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I Should Have Been Better: Difference between revisions

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I Should Have Been Better (view source)

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* Rather poignantly stated in the first ''[[Superman]]'' film, about Clark's father, Jonathan Kent: "All these powers, and I couldn't even save him."
* Mr. Incredible feels like this near the end of ''[[The Incredibles]]''.
* In ''[[Spider-Man (Filmfilm)|Spider-Man]] 2'', Peter Parker loses his powers for whatever reason, but then decides to run into a burning building anyway to rescue a little girl. After fighting his way through the blaze and saving the girl, the firefighters praise Peter's heroics, then talk amongst themselves about someone else on one of the upper levels who wasn't so lucky. By the look on his face, it's clear that Peter doesn't feel very heroic about that.
** To be fair, that might be less a case of "I should have saved him too as a de-powered normal person" and more a case of "I could have saved him if I still had spider powers"
 
== [[Literature]] ==
* In ''[[The Dresden Files]]'', Harry goes through this from time to time, especially as it relates to Susan getting put on the road to vampirism by the Red Court, courtesy of Harry's dose of [[Chronic Hero Syndrome]]. The fact that he was usually lucky to have survived himself does little to help him cope.
* Kaladin from ''[[The Stormlight Archive (Literature)|The Stormlight Archive]]'' does this ''a lot''. He starts off as a surgeon's apprentice who gets depressed everytime a patient dies, then he becomes a soldier and gets depressed and puts himself through [[Training From Hell]] after his brother is killed in battle, then he ends up a slave stuck in a causality heavy job and tries to save the members of his crew and gets depressed when a number of them end up dead.
* The hero of the ''Cybernarc'' novels goes through this twice in the first book, once when his squad is ambushed by drug smugglers and again when the same smugglers attack his family. Both times he does everything he could have done, but still feels guilty that he didn't save everybody.
 
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Peter Petrelli of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', as the page quote indicates, falls into this a lot.
* [[The X -Files|Fox Mulder]] expresses this sentiment in the first-season episode "Young at Heart": on his first field assignment for the FBI, he hesitated to shoot a criminal, who killed the hostage and an FBI agent. Although subsequent investigation proved that he did everything right, he could never forgive himself.
* A ''sort of'' example that does involve wanting to be better, but not for heroic reasons: [[Angel (TV)|Angel]] and [[Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)|Spike]], being the only two vampires with souls, have a deep rivalry when Spike makes the switch from the show ''Buffy'' to ''Angel'' in the fifth season. At one point, they fight over what they believe to be a cup of extreme suffering, destined to be drunk only by the true champion of the world. It turns out to just be a fake chalice filled with Mountain Dew. After Spike beats Angel, even after the drink is revealed to be a fake, Angel expresses this, feeling he should have wanted it enough to beat Spike.
* One episode of ''[[Seven Days]]'' involves Frank on a time-critical mission to save his boss from capture (and from taking a [[Suicide Pill]] to avoid interrogation). Along the way, Frank witnesses a shootout between gangsters, where an innocent civilian dies in the crossfire. Problem is, if he saves the civilian, he doesn't reach his boss in time. If he focuses on his primary mission, he sees the civilian die. Frank is eventually able to voluntarily invoke enough [[Groundhog Day Loop|Groundhog Day Loops]] to [[The Good Guys Always Win|save both]].
 
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* ''[[Megatokyo]]'': [[Magical Girl|Yuki]] has a variant of this in the [[Alternate Universe|unMod]] [[Bonus Material]] after she saves the [[Sex Slave|girls]] and the police officers, but not the traffickers. It's not clear whether she ''could'' have saved everyone, and chose not to, or she couldn't save everyone and prioritized the victims. Either way, [[Break the Cutie|her innocence has been tarnished.]]
* ''[[Digger (Webcomic)|Digger]]'', after killing He-Is, berates herself for being unable to prevent Ed's death.
* In ''[[Our Little Adventure]]'', [http://danielscreations.com/ola/comics/ep0190.html speculated as the motive for Julie's anguish over Pauline's death].
 
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