10 MCU Characters Who’ve Had The Most Painful Story Arc

Warning: Spoilers Follow For Several MCU Films!

It’s the classic hero’s journey tale that’s been told since early antiquity; a person fated for glory or infamy must suffer through trials of fire to become what they’re meant to be. Marvel has been putting out those stories since 1939, and in their latest offering Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the hero within is no different in regard to forging through adversity and coming out the other side perhaps a little wiser for wear.

Though nearly all the heroes and villains in the MCU enjoy a lengthy era of taking their lumps, some elite few of them truly run through impossibly painful gauntlets both physical and emotional.

Nebula

There’s no question Gamora’s sister endured a great amount of hardship in being Thanos’ ‘less favorite’ daughter. As an adopted daughter of the intergalactic despot, the Luphomoid assassin first had to watch him murder her entire family, then was put through years of rigorous training against her adopted sister, Gamora (who routinely triumphed over her). As punishment, Thanos implemented tortuous upgrades and cybernetic augmentations to try and balance out the odds.

Related: 10 Memes That Perfectly Sum Up Gamora And Nebula’s Relationship

While fans saw an eventual evolution from determined henchman underling in Guardians of the Galaxy to a sprouting antihero in Avengers: Endgame, Nebula experienced an excruciating amount of emotional degradation and physical abuse at the hands of her warlord father.

Bruce Banner

It’s not easy being the Hulk. While the green machine is often prized for his strength and virtual invulnerability, the fact is Bruce Banner was constantly at odds with his alter ego, as shown during the events of Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Infinity War. When the Hulk went off-world after the events of Age of Ultron, Banner was trapped inside the Hulk for two years on Sakaar.

While the MCU never explicitly shows the body count aftermath of Hulk’s various rampages (the Wanda-fueled delirium in Johannesburg after fighting Tony’s Hulkbuster comes primarily to mind), it’s a given that many people have died because of the Hulk’s raging, and that weighs heavy on Banner’s conscience.

Natasha Romanoff

The beating heart and soul of the Avengers had a rough go of it before her untimely end and sacrifice on Vormir. As depicted both in Age of Ultron and her solo movie Black Widow, Romanoff experienced many years of torture and mind-conditioning during her stint in the Russian black-ops program (known as the Red Room).

Related: 9 Best Black Widow Memes

Forcibly taken from their families, potential Black Widows went through grueling training regimens, including subliminal brainwashing, fight-to-the-death sparring bouts, lockdowns, and forced sterilizations. Then, of course, there was her assassin years, in which she garnered a great amount of ‘red in her ledger,’ as she put it. Natasha is the definition of a tortured antihero.

Ava Starr

Following a quantum accident, which killed both of her parents, Ava Starr gained quantum powers and the ability to render herself intangible, though it came with a daily price – extreme, constant pain throughout her entire body. S.H.I.E.L.D. availed themselves of her stealth skills and gave her the code name Ghost.

Under the oversight of Goliath/Bill Foster, she learned she was dying because of her quantum imbalance and suffered years of horrible pain accordingly until Janet Van Dyne returned from the Quantum Realm and transferred some of her own quantum energy into Ava, stabilizing her. Ava will soon become a member of the upcoming Thunderbolts team and it’ll be interesting to see how she’s managed to navigate her power.

Bucky Buchanan

Bucky’s had a long hard road in his decades-spanning stint as Russia’s super soldier counterpart to Captain America. Forced to accept the amputation of his left arm as part of his cybernetic augmentation, as the Winter Soldier, he was continually subjected to the rigors of extremist military training and subjugation.

Related: 10 Biggest Steps In Bucky’s MCU Redemption

As part of his conditioning, he was routinely mind-wiped and memory-scrubbed, and killed countless operatives and targets across the world (including Tony Stark’s parents). His brainwashing made him constantly susceptible to being activated inadvertently as he was in Captain America: Civil War by Zemo, until he was rendered into the care of the Wakandans. He is unquestionably the MCU’s most dramatic case of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Peter Parker

For a kid that’s still in high school, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man has surely been put to his mantra’s test: ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ Not only did he lose his adoptive parents Uncle Ben (offscreen) and Aunt May (during the formative events of Spider-Man: No Way Home), he stood toe-to-toe with the Mad Titan only to eventually be blipped away for five years.

Then he lost yet another parental figure via the death of his mentor Tony Stark. His secret identity was revealed by Mysterio and to protect the lives of his loved ones, he asked Doctor Strange to cast a spell which went wildly awry, forcing Parker to have Strange make the world completely forget who he is (losing Mary Jane in the process). There’s little question why Spider-Man is Marvel’s most popular character and it’s not because of his powers. It’s because of his humanity.

Rocket Raccoon

James Gunn and Bradley Cooper’s wildly popular trash panda is many MCU fans’ favorite galactic Guardian. With his cutting edge sarcasm and demonstrative demeanor, Rocket rose to the top of the MCU’s most cherished ranks, but his heretofore unknown backstory – soon to be more deeply fleshed out in 2023’s Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 – reveals significant trauma in Rocket’s past.

Related: 9 Memes That Perfectly Sum Up Rocket Raccoon As A Character

In the comics, Rocket comes from a planet known as Halfworld, which is basically one giant asylum, where he was involuntarily augmented with cybernetics and genetically enhanced. In the Guardians sequel, it’s rumored Marvel’s High Evolutionary will be the dangerous scientist who tortured Rocket in his beginnings. It’s easy to glean what Rocket’s been through in the first Guardians film when he takes off his tunic and Starlord looks in shock on his back’s cyber implants.

Loki

Some MCU fans might find it harder to sympathize with the god of mischief’s tales of woe, seeing as how he brings so much of them on himself. Yet nonetheless, Tom Hiddleston’s much beloved antihero character grew up under the wide shadow of his golden-haired much revered brother, discovered he’s actually a Jotunheim frost giant and not the blood kin of Odin and Frigga, cheated death at least twice (once in the void, once to a dark elf), and was crowd-pleasingly pummeled by the Hulk.

His true death finally found him when his neck was snapped by the Mad Titan after which he received a fateful semi-resurrection via time displacement courtesy of the TVA. Say what you will about the trickster, but he’s no lightweight when it comes to adversity.

Wanda Maximoff

Of all the Avengers, Wanda’s rise and fall from grace might be the hardest for MCU fans to digest, given how personal her conflicts tend to run. She was orphaned at an early age thanks to a Stark munition, lost her speedster brother to Ultron in Sokovia, had to destroy her android love only to have that sacrifice immediately reversed via the Time Stone, and created an illusory family reality in Westfield that couldn’t possibly last.

Related: Wanda Maximoff’s 10 Best MCU Fight Scenes

Then she got into the Darkhold and began her dark descent into becoming the Scarlet Witch, killing a number of variant heroes in the multiverse to find variants of her witchcraft-created children. Other than Wakanda Forever‘s recent in-film homages to Chadwick Boseman and Tony Stark’s death, there likely isn’t a more anguished MCU moment than Wanda’s tears as she’s forced to kill Vision in Infinity War.

Thor

‘Point Break’ has a veritable laundry list of egregious loss. It seems MCU writers consistently want the god of thunder to be pushed to his utmost limits, what with his almost unmatched power set. He’s soldiered through the deaths of his parents, his friends the Warriors Three, his brother Loki several times, his best friend Heimdall, and he had to kill his own sister Hela to whom he lost an eye, his hammer Mjolnir, and his home world of Asgard.

In Infinity War he had to watch half his Asgardian people die at the hands of the Black Order, endured the weapon-forging energy of Nedavillir’s neutron star, and didn’t go for Thanos’ head with Stormbreaker, inadvertently failing to prevent half the universe from dying. Top all that off with dealing with Jane Foster’s death in Thor: Love and Thunder, and you’ve got the undisputed MCU champion of bad breaks.

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