Woobies Wanted

[thefourthvine]

brown_betty and I have been discussing woobies. Further research - for the good of science! - is now required, and so I come to you for help. I need a list of woobies.

TVTropes has a great page on woobies [Warning: cherry_ice and I have determined that TVTropes is a black hole. If you click on this link, there is a chance you will never escape from the website. Leave a message for your loved ones before you click. Also it's a good idea to pack a lunch.], which features this definition:

"[The woobie] is that character you want to give a big hug, wrap in a blanket and feed soup to when he or she suffers so very beautifully."

And there is, of course, a huge long list of woobies attached, but a lot of those people are woobies in canon more than in fan fiction, and I want the fannish ones. I'm looking for the person in a given fandom who is always being hurt (and then comforted), the person who you just know is going to have a secret shame or a secret trauma or a secret disease, probably while he is being raped and beaten in prison by Nazis with spiky boots. In other words, I want to know who, in your fandom, is the character who you'd immediately think of if you read this header:

Title: Recovery and Revelations Part 7, 1/???
Series: Hold Me Tight Tonight (Confronting the Darkness)
Author: I <3 Woobies!
Summary: To protect the ones he or she loves, Character X sold his or her body to evil slaver alien wizards. Now Character X is finally back home. Can the [team/family/friends/loved ones/etc.] help him or her recover?
Warnings: Noncon, dubcon, torture, past child abuse and incest, betrayal, cutting, slavery, underage sex, involuntary drug use, porn, some swears.

In the future, there will be a poll. But first, I need the names to go in the poll. So tell me: in your fandom, who is the woobie? To make this extra-challenging, especially for you people in Harry Potter and Supernatural: you can only nominate one person per fandom. I want to hear about the Woobiest in All the Land.

Comments

[copracat]

Seven of Nine/Janeway: PRACTICALLY CANON. Fourth season is a Xena-like heaven. Oh, TFV, it's like Bechdel every day. If you see one episode, that episode should be The Omega Directive.

[thefourthvine]

You tempt me strangely!

We watched an episode of Deep Space 9 (because it came on the TOS set), and I was ASTONISHED at how good it was. (Although, in fairness, I should also mention that it featured TOS parts and one of my nearly bulletproof narrative kinks, so. But there were moments of meta commentary and characters I mostly liked, too.) This makes me think the other shows might also have things worth seeing, although I suspect that anything without a Spock in it would not be worth extended viewing.

Seven of Nine/Janeway - the thing is, the very first vid I watched for this pairing (and there are a LOT of them, wow) suggested a more mother and child type relationship, so I was really QUITE surprised when vids 2 through, like, 50 were more along the lines of THE SEXIN, OMG THE SEXIN.

But. Hmmm. Bechdel passing! Xenaesqueness! (Although I have never actually seen an ep of Xena, and many of the vids seem to feature her in het relationships, so I am not sure I can quite imagine this. Unless it's like Boom Boom Ba, in which case holy GOD sign me UP.)

And, hey! Speaking of, you know, things f/f - this vid is relevant to your interests. (Anime vid, which means it's on a site that requires membership to download, so I linked to YouTube.)

[copracat]

Oh, that video, thank you. How gorgeous! Amnesia and girl assassins on a quest, what Vera-nip!

And as for Xena, both she and Gabs were obviously bisexual in canon. You know all that footage in Boom Boom Ba where it looks like they're in a bath together? They were usually in a bath together. Or where it looked like they were kissing? They were usually kissing. All for the story, of course, but when the story is Xena waking Gabrielle from an enchanted sleep with a kiss, I think you see where I'm going.

[zeborah]

...I clearly need to watch more Xena than I did.

[copracat]

You wouldn't catch me disagreeing.

[zeborah]

My opinion: DS9 is actually good (by and large; it still has clunkers), whereas Voyager brings home report cards saying "Has potential". So much potential, so cruelly squandered. You can be watching an episode for 55 minutes saying "Wow, this is actually good!" and then they'll manage to retroactively spoil the whole episode in the last scene. And yet I'm still by and large a fan, because how can you ignore potential like that?

Seven/Janeway -- I'm pretty sure I wrote the very first Janeway/7 fanfic ever. It was appalling, particularly because I live in New Zealand and this was before bittorrent so I wrote it based on episode summaries and got a bunch of things wrong. But it's my claim to fame so I cling to it anyway. --I think in the show, really it is primarily a mother/daughter relationship, though not a terribly healthy one; though that's possibly my bias against Janeway, who I increasingly saw as so unpredictable in her leadership style that it's almost abusive to the whole crew. But when did canon ever get in the way of fanon?

Xena has a sidekick Gabrielle. I've hardly watched any Xena but I can wholeheartedly recommend the musical episode. Apparently much backstory happens before it but I managed to figure out enough of it to enjoy the episode without any of that context. It's full of Xena/Gabrielle "You betrayed me! No, you betrayed *me*!" angst and the slashy subtext isn't all that far sub.