- Day of the Barney Trilogy: The titular Day Of The Barney kicks off one of these, a hellish new earth where adults are slaughtered en masse and children are indoctrinated in camps, destined to one day be culled when they become old enough as well. What survivors remain have to flee underground in hiding, and even when it ends the world has an irrepairable chunk taken out of the human population.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers
- In Heroes for Earth, no one cares to fight the Corporation's callous destruction of the ecosystem through their blatant corruption and waving of power over local governments.
- The setting of Code Geass Megiddo: To begin with, Japan was totally destroyed by detonating the underground reserves of sakuradite, with what little remnants of it now being a desolate wasteland, like The Matrix. From there, the rest of the world is engaged in the Code Geass equivalent of World War III, with all the devastation that entails. Every faction has their share of narrow-minded racists and warmongers that want to wipe out some section of humanity, while in the shadows, the Eildons (the story's version of the Geass Order, which now holds a Knights Templar / Illuminati tone and composition) watches the war's progress while preparing for Ragnarok. All that said, Megiddo would have a serious case of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring if not for certain "good" characters and situations breaking the gloom, as well as Lelouch's proclaimed agenda being to destroy the current world and replace it with something better.
- A Is A: The most prominent to date has been the world of Battlefield 2142: Nearly all aerable land in the Northern Hemisphere is overtaken by glaciers, what's left of Europe is under the crushing occupation of the Pan-Asian Coalition, and what's left of Europe's population has to live in crammed cities in North Africa. The majority of food is insect meat, soy, and lentils, with special occasions meaning a loaf of bread and chicken meat. Nearly every civilian contributes to the war economy, while nationalist movements still operate trying to destabilize the EU. It's hinted life under PAC control is even worse.
- Aeon Natum Engel: The Neon Genesis Evangelion cast placed in the CthulhuTech setting + F.E.A.R.. In the background there is the Unknowable Tsab, the Lovecraftisized Darker and Edgier Time and Space Administration Bureau. That should be self-explanatory.
- Its rewrite Aeon Entelechy Evangelion at the first glance seems to be a little lighter, what with stabilized fronts, the Rapine Storm successfully contained and with everyone being much, much more competent. And then we are introduced to the TITAN AIs, and one of them is based on CABAL.
- In Avenger Knight, Gotham is presented as such a dark city that some characters wonder if it’s actually cursed, with characters like Clint reflecting that it’s clear that Batman is the only reason it hasn’t fallen apart already.
- In Christian Humber Reloaded, the world faces the threat of village-destroying raiders, Chaos, the Visorak, Dr. Eggman's forces, rogue dragons, the Zerg, a fusion of Sin and Vegnagun, Organization XIII, and even the President, among others. The only hope it has is a psychopath who will kill people for barely any reason.
- Death Note Equestria: After centuries of being a Sugar Bowl, Equestria is completely unprepared for the increase in crime that comes with the increased population. As a result, its justice system is ridiculously inefficient, to the point of convicted murderers getting released when a prison gets overcrowded. This is what motivates Twilight Sparkle to become the first Kira and begin killing criminals.
- Fallout: Equestria and the fan made universe surrounding it are noteworthy in that they take the magical land of Equestria and make it more awful and crapsacky than the Fallout games it is partially based on.
- In Fractured (SovereignGFC), a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel, Origins Pandora is still a mess. It goes up to eleven since in this universe, the whole surrounding galaxy is very similar to Pandora, with a few ultra-wealthy elites escaping a miserable existence but everyone else condemned to live meager lives. When the Flood shows up, there isn't much of a coherent defense mounted as a result.
- The Infinite Loops were started when the multiverse crashed and damage was done to multiple realities. That's not this trope. What is this trope is loops that are quarantined, either due to being so full of viruses and malware they could Mind Rape any Looper that winds up in there, or simply having enough baseline power to pose a danger to the multiverse.
- The Lone Traveler started out in one and comes across several in his wanderings through the multiverse.
- Metal Gear: Green: Despite looking pristine and beautiful, the MHA world is marred in massive amounts of corruption and scandals. Most heroes act and behave like criminals when not on duty or given assignments by the HPSC, Africa is a massive war-torn continent except for HPSC-controlled cities kept pristine alongside a 50-mile circle where no battles take place, human and drug trafficking are rampant, and crime is strictly controlled by the HPSC. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to better keep hero society in line. Too little crime and heroes seem like a pointless expenditure. Too much and they seem ineffective. So the HPSC makes deals with large criminal organizations, in exchange for the organizations following their orders. People with Mutation Quirks, 'Villainous' Quirks or no Quirks are discriminated against so immensely that many of them end up becoming villains. The ones that don't either join the MSF or are already Driven to Suicide. Is it any wonder many disgruntled heroes and civilians join the MSF?
- It's practically bad enough that the Broker was collecting naval ships that were stolen. And since the armed forces across the world except for a few nations are nonexistent, it meant that these ships are sold on the Black market at dirt cheap prices or for free.
- Grizzly mentally remarks when Eagle reveals he's Quirkless that if he hadn't joined the MSF and fought on a battlefield, he'd be no different than those who act all condescending to the Quirkless.Narration: War didn’t give a fuck on what your quirk was, all of them were dying to the mortar shell.
- When Ocelot goes to a JSDF armory to get some weapons, he finds that 70 tanks are missing and the rest have their parts stripped, all artillery pieces were either missing or had their parts stripped, and many of the guns were either rusted from disuse or likely gone.
- In the world of Mirai SMP, if you're one of the unlucky people chosen to participate in the game, it is almost guaranteed that you're gonna die, and probably brutally, too. You get to bear witness to everyone you care about dying one by one. And all this is for the game of a sick God.
- For a Dark Fantasy like The Night Unfurls, this is surprisingly downplayed — the Low Fantasy elements keep the main setting, the country of Eostia, from being so relentlessly, unrealistically dark. Accurately speaking, Eostia is portrayed as a workable yet flawed place, where anyone unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of those flaws would suffer.
- While Wretched Hives (e.g. Ansur) and other shoddy places are not uncommon, they are not everywhere.
- Eostia has been engaging a centuries-old with the Grim Up North. War Is Hell, obviously, but the country did manage to persist for centuries as well.
- The Church is obviously not saintly, but not beyond saving, a rarity amongst the usual depiction in other Dark Fantasy series. Scumbags like Archbishop Grishom exist, but an average, nameless or non-nominally important cleric in the battlefield can be decent and fulfil their duty as expected of their occupation. In particular, one of the heroes (Lily) started out as a nun of the church.
- Slavery is considered to be a crime in Eostia, and several characters treat it as a special kind of evil, but it is often went unpunished, indicating a sizeable black market implied to persist for centuries. As the trafficking scenes would tell you, the enslaved are obviously not having a good time. Fortunately, progress of any sort is being made, with the slavers responsible getting hunted down.
- The narrative doesn't give any indication on whether the gods do anything, but there is certainly an active Eldritch Abomination. Said Eldritch Abomination is neither benevolent nor something out of a straight Cosmic Horror Story, which really says a lot on the bent of this story. Ah, forgot to mention. The Protagonist (Kyril) is the Eldritch Abomination.
- In Project Ignition it sucks to be on the Earth. It really, really does. Starting back in the 1970s, there's been an Alien Invasion (it left the world to be as described "That fucked up world"), constant warfare where civilians often ARE the targets, and if you're not getting killed by some corporate, you're living in slave like conditions, there's highly corrosive radioactive particles floating in the air, EVERYWHERE, and dying of "Kojima Poisoning" is EXTREMELY painful, and common. And oh, the aliens are back- and the best weapon to fight them? It spreads the aforementioned "Kojima Particles". Yeah, everyone is just shy of "Fucked" and "Fucked Harder". And that plan to escape the Earth? You know, the Closed Plan? Corporate Scheme.
- In Rising of the Sleeping Soldier, when the other cardinal heroes ask Alucard what his world is like, he describes it plainly as "[c]overed in shit, piss, and gore. The church is corrupt and everyone is dead or in the process of dying." Considering it's Dark Age Europe with demons roaming the woods, the description is not too far off.
- Soul Chess: Given it's Parent Series, this is pretty much a given; both the living world and the afterlife are pretty nasty places to be on the whole. The first part is mainly afterlife based; crime and disease are rampant, living conditions are woeful, and the nobles do pretty much what they want with impunity. Lelouch spends over a century trying to make things better, sometimes through being an All-Loving Hero, others by being a Manipulative Bastard (mainly tricking the Gotei into getting off their backsides and dealing with the problems themselves). Later actions shift to the world of the living. He knows the living world is going to get more crapsack; he's lived through it once, and now gets to see all again as a spectator. And because of the Grandfather Paradox, he knows he can do absolutely nothing about it.
- Sudden Contact: After the defeat of the zerg in the first story, the galaxy as a whole becomes this, as the zerg invasion left the elcor an endangered species, hundreds of worlds uninhabitable, and the asari without a fleet or homeworld. The latter results in the asari losing their spot on the Citadel Council, causing civil unrest between the turians and the salarians that escalates into full-scale war, with much of the galaxy's races caught in the middle. Furthermore, the many terran polities are at each other's throats, and the batarians, the galaxy's most disreputable species, have made a significant jump in their economy and military thanks to the Kel-Morian Combine, and other species are suffering for it.
- Warhammer 40000 Trouble: In the 21st century, there's only love adventures. Okay, isn't that's a vortex appearing in the sky? Meteors falling from that vortex? We don't care, we have laser towers everywhere... what do you mean there's an EMP storm following? Wait, are those greenskins riding those meteors? Now the cast of To Love Ru have to fight in the endless wars of Warhammer 40,000.
- Thought the world after the Tragedy is bad enough? The fanfiction "Forest of Despair" continues a couple decades after the Tragedy, and things are still bad. With Killing Games still happening and a questionable group called the Committee slowly taking over the world. And it just gets worse with famine, gang violence and poverty on the rise. And this is only the surface of everything...
- The Despair Kids actually manages to make the Tragedy itself worse than in canon. Roughly 4 billion people have become despairs, the global population is falling like dominoes, and entire countries have succumbed; the United States is in the grip of civil War, with the last remnants of the sane population holed up in New England, and a similar fate has befallen the entire South American continent. Canada fell to a coup and has become a lawless hellhole, Europe is waging a brutal war against Russia and Africa, China has broken up into four smaller states, and Japan has become the most violent country on the planet, with every type of criminal, cannibal, pervert, and psycho free to walk the streets. To make matters worse, both the despairs and affected countries are hurling nukes around like they're snowballs, destroying cities like Caracas and Mecca. And all the pollutants produced from this conflict are slowly eating away at the ozone layer.
- The world of The Faceless (Disguise of Carnivorism) an AU with a Broken Masquerade exposing the reality of the Shinigami World to the human race which results in a post-apocalyptic world of nihilism-civilization has collapsed, it's a world of permanent war, everyone wears masks and are busy dying.
- The Odyssey. It's set in Exalted, and the protagonist is currently a mortal. That should tell you all you need to know. Every day is a constant battle for survival, pitting sheer determination against the overwhelming power of the Realm's Dragon-Blooded.
- A Brighter Dark
does this by making the two sides in the original story more closely resemble their real-life counterparts. Hoshido became an intensely xenophobic state consumed by infighting and civil war, while Nohr remained mostly the same with more emphasis being focused on their incredibly high death toll and mass starvation. And then the two sides go to war, and all that entails.- Despite this, the overall message of the fic remains strangely optimistic, meaning the author is probably aiming for a World Half Full feeling. Whether or not that is achieved is a divisive subject.
- Harry Potter Fanfictions love this trope, and it doesn't even require Voldemort to be even in a body to do it, Pureblood behavior allows the fanfiction writers to make a world that is the absolute worst take on medieval society...and it isn't so much a crack fic as in other worlds. After all, in canon you have people like Umbridge in power....
- Deserving is set in a version of the setting where most of the heroes are jerks, creepy, or just plain absent. The villains aren't much better.
- The wizarding world is becoming this in Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness. And Sluagh somehow managed to mesh the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the worst of Voldemort's reign of terror.
- Faery Heroes starts off in a future where Voldemort attacked the Muggles, and ended up causing the magicals to be in a desperate war of survival, with all the magicals forgetting he started it. The first chapter featured a dying Santa Claus due to how bad it was, for crying out loud.
- The Firebird Trilogy deconstructs the harem genre, creating a world where sexual harassment of young males is encouraged, Goblins are witch-raping monsters, and Voldemort (who is very much like his canon counterpart, if perhaps worse), is seen by most of the fans as a hero.
- To explain the first, if a girl or woman doesn't "poach" a boy at a young age, they are likely to never get married or have a partner at all due to the extreme gender imbalance. So young teen girls have to plan out seducing, blackmailing, tricking, or outright raping a good prospective mate if they hope to have any sort of future at all (as power and success is found in family groups, rather than as individuals).
- The Harem War has over a third of all magical females as concubines against their wills, hinted to be killed in later life after being made as sex slaves at very young ages, with the rest of the magical females in general being treated poorly.
- Harry Potter and the Altered World has this with large conflicts in Russia, China, South American and Africa, but in a What If version of the story the world is so bad that Bellatrix teaches at Hogwarts, muggle borns can't buy books for school (this includes Hermione) and all the main characters are either orphans or abused. Not to mention that world had Voldemort as a hero to Muggleborns and Half-Bloods... and he was killed by accident by an evil James Potter.
- There's a world in the realm of Fan Fiction where daring to like what you wish to can result in torture, where ideology can get you imprisoned with guards who are Mind Rape incarnate, where pedophiles are allowed to be teachers, and where you can get away scot-free for murdering someone who asked you to quiet down in the movie theater. In this world, students are tortured, reason seems to have fled, and whatever choice you make on ideology, you are doomed to become reviled, except if you fill some completely arbitrary criteria. What is this horrific world? It's My Immortal, widely considered the worst fanfic ever written.
- Thirty Hs has Surf Ninja Moon X, a world whose ecology was decimated by the surf ninjas, leaving a cabbage and mustard sandwich as the last piece of food. And then Harry eats it. It's actually cartilage and mustard.
- Wish Carefully has Magical Britain turn into one due to Harry deciding To Win Without Fighting by giving the Death Eaters exactly what they want. The economy and social infrastructure have practically collapsed due most of the business owners, workforce and consumers leaving the country with Harry, and Hogwarts is reduced to nothing more than an empty castle due Harry and his crew taking away everything that could be moved and the part of Hogwarts that made it magical deciding to leave with them. On top of that, the purebloods' close relations and more isolated population has caused their inbreeding to reach the point that more Squibs are being born in each succeeding generation (while the few non-Squibs are so intellectually and magically weak that they can't even complete the traditional sixth year Hogwarts courses), forcing the Death Eaters to resort to kidnapping women from other countries to serve as Breeding Slaves in order to get some fresh new blood into their limited gene pool, a solution that even Lucius admits has held off the inevitable by a few more generations. In response to the kidnappings, the International Confederation of Wizards put up a Net over England and keeps high surveillance on anyone who enters or leaves the country. Any attempts to correct the above problems by investing in the Muggle World or reproducing with the Muggleborns are impossible due a magically-enforced treaty barring any contact with Muggles (with the consequence being that the wizard in question will lose their magic) and having any new Muggleborn shipped off-country. And since they don't have anyone to lord over, Voldemort has become even more of a torture-happy Control Freak who will casually torture any of his followers for kicks and kills people wearing glasses. By the time Lucius is an old man on his last legs, everyone has become so sick of Voldemort's cruelty and madness and are so desperate to fix things that they're planning to kill Voldemort themselves or, if Harry really is the only one who can kill him, incapacitate him and mail him to Harry for disposal, so the treaty that also bars those who have left from returning until Voldemort and his men are no longer in control, will be invalidated. However, as Lucius' grandson (and White Sheep of the family) Leonidas has pointed out, there's no guarantee Harry will do anything until their very society has died out. As a silver lining however, the rest of the Magical World has gotten much better due the other pureblood supremacists seeing what happened in Britain and these ideals getting discredited, which has led to more esteem and better treatment for Muggleborns, and those who have emigrated with Harry have experienced a prosperous economy and a very healthy and robust population.
- This is pretty much the default for much of the world in the AU, the 1983: Doomsday Stories, at least in the first 10 years or so after Doomsday. A good deal of the Nations are dead. Those who survived the initial nuclear carnage were forced to a grueling existence of simply trying to stay alive from day to day. Eventually, things do get better in some parts, like the Alpine Confederation.
- Hivefled's take on Alternia manages to be even more crapsack then it was in the original, which is saying something. Mind you, this is somewhat unsurprising given whose in charge.
- Horseshoes and Hand Grenades is set in the optimistic world of Fourze...except in this world, Gentaro's death brought in an ancient serpent who resurrected him and now Gentaro's planning on destroying the world. Moreover, other serpents have begun possessing people who have also recently died, other Kamen Rider shows got involved in the mix, the original Big Bad is crossing lines and the Mysterious Benefactor is being amoral for some odd reason. All in all, friendship isn't going to be the shining beacon of light in this fic.
- The Great Desert takes place in a desertified Hyrule and centers around restoring life to the kingdom.
- In The Lion King Adventures, the world is this for Simba, Nala and Haiba in Series Five after the destruction of the Pride Lands at the end of Series Four.
- Despite being set in the same world, Miraculous: The Phoenix Rises is practically set in one. Virtually every adult or authority figure seen is useless, or worse, anyone who gets fed up risks getting mutated into a supervillain, and a generally cynical tone hangs over everyone.
Monster Girl Encyclopedia
- Due to taking place before the monsters were turned into Cute Monster Girls, the world of Sword and Claw is filled with vicious monsters that prey on humans, and (as shown in an early chapter) they can wipe out entire villages. Even the heroes tasked to fight them don't always succeed.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- The setting of Bad Future Crusaders — the Face Heel Turned Queen Twilight Sparkle has turned conquered Equestria and the Crystal Empire, turning them into a totalitarian Police State/Empire, whose military has no problem with bombing population centers in order to drive fugitives out of hiding. Meanwhile, what we've seen of the rest of the world isn't nice either, as Sonhos Vale (the country where Apple Bloom and Silver Spoon grew up as refugees) has been split by civil war for so long no one remembers why, and Saddle Arabia has suffered from such serious drought that its society is on the verge of collapse.
- The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum is a War Fic take on The Conversion Bureau and promptly takes it all up to eleven, with all the crapsack-ness that it implies. And there's a lot. Food is so scarce that some jobs have started paying people in rations instead of money, and some people have resorted to cannibalism; humanity is fighting a what is pretty much a Hopeless War and their only possible shot at victory is likely to be a Pyrrhic Victory by detonating the Yellowstone megavolcano; if they lose they'll get turned into zombified slaves, with the Equestrian Barrier is spreading across the world and destroying every human and human-made object it touches. So many of our characters are traumatized in some way that the fic may deserve its own page for Woobies, and it may actually be a convincing argument for bringing back the old "World of Woobie" trope. However, there's still a glimmer of hope, as a good Equestria much more based on MLP canon has joined the battle and will aid humanity.
- TCB!Equestria, however, is as little of a Crapsaccharine World as you can have while still being 'straight' crapsack, as TCB!Equestria's war effort has not been kind to it. There's implied starvation, overpopulation of urban centers and pollution, a total logistic breakdown, mass poverty, and deranged newfoals just barely hidden under the veneer. Only fear and brainwashing appear able to hold it together.
- The TCB!Crystal Empire, according to Stephan and any refugees from there, has turned into a police state under total media blackout, and the crystal ponies have been enslaved, forced to mine for crystals everyday, kept obedient out of fear of humans and they aren't even told that the barrier is impassable. Marcus even goes so far as to call the place the "North Korea of Equus."
- The Equestria of 1000 years hence in Harmony Theory: Princesses Celestia and Luna are, to all intents and purposes, dead, having been sealed away inside their respective celestial bodies. A massive magical wasteland now occupies a large portion of what was once the center of Equestria, so dangerous it's nearly certain death to go inside. The loss of the Alicorns brought about a Götterdämmerung effect, resulting in a catastrophic lowering of ambient magic; several races, explicitly including the Buffalo have gone extinct, Griffons are dying out because the lowered magic has made it almost impossible for them to breed, Dragons can't grow beyond a certain size or else they die from the Square Cube Law, and Ponies... Well, to start with, Rainbow Dash finds they have become Made of Plasticine as a side effect of their general loss in magical power; they're so much generally weaker than her that she almost kills somepony by accident, being so much tougher, stronger and faster that she's classified as a living superweapon, and a powerful pony of the "modern era" would be just barely better than average in Rainbow Dash's original time. Cutie Marks, now renamed Talent Brands, are capable of mentally influencing their hosts in extremely unpleasant ways; for example, a pony unfortunate enough to have Talent Brand for killing (which itself shows what kind of crapsack world this is) has been driven insane by a constant mental barrage of subconscious demands to kill everyone she meets. There's a Mad God who wants to destroy the world. Equestrian civilization has shattered into two fundamentally opposed warring territories, one to either side of the aforementioned magical wasteland; the Solar Empire and the Luna Republic. There's a Straw Nihilist running around after the Elements of Harmony for some insane plot of his own. There's hints that the Elements of Harmony may actually be an Artifact of Doom with good press. And the technological progress nowhere near matches what Rainbow Dash expected after 1000 years. It's not really so unbelievable that Rainbow Dash is pretty dismissive of the future.
- MLP is set in a world of the crapsaccharine variety. The Equestria of MLP is quite similar to the Equestria of the original show; however, this fic places a much higher emphasis on its more unsavory aspects. For instance, many of the more powerful major villains (Tirek, Chrysalis, Sombra, etc.) are treated as The Dreaded Sealed Evils in Cans, and the Reality-Warping God of Chaos Discord is regarded as an unfathomably powerful Eldritch Abomination who is treated with a level of fear and dread that one might expect to be directed towards Lovecraftian horrors. It also explicitly has deep societal problems such as vitriolic racism, child prostitution, and oppressive, soul-destroying cults.
- The Pony POV Series has the Epilogue timeline (based on the first series' alternate ending, later expanded on by Applejack's glimpses in the Truth, and eventually explored in-depth by the Dark World arc), which shows what would have happened had Discord succeeded in conquering Equestria. It is possibly the ultimate Villain World, where the Mane Cast have been brainwashed into Discord's loyal enforcers, killing anyone (including children) who opposes him (and sometimes for no reason whatsoever), while at the same time are victims of his mind games the same as everypony else. Meanwhile, Discord's rewritten history to make himself seem benevolent compared to the deposed Celestia and Luna, even as he causes random chaotic events on a daily basis for his amusement — among other things, it seems the dead rising to eat their loved ones is a common occurrence under his reign. Need I go on? It's such a horrible place that even Original Timeline!Discord is unnerved by it.
- Ironically, when we return during the Dark World Arc, part of the story is showing that there's still good in it, including the previously mentioned Sea Ponies, griffins and pegasi giving up racial tensions and essentially merging into one species (hippogriffs), and Changelings have gone from parasitic love vampires to downright heroic. While it's still a nasty place to live, there's at least hope of saving it. And a redeemed Twilight is going to try. Eventually, Discord and Nightmare Eclipse are defeated and reconstruction begins.
- The Grim Dark Worlds, Alternate Universes ruled over by Nyarlathotrot, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the negative qualities of the Shadows Who Make (his sibling Fillimon represents their positive ones). Nyarlathotrot enjoys a good tragedy by nature, and as such tends to invoke this trope when making a world. Thankfully, Twilight's Alicorn self, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Happy Endings, took to purifying his worlds and removing problems.
- Nyarlathotrot naturally gets clopped off by this and helps Discord perform a Rewriting Reality plot to turn the prime timeline into one of these were every grimdark fic is happening at once as Revenge by Proxy on Amicitia, with the CMC having to stop it.
- The Alternate Universe depicted in Sunshine and Fire. It is not at all a pleasant world - the Endless Daytime brought on by Daymare Sun has caused water (and thus the ability to grow crops) to become a luxury with death by dehydration a very common occurrence, the Earth Ponies being horribly treated and discriminated against, children are taken away from their homes if they have a special talent that could be useful to the Queen (and they're often Brainwashed into her ruthless agents on top of that), there's political infighting, murders, reeducation, and treason both direct and indirect.
- The "present" era of the Twilight Then, Twilight Now Universe is pretty much this, after a long chain of Gotterdammerungs. The end result is that, after a series of war that left over 60% of all Equestrians dead, the Crystal Empire being destroyed, the deaths of Princesses Celestia and Luna, the temporary-but-damaging reign of a zealous worshipper of a new monotheistic religion, Zoraponyism, who brutally tortured and murdered Alicornists for their different beliefs, the rise of a brutal Earth Pony Supremacist kingdom in Coltonville that mutilates unicorn & pegasi foals at birth so they can't do anything but live as Earth Ponies, the destruction of the Tree of Harmony, a literal Hate Plague that has resulted in stallions being denied political power and generally made socially inferior in comparison to mares as a result of it driving so many of them violently insane, and the efforts of evil-worshipping sorcerers and witches, ponykind has changed to the point that things like "friendship" and "pacifism" are spat on rather than upheld as virtues. It's so awful that a B-plot of one story, The Magnificent Six, has a character, Applejack, made immortal shortly before everything went to hell, work to travel back through time and Set Right What Once Went Wrong, arguing that a world this damaged and warped has no right to exist at the cost of the peaceful, loving, happy Equestria of old. Though apparently the world is set on track to a brighter future at the end of the "core" fanfic (the titular Twilight Then, Twilight Now), "Ponyland" is still an awful world until then, and the series has struggled considerably with Too Bleak, Stopped Caring.
- In Adored, the changeling kingdom is a horrible place to live, no thanks to Chrysalis' incompetence as a ruler and lack of care for her people, although the harsh weather and desolate environment doesn't help. Only 10% of the population lives in towns and cities, the majority of changelings are peasants, the infant mortality rate is a staggering 25%, and large numbers of skilled workers are immigrating to other places like Equestria to start better lives.
- With a world filled with 9 ultra destructive demons who have a habit of escaping their human prisons and people capable of causing earthquakes, summoning snakes big enough to eat cars, mind rape people and in general causing mass destruction, Naruto worlds are rarely that far behind the Harry Potters.
- Always Visible: When reading this work, you may get the impression that London is a very terrible place, with disgusting restaurants, hotels and taxi drivers.
- Brave New World
- You know how Treasure Town in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon is listed as one of these? In this fic, it's about eleven zillion times worse. The entire town is built upon a huge gate that contains the most evil thin in the Omniverse (that is, a collection of every multiverse ever), and it is the primary base of the Nhilators, a villainous group that at times gives Chaos a run for its money. There is exactly one character from Treasure Town that is not evil, and he's a ghost who became a priest in order to repent.
- Also there's a place which is worse than Treasure town... Genocide city, a place worst than the gate to hell. Even after the seal on the gate weakens and monstrous things start crawling up from the depths, Treasure Town is still "not as bad as Genocide City".
- The entire world in Poké Wars has become one of these, what with wild 'mons running rampant in a discoordinate, but efficient, effort to wipe humanity off the map. Cities covered by Muk sludge, towns overrun by Fearows, legendaries practically nuking large settlements... you get the idea. It's even worse when you find out that the Pokémon's powers were amplified way above their original levels. Johto got it particularly bad, being the "rebel" Pokémon's main stronghold.
- The Sun Soul, a story set in the Pokémon universe is essentially a highly methodical deconstruction of how brutal and dangerous a world with such monsters would be. A single Gyarados for example is more than capable of wiping a small town off the map. The villians start and control wars from the shadows, orchestrate crises to further theit political power, and merrily murder anyone who gets in their way. The heroes are, of course, trying to fix all this but in a world stalked by one horrifyingly effective Hero Killer after another, where being Killed Off for Real at any moment is a real threat, it isn't easy.
- Redwall ficcers love this trope, unsurprisingly considering the Crapsaccharine World nature of the original. Success varies wildly.
- ultamite nineball attempted this.
- The bleak Dark Science Fantasy setting of Sonic X: Dark Chaos could possibly give Warhammer 40,000 a run for its money - the Milky Way Galaxy is not a nice place. A civil war between the Metarex and Tsali the Ultimate Weapon has decimated countless worlds and murdered billions of people. Meanwhile, God and Satan Are Both Jerks who wage eternal cold war on each other and are responsible for most of the bleakness, manipulating and dooming whole galaxies to annihilation in order to further their plans. A corrupt and repressive autocratic empire of Demons and a divided federation of Angels battle in a Forever War across the whole universe, with genocide and Rape, Pillage, and Burn being the rule rather than the exception. Shroud parasites, led by their Primes, devour entire worlds on a regular basis. Torture, rape, starvation and disease run rampant, forcing innocents such as Molly and Leon's refugee group to resort to cannibalism to survive. By the end of the story, it's implied that the galaxy has been depopulated so much that it may never recover. And that's all before Dark Tails and the Forerunners enter the fray...
- Zigzagged with the alternate endings. Ending B manages to top even that where The Bad Guy Wins and opens up a supercluster-sized Negative Space Wedgie, with the resulting Shroud invasion bringing about a universe-wide dark age. However, Ending D is notably more hopeful and upbeat on a small scale.
- The author's background materials makes it worse. One of the most sacred traditions of the Angels is ritual child molestation. The Jews and their society are obsessed with racial purity and genocide, and often exterminate worlds with toxic gas. The Muslims routinely inflict And I Must Scream on their women and female captives. And so on.
- In Flight of the Condor, Kirk and Spock chase a fugitive and end up in a crapsack world. It is the Earth of an alternate 23rd century.
- Survivors's Krypton is a blend of the Krypton's worst versions across various Superman media: a perpetually hot world of boiling brown seas, polluted atmosphere, frequent earthquakes and mutated creatures where people ate solely artificial food and babies were genetically engineered. Kara is shocked when she finds out the air is -comparatively speaking- amazingly pure.
- In Thomas Abridged, the Other Railway is dark, grimy, and never sunny. Oh, and it's populated by "fakes", which are mindless clones of Sodor diesels with a taste for human blood, and it's also the headquarters of an operation trying to take over Sodor and capture Lady.
- Sodor itself isn't far behind, though it is somewhat more comedic in nature: On top of being dotted with abandoned mines and polluted rivers, the railway that connects it all is disorganized, underfunded, and run by a depressed, violently temperamental overweight man in the process of a drawn-out divorce proceeding, and its staffing consists of a group of dysfunctional locomotives who are just as surly and cynical as the railway workers that drive them. The infrastructure somehow keeps going despite of this, and despite of the fact that everyone on the island appears to be alcoholic, even the locomotives. Especially the locomotives.
- We have this to a certain degree in the Gensokyo 20XX Series with Fantastic Racism being a driving factor, especially in 20XXV, when it was made a tad more apparent in chapter fourteen where Yuuka notes that some people resorted to their more unethical side to get by or get things that they need, as well as the fact that drugs run rampant. There is also the fact that Wretched Hives like The Forbiddens exist and Bedlam Houses as the alternatives to dealing with the very mentally ill. Aside from the aforementioned, it seems to okay. Word of God did state that some semblance of this can be seen in how the children behaved, making a comparison to South Park.Amoridere: On the note of the swearing, which they do on a fairly normal basis, well, I suppose it could serve as an allegory or representation of the world and life's state, the world being a crapsack. As a matter of fact, the kids are also not necessarily immune to violence and neither do they have much holding back when they use it, let alone any qualms about using it. I mean, think about it this way, sure, when the kids swear on South Park, it is supposed to be seen as funny, but, at the same time, seeing all of the other stuff they do besides swearing (like bullying, stealing, and various other things that kids have no business doing) and doing whatever the hell they want to do whenever they wanna do it, it could show as to how useless their parents are, as well as the fact theire world is also a crapsack.
- The Shape of the Nightmare to Come - Dark Fic of Warhammer 40,000, the patron saint of all crapsack worlds and turns its crappiness up to eleven. The God Emperor of Mankind dies and is reborn in the Warp as the Star Father, ruthless Chaos God of Order, the Astronomicon collapses, so the Imperium of Man gets fractured into several smaller empires, out of which many are even worse than it was and most of its' forces are either destroyed or start mad, fanatical crusades. The Tau turns into bitter conquerors who sees other races as lesser ones. Most of the Eldar die to awake Ynnead, who ends up trapped in the Infinity Circuits so they all died for nothing. Chaos breaks from the Eye of Terror and two Chaos Empires - one ruled by Abbadon and another by Huron Blackheart - rise. The Orks and Tyranids merge into terrible New Devourer that eats half of the galaxy. The Void Dragon breaks free through ends trapped in Sol System. Oh, and the Necrons have unleashed Ophilim Kiasoz, an Eldritch Abomination that unmakes solar systems just by passing through them. The introduction sums it up:It is the 51st Millennium and I cannot wake up from this nightmare! I cannot wake up!
- Its sequel, The Age of Dusk, may be heading into that direction - while some things gets better, many gets much worse.
- While a great many Worm Fanfictions are prone to focusing on obscure secondary characters, many of which die in canon, special mention must be given to Bird which features the canon backstory of Labyrinth and Burnscar. An insane asylum for parahumans.
- Re: Yin Yang Who? has one of this story's review summing it up as this... partially.note
