Basic Trope: Suffering is beneficial for a character.
- Straight: Bob goes through hardships in his life from physical and emotional pain, but this made him stronger.
- Exaggerated: Living his entire life in a demented Crapsack World full of brutal people has made Bob the most proficient, most powerful man on earth.
- Downplayed:
- Bob is pressured into doing chores, homework, and playing nice with the neighbours' kids. He finds it unpleasant, but becomes a better person later in life.
- While some suffering is beneficial for building character, too much suffering (or suffering for no reason other than "life's not fair") just make people more miserable.
- Justified: Physical and Mental hardships have the possibility of helping Bob turn into a stronger, smarter person, or sometimes a worse one.
- Inverted:
- Pleasure and peace are bad for you.
- Misery Destroys Character - Bob is left as a burnt out, traumatized shell who lacks the motivation to do anything in the aftermath of his traumas.
- Subverted: Bob's hardships cause him to breakdown because of the PTSD, turning him into a pathetic shell of a man.
- Double Subverted: But somehow he manages to put himself together, maybe even with the help of his friends or therapy, and acknowledge that the hardships made him stronger.
- Parodied: Eating spoiled and poisonous food is what made Bob a better person.
- Zig Zagged:
- Bad things are good for Bob, but in other situations, bad things are not good.
- Alice avoided all hardships and became an entitled Womanchild who never learns her lesson. Charlie, meanwhile, broke under the weight of his misfortune and became a Misanthrope Supreme who never learns his lesson. Bob is relatively fortunate, experiencing enough suffering to learn and grow as a person, without being broken... yet Della was spoiled rotten by her parents yet still wound up as a good person, who proves to be resilient even in the face of adversity despite (or even because) of the lack of adversity faced in her life, and Evan was pretty much abused and pretty much gone through thousands upon thousands of Humiliation Congas per hour, yet still wound up as a good person, who proves to be serene and cool-headed even in the face of adversity because (or even despite) the sheer amount of adversity faced in his life.
- Averted: Suffering neither builds nor destroys character.
- Enforced:
- The writer had experienced suffering that made him a stronger person, so he creates the character Bob as a reflection to help others.
- The writer wants Bob to be an old-school "father knows best"-type, and at his worst he's still not completely in the wrong. Most sure-fire way to have him be correct is to show he's had some experience in what's going on, as awful that experience turned out to be.
- Bob is beginning to look like an Invincible Hero and boring the audience. The writers decide to break him a little and increase audience sympathy.
- Lampshaded: "Suffer a little more and you'll become a better person."
- Invoked:
- A tyrannical dictator wants to make obedient citizens by bringing forth intense suffering to them.
- Or alternatively, a deontological and strict ruler figures that the best way to make his subjects well-behaved and disciplined is to make them go through something extremely horrific.
- Bob enjoys suffering and awaits for it to happen.
- Al fully believes in this trope and feels that treating Bob with Tough Love is beneficial for his growth.
- A group of Knight Templars run around subjecting people to all kinds of trials (anything from stealing all of their money, dislocating their shoulders and running over their dogs up to subjecting them to Saw-style "maim yourself to break free" tortures) to teach them this lesson.
- Exploited: Same as "Invoked 1" except the tyrant wants to be seen as a well-meaning person for creating benefits through inflicting suffering, making him feel better about himself.
- Defied:
- "Suffering doesn't build character. You're just saying that as an excuse to be a douchebag."
- "Suffering doesn't build character. Suffering is just suffering."
- "I almost got myself killed doing what you asked me to do. Unless you wanna find out how much 'character' it builds to lose all of your fucking teeth, don't you ever dare use that fucking phrase again."
- "The pain of spending fifty bucks also 'builds character', so let's go pay the damn professional you're trying to skim on by asking me to do this crap."
- "Fuck you, I'm not doing this, period. See? I've got plenty of character."
- Discussed:
- "It's always those types of people who think that bad things are good for us."
- "Suffering makes us stronger? What kind of drugs are you on?!"
- "Well, it's really nice that losing your uncle made you the greatest living saint that ever sainted in New York City, the savior of freaking Earth nineteen times over no matter what the idiot on the radio yells every morning, but guess what!? I'm not you!! News flash, some people lose their uncles to a violent robbery and they roll over and die, okay!? They just… roll over and die. Now would you please let me join them?"
- Conversed: "You would think that the writers made Bob suffer long enough?"
- Deconstructed:
- The belief that bad things are good for people opens a door for those to use said belief to justify their rotten behavior, making the world a horrible place to live; as a result, many people who are bullied, abused, and harassed choose to take their own lives. In addition, society labels those who detest and reject the belief as spineless cowards who can't handle the suffering in life or lazy entitled ingrates who will never succeed in life because they won't stop indulging in its pleasures.
- Whatever character is built is shown to always come with serious long term downsides. While training may have toughened the soldiers up they can no longer function in normal society.
- Any parent that invokes this lesson on their family the way the Trope usually does (that is, make them all endure a hellish experience and they better grin and bear it) is an asshole, plain and simple — whether they are doing this accidentally (and a jaw-droppingly foolish accident, at that) or deliberately.
- Bob suffers hardships and emerges from them dilligent, brave, and streetwise, but it also made him a cynical misanthrope who believes the worst in the world and gave him an intense hatred of Al and anyone else involved in the hardships that made him who he is, leading him to turn against his friends and family.
- Bob's father Al went through hell but as The Stoic, never showed his vulnerable side to anyone else and suffered alone. Bob idolizes his father and grows up believing that simply pushing through any moment of weakness will make him stronger, just like his father. Years after his father's death, Bob is finally hit with severe trauma and he proceeds to downplay his issues and refuse all help because he believes that his late father would be disappointed in him for not being strong enough to fix things alone.
- For every person who faces adversity and rises above, a million are knocked down and stay down, if they do not just die (and this is leaving alone the whole "building character" part of the equation), and because media has a particularly bad habit of not pointing this out, people tend to not really think this through.
- Bob doesn't realise it's recovery, rather than trauma itself, that makes people stronger. He rejects people's kindness and refuses therapy in order to keep suffering, only to end up on a downward spiral that takes him over the Despair Event Horizon.
- Reconstructed:
- It is shown that a person who has suffered and recovered from hardships is much better prepared to face the real world than someone who avoided any form of adversity, and that while insurmountable hardships can very likely cause a person to break down and destroy his/her character; courage, personal attitude and support from friends and family can make adversity much more manageable, and actually make people grow.
- Bob recovers from the trauma, gets some therapy, and learns to be strong without being an abusive dick.
- Bob was a bratty little shit and he became better after getting a reality check. Al may have been in the wrong, but he wasn't completely in the wrong. Bob comes to terms with the fact that his father wasn't perfect, but he was trying.
- Bob's father learns to balance fairness and indulgence. He still teaches Bob to be strong, but he also remembers other important virtues like kindness, teamwork, and empathy that also matter.
- Misery doesn't always have to be life-threatening or -ruining to help build one's character. Minor incidents or issues can just as well help shape someone into a better person by virtue of becoming less sheltered and more wise to the world.
- Played For Laughs: There is a literal grindstone that can be used to build one's character into a perfect personality. No one uses it because it is so tedious.
- Played For Drama:
- The trials and tribulations a character goes through break the audience's hearts.
- Bob, who is The Big Guy and no stranger to eating humble pie (with his job having a surprisingly high death count) or suffering (either personally or for the sake of his friends) spends a full season (and the five-year Time Skip between seasons) on a wheelchair with an injured back, watching the world pass him by and his friends achieving all of the objectives they set out to do from the beginning of the show without him, society again and again trying and failing to not address his absence and apparent uselessness as the elephant in the room, and every time he tries to return to the game in any way, shape or form he just ends with egg on his face or any other kind of humiliation and disrespect that would come his way. And he is supposed to achieve… a better character from this. Bob is completely nonplussed.
- Played For Horror: The Big Bad Abusive Parents use this Trope as an excuse to perform all kinds of brutal, vomitive atrocities on their children like torture, rape, maiming, the assassination of anybody who shows kindness to them, the punting of their pets and literally shitting on them. Bob does "gain character" from this, in the sense of finally gaining the courage to bash their heads in not just to avenge himself but anyone else they might get their hands on.
- Plotted A Good Waste: The villain has locked all of humanity in a Lotus-Eater Machine of suffering and torment, figuring that an eternity of misery will serve to awaken humanity's true potential.
Back to Misery Builds Character. You'll suffer, but it's good for you.
