Gone Horribly Right / Anime & Manga

"We dreamed of creating the world's strongest Pokémon... and we succeeded."

— Dr. Fuji's last words, Pokémon: The First Movie

Times where a plan Goes Horribly Right in Anime & Manga.

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• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You:
  • A bonus story in the fifth volume reveals that this is how Iku's masochism started. As a little girl, she was a crybaby who always gave up if things got too difficult, until her older brother gave her an encouraging pep talk about how one should always keep trying no matter how painful it gets. While it did encourage Iku to keep trying no matter what, it also caused her to consider pain a good thing.
  • Volume 16's bonus story shows a reckless young Eira putting herself in danger because she believes that anything and everything can be beaten with a kick, even colds or strong river currents. Concerned, her dad sets her up to be scared by a Bedsheet Ghost she can't defeat by kicking. While this succeeds in teaching Eira that there are things she should fear, by the present day Eira's father notes it worked too well, as Eira has developed an Absurd Phobia of anything she can't beat up with a kick, whether it's something too small or immaterial to kick (germs, lightning, being late) or something so delecate a mere touch would break it, nevermind a kick (small animals, babies).
• In Episodes 15 and 16 of Season 2's Ah! My Goddess, Marller manages to separate Urd's evil half from her good half and transport it to an artificial body that looks exactly like Urd. Seems to go well for Marller, until evil Urd starts to suffer a Super-Power Meltdown due to her body being unable to handle the magic being used. In addition, the evil half seems to want to do things even Marller hadn't thought of, or wanted to do, such as taking over the world, rather than simply kicking the goddesses out of Earth.
• Ayakashi Triangle: Shadow Mei lives in an long-abandoned hotel, which three men end up disturbing by hanging around to drink. As a peace offering, Matsuri gathers a bunch of ayakashi together to scare them away. But the men tell others about what they saw, causing far more people to skulk around on a Scare Dare—so many that the authorities end up hastening its demolition, leaving Mei without a home.
  Shadow Mei: [angrily marching away with her things wrapped up in a cloth on her back] Humans... Matsuri Kazamaki... I will never forgive either.
• A minor one, but in Berserk, Guts constantly seeks purpose in life. This eventually leads him to helping Grifith reach his dream, only to realize that once that's fulfilled Guts will not have a purpose anymore. This leads him to leave the Band of the Hawk which then sets in motion the series of events that give Guts a purpose at last: getting revenge.
• Researchers in Bio-Meat: Nectar created the eponymous BMs. They can and do eat anything except for glass, metal, and fiberglass (and apparently stone), to serve as living waste recyclers. They also are tough enough to chew through anything short of these materials. They are supposed to be an ultra cheap food source, and so they can multiply extremely rapidly, as long as there is enough food for them. And did we mention that they eat anything? And when some of them get out of containment, horror ensues.
• Sosuke Aizen, of Bleach, set in motion a 100-year long plan to become a Physical God. In order to test his new powers against a Worthy Opponent, he set in motion a plan to have Ichigo Kurosaki become one as well. Aizen became absurdly powerful, but he never transcended the limits of Soul Reapers and Hollows. Ichigo however, did, leaving Aizen no match for him.
• Played for Laughs in Episode 4 of Blend-S. After noticing some Cafe Stile customers still think Maika isn't sadistic enough for her role, the cast tries to train her in that direction. The result is a Maika that acts like a dominatrix, which the cast unanimously agree is overly hardcore for a Cosplay Café.
• Blood+: Overlapping with Gone Horribly Wrong. During the Vietnam War, the Red Shield forcibly awakens Saya from hibernation to fend off chiropterans. She does so, but also awakens in a psychotic rage that leads her to mercilessly butcher both humans and chiropterans left, right, and center.
• Played for Laughs in one chapter of Boarding School Juliet. When Juliet gets swamped by little girls who want to spend time with her, Romio pretends to be a pedophile (Nightmare Face and all) in order to shoo them away and he and Juliet can go on their lunch date. It worked: the little girls are scared witless and run away. Unfortunately for Romio, his act convinced Juliet as well.
• Played for Laughs in A Certain Scientific Railgun. One of Misaki Shokuhou's followers, Junko, tries to get Misaki and Mikoto closer together by asking them to use a technology to share dreams. Though they're not interested, it does work indirectly. When they find out that one of the dream makers is giving out sex dreams about them, they join forces to destroy him completely.
  Mikoto: Excuse me. I think I need to visit the next shop over...
  Junko: She's going to kill them! Queen, you have to stop—
  Misaki: Today, I'll do you a favor of altering the witnesses' memory abilities. You handle the security cameras.
  Junko: Oh no, together, these two can easily commit the perfect crime!!
• Cells at Work!: This is basically how allergic reactions work. Everyone is just doing their job exactly as required, with the B-cell firing antibodies to get rid of the allergens, and the mast cell releasing histamines to clear the excess antibodies. However, the overflow of histamines causes sneezing, stuffy nose, and tears—which, to the cells inside the host body, is depicted as catastrophic disasters.
  White Blood Cell: To think this all happened because everyone did their job properly...
• Code Geass
  • Nina feels this way upon seeing the aftermath of her invention, the FLEIJA warhead. Hint: it goes off in the middle of Tokyo, causing 35 million casualties. Her Thousand-Yard Stare implies that she wasn't expecting it to be that powerful, or to be used in the way that it was.
  • Also, Lelouch, to protect Suzaku from his own refusal to disobey orders even when it would kill him, orders him to survive at all costs. In the immediate, this gets him to retreat against orders. But the order also means that, if his options are dying or killing millions of innocents, he's going with the mass murder.
  • In the same series, Lelouch notes that his desire to stop the SAZ and discredit Euphemia went horribly right in a completely unexpected direction. Ironically, this is a situation that counts as both Gone Horribly Wrong and Gone Horribly Right.
• In Da Capo, the Giant Sakura Tree was intended to look after Sakura after her grandmother's death and use its magic to fulfill all her wishes. Unfortunately, Sakura grows up to be a clingy jealous Yandere on the losing end of a love triangle and the tree grants subconscious wishes. In the original Visual Novel, Sakura is doing it unconsciously herself.
• In Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, Ryouta's plans to create an anime full of hope that includes brainwashing methods ended up working perfectly bringing Junko Enoshima to tears. However, she used that anime to her benefit by brainwashing Class 77-B and Chisa to be members of the Ultimate Despair.
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: This is what led to the rise of Muzan Kibutsuji and the demons. Muzan was born a sickly boy who wasn't supposed to live up to the age of 20. Yet a doctor was able to cure him with an experimental medicine...except it turned him into a demon. The rest is history.
• Digimon:
  • Digimon Adventure: After getting his Crest of Courage, Tai goes above and beyond to get Agumon to digivolve to the Ultimate level, overfeeding him and finally deliberately endangering himself during a battle with Etemon's Greymon. As a result, Greymon digivolves...into SkullGreymon, who easily defeats his opponent before going on a rampage.
  • Digimon Adventure 02: When Arukenimon created BlackWarGreymon from a massive number of Control Spires, she probably didn't expect him to go insane from reflection over the implications of his formation. It certainly didn't help matters that he was a Mega level, and therefore significantly more powerful than anyone in the existing cast, including Arukenimon herself and her partner Mummymon, both of whom are only Ultimate level.
  • Digimon Tamers:
    • The D-Reaper started out as a harmless automatic utility program designed to delete any data that grows beyond its original parameters and becomes a threat to the integrity of the system. Eventually, it was subdued by the very programs it was built to delete, and was laid to dormancy in the Digital World's center, to eventually fester into a nihilistic cybernetic menace Powered by a Forsaken Child, which began wreaking havoc in both the Digital and Real Worlds. In this, it has a single purpose: follow its prime directive to the letter by deleting anything that grows too much. Unfortunately, by that point, that directive means "delete everything".
    • Also occurs when Leomon is killed by Beelzemon. Takato completely flips his lid and forcibly orders Guilmon to digivolve to Mega level with his rage, which results in Guilmon digivolving into Megidramon. A Digimon of pure evil and chaos so powerful his very existence nearly destroys both the real world and the Digital world.
• Doctor Slump:
  • The chapter "Citizen Arale" starts with Midori telling her class to "bring a lost item to the police" as part of her lesson on "how to be good citizens". Too bad Arale, a Cloud Cuckoolander Robot Girl with Super-Strength, really takes her lesson to heart, and starts by taking a book Midori drops, not to her (even though she's right next to Arale at that moment), but to the police, and her applications of the lesson only escalate from there and last through the rest of the chapter. By the time the chapter ends, she has brought to the police loads of poop she found on the roadside, plus every car, house, and mountain she sees and takes to the police, making the police station and its surrounding area look like a junkyard as a result.
  • The chapter "Mr. Handy", has Senbei using his eponymous creation to allow him to move around within it without much trouble. He's so impressed with its performance, he never leaves it — in fact, he sleeps in it. A month later, his body odor reaches foul levels because he neglects to shower throughout his time in his creation, and, due to his lack of exercise because he's been inside it the whole month, his body becomes so plump that Arale rolls him around like a ball.
• In one episode of Doraemon, Suneo and his mom get a hold of Doraemon's amazing blanket that can make old things like new. Suneo's mom has an old ratty crocodile purse that isn't what it used to be. She uses the blanket on it, making it exactly what it used to be.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • Majin Buu. The wizard Bibidi wanted to release a being of unstoppable power. It totally worked; said entity was powerful enough to kill all but one of the Supreme Kais... but was also completely uncontrollable, to the point where Bibidi had to seal him away (usually, he'd release the seal on a planet he wanted Buu to destroy, but the Sole Survivor of the Supreme Kais tracked him down and killed him while Buu was still sealed on Earth). His son/doppelgänger Babidi later unseals Majin Buu, finding him exactly as powerful (if a good deal sillier) as expected. Problem was, Buu soon decided he didn't want to take orders from the jerk who abused him and ordered him around all the time, and killed him when he found an opening.
  • Also, the Saiyan race as a whole. Originally a tribe of wandering space barbarians, they were unable to evolve beyond their barbaric level. So they joined Freeza's Army where Freeza offered to uplift them into a technologically advanced, space-faring race in exchange for their services. By then, however, the Saiyans had grown so powerful, and so advanced, as to pose a danger to Freeza himself, who felt compelled to wipe out their race. However, since he had groomed the Saiyans into a spacefaring, unstoppable warrior race, some of them were able to escape. One of them, Goku, eventually defeats Freeza, and Trunks (Vegeta's son) kills him.
  • The Androids. Dr. Gero creates the Androids in order to kill Goku, but the Androids are too strong to be controlled, and kill Dr. Gero instead. He kind of brought this on himself though, since he made the two out of runaway teenagers that he kidnapped- no freaking wonder they hated him. This also applies for the Tournament of Power, Dr. Gero would be spinning from his grave to know that 17 and 18 would save the multiverse.
  • His next creation, Cell, does kill Goku... and also massacres his way across the planet, before deciding to destroy it.
  • A double whammy; Cell manipulates Vegeta into helping the android reach his perfect form, by exploiting Vegeta's ego and the Saiyans' natural desire to fight opponents at their strongest. Once Cell, with Vegeta's help, achieves that goal, he's so strong he completely whoops Vegeta's sorry ass without even trying. Then later on, during the Cell Games, Cell is driven by the very same egotism and desire to push Gohan into turning Super Saiyan 2, after which Gohan very much outclasses Cell, even taking the time to rub his newfound power in Cell's face:
    Gohan: What are you so afraid of, Cell? Isn't this what you wanted?
  • Cell almost fell into this trope before Gohan: after achieving his perfect form, in order to show off his newfound power, he asks Vegeta to hit him with his strongest attack. Turns out that Vegeta's Final Flash is much more powerful than expected: if Vegeta hadn't aimed it away from the Earth, or if Cell didn't try to dodge it at the last second, Cell would've been dead.
  • Goku's entire plan for beating Cell hinged solely on Cell deliberately pissing Gohan off enough to unleash his full power. The plan works all too well: Gohan goes Super Saiyan 2 and beats the perfection out of Cell, but Goku never counted on Gohan, in a state of Revenge Before Reason, deliberately prolonging the Curb-Stomp Battle just so he could humiliate Cell even further, which drives Cell to a Villainous Breakdown and causes him to try to blow up the Earth in a rage, forcing Goku to pull off a Heroic Sacrifice to save the world.
  • A humorous example: at the start of the Buu saga, Babidi decides to help his minion Puipui against Vegeta (who was kicking his ass) by turning the battlefield into Puipui's homeworld, that has ten times the gravity of Earth. As Vegeta comes from a world with the same gravity and routinely trains in gravity even harsher, it only made things worse for Puipui.
  • During the Potafeu filler arc in Super, this happens three times back-to-back. The Commeson (a sapient goo that steals power from people and creates copies of them) was originally created by the people of Potafeu to defend them; however, when it absorbed powers it also absorbed elements of the victim's personality, resulting in the Commeson turning evil after being used against evil people, and its creators sealing it away at the cost of their lives. Then a criminal named Gryll unseals it, thinking that it's a power enhancer- and promptly gets himself and his crew power-drained (which swiftly kills them) and copied. Copy!Gryll uses dirty tactics to copy Vegeta... but Copy!Vegeta still has Vegeta's strong will and overwhelming Pride, so not only is he completely uncontrollable, but he also outright refuses to use stealth attacks to drain Goku's energy, because he's too proud to lower himself to such cheap tricks.
  • In Dragon Ball Super: Broly, Freeza kills Broly's father Paragus, remembering that a similar incident caused Goku to reach Super Saiyan. If anyone knows how Broly was in Super Saiyan form in the non-canon movies, you definitely know how much he just screwed up — while Goku and Vegeta learn how to fuse into Gogeta, Freeza has to serve as an unwanted distraction.
  • A Real Life example. Akira Toriyama has gone on record saying he disliked that the original Dragon Ball Z anime turned Goku into a more standard heroic protagonist rather than the self-centered and apathetic main character he was in the manga. Indeed, as stated in an interview what he "wanted to depict the most was the sense that [Goku] might not be a good guy at all, although he does do good things as a result". Dragon Ball Super attempted to follow this course by the virtue of being more faithful to the original source. The result that there's an awful lot of fans who believe that Goku is the main villain of Super due to his action during the "Tournament of Power" arc. Not to mention the fact that some fans hated that Goku also seems to have become dumber.
• Elfen Lied:
  • Lucy was part of a government-supported program to create a new human being that would wipe out and replace the existing humanity with her species. Unfortunately, she took to it beyond the Kakuzawas' expectations (a polite way of saying virtually no one else who encountered her made it out alive).
  • Tomoo and his gang of bullies. They decided to literally Kick the Dog by beating a puppy Lucy had started to care for to death while making her watch, just to see if they could get any kind of reaction out of her at all. They got a lot more than they bargained for when Lucy snapped and used her newly-awakened vectors to splatter them all over the room.
• Fairy Tail:
  • Master Hades, whose Evil Plan involves unsealing Zeref, the resident Dreaded of the series. The problem? Not only was Zeref not sealed in the first place, he is, in actuality, a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who feels an awful lot of guilt about all of the evil things he's done, and kills Hades for dragging him out of hiding and thrusting him back into world events. A classic case of Evil Is Not a Toy.
  • In the backstory, it turns out there was a civil war between the dragons, one side that believed Humans Are Special and deserved to co-exist with as equals, the other (and far larger) that said they're Puny Humans and better off as snacks. Outnumbered and losing the war, the co-existence dragons and their human allies decided to bolster their ranks and prove the dedication of their cause by training the first Dragon Slayers with their Dragon Magic, which did indeed turn the tides in their favor...but what no one counted on were the various side-effects of Dragon Magic on those first Slayers driving them to bloodlust and insanity, as well as actually turning them into dragons. And then the most powerful dragon-hating Slayer went completely off the deep end and slaughtered every dragon he could find along with a good number of those Dragon Slayers, before he completely transformed into a dragon and was crowned the "king" of the virtually-extinct race. And that is the origin story of Acnologia.
• Almost every single surgery that occurs in Franken Fran. For the clients, at least. Fran herself is just happy to have more test subje-er... patients.
  • Fran herself says she was "half-dead from the very beginning." Her moral code includes saving every life she can, and she is a brilliant surgeon. She is in fact a caring, sensitive individual and an overly enthusiastic Mad Scientist. Given that, she often comes with a solution that is effective, fully within the exact wording of her client's request... and utterly terrifying to normal people.
• Fruits Basket: The reason why Tohru Honda is invited to live in the Sohma estate is because Ren Sohma, the Evil Matriarch of Akito, wants to prove that the adoration her daughter receives as the God of the Zodiac is a fraud, and the Zodiac members will be tempted to love someone from the outside world the instant they are exposed to it. Sure enough, the Zodiac members slowly gravitate towards Tohru, leaving Akito in the dust. But Ren doesn't factor in the possibility of Tohru extending her gentle hand of friendship towards Akito herself, enabling her to not only admit her shortcomings but also resolve to become a better person. This means that Akito is eventually accepted back to the fold with genuine love, meaning Ren has utterly failed in her mission.
• Towards the end of Fullmetal Alchemist, Envy decides to piss off Mustang by gloating about how they killed his best friend Hughes in front of him. Envy succeeds with flying colors... and to say that they get themselves seriously injured would be an understatement.
• One episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has the Major come across an artificially-sustained human brain. Within its mental world is a theater constantly playing a movie so emotionally gripping that, until this point, no one who dove in ever wanted to leave. The Major managed to resist, but not before (in a showing of its emotional grip) the film drew a rare tear out of her.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: After discovering that Ōgi, the teacher she had a crush on, was already engaged and that he had only invited her to dinner to introduce her to his fiancée, a scorned Miyabi takes illicit photographs of herself (knowing that his hobby was photography) and tells the class that he took advantage of her. However, Miyabi's plan works too well; her classmate Takumi Ishida takes matters into his own hands and assaults Ōgi, resulting in Takumi being expelled and Ōgi being fired.
• Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor. Aliens invent biological symbiotic armor. Good. Aliens invent a new species designed for combat. Great. Aliens give the species the armo- ABORT! ABORT! SWEET JESUS, IT HAS A PARTICLE CANNON FOR A TORSO!
  • And that's only the half of it. Normal humans were designed as the genetic equivalent of play-doh so that the Aliens could make us into any sort of weapon they wanted, even after birth. The unintended side effect is that they skewed baseline Muggles into being far more aggressive than normal evolution would have made us, leading us to be a far more warlike species than we would be otherwise. The other half of it is that if a human were genetically augmented and given the biological symbiotic armor, they'd be akin to a god. Which, of course, is exactly what the bad guy(s) wants for himself.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Phantom Blood: Dio Brando fatally wounds Jonathan Joestar; but before Jonathan dies, he saves everyone from Dio by simply holding Dio's head,and Goes Out With A Smile; and when Dio tried to give a Deal with the Devil with Jonathan it was too late, Jonathan was dead, and it would take a long time before DIO becomes a threat again.
  • Battle Tendency: The majority of The Pillar Men believed Kars's experiments to gain true immortality would be disastrous if they succeeded. While it's possible for them to get stronger through Stone Masks, doing so means they need to consume more lifeforms to fuel their new strength, which could result in them consuming faster than other lifeforms can reproduce.
  • Stardust Crusaders: While Boingo's Stand may have correctly predicted the outcome he was shown, it didn't save Oingo from suffering the same fate while disguised, and likewise with Hol Horse accidentally shooting himself through the comic's picture of Jotaro due to a slightly sped-up watch.
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: Josuke is fighting Rohan Kishibe whose powers require his victim to look at one of his drawings to work. Josuke gets around this by keeping his eyes closed, even when stabbed by sharp objects. Rohan intentionally pushes Josuke's Berserk Button by insulting his hair, hoping to get him to open his eyes in anger. Josuke opens his eyes, but he gets so angry he becomes literally blind with rage, ignoring the drawing entirely and brutally pummels Rohan.
  • Golden Wind: Polnareff's Chariot Requiem has exactly one purpose given to it by its dying master; to protect the Arrow at all costs from Diavolo. It works, but since he can no longer control his Stand anymore, it now protects the Arrow from everyone trying to get it including the good guys and his former master. Not only that but its soul swapping powers indiscriminately target anyone they can find and slowly mutate them via rapid evolution.
  • Stone Ocean: In the spin-off story; "Whitesnake's Miscalculation", with Jolyne being influenced by Fujiko's Bad Romance, Pucci could find a way to advance his plan while Jolyne was incapacitated — exactly what he intended Fujiko to do with her Stand and her perverted tastes. Instead, Fujiko's mood was so inspired by Jolyne's positive feedback that she started to portray her in religious artwork, which is blasphemous to Pucci, a priest.
  • Steel Ball Run: Lucy uses her appearance by seducing Scarlet Valentine into giving her the Corpse Parts that Funny Valentine has in his possession, followed by her disguising herself as Scarlet and trying to sway Valentine in an attempt to kill him. Though, it works a little too well, as Valentine discovers that she's not actually Scarlet and still ends up attempting to rape Lucy.
• One of Kaguya's plans in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War involved tricking Shirogane into using love tips from a girls magazine on her so she could prove that he liked her (It Makes Sense in Context). All three of the steps end up working perfectly on her (she even ends up having a Heroic BSoD when he gets to the "say you hate them" step, despite the fact that she knew he was faking it).
• In Kinnikuman Nisei, we learn that to keep his son Mantaro from being intimidated by his father's reputation as a wrestling superhero, Kinnikuman had all of the videos and photos of his matches destroyed. This worked a little too well- Mantaro has virtually no respect for his over-the-hill dad, and thinks his matches were all fixed! And this in turn plays into Tel Tel Boy's defeat; during his match against Mantaro, Tel Tel Boy uses his illusion powers to make Mantaro think he's fighting Suguru, as "All children fear their parents". This backfires, as while Mantaro was scared spitless of the Evil Choujin, thinking he's facing his Bumbling Dad gives him the confidence to attack Tel Tel Boy head-on!
  MAX Man: Why isn't the Trauma Call working?!
  Meat: Oh, it's working, all right. Perfectly!
• Kodoku Experiment is basically "Gone Horribly Right The Manga". The Manipulative Bitch Captain Bagures and leader of the research spacecraft, who as part of an experiment to create the perfect biological weapon, takes a bunch of vicious carnivorous engineered creatures and puts them on another planet so they fight for survival and leave the strongest one standing. With the planet dying and ready to explode, a military team is sent down on the inhospitable planet. Unbeknownst to them they were all simply another part of the Captain's twisted experiments, and they all die horribly except for one last survivor, who promises revenge on the Captain before his memories are assimilated by a nearby literal Starfish Alien. The alien is not only Nigh-Invulnerable as it survives the planetary explosion in the form of a shriveled up fossil, but it is also The Virus when it creates more versions of itself simply by flashing some alien light from its eyestalks on any unfortunate onlooker, even through video recordings. This is in addition to its vast array of other abilities, all of them veered towards a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Captain.
• In Koe de Oshigoto!, Kanna nervously asks her sister what anal sex is like, because she doesn't know how to convey it through her acting, but Yayoi just tells her that she should "completely become the character of the game" and assume that it feels good. A short while later in the recording booth, she goes so far into character that she actually tries to initiate anal sex with Motoki.
• Komi Can't Communicate: The most recent chapters reveal that Kawai, the girl who rejected Tadano back in middle school, actually did like him, but rejected him so he would mature out of his Chunnibyou phase. That part worked out alright, but she wasn't expecting that he would develop an uncanny ability to read people, enough to befriend and make Komi fall in love with and eventually date him.
• In Little Witch Academia, The Noir Rod was designed to absorb negative emotions to fuel it, primarily through the use of a cellphone app. By the time it absorbs a certain amount, it becomes sentient and stops needing the app, to the point that Croix herself can't shut it off.
• The Big Bad of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS is a genetically-engineered Mad Scientist who turned out to be a lot better at his job than his creators had intended, killing said creators and nearly toppling The Federation they were in charge of. Interestingly, one of the main heroines of the series, and the one who personally defeats the Big Bad at that, had years earlier been created by him. As was the case with his own creators, he found that overachieving has its perils.
• In the anime adaptation of Maya the Bee, the title heroine is tasked with gathering pollen from around her hive. So she does. All of it. So now she gets sent far out from the hive to find more.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam MS Igloo, Zeon creates a Mobile Suit known as the "GM Camouf", a Zaku frame armored up to look like a GM designed for a False Flag Operation. It worked too well as an entire squad of Camoufs were destroyed by their own Musai transport.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans is set in a world where war orphans are often scooped up by Private Military Contractors and used as cheap, expendable labor — and there's one subset that has it even worse, being labeled "Human Debris" and being little better than slaves. The protagonists are a group of such orphans who overthrow their abusive bosses, take over the PMC, and then become famous after their first job (to escort a VIP to Earth) leads to them saving Edmonton, Canada from a madman in a Super Prototype. The Opening Narration for the second season reveals that there's been a severe uptick in the number of Child Soldiers and Human Debris employed by PMCs, because the protagonists are living proof of how effective they can be.
• Monster: Johan Liebert was part of a social engineering experiment to create vicious, emotionless Super Soldiers. Unfortunately for those in charge, he took to it very well indeed. By which we mean no one else made it out alive.
• My Hero Academia: Kotaro Shimura tried to force his son Tenko to give up on his dream of becoming a hero through systematic abuse. Tenko suffers a psychotic break from accumulated stress and accidentally kills his family with his Quirk, culminating in murdering his father in a blind rage. At least he gave up on his dream. Now he can never be a hero. Tenko, now called Tomura Shigaraki, grows up becoming the Symbol of Fear, in fact.
• Naruto:
  • Gaara was, by the will of the Fourth Kazekage, made to be a human super weapon via demonic sealing at (or, technically, not long before) birth. It worked a little too well. But after Gaara got into his "kill everyone" stage, the Kazekage, having invested years into training Gaara as an unstoppable, invincible weapon, admitted defeat and tried to have Gaara assassinated. Except he was an unstoppable, invincible weapon who killed all of the assassins.
    • Later revealed to have gone even more horribly right than imagined. Gaara entered his "kill everyone" stage because his uncle, Yashamaru, tried to kill him and told him he'd never loved Gaara. Turned out the uncle did love Gaara and the Kazekage just wanted to find out how good Gaara's self-control was—he found out all right when the kid snapped after Yashamaru played his part.
  • Orochimaru's training of Sasuke ends up with this. Orochimaru wanted to make Sasuke as strong as he possibly could so that he could have a perfect vessel. They agreed on the first part but differed on the second, and it turns out Sasuke is much better trained than Orochimaru believed... which doesn't work out well for him.
  • Congratulations, Itachi. Your attempts to turn your little brother into a nigh-invincible, revenge-bent One-Man Army worked. Too bad people like that aren't interested in returning home a hero to live peacefully surrounded by friends like you wanted.
  • Jiraiya teaching ninjutsu to three Hidden Rain orphans so that they could protect themselves turned out much better than he would have liked or expected. In his defense, it was not his actions and mistakes that turned them against Konoha. The blame goes right to Danzo's attempt to kill them Gone Horribly Wrong. resulting in the death of one and the other two becoming Well Intentioned Extremists.
  • Pain attempts to make Naruto see the error of his highly-optimistic ways. He succeeds, but as a result has to deal with a rampaging tailed beast.
  • Madara Uchiha organized Start of Darkness for Obito with two goals: Firstly in order to Obito wanted to fulfill his plan and secondly in order to he had the full loyalty to him and unquestioningly obeyed his plan. The first part worked beyond any expectation, the second... not so much.
  • The researchers in the backstory of the anime-only episode "The Forgotten Island" wanted to create the ultimate summoning animal. They did it, all right. They got a creature that could gain new abilities by eating other summoning animals. Unfortunately, it was an Extreme Omnivore that saw them as lunch.
• The back story, the "scenarios", and the resolution of Neon Genesis Evangelion show that GEHIRN, SEELE, and NERV all have far, far worse horribly right effects on their world than anything before.
  • In order: GEHIRN wanted to create the ultimate weapons against the Angels by cloning Adam and Lilith. They succeeded but the things end up being so powerful they cause the end of the world. SEELE wanted to cause Third Impact only to find out that though their plan succeeds, they're going to be trapped in Instrumentality forever, especially when people choose to leave the ocean as Shinji and Asuka did. NERV kills all the Angels on SEELE's orders only to find out that without the Angels, there's nothing stopping SEELE from triggering their plans for the end of the world. Lastly, Gendo, commander of NERV, gets his wish to see Yui again. She despises him for all the evil shit he did to get her back, and allows EVA-01 to kill him.
• One Piece:
  • A lesser example in the Enies Lobby arc: Nami's Perfect Clima-Tact works too well when she first tried it, and leaves her as scared as her enemies.
  • Occurs to Trafalgar Law during the Pirate Alliance arc. He teamed up with the Straw Hats since he has faith in Luffy's ability as a fellow D to wreak havoc and wants that havoc on his side, at least, since the Straw Hats are already there. He got way more than he bargained for and found himself constantly stunned by the Straw Hats' antics. Thankfully, the trope worked out in the end as Law really was right about Luffy... he just had to endure their sanity-destroying quirks for a while because of it.
  • Happens to Sugar on Dressrosa. Realizing Usopp is terrified of her and that the rebels attempted to knock her out with a poisoned grape, she grabs it and force-feeds it to Usopp to revel in his terror...only for his Freak Out to so terrify her that she faints, accomplishing the rebels' goal.
  • A notable Real Life example comes from 4Kids Entertainment. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with One Piece, and put as little effort into it as possible hoping to give up the rights the first chance they could. Unfortunately, their Creator's Apathy lead to the franchise being seen as a joke for several years in English speaking countries. Only recently has One Piece been seen as the story it was meant to be.
• One-Punch Man: Saitama wanted to become the hero who could destroy anything in one punch as a child. When he finally becomes that, he gets bored of it because there's no challenge in his life.
• In Pet Shop of Horrors, one story centers around the idea of dieting. Two of the characters (an overweight schoolgirl and a boxer) diet through exercise, discipline, and a balanced diet and end up doing well. The third dieter is a model who was told by a fellow model about a miracle pill that would let her shed pounds while letting her eat whatever she wanted. It worked great at first, until she ended up getting bone-skinny, losing her hair, always being cold, and constantly suffering from hunger and thirst. Eventually this ends when her body crumbles and a being that resembles the model (only inhumanly beautiful) bursts out. It's revealed that the same thing had happened to the model that suggested the pill in the first place, and she even says "There are thousands of people who are dying to shed a few pounds. We just need to take them on their word."
• The scientists in Pokémon: The First Movie create Mewtwo, who is not entirely happy with the circumstances of his "birth". He is also extremely powerful. This... doesn't work out too well.
  Dr. Fuji: We dreamed of creating the world's strongest Pokémon ...and we succeeded.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica:
  • From Kyubey's point of view, throughout the series he tries to get Madoka to make a pact with him because of her potential for enormous power which will also make her an incredibly powerful witch. When he finally manages to arrange matters in such a way that Madoka decides to make a pact with him, the wish that she makes as part of the pact rewrites reality and completely changes the nature of the whole magical girl system, making it so that no witches — including the future Witch!Madoka herself — ever existed. And with all the accumulated power on her side, Kyuubey cannot deny her said wish. He doesn't like that.
  • Most wishes also work out this way:
    • Mami wished to be saved from the car crash in which she had been involved with her parents, with the wording being akin to "Save me". The wish saved her, and let her parents die. That's why, in the series, she always warn potentials to think before making their wish, ultimately influencing Madoka's wish.
    • Sayaka wishes for Kyosuke's hand to be healed. It works, but Sayaka doesn't feel that she can date him now that she's essentially a lich, so he ends up dating Hitomi, which adds up to Sayaka's already present troubles and helps toss her into the Despair Event Horizon.
    • Kyouko wished for people to listen to her father's teachings; so many people showed up that he got suspicious, and when he found out what she did he completely lost his mind and murdered the rest of her family and himself out of madness and shame.
    • Homura wished to redo her meeting with Madoka to prevent her death, but she ends up in an infinite "Groundhog Day" Loop of failing to save her, and the whole process just makes Madoka's situation worse from accumulated despair.
    • Even Madoka's game-breaking wish goes a bit horribly right, since she gets (mostly) erased from existence due to becoming some sort of trans-temporal entity. She counts on that and is cool with it, though. Though as far as Homura's concerned, she too began to regret it.
• Rebuild World: At one point when Akira is unable to access his home city and the Friendly Shop Keeper there he usually buys equipment from, the Intrepid Merchant Katsuragi comes to him with equipment he figures Akira can’t afford yet, inflated to “the wasteland price”, in order to try and get Akira into his debt and thus profit off of his Indentured Servitude. Katsuragi’s plan ends up as this when Akira spends 18 billion aurum on the equipment which leaves Katsuragi collapsed in a fit of laughter.
• In Re:CREATORS, the main cast decides to record the final battle between the Creations and the main antagonist as a TV special, thereby trapping her in a work of fiction and forcing her to play by its (and the audience's) rules. It works particularly well...so well, in fact, that the heroes are now trapped with her. As a fanwork-only character, Altair's powers by default are acceptable to the fans, thus she can bolster her power with anything a fan's cooked up for her. And since the heroes are part of the show as well, their special-only powerups get criticised by the fans as too much of an in-universe Ass Pull to keep Altair down.
• One of the shorts of Robot Carnival, "Presence", is based on this trope. The story is about a toymaker looking to build his ideal soulmate in a robot girl. However, the girl turns out to know more about him than he knew about himself, as a result terrifying him and making him lash out and ultimately shutting her off. Even so, the experience haunts him even many years later.
• In Robotech/Super Dimension Fortress Macross the SDF-1 is programmed to do a space fold to the moon and is floating above Macross/South Ataria Island when it warps out. Since the crew don't understand entirely how the space fold system works, there are... complications. The warp bubble is large enough to warp out the SDF-1...and the entire island, including two ships docked in Macross Bay. Fortunately, the island's denizens are in airtight emergency bunkers, so no one (that we know of) dies. Also, they end up on the far side of Mars Pluto! However, the people on board the Daedalus and Prometheus aren't so lucky. The Daedalus was an amphibious assault vehicle (not submarine), and the Prometheus was a semi-submersible aircraft carrier. According to the show, neither ship could be hailed and are immediately assumed to have all hands lost due to the neither being designed for space. Roleplaying supplemental information for Robotech state that the crew of the Prometheus actually survived because of the semi-submersible construction.
  • In Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, Netron-S Missiles turn out to be this. Should even a single missile be detonated on Earth, it would turn Earth into a black hole, obliterating all the Invids and humans still there, AND obliterate the entire RDF fleet.
• Saikano. The goal was to make an unstoppable killing machine. The problem came when it became a bit too unstoppable. Eventually, Chise begins to find the whole war pointless. It's all the same, just with different uniforms. If they're all going to die anyway, why should she pick and choose who she kills? At that point, she just starts nuking major cities. This being Saikano, it goes From Bad to Worse.
• Sailor Moon has a couple examples:
  • In the manga, Minako hides her immense emotional pain so to appear an invincible and unstoppable warrior and be of example to the other Sailor Soldiers. It works so well that by the time the Dream Arc rolls in Ami, Rei and Makoto think of themselves less as her companions and more as her sidekicks, and inadequate ones at that, and have no idea that Minako isn't so unbreakable, and as she can't see that she thinks that their request to call the Outers in is more about them thinking she is inadequate (something she's starting to think because after they were all Brought Down to Normal she's the only one who still had to recover her powers, something the others think has already happened or assume she didn't lose her powers to begin with).
  • In Codename: Sailor V (of which Sailor Moon is the More Popular Spin Off), Danburite's real plan is to make Sailor V fall for him and use that to make her realize she'll always put duty over love and awaken her memories of her past life, with her true power along it, before fighting her with his Dark Kingdom-given powers. It works perfectly... And her one strike is so powerful it overwhelms his strongest attack and makes him slowly disintegrate.
• Shiori Experience has the protagonist band stuck in a rut after a disastrous performance and their club president being so demoralized that she decides to quit the band, since she felt like she had no place as a sax player in a rock group. To win them over and make efforts to improve themselves, they take time off to perfect their instruments and pump their in-progress song with so much passion that they hope will get their message out. In the end, they did improve immensely, and they were able to make their feelings known—but they only proved the president right, in that the song no longer has room for a saxophone part. And she only came back to resign.
• One of the Slayers OVA's features the shadow reflector, a Magic Mirror designed to counter demons by creating a copy of them loyal to the user with a completely opposite personality. It works, but since the opposite of an Omnicidal Maniac is a person with absolutely no will to fight, the mirror is essentially useless and its creator hid it away in shame. The results when it gets turned against our heroes are highly amusing.
  • Also in Slayers, the spell Giga Slave is supposed to do this eventually. It calls forth the powers of Lord of Nightmares, which is the creator of that world, and her powers is her will so it risks destroying the world completely. Even our hero of mass destruction decided to just seal the spell for good.
    • A demon lord wanting to utilise this spell and force her to use it by capturing her teammates and threaten killing them. She reluctantly uses the spell and successfully called forth the Lord of Destruction herself. To the dismay of the demon, this has definitely gone horribly right because while the Lord created the demons to destroy the world(where she also created the gods to protect it), she asked them to do their own work and viewed the demon lord to be just a child refusing to do his own homework and disposed of him for calling her to do his work for him.
• Mention must be made of the Buff Clan's final plan to destroy the titular robot in Space Runaway Ideon. They decided to use a massive, planet-destroying Wave-Motion Gun to destroy the Ideon. It WORKS... but in doing so causes a massive outflow of Ide, killing everyone in a slowly expanding wave of destruction. The Movie ends with everyone in some kind of afterlife.
• In Uchuu Senkan Yamato, the heroes first use their Wave-Motion Gun to destroy an enemy base on Jupiter's Floating Continent. To their shock, they find out just how powerful the gun is when the resultant blast destroys the entire continent and almost destroys their ship. From then on, they're far more judicious about when to use the thing.
• In Urusei Yatsura, the Mizunokoji family keeps its female heirs secluded from all male contact until the day of their Arranged Marriage to ensure their purity. Unfortunately, the current heiress, Asuka, was attended to by extremely incompetent female protectors, leaving her with little understanding and a considerable fear of men — something only made worse by her first sight of a man being super-lech Ataru Moroboshi. To calm her fears, her attendants tried telling her about her big brother Tobimaro, and now he's the only man she's not terrified of... but because of her ignorance of male/female relationships, she wants to marry her brother.
• Wagnaria!!: Mahiru Inami's father trained her from birth to instinctively fear all men, so as to protect her from any boy that tried to date her. Unfortunately, she decided that the best defense was a good offense, and instead attacks any man that gets within several meters of her, while yelling and crying from fear. Including her father.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Gozaburo Kaiba adopts an orphan named Seto Kaiba to be the heir to his corporation, and puts him through Training from Hell to make him as ruthless as possible. A few years later, Seto Kaiba ousts his adoptive father and takes control of KaibaCorp. Interestingly, Gozaburo played this one Palpatine-style: Seto succeeded because he'd earned it, and Gozaburo, as the loser, had to pay the price.^*In the dub, he ran away and disappeared forever — or at least until season 3.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, III is the meekest of the Tron family, possibly qualifying as a Minion with an F in Evil. Once he decides that he needs to defeat Yuma to become a strong duelist, he asks Tron for power taken from Haruto in order to give him the confidence he needs. He gets far more than he bargained for; the dark spell turns him into an Ax-Crazy and sadistic sociopath that almost kills both Yuma and Astral in their worst battle to date.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, the Professor takes advantage of Yuri's strength and trains him to be his most effective Child Soldier, while encouraging him to enjoy his work. Yuri ends up being one of the strongest villains in the series, but only because he enjoys hurting people. In fact, Yuri enjoys his work so much that he plans on carding everyone in the world, until he is the only survivor. He later forgets his work to pursue his own interest in finding his dimensional counterparts, defeating them and absorbing them.

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