Follow TV Tropes

Following

Break The Cutie / Anime & Manga
aka: Anime

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/878d08e6_9528_410b_a4a0_898e8f925d4b.jpeg

Cuties being broken in Anime and Manga.

Shows with their own pages:


Individual examples:

    open/close all folders 

    A 
  • Afterschool Charisma is not kind to its main character, Shiro. Not only does he have to deal with the only non-clone in a school of clones, but then he discovers that he might be a clone after all, and then Joan dies despite all of her efforts to Screw Destiny. Hitler doesn't take that last one very well either, especially considering that just beforehand he learns that Rasputin and Einstein made up the whole "Almighty Dolly" thing as an experiment. More troubling, the formerly shy and kind boy is beginning to show signs of becoming like his original.
  • Ah! My Goddess: The demons try this with Belldandy all the time. Nothing really disturbing ever happens though.
  • Ai no Wakakusa Monogatari: Beth, the youngest and cutest of the March sisters, starts crying because of The Hummels' baby dies of scarlet fever.
  • Aido: Ureha may have been kind of clingy, but being downright cruelly humiliated by Sawori...
  • Air Gear:
    • In Akito’s backstory, he was forced by Kaito to murder someone. This broke him so badly he actually created Agito to handle killing for him.
    • In the past, Kilik was a great guy to be around; idealistic, selfless, and honest and forthright. Then he was betrayed by his friends and he became the cynical Well-Intentioned Extremist he is in the series proper.
  • In Ai Yori Aoshi, we're introduced to Kaoru Hanabishi post-breaking. In the period of the first chapters / episodes, he's partly recovered, but distant and lonely. Then Aoi shows up, and the process of reconstruction begins. As for the breaking part, we see through flashbacks that he was subjected to Torture Technician-as-guardian: he lost both his parents, had most of the few keepsakes he had left destroyed, was beaten to the point of horrible scarring by said guardian, and never again saw the cute girl he used to play with. Then he struck out on his own to work as a menial and go to school, in the hopes of making it on his own. Only the efforts of Tina, and later Aoi and the rest of the True Companions, were able to help him be a whole person.
  • Akame ga Kill!: In the first chapter, Tatsumi loses both of his childhood friends and it just goes downhill from there. Averted by his Foil Wave of the Jaegers, who despite getting just as much shit thrown at him manages to hold on to his idealism while Tatsumi edges closer to Pragmatic Hero.
  • In AKIRA, taken to the most literal extent possible with the poor sweet Love Martyr Kaori. Squish.
    • It's made even worse in the manga, where Kaori's role is more fleshed in and she manages to mildly resist all the shit thrown at her until almost the end. Then she's gunned down by Tetsuo's treacherous lieutenant, and dies in the arms of Tetsuo himself.
    • According to Kaneda after Yamagata got killed, everyone at school teased Tetsuo and tried to make him cry. This would have serious consequences when Tetsuo's powers awakened.
  • Amatsuki : Tsuruume after the reset. This trope also applies to Toki himself after he loses Kuchiha and Kon as a consequence of his own decisions, and if we get to count the past, Hiwa/Bonten, Shinshu, and Ginshu. Though one might argue that Ginshu was broken from the start.
    • Tsuyukusa blamed himself for Byakuroku's death (it was revenge for some miko shooting Tsuyukusa), nearly going insane with grief in the process.
    • Shinshu’s relationship with Ginshu never recovered following the Byakuroku incident.
    • After the person Tsuruume loves most is killed off and replaced by someone else, she's the only one who remembers the real Ginshu, and she is assumed crazy and thrown in jail, where she goes half mad worrying and fighting with her emotions.
  • Alien Nine takes glee in doing horrible things to the cute girls who make up the cast, from mind rape to complete memory erasure to being eaten alive.
  • In Angel Beats! Yuri had her siblings killed in front of her by robbers when she was a kid. The worst part is that it was Yuri's "fault" that they died because she couldn't find money in the house to give to the robbers. They probably would've killed them all regardless, but that doesn't really help Yuri's feelings of guilt.
    • Iwasawa had an abusive Dad and generally a broken household. She found her savior in music, but that was taken away from her when her Dad hit her causing her to lose her voice first, then die.
    • Angel has a lesser example but her rank as Student Council President was taken away, the teachers and students have lost all respect for her, and her comfort food was taken away from her all because of the SSS's actions. It's also sad when you realize that Angel probably is a human like the rest of SSS and was just trying to fulfill her duties as Student Council President. Her reputation and life in the after world is ruined because she was trying to play by the rules. (And in the end, it turns out that yes, she is.)
    • Otonashi has a bit of one with Angel, or better said Kanade Tachibana, at the near the end of the series, reveals her desire to thank him for the gift of his heart during her life (which was the only thing keeping her there) fulfilled. She manages to say her thanks... and then she disappears in his arms.
  • Misaki in Angelic Layer is a friendly, cute, sometimes shy and sometimes very energetic little girl...who has been repressing feelings of inadequacy and sadness due to her mom being gone for a large portion of her life. Her Break the Cutie moment comes in the Tear Jerker-filled Episode 25 when she sees her mom is not only the Champion of Angelic Layer, but has had multiple opportunities to see her and never did. She starts question why her mom never saw her and runs away crying because she thinks she was bad and her mother didn't want to see her. She gets better.
  • Animal X: Between Morning Sickness, anemia, constant attempted rapes, having to bear the child of the man who raped him, and both him and his family being pawns/targets in half a dozen gambits, Yuuji cannot catch a break. He crosses the Despair Event Horizon when he finds out what happened to his first child: she was subjected to vivisection, died, and then her remains were kept on ice in a research facility. After that, Yuuji is quietly broken and makes remarks that show that he's reached a point where he doesn't much care if he lives or dies.
  • Ritsu from Assassination Classroom. To her dismay, her creators tried to revert her new-found personality from cheerful back to emotionless killer machine. However, she was able to save and hide her memories from them and retain her personality.
  • Ashita no Nadja:
    • Colette was very broken at some point. As a rich noblewoman who fell for her piano teacher, they eloped and lived a simple but happy life together in Paris. Then her hubby died in an accident. Then she had to support herself and her baby daughter alone as a seamstress, which was harsh but not unlivable until they both fell very sick. And then she was tricked by the envoys of her rich family into believing that he daughter perished of said illness, thus making her return to her clan. She gets somewhat better, but never forgets her former life.
    • Nadja lives a simple but happy life as an orphan girl and then a dancer. Then finds herself in a love triangle with two very troubled young men who are also twins - one is a cynical but goodhearted Gentleman Thief, the other is a softspoken but very troubled Sheltered Aristocrat. And then she puts pieces of her past together and gets closer to her mother... but then, her former best friend who has snapped on her due to a huge misunderstanding and her Evil Uncle plot against her. And holy shit, Nadja gets more and more broken since then.]]
  • Attack on Titan does this to anyone that started out idealistic and naive.
    • This is Mikasa's backstory in a nutshell. She was a sweet, innocent little girl until a gang murdered her parents in front of her and then kidnapped her, with the implications she was going to be sold into sexual slavery. She ended up being forced to murder one of the men, and came to accept that the world was a cruel place where only the strong survive. While already broken, she got an extra dose when Wall Maria fell and her foster mother was eaten by a Titan in front of her.
    • Connie started out as the Plucky Comic Relief, and managed to handle his first few traumatic ordeals pretty well. But then a mysterious horde of Titans appeared inside Wall Rose, seemingly passing through and destroying his village without actually eating anyone — they've all simply vanished without a trace. The one crippled Titan they discover in the ruins of his house speaks to him, and he realizes that it resembles his mother.....something the others desperately try to keep him from thinking about. And when it finally seems like the crisis is over, his surrogate big brother turns out to be The Mole.
    • Reiner was shown in flashbacks to be a happy kid who just wanted to make his mother proud of him by becoming a soldier. He ended up inheriting the Armored Titan, but learns that it was only because Marcel begged the military officials to give it to Reiner instead of Marcel's brother, Porco (who ironically ends up with titan powers later on anyway). While still processing this information, Marcel is eaten in front of Reiner, Bertolt and Annie while they're unable to do anything, which causes Reiner to suffer from some serious Survivor Guilt. That guilt manifests itself tenfold after his mission on Paradis, where he's the only one of his friends to make it back home, to the point where he attempts to kill himself but is (unknowingly) stopped. And that's after having to fight in another war for four years. Then he finds out that Eren has snuck into his hometown, used one of the child soldiers he's looking after to do so, and that Eren is planning on killing all of his hometown if Reiner doesn't cooperate. He's so broken by this point that he even asks Eren to kill him.
    • Falco, who is responsible for helping Eren infiltrate Liberio and Marley's military, does not take the news that it's his fault very well.
    • In fact, anyone who has witnessed a Titan attack tends to have a Thousand-Yard Stare and PTSD flashbacks. The commander at basic training for new soldiers completely ignores any Titan survivors among the recruits when doing his Drill Sergeant Nasty routine: they're already broken, and he knows it. Breaking them further would serve no purpose save pointless cruelty.

    B 
  • Banana Fish: Yau-Si's backstory. In a flashback he appears as a seemingly normal and very Moe child... before his half-brothers rape and murder his mother, which leads to him, ten years later, having become an emotionally unstable, murderous and utterly miserable Jerkass.
  • Bannertail: The Adventures of Gray Squirrel: Banner, a young and happy-go-lucky squirrel, loses his mother and his home in quick succession, being forced to move in the woods. Later, after seeing Uncle Owl getting shot right in front of him, Banner is seen running to a tree and punching it as he starts wailing in agony over his death.
  • Barefoot Gen seems to be leading towards this for Gen and all of his family, given that they're a family of war protestors in World War II era Japan... specifically, Hiroshima. They're mocked for being traitors, refused food, Gen's father is arrested and beaten, have their field of wheat which is the only hope they had of not starving destroyed, Gen's sister is accused of stealing money and stripped naked, the sweet potatoes they get from some friends in the countryside are taken away when a policeman accuses them of buying them on the black market, and plenty of other constant insults by their neighbors and times when they almost starve to death. Then the atomic bomb goes off. This finally breaks Gen's mother, who has to watch her husband, son, and daughter burn to death in the remains of her house. She does get better, though.
  • Basilisk: Princess Oboro's fiancé is the leader of an enemy faction despite both being really in love, the peace treaty that would allow them to marry was messily broken behind her back, her lieutenant steals the command from her and attempts to rape her twice in the course of the story, very powerful people meddle in the clans' feud to make it worse, and all of her servants/warriors/friends/enemies die, all of them VERY messily. No wonder she ultimately decides to kill herself and die with honor rather than fighting her injured, blinded, almost dead True Love in the end. Who, having become broken as well, promptly commits suicide as well.
  • Battle B-Daman:
    • Poor little Enjyu was forced to take a dive on each of his battles so his dad could pay for their rent. At the Junior B-Daman Tournament he was disqualified after unfairly being accused of cheating due to his refusal to continue with the charade, thus being betrayed by his only friend, Enjyu took out his anger on his father in a B-daBattle, resulting him into changing his hair from blue to red and changing from timid and meek to cold and ruthless.
    • As a child, Cain went through training of his strict father, turning him egocentric and power hungry.
  • When we first meet Bitter Virgin's sixteen-year-old Hinako Aikawa, she had already endured serious sexual abuse from her stepfather. Abuse which her mother refused to acknowledge was happening until it got Hinako pregnant for the second time. Readers saw these events transpire in a flashback that occurred while Hinako was in the process of being raped again by a random molester. Fortunately, that time she was rescued, and the series as a whole focuses on Hinako's recovery from these traumas.
  • Black Butler:
    • Ciel Phantomhive is already broken and toughened up by the time we see him. In flashbacks he appears to be a very happy, cheerful, and loving little boy who has a close relationship with his family. Then things go horribly wrong. After his parents, house staff, and dog are killed, his home is set on fire to destroy any evidence and Ciel is kidnapped. Flashbacks show him in a cage with other children his age and cultists around them who apparently used the children kidnapped as sacrifices. Ciel witnessed these sacrifices and when it was his turn he accidentally summoned a demon in his desperation. Three years later he is the successful owner of a toy and confectionaries company, but also very bitter, jaded, and cold.
    • The anime's second season did something of the sort to Alois Trancy. In episodes 7 and 8, Alois, who before seemed like a complete jackass, is stabbed and ignored by Claude for a bit who's busy practically orgasming over the taste of Ciel's blood. Alois's tearful response "Oh, you look like you've seen a bunch of maggots squirming in a dung pile," to Claude's indifference towards him is heartbreaking; then we learn his backstory, where his little brother died and left him alone and he was made to become a sex slave to a perverted old man, and he later practically confesses his love for Claude, telling him he's the only one he has left in the world, before Claude tenderly holds his face and then crushes his head in.
  • Durham tried this in Black Cat and uses Eve's blood to leave her friends a message.
  • Black Lagoon is either in love with this trope or owes it money:
    • Hansel and Gretel were created by an entire upbringing of this.
    • Revy is heavily implied to have been broken at some point in her past. Confirmed when we learn that THE breaking event was being tortured and raped by a policeman when she was a Street Urchin.
    • The entire Fujiyama Gangsta Paradise arc is this for Yukio AND Ginji.
    • Believe it or not, Balalaika used to be an idealistic little girl whose only goal in life was to regain her family's honor by competing in the Olympics. You had better bet that she got hit hard by this trope in order to make her into what she is today.
    • Garcia in the El Baile De La Muerte arc. It started the minute he stepped foot in Roanapur and just kept getting worse.
  • Overall, all the characters in Bloody Maiden: Juusanki no Shima via the killer. Specifically, Miaki right after seeing Risa, her big sister figure, killed and thrown off a windmill as the fifth sacrifice.
  • Blood+:
    • The series manages to break the same cutie twice courtesy of Easy Amnesia: Saya Otonashi starts out as a carefree young girl until her twin sister Diva, who Saya had set loose, murders Saya's foster father Joel and everyone else who was attending his birthday party, turning Saya's entire life into a mission to hunt Diva and her Chevaliers down and kill them. Then, after the Red Shield's disastrous meddling in Vietnam causes Saya to awaken in the present with no memories, Saya is once more a normal, cute Ordinary High-School Student... who is forced to fight Chiropterans, manipulated by her enemies, and has to deal with realizing that she's not human. When Diva rapes and murders Saya's adopted little brother Riku, Saya has a full-blown Heroic BSoD.
    • Aside from this, averted with Lulu, who sees all of the other Schiff die off in ones and twos, and faces her own premature death from the Thorn. Despite this, she remains happy and chipper, and eventually they find her a cure.
    • Pulled yet again in regards to Haji. Through a flashback, it is shown that the reason he went from being somewhat stoic to made of stone was because his blood turned his One True Love and reason for living into a murdering psychopath who forgot who he was and cut his arm off during her rampage.
  • Blue Gender:
    • Alica, whose introduced as bubbly and optimistic. Then she happens upon Tony in a Blue's nest and her attitude changes rapidly.
    • This is also part of Yuji's character development early on in the series.
  • Seems to be the entire point of Bokurano, featuring a large cast of cuties all broken, tortured, and killed one by one.
  • Bokura no Hentai:
    • Marika starts the manga as a chipper, innocent cutie pie who thinks like a 1970s shoujo manga. Her choice in friends puts a dent in that. In particular her relationship with Tamura, who started out nice enough seeming, causes her to become much more cynical and depressed. Her gender dysphoria and issues with her budding sexuality only make everything worse.
    • Tamura starts as a somber, quiet middle school boy with a crush on a straight classmate. They begin an abusive sexual relationship which helps spur Repressed Memories in Tamura. Once those memories surface Tamura's personality takes a horrible turn and he displays suicidal and overall self-destructive ideation. Unlike Marika, he's troubled as adult.
  • Bomberman Jetters: Both White Bomber and Shout get this around the halfway point on discovering Mighty's death.
  • Makino goes through this over the course of Boys over Flowers, but her Plucky Girl nature tends to win out over despair in the end.
  • Cleo Saburafu from Broken Blade doesn't handle her comrades' deaths too well, though she seems to have recovered.
  • Life gets progressively harder and harder for Marin Asagi with each episode of Brigadoon: Marin and Melan and just when you think things can't possibly get any worse for her, they do.
  • Bubblegum Crisis:
    • The second AD Police OVA is told from the viewpoint of an idealistic young policewoman who is trying to prove that the serial killer in the episode is human (both to the police and herself) while struggling with the decision to replace her right eye with an artificial one. The episode ends with her going under the knife, narrating that this was the story of how she lost part of her humanity.
    • Nene undergoes this in the 2040 episodes My Nation Underground and Woke Up With A Monster when her bratty arrogance finally comes back to bite her in the ass after she tries to play match maker between Priss and Leon, earning her a long overdue scolding from Sylia for endangering the team's secrecy, and then gets her ass handed to her in a boomer fight when she tries to rush in and beat the boomer by herself in a misguided attempt to prove herself.
  • Cuties of all kinds are broken on Canaan, but Hakko takes the cake. Her voice can literally kill people. When she accidentally kills her lover she breaks down and it ends up in all kinds of messed up. Mari and Yunyun also qualify.

    C 
  • Candy♡Candy thrives on this since the main character, Candace White Andree, has led a hash life that incluides orphanhood, having her best friend Annie adopted and taken away, being employed as a maid for a rich family and being treated like shit by the bosses' spoiled brats, losing her First Love very messily right after another rich family, etc.
  • Captain Tsubasa:
    • Taro Misaki’s familiar problems make him suffer more than once, but he's not completely broken. By WYC, he retakes contact with his Missing Mom and gets along real well with his kind stepfather and Moe half-sister.
    • Roberto Hongo’s backstory, specially his childhood, as told by the J and Road to 2002 series, and his eyesight problems, which forced him into retirement.
    • Yoshiko-chan almost. The poor little girl took her half-brother's accident hard, and even more so since he got hurt to save her, but Misaki managed to calm her down.
  • Played hard a couple of times in Cardcaptor Sakura. Both out and in-universe, Sakura in tears is considered an incredibly heartbreaking sight (interestingly the dub downplays a few of these scenes, likely to make her seem like a less vulnerable protagonist, though the remaining examples are still valid).
  • Aichi Sendou of Cardfight!! Vanguard, who suffered years of bullying which left him with as much self-confidence as a Shinji Ikari expy. He has virtually nothing to look forward to until Kai shows up in his life again, but he's completely transformed. Aichi's motivation throughout the first season of the show is to become strong enough for Kai to acknowledge him and have a fight, only it serves to push him off the deep end and into the hands of Ren, who manipulates Aichi in order to turn him against Kai and pushes him deeper into Psyqualia. When Kai actually rescues Aichi, it all becomes too much for him and he shuts down. It takes a couple of episodes to snap him out of it. And then there's the matter of him having to confront Ren and going through the latter part of his descent all over again.
    • Misaki Tokura's perfect memory has one major flaw to it: she can't forget her parents' deaths. She doesn't play Vanguard that much because the cards remind her of them and she quits Team Q4 when she realizes she can't separate her past and the game. Although she does snap out of it before long.
    • Leon Souryuu's backstory as well. His family were isolated at sea and he was told the story of the Souryuu Child, who would bring salvation. Only to learn it was a tale one of the elders made up. Cue Deal with the Devil.
  • In the backstory of Chrono Crusade, Joshua was an imaginative, yet sick boy that desperately wanted to be strong so he could overcome his illness. So when Aion offers him the chance to be powerful with the use of a pair of demon horns, he quickly accepts...and almost immediately goes insane because the power of the horns is too much for him to bear. The rest of the series has him acting as both the reason for Chrono and Rosette to fight and a Psychopathic Manchild that proves to be a dangerous opponent.
  • Claudine:
    • It's hard not to feel sorry for Maura when she realizes that her first paycheck never arrived home and when her dad suddenly dies.
    • Rosemarie witnesses all the disgraces that befalls Claude, and can only give him limited support. She gets half her face scarred in the fire that killed August and Cécilia and that, combined with her one-sided love for Claude, means she'll never marry.
  • Claymore's in general tend to have tragic backstories, but Clare gets it particularly badly. Priscilla has set the groundwork for the entire plot. "I killed my daddy while he ate my brother's innards..." Brrr.
  • Code Geass has quite a few:
    • C.C. was apparently The Cutie before the harsh realities of living in a Crapsack World turned her into a cynical person who gives people (including an orphaned child) Blessed with Suck powers in an attempt to finally die.
    • Shirley Fennette was convinced by Mao to try to shoot Lelouch, as he knew exactly what to say due to his mind-reading powers. Lelouch tried to fix everything by giving her amnesia, but she still wound up really insecure and timid. In the second season, Gottwald accidentally brings her memories back while testing out his Geass Canceler, which leads to her eventual death at Rolo's hands.
    • Nunnally maintains a happy smile and only wants to be with her brother, despite being blind and crippled as a result of her mother being murdered in front of her. Although many things happen over the course of the show to separate them, she never lets them get her down. And by the second season she comes into her own, as Viceroy of Area 11. However, at the end of the show, her brother uses his Geass to force her to give him the key to a WMD, chains her up as a prisoner in a parade, then winds up dead (by his own orders) in an effort to unite the world in hating him. All this gets to her and she wails over his dead body. Even then, she still manages to take his place on the throne in order help finish bringing peace.
    • Mao, the orphan whom C.C. gave Geass to, went through this as well. He Used to Be a Sweet Kid but his mind-reading powers drove him completely insane, rendering him the most irreparably broken character in the entire series, who had to be Mercy Killed by C.C.. He's even famous for it.
    • Suzaku starts off at the beginning of the series as a chivalrous and gentle person before the series starts getting darker. As it runs its course, he suffers a Heroic BSoD when it's revealed that he killed his father, and then later he's given a "Live" Geass order from Lelouch which means that he has to stay alive at all costs, after which his girlfriend gets killed off in a very ugly fashion and then later he ends up deploying nuclear weapons while under the effect of his Geass, and ultimately gets pushed across the Despair Event Horizon. And then finally he's left to a potential Fate Worse than Death by killing Lelouch as Zero as soon as he manages to hook back up with him, and has to spend the rest of his life as Zero all Lonely at the Top.
    • Princess Euphemia is the one genuinely nice royal, an All-Loving Heroine who wants to genuinely make a better world for everyone. Then a terrible accident on Lelouch's part turns her into the Massacre Princess and she ends up dead.
    • Lelouch himself in the backstory; flashbacks and extra materials paints him as a happy child when younger. Then his mother was assassinated, his sister crippled and blinded by trauma, his father rejects both of them as "weaklings" and sends them as hostages to Japan, they are thrown away as collateral in the war against Japan, and Lelouch is forced to get himself and Nunnally (plus Suzaku) through battlefields to safety. By the start of the story he's a Broken Bird...and the series somehow manages to break him even more, wiping away what innocence and hope he has until he becomes a Death Seeker.
  • Minako goes through one hell of a Break the Cutie process at the ending of Codename: Sailor V. After a year of fighting youma all by herself, with indications that she felt that it was too much for her interspersed throughout the series, she learned that Kaitou Ace, her only true love was Danburite, a general of the Dark Kingdom, enemies of the Moon Kingdom. She had no choice but to kill her one true love, something she'd wanted all her life, and she renounced all of her former dreams in favour of her mission. Also, she learned that in her previous lifetime, she was the leader of Princess Serenity's warriors (aka the Sailor Senshi), and that all of the Senshi, Princess Serenity and Endymion had all died, and their world was destroyed because of the Dark Kingdom. The responsibility of preventing that from reoccuring lied with her. This symbolizes her becoming focused solely on her mission to protect Princess Serenity, and her going from a genuine Genki Girl to a Stepford Smiler.
  • Cross Ange introduces us to Princess Angelise Ikaruga Misurugi, the beloved and popular daughter of the Emperor and Empress of the Misurugi Empire. Sweet, caring, a good sport while playing the fantasical sport Iaria, and beloved by her teammates, her Iaria rivals, and everyone in the Empire. Her only real flaw is her elitist ignorance to the plight of Normas, who cannot use the Light of Mana that has ascended most of the world to an idyllic utopia. Normas are prejudiced universally and forcibly extricated from the Society of Mana, thus Angelise ignorantly believes that the Normas should be purged and destroyed. But on her 16th birthday, during her royal "Baptism Ceremony", she is suddenly outed as a Norma herself by her ruthless brother, Prince Julio, to the entire Misurugi Empire and herself. Not only is she completely blindsided by this revelation, she completely refuses to accept the truth and attacks the officers attempting to arrest her. This only results in her mother, Empress Sophia, jumping in harm's way and getting fatally shot to protect Angelise. Angelise is then arrested, declared a Norma, rejected by all her "friends", and shipped to Arzenal where she will be conscripted into the military. This all happens in the first episode, and she ends it lying on the cold ground of a prison cell, stripped, bloodied, violated via cavity search, and in tears. The rest of the series is devoted to her development from Angelise, the Fallen Princess who has lost everything... to Ange, a stone-cold, prickly, tomboyish, hardened Action Survivor.
  • A Cruel God Reigns: Jeremy. For the entire series. He's just a sweet, loving boy who would do anything to make sure his mother is happy. Unfortunately for him.
  • Played in reverse in Cyber Team in Akihabara, Tsubame Utorii is introduced as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who viciously attacks and defeats the main cast every chance she gets. It's eventually shown just how badly broken she is. In a late episode, Hibari Hanakogane goes to great lengths to try and befriend Tsubame. After an emotional breakdown in which she compares her life to Hibari's, Tsubame joins the Cyberteam, and spends the remainder of the series trying to repair her broken childhood with good memories as an adopted child in the Hanakogane household.

    D 
  • Daimos: Erika carried the Survivor's Guilt of thinking of being responsible of the deaths of her own father and the emissary of peace from Earth, then lost her memory and then fell in love with the son of said emissary, Kazuya, all while her homeland was at war with Earth because of that death and her brother Richter was spearheading the attack and too stubborn to back down and her boyfriend was the main defender of Earth. When everything came to her together, it just utterly breaks her whereas in normal mode, Erika is usually the sweet All-Loving Hero and Proper Lady. Thankfully, Erika finally earns her Bittersweet Ending, which is after tons of suffering, including Richter performing a Heroic Sacrifice out of shame of that invasion.
  • Daltanious:
    • Sanae Shiratori was forced to watch her parents burn to death in the hospital they worked at during the 1995 Alien Invasion, and when she tried to rescue them, two survivors held her back because they knew she was going to die too. Poor Sanae had to watch helplessly with tears in her eyes as they died.
    • Six-year-old Ochame was abandoned at a young age and never knew her real parents. The Alien Invasion led her to Sanae, and they became fast friends over their shared experiences, before joining Kento's Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. However, when Sanae contracts a virus because of Ochame's insistence, she becomes distraught and blames herself, anbd begins crying when Earl tells her it has a 70& fatality rate. Luckily, Danji brings Earl the blood of a Bemborg, which he makes a cure out of.
  • In Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, we have several over the two story arcs. In the Future arc, we have Aoi Asahina and Makoto Naegi being put through another murder game, with the death of their friend and classmate Kyoko Kirigiri being a significant blow to their morale. And even worse, Episode 12 reveals that this was the whole purpose of the game in the first place: to break Ryota Mitarai and drive him to use a brainwashing video to destroy all negative emotions at the cost of everyone's humanity. In the Despair arc, we have the torture of Chisa Yukizome, and the turning of class 77 (a.k.a. the cast of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair) into Ultimate Despairs through being forced to watch their classmate Chiaki being executed via. a brainwashing video.
  • Chiko from The Daughter of Twenty Faces has a rare double Break the Cutie. In the two-part Wham Episode early on, Chiko makes friends with a local girl whose dad is head of security at the local museum. The girl has a major crush on Chiko's disguise as a member of a circus, and invites her over, allowing Chiko to discover many weaknesses in the security. And turns them over to her thief comrades, who steal the major artifact from the museum... breaking the girl in the process. In part 2, the girl falls in line with some thieves gunning for Chiko's comrades, and the resulting carnage and death of the girl fighting Chiko breaks her as well.
  • Baran; Hadler and Vearn's numerous attempts at making Dai snap and/or join their ranks in Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai.
  • Deadman Wonderland:
    • The main character Ganta is imprisoned in a maximum security prison/theme park after emerging from a Heroic BSoD after his entire class gets slaughtered by a mysterious "Red Man" right before a field trip to said prison/theme park. In short order he's sentenced to death, befriended by Ax-Crazy Shiro, discovers that a piece of candy he lost was actually antidote for the poison that's being constantly injected into his body, that he actually does have the power that killed his classmates, courtesy of a red diamond implanted into his body by the Red Man, and discovers other "Deadmen" and is forced to learn how to use his power to fight them in a tournament. And that's not even half of this manga's current chapters.
    • This also happens to Nagi after Genkaku reminds him that he has no hope of seeing his child by escaping out of Deadman Wonderland. He later kills himself and attempts to take Genkaku with him (the monk ends up in a coma). And then there's Genkaku himself, who was shown in the past to have been a timid, cute monk that got repeatedly beaten and raped by bullies, with the elder monk in charge being unsympathetic and uncaring, and seeing the little wounded kitten he was taking care of die - all of this causing him to go insane.
  • Nanako Misonoo from Dear Brother. Mariko, Rei, and Nanako's classmate Junko, too, although Mariko and Rei were already broken to begin with. And Rei herself is so broken that she commits suicide in the manga. (In the anime she dies too, but it's an accident. One that happens when her life was starting to get better.)
  • Death Note:
    • Light Yagami himself. invoked Word of God has explicitly stated that Light was not born cruel or evil. It is also strongly implied that he was quite empathic even by human standards, which is largely why the notebook distorted his sense of justice and morality.
    • Sayu Yagami, Light's sweet, adorable little sister in: During the second arc she gets kidnapped by Mello and ends up so traumatized that she goes catatonic and her mother has to use a wheelchair to move her around. She appears in a brief scene later in the manga. The author says she hasn't fully recovered, but she's improving. Thank God.
    • There's also poor Touta Matsuda, who is a genuinely good person who very much looks up to Soichiro, L, and Light, and always gives his everything has to the task force. Everyone makes it very clear that they don't think Matsuda is very important, despite that he's as committed as everyone else, and he ends up developing somewhat of an inferiority complex; even so, he never loses his heart, sense of humor, and pure dedication to catching Kira. Then two of his heroes (Soichiro and L) die, and in the final episode, he finds out that Light has been Kira all along, making him responsible for Soichiro and L's deaths. When Matsuda shoots the pen out of Light's hand before he can kill Near, Light starts screaming at him, belittling his own father's death and telling Matsuda that he should take his side and kill everyone in the room so Soichiro's death won't be in vain. The poor guy has had his idealism, mentors, and self-esteem slowly demolished throughout the series, so it's no wonder he completely snaps and almost kills Light in the spot when he tries to write Near's name one more time, Berserker Tears running down his face and coming literal inches away to putting his last bullet between Light's eyes. He's calmed down in the epilogue of the manga, but is a little bit less trusting.
  • Chiyuki from Death Parade was a promising young ice-skater who injured her knee. She was unable to skate anymore and ended up Driven to Suicide. Chiyuki is the amnesiac protagonist of the anime.
  • Tsuzuki's whole life (and afterlife) in Descendants of Darkness. Man does that guy have a sad story. To a lesser extent, Hisoka and the rest of the bureaucracy too.
  • D.Gray-Man:
    • The manga has a really nasty example of this in a flashback: Kanda's childhood friend Alma Karma. Despite a horrible life as a test subject for the Black Order, Alma was a Cheerful Child and the optimist to Kanda's cynical Jerkass. But after he got fried by the Crow while trying to save Kanda and only lived because he managed to synchronize with Innocence, he decided that the world was such a horrible place that it was doing everyone a favor to kill them. Which he attempted. Enthusiastically. When Kanda finally found him, he was standing in the midst of dozens of corpses, drenched in blood and smiling serenely, with another corpse still impaled on his "razor wing" Innocence. And he'd been trying to kill himself, too; his Healing Factor just kept closing it up.
    • Lenalee Lee. Parents killed by akuma. Abducted from the home she shared with her older brother after she was found out being a innocence host. Tortured, losing mind, possibly even driven to attempted suicide (specuialted by fandom, but still) - and all this before she was 13. She got better after her aforementioned older brother joined the Order itself to live with her. Just to have serious breakdowns whenever one of her True Companions dies (which for her is like her world falling apart). Good for her she's also a Plucky Girl, leading to her being an Action Girl. Then again this habit, altogether with her True Companions thing leads her to be a Stepford Smiler who has to admit how broken she is to become a better person. She still suffers trauma from her early years in the Order.
    • Miranda Lotto. Especially when she is forced to release the activation of her innocence, knowing that the people she kept alive with this and who protected her will ultimately die.. And her backstory was not nice either, conidering how she was shunned all of her life in her home due to her clumsiness and bad luck, to the point that she took broken dolls and fixed them in an attempt to not feel lonely.
    • The plot tries to do this on Allen Walker frequently. Up til now it did not succeed completely. He has some serious cracks now but is not completely broken, due to his status as Iron Woobie. (Just think about it. Parents abandoned him. Lived in an abusive circus where he was beaten by clowns, along with suffering from some really horrible mental and emotional abuse. Things get better after he gets adopted by Mana. Then things get horrible again as he has the lovely time of seeing his foster father die, said foster father getting turn into an Akuma (triggered by a fat guy with silly top hat), and then, his arm goes berserk and kills said Akuma... just after Mana (as an Akuma) tells him that he loves him. Next person who took care of him... left a trauma that's usually played for laughs but still leaves a bad taste in your mouth if you think of it. And basically, he's already crossed the Despair Event Horizon once by the time the series starts. Not that you'd realize that looking at him right away. He wants to save the souls of people who got tricked by the same fat guy that tricked him. Just to realize that somewhere along the way he probably is going to kill some humans too. No matter how bad they are. And then, just to sweeten the pot he learns that one of those Big Bad guys resides within him, and that this guy will eventually erase him, that same guy was the brother of his foster father, said one was nuts already when he adopted Allen and probably never loved Allen but his brother (not that it influenced him being a good caretaker, as it seemed... or Allen's love for said foster father. Woobie indeed.) - and just now he's in prison, damocles' sword of execution or some other Fate Worse than Death above his head... and as it seems this is not the end of it. Really now, if things continue at this rate, he'll definitely fall into the trope.

    E 

    F 
  • Future Lucy, it is made quite clear with her emotional state that her life became a living hell because of the dragons destroying everything. In the anime the tone of her voice shows just how broken down she is.
  • Natsu got hit with this hard near the end of the Tartaros arc. Throughout the series, it's been specifically stated that his Goal in Life was to see his foster father, Igneel, again. They finally reunite...but only because the Dragon King Acnologia was about to kill everyone. Igneel faces off against him, telling Natsu they'll talk afterwards. So, Natsu and company work together and manage to beat down what's left of Tartaros, and Natsu's all ready for that talk. Igneel dies graphically against Acnologia, right before getting finished off by the monster's Breath Weapon. Natsu has a front-row seat to watch too, and while all of this is happening, Igneel is using his last moments to tell him why he left and that he always loved him. The look on his face says it all...
  • Final Fantasy: Unlimited : The entirety of After is based on the forces of Chaos putting Lisa through as much emotional turmoil as possible. This is also just Chaos' favorite game, seeing as how it feeds on negative emotions and all.
  • Finder Series:
    • The entire Hong Kong arc was basically seeing how much rape and physical/mental torture Takaba could take before he snapped. It took a lot. Apparently a few days on a tropical island makes it all better though...
    • The High Loft arc describes how Feilong's world falls apart after he meets Asami. He's later explicitely described in Naked Truth Zero as being so broken that he doesn't even care about the assassins sent after him in jail.
  • Honoo no Alpen Rose: Whenever Jeudi first hears the song of the Alpen Rose, she keeps remembering vivid images of a fire burning and intense violence, breaking down and begging Martha to stop singing. Jeudi breaks again when she realizes that her birth mother is blind and cannot recognize her, and she's been replaced by a Body Double in the form of Mathilda.
  • Practically the whole cast of Fruits Basket. If there's a Cutie, the Cutie either is broken or will be shortly.
    • Tohru, whose father died when she was 3 and whose mother died when she was 16. Her whole family hates her except for her grandfather.
    • Kyo, who's rejected by everyone for being the Cat of the Zodiac. And he blames himself for the deaths of his mother and Kyoko Honda.
    • Yuki, who was psychologically abused by Akito while his family completely ignored his pleas for help.
    • Momiji, whose mother rejected him for being a member of the Zodiac and now doesn't remember him.
    • Hatori, who had to erase the memories of the woman he loved and break off all contact with her.
    • Hanajima, whose sixth sense resulted in her almost killing a boy in sixth grade and hearing everybody's thoughts until well into her teens, when she finally learned to control it.
    • Kisa, who was bullied so much she stopped speaking.
    • Isuzu, whose parents pretended to love her and then started abusing her when she found out. And that's not counting what Akito did to her...
    • Akito herself, since her mother hated her ever from before she was born for utterly petty reasons, and ever since her kind father died was driven by her mother to hate, abuse, and break everyone in her surroundings.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
    • Riza Hawkeye is a retroactive example. She used to be a cute and meek girl before her parents died (and it's strongly implied her dad was rather unbalanced, which is confirmed later), leaving her an orphan, and she trusted Roy with the secret to Fire Alchemy, inadvertently creating a Person of Mass Destruction. She then joined the army and went through Ishval, forcing her to toughen up the hard way, but without tossing all of her feelings away. How she got that secret: by having it forcibly tattooed on her back. And Roy later had to add more scars by burning said back so no one would be able to discover it.
    • Winry. She grows up fine into a strong and cheerful girl, despite her parents' death in Ishval while helping the wounded Ishvalans. Then she found out who killed her parents. All emotions break loose. In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), that is played differently. She eventually learns who killed parents but she doesn't confront him. She does make it known through her body language that she hates him for what he did though.
    • The identity of the Rockbells' killer differs between Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and the manga/Brotherhood anime. A young and traumatized Roy in the first series, Scar in the manga/Brotherhood. But it's played amazingly both times.
    • Ed and Al, in all continuities. They started out with a happy family, but then Daddy left for very good reasons, Mommy died, they attempted to bring back Mommy only to fail and mutilate themselves in the process. And THAT'S all before the story even begins!
    • Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) has Rose, who just wanted to help people. She felt the full swing of the show's gradual slide away from the idealistic end of the scale when she was protecting some children during an invasion of her home town. She was gangraped by soldiers and left pregnant and mute (due to trauma), and ended up so empty that she was used as a figurehead of a religious movement, and then just as an empty shell for the Big Bad to possess. She thankfully recovers by the end.
    • Wrath starts out as a perky Cheerful Child until he regains his memories from beyond the Gate. He becomes very resentful of Izumi, his mother and joins the villainous side. By Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa he has lost any happiness to his character. He ends up doing a Heroic Sacrifice and ends up Together in Death with Izumi, who died due to her injuries between the end of the anime and The Movie.
  • In Full Metal Panic!'s backstory between Sōsuke and Kalinin, you can get a taste of young Sōsuke's Break the Cutie (though most of what you see is the huge contrast and aftermath). Especially noticeable from this to this.
  • Full Moon: Takuto, Meroko, AND Izumi all have major breakdowns while remembering their (manga-only) suicidal pasts. Mitsuki's backstory as well.
  • In the anime of Full Moon, Mitsuki loses the will to live after finding out Eichi was dead all along and goes into a doll-like state (complete with Dull Eyes of Unhappiness) until Takuto convinces her to live for her own sake. Takuto goes through severe emotional and physical pain from his previous memories.
  • Fushigi Yuugi revolves around this trope. Yui is raped within 5 minutes of her second trip there, and becomes a vengeful, hateful villainess, primarily because of her bishonen bodyguard Nakago, who warped her mind to the point where she blames her best friend Miaka for the rape, since she wasn't there to help her. Eventually, it turns out that Yui was never actually raped, but the entire thing was a ridiculously complicated plan by Nakago to pit them against each other as a part of a larger plan to stage a coup in Genbu. Later he tries to rape Miaka as well but fails, though he does get her to believe that it happened until someone else explains the mess.
  • Future Diary:
    • Yukiteru had this happen to him. Originally a more naive pacifist who just wants to get along and save anyone he can, he eventually breaks after his father is revealed to have only come back so he could destroy Yukiteru's Diary to clear his 3 million yen debt (although he doesn't seem to know that doing so will kill Yuki), kills Yukiteru's beloved mother in a moment of extreme stress and desperation, then buys a telescope and tries to "start over" with Yukiteru only to end up getting stabbed to death by men working with the Eleventh. It probably didn't help that Yukiteru had a psycho Stalker with a Crush after him that probably whittled away at his sanity.
    • Break the Cutie is also the reason why Tsubaki Kasugano aka the 6th is the Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds that we meet. That's what being imprisoned and repeatedly raped by the members of a Religion of Evil after the murder of your parents will do to you.
    • Yuno herself qualifies. When we see Yuno in the past, she seems to have been a sweet, optimistic girl, who still believed the best of her parents ("Mama's just sick...") despite their horrific abuse towards her. But sadly the abuse kept going on for the Yuno of the 1st world until she became twisted and locked her own parents in a cage, just to get away from it all for a minute and so they could know what they were putting her through. Unfortunately, they starved and she went completely over the deep-end. When the 3rd world changes and Yuno's parents stop abusing her, she seems to have grown up to be a perfectly normal, nice girl.
    • Aru’s confrontation with Deus. It's a real shocker to find out that you're not even human and then denied the things that made you you. The pride in his detective skills as well as his love for Yuki were denied by God himself. Fortunately, he breaks out of this quickly.

    G 
  • Poor Genzo, who got his wife horribly killed in front of his eyes. Also Otsuru in volumes 1 and 5 when she's almost raped and quartered by Denzaemon.
  • In Gintama, Kagura ends up snapping and showing off merciless inner Yato because of how badly Shinpachi was getting beaten. Complete with a Slasher Smile.
  • Good Luck Girl!: As if Kurumi's betrayal isn't enough, Ikari decides to turn everyone in Ichiko's hometown against her just when she has finally gained some trustworthy companions.
  • Punpun from Goodnight Punpun starts the series after a Cheerful Child however the extremely cynical tone of the manga kills that very quickly. To start off the series he walks in on his father beating his mom, though later we learn he was stopping her from committing Murder-Suicide with her son, and his father gets arrested. By his adulthood Punpun is a suicidal loner with a dysfunctional obsession for his (deeply troubled herself) childhood crush Aiko, or more so he is in love with the idea of her rather than Aiko herself.
  • Gosick: Episode 19 - The Birth Of Victorique. She was never married to Marquis Albert de Blois. He simply realized that Cordelia Gallo was a stray superhuman suitable for breeding him a Tyke Bomb. He kidnapped her that very night, then raped her. For months on end, as she was his prisoner for a solid year before the Screaming Birth... which probably had something to do with having to squat out Albert's superbaby while chained to a stone altar and surrounded by scary guys in hooded robes. Afterwards, she sees her baby for maybe three seconds before passing out and waking up in a Bedlam House because Albert had no more use for her. Worst part? Even though her first love broke her out of the Bedlam House, she picked up a severe case of Babies Make Everything Better at some point in the pregnancy and can't bring herself to get the hell out of Sauvile because that would mean leaving Victorique in Albert's sick hands. Her only bright(ish) spot is one of de Blois' men having a microsecond of regret at the whole thing and slipping her Victorique's picture.
  • Green Blood: Brad was broken hard as a child. Then Luke was. Jenny Macy gets it when her mother dies, and Ned Huddleston later on. However, all of them become stronger people for it.
  • GunBuster: Noriko goes through hell and back directly due to her insecurity and codependency issues before finally shaping up and becoming a Hot-Blooded badass. Kazumi doesn't exactly get off easy in Episode 5, either.
  • Mika Asagi from Gungrave anime. Her mother wanted her to live a normal life without knowing anything about Millenion and her parents' involvement, but things went very bad once the Millenion agents found them. Her mother sent her away with the butler to find a man named Brandon Heat, but as Mika and the butler left, she saw her mother being shot down. Soon, they encountered an Orgmen during their escape, and the butler was killed while trying to buy some time for Mika to continue her journey. Mika finally found Dr. Tokioka and Brandon (who was now called 'Beyond the Grave'), and things appeared to be fine until Grave left her with Gary and Widge (Grave's old friends). Mika watched Gary's and Widge's gruesome death before being kidnapped by Balladbird Lee. Soon, Grave arrived to rescue her, but during the battle, Dr. Tokioka shielded her with his body from Lee's attacks, which resulted in his death. Things went From Bad to Worse because with the equipments left, Grave could only live for about ten days. And Mika soon found out that Grave's body had begun to crack, indicating that he wouldn't last long anymore. Because she loved Grave, she begged him to forget about Millenion and asked him to go faraway with her and live together, but Grave knocked her out cold with a punch to the gut. When she woke up, Grave had gone, and she tried to find him. Unfortunately, Grave had truly died by the time she found him, leaving her alone as everybody she loved had gone.
  • The titular heroines of Gunslinger Girl get broken from the inside by their own cybernetic implants and by the brutal mental conditioning they receive to function as cold-blooded assassins. And that's not even mentioning the singularly horrible things that happened to them in order to necessitate them becoming cyborgs to survive. For example, Henrietta was a normal little girl until a home invasion ended in her parents being killed in front of her and her being severely raped multiple times to the degree that it's implied that is why she can't menstruate. She ended up suicidal however it was deemed she was a perfect candidate for being made into a cybernetic Child Soldier. Her traumatic memories were repressed so that she acts like a happy child throughout the manga, even despite her horrible life and the fact she's often treated as sub-human. However, late in the manga her personality and memories are removed which causes her to act robotic and emotionless. She only gets better right before her death.

    H 
  • Haou Airen: Kurumi, despite her Love Martyr tendencies, finds herself pretty broken. A good example would be her huge Heroic BSoD after Reilan's Thanatos Gambit. The fact that immediately afterward Hakuron raped her repeatedly in an effort to stop her from leaving him didn't help.
  • Haibane Renmei: Rakka hits this after Kuu's Day of Flight occurs and she leaves. It gets to the point she hits rock bottom, literally (in a dry well) and figuratively. She becomes suicidal and sin-bound, which causes her white wings to turn grey. This in turn causes her to cut off the affected feathers. Eventually she gets better after she comes to terms with everything.
  • Hanasaku Iroha: Ohana has been traumatized a few times, especially in Episode 1, when many of her expectations about the inn gets blown up in her face spectacularly. Fortunately she can cope well, and as such she has, time and again, gotten out of such situations changed for the better. This is what passes for Coming of Age in this show.
  • Heaven's Lost Property:
    • Nymph gets stomped and beaten on quite a bit early on.
    • Chapter 47 is completely devoted to breaking Chaos. She finally realized what love actually is and attempted to go back to Synapse, but the Master blasts her with his strongest weapon. She survives and goes to Tomoki's house but accidentally overhears him say that Angeloids should leave and never come back. She starts crying, and decides that love is pain again. Then she dives to the bottom of the ocean. The entire time, she held on to the shoes Tomoki gave her.

      What makes this even worse is that the scene then shifts to Tomoki sitting in the playground where he met Chaos, and he has a bunch of toys all set for her to play with.

      And now she not only has all the memories of one of the kindest and most loving cast members all wrapped up in her head, but she just stabbed Tomoki through the friggin' heart. Seems like the author is dedicated to pushing the poor thing until she finally snaps so bad that she has to be put down.
  • Hello Sandybelle:
    • At the start of the anime, Sandybelle's father dies of disease, and shortly before he dies he reveals to her that she's adopted. She's sent to live with her father's best friend, and his daughter instantly hates her. She's also subject to cruel bullying from Kitty Shearer. Throughout the series, Sandybelle is kidnapped and attacked in the search to find her real mother and re-unite with Marc, but she never crosses the Despair Event Horizon.
    • Marc's family is struggling to adapt to their new lifestyle after losing their money, and just as he makes some new friends, his mother is brutally killed in a traffic accident. Even though he's a minor, his father tries to force him to marry a girl he can't stand, and Marc is so full of grief he runs away.
  • Hellsing:
    • Seras, who seems a cheerful and upbeat girl for most of the manga, has a rather dark and disturbing backstory, which seems to have happened when she was very young. It consists of her father being murdered by burglars, her mother hiding her in a cupboard to protect her, and her mother's subsequent murder by the same burglars. Seras tries to exact revenge by stabbing one of the guys in the eye with a fork. She gets shot for her trouble and one of the perpetrators proceed to rape her mother's corpse, due to it being "still warm". In full view of Seras, who lies on the ground bleeding profusely watching it happen and unable to do anything to stop it.
      • The seventh OVA is specifically dedicated to having Zorin Blitz do this to Seras as well. She delves deep into Seras' memories, forcing her to relive her painful childhood. While Seras is trapped in the illusion and crying profusely, Zorin hacks off her arm, stabs her through the back, and slices her eyes. Pip and his two remaining squad members arrive and manage to temporarily disable Zorin before she can kill Seras by shooting her multiple times. Pip tries to escape with the badly wounded Seras, but Zorin stabs him through the back. He kisses Seras in his agony, then tells her to bite him before he dies. Tearfully, she does so, healing most of her wounds and becoming a true vampire. Seras then goes into Roaring Rampage of Revenge mode and utterly destroys Zorin's forces and Zorin herself.
    • Integra didn't have it easy, either. She used to be a shy girl; then, her father died when she was twelve, leaving her the leader of Hellsing and a member of the Royal Order of Protestant Knights. Almost immediately after his death, her remaining blood relative, Richard, tried to murder her. Escaping through the air vent and fleeing for her life, she stumbled upon Alucard out of pure luck. If Richard hadn't shot her in the shoulder first, Alucard would not have awakened in time to slaughter the two henchmen and block the bullet for Integra. She then shot and killed Richard, effectively losing the last of her family on the same day. Further attempts of breakdowns consist of the attack to her mansion by the Valentine brothers that forced her to shoot down all her troops that had been turned into ghouls, what happened later on in London (she witnessed how it was destroyed to the ground and was the only real survivor of the attack), the deaths of Penwood and Walter (coupled with his betrayal), and Alucard's disappearance.
    • Alucard himself was very repeteadly screwed over. He might have very questionable hobbies, but was very much a warrior of Christ. And the manga makes his position very, very clear in the scene of his human form's death, with him kneeling to lap at the blood of his homeland. The man, the most devout of the knights of God, stripped of everything that ever meant anything to him and left to see as the enemies of his faith are left to ravage his beloved homeland.
  • Hero Tales: Laila she finds out Taito's fate as the Hagun resulted in death of her parents and their adoptive father, going so far as to try and kill him in anger before she comes to her senses.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers:
    • Russia was already under Tatar's rule which, according to Hungary and Lithuania's pity for him, is a bad situation to be in. But Russia's most noticeable Freak Out takes place during the Bloody Sunday strip. Russia is doing his best to try and make the people in his country happy, but they aren't satisfied. In this particular strip, the people are protesting, and demanding freedom and higher wages. Russia can take no more of the people blaming him for everything, but manages to endure it. However, when the Romanovs are killed, he horribly snaps.
    • The revolutionary war also counts as one for England. While not so much cute, he seemed genuinely happy with America, and then America left, making it clear that he wanted freedom rather than being with England, and unintentionally broke him in the process. Most fans couldn't help but feel bad for England when he, the Great British Empire who had seen through countless wars and battles before, threw away his gun and started sobbing as America said that he "used to be so big"...
  • Highschool of the Dead: Takashi and his friends first meet Asami, in chapter 18, and was a newly appointed patrol officer who'd been left in charge of the survivors at the mall. She was initially presented as cheerful, perky, and eager to make a good impression. Unfortunately, her inexperience as an officer, along with her timid nature, made her an easy scapegoat for the mall survivors who vented their frustrations on her simply because of her position. Still, her growing affection for Hirano and her faith in her CO, who'd gone for help, provided her with some glimmer of hope. Until Hirano tried to let her down gently by explaining he was already part of a group, which broke her heart and mere moments later discovers that her CO didn't make it. Which caused her to lash out at Hirano, before running off to the roof, believing she was a failure and that she had no one. The closest she comes to finding happiness was when Hirano asks her to come with him, making her cry in happiness as she happily accepted. Except circumstance and her duty as an officer wouldn't allow it, ultimately resulting in Hirano having to kill her before "they got to her.
  • In Himitsu no Hanazono, the anime version of The Secret Garden, Camilla and Max Hawkins were horribly broken in their backstories, which also influences Max in his revenge quest against Archibald. Not to mention, we get to see exactly how badly Lillias's Death by Childbirth broke Mr. Craven himself...
  • The plot of Honoo no Alpen Rose bends over to try breaking Jeudi. And it's very, VERY close to succeed. But she pulls through more than once.
  • Hoshin Engi: Tenshou's his mom and aunt both kill themselves, he watches his dad die by acid rain right in front of him, and his older brother kicks it soon after. It is seriously no wonder the kid developed an abandonment complex.
  • Howl's Moving Castle: The raping-aging spell cast on innocent Sophie hits her pretty hard in the face, but she learns to grow out of it soon.
  • Neptune of Hyperdimension Neptunia the Animation is a goofy, 4th Wall Breaking, game loving bundle of happiness...who falls into two separate depressions in Episodes 9 and 10. The first is due to Peashy missing and Neptune keeps forcing herself to ignore how bad she feels since the last time they were together they had a big fight and Peashy said she hated Neptune. She gets better thanks to Plutia/Iris Heart...and then she finds out Peashy's been brainwashed and turned into a super powerful CPU, Yellow Heart, at the end of the episode. Then comes the absolutely heartbreaking events in Episode 10 where Neptune had locked herself in her room...only to force herself to face Yellow Heart and do her best to make Peashy remember. She doesn't get better by the end of the episode, which ends with Peashy remembering her just as she's taken back to her home dimension. Leaving Neptune to look over Peashy's drawings and cry.

    I 
  • Idol Densetsu Eriko: In the first episode, Eriko's parents get into a car accident which kills her father and leaves her mother in a coma. That sets the tone for the rest of the series.
  • Ie Naki Ko Remi: Remi, Remi, Remi. She's been through harsh winters, was nearly sold off to a slave trader by her adoptive dad, and beaten by someone who couldn't care less about children.
  • Inazuma Eleven: The second season was surprisingly relentless with this, but the one who suffered the most is Fubuki. If losing his whole family in an avalanche accident and developing a Split Personality of his brother isn't enough, he spends the whole season struggling to get over his disorder, especially when Epsilon was their main threat. He manages to earn his happy ending after merging with his brother.
  • Inside Mari: Mari was a Cheerful Child until her grandmother died. Her emotionally abusive mother hated her mother-in-law and went as far as to change Mari's name from "Fumiko" - which was chosen by her grandmother - to the name she had wanted. This all ended up having an unexpected toll on Mari's psyche to the point where as a teenager it's implied she developed a Split Personality and has dissociation issues due to that. She's also generally aloof and has Stepford Smiler tendencies in her "Mari" persona.
  • Suzu from In This Corner of the World goes through quite a bit of this. We're introduced to her as a sweet and carefree girl living near Hiroshima in the 1940s. After getting engaged, she moves to Kure to live with her new husband's family, but their lives become increasingly more difficult as the effects of World War II start to take their toll. When Suzu is returning from an errand with her daughter-in-law Harumi, a severe air raid starts and they take cover in a public bomb shelter. The raid stops and all appears to be safe, but then they come across a time-delayed bomb that suddenly goes off, killing Harumi and taking Suzu's right hand. And that's before the infamous nuclear bombing of Hiroshima happens...
  • Inuyasha: Kohaku's village was destroyed, he was possessed and forced to attack his companions, wounding his sister Sango almost fatally and murdering his father and friends, and then got killed. He was revived and brainwashed by Naraku (the one responsible of all of the above) to be used against his sister and her new friends and to help in his plots by slaughtering a lot of innocent people. When he finally regained his memories, two of his "protectors" were killed (Kagura and Kikyo), he can't stand being near his sister because of the guilt and he thinks the only way to atone is to die killing Naraku. If that wasn't enough, he was later forced to relive the day he killed his father and friends over and over again for days. He used to be a shy, gentle and happy 11 year-old boy.
  • None of the characters are actually broken in I"s, but they do suffer some damage. Here is a tally.
    • Iori's rehearsal regime is designed to break her on the theory that it will make her a better actor.
    • Itsuki when she realizes she'll never have Ichitaka's heart.
    • Aiko when her boyfriend dumps her.
    • Iori when she is almost raped for the second time. It is amazing she didn't need therapy by the end of the story!.
  • Isabelle of Paris: In the Grand Finale, Isabelle watches helplessly as the French soldiers, one by one, massacre her crush, her friends, her brother and her childhood best friend, Jean. She cries upon realizing she's the Sole Survivor, and the anime ends on a sad note. This is marketed as a Shoujo, by the way.
  • Episode 9 of Is This A Zombie? is this for Eucliwood Hellscythe when her previous zombie servant returns and outright gives her a Breaking Speech about how her powers could potentially put in danger anyone close to her if she loses control of emotions. When she witnesses firsthand what she's capable of, she distances herself from Ayumu and the others in order to protect them from herself.

    J 
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • Diamond is Unbreakable: Hayato Kawajiri is a Child Prodigy who doesn't think very highly of his parents. However, while he's initially shown as a shut-in who does very little but spy on his parents, he forces himself to take action upon figuring out that his father, Kosaku, was murdered and impersonated by Morioh's resident serial killer, Yoshikage Kira. Even so, once Kira is finally defeated and out of his life, he then has to bear the guilt of his father being gone forever, and given that his mother, Shinobu, was in love with Kira more than her actual husband, Hayato can't bring himself to admit to her that Kira or Kosaku are dead, causing him to repress his emotions whilst fighting back his tears, leaving his mom to wait for the man she loved who is never coming back.
    • Stone Ocean: Emporio Alniño was already pretty broken as is, being born to a mother inside a women's prison who was then later killed by Father Enrico Pucci. For the first 11 years of his life, he had to go into hiding, using his Stand called Burning Down the House to recreate rooms that have long since been destroyed which nobody else but other Stand users can access. His life begins to improve once he meets Jolyne Cujoh, Jotaro Kujo, Ermes Costello, Foo Fighters, Weather Report, and Narciso Anasui, but it wouldn't be long before Foo Fighters and Weather Report meet their untimely demise. However, what truly pushes Emporio past the Despair Event Horizon is the group's final encounter with Pucci. Pucci uses his newly-gained Stand of Made in Heaven to accelerate time to infinite speed until the universe ends; then resets itself. From this acceleration, Pucci himself gains infinite speed, which he uses to brutally murder Anasui, Ermes, Jotaro, and Jolyne in respective order, leaving Emporio as the Sole Survivor once the universe resets. Although, Emporio tricks Pucci into inserting Weather Report's Stand Disc into him, which allows him to kill Pucci from oxygen poisoning and cause the universe to snap back. Emporio, relieved that he saved the universe, goes to see his friends once again, only to find out that they've all had personality rewrites with none of their memories (sans Foo Fighters, who is now Ret-Gone), and now that none of his friends recognize him anymore, Emporio completely gives into despair whilst accompanying them.

    K 
  • Sora is the target of lots of bullying in the first season of Kaleido Star, until she proves she's more than Kalos's protege and has her own worth as a performer. And in the second one she's also the target of ridicule and lectures for her rose-tinted vision of circus life and her own self-esteem problems.
    • Also, a terrible Break the Cutie process made Leon Oswald the cruel, bitter person we meet. He gets better.
  • Katri, Girl of the Meadows: At the start of the anime, little Katri, who's raised by her grandparents because her parents aren't around, finds out that bears have massacred her family's livestock, and now they have to make more money. Her grandparents don't want her to work at her age but she can't stand to see them starve (this being 1900s Finland, there's a war going on) and becomes a maid at various wealthy mansions. Luckily, one of these mansions is headed by a kindly lady and she helps Katri earn her happy ending.
  • Karas: Sagisaka's daughter Yoshiko is a post-break example, having become a near-catatonic mute after witnessing a mikura slaughter her entire class. She gets better, with the help of Kure.
  • Hiyori from Kare wa Tomodachi especially when she finds out she's pregnant and gets a miscarriage and Kotone in her back story as her mother's admittance that she should have never gave birth to her and Mizuno ignoring Kotone during middle school drove Kotone to online dating websites.
  • Kasei Yakyoku: And how. Specially Sara, who gets forcibly stripped and almost gangraped by yakuza in the second OAV, but the worst comes in the fourth, when she nbrely survives the Kanto Earthquake, loses her and Junichirou's mother, witnesses Saburo's death after barely escaping from more thugs, and learns that Taka and Junichirou have left. Wah!
  • Kiba: Rebecca's physically manipulated into stabbing her father by her teacher and forced into marriage with Dumas, only to be given to Hugh instead in a plot to get one of the key spirits. Then her father is killed.
    • Then there's Noah, who landed in Neotopia. Despite being rescued by a kindly couple and temporarily regaining his strength, he results in Gale, the couple's son, killing his father due to the country's laws. Then Gale fights Keith and dies along with Aisha, both of whom Noah had befriended, after Noah unintentionally sets everything on fire. Then Noah ends up with some Seekers and finds the key spirit Sachira, causing everyone but Sagiri and himself to die. After he becomes Neotopia's top shardcaster, Hugh attacks the capital and Zed drags Hyrum to him in exchange for the many civilians that are about to be eaten by Spirits. Hyrum kills himself, and Diana and Sagiri appear to die when the building collapses. Let us not forget about the debilitating illness that has plagued him since childhood, which will eventually kill him and renders him practically catatonic by show's end, nor the fact that the thing that started this series of events was his desire to help Zed... who's joined up with the opposition, becomes Noah's enemy, and ultimately takes him down.
  • Kill la Kill: Mako Mankanshoku. After becoming the Fight Club President of Honnouji Academy, Mako (as well as her whole family) starts to take several levels of jerkass as she forces her own best friend, Ryuko Matoi, to fight numerous school clubs to maintain her family's growing status. This culminates when she is given a Two-Star Goku Uniform by Satsuki Kiryuin, and is told to kill Ryuko in order to gain Three-Star status. Mako proceeds to beat Ryuko within an inch of her life while her mom, dad, and little brother cheer her on. The whole scenario is made all the worse when you remember that Mako and her family took Ryuko in when she had nowhere else to go, but they are now gladly throwing her to the wolves just to maintain their current, and rather hedonistic, lifestyle. But right before Mako can administer the killing blow, she suddenly has a moment of clarity in which she realizes what she's becoming, and stops herself before calling her family out for not stopping her. She then breaks down in broken tears, stating outright that she and her whole family let themselves be blinded by greed. Ryuko, being the good friend she is, forgives Mako and offers to destroy her Two-Star Uniform, allowing them to reconcile.
  • The title character from Kimba the White Lion also had it pretty rough. Before he even was born, his father was shot by hunters, while his still pregnant mother was put on a boat to become a zoo animal. After several weeks Kimba was born, a storm was coming right towards the boat, so his mother forced him to leave her behind while she drowns in her cage. Not the smoothest way to start out a series.
  • King of Thorn:
    • Kasumi goes through a lot of this. Amazingly enough, she manages to get through it pretty well. Shizuku, on the other hand, doesn't fare quite as well.
    • Alice went through eight years of breaking, leading her to eventually become a Broken Bird.
  • Kitchen Princess: Najika.
  • Brynhildr in the Darkness: All the magic users come prebroken. You could think that further breaking is on the menu and we wouldn't blame you for it, anyways.

    L 
  • Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne: Done to Muginami in episode 5 after Villagiulio tells her that she is just a parasite and that she never was a part of his team.
  • La Seine No Hoshi: At fifteen, Simone watches the massacre of adoptive parents, the exile of her next set of adoptive parents, her friends sentenced to Execution and is exposed to the filthy political underbelly on France. It drives her to become the superheroine La Seine No Hoshi and fight against the corrupt elite in power.
  • Last Exile: The character Dio. His sister Delphine kidnaps him while his friend Luciola stands by and does nothing (although, to be fair, they were outnumbered by Delphine's elite guards). Then, while he screams for Luciola to save him, he is brutally Mind Raped on his sister's orders. Pre-Mind Rape, Dio was a cheerful, if odd and extremely hyper, young man with a great fondness for glomping people and flying vanships. Post Mind Rape, he is a mentally unhinged killer with a tendency to stare off into space giggling and engage in Brother–Sister Incest with the one who made him that way. The birthday party scene made this even worse. Though he got better.
    • How exactly did he get better? He snaps out of his Mind Rape in a vanship, alone, just after having hallucinated being in a race and telling Luciora (who was already dead at that point) to jump out to reduce weight.
  • Last Exile: Fam, the Silver Wing: Victims include Giselle (who the Skyship Hunt took its toll on) and Augusta Sara (who couldn't take her generals trying to kill each other).
  • Robin is probably the happiest and most optimistic member of the main cast early in Le Chevalier d'Eon. By the end, however, he's become so angry and disillusioned he changes his name and becomes the historical Maximilien Robespierre, responsible for the Reign of Terror.
  • Rikka's dad's death in Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! had a traumatic impact on her, thus watching Yuuta and later creating her "Wicked Eye" persona is her coping mechanism. She gets broken again at the end of episode 10 where the last support she has for her delusions, Yuuta, suddenly turns on her and tries to make her face reality right before they were supposed to perform at the school festival and not even a day after they had confessed to each other.
  • Loveless: It happens to Youji during his confrontation with Seimei (though Natsuo helps him through it), and Soubi almost directy after (though he was pretty broken to begin with). Also Ritsuka, when he realizes quite how far Seimei is from the person he Ritsuka thought he was. Nana has a relatively minor one when she realizes it was the flaws in her security system that let Nisei and Seimei into the academy. Everyone in Loveless was either already broken, gets broken during the series, or will eventually; it is a Crapsack World afterall.
    • Ritsuka Aoyagi from Loveless counts as one of these. First off, he's constantly suffering abuse at the hands of his mentally-ill mother Misaki because of his personality change after he lost all of his memories; because of this, he believes he isn't even the real Ritsuka and lives in fear that someday he'll disappear (he even needs therapy to try and recover his lost memories). Then he discovers the burned up body of his brother, the one who protected him from his mother, in his classroom. He had no friends and didn't really believe in love because of the trauma he experienced. After this, the only people who show him any kind of love are pedos and Yuiko. He's told that his real name is Loveless, which means "one without love". Plus the villains keep showing up trying to capture or kill him, and because he's the Sacrifice while Soubi's the Fighter, Ritsuka has to take all the damage whenever they fight. Plus when Seimei finally comes back. Turn's out that he only faked his death... and he also murdered people, caused so much suffering for his little brother, even going as far as to try and convince Misaki to kill him. And all this is just because he's insecure and wants to "test" Ritsuka's love for him. It's even implied that he sexually abused Ritsuka when they were younger! And through all this, Ritsuka remains a forgiving pacifist who just wants to be loved.
  • Ludwig Revolution: Lisette was tricked into slaughtering her family, as well as Hansel and Gretel, who had a poor abused childhood made much worse by an extremely deranged and savage experience, which turned them into cruel killers. Lisette probably loved killing her parents, as they forced her into prostitution as a child.
  • Lyrical Nanoha:
    • Subverted with Hayate in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. After being Forced to Watch two people slaughter her family in front of her on Christmas Eve, she seemingly snaps and is promptly possessed by the Book of Darkness. However, she is perfectly fine when she regains consciousness two episodes later and immediately sets about reviving her family and stopping the destruction of the planet.
    • Rinne in ViVid Strike! was picked on a lot as a kid for her background as a poor orphan, and it only got worse after she started attending school and others found out that she was adopted. Her not being able to keep her adoptive grandfather's keepsake safe and to arrive in time to meet him before he died as a result of being knocked out by bullies was the final straw that turned her into a girl "who despises the weak".
    • Fate Testarossa from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is an inversion of this trope. When she is introduced, she is a cutie broken by severe emotional and physical abuse perpetrated by her deranged Mad Scientist of a mother, Precia. Through The Power of Friendship, a nice adoptive family and an interesting job, she ends up unbroken... But not before getting further broken shortly after being "befriended" when she found out that she was merely a clone of Precia's real daughter, Alicia, and Precia has despised her since the moment she was born.
  • La Seine No Hoshi: When Simone was fifteen years old, Madame Catherine ordered the death of her parents...because she didn't like that they supplied the roses that made Marie Antoinette's dress outshine her own. Simone was broken at seeing them die, and even more so when her father's last words to her were confessing that she was adopted. To avenge them, Simone became the heroine La Seine No Hoshi to fight against the cruel aristocrats of France.
  • Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow: Lucy-May starts the series as a Cheerful Child, but after her family becomes deeply entrenched in poverty and have to sell their animals to afford food, she comes distraught. She faces further angst when she becomes an amnesiac, and is rescued by a wealthy man, Frank Princeton, who is touched by her innocence and wishes to adopt her to replace his deceased first child, Emily. Before Frank makes this offer, Lucy-May regains her memory after arriving to the scene of the accident and dearly misses her old family, the Popples. She wants to go back to them, but the Princetons also offered them a lot of land that would cure their financial issues if they agreed to relinquish custody of her. When Lucy-May says thats he would like them to adopt her, Frank sees through it and realizes she's lying to make sure her family doesn't remain poor. He is so warmed by her that he gives the land to them anyway and allows her to return to them, and the anime ends with the two families being close friends.

    M 
  • Macross Frontier smacks Sheryl Nome with this one. Hard. Along with Break the Haughty. She ends up getting most of the example bad things: Her manager/best friend/practical foster mother turns out to be the Big Bad and takes an openly sadistic pleasure in verbally beating Sheryl down and telling her that she is going to die, because Grace infected her with a V-type infection ten years ago in an extremely painful medical procedure that was supposed to help her, which turns out to now be in the very late stages, making it incurably terminal with Sheryl's remaining lifespan measured in weeks. Faced with all this, she is finally confronted with the notion that she may not even be remembered, as her former interstellar stardom is suddenly forgotten in favor of Ranka's, and she roams the streets without disguise completely ignored. And it's raining at the time. She finally breaks down into a sobbing wreck when she finds one of her concert posters discarded on the sidewalk and left in the rain like common trash. When she recovers, she becomes a better person overall.
  • All three main girls of Magic Knight Rayearth started out as up and coming and quite eager with their mission to save Cephiro and Princess Emeraude from the clutches of the rogue High Priest Zagato, and it's getting a bit too much like a cliche, yet fulfilling RPG game. Then in the next moment, they were hit with the Awful Truth that to save Cephiro, they had to kill Emeraude, who admitted being the culprit on the chaos of Cephiro just because she fell in love with Zagato and he was trying his best to prevent her death out of love as well. Between seeing Cephiro completely destroyed or fulfilling their mission, they had to pick the latter. And so their quest ended... with all three girls utterly traumatized that they just killed two people screwed up by destiny. The second season reveals that the cheeriest of the three, Hikaru, got hit with it the hardest that she secretly harbored a self-loathing that it became her own Enemy Without that got manipulated by the ultimate Big Bad; and everytime she acted confident, her other friends start to worry that she's going to do something really reckless. Thankfully, by the end of the series, Hikaru started recovering herself and all three also restored their spirit.
  • Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka: The happy-go-lucky schoolgirl Nozomi gets kidnapped and horribly tortured by her captors (completely unnecessarily, since they were using her as bait). By the time she is rescued, she is left so traumatized that the only way for her to return to a normal life is to erase her memories of the kidnapping and torture.
  • Magical × Miracle: Mel never completely breaks, but she's put under a lot of stressful and on occasion, dangerous situations over the course of the series.
  • MÄR:
    • Snow had been locked up and all alone as a child, and constantly had visions of Ginta and Koyuki in the other world and wished nothing more than be friends with Ginta. She wanted Ginta to rely on her the same way he relied on Koyuki back on Earth but Snow just kept failing. By the time she realizes this, she experiences a Heroic BSoD so bad she's willing to simply fade away and disappear forever. She's just a fragment of Koyuki's soul that was used and treated like an object instead of a person, destined to die to bring pain to others when all she wanted to do was help people. Ginta manages to pull her out of this despair with a Cooldown Hug and some kind words. Things get even more sad when she dies in his arms two episodes later after confesses her love to him.
    • Anime fillers love do this to Alvis specifically the last arc where he finds out that his idol Danna is actually the King that killed all of his friends. He can't bring himself to fight back and that's all King needs in order to stab him which said wounds would later kill him.. And the Ghost Chess arc. In fact, Phantom was intentionally trying to break him so he would submit to the Zombie Tattoo and be forever immortal with Phantom.
    • Phantom was just an innocent, 10-year-old kid who was attracted to the Caldean Orb due to his own unusually strong magic power, and was charmed into committing a taboo by that same evil presence. He was promptly chucked into prison, all the while quite clueless to the magnitude of his transgression. After a while his parents came to bring him back home, and all seemed well, his mom even cooked him a good meal. Next morning, he woke up to find his parents both dead, having taking their own lives because they couldn't find the resolution to kill him. He ended up in prison for ten years and would likely have rotten there until he died, had Diana not gotten him out, and then he fell under the influence of the same dark force that caused his parent's deaths and his imprisonment. Then he managed to find a girlfriend, but she left him the moment she knew he consented to being a zombie, a curse bestowed on him by the bad guy above, again. Oh, and this bad guy is also responsible for her death, and barred her and her friends from entering heaven by sealing their souls inside a cave (note that they won't be released until 6 years later, when Ginta arrives in MAR-Heaven). He spent the next ten years fighting and dying, then resurrecting only to fight for that bad guy. After he loses, said bad guy releases his hold on him, allowing him for the first time to reflect on his life: everyone he ever loved are dead thanks to said bad guy, his opponent's ideals completely trumph his, and all he's left with is the immortality he no longer finds cool. No wonder he becomes such a depressed wreck of angst after the War Games.
    • Chaton. Break the Cutie: In the anime, she is forced to watch Loco sacrifice her age to save them from the Ghost Chess and then she is forced to watch Alan die in front of her which sets her off.
  • Marvel Anime: Iron Man: Flashbacks reveal that after Yinsen miraculously avoided his Death by Origin Story, he was taken in by a rural village, where he began to recover in both body and soul. However, the Big Bad then destroyed the entire village using Stark weaponry in order to turn Yinsen against Tony.
  • Mitsudomoe: Yabe suffers from this after episode two of Zouryouchuu. After having the worst Christmas ever by getting rejected by Kuriyama, sitting alone in his apartment while wearing a Santa outfit with a mannequin with glasses wearing a female Santa outfit in front of him, having his beloved mannequin fall face first onto his Christmas cake and then catch on fire, becoming Santa for Futaba when Soujirou is running late, getting the crap beat out of him by Soujirou after a misunderstanding and finally walking home in the freezing snow in nothing but a Santa hat and his boxers, his personality changes in the next episodes, becoming easily irritated, resigned and unsurprised of the weird attitude of his classmates.
  • Monster:
    • Johan is especially prone to doing this to his victims, even simply to screw with them. For example, in volume 12, sending an abandoned small boy to look for his mother, telling him that if he sees her, and she sees him, if she truly loves him and wants him she'll take him back (naturally, Johan is crossdressing as the much more wholesome Anna at the time, making it that much creepier). He sends him to look for his mother in the red light district of Prague — where the boy witnesses rape, depravity, a drug addicted prostitute dying from withdrawal begging him for money and the prostitutes themselves taunting him. Tenma and Grimmer have to talk him out of jumping off a bridge after this. This still doesn't quite break the cutie. But it comes damn close. This boy is perhaps 7 or 8. This is one of Johan's most despicable acts of the series, and considering that he commits quite a few of them throughout, that's saying something.
    • Johan crushes Anna so many times in so many ways that she comes this close to suicide.
  • In Mother Keeper, Syal's backstory takes her from a happy life with her adopted family to being sold as a slave, drugged and forced to fight to the death for around 6 months before being forced to kill the woman she cared about most. Then as the woman dies, she begs the authorities to save her life and let her die instead, only to be misunderstood and made into an immortal cyborg.
  • In MPD Psycho, a Serial Killer kidnaps the girlfriend of the lead detective investigating his case, mutilates her, rapes her repeatedly (in that order), then delivers her — limbless but still alive — directly to the detective's office.
  • Mr. Fullswing: The reason why Inukai and Tatsuragawa's friendship with Miyanagi broke off is because of the death of their mentor Ookami.
  • My-HiME: Mai Tokiha was a loving sister that worked hard for her Delicate and Sickly brother's sake and an all-around nice girl, willing to sacrifice herself for others. However, the combined weight of having to try to prevent her friends from killing each other, watching Shiho order Yuuichi to kiss her to deliberately make Mai jealous, and then watching her brother Takumi die in her arms (apparently at the hands of her best friend Mikoto, but it later turns out that Shiho killed Akira's child out of jealousy) finally pushed her over the edge. She calmed down a bit when Mikoto temporarily came out of her Brainwashed and Crazy state and tried to apologize, but was unable to call off Kagutsuchi's attack in time and watched as it seemingly burned Mikoto to ashes. With her brother who she built an identity around working to provide for dead, her love interest stolen by his childhood friend, her best friend having just died by her own hands, and with other HiMEs after her own life... Well, she breaks.

    N 
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
    • Negi's hometown gets destroyed by demons at age four or so, and at age ten he ends not only with the responsibility of protecting his students after they get Trapped in Another World (and sold into slavery, get amnesia, and framed for terrorism), but he discovers that his mother was framed for genocide, and the people who did it are trying to kill him. And then there's the whole "having to prevent the magic world from collapsing" thing... Fortunately, all the crap that happens to him only drives him to become stronger.
    • Ako starts as a doormat with major self-esteem issues, then accidentally gets trapped in the magic world, where she gets a disease, forcing her and two of her friends to sell themselves into slavery to pay for the cure. To top it off, she then falls in love with someone who turns out to be Negi's aged up alter ego and thus not even really exists.
    • Asuna gets so broken, her memory is blocked so she can have a chance at a normal life. Then has the block removed later to cause a Heroic BSoD, then after being sealed for 130 years, gets shattered TOTALLY on seeing everyone she knew dead and finding out that she would have been able to see her best friend one last time if she hadn't overslept.
    • Evangeline was turned into a vampire and unwittingly killed her parents immediately afterwards. She then spent centuries with everyone hating her, before her crush cursed her to stay in a school... that she has spent fifteen years in. And she still looks ten.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion:
    • Shinji got traumatized to the point of snapping into a psychological breakdown and destroying humanity. It's particularly heartbreaking when we're shown a flashback of a toddler Shinji right before witnessing the death of his mother: a young child who's smiling and constantly laughing, without a hint of bitterness and actually seeming outgoing. His 'break the cutie' process started at 4 years old and just kept going downhill.
      • Well, things slowly started to look up for him and it looked like the series was going to progress towards a more positive ending...and then came Episode 18 with the Eva-infecting angel Bardiel and Shinji's cycle of misery began anew.
    • Asuka Langley Sohryu's mother Kyouko went crazy after having half her soul sucked in by the EVA 02, completely ignored Asuka and started seeing a Creepy Doll as a replacement for her (and may have tried to strangle little Asuka at least once), then hanged herself in her room with said doll (after breaking the doll's neck) in the same day Asuka was chosen as the EVA 02 pilot. And the poor little girl was the one who found the body. Her "arrogant, annoying" self in reality is a fake persona that she donned in order to push everyone away because she -much like Shinji — was afraid of getting close to someone and get hurt again. Her real personality is a vulnerable girl with zero self-esteem that may be nice to someone that shows that genuinely cares for her. And how do we find that out? When she's under a horrendous Mind Rape that forces her to relive those memories.
    • Maya Ibuki is probably the only character that manages to remain cheerful and well adjusted throughout the series. Which all falls apart in the final battle when all their hard work was seemingly for naught and the JSSDF (their supposed allies and fellow humans) start breaking into their base and slaughtering people. Upon being given a gun and told to fight off fellow humans Maya proceeds to hide under her desk and hug her stuffed rabbit pillow for dear life while everyone else fights. She later graduates from this to completely snapping and turning into a bubbering shrieking mess as she watches Asuka get torn apart, and Lillith Rei appears moving right through her, and she watches her fellow staff melt into orange liquid all around her. She finally only calms down when Ritsuko appears, except it's just Lilith Rei messing with her head, who promptly melts her as well.
  • Night Wizard: Poor Eris. She learns that she is the reincarnation of Shaimal, the God of Destruction; all of her memories before meeting Renji and the others were fabricated; of her friends, only Renji stays with her and he ends up fighting Akari and (almost) Kureha; and finally, just as Kureha joins them, she is killed by Kirihito, who then reveals himself to be Eris' mysterious benefactor and planned everything so that she'd fall into a Despair Event Horizon and awaken Shaimal within her. She gets better though.
  • Not Simple: Even as an adult, Ian has that wistful, innocent look that makes all the unsimple things even worse.
  • Every likable character from Now and Then, Here and There — but especially Sara, who, after being mistaken for Lala Ru, gets abducted, beaten, and repeatedly raped, eventually committing murder in order to escape into the desert with no supplies, where she ends up buried in a sandstorm. She survives that only to later learn one of the rapes got her pregnant. She eventually chose to keep the child..
  • No. 6: Sion in the Correctional facility during episode 10.
  • Oneechan ga Kita: Fujisaki's past reveals she was bullied, and even when she tried to be nice as told to by a teacher, boys still treated her with contempt.

    O 

    P 
  • Oz from PandoraHearts should be the poster boy for this trope. He's determined to be cute and cheerful in the face of horror so his friends won't worry about him, but that doesn't last long. He was abandoned by his own father and called ‘filthy’ when he was trying to get his father’s attention. And then his father sent him to the Abyss because of the sin of ‘existing.’ This is just the first chapter.
    • In the Cheshire Dimension arc, he freaked out and almost destroyed the dimension when he saw Alice’s corpse which has been murdered 100 years ago.
    • And don’t forget the infamous Jack’s Intention arc. First off, Jack took control of his body and stabbed his friend. Then Jack revealed to him that Jack caused the Tragedy of Sablier, using Oz himself as his Living Weapon. And then he saw that his dearest friend and sister figure killed herself in order to keep Jack from using Oz to hurt more people, right in front of Oz. And then he was shot at point-blank range by his other best friend. And then after a touching bit of reconciliation, his beloved uncle was stabbed by the girl who tried to comfort him when he was awaiting execution by the Baskervilles, again right in front of Oz, and finished off by Oz's own adoptive father. Said girl then later dies in his arms. Oh, also, Oz was never a human being, but a soul born inside a children's comfort toy that, due to the Will of the Abyss thinking sentient children's toys are the perfect murder weapons, ended up being given to Jack Vessalius as a "guide" and sharing his body when Oz's own was destroyed.
    • To clarify on that "caused the Tragedy of Sablier" bit: Oz was tricked into binding himself to an Omnicidal Maniac thinking he was simply going to guide the man to visit the Will of the Abyss. He was subsequently stripped of free will and forced to slaughter and destroy the human city he had lived in as a plush rabbit, including people he recognized and loved, while still being mentally himself and all too aware of what was happening around him. Remembering this was the Break the Cutie moment that almost destroyed him.
  • Peacemaker Kurogane: Suzu goes insane after he thinks that Tetsunosuke (his only friend) killed his master Yoshida (whom he admired and was the only person who cared for him). He was taken in by a Depraved Homosexual old man from off the streets when he was alone and starving and subsequently raped.
  • The whole world of Penguindrum seems to bend over to break the three Takakura siblings as well as their friend Ringo Oginome. And this is not counting how Yuri and Tabuki were broken in their own pasts.
  • Mima Kirigoe from Perfect Blue starts off as a typical Idol Singer, with the usual cherry personality and cheesy themes, but in real life she comes across as a genuinely sweet, sympathetic, attractive woman. Then the trouble hits. By the end of the movie she's deranged, a murderer (depending on your interpretation), and suffering from severe identity crisis.
  • Maron from Phantom Thief Jeanne has been the victim of one of these, planned and executed since her birth, due to being the reincarnation of Jeanne d'Arc.
  • Shigeko from Pieta deliberately tries to crush Rio's spirit whenever she can, and finally manipulates Rio into attempting suicide by playing on her missing memories of her sister and insinuating that Rio actually killed her, which is not even remotely true (even Rio's father admits this when Shoumitsu confronts them about it).
  • The Place Promised in Our Early Days: Sayuri's isolation in the nether world drives this point home.
  • Planetes: Heavens above, Ai Tanabe. Physically, by way of her severe nerve damage, and almost mentally, when she begins to consider taking Claire's O2 tank as her own runs out. She gets better, though.
  • In Pluto, the titular villain may be a seething mass of hatred, but after what he goes through Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy's hatred is greater by far.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • Dawn fits this to a T. She was bubbly and cheery in the beginning, then when she failed at one too many Pokémon Contests, not even getting past the Appeals stage in her last, she was absolutely crushed. She proceeded to fake being cheery and bubbly, crying when nobody's around, and experienced a LOT of self-doubt until the Wallace Cup.
    • Not too long after Dawn got broken, the group learned Maylene was in a similar situation — Paul had recently kicked her ass and called her a weakling after getting his badge. The girls end up in a Pokémon battle to get each other back in fighting spirit.
    • Ash went through this after being beaten in a Curb-Stomp Battle against Paul, where he got beaten 6-2. He spent an episode moping until he finally pulled himself together, but though his attitude improved, his battle skills have suffered tremendously, in the form of him not winning a single non-gym battle for quite a while.
      • While Ash is participating in the Indigo League Championships, he gets kidnapped by Team Rocket on the day of his match with Ritchie. After spending the entire episode using all of his Pokemon to escape (almost missing the match, and only not missing it because Ritchie kept stalling for time), he finally makes it back. Most of his Pokemon are too exhausted to battle by this point, meaning that he's handicapped. On top of that, he loses solely because Charizard refuses to listen to him, thinking Ritchie's Pikachu was too weak to battle. Ash, feeling that his dreams were now over, is understandably depressed the next day, but everyone treats him like he has no right to mope. He bounces back, but after all he went through (not just losing the match for arguably unfair reasons, but also Team Rocket's harassment), a little depression is understandable.
    • After having to develop her training abilities from scratch, pulverizing a Drilbur in lieu of a Pokemon battle so it can serve as her starter, and wiping 99 trainers in a row, Iris had every right to brag. Then Drayden came along and stomped her so hard she lost her composure and Excadrill stopped obeying her out of despair. It takes losing to Langley for Iris to begin rediscovering herself and helping Excadrill out of his funk. It seems to have paid off, as the rematch ended in a draw between Excadrill and Beartic.
  • In Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! this happened retroactively to Koya and his Growlithe. After battling a trainer that was way above their level, Growlithe was so traumatized that it didn't even want to be touched by its trainer. Koya became more aggressive and serious.
  • Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior: Zero in the Manga.
    Zero: [after Newton deletes the blueprints to the Megarig] How could you..PLEASE...DON'T DISAPPEAR!!
    Newton: Leave it be, Zero...this is how it should be. We cannot sacrifice Giratina for the sake of our research. Please understand, Zero!
    Zero: *crying* All...All I wanted...I hate this polluted world...I just wanted to stay in the beautiful Reverse World...That's all...
  • Pokémon Adventures: White gets hit hard as N reveals to her that her star Tepig actress may have never shared her dreams alongside of her. When White tries to jump out of the Ferris Wheel car that she is currently stuck inside, Gigi decides to stay with N. The shock makes her slip out and fall, and she ends up on the ground, barely conscious, with her eyes full of tears.
    • Black doesn't get it much better, as N proves to Black all of his Pokemon don't want to fight N's team, and know they will lose. N then follows this up by showing Black that Musha only went with Black to eat his dreams, and now that Black's dreams don't appeal to him anymore, Musha bails on him. He hits a Heroic BSoD almost as bad as White's, and apparently a week later, he's still in a funk about it.
  • Pollyanna: Pollyanna tries her best to keep up with The Glad Game and always stay happy, but even she can't lie to herself when she's really in the shits. When she breaks her legs in an accident, she mourns no longer being able to do the things she loved, and this drives Jimmy to Rage Against the Heavens.
  • Both Rue and Fakir have this as part of their backstories in Princess Tutu. In a flashback, we see Fakir as a cheerful, imaginative child — in stark contrast to his Ineffectual Loner personality in the main part of the story. It's revealed that a mixture of his parent's deaths because of his powers and stress over feeling responsible for Mytho's safety slowly wore on him until he became the Jerkass we see at the beginning of the story. Rue, herself, is shown as being sweet and caring as a child, but snobby and harsh when she's older (to the point where she insists on being called Rue-sama/Lady Rue). Her personality change is revealed to be the result of constant emotional abuse from her father, the Raven. It only gets worse in the second season, when Mytho begins to physically abuse her and manipulate her.
    • Mytho himself! He was first just an adorable Cloud Cuckoolander, later after having a piece of his heart soaked in raven's blood he becomes quite... well, bat shit insane. Not so cute anymore. It takes Rue's Heroic Sacrifice to fix him.
    • Probably Drosselmeyer's intentions for the whole cast, but his efforts are most obvious with Duck herself. He gives her the chance to become a Magical Girl and save the boy she loves, only to discover that A) She can never confess her love to him and B) She's inadvertently leading the whole cast (and possibly the whole world) to a Downer Ending. Despite a few Heroic BSoD's, though, she never actually breaks.
  • Lots of characters in The Promised Neverland go through this.
    • Main character Emma, an adorably hyper preteen who loves her surrogate siblings with all of her heart, stumbles upon the dead body of her younger sister, Connie, and discovers that her whole life she had been raised as meat for demons to consume. In her quest to break her and her siblings out of the farm, she gets her leg broken by her "Mama," finds out that all of her hard work was for nothing, witnesses one of her best friends be sent out to die, chops off her own ear, and ends up having to leave behind all of her youngest siblings. Once she gets out, she's subject to even more torture. Just to name a few: a hunting ground where demons force kidnapped farm children to fight for their lives, a magical gate that forces her to feel like time is being altered, and being separated from her family and having her memory taken away.
    • Mama Isabella was also put through a lot. She spent her whole childhood inside of a farm, discovered the truth about the world, found out her best friend died, and was forced to become a Mama and lead children to their deaths just to survive.
    • Poor little Phil. At only four years old, he's entrusted with the responsibility of knowing the truth about the farm and forced to watch all of his older siblings leave. When he's moved to another farm, he has to keep his mouth shut and live knowing that all of the new siblings that go off to be "adopted" are actually dying.
    • Ayeshe, to an extent. She would have been discarded as a baby because of her facial deformity, but a similarly deformed demon empathized with her and adopted her as a daughter. Despite knowing that her father was still eating other humans, Ayeshe truly loved him and they had a genuine relationship. When Minerva's devotees broke into her father's home, they mistook her as a kidnapped prisoner and killed him to "save" her. She spent a long time afterwards pretending to only know demon language and harboring a grudge against the people who "rescued" her.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The universe seems to have it in for the All-Loving Heroine protagonist and every other magical girl within it.
  • Mercilessly parodied in the second episode of Puni Puni☆Poemi.
    "Don't you love the look of women who've been broken?"

    Q-R 
  • Shiino from Q·Ko-chan: The Earth Invader Girl... constantly. First she gets involved in a firefight, then her mother wants to move from town, then she thinks her only friend, Mei, has abandoned her for RK•Ko, and finally, she snaps from finding out that her supportive older brother is keeping an Alien child in his room. She does NOT take this well...
  • Ragnarok the Animation:
    • Maya suffers this A LOT! Starting from her Dark and Troubled Past to losing her best friend, Alice, whom she kills due to her being unable to recognize Alice in the monster form and believing that the monster has killed Alice, and eventually witnessing Jiltus' Heroic Sacrifice / Redemption Equals Death for her as a sign of friendship.
    • Yufa sees her brother being killed in a Heroic Sacrifice for Roan, Iruga, and her. Soon, it is revealed that Keough is alive, but unfortunately, he is now evil. Yuufa also witnesses Keough injuring and even poisoning Iruga.
  • Heck, Roan too. He is often implied or even stated as weak or useless when he is a Swordsman, which saddens him to the point he becomes emotionally unstable.
  • Almost everyone in Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin, even the side characters, has gone through some amount of this (the rule seems to be that you are either broken or the one responsible for said breaking). That being said, Joe has it bad even by the usual standards of the series, his life being a mixture of Parental Abandonment, Rape as Backstory, being seperated from his sister (and only known family member), his But Not Too Foreign looks getting him labelled as 'exotic' in a So Beautiful, It's a Curse sort of way that attracts the attention of many, many an abusive pervert and so on, even before he ends up in a Hellhole Prison at the age of 16. The fact that he eventually comes to agree with his sister that, as orphans, they "have no other choice but to be used by other people" says it all, really.
  • Rave Master: The ending to the Levin bonus story—to Haru and Elie's shock.
    • Ellie's a heck of a lot more prone to tears after getting back her memory.
  • Prince Juda from Red River (1995) gets dragged through a lot of crap, mostly due to the extent his mother is willing to go to make him become the next Emperor of the Hittite Empire. Juda himself is a very kind and gentle kid, looking up to his older brothers and having no ambition for the throne himself. But his mother's constant plans keep making trouble for his brother and Juda even ends up spending a good portion of the series under magical brainwashing done by his own mother. All of her schemes eventually drive Juda to attempt suicide when her latest plan goes too far because he figures that she'll stop when her reason for doing everything — Juda himself — is dead. It's even implied that he was a Stepford Smiler to a degree for years because of rumors that he was not the previous emperor's child because he more closely resembled his mother's advisor being whispered near him since childhood. Juda does eventually get to call out his mother on her ways and abdicates from the throne. An image shows that he does end up Happily Married to Princess Alexandria.
  • Mayo Tohdoh in volume two of Reiko the Zombie Shop. When we meet her she's in a wheelchair, but still a cheerful, upbeat child. Then she witnesses her brother Yuki turn traitor and kill their friend Rudoh on the promise that one of Rurika's henchmen can fix Mayo's legs. And then Rurika goes back on the deal and has Yuki killed. When Reiko finds her Mayo is a full blown Stepford Smiler and cheerfully tells Reiko what happened.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena: Weaklings in Utena either stay weak and get into severe trouble, or they try to seize power in incredibly unscrupulous ways.
    • Utena only wanted to become the prince she admired. It didn't happen.
    • When Kanae snaps, she snaps. Being practically Mind Raped by Mikage and Mamiya did NOT help.
  • Ring ni Kakero: The Takane's past. They go to Tokyo to run away from their stepdad, in addition to fulfill their dad's dreams.
  • Rosario + Vampire: Kurumu has come to the conclusion that, no matter what she does, Tsukune is going to try and make Moka his girlfriend and not them. Mizore states she won't give up or change in her feelings, Rubi seems to be of a similar mindset, but it has serious adverse effects on Kurumu. She's a succubus so she runs on love and when she is forced to acknowledge that Tsukune isn't going to love her, she breaks down and reveals that for a Succubi unrequited love is fatal, in chapter 40 of Rosario Vampire II. Though after they kissed it seems Kurumu has gained some insight and is no longer in danger of dying.
    • The Flower Offering arc included a very serious intent of doing this to Mizore.
  • Riyoko Ikeda's other work, The Rose of Versailles, isn't a slouch either in the fields. The most notable examples are Oscar, Andre, Rosalie, Charlotte and Marie-Antoinette.
  • Rozen Maiden: Suigintou in Overature. She starts out a very friendly doll despite the fact that her father abandoned her (incomplete) and she's been crawling through N-Fields to find him. She happens to find Shinku, who takes her in and acts as if she cares. However, once Sugintou is killed the first time by Souseseki, Shinku reveals that Sugintou is not a complete doll, and looks on coldly as Sugintou begs Shinku to save her. Shinku refers to her as junk several times. Sugintou comes back, because Rozen decided to quit being a Jerkass, and tries to grab Shinku's Roza Mystica.
    • Jun's Backstory about why he became a hikikomori is also this. Put simply: having a non-masculine hobby (sewing in this case) would make one a social pariah and eventually cause severe self-image issues. He's an unstable mess of self-hatred by the time the dolls came into his life that Nori needs to look after him.
  • Rurouni Kenshin:
    • Happens to Kenshin as a result of being an assassin.
    • As a child, Amakusa and his sister saw their family die horribly, which embittered him very much)
    • Magdaria was a happy-go-lucky Christian little girl from the countryside. Then, shit happened. LOTS of shit.
    • Fuji’s backstory (which involved being shunned and treated like a monster for his abnormal height, getting shot by armed guards and being manipulated into serving as a weapon by Saizuchi) is completely heartwrenching. Notice that in the manga, we're only given hints about his past by Saizuchi; in the anime, we see it all.
    • Anji was once a sweet, caring monk. Then, his adoptive children were murdered and his shrine was burned down. He... snapped.

    S 
  • Chise from Saikano. She asks for death before the series is even half over. But she's not that lucky.
  • Sailor Moon also tends to do this, sometimes slow, other times taking place in one episode, other times being a full-blown Mind Rape.
    • In Episodes 45 and 46 of Season 1, the inner soldiers die, leaving Usagi without her friends before confronting Queen Beryl. Then she is forced to fight her love interest who's been possessed by Metalia's energy, who then dies protecting her so she can fight the Big Bad. Although she wins the last fight and dies, the experience makes her wish things back to the way they were before she was awakened as Sailor Moon. It didn't last.
  • An even stronger Usagi example is during the third season. It's Usagi's birthday, but her boyfriend doesn't remember, so she slaps him and spends a few hours feeling extremely guilty, then realizes she never told him her birthday in the first place. He makes up for it by buying her the glass shoes she wanted... which turn out to be possessed by a Daimohn after her Pure Heart. Worse, judging by the sheer shininess of her Pure Heart, which is pretty damn bright, she might just be the possessor of a talisman. Tuxedo Mask comes to her rescue, but her broach is stolen by Kaolinite so she can't transform, and it's only a matter of time before the Daimon tracks her down. Usagi, Tuxedo Mask, Kaolinite, and the Daimon end up facing off in an under ground parking garage, where Tuxedo Mask is turned into a glass sculpture and Kaolinite gets away with him and her broach. Kaolinite uses the two of them for ransom, and Usagi ends up going to Tokyo Tower and offering her Pure Heart up. It turns out it isn't a talisman and everything's okay in the end - Uranus and Neptune even killed off Kaolinite - but it was sure a hellish day for Usagi. Oh, and to top it off, the glass shoes Mamoru bought her broke.
  • It gets worse in the manga version of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars. First, Mamoru is killed off by Galaxia in front of Usagi, and Usagi blocks the incident out of her memory. Then the Inner Senshi are murdered in front of her, and the Starlights trigger her memories of Mamoru's death, sending her into a near breakdown. Next, the outer soldiers are killed one by one after they return to their bases, Usagi again loses her memory, and the cats and the Starlights are killed. She nearly gets burned to death by one of Galaxia's minions and is forced to watch Princess Kakyuu get impaled by another minion. If poor Usagi hasn't had enough to deal with, it gets even worse when she turns up at Galaxia's base and is forced to fight the reanimated sailor soldiers and Mamoru. After having the crap beaten out of her, she manages to get her strength back and kill the evil soldiers, only for Galaxia to toss Mamoru off a cliff (but not before making him kiss her boots), which in turn kills Chibiusa as she can't exist if Mamoru is dead. It's a wonder Usagi isn't driven completely insane. Luckily, everyone gets better.
  • The anime may remove one or two things, but it's still not easy to deal with. First, Galaxia releases Nehelenia, who then sets up a whole world takeover that has her transforming people into empty shells, which includes Mamoru too. Then the Inner and Outer Senshi are captured one by one and sealed away in mirrors, while Usagi sets out to release Mamoru and face Nehelenia despite having lost a good part of her powers. She then almost is mindwiped, and how she gets released? By seeing Jupiter's rose earring fall to the ground after Jupiter is tortured to near death by Nehelenia and then is captured. When Usagi gets better, she reaches Nehelenia's lair... and since Mamoru is brainwashed and has forgotten abut her and Chibiusa, poor Chibiusa is killed/fades out of existence in Usagi's arms. It takes all of Usagi's willpower and then redeeming Nehelenia (another broken cutie in this particular continuity) to fix all of this shit. And then the incident that kills Mamoru happens, but Usagi wasn't there to witness it, thus the poor girl believes that Mamoru is way too busy to contact her in the States. She lives her life as much as she can, hiding her bad feelings as she fights alongside her Senshi and the Starlights, but the truth starts to surface slowly. And soon afterwards, Princess Kakyuu reappears only to die protecting Usagi and the Starlights, then Galaxia invades and kills the Inner Seishi in front of Usagi and the Starlights... only to drop a huge bomb by showing Usagi Mamoru's starseed, the proof that she killed him. And then comes Haruka and Michiru's Fake Defector act where they kill Hotaru and Setsuna in front of Usagi again, then die as they fail to bring down Galaxia. Again, it's a wonder that Usagi isn't driven insane, and that she manages to ultimately get better.
  • Usagi isn't the only one who suffers from this, Hotaru Tomoe does too. At first she was a happy girl living with her parents, but after a laboratory accident her mother dies and her father has to make a Deal with the Devil to save Hotaru by allowing an evil entity (Mistress 9) to stay in the his daughter's body After this, Hotaru's life becomes hell, having a terrible state of health and with an evil double personality that causes harm without her wanting to and this makes her isolate herself from the rest of society and become a depressed person. It takes several years for Hotaru to find a friend, Chibiusa, and at first everything goes well, but after the Outer Senshis discover that Hotaru is the reincarnation of Sailor Saturn, they conclude that Hotaru is the messiah of silence and try to kill her. After going through many unfortunate events, Hotaru awakens as Sailor Saturn and manages to destroy Mistress 9, but she realizes that the only way to stop Pharaoh 90 is to make a suicide sacrifice. Fortunately for her, Sailor Moon manages to save Saturn from her death and Hotaru is reborn as a baby to live a new normal life. It didn't last.
  • Sakura Gari: First time, we see Masataka getting horribly and painfully broken in the Saiki household as time passes. Then we learn Souma that became so broken by the end of his childhood that he grew into an Empty Shell Stepford Smiler who allowed anyone to screw him if he could get by in life in return. And then we see other characters being very broken, like Asayo and the unnamed maid Honestly, the base premise of the entire series is this trope.
  • Samurai Champloo: Koza in "Misguided Miscreants" is already broken before the episode begins, because she's been living on a destitute island all her life with no family or friends, only sticking around Mukuro because there was nobody else, and she knows she can't survive on her own. Her situation only gets worse.
  • School-Live! is a depressing horror manga disguised as a Schoolgirl Series. Most of the main characters fit moe cliches and go through horrible traumas:
    • Rose-Haired Sweetie Yuki was hit with this prior to the manga. She couldn't deal with the Zombie Apocalypse and was melancholy until she underwent a Sanity Slippage, especially after her close friend and teacher Megu-nee was killed by zombies. The only reason she isn't a Broken Bird is because she hallucinates no zombies exist. She starts to snap out of it after being forced to kill a zombie. She still pretends to be delusional because her cheeriness makes her the Living Emotional Crutch for the others.
    • Sensei-chan Megu-nee was shown to have had deep guilt over worries that she could have stopped the zombie apocalypse if she had opened the emergency manual given to her earlier.
    • Miki snapped due to living in haunting isolation for weeks. She was the Sole Survivor of a group of humans stick in a mall surrounded by zombies. She gets better after being rescued by the School Live club and displays the least overall trauma of the group, not to say she isn't prone to tears and anxiety though.
    • Cool Big Sis Rii has been hit hardest with this. After losing Megu-nee, almost having to kill a zombifying Kurumi, the rescue helicopter crashing, being forced to evacuate the school, and remembering she has a little sister her mental health has taken major damage. It's heavy implied Tagalong Kid Ruu is really a stuffed animal.
    • Kurumi shows some suicidal tendencies after being bit by Megu-nee and being partially cured. She is a Heartbroken Badass as well because she had to kill her zombified crush at the start of the outbreak.
  • Joe Asakura has this as his past in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, losing his parents and nearly dying himself at the tender age of eight. Worse still, his parents were Galactor agents looking to defect with Dr. Nambu's help. Being orphaned thanks to Galactor was bad enough, but Joe was not happy to find out his parents were actually involved with them!
  • Scrapped Princess: Pacifica. Yeah, kinda inevitable when everyone in the world is trying to kill you. The Breaking finally comes in the forest night scene of episode 22.
  • If you're a character in Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi, chances are you're going to break at some point or go through a Heroic BSoD.
    • Ritsu in his backstory is full of this. He was an All-Loving Hero in his high school days but miscommunication with his boyfriend Takano caused him to have a freak out and leave Japan to study aboard. The series introduces him as a jaded individual who does not believe in love. To make matters worse, his self-esteem was hit before transferring to the manga industry when he hears that the people he worked with in the literature industry are jealous of his success and claim that he's only getting the top authors because of connections and not because he worked hard at his job. Combine this with Takano's friend Yokozawa constantly telling him to leave the manga industry and stop playing with Takano's heart, it's no wonder he doesn't break down as much as the other characters would.
      • When more of his backstory is revealed, this trope really stands out. Ritsu was basically a Love Martyr, and Takano initially only got into a relationship with him in order to hurt him. Then while Ritsu does everything in his power to be a good boyfriend to Takano, out of the blue (to Ritsu at least) Takano gives him a "Reason You Suck" Speech about how annoying and disgusting he is. Despite this, Ritsu continues to stand by Takano up to their breakup. The fact that Takano comes to love him for real seems lost because of their continued miscommunication.
    • Chiaki has it worse in the current timeline. He's your typical idiot protagonist that is Oblivious to Love. However, given his arc is a deconstruction of the love triangle, Chiaki ends up brutally raped by his best friend Hatori who thought Yanase was going to win him over and took action. The worse part unlike most yaoi series, Chiaki is seriously hurt physically, mentally and emotionally screaming the entire time he's raped for Hatori to stop. Naturally, this scene was toned down in the anime with just a kiss but the implications are still there. Alas, Chiaki ends up forgiving Hatori who ends up being a Karma Houdini as a result and Chiaki ends up becoming more of an asshole with each episode as evident with his relationship with Yanase being strained.
    • Even Yanase goes through this, and it might be more serious than what the series implies. For one thing, he's been in love with Chiaki since middle school. Yanase has then dedicated himself to his friend and constantly turns down jobs that are more worth his skill and better pay because he loves Chiaki too much to leave his side as an editor. He doesn't seem to realize that Hatori beat him to the punch by raping his best friend, but regardless still hates him for being an obstacle, but by trying to be the Nice Guy, he ends up losing Chiaki to him. And it gets worse. When Chiaki and Hatori start dating, his relationship with Chiaki starts getting strained due to the trauma Chiaki faced and Hatori constantly harassing Chiaki to stay away from him. It gets to the point where he ends up directly in the middle of their fight and has his heart strings pulled over and over again. Given that Yanase hates people lying to him, he flips out in episode 15 when he calls Chiaki out on his actions for lying to his best friend about a family issue Chiaki supposedly had on his birthday when in actuality, he went to go see Hatori and apologize for their fight (and Yanase even mentions that Chiaki could have just seen him the next day and apologize) leaving Yanase drunk at a hot spring that he planned for them both. Even when Yanase confesses in the heart of the moment, Chiaki refuses to take his love seriously and by episode 16, Yanase finally breaks down crying when Chiaki punches him and rejects him a third time. And Hatori makes it worse by harassing Yanase on the phone, and then barging into his own house and trying to beat the shit out of him. The episode implies that Yanase had a full blown Heroic BSoD and that after Yanase uses the last of his strength to kick them both out, he breaks down crying. This makes his whole Break the Cutie a huge Tear Jerker and slams Chiaki and Hatori into the scrap heap. The worse part? This is the conclusion of the Domestica pairing in the anime so we don't know what happens to them afterwards.
      • While being rejected by Chiaki was a definite Break the Cutie moment, Yanase is far from being a Woobie. He was fully aware that Chiaki and Hatori had started dating, but since the two kept it a secret Yanase decided to ignore their relationship and still pursue Chiaki. This fake ignorance allowed him to try and repeatedly sabotage their relationship, including coming on to Chiaki in front of Hatori on the pretext that he was being friendly. Realizing that Chiaki wasn't going to ever love him that way broke Yanase, but the heartache is cheapened somewhat by the way he kept manipulating Chiaki.
  • Seraph of the End has this in spades for Yuu and Mika. They started out as orphans who managed to create their own little family with the other children at the orphanage before they were taken by the vampires and treated like cattle. They all try to escape after Mika comes up with a plan, but said plan fails and all the children aside from Mika and Yuu are killed, while Mika is ripped apart. Yuu is forced to leave him behind and for the next four years he believes him to be dead. Meanwhile, Mika is forced to become a vampire. And that's just the first episode. All in all Yuu manages to handle this much better than Mika.
  • The utter hell Hiroko goes through at the hands of Aki Honda and her Girl Posse, culminating in being raped with a test tube. That they then threatened to break while it was still inside her. When Hiro-chan gets her shadow dragon, things turn very, very ugly for everyone involved.
  • Averted by Norio Koga, which is impressive given what ends up happening to him. Sure, he was raped to death but he didn't dwell on his situation, and instead focused on helping out Tsurumaru and Shiina by taking out bombers, despite the giant pedophile on his back.
  • Shigurui: Irako, though he doesn't stay broken for long, and Mie. Subverted by Iku, who has horrible, horrible things happen to her and her breasts but stays fairly constant throughout. She's a tough lady.
  • Shiki: Kaori goes Ax-Crazy in Chapter 32 when her undead father tries to kill her. She applies a baseball bat to his head multiple times, and when that doesn't kill him, she gets out a pickaxe to finish him off. She then proceeds to shove his unrecognizable corpse into a closet for good measure.
  • Happened with Hibiki in Shinigami-sama ni Saigo no Onegai wo. Initially somewhat averted by the fact that Shizuka was not yet dead, but later played straight when Shizuka is killed right in front of her eyes. He was later revived (albeit illegally, in Shinigami law) by Hibiki.
  • Shitsurakuen:
    • After Sora wins Tomoko, the boys figure out that Exaclan only protects against physical harm, not threats or emotional abuse. A group of boys isolate Tomoko and proceed to terrorize her in the worst way. Tomoko doesn't handle it well.
    • Sora gets large amounts of it, but always manages to snap out of it; other times she needs to be slapped out of it.
  • What happens to Little Sparrow in Shut Hell.The transformation is so great that it turns her into a psychopath.
  • In Silent Möbius, not long after Katsumi's Face–Heel Turn, Yuki Saikou starts seeing disturbing visions of the future. Needless to say, she doesn't take this well at all. And we're not counting Yuki's own past as well...
  • In A Silent Voice, Shouko Nishimiya, a Cute Mute deaf girl spent her first year in her new elementary school being constantly mocked, bullied and harassed for her disability, with her every effort to make friends rejected and destroyed without fail. It's so bad, she's not the only Cutie broken by it. One of her tormenters, Ishida Shouya, ends up as the scapegoat for his entire class, taking all the blame for Shouko's torment and spends the next few years suffering treatment almost worse then Shouko at the hands of students and teachers, while also bearing horrible guilt over what he did to Shouko before she left school. He completely shuns his class and foresees nothing but a life of endless suffering ahead for him, which eventually makes him plan to kill himself early in the series. The results of Shouya's bullying is revealed late into the manga when flashbacks show Shouko ended up suicidal as a result.
  • The Golden Dragon Filia from the third season of Slayers is a competent mage who, at a first glance, is haughty and arrogant, but in reality is naive and sheltered about the gray morality of the human world (which she has never travelled upon), and simply doesn't know that her own race slaughtered the Ancient Dragons; the season's Big Bad, Valgaav, belonged to that race before he was turned into a half-Mazoku. When the girl finds out about that (followed by everyone she ever while growing up knowing dying horribly shortly thereafter), she splinters massively. Only in the finale does she fully get better, return from the Despair Event Horizon and find a new purpose.
    • Amelia, princess of Seyruun, reaches this trope several times, but she manages to snap back without breaking. It's kind of strange, granted that her mother was killed by an assassin when she was young, and her older sister left her because of it. The closest that she was to it was in NEXT, when she thought her father was dead too, and she collapsed in tears over that.
  • Averted with Sylphiel, who lost her Father and hometown in one night, only for Hellmaster Phibrizzo to bring them back with a half-life, where Sylphiel's Father has to reveal to her that he isn't really back, and that he has no heartbeat. Then she witnesses several of her friends murdered by Phibrizzo quite casually, only to end up joining them. And later, when she is brought back, she finds that the Lord of Nightmares has consumed Lina Inverse. Despite all of this, Sylphiel never actually breaks.
  • Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Minmay starts out quite innocent and loveable, but her cousin puts her through so much grief that she would probably wind up an old maid, since Hikaru Ichijo, the man she really loves, winds up marrying Misa instead.

    T 
  • Moriritchi of Tamagotchi goes through this in the "eggification curse" Story Arc at the end of the original (pre-New Season, New Name) series. She witnesses her older sister Anemoriritchi fall victim to the egg curse along with the rest of Tamagotchi Town, causing them to lose their personality and sense of fashion. In episode 143 (the last part of the story arc), she gets quite sad over this, culminating in her becoming an egg herself.
  • In Tokyo Babylon main character Subaru is introduced as an adorable teenager overall contented with his life. Then the man he's fallen in love with turns out to be the assassin who has sworn to kill him, and who ends up murdering his sister in his stead when she offers herself in Heroic Sacrifice. By the time he appears again in X/1999, several years later, he is a broken, bitter person, and as soon as it seems he might get better he gets his revenge and cannot take the pain he feels afterwards, leading to his Face–Heel Turn.
  • Poor, poor Kaneki Ken of Tokyo Ghoul. Where do we begin?
    • His father died when he was only four, leaving only books to remember him by.
    • His mother, whom he repeatedly refers to as kind and a wonderful person, beat him as a child before working herself to death to support herself, her sister, and her son when Kaneki was ten.
    • After his mother's death, he was sent to live with his aunt, who was verbally and emotionally abusive towards him, excluding him from family meals and instead giving him a meager amount of money to buy his own food.
    • He gets six months or so of happiness after leaving for college, until the universe decides he hasn't had enough trauma lately, and he goes on a date with Kamishiro Rize, who turns out to be a ghoul and tries to kill and eat Kaneki. After what seems to be an accident involving steel beams falling and crushing Rize. To save his life, her organs are transplanted into Kaneki, turning him into a half-ghoul hybrid. And all of this is just up to the first episode.
    • After that, he is tricked into becoming a meal in the Ghoul Restaurant, kidnapped by Aogiri, tortured psychologically and physically by having his fingers and toes torn off repeatedly with pliers and a centipede left to crawl around in his ear for ten days straight. His defining breaking moment is when he is forced to choose between killing a mother and a child. He chooses himself to die. His tormentor kills them both.

    V-W 
  • Vampire Knight: What happened to eleven-year-old Zero.
  • Nitori from Wandering Son deals with a lot of garbage over the course of the manga. Between being bullied for being too feminine, having a bully of an older sister, dealing with gender double standards and dysphoria, she has more than a few moments where she crashes. Early in the manga she is especially prone to fits of Tender Tears however her Character Development has her gaining a stronger backbone.
  • Happened to Marnie from When Marnie Was There prior to the film. She was a sweet girl growing up whose parents were never around and who was left supervised by abusive staff. When she grew up she married her childhood sweetheart Kazuhiko, but he ended up dying when their daughter Emily was young. Marnie broke down so badly that she was sent to an asylum for several years, which ruined her relationship with Emily since she was sent Off to Boarding School and this broke her badly enough to resent her mother for it. They never mended that bond, so after Emily's death she took in her young granddaughter Anna before dying herself. She was a Doting Grandparent until her death, but everything caused her to 'come back' as a ghost child and befriend Anna, while she visited the countryside.

    Y 

    Z 
  • Zambot 3: Kappei started out as an up and coming kid, even if he may be a bit of a jerk. Over the course of the series, he lost a lot of his positive outlook and became more jaded even if he would still fight to protect the Earth. Being shunned, losing friends and family, seeing how brutal the Gaizok could be while having to be a Child Soldier too early for his age will do that to him.


Alternative Title(s): Anime

Top