Break The Cutie

From Tv Tropes

File:Breakthecutie2.jpg
First: The Pollyanna
Second: Heroic BSOD
Third: Despair Event Horizon
"Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, "Eight Rules for Writing Fiction"


A series introduces a character as sweet and lovable, more comic relief than anything, who likes nothing more than to pet little puppies. They make you adore them, root for them, and love them. And then the writers proceed to slowly torment them in front of your very eyes. They destroy everything important to them, kill everyone they love, and make them suffer from horrible accidents, diseases and acts of violence. They beat the character with one cruel stroke of fate after another until they are just a shell of their former cheerful, carefree self.

Be careful about tormenting sweet little things, though -- sometimes instead of breaking, they snap. If they do, you'd better hope your life insurance policy is up to date.

This technique is often used to build The Woobie. Writers have to be careful though, else it seems The Cutie becomes the universe's Chew Toy.

On a positive note, sometimes Breaking the Cutie can result in a cute but weak character Taking a Level in Badass as they confront their tormentors and become more assertive; on a less positive note, prepare for the advent of a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds if the cutie was quite the Badass Adorable to begin with. If the victim is not a cutie but the tormentors believe him or her to be, it's a case of Bullying a Dragon.

Sometimes it can be Corrupt the Cutie, where via Pygmalion Plot or Wife Husbandry, the girl in question breaks by herself. Frequently a part of a character crossing the Despair Event Horizon. Also, this is frequently part of the Back Story of the Broken Bird, and instrumental in the Freudian Excuse of a villain who Used to Be a Sweet Kid.

When the cutie refuses to break, they might become an Iron or Stoic Woobie, a Determinator, or a Plucky Girl. If they do break but refuse to show it, they could be a Stepford Smiler. If they are simply unbreakable to begin with, they are probably a Pollyanna.

Contrast Break the Haughty, where bad things happen to an arrogant person (who had it coming), or the even worse variation Kill the Cutie.


Contents

[edit] Examples

[edit] Animation

  • In an episode of Dexter's Laboratory, DeeDee breaks when she loses her teddy bear, Mr. Fuzzums. Throughout the episode, she is catatonic and only speaks by muttering, "Fuzzum uzzum, uzzum, uzzum fuzzum," etc. Of course, she is fixed by the end of the episode.
  • Butters from South Park snapping and becoming Professor Chaos. It happens again when he becomes a "vampire" (actually just a fad of pretending to be a vampire induced by the new Twilight movie, but he thinks it's real).
    • Kyle gets this as well, most notably in Cartmanland. It's one thing into being pushed into denouncing the existence of a God (or in this case a righteous God). It's another to be pushed to the point of giving up on life due to Cartman's constant Karma Houdini instances. It takes one major case of divine intervention to rectify.
  • Terra from the animated Teen Titans started out cracked, then met Slade, who did his best to finish breaking her.
  • Drakken, Monkey Fist and Killigan nearly do this to Kim Possible. When they go after Ron however, she breaks them.
    • Drakken tries this again in "So the Drama", by creating a "perfect boyfriend" for Kim and having him betray her when she is most vulnerable. When she realizes the truth, she nearly gives up, saying, "Drakken won. I should have stuck to babysitting." Ron pulled her out of her funk, and in the process instigated their Relationship Upgrade.
  • The Joker did this in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker where during Bruce's time he kidnaps Tim Drake and tortures/Mind Rapes him into giving up Batman's secrets (including his Secret Identity) as well as making him into a miniature version of The Joker known as J.J (Joker Jr.) to fit into a sick excuse of a family unit with Harley Quinn and him. This is shown as enough to convince Batman to try and kill Joker, (basically meaning the Joker finally broke Batman, too) which he fails to do... but is saved by the still-broken Tim killing the Joker after Joker tries to get him to kill the subdued Batman. This only further adds to his trauma. Although he does get better, Tim is forever traumatized and never again becomes Robin in the DCAU.
  • Happens to Spongebob Squarepants a lot.
  • Happens to Prince Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender prior to the show's timeline. Flashbacks of younger Zuko portray an idealistic young man with a thirst for knowledge and experience to help him learn to be a good leader and a genuine concern for the welfare of his nation's citizens. True, he's arrogant and brash, but hey he's a teenage boy and royalty. His naivety results in a serious disagreement with his father that leads to his scarring and banishment. By the time the other characters encounter him he's bitter, angry and obsessed with doing whatever it takes to regain his father's approval. It doesn't help that actions stemming from his inherent "good" side often backfire.
  • This is what the first arc of the X-Men cartoon was trying to do to Jubilee. The Unspoken Back Story that her parents had been killed (by assassins looking for the Lees down the street and got lost) and she was in a foster home, then when she'd finally come to terms with that, they register her with a front organization for Project Wideawake. So the Sentinels come, after she runs away. Oh, but that doesn't stop the metal monsters from killing her step-parents. It may not get worse, but it doesn't get better quickly.
  • Rusty Venture on "Venture Brothers"
  • The Simpsons when Ralph takes Lisa out to Krusty's anniversary special, only for her to dump him on live TV.
Bart: (replaying a video of the event) "Watch this, Lis. You can actually pinpoint the second his heart breaks in half."
  • This happens to the title character of Doug during the Nickelodeon Christmas special. After his dog, Porkchop, ends up biting Beebe Bluff while she and the other main kids were playing hockey (he was actually trying to save her from the thin ice) and she gets badly injured, poor Porkchop ends up having to be taken to the pound and even has to be put on trial. The day before the trial, Doug remembers about how he got Porkchop for Christmas when he was a year old, and how the previous Christmas, he got him his journal. Then, because of how Porkchop is being treated by everyone in town, he imagines standing at Porkchop's grave, and begins to cry. He really needed a hug in this episode.
  • Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic in "Party of One" reverts to her depressed straight-haired state seen in "Cutie Mark Chronicles" when she thinks her friends don't like her or her parties anymore.
  • The main character of Elfen Lied, Lucy, started out as this, and was tormented from a young age by the other children for being different. Unfortunately, those differences extended far beyond anyone's expectations of her, and when she finally snapped after the other kids literally murder her puppy in front of her, she started killing people efficiently and indiscriminately, with the ultimate goal of human extinction.
  • In Akira, taken to the most literal extent possible with the poor sweet Love Martyr Kaori. Squish.
  • Sweet innocent Rose from the first few episodes of the first Fullmetal Alchemist, who just wanted to help people, felt the full swing of the show's gradual slide away from the idealistic end of the scale, when she was protecting some children during an invasion of her home town. She was gangraped by soldiers and left pregnant and mute (due to trauma), and ended up so empty that she was used first as a figurehead of a religious movement, and then just as an empty shell for the Big Bad to possess.
  • Sayu Yagami, Light's sweet, adorable little sister in Death Note: during the second arc she gets kidnapped by Mello and ends up so traumatized that she goes catatonic and her mother has to use a wheelchair to move her around.
  • Code Geass has C.C. who was apparently once The Cutie before the harsh realities of living in a Crapsack World turned her into a cynical person who gives people (including an orphaned child) Blessed With Suck in an attempt to die.
  • Fate Testarossa from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is an inversion of this trope. When she is introduced, she is a cutie broken by severe emotional and physical abuse perpetrated by her deranged Mad Scientist of a mother, Precia.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion's plot tortures its already troubled protagonist Shinji to the point of snapping into a psychological breakdown. It does something similar to almost every single other character. Let's just face it, at some point the writers sat down and said "Okay, we need to break every single character by the end of this series. Any ideas?"
  • One Piece: Almost every time a Strawhat Pirate member has a flashback. The combination of Oda's skill at drawing cute kids and writing cruel back stories is just plain lethal.
  • Black Lagoon is either in love with this trope or owes it money. Hansel and Gretel were created by an entire upbringing of this.
  • One has to suspect that the writers of Vision of Escaflowne had some sort of "Torturing your main character, in body and soul" checklist, given the sheer amount of abuse Van goes through in the series. Kill off his family in his bactstory? Check. Have his country burned to the ground and force him to go on the run? Of course! Reveal to him that his brother is alive, but on the bad guy's side? Would never think of leaving it out.
  • The main characters of Grave of the Fireflies are an example of how truly tragic this trope can be.
  • Fievel from An American Tail, who suffers disappointment after disappointment as he searches for his family in New York, to the point where he completely gives up trying to search for his family and decides to become a Street Urchin. Cue Gray Rain of Depression as he curls up and cries himself to sleep.
  • 5 from 9 is a very sweet and trusting character, but that doesn't stop him from getting abused. First he loses his eye. And then his best friend is killed right in front of him. And then, right when it seems like everything is going to be all right, he dies. And his death is the most High-Octane Nightmare Fuel-filled one in the entire movie. Let that sink in a bit: the broken cutie doesn't even get to have a peaceful, quick death: it's full of High-Octane Nightmare Fuel, and he spends his last few second alive screaming, nearly-crying, and pleading for his life.
  • Susan Murphy of Monsters vs. Aliens. Hit by a meteor on her wedding day, she begins glowing green and turns into a monster, sending everyone she knows fleeing in terror. She's captured by the military and locked away permanently. She's with real monsters who don't understand her. When she finally gets a chance to get out (by facing something out of her nightmares), her fiance rejects her and she's abandoned. Then she's kidnapped by an alien who wants the Phlebotinum that turned her into Ginormica so he can destroy the world. She finally grows a backbone and takes a level in badass.
  • Simba of The Lion King was once a fun-loving and somewhat immature little lion cub who just couldn't wait to be king. Then his evil bastard uncle, Scar, sent Simba's father off a cliff to be trampled to death by a wildebeest stampede that his hyenas set off in a dastardly scheme to take the throne of the Pride Lands for himself. And just for added Kick the Dog measure, the son of a bitch then makes Simba believe that he was responsible for his father's death before then encouraging him to leave the Pride Lands and never return, while at the same time sending his hyenas to kill him. It takes a number of years with Timon and Pumbaa, a reunion with his childhood sweetheart Nala, and a fateful meeting with the ghost of his father before he's finally ready to take back his home, and even then, it was only after learning the truth of who was responsible for Mufasa's death that he truly manages to turn things around emotionally.
  • The Fox and the Hound's Todd and Copper. They start out as best childhood friends, and one of them is supposed to kill the other. Todd especially gets it bad; he is abandoned by the only family he knows to live in the forest where he meets some angry critters. He falls in love with a girl fox and makes a fool out of himself in front of her. His best friend blames him and wants to kill him for something that wasn't his fault. The way he got his friend to forgive him? Fight a giant bear and nearly die. And it's implied that they aren't allowed to see each other anymore after that.
  • Happens to Mater in Cars 2 after he discovers that everyone else views him as a clueless ditz, good only at distracting others while real heroes get things done.

[edit] Comic Books

  • Tim Drake, formerly Robin and now Red Robin, started out quite differently from his predecessors. Unlike the first Robin, Dick Grayson, he had a family during his run and a large supporting cast at his school. Overall, he was portrayed more as a realistic teenager than a vigilante. That was until his girlfriend was brutally tortured to death by Black Mask. Later on, his father was killed by another villain, Captain Boomerang. You would think that would be enough, but DC editors would think otherwise. His two best friends, Conner Kent and Bart Allen, Superboy and Kid Flash respectively, died saving the world making Tim the last surviving member of the original team they started, Young Justice. He has since taken up more of Batman's mannerisms, now being able to put fear into the eyes of his enemies. When you take into consideration that many of these events happened in the time span of a year or so, expect him to be in need of some psychiatric help in the near future.
  • Lyta Hall from Sandman, after her son Daniel is kidnapped, then reported killed, she spends an issue wandering around hallucinating, thinking she's in a fairytale. And then she meets the Kindly Ones and uses them to get revenge against the person who she thinks is responsible for her son's death.
  • Illyana Rasputin (Magick of the New Mutants) started as Collosus' little sister. After being sucked into hell while staying at Xavier's mansion, she returned with new magic powers and a severely damaged mental state. (To be fair to the team, time differences were so great she appeared to only be gone a few seconds externally... her actual time in hell can be measured in years internally.)
    • Rahne Sinclair has this in spades. Rescued from being burned at the stake by her abusive father, her life seemed to be getting better once she joined the New Mutants. Cue a long string of traumas -- her first love dying to save her, being mind-raped by an evil psychic, her best friend being possessed by a demon, being kidnapped and mind-raped/genetically modified into a mindless slave, seeing another dear friend murdered, struggling to break free of brainwashing, losing her powers and adoptive mother in a single day, and being shown a Bad Future where she murders two dear friends. Then she got recruited onto a black ops X-team, where she would be brainwashed and given a heroin overdose by her father. This resulted in her nearly murdering her teammates, and eventually killing and eating her father, a trauma she's blocked out.
  • Pick any characters who happens to be Brian Bendis' favorite. Joe Quesada once said of Bendis: "He wants to kill everyone."

[edit] Fan Works

  • For some reason, Jim Kirk is given a Break the Cutie back story to explain his Jerk With a Heart of Gold behavior. Witnessing a massacre on Tarsus IV, child abuse, mentally ill mother, and rape as backstory are all favorite plotlines. There is even a link on the Star Trek (Film) fanfic recs to a Hurt!Jim site consisting entirely of fics involving Kirk getting hurt.
  • The Firefly fanfic Forward manages to break River Tam all over again after she started healing at the end of the movie by having both River and Jayne captured and tortured by Niska, effectively undoing nearly a year's worth of mental healing for her.
  • The Harry Potter fanfic "Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness" is all over this. Poor, poor Colin and Dennis!

[edit] Film

  • Sara Goldfarb from Requiem For a Dream. This is not a feel-good movie.
  • This is pretty much the entire plot of Precious. Just when you think Precious has taken a single step out of the muck, life sends her crashing down three whole flights. It gets so bad that the character's otherwise minor victory at the end emancipating herself from her mother is downright triumphant.
  • Alice from Last of the Mohicans goes through an entire movie like this. All her scenes exist to basically show the gradual breakdown of her innocence, so no dialogue is needed to explain why she jumps off a cliff in the end.
  • Forget about survival horror. Dismiss any thoughts in your head of zombies, or teamwork, or social commentary. Watching Cillian Murphy totally snap in 28 Days Later is so much more entertaining. It's not so much a journey from innocence to adulthood as it is getting so far, far broke that you come out the other side.
  • In Galaxy Quest, Sarris forces Jason to do this to the alien leader Mathesar by admitting that the Show Within a Show is fiction.
  • Private Leonard Lawrence, a.k.a. Gomer Pyle, in Full Metal Jacket is put through utter hell during the first half of the movie. Overweight and mentally slow, Pyle quickly draws the wrath of the original Drill Sergeant Nasty, who reserves the worst of his abuse and invective for him. Eventually Pyle gets paired up with Joker, with whose help he starts to show some improvement. But then Hartman finds a jelly doughnut in his foot locker and decides to punish the entire platoon, resulting in the other members getting pissed and deciding to take it out on Pyle in the infamous "blanket party" scene. Pyle is never quite the same after this incident, and though he soon develops into a model Marine and an expert rifleman, he starts undergoing a psychotic breakdown in which he withdraws from the others and talks to his M-14. The first half ends with Pyle snapping out, murdering Hartman and then committing suicide in a nightmarish scene.
  • Nina, the protagonist of Black Swan, spirals through this from beginning to end.
  • Moulin Rouge. The movie starts out as a romance with Christian, an innocent, naive, carefree poet, moving to Paris to write about love (except he's never been in love) and falling for a beautiful courtesan at the Moulin Rouge. From there the film gets progressively darker as Christian experiences love, loss, and betrayal. His lover, Satine, denies that she loves him, but when he comes back for her in the finale of the bohemian play he's written for her, she reaffirms her love. The rich guy who tries to take her from Christian is defeated and humiliated. All great and wonderful... But then, as the curtains fall, she has a fatal attack of consumption. He wins everything and loses everything within a few minutes. That is how you Break the Cutie.

[edit] Literature

  • Fantine from Les Miserables.
  • Candide absolutely crushes everyone, especially it's protagonist. Voltaire really didn't like the idea of the best of all possible worlds...
  • In War and Peace, Anatole Kuragin does this to Natasha Rostov by seducing her into abandoning her marriage with Prince Andrei and running away with him. People manage to foil Anatole's plan, but she's never the same afterwards.
  • Both of the Stark daughters, Arya and Sansa, from A Song of Ice and Fire. Arya lives on the run as a Street Urchin, sees her father, mother and older brother die without being able to do anything to stop such deaths, progressively falls into insanity and is taken in by a murderous cult; Sansa is abused by almost every person she trusts, witnesses several horrific machinations and has to put on a bitch facade to survive.
  • Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien even wrote a letter explaining that Frodo can't be called a hero, that he was doomed to fail from the start ("he could not even throw the ring into his own fireplace!") and that his failure was in wanting to be called a hero, since nobody could have willingly destroyed the ring without divine intervention, and that the only thing that saved Frodo from A Fate Worse Than Death was his kindness to Gollum.
  • The entire premise of Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game. The Battle School teachers have a conversation early on, saying that although Ender is a peaceful child, he becomes extremely aggressive when up against his enemies. Since it is his aggression that they need, they decide that they will keep him constantly surrounded by enemies, until he will be forced to become the ruthless military mind that they need - basically invoking Beware the Nice Ones.
  • Water Lily of Wild Cards undergoes this in volume five, after Ti Malice turns her into a junkie for his "kiss" -- direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centres.
  • The Mord-Sith from The Sword of Truth are a perfect example of this. The gentlest and kindest little girls of D'Hara are "broken" with three levels. The first level is to be tortured to the point of absolute obedience. The second level is to watch her teacher torture her mother to death. The third level is for her to torture her father to death. Talk about breaking to the extreme.
  • Heathcliff spends a lot of the second half of Wuthering Heights doing this to... well, almost everyone.
  • Most of A Little Princess is devoted to breaking Sara Crewe. From being the richest, cleverest, and most beloved student at her Boarding School, she goes to a friendless and penniless servant after her father dies -- with the news delivered in the middle of her birthday party. The servants and especially Miss Minchin all try their best to break her from that point on. Sara never breaks per say, but she does cool off and become much more distant and withdrawn, and almost breaks at one point.
  • Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is pretty much one long Break the Cutie plot. Poor Fanny -- just her luck that's she'd be the Austen heroine who gets the more realistic story.
  • The Harry Potter series is basically an extended, attempted Break the Cutie for Harry, beginning with the deaths of his parents, his upbringing by his abusive aunt and uncle, and his repeated run-ins with Lord Voldemort. It's made worse by the rest of the Wizarding world not being able to decide if he's a hero they should support or if he's just a bratty, coddled attention whore (an attitude which even his best friend shared at one point). The bright little boy who was awed by magic and wanted only wanted to be accepted ends up as a mentally scared teenager who was pretty much destroyed and knew that he actually had to die to save the 'world!'
  • Mercedes Lackey brags about doing this to her characters]:
"The Lackey patented formula for success—make your audience identify with and care deeply for a character then drop a mountain on him!"

[edit] Music

  • "Janie's Got a Gun" by Aerosmith. Janie is sexually abused by her father multiple times. She's told people, but nobody has listened or helped her (the music video takes this farther, by showing that her mother is well aware of what her husband is doing, but is choosing not to act). She finally just snaps and puts a bullet in his head, later showing no remorse or guilt.
  • "Happiest Girl" by Depeche Mode.
  • "Breaking the Girl" by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

aking the girl...

  • "And She Sang" by The Puppini Sisters tells of an innocent young woman who believed in fairy tales and the new man in her life. He basically had some fun with her, and then he left without a trace. That's when the music suddenly changes from witty and magical to a loud instrumental breakdown. Then as the music calms down again, it feels a little sadder, signifying that the woman was merely a shadow of her former self.

[edit] Real Life

  • The sad story of Eliza Emily Donnithorne, a stubborn rich girl who refused to marry for anything but love, which at the time, was pretty unrealistic. Finally, she did fall in love with a poor guy, and after carrying on a secret romance with him for quite some time, the boy got the permission to marry Eliza. No one knows why, but he never showed up on the wedding day. Eliza was destroyed, when people began picking at the wedding food, she screamed at them to leave it alone so it'd be perfect for when he arrived. She had everything locked up, left it untouched for the rest of her life, became a hermit... and never left her house again. Google it, it's much sadder than I can even write. She may well have been the inspiration for Charles Dickens's character Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.
  • When Bosnia was ruled by the murderous dictator Slobodan Milosevic, his armed forces would round up poor, illiterate farm boys when they were very young and force them to methodically slaughter pigs over and over again until they became emotionally detached from the process of killing and could become effective executioners.
  • The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia rounded up poor boys who lived in the country and conscripted them into service, then handed them a shovel and a bunch of coconuts so they could practice smashing the coconuts in. They did this while brainwashing them into thinking the "urban"/"intellectual" Cambodians were their enemy and that they were the ones responsible for the bombing campaign that was going on in their region at the time (this being at the close of the Vietnam War). That way they could more effectively harbor hatred and anger at the millions of "enemies" rounded up from the cities and then, when it came time to "educate" them (i.e. slaughtering a few people for the sake of instilling fear in the others), they could more effectively kill the people in the way the Khmer Rouge preferred, i.e. smashing the people's skulls in with the back of a shovel.

[edit] Religion and Mythology

  • The Book of Job is one long tale of horrible misfortunes that beset a decent, pious man because God and the devil made a bet on whether he could be broken. He did break, but not quite as far as the Devil wanted him to. Satan's goal was for him to say "Fuck you, God" as a subtextual request for a mercy-killing (or as his wife puts it, "Why don't you just curse God and die?"); he settles for cursing his own existence.

[edit] Television

  • Some obvious examples come from various Mutant Enemy productions:
  • River Tam from Firefly came conveniently pre-broken, but we got to see the earlier cutie in a very few flashbacks. Or, if you watch the R. Tam Sessions, you get to see the whole process, including a rather jarring look into what River was like before she got broken in the brainpan.
    • The first thing the series did was break the cutie. Joss did it to Mal in the very first scene.
  • Sierra on Dollhouse. Seems a particularly sweet and cute doll, then there's the time she reverts to her base personality and confronts a man who claims to have put her in the Dollhouse. That's left on hold for a bit, until Topher finds out that he really did put her there against her will, and in a rare act of conscience, lets her base personality loose. Her tormentor gets what's coming to him, and everyone else gets a load of guilt. Thankfully, as Sierra, she won't remember anything. It's less clear whether they were able to purge her memories of when her first handler raped her in the innocent doll state repeatedly.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. This is part of the dangers of living over a Hellmouth, and the entire purpose of The First Evil. For specific examples... get a coffee, this is a long list:
    • Buffy herself entered the series only slightly dented, and slowly bent to the breaking point.
    • Faith can be put into this camp. A street kid, pursued by the hordes of Kakistos, desperate for someone to trust, constantly betrayed by Watchers and others until she had nowhere to turn when things went wrong, and then ruined by a father figure who got her to commit murders for him. After she came out of her coma, she was in such bad shape that she tried to commit "suicide by vampire".
    • Over seven seasons Willow loses her first lover to the curse of lycanthropy, loses her new lover to a brainwipe, gets her lover back, watches her best friend die, loses her lover to her obsession with magic, gets her lover back, and just as they've finally reconciled loses her lover to a random gunshot that wasn't even intended for her. Bad Things ensue, and the primary focus of her arc in the next season is just putting her back together.
    • Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel also counts towards this; as Angelus considered her to be his finest work. His methods of torture included taking advantage of the fact that she was psychic by pretending to be a priest during confession, saying such things as "Yes, you are evil. It is God's plan for you to be evil, so why not give in to His desire?". Also included was killing her entire family, sending her very nasty gifts and, when she went to a convent for sanctuary, he and Darla killed every nun in the building then had sex on the Altar in front of her. Finally, while Drusilla was utterly traumatised, Angelus turned her, leaving her utterly insane for the rest of her existence. Of course, the results were the complete opposite of his hopes: instead of suffering forever she ended up even more psychotic, the definition of Too Kinky to Torture, and arguably the most powerful and in an odd way least conflicted or unstable vampire in the show.
    • When Riley is introduced, he is happy with his job at the Initiative and thinks they're doing good work, and all in all is a pretty normal guy, 'cept the whole demon-fighting thing. Then he falls in love with Buffy, who his boss and mother-figure tries to kill, he learns that Maggie created a Frankenstein-like monster who will take over the world, and Riley is meant to become like the monster too, while he's going through horrible drug withdrawal from all the chemicals the Initiative pumped into him to make him (and every other Initiative soldier) into a Super Soldier. He gets discarded from the Initiative and loses his faith in what they did, and two people he cared about are turned either into zombies or Adam Mk. II by Adam. After that's all over, he comes to realise that no matter how much he loves Buffy, she doesn't feel as strongly about him and never really will. All these issues, especially Buffy's lack of love for him, lead to him masochistically paying female vampires to suck his blood, and eventually he leaves town completely. When he makes a one-episode return in season 6, he seems a lot better.
    • None of these hold a candle to Buffy. A summary of her suffering would be a synopsis of the entire series. Highlights include her boyfriend losing his soul and becoming a Complete Monster after sleeping with her, losing her mother to an aneurysm, being pulled out of heaven, and spending seven years fighting a war against evil.
  • Literally done with Kes from Star Trek: Voyager.
  • Pretty much the entirety of the Doctor Who episode "The Family of Blood" is devoted to breaking the character of John Smith (an amnesiac, human Doctor) into teeny tiny pieces after setting him up as a rather lovely bloke in the prior episode. It's effective.
  • Boomer from the new Battlestar Galactica is a naive young rookie pilot whose parents supposedly died in an accident when she was younger, which left her with a bad case of survivor's guilt nearly leading her to wash out, but for Adama's kindness. Her fellow crew are her family, Commander Adama's like a father, and Starbuck's like a big sister. She's having sex with the chief of the deck and thinking she's getting away with it, and she takes in one of the kids orphaned by the Cylon attack for a time. Then it turns out that she is a Cylon sleeper agent implanted with hidden programming that makes her zone out and commit acts of sabotage she can't remember, and everything goes to hell. She finds herself shooting her beloved commanding officer against her will, gets broken up with by the Chief, lied to, encouraged to suicide, confronted by creepy loving clones, violently interrogated, publicly hated on, shot, resurrected among the creepy loving clones, convinced to be a leader in a peace movement that fails miserably, and rejected by her clone's daughter (whose father is her own former co-pilot). Oh, and for a time her face is on the shooting range targets. Not to mention that Athena, her genetic twin, was the one who got the chance Boomer never had and crossed the finish line. Not only did she win acceptance from those who were aware of her true nature, but she got the guy, the kid and the life Boomer wanted. Oh, and Athena also earned the respect from her model number for being the first Cylon to overcome her programming. No wonder Boomer is so bitter.
    • Felix Gaeta was a good case of this. He was initially an earnest and contentious guy with a case of hero worship (or more) on Gaius Baltar. Then saw his expectations betrayed by New Caprica, the occupation by the Cylons, got himself ostracized, tried and nearly killed for Collaboration despite the part he took secretly in La Resistance. Then he lost his leg to friendly fire and gangrene during a mutiny situation. He certainly grew more bitter and sarcastic, but the show reminds us what a woobie he is by showing off his singing voice. He finally broke in the last season. Dee's suicide and his "efforts" on New Caprica being revealed to him as making things worse were the last straws, and he went into a full-blown Face Heel Turn, leading a mutiny on Galactica. The mutiny failed, and he was executed, along with his co-conspirator.
    • And of course, Dee. Losing Billy after turning to Apollo, marrying the latter, having their sham of a marriage wrecked by Starbuck/Apollo shippers, and then Earth's turning out to be uninhabitable was just too much. It didn't help that she was Adama's right-hand during the first three seasons: it's easily one of the most stressful and burdensome jobs in the fleet, and in fact she described it as getting harder, not easier, in one second-season episode.
  • Happens in a completely mundane, underplayed, and painful way to Peggy Olsen on Mad Men. In the pilot, she's tiny, wide-eyed, hopeful, and naive; since then, she's had a disastrous affair with a Jerkass coworker (which he initiated just days before his wedding), been mocked and sexually harassed on an hourly basis, and gotten pregnant, denied it until she went into labor, been declared an unfit mother, and been forced to hand the kid over. Then her boss came and told her to just go on pretending it'd never happened. Yeah, that'll work.]] Granted, she's made some great strides on the career front, and become miles more confident than she was in the pilot, but... to sum it up in one heartbreaking word? Playgrounds.
  • Throughout the first four seasons of Lost Hurley was the series' comic relief and all-around nice guy, even though he believes he is cursed and still struggles with his food addiction on the island. Once he gets off the island, however, he starts to become haunted by the ghosts of people from the island, and by the end of season four, he's far from the happy-go-lucky Hurley of earlier seasons.
  • Heroes has not yet broken Hiro Nakamura, but it sure is working on it.
  • Dr. Kelso in Scrubs does this with Elliot. Dr. Cox literally punches him out because of it.
  • Serial killers Mr. Yang and Mr. Yin attempt to break Shawn in Psych. In the season three finale Yang kidnaps a waitress, and sends Shawn a series of taunting clues warning that is Shawn does not solve them the girl will be killed. Yang then abducts Shawn's mother and straps her with explosives. Shawn realizes that Yang was watching him the entire time and was even in his office, which scares him. In the season four finale, Yang's partner Mr. Yin emerges and sets his sights on Shawn as well. Yin kills two people before kidnapping Shawn's longtime crush Detective Juliet O'Hara and his childhood sweetheart Abigail. Yin arranges for both girls to be killed, and calls Shawn with the information that he has time to save only one girl and that he must choose who means more to him. Shawn chooses to save Abigail; Juliet is saved by Detective Lassiter. When Shawn arrives to rescue Abigail, he finds himself face to face with Yin - he must let Yin go in order to get to Abigail in time. Losing Yin clearly shakes Shawn, as does his guilt at nearly sacrificing Juliet. It's hard to say if this will have any lasting effect, given the nature of the show, but since Yin is still at large Shawn will likely face him again in the future.
  • Party of Five: Sarah (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) started as a nice, cheerful girl and within one or two seasons was as morbid and whiny and angst-ridden as everyone else in the show...
  • Several characters on Breaking Bad, but most notable among them Jesse. While he didn't exactly start as the most idealistic person, he was getting by making sub-par meth and his worst experiences were a few arrests. Since agreeing to partner with Walt, however, he's inadvertently gotten his girlfriend hooked onto drugs again, leading to her death; seen several other people die in front of him, most of them pretty brutally; and killed a decent man in cold blood on Walt's orders to prevent Gus from killing Walt. At times it seems the writers' main goal is to come up with new ways to break Jesse even further.

[edit] Theater

  • Tosca: Floria Tosca is a sweet, religious girl, though a bit prone to jealousy. Corrupt police boss Scarpia uses this jealousy to not only get her to accidentally betray the artist Mario Cavaradossi, who she loves, to him, but then forces her to both tell him where Mario might be hiding Angelotti to stop him from being tortured, then agree to be raped to keep him from being executed in Scarpia's namesake ultimatum. Poor Tosca has a complete breakdown at that point, asking God why he would do this to her, who lived only for art and love, and tried only to serve him. She manages to palm a dagger and kill Scarpia when he returns to rape her -- but, when she goes to meet up with Mario, the false execution that Scarpia arranged... turns out to be not so fake after all. As she breaks completely, and the troops can be heard coming to arrest her for the murder of Scarpia, she takes the only action left to her, and throws herself off the roof of a tower.
  • Maria in West Side Story. "How do you fire this gun, Chino? Just by pulling this little trigger? How many bullets are left, Chino? Enough for you? And you? All of you? WE ALL KILLED HIM; and my brother and Riff. I, too. I CAN KILL NOW BECAUSE I HATE NOW! How many can I kill, Chino? How many -- and still have one bullet left for me?"
    • Anita might also count as this. She starts out as a nice girl who's happy to be in America and only wants to live her life in a new country and even help Maria and Tony out. Then Tony kills her boyfriend. Understandably she becomes pretty jaded, but she STILL agrees to help Maria get a message to Tony (yes, the guy who killed her boyfriend). Instead she finds his friends, who almost rape her. That's pretty much the last straw, and she tells the lie that leads to the tragic conclusion.
  • Hamlet pretty much pulls this trope on Ophelia. Between his running into her room disheveled, sexually harasses her (in two separate scenes, no less) and finally kills her father under the impression that he was killing Claudius, driving her insane. It's not quite Kill the Cutie, since she kills herself, but it's at the hard dark edge of the two tropes.
  • By the end of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Johanna and Toby have gone mad due to having been treated cruelly for their whole lives, but also partly because of their first hand discoveries of Sweeney and Lovett's practices.
  • Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Three hours after she marries Romeo, he kills her cousin (who was like a brother to her) and gets kicked out of Verona. The next day her parents try to force her to marry a man she doesn't love, and threaten to disown her if she refuses. Her father claims that he and her mother "have had a curse in having her". Meanwhile, she's loyal to Romeo, not only because of her inclinations, but because of her religious beliefs (i.e. "I'm already married, it would be wrong of me to get married again") and is fully prepared to kill herself rather than go through with the wedding. She ends up taking a potion that makes her appear dead, even though she's terrified of what it will do to her, as part of an incredibly risky plan to get out of Verona that entails never seeing the people she loves again. Then, when she wakes up in her family tomb, her husband is lying dead with his head on her chest. She runs herself through with his dagger. And she's fourteen years old.

[edit] Video Games

  • Isaac Clarke, the protagonist of Dead Space. Granted, he is not a cute anime girl with big eyes and bright hair, but still, he is your average 40 years old guy trying to earn his salary and get some news about her former girlfriend on a supposedly routine repair job, and he gets stuck facing off against horribly mutated undead creatures, some of whom he knew, the people who try to help him stop the necromorphs being brutally murdered, he gets betrayed by one of his own teammates and at the end it's revealed his girlfriend killed herself before he arrived and he's been driven insane by a fake Artifact of Doom. When he finally gets a break from all the massacres and bloodshed, he seems to be coming to terms with the loss of his girlfriend... then he is apparently attacked by her. Luckily for him, according to the creators of the game, he is still alive.
  • In Halo, the third installation, Cortana is captured by the Gravemind, and it tries to force her to give up information. It then starts pushing her into insanity. There is a lot of speculation about what precisely it does, but that she is tortured and, to some extent, violated is made obvious by her fetal-position posture when the Master Chief finally rescues her.
  • Kingdom Hearts does this to several characters, most notably Roxas and Xion. Roxas is a curious case in that he's broken posthumously and only to the player's point of view. He's established as a normal kid not unlike Sora who just has fun hanging out with his friends during summer until the Keyblade enters his life. Then 358/2 Days came out, and it turns out Roxas spent his entire life as the Organization's Unwitting Pawn, and besides Axel and Xion no one cared about him and in fact they frequently insulted and abused him. That blissfully ignorant week where he had his memories erased and replaced with fake memories from Namine was the happiest time in his life--which by the way, was barely a year long.
  • Mass Effect. Rule Of Thumb: if the word 'cute' can be even vaguely applied to a party member, either they will be broken by events at some point or they've come pre-broken. An odd example is Kaidan Alenko, who'd been pre-broken thanks to undergoing Training From Hell for his biotic powers]] as a teenager, but has since recovered. This was before you meet him -- he came pre-mended. It really weirded this troper out whenever he discussed his horrific past, and casually concluded each time with something like "But that's all in the past, Commander. I faced my demons a long time ago."
    • Tali'Zorah is an example that is worth mentioning, as the second game sees her utterly annihilated. At the very first mission of the game, the team she is leading is crippled by a heavy mech. During her recruitment mission, all of her team, with one potential exception, is killed. After she joins you, she is charged with treason against the Migrant Fleet. When you get there to meet the charges, you learn that the lab ship her father was working on is overrun with geth and everyone in there is presumed dead. When you board the said lab ship, everyone in there is dead. At the point where you find Tali's father's corpse, the game gives you the option to give her a hug (and if you don't take that option, you're a heartless monster). Turns out that her father committed one of the worst war crimes in the history of her people, and she begs you not to share the evidence with the judges of the trial. If your Morality Meter is not high enough, you can either withhold the evidence, causing her to be exiled permanently from her home, or share the evidence, and destroy her trust in you.
    • And for some strange reason, there is no mention of Yeoman Kelly Chambers. She loves dogs, cats, every species in the universe, said that she cried when she met Tali and Thane, and if you read the Shadow Broker file on Zaeed, find that she is innocent enough to be disgusted by the Badass. And then, when the Reaper IFF is installed, and the Collector's board the Normandy, you see her scream as she is dragged into the main elevator by a Skion. And then, when you think it can't get any worse, you find her in the Collector Base, seconds away from being turned into liquidized human fuel for a war machine, and if you didn't go through the Omega 4 relay immediately, she doesn't make it.
  • City of Heroes Mission Architect Arch ID: 266877....title: The Most Important Thing.


[edit] Webcomics

  • Hanna is Not a Boy's Name features Hanna after the fact, though Tessa featured a time line of his life where he was a happy go lucky kid, something absolutely terrible happened that brought him down to a severe depression/dark stage but then he got back up again. Some things he still refuses to talk about, but has returned to a somewhat normal cutie goof ball of hyper activity.
  • Girls With Slingshots seems to be doing this a lot to Jamie lately. Those poor Woobie-ish eyes...
  • Grace from El Goonish Shive, during the most Cerebus-y arc, "Painted Black". She gets unbroken. Bonus points for Ellen during "Sister", if we can really call her The Cutie.
  • Order of the Stick has a point where Haley snaps after all the treasure they gathered from a dragons horde went up in flames, following an incident involving explosives in the tavern they were staying at. She spends the next several dozen strips unable to speak in anything except gibberish, and slowly developing a host of ghostly subconscious voices counseling her to confess her secrets. Still quite funny how it plays out.
    • Coincidentally, this same arc culminated in Nale telling Elan that Haley is Evil All Along and The Mole and (with the help of some Brainwashing) drives Elan into briefly snapping and nearly killing Haley before Haley manages to break out of her gibberish-speak by finally confessing to Elan that she loves him.
    • The Therkla arc. The entire story of that (once the character comes in) is Elan being punished for the naive loyalty he shows to Haley, up to and including Therkla dying rather than living without Elan. What's surprising is how he comes out.
  • Luna starts out like this in Dominic Deegan, and gradually gets better. Currently, she's unbreakable, even though almost every villainous character who knows about her past has tried to rebreak her.
  • Happens to a degree with Laura in Collar 6, as she realizes just how seriously she's getting involved in BDSM.

[edit] Web Original


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