Who Had It Worst? Ranking the MCU’s Most Heartbreaking Origin Stories

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 left audiences shattered by Rocket Raccoon’s past, but is he really the MCU’s most tragic hero—or do even darker origin stories lurk in the lineup?

If you walked out of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 with puffy eyes, you are very much not alone. Rocket Raccoon’s past is a punch to the gut. But is it the MCU’s bleakest origin? Let’s line up the contenders and, yes, this gets dark fast. Being a hero in this universe almost always means losing something, usually in some combination of these four flavors: captured or kidnapped, tortured or experimented on, loved ones killed, or straight-up mind control. Most characters hit more than one box. Here are the ones who hit them the hardest, plus a quick pass through some very worthy honorable mentions.

The categories we’re dealing with

To keep this sane, think of MCU tragedies as clustering into four buckets: capture/kidnapping, torture/experimentation, loved ones dead, and mind control. Rather than roll call every hero who fits (that would be… nearly all of them), I’m focusing on the heaviest hitters in each lane, then flagging others who could have easily made the cut.

Scarlet Witch

Wanda Maximoff’s pain was baked in early. She and her twin brother Pietro watched their parents die in a Sokovian bombing and barely survived themselves. Blaming Tony Stark and the Avengers, the twins volunteered for HYDRA and were subjected to experiments with the Mind Stone. Yes, they came out with powers, but the bill came due: when they switched sides to stop Ultron, Pietro didn’t make it out alive. Wanda’s grief only compounded from there, but even just the origin story is a rough ride.

Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier

Steve Rogers’ best friend didn’t die when he fell off that train in WWII. He survived, which unfortunately meant HYDRA got their hands on him. Arnim Zola’s experiments turned Bucky into a super soldier with a metal arm and a new alias: the Winter Soldier. The cost? Decades of being used as a ghost assassin, with his brain regularly scrambled into mush so he’d follow orders. Shuri and the Wakandans eventually freed him from the programming, giving him a path to redemption. The path that led there is brutal.

Nebula and Gamora

Take the Black Widow program’s trauma and crank it up. Thanos didn’t just adopt Gamora and Nebula — he forged them into weapons. Gamora was taken from her homeworld during one of Thanos’ massacres, where he wiped out half the population on the spot. Her parents were most likely among the dead. Years later, the man who called her daughter murdered her for the Soul Stone — because she was the only thing he loved. That’s as cold as it gets.

Nebula’s story is somehow even more invasive. Also taken by Thanos and raised alongside Gamora, she failed to measure up in his eyes, so piece by piece he replaced her organic body with machinery to make her more lethal. Kidnapped, modified against her will, and molded into a weapon — it works for combat, and it wrecks your life.

Rocket Raccoon

Rocket’s backstory is the MCU’s heartbreaker-in-chief. He starts as a defenseless animal on Earth, gets captured by the High Evolutionary, and is repeatedly torn apart and stitched back together in a series of experiments. The process turns him into one of the sharpest minds in the galaxy, but the price is endless pain.

It gets worse. Rocket bonds with fellow test subjects Lyla, Teefs, and Floor, then learns they’re all slated for termination. He nearly pulls off an escape, only to watch his friends die at the hands of the monster who made them. Torturing a powerless creature, then killing the only family it ever knew — that combination is why Rocket’s origin sits at the top of the MCU misery index.

Honorable mentions (because tragedy is kind of the MCU’s brand)

• Spider-Man: Orphaned, destined to lose Uncle Ben in any universe, and constantly paying the price for doing the right thing. In the MCU specifically, though, Peter Parker is a gifted kid who got access to Stark tech at 15 — others have it worse from the jump.
• America Chavez: The multiverse-hopper’s backstory is still mostly a blank in the films. What we have is this: a bee stung her, she panicked, her powers sparked, and her parents were blasted through a portal to who-knows-where. If they turn out to be alive, her origin shifts from tragic to complicated.
• The Eternals: Created to protect worlds that are ultimately meant to be sacrificed so new Celestials can be born. Try spending thousands of years building relationships on planets you’re unknowingly grooming for destruction. That’s existentially grim.
• Tony Stark: Kidnapped, tortured, and forced to build his first Iron Man suit from scraps while watching Yinsen die to buy him time. It’s harrowing — but Tony also started life rich, brilliant, and complicit in selling weapons that ended up with terrorists. His hero turn begins as atonement.
• Sylvie: As a child, she’s yanked out of her life by the TVA with zero explanation, and her entire timeline is pruned. Years later she kills He Who Remains and knocks the multiverse off its axis. Going that far might be too far — but the anger tracks.
• Natasha and Yelena: The Red Room and the Black Widow Program are nightmares, period. Add the whiplash of a fake-but-happy childhood before being fed into that machine. The only upside? They became two of the most dangerous operatives the MCU’s ever seen.
• Peter Quill: Watches his mom die of cancer, then gets abducted by Yondu and the Ravagers minutes later. As an adult he kills his father after learning that dad murdered his mom, then he loses Yondu and Gamora. He’s finally trying to reconnect with his grandpa, which feels overdue.

Bottom line: most MCU heroes are built in a blender of loss and coercion. Some just get ground finer than others. Rocket, Wanda, Bucky, Nebula, and Gamora sit at the peak of the pain pyramid, and that’s saying something in a franchise where suffering is practically a superpower prerequisite.