Basic Trope: A sweet, lovable character is put through horrible experiences which breaks their spirit.
- Straight: Alice is an all-round Nice Girl who has the ill fortune of losing her fiancé to cancer, being fired from her job, and surviving a traumatic car accident. This causes her to fall into a deep depression.
- Exaggerated: Kill the Cutie.
- Downplayed:
- Alice gets bullied for the first time in her life and doesn't seem too happy about it.
- Broken Bird
- Justified: Being a nice person doesn’t prevent you from facing horrible trauma.
- Inverted:
- Karma Houdini; Alice is a horrible person who routinely burns money in front of homeless people and kicks puppies, but enjoys a happy, stress-free life with no real comeuppance.
- Alice is a Broken Bird but her life gets better over time, leading Alice to show her sweetness again.
- Subverted:
- With regular therapy and supportive friends, Alice manages to surpass her despair and lead a happy life despite the tragedies in her past.
- Alice's traumas turn out to be All Just a Dream.
- Double Subverted:
- Et Tu, Brute?; Alice's friends betray her, resulting in her being depressed again.
- That Was Not a Dream.
- Alternatively, the events being All Just a Dream didn't make them much less hurtful.
- Parodied: Alice is a Drama Queen who does this all the time.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- Alice's spirit isn't broken by these traumas.
- Alice doesn't experience these traumas.
- Alice, a huge jerkass has the ill fortune of losing her fiancé to cancer, being fired from her job, and surviving a traumatic car accident. This causes her to fall into a deep depression.
- Enforced:
- The creators want the audience to root for Alice. They figure making her The Woobie would be a good way of going about this.
- Alice is a character in a very cynical show. "There is no justice in this world, and sometimes the kindest people lead the toughest lives" is one of their mission statements.
- The show is a prequel focusing on what made Alice the cynic she was at the start of the original.
- Lampshaded: "Poor Alice! Why did they have to break that cutie?"
- Invoked: Evulz decides to put Alice through a Trauma Conga Line just to Kick the Dog.
- Exploited: Evulz recruits Alice by offering her revenge on the world that hurt her so much.
- Defied: Alice decides she can't let these tragedies ruin her life and resolves to remain unbroken and carry on with her life as her fiancé would've wanted.
- Discussed: "Starting off as an innocent, poor little thing and having misery thrown at them on a daily basis? Where have I heard that one before?" "I guess it's a matter of life, dude. I've been through something like this as well before."
- Conversed: "Oh no! She is a cutie-pie, she doesn't deserve this! How could you not care about her?" "Well, given how dark this show is, this hardly surprises me anymore."
- Implied: Alice is introduced as a sad, despairing character who's given up on life. In later episodes, flashbacks show her as a much happier and joyful person, but what caused her to change isn't revealed.
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed: Alice ends up as an Iron Woobie, and things don't get to her anymore.
- Played For Laughs: Alice was the sweetest, most lovable person on Earth, but after her favorite TV show is cancelled she falls into a deep well of despair and is never quite the same again.
Back to Break the Cutie.
