The events of 9/11? Real. Tyler Hawkins? Fictional.
"If all the fictional characters on board the ship could be counted, they would far outnumber the real passengers and crew. If they had any weight, they might sink the vessel without any help from the iceberg."
— Brian Lavery, British naval historian, in reference to how often fictional characters have been placed on the Titanic
Where the Post-9/11 Terrorism Movie focuses on the terrorists, this focuses on the victims. Hundreds of millions of people witnessed a massive tragedy, and these characters, for a time, put a face on that suffering and gave us someone to grieve through.
Every decade seems to give us a major tragedy and writers focus on those tragedies to ... work through their own trauma, to help people work through their trauma, to make a living...
If the person existed in real life, but the person focused on is a fictional relative, that is covered by Historical Character's Fictional Relative. Whether it focuses on the person who died or on their friends and family, this is an entirely separate trope: this person is completely invented. No matter how closely they mirror Real Life, acts of violence Based on a True Story does not qualify for this trope. The violence must be explicitly a case that took place in real life. May be related to Been There, Shaped History; Who Shot JFK? is a common inversion, in which the perpetrator of a real-life tragedy is fictional.
This is distinct from Genocide Survivor, Returning War Vet, The Vietnam Vet, or the Shell-Shocked Veteran, because genocides and wars are massive events that encompass thousands, if not millions, of people. When genocides are dramatized, these people are usually fictional, but there is no hard or fast rule on how many people were involved in the horrors of, for example, The Holocaust or The Partition of India among others in comparison to, for example, the sinking of the RMS Titanic. If a smaller or more localized event that took place during a genocide or a war is referred to in-universe, that may qualify.
Contrast Fictionalized Death Account, where a real historical figure dies in a different manner than they actually did in real life.
No Real Life Examples, Please! As a death trope, no spoilers will be marked.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Shibuya Chogoro from Idol Angel Yokoso Yoko is a survivor of the 1945 Tokyo Air Raids (known in the West as "Operation Meetinghouse
") where he lost his parents. Even though it has been 45 years since the incident he is still haunted by the incident and is implied to have PTSD.
- Jormungand: Hex's fiance was killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack and caused her to have an extreme approach when dealing with radicals in her job with the CIA.
- Overtake!: Protagonist Kouya Madoka was in Tohoku on an assignment when the 2011 earthquake and tsunami hit, and while he was there, he took an award-winning photograph of a young girl about to be swept away by the waves. He stuck around for months to help with the relief effort, but ended up with such severe PTSD that he's unable to take pictures of other people; every time he tries, he ends up picturing the girl.
- Penguindrum features the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway as an important part of the backstory, with Ringo's sister Momoka being a victim.
Asian Animation
- Link Click: The climax of Chen Xiao's arc reveals that said character's photo was taken just before the 2008 Sichuan earthquake—meaning that everyone in his village, including his crush, best friend, mother, and a visiting sports team, are about to be crushed in the aftermath. Chen himself only survives thanks to his mother shielding his body in addition to hiding under a table.
Comic Books
- The Boys: Played with. Vought dispatched Queen Maeve and Homelander to try and stop 9/11, but both were unprepared with how to deal with it and as a result, they made the situation worse, bringing it into Alternate History. Instead of the second plane hitting the South Tower, it hit the Brooklyn Bridge instead, killing many more people who would not otherwise have died. This would cause Maeve to start drinking to cope with being unable to rescue the victims on the planes.
- X-Men: Storm was introduced in 1975 by Len Wein. When Chris Claremont began writing her, starting with Uncanny X-Men (1963) #94, he established that her parents died during the Suez Crisis (1956), while they were in Cairo. Her backstory was later changed to excise the time reference to the real life event, while keeping her parents' death.
Films — Live-Action
- Blackhat: FBI Agent Carol Barrett lost her husband on 9/11 and her drive to capture terrorists at any cost is seen as Cowboy Cop material by her higher-ups, with the resulting lack of respect.
- Dead Like Me: Life After Death: Cameron fell 80 stories from the South Tower and apparently learned nothing from the experience.
- A rare example that doesn't involve death or near-death. The remake of Fun with Dick and Jane very heavily implied that Dick and Jane will lose their money (again) to the Enron scandal.
- In the Line of Fire: The protagonist was a secret service agent on President John Kennedy’s detail the day Kennedy was assassinated. The agent, Frank Horrigan, is haunted by his failure to protect Kennedy ever since.
- Jaws 1: Quint reveals that he was stationed on the USS Indianapolis when it was sunk during World War II. During a monologue, he describes witnessing hundreds of the ship's crew being devoured by sharks while they were stranded in the water and how it fueled his obsession with hunting them down ever since.
Quint: I'll never put on a life jacket again. So eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest.
- Killers of the Flower Moon shows a fictionalised private investigator beaten, potentially fatally, during the course of the movie's murder plot. What's unusual is that while the private investigator is named for and is partially based on a real person, the real person was not attacked and went on to serve with the early FBI; the investigator in the film is a combination of several private investigators and a lawyer who was murdered under similar circumstances in the actual events.
- Natural Born Killers: Detective Jack Scagnetti's backstory has his mother being killed in the University of Texas tower shooting committed by Charles Whitman when he was a child. He also mentions that they were there because he wanted her to take him to the park for the day.
- Oscar (1991): Inverted — it is insinuated that the main character, Snaps Provolone, and members of his gang were involved in the Valentine's Day Massacre.
- Patch Adams: Carin was a complete invention of the film, as was her murder by a patient of Adams's. A close friend of Adams was murdered under similar circumstances, but notably, they were a male friend of his.
- Pearl Harbor focuses on fictional nurses, pilots, and sailors who are killed in the Pearl Harbor raid; the last half of the movie is about avenging the fallen via the Dolittle Raid.
- Reign Over Me is the story of a dentist reconnecting with a college friend who lost his family on 9/11 and suffered such severe PTSD that he's become a shut-in.
- Remember Me (2010): The film has an infamous Sudden Downer Ending where Caroline goes to school and her brother Tyler goes to meet his father at his office. The date written on the classroom chalkboard is September 11th, 2001, and a shot in Tyler's father's office pulls back to reveal that he works in the World Trade Center. The final scene is about Tyler's family and loved ones coping and trying to move on after his death.
- San Francisco (1936) is about a number of characters in the months immediately before the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.
- Titanic (1997):
- 101-year-old Rose Calvert tells the story of her first love, Jack Dawson, who she met and lost on the Titanic. It's Handwaved for Jack as it's mentioned that, 84 years later, nobody is able to find any records of his existence, likely due to his poor background and the fact that he won his ticket in a poker match.
- As a fun fact, in the Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Canada, there is actually a "J. Dawson" headstone, but it belongs to Joseph Dawson (1888–1912), an Irish coal trimmer who died in the sinking of the Titanic. Although, it frequently receives visits from fans who, at first glance, believe the tombstone belongs to the fictional "Jack Dawson".
- Other characters besides Jack this trope applies to include Fabrizio De Rossi, Tommy Ryan, Spicer Lovejoy, Trudy Bolt, and the Cartmell family.
- 101-year-old Rose Calvert tells the story of her first love, Jack Dawson, who she met and lost on the Titanic. It's Handwaved for Jack as it's mentioned that, 84 years later, nobody is able to find any records of his existence, likely due to his poor background and the fact that he won his ticket in a poker match.
Literature
- Dear America:
- In Hear My Sorrow, Angela Denoto's cousin Rosa and friend Clara are among the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.
- In Voyage on the Great Titanic, Margaret Brady's love interest Robert is killed in the eponymous disaster, while Margaret herself only barely escapes.
- In A City Tossed and Broken, the entire Sump family — the family Minnie Bonner works for — are killed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and Minnie is forced to temporarily impersonate the family's daughter in order to survive.
- In the spin-off Dear Canada series book No Safe Harbour, Charlotte Blackburn loses her parents and two older sisters in the Halifax explosion. She initially believes she's lost her twin brother too, as no one can find him, but it turns out he was merely suffering from a temporary bout of Identity Amnesia due to the extent of his injuries that prevented him from being correctly identified; as soon as he gets his memory back and remembers who he is, he and Charlotte are reunited.
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and its film adaptation is the story of a young boy whose father died on 9/11 unraveling the mystery of a key his father left him and what it unlocks.
- The Family Tree Series book Home Is the Place has main narrator Georgie in first grade when 9/11 happens. Her best friend Leslie's father works in the Twin Towers and is killed in the attack; Leslie's widowed mother ends up moving their family to Colorado and Georgie never sees Leslie again. Georgie's paranoid mother Francie uproots the whole family to Maine in the wake, making her husband George have to give up his good teaching job in the process.
- The Hour I First Believed: Caelum's wife Maureen becomes addicted to Vicodin after she gets shot and narrowly survives the Columbine school shooting.
- A series of children's novels have been published called I Survived where fictional characters are placed in real tragedies. These have included the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the sinking of the Titanic, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and a fair amount of others.
- Just After Sunset: "The Things They Left Behind" is about Scott Staley, who worked at (the fictional) Light and Bell Insurance on the 110th floor in the World Trade Center. He was Playing Sick on 9/11, and every one of his workmates died.
- Killer Bass Helix: Chuck lost his entire family in the Northwest Airlink 5719 crash.
- Indonesian novel Laut Bercerita (The Sea Speaks His Name) is based on the point of view of university student and activist Biru Laut and his sister, Asmara Jati, with focus on Indonesia's 1998 movement and the tragedy behind it, with Biru Laut being a representation of one of the activisits who were captured and marked "missing", while Asmara Jati's story focuses on the aftermath of Biru Laut's disappearance and what comes after 1998.
- Martyr!: Cyrus' Missing Mom Roya was aboard Iran Air Flight 655 when it was shot down.
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation takes place in the year 2000-2001, ending on 9/11. The narrator's ex-boyfriend, Trevor, works at the Twin Towers. He survives; he's on honeymoon at the time. The unnamed narrator's best and Only Friend Reva is transferred to Marsh (which had the second-largest loss of life on 9/11) and was situated between floors 93 and 100 in the North Tower. She is killed.
- Les Misérables: Much of the cast is killed on the barricades during the June 1832 uprising. While the characters are fictional, the failed revolution is very much real.
- Solar Pons: Dr. Parker's first wife was an American who died on the Titanic.
- The Thirteen Problems: At the end of "The Idol House of Astarte," Dr. Pender reveals that the murderer eventually became The Atoner and joined Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to Antarctica in 1911; all of the members of that expedition died. It's implied that the killer was actually one of the real members of the group, with Dr. Pender changing their name to avoid destroying their reputation.
Live-Action TV
- 9-1-1: Lone Star: Protagonist Owen Strand was a first responder at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and developed lung cancer as a result. The rest of his firehouse died, and he has part of the South Tower as a Tragic Keepsake.
- One of the final episodes of Becker, "Subway Story", sees the titular Dr. Jerk dealing with a woman trying to get directions while he's trying to get to Chamber Street and getting to annoyed — until he learns that the woman was the mother of someone who worked in the World Trade Center who died on 9/11 and she was trying to pay her respects to him, then he decides to stay with her to comfort her.
- Billions: Bobby Axelrod is the Sole Survivor of a hedge fund whose offices were located in the Twin Towers. It later emerges that the reason for his survival was that he was actually fired from the firm for insider trading and was offsite at his lawyer's office finalizing the severance package paperwork when the attacks happened. His wife Lara also lost her brother Dean, who was an FDNY firefighter, in the attacks.
- Blue Bloods: The party salad of both Frank and Danny Reagan's dress uniforms include a black bar with the gold letters "WTC", awarded by the NYPD to 9/11 first responders—many of whom were killed when the towers collapsed. One Very Special Episode in season 1 has Frank grappling with Survivor's Guilt from the death of an old friend from lung disease incurred from breathing contaminated air at the site.
- Bones:
- In "The Patriot in Purgatory", Brennan tasks five of her best squinterns with identifying sets of unidentified remains. One of the sets of remains, of a homeless veteran found behind a parking garage, is discovered to have been injured during the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon. While his death is marked as 10 days later, the injuries he sustained saving three people from the attack were what caused him to slowly bleed out.
- Wendell reveals that his uncle was a firefighter who died on 9/11.
- The episode “The Witch in the Wardrobe” invents a fictional Salem Witchcraft Trials victim for a modern-day murder victim to be descended from.
- Castle (2009): Agent Fallon from season 3 was on the phone with his wife when her plane crashed into the second tower on 9/11. As a result, he's an absolute hardass anti-terrorist DHS agent.
- China Beach: Given The Vietnam War setting, casualties are to be expected. However, a few main characters end up victims:
- Red Cross volunteer Cherry White is killed during the Tet Offensive in 1968.
- Army Specialist and combat medic Jeff Hyers is killed in action during a patrol.
- The Comeback: As a result of Robert Michael Morris' death in 2017, Mickey is killed off. However, in Season 3, it's said that Mickey died of COVID-19 during the first wave in 2020.
- Criminal Minds: There are two examples where members of the BAU are connected to victims of real-life tragedies.
- In "A Thousand Suns", SSA Kate Callahan reveals her sister and brother-in-law died in the 9/11 terror attacks when American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, where they worked. This is used to connect to the case the BAU's working involving a plane hijacking, and reveals what happened to her niece's biological parents.
- A variation in that BAU member Tara Lewis was not a victim, but instead a witness to a national tragedy. In "False Flag", a Conspiracy Theorist tells her that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged. Since Tara had actually been sent to Sandy Hook to investigate and saw firsthand the survivors' trauma, this hits her Berserk Button and forces her to find a place where she can scream in private.
- The Crown (2016): The episode "Act of God" focuses on the Great Smog of London in December 1952. Venetia, a fictional assistant to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, dies in a car accident caused by the smog.
- CSI: New York: Mac lost his wife on 9/11. The exact circumstances of her death aren't known. She had called Mac and said she'd gotten out of the first tower, but that she wanted to go back and help others. Mac told her to stay out where it was safe. The call cut off. It is not known if she ran back in to try and save others, or if she was killed by debris when the second plane hit. All Mac knows for sure is she's gone.
- Downton Abbey: The inciting event of the series is the death of the Downton heir and his son, Mary's unofficial fiancé and Edith's secret crush, in the RMS Titanic sinking. This causes chaos as the Crawleys have to reach out to a distant relative to be the new heir in order to save the estate.
- Flashpoint: In one episode, the antagonist is targeting the local Islamic community because he lost his wife in the 7/7 London attacks and believes members of that community are responsible. (In reality, they have only a tenuous link to the incident at most and it was entirely inadvertent — they had been tricked into giving money to a "charity" that was actually a front for terrorism — but the antagonist is too angry to be reasonable.)
- Judging Amy: In the fourth season episode "The Frozen Zone", Amy hears a custody case between a father and a grandmother of a boy whose mother died on 9/11 in one of the Twin Towers.
- Law & Order:
- The episode "The Ring" involves the discovery of a skeleton in a vacant lot. Using a ring that was found on the skeleton, Briscoe and Green learn that the woman had supposedly died on 9/11. Of course, the discovery of her corpse far away from Ground Zero throws that story into doubt.
- The episode "The Dead Wives Club" involves multiple fictional 9/11 victims: the Victim of the Week, Donna, was widowed in 9/11 due to the death of her firefighter husband. Another firefighter is shown dying from leukemia after 9/11, and Donna's new boyfriend is revealed to be a firefighter who survived 9/11.
- Mistresses: Trudi is a 9/11 widow and receives a million-pound cheque from the bereavement services in the first episode. It's then subverted with the revelation that, although Paul worked in the Twin Towers, he used the event to fake his own death so that his mistress Sally could take half of the money and to avoid divorcing Trudi. This was changed in the US adaptation, where Trudi's equivalent, April, had her husband "die" in a thoroughly fictional boating accident.
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Season 2 reveals what happened to Keiko's deceased first husband from Japan and her son Hiroshi's biological father. He worked as a medic in Nagasaki, at the end of World War II, and cancer killed him in the following years.
- The Muppet Show: The episode guest starring Alan Arkin, Statler reveals that he's a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic after Fozzie makes a joke referencing the tragedy which came across as especially tasteless for him. Not that his distaste stops Waldorf from cracking that Statler still had the dress he wore to sneak onto the lifeboat.
- NCIS: The last episode of the seventeenth season, called "The Arizona", has the team trying to verify the claims of a WWII veteran named Joseph "Joe" Smith. Smith claims he was serving on the U.S.S. Arizona when it exploded and sank at Pearl Harbor, but there aren't any records of him being aboard the ship when the Japanese attacked (Smith had used his brother's birth certificate to enlist, as he was too young). In the end Joe dies of a heart attack but the team can prove the shrapnel in his arm matches the wreckage of the battleship, which allow them to grant his Last Request of his ashes being interred aboard her with the remains of his fallen shipmates.
- Ordinary Joe: A key part of Joe's backstory is that his father was a cop who died on 9/11, which Joe blames himself for because the two of them were supposed to be out of town at a football game that day, but Joe wanted to stay so he could practice with his friends' band, so his dad also stayed and was therefore still on duty when the planes hit the towers; because of this, Joe blames himself for his dad's death. One episode shows how he copes with this across the Alternate Timelines — Cop Joe and Musician Joe actively avoid the subject when the anniversary comes up, but Nurse Joe finally confronts his grief and guilt, allowing him to move on.
- Pachinko's second season sees Yoseb drafted off to a munitions factory in Nagasaki at the tail end of World War II. Episode 5 even opens with an ominous daily countdown to August 9, 1945 in black and white. Yoseb survives the atom bomb that hits the city, but his coworkers are not so lucky.
- Quantico: Played with. A significant part of Shelby Wyatt's backstory and motivation for joining the FBI is that she lost her parents in the September 11th attacks on United Airlines Flight 175 (the plane that hit the South Tower). She later finds out that her parents are still alive; they happened to miss that fateful flight, but having been under investigation for treason at the time, they found it convenient to let the world think they were dead.
- Quantum Leap (2022) has Ben trying to Defy someone dying in a real tragedy on occasion:
- A first season episode has Ben leap into a man from San Francisco whose marriage is falling apart. Then the Loma Prieta Earthquake occurs and he and his (host's) wife need to get to Oakland to save their son from a building collapse.
- A second season episode has Ben leap into the son of a shopkeeper during the L.A. Riots. He needs to prevent his host's father from being killed by looters. He later needs to prevent his host's brother from dying when the father shoots him by mistake.
- Saving Grace: Grace's brother and father both died in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
- Seinfeld: One episode sees George trying to become the lessee for a new apartment. The other candidate is a survivor of the Andrea Doria shipwreck, who was about to get the apartment out of pity, and thus George and Kramer set out to disprove that the shipwreck was truly more traumatic than George's entire life.
- A subplot of the third season of Third Watch (a show about New York City paramedics/cops/firefighters) was the continuing search for the bodies of those killed in the collapse, in particular, the father of one of the firefighters. Throughout the year, there would be a moment when one of them would be found.
- Touch (2012): Martin Bohm lost his wife — who was also the mother of his son Jake — in the collapse of the World Trade Center.
- Watchmen (2019): William Reeves, who openly admits to murdering Tulsa police chief Judd Crawford, was a survivor of the Tulsa race riots, which killed his parents and left him an orphan.
Podcasts
- The Magnus Archives crosses this with Historical Domain Character in the Season 1 episode "The Piper". The man giving the statement, Sgt. Clarence Berry, recounts his friendship with real poet Wilfred Owen, best known for Dulce et Decorum Est, during the First World War. and how Owen died on the eve of the armistice due to his connection with some supernatural entity that was feeding off of the war.
Theatre
- Les Misérables: Much of the cast is killed on the barricades during the June 1832 uprising. While the characters are fictional, the failed revolution is very much real.
- Ordinary Days: Claire struggles to move on with her new man after losing her first husband on 9/11.
Video Games
- Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners: Professor Tetsuya Tsuchida's daughter Shizumi is said to have been one of the victims of the Luxor Massacre, with the whole plot being the result of his plan to punish his assistant for failing to save her life.
- In Phantom Doctrine CIA campaign, the player character's mentor Leslie is killed in the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing.
Web Original
- Honest Trailers spoofs this in their trailer for Titanic (1997) by saying "Based on the tragedy that spawned thousands of heartbreaking true stories, comes this fake one".
- A tale from the SCP Foundation invokes this; Kirche is set in the aftermath of the Bombing of Dresden in WWII, and features a medium working for the Foundation detecting hundreds of dead ghosts in the rubble of a church... but when they break into the crypt, it turns out that the ghosts are of people who never existed, reflecting the uncertain final death toll in Dresden.
- In Seinfeld - "The Twin Towers" (a "What If? Seinfeld had been airing during 9/11?" spec script), Elaine's guy of the week is one of the people who survived the Towers' destruction. Elaine, finding his histrionics annoying, finds equally annoying that he survived because now she will need to figure out a way to dump him. One of the major subplots is George being mistaken for a heroic survivor of the attack and exploiting the Hospitality for Heroes that he is offered. Parodied with Kramer, who has banded a crowd of fellow Cloud Cuckoolanders to file a Frivolous Lawsuit against the city of New York and call themselves "victims" in the most disproportionate of fashions (noise from the Twin Towers falling and rescue vehicles mobilizing interferes with scrapbooking, live news coverage interferes with game shows, and Kramer lost a box cutter by lending it to one of the terrorists - yes, he knows and does not cares).
