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Deus Angst Machina

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What a coincidence.

"You'd think I'd be used to it by now. But they keep finding new angles to torture me with."
Spider-Man, inner monologue. It's unclear if he means his villains or his writers.

Your character is angsting. It seems that his dog just died in a freak accident. That accident involved his kindly uncle, who didn't swerve in time to avoid the poor puppy. However, he did swerve in time to go off an embankment and hit a bus full of high school students, killing many, including the character's beloved girlfriend, to whom he'd just been engaged the previous day. Unfortunately, the shock of the news caused the protagonist's kindly old mother to have a heart attack, which left his father devastated. More unfortunately, economic recession hits, and the character and his father are left without a job and sunk neck-deep in debt. The character's brother turns to robbery but is caught and thrown in prison. Poor Daddy turned to drinking and lost all will to live, and finally shot himself (along with several others in a mad shootout), leaving the character all alone in the world to deal with the trauma. And that just happens to be the day when the mother of all earthquakes lays waste to the whole city, including the character's house. Our character (who now has to live on the streets) is pulled out of the ruins, perhaps having suffered a crippling injury, and is taken to the hospital, where the doctor diagnoses him with cancer. Boy, what a day.

And that's just the beginning of his bad days... Wait, what? Isn't this a little too overboard?

Deus Angst Machina is something of the polar opposite of Wangst in terms of cause but can come across as no less frustrating. Simply put, the character in question has every reason in the world to retreat into himself and become a brooding, angsty person, because his life really does suck as much as he thinks it does. However, the circumstances seem entirely too contrived. This is a step beyond the coincidences that most stories tend towards to build up drama, as the character seems to have provoked some sadistic god who is now dedicated to making his life as miserable (and angst-filled) as possible. Sure, anyone would be miserable in his situation, but when said situation is less likely than being struck by lightning, it can seem to be outright ludicrous. If used too much, it can cause Too Bleak, Stopped Caring.

However, Tropes Are Not Bad, and if done with careful consideration and appropriate acknowledgment of just how unlikely it all is, it can be justified.

A common pitfall for those who think True Art Is Angsty, yet are wary of falling into Wangst (although, given the nature of the trope, they generally end up falling into it anyway). Characters who this happens to often become The Woobie. For the comedic version, see The Chew Toy. Commonly experienced by those who have heard the writing advice "conflict is drama, so the more conflict, the more drama", but who don't quite get that conflict is about more than just angst. Remember... any writer who thinks happy people are boring isn't trying hard enough.

Different from Diabolus ex Machina in that it's many separate and unlikely events conspiring to create angst instead of a Downer Ending, but can still overlap at times.

Misery Lit has thrived on this trope since the Victorian era. The Sadist Show will play it for laughs, and others may end up doing so unintentionally. If the story appears to be building up to something, only to ultimately end up going nowhere or sputtering out, then it may be a case of "Shaggy Dog" Story. If, at the end of this long chain of unlikely tragedies, The Protagonist dies without accomplishing anything then you have Shoot the Shaggy Dog.

Not to be confused with Tragedy. See also Trauma Conga Line, Disaster Dominoes, Dark and Troubled Past. And it's far worse when it happens in Real Life.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • The last sequence of Ai no Kusabi cements just how much Riki's life has sucked. Just when it seemed it was going to get a bit easier, things went From Bad to Worse. It amounts at best to a Bittersweet Ending where Riki and Iason die happy as Star-Crossed Lovers.
  • The life of Guts from Berserk sucks to such a major degree that it puts the Trauma Conga Lines of Griffith and Casca to shame, especially since the trauma factor of the latter coincides with the trauma of the former. His life sucks so much that the universe was out to get him before the dude was born. He refuses to let the universe control his destiny, but even Guts has his breaking point.
  • In Blue Gender, the universe is out to get Yuji and Marlene. This is not a supposition, it is a fact supported by Word of God.
  • Being as it sits on the very far right of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, Bokurano can feel like this trope. Not only are the kids tricked into playing a deadly "game", but the one who pilots the mecha will die whether he/she wins or loses. If they lose, their universe is destroyed, but if they win, they destroy another universe and everyone in that universe will die. The series seems to go out of its way to make everything as tragic and depressing as possible, as most of the children have tragic backstories on top of having to play the "game"; for just one example, see the pilot who turns out to be pregnant, and whose baby dies along with her after her battle.
  • Poor Tomoya in CLANNAD. His mother died when he was small, driving his father to drinking, gambling, and drugs; after his father injured him to an extent that he had to give up his dream of becoming a basketball player, the two were distanced from each other completely. Tomoya eventually finds happiness with his high-school sweetheart, Nagisa, who just happens to be ill. She dies giving birth to his daughter. He has a massive Heroic BSoD and doesn't see said daughter for about five years before finally reconciling with her... only to have her die in his arms from the same illness that claimed his wife. It's thankfully subverted due to a miracle in the ending, but it's still a horrendous life to have led, even in one universe.
  • Code Geass:
    • Lelouch Lamperouge's mother was killed and sister crippled early on, he and said sister were sent to Japan as a pawn only for said nation to get invaded, razed, and colonized by the nation he now declares corrupt, leading him to take his sister along with him into hiding. And that's just the prologue. In the series proper, fate just loves bopping him one frequently, every time he gets a leg up or in some cases just finished licking his wounds from his last misfortune. Just as he finds the means to start his rebellion, his old friend from Japan has just as suddenly become one of his biggest rivals. Right after he makes a deal with his half-sister he still fondly remembered that would ease things a little, his geass activates at the wrong moment, forcing her into a massacre which he can only stop by killing her. Later his sister is kidnapped causing him to lose focus during the Black Rebellion, and as he tries to save her, he gets captured by his old friend and sold out to the Emperor for a promotion, with the latter rewriting his memories sidelining him for a whole year under surveillance among other consequences. His sister ends up back in the Britannian family under threat of being used against him at any moment. Just as things are on the up and up, his best fighter is captured for a few episodes, and his fake brother kills his would-be girlfriend, leading him into insanity. His half-brother and worst enemy sabotages a potential truce with his best friend, indirectly leading to the destruction of Tokyo, with his sister among the dead (apparently), and finally, Lelouch once again gets sold out to a Britannian royal, this time by his own resistance who have sided with said half-brother over some decidedly shady half-truths and later turns out to have hid his sister, who has also been turned against him. It's a wonder the boy didn't completely snap.
    • It's pretty safe to say that C. C.'s life isn't peachy, either. Began life as an orphan, only wanted to be loved, and is seemingly given the means to make it a reality, only to realize she's been scammed into accepting immortality, and lives the next several centuries, suffering a thousand "deaths" from people who accuse her of being a witch. By the beginning of the show (or rather, well before it already), she's a weary, cynical shell of a person.
  • Cross Ange: The titular heroine's life is one big Trauma Conga Line from the end of the first episode: she is betrayed by her brother, who reveals to everyone (including herself) that she is a norma, leading her to lose her royal title and basic societal rights and get shipped off to a Penal Colony to be used as Cannon Fodder against invading dragons. Her parents are killed in the process of trying to protect her. After accidentally getting three of her teammates killed, a few of her other squadmates try to kill her by unfriendly fire. Her brother tries to kill her, first by luring her out of Arzenal, then by leading a massacre of the place. Needless to say, there are few characters who have not tried to kill or use her. Oh, and the Big Bad tries to rape her.
  • A Cruel God Reigns: Jeremy gets this for the entire series. His mother, Sandra, falls in love and gets engaged, but it turns out the guy, Greg, is a pedophile. Jeremy refuses Greg, Greg cancels the engagement, Sandra tries to kill herself. Greg comes back at Jeremy's pleading but only if he will sleep with him and promises it will be a one-time deal. It's not. Sandra and Greg get married, and Jeremy is forced to move to England where he attends boarding school with his older step-brother Ian. He's saved, right? Nope. Greg comes to school, and then beats him, threatening him to come home on the weekends. Jeremy seeks advice from a psychologist in London and begins to recover. The psychologist dies.and Ian steals the girl he was falling in love with. Soon, a servant mistakes Greg kissing Jeremy as being consenting and blackmails him into giving her money he doesn't have. Jeremy has a Freak Out when Ian's friend tries to kiss him while drunk and nearly blinds him, resulting in his near expulsion and more of Greg's wrath. Jeremy eventually tampers with Greg's car and kills him, but it also kills his mother. Ian practically Mind Rapes him to get him to confess, but when he does in addition to confessing to the abuse with a Driven to Suicide and Bungled Suicide, Ian accuses him of lying. Jeremy flees back to Boston where he becomes a drug addict and prostitute to deal with the guilt. Ian has a My God, What Have I Done? and drags Jeremy back to England to help him, but ends up paying him for sex and yelling at him when Jeremy can't recover like Ian would like him to. The poor kid can't catch a break.
  • Yamcha of Dragon Ball has a large one in the Cell Saga. His girlfriend of 15 years gets pregnant by the sociopath who oversaw his murder and his friends rub salt in the wound by asking if the baby is his. Shortly afterwards he gets impaled by a relatively weak android and realizes he'll never be able to catch up. In Bojack Unbound it's revealed he's broke and in his last DBZ appearance, he still has no one as a 50-year-old man (with his goal in life being to raising a family). His miserable lot in life is parodied in Gintama's 202nd episode. As of Dragon Ball Super, things seem to have improved for the guy, with him having become a professional baseball player.
  • Kiritsugu of Fate/Zero is a lot like the guy in the trope description, except his life is even worse. It all starts with a Troubled Backstory Flashback to when he was a kid living on an island with his dad and a Love Interest. She suddenly turns into a zombie, and because Kiritsugu fails to Mercy Kill her, she turns everyone else he knows into zombies. When he learns that his dad caused this by screwing around with magic, he stabs his father to death. Then, a female zombie hunter drags him away from the miniature Zombie Apocalypse. She becomes his mother figure, so, naturally, he ends up being forced to kill her when she gets stuck on a plane infested with zombies. During the series proper, his only companions are his homunculus wife, her daughter, and his sort-of-mistress female partner. They all end up dead or permanently separated from him, some of them by his own unwilling hand. Kiritsugu himself ends up with some kind of Incurable Cough of Death so that he won't be around for the sequel series, and all he has left in the end is some random kid he found in the wreckage after he obliterated the Grail (the series' MacGuffin which could have invoked Utopia Justifies the Means) because it was "corrupted" and no longer usable. Thus, everything he did since the series proper, all his sacrifices and dirty business, was pointless. Did we mention the Grail was kinda-sorta his wife? note 
  • GunBuster: Well known for its proper depiction of time dilation, this series also seems to only display such well-researched science when it can make the main character's angst. Prime example? Jung making a careless comment to Noriko regarding the loss of her father because it's been months from her perspective but only hours from Noriko's.
  • Subverted: Hayate in Hayate the Combat Butler can never seem to get a break. He's got deadbeat parents who steal his money and are willing to sell him to some very nice people to clear their gambling debts, and after becoming Nagi's butler, he keeps getting into situations where everybody wants him dead. He's the greatest, most gentle kid in the world, and Santa won't even give him presents! The only thing that keeps this series from becoming a tragedy is that Hayate is used to crap like this happening and that some twist of fate usually occurs to make it so that things aren't quite as bad as they seemed at first. And that most of these events are Played for Laughs.
  • The entire story of Koi Zora can come off as this for the main character. Ranging from gang-rape to attempted suicide, then she gets unwantedly pregnant and ends up miscarrying, her boyfriend turns into a Jerkass so she leaves him, her parents are getting divorced... and years later, the final kicker with her first boyfriend turning out to have been mean to her so she'd dump him since he's got cancer and didn't want to force her to waste her time with him... they get back together and then he dies. While this could be seen as possible, since it's supposedly a biographical story, but some say it's Very Loosely Based on a True Story if not flat out Based on a Great Big Lie.
  • Mori, the main protagonist of Kokou no Hito, has even worse luck than Kenshirou. Everyone who spends time with him gets shafted by fate: ( Yumi, who loses her scholarship and ends up becoming a prostitute; his co-workers, who all get shafted by their company because they're temps; his teacher, who gets killed by a giant boulder while trying to find Mori on a local mountain; and the ENTIRE TEAM he climbs Kazeru no Ken with, who die off one by one). On top of that, because of his shyness and awkwardness, he's treated like shit by his co-workers and fellow climbers. Even the company's resident creepy quiet girl is able to impose herself on him, as Mori can only will himself to put his foot down after she falls down the stairs at his place. It's as if the author enjoys concocting new ways to keep him socially isolated and mentally frail.
  • Shirakawa Naoya in Love Mode. I mean, how much misery can one person have in a short time?
  • Strangely inverted in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. In the first Gundam series, Char has lost one of the most important people in his life but barely reacted. Now a decade later Char realizes he wants to avenge her and save others from the same fate by creating a terrorist to give people an angst-killer Deus ex Machina. However, he makes one big mistake in his plan: assisting his target so that he can have a fair revenge.
  • Naruto:
    • Sasuke Uchiha discovered at a young age that his own brother, Itachi, had allegedly killed their family and their entire clan on a whim, and was forced to live with the hatred he felt for a once-loved sibling over this act. Upon finally tracking down his brother, Itachi beats Sasuke to a pulp before using a Mind Rape technique on him to make Sasuke re-experience the entire ordeal. Not long after this, Sasuke realizes he Can't Catch Up up to the main character or the increasing number of increasingly powerful antagonists, so he accepts a previous offer for Training from Hell from the then-Big Bad Orochimaru so that he can gain enough power to eliminate Itachi. Cue a Time Skip, and Sasuke's Cycle of Revenge starts pedaling as he betrays Orochimaru and gathers a Quirky Miniboss Squad, and finally hunts down his brother. However, this only serves to give Sasuke a case of Revenge Myopia as it turns out Itachi wasn't entirely to blame; which slowly but surely puts Sasuke on the path to a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
    • There was also Nagato, who went down the Bruce Wayne route after witnessing his parents being killed when he was still a child. Though he did get revenge by activating the Rinnegan and killing the two shinobi who were mistaken as assassins. Nagato became an orphan, finding companionship from Yahiko and Konan, and was taken in by one of the Legendary Sannin, Jiraiya, who took him and his friends in and taught them the ninja arts so that they could protect themselves and each other. This all went downhill as the group was locked into a Sadistic Choice that resulted in Yahiko's death, following which Nagato slaughtered a good number of the opposing force at the cost of his health. Nagato then obsessed with finding a method to establish absolute peace: whatever brought him into the Big Bad's clutches, it led to him demolishing a village full of people and leading a one-man (well, six or seven) assault against Konoha.
    • Gaara... Holy CRAP, GAARA!!! When he was born, his mother died and his father pampered him in false love before sending a bunch of assassins after him for being "too dangerous" when in reality, he just couldn't control his sand powers. And then, he hurts a girl at the playground, tries to give her medicine only to be called a freak and have the door closed in his face, accidentally kills a drunk man, has an assassin try to kill him shortly afterwards, who is revealed to be his UNCLE who THEN tells him that he hated him and so did his mother! And all of these events happened in one day when he was only six years old! It's no wonder that he ends up becoming a sociopath and a Serial Killer for the next seven years! It's not until Naruto beats some sense into him that things FINALLY look up for him! And this was for the first 12 and a half years of his life! Wow...
  • D-Boy/Takaya Aiba of Tekkaman Blade. Gosh, his life is really sucks. Fortunately, the sequel show him completely recovered from his loss so it all ends well, but the sheer crap he gone through is so nasty, it's a wonder why he doesn't snap from all of it.
    • D-boy lost all his memories of the first series' events. If he kept them, he would have definitely snapped. He's catatonic and needs the female lead to take care of him for a while.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: Most characters only seem to get Character Development so that they can angst over it.
    • Shinji. Almost anything bad can and will happen so he can angst about it. Potential replacement mother figure sucks at the job? Angst. Fellow pilot and Love Interest is a dysfunctional world-class Tsundere with deep traumas and anger management issues? Angst. Same girl is then telepathically mind raped from orbit? Angst. Girl finally snaps and goes catatonic? Angst. Permanently maims one of his friends (or in the manga, kills) without knowing about it until after the fact? Angst. Creepy fellow pilot nearly dies? Angst. Said girl then turns out to have been a science experiment and basically his sister, and an aquarium full of clones of her get diced? Angst. New friend that genuinely cares for him turns out to be The Mole and Shinji has to crush him to death so he won't set off The End of the World as We Know It? Angst. Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies? ...uh, you get the picture.
    • Asuka Langley Sohryu has it as bad as Shinji, and even their traumas are similar (Rei in chapter 25 and Shinji during End of Evangelion point out that they aren't so different.). The universe loves making her life Hell, and she has at least two Heroic BSoD during the series. Mother gets crazy and does not recognize her? Angst. Father cheats on her mother with her mother's nurse and Asuka finds out? Angst. Mother commits suicide in a way that shows that she also wanted her daughter dead and Asuka finds the corpse? Angst. Father and stepmother make clear that she is a burden to them? Angst. Asuka gets new surrogate parents but they suck at the job and she has a crush on her father figure who is in love with her mother figure? Angst. Her rival is also her Love Interest but he is utterly oblivious to her feelings, never identifies her flirting attempts for what they are and almost never is there for her, ruining her fragile self-esteem? Angst. She underperforms at the task that she has been training her life for, the only thing that she feels validates her existence and gets surpassed by a weak rookie with no training? Angst. She gets repeatedly beaten, trashed, humiliated, and even Mind Raped? Angst. She tries to kill herself, falls into a coma -during which is used like a masturbation object-? Angst. She wakes up from her coma and find her happiness only to be defeated -again-, impaled and chopped into pieces? Er... You have the idea.
    • Several more characters go through at least a Heroic BSoD or Villainous Breakdown.
    • Essentially: Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And if it's going right, that's just so the very next thing will be more devastating.
  • One Piece is a generally cheerful series, but a few of the main characters have quite a crappy past. In particular are Nami, Robin, and Brook's pasts. And the entire Sabaody/Impel Down/Marineford arc seemed to be concentrated on making Luffy's life as horrible as possible.
  • In volume two of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers we are introduced to an ill-tempered and somewhat unstable maiden referred to as Shogun Iemitsu. Then we find out where she is coming from. Her mother was a commoner raped by Shogun Iemitsu on a whim to prove to his retainer that he could to lie with women (said retainer could do nothing to intercede but leave his short sword as proof of his identity, and it is to the credit of Iemitsu's de facto chancellor Lady Kagura that despite Iemitsu's refusal to admit he had ever seen her when she showed up a year later with a daughter the commoner was bought off with a manor and pension anyway). Then when said daughter (then named Chie) was around ten she was effectively kidnapped (her mother and nurse were murdered out of hand) and dragged to Edo Castle where her hair was forcibly cut off, she was dressed as a boy, and she was told that her name would henceforth be Lord Iemitsu. At fourteen she was wandering the grounds when a groundskeeper took her for a catamite, tore off her clothes to discover otherwise, then raped her. She was found only after she had stabbed the man to death, and she insisted that she had sported with him willingly then killed him for his clumsiness. Then she found out she was pregnant. Then her daughter was stillborn. Who would not have an attitude problem after all that?
  • Poor Oz in PandoraHearts. Life just seems to keep on getting worse for him as he discovers not only has one of his closest friends died, the time he actually reached out to one ended up with that one getting IMPALED by Jack, the person he looks up to and regards as a hero. Guess what, Oz? He's not a hero. He's manipulating you for his own purposes and he also Mind Rapes Oz by telling him that nothing can belong to someone like him. It turns out that Oz is actually the Bloodstained Black Rabbit himself and that Jack just used him as a pawn to start the Tragedy of Sablier and made him kill against his own will. Oh, and also, he's also just stealing Jack's body. Jack's body goes through a regressing cycle because the Abyss rejected his soul for the atrocities he committed, so Oz is just a younger version of Jack. Also, he's a freaking stuffed rabbit. That's his sin. He was really just a stuffed rabbit who wanted to be loved by Alice so much that he came to life, but then he disintegrated and was turned into a monster. After learning all of these things, he goes into a Heroic BSoD. It gets worse. Alice gave her life up for him, so that means he's in a sense responsible for her death. He wishes her away to the Abyss and Gil shoots him now that he remembers everything. Then he's imprisoned down in Pandora's dungeon and is going to be executed by who other than LEO! He tells Echo he's nothing but a doll.....WHILE SMILING. Someone please give B-rabbit Oz a hug.
  • Parodied and averted in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. The title character engages in Wangst to the extreme over ridiculous hypotheses and tiny coincidences. Meanwhile, Kafuka, the happy ball of sunshine who continues to announce that life is wonderful every single day, often mentions in passing that her father repeatedly attempted suicide, her mother was possessed by a demon, she appears to be in the Witness Protection Program...
  • Poor Joe Asakura in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. To explain everything here would take forever, starting with him witnessing his parents' murder as a child, to an apparent Cartwright Curse and finally being turned into a cyborg to save his life.
  • Parodied in the fourth episode of Slayers Evolution-R where drama-inducing events make no sense at all. For example, a character becomes a delinquent and another is revealed to have a terminal disease. It all happened for no reason in an instant. They were both happy walking fish kids before.
  • Used in an interesting fashion in Trigun. Not only does Vash actually have someone out there living and breathing solely to make him as miserable as possible, he's also very good at it.
  • Fay from Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- is cursed, and more than once: He had a twin, which in his world was considered a bad omen, so both little boys got imprisoned separately- only after their father has died and their mother has killed herself, supposedly because of the twins. Then the king who condemned the boys to an eternity in prison stabs himself through the neck in front of Fay (Yuui) while begrudging their birth. Still as a kid, the Big Bad promises to have someone set him free if his brother dies, and then he curses him. Twice. If he ever meets someone more powerful than him, Fay will have to kill them: this means stabbing Sakura, the heroine, whom he loves as a daughter. The other curse? He must kill the king who rescued him from prison, or else his world will implode. The king knows this and kills most of his people just so Fay would kill him in turn... but Fay still refuses, someone else kills the king, and the world implodes. Oh, and to get Fay out of the imploding world, Kurogane gives up one of his arms. It also turns out that Fay still wished to revive his brother, and found out the hard way that it was impossible. But wait, there's more! The kid that Fay grew to love like a daughter/younger sister is essentially dead and he will likely never see her again! What's more, the kid that Fay loved as a son/younger brother turns out to be a soulless clone who gouges out Fay's eye and eats it for its magic! And to survive, Fay gets turned into a vampire! And he can only feed on the man he loves! How fun!
  • The Battle City Tournament Arc of Yu-Gi-Oh!, and its immediate anime Filler arc, Doma, were seemingly written to break down poor Mai. The Doma season was especially bad since Mai had to learn about The Power of Friendship all over again.
    • The entirety of Ryou Bakura's time onscreen is this in every continuity. Manga Ryou had to constantly change schools due to Yami Bakura sticking his friends into figurines, his father’s never around due to work, his mother and sister died when he was younger, he shattered his own soul to stop Yami Bakura and never defied him again afterward, he spent a lot of Duelist Kingdom being coaxed into putting the Ring back on, he spent most of Battle City injured, possessed, unconscious, or dead, he got nudged into retrieving the Ring post-Battle City and building the Shadow RPG diorama, he got excluded from the Memory World so he couldn’t help there, and his other friends Bakura captured might still be stuck in their figurines. Toei Ryou was lonely as a child and just wanted friends, which the Ring gave him by trapping their souls in figurines, and he also had memory gaps, getting his hand and chest stabbed, and soul pains before Yami Bakura took over for the first time. He also had to live with the guilt of what his other self did to his friends as well as Yugi and friends. Anime Ryou almost got sent to the card graveyard to win against Bakura, couldn’t get rid of the Ring since it magically came back, didn’t get to go on any non-manga adapted adventures, Yami Bakura could imitate him so well it fooled everyone, the Battle City fiasco happened, and when he did fight against Yami Bakura in season 5 he ended up possessed anyway. In The Darskside of Dimensions, he's understandably traumatized over everything to the point of not wanting to talk about the Ring at all, but is targeted by Aigami and is nearly killed, then sent to another dimension for the last third of the movie.

    Audio Plays 
  • Bert and I...: "No News" on Bert and I Stem Inflation is a variant of the "Your dog died from eating burnt horse flesh" urban legend, below.

    Comic Books 
  • Wolverine: Wolverine is famous for these bordering on Diabolus ex Machina. It eventually turns out, in the mainstream Marvel Universe, that the reason he can remember almost nothing about his past (which, due to his Healing Factor, is over a century, at least) is that his mutant Healing Factor deliberately blanks out the most painful memories of his life. And when you look at some of the things he does remember...
    1. Being kidnapped by a Canadian black ops group to be turned into a Super-Soldier, a process that involved having white-hot (Adamantium only being malleable at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit) liquid metal injected into his skeletal system and repeated Brainwashing to turn him into a mindless assassin.
    2. Falling in love with a girl in Japan and finally feeling at peace, only to end up A: losing her to another man because her father has an Arranged Marriage for her, B: accidentally killing her father in front of her, and C: finally seeing her get killed in front of him.
  • The Incredible Hulk: The series eventually got to the point where it more or less became a parody of itself for half a decade during the Dark Age because the writers were sick of the endless angst (probably).
  • Robin: Since Tim Drake became Robin: His mother was murdered, his friend Darla was killed and came back as an undead villain, his dad was killed by a Captain Boomerang, his girlfriend Stephanie was tortured and 'murdered', his stepmother is missing and presumed dead, his best friends Kon-El and Bart were killed (later they came back to life), his adopted sister Cass Cain turned evil (this change did not last), his civilian best friend, Ives, has cancer now in remission, and Batman supposedly died. Steph came back years later only to start helping one of Tim's enemies in order to push him to become more efficient on Batman's orders. The writers joke about giving him a puppy so they can kill it too. Tim's response to all this? To emotionally deaden himself and go the Jerkass route. Hilariously he was originally envisioned as the Robin without angst and given two living parents to enable this.
    • What about Jason Todd? His mother dies of an overdose, his dad's killed by his criminal boss and unlike Dick Grayson, he isn't immediately adopted by Bruce Wayne, he lives on the street, forced into the world of crimes to survive, then, after becoming Robin he finds out his mother wasn't his biological mother, tracks down his real mother who sells him out to The Joker who promptly beats him half to death with a crowbar and then blows him up to finish the job. Even then it's not over, he wakes up inside his own coffin and has to dig his way out, instead of reuniting with his family he gets taken by the League of Assassins, thrown in a Lazarus Pit, and then finds out that not only was his killer still alive killing people, but Batman had a new Robin, leaving him feeling replaced. It's not surprising he goes a bit nuts, all things considered.
  • Batgirl (2009): Stephanie Brown grew up the child of a physically and emotionally abusive convict and a (now-rehabilitated) drug addict. Suffered attempted sexual molestation by her piano teacher at age 11. Almost had her face melted off by her own father with an acid capsule on her first foray as a vigilante. Set up for kidnapping and murder by her own father again several months later. Becomes pregnant by a boy who abandons her without even stopping long enough to learn that she was pregnant. Carries the child to term, then gives him/her up for adoption in a complete Tear Jerker of a moment, not letting herself even know her baby's sex or naming him/her because otherwise she could never force herself to let go. (And for extra angst points, almost dies of complications during the delivery.) Father (apparently) dies while trying to reform, leaving her entirely conflicted on the issue. Tortured grotesquely by Black Mask for hours. Upon returning from her faked death and one year's isolation in Africa, immediately ordered by Batman to betray her ex-boyfriend "for his own good", leading to complete alienation from him. Given the absolute minimum of support and validation in her superhero career, even by her own boyfriend, throughout. Subjected to active discouragement from pursuing a superhero career by virtually everyone. Depending on whether or not it's Canon Discontinuity yet, possibly still carrying the guilt for setting off a destructive gang war that killed hundreds. And her response? Total refusal to let any of this crap get her down. With arguably as much to angst about as her ex-boyfriend Tim, there is not one panel of her whining or indulging in self-pity available in the sixteen years the character has been in Bat-Comics. Steph entirely shares Commissioner Gordon's awesome immunity to PTSD or Wangst.
  • Spider-Man: The Brand New Day storyline is nothing but Deus Angst Machina, mixed in with a healthy serving of non-stop Wangst. Every conceivable thing that can go wrong does. Twice. In a single issue. Just to remind us Spider-Man's deeper and more dramatic now!
  • These British girls' comics. As the commentator puts it, "Sometimes your ballet career is cut short by a tragic car accident that kills your family and leaves you a cripple and your evil relatives are stealing your disability checks and they're sending your toddler brother out to work with the construction crew next door. I hate when that happens."
  • He doesn't exactly angst over it but Nodwick has all kinds of horrible things happen to him and done to him (even by his allies) for the sake of comedy, including dying regularly — sometimes multiple times on the same page! When he gets the chance to hear why from The Powers What Is, they state that he is a "destiny sponge" soaking up all kinds of horribleness so other people and the world don't have to. Alternate worlds without him have gone from crapsack to pure hell.
  • W.I.T.C.H.: This was Will Vandom's life. Let's see — dad was a compulsive gambler, making their family broke. Mom divorced him and he disappeared. When her powers start to develop, she's ostracized by her friends for being weird. Mom decides to move to Heatherfield and she spends her first day of school in the rain with a broken bike. You'd think that after becoming a Guardian, her life would be better — you'd think wrong. Stops Phobos? Mom wants to move back to their old town. Dad comes back? Turns out he wants to use Will to swindle money out of her mom... and when he's gone, her precious pet dormouse she got from her future boyfriend Matt is run down by a passing car! It's no wonder when that happens, the first thing she says is "Why does this keep happening?!"
  • The Chick Tract "Unloved" provides the page image, in which a young man is treated as The Un-Favourite of his family, and in short order as an adult, gets divorced by his wife, disowned by his parents and diagnosed with terminal cancer; the strain of all this causes him to be nearly Driven to Suicide. The latter development was only revealed in passing in that panel.
  • In For the Man Who Has Everything, Superman is held trapped by a plant that gives its victim the illusion of living the life they would have if their dearest desire was true. In Superman's case, he's living as an ordinary citizen on a Krypton that was never destroyed. However, since the plant provides a logical extrapolation of the consequences of the victim's wish, Be Careful What You Wish For applies, and in this case, life on Krypton has some serious downsides. Okay... there's probably no logical reason why a logical extrapolation of what it would be like would not involve Krypton having descended into social upheaval and riots, Superman's father having become a reactionary bigot, and his mother having died of cancer. But there's also no reason it would have to involve those things other than it being necessary for the plot. (That last one especially... is the plant The Omniscient and knows that she was carrying potential cancer when she was alive in reality?)

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Crank had, as its theme, that every character from minor to major had the biggest bad luck day possible on the day that Chev was poisoned.
  • Six Shooter starts with the main character on the train home from the hospital after finding out that his wife has died in an accident. He strikes up a conversation with a young man, who reveals that his mother had been murdered the night before. Over the course of the movie said young man ends up causing the suicide of a young mother who'd just lost her child, is found to be the murderer of his mother, and dies in a shoot-out with the police (still on the train). The main character picks up the discarded gun, which has two bullets left. He takes it home intending to commit suicide. He remembers his wife's rabbit and, being merciful, shoots it first so it doesn't have to starve. He then drops the gun, which fires its last bullet, and so he can't kill himself anymore. The last line? 'What a day.'
  • Mel Gibson's character, Benjamin Martin, in The Patriot (2000) only decides to fight in the Revolution after his eldest son was captured and sentenced to hang and his younger son was shot in cold blood by the over-the-top evil Tavington, who had just walked in to the Martins' home and murdered several wounded Colonials in their beds and set their home on fire as punishment, even though the Martins were also caring for British wounded. That's when Benjamin gets out the hatchets.
  • Played for humor in My Cousin Vinny when Lisa nags Vinny about getting married:
    Vinny: "Lisa, I don't need this. I swear to God, I do not need this right now, okay? I've got a judge that's just aching to throw me in jail. An idiot who wants to fight me for two hundred dollars. Slaughtered pigs. Giant loud whistles. I ain't slept in five days. I got no money, a dress code problem, AND a little murder case which, in the balance, holds the lives of two innocent kids, not to mention your [stomps his foot] BIOLOGICAL CLOCK - my career, your life, our marriage, and let me see, what else can we pile on? Is there any more SHIT we can pile on to the top of the outcome of this case? Is it possible?"
    Lisa: [pause] "Maybe it was a bad time to bring it up."
  • Parodied in Mel Brooks' Robin Hood: Men in Tights:
    Robin Hood: Blinkin, listen to me. They've taken the castle!
    Blinkin: I thought it felt a bit drafty. Ohh...this never would have happened if your father was alive.
    Robin Hood: He's dead?
    Blinkin: Yes.
    Robin Hood: And my mother?
    Blinkin: She died of pneumonia while... oh, you were away.
    Robin Hood: My brothers?
    Blinkin: There were all killed by the plague.
    Robin Hood: My dog, Pogo?
    Blinkin: Run over by a carriage.
    Robin Hood: My goldfish, Goldie?
    Blinkin: Eaten by the cat.
    Robin Hood: [on the verge of tears] My cat?
    Blinkin: Choked on the goldfish.
    • The clincher:
      Blinkin: Oh, it's good to be home, ain't it, Master Robin?
  • Much like the Robin Hood example above, the Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence movie Life provided this.
    Pokerface: [on a break; Ray and Claude have just come in] Either one of you new fellas know how to read?
    Ray: I know how to read, why?
    Pokerface: I've been carrying this letter for four months now
    Claude: You mean to tell me none of y'all can read?
    Willie Long: Last fella what could read made parole about, what, Christmas.
    Pokerface: [about his letter] I don't even know who this come from.
    Ray: [takes the letter] Gimme that shit.
    [turns to old inmate sitting next to him]
    Ray: You can't read?
    [old inmate replies "no"]
    Ray: Almost sixty years old; motherfucker can't read. Here: look, it's from, it's from your mama's neighbor, Mrs. Tadwell, you know who that is, Mrs. Tadwell; she thought you ought to know that your second cousin Bo died, Bo died, and your, and your other cousin Sally on your daddy's side, she died. Oh, and apparently your sister died, too.
    Pokerface: Jenny?
    Ray: No, it said Marlene here, Marlene died.
    [reads on]
    Ray: ... no no no, Marlene, Jen-Jenny, Jenny died, too, Jenny and Marlene both dead. Then it goes on for a while about how the crop didn't come in on account of the frost, she finished up, there's been a big tornado in which your mama and your daddy were both killed, but don't worry because she's gonna take care of the dog, that is if he gets over the worms; dog had worms.
    Pokerface: Appreciate it.
    Ray: Yeah, well you know, any time I can help.
  • In The Dark Knight, the Joker unleashes an escalating series of catastrophic events on Gotham City, including murdering cops and public officials, blowing up hospitals, and finally turning the much-admired "White Knight" district attorney Harvey Dent into the crazed killer Two-Face. By inducing a state of desperate panic and fear on the city, he hopes to prove that deep down, people are savage, selfish and ignoble. A good example, as it all goes to making it more satisfying to see him proven wrong.
  • The revised ending of Stephen King's The Mist, in which the main character kills all the other survivors, including his ten-year-old son, only to run out of bullets when he tries to finish it by killing himself and tries to get a monster to kill him...just in time for the cavalry to arrive — this in Portland, having come all the way from Bangor with no sign of fellow survivors.
  • In Van Helsing, Anna's death doesn't really have much narrative purpose other than giving Van Helsing something to scream about.

    Literature 
  • The whole plot of Les Misérables is an example. Everyone in the cast suffers, and almost the whole cast dies. This is specially true with the title character, Jean Valjean: He spends 19 years in jail because he stole a loaf of bread (come on!!). Then after no one will even let him stay at an inn, he accidentally commits highway robbery and ends up living always on the run, even after faking his death as one man refuses to let it go. But then, one girl that worked for him is fired, raped, teeth-pulled, hair sold, and so on so she can send money to her daughter. She dies, and Valjean becomes the guardian of the girl. THEN they go to Paris some years later, where not only is Javert still playing cat and mouse with him, but the whole city is planning a revolution and the small girl is now in love with one of the revolutionaries... This can only go wrong from here...
  • Possibly subverted (eventually) in The Bible. The story of Job centers on a man who loses his farmhands, shepherds, servants, several kinds of cattle, children, and health. All of this ends up demonstrating several points about God's sovereignty, though, among other things, and at any rate, Job got better.
  • Pick a character in Animorphs. Almost any character. Fans tend to think Tobias wins at this particular kind of angst, but a careful reading of the series reveals that he has some pretty serious competition. (Consider the backstories of the Auxiliary Animorphs, and how they wound up being used in the end. Dang.) And, in a weird way, Loren.
  • Robin Jarvis loves doing this to his characters. For one example, in the Deptford Mice trilogy, Audrey's father disappears and it turns out he has been murdered (she refuses to believe he is dead at first, but gradually comes to accept it), she is accused of being a witch and almost hanged (with the only way to save her being marriage to a friend who is not her true love), Piccadilly (the boy mouse she is in love with) is murdered before she can confess her feelings to him, she is attacked by multiple brainwashed and violent ghosts of those she knew in life (including Piccadilly in a particularly traumatic encounter, but she is able to jog his memory and tell him she loves him; though of course it is too late to do anything about it and she witnesses his crossing over to the other side), she is forced to face the Big Bad Jupiter (the cause of the majority of her misery) head-on multiple times, and she is tricked into becoming the (at least initially) unwilling successor of the Starwife.
  • It has become pretty apparent that the writer To Live's main objective is to make the protagonist suffer as much as possible, no matter how ridiculous the manner is.
  • Harry Potter — every single male parental figure in the title character's life — except Hagrid and Arthur, who was supposed to die in the middle of book five — ends up dead, one by one. (Sort of Voldemort's plan) Tip of the iceberg. Harry's whole life is epic Dickensian-level suck, from the ugly hand-me-downs to the ridiculously cruel relatives.
  • Stephen R. Donaldson loves putting his characters through hell so he can watch them suffer.
  • Even The Black Stallion series goes for this one. Jockey Alec Ramsey, having undergone a pretty eventful life already, falls in love with a bewitching free spirit named Pam in The Black Stallion and the Girl. She leaves him to continue her wandering ways, but at the beginning of the next book The Black Stallion Legend, her bus plunges off a cliff, killing her and everyone else on board. Alec finds out about this through a newspaper account and goes quite mad. He recovers eventually. But not before he drives out into the desert with only his beloved horse, gets lost, gets found by an Indian tribe who thinks the Black is some sort of spirit horse sent to lead them to safety, which seems more reasonable when a GIANT METEOR hits the Earth, causing disaster and destruction, including massive damage to Hopeful Farm which he finds out when he decides to call home and tell them he's not dead, but it does all get better in the end. Yeah, at this point, author Walter Farley was getting a bit odd. To be fair, Pam was modelled on Farley's daughter, who died in a car crash in Europe. The Black Stallion Legend was his way of handling it.
  • Sword Art Online's Kirito's life is pretty dim. To start things off, his parents died in a car crash when he was 2, and he only found out about that by the time he was 10. Things take a nosedive for the worse once he gets into SAO, where he gets trapped alongside several thousands of people, and if they die, they die for real. Not only that but he gets into the crosshairs of several particularly dangerous serial killers, one of whom almost manages to kill him, sending him into a coma. And to top it off, he sees several of his closest friends die one by one, and they hit him so hard that he actually has attempted suicide, and twice. The ending of volume 18 shows how hard his life has hit him.
  • Is there an "uplifting" chick-lit novel, Lifetime Movie of the Week, or Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that doesn't do this to its heroine(s)?
  • Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, arguably. Two young teens being desperately in love with each other but separated by the feuding of their families is a realistic situation, but that ridiculous farce of a dual duel misunderstanding? Tybalt tries to challenge Romeo, Romeo refuses so Mercutio fights in his place, and is killed by Tybalt, causing Romeo to kill the offender in a fit of pique. And on top of this, the Friar's messenger just conveniently fails to reach Romeo to warn him of Juliet's fake death, causing Romeo to drink poison mere moments before Juliet awakens, who then proceeds to stab herself with a dagger, promptly dying. So the actual tragedy of the story, the lovers' demise, could've been avoided if Romeo had waited a bloody five minutes before committing suicide, or even if the messenger had succeeded in delivering the message in the first place. The "mere moments" leads to a lovely scene in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet when Juliet wakes up right as Romeo drinks the poison, and he sees her waking up just before the poison takes effect. The "Oh, Crap!" look on Leonardo DiCaprio's face is priceless.
  • Soul of the Fire, the fifth book of the Sword of Truth series is made of this. For starters, it takes place in a country where more than half the population is convinced they're inherently evil (think about if Hitler somehow managed to convince the Jews they deserved to be exterminated, and you'll get the idea). The one person in this group who wants to change it has his head unceremoniously broken in half. His would-be girlfriend sees her entire regiment (made up of fresh-faced girls) either slaughtered, raped, or both at the same time before running for her life and likely suffering the same fate. A good friend that a major character had known years ago is burned at the stake. And the hero's wife is beaten to death (but saved with the kiss of life) and loses their baby. Singularly the most depressing book in the whole series.
  • Túrin from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin. His little sister died when he was 5. When he was 9, his father went off to war and was captured by the Big Bad, who cursed his entire family. (Túrin didn't know about it and thought his father died.) He then leaves his pregnant mother behind to seek shelter from the Elf king, so he wouldn't be enslaved. When he was 20, he accidentally kills an Elf who attacked him verbally and physically. Believing the king would punish him, he exiles himself. The king forgave him when he found out the truth, and let Beleg, a good friend of Túrin, search for him. Túrin joins a band of outlaws and becomes their leader. He is captured by orcs and tied up. Beleg finds him at night and cuts his bonds, but his knife slips and wakes Túrin up. Túrin jumps up and kills Beleg. Later, his mother and the sister that was born after he'd left, Niënor, go to the Elf king to look for Túrin. Obviously he's not there, so they go look for him. Glaurung the dragon puts a spell over Niënor so she forgets who she is. She goes running crazy into the woods until Túrin finds her. They fall in love and get married. Eventually Túrin goes to slay Glaurung. He fatally stabs him, but the blood makes him pass out. Niënor finds him and thinks he's dead. Glaurung tells her that she's pregnant by her brother and dies, thus lifting the spell. Niënor remembers everything and jumps off a cliff. Túrin wakes up and goes home, where he is told about Niënor from her Stalker with a Crush. He commits suicide by impaling himself on his sword which apparently talks to him.
    • Tolkien makes the subtle point that most of Túrin's troubles can be traced to his angsty self-absorption. As somebody — Beleg? — points out, other people have their problems too. Given that the War Against Morgoth is being lost, that is something of an understatement!
    • This series of events is supposed to be abnormally unfortunate, as Morgoth's punishment of Húrin (Túrin's father) was to give Húrin the ability to see everything that happened to his family and then to curse said family. Considering that Morgoth helped make the world, it is to be assumed that his curses would actually come true.
    • When he goes to Nargothrond with Gwindor, Gwindor's fiancée falls for him whilst he remains oblivious, and he ends up destroying Nargothrond by persuading its inhabitants to fight. Gwindor dies wishing he'd never met Túrin and Finduilas dies because Glaurung hypnotises Túrin into letting orcs drag her off.
  • Realm Of The Elderling: Fitz, from Farseer, never seems to get an even break. Every time he appears to achieve or be about to achieve anything events conspire to dash his hopes and often make things much, much worse. Possibly justified because all the bad things that happen are the natural result of the setting and events transpiring around him, but included because he always seems to get the short end of the stick. This is Fitz's role in fate. note 
  • Spoofed in the "Kevin Shapiro, Boy Orphan" stories within Daniel Pinkwater's Young Adult Novel:
    So here was Kevin, a thirteen-year-old alcoholic, pusher, and thief. His mother would never get well, his father certainly wouldn't, and sister Isobel was turning tricks on State Street. It seemed to Kevin that there wasn't a chance in the world that he would ever get his life straightened out.
    And he was right. So we hit him over the head and fed him to the pigs.
  • Voltaire's Candide is a book of this. Despite his assertions that we live in the best of all possible worlds, Candide is kicked out of his idyllic home for kissing a girl who is apparently his cousin (although this is never brought up by any of the characters), is tricked into joining the Bulgarian army, is flogged until he has no skin on his back and begs for death, sees horrific death and destruction caused by the war, has a chamber-pot emptied on him, finds out that his beloved teacher has become a beggar hideously disfigured by syphilis, learns that his childhood home was utterly destroyed and his love interest and her family have been murdered (after brutal mass rape), and the ship he's on is beset by a storm... in the first four chapters. In fact, every character in Candide suffers from this trope—it's hard to find a character who hasn't been enslaved, raped, flogged, or lost all their worldly possessions. Interesting in that it was all played for laughs
  • In Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Universe, after a long, long list of calamities inflicted by the fictional foes of the US including multiple attacks with various weapons of mass destruction (once almost leading to all-out nuclear war), terrorism on a scale to make any budding Osama bin Laden ecstatic, and plots aplenty to destroy or severely cripple the country, Clancy decides to still include the events of September 11, 2001, in this world. What already happened was bad enough; the last one was truly unnecessary piling on.
  • In The Last Herald-Mage trilogy from the Heralds of Valdemar books, the title character Vanyel has no paranormal abilities at all and no friends. He gets his arm broken by his weapons trainer in an attempt to "toughen him up" (he was an aspiring musician). His one true love goes insane when his twin brother dies, plans a complicated revenge, suffers a massive breakdown, and ultimately commits suicide, but not before flooding Van with a massive torrent of magical energy that forcibly awakens all of his magical gifts. Van is left in such emotional and psychic pain that he attempts suicide twice before starting to recover.
    • And that was just in the first volume! In the second volume he's mostly just lonely, a bit sad, slightly shell-shocked, and suffering from a mild death wish; but in the third volume he watches his king (who is one of his few actual friends) die by inches (and it is quite explicit that the king's beloved, one of Vanyel's other few friends, will die with him), his aunt is painfully killed because he dismisses her worries about a rash of fatal accidents, and he gets gang-raped... all because apparently he didn't have enough angst in his life already...
    • He is cursed with foresight, starting early in Book One, that he will die facing down an Evil Sorcerer.
  • X-Wing Series: Tycho Celchu can be seen as one of these. He was born and grew up on Alderaan and was a very good pilot for The Empire. When the Empire blew up his homeworld, it was his birthday, and he was in a full-holo conference celebrating it with his entire family and his fiancée. When the holo failed, for several hours he thought it was just "technical difficulties" and planned to rib them about it, since his family owned the station and had been suffering similar failures. Later, having switched sides and serving the Rebellion, he got kidnapped by Isard, the Empire's mistress of intelligence and brainwashing. She failed and transferred him out of her secret prison into one from which he was able to escape. Since he told his superiors that Isard had kidnapped him, they believed he had been brainwashed — all previous brainwashed people hadn't been able to tell anyone — and restricted what he could and could not do. Since the head of Rouge Squadron trusted him, he was allowed to fly an unarmed shuttle into combat to rescue downed pilots, but he had a guard at all times. Later he got framed for Corran Horn's apparent death, and his friends and allies were forced to clear his name. Throughout this Tycho was unfailingly portrayed as incredibly calm and noble. His situation certainly got better later, but damn.
    "I am Tycho Celchu, son of Alderaan, now orphan of the galaxy. I have come to this place of my birth to pay homage to who I was and those I knew. And those I loved and love still. It is my wish that when life abandons me, I am returned here to be among you, so that for eternity we may be together as we should have been in life. These gifts are but insufficient tokens of the love for you all that still burns within me. This fighter is another. It bears the colors of the Alderaanian Guard and transmits their code. It is my pledge to you — not of vengeance but of vigilance. I hope you rest well knowing you will rest alone, because it is my life's work to see to it that no one else suffers as you have. I won't rest until this quest is complete. Rest easy. I miss you all."
    • A later book lampshades it a little when Adumarians dub him "The Doleful One". He's not sad, but he always looks sad. So sad that, well...
      Tycho: * frowns* I'm not sad.
      Janson: No, but you look sad. Makes the ladies of Cartann's court want to comfort you. They're so sad about wanting to comfort you that you could comfort them.
      Hobbie: And Tycho's the only one of us with a successful relationship with a woman. Missed opportunities, Tycho.
  • Leafpool in Warrior Cats. In Twilight, her mentor dies (and she blames herself for her death), she has to give up the love of her life, and she essentially becomes isolated from the rest of the Clan. She seems to have been able to suck it up, but then in Sunrise it is revealed that she was actually pregnant and had to give up her kits to be raised by her sister, she can no longer be a medicine cat (the only joy in life she had left), she gets insulted by the aforementioned love of her life, her own daughter tries to kill her, and she apparently blames herself for Ashfur's death. The ending makes it difficult to tell exactly what is going to happen to her now. All this isn't really a Contrived Coincidence though, since it all just originates from one bad decision... and another bad decision to cover up the first one...
  • Alonso Quixano in The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. Almost everybody he encounters takes advantage of his delusions for comedy value. Don Quixote attributes all misfortunes to his mysterious, non-existent enemies, which are exchangeable, and consist of a sorcerer.
  • Push by Sapphire has received criticism because of this. Precious Jones, the protagonist, is a completely illiterate 16-year-old in the 8th grade. Her father raped her and caused her to get pregnant twice, the first time when she was 13. The baby from the first pregnancy (Little Mongo) has severe Down's syndrome. She is currently pregnant with the second. When she was in labor with Mongo, her mother was kicking her on the floor. It gets worse (and a little bit better). By the end of the book, she is a semi-literate HIV-positive teen mom living in a homeless shelter. And the sequel, The Kid, is apparently even worse, with Precious dying in the first chapter. Though the author has said that Precious was based on a girl she met when she was a teacher.
  • Jodi Picoult:
    • In My Sister's Keeper, one sister has leukemia, the other was born to give the other tissue, and the brother is a serial arsonist.
    • In The Pact, a teenage girl puts her boyfriend's hand to shoot the gun so she can die, results in criminal case for boyfriend; it is revealed that the teenage girl was pregnant, and had been raped as a child, and as a result could not bring herself to get an abortion.
  • Kurt Vonnegut's success is based on laying misery down on his characters, but special mention goes to the book Deadeye Dick. The main character, Rudy Waltz accidentally shoots and kills a pregnant woman at twelve years old. His naive, pampered father takes the blame for the killing, and both he and his son are imprisoned, where they are tortured and humiliated by the police. Rudy is stricken by grief and dedicates his life to making up for his actions he never does, at least to his satisfaction. Consumed by grief he shuts himself off from all worldly pleasure and lives life as what he calls as an asexual "neuter." His hometown knows him as almost an urban legend and derisively refer to him as "Deadeye Dick." He spends the remainder of his parents' lives as their effective slave because they have no idea how to care for themselves after losing their enormous wealth. When they die, he becomes an expatriate in Haiti until he hears his hometown has been obliterated by a Neutron Bomb to open the city up for real-estate sales. And that's the end of the book.
  • Thomas Hardy is notorious for books of this nature. Characters may make temporary gains, but everything from the nature of society to the weather will conspire to destroy them. It's been suggested that he suffered from depression himself.
  • Happens in Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. Not only is the main character's family poor and living in the middle of Kansas in the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, but she accidentally burns her hands, destroying her musical talent, after she sets her pregnant mother on fire, eventually killing her.
  • Ron Currie, Jr.'s Everything Matters. So your druggie brother finally starts to get clean? Oops, the drugs addled his brain. He'll live, but with the mentality of a child. You almost killed yourself to find a cure for your father's cancer? He'll fall asleep at the wheel and die before you get to see him again anyway. You finally convinced your girlfriend to escape your doomed planet with you? She's going to be shot by terrorists a page later. And then there's the small matter of The End of the World as We Know It hanging over the whole story... Still a good book.
  • Sharon Kay Penman's The Sunne in Splendour. The last fourth of the book involves nearly everyone close to Richard either dying or betraying him, to the point where he more or less stops caring. Justified because all of these events come out of the historical record, turning the whole thing into a major Tear Jerker.
  • The Aeneid. Juno (who in an earlier epic poem is actually called an "eternal bitch") gets angry at the Trojans. Therefore, Aeneas' city (Troy) is defeated and burned. As he's escaping, he loses his wife, and his frantic midnight search for her only turns up her ghost. Then he has to lead a bunch of refugees across the known world in search of a safe place to resettle. They are caught in numerous storms, and accidentally burn down their own fleet at one point. He is forced to abandon the first woman he falls in love with, leading to her suicide. When they finally reach a point where they think they can settle down and rebuild their lives, Virgil says "Only look upward" and reminds the reader that the bitchy goddess is still after them... enter war and death and destruction.
  • Subverted in The Count of Monte Cristo. Initially Dantes is quite justifiably angsty about his certainly terrible position. But when he overcomes it, he decides that he's going to spend the rest of his lifetime handing out angst to those who deserve it.
  • Agrajag in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is killed by Arthur Dent in each of his lives (he keeps reincarnating).
  • Very common in Danielle Steel's novels. An example is Gabbie in The Long Road Home, who has a very abusive mother, a father who doesn't help and leaves when she is 9. Her mother then moves to California and leaves her in a convent, where she decides to become a nun and falls in love with a priest. However, they are not allowed to be together, and her lover feels guilty and hangs himself. She is kicked out of the convent and ends up moving into a boarding house. Just as things seem to be moving up, her closest friend is essentially killed by the con man Gabbie fell in love with and said con man then beats Gabbie almost to death for the money the friend left her in his will.
  • Life in the Fat Lane, by Cherie Bennett is almost nothing but Deus Angst Machina Lara Ardeche, homecoming queen and teen beauty contestant, develops a chemical imbalance that causes her weight to double within months. Her Girl Posse brush her off as a result; the school fat girl, whom she'd inadvertently insulted, makes a point of gloating; and her relationship with her parents deteriorates. Later, her father cheats on her mother, her mother attempts suicide, and the whole family moves to another town...where Lara is treated like a Butt-Monkey at school for being fat. (And there's also her break-up with Jett...but that was kind of her own damn fault.)
  • Invoked purposefully in Mockingjay, and one of the main criticisms from disgruntled fans. Character after character after character dies, Peeta is a victim of mind-control and tries to strangle Katniss, Katniss's sister is killed. Among other things.
  • A little bit in The Dresden Files. Harry's mother dies in childbirth, his father dies when he's 6, he gets adopted (and tutored in magic) by the wizard Justin DuMorne, who—SURPRISE—turns out to be evil, and uses Harry's girlfriend to attempt to mind control him, Harry escapes, accidentally sells his life to a semi-evil faery, kills his adopted father, and presumably his girlfriend at the time, with a massive fire spell (his specialty), then he gets dragged before the White Council (the UN of Wizards), for breaking the First Law of Magic (Thou Shall Not Kill By Use of Magic), gets sent to live with a 200+ year old wizard (which isn't bad-for a while), then starts a PI business, where he is promptly beaten, brused, burned, clawed, bitten, and generally attacked by various magical beasts, including a few genuine Christian Demons, loses the trust of his best friend, then the woman he loves is half turned into a vampire(the soul-less abomination kind), AND, he happened to start a war between the Vampire Court and the White Council, not to mention that the Council hated him LONG before he started said war.
    • Then excessively, Changes. Finding out he has a daughter right after she was kidnapped by the Red Court. Having his office building blown up, his apartment burnt, becoming paralysed, and forced to make a deal with the devil in order to stand a chance. Then, in the finale, he is forced to watch the love of his life turn into a full vampire, kill her to save his daughter. And when you finally think that something good is going to happen in Harry's life for a change, he is shot.
  • Parodied in My Godawful Life by Michael Kelly (under the pseudonym Sunny Mccreary), as the protagonist endures ever more horrible and ridiculous misfortunes throughout his life, such as getting pushed into prostitution by his parents, resorting to cannibalism when trapped in a mine, and being forced to live in Northumberland.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Goren from Law & Order: Criminal Intent qualifies if anyone does. Let's see.... his schizophrenic mother hates him, even though he's the only one who takes care of her, his drug-addicted brother gets all the love from their mother, his father — who treated him like shit anyway — turned out not to be his real father, and his biological father turned out to be a serial killer who's executed in another state. He gets persecuted by the FBI, ends up in a mental hospital, gets fired, and his health and good looks go to shit, too. This is only a partial list of all the shit that goes down. If anyone can be accused of provoking the wrath of the writer-deities, this character would definitely be it. The unrelenting, unceasing suffering that occurs was enough to make many fans stop watching the show, out of sheer disgust. If anyone earned a happy ending they never got, it's Goren. Shoot the Shaggy Dog, already.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit often falls into this. Granted, a Cop Show about victims of rape and other sex crimes isn't exactly going to be all smiles, sunshine, and cartoon bluebirds, and there's going to be fair bit of angst at times, but they really do tend to lay it on a bit thick. Often occurs whenever one of the characters gets into an It's Personal moment, which is roughly every episode.
  • Anyone in Battlestar Galactica. Anyone. Cylons included. They exterminated 99.99% of the human race - and it was just the beginning!
  • Daniel Jackson in Stargate and Stargate SG-1. Loses both his parents in an archeology accident when a giant slab of rock fell on them and he was present to witness it, has his scientific discoveries rejected and mocked... then, just as he finds that his theories aren't crazy after all and everyone thinks he's going to live Happily Ever After on another planet with his new wife, she is promptly taken away by the Big Bad and implanted with a Goa'uld symbiote. After he spends three years fighting the Goa'uld, with the hope of seeing her again being his only motivation, he's forced to see her killed by Teal'c, one of his best friends. He recovers, only to have another love interest taken away by another Goa'uld. Not even death stops the chain of unfortunate events: after ascending, he's quickly frustrated with his inability to intervene, and finally kicked from the ascended plane after trying to stop another Big Bad from dropping a planet's worth of bridges on Abydos... and failing. The most amazing thing is how he eventually gets over all this...
    • All the main characters of SG-1 have tormented pasts and presents, perhaps not contrived when you take into account how often they tempt fate and win.
  • In the Canadian teen drama series Degrassi, every awful thing that can happen to a teenager has happened to one of the characters. There's been a school shooting, a stabbing, at least one rape, self-mutilation, eating disorders, and multiple drug addictions and pregnancies. All the while, nobody seems to notice that Degrassi might not be the best place to go to school...
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy during season six. The last couple of episodes stick out though: After having her mentor/father figure leave town, seeing the marriage of two of her best friends fall apart at the altar (causing one of them to revert to being an evil vengeance demon), having her ex-boyfriend come back to town happily married and disappointed in seeing her working a dead-end job at a fast food place and dating a vampire, then barely avoiding a rape by said vampire, then having her best friend's girlfriend shot by a random bullet meant for her, then having said best friend go Psycho Lesbian and on a killing spree with her magical powers, then having her little sister attacked by demons en route to the Psycho Lesbian causing the end of the world... who could blame Buffy for wishing she had stayed dead at the end of season 5?
  • A Saturday Night Live sketch featured Mike Myers as a British WWII soldier recovering in a hospital, who goes through one of the worst cases of this ever but refuses to lose his cool. Turns out the nurse he is engaged to is already married and only pretended to be in love with him to keep his hopes up. And the mission he just flew didn't result in the death of Hitler as he had been told. In fact, he blew up an orphanage. And he can't go back and play football for his favorite team because the doctors had to amputate his leg. And his team lost anyway. Because their opponents' team had the nurse's husband kick the winning goals. And when he comments that such a great player must have three legs, it turns out that he does. Because that's what they did with the leg they took from him. And then the husband shows up and it's Hitler! Myers comments that at least nobody has hit him over the head with a pipe today. Guess what Hitler does.
  • EastEnders: Most soaps have a bit of inherent angst involved, but in that one, whatever can go wrong is guaranteed to go wrong — and then, whatever can't go wrong will also go wrong, just for good measure.
  • Days of Our Lives seems to hate its characters. If you're not simultaneously worrying about your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse sleeping with someone else, sleeping with someone else yourself and then feeling guilty, keeping secrets of who slept with whom for your friends, keeping secrets of who slept with whom for your enemies because of the collateral damage to your friends, wondering who the father of the new pregnancy of the week is thanks to all that sleeping around, angsting over the Law of Inverse Fertility and worrying about being pregnant despite birth control or lack of fertility (bonus points for doing both at once!), getting harassed by a psychopath, or having any number of other sources of drama heaped on you...just wait. Just you wait.
  • Oh, lord, Supernatural. With its numerous break the cuties, Abusive Parents of all kinds, characters that can jump from a Jerkass to a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, applies Rule 34 and Mood Whiplash in spades, numerous death wishes, deals with the devil that twist and break the other characters, episodes where incest would actually be more acceptable, a penchant for Downer Endings and festering issues, you have to wonder how anyone on the show hasn't checked into therapy yet or put a bullet in their brain (although Dean was close in Seasons Two and Four). This might seem like the rest of the shows on here but you have to remember; this was supposed to be a show with no chick-flick moments and the basic premise of two pretty-boys brothers hunting down demons with rock salt.
    • Lampshaded in a Season 5 meta episode when Dean confronts a pair of In-Universe Sam and Dean cosplayers, telling them that Sam and Dean's lives would send any normal human howling to the nuthouse.
    • Sam actually does spend time in a mental hospital in Season 7, as does Castiel. Because their minds are being haunted by Lucifer himself.
    • In Season 9, when Castiel is human, an angel senses his psychological pain and arrives to put him out of his misery.
    • In Season 13, the brothers and Jack actually see a therapist as part of a case but wind up actually having some useful therapy with the empathetic shapeshifter therapist.
  • Everyone in Xena: Warrior Princess, but Callisto in particular: Her sociopathic/homicidal tendencies stem from witnessing her parents' deaths. Upon attaining Goddess-hood she has the chance to save them via time travel... and kills them in front of her younger self to ensure she becomes the person she is.
  • The modern Doctor Who veers hard into this country, to the point that Wangst has replaced gratuitous kidnapping of a companion as a source of cheap drama. See the endings of Journey's End and, depending on your interpretation, Forest of the Dead for some particularly gratuitous examples.
    • A more egregious example would be the Doctor, a pacifist being forced to fight in the biggest war ever, the Time War, having to destroy his planet and kill his entire species in order to end it. But the Daleks still manage to survive, again and again. He finds love in Rose Tyler, but she is sucked into a parallel universe, never to be seen again. He discovers another of his kind still alive - but it's the Master, who takes over the entire Earth and subjects the Doctor to ritual torture humiliation for over a year, and showing the Doctor that his precious humans are capable of cannibalising themselves, turning themselves into mutants strapped into cold metal shells, and coming back in time to murder their ancestors "because it's fun". And then when shot, the Master chooses to die rather than regenerate purely to spite the Doctor and make him suffer. In the series four finale, he is reunited with all his past companions, even Rose, but one by one they all leave him, and he even has to wipe Donna's mind of all her memories of him, right after she saved the world and gained self-confidence for the first time in her life. For a family program, the show ain't half depressing sometimes; it sometimes seems that the writers of the new series take some sort of sadistic pleasure in emotionally torturing the Doctor and are determined to break him into little pieces. No wonder he almost went completely mad over the course of the 2009 specials.
  • House: Gregory House was physically abused as a child by a man who turned out to be his non-biological father. As an adult, he partially lost use of his left leg as a result of a blood clot, and his girlfriend Stacy going behind his back to get him the procedure he didn't want. This causes a years-long addiction to Vicodin. House and Stacy broke up but when he finally reunites with her, he realizes that he can't make her leave her husband. He's shot by a random assailant in the season 2 finale, where we see House's subconscious chewing him out about refusing happiness for the sake of his job. In season 3 he finds a way to fix his leg, but it's only temporary and he's also hounded by an obsessed cop with a grudge. In seasons 4 and 5, he has to cope with the guilt over his involvement in the events that led to the death of his best friend Wilson's girlfriend and Wilson refusing to speak to him anymore. He nearly got brain damage while trying to save her too. In season 5 one of his colleagues commits suicide and House struggles to figure out the reason, before he starts having hallucinations, his Vicodin addiction goes out of control, and he has to be hospitalized. His attempt at a relationship with Cuddy in season 7 goes downhill because they secretly make each other miserable, Cuddy later dumps him, he's back on Vicodin, and to top it all off he's a wanted criminal when he flees the country for months after ramming a car into her home out of revenge. In season 8 he's jailed for several months before he's allowed probation if he'll practice medicine regularly. He marries a Russian emigrant to get her a green card, but when he falls in love with her for real it quickly falls apart once she figures out that he kept the confirmation of her naturalization from her out of fear that he'd lose her. Later on, Wilson tells House that he (Wilson) has stage 2 thymoma, forcing House to ruin his career and fake his own death so he travels the country with Wilson before his best friend dies.
  • A stellar example: the all but forgotten Disney Channel original movie One Magic Christmas. It is a... loose reimagining of It's a Wonderful Life, sort of. It sits uncomfortably between this trope, Narm, Clueless Aesop, Glurge, and just plain terrifying, the last especially due to the violent Mood Whiplash. Bonus points for having many of the same Unfortunate Implications as The Christmas Shoes, as pointed out by Patton Oswalt: "What a horrible fucking God!!!". The whole thing seems like it was designed to scar children for life.
  • The Filipino drama Eva Fonda is a quite horrific example. The show starts off its first episode with the main character being raped by one of the richest men in town. Then she goes home after the rape to find out that the love of her life was sleeping with her best friend while she was being raped! The show then continues with her trying to confront her rapist's father, only for him to try and rape her too! After she stabs him in self-defense and is taken to jail, one of the police officers tries to rape her during her interrogation! During her time in jail, she finds out that her sister died, and later on finds out she's pregnant with her rapist's child (which, by the way, she decides to keep and miscarries). She ends up escaping jail and living on the lam from the police and her now even-more-obsessed rapist, and the show isn't even over yet... Deus Angst Machina indeed.
  • Torchwood is veering into this after killing half of its main cast within a few episodes of each other.
  • Little House on the Prairie is fairly notorious for this. If anything good is happening to anyone in the Ingalls family and/or great plans are being made, expect something to go horribly wrong soon. The absolute worst case was with Albert, who found out he was terminally ill just as he received a full scholarship for medical school. To make matters worse, this was not long after he overcame a morphine addiction.
  • Hawkeye — Hawkeye, Hawkeye, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H. The writers seemed absolutely determined to do anything they could to break his spirit (going so far, in one episode, as to instill an army point system — which in real life, hadn't actually been in effect since WWII — so that Colonel Potter could tell Hawkeye the army had raised the number of points needed to get out of the military) until he's finally nearly beaten in the show's finale when he unintentionally causes a mother to suffocate her own child.
  • Veronica Mars - what did this girl do in a previous life? Not only does her best friend die, her boyfriend dumps her for no reason, her whole school hates her, her father loses his job, her mom walks out (after having been an alcoholic and cheater), and she's drugged, raped, and laughed off when she tries to report it. Then the actual series starts...
  • John Crichton in Farscape. First, he gets lost untold light-years away from Earth. Then, he gets tortured, mind-raped, and raped. Then he gets mind-raped and tortured some more, kills his girlfriend, gets cloned, loses his girlfriend to his clone (the clone, who is actually a perfect double rather than a copy, gets the girl but has to perform a Heroic Sacrifice to protect her), dies repeatedly, and also has the secret to the ultimate weapon of the universe implanted in his head, ensuring that the weight of the universe falls on his shoulders and that he's going to be pursued by everyone, all of whom are eager to torture, mind-rape, and rape him some more.
    • Crichton does go completely frelling insane by the end. The functional kind of crazy, but still.
  • ER writers always seemed to go out of their way to make the characters as miserable as possible. Nobody on the show was ever genuinely happy.
    • Mark Greene probably gets the worst of this. First his wife divorces him and takes their daughter with her, then he misses getting to a train in time to tell his best friend that he's in love with her before she leaves Chicago forever, then a chain of terrible minor incidents happen to him, then he gets viciously beaten up for no reason in a bathroom and develops PTSD as a result, then his best friend moves away, then his mother gets dementia and dies, then father gets cancer and dies, and then, just after he gets happily engaged to Doctor Corday, she gets pregnant on the same day that he finds out he has terminal brain cancer and will only live a few months. And then he dies. His only consolation prize is that he hangs in there a bit longer than expected, so he gets to see his child born before he kicks off.
  • True Blood:
    • Sookie Stackhouse loses family members and friends, often but not always to death, all the time, starting with her parents years before the beginning of the show.
    • Her best friend Tara has it even worse: she was abused by a violent alcoholic mother throughout her childhood, and it only gets worse from there.
  • Mulder on The X-Files. His sister disappears when he's a kid, which ends his parents' marriage and he later finds out he was the one that was supposed to be taken. And he finds out that she was dead most of the time and he was never going to find her. He works in a division that everyone thinks is a joke and no one ever believes most of the stuff he says (even though he's usually right) and he has very few friends. He gets shot three different times, once by his own partner, plus the countless times he gets beaten up and loses his gun. His father is murdered right in front of him, his mom has a stroke and later commits suicide. His partner and the only person he really trusts gets abducted by aliens and almost dies. Then she gets cancer and almost dies again. He's been drugged, had his memories erased, arrested, imprisoned, tortured by Russian scientists, almost had his arm removed against his will, starts getting debilitating headaches and other problems and then has brain surgery against his will, and then gets abducted by aliens himself and is tortured in various gruesome ways. He's died and come back to life several times, and was once buried semi-alive. He's forced to leave Scully and their son, and by the time he comes back the baby has been given up for adoption. He gets caught on a secret government installation where he's arrested and tortured (again) in an attempt to brainwash him. He's put on trial and condemned to death but he escapes. Oh, and the guy he hated most who was at the head of most of the conspiracies he was trying to expose? Was his biological father.
  • Grey's Anatomy is full of this, especially the season finales. George gets hit by a bus while Izzie is undergoing a risky surgery for her brain tumor, which ends with them both being in comas at the end of the episode. One of them dies. Another episode has a Code Silver situation which results in Meredith having a miscarriage and Cristina having her first major incident of PTSD. Later, half the cast is in a plane crash where Lexie and Mark die, Arizona loses a leg, and Derek has to smash his hand so that he might not ever be able to do surgery again (or at least until midway through the last season).
  • Andy Sipowicz from NYPD Blue: his mother was killed in a robbery when he was little. He grew up to be an alcoholic (like his father), causing his estrangement from his wife and son. He was shot six times and almost died. He sobered up and rebuilt his relationship with Andy Jr. but his son was gunned soon afterwards, causing him to fall off the wagon. And then he got cancer. And then his partner/best friend Bobby died a lingering death from heart failure. And then his new wife was gunned down, too, right in front of him. Oh, and then his new son Theo got sick and was thought to have leukemia. Oh, and then the partner who replaced Bobby was murdered. Oh, and then...
  • Criminal Minds:
    • Spencer Reid has this problem. He grew up an only child with his single, schizophrenic mother after his father abandoned them because he couldn't take her illness anymore, only to move around ten minutes up the road and never talk to them; because of her, he is at risk of developing schizophrenia himself. He was also the victim of vicious bullying at school. In season 2 he is kidnapped by a schizophrenic unsub and subsequently becomes addicted to drugs. His mentor and father figure leaves him soon after, leaving only a letter for him to find when he started to look for him. In season 6, one of his dear friends dies and he blames himself for it only to find out she faked it, which causes even more wangst for him. In season 8, after years of him being unable to really even talk to a woman and two flings that came to nothing, he finally gets a girlfriend whom he loves and whom loves him... only for her to die. note  Eventually, his mother also develops Alzheimer's, putting him at risk for that too (and he's too young to be screened), and he takes her in to try to give her the best possible care, only to get in over his head. This eventually gets him arrested for murder in Mexico after getting framed for murder while sneaking some non-FDA-approved herbal treatments, causing him to spend half a season in prison. As soon as he's cleared, the mastermind's girlfriend (who was a victim he couldn't protect from a cycle of violence, making him feel responsible for her) kidnaps his mother. All through the show, we are reminded that he's socially inept, easily embarrassed, and rarely taken seriously.
    • Derek's dad, Derek's abusive youth center backstory, Derek's missing cousin protracted storyline; Dave's ex-wife popping 'round to tell him she has ALS and to give him the faux choice of euthanizing her before it gets too bad, but really just so he can arrive too late to call for help but in time to comfort her while she dies from poisoning herself, Dave's girlfriend Strauss getting murdered by the Replicator; Emily's childhood friends getting murdered by wacky cleric; Garcia's parents killed in a car wreck while looking for the teenage, truant Garcia.
  • Frasier: As was revealed over the years, Frasier and Niles had incredibly sucky childhoods, no thanks to all the vicious bullying they went through. As a matter of fact, in the episode "Radio Wars," Martin pretty much says that everything Frasier and Niles said and did when they were kids - even the things that did not inconvenience their disturbingly numerous bullies - still got them targeted and picked on.
  • Trace has Stepan Danilov whose whole life is just a way from one disaster to another. First, his parents die in a car crash, then, after culture classes he goes straight to the Chechen war. After that, one of his girlfriends is killed during their wedding. Then another decides to dump him because of his dangerous job (after Stepan saved her from kidnappers). And finally, his sister and niece die in a shopping mall fire. All this makes to ask: WHY???
  • The Walking Dead, oh so much. While it's a given that things are not going to be all rainbows and sunshine in the zombie apocalypse, it's gotten to the point where not only will the worst thing that could possibly happen in a given situation will happen, but a couple of other things nobody considered will crawl out of the woodwork to bite someone in the face, just for giggles.

    Music 
  • Country music in general is frequently criticized for Deus Angst Machina. The old joke "what happens when you play country music backwards" makes light of this.
    • punchline: you get your dog back, you get your truck back, you get your house back, you get your girl back...
  • The Police's song "On Any Other Day" from the album Reggatta de Blanc: the narrator's wife has burned the scrambled eggs, the dog just bit his leg, his daughter ran away, his son has turned out gay (the song's context makes it clear that the dad doesn't mind but just resents his son's abysmal sense of timing), he slammed his fingers in his car door, his wife proudly tells him of her love affairs, and he just spilled his tea and is "covered in misery". However, the whole thing is Played for Laughs. On the other hand, the really creepy, near-horror variety of this comes with "Synchronicity II", which chronicles the similarly Deus Angst Machina day of a depressed, frustrated average guy stuck in a miserable existence by contrasting it with the repeated imagery of "something crawling from the bottom of a dark Scottish lake" - the final verse can be taken as implying that he finally snapped.
  • You Never Even Called Me By My Name by David Allan Coe has a final verse that parodies country music's tendency towards this:
    I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
    And I went to pick her up in the rain
    But before I could get to the station in my pick-up truck
    She got ranned over by a damned old train
    • When writer Steve Goodman showed Coe the song and bragged that it was "the ultimate country and western song", Coe disagreed because it "hadn't said anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk", and proceeded to write the last verse.
  • The backstory of Evelyn Evelyn. The title characters were conjoined twins (actual names Eva and Lyn Neville) whose mother suffered Death by Childbirth. The doctor attempted to separate them with a chainsaw, then was shot by the sheriff who walked in just in time, causing him to accidentally kill the twins' father with the chainsaw. Then it got worse.
  • The "Weird Al" Yankovic song "One of Those Days" describes a day in which everything goes wrong in a Trauma Conga Line, starting with sleeping through your alarm and ending with the world blowing up.
  • It's probably an Affectionate Parody of the blues genre, but on the album The Simpsons Sing the Blues, Homer and Lisa would have you think their lives were like this in their respective songs "Born Under a Bad Sign" and "Moanin' Lisa Blues."

    Professional Wrestling 
  • A bizarre mix of real life and storyline trauma afflicted Jeff Hardy between 2007 and 2009 in the WWE. First, his beloved older brother Matt's appendix bursts and he nearly dies from an infection. Then for several months, he can't quite manage to get over the hump and win the WWE title, though he's coming closer than he ever has. Then he fails a Wellness test and gets suspended for two months, including WrestleMania, at which he had been rumored to win a high-profile match. While he's suspended, his house and everything he owns burns to the ground, and his cherished dog is killed in the fire as well. Then once he returns, he's set upon by a malevolent GM and still can't quite make it to winning the title. Finally, finally he wins it, but his brief run is marred by a mysterious person making repeated attempts on his life. His title run ends when his own brother turns on him in favor of Edge, who at the time was the mortal enemy of both. Matt then reveals that not only did he do that, he was the one repeatedly trying to kill Jeff, he was the one who burned his house to the ground, and he was the one who killed Jeff's dog, and he then goes on to soundly trounce Jeff in all but the very last match of their feud. After all this, he wins the title again but loses it within a few minutes to CM Punk, who then goes on to rail at Jeff about his drug issues and keeps the title from him through many underhanded tactics. And when things are finally looking up for Jeff...he's made peace with his brother, he'd won the championship again, all was just starting to look up, bam, he loses it and his job thanks to Punk. The sad thing is, there's probably some more things that got missed in all of this. Can't blame the guy for wanting to go home and lick his wounds for a while now, can you?

    Radio 
  • In Big Finish Doctor Who this happens to the Eighth Doctor a lot. He gets possessed by an Anti-Time creature, has to be exiled to a timeless Universe, then his companion C'rizz dies and due to amnesia he thinks Charley leaves on bad terms with him. He starts travelling with Lucie Miller, meets his granddaughter Susan again, and finds she has a son, Alex Campbell. Then Alex and Lucie die defeating a Dalek invasion of Earth.

    Theatre 
  • Katurian of The Pillowman has a reeaally sucky day. He's arrested by the police force of a totalitarian government and doesn't even know why. The cops won't tell him outright what the problem is, just that it seems to be related to the stories he writes. Offering to take out anything political doesn't make anything better and Katurian eventually finds out that the police have arrested his mentally disabled little brother Michal as well, whom he has a strong instinct to protect. Finally Katurian finds out that the police are investigating a series of murders based on the stories he's written, which would tend to be upsetting, but after Katurian is tortured he finds out that his brother Michal is responsible for the killings which absolutely horrifies him. Then the police threaten to destroy his stories, which panics him because even though everything he writes is gruesome and creepy, he considers his stories to be his whole life and his mark on the world to the point where he is willing to die to keep them safe. He ends up killing Michal himself partly out of the horror of what Michal has done and partly to shield him from any further suffering before or during his execution and confessing to the murders (even though he didn't commit them) as part of a deal with the police to keep his stories safe (they promise not to destroy them if he tells them the truth, and since he knows they'll believe he committed the murders, and doesn't want them to find out that Michal did, he decides this is his best option). Plus his Backstory where his parents tortured Michal and made him listen with the intent of making him into a great, dark author, and whom he eventually killed at the age of 14 in order to save his brother, which then saddled him, a 14-year-old, with the task of taking care of a torture-induced mentally disabled child. He gets a small break when one of the most gruesomely murdered children turns out to be alive and completely fine, and things seem to be getting even better once the police realize Katurian didn't murder the children after all. However, this means he did lie to them, breaking his part of the deal about the stories, and the police tell him they intend to now destroy them all. Then they execute him, and although we have a slightly uplifting ending in the fact that the police choose not to destroy the stories, it's not as if Katurian got to know that before he died.
  • In Sophocles' Antigone, after a bloody battle for Thebes and the mutual slaying of the two heirs to the throne, Creon, the self-proclaimed new king condemns his niece to be buried alive for having buried one of the two aforementioned heirs who had fought against Thebes. When the oracle Tiresias comes to warn him that this blasphemous travesty will bring Creon much anguish, Creon relents and goes to free her, only to find the tomb already open and his son Haemon, who was betrothed to Antigone, mourning over her dead body, with her having hung herself. Haemon kills himself, and then Eurydice, Creon's wife, kills herself in response.
  • Diane in "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You" hangs a lampshade on this trope, explaining she suffered so much, so quickly, it sounds like she's making it up, "but bad things sometimes happen all at once."

    Video Games 
  • Lucas, the main protagonist of Mother 3 pretty much embodies this trope, as it feels like his world was made specifically to torture him at certain points. If you list out all of the terrible things to happen to him in his short life, you pretty much have a summary of the main plot. To start with, his mother gets violently killed right in front of his eyes by what's essentially a dinosaur. As a result, his father almost goes mad from the resulting grief, attacking people from the village and getting chucked into prison before he can even attend her funeral, also all in front of Lucas and his twin, Claus. Shortly afterwards, Claus goes out to try and avenge his mother's death and goes missing in the process. All in the span of two days. Please note that this is the first time anybody in the society he lives in has experienced grief, so nobody knows how to console or comfort him. Not done yet, though. That very same day, a suspicious guy comes into Tazmily Village, telling everybody a load of waffle about "happiness" and starts peddling objects called "Happy Boxes" to everyone. These boxes essentially hypnotize the entire village, except for Lucas, who refuses to buy one. As a result, everybody in this previously close-knit and loving community slowly begins turning into selfish, hedonistic jerks. Years later, Lucas is now considered an outcast, even a disgrace, to the village. His father, still grieving over his wife, barely talks with him anymore and spends nearly all of his time searching for Claus, who is still missing. Around this time, his adventure starts. And while he does finally make two very good friends and has his trusty dog Boney by his side as a result, his situation hardly improves. On top of having to constantly battle against horrifying, bloodthirsty creatures known as Chimeras, he now has an entire army set against him, the same army who was indirectly responsible for his mother's death in the first place. After disabling the army's thunder tower, he finds himself in a field of sunflowers where, out of nowhere, he sees his mother's ghost. He can't touch or communicate with her and ends up chasing her off a cliff in desperation. It's not very clear if this is a dream or actually happening. But wait, there's more. Around this time, he and his friends find out about these weird objects known as the seven needles, which will restore the entire world either full of evil or full of good depending on who pulls them. The journey to getting the seven needles leads him through countless traumatic situations, from being nearly eaten alive by a horrifying monster called the Ultimate Chimera, to accidentally sending himself on a very, very bad hallucinogenic drug trip that makes him face his worst fears and deep scarring, but he ultimately only manages to pull half of them. The other half are getting pulled by the commander of the army, known as the Masked Man. Once he and the Masked Man have both pulled three, Tazmily is now completely abandoned, so he has no choice but to finally go to the hub of all the corruption in his world, New Pork City. Once there, he has to live with the long-hidden truth about Tazmily: It was all a lie. The game actually takes place After the End, and Tazmily was set up so the last few dozen people left on Earth could live in ignorance of the world's destruction. After this, the final needle is located, and he and his friends go to pull it, as it is now the world's only hope for redemption. After defeating the Big Bad, he and the Masked Man meet in front of the final needle, ready to battle for it. As it turns out, the Masked Man is actually Claus, brainwashed and with no memory of being Lucas's brother. What follows is an absolutely heartbreaking "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight, during which Claus easily has the upper hand, and with him still showing no sign of remembering, his mother's ghost shows up for a second time. With her help, Claus very slowly realizes who he is and takes his mask off. He then kills himself, allowing Lucas to take the needle, and dies in Lucas's arms. And this all happens to him in the age range of 9 to 12. There's a very good reason many people consider the ending of the game to be Lucas destroying the entire world out of the wangst he probably accrued throughout the game, and those that don't consider him one of the strongest Iron Woobies in any form of fiction.
  • Technically, he brought it all on himself, but to the player of Planescape: Torment it sure seems like the entire world is against him. First of all, you're cursed with immortality as well as amnesia. Your only guide is a floating skull who is a compulsive liar. Meanwhile, strewn about you are the people whom you've hurt and pissed off in past lives, and they just love to get their revenge by screwing with you and manipulating you for their own gain. Half your companions only join you because a past version of you enslaved them. You are haunted by the ghost of a woman who claims to love you but is too confused and heartbroken to give you any useful information (also, it turns out you murdered her, and she still loves you anyway). Worst of all, you come to realize over the course of the game that you are a real asshole, and you absolutely deserve everything you've got, which would make this more legitimate angst than Deus Angst Machina, except for the fact that you can't remember doing any of it.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • Fortune's father was sunk in the game's prologue, causing her mother to kill herself, her husband died in prison, and the grief caused her to miscarry. As Snake explains, in the six months following her father's death, she lost her family and everything that mattered in her life. When she tries to commit suicide, she discovers that she's gained a flukish ability to escape death or injury, allowing her to wield experimental weapons and fight battles that would otherwise be impossible.
    • Otacon turned out to have had deep layers of sexual trauma all this time that were never mentioned at all before the point he revealed them. Also the only person in the whole wide world that he loves platonically (or not) who hasn't died horribly yet is Solid Snake, and he's a self-destructive killer who happens to be aging prematurely into the bargain. Then in MGS4, it's revealed that Solid Snake is carrying a mutated FoxDie that carries a high chance of turning him into a living bioweapon within six months, which means that Snake needs to commit suicide, be executed, or be permanently quarantined before that happens.
  • Xenosaga: Shion's life in detail: Shion was a pretty sweet little girl, who loved her parents and flowers. Then the plot happens—her mother Aoi comes down with a strange illness that leaves her a vegetable, causing Shion's father to distance himself away from Shion and putting his comatose wife in a treatment institution, and Shion's brother Jin spent nearly all of his time in the military. Second Milita gets caught up in a battle over the Zohar, and someone lets loose an army of crazed, cannibalistic Realians, a few of them killing and devouring Shion's nanny Febronia while Shion watches. The guy who saves her stays behind to fight them off, instructing her to escape into the city where her mother is, only to get cornered in her mother's room and forced to watch as both her father and mother are brutally murdered by another brigade of berserker Realians. Made even more twisted in III by the fact that Shion is The Chosen One... of chaos, which means she has the power to summon uncontrollable, colony-wiping space monsters with her psychic angst. Wilhelm intentionally cultivated her misery and anxiety (over multiple alternate timelines) so she would accidentally summon the Gnosis and eventually the Ark.
  • Every single one of the Beauty And The Beast unit in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Laughing Octopus watched her entire village's population killed by octopus-eater-hating cult members while she was a child. That is, they killed all but her own family and friends, whom she had to torture and kill herself. Raging Raven grew up in a war-torn country, and was captured as a child by soldiers, who beat her and the other kids regularly. Eventually, she and the other children were left by the soldiers, and the rest of the children were eaten by birds. Crying Wolf also had her village slaughtered, but escaped along with her baby brother. Whom she smothered to death in order to escape notice from soldiers. And then carried the rotting corpse around to a refugee camp, where she went mad from the crying of children and killed all the children there. Screaming Mantis also watched her village burn to the ground. When escaping, she wound up hiding in a corpse pit beneath a torture chamber and was locked in there, while villagers were tortured above. She stayed there for weeks, surviving by drinking bloody water and eating off of the corpses. All four were taken in by Liquid Ocelot, who turned them into war machine pilots/sex models. He also implanted Psycho Mantis into Screaming Mantis' psyche to act as the unit's leader, which screwed with their minds even further.
  • Kratos from the God of War series finds his own, murdering his wife and daughter in a blind rage, then having their ashes permanently fixed to his body. When asking the gods to make him forget his crimes, he is forced to live through it again at the hands of Ares. When he has killed Ares, and the gods tell him they lied to him to get him to do their dirty work for them, he tries to kill himself - and is instead given immortality, an eternity with his memories. No wonder he made a beast of himself to get rid of the pains of being a man (lot deeper than you thought, eh?)
  • Oersted, one of the heroes from the SNES game Live A Live. As his chapter starts, he wins the tournament which names him the greatest hero in the land, as well as the hand of the beautiful princess in marriage. As the two make wedding plans, a monstrous demon sent by the Lord of Dark appears and kidnaps the princess. No matter, this happens in video games all the time. Oersted and his best friend Streibough the magician, as well as two older heroes who defeated the Lord of Dark years earlier, set off on a quest to get her back. And then... The group is barely able to reach the Lord of Dark's palace before one of the heroes is killed. And then the palace collapses, and they are forced to leave Streibough behind. And then, when Oersted returns to the palace, he finds the Lord of Dark there and slays him... oops, that was actually an illusion, and his would-be father-in-law is now dead by his hand. Oersted is arrested for murdering the King, and the other elder hero is tortured to death as an accessory, barely able to summon enough strength to help Oersted escape. Oersted flees the kingdom, every citizen in it who once cheered him now calling him a traitor and murderer, and makes a heroic solo effort to take the Lord of Dark down. When he finally reaches the villain... it turns out it was his old friend Streibough all along. Oersted is forced to kill his best friend, and the princess appears. A bittersweet ending? Nope. The princess tells Oersted that she believed Oersted would save her, but it was Streibough who saved hernote , declares that she loves Streibough, not him, and commits suicide as a final act of spite. Poor Oersted. Is it any surprise to find that Odio, the Lord of Dark that the other heroes battled was Oersted himself, embracing the darkness?
  • Ace Attorney: Acro (aka Ken Dingling)'s suffering in a list. First, his parents abandoned him and his brother, forcing them to join the circus (lessened by the fact that the ringmaster is the nicest guy you'll meet. Acro dedicates himself to repaying his kindness). Some time later, the ringmaster's daughter Regina gave Bat a scarf covered in pepper, to get him back for all the times he teased her with it. He then proceeded to go "If I can put my head in the lion's mouth you have to take me to the movies!" The lion sneezed with his head inside, putting him in a coma. Acro tried to save him, but that just put him in a wheelchair. Shame she's so innocent and naive that she believes Bat is just a star in the sky, making Acro think she's making fun of the whole thing. He plans on murdering her, but after a series of events, he ends up accidentally murdering the ringmaster, the man that has been his father figure all these years.
  • Dragon Age II - Arguably an example the main character (and again, arguably his/her entire party to an extent) suffers this in that over a ten-year span you lose your father, your home, 'one' of your siblings is killed brutally on screen, you're forced into a year of servitude, your other sibling can die or otherwise be forced, or by their own choice, into ditching you, your mother dies after finally getting back her childhood home and in a particularly heartwrenching fashion too and finally at the end of it all a party member and possible love interest sets off a series of events where you are forced to make a gristly decision involving either massacring a series of mostly innocent mages and supporting the Knight Templar or becoming an outlaw and possibly losing friends because they just weren't quite loyal enough. Damnit, Hawke just cannot catch a bloody break...or maybe that's the issue, he can.
    • One companion, Fenris, practically embodies this. An elven slave in the evil Tevinter Imperium, he was forced to endure having lyrium tattooed into his skin in a ritual that stripped him of all his memories. The tattoos cause him great pain at all times, and he can't bear to be touched because of them. His masters were extremely physically (and, it's hinted, sexually) abusive, and continue to hunt for him to kill him and retrieve the valuable quantity of lyrium in his skin. Then, he learns he had a sister who is still alive. After spending three years trying to contact her, and bringing her by ship all the way to Kirkwall, she betrays him by bringing his former master along with her to sell him out in exchange for a higher status in the Imperium. If you stop him from killing her on the spot, she tells him that he wanted the tattoos, and competed for them, before leaving (presumably forever). And of course, if he doesn't have enough of Hawke's loyalty, he'll side with the Templars, who ironically treat him like a captain before he and his underleveled squad are systematically pulverized to death by your party. The universe just does not want this guy to be happy, and only the guiding hand of character development gives him the fanbase he has.
  • Cloud Strife of Final Fantasy VII is the victim of a truly epic Trauma Conga Line. He failed to become a SOLDIER, instead of ending up as a grunt. His great hero Sephiroth flipped out, went on a killing spree in his hometown, causing a fire that roasted his mother alive while he watched. He received grievous wounds from Sephiroth and was then experimented on by Hojo for years, who infused him with JENOVA cells and gave him Mako poisoning. His best friend Zack then died defending Cloud, and the end result of all this human experimentation and PTSD caused his mind to shatter and subconsciously rewrite his memories. And that's all before the first game even begins.
  • Jack in Mass Effect 2. She is abducted by a terrorist organization at age four, with her parents believing her dead. The said organization, Cerberus, tortures and drugs her for most of her childhood, For Science!, in a bid to create a super-biotic. In the Cerberus facility, she's forced to fight and kill other children in arena fights, being electroshocked when she refuses to, which is about the only interaction she has with other people, as she is else locked up and isolated in her room all the time. After escaping, she immediately ends up with people who abuse her for her powers and her body, only to then sell her as a slave. This starts Jack's long career of criminal activity and violence, where most people only see her as a tool to be used, while Cerberus' agents still hunt her. The only person in all the time who does care for her and loves her ends up sacrificing himself for her so she can get away after a weapons theft goes bad, giving her a massive dose of survivor's guilt as well. She eventually ends up on 'Purgatory', a prison ship from hell doubling as a slave market, where she is gang-raped by a group of wardens and prisoners, and upon taking her revenge is put into constant cryostasis, as she is deemed too dangerous. She joins the game because she is bought free by Commander Shepard's financial backers — which is Cerberus. So she ends up on a Cerberus ship, with the ship's XO flat-out rejecting that the organisation made any mistakes. Said ship is heading towards a suicide mission. Luckily for her, if she survives said mission, this also signals things getting better for her as Shepard shows her she need not subside on anger and bitterness alone. In Mass Effect 3 her life has gotten somewhat better. Except for omnicidal AI killing machines invading the galaxy, but that's a fate everybody suffers then.
  • Parodied in Fallout 2 with a minor NPC (Dave in Vault 13) whose life story is a long sequence of bad things happening to him or his family members each year of his life. The player ends up having no other option than to leave the conversation in disgust. The guy is also found in a location where everyone ends up being killed and the player can't prevent it due to a bug (unless you use a fanmade patch).
  • Rean Schwarzer from The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has so many problems piled up on him that some wonder if he drew the short end. In short order, as a kid he was abandoned at a snowy field and not remembering anything before that, he inadvertently made his adopted noble family outcasts from the other nobles, and he somehow has powers that he has no control whatsoever and starts being afraid of it as it could potentially harm his loved ones. Then at the end of the first game, he finds out that his friend and classmate is the Big Bad Friend who starts the Civil War by assassinating the chancellor, is soundly defeated by him thanks to the latter's 3-year experience piloting a Humongous Mecha compared to Rean's one-day experience and is forced to abandon his classmates to uncertain doom. Then in the second game, after waking up a month after the first game and dealing with a magic knight, he finds out that jaegers started wrecking his hometown, his dad is in a coma from defending his territory, he watches as Altina kidnaps both his sister and the crown princess right before his eyes. While he gets a Hope Spot by reuniting with his classmates, he is forced to separate from them again thanks to the Big Bad Wannabe invading his hometown. While hostage, he finds out why the Big Bad Friend of the first game killed the chancellor near the climax of the first game. Later on after he's free, he fails to save one of the terrorists from the first game to become The Atoner, he fails to bring back the Big Bad Friend to make him atone for his crimes because the latter had to perform a Heroic Sacrifice for Rean to save the crown prince, and finds out that said chancellor is actually alive and well and that the chancellor wins the Civil War. Then said chancellor "points a gun" at a neighboring city-state and makes Rean participate in his war to make sure that the city-state belongs to the Erebonian empire while making sure the enemy nation, Calvard, can't get it. Along the way, said chancellor reveals that he is Rean's biological dad. By the end of the second game, it's clear he's become so tired that he's just going through the motions. And then there's Cold Steel III where he decides to become a teacher, only to have two of his students not exactly his big fans; one of them comes from said city-state that Rean helped take over and the other is from a noble family whose dream job was to protect the royal family, only for the chancellor to remove his family from protecting the royal family. While he finally reconciles with the two above, his life goes From Bad to Worse in the final chapter of the third game where he finds out that he finally finds out his Dark and Troubled Past in full detail on the night of his sister and the royal princess' debut in society, one of his students shoots the emperor and is in critical condition thanks to a curse and is used as The Scapegoat, witnesses the Courageous exploding in the sky with his allies still on-board, nearly sees his student die in front of him to protect him from a divine beast who was chewing him up, seeing his friend die in front of him to protect him and her soul is then used to forge a sword capable of defeating the beast. He then loses control of his powers and starts hacking at the Final Boss in rage and kills it, only to unintentionally plunge his country in complete darkness and make the citizens lose control of their emotions and replace it with anger, who then directs it towards a neighboring country because the Evil Chancellor tells the public that Calvard is to blame for the attempted assassination of the emperor. Yeah, Rean just can't catch a break in his game.

    Visual Novels 
  • To put it lightly, Tsugumi of Ever17 has lived a really crappy life. She lives the first 12 years of her life quite normally until her friend dies of leukemia, then on the same day, she's hit by a truck. She wakes up in a test facility of a pharmaceutical corporation, where she learns she has caught a virus that will render her immortal after 5 years. She is then experimented on for eight years straight, lied to by the staff, and her only friend in the facility dies five years in. Then she escapes from said facility and lives as a fugitive for four years. Then she gets trapped in an underwater theme park, and just when it seems like her life is turning around after she's met a guy that she loves, he sacrifices himself so that she survives to escape the park. Then she goes on the run as a fugitive again from the corporation and discovers she's pregnant with the guy's kids. After giving birth to them and living a hard but happy eighteen months with them, she's found again by the company and is forced to give up her children to an orphanage to hide them from the group so they may live normal lives. She goes on the run for 16 more years, and in this time, her son and daughter are found by the corporation anyway and are experimented on for ten years. At least it all works out well for her in the end.
  • Hitori Uzune from Hatoful Boyfriend, a character so dramatically depressing that his name literally means "alone". He grew up in an orphanage during a war and started working as a young teen to keep up with the cost of food and medicine for his sickly brother, Nageki. One day he came home from work to find out that terrorists had taken the orphanage hostage, and murdered every single child there, except for his brother. They both had to leave since the house was too expensive and depressing for just the two of them. His brother got sicker and sicker, and he worked as hard as he could to afford all of the hospital bills, but no doctors were able to help. Eventually they found someone who said that he could - but it turns out he was lying, and actually used Nageki in sadistic experiments attempting to kill all of humanity. When Hitori figured out that things were so messed up, he ran to try to save his brother - but happened to show up on the exact day that Nageki decided to kill himself. He had to listen to his brother burn to death, knowing that he was the one who insisted that he come here for help. No wonder the guy went insane.

    Web Comics 
  • Speaking of furry comics, the side comic Abel's Story from Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures. If Abel cares about a character, they're screwed, and it's not even a plot point. After an old friend's funeral, two of Abel's newfound friends are slaughtered by a group that includes his old kindergarten teacher, his dad suffers a "heart attack" before turning back into his true form, an evil incubus, and then proceeds to severally beat Abel's mother, kill his best friend via slicing her into pieces, and spirits him off to the cubi academy, all within a few hours. This results in a long-lasting BSOD.
  • Jay Naylor's Better Days seems to have been written to be one long string of these, functioning under the two classic errors that "bad things happening" is the same thing as "Character Development," and that "bad things happening" is always good writing. For actually good writing (or rather, terrible writing, but done intentionally in a hilariously ingenious way), try "Nay Jaylor's" edits of Better Days strips. "Hey, guys look how far I can suck in my face." * FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF*
  • In Roomies! and It's Walky!, David Wallis' habit of dropping the Drama Bomb meant that his characters often had to suffer through copious amounts of extremely unpleasant and traumatic things happening to them all at once (when they weren't angsting about things that had happened long ago, that is). His subsequent strip, Shortpacked!, is relatively free of this in comparison.
  • The Order of the Stick: One arc can arguably be summed up as Vaarsuvius' Bad Day. Nearly every single twist in the plot, the timing, and the contrived coincidences seem as if they were engineered with the explicit, deliberate purpose of breaking Vaarsuvius in mind and spirit. Or, to put it a bit more optimistically, with the purpose of bursting V's bubble and inducing crucial character growth. Although considering this was mostly caused by them making a bargain with the manipulative forces of hell it's entirely possible it was engineered to break them.
  • Similarly to the Better Days example above, this was one of the major failings of The Broken Mirror, together with no real character development from this "character development".
  • Parodied in Trigger Star with the protagonist, Avocado, who initially sets out to avenge his torched stack of porn magazines.
  • The Ciem Webcomic Series began as one very long string of this, with the goal being a Break the Cutie moment to force the protagonist from being a humble teenage girl to being a superpowered spy/vigilante - one who's not above tricking her enemies into killing themselves.
  • John of The Word Weary often uses his angst as an excuse not to move forward with his life or pursue women- unless he's drunk. Poor Trotmann on the other hand is a straighter version of the trope.

    Web Original 
  • Subplott's backstory in Life in a Game: He finds out he's a prince, but then an evil wizard brainwashes his father, the king, killed his uncle, kidnapped his sister, Zelda, and banished him, then, to top it off, erased Subplott's Pokédex.
  • This trope (along with All of the Other Reindeer) is both parodied and discussed in the following tweet from the Twitter blog Worst Muse:
  • Plenty of main characters in the Whateley Universe have horrific backstories, but the ongoing Merry stories never seem to stop piling it on. When Merry isn't being captured and tortured by government agencies, she's getting multiple personality disorder, only one of the personalities is the evil AI she defeated, which has found a home for itself. In her head. She's been injured, killed, gone to Hell repeatedly, you name it.
  • The Grayson family in We Are Our Avatars couldn't catch a break. Their parent, Carter/Catherine suffered too many losses and few victories, the kids turned negative, the grandson was a Jerkass Demigod, and nearly everyone died so many times and were revived repeatedly. To say that their lives sucked hard would be an understatement. Eventually, they got better.
    • "Raven", Hydronix's character, also suffered from this, but not to the extent of the Grayson family.

    Western Animation 
  • Spoofed on Futurama, in an episode of the Show Within a Show "All My Circuits":
    Calculon: Give it to me straight, doctor. Don't sugarcoat it.
    Doctor: Very well. Your entire family died when a plane, piloted by your fiancee, crashed into your uninsured home... and you have inoperable cancer.
    • Zoidberg himself, a walking, talking, lobsteresuque version of this trope- which is the writers' intent. In one episode, for instance, his lovable pet slinky, is, how you say, de-slinked by Bender (along with several other objects in the house, and Professor Farnsworth) into a long, thin metal noodle. Zoidberg attempts to remake its coils, tentatively sends it down an ascending pile of books- then the toy promptly bursts into flames.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Frank Grimes from "Homer's Enemy" hated his life and his whole set of circumstances. Everything he tried to accomplish backfired on him, he lost out on the position at the nuclear plant he was originally selected for to a dog, he lived in an apartment sandwiched between two bowling alleys, and his arch-nemesis, Homer Simpson, seemed to have a better life than him (at one point, Grimes gets demoted after throwing away acid that Homer was about to drink and Homer gets off scot-free). Frank's hell is thought of as Heaven by Homer, but the final attempt to shame Homer for life (by having him enter a children's model-building contest) imploded spectacularly when Homer won, and thus, he went crazy. And electrocuted himself. And as a final little insult, Homer fell asleep during his funeral and loudly ruined it by yelling "Change the channel, Marge!" in his sleep, to the amusement of everyone else attending. The producers later attempted to rebut criticism that they went a bit over the top torturing Grimes by claiming that it demonstrated that a 'real' person couldn't survive in the Simpsons universe, but even this explanation is a little unsatisfying considering the sheer amount of misfortunes piled on top of Grimey is way over the top.
    • Then there's Kirk Van Houten's divorce from "A Milhouse Divided", where his wife is shown as inherently right despite the divorce obviously coming from mutual resentment and disrespect, he's fired from his job for being single, and apparently got nothing out of the divorce settlement so he ends up straight in low-income housing, and it's one of the few times the show defies Status Quo Is God by keeping it this way. All of this just to deliver a Broken Aesop to Homer about respecting his wife that he'll forget by the next episode.
    • Hans Moleman is interesting in that he is a literal example—he originated as an animation mistake that creator Matt Groening hated, but the rest of the staff loved. His Running Gag of being repeatedly killed was, according to DVD commentary, a teasing attempt to placate Groening's demands that the character never be seen again.
    • And then there's old Gil.
    • While he offered Homer some good advice on how to handle his situation in the aforementioned "Homer's Enemy" episode (Except for "the ol' fork-in-the-eye" bit), Moe Syzlak is himself a victim of Deus Angst Machina. Every success Moe has had in life has been taken away from him somehow (getting a girlfriend, landing an acting career, etc.). In "The Seemingly Never-Ending Story" he said that fate likes to play a game called "Up yours, Moe". It's easy to see why later seasons portray him as suicidal. And yes, he fails at suicide too.
  • Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender spends his childhood being mentally tortured by his sadistic sister, gets a fireball thrown into his face by his own father, is banished for speaking up in a war meeting and suggesting a tactic that could save the lives of more of his country's soldiers, and is constantly humiliated in his attempts to capture Aang to regain his family's respect. Eventually he's even declared a fugitive for his continued failure and has to live off the land for the first time in his life. His Day in the Limelight episode features him befriending a family of farmers and taking care of the corrupt soldiers harassing them, only for them to reject him afterwards because he revealed his identity in the process. Is it any wonder he takes to screaming at the sky, demanding to be hit by lightning? And it fails to happen? Fortunately, things got better for him when he joined Team Avatar (it still took a few life-changing field trips, though).
  • In an alternate time stream, the titular character of Danny Phantom grows up to be evil, and we mean EVIL. Why did he turn evil? When under pressure for the CAT test, Danny ends up deciding to cheat with the accidentally acquired answers. Harmless enough, but via a Stable Time Loop and his parents and teacher's concern (and his evil future self's intervention) he witnesses the explosive death of his family, friends, and teacher. Broken, he goes to live with his Arch-Enemy, Vlad Masters. Then, unable to bear his tortured emotions, he has his humanity torn away from his ghost half, which goes mad with pain, merges with Vlad's ghost half and murders his human half. Through the combination of Danny's evolving powers and Vlad's total evilness, he ends up destroying the world. Even disregarding what it must have felt like for Danny to be torn into his two alter egos, then turn evil/helplessly watch as his heroic side turns evil, when the time-traveling Danny sees all this... it kinda falls right in this trope.
  • Voltron: Legendary Defender:
    • In the first scene in the series, Shiro, along with Sam and Matt Holt, is abducted off of Kerberos, one of Pluto's moons. In the Time Skip between this and the scene a year later, he has been enslaved, separated from his companions, experimented on, and forced to become a gladiator for the amusement of The Empire. The entire ordeal cost him his right arm and severely traumatized him.
    • After waking up from a 10,000-year cryogenic sleep, one of the first things Allura finds out is that her entire planet was destroyed along with her entire species, including her parents. Not to mention she is never given time to mourn them properly. So...yeah...
    • And then there's Keith, who grew up (falsely) believing his mother had willingly abandoned him as an infant, lost his father at a young age, and spent much of his childhood alone and unloved. When he finally made one friend, he later received word that he had died on a space mission (see first example for what really happened). And then he got expelled from Space Cadet Academy and lived alone in the desert for a year. As a result, he is depressed at the start of the series.

    Other 
  • Parodied in an Urban Legend: "Your Dog is Dead" - I've got some bad news: your dog died... from eating charred horse flesh... they died in the fire... started by the candles from the funeral... for your mother who had a heart attack... after she found your kid who drowned in the tub... because your wife slipped on the stairs and broke her neck.... [and on and on].
    • It appears in a comedy sketch, with the punchline being that the mother died from a broken heart because she found out the guy's wife was cheating on him with the groundskeeper... The guy interrupts: "Wait a minute, you're my groundskeeper!" Cue guy chasing storyteller off-stage.
  • The game Kill Murray/Save Murray features two gods, one benevolent, who wants to keep plucky everyman Murray alive, and one evil, who moves the game forward by throwing anything and everything he can think of to utterly annihilate him.
  • This chain e-mail.


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