The Woobie/Live-Action TV

Examples of The Woobie in Live Action Television. Tissues at the ready, everyone.

""my shoes are too tight, and I have forgotten how to dance.""
 * Adam-12 had several such episodes featuring children in child neglect situations, but none were more definitive than "He ... He Was Trying to Kill Me," a late first-season episode where Reed and Malloy interact with a 6-year-old girl named Charlie, who was left home alone to care for her 10-month-old brother in a run-down, roach-infested apartment, while her drug-infused mother sought (in vain) modeling jobs and no true father figure was present. Charlie has heartfelt conversations with both Reed and Malloy and win them over, even after they turned over the case to Social Services.
 * Beverly Hills, 90210 has a bunch of woobies, but none of them stand out quite so in need of a big hug as Valerie Malone.
 * Rachel Hicks in Bad Girls
 * How about Faceman, on The A-Team?
 * His father left him before he was old enough to even remember, no mention of what happened to his mother...all we know is that he wandered into an orphanage when he was five years old. From a young age, he taught himself to con people, seizing at every little opportunity he saw, only to miss out on the big ones because of it--most notably when he  Granted, that was Face's own fault, but that kind of makes it worse.
 * His college girlfriend Leslie (who he called "The only woman I ever really loved") disappeared with no explanation on the same day he was going to propose to her. He never allowed himself to get too close to another woman after that, so very few of his relationships ever made it past one-night stands.
 * Leslie's disappearance led Face to drop out of college and join the Army...where he went through the horrors of the Vietnam War, including spending time in a prison camp, and then he and the rest of the team ended up as fugitives because of something they were ordered to do (he laments in one episode, "Why is it that every time we try to serve our country, we end up behind bars?").
 * In Family Reunion, Murdock discovers that A.J. Bancroft, a criminal the team is negotiating with, is  A.J. begs Murdock not to tell Face--he wants to do it himself. But A.J. chickens out and ends up , leaving Murdock to have to deliver what would have been good news had it come earlier.
 * Not to mention the number of times Face has been hurt, kidnapped, beaten up by the bad guys...somebody give this guy a hug!
 * Dr. Daniel Jackson of Stargate SG-1 takes the cake. The "SG-1 Whipping Boy," as his actor has called him, has been blasted (several times), brain-fried (ditto), lost his wife to a Shoot the Dog moment while she'd been taken over by Puppeteer Parasite and was trying to kill him (that's brain-fry #3!), he's had a cave collapse on him while a slave of the episode's villain. He's been raped, been poisoned by radiation... when we first meet him in the original movie, we find out he's ridiculed for his theories and is next to penniless. Oh, his parents were killed in front of him as a child. That sneezing-when-he-travels thing? Psychosomatic. That's the short version. A complete list would basically be a detailed rundown of every episode of the series.
 * I could have sworn Cameron was the whipping boy.
 * Cameron is Daniel's whipping boy.
 * Colonel O'Neill's had it rough, too, with his son having shot himself with O'Neill's gun, his marriage dissolving, and Skaara, the alien boy who reminded him so much of his son, also getting taken over by the villains-the Big Bad's son, no less - and having to be shot (at least he gets better... to continue as a prisoner of his own body for another couple of seasons until Anubis blows his planet up and kills him.) Getting tortured by Baal wasn't much fun, either.
 * Vala mal Doran anyone? Gets abandoned by her parental figures. Gets sold to a weapon muggler who she eventually kills. Gets taken over by Qetesh when she's young, and has to live through all her horrible actions. Then gets brutally tortured by her own people. Then spends years of her life on the run from the many, many people she's scammed. And then she meets Daniel: . How long was she in the series, for all this to happen? Oh, only about two years, and most of that was spent stuck on a hostile planet in a distant universe pregnant with the female Jesus. Man, her life sucks.
 * What about Sam "Blackwidow" Carter? Her mother died when she was young, and her father was a jerkass and her broher wouldn't speak to her (though they later reconciled). All of her sort of boyfriends die (or have to be killed by her) and have a tendency to take other people out with them. She watched one of her best friends die, ascend, whatever (the above mentioned Daniel), and her closest female friend was killed. Oh yeah, and she's been killed, tortured, shot, stabbed, electrocuted, possessed by alien parasites (particularly a Tok'ra that left her with centuries of memories and feelings not her own) and other entities, and that's just some of the fun stuff. She's also the one everyone looks to when its time to come up with a plan to save the galaxy. Sure, no pressure.
 * And Teal'c too? He spent a century as a slave to a false God, committed horrible crimes in the name of that God, had to carry in his belly what would be a future false God in order to survive, and let's not even get into living fifty years with the rest of SG-1 that the rest of the team doesn't remember. Simply put all of SG-1 gets screwed time and time again, but it's Sam and especially Teal'c that always get left behind.
 * And how about Cassandra? When she's about eleven, her entire planet is wiped out by a Goa'uld who also puts a bomb in her chest, all just set up as a trap to take out the Earthlings. Fortunately, she spends the next several years of her life happily with her adoptive mother Doctor Janet Frasier. But wait, Doc Frasier is killed, and Cassie gets a one line mention about being a tough kid and isn't even seen at the funeral. Nice.
 * From Stargate Atlantis comes Rodney McKay who the writers apparently competed to put him in worse and worse situations. Getting stuck in a sinking Jumper, getting superpowers that were killing him (more than once), having  die, all the stuff with his sister, waiting in computer form for hundreds of years just to save Sheppard...
 * And Stargate Universe has Chloe Armstrong. She ends up trapped on a ship on the other side of the universe, and has to watch her father sacrifice himself to save the rest of them. On top of that, she has no useful skills, so while she's not alone in dealing with the daily struggle to survive, there's not much she can do to help.
 * In Season 1.5, she has also been captured by aliens (for a few hours), nearly been left behind by Destiny (albeit with her boyfriend and her best friend), and been shot when hostiles attacked Destiny.
 * Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks fits so well she could be the Trope namer. The entire town mourned her death and the viewing public was obsessed with finding out who killed her. Plus she went through unimaginable amounts of suffering for years and death was her only possible escape.
 * Special Agent Dale Cooper could also be considered a Woobie.
 * Lord Percy Percy of the first two seasons of Blackadder, although alternating between Woobie and Chew Toy, fits better into this category: the psychological abuse he suffers at the callously uncaring hands of Edmund Blackadder ought to elicite sympathy from anyone with basic human emotions. He considers Blackadder a friend and is ever eager to jump in and help him fix his problems, yet is treated as nothing more than a hated nuisance by Blackadder (to be fair, his general thickness must get rather annoying, but the complete lack of any gratefulness on Blackadder's part can't be passed over). A famed example would be when he offers to pay off Blackadder's bank debts with his retirement savings: Blackadder coldly tells him that he has long since pinched and spent these savings. Later, he attempts to manufacture jewelry, which he plans to sell of to help Blackadder: Blackadder has nothing to say except that the jewelry (which is green) looks like snot. And then there is the depths he sank to in framing the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Shudder.
 * Tim McInnerny's acting likely had something to do with this: thanks to him, the character constantly looked to be on the verge of tears. This may be the reason why so many also Woobie Captain Darling of the fourth season, also played by McInnerny, when he is
 * There's also the surprisingly brutal interrogation scene in the episode "General Hospital" where Blackadder has Darling tied to a chair and is screaming at him to confess that he's a German spy. Despite being near the end of the series, this was Darling's big Woobie moment as he was literally crying for mercy after a few minutes.
 * Lieutenant George should get honorary Woobie recognition for his admittance before The Final Push that, despite the ultra-eager face and voice he's had about the war during the entire series, he's scared and doesn't want to die.
 * For a man dressed up to be so ugly, Baldrick the third and fourth are surprisingly adorable in their suffering.
 * Pretty much everyone on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who was even remotely sympathetic. After Tara finally died, her actress, Amber Benson, refused to return to the show because she was sick of horrible things happening to her character. Joss Whedon is not nice to his characters.
 * Considering that Joss was initially planning to have the First Evil appear in the form of Tara to mess with Willow's head, can you really blame her?
 * This troper considers Buffy to be the biggest Woobie of all, with Willow a strong second.
 * I disagree. Angel is much woobier (after he stops the moping), especially when he gives Buffy the puppy-dog face.
 * And even more so after And more still when
 * Also, Xander. I mean, the guy loses every girl he's with, roughly three-quarters of them are evil, and he's constantly Overshadowed by Awesome to the point where he has fully fledged moments of angst about it. Then again, he also saves the world
 * Dawn made third place with Tara's death. Coming home to find your friend/mother figure who helped raised you dead in the bedroom, and sitting with her body for probably several hours because you're unwilling to leave... if Dawn wasn't made out of Buffy, she'd probably have gone catatonic.
 * Not even mentioning everything she went through in season 5. She's not even real, she thinks she might be evil, she feels responsible for one of her friends being tortured and another driven insane, her mother dies, she's got whole armies who want to kill her, Glory almost uses her to end the world, then Buffy dies before her very eyes. Any whining after all this is well-earned, fans. Cripes, any day Dawn doesn't take the rocket launcher up a clock tower and start emptying it into nearby buildings at random is a good mental health day for her.
 * Both Willow and Tara fit the archetype in their initial appearances. Joss Whedon says in a DVD Commentary from early in Season 1 that the writers learned very quickly that if they wanted to get an emotional reaction from viewers, all they had to do was put Willow in danger because Alyson Hannigan was so good at portraying believable vulnerability. (One could argue that Buffy and Angel are both too strong to count as woobies.) In a later commentary, either Whedon or someone else involved in the show says that Tara was conceived partly as the "new Willow" -- Willow had become too powerful and confident for "woobiedom," and they wanted someone to fill the emotional role that she had filled in the first few sesons.
 * Willow, oh God yes. It's hard to tell because of how she normally acts so sweet and optimistic, but she's really screwed up. Just look at her speech after Tara's death: "Let me tell you something about Willow. She's a loser. Always has been. She got picked on through junior high, high school, right up until college. With her stupid mousy ways. And now? [laughs bitterly] Willow's a junkie. The only thing Willow was ever good for... the only thing I ever had going for me were those moments... just moments... where Tara would look at me and I was wonderful. And that will never happen again!" Ouch.
 * Faith? OK, so her parents were abusive, violent alcoholics. Then she found a parent figure in her Watcher, who was torn apart right in front of her eyes. Then she goes to Sunnydale and is ritually ignored by the Scooby gang despite her attempts to fit in. She gets a new Watcher, who she quickly grows attached to, but who betrays and tries to kill her. Then she accidentally kills a man who she thinks is a vampire, which pretty much destroys her mentally. She is almost helped by Angel, but Wesley pretty much ruins that and makes sure that Faith doesn't trust anyone else ever again. She is driven into the hands of the Big Bad, who is pretty much an adoptive father to her - who asks her to kill people for him. Then she is stabbed into a coma by her former friend. When she wakes up she finds that the aforementioned friend has killed the father-figure, and has already broken up with the man that she tried to kill Faith to save. A short arc later and she's sobbing in Angel's arms, begging for him to kill her. Faith is pretty much the lovechild of the Dark Action Girl and the Woobiest Woobie of them all.
 * The ultimate woobie is Drusilla. She had her whole family killed and she was tortured more cruelly by Angel than he ever tortured anyone, which given his history of sadism is really saying something. Then once she is insane he turns her into a vampire so she is insane forever.
 * This troper would also count Jonathan. Picked on for all of high school, feels so horrible about that he tries to commit suicide, two of his friends become murderers, and when he finally seems happy with his life, one of the aforementioned murderous friends kills him by literally stabbing him in the back.
 * Angel too. Pretty much every character qualifies, but this troper would select Fred, Wesley and Connor to be the top woobies.
 * Fred: Spent five years as an escaped slave in a hell dimension, was driven insane by the experience, wouldn't leave her room for three months after getting back, was stalked and attacked by a magicked evil Wesley, found out someone she liked and trusted had purposely sent her to the hell dimension, had all her Jasmaniac friends wanting to kill her, got shot, and then And Amy Acker is just cute as a button, which helps does not help.
 * This is made so, so much worse by the fact that, well, Fred never did anything wrong. Flashbacks to life before Pylea show her as a lovely, inherently sweet girl who never meant to harm anyone, and she actually remains this after all the torture, only to be . Seriosuly, Joss Whedon, damn.
 * Wesley: Was hated by his father, realized he was a failure as a Watcher, was left stranded in Los Angeles by the Watchers' Council, got shot, got abandoned by all his friends, had his evil but awesome girlfriend, thought he killed his backstabbing father,
 * Connor: was tricked into thinking Angel had murdered Holtz, and spent a season being lied to and manipulated into doing bad things by, in the name of "protecting our family." He saw through Jasmine from the start, but kept trying to believe the lie so he could stop fighting and be happy. It didn't work, and he's left suicidal and kinda Ax Crazy.
 * This troper has to think Gunn is near the top, and has to be mentioned. His parents were most likely killed by vampires, he lives starving on the streets for most of his teenage years, he's had to fight since he was 12, he had so little hope for the future he sold his soul for a truck, his little sister Alonna is turned into a vampire and he has to stake her, he's caught between his "two gangs" for ages, he's accused of letting his sister die, he and loses her as a result, he's really insecure about being "the muscle," he accidentally  and hates himself for it, got stabbed, imprisoned himself in a hell dimension to try and make up for, and was last scene fatally wounded, with about 10 minutes left to live. In the comics ...
 * Cordelia, the definition of Break the Cutie? She falls for a guy and he, her family fortune is stripped away and her father sent to jail for tax evasion, she gets regular painful visions which are killing her, but she feels useless without them, and is unwilling to tell anyone about how bad it is; she felt all the pain in the world in the Season 1 finale, her former best friend becomes a vampire and betrays her, she's forced to so she can survive her visions (physically and mentally) and stay in one piece, she has amnesia for quite a while, she and Angel are pulled apart for months on the brink of their falling in love,  Damn.
 * Almost every regular or semi-regular character on Lost is either a woobie or was intended to be.
 * Locke. Full freaking STOP. Let's just put it this way: Name a time in his life. Go on, any time. If he isn't miserable, he's finally found something great that makes him happy. It won't last. It won't end well. And it just keeps getting worse. Let's leave it at that.
 * Hurley. The butt of many of Sawyer's fat jokes, has incredibly bad luck and possible mental instability. But the worst times were during season 2 when  Again, in Season 3   which makes the Season 4 opener much more bittersweet when he canonballs. Also the entire Season 4 opener flash-forwards.
 * Flashbacks to  childhood deserve special mention:   and a lonely childhood all add up to a pretty sad life. It makes what he becomes all the more awesome, (if still kind of creepy).
 * His emotional speech to  asking "What about me?" helps- only to be replied with "What about you?"
 * Also, what Locke says about how his years of devoted service were rewarded with him getting cancer, having to watch his daughter murdered, and then being exiled from the island. He gets beat up a lot on the show, too, to the point where you can't help but feel sorry for him.
 * Daniel Faraday is probably one of the woobiest characters on the show, especially when, and later on when he gets.
 * Charlie Pace has his moments too. Thankfully, he also has some moments of real lightness and joy, which either balance it out or make it worse.
 * As of Ab Aeterno, Richard. Full stop.
 * The Man in Black was pretty Woobie before he got all smoke-ified.
 * Seth Cohen from The OC.
 * Ryan was pretty woobieful in his earliest appearances as well, as a kid from a broken home, abandoned by his horrible mother and with nowhere to go, and hopelessly inept at attempting to fit in with the Cohens' world.
 * G'Kar from Babylon 5.
 * Vir Cotto even more so.
 * But at least they both got their Crowning Moments Of Awesome.
 * This troper found Londo Mollari to be the real Woobie of the piece.
 * Garibaldi, my lovely, dear Garibaldi. Several wrenching losses, a history of alcoholism, and then which leads him to start drinking again because he can't deal with the loss of control. Making matters worse, Garibaldi is the guy who's been backing up, supporting, and confronting people like Foster when their issues get too overwhelming, but nobody notices that he's gone off the rails until it's much too late. (Except Zack. Thanks, Zack.)
 * Ivanova is mostly just a badass and the occasional Stoic Woobie, but she has her moments, between and.


 * Lana Lang on Smallville is an example of a poorly executed Woobie. Lex Luthor in the same series is a well-executed one.
 * How about we just execute both of them and call it a day?
 * Pretty much every main character on My So-Called Life, and even a guest star or two (Delia Fisher, anyone?) It was really quite amazing for a show that lasted only 19 episodes.
 * Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation (The favorite plaything of Q, assimilated by Borg, tortured by Cardassians, brother and nephew die, gets Alzheimer's, etc.).
 * Don't forget the perfect storm of woobiedom that resulted from "The Inner Light."
 * Data has his moments, in spite of supposedly not having any emotions.
 * Captain Archer from Star Trek: Enterprise didn't suffer quite as dramatically, but went for quantity instead: it seems someone was beating him up every single episode.
 * Come on now, Trip is totally the Woobie. There's a fanpage devoted to proving and exploring this.
 * Some in the writing crew of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine talked openly about doing "O'Brien Must Suffer episodes." Apparently, they felt he was the most likeable adult character on the show, and thus subjected him to numerous beatings, implanted memories of a harsh prison sentence, abduction and cloning, nearly getting killed by an alien WMD etc. He was also constantly dislocating his shoulder/breaking bones, though this was more for Chew Toy effect.
 * Kira Nerys from the same series, possibly even more than O'Brien. The writers didn't need to fill a once a season "Torture Kira" episode quota, they were screwing her over all the time. Some examples: Her religious leader dies, comes back to life, and must be left on a war torn penal colony. Her lover dies slowly and painfully. A man she considers a father figure dies slowly and painfully. The girl she considers a surrogate daughter/sister is murdered. An entire civilization of 30,000 people is destroyed and ceases to ever have existed so that she can live, even though she wanted to die to save them. Her entire former resistance cell is systematically murdered, leading to her capture and torture. The mirror universe version of her dead lover comes along, she is briefly happy, before he reveals he's out to trick her and goes off with her mirror universe evil counterpart. She discovers her mother was a collaborator who was a concubine to Kira's most hated enemy, Gul Dukat (who spends years trying to seduce her). Not to mention the fact that all of her family and several friends are dead by the start of the series due to the brutal occupation of her planet, during which she saw and did terrible things.
 * Speaking of Dukat, at times he could be something of a woobie himself (even the Chew Toy and this despite--or perhaps as a result of--spending too much time as the Magnificent Bastard and/or Manipulative Bastard). Over the course of Deep Space Nine the poor guy basically loses everything that was ever remotely important to him, even his sanity by the end of the sixth season. And all because he just wanted to be loved and/or noticed.
 * And how can we forget Odo?
 * Is there anyone on Star Trek: Voyager who isn't a woobie? Even with all that competition, somehow Seven of Nine still stands out in this category. She constantly drifts between woobie and Chew Toy, with a heavy dose of The Scrappy to boot.
 * But Jeri Ryan's super freaking hot, so that's okay.
 * Second place surely goes to Tom Paris, a more traditional Woobie whose need for his father's approval led him to disaster, and whose subsequent rebellion made things even worse. Fans were rewarded by the end of the series; he'd become a family man and the most content person on the ship, without losing his sense of fun.
 * Naw, I'd have to say Captain Janeway. Come on, she is not only the captain of the ONLY Federation starship in the entire quadrant, but she's also had to act as a mother-figure for the entire crew. That, and she is surprisingly cute.
 * You forgot about Ransom, who had a far less powerful ship than her
 * Harry Kim. His potential love interests always turn out to be a terrorist, a corpse, or something of that variety. He also dies. Several times.
 * Sorry all, but Lt. Barclay is far and away the quintessential Star Trek woobie. And he puts in one or more appearances in virtually every Star Trek: The Next Generation spin off to further solidify his well-meaning, lovable loser status. Maybe edges dangerously close to the Chew Toy at times.
 * Commodore Matt Decker. He lost his crew to a neutronium Planet Killer, due to a grave but hard-to-avoid error in judgment on his part, and had severe PTSD and survivor's guilt.
 * Really, was there anyone on any of the Star Trek spin-off franchises that didn't fit this trope at one point or another?
 * Quinn Mallory of Sliders got hurt a lot as well. And then his dimension gets taken over, and then he gets fused with another character (for a half Jonas Quinn and half The Nth Doctor situation.)
 * Rembrandt takes over the role in season five, and is much better at it.
 * Hell, Rembrandt in the Pilot. He's on the cusp of his comeback as a famous singer, when (through no fault of his own) he gets sucked into a wormhole while driving by Quinn's house, subsequently crashes and abandons his beloved Cool Car in a nuclear winter universe, gets arrested by commies in a Soviet-ruled universe, and then gets stuck sliding for the rest of the entire series.
 * Boston Legal has Alan Shore. Despite being the funny man 95% of the time, he has had a rough time in the past. His wife's dead and he lost his virginity at age 14, causing complete loss of innocence. Also, he can never seem to form a meaningful relationship. Ever.
 * Alan Shore pales in comparison to Jerry Espenson who never ever has anything go right for him and is constantly the butt of others' jokes.
 * River Tam from Firefly, even if she's also the closest you can come to a heroic Ax Crazy. She's had it rough -- her backstory involved her being enrolled into what was purported to be a school for the exceptionally gifted, but that turned out to be a twisted government/corporate facility whose scientists cut into her brain, stripped out her amygdala, and subjected her to horrifically cruel experiments and brainwashing that rendered her insane because they were seeking to turn her into a weapon. She and her brother Simon received no help whatsoever from her family, and when Simon rescued her from the Academy, both she and Simon were put on the Alliance's most wanted list. She's since had lots of bad guys and others after her, including Alliance Feds, settlers out to burn her at the stake, the Hands of Blue from the Academy, a ruthless Bounty Hunter, and even a government assassin.
 * The woobification hits critical mass in "War Stories," where River has her physical and emotional breakdown once her medication starts to wear off, and she says that while she enjoyed being able to think clearly, she hates it at the same time because she knows she's going to go right back to her chaotic insanity. She's actually despairing at that moment, because she knows she's never going to be fully healed, and that fact is heartbreaking.
 * One of the worst moments comes right in the original pilot, when River wakes up in the infirmary. She stumbles around, calling out to Simon, and looks terribly lost and confused....and then Dobson leaps out of nowhere, shoves a gun in her face, and takes her hostage. While he's got the gun to her head, she starts sobbing helplessly. She's lost, confused, in a strange place, the only person she has to rely on is inexplicably missing, and due to her Psychic Powers, she knows exactly what Dobson is going to do: take her back to that place that MindRaped her for three years. In that context, that brief, helpless, pained sob is just heartbreaking.
 * And in Serenity she hits absolute rock-bottom when she knows that the crew is terrified of her and that she's bringing the Operative down on them all, and then asks Simon to "put a bullet to me. Bullet in the brainpan, squish!" Interspersed with images of her with a gun to her own head. If you're not feeling a little bit of sympathy for the poor girl, you're a soulless person without a soul.
 * Simon (arguably) has it even worse, considering he has to deal with all of the above plus everyone demanding he keep his sister quiet (not to mention giving up his promising career for her). And that's not even mentioning his problems when it comes to Kaylee.
 * What makes it worse is that in "Safe," River blames herself for ruining Simon's life and career. It's bad enough seeing her already so absolutely broken, but then piling on that kind of guilt just makes it even worse for the both of them.
 * And then there's what Kaylee goes through in "Objects in Space," which just makes you want to hug her and tell her it's going to be all right -- as well as throw Jubal Early out the nearest airlock.
 * John Crichton from Farscape. In the very first episode, he's sucked into a wormhole away from everything he's ever known, picked up by bunch of escaping criminals, threatened and roughed up by every one of them, forcibly injected with translator microbes, and blamed for the death of an insane military commander's brother. And this is before the frequent torture, frequent insanity, neural clone living in his head, rape, etc... Luckily, the fans--and his lover--seem to find his fractured mental state endearing.
 * Farscape: One man's descent into madness. With puppets. And snarkiness. Awww.
 * Aeryn Sun. Badass, Hot Amazon, Action Girl...but also undeniably with her life a suckfest. Her parents are both dead, one killed by the other; her childhood friends are all either dead by John's great big ship-explodey plan or hate her guts; the first man she loves she turns in for torture and a slow death and the second man she loves dies heroically of radiation poisoning. Her friends  also died, one as the direct result of her actions. And then there's being tortured horribly. Compared to all this her ridiculous, painful relationship with the   John Crichton is actually a high point rather than the emotionally damaging self-esteem-destroyer it would be otherwise.
 * To put this in context: literally the next episode after that relationship finally works itself around to a good, somewhat healthy, happy place, the kidnapping and horrible torture happens.
 * Stark's another great example of a woobie in Farscape: an enslaved medium in the business of assisting the dying into the afterlife, who also happens to have no manner of luck whatsoever. His woobiedom got particularly blatant during the episodes "Self-Inflicted Wounds" and "Different Destinations"- which seem to have been written exclusively to torture the poor bugger: he gets vomited on by Pilot, menaced by a giant serpent, whined at by Jool, doublecrossed by the Pathfinders, and forced to listen as Zhaan - his lover - dies before he can reach her. And then, during his long period of inconsolable mourning, Crichton's attempt to cheer him up backfires by sending them all back in time, where everyone befriended by the main cast ends up horribly murdered.
 * The Stark-Sikozu hybrid in "Unrealized Realities" and "Prayer." Quite apart from the trauma of being menaced by Scorpius and being forced to watch Chiana/Aeryn die, she sounds like she's just about to burst into tears at any given moment.
 * Between the torture inflicted on him by others, emotional torture he inflicts on himself and his general bad luck, he's pretty much picked "bat-shit insane" over the alternative of remaining constantly aware of how suck his life is. Zhaan was the closest link to a sane and happy reality he had, and as mentioned, she died. And when he does his job of helping people pass on, he does it with such gentleness and dignity that you get the glimpse of what he could be like if he weren't so constantly crapped on by circumstance.
 * Worse still for John is that he's essentially spending the entire series trying to get home, and when he finally manages to return, not only does he realize that the Earth isn't ready to deal with the things that are out there, but that he can't simply go back to living a normal life: He'd be putting Earth at risk, and beyond that, most of the people on Earth don't even seem to want him there. It's not just John, though. Aeryn and John had hopes that they might be able to live together there, and from what we see of the crew's time on earth from their perspective, it initially seems like they could eventually fit in after all. Then you watch "A constellation of Doubt" and see how the world's been reacting when they're not around - almost the entire cast is painted unfairly. Even Rygel seems hurt by how the humans regarded them. The aspect that makes that episode so particularly painful is that, to the savvy viewer, it's a COMPLETELY realistic portrayal of how humans would likely react, so you can't even draw comfort from the fact that it's fiction.
 * It goes without saying that pretty much any character on Farscape is or could be a woobie. (Pretty much only the Scarrans and Grayza excepted.) It's worth pointing out, however, that of all of the woobies, Chiana's the only one who doesn't really get a happy ending.
 * Radu from Space Cases. Fannish opinion is divided on whether he's a well- or poorly-executed example of the trope.
 * Vorenus and Octavia from Rome.
 * Little Mo from Eastenders. A victim of bullying all her life who grows up feeling she is unwanted. Marries a man who not only has a baby with someone else but subjects her to appalling violence and cruelty including rape. She fights back in self-defense and is sent to jail where she is beaten up on a daily basis. When she gets out her psycho ex kidnaps and tries to kill. Then just when she is settled and happily married she is raped (again). She then finds she is pregnant by her rapist which destroys her marriage.
 * Ronnie Mitchell
 * Syed fit this for a while there, although his life has gotten a bit better once he reconciled his faith and his sexuality.
 * Cyrus Lupo from Law and Order certainly has woobpotential. When his girlfriend left him and married his brother, he stopped talking to both of them and went into the French Foreign Legion undercover terror investigation. He came back to the states when said brother died by assisted suicide. Still carries a torch for his sister-in-law too.
 * Law and Order: Criminal Intent: Robert Goren's schizophrenic mother was fertile ground for Arch Enemy Nicole Wallace's taunts. Goren learns that his partner, Alex Eames, once requested a new partner because she was having doubts about his mental stability. He goes undercover in a prison to help his nephew where he is essentially tortured, starved, and dehydrated. His needy alcohol- and gambling-addicted brother Frank Oh, yeah...Goren's mom dies of cancer - but not before.
 * Robbie Boatman from the L&O:CI episode "Scared Crazy" is made entirely of woobie-ness. Then again, he is played by DJ Qualls, a human incarnation of Wall-e if this troper has ever seen one.
 * Elliott Reid in the first three seasons of Scrubs. Gets cut-off from her family's wealth by her father, loses her apartment, loses her car, her moving van with all her stuff in it gets stolen, two failed relationships with J.D. (the second attempt required her to dump her then perfect boyfriend), never gets taken seriously by Dr. Jerks Cox and Kelso...the fourth season is when things finally turn around for her and by the fifth season, she has made attending and is in a better place mentally.
 * Dr. Cox on many occasions. Why do you think "My Screwup" and "My Lunch" (The two episodes where he cries) are the most popular and highest rated of all? Cue goddamn Tear Jerker..
 * Wait, we mention Doctor Cox, Jerkass extraorinare, but not Ted? Let's look over him, shall we? His wife left him for his brother due to his balding and impotence. He has never won a case to date, he's terrified of other attourneys, his suicide attempts fail, his boss treats him like crap, his self esteem is so low he's shocked when any moderately attractive girl knows his name, his best friend, the Janitor, treats him like garbage, there are times when nobody at all notices him, he gets no recognition for the good things he does, and the one time he gets to be with a woman, she's a terminally ill patient whose also a virgin.
 * Probably because Ted is closer to a Chew Toy, especially in the beginning. He gets thrown a bone now and then but is generally played for laughs.
 * And there's a new woobie in town! New intern Lucy, who's innocent, good-natured, adorable, and barely surviving. Also she thinks that if horses could talk, they would be very wise. Guess how well she's holding up so far with the likes of Dr. Cox et al?
 * Supernatural: The show has put Sam and Dean through so much emotional trauma that to list every suicidal/Damsel in Distress/chew toy/broken in the brainpan moment of theirs would take over the entire page. Both brothers have no sense of self-worth (Dean fakes it, and Sam only thinks well of himself when he's high ondemon blood), which sets them up for serious guilt issues with their lifestyle hunting monsters and being manipulated by heaven and hell.
 * Dean is being driven toward utter breakdown by losing his family and friends, really plunging downhill starting when his father sacrificed himself for him. When his brother dies, Dean feels like a failure and sells his soul to bring Sam back. He suffers in hell until angels resurrect him because they want him to become Michael's vessel to kill Lucifer even though doing so will raze the world in the process. Not trusting his brother to say no to Lucifer after Sam's betrayal to face Lilith alone using demon-blood-fueled powers, Dean has so given up that he almost says yes to Michael at the end of season five. Instead, Dean loses his brother to stop the Apocalypse, letting Sam

After that, in season six, Dean gets a safe "apple-pie" life--and then has to give it up before things get worse. Their new enemy turns out to be. Then, in season seven, hungry, shape-changing monsters that can't be killed are loosed on the world. Then Dean has to watch his brother suffer a breakdown
 * Sam has to deal with being the reason his mother and girlfriend died, his brother goes to hell, and the countdown to Apocalypse starts. After losing himself to demon blood addiction in an effort to gain the power to prevent the Apocalypse, he instead sets Lucifer free. Not only does he never get his safe "apple-pie" life, but he learns he's meant to be Lucifier's vessel for destroying humanity.

At the end of season five, Sam goes through with a Self-Sacrifice Scheme to And  season six ends with Sam faltering  In season seven,  he and his brother are facing a new enemy they can't kill and losing nearly all their allies and boltholes. "Liz: Oh, when will death come!?"
 * Bobby is worth a mention, as he had to kill his own wife, and then got stuck in a wheelchair before getting better in season six. Then in season seven, Bobby
 * John had to see his wife die and later gives up his own life to save Dean. His woobiefication kinda depends on whether you see him as a good guy or a Jerkass father who abused one son into running away and the other into having such helplessly low self-esteem that he becomes a Death Seeker
 * Ellen too, considering the fact that she lost her husband (thanks to John), had her daughter run away, got her saloon destroyed by demons, was made to (telepathetically) put a gun to her head and got her very own bit of Survivor Guilt. And then Jo gets
 * On that subject, Jo probably qualifies as well.
 * Castiel and his host Jimmy are Natural Born Woobies too; Castiel has begun to feel human emotions and, been stabbed in the back (figuratively and almost literally) by his Angel brother Uriel and  , Jimmy has had his wife and daughter attacked by demons, his wife possessed by one, and
 * Gabriel could count as well. Not only is he dragged into the fight between Michael, Lucifer and Team Free Will, but he's berated by Dean. He eventually confronts Lucifer and declares that he's fighting for humans and is killed for it.
 * Let's just agree that Supernatural is a bloody breeding ground for woobies.
 * Felix Gaeta from the new Battlestar Galactica is throughly woobified when.
 * Particularily heartbreaking is that ,
 * Sam Anders,, has his own large issues.
 * Likewise Boomer. It made her do a Face Heel Turn.
 * Her duplicate Athena, the one that did a Heel Face Turn, has also been through heck.
 * Chief Tyrol has had quite an interesting story too. In the miniseries he loses 58 of his colleagues to prevent the death of everyone. Then his girlfriend turns out to be a cylon and "dies" in his arms. Then he's arrested under suspicions of being a Cylon himself . Not much time later, a clone of his ex-girlfriend appears and marries another man with whom she has a kid. He ends up marrying a woman he doesn't really love (and once beat to pulp) and has a kid on his own. Later, when his wife discovers, she assaults him with a wrench and tries to commit suicide before . Tyrol then has a long overdue mental breakdown, from which he recovers slowly. Just in time for the Big Reveal, where they all learn . And you wonder why in that scene he decides to wear a sarcastic smirk on his face instead of everyone else's devastated expressions.
 * Don't forget the part about.
 * As well as the part where Yeah.
 * We cannot forget Cally, either. The episode where she  was wall-to-wall Woobification.
 * And how about Admiral Adama? He's.
 * Was this troper the only one sobbing when
 * Kara Thrace. She blames herself for the death of Zac, for starters
 * Seriously? No sympathy for Laura Roslin? After the genocide of the human race she was forced into being the President simply through blind chance - a job she never wanted but had to do for fear of what would happen if someone else was in charge. Oh and she only got the job because all the people above her in the chain of command were killed. Despite having to deal with the life and death decisions of an entire race, her every political move is harshly judged by the press and despite all she does for the survivors, she's voted out of office in favour of the man who actually caused said genocide. Oh, and did I mention that all this happens on the day she discovers she has terminal cancer?
 * Then, in a later flashback, we learn the reason that she even became a politician despite hating politics -
 * To top it all off, in the final episode she, something that wouldn't have been possible without her, but
 * Wait - no Lee? Criminal! A man whose very last scene is
 * What, no love for the original BSG? Apollo, anyone?
 * Seriously, in the very first episode he In the same episode he meets a woman named Serina and they fall in love. In the fifth episode   only for Serina to be   Then, in the sixth episode, he crash lands on a planet and meets a widowed woman and her young son who both   He spends a good portion of that episode unsure of whether or not he'll ever even get off the planet and back to the Galactica. Yeah, this guy's definitely a woobie.
 * Dr. James Wilson from House. Seriously, how much more are they going to make this guy suffer? There is a reason that "Wilson's Heart" is considered a high point of the series.
 * The end of season 8. It Got Worse.
 * Dr. Chase has a small but vocal fanbase that sees him like this. He was a slimy weasel in the first season, but his backstory (alcoholic mum that he took care of at 15 after his dad left; both are now dead) combined with his Character Development (becomes more competent, empathetic and loyal), not to mention constant abuse from House (everyone gets it, but no one else got punched in the face) and the rest of the team walks all over him. This has fans (mostly female) wanting nothing more to hug him better.
 * Lisa Cuddy manages to become one within the space of a single episode, "Joy", or "What Happens When You Singlehandedly Crush A Woman's Dreams of Being A Mother In A Single Sentence".
 * Hell, even House has had more than his fair share of woobie moments. "Three Stories" is probably the most notable of these, where we learn that he got his limp in unbelievably crappy circumstances (a blood clot during a golf game - the doctors thinking that he was just a drug addict and sending him home for three days - having to diagnose himself with muscle death - an unsuccessful operation leaving him in agony - his girlfriend and medical proxy telling the doctors to cut out the thigh muscle, without his consent) and that he had massive self-worth issues even before his infarction.
 * It's a main point in the show to make House suffer. He has had God knows how many near death experiences, got shot, was nearly thrown in the prison, and so on. In the third season, nobody believes him when he says his leg pain is coming back after a treatment that was supposed to cure it. Then Tritter drives him to almost killing himself by overdosing. In the fifth season, his best friend blames him for the death of his girlfriend and leaves him, and this was after he electrocuted his brain to find what's wrong with her. Still, the Word of God says that there is more suffering in store for House...
 * Wilson: "I don't blame you [for Amber's death]. I wanted to. I tried to. I must have reviewed Amber's case file a hundred times to find a way— but it wasn't your fault... We're not okay. Amber was never the reason I was leaving. I didn't want to tell you because— because I was trying like I always do to protect you, which is the problem. You spread misery because you can't feel anything else. You manipulate people because you can't handle any kind of real relationship. And I've enabled it. For years. The games. The binges. The middle-of-the-night phone calls. I should have been the one on the bus not— You should have been alone on the bus. If I've learned anything from Amber it's that I have to take care of myself. We're not friends any more, House. I'm not sure we ever were." The break up is understandably Wilson's act of self-preservation for both himself and House: consider how many terrible things happen due to House's behaviour/the odd times when Wilson is too busy or is unaware that House needs him for something - it usually has a horrific outcome. Wilson's right - House should have either gotten on a bus by himself or called a cab like an adult, or just not have been out getting blitzed on work day night. Wilson also admits that it's no wonder House called him - House expected a ride because Wilson nearly always gives in, so he has to end the enabling now. It's only been two months since his girlfriend was killed, the man's allowed to go through a life crisis.
 * Oh yes. Quite. In Season 5, he's had to deal with, a kid whom he seemed to genuinely like, started , then ends up at the season finale The look on his face as he goes through the door is absolutely haunting.
 * Basically his life fucking sucks.
 * Thirteen in "The Greater Good". There's this bit where Foreman walks into her apartment, starts talking to her, and she cuts him off and goes, "My leg is bleeding." He asks what happens, she tells him that she tripped over the table when she was going for the phone, and then she crowns it by going, "I can't see," and she looks so sad that I just went, "Oh, you poor thing!"
 * Actually, make that Thirteen full stop- I'd swear the writers are trying to either break her, or woobify her.
 * Can't believe no one's mentioned Cameron. Husband dead from thyroid cancer, rejected by House and it seems that every morally bankrupt Patient of the Week was put on the Earth solely for the purpose of destroying her faith in the goodness of humanity.
 * Foreman too. Crappy upbringing, juvenile record, brother in prison, mother with Alzheimer's, religious nut for a dad, nearly dies, becomes a happier person after this, then has House take it all away again, tries to escape from PPTH so he won't become House, finds out it's too late and no one else will hire him, has a girlfriend dying of Huntington's and finds the body of a co-worker who just committed suicide. Not to mention all the smart ass comment he puts up with from House.
 * Taub: His best friend at work commits suicide, he's unable to cope with it, all while his wife nearly divorced him because of his infidelity. Oh, and he had to give up a lucrative practice as a plastic surgeon making half a million dollars per year to become House's bitch for about a quarter of the pay and shit in terms of benefits.
 * Woobie status for Taub is debatable as some believe most of it he brought on himself (except for the friend's suicide all of his issues come from cheating, and he's only shown to have an issue about Kutner immediately after it happened.)
 * I think it can be safe to say that every character on House is miserable, and is a woobie to some extent.
 * Meredith Grey from Grey's Anatomy. She had a crappy childhood, a bitchy Alzheimer's mother, a boyfriend who turns out to have a wife, she almost gets blown up, dies at one point, in season 3 her mother dies, her stepmother dies and her newly-reconciled father becomes abusive. Her woobie status is hotly disputed however, and could be interpreted as a poorly executed woobie (as it is by a lot of fans).
 * Meredith is the Wangsty one. The real woobies (at least in the first two seasons) are George and Izzie. Especially George.
 * George became one again in season five, with the rest of the cast ignoring him for no good reason. He eventually  Poor George.
 * Also Alex Karev he may be a bit of a Jerkass but we find out in season six
 * Heroes. Save the woobie, save the world.
 * Hiro is undoubtedly the Woobie in Heroes. His father thinks he's a failiure, his coworkers think he's either a loser or a lunatic. When he finally gets his friend to believe in him and go on a quest to save the world he fails to protect people twice (The second time being a girl he loved, whose head is brutally ripped open) he then loses his powers, narrowly avoids being dragged back to Japan, his friend gets shot, he sees himself DIE in a fascist future, he has to kill a man to save the world. This is all JUST in Season One. Season two he loses ANOTHER love, finds out his boyhood hero is an omnicidal Ra's Al Ghul style villain, loses his father, is attacked by Peter who he previously considered a friend and learns his failiure to kill Adam Monroe is the reason his father is dead. Season Three he is trapped in a miserable job, has his desire for excitement cause him to lose a deadly formula, sees a dark future where his friend Ando KILLS him, is locked up by Primatech, mind wiped by Arthur, has to see his mother DIE, has his powers taken and is shoved off a building. I'm convinced the whole show is really just one long string of Break the Cutie moments for the poor guy. The fact that he's as close to a plushie in human form as you can get doesn't help.
 * Fredward "Freddie" Benson from iCarly. He's both physically and verbally abused by his "friend" Sam just for being a nerd. The poor kid just doesn't deserve that kind of abuse, dang it. "iMeet Fred" probably throws the most crap his way; his statement about the Fred videos causes Fred videos to stop being made, and as a result, he gets thrown out of about 5 different clubs, gets pushed down twice, and gains the ire of everyone at school and his family. Then, when the gang goes to speak to the guy who makes the Fred videos, Sam "convinces" Freddy to apologize for stating his opinion by beating him over the head with a tennis racket hard enough to break the frame. OF A TENNIS RACKET. I mean, sure it's funny, but think about the pain that would cause in real life. And then it turns out that the maker of Fred videos just stopped making videos as a publicity stunt for both him and iCarly. He wasn't even offended by the statement. So, Freddie went through all the previous pain, specifically the tennis racket beating, for absolutely no reason. And then he gets pushed out of a treehouse and gets jumped on by Sam. Mind you, this is only one episode. And we still haven't gotten into the cruelty of Carly's ship teasing...
 * It started badly in the pilot, and then It Got Worse (his mother wasn't part of the pilot). He gets rejected by Carly, the door gets shut in his face, Sam comes in insults him straight away, Freddie goes to leave, gets manipulated by Carly to stay, gets dragged out of his apartment again by Sam after he made a simple mistake in uploading a video, and even after coming up with the name for the show, is still insulted by everyone, and finally gets rejected by Carly again.
 * The Shield has two characters worthy of the title of "The Woobie": perpetually picked on Detective "Dutch" Wagenbach and perpetually abused, disfigured, and ultimately betrayed Detective Ronnie Gardocki. The two characters ultimately came into collision with each other in the finale, in a ten car trainwreck of Woobieism meets crowning moment of awesomeness, as Dutch arrests Ronnie (who had stood by and watched Vic torment Dutch mercilessly over the course of the series) and goes into overdrive to spell out to Ronnie that Vic had condemned him to a fate of irrevocable damnation, inadvertedly in the process making Ronnie the last Woobie standing of the two men.
 * Shawn Hunter on Boy Meets World, via a buttload of Character Development.
 * Also Eric Matthews, who lost all the sex appeal (and not to mention intelligence) he had in earlier seasons. He had lost the girl he loved to his best friend, had to say goodbye to the young orphan he had bonded with when he was adopted, and was exploited by said best friend for money. He is treated like a joke by everyone (his dad once even called him "corky"), even himself, and was struck by lightning. Twice. In a row. Not to mention that it is highly implied that he has become The Unfavorite to his parents (who at times are hardly shy about it) and his brother in which unlike the other examples, as shown in "Brotherly Shove," it is not Played for Laughs.
 * Sam Tyler on Life On Mars, to the point where John Simm got tired of having to cry nearly every episode during the first season.
 * Mason on Dead Like Me, at least in this troper's mind. Though he may count as a Chew Toy instead (or as well). And Rube, to a degree.
 * Archie Kennedy in the Horatio Hornblower miniseries. In the first four movies, he undergoes all sorts of emotional and physical trauma, first at the hands of the first movie's Big Bad, and later as a prisoner of war, which, despite the series' usually rather relaxed approach to continuity, is enough to give him =PTSD= issues even after he returns to the Navy. By the second installment, he has become a more confident person, only to
 * The torments he experiences canonically are bad enough, but the popular interpretation of what happened with Simpson just makes it worse. Also, he's perpetually in his best friend's shadow, and while he usually seems fine with letting Horatio have all the glory, in "The Duchess and the Devil" he flat-out refuses to go back to the Indefatigable and let everyone talk about "how Horatio Hornblower rescued his shipmate from prison," and insists that Horatio doesn't need him. After trying to starve himself to death.
 * There's also Wellard in the second series. Presumably they needed someone to torture and Archie had gotten too confident and stable to be tormented the way he was in the first. Wellard appears to be a pretty decent, competent and promising young midshipman, if slightly unsure of himself, but then he catches the attention of the mad captain, who starts having him whipped practically every other day, for completely insane reasons. When the captain falls down an open hatchway in the presence of Archie, Horatio and Wellard, there's some confusion as to whether or not one of them pushed him. It's implied that Wellard thinks he did it, but he was too high on laudanum to remember, and for a while he's tormented by the possibility that he might be responsible (which some members of the crew believe as well, and tell him).
 * Niles from Frasier, after the Character Development and before he got together with Daphne.
 * Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue: Starts off as a foulmouthed, alcoholic, Noble Bigot with a Badge, but makes an effort to clean up his act to woo the lovely Sylvia Costas. He succeeds (they're married in Season 3). Then the bad things start. His oldest son, rookie cop Andy, Jr., is killed in the line of duty. Then his prostate cancer scare. Then Sylvia is killed in a courthouse shooting - leaving Andy to care for their toddler son. Then Theo (the aforementioned toddler) has a leukemia scare. In between all that, one partner dies of Soap Opera Disease (a since-discredited heart infection from a nick during dental work) and another is murdered by gangsters . By the time the show ended, and he was married to the way-out-of-his-league Connie (with a newborn daughter) and squad commander, the implausible string of good fortune was handwaved by the fans with a collective "He deserves it."
 * Little House On the Prairie:
 * Mary Ingalls. The tragic blindness could be excused as historically accurate... but not the sandstorm on her wedding day, the miscarriage of one child, the horrible death of another in the same fire that destroyed the school she and her husband ran and just generally having her isolation and helplessness exploited for every last drop of drama. They even devoted an entire episode to raising her hopes about getting her sight back, only to dash them in the last act.
 * Nancy Olesen. At least this is how she presents herself in the Season 8 opener, "The Reincarnation of Nellie." Nancy tells classmates that her bratty behavior is the result of her being abandoned by her mother (whom she "dearly loved") and then leading a hard life in being moved from orphanage to orphanage; her story behind the latter was that she was not liked by the orphanage director. The classic woobie-worthy tale is undone when Charles Ingalls, through a casual conversation with the orphanage director (since he and Caroline were adopting an orphaned brother and sister) finds out that: 1. Her mother had died while giving birth to Nancy, having suffered from a condition today known as pre-eclampsia; and 2. Her increasing behavior problems were behind her constant moves (although in the 1880s, the additional reality was that orphaned children frequently moved, without regard to how well-liked or well-behaved they may have been). In addition to getting revenge for some shenanigans Nancy had pulled in the episode, the town turns out to teach Nancy a tough lesson. Still, Mrs. Olesen -- and her husband, Nels -- are willing to give Nancy the good, stable home she needs.
 * James and Cassandra Cooper Ingalls, the children Charles and Caroline adopt in Season 8. In the 1980-1981 season finale, James (Jason Bateman) and Cassandra (Missy Francis) had witnessed their biological parents' violent death when their wagon spirals out of control down a steep hill, but the emotional ethos comes when Cassandra sees Caroline and begins to cry ... since Caroline strongly resembled her own, sweet mother.
 * Arnie Swenton from The Cleaner, at least to this troper. Especially in the second half of the first season.
 * Some of the characters on Gossip Girl qualify, especially Chuck and Blair (who Serena refers to as the most damaged people she knows - and on this show, that's no mean feat).
 * Chuck's mother is either dead or screwed him over (pick one), his father neglected and emotionally abused him before dying tragically, his uncle's main goal in life is to cause Chuck pain, his best friend either ignores him or insults him, his sister treats him horribly, he got shot, and the love of his life is currently engaged to someone else.
 * Blair's mother neglects and emotionally abuses her (especially in the early seasons), her father moved to another country with a male model, she has low self esteem and bulimia, her best friend has said some unforgivable things to her, she's had three boyfriends who have all at some point cheated on her (one with her aforementioned best friend, one with an interior decorater, and one with his stepmother), she's been pimped out for a hotel, and the love of her life just told her to go marry someone else.
 * These two qualify more as Jerkass Woobie'. While both put through some incredible misery, Chuck and Blair are pretty unsympathetic otherwise. Blair is an Alpha Bitch who treats people like dirt and has a deeply self-centered world view who never really cares about the people she may hurt. Chuck is an incredible snob who doesn't even pretend to be likeable and has no problem voicing his disdain for those less wealthy than Himself. He even tried to rape Jenny in the pilot.
 * Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds. The guy was for Pete's sake.
 * As Reid's actor himself described; "I've been kidnapped three times, held hostage twice, I've watched my best friend kill a man, I've seen a kid commit suicide in front of me, I've been shot and even set on fire," ...and that was only after the first 3 seasons. He's since been
 * Aaron Hotchner qualifies, too. Gideon left, Haley left, he got blowed up pretty good and watched Kate Joyner bleed to death while they were stuck in front of Federal Plaza. And THEN he was  He's bound to have the most EPIC of epic breakdowns. It's only a matter of when he breaks.
 * Not to mention that, since that writing, he's lost his leadership position, he's got higher-ups doing everything they can to destroy his career, and  What else are they going to do to this poor guy?
 * And how about Jason Gideon? By the end of his character run, he's been made to feel personally responsible for the deaths of how many people? One of whom is.
 * If it's possible for a single-episode character to be a Woobie, then Johnny McHale from "True Night" probably is one.
 * There are certainly a few unsubs who at least have moments of being downright piteous. Tobias Henkel, anyone?
 * All of the team members get their turn as woobie as lampshaded by the network in a recent "profilers in peril marathon."
 * Let's not forget some of the would-be victims. Rebecca from "...A Thousand Words" is kidnapped by an unsub who commits suicide, leaving her in the hands of his pregnant wife. When the wife goes into labor, she throws the key Rebecca needs to escape out of her reach. Rebecca helps her give birth to a son, only for the wife to tell her to keep the baby away from her. Then she dies, leaving Rebecca with the newborn. As you might guess, by the time the team finds her, she's understandably freaking out. Or how about the father and daughter in "The Fight" who were abducted by the unsub, who forces the father to fight homeless men (in one case, to the death) or he'll kill them both? Made all the more heartwrenching by the fact that the father regrets not being the best father. Finally, the daughter agrees to leave with the unsub, if only so he'll stop forcing her father into any more fights. And let's not forget the parents of the missing boy in "A Shade Of Gray". They're clearly loving parents who are distraught over their son's disappearance.
 * Liz Lemon of 30 Rock. Probably anyone with her job qualifies to some degree, but between being constantly put-upon at work, her unreasonably terrible love life, general awkwardness, constant abuse from her boss, and other random problems like her roommate messing around with his wife in Liz's bed...

""I was just trying to help her...." "I can keep it...but I don't know if I can live with it.""
 * Kenneth, too, is an extreme Woobie. On top of having a truly terrible job in which he's constantly mistreated by pretty much everybody, he gets a number of subplots that revolve around his suffering. A good example would be "Flu Shot," in which he gets increasingly sicker throughout the episode. Another is "Reunion," in which he manages to accrue some meager scraps of popularity by cracking jokes in the elevator--until Tracy and Jenna become jealous and confront him over it, reducing him to tears and ensuring that he will never try to "upstage" them again. Also, nobody can look utterly miserable quite like Kenneth can; the fact that he smiles most of the time further amplifies the Woobieness when something actually gets to him.
 * Eddie from Desperate Housewives This troper would like nothing more than to hug Eddie.
 * Rita from Dexter, who went from a horribly abusive husband to dating a serial killer (who actually represents an improvement in her taste in men, since he treats her and her kids a lot better).
 * Screw that! Dexter himself is the main woobie of the series. Rita's misfortune has at least been partially due to the choices she has made. Dexter, on the other hand, Serial killer or not, it is hard for me to imagine how anyone wouldn't sympathize with this guy.
 * Some of those examples are just as much about Dexters choices as Rita's misfortunes are about hers.
 * What about Debra? She just cannot catch a break. It doesn't hurt that she becomes more and more likeable throughout the series.
 * Dexter's brother, Brian, is hardly safe from this trope.
 * Laguerta may count as well. First,  Add all this to the unjust treatment she recieves from her captain. Lets hope that she can find some happiness with
 * Christine  absolutely counts.
 * The title character in I Woobius.
 * Pretty much any good guy on 24. Jack Bauer's arguably had it the worst, although that's probably only because he's the only one who's been around the whole time.
 * Tony Almeida on Day 3, who gets one of the cruelest hope spots ever. Even Jack clearly feels horrible for him.
 * Mr. Bean is a Woobie to some, since he appears to be one of the most pathetically lonely characters on television. He doesn't seem to mind though.
 * Summer Glau plays Woobies so very well.
 * First as River Tam.
 * In The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode "Allison from Palmdale," there's Allison Young, a teenage girl kidnapped by SkyNet's army, who is tortured and repeatedly put through a psychologically damaging series of interrogations by the machines, but continues trying to resist and escape at every chance she can get. In the end, it turns out A rather shocking and chilling ending to an episode that already tugs at the heartstrings with everything Allison is going through.
 * Normal Cameron has her woobie moments too, such as in "Mr. Ferguson Is Ill Today" when she tells John that "I can't feel happy." This troper never thought he'd feel sorry for a Terminator, but now he just wants to wrap Cameron in a blanket and tell her she'll be okay.
 * "Self Made Man" makes it even worse. Cameron makes a friend, and then she inadvertently wrecks him, and then he goes away, leaving her with a bag of donuts and no idea what to do with them. And then she  The poor killer deathbot is confused and lonely now.
 * And in "Ourselves Alone" John is shown fixing Cameron's arm. She's sitting there like a girl getting her shots (although her arm has been cut open). What could be cuter than fixing your own killer deathbot?
 * Also, at the end of that episode, she  If you didn't feel bad for her before....
 * And in the same episode, she spends the opening scene talking to a lost bird that has nested in their chimney, before accidentally killing it with a twitch of her fingers. The way she just stares at the bird, it's so....sad.
 * And then in the next episode, after seeing another bird immediately fly away from her, Cameron forelornly declares: "Good bye, Bird. There was a 51% chance I wouldn't have killed you."
 * The woobieifcation of Cameron keeps getting amplified in "Today is the Day", whe she starts being blamed by everyone for  Fortunately, her vindication in the following episode is a definite Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
 * And "Born To Run."
 * It doesn't help that, prior to that scene, we see Cameron walking around with half her face blown off. All I could think of was "Cameron needs bandages! The huggable deathbot needs bandages!"
 * The fact that Summer Glau is cuter than a basket of playful kittens helps as well.
 * Soon after T:SCC was cancelled Summer brought her kittenbasketcuteness to Joss Whedon's show Dollhouse as Washington D.C. Dollhouse programmer Bennett Halverson. When she first appeared in the episodes The Public Eye and The Left Hand she was geeky in glasses but also angry and vengeful toward Caroline for leaving her trapped with her arm beneath causing it to be dead. Then when she came back in the episode Getting Closer we learn in flashbacks  Then she seemed to have achieved a cute Pair the Smart Ones situation with fellow geek Topher. Unfortunately  Woobie transferrence achieved. She makes one last appearance in the series finale Epitaph Two set ten years in the future as
 * Both played straight and subverted in the Lifetime Movie of the Week Deadly Honeymoon, where Summer's character, Lindsey Forrest, has to deal with the death of her husband. Its played straight in that throughout the entire movie, Lindsey is an intensely sympathetic character . However, it is subverted in that Lindsey knows she's getting a lot of sympathy, and moreso, she uses her situation to secure   The movie itself never makes it clear on whether or not Lindsey was actually responsible for her husband's death or if it was an accident, but either way she's clearly guilt-ridden about it, and she's milking the sympathy angle for all its worth even while being clearly traumatized and pained by what happened.
 * A lot of the CSI NY characters fall into this category. Mac Taylor lost his wife on 9/11, and in season three . Also, Danny Messer, who undergoes a spectacular fall from grace in the first season, second season , gets absolutely whomped on in the third season finale, and in fourth season.
 * Lab Tech Adam (Ross) as well, especially for the amount of screen time he gets. He gets very nervous and lacks confidence around authority because, which leads him to often embarrassing himself in front of Mac and Stella, two of the people he respects the most. In the season 3 finale he was   and   Not to mention the guilt he must have   In Green Piece, he's playing a pick-up street hockey game   and after
 * Adam also thinks he is being  and two seasons later still thinks it might happen.
 * Flack has had his fair share as well. Had to arrest his mentor who covered up part of a crime to save his son, gets caught in an explosion and left in a coma in the season 2 cliffhanger, finds out his sister is an alcoholic in season 5,
 * Ned from Pushing Daisies. His mother's dead and his father abandoned him afterwards. Now he can't touch his girlfriend or she'll die.
 * How about Chuck? Her mother died in childbirth, or so she thought. Her boyfriend indirectly killed her dad. She grew up taking care of her shut-in aunts, and when she finally tries to get out and see the world, she's murdered. Now she can't touch her boyfriend or she'll die again.
 * Yes, but Chuck is surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing, while Ned suffers beautifully.
 * Lily and Vivian get their moments, too. Their social phobias and the vacuum that Chuck leaves in their house force them to remain close to each other, a daunting task.
 * They don't all fit the exact characteristics of a true Woobie, but I think we can agree that every main character in that show needs a hug. Yes, even Emerson.
 * Kathleen from Degrassi Junior High/Degrassi High. She has an embarassing alcoholic mother, her father is perpetually off working, she developed anorexia and the only boyfriend we ever see her with abused her.
 * In The Next Generation, Manny. She gets gets kicked out of her house, her dad calls her a whore, her dreams get crushed, a video of her topless gets emailed to everyone in the school and her best friend hates her. And that's only the season five premiere.
 * Most of the cast falls into this trope for some period of time or another. Ellie's full story definitely leads to you thinking she needs a lot more hugs than she gets on the show.
 * Most recently, Adam. In spades.
 * Richard Hammond ("Hamster") on Top Gear is a strange blend of The Woobie and Made of Iron. Of the three presenters, he's the one most capable of showing distress -- but he's also the one most capable of withstanding stressful situations. So if the script calls for someone to, say, try to escape a submerged vehicle, Hammond's the one sitting there making scared eyes at the camera as the car fills up with water.
 * Leaked out disturbingly into real life when he had that car crash.
 * Roy Cropper from Coronation Street. He was revealed to have been neglected as a child, suspected of being a pervert, taken advantage of by a neighbour, subject to bigotry when his girlfriend Hayley was revealed as transgender, had his wedding to Hayley almost ruined by paparazzi, accused of sexual harassment by his foster daughter, almost jailed when he and Hayley kidnapped their foster son to get him away from his abusive father, slipped a date rape drug and tricked into thinking he'd slept with Tracy Barlow just so Tracy could win a bet, almost committed suicide when Hayley left him as a result of Tracy's lies, tricked into thinking he was the father of Tracy's baby and into giving Tracy his life savings, misled by his lawyer into thinking he and Tracy had to get married in order so he would have a legal claim over his child, found out he'd never slept with Tracy and that her daughter wasn't his, bullied by Vince who hit him with a spatula and scalded his face with a hot frying pan and finally found out that Hayley had fathered a son when she was a man. Hayley blamed Roy when her son rejected her and went off to Africa for a year where she developed feelings for someone else.
 * Fox Mulder from The X-Files. Witnessed his sister being abducted by aliens when he was a child, as an adult fails to avert his father's assassination (and later is forced to confront the possibility that his biological father may well be his own worst enemy), virtually all of his close associates die mysteriously or suffer as a result of their connection to him, his hot-yet-intellectual partner shows little interest (or faith) in him through most of the series' run beyond pure, platonic love, and almost without exception everyone is looking the other way every time the real aliens or flying saucers reveal themselves to him. Oh yeah, and . The guy is Woobification Incarnate. Also a prime example of the Butt Monkey and the Chew Toy.
 * Scully also has her moment]. She's been shot, stabbed, abducted by aliens, made infertile, given terminal cancer, and had to see the child she didn't even know she had die just a few days after learning of her existence. She's also had to live through the death of her sister (with a bullet meant for her), the death of her father, MULTIPLE deaths of Mulder himself. Her basic beliefs in both science and her government have been shaken to the core, her career has gone down a black hole, her life irreversibly screwed up, and this isn't even her crusade.
 * And she doesn't even get a desk.
 * Scully's mom also qualifies - whenever we see her, she's usually having to deal with some awful family tragedy.
 * Lt. Nate Fick in the miniseries adaptation of Generation Kill seriously needs a hug after every time he has to deal with his incompetent superiors; seriously, if those eyes of his don't make you want to hug him, you need help. Ray Person goes from zero to woobie in about two seconds when he, quite depressingly and with equally big puppy-dog eyes, admits that he's stopped talking everyone's ears off because he's run out of his energy pills. Worse, in the very next scene, he has a Heroic BSOD and attacks another, much larger Marine, only for the other to BSOD even worse and pound him in the face as a response, prompting Ray to finally break down.
 * Fick's woobiefication doubles over if you've read the actual Fick's book, One Bullet Away, if only because of the incredible professionalism he exhibited during the course of the events in the war, especially when compared with the incompetence of his superiors.
 * Former District Attorney Jessica Devlin of Shark was desperately in need of a hug and a bottle of single malt. She was widowed young, two of her best friends ended up in jail for murder, and one of them tried to take her down with her. Her friend and colleague the mayor backstabbed her at the last minute and cost her the election even after her formerly hated rival Sebastian Stark went to bat for her. Another best friend was murdered after Jessica failed to re-convict her stalker, causing her to have a brief Heroic BSOD. Then she finds out that her by-then close friend Stark was hiding some serious skeletons in his closet, shattering her newfound trust in him. Then her father has a stroke. One can only speculate that, had the series continued, the writers would have come up with exciting new ways to destroy everything she loved.
 * Jake of Jericho, the angsty Troubled but Cute hero with a dark past. Then his dad dies.
 * Heather got slowly woobified in the second season. In season one, she went to help the neighbouring town build windmills to generate power, and when it turns out the town's leader is planning to invade Jericho we hear she's dead. But then she turns up alive in a car crash later and makes it back to Jericho, so everything's good, right? Well, sort of. She's okay, but after a few episodes, we notice the natural optimism and cheerfulness even the goddamn apocalypse hadn't gotten rid of - it's all gone, and she's as depressed and serious as everyone else. Awwwwwww...
 * And then there's Stanley, who struggled for years to run his deceased parents' farm and care for his younger deaf sister only to . All of this only to become a political criminal forced into hiding shortly after.
 * Nick Stokes of CSI. He got BURIED ALIVE. Also, he has been stalked; had a gun pointed at him by a killer; fallen in love with a hooker that died (and then he was a suspect in her death). And he was molested by a babysitter as a child.
 * Greg might also count in certain instances. The episode where he is violently beaten by the gang that had been attacking tourists all night while saving one in the process comes to mind. Then later when he tells Grissom that his parents don't know he's working in the field and how he was way overprotected in his childhood make you want to give the guy a hug. There was also the time the lab exploded while he was in it, through no fault of his own.
 * Dollhouse. Dr. Saunders, the Dollhouse's resident physician, cares more about the Dolls than is healthy for anyone working for an organization like the Dollhouse, and she usually hides in her office because she doesn't want to see the massive scars she got when her gorgeous face . Oh, it probably doesn't help that  and in the future, It Gets Worse. First with the "Was I my best?" and then with the "I have to wait here."
 * Adelle DeWitt: A sad, lonely woman who  In Spy in the House of Love she nearly started crying when she found out who the spy was, and looked ready to do so again when speaking with  . She really was trying to help people, and she ends up basically responsible for the end of the world, trying desperately to protect her for-all-practical-purposes son
 * Paul establishes his Woobie credentials in the scene where he discovers.
 * Not to mention he's basically lost his job as a federal agent and that for a solid portion of his life he's been under surveillance by the organization he's supposed to be investigating.
 * What about Echo? Especially in "True Believer". You find yourself asking "How many times is that poor girl going to get clunked in the head?"
 * Victor, at least partially due to being Mr. Fanservice. "I did something bad." "What did you do?" "They won't tell me."
 * Finding out he's in the dollhouse to get a cure for his PTSD doesn't hurt.
 * Sierra, after, the repressed memories of it, and Nolan, the bastard who   Poor thing.
 * And now Topher, a man so lonely.
 * You mean this troper's ideal girlfriend who'll never exist ever? :(
 * For this troper watching Topher explaining to Ivy how his imprint on Echo is going to help a young girl, is really sad to watch. He's actually feeling truly good about his work, not in a god-complex way but that he actually helped someone, he's bonding with Ivy... and then he has to go imprint Victor with Dominic, who he put in the attic. Ouch.
 * Not to mention he seems to have deliberately programmed  to hate him due to his guilt about.
 * Just try watching Epitaph One. "I know what I know, I know what I know, I know what I know..."
 * And then it gets worse in Epitaph Two, with his
 * And then 2X04 "Belonging."

"Gaius > Merlin: Hey, Kid. How's your mind today? Not blown? Well, let me help. The last Dragonlore, Balinor, he's your father.""
 * And then in 2x11, "Getting Closer"., giving him a Heroic BSOD.
 * Even Dominic is getting there, though in his case it's almost more of an Alas, Poor Scrappy thing: his behavior in "Echos" hinted at Hidden Depths, but most fans' sympathy seems driven by horrified reactions to what's happened to him in his last two appearances.
 * The scene in Epitaph One where he demands of Adelle why she would expect him to help her, after what she did, was plenty sympathy inducing.
 * Not to mention the rest of the Dolls. On the one hand, they're memory wiped, have no self-awareness, are pimped out on a regular basis, and there's nothing they can do to fight back. On the other hand, Dolls are implied to mostly be volunteers.
 * For a given value of "volunteers," perhaps. Echo chose to become a Doll, but only because the Dollhouse let her choose between that or something even worse (either death or lifetime in prison for something she didn't do, presumably). Like one of the people interviewed in episode 1x06 said, "the only way you'd sign up to be a slave is if you are one already." The dollhouse had spent two years looking for Caroline, they were never going to let her go.
 * And what about Mellie/? She was, and in "Needs" we see that her motivation comes from . Not to mention that by the end of the series
 * Seriously, is there longterm character on this show that isn't a woobie?
 * No.
 * Well...two words: Joss Whedon
 * This show is so sad, that even one-episode characters we never see again can be woobies:
 * The internet mogul who rents out a doll to relive his life with the woman he loved, who died tragically just before he became the man she wanted him to be. Being played by Patton Oswalt helps.
 * This troper's heart hurt for Margaret in 1x10. "I should've stayed dead." * tear*
 * Susan. A ten year old girl who was pimped out by her dead mothers boyfriend, who hates herself for having needed help to escape and can't feel safe while talking to an adult if she doesn't have a knife on her. Poor thing.
 * The series should probably be renamed Woobiehouse; somehow, they managed to make Bennett, an Axe Crazy Cold-Blooded Torture Technician, into a woobie...in the course of a single episode.
 * Willie Loomis in both the original 60s and 70s Dark Shadows series and the 1991 "revival" series. Let's face it, even though Willie started out as a drunk, a thief, a womanizer, and a con-man he really does change post-vamp bite. Still, his life sucks! He gets beaten on a regular basis, is none too bright, and is basically a mildly upgraded Renfield in that he knows his master is wrong but does what he's told anyway. The girl he likes thinks of him only as a friend and is tormented by the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire. The boy then gets shot five times, put into a coma, wakes up in a loony bin, and is crazy until the character is written out of the show, all the while staring at you with those big, hurt puppy dog eyes and trying to be The Hero. If you count the movie "House of Dark Shadows", Willie ends up the Accidental Hero, but Willie dies in the end anyway, another victim of Supernatural Soap Opera. A different character takes the credit for killing the vampire and saving the girl. In the words of Dr. Horrible: "Balls."
 * Oz. Father Ray Makkuda, sent to Oz because he questioned the conservative views of his powerful church patron, is clearly out of his depth in the maximum security prison, but tries his best anyway.
 * What about Jeremiah Cloutier (Luke Perry)? He probably went through more suffering and torture than any character in the history of the show which is saying something.
 * Cloutier is one of the biggest woobies in TV history. Beecher and Peter Schibetta were definite Woobies as well.
 * David on Roseanne. Comes in as Darlene's boyfriend (and brother of Becky's boyfriend), stays on as part of the family. The Connors are a loud, brash, emotional family who pick on one another to an extent that could be considered terrible if it wasn't for the fact that they all genuinely love each other. David is a meek, shy little boy who grows up to be a meek, shy little man. He generally just takes the teasing (and occasional indentured servitude) with a timid "okay," prompting Roseanne to comment at least once that she doesn't know how to talk to a kid who won't yell back. Things go swooping into woobie territory when we meet his mother, a horrible, verbally abusive woman who calls him a worthless bastard and manipulates him to be there to help her own emotionally crippling neediness. Oh, and he spends a whole season being constantly bullied by not just his jerky older brother, but middle school student DJ. The boy needs hugs. Constantly.
 * Tony DiNozzo on NCIS manages to be The Woobie Jerk Jock Handsome Lech with a combination of depressing/abusive childhood, inadequacy issues and getting hit on the head a lot, and not just when Gibbs dishes out a Dope Slap. Also, he had the plague. That's right, the plague. Not to mention being drugged, abducted, chained to a serial killer, framed for murder/accused of murder multiple times, falling in love undercover (resulting in a vicious, soul-destroying break-up), having his partner murdered so close to him her blood sprayed across his face, having his car blown up (twice), inheriting a debt, and there is more.
 * Ziva as well, though she qualifies as more of a stoic woobie. Having already pretty much given up on idealism after having lost who knows how many friends  to the conflict in Israel, she , her partner  , her father doesn't give a crap about her, and she's been tortured horribly only to come back to a world that does not trust her. Talk about needing a hug from...
 * Abby; she's been attacked by Chip, stalked by an ex-boyfriend, shot at, lost her best friend, and her Dad. Not to mention, shes absolutely adorable!
 * Between her usually upbeat attitude, and the willingness of the other characters to do pretty much anything for her, it can be hard to see her as really needing a hug from the audience. She's usually the one giving them to other characters.
 * Even Ducky has a few woobie moments. There's "Broken Bird", which gives us some sad backstory, and then in a recent episode,  Am I the only one who wanted to give him a hug?
 * Kings has a pretty tiny fandom for various reasons, but the fandom that does exist is almost unanimously on Team Jack because of this trope. He is not the friendliest guy, but fans tend to excuse this because seriously, nothing good ever happens to him.
 * If you weren't on the "Jack is a Woobie" bandwagon before the finale, well, you'll be there afterward, when
 * Henry from Harper's Island. His  and what does he say?   This troper just wanted to give him a big hug.
 * While it is sad that he is  From that perspective everyone in the series except for Henry is The Woobie.
 * Merlin on the BBC's Merlin, who has adorably enormous ears and is constantly (and increasingly affectionately) abused by Prince Arthur. General woobieness turns massive when  or when   or, really, any time Merlin tries to.
 * I always had a soft spot for Merlin whenever someone (usually Uther or Arthur) told him that he's a great asset against magic. The scene when Arthur said that those who use magic are evil and dangerous and thanking Merlin for helping him see it absolutely tears this Troper up at the look on Merlin's face and the way he replies that he's glad to help.
 * Been forced to help keep the status quo wherein he cannot use magic multiple times, watched his friend, his mother, and his father figure  all in one episode, watched an old , possessed by an ancient sorcerer, been on the run from various armies and kings, (Correctly) accused of witchcraft and sentenced to death, watched his first love   been forced to   and shortly afterward watch   This is on top of all the guilt he must feel for the people of Camelot who are   Piled onto all of this, he's subserviant to someone who would likely turn him in for practicing witchcraft and be executed.
 * "'Sit around all day and do nothing?' You think I sit around all day and do nothing? I haven't had a chance to sit around all day and do nothing since the day I arrived in Camelot. I'm too busy running after Arthur. 'Merlin, do this, Merlin do that!' And if I'm not running after Arthur, I'm doing chores for you. And if I'm not doing that then I'm fulfilling my destiny. Do you know how many times I've saved Arthur's life? I've lost count. And does anyone thank me? No. I've fought griffins, witches, bandits, I've been punched, poisoned, pelted with fruit, and all the while I have to hide who I really am because if anyone finds out, Uther will have me executed. Sometimes I feel like I'm being pulled in so many directions at once, I don't know which way to turn!"
 * A truly heart wrenching scene was when seconds after his father's death, Merlin had to put a hand to his mouth to muffle his violent sobbing and vehemently wipe his tear flowing eyes inorder to hide the extend of his grief from his own friend, from whom he had to hide their father son relation. Imagine it, the boy's father just died and he can't even express the grief! Colin Morgan was so convincingly anguished in this scene that this trooper herself died inside.
 * The Torch Online's Facebook-style recap of episode 2x13. even made a joke out of his constant misfortunes.

"Leonard: When I was ten years old, I built a hugging machine..."
 * As a true testament to his woobie-tude, look at the length of this section. Most every fandom that goes for six (now seven) bullets or more changes focus, adding one character per bullet. We've been going on about Merlin this entire time. That alone should tell you something.
 * And to make his woobie-ness even more potent, he can't even let anyone know he is a woobie! He has to just smile like's it all okay and listen to Arthur bemoan all his troubles with a sympathetic expression on his face! Most people would be like  Merlin smiles but his eyes... His eyes. It makes you want to hold him close and never let go.
 * Leonard from The Big Bang Theory, especially in the episode where his mother visits him.

"Leonard: My father used to borrow it."
 * This troper hasn't seen much of The Big Bang Theory but that quote just made her go "Awwwwww..."
 * I hope they come back here, because here is a second part to that quote.

"Erin:I've never had a beef with anyone. I've like every single person I've ever met!"
 * Ned from Pushing Daisies, mentioned above, used a hugging machine in one episode. He and Leonard should start a support group.
 * Come to think of it, this trope has pretty much been Johnny Galecki's entire career thus far.
 * Despite his usually being impenetrably insensitive, Sheldon gets a few woobie moments. One happens when we discover his parents made him hate the sound of fighting when Leonard and Penny's quarreling sends him into an emotional meltdown.
 * The opener of series 3, when Sheldon finds out that his dreams and possibly his entire professional career have been trashed by his best friend. Some of us did think that was a Big Deal, actually.
 * Although in season 4, Sheldon does the same thing to Howard by telling the FBI about his crashing the Mars rover, and it seems that this actually HAS pushed Howard's career back a few years whereas Sheldon's dreams may have been 'trashed' in the arctic, but his career was not. It was embarrassing to him because HE emailed the entire faculty to tell them he proved string theory - but this didn't actually alter his reputation any because that sort of thing is common from Sheldon. It also had no apparent influence on his career, because as far as the REST of the scientific community knows, he simply didn't have any usable results from his trip. Therefore his career wasn't trashed, and the dreams were short-term dreams about what he hoped from his trip to the arctic; he continues to study and pursue scientific results about string theory so it's hardly as though he's actually had his life destroyed in any manner. Of course what Sheldon did to Howard was an accident, which is why it's easy for the audience to forgive him (and is why Howard ends up forgiving him too, even though it understandably took him some time to do so), and I don't hold it against Sheldon because he has demonstrated time and again that he can't keep secrets and Howard probably should have thought of that before putting him as a reference. But Sheldon's career and dreams weren't ACTUALLY hindered by what happened in the arctic, the issue was solely a personal issue for him which is where the sympathy goes. Making it out as if this is anything but a hurtful incident between friends is against everything we actually get from the show, where it never comes up again after Leonard and the others apologize, whereas what happened with Howard actually had direct negative impact upon his professional life.
 * Amy spent most of her life as a pariah, and the main characters are the only friends she's ever had. When Bernadette and Penny go shopping without her, she decides that they don't like her anymore and compares herself to a brain tumor.
 * Bones has baby-faced psychologist Sweets. He was adopted, suffered abuse in foster care that left him with whip scars on his back, and his birth mother is a circus person whom he's never met but tried in vain to get in contact with. His loving adoptive parents died not long before he came into the show. He was sure for a while that he was hated and that everyone found him annoying until Cam reassured him that it wasn't true with the fact that every character had, at some point, came to him for advice.
 * There's also Zack. He was the "baby" of the team until he was manipulated by cannibilistic serial killer Gormogon into doing his dirty work, going so far as to stage an explosion (in which he severely injures himself in an attempt to keep best friend Hodgins safe), so Gormogon could liberate his "masterpiece" from the Jeffersonian. He also claims to have killed someone under Gormogon's command, (although it's revealed that he didn't actually, he just said it to avoid going to jail) and is sent to an asylum. He then escapes said asylum to help his friends out with a case and willingly goes back when it's over. And his friends still love him. How's that for friendship loyalty, eh?
 * This troper also believes Hodgins counts, if only for a few episodes. He has troubles with his fiancÃ©e which inevitably leads to their breakup, which is difficult as he has to see her every single day at work. His best friend is institutionalised, partly because of his paranoid ramblings of cospiracy theories. He begins to "hate everybody" and has a session with Sweets where he assumes he'd have to be heavily medicated and undergo an endless stream of therapy. He is reassured that he's handling everything in his life well and will start to feel better.
 * Donna on The West Wing, loyal and faithful to her boss Josh Lyman - and desperately in love with him, to the point where everyone else can see it except for the selfish bastard himself. Every time he neglects to treat her well in the first several seasons, this Troper's heart dies just a little bit. Then Josh himself becomes the Woobie . The more independent she gets, though, the less this feeling occurs, so that when , it's almost an anticlimax. So to speak.
 * Josh Lyman may be the woobiest woobie on the small screen whose woobiness was achieved without supernatural or sci-fi causes. He has a record for losing loved ones, which has given him a major Guilt Complex. His misfortunes peak when he  Due to this,   because he masks his guilt and anxiety dying by acting perpetually unaffected by his Chew Toy status. He also gets landed in a Masochism Tango that he can't seem to get rid of, at the same time as he starts to fall in love with his assistant (see above), who he can't get get together with because of conflict of interest. However, even his track record isn't what makes him so woobieish — it's the fact that all of this has left him frantically paranoid about something happening to one of his friends to point of being visibly agonized by every misfortune that befalls them. In Donna's words: "He goes through every day worrying someone he likes is going to die and it's gonna be his fault. What do you think makes him walk so fast?"
 * Mac from Veronica Mars. Even before she started dating Beaver.
 * And Logan! Abusive Dad, dead ex-girlfriend, dead mom...
 * Veronica herself is pretty woobie-ish. Dead best friend, outcast by her school, alcoholic mom leaves, and then she's raped... this is just the backstory.
 * Subverted in the case of He receives so much crap from, and is very Moe and has the Puppy Dog Eyes to end all Puppy Dog Eyes... oh yeah, he's a mass murderer, btw. He's still rather pitiful though.
 * This isn't a popular fandom opinion, but... dammit, Duncan needs a hug. As if his sister's murder isn't enough, Seriously, am I the only one who feels sorry for him?
 * Adrian Monk. His wife died in a horrifying and violent fashion, propelling his already severe OCD to new heights. Whenever it seems like he might be getting better, something happens to traumatize him further and make his condition as bad as it ever was.
 * Whose Line Is It Anyway? gave us Colin. No, really.
 * It's not so hard to believe when you realize how many bald jokes he's had to endure over the years.
 * Dads Army - Private Charles Godfrey, he's one of those old characters you just want to protect, this is expecially clear in the Episode "Branded"
 * Captain Mainwaring counts as well: he's trapped in a loveless marriage with an abusive wife, and equally trapped in Walmington-on-Sea by having hit the glass ceiling at the Bank. It's no wonder he's so fervent about his Home Guard duties; it's the only thing that truely makes him happy.
 * In The Office (US Version), Michael and Jim both have Woobie-ish qualities (Jim moreso during his pining for Pam in the early series), but Toby full-out demonstrates it. He's already going through a divorce when he was introduced, and Michael's horrible treatment of him sometimes generates more grief for Toby than it does laughs at the absurdity of Michael's grudge. When Dwight takes his robe in the Season 3 Christmas episode and when Michael bars him from the beach in the beach episode are both extreme Woobie moments for Toby. Plus there's  Even beyond that, Toby seems to wind up in a variety of awkward/horrible situations such as his accident after arriving in Costa Rica or trying hard to get the unicorn princess doll for his daughter and winding up with the African American variety. It is averted from time to time with Michael's plots against Toby backfiring, Toby receiving sudden fortunes (and being shown with hot girlfriends in two episodes) or Pam doing something nice for Toby. He cements his self-awareness of his own Woobie status in the episode featuring Cici's Christening, where he is hesitant to go into the Church, and when he finally does, approaches the empty pulpit and asks "Why are you always picking on me?"
 * Starting from the end of season 5, Erin. Her polite, and enthusiastic personality- coupled with a big inferiority complex and extreme naÃ¯vetÃ©- often results in her being taken advantage of. In several online deleted scenes, she is shown yelled at by Michael simply for apologizing to him, as well as being rejected in her attempts to befriend her fellow workers . She's such an innocent, sweet addition to an otherwise sarcastic cast, this troper is begging her character not to result in a Break the Cutie moment.

"Hippie!Barney:...But...I love you. Shannon:...But he has a boat."
 * In Koi Pond where everyone has to write on a board what about themselves they don't want anyone else in the office to make fun of, Erin wrote being an orphan.
 * Also, undoubtedly, the extent of Andy's Christmas gifts on her (as shown by a noticeably painful facial gash).
 * Andy in Garden Party when he learn he is The Unfavorite to his parents who prefer his younger brother Walter. His father tells him outright that he can't compare to his more successful brother because he is just an office manager of a paper company in Scranton.
 * Jeremy from Army Wives
 * Matthew in One Life to Live is closing in fast on Mary Ingalls' record. Every time the writers want to bring Bo and Nora together, something bad happens to him; first there were the paternity issues, then he lost several loved ones as a young child, then his childhood home burned down, and finally he was paralyzed from the waist down in a car crash and has had the possibility of a miracle cure repeatedly dangled in front of him and yanked away at the last second. And he's still only 15.
 * Radar, on |M*A*S*H. Never more so than when
 * Really, though, by the end of the series pretty much everyone working at the 4077th is a Woobie. Not necessarily because of their childhoods (most of them, actually, ranged from average to idyllic), but because they were apparently stuck in a time loop in which 3 years of a war were magically stretched into a whopping 11 traumatic and scarring years. Why the heck don't any of them just board one of those helicopters and get the heck out of there? Could the consequences be that much worse than that job?
 * Even Frank "Ferret Face" Burns goes from Butt Monkey to Jerkass Woobie. Viewers may have spent most of his tenure laughing at the abuse he so richly deserved, but was anyone else tempted to reach for the tissues at the look on his face as Margaret's helicopter disappeared into the distance?
 * FlashForward has its woobie in the form of Agent Demetri Noh. While he's not much on quantity of bad things happening too him, the fact that he's faced with the possibility of dying in the next six months, and then  have made his character pretty woobilicious.
 * Nobuta from the Nobuta wo Produce drama definately needs a few hugs, poor dear. As a little girl, she barely managed to muster up enough courage to call the man her mother married "Otousan" and was told by the guy that he wasn't really her dad. Around the same time, her doll was thrown in the trash by classmates and they graffittied her shirt to say "Little Tick." Throughout her school years, she gets miserably bullied by other classmates to the point where she planned to commit suicide by hanging herself from a tree - which gets ripped out of the ground before she gets there. She gets pushed around, hosed with cold water, has her lunch pushed to the floor and
 * The boys also get their share of Woobie moments too: Akira is constantly badgered by his violent father to succeed the company, while the boy just wants to live out his youth years in peace. He obviously is not the company-president type, but constantly gets into physical fights over it. He also has to deal with having
 * Shuji resorts to his "Game" because he truly cares about people and fears being alone more than anything else.
 * Christopher and Erin on Titus both fit.
 * Ted Schmidt from the American version of Queer as Folk certainly qualifies as a woobie. From the very beginning of the series, he is shown to have very poor self-esteem. In episode 3, he fell into a drug-induced coma. He later got fired from his job in season 2. He lost his next job, almost went to prison, and got addicted to crystal meth in season 3. He hit rock bottom when he saw a video of himself getting gangbanged while he was out of it. This isn't even mentioning all the horrible experiences he had with trying to find a partner! The actor has even said that he fell into a depression while playing this character! Fortunately, things started going better for him in the end. I don't know how much more hardship I could stand to see the poor guy go through!
 * Henry Foss from Sanctuary. He seems to nearly always be either dealing with some internal turmoil, struggling to prove himself to the other characters, or dealing with death/impending doom/severe injuries inflicted on those he is close to.
 * Allo Allo has two surprising woobies, one is a gay Nazi and the other is a Gestapo agent, yes thats right, Godwin's Law notwithstanding, people who watch this show do feel sorry for Lt. Gruber and Agent von Smallhausen.
 * Friends has Ross Geller, who is the "divorce" guy in the group. He is possibly the worst when it comes to relationships, sometimes, these relationships fail because of the actions of his friends, sometimes because of his own actions. Nonetheless, you can't help but feel a little bit sorry for him most of the time. The only reason he isn't any woobier is because he finally does hook up with the girl he has loved since the 9th grade by the end of the series.
 * All of them are a bit woobie-ish in their own ways (I can't think of any for Joey, feel free to add if you do):
 * Monica was (and still is) the Unfavourite to her parents simply for being second-born and was also obese when she was young. She then becomes a Woobie again at one point during work, when the job she's dreamed of doing for years is ruined because the staff all hate and bully her.
 * Chandler is a Sad Clown who uses humour as a defence and has very low self esteem, which stems from his Amazingly Embarassing Parents divorce when he was younger.
 * Rachel is a Woobie at the start of the show, when she's a waitress and is very low on income, a huge change to the life she had before. It's also implied that she never felt that she was good at anything during a fight with Ross.
 * Pheobe is the woobiest of all of them, with her Trauma Conga Line past: she grew up very poor (she mentions once that on Christmas, her stepdad would "sell his blood to buy us food"), her drug-dealer mother killed herself, she lived as a homeless for a lot of her life and then found out that her real mother had given her away. No wonder she's so messed up...
 * How about Gunther? Poor guy's stuck in a dead end job at Central Perk and harboring a huge crush on Rachel for at least 9 years that's completely unreciprocated, and it's implied he doesn't really have that many friends either.
 * True Blood Godric, 2000 year old vampire with severe depression. He was only briefly on the show, but during his run he tries to fix problems between the vampires and the Fellowship of the Sun. The Fellowship ends up sending a suicide bomber to his home, killing many of his guests and destroying the property. The other vampires blame him for the disaster and he gets fired from his position as area Sheriff. He then commits suicide  He also has the appearance of a 15-year-old boy, which helps the Woobification.
 * Eric becomes the Woobie after Godric ,Eric's maker, commits suicide. Many Manly Tears were shed.
 * Eric gets a double whammy as in the new season  not to mention that the first time we see him after this happens is him walking along the road shirtless and confused.
 * Jason Stackhouse may qualify. In the first season,  He's blamed for these murders, despite being too stupid to commit them. Later one, he falls for   Don't forget, he was orphaned as a young kid, got beat up regularly as a kid for defending his little sister, and believed that   for over a year.
 * How can you forget the leading trio of Fringe? Let's see:
 * We have Olivia who gets betrayed by her lover and then learns that she was (without any memory) cruely experimented on as a child to become savior of the world in the midst of war between realties.
 * Peter whose dad leaves him at 13 and is unaware that.
 * And the most Woobieful of the lot, Walter Bishop, a brain-damaged Mad Scientist who spent 17 years in a mental institution and is now unable to function in society; he retains his prodigious intelligence but can't even go to the store without getting lost, and he's haunted by the knowledge that he's done terrible things in the past but can't remember what they were.
 * Astrid seems fine though.
 * Emily Fitch from Skins, seriously whenever something bad happens to her, it's like watching an adorable puppy get kicked in the face. Certain fans have also expressed feelings of wanting to go into their televisions and save Cassie and Chris.
 * Well, then what about Freddie? He's stuck with a jerkass best friend who constantly tries to and succeeds in getting it on with the girl he's in love with, his mom commited suicide, he gets his hiding place stripped away by his egotistical sister and just as he is finally coming to terms with his messed-up family, his best friend ruins his sisters' career. Then runs off with the girl Freddie loves...and once he finally starts getting it on with Effy, it turns out she suffers from depression, the same mental illness that drove his mother to commit suicide. As if that's not enough, he get's . This troper hopes there is a big, fluffy blanket waiting for him.
 * Bubbles from The Wire. His life as a homeless heroin addict in the first three seasons was sad enough, but he really hits rock bottom in the fourth, when
 * Let's not forget Randy Wagstaff who's storyline is, along with Bubbles', the biggest Tear Jerker of the entire series. And he's only 13-14 years old.
 * Simon Bellamy from Misfits is pure Woobie material, and has been bullied and victimised all his life. Even the other young offenders think he's a freak, and Nathan in particular ridicules him without mercy. While his Butt Monkey status is Played for Laughs on occasion, the overall effect is one of major Woobification, particularly given some of the traumatising things that happen to him over the series.
 * Simon is a somewhat polarising character in the Misfits fandom. Some see him as an adorable, tortured uber-woobie who does nothing to deserve the abuse he gets, others think he's foaming-at-the-mouth crazy and totally unsympathetic. In either case, though, he certainly does go through hell and really ought to qualify as something of a woobie by most people's estimations.
 * Funnily enough, Nathan himself arguably achieves Woobie status in the end, despite starting out as a - thoroughly deserving - Chew Toy. Basically, it's funny and somewhat gratifying when he gets bashed around a bit, humiliated or otherwise punished for being a prize Jerkass. But it's hard not to feel some sympathy when genuinely unpleasant stuff happens to him, such as being  He may be a jerk at times, but talk about Disproportionate Retribution...
 * James from All Creatures Great and Small, particularly because whenever he's humiliated or insulted he's just too damn polite to make a fuss over it. His politeness gets him into trouble in other situations too, like when he just can't refuse that extra drink or that plate of pigs fat that's obviously going to have him retching in the bushes later. Poor James.
 * Willie on V. He was a minor part of the original miniseries and The Final Battle, but was so popular with fans they made him a regular on the subsequent television series. If memory serves, he's the first of the Visitors to join the Resistance, he speaks broken English ("English is not well to me. I learned Arabic for going there.") and . He's got a perpetual hangdog look and in the series he wears a bow tie!
 * You'd never believe he's Freddy Krueger's alter-ego.
 * Cally of Blakes Seven is pure woobieness. Banished from her planet by her own people forcing her to be alone among humans, then all her guerilla companions are wiped out and she becomes the only telepath on a ship with a crew of criminals, misfits and jerkasses, and finally . Woobie if I ever saw one.
 * What about Vila? My poor, innocent Vila. He really does need a hug. I WANT TO HUG HIM, DAMMIT! We first meet him cowering in a prison cell, cleary hiding from most of the other criminals - and it just goes downhill from there.
 * Cowering?! He was PICKING BLAKE'S POCKETS!! He was neither hiding nor the least bit frightened...in fact, he was trying to frighten Blake with his "I'm not quite right in the head" act. Vila wasn't nearly as much of Woobie on the show that he became later in the fanfic--he was a lying, cheating con artist who was FAR from "innocent." That said, though...he's basically good-hearted and (yes) adorable; and although his real "Woobie-making" moment  doesn't come until late in the series, it is so truly shocking and awful that you want to hug him...and never, ever stop.
 * Ariel Dubois has had a lot to deal with in two episodes in a row: first she  And then
 * Anybody else think Kurt from Glee fits this trope? He's  Every episode, this Troper just wants to hold him and say "There, there... it'll be all right..."
 * Then comes season 2: his dad has, there's the  Not to mention his inability to find someone who reciprocates his feelings. Well, until   Even people who hate   were happy that at least something good finally happened to Kurt.
 * Artie fits too, yes? You know coz he's paralyzed from the waist down, the entire thing with Tina, and how he really wishes he to be a dancer as seen in "Dream On" I just want to hug him every time I see him not singing like he's a stud.
 * Coach Bieste. She's a female football coach who has had to deal with ridicule her whole life because of her profession, looks and voice. Many agree that her crying in 'Auditions' over the bullying from Sue and Will was heartbreaking. She's a sweetie and can't help looking/sounding as gruff as she does. She's become even more of a woobie by the end of 'Never Been Kissed'.
 * Arguably, almost every character has had flashes of being the woobie.
 * Tina, who in season 1, thought she needed to fake a stutter to fit in.
 * Quinn, who dealt with a pregnancy in season 1, and then the revelation of the past she ran away from.
 * Puck, when he talked about what really went down while he was in juvie.
 * Blaine, who recently was shown to have things worse than Kurt in that
 * Emma, when she finally
 * Sue, when
 * Will, when he has to choose between
 * Rachel, in Born This Way, when everyone is giving her grief about her decision to  She eventually changes her mind.
 * Brittany, who while a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander, is a sweet girl. She  because he called her stupid. Turns out, he was the only one in the school who'd never called her that.
 * Santana, dealing with
 * Sam, when, in Rumours, it was revealed that  It comes to a head when Kurt and Quinn are caught
 * Dave, in the Prom episode, when he finally
 * Also in the episode On My Way, when he
 * Many a coming of age story has a woobie hero. A reason for that is that one of the chief things many remember about being a teenager is feeling themselves to be a woobie.
 * The Defendent on one episode of the show Justice is this Trope incarnate. When the defendent, Jenny Marshall, first appears, she's a happy honor student with no care in the world. Then the kid she babysits dies climbing a bookcase, she gets interrogated into falsely confessing, is repeatedly demonized especially when she tries to call the father, is forced to watch a kid she babysat lie on the stand (he was basically under the impression that it would appease his mom, and not trying to be evil), and even when she's accuited the kid's dad still tries to demonize her, thus causing her to break down crying. Honestly, she just goes through so much that you just want to hug her.
 * From Lie to Me, Eli Loker. He works so hard for Lightman's approval and it always seems as though Lightman doesn't quite like or respect him. He implies that he was bullied a lot as a kid for being a little different, and he uses his radical honesty and humour to cover his sadness. In the episode Sweet Sixteen, after the detonation of the car bomb in the opening, he looks so confused and so utterly helpless that this troper just wanted to hold him until he got better.
 * Walter on Maude. Think about it, he was an alcoholic and he lost his business, leading to a serious depression and a suicide attempt. After that he wanted to stay locked up in a mental institution because it made life easier. His life almost always seemd to kick him in the ass.
 * Lina Warbler in The Class. In 19 episodes, her boyfriend is sleeping with another woman in her own bed, her feet get run over by a car, and she starts dating a guy who has been married for five years. It doesn't help that she is possibly this show's living incarnation of the Woobie.
 * Ray Fiske from Damages veers into Woobie-ness towards the end of the first season, mostly because Zeljko Ivanek is so good at looking miserable and weighed down with guilt.
 * Michael Costello from Season 8 of Project Runway. Starting after his first win, half of the other contestants spontaneously became a Hate Club for him, for no apparent reason. As of episode 5, the only response he gets for winning the challenge is a series of scowls from everyone in the room and total, cold, stony silence.
 * Arrested Development's Buster, as well as Gob everytime he lets his emotional wall down.
 * Although a lot of the time Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother appears carefree and brimming with confidence, he is in actuality quite a fragile person with more than a few issues, particularly abandonment ones. He used to be an idealistic hippie who wanted to join the Peace Corps with the love of his life Shannon...until she cheated on him and left him for a richer more successful guy.

"Jake Anderson (calling his mom after his sister's death): She's in a better place now, mom. She finally beautiful now! She can run!"
 * This crushed him and prompted him to 'suit up' for the first time, building thick emotional walls around himself. We've also learned that he had a very lonely childhood with little to no friends (nobody showed up for his eighth birthday party), and that his mother occasionally left him and brother alone for days at a time when they were very young. His mother also used to constantly (albeit with generally good intentions) lie to him about many things, such as telling him that his father was Bob Barker. Barney latched onto all these lies, particularly the Bob Barker one, in order to feel better about himself. Such was his desperate need for a dad that even after admitting it wasn't Bob Barker, he briefly went into massive denial about it being his (black) half-brother James' dad, and that therefore he must be black himself. In the end, he came to terms with the fact that these were all just lies he was telling himself and he's okay with not knowing who his father is, showing a big step forward for him. But...wow. This troper just wants to hug him.
 * Not to mention how devastated he was when Ted temporarily declared Barney 'something he had no use for anymore' and briefly ended their friendship after Barney slept with Ted's ex, Robin.
 * Marshall Eriksen definitely counts too. A notable time is during Season 2 after Lily breaks their engagement and moves away. In addition, he's had moments of getting stressed out by his job, among several other unpleasant situations, but his biggest moment of all where he becomes this is in Season 6 when.
 * An in-universe example in How I Met Your Mother is Zoe's gullible cousin "Honey," so nicknamed because almost everything she does makes people want to say "Oh, honey..." out of pity. Robin actually states "You just want to wrap her up in a blanket and give her a cup of tea."
 * Of course, Barney is more accurately a Jerkass Woobie, due to his insensitive and remorseless-bordering-on-cruel treatment of people outside his family and circle of friends, especially his one-night stands. But people tend to forget this.
 * Hell, all the characters in How I Met Your Mother become this at one time or another. Ted in season 4, who not only gets left at the altar by the love of his life, but gets tormented by the universe all season in a Trauma Conga Line. Robin, in early season 7, where she's pining silently for an oblivious Barney, and in her sheer aggregate number of Chew Toy incidents, (usually job-related). And Lily in season 2, getting rejected after she went crawling back to Marshall begging him to take her back, although she kind of deserved that.
 * Bianca Montgomery from All My Children. What hasn't happen to her? From the moment she was born Bianca had to suffer one tragedy after another, some are: being kidnapped as a child, having anorexia, being forced to live far away from her mother, her father dying at a young age, being humiliated in public by the tabloids time and time again, almost losing her mind twice (one after being raped and the other after believing her newborn daughter died), always losing the girl she falls in love with for a reason or another, and yet she's probably the happiest character on the show. Always smiling and being kind to other, no matter how they have hurt her she always find a way to love them and forgive them, eventually. When her chin starts to quiver and her eyes well up with tears you will feel terrible for her because something terrible just happened to her.
 * Rocket Romano from ER. Although he is technically Dr. Jerk, he does take a fair amount of punishment. He hopelessly pines after Elizabeth Corday from the moment they meet until he dies, and watches her have various relationships. His assy behaviour means that he can and does alienate people, and it is hinted that he is very lonely. We, the audience, see enough Pet the Dog moments that we nevertheless feel sorry for him. Then, his arm is cut off in an accident involving a helicopter. The re-attachment and recovery goes badly, and the arm eventually has to be amputated. Suffering badly from PTSD, he is no longer able to operate, demoted, and surrounded by colleagues who despise him. Eventually, another helicopter falls on him and puts him out his misery.
 * Dr. Kovac goes through pretty much every painful misfortune and angst-inducing experience possible throughout the series, and whenever someone gets violent in the ER, 75% of the time he's the one who winds up getting the crap beaten out of him. And before the series even started, his wife and kids were blown up while they were living in a war zone in Croatia, when a stray shell struck the house seconds after he left to go shopping.
 * Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It has wandered into this trope in the third series. Desperately struggling to keep the government in power in its dying days, Malcolm's efforts are not always appreciated by his bosses and enemies are lurking everywhere. His big breakdown in front of Terri about this definitely qualifies as a woobie moment. There are little hints of woobie-ness earlier in series 3 too, such as Malcolm spending his 50th birthday alone in his office. The big climax of the series, when Fleming gets Malcolm fired, and several scenes afterwards where Malcolm looks suspiciously red-eyed, are definitely in woobie territory.
 * Gene Hunt in Ashes to Ashes makes real strides into woobie-dom. His wife has let him, and he has relocated to London following the death of his best friend and colleague, Sam Tyler. He's starting to feel his age, and there are frequent references to how old-fashioned he is, and how the modern police force is gradually getting rid of 'dinosaurs' like him. The real woobie-fication takes place when we realise
 * Astronema from Power Rangers in Space. She is kidnapped as a child and raised to be Princess of Evil. Therefore she did not experience feelings like love and friendship. After she discovers who she really is, she is torn between being the cold princess of evil and her real self. When she officially joins the rangers, she is very insecure and downtrodden, because believes she does not deserve any friends.
 * It Got Worse: After she becomes good, she is captured and forced to be evil by Ecliptor (who had been brainwashed himself) who basically was her father figure and only friend.
 * Doctor K from Power Rangers RPM. Kidnapped at a young age by the government and forced to work in a top-secret think-tank for them developing advanced physcis and technology with very little break and no leisure (her "birthday present" one was a new equation they needed solving), all perpetuated by convincing her she was allergic to sunlight. She attempted escape using a virus they had her made, and was caught before she could set up a firewall, causing a Robot War that killed at least 90% of humanity in a nuclear holocaust. She is every bit as socially stunted and emotionally damaged as someone with that kind of childhood could be expected to be.
 * Actually, all the RPM rangers could be considered to be woobies at some point. Even Gem and Gemma; though it's never explored, a little thinking can get you to be horrified. Sure they're always smiling and like to draw rainbows and unicorns, but when they don't lose that cheerful tone when they talk about being tortured, you know something screwed them over bad to make them like this. It's inferred that like Dr. K, they were kidnapped off the streets as young children so that they could be groomed into soldiers.
 * The BBC adaptation of Our Mutual Friend did this to Bradley Headstone. His suffering throughout is so intense that it's downright painful to watch.
 * The youth years of Greg Warner from Yes, Dear weren't good to him. He was constantly unpopular at school and unlucky with girls (an example has him dressed as Princess Leia in an attempt to please his girlfriend at the time, only for said girlfriend to take photos of him in the costume and show them to the next kid who turned up at the scene and impressed her with his skating skill). While he eventually turned out decent and successful enough (with a high-paying job and a beautiful, loving wife, as well), some of the wound still remained, to the point that he claimed he agreed -- on a rare occasion -- with his former Jerk Jock brother-in-law's All Girls Want Bad Boys belief. His wife and sister-in-law, both of whom openly disagreed about this opinion, were actually tolerant of him for saying it, if only because his bad memories about dating were bad enough for them to sympathize with him.
 * Homicide:Life on The Street had a few of pretty notable Woobies.Most notable is Bayliss.After surviving an Abusive Childhood,He becomes a Cop and joins Homicide,only for everyone to treat Him like Shit because of His lack of investigative experience.Then His first case is a murdered eleven year old girl which becomes high profile very quickly.The case is Fucked from the get go with the scene contaminated,the lack of Evidence and the superior detectives moving the body too soon,all of which He is blamed for.The case remains open and Bayliss is forever haunted.Then He has three Years of being treated like Shit by His partner Pembleton whom He seems to idolise.After Pembleton has a stroke,He starts treating Bayliss better until Bayliss is shot which convinces Pembleton to retire.In the Finale,He murders a released Killer and is driven insane by Guilt
 * Other Detectives didn't fare much better.Lewis was left traumatized by His partners Suicide,Felton's unstable Wife took His kids from Him,Bolander is divorced with no Children and is starting to realize just how much He regrets His path in life,Kellerman was forced to endure the humiliation of a Corruption accusation with no one believing His innocence or willing to help Him which nearly drove Him to Suicide,and Munch has three ex-wives,no luck in work or Relationships,a Partner who openly hates Him and ignores Him after He leaves and having to watch three of His fellow detectives get shot.Later We learn He was miserable in High school,loved a Girl who didn't love him and who later turned up Murdered, and His father killed Himself.
 * While never specified,Crosetti was so unhappy He was driven to Suicide
 * Dr Ruth Winters in Casualty. Something of a Dr. Jerk who alienates everyone around her, always puts her career first and has lied to cover up her mistakes, several of which have led to patient deaths. And yet...
 * Lost Girl
 * Dyson. Constantly caught between loyalties, lets Bo feed from him whenever she needs and helps her all the time even though it's agony for him to be around her knowing she can't be all his the way he wants.  Then blamed and mistrusted by Bo for keeping secrets from her so that she
 * This troper disagrees that Dyson was a woobie because he kept secrets from Bo while letting her use him. (Kinda like the aforementioned example of Buffy and Angel before, he's too strong to be a proper woobie in that context) Although I do agree with the latter reason with the
 * Lauren: Before Kenzi she's the only human in the fae world, weak and
 * Trick: again, takes huge risks to protect his friends, nearly  because of an overly tricksy "friend." Traded a priceless fae collector's item he said he would never let go for  Gave up
 * In Deadliest Catch, you've got Jake Anderson, the most junior deckhand of the Northwestern. Of course, with all the abuse he's put through, he could either be a Determinator or an Iron Woobie.
 * Then there's the death of his oldest sister during Season 5, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis her entire life. Him finding out was a complete Tear Jerker.


 * The events of Season 6 lined up to really kick Jake in the teeth. At the beginning of King Crab season, he swapped places with Jake Harris of the Cornelia Marie for several weeks and worked well with Captain Phil. Then before Opilio season, Anderson's dad went missing. Then during Opilio season, Captain Phil died. Jake took it hardest among those not actually on the Cornelia Marie.
 * Alma Garret(Molly Parker) on Deadwood. Apparently, the Cartwrights must be an extended family. Her eyes, which make her constantly look like she's one second from melting down into a lake of tears, don't help.
 * I'm not sure if sketch comedy counts, but Cheesoid from That Mitchell and Webb Look has all the required attributes of true Woobiedom. He's a robot that navigates by smell and can only smell cheese and petrol - and constantly gets them mixed up. Most of it's played for laughs, and much of the sketch concentrates on the travails of the scientist who built Cheesoid, but when he gets something wrong he emits this plaintive little "Cheesoid hate self. Hate self." and eventually attempts suicide by immolation. Of course, he gets it wrong, and the creator just gives up. "Why Cheesoid exist?" Why indeed, little guy. C'mere.
 * Lennier on Babylon 5 who serves so faithfully only to see Delenn marry another. If one disallows his final scene he could qualify as an Iron Woobie.
 * Larry Appleton in Perfect Strangers. Oh sure, he's the Chew Toy who often deserves it when it's his own greed or insecurity that causes his problems. However he actually is a caring person who also gets in trouble for trying to help his friends, or simply for trying to get ahead in life or earn some respect. You really feel sorry for him when he freaks out or gets depressed.
 * His cousin and co-star Balky gets to be a woobie too when his innocent trust in the world around him fails.
 * Both of them eventually succeed in love and life, slowly over the years.
 * Paige Matthews from Charmed definitely counts. Her parents had to abandon her because their relationship was forbidden so she was raised by adoptive parents. They were good parents but she went through a rebellious teenage phase only for her parents to die in horrible car crash when she was 16 years old. She spends the next few years of her life searching for her family and finds out one of her sisters has been killed. And then she gets the whole witch thing dumped on her with the Source of All Evil possessing her boyfriend to try and manipulate her. Just try watching "A Paige From The Past" and see if you can resist the urge to give Paige a big hug.
 * While she may be The Scrappy to most fans, Billie Jenkins qualifies. Her sister was kidnapped by demons in front of her when she was six years old and she spent the rest of her childhood in a bad relationship with her parents who refused to talk about it. Then when she discovers her witch powers her parents end up getting killed by demons. Then she finally finds her sister only to discover . Try not to feel sorry for Billie when she collapses crying in the final episode.
 * Sheldon from Less Than Kind is pretty much made of this trope.
 * Abed from Community could count. His father blamed him for his mother leaving, it's implied he had no friends growing up, and in Season 2's Christmas episode he has a Heroic BSOD when his mother has a new family and doesn't want to celebrate Christmas with him anymore.
 * Annie too, at the beginning of Season 1, but continuing a bit onto later seasons. She wanted to go to an Ivy League school but dropped out due to a pill addiction, which caused her mother to cut her off, and upon going to community college the boy she had a crush on all through high school didn't even know who she was except by her mean nickname. Throughout all of this she also had major self-confidence issues.
 * Pretty much any victim on Cold Case. Why do all the good ones have to die?
 * Haley Reinhart from American Idol Season 10 most definitely achieved Woobie status during Top 4 week. The critiques given to her first performances both then and in Top 5 week, and especially what happened when the four finalists were all called out after the first round, were certainly examples of Break the Cutie. Of course, her responses in the second round of both weeks were what really solidified her Woobification. In fact, Nigel Lythgoe basically admitted that this storyline was the goal of those first round critiques.
 * While Haley is the most recent (and best) example of an American Idol Woobie, there are earlier examples such as Brooke White from Season 7 and Siobhan Magnus from Season 9.
 * The majority of the major characters on The Vampire Diaries are Woobies, in particular Elena and Jeremy, who have lost, in the space of two seasons. Elena lives in constant fear that someone she loves is going to get hurt (including Jeremy, who actually has died and been brought back) and has to base everything she does around keeping the people she cares about safe, even if it means sacrificing her own happiness . Both Salvatore brothers, Caroline, Vicki, Matt, Tyler, and even Katherine also display Woobie-like elements to varying degrees.
 * And now Rebekah and all her siblings - minus Klaus of course.
 * Essentially every animal to ever appear on the Animal Planet Heroes series. It's a show about helping abused animals, and animals in trouble, after-all.
 * Parker of Leverage most certainly qualifies. She has an unknown number of terrible foster homes, at least one of which she blew up when she was about six, she watched her brother die (while he was riding his bike, something that she taught him how to do), she's eventually taken under the wing of a professional thief who trains her but refuses to give her a proper home because he knows that she wouldn't have fit in, and that's all before she hits her teenage years. As an adult and a member of the Leverage crew, she initially refuses to help a group of Serbian orphans because she's afraid that they'll be put in the foster system and turn out like her. And while she is learning how to have proper human emotions, it is still obviously difficult for her.
 * It's hard not to feel sorry for Eliot when he talks about the parts of his past he regrets. In the third season finale, when it's revealed he used to work for  He considers himself unforgivable, and does what needs to be done so the others don't have to.
 * Then there's Nate. The company he worked for for over ten years, saving them countless millions in insurance payments, allowed his eight-year-old son to die; something for which he blames himself. It broke him, so badly he's drinking himself to death when the series begins, and he still hasn't recovered. As much of a jerk as he can be at times, it's clear nobody hates Nate as much as Nate hates himself.
 * Everyone on Malcolm in the Middle, pretty much. We are reminded that "Life is Unfair" at the beggining of every episode, after all!
 * DC Emerson Kent in Whitechapel. He's the youngest member of the team and the only one to be nice to Chandler from the get-go. In the first series it's revealed that he deals with the stress of his job by hiding in a car park and crying. In the second series, he's striped (an extremely painful knife assault involving long, deep slashes to the buttocks and upper legs), and
 * Ikeuchi Aya in One Liter of Tears.
 * American Idol has been criticized for having too many of these. Every season there are multiple contestants who have experienced personal tragedies, etc. Katy Perry once called Kara DioGuardi out when she was praising one
 * Katy: This is not a Lifetime Movie sweetheart
 * Matt Saracen on Friday Night Lights. Seriously the guy pretty much redefines Woobiedom. He's the only person taking care of his dementia ridden Grandmother, His mother left when he was a kid, He's a social outcast with only one friend, He has no luck with girls, his father is in Iraq, and he's forced to be quarterback of the football team after the main star was paralyzed, in a town where football is practically a religion and no one has any faith in him at all. Said father returns and is revealed as a cold bastard who cares a lot more about the military than his son or mother, he loses the father figure he had in coach Taylor, his girlfriend breaks up with Him, his father dies, he loses the quarterback position to a new player and pretty much everyone he cares about leaves him at one time or another. Season 4 is when things finally start going right for Him and You can't help but be happy for the guy at last.
 * Sherlock:
 * John is the ultimate Woobie by the final scene of "The Reichenbach Fall". I mean, was anybody not crying while he ?
 * Sherlock himself becomes a Woobie in "A Scandal In Belgravia" when.
 * Charlie Kelly from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The only member of the gang who is even remotely morally grounded and isn't a full-blown Jerkass of some sort just so happens to also be the show's penultimate Butt Monkey. His rather unconventional mindsets when it comes to the more mundane things in life that pretty much make him a complete social outcast, especially when contrasted with the rest of the cast, make him all the more huggable, despite his notorious body order making such an action somewhat unpleasant.