History Characters / WardBreakthrough

* HeroWithBadPublicity: Her actions in the first arc to protect a reformed villain earned her the ire of most human groups because they saw it as prioritizing the life of one cape against dozen of humans. Her subsequent forming of a team of problematic cases and establishment of an alliance with the [[ThePiratesWhoDontDoAnything Undersiders]] generated suspicion in hero circles about her team's intentions. [[TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers She was also rude]] [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking to Shortcut that one time.]]

* CloningBlues: Downplayed, since at least overtly she's utterly determined to present herself as the same person as the original, but it still creeps in from time to time.

* CloningBlues:

* HurtingHero: She's simultaneously a more fragile and more heroic person than she was previously, both due to her experiences in the asylum.

* DysfunctionJunction: They are this even ''moreso'' than other capes. This trope could even be their alternate name if the actual one doesn't work. Practically ''everyone'' in the team has some short of shady past, actions that they heavily regret doing, were victims of some sort of very traumatic event that could put their trigger event to shame, or a combination of all three. Ironically this seems to make them stick together more often than not, something that is very uncommon on cape teams with the same characteristic (read: most of them), that tend to crash and burn over time.

* EnemyMine: More than once, Breakthrough has had to work together with less than scrupulous characters; most commonly Tattletale and the Undersiders.
* HeroWithBadPublicity: Zig-zagged. Most of the team have sketchy to criminal backgrounds which serve as an impediment in establishing relationships with other hero teams in the beginning. But through the story their continued track record of detecting major threats before they happen and taking decisive action against them have earned respect from their peers.
* LoopholeAbuse: Breakthrough have had to put a lot of work into thinking and acting around each of their own psychological quirks. This makes them quite unpredictable when it comes to mind control or other Master- or Stranger-whammy effects, since regular practice in metacognitive evaluation, checks and balances pays off in getting around outside orders or perceptual weirdness, too.

* RagtagBunchOfMisfits: They range from three former heroes (Capricorn, Kenzie, and Victoria) to one accidental mass-murderer (Sveta), [[spoiler:a member of the Fallen]] (Rain), and an intended villain (Ashley). They also include a Case 53 (Sveta), a case 70 (Capricorn), a clone (Ashley) as well as a semi-official, honorary Case 53 (Victoria) -- her two-year dose of extreme BodyHorror and MindRape, plus their residual effects, earn her the spot, even though Cauldron were not directly involved. [[spoiler:Chris also turns out to be a half-clone, half-tinker creation of the late Lab Rat.]]

The main protagonist, the former Glory Girl of New Wave. She officially adopts the name Antares in Torch 7.8, spending the first portion of the story beforehand without a name after discarding Glory Girl.

* BoomerangBigot: She makes insensitive comments about the battle-hardiness of some Mover heroes based on her academic studies into trends in cape psychology (imagine saying that a female hero becoming shell shocked is to be expected due to overall trends that academia has found in gender psychology) while herself being a Mover.

* CelibateHero: Victoria hasn't completely moved from the death of her ex-boyfriend. She also has numerous body issues because of the time that she was a human blob with an untold numbers of mouths, hands, and who knows what else for ''two years'' with Amy's MindRape still active for that time, causing her multiple emotional issues by the start of the story. The fact that her forcefield is a constant reminder of both hasn't helped her one bit to open herself up to dating, or sex for that matter. Ironically, she has no problems having guys interested in her. [[spoiler:[[CharacterDevelopment She slowly gets past this]], first fantasizing about the hero Annelace, who volunteers at her physical therapy center. Later, after she has been benched and separated from her team by the Wardens, her craving for human connection drives her past her body issues and she has a fling with him. By the epilogues, it becomes clear she's made real progress and is slowly turning that fling into a healthy dating relationship.]]

* CoveredWithScars: By the end of 'Ward'' Victoria has taken enough hits that made it past her forcefield that she has become pretty scarred up. Hilights include [[spoiler:a gunshot wound to the arm, acid burns, claw and bite marks from giant centipedes, numerous stitch scars on her arms, legs, and torso, and a missing fingernail.]] Some of these she could have gotten healed, but due to her personal history she's not so interested in doing so using powers.

** Later, [[spoiler:after her adventures in shardspace, she forms a much closer connection to her shard and her power changes again. Victoria begins being able to control her forcefield both unconsciously and consciously with a much greater degree of precision than before. It's still shaped like her deformed body, but she can move herself around inside of it and treat it's extra limbs like "gloves" she can manipulate from inside. Then she later basically begins treating the forcefield like a set of extra limbs, but now with complete and natural control over it, to the point she doesn't even notice she's using her power vice her hands.]]

* HairOfGoldHeartOfGold: Victoria is a gorgeous blonde, and one of the most geniunely heroic individuals in the setting.

* MundaneUtility: In addition to all the ways she uses it in combat, she uses her flight to move around her apartment at night without waking her roomates and to avoid putting weight on her bad leg after an injury. Humorously she's even used it to lie down in midair so that she could use her own body as a food tray.
** Later in the story, her force field [[spoiler:improves markedly in controlability and precision, and she is able to use the "extra limbs" for a variety of everyday tasks. At one point she uses it to hold her phone up to her ear so she can rest her real arms, it brushes aside an unwanted touch from her, and she even uses it to ''braid her hair''.]]

* SelfCareEpiphany: Victoria's struggle with her [[ChronicHeroSyndrome desire to be heroic]] and her [[SamaritanSyndrome need to help others]] against the very real mental and physical burden that those things place on her is one of the core conflicts of her character arc. The trope is almost [[ZigZaggedTrope zig-zagged]] in that she academically understands she should take better care of herself and it's not her responsability to fix ''every'' problem she comes across, but she finds it difficult to follow through and step back. By the epilogue, [[spoiler:she has finally managed to come to terms with her powers and found a way to help others without constantly putting herself in harm's way]].

** Later she repeats the "coin-shot" trick by crumbling concrete into gravel and firing it at enemies like she was a flying a machine gun nest.

* OneHitPointWonder: It can only take one solid hit before collapsing. Apparently it does much better against sustained damage though. That said, it doesn't matter how strong that one hit that drops it is, it's getting blocked, whether it's a bullet or (according to WordOfGod) one of [[EldritchAbomination Scion's]] blasts.
* PowerIncontinence: The physical manifestation of Victoria's. She can choose to summon or dissipate it, and can sometimes give it simple orders, but other than that it acts on its own. It's to the point that Victoria addresses it like its a separate entity from herself, which may not be inaccurate if her passenger is taking a hand in controlling it.

* RequiredSecondaryPowers: Tristan has mild SuperStrength to lift his stone creations easier, while Byron is resistant to extreme temperatures, presumably to avoid getting hypothermia from his water. Byron also doesn't need to breath as much, helping protect him from drowning with his later power or suffocating with the original. They both have access to their own halves of a form of either HammerSpace or a PocketDimension. It certainly helps with their quick-complete-changeover-thing to have a way to store their specific equipment, accessories, accoutrements and ''stuff'' for it to be almost instantly available, but it may have other uses. [[FridgeHorror Just don't think too long about who/what organizes who gets what and how in the dimensional shenanigans. Including biology: it's mucked it up at least once.]] Darlene's power also reveals that the currently phased out twin still has his body move its limbs so that he will be on solid footing when the other decides to switch.

* BackFromTheDead: [[spoiler:Kenzie is working to achieve this for Byron as of the epilogues. The SharingABody / AndIMustScream situation may actually make this easier/less flawed than previous resurrections by cloning or Valkyrie, since he's maintained continuity of consciousness and his every waking moment was relevant data to the shard's analysis of his conflict with Byron.]]

* ItsAllAboutMe: Flashback chapters show he had this attitude before triggering and a good deal into his hero career. His most egregious instances of this were just not letting Byron act as an equal, going to business meetings and therapy sessions that affect both of them without ever giving up control, essentially making all the decisions and assuming Byron would go along with it. At another point he blamed Byron for not letting him daydream because of the rules he put in place despite daydreams being, you know, typically about private things you can't/won't actually outright ''do'' in the first place. What he probably meant was "I can't do what I dream up and then want to do right in that moment"... which isn't really "daydreaming" as most people define the word.

* SelfHarm: In his interlude chapter Byron is shown to have engaged in self-harm with a pen to cope with the stress of his and Tristan's situation. Keep in mind that Tristan was also along for the ride, even if Byron doesn't quite acknowledge that bit...

A Case 53 whose body is a mass of super-strong tentacles that [[PowerIncontinence she can't completely control]]. These days, she wears a human shaped, full-body prosthetic suit that she can manipulate from the inside and that also contains her tentacles. Used to work with the Irregulars prior to the team's collapse. Having grown to the point where she no longer has to be worried about endangering everyone around her, she's making an effort to branch out and be her own person by becoming a superhero in her own right. Was formerly known as Garrotte, before adopting the name Tress in Torch 7.8.

* CombatTentacles: Pretty much all her actual body is. Later on Rain builds some additions to her artificial body to giver her safer versions of this, though she chooses to forgo them shortly after.

* {{Foil}}: While using a prosthetic body whose limbs she can extend using her own tendrils, she has certain resonances with... Mannequin from the S9. They form contrasts on many scales: a colourfully artistic embellisher vs ''the'' consummate minimalist, optimistic humanist vs depressed nihilist, control issues vs control freak... it goes on. They both, however, have stonkingly massive body dysphoria their powers do nothing but make more complicated. For very different reasons.

* HeroicSelfDeprecation: Sveta has a lot of insecurities, particularly over her relationship with Weld, feeling like she's more like a burden he has to look after than a girlfriend. As she sees it, she can't figure out how to make food he likes, she can't have sex, and though she knows music is about the only thing he can enjoy she can't sing or play instruments. Weld doesn't actually have much, if any, sense of taste, smell or touch in the first place, but it's clear it's a deep set fear that Victoria tries to reassure her this isn't the case.

* PassiveAggressiveKombat: Is quick to pull out the verbal knives when she and Victoria work with Tattletale [[spoiler:to uncover a plot to drive wedges within hero and villain teams.]] Tattletale, however, considers it fun, and may even be her way of helping Sveta blow off steam [[spoiler:after she has a messy fight with Weld due to aforementioned plot targeting their relationship.]]

* BadassBookworm: She's a avid reader, and apparently trades books with Rain frequently. Counting the events of her predecessor's life, she also has the longest cape career out of anyone on the team.

* DefrostingIceQueen: For all her aloofness and disdain for people, she enjoys Kenzie's company, and in Shade 4.4, is visibly happy at a fan's excited responses to getting sent a photo of Victoria, Ashley and Tristan.

* GhostMemory: Ashley has the memories of the original Damsel, the Damsel clones Bonesaw killed before her, and people who the original Damsel knew, like Edict and Licit. However, Bonesaw did not intentionally give her most of those memories (nor did she have access to Edict and Licit's memories), leaving the question of where Ashley got those memories from unsolved.

* LikeAnOldMarriedCouple: While is clear than she and her sister care for one another, they're also technically the same person with some differences in personality and life choices. So it's practically a given they bicker a lot. From the apartment to Swansong choice to be hero, or even her haircut, they practically dissent about everything. Victoria is already accustomed to this so it's a given they do it pretty often.

* PunnyName: Comes with the cape turf. In her case, she's truly neither the pale Damsel of Distress nor Ashley Stillons and has yet to differentiate herself. Yet, she still kind of ''is'' a messed-up coda appended the life of the messed-up woman who was. Who can insta-kill most things, by-the-by. Yeah: Swansong.
* RecoilBoost: Ashley's space warping/matter destroying blasts create a strong recoil which she can use to dodge attacks and move around with. [[spoiler:It's the lowest setting of the whole propulsion-engine-shard-thing, basically.]]

* ThePiratesWhoDontDoAnything: Downplayed. She styles herself as an [[CardCarryingVillain evil villainess]], but while she did do crimes as a villain, such as trying (and failing) to rob a bank, it is revealed that despite her very lethal and difficult to control power, she avoided using her power against others, killing exactly one person, who she believed had betrayed her on a very personal level. Meaning that whenever she went on a mad rant about having killed people,she was actually referring to the accidental killing of her parents immediately after triggering.

** His tinker arms are very, very easy to break. On the plus-side: he can whip them up relatively quickly when on a good day. [[spoiler:And surprise people with hidden knives that stick out when the arms break.]]
* BunglingInventor: He's a Tinker who can make prosthetic hands and arms, but they're really not very good. Well, ''he'' constantly says they're not: Ashley, for one, somewhat disagrees with his assessment for a few good reasons. He may not be a Riley-level medical Tinker with self-repairing creations, but he's ''not'' in any real danger of going full-on Bonesaw with his tinkering partly ''because'' of his limits, either. Also, her not dying because he can both do Tinkerish first aid at need ''and'' jury-rig patches on Riley's work in the field if/when breakdowns happen? Worth it! Also, patching or tweaking Sveta's mannequin/armour/suit up at need is no mean task, either. Being a front line patching ''tinker'' for other Tinker's work ain't a bad thing, at all. He's basically a cut-price mini-Dragon, and doesn't know it.
* ColdBloodedTorture: [[spoiler:During the Pitch arc, Cradle and Operator Red slice him up very badly, though he lives and recovers.]]

* MultiArmedAndDangerous: In costume he usually sports several of his prosthetic robot arms. Downplayed, since they're very fragile and usually not very dangerous. [[spoiler:Unless he hides knives in them to impale whoever breaks them.]]

* SupportPartyMember: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. Rain is able to hold his own in a fight, but his powers are more geared towards supporting his teammates than 1v1's: his blades allow more mobile teammates to break things more easily, and his tinkertech is useful to Ashley and Sveta. [[spoiler:His emotion power also turns out to be more useful on his allies than his enemies, as its shame and self-blame effect forces one to learn faster from their mistakes and turns them into pseudo-combat thinkers. When fully powered up with Love Lost's token, his aura turns into a very effective large scale manipulation tool that disrupts an entire mercenary team and made the following fight much easier.]]

* AbusiveParents: [[spoiler:Her mother in particular is revealed in Interlude 7.x to have once slammed Kenzie into her plate so hard that it scarred her cheek, and previously grabbed her so hard she left bruises. Both parents were emotionally and verbally abusive as well.]]

* HolographicDisguise: Kenzie's specialization in surveillance/counter-surveillance allows her to make liberal use of these. She hands them out to other members to Breakthrough in order to allow the less-human looking members to appear normal, uses them as part of her costume, uses them on drones to fake her presence in the field, and even uses them like makeup to conceal aspects of her appearance that she doesn't like.

* NoSocialSkills: For all her cuteness and affection, she doesn't quite get how things like friendships and relationships work. She's managed to turn friends, classmates and teammates away from her without realising why, and has spent nights trying to find the magical button to press that will make people like her. Houndstooth says that at nine, she had no brakes, boundaries or emotional defences.

* StepfordSmiler: Her power-set makes it all too tempting to hide the hot mess of issues she has under a veneer of chipper acceptability. She can sustain her masks for a while, especially as she has rarely stayed in any one place for long, but has been creeping others out ''for years''. She reveals in Interlude 7.x that she only smiles when she's ''not'' happy, because it makes whatever's happening go better, and doesn't smile when she's happy.

** She once did something sexual to [[spoiler:one of her foster fathers because she wanted to show him she loved him]], having looked up how to show someone she loved them and not understood things like appropriate behaviour and boundaries.

** [[spoiler:Once we know the truth of his powers, this becomes even a greater part of them. He's a tinker with a specialty in mutagenic substances, but he prefers using them on himself. All the powers that he shows on his different forms are copied from a cape he had contact and "scanned" previously, with the added benefit that he can mix and match powers to make different forms. This effectively makes him the resident DittoFighter. Once he helps in making the Giants for Shin it's clear that he can also use this powers on his own creations, which is ''impressive'' since he has copied the powers of extremely powerful parahumans like Goddess or Mama Mathers.]]

* DeadpanSnarker: Snarky one-liners seem to be his primary method of interacting with pretty much anybody. This is actually a point of contention in his therapy sessions with Dr. Yamada, who thinks he spends too much focus on how clever a put-down might be and not on the fact that it's actually, you know, a put-down. It's so pronounced, that when his teammates experience a gap where some acid remark would usually be, they know he's either taken off or gone silent for some other notable reason that may need looking in to.

* InvisibilityCloak: Kenzie made a cloaking device for his that he uses to hide while untransformed or changing.

* MadScientist: [[spoiler:His ''actual'' power. Lab Rat's primary motivation for villainy was to get as many test subjects as possible, usually by kidnapping. Cryptid, however is not a perfect clone of the original and seems to only experiment on ''himself'', though he does seek out other parahumans to "scan" for inspiration.]]

* SquishyWizard: He claims to be very frail, so much so that even Kenzie could overpower him. Given what we've seen of the effects of his powers, this could very well be the case. [[spoiler: After finding out his true nature, this is even more so the case. He's mentions being "made to grow fast, not well", which implies that he might not even be capable of surviving without his "vials". For what it's worth he can pick and choose forms as long as he has his tinker vials, but he is even more defenseless than the average tinker without them.]]

* TragicMonster: [[spoiler:Chris really did have a horrible past and he is still controlled by the "imperatives" established by his maker. He's paranoid and trusts no one, even people that could conceivably help or understand him. Tellingly, Jessica believed he was on the road to recovery, which is why she wasn't worried about him on being the cape team. He drives people away with cruelty to "become more monstrous" and avert his maker's influence, but he's clearly capable of empathy and everyone can still tell that he cares for his ex-teammates. When in a really tight spot he has shown that he will go out of the way to help them, but that's while also working overtime to hurt their feelings to prove a point to himself. Even though his teammates know this, the lengths he's willing to go make them much less eager to forgive him. By the end he essentially runs out of sympathy and makes an poorly thought-out move to betray humanity and ends up pathetic and alone. He's essentially a non-romantic, very dark deconstruction of a Tsundere.]]

* TinyHeadedBehemoth: Not quite gigantic, but bigger than a normal person and with a smaller than proportionate head.

* CastFullOfGay: Or a least half the cast. Tristan is gay, [[spoiler: Sveta]] is trans, [[spoiler: Kenzie]] is bi/pan, [[spoiler:Chris]] is functionally asexual, and [[spoiler:Ashley and Victoria]] have at the very least some homosocial tendencies.

** As Victoria slowly comes to terms with her trauma and begins to recover psychologically, her feelings towards her powers change. Initially she calls her forcefield The Wretch, [[spoiler: but once she sees it in action in shardspace, throwing itself at hostile shards to defend her, getting put down and coming back again, she realizes that it (and her trauma) is a source of strength, not weakness, and that it wants to help her. She starts calling it instead The Fragile One and using the pronouns "she" and "her" to refer to it as if it were human.]]

** In Radiation 18.8, Victoria is denied the firepower she originally requested, but instead is given [[spoiler: a tinker-tech laser cannon made by Dragon that, when not carried by Vicky requires a flatbed truck to move around and weighs ''12 tons''.]]

* BackFromTheDead: [[spoiler: Kenzie is working to achieve this for Byron as of the epilogues. The SharingABody / AndIMustScream situation may actually make this easier / less flawed than previous resurrections by cloning or Valkyrie, since he's maintained continuity of consciousness and his every waking moment was relevant data to the shard's analysis of his conflict with Byron.]]
* DespairEventHorizon: [[spoiler:Hits this after accidentally getting Tribute killed and having a [[PoorCommunicationKills tragic misunderstanding]] in a conversation with Moonsong afterward. [[DriventoSuicide It doesn't get better]] [[HeroicSacrifice after that.]]]]

* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:Kills himself to prevent the cracks in reality from turning him and his brother into a Titan.]]

* EvenEvilHasStandards: As part of his role as foil to Amy, even though [[spoiler: Tristan faking Byron's death was partially motivated by his desire to pursue a romantic relationship without Byron being able to object to the rape by proxy]], once he's actually in that position he's too riddled with guilt to go through with it.

* HeroicSacrifice: [[spoiler:A notably dark example: Tristan kills himself with his own power to prevent him and his brother from going Titan.]]

* InsistentTerminology: Because her Tinker focus is on surveillance and cameras in particular, she's able to work better when she conceptualizes almost everything she makes as a camera, to the point where she insists that her audio-recording devices are "sound cameras."

* SemanticSuperpower: Her camera/projector specialty is far more versatile than it sounds at first, thanks to very broad definitions of "camera" and "projector". [[spoiler:For instance, she's easily able to hijack Teacher's portal generator technology once she realizes it's both a camera and a projector by her terms. It's also hinted that {{teleportation}}, HardLight, and {{Intangibility}} tech are other potential forms of cameras and projectors that she hasn't quite mastered yet.]]