Summary
- Tragic anime backstories provide a deep emotional impact and shed light on real-life problems that many people face.
- The best tragic anime backstories tackle sensitive subjects and evoke empathy for those who have experienced trauma.
- These backstories often explore the consequences of abuse, neglect, isolation, and other forms of emotional and physical pain.
Warning: This article contains serious discussions of assault and self-harm
Tragic backstories are an important part of anime, with the most tragic anime backstories making fans appreciate a series' story and characters on a whole other level. While it's easy for the tragic backstory to be overdone or hackneyed, few plot devices can pack the same emotional gut punch of a well-deployed tragic backstory.
Tragic anime backstories run the gamut of human experience, exploring a wide variety of traumas. Though these tragic backstories often employ fantastical elements, at their core, these tales are often about very real problems that come to define many real people. The best tragic anime backstories shed light on sensitive subjects and provide empathy for those afflicted.
Shoto Todoroki - His Abusive Father Ruined His Life
My Hero Academia
As the son of one of the worst characters in My Hero Academia, Shoto had it rough from conception. His father, Endeavor, is utterly self-absorbed and obsessed with creating and grooming a hero stronger than All Might, resulting in the children who didn't measure up being neglected. When Shoto was born with both his father and mother's Quirks, he was put through an abusive training regimen by Endeavor.
The real kicker is that Endeavor's domestic abuse also ruined Shoto's relationship with his mother: though she loves Shoto and inspired him to be kind, life with Endeavor drove her to a mental breakdown where the mere sight of the features on Shoto's left side triggered her to burn it with boiling water, giving Shoto his facial scar and aloof, bitter demeanor. Worse yet is how Endeavor treated his first son, Toya. Endeavor's cruel treatment of a young Toya is responsible for creating one of My Hero Academia's strongest villains in Dabi.
Haruka Kotoura - Her Telepathy Alienated Everyone in Her Life
Kotoura-san
Though Kotoura-san is largely a comedy, its first episode "Kotoura-san and Manabe-kun" is incredibly rough to get through. Kotoura is born with the ability to read minds, which in a different series might be 100% beneficial to her or only played for laughs, but which here isolates her quickly from the rest of the world.
She isn't able to distinguish what's supposed to be private and what isn't, making people uncomfortable around her because they understand her ability as little as she does. When Kotoura accidentally reveals her parents' cheating on each other, her mother disowns and abandons her. Bewildered and hating herself, Kotoura chooses to withdraw from others and never speak, all before starting middle school.
Asuka Langley Sohryu - Motivated By Her Mother's Breakdown
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Nobody has a good time in one of the most depressing anime ever made, but Asuka's backstory is particularly horrifying. As a young child, Asuka's mother suffered a psychotic break and no longer recognized Asuka as Asuka, instead treating a doll as her daughter. This culminated in her hanging both herself and the doll, a sight that left Asuka with lifelong trauma.
As a teenager, Asuka desperately needs to be seen and acknowledged by others and is terrified of being found wanting in any way, meaning she cannot mentally handle failure. Her obsession with being the best of the best in everything, not just piloting an EVA, is her attempt to stop anyone else from discarding and replacing her.
Czeslaw Meyer - Made Immortal & Tortured For 200 Years
Baccano!
Eternal life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just ask Czes, who was on board the Advena Avis alongside his guardian Fermet and was given the immortality draught like the other engers. For the next two hundred years, Fermet used Czes as the subject of sadistic experiments testing the limits of immortality, which amounted to little more than torture.
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Czes was only able to escape by "devouring" Fermet: absorbing him into himself, the only way an immortal can kill another immortal. Alone and locked into the body of a child, he fends for himself and is willing to do anything to survive. He's highly paranoid and terrified of other immortals, convinced they will devour him at the first opportunity.
Vash the Stampede - His Evil Brother Caused Him to Destroy a City
Trigun
All Vash wants to do is be kind and follow the philosophy of "Love and peace!" However, due to living on a hopelessly cynical world and being on the wrong end of one of the best sibling rivalries in anime, he winds up with an utterly ruined reputation planet-wide and a terribly lonely life.
Vash and his twin brother Knives are Plants, artificial beings with special powers used to create energy. While Vash tries to use his powers to protect humanity, Knives wants to destroy them and bring his brother to heel. To this end, Knives sabotages the spaceship they lived in as children, kills their foster mother, and causes the July disaster, killing thousands while people blame Vash.
Gaara - Feared By His People & Used By His Father as a Weapon
Naruto
The tragedy of Gaara's backstory is how closely it parallels Naruto's, but where Naruto got rare lucky breaks that shaped his path into becoming a good person, Gaara only found abuse and misfortune, going back to even the causes of their becoming jinchuuriki: Gaara's father did it to turn his son into a weapon, Minato did it out of love for Naruto.
Shukaku's sand lashing out prevents Gaara from even getting near other children without hurting them, while Naruto is able to play with at least some kids, like Shikamaru. While Naruto had a kind mentor figure in Iruka, Gaara's uncle Yashamaru, who did truly love him, was forced to try and kill him by Gaara's father, demolishing Gaara's trust in others.
Momiji Sohma - Forgotten By His Mother & Ignored By His Father
Fruits Basket
It's a monumental task to pick out which Fruits Basket character has the most tragic backstory, but Momiji might just take the cake. His mother rejected him for his Zodiac curse, leading her to choose to have her memories of her son erased by Hatori so she can return to a normal life.
Even worse than her and many of the other Fruits Basket parents' open hatred of their children is Momiji's father's insincere shows of affection for him. He pressures Momiji into saying he's okay with his erasure from his mother's life, promising to love him twice as much to make up for it. But he's never once shown following up on this promise, ignoring Momiji in favor of his wife and new daughter.
Hyakkimaru - Had His Body Sacrificed By His Father
Dororo
Hyakkimaru from Dororo might have had a normal life had it not been for his father Daigo's greed. The instant Hyakkimaru was born, Daigo sacrificed the body of his heir to demons to ensure the prosperity of his land, then tried to have his newly skinless, limbless child killed, reasoning he can simply conceive a new heir.
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Hyakkimaru survives, growing up in pain and forced to learn to fight with prosthetic limbs so he can kill the demons and claim his body. The worst part? It's only after his land is destroyed in the wake of Hyakkimaru's quest to restore himself that Daigo realizes sacrificing him was all for nothing: simply letting his heir grow up and succeed him would have led them to prosperity on its own.
Guts - Abused By His Father & Betrayed By His Best friend
Berserk
Guts came out of the womb unlucky. He has no idea who his birth father was, and he was born as his birth mother was hanged for an unspecified crime. He didn't fare too much better with his adoptive parents: though his mother Sys took pity on the newborn and cared for him, against the wishes of her lover Gambino, she died of a plague a few years later.
Convinced Guts brought such bad fortune on them, Gambino abused Guts and used him as a child soldier for eleven years, until finally trying to murder him. Guts was forced to kill him and then to fend for himself in one of the bleakest worlds in anime. As an adult, Guts has horrible self-worth and is unable to trust others not to hurt or betray him. Worse yet, any sense of trust Guts does develop is completely violated by his best friend Griffith in the horrific eclipse.
Crona - The Most Tragic Anime Backstory
Soul Eater
Any character introduced with a tragic version of the "Hail Mary" prayer as their theme music is going to have some serious mother issues. Crona was conceived and raised by the witch Medusa in her attempt to create an artificial Kishin. They were isolated from everyone else, only interacting with other people when ordered to kill them and feed them to Ragnarok, the liquid weapon that Medusa replaced their blood with.
Even after being rescued by Maka, Crona still finds it terrifying to deal with everyday life. In the anime, they successfully break from Medusa and have the chance to live freely, but in the manga, they have no such luck: Medusa's conditioning is too strong. They return to her and are mentally and physically shattered even further as a result. All of this results in Crona having the most tragic backstory in anime history.
