< Break the Cutie

Break the Cutie/Literature

  • David Wingrove's Chung Kuo has Sweet Flute, a young and innocent prostitute at a high-end brothel, who is sold as a concubine before she has time to toughen up. It does not go well for her, especially not after she has a child.
  • Fantine from Les Misérables. (Cosette, not so much, since her story is the inverse of this trope).
  • Fitz Chivalry from Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies.
  • Poor, poor Ji-Li Jiang from Red Scarf Girl! Let's see, she starts out as a happy twelve year old who is among the top of her class. Then, the Chinese Cultural Revolution happens and it all goes downhill, really fast. The fact that this is a memoir doesn't help.
  • Lucien from Lost Illusions.
  • Happens to an entire race of beings in "Dragonlance". Given that the race in question has been through a lot, this should really communicate the impact of the event.
  • Candide absolutely crushes everyone, especially it's protagonist. Voltaire really didn't like the idea of the best of all possible worlds...
  • In War and Peace, Anatole Kuragin does this to Natasha Rostov by seducing her into abandoning her marriage with Prince Andrei and running away with him. People manage to foil Anatole's plan, but she's never the same afterwards.
  • Kingdom Rattus' Tranah. Joins her brother's quest on a lark, and sees everyone she knows and loves either die or turn out to have been lying to her her whole life. It gets so bad for her that at the end, she swears that, given the opportunity, she would betray her own family.
  • Both of the Stark daughters, Arya and Sansa, from A Song of Ice and Fire. Arya lives on the run as a Street Urchin, sees her father, mother and older brother die without being able to do anything to stop such deaths, progressively falls into insanity and is taken in by a murderous cult; Sansa is abused by almost every person she trusts, witnesses several horrific machinations and has to put on a bitch facade to survive.
    • Sansa much more so than Arya, since Arya was always rather more sensible and fiery. Sansa starts out sweet, frivolous, and naive, convinced that life is like a song: true knights, elegant princesses, chivalrous princes, all the fairytale rot. Then the breaking begins, kicked off by watching the guy she was all starry-eyed over murder her father right in front of her, and by the end of the second book, all such illusions have been crushed. By book four, she's almost as cynical as the Manipulative Bastard that's training her.
    • The aforementioned Manipulative Bastard, Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish, mentioned as having been adorably mischievous as a child, went through a similar process to Sansa, leading to his Start of Darkness.
    • What, no mention of their brother Bran? He got tossed out a window and broke his spine! And that was just the first book...
    • Also present with Daenerys's storyline. To start off, her brother Viserys is the only close surviving relative, and they were both kicked out of the only home she ever truly knew about. Her brother is horribly abusive, both mentally and physically, seeing her only as a pawn for power and marries her off to a scary barbarian warlord at the age of 13. Although they do both eventually fall in love, nearly everything goes horribly wrong. Her brother is eventually killed, her husband nearly dies of an infected wound and becomes comatose after using blood magic to heal him, and she smothers him out of mercy. Her unborn son Rhaego dies as a result of said blood magic and she is betrayed by nearly everyone she comes across. The end of the first book shows that she's clearly not someone to fuck with anymore as she burns alive the witch that killed her son and made her husband a Soulless Shell and she hatches the only three dragons in the world.
    • These books are pretty much 'break everyone', Arya and Sansa just happen to be the only available cuties.
    • In the fifth book, Sansa's friend Jeyne Poole, who is perhaps even more idealistic than Sansa, is married off to the Bastard of Bolton. Rape only begins to describe what follows.
  • Mercy Thompson of the eponymous series. She's cheerful and helpful, but in Iron Kissed she got physically and mentally raped. She breaks, and while beating her rapist's head in with a blunt object helped, her slow recovery is the plot of the fourth book and she's still not one hundred percent by the end.
  • Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien even wrote a letter explaining that Frodo failed and can't be called a hero, that he was doomed to fail from the start ("he could not even throw the ring into his own fireplace!") and that his failure was in wanting to be called a hero, since nobody could have willingly destroyed the ring without divine intervention, and that the only thing that saved Frodo from A Fate Worse Than Death was his kindness to Gollum. The film version takes pains to emphasize Frodo's cuteness and Woobie-ness, but eventually turns Gollum into a pantomime villain in the third act, which sort of undermines the original point... but Frodo ends up a broken shell of himself anyhow.
  • The entire premise of Orson Scott Card's novel Ender's Game. The Battle School teachers have a conversation early on, saying that although Ender is a peaceful child, he becomes extremely aggressive when up against his enemies. Since it is his aggression that they need, they decide that they will keep him constantly surrounded by enemies, until he will be forced to become the ruthless military mind that they need - basically invoking Beware the Nice Ones.
  • In the fourth Fingerprints book, Badass Tomboy Yana tells a very sad story about how when she wanted to be a ballerina as a kid, but her abusive father crushed her dream. Her backstory only gets sadder when more details are revealed in later books, and is a Freudian Excuse for her villainous Disproportionate Retribution.
  • Water Lily of Wild Cards undergoes this in volume five, after Ti Malice turns her into a junkie for his "kiss" -- direct stimulation of the brain's pleasure centres.
  • The Mord-Sith from The Sword of Truth are a perfect example of this. The gentlest and kindest little girls of D'Hara are "broken" with three levels. The first level is to be tortured to the point of absolute obedience. The second level is to watch her teacher torture her mother to death. The third level is for her to torture her father to death. Talk about breaking to the extreme.
  • Heathcliff spends a lot of the second half of Wuthering Heights doing this to... well, almost everyone. Starting with Hareton, although this is partly also due to Hareton's father's descent into alcoholism (also encouraged by Heathcliff). Then when he discovers that Isabella fancies him, he takes advantage of the fact, mentally and physically abusing her to see how far he can push her -- immediately before they elope together, he makes her watch whilst he hangs her pet dog. He then goes onto manipulate his and Isabella's son Linton into seducing the younger Cathy and luring her into Wuthering Heights so that he can have them forcibly married. By the end, Linton is so terrified he's constantly hallucinating Heathcliff's presence. And then he keeps Cathy a virtual prisoner and slave, psychologically and physically tormenting her too. He really isn't a very nice man.
  • The Marquis de Sade loved this, unsurprisingly. Justine is an entire novel devoted to this, and without even a hint of sympathy for the character. Squick!
  • Darren Shan from The Saga of Darren Shan goes from being unwilling to even drink blood to very nearly killing Darius, only stopping when he discovers he's his nephew.
  • Thomas of The Dresden Files. If you thought the mess with Justine was bad wait until you find out what the skinwalker did...
    • What about what the Denarians did to Ivy/The Archive on the island to try and break her. Granted, it wasn't to the scope of the above, but Harry said something along the lines of it being petty, cruel and to a kid, the very picture of horror.
    • Don't forget Murphy. This is slightly subverted by the fact that Murphy is a Badass to begin with, but by Ghost Story she's completely and utterly broken. She's functional, but only just. This is contrasted by Molly. She looks more broken than Murphy, but is actually much more sane.
  • Most of A Little Princess is devoted to breaking Sara Crewe. From being the richest, cleverest, and most beloved student at her Boarding School, she goes to a friendless and penniless servant after her father dies -- with the news delivered in the middle of her birthday party. The servants and especially Miss Minchin all try their best to break her from that point on. Sara never breaks, but she does cool off and become much more distant and withdrawn, and almost breaks at one point.
  • Meredith Host from the book Friday the 13th: Church of the Divine Psychopath, who's bubbly, innocent and just seems perpetually happy, actually managing to befriend the surly Final Girl of the book. Things quickly degenerate when she witnesses her parents be butchered in front of her by Jason, with the leader of the mad Jason-worshipping cult they were apart of (thought it was just a regular church group) saying they deserved it; she also winds up dealing with lots of self-hate over being a closet lesbian due to her religious upbringing and near the end winds up almost being raped by one of the aforementioned mad cultists, who had grown steadily more obsessed with her. Though she's saved at the last minute by one the soldiers sent out to track down and kill Jason she still dies quite horribly when Jason randomly shows up seconds later and splits her head open before the soldier can even get a shot at him.
  • Morn Hyland of Donaldson's Gap Cycle begins the series as a barely of-age, beautiful young soldier. She is subjected first to "Gap sickness," then to violent sexual abuse (resulting in being impregnated by her repulsive, insane abuser), then to horrific psychological abuse, while possessing a brain implant with a remote control that could grant unspeakable power over her to any of the many sociopathic people around her if they were to get hold of it. Her son is "force-grown" to a young teenager and implanted with all of her memories (including being raped by his father), resulting in a multiple Mind Screw for him as well.
  • All cuties in the Warrior Cats series CAN and almost certainly WILL be broken in the most heartwrenching and/or violent way possible. You can count on it.
  • Lev in Unwind.
  • Diana Mayo in The Sheik. The titular character hates the English because his father is actually an Englishman who was very abusive of his mother, and he kidnaps her and rapes her with the aim of breaking her just because he can. She later falls in love with him.
  • In the backstory of Everworld, the quiet and innocent girl Senda goes through this when her mother leaves her with her biological father's family, all of whom either fear or hate her. This eventually results in her adopting, and ultimately becoming, the persona of the cold, controlling witch Senna Wales. In the meantime, she relieves some of her pent-up frustrations by messing with her half-sister, who is even more of a cutie.
  • In Deerskin, the princess is introduced as thoughtful, curious, and somewhat reserved, but unfortunately almost literally cursed with beauty, specifically her dead mother's beauty, which very unfortunately draws an unhealthy amount of attention from her father. The father eventually rapes her, leaving her horribly wounded and pregnant. She runs away into the woods, largely without memory of anything but her name and her dog's. She passes the winter in a tiny hut, subsisting largely on rotten food, until she miscarries and all her repressed memories come back. Fortunately for her, a figure called the Moonwoman heals her wounds and takes her memories away once more, to give her the time to grow strong enough to deal with them once they're returned to her.
  • Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is pretty much one long Break the Cutie plot. Poor Fanny -- just her luck that's she'd be the Austen heroine who gets the Darker and Edgier/more realistic story.
  • The Doctor Who Expanded Universe loves doing this to former companions. Susan? Her husband was killed in front of her by the Master. Dodo? Came away borderline-insane with a venereal disease, and that's not the end of it. Victoria? Was possessed by a Cosmic Horror for twenty years and ended up unable to form relationships. Zoe? Wasted her life working for a boss straight out of Dilbert and had nightmares every night for decades. Jo? Ended up as a divorced single mother wondering where it all went wrong (though Sarah Jane Adventures says otherwise). Tegan? Nervous breakdown and amnesia. Peri? Backstory filled with childhood abuse, and her marriage explicitly stated to be loveless.
  • In the book This Rag And Bone Shop, a little girl turns up murdered in the woods. The last person to see her was an older boy (the girl being his only friend in the world), the Cutie in this tale, and was interrogated by a Jerkass cop for hours, and forced through his horrible mind-games. After nearly an entire day passes, in which the cop practically mind-rapes him, accuses him of killing his only friend, and doing a damn good job of breaking an already-cracked Cutie, the boy tearfully confesses to murdering her. But the twist is, he didn't kill her; the girl's brother did. The poor boy is so utterly ruined and broken, reduced to a sobbing wreck by the end of the day, that he was willing to say anything to make it stop. The cop feels terrible guilt upon finding out, and seeing the boy's now-dead-looking eyes...and the end of the story has the boy thinking that if he's been called a murderer once, why not murder? And he takes a butcher knife from the kitchen, goes to the park...
  • Hannah Baker from Thirteen Reasons Why. Hannah suffers from a number of incidents, some minor (a friend blaming Hannah for unknowingly being used to get revenge on her, a guy she trusted stealing her poem and publishing it in his school newsletter, a boy spreading rumours that their relationship, which never went further than making out, was much more) and some major (failing to prevent a rape, being sexually harassed and later raped by the same person) which finally ends in her committing suicide.
  • Lots of characters go through this in the Shadowleague books, but especially Rochalla, Scall, and Annas.
  • Some Sidney Sheldon leading ladies are broken souls.
    • The Other Side of Midnight -- Young Frenchwoman Noelle Page comes from a poor family and is essentially sold by her doting father into serving as a dress shop owner's mistress; she runs away to Paris after conning the man out of some money, and loses what little she has with her thanks to a dishonest cabbie. While American pilot Larry Douglas gives her a place to stay and they become lovers, his promise to return to her when he's called away to England turns out to be a lie, and by the time she finds out about that she's pregnant...This turns her into an evil Gold Digger who chooses to devote her life to ruining his.
    • Rage of Angels -- Jennifer Parker, fresh out of law school, becomes an assistant to the District Attorney of Manhattan just as he's putting a Mafia prince on trial. Alas, a trick by one of the villain's underlings means she unwittingly ruins the case. After firing her, the vengeful D.A. tries to have her disbarred, believing she was in on the plan all along. Her means dwindle quickly as no one will hire her thanks to the bad publicity. But she is determined to survive and becomes an excellent Amoral Attorney in the process, eventually becoming wildly successful. In the end, however, thanks to becoming the mistress of first a senator and then said Mafia prince, she ends up a hollow shell.
    • If Tomorrow Comes -- Tracy Whitney is engaged to be married to one of the most eligible bachelors in Philadelphia, but then her mother commits suicide after being ruined by a mobster. Her attempt to right this wrong results in a near-rape, false accusations of attempted murder and actual theft, and -- thanks to a crooked lawyer -- a sentence that condemns her to a hellish prison for fiteen years. Her fiance turns his back on her, she has no family left, and she's pregnant...until an assault behind bars leads to a miscarriage and her being sent to solitary confinement. During her time there, she swears her Revenge on those who ruined her...
  • The Sparrow: Emilio Sandoz starts the book broken. The rest of the novel shows how he got that way.
  • The Harry Potter series is basically an extended, attempted Break the Cutie for Harry, beginning with the deaths of his parents, his upbringing by his abusive aunt and uncle, and his repeated run-ins with Lord Voldemort. It's made worse by the rest of the Wizarding world not being able to decide if he's a hero they should support or if he's just a bratty, coddled attention whore (an attitude which even his best friend shared at one point).
    • Really, I mean he saw his mother murdered when he was only a baby, then was shipped to abusive/neglectful relatives where he had been told that he should have died with his parents, constantly. Then he goes to Hogwarts where his ideal life of Magic is destroyed and he gets so much mental trauma that it's hilarious, getting attacked by a professor physically one of the least worst things to happen to him at that school. Then at 14 16 he watched a classmate and his godfather die pretty much by his own fault. Then finds out that he and Voldie have a kill or be killed thing going on.. And it keeps going on and on until the bright little boy who was awed by magic and wanted acceptance to an even-more mentally scared teenager who was pretty much destroyed and knew that he actually had to die to save the 'world!'
    • Luna Lovegood as well. She's introduced as this innocent, open-minded fourth year who believes in nargles and wrackspurts, but at the end of that year, she ends up in the battle in the Department of Mysteries. Not forgetting to mention that in the Deathly Hallows, she was captured by Death Eaters and kept in a cellar for months. This deleted scene from the Deathly Hallows Part Two:

Harry: Hogwarts? It's not the place you left, you know. It's not the same.
Luna: Neither am I.

  • The Hunger Games series brings us Peeta Mellark, the sweet, friendly baker's son. Who is promptly forced into a deadly TV competition, loses a leg, finds out his love interest was playing for the cameras, is forced into ANOTHER deadly competition, and then is captured by the government, who torture him and alter his memories so he'll pretty much never be the same person he used to be. Yeeeeeah.
    • Not to mention the heroine / narrator, Katniss. There's not enough bandwidth in the universe to list what the poor girl goes through, starting with losing her father in a mine accident and finishing physically broken, covered in scars and lacking a spleen, her sister dead, racked with guilt, hating the whole human race including herself, in a near catatonic state and rejecting her one childhood friend, perhaps with good reason, with just about everything bad happening in between these two points.
    • Honestly, you can pick any cutie in the series, and if they aren't dead by the end of it they've been ground into a fine emotional powder.
  • Done to a number of characters in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series:

"The Lackey patented formula for success—make your audience identify with and care deeply for a character then drop a mountain on him!"

  • This was pretty much Charles Dickens' modus operandi in his books. Read Bleak House, Oliver Twist, or Great Expectations. Even though his protagonists are living in a Crapsack World, Dickens heaps progressively more manure on them and then creates a happy ending by having something mildly good happen to them, which in isolation looks like a massive copout.
  • Artyom, in Metro 2033. He sets out on a journey from his home station of ВДНХ/VDNKh, and ends up seeing just how far the human race has fallen. Needless to say, he doesn't get a happy ending.
  • Lois Mcmaster Bujold has said that her plot generating device is "What's the worst thing I can do to this character?"
  • The original Pollyanna invents the Glad Game to stop herself from breaking given that she's an orphan living with a grumpy spinster aunt. She eventually breaks when she loses the use of her legs. She gets better, appreciating that she had legs and she is implied to learn to walk again.
  • The God Mara from David Eddings' Belgariad series. He is the god of the Marags..maybe not a cutie, but a fairly benign god. He wakes up to find out that his entire race of followers have been raped and murdered by a neighboring nation. He proceeds to go into a God Mode version of BSOD. He snaps so hard that all he can do is stand there projecting the most gruesome aspects of what happened to his people... over his entire country...for thousands of years. Any normal human that ventures into his land are driven insane from his grief and horror. He only snaps out of it when it is learned some of his followers were sold into slavery and one of their descendants survives.
  • Pouncequick in Tailchaser's Song.
  • Chaos Walking: Just about every main character at some point. For Manchee it's a literal Break the Cutie
  • Val's daughter Chris gets thoroughly broken in The Women's Room, courtesy of a teenage rapist, and uncaring policemen and lawyers. She goes from a happy, precocious teenage girl to a frightened, miserable Broken Bird who gets terrified if her mother leaves the house, and can barely look her mother's friends or boyfriend in the eye. Eventually, Val sends her off to live with some friends on a commune. Chris is furious with Val, believing that her mother is abandoning her just when Chris needs her the most, and breaks off contact (although she does attend Val's funeral). Sadly, Mira never finds out what happened to her afterwards.
  • Both William Marsh and Henry Lewis in Darkness Visible, though some might consider Lewis too much of a Jerkass to be counted as a Cutie. Marsh gets stabbed, shot, and loses a finger in a venturing accident. And that's not even mentioning the horrific scars inflicted by his abusive father which criss-cross his entire back. Lewis gets shot, and nearly dies from over-stressing his brain. Twice.
  • In Rogue's Home, the second book in the Knight and Rogue Series Michael goes from an eternally optomistic, naive, noble, innocent young man to feeling worthless and despised, and even resenting total strangers for not being as down on their luck as he is. This is half from having devloped magic at the end of the previous book and feeling like a freak for it, and half from being despised for having been maraked as unredeemed, in spite of his only crime being making a stupid mistake. No matter how hard he tries to do good people see him as a criminal and treat him as such. He gets better towards the end, but he never gets quite as cheerful as he was in The Last Knight.
  • In Echo, a short story by J. Nagibin, this happens to Vika, a 10 years old girl and a Blithe Spirit. She is caught Skinny Dipping by a bunch of local bulles, who proceed to thoroughly mock and harass her, including some ambiguous threats, while her friend doesn't have courage to stand up to them, and promptly reveal her secret to them. The ordeal puts her into a Heroic BSOD, with tears, name-calling (though the boy did deserve that), and self-hatred. She is clearly a completely different person afterwards, much sadder, fearful and withdrawn. Her Blithe Spirit properties are completely gone and replaced by mistrust.
    • Subverted in The Film of the Book, where Vika simply doesn't break, instead causing the bullies (her "friend" first and foremost) to be deeply ashamed of themselves. Instead it's her friend who is broken by experience, though he does get a valuable lesson from it.
  • The Name of the Wind and its sequels are basically the story of how the main character went from being a cute, happy eleven year old to a young man waiting for death.
  • Percy Jackson and The Olympians:
    • Nico di Angelo: Starts out as a cheery, nerdy ten year old then his sister dies and he runs away, then get manipulated by a ghost and trapped in the Labyrinth. He learns that he will never be accepted because he's the son of Hades . When he's twelve he is learns of his mother's death at the hands of Zeus and the curse that Hades put on the Oracle. Hades then says that he'd rather have had Nico die instead of Bianca. When he's 13, he finds out that Bianca was reborn without telling him. Then he gets kidnapped by Gaea. Break the cutie indeed.
  • Break the Cutie: A very disturbing example from Dune: House Harkonnen is the prolonged and violent forced prostitution (and eventual murder) of Gurney Halleck's gentle younger sister Bheth. First she is kidnapped by the Harkonnens for trying to protect her brother. Then they cut out her larynx so she can't do more than scream wordlessly. Next she is subjected to 6 years (starting at age 17) of sadistic rape and torture by a recorded 4620 Harkonnan soldiers. Rabban finally kills her in retribution of Gurney's attempt on his life.
  • In The Heritage of Shannara, Big Bad Rimmer Dall does his best to break Par Ohmsford's mind so that he can bypass his mental and magical defences, and seize control of his body. It's not a pretty thing to watch, and it nearly works, with Par spiralling into near schizophrenic madness before the end.
  • The entire Leckery family, probably the one actually nice family, gets this in Chronicles of Magravandias, but Khaster and Ellony get this the worst. The latter goes mad in a magical ritual and drowns and the former has a complete Heroic BSOD before running off into enemy territory. The Leckerys have been mourning for them ever since.
  • In Enchantress From the Stars Elana, a Naive Newcomer from The Federation, overenthusiastically joins a mission to rescue a medieval planet from an interstellar invasion. Then she witnesses her colleague killed by Imperials. Then she is confronted with harsh realities on a world stuck in The Dung Ages, and learns that because of Alien Non-Interference Clause she cannot help this. Just as she is at a new low, she is captured by Imperials, paralysed, and informed by her father that she will be dissected and mind-probed by imperials... unless she commits suicide. At this point, she sees suicide as an easy way out.
  • Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel "The Things They Carried" tells the story of an idealistic G.I. who decides to fly his sweetheart out to join him. She takes quickly to military life. So quickly, in fact, that she falls in with the Green Berets, losing herself to the realities of war and disappearing for days at a time on ambushes. She is last seen trekking alone into the mountains, wearing a necklace of human tongues.
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