I Should Have Been Better

EMT: Hey, Peter, good job saving that girl today.
Peter: Her mother died. I should have gotten there sooner.
EMT: Should have...? Peter, you got there faster than is humanly possible.
Peter: I should have been faster.

— Heroes

It's an old standby: the hero has done their absolute best, saved everyone he possibly could...but not everyone. Someone died, nearly always in a way completely outside the hero's control. They went above and beyond the call of duty, but it wasn't enough.

Can lead to Training from Hell, Heroic BSoD, and, in rare cases, Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. See also Chronic Hero Syndrome and Samaritan Syndrome. Friends will often respond with, "You Did Everything You Could."

Related to Guilt Complex or My Greatest Failure.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist invokes this trope at the end of the series. After looking back on everything, it is revealed that he still feels guilt about Nina and Hughes's deaths.
• In the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Reflection manga, it's shown that Nanoha regrets the fact that she was unable to save Precia and Reinforce, which is part of the reason why she constantly subjects herself to Training from Hell. Given the fact that Reflection is set just six months before her fateful encounter with the Type IV Gadget Drone in canon, it's clearly meant to be a sign that her mindset is unhealthy.
• Negi Springfield of Negima! Magister Negi Magi gets like this should one of his students suffer so much as a scratch. His response is Training from Hell. Of course, his response to everything is Training from Hell (or kissing).

Comic Books

• Batman: It's Batman's shtick; he wasn't able to save his family as a child, leading him to become the criminal-pulping badass he is today. All in the name of trying to make sure no eight-year-old boy ever has his parents taken away by a punk with a gun, ever again. It's highly unlikely that he'll succeed, but we still love the journey.
• The Sentry: This is part of the Sentry's mental problems. He has the power of a million exploding suns, but whom does he choose to save and whom to let die?
• Spider-Man: This is one of the key elements of the series. Our friendly neighborhood superhero never congratulates himself on the fact that he saves 99% of the people who fall into danger, but he always blames himself for that 1% he couldn't save.
• Superman: Despite his vast powers, he is not a god. He is still someone with his own life yet is burdened by the fact that he cannot always be there for people that need him and having his supersenses means he knows when so many people are in trouble.
  • As listed in film, a very poignant and Tearjerking example was the inability to save Pa Kent.

Comic Strips

• In one short series of Peanuts strips, Snoopy attempts to write a book which he titles Things I've Learned After It Was Too Late.

Fan Works

• In Fractured (SovereignGFC), a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel, Origins, Samantha Shepard experiences this trope full-force. She blames herself for her own Heroic BSoD in Fractured, and then insists (against all reason) that she is also somehow responsible for the Flood's taking over the galaxy.
• Kyoshi Rising: the title character constantly beats herself up over failing to defend her home from bandits, and like the Batman example above she sets out to make sure that no one else has to go through the same experience.
• The Night Unfurls:
  • Chapter 17 of the original deals with the aftermath of the Rad Arc, which, in stricter terms, is far from a victory. Therefore, it is to be expected that a number of characters express this sentiment. They express regret about the things they should have done for a better outcome, and, in response, some of the others would reassure them that they did well nonetheless. This trope is all over the place in this chapter.
  • After receiving thanks from the village leader of Idoun in Chapter 1, remastered version, Alicia regrets that she still failed to rescue two others from the now-destroyed orc band, stating that it was her fault for not doing enough.
• RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: Princess Luna starts off the Grand Galloping Gala with one of these, delivered to the town of Ponyville, for letting her Night Court get out of control.
• Second Chances: As Katsuki looks through Izuku's hero journal, his feelings of regret and guilt grow as he realizes he should've been there for Izuku when others bullied and harassed him, instead of labelling him "Deku".

Films — Animation

• Mr. Incredible feels like this near the end of The Incredibles for an atypical reason - he says that he's "not strong enough", which Helen assumes to mean this. Bob was referring to having watched their plane get shot down and fearing the worst just hours before.
  Bob: I can't lose you again! ...I can't. Not again. I'm not... strong enough.
  Helen: If we work together, you won't have to be.
• Downplayed in Turning Red. Mei's failure to get first place in a spelling bee when she was younger remains a sore spot for her and serves as one of her emotional triggers.

Films — Live-Action

• Played for laughs in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. During a spoof of Cliffhanger to open the film, Ace is attempting to rescue a raccoon trapped on a mountainside but loses his grip and the animal falls to its death. Cue Time Skip, and Ace is holed up in a monastery attempting to find inner peace over the failure.
• Happens to Indiana Jones at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Elsa Schneider sets off an earthquake by taking the holy grail past the temple’s seal. Indiana manages to grab her just before she falls in a crevasse and is about to pull her up to safety. But Elsa, consumed by greed, uses her free hand to reach for the grail below her. Indiana struggles to hold her because the leather glove on her hand is too slippery. He desperately tries to get through to her, but she’s too obsessed with the grail. The glove finally slips off and she falls to her death. Afterwards, he looks back at the collapsed temple with regret that he couldn’t save her. In the novelization, Indy wonders if he could have saved her by telling her what his father told him: "Let it go."
• At the end of Schindler's List, Oskar Schindler laments that he could have saved more Jews than he did if he'd thought to sell more of his possessions, in particular his Nazi party lapel pin (which is gold). Itzhak Stern tries to reassure Schindler by pointing out that he saved over a thousand Jewish lives. Stern's words do little to assuage Schindler's guilt, as he collapses to the ground in tears.
  Oskar Schindler: I could have gotten one more person. And I didn't. And I... I didn't!
• In Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker loses his powers for whatever reason but then decides to run into a burning building anyway to rescue a little girl. After fighting his way through the blaze and saving the girl, the firefighters praise Peter's heroics, then talk amongst themselves about someone else on one of the upper levels who wasn't so lucky. By the look on his face, it's clear that Peter doesn't feel very heroic about that. It's less of an "I should have saved him too as a de-powered normal person" and more a case of "I could have saved him if I still had spider powers."
• Star Wars: Anakin Skywalker feels this way in Attack of the Clones after failing to save his mother in time. His desperation to become so powerful that such a thing never happens again makes a monster out of him as he pledges himself to Darth Sidious, immerses himself in the Dark Side of the Force, and becomes The Dreaded Darth Vader.
• Rather poignantly stated in Superman: The Movie, about Clark's father, Jonathan Kent: "All these powers, and I couldn't even save him."

Literature

• The hero of the Cybernarc novels goes through this twice in the first book, once when his squad is ambushed by drug smugglers and again when the same smugglers attack his family. Both times he does everything he could have done, but still feels guilty that he didn't save everybody.
• In The Dresden Files, Harry goes through this from time to time, especially as it relates to Susan getting put on the road to vampirism by the Red Court, courtesy of Harry's dose of Chronic Hero Syndrome. The fact that he was usually lucky to have survived himself does little to help him cope.
• In Aftershock!, the sequel to Shatterbelt, Tracy expresses some guilt about not being smart enough to figure out that her psychic visions were pointing her to an earthquake. "I couldn't get the message, not until the very last minute when Sally showed me the sundial and the motto. And even then I got it wrong. I thought it would be an explosion, a bomb." Her mother Helen tries to remind her that her intervention saved hundreds of lives and that no one will forget that, but Tracy remains fixated on her failure to save Pamela's dog Kazan.
• Kaladin from The Stormlight Archive has this as basically his defining character trait. He starts off as a surgeon's apprentice who gets depressed every time a patient dies, then he becomes a soldier and gets depressed every time a squadmate dies, then he ends up a slave essentially acting as bait for the army and gets depressed when he can't save his fellow slaves. The fact that others are constantly telling him how lucky it is to have him around seems to only make it worse, as he focuses only on the people he failed rather than those he saved. Of course he ends up becoming part of an ancient order of magic knight whose powers are based on their oaths to protect others.
  • In the fourth book, Rhythm of War, he finally manages to break out of this mindset by swearing the Fourth Ideal of the Windrunners: "I accept that there will be those I cannot save".

Live-Action TV

• A sort of example that does involve wanting to be better, but not for heroic reasons: Angel and Spike, being the only two vampires with souls, have a deep rivalry when Spike makes the switch from the show Buffy to Angel in the fifth season. At one point, they fight over what they believe to be a cup of extreme suffering, destined to be drunk only by the true champion of the world. It turns out to just be a fake chalice filled with Mountain Dew. After Spike beats Angel, even after the drink is revealed to be a fake, Angel expresses this, feeling he should have wanted it enough to beat Spike.
  • In Buffy's "After Life," we learn that Spike has been feeling this way about Buffy's death and has some serious guilt over it.
    Spike: Uh, I do remember what I said. The promise... to protect her. If I'da done that... even if I didn't make it... you wouldn't have had to jump. But I want you to know I did save you. Not when it counted, of course, but, after that. Every night after that. I'd see it all again... I do something different. Faster or more clever, you know? Dozens of times, lots of different ways... Every night I save you.
• The title protagonist of Doctor Who has lamented many times about the people and even whole races he couldn't save, including the Nestene, the Time Lords, and even the Daleks and Davros, his greatest enemies. At least two occasions in the more recent series have seen him save the world/universe at the cost of losing a companion, leading him to decide he will be better by performing a Heroic Sacrifice for them.
• In Elementary, Sherlock actually encourages this mindset in his proteges; if they screw things up and apologise, he usually replies with "Don't be sorry, be better." In his view, being sorry leads to wallowing in guilt and self-recrimination which does nobody any good, and it's much more useful to make sure the mistake is not repeated in the future. He tries to hold himself to the same standards and doesn't object when the same proteges call him out if he goes into a Heroic BSoD after mistakes of his own.
• Emergency!: Paramedic Roy DeSoto takes it hard every time he and his partner lose a patient, but one case in particular gets this reaction. In Season 2 episode 1, "Decision a.k.a. Problem", Roy is out of contact with Rampart and is forced to make a decision on his own, which endangers the life of a patient. He gets chewed out for it by the patient's own regular doctor, and then the patient dies in the hospital. Roy is a Nice Guy who became a firefighter and then a paramedic out of a genuine desire to save lives and help people, and the thought that in this case he killed the patient is almost too much for him. He gets better after Brackett tells him that he (Brackett) would have done the same thing, and the patient would still have died from his injuries.
• In the Family Matters episode "I Should Have Done Something", Carl is depressed because it's the one-year anniversary of an incident where he responded to a hostage situation at a convenience store that led to an innocent man getting shot and killed, and he feels guilty because he believes that things might have gone differently had he done something to save the man.
  Harriette: Listen to me, Carl, that was a year ago. It was not your fault.
  Carl: I know that here. (points to his head) But the problem is...I'm not sure I know that here. (points to his heart)
• Game of Thrones: Jon laments that his mission to Hardhome was a failure because he did not save enough people. Sam consoles him by pointing to the people he did save.
• Peter Petrelli of Heroes, as the page quote indicates, falls into this a lot.
• This is one of the many issues of Taiga Hanaya in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. He failed to save a patient at Zero Day and has been always holding onto this failure from that day onwards. While it helped him Take a Level in Badass and generally keeps him going, it also makes him just a mess of self-loathing under the prickly exterior. This eventually leads to him being gravely injured in a fight against Graphite. He scolds himself for failing to beat him (again) and apologizes to Nico for not being able to take care of her any further.
• One episode of Seven Days involves Frank on a time-critical mission to save his boss from capture (and from taking a Suicide Pill to avoid interrogation). Along the way, Frank witnesses a shootout between gangsters, where an innocent civilian dies in the crossfire. Problem is, if he saves the civilian, he doesn't reach his boss in time. If he focuses on his primary mission, he sees the civilian die. Frank is eventually able to voluntarily invoke enough Groundhog Day Loops to save both.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Captain Picard reveals to his brother he feels this way about his experience at the hands of the Borg.
  Picard: They used me to kill and to destroy and I couldn't stop them! I should have been able to stop them! I tried. I tried so hard! But I wasn't strong enough! I wasn't good enough. I should've been able to stop them. I should, I should.
• In Supernatural, Sam, Dean, Bobby, and Castiel...hell, all the good guys (or semi-good) have this problem. They save a lot of people, but never the "ones they needed to" or "the ones they should have". Dean almost goes into Heroic BSoD after failing to save Sam from the trials without allowing an evil angel to possess him and heal him from the inside, and then kill Kevin Tran, who Dean felt was his responsibility.
• The X-Files: Fox Mulder expresses this sentiment in the first-season episode "Young at Heart": on his first field assignment for the FBI, he hesitated to shoot a criminal, who killed the hostage and an FBI agent. Although subsequent investigation proved that he did everything right, he could never forgive himself.

Video Games

• In a very meta way, speed runners often have this opinion of their successes. Sure, they just beat their personal record (or world record if they're really good), but after the dust is settled they can only think of every minor mistake they made on their run that added precious seconds to the clock. A much more lighthearted example of this trope, of course, because nobody would follow speed runners if they stopped trying for better times and they all enjoy what they do, even when they fail.
• Mass Effect:
  • A Paragon Shepard can fall into this, though it's hard to tell since (being player-controlled) (s)he usually succeeds at everything with ease. (S)he still has to make quite a few sacrifices that can verge into The Chains of Commanding and It's All My Fault territory.
  • In the third game, the fall of Thessia causes this.
    Liara: You couldn't possibly have been prepared for this.
    Shepard: It's my job to be prepared, no matter what.
• In the climax of The Park, Lorraine seemingly manages to escape Atlantic Island Park's influence just long enough to try and rescue Callum from the basement of the House of Horrors; then Nathaniel Winter appears and mind-controls Lorraine into murdering her son in cold blood. The Secret World reveals that Lorraine never recovered from the incident, and experienced this trope heavily: when you follow the trail of nightmares she's forced herself through, one of the fears she set out to confront manifests itself as a scenario in which she struggles to reach Callum while hobbled and in agony, always arriving too late. According to her dream diary, this is the incarnation of the fear of not being good enough.

Webcomics

• Digger, after killing He-Is, berates herself for being unable to prevent Ed's death.
• Grace in El Goonish Shive, when she learns she was created as a weapon, immediately has the reaction that she should have fought against Damian, and blames herself for not doing so. Even though she was only intended to be a weapon, but one of the scientists involved decided to make her into something else.
• In Love and Capes, the fact that you can't save everyone is frequently noted to be something that weighs on every true superhero's mind.
• MegaTokyo: Yuki has a variant of this in the unMod Bonus Material after she saves the girls and the police officers, but not the traffickers. It's not clear whether she could have saved everyone, and chose not to, or she couldn't save everyone and prioritized the victims. Either way, her innocence has been tarnished.
• Vaarsuvius in The Order of the Stick went into a deep Heroic BSoD after their magic was depleted in the Battle Of Azure City, rendering V incapable of saving hundreds of Azurites. Best seen in this quote:
  Durkon: V, no one blames ye for runnin' when ye ran out o' spells.
  Vaarsuvius: Of course not. Fleeing at that point was the only sound tactical decision. I am saying that I am to blame for my magic not being powerful enough to avoid that situation in the first place. I could have saved the lives of countless soldiers with only a slightly greater application of arcane force, but I did not possess the requisite capacity.
• In Our Little Adventure, speculated as the motive for Julie's anguish over Pauline's death.

Web Original

• In Worm, Eidolon is the single most powerful superhero on the planet. Capable of selecting and using any three powers at once, he is essentially the entire reason why humanity is still alive in the face of the Endbringers. However, in spite of all his power, he has never been able to kill any of the Endbringers, and humanity is slowly being ground down. To make things worse, his powers are slowly fading. It gets to the point where he hits himself with this after every major fight.

Western Animation

• Aang of Avatar: The Last Airbender feels this heavily at the beginning of Season 3, after the fall of Ba Sing Se. Somewhat justified, in that his initial Refusal of the Call meant he wasn't around to stop the war 100 years ago when it began (and he wasn't there when his people, the Air Nomads, were wiped out in a genocidal first strike by the Fire Nation, though since he was only 12, there wasn't much he could've done). This time, he was there at Ba Sing Se and still couldn't save the city from being conquered.
• Leonardo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) feels this way for a long time after the turtles challenged Shredder while he was trying to leave Earth. They ended up soundly defeated by Shredder and resorted in the end to try to overload the power core of the spaceship. Something that they were all saved from thanks to the Utroms stepping in at the last moment. Afterward, Leo's frustration and anger over that hopeless situation lead to him accidentally injuring Splinter during training, thus he was sent off to train under The Ancient One, who manages to convince him that he shouldn't be so hard on himself for doing his best.
  Leonardo: I did the best I could! There was nothing more I could have done!
  Ancient One: If you did everything you could, then why do you punish yourself so?
• While it's usually never spoken of aloud, many versions of Optimus Prime of the Transformers multiverse appear to take their failures very seriously.
  • In Transformers: Prime, Ratchet tells Raf how Bumblebee lost his voice: He was tortured by Megatron for refusing to speak during an interrogation and was promptly left for dead. A field medic was able to save his life but not his voice. While Raf praises the field medic for saving Bumblebee's life, Ratchet believes that he "could have done better." The flashback clearly shows Ratchet was that field medic.
• Young Justice: In Season 4 Beast Boy goes through a serious episode of depression following Connor's death on Mars. When he's forced into attending a therapy session with Black Canary she uncovers that this is all an accumulation of the many people he's lost over the years, and he has solely blamed himself for their deaths, but she gets him to realize that even with powers, he's only one individual and sometimes there are things you can't circumvent.

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