Broken Angel (TV Tropes)

Many fantasy creatures are fantastic. Whether a sphinx, dragon, or steam powered robot beetle; whether practically human, incomprehensible or pure evil, these creatures can elicit a sense of wonder and terror in any observer. Now imagine someone took a sledgehammer to that marvel and left it bleeding and broken on the floor. That is the Broken Angel, a fantastic creature that has been stripped of their fantastic. This can take many forms: the eponymous angel with hurt wings, broken horned unicorns, newly mortal elves (or any other immortal being), magicless wizards, robots whose body is centimeters from going offline, etc. When played for drama, this is usually used to evoke deep sadness. This is a unique, beautiful creature that has been cruelly torn asunder. Not even killed, but left alive to suffer being flawed after having been perfect or at least "the way I was meant to be." As you can imagine, a lot of Fallen Heroes have this as a backstory. When one is killed you can expect the killers (even if they're heroes) to lament destroying something that is one of a kind. If it was the Last of His Kind, this serves a double whammy by signaling the End of an Age: there will be no more like it, ever. If a villain is the one doing the killing or crippling, they haven't just Kicked The Unicorn, they broke off the horn and stabbed it to death with it. May make its home in a Fantastic Nature Reserve. On the positive side, they may be able to heal naturally, get repaired, seek redemption or find the cure to their ailment. However the story presents a way to make the "fantastic" be restorable, actually restoring it will be a quest in and of itself. If the Broken Angel is found by a Good Samaritan, they'll get some help to this end by being hidden and nursed back to health. Of course, there will be danger from those who did the breaking coming, or from locals with Torches and Pitchforks out to finish the job. On the other hand, this can be used as a Karmic Transformation (more like "Karmic Crippling" in a few instances) to punish rebellious members of this species. Whether for good or bad behavior depends. If it was due to evil, you can expect these Fallen Angels to wear their broken wings with defiant Pride. Even more rarely, rather than grieve over the loss after being Brought Down to Normal or De Powered this way, they might like the change. Contrast Freakiness Shame. No real overlap with One-Winged Angel, unless the being still has enough juice to enter a Super Mode which prominently features their one good wing. Not to be confused with but similar to Broken Bird. See also Unicorns Are Sacred.

Basic Trope: Something fantastical whose specialness has been damaged. Straight: Alice, an angel, loses her wings. Exaggerated: Bob, once a mighty Eldritch Abomination has been reduced to just his human-like brain. Downplayed: Alice's wings have been clipped, leaving her unable to fly properly. Justified: Bob needs to be suitably punished for his crime, thus deprived of his grandness. Inverted: Alice, a former angel, has become an even greater and grander entity as a Seraph. Subverted: Bob the demon has always lacked horns, thus not caring. Double Subverted: ...Because they were cut off in his infancy, something he doesn't know about. Parodied: Alice regularly sheds feathers and goes through episodes of melodrama as a result. Zig Zagged: Alice loses her wings, but she learns not only to live without them, but to become a great person who isn't defined by her fantastic aspects. And then they grow back. Averted: The fantastic never lives as crippled, they either die or live as intended. Enforced: "We need to show the kiddies who you are is important, thus let's show them Alice losing her wings." Lampshaded: "Why do people always target the fantastic in someone? General mutilation is good enough." Invoked: Emperor Evulz deliberately attacks the fantastic in someone to establish his sheer cruelty. Exploited: Emperor Evulz is able to amass an army by promising to fix the broken fantastics. Defied: Damaging the uniqueness of someone is treated as the sin above all sins, thus extremely brutal repercussions for those who do. Discussed: "Wings mean a great deal to our kind. To damage them is to take away a large part of who we are... Sometimes I wonder if I can even be called an angel any more." Conversed: "It sure is depressing to see fantastic beings lose what makes them special." Implied: Alice never wears backless clothing and a sense of wonder comes off of her, though what exactly she is nobody knows. Deconstructed: Because a fantastical's being's fantasticness is always targeted, these species gradually become lesser overall. Thus the ultimate fate of the fantastic is extinction or becoming something radically different, the end result being the end of all marvelous things. Just like a real-world disabled person, Alice hates being viewed as "broken" and pitied for it. She may even have been born without wings, or have lost them at a young age, meaning she's accustomed to her condition and views herself as a whole person, with or without fantastic aspects. Plus there's the implication that angels generally think themselves superior to mundane people. Reconstructed: Though the fantastic in the fantastical tends to be targeted, it is controlled to maximize the despair. Thus the fantastical species continue to live, so that damaging their fantasticness has meaning. Alice knows she still has as much value as anyone else, fantastic or not. She just really enjoyed flying prior to losing her wings, feels she's lost a major part of her identity, and has every right to grieve. Played For Laughs: Bob the regenerator expresses sorrow whenever he loses a part, even though it quickly gets replaced completely identical. Played For Drama: Bob, once a mighty member of the Fair Folk, is driven to insane rage upon losing access to magic completely. Thus the once grand being reduced to incoherent screams and pathetic frailing, whatever respect he once held by his people is lost. Now alone in the world, dramatically weakened, Bob never again knows happiness. MEDIA EXAMPLES The Organization in Claymore is revealed to have two captured dragon people in their basement, which they all but harvest. The sight of these undoubtedly majestic beings who look like some streamlined science-fiction monsters being chained, hooked up to tubes with half their bodies missing, is certainly a textbook example, especially considering how they're being kept just barely alive so that their flesh remains fresh for the various uses they have for it... Fortunately, Miria grants them a Mercy Kill. Durarara!! has Celty, a dullahan who's lost her disembodied head (along with all the memories in it) some twenty years ago and still feels incomplete without it. While the renegade Shadow Angel Apollonius in Genesis of Aquarion is generally portrayed with his wings spread, one flashback to twelve thousand years ago had him rip his own wings off while escaping from crucifixion to protect Celiane, the love of his life. Heart Catch Pretty Cure applies the trope to a more recent sort of fantasy being with Yuri, a former Magical Girl Warrior. Interspecies Reviewers has Crim, an angel that got his halo broken due to odd circumstances, which not only prevents him from using any angelic powers but also has resulted in him being stuck in the mortal plane. He's hoping to eventually get it fixed and return to Heaven, but as the story goes on he grows worried that it will never heal and he'll be stuck in the mortal realm for the rest of his life, even if he's found it's not as bad as he initially thought it would be (for one thing, normally angels with intact halos are incorporeal and invisible, practically incapable of interacting with the world, and several of Crim's contemporaries are actually jealous of his newly-gained ability to eat food and -- in particular -- have sex as a charter member of the titular brothel-crawlers). There is a broken angel housed in the NERV basement in Neon Genesis Evangelion, it's the one nailed to a cross. There's also the literal "broken Angel" from the second Rebuild of Evangelion movie which was captured and experimented on until its bones were stripped bare of flesh. Hayao Miyazaki made a music video set to On Your Mark about two police officers who find a winged girl held (and mistreated) by a cult; and then mistreated by the government scientists. From the fourth arc of Umineko: When They Cry on, a huge theme of the series is whether or not the magic that Beatrice weaves is truly bad or not. Serving to personify this conflict is Beatrice herself, having been turned into an Empty Shell by Battler, who grieves over her until deciding to resurrect her. Black Bolt in Earth X has a bit of a costume makeover which gives him huge wings made of silver blades. When he goes up against the planet eating Celestials and loses he's left in his broken armor and exposed face on the moon. Luckily, his Distress Call was answered by Galactus. The Filth gives us Secret Original, a Golden Age superhero who came into reality, and now is a wheelchair-bound cripple. Hellboy is recognizable for having two neatly sawed off horn stumps on his forehead. Though in a subversion of this trope, he cut them off himself for (at first) the practical reason of helping him fit in with humans. And later on when he learned his longstanding fate as an Apocalypse Maiden and The Antichrist, he now cuts them off as a sign of rejecting said fate. Fate being persistent though, they tend to grow back if he ever gets exposed to infernal energy or starts to doubt or become convinced of ending the world. The movies have at least a few scenes where he sands off the ends, as though it were shaving. This was done to Dawnstar during the Darker and Edgier Giffen run of the Legion of Super-Heroes. She seemed to be getting over it, until the entire universe was rebooted in Zero Hour. The Mexican graphic novel Operación Bolivar by Edgar Clemens, stars a man who, being born with the ability to see and touch angels, works as an angel hunter, since their body parts are good for a very wide array of uses (the meat is medicinal, the eyes can be used in robotics, the feathers make you an amazing writer, the bones are powdered into an incredibly potent drug, etc). The story deals with a Government Conspiracy to turn the angel-hunting business into mass production in an attempt to overcome the Asian intrusion on the same market with dragon body parts. In the story's introduction he narrates how terrible killing such majestic creatures is: "Killing angels may seem like a repulsive business. And it is. To kill them you need cold blood. Many can't stand it and go mad or kill themselves. But an angel hunter was born for this business. We are marked beings. We can't escape fate." A possible origin for The Phantom Stranger is that he was an angel who refused to take sides in the War in Heaven and after the war was barred from entering Heaven. He attempted to find refuge in Hell, only for the demons there to angrily rip his wings off and condemn him to Walk the Earth. The Sandman (1989): Lucifer asks Dream to cut off his wings for him since this is the last thing that needs to be done before Lucifer can quit being the ruler of Hell. He was also Broken already. Probably as a side effect of either rebelling or living in Hell his beautiful white feathered wings had become blackened bat wings. In spin-off series Lucifer, we discover that the Archangel Michael has been imprisoned for millennia by Sandalphon and had his body cut open repeatedly. The human who sees him in this state narrates how the chains were "obscene" and the brutality even more sickening than it would otherwise be because the victim of it was so magnificent and beautiful, and that the sight of such beauty and ugliness together hurt his eyes. X-Men: Angel has had this happen to him various times in various continuities. In the original comics, he has his wings cut off by a villain, leading to a period of depression. Apocalypse convinces him to do a Face–Heel Turn by promising to "give them back"... by upgrading him into the angel of death with metal wings. And eventually he manages to heal and regrow his wings naturally. In the more traditional terms of this trope, we have the Acanti, a race of Space Whales that have been enslaved by the Brood for generations. At least one arc of Uncanny X-Men in the '80s revolves around saving them. In Disney Fairies: Secret of the Wings, Tinker Bell has her wings damaged to the point of being unable to fly when crossing over into the country/season of Winter (since her wings can't hold up in cold weather). It's supposed to be impossible to cure, but her twin ends up being a work-around to that. There's a story told earlier in the film about a Winter fairy that had his wings damaged while courting a Spring fairy. When the Winter fairy telling Periwinkle the story turns away from her at the end, we see that he's been telling his own story; his wings are missing. In Ghost in the Shell (1995), Motoko takes on an enemy one number too big for her and ends up ruining her mechanical body by overexerting herself, leaving her limbs shattered. Helpless, half-naked and unable to move, she makes for quite a sad sight. Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon suffers permanent damage to his tail that hinders his flight capability early in the movie. Hiccup builds a tail attachment to help Toothless fly again, but the dragon still needs a rider to help him fly at his best. It should be noted that in the short animation Gift of the Night Fury that continues on from the film, Hiccup builds an automatic tail attachment, allowing Toothless to fly on his own once more. Near the end of the film, Toothless smashes the attachment, showing he prefers having Hiccup as a rider to flying on his own. However, by How to Train Your Dragon 2, Hiccup has apparently modified the fin to allow him to lock it in position so Toothless can continue flying on his own while Hiccup jumps from his back to try out his new wingsuit. In How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World He builds another automatic tail attachment for Toothless when it becomes clear that he is yearning to fly off on his own after meeting a female Lightfury. The Last Unicorn: The titular unicorn becomes this after she in transformed into the human woman, Amalthea, after bumbling amateur magician Schmindreck uses Wild Magic in a desperate attempt to rescue her from the Red Bull (the villain's Pet Monstrosity that hunts and captures unicorns. Although saved from the fate of the rest of the unicorns and still extremely graceful and beautiful for a human, the transformation into any mortal being, let alone a human, is extremely horrific and traumatizing for her, especially at first, and presented as something that has trapped a being of an ethereal nature in the form of a decaying and ill-suited mortal body, with various psychological and spiritual consequences. When she eventually is turned back, she remains a more figurative example; Unicorns are stated to be pure, immortal beings and, by their very nature, untouched by emotions like regret, longing, or grief. But her experience as a human being (who fell in love) has left Amalthea capable of these feelings. And now she will have to feel them forever. Inverted with Mommy Fortuna's menagerie of "mystical beings", which are actually mostly fakes, being pitiful animals that she casts glamours on, so that they appear as legendary beasts to those who want to see as much. The only real fantastic creatures in the caravan are the unicorn and the Harpy, who has mommy Fortuna's number. Tempest Shadow from My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) is a unicorn with a broken horn that leaves her unable to control her magic. She serves the evil Storm King because he promised to restore it in exchange for her service. The Forest God from Princess Mononoke appears as spritely and otherworldy stag with a vaguely anthropomorphic face that spreads life and fertility in its wake, basically a combination of a unicorn-like creature, a youkai and a primordial god. That is, until some fool cuts off its head, that is, at which point the body becomes a Eldritch Abomination, mindlessly showering decay and destruction on epic scale until it is reunited with its head. The felling of the Home Tree in Avatar has a dreadful sense of finality in it and prompts several characters who were hedging their bets to complete their Heel Face Turns. In Barbarella, the angel Pygar is blind. Near the end of Constantine (2005) the angelic halfbreed Gabriel has his wings blasted off by God. However, since he was The Man Behind the Man, he really had it coming. The Hellblazer comic that inspired this event took this even further: after falling from grace and losing most of his wings, Gabriel ends up having the tattered remains chainsawed off by Constantine. And then he's left to make the most of his newfound mortality as a homeless man. The angel in Date with an Angel gets winged in a collision with a communications satellite. The Angels in Dogma have to lose their wings in order to become mortal. The de-horned unicorn in Legend (1985) is central to the plot. The titular character of Maleficent after her wings are cut off while she's sleeping. The act is wholly responsible for her Start of Darkness. Mermaid Down is about a mermaid whose tail is cut off by fishermen, causing her to grow legs that look like a human's. She is placed in a mental facility with other patients who think she's an insane, catatonic human. Later she tells them through a sign language interpreter that sailors used to take mermaids for their wives by cutting their tails off, and that there are people alive today who are descended from merfolk and don't know it. When the mermaid gets to be in non-chlorinated water, her tail grows back. In the film Noah, the titular character is helped by the Watchers, fallen angels who have been encased in stone for disobeying god by aiding humans, who later betrayed them. They understandably distrust humans. Lucifer, the Trope Codifier. As he said in The Prophecy (1995): "I was the first angel, loved once above all others... (sings) But like all true love... one day it withered on the vine..." Skellig is implied to be an angel exiled to earth, hopeless and miserable but unable to die. In the beginning he lives in an abandoned shed, covered in filth and in such bad shape that he can't fly or even walk, with nothing but insects to eat. Perhaps a subversion in that his condition (and personality) elicit revulsion rather than sadness and sympathy. X-Men Film Series: X-Men: The Last Stand: A young Warren Worthington III tried to cut his wings off to avoid being rejected by his father. X-Men: Apocalypse: Angel's wing is seriously crippled after his fight with Nightcrawler, hampering his ability to fly.