< Break the Cutie

Break the Cutie/Anime

  • The main character of Elfen Lied, Lucy, started out as this, and was tormented from a young age by the other children for being different. Unfortunately, those differences extended far beyond anyone's expectations of her, and when she finally snapped after the other kids literally murder her puppy in front of her, she started killing people efficiently and indiscriminately, with the ultimate goal of human extinction.
  • 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.
  • 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, 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.
    • Zelgadis was a Wide-Eyed Idealist (albeit a more hardened one), as shown in some flashbacks, and he was a cheerful fanatic of his great-grandfather, Rezo. When he desired power for protecting others and for himself, Rezo gives it to him...by turning him into a strange-looking chimera. He has the power he desires, but he's often viewed as a monster, and he breaks down into the cold, snarky, Jerkass seen in the series.
    • And don't forget Sylphiel, a sweet and discreet White Magician Girl who breaks badly when she becomes the Sole Survivor of her beloved Sairaag.
    • Arguably, Naga was broken in the past. After all she IS Amelia's older sister Gracia, and the circumstances in which she left Seyroon were simply horrible. She walked on her mom's assassination, killed the culprit in a really gory fashion, and then she set off home.
  • Chise from Saikano. She asks for death before the series is even half over. But she's not that lucky.
  • Dawn/Hikari from Pokémon 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. And proceeded to fake being cheery and bubbly, crying when nobody's around, and experiencing 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, while not a "cutie" per se, went through this after being beaten in a Curb Stomp Battle against Paul, where he got beaten 6-2. He spent almost an entire episode moping until he finally managed to pull 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.
      • Ash was broken way back in The Indigo League. In the Indigo League Championships, the day of his match with Ritchie, he was kidnapped by Team Rocket. 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 lost solely because Charizard refused to listen to him, thinking Ritchie's Pikachu was too weak to battle. Ash, feeling that his dreams were now over, was understandably depressed the next day, only everyone treated him like he had 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 was 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. We'll see how long that lasts.
  • 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.
  • In 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.
    • Let's not forget 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.
    • Also 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 emotion break loose.
      • The identity of the Rockbells' killer differs between the 2003 anime version 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.
    • Also Ed and Al, in all cotinuities. 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. Whoa boy!
    • In the 2003 anime version, Rose, who just wanted to help people, 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.
  • Death Note:
    • There's poor 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. Word of God says she hasn't fully recovered, but she's improving. Thank the Gods.
    • There's also poor Touta Matsuda, who is a genuinely good (if a little dumb) person who hero-worships Soichiro, L, and Light and always gives his all to the investigation, even if he ends up hindering it more than helping it. Everyone makes it very clear that they don't think Matsuda is very important to the investigation despite that he's as committed as everyone else, and he ends up developing a pretty big inferiority complex. Then two of his heroes (Soichiro and L) die, and in the Yellow Box Warehouse he finds out that Light was responsible for both deaths and that he is the killer that they've been hunting this entire time. When Matsuda tries to take him down before he can kill Near, Light starts screaming that he's an idiot.. The poor guy has his idealism, mentors, and self-esteem slowly demolished throughout the series... No wonder he completely snaps and almost kills Light in the spot, screaming his head off and with Berserker Tears running down his face. He's back to normal in the epilogue of the manga, but a little bit less trusting.
  • 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...
  • Code Geass has C.C. who was apparently once 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 in an attempt to die. There are two other, cuties in the series (Shirley and Euphemia) but neither are broken, and remain as The Cutie even as they die.
    • I'd say the first time around Shirley Fennette got kinda broken, before Lelouch fixed everything by causing Laser-Guided Amnesia (and managing to screw himself over at the same time). Thank you, Mao. . But in R2, Gottwald brings her memories back after testing out his Geass canceller on her, which lead to her eventual death at Rolo's hands.
      • No, Lelouch didn't fix it—he tried, but couldn't. In last episodes of season 1, she was really insecure, suffering both knowing Lelouch was Zero and having forgotten her love for him, not understanding why. So the one we must thank for having the sweet Shirley back in the beginning of R2 is the Emperor. That's how broken Shirley was.
    • What about Nunnally? She's blind and crippled as a result of her mother being murdered in front of her. She maintains a happy smile and only wants to be with her brother. Although many things happen over the course of the show to separate them, she never lets herself look down. And by the second season she does manage to pull herself together and come into her own. However, at the end of the show, she's trying to stop Lelouch from getting the key to a WMD. Lelouch Geasses her and steals it, and she pitifully tries to stop him from getting away. It gets worse when she's chained up as a prisoner in a parade. Then, she watches her brother get murdered at his own orders to unite the world in hating him. All this gets to her and she wails over his dead body.
      • Knowing it's done for the good of the whole FLIPPIN' WORLD makes it a lot better. Nunnally is a unique example in that her image as The Cutie is broken, to the audience. Until she died, she kept an optimistic personality, because Lelouch unintentionally Geass'd her into it.
        • No... he geassed her into handing over the Damocles controller. Besides, does this sound optimistic to you? : "It's not fair... All I wanted and needed to be happy was to be with you! How can I ever look forward to the future without you?!" You were thinking of the Euphinator, I'm afraid.
    • How have we gone without mention of Euphemia, who was accidentally forced to slaughter hundreds of people against her will, and, just to add insult to injury, was forever known as the "massacre princess" or even "The Euphinator"?
    • 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 has to be Mercy Killed by C.C.. He's even famous for it.
    • Suzaku fits to an extent as well, since he starts off at the beginning of the series as a chivalrous and gentle person before the series embarks on the path of It Got Worse. 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.
    • Lelouch also fits to an extent, dating back to his failed attempt at Calling the Old Man Out for apparently not doing anything in response to Marianne's murder and Nunnally's crippling that led the expulsion of him and Nunnally to Japan. Then It Got Worse. And thanks to himself, in a way.
  • Mai Tokiha from My-HiME was a loving sister that worked hard for her 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 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.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Judai Yuuki's experiences in Season 3, including being pursued by a supernatural Stalker with a Crush, seeing his best friends die one by one, and hitting the Moral Event Horizon with his 'being evil in order to fight evil',have slowly and painfully turned him from the happy-go-lucky Ace into a depressed shell that makes Shinji Ikari look downright chipper. The dub, meanwhile, seemed on track to ignore all of that but didn't, for once. He gets better. A lot better, ending the series by going out into the world to help other people with his powers instead of just selfishly pursuing his own desires.
    • In the original series of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Mai Valentine experienced this between the end of Battle City and the Doma arc.
    • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's we have Carly Nagisa, in a combination with Kill the Cutie. Results in a Tear Jerker at the end of Episode 39. It even doubles as a Break the Haughty moment considering who it is that kills said cutie and promptly finds himself on the receiving end of a Super-Powered Evil Side.
      • Also from 5D's: Dark Magical Girl Aki Izayoi. We're first introduced to her as the Emotionless Girl and a closet sadist, as well as someone who refuses to think for herself and is a generally unsympathetic character, to both the audience and pretty much the entire world. Come Episode 40, where Aki is comatose after dueling Evil Counterpart Misty (who pretty much breaks her brain by telling Aki that she killed her brother, and, indirectly, Misty herself) and witnessing the only person she really cares about fall to his death (or so they think!), and we meet her father. Who reveals that, aside from having serious abandonment issues due to the fact that she adored him and he was never home, she suffered serious mental abuse and even a bit of physical abuse when she was a child, due to the fact that he couldn't come to terms with the fact that she had powers. When she grows up, she's ostracized by nearly every single person she meets for the same reason, and she can't get rid of it without turning into what is implied to be an even bigger social pariah in the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe, since everyone you meet plays cards. And I mean everyone. Yuusei forgives her for being a little psychopathic.
  • Subaru Sumeragi in CLAMP's Tokyo Babylon and X 1999 was very carefully broken, and then some more, by his love interest Seishirou.
  • Kamui from X 1999. Probably the only CLAMP character able to give Subaru (above) a run for his money, and CLAMP love their woobies. No wonder Subaru becomes Kamui's Big Brother Mentor.
  • Rena and Satoko from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni both qualify, though Rena tends to snap, while Satoko breaks. Rika also tends to get it pretty hard. In fact, it's hard to argue that any of the cuties of Hinamizawa aren't broken at some point.
  • Seems to be the entire point of Bokurano, featuring a large cast of cuties all broken, tortured, and killed one by one.
    • Or any story Mohiro Kitoh writes, really. Just look at Hiroko, Akira, Norio, and pretty much everyone in the side of good from Narutaru.
  • Gohan in Dragonball Z. He starts out as something of a nerdy crybaby, but then he's kidnapped (twice in the same day!), abandoned in the wilderness, watches his father get beaten and killed, watches his kidnapper-turned-father-figure get beaten and killed, watches a bunch of his father's friends get beaten and killed, and watches his father's best friend get beaten and almost killed, all in the first story arc! This is repeated in the following story arc, with the deaths of Krillin and Dende, and more beatings for Goku and Piccolo. It finally culminates in the Cell arc, when Cell deliberately goes out of his way to piss Gohan the hell off and he dutifully shows us why we should Beware the Nice Ones by reaching the first level beyond Super Saiyan, by shifting from The Messiah Jr. into a brutal, sadistic, homicidal maniac that would make Frieza proud. Then his father dies. Post-Time Skip, aside from the Superhero gig, Gohan's retired from fighting in order to attend high school and take a shot at just being a normal kid, but once he re-takes a level in badass and finds out the Big Bad murdered just about everyone, including his Love Interest and mother? DBZ is nothing if not repetitive! Note that the Future Badass version, who suffered the permanent loss of just about everyone he knew at a young age, does not even approach this level of power or heartbreak.
    • Gohan actually got an episode seemingly centered around this. Early on, Gohan had apparently been watching too many Disney movies, as he's constantly trying to make friends with butterflies and squirrels, asking them their names, etc. Then an early Z episode shatters any illusions he may have had about nature being cuddly and cute. He meets a wounded dinosaur and attempts to nurse it back to health, applying a poultice to its injuries and gathering food for it. There's a short scene where he imagines how cool it will be to keep it for a pet and have adventures with it, illustrated in a cute super-deformed style. Then a short while later, another dinosaur attacks it, and Gohan fails in fighting it off and gets knocked senseless, awakening to find his new friend's bones scattered on the ground. The lesson: stop baby-talking at nature, little five-year-old, it doesn't like you.
      • He spends pretty much the latter half of his training eating that other dinosaur's tail, bit by bit, for breakfast. Payback is not only a bitch, but apparently delicious.
    • Much more mild, and much, much shorter versions of this trope were applied to Gohan's younger brother Goten, who watched the Big Bad murder his mother in cold blood after his father returned to the Afterlife and he was lead to believe that Gohan himself was dead, and daughter Pan, who was nearly killed by various Brainwashed and Crazy family members, including Gohan himself.
    • Vegeta is implied to have suffered similar things throughout his childhood: According to his death speech, he was kidnapped by Frieza, and then ordered to do whatever Frieza demanded if he wants to see his father live. Unfortunately for him, Frieza isn't one who keeps his word, as his dad ended up murdered by him, as well as virtually all of his race.
      • Broly, since his birth, had to endure several life-threatening situations. For one thing, King Vegeta attempted to have Broly executed just because he felt he would have been a threat to the royal family due to his power level of 10,000. Shortly after that, as well as being tossed into a dump along with his father (who was also nearly executed because he attempted to stop Vegeta from executing his son), he also narrowly escaped with his dad from Planet Vegeta's destruction by Frieza, and was also implied to have spent most of his childhood constantly in hiding and also in constant pain and fear, and eventually started developing Ax Crazy tendencies. Later, his dad also forced him to wear a Hypno Trinket / Power Limiter due to fearing his power, and was later used to destroy the South Galaxy as part of a revenge scheme against Vegeta.
  • Oddly enough, though comparatively little happened to her in the story compared to other examples (at least physically anyway), Kotonoha Katsura from School Days seems to "snap" particularly hard. Then again, she was most likely unstable from the beginning...
    • "Comparatively little"!? She was raped by her boyfriend's best friend for goodness' sake!
      • Well... Yes. Comparatively little. Have you read these OTHER examples?
      • Don't forget she was bullied by Otome and her friends for at least several months just for being rich and pretty, and the bullying got much worse after she went out to Makoto. And then we have Setsuna treating her like shit so Makoto hooks up with Sekai. And people in Real Life have reacted worse for much lighter stuff.
  • Last Exile: The character Dio. To clarify: his sister Delphine basically 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 it should be noted that 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. Hard to imagine anything more heart-breaking.
  • Despite his age, Vash from Trigun has a childlike view of humanity and pretty much breaks every time he sees anyone, innocent or not, killed by another person. He truly does break when he's forced to shoot Legato in the head to save Meryl and Millie, at least for a little while.
    • His past was like this, too. He is a Broken Hero, after all.
    • Knives had this happen to him too (moreso in the manga). In fact, when they were young, Knives had been more sensitive than Vash. Which also explains why he took the discovery of the experiments on other plants so much worse than Vash.
  • 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.
      • Even more, in the movie continuity... Precia was the broken cutie. And it wasn't pretty, either.
    • In the second season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, after Hayate was given a surprise party by Suzuka, Alisa, Nanoha, and Fate, two mages disguised as the main leads brought Hayate to the roof of the hospital and told her that her disease was incurable and fatal. Then they showed her the remains of Signum and Shamal, two of the knights she had adopted as her family. Then they executed Vita, the knight she was closest to, right in front of her eyes. Oh, and all of this was done during Christmas Eve. Snap.
    • One could argue that this trope was both played straight and inverted when it comes to Hayate. She does get better, most of her loved ones are saved eventually and she ultimately grows into a successful levelheaded woman.
    • Hayate is a pretty poor example. Despite going through that wringer, her "breakdown" consisted of screaming for a moment and then having her body involuntarily taken. She wakes up in something like an hour and tells her body-hijacking servant that the whole "kill the world" thing it thought she wanted was a load of grade-A bullcrap, and helps the heroines take down the berserk system.
  • 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.
  • The Berserk storyline specializes in taking sympathetic characters and putting them through horrible shit.
    • When we first meet Casca, she's an intelligent and capable Action Girl who at one point leads the Band of the Hawks to rescue Griffith from his horrific year-long torture ordered by the King for having sex with his daughter. But when Griffith later does his infamous Face Heel Turn, she loses everyone in the Hawks to a whole mess of demons summoned by the evil Godhand, and then gets stripped naked by demons who have naughty tentacles in mind for her before being raped by the newly-transformed Griffith, who has joined the Godhand as their fifth member Femto, right in front of Guts, the man she loves, who is Forced to Watch. The horror of the experience completely shatters poor Casca's mind and leaves her unable to speak. Needless to say, Guts is madder than hell at Griffith both for this and the betrayal that led up to it.
    • The universe hasn't been kind to Guts either. A poor innocent baby who is rescued from under the tree where his mother was hanged while she was pregnant, Guts is a pretty nice kid early on his life. He willingly serves the mercenary group that raises him, and even gives all of the money he earns to his surrogate father, Gambino, and devotes his life to trying to please him. After Gambino sells him to a mercenary named Donovan for three silver coins, who proceeds to rape him despite Guts's best efforts to fight him off, he starts to lose his innocence (as if living day to day by killing people wasn't enough of a stressor), this loss of innocence finally solidifies when Gambino, having lost his leg in battle and no longer able to fight or lead his men on the battlefield, gets massively drunk and attempts to murder him because he believes that Guts is cursed and blames him for the death of his lover Shisu, Guts's surrogate mother, from the plague, and Guts is forced to kill him out of self-defense. Guts still has nightmares about the experiences as an adult, even before the Eclipse goes down.
    • Many Apostles have had their lives go completely to shit as part of the process of causality leading them to their Despair Event Horizon, their sacrifice and their transformation, but none more tragically than Rosine. An imaginative and clever little girl from an abusive household, strongly hinted to have been a Child by Rape (her mom was raped during the war and her dad abuses both mom and kid due to this), all she wanted was to find the elves that she always believed in and get away from her horrible home situation. When she runs off looking for the elves, she doesn't find them, but her parents find her. Her mom is just glad that she's okay and alive, but her abusive father is furious, and starts viciously beating on her. The blood from the beating and her despair activates the Behelit, which leads to the poor frightened little girl who just wanted elves to be real finding out that she could have been one herself and not just some filthy cruel human, and proceeds to sacrifice both her parents in order to become what she thinks is an elf.
    • Theresia, a twelve-year-old girl and the daughter of The Count, one of the early Apostles that Guts kills in the series, is a classic case of an innocent daughter sheltered from the world and wanting more than anything to be free of her "cage," as she explains to Puck, who the Count has captured and brought to her as a "pet." She tells Puck that her mother was killed by pagans, and her father became different ever since, almost like he wasn't even human anymore. When Guts's battle with the Count makes a wreck of the castle, the door to Theresia's room becomes undone, and Theresia can finally escape. But when she arrives at her father's chamber, she is horrified upon seeing the monstrous Apostle form of her father, is taken hostage by Guts in a What the Hell, Hero? moment, and then is forced to watch as Guts puts him through the same torture that he puts other Apostles through. And then the Count's Behelit activates and the Godhand arrive. After a brief battle with Guts, Femto, the newest member of the Godhand, establishes his Complete Monster credentials in a big way by demanding that Theresia be sacrificed so that the Count can continue to live. And then, as Theresia watches in terror and horror, the other Godhands reveal to her the truth about her mother's fate -- that she had joined the pagans and was conducting an orgy in the Count's own castle when he arrived, that he found himself unable to kill her despite her utter betrayal, which drove him over the Despair Event Horizon and allowed the Godhand to show up, and that the Count himself sacrificed her in order to become a demon. This ordeal, along with having to watch her father get Dragged Off to Hell after refusing to sacrifice her, is enough to drive Theresia to attempt suicide, but she finds the will to live again when the ground below her gives way and she grabs Guts's outstretched Dragon Slayer. Poor little Theresia is left with an utter hatred for Guts, manifested in one of the scariest Death Glares ever as she vows to kill him one day.
  • Louise Halevy from Gundam 00 falls into this trope after Nena Trinity obliterates her family at a wedding, leaving the girl without her left hand and completely distraught. Starting with the second season, she joins the A-Laws, the secret police of the Federation, as she tries to get revenge on Celestial Being for the murders of her family. She finally finds the said murderer and gets her revenge, but it only serves to BREAK her further (here at 20:27). She didn't find any satisfaction, she didn't find any praises from her dead parents from avenging them, and she has become a murderer, just like the murdered. She got better, eventually.
  • And don't forget that the other Gundam pilots also get quite broken. Examples?
      • Gundam Wing: Quatre. Although, his is an odd example, since it's the system he was hooked into to that psychically broke him. And then he bounced back.
      • Before piloting Wing Zero, Quatre was already distraught over his colony's betrayal, his father's death and one of his sisters being critically injured during the attack. The manga says she died, but in the anime she just vanishes - and later, the light novel says she lived on.. The system was merely a catalyst: he would've have been broken anyway without the Zero system, which sped up the breaking process.
      • Setsuna F Seiei murders his family as part of a requirement to fight for God. Too bad the person who told him to do it really wasn't a messenger from God, and just got his kicks from killing people, something Setsuna finds out quite crapily when he finds this same person serving as a commander in a totally unrelated PMC.
      • Lockon Stratos (The first one) starts out as a cute kid who's life is torn apart when his family is killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by someone who turns out to be one of one of Setsuna's True Companions. And then he dies, left as a wreck of a man who gave hope and help to others, but was himself consumed by his desire for revenge, and not to mention he actively refused to meet the only relative he had left: his twin younger brother.
        • The second Lockon (and said twin brother) didn't have it much better. He tried to get over his own revenge desire, but had to deal with his teammates distrusting him at first and comparing him to the first one for a while. And then his girlfriend turned out to be a Manchurian Agent, and when he was THIS close to subvert her brainwashing... she got brainwashed AGAIN, and Setsuna has to Shoot the Dog. He almost breaks.
      • As long as we're talking Gundam pilots, most of the non-Char non-Bright cast in Zeta Gundam. Four comes prebroken, but Rosamia, who seems like a Cloudcuckoolander (if perhaps mildly mentally challenged) completely breaks during the series. And, of course, Kamille himself in the finale. Of course, what can you expect from a series with a mobile suit named the Psycho Gundam?
    • While not the main Gundam pilot, After War Gundam X has a picture of a young, happy Jamil Neate prior to his stint as the GX's original pilot. Fifteen years later, he is much more subdued, has a huge scar across his face, (the girl who's with him in the picture has been turned into a Girl in a Box and disappeared), he is put into extreme pain when he uses his Newtype powers, and has a major "cockpit phobia" that prevents him from operating a mobile suit. (Not that any of these factors make him less of a total Badass.) Not to mention the whole blaming himself for the apocalypse thing.
      • And while not shown openly, his adoptive daughter and fellow Newtype Tiffa Addil is strongly implied to have been treated as a little more than a lab rat for most of her 15 years of life, which left her with a strong phobia of people aside of Jamil and the Freeden crew. A good part of her Character Development consists on this particular broken cutie managing to put her own pieces together and remaining quiet, yet not as fearful as she used to be.
    • Flit Asuno in Gundam AGE, when Yurin dies. From then on, he goes the Dark Messiah route.
    • As of the third generation, his grandson Kio Asuno is starting to get quite broken as well. In episode 32, i.e., the death of his Cool Big Sis figure Shanalua hurt.
  • In Deadman Wonderland, 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 takes Genkaku with him. 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.
  • In Monster, Johan is -- as noted—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, basically 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 even 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. Mind you, this boy is perhaps 7 or 8.
    • And Anna! Poor, poor Anna... Johan crushes her so many times in so many ways that she comes this close to suicide.
  • Momo Hinamori from Bleach. She's pretty much manipulated for decades by someone she dearly loved, who knew all of her strengths and weaknesses and played them frighteningly well to get his plans done. And when it's all said and done, he almost kills the already messed-up girl, leaving her deeply traumatized, brokenhearted and in denial too. And people think she's stupid and has no chance for recovery after that.
    • She partially gets over it and joins her colleagues in fighting her betraying captain. However, her friend Matsumoto still seems to be worried about her state of mind. These worries likely escalated, since Aizen's last ploy made Histugaya stab the poor girl through her vitals. Now she's got betrayal from Aizen and her little brother figure. *** She lived through that, however. Kubo also mentions in some notes that, now that Shinji Hirako has become her new Captain, he's helping her to put herself back on her feet. There's a whole last arc left, though -- who knows what will happen to her AND others from now on.
    • Hinamori's best friend Hitsugaya has had it hard as well, even if not in her level. As a child, people used to fear him because of his powers, with Hinamori and his grandma as the only ones who didn't run from him. Later he decides to become a shinigami to protect Hinamori, but couldn't save her from herself and Aizen, getting to witness Hinamori's breaking and then being stabbed to near death for confronting Aizen about it. And then there's the certain incident described above, which finishes with poor Hitsugaya screaming in horror at what he was made to do and completely breaking down in grief and fury. And when when he and Hinamori get sorta better from that, he still feels guilty and worthless about it for a long time.
    • And then there's Momo's close friend and Hitsugaya's Number Two, Rangiku Matsumoto. We know her as a slightly inebriated (when off-work) buxom babe who flirts with everyone and is a Cool Big Sis to Hinamori and Orihime and even to her own captain. The only real hints of a darker past is her relationship with Gin Ichimaru, who saved her from starving to death when they were children and to whom she's the Morality Pet (of sorts). And MUCH later, we see that not only she and Gin were street urchins, but that she was beaten up by a bunch of thugs. Gin rescued her, and since then he became obsessed with both protecting her and getting revenge on the boss of those thugs, Aizen, for what was done to her without her consent and knowledge. This put a huge damper in their friendship and lots of pressure on Matsumoto, who would've likely been much happier if Gin just stayed by her side in Soul Society. And she only learned about Gin's real thoughts when he, having failed to kill Aizen, was about to die.
    • Rukia Kuchiki seems to have stretched her breaking out over several decades, after her childhood as a Street Urchin and having to kill her Big Brother Mentor and first love. She largely managed to hold herself together, right up until the aforementioned Gin managed to shatter her composure prior to her execution with just a few words, leaving her a screaming wreck. Thankfully, she manages to slowly put herself back together with the help of Ichigo and her other friends.
    • The Hueco Mundo and Arrancar arcs are pretty much designed to break a certain Orihime Inoue. Repeatedly.
      • Orihime sorta came pre-broken, though. Her parents were abusive drunkards, so her older brother Sora ran away with a toddler Orihime when he turned 18 and then went the Promotion to Parent way. He then was seriosuly injured right after their first and only fight, and Orihime took him to the Kurosaki clinic but Isshin couldn't do anything to save him—and that is when she met Ichigo. Later she was had her hair forcibly cut by other girls, and Tatsuki stepped to help her. And after being more or less stable but still questioning her own worth and her growing feelings for Ichigo through the first arcs... well, the Hueco Mundo and Arrancar arcs came. She's more or less getting better, if the X-Cution arc is a lead.
        • Shall we elaborate on the Hueco Mundo arc? She's emotionally blackmailed into going to Aizen's palace, psychologically tortured by Ulquiorra, physically tortured by Aizen's two jealous aides/fangirls, Forced to Watch Ichigo get the crap kicked out of him no less by four times and come back as a monster after the last one, and with the exception of her kidnapping, all of this happens on the same day.
    • And later? ICHIGO is the cutie being actively broken. He did get a huge taste of it when his beloved mother Masaki died to save him when he was only nine years old, and he spent years blaming himself for it. Then the Soul Society and Arrancar/Hueco Mundo/Fake Karakura/Deicide arcs came (not to mention the fillers), and while he was broken more than once he always bounced back somehow. And then, in the X-Cution arc, his beloved family and friends (including the aforementioned Orihime) are not only attacked, but brainwashed by current Big Bad Tsukishima, and the kid starts splintering. Badly. It takes a LOT for him to become more or less stable.
    • And in the
  • Everything that happens to Princess Oboro in Basilisk. Her 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.
  • Juri Katou of Digimon Tamers started out as a Genki Girl with a hand puppet to emphasize her childlike nature. She is the penultimate innocent of the cast, as well as the shy, sweet girl that main character Takato has a crush on. Then, once on the adventure, after a promising start as a potentially excellent Tamer, she loses her Digimon partner and gets kidnapped and possessed by the Big Bad. The Big Bad then proceeds to conjure up monsters based on her worst memories (revealing in the process that she was a Stepford Smiler all along, completely broken after her beloved mother dies of illness and her father tries to raise her alone but can't do a lot for her) in order to feed on her sadness. This is one instance of Mind Rape that would give even NGE a run for its money...
    • It's not quite the same as Jeri,but Keenan in Digimon Savers pretty much fits the bill. As a baby he falls into a gate to the Digiworld crying helplessly for hours. So he gets adopted by a Frigimon,that gets killed right in front of him via Kurata and he's only 5. So he comes to think Humans Are Bastards already. But even his own compatriots don't trust him and turn on him at proper excuse. Finally his father figure Merukimon also gets killed in front of him.
    • Seems tame in comparison to poor Juri but Ken Ichijoji also fits the bill, too. He goes from the Big Bad and Evil Genius in the first season of Digimon Adventure 02 to being The Woobie and The Atoner with a Dark and Troubled Past all in one go. He deals with everything from crushing guilt to being completely isolated from everyone, to his brother's death, to being infected with the Dark Spore, to kidnapping, to being occasionally dragged into a Lovecraftian-inspired other world... Somebody on the writing team really wanted to make sure this guy earned his redemption.
      • And then there's Takeru/TK in the original series... poor damn TK, it just wasn't fair. To elaborate, at age 8 he is dealing with his parents being divorced, his Aloof Older Brother being moody and unpleasant because of this, and then he witnesses his close friend and Digimon Patamon die right in front of him without the knowledge that he'd come back okay. He does manage to deal with this and becomes a level-headed Lancer in the second season... unless he encounters anyone making use of the Powers of Darkness.
        • Speaking of the original series, Tailmon/Gatomon may be a Badass, but that's partly because she went through this a long time ago. She was accidentally dropped in the forest as an egg when the Chosen Digimon were being transported to where they'd meet their partners, hatched and spent her entire early childhood isolated and lonely but still with a desire to be with her partner that she couldn't place, when she reached her Child/Rookie stage set off looking for her only to be captured by Vamdemon/Myotismon as a recruit for his army. She resisted for a while and ended up regularly beaten for it to the point that she gave in just to stay alive and eventually forgot the whole thing and got to be noted as one of his more valuable servants. When she does finally find Hikari and remember her past, nothing gets easier, seeing as she gets kidnapped and used to lure out her own partner and Wizarmon, her only real friend during her time under Vamdemon's service, is killed right in front of her(twice), and even after Vamdemon seems to be defeated, her experiences don't entirely leave her.
  • Blood Plus 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.
  • FLCL: The entire Beauty, Brains, and Brawn trio are broken little girls, but they all get better when they grow up.
  • Fushigi Yuugi revolves around this trope. Yui is raped basically 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.
  • Misuzu from AIR arguably qualifies, since a lot of time and effort is put into presenting her as a sweet, lovable, although somewhat peculiar girl—only to have her suffer enormous pain in the last few episodes and die in the arms of her adoptive mother, her aunt Haruko. Her final moments are still gruesomely beautiful, though.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion's plot tortures its already troubled protagonist Shinji to the point of snapping into a psychological breakdown for two whole episodes and/or destroying humanity. Not to mention doing something similar to almost every single other character. Let's just face it, at some point the writers sat down and said 'okay, we need to break every single character by the end of this series. Any ideas?' 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... really downhill...
    • Asuka Langlay Sohryu is a Jerkass Tsundere. Then we learn, in episode 22, that a full-blown Break the Cutie process made her the bitch we know: her 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 in the same day Asuka was chosen as the EVA 02 pilot. And the poor little girl was the one who found the body. And how do we find that out? When she's under a horrendous Mind Rape that forces her to relive those memories. OUCH!
      • At least we get the hints that Shinji and Asuka (and most EVA characters) are messed up right away. But poor Maya Ibuki is probably the only character that manages to remain cheerful and well adjusted throughout the series. Which all falls apart in End of Evangelion when all their hard work was seemingly for naught and the JSDF (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 literally moving right through her, and she watches her fellow staff melt into orange liquid all around her. She finally only clams down when Ritsuko appears, except it's just Lillith Rei messing with her head, who promptly melts her as well.
  • 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 Cloudcuckoolander, 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.
  • Baccano! does this to Czeslaw Meyer, a seemingly Adorably Precocious Child who ends up getting his limbs torn off, shot in the face, and having all sorts of other unpleasant things happen to him. Good thing he can heal... or not.
  • 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.
  • Cream gets one of these in Sonic X after the robot Emerl whom she rescued and made friends with goes crazy under the power of Green Rocks, tries to attack her mother and then beats the living heck out of Sonic, who got in the way while Cream was trying to reason with him and he went for her instead. A distraught Cream then has to destroy Emerl herself. Being who she is, however, she gets over it, to an extent.
    • Cosmo can be considered this as well, except that she was damn well broken to begin with, what with having her entire home and family destroyed right in front of her, crash landing on another planet being used as an unwitting spy by the enemy she was trying to fight against and ending up stuck in a situation which meant she either lost her sight and hearing or the bad guys kept watching... Not to mention the fact that the bad guys turned out to actually be her species with their leader quite possibly being her father, and having the worst case of survivor's guilt ever encountered in a series aimed at an under-teen demographic. And has to force her boyfriend to kill her, which counts as a double Break the Cutie between them.
  • Pretty much 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..
  • 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.
  • In Vampire Princess Miyu, not only Miyu is an already broken cutie who had her powers awaken when someone came to kill her and she had to bite him to survive, then saw her parents be captured and put in suspended animation when her mom tried to Screw Destiny and not have Miyu become the Shinma Guardian, but she actively seeks out pretty people who have been through extreme suffering and pain in their pasts, so she can offer them a blood contract: they give her their blood, she eases their pain through placing them in a dream-like trance. Unless they still have things to do and people are suffering because of them, like the third OAV shows.
  • Ken Hidaka from Weiss Kreuz. He starts out as a cheerful, optimistic, naive boy-next-door who, when he's not killing people, spends his spare time teaching small children how to play soccer. Then he kills his best friend, who was screwing him over and had tried to kill him twice, the first time by trying to have Ken burned alive; leaves his first girlfriend Yuriko to keep her safe; sees another childhood friend manipulated to suicide by a woman he saw as a surrogate mother, who he goes on to kill; watches a woman get stabbed protecting him and then bleed to death in his arms; discovers another friend he tries to protect shot to death so, after faking the murders of two of his teammates, shotguns the man who ordered it and enjoys it; then has to kill his second girlfriend when she turns out to be one of his targets as well. And those are just the events that effect him personally. It's also revealed along the way that his mother died when he was five then his father abandoned him, that he spent a period of time homeless, and he contemplated becoming a contract killer simply so he had an excuse to kill people. Unsurprisingly, by Weiss Kreuz Gluhen it's become obvious that Ken hasn't so much been broken as he's violently snapped. Cue the shot from the OVA where he's smiling psychotically as blood spray peppers his face.
    • Despite this, he gets better; breaking ties with Kritiker and using Omi's connections to have himself voluntarily incarcerated for a while restores him to something like his old self in time to follow Aya west and join Kryptonbrand in Side B.
    • Gluhen claims another one in short order. Sena Izumi, the idealistic, hotheaded, optimistic addition to Weiss is revealed to have found his sister's dead body, heard the gunshot that killed his father, and then while cowering in a closet had the gun turned on him by their murderer--his mother, who then goes missing. During the Koua mission, he proceeds to get broken even more by losing Nozomi, a friend he'd sworn to protect, to brainwashing-induced suicide--right in front of him, even; Kyou, another member of Weiss whom he had begun to think of as an older brother; be manipulated into killing his uncle; finally find his mother...and then is promptly shot in the chest by her. He dies in Aya's arms after apologizing for being unable to kill her first.
  • 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.
  • Yukiteru from Mirai Nikki 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 can kill Yukiteru to get money, kills Yukiteru's beloved mother, 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.
    • Whoa, Yukiteru's father was only told that he had to destroy his sons phone, how would he know that it would kill Yukiteru
      • True, but that still doesn't excuse the betrayal, especially after his father had built up his hopes that he and Yukiteru's mother would get back together. Then when he fails, he jumps out of a collapsing building by stealing his sons parachute leaving him to die.
    • 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.
  • Sailor Moon also tends to do this, sometimes slow, other times taking place in one episode, other times being a full-blown Mind Rape. An example would be episodes 45 and 46 of the first season, where the inner scouts 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.
    • Don't forget about Chibiusa in the Black Moon arc, or Hotaru, since she was born. No wonder these two are BFFs.
    • 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 - heck, Uranus and Neptune even managed to kill 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 scouts 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 scouts and Mamoru. After having the crap beaten out of her, she manages to get her strength back and kill the evil scouts, only for Galaxia to toss Mamoru off a cliff, 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 scouts 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/written out of existence in Usagi's arms. It takes Usagi all of her 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 kid 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 Seishi 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.
  • One Piece: Almost every time a Strawhat Pirate member has a flashback. The combination of Oda's skill at drawing cute kids and writing cruel back stories is just plain lethal.
    • While the Strawhats do tend to have traumatizing backstories, the only ones who have Break The Cutie moments are Nami, Robin, Zoro, Chopper and Franky. Luffy's trauma just makes him more obstinate than he was, Usopp's backstory has a Break the Cutie moment for his best friend/possible love intrest and not for him, Sanji's back story was more encouragement to his dream than trying to break him, and Brook is more of a The Pollyana than a Cutie.
    • Nami has the added bonus of being broken by Arlong again when all her effort to buy back her village is destroyed when the Marines confiscate all her collected money. Her obviously forced smile when she tries to tell the Kokoyashi villagers that she can just get more money just makes it all the more heartbreaking, especially so when she breaks down after they've resolved to take down Arlong, no matter what the end result.
    • And then there's Vivi, whose Broken Cutie status is built up throughout the whole Alabasta arc, and completely explodes during the climax of the civil war.
    • Second backstory for Luffy, and it fits right in. More like the entirety of the Impel Down and Marineford arcs in addition to the flashback serve as one huge moment of this.
    • From the (canonical) Monsters story in One Piece Wanted, Flare breaks down when Cyrano, the guy she viewed as her hero for years, was actually the one who destroyed her hometown and killed her father (And everyone else in the village, directly or not). What made it even worse is that Cyrano was laughing about the whole thing. She tried to hold her tears, but eventually broke down and cried. Really hard.
    • And a full-blown Break the Cutie process is what made Boa Hancock the huge bitch that we meet. More exactly, she and her sisters Sandersonia and Marigold start out as normal little girls in the Kuja Pirates, then are kidnapped by slave drivers and fall in the hands of the World Nobles. They branded them like cattle, force them to eat Devil Fruits for their own amusement, and torture them and many others nonstop four hellish years. When the Boa girls manage to escape thanks to a really badass fish man, the damage is already done, and Hancock has specially become a total bitch.
  • In Chirin no Suzu a lamb named Chirin starts out as cute, friendly, and happy go lucky until his mother is killed by a wolf, so he seeks revenge but realizes that he's too small and weak to do any damage so he convinces the wolf to become his apprentice and he goes through Training from Hell until he becomes a deformed ruthless killing machine.
  • 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.
  • As mentioned in passing above, Kimihiro Watanuki from xxxHolic starts the story as a cheerful guy prone to humorously spazzing out but very well-adjusted for someone whose parents died when he was a little kid and who sees and attracts monsters that try to eat him. This is mostly played for laughs in the beginning, but gets progressively more serious, until the traumatic revelations start to pile up and he ends up realizing he may not even be real. Apart from several near-death experiences one of them unconsciously self-induced, having an eye eaten by a monster and losing the mobility of one finger, and seeing his mentor and mother figure die before his eyes after his surrogate family of sorts disappears without a trace. CLAMP mass-produce woobies.
  • Ditto for Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. All 4 main characters have tragic angsty backstory.
  • This happens to main character Sara Werec of Soukou no Strain. In the first episode no less!
  • In Naruto, the death of Jiraiya, near-death of Hinata, destruction of Konoha, and having the truth of the ninja system quite brutally explained to him almost breaks Naruto. However, thanks to a few well-placed flashbacks, Jiraiya's book, and a pep talk from Iruka, Shikamaru and the Fourth Hokage Naruto recovers just in time.
      • Actually, if you think about everything that has happened in the series, Naruto kinda qualified as a 'break the cutie' from the outset. First, his father sealed a demon inside him as the nly way t save their village, his parents are dead, and he grows up ostracised by the entire village. Then, finally, when things start looking up, his best friend decides to turn on him, cue battling with the power inside him for control, his best friend tries to kill his love interest, tries to destroy his village, and everyone is trying to get him to kill said best friend. And his parents gave their lives to save him when he was a baby, and he was made to house the Kyuubi inside of him, the very same Kyuubi that his mother housed for a time, killed his parents, and tried to kill him. Really not fun.
    • The same can't be said for Sasuke though. Despite how he is now, in flashbacks he was shown to be a cute, naive kid. Until Itachi murdered their family... and then showed it to him... twice. The second time leading to his Face Heel Turn.
      • To be more specific, the first mind rape and the actual massacre occur when he's about seven, and the second time, aged twelve-thirteen, had him forced to watch everyone being slaughtered hundreds of times, over and over, leaving him in a coma that only Tsunade is able to bring him out of. No wonder he freaks out, and then he gets worse and worse.
    • Another possible candidate is Gaara (hear me out). He was initially a kind-hearted child who just wanted some friends. Then he killed the one person he cared for because they were trying to kill him (on Gaara's dad's orders, no less,) due to the beast within him was something the village would rather forget. we've seen how this turns out...
      • Possible? Gaara was six years old when he realized that no one loved him. His father hated him for his inability to control Shukaku, his uncle hated him because Gaara's mother, his sister, died in childbirth, everyone else hates him because he's a "monster" ... he himself tries to hurt himself (in the flashback, he's trying to stab himself, and is disappointed when it doesn't work; later, he cries after being called a freak). His uncle tries to murder him -- on his father's orders, which he actually questioned -- and Gaara kills him in self-defense. He is effectively abandoned by everyone who should have cared. And the result? Sociopath at six, after he realigns his life's philosophy to fit with what he's learned; and serial killer by twelve, after he puts that philosophy into effect. No wonder he latched on to the idea of Shukaku as a "Mother"—the demon was the only thing making any effort to protect him (and even it was only doing so out of self-interest). When you've been starved for love all your life, anything will do. Even after he reforms (which Naruto brings about by giving him a good heart-to-heart talk about caring for others) and builds a family with his brother and sister, he is still haunted by his past—listen to what he says to Lee after saving him from Kimimaro, or what he says to Matsuri in what was one of the few good scenes in that filler arc. Six years of solid hate and horror? I'd call that broken. Made all the more meaningful by him actually getting much better in the current arc. Specially now that he can call out his old man on all the shit he did to him, leading the Kazekage to aknowledge said shit and telling hi that Shukaku's sand was sorta directed by his mom's spirit.
    • One other example is Nagato/Pain. He was a cute kid that Jiraiya trained and was so cute that he cried when he had to kill someone to save his friend's life. Then we found out about his childhood. He watched his parents get killed because they were trying to protect him from ninjas from Konoha (though it was mainly a case of mistaken identity), bonds with a dog and makes friends. He subsequently loses the dog when an explosive kunai blows it up as collateral damage from Konoha ninjas fighting some guy. Years later he loses his best friend because a Konoha ninja Danzo set him up to die. Not surpisingly, Nagato isn't too fond of Konoha.
    • Sakura now fits this trope. It went like this:
      • Sasuke's defection, then Naruto failed to bring him back.
      • Then Naruto went 4 tails against Orochimaru and Kabuto makes her realize it's at least partially because she made him promise to get Sasuke back and he agreed that he would, and he's still trying to do that no matter what
      • They find Sasuke but he leaves with Orochimaru and Kabuto
      • Danzou gives permission to have Sasuke whacked
      • Sai (of all people) get her to realize Naruto's feelings for her, and everything Naruto is going through: the burden of expectations she and the village pile on Naruto, and especially the suffering he's going through because of both her and Sasuke. Then Naruto also calls her out in her "love confession"
      • And then, she tries to kill Sasuke herself and fails, since she just can't go and kill one of her dearest friends no matter how far gone he is.
      • And then Sasuke tries to kill her. If the girl doesn't end up as a Broken Bird, it'll be a miracle.
    • You also can't forget Haku. He watches his Mother get killed by his Father and then kills his Father. Now an orphan he's forced to live on the streets fighting off wild dogs for food. Ends his life as Zabuza's weapon.
  • 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.
  • Shokojo Sera, the Adaptation Expansion of A Little Princess, takes this trope from the original novel and multiplies it by a factor of 100.
  • One has to suspect that the writers of Vision of Escaflowne had some sort of "Torturing your main character, in body and soul" checklist, given the sheer amount of abuse Van goes through in the series. Kill off his family in his bactstory? Check. Have his country burned to the ground and force him to go on the run? Of course! Reveal to him that his brother is alive, but on the bad guy's side? Would never think of leaving it out. Synch him up with his mech just before the one battle where he totally trashes it, leaving him an oozing, bloody mess? Oh, most definitely. Having said older brother actually pull a Heel Face Turn and return to his side (which in turn reveals that he did it to ensure Van wouldn't have to be broken as he grew up), only for him to perish through Karmic Death right before the final battle? Check, Please!, Make the only means of saving him (repairing the Escaflowne) the most unimaginably painful method you can think of? Not actually on the list, but sure!... Really, the list goes on.
    • Don't even get us started on Hitomi, and for that matter, most of the whole damn cast.
  • Tomoya Okazaki from Clannad becomes The Woobie because of this. I mean, first his wife dies, then his daughter dies, and they were the only reasons he wanted to continue living. Then he dies alongside his own daughter. Of course, they all got better.
    • HELL EVERY NAMED PERSON.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Mikuru Asahina from the Haruhi Suzumiya series can be viewed as a work in progress for this trope. Haruhi has no hesitation in abusing her both consciously (like having another student grope her and photo it for blackmail) and unconsciously (like giving her eyebeam powers which requires Nagato to bite her in order to inject counter-nanobots). Arguably future Asahina seems well adjusted, but since Haruhi can alter the timestream that's not a guarantee. You have to worry for someone when they ask "will you still marry me, if I'm unable to" after a session with Haruhi.
    • Haruhi and Yuki gets the treatment too. Let's start with Yuki.
      • Yuki lives through over 15,000 (15,498 in the novels, 15,513 in the anime) repetitions of the same 2 weeks without aging, remembering everything to do with it. And she can't do a single thing because her job is to observe. By the end of it, Kyon notices that The Stoic, turned Up to Eleven is now openly showing her sadness. No wonder. She lived for nearly 600 years without aging a single bit.
      • Haruhi is closer to a Broken Bird than a Broken Cutie. She learns, rather painfully, that she isn't all that special, and in her quest to make her life special, goes on the hunt for aliens, time travellers and ESPers after some inspiration from Kyon. This leads to her general sociopathy, and her obsession with cosplaying Mikuru. A good part of the plot is her learning how to be a good person again, as noted by Kyon.
  • Negi of Mahou Sensei Negima: his 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.
    • Also Ako. She 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 not even really exist.
    • And Asuna as well who gets so broken, her memory is wiped so she can have a chance at a normal life.
    • And Evangeline, who was turned into a vampire and unwittingly killed her vampire 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • For a Hentai series, Bondage Fairies can sure put its two main characters through the wringer. The original manga sees Pfil being physically and psychologically tortured by the sisters Oliga and Marcia (Ilina sat it out since she kinda liked Pfil), briefly becoming convinced that she's a helpless failure. She overcomes it. The fourth manga, Extreme, sees normally-unflappable Pamila get it even worse. Seeing the strength of the brainwashing Urushira has over Pfil, while being assaulted and used as a "toy" by Urushira, and experiencing flashbacks (for us to see) to her own traumatic past, means that she ends up quite broken. When Pfil finally breaks free of the brain-washing, she helps Pamila un-break.
  • Moonlight Lady, an ero-OVA series, demonstrates this trope with the character Sayaka Kurihara. Originally a shy actress by the name of Ruri Yamato, she was preparing for a movie when she wandered into the Kuraki estate, and was summarily kidnapped and raped. The strain was so much that she hid herself within her own mind and allowed a second personality take over: that of her upcoming character, the bubbly and vivacious "Sayaka Kurihara".
  • D.Gray-man 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.
    • Which is just the worst example of them. It seems you have to be really fucked up so Innocence accepts you. And if you aren't - you'll be. Examples?
      • 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 one hell of an Action Girl. Then again this habit, altogether with her True Companions thing leads her to be pretty much of a Stepford Smiler who has to admit how broken she is to become a better person. Not to mention 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. (think of it. Parents abandoned him. Lived as an orphan til someone adopted him. That man got killed. Resurrection (triggered by a fat guy with silly top hat) utterly failed. 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... 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 he's obsessed with one of those Big Bad guys, 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 this will he'll efinitely fall into the trope.
  • Chapter's 304 and 305 in Hunter X Hunter. Poor, poor, Gon.
  • 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. 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.
      • Of course, neither had it as bad as Alucard himself… with his captivity and rape as a child. Quite honestly, he was a goddamn saint for Christendom throughout his entire life and 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 literally everything that ever meant anything to him and left to see as the enemies of his faith are left to ravage his beloved homeland. And today, readers would bet every single one of you, reading this article, has only known Vlad III of Wallachia as Dracula. A monster. Humans Are the Real Monsters.
  • The entire Texhnolyze anime seems to be designed to do just this to main character Ichise up until he dies in the last episode.
  • Edmond and Albert in Gankutsuou. Big time.
  • 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.
    • And later? Said daughter, the main character Nadja, also 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 White Prince. 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.
  • 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.
        • Otonashi has a bit of one when Angel at the near the end of the series, her desire to thank him for the gift of his heart during her life (which was the only thing keeping her there) fulfilled.
  • Kaze to Ki no Uta: Gilbert (although he was already pretty broken to begin with). Serge too, but to a lesser extent, but Serge tends to be more resilient.
  • 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). Not to mention that he was taken in by a Depraved Homosexual old man from off the streets when he was alone and starving and subsequently raped.
  • Count Cain: Jizabel's backstory.
  • Black Butler's 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.
    • There's a few other characters too, such as Freckles/Doll from the circus arc.
    • Elizabeth in chapter 57.
  • Court Intrigue, a Sailor Moon RPG set in the 30th Century, has a race of aliens called the Argenians who have their planet destroyed. Among the survivors are 8-year-old Mirek and 9-year-old Keiki. The former becomes a mute and latter starts to act out because the events are so upsetting.
    • Oh yes, did I mention that Neo Queen Serenity, King Endymion, Sailor Venus, Sailor Mars, and Artemis all get killed and they don't get better? You can imagine what this does to (Chibi) Usagi and Diana.
  • 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 literally 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 pretty much an unstable mess of self-hatred by the time the dolls came into his life that Nori needs to look after him.
  • Crona of Soul Eater has his/her past shown when his/her mother Medusa tortured Crona by placing him/her into a dark room and constantly getting beat on by an evil monster living in his/her body. Eventually, Crona went completely insane and began easily killing things, eventually years down the line begins viciously taking out members of the main cast with sadistic ease and violent moves, justifying her/himself with "but she (Medusa) said it was okay". Shortly after being defeated however, Death allows Crona to join the DWMA and Maka becomes his/her best friend. From that point on, Crona becomes more of a woobie and plays for comedic laughs at Crona's immense emo-ness and the fact that he/she's always hiding behind Maka like a frightened 4 year old.
    • The anime has Crona ending up somewhat less broken by the end, following a confrontation with Medusa. Alas, in the manga it gets worse, with Medusa's More Than Mind Control wiping out all the good Maka and co attempted.
  • 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. Of course. 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.
  • 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 it gets worse. By the end of the movie she's deranged, a murderer (depending on your interpretation), and suffering from severe identity crisis.
  • Masomi Kida from Durarara!! goes through hell and back through the third arc of the series. Seemingly happy and go lucky, he was broken before the series started. Let's start that he had uncaring parents (or at least hinted), so he started a gang known as Yellow Scarves because of his insecurities of wanting to be someone in life Then his life went to hell when he met both his girlfriend Saki Mikajima and the informant Izaya Orihara. While he got to know them both, fights were breaking out more with the rival gang Blue Squares. It got to the point where Masomi needed to ask Izaya for help in order to defeat the rival gang. And then hell strikes and Saki is kidnapped by their leader and have her legs broken. The person that he started to trust ends up not responding to the phone calls and in a panic, Masomi tries to save Saki...only to freeze up. While Saki is saved by Kadota and his gang after they quit Blue Squares, Izaya then accuses Masomi for letting Saki get hurt. He then tells him that he'll have to live with the guilt forever. Cue the series starts and he invites his friend Mikado over to Ikebukuro so he could save him but by the time that his other friend Anri is injured by the Slashers who is hinted to be part of the Dollars, he's forced to rejoin his gang and then is thrown back into the hell by relying on Izaya again and having him reveal that the leader of Dollars is his best friend and then later getting bitchslapped by Anri after he accuses her of "sucking up" to Mikado. What finally sends him over the edge is Jerkass Horoda telling him he's out of the group because he was hiding information from them about Dollars and declared that they would kill his best friend. Finally, he tries to kill Horoda to make up for what happened to Saki but almost dies in the process. Luckily, Mikado and Anri appear to save his ass. By the end of the anime series, he seems recovered... but in recent novel chapters, he's going back to hell after finding out that Mikado is going through the same thing but is taking it a different way. This kid needs a hug and therapy.
    • What no mention of Anri? The fact that she was abused by her own father, and seeing her own mother Sayaka kill him and committing suicide at the same time using Saika, resulting in her without a heart and being Saika's new owner, must've been hard for her. It's hard not to feel sympathy for her.
    • Mikado as well. He starts off as this adorably idealistic boy, just moved to a new city, all excited about making new friends and watching the growth of his ideal group, the Dollars. But then his best friend leaves, the girl he likes might be a psycho but they don't talk about it, and the Dollars starts filling up with low-level gangsters who just use the name. Not to mention the fact that he's manipulated and used by Izaya and Aoba, to the point that his dark side pops up and he stabs his kouhai with a pen.
      • However, this might be a subversion as Aoba points out that Mikado had this dark personality from the very beginning and if that's the case, his whole idealistic nature might as well be a facade for hiding the darkness in his heart. Though in a sense, it could potentially be worse: how broken you have to be to do that, huh?
  • Blue from Pokémon Special just barely averts this, which is a refreshing change, given that she has every right to wangst. Being kidnapped by a frickin' giant flaming bird at the age of five will do things to you. She managed to stay reasonably upbeat as she spent a lot of time carefully planning to take down the Big Bad responsible for all her misery. (Admittedly, there are a few cracks now and then, especially when confronted with the crippling fear of birds that he had instilled in her.) After spending most of her time getting over everything (doing so in almost complete solitude), she finally found her parents and headed off for a joyous reunion... only for them to vanish right before her eyes. Ouch. Angst Coma was immediate, though she did wake up quickly enough to keep fighting.
    • 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.
  • 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.
  • Kohaku from Inuyasha. His 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.
  • 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 his Love Interest Aoi shows up, and the process of reconstruction begins. As for the breaking part, we see through flashbacks that he was basically 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.
  • 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.
  • Lucy and Erza's pasts in Fairy Tail.
    • Ur, despite being older than most exmaples.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The entire universe seems to have it in for the titular character. And Sayaka. And Kyouko. And pretty much any magical girl, really.
  • Kodomo no Jikan gives us two examples before the series even starts: Rin and Reiji. Reiji was broken first by his abusive, drunken father and indifferent mother, then was repaired a bit by his relationship with Rin's mother (his cousin), but then she died from lung cancer. That, combined with his actions, broke Rin herself.
  • Reika Kitami, the main villain of the Bible Black series experiences this in the Prequel. When she first arrives in high school, she's a sweet, Wide-Eyed Idealist who bonds with a puppy, who wouldn't hurt a fly unless pushed, and is absolutely pure sexually and mentally. Unfortunately, these make her the prime target of the Rose Cross Coven (a cabal of 7 high school girls who practice black magic to make money and to hurt people they don't like). She also angers Kozono Nami, the school's resident Rich Bitch, Alpha Bitch, and Psycho Lesbian by refusing her advances. The result? First, the puppy she bonded with is used as a sacrifice, than she gets raped by a bunch of thugs (loosing her virginity in the most horrible way possible short of being tentacle raped), then she gets knocked out and wakes up on a human sacrifice alter in the school basement. While all this is going on, she's not only physically and emotionally traumatized, terrified and likely in shock, but doesn't even have any idea what the hell is going on. After getting stabbed... repeatedly... with a very large sword, she witnesses the rest of the cult members getting massacred by Nami after the ritual fails (since Kitami was no longer a virgin). After summoning the last of her strength to kill Nami she collapses mortally wounded. At this point, the Devil offers her a contract to save her life. At this point, Kitami is simply so terrified and in agony/shock that she accepts it without question. The very final scene in the prequal shows Kitami walking into the sunrise with a vacant grin, on a residential street... naked... and covered in blood.
    • And if that wasn't bad enough, the process is repeated on Imari in the original series. Imari starts out exactly as Reika did. Cute, sweet, innocent high school girl, with an apparently reciprocated crush on the primary male protagonist, Minase. As soon as Minase finds the Black Bible used by the original Rose Cross Coven, it all just goes badly for Imari. It begins with her walking in on Minase having sex with another female student (after he invited her to come over and cook diner for him in the first place), she gets kidnapped by the new coven (Now taken over by Reika) thanks to Minase (who has become the 2nd under Reika after his own magical mind break), is drugged and subsequently forcibly sodomized by a magically controlled but fully aware/struggling Minase. Then gang sodomized by numerous other anonymous men AND the demonically "gifted" Reika, then has her actual virginity taken by Reika as part of the ritual attempted with her in the prequel. By the end of the series, Imari is pretty much gone with Reika having taken over her body completely. Don't think it gets more broken than that.
  • In Axis Powers Hetalia. 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.
  • No. 6: Sion in the Correctional facility during episode 10.
  • Nanako from Oniisama e.... Mariko, Rei, and Nanako's classmate Junko, too, although Mariko and Rei were already broken to begin with.
  • The whole world of Mawaru 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.
  • Practically the whole cast of Fruits Basket. Let's see...
    • Tohru, whose father died when she was three and whose mother died when she was sixteen. Not to mention her whole family hates her except for her grandfather.
    • Kyo, who's rejected by everyone for being the cat of the zodiac.
    • Yuki, who was psychologically abused by Akito (in addition to everybody else).
    • 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 when she was six 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 Complete Monster 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.

The list goes on...

  • 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 basically made up the whole "Almighty Dolly" thing as an experiment. More troubling, the formerly shy and even kind boy is beginning to show signs of becoming like his original.
  • THE iDOLM@STER - Haruka
  • The entire main cast of Cyborg 009, to one or another degree... those poor souls.
    • And not only the main cast is broken. Cases in point: Cynthia Finder, Cyborg 0012, Cyborg 0013, Lina and Phil from the Psychic Assassins, and specially the Pu'Awak sisters
  • Takaya "D-Boy" Aiba from Tekkaman Blade, if you pay an attention to his Flashbacks, you will wonder how much the universe has tortured such a cheerful child into such a Jerk with a Heart of Gold. Heck it is implied that D-Boy is a really Nice Guy before the plot starts, which is to say really surprising(the D stands for DANGEROUS)
    • Also, his sister Miyuki. So broken that she ends up dead.
    • And rather surprisingly, some alternate materials show that Shinya Aiba aka Tekkaman Evil was this in the past.
  • Happens to Youji in Loveless 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. Pretty much everyone in Loveless was either already broken, gets broken during the series, or will eventually; it is a Crapsack World afterall.
  • Chirin from Chirin no Suzu is a spunky young lamb for the first few minutes of the film. He eventually loses his happy-go-lucky spirit after his mother is killed by a wolf, and goes on a revenge quest.
  • Episode 9 of Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? is this for Eucliwood Hellscythe when her previous zombie servant returns and outright gives her a Hannibal Lecture 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.
  • Mii from Popotan is as cheerful and innocent (generally speaking) as most children, with no other goal in life than to make as many friends as possible. The problem is that she, like the rest of her household, is a time traveller who can't control when to leave a specific time period, a process that has taken a heavy toll on her older sister Mai. When the girls are presented with the option to leave their adventure and by extention their family, Mai does this before long. Mii finds her farewell letter, making her decisively less cheery than usual and eventually causing her to leave as well. Mai and Ai could count as well as of episodes 9 and 11, where Mai is told that her best friend died waiting for her to return and Ai is left to live alone without her sisters respectively, although none of them are as much of a "Cutie" as their younger sister.
  • Happens to Tsuna of Katekyo Hitman Reborn every arc. Usually as a result of trusting people too easily.
  • Please don't be a female lead in a Mayu Shinjo manga. And specially, don't name yourself Kurumi Akino or Aine Yukimura. Because you'll end up horribly broken not just by your boyfriend's rivals/enemies/scorned women, but by your own boyfriend.
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