Collateral Angst

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Someone's in trouble. The type of trouble can vary enormously - they could have been brutally attacked, raped, recently bereaved or blaming themselves for a catastrophe they couldn't stop. So now they're laid up in hospital with half their body in plaster, or mid-Heroic BSOD. Even the most cynical of viewers can't blame the poor soul for going a bit Emo.

But the writers aren't directing the audience's sympathies toward the victim but instead toward someone close to the victim. While the victim is recovering, their significant other is raving "I failed to protect him/her!" or "What happens to our relationship now?" Entire plot lines are devoted to how this person gets over the tragedy.

The real point of the story isn't "the victim was attacked" but "look how protective/self-loathing/angsty/loving the victim's friend is." The scenario is set up for the friend to get Character Focus. The person who was hurt is Collateral Angst.

Some stories make things even more peculiar by having the casualty apologise for being hurt. They will use phrases such as "being a burden" or "letting you down" to express their guilt. If the injured party is more upbeat and has coped admirably with the tragedy, they may try to cheer up their distraught partner, apparently oblivious to the irony of their actions as they do so. It's doubly strange if the victim is dealing well with their situation, but they then have to rescue their other half from the Heroic BSOD they've suffered.

When well used, this trope establishes the bond between the two characters, especially if the viewer recognises that Character A reacts more violently when Character B is hurt than if they themselves were. When badly executed, Character A may well look like an attention seeking diva, and the viewer may wonder if Character B needs this much drama in their life when they're trying to recover.

The only glimmer of hope for a "damage victim" is that they are important characters in their own right. Once they have recovered, things will be business as usual. It could be worse. If the wronged party isn't just injured, but dies in a particularly pointless way for the main character to angst over, they were probably Stuffed Into the Fridge. Someone who is living, breathing Collateral Angst - to the point the reader/viewer wonders if they're ever out of the hospital - and has little plot importance or characterisation beyond that is a Disposable Woman. Of course, two X-chromosomes are required to qualify. Usually.

Examples of Collateral Angst include:

Anime and Manga

• Both Kisa and Rin are viciously attacked by Akito in Fruits Basket; Rin in particular is badly injured after being pushed out of an upper floor window. However, Kisa is more worried about the bullying she suffers at school, while Rin desperately searches for a cure to the Sohma curse in between hospital visits. Their love interests, Hiro and Hatsuharu respectively, angst constantly about their failure to protect their girlfriends. This cycle is broken when Hiro tells Haru what happened to Rin and, more importantly, why did it happen (she had told Akito she was the one leading the relationship, pressing Akito's Berserk Button to protect Haru; Hiro also blamed himself for the mess with her). This gives Hatsuharu the chance to both confront Akito on her bullshit and truly reach for Rin, convincing her to let him and others take care of her (and realise that he was unintentionally selfish towards her).
• Shuichi from Gravitation is brutally gang raped, actually submitting to the attack in an attempt to preserve his boyfriend's reputation... despite the fact that said boyfriend, Yuki, has just dumped him. Shuichi's best friend seems to be the only one who takes the attack seriously, and he storms off to Yuki's house, both to reprimand him for the way he's treated his friend and to inform him of the rape. Yuki responds by threatening Taki, the leader of a rival band and the one who ordered Shuichi raped. After this display of machismo on Yuki's part, Shuichi himself seems to get over the rape remarkably quickly. A few chapters later though, it's Yuki who has a not-so-Heroic BSOD, claiming that it's his fault that Shuichi had to suffer (which is at least somewhat correct) and resulting in Shuichi comforting Yuki for the trauma Shuichi's rape inflicted on the novelist (which just seems plain wrong). In fact, it seems the rape was only there as an introduction to Yuki's dark past.
  • Yuki's angst at the attack on his boyfriend seems doubly bizarre since, in the manga at least, his first sexual encounter with Shuichi wasn't entirely consensual on Shuichi's part.
  • The attitude of Collateral Angst is reflected by the characters within the story as well: only when Yuki is affected by these events does record company owner (and Shuichi and Taki's boss) Tohma decide to take action against Taki. He didn't really care about Shuichi being raped, but making Yuki cry warrants serious punishment. Then again, Tohma's a bit scary and weird to begin with.
• Sailor Moon's friends fall under this in the first and last seasons of the first anime, and especially in the Stars manga; in all scenarios they're killed one by one in quick succession to show how heroic Usagi can be as she copes with such tragedy.
  • The Senshi themselves also play this straight in the first anime's Stars season, as when they find out that Usagi hid from them how Mamoru all but disappeared from her life (not knowing why) they're later seen angstily asking themselves why Usagi has been suffering on her own.

Comic Books

• The Green Lantern plot arc where Kyle Rayner's assistant Terry Berg gets gay bashed focused more on Kyle dealing with the angst of such a thing happening to his best friend, tracking down the assailants and scaring the bejeesus out of them, and eventually deciding that he was running out of faith in humanity and taking off for the stars. All while Terry, the one who actually got attacked, lay in traction.
• One of Linkara's problems with DC's Infinite Crisis: Sue Dibney is raped, but the story completely ignores the issue of how the attack affects her in favour of focusing on how it affects everyone else. He goes on to point out the the comic's multiple narrators are all men, so while rape as a plot device (Linkara argues) is used by bad writers as "a thing that happens to women", an actual woman's take on the attack isn't provided, let alone the victim's own experience. Here's the episode for more details.

Fan Works

• Cori Falls's Pokemon fanfics do this quite a bit, but most notably in "The Thorns of the Rose" in which Jessie is badly triggered by memories of an abusive past relationship and all James can do is cry and mope about how he thinks she's stopped loving him.
• Fire Emblem shipping fic in general adores this trope, especially when Bodyguard Crush is involved. It's most popular with Kent/Lyn, Seth/Eirika, Frederick/Cordelia, Gerome/Lucina, Chrom/Robin (either of them, but mostly the Female one), Xander/Female Corrin, Leo/Takumi, Leo/Niles, Takumi/Camilla, Ingrid/Sylvain, Female Byleth/Dimitri, Dedue/Dimitri, Edelgard/Dimitri, and Hubert/Ferdinand.
  • Pregnancy fics in the fandom tend to give the lady difficulties during the pregnancy itself or the childbirth so her husband can fret and pace and plead with the 'verse's deities to keep her and the baby safe. If the woman ends up dying in childbirth, the fic becomes all about the man wailing and gnashing his teeth with maybe a small snippet of him telling his plot-device kids about their sainted angel of a mother.
  • In the now lost Fire Emblem Awakening fancomic Future of Despair, Lon'qu and Panne are both Stuffed Into the Fridge solely so their respective in-story spouses, Lissa and Henry, can beautifully angst and whine about them.
  • In the Three Houses fic "The Savior King, the Master Tactician, and the Queen of Liberation", Byleth almost dies from overtaxing the Crest of Flames and its fan-made powers during the Cindered Shadows sidequest, and while she's in her coma Dimitri gives a dramatic, weepy speech about how he's so afraid to lose her, how he wishes it was him lying there, and how much he loves her. A few chapters later, Byleth hugs him and tearfully apologizes for causing him such anguish. Completely ignoring how she almost died.
  • Fics centering around Princess Celine of Fire Emblem Engage take her canon worries about her former Ill Boy brother Alfred and crank it up to eleven, making Alfred's condition out to be worse than it is (he has spells now and then but is more or less fine) or make his death at a young age in the Distant Finale if he doesn't S support Alear all about her pain and how her horrible nightmares have come true. She has this in canon (see Video Games below) but it's not nearly as blatant as fanfic makes it out to be.
    • One F!Alear/Alfred fic has Alear lose two babies (one dies in utero while the other is stillborn), but the story is from Alfred's POV as he angsts endlessly about how his illness must be responsible for his wife's inability to carry a healthy baby to term. He is seen comforting her a bit, but still.
• Some Voltron: Legendary Defender fics have Keith attacked, raped, captured, or poisoned by people who hate him for being half-Galra just so they can focus on how worried and upset the person he's being shipped with is. This is also fairly common with Pidge (the youngest Paladin who slots easily into the "precious baby sister" role to fans), Lance (an early favorite target for loads of angst and hurt/comfort to the point where it got its own name) and Shiro (expanding on what he's suffered in canon, only whoever he's being shipped with fusses ten times more).
  • One series of Shiro/Pidge fics has their daughter horribly bullied at school for not knowing how to read by the first grade. Instead of focusing on the child's struggles or having Pidge take steps to correct this, like teaching her how to read by herself, the fic instead centers on how very sad poor, useless Pidge is about the whole thing, mainly because it reminds her of how she was bullied as a child. The bullied and troubled little girl is nothing but a Living Prop for Pidge to whine endlessly about how bad of a mom she believes herself to be.
• Ace Attorney fics pairing Phoenix and Maya put the spotlight on his angst over failing to protect her from being arrested or kidnapped. Some Phoenix/Edgeworth fics also focus on Phoenix fretting over Edgeworth's traumas rather than the latter's own feelings.
• Hermione's rape in the Harry Potter fic In This World and the Next happens solely to upset Harry and drive him to revenge. Never once are Hermione's own feelings explored.
• In this Speed Racer fic, Trixie is critically injured in a car crash and Speed dives headfirst into this, wailing and gnashing his teeth about how he failed to protect her, how it was his fault the steering wheel locked even when he should know as well as anyone that it can happen to any car, and even making plans to scrap the Mach 5 and quit racing if Trixie dies. He's even called out on this several times, but he won't be reasoned with.
• Most Mary Sue fics have the character she's being paired with spend a whole chapter lamenting how he or she "failed to protect her" from whatever trauma has befallen her. Usually kidnapping or rape.
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba fics that pair Giyu and Shinobu and deal with Shinobu's death in the Final Battle tend to center near exclusively on making Giyu angst endlessly about it, rather than exploring the latter's process that led to it (like canon briefly did in a flashback). As such, Giyuis seen angsting nonstop about their love, how much he misses her and how broken-hearted he is over her death, rarely if ever considering the feelings of the other people in their surroundings.

Film

• In Gran Torino, Sue is beaten and gang raped by her own gangster cousins to get back at her, her brother, and Walt for standing up to them and challenging them, though the movie focuses more on Walt's reaction, partly because the attack immediately followed his own browbeating of one of the gangsters.

Literature

• Little Women: It's painful for Beth to die young; it's more painful for Jo to live without her Dead Little Sister. As Louisa knew firsthand.
• A big part of Jodi Picoult's Handle with Care is the fact that while Willow is physically injured for most of the book (she has brittle bone disease), it's her mother, Charlotte, that does all the angsting—and it's her mother's lawsuit that threatens the family, not Willow's disease. Even Charlotte is forced to realise that the court case she's set in motion is more about herself that Willow.
• My Sister's Keeper seems set up for this trope. A young girl has leukaemia, tragic: we learn about her mother's constant state of panic and worry over looking after her; her father's shame over not being able to help and tendency to withdraw to his fire station and astronomy for peace; her brother's frustration at getting no attention from a family so wrapped up in her condition that he becomes a juvenile delinquent; and her younger sister, who was born for the sole purpose of being her organ donor, and who gets tired of being seen only as a means to keep her sister alive. The plot of the book focusing on the lawsuit that said younger sister launches to get medical emancipation to prevent her parents from forcing her to donate a kidney to her sister. Precious little attention is given to Kate, the actual girl with a terminal illness. It's worth mentioning that the book has a shifting first person perspective so that all of the above characters (as well as a lawyer involved with the case) have at least a few chapters which they narrate, which give us an insight into them, what they're like and how they develop over the course of the book... except for Kate, naturally, whose narration is minimal and saved for the final chapter and whom we mostly learn about through other people's eyes.
• Lurlene McDaniel's books typically focus on the character suffering from a fatal illness, but a few of them are from the POV of friends, family, and other loved ones about to lose them.
  • Don't Die, My Love is the prime example, with Luke suffering Hodgkin's Lymphoma and the story being all about how his girlfriend Julie will live without him when the inevitable happens.
  • Let Him Live is about Meg, a candy striper who falls in love with a boy who needs a liver transplant. Meg even realizes when the end is near that she let herself get too close, and is now suffering for it.
  • Angel of Hope sees the previous book's heroine dying of hepatitis C, with her sister as the POV character struggling to accept the loss.
  • She Died Too Young is from the POV of the girl who lives while her friend dies. She feels guilty for getting the transplant her friend also needed, and is hurt that the girl's brother now hates her for it.
  • Some of the books shift POVs, such as 16 and Dying and Someone Lives, Someone Dies. This gives the story a more even view of the relationship.

Live Action Television

• Deconstructed twice in Scrubs:
  • When his best friend, Ben, is diagnosed with leukaemia, Dr. Cox doesn't cope well. Ben, in a rare subversion, actually calls him on this behaviour, pointing out that he's the one with the disease, and could use his friend's help rather than having to cope with Cox's issues.
  • Later in the series, Dr. Cox is traumatised by Ben's death. He's annoyed at how well Jordan is coping with the death of her brother, to the point that she has her best friends staying with her. They're out enjoying themselves while Cox openly grieves. Not until the end of the episode does he realise that Jordan has been seriously affected by her brother's death, and her friends are offering comfort where he failed to do so. Arguably, Cox was as close to Ben as Jordan was, but the theme of self-pity at someone else's expense remains.
• House M.D. often treats House's addiction, disability and destructive personality more as a problem for Wilson than a problem for House. It gets to the point where even the idea of anyone feeling sorry for House because of any of these reasons seems ridiculous, even though Fridge Logic tells us it really shouldn't be.

Mythology

• Most people feel soooo bad for Hercules when he accidentally kills his wife and children. The actual wife and children who've just been brutally beaten to death, of course, are generally unnamed.

Video Games

• Prince Dimitri in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and its spinoff Warriors: Three Hopes suffers such a bad case of it that in the former it literally drives him to madness and in the latter he's willing to martyr himself to prevent other deaths. In both cases, his troubled mind causes him to see the ghosts of lost loved ones.
• Princess Celine of Firene in Fire Emblem Engage has this over her brother Alfred, who was sickly as a child and still has spells of it now and then. Alfred continually assures her he'll be okay, and during his other supports and the game proper he basically is. But Celine is so troubled by what remains of his illness that she has regular nightmares about him dying.

Other

• Many AIDS stories focus more on the (generally straight, while the party with AIDS is gay) supportive healthy friend character and how sad they're going to be when their friend is dead, rather than the person with AIDS themselves. Parting Glances plays it dead-straight, even with a scene in which (cool, accepting) Nick comforts Michael when he cries.
  • Rent is a little less supportive of this trope during "Goodbye Love," when Roger snaps a sarcastic "poor baby!" after Mark says that the reason he keeps himself emotionally withdrawn is because chances are very good that he'll outlive his friends with AIDS.