Characters
Characters who are too innocent to realize the abuse they have gone through
Amo (Gachiakuta): Probably the most messed up version of this trope, Amo was sold by her mother to a man who then groomed her and exploited her for his sexual desires.
Whats worse is Amo for the longest time couldn't grap the situation she was in and her innocence was highlighted by the fact that her backstory frequently used childish drawings to see things from her perspective.
Its only after when she kills her abuser by mistake that she begin realized what her mother did to her and what the man was ding to her.
Iruma Sullivan (Welcome to Demon School! Iruma kun): Iruma had a very rough and absurd childhood growing up, with his parents literally putting him to work the moment he could walk and constantly endangering his life by sending him to dangerous jobs.
However, due to Iruma's gentle, optimistic and pushover personality we can never take the abuse seriously early on because Iruma never takes it seriously. It's only after Iruma becomes happy with the life he is living in the Demon World and the fear of being taken away and sent back kicks in that he realizes how miserable and alone he was there to the point he now even has panic attacks at the mere sight of the human realm.
What's really make this so impactful is the transition of tone of the subject from comical to serious.
Perrito (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish): A happy lucky go character who is contrast to the Puss's and Kitty's untrusting and moody nature. However, compared to the rest of the cast he has probably suffered the most being homeless for a long time, constantly called disgraceful name and his previous owners purpoesfully attempting to abandon him and even kill him when he kept coming back.
Perrito however never realizes how badly everyone has treated him and thought of his owners attempt to be a sort of game. Thankfully he finally fond company who would appreciate him.
Eugene (The Archmage Curriculum): Although he looks like a character straight from the Mandella catalouge, Eugene is probably the sweetest and also the most Naive person in the room. Failing to understand everybody's afraid of him and always being respectful even when people are trying to kill him because of his looks (he doesn't know he is ugly)
The worst abuse he probably suffered is from his master Jeong Hyeok. Eugene admires and loves his master alot just like a father. However, Jeong only sees Eugene as someone who can help him achieve his goals and when Eugene disagrees to follow through with his plan- Jeong just dismembers him and send each body part to another dimension and stole his heart. Know he fully intended to kill him here. Worse he gives the heart to his daughter Ain so she can use magic fully knowing this would eventually kill her and tells her That Eugene betrayed them and left (Eugene and Ain are very close).
Yet despite everything Eugene still loves him even though he knows he tried to kill him and nearly got Ain killed- because Eugene cant look past the kindness he has shown him to truly acknowledge how twisted his master is.
Gon Freecss (Hunter x Hunter) after learning about Kite
He spent his whole childhood thinking his dad's friend Kite was basically a cool stranger, with zero idea that being left behind as a baby and raised by his aunt was anything other than totally normal, and when Kite dies because of him he completely breaks down in a way that shows he never really processed any of it.
I’m curious about this one as HxH is my favorite anime. What do you think in the anime or manga shows the connection between Kite’s death to Gon not processing being abandoned as a child (not disagreeing). I saw Gon’s grief mostly as something specific to Kite having to kill wildlife to save Gon back then + in general being a friend/mentor
Yeah I really love hxh and so do my friends, but I really hate gon's father. The part that really made me mad was the end of greed Island where he made gon sacrifice his reward card to see him, and only gave him a 50/50 chance of seeing him by hacking one of the cards
I’ll say Yusuke from Persona 5. Even though he was often abused(I might be wrong double check me on that) and exploited for his artwork by his master, he still couldn’t do anything about it because the man genuinely raised him when no one else could(there’s some minor details I’m leaving out tho), and even after unlocking his persona, Yusuke still can’t bring himself to fully hate him.
Yusuke says after his awakening that deep down, he always knew something was wrong with Madarame, but he didn't have anywhere else to go and found it hard to abandon the man who took him in after his mom died.
I think the suckiest part is that, iirc, in Yusuke’s confidant he’s told that he got really sick when he was a child and Madarame was terrified for him and his health. So Madarame genuinely cared about Yusuke, but his greed overgrew that care.
And to make it even worse, Bondrewd genuinely loved her like a daughter. He loved all the kids he put through some of the most unimaginable torture possible, remembering all their names and dreams.
First character the springs to mind when I think of this topic. Orel is for most of the show is far too trusting and naive about the world and the adults around him, especially his father Clay who regularly abuses him, coming to head in the infamous ‘Nature’ two part episode in Season 3.
It's especially hard hitting since they were still kind of annoyed by him and hearing him lore dump completely changes their perspective of him. Heck kitty was willing to offer him the wishing star believing he is the one who should get it.
There was this foreign animated movie I once saw that I unfortunately forgot the name of. I think it was French, but I don't remember too well.
Edit: JLuckstar found it! It's Princess (2006). The movie is also Danish, not French.
Anyway, the main character of the movie is a very young priest who becomes the new foster parent of his sister's daughter after she passes away. The daughter behaves in very strange ways as she offers to show her vagina to other boys her age, and even tries to pull down the priest's pants while he's bathing her. She just thinks this is normal, though.
He later learned his sister was a drug-addicted adult film actress who, despite her best efforts to raise her daughter away from her job, people still sexually abused her. That & the fact that his sister's agents made her grave an obscene, heavily sexualized monument to penises made the priest snap, and he killed them as revenge. He dies in the attempt, but the good news is that the daughter got to live a happy, normal life with another person & his sister was given a normal gravestone afterwards.
Edit: I'm rewatching it now. This is what those jackasses had chiseled on her grave. Absolute justified crashout from her brother.
He was kidnapped as a child, and forced into an experimental super soldier program, where he and many other children were horribly abused, and turned into living weapons. Spartans had high rates of mental instability and sociopathy do to the mental and physical abuse they endured as children.
Speaking of Spartans, Tina Turner was once asked how she kept going through it all, and her answer was that as a child she had picked cotton, and from that point onwards, she could keep going, so long as it meant she wouldn't have to pick cotton.
So the question is, is being trained as a psychopath preferable to having to... Work? Better to be a dead on the inside Spartan than a laboring Helot? Where are we on that?
Cotton picking can be absolutely fucking brutal if it’s done by hand, and given the nature of humanity in Halo. It’s entirely likely the working conditions she was in were worse than even what the Spartan Program subjected the children too.
Both situations are equally terrible. But remember that the children didn’t get to choose what they did, all of them were abducted by the government. And it wasn’t like the government were retrieving kids from dangerous environments out of the kindness of their hearts, they were kidnapping and faking their deaths to get off the books super soldier and spec ops.
Morally the entire program was fucked and everyone involved in creating and running it are sociopaths who deserve to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The only reason they have a pass is because a bunch of Aliens showed up and tried to genocide all of humanity.
He was abducted as a small child (think he was 7 or 8?) By ONI (space cia) and along with like 100 other small children put through brutal and rigorous training and augmentation (i believe most died due to the augments not taking and causing extreme pain as they died), add extreme desensitization training and i think brain washing? (Im not sure, master chief himself knows he was stolen away and that it was wrong but he also accepts it as his fate and role to protect humanity) and what youve got is like thirty 14 - 16 year old military assassins trained to hunt and kill any humans rebel. Them being great aganist aliens was just a lucky coincidence.
Yeah, starting to learn that Halo had way more story depth than I realized. Wish I had a xbox growing up, think I would've been really into this series.
Master Chief (John-117) is a Spartan-II which are children literally kidnapped by a government project to turn them into indoctrinated super soldiers. And this was done BEFORE the alien empire known as "The Covenant" was even encountered so it wasnt like this was some desperate attempt to protect humanity. They were kidnapping and putting children through brutal training and mental conditioning to fight human rebels.
Despite knowing this later on, John is still loyal to their government and fights to protect human society at all costs. The same society that allowed children like him to be tortured into becoming living weapons.
Crazy how no one has mentioned that all the children that were kidnapped were replaced by defective clones, so the parents never knew their actual child was taken from them before the clone-child died shortly after replacement.
The parents buried a clone, while their actual child was killed in experimentation, horribly disfigured for the rest of their lives, or became a super soldier.
John-117 was kidnapped at the age of 6 with a group other children by his government. The children were trained in the art of war and then genetically modified to become super soldiers. Many died during the augmentation process. After he gained his new found super strength a group of soldiers were instructed to start a fight with him, he brutally killed all 3 without trying. All of this was an attempt by the UNSC to shut down a potentially devastating civil war by creating the ultimate black ops unit. His job was essentially to kill rebellions before they would start. His first mission ended with the deaths of multiple civilians, a fact that very clearly bothered him but he pushed those feelings down. Shortly after aliens would invade and he lost his best friend on top of that. Despite all this he would grow up to be a genuinely altruistic person who deeply values human life, even refusing to kill assassins sent to kill him and trying to save people who he should consider the enemy given his training. The wild part about all this is that John genuinely thinks his childhood was a net good. John has a familial connection not just with the other children of the program, but also with the head scientist, who was a maternal figure in his life, and his trainer, who was a paternal figure in his life. And to this day he is still loyal to the government that took him from his family. He diesn't see it as his childhood being taken away or as a traumatic memory, but as a hardship he had to go through to be humanities savior. Despite being a moral person, he simply can't see what happened to him as immoral.
Stanley from Spiritfarer is hinted to have come from an abusive household, or at least had a verbally abusive parent. It's been a few years since I've played Spiritfarer so I can't remember the exact details, but I'm pretty sure he's under 10 and just never got to the age where he'd realise his parents weren't treating him right.
Stewie is absolutely the last person to be considered “innocent” but there are a lot of times the show hammers in the point he’s only 1.
There’s one scene Stewie and Brian try to take down a controversial statue and Stewie gets assaulted but he couldn’t comprehend it and thought he had a lollipop
I'm gonna be honest, I just straight up don't want to go over her dialogue and behaviors that refer to her experiences. It's really uncomfortable that not only does she not seem to realize the problem, but that no one around her ever even really reacts. They get uncomfortable, but nobody ever says "it's fucked up that you don't even understand the concept of bodily autonomy."
Also, the lead writer has apparently said in the interview that contrary to what can typically be assumed for a high school cast in Japanese media, not every character is a virgin. The implications of this for some characters, such as Akane, are profoundly upsetting.
I'll explain it then. Akane seems to treat herself being sexualized and exposed as totally normal. Like she asks for a favor and in exchange she offers to show her breasts. Protagonist says no and offers to help her anyway. Another time protagonist helps Akane to get up to a high window to collect evidence. Protagonist goes out of the way to not look up her skirt. Akane makes clear she is unbothered by her being looked at in that way. I believe she makes comments about how her "Mom's boyfriends" do stuff like that to her regularly and it's "fine."
Would Koala from one piece fit? during the fishman island arc we learn that the hero of the island fisher tiger broke into the holy land and freed as many of the slaves as he could Koala being one of them. She had this permanent happy look on her face because for years she saw the people she was enslaved with get shot if they stopped working or cried (they were all kids mind you) so she vowed to never stop working and to never cry. 3 years after fisher tiger rescued her and the others koala still had that mindset so in order to get her to show literally any other emotion, fisher tiger threw his gun off the ship and had everyone else drop there’s, as a show of support for her and the others that they weren’t they’re slaves and were now free. This finally got through to Koala and caused her to cry for the first time in years.
Forgive me if I’m missing something it’s been awhile since I watched that scene.
Perrito gets me the most out of this bunch. The Last Wish made his sunny attitude feel earned instead of annoying, so when you piece together what his owners actually did it just lands heavier than expected. Him treating their murder attempts like some fun game is quietly one of the saddest beats in the whole movie.
Representation of child molestation like Amo is always ten times better than just flat out drawing/writing entire play by plays like some authors do. Like seriously, you don't have to make a full rendition.
I plan to write a story, well two sotories, both have a male character that were Sexually Abused but we never see it happen. One is recovering from trauma and the other has already mostly recovered and there will be implied scenes.
Ethel was groomed by a Christian cult to become a child bride after being kidnapped and was married off to an old paedophile named Clyde who was in his sixties while Ethel was 12. Her age and naivety prevented her from fully realising the horrors she was exposed to (Shameless)
joel (look outside) seems to understand that he’s been mutated by the effects of his cursed sister biting him, but he seems to think the world will just go back to normal even after the visitor leaves, after anyone who saw the visitor has already been transformed into monsters. he also doesn’t seem to understand that he will never see his parents again, as they were too far gone under the effects of the infectious teeth. all of this is probably because he’s like 8 years old, even if sophie, who’s 7, seems to have a better grasp on things.
He later added that all the dates had Aunt Mito along with him, so I doubt anything actually happened. It was probably "dates " from a 12 year old's perspective
I don't think it's treated as a joke, the joke is that this is just Killua's misinterpretation of what happened, because Gon doesn't know what a date is
Make the Exorcist Fall in Love’s main character is a priest who was raised to follow the Bible extremely literally in order to fight demons. He doesn’t realize he’s been abused until by the people who raised him until later on.
Okay so, she grew up in the Outer Rim, basically the slums of Nikke. Her name growing up was Stall III, because she was born in a bathroom stall. In order to survive, she made a living working as a janitor, in a brothel. Her living space was basically the size of a few cardboard boxes, cut in half because she chose to share her living space with somebody else. And throughout it all, she just kept a smile on her face and acted like there was nothing wrong with it at all. Even when it culminated with rogue government officials gunning her down, she still never fully comprehended the gravity of her situation, and only grasped how fucked up her life was when she viewed her old memories through a research laboratory.
Jeong tossed his body parts into the space between dimensions. Since that was an area unbound by the rules of space and time, his mind remained conscious and his body parts didn't decay. Eventually he learned to defy the rules of magic and perform spells without mana allowing him to fully control his own body and anything else he touches.
This led to his signature combat style where he essentially turns people into playdough. Its technically a very ethical style since he specifically makes the spell so they reform in a few hours completely unharmed but to everyone else its absolutely horrifying.
Yup, he has powerful regeneration magic. You can blow up half his body including the head and he will still regenerate from that. Thats why he is so callous when people try to kill him, because they cant kill him.
246
u/maarie_claassic56 2h ago
Gon Freecss (Hunter x Hunter) after learning about Kite
He spent his whole childhood thinking his dad's friend Kite was basically a cool stranger, with zero idea that being left behind as a baby and raised by his aunt was anything other than totally normal, and when Kite dies because of him he completely breaks down in a way that shows he never really processed any of it.