Experiences Worst Angst You Put Your Charas Through?

[mother of sorrows]

so, i feel like it's true for most of us that if our charas ever came to life, they... would probably hate us all their being for the things we do to them. :^) torturing characters can be a pretty big part of roleplaying and just writing stories in general - and that got thinking, what is the worst angst you've put your charas through? it can be anything, from mental to physical or emotional pain!

for me, one of my characters stabbed his boyfriend under the influence of a spell. pretty cliche, but my chara finally got free of the spell and was forced to watch as his boyfriend slowly bled out in his arms because of something my chara did :^) cue crippling guilt and depression. not the worst, but still kinda sad!

another chara that suffered at my hands is nei! he was part of a naruto-like setting me and my friend made, so he was a ninja. basically, i made him go on a mission to catch a missing nin, but things went really bad. half of his team was dead (including his lover) and he got captured and tortured, which left him with mental and physical scars. nei came back, but his family slowly distanced themselves from him because he didn't 'heal' from his trauma as quick as they would have liked. and oh, i also make his family take away his daughter and not allowing him to see her, because he's as too unstable to raise her. in my defense, i was bored when i made him, so...

 

[bad wolf]

I buried one of my characters for a few decades.

 

[CrowOuttaHell]

I've done a lot of harm to some of my old characters before to keep up with my writing partner who, at that time, liked putting her characters through a lot, but nothing tops my list from that time of my life where I made a guy slit his wrists and write a letter in his own blood because he was having girlfriend problems. I was a stupid writer.

In more recent times, I have this semi-noir or just plain bittersweet AU of an otherwise comedic story I was working on where protagonist's girlfriend disappears for two years, they reunite but girlfriend is cold, protagonist kind of slowly continues to break down mentally and emotionally because she can't take this, somehow doesn't end up offing herself...and when GF starts reciprocating that much-needed love it's already at this weird point where protagonist is pretty much broken internally.

Yeah, I have no idea what made me write that one either. XD

 

[Lioness075]

Oh man, I’m terrible to my characters. All of mine have some kind of disability, physical and/or mental, and a hidden trauma in their past. Idk, I’m kinda obsessed with someone having a shitty past and then overcoming it to become a better person in time.
My most current character has memory loss of her past year (RP gives that perk to everyone) and I carefully inserted her mystery trauma into that lost year. She has a twin brother, but can’t find him after that year suddenly passes and she realizes it’s time for her to go to her special ceremony for the RP. And now I’ve given her a mystery injury in her dominant hand that healed poorly and hinders her from doing her usual line of work - hunting. I’d say more, but I don’t want to give anything away in case someone from that RP finds this post.

 

[Malphaestus]

Oh man, I’m terrible to my characters. All of mine have some kind of disability, physical and/or mental, and a hidden trauma in their past. Idk, I’m kinda obsessed with someone having a shitty past and then overcoming it to become a better person in time.
My most current character has memory loss of her past year (RP gives that perk to everyone) and I carefully inserted her mystery trauma into that lost year. She has a twin brother, but can’t find him after that year suddenly passes and she realizes it’s time for her to go to her special ceremony for the RP. And now I’ve given her a mystery injury in her dominant hand that healed poorly and hinders her from doing her usual line of work - hunting. I’d say more, but I don’t want to give anything away in case someone from that RP finds this post.

Luckily for you, I follow that one.

When it comes to myself, I tend to prefer darker worlds because it allows for more creative freedom since the moral boundries do not limit the expressions a writer can enact upon their creation. Crucifying is a common perk of which I attribute to my characters when I write alone, but my worst one was probably the following:

It was a world where god was alive, and a bit of a genocidal maniac who headed a genocidal religion for the sake of attaining world control, so the world could be transformed from material to ephemeral paradise (heaven and the material plane were linked; they ruled heaven, but needed to rule the materium as well to change the fabric of reality. And as such, they steamrolled everyone who disbelieved and murdered rampantly). Absolutely totalitarian in their approach.

But anyway, they were found by the inquisition, crucified at the forum of the capital of the world, millions of onlookers beholding both them and the 'pope' figure who commanded the human element of the faith. Needless to say, it was far from fair, rocks and other discardables were used, and all fairness was lost, and the depravities of the masses were put on full display.

 

[Crayons]

Interesting topic! I feel like my RPs have been less melodramatic in recent years and the angst level has been more "normal" level than extreme messed-upedness.

So this is from a long while ago, but the cumulative angst of this storyline was so immense.

My character was a, eh... slightly morally dubious, kind of a jerk, but ultimately a Good Person(tm). He was descended directly from a god, as was the other player's character so we played for Big Stakes in this RP. In the course of trying to rescue Character B (Char. A's wife) from her evil brother, Character A ended up being poisoned by Corruption. Bearing the secret knowledge that Char. B's daughter (that Character A was raising as his own along with her) was secretly the reincarnated version of the Not Nice At All(tm) God of Dreams who had kidnapped and tortured her. Carrying this dangerous secret caused the corruption inside him to do it's work, and he ended up killing a friend of his because he thought he was having an affair with Character A (he wasn't), then using his powers to wholesale kill a bunch of people by burying them in an avalanche because why not, and then try to kill his wife in an epic battle where BOTH of them ended up being mortally wounded and then healed up. And then angst upon angst as he realised all the crappy things he had done. And then trying to make up with his wife, and her angsting her little heart out as well. It got so angsty that I actually got kind of sick of the angst and requested a timeskip. XD

I feel like there were even more angsty things in there but probably too many to remember or mention.

Nowadays the angst tends to stick to things like "My dad is a jerk and constantly critical of me and it makes me sad" or "I'm not allowed to marry the woman I love because she's a servant" and so on.

 

[NotaViolinist]

In one of my old stories I had a character go through nondescript torture at the hands of another (mostly it was vague descriptions of being cut all over and left to bleed out). It was mostly an experimental thing for me since I was exploring writing with other senses than sight (as the character was blindfolded, I had to rely on other senses to describe the scene). I don't really feel too negative or positive about that story, it was just kind of a drabble.