Whats a story without angst? (Please share!)

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE ANGST IN STORIES. Especially when involving yaoi.. 

I play in alot of ttrpgs, and I only have fun when my characters have dark pasts that haunt them as they slowly try to recover. Its absolutely the best thing ever getting to roleplay being sad as your character slowly gets better.

I invite anyone to tell me about their oc's dark past (or angsty things happening in the present) because it is absolutely the best part of any story to me and I would love love love to read what you have. I might share some of my own too :)

The one I'd like to share in this reply is my pathfinder 2e character Karo. (I wont delve into everything that's happened to him over the 3+ year campaign since I'd be here a while, so I'll just note something small that happened fairly recently) 

Recently he was "kidnapped" by a gang of alchemists and stuck with a syringe that blocked out his memory of his friends. He purposely gave himself up to this gang to gather intel on the area and the lich controlling it, and took the party's cleric William with him as backup. This is not the first time he's had his mind altered in some way on this adventure, the first time his weakened and agreeable state taken advantage of by another party member who is no longer traveling with them (WHOLE other story)

He's since been rescued by the rest of the party, but he had been controlled in that manner for two weeks and is still trying to grapple with what he did in that state, and how kind his captors had been to him in that mindset. Oh, and that his friends attacked him inorder to cure the poison in him, which included his party member Urick slashing him across the chest and leaving behind a nasty scar. The current state of things, he flinches more around Urick and has trouble eating after a pretty nasty drug induced nightmare he had before he was converted to the side of the alchemists.

He's trying his best, but his best can only take him so far.

I will say the aftermath of the session right after they saved him was considerably worse, if you could even believe it.. of which I might share later.. maybe.. I summarized it once for a friend and it took up 4 non-nitro character limit messages. The session was 8 hours long.

(heres a drawing of him about to get downed by Urick, btw! ^^ )

Amazing art! I have a lot of OCs and sonas. The one I can remember off the top of my head is Eddy. 

Eddy is a half-human half-albino crocodile with pink spikes. He is blind in his right eye and has stitches on his snout. He was a lab experiment by [REDACTED] an underground facility of horrific inhumane torture that also experimented on people. He escaped the sewers and has befriended hobo anthropomorphic feline named Bo. Bo is a bohemian of sorts and he has failed to have a successful band multiple times. 

More on Eddy's past, he sometimes cannot tell the difference between his imagination and reality, especially when upset or scared, he sees whatever is provoking these negative emotions as the "scientists"(more like sadists) and can almost feel the memories. The syringe needles piercing his skin, tiny nerves in his brain and body being electrocuted, "surgeries" with no anesthesia but instead adrenaline being pumped into his veins aware of all the pain. Being shoved underwater until his lungs and head burned, only to have the water level lowered so he could gasp for air for a brief moment sounding like a suffocating old man, only to be put under water again. Crying himself to sleep often until he no longer had tears and only had cellmates for brief comfort, but many often didn't make it, whether it was death or insanity that took them.

I have been preparing a "pilot" or comic of sorts that is set in the present where Bo lives in an apartment with Maxine, his new girlfriend who is emo. The world is one of superheros and anthropomorphic beings on earth. I thought of it and did some world-buildling months before I started watching MHA.

I know it all sounds kinda cringe. The lab experiment trope and weird-creature-has-to-with-some-guy-to-escape-the-government trope(ex: Sonic the hedgehog movie, Sonic X, Alvin and the chipmunks but not really cause they become "major rockstars" and the same kinda thing happens with Ted 1 and 2) has all been done before but what can I say I just like the lab experiment trope even if it may be cliche. Also, the other trope may definitely be a cliche but it is kidna realistic. On another note, writing with tropes can still be good as long as you are saying SOMETHING even a little different with it and doing it in a different way. My little pony for example does lots of tropes but so many people like it because they do it with a twist usually.

Sorry if that was too long and kinda off topic, it's how I roll. Good post by the way, pretty thought- provoking. 

Side note: Your character doesn't have to have a dark past to be interesting, I have more characters with a non-dark past than dark past. I know it's an interesting thing for you and it is for me too but it should be done well in order to not be seen as cliche/over-rated. And I am NOT saying you are doing that. I find your character to be interesting and I'd love to know more and wish I could play pathfinder with you. More people are moving away from DnD(cause its starting to fall OFF) to that I heard and I know some stuff about it. I also heard about starfinder which I wanna look into more.

Sorry again for ranting but I guess this is what this was meant for lol. 

I don't know about 'angsty' back stories, but my players tend to create characters with rich personality quirks, seemingly designed to annoy one another to maximum effect, creating a sort of existential "No Exit" a la Sartre. 

One of my current players, Chris, is playing a human Magic-User (what we call a wizard in 1e AD&D land). But, he was raised by goblins as a foster child. Not 'mines of Moria' type goblins but living in the goblin reservation in the city 'civilized' goblins. 

The character's name is Jim Smorkle, and he is nearly completely unaware of what actual human/elf/dwarf polite society is like. As a magic-user, he carries with him a false beard. He puts on this false beard for spell casting because he truly believes the beard is important for doing "wizard stuff".

Goblins are only 'tolerated' in his origin city, rather than accepted, which is still a big step ahead of most other 'civilized' places. In the time of Jim Smorkle's foster grandfather, the goblins quietly began to infiltrate the city's underbelly seeking a peaceful place to settle. They usually went about at night, or if during the day, with cloaks and disguises to TRY to pass as some sort of demi-human. 

Living in the fringes, they slowly worked their way into the extermination business. Rats, bugs, and such. Also in waste disposal. Also, setting up a legitimate shop to sell non-magical disguises! (a skill they honed out of necessity). By Jim Smorkle's time, they were the largest organized crime syndicate in the city, dealing with extortion and protection rackets with the currency being other people's dirty secrets. 

More than tolerated, they are a fixture, as no one wants to handle the legitimate extermination nor waste disposal jobs either. 

Tolerated, but still not quite ever accepted into 'polite' society.

The extended Smorkle clan was DELIGHTED to discover their adopted son possessed high intelligence and magical talent, so they could FINALLY have a family member with wizarding skills! His foster brothers, goblins not being allowed bear the wizard college, even disguised themselves as humans (one goblin upon another's shoulders in a trench coat) so that they could sneak into his graduation ceremony! 

Lol, I might tell more of it, but this was all back story! Not all fleshed out at character creation, but developed as the character's personality emerged through pkay. 

I've been writing my own TTRPG set in my reimagined universe of a previous story I wrote called Reliving Past Horrors.
This reimagining of the original story is specifically set to be a lot more of a grounded take on the story, which naturally lends itself to a LOT of horror and angst (the original story had everything from human experimentation to unlock transcendance to the genocide of the whole planet).

One of the major themes in this story is the horrors/injustices inflicted on women by men in power, as portrayed from personal experience. My own self-insert for example is the story of a girl named Livvy, who ends up drowning in her own pool due to the inability for her boyfriend to react and save her, but instead of dying. She ends up revived in her own bed. Though her dead body now does still exist, and everyone around her is convinced that the corpse is actually Livvy and the new girl that just appeared is not Livvy but just someone claiming to be her despite the fact they look practically perfectly alike. So now she has to come to terms with nobody recognizing her, her own "death" and the fact that everytime she touches water, this water can now be used to revive the dead (though these revived people now also need to deal with everyone thinking they are just a lookalike)

There's a lot more angst in this universe, like people getting wrongfully framed for murder. Losing your parents in a night only to have to come to terms that one of your parents may have been responsible for a lot of misery inflicted on others. And people rising to power to oppose a system that hates them.

the way my dumbass was about to say chainsaw man... anyways Saiki K