Out of the five main characters of one thing I planned out:
One had her mother murdered in front of her by another main character, then accidentally got into a relationship with her own half brother, then exiled to a tiny rock island.
Two was imprisoned by his parents due to the type of magic he could control, saw his little sister burn to death, watched his parents tortured, killed his own parents at the age of six and had his name taken away from him.
Three had to deal with racism all his life, including from his father and little half sister, was abandoned by his only friend and ended up trapped in the middle of a never ending civil war in which he cannot join one side or the other.
Four ran away from home, nearly froze to death, saw his pet dog die of starvation, had to eat said dog, was captured and sold into slavery,then committed suicide.
Five was exiled for accidentally betraying his country, saw his mother turn her back on him, was arrested in the country he was sent to and eventually executed.

First of all, before anything else, I must say that that comic is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen.

Moving on, now. My characters are, as far as I can tell, a perfect example of this. The first one was kicked out of the foster home he'd lived in for basically his entire life after nearly killing another inhabitant. Second one's mother died when she was eight years old, and the third lost both parents to death and alcoholism, respectively.

Writing this out has made me feel evil. I seem to have a penchant for making them all struggle.

I'm going to name-replace for the sake of clarity here.

Hmmm... lets see, out of the main characters in just one story-world, we have:

1) The Narrator, a girl whose childhood wandering around the country with her (probably bipolar) single mother resulted in her not having any friends until the age of seventeen, after which she blamed herself for not being there when her mother attempted to commit suicide. Her mother survived, but was critically brain damaged from the amount of time that she spent without oxygen. She does not remember her daughter. The Narrator feels simultaneously guilty that she hadn't gotten home sooner and guilty that she sometimes wishes that she'd gotten there later, because her mother as she knew her is gone. The Narrator flees her problems by running away with The Wizard.

2) The Wizard had a happy childhood with her sisters, the Knight and The Genius. However, while she was staying with her aunt and her childhood friend The Inventor during a middle-school break, she and The Inventor decide to have a look around one of the local abandoned houses. It turns out that The Inventor's ancestors managed to create not only one immortal, Frankenstein-type monster, but four of them, three of which are completely loyal to the fourth. None of them have any conception of the real world, having been locked in the house for decades following the death of their original creator, and they hold both children captive and cook up a scheme to get their "father" back, which involves sacrificing the children. When the children try to escape, The Inventor suffers an extremely nasty concussion and The Wiizard is injured as well, leading her to panic and kill all four of the constructs with fire. (This leads to her parents taking her home and to her eventually traveling far away to the school where she meets The Narrator.)

3) The Inventor, in addition to the above, was severely injured by the blow to the head (and the hours and hours before anybody found them,) and now, even in adulthood, suffers from intermittent, crippling migraines and loss of motor function on his left side. Despite this, he managed to recover enough in the four years after the injury that he could go to college and live a somewhat normal life... until his mother died while he was away at school and his inventions were dismissed as being impossible to create. Eventually, he got desperate enough to test one of his devices on himself...

4) The Knight still doesn't know what happened to her twin sister, The Wizard, and is perfectly ready to fight her older sister, The Genius, if she ever implies again that the fire might have been The Wizard's fault. Since neither of her sisters are fit to inherit the family's responsibilities (namely, negotiating with other families that have wizards or land,) she becomes the default heir and has to take up all the responsibilities that The Wizard abandons when she runs away with The Narrator. (Other than that, though, The Knight has had it relatively easy until the story actually starts.)

5) The Genius lost her best (and almost her only) friend when her younger sister, The Wizard, nearly died. The two have not spoken since The Wizard's fateful run-in with the Frankenstein creatures, almost a decade ago when the story starts. The Wizard, however, does not know that her big sister investigated the scene of the incident and was able to determine that she started the fire herself, but not why. This puts a lot of strain on The Genius, because she doesn't want to admit that her sister could kill, especially at age thirteen... but all available evidence suggests that she did.

Okay, that's enough to be getting on with, I think, but the secondary characters certainly get enough grief. Let's see, I have a soldier from the mages'-war who became a cop so that she could recapture the adrenaline, a necromanceress who was wrongfully accused of using black magic and who was condemned without a trial to a slow death by having her magic removed (she clearly lived, but yeah, enduring any of that process wasn't fun,) a guy who was forcibly suspended in time for fifteen years and who can't ever go home even after he avenged his father's death, because he's fifteen years younger than he should be, and another guy who is currently watching his elderly father succumb to Alzheimers, being daily mistaken by his dad for his dead, decade-older war hero brother.

And this group right here? They're some of my favorite characters ever, and I've had them for nearly four years now. I'm not even going to go into the ones that I got this year. (Also, I'm aware that all gets confusing, but there are multiple stories in this world, so it fits together better with more information, I promise.)

So, what's the worst thing anybody here has ever done to a character?

I called this continuum Midnight Sun (no relation to the Stephanie Meyer novel, I came up with this first). Let's run through the character histories:

The tertiary protagonist, Voyd Kyoujin. He evolved from a self-insert. Subject of parental favoritism... which led to his dad (the Big Bad) doing something horrible to his brother. Voyd went somewhat insane, and is VERY much a loose cannon who has to develop into friendship with the other protagonists. He is also almost completely repressed emotionally, and even at his most psychotic, he never loses his dull-eyed frown.

The big bad, Sh'tennin: No, that's not his real name. First off, he's the king of his race. Doesn't sound bad, right? Here's the catch: the monarch has to absorb the psychosis and negative emotions of the race so that they don't drive themselves extinct. Most rulers go insane after a few centuries. He's been alive for five million years. Besides all that mess, he values his family, and rather misguidedly tormented one of his sons, thinking Voyd wouldn't have a problem with that. He also had a third child; his queen went batshit and killed it right after it was born, and he had to kill her. Halfway through the story, Voyd has a cosmic meltdown, killing himself and driving Sh'tennin further into his own torment. Yeah. His goal is actually kind of noble: He wants to transform all life into his race... to take their negative emotions as well, so that there won't be any more war or conflict. If he succeeded, he'd seal himself into an eternal sleep so that he wouldn't lose his mind. He's risking a LOT to get peace.

Then we have the antagonists' mad scientist, Heinrich Hollenhund. Born to an evil human made ageless by cosmic interference, Heinrich had the misfortune of being pansexual in 1920's Germany. His father Albert, tired of this life and wanting to move on to a new one, sent both Heinrich and his mother to Auschwitz. Albert then joined the Reich and transferred to Auschwitz to torment his wife and son himself. Anyone who knows anything about WWII knows how that goes, and Albert shot Heinrich's mother in front of him. Heinrich got left behind when Auschwitz was overrun, and Sh'tennin (traveling the universe in secret) found him going out of his mind. He took the poor guy in, and Heinrich basically serves as that third son he never had.

Heinrich does get his revenge on Albert, by the way. Very brutal vengeance.

There are more, but I'd be rambling more than I already am. Let's just say one thing: You know that thing that I said was implied to be God? One of its "offspring" (term used very loosely) has it just as rough as Sh'tennin or Heinrich.

Fear the Midnight Sun universe. It is filled with sorrow, fury, and bizarre alien morality/biology.

Let's take my newest agent characters for examples.

Kozar was a slightly unusual Klingon, and was a bit ostracized and looked down upon in his home world. In the PPC, I've put him through working with someone who presents herself as insane, half a month of dealing with the same partner's new tribble (the Klingons view them as horrible parasites), a new partner who he ends up caring enough about to adopt into his family--who dies, and a new partner who could, at any moment, be killed and turn into a completely different person. I wouldn't say I've been particularly kind to him.

The Reader (Kozar's latest partner) recently found out that her planet and her people had been destroyed in a horrific war that she actually saw part of, and that there are two people of her species remaining outside the PPC (and a somewhat larger number inside it). She's not dealing so well with that. Her partner is also still trying to deal with losing his previous partner, who, as I mentioned, was family, and he keeps seeing bits of his former partner in her (it doesn't help that her current regeneration is of a similar height and coloring to the dead partner). She wants them to get along and be able to work together, but they mostly end up arguing or focusing on work. She also repeatedly makes missteps in Klingon culture, which she doesn't know very well. And, on top of all that, her TARDIS is missing.

So you tell me. Have I been particularly kind to these characters? I mean, on the one hand, yes, but on the other hand...no, I really haven't.

And while I wouldn't say that this is typical of my work, it's not particularly atypical, either.

In terms of the comic...it's a cute idea, but only if you don't look too closely at the message it's sending.

~DF

Most of the characters I've created a full backstory for have had pretty much terrible lives. The mage who couldn't control his magic properly and accidentally killed his mother. The man who, even into his adulthood, was hated by everyone he knew because of things his father had done. The girl who was forced to work as a slave because of the meaning of her name. The old man who was born with the illegal power to alter emotions, who only ever allow his son to come near his to avoid accidentally using the power.

Hm, I just realised how few characters I actually planned out in this universe. Maybe I should stop creating the mythology and history of the place and start working on more actual people, haha.

Okay, yes, I'll occasionally explode someone to death and send him off to meet Morgoth in a dream(?), or drive someone insane and turn her into a ruthless, amoral killer... but by the time their stories end, they're almost always healed and in a reasonably cheerful state of mind.

I guess I don't think that brutal physical or mental torture is the best way to grow a character. Maybe because it's not something that normally happens to people, and therefore won't produce a realistic person? Whereas Dafydd, for example, goes through friends who hate him, friends being hurt (when he can help, but it'll be hard on him), being in the papers, losing control of his anger, and losing his family. All right, yes, and dying and being resurrected - but he doesn't remember that. In general, though, those are all things a real person could go through, and that means I get to explore how Dafydd is different to most people - and how he's the same.

hS

I have an original continuum that I've been writing since I was 15, and dreaming up since 13 (I'm now 24). I can say that pretty much all of the main characters have to suffer through all sorts of terrible things, although they usually end up stronger afterwards... eventually.

There is one character, though, who would look upon five million years of pain as small fry compared to her billions. A large part of it delves into her psychology, so hopefully she is quite well characterised (some of the earlier, less powerful, mains seem a bit bland, and I'm not sure how to fix them) - especially given she has the power level to take down the equivalent of deities.

Good grief, I think I've been sheltering my lot.

I always have a tendency to write these really... average characters. Like, "Arthur Dent übermuggle" average, where the focus is more on the world and the character's companions. Average to the point of writing (but never really finishing/publishing) about the daily life of a half-blood Hufflepuff fifth year at Hogwarts. The main thing that set this story apart was that I got to explore each house's attitude toward Hufflepuff, which is seriously under-appreciated by the way.

I've always been more of a world-builder than a character builder, so that's probably the explanation.

For at least a few characters in practically everything I write, I give them something awful in their past, good reason to believe that something awful will happen in the future, or both. Of course, I usually pair them with a more idealistic or happy-go-lucky character and watch the two of them bicker, but sometimes I just pile so much nasty stuff on the entire story.

In one of the biggest cases of the latter, which I wrote about a year ago, I had originally intended as a deconstruction of the clichés of Internet paranormal fiction like the creepypastas. It turned into what is probably the darkest story I've ever made.

One of the main characters ended up with his mind and personality destroyed, with its remnants piloting a body that had been twisted, enthralled, and "modified" by a humanoid abomination called the Gentleman, and became a central antagonist for the second third of the story before his nervous system started breaking down during one of his fights and he ended up being turned on by the other modified once-humans.

The protagonist, who had an ability to see events in possible futures in his dreams in reference to the old cliché(though I subverted it by making it a plot device exactly once and a problem every other time his clairvoyance showed up), was driven close to madness as it became more and more probable that he'd fail, which caused him to have steadily increasing nightmares where he watched alternate versions of himself get killed, often at the claws of the once-humans, all the while with the knowledge that what he was seeing was actually happening in a potential world, and that one of the dying versions he saw might be him.

His love interest was later aged to death by the Gentleman, and since the abomination was planning on healing itself by draining the minds of a nursing home(it makes a lot more sense in context, I swear, the Gentleman didn't mind-drain the elderly just to be extra-evil), and the protagonist had to burn it down to keep his enemy from coming back to full strength.

No, I don't usually write nearly as dark as that any more, because that story was incredibly over-the-top as it was, though it was very fun to write.
Actually, since the protagonist ended up charged with arson and later deemed legally insane after recounting his experiences, and the Gentleman was alive at the end, that story may not have been the best choice to put in a thread about what seems to largely be about characters succeeding after undergoing their traumatic events at this point.

It's my headcanon that Agent Christianne's past romantic life was... not very rosy. That in turn has led to her general cynicism and reluctance in her relationship with Eledhwen (platonic or not) because she's scared of it repeating. Oh, and also because her previous partners (as mentioned in the Monitor) went insane and/or died, and she doesn't want that happening to Eledhwen. (And also the classic immortality thing too, but that's been addressed.)

But in a less romantic scenario - well, I've had my author avatar at IAHF constantly get landed in detention for small infractions, put on a kangaroo trial and thrown in a internment camp, fall through thin ice, sexually assaulted by a fellow student, be denied a fair trial because of such (yet Belgium punished that student in the end anyway, so justice was served in the end), have her own roommate and best friend turn on her, have her romantic interest get killed by a giant snake, come face-to-face with her phobia (said snake) and her worst fears, and suffer through a maze while in the middle of a Mary Sue invasion. Granted, it's an OFU, but I think OFUs are a great place to dump terrible things on a character to watch them become a better person. And I think my self-insert's done that.

Back when I was writing borderline sues (and way over the line sues, for that matter) I used mental torture galore. You aren't the only one. Heck, sometimes I still catch myself doing it a little bit. Not the same kinds of things, but maybe I see a friend who's got parents she clashes with, so I slap my character with clueless parents. Or maybe her Dad's one of the evil mediums. The list goes on.....

I seriously think the only main character. I haven't slapped with some outside issues like that is probably Katty, and that's because in her case, I don't feel it's worth it. Well- Annette too, but she doesn't count, she's a role play.

It sort of creates something that you need to explore, I guess. As a writer, I kind of feel like writing stories is my way of understanding. It tends to be hard for me to see things unless they're put in my perspective.

Some of you may know of my Agents Deuce and Adder; they're both characters of the same original story of mine. One of them was abandoned (one way or another) by his mother and twin brother and left alone with a sociopathic father who raised him to be an instrument of revenge, and continued down that path until the aforementioned brother returned and stopped him by killing him (though he would later be resurrected and given a second shot at making things right). The other took a magical proverbial bullet to the head when she was little and as a result must contend with infrequent but barely-controllable berserk rages. She then became an exile from her people at the tender age of nine, after she witnessed her mother's murder and barely escaped with her own life. She was born a member of the group of people designated as villains, a secret she hides from her friends every day.

I think that if I make a character suffer, it mainly happens when I'm really, really attached to them. This may seem ironic, and I used to think it was, but I really don't anymore. One of my favorite aspects of writing and reading fiction is watching characters experience positive growth. It's so beautiful and I love it. And, well, some of the best positive growth starts at rock bottom, and you can't have good development without bumps and stumbling blocks along the way. It's impossible, and just unrealistic.

So yes, I kick my characters while they're down. I tear their families apart, take away the things they love, and beat them into the dust. And then when I'm done, I stand back, and I watch as they curse and cry and then catch their breath and get back up. Some of them stagger up, bruised and bleeding and barely standing, and go on to drag someone else up with them. I love to see them be strong. I love to see them make one another strong. And that's why I torture them: because I know they can take it.

In short, I'll see your comic and raise you another one. http://mindofgemini.deviantart.com/art/TGf-Mog-Comic-Crossover-My-Writing-Process-332939062

I've done plenty of horrible things to my characters. Not all of them start out like that, but I really really love tearing them down to see how they take it.

Like that one character whose little brother killed her because she was fated to be the consort of an evil god, but he had twisted mommy issues and she'd been his mother figure all his life (all six years of it...) and he couldn't take her ignoring him for someone else.

Wow that story was fun to write I need to see if I have a copy floating around on my computer anywhere...

And of any good story. If your character never suffered, their story would be boring, and they would be a Mary Sue. You must be cruel to your creations, by necessity. I wouldn't feel guilty - I would focus on telling the story well, so that it would be a truely good story, not just torture.

Because I saw that picture and was immediately reminded of how I think of the characters in my writing to be people in their own way.

...I think I may need a moment.