- Medoute of Blaze Union is usually a nice enough person... until she gets into pushy mentor mode. She believes very firmly that there is only one Right Way to handle life—and that is to be detached and to deal with things rationally, stifling any emotional or knee-jerk reactions in order to be objective. This stems from her own coping mechanism of avoidance. Sometimes her input is helpful to the other characters, but other times it's markedly less so. Oh, so your subconscious is trying to block out the fact that your best friend since toddlerhood needs a Mercy Kill, since you might not be able to handle the idea just yet? Stop crying and man up to the truth! What are you, a baby?! In the A route, where Medoute's own objectivity is compromised by Fantastic Racism, this devolves into puppy soccer against Gulcasa—who is grieving, sick, and can only lean on someone who's taking advantage of his inability to think straight. Medoute, unwilling to empathize with or condone his emotional distress, chooses to interpret his behavioral changes as Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and tries to kill him. Poor Communication Kills applies heavily.
- Claptrap from the Borderlands games is a Butt-Monkey, being used as target practice by bandits, a torture doll by one of their leaders, having his entire product line exterminated by Handsome Jack making him the Last of His Kind, being abandoned in a frozen wasteland, and having nobody but the Vault Hunter show up for his birthday party. Despite all he's been through, he is universally treated like an annoying (his voice is programmed to sound that way — he's actually quite depressed) pest. No Sympathy is the rule, rather than the exception, in Borderlands, which runs on Comedic Sociopathy, but almost everyone steps up their game at least one more notch to crap on Claptrap.
- Dawn of War 2: When reviving a fallen hero, heroes have quotes usually along the lines of Quit Your Whining due to the grimdark setting. And then there's the orks...Just stick da bone back in!
There's a fight and ye're sleepin'!? What kinda ork iz ya?
Get up! Ye're an embarrassment to da whole ork species! - Dead Space 3: Ellie’s breakup with Isaac is seen as this by some. Throughout the series, Isaac has (among other things) witnessed countless people be brutally slaughtered and warped into Necromorphs, helplessly watched his last girlfriend kill herself, been manipulated and betrayed numerous times and subjected to Mind Rape by the Markers more than once. All of this and more has understandably left Isaac with extremely severe trauma and PTSD. Instead of, say, getting Isaac the help he clearly needs, Ellie coldly leaves him after calling him a coward for not just getting over it, and later insults him for not wanting to rejoin the search for the Markers (aka the source of all his trauma).
- Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: When Funky accidentally causes Bashmaster's Popsicle to be eaten by piranhas, he crosses his arms and makes a "hey, shit happens" kind of look.
- Early in Final Fantasy IV, the kingdom of Damcyan is attacked. The king and queen die, as does Anna, Tellah's daughter and Prince Edward's love, and numerous Red Shirts. When the party finds Edward, he's flattened with grief because everyone he loves is dead... so Tellah attacks him.note When Anna gives her last words and dies, Edward is even more devastated. Rydia and Cecil immediately lay into him for being a selfish weakling, moping over the deaths of everyone he's ever loved when there are some strangers here who want a favor! While it's true that Edward is the ruler of Damcyan, thus needs to be strong to lead the country, Rydia's reaction is a tad hypocritical — her reaction to the same circumstances was to summon Titan to whoop Cecil and Kain's backsides, but apparently it is wrong for a man to be temporarily paralyzed by the deaths of everyone he's ever loved. Understandable, since she is Just a Kid after all, and had underwent a bit of Character Development.
- Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn give us Soren most frequently but Ike most famously.note
- It makes more sense if you interpret Ike's now-legendary "You'll get no sympathy from me" as something more along the lines of "I'll show you no mercy" (there was possibly some translation fudging involved), which would be true to how Ike was genuinely sympathetic toward many of his old allies and their plights in Dawn but unwilling to go easy on them as they now found themselves on opposite sides of a war. It would then also double as a Mythology Gag to the Greil Mercenaries' run-in with slave traders in Chapter 14 of PoR, where, after their leader Gashilama refuses to surrender, Ike states, "In that case, we've no choice. You'll receive no mercy from us!"
- Pac-Man World infamously ends with Pac-Man hearing the defeated final boss Toc-Man reveal himself as a sad ghost who goes on a Motive Rant about how he tried to imitate him because "nobody loves a ghost," only to eat him in response. To be fair, the guy did kidnap his entire family. Regardless, the Re-PAC remake softened this by having him instead hold out his hand in forgiveness, but only if you rescue all his family members.note
- In the ending of Sonic and the Black Knight, Sonic explains to Amy about how he missed their date due to being sent to Arthurian times. Amy thinks he's just making up excuses for missing their date and proceeds to chase him with her hammer. Granted, randomly being summoned to Arthurian times is a bit far-fetched.
- In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, there is a side quest in which the player character, who is pretending to be a Sith student, is captured by an insane former Sith teacher who puts them through a sadistic test of Sith philosophy with pain and eventually death as the price for wrong answers. This being Sith philosophy, the right answer can always be found by choosing the most evil and cruel option, which the teacher will then rationalise as somehow being the most rational one in terms of maintaining your power. Hence, when one question is something like "You have a loyal and capable subordinate who hasn't failed you once before, but now does due to bad luck, what do you do?" the right answer is in the lines of "Kill them right away, because we mustn't allow any weakness." In general, the Sith philosophy works like this elsewhere in the game and at least some parts of the Expanded Universe as well.
- Paradoxically and by contrast, Darth Bane in his own novels that tie in with the game and whose writer was involved in writing them bears no grudge over a failed attempt to assassinate him, since that's what Sith are supposed to do.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NoSympathy/VideoGames
FollowingNo Sympathy / Video Games
Go To
