Two characters are fighting over something and in the process the thing they are fighting over gets broken, damaged, or destroyed. Often overlaps with
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. May be seen as poetic justice. Usually implies
a moral about how fighting is bad.
If the thing that is "broken" is a contest that either would normally win, this may lead to a
Dark Horse Victory.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In the original Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, when Nanoha and Fate fight over one of the Jewel Seeds, they accidentally activate it, almost causing an explosion. Fate then risks her life to contain it and therefore ends up claiming it.
Fan Fiction
Film
- In the movie The War, two groups of kids fight a battle over a treehouse. The treehouse is pretty much wrecked in the fighting.
- This is how the Ring is destroyed in the Lord of the Rings movie (though not the book). After Gollum wrests the ring from Frodo, Frodo tries to take it back. The result is that Gollum falls into Mt. Doom, still clutching the ring.
Literature
- Inverted in a short story from Tales of Ravenloft. A young bride's sorcerer husband fights another wizard. Each begs for her help, warning her that the other is evil and intends to destroy her using a cursed portal she's discovered. Repelled by how each cares more about beating the other than about her, she uses the portal herself to kill both men, becoming a nastier villain than either.
- By the beginning of the first Thursday Next novel The Eyre Affair, the armies of Great Britain and Russia have between them reduced the Crimean peninsula to a barren wasteland.
Live-Action TV
Newspaper Comics
- In a Peanuts strip, Lucy fights with "Royanne," the girl who claimed to be Roy Hobbs's great-granddaughter, over a baseball bat. Snoopy solves the dispute by sawing the bat in half.
Puppet Shows
- A Sesame Street sketch involves the Two-Headed Monster building a two-headed snowman. Only one carrot is available, so the two heads argue over the carrot. The carrot snaps in two, so each head of the snowman can have a carrot nose.
Web Original
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: Bart, Milhouse and Martin go in on buying the first issue of Radioactive Man for $100 and end up destroying it during their squabble.
- TMNT Back to the Sewer: Raph and Mikey manage to rip the Green Mantle in half while fighting over it, splitting its power between the pieces.
- The short film A Gentlemans Duel is a good example. Two gentleman duel (in steampunk Mechas) for the affection of a beutiful lady... but the battle causes much damage to her property and risks her life. after seeing one of her boots crashed by a large piece of stone, the duelists presume she's dead, end flee the scene. But she's Not Quite Dead, she had stripped out her boots (and most of her clothes) to enjoy the intimate company of her butler behind the bushes of her garden.
Real Life
- Needless to say, it happens in real life all the time - from kids fighting over a toy and breaking it to governments fighting over a province and reducing it to a wasteland.
