Life sucks if you have a name in Code Geass.
- Nunnally Lamperouge. At the age of six or seven or so, she's crippled when her home is attacked by supposed terrorists. She is struck by forty-odd pieces of shrapnel, costing her the use of her legs, and witnesses the death of her mother, who then collapses on top of her. This psychological trauma renders her blind. She and her brother Lelouch (who is about nine at this point) are then sent to Japan to be political hostages, where they are both frequently bullied for being Britannian. They are then abandoned and left to die when Britannia declares war on Japan. It gets worse once we move on from the backstory to the actual series. Despite all this, Nunnally maintains to cheerfully smile for those around her, seemingly willfully ignoring her brother's slow descent into darkness. Until Season 2, that is...
- Her brother Lelouch, the show's protagonist, could also qualify, seeing as the universe (or at least the writers) seem to love kicking him when he's down. Or up. Or anywhere in the middle. Also counts as an Iron Woobie.
- Shirley Fenette. After she finally works up the courage to ask her classmate and crush Lelouch on a date, later that day she learns her dad was an innocent civilian killed by collateral damage from the Well-Intentioned Extremist Zero's guerilla war. Later, she finds out her beloved "Lulu" is none other than Zero himself. Before she confronts him about it, she gets mind-raped by Geass-user Mao into almost killing Lelouch, and to undo the psychological trauma she's suffered, her crush erases all of her memories about him, hoping to protect her from himself. She gradually falls in love with him again over the next year, and just when they officially become more than friends, someone from Zero's past shows up and restores all of her lost memories. She spends the next episode struggling to figure out what's really going on, eventually comes to terms with her feelings, realizes how lonely Lelouch is under his mask, decides she wants to be with him no matter what sins he's committed... and is promptly murdered by someone loyal to Lelouch. The only consolation for her is that she can spend her final moment telling Lelouch how much she loved him.
- This could also apply to the Compilation Movie, where even though a lot of this is Adapted Out, including her (and maybe even her dad) not getting killed this time, this means that she now has to see him die as part of the Zero Requiem.
- There's also C.C., after her backstory is revealed and her mind is reverted to when she was a 10-year-old slave before she got the power of Geass.
- Jiang Linhua/Empress Tianzi of the Chinese Federation. While not as central to the plot as the other characters mentioned, she's pretty much designed to raise protective feelings in the viewers — a young, albino teenage girl used as a political pawn by the corrupt High Eunuchs, completely dependent on her servants, and utterly clueless about the real world... yet still touchingly determined to do the right thing whenever given the chance.
- Euphemia is one of the kindest characters in the series, having good intentions and good means to achieve them, but due to Diabolus ex Machina, she ends up causing a massacre and Lelouch is forced to kill her. After that, she is remembered as "Massacre Princess".
- Kallen Kouzuki is half-Japanese, half-Britannian due to her father's relationship with a Japanese woman, her mother, which of course is looked down upon by the Britannian elite. While she has to cope with the death of her brother, who was a member of the Japanese Resistance, her mother turns to a drug called Refrain, which regresses the mind and allows them to relive happy memories in her grief. Due to her mother's inability to parent, she's sent to live with her father and stepmother, who hates her. She herself chooses to join the resistance to fulfil her brother's dream of a free Japan, while putting up the façade at school as a weak sickly Britannian girl. After the Resistance starts working with Zero, she falls in love with Zero, who she finds out the hard way is Lelouch, and after all that, near the end of Season 2, when Lelouch declares war on the world, her feelings for him, and whatever feelings he had for her culminates and is out to rest when they kiss, then part because of opposite sides of war. Even through all this, she's one of the ones who remain at the end and gets a slightly happy ending.
