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Do you really want to break me?
"Why am I not leaving, Dr. Reid? Because I don't want to miss you breaking down and weeping in front of everyone! Oh, here it comes! Great big tears! Great big crocodile tears!" — Dr. Kelso, Scrubs
Twisting and turning
Her feelings are burning
You're breaking the girl...
— Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Breaking the Girl"
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.
Then they proceed to slowly break 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, careless 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 sometimes used to build The Woobie. Writers have to be careful though, else it seems The Cutie becomes the universe's Butt Monkey.
Contrast: Break The Haughty, where bad things happen to an arrogant person (who had it coming), or the even worse variation Kill The Cutie.
On a positive note, sometimes breaking the cutie can result in a cute but weak character Taking a Level in Badass; on a less positive note, prepare for the advent of a Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds if the cutie was quite the badass to begin with. Or it can fail entirely, creating The Pollyanna.
Sometimes it can be Corrupt The Cutie, where via Pygmalion Plot or a Hikaru Genji Plan the girl in question breaks it by herself. Frequently occurs when the character crosses the Despair Event Horizon.
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Examples:
Anime & Manga
- Dawn/Hikari from Pokémon fits this to a T. She was bubbly and cheery in the beginning, then when she failed at one too many Pokémon Contests, not even getting past the Appeals stage in her last, she was absolutely crushed. And proceeded to fake being cheery and bubbly, crying when nobody's around, and experiencing a LOT of self-doubt.
- Sweet innocent Rose from the first few episodes of the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, 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.
- Luckily for her, in the manga she does not suffer such horrible fates and instead is happily aiding the reconstruction of her town when she is next seen after the opening chapters.
- Nina is another example from the same series (this time in both the anime and manga)
- In the manga, Riza is a retroactive example. She used to be a cute and meek girl before her parent died, leaving her an orphan, and she trusted Roy with the secret to the Fire Alchemy, inadvertedly creating a Person Of Mass Destruction, and then joined the army and went through Ishval forcing her to toughen up the hard way.
- Also Winry. She grows up fine into a strong and cheerful girl, despite his parent's death in Ishvall while assisting the Ishbalan. Then she found out who killed her parents. All emotion break loose.
- And then there's poor Sayu, 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 (!)
- She appears in a brief scene later in the manga Word Of God says she hasn't fully recovered, but she's improving.
- 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. There are two other, cuties in the series but neither are broken, and remain as The Cutie even as they die.
- I'd say the first time around Shirley got kinda broken, before Lelouch fixed everything by mind raping her (and managing to screw himself over at the same time). But in R2, Gottwald brings her memories back after testing out his Geass canceller on her, which lead to her eventual death at Rolo's hands.
- What about Nunnally? She's blind and crippled as a result of her mother being murdered in front of her. She maintains a happy smile and only wants to be with her brother. Although many things happen over the course of the show to separate them, she never lets herself look down. However, at the end of the show, she's trying to stop Lelouch from getting the key to a WMD. Lelouch Geasses her and steals it, and she pitifully tries to stop him from getting away. It gets worse when she's chained up as a prisoner in a parade. Then, she watches her brother get murdered at his own orders to unite the world in hating him. All this gets to her and she wails over his dead body.
- knowing it's done for the good of the whole FLIPPIN' WORLD makes it a lot better. Euphie is a unique example in that her image as The Cutie is broken, to the audience. Until she died, she kept an optimistic personality, because Lelouch unintentionally Geass'd her into it.
- Mai Tokiha from Mai-HiME was a loving sister that worked hard for her sickly brother's sake and an all-around nice girl, willing to sacrifice herself for others. However, the combined weight of having to try to prevent her friends from killing each other, watching Shiho order Yuuichi to kiss her to deliberately make Mai jealous, and then watching her brother Takumi die in her arms (at the hands of her best friend Mikoto, despite her originally aiming for Shiho's Yatagarasu until her "beast mode" took over and attacked Akira's CHILD) finally pushed her over the edge. She calmed down a bit when Mikoto temporarily came out of her Brainwashed And Crazy state and tried to apologize, but was unable to call off Kagutsuchi's attack in time and watched as it seemingly burned Mikoto to ashes. With her brother who she built an identity around working to provide for dead, her love interest stolen by his childhood friend, her best friend having just died by her own hands, and with other Hi M Es after her own life... Well, she breaks.
- Yu-Gi-Oh GX: Judai Yuuki's experiences in Season 3, including being pursued by a supernatural Stalker With A Crush, seeing his best friends die one by one, being possessed by an evil spirit/ alternate version of himself, and trying to Take Over The World, have slowly and painfully turned him from the happy-go-lucky Ace into a depressed shell that makes Shinji Ikari look downright chipper. The dub, meanwhile, seemed on track to ignore all of that but didn't, for once.
- Did you just compare a character from Yu-Gi-Oh with Neon Genesis Evangelion? Shinji and Judai both face the end of the world, Parental Abandonment, Mind Rape, and fighting creatures that make Saw look tame. Shinji only channels his Heroic BSOD into fighting Angels and setting off Instrumentality, rather than focusing it wholly inward as Judai did. Also, Shinji's emotional high point from which he fell was much, much, much lower than Judai's high point.
- In the original series of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Mai Valentine experienced this between the end of Battle City and the Doma arc.
- In Yu-Gi-Oh 5D's we have Carly, in a combination with Kill The Cutie. Results in a Tear Jerker at the end of Episode 39. It even doubles as a Break The Haughty moment considering who it is that kills said cutie and promptly finds himself on the receiving end of a Superpowered Evil Side.
- Also from 5D's: Aki. We're first introduced to her as the Emotionless Girl and a closet sadist, as well as someone who refuses to think for herself and is a generally unsympathetic character, to both the audience and pretty much the entire world. Come Episode 40, where Aki is comatose after dueling Evil Counterpart Misty (who pretty much breaks her brain by telling Aki that she killed her brother, and, indirectly, Misty herself) and witnessing the only person she really cares about fall to his death (or so they think!), and we meet her father. Who reveals that, aside from having serious abandonment issues due to the fact that she adored him and he was never home, she suffered serious mental abuse and even a bit of physical abuse when she was a child, due to the fact that he couldn't come to terms with the fact that she had powers. When she grows up, she's ostracized by nearly every single person she meets for the same reason, and she can't get rid of it without turning into what is implied to be an even bigger social pariah in the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe, since everyone you meet plays cards. And I mean everyone. Yuusei forgives her for being a little psychopathic. The fans do not.
- Subaru Sumeragi in CLAMP's Tokyo Babylon and X1999 was very carefully broken, and then some more, by his love interest Seishirou.
- Kamui from X1999. Probably the only CLAMP character able to give Subaru (above) a run for his money, and CLAMP love their woobies.
- The main characters of Grave Of The Fireflies are an example of how truly tragic this trope can be.
- 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.
- Theres a fair few characters in Elfen Lied that are this "fair few" meaning every single protagonist, without exception. Nana gets a special mention.
- Nana is an extremely clever inversion. It's explicitly stated that her "Cutie" persona is a psychological defense mechanism that she developed as a result of the universe's constant attempts to break her. Without that, she would be every bit the killing machine that Lucy and Mariko are.
- So the 'cute and harmless' personality thing is evidently the default fallback persona for Dicloni'?
- Or Mayu, who ran away from home because her stepfather was molesting her and her mother blamed her for it and was repeatedly exposed to scenes of carnage and horror and her dog being taken away. Though, in a fashion that's something of a theme of the story, he comes back
- Don't underestimate the part where Lucy is captured shortly after her childhood breakage after her only friend is shot by government agents who are after Lucy and are terrible shots (Then again, their target WAS just 'little girl'). And she agrees to go with the director of the program peacefully instead of murdering everyone there because he says he'll save her friend.He doesn't/can't and spends the rest of her childhood and most of her teen years incapacitated in a mega-straightjacket and stored in a high security vault, with strict orders for nobody and nothing to approach within 6 feet of her on threat of being viciously murdered, and finally being treated as an experimental lab animal given given absolutely no compassion, emotional or physical contact. If she wasn't already broken ...
- Rena and Satoko from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni both qualify, though Rena tends to snap, while Satoko breaks. Rika also tends to get it pretty hard. In fact, it's hard to argue that any of the cuties of Hinamizawa aren't broken at some point.
- Shion, however, outperforms all other cuties in the fine art of breaking and snapping. Don't ask. Rather, instead of breaking/snapping, she explodes violently with the force of an anti-personnel mine, ripping everyone else apart with the shrapnel.
- Seems to be the entire point of Bokurano, featuring a large cast of cuties all broken, tortured, and killed one by one.
- Or any story Mohiro Kitoh writes, really. Just look at Hiroko and Akira from Narutaru.
- Gohan in Dragon Ball Z. He starts out as something of a nerdy crybaby, but then he's kidnapped (twice in the same day!), abandoned in the wilderness, watches his father get beaten and killed, watches his kidnapper-turned-father-figure get beaten and killed, watches a bunch of his father's friends get beaten and killed, and watches his father's best friend get beaten and almost killed, all in the first story arc! This is repeated in the following story arc, with the deaths of Kuririn and Dende, and more beatings for Goku and Piccolo. It finally culminates in the Cell arc, when Cell deliberately goes out of his way to piss Gohan the hell off and he dutifully shows us why we should Beware The Nice Ones by reaching the first level beyond Super Saiyajin, by shifting from The Messiah Jr. into a brutal, sadistic, homicidal maniac that would make Freeza proud. Then his father dies. Post-Time Skip, aside from the Super Hero gig, Gohan's retired from fighting in order to attend high school and take a shot at just being a normal kid, but once he re-takes a level in badass and finds out the Big Bad murdered just about everyone, including his Love Interest and mother? DBZ is nothing if not repetitive! Note that the Future Badass version, who suffered the permanent loss of just about everyone he knew at a young age, does not even approach this level of power or heartbreak.
- Gohan actually got an episode seemingly centered around this. Early on, Gohan had apparently been watching too many Disney movies, as he's constantly trying to make friends with butterflies and squirrels, asking them their names, etc. — then an early Z episode shatters any illusions he may have had about nature being cuddly and cute. He meets a wounded dinosaur and attempts to nurse it back to health, applying a poultice to its injuries and gathering food for it. There's a short scene where he imagines how cool it will be to keep it for a pet and have adventures with it, illustrated in a cute super-deformed style. Then a short while later, another dinosaur attacks it, and Gohan fails in fighting it off and gets knocked senseless, awakening to find his new friend's bones scattered on the ground. The lesson: stop baby-talking at nature, little five-year-old, it doesn't like you.
- Much more mild, and much, much shorter versions of this trope were applied to Gohan's younger brother Goten, who watched the Big Bad murder his mother in cold blood after his father returned to the Afterlife and he was lead to believe that Gohan himself was dead, and daughter Pan, who was nearly killed by various Brainwashed And Crazy family members, including Gohan himself.
- Oddly enough, though comparatively little happened to her in the story compared to other examples (at least physically anyway), Kotonoha Katsura from School Days seems to "snap" particularly hard. Then again, she was most likely unstable from the beginning...
- "Comparatively little"!? She was raped by her boyfriend's best friend for goodness' sake!
- Well... Yes. Comparatively little. Have you read these OTHER examples?
- Don't forget she was bullied by Otome and her friends for at least several months just for being rich and pretty, and the bullying got much worse after she went out to Makoto. And then we have Setsuna treating her like shit so Makoto hooks up with Sekai. And people in Real Life have reacted worse for much lighter stuff.
- Last Exile: The character Dio.
- To clarify: his sister Delphine basically kidnaps him while his friend Luciola stands by and does nothing (although, to be fair, they were outnumbered by Delphine's elite guards). Then, while he screams for Luciola to save him, he is brutally Mind Raped on his sister's orders. Pre-Mind Rape, Dio was a cheerful, if odd and extremely hyper, young man with a great fondness for glomping people and flying vanships. Post Mind Rape, he is a mentally unhinged killer with a tendency to stare off into space giggling and engage in Brother Sister Incest with the one who made him that way. The birthday party scene made this even worse.
- Despite his age, Vash from Trigun has a childlike view of humanity and pretty much breaks every time he sees anyone, innocent or not, killed by another person. He truly does break when he's forced to shoot Legato in the head to save Meryl and Millie, at least for a little while.
- His past was like this, too. He is a Broken Hero, after all.
- Knives had this happen to him too (moreso in the manga). In fact, when they were young, Knives had been more sensitive than Vash. Which also explains why he took the discovery of the experiments on other plants so much worse than Vash.
- 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. Through The Power Of Friendship, a nice adoptive family and an interesting job, she ends up unbroken.
- But not before getting further broken shortly after being "befriended" when she found out that she was merely a clone of Precia's real daughter, Alicia.
- In the second season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, after Hayate was given a surprise party by Suzuka, Alisa, Nanoha, and Fate, two mages disguised as the main leads brought Hayate to the roof of the hospital and told her that her disease was incurable and fatal. Then they showed her the remains of Signum and Shamal, two of the knights she had adopted as her family. Then they executed Vita, the knight she was closest to, right in front of her eyes. Oh, and all of this was done during Christmas Eve. Snap.
- One could argue that this trope was both played straight and inverted when it comes to Hayate. She does get better, most of her loved ones are saved eventually and she ultimately grows into a successful levelheaded woman.
- Hayate is a pretty poor example. Despite going through that ringer, her "breakdown" consisted of screaming for a moment and then having her body involuntarily taken. She wakes up in something like and hour and tells her body-hijacking servant that the whole "kill the world" thing it thought she wanted was a load of grade-A bullcrap, and helps the heroines take down the berserk system.
- The titular heroines of Gunslinger Girl get broken from the inside by their own cybernetic implants and by the brutal mental conditioning they receive to function as cold-blooded assassins. And that's not even mentioning the singularly horrible things that happened to them in order to necessitate them becoming cyborgs to survive.
- When we first meet Casca from Berserk, she's an intelligent and capable Action Girl who at one point leads the Band of the Hawks to rescue Griffith from his horrific year-long torture ordered by the King for having sex with his daughter. But when Griffith later does his infamous Face Heel Turn, she loses everyone in the Hawks to a whole mess of demons summoned by the evil Godhand, and then gets raped by the newly-transformed Griffith, who has joined the Godhand as their fifth member Femto, right in front of Guts, the man she loves. The horror of the experience completely shatters poor Casca's mind and leaves her unable to speak. Needless to say, Guts is madder than hell at Griffith both for this and the betrayal that led up to it.
- On that note Guts himself could fit the trope. A poor innocent baby who is rescued from under the tree where his mother was hung while she was pregnant, Guts is a pretty nice kid early on his life. He willingly serves the mercinary group that raises him, and even gives all of the money he earns to his surrogate father and devotes his life to trying to please him. After that same surrogate father lets a fellow mercinary sodomize Guts for a few silver pieces he starts to lose his innocence (as if living day to day by killing people wasn't enough of a stressor), this loss of innocence finally solidifies when that surrogate father attempts to murder him because he thinks the child is cursed and responsible for losing his leg, and Guts is forced to kill him out of self-defense. He still has nightmares about the experiences as an adult.
- Louise Halevy from Gundam 00 falls into this trope after Nena of the Throne units obliterates her family at a wedding, leaving the girl without her left hand and completely distraught and broken hearted. Starting with the second season, she joins the A-Laws, the secret police of the Federation, as she tries to get revenge on Celestial Being for the murders of her family. Too bad said murderer isn't even part of Celestial Being, and Louise's fiance is aboard the ship. She finally finds the said murderer and delivers a well-deserved strike of vengeance with death, but it only serves to BREAK her further that she didn't find any further satisfactions, she didn't find any praises from her dead parents from avenging them, and she has become a murderer, just like the murdered. She got better, eventually
- And don't forget the Gundam pilots themselves also get quite broken. Examples?
- Gundam Wing: Quatre. Although, his is an odd example, since it's the system he was hooked into to that psychically broke him. And then he bounced back.
- Before piloting Wing Zero, Quatre was already distraught over his colony's betrayal, his father's death and one of his sisters being critically injured during the attack. It is unknown whether she died or not, since she is never seen again, although in the manga adaptation, she was killed along with their father. The system was merely a catalyst: he would've have been broken anyway without the Zero system, which sped up the breaking process.
- Setsuna F Seiei murders his family as part of a requirement to fight for God. Too bad the person who told him to do it really wasn't a messenger from God, and just got his kicks from killing people, something Setsuna finds out quite crapily when he finds this same person serving as a commander in a totally unrelated PMC.
- Lockon Stratos (The first one) starts out as a cute kid who's life is torn apart when his family is killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by someone who turns out to be one of one of Setsuna's Nakama.
- As long as we're talking Gundam pilots, most of the non-Char non-Bright cast in Zeta Gundam. Four comes prebroken, but Rosamia, who seems like a Cloudcuckoolander (if perhaps mildly mentally challenged) completely breaks during the series. And, of course, Kamille himself in the finale. Of course, what can you expect from a series with a mobile suit named the Psycho Gundam?
- In Deadman Wonderland, main character Ganta is imprisoned in a maximum security prison/themepark after emerging from a Heroic BSOD after his entire class gets slaughtered by a mysterious "Red Man" right before a field trip to said prison/themepark. In short order he's sentenced to death, befriended by Ax Crazy Shiro, discovers that a piece of candy he lost was actually antidote for the poison that's being constantly injected into his body, that he actually does have the power that killed his classmates, courtesy of a red diamond implated into his body by the Red Man, and discovers other "Deadmen" and is forced to learn how to use his power to fight them in a tournament. And that's not even half of this manga's current ten chapters.
- Eighteen, now. And man, will Ganta either break or snap hard once he finds out who the Red Man is...
- In Monster, Johan is — as noted — especially prone to doing this to his victims, even simply to screw with them. For example, in volume 12, sending an abandoned small boy to look for his mother, basically telling him that if he sees her, and she sees him, if she truly loves him and wants him she'll take him back (naturally, Johan is crossdressing as the much more wholesome Anna at the time, making it that much creepier). He sends him to look for his mother in the red light district of Prague — where the boy witnesses rape, depravity, a drug addicted prostitute dying from withdrawal begging him for money and even the prostitutes themselves taunting him. Tenma and Grimmer have to talk him out of jumping off a bridge after this. This still doesn't quite break the cutie. But it comes damn close. Mind you, this boy is perhaps 7 or 8.
- And Anna! Poor, poor Anna... Johan crushes her so many times in so many ways that she comes this close to suicide.
- Momo Hinamori in Bleach. She's pretty much manipulated for decades by someone she dearly loved, who knew all of her strengths and weaknesses and played them frighteningly well to get his plans done. And when it's all said and done, he almost kills the already messed up girl, leaving her deeply traumatized, brokenhearted and in denial too. And people think she's stupid and has no chance for recovery after that.
- She has partially gotten over it and has joined her colleagues in fighting her betraying captain. However, Rangiku still seems to be worried about her state of mind.
- Orihime Inoue is also subjected to similar Mind Rape by (surprise surprise) Aizen, the one who broke the adorementioned Momo. He forces her into joining forces with his Arrancars to protect her friends, and during her time in captivity she is mentally abused, physically tortured and forced to see all the nasty things happening to her friends, being also made to believe it is her own fault. And to think, she used to be the Plucky Comic Relief and Genki Girl of the group, eh? And yes, several fans hate her for that, too. How DARE she be affected by all the bullshit and cry.
- Actually, Ulquiorra is the one who did that to Orihime. Of course, he's one of Aizen's lackies, so the point is still valid.
- Everything that happens to Princess Oboro in Basilisk. Her fiancé is the leader of an enemy faction despite both being really in love, the peace treaty that would allow them to marry was messily broken behind her back, her lieutenant steals the command from her and attempts to rape her twice in the course of the story, very powerful people meddle in the clans' feud to make it worse, and all of her servants/warriors/friends/enemies die, all of them VERY messily. No wonder she ultimately decides to kill herself and die with honor rather than fighting her injured, blinded, almost dead True Love in the end. Who promptly commits suicide as well.
- Juri Katou of Digimon Tamers started out as a Genki Girl with a hand puppet to emphasize her childlike nature. She is the penultimate innocent of the cast, as well as the shy, sweet girl that main character Takato has a crush on. Then, once on the adventure, she loses her Digimon partner and gets possessed by the Big Bad. The Big Bad then proceeds to conjure up monsters based on her worst memories (revealing in the process that she was a Stepford Smiler all along) in order to feed on her sadness. This is one instance of Mind Rape that would give even NGE a run for its money...
- Blood Plus manages to break the same cutie twice courtesy of Easy Amnesia: Saya Otonashi starts out as a carefree young girl until her twin sister Diva, who Saya had set loose, murders Saya's foster father Joel and everyone else who was attending his birthday party, turning Saya's entire life into a mission to hunt Diva and her Chevaliers down and kill them. Then, after the Red Shield's disastrous meddling in Vietnam causes Saya to awaken in the present with no memories, Saya is once more a normal, cute Ordinary High School Student... who is forced to fight Chiropterans, manipulated by her enemies, and has to deal with realizing that she's not human. When Diva rapes and murders Saya's adopted little brother Riku, Saya has a full-blown Heroic BSOD.
- Aside from this, averted with Lulu, who sees all of the other Schiff die off in ones and twos, and faces her own premature death from the Thorn. Despite this, she remains happy and chipper, and eventually they find her a cure.
- Pulled yet again in regards to Haji. Through a flashback, it is shown that the reason he went from being somewhat stoic to made of stone was because his blood turned his One True Love and reason for living into a murdering psychopath who forgot who he was and cut his arm off during her rampage.
- Fushigi Yuugi revolves around this trope. Yui is raped basically within 5 minutes of her second trip there, and becomes a vengeful, hateful villainess, primarily because of her bishonen bodyguard Nakago, who warped her mind to the point where she blames her best friend Miaka for the rape, since she wasn't there to help her. Eventually, it turns out that Yui was never actually raped, but the entire thing was a ridiculously complicated plan by Nakago to pit them against each other as a part of a larger plan to stage a coup in Genbu. Later he tries to rape Miaka as well but fails, though he does get her to believe that it happened until someone else explains the mess.
- Also, that whole arc where Yui drugs Tamahome to make him betray Miaka, who was temporarily broken until she breaks the spell with The Power Of Love. Then, Miaka's own mistakes make everything worse for her, Tamahome, and their friends
- Misuzu from AIR arguably qualifies, since a lot of time and effort is put into presenting her as a sweet, lovable, although somewhat peculiar girl — only to have her suffer enormous pain in the last few episodes and die in the arms of her adoptive mother, her aunt Haruko. Her final moments are still gruesomely beautiful, though.
- This Troper isn't quite sure how Neon Genesis Evangelion hasn't been mentioned yet, given that the show's plot tortures its already troubled protagonist Shinji to the point of snapping into a psychological breakdown for two whole episodes and/or destroying humanity. Not to mention doing something similar to almost every single other character.
- It's particularly heartbreaking when we're shown a flashback of a toddler Shinji right before witnessing the death of his mother: a young child who's smiling and constantly laughing, without a hint of bitterness and actually seeming outgoing.
- Both Rue and Fakir have this as part of their backstories in Princess Tutu. In a flashback, we see Fakir as a cheerful, imaginative child — in stark contrast to his Ineffectual Loner personality in the main part of the story. It's revealed that a mixture of his parent's deaths because of his powers and stress over feeling responsible for Mytho's safety slowly wore on him until he became the Jerk Ass we see at the beginning of the story. Rue, herself, is shown as being sweet and caring as a child, but snobby and harsh when she's older (to the point where she insists on being called Rue-sama/Lady Rue). Her personality change is revealed to be the result of constant emotional abuse from her father, the Raven. It only gets worse in the second season, when Mytho begins to physically abuse her and manipulate her.
- Baccano! does this to Czeslaw Meyer, a seemingly Cute Shotaro Boy who ends up getting his limbs torn off, shot in the face, and having all sorts of other unpleasant things happen to him. Good thing he can heal... or not.
- Chiko from The Daughter Of Twenty Faces has a rare double Break The Cutie. In the two-part Wham Episode early on, Chiko makes friends with a local girl whose dad is head of security at the local museum. The girl has a major crush on Chiko's disguise as a member of a circus, and invites her over, allowing Chiko to discover many weaknesses in the security. And turns them over to her thief comrades, who steal the major artifact from the museum... breaking the girl in the process. In part 2, the girl falls in line with some thieves gunning for Chiko's comrades, and the resulting carnage and death of the girl fighting Chiko breaks her as well.
- Cream gets one of these in Sonic X after the robot Emerl whom she rescued and made friends with goes crazy under the power of green rocks, tries to attack her mother and then beats the living heck out of Sonic, who got in the way while Cream was trying to reason with him and he went for her instead. A distraught Cream then has to destroy Emerl herself. Being who she is, however, she gets over it, to an extent.
- Cosmo can be considered this as well, except that she was damn well broken to begin with, what with having her entire home and family destroyed right in front of her, crash landing on another planet being used as an unwitting spy by the enemy she was trying to fight against and ending up stuck in a situation which meant she either lost her sight and hearing or the bad guys kept watching... Not to mention the fact that the bad guys turned out to actually be her species with their leader quite possibly being her father, and having the worst case of survivor's guilt ever encountered in a series aimed at an under-teen demographic.
- Pretty much every likable character from Now and Then, Here and There — but especially Sara, who, after being mistaken for Lala Ru, gets abducted, beaten, and repeatedly raped, eventually committing murder in order to escape into the desert with no supplies, where she ends up buried in a sandstorm. She survives that only to later learn one of the rapes got her pregnant. She eventually chose to keep the child..
- When we first meet Bitter Virgin's sixteen-year-old Hinako Aikawa, she had already endured serious sexual abuse from her stepfather. Abuse which her mother refused to acknowledge was happening until it got Hinako pregnant for the second time. Readers saw these events transpire in a flashback that occurred while Hinako was in the process of being raped again by a random molester. Fortunately, that time she was rescued, and the series as a whole focuses on Hinako's recovery from these traumas.
- In Vampire Princess Miyu, not only Miyu is an already broken cutie who had her powers awaken when someone came to kill her and she had to bite him to survive, then saw her parents be captured and put in suspended animation when her mom tried to Screw Destiny and not have Miyu become the Shinma Guardian, but she actively seeks out pretty people who have been through extreme suffering and pain in their pasts, so she can offer them a blood contract: they give her their blood, she eases their pain through placing them in a dream-like trance. Unless they still have things to do and people are suffering because of them, like the third OAV shows.
- Ken Hidaka from Weiss Kreuz. He starts out as a cheerful, optimistic, naive boy-next-door who, when he's not killing people, spends his spare time teaching small children how to play soccer. Then he kills his best friend, who was screwing him over and had tried to kill him twice, the first time by trying to have Ken burned alive; leaves his first girlfriend to keep her safe; sees another childhood friend manipulated to suicide by a woman he saw as a surrogate mother, who he goes on to kill; watches a woman get stabbed protecting him and then bleed to death in his arms; discovers another friend he tries to protect shot to death so, after faking the murders of two of his teammates, shotguns the man who ordered it and enjoys it; then has to kill his second girlfriend when she turns out to be one of his targets as well. And those are just the events that effect him personally. It's also revealed along the way that his mother died when he was five then his father abandoned him, that he spent a period of time homeless, and he contemplated becoming a contract killer simply so he had an excuse to kill people. Unsurprisingly, by Weiss Kreuz Gluhen it's become obvious that Ken hasn't so much been broken as he's violently snapped.
- Despite this, he gets better; breaking ties with Kritiker and using Omi's connections to have himself voluntarily incarcerated for a while restores him to something like his old self in time to follow Aya west and join Kryptonbrand in Side B.
- Barefoot Gen seems to be leading towards this for Gen and all of his family, given that they're a family of war protestors in World War II era Japan... specifically, Hiroshima. They're mocked for being traitors, refused food, Gen's father is arrested and beaten, have their field of wheat which is the only hope they had of not starving destroyed, Gen's sister is accused of stealing money and stripped naked, the sweet potatos they get from some friends in the countryside are taken away when a policeman accuses them of buying them on the black market, and plenty of other constant insults by their neighbors and times when they almost starve to death. Then the atomic bomb goes off. This finally breaks Gen's mother, who has to watch her husband, son, and daughter burn to death in the remains of her house. She does get better, though.
- Yukiteru from Mirai Nikki had this happen to him. Originally a more naive pacifist who just wants to get along and save anyone he can, he eventually breaks after his father is revealed to have only come back so he can kill Yukiteru to get money, kills Yukiteru's beloved mother, then buys a telescope and tries to "start over" with Yukiteru only to end up getting stabbed to death by men working with the Eleventh. It probably didn't help that Yukiteru had a psycho Stalker With A Crush after him that probably whittled away at his sanity.
- Whoa, Yukiteru's father was only told that he had to destroy his sons phone, how would he know that it would kill Yukiteru
- True, but that still doesn't excuse the betrayal, especially after his father had built up his hopes that he and Yukiteru's mother would get back together. Then when he fails, he jumps out of a collapsing building by stealing his sons parachute leaving him to die.
- Ai Tanabe of Planetes suffers a particularly horrifying fate; Having spent the entire series being a Love Freak, she ends up stranded and running out of air, having to choose between killing someone by stealing their breathable air or dying herself. She chooses to spare the other, which results in paralyzation from the waist down. Blessedly, the final episodes make this less gloomy than it could have been.
- Sailor Moon also tends to do this, sometimes slow, other times taking place in one episode, other times being a full-blown Mind Rape. An example would be episodes 45 and 46 of the first season, where 4 Sailor Senshi die in episode 45, leaving Usagi without her friends before confronting Queen Beryl. Then, she is forced to fight her love interest who's been possessed by Metalia's energy, and then dies protecting her so she can fight the Big Bad. Although she wins the last fight and then dies, the experience makes her wish things back to the way they were before she was awakened as Sailor Moon. It didn't last.
- Don't forget about Chibi-Usa in the Black Moon Arc, or Hotaru, since she was born. No wonder these two are BFFs.
- An even stronger Usagi example is during the third season. It's Usagi's birthday, but her boyfriend doesn't remember, so she slaps him and spends a few hours feeling extremely guilty, then realizes she never told him her birthday in the first place. He makes up for it by buying her the glass shoes she wanted... which turn out to be possessed by a Daimohn after her Pure Heart. Worse, judging by the sheer shininess of her Pure Heart, which is pretty damn bright, she might just be the possessor of a talisman. Tuxedo Mask comes to her rescue, but her broach is stolen by Kaolinite so she can't transform, and it's only a matter of time before the Daimohn tracks her down. Usagi, Tuxedo Mask, Kaolinite, and the Daimohn end up facing off in an under ground parking garage, where Tuxedo Mask is turned into a glass sculpture and Kaolinite gets away with him and her broach. Kaolinite uses the two of them for ransom, and Usagi ends up going to Tokyo Tower and offering her Pure Heart up. It turns out it isn't a talisman and everything's okay in the end — heck, Uranus and Neptune even managed to kill off Kaolinite — but it was sure a hellish day for Usagi. Oh, and to top it off, the glass shoes Mamoru bought her broke. Well, at least the poor guy is safe.
- Jesus, almost every time a Straw hat Pirate member has a flashback. The combination of Oda's skill at drawing cute kids and writing cruel back stories is just plain lethal.
- While the Strawhats do tend to have traumatizing backstories, the only ones who have Break The Cutie moments are Nami, Robin, Zoro, Chopper and Franky. Luffy's trauma just makes him more obstinate than he was, Usopp's backstory has a Break The Cutie moment for his love interest and not for him, Sanji's back story was more encouragement to his dream than trying to break him, and Brook is more of a Pollyana than a Cutie.
- Nami has the added bonus of being broken by Arlong when all her effort to buy back her village is destroyed when the Marines confiscate all her collected money. Her obviously forced smile when she tries to tell the Kokoyashi villagers that she can just get more money just makes it all the more heartbreaking, especially so when she breaks down after they've resolved to take down Arlong, no matter what the end result.
- And then there's Vivi, whose Broken Cutie status is built up throughout the whole Alabasta arc, and completely explodes during the climax of the civil war.
- In Chirin No Suzu a lamb named Chirin starts out as cute, friendly, and happy go lucky until his mother is killed by a wolf, so he seeks revenge but realizes that he's too small and weak to do any damage so he convinces the wolf to become his apprentice and he goes through Training From Hell until he becomes a deformed ruthless killing machine.
- In Full Metal Panic's backstory between Sōsuke and Kalinin, you can get a taste of young Sousuke's Break The Cutie (though most of what you see is the huge contrast and aftermath). Especially noticeable from this to this.
- As mentioned in passing above, Kimihiro Watanuki from xxxHOLiC starts the story as a cheerful guy prone to humorously spazzing out but very well-adjusted for someone whose parents died when he was a little kid and who sees and attracts monsters that try to eat him. This is mostly played for laughs in the beginning, but gets progressively more serious, until the traumatic revelations start to pile up and he ends up realizing he may not even be real. Apart from several near-death experiences one of them unconsciously self-induced, having an eye eaten by a monster and losing the movility of one finger, and seeing his mentor and mother figure die before his eyes after his surrogate family of sorts disappears without a trace. CLAMP mass-produce woobies.
- Ditto for Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. All 4 main characters have tragic angsty backstory.
- The title character of Midori, a fantastically gory and disturbing 1992 short movie made almost entirely by one Hiroshi Harada over the course of five years, is the ultimate example of this - her parents die, she is taken in by a freak show where she is routinely beaten and raped by the workers, and - well, if not worse, it certainly gets more bizarre from there.
- This happens to main character Sara Werec of Soukou No Strain. In the first episode no less!
- In Naruto, the death of Jiraiya, near-death of Hinata, destruction of Konoha, and having the truth of the ninja system quite brutally explained to him almost breaks Naruto. However thanks to a few well-placed flashbacks, Jiraiya's book, and a pep talk from Iruka and the Fourth Hokage Naruto gets better just in time.
- The same can't be said for Sasuke though. Despite how he is now, in flashbacks he was shown to be a cute, naive kid. Until Itachi murdered their family... and then showed it to him... twice. The second time leading to his Face Heel Turn.
- To be more specific, the first mind rape and the actual massacre occur when he's about seven, and the second time, aged twelve-thirteen, had him forced to watch everyone being slaughtered hundreds of times, over and over, leaving him in a coma that only Tsunade is able to bring him out of. No wonder he freaks out.
- Another possible candidate is Gaara (hear me out). He was initially a kind-hearted child who just wanted some friends. Then he killed the one person he cared for because they were trying to kill him (on Gaaras dads orders, no less,) due to the beast within him was something the village would rather forget. we've seen how this turns out...
- Black Lagoon is either in love with this trope or owes it money.
- Hansel and Gretel were created by an entire upbringing of this.
- Revy is heavily implied to have been broken at some point in her past.
- The entire Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc is this for Yukio.
- Believe it or not, Balalaika used to be an idealistic little girl whose only girl in life was to regain her family's honor by competing in the Olympics. You had better bet that she got his hard by this trope in order to make her into what she is today.
- Garica in the El Baile de la Muerte arc.
- Shokojo Sera, the Adaptation Expansion of A Little Princess, takes this trope from the original novel and multiplies it by a factor of 100.
- One has to suspect that the writers of Vision Of Escaflowne had some sort of "Torturing your main character, in body in soul" checklist, given the sheer amount of abuse Van goes through in the series. Kill of his family in his bactstory? Check. Have his country burned to the ground and force him 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. Synch him up with his mech just before the one battle where he totally trashes it, leaving him an oozing, bloody mess? Oh, most definitely. Make the only means of saving him (repairing the Escaflowne) the most unimaginably painful method you can think of? Not actually on the list, but sure!...Really, the list goes on.
- Don't even get me started on Hitomi, and for that matter, most of the whole damn cast.
- Tomoya Okazaki from Clannad becomes The Woobie because of this. I mean, first his wife dies, then his daughter dies, and they were the only reasons he wanted to continue living. Then he dies alongside his own daughter. Of course, they all got better.
- In MPD Psycho, a Serial Killer kidnaps the girlfriend of the lead detective investigating his case, mutilates her, rapes her repeatedly (in that order), then delivers her — limbless but still alive — directly to the detective's office.
- Alien Nine takes glee in doing horrible things to the cute girls who make up the cast, from mind rape to complete memory erasure to being eaten alive.
Comics
- In the 2000AD black comedy story D.R. and Quinch go Girl Crazy, Waldo "Diminished Responsibility" Dobbs has paired up with Chrysoprasia, a drama coach's daughter, and is putting on a respectable front to win her approval. His friend Ernie Quinch is worried that she is falling for his evil, delinquent friend and also breaking up the evil, delinquent partnership of D.R. and Quinch. So he kidnaps her and shows her their home movies, to prove to her that she doesn't want to know D.R. But instead, the horrific experience triggers a mental breakdown leading to a Face Heel Turn whereby she becomes more evil and delinquent than either of them and reinvents herself as "Crazy Chrissie".
- Tim Drake, the third and current 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 Impulse/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.
- Uh, Bruce Wayne? Parents dying? In front of his eyes? It's only Batman's freakin' origin story here, people.
- Lyta Hall from Sandman, after her son Daniel is kidnapped, then reported killed. She spends an issue wandering around, thinking she's in a fairytale, before meeting the Kindly Ones and using them to get revenge against the person who she thinks is responsible.
- Do NOT attend the Xavier Institute, just don't. This goes double if you're on Earth 616. They will kill all your friends, run over your dog, and rip out your soul all in the space of a few hours if you go to the Xavier Institute.
- Adrianna Tomaz, aka Isis from Fifty Two. She starts as The Messiah, determined to see the good in the world despite all of the horrible things she had endured up to that point (being kidnapped to be used as a bargaining chip by Intergang for starters). As Isis, she brings light to Khandaq and even convinces her new husband Black Adam that he doesn't have to be a violent Antivillain anymore. Then it all goes to hell in One Bad Day. Her brother is eaten alive by their Team Pet Sobek who by the way was really a member of a group of Eldritch Abominations sent by Intergang to destroy the Marvels. Then she gets a mouthful of plague and dies a painful death in Black Adam's arms. Adrianna is so broken that she renounces her idealism, tells Black Adam that he had been right all along about the world, and with her last breath asks him to "avenge us". Believe it or not, It Got Worse. Being resurrected and brainwashed by a Complete Monster Evil Sorcerer who used her to free himself from a prison and subsequently being constantly raped by said sorcerer sent her soaring over the Despair Event Horizon. When Black Adam eventually frees her, Adrianna's first act is to castrate the sorcerer with her bare hands. Finally, she crosses the Moral Event Horizon into full-blown villainy when she declares the people of Khandaq, the people who worship her as a goddess, to be just another bunch of bastards, and starts turning them into dirt statues. Even Black Adam is horrified by this!
- Stacy Palumbo of Grendel's corruption from a Cheerful Child into a Creepy Child/Broken Bird began from her discovery of her adoptive father Hunter Rose's identy as Villain Protagonist Grendel, the man who killed her uncle. After planning out Hunter's death by secretly assisting Argent taking down Grendel's criminal empire and ultimately leading both into their final showdown. After Rose's death she was institutionalized. Just when things are going to look better after a few years with her marrying her therapist, her husband goes ahead and rapes her on their wedding night before hanging himself. Since then she began to slowly waste away in body and mind until she finally dies.
Fan Works
- Thrythlind's explanation for Kodachi's personality in Control which is set in the same world as but prior to The Amazon and the Moneylender.
- The One Piece fanfic "Dark Truth". One night, Luffy is tortured and nearly killed by his crew, who are possessed by the ghosts of a long-dead pirate crew who seek revenge on all captains traveling through their haunting grounds. He survives, but is a lethargic shell of his former self, and his crew can't remember what happened that night. Also contains Squick, Nightmare Fuel, And I Must Scream, To The Pain, Fate Worse Than Death, and especially Et Tu Brute.
- The Firefly fanfic Forward manages to break River 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.
Films
- The Dark Knight: Rachel before she dies, as well as Harvey Dent. And perhaps Batman himself, as well.
- Lars Von Trier's Dancer In The Dark brings this trope to a truly unsettling level.
- As does Dogville by the same director.
- What Dancer in the Dark does to Selma goes way beyond Tear Jerker worthy; be prepared to burst into tears and stay that way for the last forty minutes.
- While not exactly a cutie, Leonard Lawrence a.k.a. Gomer Pyle in the film Full Metal Jacket starts off in the story as a good hearted yet somewhat bumbling and overweight Marine recruit under the command of brutal Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, who has instant disdain for the man because of Pyle's incompetence. Thus, with the help of the rest of the platoon, he torments the man repeatedly and mercilessly until Pyle's sanity snaps in a Heroic BSOD. Pyle, now completely insane and psychotic, shoots and murders Sergeant Hartman and then himself in front of the main character, in an extremely eerie and disturbing scene.
- 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.
- The entire backstory to The Ring. Sadako was born to a psychic mother, and probably a sea god, her mother was run out of town after going on TV and screwing up due to all the negative psychic energy of the people in the audience. Her mother then threw herself into a volcano. Her stepfather trained to gain psychic powers by meditating under a waterfall until he got sick. Oh, and while she was visiting him at the sanatorium, she was raped. When the guy found out she had feminine testicular syndrome (i.e. she's a man with the body of a woman and a set of testicles) he beat her and dumped her into a well. To top it all of, she got smallpox.
- The movie... didn't go quite so far. The entire second half of the paragraph is left out, and Sadako was thrown into the well by her stepfather, who was convinced she was evil. He was right. Most consider this Adaptation Distillation.
- The prequel movie, Birthday, which shows Sadako's sweet, Yamato Nadeshiko, non-demonic side is a heartbreaking example of the trope. To list everything that was done to her (none of which was her fault, and none of which she really deserved,) resulting in that final snap that made her accept her dark half, would result in a summary of the entire film.
- In the Made For TV Movie, Intensity, Edgler Vess takes pleasure in specifically putting all of his efforts into "breaking" any victim whom he happens to kidnap.
- Nigel the koala from The Wild (voiced by Eddie Izzard) is most like this despite being a cute, fluffy koala. He's also a bit of a Deadpan Snarker and a regular Butt Monkey (or should that be marsupial?).
- Forget about survival horror. Dismiss any thoughts in your head of zombies, or teamwork, or social commentary. Watching Cillian Murphy totally snap 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.
- Well, if you find a cutie in the cast of a horror movie...
- The entire final sequence of Sweeney Todd is a Break The Cutie for Toby and Johanna. The first gradually finds out just what Sweeney does and what Mrs. Lovett does with his victims, which is a complete shock to him, especially since he looks upon Mrs. Lovett as his mother. He has to hide in the sewers as Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett come looking for him, presumably to kill him too. After he witnessed Sweeney killing Mrs. Lovett by throwing her into the oven, he kills Sweeney himself. In the stage version, he is completely driven into insanity. The other is penned up in Fogg's Asylum by Judge Turpin, and God knows what he made her do before that. In the stage version, she is forced to kill Fogg after being rescued by Anthony. Afterwards (in both versions), she witnesses the murders of her mother and her adoptive father by her own father — though, granted, she didn't realise these were her parents. Then, Sweeney almost kills her, too.
- Going on the concerts on YouTube: Anthony and Joahnna are caught by the police and probably sentenced to death for killing the asylum director, or if you're an optimist the pair of jail breakers is quickly eclipsed by a (very very) multiple homicide, which is initially pinned on Toby. Everyone remotely sympathetic is broken, tenderized, ground into tiny bits and burnt to ashes.
- And made into delicious mincemeat pies.
- Actually, in the original play it is made clear that Johanna and Anthony get a "happy" ending (though, after she just did that whole "the ghosts never go away" speech, then witnessed her father killing her mother, happiness is relative.) and Toby is driven into insanity.
- Repo! The Genetic Opera has Shilo. Given it's directed by the guy who did most of the Saw franchise, you just know she'll be broken by the end.
- To whit: she started as an Ill Girl with a vaguely-defined blood disease. While visiting her mother Marni's tomb, she runs into Grave-Robber, who proceeds to call a whole platoon of heavily armed police down on them, then drags her into a cavern filled with the rotting corpses of repossessed victims. The stress makes her illness flare up and she collapses while surrounded by said cops, as well as the nightmarish Repo Man. When she wakes up, sick and weak in her bedroom, her father tells her it was all a bad dream, then yells at her for taking risks with her health. And that's just the beginning.
- In Police Story, we get to see what happens when Jackie Chan's typical happy-go-lucky character who is nevertheless a fearsome martial artist gets pushed too far. Chan has said it's his favorite of his action films.
- All About Lily Chou Chou does this to every single main character.
- Amy Adam's character Sister James undergoes a mild form of this is in Doubt when she has to accept the possibility that a priest at their school molested a young boy.
- In Trading Places, Lewis Winthorp III, a star executive is framed for theft and drug dealing, and then loses his job, his friends, his money, and his home. His life spirals downward, causing him to eventually attempt suicide. All because his bosses made a bet.
- But he's not a cutie (no offense to Dan Ackroyd). He starts off as the picture of unearned entitlement. Much more of a Break The Haughty setup.
- Jamie Lloyd from the Halloween series. Her parents died when she was young, she was constantly bullied due to being the niece of an undying mute thing who shows up and almost kills her before briefly imbuing her with some of his evil, prompting paranoid citizens to regard her as some kind of devil child; after all that Evil Uncle Michael shows up again the next year, kills pretty much all her loved ones and after being captured he's sprung from prison by a fanatical cult which abducts her as well, apparently having Michael rape and impregnate her while the two are held captive. Though she escapes and gets the baby to safety, Michael still kills her via tractor.
- Pretty much the entire Ludlow family in Legends of the Fall but hoooooo boy, Tristan. (Played by Brad Pitt in the film. Brad Pitt counts as a cutie, right?) Early on Col. Ludlow, the father, moves his entire family to Montana to get as far from the government as possible, sickened by what he considers constant betrayal after betrayal of Native Americans, with whom he has developed respect and close personal relationships from his time in the military. Tristan adopts everything he is able about Native American culture, even given a tribal name for cutting a claw from a grizzly bear at the age of 12. It all starts to fall apart when younger brother Samuel decides to sign up for service in WWI. Tristan and older brother Alfred also decide to sign up to keep an eye on Samuel, all against their father's wishes. Tristan has already abandoned his unit to be by side of an injured Alfred in a WWI field hospital when he hears word that Samuel is about to embark on a certain suicide mission. Tristan rushes to try to stop him, but fails and ends up holding his brother in the middle of the battlefield while Samuel dies from injuries sustained by machine gun and mustard gas. To the absolute horror of the other soldiers, Tristan arrives back at the field camp the next morning, decorated with tribal warpaint of mud and blood and with strings of fresh German scalps hung around his neck. Things go downhill from there.
- Ellen Ripley of the Alien series of movies might seem an unlikely candidate, because it's easy to forget that, at the beginning of the first film, she was not the Action Girl that she later becomes famous as - she was a bit uncertain and some other characters didn't entirely accept her as second in command. At the end of the first film, the alien has killed off all her crewmates; in the second film, she wakes up half a century later, and the aliens lay waste to a colony; in the third, aliens have killed Newt and all her crewmates from the previous film, not to mention she discovers she is hosting an alien herself; finally, in the fourth, she wakes up as the scientific demon spawn of an alien, and it's no wonder she gets a little unhinged.
Literature
- Fantine from Les Miserables. (Cosette, not so much, since her story is the inverse of this trope).
- Candide absolutely crushes everyone, but don't worry. It still has a wholesome happy ending.
- 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.
- Mercy Thompson of the eponymous series. She isn't exactly the sweetest girl, but in Iron Kissed she got physically and mentally raped. She breaks, but recovers by the end of the book, thanks to the support of her friends, and the therapeutic effect of beating your rapist's head in with a blunt object.
- Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien even wrote a letter explaining that Frodo failed and 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 film version takes pains to emphasize Frodo's cuteness and Woobie-ness, but eventually turns Gollum into a pantomime villain in the third act, which sort of undermines the original point... but Frodo ends up a broken shell of himself anyhow.
- The entire premise of Orson Scott Card's novel Enders 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.
- In the fourth Fingerprints book, Badass Tomboy Yana tells a very sad story about how when she wanted to be a ballerina as a kid, but her abusive father crushed her dream. Her backstory only gets sadder when more details are revealed in later books, and is a Freudian Excuse for her villainous Disproportionate Retribution.
- 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. Starting with Hareton, although this is partly also due to Hareton's father's descent into alcoholism (also encouraged by Heathcliff). Then when he discovers that Isabella fancies him, he takes advantage of the fact, mentally and physically abusing her to see how far he can push her — immediately before they elope together, he makes her watch whilst he hangs her pet dog. He then goes onto manipulate his and Isabella's son Linton into seducing the younger Cathy and luring her into Wuthering Heights so that he can have them forcibly married. By the end, Linton is so terrified he's constantly hallucinating Heathcliff's presence. And then he keeps Cathy a virtual prisoner and slave, psychologically and physically tormenting her too. He really isn't a very nice man.
- The Marquis de Sade loved this (unsurprisingly). Justine is an entire novel devoted to this, and without even a hint of sympathy for the character. Squick!
- In Darren Shan from The Saga Of Darren Shan goes from being unwilling to even drink blood to very nearly killing Darius, only stopping when he discovers he's his nephew.
- Thomas of The Dresden Files. If you thought the mess with Justine was bad wait until you find out what the skinwalker did...
- What about what the Denarians did to Ivy/The Archive on the island to try and break her. Granted, it wasn't to the scope of the above, but Harry said something along the lines of it being petty, cruel and to a kid, the very picture of horror.
- 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, but she does cool off and become much more distant and withdrawn, and almost breaks at one point.
- Meredith Host from the book Friday The13th: Church of the Divine Psychopath, who's bubbly, innocent and just seems perpetually happy, actually managing to befriend the surly Final Girl of the book. Things quickly degenerate when she witnesses her parents be butchered in front of her by Jason, with the leader of the mad Jason-worshipping cult they were apart of (thought it was just a regular church group) saying they deserved it; she also winds up dealing with lots of self-hate over being a closet lesbian due to her religious upbringing and near the end winds up almost being raped by one of the aforementioned mad cultists, who had grown steadily more obsessed with her. Though she's saved at the last minute by one the soldiers sent out to track down and kill Jason she still dies quite horribly when Jason randomly shows up seconds later and splits her head open before the soldier can even get a shot at him.
- Older Than Dirt: 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.
- Morn Hyland of Donaldson's Gap Cycle begins the series as a barely of-age, beautiful young soldier. She is subjected first to "Gap sickness," then to violent sexual abuse (resulting in being impregnated by her repulsive, insane abuser), then to horrific psychological abuse, while possessing a brain implant with a remote control that could grant unspeakable power over her to any of the many sociopathic people around her if they were to get hold of it. Her son is "force-grown" to a young teenager and implanted with all of her memories (including being raped by his father), resulting in a multiple Mind Screw for him as well.
- All cuties in the Warrior Cats series CAN and almost certainly WILL be broken in the most heartwrenching and/or violent way possible. You can count on it.
- Lev in Unwind.
- Diana Mayo in The Sheik. The titular character hates the English because his father is actually an Englishman who was very abusive of his mother, and he kidnaps her and rapes her with the aim of breaking her just because he can. She later falls in love with him.
Live Action TV
- "Heart of Fire" in Blood Ties is a good example of this: the ultra-handsome, charming and quirky Henry Fitzroy is physically tortured by a mad priest, who beats, drains and starves the vampire into confessing his sins so the priest can kill him. The priest also enthusiastically Breaks the Cutie by showing him videos of his ex-girlfriend betraying him, trying to get Henry to suck dry his love interest Vicki, and twisting a device that is LODGED around Henry's heart with metal spikes. As the final Break The Cutie moment, he even kills a cute little rat that Henry had spared despite his desperation for blood.
- Obvious examples come from Mutant Enemy: River 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.
- Fresh example: 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.
- Dr. Saunders, perhaps? When the show begins, it's bad enough-she's recently had severe facial injuries inflicted by Alpha, a deranged rogue Active. At the end of the first season's aired episodes, she finds out that she's not even 'real'-she's actually Whiskey, an Active who Alpha hacked up because he liked Echo more. She was 'saved' by the Dollhouse (who wouldn't want to waste an asset), imprinted to replace the recently deceased house doctor. Another Active who was attacked by Alpha is granted extensive plastic surgery to repair similar facial damage, which Saunders/Whiskey isn't offered and isn't sure she wants since it's likely that her face being fixed would result in her being put back into the Active pool. She tries confronting her creator, Topher, which only serves to further break her down, resulting in her fleeing the Dollhouse entirely. If that wasn't enough, as of the future world of Epitaph One, she's clearly and definitively broken-she literally loses her mind, reverting to her base Active state on what appears to be a permanent basis. She is the only Active who never really escapes from the Dollhouse, ultimately committing suicide rather than returning to the world.
- Wesley, Cordelia and Willow of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel. Heck, for that matter, Buffy herself entered the series only slightly dented, and slowly bent to the breaking point. Even 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'.
- 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.
- Inverted with Fred: She was introduced as a broken cutie, then was unbroken back into a confident, capable, monster-fighting, and fun-loving young woman. Then her body was taken over and soul devoured by an ancient uber demon. Ouch.
- While growing in confidence and happy in her relationship with Willow, Tara was brainsucked by Glory and driven crazy. In a rare example of breaking and then fixing the cutie, Willow was eventually able to do a spell to reverse the process and Tara was once again whole. Until she got shot.
- 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 withdrawl 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.
- Season 5 dedicates itself to doing this to Dawn, and does not let go. It starts with Dawn finding out that she's the Key — as one fan put it, take your average teen identity crisis, and multiply it by about 3,000. Just as she recovers from that, her mom dies. Then Tara is attacked, injured, and driven insane by Glory because she thought Tara was the newest thing in Buffy's life and therefore the Key — which Dawn blames herself for. Then she's captured by Glory, and it seems that she's going to die. She's rescued seconds too late, and her sister/guardian has to kill herself in order to save Dawn and the world.
- In season 6, she's dealing with all the grief, until Buffy is resurrected, only to spend the season ignoring her - finally culminating in attempted murder (while Buffy was under the effect of a demon that made her hallucinate). In the episode "Villains", Dawn comes home from school to find nobody there... only Tara's body. She sits with the body for probably three hours, not willing to leave her alone.
- In season 7, this is mostly absent, except for the entirety of "Conversations With Dead People". But this time, Dawn doesn't break.
- Don't forget Anya, who spends most of her time on the show as the perky and bubbly comic relief. Then Xander leaves her at the altar late in season 6. She reacts to this by returning to vengeance. She finds herself unable to do it properly at first, but when she does get back into the swing by slaughtering ten frat boys who humiliated a girl, she suddenly realises what she's done and plunges into Death Seekerdom. She survives, and is still comic relief, but she's a little less perky now.
- Literally done with Kes from Star Trek Voyager.
- Then there's Data. One of the male examples. His "older brother" turned out to be a murdering psycho, he found his long lost father not long before already said father was murdered by psychotic brother. He saw the woman to whom he "lost his virginity" murdered before his eyes for no reason but malice. He had to go to court over his right not to be dismantled, created a daughter who died after they tried to take her away from him and she couldn't deal with the shock. Was kidnapped by some rich guy who drove him to attempted murder (possibly Data's defining Break The Cutie moment), went through the whole Long Lost Relative plot, tried to kill his best friend under mental coersion (psycho brother's fault again), was possessed a couple of times... Have to say, if he actually ''had'' emotions, they would have screwed him to hell and back by the end of season seven.
- And then he gets emotions in Generations... Frankly, it's surprising how he dealt with that with only one or two guilt trips. The amount of crap he went through wouldn't have been attempted with any other character, specifically because Data couldn't actually be broken. You could kick him around like a football and you're not likely to permenantly psychologically wreck him.
- Unless you count Descent.
- Stargate SG-1 did this with a lot of its characters but particularly Daniel Jackson and Colonel Sam Carter. However it resulted in them becoming Cool Badasses.
- The Master of Doctor Who does this a lot in the season finale. By the beginning of the final episode, he's done heavily implied squicky things to Jack and chained him up in the basement of his airship, which is only made more disturbing by the fact that Jack's immortal; done heavily implied squicky things to Martha's family to the point that, just before the cavalry arrives, they're sitting in a circle fighting over who gets to kill him; aged the Doctor's body, done heavily implied squicky things to him, aged his body again, and locked him in a birdcage; and turned his formerly happy (albeit mostly trigger-happy) wife into a battered slave.. Fortunately, everybody gets better except for Lucy by the end of the episode.
- Happens in Torchwood, in the episode "Adam", the titular memory-changing alien breaks the handsome, soft-spoken, and likeable Deadpan Snarker Ianto by implanting in him false memories of murdering women, but due to the use of Retcon pills none of the characters remember the events of the episode and thus any breakage is temporary.
- They like doing this: Ianto gets broken in "Cyberwoman". "Greeks Bearing Gifts" does the same to Tosh. And in "End of Days," Gwen loses it completely when Rhys gets killed. He gets better.
- At the start of Supernatural, Dean is pretty happy with his life, comic relief to Sam's big ball of angst and loves the hunt. While Sam has also been pretty broken too, the show's various methods of bending Dean to breaking point have included: getting tortured by his possessed father and possessed brother at two different times, making him feel like it's all his fault that someone died to save him in the first season and ramping that suicidal guilt up to 100 when his father dies for him in the second season, having his brother die in his arms, sending him to hell this season and having almost everyone taunt him on how worthless he is.
- And even all that pales in comparison to what happens to him in Season Four; clawing his way out of his own grave, being an (albeit extremely pretty) angel's bitch, getting guilt-tripped from victims he couldn't save, going back in time and apparently causing the events leading to his mother's death, getting infected with a ghost sickness that makes him even more of a Butt Monkey, remembering all his forty years of hell, breaking after thirty and enjoying torturing other victims for ten, having suddenly to remember the events of "In My Time Of Dying", having to torture Alistair for information and learning that he was the first seal, he's the only one who can stop the apocalypse and that his Dad spent a century on the rack and never broke. With all that, it's no wonder that the writers panicked, went meta and introduced a new angel that told him to stop whining.
- If you want to know how having a demon infecting you with his blood/having your mother die/having a crappy childhood/having your father disown you/having your girlfriend die/having demonic powers/having your father die/having your brother break down before your eyes and then pretty much committing suicide for you and then having to watch him killed in a hundred different ways and then, later on, getting ripped apart by hellhounds, just ask Sam. Poor boy.
- We can now add John to this list. Once upon a time, he was a naive, innocent, sweet little himbo and look what happened to him. But unlike his sons, who have been broken slowly and horribly over the past few seasons due to numerous events, he just snapped from the one event (his wife dying) and became the borderline abusive, jerkass parent who was so at the end of his rope that he committed suicide for Dean in the most self-righteous way possible.
- They're starting to do this with Castiel too now. Oh, how cute, a good little soldier angel that loves his daddy - God, gets nervous around whores, and thinks humans are God's works of art. Now lets have his brother kill his garrison and try to kill him, his other brother tell him God is dead and that he was raised by Lucifer to be his bitch, and then let's totally break him in the future and turn him in to a drug addicted, orgy-having jerkass fallen human who hates "life."
- In summary, all Winchesters come pre-broken, or get broken shortly thereafter, along with any longtime associates.
- A lot of American Gothic seems devoted to doing this to poor Dr. Crower, especially the episodes dealing with his alcoholism and the one where he attempts to kill Buck after learning from a woman who claims to be the sheriff's mother that Buck is the Devil Incarnate. (This is later revealed to be all part of Buck's dastardly plot to discredit him.) The fact Dr. Matt is eventually Put On A Bus, is found to have a creepy stalker shrine to Buck, and is last seen locked up in an insane asylum pretty much clinches his status as broken.
- The new Battlestar Galactica likes this one:
- Boomer 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 Twins|creepy loving clones]], violently interrogated, publically 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. And now, she does some very, very vile things on board Galactica, possibly breaking Athena as a result. Then, in the finale, she finally returns the kid to Athena and is thanked with gut bullets.
- Athena did break. A big part of Athena's motivation was that she didn't want to be a Cylon. By Season 4, she had pretty much convinced herself that she was human, hence her increasing animosity towards her own people. When Boomer had sex with Helo while she was tied up and forced to watch from the locker, it shatterd that viewpoint into a million, tiny pieces: Her own husband can't tell her apart from other individuals of her model number; She's not human and she never will be human, no matter how much she wants to be. Not only that, but Boomer kidnapped Hera, which means Athena had to go through the pain of losing her child a second time. She breaks down completely near the end of the episode. The next one shows that she has completely closed herself off to everyone, including her husband.
- Felix Gaeta is/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 ostracised, tried and nearly killed for Collaboration despite the part he took secretly in La Resistance. Then lately 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.
- Because of Earth, could be applied to the entire fleet.
- According to the Word Of God , as handed out in the weekly podcasts by the Executive Producer, the Earth arc is intended to be a Break The Cutie for the audience.
- It worked.
- One Name: Cally. Shown as the cute deck hand and gofer girl to the chief, she stays cute and relatively innocent (like Kaylee from Firefly) up to Kobol and from there takes worse. It wasn't too bad untill Nikki started playing up, her marrage was falling apart (like all bsg ones seem to) Then she tried to committ suiside but was murdered instead. This was one uber woobie moment.
- 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 on the night 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 to her bitchy, controlling sister to raise. Granted, she's had a few lucky breaks on the career front, but she's looking a lot more tense these days.
- Throughout the 4 seasons of LOST so far, Hurley, the series' comic relief and all-around nice guy, has been revealed to be cursed with bad luck by the mysterious Numbers, which he used to win the lottery. Also, he's not quite right in the head, believes himself responsible for the death of some people in an accident years ago as well as for the crash of Oceanic 815. When he starts controlling his eating habits, a whole lot of food just pops out of nowhere, leading him to believe the island is inside his head, and almost commits suicide. He meets a girl on the island who is interested in him, but she turns out to secretly be another mental patient from the same institution he was at. Then she dies. Then he has to kill a bad guy to save his friends. Then his best friend dies. Then the camp divides and he picks the side that gets massacred, but survives, and starts being haunted by Jacob's cabin. Finally he leaves the island, but not before watching the freighter where some of his friends were explode. On the outside world, his family unintentionally tortures him, so he leaves them, gets arrested and thrown back into a mental institution, and becomes haunted by the people who died on the island, including his best friend. Not so nice anymore.
- Now we have Juliet, reduced to a sobbing severely wounded wreck by the end of Season 5.
- Even Ben, of all people, was a sweet, albeit sad, little kid who seemed like he might turn out alright despite being abused by his alcoholic father... until he was shot by a time-traveling enemy when he was only 14, and then "cured" by a mysterious entity that "took his innocence."
- Heroes has not yet broken Hiro Nakamura, but it sure is working on it.
- It looked like he might finally break, but his reversion to his personality when he was 10 years old has saved him. Hiro Nakamura is Unbreakable.
- They're definitely hammering on Claire, too.
- They've stepped up the pace recently. Season 3 has delivered at least one blow per episode so far. 1) Attacked by Sylar. 2) Lost ability to feel pain. 3) Her "lesson" with Meredith. 4) Being forced into a game of Russian roulette with her birth and adoptive mothers.
- Heroes has the interesting distinction of having shown both Claire and Peter as broken cuties in some of its flash-forward episodes, though because of the nature of time travel in the show, it's impossible to say if those fates are actually going to happen or not.
- Dr. Kelso in Scrubs does this with Elliot. Dr. Cox literally punches him out of it. So Yeah.
- In the seventh season of 24, Agent Renee Walker meets Jack Bauer. Within 10 hours, she is shot at, betrayed, choked to unconsciousness, wounded in the neck, buried alive, then resucitated. Besides that, she almost suffocated a man in the hospital, held a woman hostage, threatened that woman's child, then got a different woman killed after she'd promised that woman's sister to keep her safe. Hour 10 had her point a gun at Jack, then later slap him in the face before collapsing into his arms and weeping hysterically. The cutie, she broke.
- In the seven hours after that, she: found out the White House was the next target, swam the Potomac, saw a fellow agent murdered in front of her eyes, barely escaped Juma's army, discovered Jack was being held hostage by the dictator of Sangala (who also happened to have nabbed the President), saw a bomb go off in the White House, was told Jack had murdered Ryan Burnett and Senator Mayer, tried to help him, got herself fired, was proved right about Jack's innocence, was reinstated, saw her boss almost die, found out Jack had been infected with a deadly bioweapon, saw him have a seizure right in front of her eyes, and witnessed him refuse the only possible treatment to save his life. Emotional rollercoaster much?
- After that, she also got to see her dead boss after Tony Almeida betrayed everyone and killed him. She also got to see Jack having more seizures, the Heroic Sacrifce of Bill Buchanan, and after all that her metamorphisis into the female Jack Bauer [aka: Rack Bauer] was complete when she tortured the Big Bad of Season 7, Alan Wilson off-screen in the Season Finale.
- President Allison Taylor began her run in 24: Redemption as an idealistic President-Elect who won by a landslide. Since then, her son was murdered, Dubaku corrupted every department of her government, Juma landed on US soil, she was taken hostage, a bomb went off in the White House, her husband was shot and almost killed, the infrastructure of the entire United States was breached, two planes were crashed into each other just outside her window, a biochemical plant was just barely not blown up, her Chief of Staff resigned, she hired her manipulative bitch of a daughter to replace him, her Secretary of State quit, Juma's forces slaughtered most of the Secret Service, Senator Mayer and his traitorous Chief of Staff were murdered (by Jack Bauer, except not) and she is facing the possibility of civil war with Starkwood. Not necessarily in that order.
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles absolutely loves torturing the cuties. Riley, Cameron, Allison Young, Cameron while being Allison Young, and even Jesse all get thoroughly and brutally broken over the course of the second season.
- Smallville, end of S7 and so far all of S8, seems to be doing this with Chloe Sullivan. Fired, wedding ruined by Doomsday's attack, marriage ruined by her manipulation by Doomsday, new friend and one ray of sunshine in this mire is a serial killer. She actually had a Lampshade Hanging moment at her birthday party when she recounted much of what is listed previously (and more), but it was dropped somewhat by the end of the episode.
- Oz: Tobias Beecher. Shinji Ikari can't even compete with all the shit that he goes through.
- A number of characters on ER probably qualify, particularly Carter and others who start work with a very naive world view. Probably justified, given the grim/frustrating nature of emergency medical services and the hazards of hospital politics.
- Degrassi The Next Generation has done this twice.
- JT: Plucky Comic Relief for most of the series, he gets his girlfriend pregnant in season 5. After much debate, they decide to keep the baby, but they don't have the money no matter how hard he works (and he works hard), at which pointt he gets convinced to sell drugs he stole from the pharmacist (one of his jobs) as it's the only way to get enough money. His girlfriend finds out, his employer is pretty obviously about to find out, the drug dealer he's selling drugs to refuses to let him go, and eventually he tries to kill himself. He fails, his girlfriend dumps him and puts the baby up for adoption against his will, he's obviously still in love with her, and just before they're reunited, he's killed by a random psycho.
- Darcy: Starts off sweet religious girl, but she's drugged and raped at a party in the season 7 premiere, and... she kind of loses it.
- On Criminal Minds, this seems to happen to Spencer Reid a LOT. His dad abandons him and his mom when he's ten and he has to put his scizophrenic mother in the asylum when he turns 18. He gets kidnapped by a multiple-personality serial killer and is beaten and drugged and is forced to dig his own grave. Then he is moody and irritable for most of the rest of the season, even bitching at his teammate when she legitimately is just trying to help with the case. Then his new father-figure and mentor cracks under pressure and abandons his team, with the only note of explanation being addressed solely to Reid. Then Reid is held hostage in a cult with another team member (the same one he was bitchy to, just to mention) and when the cult leader threatens to shoot him for being FBI, the other team member falls on her sword and gets the crap beat out of her for it. Cue guilt. And then, if he wasn't damaged enough, he gets anthrax poisoning.
- Dr. K in Power Rangers RPM comes pre-broken, having been kidnapped as a young child by the government and kept in a research facility doing military work for them under the pretense of a "sunlight allergy". When they break her, she accidentally causes the apocalypse in trying to escape.
- In One Life To Live, every time they want to bring Bo and Nora together, something bad happens to Matthew. Lucky for him, this is a Soap Opera, and they're generous with the miracle cures...
Music
- "Happiest Girl" by Depeche Mode (from the World in My Eyes EP): And I would have to pinch her / Just to see that she was real / Just to watch the smile fade away / See the pain she'd feel
- "Breaking the Girl" by Red Hot Chili Peppers (from Blood Sugar Sex Magik): Twisting and turning / Her feelings are burning / You're breaking the girl...
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.
- Opera in general is a veritable breeding ground for breaking cuties. And Puccini was a GREAT cutie breaker. Poor, poor Cio-Cio-San from Madame Butterfly, indeed. And if we go to Donizetti, Lucia di Lamermoor. And, in French opera, Marguerite in Gounod's Faust.
- 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 HIIM; 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.
- Shelley in the musical Bat Boy. She is living happily with her veterinarian father and house-wife mother. She falls in love with Edgar, a feral 'Bat Boy' that was found nearby who lived on blood, after her mother makes him civil and caring. All is well. Towards the end of the show, after Shelley and Edgar have already had sex, it's then revealed that while her mother worked as her father's assistant in a lab, he accidentally spilled an experimental pheromone on her, and, driven mad with lust, raped her. Stumbling her way home, she is then attacked and raped by a swarm of bats.She got pregnant and gave birth to twins: a mutant (Edgar), and a human (Shelley) So, Edgar turns out to be her twin brother. In the finale, Shelley watches as her father (Dr. Parker), furious and out of his mind, slits open his throat to tempt Edgar with blood. Edgar pounces on him and begins to drink, and Dr. Parker takes the initiative to stab him multiple times in the back. Trying to get him to stop, her mother rushes in and is also stabbed by her husband. All three of them die, and Edgar dies in her lap. So, no only does she find out her lover is actually her brother, she watcher her ENTIRE FAMILY get murdered by her father, who in turn bleeds out through the neck. After that, she's very quiet. Nice story, right? I thought so too.
- 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 murders her father, 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.
Video Games
- Marona of Phantom Brave gets broken, put together, then broken again throughout the game due to her ability to manifest ghosts, which everyone hates her for. Poor Marona...
- 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.
- You can find even more breaking events in her bio, it seems his father abandon him when he was young and his mother prefered to spend the money which could have been for his education in to buy a good position in the Church of Unitology.
- Latooni Subota from Super Robot Wars Original Generation is a pre-broken cutie who was traumatized in the School, a Federation institute that turns children into pilots. Everyone in the Latooni class except for her died. She was constantly experimented on by Adler Koch and Agilla Setme. Finally, she was forced to undergo an intense experiment that caused her to suffer a kind of androphobia where she could barely talk. Over the course of the game she gets better, and starts making a full recovery. After the Divine Crusaders are defeated she becomes The Woobie.
- In term of being broken, it looks like Latooni has been topped by Setsuko Ohara of Z, it starts off with her mentor and boyfried as a team at first but as soon as Asakim the evil alternative Masaki shows up. Things go downhill for her, her team gets killed, evil Masaki takes a special moment to physically abuse her a bit and presumably traumatize her with showing her dead comrades remains and she is only subjected to more abuse later on, even having to fight her seiyu's idol Kira Yamato a few times. To make things worse, she can't get back at Not-Masaki by killing him, because that's exactly what he wanted, killing him will give him satisfaction and ends her in defeat, so she either has to admit defeat by killing him, or let him live... and break her even further.
- And her endings arent exactly happy either In her average ending, she is stranded alone and eventually dies due to using her mech too much when it's been revealed that it eats up her life (but at least she's happy knowing that she saved the world), worst ending places her in a world of eternal strife (and she gets to die first) and while the best ending reunites her with her team, they do not know her as Setsuko at all
- 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.
- In F.E.A.R., the cute and innocent one, an incredibly powerful psychic girl named Alma, was pretty much broken from birth. Born with the ability to sense and react to negative emotions, she was so bat-crazy that she was able to drive other people insane from simply being in proximity to them. Of course, this is before the evil faceless corporation studying her locked her away in a forced coma at the age of eight, then years later used her teenage body as an incubator for psychic Super Soldiers. To add to the whole mess, she develops an intense attachment to her unborn children, which are then promptly taken away from her before she's sent back to the psychic vault she's being imprisoned in. Needless to say, when she gets loose with all that pent up rage, the crap really hits the fan.
- Imoen from Baldur's Gate. She starts off as a chipper and upbeat girl until she, along with the protagonist and a handful of other characters, are captured by Irenicus in the second game and tortured mercilessly. Then, when she finally escapes to the city of Amn, she makes the mistake of using magic against Irenicus, who comes to stop your group (using magic in Amn is strictly forbidden without special permission.) She and Irenicus are arrested and sentenced to Spellhold, a nuthouse for crazy wizards, where Irenicus takes over the building, and then tortures Imoen even more, eventually violently tearing out her soul, leaving her a broken, babbling mess by the time you catch up to her. She eventually heals...
- But then she finds out she's one of the Bhaalspawn, and then has to deal with her newfound murderous impulses (she tells the protagonist at one point that during the last battle she suddenly had the urge to tear out the bad guy's throat with her bare hands.) Needless to say, she's not so chipper or upbeat anymore. Although given that it's Imoen, that's relative to herself, not anyone else. As one character notes well after she's found all this out, she "reminds [him] considerably of a squirrel on a sugar high with a death wish".
- In the middle of the "Throne of Bhaal", your party will encounter a wraith that impersonates Gorion and chews your main character out. While your character can take it, they will target the NPC your character is romancing and will proceed to break them down, hard. For example, if your character is romancing Aerie, the wraith conjured an image of her Avariel mother, and then said image told her how she tried looking for her daughter, then was captured with much more brutal slavers and killed, then pinned the blame on Aerie, who caused her to fly down to the ground and get caught in the first place. It's a lie, of course, but that was enough to break her down into tears and sobbing.
- Aerie's background story in the first place: A sweet, innocent little winged girl is living happily with her parents in a wondrous city. She loves to fly, but one time she sees a group of humans being attacked by slavers on the ground. Her taught fear of earthborne creatures overcome by her empathy, she swoops down to rescue a fleeing child. However, she is shot down, captured, caged, sold into a circus, kept on display, and held in such a small space she has no room to move. Her precious wings become infected and are crudely chopped off to save her life, leaving her crippled both emotionally and physically, having lost her home, sense of identity and ability to fly.
- Ah Planescape Torment, where to start?
- How about The sweet little girl who loved The Nameless One? Who was willing to do anything, anything at all for him? Even become a ghost inside a horrible, horrible place... Only, damn, the guy she loved had intended for her to die and become a ghost *as a way of spying on his adversary* and that was the reason he talked to her in the first place. When you meet Deionarra she's understandably very bitter about it. Gets even more heartbreaking if you are evil though.
- An odd example is the Night Hag Ravel, somehow proving that even even someone so incredibly creepy can be a Woobie.
- Fire Emblem 4 has Tiltyu, a young thunder mage originally portrayed as a Tsundere-ish genki Rebellious Princess. But things start to go downhill for her when her leader, Sigurd, is killed. She survives the battle only to be separated from her husband (who may be either dead or alive, depending on who did she marry), and although she once managed to fled in Silesia with her kids Arthur and Tinny, she gets taken back to her destroyed homeland, is separated from her son by force, and she has to withstand mental and physical abuse from her power-hungry bitch of a sister-in-law Hilda, with her king and older brother Blume not interfering with the abuse since Tiltyu is seen as a traitor by her people, all while protecting her daughter from said abuses by taking them on herself. Eventually, the poor girl cannot become a genki mother as she was before, cries every day, and eventually dies in sorrow after getting sick.
- Averted with Cheerful Child Nino from Fire Emblem 7. Having a manipulative, evil woman like Sonia as a mother would be enough to drive a little girl over the edge, but It Got Worse. First, her mother orders her killed in order to make a scapegoat for an assassination plot. After a narrow save by her best friend (and possible love interest through supports), she later confronts Sonia, only to learn that Sonia actually murdered her birth family when she was a baby, and would have killed her as well if it wasn't for orders from the Big Bad. Then, she has to witness the murder of one of her adopted brothers, one which she tried her best to prevent. After watching the Black Fang fall apart, if you keep her around for the final boss, she has to fight the animated corpses of said adopted family: not only her brothers, but her father as well. Yet in spite of it all, Nino presses on and, despite having her small breakdowns, never fully gives into despair.
- Ninian and Nils, also from Fire Emblem 7, are no slouches in this either. Children of a human druid and a female dragon who disappeared during the Scouring? Check. Had to pass through the Gate when Dad went missing too? Check. Missed home so much they jumped at the call when they were invoked, only to be trapped by the Black Fang whose leader is hinted to be their father? Check. Had to run away for years, with the Black Fang on their heels? Check. Recaptured, befriended Eliwood's Disappeared Dad only to be partially guilty of his death? Check. Ninian falling for Eliwood but being unable to tell him because of her heritage? Check. Ninian being forced by Nergal to return to her dragon form, only to be slain by Eliwood? Check... Not to mention Nils' Heroic BSOD that comes soon after.
- Also averted with Lucius. Being orphaned at a young age, teased all his life for his feminine appearance, and mistreated by a teacher shaped him into... one of the most faithful and reverent characters in the entire game. When he meets the now-reformed killer of his father and he breaks down crying and begging for Lucius' forgiveness... he does.
- Oichi in Sengoku Basara, in her story mode (she didn't break in other stories). Starting out as an introverted woman with casual dark powers, she got a very sadistic son of a bitch for a brother that is Oda Nobunaga, who tried to kill her, and then her husband Azai Nagamasa takes a deadly shot from Nobunaga meant for her. And then he forcefully drafts her into his army and makes her do many killings in his name, careless if she feels really guilty on the mass murdering. And she finally snaps, taken over with her evil side and kills her brother and his subordinates, all with a twisted Evil Laugh. She finally returns to her gentle self and cries over her atrocity, but even fate wants to break her. So, the ceiling in the temple where she killed her brother finally falls on her and the whole temple is completely consumed with fire, killing her.
- This happens to Sera, the cute and innocent Mysterious Waif of Digital Devil Saga. Whilst undergoing a series of experiments designed to exploit her psychic powers to talk to "God", she slowly falls in love with the lead scientist. When she simultaneously discovers that he was actually a Magnificent Bastard using her for his own ends and witnesses the murder of the only person who genuinely did care for her, her resulting emotional backlash causes The End Of The World As We Know It.
- This is basically what your character does, over and over again, to the remaining cast of Soul Nomad And The World Eaters if you choose the evil path. Usually with hilariously morbid results. The exception to this is Tricia, whose breaking (or pre-breaking, as it is in the evil path) is not particularly hilarious in either storyline.
- Yukari Takeba and Mitsuru Kirijo in Persona 3. Mitsuru falls into Heroic BSOD after Chairman Ikutsuki murders her father right before her eyes.
- Marona of Phantom Brave is broken, glued back together crudely, and broken again several times throughout the game. For instance, in Episode 2, she is refused a reward for her monster hunting job because someone who openly admitted to being a professional job thief (who didn't really DO anything) pointed out to the client that she was possessed. Without proof. Yeah, people don't like her.
- Lisa Trevor of the Resident Evil remake. Her mother is murdered with a virus and her father is killed by Umbrella after building the Mansion. Then Umbrella discovers that she is nearly immortal, and begins injecting her with insane viruses just to see what would happen.
- She was broken even before that point, as Lisa was also experimented on with the Progenitor virus, breaking her mind to the point that she killed her own mother by tearing off her face, believing she was an 'imposter'. Thirty years later when she finds her mother's remains, she moans 'mother' before grabbing her skull and leaping into a bottomless pit.
- From Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia, Isaac is a surprisingly good example. He was tricked by Kincaid, his teacher from Ranger school, into working for Team Dim Sun, thinking that they were the good guys. During his time there, he made the Miniremo units you have to fight against throughout the game, as well as working on most of the Altru Tower's design. (It turned out that Kincaid was only teaching at the school to find the kind of genius that could do those things.) He was understandably hit hard when he found this out. To make matters worse, it was Kincaid who broke it to him, and not too kindly, either. A short Heroic BSOD ensues. It Gets Worse, though—afterwards, his little sister Melody is kidnapped by Team Dim Sun and used as bait to get him to finish the machine. In the end, though, he seems to be just fine.
- Sakura from Fate Stay Night, as revealed in the game's final route, Heaven's Feel.
- Iji does this to the titular character, who somehow, despite an increasing guilt complex, hallucinations, and one of the only two humans she knows isn't dead, remains sane... Until Asha kills Dan, at which point she throughly becomes Psych Ward material and convinces herself he's still alive. Thankfully, this event isn't set in stone, in which case she remains sane. Ish.
- Neverwinter Nights: Aribeth. Fenthick's death causes her to go from patriotic, god-loving Paladin to god-forswearing general of the Always Chaotic Evil Old Ones.
- The above, while certainly not a high point for the said character, is only the beginning. Dread Queen Morag's sending false visions of her god abandoning her and the ensuing self-doubt/loathing is likely much more damaging to her already weakened psyche. So much for the Paladin's high will save...
- Lili from Senko No Ronde is such a case. Apparently having been given to a laboratory by her family prior to the events of the game she still acts rather cute at first. She's shy, very insecure and easily scared... until she battles Ernula and it triggers something within her, causing a 180° turn in her personality and transforming her into an insane, blood-thirsty killing machine obsessed with beautifully destroying everything she can. As she gains an utterly evil look and an insane laughter she first starts by just beating up foes until she eventually resorts to even attacking her own comrades to satisfy her urge to destroy. She returns back to normal though when Mika defeats her in combat and she dies.
- Fatal Frame series take it bad, canonically giving all the female protagonists sad endings regardless of how much they had to go through. This is even part of the plot in the third game, where we see the two previous protagonists still suffering for losing their loved ones, and because of that they get cursed!
- Final Fantasy VI - Terra starts out the game pretty much broken. Celes tries to commit suicide after finding herself alone (Cid is dead or dying then) on a deserted island.
- In Final Fantasy IX, poor Princess Garnet suffers so many traumas in a short space in time like watching her mother die, becoming the queen and never being able to see her love Zidane again, only to have her kingdom nearly destroyed by Bahumat that she goes completely mute for a good section of the game.
- And let's not even start with Vivi. Finds out he's a prototype model of mindless magical soldiers, watches his own kind get killed or sacrificed like cannon fodder, and then learns that all the black mages have a very short lifespan and his time could come any moment. No wonder he's The Woobie.
- Silent Hill: Alessa.
- Gwen from Guild Wars, you first meet her at the beginning of the first campaign Prophecies as a cute, cheerful and lovely little girl, soon after her's (and your's too) hometown is destroyed by the Charr and Gwen's fate is unknown, until years pass and you meet her again as a young woman in the expansion pack Eye of the North, it is revealed that she was brutally tortured and enslaved by the Charr and she bitterly harbors hate and desire of revenge against them.
- Tales Of Rebirth had this done to Hilda Rhambling. First off, she's been branded as an impure because she's a Half Human Hybrid, so she went out of her way to hide that fact, with Nice Hat and tearing up her horn. However, after a failure in her job, Tohma blew her cover away and gleefully boasted on how dirty she is. If that wasn't enough, later in the game, just when Hilda could have come to terms with her estranged mother, she made a Heroic Sacrifice in front of her, killed by Tohma, and after she realized she never once called her 'mother' and she's now dead, she literally broke down crying. Truly one of Tales Series' biggest woobies.
- Schala from Chrono Trigger fits a sufficient portion of this bill, what with her entire world being destroyed by the insane ambitions of her mother and Chrono getting vaporized right in front of her by Lavos, knowing full well that none of it would have happened had she simply refused to power up the Mammon Machine. The despair this sent her into lead her to become one with Lavos and give rise to the Time Devourer, effectively making her Woobie, Destroyer of ALL EXISTENCE.
- I'd say Lyude from Baten Kaitos is a good candidate. Let's see...yes, he's real cute, he's got red hair, and a somewhat naive and/or innocent view on the world, claiming he stands for justice and all. I will try to explain best I can on the "Break the Cutie".
- It always appeared to me that he had shaky confidence, but after he gets hypnotized by one of the Big Bad's men (not sure when it happened, but it happened), causing the group to lose a valuable Plot Coupon, he gets pretty depressed. To paraphrase his words "What should I do? I can't return to my homeland...but they used me. Manipulated my thoughts as a tool for their plans. Why would I even want to go back?". And his little bouts of depression don't stop there.
- When we finally reach said big bad empire, we meet his foster nurse Almarde, and his brother and sister...only to see, in a span of not even five minutes, Lyude unable to return to his brother and sister's side (who were threatening him at gunpoint), and Almarde get fatally shot and die in Lyude's arms. And this is someone who supposedly is his ACTUAL mother! That's another blow to his confidence.
- Finally, much later on into the game, we learn of a phantom ship with ghosts calling out to Lyude. When the group goes to visit said phantom ship, it's filled with the ghosts of Lyude's old friends and fellow Imperial solders. They constantly put the blame on Lyude, accusing him of betraying Alfard and leaving his former family and friends to die. The ghost of his former commander terribly chews him out. The ghosts of his older brother and sister very much start the breaking of Lyude, saying he was always hated by them and unworthy of their attention.
- ...And finally...the fake ghost of Almarde shows up herself, saying terrible things to him. Then she teams up with the former commander, his brother and sister, and tell Lyude that he is a coward and has no right to love or be loved by anyone. Poor kid breaks down and actually cries, asking through tears what he should do. The fake Almarde ghost nearly pulls Lyude into the dark side...until the ghost of the real Almarde shows up, saving Lyude from any more break-ness just in the nick of time. Cue a huge monster showing up, a monster that is a manesfestation of Lyude's self-doubt, self-hate, low-confidence, and broken status.
- In the Galactic Civilizations backstory, Drengin do this to Torians.
- Kingdom Hearts does this to several characters, most notable Roxas and Xion.
Web Comics
- Name just one Web Comic which has gone into Cerebus Syndrome that hasn't done this once, at least temporarily. I dare you.
- Early webcomic Roomies is probably responsible for this, when it broke Joyce Brown by showing porn to her (yeah). Years later in It's Walky, Joyce isn't so innocent, but thanks to some convenient Applied Phlebotinum, she can't remember the incident and still thinks it was something absolutely horrible.
- Jack has this in spades, to the point of ridiculousness.
- 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.
- The Order of the Stick had 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.
- What about the Therkla arc? The entire story of that (once the titular character comes in) is Elan being punished for the naďve loyalty he shows to Haley, up to and including Therkla dying rather than living without Elan. What's surprising is how he comes out.
- Sluggy Freelance had a six-month storyline apparently dedicated to accomplishing this.
- Which arc was this? Was it the dimension-swapped universe with AltZoe? the Oceans Unmoving arc for the carib or the human? (although the human was more of a ph3ar t3h cute ones than a broken cutie) Or was it the arc where Oasis learns about... well, pretty much everything in her past? Or maybe there was this one arc with Aylee, I'll have to check my notes... Pete's a really big fan of this trope, about the only unbroken cutie in that series is Kiki, and she tends to be broken by watching sad movies (even when only sad after application of Fridge Logic).
- Are we forgetting about the "Y 2 K" arc now?
- Dellyn Goblinslayer of Goblins puts the hapless goblin Fumbles through a brutal torture session, climaxing in carving the word "Monster" upon his forehead. The next time he is seen, Fumbles is shown to be mentally broken and mute.
- Luna starts out like this in Dominic Deegan, and gradually gets better. Currently, she's unbreakable, even though almost every villanous character who knows about her past has tried to rebreak her. Nimmel becomes this for quite some time, but, again, gets better. Actually, almost every major character in DD has come fairly close to breaking but has either been able to get better or are able to pull themselves together at the very brink.
- In No Rest for the Wicked, both Red and Clare had break the cutie backstories.
- The Cyantian Chronicles: Jules gets the wrong end of this in No Angel. Although she really isn't the cutest of cuties, she still qualifies. She gets better.
- The entire series of Zebra Girl is one long, protracted exercise in Breaking the Cutie, followed by the consequences.
Web Original
- This trope is not only performed brutally and horrifically in Broken Saints, it's part of the Big Bad's plan: Shandala is raised in paradise by a loving, nurturing family, then taken away from said paradise and had bad thing after bad thing happen to her, all so that her empathic abilities would become fully realized, and used to the Big Bad's advantage.
- Himei from Sailor Nothing is a "cutie that already has been broken".
- Want to see a cutie and Technical Pacifist break onscreen? Watch the end of Act II of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, an online Supervillain Musical by Joss Whedon. (online only between 15.-20. July 2008!) Meet Dr. Horrible, struggling geeky gadgeteer supervillain, and his archnemesis Captain Hammer, corporate tool and Jerk Jock super"hero", who regularly and casually beats up Dr. Horrible and then steals his girl. But when he finally snaps, Dr. Horrible learns that Evil Feels Good.
- For a Let's Play example: Deceased Crab's playthrough of Eversion slowly but surely tramautizes the normally happy-go-lucky LPer.
- In LessThanThree Comics' Brat Pack, resident Cutie, Pixel, tries to take on the psychopathic villain with a grudge, Gauss, all alone, while her teammates go home to change into their uniforms. Naturally, when they find out who she's fighting (the team's precog only knew something big was about to happen), they rush back, but are too late, Gauss and his own teammate Helix, a sadistic psychic, had already done their worst to Pixel, leaving her a sobbing mess.
Western Animation
- Butters from South Park snapping and becoming Professor Chaos. He seems to revert back rather easily, though.
- 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)
- Terra from the animated Teen Titans started out cracked, then met Slade, who did his best to finish breaking her.
- Nerissa tried to do this to Hay Lin in the second-season WITCH episode "T is for Trauma", first by exploiting the fact that Hay Lin's grandmother Yan Lin had just betrayed her (though it was actually a brainwashed clone), secondly by using her good looks (in her youthful Uncanny Valley Girl form) to seduce Hay Lin's boyfriend Eric away (though again, she had to brainwash him), and thirdly, by trying to make Hay Lin feel insecure about her new braces. She finishes all this up by trying to kill Eric, but Hay Lin ends up pulling herself together and saving him.
- Drakken, Monkey Fist and Killigan nearly do this to Kim Possible. When they go after Ron however, she breaks them.
- 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 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, which he fails to do... but is saved by the still-broken Tim 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.
- Toki Wartooth from Metalocalypse. Man, the second season broke that cutie all to hell. And yet, being an Adult Swim show, this is all somehow played for (very dark) laughs.
- Flippy from Happy Tree Friends starts out as a cute, friendly, fun loving bear but whenever he sees or hears something that reminds him of the Vietnam War he transforms into a cruel, murderous, psychopath.
- Happens to SpongeBob a lot.
- Aelita from Code Lyoko gets this treatment over the course of the series. She never actually breaks (although she gets quite close to suicide in the Season 2 finale), but dang, the poor girl's been to hell and back. And it doesn't get much better in the end, when XANA is finally defeated... at the cost of her father's life.
- Averted in The Powerpuff Girls. Him seems hellbent on destroying the Powerpuffs (especially Bubbles) mentally and came close a few times (the episodes "Speed Demon", "Power Noia", and "All Chalked Up" come to mind). However he failed everytime.
- Arguably, Wall-E. Let's see, the main character gets rejected by his love, multiple times, and ends up risking his life to help her; said girl is called dysfunctional, is classified a rogue robot, and watches the robot she finally loves get squashed; and that's not counting the myraid of possibilities in the repair ward.
- 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. Spare Zhao's life? Zhao tries to kill him- several times. Help the little boy bullied by thuggish soldiers? Whole village turns on him because he has to resort to Firebending to do so. Share a moment of introspection with a fellow traveler? Said traveler tries to recruit him, then stalks and attacks him. Offer a bit of compassion to a fellow prisoner? Seems to work, as Katara offers to heal him, then Aang shows up, and Katara runs to him. Well, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
- This Troper feels that this is what the first arc of the X-Men cartoon was trying to do to Jubilee. The Unspoken Backstory 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.
Real Life
- Sad story: Eliza Emily Donnithorne, stubborn rich girl 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 marriage 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.
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