Tear Jerker / Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Good night, guys... I miss you...

"We can't go back! I'm not going back into that house! There has to be something, anything!"

— Red Guy, "Transport"

For a show that seems like it would be a mix between horror and humor, you would be quite surprised to learn that it does have a few moments that will make you shed a tear.

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Web Series

• While the videos themselves generally aren't considered this, this DHMIS-themed ask blog manages to make the Hostage Situation one of these. Tony makes hand puppets of the trio and Sketchbook to help him cope with the disappearance of the originals, and one post has Roy being too depressed to do anything other than look at family photos.
  • One of the Original Flavor ask blogs is very good at this, especially during the kickstarter kidnapping arc. When read in chronological order, you can actually track how exhausted and resigned Tony gets each time.
• Yellow Guy crying after Duck swats the "pesky bee" (actually a butterfly the former briefly grew attached to).
• The Story of Michael, the Loneliest Boy in Town. Apparently he also has a "special one", but the last we see him, he's still living in a cave.
• The end credits for 5 could qualify, especially if the fan theory that Red Guy was calling the surviving puppets to help them escape their reality is true.
  • Duck being killed and fed to Yellow Guy in 5. It's especially heartbreaking to see Yellow Guy, now stuffed with his own friend's organs, sitting alone in the dark, quiet kitchen; both of his best friends are gone forever, and he can't do anything about it.
  • Just before that, he finally completely breaks down. It seems that all this insanity has finally caught up to him.
    Refrigerator: Everything tastes great! Maybe we should wait!
    Duck: NO!
    Refrigerator: Before we put it on the plate!
    Duck: ENOUGH!
    Refrigerator: Or it may be too late—
    Duck: I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE!!!
  • During that aforementioned scene Yellow Guy's jaw drops and he looks pretty shocked. It's very likely he wasn't expecting his friend to breakdown either, and then the teachers force feed him the remains of his friend directly right after that. The poor guy looks confused and upset near the end of the episode. Probably realizing what the Teachers just did, he is now alone. To jab it in further, Yellow Guy probably didn't even know he ate one of his friends. For all he knows, Duck just disappeared.
  • The worst part? When you really think about it, Duck's fate was probably the most merciful out of those of the other puppets—his suffering at that point is over, unlike Yellow Guy (who's still trapped in the lessons) and Red Guy (who's stuck in the real world without his friends, and oblivious to one of their deaths).
• The sixth one opens with Yellow Guy, in the trio's bedroom, crying over photos of his friends.
  Yellow Guy: Goodnight, guys... I miss you...
  • While Yellow Guy's refusal to go along with the lamp's lessons and declaration that he doesn't want to know about dreaming is both awesome and hilarious, there is a very sad undertone to it. In the previous episodes, Yellow Guy regarded the world with wonder and innocence, and was always eager to find out more about whatever the teachers wanted to talk about. But in this one, he's been reduced to a nervous wreck who's terrified of learning anything anymore, all because of what his sadistic, warped "teachers" have inflicted on him and his friends. Which, for all we know, may have been the teachers' plan all along.
  Yellow Guy: "No, I don't want to know! I... I don't want to know how to have dreams! No! NO!"
  Yellow Guy: "No! No, no, no! NO MORE SONGS!"
  • All the singing lamp has to do is reference the others- "you can have a dream about losing your friends." - to make Yellow Guy immediately break down weeping again. He is not doing well.
  • Red Guy also very clearly misses his friends. Worse, he even seems to miss the teachers. And when he shows the slightest bit of interestingness, he gets shot down with one of his own lines: "That sounds really boring."
  • When Red Guy's in the bar trying to sing the Creativity song, he just sounds so broken and forlorn, or at least more so than usual.
  • Duck's still dead. The only time he reappears is when Red Guy brings him back to life for a few seconds and he actually doesn't seem happy about it.
• When Red Guy is messing with the control panel to make various different teachers appear, Yellow Guy is so terrified that all he can do is cry his eyes out and plead for it to stop. Made even worse if you're one of the people who think he's a young child. Worse, it is implied that Red is trying to stop all the teachers appearing and tormenting Yellow Guy, but he keeps making them appear instead.
• It is heavily implied in DHMIS 6 and the interview that Roy was the one behind this all along, and that he did it to punish Yellow Guy for no real reason. Considering that he's Yellow Guy's father and the latter considers him his friend, this is pretty sad.

TV Series

• "Jobs":
  • Unemployed Brendon, while played for laughs, clearly has a sad lot in life. His own brother makes him sing about how people shouldn't be unemployed like him (with lyrics that glorify said brother to the point of outright calling him "perfect", whilst belittling Brendon), eventually leading to an argument between them. Not only that, but his reaction to Red Guy merely asking if he's okay after he hurts himself implies that thanks to his brother, he now sees any form of sympathy as condescending pity.
    Briefcase: Keep going, Unemployed Brendon-
    Brendon: Why can't you just call me Brendon!? My name's Brendon!
  • At the end of the episode after the Reset Button happens, Yellow Guy is upset that the daughter his older self had isn't there anymore.
• While the concept of death in "Death" is mostly Played for Laughs thanks to Red Guy and Yellow Guy's unawareness and the fact that Duck is perfectly fine, it's still a surprisingly realistic depiction of the grief of having lost a loved one. Besides Red Guy and Yellow Guy, everyone plays the mourning session completely straight, and following that, Red Guy and Yellow Guy are actually shown becoming grief-stricken over Duck's departure, to the point of trying to replace him. It especially gets sad during Yellow Guy's "Memories" song, where he ends up recalling "fond" memories of his time with Duck, until he ultimately ends up visiting his grave again. This part hits especially hard:
  Yellow Guy: [while Stain Edwards, the Forever Boy is gushing about their core values] Stop saying that! You're not supposed to say that kinda stuff! You're supposed to say that the floor is too loud, or the window is disrespecting you, or—
  Stain Edwards, the Forever Boy: Why would I say that when the world is so full of wonder?
  Yellow Guy: No, it's not! It's all wrong without... [looks up at a picture of Duck and starts sobbing]
• "Family":
  • Duck singing about his family (which also counts as a heartwarming moment).
    Duck: I asked the members of my family... who they love the most... and they all said me...
  • During the scene where the twins are showing family movies to the cast, Todney mentions that he was stung by a bee in his eyes and his mother kissed his eye to make it better. Lilly makes a sad face, and her brother shushes her. As creepy as the twins are, along with their family, this scene implies that they genuinely loved their mother and are still heartbroken by her death.
  • When Roy pulls his Villainous Rescue of Yellow Guy, Yellow Guy is happy at first, saying, "I knew you'd come!" But then he realizes that his father is far more concerned with eating his kidnappers than he is with saving him, something that Roy emphasizes by roughly shoving him out of the way as he walks to the dinner table. As he leaves and even later when back home, Yellow Guy seems depressed that even when he comes to rescue him, his father shows him no affection.
    Yellow Guy: [casually yet sadly] Bye...
• "Friendship":
  • When Warren the Eagle rhetorically asks why he doesn't have friends, he ends up being viciously insulted by the main trio and Colin, who repeatedly tell him how ugly he is until he's on the verge of breaking into tears, trying the best to hold it in.
  • While Warren is played for laughs in general, the scene where he drives Yellow Guy's imaginary friends part can hit quite close to home for anyone who's had a close friendship be broken by a toxic influence.
  • The ending, in which the trio angrily starts fighting in the most violent way possible. It can be seen as frightening or hilarious for the most part, if not both, but still.
• "Transport":
  • Red Guy's entire situation in this episode. It's made clear at the beginning of the episode that he wants to be anywhere else, and he's shown to be very aware of how a typical episode goes. As he drives out of the house, he gets steadily more panicky and stressed as he desperately tries to escape. When the Old Train wakes back up and starts to die for real, seemingly spelling the end of the puppets' escape attempt, Red Guy starts pleading to not be sent back with the most emotion he's ever shown.
    Red Guy: We can't go back! I'm not going back into that house! There has to be something, anything!
  • Red Guy's desperate attempt to escape the house is sad enough, but then the gang just ends up in a desolate real-world junkyard. The episode ends with them huddled around a fire, shivering and clearly scared out of their minds. If you listen closely, you can hear that Red Guy appears to be crying. He wanted so badly to escape that house, and it all turned out to be for nothing. Worse still: given that Lesley is shown to keep backups of the gang if they die, it's possible that those versions of the trio are still out there.
  • The death of the Old Train (both times) is fairly tragic in itself. He's clearly very up in his years, relying on his "special drink" and medicine just to stay in a somewhat functioning form. Despite this, he seems to be one of the more well-meaning teachers, without any ulterior motives or nefarious plots in mind for the trio. But he's just too damn old for this job, with every transformation further deteriorating his body, until he simply cannot take it any more and expires. And then he wakes up later, confused, outraged, and very much in distress, having been taken far further than he was meant to, and the poor guy seems to spend his true last moments absolutely terrified, with no idea what was going on, and then, unfortunately, his body is dismantled to be used for a campfire. Even more tragically, many viewers have compared him to real-life situations where an elderly person without an adequate retirement fund was forced back into employment just to make ends meet, despite being nowhere near adequate health for the job, and eventually just works themselves to death.
• "Electricity":
  • Yellow Guy's moment of clarity after becoming smart when he talks to himself in the mirror, which reveals just how victimized he's been by Red Guy and Duck when he was dumb.
    Yellow Guy: Have we gone wrong?
    Smart Yellow Guy: ...I don't think so. This doesn't feel wrong. At least it doesn't hurt to think anymore.
    Yellow Guy: But they seem upset with us!
    Smart Yellow Guy: Hm... Well, maybe, they're not in charge of us, anymore.
    Yellow Guy: Maybe they never were...
  • The ending. Yellow Guy shreds the book that (supposedly) had the answers while the others are cheering him on, completely unaware that they've ruined their only chance at escaping. Made even sadder if you believe the theory that Yellow Guy knew what the book said, and decided to destroy it to not face the truth.
    • When Duck asks him what he's holding, Yellow Guy tries to remember what the book was. Before he can say it, he reverts to his dumb voice and disregards it as something shreddable. He tried to hold on to his clarity to tell the others that the had the answers, but failed.

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