Tear Jerker / Neopets

• Generally, the Advent Calendar animations tend to either be Heartwarming or humorous. However, some go into this territory. An example would be the December 11th, 2014 one. King Altador is seen in a Hall of Heroes decorated for the holidays, only to stop at the empty space where The Sleeper is supposed to be. He seems depressed, and puts a lone flower on the space. To bring it home, the items given out for that day were a wearable item called Flower of Remembrance ("A single flower for a lost friend.") and a book called Sleep Well, A Holiday Tale ("A haunting tale told from the point of view of beloved King Altador.")
• The Spardel is a rather goofy-looking doglike petpet. Its design was inspired by an actual dog named Sparky, who belonged to one of TNT's artists. When this dog passed away in late 2013, a new Petpet was created: the Sparky, which looks like an angelic Spardel.
  That'll do, Sparky. That'll do.
• Baelia the Grey Faerie lost her name, wings, and powers to Jennumara the Dark Faerie. When she gives out quests, she mentions that it's okay if you couldn't find the items because hardly anyone helps grey faeries.
  • Grey day in general. It's basically celebrating sadness.
  • On an upside, though it's due to Fyora falling ill due to plot-related reasons, she gets to run the Hidden Tower.
• When Hannah was left for dead by Kanrik in the Hannah and The Ice Caves Plot, after she was hit by a red light that cursed her. The fact that she nearly died on Terror Mountain twice doesn't really help Kanrik in some people's eyes, in terms of redemption.
• The mass layoff of TNT in early March 2015 drove many players to tears, wishing them well and hoping for the site's continuance.
• The Pound is a place where you can go to abandon a pet if you don't want it anymore. Going to the adoption section of the Pound shows all the ownerless pets—the vast majority of them with basic colors and misspelled names with underscores and numbers—looking sad and dejected. There's no way to tell exactly how long a pet has been in the Pound, but if you look at how old they are after adopting them, it's a safe bet that a lot of them have been in there for many years, possibly even decades.
  • One of the phrases that pets about to be pounded say is "leave me to die".
  • The Lutari is the only pet that refuses to be pounded. If you try to abandon a Lutari, it will simply run away and disappear forever.
  • To keep you from abandoning a pet by accident, once you choose to abandon a pet, it will take you to a mini screen that says "Are you sure you want to abandon [pet's name]?" and you have to press the button five times while it says things like "Break my heart," "Cast me aside," "You would leave me?" and "What did I do?"
• Your Petpets can get eaten by the Turmaculus without warning. It can be devastating if you'd had the pet for a long time.
• On the answer to the FAQ for how to delete your account is a sad-looking Gelert with the words "Sob...don't you want me?"
• The Christmas Aisha who tends the Advent Calendar. She's only happy one month out of the year. The other eleven months she spends alone and weeping whenever someone visits her, because the Advent Calendar is closed.
  • This video only reinforces this — she's crying buckets!
• Whenever you try to visit Naia at the Rainbow Pool while the magic is used up. She looks dejected and her text has frowny-face emojis in it.
• In the Choose Your Own Adventure Maker, in one of the adventures, one of the endings in one of the adventures is the death of a Neopet you are babysitting.
• An adventure called Starstaff (Al'Driao on Fanfiction) by Child_Dragon has a bittersweet ending. The world is saved but at the cost of the narrator's best friend, and either the narrator herself or the narrator's pet.
• An adventure called "Glass Roses" ends tragically a la Romeo and Juliet, and it's set in old Neopia, where Gelerts live in Lupe packs for protection but are treated horribly, and Lupes still eat Chias.
• Visiting the Kadoatery at the wrong time of day gives you lots of cute catlike animals crying their eyes out.
• Really thinking about what happened to Old Maraqua. It wasn't an Inferred Holocaust — it was an explicit holocaust. As this news report states, they tried sending in rescue teams, but there was nobody left to rescue. Nearly everything was destroyed. All hope of finding survivors had been given up. And just in case it didn't sink into the playerbase enough, it takes care to linger on who the players actually interacted with — the shops, all but confirming that the shopkeepers were among the dead. Not to mention that two species of Neopet were nearly wiped out; the Koi and Jetsam population never recovered, becoming Limited Edition from that point on.