin with.
• Mitsumi from Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! had an overwhelmingly horrible childhood, what with being a Creepy Child orphan who was taken in by Big Bad Cyrus and trained to be what essentially is a Child Soldier until she left in her teenage years. She doesn't seem to have too many issues though.
• Jessie from Pokémon: The Series has had a horrible childhood, which has only gotten worse due to added details over the years. Her mom was a part of Team Rocket but has been missing for twenty years, she grew up poor, eating snacks made of snow is a cherished childhood memory, she ended up running away at least once, she finished high school but couldn't get a diploma in nursing afterwards because it was a school for Chansey, and she's had countless other troubles. That's not even counting how she is treated nowadays. Her past is played up for laughs most of the time and Jessie herself seems to have the type of mentality about not letting past troubles get to her. The dub adds a few lines complaining about her past but in the Japanese original, she is pretty nonchalant about everything.
• Pom Poko:
  • In the past, Kiyo's grandfather was shot and killed by a hunter who then sold his pelt. She's surprisingly undisturbed by this.
  • Many of the Tanukis can barely contain their laughter after accidentally killing several people.
• Sailor Moon:
  • A lot of the characters have Parental Abandonment issues. Makoto was orphaned at a young age when her parents both died in a plane crash, and a car crash took Mamoru's. Neither of them is seen angsting about that, though Mamoru does have some outstanding issues with the amnesia it left him with that are resolved as part of the manga's first story arc. The manga does have a side story that shows that Makoto still has issues from her parents' deaths, namely that she panics and hides behind the curtains if she even sees an airplane on the television.
  • Usagi doesn't seem to angst much when confronting the first Big Bad Queen Metalia, who was responsible for the death of her and everyone she cared about in her previous life. In either version, the only one of the Senshi that displays any anger towards Metalia or Beryl is Minako, the case with the latter is justified since she's the only one of the senshi when they confront Beryl in the manga that regained her memories from their previous life. Everyone else, in both versions, there's no excuse.
  • In the anime, Naru experiences the death of her first love as he is impaled in front of her and bleeds to death in her arms. Furthermore, because he wasn't even human and his body apparently disintegrated on death, she can't confide in pretty much anyone (including her family). While she clearly reacts to this in the episode itself and two episodes later it's shown she was out of school to grieve, she resolves it rather quickly at the end of that episode and is pretty much her old self again.
  • In the Makenjuu Filler Arc, a massive chunk of the story deals with not only Usagi being reactivated as Sailor Moon and the Moon Princess, but also trying to reclaim Mamoru and the pain of all of that is having on her. However, the other Sailors don't get this - they're reactivated and they're perfectly fine.
  • In the manga, Rei is fairly aloof and deals with Guardian business in a stoic manner, apart from when Usagi's life is in danger. These include dying, being kidnapped and left to suffocate with her friends, and witnessing the apocalypse several times. Rei bears it all; in fact, she's more upset when reconnecting with one of her father's proteges and bluntly asking why he didn't consider pursuing a relationship with her to further his ambitions.
• Sailor Moon Crystal: Makoto flirts with Asanuma by talking about the tragic deaths of her parents and smiling, complete with an inappropriate wink and a blush. (The same scene was in the manga, but leaned more towards Makoto trying to indicate to him not to worry about her.)
• Deconstructed in School-Live!. The girls seem to be in a happy Schoolgirl Series despite the Zombie Apocalypse. It's shown Yuki keeps everyone sane. Rii, the Team Mom, looks chipper and stable but is the most emotionally fragile of the girls and eventually undergoes a Sanity Slippage when things go From Bad to Worse. Kurumi is the funny Action Girl but having to kill zombies has an emotional toll on her, especially since her first kill was her crush. Sensei-chan Megu-nee is shown to have had a large amount of guilt due to feeling she could have done something about the apocalypse if she had opened her emergency manual earlier. The only reason Yuki is so genuinely happy is that she is delusional and has blocked out the zombies. In the past, she was bullied due to her odd personality. In her hallucinations, she sees herself as having a lot of friends. It's been stated she had occasional lapses of hallucinations when the zombies first appeared but was usually sane, though very unhappy, until Megu-nee's death caused her to repress everything.
• Serendipity the Pink Dragon: Bobby seems to completely forget that he'll probably never see his parents again once Serendipity hatches.
• Sakai Yuji from Shakugan no Shana, considering how he handled being a Torch/Mystes and fated to perish, he is more concerned of people he will leave behind and relieved no one will be sad because they will forget about him. Shana, Alastor, and Lammie compliment him for staying sane from the revelation.
• In SHUFFLE!, Rin hardly reacts at all to both his parents dying, in contrast to Kaede, who went into a Heroic BSoD and nearly died after losing her mother in the same car accident.
• Shouko from A Silent Voice seems to hold no ill contempt to Shouya for severely bullying her in elementary due to being deaf. In fact, she doesn't seem quite sad about anything despite having an emotionally distant and abusive mother, or the fact her disability has caused her to be ostracized. It's later deconstructed when it's shown Shouko is covering up her sadness. She became suicidal due to the bullying and the Festival Episode ends with her trying to jump off a balcony, despite seeming fine before. Shouya saves her but gets injured in the process. In the chapters afterwards Shouko lowers her guard and her true pain becomes noticeable.
• Slayers:
  • Given that she belongs to a royal family that's full of members constantly at each other's throats and will do morally questionable things for the sake of power (especially with her cousin Alfred, who requests help from two members of an Always Chaotic Evil race of demons), Princess Amelia doesn't seem very fazed by the tragedies that happened to her: when her uncle Randionel is killed in the first season after a botched act of treason, she moves on as if nothing happened. However, it's implied that the assassination of her mother and her sister's disappearance upset her greatly, but the angst implied behind it is appropriate and never exaggerated.
  • It's implied that Gourry had a horrific family life; outside material notes that his family had a massive personal war over the Sword of Light. He runs off with it, meets a man who instills him with purpose (he was actually Lina's father), and from there, became the happy-go-lucky swordsman who strives for the future that he's known as.
• In one episode of Sonic X Amy, Tails, Chris, and Cream see Gerald Robotnik being executed on tape. They don't react with anything besides mild confusion. This is because the original Sonic Adventure 2 scene rewound before the shooting.
• Before the start of Super Cub, Koguma's father dies and her mother abandons her after squandering the family's inheritance money. Koguma doesn't feel much sorrow, and while this is explained by the fact that she doesn't become attached to others, the narration of the light novel notes that her emotional response "was surprisingly weak even for her."
• Ichise from Texhnolyze. He grows up as an ostracized outsider, works as a fighter in an underground ring, has his limbs cut off, has to go through the agonising pain of learning to use new limbs, watches his entire world deteriorate, realizes that the entire human race is effectively dead, and then watches the only human he actually has a connection to have their head stuck on the body of his enemy. When he and his mother discovered his father's dead body he didn't show any emotion and looked surprised when he saw his mother crying at the sight. He goes a little insane in the very last episode, but apart from that, he copes a little too well...
• Tiger & Bunny: Keith doesn't seem to care that the girl he was crushing on just disappears, forever unaware the robot he destroyed and the woman he pined for were one and the same.
• Minorin in Toradora! lives by the principle that she shall always be happy, no matter what happens. Although she doesn't have any actual tragedy in her past, this still leaves her feeling a bit... hollow, at times. She might even fool herself, but she isn't fooling the viewers.
• Wicked City: Makie gets gang raped after being horribly defeated by a demon no less. A moment after she is rescued, she is back to quipping with Taki and shows no signs of distress.
• Yokaiden: The main character, Hamachi, had his parents die when he was just a little kid and was sent to live with his Grandma, who appeared to hate Hamachi and calls him demon-spawn. A creature whose life he saved then kills his Grandma, so Hamachi goes on a quest to track down the creature. How does he deal with all this? By cheerfully treating it like one big adventure.
• To a small extent, the Pharaoh from Yu-Gi-Oh!. On finding out his real identity he caustically remarks that it's no wonder he's lost his memories. His means of avoiding angsting about his lost identity seem to be his devil-may-care attitude towards things and occasional snarky smirk. Interestingly, his moments of overconfidence settle down dramatically when he learns his identity.
• Juudai/Jaden Yuki from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. Until season 3, he laughs at everything. At the end of season 2, while he's fighting the epitome of evil, with nothing but a children's card game standing in the way of the destruction of the universe, he still tries to convince Evil Sartorius that card games are all about fun. In the manga, however, he's never quite as innocent as in the early anime, but he never gets as broken as in the late anime. He's seen his friend and dueling idol, Koyo, go into a coma, had to once fight a duel with Sho/Syrus in which either he would lose his deck or Sho would get expelled and has had to fight several Shadow Duels over the course of the series. He angsts over his issues when he takes the time to reflect on them.
• Characters on Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds who have lived most if not all their lives on the poverty-stricken streets of Satellite claim they've gotten used to dealing with pain and hardship, explaining why they spend less time angsting than you'd expect.
• None of the girls in Yuki Yuna is a Hero (besides Togo) seem too fazed by The Reveal that they're Child Soldiers forced to slowly sacrifice themselves to the World Tree. Fuu had a breakdown due to her sister's wants of being a singer being impossible due to her recent muteness. However the concept of them eventually becoming paralyzed and heavily disabled due to being a Magical Girl Warrior doesn't seem to bug them much.

Comic Books

• Amulet:
  • After having spent the entire series brooding due to her father's death and having just learnt at the end of the previous book what exactly caused him to die, Emily gets over it rather quickly after having a pep talk about it with Moze in "Supernova".
  • Trellis despaired for a couple of panels when he finally knew what happened to his mother in Supernova, but it wasn't addressed at all after that scene and he seems mostly unaffected by it after leaving the memory.
  • Navin is briefly shown to be affected just like Emily on losing his dad in Book 5, but other than that it's never been touched upon. Not only that, he doesn't show more than slight distress when he sees his fellow pilots die in front of him, some of which are his age.
• Birds of Prey: In one issue, Lady Blackhawk is mind-controlled in a squick-inducing fashion by a villain. When one of her teammates later suggests that she should seek therapy, Lady Blackhawk responds that breaking the villain's face was all the therapy she needed.
• Give Me Liberty: Wasserstein has lost his entire nation, but doesn't seem to care about this, and even thinks the Apache nation was a dumb idea.
• Green Arrow: Lian Harper is understandably freaked out when Dreamslayer summons her in Convergence: Titans but she manages to roll with everything that happens after Arsenal saves her. She doesn't even seem fazed by how, since the last time she saw her father (which to her had just been earlier in her day), he now has a prosthetic arm.
• Green Lantern: In Green Lantern: New Guardians]], Glomulus is essentially a living construct made by Larfleeze. As in he can be dispersed whenever Larfleeze feels like it. Kyle Rayner asks if Glomulus is truly alive or not. Glommy's response? "Glomulus is Glomulus." It's kind of endearing that he can brush off something like that.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
  • The Cutie Mark Crusaders don't seem to think being fillynapped by a monstrous Queen is a big deal, nor did they seem bothered by the fact that the queen killed a luvcat in front of them.
  • Also, Fluttershy is gleefully fascinated by two creatures fighting over the right to eat her and her friends. Played for Laughs, since she is an Animal Lover and simply treated it like watching a live-action nature documentary.
• The Punisher: Frank Castle's family being killed by criminals during a picnic comes up a lot (especially by criminals facing him), but his only real reaction since it happened is to go out and shoot criminals in the face (for over 30 years in the MAX 'verse). Note that whether this makes him badass or severely mentally disturbed is a debate that goes on in-universe, several characters have gone through similar trauma with nowhere near Frank's level of self-control or detachment. In one case, he managed to snap a man who'd gone through a similar Trauma Conga Line back to his senses with six words: "Do you want to be me?"
• Robin (1993): The most reaction we get from Tim Drake about the death of Stephanie Brown was the story where she was revealed to be Not Quite Dead.
• Runaways: When six teenagers discover that their parents are supervillains and have to go on the run, they handle it remarkably well, barely complaining about being betrayed. But there are hints dropped that they've been traumatized like real teenage runaways — they just show it less. (Their motto is that no adult, ever, is to be trusted, and some of the kids — especially Karolina and Molly — approach Stepford Smiler territory in the early issues.) The use of this was lampshaded by Karolina and Xavin when the team is indulging in some (mostly appropriate) angst after Gert's death, where Xavin points out that Karolina's homeworld and at least one Skrull colony world have all but been destroyed in a war the two of them failed to stop, and everyone is angsting more about the death of one girl instead of two whole worlds.
• Shazam!: Captain Marvel was made of this. Billy Batson had his parents murdered when he was around 8 years old, lost his sister, and was given over to his uncle Ebenezer Batson, who was his only living blood relative. Ebenezer only kept Billy around long enough to legally secure the boy's inheritance as his own, and then threw Billy out onto the street, leaving him homeless. But instead of becoming bitter about his circumstances, Billy instead became more empathic to the suffering of others, maintained his positive outlook, and refused to let his bad situation ruin his ideals or his sense of wonder and hope. It was precisely these qualities that made him worthy to wield the power the wizard Shazam bestowed upon him. It's also one reason why many fans dislike the Nu-52 Billy Batson, who has done a complete 180 and is an angry, petulant little brat consumed by Wangst.
• Static: Static was created in an attempt of capturing a more modern interpretation of Spider-Man. Virgil carries similar wit and banter but none of the angst. He becomes a Super Hero, not because of dead parents or to follow in his mentor's footsteps. He does it just because he knows right from wrong. The animated series plays with it a bit more. Virgil still is a superhero because of a sense of justice, but he also occasionally angsts over his dead mother, who he only just remembers and misses, at least until a Time Travel episode.
• Superman: In Superman Family #165, Krypto the Superdog travels through time and emerges in the past, almost immediately transformed into a cow (thanks to some Red Kryptonite). He finds himself milked, and he gets so upset over his situation he knocks a lamp over, causing a fire. Krypto soon turns back to normal and leaves the farm, only to overhear the farmer calling for Mrs. O'Leary. It is at that moment that Krypto realises that he traveled to the beginning of the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. Krypto's reaction upon realising that he's the one who caused the greatest fire in history? "Well, I'll fly back to my own time-era!"
• Teen Titans: Beast Boy/Changeling spent most of his life as a glutton for punishment. Details aside, most people tend to assume he's miserable and pity him. In Geoff Johns' Teen Titans, he makes it clear that the problems in his life don't bother him nearly as much as they think; but what he can't stand is when people feel sorry for him.
• Ultimate Spider-Man: In-universe, Dr. Bradley offers Peter (and any other student) support to cope with the Green Goblin and Spider-Man disaster that took place in the school. Peter has no trauma or personal crisis about it (of course, as he is Spider-Man).
• X-Factor:
  • Strong Guy is one of the "hurts on the inside" variety. He's always cracking jokes, despite emotional pain and physical pain (because of the way his powers warped his body).
  • One issue in X-Factor (2006) was all about Doctor Leonard Samson going through the team in his role as a psychiatrist. This revealed that Monet kept all her feelings bottled up inside because she feels she needs to put up a brave face, and she is afraid of losing control of herself, especially with how her brother ended up evil. Meanwhile, Siryn appeared to take her father's death in Deadly Genesis oddly lightly. She explained that he was bound to come back from the dead, given how that happens constantly in the Marvel universe. Samson is left speechless. Whether that is a perfectly reasonable stance or unhealthy denial is left up to the reader to decide.
• X-Men:
  • A story featured a villain trying to psychically possess Jean Grey's corpse. To stop her, Cyclops secretly had Jean's body dug up and replaced with somebody else's. Oddly, despite all the truckloads of angst that Cyke has had about Jean's death over the years, digging up her corpse didn't seem to disturb him that much. He got over it in about two pages.
  • Discussed by Jubilee (a sassy orphan) and Warren Worthington III (who's been tortured, mutilated, brainwashed, and had his fiancee murdered, and has since been playing The Stoic).
    Jubilee: I'm just a kid — if I want to pretend nothin' ever bothers me, that's my right as an immature brat. But you — what's your excuse, Tweety?
  • An X-Man finally snapped in a 2016 storyline. A serial killer in Germany had been murdering what he had hallucinated with contagious sentients. When Nightcrawler saw the mass grave, he had a complete mental breakdown.
• Young Justice: In Young Justice (2019), the series manages to somehow entirely avoid the angst that would come with Bart Allen returning to a world where his sidekick role has been filled by Wallace West, his grandpa and grandma are no longer married, his favourite parental figure Linda Park no longer remembers anything about her life with the Flash Family, both of his adoptive fathers Max Mercury and Jay Garrick doesn't even exist and the fact that Wally West, his preferred partner Flash, has committed manslaughter and is imprisoned. He somehow is just as chipper as he was in the '90s series.

Comic Strips

• 9 Chickweed Lane: Gran revealed to her daughter Juliette that her biological father was an artistic ex-Nazi, not the conservative man who raised her. The announcement would have a bit more weight if both Gran and Juliette's daughter didn't accompany the word "lovechild" with fist-pumping motions.
• Pearls Before Swine loves to play this for dark laughs. Various crocodiles, Rat and Pig's roommate Leonard, and even Stephan Pastis himself have died (and undied) in the series, with little if any mourning.

Fan Works

• Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Italy remained all smiles even after being beaten and nearly raped. Italy remained all smiles even after being bullied shortly afterward. Nothing is as it seems though...
• In this Girls und Panzer, fan comic, Miho's reaction to hearing from her mother, Shiho, about her being disinherited (something she has not heard about in canon, even assuming Shiho didn't change her mind in the last episode) is to get somewhat annoyed at Maho and Shiho sneaking onto campus, although the entire issue is Played for Laughs.
  Miho: Why are you two here?
  Shiho: To tell you about your disinheritance..
  Miho: Just give it to me and go home already.
• In Let Me In fanfic A Cold Winter's Night, for having just run away from home and everything he knew and embracing a life of vampiric murder, Owen is surprisingly put together at the start of the first chronological story, although it's justified by his mutual dependence on Abby and the chapter's rather short nature.
• Escape From The Hokage's Hat: Naruto like in canon is like this. At least until he realizes the village had multiple blood seals placed on him by the village ninja to limit his growth (mental and physical). Then he ever so slowly comes to the realization of how bad his life is.
  "Now while he was embarrassed, Naruto found that he rather enjoyed being tickled by Tsunade. In all honesty, this was the most human contact he'd had in his entire life. He promptly shoved that thought aside as it sounded too morbid."
• In the Girls und Panzer fic Of Blood and Steel, this is zig-zagged. Erwin doesn't feel much angst over her father's death from liver failure two years ago, saying that "the pain is largely gone", but is quite bitter over having to move as a result of her mother getting a new job in America. Henrietta's lack of reaction to being ostracized due to being the daughter of a Private Military Contractor is similar to Erwin's glossing over her father's death, saying that she's dealt with it for long enough.
• Leaving Town has a similar premise to the above fic, and Erwin's father also died in the past. Erwin is similarly not troubled by the loss, noting that she barely knew her father anymore by the time of her death.
• Happens in Derailed, due to it being a collaborative story with minimal communication between the different authors. Celestia explains to Octavia the relationship they had before Octavia's injuries and amnesia. Octavia is somewhat taken aback, and she tells the hospital staff that she doesn't want Celestia to visit again in the next few days. The next section is written by a different author—it's less than a day later, and Octavia is hanging out with Celestia in the castle like it's no big deal.
• In Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo crossover, the Rich Bitch character Jackie Jakobs comes off as manipulative, engages in some Cold-Blooded Torture of heroic characters, and generally makes herself dislikeable. Then it is revealed she has a reason or several to be the way she is. Thanks to the Trans-Galactic Republic, Jackie receives some much-needed real therapy after first being helped by Mad Moxxi. Her properly-licensed therapist even lampshades how quickly her recovery is proceeding.
• Peter Parker Needs A Hug: Peter tries to do this, as he focuses as much as he can on building a new life for himself in Gotham (and throwing himself into being Spider-Man). Still, the traumas he faced in Infinity War, Endgame, and Now Way Home are eating at him, causing him to ignore people who are trying to help him. It's only after Bruce Wayne convinces Peter to move into Wayne Manor (and officially become one of the Bats) that he starts to open up about his pain.
• Considering all the War Is Hell and utterly terrible things the Sonic characters face in Sonic X: Dark Chaos, none of them (except for Cosmo) angst about it very much. The rewrite has more angst though, and this is somewhat justified considering Sonic's heroic nature.
  • Tsali barely angsts at all, even though he has a backstory that could rival Guts and is implied to be going through minor And I Must Scream. He just kills stuff instead. Discussed in the rewrite, when he tells Trinity that It Gets Easier and that moping over the past is a waste of time.
  • In Episode 74, Tails takes his newfound Shroud abilities better than anyone thinks. Not only is he not fazed at all by his Squick-y powers, he genuinely thinks they're the coolest thing ever and is confused by the rest of the cast's horrified reactions. When Knuckles tells him what happened in the previous episode when he nearly burned Tails to death to stop his Shroud form, Tails forgives Knuckles immediately.
• While the rest of the Touhou Ibunshu cast have much justifiable angst about various things, Reimu and Marisa get over things remarkably quickly and soon start reacting to being in constant mortal danger with the equivalent of "not this again". Even getting stabbed to death and resurrected in the second arc barely registered; Alice ended up being more upset about that than they were. This is presented as being a virtue and part of the reason why they're so heroic compared to the more morally questionable characters, as they are more concerned with making a new future than dwelling on the past.
  • That said, Reimu is later shown to suffer the beginnings of depression and PTSD, at least partly due to the isolation she'd imposed upon herself. Yukari, picking on this, sends Suika, who takes her on a Journey to the Center of the Mind of her friends, forcing her to talk with others about her death and resurrection. Merely acknowledging what happened somewhat helps, as does recognizing that she has friends she can rely upon; discussing it and encountering different viewpoints (notably, helping Sakuya deal with her own Enemy Within) helps even more. Between this and learning of the Kashoyo threat, Reimu is jolted out of her depression. Marisa, who's more extroverted, more likely to talk about her issues and has been leaning on Alice, is noticeably less affected.
• In the Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name fanfic Note to Self: Invest in a Sofa Bed, Hanna suffers a flat affect as a result of the trauma of having to destroy his dead parents-turned-demons. It takes about a day for Dr. Worth to get him to a point where he can explain what happened without mentally checking out.
• In the One Piece fanfic New Game Plus, Kaya is this in regards to the only secret Usopp had kept from her. Upon learning about the real identity and intentions of her butler Klahadore, she's not heartbroken but pissed - due to her stronger personality in this timeline, she saw him as stingy and bossy rather than fatherly, never liking him firsthand.
• Lampshaded and Played for Drama in Project Tatterdemalion. The shinigami have been transformed into monsters, seen their friends and family transformed into even worse monsters, telepathically heard those former friends and family express the desire to eat them alive, and been forced to rip those former friends and family to pieces with their bare hands (and some shiny new claws) to survive. They are ok with this. They know they should not be ok with this. They are quite capable of figuring out that the only reason they are ok with this is that the shinigami virus is interfering with their brains. They don't know what else it might be doing while it's in there.
• In Girls und Panzer- The Eagles of Oarai, this is zig-zagged. Miho is reduced to tears when Shiho shows up at Oarai's match with Kuromorimine to disown her, but cheers up almost immediately after her sister and her friends comfort her, and manages to command the team during the match without dwelling on what was done to her. She also is somewhat shocked but not all that upset to see her mother arrested for sending one of her pilots to fly in an under-protected aircraft and pulling a gun on Jake, but it's justified in that she's appalled by what her mother has done.
• The Longest Road tries to adapt the episode of the Pokémon anime "Pikachu's Goodbye" into being more sentimental, by adding a reunion with Pikachu's mother, who is sick and dying. Keyword being tries since the events are rather rushed and at the end, when Pikachu's mom is on her last legs, she begs Pikachu that he stays in the forest as the leader of the clan. Pikachu hesitates just for a couple of seconds at most before saying he's going to stick with Ash. Pikachu's mom is all fine with this before dying, and Pikachu mourns her... before he's ready to be comforted by Misty's Vaporeon and continue the journey. Even more jarring is that the next chapter barely alludes to this event at the start (as happening only four days prior), but after that, it's all but forgotten.
  • From the same author Broken Legs, Unbroken Love has as its premise that Misty broke both her legs in an accident, and somehow manages to mix this with bits of Wangst in the first chapters. The author seemingly tries to Hand Wave it by saying that she'll recover in one year, and she's just moody because she'll bore to death until then, so it goes both ways because the story doesn't make it clear just how grave Misty's injuries really are.
• In Danganronpa, the end of a class trial, in which a student is executed for killing a classmate, is generally considered a tragedy. Most of the class feels bad for the dead students, even if they didn't like the killer or victim, and the survivors spend some time consumed by grief and despair, especially if one of the dead was someone they cared about. In New Hope University: Major In Murder, the rest of the cast barely reacts to the first execution, save for Rodrigo calling Monokuma a "monster", and in the aftermath, Saya's more upset about Lucina harshly calling her out on her manipulative tactics than she is about either of the deaths. Granted, she did faint when faced with the victim's severed head, but that may be because it was an especially gruesome and shocking sight.
• In Kiyosumi Captain Monogatari, Yuuki innocently asks why Mihoko, who canonically attended the prefectural champion Kazekoshi, instead chose to come to Kiyosumi. Mihoko then recounts how her father's company was shut down, her mother was hospitalized, her house burned down (albeit with no one being hurt), his father losing her job again, her mother having an affair with a coworker, and her family going broke. She then concludes by saying, "But I'm very happy being at Kiyosumi because Hisa is here!", resulting in Hisa being unsure of what to say to that.
• All-Might in Metallurgy initially views Izuku's crippling injury as his greatest failure, but the moment he learns Izuku can use his Quirk to replace his severed hand, All-Might seemingly forgets the entire event even happened.
• In The Chronicles of Karai Getting Her Shit Together, while the fanfic is full of angst from various characters (Karai is a victim of rape and Parental Incest from the Shredder, Leo cuts himself, Mikey's self-esteem issues due to his brothers dismissing him), Raphael gets over the fact that he loses an eye to the Creep very quickly.
• Vision of Escaflowne Abridged: Van in this version is The Pollyanna despite going through the same trauma as in canon.
  Hitomi: Do you have an angsty backstory that you can play for [audience] sympathy?
  Van: Uh, yeah, you were there. My brother betrayed me and joined an evil empire, they invaded my homeland, scattered my people, killed my mentor, my parents... well, okay, they both died of natural causes years ago, but it still sucked!
  Hitomi: Oh yeah, I guess I just don't think about it because you're so happy-go-lucky all the time. I mean, would it kill you to mope about it a little more?
• Harry in Oh God, Not Again! is really very chipper and upbeat for someone who's reset his original timeline and effectively wiped his own child from existence, along with undoing all his other accomplishments and turned his wife back into a child. The author has stated that anyone who feels that Harry should angst more can assume he's doing it off screen. (He does however feel a pang of hurt seeing Colin Creevey take his picture, and is determined to save more lives this time around.)

Films — Animation

• In Rise of the Guardians, when Jack regains his memories, he learns that he drowned in a frozen pond whilst saving his sister. He proceeds to focus on the fact that he saved his sister, rather than the fact that he died. In one way it makes sense, considering that Jack's purpose is to literally be Fun Personified.
• In An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Fievel's parents really don't seem sad or concerned enough when Fievel falls off the train on their "way out west", leaving him stranded in the middle of the desert and possibly gravely injured. When they get to the town of Green River they're more concerned about where they're going to be living than the whereabouts of their son, saying "He'll find his way here on his own". And when Fievel finally is reunited with them, they're happy, but they don't make a big deal out of it. It's like "Oh, Fievel's lost. It must be Tuesday again." This is probably because executives wanted Fievel Goes West to be Lighter and Softer than the first movie, which had more than enough angst to go around after Fievel got lost.
• In Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Aurora has a meltdown when she's told she can't see a boy (she literally just met outside of infancy) again. On the other hand, she doesn't give two spits that her aunts are fairies hired to protect her, she's now required to go live as a princess after years of freedom as a peasant, and her parents are actually alive and well. If the happy dance at the end is any indication, Phillip is all that matters.
• In Aladdin, the genie says he's been trapped in his lamp for 10,000 years, a fate that would have driven any of us insane with boredom. But he seems fine apart from a "crick in the neck." Although, being a genie, maybe he has ways to amuse himself that we don't. The number of anachronistic jokes he makes over the course of the movie would indicate that at the very least, he doesn't perceive time and space the same way we do.
• In Gnomeo & Juliet, Featherstone the flamingo just instantly dives out of his shed and goes bananas with happiness upon being released. He was trapped inside for 20 years. And separated from his lover for all that time.
• In Treasure Planet, Silver gives one of the best lines that describes this after he left almost all of the treasure behind to save Jim.
  Silver: Just a lifelong obsession, Jim. I'll get over it.
• A humorous example from The Emperor's New Groove, following a mass Forced Transformation:
  Guard: Hey, I've been turned into a cow. Can I go home?
  Yzma: You're excused. Anyone else?
  Other guards: No no no, we're good.
• Rapunzel from Tangled seems pretty chipper despite being locked up in a tower her entire life with only her emotionally abusive mother as her human friend. It gets more noticeable later into the film after she finds out her mother kidnapped her as an infant, never loved her, has been lying to Rapunzel her entire life, and only kept her around for her magical powers. She also saw her mother suffer a Disney Villain Death. Despite all this, she still seems to be a Plucky Girl. Granted, she does have small symptoms like her emotional meltdown after first leaving her tower and when she first opens up at the campfire scene, showing that she is not completely fine. Rapunzel actually had more trauma due to Gothel during earlier development, where the darker script had her acting much more reluctant to leave her tower and more nervous around people.
• In The Ant Bully, Lucas wakes up to find himself shrunk, gets kidnapped by ants, thrown into their anthill and finally put on trial where several of the ants are actively urging for him to be killed. The very next morning he treats this whole ordeal as an annoying inconvenience at most. Later on in the film, he does express some sadness over missing his family, but it's relatively little considering he might never get to see them or his former life again.
• The Jungle Book (1967): In the first five minutes, we learn that Mowgli was Raised by Wolves. Then Bagheera tells him that he's taking him to the man-village, and...Mowgli seems to forget about the family who raised him for ten years. Heck, in the sequel he never even mentions them, all while mourning his separation from Baloo, who he knew for, what, maybe two days? All this is a major contrast from the source material, where his relationship with the wolf pack is given appropriate weight.
• Bambi: The death of Bambi's mother is instantly followed by a Time Skip to the first spring of Bambi's adulthood, which opens with the Mood Whiplash of a cheery song with chirping, dancing birds and flowers. Any grieving process Bambi might have gone through is kept offscreen.
• One of the segments in Heavy Metal features Den, who gets snatched from Earth and flung to some far-distant planet, never to see his home again. The fact that he's turned from a scrawny nerd into a perfect physical specimen who gets to have sex with hot babes sorta takes the sting away.
• In American Pop Zalmie's wife Bella is killed in an explosion after she opens a package containing a bomb left by the mafia, everyone reacts in horror except for their son Benny who just glances over at the sight and goes back to playing his piano, barely showing any emotion, he never brings up his mother's death for the rest of his screen time.
• Played for Laughs in The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part. Emmet remains his optimistic self despite the fact that Bricksburg has been reduced to an apocalyptic wasteland and his joyful attitude makes him stick out like a sore thumb among its toughened citizens.
• A Bug's Life: Molt got over Hopper's death pretty darned fast as he is happily joining the circus that played a hand in his elder brother's defeat. But then again, seeing how he treated Molt arguably worse than he did the ants of Ant Island, perhaps it's understandable. Not to mention there's a timeskip between Hopper's death (sometime during the fall) and the ending of the movie when Molt leaves with the circus (taking place in the spring), giving him a good few months to get over it.
• Turning Red:
  • How the movie ends for the most part. Ming tries to outright hurt Mei and ruins the concert that she was anticipating for months, while having an angry fugue episode. Anyone with an abusive parent or guardian can tell you that getting physically hurt by a person responsible for protecting you is a trauma that can last for years and cause lingering trust issues. Instead, Mei forgives her mother after finding her in the astral plane, getting her to the mirror where she can control the transformation again. Heck, when Ming was in a similar situation, the trauma colored her for years on end, and it informs most of her actions throughout the movie. The Time Skip shows that their relationship is in a healthier place, with Mei being more comfortable about setting boundaries.
  • Despite the fact that one of their neighbors nearly caused disaster at a local concert equivalent to a terrorist attack that could have killed many children, the Toronto community is still visiting the temple regularly, even more so now to see a transformed Mei. That must have been one heck of a settlement agreement that Ming reached with the city.
• Epic (1984): The King and Queen of the Dingoes seem way too unconcerned of losing all but one of their pups during the flood at the beginning.
• Freddie as F.R.O.7: Freddie seems oddly relaxed when dealing with Messina at the climax. Considering she killed both of his parents, you'd think he'd be angrier, passionate at least.
• Joshua and the Promised Land: By the end of the movie, Joshua never shows any sign of being mentally scarred or fatigued, even though by this point he ought to mentally be a war veteran in his late 40's or early 50's, who spent most of his life trapped in biblical times, either fighting for his life in a war or struggling to survive in a harsh desert.
• Samson and Sally: Sally watched her parents die, as well as some of her friends, but she seems none the worse for wear. This could arguably apply to Samson, who loses his mother in one scene but appears to forget about her by the next.
• The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue: Despite the fact that Martin went missing when Timmy was young, the latter is seen happily singing in the Time-Passes Montage.
• Miracle in Toyland: The toys get over the apparent death of one of the toy soldiers (caused by Jesse) rather quickly.
• Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer: The family, especially Grandpa of all people, take Grandma's disappearance rather nonchalantly. Jake seems to be the only one who has a vaguely appropriate reaction and wants to do something about it.
• The Legend of the Titanic: Our heroes seem to care very little about the fact that they're stuck in Atlantis forever, even though on the surface Don Juan has his Romani friends, Elizabeth has her father, Connors has a wife, and Ronnie has a sister and family.
• Rankin Bass' Jack Frost: Jack gets over Elisa pretty quickly; he sheds some tears, turns her bouquet white, flies back up to his friends and cheerfully waves goodbye to the audience. Presumably the knowledge that she's happy and that she does love him in a non-romantic way (through her love for the beauty of winter) is enough to comfort him.
• Coonskin: Marigold didn't seem particularly fazed when her dad, the sheriff, gets stabbed and presumably killed by the brothers.
• A Matter of Loaf and Death: While he sadly laments Piella's death in the moment, Wallace is quickly back to his chipper old self seconds later.
  Wallace: Farewell, my angel cake. You'll always be my Bake-O-Lite girl. (Beat) I think I'll need a cup of tea after all that!
• Camelot: Arthur isn't angry about Guinivere and Lancelot's affair, and even considers them good friends as he lies dying.
• Aladdin and the King of Thieves: Despite regarding them as family, Cassim is never shown learning or reacting to the majority of his fellow thieves being imprisoned, nor is he overly concerned when the remaining members turn on him and join Sa'Luk.
• The Jungle Book 2: Despite pining for the jungle for so long, Mowgli does not even make so much as a passing mention of his wolf family. Come to think of it, they never even show up at all.
• Wish (2023): Queen Amaya is a loving and faithful wife to King Magnifico, a seemingly benevolent and beloved ruler, his only questionable actions being his choice not to grant certain wishes of his people and also making it impossible for them to actualize the wishes on their own as he wants to protect the status quo he's created. Over the course of about three days, she watches him Jumping Off the Slippery Slope into becoming a Sorcerous Overlord, much to her horror and to the point of joining Asha's side to stop him...but at the end, when he proves unredeemable (thanks to the hold of forbidden magic) and is trapped in his magic staff's mirror upon defeat, she shows no regret or sorrow and happily has the mirror placed in the dungeon and becomes the kingdom's sole ruler. Discussed in the Screen Rant Pitch Meetings for the film: "Wait, are we sure she's not evil?"

Films — Live-Action

• In 2012, given that something like 99.995% of the world's population died less than a month ago everyone on the arks seems to have got over it rather quickly. Adrian and the President's daughter deserve special mention, flirting carefree just after both their fathers (and presumably the rest of their families) died.
• 7 Faces of Dr. Lao: Mike and his dead father:
  Mike: I never knew my father. He died when I was little.
  Lao: Oh, Mike. That's very sad.
  Mike: [very casual] Uh huh.
• Amélie: Amélie's life and upbringing has been largely dysfunctional and lonely, but she remains resolutely cheerful, kind-hearted and optimistic. She is, however, painfully shy and introverted as a result of her upbringing. Much of her Character Development centers around her loneliness and working up the nerve to live.
• At the beginning of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Austin's new wife and heroine of the previous film Vanessa Kensington is almost immediately revealed as a fembot who tries to kill him before Austin soon subdues her. He is initially heartbroken, reflecting on the loss of his first true monogamous love, before realizing he is once more single and free to womanize in a recovery so sudden it's somewhat lampshaded.
  Austin: (mournfully) I can't believe Vanessa, my bride, my one true love, the woman who taught me the beauty of monogamy, was a fembot all along... (cheerfully) Wait a tick, that means I'm single again! Oh, behave!
• Portrayed in the most unintentionally hilarious way ever in Battle: Los Angeles: during the Alien Invasion, Nantz gives a long speech in which he reels off the names and serial numbers of all of his men who were killed on the last mission, making it clear he remembers each one of them. After a Melodramatic Pause, he growls "But none of that matters now" because they can't dwell on the past and have to get back to killing aliens. Cue laughter and applause from the audience.
• The Blood on Satan's Claw:
  • Ellen by the third act seems incredibly okay with the fact that both her children were horribly murdered.
  • Ralph seems unusually sympathetic to Margaret even when she proudly declares herself as a member of the cult, meaning he has to know she helped murder Mark and Cathy.
• Castaways: Emily is unsure whether her mom has survived the boat going down at first or not. Later on seeing her mom's corpse wash up and learning she didn't, she's only briefly upset. Then she's entirely happy with everyone she ever knew being dead or beyond reach, living on a Deserted Island in the Pacific with Cara forever. This might be justified slightly due to the fact they didn't have the best relationship going by what she tells Cara, but it still seems like a stretch that she'd get over it this easily.
• Damnation Alley: Despite witnessing full-scale nuclear war being carried out during which everyone they've ever known is killed, society and civilization are completely destroyed and thousands of years of progress is undone, not a single person we see in the base appears to be the least bit worried or concerned, as if the announcement of the Incoming! nuclear missiles had instead been about a change to the lunch menu. This could have been excused if they thought it was only a training exercise and found later that it was real and then everybody freaked out.
• Invoked and justified in Defending Your Life. The recent dead are relieved of the worry and angst of having died and the loved ones they'll never see again so that they can focus on their trials.
• The Day Time Ended: Grant, Barbra, and Steve all tend to have limited reactions to the events. Especially Grant and Barbra- after being buzzed by UFOs, they flee for the house, then decide that they really aren't going to worry about it and go to bed.
• By the end of Face/Off, Eve Archer has been effectively sleeping with Castor Troy (wearing Sean Archer's face), and Jamie has stabbed Castor in the leg - an act which rarely leaves people unscarred in Real Life. This family really should be falling apart any second now, especially after Sean adopts Castor's son who was orphaned partially due to him - but we are asked to accept this as a Happy Ending.
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!: Billie goes from shock and anger at Varla killing Tommy and venting at her about it to quickly ogling the Vegetable and talking about how hot he is within one scene.
• The kids in Final Destination barely notice the sudden, shocking deaths of their friends, and instead focus almost exclusively on scheming to cheat Death. This hits a crescendo of ridiculousness when Billy is gruesomely decapitated right in front of them by flying debris, and there isn't so much as a "Holy shit!" in reaction before they roll out the metaphorical blackboard and start trying to find a workaround to the Grim Reaper's cosmic book-balancing. The sequels then take it up several more notches.
• Gremlins: When Rand reunites with Billy and Kate at the tail end of the movie's climax, he doesn't react to the fact his son is clearly bleeding and heavily injured at all — his role in the scene literally plays out as if Billy is physically fine. Whilst seeing a gremlin for the first time (while it's melting to death no less) is a pretty eye-catching thing, it's a bit of a stretch for it to override the paternal instincts of a decent middle-class father whose son is visibly injured for reasons he doesn't yet know, nevermind that Rand's lack of reaction persists after the gremlin's (Stripe's) body has fallen out of sight into the fountain.
• Harry Potter:
  • A lot of characters, major and minor, both in the books and the films seem to have no trouble getting over accidents, mutations, and near-death experiences that should have traumatized them for life or for a very lengthy period of time that would have required a lot of counseling for most people.
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Barty Crouch is found dead in the woods and... no one cares. It's never mentioned again. Not that his death should inspire all that much angst ^note although he is a much nicer character in the film, but it's a fairly important plot point in the book, and besides, a Ministry official showed up dead in the forest. Someone want to... look into that?
  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: We see Sirius die, in a super dramatic, gut-wrenching scene. Then we finish the battle. Then we see Harry and Dumbledore have less than a five-minute conversation. Harry barely looks upset. That's it for the rest of the series. Drastically different from the book, in which Harry trashes Dumbledore's office and yells at him. He then spends most of the remainder of the year in solitude, until Luna comforts him...and even then, it takes him a couple of weeks to get over it.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Arthur Dent watches as everyone he ever loved or cared about (except Trillian) plus the human race destroyed right before his eyes. He is half of the existing human race, with absolutely no hope (at that point) of rebuilding the species or ever going home. All over a bureaucratic snafu by an uncaring galactic government, and he receives absolutely no sympathy from other characters for the genocide of his race. And this is played for laughs. The story rolls on, Dent doesn't seem too broken up about it (it might not have even happened as far as Trillian is concerned) and it's all handwaved at the end.
• The characters in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids react rather calmly to terrifying situations. The kids weren't really scared when they got shrunk and almost got hurt or even died a few times, and the adults take the news of their kids being shrunk rather better than most adults would. This is especially noticeable during the climax of the film when Wayne almost accidentally eats Nick in his bowl of Cheerios, as Nick doesn't look even the slightest bit traumatized that he almost got eaten by his dad, and Wayne doesn't look the slightest bit traumatized that he almost ate his son.
• The Horror of Party Beach: Less than a month after his girlfriend gets killed by a monster, Hank returns to the very beach she died on and comments to a band member, "Pretty dead tonight, huh, Ron?" They play a spritely tune to get the moods up.
• In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Elsa is severely traumatized, screaming her head off, as Donovan dies right in front of her eyes due to something she deliberately did, and yet in the next scene, she acts as if nothing happened. However, the next line of dialogue implies that she deliberately gave Donovan the wrong grail to get rid of him.
• James Bond:
  • Diamonds Are Forever. The film opens with Bond hunting down his wife's murderer, Big Bad Ernst Stavro Blofeld, with the permission and support of MI6 and apparently getting his revenge by making Blofeld drown headfirst into superheated mud. While that should have given him some satisfaction to help him recover, the fact remains that his wife has just been killed on their wedding day, and yet he's back to his old womanizing and deadpanning days in an instant, even laughing at a few cracks Miss Moneypenny makes about engagement rings. This could be due to the Negative Continuity of the series.
  • In Licence to Kill, Felix Leiter loses his limbs and his newlywed wife is brutally murdered, but at the end of his movie he's cheerfully chatting on the phone from his hospital bed.
  • In Skyfall, Bond doesn't seem too concerned when Severine was shot, despite saying he would protect her.
• Speaking of Whedon, his version of Justice League was noted to suffer from the same problem as Age of Ultron below, but it was even more noticeable since this made two characters - Superman and Batman - act Out of Character. While the two films that led up to JL - while not flawless in their execution^note Man of Steel does gloss over the damage and deaths caused in the climax, but this wasn't the original intention; while Dawn of Justice doesn't necessarily explain Bruce's Sanity Slippage well - usually didn't shy away from deconstructing the superhero genre and to add some sense of realism to the setting (Such as Superman's struggle to limit the damage to Metropolis in Man of Steel making people question his motives, or Batman developing PTSD from witnessing the same event), in JL most of the two character's trauma is largely forgotten about and both regularly crack jokes in the finale. While some watchers were pleased with this Superman becoming more light-hearted, both fans and detractors alike have pointed out that having Batman acting this way isn't only out of character for the DCEU version, but arguably the character in general.
• Katja And The Falcon: The eponymous heroine of this Danish film is a 10-year-old Danish girl who gets stranded in Rome with no money, no acquaintances, and no knowledge of the Italian language. She never reminiscences over her predicament, instead quickly bonding with a bunch of local kids and concentrating on freeing the titular falcon.
• In A Kid in King Arthur's Court, Calvin has been transported to Camelot without warning. He spends his first few days in another time period commissioning rollerblades from the local blacksmith and making Big Macs somehow.
• Vernita's daughter from Kill Bill doesn't look upset that her mother was murdered right in front of her. Though it might be because she's just too shocked to react. Beatrix at least seems to believe it will affect her, as she claims she'll understand if the girl tries to avenge this later.
• Laserblast: Kathy quickly shakes-off her Attempted Rape, because it might ruin the party.
• Lampshaded and subverted in Last Action Hero when Jack Slater confides in Daniel: "Let's throw his son off a building. Oh sure, it will give you nightmares for the rest of your life, but you're fiction, so who cares?"
• A minor problem with Mars Attacks!, as the President's daughter is seen at the end, only days after her parents have been killed, presenting Richie with his medal and seems unaffected. She even starts to ask him out. Arguably, Richie himself, who is only briefly affected by the death of his brother.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Avengers: Age of Ultron, the characters don't let something as trivial as a floating island that could wipe out humanity if dropped stop them from making wisecracks. It's something of a trademark for Joss Whedon in his works, but many professional and amateur critics have noted that while the constant quipping in life-or-death situations is an effective tension-breaker and helps lighten the mood, tension is a good thing when a scene actually calls for it, and injecting humor into it will cause immediate Mood Whiplash.
  • Captain America: Civil War: In the infamous airport fight scene. The Avengers are literally split right down the middle, fighting one another. Some of them are like family to each other, but each and every one of them seems more obsessed with being “the funny one”, cracking jokes and one liners and trying to top one another in the comedy department instead of realizing that they are falling apart.
• The Mask of Zorro: Elena quickly getting over how easily Zorro stripped her could count. Possibly she found it a turn-on, like the audience.
• Massacre at Central High: When David starts killing the members of the Gang of Bullies, they don't seem to grieve each other's deaths at all. The strongest reaction is from Paul, who's afraid he'll be next, but even he isn't sad, just scared.
• Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials:
  • None of the other kids resent Thomas for getting Winston killed or call him out for forcing them to fend for themselves in a desert.
  • Likewise, after Theresa betrays them to WCKD, Thomas immediately decides to go back and help. He doesn't show any angst about all the people who got killed as a result. This is in stark contrast to the book where, although he forgives her, he can't trust her anymore. What's more is that in the book Theresa is being forced to betray them by WICKED, and in the film, she just chooses to do so.
• Ed Jr. from The Mutilator grew up with a crazy abusive alcoholic father who would beat him, and one day while fooling around with one of his father's guns accidentally shoots and kills his mother. In the present day he displays no signs of trauma or PTSD, he seems like a happy upbeat young man hanging out with his friends. While he does bring up to them how much of an abusive nutcase his father is, he seems to harbor no ill will towards him, that is until he starts murdering his friends.
• The New Mutants:
  • Despite being Catholic, Rahne doesn't seem to have any problem with being romantically attracted to Dani. Notably, she confessed to masturbating in the chapel booth, a somewhat less serious sin in Catholicism.
  • Likewise, while three of the others angst about killing the people around them by accident, Dani never displays a horrified reaction to the fact that she was the one who killed everyone on her reservation. Especially considering that she tried to commit suicide before the fact came to light.
• No One Will Save You: After the aliens take over, Brynn is allowed to live amongst the human puppets as a free-thinking woman. However, as the entire town had spent the past ten years treating her like crap, she actually appears content with her situation, as everyone is much more friendly to her now.
• In-Universe and a Discussed Trope in Only Angels Have Wings. The movie opens with the death of a pilot named Joe, and immediately the pilots go around asking "Who's Joe?" and celebrate anyway though they mourn privately. Bonnie is horrified at their seeming callousness, but Geoff points out that theirs is a high-stress life and ostentatious mourning won't bring Joe back.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Percy's mother is killed right in front of him by a Minotaur. It's later revealed that she's not really dead and is eventually brought back, but during the time he thinks she's really gone Percy is remarkably blasé about it and just throws himself into learning about his powers and his sea-god father. This is half the reason it's considered an In Name Only adaptation by most of the fans, as Percy's entire Character Development in the book involved him mourning his mother, hating the gods for getting her caught up in this, and then gradually coming to accept that there was a bigger picture.
• Pete's Dragon (1977): Pete is certainly sad to learn that his beloved dragon friend whom he specifically hoped would never disappear is going to disappear and never, ever come back. But he gets over it in a literal instant.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: As Screen Rant Pitch Meetings (hilariously) points out, the fact that Aztec gods are real doesn't really change anyone's worldview or religious beliefs at all.
• In Rebel Without a Cause, Judy falls in love with Jim and seems to forget that her boyfriend died in a horrific car accident not even two hours beforehand.
• In Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Robin returns from the Crusades to find his family home repossessed and all his loved ones dead (including his pets). He gets a distressed expression for a second or two and then is off to his life of adventure.
• The Room (2003):
  • Claudette's breast cancer is treated as a mild annoyance. This is never mentioned again, leading many to just assume the woman is straight-up lying.
  • Johnny apparently does not give a damn that Denny is in love with his fiancée.
• The Santa Clause: When Scott first arrives at the North Pole, the elves are completely nonchalant about the appearance of a new Santa Claus and show no sign of mourning the previous Santa's death. The Santa Clauses eventually explains it with the reveal that the previous Santa didn't really die, but staged his "accident" because he had chosen Scott to take over his role, and the elves were in on the plan.
• Scarecrow Slayer: Mary is the Sole Survivor of this whole scarecrow ordeal. With several people, including her best friends and a guy who was in love with her, massacred right in front of her. You'd think that she would be at least a little bit upset by this. But after she blows the scarecrow up, she smiles and struts away like she hasn't a care in the world.
• Given how long Billy searched and longed for a reunion with his missing mother in SHAZAM! (2019), he was able to put on a brave face when he discovered his mother deliberately abandoned him and all his attempts to find her over the years were All for Nothing as she currently doesn't want him back in her life. He leaves the meeting on neutral terms but it's clear as he is walking away that he is on the verge of tears. He's then immediately pulled into a fight with Sivana without further time to process what had happened.
• Parodied by Officer Doughy in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
  "Well, that about does it. I killed my cousin, my heart is broken, my sister's dead. Dammit, I love this job."
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Generations: Even though the message was to move on with your life after past failures/tragedies, Picard seems unusually subdued about the fact that the Enterprise was destroyed in his absence. He even picks up a priceless artifact he got from a now-dead mentor during the series and sets it aside as if it meant nothing.^note The artifact is seen in his archive on Earth in Star Trek: Picard, leading to fan theories that it was either recovered from the wreckage later, or else had been safely stored on Earth the whole time due to its priceless nature, with Picard discarding a mere replica he had had made for his enjoyment. At least when he learns his nephew and brother died, it causes him actual grief. All that was in character, though; it's only discussed in private with Counselor Troi (making it the only time we've ever seen him consult with her), but he does express real sorrow at this (even growing close to crying). Still, it was never mentioned again, and it's not shown to affect him after this.
  • Star Trek (2009): It's practically deconstructed, as McCoy chastises Spock over not acting as though the destruction of Vulcan, his home planet, was an important deal to him. Spock responds with a curt, "If you think crew morale would be better served by me wandering the hallways in sorrow, please tell me." As a Vulcan, he is trained from birth to suppress his emotions, and his point is valid as they still had to confront the Big Bad heading towards Earth. But as a ploy to gain control of the Enterprise Kirk antagonizes him so his emotions explode, proving it did have an effect on him.
• Star Wars:
  • Luke Skywalker in A New Hope regarding the deaths of his family members: Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. You know, the people who raised him from a baby. Okay, he grieved for them for... 15 seconds screen time? He seemed over it by the time they reached Mos Eisley. Worse, they (probably) can't even become Force Spirits like Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin did, each of whom Luke seemed a lot more sad about dying. In Legacy Luke finally talks about his Aunt and Uncle's deaths to Cade who's in their old home. More or less, at first he wanted to make the Empire pay but knew he couldn't stop and angst about it. Later, when he became a Jedi, he accepted their deaths and knew they're part of the Living Force now, which they are.
  • Leia watched her entire planet get blown to smithereens before her eyes. Leia's only subsequent (onscreen) comment on the destruction of her home, her family, most of the people she's ever known, everyone she's never known, all that history, all that culture, all those people is "We have no time for our sorrows." (And a deleted scene where Leia sinks her head in shock immediately after Alderaan's destruction, before turning to Grand Moff Tarkin and saying "And you call yourselves human...") In fact, she is the one comforting Luke when he is upset over Obi-Wan's death after the escape from Death Star. Star Wars Legends talks about it; Leia turns any angst into hating The Empire even more, and at one point flips out meeting an Alderaanian Stormtrooper. It's illustrated by this quote from Shadows of the Empire:
  She felt the emotions well, felt them threaten to spill out in tears, but she fought it. She was Leia Organa, Princess of the Royal Family of Alderaan, elected to the Imperial Senate, a worker in the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Alderaan was gone, destroyed by Vader and the Death Star; the Imperial Senate was disbanded; the Alliance was outmanned and outgunned ten thousand to one, but she was who she was. She would not cry.
  She would not cry.
  She would get even.
  • In the new Expanded Universe, Leia is devastated by her planet's destruction, but doesn't show any outward grief from it, causing a lot of the rebels under her command to think of her as coldhearted. Eventually, she defies her superiors' wishes to embark on a quest to find and unite the surviving Alderaanians.
  • The rebels at the end of The Last Jedi are in a far worse off situation than at any time in The Empire Strikes Back^note Where despite setbacks, they managed to successfully evacuate the bulk of their forces by the time Vader landed at Hoth, managed to get new allies in Lando Calrissian and Cloud City by the end, and Vader ended up failing in his plan to topple Palpatine, and suffered no major character deaths. At the end, they lose the bulk of their fleet, much of their material, are reduced to a small skeleton that can be housed in the Millennium Falcon, end up suffering key casualties (Admiral Ackbar, Admiral Holdo, Luke Skywalker) and Kylo Ren ends up pulling a coup on the First Order, becoming the most powerful man in the galaxy. There's literally nothing in the way of the First Order to reclaim the Empire. Yet the end of the film soft-pedals this disaster with Leia insisting they have "what they need" and Poe Dameron and others trying to pass off their survival as if it's a great retreat, while the coda at Canto Bight doesn't suggest Tyrant Takes the Helm. This particular case did not escape Mr Plinkett in his review of the film.
  • Likewise, Luke didn't really seem to saddened after learning of Han's death from Rey and the others, despite having been very close in the original trilogy. It's anyone's guess as to why filmed scenes showing him grieving were deleted for the movie.
• Teen-Age Strangler: No one in the film other than the cops seems all that concerned about a psychopath going around murdering people. Barely a day after a violent murder, the friends of the victim all go out to a party. Mr. Royce seems more mad that his daughter was dating a member of a gang than that she was witness to a murder — meanwhile Mrs. Royce is delighted to be interrogated by the officer investigating her daughter's friend's murder, even getting downright flirty with him. All of the parents and teenagers seem more focused on trivial things like their social lives and stolen bikes over murders and gangs.
• They Live!. The hero learns that the world is a vast lie created by aliens in human guise that live among us. So he stares one of them in the face and says, "you look like your face fell in the cheese dip back in 1957!" Part of it is due to the hinting that Piper's character is having an "I knew it" attitude.
• In Time Trap, Taylor, Cara, Jackie, and Veeves only show angst briefly in reaction to knowing that everyone and everything they knew outside has long been gone, given that it has been over ten millennia outside since they first entered the cave . Justified in that they were focused on not getting killed by hostile cavemen. At the end of the movie, when they rescue Furby, Hopper, Hopper's parents and Hoppers' sister, they show little angst as they had years to come to terms with life over ten thousand years after their own time.
• In the Transformers Film Series, Optimus Prime has been criticized by fans for practically not giving a crap when Jazz dies.
• Tucker & Dale vs. Evil: Allison doesn't seem all that broken up about all her friends being killed.
• Where the Truth Lies features the heroine, played by Alison Lohman, being drugged and raped by an aspiring singer and then threatened with blackmail over it. She's not happy about it, but she shrugs it off rather easily.
• Witchfinder General: Although Sara displays angst about her uncle's death, having to prostitute herself to Hopkins and the torture of the other innocent people - she doesn't seem at all affected by Stearne's rape of her. It's practically forgotten about after it happens.
• The World of Suzie Wong: In the book Suzie gets over the death of her son rather quickly. The film changes this so that it features as the climax and finale.
• In World War Z, a small boy sees both his parents get turned into zombies, try to attack him, and then get gunned down by the military. Despite this, he seems mostly unfazed.
• In Zombieland, Columbus shoots and kills Bill Murray by mistake. He suffers no angst at all about this, but in fairness Bill Murray himself takes it pretty well all things considered. Tallahassee, on the other hand, is in tears.

Literature

• Huckleberry Finn of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has an abusive, drunken father, a dead mother, and no home whatsoever. For him, this is all just business as usual. It's worth noting he keeps a careful distance from most adults, but immediately latches on tightly to Jim, a common occurrence with children of his background.
• By the time the eponymous heroine from Alice, Girl from the Future is ten, she was captured about three dozen times and had multiple near-death experiences. She never sees a therapist about this and is as adventurous, eager, and trusting as before.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Alice is trapped in a World Gone Mad, but she doesn't react as badly as many real people would. Granted, she's dreaming; she can't be expected to behave normally in a dream. She does angst, one time, which results in her tears flooding the hallway and her having to swim to safety. Can't blame her for trying to avoid that again.
• In A Brother's Price, Jerin does angst after he is kidnapped and a woman sat on his face without clothes in-between, i.e., sort of oral rape without actual penetration, but only because he fears he is Defiled Forever due to consensual sex he suspects he might have had in a night he doesn't remember. After he is told that all is well, the woman he thinks he slept with was his bride, anyway, and they didn't even have sex, and he is welcomed back by his wives to be he quickly recovers. May or may not be justified, regarding how serious of an issue one regards the thing that happened. Other protagonists show realistic angst over the death of their relatives. Ren, for example, is plagued by nightmares of the night her sisters died in an explosion. Jerin's toddler sisters don't want to let him go, for fear he will never return, "like daddy"; their father died a couple of months ago, and Jerin was promoted to parent. The youngest doesn't quite understand that, unlike her father, Jerin will come back to visit.
• Touma in A Certain Magical Index. Due to being Born Unlucky, he suffers literally orders of magnitude more than the other protagonists combined. The main example is in New Testament Volume 9, where he experiences a series of hells, any one of which would be enough to break a normal person, and pulls himself together in order to keep fighting. This is followed by being killed countless times. After it all, he has essentially the same personality as before. He does later have breakdowns when encountering other Magic Gods, but not nearly as severe as you'd expect^note He has no problem living with Othinus, the Magic God who did all of this to him, for example, and he's still able to keep going.
• In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Golden Ticket tour group learns how dangerous Wonka's Factory can be — not to mention how nonchalant their guide is — when Augustus Gloop winds up sent to who-knows-where via the pipes, but it doesn't dampen their enthusiasm for the rest of the tour, even as further members are eliminated in similarly absurd disasters. No matter what they witness, no one ever asks to leave if they aren't directly affected by events, and the Audience Surrogate is having the time of his life. Granted, the disasters are all played for Black Comedy and the victims are all repulsive brats and coddling parents. The 2013 stage adaptation plays with this a little, again for laughs — even though the party is horrified by what happens to Augustus (and in this version it's suggested he might not survive), when the impatient Mr. Wonka asks them "Anybody want to go home?", no one answers in the affirmative! As the party further dwindles, though, anxiety creeps into the wonder of those still standing...
• The Chronicles of Narnia:
  • The Silver Chair: The narrator takes the time to explain and justify Jill Pole's right to be this, acknowledging that this is generally preferred amongst readers. Also, human emotions received more attention as the series progressed, which makes Jill's portrayal far different from the Pevensies' four books ago.
  • It's played with in the case of Prince Rilian. He's genuinely traumatized at spending years as a prisoner underground, to the point where he violently threatens the children when it looks like they won't free him. He also is heartbroken over the death of his father. But on the other hand, as he and the children flee the collapsing underground and he knows his time is limited to reach his dying father, he still is seriously tempted to stop to explore the deep underground realm of the dwarfs. Jill has to remind him of his other obligations.
  • The Pevensies had a rather severe case of this. Their home is being bombed, and they're living with a stranger to get away from the fighting. They've stumbled upon another world, and Lucy's friend there has been kidnapped. They then find out that they're part of an ancient prophecy that involves going back into a warzone. Their first response is essentially a cheery, "Great, where do we sign up?" Nor do they seem to miss their home while living in Narnia. Then, in Prince Caspian, the once-kings-now-kids seem to have had no trouble readjusting to being children in London after spending (at least) fifteen years as royalty in a magic land. Once they are transported back, they seem none the worse after figuring out that it's been a thousand years in Narnia and all their old friends are dead. And once they rescue Trumpkin and find out what's happening, they rush off to help rescue the title character, with no thought of getting their old thrones back.
  • The Magician's Nephew: While Diggory spends much of the book justifiably angsting over his sick and dying mother, he takes traveling to new worlds and fighting a witch pretty well. Uncle Andrew however takes it poorly when he's thrown into the world of magic, and it's played for laughs.
  • In The Horse and His Boy when Shasta discovers he is not the son of the man who raised him from a baby he is relieved, as he didn't love him anyway. Though King Lune mentions that being driven from her father's house must be a grief to Aravis, she never speaks or acts like it.
• At the start of A Clash of Kings, when Tyrion offers his condolences to Joffrey for the loss of his supposed father, Joffrey has to be reminded of the loss. Justified in that Joffrey is a sociopath who was never close to his father, and the death led to his ascension as king, which he's thrilled about. It's hinted that Joffrey may have seen the Hound as something of a surrogate father figure, albeit an emotionally distant one he could casually abuse, but he doesn't show much grief when the Hound takes off without a word either.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses:
  • Besides occasionally having nightmares (which tend to be mentioned rather than shown), Rhysand is surprisingly well-adjusted for someone who found his mother and sister decapitated, then was held captive, repeatedly raped and made to torture and murder dozens - if not hundreds - of people for half a century. Considering he's only had his freedom back for three months by A Court of Mist and Fury, you'd expect him to be more affected by it. He also never expresses much remorse or guilt about the numerous people he's hurt and killed over the years in Amarantha's service. No one in the Inner Circle ever really brings it up either, even though something awful happened to someone they love that kept him away from them for decades (plus he mostly endured it purely to protect them, which you would think would cause some feelings guilt or responsibility).
  • In A Court of Silver Flames, Feyre doesn't seem nearly as horrified as one would expect when she discovers her mate and friends all conspired not to tell her that she and her unborn baby are very likely going to die in childbirth; she finds out when her sister blurts it out in a moment of rage (her mate then threatens to kill her sister). Feyre does get upset and later states Rhysand overreacted about Nesta, but she forgives Rhysand and the Inner Circle very easily despite them lying to her about something so serious and personal to her. Considering Feyre's past trauma around being controlled and left out of the loop by a partner (and that she went nuclear on Tamlin for betraying her trust and hurting her family), her reaction can come off as bizarrely minor.
• Dear Mr. Henshaw: Leigh gets over Dad getting Bandit instead of him in the span of about fifteen seconds. It's kinda-sorta justified in that Leigh wants his dad to be happy, and also wants Bandit to be happy, but still...
• Mused upon in The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar, when, after a fair share of Wangst prior to the departure from St. Petersburg, Griboyedov, the main character, first calms down and then stops at a small hut on his way to Tiflis. He suddenly realizes that he is happy - because a man can't really be unhappy all the time and that there is more to a person than just grandiose plans, love, and misery.
• Enforced in-universe in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down. While working on their No Budget indie horror film Night of the Night Crawlers, Rowley is so freaked out that Greg has to shoehorn in a joke to keep him from running away. This joke turns out to be an unnamed man reacting to his wife's horrifying death by saying "Well, I guess this means I'm single!" and winking at the camera.
• In Dinoverse Janine and Patience are the two characters who react to being torn away from their bodies and becoming very inhuman dinosaurs with basically acceptance and no regret or worry about it, in strict contrast with their companions. Janine is calm enough that the other characters notice and comment on it; she's intending to stay as a pterosaur and remain in the Cretaceous to escape a troubled home life. Patience also has a difficult home life, but she wants to go back and try to power through it; she's not particularly tempted to stay, and just doesn't see the use in dwelling on angst.
• In Dragon Bones, Ward is shown to have a very abusive father (who dies at the start of the novel), but never seems to angst about it, even though he had to resort to Obfuscating Stupidity for seven years to not be killed by his father. Justified in that it's implied he's just that resilient - other family members are shown to be more severely affected, like his mother, who became The Ophelia, his Cute Mute sister Ciarra, who is, well, mute, and easily scared, and brother Tosten who attempted suicide, and whom Ward took away from the family castle to ensure his survival. (The rest of the family thinks Tosten ran away and is likely dead).
• In Dr. Franklin's Island, Semi and Miranda notice in themselves that while they were terrified before the completion of their Slow Transformation, when it's done and they start to find that they're almost happy as a fish and bird monster respectively. Being enclosed isn't good but they have each other. As the plot progresses Miranda is given limited freedom to fly and the possibility of returning to human is dangled in front of Semi, anguish returns - Semi notes that there's something almost comforting about not having any hope, wheras this uncertain hope that she doesn't really believe in is painful.
• The Elminster Series:
  • Elminster is upset when his father and mother are murdered, along with his hometown being burned to the ground, but he gets over it very quickly (albeit seeking revenge even so). It's still much more believable than when he just wakes up from suspended animation over three hundred years and then finds the entire city of Hastarl is gone, destroyed by an orc horde, with everyone he'd known (including his close friends there) all long dead, which it seems doesn't affect him at all.
  • Elminster ends up in stasis for a century and when he wakes up finds that Myth Drannor, the city he sought so hard to reform, has been turned into a hellish demon-ridden ruin. Elminster takes it in stride.
• Expeditionary Force: Much of the series has the Earth on the verge of total destruction and over a hundred thousand humans abandoned on the planet Paradise to never be seen again. The protagonists seem remarkably well-adjusted to the constant threat as well as abandoning so many of their former comrades.
• In Holly Lisle's Fire in the Mist, Faia (the main character) leaves town for a bit and soon returns to find that everyone she ever knew is dead, from plague. She promptly freaks out and nukes the entire town with her latent magic abilities. About three days later she considers suicide. So it's a subversion, right? Wrong. About one day later, we find this quote: "And indeed, she felt happy. Or, if not exactly happy, then free at last of the dark burden of [her hometown's] annihilation." After that, the horrible events are never ever mentioned again, and Faia never angsts or even thinks about it. So Lisle was smart enough to give Faia some real pain, but then she erased that pain pretty quickly. Ask anyone: emotional pain of that scale doesn't heal in just a couple days.
• Mistress Commander Angharad Godkin in Flight of the Godkin Griffin gets beaten nearly to death and gang-raped by half-human monsters and her only reaction is to get mildly irritated about a potential pregnancy screwing up her family bloodlines. Oh, and she utterly wipes out the mountain pards responsible for creating their monster children.
• Guardians of the Flame: The main characters really aren't bothered about everyone they've left here on Earth, i.e. "the Other Side". It's to the point that most don't even mention their parents, other family, friends etc. While their return to "This Side" the first time makes sense, as they had to get James Michael/Ahira Back from the Dead, later none seems to care. In another book later Walter thinks about his brother, pondering that he hasn't seen him for years after settling down into "the Other Side" permanently, and likely never will again. That's it. For all their loved ones know, they disappeared without a trace, and the mental anguish of that (as many who have lost people will know, especially when there's no explanation) could be devastating. Apparently though this never occurs to any of them, nor does the fact they will never see them again or can explain what happened affect them at all in the books. However, since it's shown that Narnia Time applies (several weeks of adventuring adds up to eight hours back on Earth), it's likely that even by the time Karl and Andy-Andy's son grows to maturity, they've been gone from Earth for a few weeks, tops. Plus since they 1) literally have no way to get back home once the Dragon is awakened and 2) are in a near-constant fight for their lives, focusing on the here-and-now is essential to their physical and mental survival. Even so, that they don't show even a single instance of concern or sorrow over this is really jarring.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • Arthur Dent, as mentioned above. He has an even worse time of things in the books than in the movie; Earth is destroyed more than once. Admittedly, in the books, his feelings on all the terrible things that seem to happen to him are explored a bit more fully, and he does occasionally get something like impatient sympathy from Trillian or Ford. But mostly, everything that happens seems to be nothing but a big joke at his expense. There's a sequence that plays with this; it seems trying to imagine everyone on earth is gone is just too big a thought for his head to contain. Instead, he worries about little things like Nelson's Column and the permanent end of the US dollar. When he realizes there are no more McDonalds hamburgers, he passes out and wakes up sobbing for his mother.
  • Ford's father died of shame because he (Ford) never learned to pronounce his own real name. This is explained in a footnote. He spends fifteen years trapped on Earth, one of the most boring places in the universe for a traveler to be, kept away from everyone and everything he knows and loves. He regularly gets drunk and staggers around outside looking for spaceships and saying "I'm trying, I'm trying" to people who tell him to go home. Arthur was probably the only real friend he made and kept during this time, as he was the only person he bothered to rescue from the Vogons. Not much is made of any of this.
• Berry, the adopted daughter of Anton Zilwicki in Honor Harrington has this as a defining character trait. So much so that virtually every person she knows comments on how 'intrinsically sane' she is in the face of the horrors she's been through.
  "They might rape me? Well, I've been raped before."
• Harry Potter: Harry's parents died when he was a year old. He spent the next ten years in the care of his abusive relatives who, amongst other things: made him sleep in a cupboard; put bars on his window (when they finally gave him a room to sleep in); badmouthed his dead parents and kept the truth about them from him; kept from him the truth about his magical heritage; physically abused him; made him do all the chores; never celebrated his birthday, gave him presents, gave him clothes that fit, toys, or anything a child would have needed. Harry takes all of this in stride. He doesn't show any curiosity about his parents and the world that had been kept from him even when he comes to Hogwarts - other characters have to practically force the plot-relevant parts of this knowledge onto him over the years. He never questions his and all his friends' loyalty to Dumbledore, who happens to be both the all-powerful headmaster of Hogwarts and the person who sent Harry to live with his abusers in the first place. He also accepts being practically adopted into the Weasley family without much fuss and takes their generosity completely at face value.
  • It's zig-zagged with Harry regarding the rest of the series' plot. On the one hand, Sirius Black's death hits him hard in book six (if not book five where it actually happens), and Cedric Diggory's death at least allows him to see thestrals. On the other hand, he just lets Snape die without any attempt at saving him, and seems completely fine with that afterwards. Even though Snape had protected him and saved his life countless times.
• The Hunger Games:
  • The only thing that seems to make Peeta Mellark angst is being hijacked by the Capitol, and even that is the result of brainwashing targeted to make people frightened and anguished. The list of things he shows no signs of angsting over include having killer wasps dropped on him while sleeping, taking a sword to the leg, nearly dying of sepsis, being forced to listen to someone being slowly chewed to death over several hours, having his leg amputated and finding out the girl he loves only pretended to love him back. And that's just from the first book. Even his nightmares are mostly about losing Katniss and not about the horrors he's lived through.
  • Gale doesn't spend much time angsting, not even when he's been flogged within an inch of his life.
• Inheritance Cycle:
  • Eragon exhibits this in the second book Eldest. It is revealed to him that his father was The Dragon to the Big Bad, and to put it lightly, not a nice person. He gets over this in three paragraphs. He does, however, angst when his uncle dies (for a few chapters, after which he gets over it), when he is told that his father was really his mentor, Brom, and when Murtagh joins the enemy.
  • There's also Arya in Eragon: in spite of having been, by her own admission, beaten, tortured, and very nearly raped for months on end, the biggest reaction we get out of her thereafter is a paragraph of her clenching her jaw a bit as she recounts the events... and after that everything's just peachy. This may also be a racial thing for her, considering one of the things about elves is their iron control over themselves. Arya is also more withdrawn and closed than most of them, and for her, even a clenched jaw might equal something stronger from others. This is eventually addressed much later in the series, in the third book, when Eragon notes that she never talks about what happened to her. This leads to her breaking down and weeping while sharing the details of her captivity and its effects on her.
• The children in Stephen King's It are much more capable of dealing with supernatural horror than adults; for example, after defeating the Eldritch Abomination in the sewers, Bill, the main character goes home: "After a block or two he begins to walk faster, thinking of supper... and a block or two after that, he begins to whistle." As adults, they're no longer that good in that, so a benevolent force wipes their memories. A good portion of the novel follows the main characters as adults trying to remember what they did to stop It. When one of the kids, as an adult does remember the full horror of IT, he commits suicide in the bathtub. This seems to be what King believes kids do all the time with painful memories. In one of his short stories, he had a boy trying to get over the fact that one of his friends and his teacher had just been eaten by a tiger in the school toilet in the span of time it took to walk down the hallway. The reader is shown the process, which mostly consists of focusing on all the trivial posters on the walls. There was also the Library Policeman's protagonist, though it was made pretty clear the angst from getting raped as a kid left its marks on his adult self.
• Left Behind: Imagine that every child in the world and a not-insignificant chunk of the adult population vanishes in a single instant. This being a billion or so people (not counting the collateral deaths) with no plausible explanation, you'd probably be terrified, shell-shocked, if not suicidal. It's unusual then that everyone manages to continue running the world so quickly afterward — with governments and airlines and such remaining unaffected. The phone company endures all that and the onset of nuclear war, maintaining flawless cellular reception to a degree they can barely manage in reality.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Hobbits have this quality, mental resiliency. Their ability to shake their troubles and get past horrible experiences is often mentioned. One example is Merry and Pippin strolling around in Fangorn forest being curious about their surroundings and seemingly with hardly a care in the world. This after they've been abducted for the purpose of torture (and watched their friend die trying to save them), been handled roughly to say the least by the uruk-hai, and nearly been killed in a battle. During Merry's healing in Return of the King, Merry mentions that Hobbits deal with turmoil by trying to react as if all is mostly well. This sorta hits home once you read "The Sea-Bell" and realise Frodo is still suffering years after he returned to the shire.
  • King Théoden is as calm about the recent death of his son Théodred as if it had happened years ago. The Movie adds a scene of him heart-breakingly mourning his son.
  • The Rohirrim tend to be kinda Viking about the whole 'death in battle' thing. "Hail the victorious dead!" is again movie continuity only, but it's definitely true to the essence of the culture.
• In the Lords of the Underworld series, Gwen is kidnapped by mad scientists, caged for months in a glass dome so small she can't even lie down in it, and Forced to Watch many other captives being tortured and raped. This experience is treated by everyone as a bad thing, sure, but a day later Gwen is entirely re-acclimated to normal life and has no trauma or lasting emotional effects whatsoever ^note although the lack of physical harm is explained by her immortal nature.
• The main heroine of Luise Indiewelt is an 11-year-old girl who, true to her name (which means "In the world"), travels the world in search of her father, and is not stopped by things like being kidnapped or having no money left.
• Jeb Batchelder in Maximum Ride has every reason to angst — his son dies, twice, once practically in his arms, his daughter would gladly kill him if given the chance, and he regularly gets slapped around by his superiors — and yet he never says a word. He does get really upset during both of the times when Ari dies and it was mentioned that the clone of Max makes him very upset.
• Millennium Series:
  • On the one hand, Lisbeth Salander has been deeply marked by her terrible childhood experiences, but on the other hand, this has made her pretty much impervious to any later trauma. Her reaction to being brutally raped and tortured for an entire night is to very calmly get revenge and then move on without any sign of being hurt by it. Her reaction to being shot in the head and buried alive is likewise to get revenge, and then function pretty much exactly as she has always done.
  • Other characters seem to have reasonable immediate reactions to trauma and go into shock or have delayed reactions quite realistically, but do not seem to have any permanent mental scars from their experiences. Considering everything Mikael has gone through by the end of the trilogy, this is quite extraordinary.
• Mister & Missus:
  • The Mister:
    • Alessia comes off as having surprisingly little trauma despite growing up with a violent, domineering father who forced her into a betrothal to an equally repulsive man, and being a victim of sex trafficking who was fortunate enough to escape before she was sexually violated (the kidnapping alone was bad enough). She expresses a bit of angst over the other women being trafficked alongside her - with whom she was on a first name basis - but beyond mentioning on a few occasions that she hoped they escaped she rarely thinks about it. This also doesn't impact her romance with Maxim much; despite her background priming her to have issues with trust and intimacy, she quickly overcomes any qualms and is happy to jump into bed with Maxim just weeks after meeting him.
    • The novel's climax is sapped of a lot of its urgency and tension due to Maxim's rather nonchalant approach to Alessia being kidnapped and forced to return to Albania by her crazy ex, who intends to force her into marriage. He never seems truly concerned that he might not reach her in time, that he may never see her again at all or that horrible things might be happening to her; he takes his sweet time coming to her rescue and thinks stopping off to drink with his buddy and shop for engagement rings on the way is a good idea.
  • Alessia has another big case of this in the sequel, The Missus. It's been a mere two months since Alessia was trafficked to a foreign country and wound up a homeless illegal immigrant being hunted by her kidnappers. She was then abducted again by her abusive ex, held at gunpoint, nearly raped and faced the prospect of being forced to marry this man just days before this story begins. Despite her horrifying ordeal and how little time has passed since then, Alessia hardly seems bothered by any of it after marrying Maxim (a man she barely knows), not even suffering much from nightmares or a fear of darkness anymore (which she did experience in the previous novel). Maxim appears more affected by it than Alessia, such as getting paranoid and anxious if Alessia is out of his sight or doesn't get in contact with him, while Alessia just brushes it off.
• Peter Pan is legendary for this. Pirates and Indians are fun to read about, and some children would want to have adventures with them. But most children would decide enough was enough after the third time they nearly get killed. The Darlings, by contrast, are having the time of their lives in Neverland, and never wanted to go home until they realized their mother was feeling awful. Not everybody would want to be a kid forever, either — the ending suggests that being eternally young isn't all it's cracked up to be. The books lay out that part of why Peter is the one child who will never grow up is because of his immaturity. When an older Wendy asks him what happened to Tinker Bell, he has absolutely no memory of her although the Fairy was a loyal companion. She died seasons ago and faded from Peter's mind to protect him from growing up. Similarly, the longer the Darlings stay in Neverland the harder it gets for them to want to remember their old lives, thus explaining the missing angst. By having Peter avoid getting too angst-filled, it sure does invoke it in the reader.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray: Gray's fiancée commits suicide. Later that day, he enjoys the opera with his friend. The next day, he claims that he was simply in control of his emotions and, after he had been done with the emotion of sadness, he simply moved on. Leads to a funny conversation with Basil when he accuses him of being kind enough to console him but showing frustration that he is already consoled.
• This was the gimmick of Pollyanna, and is the one thing the book is best remembered for, as witnessed by it lending its name to the term The Pollyanna.
• In Robert E. Howard's The Pool of the Black One, Conan the Barbarian gets an in-universe comment about this: a handful of them have just escaped an Eldritch Abomination in Alien Geometries, and he's cheerfully shouting about how they will sail to waters with rich prey.
• In the fourth book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the character Phil remains quite upbeat for a guy who is working in a lumber mill, is paid with coupons, and has gum for lunch every day. When his leg is crushed, he says, "Well, this isn't too bad. My left leg is broken, but at least I'm right-legged." Somebody comments, "Gee, I thought he'd say something more along the lines of 'Aaaaah! My leg! My leg!'"
• Ninevah "Nin" Redstone from Caro King's Seven Sorcerers series is a glaring example. Sure, she shows lots of fear when things are actually threatening... but the moment the danger is gone, she immediately reverts to being a cheerful and carefree Plucky Girl.
• For a completely realistic, thoughtful, and adult portrayal of how humans deal with life-threatening danger, try The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis, ironically written prior to Narnia. Lewis was a veteran of World War I.
• Meursault's lack of angst over his mother's death is a major plot point in The Stranger. Plus his lack of angst over his own impending execution.
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit:
  "Now my dears," said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, "you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor."
• Teen Angst? Nah... by Ned Vizzini. Sums it up right in the title.
• In Those nearby by A. Afanas'ev, Sofa, an alien girl with psychic powers, is Brought Down to Normal and captured by the Big Bad, along with the main protagonist. When they are interrogated, Sofa's snarky comments drive the Big Bad nuts. His threats of violence (including thinly veiled torture threats) have no effect on her, even though she clearly takes them for real. She even misses her chance to escape when doing so would leave the protagonist alone.
• Time of Death protagonist Emma Rossi survives a staggering amount of horrible events including no less than THREE city-sized settlements of survivors being destroyed around her—in the first book (!!) but maintains a positive attitude.
• In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins's father dies in about the second chapter. This is the last mention of him; from then on Jim's too busy having an adventure to grieve. A number of adaptations simply have Jim's father either leave or die before the main story even starts, effectively clearing up that bit of loose end.
• The teenage Bob-Whites of Trixie Belden have no adverse reaction to being nearly murdered, held at gunpoint, mauled by wildcats, poisoned etc...
  • In particular, both Jim and Dan don't take long at all to get over their Orphan's Ordeal and Trauma Conga Line, respectively. Dan at least spends some time sullen and closed-off, but Jim's years of severe physical and emotional abuse are barely even mentioned again once he's Happily Adopted.
• The Twilight Saga:
  • While Bella Swan is wangst incarnate, whining about absolutely everything, angsting about how she doesn't deserve to be with someone like Edward or to have a friend like Jacob and gets incredibly depressed whenever Edward leaves her or tries to, she's this in the areas where she really should be. She barely gives a thought to how Edward's a blood-sucking vampire who constantly warns her that her life could be in danger if she gets close to him, or the very real consequences that come with becoming a vampire. Uncontrollable hunger for blood? Loss of human emotions? Who cares? All she wants is to be with Edward forever! (It turns out that she doesn't suffer from the drawbacks of becoming a vampire... for some reason.) She also has a grand total of maybe one or two misgivings about leaving her human family to be with Edward. Considering how she's set up as a loving, sweet daughter who is her mother's best friend and her father's only hope for normalcy, it seems odd that she's willing to live forever without them after they die a mere month or two after meeting Edward. Then again, it quickly becomes evident that she lies to and patronizes her mother every chance she gets.
  • Bella's father Charlie seems pretty nonchalant for a guy whose daughter changed overnight from a clumsy, fairly pretty everygirl to a ravishing, completely-in-control model.
  • As we see in Breaking Dawn, imprinting is enough to get a guy to not care that the former love of his life and mother of his new love interest just died violently and bloodily not minutes prior, nor that she is now what he used to consider a soulless monster, nor that she has definitely left him for another man. Never mind that he wanted to kill the girl a minute earlier, nor that she is a newborn baby.
  • The Cullen family are supposed to be highly moral (especially Carlisle) and regret all human lives that have to be lost. Then they invite every vampire they know into the area where they live, and allow them to eat whoever they want provided it's not someone Bella cares about. She thinks about this for a second, then deliberately puts it out of her mind, and it's never ever brought up again.
• Firestar in Warrior Cats doesn't think twice about leaving his 'housefolk' to go live with a group of feral cats. It seems he didn't really care for his owners since plenty of cats do just run off, but is a bit jarring. He thinks about his feline friends and believes he's better off with Thunderclan, but doesn't think of his humans besides the fact that they'll get a Replacement Goldfish after he leaves (which they do).
• In Watership Down it is noted that the rabbits, like humanity, are well suited to weathering disaster and moving on quickly. (As they should be. Rabbits are prey animals. Getting eaten is what they do.)
• In The Will of the Empress, Sandry annuls the marriage of an abused woman named Gudruny who was forced into marriage many years ago, and who was so desperate she risked hiding in Sandry's wardrobe to beg for release. In Real Life, long-term abuse survivors have a lot of emotional problems to work through after they escape, but Gudruny turns from "battered wife" to "motherly dispenser of wisdom" almost overnight, with no apparent ill effects.^note Although the setting does have "mind healers" who seem able to magically treat emotional problems and some mental illness, there is no mention of Gudruny ever visiting one.
• The protagonists of Wings of Fire are young children thrown into the middle of a war, who have spent nearly all of their lives trapped in a cave for their own safety. And because of their importance to the prophecy, everyone they meet tries to either kill them, kidnap them, or use them for political ends. Yet they remain remarkably casual about this.

Live-Action TV

• Lennier on Babylon 5 lost family during the Earth/Minbari War when the Minbari warship Drala'fi (Black Star) was destroyed. Despite this, he holds no grudge against the person directly responsible for destroying the ship (Sheridan), nor the person who gave the order that started the war in the first place (Ambassador Delenn).
• Back to Life: Central character Miri Matteson has just come out of jail after serving 18 years for what we learn was a Crime of Self-Defense, yet isn't bitter or damaged, in fact she comes across as far more well-adjusted than most of the supporting characters.
• The Boys (2019): In "The Bloody Doors" Annie's ease of getting over accidentally killing their carjacking victim, an innocent man, is at odds with her character when the worst she's done so far is blackmail. Given that Annie admits to being under constant stress as The Mole, she's likely become more self-centered as a way of coping. She herself even wonders aloud over this change in her character, saying her only thought about the guy was he'd been an idiot.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "The Harvest", the second episode, Xander and Willow's so-called best friend Jesse gets turned into a vampire, and Xander is forced to slay him. Neither Xander nor Willow seem that affected by this event, especially over the long term. Jesse is never mentioned again. Worse, this was their first exposure to the fact that vampires are real. The situation might have been different if the development plans for Jesse had come through, since a proposed line was for him to become a recurring, unapologetic vampire opponent (like vamp!Xander and vamp!Willow in the Wishverse).
• A few of the characters of Degrassi: The Next Generation have this, but Toby especially. He is consistently picked on, ignored by his unrequited crushes, and has two of his only friends killed by school violence, but seems no worse for wear by the next episode he's in.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Doctor himself has gone back and forth on this. Often serials would have a very Bittersweet Ending with a high body count, and the Doctor mourning the senseless tragedy of it all. Next serial he'd be up for a bit more fun sightseeing, even when it's made clear that little time has passed between stories. One explanation — and justification of this — running since the First Doctor days and made more explicit in the new series is that the Doctor feels the angst all too much (especially the destruction of his own people between the original show and the revival), but must keep running. To dwell on all the horror he has faced would mean a one-way trip across the Despair Event Horizon. Like the First Doctor says hugging Dodo after "The Savages", he must never look back!
  • The first companion to leave in the whole show is Susan, the Doctor's own granddaughter. He quietly misses her for a few moments during "The Rescue", but then he picks up Vicki, a Replacement Goldfish granddaughter who, unlike Susan, tends to be the Doctor's chirpy sidekick instead of the Screaming Woman. This suits the Doctor's selfishness and Blue-and-Orange Morality but isn't exactly sympathetic to consider in any depth. Susan presents all sorts of problems in this regard as she was a companion from a very different show to what the show eventually became and being the only companion the Doctor has no reason never to go back for - the show did its best in the old days to deal with this by simply forgetting she ever existed. The Expanded Universe even suggests that the Doctor even forgot all about Susan, but the revival series has both the Ninth and Tenth Doctor mention being a grandparent in a far more angsty way.
  • "The Daleks' Master Plan" is an ungodly long twelve-part story arc, where the first-ever companion deaths in the series are encountered- that of Sara Kingdom and Katarina. Is the Doctor depressed about this? Broken, that after taking up Barbara and Ian so long ago to travel in space in time, that a human died in his helpless hands? No. He shakes his head, says goodbye, and moves on.
  • "Doctor Who and the Silurians" is a harrowing story with a colossal body count where the Doctor is stuck mediating between the Silurians and the humans, both of whom are trying to kill each other out of racist paranoia even though the Doctor is convinced they could talk it out. At the end of the story, hundreds of humans are dead from the Silurian plague, and the Brigadier's misguided attempts to protect humanity from further warfare led him to simply murder all of the defenceless Silurians in suspended animation, metaphorically stabbing the Doctor in the back in order to do so. The final image of the story is the Doctor looking down at the explosion in horror, declaring that the Brigadier had committed murder. The following story, "The Ambassadors of Death", opens with the Doctor in a new house making the TARDIS console do Timey-Wimey Ball tricks and still working for the Brigadier like nothing has happened, with the exception of one throwaway barbed comment about the Brigadier being bored because he can't find more Silurians to shoot.
  • Something horrible, usually getting possessed or blinded or so on, ends up happening to Sarah Jane once a story, and she eventually decides to leave the TARDIS crew because of it... but not because it's so scary and unpleasant, because it's boring. Her final speech in which she complains to the Doctor is delivered in tones of naggy frustration while the Doctor tinkers with the TARDIS in the background in the manner of a boorish husband fiddling with his car while his wife tells him off.
  • Dealt with interestingly in Season 14. The Doctor in "The Face of Evil" is rather chirpy considering he's just been dumped by Sarah before having an unusually harrowing experience involving the Master and a lot of torture... but the opening of "The Robots of Death" has him give his age to Leela, and it's a year higher than it had been a couple of episodes ago. Presumably he did his brooding offscreen. The Expanded Universe plugs the gap here.
  • Director Ben Wheatley cited this as the reason why he found Fourth Doctor stuff so dark:
    "If you look at the Tom Baker stuff, it's especially dark. When he leaves Leela — who's a very beloved assistant — he just laughs after it. There's none of the [breaking down and crying]. He just laughs, and "on to the next one," you know."
  • Companions run the gamut in how well they cope with their adventures, from Action Girl to Screaming Woman. The companions who freak when they're running from homicidal Daleks would seem to be more realistic than the ones who stand and fight (not to mention saner), but the fans always prefer the ones who don't angst. Realistic or not, which one do you want to spend a half-hour watching?
  • Matthew Waterhouse (Adric) thinks this was the reason the show treated much of the universe as a Throw-Away Country after its destruction in "Logopolis" - there was no way to deal with the implications of what had happened, and the characters' participation (however unwitting) in it, without derailing the show. (The third option would have been not to have such a huge catastrophe in the first place, but anyway.) Nyssa, who was from that part of the universe, is visibly choked up, her voice breaking (or shaking with suppressed rage, it's hard to tell which) when watching Traken's destruction. After that, events moved with enough speed and desperation that she wouldn't have had a chance to emotionally break down until the end of the story arc, at which point she presumably did her mourning offstage in the time gap between episodes. It's also entirely in-character for Nyssa to not go around emotionally freaking out; unlike some of the more higher-strung Companions, Nyssa's hat was being the calm and intelligent one.
  • Ended up being something of a signature of the Peter Davison era, as an unfortunate result of (not entirely unsuccessful) attempts to ramp up the drama and conflict, presided over by a bunch of sci-fi and light entertainment writers and producers who didn't really understand how to pull this off. Nyssa's father's corpse is being worn by a mad Time Lord constantly trying to kill her!... and she never mentions it at all or even reacts. Tegan's aunt is killed by the Master!... "...and what's worse, I'm late for work!". Adric dies in a brilliant and painful sequence!... and in the next episode, the Doctor says Adric wouldn't want everyone to mourn and everything is forgotten! The Doctor is introduced to his granddaughter who he abandoned centuries ago in a war zone and vowed through suppressed tears that he would come back for her!... and says "Yes, I know".
  • Ianto Jones is a lot less distressed about the Dalek invasion in "The Stolen Earth" than Jack is, considering he and his girlfriend was at Torchwood One during the Battle of Canary Warf where said girlfriend became half-converted into a Cyberman... Then again, this is Ianto we're talking about.
  • Amy displays a blase attitude towards adventuring, danger, and her fiancé's safety, and is especially blatant after the previous regime's more realistic depiction of extreme trauma. Halfway through her second season, she has her month-old baby taken to be made into a human weapon, and while at the end of the episode she's seen shaking and crying, come the next episode and everything is business as usual. On the other hand, the actress describes Amy as a Stepford Smiler, so she just isn't showing it. This was also partly the result of the series's Troubled Production, and there are multiple Expanded Universe stories and minisodes which attempt to plug the gaps.
  • Clara Oswald's tenure is a deconstruction of this, not helped by her tendency to act as a strong-willed, Don't You Dare Pity Me! type of person, or the fact that her friendship with the Doctor is frequently mired in misunderstandings, half-truths, and flat-out lies (especially with the colder, more detached and more alien Twelfth Doctor). By her third series, she's forever lost the man she grew to love and has changed from a cheerful and cheeky lady into a more world-weary and reckless figure with a lot of barely repressed trauma. Even though the Doctor is trying to be a caring friend, he realises she's bordering on being a death seeker, causing him to explicitly worry about her despite needing her as his Living Emotional Crutch, while she keeps denying that her grief is making her increasingly depressed and jaded towards everything but her adrenaline junkie desires. In the end, it's reconstructed: When she condemns herself to death in "Face the Raven", she accepts this as the bitter fruit of her recklessness and faces it with courage, telling the Doctor that both of them must be brave now. Unfortunately, he has a Sanity Slippage, as she learns when he pulls her out of time. In the end, helping him move on leaves her functionally immortal with her own TARDIS and companion, able to have near-infinite adventures — so long as she eventually returns to her death — as a sadder, wiser, more cautious woman.
  • The Fourteenth Doctor specials examine this tendency, perhaps in response to Thirteen largely shrugging off major events like the revelation of not actually being a Time Lord, and the Flux destroying half the universe. After so many lifetimes of never pausing to look back at his pain, the Doctor is at a breaking point and feels everything catching up to him, with other characters clearly seeing that the angst is eating at him. At one point, he nearly breaks down in tears when the subject of his unwitting role in the Flux as Thirteen comes up, and he has to take a moment to scream and pound the walls in frustration before he can re-focus on more immediate problems. Eventually, he realizes that his latest regeneration left him with the face of an older Ten because he subconsciously wants to work out his angst for once, both the recent stuff as well as much older issues that've been long kept buried (mentioning the destruction from Logopolis, among others); he ends up deciding to settle down with Donna's family for the time being to finally start processing everything in a healthy manner.
• The Dolls in Dollhouse seem to be like this on the surface. When not programmed, they are essentially childlike and complacent to those in authority over them, with not much will outside that, to a dangerous degree. For instance, Sierra seems to be able to shake off being repeatedly raped by her handler pretty well.
• Fawlty Towers lost a good joke because of John Cleese's unwillingness to do this. In "The Kipper and the Corpse", the original ending was that the late Mr. Leaman's twin brother arrived, greatly upsetting Basil who thought he was the guest and had been pranking him. Cleese realized that at some point the man would have to catch on that his brother was dead, which would ruin any comedy.
• Firefly:
  • The crew in general seem to try to get over various betrayals and deaths as quickly as they can, probably because as outlaws there isn't much chance for mourning. (In Serenity for example, Mal tells the crew to stop mourning the deaths of Shepherd Book and his people because all they can do now is avenge their deaths.
• A French Village:
  • Lucienne, aside from looking somewhat distraught on the morning after, seems unaffected by her rape. It's never once shown to affect her later.
  • Marie has no problem with shooting her husband in cold blood, despite not being ever portrayed as cold-hearted or otherwise fine with killing. Sure, he had been abusive and nearly killed her lover before, but it seems to be very out of character overall. She never even shows a twinge as their sons ask where he is.
• There were a number of instances of abuse, death, etc. on Friends where the characters' lack of a sympathetic reaction made them seem rather tactless:
  • Despite having had what most would consider a traumatic life, Phoebe is usually very throwaway about it, even using her mother's suicide to get the last muffin.
  • Monica and Chandler aren't quite as bad but seem blase about their absolutely horrible childhoods. (Both involving Parental Neglect and borderline Abusive Parents). Then again, she is a Control Freak and he a Stepford Snarker, so their responses are subconsciously present.
  • The only characters who react realistically to break-ups are Monica and Chandler, as the fallout from their various breakups last several episodes. (Both characters seemed to be more romantically vulnerable than the others, though that made them more sympathetic rather than needy). Otherwise characters would shrug it off and be fine by the end of the episode.
• In season five of Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister seems much less bothered after having murdered his former lover Shae and his father after having found her in his bed in the Tower of the Hand. Tyrion seems back to his old wise-cracking, clever self by the time he is captured by Jorah Mormont. Some fans have theorized that this was done to avoid Tyrion's much darker characterization from the corresponding book, which was disliked by many readers.
• The Golden Girls: Dorothy's children don't seem to care that their dad dumped their mom for a much younger woman.
• Justified in The Good Place: Real Eleanor is very calm as she explains what it was like to be tortured after being wrongly sent to The Bad Place. Her reason for being so calm is she was never tortured and she's actually a demon trying to psychologically torment the main characters.
• Niki in Heroes does not show much angst about being responsible for her husband's death.
• How I Met Your Mother: Ted’s kids in the series finale when they figured it out that the whole premise is their dad’s way of asking permission to date Robin again after their titular mother died six years ago prior to Ted telling the story. While it should be noted that the scene was filmed back in 2006 and realistically people had enough time to recover and move on in six years, the way the episode and scenes were put together made it look like that kids wanted their dad to date Robin again and don’t care about their dead mom which doesn’t help that the opening scene of the show has them groaning "Are we being punished or something?" and rolling their eyes.
• Showa Kamen Rider series usually has the riders treat their angst relatively quickly, Heisei Riders are a mixed bag.
  • Some of the Showa series (for non-Japanophiles, "Showa era" means "up to nearly the end of The '80s.") have angst as an Informed Attribute; sometimes the episode ends with Kotaro hoping to get Nobuhiko back someday but laughing and having fun with his friends for now at the end of an episode as the narrator assures us that despite the soul-searing agony that is the torturous existence of a Kamen Rider, our poor tragic hero shall valiantly soldier on. It's frankly hilarious.
  • Eiji, on the other hand, is an upbeat guy, but the deeper wounds left on him by his experience in that war zone are very much important to the plot.
  • Gentaro lost his parents when he was little, but when his friends find out about this he says it doesn't bother him much because he still has happy memories of them, and every day he tries to make as many friends as possible, just like they asked. This is a strong contrast to other Heisei Riders like Kenzaki and Haruto who also lost their parents when they were little, but still suffer a form of survivor's guilt at the start of their shows.
  • In Kamen Rider Kiva, Wataru has a party over his broken heart.
• LazyTown:
  • The citizens of LazyTown are pretty unconcerned by the closed businesses, parental neglect, and bumbling mayor manning the helm.
  • Sportacus seems awfully cheerful for someone who protects an entire town alone, and various episodes establish that he deals with everything from cats stuck in trees to natural disasters. Robbie Rotten's constant schemes don't help. Possibly justified if his implied elven nature gives him enhanced physical and psychological capabilities.
• In the Leverage episode "The Grave Danger Job", Hardison spends most of the story Buried Alive. Once he's rescued and gets the criminals responsible arrested, he recovers very quickly, and the incident is never mentioned again for the rest of the series.
• Claire on Lost, after Charlie's death.
• The Mentalist: In Ball of Fire, Patrick Jane goes through an insane amount of trauma. He's kidnapped at gunpoint, sees someone he knows shot dead trying to help him, nearly succeeds at hypnotising the guy who kidnapped him only for them to be shot in front of him by the real kidnapper. Then he's held at gunpoint, fired at (simulated execution is a recognised form of torture), tortured with a cattleprod for an unknown amount of time but it seems to be most of an afternoon, nearly burned alive along with the person he cares about most in the world and nearly shot before being rescued in the nick of time. All in a day. In spite of the fact that Jane is not exactly a Navy Seal, the closest thing to emotional fallout from all this is that he no longer says things like, "pain is in the mind." Two episodes later he voluntarily goes undercover at a clinic that uses aversion therapy in the form of electric shocks.
• Misfits falls into this category at times, probably due to the fast-paced nature of the show - what with there being only six episodes per season, and a lot of ground to cover in that time. Although characters do angst briefly when something traumatic happens to them, the angst is either rarely mentioned in later episodes, or it leads to them immediately taking a level in badass. For example, Nikki's death instigated the closest thing to a Misfit Mobilization Moment the show has ever had.
• On No Ordinary Family, during Steph and Jim's first outing together as heroes, they accidentally cause the death of an insane pyrokinetic. The angst over his death lasts about five minutes on the car ride back, then they're back to normal.
• Robin Hood in Once Upon a Time gives his BBC counterpart some competition. He's introduced as a widower who finds love again with former evil queen Regina. When Marian comes back from the dead and reveals to him that Regina was the one who killed her, he doesn't give a damn and is mostly upset to be separated from his true love. A few months later, it turns out that Marian is actually Regina's sister Zelina in disguise who repeatedly raped him by fraud. Once again, he's just upset with her being pregnant and is immediately ready to move on with Regina.
• Only Murders in the Building: In season 1, Oscar has only been back a few days from serving 10 years in prison (his entire adult life) for a violent crime he didn't commit. He's perfectly well-adjusted and chipper and needs no time at all to readjust to life outside of prison.
• Person of Interest: Every member of Team Machine has a dark traumatic past and need for redemption which makes them very dour people. It seems like an occupational hazard until they met the Washington D.C. Team Machine. Despite having similarly dark pasts, Logan Pierce, Joey Durban, and Harper Rose are all smiles while doing their jobs. Logan Pierce even lamented that knowing right away that John was the victim and not the killer took some of the fun out of it.
• Power Rangers S.P.D. gives us Sam, the Omega Ranger who is from a Bad Future where Emperor Grumm won and B Squad was killed, so he went back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. What makes this a particularly bad offender is that the members of B Squad were some of his only friends when he was a kid, and you'd think that combined with The Bad Guy Wins would traumatize him so badly, it would border on Wangst, but he never shows a trace of angst. Then again, Executive Meddling caused him to be Demoted to Extra, with only a small number of cases where he got to be a Spotlight-Stealing Squad, so he was pretty much shafted in terms of Character Development...
• Power Rangers Super Megaforce gives us Orion. He's a simple civilian from Andresia and its sole survivor after the armada attacked. Orion spent a long time being alone on his planet, simply working on surviving and living, until he managed to hijack an airship from the enemies and came to Earth. Outside of his introductory episode making a short mention that he's bent on getting his revenge on the empire, nothing comes of it. He's shown participating in shopping trips with Gia and Emily, dancing in his underpants in an empty school, and his revenge is only ever mentioned near the end, where he supposedly learned to get over his need for revenge. However, (Super) Megaforce was a season known for its horrible handling of characters and over-reliance on action scenes, so none of the characters really had much going for them. It's just that Orion's case stands out because there was apparently supposed to be something that never came to fruition.
• Frequently in Professional Wrestling. Your brother turns on you, destroys your entire life, kills your dog? Some little creep from your past tries to cripple your entire family? Your best friend mauls you to the point of hospitalization and tries to steal your son from you? Some freak with a beard killed your unborn baby? Eh, within a few months you'll have forgotten all about it and probably be best friends again (and again and again). Maybe you can even get Beard-Boy to read a poem at your wedding!
• In the first episode of Queer as Folk (UK), Stuart narrates to the camera how he lost his virginity: to his PE teacher when he was eleven years old. While he comments that "I must have been scared to death", he doesn't seem to believe the man raped him (he tells it as though he was the one who instigated the sex), and it's never mentioned again.
• Robin from Robin Hood BBC's retelling of the legend spends two seasons head over heels in love with Marian. Then when Marian is murdered, he gets over his grief in one episode. And in Series Three, the hero who declared he'd love Marian forever gets two new love interests without any sign he misses his first. Also, when he was a little kid, there seems to have been no long-term effects after his father is burnt to death in a fire; approximately two minutes after it occurred, Kid!Robin is throwing a party for the peasants.
• Schitt's Creek: Rose family patriarch Johnny Rose was robbed of his fortune and is forced into rural exile through no fault of his own, beyond not keeping close tabs on a corrupt business manager. Johnny's son David and wife Moira experience angst over their situation, but beyond one instance of drowning his sorrows, Johnny remains focused on getting out of his situation through hard work. This is a man who worked hard his whole life and built himself a fortune and whose only sin seems to have been to overindulge his wife and children. Yet, he accepts his fate with little angst.
• When the gang in Seinfeld hear that Susan, George's fiance, has died from licking low-grade wedding invitation envelopes, they all shrug and go back about their business. Especially George, who angsts far more about the work he needs to do because of her death. This is a case of Crosses the Line Twice. In his case, it helps convince others (such as her family) that he murdered Susan.
• In Smallville, Chloe has a tendency to be this, as a Foil to Clark's Angsting.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series
    • Captain Kirk is pretty bad about this. The most grating example has to be in "Operation: Annihilate!" where Kirk's only brother and his sister-in-law die horribly, leaving their young son an orphan, only a week after Edith Keeler's death. Not only does the episode end on a bright, chipper note but we never even find out what happened to Kirk's nephew.
    • Over the seasons, various crew members have been mindwiped, tortured, killed, mind raped, and so on. None of it ever gets mentioned later.
    • In "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Gary Mitchell, who is made out to be Kirk's good friend from years back goes mad from receiving godlike powers and Kirk is forced to kill him. No mention is made of it afterwards.
    • Not to mention the various crew members (usually wearing red shirts) who regularly die, often horribly, under Kirk's command, often with little or no reaction by the main cast.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation tends to have this as a result of the Reset Button.
    • A typical example is "The Inner Light," the episode where Picard, via implanted memories, lives an entire lifetime in a few moments, and experiences the planet he grew up on destroyed and everyone he loved killed. There's a brief shot at the end when he looks sad, but then it's like it never happened. Ronald Moore said that the episode was sort of an accident; they were just concerned with making a good hour-long story (and it is considered one of the best of the series) and didn't realize until it aired just how traumatized Picard should have been afterwards. They resolved to make a few continuity nods (he can now play the flute!) and then just continue. (It's not even addressed in Star Trek: Picard, beyond the series' theme music quoting some of the music from "The Inner Light.")
    • A rare aversion: "The Best of Both Worlds" makes it seem as if Picard is just going to shrug off being assimilated and turned into Locutus, despite looking a little haunted at the final shot. Nope, the very next episode, "Family" (Fan Nickname: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part III") has Picard collapsing in tears about how the Borg essentially raped him and forced him to experience every moment. You might think it's Catharsis Factor in that episode, but nope. Fast forward to Star Trek: First Contact, and we find Jean-Luc has not gotten over it at all, and it's hinted he has nightmares about it all the time. He's still dealing with it decades later during Star Trek: Picard.
    • Played straight for Picard in "Chain of Command". Picard does express to Troi at the end of the episode that he is still feeling the emotional impact of his torture at the hands of the Cardassians, but by the next episode, it's as if it never happened. This carries through even when he's interacting with Cardassians in later episodes.
    • The episode "The Wounded" introduced Chief O'Brien's former CO, Captain Maxwell, whose wife and children were killed During the War with the Cardassians. Picard believes Maxwell's current unauthorized attacks on Cardassian ships are motivated by vengeance, but O'Brien insists Maxwell remained stoic and in good humour after his family's deaths and he must have a good reason for attacking the Cardassians. Turns out they're both right.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, due to its innovative serial format, makes much less use of the Reset Button than its forerunner series, and several characters are shown to live with psychological scars from previous episodes, such as Sisko and Nog. But there are still many exceptions:
    • The notorious "O'Brien must suffer" episodes seemed not to have any lasting psychological impacts on him or ever get mentioned again. These included such trivial inconveniences as being nearly assassinated by an alien government and infected with a biological weapon; kidnapped, tortured, and sentenced to death by the Cardassians; seeing copies of him die twice; being forced to live a twenty-year prison sentence in a few minutes; having his wife nearly die and nearly miscarry their baby; having his wife be possessed by aliens and coerce him into sabotaging the station; and having his young daughter disappear into an anomaly and be replaced by a feral teenager, to mention only a few (and nothing from his backstory or from TNG). The prison sentence is shown to damage him psychologically nearly to the point of suicide, but after working through his angst in that episode, it's never mentioned again.
    • Doctor Bashir is captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the Dominion and replaced with a shapeshifter duplicate who his colleagues don't realize isn't him for weeks, until it nearly succeeds in destroying the entire Bajoran star system. This is never discussed again. Immediately after he's rescued, his darkest secret is revealed, he confronts his abusive parents about it, his father is imprisoned, and he's nearly drummed out of Starfleet. The effects of this do come up from time to time, but the likely psychological effects are pretty downplayed, let alone the effects of having both of those things happen so close together.
    • In "The Die Is Cast," Garak is required to torture Odo. Not only does Odo Easily Forgive Garak, he starts having breakfast with him.
    • Jadzia is nearly abducted, then put on trial for murder; her symbiont is ripped out of her, nearly killing her; and she defies orders and engages in bloody hand-to-hand combat against the man who killed her godson, in which two of her oldest friends are killed. None of these things is discussed again.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Harry Kim basically undergoes a seven-year Trauma Conga Line while lost in the Delta Quadrant — ranging from torment by a Monster Clown to repeatedly getting killed — and yet remains one of the most bright-eyed optimists on the ship.
    • Many of the original crew aboard Voyager (including the first officer, chief engineer, and entire medical staff) are killed in the pilot - and are never mentioned again by Captain Janeway or their surviving shipmates throughout the entire series.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise:
    • T'Pol after her mother's death. Then again, she's a Vulcan, so she was probably repressing it. On the other hand, Trip still feels the death of his sister several episodes later and has nightmares about it.
    • In an alternate future episode, Earth has been destroyed by the Xindi, but everyone seems fine with it. Archer feels sad for about a minute.
    • Interestingly, Soval, despite being a Vulcan, seems genuinely sad about Admiral Forrest's death. For about an episode. Of course as a Vulcan, the fact that it lasted that long is really saying something.
    • Hoshi is Mind Raped by the Xindi Reptilians but suffers for no more than an episode after this.
• In Supernatural season six, soulless Sam is a good example of this.
  Sparrow: Your brother was abducted by aliens?
  Sam: Yeah.
  Sparrow: Oh my god!
  Sam: It's okay, I've had time to adjust.
  Sparrow: Did it happen when you were kids?
  Sam: No, like, a half hour ago.
• On Top Gear (UK), the three presenters allegedly have a pact that, should any of them die while filming the show, the remaining pair would appear at the beginning of the next episode, make a mournful comment, pause for a moment of silence, and then say "Anyway," and cheerily continue with the show. When Richard Hammond was seriously injured in 2006, Jeremy Clarkson commented that the joke didn't seem funny anymore, but after he recovered the pact seems to be back on.
• On True Blood, perhaps as a result of the break-neck pace of the series, no one really has the opportunity to deal with traumatic events for more than half an episode before the plot train comes to take them to the next station. Not that there aren't moments of angst (e.g., Eric's response to Godric's suicide), but they rarely have any long-term effects.
• Despite being kidnapped or assaulted literally every other episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, DA Alex Cahill was always perfectly fine by the next, or even by the end of the episode itself.

Manhua

• School Shock's heroine Liu Li has no parents, almost everyone she got attached to was mentioned to have died and she herself has become dependent on drugs to prolong her short life. She is calm, cool, and collected most of the time and also downright adorable in other and overlapping moments. Then again, she spent all her life in the military. It's just life to her.

Music

• Modest Mouse's "Float On" is the musical epitome of this. ("A fake Jamaican took every last dime with a scam/It was worth it just to learn some sleight-of-hand/Bad news is coming don't you worry cuz when it lands/Good news will work its way to all them plans") The whole reason the song even exists is because frontman Isaac Brock wanted to take a break from writing depressing, angsty music.
• Amanda Palmer's "Oasis" plays this for laughs. Very dark laughs. The protagonist was raped, impregnated, and has to undergo an abortion but stays chipper. The song has an incredibly upbeat tune.

Podcasts

• Keri in the Cool Kids Table game Bloody Mooney is pretty chill about finding her own mother torn apart with blood everywhere thanks to being eaten by the very animal that she brought into her home. Though her player Shannon has stated that it was closer to shock than anything else, and the game ends before we can see Keri react much further than the initial surprise.

Tabletop Games

• It is common among many players of Tabletop RPGs to overlook the emotional situation of their characters, leading to people that watch their home towns burn and are over it just a round after the incident. Granted, if the group as a whole doesn't care, it's better off that way, but it's a major hindrance to group dynamics when some players want to deepen their characters' deep-seated emotional issues and some players just want to kick asses and take names. It's also common among most role-players for characters to take a fairly laid-back attitude to the death of other party members. You'd think watching your friend and companion get horribly killed, mutilated, turned to stone or worse would bother someone, but typically they just move on without a second thought. (It helps when they get themselves killed in stupid ways, like Bullying a Dragon.)
  • The murderhobo phenomenon (where characters just go from place to place killing things to take their stuff and only engage in the minimum amount of roleplaying) is believed to have been partly due to this, in reaction to Killer GMs causing an excess of angst by exploiting the characters' Trauma Button. Why bother getting attached if your character has no tragic backstory and can be instantly replaced by an equally-non-personality?
• New World of Darkness games: Especially considering its predecessor, the entire setting of Geist: The Sin-Eaters manages this quite nicely. To wit: in order to become a Sin Eater, you have to 1) start out with some kind of connection to death, such as through some kind of psychic power; 2) you need to die; and 3) you need to make a deal with a Geist to come Back from the Dead. Though one would think this would lead to tons of Supernatural Angst, most Sin Eaters seem to believe that, now that they've already died once, there's no reason they shouldn't enjoy themselves till Death gets them again.
• Hunter: The Reckoning counselled players to avoid this:
  If your sister got turned into a zombie and showed up at your front door, you wouldn't grab a baseball bat and cry havoc. You'd shit your pants.

Video Games

• Aileen Harding from Alien Syndrome has every right to feel relatively down most of the time, but she usually is in good enough shape to not take it too far.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Your party is generally made up of either psychos, megalomaniacs, or people with incredibly tragic backstories. Mazzy Fentan in particular, despite having her entire party of companions turned into life-sucking undead horrors, just picks up her blade and goes on.
  • CHARNAME, over the course of the games, lost (for the sake of convenience) his father, his home, and a startling number of friends (and Xzar), learned he's descended from the dead and evil God of Murder and witnessed countless innocents meet horrifying fates at the hands of cosmic horrors and tentacle monsters. The net result, as most people play it, includes very little moping and huge quantities of snark, usually followed by a few explosions, and then carry on as always - including providing therapy for angsty comrades.
• In Baten Kaitos Origins, Sagi is surprisingly optimistic and agreeable throughout most of the game, despite the various misfortunes and defeats he suffers. He does have a few moments, but his default mood seems to be very cheerful.
• In the little known game Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer, the main character Brave sees his home destroyed, his best friend Meadow Flower turned into a sort-of zombie... thing, has his mentor, Grey Bear, die in his arms, after shielding Brave from an attack, and is forced to flee for his life. All in the same scene. Brave is upset about it for about a scene or so, but then cheerfully goes on his way to find the Spirit Dancer.
• Nina of Breath of Fire II is gradually revealed to have the darkest past of any of the player party, including being excommunicated by her family, raised half a continent away from her home, and generally shunned from returning thanks to her black wings. Apart from being a bit depressed when she explains the symbolism of the latter, she never shows any angst over it, due to a stable upbringing, a healthy set of coping mechanisms, and willpower that impresses even her ancestor.
• Corpse Party deconstructs this. While Seiko Shinohara is secretly a bit of a Stepford Smiler, her apparent lack of angst despite being trapped in a nightmarish situation causes her best friend Naomi Nakashima to accuse her of being creepy. This leads to a fight between the two and they separate. The next time they meet, Seiko is hanging from a pillar in the girl's bathroom. And there is no way for Naomi to save her.
• Cult of the Lamb: While it's meant to set up the backdrop of the story and establish why the Lamb was chosen to be a servant of The One Who Waits, the Lamb doesn't seem too broken up about the fact that their unseen family and potentially friends were genocided so that the prophecy couldn't be fulfilled.
• At the beginning of Devil May Cry 5, Nero lost his arm, Dante, Trish, and Lady are presumed dead, and the world is on the brink of destruction. Despite all of this, Nero bounces back to his usual self pretty quickly. He sums up his feelings in one line.
  "If Dante's alive, we'll save him. If he's not, we don't."
• In stark contrast to many other vampires, Valvatorez from Disgaea 4 spends very little time brooding over tragic events. He's even cheerful about his fall from Tyrant to the lowly position of Prinny Instructor.
  Valvatorez: Plus, by falling into Hades, I discovered sardines: an excellent source of nutrition. Actually, I should be thanking you for that.
  Artina: Oh, Mr. Vampire... I'm trying to be serious right now.
  Valvatorez: I'm being serious too.
• Dragon Age:
  • Zevran in Dragon Age: Origins hides behind a facade of this unless he trusts the main character enough to reveal his true feelings.
  • Sigrun in Awakening, despite being the Sole Survivor of a sect of Death Seeking Dwarves refuses to wallow in angst and is about as upbeat as someone in her position can get.
  Nathaniel: For a dead woman you're remarkably perky.
  Sigrun: I could be less perky if you like. 'The darkness of the Deep Roads is seeped into my soul! The world is dead! My heart is black! Alas! Woe! Woe!'
  Nathaniel: Let's stick to perky.
  • The Grey Warden's origin can have such lovely events as being tainted by a cursed artifact, having your younger brother murder your older brother and pin the crime on you, or having your family's castle assaulted and your entire family down to your young nephew killed. Then there's the battle where you're double-crossed and one of only two survivors. You'd think that would result in some issues, which it does with Alistair.
• Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress have an odd way of measuring their moods; it's a strict positive/negative thing. Did their wife and children just get killed by a Forgotten Beast? This can be balanced out by eating in a really nice communal dining room, sleeping in a nice bedroom, and obtaining a well-made pair of socks, leaving them at least "quite content" overall. Some Alternative Character Interpretation is that quite content is more "coping with life" than it is "sort of happy"; at anything below "quite content" Dwarves are at risk of snapping in one way or another, throwing a potentially Fortress destroying tantrum, being Driven to Suicide or going permanently Ax-Crazy. Or going into a fell mood and killing some random dwarf.
• Invoked, discussed, and turned into a Moment of Awesome in Endless Frontier. When Haken learns the shocking secret of his birth (that he's an artificially-created Super-Soldier made to wage war in alternate universes), he spends all of zero seconds angsting about it before moving on to the task at hand. His companions actually have to press him on the subject before he finally just says I Am What I Am and compares it to boobs.
  Haken: In the end, all we discovered here was the shocking secret of my birth.
  Reiji: You don't seem to be too shocked about it, though.
  Haken: Sorry about that. Should I faint and start screaming a little? ...If I did something like that, it'd just make Kaguya and the others worry more about me, right?
• Subaru from Ensemble Stars! is something of a Deconstruction - the previous year, when the War was raging and idols were having their future destroyed left and right, traumatising a good proportion of the cast, he continued to act as much like an upbeat, energetic Pollyanna as ever. However, this actually caused his classmates to turn against him, as he seemed incredibly insensitive and lacking in empathy. Subaru didn't understand this at all, because at the time he didn't understand emotions well and honestly thought everyone would rather be happy all the time. He didn't even realise that he himself might be dealing with some negative emotions, only recognising after the fact that he probably had felt upset alongside everyone else but had no idea what to do with that feeling. In the present year, he's gotten a lot better, but he's still off-puttingly perky at times.
• Two of the three playable Servants in Fate/EXTRA, Red Saber and Fox Caster have shades of this, (the third servant is Archer from Fate/stay night) despite having Broken Bird level histories none of them really lament their past lives. It might be because they have had time to deal with it, but even over the course of the game, where things keep going From Bad to Worse, they are the rock that keeps the protagonist going.
• Final Fantasy:
  • In Final Fantasy III, one of your Guest Star Party Members, Aria, performs a Heroic Sacrifice and dies in Luneth's arms. After they all blackout and wake up in town later, no further mention is made, not even by Luneth, who Aria was closest to.
  • In Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, hero Benjamin exclaims in shock when his village is destroyed, but he seems more irritated about it than anything else and doesn't bring it up again for the rest of the game.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • Red XIII is introduced as one of Hojo's research specimens and was being experimented on for use in breeding experiments. It's unclear how long he has been a specimen for, but it's suggested it's for years. Other party members subjected to Hojo's experimentation (Vincent and Cloud) were deeply traumatized by it. The moodiest Red XIII gets about it is a brief Fauxshadowing scene where he mentions to Tifa that he's worried he'll start to go mad like the Clones, and Tifa tells him to be strong - other than that, he's more concerned with his own dorky persona issues than the horrific body horror in his history. This may be the result of how a lot of Red XIII's planned material was cut. It might also be a character choice, as upon witnessing his grandfather's death, Red XIII responds with giggling denial.
    • Aeris's death was a very dark event for video games at the time and is still unusual in that it focuses on loss and emptiness rather than Heroic Sacrifice. As Cloud points out, he nearly killed her himself and would have done it if his party members hadn't distracted him at the critical moment. The party continues on their journey North, where they go to a town full of cute snowmen and children in bobble hats, have a slapsticky fight with Elena, and travel to the next dungeon by doing a comedic obstacle course on a rainbow-coloured snowboard. The characters don't actually comment about Aeris or mourn for her at all until the party runs out of obvious things to do, leading Cloud to start wondering about what Aeris's plan had been.
    • Every playable character have some deep issues that bother them. Aeris, while having her own issues as well, is the most well-adjusted of the group. Despite the fact that her mother died protecting her while fleeing from Shinra, constantly being hunted down by Shinra, and growing up in the Midgar slums with her adoptive mother, Aeris remains quite cheerful and always has a positive outlook. This makes her sudden death all the more tragic for everyone.
  • Zidane of Final Fantasy IX is surprisingly well adjusted for a 16-year-old orphan with a tail that gets dragged along to multiple genocides over the course of the game. It's genuinely shocking that his true origins can actually cause a Heroic BSoD, which he still gets over rather quickly. Even the adults in this game aren't that well put together. And while finding out his origins did freak him out a bit, he immediately pushed it aside and turned on his creator while citing The Power of Friendship. The BSOD only occurred after his creator apparently ripped his soul out, and it took the rest of the party's Friendship speeches to help him recover.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • Tidus woke up stranded in a strange new land and later found out his home was destroyed, but he's always cheerful and energetic. Even when he finds out he's a ghost (of a sort) and will fade away once Sin is defeated, he faces his end with a jubilant attitude.
    • Most of the main cast is quite depressed and either repressing it, hiding it or coping in their own way. The game lampshades this after Home when a character tells Tidus to smile because he'll only worry Yuna if he doesn't. It isn't hard to imagine this is what all the Guardians are doing the same so as to make the Pilgrimage less painful. This is specifically addressed in the cutscene outside of Djose Temple: Yuna shows up late, and everyone starts making cracks about her hair and generally kidding each other. In the narration, Tidus says that at that point, he was the only one really laughing, the implication being that everyone else was just trying to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of Spira's, and more specifically their, inevitable fate.
    • Spira as a whole has this feel to it, especially considering their constant terror by Sin. It's remarkable how they can continue their lives when Cthulu-Moby Dick can wipe out their lives in an instant.
  • The protagonist of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, while he strives to go home, he does so in a manner free of angst. In Final Fantasy Tactics A2, meanwhile, the protagonist is dragged alone (at least Marche had his friends dragged with him), he kind of goes with it. At one point, he rather cheerfully admits to forgetting that the whole point of him traveling and adventuring was to go home; he was having too much fun, you know, traveling and adventuring.
  • What about Serah of Final Fantasy XIII-2? At the start of the game, she's already depressed about Lightning missing and Snow somewhere in Gran Pulse. During the course of the game, she found out that she has the Eyes of Etro, meaning her life span shortens every time she changes the timeline. She also found out that Snow acquired a l'cie mark, Lightning is in Valhalla (a place she can't leave easily) and the crystal pillar is in danger of breaking. Despite all that, she stays cheerful and optimistic. Then we found out that after defeating Caius, all the time paradoxes get resolved and the only timeline they can return to is 500AF. This means that the people Serah know in 2AF are dead, Snow may or may not be in the same timeline, Lightning may or may not leave Valhalla, Noel may vanish and she may die. She probably knows these but she still went ahead with a smile.
  • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII has Lightning mention that she should be feeling something, especially since she sent her little sister onto a journey that, she learned, was the cause of Serah's death, but feels nothing. It is explained that Bhunivelze 'sealed' her emotions away so that she could focus on her mission of saving as many souls as possible before Nova Chrysalis ceases to exist. Near the end, though, Lightning shows everything that has been repressed and realizes in horror what her becoming Etro for the new world will mean: being forever separated from her sister and friends and tearfully begs for someone to help her.
  • When Kotaku reviewed Final Fantasy XV, they actually criticized it for having a traumatic setup where a young man's father gets murdered, and then straight away turning into a goofy road trip between a group of guys messing around and making terrible puns.
• Deconstructed in God of War (PS4): As a Spartan, Kratos mourns for his recently deceased wife in the way his culture would’ve expected; with stoicism, practicality, and quiet introspection. His son Atreus, however, grew up in Norse culture and doesn’t have any context behind that behavior. As a result, he mistakes Kratos’s calm acceptance as him not caring about Faye’s death, worsening the tension between them.
• In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Ryder and Big Smoke are revealed to be traitors of the Grove Street Families on the final mission of Los Santos, as shown by Cesar to CJ. However, it's Big Smoke who he puts the focus on, and even when Smoke's betrayal is mentioned by several other characters besides CJ, Ryder is completely left out of the subject, and he is even unceremoniously killed off midway through the story and completely forgotten about even by Sweet, who CJ didn't even mention anything about Ryder to.
• The kids in Grounded are very unconcerned about the fact that they've been shrunk down to ant size and stranded in an overgrown yard full of dangers, with no way to contact parents or authorities and having nothing to help them survive beyond what they can scrabble together from stuff they find. Instead, they treat it all like it's a fun camping trip and that getting back home is a given fact.
• Half-Life has the one and only Gordon Freeman, a young physicist who never saw combat before the Black Mesa Incident and afterward has spent almost a week straight fighting for his life, with any respites lasting no more than an hour at a time. Granted, as a Heroic Mime the player never gets to see his reaction, but at this point, he should be huddled in a corner somewhere, not facing the next deadly monstrosity guns blazing.
  • The same goes for his cohorts in the Resistance in Half-Life 2. Despite a horrifically bleak alien invasion resulting in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, everyone you meet talks to you with the good-natured cheer of a friendly coworker.
• In inFAMOUS, Cole loses Trish, gets backstabbed by Zeke, discovers that his future-self is a huge asshole, and learns that there is an unstoppable world-destroying monster on the way that only he can fight. In the sequel, he's back on good terms with Zeke and seems all-around fairly chipper. This may or may not be a façade depending on your interpretation. Zeke had to work to prove that he was still Cole's friend, bringing up the topic of Trish around Cole is a Bad Idea and in the good path he never shows interest in any other woman, he will react very poorly to the mention of his similarities with Kessler, and he spends almost every waking moment trying to find ways to fight back against the Beast. His lack-of-angst about the destruction of Empire City is still very strange, however.
• Ann of Jurassic Park: Trespasser does have a few reasonable worries when she realizes she's crashed on Site B—but deals remarkably well with being attacked by a Velociraptor out of seemingly nowhere.
• Prince Alexander of King's Quest spent most of his life as a mistreated slave, but you'd be hard-pressed to tell in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow where he seems to be an appropriately well-mannered and gracious gentleman, other than a few wistful comments he makes alluding to the matter. (He is rather quiet and reserved, but not more so than you might expect someone who's a scholarly bookworm by inclination would naturally be.) The Expanded Universe and fanworks almost invariably respond to this by altering his behavior in some way to be more "realistic".
• Kingdom Hearts: Sora is worried for his parents (and the rest of Destiny Island civilization) for all of five minutes before setting out to save the world with a big grin on his face. Donald and Goofy specifically ask him not to angst, and in Sora's defense many people have a pretty high level of optimism at his age — the old "you're a teenager, you can solve any problem" thing. He does slip into momentary depression throughout the series in response to events (before being cheered up by friends/distracted by the task at hand), and it is implied that everything that has happened is slowly taking a toll on him.
• Knights of the Old Republic: Rahasia Sandral doesn't act very upset when you tell her that her brother is dead.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link doesn't seem the least bit upset over opening the gate to the Sacred Realm, allowing Ganondorf to seize the Triforce and plunge Hyrule into darkness, nor does he seem too upset over losing all his friends due to being sent back into time to before he met them. Then again...
  • The Sleeping Zelda in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has been asleep for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Everyone she has ever loved is long dead and she is stuck in a strange, new world with the only known family being her distant relative who shares her name. Despite this, she's completely unfazed when awoken.
    • To be fair, we only see her for a few seconds after her awakening. She may well have had a complete nervous breakdown once she was told what had happened.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Champions seem on the whole remarkably cheery despite having been killed in the Great Calamity and trapped as ghosts in their Divine Beasts for a century. Only Mipha is shown to have been truly upset by this, having been "awash in a pool of tears" until Link came to free her. Revali is more annoyed that Link took so long than anything. Daruk and Urbosa are especially happy and encouraging when guiding Link through their Divine Beasts.
• Deconstructed in Live A Live. Oersted silently bears all the misfortunes his quest throws in his way as it slowly goes from a very generic "save the princess" plot into the depths of From Bad to Worse territory. He's told that as long as someone's counting on him, he should keep moving forward, and that's exactly what he does. Until the princess tells him she hates him and kills herself rather than be saved by him. Is it any wonder that he breaks?
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, Liara takes her mother's Face–Heel Turn and death in stride, and is actually surprised if Shepard asks her if she needs any help dealing with it. She does, however, have a very anguished reaction when Benezia regains control of herself late in the fight and again as she is dying, and after Benezia dies, Ashley notes that Liara probably heartbroken. In the third game, fondly talks about childhood memories with the implication that she misses her mother.
  • In Mass Effect 2, Shepard seems to take finding out that they have been dead for two years rather in stride. While it's talked about briefly at the beginning — and again when characters from the last game react to seeing their old commander alive — Shepard seems to completely avoid any of the angst or existential crises that one might expect from someone who has killed and brought back to life; and, depending on your dialogue choices, seems downright chipper for most of the story. This can be attributed to how Shepard is completely and utterly focused on the kidnapped human's mystery. Given quiet time in Mass Effect 3, they start questioning their own existence, wondering if they're just a Tomato in the Mirror.
  • Jacob Taylor of Mass Effect 2 is almost entirely unaffected by what he discovers during his personal mission, beyond briefly getting very angry during the mission but then proceeding to cope quickly, effectively, and without any external help. This is possibly lampshaded in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC, where the files on Jacob suggest that, despite his combat skills, the real reason he was put on the Normandy was for the "stabilising effects of his personality" in the Dysfunction Junction that makes up the rest of the team.
  • Lampshaded by Mordin: despite his loyalty mission forcing him into conflict with his ex-protege and causing him to question his entire life's work, the next time you talk to him he's as chipper as ever. He happily explains that salarians work through emotions very fast, so he's already dealt with all his angst on the flight back to the ship. Mass Effect 3, however, shows that Mordin has not quite gotten over all of it, as he leaks Eve's existence to Wrex and stubbornly goes through with the plan to cure the genophage, fully aware that doing so will kill him. If you did not report the sabotage to Mordin and ask him why he's going this far, he'll say that "I MADE A MISTAKE!"
  • Used interestingly after the Suicide Mission by your crew if you save them from liquefaction at the hands of the Collectors. Most seem just fine later, a little shaken up but generally fine. But when you ask Kelly Chambers if she's all right, she goes into a horrifying flashback and is clearly, obviously not — and yet she pushes this back and doesn't show it otherwise. In Mass Effect 3 it is possible to meet Kelly again, and she explains that she's having a delayed reaction to the trauma, and can't bring herself to set foot on the Normandy again because of it.
  • If you comply with Tali's request in her Loyalty mission and refuse to share the information about her late father's experiments, resulting in her being convicted of treason and exiled from the Migrant Fleet, she's perfectly fine with it, seeing it as preferable to the alternative(which will cost you the chance to earn her loyalty).
• Considering that he lost his father (whose death was a direct result of a terrible decision on his part), the mercenary unit he had lived with all his life, the planetary base he called home, almost every support network he had, and was nearly killed himself, Jake Mason of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is surprisingly upbeat considering that not even a week passes between this enormous loss and going right back to picking up the pieces of his mercenary life afterwards.
• In Metroid: Other M, Samus angsts about a lot of things, much to the displeasure of fans. But the one thing fans expected her to show some complicated and mixed feelings about is glossed over completely, that being the destruction of Zebes. Zebes wasn't just the Space Pirate homeworld, it was Samus' childhood home; she was raised by Chozo on the planet following the death of her birth parents. (Zero Mission even ends on a shot of a childhood drawing on the base of a statue in one of the temples). In fact, there isn't a single mention of the Chozo in Other M. Samus identifies Adam as a father figure without ever bringing up her two bird dads. Why she's so blasé about the recent loss of her childhood home over all the other stuff she weeps about is a mystery.
• In Mother 3, every single one of the protagonists has royally messed-up lives, and don't angst a bit about it (except Flint and maybe Salsa, but that's a bit hard to tell since he's a monkey). Lucas was a crybaby before getting an angst-worthy life and then became nice, brave and almost selfless. Before the game, the people of Tazmily Village were blissfully unaware of "sadness" so it's not unheard of that they wouldn't know how to angst about it.
• Octopath Traveler: Due to the fact that The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is mechanically a sidequest, none of the characters get to react to the revelations within. In particular, Ophilia doesn't get to react to the knowledge that her adoptive father was murdered by Mattias, and did not die by natural causes as was presumed, Olberic doesn't get to react to the knowledge that Werner lied to Erhardt about what really happened at Grynd—claiming Hornburg razed it when he actually arranged for his own bandits to destroy it as a means to bring down Hornburg—and made him bring down an entire nation thanks to said lies as a means to open the Gate of Finis, while Tressa, Alfyn, and H'aanit don't get to react to the knowledge that Graham Crossford, an individual connected to all three of them, was corrupted into Redeye.^{Explanation(Spoilers)}Graham Crossford used the elixir he'd made to save his wife to save a young Alfyn instead, leading the latter to become an apothecary himself. Tressa acquired Graham's journal during her travels. As for H'aanit, killing Redeye is the goal of her storyline.
• Overwatch:
  • Tracer is Unstuck in Time due to an experiment gone wrong. She's effectively a ghost that blinks in and out of existence irregularly without a special device she has to wear at all times on a harness. Despite this, she's incredibly chipper and only seems to notice the benefits of her situation now that she's a partial Time Master.
  • Mei has a distinctly bubbly and happy attitude, so you wouldn't guess that she actually has one of the darkest backstories of any of the heroes. She's a scientist who was stationed in Antarctica when a polar storm hit, and she along with all of the other scientists stationed there entered cryostasis in an attempt to survive. Years later, Mei was the only survivor as all of the other scientist's cryogenic chambers had failed.
• Persona 5: The Silent Protagonist was brutally tortured and forcibly injected with drugs by the Dirty Cops and narrowly avoided being killed by Akechi. But when he returns to LeBlanc, he is no worse than wear. In fact, one of his dialogue options can be him joking about the situation by saying " I mean, I died."
• Pokémon:
  • The protagonists of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games never seem too concerned about being stuck as a Pokemon. Despite the initial shock they never think about if they have family or friends they can never see again.
  • Similarly, the protagonist of Pokémon Legends: Arceus gets over being stuck in the past rather quickly.
• In Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Sherry takes the deaths of her parents and surviving a zombie apocalypse rather easily. She even starts talking about Leon and Claire adopting her and how they could get a puppy and a parrot since her mom didn't let her have pets before.
• Kyrie, the main hero of Sands of Destruction, doesn't actually stop to feel sorry about accidentally destroying his village and turning all of its inhabitants into dust. He seems to forgets all of it because he meets this girl... At first.
• Silent Hill:
  • There are a lot of people who won't even play the games alone with the lights turned out, but for some reason, none of the main characters ever just break down screaming. The only comment ever given on the situation comes from Silent Hill 3 when Heather says that she used to be bothered by the corpses lying all over the place, but barely notices them anymore. Granted, once we find out who she is, her resiliency isn't all that surprising. Harry's love for his child, James' near-suicidal need to be with his wife, and Travis' repressed violent urges are the things that drive each of them on in spite of common sense. Henry, meanwhile, seems to simply not process or react any of it, continuing out of sheer stubbornness.
  • Justified in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, in which Harry is actually just a figment of his daughter's imagination. She imagines him as a Big Damn Hero (or a doormat, or an abusive alcoholic, or a philanderer, depending on how you play) and so that's what he is. He still shows signs of "oh god, what the hell is going on?"
• Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, to a really, really amazing degree. To the point where crashing on a deserted island after seemingly losing his friends in a burning vessel...Vyse just shrugs and treats it as a vacation. At one point, after his base of operations is razed to the ground, the player has an option to have him claim to one of his builders that they needed a renovation anyway, which completely shocks her due to how bizarrely optimistic his statement is. The game's script treats his demeanor as out of the ordinary even for the universe it's in, but also points out several times that his attitude is also what makes him an effective leader and captain. In the Gamecube "Legends" release choosing the noblest and optimistic statement in any scenario is scored and affects the unlocking of some of the new content. Notably, towards the very end of the game, he does have a moment where he nearly does crack though it took an apocalyptic genocide for him to get that far. Fortunately, before he does snap, all the people he helped immediately show up to vow to fight with him and break him out of his funk.
• Sly Cooper:
  • For a guy who saw his parents murdered in front of him, saw the Thievius Racoonus torn apart, saw his friends being held captive, been captured a couple of times himself, saw his friend (Bentley) get crippled by Clock-La at the end of the second game, amongst other stuff, Sly doesn't show much angst.
  • Bentley is remarkably angst-free about being stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and though he does show one instance of insecurity about it, it seems he is sufficiently confident in his abilities as The Smart Guy of the team to compensate for his physical weakness. Being fairly frail to start with, and fixing up his wheelchair with a mini-armoury of gadgets might help with that.
  • In Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Sly isn't too unhappy when Carmelita catches him stealing in the tutorial, putting an end to their relationship or at least making it much harder to maintain. Slightly mitigated by the fact that he and his gang were racing against time then, and he does worry a little about how he's going to make it up to her later into the game.
    Sly: (talking to himself) How will I explain this to Carmelita? Time travel? She'll never believe it!
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic just doesn't seem to "do" angst. Throw him into space, blow up his home, turn him into a werewolf, he'll shrug it off within five seconds and get back to work. The closest thing to angst we've ever seen from him is a brief moment of reflection during the ending of Sonic Adventure 2, but even then he shrugs it off pretty quickly. It's explained in Sonic Unleashed by Sonic having an amount of Heroic Willpower off the charts, so much so that it's the only reason his transformation into the Werehog only gave him a slightly enhanced aggression streak (and he never experiences any real negative influence from it) instead of turning him into a monstrous killing machine. Also, his Image Song It Doesn't Matter reveals he does have fears and is uncertain about what is right or wrong, but there's just so many things to do in life that he'd rather not waste it bogged down by his insecurities. This aspect of his character comes more into focus in the Sonic Storybook Series.
  • Tails is apparently an orphan that lives alone in his laboratory building things until Sonic decides to call him up whenever he needs to use his airplane. It's also mentioned in most continuities that he was heavily bullied before he met Sonic. Yet he still manages to be a Cheerful Child, despite his backstory. Perhaps him being so happy-go-lucky regardless is because Sonic had that much of a positive effect on him.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Princess Peach has been captured by Bowser, and occasionally other villains, numerous times but it never gets to her.
  • A specific game example: In the 3DS installment of the Mario Golf series, most characters tend to overreact to getting Bogeys or worse. Diddy Kong, on the other hand, simply shrugs and eats a banana nonchalantly.
• The Heavy of Team Fortress 2 fame has a Dark and Troubled Past, but you'd never know it by looking at him. Meet the Director has the titular character attempting in vain to wring some pathos out of him.
  Director: Your father was a counter-revolutionary. When he was killed, you, your mother, and your sisters were transported to a North Siberian gulag. Paint me the picture.
  Heavy: No. This is my gun. I like to shoot this gun. Is all you need to know.
• Touhou Project:
  • Reimu is likely an orphan, and Marisa has been estranged from her family since she was young, but they never mention it, let alone to angst about it. All indications point towards them preferring it that way.
  • Flandre Scarlet has spent almost five hundred years in the basement of the Scarlet Mansion because her ridiculous levels of power are a threat to everyone and everything, yet despite what fan works would have you believe she remains a Cheerful Child with no malice or resentment towards anyone.
  • Yuyuko's ability to control the spirits of the dead eventually developed into the immensely dangerous power to invoke death with a mere thought and while her fear of this power eventually did drive her to commit suicide she is now one of the funniest and cheerful characters in Gensoukyou, having fully embraced her existence as a Cute Ghost Girl and no trace of her earlier worries are ever so much as hinted at. The revelation that her body is currently used to seal the Saigyouji Ayakashi, meaning that she's forever barred from entering heaven and her soul won't survive if she's ever resurrected, has not even put a frown on her face.
  • Played for drama in the case of the satori Koishi Komeiji: She used to have the racial passive ability to compulsively read other people's thoughts and feelings out loud. This made her feared and hatred among humans and youkai both, and minds full of fear and hatred of you are terrible to read. So much, in fact, that it eventually drove Koishi to give herself a Poke in the Third Eye, making her incapable of reading minds, even her own. Now physically incapable of dwelling on the angst, bad memories and traumas that lead her to effectively lobotomize herself, she has become a Cheerful Child.
  • Byakuren Hijiri was imprisoned in Makai for more than one thousand years as punishment for thinking it would be nice for youkai and humans to stop fighting each other, yet she remains probably the friendliest, most caring person in the series. Fans almost immediately dubbed her "Youkai Jesus" as a result.
  • Even though Gensoukyou is cut off from the outside world, sometimes stuff from the outside world falls through holes in the barrier and some of the stuff includes scientific scriptures. This, it turns out, is like a plague in the setting. Yamabiko, the youkai race responsible for shouting your echo back at you, used to be common in Gensoukyou, but following a rumor that started to spread in the human village that echoes are actually just sound waves being reflected back at you from surfaces, the yamabiko are losing their purpose in life and essentially facing extinction via Puff of Logic. Kyouko Kasodani is a yamabiko but you really wouldn't believe any of the above information from her friendly and cheerful demeanor.
• Dr. Valerie, Dr. Markus, and Nurse Elena in Trauma Center: New Blood go through several harrowing events that would have broken down anyone else; first, they get kidnapped by terrorists who force them to perform surgeries on certain people that have various strains of Stigma and then the bad guys throw them into a Drowning Pit and fill it with water unless they agree to work for them. They manage to escape by solving a toy lock puzzle that one of the henchmen used to lock them up. Second, the trio are sent to a war torn country to assist the people that were infected with Stigma and the doctors get to experience the brutality of war firsthand. Third, the doctors are later sent to a country where the authorities are performing a raid on the hideout where the the syndicate's leader hs hiding and they witness people being hit with poisonous gas. Despite all the horrors the three doctors have personally witnessed, they are a bit shaken, but they don't dwell on the fears and use their resolve as doctors to push on and help those in need.
• The second Ubersoldier has a rather baffling moment in the end where it's revealed the Nazi super-soldier you've spent most of the game's first half battling to be Dietrich Schneider, your Love Interest Maria Schneider's supposedly-deceased brother, captured and converted into becoming a Nazi tool of war until you defeat him in a boss fight. Dietrich regains his memories in time and eventually betrays his boss, the Big Bad Nazi Schaeffer, and performs a Heroic Sacrifice to destroy Schaeffer and the Ubersoldier facility for good. Maria actually yells "NO!" while you drag her away from the exploding facility, as the whole place explodes behind you... and in the following cutscene, you're frolicking and rolling around in the snow with Maria, less than a mile away from the facility's ruins, with the not-really-that-upset Maria laughing as she sits on you. Despite, you know, witnessing her brother's death barely an hour ago.
• Uncharted: The games play out like adventure tales, with the treasure-hunting protagonists frequently making breezy and irreverent comments to each other as they explore lost tombs and civilizations. While this would make sense as Casual Danger Dialogue for treasure hunters, it doesn't really take into account that the gameplay heavily features combat, so these amiable treasure hunters are killing hundreds of mooks between the quips. The games never seem to acknowledge that, by the final installment, Drake alone has murdered over a thousand people.
• Until Dawn:
  • Mike gets over the loss of two of his fingers really fast. This is because his lines are largely the same whether it happens or not, so he'll be making wry jokes to himself only a minute or two after the injury.
  • If you keep Chris alive to the end (also resulting in him and Ashley having a Relationship Upgrade) but if Ashley died, strangely he will make no mention of Ashley or their relationship in the police interviews.
• Jude Maverick, main character of Wild ARMs 4, prior to his mother's death, anyway.
• World of Warcraft: For whatever reason, since Mists of Pandaria Horde characters aren't allowed to mention their grievances about the Alliance actions against them. A blatant example is the Explorer's league backed by Ironforge wiping out an entire tauren tribe never getting a mention even when the Horde player is sent to kill one of the Generals who did it(who is inexplicably depicted as sympathetic) or the Horde, tauren included, working with the Explorer's League in Legion.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Trucy Wright gets over both the disappearance and the murder of her father surprisingly quickly. In fact, Apollo seems more shocked than she is. Towards the end, however, it's revealed that she is upset about it, she just avoids showing it to most people.
  • Phoenix gets over his shock at Mia's death in the first game rather quickly, considering how much she meant to him. He may be channeling his grief into determination to bring the (real) murderer to justice within the three-day trial, however. The effect is also softened somewhat by the fact that Phoenix still gets to see Mia occasionally by way of Maya channeling her, though it is still weird during the case itself.
  • There's some sort of Law of Diminishing Grief at play in the AA-verse. Maya reacts somewhat realistically to Mia's death in the first game and is similarly shown to still carry grief for her missing mother. However, when her mother not only appears but is brutally murdered, Maya seems far more hand-wavey. This is explained as her being strong for Pearl's sake, and she does seem pretty upset during her testimony in the final trial, so after multiple installments showing that Maya has kind of a crazy threshold for emotional and physical trauma (being kidnapped and held for ransom, diving in front of a taser, etc.), it's believable. However, in later games, both Trucy and Kay Faraday seem to immediately recover from the deaths of their fathers at breakneck speed — in the former case, the character had been estranged from her father for years, but in the latter the two characters were apparently inseparable and the father had died about two hours before, creating a strange jarring effect. Like... seriously, we're talking about Swiss rolls right now? Your dad is dead.
  • If Franziska von Karma is upset that Phoenix sent her father to jail for murder, she doesn't seem to show it. Her main concern is defeating him where Edgeworth failed in order to prove herself superior. This does eventually get addressed (very) briefly in the third game (where she mentions she isn't out for revenge for her father, implying that she's had time to think about it) and then more profoundly in Investigations 2, where she tells Kay, referring to a distraught Sebastian who's just realized his father is a murderer, that one must accept the mistakes of one's father, "however much they may look up to them," revealing her own internal struggle with coming to terms with her father's crimes.
  • Perhaps, given the high Parental Abandonment rate in the Ace Attorney world, people just get over the loss of their parents very quickly. Right after her mother is arrested, Pearl Fey is happily going to the circus and hanging out with the guy who caused it. Though it is later implied that she didn't really understand what that all was about. She was 8 or so at the time, so that is possible. Also, Phoenix had her channeling Mia on the last day so she wouldn't see the trial and verdict herself.
  • Speaking of Parental Abandonment Apollo loses his father, and is separated from his mother yet no one, including him, seems to care all that much, except for that one brief comment by the journalist Spark Brushel who called Trucy 'lucky' compared to Apollo in that she was kept while he was abandoned. During the fifth game, he helps his best friend out with his own mother's death by using his own background as his example, so he's clearly handling it very well.
  • Klavier Gavin has a lot of things to be down about. During the fourth game his police detective bandmate had smuggled contraband into the country and killed the Interpol agent who was tracking him and his own brother turned out to be a twisted psychopath who is responsible for two deaths, used Klavier to sabotage a talented lawyer's career, and has a severe case of Disproportionate Retribution. In the fifth game, you can add his instructor from high school, a perfectly upstanding and honorable individual, is killed simply because she was trying to be upstanding and honorable to the wrong person. Even if he's able to put aside friend and familial relationships to see justice done, there was no justice in Constance Courte's murder, which would surely send most characters into a swill of cynicism and disillusionment. Yet in spite of all this, his personality always remains a calm, suave, debonair ladies' man full of charm and charisma with no hint of internal struggle or pain.
  • Regina Berry is so cheerful when Phoenix and Maya meet her that the two of them can hardly believe that it's only been a day since Regina's father was murdered. It turns out that this is partly due to Regina's belief that when people die, they turn into stars and go into the sky. At the end of the trial, however, she has a breakdown upon realizing that the Deadly Prank that she performed on Bat, which put him into a coma and crippled his brother Acro, resulted in Acro trying to murder her in revenge and killing her father by mistake. In fact, her seeming indifference to the consequences of her actions enraged Acro so much that he set out to kill her.
  • In Case 4 of Ace Attorney Investigations, one of the victims is Byrne Faraday, a prosecutor. Tyrell Badd, a detective working for Byrne who is close enough to him to be an Honorary Uncle to Byrne's daughter Kay, is initially unemotional about Byrne's death, and is willing to consider the possibility that Byrne and the other victim killed each other. However, he still gets angry when Manred von Karma mocks Byrne as incompetent, as well as when the killer turns out to be a mutual acquaintance with Badd and Byrne, as well as the other member of the Yatagarasu group.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: In chapter 3, other than the initial shock of finding the body, barely any of the other students cares that Kiyotaka Ishimaru has been murdered(admittedly, his only real friend had died in the previous chapter, leaving no one who cares enough to mourn him), with most of their concern being pointed towards Hifumi Yamamda, who is later revealed to have killed Ishimaru in cold blood under the orders of Celestia Ludenberg, who later double-crossed and killed him herself. Word of God has stated that any reaction to the death had to be cut because of the amount of things going on during the investigation.
• Tsukihime:
  • Arcueid is the last remaining sane True Ancestor (until the Nasuverse needs more, anyway) and the strongest one ever. Why? Because she's a living weapon. No life experiences, no memories, no friends, no family (except a 'sister' that she does not get along with, and her father the... moon? Skip that one for now) and then we get to the first person she ever really talked to, Roa, who tricked her into drinking his blood, causing her to kill all the True Ancestors and stole some of her power, then goes around being all vampirey just so she comes and chases him. 800 years later she has so little life experience that she's ecstatic over a simple conversation. Oh, and before that, she never spoke to anyone nor had anything she thought of as fun. Yet she's probably the sanest/most well-adjusted character in the series (except when she goes yandere) apart from Arihiko. She doesn't even really care and is a big goofball all the time.
  • Shiki, which was intentionally done and is noted several times. Presumably it was done in order to contrast him with the likes of Kohaku, Hisui or Ciel who just can't leave the past alone, and it kinda helps that his memory is Swiss Cheese due to his stepfather's actions, to the point that he doesn't really remember two of the most traumatic instances of his childhood except subconsciously. Though the one time he realized that he was suppressing his guilt over murdering Arcueid, he was completely horrified with himself and immediately began apologizing to her.
  • Looking at Arihiko's behavior in the main storylines, you'd never guess that his backstory involved almost his entire family being killed in an earthquake and guilt over wishing that his crushed grandmother would die faster so that she wouldn't cause the rubble to shift while trying to reach him where he was pinned for days in the wreckage.
• Lilly of Katawa Shoujo does not bear any resentment toward her parents for leaving her behind in Japan with her sister(who, unlike her, is quite bitter), prompting Hisao to point out that she's "too kind" to them. She is, however, also a Stepford Smiler and The Stoic who rarely lets her emotional guard down, so it's difficult to tell whether this is how she actually feels.
• Lily in Mia's route from Duel Savior Destiny after seeing all her friends outside of Taiga turned to stone (forever, for all she knew), Mia seemingly fall to her death, and her mother being arrested. Though it's more that she can't, since breaking down would cause Taiga's horrible mental state to become even worse, which would almost certainly lead to Ruin winning.
• This is Rena's worldview at the start of Tsumihoroboshi-hen in Higurashi: When They Cry. She prefers to ignore any pain and be as happy as can be. It doesn't work out.
• In Seraphim Slum, Ezekiel becomes this after entering the slum. Despite being fated to fall, she tells Oriel (with no small amount of glee) that she hasn't been happier than she's ever been in the slum. Justified, as Ezekiel in heaven was suffering in monotony and entering the slum was the only time that made her feel alive.

Webcomics

• In Ship in a Bottle, Ship takes being stuffed away for a century oddly well, mainly because she's immortal. Alan provides the requisite lampshading, but Ship does hint she's hurt that her former master, Ronald, forgot about her.
• Last Res0rt:
  • Daisy's had her leg amputated and has been held prisoner/tortured for at least the past three months prior to her arrival on the show. We can justify some of her dissonance by assuming if she IS Scout Arael, she's been conditioned previously to withstand some of what happened to her and that on top of this, her Autistic traits make it harder to notice if she's angsting.
  • Jigsaw's also been hiding away from her family and everyone else in the three months between turning into a vampire (and believing she murdered her sire). She's been surprisingly calm since.
  • Slick's been in jail for six years for a crime he didn't do — though there's at least a couple on the list he probably did do, he most definitely didn't kill his own father.
  • White Noise has been in jail for forty-seven years although in his case he definitely did the crime, he just claims he was ordered to do it. Granted, he also became filthy rich while he was locked up, but still.
• Misfile:
  • Ash angsts constantly about the problems from his Gender Bender. But he never angsts (or even notices) that his pre-Gender Bender life was in some ways worse; he had no mother, his father was cold to him, he had a grand total of two friends (or, for that matter, people he even talked to), and so on. In fairness, the intense mental and emotional effect of a radical change in your body and having your entire life and past changed to something you don't even know everything about overnight isn't exactly easy. Furthermore, a fair amount of angst is because his life is better as a girl.
  • Emily just lost the last two years of her life. Oh, and all of her former "friends" didn't make the jump back. So, she's isolated, stressed, and confused, and she rarely complains about it. She even says so, which pisses off Ash since he's NOT happy with the change. Then they have a big "I want to help you, but I like my own life" thing, where she probably was about to admit she'd love for Ash to be a boy again, because she wants in his pants, but not as a girl.
• It takes something major to keep the Sluggy Freelance cast down for long. Justified with Bun-Bun, who is noted for his great emotional resilience, and Torg, for different reasons:
  Horribus: Why can't we use his fears against him?
  Psyk: The long of it is, he does not explore consequences in depth, so he has no unknown fears to confront. And his memories are limited, so he has no fears from his past. The only things he seems to "fear" stem from simpler things we would not even regard.
  Torg: Hey, are you saying I'm too stupid to be afraid?
  Psyk: That's the short of it.
• Sabrina Online has Sabrina learning that Zig Zag had a difficult childhood with Abusive Parents. However, Zig Zag has put that behind her and is adamant that she doesn't want to talk about it; she's doesn't want her sexual appetites to be treated as a source of pity.
• Jodie of Loserz is alright about her lack of a father and her status as an accidental baby.
• Homestuck:
  • A quartet of 13-years-olds have had their homes destroyed by meteors, they're in the middle of some weird paradox land and given a mission nobody thinks they can complete, they have a much higher chance of dying than succeeding (and there are timelines in which some of them have already died), and they're destined to screw up the game even worse than they already have. The Rule of Funny seems to be the only thing keeping them from breaking down at this point. Cerebus Syndrome eventually cuts it down considerably, but John remains a good example; he watched Jade sacrifice her dream self to save him, was woken up from dreaming right before being reunited with his father, and is still being told over and over again that You Can't Fight Fate, but none of it seems to have had any significant effect on his optimism.
  • Dave gets special credit for not batting an eye when discovering his own murdered corpse. He shoves it out the window fearing "Jade might see it and freak out." Afterward he Contemplates His Hands, but doesn't otherwise seem bothered.
  • In a couple of panels, Nepeta is smiling even as she's sitting next to the corpse of her beloved lusus crushed in a cave-in. She may have known by then that she could resurrect Pounce, in a way, but still.
  • Sollux goes as far as adopting a more casual attitude after his matesprit is killed, there are two Ax-Crazy psychopaths on the loose and he's been blinded. This plays into Sollux's Gemini theme, with his canonical bipolar disorder taken to an extreme extent.
• Hanna from Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name seems to be this way with his elusive past. (Unless he's a Stepford Smiler.)
• In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, the fae are suggested to be like this in-universe (somewhat justified by their incredibly long lifespans).
• In School Bites, Charlotte's first words after discovering with shock that she's now a vampire: "Kewl!''
• Heather from Vampire Cheerleaders has the same reaction:
  "Oh my god! I'm a vampire? COOL! <3"
• Anyone and everyone from Sonichu. When two characters are killed off-panel, they mourn all for about one panel, before they instantly get over it and return to doing whatever they were doing. They don't even linger on it.
• El Goonish Shive has a bunch of examples:
  • Elliot has to use his Gender Bender power every few hours, or it'll trigger at a random time. He also has to sleep as a girl, for the same reason. For him, this is more inconvenient than it would be for other people. He has never once complained about this, which is noted in comic as somewhat unusual.
  • Grace has had the most horrible life out of all the characters. When confronted with it, she reacted appropriately, but once it's all over? It's like she never suffered years of trauma at the hands of Damien, who beat her when she displeased him and intended to use her to breed an army of chimeras! Nope, it's all swept under the rug. She's the most upbeat, positive character in the comic. Though it's later hinted that at least some of her cheerful attitude might be a facade.
    • Humorously alluded to when Ashley gets introduced to the masquerade.
    Ashley: (after learning Grace's abilities) That's amazing! Wait, I'm sorry, I don't know how tragic your past is!
    Grace: Super tragic! But it's okay! I'm just so happy I don't have to hide this from you!
• Played for laughs in Goblins, where Biscuit the Orc states that 600 years of demonic torture barely fazed him since members of his clan are taught to accept loss without pain or regret to become immune to emotional pain. When told that his clan was wiped out 200 years ago, he responds with a simple "Meh, oh well".
• In True Villains, cheery little girl Mia doesn't let much get her down. Not the fact that lives in squalor, nor the fact that her entire town and only home is destroyed in a fiery blaze of death and destruction.
• Gunnerkrigg Court has this when Annie and Ysengrin talk about his attempt to murder her. Made all the stranger because Ysengrin's motivation for doing so was incredibly flimsy. Of course, Annie's odd choices in who to trust and who to distrust were a well-established character trait by that point.
• In Knights of Buena Vista, Dick snarks about this In-Universe when Mary and Adriana discuss the backstory for Anna and Elsa and think a tragic event in their past would actually be an awesome thing.
• A Magical Roommate. "Hi hi, everyone! Sure my parents and sister are dead, but look at this neat machine that turns dietary fiber into plastic explosives! Yay yay, it failed!" and other happy-go-lucky statements. It probably helps that Daria's from a long-lived race and has a loving step-sister and nephew, but she NEVER angsts about her dead family.
• Called out by the main character of Captain SNES: The Game Masta when he learns that Kevin Keene's response to his wife dying, a minute or so after-the-fact, is to mention it offhand and focus on other things, without shedding so much as a tear. Alex remarks that the reaction barely even seemed human.
• In The Dragon Doctors, Kili's life has been turned upside down at least four times that we know of — by the King of Dust as a child, by the destruction of his hometown as a teenager, by the Gender Bender at the start of the story, and by becoming a werewolf not long after that — and every time it was involuntary and unwanted. But you would be hard-pressed to know that from meeting her because she has made it her job to know how to deal with bad fortune. Literally.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Emil comes across as this after Tuuri's death, considering an earlier point of the story had him much more obviously sad and bummed out over the death of the mother and littermates of the kitten that went on to become the Team Pet. Giving a Mercy Kill to the Plague Zombie dog responsible for the death of the mother and littermates had him quite shaken as well.
• Saitama from One-Punch Man seems pretty unfazed by the unwarranted hate mail he gets. Might be because he never had any close friends or family growing up, and lived alone in a secluded area for most of his life. Everything he does including his hero hobby is for himself, thus he does not care what others have to say about it.
• Rain (2010):
  • Even though Rudy's parents sent him to a Catholic school to "cure" his orientation, he seems very cheery.
  • Later comics, especially after his breakup with Rain, start to see his constant cheer break down. Though even then, he still tries to keep a smile on his face and make others laugh.
  • In Chapter 34, both Rudy and Maria act like this after their father catches Rudy going out as "Ruby" and he finds Maria's texts and calls with her girlfriend Chanel, although they both admit they're just using humor to distract themselves.
  • Ana had a truly heartbreaking past yet she remains arguably the comic's kindest character.
• The Legend of Spyro: Zonoya's Revenge: Nina is never affected by anything, from Zonoya kidnapping her to Frijir possessing her.

Web Original

• This defines Magnus, Merle, and Taako throughout first few arcs of The Adventure Zone. They destroy a city, commit several murders, come close to death, are inducted into a secret organization, and lose friends for over 30 episodes before any one of them shows any sign of caring. As the show goes on and the stakes get higher, this is phased out somewhat (but not completely).
• Chaka of the Whateley Universe. Turned into a mutant, the mutation changed them from a he to a she, had to leave home and go to Whateley Academy, targeted by more than one campus villain, has fought supervillains who kill people, and never angsts. A lot of the reason is that the old Tony hated their life because he knew they were transgender, so the change to Toni is everything they'd ever dreamed of. Everything else is just side issues to them.
• The seventh episode of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Witchcraft Abridged Series features the song "The Gypsy Bard", essentially a musical endorsement of this by Pinkie Pie as a coping mechanism against life's unrelenting cruelty.
• The Winds of Change universe features this a lot. Everyone in the world is suddenly transformed into anthropomorphic animals - of various degrees too, some are even forced to dramatically alter their lives because some of the most high-degree morphs would practically be just like a standard wolf with hands! Some of the poor Aquatics got a load of people who didn't understand exactly how they function in charge and making decisions and had to alter their lifestyles the most out of anyone. Then there are those people who either got lost entirely to animalistic instincts or had lost family members to them. And yet maybe 1% of the population actually seems to have any issues with those...Especially in America.
• Metamor Keep, a story universe that shares several authors with the Winds of Change, often has this too. There are people who're transformed into anthropomorphic animals, some are transgender, and others are regressed to a child. This obviously doesn't stop anyone from enacting acts of the Renaissance in the Keep valley or enjoying themselves! Some start out whining about how they can't return to normal society or am now a woman or something, but they get over it and there are some who came to Metamor specifically so they could be transformed.
• Because of Rule of Funny and Negative Continuity, Channel Awesome. Dying all the time? Being killed and made into a zombie? Having your post-rape trauma spill out live on camera? Having a robot stalk you for months? Not to worry, it'll be okay the next week.
  • Spoony spends most of Kickassia absolutely terrified at the thought of becoming Doctor Insano. Then it finally happens, and later when he shows up as himself again, we get this exchange:
    Cinema Snob: Weren't you Doctor Insano?
    Spoony: Eh, I got better.
• Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv) likes this:
  Light: L, why?! Why did you leave me?! Why did you leave me alone with these IDIOTS! *sobbing* And... yeah, I'm over it now.
  • And:
  Matsuda: My life's work has just gone up in flames! Just like Light's ex-girlfriend!
  Near: Too soon, Matsuda.
  Light: No, it's fine. I'm over it.
• Demo Reel usually avoids this, playing abusive pasts and issues appropriately, but in "The Review Must Go On", Tacoma, Karl, Quinn, and Rebecca are disquietingly serene over losing Donnie and finding out they never actually existed. The Nostalgia Critic was bothered by this too in his review of it.
• Retsupurae made fun of this tendency in some of the creepypasta readings.
  • In 0bl1v10n.exe, the narrator appears more upset about destroying his laptop than his best friend getting killed.
    slowbeef: [narrating] "I woke up at about 7:30 in the morning feeling the best I had in months" — Your friend just died. "I couldn't believe it. It was over. It was all over. I was so happy I woke up one of the guests next door with my laughing. But I didn't care who was mad. I was having the best time of my life" — Your friend just died.
  • In "Mega Man's Ladder... to Hell!":
    slowbeef: Guy got over his dead brother pretty quickly.
    Diabetus: Well, it's Mega Man 2. It's a classic.
    slowbeef: I can't believe Brandon killed himsel— Oh my god! Videogames!
    Diabetus: Sweet!
• Hugo of Matt Santoro's web series frequently gets locked up and yelled at by Matt, but is usually happy when he's seen outside of his cage.
• 'Arthur shrugs off getting raped by a wolf-monster like it's a mild hangover and confesses his love for Ford' is from the Cracked article [1], which pretty much sums this up.
• In Danganronpa Abridged Thing, this is often in effect considering that the fairly dark moments of the original Danganronpa are Played for Laughs. In the original, Naegi was quite heartbroken and betrayed when Maizono, who was possibly the closest person he had to a friend among his schoolmates at Hope's Peak Academy, was murdered in the course of trying to kill someone and frame him for it, although it's implied that he forgave her and came to terms with the issue. Here, after the original freakout over finding a dead body in his shower fades, he's most shocked about the victim supposedly planning a "sugoi booty call" in his room. This is possibly because, in the abridged series, the kindest thing Naegi could say about Maizono was that he was "the only one who could tolerate her."
• Economy Watch: David seems to be traumatized, but mostly appears happy-go-lucky and care-free.
• RWBY: In early seasons, Ruby stays perennially cheerful and happy as the tone grows Darker and Edgier and the cast begin to develop more complex personalities. Some people find it grating, others see her positive attitude as a charming non-British example of Stiff Upper Lip. And then there is one episode that implies she really is as affected by the goings-on as everyone else but feels the need as leader of Team RWBY to keep up the appearance.
• Screen Rant Pitch Meetings often makes fun of movies that fall into this, as shown in the page quote. The Screenwriter will often mention something horrible happening to the character, often losing a mentor or loved one. The Producer then asks whether the character will feel sad about it, and the Screenwriter will say that the character will be upset for a few minutes, if at all.

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