I Should Have Been Better

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

EMT: Hey Peter, good job saving that girl today.
Peter: Her mother died. I should have gotten there sooner.
EMT: Should have...Peter, you got there faster than is humanly possible.
Peter: I should have been faster.

—Heroes

It's an old standby: The hero has done his absolute best, saved everyone he possibly could...but not everyone. Someone died, nearly always in a way completely outside the hero's control. He went above and beyond the call of duty, but it wasn't enough.

Can lead to Training from Hell, Heroic BSOD and, in rare cases, Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. See also Chronic Hero Syndrome. Friends will often respond with, "You Did Everything You Could."

Related to Guilt Complex or My Greatest Failure.

Examples of I Should Have Been Better include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • In Marvel Comics, this is the cause of Sentry's mental problems. He has the power of a million exploding suns, but whom does he choose to save and whom to let die?

Film

  • The famous scene at the end of Schindler's List in which Oskar Schindler laments that he could have saved more than he did if he'd thought to sell more of his possessions, in particular his Nazi party lapel pin (which is gold):

"I could have gotten one more person... and I didn't! And I... I didn't!"

  • Anakin Skywalker feels this way in Attack of the Clones after failing to save his mother in time.
  • Rather poignantly stated in the first Superman film, about Clark's father, Jonathan Kent: "All these powers, and I couldn't even save him."
  • Mr. Incredible feels like this near the end of The Incredibles.
  • In Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker loses his powers for whatever reason, but then decides to run into a burning building anyway to rescue a little girl. After fighting his way through the blaze and saving the girl, the firefighters praise Peter's heroics, then talk amongst themselves about someone else on one of the upper levels who wasn't so lucky. By the look on his face, it's clear that Peter doesn't feel very heroic about that.
    • To be fair, that might be less a case of "I should have saved him too as a de-powered normal person" and more a case of "I could have saved him if I still had spider powers"

Literature

  • In The Dresden Files, Harry goes through this from time to time, especially as it relates to Susan getting put on the road to vampirism by the Red Court, courtesy of Harry's dose of Chronic Hero Syndrome. The fact that he was usually lucky to have survived himself does little to help him cope.
  • Kaladin from The Stormlight Archive does this a lot. He starts off as a surgeon's apprentice who gets depressed everytime a patient dies, then he becomes a soldier and gets depressed and puts himself through Training from Hell after his brother is killed in battle, then he ends up a slave stuck in a causality heavy job and tries to save the members of his crew and gets depressed when a number of them end up dead.
  • The hero of the Cybernarc novels goes through this twice in the first book, once when his squad is ambushed by drug smugglers and again when the same smugglers attack his family. Both times he does everything he could have done, but still feels guilty that he didn't save everybody.

Live-Action TV

  • Peter Petrelli of Heroes, as the page quote indicates, falls into this a lot.
  • Fox Mulder expresses this sentiment in the first-season episode "Young at Heart": on his first field assignment for the FBI, he hesitated to shoot a criminal, who killed the hostage and an FBI agent. Although subsequent investigation proved that he did everything right, he could never forgive himself.
  • A sort of example that does involve wanting to be better, but not for heroic reasons: Angel and Spike, being the only two vampires with souls, have a deep rivalry when Spike makes the switch from the show Buffy to Angel in the fifth season. At one point, they fight over what they believe to be a cup of extreme suffering, destined to be drunk only by the true champion of the world. It turns out to just be a fake chalice filled with Mountain Dew. After Spike beats Angel, even after the drink is revealed to be a fake, Angel expresses this, feeling he should have wanted it enough to beat Spike.
  • One episode of Seven Days involves Frank on a time-critical mission to save his boss from capture (and from taking a Suicide Pill to avoid interrogation). Along the way, Frank witnesses a shootout between gangsters, where an innocent civilian dies in the crossfire. Problem is, if he saves the civilian, he doesn't reach his boss in time. If he focuses on his primary mission, he sees the civilian die. Frank is eventually able to voluntarily invoke enough Groundhog Day Loops to save both.

Newspaper Comics

  • Peanuts
    • In one short series of strips, Snoopy attempts to write a book which he titles Things I've Learned After It Was Too Late.
    • In another famous strip, Sally is making two lists of things she has learned in life; one of them is much longer than the other, because "These are things I learned the hard way!"

Video Games

Web Comics

Western Animation

  • Aang feels this heavily at the beginning of Season 3, after the fall of Ba Sing Se. Somewhat justified, in that his initial Refusal of the Call led to the beginning of the war and loss of the Air Nomads.
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