Laser Guided Karma / Literature

Laser-Guided Karma in Literature.

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• Lots of fairy tales rely on this trope.
  • Charles Perrault and The Brothers Grimm have a lot of stories like this, such as Diamonds and Toads and The Queen Bee.
  • In at least one Russian story, Baba Yaga's gate/pets/household goods help the heroine to escape because she was kinder to them than Baba Yaga was.
  • Many fairy tales also have poor, hungry, often ugly old women who just want some food or a place to stay. They may or may not be a fairy queen in disguise, but it's always a Secret Test of Character, generally with good advice for the people who succeed and deadly curses for those who don't. The most obvious example is Beauty and the Beast.
  • There is an Irish folktale called The Hunchback and the Elves where a hunchback happens upon a gathering of elves; because he is kind to them, they reward him by removing his hunch. He tells another hunchback, who also visits the elves, shows them kindness, and is rewarded the same way. A third hunchback visits the elves but tries to steal their treasure and instead of being rewarded, the elves give him the other two hunchbacks' hunches in addition to one he already had. Japan has its own version of the tale titled How an Old Man Lost His Wen. The only differences are that there are two men instead of three, instead of a hunch the men have a growth on their faces called a wen, and instead of elves they run into tengu.
• In And Then There Were None, Judge Wargrave lures nine people who escaped punishment for killing others to an island with the intent of being the instigator of this trope for them. It's quite telling that in adaptations that spare some of Wargrave's intended victims, the spared victims are always revealed to be actually innocent of the murders he believed them to be guilty of.
• In Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, the entire elf race, to the last child, suffers a face full of karma for the way they abuse their human slaves. As part of his Xanatos Gambit, protagonist Light engineers a full and immediate Slave Liberation and evacuation of all the humans in the elf kingdom, upon threat of deadly force. In less than a week, the elves all learn, rather painfully, that every single one of their Green Aesop complaints against the humans actually apply to themselves instead, as now they have nobody around to clean up after their filth and refuse, and none of them even know where to start trying to do the work. Vermin of all stripes are lured in by the stench and start spreading disease. Light (and the fanbase) find it all very, very gratifying.
• This has been known to happen to Brother Bear from The Berenstain Bears whenever he's rude to his little sister. For example, in "The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Dream", he drags his sister to a movie about the Space Grizzlies (a series he loves) that scares the daylights out of her and results in a bad dream. Not long afterwards, he also has a bad dream. He also (somehow) winds up afraid of the dark by the end of "...In The Dark" after he picks on his sister about being afraid of the dark herself for most of the book.
• The Bestseller:
  • Daniel goes to massive lengths to "prove" he wrote a major novel when his wife Judith did all the work. The novel turns out to be a huge flop and Daniel's insistence on taking sole credit means he gets sole blame.
  • In the same book, bitchy editor Pam's constant scheming and screwing over others finally gets her fired.
  • Also, Gerald's own scheming and attempt to steal the sales of other books to boost his own is discovered and he's fired by his own father.
• In Tom Kratman's Caliphate, an amoral, self-centered pedophile with no redeeming qualities whatsoever is working for the book's bad guys to create a super-virus. When he along with the child slaves being used for both test subjects and his personal gratification are rescued by the protagonist team, two of the children he abused use a shoelace and pencil to create a tourniquet they use to kill him by strangulation.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory runs on this with regard to the four naughty kids — their selfishness, pride, etc. is such that they disregard Willy Wonka's instructions and warnings as the tour of the factory progresses, and in each case, it backfires on them big time.
• In "Dancing Dan's Christmas" by Damon Runyon, Dancing Dan decides on a whim to borrow a drunken Mall Santa's outfit and anonymously improve the lives of some poverty-stricken persons of his acquaintance. This whim saves his life, as it causes a hitman who'd almost tracked him down (and of whose existence he was completely unaware) to lose his trail.
• Discworld:
  • The Eludidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, who summon the dragon in Guards! Guards!, end up burnt to death as soon as the dragon slips the leash. The Discworld Companion lampshades this in the entry for the Brethren. "The thing about karma on the Discworld is that it often happens real soon."
    Brother Watchtower: We just wanted what was due to us.
    Death: Congratulations.
  • The Last Hero mentions one tribe with no imagination, and therefore no gods, that was wiped out by a nearby tribe who believed a light from the moon was a signal from their god to increase their hunting grounds. The second tribe was wiped out years later by a third tribe, who apparently got a message from their ancestors living in the moon that all non-believers in their goddess should be killed. That third tribe was killed years later by a rock falling from the sky, as the result of a star exploding a billion years ago.
    What goes around comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.
• Peter in Divergent receives a whopping heap of it. After spending most of the book bullying others, sabotaging or attempting to murder anyone who does better than him in the trials, he ends up injured courtesy of Tris, begging for his life and forced to assist in undoing the brainwashing simulation knowing that everyone can see him for what he really is.
• At the beginning of Dragon Bones, Ward finds out that one of their cousins has bullied his sister Ciarra, and punches him in the face. Then he goes to find her, as if she is late to dinner, their abusive father will beat her up. When they arrive home, they are told that their father is on his deathbed after having been thrown by his horse — a horse he turned into an aggressive beast through mistreatment.
• Arianna Ortega from The Dresden Files falls prey to this; she keeps her dad from interfering with her plan to gain the prestige to dethrone him by citing legal reasons; when the father of the girl she kidnapped and planned to sacrifice comes calling, he uses the same excuse that she did to get her father to let him challenge her, which ends with Arianna impaled by ice spears. Then her father tries to back out of his deal with the father to let him and the child go. It costs him more than his life when karma comes calling.
• Roald Dahl's The Enormous Crocodile. The title character's misdeeds towards other animals throughout the book backfire on him big time, and devious attempts to eat kids are thwarted at every turn. He ends up being thrown into the Sun by the elephant he bit earlier.
• One particularly horrific version appears in the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel Festival of Death, in which a character wipes out a species as research into how they are able to resurrect at the beginning of their lives with memories of how the last one went, in the hope of doing this and saving his parents from a shuttle accident. He succeeds, and learns that he can only watch, not interfere with what's happened, essentially forcing him to watch all the tragedies and atrocities of his life an infinite number of times.
• The Faerie Queene's Malbecco is a miser who locks his wife and refuses to let anyone from the outside world into his home. In the end, his wife leaves him for a group of satyrs out in the wild, his money gets lost in the woods, and he lives alone the rest of his days alone in a small, dark cave
• In The First Wives Club, all of the ex-husbands end up humiliated in their various fields, a couple lose their jobs when their long-term cheating is discovered, and Gil (a racist who drove his ex-wife to suicide) goes to jail for insider trading.
• Goodbye Charlie: As a man, Charlie was a notorious womanizer. He is resurrected as a woman.
• The Great Zoo of China features a positive example. Early on, CJ first protects a hapless worker from the wrath of his supervisor, then saves Lucky the dragon when she's surrounded by black dragons. Both come back to help her later in the book.
• Harry Potter:
  • This trope is subverted and then played straight, then subverted again, in the case of Wormtail. Harry allows Wormtail to live, even though Wormtail was responsible for the death of Harry's parents, which first allows Wormtail to find Voldemort and return him to full power. However, as Dumbledore suggested, Harry's kindness meant that Wormtail felt that he was in Harry's debt, eventually leading to Wormtail saving Harry's life in the final book. Wormtail is then rewarded for this act of mercy by being strangled to death by his own magical prosthetic hand, which had been programmed to do so by Voldemort in case Wormtail's loyalty ever wavered again.
  • Umbridge at the end of Order of the Phoenix. Hates "half-breeds" like centaurs, mermaids, etc. Traumatized so badly by them that the next time we see her (not too long after the incident in question), she's practically catatonic. Sadly it doesn't stick.
  • Cornelius Fudge spends an entire year denying that Voldemort was back, and sets up an entire smear campaign against Harry, Dumbledore, and their supporters to disgrace them and to destroy their reputations. Once it turns out that Voldemort really has returned, all of the slander he aimed at his "enemies" turns around and bites him in the ass. The entire wizarding community now sees him as a Dirty Coward, so he gets fired in disgrace and his reputation is destroyed, and he's going down in history as one of the worst Ministers of Magic ever.
  • Marietta Edgecombe betrays Dumbledore's Army, only to have the word "Sneak" written with pimples all over her face. This was Hermione's doing — all of the members of Dumbledore's Army unknowingly signed an enchanted contract.
  • Gilderoy Lockhart, who takes credit for other people's achievements then erases their memories. He tries to do the same to Ron and Harry in Chamber of Secrets but uses a broken wand, which causes the Obliviate spell to backfire and wipe his memories. Pottermore shows that this was somewhat intentional on Dumbledore's part at least, since he knew some of the people whose memories Lockhart wiped and hired him so he'd end up exposing himself as a fraud.
  • What gets Bellatrix Lestrange bitten in the butt is her trying to murder Ginny Weasley in front of her overprotective and furious mother. "Not my daughter you bitch" indeed. Even more ironic is that Bellatrix kills her cousin Sirius after he underestimated her, and yet she later does the same thing with the same consequences; especially ironic is the imagery of both of them laughing right before the curse hits.
  • Dudley Dursley spends his childhood bullying Harry just because he was there. Once Harry has some more powerful friends, they seem to make it a personal mission to torment Dudley whenever in his presence. But in the fifth book, Dudley gets a different kind of karma when he and Harry are in the presence of a Dementor — which causes him to see exactly what a horrible person he truly is. Because of that karmic revelation, Dudley changes his ways. By the time the Dursleys go into hiding in the last book, Harry and Dudley have made peace and part very amicably, and Word of God says that as adults, they occasionally get their kids together for playdates.
  • The Death Eater organization as a whole end up being on the wrong end of a satisfying karmic beatdown during the end of the battle of Hogwarts at the hands of everyone/thing they've been terrorizing for the last two books, including: the enraged Mama Bear and Papa Wolf parents and family members of every student who stayed to fight, the returning students of Slytherin house who had fled before the fighting started (including their head of house), every house elf in Hogwarts (whom they view as slaves), the centaurs (who are viewed as animals), a herd of Thestrals, a Hippogriff, and a giant.
  • Bartemius Crouch Senior becomes an Unwitting Pawn and later killed because of the two Death Eaters who helped Voldemort's return to power. One of those Death Eaters is Bartemius Crouch Junior, who was at large because Senior broke him from Azkaban and kept him under the Imperius Curse, which was later used to force Senior to help with their plan; and the other is Peter Pettigrew, whose trick to cheat justice in the past was helped by Crouch Senior sending Sirius Black to Azkaban without a trial.
• In His Only Wife, Afi marries Elikem Ganyo as part of an Arranged Marriage. After Afi decides to leave Elikem for good, his sister Yaya delivers a The Reason You Suck speech to Afi, lambasting her for acting like the Ganyos dragged her into something she didn't want to. Later on, Yaya's domineering mother (who had arranged the marriage to begin with) has her move to Elikem's home to take care of him. Elikem is a healthy adult with housekeeping staff, and does not need a caregiver.
• In Holes, white school teacher Kate Barlow and black onion seller Sam kiss, and as a result, the town of Green Lake lynch Sam and burn down the schoolhouse. In bitter retribution, Ms. Barlow becomes the feared outlaw Kissin' Kate Barlow; meanwhile, the town suffers a drought which dries up the lake for which it was named, also causing the fortune of the man who led the mob to dry up as well. Ironically, an old woman who saw the kiss commented "God will punish you!" As the narration notes, whom did God punish, indeed?
• Honor Harrington:
  • Two from Honor Among Enemies:
    • Andrew Warnecke and his close followers are killed by Honor and her crew, having followed the terms of the agreement that Warnecke "forced" on them nearly to the letter. His mistake was in not searching for chemical-propelled weaponry, like Honor's Colt M1911 pistol.
    • Steilman's gang of thugs ultimately wind up killed by a grazer fired by a warship from the same people to whom he had planned to defect, with copies of the manuals for advanced Manticoran military technology.
  • In Storm From the Shadows, Solarian admiral Josef Byng slaughters three Manticoran destroyers out of hand while their wedges are down and the ships are entirely unprotected in the star system of New Tuscany; the fourth and last member of the division survives only because it was hiding out-system. Later in the novel, Admiral Michelle Henke, a bit irritated at the unprovoked destruction of a part of her fleet, guides karma comprised of lasers — the kind that make up the RMN's ridiculously powerful, precisely targeted, and very lethal missile heads — right into Byng's flagship. Neither flagship nor Byng survives the encounter.
• Horizon of War: Sergio bitterly rebukes his former followers who have turned on him and brought him down, complaining, "I led you through famine and this is my reward—" before one of his soldiers, who had lost friends and family to Sergio's self-aggrandising schemes, stuffs his mouth with the gold coins he had been collecting.
  Soldier: This is the reward you sought!
• In How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III spends the whole book on a dangerous quest for the believed-nonexistent potato to save his friend Fishlegs from the bite of a poisonous dragon. That's a good thing because guess who was really bitten.
• In The Hunger Games:
  • Foxface keeps stealing everyone else's food. In the end, she dies after stealing some berries from Peeta that turn out to be poisonous.
  • In-universe, the rules of the first Quarter Quells were designed to inflict "karmic justice" on the Districts. In the 25th Hunger Games, tributes were voted in by the District citizens instead of randomly selected, to remind them that they chose to rebel against the Capitol. In the 50th Hunger Games, twice as many tributes were reaped to remind them that two District citizens died for every one Capitol citizen.
  • The people of the Capitol voted to pit the District children to fight to the death for 74 years. Near the end of Mockingjay, they have to watch dozens if not hundreds of their own children blown to bits by bombs dropped from their planes (actually rebels', but painted with Capitol colors). President Coin's subsequent suggestion to hold a symbolic Hunger Games with Capitol children would have been an even more karmic retribution, had Katniss not stopped it at the last minute.
• In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Jonathan's father Lawrence decides to punish a servant who annoyed him by sending him out on a long and pointless journey on a cold night. When he comes back feverish Lawrence insists that the man attend him as he works all night, and opens a window. He overlooks that feverish as the man is, the servant is much younger and in better health, and in the morning Lawrence is found to have died of exposure.
• King of the Bench: Jimmy Jimerino's dad spends every game in Kicking and Screaming being loud and obnoxious, and becoming disappointed in his son every time he misses. At the end of the book, he's been sentenced to spend every game he attends from that point on sitting in front of Principal T.
• Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library, Charles Chiltington pressures his teammate Andrew into stealing a competitor's library card, which he knows would get him removed from the competition. One of the adults in charge reviews security footage, sees he put Andrew up to it, and disqualifies him too.
• In Killer Frost, the final Mythos Academy book, Gwen is fighting Vivien, who murdered Gwen's mom and countless others, and is just all-around evil. Gwen uses her psychometry to push every bit of suffering she's experienced in her own life and through others into Vivien's mind until it breaks. Vivien is left curled up mumbling to herself and begging for it to stop — apparently for the rest of her life. Even Vivien's thoroughly evil mentor is horrified and looks at Gwen with fear.
• Although Artemis Entreri was a Karma Houdini in The Icewind Dale Trilogy, taking Regis captive and cutting off two of his fingers, karma catches up to him shortly after. In The Legacy he tortures Regis even more, to goad Drizzt into fighting for his friend's life. But when it's all said and done, Entreri ends up badly injured and hanging from a cliff by his torn cloak. He is stuck in that position for over a day before he is found... by Regis. Regis taunts the helpless Entreri, takes several of his possessions, wonders aloud if he should bring help for the assassin... then decides that he's not feeling too merciful, and cuts the last remaining strands of Entreri's cloak, causing him to fall. And while Entreri does survive this, he winds up stuck in Menzoberranzan, and he is absolutely miserable there.
• In the The Lord of the Rings, each of the Ring-bearers shows mercy to Gollum and is rewarded for it later. Bilbo refrains from murdering Gollum in the goblin caves and is rewarded (according to Gandalf) by taking very little hurt from the evil of the Ring and being able to give it up at the end. Frodo is merciful when Gollum finds him and Sam in the Emyn Muil and is rewarded when Gollum successfully gets the two of them into Mordor. Finally, Sam himself shows mercy to Gollum on the slopes of Mount Doom and is rewarded when Gollum bites the Ring from Frodo's hand (thus freeing Frodo from the Ring's control) and falls with it into the Fire. Conversely, the Ring's malevolent corruption of Gollum ultimately results in the Ring's own destruction.
• In Loyal Enemies, one of the villains attempts to pull a Karma Houdini after the final battle by stealing one of the heroes' kelpies. Now, kelpies are actually water currents that take the form of white horses on land and have to be kept bridled or they run for the nearest body of water to reunite with it. Veres, pretending to be intimidated, lets Etvor have the horse — sans bridle. Thinking only of getting away as fast as possible, Etvor lets the kelpie run freely and ends up drowning in the nearest icy river.
• In Mansfield Park, Mrs. Norris raises her niece Maria to be vain, haughty, and to consider her own wants and desires above anyone else's (although with the gentility of upper-class manners). When Maria is grown, Mrs. Norris arranges a match with Mr. Rushworth, who is rich but stupid. Maria eventually realizes she can't stand being married to him and runs off with the man she'd nearly cheated with during her engagement, resulting in public disgrace and exile from the family. Mrs. Norris insists on going to live with Maria in her country cottage, and the narrator supposes that each served as the other's penance.
• In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Metzengerstein," the title character is a Spoiled Brat who burns down the stables of the rival Berliftzing family, killing the patriarch. A strange red horse apparently escapes the fire, and Baron Metzengerstein takes it for his own. The horse is implied to be Count Berliftzing reincarnated, and he eventually carries Metzengerstein to his doom... in a fire.
• Played straight in The Millennium Trilogy. Every single evil-doer gets their comeuppance.
  • Gottfreid Vanger is murdered by the daughter he raped and abused for years.
  • Gottfreid's son, Martin, who also turned out to be a serial killer, commits suicide after being attacked and chased down by Lisbeth.
  • Nils Bjurmann first gets "I am a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist" tattooed on his abdomen by Lisbeth; then, in the second book, he is murdered.
  • Zala is shot point-blank and murdered by Evert Gullberg, who then turns the gun on himself.
  • Gunnar Björk is murdered and staged to look like a suicide.
  • Peter Teleborian is arrested for possession of child pornography which Lisbeth and her fellow hackers found on his own laptop after being exposed as a liar and a criminal by Lisbeth's lawyer, Annika Giannini.
  • All the members of the Section are arrested by the police in a highly organized raid and crackdown.
  • Niedermann is shot by a rival gang member, and then those gang members are arrested by the police.
• Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey is an insincere Gold Digger who realizes that her chosen conquest, James Morland, isn't as rich as she supposed... so she begins to return the flirtatious attentions of the definitely-rich Captain Tilney. But when James breaks the engagement, Isabella discovers that Captain Tilney has no intention of following through on his flirtation. She tries writing to Catherine Morland in a desperate effort to renew their friendship and the engagement, but to no avail.
• In An Outcast in Another World, Elder Cesario betrays Rob and The Village by revealing Rob’s existence to the world at large. He gets eaten by monsters not long after.
• Överenskommelser by Simona Ahrnstedt has three heinous villains, because one creep obviously wasn't enough. But at least karma eventually catches up with them.
  • Count Rosenschiöld is a sadistic serial abuser of women who rapes and almost kills Beatrice (the poor female protagonist) on their wedding night who ends up dying what we only can hope is a painful death. As a beautiful irony, Beatrice survives to find happiness with another (much younger) man and work for women's rights.
  • Edvard takes his sadism too far one time too many, leaving him brutally maimed and hiding in a hospital in Germany.
  • Wilhelm is a cruel domestic abuser who has loses everything in the end. His son has been maimed, his daughter no longer wants to see him, even his doormat wife has left him, and Beatrice (his niece) claims the right to "his" house, which turned out to be her inheritance from her grandmother.
• In the Pig the Pug series, Pig is rude, gross, and ignores all the advice that Trevor attempts to give him. Because of this, Pig's actions always come crumbling down by the end of the story, often in a way themed after the book.
• In Protector of the Small, knight-in-training Vinson of Genlith tries to assault Kel's maid, Lalasa, before Kel arrives and drives him off. Lalasa begs her not to report him officially because his powerful family retaliate against Lalasa and her uncle, who are servants, and so Kel reluctantly lets him go unpunished. Later, Vinson beats three commoner girls and rapes one in the city. This is discovered because the Chamber of the Ordeal, which houses an entity that tests the character of would-be knights, has cursed him to experience the injuries he inflicted on his victims indefinitely.
• A Rebellious Princess herself in her youth, Cassandra from Ranger's Apprentice does not appreciate having a daughter who does the exact same things she did as a stupid teenager. This is lampshaded. Heavily.
  • Said daughter, Madelyn, has hints of being a Spoiled Brat, which her parents have been trying to break her of to no avail. This comes to a head when she haughtily flaunts her rank to a "mere" cook — who happens to be one of her father's oldest friends. Will decides enough is enough and reveals that her parents have disowned her in a last-ditch effort to get through to her how unacceptable her behavior is. The revelation completely devastates her and finally kicks off her Character Development.
• Seven Years Awesome Luck: Kester teaches six-year-old Landon how to use his burgeoning magic to control people, practising on a police officer with valuable information about an ongoing case. Shortly afterward, Landon experiments on controlling Kester, whose magical defences were temporarily down, and who doesn't appreciate being on the receiving end, leading to his Heel Realization.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, a man in one city begins to rape his own daughter, telling her to shut up and enjoy it as she screams. Cue Daylen Namaran crashing through the roof and performing an impromptu castration on the rapist before throwing him straight through a brick wall.
  Daylen: Your father deserved it.
• Six of Crows has several examples:
  • Pekka Rollins, the gang boss and King of the Barrel, tries to get Kaz Brekker (aka the Bastard of the Barrel) and his crew killed. In response to this and the fact that Pekka unintentionally caused Kaz's Start of Darkness by stealing his brother Jordie's money and leaving the two on the streets, where they caught firepox and Jordie died, Kaz humiliates Pekka, making sure that everyone knows that since Pekka is taking orders from a mercher, he's not a real Barrel boss. Kaz also tells Pekka that he buried Pekka's toddler son in a graveyard, alive. He was lying, but the sight of Pekka on his knees begging for Kaz's mercy definitely helped his downfall. Oh, and Kaz also ensured that Pekka's gambling halls and pleasure house were quarantined by the stadwatch under the belief that plague had struck them. Never cross Kaz Brekker. He'll make sure you regret it.
  • Jan Van Eck, the mercher who hired Kaz to break into the Ice Court, double-crosses Kaz and tries to have him arrested, as well as kidnapped Inej and generally making their lives very difficult. He also is Wylan's father. In response, Kaz orchestrates a Humiliation Conga for him, first kidnapped Van Eck's pregnant wife, then making arrangments for Van Eck's shady business practices to come to light (in a society that regards fraud as a capital offense). Then Van Eck is exposed to the entire Merchant's Council (of which he is a member) and humiliated by not only being (shown to be) wrong about Kaz's plans, but also being believed insane by his former councilmembers (and all of Ketterdam) when he wildly states that Wylan will run his business into the ground since Wylan can't read, only for Wylan to take a piece of paper whose contents he knows by heart and recite the words. He ends the series imprisoned for fraud.
  • Heleen Van Houden is the owner and propretier of the House of Exotics, also known as the Menagerie, a pleasure house that caters to those who fetishize foreign women. She purchased Inej as a slave before the start of the series and forced Inej to become a Sex Slave at the Menagerie. By the end of the duology, she has been choked by her former slave, Inej, now free thanks to Kaz, and likely will lose her business due to the plague (in reality, something Kaz and Nina cooked up that resembles the plague but is actually harmless. Not that anyone else knows this.) Kaz remarks that it seems that Heleen won't be able to make her rent that month, very smugly. It's a fitting end for her.
• In Joe Hill's novella Snapshot, from Strange Weather, the antagonist ends up having his memory-stealing camera turned against him by the protagonist, leaving him severely addled and no longer able to threaten anyone.
• In Space Marine Battles novel Siege of Castellax, Skintaker Algol threatens to kill a runaway slave as slowly and painfully as possible. Come the end of the novel, and he's buried under rubble, immobilizing him. The same slave finds him and starts stabbing him, and Skintaker's superhuman metabolism results in long, drawn-out death.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has several instances of this.
  • One of the most shining examples would be Tywin Lannister getting killed by Tyrion, the son he always disliked and mistreated, by the end of A Storm of Swords.
  • In the first book, Jaime Lannister pushes young Bran off a tower in an attempt to kill him, thus violating his guest rights to his hosts, the Starks. Two books later, the hand with which he pushed Bran gets cut off by a bloodthirsty sellsword.
  • Twyin's daughter Cersei gets her own karmic treatment near the end of A Feast for Crows. She gets arrested by the story's Church Militant and punished for her sins in a most humiliating way. That's right, the same Church Militant she raised back to power earlier in the same book.
  • After the Freys break the Laws of Hospitality by killing several Starks and their bannermen during the Red Wedding, their reputation is tarnished. Even worse, many of the Northerners and the Brotherhood without Banners actively hunt down and kill any Frey they capture.
  • Jorah Mormont is extremely bitter about being banished from Westeros, which he believes to be Disproportionate Retribution for selling "a few lice-ridden poachers" as slaves. Later, he thinks nothing of encouraging Daenerys to buy the Unsullied, an army of slaves, to retake Westeros despite her hatred of slavery. Several books later, he himself is Made a Slave.
• In Speak, the protagonist Melinda, a social outcast, befriends and helps the new girl, Heather. However, Heather, being a Social Climber with aspirations of popularity, ditches Melinda the second she gets the chance to join a clique of popular girls known as The Marthas, even returning the friendship necklace the latter gave her for a Christmas gift. Several months later, Heather comes crawling back to Melinda, asking her help in decorating the Route 11 Holiday Inn ballroom for the prom, as she is unable to do it by herself. Melinda refuses, and the last we hear of Heather is that she missed school the day after prom because everybody is grumbling about her lame decorations. Immediately afterward, Melinda remarks that Heather should run away and join the Marines because "they'll be much sweeter to her than a swarm of angry Marthas".
• In an Italian children's story called Strega Nona (which translates to "Grandma Witch"), the titular character owns a pot that can magically cook pasta. One day, she leaves to visit a friend, and her caretaker, Big Anthony, uses the pot to make pasta for the entire village. But because he doesn't know how to make the pot stop, the entire village is soon flooded with pasta noodles. After Strega Nona returns and saves the day, she hands Big Anthony a fork and tells him to eat all of the pasta, saying "the punishment must fit the crime".
• Struwwelpeter:
  • In "The Story of the Inky Boys", three kids who tease a black boy get their just deserts when Nikolas dips them into a gigantic inkwell.
  • In "The Story of Cruel Frederick", a mean boy who abuses animals and breaks things gets a nasty bite on the leg from a dog he whipped, leaving him laid up in bed for days and fed nasty-tasting medicine.
• Teen Power Inc.: While Avnet Cain from Breaking Point isn't the Big Bad of the book, he does shamelessly manipulate the gang in a way that involves faking an injury, only to suffer that injury for real during a scuffle with the main villain in the climax. He even lampshades how poetic it is.
• Treasure Island: Old pirate Pew leads Flint's pirate crew to find the treasure map in the Admiral Benbow, ordering the men to burn the place down later. He gets so angry that all the other pirates run away while he screams at them — at which point a soldier patrol arrives on horse, accidentally running over Pew.
• Under Heaven: There are (at least) three characters that received negative karma this way, and one positive.
  • Wen Zhou: Gave an order to Second Division soldiers that lead to their death in a battle, when they could have stayed put in a siege situation and had a guaranteed win. Later, other soldiers, including from Second Division (or friends of theirs), call him out, and end up shooting him full of arrows in grief over what happened.
  • Wen Jian: Had played Wen Zhou and An Li against each other, appearing to alternate in playing favorites; this leads to a Civil War, which includes the battle lost by the Second Division. She's killed soon after her cousin Zhou, but by Shen Liu, so the same soldiers aren't marked for death for shooting the Emperor's consort.
  • Shen Liu: He becomes an advisor to Wen Zhou, both for honor, and to help support his family's prospects. After Zhou's fall from grace (and subsequent death), he realizes that he's a marked man (and his family could end up in trouble) despite the fact Zhou had stopped taking his advice. He decides to commit Suicide by Cop, and instructs his brother on how to try to distance the family from the consequences of his actions.
  • Lin Chang: She hires Kanlin guards for Shen Tai, because of rumors she had heard (before his gift of horses). Later when she flees the capital, her own guards that she had hired refuse to let her travel past a certain point on her own; their presence is noted in the narration to have not only kept her and her servants safe, but also the caravan she was traveling with. Also, she had provided for a former servant that had lost his job with her husband; Shen Tai is able to use him to pass a message along that lets her leave the capital in time before it's sacked in the civil war.
• In The Valet's Secret, Rebecca's father verbally abused her for years... while also relying on her to do basically all the work in "his" business of making silhouette portraits for the wealthy. When he escalates to physical abuse, Rebecca finally puts her foot down and leaves. Even then, she's willing to help him with his work, but he escalates his abuse further, prompting her to cut ties completely for her own safety and dooming him to financial ruin.
• In Warrior Cats, Tigerstar has been manipulating events for a while in order to become ThunderClan's leader. He got to set a trap for Bluestar at the edge of the Thunderpath with the intention of killing her, but Cinderpelt ended up investigating the Thunderpath and getting hit by a car, which permanently damaged one of her legs and dashed her hopes of ever being a Warrior. Before that, in Into the Wild, he killed Redtail, ThunderClan's deputy at the time. Not many moons after that, he learned that Ravenpaw, his apprentice, saw what happened, and Tigerstar tried to turn the clan against Ravenpaw and planned to kill him to make sure he stayed silent. In Forest of Secrets, he led a group of rogues in an attack against ThunderClan, and he surely would've killed Bluestar if Firestar hadn't been present. In A Dangerous Path, he led a pack of dogs to Snakerocks, which ended up killing one apprentice and disfiguring another as well as killing another cat to give the dogs a taste for cat blood. It all comes to a head in The Darkest Hour when he wants to unite the clans as one (which is a lot worse than it sounds) under his leadership. He manages to get RiverClan to join "TigerClan" and tries to get Graystripe's kits killed by having Stonefur, Bluestar's son, kill them. When Stonefur refuses, he sics Darkstripe on him, and when it looks like Darkstripe is going to lose, Tigerstar gets another one of his followers to kill Stonefur. And after his betrayal, Bluestar completely loses her mind, which makes her stop caring about her Clan. While his death at the hands of Scourge isn't one that any sane cat would wish on another, you have to admit that after all that happened he really deserved to die. In fact, Tigerstar is so despised that his son carries the suspicions of his Clanmates.
• In Watch on the Rhine, Sergeant Major Krueger, a rejuvenated SS soldier who once served in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, loves to boast about how easy it was to rape the female prisoners — you didn't even need to ask their names. His commanding officer is also a rejuvenated SS soldier — but one who later in life joined the Israeli military as a form of penance, and ended up marrying a survivor of Ravensbruck. At the end of the book, Colonel Brasche ends up alone with Sergeant Major Krueger.
  Hans Brasche: This is for my wife Anna, whose name you never asked, you NAZI SON OF A BITCH!
• The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963: Played with. Larry Dunn is The Bully, steals Kenny's gloves for himself (and paints them black to poorly hide it), and beats him and Rufus up by rubbing their faces in with snow, so it seems fitting that he gets bullied himself by Kenny's older brother Byron as "punishment" for stealing Kenny's gloves. But the way Byron punishes him is so brutal (he repeatedly throws Larry across the ice at a chain-link fence, and because Larry is wearing sneakers with no traction on the ice, he gets slammed face-first on the fence to the point of getting a bloody nose) that Kenny just feels sorry for Larry, and goes home with his friend Rufus because he can't stand to keep watching it.
• Way of Choices: Xu Yourong, poisoned and gravely wounded, is captured by the cowardly Bai Hai, who hopes to drink her blood and steal her power. He does manage to get at her blood, but it's still full of poison and he is much, much weaker than her...
• In the Wings of Fire series, Darkstalker committed such horrifying atrocities that other NightWings gave up their powers (of telepathy and precognition) to make sure no one as powerful as him would ever be born again. This is why no one knows Darkstalker is still alive, hundreds of years into the future, trapped under a mountain and unable to move or eat — they can't hear him.
• In Wilder Girls Headmistress laced bottles of water with gunpowder for the girls to drink, and later claims that it was to spare them from the pain of the Tox, the infectious disease afflicting all the girls. Hetty force-feeds the poisoned water to that person, so they find out for themselves how merciful it is to die via gunpowder poisoning. Hint: it is not.
• In Worm:
  • Regent is baffled in the Shell arc by Skitter's refusal to seek any revenge on those bullying her civilian identity. After they discover one of these bullies to be a Nominal Hero, Regent takes control of her for a mission, then fakes driving her out of town for his team. In actual fact, he puts her through a Humiliation Conga by exposing all of her misdeeds that he can and revealing her nature to her family, culminating in nearly having her kill herself, all because she messed with his teammate and he knows she'd never do it herself.
  • Doctor Mother, leader of Cauldron, had thousands of people across various worlds kidnapped to act as test subjects for the formulas to create superheroes, which ended up turning them into Case 53s: barely human creatures that have no memories of who they are and problematic powers. Before the final battle, Doctor Mother ends up crushed to death by a Case 53 who had lost control of her powers.
• In Young Wives, cheating husband Reid ends up humiliated by his ex-wife into a kinky scene in front of his new fiancee.

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