Crapsack World / Western Animation

When Vendetta took over, this town went from happy to crappy.

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#-D

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: One episode had an evil clone of Jimmy managing to create another Earth, where every single person there, parents and teachers included, was evil, the sun was never bright, and doing anything good was severely frowned upon.
• American Dad!: Langley Falls, Virginia is inhabited by jerks, psychopaths, idiots, drug lords, sex offenders, etc. The mere fact that Roger is in this world really says it all.
• Argai: The Prophecy: By 2075, Earth has become this.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The world has been enduring war for a century, with the person given the duty to stop the war has been missing for the same amount of time (and when he comes back to the world, is a 12-year-old boy). What isn't colonized by the Fire Nation has been severely depleted of their population and benders (with the Avatar being the last of the Airbenders after the Fire Nation killed them all) or a brainwashed utopia, a 15-year-old male with no bending capability is placed in the role of being the sole guardian of the Southern Water Tribe, and we see multiple lives and families ruined by the war, on both sides. Thankfully, the story chronicles Aang's journey to restore balance to the world. At least for the moment.
  • The world in The Legend of Korra is less crapsacky, as peace has been restored, but Republic City resembles Depression America, or perhaps even Germany, with poverty being rampant and radical politics and popular unrest widespread. The benders abused their power, and that caused the Equalist Revolution, which is pretty much a terrorist movement led by a highly manipulative Knight Templar and that manages to conquer Republic City. Afterward, Amon is defeated and the Equalist movement is seemingly losing power, but the next season features evil spirits running rampant.
  • The episode "Beginnings" reveals what the world was before the Avatar and the Bending Arts existed. The spirits invaded the material world and killed most of the human race on the grounds of "disrespecting nature" (which seemingly included capturing and eating wild animals out of self-preservation). To survive, humanity was forced to live in the shells of giant, magical turtles that also gave a few of them Elemental Powers (the precursor of the Bending Arts) to ward off the spirits and gather food. But even then, life was hard since the turtles could only carry so many people, social inequality was high, and only a few people were given the elemental power of fire to gather food. If it had not been for Wan, the world would have continued this way.
  • It turns out things have already been much worse prior to Book 1. Every country in the world (except for the Fire Nation) has an evil head of state. At the end of each book though, that changes. By the end of Book 3 however, things only got worse after the evil Earth Queen is dead. Even with the evil rulers defeated and replaced with better ones, the new world leaders are now being targeted by a global anarchist organization.
• Batman: The Animated Series: Gotham City is almost as bad as its comic counterpart. In most other action shows of its time, there were space monsters and futuristic skyscrapers. Gotham was the only kids' show setting you had to walk the streets of while worrying about getting mugged and/or shot.
• Batman Beyond is similar to The Animated Series, only more Cyberpunk. In the promotional commercials in the days leading up to Batman Beyond's premiere, the narrator described Gotham as "a city without a hero. Its people, no hope. Its youth, no future."
• The French cartoon The Bear's Island (French: L'Île Aux Ours): takes place in a very unfriendly and inhospitable world that is pretty much at the mercy of the Four Elements, four capricious and petty deities whose whims and attempts to seize more power cause catastrophic and deadly damage. Apart from the serene Rabbit's island no place is safe and traveling is always dangerous not only because of those cataclysms but also because of lurking pirates who sell prisoners to the slave market since in the big country that appears slavery is legal. There is also at least one psycho scientist who lives in an isolated laboratory perched upon a rocky island and who conducts painful experiments on the unlucky animals that he captures who dared to travel abroad.
• Beavis and Butt-Head: Highland, Texas. The adults are either mean-spirited and ill-tempered or peaceful yet clueless; the kids and the teenagers following suit are similarly stupid and/or violent; and the whole town looks like the extension of a junkyard. The Only Sane Man is Daria Morgendorffer, a cynical Deadpan Snarker, which pretty much says it all.
• Ben 10 would count, as despite its cartoony portrayal, it's not a nice place to live in. Basically, Earth is constantly visited by hundreds of aliens, who are only interested in exploiting the planet for its resources or schemes, or destroy it as part of their evil plan, or that they can. There are Space Cops to deal with that sort of thing, but Earth is considered a backwater planet, so many of them are outright reluctant to waste resources in order to defend it (though this seems to improve over the course of the franchise). You also have Lovecraftian cosmic horrors from another dimension, crazy Cape Busters who dress and behave like literal Knight Templars, and an entire Empire of frog-like Blood Knights who don't follow the previously mentioned Space Cops' rules and are a huge example of Aliens Are Bastards. Also, Death Rays capable of destroying planets are available even to comedic villains.
• The world of The Boondocks. Negative stereotypes of people with black or brown complexions are rampant, corrupt people with lighter complexions and greater wealth get away with everything, a group of Muslims owning a gas station are arrested for defending themselves when their station is robbed and the robbers (the aforementioned people with greater wealth) are cheered for stomping out terrorism, and any world where Uncle Ruckus isn't locked inside an insane asylum is a bad one.
• Brickleberry: The titular setting of Brickleberry is prone to forest fires, pollution, destruction, the endangerment or disorganization of animals, violence, explosions, destruction, sex and hate crimes, etc. Not to mention the severely underhanded and incompetent staff members who are responsible for most of the chaos.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • From Congress passing laws to hurt kids even though they break the Constitution, to constant battles, to the fact a huge-ass ship manned by Candy Pirates can plow through your city at any moment, it's surprising that no one in the universe is suicidal.
  • If the episode "Operation ARCHIVE" is taken with a grain of salt, the world started out this way. Children created adults, but after years of constant abuse, the adults rebelled and the children were forced to flee to the moon. Some time later, the adult ambassadors offered a way for children and adults to live together as families. The children agreed, only to be betrayed by the adults and had their memories erased so that they would forget that they created the adults. Oh, and in this world, aging is a form of a bioweapon the adults created to ensure their reign over children would last forever.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog is full of jerks, idiots, psychopaths, and horror villains in general. The only seemingly decent characters are Muriel, who is oblivious but very likable, and the titular dog Courage, the only moderately sane and reasonable main character.
• Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic: Imagine an afterlife where very few people actually ascend to heaven, but most suffer in the nine circles of Hell for the sins they committed in life. In Hell, where mankind's sins have caused Lucifer to grow in power, not worshipping the Christian faith not only sends you to limbo for all eternity despite the good deeds you have done in life, even unbaptized babies must reside in the first circle through a fault not entirely their own (this was where Dante's stillborn malformed child was held). Then there's Dante's mother, who upon committing suicide, was sent to the Wood of Suicide by Minos where she is turned into a fleshly tree growing in eternal pain. And there are the rest of the nine hells, like Gluttony, a wet fleshy realm where Cerberus (who looks nothing like a three-headed dog) swallows the gluttonous and condemns to a fate of everlasting hunger. This all isn't surprising since the animated short is based on the video game which itself is based on Dante's The Divine Comedy. Lucifer sums it up to Beatrice perfectly:
  Beatrice: "It is not our fault. None of it. Man is good."
  Lucifer: "No... you don't understand. The Earth is another form of Hell. And men are its demons."
• In the other Dante's Inferno, Hell is a huge urban landscape in total disarray. The punishments of the damned are more or less the same as the original, but the images (and the actual damned themselves) are updated so viewers will recognize them. Marilyn Monroe is among the suicides turned into trees, Limbo is a slum where Virgil and company are essentially bums, and identity thieves take on the appearance of whoever passes by. In this case, it's played for laughs.
• Dan Vs. starts in a Crapsaccharine World before quickly delving into this. It's initially crapsaccharine because despite being a normal world, the protagonist is a petty, paranoid psychopath who takes out revenge on people for the smallest of felonies. It becomes this trope when you realize, Dan ended up the way he is because of this world. Every job is Serious Business: dentists hurt patients to ensure they keep coming back and a demon from Hell runs your office. If you don't have enough insurance, hospitals hire an actor pretending to be a doctor. Cyborgs run your local gym and they're going to replace you. New Mexico sacrifices someone every year for a hot air balloon. The main population, including police forces, have the intelligence of a fly. This was planned by other countries hoping to dumb down America until they aren't a threat. People hoping to steal your identity or eat you alive are everywhere. The government can't deal with minor issues like that because they're busy ensuring peace between nations and hiding dinosaurs from the public. The only person who does anything is Dan. He only cares if it affects him, and he's blown up countries because he's had a bad day.
• Daria: The town of Lawndale. Daria and her friends are the sole island of sanity in a school where athletic accomplishment is valued over academic achievement, where the popular kids are too stupid to actually be malicious, and where the entire faculty is composed of mental basket cases. Back home, their parents are either neurotic or absentee, and their siblings are vapid. Sick, Sad World, a tabloid shockumentary show that Daria watches, even used to lend its name to a separate trope here (before it was redirected to this one).
• Like the newspaper comic strip where it originated, the animated version of Dilbert is also an incredibly crapsack world. Everyone (except Dilbert, and to a lesser extent Dogbert) is either stupid, greedy, or deceptive. Dogbert, while he is greedy, is more The Barnum, and delights in taking advantage of the complete idiocy of humanity. Dilbert is (quite possibly) the Only Sane Man, and tries to be a nice guy, attempting to come up with solutions to problems that he had nothing to do with (but is forced into lending a hand anyway), or don't even exist in the first place (such as "Cubicle Syndrome"). If said solution works, then all credit will either go to his Pointy-Haired Boss, the guys in Marketing, or the problem will simply go away on its own, making Dilbert's solution moot. If normally Nice Guys Finish Last, in Dilbert, they probably won't cross the finish line.
• Disenchantment: Dreamland is quite a medieval shithole, and it's all played for laughs at every opportunity. This kingdom is ruled by King Zog, a brutal tyrant who often sentences people to death and/or torture for a variety of offenses, such as attempting to sleep with his daughter. Most citizens are poor peasants, and even the nobility are going bankrupt. The country is being ravaged by disease outbreaks, with the bodies of plague victims regularly being collected to be cremated in a mass grave/pyre. Dreamland's relations with neighboring nations are tense at best, even with their allies, and the threat of war is always possible.
• Definitely the point of Drawn Together.
• Ditto Duckman. Even the animation depicting the show is deliberately ugly, even if it's the studio's style.

E-O

• Ed, Edd n Eddy: The Cul-De-Sac is presented as this. The Eds are con artists who scam children to buy jawbreakers, with Ed supporting Eddy due to his stupidity and Edd (Double D) supporting Eddy due to being an Extreme Doormat. The kids involved in the scams are not innocent either, giving them Disproportionate Retribution or unprovoked rewards. There are also the Kanker Sisters, a Gang of Bullies who are feared by not only the Eds but the rest of the kids as well.
• The Fairly OddParents!: The town of Dimmsdale is composed of insufferable jerks, psychotic maniacs, complete idiots, and miserable losers. It is also prone to havoc (usually due to Timmy's irresponsible wishes) and run by a Corrupt Corporate Executive who specializes in milk propaganda.
• Family Guy: Quahog, Rhode Island is a town filled with morons, perverts, jerkasses, racists, abusers, the greedy, the violent, the mentally ill, and the morally corrupt, among other things. Special mention to Peter, an abusive Psychopathic Manchild who constantly evades the law and instigates disharmony, and Mayor Adam West, a corrupt lunatic who has gotten away with killing people in public.
• F is for Family takes place in one that's Played for Laughs — everyone's a Jerkass, a moron, a pervert, a creep, or some combination of the above.
• Futurama:
  • The world has many attractions to it, but at base it's a stereotypical American trailer park expanded to world size: nearly everyone is annoyed and annoying, credulous, stupid, bigoted, and rude; vital human organs are removed from unwilling donators on the city streets, at least moderately-intelligent animals, including humans, dolphins, and whales are killed for food or fuel; it is implied that there will be no qualms about synthesizing a needed oil in the cells of gene-spliced third-world orphans who would then presumably be violently harvested. The Earth's most looked-up-to figure is a megalomaniacal, genocidal (of both aliens and his own troops), jerk who is also pretty lousy in bed. And Richard Nixon, or at least his head, rules over the whole shebang, his tyranny (as before) limited only by his incompetence and self-hatred. Even Santa Claus is a postal invincible psycho who has turned Xmas into a night of terror and despair, where the populace huddle in military-grade bunkers and hope to survive his brutal rampage.
    • New New York is pretty well off, though, when compared to the hellhole of 31st century Los Angeles. The latter would not look out of place in a Mad Max film, and they don't even seem to have the luxury of flying cars.
  • In the episode "The Late Philip J. Fry," Bender has traveled to the year 10,000, in which society has crumbled, and has this to say:
    "Man, the future's a total craphole, and whoever lives here is a crap-faced sack of crap!"
• In Generator Rex, after the Nanite Event, the world got a lot nastier. Everyone is infected with nanomachines that can go rogue and cause horrible mutations at any given moment. Imagine you're sitting on the bus, and out of nowhere, the guy sitting next to you screams in pain and turns into a rampaging monster that'd give H. R. Giger nightmares. Bad day to be you. Quite possibly an even worse day to be the guy who was sitting next to you. This happens around the world every day, and only one person in the entire world might be able to turn the monster back into a normal person. And if he can't turn you back, you're either killed outright, or else "contained" indefinitely, by Providence, the morally-gray (at best) international consortium that more or less runs the post-Event world.
• In the Gorillaz universe, Murdoc Niccals was permitted, nay, required as part of his community service sentence, to look after a coma patient whose condition was Murdoc's fault in the first place. Plus three single men — one a well-known criminal and all-round sleazebag, one a ditzy prescription drug addict, and one a possession victim who may not at that time have had UK citizenship — who were, at the time, living in a building haunted by demons and zombies, apparently ran into no legal obstacles whatever when they decided to raise a ten-year-old non-English-speaking girl they found in a FedEx crate. Okay, so Noodle actually worked out fine (at least until El Manana), but ...
• Inside Job (2021): The world is secretly run by six societies on behest of a council of shadowy elites. One is an amoral company that is planning out World War III, keeping governments from doing anything about climate change, and has turned democracy into a sham. Another society is the race of human-hating Reptoids, consisting of various politicians and celebrities, who are planning on conquering the world through the aforementioned allowance of climate change. The Illuminati is another society, also made up of politicians and celebrities, who engage in dark mystical rites. The Catholic Church is yet another society that is willing to build a fake Hell to scare the populace into going to church again. In the hollow center of the Earth are a race of psychic mushrooms who want to overthrow humanity. Cthulhu exists. Behind the rampant comedy, this is a bleak setting indeed.
• Invader Zim: Earth, where humans are generally stupid, ignorant, and repulsive and the world they live in is polluted and unclean. The episode "Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom" featured creatures from another almost hell-like dimension crossing over under the impression that the other side is a perfect world that they can ruin, but they are so repulsed by their first impressions that they immediately retreat back into their own world. The Irkens, the other main civilization featured, are a cheerfully xenocidal species that decide rank by the individual's height and whose main form of entertainment is the extermination of entire planets while eating nachos and curly fries. The main characters — being somewhat more intelligent than most of the others — nevertheless only seem able to cope by being delusional (Zim), apathetic (Gaz) or ridiculously persistent (Dib). The episode "Door to Door" plays with this idea well, as Zim shows a cretinous family what will happen if they don't buy his candy — the Crapsack World will become even worse. And the future he shows them is, in actuality, the fate Zim has in mind for Earth when he succeeds.
• The appropriately named Miseryville of Jimmy Two-Shoes. The whole town has been ruled/owned by the Royally Screwed Up Heinous family for countless centuries, and they run a sadistic MegaCorp called Misery Inc. that is wholly dedicated to making the people (who are all different kinds of demonic creatures) as miserable as possible through awful products that May Contain Evil. And to top if off, it's heavily implied to be Hell. However, Jimmy's optimistic thrill-seeking and contagious cheer helps to alleviate everyone's unhappiness to some extent, making surprisingly more tolerable than it sounds.
• The Jumanji: The Animated Series, more so than the film, depicts the game world as a brutal place to live, in which Alan can barely survive. Unlike many of the other examples on this page, Jumanji is not a dystopian and human Crapsack World, but a terrifying,monster-filled jungle. It's Darkest Africa on steroids.
• Canada, according to Kevin Spencer. Kevin himself becomes somewhat Out of Focus and the storylines start being more about his drunken welfare-chiseling father, obese slut of a mother, and other minor townsfolk right about season three or so. The system has failed royally, the police, news media, and teachers don't give a shit, and the town itself is a converted landfill. Just look at season four and that happy, whistling tune playing over scenes of chaos as Kevin strolls through town, and one begins to wonder, psychological issues aside, if Kevin isn't actually the normal one here.
• Making Fiends: Clamburg is overrun by a kid in elementary school with the power to create monsters, almost all the shops are closed down, and the inhabitants can't find any joy whatsoever. At one point, it was deemed unlivable, and most residents were forced to leave.
• During the intro of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Bubbie expresses the desire for Flapjack to stay in Stormalong Harbour, as she believes it safer than the many strange areas that surround it. However, this turns out to be incorrect, as many of the titular misadventures and dangers actually happen on the docks as it's a grim, dystopian place plagued by violence, dinginess, poverty, the plague, corrupt officials and jerks who can be riled up to a mob at an alarming rate. The fact that the whole universe is surreal and makes no sense plot-wise, fitting like a glove with all the characters' perception, makes it both worse and better than it would otherwise be.
• Megas XLR has the alternate dimension, as shown in "Rearview Mirror, Mirror". Of course, the main universe's version of New Jersey is only so much better, given how often the Megas crew destroys most of it (and the fact that it's New Jersey, but that goes without saying).
• The world of Metalocalypse. The entire planet moves at the whim of the metal band Dethklok, which wields more power, money, and influence than many entire nations. Dethklok themselves are idiots whose attitudes toward human life range from apathy to outright contempt; nearly all their concerts have a hefty bodycount. Dethklok's fanbase of billions is universally shown to be a bunch of obsessive psychotics who have torn people apart for insulting the band. The other major faction is the Tribunal, an Illuminati-style alliance of various powerful figures whose stated motivation is to keep the entire populace stupid, complacent, and easily-exploited. Somewhere beneath them is the Revengencers, a disaffected anti-Dethklok group who wantonly commits mass murder to achieve their goals. Nearly every lesser organization is depicted in a highly unflattering light, with everything from celebrity tabloids to cults to rehab programs to dating services being willing to venture into outright criminal territory. Oh, and the world is probably about to come to an end.
• The Mighty B!: San Francisco is portrayed as a shithole city full of sadistic bullies, jerks, and idiots, with a corrupt and underfunded school system. Bessie herself tends to fall victim to this the most, although this never breaks her chipper attitude.
• Moralton in Moral Orel. Originally, this was Played for Laughs, but by Season 3 it got downright depressing with just how horrible everything was.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In the episode "Magic Duel," the city of Ponyville turned into this when the Amulet-corrupted Trixie started taking control.
  • Equestria under control of any of the previous main villains was this as well — arguably.
• Ōban Star-Racers: As cool as it is to look at, the universe of this series is not a place you want to live. Centuries into the future, Earth is on the brink of war with the Krogs, a warmongering race of Always Chaotic Evil barbarians whose culture revolves around conquering and subjugating other worlds. The president of Earth is a paranoid jingoist willing to plunge humanity into war to beat the invaders. Several whole races and planets have gone extinct, nearly every alien we meet is a hostile Jerkass who thinks of humans as insects, and as shown in a flashback, some have no qualms about hunting other sentient species for profit. The one governing the universe is the all-powerful "Avatar" but even he doesn't do much to change things. Every 10,000 years, a great galactic race is held to determine which planet gets the "Ultimate Prize". Except said prize is actually to trick the participants into becoming the new Avatar, a position which you have to keep for the next 10,000 years all alone. Even better, they'll let anyone into this job, as one of the past Avatars is an insanely powerful Omnicidal Maniac who obliterated worlds while the beings above did nothing, and now bides his time manipulating the current race so he can escape and wipe out the universe because he thinks it's too flawed. Worst of all, he may have a point.
• Hill Valley in The Oblongs, where the wealthy residents of the Hills never receive any comeuppance for their treatment of the Valley people.
• The Owl House: It's amazing how Luz's unquenchable thirst for novelty and adventure keeps the Boiling Isles such an enticing place, because by any objective metric (geographical, meteorological, social, political, even sanitational), it sucks. The place is under the eyes of a genocidal tyrant, behavior differing from the sanctioned norm is an imprisonable offense, refusing to join a coven will get you permanently labeled as a wanted criminal, everything from vicious monsters to the weather can kill you, and the majority of people are self-centered jerks with an ingrained mindset of Might Makes Right. The only real positives are that homophobia and racism are nonexistent and the exploits of the main cast (particularly Luz's) are actively encouraging the people around them to be better.

P-Z

• Paradise PD: The ironically-named town of Paradise is home to Police Brutality, sex crimes, drug trafficking, property damage, monster invasions, unethical testing, obesity epidemics, etc. The only person with a good moral compass is Kevin Crawford, a Lethally Stupid young adult who is also the residential Chew Toy.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Downplayed with the city of Townsville throughout the general franchise. It's not a terrible place to live (for the large part) and looks pretty much the same as any average US city, but it's threatened by giant monsters, supervillains, criminals, natural disasters and aliens on what seems to be a daily basis, most of which have to be stopped by the titular girls themselves. Even though, the city is always restored to its normal state before the events of the next episode, with no explanation as to how the damage was repaired so quickly and how its economy hasn't collapsed from this happening constantly.
  • More explicit Crapsack Worlds were shown in specific episodes of the 1998 series, including:
    • A Bad Future where HIM took over Townsville in "Speed Demon".
    • The town of Citiesville from "Town and Out". It's a more realistic setting where there are many criminals who currently run amok unstopped. Not only that, but everyone else there is a complete Jerkass to everyone, especially the girls and Professor Utonium, whom they consider freaks.
    • Townsville's status in The Powerpuff Girls Movie before the Powerpuff Girls were created. Even the Narrator had the tone of "abandon hope all ye who enter".
• Rainbow Brite: In the Origins Episode, Rainbowland is shown to be a horrible place to live in. The area is dark and gloomy, freakish monsters and animals run amok, earthquakes are extremely frequent, there are lightning bolts that turn anyone they strike to ice, the Color Kids are all captured, and the Sprites live in utter fear under the King of Shadows, who hides in his castle with his servants Murky Dismal and Lurky. Luckily, Rainbow Brite soon arrives, defeats the King of Shadows, and turns the land into a beautiful realm of color.
• ReBoot: In season 3, the formerly bustling city of Mainframe has been turned into a really nasty world, not helping that there were 3 internet and/or computer-related wars they had to deal with. While it does get better, the cliffhanger ending of the fourth season seems to go back into relapse, as Megabyte takes over the mainframe, triggering the Downer Ending.
• The setting of The Ren & Stimpy Show looks bright and cheerful while being messed up. It is a city full of Ax Crazies, sociopaths, perverts, jerks, morons, greedy maniacs and Nausea Fuel, not to mention the two main characters of the show: Ren is a clear mentally unstable guy, and Stimpy is a Manchild who — though in spite of sometimes acting like an idiot — is clearly more normal than his friend. There is also George Liquor, an egocentric, abusive, Ax-Crazy sociopath who is capable of the most extreme things to be the best one. Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon" manages to make the already messed up setting even more messed up, especially with "Ren Seeks Help", as Ren became more psychotic, and the world has become worse to live in.
• Robotomy is set on the planet Insanus, a fiery, industrial hellscape inhabited by vicious monsters where wanton mass destruction, war, death, torture, slavery, and mutilation are not only expected, but encouraged and celebrated, while things like kindness, empathy, and non-conformity are punished by being rocketed into one of the planet's twelve suns. Insanus is inhabited by killer robots who believe Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad and can be easily rebuilt from any sort of destruction (even the entire planet blowing up is no big deal, as they just colonize a new planet, something that happens several times per month), so all of this is totally normal to them. There's even worse planets than Insanus too, like the also robot-inhabited Wretchneya, which is a polluted, poverty-stricken wasteland.
• Rocko's Modern Life isn't safe from this trope either. Aside from the titular wallaby himself, almost everyone in O-Town are either mentally unstable or complete jerkasses. Hell, the intro of the show is pretty much self-explanatory.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle: Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale hail from Pottsylvania, the only nation where the Cold War never ended and whose culture centers around espionage. The locals are Always Chaotic Evil, meaning they are Card Carrying Villains who believe in Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad. The government is a corrupt dictatorship that relies on trickery and theft to keep its barely functioning economy afloat.
• The Bad Future Villain World of Samurai Jack. Aku has conquered the entire planet of Earth, inflicting chaos and cruelty on its inhabitants for his own amusement. If you're not one of Aku's many slaves, chances are you're being terrorized by some ruthless criminals or predatory monsters. Half the world is technologically stuck in ancient times, while the other half is a futuristic dystopia (fragile ecosystems are destroyed for senseless industrialization, and the major hubs are cyberpunk mega-cities that put Mos Eisley to shame). Also, Aku's finally gotten bored of Earth, so he's branching out and expanding his tyranny to other planets across the known universe.
• The Simpsons: The town of Springfield is plagued by poverty, corruption, pollution, and radiation, among other things. The school system is underfunded and poorly managed; the police force is corrupt and incompetent; the mayor is heavily corrupt; and the nuclear power plant has zero safety due to the multi-billionaire owner's corruption. The town is culturally, socially, and politically backward, with its citizens being moronic, uncultured, and rude. They form angry mobs, ostracize those who challenge their beliefs, and discourage others from thinking for themselves or hoping for the future. This trope is best lampshaded in "The Boys of Bummer", where it turns out that Springfield is actually proudly considered to be "the meanest town in America" — with billboards and everything, no less.
• South Park: The titular town is the archetypal comedic example of this trope, being filled with racism, violence, jerks, idiots, murder, etc. Characters often get sick with terminal life-threatening diseases, leading to a borderline "Life After People" atmosphere, with inept hospital staff to boot. Mormonism is the only true faith that leads to a boring Heaven, although non-Mormons are eventually allowed in Heaven because of a lack of manpower compared to Hell. And to top it all off, the adults' lack of common sense makes living in South Park hell.
• Spiral Zone takes place in a mid-apocalyptic world, and pulls as few punches as an 80s cartoon can get away with. The basic premise is that a Mad Scientist named Overlord has created the titular zone by setting up a chain of "Zone Generators", which deploy a Fog of Doom laced with a Synthetic Plague that transforms anyone who is exposed to it into a "Zoner" — a hideously deformed drone that mindlessly obeys anyone with a superior will. This "Spiral Zone" effectively covers half the planet, reducing millions of people to Zoners and creating an impregnable territory from which Overlord and his minions, the Black Widows, can attempt to expand the Zone into the remaining livable territories by setting up new Zone Generators. The only antidotes to Overlord's Zone Plague are either a gene-modifying process of Overlord's own design, or access to an incredibly rare metal, forcing the free peoples of the world to rely on a single squad of elite commandos to try and hold back Overlord's efforts. The series also pays some note to the devastation having half the world turned into a zombie-infested hellhole has had on the remaining territories; morale is a constant issue, communication and transport are awful, and supplies are stretched thin because so much productive territory was swallowed by the Spiral Zone. Mention is even made of people losing hope and deliberately walking into the Spiral Zone, because they figure that life as a Zoner beats slowly starving to death in the free lands.
• The whole point of Stressed Eric.
• Superjail!: There's a reason why business is always booming. The world is violent, cold and crime-filled everywhere. Do not make any gestures of kindness or the predatory masses will see it as weakness. You will be robbed and beaten savagely within seconds of giving a kind word. And that's just life outside the jail. Inside the jail, led by a Reality Warper Psychopathic Manchild Warden, the inmates (thugs, terrorists, rapists and the occasional comedic — but still lethal — supervillain) are brutally murdered by a killer robot, an overly-violent Transgender woman, a Mad Scientist obsessed with Half-Human Hybrids and a couple of alien twins who wreak havoc just For the Evulz.
• Squidbillies: Dougal County certainly qualifies, where being attacked by criminally insane squids, haunted by fire-ant ghosts, and disemboweled by giant health-obsessed amphibians is just another Tuesday.
• SWAT Kats: For random civilians, Megakat City seems to apply. The city, or large parts of it, seems to be destroyed on a regular basis, the police are too incompetent to prevent supervillain attacks before they happen, and the local eponymous vigilantes can only stop the attacks from consuming the whole city, but usually several skyscrapers, at the least, are destroyed in the process.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): Shredderville in the episode of the same name. The Turtles think they have traveled to an alternate reality where they never existed, in which Shredder has managed to become the ruler of the world. Bebop and Rocksteady are still humans, April O'Neil and Irma are their servants, and there's a whole anti-mutant sentiment among the humans because of Krang and his Dimension X allies. On top of all that, everything in that world is falling apart, and Shredder is so inefficient as a world leader that he begs the Turtles to take him back to their world where he was never the ruler of anything.
• Teen Titans Go!: It lives off of idiocy and jerkassery, all of which are Played for Laughs. The crossover with The Powerpuff Girls (2016) does a good job of pointing it out. Mojo Jojo describes the Titans' dimension as a place where superheroes don't fight villains, and the narrator asks "What kind of horrible place is that?" When the Girls arrive, the Titans do nothing but belittle and dismiss them as "tiny, harmless babies", even as they best them in every way possible. In the end, Blossom outright calls them horrible superheroes.
• The Other Railway in Thomas & Friends, as seen in the episodes "Escape" and "Rusty to the Rescue". It's shown to be a bleak, depressing railway that no longer has any use for steam engines. Naturally, Oliver and Stepney were more than happy to be rescued so they could get the hell outta there.
• Tom Goes to the Mayor: Jefferton seems to be an unpleasant mix of Suburbia and Industrial Ghetto that's shown to be an extraordinarily drab and ugly place where the people are all either apathetic, bitter, stupid, or flat-out insane. Jefferton also celebrates idiotic local holidays like Tootle Day (where dogs are married) and advertises utterly impractical and useless products like the Eez-Zee Stoolstrip Tester (a home starch detection device). Word of God says not only is it an amalgamation of every real-life crapsack town the creators had been to, it is actually the titular character's own personal Hell.
• Total Drama: Downplayed. While the series doesn't focus entirely on Canada, in a show often filled with idiots, jerks and morons and Butt Monkeys who have terrible luck and a state that doesn't do anything about the fact that two contestants have suffered from Body Horror, Total Drama's take on Canada seems like a rather crapsack world to be a part of.
• Transformers:
  • Cybertron is either a burnt-out urban wasteland sucked dry of energy after eons of warfare (see Generation 1), a natural Death World for any species that aren't Mechanical Lifeforms and may be a hazard even for them (see the comics, where Cybertron's natural ecology includes huge lightning storms and seas of acid), or both.
  • Earth often isn't much better after the Transformers show up. Two armies of sentient Humongous Mecha that have been fighting for probably longer than the human race has existed have chosen our planet for their latest battleground. For extra Paranoia Fuel, those giant robots can disguise themselves as anything even vaguely mechanical, including buildings.
    • Don't turn your back on appliances either. Your boombox could turn into Soundwave or one of his minions...
• True and the Rainbow Kingdom: Glummy Glooma makes his lair in the depths of a downplayed example that stands out among the Sugar Bowl of the Rainbow Kingdom.
• The Venture Bros. features this pretty heavily. All of the primary characters are neatly defined by their failures, and the same goes for most secondaries. There will be no Affectionate Parody; cameos are more along the lines of a drug-crazed Johnny Quest, a world-dominating Walt Disney expy, or the Fantastic Four where Mr. Fantastic isn't the most useless one. The only good character besides the Venture Brothers themselves in the whole show is a necromancer who doesn't care a whit about messing with the powers of beyond and black magics.

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