Break the Cutie/Live-Action TV: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

* On [[Lincoln Heights]] every single child living in Lincoln Heights without ONE single exception. Most of the adults were broken when they were young as well.

** Jubal Early's threat to Kaylee in "Objects in Space." Poor, poor Kaylee...

** The first thing the series did was break the cutie. Joss did it to Mal in the very first scene.

** This is a show that actually uses the word "broken".

* The title character of ''[[Veronica Mars]]'' is shown to have already been broken before the first series begins - the flashbacks show an almost painfully-innocent girl lose her best friend and then all the others, her mother, her home, any social standing and any shred of dignity she might have otherwise held on to, and all in the space of a year.

** Wesley, Cordelia and Willow. Heck, for that matter, Buffy herself entered the series only slightly dented, and slowly bent to the breaking point. Even Faith can be put into this camp. A street kid, pursued by the hordes of Kakistos, desperate for someone to trust, constantly betrayed by Watchers and others until she had nowhere to turn when things went wrong, and then ruined by a father figure who got her to commit murders for him. After she came out of her coma, she was in such bad shape that she tried to commit "suicide by vampire".

** Over seven seasons Willow loses her first lover to the curse of lycanthropy, loses her new lover to a brainwipe, gets her lover back, watches her best friend die, loses her lover to her obsession with magic, gets her lover back, and just as they've finally reconciled loses her lover to a random gunshot that wasn't even intended for her. Bad Things ensue, and the primary focus of her arc in the next season is just putting her back together.

*** In season 7, this is mostly absent, except for the entirety of "Conversations With Dead People". But this time, Dawn doesn't break.

** Don't forget Anya, who spends most of her time on the show as the perky and bubbly comic relief. Then {{spoiler|Xander leaves her at the altar}} late in season 6. She reacts to this by {{spoiler|returning to vengeance. She finds herself unable to do it properly at first, but when she does get back into the swing by slaughtering ten frat boys who humiliated a girl, she suddenly realises what she's done and plunges into [[Death Seeker|Death Seekerdom]] To top that off, when she begs D'Hoffryn to undo it (the price of which would be her life and soul), he instead kills her friend Halfrek in front of her as the payment. He then follows this up with, "Haven't I taught you anything, Anya? Never go for the kill when you can go for the pain."}}. She survives, and is still comic relief, but she's a little less perky now. {{spoiler|And then she gets cut in half.}}

** And then he ''gets'' emotions in [[The Movie|Generations]]... Frankly, it's surprising how he dealt with that with only one or two guilt trips. The amount of crap he went through wouldn't have been attempted with any other character, specifically because Data ''couldn't'' actually be broken. You could kick him around like a football and you're not likely to permanently psychologically wreck him.

*** Unless you count ''Descent''.

**** A madcap [[Bow Ties Are Cool|bow-tie]]-wearing, [[Nice Hat|hat-loving]] [[The Woobie|perma-Woobie]].

**** During the more [[Foe Yay|"serious"]] scenes between the Doctor and the Master, you can see the Master himself suffers this because of the drums. Suffers it horribly, in fact. Which means that ''everything the Master has ever done'' was the fault of {{spoiler|Rassilon and the Council}}; he started out as a completely normal child. Poor mad Master.

** ''[[Doctor Who/NS/Recap/S4 E10 Midnight|Midnight]].'' When a mysterious unseen creature strikes his transport, the Doctor watches helplessly as his "listen to me, I'm clever and I can help" attitude not only fails miserably but starts to turn the rest of the passengers ''against'' him and leaves him open to immobilizing [[Mind Rape]], resulting in one of the most intense cases of [[Humans Are Bastards]] in the whole series. If you don't find yourself wanting very desperately to [[The Woobie|give him a hug]] when it all ends and he's lying sprawled on the floor and clutching his chest gasping "It's gone... it's gone... it's gone..." then I don't know what to do with you.

** In ''A Good Man Goes To War'', both Amy and the Doctor get pretty broken. First, {{spoiler|Amy gets her baby taken away, the baby she hadn't even known she was pregnant with until a month before; then, the Doctor saves her and Melody, only to realize that his entire plan has led them all into a massive trap. Melody is not really Melody but is Flesh!Melody, who then dissolves in Amy's arms. Amy, understandably, freaks out. The Doctor tries to hug her, but she won't let him. [[Tear Jerker|That broke him, hard.]] And then, just to pour salt into his open wound, River shows up and gives him an interestingly inverted version of a [["The Reason You Suck" Speech]] in which she tells him he's getting too good at what he does and becoming a mighty warrior, exactly the opposite of what he wanted, and because of this, it's his fault that Melody was taken. Ouch.}}

*** Don't forget that as part of all that {{spoiler|he was unable to resist being forced by his auton body to shoot the woman he loves}}. So yeah...

** The Fifth Doctor was the nicest, mildest, friendliest, most trusting and most pacific of all the Doctors. The death toll in his adventures was horrific and frequently claimed all the non-regular cast; Adric, a long-running companion and only a boy, was killed; Tegan ran away because she'd seen enough death. He eventually sacrificed himself to prevent yet another person dying on him. Poor soul.

** If you think Ten and Eleven had it bad, consider Eight's audio adventures. At the start he's the nicest, most cheerful Doctor in a couple of decades. He saves his newest companion, Charlie from the doomed airship R101, thus creating a paradox. In a heartwrenching scene Charlie begs him to kill her in order to save our Universe from anti-time, which breaks free through Charlie. The Doctor instead chooses {{spoiler|to materialize the TARDIS around the casket of anti-time, saving Charlie and sacrificing himself.}} He then becomes infected with the entity known as {{spoiler|Zagreus, who wants to destroy the Universe or something}}. He becomes basically mad with split personalities. Then it turns out that {{spoiler|TARDIS is infected as well}} and very pissed at the Doctor. Torture ensues. At last, mirroring earlier scene with Charlie, {{spoiler|he begs to kill him. Which she complies with much drama. He then fails to regenerate, because for a second, he wanted to die. He eventually survives by accepting Zagreus}}. He then forced to {{spoiler|leave our Universe forever, because otherwise Zagreus will infect our Universe with antitime, which is bad.}}. He is througly disillusioned with Time Lords, most of whom turn out to be lunatics on his watch. Thus begin his adventures in {{spoiler|the divergent Universe}}, where there is no time, which is highly uncomfortable for the Doctor and he is decidedly gloomier after his experiences and as a result of {{spoiler|merging with Zagreus}}. Eventually, he is able to return. Then it turns out that Davros {{spoiler|completely erased his memories of his two companions prior to Charlie}} as an elaborate revenge plan. Some time after, Charlie leaves {{spoiler|on quite the bad terms with the Doctor}}. The Doctor meets Lucie, and just when their relationship starts being warm and friendly, {{spoiler|The Doctor is trapped for 600 years on the planet with the jellyfish people, to whom he gets pretty attached. Who are all slaughtered by the end of the episode}}. The Doctor becomes even more aloof and gloomy and continues travelling with Lucie, but their realationship has suffered and they distrust each other. Just as things seem to have returned to normal, Lucie discovers that the Doctor lied to her by omission about her past. She {{spoiler|leaves}} in a decidedly unjovial Christmas special. He meets her again during an epic showdown with the Daleks, {{spoiler|during which both Lucie and the Doctor's great-grandson die}}. We've yet to see fallout form that one, but one thing for sure, it won't be pretty.

** This is Victoria Waterfield's entire character arc. In her first story, the Daleks kill her father and blow up her home. Despite this, she's still reasonably adventurous and confident. By the time she calls it a day in ''Fury From The Deep'', she's a nervous wreck who can't sleep for fear of the [[Monster of the Week]].

** They like doing this: Ianto gets broken in "Cyberwoman". "Greeks Bearing Gifts" does the same to Tosh. "Fragments" breaks both Tosh and Owen. And in "End of Days," Gwen loses it completely {{spoiler|when Rhys gets killed. He gets better}}.

** Esther gets it too over the first half of ''Miracle Day''.

** Its various methods of bending Dean to breaking point have included: getting tortured by his possessed father and possessed brother at two different times, making him feel [[It's All My Fault|guilty]] because someone died to save him in the first season and ramping that suicidal guilt up to 100 when his father dies for him in the second season, having [[Protectorate|his]] [[Big Brother Instinct|brother]] [[Despair Event Horizon|die in his arms]], sending him to hell at the end of season three, and having enemies taunt him and allies accost him with how worthless he is.<br /><br />And even all that pales in comparison to what happens to Dean in Season 4: clawing his way out of his own grave, being an (albeit extremely pretty) angel's bitch, getting guilt-tripped from victims he couldn't save, [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong|going back in time]] and apparently causing [[You Already Changed the Past|the events]] leading to his mother's death; getting infected with a ghost sickness that makes him even more of [[The Chew Toy]], remembering all his forty years of hell, breaking after thirty and enjoying torturing other victims for ten, having suddenly to remember the events of "In My Time Of Dying", having to torture Alistair for information and learning that he was the first seal and that his Dad spent a century on the rack but never broke.<br /><br />And most of all, finding out he's the only one who can stop "it", and then discovering ''this '''isn't''' referring to the Apocalypse''. Instead, he's meant to let the [[Light Is Not Good|angels]] engineer the [[Godzilla Threshold|Apocalypse]] and then end it by [[Summon Bigger Fish|having Michael possess Dean]] and [[Destructive Savior|destroy]] most of the world fighting and [[Utopia Justifies the Means|killing Lucifer]].

*** And then [[It Got Worse|it gets worse]]. At the end of season five, Dean has to let his brother {{spoiler|[[Heroic Sacrifice|throw himself]] into hell to stop Lucifer,}} in season six, he {{spoiler|has to deal with [[Came Back Wrong|soulless Sam]], loses the family he'd always wanted,}} ''and then'' in season seven Dean has to deal with Sam going crazy and [[Eldritch Abomination|monsters]] they can't kill trying to eat the world {{spoiler|because his like-a-brother buddy Cas [[Jumped Off the Slippery Slope|betrayed them all]] [[Knight Templar|trying to save the world]], [[Moral Event Horizon|killed his angelic allies]], and [[Kick the Dog|broke Sam's mind]] before taking in [[With Great Power Comes Great Insanity|dangerous power]] that [[A God Am I|pushed him over the edge]] and released those monsters.}} Just when it seems like Dean has lost nearly everything and everyone, {{spoiler|with Bobby dead, Cas apparently dead, and Sam dying because of his memories of hell, Cas returns only to sacrifice his mind to save Sam's.}}

*** [[Fate Worse Than Death|It got much worse]]. At the end of season five, {{spoiler|Sam [[Self-Sacrifice Scheme|had to let Lucifer possess him]] [[Fighting From the Inside|to take]] Lucifer [[Heroic Willpower|back into hell's solitary confinement]].}} In season six, {{spoiler|when Sam finally got his soul back after being brought back to life, Castiel broke his mind to let the memories of probably 180 years [[Fate Worse Than Death|being tormented by Lucifer]] overwhelm him.}} In season seven, Sam has been losing his grip on reality at a time when they're facing a threat they can't kill, to the point where he {{spoiler|almost dies because a hallucination of Lucifer won't let him sleep. And then has to deal with knowing Castiel sacrificed his mind for Sam's}}.

** We can now add John to this list. Once upon a time, he was a naive, innocent, sweet little himbo and look what happened to him. But unlike his sons, who have been broken slowly and horribly over the past few seasons due to numerous events, he just snapped from the one event (his wife dying) and became the borderline abusive, jerkass parent who was so at the end of his rope that he committed suicide for Dean in the most self-righteous way possible.

*** Also he'd refused to have kids ever a few days before his wife died, and wouldn't explain it was because of deep issues going back to when he shot his abusive dad in the head as a kid. In the kitchen of the same house he lived in until the Leviathans burned it down a few episodes before he died.

** In summary, all Winchesters come pre-broken, or get broken shortly thereafter, along with any longtime associates. The customary dying seems to be easier. Unless you're Dean or Sam; then, Hell ''and even Heaven'' are all about this trope.

* The new ''[[Battlestar Galactica]]'' likes this one:

*** Athena {{spoiler|did break. A big part of Athena's motivation was that she didn't want to be a Cylon. By Season 4, she had pretty much convinced herself that she was human, hence her increasing animosity towards her own people. When Boomer had sex with Helo while she was tied up and forced to watch from the locker, it ''shatterd'' that viewpoint into a million, tiny pieces: Her own husband can't tell her apart from other individuals of her model number; She's not human and she never will be human, no matter how much she wants to be. Not only that, but Boomer kidnapped Hera, which means Athena had to go through the pain of losing her child ''a second time.''}} She breaks down completely near the end of the episode. The next one shows that she has completely closed herself off to everyone, including her husband.

** Felix Gaeta is{{spoiler|/was}} a good case of this. He was initially an earnest and contentious guy with a case of hero worship (or [[Bi the Way|more]]) on Gaius Baltar. Then saw his expectations betrayed by New Caprica, the occupation by the Cylons, got himself ostracised, tried and nearly killed for [[Les Collaborateurs|Collaboration]] despite the part he took secretly in [[La Résistance]]. Then lately he lost his leg to friendly fire and gangrene during a mutiny situation. He certainly grew more bitter and sarcastic, but the show reminds us what a [[The Woobie|woobie]] he is by showing off his singing voice.

**** {{spoiler|According to the [[Word of God]] , as handed out in the weekly podcasts by the Executive Producer, the Earth arc is intended to be a [[Break the Cutie]] for the ''audience''.}}

***** [[Shaggy Dog Story|It]] [[Wham! Episode|worked]].

* Happens in a completely mundane, underplayed, and painful way to Peggy Olsen on ''[[Mad Men]]''. In the pilot, she's tiny, wide-eyed, hopeful, and naive; since then, she's had a disastrous affair with a [[Jerkass]] coworker (which he initiated just days before his wedding), been mocked and sexually harassed on an hourly basis, and {{spoiler|gotten pregnant, denied it ''until she went into labor'', been declared an unfit mother, and been forced to hand the kid over. Then her boss came and told her to just go on pretending it'd never happened. Yeah, that'll work.}} Granted, she's made some great strides on the career front, and become miles more confident than she was in the pilot, but... to sum it up in one heartbreaking word? Playgrounds.

*** Not to mention, [[Daddy's Girl|her dad]] [[Dark and Troubled Past|died right in front of her]], her mother and sister will never think she's good enough, and then there's the pesky priest who won't stop bugging her to confess her sins and feel guilty like a [[Raised Catholic|proper]] [[Sex Is Evil|Catholic]].

** Sally Draper gets a lot of this in season three, most notably when {{spoiler|Grandpa Gene, the only adult who really gives her the time of day, dies. Neither Don nor Betty initially take Sally's reaction into consideration and she's left to quietly grieve by herself, followed by an angry outburst at them when she overhears them laughing and thinks they're not taking his death seriously. They, in turn, send her back out to the living room, where she quietly watches news footage of a Tibetan monk ''setting himself on fire.''}} It probably doesn't come as a shock to most viewers that in the following episode she displays some antisocial tendencies at school. It only gets worse when {{spoiler|Betty decides to name her new son, born soon after Grandpa Gene dying, Eugene, which only serves to further traumatize Sally.}}

* Throughout the first 4 seasons of ''[[Lost]]'' Hurley was the series' comic relief and all-around nice guy, even though he believes he is cursed and still struggles with his food addiction on the island. Once he {{spoiler|gets off the island}}, however, he starts to become haunted by the ghosts of people from the island, and by the end of season four, he's far from the happy-go-lucky Hurley of earlier seasons. He gets better {{spoiler|once he returns to the island}}, however.

*** And poor Richard, who's been steadily beat down for [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old|over a hundred years]].

** Really [[Dysfunction Junction|every single character was already broken at the beginning]]. [[It Got Worse]].

** It looked like he might finally break, but his reversion to his personality when he was 10 years old has saved him. Hiro Nakamura is Unbreakable.

*** Would this be a case of [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Nice Job Breaking Hiro]]?

** They're definitely hammering on Claire, too.

*** They've stepped up the pace recently. Season 3 has delivered at least one blow per episode so far. {{spoiler|1) Attacked by Sylar. 2) Lost ability to feel pain. 3) Her "lesson" with Meredith. 4) Being forced into a game of Russian roulette with her birth and adoptive mothers.}}

** Elle was the one character that was successfully broken.

** Even before that, the script writers decided to pile the abuse on Elliot, [[Deus Angst Machina|culminating with her being sued by a]] [[Jerkass]] [[Deus Angst Machina|patient, causing her to get kicked out of her house and live in her moving van,]] ''[[Deus Angst Machina|which then gets stolen with all of her stuff.]]'' And none of her friends seem to care.

** In season 1's "My Own Personal Jesus," this happens to Turk when he's on-call during Christmas Eve, and is inundated with a string of horrors from the emergency room that leave him utterly broken and hopeless by morning. [[Gallows Humor|His breaking is even set to a cheerful Christmas melody!]]

Two shattered skulls<br />

And a drunk who drove into a tree. }}

** In the seven hours after ''that'', she: found out the White House was the next target, swam the Potomac, saw a fellow agent murdered in front of her eyes, barely escaped Juma's army, discovered Jack was being held hostage by the dictator of Sangala (who also happened to have nabbed the President), saw a bomb go off in the White House, was told Jack had murdered Ryan Burnett and Senator Mayer, tried to help him, got herself fired, was proved right about Jack's innocence, was reinstated, saw her boss almost die, found out Jack had been infected with a deadly bioweapon, saw him have a seizure right in front of her eyes, and witnessed him refuse the only possible treatment to save his life. Emotional rollercoaster much?

*** After ''that'', she also got to see her dead {{spoiler|boss after Tony Almeida betrayed everyone and killed him}}. She also got to see Jack having more seizures, the {{spoiler|Heroic Sacrifce of Bill Buchanan}}, and after all that her metamorphesis into the female Jack Bauer was complete when she {{spoiler|tortured the Big Bad of Season 7, Alan Wilson}} in the Season Finale.

** Shawn is also shot, kidnapped, and held in a trunk in the episode "Shawn Takes a Shot in the Dark."

* [[Party of Five]]: Sarah (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt) started as a nice, cheerful girl and within 1-2 seasons was as morbid and whiny and angst-ridden as everyone else in the show...

* After he went to jail, [[Johnny Depp|Tom Hanson]] was a lot darker of a character in [[21 Jump Street]]

* [[The Woobie|Poor]] [[Blake's Seven|Vila.]]

{{quote| '''Michael:''' So who's the victim this year?<br />

'''Tracy:''' Sally, the new cashier.<br />

* Niles Crane on ''[[Frasier]]'', in stark contrast to his (and Frasier's) frequent, minor, [[Played for Laughs]] [[Break the Haughty]] moments, get ''several'' of these. Ignoring his [[Trauma Conga Line]] of [[The Woobie|smaller bouts of torture]]: he seems to already be broken by his mother's death, Frasier's long absence, and a stifling, emotionally-abusive marriage at the series' beginning and gets ground into progressively smaller pieces by the latter during the first two seasons. Then his marriage falls apart and he manages to build himself up again, but Daphne, with whom he is smitten, is utterly oblivious to his feelings and unknowingly shatters his heart over and over. Devastated by this, he eventually gives up and then naively returns to his unstable, [[Jerkass]] wife after she "promises" that she'll treat him better this time, only for her to turn around and cheat on him with their marriage counselor weeks later. He eventually pulls himself up by the bootstraps, but then, after he rejects his wife's offer to reconcile again, she tears up their unsigned divorce settlement and proceeds to slowly torture and financially ruin him over several months. Then, when he finally gets rescued from Maris by a savvy divorce lawyer and is about to put his life back together, said lawyer immediately starts dating Daphne, and ''then'' broken once more, he flees into the arms of a manipulative carbon-copy of his ex-wife...etc, etc, etc...Thankfully though, this all turns out to be an [[Earn Your Happy Ending]], as Daphne falls in love with him, and heals him after [[They Do]].

* The critiques, especially from Randy Jackson, after Haley Reinhart's first performance in Top 4 week of ''[[American Idol]]'' Season 10. [[It Got Worse]] after the round was over and Ryan Seacrest called the four finalists out for an overall Round 1 assessment. To top it off, they ruined the surprise of what she was wearing for her second performance (which epitomized [[Crowning Music of Awesome]] and showed that the "breaking" didn't quite work). Nigel Lythgoe couldn't have scripted it better...oh, wait...he admitted that he DID script it that way!

** Not to mention being told by the man thought to be her father {{spoiler|that part of the reason for him leaving him was her deafness. Especially after being by Regina told that was the reason him leaving your entire life. Only for Regina to change her views about that to Daphne when Angelo came back.}}

* Several characters on ''[[Breaking Bad]]'', but most notable among them Jesse. While he didn't exactly start as the most idealistic person, he was getting by making sub-par meth and his worst experiences were a few arrests. Since agreeing to partner with Walt, however, he's inadvertently gotten his girlfriend hooked onto drugs again, leading to her death; seen several other people die in front of him, most of them pretty brutally; and killed a decent man in cold blood on Walt's orders to prevent Gus from killing Walt. At times it seems the writers' main goal is to come up with new ways to break Jesse even further.