Shower of Angst/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character, after facing a harsh event, sucumbs to sorrow while taking a shower.

  • Straight: Alice witnesses Bob's Heroic Sacrifice to take down a powerful villain, but she doesn't react at all. After it, she arrives home and decides to take a shower to wash away the dirt from the previous battle. And then, while she's under the stream of water, she finally breaks into tears.
  • Exaggerated: Alice witnesses Bob's horrible torturing and death at the hands of a sadistic villain; it's a scene so twisted and violent that she gets unwillingly stained in her friend's blood. After the villain escapes, a frightened and confused Alice strips herself naked and goes into the nearest shower to wash away Bob's blood. There her emotions explode, going from total despair to blind anger as she trashes the whole room. After this outburst of destruction she just collapses into the floor, curled into fetal position and broken in tears.
  • Justified: While Alice is deeply affected by Bob's death she, as the Nakama's leader, cannot let her emotions overflow in front of her comrades because that would unsettle them, she has to show emotional strength from them to overcome it. However, the shower it's a private place, water's noise mitigates the sound of her lament, and it can help to mask and / or wash away the tears.
  • Inverted: After accepting Bob's marriage proposal, (with an astonishing calm) Alice goes to her home to wash away the sweat generated from her restrained excitement. And then, while she's under the stream of water, she overflows in joy and happiness, even breaking into spontaneous dancing and (bad) singing.
  • Subverted: Alice goes home and showers without incident before going to bed.
  • Double Subverted: But it's the one she takes the next morning, when she realizes that Bob won't be coming by for his usual morning visit, and yesterday's events finally set it for good, that causes her to break down, big time.
  • Parodied: Alice sorrow invokes a Personal Raincloud over her head, so she decides use this chance to take a shower.
  • Deconstructed: Alice uses Showers Of Angst as a coping mechanism so often that she develops a psychological dependency on them whenever anything she doesn't like happens.
  • Reconstructed: Alice feels better after using Showers Of Angst, in conjunction with more healthy ways of coping.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice, on the verge of tears, says "I... I just need some alone time..." and heads off to the bathroom. The other characters assume she's going to take a Shower of Angst, but really she just needed to use the bathroom. Then she takes a Shower of Angst. But then really it turned out that she's just very particular about washing her back and the fetal position is the most effective way to get it wet. But then she starts thinking about Bob's death...
  • Averted: Alice releases the sorrow generated from Bob's death right in the spot.
  • Enforced: Alice is our series' Action Girl, we can't have her reduced to tears at the death of a male teammate, the audience will think we're trying to turn her into a Damsel in Distress.
  • Lampshaded: "The tears just won't stop... I might as well shut the water and wash myself on this stream of despair... Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
    • "I scrubbed untill a bit of skin came off..."
  • Invoked: Bob bleeds to death on Alice arms, but before she can properly react to it, another character orders her to wash herself to a avoid a possible contamination while they dispose the body.
  • Defied: Alice cries openly at Bob's funeral, not caring what others will think.
  • Discussed:

Steven: "I've heard Alice crying on the shower... Do you think she'll be all-right?"
Claire: "Let her be, it will help her to ease her emotion after Bob's death. Everyone else is discharging their emotion on their own particular way; it helps the body and spirit"
Steven: "What about you Claire? I haven't seen particularly affected for it."
Claire: "Oh, but I am. In fact, I'm actually enraged beyond the breaking point right now. But just like Alice that restrained her sorrow up until now, I'm just containing my rage to release it on the worthless son-of-a-bitch that killed Bob."

  • Conversed:

Johnny: "I don't mind Fan Service from time to time, but was this scene really necessary? I mean, what could have been a powerful and emotional scene gets overshadowed for the unsettling attention on her nude body"
Charly: "And you're complaining about it?! Dude, you're weird!"

Did you had a bad day? Maybe you need a Shower of Angst wash away the pain.

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