Be Careful What You Wish For / Web Original

"People conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request."

— The description of the Subreddit r/MaliciousCompliance

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• In Alien Abduction Role Play, the titular alien, Acktreal Domma, expresses frustration that she isn't allowed to eat the humans under her care. Later in the series she gets her chance to eat human flesh in her feral state, but when told about it when lucid again, she is horrified and breaks down in tears.
• During one of his Among Us videos, CaptainSparklez kept getting only vanilla Crewmate. He wants the game to give him a different role. The lobby he's in is using a mod that adds four roles not normally in Among Us (specifically 'Medic', a crewmate who can shield another player; 'Engineer', a crewmate who can use the vents and fix a sabotage from anywhere on the map; 'Officer', later renamed 'Sheriff' in later mods, a crewmate who can shoot an Impostor but dies if they shoot a crewmate; and 'Joker', later renamed 'Jester', a neutral player who wins if they get ejected). What role does the game give him? Impostor, the other role from the vanilla game.
• In the Tales of the Folly series in the Chakona Space setting, you really should be careful what you wish for on the Folly, as there are a number of fairly mischievous, and meddlesome Rakshani Deities hanging around. The trope is lampshaded word-for-word on a couple of occasions.
• From one of The Cinema Snob's reviews, Beware Children at Play...
  Snob: You know, the kids are evil, just fucking kill them!
  [massacre of children begins as the Snob watches in horror]
  Snob:...I wasn't serious about killing them!
• In the first season of Cobra Kai, Johnny gets hit hard with this trope. First he reopens the dojo in the hopes of training a new generation, only to find that his new students are a horde of youth that wouldn't be out of place in a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. But at the All Valley Tournament, his three top charges have taken his Training from Hell, in response to a bullying epidemic, to its logical extreme.
• In an episode of The Completionist about the Pepsiman game, the beginning of the episode shows Jirard, Alex and Frasier sitting on a couch, complaining about how they're hot and could really go for some cool, refreshing soda. Eventually, Pepsiman shows up and gives them Pepsi! But Frasier notes that it's warm and asks for a cold one instead, prompting Pepsiman to give him a can that was stored in his crotch. Frasier complains loudly...and is transformed into Pepsi. That Alex proceeds to drink.
• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Ivy used to hope that her life could become more eventful than simply falling into the same routine of going to school every day. Then she got superpowers, which is a little more than what she was expecting or wanted.
• Rob from Dimension Heroes wishing for a less boring summer. Boy, did he get that wish granted...
• The Red Guy from Don't Hug Me I'm Scared was the only one of the three students who wanted a relatively normal life away from constant interruptions by whimsical yet sinister teachers. In episode 6, he gets an office job in a more normal world and finds it to be extremely boring.
  • Another spoiler-ful interpretation also fits this: He was an office worker who wanted to make a children's show. Roy gave him the opportunity, but because of the corporate sponsorship the show was ruined.
• Invoked in an intentionally nonsensical manner in the Something Awful parody "horror film" Doom House. "My name is Reginald P. Linux, and ever since my wife died, I've been very depressed. This is why I've been searching for the house of my dreams. But as a philosopher once said, be careful what you dream for, because you just... might... get it." Since he wasn't "dreaming for" a house haunted by an odd-looking figurine and built over a terrorist burial camp, this makes no sense, and it's only put there as a parody of bad writing.
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is this trope played deadly straight. Billy/Dr. Horrible wants to be a supervillain and join the Evil League of Evil. He also wants to get a girlfriend. Well, he gets one of his wishes when the Evil League demands that he commit a heinous crime ("a murder would be nice of course") as a membership test. This turns out to be Foreshadowing, as the final confrontation with his Arch-Enemy, Captain Hammer, ends with the latter's humiliating defeat and the world bowing to him in fear due to the murder of... his girlfriend, Penny. Cue his entry into the Evil League, having both gained and lost everything he wanted.
• In Season 1 of Empires SMP, Scott repeatedly expresses a desire to get his hands on some Frost Walker-enchanted boots so he can get ice powers, referring to it multiple times as him wanting an "Elsa Arc". Naturally, when he does get the boots and cryokinetic powers, his subsequent character arc parallels Elsa's... including the negative parts.
• In Farce of the Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Ke wants to finish his war, get a more dramatic death scene, and have some memorable last words. Since the Third Judge is a Jackass Genie, he loses the war, gets an absurdly long-drawn and over-the-top death scene, and his last words are "Why am I in a frog's body? Why am I in a maid outfit?"
• Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged: Back when Cloud Strife and Sephiroth were allies, Cloud said he wanted to be just like Sephiroth. Sephiroth kills Cloud's mother, then says they are now the same because Sephiroth doesn't have a mother either.
  Sephiroth: You admired me so much, and now you've experienced the pain I've felt for so long. We finally have something in common... Isn't that what you've always wanted? To be JUST. LIKE. ME?
• Fire Emblem on Forums:
  • Fire Emblem On Forums Wonderful Blessing: A common theme with Revivians, humans transported from Earth to Generia is to make wishes with Serena, who then grants it exactly as they wanted, leaving them with unintended consequences. Asuna is a victim of this; she wished to be reincarnated as Asuna from Sword Art Online and got it, ending up the victim of Perverse Sexual Lust and being unable to be anyone except Asuna from Sword Art Online. Those who make wishes with Freya avert this, as Freya is outright incompetent.
• FreedomToons: "Game Stonks" has a rich person tell a poor person to stop buying lattes and invest his money instead. The poor person takes his advice and invests in Game Stop, resulting in the rich person being left in dirty rags and poor himself. The investor then declares that he can buy all the lattes he wants now that he's rich.
• Several JonTron fans kept constantly whining about a lack of new videos, so Jon decided he should please them by leaving Game Grumps to go work on his own videos. While Danny Sexbang, his replacement, is not getting nearly the same amount of hatred he did when he first showed up, there are still many fans who wish they just kept their mouths shut in the first place.
• One instance of the Kakos Industries Ruin-A-Life Drawing had the Wheel of Misery land on the space labelled "Greatest Desire Granted" for its victim, Carl. Carl's greatest wish was to live during a Zombie Apocalypse, so Kakos Industries engineered a zombie apocalypse just for him. They even made someone a fair distance away Patient Zero to give him half a day's head start in getting his preparations in order. Then fifteen zombies bum rushed him while he was sitting on the toilet. Following that, he came back as an undead with his pants around his ankles and insufficient cleanup.
• Limited Life SMP: GoodTimesWithScar has requested Mojang for waterloggable leaf blocks for years, but it winds up being his downfall as he's unable to save himself with Soft Water after being spleefed from Skynet by Martyn.
  Scar: I dropped the water but it waterlogged! Mojang, I know I've cried from the hilltops of needing waterlogged leaves for years upon years! But I really didn't need it. We didn't need it! We never needed it!
• Mahu: In "Second Chance", the Zracon are an alien race of sentient plants who believe in their deity, which they simply call "The Light", with the zeal of fanatics. It reaches a point where they try to bring it to their own universe. They accomplish this... only to be all killed in return.
• New Life SMP: Sparrow spends much of his life as a Human researcher wanting to see what life as a hybrid is like. When he manages to replicate the abilities of one twice — the first time by Professor Guinea Pig means, the second time by supernatural parasitic infection, he finds that The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body and is eventually so disturbed by what his life has come to (both times) that he takes to attempting suicide to get out of it.
• In Noob, we find out that the reason Judge Dead quit playing the MMORPG in which the story is set and got himself hired as a Game Master was that another player among the elite turned out to be his father attempting to connect with him. Judge Dead didn't take it well due to suffering from an Inferiority Superiority Complex and his father being much better at him at stuff having become a pattern over the years. Once a Game Master, Judge Dead decided to use his new power to spite the other player, who had also quit. A message along the lines of "If you want to apologize, log in your avatar one last time and let me ban it forever." gets sent. The other player did log in his gaming avatar Clark Kenting as the hacker known to always get himself in the game despite the best efforts of the Game Master team in the main timeframe. The whole story can very well qualify for Create Your Own Villain.
• Not Always Learning has this tale, in which a class-cutting student tells the professor that all they want from the class they skipped so much is a passing grade. At the end of the semester, the student gets a C... even though they completed enough coursework to earn an A.
  • This choir director demanded nothing less than a personally-delivered doctor's note as proof that his star student was sick the week of a concert. The student turned out to have severe influenza, but delivered the note anyway, panicking the director when he realized the student was not only really sick but contagious.
• Not Always Working has a cocky workplace braggart insisting that he can do someone else's job better than they can. When that coworker goes on vacation, the braggart is made to fill in for them, and quickly overwhelmed.
  • The owner in this story had been actively bending every rule he could to treat his employees generously. When one worker gets greedy over bonus checks, the owner simply gives them exactly what they'd asked for— merit-based bonus checks (the greedy worker hadn't contributed to the project, and so got no bonus), and a departure without being fired (making them ineligible for severance pay).
  • In this story, an entitled lady tries to make the employees of a grocery store do her shopping (from an extremely generic list) for her. The manager acquiesces... and sends the submitter to get her the absolute most expensive of every category she asked for (i.e. interpreting 'snacks' to mean gourmet cookies instead of a bag of potato chips). By the end of the story, not only has the woman been waiting several hours more than otherwise (despite claiming to be in a hurry), a shopping trip that would have cost her around ~$150 has been bumped up to $1,400. The employees then send her on her way and tack up a copy of her receipt on their hall of fame board.
  • A worker with an unpleasant personality decides to demand payment at a higher rate than his position, and threatens to quit if he doesn't get it. The boss happily takes his resignation at face value and sends him on his way.
• On the Pokémon-themed egg-hatching website PokeFarm Q, when the new Mons from Pokémon X and Y were added, several were initially displayed as question marks as their sprites hadn't been completed yet. In response to users constantly demanding that the sprites be completed right now, the admins granted their wish... uploading incredibly bad MS Paint-style artwork for every Pokémon currently without a sprite. In a subversion, the player base took it on the chin, with many finding the sprites hilarious.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: Supernumerary asked to be partnered with an Andalite from Animorphs due to their normally logical, professional manner. The Andalite he ends up with, Ilraen-Aroline-Fothergill, is a Blank Slate due to lacking any defining characteristics whatsoever in the fic he was recruited from; he has barely any personality at all to begin with, let alone anything that would make him act in a logical and professional manner.
• SCP-738 ("The Devil's Deal"). The entity connected to SCP-738 grants wishes as part of a bargain, but it will only give exactly what it has agreed to and no more. For example, one subject who asked for "freedom" disappeared from custody, but was captured again a few hours later.
• YouTuber Shawn Woods posted a video showcasing a very effective mousetrap that catches and drowns mice in a bucket. After many outraged comments about how cruel and inhumane it was to add water and drown said mice, he posted another video showing what happened when he did as they requested and left the bucket empty. Suffice to say, these mice did not throw a tea party together down there; cute or not, mice are wild animals that are not above resorting to cannibalism and are perfectly willing to kill each other due to the stress caused by being trapped. Very cruel and disgusting, indeed.
  Shawn: It's more cruel for me to put mice in a confined area, then have them tear each other to pieces.
• In a Sidemen Spelling Bee video, Vik asked JJ (the proctor) if he can get some difficult words for him to spell. Unfortunately for Vik, he ends up swapping places with Ethan, whom JJ deliberately intends to make him spell hard words at first and this is before JJ made him try to spell N-Word Privileges words...
• StacheBros: In "Night Of The Living Goomba", when Mario and Luigi discover a pile of Goomba corpses underground, they feel immense guilt for killing them and Mario wishes they never died. Unfortunately, Mario's wish being granted leads to him and Luigi being chased by a horde of zombified Goombas.
• Stuart Ashen had a taste of this trope in the Toy Box, Geek Gear July 2016 video. While reviewing the 90s box, Ashen joked about how the 80s box would probably come with the notorious E.T. game after being all pleased with receiving a copy of Link's Awakening DX for the Game Boy. A while later he moves on to the 80s box and finds that there is indeed a copy of E.T. in there, and broke down corpsing. After finally regaining his composure, he warned viewers to never ever joke about these kinds of things because they may become true.
• In That Guy Destroys Psionics, the narrator informed the Pathfinder DM whose campaign he was to join that he wanted to play a rogue with a focus on trap making and disabling. Unfortunately, the DM wanted to direct a D&D meets X-Men campaign with a plot of "magic is dying and psionics are taking its place", and basically directed him to minmax his player character like the other players did or GTFO. So the player came off with an elf wizard called Elsimore, who was so overpowered that he managed to destroy the source of psionics and the setting thrice before the player got thrown out of the group and the DM's house.
• In Three wishes for free will — a story posted on some blog — a man is worried that there is no free will and tries to wish from a genie to have it. However, the genie requires him to explain what he means by free will, and since he doesn't really understand what follows from different explanations he can think of, the results are rather weird. For example, on the second wish, he ends up deciding to do all sorts of crazy things for no reason because he asked to be able to make decisions that "aren't determined".
• WitchCraft SMP: Played for Laughs. In her backstory, Lauren wishes to become a Sand Witch. While she is granted Sand Blaster abilities at the start of the story, she also turns into a literal PB&J sandwich. She later admits she should have been more specific about her request to the universe.

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