Break the Cutie/Western Animation

• In an episode of Dexter's Laboratory, DeeDee breaks when she loses her teddy bear, Mr. Fuzzums. Throughout the episode, she is catatonic and only speaks by muttering, "Fuzzum uzzum, uzzum, uzzum fuzzum," etc. Of course, she is fixed by the end of the episode.
• Butters from South Park snapping and becoming Professor Chaos. He seems to revert back rather easily, though.
  • It happens again when he becomes a "vampire" (actually just a fad of pretending to be a vampire induced by the new Twilight movie, but he thinks it's real)
  • Kyle gets this as well, most notably in Cartmanland. It's one thing into being pushed into denouncing the existence of a God (or in this case a righteous God). It's another to be pushed to the point of giving up on life due to Cartman's constant Karma Houdini instances. It takes one major case of divine intervention to rectify.
  • In season 15, Kyle isn't the only one who gets broken, but Stan and Cartman, too. Stan spends 2 episodes in a state of cynicism that worsens after his parents temporarily divorce again, and Cartman breaks when he destroys all of his stuffed animals in order to be more mature.
• Terra from the animated Teen Titans started out cracked, then met Slade, who did his best to finish breaking her.
• Nurse Bendy in Moral Orel. The first two seasons play her as a loose, air-headed woman who is commonly used by the men of the town. Her presence in Season 3 would reveal she's pretty much mentally 14, treats two teddy bears like an actual husband and son, and starts weeping and screaming when she thinks the teddy husband's trying to have sex with her. It is not Played for Laughs.
  • Orel himself, during the infamous "Nature" two parter. In the span of two episode, thanks to his drunk father shooting him in the leg, blaming Orel for it, and passing out drunk for two days the usually chipper Orel is broken something fierce, and he's never quite the same from then on. Interestingly as the third season goes on it seems like this is Clay's whole motivation. To make up for his own shitiness he tries to prove that Orel is not really as pure, good, and innocent as he seems and that his religious beliefs are built on sand. When Orel proves him wrong it drives Clay crazy.
• Nerissa tried to do this to Hay Lin in the second-season WITCH episode "T is for Trauma", first by exploiting the fact that Hay Lin's grandmother Yan Lin had just betrayed her (though it was actually a brainwashed clone), secondly by using her good looks (in her youthful Uncanny Valley Girl form) to seduce Hay Lin's boyfriend Eric away (though again, she had to brainwash him), and thirdly, by trying to make Hay Lin feel insecure about her new braces. She finishes all this up by trying to kill Eric, but Hay Lin ends up pulling herself together and saving him.
• Drakken, Monkey Fist and Killigan nearly do this to Kim Possible. When they go after Ron however, she breaks them.
  • Drakken tries this again in So The Drama, by creating a "perfect boyfriend" for Kim and having him betray her when she is most vulnerable. When she realizes the truth, she nearly gives up, saying, "Drakken won. I should have stuck to babysitting." Ron pulled her out of her funk, and in the process instigated their Relationship Upgrade.
• The Joker did this in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker where during Bruce's time he kidnaps Tim Drake and tortures/Mind Rapes him into giving up Batman's secrets (including Secret Identity) as well as making him into a miniature version of The Joker known as J.J (Joker Jr.) to fit into a sick excuse of a family unit with Harley Quinn and him. This is shown as enough to convince Batman to try and kill Joker, (basically meaning the Joker finally broke Batman, too) which he fails to do... but is saved by the still-broken Tim killing the Joker after Joker tries to get him to kill the subdued Batman. This only further adds to his trauma. Although he does get better, Tim is forever traumatized and never again becomes Robin in the DCAU.
• Toki Wartooth from Metalocalypse. Man, the second season broke that cutie all to hell. And yet, being an Adult Swim show, this is all somehow played for (very dark) laughs.
  • In-universe, the Omniscient Council of Vagueness even notes that everything Toki loves dies.
• Flippy from Happy Tree Friends starts out as a cute, friendly, fun loving bear but whenever he sees or hears something that reminds him of the Vietnam War he transforms into a cruel, murderous, psychopath.
• Happens to SpongeBob a lot.
• Aelita from Code Lyoko gets this treatment over the course of the series. She never actually breaks (although she gets quite close to suicide in the Season 2 finale), but dang, the poor girl's been to hell and back. And it doesn't get much better in the end, when XANA is finally defeated... at the cost of her father's life.
• 2-D of the Gorillaz gets pretty thoroughly broken over the course of the story. It all starts when he gets run over and knocked into a coma at age 19... which is how he met his 'friend' Murdoc. From then on he is run over again, has his front teeth bashed out, beaten silly countless times, kidnapped, held captive against his will, harvested for organs and mentally tortured. Granted, 2-D is by no means a saint, but he was always pretty harmless. At this point, it's nigh-impossible not to feel kind of sorry for him.
• Averted in The Powerpuff Girls. Him seems hellbent on destroying the Powerpuffs (especially Bubbles) mentally and came close a few times (the episodes "Speed Demon", "Power Noia", and "All Chalked Up" come to mind). However he failed everytime.
  • Though, played semi-straight in the episode "Bubblevicious". Bubbles essentially induces this on herself, trying to become as strong as her sisters. She loses her sweet act and becomes rather brütal (Read: bitchy). This culminates with Bubbles taking it (quite literally) Up to Eleven after Mojo Jojo tries to torture her and break her even further. Bubbles wouldn't have any of that shit. Luckily, though, after probably deadening a majority of Mojo's nerve cells, her sisters come and snap her out of it quite quickly.
• Happens to Prince Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender prior to the show's timeline. Flashbacks of younger Zuko portray an idealistic young man with a thirst for knowledge and experience to help him learn to be a good leader and a genuine concern for the welfare of his nation's citizens. True, he's arrogant and brash, but hey he's a teenage boy and Royalty. His naivety results in a serious disagreement with his father that leads to his scarring and banishment. By the time the other characters encounter him he's bitter, angry and obsessed with doing whatever it takes to regain his father's approval. It doesn't help that actions stemming from his inherent "good" side often backfire. Spare Zhao's life? Zhao tries to kill him- several times. Help the little boy bullied by thuggish soldiers? Whole village turns on him because he has to resort to Firebending to do so. Share a moment of introspection with a fellow traveler? Said traveler tries to recruit him, then stalks and attacks him. Offer a bit of compassion to a fellow prisoner? Seems to work, as Katara offers to heal him, then Aang shows up, and Katara runs to him. Well, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
  • Let's not forget Aang himself. He starts off as this rather goofy, optimistic kid. Then proceeds to learn that his own people have been killed off, basically everyone he ever knew it gone, that he's capable of pretty horrible destruction and might need to kill people.
  • The episode "Appa's Lost Days" does this to Appa. Kidnapped by Sandbenders, sold to a circus, beaten, sleep-deprived, forced to abandon friends in need, and captured again. This flying bison needs a freaking break!
  • Hama. She doesn't cross the Moral Event Horizon. She is forcibily thrown over it ^{[dead link]} . See before and after.
  • Katara herself suffered this very early in her life, before the series even started when her mother was executed in cold-blood.
  • Heck, Jet counts. He's probably one of the last characters on the show anyone would describe as a "cutie" (Well, unless you're using a certain connotation of the word), but a flashback scene shows a little eight-year-old Jet sobbing while watching his village burn down... which is what turns him into the thug he is when the Gaang meets him.
• This is what the first arc of the X-Men cartoon was trying to do to Jubilee. The Unspoken Backstory that her parents had been killed (by assassins looking for the Lees down the street and got lost) and she was in a foster home, then when she'd finally come to terms with THAT, they register her with a front organization for Project Wideawake. So the Sentinels come, after she runs away. Oh, but that doesn't stop the metal monsters from killing her step-parents. It may not get worse, but it doesn't get better quickly.
• Transformers Animated: Sari in Season 2. First her dad goes missing, then her dad's company gets taken out of her control by Porter C. Powell who reveals with the subtlety of a brick that she doesn't exist in any form of legal documentation. If it weren't for the Autobots helping her cope over all of this, Sari could very easily have snapped upon the revelation that she was part Cybertronian instead of taking a level in badass.
• Wakfu, episode 19: Sadlygrove, possessed by the demon of his sword, proceed to crush both forearm and bow of Love Interest Evangelyne, who has only just begun to reciprocate his feelings, in one grasp. The tears of physical and emotional pain she show afterwards are enough to cause a My God, What Have I Done? moment in Sadlygrove, almost making him another broken cutie.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: Mac goes through tis a ton of times. Escpecially in "Bye Bye Nerdy", when he comes to the conclusion he's a nerd.
  • Then in "Afair Weather Friends", when he found out Bloo was hanging with another kid behind his back.
  • When he found out that Santa Claus wasn't real in the Christmas Special. (in this case, he was) (He gets better)
  • When Bloo became a celebrity and was ignoring him (it was actually because his manager was nasty). (He gets better).
• Rusty Venture on "Venture Brothers"
• The Simpsons arguably subverts this in Dog Of Death. When Burns gets a hold of Bart's friendly, gentle pet dog, he straps the dog to a chair, sets up a machine that holds the dog's eyes open, and forces the dog to watch several images of animal abuse to, as Burns himself put it, turn the dog into "a vicious, soulless killer." However, when Burns sends said dog after Bart, the dog's memories of good times with Bart prompt him to lick Bart's face instead of attacking him. When the other dogs come after Bart, said pet dog growls at the other dogs and scares them off, only to proceed to lick Bart's face AGAIN. Burns' attempt at breaking the dog's spirit yields, if any change in the dog at all, a result of the dog taking a level in badass while no longer being on Burns' side in the long run.
  • Played straight with Ralph when he takes Lisa out to Krusty's anniversary special, only for her to dump him on live TV.

Bart (replaying a video of the event): Watch this, Lis. You can actually pinpoint the second his heart breaks in half.

• • One of the usually playful and rambunctious Nahasapeemapetilon Octuplets, Anoop, becomes this in the alternate future of the episode "Future-Drama". When Bart works part-time at the Kwik-E-Mart, he (along with the other Octuplets) is very bossy and sadistic to him, going as far as to kick him in the head (while wearing a hover pack).

Anoop: You missed a spot! (spits on the floor) Do it again!
Bart: Yes, Mr. Gheet...
Anoop: I'm Anoop, you racist cracker! (kicks Bart in the head)

• Family Guy usually plays with this as most of the characters go through some of the most horrible incidents that someone can go through. But it's played straight with Lois during the Christmas Episode in the earlier seasons. All the presents given to another family? Hey, another family benefits from the charity. House burn down? At least everyones safe. Your turkey is ruined? We can work something out. Out of paper-towels? Oh, snap.
  • YMMV about this being either a Roaring Rampage of Revenge or Beware the Nice Ones, but considering that Lois isn't exactly a Purity Sue to begin with, it might not really apply.
    • That was an earlier episode. She wasn't exactly a Purity Sue back then, but she was a lot nicer before then.
• Happens twice on Phineas and Ferb:
  • On "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", Phineas and Ferb's latest invention actually destroys the house and they are caught by their mom. Even though they believed they had permission, they're shipped off to reform school, where they are tortured and stripped of their identities and creativity, afraid to even touch on of their tools. It's all a dream, but still a pretty horrid What If episode.
  • On "Summer Belongs To You", the crew is stranded on an island with no resources, and Phineas has a nervous breakdown because he can't build anything to help them.
• Shifty Dingo from Blinky Bill takes a lot of crap. In the wedding picnic episode, he gets bitten on the leg by Marcia, cries his eyes out, fails at dance steps, cries his eyes out again, breaks his leg while practicing dance steps and his own mother won't let his friends give him flowers to cheer him up. Ouch. In another episode, he saves Marcia with CPR and her reaction? "Yuck kissed by a dingo!" and then she punches him in the face. He frequently gets picked on in multiple episodes and Nutsy is one of the only characters to stand up for him.
• This happens to the title character of Doug during the Nickelodeon Christmas special. After his dog, Porkchop, ends up biting Beebe Bluff while she and the other main kids were playing hockey (he was actually trying to save her from the thin ice) and she gets badly injured, poor Porkchop ends up having to be taken to the pound and even has to be put on trial. The day before the trial, Doug remembers about how he got Porkchop for Christmas when he was a year old, and how the previous Christmas, he got him his journal. Then, because of how Porkchop is being treated by everyone in town, he imagines standing at Porkchop's grave, and begins to cry. He really needed a hug in this episode.
• Dib from Invader Zim, through YMMV. If you count him to be cute and The Woobie. During the course of the show, he gets laughed at, gets pummeled by his sister (numerous times), gets threatened to be eaten by mechanical stuffed animals, has a water balloon CONTAINING ALL THE WATER ON PLANET EARTH dropped on his head, is held over the city cesspool for an entire day, gets thrown into a slowly expanding explosion, gets put into a Lotus Eater Machine and has a wonderful life, until he realizes that it was all a dream, gets shot with a gigantic laser gun (albeit using muffins as ammo,) gets laughed at again, gets pummeled by a monkey, and of course, who could forget his LANDING-PAD-SIZED MONSTER OF A HEAD THAT IS ALSO DISTURBINGLY LARGE? Of course... he cracks appropriately.
• Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic in "Party of One" reverts to her depressed straight-haired state seen in "Cutie Mark Chronicles" when she thinks her friends don't like her or her parties anymore.
  • Also from the same show, in "The Best Night Ever", all the ponies are broken to a certain extent, but none more than Fluttershy, who is of course the super-incredibly-shy one. When the animals at the gardens at the Royal Palace run away from her, she snaps, chasing and screaming at them to love her.
  • Discord loves doing this. Twilight is the only one to escape him, and the fact her friends are brainwashed it's likely he got to her too. Fluttershy manages to partly avoid it by virtue of being aware and accepting of her faults, but he still brainwashes her anyway.
    • What Discord does is more in-line with Corrupt the Cutie.
  • Even though she isn't brainwashed directly, Twilight still gets hit with this. Discord reunites her with her friends after he's finished breaking them. The result is Twilight being treated like dirt by her beloved True Companions and having no idea what's happening to them. By the time the corrupted Fluttershy verbly assaults her, the poor girl has been broken as well...
    • It gets so bad in the second episode that she turns gray without brainwashing.
  • They all have a turn at breaking; usually, it happens because the aspect of their lives symbolized by the markings on their flanks has been called into question. This is the root cause of so many pony breakdowns that the fandom has dubbed it "Cutie Mark Failure Insanity Syndrome".
  • Pinkie breaks again in "Baby Cakes", where she suffers all sorts of indignities trying to prove she's responsible enough to look after the Cakes' new foals. After Pound Cake (a pegasus) and Pumpkin Cake (a unicorn) start manifesting their respective powers of flight and magic and making even more mischief, Pinkie finally snaps and bursts into tears.
  • Applejack gets this treatment two episodes in a row. In "The Last Round-up", her inability to win a single blue ribbon or earn any prize money for Ponyville breaks her so hard she can't face returning to Ponyville since she feels she let everyone down. In "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000", the apparent loss of her home and vocation drives Applejack to tears.
  • Pinkie (again; she seems to get a lot of this) and Rarity are driven to tears by numerous insults from Fluttershy, when the pegasus tries to act more assertive in "Putting Your Hoof Down." Included among these is Fluttershy calling Pinkie "simple," calling Rarity "petty," and saying that what is essentially both of their lives' purpose is useless. Note that neither of the did anything to deserve this treatment -- they only tried to help Fluttershy and expressed concern about her recent behavior.
  • Fluttershy gets this hard in Hurricane Fluttershy. In fact, it happens three times! First when Rainbow Dash trying to get her to join in making the tornado brings up a pretty brutal bullying incident from her foalhood. Second when some ponies laugh at her wing speed test, sending her running off practically crying her eyes out. And then, after she manages to train a lot, finding out it wasn't nearly enough and once more running off in tears. Poor thing...
• Scooby Doo Mystery Inc breaks all four at once in the season finale. After Mayor Jones is revealed to not only have been the Freak Of Crystal Cove and kidnapped Freddy as an infant from his real parents to raise, but now Freddy has dissolved the team to look for his parents. Meanwhile, Shaggy's parents are shipping him to military school, and Velma is on the outs with everyone for keeping Angel Dynamite's identity a secret from them. Daphne is absolutely devastated as Fred had proposed marriage to her in episode 24, but now that's off as Fred seeks to discover who he really is.
• The Young Justice episode "Failsafe" breaks Miss Martian, after she loses control of her powers and accidentally pulls a Holodeck Malfunction on the team during a training exercise, rewriting their memories to make them believe the simulation was real and leaving them all in comas when they "died." She collapses in tears at the end of the episode when she learns what happened.
  • The Holodeck Malfunction a pretty good job of breaking Robin, too. It's not really touched upon until the following episode, but the burden of sending his friends to their deaths took its toll on him, and made him realize that he didn't want to become the Batman.
  • In "Misplaced" it's Zatanna's turn to be broken when her father takes her place as Nabu's host (effectively killing him). One of the last scenes of the episode is Zatanna sitting alone in her new room at Young Justice headquarters crying her heart out.
• The eight children of All Grown Up! play a role in this trope. As babies in Rugrats, Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil, and Kimi (excluding Dil, due to being a few months too young at the time for character development) basically had no serious worries (aside from Angelica and other episodic misunderstandings) compared to their 10-year pre-teen future-selves. In All Grown Up, the children deal with various life difficulties as they attend school. Occasionally, the problems they face would delve into heavier issues, which would put them at each other's throats, like a loose spoof of Degrassi, making their toddler years seem like bliss.
  • Some example would include Tommy and Chuckie's friendship being strained in "Fear of Falling" and "TP + KF", Phil & Lil having a less-than-inseparable bond in "Coup Deville" and "Seperate But Equal", and Chuckie and Kimi's sibling bond being strained in "Memoirs of a Finster and "Petition This".
• This happens to Finn a lot, but by far his biggest example was in "The New Frontier". Nearly losing your best friend/only relative to a You Can't Fight Fate type of suicide? Not the best thing to happen to you. He also has another one in "Too Young" when Princess Bubblegum just broke up with him, and he goes through a Heroic BSOD when she pushes him further away in "Incendium".
  • It's also one of the few times Finn actually cries.
  • Lots of recent episodes seem to be this trope on laser guidance. Finn tries to get one tiny thing done and the entire world gangs up on him. See "Blood under the skin", "Another Way", etc.