My Favorite Shirt

Well, you can knock me down,
Step in my face,
Slander my name
All over the place.
Do anything that you want to do, but uh-uh,
Honey, lay off of my shoes
Don't you step on my blue suede shoes.

— Elvis Presley ^note Well, technically, Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"

Somewhere in between the Law of Disproportionate Response and Berserk Button.

Alice and Bob are fighting. Alice manages to destroy/ruin/mangle Bob's shirt/sunglasses/hair/whatever. This unhinges Bob and he suddenly goes into Determinator mode. While the destroyed item is often a #1 Dime, the reaction usually comes out of the blue.

Not necessarily something to make him go berserk, but to Bob, it's like she kicked the dog. If Alice was bad before, now she's unforgivable.

Can be a Stock Phrase. Compare Lost Food Grievance and Wardrobe Wound.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Digimon Adventure 02 has this with Mimi when the Roachmon brothers have ruined her designer blouse by covering her with garbage.
  Mimi: That's it! This is a designer blouse!
• In Dragon Ball, Tao gets quite annoyed with Goku when his Kamehameha wave ruins his outfit. It doesn't really change his intensity during the fight (he was hired to kill Goku after all), but he does care enough about it to get a custom-made new one afterwards.
• Grenadier — The manga opens with a bunch of mooks damaging Rushuna's hat. She goes ballistic, shoots them, and gets repaid for it by the dazed goons.
• The first episode of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's has Nanoha damaging Vita's hat. Two minutes later, Nanoha's Deflector Shields are shattered, her Barrier Jacket's destroyed, her weapon's wrecked, and she's been smashed through a building and into a wall, completely defeated.
• In One Piece, Luffy knocks Buggy the Clown into next week after Buggy damages Luffy's straw hat.
• In Pokémon: The Series, Ash used to get rather worked up anytime something would happen to his hat (usually being stolen by a simian Pokémon), but he appears to have since mellowed out about it since he always gets a new hat each series and thus doesn't have the same significance as the original Pokemon League Expo hat he won in a contest.
• In Ranma and Ryouga's first duel in Ranma ½, Ryouga rips a tear across Ranma's shirt. The latter complains about it being his favorite shirt, and the former calls him "a girl" for whining about it in the middle of a man-to-man fight. That was about the last thing Ryouga should have called him. Later on, that same rip gives Ryouga quite an eyeful when Ranma inevitably transforms.

Comic Books

• In PS238, Julie has this reaction when somebody rips her cape in the Vegas arc. As she later explains, her parents had to pay a lot of money to get her one made out of almost-indestructible fabric, meaning that she can't realistically replace it. Fortunately, at the end of the arc she's given a new, free costume by the casino owner they've been helping.
• When Superboy had to capture the former Intergang boss Steelhand (to have it televised by the WGBS channel), a bus hits him against a building and causes an explosion. He is unscathed, save for... "Okay, trying to kill me is one thing ... but that was my ONLY jacket!" He even brought it up again during Tana Moon's interview. Luckily, WGBS agreed to provide him with a supply of jackets as part of his contract.

Fanfiction

• There Be Dragons, Harry:
  Terion: Language, Draco. That was uncalled for.
  Draco: It was my favorite shirt! My favorite! I don't have another one like that and it's not like I asked for them to attack me and-
• In I Wish Snape cuts open Harry's shirt to gain access to his injuries.
  Harry: That was my favorite shirt.
  Snape: Then you should have thought twice before getting blood on it.
• Midnight Blues:
  Tiburtus: I will not let thee carry me off towards my ill-deserved fate, ye beast of burden! Ye horrid hunter of thine eternal!
  Harry: Oh, cut the crap. And you're paying for a new shirt! This was my favorite shirt.

Film

• Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls: "All right...that's it! This 'White Devil' thing has gone far enough. Nobody! Messes! With The 'DO!" He then proceeds to get his butt kicked.
• The Matrix— Neo kicks Agent Smith in the face, breaking his sunglasses. Agent Smith does not look happy.
• In The Matrix Reloaded, a normal agent does this when Morpheus cuts his tie.
• Maverick. The title character gets angry (or possibly pretends to) when his shirt is damaged during a fight.
  Maverick: All right! My shirt's damaged! Damn! What the hell else bad can happen?
• Mortal Kombat: The Movie: Goro takes Johnny Cage's sunglasses and crushes them. Johnny Cage says later "Those were $500 sunglasses, asshole!" before beating the crap out of Goro.
• The Pacifier — A slice of bologna covered with mustard falls on Agent Wolf's shirt. He even replies, "this is my favorite shirt," invoking the Stock Phrase part of the trope.
• In the horror movie Seven Days To Live, the main character attempts at one point to defend herself from her (driven insane by the movie's evil house) husband by stabbing him in the midsection with a screwdriver. Later in the movie, he has her tied up and gagged and one of the things he tells her during his mad ramblings is, "Look at this. You ruined my favourite shirt and a perfectly good kidney."
• Spaceballs — Lonestar, Barf, Vespa, and Dot are running for Lonestar's ship to get off of Spaceball 1.
  Princess Vespa: I ain't shootin' this thing, I hate guns!
  [Vespa's hair gets singed]
  Princess Vespa: My hair! He shot my hair! That son of a bitch!
  [takes the gun and takes out upwards of 8 guards]
  Barf: Holy shit!
• Undercover Brother. While fighting the title character, Mr. Feather cuts out part of his afro. Undercover Brother calmly says "You mess with the 'fro, you got to go", and proceeds to give Mr. Feather a righteous butt-kicking.
• In Mandy, the main character are engaged in a close-quarter battle to the death with the Black Skulls, a mysterious biker gang, involved with the death of the titular character, his girlfriend. At one point, he almost loses his manhood by way of a bladed codpiece, only to find out he's still alive shortly after. He proceeds to brutalize the Black Skull that got the drop on him, screaming "YOU RIPPED MAH SHIRT!" all the while. The audience later find out why he values the shirt so much — in a flashback, it is shown that he wore it the first time he met Mandy.

Literature

• In the Discworld novel Thief of Time, the History Monk Sato believes in peace to all living things, UNLESS you touch his hair. Some very luckless (and now dead) individuals find this out at the end of the book.
• Psmith's hat gets destroyed by gun-toting gangsters in Psmith, Journalist. To Psmith, this is just as bad as the fact that one of his friends lost part of his ear in the same shoot-out, and being Psmith, he ends up literally making the guy who hired them pay for the hat.
• Used without the Berserk Button in a Star Wars NJO novel. Barabel Jedi Tesar Sebatyne gets shot during a boarding action. Leia asks how bad it is. The response? "Bad... my best robe. This really burns me." Then he laughs and goes to kick all kinds of rear since that's how Barabels are.
• Used as a Major Injury Underreaction in The Truth, by Otto Chriek. When he's stabbed in the chest by William's father in the climax, his response is irritation that he can't keep his nice shirts clean.
  • Wizards and Witches on Discworld love their hats. Don't ever damage them or even ask them to take them off. Not even if a witch is sitting in front of you at the theater.

Live-Action TV

• In The Beverly Hillbillies, Mr. Drysdale's first introduction to Jed Clampet is when he grabs a ruffian who's holding up the workers at the Clampet estate and asks if he knows of Jed Clampet. Jed's response is along the lines of "I am Jed Clampet and I'd appreciate it if you let go of my Sunday shirt." In a very (uncharacteristically) angry tone.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Kendra in the episode "What's My Line Part 2".
    "That's me favorite shirt. [Beat] That's me only shirt!"
  • Giles in a later episode when he gets turned into a demon. He humorously tries to put on a favored shirt of his but it gets torn up, much to his dismay. "And I liked that shirt!"
• How about The Doctor from Doctor Who? The Ninth Doctor had an amazing passion for his black leather jacket, and the Tenth Doctor was very attached to the coat he got from Janis Joplin, always making sure to tell people not to "hurt" it, since well it was a present.
• On Friends, Chandler does this to Joey by pulling on the back of his jersey during their thanksgiving football game.
  "That was my favorite shirt!"
  "Well, now you have two!"
• Get Smart. Parodied in "Leadside". Max is losing a fencing duel against wheelchair-bound evil mastermind Leadside, until Leadside slices one of the buttons off Max's shirt.
  Max: "99 gave me that button! Thanks, Leadside, I needed that!"
  Fight continues but now with Max winning until the henchman pushing Leadside's wheelchair goes out the window.
  Leadside: "My mother gave me that henchman! Thank you, Mr. Smart, I needed that!"
• Used to a rather badass effect in Luke Cage Season 1 Episode 7. The titular Hero for Hire walks into a gym whose owner is gun-running for Cottonmouth on the side and gets shot at by a couple of heavies, accomplishing absolutely nothing except ruining his jacket.
  Luke: (utterly deadpan) "I'm about sick of always having to buy new clothes."
• The Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide episode "Parties" has Ned getting himself locked in the closet to hide from Missy. After he gets out, Missy comes back later with a sledgehammer that she uses to smash the door in order to get him out. Seth yells, "That was my parents' favorite door!" and has her thrown out of the party.
• "This is my best top, dammit!" ~ Ace Rimmer, Red Dwarf episode "Stoke Me a Clipper", directly after being fatally shot in the chest, and directly before killing the Nazis responsible. What a guy!
• Related, though not quite fitting as it's not a human destroying it: one Seinfeld episode features Jerry lamenting the slow death of "Golden Boy", his best shirt, slowly fading to the point of being unwearable due to overwashing.
• Kara inverts the trope in one episode of Supergirl: while she normally rips her shirts open to change into her super-outfit, in this episode she unbuttons the shirt carefully. Then answers the incredulous looks of her friends with: "What? I like this shirt!"
• The Professionals. In "Mixed Doubles", an unarmed Bodie is facing off with a combat instructor armed with a huge Bowie knife, with Doyle egging on his friend from the sidelines. Doyle then gets angry when Bodie gets his shirt sliced because that's his shirt that he's wearing!

Music

• The Barenaked Ladies have a song titled "An Ode to Ed's Shirt".
• Several versions of the Murder Ballad "Stagger Lee" involve the title character shooting Billy DeLions because the latter stole (or won, or damaged) Stagolee's prized Stetson.

Professional Wrestling

• The Rock was extremely protective of his "$5000 shirts".

Puppet Shows

• A sketch on Eureeka's Castle revolvs around Magellan accidentally breaking Eureeka's favorite vase. He tries gluing it back together, but fails miserably, then he tries to hide it from Eureeka, but realizing something is up, she lightly chides him into confessing. To his surprise, she's not that upset. Turns out she anticipated something like this happening, so she bought ten of them.

Web Comics

• Girly Subverted it here
• In Sluggy Freelance Bun-Bun has this reaction when Aylee accidentally erases his Baywatch tapes. He goes even more homicidal than usual. "I'm going to hunt you all down if it takes forever! I'm going to be the freaking Terminator on your collective butts! I will never stop! Never! NEVER!"
• Tower of God: Endorsi Jahad is incredibly protective of her face "humanity's greatest cultural heritage". When Hwaryun aims a kick at it, she loses her cool and quite literally slips up. Of course, we are talking of her face.
• This xkcd strip has a character use a stolen Russian submarine to retrieve his hat.

Web Original

• When Yajirobe breaks Vegeta's armor in Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Vegeta gets pissed.
  Vegeta: You cut through my armor! This was a gift from my father!
  Yajirobe: Oh, uh, I'm sorry. I'm sure your father was a great man!
  Vegeta: I hated my father!
  Yajirobe: Oh, well, I'm sure your father was a total prick then!
  Vegeta: HOW DARE YOU TALK ABOUT MY FATHER LIKE THAT!?!
  • Android 13 is positively obsessed with his trucker hat. He does not take well to it being lost in the glacier.
  13: My trucker hat! Ya plumb done gon dagum did it now, son!

Western Animation

• A moment from the The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 features Luigi throwing Mario's "favorite record" into the fire. Mario is not pleased.
• In Beavis and Butt-Head, when Beavis in a runaway rolling tire causes Todd to spill a drop of his beer on his good jeans, he proceeds to kick the crap out of Beavis off-screen. Butt-Head, true friend that he is, revels in it.
• Celebrity Deathmatch: Christopher Walken, who has been behaving in an Affably Evil way up to this point in his match, turns homicidal after Gary Oldman messes up his hair.
• In Clerks: The Animated Series... well... Randal, in harsh captivity, tears his shirt and writes a note to Dante on it in his blood, which ends with "Also, I ruined the shirt I borrowed from you."
• In the Dexter's Laboratory special Ego Trip, Executive!Mandark breaks Young Adult!Dexter's glasses which finally causes him to lose it at Executive!Mandark after years of abuse and proceeds to kick the shit out of him.
• In the Family Guy episode "Emission Impossible", Stewie puts on lipstick and leaves kissy marks on Peter's shirt so he and Lois won't have sex and have another baby. Lois catches him and scolds him for ruining Peter's favorite shirt... the kind he wears every day.
• In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Billy sprays Grim with coffee and he says "Not again! And it was me good robe too!"
• In Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama, while fighting two of the Diablo robots, Kim gets shot at by one of their lasers, and while she's not hurt, the hem of her prom dress is burnt pretty bad. Needless to say, Kim was not happy.
  Kim: Do you know how much babysitting I had to do to pay for this dress?!
• An episode of The Mask had the Mask chase an assassin robot to the future just because he had damaged his suit. Sure enough, it was a trap.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • In the first pilot, "Meat Fuzzy Lumpkins", Bubbles's hair is this.
    Oh, no! It can't be! It's... MEAT HAIR! Oh, this is terrible! People, if you only knew how much pride Bubbles takes in her hair! All the washing and conditioning, and the brushing, and brushing, and brushing, and brushing!
  • In "Impeach Fuzz":
    Mayor: FUZZY! NOBODY WEARS MY HAT!!! ...let's get it on.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: In "Fake Dad", Ren's adopted son, a burly jailbird named Kowalski, gets angry when Ren hits him with a spoon. He proceeds to take the couch ("My favorite couch!"), a television set ("My favorite TV!") and Stimpy ("My favorite friend!") and crunch them all to dust.
• Rocko from Rocko's Modern Life had both a lucky shirt (which got lost on Laundry Day) and a closet full of shirts of the same design.
• Rugrats (1991):
  • In the first episode, Stu shouts "My favorite shirt!". A bit later, he gets a new one and it gets ruined again, this time saying "My other favorite shirt!".
  • Near the end of "Chuckie Loses His Glasses", Angelica gets dizzy from wearing Chuckie's glasses and vomits on her father, who shouts "Oh no! All over my new sweater!".
• In Samurai Jack, Jack encounters the very time portal he is destined to take back to the past... and finds it guarded by an incredibly formidable warrior. As their battle drags on, well... "That was my favorite suit you just ruined!"
• A bit of a Running Gag on the old TMNT show.
  Donatello: Aw, gee; that was my favorite bo.
• Young Justice had Superboy accidentally sink his feet in lava. He wasn't hurt, but it burned his boots off.

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