Tear Jerker / The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Volumes 1&2

• The death of Hyde was definitely not your standard tear jerker. Hyde was a monster, and he knew it, completely denying and shooting down anything that would make him sympathetic (his feelings for Mina being love, any desire he might have had to save the world), but somehow him destroying the Martians after saying goodbye to Mina and going to his inevitable death singing and dancing ended up looking really noble. He was an awful person, but he did heroic things; a true anti-hero. Then they named a park after him. You know the one.
  • Hyde and Mina's final goodbye. All he asks of her is for her to let him kiss her and to let him touch her breasts. Throughout the second volume, Mina was the one and only person that the monster Hyde remotely liked, maybe loved. He even states so himself that out of all mankind, Mina is the only person he cares about, because she's the only one who sees him as a man, albeit an evil man. She has met somebody far worse.
    Hyde (leaving to fight the Martians): Goodbye, my perfect Mina.
  • The death of poor Dr. Jekyll. Like in the original story, he doesn't even get to die as himself, he is simply submerged into Hyde and disappears forever.
• Griffin's betrayal has a notably horrific moment when he strikes Mina down, steals the plans from her, and forces her to degrade herself before he departs. Seeing her in such a broken state is pretty damn depressing, especially so when Hyde finds her and legitimately freaks out over her collapsed form.
• The Downer Ending of the book with two fifths of the team dead, Nemo going off the team after the British Government develops bio-weapons to fight the Martians, with Allan and Mina unaware they were carrying said weapons and Mina leaving Allan to clear her head in Scotland after the entire situation is done with. The final panel is Allan, sitting defeated on a park bench with leaves falling around him.
• In The Traveller's Almanack appendix, covering the surviving members travels (alongside documentation about the travels of the other Leagues), Mina and Allan stumble across a mysterious, abandoned treehouse in the middle of the African jungle. It's all but stated that it was the home of Lord and Lady Greystoke from the Tarzan stories. They even find the skeletal remains of Kala's infant in a crib, much to Mina's horror. Allan and Mina have no way of knowing what actually transpired there, nor that Tarzan is still alive, and in the end, decide to leave the melancholy place untouched.
  • The remains of Sir Lancelot's grave, which has been utterly desecrated in a misplaced attempt at preserving it. When originally visited by Prospero in the 16th century, it was badly deteriorated, but still portrayed Lancelot as he had been in life, a shaggy warrior with a wild beard. When Mina visits it 200 years later, it has been "restored", but unfortunately changed to reflect the pop culture image of Lancelot as a clean-cut chivalrous knight. And so, the image of one of France and England's great heroes is lost forever.
  • The sad fate of Alice Lidell. While she returned from Wonderland mostly unharmed, her visit to Looking Glass Land was disastrous, and eventually led to her death, as she could no longer digest normal food, leading to her withering away.
  • Christian leaving for the Blazing World, bidding a final goodbye to Prospero as he disappears into the great unknown. Prospero can only hope that the Pilgrim finally found his way back to his own shining realm.
  Prospero: Christian has gone...
  • Orlando having one of his/her few despairing moments of reminiscence as he/she briefly remembers the past and wonders where all those things had gone that once seemed so important.
  • The ruins of The Giant's Garden.

Black Dossier

• Orlando's account of his/her past has moments of this, most notably his/her sadness over never seeing Sinbad, whom he/she considered his/her true love amongst countless others, ever again following the sailor's Eight Voyage.
• He's a hotblooded racist, for sure, but Hugo Drummond deeply cared for his goddaughter, Emma Night. So when he's informed that "Jimmy" Bond murdered her father, who was also a good friend of his, Drummond flies into a rage and attacks him. Sadly, Bond shoots Drummond in the knee and then in the head while he's down. To make it even worse, Bond gloats to Drummond before he kills him about how he'll be a hero and screw Emma, all while she's unaware of Bond's actions.
• Billy Bunter might be a Dirty Coward, but it's sad seeing what eventually became of him; an obese old man sitting in the crumbling ruins of Greyfriars, which he never left, having become a staff member and eventual caretaker after graduation. He outright states that he belives the only reason why he wasn't shipped off to a camp during the Ingsoc years is because the Inner Party, all being former Greyfriar students, felt sorry for him, and left him to his own devices in the school. He's also shown sadly staring at a photo of his sister Bessie, who had been married to Big Brother, and it's hinted she was assassinated after his death.

The Century Trilogy

• Janni started out as a woman who defied her father's request to continue his tradition as a terrorist. But then she is raped in 1910, which sadly prompts her Face–Heel Turn, and results in her becoming a bigger monster than her father had been. And as seen in the examples of the Nemo spinoffs below, her life gets much sadder.
  • Nemo himself finally dying of old age, with only Ishmael and Broad-Arrow Jack by his side. Ishmael openly weeps at the loss of his captain.
• The massacre at Hogwarts, committed by Harry himself, is bound to cause such a response from fans of the franchise. And even then, there are pretty horrific sequences, like Ron and Hermoine begging for their lives moments before they're killed.
• As much of an ass he is, and as horrible as the acts he commits are, there is still a sadness to Harry Potter in 2009. The young man had been manipulated towards a horrific destiny as an Antichrist by Oliver Haddo, tried to delay it as long as he could by secluding himself in the long-abandoned Privet Drive, and took as many medications as he can to keep himself in control. He becomes quite pitiable in that regard. On top of that trauma, after all that, Haddo is disappointed with his creation, calling him a "banal Antichrist". All of it was for nothing.
  • What makes it sad is that, for all the complaints of Shallow Parody attributed to this section, Prime!Harry in the books is also quite a Wangst-filled teenager with trust issues, and that he's also an Unwitting Pawn for schemes by older headmasters. If this situation did occur in the main verse, it's quite likely that it would push his Berserk Button and make him Go Mad from the Revelation since he's already been through a lot of trauma and Yank the Dog's Chain in the main books from constant Broken Pedestal and paranoia.
• By the time of 2009, Allan Quatermain is arguably more of a wreck than he was before. The effects of his immortality have taken hold, and he's vehemently opposed to being the hero ever again due to the massive stress it causes. However, he returns to aid Mina and Orlando by the climax, and even manages to fire off a shot at the Antichrist with his elephant gun. But then, he is killed by the Antichrist in an extremely degrading manner via electrocution as the monster literally urinates lightning. Seeing a hero suffer such a fate is pretty heart-wrenching. If nothing else, his sacrifice was enough to save Mina and Orlando.
  • In the end, Mina and Orlando brings his body back to Africa, where he's finally put to rest with his friends from his old adventures.

Nemo: Heart of Ice

• The Bittersweet Ending of the book, narrowly avoiding Downer Ending with Janni realising her feelings for Broad Arrow Jack after her mission ends with Ishmael's death along with all of her landing crew's demises and the ensuing madness of Tom Syfte after leaving Frank Reade Jr. to be consumed by a Shoggoth.

Nemo: Roses of Berlin

• Jack rushes in to attack Ayesha, after braving through Hynkel's Metropolis with Janni to save their daughter and son-in-law. He even manages to seize Ayesha by the throat... only to have his head split open by Maria's hand.
  • What's worse is that it can be taken that Jack didn't expect himself to survive his attack on Ayesha, it was all just that his love could escape to safety without him
• The looks of horror on Janni and Jack's faces when they are informed that Hira's craft was shot down say it all. Hira turns out to have survived, but she returns to her mother just in time to be informed of her father's death.

Nemo: River Of Souls

• In 1975, Janni has been reduced to a decrepit old woman, haunted by the ghosts of her friends and family long since passed. Even worse, since she's the only person who can see them, her crew has begun to think she's losing her mind because of a brain tumor and her obession with Ayesha returning is just paranoia. In the end, she simply sits down in the burning remains of Goldfoot's base, awaiting her coming death, with the last trace of Ayesha and Adenoid Hynkel's madness eradicated forever.
  • Poor Jack Jr is terrified of his grandmother's growing obsession, and attempts to save the youngest Ayesha clone in a vain attempt at breaking the endless feuds of his family's past. It fails, as she turns out to be just as vicious as her sisters, and in the end, we're shown that he became just as brutal as his grandmother and great-grandfather.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

• In the first book, we see what happened to Pepper's Land after the movie. During the Falkland War, the island took heavy damage by the battles. The titular submarine is all rusted and decayed, there's a bird picking the carcass of the Flying Glove, the landscape is in ruin and there seems to be a skull of the Big Blue Meanie laying on the shore.
  • Emma's close friends and former Bond girls were tortured and killed by MI5.
• In book two, Jimmy launches a nuclear bomb in the Blazing World and seeming to destroy it.
  • Emma's discovery of her friend's executions and realizing that Jimmy Bond is the new leader of MI5.
  • The Superhuman retirement home present here is pretty sad, like most nursing homes, but seeing such famous supers in such a sorry state is pretty sad.
    • To recap, Captain Marvel is overweight and can't saying anything other than "Zam", Plastic Man is trying to hang himself, Adam Strange is senile, Captain America is sporting a swastika tattoo, Namor is unaware that he urinated himself, Giant Man keeps shrinking and growing, Green Arrow gets punched in the face by Captain America, and Doll Man is seeming to only lucid enough to ride on his dog while in his underwear.

Film

• The moment when Dorian reveals he's the traitor. Murdering Nemo's first mate Ishmael and stealing one of the Nautilus's exploration pods.
  Sawyer: (hears a clanging metal sound from inside the Nautilus) What is it?
  Nemo: (enraged) The sound of treachery!
  • Though brief, Nemo's heartbroken reaction to Ishmael's death.
• Quatermain's death.
  Quatermain: (to Sawyer) May this new century be yours, son, as the old one was mine.
• A deleted scene has Sawyer saying that the Fantom murdered another Secret Service agent who was a childhood friend, all but confirming that it was Huckleberry Finn.

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