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Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds: F Ilm
  • In Chronicle, Andrew is bullied and made fun of constantly through the movie, in addition to a sick mother and an abusive father. After he gets his superpowers, he begins to snap, and starts to get involved in crime to save his mother's life, stealing medicines and such. By the end of the movie, during the climax, he nearly destroys the city.
  • Milton (Stephen Root) in Office Space. After enduring bureaucratic neglect, managerial indifference, and stapler deprivation, he walks into the Initech office complex, finds and steals an envelope full of embezzled cash, and burns the place down.
  • Harvey Dent/Two-Face in The Dark Knight.
  • The eponymous character of Carrie (1976) is certainly a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds, even if she doesn't quite want to destroy worlds... just most of her high school. Her rampage luckily ends before she gets the chance to do anything more.
    • But only in the 1976 film. In the book and the remakes, she wants to kill everyone at her school, everyone in her town, and everybody else. Fortunately, she dies before she can commit anything more than demolishing her school, giving her mom a heart attack that kills her, killing two horrible bullies in a car crash, electrocuting several people, and setting her town on fire.
    • Spoofed in the zany teen comedy Zapped!, in which science nerd Barney Springboro is similarly degraded at a prom when the Alpha Bitch throws a watermelon at his head, almost knocking him out and causing almost everyone in attendance to laugh at him. Barney avenges himself by using his telekinetic powers to blow open the gymnasium doors and summon a hurricane-like wind that strips everyone except Barney's prom date and his best friend down to their underwear. Woobie, Nudifier of Worlds, perhaps?
  • The Moorwen!!! In Outlander, its species is destroyed for being less intelligent than man, and its only offspring is killed off brutally. You should give it a hug...if you believe you won't get torn apart.
  • Ramon from Alligator counts as this to an extent.
  • J.D. (Christian Slater) in Heathers. For starters, his father is a sociopathic bastard who doesn't care for him (when asked if he even likes his father, he responds that he "[hasn't] given the matter much thought"), and his mother killed herself in front of his eyes to get away from her husband. His entire life was spent moving around from town to town and school to school wherever his father's demolition job took him, where, it is implied, he saw the same scenario of clique groups bullying other students at every high school he's attended. He starts out by murdering Jerk Jocks and Alpha Bitches and making their deaths appear as suicides (also implied as something he's done before), but he ultimately resorts to trying to blow up the entire school. He explains his intentions are such because he believes that nobody loves him, and that "the only place different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven", somehow seeing the school as a representation of society itself.
  • Bartleby in Dogma: he eventually snaps, realizing that God always favored man above angels like himself, gives up hope that "He" will never forgive him and Loki for their menial transgressions, and so decides to kill everything.
    Loki: My god. I've heard a rant like this before.
    Bartleby: What did you say?
    Loki: I've heard a rant like this before.
    Bartleby: Don't you fucking do that to me.
    Loki: You sound like the Morning Star!
    Bartleby: You shut your fucking mouth!
    Loki: You sound like LUCIFER, man! You've fucking lost it! You're not talking about going home, Bartleby, You're talking about fucking war on God! Well fuck that! I have seen what happens to the proud when they decide to take on the throne! I'm goin' back to Wisconsin.
    Bartleby: We're going home, Loki! And no one, not you, not even the Almighty himself is going to make that otherwise!
  • Norman Bates in the Psycho series is practically the Trope Codifier.
  • Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean doesn't seem to want to destroy everything - just everything that crosses his path. He's like this because his one true love, the goddess Calypso, betrayed him (presumably for another man, though it's never elaborated on) centuries ago. Jones' agony was unbearable, so he cut out his own heart to end it. When that failed, he adopted a different tactic - finding relief by sharing his pain with everyone he meets.
  • Oswald Cobblepot in Batman Returns: disfigured since birth, his aristocratic parents attempted to drown him in the sewers. He was found by a traveling circus, and was raised in the freak show as "The Penguin". While the public views him with sympathy, he has become a warped sociopath, plotting to murder all the first born sons of Gotham City. When Batman foils him, he straps rockets to his hundreds (thousands?) of pet penguins, intending to use them in a suicide bombing to kill all of Gotham, which, as the only setting we see, is extremely omnicidal in context. And yet, you still can't help but pity him at his death.
  • X-Men:
  • Glen Ray from Seed of Chucky briefly fell into this when he saw his father, Chucky, murdering his mother, Tiffany. Despite being the kindest living doll that had the face of a demon, but the mind of an angel, seeing his father murdering his mother hit him hard because of his love to life. It's no wonder why he snapped and killed Chucky for doing this. He's not like his sister, Glenda (who's just like Chucky), his love to his mother broke him down and seeing his father do such a thing eventually made him turn against him. He slices off Chucky's arms and legs and as he's doing this he asks his father if he's proud of who he is and then decapitates and kills him.
  • Kim Jong Il from Team America: World Police. He's plotting the destruction of society as we know it, but deep down, he's just "a rittre ronery" (read: little lonely).
  • Francis Dolarhyde: actually lampshaded by Will Graham; he says that he feels a lot of sympathy for the child he once was, but thinks someone should put a bullet in the adult Francis' brain.
  • Seymour Parrish (Robin Williams) in One Hour Photo. He starts out sympathetic, if a little deranged, then you find out what made him crazy.
  • Big Daddy from Kick-Ass is a rare heroic version when you find out what Frank D'Amico did to his life.
  • Hiroki Sawada — or Noah's Ark in the Detective Conan Non-Serial Movie Phantom of Baker Street. A Child Prodigy who was already beyond what the Japanese elementary school can handle, which sparked arguments among his parents, culminating in his mother taking him to the US. When she died soon after, he was adequately homeschooled and adopted by his father's employer, Joe Schneider, which quickly made him a Lonely Rich Kid, who also exploit his intelligence...Schneider's own fear of In the Blood, though, drove him to suicide, leaving a digitalized form of himself behind, who caused a Holodeck Malfunction on Schneider's VR game launch, taking 50 kids as hostages...
  • Grace in Dogville. Made all the more ambiguous by the discussion just before the ending, where it suddenly becomes very clear that she's only a child.
  • In a perfect example of Break the Cutie, Alessa Gillespie from Silent Hill was burned alive by the cult she was a member of, but survived by her own power and remained wrapped in bandages for 30 years, unable to move anything but her eyes (and her lips, but only enough to kind of smile, but not enough to form words). She does the only logical thing and splits her soul into 3 parts so she can kill everyone in the cult (excluding Rose, her good half, Sharon, and her mother).
  • King Kong.
  • The Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth.
  • In Stephen King's The Shining (1997), Jack Torrance is portrayed sympathetically. His turn to Ax Craziness is tragic AND terrifying.
  • Gurdy the Clown / Luther Edward Baxter from 100 Tears.
  • May is a particularly heartbreaking-cum-vicious example.
  • The infant(s) of It's Alive, whose homicidal rampage turns out to be birth trauma and separation anxiety, and who longs only to be reunited with his family.
  • Sadako in Ringu and her counterpart, Samara, in the US remake, The Ring, considering that both were mistreated and murdered.
  • Asami in Audition. She endured a horrific childhood.
  • Eli in Let the Right One In, a vampire who is trapped not just physically in a 12 year old body but apparently emotionally as well, forced to kill to survive, whose only friend is an equally screwed up boy.
    • Also, Abby in Let Me In, the remake of Let the Right One In.
  • Bill Foster in Falling Down goes on a rampage of terror after his wife left him and would not allow him to see their daughter. He is fired from his job in the defense industry due to post-Cold War budget cuts and is generally just pissed off with the state of the world and takes his anger out on every issue, whether minor (foreign shopkeepers, high prices, poor fast-food service) or major (racism, social class, unemployment). While he is overly violent, he is representative of the everyday man pushed too far by the world.
  • Loki in Thor. He wanted to prove that he was just as good as Thor, and then found out that he was descended from Frost Giants, after being raised around Asgardians who hate Frost Giants. He's also Laufey's son. He believes that he never really had a chance because Odin would never want a Frost Giant on the throne. He was passed over in favor of Thor a lot during their childhood. He takes a more literal turn in the film's climax when he tries to use the power of the Bifrost to destroy Jotunheim.
    • In the subsequent The Avengers, Loki has become the main villain and attempts to subjugate the entire population of Earth.
      • And in the sequel to Thor, Thor agrees to let Loki out of prison in exchange for his help against the new threat to Asgard.
  • Oddly enough, Michael Myers is one of these in the Halloween (2007) remake. Director Rob Zombie tried to portray him in a much more sympathetic light.
  • Dr. Tolian Soran in Star Trek: Generations.
    • From the reboot series, we have Nero and John Harrison/ Khan. The former was a Romulan miner who tried saving his homeworld from being destroyed by a supernova, only for the galactic bureaucrats to dismiss him and becoming driven insane with grief and a thirst for vengeance against Spock, the man who promised to save his world. The latter ,while an Evil Overlord back in the day, just wants to save his crew from Admiral Marcus, who forced him into making weapons for the Federation at the risk of having them killed. Harrison even calls them his family and starts tearing up about how he couldn't save them.
  • The female half of the Big Bad Duumvirate in The World Is Not Enough. Being abandoned to be repeatedly raped by terrorists by your own father, and at the advice of the Big Good no less, certainly won't do wonders for your sanity.
  • Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. He decides to lead a primate uprising partly because he believes that the man who raised him doesn't love him anymore.
  • In Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker's final transformation into Darth Vader is shown to be caused by losing everything and everyone he cares for, albeit due to his own actions.
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Also see the theatre page.
  • Godzilla. The original film shows him as a Tragic Villain, just as much a victim of nuclear weaponry as anyone else. This is especially evident in the Heisei films, where he's portrayed as more of a "force of nature" rather than an outright villain.
  • Elijah Price in Unbreakable is afflicted with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which creates a brittleness in his bones that make them very susceptible to fracture. He can't do things other kids can do in his childhood, is constantly in casts, and only has comicbooks to bring him joy. Then he decides that his purpose in life is to be a supervillain...

Fan WorksWoobie, Destroyer of WorldsLiterature

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