Woobie / Music

• The Dierks Bentley song "Settle For a Slowdown". The lyrics almost make the poor guy sound like an abandoned puppy...
• The girl from Martina McBride's "Concrete Angel" song and video. Full stop.
• The Decemberists' song "The Chimbley Sweep". Poor, poor kid. And the tune is so frickin' addictive ...
• The Girl in the Slayer Jacket from the Pig Destroyer song of the same name. Just go read the lyrics, man.
• Dr. Light in The Protomen's rock opera. That poor man spent pretty much his whole life enduring tragedy after tragedy, the abbreviated list including the death of his love, being framed and arrested for said killing, narrowly escaping the death sentence, getting chased out of town by a lynch mob that believed he deserved the death sentence, sending an innocent teenager to his death for a plan that didn't work anyway, losing his first son to the tyrannical dictator suppressing the city, having to watch his second son kill his first, then watching his second son abandon mankind to it's doom. Someone give the old lump a hug already.
  • On that note, Protoman himself counts. He might not think humanity's worth saving (in fairness, they did just watch Wily's robots 'kill' him) due to their refusal to fight for themselves, but he wants so desperately to be proven wrong. Especially in "The Stand", where humanity proves him right, again, and he's genuinely heartbroken- "They'll watch you die to save their lives! They will not stand here by your side..."
• The Megas version of Protoman, too, due to some pretty impressive Parental Abandonment issues.
• The subject of the song "Carry You Home" by James Blunt. The poor kid's apparently never had any friends, and seems to have leukemia or something. The only one with her when she Shuffles Off is James.
• The runaway girl from Nuclear Death's "Days of the Weak". Also a bit horrifying.
• The eponymous subject of Blutengel's song "Broken Girl".
• All three girls mentioned in the song "Runaway Love" by Ludacris and Mary J. Blige are runaways who made the decision to run away from home because of how much their life sucked. Lisa has a drug-addicted mother who brings home men who molest her daughter while the mother is passed out and doesn't believe her daughter when she tells her about it, Nicole is routinely beaten by her alcoholic stepfather and ends up losing her only friend to a drive-by shooting, and Erica becomes impregnated from sleeping with an older boy who bails out, plus her family is too poor to pay for an abortion, so she fears her mother's wrath at finding out.
• The titular character of The Who's Tommy. First he's rendered deaf, dumb and blind after he witnesses a murder as a young child. Then he gets tortured by his cousin. Then he's given tons of drugs by the 'Acid Queen.' And then he gets molested by his Uncle Ernie. Eventually his sight, voice, and hearing are restored, and he becomes a Messiah figure to the fans he gained playing pinball. His followers turn on him shortly after.
• Evelyn Evelyn's Eva and Lynn Neville. 'Abusive childhood' doesn't even begin to cover it.
• Richard Marx's song "Hazard" portrays a guy who grew up with his single mother in a town where everybody refused to believe that there was any good in him. Eventually, he meets a woman who sees him for who he really is, but when she is murdered, the whole town naturally blames him. But the music video shows that the sheriff killed her, seeking to blame it on the protagonist and get rid of him for good. Fortunately, they can't prove him guilty, so he is released, and he packs his bags and leaves town for a brighter future.
• The titular character of Steely Dan's song "Charlie Freak".
• Len from Vocaloid. There's hardly a song without him dying in some way, like in the Story of Evil series, for example.
  • His sister, Rin, has the same problem, although in her case she tends to be a Jerkass Woobie at best.
  • Haku Yowane was pretty much designed to be this, with her inferiority complex toward Miku and her alcoholism.
• From the songs of David Bowie:
  • The "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" (Space Oddity) is an innocent "missionary mystic of peace/love", but feared, imprisoned, and sentenced to hang by the denizens of a village simply for his oddness. He accepts this fate, but the titular mountain sends down an avalanche to save him, despite his cries for it to stop — he lives, but the village is destroyed and he's in tears as he heads home.
  • The protagonist of "Jump They Say" (Black Tie White Noise) is a mentally ill man who is Driven to Suicide by — depending on how the lyrics are interpreted — the voices in his head and/or a society that doesn't understand him or care what becomes of him. The video expands on this by establishing him as a businessman (played by Bowie) who has done no one any harm, has not rocked anyone's boat, yet is taken captive by his peers and subjected to shock therapy...paving the way for his fateful jump. (Reality Subtext: This song was inspired by the suicide of Bowie's schizophrenic half-brother.)
• Julie, one of the protagonists of the '70s pop song "Run Joey Run" by David Geddes. Her dad finds out she and the eponymous Joey have been up to things that the dad doesn't approve of and beats the crap out of her. Then when Dad goes hunting for Joey, rifle in hand... things got worse for poor Julie. The song's a bit on the manipulative side, but oh, how the listener feels for Julie! (And — the hell? This song was performed on "Glee"?)
• The title character of the 1970 hit "Jennifer Tomkins" by Street People. She's abandoned by her alcoholic father, her mother dies, she's forced into child labor, then when she grows up she dates a jerk.
• The old country standard "Nobody's Child". It's about an orphan. An orphan that no one wants to adopt. Because he's blind.
• The title character from Donovan's "Laléna".
• Tuomas Holopainen while composing "The Poet And The Pendulum."
• The titular character in "Little Susie" by Michael Jackson.
  • Michael Jackson himself is considered to be one to some extent.
• The Beatles:
  • The title character in "Nowhere Man".
  • "The Fool On The Hill", the main character of the song of the same name from Magical Mystery Tour. No one likes him, no one accepts the fact that he's wise, and no one listens to what he has to say.
• 2D of Gorillaz: when he was nineteen, he was run over, put into a coma, and left with a fractured eyeball by Murdoc. Murdoc then got stuck as his caregiver (and the Slash Fic writers have some rather horrible ideas about what may or may not have happened during that time - Murdoc probably is enough of a bastard to pull a stunt like that if he knew nobody would find out). A year later, Murdoc ran 2D over again, bringing him out of the coma and fracturing his other eyeball. 2D's birth name is Stuart Pot, a.k.a. Stu-Pot, which is a bad enough Punny Name in itself, but Murdoc nicknamed him 2D, short for "Two Dents", after what happened to his eyes. Murdoc then stole 2D's girlfriend Paula, ruined his later relationship with Rachel Stevens, and regularly uses him as a verbal and physical punching bag. Despite all this, 2D never lost his sunny disposition and never seemed to harbour any real resentment. The band broke up for a while before "Demon Days", and 2D apparently went a bit wild during that time; he was told later via email that he'd fathered ten illegitimate children, and the lawyer who told him asked for his autograph in the same email. He was also being held captive by Murdoc on Plastic Beach.
• Lala, the lead singer of Japanese virtual band わたしのココ (Watashi No Koko), largely due to the fact that she's an Anthropomorphic Personification of LalaVoice, a long-abandoned software similar to Vocaloids of today. The band's lyrics, sung from her own perspective, tend to revolve around the feeling of being forgotten, broken, the despair of not being heard, and a longing for death.
• Red Shoe Parade: The " evil thief". He was robbed in the street by the "Shadow Parade", they then broke into his house and all the food while he was away. In afternoon, they returned and raped him, his wife and children.At night when they found that he's still happy despite what they did to him, they choose to stab him to death.
• Melanie Martinez's Concept Album "Cry Baby" is about a woman named Cry Baby, loosely based on Melanie herself. Her story is really messed up. To start things off she had a really crappy family life which ended in her mother murdering her husband and his mistress. She's had an unlucky love life and after having a One-Person Birthday Party she snaps.
• Camilo, the young boy in Said The Whale's Camilo (The Magician). He falls in love with a girl by the end, though.
• The person being sung to in "The Angel Song" by Great White, described as a "fallen angel, ripped and bruised". Other lines that demonstrate this include "Life is rude, treats you bad, tears your wings away" and "The streets are hard, they're mean and scarred".
• The girl described in "Nowhere Girl" by B-Movie. She's a girl who sounds like she has some kind of mental illness and thus never goes outside or does anything. The song is about her and the singer's repeated failed attempts to reach out to her.
• The title character in "Emma" by Hot Chocolate. Basically, the protagonist has been Platonic Life-Partners with a girl named Emma since he was five, and even then she wanted more than anything to be famous. When they were 17 they got married but she was still depressed all the time due to not being able to achieve her goals, and eventually he comes home to find her dead with a suicide note saying she just couldn't go on.
• The protagonist in The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?", who seems to have some sort extremely introversion, possibly even a condition like Asperger's Syndrome, and is alone and miserable as a result. Particularily sad are the verses:
  "There's a club if you'd like to go. you could find somebody who really loves you. So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own, and you go home, and you cry and you want to die."
  "When you say it's gonna happen now, when exactly do you mean? See I've already waited too long, and all my hope is gone."
• Daft Punk:
  • Charles, the broken-legged anthropomorphic dog who was the main character of the "Da Funk" video. Over the course of the video, his limp and appearance is mocked by a pair of young boys, he tries to participate in a survey and is turned down for not living in the city long enough, and is treated brusquely by a street vendor (who is annoyed by Charles' broken, constantly blaring boombox). Even when he has a happy reunion with childhood friend Beatrice and she invites him over for dinner, he ends up alone when he can't take the bus with her due to his boombox. The reactions were so unexpectedly strong that the duo brought him back for a sequel video "Fresh", showing him in a much happier situation, becoming a successful film actor and getting in a relationship with Beatrice after all.
  • Melody, the young girl in the music video for "The Prime Time of Your Life". Throughout the video, she sees everybody around her as pink skeletons, and sees herself in photos as extremely fat, despite being moderately sized. To fit in with these skeletons, she proceeds to cut herself with a razor, until she's removed all of her flesh and becomes a giant, pink blob of muscle. She then sees her life flash before her eyes and collapses over dead, with her parents rushing in to find her dead body. It's then revealed that everything she witnessed was Through the Eyes of Madness, as all of the skeletons were actual humans, and she was anything but fat in the photos she looked at.
• The protagonist in "Weird Al" Yankovic's "You Don't Love Me Anymore". Poor guy treats his Complete Monster girlfriend's quirks like something normal and even cute and only supposes she doesn't have the same feelings for him as before.

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