Tropes A to B (Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole, Arc Villain, Berserk Button, Beware the Silly Ones, Big Brother Instinct, Bowdlerise, Break the Cutie) | Tropes C to D (Call-Back, Chekhov's Gun, Cliffhanger, Combat Pragmatist, Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, Curb-Stomp Battle, Dark and Troubled Past, Deconstructed Character Archetype) | Tropes E to F (Early Installment Weirdness, Famous Last Words, Foreshadowing) | Tropes G to J (Heart is an Awesome Power, Hypocrite) | Tropes K to M (Laser-Guided Karma, Logical Weakness, Mass "Oh, Crap!", Moral Myopia, Muscles Are Meaningless) | Tropes N to P (Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, Oh, Crap!, O.O.C. Is Serious Business) | Tropes Q to S (The Reveal, Shout-Out, Spanner in the Works, Superpower Lottery) | Tropes T to Z (Wham Episode, Wham Line)
- Almost every time a Straw Hat 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 Straw Hats 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 Pollyanna 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. By the time Luffy arrives, she's in full Heroic BSoD mode and a step or two away from Despair Event Horizon. It's here, in a voice uncharacteristically meek and helpless, she begs Luffy, "Help me..."
- 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.
- Enies Lobby revealed that CP9 managed to reopen the old wound that broke Nico Robin and cause her past 20 years to come crashing down on her. By the time the Straw Hats caught up with her, she was slipping past the Despair Event Horizon wishing nothing more than to die, but Luffy's rousing defiance of the entire world sets up one of the series' most powerful heartwarming moment.
- 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.
- In the Monsters story of Wanted! (1998), Flare breaks down when Cyrano, the man 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.
- And a full-blown Break the Cutie process is what made Boa Hancock the huge jerkass 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 into the hands of the World Nobles. They branded them like cattle, forced them to eat Devil Fruits for their own amusement, and tortured them and many others nonstop 4 years. When the Boa girls manage to escape thanks to a really badass fish man, the damage is already done, and Hancock has especially become a complete jerkass.
