Tear Jerker / Fallen London

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

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General

• Potentially being forced to deal with your Nightmares. Your character, who can have potentially fought London's worst horrors, is more scared of their sleep.
  • Or even better, imagining your Companions, Acquaintances, Spouse, or pets' reaction to your insanity.
  • It becomes even worse for The Regretful Soldier, as he had to deal with his wife becoming an Empty Shell.
• Arguably a Fridge Tearjerker: it is well-documented how much the real-life Queen Victoria loved her husband. In Fallen London, she sacrificed London to the Bazaar to save his life when he was about to die of typhoid - and of course went on to become the game's Traitor Empress. Of course, the real-life Prince Albert died in 1860 and Victoria spent the rest of her life in mourning. All of which implies that in our universe she refused the Masters' offer, and watched the love of her life die for the greater good of her subjects.

Ambitions

Heart's Desire

• If you choose the Heart's Desire Ambition, you eventually get to learn more about the identity of one of the players of the Marvellous: The Topsy King, whose true name is Tristam Bagley. The short of it is that he was a composer, violinist and scholar (of the Correspondence), and that he attempted to write an opera involving some symbols of the Correspondence. He could not finish it, and so he desperately played in the Marvellous, hoping he'd be able to complete it. However, he lost his mind while playing, and has been the Topsy King since. His sister asks you to help him recover his mind, in the only way that is possible - Double or Nothing. To get to the next steps you need to convince him, temporarily bringing him back to sanity by staging his opera. When you manage do so, you next meet him as he once was:
  'We don't have long. I can feel them coming back. The letters, the shapes, the words in the sky... here they come again, up from the depths. I'll burn with them. But you've done enough, and I thank you. Perhaps if I can finish the opera... Perhaps I can get them out. Throw the letters into the sky and be me again. I'll play. Even when I become him again, I'll play. I'll remember. Tell my sister that I love her. And tell the Manager that I won't fall for that bluff again.
  Tristram Bagley looks down at his feet. He drops his cigar. A bat lands on his shoulder. The Topsy King looks up at you. 'Garbles,' he says softly. 'Garbles...'
  • If he ends up facing the Manager again, he loses. It's implied he stakes even more and ends up even worse off the second time, being unable to make music anymore. The first time left him insane. The second time leaves him utterly broken.
• Keep going and you can start trying to recruit another of the players: the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel. He promised someone in Polythreme that he wouldn't play it again, but if that someone released him from his promise, he'd do it. Go there, and you learn that the Manager was the Priest-King of the First City, and he fell in love with a traveler who then fell ill.

  'My lover saved me, in a manner of speaking. My fits would have killed me, so he bargained that we should both endure the ages, in return for his city. But the Bazaar isn't kind. Look what it did to me. The Masters took a diamond from the great glowing mountain in the South and gave it to me for a heart. They made me like this.'

  'I no longer love him. How could I, after what he had done to me? But his love abides, over the sea in London. I am his heart's desire.'

  • How long have they been like this? Well. They say that even Babylon was young when the First City fell...
• If you end up besting the monkey at cards, he offers to stake what's left of his humanity for a final chance. Except he's not looking for a final chance. He's looking to end it. He loves the game as much as he hates it, and if you don't take his humanity away, the drive to continue playing is all that will be left of him. If you do accept his chance, he folds before even looking at the cards, and you get to watch as Gregory Beechwood drains from his eyes, until there is only an animal before you, frightened and confused. It's not clear which option is the crueler of the two at this point.

  His shoulders are slumped. His eyes are pleading. He is tired of this game, tired of remembering it, tired of playing it, tired of loving it. This is his way out.

Nemesis

• The entire storyline is about finding out who killed your loved one and why. The descriptions of who it was aren't the brightest, understandably.
  Death of a Daughter: You couldn't protect her.
  Death of a Brother: Twenty heartbeats sooner, and you'd have heard his last words.
  Death of a Spouse: All those years, gone in a moment.
  Death of a Lover: And now you'll never know.

• Further in the ambition, and you'll find the murderer in the Iron Republic: Scathewick. By the time you find him, however, he's a broken man. You can either fulfill you revenge and kill him, or spare him and let him go. Regardless of what you pick, though, the mystery of your loved's one death isn't over yet.

• The simple fact that if you choose the resurrection option at the end of the storyline, despite all you've done, sacrificed, and gone through, your daughter or brother doesn't remember you. The murderer still lives, and while your loved one is back, they'll never be the person you knew and went to the Neath for.

Location-based storylets

The Cave of the Nadir

• A lot of the Nadir cards are this mixed with Nightmare Fuel, as the majority are people (or you) weeping as they forget who they loved on the surface.

Irem and the Loom of Fate

• If there is such a thing as an entire setting made a Broken Angel, the Ruinous Future you can find in Irem is it. All the wonder of London and the Neath is gone, with those supernatural elements that made it a marvelous or at least interesting place either dead and withered, or given a turn for the worse. The false-stars are so dead their glim has turned to gray (and if you went through the Light Fingers ambition, not even yours was spared and the game brings back the Arc Words just to hit you with it), the rats (talking or otherwise) are all gone, and all you have by then is people slowly starving to death but never dying, bandaged in whatever rags they can find, scavenging just to try and make another day in what was once London a little more bearable.
  All is lost. You are home.
• The hidden Neon Future, while ultimately hopeful, implies that your character, despite having all the resources, abilities, and Plot Armor you have now and more, was still unable to stop London or the Sixth City from being destroyed.

Veilgarden

• When at a party, you can ask the Turkish Girl to put her name on your dance card. If you fail the persuasive challenge she begins crying and runs away. A woman next to you says the Turkish Girl never learned how to read or write and that "It's a common ailment of the lower classes". Mood Whiplash at its finest.

Wolfstack Docks

• The Driven to Suicide overtones present for many of the Black Ribboners.

The City Of The Tracklayers

• You finally find out what Project Phoenix is: An attempt to purchase Istanbul and turn it into the Sixth City. And once again, someone in the government is in danger of selling their city to the Masters to save their beloved: their little daughter is dying of a horrifying disease, one that has turned her into a wasting shell who could die if moved. The Ottomans' Dignitary can't think of anything but how little time she has left, and is in danger of selling Istanbul. They are a mere expendable diplomat, and yet the grief and fear they experience is so genuine that the Judgements would deem their ownership of Istanbul valid.
  • You have an important choice: you can take the choice from the Dignitary to guarantee both London and Istanbul's safety - by murdering his daughter. If you took the Nemesis ambition, a part of you realizes that you have become no different from the bastards who murdered your loved one [[spoiler:purely to manipulate you.]] Worse still, you can then go leagues further and use the intel you've stolen from the project to start a war. All for London, of course, but the quality indicating how much permanent death you have caused jumps up by about 150 points, showcasing all the tragedy you've orchestrated.

Opportunity cards

• The Rubbery Men are a species of squid-humanoids who can't speak common tongues. They're disrespected by most and hated by some, and regularly get rocks thrown at them. On their opportunity card, the player character has the option to be cruel and kill one.
• The ending of the Watchful and Dangerous paths of the Mysterious Benefactor storyline. You can make the Watchful path less of a tear jerker by convincing the Mendicant to stay out of Hell and pursue the nature of God by other means. He's a little dismayed, but you may have literally saved him from an eternity of torment.
• If you play the long game and raise an orphanage, you can reunite a talented orphan with his well-off family... only to discover later that they were servants of Mr. Eaten, who plans to... well, the name says it all.

Non-repeatable storylines

• The ending of the Comtessa storyline, mixed with a bit of Player Punch. You arrive too late to do anything; the Comtessa is in the process of being turned to stone by her Clay Man lover. You are given no information as to whether or not the Comtessa gave consent, or what the end result of the process is, only a frightened look in the Comtessa's eyes. Your only options are to Mercy Kill the Comtessa or turn and leave. Yeah, it's a Downer Ending.
  • It says a lot about the Comtessa storyline that you can tell Mrs. Plenty what happened to her is the reason you are determined to seek the Name, and she is understanding.
• The entire Cheesemonger storyline could be considered this. It starts off with you doing increasingly shady and morally blurred things to people who don't seem to deserve it. Then you get to talk to people who used to be agents of the Cheesemonger like yourself. They're hiding in the darkest corners of Fallen London, terrified that the Cheesemonger will come after them, saying she's snapped and wants to kill everyone involved. If you investigate her past, you find her reasoning for this: her family used to all be operatives in the Great Game, but her entire family was assassinated. As revenge, she decides to ruin the Great Game forever so that no one will suffer like she did ever again — by "wiping half the pieces off the board". If you agree to help her and make all the operatives who killed her family Deader than Dead ("Can you live with that much blood on your hands?"), the Cheesemonger is eventually found dead. Furthermore, the Game was merely paused for a few weeks, not stopped — so the whole thing was meaningless in the end. The alternatives aren't much better: you can kill her yourself, which means she dies without any sort of fulfillment, or you can have her packed off to the Tomb-Colonies and put her "daughter" into her place, which is probably the last thing she ever wanted for her.
• The climax to Family and Law, the story of the Last Constable and Cheery Man, can end bittersweet all the way to senseless and depressing. You CAN help alter the odds in your favor... but the side you support will never forgive you, even if you save them. If you don't, you need to succeed in a gamut of the same Luck-Based Mission that makes Polythreme a nightmare to get through, and unlike a great number of storylines in Fallen London, there is no reset button. To say that it has put a rend into the hearts and attitudes of long-time players is a major understatement.
  • Even winning said Luck-Based Mission can be sad. You can confess to the Last Constable that you are helping her because you have fallen in love with her, but the end of the story makes it perfectly clear that you will never see her again.
• The Case of the Absconding Devil is about the titular devil that plans to run away to the tomb-colonies with a human woman - the Sardonic Music-Hall Singer - whom he fell in love with. Through the quest, you find sketches of her plastered on his mirror as well as a response from a church in regards of marriage. If you choose to warn him about both the singer's impending betrayal and the Brass Embassy being on his trail:
  [...] "Of course I knew. Of course." [...] He is expressionless as he takes out a handkerchief. He wipes his yellow eye and presses something into your hand before heading up the gangplank. In your hand is a teardrop-shaped diamond.

Seasonal events

• The Noman. A Lacre based alter-ego who will inevitably melt away and knows this.
• During Hallowmas 1894, you can obtain a confession from the Illuminated Gentleman that reveals that he had a lover who became separated from him after they descended into the Neath. The Illuminated Gentleman missed his lover so dearly that he accepted a commission to kill someone in the Neath to give himself an opportunity to track down his lover there, only to find out that his lover was the one he had been assigned to kill. He still felt compelled to do his duty and erased his memories of his love to be able to carry it out. To make all of this even more tragic, you can later meet a "friend" of the Illuminated Gentleman who's very clearly his former lover, still alive but in such an advanced state of decay that he can no longer speak and he must also be aware that his lover no longer remembers him.
• Mr Eaten's visit during Sackmas. Even in a dream, he is so frail and fleeting. The tone is so melancholy and mournful; you really can't help but feel sympathy for him.

  A trace of sadness, like the frost which silvers the night
  The light on the edge of sleep was mine. I was Mr Candles. I will not be again.

  • If you choose to ignore him, he becomes almost pitiful.
    A face lost beneath water
    You've forgotten him too. Each trace is erased, year on year. Very soon, nothing will remain.
• Even with everything that Her Enduring Majesty has done, when F. F. Gebrandt reveals a machine that can try and give her just a little more time with the Prince Consort as he once was during the founding of the Prelapsarian Museum, the sheer vulnerability she shows for the first time in the whole game is pitiable... even as she stops Gebrandt from stopping the machine on risk of a Phlebotinum Breakdown. Even as the manifestation in question pleads with her, Queen Victoria just cannot let go.
• While the War against the Starved was a thrilling (and occasionally amusing) experience as a whole, there is a strangely bittersweet moment you can unlock if you saved the Commodore during the recon flights. Your airship crew come looking for you one last time, having taken the time to find the sun-scorched hulk of the ship that saved London, your ship, still with whatever name it might've had. And just knowing it's there, resting at last, puts your heart at ease.
  She doesn't fly these days – but she did more than enough flying for one lifetime. Her guns don't fire. Her engine doesn't thrum. But when you speak of that day – when you point to the singes on her hull, the dents and the clawmarks – you leave people in no doubt that once, she soared.

Fate-locked content

• The Regretful Soldier's backstory, which you can hear from him if you have access to the House of Chimes. He was a member of the cavalry that attempted to invade Hell and failed, and his wife had to sell her soul to rescue him from the underworld. He now lives with the soulless shell of her.
• The end of the Long Lost Daughter storyline. The woman who you thought was your daughter was an imposter. While you can get your revenge on her, at the end of the day you have no idea what happened to your real daughter.

Jossed fanon

• This one holds some gigantic spoilers, but when you've figured the whole "why" of it out, the main surrounding plotline counts. ^{Don't say you weren't warned}The Bazaar still loves the Sun to this day, but none of the other Judgements will allow such a thing to pass, as they're in different levels of the Great Chain of Being. It has to hide away from its light, so it won't be burned by their vindictive light as well. And to this day it collects love stories, in search of the one that maybe, just maybe, can prove love between different links of the Great Chain of Being can happen, and be permitted. But it's been five cities. Thousands of years looking, and it's not enough. The helpers it has, once optimistic, have lost faith, all but one remaining only from contractual obligation, believing it's a lost chance. The Bazaar and the Sun even have a child, or "experiment" as the Judgements call it. And it has to hide too, away from the Bazaar itself, in the Elder Continent, injured and bleeding to this day from unknown wounds. And these humans are getting closer and closer to a point where it'd only take a renegade group to kill it, the Sun, or both, making the whole thing pointless, leaving both without a chance to prove their love. It used to be optimistic. Now, it can only lie there, weep every passing day, and consume stone soaked in memories of simpler times, when it still had hope. The Bazaar is a source of some very depressing love stories, but its own is perhaps the most tragic. And of course, this tale has no happy ending; Sunless Skies reveals one of the very first things the Empress does upon reaching the stars is murdering the Sun, rendering everything moot (on the other hand, it is implied that the Albion's now-dead sun is not our world's Sun; what's more, Sunless Skies is just one of the possible futures, like the ones a player character can dream of when they see their Destiny).
• The entire game gets sadder when the sequels are taken into account. Sunless Sea has the player characters exploring the Unterzee and leaving London behind, while Sunless Skies has the stars being murdered and the Empress herself abandoning London. That said, these are only alternate futures, which mean these occurrences may or may not come to pass.

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Melancholy is increasing...