The Woobie/Oral Tradition


 * Lucifer from a Satan Is Good perspective. Specially if God Is Good as well.
 * The Blessed Virgin Mary is sometimes this to Catholics. While they believe that She is very powerful and strong, having even Satan himself fear her, you can't possibly read about Her apparitions at Fatima without crying and wanting to spread devotion towards Her so that She may be loved. And then we find out that very few people actually listened to Her, thereby hindering her chances at having more children and bestowing graces upon them.
 * She also had to watch her son die a painful and humiliating death for something he was innocent of. She also grew up in poverty.
 * Orpheus is the premier Woobie of Greek mythology (if not in fiction in general). If he expressed such sadness after his wife's death that even Hades wept for him.
 * Hephaestus needs a hug. Stable, hard-working guy who's horribly ugly, born crippled, kicked out of Mount Olympus, possibly by his own mother, married to the goddess of beauty who never cared about him.
 * Played straight in God of War 3. Even Kratos was disgusted by the Olympians' treatment of him and his "daughter."
 * Cassandra. Just Cassandra.
 * Medea has a bit of this going on. She was a princess of a foreign country, and when Jason arrived to get the Golden Fleece, she fell in love with him and used her magic powers to help him accomplish his quest on the condition that he'd marry her. They wound up fleeing the country to escape her father's anger, and in a lot of stories Medea had to kill her brother to distract the king long enough for them to get away. Okay, all well and good. But fast-forward a few years, and now she's a foreigner alone in xenophobic Greece aside from her husband and two children, estranged from her family and friends, and her husband has just announced that he's leaving her to marry the (younger, prettier) princess of Corinth for political gain and oh, by the way, she's going to have to be exiled from the country now but Jason is totally going to try to let her come back to be his mistress. Medea was not pleased at all and poisoned the princess before fleeing the country... so the Corinthians killed her kids.
 * Though she loses most of her Woobie cred in Euripides' version and the variations that follow, where instead of her children being murdered by the angry populace, she kills them herself to get back at Jason.
 * Some versions of Medusa are this in a nutshell. When you're punished by being made a gorgon because Poseidon couldn't keep it in his pants and raped you in the temple of Athena, let's just say you definitely deserve a hug, even if the hugger is likely to get poisoned or turned to stone for his or her trouble.
 * Osiris from Egyptian Mythology. The poor guy was tricked and murdered by his brother, and later had his corpse torn apart by him too.