Break The Cutie / Marvel Universe

Marvel Universe

Comic Books

Comic Books

• Alias: Jessica Jones was a teenage superhero who confronted the Purple Man and instantly got hit by his powers. Which he used to pretty much torment her for eight months before she was rescued.
• Avengers Arena:
  • Hazmat's harsher than your typical cutie, but she's been through absolute hell while in Murderworld.
  • Juston was always a sweet kid, but Apex crippling him and being left in the desert for a week, has completely broken his spirit and made him angry enough to want to kill her.
  • All Nico went through including getting brutally killed pushed her to the point at which she would willingly kill Apex.
  • Death Locket's backstory has her seeing her mother and little brother murdered by a Deathlok cyborg that time-traveled to killed her father Harlan Ryker, who created them. She gets caught in the explosion that killed her mother and brother. Her father transforms her into a Deathlok to save her life. And then her father is taken to jail, and just when she wakes from her coma and finds out she's a cyborg, she's transported to Murderworld. You can also add being controlled by Apex into shooting at the heroes, not to mention killing her first love to the list.
    • All of this culminates in Avengers Undercover when Baron Zemo notes the look on the survivor's eyes when they find Arcade again.
• She-Hulk is always the Life of the Party, but in Avengers Disassembled she suffers a lot. She saw a friend killed for no reason, lost control like the Hulk and killed the Vision, controlled by the Scarlet Witch.
• Cloud 9 during the first thirteen issues of Avengers: The Initiative.
• John "U.S. Agent" Walker's entire tenure as Captain America was one of these.
• Daredevil has several nervous breakdowns; unfortunately for him There Are No Therapists.
  • Poor gentle Melvin suffers another mental break down after being manipulated by both Alexander Bont and Mr. Fear.
• Bobbi/Mockingbird started out as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who hung out with Ka-Zar and later worked with and ended up marring Clint Barton. Then she was abducted, drugged and raped by the Phantom Rider, who then proceeded to try and ruin her life. She was one of the first characters to be replaced by the Skrulls and spent time on the run from them on their own planet, avoiding capture by a Skrull who had taken on Clint's appearance. Then when she was eventually returned, it was to a different life than the one she'd left behind because she'd been gone for years. Then the Phantom Rider came back to try and kill her again so they could be together forever.
  • Seemed very broken when rescued from AIM in Secret Avengers, to the point where Taskmaster wonders what they did to her.
• Daramount's goal for Jun, Hunter, Casey and Jade in Morning Glories.
  • Also Daramount to Hodge as children, in a way.
• Muties: Prior to meeting Nata, Jisa was kicked out of her home by her parents and then knocked up by her asshole boyfriend.
• New Mutants:
  • Illyana in the original series with all Belasco did to her, Inferno and Legacy Virus. Most of the characters from New X-Men got it in one way or another after Kyle and Yost took over but the crown goes to Pixie, who got part of her soul stolen. TWICE.
  • Age of X crossover has broken both Pixie and Cannonball. To explain, in that story we see alternate reality, that is terrible Crapsack World and all mutants are fighting for their survival until it's revealed that it's actually pocket reality created by one of Legion's personalities and all those people are members of 616 X-Men dragged into it. Everybody have now different history and Sam and Megan have ones of the most depressing ones and once everything goes back to normal they are devastated and demands their memories about whole thing erased. Oh, and Pixie counterpart from that world, Nightmare, apparently survived as Superpowered Evil Side inside her mind.
  • Mercury after getting kidnapped and tortured by Facility.
• The Pulse: Jessica Jones again gets hit with this when she thinks she's lost her baby after getting caught in an explosion, she's first enraged, then reduced to tears.
• Runaways: There's the sad history of Klara Prast, who kept talking to plants. Her religious asshole parents convinced her she was the spawn of Satan and married her off, at the age of eleven, to a creep who raped her and forced her into dangerous jobs to earn money for him to buy booze. Luckily, the Runaways rescued her and brought her into the future where New York happened to be under invasion by Skrulls. And then, just when she was starting to get the hang of our modern world, someone fired a missile at the Runaways' home that came so close to killing her that she lost control of her powers and accidentally attacked her friends, and Nico decided to mystically pacify her. In Avengers Academy, she's become such a nervous wreck that Hank Pym and Tigra decide to break with the Avengers' previous stance on the Runaways and let them stay together, specifically because they fear that separating Klara from the Runaways might further damage her emotional well being. Of course, then Avengers Arena happened...
• Scarlet Witch. She finds out Magneto is her father, her children turn out to be kinda sorta not real, she loses her husband, her brother manipulates her into altering reality, and Magneto kills her brother. That's not even half of it. She reacts by wiping out the powers of 90% of the world's mutant population.
• Shadowland: After all the years of trauma and abuse, Daredevil has finally snapped.
• Spider-Man: This happens to Spider-Man on a depressingly regular basis. See The Night Gwen Stacy Died and One More Day for precise examples.
• Invoked in Superior Spider-Man (2023). Otto-as-Peter disassociates himself from Bailey to prevent the boy from exposing Otto's Grand Theft Me of Peter's body. He does this with a searing "The Reason You Suck" Speech that reduces Bailey to tears, something that the Fantastic Four calls Otto out on as he mentally pats himself on the back for it.
• X-Force did this to Psylocke. Uncanny X-Force started with Betsy Braddock cool, collected, and confident and together with the man she loves. Then the man she loves turns evil. And then she kills him. And then she kills her brother to save reality. And then she's mind-raped after being ambushed by another psychic. And then a second man she's come to have very complicated feelings for sacrifices himself to save her. And then she finds out she causes a totalitarian Bad Future. Post-traumatic stress disorder doesn't even begin to describe it.
• X-Men: Do not attend the Xavier Institute. Just don't. This goes double if you're on Earth-616. They will kill all your friends, run over your dog, and rip out your soul all in the space of a few hours if you go to the Xavier Institute. This goes quadruple if you're on Earth-1610, where nearly all of the original X-Men are dead at this point, the remaining mutants are living on the run from a government even more prejudiced than before, and while he was alive, Professor Xavier wasn't above using his powers, and sometimes just his intellect, to manipulate his students.
  • Magik started as Colossus' little sister; after being sucked into Limbo (Belasco's dimension) while at Xavier's, she returned with new magic powers and a severely damaged mental state (to be fair to the team, time differences were so great, she appeared to only be gone a few seconds). She is then returned to Belasco's, where she undergoes a weird process that causes her to split into multiple beings, rather confusing, one being a soulless girl stuck in Belasco's dimension.
    • Then you get to poor Megan Gwynn, aka Pixie, a girl who (before House of M) was voted most cheerful person at Xavier's. She along with her classmates are dragged into Belasco's dimension, where, in order to escape, team up with the soulless Illyana. In the process, Pixie loses a portion of HER SOUL. She returns with black streaks in her hair (presumably representing the darkness now in her soul) and a magical dagger that allows her to teleport. Then in another arc she returns to that dimension, this time with the main team. Here she attacks Illyana for stealing a portion of her soul and after losing, Illyana takes YET ANOTHER chunk of Pixie's soul and sends the X-Men back home. Later she gets badly beaten by some racists, kidnapped by demons and finds out her parents aren't her real parents and she is really a daughter of Mastermind and some witch. And then she gets to Limbo and has another part of her soul stolen again, though this time she regains all parts of her soul at the end. And then, along with everybody else, she gets brainwashed by a powerful reality warper into believing her life was one big hell on Earth, which turns her into murderous sex-obsessed psychopath with a demonic look, called Nightmare. And once she gets back to normal, Nightmare survives in her mind as a Superpowered Evil Side. Poor girl cannot catch a break.
    • Or Longshot — a peppy, happy-go-lucky charmer. WHO HAS HIS SOUL EATEN BY A DEMON in the Inferno (1988) storyline. Even when everything goes back to normal, he's left with some serious angst.
  • If you're a young mutant, this is bound to happen no matter where you live. The only place more dangerous than the Xavier Institute (or whatever the current headquarters of the X-Men happens to be) for young mutants is the world outside of it.
  • Rahne Sinclair has this in spades. Rescued from being burned at the stake by her abusive father, her life seemed to be getting better once she joined the New Mutants. Cue a long string of traumas — her first love dying to save her, being mind-raped by an evil psychic, her best friend being possessed by a demon, being kidnapped and mind-raped/genetically modified into a mindless slave, seeing another dear friend murdered, struggling to break free of brainwashing, losing her powers and adoptive mother in a single day, and being shown a Bad Future where she murders two dear friends. Then she got recruited onto a black ops X-team, where she would be brainwashed and given a heroin overdose by her father. This resulted in her nearly murdering her teammates, and eventually EATING HER FATHER, a trauma she's blocked out. While being deprogrammed, she was reunited with an old love and became pregnant, only for him to sell his soul to save her. The baby nearly killed her and turned out to be a supernatural beacon for bad things when close to being born. All of this over the course of maybe 7-8 years of time.
  • What was done to X-23 (Laura Kinney) from birth until she escaped, then her handler tracked her down, and what happened wasn't pretty. What makes it worse is that X-23's treatment by the Facility in X-23: Innocence Lost was intended to break her down and turn her into an emotionless killing machine on purpose. When they decided she had too much empathy for others, they gave her a puppy with orders to kill it. When she played with it instead and failed to carry out the orders they threatened to torture it to death and make Laura watch as punishment. She gets better and learns to be a normal girl from Jubilee... kinda. Avengers Arena looks to be attempting to break her all over again...
  • Little Jean Grey, who begins as the sweetest person at Xavier's. She's the Team Chick and is as cheery and perky as can be. Then, while hunting Proteus, Jean starts having these daydreams where she's slipping into the past, where she is in a rather intimate relationship with a man who is far less strait-laced than Scott. Did I mention that just a little while before this, Jean, dying of radiation, made contact with a cosmic entity called The Phoenix Force who just happened to share its infinite power with her? And that with that power she'd fought Galactus to a standstill and healed a cancerous galaxy? So yeah, Jean keeps having these visions until she can't escape from them. Then the masquerade is over, and Jean realizes she was being used by Mastermind and The White Queen, who have been more or less raping her mind and forcing her to do things that were scandalous to her. Except when the mask comes off, Jean loses her grip on all that infinite power that The Phoenix gave her, and it drives her mad. She's filled with the hunger of a Cosmic being, and the memories of her glorious triumphs. So she breaks down and eats a star. Then the Shi'ar get upset and condemn her to death, and Jean knows there's nothing for it, so she commits suicide to avoid repeating the things she did.
    • The above did not happen to Jean, but to the Phoenix itself, which from time to time wants to know how it is to feel human, and took her memories, looks and personality while the real Jean was healing in a cocoon at the bottom of the ocean. However, after the real Jean has come back and her clone Madelyne Pryor (read below) dies, Jean is given the memories of both Madelyne and the Phoenix. Given that she also had a traumatic experience at the age of 10, watching her best friend die from a car accident while being mentally linked to her and feeling everything she felt, we can safely say Jean has three sets of screwed up memories in her brain, two of which are of women that looked exactly like her.
    • Then, when she's revived, the love of her life is with a clone of hers, who has her own breakdown, resulting in a deal with the devil and the return of the Phoenix Force. Then Scott cheats on her with the very woman who caused the Dark Phoenix to come into being. Then Jean dies, and sees a future in which all her friends suffer incredible anguish and, because the Phoenix is as much her tormentor as her friend, it convinces her that the only way to fix all this is making her push her husband into the arms of the woman who caused the Dark Phoenix to come about. Then the Shi'ar slaughtered her entire family. Then they hurt the Phoenix and it forced her back out of the grave, so she had to die again. Then the Phoenix came back and handed itself into the arms of The White Queen, and with that power, Scott went nuts.
    • Long story short, the day the Phoenix saved Jean's life, it set her on a very, very painful path.
  • Can't forget to add in Dust. Separated from her mother (whose fate is unknown), was sold into slavery until Wolverine saved her and becomes enrolled in the Xavier Institute, only for some of her new friends and love interest to die as the comic progresses.
  • What about Cyclops: his life started going badly when his parents threw him and his little brother out of a plane when he was a young child, leaving him an orphan with brain damage. His life only got worse from there, even more so once he reached adulthood. The level of shit he has gone through since then makes Charles Xavier rescuing him from an abusive criminal seem more like an act of Yank the Dog's Chain than anything else. To put how much Cyke has been broken into perspective, when he first arrived at the school (while still undeniably broken) he was a Dandere. Adult Cyke proceeded into Sugar-and-Ice Personality to avoid being hurt anymore.
  • Angel has also been horribly broken beyond recognition, similar to his two teammates mentioned above. When he started out at Xavier's Angel was a conceited but caring young superhero who wanted nothing more than to fly and protect his teammates. Unfortunately, this led to him taking a lot of punishment from various villains as he was tortured, knocked around and sometimes nearly killed. And this was back in the original run of the comic book when things were nice and happy. He leaves the X-Men, returns to see his childhood crush go crazy and kill herself, and then quits because the team now includes Wolverine, who Angel disagrees with strongly. Surprise though! His childhood crush is now alive and is interested in his married friend, not him. His girlfriend thinks he's cheating on her (he isn't), he is outed to the public as a supporter of "mutant hunters" (really a cover), and when trying to save a child, he gets tortured and his wings are ripped apart. The wings are amputated, he nearly gets blown up, Apocalypse brainwashes him, and a childhood friend kills his girlfriend. Hoo boy.
    • This isn't even the end of it. Angel, now Archangel, is recovering until his wings get ripped off again. He becomes bipolar, gets put on a murder squad, and gradually descends into insanity until he finally loses it and kills a small town. Another girlfriend, Psylocke, kills him and and Angel comes back with no memory. He then loses it again, gets used as a puppet by Psylocke to kill people, and then gets used by a cult as a weapon. Who even knows what he is now. Someone at Marvel must really hate this guy.
• Gwen Stacy: Originally an Alpha Bitch who took a level of Character Development until she became a mature and thoughtful Tsundere Girl Next Door type. Then, her dad died. When she finally managed to get over that, SHE dies.
• Poor Kid Loki, you never stood a chance. First, he's brought back to Asgard, a place where he's widely hated and mistrusted for things he did which he can't even remember. Sure, at least his brother is on his side, but he's barely ever there. His first companion? Ikol, The spirit of his old, evil self. Then he gets a friend his own age, only she seems to enjoy being as mean as possible to him. And then she leaves. And he gets a dog, too. An evil dog that spits out fire and is obsessed with killing people. And his mother blackmails him into being a spy. And his dreams are mostly nightmares of his past deeds and growing up to be horrible all over again. Then his friend comes back only to betray him and the dog turns on him and what little respect he managed to garner through hard work and doing good is tossed aside when everything comes crushing down on his 13-year-old little head. But, hey, at least Ikol won't turn on him, right?

Films

Films

• Happens to both Natasha and Yelena at the beginning of Black Widow. They are first seen living fairly normal lives as innocent little girls before both being given to Dreykov and subjected to Training from Hell in the Red Room to become killers and serve as his personal pawns.
• X-Men Film Series
  • X-Men: First Class:
    • Charles Xavier. When the movie starts, he's a friendly, happy-go-lucky, idealistic Oxford grad whose only interests are protecting his foster sister, studying genetics, drinking yards of beer and picking up coeds. His initial reaction to meeting other mutants is a puppyish eagerness to find others like him, as well as a gung-ho enthusiasm to work with a superhuman team to fight evil. During the climax, he gets smacked around in a variety of ways, including telepathically experiencing Shaw's gruesome death at Magneto's hands, getting shot in the spine, and having the US government, his best friend, and his sister all turn against him. By the finale, his government is trying to hunt him down, his best friend is preparing for a war against humans, and he's crippled for life in a wheelchair. We know from future installments that he never quite abandons his ideals, but he's frighteningly subdued and obviously much more cautious about who knows his secrets.
    • Hank McCoy starts off as the adorably awkward love interest for Raven. He then undergoes a Karmic Transformation after telling Raven that society would never accept them for the way they really looked.
    • Raven Darkholme starts off as an innocent Womanchild who turns into a villain by the end, after being harshly rejected by her love interest Hank, and being repulsed by both humanity's intolerance and by Charles' ideals.
    • Erik Lehnsherr as a child in the early scenes, where he is subjected to the harsh treatment of the concentration camps and is forced to watch his mother die simply because he couldn't move a coin in time.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Professor X's attempts to set up a school for mutants has come crashing down around him due to the outbreak of the Vietnam War. It's heartbreaking to see just how much those events have broken him, to the point where he's taking a serum designed by Hank that suppresses his powers and restores the use of his legs just so he can sleep at night without feeling other people's pain.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse:
    • For the past decade, Professor X has been very happy running his school with Hank by his side, and he's pleased by human society being more accepting of mutants. He's then kidnapped by Apocalypse (and with Magneto's assistance, no less), his home is blown to smithereens, and he's brought halfway across the world into a situation where's he's completely at the mercy of a mutant who's more powerful than he is. Apocalypse wants to cleanse the Earth of any mutant or human who isn't strong enough to survive the new world order, and he intends to exploit Xavier's telepathy to facilitate this extinction-level event by taking control of him. For Charles, this is a far more terrible hell than what he had endured in the previous two films. James McAvoy sums up his character's suffering as:
      "It wasn't just the weight of the world I was feeling. It was the death of the world."
    • Literally Break the Cutie in the case of Quicksilver. He's a Manchild living in his mother's basement who simply wanted to meet his estranged father. When he seeks the Professor's help in locating Magneto, Peter is abducted, imprisoned and interrogated by Stryker. He joins the X-Men when they head to Cairo, but the reunion Maximoff had longed for with Erik doesn't come to fruition because he learns that the older mutant has another family and is mourning their deaths. Quicksilver fears that Magneto may not embrace him as a son because Lehnsherr doesn't love his mother, so Peter assists Mystique in attempting to take down Apocalypse. The god-like mutant then breaks Maximoff's leg, which leaves the latter thoroughly vulnerable, and it seems that Quicksilver will meet his death at the tip of Psylocke's katana.
  • Logan: Mutants are just about extinct, everything Charles did for them throughout the series having come to naught. He personally killed seven of his beloved X-Men with his psychic powers when he had a seizure. He now lives in a metal tank, where Logan keeps him drugged up so he won't endanger anyone else. Throughout the film he sees people he cares about hurt and killed, accidentally harms a lot of innocent people with another seizure, and finally is killed by Logan's Evil Twin, whom he believes to be Logan.
  • Dark Phoenix:
    • Jean Grey. She gets a serious case of Power Incontinence when she absorbs Phoenix Essence so it won't kill her friends and the astronauts they just saved. As Phoenix power takes her over, she learns about memories that Charles blocked in her mind (again). Those memories? She unwittingly caused a car accident that killed her mother, but her father is alive and wants to do nothing with her. Afterwards, she unwittingly attacks policemen, kills Raven by accident, and then is pursued by alien race and their leader that wants to claim that power for herself. Good lord.
    • Charles Xavier again sees his efforts torn apart as Raven is killed, Hank is alienated by his choices, notably regarding his decision to suppress some of Jean's memories, and joins Erik in his revenge quest, and Jean's attacks against humans reset the human-mutant relations back to the level seen at the end of First Class.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• At the start of Season 2 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a combination of things at the end of Season 1 including Ward's betrayal and his own brain damage from oxygen deprivation leaves Fitz broken mentally and emotionally.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• This is what the first arc of the X-Men: The Animated Series 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.

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