The Woobie is an individual who suffers. This trope is The Woobie on a wider scale, applying to an entire group. In particular, woobieness happens to be a trait of an entire species (alien or otherwise) or fantastic race. The reasons for this can vary. Maybe they are endangered. Maybe they are misunderstood or discriminated against. Maybe they're enslaved or made into hapless mooks especially if they're made sympathetic. Whatever the reason, the audience and/or characters in-universe feel sorry for them.
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Anime And Manga
- Most half-human and half-demon hybrids in Inuyasha count for this considering that both humans and demons refuse to accept them most of the time.
- The Diclonii from Elfen Lied. Bonus points for the bulk of them going down the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds road.
- In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, already a Crapsack World, offers for its Woobie Species The Witches. Yes, the monsters of the week are the woobies here. Why? Well, Witches were formerly Puella Magi that have gone past the Despair Event Horizon and became monsters. It's worth the extra mention that the Puella Magi who were already woobies become Witches at some point.
- The Sekirei in the series of the same name, a race of battle aliens forced to participate in a game where There Can Be Only One. This involves seeking out their One True Love and then fighting to the death against the rest of their kind with the knowledge only one will be allowed to stay with their Ashikabi. Out of the 108, the vast majority are Monster Munch or Red Shirts with absolutely no hope of winning against their more powerful elders, the Single Numbers. This leads many pairs to attempt to flee the capital, only to be hunted down and slaughtered by the Discipline Squad.
- The cursed children from Black Bullet, lolis born with the Gastrea virus in their blood, the same virus that turn people into Eldritch Abomination. How society treats the cursed children is sickeningly in Jim Crow law levels (from public flogging and lynching to forced segregation and even Police Brutality). It also doesn't help to note that because the cursed children are born with the said virus, they'll eventually turn into Eldritch Abomination anyways in a much slower rate. It gets worse for them when the government plans to strip them away from their citizenship and plan a genocide against them.
- The Jaguarians from Les Légendaires, big time. For starter, they all suffer from birth a particular kind of sickness called "Chakounia", which causes them to turn into mindless blood-thirsty beasts whenever they are in proximity of other Jaguarians or anything related to their civilization; said sickness can only be contained thanks to a jewel called Katseye which acts as a Restraining Bolt, and being too brutally separated from their Katseye can cause serious psychological damages, from amnesia to flat out turning you Axe Crazy. And as if that wasn't enough, humans absolutely hate them and constantly hunt them down like beasts, either to exterminate them or take them as slaves and force them to battle other monsters in bloody gladiator-like fights. By the time the series takes place, the whole species only managed to survive by turning their city into a Hidden Elf Village thanks to a deal with a God.
- Mirrors In Shadows by author TonicPlotter portrays changelings as this. They are every bit as intelligent as ponies but operate on Blue and Orange Morality, and drive themselves to enforce a Hive Mind mentality (going so far as to not name themselves) to cope with how they constantly need to imitate ponies just to feed. Since they feed on love via Vampiric Draining, a pony will die if they stay too long meaning if they ever actually find a pony they love, they have no choice but to abandon them. Be warned, it is sad.
Films — Animated
- In Titan A.E., humans themselves because Earth was destroyed by the Drej, making humans galactic drifters.
- Mice in An American Tail, where they are made to represent oppressed minorities and are subjugated by cats.
- The Grungies in The Jetsons Movie.
- How to Train Your Dragon: The dragons themselves when it's revealed they're enslaved by a dragon queen, forced to wage war against Vikings to get her food (resulting in thousands of deaths) and get hardly anything to survive on themselves. No wonder Hiccup was so drawn to them.
Films — Live-Action
- The Ewoks from Star Wars.
- The Na'vi from Avatar exist to make us feel sorry for the plight of indigenous peoples.
- The alien "prawns" from District 9 are another racism-related example combined with What Measure Is a Non-Cute?.
- The Thermians from Galaxy Quest. They all seem relatively peaceful and innocent, but they're also under attack by another alien species intent on wiping them out. On top of that, they have no concept of fiction, meaning that they end up mistaking a Star Trek-esque show from Earth as the real deal and model their entire society after it before finally recruiting the cast of the show to try and save them from the aforementioned genocidal aliens (and they take it pretty hard when they find out none of it was actually real.)
- Many aliens in Animorphs apply.
- The Yeerks are the misunderstood variety...for the most part. They are basically blind, sapient slugs who only take hosts to compensate for their biology. Only those in power and those seeking power can be said to be really evil, as most of them are either swept up in the propaganda or afraid to challenge superiors.
- The Taxxons suffer from terrible Horror Hunger.
- The Hork-Bajir were nearly wiped out in an attempt to deprive the Yeerks of hosts.
- Gedds seem to be inferior to many species in just about every way. And they are the basic Yeerk host.
- The House elves in Harry Potter.
- In David Brin's Uplift saga, humans themselves are presented as a Woobie Species. Most aliens despise or hate them as an upstart rogue species that never had a proper upbringing, but even in-universe a few view them as The Woobie.
- In A. E. van Vogt's Slan, the titular species, hated and hunted by ordinary humanity, bore a striking resemblance to the smart kids who get picked on at school, the primary demographic of most science fiction of the time.
- Discworld goblins. Of all the intelligent humanoids on the Disc, Fantastic Racism may hit them the hardest - they face poverty and social marginalization wherever they live, and in many areas aren't legally considered people and can be murdered and enslaved with impunity.
- Possibly Discworld orcs as well. They're considerably less pathetic than the goblins, but it's not as if they wanted to be bioengineered cannon fodder in someone else's war. The only named orc character is a woobie in his own right.
- The Nephilim of the Hush, Hush series. Their entire purpose is to be tracked down by fallen angels and be mindraped into spending the rest of their lives in the service of said fallen angels. Said service consists of the fallen angels possessing their bodies for two weeks out of every year, and using them for physical sensations that are usually sex. While the Nephilim are still conscious in their possessed bodies. Also, Word of God states that Nephilim become immortal and frozen at the age they are when they are forced into the service of fallen angels, so they get to look forward to an eternity of this treatment.
- The Acharis in The Neverending Story, hideous worm-like creatures who hate themselves for being so ugly and who spend their lives crying as a result.
- The obscure Star Wars Expanded Universe species known as the Evocii, the original inhabitants of the planet that would come to be known as Nal Hutta. The Hutts conquered them, stripped them of their rights, and polluted their planet so badly most of them become horribly deformed, and what's more unlike a lot of oppressed species such as the Chevs and the Nikto, they don't even get a happy ending under the New Republic, as it's implied that the Yuuzhan Vong killed them all during their conquest of Nal Hutta.
- The kandra, once you get past the squickiness of how their powers work note . Victims of extreme Fantastic Racism from humans who fear and/or are squicked by their abilities, the only way they survive is by creating a Contract that allows individual kandra to rent themselves out as servants to powerful humans, who often abuse them horribly (since, as the kandra Ten Soon notes, you can beat a kandra to death at night and still have them ready to serve you next morning, so long as you give them new bones). Oh, and their ancestors were human, and the process used to transform them leaves them open to mind control by an insane, nihilistic god.
- The koloss are a Jerkass Woobie species. Created by the Lord Ruler to act as shock troops, koloss are humans who have forcibly undergone and stomach-churning physical and mental transformation that leaves them enormous, mentally-stunted berserkers. No longer able to derive joy from anything but killing- koloss only have two emotions, apathetic and enraged- they vaguely remember that they were once human and still should be, but no longer know exactly what that was like. Like their "cousins" the kandra, they are also open to being controlled by the same dark god.
- The Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were this once upon a time. This tribe of unusually Little People comes from Loompaland, a Death World where they were constantly at the mercy of carnivorous beasts. They found some protection from them by building a Tree Top Town to live in, but they still faced a lack of palatable food for themselves — they subsisted primarily on mashed green caterpillars — and more than anything else they craved cacao beans, which were virtually nonexistent. When chocolatier Willy Wonka came along and offered them the chance to live in his chocolate factory and enjoy all the cacao beans they wanted in exchange for serving as his new workforce, they didn't hesitate to take him up on the offer!
Live Action TV
- Prometheans in the New World of Darkness. Depending on your definition of "species", Changelings may also qualify. Life really, really sucks for both of them.
- The Eldar of Warhammer 40,000 are more of a "Jerkass Woobie Species", but they fit into this trope. After all, not only does everything want them dead, but they have a literal God of Evil note whose greatest desire is to claim their souls and force them into a literal Hell. And they're all painfully aware of this.
- Humans also count for the same reason, although minus the God of Evil part. Yeah, they're xenophobic bastards, but the other alien races give them every reason to be.
- The Demi-humans in Chrono Cross are discriminated against and exploited by humans.
- Star Control series:
- The Spathi are pantophobics and are born in such numbers that they receive no attention from their parents. They had a chance to have a protective bubble put around their planet, but due to a mix-up, they are now Reluctant Warriors for an alien dictatorship.
- The Utwig are horribly depressed because they accidentally broke their Ultron, which is the most important MacGuffin in the history of their society. Of course, there is a quest where you can fix it.
- The Ur-Quan, whose entire civilization was enslaved by tyrannical Hypnotoads and reclaimed their freedom only after a lengthy campaign of mind control-disrupting self-torture. Small wonder half of them became control freaks and the other half became Omnicidal Maniacs.
- Dragon Age's elves have not had it easy, that's for sure. Their original homeland was invaded by the Tevinter Imperium, and they were enslaved. They were freed after they helped Andraste overthrow the Imperium and established a new homeland. This was invaded by the Chantry (which was founded by Andraste's followers) because they didn't help stop the blight that was going on at that point, and are now either second class citizens living in walled off alienages in the cities, or in the forests, where they try to reclaim their heritage, and even then are often seen as troublemakers. It gets worse in Dragon Age: Inquisition with The Reveal that everything they knew about their homeland was wrong. The Elven Empire was just as bad, if not worse than Tevinter and Orlais, with an immortal nobility that enslaved lower class elves. The blood-writing the Dalish put on their faces to honor their gods? Those were originally slave brands nobles put on their slaves to honor the gods. The final nail in the coffin is an Ancient Elf admitting that the Elven Empire destroyed itself in a civil war. Tevinter simply scavenged the remains.
- Mass Effect Examples:
- The Protheans. They get invaded by the Abusive Precursors, all but a few scientists are mind-controlled, warped into Bee People, and implanted with enough technology to be possessed by their commander without notice. The remaining scientists went into cryo-sleep to wait out the invasion, which took so long that very few were left by the time the VI in charge thought it safe enough to wake them up. Their reward? Dying of starvation in the very deathtrap that doomed their species to oblivion, with the hope that future species would catch on before the invaders return. However, they are also a Jerkass Woobie species, as according to Javik, they were a very brutal and imperialistic empire
- Also, despite being one of the main enemy species, the geth. In the infancy of their sapience, the quarians attempted to destroy them all simply for having become self-aware. Despite the situation, they remained almost depressingly cooperative and friendly to the quarians before the war over Rannoch broke out. Even afterwards, they are still more than willing to make peace, but are forced into siding with the Reapers in self-defense because the quarians are trying to exterminate them again.
- Speaking of the quarians, whether you see them as committing unjustifiable genocide on the geth, or simply trying to stop them before they could turn against their masters in a spat of Wrong Genre Savvy, it's hard to deny that their current lives aren't easy. They live on a giant fleet, that has limited resources, and could be crippled by destroying the few liveships they get all their food from, are probably the biggest victims of Fantastic Racism in the series, seen as outcasts and troublemakers by the rest of the galaxy, are blamed for creating the geth (even though every single person actually involved in those events has been dead for centuries), are frequently enslaved, and must spend all their time in their environmental suits or become very sick and possibly die.
- The drell. Even more of an endangered species then the quarians and would have gone extinct altogether if the hanar hadn't come to their aid. Unfortunately the environment of the hanar homeworld isn't compatible with drell biology, specifically there's a lot of water vapor in the atmosphere which in drell causes an incurable, progressive and ultimately fatal condition called Kepral's Syndrome which is their leading cause of death.
- The Krogan are a complicated case. They are all infected with a Sterility Plague that has driven them roughly over the Despair Event Horizon as a species, and most of them have given up on fighting honorably and have become bounty hunters and Death Seekers. However, the Sterility Plague was released in self-defense by the Turians and Salarians after the Krogan were slaughtering them by the thousands in attempts to conquer the galaxy. So, in a way, they are responsible for the situation they are in. Also, the Genophage is designed so that the Krogan can overcome it and survive should they learn to stop fighting. However, this trope slowly becomes more straight when it is revealed through talking with Mordin that not only are they culturally behind, they're actually unevolved. They were only able to wreak the havoc they did because the Salarians "uplifted" them by giving them space-faring technology that they weren't ready to have to help fight a war for them. As Mordin put it, it's like giving nuclear weapons to cavemen (kind of a bad analogy though, since they already had nuclear weapons). The main reason they were trying to conquer so much was not just out of power-thirst, but because they'd made their homeworld nigh-uninhabitable. And in Mass Effect 3 it's revealed that they were on the brink of cultural renaissance before the Rachni Wars.
- The Batarians: sure, they're slave-driving jerkwads who basically exist to oppose the Alliance/Shepard in the backstory, Mass Effect 1 DLC and in Mass Effect 2, but they're basically a paper tiger that's been on the decline for years. Their government is an oppressive dictatorship enforcing a brutal caste system, and they repeatedly get trounced by the Alliance whenever the two come into conflict. They lose an entire system, along with 300,000 civilians, when Shepard smashes an asteroid into a Mass Relay during Arrival to prevent the reapers from using it to invade. Mass Effect 3 cranks this Up to Eleven when it's revealed that the Reapers just walked into batarian space anyway a few months later, almost exterminating them, turning their captives into huskified slaves, and sent the survivors fleeing across the galaxy. And even after joining the galactic war effort, their troops still face serious prejudice to horrifying levels, if this blog post is true.
- The Mudokons in the Oddworld saga. The utter woobieness of the main character as he tries, in his hapless way, to free his fellow woobies from a lifetime of slavery is the main appeal of these games.
- Gorons and Zoras from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Ganondorf starves the Gorons when their leader refuses to hand over the Goron's ruby, and later tries to feed them all to a dragon in the fire temple as a warning to those who would defy Ganondorf's rule. Also, the Zoras are frozen under ice after Ganondorf takes over; they get better, but in real life this is the kind of thing that would kill you.
- Half-elves in Tales of Symphonia, who are the outcasts of society, rejected by both humans and elves. The fact that the evil organization that's rounding up humans into concentration camps is made up entirely of half-elves certainly doesn't help the race's image, either. It gets to the point that the two half-elves in your party have to pretend to be pure-blooded elves just to have a decent life, and the Big Bad is a half-elf trying to bring about an Assimilation Plot to end racism by making everyone the same race of lifeless beings.
- The Dunmer from The Elder Scrolls have a long series of hardships throughout their history, but the absolute worst comes by the time of Skyrim, where their homeland is buried by an erupting volcano and invaded, forcing them to disperse into other lands as refugees...only to be discriminated against and looked down upon by the natives there.
- The Orcs are an Iron Woobie Species. They were turned the way they were by their patron god being devoured, they've faced oppression and racism from just about every other race - particularly the Bretons and Redguards, their immediate neighbors - and every time they manage to carve some land for themselves and found a nation of their own, it doesn't last. But they take this all in a stride, and have become all the stronger because of it.
- Argonians have a long history of being enslaved and marginalized by the other races, especially the Dunmer. As of Skyrim, they've become a little less deserving of sympathy when they invade the Dunmers' homeland of Vvardenfall, though it's arguably payback for what the Dunmer did to them.
- Engineers from Halo. Initially True Neutral pacifist critters who just like fixing technology, late in the war many of them end up defecting to the UNSC because of how the Covenant has been mistreating them, such as having bombs strapped to them. And how has Bungie managed to design a species that's both Starfish Alien and cute??
- The enslaved whales in the Dolphins' Nightmare section of Ecco The Dolphin: Defender of the Future. The two Ecco meets are being used to power the Hanging Waters. In the same reality, the Outcast dolphins come across as a species of Jerkass Woobies - they're jerks to the other marine life as much as all dolphins are in that reality (since their ancestors had Compassion stolen from them) but are constantly abused by the Clan dolphins.
- Touhou is full of it. The list of the woobies starts with humans, and it gets worse from there. Some of the youkai simply can't take the persecution anymore and retreat to an underground city that used to be Hell. This includes Suika's people, and they are one of the biggest and strongest (and most boisterous) youkai out there. Gensokyo is not a nice place.
- Pokémon has a few species with sad backstories.
- Yamask. Apparently each Was Once a Man. That mask they carry around? It was their face when they were human. They cry when they look at it.
- Absols can sense when natural disasters are about to occur and try to warn people about it, but the fact that they can't vocalize mean that they were mistaken as the source of said disaster, and often get abused and chased out of the area they're living in as a result. X and Y's pokedex entry uses the past tense regarding that rumor though, so maybe the myth has died off.
- Cubone is the original Pokémon Woobie, and appears to have been designed to harp on this trope as hard as possible. Cubones are orphans, having been separated from their mother at a young age (and, in a just-a-bit-creepy development, wear said mother's skull as a helmet). They avoid interacting with others and at night, they can be seen staring at the moon and crying, since it reminds them of their mother. Just to reiterate that, Cubone is an entire species of orphans that cries themselves to sleep nightly. And since that apparently wasn't subtle enough, their species name is "Lonely Pokémon."
- Shades from Nier. They were infected with White Chlorination Syndrome, watched their world get destroyed, gave up their human bodies, some of them went insane, they were forced into cryogenic sleep, and then treated as monsters by their clones and slaughtered.
- The titular characters from Gargoyles.
- The Beast-Men in ThunderCats (1985).
- The Goblins in Adventure Time. Their society embodies a more tragic take on Hobbes Was Right. Their monarchy is bound by a giant rulebook that prevents the current ruler from doing... well, anything. If the king breaks these rules, the goblins instantly assume he's an Evil Overlord out to spank every last one of them raw, (an assumption that has, presumably, been vindicated by their experience). And if you're stupid enough to depose the current ruler and refuse the crown yourself, the Goblins will (basically) commit collective suicide. Violent collective suicide.
- The G4 iteration of the Breezies in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Apparently they are so fragile and helpless that even the Sugar Bowl that is Equestria is a Death World to them. A single leaf can somehow disrupt their flight path and can blow them off course. Bees are extremely dangerous, and their lifestyle involves making dangerous journeys across this Death World to gather food and ensure their species's continued survival.
- Endangered species.
- Which species is given the most sympathy varies greatly though. If the animal is cute and cuddly, like the Panda, then thousands of dollars will be spent to ensure that they breed and are well taken care of, if it isn't, then people might not really care about it that much.
- Dinosaurs, though they're rarely given credit for it by documentaries, which traditionally portray their extinction as a good thing (Most Writers Are Human after all). Discovery Channel's "The Last Day of the Dinosaurs" plays them up as woobies fairly well, showing what a catastrophic event the asteroid impact was.
- One could argue humans. Sure, we're incredibly advanced and intelligent, but it comes at a price. We're alone in the world, contemplate concepts like suffering and the end of the universe, and seem to be the only species capable of true, selfish evil. We know we're temporary, flawed and going to experience suffering in life. We still manage to range from Iron Woobie to Stoic Woobie.
- Sharks. Thanks to a certain movie they have an irreparably horrible reputation, despite killing fewer people than your average mosquito. It's so bad that humans have been known to kill sharks simply because they're afraid of them. Not helped at all by humans who like talking about how cute and harmless the animals known to tear sharks and other animals apart for fun (dolphins and orcas) are.