Be Careful What You Wish For - Television Tropes & Idioms

"A fairy might make the tiniest, most innocent wish, and it could cause a world of trouble. Mother Dove doubted even she could see around all the corners of a wish."

— Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand

Greenslade: "Needle-nardle-noo, ying tong iddle i po, spling-splang-splong, and this is Wallace Greenslade, lover of good English, wishing he was dead."

[Gunshot]

Peter Sellers: "Wish granted!"

The Goon Show

Any plot where a character expresses a wish that things were different, the wish is granted, and the character learns that the reality doesn't live up to their fantasies. A Sci Fi series may grant the wish with an Alternate Universe or Time Travel. The episode will end with the Reset Button firmly pressed.

If this is done poorly, then the wish has a secondary bad effect tacked onto it that has little to do with the original wish. No, the character is not allowed to "modify" what they wish so that the negative effect is nullified. Plot Induced Stupidity demands that there is only one possible outcome to a wish; otherwise An Aesop is compromised.

A common way for a careless wish to be granted is through the sudden appearance of Louis Cypher, ready to make a deal. This is especially likely if the wish is expressed by the character saying that he'd sell his soul for something (Speak Of The Devil).

Another common technique is for the wish-granter to not wait until the entire wish has been expressed, and grant the portion that has been.

Specific types of Be Careful What You Wish For are Wonderful Life, I Wish It Were Real, and I Wished You Were Dead. Often a cause of Blessed With Suck, though not the only one. Subtrope to Be Careful What You Say. Often made during Three Wishes. See also Exact Words.

Also the supertrope of Literal Genie. The majority of trope examples will belong on that page! Contrast Gone Horribly Right.

Examples:

Anime and Manga

The series Asatte No Houkou begins with a single (well, double) instance of this, with a dash of Swapped Roles. The rest of the series consists of the characters dealing with the results.
Making wishes under the old sakura tree in Da Capo can have major consequences. For some it's even worse though when those wishes get reverted.
The 'Suruga Monkey' arc of Bakemonogatari initially appears to be a minor twist on the traditional story of the Monkey's Paw (the twist being that the paw has grafted itself to its owner's arm) but turns out to be rather more of a twist than usual. The owner's first wish was to run faster than her classmates to stop them from laughing at her; everyone in the class faster than her was mysteriously beaten up the day before the athletics carnival. The real twist is that the paw isn't a Monkey's Paw, it belongs to a malevolent spirit called a Rainy Devil that grants your true subconscious wish- even though Kanbaru wished to run faster than her classmates she really wanted revenge on them, so the Rainy Devil possessed her and beat them up. Things get worse when the sempai she had a long-term crush on gets a boyfriend. The final twist is that after granting her third wish, the Rainy Devil will take her soul.
The Rayearth OVA starts this way - the heroines fear their graduation, as they will be separated. So they wish something prevents this... then all the mayhem starts.
The scientists in Utawarerumono wanted to live forever. Unfortunately Iceman was basically a god and they just REALLY pissed him off, so he gave them all bodies that would be immortal by turning them all into red jelly.
In D.Gray-Man, the unlucky Miranda Lotto loses her one hundredth job. She says: "Day after day, things always go wrong for me. I wish tomorrow would never come.". What's the problem? Her Innocence-superpowered clock hears it, and it grants her wish. The whole town where she lives gets stuck in October 9th for more than a month.
Quite a few Franken Fran stories end this way. One, for example, has a modern Elizabeth Bathory asking for eternal youth and eternal life. Fran gave her what she wants by turning all of her cells into the one type of cell that isn't programmed to die: Cancer Cells.
xxxHolic features a chapter and episode involving a monkey's paw, which, as in the original W. W. Jacobs short story, grants wishes for its holder - five wishes in this case, one for each finger of the mummified paw, which break one at a time as wishes are granted. Also as in the original story, the young woman who gets hold of the paw finds her wishes backfiring on her, particularly when she thoughtlessly wishes that there would be a railway accident so that her lateness would be excused, causing a bystander to be suddenly pushed in front of the train. The paw and her own careless wishes end up killing her.

Comic Books

Subverted in Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes because there is no Reset Button at the end. Protagonist Hana, having used up all five wishes and finding herself no better off, maybe even worse, than at the beginning of the story, decides to jump off a bridge so as to get rid of the demon Romeo and prevent his magic from harming anyone ever again. Romeo somehow escapes from the box before they reach the riverbed, claiming that he "can't die." The last page shows a news report saying that Hana's body has still not been found.
"Wish You Were Here", a 1953 story from the EC Comics horror title The Haunt of Fear, uses a variation of The Monkey's Paw story: A businessman's wife discovers an enchanted Chinese figurine and wishes for a fortune. Learning that her husband was killed while driving to his lawyer's office (after naming her the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy) and remembering what happened in The Monkey's Paw, she wishes for him to be brought back to the way he was "just before the accident"; unfortunately, he's still a corpse since his actual death was due to a heart attack. She uses the third and final wish to make him "alive now, alive forever!"...which condemns him to eternal pain and agony, since his dead body had been enbalmed. Even her hacking him to tiny bits can't put him out of his misery. (The comic was later adapted for the 1972 movie anthology of Tales from the Crypt.)
Played with in Knights Of The Dinner Table. When given the opportunity for a Wish, resident Rules Lawyer Brian pulls out a 20-page legal document he's been carrying around for just such an opportunity. It's so complex that the Dungeon Master has to call several other DMs to help him interpret it.

Fairy Tales

In The Twelve Wild Ducks, a queen says, "If I only had a daughter as white as snow and as red as blood, I shouldn't care what became of all my sons." A troll witch hears and takes her sons.
In The Seven Ravens, the father wishes his sons were ravens for being forgetful. (To add to the irony, he was mistaken about why they hadn't done as he said.)
In The Myrtle, a woman wishes for a child, even a sprig of myrtle.
In Hans the Hedgehog, the father wishes for a son, even a hedgehog.
Similar stories went around in seventeenth century England. In some cases a Catholic or Anglican parent would rather their unborn child to have no head than be a Roundhead, in others, a Puritan would wish for their child have no head than have a priest make the Sign of the Cross on it. Either way, they ended up with a headless baby.
This troper recalls a fairy tale about a poor couple that rescues an elf and is granted three wishes in return. The wife, being hungry, wishes she had a nice, tasty sausage. Her husband scolds her for wasting a wish on such a mundane thing and blurts out in anger: "I wish that stupid sausage would stick to your nose!" which is, of course, exactly what happens next. In the end, they have to use the third wish to get the sausage off the poor woman's face and have thus wasted all three of them.
- As I remember it, the story begins with the elf being saved by a couple who use their wishes sensibly. The other (nasty) couple hear about this and arrange to rescue the elf as well, with the above results.
In Hans Christian Andersen's The Galoches of Fortune, the titluar shoes grant the wishes of whoever wearing them. This usually ends badly, as the characters are unaware of their power. For example, the Councilor of Justice held the view that in the time of King Hans, around 1500, everything was better; when the galoches transport him to that age, he finds out that it was actually much worse.

Film

This is, of course, how Labyrinth starts. Frustrated at her baby half-brother, Sarah carelessly wishes that the villain from her favorite book would take the brat away and is more than a bit shocked when he actually does. Whoopsie.
This is the main plot of the Tom Hanks film Big.
- Parodied by Family Guy. Stewie wishes that he was big, the wish-granting machine wishes it could weigh people.
Ditto for the Jennifer Garner movie 13 Going on 30, which is the same premise with a girl.
- Seventeen Again.
The short film "A Case of Spring Fever", as featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 1012, has an oddly specific example. A man, tired of trying to fix the sofa, wishes he never sees another spring in his life, only for it to be granted by the insanely cackling spirit "Coily, the spring sprite". Hilarity Ensues as his door locks, phone dial and car pedals stop working. Noooooooooo Springs!
- Parodied in The Simpsons; a 1950s educational film has a young man foolishly wish that zinc didn't exist (?!), which proceeded to ruin his life because he couldn't (a) drive his zinc-less car to pick up his girlfriend for a date; (b) call his girlfriend to postpone their date with his zinc-less telephone; and (c) shoot himself in despair (as even the hammer in the gun was made of zinc). The young man is quick to regret his desire for a world without zinc ("Zinc! Come back!"); fortunately, it turns out to be All Just A Dream.
  - The Simpsons example may have been a Shout Out to the sketch "Zinc Oxide and You" from the film The Kentucky Fried Movie, which has a housewife suffering from similar losses, including her bra, her husband's pacemaker, and anything to put out a fire in her house with. Listen to it here, or better yet, watch it here.
- MST 3 K had parodied Coily before, in episode 317 (the famous "waffle episode"), with Willy the Waffle, the Wonderful Whimsical Wisecracking Waffle granting Tom's wish for a world without waffles ("Noooooooooo Waffles! *coil spring noise*"). Willy appeared again in 423 to show Tom a world without advertising ("It was all I had, I had to work fast"). After Willy's spiel, Joel and Tom agree that they prefer the world without advertising.
Bedazzled has this as its main premise.
Disney's Aladdin uses this idea. In the first film, all that Aladdin wants is for Princess Jasmine to love him, a wish the Genie cannot grant, and ironically, Jasmine already loves him. So he wishes to become a prince, so that he can woo Jasmine - a wish which makes her like him less because he's just another prince. She doesn't start loving him until he acts like normal - funny, charming and adventurous.
- When Jafar is turned into a genie, with Abis Mal as his master, Abis Mal requests a Sunken Treasure Ship. Jafar then sends him to the bottom of the sea. This forces Abis Mal to use his second wish to return to the desert. Jafar is destroyed before Abis Mal gets his third wish, but Jafar intended to trick him into wishing him free of the lamp.
  - Jafar himself had this bite him in the ass. He didn't want to be second fiddle to Genie, so he wished to become the most powerful genie. Unfortunately, genies are bound to lamps and have to grant wishes, so he found himself stuck in servitude.
In the fourth Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Big Bad asks the movie's extradimensional aliens for all of their knowledge. She gets it all of course, so much in fact that she literally explodes from the information overload.
In the Frank Capra classic It's a Wonderful Life, protagonist George Bailey's falls apart so dramatically that he wishes he was never born. His guardian angel, Clarence decides to show him exactly how much of a suckfest his home town of Bedford Falls would have become without his influence.
- This in turn was parodied relentlessly by shows as varied as Beavis And Butt Head & That70s Show.
In Star Wars, Padme says that "Politicians always give people what they want, not what they need".
The Russian film Adventures of Petrov and Vasechkin (two children) has a subplot about wishes. For example, Vasechkin states how great it would be to be invisible, only to collide with other person and shout: "What are you thinking, didn't you see me?!" When they really get wishes granted, things get even uglier.
The Incredible Mr. Limpet.
- Ultimately averted because it turns out he really is happier as a fish (or was he a porpoise, never was quite sure of that).
In Leatherheads, "Dodge" Connelly (played by George Clooney) wants professional football to become a legitimate, respectable way to make a living. A variant in that there's nothing supernatural to grant his wish. The government steps in and appoints a Commissioner to clean things up. Once this happens, he discovers there's no longer a place for him or his style of play.
The B-movie Wish Master.
In Bolt, the director pulls one of these when Mindy-from-the-Network asks for a less than happy ending. He ends it abruptly and says to Mindy "How does your audience feel about... cliffhangers? You wanted unhappy 18-35 year olds, I'll give you unhappy 18-35 year olds. Small example but it works."

Literature

A Goosebumps book with this very title has this as its premise, with the term Reset Button loosely applied.
Poor old(?) Dorian Gray. We all know how his wish turned out!
W.W. Jacobs' classic short story The Monkeys Paw concerns a married couple who receive the title item as a gift from a friend who served in the British Army in India. The paw grants its owner Three Wishes, and the husband uses the first of these to wish for 200 pounds; the couple subsequently learns that their grown son was killed after falling into the machinery at the factory where he worked, and they are offered £200 as compensation from the employers. The wife then begs the husband to wish for the son to be brought back to life; after he does so (with great reluctance), they hear a steady knocking on their door. As the overjoyed wife runs to unlock and open the door, the husband realizes to his horror that the son will have come back in his mutilated state, and quickly uses the third wish; when the wife finally gets the door open, there's nobody there, implying that the third wish was for the son to be returned to the grave.
- The short youtube film The Monkey's Paw is based off of the same story, except it's the son and the mother who find the paw and instead of wishing the paw never existed the son just wishes his zombie father away. (The wish has no audio, so the wording of his wish is unknown.)
Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand by Gail Carson Levine. The Neverland fairies get a wand to repay a mermaid, but, unaware that all wands have a mind of their own, accidentally pick one of the meanest wands.
Bill Brittain's The Wish Giver is all about this. Three children in a small American town (along with the narrator, a man from the general store who answers to the nickname "Stew Meat") get cards that supposedly grant wishes from a mysterious vendor at the county fair, and the three stories in the book deal with the consequences of the kids' ill-thought-out wishes: A sharp-tongued tomboy named Polly wishes people would start being glad to see her, and much to the amusement of her peers she starts to croak like a bullfrog whenever she starts insulting people; a sentimental girl named Rowena wishes the handsome young traveling salesman she has a crush on would "put down roots in Coven Tree and never leave", and he starts turning into a tree; a farm boy named Adam wishes his family's farm had more than enough water, and it ends up flooded. In the epilogue, the trio have learned their lessons, and beg Stew Meat to undo their wishes with his own wish card.
The entire premise of John Brunner's novel The Traveller in Black is that of a man who grants wishes in ways that are never to the wishers' liking, the ultimate goal of which is to replace Chaos with Order.
Even older than the Dorian Gray example above is the story of King Midas. A notoriously greedy man, he once made a wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. When his wish was granted, he was ecstatic... at least until the first time he tried to eat something. Thus this is Older Than Dirt.
Serwe's backstory in Second Apocalypse has a lot to do with this trope. Her prayers to gods come true several times but not in a way she wants.
In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, the protagonist is repeatedly asked to dream of a solution to a pressing problem, and the solution turns out to be worse than the original. For example, asked to make sure that there is enough food for everyone, he dreams of a plague that has killed most people in the past, and the survivors have enough to eat. Then, when there are alien invaders on the Moon, he is asked to dream that the aliens are no longer on the moon, so he makes them leave the Moon for...Earth.
A running theme in the Tiffany Aching series (the young adult Discworld books):
- In Wee Free Men, Tiffany's baby brother is stolen by the Queen of the Fairies, who will give him whatever he wants - and since he wants sweets, he'll get sweets, and nothing else, for the rest of his life.
- In A Hat Full of Sky, this trope is explicitly dissected, with Granny Weatherwax pointing out that if someone in a story gets three wishes, the third will always be "undo the harm caused by the first two wishes".
  - And in the begining of the book it's noted that had Tiffany said aloud that she'd like to marry a prince, the Feegles might well show up at her door with an (unconscious) prince and a (tied up) priest ready to perform the ceremony.
- In the third book in the series, Wintersmith, Tiffany doesn't want the titular Anthropomorphic Personification of Winter to continue making her name in frost, or icebergs that look like her, but feels sorry and lets him make all the snowflake portraits of her that he wishes. As the story opens with a flash-forward of the entire Chalk covered in tens of feet of snow, you can see where this is going.
Forms most of the plot of the Victorian children's novel Five Children and It - the "it" of the title is a cantankerous sand-fairy, whose granted wishes always backfire on the children.
Both subverted and not in the short story "The Wish Ring". A farmer is kind to an old woman, and gets a wish ring in return. He shows it to a jeweler to see how much it's worth, and the jeweler steals it from him and replaces it with an identical copy. The jeweler then wishes for a million gold pieces, which promptly begin raining from the sky and crush him to death. In the meantime, the farmer goes home still thinking he has the real ring. Every time his wife suggests something they could wish for, he says no, they can work for that and earn it instead. Eventually they become happy and rich because of their hard work, and die with the wish still unasked.
A principal point in the novel Coraline by Neil Gaiman - even used as a tagline in the film. Coraline wants her life to be more interesting, exciting, and engaging... she gets it, but not the way she wants.
Frodo always wished for adventures when he was small... didn't work out well, either.
Gelsomino, whose voice could shatter even stone, wished to come into a land "where everything is inversed, and people don't worry about my voice". He then arrives into Land of Liars, where everybody is obliged by law to lie, naming night day, black white etc. Naturally, they don't care about his voice - they have other problems!
In the medieval Chivalric Romance of Robert the Devil and all its variants, the parents wish for a child — whether from God or the Devil. The son is therefore born possessed by evil. (Fortunately for him, in due time, he repents and does penitence for his evil. This results in either marrying the princess or becoming a saint.)
In CJ Cherryh's Russian trilogy (Rusalka, Chernevog, and Yvgenie), wizards work magic by wanting something. Since the form of the wish takes the easiest path, a wish, for example, for the five-year-old wizard's father to not hit him again could — and did — result in the house burning down and both his parents dying in the fire. Every wish is fraught with the potential for disaster, and not wanting things is like not thinking of elephants, so wizards, by and large, end up insane hermits.
In Harry Potter, two out of three Deathly Hallows backfired on their owners.
- Its in more of a "know thyself" fashion than in a "be careful what you wish for" fashion. The first brother was a braggart, thus leading to his eventual death so someone else could have the elder wand. The second brother didn't realize the implication that not even Death can restore people to life, and thus was driven insane by his wife's ghost from the ressurection stone. The third brother, the most sensible, used the invisibility cloak to avoid confrontations and kept the knowledge to himself until he was ready to meet Death as an old friend.
There's a short story about a world where wishes came true automatically. In this setting, people lived idyllic lives as their every needs were met. Unfortunately, there was a fool, whose wishes were so poorly conceived that they always backfired on him. After making a number of increasingly short-sighted wishes, he finally thought of one that would put an end to this chain of misfortune: he wished "that wishes would no longer automatically come true." The next and final line of the story reads, "Things were tough all over."
Non-supernatural example: In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the character of Serena Joy is a former conservative televangelist who preached that women belonged in the home and helped to support the overthrow of the United States by the theocratic Republic of Gilead; by the time of the novel, she has been stripped of her public role and reduced to the role of subjugated housewife. As Atwood wryly notes, "How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."
- Along the same lines, Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here details the takeover of the U.S. government by a fascist regime led by a demagogue named Buzz Windrip. Many characters who initially supported Windrip's regime wind up becoming imprisoned or executed by it.
The Edgar Allan Poe story Never Bet the Devil Your Head is an odd case of this. A man tells a story of a friend who says he'd "bet the devil his head" that he could perform a particular trick; out of nowhere, a mystery man shows up eager to take him up on his bet, and sure enough, he manages to decapitate himself and the man runs off with his prize.
In Wedding Shirts, a ballad by Karel Jaromír Erben, a woman makes the following wish in a prayer: "Either return my beloved to me, or else cut my life short". You know what followed ... Yes, her beloved returned to her from the grave, almost leading to the second part of the wish coming true as well.
It doesen't *quite* come true, but there is a scene in A Song Of Ice And Fire where Arya (disguised as a servant-girl) is talking to an annoying Frey squire who keeps jabbering about how he's going to marry a princess. At some point Arya just snaps at him, yelling "I wish your princess was dead!" not knowing she just wished her own demise. Averted in some ways in that she's still alive, although whether or not she's still Arya Stark is questionable.
Common in Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell, especially when fairies are involved. The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair even invokes this, as one of his plans for defeating Jonathan Strange is to appear to him and offer him whatever he wants, on the basis that it's bound to cause him trouble. That plan rather backfired though.
Piers Anthony's post-apocalyptic novel Battle Circle lives the non-supernatural form of this trope. Every major character who wants something ends up getting it at a terrible cost, or only after they've changed their mind, or (often) both.

Live Action TV

The Cosby Show did this plot, with Theo as the teenager who wanted to be treated like an adult, in its first season, but it has appeared in other series as well.
- This troper considers that particular episode to be a surprisingly well-made version of the plot, realized with only the household members playing parts-within-parts. The script for the episode should be used to bludgeon those scriptwriters who utilize the trope poorly.
Standard episode plot for at least the first four seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The most obvious of these was the episode entitled "The Wish," where Cordelia wished that "Buffy Summers had never come to Sunnydale." In the Bizarro World which resulted, Cordelia's friends, Willow and Xander, had been killed and changed into vampires, and Cordelia herself was eventually killed. In another example from the series, Buffy wishes that her parental figures, Joyce (her actual mother) and Giles (her Watcher) would stop forcing her to be responsible. Later in the episode, entitled "Band Candy," when the adults lose their ability to act responsibly, Buffy sees the disasters that can result when no one does what they are supposed to do, e.g. vampires can steal babies to feed to giant demon snakes if no one cares to watch out for such things. The Reset is rarely complete though - quite a few memories and changes were kept until the end of the show.
- A more terrifying example occurs in the episode wherein Dawn uses a spell to bring Joyce Summers back to life. It's the classic Monkey's Paw, and the horror is only increased by the fact that except for her feet walking through the cemetery, we never see what Joyce looked like. She had been dead for some time, so...
  - Eventually, they knew better than to say they wished for things aloud, given every time they do, something perverts the wish. This is much to the chagrin of Anya, who was trying to get them to wish for something so she could pervert it.
- Cordelia actually has this happen to her twice—given the opportunity in Angel to wish she had never gotten the visions which were killing her she found herself in a world where Angel was insane, Wesley was missing an arm, and Fred was nowhere to be found.
Newsradio did a hilarious variation on this where Dave and Lisa put Bill in charge of the station for a day in order to show him how hard their jobs were; the twist was that Bill knew what they were doing from the start (going so far as to ask if they were doing it), but he still played along until they admitted to what they were doing.
Subverted in Dads Army, when Captain Mainwaring decides to give persistent grumbler Private Frazer a week's experience in commanding the unit in order to see that it is not as easy as he thinks, only for Frazer to grow increasingly tyrannical and arrogant with power; the catch is that Frazer, although unpopular with the rest of the men, actually proves himself a competent commanding officer whose skills are even recognized and rewarded by a superior officer.
In the X-Files episode Je Souhaite, Mulder meets a female genie who can grant anyone three wishes... but she is forced to interpret the wishes rather literally, causing her much frustration at the stupidity of people who don't think things through. It is revealed that she used to be a poor peasant woman in the Middle Ages, who found the original genie and squandered her first two wishes asking for a mule and a magic sack of turnips that never ran out. For her third wish, she asked for great power and eternal life: the other genie promptly turned her into a genie, too. The downside: She is now bound to act on the decisions of whichever idiot unrolls her from the carpet she is mystically connected to, and she cannot grant wishes to herself. When Mulder wishes for "peace on Earth", his wish is granted... by making every other person in the world disappear except him. The genie tells him it is impossible for her to change the minds of 6 billion people, but making them disappear was within the rules. Mulder uses his final wish by giving it to her, granting her the ability to make her own decisions and become a mortal woman again.
- It's implied that rather than the genie being forced to carry out the wishes literally, she's actually pissed off at having to grant everyone's selfish wishes and so makes a point of obeying the letter but not the spirit of the wish. As Mulder puts it, she's a bitch.
Charmed has several genies corrupting the wishes of the characters that made them.
One episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? has a boy running into a genie who grants him several wishes, but they all end up backfiring on him. For example, when he wishes for a brand new car, the boy gets it, but is later arrested when the police discover that the car is stolen. In order to end his torment, the boy finally wishes that he had never met the genie, effectively pressing the Reset Button.
- Another episode uses a thinly-veiled version of The Monkey's Paw: One of the kids wishes to win a race, so a wild dog shows up and breaks his rival's leg, etc. The wishes escalate until one of them wishes his grandfather (who's dead) were there, at which point Zombie Gramps starts knocking on the door (you don't get to see it, though) until one of the kids wishes they'd never made the wishes.
Wizards Of Waverly Place: In "Justin's Little Sister", Alex wishes that people would stop comparing her to Justin. The drawback? Justin still exists, but no one remembers who he is (or was).
Battlestar Galactica: The surviving Colonials tried their best to find Earth for three and a half seasons. They found Earth and it is utterly devastated.
- A metastory: when original show Battlestar Galactica was cancelled, people rooted for its revival... then for putting it to rest.
Babylon 5. One quote:
Londo: ...All right. Fine. You really want to know what I want?! You really want to know the truth?! I want my people to reclaim their rightful place in the galaxy. I want to see the Centauri stretch forth their hand again, and command the stars. I want a rebirth of glory, a renaissance of power. I want to stop running through my life like a man late for an appointment, afraid to... To look back, or to look forward. I want us to be what we used to be. I want... I want it all back, the way that it was! Does that answer your question?
Morden: ...Yes. Yes it does.
- In an aversion of the trope, the results of exchange did not come due to Time Travel or alternate dimensions, was not subject to a Snap Back, and was generally one of the major causes of the show's Myth Arc.
- And Vir ultimately got his wish granted as well...
  - An example of Be Careful What He Wishes For perhaps?
Supernatural had an episode with a whole townful of this trope because of a wishing well that worked, involving most notably (and hilariously, in that depressing ''Supernatural'' way) a little girl wishing for a giant talking Teddy Bear. Who spent most of the subsequent episode drinking, watching porn and trying to commit suicide. Life as a giant talking Teddy Bear, apparently, makes Marvin the Paranoid Android's life seem full of cheer and meaning. In a possible aversion though, the brothers stop the wishing well before things go catastrophically bad.
The Imagin of Kamen Rider Den-O operate on this trope. They seek out people and grant their wishes, but only in letter. In one episode, when a park groundskeeper wished to make his park a safe haven for strays, the Imajin granting the wish responded by attacking any human who set foot in the park and barricading the entrances.
The third season finale of Heroes seems to drop a load of this in Sylar's lap if one looks back at his words from season 1:
Gabriel Gray/Sylar: [to Chandra] When I was a kid I used to wish some stranger would come and tell me my family wasn't really my family. Oh, they weren't bad people, they were just...insignificant. And I wanted to be different. Special. I wanted to change. A new name, a new life.
Disney Channel had a weekend special where they did this with 3 of their shows:
- Hannah Montana- Miley wishes she was just Hannah Montana all the time. It is granted and her dad married a Gold Digger, her best friend became The Libby, and her brother became a hobo.
- The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody- Zack and Cody wish that they were superheroes.
- Though not an actual wish, in "The Suite Smell of Excess", Zack and Cody get a chance to go to an alternate world where everything is reversed and they can play around as much as they like and do whatever they want when they want. However after a few days of excess, they realize that the "preferred" alternate universe Tipton is NOT the perfect place they thought it would be.
A 1965 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents features an adaptation of the Monkey's Paw story.

Music

The titular King in Metallica's King Nothing did get the title he worked for, but alienated his would-be subjects in the process, leaving him alone to attend to a crumbling kingdom.

Theatre

In Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the hapless (and gormless) Tom Rakewell's troubles start with him wishing he had money, upon which a mysterious manservant appears to inform him that an estranged uncle has left him a fortune. Once Tom realises that urban decadence and high living are no substitute for the love he left behind in the countryside, he wishes he were happy, and his servant convinces him to marry a genderbending circus artist. Once the marriage falls apart, he dreams of a machine that turns stone into bread and, upon waking, wishes it were true; the servant wheels in a prototype. The machine is a complete fraud, and Tom is bankrupted. You'd think the fact that the servant gives his name as "Nick Shadow" would have rung a bell at some point...
Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods: Everyone wishes for something at one point - in fact, the beginning prologue song comprised of mostly the lyrics "I wish, more than anything, more than life" - but it typically backfires. Cinderella wishes to go to the Festival but doesn't count on a prince chasing her around the woods. The Baker and his wife wish to have a child but don't intend to also run around the woods trying to get stuff for the Witch.

Tabletop Games

Notorious warning given by almost all GM's in fantasy roleplaying when a player acquires a magical artifact or spell that grants them wishes. Often leads to almost comic wordings of wishes to avoid the GM taking it too literally and punishing the player. This Troper once saw a page-long legally-worded contract...all to get the player the arms of a white dragon, which has got to be one of the most useless wishes in the history of ever. Apparently the fact that wish is 9th level (requiring the character to be at 17th level with genius-level Intelligence to be able to cast it at all) and ages the caster five years (In pre-3rd edition D&D) isn't bad enough.
- First wish my character ever cast? The creation of a epic-level spell... that functioned exactly like wish, except without the drawbacks. I explained it as using the finite probability drive to create the infinite probability drive.
  - This troper has already found a loophole: You don't have to pay 5000XP or whatever, but you get a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT set of drawbacks that are much, MUCH worse.
  - No, he said without drawbacks, that would not do. Of course he has not specified that he should be able to actually cast the spell. Oh, by the way, the mind flayers surrounding you can and are able to extract the spell directly from your brain. (and the moral is: never try to screw about with wishes if your dm had too much imagination).
  - He said specifically without "the drawbacks of Wish". Any good GM would take advantage of Exact Words and provide something with out the specific problems of Wish but with a bunch of awful new ones.
- Has anyone in D&D ever heard of a Wish being used for any purpose other than averting a Total Party Kill that wasn't one of these? It's like a worse-than-Useless Useful Spell, since most of those only waste time, rather than killing you or worse.

Video Games

Calypso from the Twisted Metal games. He grants the winner's wish in such a way that it eventually causes their death or what they get isn't exactly what they had in mind. An example of the former is that one winner wished for a lot of money and was eventually buried alive underneath a massive pile of cash. An example of the latter is that a winner wanted their sibling back, who had participated in an earlier race, and was horrified to get them back as a living corpse. He will occasionally grant them their wish straight out if it's usually to do with killing/dying and has gotten the tables turned on him by Sweet Tooth.
Many of the "bad" endings in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl end this way, with the player character succumbing to the temptation to make a wish to the mysterious artifact in the middle of Chernobyl. All of these wishes end up backfiring on him. For example, in one ending, the character wishes for wealth and gold coins fall from the sky. However, this is an illusion, and the gold coins are actually the ceiling collapsing on top of the character, killing him. In another ending, the player character wishes for immortality and is transformed into a statue.
In Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal you get the wish spell. It's a hell of a lot more powerful than the limited wish spell and also level 9. It's also extremely tricky to cast, as the Djinn that you summon is a grumpy so-and-so who's out to get you and as such you will need a very good Wisdom score to be able to handle him okay. A WIS of 18 is nigh-on essential to get the most out of this spell, and anything under 9 WIS is catastrophic. When you cast the spell, time is stopped and the casting character negotiates with the Djinn for some hours - finally he presents you with "a list of 5 ways I can interpret your wish - choose one".
- The conditions on wish and limited wish even at very high Wisdom make them a prime example of a Useless Useful Spell, as well as occasionally Fake Difficulty. For example, asking to be protected against the undead will make it summon a horde of vampires to attack you so that there are some undead to be protected against, then not protecting you from them. This isn't Literal Genie twisting of words, it's just... not doing the thing you asked in any way.
A major concept behind the Game of Afterlife by Lucas Arts. This is even billed as rule #1 of the afterlife. Specifically, it's stated that souls are treated differently after death based on what they believed in while living.
Planescape Torment utilizes a classic and particularly chilling incarnation of the trope. An NPC named Yves Tale-Chaser will trade stories with the Nameless One and his companions. One of them begins with a man who comes to in an alley, remembering nothing. An old woman is in front of him, and she asks, "And your third wish?" He says he doesn't understand, and she explains she had offered him three wishes, and he'd already used two. He asks to know who he is. She cackles softly as she prepares to grant his wish, and he asks what's so funny. "That was your first wish." It's heavily implied in another part of the game that this actually occurred between the Nameless One and the Night Hag Ravel Puzzlewell.
Anyone who's gotten La Mulana's Bonus Level Of Hell Bragging Rights Reward (without spoiling it for themselves) can tell you this.
- The same goes for people who have Saved The Princess in Eversion.
Eternal Darkness has this happen once. Bored Cambodian temple dancer Ellia finds herself all alone with nothing but what she thinks is an innocuous book of legends to entertain herself, wishes that something exciting would happen to her, and ends up immediately getting locked inside the temple, finding herself entangled and directly involved in the book's "legends," and killed as a result of all this. Now, was that exciting enough for you, Ellia?
- It's actually worse than just that. She is turned into a zombie-like husk of a person (still alive) who has to wait until a second hero arrives to undo her mistake. For reference, Ellia's chapter takes place in 1150. That second hero who puts her out of her misery? He arrives in 1983.
Discussed in detail in Fate Stay Night, but for the most part averted. Except for Archer. I want to save everyone! I know, how about I make a contract with the world? Guardian Spirits gets to save people all the time! Oh wait, they actually kill people en masse indiscriminately to prevent them from killing even more people. Woops. Other than that little mistake, it seems the idea is 'do what you can with your own ability, and accept your own failures if it doesn't work.'
One of the side stories in Kagetsu Tohya has Shiki living in a world based on twin threesome fantasy scenario he had. The problem is, he realized such a thing could never happen unless they were in a world all by themselves plus he's currently already trapped inside a groundhogs day scenario. So the dream within a dream he has just traps him a world where he's living forever inside the mansion grounds with only Kohaku and Hisui, doing whatever he likes with them while slowly going insane.
There's a wish-granting Mana (the main character) in Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Alrevis. The first wish it ever granted was death, although, in a subversion, that wish was exactly what the person who wished it was asking for.
In Jak And Daxter, this is the exact phrase used a couple of times by the Precursors in the ending of the trilogy. When the Big Bad asks to be a God himself (or like the Gods, something along that line), it turns out that maybe the precursors are not what they seemed to be... Later, Daxter, finally in peace with his ottsel appearance, asks for a set of pants. His girlfriend then says that those pants are so cute, she wished she had a pair of them herself. Cue the precursors' "Be Careful What You Wish For" a second time, and the girl getting a pair of pants just like that... and turned into an Ottsel so she could fit into them.
- Not that she seems to mind all that much.
  - Of course not. Those pants look great!

Web Comics

Also the title (more or less) of this NSFW furry cartoon, where the wish leads to the heroine being Taken For Granite (or at least metal).
In Real Life, a character playing a D&D game gets a ring of three wishes, much to the chagrin of the DM. The character immediately wishes for more gold than he knows what to do with, and his player is instantly crushed by a giant gold boulder. When the previous wish is reversed while still losing the wish, he then wishes for a million gold pieces, and receives gold pieces so small that he "might be able to afford an ale with them". When he finally gets a wish written up by a lawyer in order to avoid any exploitable loopholes, the DM relents and has no choice but to grant the wish. And then the player's character gets eaten by a dragon.
Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs from Irregular Webcomic wished to get his job back after getting demoted. He got his job back, to process all the people who have died when the Irregular Universe was torn apart from Time Paradox.
this comic◊ from Perry Bible Fellowship.
Minus. when you ask to be sent back in time, specify when first.
- From the very end: "Who do you want brought back?" Think carefully. "Everyone" is a lot of people... and animals...
Castle Heterodyne seems to delight in creative interpretation of Agatha's orders.
This "Subnormality" strip shows how to have everything you could ever need in life.
So you're one of those genies.

Weesh has this as its premise. However, the wish-granter is not malicious (mischievious, perhaps) or literal, but the wish-makers often fail to see the implications of their wishes.

Wishing wells don't like cheapskates.

Erfworld puts an interesting spin on this trope after Parson erupts a volcano to destroy the invading army and realizes what exactly he's done.

Parson: "I mean, then... what's the lesson supposed to be here, Wanda? "Be careful what you wish for?" This isn't what I wished for!

Wanda: "Hah! You didn't wish for this world, Parson Gotti. It wished for you.

Also, the "Ultimate Warlord" spell. Why did Stanley get Parson? Well, this is how he described what he wanted:

"I want him to be obsessed with war! Somebody who plans wars and kills his enemies for fun!^* I want somebody who snacks on Gwiffons^* and eats Marbits for breakfast!^*

Well, he got exactly what he asked for.

Web Original

Rob from Dimension Heroes wishing for a less boring summer. Boy, did he get that wish granted...
The Creepypasta titled "The Wishes" found on Encyclopedia Dramatica here (It may be one of the least nsfw pages on the article, but it's still ED, so exercise caution).

Western Animation

This trope is the entire premise of The Fairly OddParents.
- both subverted and affirmed. Subverted because Cosmo and Wanda have a huge book of rules to protect Timmy, and Wanda tries to warn Timmy when he makes a bad wish (Cosmo then grants it anyway). Affirmed by Norm the Genie.
In the Reboot episode "Enzo the Smart", Enzo fiddles with the system clock in order to make himself smarter than everyone else, and instead makes everyone else half as smart as he is. Since he's Just A Kid, this ends up reducing everyone else in the city of Mainframe to roughly Ralph Wiggum level.
Danny Phantom did this in one episode, though the wishing character was not aware that their wish would be granted. Notable for the fact that at the end of the episode the Reset Button remained largely untouched. All the characters retained full memories of everything that had transpired, and a permanent change to Danny's ghost costume was made.
- There was another, earlier episode with the same villain with the same premise where Tucker wished he had ghost powers. The Reset Button was pressed because Tucker did not handle them all that well...
The pilot of Transformers Animated had Optimus Prime nostalgically wishing that he'd been around to fight Decepticons in the Great War. Ten minutes later the biggest, baddest Decepticon of all time shows up with his warship. It's not pretty.
Parodied in The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, "A Dumb Wish". Grim's mom gives Billy, Mandy, and Grim three wishes. Billy squanders his wish, and his arguing with Grim bugs Mandy enough that she wishes they would shut up, causing Billy and Grim's mouths to become sealed shut. Since Grim can't talk, Mandy gets his wish, and Grim and Billy compete to see who gets their mouth fixed by buttering up to Mandy. They only succeed in driving Mandy to the point that she shouts "I wish everyone in the entire world would just go away!" After everyone else on the planet disappears, Mandy seems to regret what she did, only to instead smile for one of the only times ever and say "Perfect".
- Another episode, "Wishbones," also played with this trope. A Literal Genie in the form of a talking, rhyming skull named Thromnambular spends most of the episode granting various characters wishes, which inevitably backfire. However, it's explicitly said that it doesn't matter what they're wishing for, it'll screw them over regardless. One example is General Skarr wishing to be ruler of the world. A giant statue of himself rises from the ground beneath him and grows so large, he ends up in the upper atmosphere and suffocates. When it's Mandy's turn to make a wish, she realizes that any wish she makes will only turn out badly, so instead she decides to sell her wish to the highest bidder. A frustrated Grim pushes the Reset Button when he declares "I wish you two had never found that skull!"
The Simpsons had a Halloween episode based on The Monkey's Paw. Homer buys the magic paw at a Bazaar Of The Bizarre and he and his family try wishing for fame and wealth (which backfires when everyone gets sick of hearing about the Simpsons) world peace (which backfires when aliens attack the now defenseless Earth) and a turkey sandwich (which backfires because the turkey's a little dry.) Homer gives the monkey paw to Flanders in the hope that it backfires on him too, but the Rule Of Funny ensures that no such thing happens.
"Wish World" from the Mighty Orbots series. Oh-No wishes to be human—and thanks to one of the Big Bad goons, she become human—but discover that Oh-No can't power up the Mighty Orbots in this form.
The episode "The Magic Coins" from My Little Pony.
The entire premise of the Celebrity Toon Wishkid. Nick gets a magical baseball glove that lets him have one wish a week - and that's it. And they're all temporary and can end at any time, meaning that every single wish he makes disappears at the worst possible time. All so he can learn this trope as a moral every single episode.
Played straight and averted in Gargoyles. When we first meet Puck, he plays Literal Genie to Demona. Later, it's revealed that when Puck revealed himself to Xanatos for the first time, he offered him either a single wish or a lifetime of loyal service as Owen Burnett. Proving himself to be the smartest person in the entire series, Xanatos chooses the latter.
The Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers episode "A Lad in a Lamp" has the heroes meet a malicious genie who would teach them just this if the episode didn't come with its very own built-in Reset Button.
- The first CDRR Fan Fic, "Rhyme and Reason" by Michael Demcio, is based on this phenomenon, too. Chip wishes for a really big and tricky case for him to solve and gets just that.
Extreme Ghostbusters. The team fought a wish-making ghost. It turned Eduardo into Kylie's cat.
A preview episode has Ben 10 easily dispatching criminals, and, in the end, he was wondering if there was any challenge left for him. The episode in question is the Series Finale, which introduced the Negative 10.
One of episodes of Der Wunschpunsch was rotating about it - Wizards created a spell that granted one wish for every person in the city, but always in the way to backfire. Wizards used it later for themselves, sure they'd found a wish that would let them get rid of their boss and not backfire at them in any way. They were wrong.
Towards the end of TinkerBell and the Last Treasure, Tink accidentally uses the Mirror of Incanta, which she intended to use to repair the broken moonstone, when she snaps at her Non Human Sidekick, "I wish you would be quiet for just one minute!"

Real Life

This editor got sick and tired of her high school's tardy rule, and wished she didn't have to worry about it. Her scoliosis got worse in senior year, requiring her to wear a back brace most of the day... and got her a medical exemption from the rule!
The Open-Source Wish Project.
As this troper once said: "Man, I hate being short, I wish I was tall! No, wait, that's going to come true and I'm going to realize that somehow, being tall would stink..."
- Which is, of course, the plot of an episode of The Twilight Zone starring Mickey Rooney.
- This troper can confirm that yes, being tall stinks, especially in public transport.
  - And car buying, and clothes shopping, and bed options (I've been in a queen size since I was 10...not cheap for my parents) And let's not forget the posture and back problems...
Buyer's remorse.
In 2001, the city of Buffalo, NY had no snow in November and most of December, and it was possible that the city would have no snow on Christmas. So on Christmas Eve, everyone in Buffalo wished for a white Christmas. The next day, they awoke to the beginning of a 5-day blizzard that killed 4 people and dropped seven feet of snow onto the city. Whoops.
During the years 2005-2006 many people in USA and UK desperately wished for real estate prices to fall. They did fall in 2007 - and we see the results.
Richard Heene's attempt to become a reality star with his Balloon Boy stunt on October 15, 2009. Looks like he succeeded, just not in the way he had hoped for.