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Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles while writing Das Kapital
And Gauguin, he buggered off, man, and he went all tropical
And Philip Larkin, he stuck it out in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas, he died drunk in St. Vincent's Hospital.
— Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "There She Goes, My Beautiful World"
Sometimes you just have a bad day.
The people who tell stories are just like anyone else. The difference, though, is that if something in their life goes all wahoonie-shaped, they have someone to take it out on — the fictional characters that inhabit their created worlds. Thus, you occasionally end up with a story taking a sharp left turn into the author's psyche. Characters can die left and right, the teenaged hero's schoolteacher will be a sadistic tormentor, and no one's love life has any chance of turning out well.
Note that this doesn't necessarily make it bad; some shows have achieved their highest ratings in the middle of a bout of Creator Breakdown, and it would be hard to argue that angst can't help you make some really good music. See also Reality Subtext. However, look out for the Writer On Board. It can also lead to an overload of Wangst or Deus Angst Machina if the creator is really determined to make their creation suffer in their name.
Contrast with Author Existence Failure where the creator of a work just dies leaving a work in an incomplete state.
Of course, it's hard to tell when Creator Breakdown is happening, and when it's a case of Genre Shift for some artistic reason; you shouldn't put an example here unless you have it from the mouth of the creator themselves, or someone who knew them well. That said...
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Probably the most famous instance of this in anime is Hideaki Anno and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The latter half of that show and the subsequent movies are a testament to his depression and conflict with the otaku lifestyle at the time; in the end, all of that eventually merged with Gainax's serious financial difficulties to create the infamous, dark and Mind Screwing last two episodes.
- Which is interesting because the first half of the show was created off of the depression, but the latter half was made while he was in therapy.
- And it shows. The first half is moody, but it's quiet moody- the "I've got problems and I don't want to talk about them" moody. Shinji in particular is a depressed, quiet, emotionless blob for the first half. Then comes the second half, where Anno starts his therapy sessions. Shinji becomes suddenly competent and gets eaten twice. Asuka gets mindraped. Misato finally ends things with Kaji and spends the rest of the series crying. It's like all the bottled emotion in the first half gets let loose in the second. And then there's the movie...
- When one starts taking antidepressants, the problem is that they restore your volition before your equanimity — you're still depressed, but now you're actually capable of doing something about it. The risk for suicidal, self-destructive or otherwise destructive behavior actually increases, therefore, for a few weeks. Something tells this troper that we have an explanation for Evangelion in here somewhere.
- FLCL was then reportedly created by Kazuya Tsurumaki as a vacation for the staff afterwards — Anno's only contribution to the series was providing the voice of a non-anthropomorphic cat. Some people even consider this to be too much.
- Interestingly, this trope is inverted in Rebuild of Evangelion. Hideaki Anno is a much different person than he used to be years ago, and now that he is not only sane, but also happily married and the director of one of Japan's most successful franchises ever, the characters are slightly saner and braver (especially Shinji), and the series' general tone seems to hold a "Light at the end of the tunnel" mentality. It is rumored that the new movies will end in a different way when compared to the famous past movie...
- Many tropers on this site once said that you could write an entire psychology thesis just by watching Evangelion. Well, it appears you could evaluate Anno's psychology just by watching the various Evangelion media.
- The other (in)famous example is Yoshiyuki Tomino. Reportedly, the famed director struggled with depression for decades, and this was expressed by the high body count of many of the series he directed, such as Space Runaway Ideon, Aura Battler Dunbine, Zeta Gundam, and the twisted Victory Gundam. Not surprisingly, this earned Tomino the nickname "Kill Em All". In his defense; however, he likes to do what he can to insure that his series will not have a sequel.
- The most obvious comparison is the way females are treated in Victory Gundam, and the way they are treated in "Turn A Gundam'' which was made after the depression. In Victory Gundam, even the toughest and more competent women are killed more or less regularly, while in Turn A, they are usually shown as just as bold, strong, and caring... but two of them are competent pilots despite using grunt suits not made for land.
- Supposedly Turn A's protagonist was to be a female, prior to Executive Meddling - explaining the high amount of crossdressing a bit.
- A couple of years before Bleach, its author Tite Kubo had another series titled "Zombie Powder", which only lasted four volumes. The series was cancelled because of its low popularity, but it was implied that a nervous breakdown the author had also influenced in the decision (the fact that the manga was left with an abrupt end may be a clue). Kubo himself acknowledged it, in a veiled manner, in the flaps on the last volume published.
- A number of fans seem to believe this is the reason why Bleach is the way it is. Zombie Powder was far darker, had western themes (and guns), a smaller cast and people died. While Bleach is all Japanese theme, a massive cast and "Nobody dies in Bleach".
- Of course, with the exception of Orihime, Chad and Uryuu, all of the "main cast" are already dead. Including Ichigo. And his father. And his sisters, although only arguably.
- Kubo's original design for the
shinigami soul reapers was to have the men wearing suits, the women all black school uniforms, and have them all as gunslingers.
- Go Nagai has suggested that he gave the anime adaptation of Devilman Lady a depressing ending (nowhere near as bad as the original Devilman) as "revenge" against his fanbase for preferring Mazinger Z to Devilman, his personal favorite.
- In Universe example: In Princess Tutu, Drosselmeyer traps the entire town of Kinkan in a story after the villagers began to fear his story-turning-into-reality powers and cut off his hands. That story? Written with his own blood from the stumps of his arms where his hands were cut off. Which, of course, explains why the man is so insane and obsessed with tragedy.
- The author of Bitter Virgin, Kusunoki Kei, explains that a character's stillborn child in the story was... inspired seems the wrong word here... that she wrote about this, after her own miscarriage. As it is often with Creator Breakdowns, the writing has emotional honesty and power, which stands out in the story's somewhat melodramatic tone.
- In Universe example: Yoshino of Clannad. Meeting a group of kids in a hospital that are fans of his music made him question his singing for his own sake, preventing him from writing new songs. Then, when the biggest of said fans committed a huge crime, he blamed himself and let that bitterness crawl into his work. It eventually led to a downward spiral where he left the music scene a broken man.
- Osamu Tezuka's, in the wake of personal betrayal, having his manga altered in serialization and anime adaptations, and health problems. His stories always had a certain 'edge', but you can see him subverting and deconstructing the ever living life out of some of his previously innocent characters and archetypes. The most blatant product of this is Alabaster.
- Yukito Kishiro suffered one, leading to the abrupt and confusing ending of Gunnm (or as it's known in the US, Battle Angel Alita). After trying his hand at a new series which sadly never caught on, he returned to his staple franchise and picked up where he left off, rewriting the events that concluded first installment.
- A particularly ugly and recent, messy example for Kentarou Yabuki, the creator of Black Cat and illustrator for To Love Ru. The cancellation of the latter manga was abrupt due to his recent divorce. It's not exactly easy to continue writing a story of the sweet and lovely Girl Next Door when the woman she's based on eventually turns out to be a cheating-lying skank, who tries to steal your life-savings AND your three-year-old daughter after stealing your heart and giving it to a wannabe-musician, who THEN sues you for monetary rights to the sweet girl who's nothing like the hateful whore that she is.
- One Piece fandom has speculated that the business with Portgas D. Rouge, Ace, and Roger was at least partially a product of Oda's anxiety over his wife's pregnancy and himself becoming a father.
- On a more humorous note, it's been joked (and outright stated) by the anime staff that the reason the amount of fanservice spiked upward was because of Oda getting married and being horny for his very attractive wife all the time, to the displeasure of fans who liked the general lack of such things in the manga early on. For a guy who prefers not emphasizing romance that's not an obvious huge joke in his stories, he sure is a massive softie for his family.
Comic Books
- What happened to Dave Sim — more than once — while writing Cerebus The Aardvark. With increasing frequency, he would halt the plot in order to lecture at length about his new religion/theory-of-everything that he created from equal parts Old Testament, conspiracy theory and vast galloping misogyny
 . Any characters or plot points that didn't fit his new view on life were hammered flat until they did. Note that this is unrelated to Cerebus Syndrome, which occurred to the comic long before his breakdown.
- There was also the time when he legitimately went nuts and had to go to the loony bin.
- Grant Morrison made a point of feeding his own personal life and interests into The Invisibles, including making a deformed villain based on the miscarriage that his girlfriend had. Weirdly, this also went the other way; Morrison is a magician and believed that in The Invisibles he was creating a giant magical work that would reshape his life. Whether or not this is the case, there were some odd moments of synchronicity — like the time his author insert character, King Mob, was shot in the chest, and Morrison was subsequently hospitalised with a collapsed lung.
- He then wrote the character all better. So did Morrison, oddly enough.
- Morrison is somewhat of a master of this trope, as he wrote about the death of his cat being used in his ground-breaking Animal Man series. In issue 26, he notes how as a creator he simultaneously feels the pain and relishes the opportunity to craft this into a story.
- Morrison subsequently deliberately wallowed in negativity (resulting in at least one suicide attempt) in order to write the very dark comedy The Filth. Morrison saw it as a way of passing through the Kabbalistic abyss that represents the darkness at the depths of the human heart and mind, but he's like that.
- Morrison also admitted that personal tragedies contributed to the very dark "Planet X" arc of New X-Men.
- Morrison is currently inverting this trope, as writing Batman has pushed him to exercise harder than he ever has in his life.
- Let's just say Grant Morrison... enjoys mirroring real life.
- James O'Barr created the comic The Crow to deal with his grief over losing his fiancée Bethany, who was killed by a drunk driver.
- Steve Ditko is the revered co-creator of the Marvel Universe among other creations. However, when he does not have a collaborator like Stan Lee to restrain him, his later stories tend to be barely more than self-righteous lectures about Objectivism.
- When Peter David started writing The Incredible Hulk, he promised that he wouldn't kill off Betty Ross, Hulk's long-time love interest, partly because the character was one of his wife's favourites. Not long after, he and his wife went through a painful divorce. Not long after that, Betty Ross met a rather painful end in the comics. David has since come out and admitted that the strip was more than a little influenced by his real-life circumstances and, had things happened differently (not limited to the fact that he was soon taken off the book), he would have let Betty live.
- Geoff Johns' sister died in the crash of TWA Flight 800. Surprisingly, nothing horrible happened to the character based on her, the Star-Spangled Kid (now known as Stargirl). However, the situation did inspire an influential arc of JSA, in which Atom Smasher loses his mother in an airplane crash, then substitutes the villain Extant — who killed Al's godfather — in place of his mother after a big reality-altering plot implodes. This led to the revitalization of Black Adam and the series' arguable high point, Black Reign.
- Mystek of the Justice League Task Force was Thrown Out The Airlock due to a tag-team combo of Executive Meddling and the resulting Creator Breakdown. As writer Christopher Priest explains at his website:
We eventually introduced a character named Mystek, but I killed her off when her miniseries was not approved. Mystek was supposed to be a creator-owned character, developed under a first-look deal, and I was instructed to put her into JLTF to introduce her to the fans in preparation for her miniseries. Then there was no series, so I shoved her out an airlock in JLTF #32.
- The creators of Superman: Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world's greatest hero. There's a story there.
- Adventures of Barry Ween creator Judd Winick wrote a touching graphic novel about his friendship with fellow MTV's Real World co-star Pedro Zamora and Pedro's eventual death, Pedro And Me. Since then, much of Winick's work - particular at DC Comics - has consisted of Very Special Issues involving HIV and homosexuality.
- Winick also married his MTV's Real World co-star Pam Ling in 2001. Since then, he has also made an effort to introduce more minority characters in his comics and to utilize underrated minority heroes, particularly Asian females. While this would normally be commendable, Winick's attempts at increasing diversity have been almost universally ham-fisted, with one of the most grievous examples being Green Lantern #150, in which Kyle Rayner learns that his long-lost father is a Mexican immigrant... despite his father having an established history as being a deep-cover government agent who worked in Ireland and Kyle having already met his very-Caucasian uncle.
- Jack Chick went through a Creator Breakdown that, for all intents and purposes, is still going on. He suffered a stroke in '96, and his ability to draw has slowly deteriorated ever since.
- Rob Schrab's difficult breakup and struggles with legal ownership of his characters as well as difficulties in getting his work adapted into other media combined to completely derail Scud: The Disposable Assassin towards the end of its initial run; the series starts out as a slightly surreal action comedy, but gets completely derailed near the end and concludes rather abruptly with the protagonist's girlfriend butchered by sadistic angels, and a general theme of "there is no god." The 2008 series reboot is much less bitter and has a much more satisfying ending.
- Joe Quesada and One More Day. In some interviews, he notes that Spider Man being married is equivalent to growing old and dying. So we know what he thinks of his marriage. Quesada also explained in later interviews that he would have done anything to save his Missing Mom, who died when he was young from cancer. Joe can't sacrifice his wife to resurrect his mother in real-life, so he has Spider-Man do it by proxy. While it's more or less understandable to have Quesada grieving after his mom, well... THUD!
- Skewered by Randy Milholland in this Super Stupor strip.
- That first panel has nothing to do with quoting this particular strip, eh? :D
- It can't be a coincidence that Carl Barks wrote Back to the Klondike — the first allusion to a tragic romance in Scrooge McDuck's past — right after his divorce from his second wife. It would certainly explain his "What Was I Thinking?" reaction to the Unfortunate Implications he didn't even realize he'd implied until the censors pointed them out.
- After the death of Jeph Loeb's son, Sam, there was a notable change in the theme and mood of his comics writing. He used one of his scripts and created "Sam story" comics for Superman/Batman, and then retired from comics. Later Joe Quesada convinced Loeb to return to the industry and work for Marvel. Since then Loeb wrote a mini-series about how several characters mourn Sam's death through the proxy that is Captain America, dropped a steaming load of Wall Banger onto the Incredible Hulk series, and is currently tearing through the Ultimate universe with Tomino-like reckless abandon. This Troper sees all of this as a way to say how much he's pissed off at the idea of a world that doesn't contain his son.
- Hergé wrote Tintin in Tibet largely as a sort of therapy, to resolve the emotional issues he had following his divorce and the distressing dreams he'd been having that involved vast white landscapes. It is widely considered to be his masterpiece.
- Everything Ivan Brunetti has ever written. It's a wonder that he's still alive and drawing.
Film
- Parodied in the movie A Mighty Wind, where folk music duo Mitch & Mickey broke up in a particularly messy romantic dysfunct, and Mitch proceeded to release several solo albums with titles and cover art demonstrating an increasingly absurd degree of emotional breakdown.
- Parodied (and expertly summarized) in The Wedding Singer. Robbie's breakdown occurred while he was writing a love song for the woman who would later leave him at the altar; the lyrics and style of that song start with fluffy romance, switch suddenly to extreme rage, dissolve into shocked sadness, and finally end with despairing "kill me now" Wangst.
- Further emphasised in the musical of The Wedding Singer — immediately after Linda leaves him (and after the above song, aptly titled "Somebody Kill Me"), Robbie and his band play at a wedding. The set begins with a half-assed, drunken attempt at the cheery opening number, and dissolves into a venomous rock song led by Robbie about the horrors of love, called "Casualty of Love" — sung directly to the bride and groom, with the rest of the wedding party joining in. And it's sung to the tune of "I Love Rock And Roll".
- The movie contains a similar scene, only the song of choice is "Love Stinks". It eventually results in the father of the bride kicking his ass and throwing him in a bin.
- After going through an emotionally painful divorce and the resulting custody battle over his daughter, David Cronenberg made The Brood, where experimental psychiatry enables the Author Avatar protagonist's psychotic wife Nola to manifest her mental trauma physically as deformed mutant children who abduct the Author Avatar's daughter and kill anyone whom Nola views as personal enemies. Does This Remind You Of Anything?
- Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay for Scarface while trying to kick his cocaine habit.
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was produced while George Lucas was going through a divorce. Lucas has admitted that this may be why the film was made so much Darker And Edgier than its predecessor.
- That and Lucas believing that said decision would replicate the success of The Empire Strikes Back. Needless to say it didn't.
- Martin Scorsese came to the decision to make Raging Bull at the behest of actor and close friend Robert De Niro when Scorsese had a life-threatening cocaine addiction. The tone of this movie with its themes of sin, punishment and redemption is largely inspired by the director's struggles to get his life back in order.
- Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth is more bloody than other versions (and with a way darker ending than the play — and the play doesn't exactly end cheerfully itself, let us note) because it was made after his pregnant wife was murdered by the Manson Family.
- The film The Fall features this regarding its Story Within A Movie. First, when Roy believes he's taken a fatal overdose of morphine, the story he's telling goes completely off the rails, including the Mystic within the story telling him that suicide isn't the answer through his Author Avatar, and Alexandria suddenly inserting herself into the story to rescue the cast from torture and death. Then, later, after Alexandria falls and injures herself trying to get more morphine for him, and the story stops being a way to manipulate her, and starts being an outlet for his depression and self-loathing, it turns very dark, very fast... only narrowly avoiding a Kill Em All Downer Ending due to Alexandria's influence.
- Almost every possible form of musical-related Creator Breakdown (as listed below) is parodied in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, in which almost every song Dewey Cox writes is a direct (and blatantly obvious) reflection of his current problems and emotional state at the time, from his complicated relationship with his father to how much he wants to sleep with his back-up singer to a Brian Wilson-writing-Smile style emotional collapse. It all culminates in his final song, "Beautiful Ride", which is an epic summing up of everything he has done and learned in his life to that point. He dies literally three minutes after performing it.
- Legend has it that James Cameron came up with the idea of The Terminator while sick in the hospital in Italy and suffering nightmares.
- Played for laughs in Hamlet 2; the Shakespearean sequel is very clearly a thinly-veiled representation of protagonist Dana Marschz's various hang-ups and neuroses, most particularly his difficult relationship with his (unseen) father. He sorts himself out by completely mangling the original Hamlet (which is oddly appropriate, in a warped way, given how relationships with fathers and father figures are a central subtext of the original) and casting himself as Jesus in the process.
- The scene in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film adaptation of Devdas where Paro's mother is ridiculed in the middle of a party was based on a recurring nightmare of his about seeing his mother humiliated.
- The majority interpretation of Antichrist is that True Art Is Offensive, but there have been arguments that the director's admitted depression was deeper than anybody quite realized. Much, much deeper.
Literature
- Louisa May Alcott broke down while writing the sequels to Little Women with the death of her father and sister and broke the Fourth Wall in the last paragraph of the last sequel:
"It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. But as that somewhat melodramatic conclusion might shock my gentle readers, I will refrain."
- Douglas Adams himself admitted that he let his own mood affect the fifth Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book. While the fourth (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish) had been a giddily happy entry in which Adams brought back Earth and let Arthur Dent fall in love and have a lot of sex, the fifth (Mostly Harmless) was a dark and morbid affair where Adams destroyed Earth again, made Arthur's girlfriend disappear from the universe in a bizarre misunderstanding of the nature of space-time, devised two different realities in which Trillian is a miserable cynic, and eventually killed all the main characters in every possible universe. Adams later regretted this book and was thinking of fixing everything in a sixth, but his death prevented this.
- On the other hand, Adams has also acknowledged he was depressed while writing So Long and Thanks, which featured very little of the other regular characters, or the typical Hitchhiker's style, and included a moment where Adams tells any readers who would rather see Marvin than Arthur's love story that they can just skip to the last chapter "which has Marvin in it" (he dies, though with a good sendoff). While Mostly Harmless may be more of a downer in the long run, it could be argued that it also feels more like a Hitchhiker's novel.
- Some years later when the later books in the series were adapted for radio, the end of Mostly Harmless was changed to a more upbeat, though still Adams-esque, conclusion.
- In fact, Adams had these a lot; one episode of the radio series was written while he was very annoyed about the number of shoe shops in Oxford Street and the impossibility of finding a pair he liked in any of them. The episode is largely about the economic concept of the Shoe Event Horizon, beyond which it becomes impossible for any aspiring businessman to open a shop that sells anything other than ill-fitting shoes, causing the collapse of a planet's entire economy. A much shorter version of the rant appeared in the novel The Restaurant At The End of the Universe; the Corrupt Corporate Executive Hig Hurtenflurst, who represents a thinly disguised version of the British Shoe Corporation, does not.
- Another episode featured a space flight delayed nine hundred years waiting to be supplied with lemon-soaked paper napkins by a civilization that no longer exists. This was based on a flight Adams took from London to Leeds, which was delayed half an hour because they had forgotten to load drinks onto the plane.
- Even the series famous fixation with towels came to exist because of one of these: Adams forgot his own towel while he was on a vacation in Greece.
- The character of Claudia the vampire child in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles was originally written as a response to Rice's young daughter's death from leukemia.
- Rice explained in an interview that she had not realized she was doing that. She did not notice the connection between the character and her daughter until someone else pointed it out to her.
- Rice very vocally disowned the Vampire Chronicles after a (re-)conversion to Roman Catholicism. She shocked pretty much everyone with her next series of novels: Christ the Lord. Yes, from the author of Interview with a Vampire.
- Stephen King states (in On Writing) that his novel Misery was the direct result of his battle with drugs and alcohol; Annie Wilkes, the killer nurse, was a metaphor for his ongoing substance abuse.
- King also has characters in The Shining, The Tommyknockers, and The Dark Tower going through such believable agonies as alcoholics (all three) and drug addicts (the latter) that this troper is still amazed that King didn't figure out what his subconscious was trying to tell him until Misery.
- In King's later books, his characters have gone through horrible accidents and have suffered a long and painful recovery process, which are described in vivid detail. Might have had something to do with Stephen King having been run over by a Dodge Caravan in the summer of 1999. Which he recounted in the final Dark Tower book, staging it so the characters saved his life. And one died in the process, which King states he didn't intend to happen. It's a little confusing.
- Wasn't it a Plymouth Voyager?
- He actually openly acknowledges that Jonesie getting hit by the car at the beginning of Dreamcatcher was his way of dealing with his own car accident.
- And let's not forget his inclusion of a similar accident for one of the main characters in his execrable version of Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom for American TV, Kingdom Hospital - in spite of the fact that no character in the original goes through anything similar to the accident. (Were it not for the horribleness of the accident, it would almost be enough to make you quote Glinda in Wicked: "It's just a pair of shoes...let it go.")
- Gulliver's change from a cheery optimist to a cynical misanthrope at the end of Gullivers Travels is said to be reflective of Jonathan Swift's increasing mental instability.
- J.K. Rowling has admitted that Professor Severus Snape, the bullying teacher of Harry Potter, was based on a much-disliked teacher from her own childhood.
- Also, quite a bit of her Kill Em All mentality latter in the series, particularly towards parents, seems to derive from the death of her mother while she was just writing the first book.
- Might as well add Harry's loneliness and constant longing for his parents as a metaphor for Rowling's grief. Also, Harry's mother sacrificial love for him was what protected him for years. Reportedly JK was closest to her mother and had a difficult relationship with her father... A way to honor her mother's memory? A Breakdown for Voldy's parents?
- That WOULD explain why it's explicitly Harry's MOTHER'S sacrifice that grants him magical protection despite that fact that his father also died to protect him in the exact same incident. It would also tend to explain why, as revealed in flashbacks, James Potter was at best a bit of a jerk and at worst an attempted murderer in high school while Lily was apparently a saint since birth.
- She claimed that early drafts of the first novel treated the death of Harry's parents much more callously than the finished article. The change was attributed to the death of JKR's own mother.
- Steven Brust's Dragaera novels, especially the Vlad series, are rife with this.
- What happens when the author's wife leaves him? We get treated to two really depressing books where the main character and his wife slowly grow apart and finally separate, after which we get treated to a really weird book where Vlad is Walking The Earth trying to find his place in the world.
- How about when the author's friend gets killed by the Real Life mafia? Suddenly, the fantasy mafia the main character belongs to stops being an amusing platform for Vlad to display his Heroic Sociopathy, and becomes a dangerous and evil organization that Vlad must get out of.
- Edgar Allan Poe thought the best theme to write about was the premature death of a beautiful woman. He married his 13-year-old-second-cousin at age 26. Her death was the basis for The Raven and Annabelle Lee (and Ligeia, and probably The Fall of the House of Usher, and a dozen more stories). He was also suicidal (possibly bipolar), an opium addict and an alcoholic, possibly explaining his obsession with madness and death. He also used hallucinogenic mushrooms and absinthe. He became a respected and very successful author yet died in poverty of what was long believed to be alcohol poisoning (recent analysis has identified rabies as a more likely culprit). But at least it meant plenty of thoroughly creepy, spine-tingling horror stories for us.
- Poe's wife actually died of TB, as well as his mother and stepmother.
- And the idea that the premature death of a beautiful woman was a wonderful theme wasn't just restricted to Poe, but is one of the main tropes of 19th century literature. Poe's work may have been innovative but in this he was completely mainstream.
- Also, keep in mind that much of what we "know" about Poe's life was invented by an enemy of his, Rufus Griswold, who for some reason was named in Poe's will as his literary executor and was only too happy to paint the author as an insane junkie. Poe still probably wasn't terribly well-adjusted, though — as evidenced by the fact that he trusted Griswold.
- Unless, of course, he was counting on Griswold doing exactly that in order to boost the popularity of his work. My Death Is Just The Beginning?
- Famous Danish playwright and writer Hans Christian Andersen led a depressing life (father dead, having to support himself and his mother, bullied by teachers and students alike in school, being dyslexic, probably gay, his early works failing to sell...), and that's likely the reason why some of his literary works (The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Story of a Mother, The Little Match Girl, The Steadfast Tin Soldier...) are so, so depressing.
- Randy Shilts averted Creator Breakdown in the process of penning And The Band Played On, his infamous chronicle on the history of the AIDS virus. Shilts was aware that he probably received the virus and went to his doctor for a test. He told his doctor not to notify him of the results before his book was complete because he was fearful that an HIV+ diagnosis would affect his then-ongoing writing process. In 1987, after he completed and submitted his book, he learned that he was indeed HIV+. Shilts died six years after the book was published (and a year after an HBO TV adaptation of his book aired).
- Bram Stoker. This civil-servant-turned-horror-novelist was obsessed with dualities; Dracula contains themes of good vs. evil, beauty vs. ugliness, east vs. west, old vs. young, and technology vs. mysticism. This seems inconsequential until you learn that his first book was The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, published 1879, and that his night-life of boozing and whoring reputedly killed him through syphilis, although this is unconfirmed. See also The Lair of the White Worm for his obsession with pairing beauty with ugliness and other opposites.
- Averted in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (the first true detective novel in the English language, and the one from which Sherlock Holmes picked up its tricks), where the funniest and most biting satire of the 800-page novel was composed from his bed while he was suffering from a painful illness, and after his mother had just died.
- Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby was written to help Palahniuk cope with the murder of his father and the decision of having his killer get the death sentence.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was composed shortly after the death of his mother, whose family had been accused of incest in much the same way as Hester was accused of adultery. Hence the slew of mother-imagery associated with Hester, especially of Hester when with Dimmesdale.
- Hawthorne's ancestor had been a magistrate who sentenced many alleged witches to death during the Salem Witch Trials. Wishing to disassociate himself, he added a w to his name.
- H.P. Lovecraft didn't so much have an author breakdown than he had had the breakdown before he even started writing. In fact, the song "Twitch" by Rudimentary Peni summons it up very nicely.
- Inversion: Narnia film director Andrew Adamson believes how C.S. Lewis' opinion of women improved after his marriage to Joy Davidman-Gresham can be seen in his altered portrayal of female characters. Jill's character, for one, underwent a drastic change between The Silver Chair and The Last Battle, and there was the introduction of Aravis.
- Although after Joy died, Creator Breakdown was played straight; A Grief Observed is like an in-depth study of this trope as well as a result of it. Being separated from his wife after a few short years of a happy marriage was definitely traumatic, especially when you consider she was likely the one of few women he connected with.
- In-story example: In Martin McDonagh's fabulously chilling and inventive play "The Pillowman," the protagonist's parents imprison and torture his brother Michael and allow the protagonist to overhear just so that the protagonist will become a darkly brilliant writer.
- Another in-story example: In Terry Pratchett's short story Final Reward the protagonist, after an argument with his girlfriend, decides to kill off the protagonist of his long-lasting book series, Erdan the Barbarian. Erdan comes to the writer's house as the titular final reward. Hilarity Ensues.
- Reportedly, this is behind the derailment of the Anita Blake character and series from the sarcastic, flippant and chaste heroine and detective noir mystery novels of the first few books to the Horny Devils and, as Publishers Weekly put it, "a case to solve between wild orgies with wereanimals" of recent books: the writer, Laurell K. Hamillton, was going through a bad divorce at the time of the initial breakdown.
- More specifically, the character of Richard is said to be loosely based on Hamilton's now ex husband. The character goes off the rails very abruptly in the book being written right around the time of the divorce. It's only after another half-dozen entries that he's begun to shift back even slightly. Conversely, the character of Micah is allegedly a stand-in for her new boyfriend.
- But... how do you explain the way they "Hooked up" in the original Narcissus in Chains?
- Here's a non-society destroying fact: Lots of people have fantasies like that. If there IS any connection between the character and the real person and Hamillton was projecting on of said fantasies onto the page, there's nothing inherently squicky about it.
- There's also the rumour that the change in narration has more to do with a secret change of writer than with a change in the writer's life.
- Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, has announced that she has ceased work on the fifth novel of the series (a retelling of the first from the hero's perspective) after someone she knew leaked the first 13 chapters online: "If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working..."
- There's also some speculation that the content of Breaking Dawn, in which the heroine gets married, becomes impregnated with a demon half-vampire baby that starts to kill her from the inside, is saved by her husband biting through her womb to birth the baby, which is born with advanced growth and a full set of teeth, is based on Meyer's own experiences as a mother. Coming from a religious, highly-conservative background, she expected motherhood to be the greatest thing that could happen to her in her life, and many think that Bella's experiences were Meyer's way of saying that it wasn't as good as she had to pretend.
- ... Or she's just completely Batshit.
- Seconded
- Many literary historians consider the monster's creation scene in Frankenstein to be an allegory on childbirth. Months before writing the book, Mary Shelley had given birth to a premature, deformed illegitimate child who lived only minutes. Victor Frankenstein's misshapen, partly-formed 'monster' is created in 'filth' and when first brought to life is jaundiced, as most premature newborns are. This allegory may be less obvious to us because most movie adaptations don't follow Shelley's text that closely and turn the creation of the monster into a more scientific and less earthy event than Shelley imagined.
- Alternate theories propose that the monster came out, well... monstrous because Victor created him alone, egotistically, without a female counterpart present during the act of creation.
- Very true, and others even compare the "bringing forth life alone" to masturbation.
- Yet another take is that the message isn't about the monster being monstrous due to only created by man or by 'masturbaton' but because Frankenstein was 'playing god' and doing too good a job at it, hence his finding of his creation hideous, disowning it instead of helping it, and the subtitle of 'the modern prometheus.' Still sparked off by the miscarriage of her child, but rather leading to Shelley's disillusionment with the concept of a loving god.
- The entire career of James Ellroy could be considered an example of the trope. The unsolved murder of his mother when he was ten launched a lifelong obsession with violent crime, particularly that of a sexual nature, which largely centered around the also unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, the infamous "Black Dahlia" case. As well, after the death of his father seven years later he spiraled down into a drug-addicted street thief before turning his life around by pouring his inner demons into novels. In particular, The Black Dahlia is a fictionalized version of the investigation of the Elizabeth Short murder which ends with the killer being found.
- Several novels of Philip K. Dick deal, more or less explicitly, with his own experiences of drug use and mental breakdown. VALIS deals with this directly (almost autobiographically) and many of his other novels contain references to the subjects of drug use, mental instability and the questioning of reality.
- Let's not forget Man in the High Castle,where an author uses the I Ching to help guide his book...in a book Dick wrote with the help of the I Ching. It's that kind of novel.
- William Burroughs allegedly wrote "Naked Lunch" during a drug binge. The text deals with both drug use and homosexuality, neither of which Burroughs was unfamiliar with.
- Will Elliott, the author of The Pilo Family Circus, is a sufferer of schizophrenia. The result? A story about a circus built within a pocket dimension, managed by two feuding mutant brothers in the pay of a race of godlike reptiles that consider humans to be little more than a delicacy and were imprisoned beneath the circus by unknown forces. Oh yeah, and the Circus's latest inhabitant is a young member of the Clown Division, who is steadily losing a fight for control over his own body. Does This Remind You Of Anything?
- Nosaka Akiyuki wrote Grave of the Fireflies out of guilt he was unable to save his younger sister from malnutrition during World War II. His alter-ego Seita dies in September 1945 as a vagrant teen in a subway.
- Tad Williams went through a painful divorce during the writing of the third novel of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and noted in his commentary that he was concerned about it affecting the mood of the story. In a possible aversion, he decided to go with a semi-happy ending rather than the Kill Em All version he had been contemplating.
- Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease, and then wrote Nation, a book about losing faith and salvaging life in the aftermath of a horrible disaster. From the guy who continues to bring you Discworld, there's quite a lot in this book that just isn't funny.
- Several of Pratchett's characters in recent Discworld books have begun to show signs of aging: memory lapses, decreased physical endurance, etc. They tend to keep forging ahead by sheer willpower for as long as possible.
- This trope is Older Than Feudalism: 1st-century-B.C. Roman poet Catullus began his career writing love poems to his girlfriend "Lesbia," and, after she left him for another man, many of his poems had as their subject "Lesbia is a slut."
- It gets better. Some scholars have theorized that the poems for Lesbia were written by a group of likeminded poets, which would make this a Creator Group Breakdown.
- The great 19th century novelist Thomas Hardy wrote increasingly fatalistic novels, to the point that the last two (Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) thoroughly burned him out; combined with the scandalous response the novels provoked in the country at large, it was enough to cause him to quit writing novels for the remaining 28 years of his life (turning his hand to plays and poetry instead).
- Larry Niven explored the pain and difficulty of being a two-pack-a-day smoker by giving several of his characters breathing problems, allergies, and so on.
- Lurlene McDaniel started writing books about dying children as a way of coping with the pain of her child's death. That was in 1985 and she's still at it, so it doesn't seem to be working.
- After the death of his wife Louisa in 1906, and the death of his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law (one of whom was E. W. Hornung, the creator of the literary character Raffles), and his two nephews shortly after World War I, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sank into depression. He found solace supporting Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave. He then wrote The Land of Mist; a novel-length tract justifying the author's conversion to Spiritualism, including the massive Character Derailment of having ultra-rationalist Professor Challenger convert to Spiritualism. There is a suggestion in chapter two that the deaths of "ten million young men" in World War I was punishment by the Central Intelligence for humanity's laughing at the alleged evidence for life after death.
- Mary Shelley's book The Last Man was written after she lost most or all of her friends and family, and consists of her proceeding to kill em all, quite literally, to the point that her narrator was the only person alive on the entire planet Earth. If that's not an example of this trope, I don't know what is.
Live Action TV
- The Friends episode that featured Phoebe thinking her mother has come back to her in cat form was penned by a writer whose own mother had recently died. Other staff writers have said that the script — which earned primarily negative responses from the audience — would not normally have been greenlit, but under the circumstances nobody felt comfortable saying 'no.'
- By her own admission, much of the widely disliked Season 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is a rehashing of that (and last) season's showrunner Marti Noxon's own personal issues.
- An example of the trope in fiction: One episode of Boy Meets World involves Eric dating the aspiring singer/songwriter Corinna (played by real-life singer Leisha Hailey), whose songs are saccharine and completely unappealing. When he dumps her, she immediately starts writing dark and angry songs clearly directed at him; these sell, and she becomes a huge success. After a while she meets with Eric, ostensibly to apologize, but he quickly realizes she's just run out of material. Refusing to give her any, he acts nice to Corinna and manages to revert her to mindless schlock mode. Part of their conversation consists of singing some of "Tomorrow" from Annie. (The episode even openly references Alanis Morissette, who had a similar transformation—see "Music", below.)
- A similar example to the above occurs on Seinfeld, when Jerry tells a would-be stand-up comic who he finds annoying that she's not funny. So, of course, when she premieres an act that centres entirely around insulting Jerry (and this isn't even telling jokes about him - this is pretty much just actually nakedly insulting him), she becomes a hit.
- A combination of Creator Breakdown and Executive Meddling may have contributed to Dave Chappelle abandoning Chappelles Show, even after the show had become a massive hit and the comedian was offered a $50 million (that's seven zeroes, BTW) contract by the network.
- In Universe example: Brian Topp in Spaced, whose default setting for all of his art is angsty, bizarre pieces directly based on his misery, fear, anger and self-loathing - except when he's happy, in which case he starts producing happy pictures of flowers and his girlfriend.
- Worse yet, misery, fear, anger and self-loathing are his muses; Brian can only produce art at all when miserable, and eventually his inspiration dries up if he doesn't have something to breakdown over.
- Tim gets in on the act as well; flipping through his sketchbook one night, Daisy is alarmed and disturbed by the sheer volume of graphic, angry and hurt revenge pictures of Tim's ex-girlfriend, who betrayed him by cheating on him with her boss and kicked him out of their flat; then, she comes across a warm, happy sketch of Tim, herself and her dog Colin drawn after they moved in together.
- Portrayed in Mad About You: Jamie discovers that her ex-boyfriend has created his own comic whose primary villain, Queen Talon, looks exactly like Jamie. Reading through his work, she discovers several events that are exaggerated sci-fi versions of incidents from their relationship.
- Deliberately played for laughs in Garth Marenghis Dark Place, in which the Show Within A Show presents more of an insight into the titular author's mindset than he perhaps realizes or wishes, especially his feelings about women. Of particular note is an episode which is essentially an extended racist tirade at the Scottish; played for laughs in that the English Marenghi loudly insists that it's not racist despite the overwhelmingly obvious evidence that it is, including another character who freely admits that it is, but didn't bother him because he too is prejudiced against the Scottish.
- In Babylon Five, Stephen Franklin quits his job and goes wandering around the seedier parts of the station. Eventually he's stabbed and nearly dies. Some time after the episode aired, J. Michael Straczynski was asked if he'd ever done anything similar. He described how he used to wander around the seedier parts of San Diego, late at night, until he was mugged and beaten nearly to death. Until then he hadn't made the connection.
- Which might also explain why San Diego is a nuclear wasteland in the Babylon Five 'verse.
- "So, to all my friends in San Diego, this is my shout-out to you." Director's Commentary.
- A very literal example, the tone of both the The Original Series-based Star Trek movies and Star Trek Generations took a significant (some would say "immensely better") turn in theme and storytelling with the departure of Gene Roddenberry, who proved unequal to the task of producing either due to ill health. The point became moot when he died in 1991.
Music
- Nick Drake's reclusiveness, not to mention his severe depression, were defining factors in the songs from Pink Moon.
- Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes' 2007 album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? details his transformation into his glam rock alter ego "Georgie Fruit", who is a black man who has had multiple sex changes, was in a band in the 70s called Arousal, and has been in prison a couple of times.
- The following album Skeletal Lamping has songs by both Kevin and Georgie.
- Modern music (particularly emo and alternative) suffers from a gratuitous amount of manufactured, fake Creator Breakdown, exemplified by Simple Plan's "Untitled". One wonders how somebody in so much unhinged turmoil can pull themselves together long enough to write an album and do a tour. The easy answer is that most of it is a huge lie.
- Evanescence's songs "Hello" and "Like You" were inspired by the death of Amy Lee's sister when she was just a child.
- In 1972, Neil Young was experiencing fame from his Harvest album and his song "Heart of Gold." At around that time, his guitarist Danny Whitten (the subject of Young's song "Needle and the Damage Done") and roadie Bruce Berry died from heroin overdoses. Young followed up the radio-friendly Harvest with what is known as "The Ditch Trilogy" (named after a remark Young made about averting fame by "heading for the ditch"): Three albums that shared a gloomy, pessimistic theme. The first album, Time Fades Away, was a live album released in 1973 consisting of original tracks. The second album, On the Beach was a studio album, continuing the dark themes in the previous album (and being named after a movie concerning nuclear war). The third album, Tonight's the Night, was directly about the deaths of Whitten and Berry (with one of the songs written by Whitten). Tonight's the Night was recorded in 1973 after the death of Bruce Berry, but the album was shelved for two years. On the Beach was released on CD twenty years after its initial release in 1974. Time Fades Away, unfortunately, still hasn't been released on CD.
- Probably the most famous musical Creator Breakdown of all time: Brian Wilson. Smile, in both the Beach Boys and solo versions, is an incredible suite of music, but there's no way it could have been composed by someone with a stable mind. And the unstable mind prevented the Beach Boys version from being released as it was intended: once "Sgt. Pepper" (by The Beatles) came out, Brian Wilson lost motivation.
- It happened to Pete Townshend THREE TIMES. The first and most notable breakdown occurred during the production of his ambitious Lifehouse project, which was to be a massive concept album / film / audience participation project, made with the intention of creating the greatest event in music history. The story was set in a dystopian future in which the cities of Earth are so polluted that everyone has to stay inside, and that everyone is hooked up to a massive network which provides entertainment through what is essentially virtual reality. (Sound familiar?) It was going to end with a Universal Chord of pure music being struck and everyone ascending to a higher plane of existence. It broke down because no one else seemed to understand the concept - especially not the other members of the band. The idea had to be scrapped, and a more "conventional" non-concept album was released based on some of the songs. The result of this "failure" was Who's Next, and is considered to be one of (if not THE) best album the Who ever released.
- The second breakdown occurred after the release of Quadrophenia, which was not as popular or as well-received at the time as Townshend had hoped it would be. This, in conjunction with his drinking problem, caused him to take a brief break from songwriting before returning two years later with the stripped-down and alarmingly cynical The Who By Numbers.
- A third breakdown occured after the death of Keith Moon and the Who's breakup in 1982 after years running on autopilot. Townshend wrote the contemplative, abstract, synth-heavy solo album "All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes".
- MC Chris, eventually, started to dislike the term "nerdcore" because it was too broad a term, and people have been rapping about Transformers and computers, not just the new movement. Eventually, he became more and more outspoken for various reasons, before finally lashing out in his blog against the media (which, from this troper's experience, has been positive about nerdcore), then lashed out against other nerdcore artists, who he says that stole all his glory, that the media only focuses on them, and how much they suck. He now no longer does nerdcore.
- Skip Spence, who used to play guitar in the 1960s psychedelic rock band Moby Grape, is an interesting example of an artist whose Breakdown (very likely from drugs and the resultant mental problems) was displayed on a single album, the songs going from "finely crafted pop" to pure Nightmare Fuel. He was later asked to contribute to the first X Files movie, but the song, called "Land of the Sun", was rejected for being too Nightmare Fuel -ish - from what this troper recalls, the writer's voice sounds like a slowed-down death rattle.
- One of the best songs from Vicentico, the lead singer from the now defunct Argentinian group Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, was written after his brother died.
- After being raped, Tori Amos wrote "Me and a Gun."
- Likewise, most of the album "From The Choirgirl Hotel" was written in the aftermath of a miscarriage, particularly the emotional "Playboy Mommy"
- Tori wrote "Toast" after her brother died from his injuries that he got from a car crash.
- Subverted by the band Rancid. After guitarist Tim Armstrong's divorce they produced, not the expected angst-fest, but the rather upbeat album Indestructible, which featured a tribute to The Power Of Friendship in the form of the song "Fall Back Down."
- After the fatal drug overdose of a friend, Minor Threat leader Ian Mc Kaye wrote the anti-drug anthem "Straight Edge," which spawned the well-known Straight Edge movement, which was not only anti-drug, but also anti-promiscuity, anti-alcohol, and sometimes, anti-meat. That was not what Ian had in mind when he wrote the song.
- By 1970, Sly and the Family Stone was on a nearly two-year hiatus that spawned a stopgap singles compilation. Previously, they played upbeat psychedelic funk and sang about unity and dismantling barriers, being also one of the few multiracial/multigendered bands of The Sixties. The band's successful breakout album, Stand!, had big shoes to fill and the Family Stone was expected to release a follow-up as vibrant and passionate as Stand! Unfortunately, Sly Stone developed drug problems and that, along with the turmoil of Vietnam-era America, was enough for Sly to build his own studio, play most of the instruments himself or with friends (as opposed to all the band members playing on Stand!), and record most of his vocals while lying in bed. The resulting record, There's A Riot Going On, was a dark and depressing record that was somewhat the opposite of Stand!. The record would later be acclaimed as the band's masterpiece.
- Singer/songwriter E, leader of the band Eels, wrote Electro-Shock Blues, arguably the band's best album, after the death of his mother from cancer and his sister's subsequent suicide. The album included poetry that his sister had written while in a mental hospital and included songs with titles like "Going to Your Funeral" and "Cancer for the Cure". The last track, however, was an upbeat number about learning to move on with life.
- The shocking death of his five-year-old son led Eric Clapton to retire from music for a while, then return with a very different sound to his repertoire. In particular, the song Tears in Heaven was written about his son.
- Before that, Clapton (as part of Derek and The Dominoes) recorded Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, an album born of the pain that results from being in love with his best friend's wife. The friend was George Harrison, by the way.
- Not only that, but after the album, he got Pattie Boyd (the wife in question) to divorce Harrison and marry Clapton. Harrison attended to Clapton's wedding and the two stayed the best of friends anyway! Not only that but Wonderful Tonight is also about her.
- Although speaking of Harrison, his album Dark Horse is also an example of Creator Breakdown: not only was it made shortly after Patti left him for Eric Clapton, Harrison's voice was shot after years of touring (leading critics to nickname the album "Dark Hoarse"). As a result, it's an uncharacteristically rough-sounding album, especially the bitter cover of "Bye Bye Love."
- The Queen songs "These Are The Days Of Our Lives," "I'm Going Slightly Mad," and "The Show Must Go On" were recorded not long before Freddie Mercury's death of AIDS — all released on an album named "Innuendo."
- The entire "Innuendo" album is widely considered to be Freddie saying his goodbyes. Two of the songs are farewells to his beloved cats.
- The Show Must Go On was done in a very interesting way. Freddie downed a measure of vodka, said "I'll fucking do it darling!" and nailed the vocal line in one take with no problems. Quite a note to go out on, really.
- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' album "The Boatman's Call" - an unusually soft and touching album - came out shortly after Cave cleaned himself up of heroin.
- Cave's side project, Grinderman, is pretty much his midlife crisis set to music. The album has a song on it called "No Pussy Blues", which tells you everything you need to know.
- Even more recently subverted in his song "More News From Nowhere", an affectionate and angstfree reminiscence about most of his ex-girlfriends.
- Emiliana Torrini's second album Fisherman's Woman was much darker than her first, mostly because her boyfriend had been killed in a car accident.
- Luke Haines of The Auteurs had gained commercial success with the band's first album, New Wave, which was about the trials of showbiz, and minor commercial success with the second, Now I'm A Cowboy, which was about rising from the middle classes into the upper classes. Then, while touring for the second album, he became so depressed that he intentionally broke both his ankles jumping off a high wall. While wheelchair-bound, he went on to write the grim After Murder Park, the first single of which - the unbelievably titled "Unsolved Child Murder" - was released as a Christmas single. The Auteurs never got on the charts again, although Haines has remained much loved by critics.
- John Lennon wrote quite a few of these in his time. However, because he was John Lennon, most of them are still great songs (and some of them among the best things he ever wrote):
- "Norwegian Wood" is about an one-night-stand that Lennon had, written in a way as to prevent his wife finding out.
- Original lyric: "Isn't it good/Knowing she would."
- "Cold Turkey" was clearly written by a man going through withdrawal from a heroin addiction, which Lennon was when he wrote and recorded the song.
- "How Do You Sleep?" is a bitter polemic directed at former songwriting partner Paul McCartney, in which he derides pretty much everything McCartney had done up to that point as worthless crap. It was written in response to at least one perceived slight against him on McCartney's album Ram.
- Pretty much every song on his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, was written when he was going through Primal therapy. The album was all about him addressing his personal issues—everything from his relationship with his dead mother to the break-up of the Beatles.
- Walls and Bridges. Most of the songs on that album appear to deal with the bad patch in John's relationship with Yoko Ono at the time—aka "the lost weekend." "Whatever Gets You through the Night" and "Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)" are dead giveaways.
- "Steel and Glass," also from Walls and Bridges, is much like "How Do You Sleep?" only, this time, directed at former business manager Allen Klein, whom Lennon had just filed suit against.
- Lennon has stated in interviews that the lyrics of "Help!" were more literal than most people assumed, as well as the seemingly over-the-top suicidal lyrics of "Yer Blues". This probably applies to lots of his other songs as well.
- Subverted: after Anal Cunt lead Seth Putnam recovered from a coma he had fallen to due to alcohol and drug abuse, he wrote a song titled "Haha, You're in a coma". Not so surprising, really from a band with classics such as "Hitler Was a Sensitive Man", "The Internet is Gay", "The Word Homophobia is Gay" and "I became a Counsellor to Tell the Rape Victims They Deserved it"
- Bjork's more introverted albums, Medúlla and Vespertine, were considered to be in reaction to a letter bomb threat, though her first album after the incident, Homogenic, is very extroverted.
- It's more likely that the sound of Vespertine is the result of her widely commented on and very traumatic struggles with director Lars von Trier (she reportedly ate a dress) while making Dancer in the Dark, a film which was by all accounts an extremely unpleasant experience for her. She found von Trier to be a misogynist and also called him a 'soul-robber'.
- Medúlla is Matthew Barney's fault.
- Actually, only "So Broken" would count as a Creator Breakdown moment. Bjork never said that Homogenic, Vespertine, and Medúlla were the results of creator breakdown. Bjork 'wanted' those albums to have a certain sound. Her personal life had nothing to do with it.
- Much of Trent Reznor's work with Nine Inch Nails up until "Year Zero" was the result of him angsting over something. The heroin abuse probably didn't help.
- In something of an inversion, Reznor has stated that some time during the tour for The Downward Spiral (a concept album about a man losing his ideals and killing himself), he felt like he started to become the character portrayed in the album by doing lots of drugs and feeling suicidal. Of course, he was probably pretty messed up beforehand, too...
- Trent has also stated that the EP Broken is dedicated to his prior music label. Not in a good way. (The music video for the song Pinion, which shows a toilet flushing through a long series of pipes into a full-face mask of a person wearing a bondage outfit is particularly telling of his feelings...)
- Pink Floyd: After the success of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here (a borderline case in itself, as it was in honour of Syd Barrett who himself had a Creator Breakdown and left the band), and Animals, the audience size grew and the older atmosphere of intimacy disappeared. After the angry Roger Waters spat on a rude audience member, Pink Floyd made the dark album The Wall. After that, Roger Waters' breakdown escalated; a few years later, Pink Floyd released Final Cut, in which Waters contemplated the Falklands War, AND the death of his father in WWII.
- Waters left the band after The Final Cut; the rest of the band carried on without him and released another album ten years later (The Division Bell) believed by many to be about Waters' own Creator Breakdown, the Waters/Gilmour rivalry, and David Gilmour's divorce and remarriage.
- Pink Floyd seem to be addicted to this trope. The original frontman, Syd Barrett, recorded two solo albums after he split with the band. The records released give some sense of the difficulty of recording someone in the middle of a breakdown, often with long gaps where Barrett sat staring into space before remembering where he was. It's difficult listening; all the more so because the music itself isn't bad.
- As private as they were, Led Zeppelin has quite a few of these. Most well known is "All of my Love," which was written by Robert Plant after his son died of a stomach infection.
- The lyrics of "Ten Years Gone" are an homage to Plant's ex-girlfriend who told him to choose between her, and his music.
- "Going to California" is rumored to be about the band's unfulfilled crush on Joni Mitchell— Plant even mutters "Oh Joni!" on the live version included on "How the West Was Won."
- The change in the band's music after "Physical Graffiti" is due to arguably very literal incarnation of this trope—by this time Jimmy Page had so wasted himself on heroin that John Paul Jones took over as the driving creative force.
- The quartet those their iconic name after Keith Moon of The Who told Page that his new band "would go down like a lead balloon." Apparently, they took that as a challenge.
- There's a song that's reputed to be either about the band taking loads of drugs or worshiping Satan. You know which one I'm talking about.
- Sting's third solo album, The Soul Cages, was written as a way to get past an almost-four-year-long writer's block following the sudden death of his parents. In this editor's opinion, it was his best and most emotionally powerful album ever.
- Blur's album 13 is a reaction to lead singer Damon Albarn's painful break-up with his long-time girlfriend Justine Frischman of the band Elastica.
- As Kurt Cobain felt increasingly guilty of his newfound fame and spiraling deeper into his heroin addiction, his band Nirvana followed up their landmark Nevermind album with In Utero, a darker, less-accessible album that contained the lyric "look on the bright side it's suicide". Kurt Cobain also included the sarcastic lyric "my favorite inside source" in "Rape Me" as a result of an associate being interviewed, as an anonymous inside source, for Vanity Fair's infamous article on his wife Courtney Love's pregnancy.
- The Manic Street Preachers album The Holy Bible is almost entirely about Richey Edwards' various problems that led to him going missing (presumed dead) after it was released. Their next album, Everything Must Go, deals with some of their reaction to his death as well as featuring some of the last lyrics he wrote.
- Alanis Morissette started as a sort-of pop princess, but her breakout hit years later, You Oughta Know (and it would seem at least one other song on the album, Jagged Little Pill) was inspired by an old boyfriend, who dumped her for another woman. People are still wondering who that man was. (Dave Coulier of Full House is considered the consensus choice, and he has admitted that at least some of the lyrics hit close to home. Yes, the host of Out Of Control dated, then broke up with, one of the kids from You Cant Do That On Television. Feel that? That's your childhood, howling in pain.)
- As the Arrogant Worms wrote:
"Alanis Morissette, she's our latest pride and joy
She used to sing about high school dances and chasing after boys
Now she is fed up and as angry as can be
She's got one hand in her pocket, and the other's on guard for thee"
- Likewise, Carly Simon's song You're so Vain also was written after a really nasty break-up. In her case, it's said the man was Warren Beatty; Carly Simon says that she is never going to tell. (Although The Telegraph obituary of William Donaldson raises the possibility that it was him, since almost everything in the song fits him.)
- Then again, the lyrics of the song make it pretty hard to let anyone say "This song is about me!" without looking like a fool.
"You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You're so vain
I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you?"
- Just about every note on the two Joy Division albums is a serious autobiographical downer from Ian Curtis. And 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' wasn't even on those albums.
- Gloria Estefan's song "Coming Out Of The Dark" was about her struggles with her rehab from the wreck that nearly left her paralyzed from the neck down.
- Similarly, Teddy Pendergrass' "In My Time" was a reflection of his life after the car crash that left him a paraplegic.
- Let us not forget No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom; many of its songs deal with Gwen Stefani's break-up with the bass player.
- This happened to Type O Negative twice: First was 1999's World Coming Down, which came after having gone Lighter And Softer for the last two albums - they even refuse to perform anything from that album live because it reminds frontman Peter Steele of the worst part of his life; the second one was made after him being imprisoned for narcotics possession and going through rehab, in a display of the band's trademark sardonic sense of humour it was called Dead Again.
- Australian singer Sia wrote the song "Breathe Me" after the death of her boyfriend. The introspective song was used as the final musical track to be played in the HBO series Six Feet Under.
- Parodied in the Beautiful South song "Song For Whoever", in which a songwriter gleefully describes how the songs he writes based on the various relationships he's had with his girlfriends — good or bad — bring in piles of cash for him ("Deep, so deep / The number one I hope reap / Depends upon the tears you weep / So cry, lover, cry!").
- Redeemer and Fuse by Beth Kinderman, not quite a breakdown, but she was definitely angry at someone.
- Parodied by Weird Al Yankovic in the song "Since You've Been Gone". The entire song is about how horrible his life has been since the break up, but ends with the line "I feel almost as bad as I did when you were still here".
- And
possibly a straight example by him: "One More Minute", which features lyrics such as "I'd rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass / than spend one more minute with you". The video includes Al ripping up a picture that allegedly shows his most recent ex-girlfriend at the time. He admitted in the liner notes to his boxed set, Permanent Record, that it was written to get over a bad break-up.
- Similarly, the song Ohne Dich (Without You) by the German a capella band Wise Guys, in which the singer details all his attempts to destroy himself and has the refrain end in "Because life is beautiful... without you".
- After most of her band died in a plane crash, Reba McEntire recorded an album appropriately titled For My Broken Heart to work through her grief.
- Eminem had a lot of these. His first 2 major studio albums (and his earlier EP as well) are likely results of Creator Breakdown. The song "Kim", written while his marriage to her was falling apart, is a hateful and disturbing song where the narrator sadistically kills his crying wife. A live performance of the song caused the real Kim to attempt suicide. Interestingly, they both tried to reconcile years after the song was released.
- This happened yet again with 2009's Relapse and Relapse 2, which were triggered by Eminems's recovery from a full-blown relapse which began in 2005. The first album, whilst containing a good dose of his vitriolic tirades and bizarre comedy, has a track called "Deja Vu". The track is a rather stark description of his relapse and the effect it had, notably apparently collapsing in his bathroom and his apparent case of pneumonia actually being related to methadone use. Also related is the song "Beautiful", which is a melancholic track where Eminem reflects on his depression and his increasing doubt over if he can still cut it as a rapper.
- After losing his infamous lawsuit against Mike Joyce over Smiths royalties, Morrissey recorded the song "Sorrow Will Come In the End," bemoaning the lawsuit. The song was cut from the UK release of Maladjusted for fear of legal action. That lawsuit is perhaps the main reason why a Smiths reunion is highly unlikely.
- Johnny Cash had a few of these. Ring of Fire, his most successful song, is about the songwriter's feelings about Cash himself. Chicken In Black is a pretty straightforward shot at his recording label of the time. Many people view his cover of Hurt as feelings towards his life as a whole as he neared the end.
- Beck's Sea Change was written in response to a break-up, and oh my does it ever show.
- Late-romantic-period composer Gustave Mahler is the rare instrumental version of this. One of his symphonies even ends with the beheading of the hero at the hands of the French revolution... which is naturally followed by a majestic fanfare to said government.
- A breakdown in reverse; The Pet Shop Boys' album Very is notably one of their most relaxed, optimistic and lush, with songs such as 'Liberation' and 'I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing' creating a liberated, free and unburdened tone. The album was the first released after Neil Tennant publicly came out as a homosexual.
- Yet that tone is subverted heavily by the song that closes the album, the cover of the Village People's "Go West". The original was a cry of celebration for an emancipated gay lifestyle; Tennant turns the remake into a cry of desperation and desire to escape in the face of AIDS.
- It's a little bit more complex than that, methinks. It's one of those songs that works on a couple of different levels.
- Especially given the imagery in the filmclip, which is very... Soviet.
- And years before that, Tennant played this trope straight by writing It's a Sin to describe his hellish years in a Catholic school in Newcastle. It doesn't help that the video for the song is full of heavy Medieval and Catholic-related imaginary, including a young Geena Davies as one of the Seven Cardinal Sins (she was the personification of Pride, if you wonder) and Tennant reciting the Comfiteor prayer, which Catholics use to express their shame for their sins (Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...).
- We can add "This must be the place I waited years to leave," an excoriation of his old school so bitter that the principal felt moved to defend it.
- Hector Berlioz's then-unrequited love for actress Harriet Smithson led him to write Symphonie fantastique.
- Skillet's song "Open Wounds" is based on frontman John Cooper's angry relationship with his father after his mother died of cancer. They later made up, however.
- Metallica's critically panned album, St. Anger, suffered from major Creator Breakdown during its production, as shown in the documentary Some Kind of Monster.
- It's This Troper's pet theory that Some Kind of Monster was the band's Let It Be moment - if the album was actually good, the band would have torn itself apart shortly thereafter. Instead, the album was released as an extended demo, and the band pulled themselves together. The subsequent tour saw them putting most of their '80s back catalog into rotation again and ditching St. Anger songs entirely. The latest album is their most Metallica-sounding effort in over a decade.
- Their fourth album, ...And Justice For All, is possibly their most aggressive. It was their first album after original bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident; his replacement, Jason Newsted, was pretty much mixed out of the album altogether.
- "Fade to Black", from 1984's Ride the Lightning, was written after the band's equipment were stolen in Boston, including James Hetfield's prized Marshall amplifier.
- James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" was initially the focus of a rumor that it was written in response to his band's secretly arranging for Taylor's girlfriend to visit him on tour, only for her plane to crash, based on the lines "Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you" and "Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground." In fact, Suzanne was his friend from rehab, who committed suicide shortly after his release. The song still qualifies.
- It was also inspired by the breakup of his band, The Flying Machine.
- Carlo Gesualdo's style and subject matter for his madrigals changed drastically after he caught his wife and her lover in the act and brutally murdered both of them.
- Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater has a habit of this. His first song for Dream Theater, "A Change of Seasons", dealt with the cycle of life in relation to the death of his mother. "The Mirror" off of Awake was about how alcoholism was slowly ruining his life. "Burning My Soul" and "Just Let Me Breathe" from the album Falling into Infinity were rants about the music industry loaded with Take Thats against his band's current and former producers, Kurt Cobain, MTV, and others. Then he started writing a still ongoing series of songs about his experience in Alcoholics Anonymous. "Honor Thy Father" off of Train of Thought is a big Take That to his stepfather. For Octavarium he wrote "Never Enough", where he vented about nagging, ungrateful fans. Someone needs a hug...
- Ironically, this troper feels that Dream Theater's best work came from these breakdowns. See also: Space Dye Vest.
- Singer James La Brie's provided a few examples of this as well; Disappear and Vacant are both written by him, about his grandmother's (or perhaps it's his mother's, I don't remember) death. Along with Space-Dye Vest, they're three of the most depressing, and downright creepy, songs the band has produced.
- Arguably Mikael Akerfeldt from Opeth inverted this by having a bunch of references to parenthood and children after his daughter was born. Although they're not really sentimental for the most part.
- Because True Art Is Angsty, and because he tries to be optimistic, Paul McCartney is most likely to produce critically accepted work when he's in the middle of a personal crisis. His most critically accepted solo album, Wings's Band on the Run, was recorded during a disastrous trip to Nigeria: Creative Differences left the band with only three members; it was the rainy season; the studio was barely usable at first; and he and Linda got careless, tried to walk to their lodgings on their own, and then got mugged at knifepoint. Near the end, he passed out from what may have been a heart attack...
- Similarly, his most recent album Chaos And Creation In The Back Yard, also widely critically acclaimed, was written during the midst of the break-up of his marriage to and and bitter divorce from Heather Mills. It's not a happy album.
- Marvin Gaye's 1978 double LP Here, My Dear was famous for its themes of lost love and estrangement, and was widely panned by critics and fans upon its initial release for being too bleak and uncommercial compared with his previous work. It is commonly believed that it was suggested by Gaye's lawyer that he use half the royalties from his next album to pay her alimony, and that Gaye originally intended to make an intentionally bad album to spite her, but after working on some of the songs he had a change of heart and decided to make a serious, confessional effort at chronicling his feelings about the breakup instead. This, however, is not true (the part about him intentionally making a bad album to spite her, that is; the songs are unquestionably about the turmoil in his life around the period).
- Similarly, Kanye West's latest album, 808s Heartbreak is a result of his mother's death as well as an obviously bitter breakup with his fiancee, that mostly features him singing (albeit with pitch correcter Auto Tune) instead of rapping.
- Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata was influenced by what he endured from society while having an affair with the soprano who most inspired him artistically.
- Lily Allen's second album is reportedly going to have a darker, more serious tone to it. This could well be inspired by her recent personal tragedies (most notably suffuring a miscarriage, her relationship with the child's father (Ed Simons of the Chemical Brothers) ending, and the death of her grandmother).
- Emilie Autumn's song "Gothic Lolita" from the album Opheliac is about a girl angrily saying the man who molested her as a child should be "killed by an army of little girls", and was at least in part inspired by her being abused by a teacher as a child (Emilie herself admitted the song was hard to record). Quite a few of her other songs on that album seem to refer either to that event or some nasty breakup, although to this troper's knowledge "Gothic Lolita" is the only one that's been confirmed.
- This troper believes that at least one song of that album is about the break-up of the relationship she has with Billy Corgan, because of the timing between his solist album (where she collaborated and even sew the costumes of the video from the first single) and the launch of Opheliac.
- The entire darker tone of Opheliac in comparison to Enchant is due to a creator break down after she had been put into a mental institution at some point in between the making of the two albums and also was what caused her to write her upcomming book, The Asylum (For Wayward Victorian girls)
- Although one may be tempted to put nearly all of Korn's work here due to the fact that most of the songs are about Jonathan Davis's life in some way, probably the truest case of Creator Breakdown (where the song becomes more intensely personal than it was intended to be) is in the song "Daddy", where the singer literally does break down and starts yelling and crying during the final minutes of the song as the rest of the band plays on uncomfortably. While some of this was undoubtedly embellished in final production (including a motherly voice that appears later on), it seems to be mostly real. Like many of the musical examples on this page, this song is considered by many fans to be quite powerful due to its intense emotional vulnerability.
- Some may argue that the two songs on Korn's untitled 8th album that insult their former guitarist Brian "Head" Welch — who abruptly quit the band, converted to evangelical Christianity, and talked a bit of trash about them himself before eventually calming down — are a decidedly more negative case of Creator Breakdown.
- And on the other manipulator, you have Pretty, a song based on an actual case Davis dealt with while working in a coroner's office. For sensitivity's sake: It's about a toddler who was raped and killed by her father. It's one of their best songs, in this troper's opinion... but apparently, Davis still can't perform it live.
- Miley Cyrus wrote "7 Things" after a breakup with Nick Jonas, during a period where she wept nonstop for a month about said breakup. She even wore his diabetes tag in the video. Also, her song "Bottom of the Ocean" was written about the death of her goldfish.
- The entire Mountain Goats album, "The Sunset Tree", written solely by John Darnielle, can be considered an example of Creator Breakdown. The album is about dealing with his grief after his step-father passed away, who abused him as a child. The songs are a narrative weaving in and out of his life, during the abuse and the after-affects. Including some songs explicitly dealing with incidents of the abuse. There's drug and alcohol-abuse once he's a teenager, suicide, mental illness and general instability. Finally, there's the song "Pale Green Things" dealing with his learning of his death.
- Ok, this troper would like to make a further point that while much of The Mountain Goats music deals with dark situations, those are threads of fictional narrative and these are true.
- The Smashing Pumpkins' "Today", while being one of their more cheerful and upbeat tunes, was written while lead singer Billy Corgan was seriously contemplating suicide. Thus the ironic tone of the lyrics, "Today is the best day/Can't wait until tomorrow".
- Upbeat?! "I'll burn my eyes out", "I'll tear my heart out" and "Pink ribbon scars/that never forgets" are clearly NOT upbeat, not to mention the tone of chorus's chord is much darker when contrast to the verse.
- Compared to songs like Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Today is practically sunshine and rainbows.
- Not to mention, you got the lyrics wrong and left out the most important part... "Today is the greatest/Day I've ever known/Can't wait for tomorrow/I might not have that long"
- Musically upbeat, duh. Its massed guitars recall My Bloody Valentine's sonic warfare and the jangly hook sounds like it came from R.E.M..
- Nearly all of Scott Weiland's career has involved Creator Breakdown of some sort. With all the albums he's done except for STP's Core and Velvet Revolver's Libertad, he was battling drug addiction or going through marital problems. And Libertad was written after his brother's death, so it isn't free of Creator Breakdown either.
- Alice In Chains. Full-stop. Everything after Facelift was written as a result of either Layne's heroin addiction or Jerry's severe depression and alcoholism.
- Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers wrote Under the Bridge, easily one of his best songs, whilst in the throes of severe drug addiction and desperation after the overdose death of guitarist Hillel Slovak. He has also written songs about Slovak's death and absence, including "My Lovely Man".
- Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was written while everyone in the band was breaking up with everyone else.
- Go Your Own Way, in particular, is pretty much the whole band writing Take Thats to each other. And let's not even start on the live version of Silver Springs.
- Inverted by Sarah McLachlan, who started writing happier (and, arguably, worse) music after the birth of her daughter; most obvious in the case of Afterglow.
- She went so far as to rerecord one of her darkest earlier songs and make it more cheerful. This troper hasn't been able to listen to anything she's done since becoming a mommy. Hopefully her recent divorce will trigger some good music.
- Another amusing fact about Sarah McLachlan is that her music is cited as stopping a suicidal case of Creator Breakdown in Darryl "D.M.C" McDaniels. As noted, Sarah's music up until her return from baby making isn't exactly the music you'd think of listening to when depressed. Case in point? The song "Angel" whose beauty struck a cord with him? It was written in reaction to several famous cases of heroin overdose. It's just one of those bizarre things that make up Reality Is Unrealistic
- Because Elton John typically writes melodies around already-composed lyrics by Bernie Taupin, his albums tend to reflect Taupin's mood at the time rather than his own, and sometimes the contrast between the two is quite notable.
- In 1976, Elton was at his commercial and creative peak while Taupin was struggling with creative exhaustian and a failed marriage; thus Elton's album of that period, Blue Moves, was the bleakest, gloomiest record he ever made.
- In 1988, Elton was struggling with substance abuse problems and a failed marriage of his own, as well as the realization that he was not bisexual at all, he was just plain gay; however, because Taupin was in a good place, Elton's album Reg Strikes Back was a considerably upbeat and happy work.
- Matthew Good's album Hospital Music is a fine example of this trope. He wrote it in the aftermath of not only the messy divorce of his cheating, gold-digging wife; but a string of hospital visits (thus the name) which resulted in two revelations: 1. That he was killing himself with the excessive amount of pills he was taking, 2. That he was bipolar. Arguably, it could be said that with the latter revelation, his career from Audio of Being onward was a long stretch of this trope.
- The Polyphonic Spree's very existence is the result of frontman Tim DeLaughter's desire to do something positive after the death of a friend & bandmate from Tripping Daisy. All of the surviving Tripping Daisy members are in the Spree, too.
- Rapper Royce Da 5'9's Death Is Certain album was recorded during a period of depression following a falling out with Eminem and a decline in commercial success after his record deal with Columbia fell through.
- Bruce Springsteen hit a depression somewhere in 1981-1982. He sat in an empty house, recorded the demo tapes of what was to become The E Street Band's next album on just guitar, harmonica and vocals, and then desperately tried to rearrange the songs for the band. When that didn't work, it was suggested to just release the demo as an album. The result, Nebraska, is one of the bleakest albums of the decade. And in this troper's opinion, one of the best as well.
- Inverted by George Michael, whose bouncy, happy, examination of his musical exploits up to that point, "Freedom 90", is a celebration of finally getting out from under a truly draconian contract with a music label he by then utterly despised.
- The song "Art of Life" by X Japan was composed by drummer/pianist/bandleader Yoshiki as he recovered from a physical and mental breakdown referred to as "neurocirculatory asthenia" attributed to his intensity in performance and emotional pain.
- "Without You" is a song written to late guitarist hide by Yoshiki, and "Jade," the band's newest and possibly truly last song, is rumored to either be the same, or to be the "other half" of the conversation began by "Without You," being hide talking back to Yoshiki.
- Underground rapper Cage built his career out of breakdowns. His 2005 album, Hell's Winter, focused mostly on him finally coming to proper terms with his issues.
- Japanese pop superstar Ayumi Hamasaki owes part of her success to writing all of her lyrics herself, something uncommon in the Japanese star system, and you could say she has built her career around a Creator Breakdown. With some exceptions, the main themes of her music are how her father abandoned her when she was a little child and she mostly can't remember him, her mother had several jobs in order to support them and thus they barely saw each other and had an aloof and cold relationship, and she was discriminated against and bullied during her childhood and teens for this unwholesome background (for Japanese standards of the time). If her lyrics are something to go by, this made her into a lonely and borderline depressive person permanently starved for affection because of her extremely poor people skills. And in her happy love songs, she has a marked tendency to bring up death. This, of course, is mainly set to aggressively cheerful pop and pop-rock melodies, with perfunctory techno remixes.
- Nightwish's evolution as a band nicely exhibits this. While their earlier albums do contain darker songs, these are usually balanced out with lighter, fantasy- oriented material. However, their fourth album contained songs that were nearly all about depression, death, escape and unrequited love/obsession. In the documentary End of Innocence the band members remark on this and how it was such a departure from their earlier material. The band's keyboardist, who writes most of their songs, acknowledges that it stemmed from going through a very dark period of his life and dealing with a love affair gone wrong. The next album continued the theme of despair. Their most recent album, after firing their lead singer and replacing her, is also their angriest (and most transparently about her and her husband).
- Speaking of which, in Tarja's solo album My Winter Storm, there are a couple of poorly disguised Take Thats at Nightwish, with Had Enough (almost certainly a resentful song about her sacking) being the most transparent.
- The Poet and The Pendulum is apparently about Tuomas' (the keyboardist) struggle with depression.
- Rather present in Keith Urban's work. His second American album, Golden Road, was released after he got out of rehab. It was considered much stronger than his mostly bland previous album, and lyrics like "It sure feels good to finally feel the way I do" (from lead-off single "Somebody Like You") show a happier man. Be Here and Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing showed a mostly positive Urban, although tracks like "Tonight I Wanna Cry" (where he addresses his drinking problem head-on) showed the demons creeping back in. After going back into rehab and then marrying Nicole Kidman, he released the album Defying Gravity, which is mostly composed of sappy love songs and has been panned by critics.
- After years of dealing with depression, Gary Allan's wife committed suicide. While Allan's previous albums always had a variety of upbeat love songs, ranging from "Right Where I Need to Be" to "Nothing On but the Radio," his next album, Tough All Over, is almost entirely devoid of any sort of happiness. The first single from this album was a cover of Vertical Horizon's "Best I Ever Had." Other songs from the album include "Life Ain't Always Beautiful," "I Just Got Back From Hell," and the blatantly auto-biographical and aptly-titled "Putting My Misery On Display." His latest album, Living Hard, continues with the theme of recovery in several songs.
- Radiohead seem to have mastered this. "My Iron Lung" was written to express discomfort at the overblown success of "Creep". Then Kid A/Amnesiac were influenced by Yorke's writers block, (which contributed to the rather disjointed feel of the 2 albums. He resorted to pulling random words out of a hat at one point.)
- Starflyer 59's second album, Gold was written in the aftermath of several dissolved friendships, and the departure of the rest of the band forced Jason Martin to record almost everything by himself. Add to this Jason's own high expectations for himself, and the result was a barely-averted nervous breakdown and an album that sounds like a soundtrack of the same. Fans initially hated the album, then they inexplicably warmed up to it and declared it Starflyer's best album ever.
- A sub-genre of black metal has emerged in recent years called suicidal/depressive Black Metal, practiced by artists such as Xasthur, Shining and countless others, which (in theory at least; see the entry on emo and alternative rock at the top of this folder) absolutely runs on this trope.
- Japanese visual kei band Malice Mizer departed from their previous romantic aesthetic and launched headlong into a gothic sense of style after their drummer, Kami, dying of an aneurism just after the lead singer, Gackt, left the group without warning. Their music also managed to get even darker than before, culminating in their album Bara no Seidou.
- Beast of Blood, which was released on the one-year anniversary of Kami's death, in addition to being one of the darkest songs Malice Mizer has ever composed, contains a hidden track called Bara no Souretsu (Funeral of Roses), which was composed by the late drummer.
- The last song released before the group went on indefinite hiatus, Garnet, is Klaha (the vocalist) speaking to a traveler, telling them to keep searching until they find the place where they truly belong. Following the hiatus, each member of the band (except the bassist) went on to form his own independent music project.
- David Bowie's tenth album, Station to Station, was created while he was in the middle of a massive cocaine addiction. An addiction so bad that he's stated he remember practically nothing of the recording process. It's also considered one of his best albums. A couple of songs from the classic "Berlin Trilogy", such as Beauty and the Beast and Always Crashing in the Same Car, have been interpreted as being about his struggles to clean himself up during that time period.
- Andy Patridge claims to have written “Your Dictionary” (“S-L-A-P / Is that how you spell kiss in your dictionary / C-O-L-D / Pronounced as care / S-H-I-T / Is that how you spelt me in your dictionary / Four-eyed fool / You led 'round everywhere”), which appears on the XTC album Apple Venus, in spite of himself:
I tried and tried NOT to write a divorce song, I really did, you have to believe me. The last thing I wanted was to come over as a grieved cattle bum crying into his beer in the bar of heartbreak motel. Or even worse, as Phil Collins. I mean, divorce is so... middle-aged and crap...Trouble was, the internal stale steam kept building, the pus kept expanding inside my head. I needed a safety valve, maybe if I just put all the hurt in one song.
- Speaking of which, Phil Collins recorded his first solo album, Face Value, while undergoing a divorce from his first wife. His feelings of anger and sorrow are reflected in the album, particularly in the song In The Air Tonight, and tend to show up as a recurring theme in the songs he writes (Collins had two subsequent marriages and divorces and his first).
- Say Anything DEFINES this trope. Partly justified, because Max Bemis (the lead singer/songwriter) has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
- In his words: —> I self-medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety.
- Voltaire's album Boo Hoo was written after he and a girlfriend of his (for about 12 years) broke up. The album is mainly comprised of songs about break ups and other stories of bad relationships.
- In spite of being a rather private person, Siouxsie has been working out her issues in song since she began writing them. "Make Up to Break Up," the earliest Banshees song with which she's credited, is quite obviously about her use of cosmetics to hide her perceived facial flaws. As the band was crumbling 20 years later, she wrote "Stargazer" and "Forever," the latter of which is a melancholy tune that starkly contrasts the love songs "O Baby" and "The Lonely One." After Sioux and Severin decided to disband the Banshees, "New Skin" was written.
- Siouxsie's solo debut, Mantaray, is practically defined by this trope, as it deals with starting one's life over at 50 post-divorce and without the musical support system she'd had for so many years. The first two songs written, "Into A Swan" and "Loveless," were supposedly written with the intent of selling them to another artist (Sugababes were referenced in at least one article this troper has seen), but they're so personal one can't help but wonder why.
- A number of Velvet Underground 's songs dealt with Lou Reed's heroin addiction, most notably "Waiting for the Man" and "Heroin."
- Reed and John Cale mourned Andy Warhol in Songs for Drella.
- Um, what? No mention of Adam Duritz, of Counting Crows fame? You could argue that the entire history of the band has been a Creator Breakdown.
- Brazilian band Os Paralamas do Sucesso released Bora Bora, an album filled with really depressing/revolted songs, after singer-songwriter Herbert Vianna broke up with his wife. (and somewhat averted this trope when Herbert got paralyzed in an aviation accident, and the saddest songs the band recorded later were written before the crash)
- Mike Oldfield apparently wrote one of the more serene parts of side B of Tubular Bells to try and give his head a quiet place to be. Most of his earlier work (up to Incantations) was also composed on a background of unsorted personal demons, and his autobiography makes it quite clear where and how the gears shifted. Though he was basically a happier man: My music had been turbocharged, it was nuclear powered because of my paranoia, but now my inspiration had gone. (Changeling, Oldfield, Virgin Books 2007). This troper begs to differ, though he still prefers the first four albums.
- Les Claypool from Primus has said that the reason the albulm "Pork Soda" was so much darker than the earlier albums was because the band had just gotten off a long tour, and they were all in a bad mood.
- Marilyn Manson's 2005 album Eat me Drink me was written when the bandleader with the same name was going through a period of severe depression. In an odd twist, however, Eat me Drink me is actually lighter and more mainstream than the band's usual output.
Newspaper Comics
- Inverted with Charles Schulz and Peanuts: naturally, after years of success, a happy marriage, and having millions of people love his work, the strip lost much of the melancholy and cruel edge that made it so innovative and popular in the first place. It was no longer a Crapsack World, just one full of oddities and absurdities.
- In his controversial biography of Schulz, David Michaelis states that a series of strips about Snoopy's fling with an (unseen) girl beagle ("with very soft paws"), was inspired by Schulz' real-life affair with another woman while he was still married to his first wife.
- Hell, it's widely accepted that Schulz detailed all of his affairs in the strip, in the form of Charlie Brown's love interests. The Little Red-Headed Girl? A woman who he pined after his whole life. Y'know, for kids!
- The whole period of the collapse of Schulz's first marriage (roughly 1968-73) had a noticeable effect on the strip in several ways. On one hand, he began experimenting with new ideas and characters, and the humor was a little hipper than before. On the other hand, there's a melancholy and reflective edge that wasn't there before. All those strips where Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty talk about what love is were probably verbatim trancripts of his own thoughts about what was happening in his life. Schulz himself even admitted this in one of his anniversary books.
- Chester Gould and Dick Tracy: Although Gould was having a great run from the late 1930s to the late 1950s, his efforts gradually went Off The Rails. For instance, he failed to appreciate that the tastes of his readers had changed or that his grotesque villains, such as the Flyface family, might now turn people off. Furthermore, he took leave of his artistic senses and subjected the strip to a silly Sci Fi period, with Tracy having adventures on the Moon with the moon people until the reality of the Apollo 11 landing forced him to backtrack. Finally, Gould's stubborn grousing about the justice system and noodling with pointless half-stories in the 1970s painted him as a cranky old man; this killed much of the interest in the strip, at least until The Movie came along. The strip still runs in many papers, but the political side of the strip has all but disappeared while the grotesque villains (and even more grotesque methods of killing them off) have returned.
- Bill Watterson, the maker of Calvin And Hobbes, had many of these. When his cat, which had served as an inspiration for Hobbes, died, he made a comic about Calvin and Hobbes discussing how they can still play in their dreams. When his agent, bored of his anti-commercialism views, said he sees all in black and white, Watterson drew a strip where Calvin literally starts seeing all in black and white as a result of his father saying it to him. Quoth the Watterson:
During my fight to keep the syndicate from licensing my work, I sometimes drew strips that had additional private meanings for myself. [...] I wouldn't have drawn these if the material didn't stand on its own, or if it was in any way inconsistent with the characters, but cartoons such as these helped me laugh at my predicament at a time when very little about it seemed funny.
- The real-life feud between Li'l Abner artist Al Capp and Joe Palooka artist Ham Fisher (Capp's former boss, who claimed Capp stole the Li'l Abner concept from him) raged for two decades, occasionally spilling into their respective strips. Fisher took things further, accusing Capp of sneaking obscene imagery into Abner strips, producing "proof" to show to a New York judge. Capp easily refuted the accusations by showing the strips in print, where the "offending" images were not present. When that failed, Fisher "anonymously" sent a packet of pornographic Lil' Abner pictures to the FCC in an effort to torpedo Capp's attempt at a TV license. He was swiftly found out and expelled from the National Cartoonist Society (an organization he helped found). He committed suicide less than a year later; such was his isolation that his body wasn't discovered for four months.
- Outside of the affermentioned feud, Al Capp himself underwent an ideological shift in The Sixties from his original liberal, anti-big business ideals to conservative and rabidly anti-counter culture: he frequently lampooned counter-culture icons and went out of his way to confront and debate the Left every chance he got. (His infamous confrontation with John Lennon was captured in the documentary Imagine.) His increasingly angry strips and media appearances cost him newspaper slots and his semi-regular guest spot on The Tonight Show.
- In his final years, BC creator Johnny Hart became a fervent Christian fundamentalist and started cramming these views into his previously light-hearted caveman gag-strip. Hilarity did not ensue.
- For Better Or For Worse manages to subvert this, though arguably not for the better. Author Lynn Johnston started going through a mess of personal problems late in the comic's run. Her reaction to this, oddly enough, was to start writing material considerably less inflammatory and dramatic than what had made her famous. Her marriage falling apart apparently greatly increased her desire to see two characters finally getting married without all the usual hang-ups weddings in troperville are generally known for. Interestingly, she still received a backlash from fans who thought that her quest for the Esoteric Happy Ending was so severe that character's personalities no longer seemed plausible, and represented the author's personal issues becoming a detriment to the work.
- Funky Winkerbean (or however it's spelled) appears to be in one since it's been in a long spiral of depression ever since the main character's wife died of cancer (critics just replace the dialog with "Cancercancercancercancer"), to the point where the title character (who apparently isn't the main character) also has cancer, the charity set up in the name of the seceded character gets stolen (it gets returned), and the high school drama class is performing the play Wit, which the PTA thinks is just too much (as do the critics, who think a one-woman show isn't fair to the drama department). Oh, and a dead Iraq war vet isn't dead after all and returns just in time to learn that a loved one has died (probably of cancer).
- The artist's other strip, Crankshaft, went through a week-long breakdown after his father died: Flash-forwards show Crankshaft as pretty much catatonic, confined to a wheelchair and living in a nursing home. At least his nurse was nice and took him out to see a ballgame (that was rained out). Since this is a strip where characters grow older, this has disturbing implications for Crankshaft. The next week featured Crankshaft being saved from a snake bite from his son-in-law's mother's yappy dog; it got better and so did the comic strip.
- Spoofed in Jeff Kinney's novel Diary of a Wimpy Kid, in which the quest for a new cartoonist for the middle school newspaper was due to this. Wacky Dawg, according to the narrator, was originally a funny strip but the creator started using it to "handle his personal business" and was subsequently fired. The sample strip the reader sees has the titular dog, instead of saying something funny, asking the creator's girlfriend to forgive him for kissing one of her friends and reminding a guy who owes the creator money to pay up.
Theatre
- It's wildly debatable, but some scholars have linked Shakespeare's play Hamlet to the death of his son Hamnet shortly before the play was written. Including Harold Bloom.
- It's faintly possible that Shakespeare chose to rewrite the already incredibly well-known Hamlet story (Kyd's Hamlet was still being played in theatres at that point) due to the similarity of the character's name to his son's, but Shakespeare wrote his Hamlet three years after Hamnet died.
- The story already existed, but may have excited Shakespeare's interest after his son's death, especially given its father-son themes. Also, the two names were interchangeable: documents record the same man calling himself "Hamlet" and "Hamnet" in different documents. Bill Bryson says this passage was also inspired by Hamnet:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief.
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
[Tearing off her head-dress.]
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows' cure!
Video Games
- Legend has it that the decision to kill off Aeris in Final Fantasy VII, as well as its centring around themes of death and rebirth, was inspired by the death of Hironobu Sakaguchi's mother. While this isn't true, his feelings that death shouldn't be portrayed as clinical and sterile and 'laudible', that it should be shown as sudden, brutal, and tragic, did influence the decision of how she should be killed off, and finalized the choice to kill her other than the other choice, Barret, as it would have a greater impact on the viewer.
- Also this trope appears to be the reason behind the exsistence of Final Fantasy itself.
- The final boss of Earthbound was inspired by a traumatic experience Shigesato Itoi had during his childhood, of seeing what he thought was a rape scene in a movie as a very young child. The final boss's dialogue ("It hurts... I feel... happy...") was based on dialogue Itoi recalled from the movie.
- In the same vein, Mother 3. As revealed by Itoi in an interview, the final battle in the unreleased Nintendo 64 version was going to be far more dark than it is in the released GBA version (and that's actually saying something). The ending was also going to be far more ambiguous and sad. He accredits the happier feel of the released game to "becoming a good person", and he was horribly stressed and depressed during the development stages of Earthbound 64.
- Howard Phillips, a former Nintendo spokesman, speculated during an interview that the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 is Platform Hellish because designer Shigeru Miyamoto was depressed at the time.
Webcomics
- Real Life Comics suffered from a form of Creator Breakdown twice, both times when Greg Dean broke up with his then-current girlfriends. Rather than affect the quality of the series, though, he simply took a brief hiatus from the comic (as he didn't feel like working on it at the time) and returned a week or so later and picked up where he left off, with the ex-girlfriend's character vanishing without a trace and never mentioned again. Of course, Greg has since gotten married, so these mini-breakdowns may be a thing of the past.
- Not sure exactly how many kinds of inversion it is, but there was a comic where, in continuity, he was with one girlfriend, but remembered this girlfriend appearing in the comic at a time when comic-Greg was dating the previous girlfriend. Inversion of Creator actually breaking down, check. Inversion of timing of changing events already having happened, check. Inversion of reality affecting the comic - maybe?
- Hilariously subverted in a strip where Greg and Tony are visiting multiple dimensions, and they stumble across Danny and Crystal, the first ex-girlfriend. Crystal looks up and says, "What, did the Artist get bored with you, too?"
- In 2002, Ubersoft.net took two-and-a-half months out from an ongoing plotline to inflict the author's computer woes on one of the main characters.
- While the official explanation for why RPG World was canceled is due to Artist Disillusionment, the fact that the main arc just suddenly ended without any noticeable decline in quality during the ostensible final storyline, along with a couple post-script side stories that basically curb-stomped the characters, seems less like actual burnout and more like some event really turned the author against his work.
- Supposedly, he was infuriated with his readers for not loving his photo-comic filler strips about the inane antics of the people supposedly actually playing RPG World as much as they loved, y'know, the actual comic. (Never mind that the photo comics were essentially just bland Two Gamers On A Couch gags.) Ending the comic may have been as much Take That as Creator Breakdown.
- One problem which the author mentions is that RPG World started out as a gag strip, and as the strip gained popularity he started to shoehorn in Cerebus Syndrome- a direction he ultimately felt unsatisfied with. His decision to end the strip appears to be due in large part to the fact he did not believe he could give it an adequate ending as he had already spent so much time going in a direction he didn't even like.
- Parodied in a brief Bob And George storyline, in which the author character becomes extremely depressed, causing the strip to literally start to fall apart, with panels sliding off each other, becoming disoriented, and appearances by characters who are supposed to be elsewhere. Naturally, the problem is solved with explosives.
- Real Life seems to have been playing Break The Cutie with Maritza Campos, author of College Roomies From Hell, slowly but surely, since 1999. It shows.
- Considering one of the most recent things that happened was her husband leaving her for a woman he'd been having an affair with for years - can she really be blamed for her breakdown? :(
- Mac Hall is a borderline case. Ian McConville simply said it wasn't fun any more, and after several months of Schedule Slip, gave the comic a proper ending and used it to segue into his new comic, Three Panel Soul.
- Doobl (link NSFW, and in incredibly bad taste, ye have been warned) was a short-lived comic that started as a Christian evangelical comic and became eventually more and more dark when the author's mother died, finishing in killing off every character and then the author himself. It was later made official that it was a Stealth Parody, but man, it'd be easy to get fooled.
- Anne Onymous, real name or not, creator of The Wotch took a hiatus when her marriage ended abruptly.
- Brawl in the Family creator Matthew Taranto suffered a short case of Creator Breakdown when his Wii was gutted out and lost all of its data. He drew a bonus strip where all of the major cast members as well as the Earth itself were destroyed by the Sun, as a comedic reference to a previous bonus comic.
Commercials
- There is a commercial for... some kind of food or restaurant(?) featuring a country songwriter whose life is so perfect and happy, he has nothing to write a good country song about!
- There is the Heineken Blues advert which could be what the troper above means. There was also a follow up where a limo pulls up and a guy jumps out to give the blues singer a recording contract which makes it less "drink Heineken and get a crap life" message.
Western Animation
- Parodied in Don Hertzfeldt's short film, Rejected. The creation quite literally falls apart.
- According to South Park co-creator Trey Parker, the episode Raisins (in which Stan's girlfriend Wendy breaks up with him) was based on the trials and tribulations he went through when he found his fiance in bed with another man, Stan's thoughts in the episode reflect Parker's.
- That's also the entire premise behind his first film, Cannibal! The Musical.
- Also, the character of Cartman's Mom was created and named after Parker's ex-fiance who left him at the altar. LeAnne Cartman is not only the town slut, she has a penis to boot.
Other
- The Onion's resident "political cartoonist" Kelly shows signs of this on a regular basis. While most of his cartoons are (misinformed and simple-minded) takes on issues of the day, he frequently uses his panel to rage about his ungrateful kids, shrewish wife, and generally reveal what a terrible, messed up individual he is. This being The Onion, it's all played for laughs, of course.
- The Goon Show may be considered as a product of Spike Milligan's manic phases.
- Parodied in the Derrick Comedy sketch "Girls Are Not To Be Trusted".
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