StarCraft/Tear Jerker

• Tassadar's Heroic Sacrifice at the end of StarCraft combines this with Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • Also, the end of Brood War was crushing. This troper wanted to cry at what was done to DuGalle, Stukov, Raynor, Mengsk, and most of all, Zeratul. Definitely Zeratul. I want to fucking kill Duran. I LIKED STUKOV
    • Bonus missions from the N64 version are canon by Word of God, and thus Stukov Lives! After being infested, then de-infested, and left a broken half-shell of a man. But he lives!
  • Or the part where Arcturus abandons Kerrigan to the Zerg. Especially in the novelization, after Raynor decides to evacuate a group of survivors and civilians rather than keep looking for her.
    • This is made even worse via a cinematic in StarCraft II, where we see Kerrigan, the last person left at New Gettysburg, calling for backup. She's implied to have watched her entire force be devoured by the Zerg, and she's darting from place to place, fighting off zerglings and hydralisks erupting from every shadow, as her cloaking device runs out of energy and her ammunition runs out. Down to just her sidearm, she sees a mass of zerglings coming towards her, and knows from the lack of radio contact and the mutalisks wheeling overhead that her rescue is not coming. Instead of fighting to the last, she drops her gun, completely broken, and just stands there as the Zerg wave rushes her. If this wasn't Arcturus's Moral Event Horizon moment before, it certainly is now.
  • Or, just this:

Raynor: Sarah? Is that really you?
Infested Kerrigan: It was.

• Pylo the Pylon...
• The entirety of the Refugee mission chain in Wings Of Liberty, involving the Koprulu Sector's unluckiest bunch of colonists and your efforts to save them from the Zerg - up to and including picking a fight with a Protoss purification fleet if you choose to do so. At the end, if you chose to protect them, their leader leaves the ship, thanking Raynor profusely for giving the colony a second chance. If you chose to help clease the infestation instead, she winds up infested as well, and Raynor is forced to kill her.
• The semi-secret Starcraft II mission "In Utter Darkness", which is a playable peek into a Bad Future that will result if Kerrigan is killed. Basically, without Kerrigan to guide them, the Void Daemons took control of the Zerg. Humanity is extinct, and you get to play as the last Protoss force in existence, holding Zerg off until the Templars can seal away a record of the conflict, and then the mission continues with the objective "Fight until the last Protoss is killed". Guiding the Protoss in a final, glorious, doomed Last Stand, you get to watch as the last vestiges of the species, including Artanis and Zeratul, are killed, all while they lament the fact that they killed Kerrigan and thus allowed this horror to happen.
• The ending of Wing's of Liberty, for untraditional reasons. After all the pain and suffering Raynor has endured for four years, he has finally managed to make a real difference for the better in the galaxy, and he managed to save the woman he loved from the zerg, and in doing so can now finally forgive himself for his failures. Even though there is a long way to go, the fact that Raynor walked away with a real victory for the first time in three games is pretty damn touching.
• The end of the novel Speed of Darkness
• Fenix's death in Brood War. This troper is not ashamed to admit to having cried at that scene. Especially considering that she killed him with broodlings. That just felt too cruel.

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En taro Tassadar