A Broken Heart Can Beat Again

She's in a tight spot and may stay there.

"Oh! I have a heart to exist stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt, and of course, if it ceased to vanquish I should cease to be. But you lot know what I mean. I have no softness there, no—sympathy-sentiment—nonsense."

These characters (often female) are coping with a Cynicism Catalyst, Despair Event Horizon, or Nighttime and Troubled Past past becoming as cynical, stoic, and/or badass as possible.

Her deep experience and emotional detachment almost always give the impression of competence, though she doesn't always live upward to her ain hype. Varying between Cool Large Sis, Emotionless Girl, Picayune Miss Snarker, and Snark Knight, she marks herself as more experienced and worldly than the other characters, even if the Competence Zone means she herself is barely out of her teens.

In fact, she can sometimes fill a mentor function for less experienced and more idealistic characters, all the while loudly expressing her irritation with said arrangement, then no 1 gets the impression she'south softening up. Sometimes, this is to Jerkass levels; yet, she is oftentimes a sympathetic Jerk with a Heart of Golden, giving an impression of contained toughness to hide a sincere affection for the other characters. In the latter case she'll almost certainly be a Mentor in Sour Armor.

This character was a hero herself once and failed miserably, or maybe she was abused in some fashion equally a child; whatever the case, her cynicism undoubtedly stems from some traumatic outcome in her past that destroyed her faith in just about everything. This revelation is ordinarily accompanied by a Freak Out, said by often delivered in a bitter diatribe towards someone who proved a bit likewise stubborn in their desire to know what it was. At this bespeak, tears are guaranteed, probably more of them the less she's expressed emotion in the past. She also has a 65% chance of engaging in serious physical violence against whoever is closest at the time. This is ever treated seriously and Broken Birds take a tendency to be both decumbent to violence and very practiced at it, therefore, potential Love Interests should always gear up to be at least slightly maimed during these breakdowns.

If she is cured of her emotional torment, wait whatsoever of a number of paths. At best, she will continue on equally a deeper and less emotionally constipated version of who she was earlier... simply she may also autumn casualty to Good Is Impaired or mutate into a Satellite Honey Involvement or Satellite Graphic symbol. Expect Hope Is Scary on the road to recovery, unless she has an Adrenaline Makeover. One time she recovers, she'south quite likely to swear not to become one e'er once more.

A number of Romance Novels lean on this trope when the love interest of the heroine is an Anti-Hero with a scar from the past for her to heal. Sometimes involves a chip of that one also. Women want to Heal the Cutie instead of Break the Cutie.

This trope tin exist summed up as Troubled, but Cute + Dark and Troubled Past.

Popular with the Byronic Hero. A Sub-Trope of Troubled, just Cute, which sometimes they first equally before becoming cleaved. Overlaps with Stoic Woobie and Jerkass Woobie. Too see Dark Magical Daughter when the Cleaved Bird happened to be a Magical Girl, Rape as Backstory and Rape as Drama for when the traumatic result involved sexual violence, My Greatest Failure for when the trauma was brought on by a mistake the character made (or thinks she fabricated) and Shellshocked Veteran when her trauma was brought by warfare. Do notation that in Existent Life, non everyone who experiences trauma (even the same type of trauma) volition react or respond in this way; just because they don't act like or come beyond as this trope doesn't mean they're lying well-nigh whatsoever it was they experienced.

The logical farthermost of this becomes an Empty Crush. Compare/contrast Stepford Smiler, Stepford Snarker, and Sour Exterior, Sad Within, for characters trying to hibernate their Broken Bird country. Contrast Malaise? What Malaise? and The Pollyanna.

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    Mythology & Religion

• Older Than Dirt: Ereshkigal, the Mesopotamian goddess of the Netherworld, is the mythological variant of this trope to a tee. While she mainly shows up as the biting, alone, and adversarial older sister of the Genki Girl goddess Inanna/Ishtar, Ereshkigal'south grapheme is more than elaborated elsewhere through her unhappy backstory and her encounter with the Troubled, simply Cute plague god Nergal. In a rare happy catastrophe in a mythological dear story, the two outcast gods eventually resolve their differences and resolve to rule the Netherworld together. (Scholarly opinions are divided on whether this resulted in Badass Disuse of her.)
• If the Romans are to believed, Queen Dido of Carthage from The Aeneid is this. She is happily married, and then her brother kills her hubby and forces her to flee her homeland. Then, she has to commencement a new city from scratch with a few men, and then Aeneas turns up. He has a dear affair with her that ends badly (he leaves her because of the Jerkass gods). Later on, she loses her sanity and kills herself. To show just how badly she is broken when Aeneas leaves her, Vergil stretches to its limits the inherent flexibility of Latin word gild (an consequence lost in translation)—the give-and-take order and grammar are so horribly cleaved that the subject and direct object can be several lines apart.

    Tabletop Games

• Elspeth Tirel from Magic: The Gathering has lived through a childhood of Phyrexian horror and has seen her self-proclaimed homeworld of Bant fall, fifty-fifty as she tried her hardest to defend it. Because of this, she is portrayed as a cynic and a Cowardly Lion who only wants to put down her sword and alive a normal life - unfortunately for her, conflict seems to follow her to every world she visits.

    Theatre

• Depending on the estimation, Joanne from Company (Sondheim) could exist a cynical case: She is an alcoholic who has been twice divorced and is currently on her 3rd husband. She is rather unlike from Bobby's other friends, spends most of the scenes making occasional snarky remarks, and is shown being extremely critical of both her husband, who conspicuously loves her with all his center, and of Bobby. Notwithstanding, Bobby describes her as "warm", and her husband says that her behaviour comes from her being "wildly complacent" with "no self-esteem", and in the end, she too plays something of a mentor role to Bobby, as she is the one who makes him question what he wants from a human relationship.
• Mrs. Linde, Nora's childhood friend, from A Doll's House, sacrificed marrying the homo she loved to marry for money to assistance her sick, widowed mother and little brothers. By the beginning of the play, she is so tired and thin Nora doesn't recognize her, and she admits she only feels adrift, not grief, now her female parent and husband are both expressionless and she has no farther task to work for.
• The titular Elisabeth, Empress of Austria (nicknamed Sisi by her family). Her life was a Trauma Conga Line: having a hands-off father (whom she nonetheless loved and admired considering she envied his freedom); married off to Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and her offset cousin, equally a child bride (they did love each other initially, but Sisi's love faded); winding upwards with a demanding, Knight Templar Parent of a mother in law; accidentally causing the death of her eldest daughter Sophie due to insisting that she and her younger sis Gisela come along on a trip to Republic of hungary; getting cheated on by her married man and infected with syphilis; having to fight for control to have a say in her own children's upbringing (thanks to Franz Joseph being a Mama'due south Boy); realizing that trying to model her life after her father's damaged her relationships with other people and resolving to be "made of stone"; then accidentally driving her only son and heir Rudolf — for whom she had fought before — to take his life by refusing to intercede in the political scandal in which he was embroiled. She winds up a heartbroken, cynical Expiry Seeker who constantly traveled to get away from the Viennese court. Her journey ends when she is stabbed to death. The kicker? Elisabeth was a real person. All of the aforementioned trauma was real. ^note Minus, perhaps, the STD. It was never confirmed. All the same, her son Rudolf did also wind up in an unhappy spousal relationship, constantly cheated on his wife Stéphanie, and made her infertile via gonorrhea. Sisi securely disliked her daughter-in-law.
• Rienne Boilou in The Hammer Trinity. Loses the dearest of her life to an bundled union, loses her husband to state of war, gets keelhauled by pirates, loses all faith in the crusade she gave her life for and finally loses the dearest of her life, over again, to war, after an Anguished Declaration of Love.
• The Witch in Into the Woods consistently embodies the cynical and badass qualities, warning Rapunzel, "the world is dark and wild." It never becomes entirely clear where the Witch'due south brokenness stems from, simply she is persuasive enough in pointing out the failings of others to make united states of america suspect that her ruthless and misanthropic ways came from somewhere.
• In The Little Foxes, Birdie married twenty years ago into a Big, Screwed-Up Family unit, who took her cotton fiber plantation and sired on her an unlikable twit of a son. She spends a lot of fourth dimension drowning her sorrows in her own room, which they endeavour to hide by lying and saying she has a headache.
• Niobe from The Love of the Nightingale. Procne and Philomele go birds after their Suspension the Cutie.
• Aldonza in Human being of La Mancha. "Aldonza" (the song) is a great portrayal of anger and pessimism overlaying a very unhappy backstory.
• Meg Giry in the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies, due to a combination of her falling for the Phantom, who still pines for Christine, and too much time on the Casting Couch over the 10 years separating the two shows. She ultimately tries to kill Christine's son; she winds up actually killing Christine.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrokenBird

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