You like her, you respect her and you think, finally, a female character who isn’t written like a malfunctioning cartoon.

And then the writers discover comedy. This is where Brittafication begins.

Coined by fans of the series Community, Brittafication describes the gradual transformation of a character from a relatively grounded, competent and compelling person into a chaotic, increasingly ridiculous version of themself. It is not quite flanderisation. Flanderisation takes one characteristic and turns the volume up to 400. Brittafication is more ambitious. It takes the entire person, throws them into a blender, and asks: What if she was just… kind of an idiot now?

This phenomenon is named after Britta Perry.

Britta begins Community as the group’s cool, politically conscious, morally serious outsider. She has principles. She cares about injustice. She is independent. She seems like the sort of person who would correct you when you use the word “literally” incorrectly.

By the later seasons, Britta has become the human equivalent of an intrusive thought.

She is still politically conscious, technically. She still has principles, technically. But somewhere along the way, the writers realised that Britta being wrong was much funnier than Britta being right. And thus, she was Brittaficated.

The beautiful thing is that Britta is not alone.

Take Jess Day from New Girl.

Jess starts out as quirky, yes, but she is also intelligent, emotionally perceptive and capable of functioning as an adult. She is a teacher. She owns furniture. She presumably knows how taxes work.

Then the show keeps adding quirk.

A little more awkwardness here. A little more childishness there. A few more bizarre facial expressions. Suddenly Jess is behaving less like a functioning adult and more like someone who has just been informed that the concept of a door is revolutionary.

Her original personality isn’t completely gone. It’s simply been buried beneath approximately 700 layers of Zooey Deschanel saying something strange. That is Brittafication.

Then we have Amy Santiago from Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Amy was introduced as an ambitious, hyper-organised, competitive detective whose greatest weapon was probably a colour-coded binder. And it worked.

Her perfectionism was a character trait. Her competitiveness was funny. Her anxiety about failure made her human.

Then somebody apparently said, “What if we made the binder her personality?”

Amy gradually becomes so neurotic about organisation that you half expect her to schedule her own emotional breakdown for Tuesday at 3:15pm, with a 15-minute buffer in case crying runs over.

Again, she remains lovable. That’s the trick. Brittafication doesn’t necessarily make a character worse. It makes them more ridiculous while insisting they’re still the same person.

And then there is Robin Scherbatsky from How I Met Your Mother.

Robin begins as one of the most independent people in the room. She is career-focused, emotionally guarded, Canadian, and seemingly immune to the kind of romantic chaos that consumes everyone around her.

Naturally, the writers spent nine seasons trying to prove her wrong.

The independent woman slowly becomes increasingly tangled in relationship drama, jealousy and emotional dysfunction. At some point, you realise that the woman who once seemed like she could survive perfectly well on her own has somehow become a recurring participant in the emotional equivalent of a house fire.

This is another form of Brittafication: take a character whose strength is being emotionally stable and put her in increasingly stupid situations until stability becomes a historical footnote.

And perhaps that is the real genius of the phenomenon. Because Brittafication isn’t limited to television. You have almost certainly witnessed it in real life.

There is the friend who started university as an intimidatingly intelligent person with big ambitions. They read books. They had opinions about capitalism. They used words like “nuance.”

Three years later, they are sending you a reel at 3:47am on Instagram containing brainrot you never could have dreamt of

Brittafied.

Then there’s the colleague who joined the office looking terrifyingly competent. Perfect clothes. Perfect CV. Perfect PowerPoint presentations.

Six months later, they are the butt of most jokes and asking people (with all seriousness) how to change the date on their computer.

Brittafied.

There is also the friend who spent years cultivating an image of being mysterious and emotionally unavailable.

Then they got into a relationship. Now you know what their partner ate for breakfast even though you never asked or wanted to know.

Brittafied.

And, perhaps most dangerously, there is the person who becomes convinced they are the sensible one in the group.

This is usually the final stage.

Because once someone starts saying, “Guys, I’m actually the most normal person here,” it is already over.

They have been Brittafied beyond recovery.

The strange thing is that we seem to enjoy watching this happen. We don’t necessarily want our favourite characters to remain perfectly competent. Competence is admirable, but incompetence is funny. We want the cool girl to occasionally make a spectacularly stupid decision. We want the smart person to misunderstand something painfully obvious. We want the morally superior character to trip over their own argument.

Because perfection is boring and that’s why Brittafication works so well. It reminds us that nobody stays cool forever.

At some point, the mysterious person becomes the oversharer. The organised person loses their keys. The intellectual starts arguing with strangers online. The emotionally mature friend gets drunk and calls their ex.

And somewhere in the background, Britta Perry is smiling her trademark smile.

Because she knows: eventually, everyone gets Britta’d.