Misused: Break The Cutie

Note: This thread was proposed by El Rise.

The correct definition of Break the Cutie is, "a sweet, lovable character (aka The Cutie) suffers at least one horrible experience that threatens to break their spirit".

Here are the results of Break The Cutie Wick Check:

• 15.74% wicks are examples / potholes that fit the definition (correct).
• 41.97% wicks are misused examples / potholes that boil down to "a character, The Cutie or not, suffers at least one horrible experience that threatens to break their spirit".
• 42.59% wicks are examples / potholes with insufficient context (ZCEs).

On paper, Break the Cutie suggests a pattern where any character that is designed in a way that conveys cuteness and has lovable traits is more prone to suffer and angst than any other character in order to increase Emotional Torque. In practice, the heaps of misuse and ZCEs indicate "bad things happen to character(s)", which is frankly what happens in all fiction due to Conflict and Rule of Drama.
Moreover, the examples have considerable overlap with similar tropes, like Innocence Lost, Trauma Conga Line, etc.
Possible suggestions:

• Make the trope page a Definition-Only Page
• Turn the trope into a super trope and disable on-page examples
• Disambig

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Paging ~El Rise as requested. Anyway, I'm going to wait for more input before voting.

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

I feel like the misuse is due to people seeing this trope as a non-YMMV Woobie. Regardless, my recommendations still stand.

Graffiti Wall

Looking at the wick check, I do see that some correct uses overlap with other tropes. So, that's a strong case for disambiguation.

she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report

Before any decision is made, I'll note that we have 11,740 wicks to clean through if we do a disambig/anything like that.

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

if we did disambig, which tropes would we disambig to? Would it just be Innocence Lost and Trauma Conga Line?

Edited by amathieu13 on Apr 3rd 2023 at 10:01:09 AM

As usual, it wouldn't be set in stone. We could start with those and add any more we find.

And yeah, I know there are a lot of wicks here. Thankfully, if we went with any of the proposals in the OP, the wick cleanup wouldn't be nearly as complex as what The Cameo ended up with (assuming retooling this into a supertrope, with or without adding this to No On-Page Examples, would require wick cleanup at all).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 3rd 2023 at 10:35:54 AM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.

Okay, but what trope covers such examples for us to get rid of it? I mean, there are lots of correct examples and there could be more bc this is just a sample and this is a valid trope. We can just clean up misuse and ZCEs.

Kicking this to Projects and closing this thread doesn't sound like a bad idea due to the high wick count, if nobody's taken this to Projects yet.

In fact, I think I'm now in favor of doing that instead of having TRS deal with another mega-thread.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Apr 3rd 2023 at 12:17:04 PM

Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.