Some worlds are absolute hell to live in. The kind where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Being Good Sucks, Finagle's Law is out to get you, and Anyone Can Die. In a World of Woobie, everyone is suffering. They may cover it up—maybe they're a Stepford Smiler, or a Stoic Badass who seems too tough to need any sort of comfort. But once their backstory comes out or the universe starts making them its personal Butt Monkey, they too will join the ranks of the characters the fans want to hug and tell, "It's okay, everything's going to be all right."

In general, the sympathetic cast in these stories will contain a lot of Iron Woobies, Stoic Woobies, and Jerkass Woobies. Antagonists will either be Anti-Villain, Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds-types, or the Complete Monsters responsible for the horrifying situations everyone else is going through.

There's a few ways this can go: perhaps everyone learns to kick ass, or a world where the scenery is chewed to ground dust due to the sheer over the top performance in such a way that they tend to invoke wildly gestures, or maybe they get sarcastic.

But you'll still feel sorry for them.

This is almost always a Crapsack World, or if they're lucky, A World Half Full. This can be used to reveal a Crap Saccharine World as well. See also Dysfunction Junction. And remember, Your Mileage May Vary; what prompts one person to Manly Tears may fall flat for another and come across as a world of Wangst instead.

Compare and contrast World of Badass.

Anime and Manga

• Angel Beats!, mentioned below. THE PLOT ACTUALLY HANGS ON IT. By definition, every single character in the show is in the Afterlife due to having died young and miserable.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion, thanks to the show's love of Deus Angst Machina.
• Fullmetal Alchemist. Also a World of Badass, which makes it a World of Iron Woobie, therefore.
• D.Gray-man.
• Quite possibly Code Geass, but all the Base Breakers and Alternate Character Interpretation makes it hard to say.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is full of woobies. The show tries to evoke sympathy for almost every character even when they're on the bad side. Although no-one ever really comes close to the woobie-ness of Fate.
• Fruits Basket.
• Elfen Lied.
• Rumbling Hearts.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Not just all the main characters. Not just the minor characters (Another drink, Junko?). The supplemental material gives a little backstory for some of the Eldritch Abominations, and it just makes you want to give them a hug. And maybe some cheese.
  • Puella Magi Kazumi Magica follows in its parent series's footsteps; at one point, literally all of the Pleiades girls, save Kazumi herself, were just about to commit group suicide. And the antagonists have harrowing, Tear Jerker backstories, too!
• Nearly every villain in Naruto has some sort of Freudian Excuse, and the other characters are no less Woobies.
• Berserk. Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds is the basic premise.
• Texhnolyze, not that it helps them in the end.
• Now and Then, Here and There.
• Even One Piece crosses into this, given that each of the nine main characters has backstories of varying tragedy (some of them being really tragic) that define themselves and how just everyone is such a dogged Determinator that it's hard to see someone fail. 'Cause when they do, nothing will stop the waterworks. Not even for the guys. Especially the guys.
• Fairy Tail in nearly the same vein as Naruto
• Hibiki no Mahou.
• Full Moon o Sagashite.
• Ga-Rei Almost every character including villains has a tragic backstory, and those that don't have one will get Break the Cutie moments leading to the The End of the World as We Know It in their Darkest Hour.
  • The evil spirits are the hatred of humanity so at one point there were living people that had gone through something so horrible that their soul can no longer rest in peace.
• Casshern Sins
• Everyone in Pandora Hearts is a Woobie...Except for Isla Yura.

Comics

• The Marvel Universe. The majority of the iconic heroes and even some of the major villains and antiheroes have been put through the Woobie mill in some fashion or another, via Fantastic Racism, an improbably unfortunate love life, psychological problems, human experimentation, child abuse, Power Incontinence, you name it.

Fan Works

• Equestria in the Pony POV Series. Note, it normally isn't this, Discord's rampage turned it into one because he pretty much mass Mind Raped the entire country, leaving everyone with deep, psychological scars to deal with. They get better.
  • One World of Woobie wasn't enough for the author, there are two. We eventually find out the G3 My Little Pony was destroyed in a Cosmic Retcon because it was dying and the only way to save the universe was to destroy that section and start over. Worse? We see The End of the World as We Know It from their POV!

Literature

• Les Misérables. It's even in the title.
• Harry Potter, sometimes.
• A Song of Ice and Fire.
• Percy Jackson and The Olympians.
• Animorphs.
• Warrior Cats.
• The Hunger Games.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe. A nonstop, cyclical war between Force Users that is mostly pointless? Check. Any good deed a character does rendered invalid sooner or later? Check. Heroic Sacrifice that turns into a Senseless Sacrifice sooner or later? Bingo. Little wonder Kreia was convinced that The Force is a callous sadist.

Live Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, above all else for being ruled by a cruel god who believes that things are going badly if the characters are happy.
  • If a Joss Whedon series goes on for long enough, the world the characters live in becomes one of these by default, really. Joss loves Breaking The Cutie.
• Torchwood, though it technically takes place in the Whoniverse. Less so in Series 3 and 4, though, not so for Captain Jack, who always gets screwed.
• Criminal Minds. When a regular day for your main characters involves solving the grisliest of murders, getting addicted to drugs, contracting anthrax, being shot multiple times, or even faking your own death, we've hit this.
• Community is a rare comedic example. Even the side characters have multiple personal flaws and insecurities.
• The Alternate Universe in Fringe is this. They ended up in the wrong side of the whole "reality breaking down" mess. It makes it all the more heartwarming when the Bridge begins to heal their world so they can reclaim lost areas. And all the more heartbreaking when the Bridge has to be sealed off to save both universes.

Newspaper Comics

• Peanuts, with the exception of Snoopy.

Tabletop Games

• In some ways, the world of Warhammer 40,000 can come across this way. In particular, the Imperial Guard has this as a primary source of appeal: at the end of the day, Guardsmen are just ordinary humans in way over their heads who manage to pull through by sheer force of will.
• In Scion, the world is so screwed up that Fenris, the giant wolf who is destined to be an integral part of Ragnarok, comes off as unfairly victimized.

Theater

• Les Mis again.
• Avenue Q, Played for Laughs.

Video Games

• Tales of Symphonia.
  • Tales of the Abyss as well.
• Psychonauts, Played for Laughs.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
• Final Fantasy VII.
• Final Fantasy VI. Damn near every playable character is marked by a horrible tragedy, either in their backstory or during the course of the story.
• Final Fantasy XIII.
• Odin Sphere.
• Persona 4.
  • If that's one, then almost certianly the darker Persona 3 is one too.
  • As would be the far darker Persona 2.
• Lux-Pain.
• Fatal Frame.
• Fallout in general, but learning the backstories of each of your companions makes you wonder how anyone can stand waking up in the morning.
• BlazBlue, it being a Darker and Edgier Spiritual Successor to Guilty Gear. With Woobies galore. And not just one, but TWO Complete Monsters.
• Mass Effect hinted at it, and Mass Effect 2 turned it Up to Eleven. Everyone, from randoms on the street to Commander Shepard is suffering. It manages to be a World of Badass at the same time.
  • If Mass Effect 2 turned it Up to Eleven, Mass Effect 3 turned it up to twelve. With a galactic war going on against the genocidal Reapers despair is everywhere. And Shepard goes through more suffering in this one than s/he did in the first two game combined.
• Mother 3, so much. Nearly everyone in the main cast has gone through hell, including the main villain.
• The sheer number of Touhou characters with dark and disturbing past would have made Gensokyo a World of Woobie, if not for them too busy being trigger-happy sociopaths. Marisa is rejected by humanity, Flandre is locked in the Scarlet Devil Mansion's cellar because of her terrible power, Yuyuko wanted to stop being an accidental murderer, Mokou wants somebody who will not leave her, Medicine fights viciously for equality, Kanako doesn't want to disappear, and Byakuren would really, really appreciate it if people would stop demonizing each other.
  • "Truly, this impure land is paradise!"
• Mortal Kombat 9, being a genuine Wham! Episode for the franchise, does not pull its punches.
• Nie R is filled with incredibly tragic characters. Even the monsters that you encounter aren't excluded.
• Most of the good characters in Dragon Quest V are woobies in the world where villains are over-the-top Complete Monsters.
• Inazuma Eleven, despite being the world full of badasses, most characters are still woobies.
• Fragile Dreams, especially for protagonist Seto.
• Dark Souls. Look closely and pay attention and you'll find that most of those you meet in Lordran are in dire need of hugs. Just not Lautrec.
• The heroes in the Arc the Lad series go through tons of death and destruction; in the second game they don't prevent the end of the world, but survive it, and are left wondering what to do next.

Visual Novels

• EVERYTHING written by Jun Maeda:
  • AIR.
  • Angel Beats!, taken to a whole new definition: It's practically an requirement to be in the plot.
  • In Clannad, just about everyone, EVERYONE, with so much as a name is a Woobie.
  • Kanon
  • Little Busters
• Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Actually, When They Cry in general. It's just that Umineko no Naku Koro ni only focuses on one family for the most part.
• Katawa Shoujo. Not only are the main characters disabled in various ways, but they have many other issues that are merely exacerbated by or unrelated to their disabilities, such as Parental Abandonment, unrequited love and being torn away from everyone and everything they once knew.

Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive is at least trying for it.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob. Even Riboflavin has gotten a bit of Woobiness recently with a flashback to his Start of Darkness.
• Electric Wonderland might count, although some characters manage to end their suffering early into the series.
• Homestuck gives us Alternia, the troll's homeplanet. It's basically an aggressive Social Darwinist society that forces (equivalent) 13-year-olds to lie, cheat and steal amongst themselves. Murder is less of a crime than a social faux-pas, and oftentimes the only retribution earned for it is revenge from the deceased's loved ones. With this brutal upbringing, even the most morally dubious characters garner some sympathy: nearly everyone from the miniature psychopaths to the relatively relatable trolls is harboring some kind of psychological scars.

Web Original

• Ruby Quest.
• Survival of the Fittest. Let's just say you'll be feeling sorry for a lot of characters.
• As the focus went from just reviews to characters doing sketch comedy, That Guy With The Glasses became full of Jerkass Woobies living in a Sadist Show Dysfunction Junction.

Western Animation

• Most of Don Bluth's earlier works feature this. Posterior movies, though, are anything but that.
• Beauty and the Beast is this trope on training wheels. Belle is ostracized for being too smart, and is sexually harassed by the town Jerkass/Villain with Good Publicity. Her father is treated as a crackpot and is nearly institutionalized for warning the town about the Beast. Oh, the Beast? Tragic Hero-slash-Jerkass Woobie. And his servants have all been robbed of their humanity as punishment for his sins.
• The Film of the Book of Coraline.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's what you get when your world has been at war for almost a century.
• Gargoyles: Most named characters are either ostracized, lose a loved one, cursed for generations, or sometimes all three.