Spoilers Off applies to all Tear Jerker pages, so all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
As Dawn of X's first event, it does not hold back in terms of making things fans cry for their mutants.
- Rockslide dies, he really dies. He was a sweet kid who had bonded with The Summoner, who was only trying to learn his weaknesses, which he exploits at the first chance. We learn that since he died in Otherworld, due to the realm's status as a nexus of the multiverse, he's gone for good, with the Five unable to truly resurrect him. This confirms that the resurrected aren't just clones with memories of the original but the real deal. The Santo that the Five do bring to life is a combination of several others from multiple realities, meaning other Rockslides died in other realities with seemingly no explanation. This subverts the Krakoan Death Is Cheap status they had taken comfort in, as they still have a battle to fight in Otherworld. What makes it sadder is Polaris's reaction. She was eager to have him resurrected because he died saving her and she wanted to apologize and thank him. She now blames herself because he was Just a Kid and now his blood is on her hands.
- What makes it even worse is that the New X-Men had gone through a terrible series of events unlike any generation of young X-men before them, and that's saying something. After watching their friends drop like flies, it seemed that this was over. And then this happened.
- Storm being pressed for time enough to burn her bridges with Wakanda and steal their most sacred artifact, the first vibranium weapon Skybreaker. After a stoic confrontation with T'Challa, he orders the Krakoan gate destroyed after she leaves, forcing any Krakoan visitors to arrive on their terms.
- The revelation of Apocalypse's full backstory for the first time: his separation from his very first wife (and also his soulmate to whom he was happily married) fellow immortal mutant Genesis, and their equally-ageless (upon reaching adulthood) four children, the First Horsemen, and the rest of all of their tens of thousands of extended family and close friends (their fellow Okkaran mutants) — and actually even half of the same sentient island continent of Okkara which they all lived upon — who selflessly sacrificed their lives in a last-ditch desperate gambit to stop and block the demonic extra-dimensional Amenthi invasion of Earth; the revelation that they left him because they all knew that the self-proclaimed First Mutant (actually the first of the Second Generation of Mutants on Earth) was simply not strong enough to come with them; the revelation that his entire credo of "Survival of the Fittest" was secretly due to a promise to said spouse to honor their selfless sacrifice and memory by ensuring that the rest of the Earth would be ready to resist Amenth upon the occasion of their inevitable re-invasion; the revelation that Apocalypse's other true hidden agenda all along was to re-open the passage from the sentient island of Krakoa to its long-lost twin island of Arrako, in order to reunite himself with the same long-lost spouse and their children; his sudden reunion with the same children, after thousands of years of separation just when he had already begun to despair of ever seeing them alive again; their revelation that their mother, his wife, was already tragically killed later revealed to actually be figurative, she was brainwashed into becoming the host for an evil demon god , the Helm of Annihilation after killing its last host in combat — which was inevitable — before she could be reunited with him, their father, her husband; and their surprise rejection and betrayal and attempted assassination — accomplished through the treachery of his own darling grandson (the only child of his second-eldest daughter) who had convinced him to go against the consensus of the rest of the Quiet Council, thus losing all of the respect & regard which he had recently gained from his fellow mutant leaders — of the same father, who they all bitterly blame for their suffering excruciatingly painful millennia of perpetual on-and-off warfare against an entire planet full of demons on an extra-dimensional hell-planet (as well as the tragic loss of the same mother and the rest of their extended family) and who they now have come to utterly loathe and despise for absolutely disappointing them by failing to live up to their memories of him when they were much younger (Apocalypse had become much more kinder and gentler since moving to live again on the sentient island of Krakoa — even changing his name to [A] — and they were just plain disgusted at his having grown to be a sentimental weakling in his old age).
- Likewise, the painful recovery of Apocalypse from said frustrated patricide by his own offspring, as he now suffers an existential crisis of faith at the realization that he wasted his whole life trying to reunite with his immediate family, as they not only hate him more than anyone, they have become the very enemy against whom he had been preparing to resist during all the time since he was separated from them millenia ago, by becoming perhaps arguably the worst of the Big Bad supervillain masterminds in the entire history of life on Earth.
- The Islands of Arakko and Krakoa are in a similar boat. They're desperate to reunify but now the beings they live in loving symbiosis with are going to fight and kill each other for dominance, two of which are the only ones they can communicate directly with and thus are their best friends. Arakko is shown crying while Krakoa pleads with Cypher not to go.
- War has now lost both her son and husband and fought and lost against the killers of both men.
- Psylocke having to leave behind Wild Child (who had become attached to her , as he saw her as "pack leader" after she beat him in combat) behind to either be tortured to death and/or eaten alive by sadistic cannibal mutants, the Locus Vile in Arakko.
