Most tragic backstory/fate for a character in a novel you've read

[ForestDweller]

Give it to me.

 

[2wordsperminute]

Either "stuck in a timeloop where he is forced to kill many innocent people and fight his friends only to die and start the process over again, unable to change anything" or "dies after digging for hundreds of years to find the man she loved (who wasn't even in the place she was digging)."
edit: wait novel? probably the dude who was forced to live with the somewhat racist but mostly just xenophobic elves by his son in law's brother (and he can also never see his daughter again)

 

[NineHeadHeavenDevouringSerpent]

Not novel, but August in fairy tail.

 

[Representing_Tromba]

14,000,000,000+ deaths and torments

 

[Cynthell]

Immortal being but only in the fact they cant die, very much can still be mutilated and maimed. Ended up being paralyzed and used as an experiment for hundreds of years.

Sounds corny but it was very much done well and left an impact on me.

 

[ThrillingHuman]

There are too many. Read case file 013 or I became popular in the Underworld after life broadcasting taoism or the world below surface. There was also a Chinese novel I forgot about how kids were starving in a famine and were eating soil with salt and pretended to be full. Also stories based off of real life about victims of Nazi German occupation and those from concentration camps, as well as native Americans under colonial occupation as well as live reports about people from improverished countires and victims of neocolonialism and stories of drug addicts etc etc. The kind of "died a trillion times in a time loop" situations don't feel tragic because they are too detached from reality, you cannot feel their weight.

 

[Syringe]

Naturally Ted from I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream (who essentially is tortured with the last remnants of humanity for a century, then forever by a sapient AI called AM). They're reduced to nothing but a living slug, barely resembling a human being and left to be an outlet for AM's hatred of humanity till its wafers decay by entropy/time.

Or what happens to the victims that remain awake in the Jaunt by Stephen King (Basically an eternity of nothingness). On the bright side, people do come back from it (but are often driven mad and die seconds later. Their hair goes pale-white in an instant). At one point a woman is sent through the Jaunt but has no destination, so she's essentially consciously trapped in the void forever. The closest comparison to the Jaunt would be the Warp Trains from the PM Universe.

 

[Daitengu]

The God Emperor of Dune himself, Leto II.

The man lost his humanity to save humanity, because his dad Paul punked out. He died a 3500 yr old virgin and saw it coming.

 

[RepresentingDesire]

Ignoramus Lady

A man has lived countless lives stuck in the body of a tropey villainess girl after his first death. As this girl, he has suffered through various brutal ends, each a result of simply trying to survive. The girl wakes up yet again, hundreds of years within the loop, at...

www.scribblehub.com

An inescapable loop.

 

[greyblob]

not in a novel. in jojo 2nd or 3rd part. the immortal guy that got thrown into outer space, forced to spend eternity cold, unable to move, and forever thinking.

 

[Plantorsomething]

Immortal being but only in the fact they cant die, very much can still be mutilated and maimed. Ended up being paralyzed and used as an experiment for hundreds of years.

Sounds corny but it was very much done well and left an impact on me.

What book?

 

[Thraben]

Suffering from Alzheimer's while an alien parasite tries to control his mind, triggering the instinctual response of using his powers to 'burn out' the foreign influence, causing this whole process to restart from zero every few seconds or so.

That's pretty bad, I would say, but I have seen worse

Like an immortal character being told 'stay by my side forever' by someone who then dies, with predictable guesses as to where that character's hollow husk of a mind puppetting a rotting carcass is located by thousands of years later. It's tragic because it's the dark side of being a golden retriever love interest.

 

[KoyukiMegumi]

Hm... I have one, but I can't remember the name of the anime. It's about a girl who becomes a weapon, slowly losing herself to her dreadful fate before sacrificing herself to save those she loves. It was the first anime ever to impact me so deeply.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

Naturally Ted from I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream (who essentially is tortured with the last remnants of humanity for a century, then forever by a sapient AI called AM). They're reduced to nothing but a living slug, barely resembling a human being and left to be an outlet for AM's hatred of humanity till its wafers decay by entropy/time..

Yeah. Ted wins. ... errr... """"""wins""""""

But that's s bit too extreme. Hard to relate to.

No no no. A true Tragic backstory requires injustice and betrayal. Like the evil step mother wins and exiles the mc, turns the family against the mc with lies and reputation destruction, only for say... 15 years later they find out the truth.

The witness was lying and finally confessed after the family had wrongly ruined the life of their son/brother/father. Something like that. Where people wrongly tortured the MC and felt so justified, only to learn they were wrong all along.

 

[SSR]

Lmao Diavolo