Trivial Tragedy

Kirito: My sandwich! It was innocent...

Asuna: ... Uh, Kirito, are you gonna—

Kirito: Shhh! I must grieve.

— Sword Art Online Abridged

A minor (often silly) incident happens, and it is treated like something extraordinarily sad. Maybe someone drops their favorite food, or lost their toy, and grieves as though a loved one had died. Maybe someone accidentally kills a mosquito and crosses the Despair Event Horizon as if they'd murdered another person. A Neat Freak might, well, have a Freak Out as a result of a mess. The Fashionista might weep and wail over their clothes being dirtied, torn, or destroyed. Whatever the case, these are pretty minor inconveniences or losses that you don't expect people to care, let alone get depressed about.

Typically a form of Comical Overreacting, this trope is frequently Played for Laughs, but it can be played seriously if the character has been experiencing a great deal of stress and that one little thing that set them off is merely The Last Straw that broke the dam. In this scenario, the character normally does not burst into tears over minor inconveniences, and them doing so now is a sign that things have gone very wrong.

See also Faux Horrific and Minor Injury Overreaction for other forms of overreactions.

Compare Serious Business, where a normally frivolous activity is treated as a matter of life and death, and Felony Misdemeanor, where a minor infraction is treated like a heinous crime and punished as such. Contrast Black Comedy, in which a serious situation is portrayed humorously, and Dude, Not Funny!, where something is Played for Laughs and fails to get them. Also see Skewed Priorities, where a character is comically more concerned about a minor thing than a major event that's going on at the moment.

This trope is Older Than Radio, with Adam Smith remarking in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: "If [a man were] to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own."

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: When she was a little girl, Yamame accidentally stepped on a bug, squishing it. The incident devastated her so much that her father had to hypnotize her in order to break her out of her guilt-ridden state and then teach her to walk on stilts so she could feel more comfortable about working in the garden.
• During the Chapter 2 / Episode 1 of Asteroid in Love, Ao explains to Moe that her demeanour isn't composure as Moe suggested earlier in the chapter; she is more reserved than in the past because she becomes extremely reluctant to speak of others because she fears she'd "mess up" again. When Moe asks what exactly happened for Ao to develop such fears, Ao recalls the an incident during she was teased by classmates, and Moe is surprised that on its own changed Ao's entire personality.
  Ao: So hot... anybody feel it's super wet today?
  Classmate A: I think "humid" is the word you're looking for?
  Classmate B: [yelling to the rest of the classroom] Hey guys! Ao just said something really dirty!
  Other Classmates: Ao is dirty!
  [Ao gets Quivering Eyes as flashback ends]
  Present-Day Ao: Since then, I've had trouble speaking up.
• Crayon Shin-chan: One episode has Shin-Chan eating a slice of strawberry cake and purposely leaving the strawberry topping for the last, but has to run off for water because he nearly choked from eating too quickly. Shin-Chan's mother walks in while Shin-Chan is away, sees the empty plate with the strawberry on top, and eats it, believing it's unwanted. Cue Shin-Chan spending the rest of the story mourning over the loss of his beloved "Ichigo-chan", and even Misae's attempts to make up by buying a new cake for Shin-Chan doesn't work.
  Shin-Chan: [tearfully] She's my Ichigo-chan. She's special to me, there is no other Ichigo like her...
• In The Devil is a Part-Timer!, Sadao is distraught when his granny bike, Dullahan, is crushed by his neighbor Suzuno's hammer. He bursts into tears while cradling its remains before demanding that Suzuno pay reparations.
• Fairy Tail: Erza's mega Angst (and Disproportionate Retribution after it) about her food is a Running Gag.
• In the Turning Red spinoff 4★Town 4★Real, Aaron T. accidentally drops his ice cream on the ground and lets out a Big "NO!" followed by sobbing until his bodyguard buys him a new one.
• The Mermaid Princess's Guilty Meal has a character who has spiraled into Despair Event Horizon after returning from war, and his tale implies that he's wracked with guilt after eating his Drill Sargeant Nasty in a moment of madness due to fear and hunger. When Ela asks him about how the sargeant tastes, the fish laughs it off. It turns out that he didn't eat the sargeant, but merely scribbled on his face using a permanent marker. And that's enough to make him see himself as a monster.
• In My Monster Secret, during the sports festival, Akane tries to prevent Youko from winning by telling her that there is no Run for the Bun event she's been looking forward to, leading to the latter's Heroic BSoD.
• A Old Master Q strip has the titular character in a restaurant when a waiter accidentally spilled a cup of hot tea on him, causing Master Q to moan in agony as he holds his on leg. Thinking he's badly scalded by hot tea, the restaurant got a doctor for him, only for Master Q to admit he's mourning over his new pants being ruined.
• One Piece: In the Zou arc, the "death" of Kanjuro's ridiculous cat drawing that was brought to life is treated as a sad thing for the Straw Hats, except for Zoro.
• Ranma ½:
  • Mundane mishaps are treated as the basis for tragedy frequently. From Ukyō's okonomiyaki sauce turning out badly (it was Ranma's fault, but that's another story), Sōun overreacting when his eldest daughter, Kasumi, catches a mild cold, the entire household believing that Kasumi had finally snapped when they all ate dinner out after she'd prepared a nice meal for them, or Ranma eating Genma's hidden sweets, causing the latter to substitute Ryōga briefly as his heir. Half the comedy in Ranma is dependent on people's dramatic overreactions to minor circumstances (with the rest being the Love Dodecahedron and various things being treated as Serious Business).
  • In one episode, we learn that after accidentally destroying an "innocent brassier", Happōsai consigned the Happo-Fire-Burst to the mists of time, declaring that never again would an innocent piece of underwear be made to suffer.
• Squid Girl: Squid Girl finds an umbrella and uses it as a weapon. It gets run over by a car, and she breaks down in tears as sad music plays.

Comic Books

• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: In "The Dream of A Lifetime", Donald accidentally puts his finger into Jesse James's gun in Scrooge's "Badland" dream. Jesse complains because the gun could have blown up in his face if he'd pull the trigger at that moment, and starts bawling about the experience even though he's perfectly fine.
  Jesse: Nobody ever stuck a finger in mah gun before! (sob) It's humiliating!
  Frank: There, there, Jessiekins.

Films — Animation

• In Foodfight!, Mr. Clipboard takes a bag of chips off a shelf in the supermarket and brutally crushes it on the floor with his foot. The owner of the supermarket is genuinely heartbroken about this.
  Owner: That was a perfectly good bag of chips! Never opened... never enjoyed...
• In Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension, the alternate dimension's Heinz Doofenshmirtz's tragic Backstory that made him evil is... that he lost his favorite train toy. Prime Doof, who had a Hilariously Abusive Childhood, is less than impressed.

Films — Live-Action

• Batman: The Movie:
  • Both Batman and Robin mourn for a porpoise that had saved them from the Penguin's torpedo, itself an extremely jarring Deus ex Machina the audience only learns about after the fact.
  • In the climax, Batman is utterly devastated when he learns his beloved Miss Kitka is really Catwoman. His Heroic BSoD is Played for Laughs thanks to just how thin Catwoman's disguise was.
• Birds of Prey (2020): Overlapping with Lost Food Grievance, the scene where Harley loses her egg sandwich after getting tackled by Renee Montoya is treated as a heartbreaking moment. Particularly since that egg sandwich was bought with the last of her money. Even better, her speech about this is very reminiscent of a lot of superhero speeches regarding the necessity of Secret Identities:
  Harley: It took losing something I truly loved for me to see that the target on my back was bigger than I thought.

Literature

• Gautrek's Saga: The hillbillies discovered by King Gauti in the forests of Gotaland, who are both extremely stingy and extremely stupid, have a family tradition of committing suicide by jumping from a nearby precipitous rock called Family Cliff whenever something so terrible happens they feel they cannot deal with it. The hillbilly patriarch, Skinflint, sees his family threatened by starvation after King Gauti ate his supper, so he divides his property among his sons Fjolmod, Imsigull, and Gilling, and then jumps from Family Cliff. Soon after, Imsigull sees a sparrow snatch a single grain of wheat from his wheat field; not wanting to live in poverty, he chooses suicide by Family Cliff. Fjolmod owns a bar of gold; one day he sees two snails crawling over it and gets it into his head that the bar is now smaller than it used to be. Unwilling to live on with the terrible knowledge that snails have gobbled up practically all his gold, he hops from Family Cliff. Gilling eventually follows the example of his brothers when his fine ox dies.
• In "The Hair Tree" by Mary de Morgan, the Queen of a country loses her hair and the whole country goes into mourning as if the Queen herself had died.
• Terra Ignota: When J.E.D.D. Mason was a young child, he once accidentally crushed a bug with his finger while trying to determine which side of a window it was on. The discovery that he could end a life on accident traumatized him so badly he refused to move for hours for fear of killing anything else, until his caretakers were able to convince him humans kill countless microorganisms every moment just by living and breathing. This is used to argue that, despite his inhuman Blue-and-Orange Morality, he is ultimately benevolent.
  Voltaire: The Alien still mourns that insect, and wears black for it, and is a much, much kinder Being than a human.

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development features the "sad walk", a Running Gag performed several times by George Michael after genuinely sad moments... but then Tobias does one after the fridge runs out of eggs.
• Birds of a Feather: Played for Drama in "Nuptials" when Dorien starts crying over the fact that her champagne has become flat, seeing as it's a sign that she's severely depressed.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Inverted in "Once More with Feeling". Buffy and the gang walk outside just in time to see the end of a huge spectacle Crowd Song, in which a man and all onlookers rejoice that "they got the mustard out!"
• One episode of Cheers opens with the bar's beer keg running dry and having to be replaced. As this happens, the gang holds a funeral for the spent keg and a coronation for the new one. Norm even starts crying.
• Doctor Who: Discussed in a short featuring Amy Pond and the Eleventh Doctor, where the Doctor asks her to tap into the psychic circuits of the TARDIS and recall her saddest memory. She's astonished to learn that her saddest memory is losing ice cream at a carnival. The Doctor states that remembering ice cream is always sad.
• In a scene appropriately titled "The Last Straw" in Frasier, Niles suffers a nervous breakdown from the stress that supporting his ex-wife Maris through a murder charge has put him through after he requests a straw for his latte at Café Nervosa; only for Roz to have been given the last one.
• In the Friends episode, "The One with the Home Study," Ross and Rachel take Emma to the park, and when Ross tries to put her in a swing set, Rachel protests. When Ross asks why she's so opposed to Emma being on a swing, Rachel responds that she had traumatic experience, and explains that when she was four, her hair got tangled in the chains of a swing, and her mother had to cut off a clump of hair, and tearfully recounts that her hair was uneven for weeks. After an Aside Glance, Ross sarcastically asks: "And you lived through that? I wonder who's gonna' play you in the movie?!"
  Rachel: I was thinking Claire Danes.
• In Glee, Sue punishes the cheerleaders by revoking their tanning privileges. Santana is heartbroken, and runs screaming and crying from the room. She's Hispanic.
• Home Improvement: Tim drops the chisel he was using to drill a hole for ice fishing into the water. He tells Al about this and hopes that he wasn't too attached to that chisel. Al tearfully replies that the chisel had been in his family for generations.
• In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney rips a suit jacket, rushes it to a tailor, cries when he's told it can't be saved, and has it cremated. Another episode features him mourning a tie that got a little ketchup on it.
• Modern Family: After he and his family narrowly escape death in a car crash, Phil decides he has to do everything in his power to keep his family safe. He becomes a control freak, micromanaging his family in an attempt to prevent any sort of accident or misfortune. This annoys the rest of his family and puts him under enormous stress. Finally, he drops a carton of milk and ends up literally crying over spilled milk.
• Red Dwarf: The Cat plummets into despair any time his clothes are damaged enough to (in his opinion) spoil his image.
  Anything broken?
  Yeah, all the stitching's ripped and the lining's come away!
• In one episode of Royal Pains, Russell mourns over an antique rug that's been badly damaged by its Nouveau Riche owners.
• In "The Understudy" episode of Seinfeld, Jerry is dating Bette Midler's understudy in a new Broadway show. When Bette is injured, the titular understudy goes on in her place, only to have a nervous breakdown on stage because her shoelace is untied.

Music

• On Top of Spaghetti dramatically recounts the loss of a meatball that fell off a plate of spaghetti, rolled away, and was squashed in the garden, concluding with An Aesop about not sneezing while eating spaghetti.
• The Vocaloid song ''Pudding Annihilation is a hard rock song expressing the despair of...dropping a pudding to the floor.

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock: In the episode "Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk," the Trash Heap is crying because she just spilled a cup of milk.
  The Trash Heap: [crying] It was the last milk we had! I was looking forward to it.
  Philo: Ohhh, Marjory, don't cry over spilt milk!
  Gunge: Yeah!
  The Trash Heap: Yes, yes. You're right, of course. That's good advice. [Sniffs.]
• Sesame Street: Ernie is happy because he's about to eat a cookie, but Cookie Monster is sad because he hasn't had a cookie all day. Ernie gives him his cookie, but now Cookie is happy and Ernie is sad. This continues as they keep passing the cookie back and forth. At last, they decide to share it—but the cookie falls and breaks into tiny pieces, leaving both of them in tears.
  Ernie: Well, at least now we can be sad together!
  [They start crying into each other's chests.]

Video Games

• AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative: Mizuki lets Date know, after he's been AWOL for six years, that she tossed out all of his porno mags, cue his overblown reaction.
  Date: "NNNOOOOOOOOO!"

Web Comics

• In Cyanide and Happiness, a cellphone dying was deemed worthy of a drop-to-your-knees-crying-and-rage-at-the-heavens level of grief, followed by a funeral and burial surrounded by mourners (and in the rain for added pathos).
• Homestuck sees a safe broken in a fight, so when a Text Parser command pops up for it to gain a Character Level, the narration instead sends it off in a Viking Funeral pyre to Vaulthalla.
• Scandinavia and the World has one strip where England accidentally touches Sister Denmark while stretching and immediately starts internally berating himself for being a perverse monster and a rapist, while applauding Sister Denmark's stoic dignity in the face of this vile harassment. England then goes off to hand himself to the police in tears for his misconduct. Sister Denmark didn't even notice the contact.

Western Animation

• On Adventure Time, Marceline angsts over the time her daddy ate her fries. Justified later when it was shown that she grew up in a post-apocalyptic world with scarce food and her father, who doesn't even need to eat, ate her only food anyway.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Iroh weeps over a spilled cup of tea.
  Iroh: I know I shouldn't cry over spilled tea, but... *bawls*
• In one episode of Brandy & Mr. Whiskers, Ed has to use the titular duo's bathroom and he started crying his heart out because he used their toilet paper.
• Craig of the Creek: The episode "Memories of Bobby" revolves around Bobby moving away. The other Creek kids mourn him and hold an entire funeral service. It's even more trivialized at the end, when Bobby reveals he only moved across the street.
• In the Futurama episode "The 30% Iron Chef", Zoidberg frames Fry for breaking Prof. Farnsworth's model ship, leading to Fry (who couldn't even be bothered to defend himself) having to... pay $10 towards the cost of materials (and later being unable to buy a turkey baster with it.) Zoidberg is stricken with guilt, culminating with an attempt at committing seppuku on live television to atone.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Grunkle Stan holds a funeral for the decapitated wax figure of himself, and at one point bursts out crying and runs from the room. Subverted by Word of God in "Behind the Falls", who attributed Stan's attachment to the wax replica with secretly missing his identical twin brother.
  • Discussed in "The Time Traveler's Pig" with Mabel, who Dipper accuses of being overdramatic when she mourns losing Waddles the pig to Pacifica due to time travel shenanigans. Subverted when Dipper tries to prove his point by going ahead in time to prove she'll get over it, only to discover she only became more depressed.
  Mabel: But what about Waddles? He was my soulmate!
  Dipper: You said that about a ball of yarn once!
• Jackie Chan Adventures: In the episode "The Tiger and the Pussycat", Jackie accidentally activates the Tiger Talisman and is split into two clones of his Yin and Yang side. While Yang Jackie is extremely aggressive and selfish, Yin Jackie is fearful and faint-hearted, to the point of insisting he must be the evil side of Jackie because he stepped on a bug.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • When the supervillain Chameleon steals Nino's cap, he is utterly devastated and in mourning until he gets it back.
  • In "Ephemeral," Bob Roth, a wealthy record producer, is devastated when he accidentally drops a single penny into a sewer grate, to the point that he gets Akumatized over it. Justified, as he's greedy and obsessed with money.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Discussed and ultimately subverted in ''Lesson Zero''. Twilight is worried because she hasn't written to Princess Celestia, since there weren't any friendship lesson learned that week. Everyone else thinks she's just being overdramatic over the schedules and dismiss her concerns as trivial; however, Twilight's anxiety makes her panic to the brink of insanity that she decides to use her magic to create a problem to be solved. As a result, she endangers Ponyville, forcing Celestia to come and resolve the problem. Twilight's friends finally realize that Twilight's concern was very important to her and tell Celestia it was all their fault. Later, the princess explains that Twilight didn't have to write her EVERY week, and lifts up the burden by asking the rest of the Mane Six to send to her their own friendship lessons, too.
• The Owl House: In "Wing it Like Witches", during a mishap while training for a big Grudgeby game, the tiny flags Gus uses to cheer for other players are broken. Gus reacts as if the flags have sustained an actual injury and is later seen trying to nurse them back to health.
• A Pup Named Scooby-Doo: This is a running gag for Daphne, who would often angst over things such as losing a single button or mud being on her new boots. Much to the annoyance of her friends.
• The Real Ghostbusters: The episode "Captain Steel Saves the Day" opens with Ray bawling in despair. His friends naturally think that something catastrophic has happened, like the return of Gozer or the destruction of the ghost storage, but Ray says "it's worse than that", explaining that his favorite comic book has been cancelled.
• John Kricfalusi stated in his blog he created The Ren & Stimpy Show episode "Son of Stimpy" as a parody of shock value pathos, making a melodramatic plot that revolved largely around the fact Stimpy couldn't fart a second time.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In "Roll With It", Bow apparently falls to his death while he, Adora and Glimmer are trying to retake Dryll from the Horde. Actually, it was his doll that was knocked off while they were planning the attack with a board game, but he lifts his tiny self up with tears in his eyes and screams: "TINY BOW, YOU WILL BE AVENGED!!"
• The Simpsons.
  • In the sixth season episode "Lisa's Rival", Homer comes across an overturned truck spilling sugar. Like expected, his first thought is to shovel a huge pile of the sugar into his car, stealing it to himself. Homer quickly becomes obsessed by the amount of sugar he has, and when rain eventually melts the pile he's gathered, we get the following reaction:
    Homer: NOOOO! It's melting! My sugar is melting!
    Marge: Homer, I'm sorry.
    Homer: No, it's fine, Marge. I learned my lesson. A mountain of sugar is too much for one man. That's why God dispenses it in tiny packets. Also, that's why he lives on a plantation in Hawaii.
  • In another episode (the one where Homer becomes a tow truck operator), they accidentally spill a carton of milk, and this brings Homer to tears. Yes, Homer is literally crying over spilled milk.
• South Park
  • In one episode, the boys are caught attempting to illegally download a single song and as punishment, are shown the consequences of illegal downloading, walking past the sight of several celebrities looking horribly depressed as they're forced to downgrade to a slightly less impressive private jet or wait a few extra weeks to buy their own private island.
  • In the 20th season, Heidi Turner deletes her Twitter account and throws her smartphone away because she's been harassed by a troll, and it's treated as though she committed suicide.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "A Day Without Tears", Squidward bets SpongeBob he can't go a day without crying. When the news anchor mentions "sad news for Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy fans", Squidward turns the volume up and the anchor says that The Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy Show will only be played seven times a day instead of eight. Not wanting to lose the bet, SpongeBob quickly changes the channel.
• Steven Universe: Future: In "Growing Pains", Dr. Maheswaran asks Steven if he had something in his childhood that has "stuck with him" — that is, any major physical or emotional trauma. Before recalling all the near-death experiences he and others went through during the original series, he first remembers how much he panicked when learning his favourite ice cream brand was being discontinued as a a kid.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): One episode has Raphael thinking he's coming down with some kind of incurable sickness, and this is seemingly confirmed when he overhears Michelangelo and Donatello talking about saying their last good-byes, and Mikey sobbing hysterically and lamenting all the pizzas they'll never get to make together, and Don trying to comfort him. Turns out, they're talking about the irreparable pizza oven.

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