YMMV / The Dispossessed

• Tear Jerker: Poor Tirin. After putting on a satirical play and deciding that art is his calling in life, he is driven to a nervous breakdown because the people of his community think he is not a good Odonian and loudly criticise him for it. It gets to the point that he feels that society has rejected him, and seeing no other option, shuts himself away in an asylum. He apparently leaves the asylum at some point and meets Shevek later in life, at which point he is a broken shell of a man, obsessing over his play and desperate for the approval of others.
• The Woobie: Shevek's daughter is bullied by her classmates and teachers as a proxy for her father, for his conflict with the entrenched bureaucracy. What's worse, since Odonian schools are all boarding schools with communal living quarters, she can't get a break until she explicitly asks her parents to let her spend the night in their room.