Being Evil Sucks

"I'm the bad guy! I don't save the day, I don't fly off into the sunset, and I don't get the girl!"

— Megamind, Megamind

Evil Is Cool, right? Wrong! Despite what certain morally ambiguous personages would lead you to believe, being evil isn't all it's cracked up to be. It can destroy your character, your soul, and everyone you love and care about. While evil may be temporarily satisfying, like cookies, the moment of sweetness can cost a lifetime of regret.

Oh, Evil Lord Bob may enjoy his reign of terror for a while, especially if there's no one to oppose him, but the consequences will eventually catch up. There's always someone looking for revenge, possibly someone motivated enough to cross the Moral Event Horizon themselves in pursuit of vengeance. Even if Bob survives, he'll have to live with the knowledge that he made another monster and loosed it on the world. If Bob lets his fear and anger have free reign, he'll come to realize that the raw emotions he thought were his strength now control him. Bob might even go insane, which isn't as fun as it sounds.

If Bob is wise, he will come to understand that true happiness can only be achieved through The Power of Love or The Power of Friendship (though he is equally likely to declare he's gone too far.) Anybody can cross the Moral Event Horizon, but the aftermath looks pretty bleak. Nobody wants to be Bob's friend, he has nothing to show for his career in evil, and in indulging his worst impulses, created a world that he himself is not satisfied with- Victory Is Boring, after all. Perhaps he has a Freudian Excuse, perhaps he thought that Revenge is Sweet and that The Villain Must Be Punished beyond all else, but since his Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse and Jumping Off the Slippery Slope is easy when your fuelled by hatred, he became a reflection of what he sought to destroy, and the only thing that remains is the sense of disappointment from the mortuary of his own design. What ever his crime was, it alienated his allies, and the only people left are amoral opportunistic bastards, not to mention all the Starscreams at every corner. And through it all his soul has become so deadened that not even Evil Feels Good anymore — in fact, he doesn't even remember how to feel happy.

Compare This Is Your Brain on Evil, Guilt-Induced Nightmare, and Video Game Cruelty Punishment (in which a video game enforces this trope). Contrast Good Feels Good (which sometimes leads to this Trope, or vice-versa, if one character is able to experience both Good and Evil in his career) and Moral Pragmatist, where Bob is whatever alignment helps him reach his goals. Pity the Minion with an F in Evil and the Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, because being evil can feel even worse if the character is bad at it. May result in Evil Desires Innocence.

If the same work also argues that Being Good Sucks, see Crapsack World.

The Complete Monster almost never falls under this trope, as they are good at being evil and proud of it. For these kinds of characters, being evil rocks! It's not entirely impossible for them to feel this way deep down though; some villains are too proud to ever abandon their course even if doing so would make them happier, so instead they try to make sure everyone else is as miserable as they are.

Truth in Television to most people and for very good reasons. We won't discuss that.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan uses this to full effect with Reiner, Bertolt, and Annie. All admit that Good Feels Good, but are resigned to having no other options. They were indoctrinated into their cause from a young age, but quickly realized the truth once they infiltrated the Survey Corps. They couldn't turn traitor because their families would be subjected to a Fate Worse than Death. Reiner, the only one to return home while Annie was captured/willingly imprisoned herself and Bertolt got eaten, suffers from crushing guilt and is suicidal, unable to fit in to the life he now knows is a lie. Oh, and their cause was All for Nothing from the beginning. Yeah, it sucks to be a Warrior.
  Reiner: It's fine. We're all short-lived mass murderers, right? Aside from us, who else could understand?
  • The Survey Corps themselves show elements of this after they're forced to kill members of the Military Police in self defence.
  • The end of the series has Eren himself fall into this trap in the climax. He made himself go through a Zero-Approval Gambit to stop the rest of the world from destroying Paradis, and lost everything in the process. What's worse is that war may still come to Paradis' doorstep in the near future despite looking through all options, meaning that it would be All for Nothing.
• In Berserk, this pretty much sums up becoming a demon (Apostle/Godhand). Sure, you're a nigh-invincible demonic powerhouse who can do anything... after suffering extreme emotional and physical trauma, sacrificing the people you cherished the most and losing your humanity. And to top it off, your soul is condemned to a hellish vortex after death as a price for the unholy deal. Almost every monster loses ambition beyond serving evil's will (Zodd, Void, Conrad, the Egg), or still suffers the same emotional flaws they did as a human (The Count, Rosine, Mozgus, Ganishka). While some are a truly gleeful, unrepentantly hedonistic lot (Slan, Ubik, Wyald), they're still in the same situation. Even Griffith with all his power and ambition implies he regrets that becoming a Godhand has robbed him of any real emotion.
• In Code Geass, Lelouch Lamperouge is a mix of this and Being Good Sucks due to ambiguous methods, pride, and bad luck, with people stabbing him in the back, whereas Suzaku Kururugi learns that using dubious yet purportedly legitimized methods in hopes of achieving his goals, such as conquering relatively innocent people and threatening ex-friends with highly addictive psychotropics... sucks. So they try to do good by joining up.
• Elfen Lied's Lucy/Kaede. After a series of events that shattered her mind, she fully gave in to the voice, which in turn proves to further ruin her life as it makes her the number 1 enemy of humanity as well as losing any chance of being with the boy she loves most. In other words, being a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds sucks.
• In Guilty Crown, Shu Ouma becoming Tennouzu High's Student Council President after Hare's death causes him to lose everything and everyone he loves by the time of Episode 17 when the Tennouzu High students turn against him.
• Fairy Tail: After Minerva leaves Sabertooth and joins Succubus Eye, everything just starts to fall apart for her. Not only does her first assignment in Succubus Eye end up a failure, when she comes back to the Succubus Eye guild hall, everyone else has been turned into a paper doll. The person who made it happen, Kyouka of Tartaros (Succubus Eye's parent guild), shows up and says that they were too weak, then attacks her, captures her, and has her turned into a demon. When she fights Erza a third time, near the end, she begs her to kill her. It's not until her Heel–Face Turn that things start to improve for her, starting with her former guildmates in Sabertooth welcoming her back with open arms as Minerva cries her heart out.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: General Regius Gaiz. After years as a corrupt official, guilt came knocking at his door in the form of Zest's clone, his best friend who shared his dreams of justice and was killed because of his secret connections to Scaglietti. Once he learned about his return, the formerly pompous general spent his time sitting in his desk in a defeated state, waiting for Zest to come.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny has a scene where Neo Roanoke, Dragon to Fantastic Racist Lord Djibril reflects on the fact that his life has come to the point where he brainwashes teenagers into doing his boss' dying for him. He admits that he's crossed his personal Moral Event Horizon, but that he sees no way out now. Given that Neo is himself a brainwashed Mu La Flaga this is unsurprising.
• William in Moriarty the Patriot loathes himself for all the murders he's committed and can barely manage to live with himself, hoping to die as quickly as his mission can be carried out.
• Naruto:
  • Gaara doesn't quite realize this until he gets the snot kicked out of him by Naruto in full "I fight for my friends" mode.
  • It takes him until he is in his deathbed for Madara Uchiha to realize that every single dickish thing that he did to upstage his rival is ultimately pointless in the end. Madara's plan has been hijacked by someone else since the very beginning, which means that the Eye of the Moon Plan and, by extension, his entire philosophy of life as something that needs to be controlled, are a sham. On the other hand, Hashirama Senju's Will of Fire has endured, and will endure for days to come.
• Pokémon: The Series: Team Rocket are perpetually hungry and blown because of their poaching. The few occasions when they have tried to help Ash and his friends, they don't end the episode or film in question off on a bad foot, but as soon as they get back to trying to steal Pikachu again, we see them blasting off again and again...
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion, Homura's life deteriorates after her depression-induced Protagonist Journey to Villain. She's long since alienated everyone who knows her true identity, and has to live with the knowledge that she betrayed the only person who truly loved her. Also, she is far too cynical and repressed to deal with any of the above.
• The thing that kicks off Eas/Setsuna's Heel–Face Turn in Fresh Pretty Cure! is when she realizes this. Her life was cold, gray, impersonal, and she's been repeatedly asked to put herself in great pain and shorten her lifespan for fights she loses anyways. And all her infiltration of the heroines has accomplished is give her a taste of their happy lives.

Comic Books

• Watchmen: Ozymandias. His intentions were never entirely evil; he wanted to stop World War III before it started, and he saw killing several million people as the only solution. Regardless of the fact that he sacrificed comparatively few to save everyone (sans Dr. Manhattan) it's obvious that he feels remorse and wishes that there had been another way.
• Harley Quinn has at least a few cases (although she's usually closer to Chaotic Neutral than outright evil). The biggest one is probably when Power Girl happens to crash outside Harley's house with amnesia and Harley convinces her she is her sidekick. This at first seems like Harley just being a jerk, but we eventually learn she really does think Power Girl is cool and wishes she really was her sidekick (along with obviously having feelings for her.) There are some other works where Harley has to join up with some hero or heroic organization (usually as part of an Enemy Mine), only to eventually leave due to Status Quo Is God. Often times she really does seem sad about having to go back to being a villain (or at least an Anti-Hero.)
• Spider-Man: The Sandman eventually got sick of all the grief that came from being a criminal, and tried to go straight. He stayed a good guy for twenty years, real world time (just a couple of years, comic book time). Then his old evil teammate the Wizard stuck him in a brainwashing machine to make him evil again, causing him more grief. Poor dude.
• Superhero team the Thunderbolts was founded as a front for a group of supervillains to gain the trust of the world's various peace-keeping forces in preparation for a world domination scheme, by changing their identities and pretending to be heroes. At least half the original team members came to realize that they really liked not being feared and hated and decided to give up on world domination and remain good guys.
• It may never be known what insane reason Priscilla Lyons had to join a bunch of cold-blooded killers who murdered super-villains like the Scourges of the Underworld, but she discovered this Trope was true when given her first mark, that of Daredevil's old enemy the Matador. She simply couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger after seeing that her intended victim was no longer a villain, living in poverty in Los Angeles, trying his hardest to help his sister take care of her children. In fact, this is what brought the organization down, due to their strict Resignations Not Accepted policy. Priscilla was smart enough to know they'd be after her; prior to this, every would-be defector (or failure, or even members who were in danger of being caught) had been killed by the others before they could spill any of the groups secrets. But she was smarter than the others, and quickly called The Avengers' hotline, and got in contact with USAgent, and as a result, they both brought the entire organization down.
• The Mighty Thor: Loki eventually began to feel this way about being an evil god, in part because as a god of mischief, he hated the idea of being predictable. One death and some not-quite-successful resurrections later, and the following Lokis embraced this trope whole-heartedly, doing everything in their power to avoid becoming a villain again, including destroying their own identities.
• Played for laughs with the Dilbert strip seen here where Catbert is depressed because being evil doesn't mean anything anymore. "These days I can cut salaries by ten percent, and people will thank me for not firing them!" (The strip was posted in 2009, during America's last economic slump, so it makes sense.)
• Turns out, Trypticon of all bots feels this way in The Transformers: Salvation. He deliberately leaves Devastator alive as a show of uncharacteristic mercy in honor of the latter's valor and determination in the face of an overwhelming foe. After the Dinobots successfully free him from Bludgeon's control (and he expresses his opinion of Bludgeon's Evil Plan via Breath Weapon), he announces that he's tired of being seen only as a force of destruction and takes the newborn Sparks inside him so that they can use the metal of his body to construct new Protoforms for themselves, allowing him to be a force of creation. The idea that he hates everything including the Decepticon cause and himself was part of his original bio but was ignored in every appearance in the franchise until now.
• If there's one running theme of Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, it's how self-hating, suicidal, and all-around messed up Darth Vader is. He violently lashes out at anything positive since it reminds him of what he used to be, spreads as much pain as he can to alleviate his own, and seeks out dangerous situations partly because he really wants to die and partly just to feel something again.
• This is a recurring theme in Astro City. Many stories show that villains are driven by a combination of greed, attention-seeking behavior, and various personality disorders, and even when they do win, they don't gain any real satisfaction from it. Many could have made a ton of money with using their talents legitimately, but for one reason or another aren't interested. As a result, the ones who make it to old age often have little to nothing to show for it.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): San (the former left head of Ghidorah) and by extension his Evil Doppelgänger certainly experience this. Whereas San's brothers (Ghidorah's right and middle heads) are truly sociopathic and find Evil Feels Good, San was never as purely invested as them in being an Omnicidal Maniac and making everything suffer, and he generally only got gratification in the short term when he was allowed to hunt, kill and eat alongside his brothers. San's brothers abused him for being distractible and less evil than them for billions of years, due to which San has a Freudian case of I Just Want to Be Loved and he seeks an emotional attachment with his new "sister" Vivienne Graham.
• Played with in Blizzard Storm, as its questionable just how much Sakido counts as evil, but she clearly still regrets her actions during her time in Hell, which she feels she has failed Darius.
• In the BLoSC Fan Verse of For Good, Warp Darkmatter holds this opinion beneath his front of Evil Pays Better. It's a crucial factor in his eventual Heel–Face Turn.
• Implied in Fred Porlock's conversations with Patterson, Wiggins, and Watson in Mortality. (An offscreen, pre-fic Heel Realization caused him to become The Atoner.
• Pony POV Series: In the Dark World timeline, both Liarjack and Traitor Dash emphasize this trope. While Angry Pie and Fluttercruel have embraced their new evil and Twilight Tragedy has given up all hope and goes along with Discord's rule because it's all she feels she has left, Liarjack and Traitor Dash (especially Dash) are painfully aware of how Discord's magic has twisted them into monsters, and they hate themselves for it, but there's nothing they can do about it. During Dark World's Final Battle, against Nightmare Eclipse/Paradox and her Psycho Rangers, we see Liarjack and Traitor Dash's examples of this trope magnified in Nightmares Mirror and Manacle, who unlike Paradox and the other Nightmares, know that what they're doing is evil, but feeling that it's the best thing that they can do. Applejack and Rainbow Dash, redeemed themselves by this point, recognize this in their counterparts, and pity them for it.
• In Nightmares Are Tragic, Princess Luna argues this to her possessing Nightshadow as part of her calculated taunting of it during their struggle within her own mind.
• Parodied in Seventh Horcrux. Voldemort's one true love has always been teaching, but declaring oneself the Dark Lord Voldemort and killing people makes it really hard to get a job around children. He would know, as he's tried.
• In Hope for the Heartless, this becomes one of the main themes to be learned by the Horned King who has been brought back to life and set on a seemingly impossible mission: earning a human's love despite all his sins before 18 months has passed. Otherwise he's doomed to be sealed inside the Black Cauldron permanently. As he slowly becomes attached to his prisoner Avalina, he realizes how his over a thousand years of existence has been wasted by committing evil in his name and that of his former master Arawn.
• The Equestrian Wind Mage is kicked off by Vaati coming to this realization, after musing on how no matter what he tries, he always ends up beaten and resealed by Link, so what's the point? As such, he throws their latest fight and teleports away, only for a last minute bit of interference to cause said teleportation to go awry, landing him in Equestria.
• In The Lunar Guardsman, Luna and Raegdan went to extremes for the sake of their goals and they ended up alone, rightfully calling their lives a living hell.
• In the Miraculous Ladybug fic Le Papillon Rising, Adrien Agreste is a supervillain known as Papillon. Adrien's akumas tend to get out of control and mess up his life. It's been implied that he'd rather die than hurt Marinette, but his ignorance of her superheroic second identity causes him to terrorize her on a daily basis instead. He often goes without sleep, and can't sort out his love life at all, thanks to competition from himself.
• The fanfic Why Bother personifies this to a T. The Mane 6 are called to stop the Goddess of Lust, Luxure but when she is released...She gives up! She states that she is aware of the Mane 6's feats and all of the enemies they faced had their asses handed to them, she decides...nope it's not worth taking over Equestria. She even says this:
  Luxure: Don’t you get it? Have you not figured it out by now after beating so many baddies no matter the odds? We’re in a situation where villainy has absolutely zero chance of ever winning. I might not’ve realized that when I was young and stupid but I do now. When I heard that you beat Nightmare Moon I thought ‘Okay, beginner’s luck, big whoop.’ Then I heard about Discord and thought ‘Okay that’s slightly discouraging.’ By the time I found out the king of evil and darkness himself could be beat by a frickin’ baby dragon, I realized any chances I had of winning were deader than shit.
  Luxure: Knowing what I do now about this world, if I actively tried to make an attempt to be villainous again I would just be making a jackass out of myself and you. I know I’m not going to win in the end, so what’s the point?” [sighs] Just put me back in the heart, or in the dungeon or whatever, I don’t really care anymore.
• Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail: At the end of the Fog Car, Grace Monroe, leader of the Apex, has come to realize that everything she made in her little cult is not worth everything that came after: mutiple people are dead because of her, she's been witholding the character growth the Apex need to leave and her desire to be noticed has now made her the scourge of the Infinity Train itself culminating to barely anyone caring that she's dead except that she can't ruin any more lives.
• Miraculous: Tales of Scarlet Beetle & Ikati Black: Nathaniel Kurtzberg is the wielder of the Butterfly Miraculous and becomes an Anti-Villain with aims of acquiring the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses so can wish for his dead father to come back to life. It doesn't go well for him, since frequently his akumas will backfire on either himself or his loved ones. He also fears that if his loved ones, like his mother or his crush Marc, find out that he is Monarch they will turn on him out of disgust.
• Windows of the Soul takes the darkest interpretation of the Ambiguous Situation from My-HiME, that Shizuru raped Natsuki in her sleep, as well as the people Shizuru killed at District One, which the story sets at roughly 800 men and women, and has her suffering a huge guilt complex for it, engaging in Self-Harm by form of a nightly "purification ritual". Natsuki had actually forgiven Shizuru in the series proper, but in the fanfic Shizuru regards it as a cold, saintly forgiveness, trying not to recognize Natsuki's genuine desire to heal their friendship and take it to the next level.

Films — Animated

• In The Bad Guys (2022), infamous thief Mr. Wolf and his gang are pretending to go good so they can pull off a heist. But once he starts getting a taste of what being good is like, he starts having doubts about staying a feared criminal. This culminates in him failing to follow through on the heist, as he couldn't bring himself to betray the newfound trust and respect he has. And when the real Big Bad turns the world against him anyway, he's devastated. In the argument afterward, he states outright he's tired of being a feared outcast.
• Kung Fu Panda 2: Lord Shen is haunted by the perception that his parents hated him, and now is out to conquer Gongmen City and then China to have something worthwhile in his life. However, when pressed, he can't say whether his dream is worth anything other than an excuse to take his pain out on.
• The eponymous character of Megamind provides the quote above, saying that he doesn't get what the heroes could.
• Rock and Rule. Slow Schlepper Brother Zip has a Heel Realization, and becomes distraught. "We ain't evil, are we?" It leads to his Heroic Sacrifice.
• In Sleeping Beauty, Fauna says of the antagonist Maleficent: "Maleficent doesn't know anything about love, or kindness, or the joy of helping others. You know, sometimes I don't think she's really very happy." However, unlike most uses of this trope, it's not used to garner any sympathy; Maleficent is one of Disney's most openly and unrepentantly evil villains and has no redeeming features whatsoever (undeniable coolness notwithstanding). The only characterisation purpose this line serves is to showcase Fauna as the most gentle-hearted of the fairies, and in terms of plot, it gives Flora her Evil Cannot Comprehend Good realisation that lets them trick Maleficent.
• Wreck-It Ralph: The eponymous character has this experience. He's tired of having been the bad guy in a video game for thirty years and getting no respect for the job he does, which kicks off the plot as he sets out to prove he can be a good guy. Although he's not really evil to begin with, he just plays a villainous role and gets patronized for it.
• The Lion King (1994): After killing Mufasa and usurping his throne, Scar finds that the power doesn't bring him nearly as much joy as he'd hoped. His vanity and short-sightedness lead him to quickly turn his newly-conquered territory into an uninhabitable wasteland, and he's haunted by the knowledge that his subjects will never respect him the same way they did his brother. By the time of his climactic confrontation with Simba, the stress has driven him to the brink of madness.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: It turns out Superfly's gang doesn't really want to overthrow humanity. They just went along with his plan because they felt they had no other option.

Films — Live-Action

• A recurring motif in the films of Guillermo del Toro. Most of his villains represent specific ideologies or sets of politics, and Del Toro shows how their values hurt not just the people around them, but themselves as well.
  • In Cronos, the villains are a reclusive billionaire terrified of his own mortality, and his insecure, abused nephew. Both of them are miserable the entire movie.
  • In The Devil's Backbone, the villain is an insecure, cowardly bully living in fear of the repercussions of his actions, specifically a kid he killed whose ghost is haunting him. He is miserable the entire movie.
  • In Pan's Labyrinth, the villain is a fascist Death Seeker obsessed with living up to the legacy of his father and getting his own Dying Moment of Awesome. He's seen idly fantasizing about suicide in one scene and has no affection for anyone around him - he's obsessed with having a son, but only so he can carry on the legacy of leaving behind unhealthy aspirations of a glorious death. He is miserable the entire movie, and dies miserable, his killers explicitly telling him said son won't even know his name.
  • In Crimson Peak, the villains are a pair of penniless aristocrats obsessed with holding onto their titles and keeping up appearances, trapped in a decaying Haunted House. They're also engaged in an incestuous affair, which he finds stifling but can't break out of, and she is terrified of losing him. They are miserable almost the entire movie - he gets a few moments of genuine happiness, which come - naturally - when he finally does the right thing.
  • In The Shape of Water, the villain has lived his entire life trying to do what he feels he is "supposed to do" in a racist, patriarchal society: getting a job working for the government, obeying orders, and chasing that white picket fence dream. But he doesn't seem to have any genuine affection for his wife and kids, lives in constant fear of displeasing his superiors, and is profoundly insecure about the way he is perceived - in one scene, he is talked into buying a car he doesn't really like when the salesman appeals to his ego and insecurity, showing what a sucker he really is in spite of his power. He is miserable the entire movie.
  • In Nightmare Alley (2021), the Villain Protagonist is a stage magician turned con artist, a Manipulative Bastard convinced he's too good to ever be conned himself, that he's above everybody else and fully in control of himself, yet also constantly projecting his own anxieties onto everybody and assuming it's all normal. As the movie goes on, we see that he is very much Not So Above It All, with his own insecurities and traumas that leave him just as manipulable as everyone else, constantly living on the edge of absolute disaster, and ultimately ruining the closest thing he has to a meaningful relationship. He is miserable the entire movie - until, maybe, the final shot, where he seems genuinely relieved to finally get what's coming to him.

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• American History X: The Armor-Piercing Question that prompts Derek's Heel–Face Turn: "Has anything you've done made your life any better?" He explains his reasoning to his brother later: "And I kept asking myself all the time, how did I buy into this shit? It was because I was pissed off, and nothing I ever did ever took that feeling away. I killed two guys, Danny, I killed them. And it didn't make me feel any different. It just got me more lost and I'm tired of being pissed off, Danny. I'm just tired of it."
• In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Jesse James spends much of the film in one stage or another of a Villainous Breakdown, and finds it all but impossible to escape the myths that have developed around him, (not to mention the government's attempts to catch him) and he is constantly reminded of the consequences of what he has done. While the film doesn't shy away from characterizing James as an unstable and murderous bully, (instead of his usual Folk Hero treatment) it's also clear that he feels genuine remorse for his misdeeds. So much so, in fact, that when he realizes that the Ford brothers are plotting to kill him, he simply allows it to happen. It's beautifully summed up by his line:
  I look at my red hands and my mean face, and I wonder about that man that's gone so wrong.
• In Battle Beyond the Stars, Roger Corman's Magnificent 7 In Space, one of the recruits is the galaxy's greatest assassin. He's amassed great wealth, but he muses that he lives alone and bored on a Ghost Planet because he's feared everywhere he goes. Shad promises a home on his planet where no one knows him and where he can be happy if he helps them fight off an Alien Invasion.
• In the movie The ButterCream Gang, Pete talks about how he's not entirely sure exactly how his Face–Heel Turn happened, only that he wishes he could go back to being who he was before it, but considers himself too far gone and incapable of it.
• D.E.B.S.: has an example with Lucy Diamond. After she falls in love with Amy and realizes that she'll have to give up her life of crime to be with her, she says "Being bad doesn't feel good anymore."
• The Godfather: Michael Corleone justifies his descent into mob villainy as being done for the wellbeing of his family, but by the end of the second movie, he starts to realize that it has destroyed his family. By the end of the third movie, almost all the people he cared for are dead or driven away as a result of his choices.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Emma Russell gets this big time after being revealed as Evil All Along. After her son's death, she became a Well-Intentioned Extremist working with Alan Jonah to forcibly awaken all the dormant Titans so they'll cull the population but reverse the manmade damage done to Earth's ecosphere, betraying everyone in Monarch in the process. Everyone — all angry former friends and colleagues, her ex-husband, even Jonah — chew her out mercilessly once the truth comes out, and when she doesn't listen to Madison's pleas against waking Rodan while there are hundreds of islanders in his path, her own daughter turns her back on her and makes it clear with a broken tablet how much Emma’s actions have destroyed their relationship. What's more, Emma can't take any comfort in thinking her mission will succeed to make up for this once the three-headed rival Alpha Titan she released usurps Godzilla's dominance of the other Titans and begins rapidly creating an even worse extinction event than the one Emma set out to prevent, and Jonah proves to be a Dragon-in-Chief who she has no control over.
• This is clearly evident with the title character in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (where he's viewed as a sympathetic character for the most part). He's lonely and full of self-loathing (he uses that term exactly), and tries to make up with the Whoos even before his epic crime by accepting Cindy-Lou's invitation. Unfortunately, the mayor ruins that by giving him an electric razor as a gag gift. Seriously, the whole guy's life sucks, and in this case, it's hard to blame him for hating Christmas.
• By the end of Lord of War, Yuri's gun running business has led to his entire family either being killed or shunning him, and Yuri himself is left with the knowledge that his new employers (the U.S. Government) can have him disposed of whenever he becomes inconvenient.
  Agent Valentine: I would tell you to go to Hell but I think you're already there.
• This is the lesson Cady learns at the end of Mean Girls.
  "Calling someone else fat won't make you any skinnier. Calling someone else stupid doesn't make you smarter. And ruining Regina George's life certainly didn't make mine any happier."
• Scarface (1983). Yes, believe it or not, this film actually shows that being evil sucks. For all of Tony Montana's Conspicuous Consumption, he becomes a lonely and miserable person. This is especially evident when he makes a drunken scene at a restaurant.
• Star Wars: This is The Dark Side of The Force in a nutshell. The Sith live by the idea that Might Makes Right - mastery of the Dark Side means being willing to eventually kill your friends, your teachers, your family, and anyone else that could oppose you.
  • It's epitomized by Anakin Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side, with the turning point being Revenge of the Sith. Pledging loyalty to The Emperor costs him everything and everyone that he loves, and leaves him scarred and confined largely to a robotic life-support suit. When Luke tries to appeal to Vader's conscience in Return of the Jedi, Vader says in an almost pitiful voice that "It's too late for me," and much of the later material in the series explores just how much hopelessness and self-hatred Vader experienced serving Darth Sidious.
  • Of all characters, Darth Maul himself is hit hard in his arc from Star Wars: The Clone Wars to Star Wars Rebels. A combination of Darth Sidious and Maul's own evil actions cause him to lose his mother, his brother, his homeworld, and everything he ever worked for. At the end of his life, he can only bitterly confirm that the Sith took everything from him and his only hope is that Sidious will someday be defeated.
  • While many Sith Lords in the movies and Expanded Universe truly believe that they're superior to the Jedi (whom they see as weak for not taking advantage of their abilities), a few Sith Lords in Star Wars Legends (such as Ajunta Pall, Yuthura Ban, Darth Revan, and one Sith Lord that tried to balance the teachings between the two) have eventually come to realize that such power isn't all that it's cracked up to be if you have to give up everything that makes life worth living.
  • Much of Kylo Ren's arc beginning in The Force Awakens focuses on his reluctance to fully embrace the Dark Side. The event that turned him against the Jedi merely tipped the scales towards evil, and he has a Villainous BSoD whenever he's expected to harm his loved ones. When he develops a bond with Rey, he misinterprets her sympathy as validation for his choices, and his voice breaks as he tries to convince her to join him.
  • A non-explicitly supernatural version is what cements Finn's Mook–Face Turn at the beginning of The Force Awakens when the First Order opens fire on largely defenseless villagers and one of his Stormtrooper comrades dies in his arms.
• Comedically zigzagged in the Dudley Do-Right movie, when Snidely Whiplash laments that inevitable defeat is the one part of being the bad guy he hates. Aside from that, "it's the best job in the world." Indeed, Alfred Molina clearly had a blast in the role.
• Outlaw: Gangster VIP: The yakuza life is depicted as a harsh one, where you're constantly making enemies and worrying if your next step will be your last before they finally catch up to you, with even sworn Blood Brothers and biological brothers turning against each other. The only people willing to live it are former street kids who joined out of desperation and dishonorable sociopaths. Even redemption is a fool's errand, as the rest will stop at nothing to kill you for trying.
• In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the titular character is The Sociopath who terrorizes everyone around him, especially his mother. He sees everything as boring, lame and/or pointless, so he can't find enjoyment in anything, including the suffering he causes, and hates people who can. His antisocial behavior is partially him lashing out because his disorder makes him unable to enjoy life or connect with people on a normal level (with the other part being It Amused Me). He kills his sister, his father, and a bunch of other students simply because they annoyed him, and after the momentary satisfaction wears off, he goes to juvenile prison where the other prisoners aren't intimidated by him the way everyone else was at home. He becomes a Retired Monster simply because he's terrified of having an even worse time in real prison.
• I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore: In spite of being idolized by his two loyal flunkies, the Big Bad Marshall is a middle-aged, balding creep who lives in a van in the woods. A meeting with a fellow criminal emphasizes how pathetic he is when he's mocked and later knocked out for being flippant, causing his dental bridge to fall out of his mouth.

Literature

• The Chronicles of Narnia: When Edmund Pevensie gets captured by the White Witch, he realizes that satisfying his greed wasn't worth the consequences it entailed for Narnia and his siblings.
• Confessions (Saint Augustine):
  • Augustine wasted his youth indulging every horrible whim he had, lying, fornicating, and stealing whatsoever he wished, all while getting no happier than the hobos he'd walk by as they lay half-dead on the street. He refers to this period of this life as "an abyss of death" and compares his joy in doing evil to a prisoner claiming omnipotence in his cell by breaking the rules without punishment, desperately trying to ignore his own confinement.
  • Augustine's metaphysics make it a rule of the universe that evil sucks, since all evil is is the absence of a good that by definition would make you better if you had it. Oh, and existence itself is a good, so the more evil you are, the less you truly exist.
• The tortures in Dante's Inferno represent how each of the damned exists internally, implying their evil itself is a torture. So, the lustful are tortured by a hurricane because their lust throws them around without rhyme or reason, while traitors are tortured with cold because they heart turned cold as ice to those who they owed warmth to. Lampshaded by Virgil when a blasphemer blames God for his torment.
  "O Capaneus, for your arrogance
  that is not quenched, you're punished all the more
  no torture other than your own madness
  could offer pain enough to match your wrath."
• The Mad Void from In the Company of Ogres is a demon so powerful that it destroyed its own home universe and a few more afterwards. From the way the Red Woman describes it however, it did this after its own loneliness and ennui drove it mad (hence its name), with further implications that it might have allowed itself to be imprisoned in a mortal body because it didn't care enough to stop it.
• A constant theme across Star Wars Legends, since Evil Will Fail.
  • In Death Star, the gunner who fired the superlaser that destroyed Alderaan, who had always wanted to fire the biggest gun, finds that following orders and getting what he'd wished for led to misery beyond his wildest dreams, a personal Moral Event Horizon. He can't justify it, can't either make it less of a crime or blame someone else, and is unable to sleep for guilt and horrible dreams. When the Death Star is in range of Yavin IV, he stalls desperately, hoping that something would happen and he wouldn't have to pull that trigger again. He got that wish.
    He wouldn't be able to walk on a street on any civilized planet in the galaxy; people wouldn't be able to abide his presence.
    Nor would he blame them.
    He couldn't stop thinking about it. He didn't believe he would ever be able to stop thinking about it. The dead would haunt him, forever.
    How could a man live with that?
  • Lampshaded in Jedi Academy Trilogy, where Corran points out that, given how prevalent Chronic Backstabbing Disorder is amongst the Sith, they're constantly weakening themselves.
  • In Yoda: Dark Rendezvous, Dooku has a philosophical debate with Yoda, and tries to turn him to the Dark Side, offering power, riches, castles, an army...Yoda points out that, if you take the Temple as a castle, he pretty much already has all those things. Dooku asks what he wants. Yoda ponders...and decides he'd like a rose. They're pretty. Dooku, exasperated, exclaims that he can't make a rose out of thin air. For all his grand power and mastery of armies, he can't make a simple flower. Not so impressive, huh?
    • It's also shown throughout the book that Dooku, for all his power, is a tired, lonely, petty old man, while the Jedi characters, no matter how long or short their lives, are fulfilled and content.
• Dragonlance Legends trilogy: Raistlin Majere gained so much power and was on the verge of becoming a God only to discover that continuing with his plan would result in the extinction of all life on the planet leaving him on a barren world. The alternative was only marginally better.
• East of Eden: Because she was born a sociopath, Cathy is intelligent enough to get away with committing horrendous crimes and has a Lack of Empathy to avoid feeling remorse for any of them. But, throughout her life, no matter how powerful or rich she becomes, she is never truly happy because she doesn't have the one thing that makes life worth living: the ability to love and be loved. Her final fate is Dying Alone by morphine overdose to escape the legal consequences of her crimes.
• The ending of Gone Girl makes it clear that, despite Amy ultimately getting everything she wanted, she still isn't really happy, and likely never will be. Nick's last line sums it up, with Amy bitterly admits that she simply cannot stop thinking about what he said.
  I feel sorry for you. Because every morning, you have to wake up and be you.
• Harry Potter:
  • In general, being a Death Eater sucks because they are under the constant threat of being murdered by their boss if they try his patience in any way. Once they're in, they're in for life. If they're caught, they face life in prison with the dementors, happiness-sucking Emotion Eaters that gradually reduce their victims to Empty Shells.
  • Severus Snape: All of his years devoted to the dark side eventually gained him nothing but destroying the one thing he'd ever loved, and indulging in half-breed hatred didn't bring him any happiness.
  • Draco Malfoy learns this the hard way near the end of the series. There's a big difference between idolizing a "cool" Evil Overlord from a safe distance and being ordered by said overlord to commit murder (practically a suicide mission) with the threat of having your entire family killed. Draco also finds out that he doesn't have it in him to directly kill a defenseless person (even someone he personally despised) right in front of him. In Book 7, he learns that he doesn't enjoy inflicting Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • Voldemort himself is completely incapable of feeling love. He is driven solely on ambition and greed, and does everything he can to ensure that he'll live forever, even going so far as to split his soul into horcruxes, which take away more and more of his humanity and cause him to gradually develop a very pale, snake-like appearance, and he becomes very paranoid and frantic as Harry and his friends destroy more of them. By the end of the series, he suffers a Fate Worse than Death. It's also pointed out by fans that he (obsessed with cheating death) actually doesn't live nearly as long as several other wizards who simply kept themselves healthy—the Big Good, Dumbledore, lived roughly 50 years longer than Voldemort did.
  • Peter Pettigrew is of particular note because he gained literally nothing out of his betrayal. He was such a Dirty Coward that nothing he did had any rhyme or reason other than temporarily saving his own ass. Before he became a Death Eater, he had three great friends who would have sacrificed their lives for him, but because Voldemort was taking over everywhere, Peter decided to hand in the Potters in the hopes that he would be spared and because he wanted to be powerful as Voldemort’s right-hand man. This did absolutely nothing for him other than force Peter to spend twelve years as a rat and be abused for the remaining four years he lived, after which he was murdered by his new master anyway, completely defeating the purpose of siding with him in the first place. Along the way, he lost everyone who actually truly cared about him and destroyed countless lives, getting absolutely nothing out of anything that he did. Had he even shown the slightest bit of courage, he ironically probably would have ended up living longer than he actually did.
• In Jim Button, dragons work like this. As Mrs. Grindtooth explains to the heroes, while dragons are evil by nature, they are quite unhappy about it and hope that a hero will come and defeat them so that they can turn into Golden Dragons of Wisdom. Unfortunately, most heroes kill the dragon while defeating it, making the transformation quite rare.
• Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: The titular Necromantic has sold his soul, alienated his family, and inflicted immense suffering in pursuit of his goal. In a candid moment with a priest, he admits that he's not at all happy and means to give it all up as soon as possible. In the climax, he pulls a Faustian Rebellion and succeeds.
• In Masques, Aralorn's friend Wolf was evil once, more precisely, his evil father raised him evil from the start, realized that it sucked, and became neutral. While he's still challenged in the empathy department, he works together with Aralorn, who is more clearly heroic.
• In Momo, the Men in Grey are inhuman creatures that live on literally borrowed time; they operate a Timesaving Bank that persuades humans to "save time" and store the resulting spare time in the bank, falsely claiming that it will be repaid with interest at some future point. When Momo uses her power of eliciting confidences to get one of the Men in Grey to confess the true nature of the scheme to her, he also finds himself admitting that it's a wearisome business that consumes most of the time they've gained, and they wouldn't continue it except that it's the only way they know to survive. When Momo foils the scheme and returns the stolen time to its rightful owners, the last of the Men in Grey to wink out of existence does so with the words, "I'm glad it's all over."
• Night Watch (Series): While the Dark Ones in use every opportunity to brag about all that freedom, independence and strength The Darkness had given them and to make some lenient remarks on the poor deluded Light Ones who are so very constricted by their rules and who fuss over humans so much... It turns out that vampires are haunted by persistent insatiable Horror Hunger, werewolves have to deal with feats of feral uncontrollable rage once in a while and all the Dark Ones in general live in a world of constant paranoia and distrust towards their own brethren and superiors; Especially superiors who wouldn't even bother notifying that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness before they set up and sacrifice you as a part of their Evil Plan. The one non-Watch dark magician we see is shown enjoying himself in a restaurant with his lovely wife and happy children.
• In Paradise Lost, Satan makes a big show of being an epic hero who rails against God for His injustices. To himself, however, he admits that he really hates having fallen and knows that he only has himself to blame. In fact, one of the big themes of the book is that the fallen angels cast themselves out of heaven with their own actions. Thus, hell isn't a punishment, it's a result.
• The Sorcerers in Rogue Sorcerer are at constant risk of being driven insane by the very spirits they command. There's also the issue of Aiden's death curse which he accidentally places over them, which kills them all off slowly and with a great deal of pain.
• The devils in The Screwtape Letters seem manifestly miserable, despite ardent statements to the contrary. Their only joy seems to come from spiting The Enemy by taking His human souls and making them miserable too.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events For the first few books, it seems Count Olaf will always win, but slowly we realize that he alienated the one person he loved and lost practically all his henchman, all on the hopes of getting the Baudelaire fortune. Guess how well that worked out?
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Jaime Lannister after getting his sword hand chopped off regrets becoming a Blood Knight and struggles to become the Knight in Shining Armor he always wanted to be.
• Soon I Will Be Invincible: The Villain Protagonist spends much of the book demonstrating this. Being a Super Villain is hard work — Failure Is the Only Option, it's Lonely at the Top, and the heroes get all the public adoration.
• In the book version of The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley gets away with everything. On the other hand, Ripley spends the rest of his life in paranoid fear of the police, wondering if the next cop he sees has figured out what Ripley has done.
• In the Tales of the Magic Land, Urfin Jus's arc is all about this. He acts as the Big Bad of two books - Urfin Jus and his Wooden Soldiers and The Fiery God of the Marrans. In both of these, he is a rotating Villain Protagonist, allowing the viewers to watch him closely and boy, is it ever sad to see. Both his attempts at conquering the Magic Land end up going roughly the same way. After spending an ungodly amount of effort raising and training his army (literally building it with his own two hands in the first case), getting it to the Emerald City, and besieging the city, he finally succeeds, spending a few months at best ruling over a populace that hates and disobeys him, before inevitably being overthrown and exiled in shame. After going through this twice, he stumbles upon more of the plants that serve as the basis for the life powder he had used to create his wooden soldiers the first time around. He briefly contemplates trying for a third go, creating even more unstoppable monstrosities under his command... then burns them instead as he realizes that it's just not worth it. When a powerful witch later offers him a place at her side, he dismisses her, all but invoking this trope and predicting (correctly) that she too will fail just as he failed.
• Tolkien's Legendarium: While the various lords of evil are always shown as reveling in being evil - indeed, they take great pleasure in being as cruel and vicious as possible to everyone and everything else - a few of the lesser evil characters fall prey to this trope:
  • In The Silmarillion, Maglor, one of Feanor's seven sons, comes to regret his actions against his fellow Elves in pursuit of the Silmarils. He rescues Elrond and Elros from certain death, with great consequences for the Second and Third Ages. Maglor's brother Maedhros may have felt similarly; it's not entirely clear.
  • In The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield becomes an example after the Battle of the Five Armies. Dying from his wounds, he realizes just how terribly wrong he was to let greed for treasure of Erebor overcome him, and how close it came to costing him everything he previously held dear.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf describes Gollum as being like this. He hates what he is, where he lives, and everything that he's done since he acquired the One Ring by murdering his friend Deagol. He even hates his "precious", the Ring itself, since it's responsible for all of it. His brief Heel–Face Turn in The Two Towers is his attempt to break out of being evil; sadly, it doesn't last.
  • The few looks we get into the minds of Orcs suggest that the average Orc feels this way. Orcs are always vicious, brutal creatures, taking no pleasure in anything except torturing and fighting. If no outside enemy is available, they'll insult and fight each other. Merry and Pippin see this among the orc-band that captures them; Sam and Frodo see it when they come across a couple of orcs in Mordor.
• In Worm, Taylor discusses this when talking to some kids about superheroism and supervillainy. She notes that despite the preponderance of supervillains in the world, the job just ain't what it cracked up to be; heroes may be less numerous, but they at least have a support structure and don't generally fight other heroes. Supervillains, meanwhile, have to build things from the ground up (or start beholden to a group that probably doesn't have their best interests in mind), fight each other as much as heroes, and most often end their career incarcerated or dead without having accomplished much. Taylor herself is one of the few exceptions, but the experience traumatized her badly.

Live-Action TV

• Breaking Bad:
  • Because of his meth-cooking, Walt's wife wants to divorce him and he has been wracked with guilt over the results of his actions. Regardless, Evil Feels Good and he keeps going. Ultimately, it becomes a straight Greek tragedy as Walt becomes the villain of his own story, and he becomes a fugitive when the DEA discover his activities.
  • For Jesse Pinkman, learning this is essentially the major part of his character arc. He starts as a delinquent who's more eager about going into the meth trade than Walt is. But as the series goes on, he starts losing everything he holds dear because of it. Two girlfriends of his die because of the drug trade (one overdosed and the other was killed to force him to comply with his kidnappers) and he himself ends up kidnapped for his knowledge of how to make blue meth. He finds out he can't take the ruthlessness of the criminal life, and his conscience constantly bothers him. He eventually tries to disassociate with the whole business, but finds out that it's way harder to get out of the drug trade than it is to get in. He does finally manage to get clean of the business after the series finale.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Selfless". The whole point of that episode was to show how damaged Anya was following her return to vengeance.
  • Even soulless vampires are sometimes subject to this—if, like Harmony or chipped Spike, they're ineffectual enough to be aware that they're ineffectual. Harmony flat out says it in season four:
    Harmony: Being a vampire sucks.
  • When Faith returns in Season Four, it's clear that her hostility is accompanied by deep self-loathing of what she's become. She seemed to be happier with it prior to her awakening, but this is likely because her slide into darkness went in hand with her relationship with her father figure. With him dead all she had left was the knowledge of how badly she'd fallen. Immediately after she leaves the season, she shows up in the first season of Angel attempting Suicide by Cop, but thankfully ends up with a Heel–Face Turn instead.
• The Cape: Voyt decides this by the finale, after he's been sold out the moment Fleming no longer needs him.
• Charmed: A demonic seer (played by Charisma Carpenter) contacts the Charmed Ones and offers them information if they will find a way to make her human. She explains that, through her visions she's seen just how much fun it is to be on the good side and realizes that as a demon, she could never experience any of that.
• In Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa, one of the episodes is a Reverse Whodunnit that follows the criminal after he commits murder. He learns how much of a mental strain it is to keep something like that a secret, and constantly experiences flashbacks to the victim and visions of her following him around. At the end of it all he's caught and arrested, and Himura lambasts him for his amateur mistakes.
• Daredevil: In contrast to his comic characterization, Benjamin Poindexter/Bullseye knows he's nuts but hates it, and sees a therapist to help deal with his issues.
• An example of Being Ambiguously Evil Sucks in Dexter, where the title character is a rare Anti-Villain example of I Just Want to Be Normal.
• Game of Thrones: Theon discovers this when he captures Winterfell, but presses on regardless because he believes he's gone too far to turn back.
• Heroes: Towards the end of Volume 5. Sylar realizes his evil life will leave him alone and unloved, so he went forth to do good and hoped to be forgiven. The judicious application of a Mind Rape taking the form of a Fate Worse than Death by Matt Parkman helped, as well.
• Kamen Rider:
  • In Kamen Rider OOO Being a Greeed turns out to be pretty unpleasant. Their creator couldn't get them to do anything, so he removed one of the ten Core Medals that make up a Greeed's being from each of them, in order to give them something to want. They came to life, but it's not much of a life. Their senses are dulled, they've got a void of desire they can never fill, and they're incapable of feeling even the most basic of positive human emotions such as love or compassion. Even getting all nine medals back and becoming as complete as they can get, most of the Greeed's ultimate goal, is a pointless effort, as it does nothing to remedy the above problems, except let them try to devour humans to feel what humans can, and even then, they're incapable of ever truly being satisfied no matter what they do. Ankh is so far the only Greeed to realize this after being able to experience what being human is like while possessing Hina's brother Shingo, and is increasingly disgusted with himself and frustrated the other Greeed are completely incapable of realizing it.
  • In Kamen Rider Ex-Aid, Poppy Pipopapo realizes that there is no point to the Bugsters' plan to destroy humanity. As video game characters that came into reality, Bugsters were created to play with humans. Without anyone to play with, there is no meaning to their existence.
• LazyTown: The trio from "Robbie's Dream Team" starts feeling this after they and Robbie capture Sportacus.
• Leverage: Before becoming good guys, every member of the team was horribly alone. "The Roshomon Job" showed that they were always so afraid of getting caught that even incompetent security guards seemed menacing.
• In My Name Is Earl, this is what spurs Earl to create the list. After winning $100,000 from a stolen lottery scratch ticket, he gets hit by a car (and badly injured), losing the lottery ticket in the process, and then his wife divorces him for Darnell and takes the trailer and the kids in the settlement, leaving him with nothing except the clothes on his back. Then, while doped up on morphine, he flips on the TV and hears Carson Daly talking about (the Theme Park Version of) karma, and decides that the reason his luck has been so bad lately is that he's done a lot of bad things... and that this karma thing will destroy him if he doesn't make up for them. So he writes down a list of all the bad things he can remember doing (some going all the way back to grade school). As he's tackling an item about littering, he finds the lost lotto ticket and claims the money, which he takes as a sign that karma is working for him. He decides to do good things from then on.
• According to Word of God, this is the premise behind Once Upon a Time. The Evil Queen's reason for choosing to get revenge on Snow White by casting a curse on the entire fairy tale world is to create a world where she can "win for once." Even there, she is shown to be deeply unhappy and is aware that she has destroyed her life for revenge. Aware of this, she finally tries to become The Atoner in Season 2.
• Only Murders in the Building: Theo Dimas has been involved with his father's grave robbery and jewely smuggling since his teens, and accidentally killed Zoe. His father was able to use his connections to keep Theo out of jail and let an innocent man get convicted and serve ten years, something Theo was complicit in. They're also very rich and enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. However, it gradually becomes clear that Theo isn't a happy person. He doesn't seem to have any friends, and while his dad loves him, he's also a very harsh and controlling father. Theo clearly carries a lot of trauma and guilt from having killed Zoe, and by Season Two, genuinely wants to reform. Even Mabel, who has been directly and deeply hurt by Theo and his father's actions, can't help but feel bad for him when she sees how alone and regretful he is.
• Power Rangers:
  • Played for Laughs in part 2 of "Alien Rangers of Aquiatar" in Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers: Finster is Squashed Flat by his monster troop and Goldar as they leave Rita’s palace. He laments "Sometimes, I really hate being a bad guy." Whether Finster was truly evil at all like his Super Sentai counterpart Pleprechaun is up for debate.
  • In Power Rangers Samurai, Dayu made a Deal with the Devil but didn't get what she asked for in the way she wanted (devils are like that). By this point, she's sick of being The Dragon to Master Xandred but there's no way out.
• The Shield: This becomes a bigger and bigger theme of the show as it goes on and Vic sinks to increasingly amoral levels for the "greater good". By the end, all his pragmatism and criminal acts have gotten him is his family leaving him, his friends abandoning him to his fate, his peers despising him, his superiors spitefully trapping him in a Soul-Crushing Desk Job they know kills him inside, his career utterly destroyed, his clout and authority amongst the streets totally evaporated, his remaining enemies waiting for the slightest screw up, and no chance to undo any of it. His life is in complete and utter ruins and the show ends with him toiling away at his desk for three years as the only possible chance he could have at doing anything beyond going to jail or getting killed.
• The Sopranos: Tony's psychiatrist frequently hints that Tony's (and certain people around him) mental problems are due to this.
• Stargate SG-1: Mentioned by Mitchell after they've captured a Mook and promised him protection from the bad guys. Sam points out that "protection" will mean locking him up:
  Mitchell: Well, there are downsides to working for a super-villain.
• Succession: The Roys are a Big, Screwed-Up Family where nearly every member has an incurable case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, inflated but incredibly fragile egos, a tendency to grab at any chance for personal power or wealth no matter who has to get hurt, no regard for most other people, and, despite the genuine love that exists between them, a tendency to twist the knife on each other. This is due to The Chain of Harm where nearly every Roy is both abused and an abuser, and none of them achieve any sort of long-term happiness. Often because their scheming blew up in their faces.
  • The worst of them is family patriarch Logan, and, tellingly, he's the most unhappy of them all; his kids at least have each other to some extent, while he and his older brother Ewan barely speak, and while his kids love him and crave his approval, they're also all completely terrified of him and willing to betray him for personal gain, since he's regularly demonstrated he'd do the same to them. Logan doesn't want them to cut contact with him for good, but is unable and unwilling to give them unconditional love, so instead he keeps them around in a deeply toxic dynamic with him that leaves them all miserable. It's also hinted that the fact that the public largely loathes him wounds Logan more than he'd admit, and in the end, he suffers an Undignified Death surrounded by his cronies, not his family.
  • Kendall alternates between idolizing and loathing his father entirely, but can't help but try to emulate him in some ways, even when he's desperately trying to avoid turning out like him. This, along with his fundamental selfishness and corrupting ambition, has left Kendall permanently chasing a Tragic Dream and unable to simply enjoy what he has and appreciate that he has kids who love him, or maintain a healthy relationship with his siblings, whom he does genuinely adore.
  • Roman is a petty jerkass who never misses a chance to make a snide comment or grab at more influence for himself. He also has no friends, is heavily implied to have suffered Rape as Backstory, and completely fawns over and senselessly defends his abusive father, who treats him with condescension at best. In the fourth season, his attempts to fill Logan's tyrannical shoes lead him to alienate Gerri, the one Waystar employee who actually cares about him and wanted to help him.
  • Shiv begins the series having seemingly gotten away; she lives in DC while the rest of her family lives in New York, she's dating a man who worships the ground she walks on, and she works for a Democratic candidate her father despises. However, when her father dangles the chance to become his successor in front of her nose, she gives into her desire for his approval and love, and spends the rest of the series either sinking to new lows to try and secure her position, or desperately mitigate the damage, aware she's losing her soul. In the end, she's left with the knowledge her family, often including her, have made the world a worse place, and she has nothing to show for it but an unhappy marriage and the loss of the family company they were all fighting over.
• In Supernatural: Hell really sucks even for demons. Ironically, for a series that often puts Being Good Sucks at the forefront, this is more or less how their universe works. All good people get to go to Heaven when they die, and spend eternity reliving the best moments of their lives. Likewise, the standards of what is classed as good is quite lenient. Despite not caring for man, the angels refuse to sell or barter the souls of Heaven, as it's their Creator's will that this be their fate. Meanwhile, all the evil people go to Hell, and are tortured til they become demons. Monsters who rip people apart in life go to Purgatory and spend eternity ripping each other apart, and all the other species just go to The Nothing After Death.
• On Teen Wolf Chris Argent the Hunter is really feeling the bite of this. His sister abandoned the Hunter's Code and committed the mass-murder of a non-hostile family of werewolves and humans, which led to her death in the end. His father ordered the abandonment of the Code, and this led to increasingly psychopathic behavior all around. When his wife is bitten by an alpha while trying to murder her daughter's teenage werewolf boyfriend, she is obligated by Hunter rules, and Gerard's insistence, to commit suicide before she turns into a werewolf. Her death pushes Allison over the edge, and she goes on a psychotic rampage. Then, the real kicker, Gerard, who has been encouraging all this crazy, reveals that he is dying of cancer and that his plan along along has been to use the Hunters to help him capture the alpha so that he can receive the bite and become a werewolf to survive the disease, making it fully clear that he knows he will have to kill his son to do it. Needless to say, Chris finds himself stuck on-side with the werewolves because of how the evil in his family has led to loss and suffering for him and his daughter.

Music

• Subverted in Voltaire's song "When You're Evil". The last verse sounds like the singer is bothered by his villainous ways and longs for some human happiness...
  It gets so lonely being evil.
  What I'd do to see a smile... even for a little while.
  And no one loves you when you're evil...
  [Beat]
  I'm lying through my teeth! Your tears are all the company I need.
• The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes", which was intended to be a song for the villain of Lifehouse, the album that became Who's Next.
• Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" tells the story of a Gangster who rules his 'hood, makes money, drives fancy cars, is feared and respected... and has been driven batshit insane by paranoia: he can't sleep at night, he sees betrayal everywhere, and he's haunted by visions of people he's already killed.
• Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" bluntly tells that it doesn't feel good to be a gangster.
  As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
  I take a look at my life and realize there's nothin' left
  Cause I've been blasting and laughing so long
  That even my mama thinks that my mind is gone
• "I Fought The Law" by Sonny Curtis is a song that shows why crime does not pay.

Professional Wrestling

• Dark Angel uncharacteristically debuted in CMLL alongside La Amapola as a ruda after training with El Satánico Dr No. It only took four matches with the promotion, which were all losses, for her to decide that she was much better as a tecnica and turn back. La Amapola never forgave Dark Angel for it.
• Averno, who himself was corrupted by El Satánico, went on to convince CMLL's poster boy of the previous decade Místico, to become a rudo at the beginning of 2010. At first he came to like living by the all's fair philosophy and eagerly tore into his friends during matches but gave up on the philosophy after learning during his subsequent feud with Volador Jr. that even in Super Libre being a rudo ultimately did not come with the freedom he was told it did, that he ended up being less successful than before and that his fans wouldn't appreciate his efforts to "defend" Mexico City even if he had otherwise succeeded.

Radio

• Old Harry's Game:
  • Satan is borderline suicidal because of the toll that running Hell has taken on him. He repeatedly tries to find a way out of his duty, but his arrogance keeps getting in the way.
  • While not everyone in Hell is evil, all evil people do go to Hell, and those who are legitimately evil, like Thomas, tend to suffer worse there than those who ended up there only because of God's incredibly high standards, like the Professor and Edith.

Religion/Mythology

• The original and most ancient concept of Karma, before later doctrines, meant action. Hence, doing anything inherently created a new 'self' which was different. Grossly oversimplified, the first victim of wrongdoing is yourself, since you've made yourself into something less than you were.
• In Christianity and Islam, the wages of sin are death, a weakening of your relationship with God, and eventual damnation if not repented. Satan himself is supposed to be constantly tortured by his decision. The Divine Comedy even has him imprisoned with the rest of the sinners who betrayed their lords.
• In The Scorpion and the Frog, the Scorpion kills itself (alongside the frog) because evil is in its nature.
  • Variation: The Scorpion and the Turtle, the Scorpion kills itself (alongside the turtle) because of spite: "It is better we should both perish than that my enemy should live.".

Tabletop Games

• In the World of Darkness, you just can't win. Not only does being good suck, but if you decide to go the other way and embrace the dark side, you can look forward to a number of side effects - starting with batshit insanity. Each of the game lines comes with its own drawbacks, lovingly crafted to screw with that particular type of critter. At the lowest level, you turn into a monster and are removed from play.
  • In Chronicles 1st Edition, as an ordinary mortal: The lower your Morality goes, the more likely you'll blow a fuse and start to go insane - every time your Morality drops, you have to make a roll to resist getting a Derangement, and your dice pool to resist is your new Morality level (so you're basically guaranteed to crack up at Morality 1). Hit Morality 0 and you snap, losing all restraints and any ability to recognize other people as people. If you're lucky, they'll put you in an institution before too long.
  • Vampires: Stronger predatory instincts and a thinner veneer of humanity, meaning the human prey can sense you want to eat them. This tends to make them want to stay away. You're literally going to devolve into a mindless animal if you do enough evil. Moreover your new society consists of assholes and psychopaths, most of whom are way older and more powerful than you and there is that mutual risk of flipping out and killing each other whenever you first meet another vampire. The original Vampire doesn't let you off the hook lightly either. While meetings between two groups of vampires do not devolve into brawls every time, you're still stuck in the society of manipulative monsters, and the power difference between you and the Powers That Be is much greater. Hit Humanity 0 and you fall completely to the Beast, becoming little more than a rabid animal to be put down.
  • Werewolves: The spirits you're trying to police can tell you're out of balance, and they hate you that much more. You have a harder time performing rituals, and it's that much harder to keep from kill-everything-around-you berserker rage. On top of all that, you tend to develop disturbing obsessions - from breaking every third window you pass to taking a bite out of anyone who looks you in the eye. At Harmony 10 and 0 (the idea is to balance your disperate natures and 5 is ideal), you're completely locked out of half of yourself. In the original Werewolf you suffer nothing of the sort and can technically do anything you please. There is just that little problem with the Universe-devouring Big Bad who has a Fate Worse than Death in store for your entire race and you personally, and whose local representatives are generally empowered by evil acts.
  • Mages: You know that Abyss that hates your magic? The more evil you become, the harder it can smack you around and the harder it is for you to resist it. In the original, you're free to do as you wish; thing is, there's a horde of Eldritch Abominations seeking to drag reality down into oblivion with them, and their goals are furthered by the spread of evil.
  • Prometheans: You know that whole "I wanna be a real boy" thing you've got going on? Your ability to comprehend humanity is judged in part by how much you understand human morals. You can be a mad murdering monster, but good luck ever earning a soul that way. If you want to create a kid/companion like you who'll help you deal with the loneliness, there's a much better chance the process will go horribly wrong and result in the creation of a bunch of cannibalistic aberrations that wish to devour your essence.
  • Changelings: Low Clarity gives a double-dose of insanity; not only do you suffer specific derangements, but your perceptions are more and more skewed by your Fae experiences. Plus, you become more and more like one of the Fae overlords who kidnapped you. Because you'll probably become one if you grow powerful enough.
  • Hunters: One trope: He Who Fights Monsters. That goes for the previous game, too.
  • Demons: To start, you just spent human history in a Hell far worse than humans comprehend. You get out, but the more evil you behave, the more Torment you accumulate, until you become a creature incapable of hope and compassion. If you're forced into an inanimate host one way or another, it gets worse, as now you lose any anchor to humanity, any way to deal with the darkness within, and become one of the Earthbound.
  • Sin-Eaters: You find it harder and harder to enter and navigate the Underworld. Kerberoi and geists can tell you're out of sync with your geist, and become more reluctant to deal with you. You also find it more difficult to perform ceremonies. Hit Synergy 0, and you end up as a Meat Puppet for your geist to drag around. By the way, you don't even have to be bad to hit Synergy 0 - every time you die, if your geist decides to pull you back, your current Synergy goes down one and your maximum Synergy goes down two. Makes being dead look a lot more attractive, doesn't it?
  • Wraiths: Your Shadow, your resident Enemy Within, grows more and more powerful, working against everything you care about. When it's finally able to take over, you become one of the local servants of Oblivion, and now work to the destruction of everything.
  • Geniuses: (yes, it's fanmade, but shut up): the you that's actually, you slowly dissipates and your personality is overtaken by some strange, unknown and terrifying will that leads you to horrible acts. Also, the Geniuses who haven't given in to Illumination (likely including your friends and Mentor) will hunt you down and kill you. Granted, by the point you've hit Obligation 0 and become an Illuminated, it could be considered a mercy to you.
  • Princesses (also fanmade): Your entire duty is to be the heroine standing against the forces of evil, and the less Belief you have, the more you've given up on that ideal, and the cause of Darkness is further advanced. Hit Belief 0, and you take a cue from Puella Magi Madoka Magica and become a Witch-like entity called a Dethroned.
    • On the other side of the War of Hope, you have the Darkened. Accept the Darkness into yourself, and you'll gain a new Umbra superpower for every point of Integrity you lose... except that every Umbra also comes with a nasty downside, and if you hit zero Integrity you die and reanimate as a mindless Darkspawn.
• Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000:
  • This is the fate of most servants of Chaos. Sure, the lucky few become immortal and godlike Daemon Princes, but the vast majority is doomed to become consumed by their emotions and end up as blood-crazed berserkers who live only to kill and die in battle, jaded hedonists who have to keep doing more and more depraved things simply to feel something, sorcerers who are forever driven to expand their knowledge in an attempt to reach an impossible goal, or disease-ridden husks who are kept alive by supernatural powers despite their bodies rotting away. That is all if you don't simply end up a mindless mass of betentacled gribblyness because of all the mutations you've been receiving, or simply sacrificed, as cannon fodder, as an experiment, to slate the hunger of ravenous daemons, as a sex toy to rapacious daemons, or simply For the Evulz. Then again, especially in 40K, it's not like the opposite is much better.
  • The Beastmen have it even worse than most of Chaos' servants. They're born creatures of Chaos and have little choice but to serve them, and as a result the blessings their gods give them are sparse and feeble compared with those who chose Chaos of their own volition. They're so attuned to its destructive nature they feel an instinctive revulsion towards building things, making them less useful to their gods. The typical role of Beastmen during Chaos invasions is to be used as a first wave of Cannon Fodder to soften up enemy defenses before the more valuable troops go in.
  • On a more personal note, some traitor Primarchs fell because Daddy didn't love them enough. Perturabo was consigned to brutal, grinding sieges, Angron was little more than a self-aware attack dog, and Lorgar had his love thrown back in his face because it was expressed as religious fervour. Konrad was just as vicious as Angron, but while Angron was a berserker, Konrad was that kid who picks apart flies allowed to practice on people. Magnus was a nerdy wizard memetically held to have done no wrong but was unjustly punished for the fallout of a backfiring plan. All of them held this inside until it crystalized into a spark of hatred that caused them to gleefully toboggan down the slippery slope when Horus betrayed the Emperor. After 10,000 years, all of them are still just hurt kids.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Elder Evils sourcebook is full of villains like this. A lot of the mortals who are servants of the Eldritch Abominations featured in the scenarios are only such because they have no choice, and are full of self-loathing as a result. One of them, Ragnorra's servant Iricathix Vane, actually can be persuaded to turn on Ragnorra and help the PCs, but most of the others are stuck where they are.
  • Asmodeus is the game's Satan analogue, a Fallen Angel who came to rule the Nine Hells and plots to overthrow the deities themselves. He's thoroughly evil, elegant, and supremely confident... and yet anyone who descends to the lowest layer of Hell, and travels down the Serpent's Coil to his citadel, the Fortress Nessus, will find a vast and splendid palace that nevertheless feels empty, melancholy. Its magnificent halls are said to resonate with despair, regret, and the constant sound of soft weeping. Though given Asmodeus is The Chessmaster and The Corruptor with a Multiple-Choice Past (and at least one of the other options states that he's a primordial force of evil older than the gods), it's quite probably that he's deliberately invoking the idea in order to make people more sympathetic to him and therefore easier to manipulate. Then again, it's just as likely that the idea that he's faking regret is itself false, to provide a cover so his subordinates don't think he's weak. Or both are true at once. Hard to tell with him.
  • Ravenloft: Part of the theme is that, however much it sucks to be good, it sucks even worse to be evil. Good and Neutral people at least live their lives without interference from the Dark Powers, but if you do enough evil deeds, you'll be getting their attention, and the Dark Powers love to get creative with curses. If you've really crossed the Moral Event Horizon, they'll go the extra mile and make you a Darklord, giving you almost unlimited power... but taking away anything that would give actual fulfillment. For example, Azalin wanted to live forever to truly master magic; as a Darklord, he's immortal, but he now cannot learn any new spells. Vlad Drakov wanted to be a conquering king; as a Darklord he has complete control of his domain, but gets his ass kicked whenever he tries to conquer any other.
• In Nomine: Demons do not, as a rule, greatly enjoy their lives. Being part of the hordes of Hell means living under a brutal Police State that will ruthlessly destroy you for any perceived disloyalty, surrounded by peers that will throw you under the bus without a moment's hesitation if they stand to gain something for it, served by underlings eager to betray you for the chance to climb in influence, and obeying superiors who will destroy you the moment they think you're trying to do the same to them — the closest demons get to friends are allies of convenience. Demons live lives ruled by paranoia, since any perceived weakness will be pounced upon by their fellows, and find joy in little outside of the pain of others.

Theater

• Several villains in William Shakespeare plays find this out.
  • Macbeth and his wife find that killing the king so that you can inherit the throne wasn't worth it, and Claudius also ends up learning that same lesson.
  • Richard III, where at the beginning Richard says, "I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days." At the end of the play, after, amongst other ill deeds, having his brother and nephews murdered, he remarks to himself:
  What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
  Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
  Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
  Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
  Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
  Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
  That I myself have done unto myself?
  O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
  For hateful deeds committed by myself!
• In The Ring of the Nibelung Hagen tells his father Alberich he is constantly miserable and hates people being happy.
• Doctor Faustus:
  • Faustus is killed and tormented eternally in Hell as a direct result of his Deal with the Devil. Faustus is told very explicitly that this will happen decades in advance, but remains in denial until he's about to die.
  • Mephistopheles claims to be "tormented with ten thousand hells" by no longer being allowed to taste the joys of Heaven, which was caused by his siding with Lucifer in the fall.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • Krika realized that he and his Brotherhood have done terrible things, but carried on doing them because he saw himself as doomed anyway, and also partly because he had hoped he could sabotage the plan of his leader by being part of it. All his brethren that had been also opposed to the Brotherhood's corruption were executed.
  • After his decision to sell out Metru Nui to the Dark Hunters, Nidhiki gets nothing but misery for his trouble. His closest friend, Lhikan, has him banished from the city, and on the isle of the Dark Hunters (Odina) he is treated with scorn and contempt, since no one trusts a traitor. Although he made one friend, Lariska, he ultimately ends up being transformed into a horrifying monster by Roodaka after trying to escape, and ends up spending the rest of his days as a hideous spider creature (the type of creature he himself had an extreme phobia of) alongside a bumbling moron before being devoured by an Evil Overlord to recharge his energies. The only upside was that he got to capture Lhikan to sate some vengeance, but even then Lhikan ended being remembered as a legendary hero while he himself was a minor villain. It's especially painful because other, far worse villains get off scot-free, such as the Shadowed One himself; so even though Nidhiki isn't exactly kind and lovable, Karma picked on him the hardest out of pretty much everyone. Ironically, in an alternate universe where Nidhiki chose to betray Lhikan in a far worse way far sooner, he actually got the better deal than his main universe counterpart, ending up as a high-ranking official of the universe-spanning Toa Empire.
• Also from LEGO, Lord Garmadon from Ninjago basically has nothing go right for him. He didn't even want to be evil in the first place, but The Corruption caused him to slowly transform into a wicked villain with a taste for conquering all of Ninjago. Said desire ended up with him being cast into the Underworld by his own brother, losing his wife and child and missing out on the chance to see the latter grow up, and ultimately finding out that Evil Is Not a Toy the hard way when he is betrayed by the Overlord. Thankfully, he is eventually purified and gets better... only for the consequences of his actions to catch up with him, and ultimately result in him being killed. When he is eventually resurrected by the Sons of Garmadon, being evil doesn't suck for him because he is reborn without any of his positive qualities, no longer "hindered" by his love for Lloyd.

Video Games

• Absented Age: Squarebound: The Karen Ganger reveals that deep down, she's ashamed of having to harm humans by eating their Heart Fragments to sate her Horror Hunger, but as a Ganger, she can't fight her nature. She allows the real Karen to Mercy Kill her, but not before requesting that Karen finds a way to save the other Gangers.
• Abyss Crossing: Being an Astras means becoming associated with one of humanity's vices, and the Astras have no control over this, which means their presence will cause humans to destroy themselves whether they want it or not. They will also lose their sanity if they take in too much magic power, and there's not much they can do to control this, especially when Kuro is causing them to take in magic power in the first place.
• Baldur's Gate III: While playing as an evil character does allow you some shortcuts in the campaign, as well as skip several boss battles, evil characters tend to lose more than that they gain, compared to their heroic counterparts. A few examples are that several party members refuse to work with you, several quests yielding nice rewards are blocked off and you also get fewer allies in the final battle. There are also several companion characters with branching paths in their stories. Usually, their evil path is the least fulfilling for them:
  • The Dark Urge becomes forever bound to his father the God of Evil Bhaal's will if he doesn't reject him, and his only options are to become an Omnicidal Maniac, kill himself to try to escape his wrath, or end up possessed and become a prisoner in his own body that can only watch helplessly as he kills his loved ones.
  • Astarion wants to hijack his former master Cazador's Deal with the Devil to become a Vampire Ascendant himself. Doing so requires him to sacrifice 7000 souls. If you persuade him into abandoning this plan, he thanks you for stopping him and becomes a happier person overall. If he does use the ritual, he becomes a cruel and powerhungry being who'll never be satisfied.
  • Shadowheart's aspiration is to become one of God of Evil Shar's Dark Justiciars. If she abandons this path, she can potentially reunite with her missing parents and settle down on a nice homestead with loads of animals and you, if you romanced her. If she does pursue this goal, she does seem happy at first, but becomes more emotionally distant and isn't allowed to continue any romantic relationships. She also kills her own parents and is then glad Shar removes any memories of them, thinking Shar protects her from pain, while Shar is actually the one behind most of it.
  • Lae'zel wants to be recognized by her God Empress, who in reality is a megalomaniac lich that consumes her subjects once they've outlived their usefulness. If not talked into a better path she meets the same fate in the epilogue after having killed her people's only hope for the future.
  • Gale starts out a friendly, Chaotic Good Absent-Minded Professor but his Fatal Flaw was his ego, which has led him astray in the past despite his good intentions. If the Player Character talks him into a Face–Heel Turn, he goes off in search of an Artifact of Doom that's laid low everyone who's tried to harness it before and succeeds, at a terrible cost. In the epilogue it's shown he becomes the god of ambition itself, and becomes a Jerkass God no different than the ones he criticized, eternally compelled to try to elevate his own station and trapping himself in an Ironic Hell. Things are even worse for him if the Player Character didn't complete his questline and steal the tome he needs for his research, as he doesn't survive the attempt and is rendered Deader than Dead, with his Virtual Ghost lamenting that he lost everything over his vanity.
• The Brief and Meaningless Adventure of Hero Man: As a dark mirror to how Hero Man feels underwhelmed by many of the endings, Lord Doldrum is depressed over his own lonely existence as a Demon Lord and admits that he requires therapy. It's implied that he can only find meaning in his life by fighting a strong hero in a deathmatch, since he kills himself when the weak Prince of Somewhere shows up first in the 8th ending.
• God of War Ragnarök: This turns out to be how Thor feels about his role as Odin's hatchet/hammer man. He drowns his guilt over committing genocide in alcohol, which in turn makes him genuinely dangerous to his loved ones, which just makes him even more miserable. And to make matters worse, Odin actively encourages him to remain a self-loathing drunkard because if Thor ever thought he could become anything other than a violent brute, he'd do it and stop being Odin's enforcer- as seen when Kratos empathizes with Thor over both being parents and persuades him to be a better person for his daughter Thrud.
• Aribeth in Neverwinter Nights turned to the dark side to get vengeance fully understanding that being evil sucks, and counted on the fact that her boss would betray her and kill her because she felt she deserved death for turning in the first place.
• As mentioned above in the Film and Literature sections, the Dark Side of the Force in Star Wars is built around the idea that while Evil Pays Better, the long-term detriments surrounding the Sith religion and The Corruption surrounding the Dark Side in general usually make it not worth it, with the Knights of the Old Republic series exploring it in depth.
  • Ajunta Pall in the first game was one of the founders of the first Sith Empire, whose Force ghost is met in his tomb on Korriban. Unlike other ghosts, Pall never became one with the Force upon death as he used his knowledge of Sith alchemy to tether his soul to the physical world, essentially trapping himself in a self-made purgatory. After spending 3000 years thinking about his regrets and the empty, meaningless life he led as a servant of evil, Light Side players can help him embrace the Light as well and move on.
  • Being evil for Darth Nihilus in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords really sucked, as indulging his Horror Hunger ate him away from the inside, leaving him an inhuman walking void that exists solely to consume all life around him. Likewise, Darth Sion is extremely unhappy with his existence as a living corpse sustained only by agony and hatred. The only way the Exile can end the final encounter with Sion is to convince him to willingly let go after admitting that his unlife isn't worth living. And then there's Darth Traya, whose Manipulative Bastard nature alienated everyone around her and turned her into a cynical Death Seeker. In a Dark Side run you and your apprentices don't fare much better as the surviving ones all become aimless Serial Killers (except Mical who becomes a Corrupt Politician) with no direction in life other than their own hatred and self-loathing.
  • The Empire in Star Wars: The Old Republic is the Sith's fifth (out of seven) overall major attempt at galactic domination and a case study as to why The Good Guys Always Win. Despite how badass they look, they have the infrastructure and political stability of a third-world Banana Republic crossed with 1600's Italy as the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder among the Sith leadership and their Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering leads to them fighting each other just as much as they do The Republic (if not more) as well as their Fantastic Racism and affinity for slavery alienating potential allies. They slowly get better as time passes but it's a Foregone Conclusion.
• Choosing the evil alignment in Black & White tends to earn the player far fewer rewards than if they play the good option when attempting challenges and mini-games.
• Super Mario Bros.: Even when he doesn't do something "evil", Waluigi suffers from this. He is hated by everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom (including himself), he lives at the constant shadow of his partner Wario, everyone despises or is scared of him and nothing ever goes right for him, no matter how hard he tries. In his first appearance, all he ever wanted was to be famous and loved like the Mario Brothers. He trained many years prior to that to become as strong as them.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, poor Vivian was clearly already starting to realize this at the start of the game. As one of the Shadow Sirens, her sisters treated her like garbage, and always dumped the blame for their mistakes on her. Then, as fate would have it, she met Mario, and because he couldn't tell her his name due to Doopliss' spell, the two formed a brief partnership, and for the first time in her life, someone was treating her decently. When she did find out who he was, the choice was between staying with someone who was treating her nicely or going back to two rotten sisters who were treating her like dirt. What other choice could she make?
• BioWare used to run with this in general. In both Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic, taking the dark path means you'll end up having to slaughter most of your party, delivering a Player Punch and making the endgame more difficult.
  • In Mass Effect, a hard-core Renegade path can bite you in the ass hard, as it makes your companions less likely to trust you, destroys several assets that would be really useful at the endgame, makes the political negotiations you have to make to get an army against the Reapers harder to accomplish, and usually results in a few dead squadmates.
  • Dragon Age is a complicated case, as it's not really that being either evil or good sucks as much as people and conflicts are so morally ambiguous, it's often hard to know what is good or bad to begin with (best illustrated with the Dwarven questline in Origins). There are, however, some cases where this trope does apply:
  • In all three games, being a jerk or mistreating your companions makes them less effective, less loyal and can eventually result in some of them turning against you. "Good" companions will also inevitably turn on you if they consider you crossed the Moral Event Horizon, whereas "evil" companions might disapprove some of your good actions, but will still stick with you regardless as long as you are nice with them.
  • In Dragon Age: Origins, doing the right thing to solve the various main questlines (saving Redcliff, saving the Circle rather than annihilating it, solving the conflict between the Dalish and the Werewolves peacefully...) usually results in better outcomes for you and ensures you more assets in the endgame.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition: Becoming a Red Templar means ingesting an extremely dangerous Fantastic Drug that puts regular lyrium to shame, with side effects including paranoia, increased aggression, and slowly crystalizing into more red lyrium, which your fellows will then mine in order to feed their own habits.
  • If the Darkspawns' backstory as narrated by the Chantry really did happen (it's implied it did), then the ancient Magister using Blood Magic and human sacrifices in an attempt to become gods only resulted in them being turned into hideously deformed and corrupt monsters who caused a deadly plague on the world. According to one of the survivors, they unleashed an already-existing corruption that killed off most of them and left him stuck in a coma until he awakened to find his home declared him anathema, his faith in the gods broke, and mankind was worshiping stupidity as a result of his actions. He still hasn't gotten it.
  • It's implied in Inquisition that the entire country of Tevinter might be going through this, as a reform movement based around removing the mustache-twirlingly evil aspects of Tevinter society (such as slavery and blood magic abuse) is gaining a surprising amount of ground.
• Beat in The World Ends with You. As a result of his subsequent side-switching, Konishi gives him a few days to live, before he'll fade away.
• Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth has power beyond what anyone can imagine but at the expense of his sanity, memories, emotions, and humanity.
• While in the original Final Fantasy VI, Kefka was painted as a psychopath without remorse, restraints, or regrets who actively, and successfully, tried to make every bad situation much, much worse, all of it because he found it entertaining beyond reason, the developers for Dissidia Final Fantasy decided to run with an Alternative Character Interpretation. There he is instead depicted as a man who's nigh-godlike powers have ruined his ability to feel joy to the point where he can only feel it when destruction is involved. The reprise of his well-known, hateful, nihilistic rant about the futility of the world from the original game takes on the nature of a wistful lament, and even as Kefka dies, he laughs. A sad laugh.
• LunarLux: According to the Murk Slayer, the Murks are in constant pain even as they attack humans. Unfortunately, he still slays them and takes their anticores. Worse yet, it turns out Murks were once humans who were experimented on by General Saros, but becoming a Murk means losing one's sanity and heightening one's negative emotions. However, the Murk Slayer hopes to find a way to change the anticores back into humans.
• In Spec Ops: The Line, Colonel John Konrad had to do horrible, sadistic things to try keeping order in the sandstorm-ravaged Dubai. Throughout the game, he repeatedly talks to the main character, Captain Martin Walker, trying to explain the choices he had to make and forcing Walker to make a few of his own. However, it is later revealed that the guilt Konrad felt for his actions led him to kill himself long before the game even began, and the Konrad that has been talking to Walker and the player is actually a hallucination; a manifestation of Walker's guilt for the actions he has done, like using white phosphorus on a refugee camp. This is an interesting variation, as the protagonist of the story thinks he's the hero charging in to save the day, but he subconsciously knows he's done bad things, and this drives him to insanity, reinforcing the game's central themes: an examination of what soldiers go through and how their mental state is affected, and a look at just how far removed modern war shooters are from reality.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Dwayne Forge describes his experience as a drug-lord in these terms. More specifically, he describes it as "sorta fun and sorta like living in hell," and being a Corrupter to those around him, preying on their flaws to turn them into crack-fiends for reliable business.
• The Godfather games, Grand Theft Auto, Mafia... just anything in the Mafia genre at all tends to have this (or specifically Crime Sucks) as one of its Central Themes. The main character will end up injured countless times, dead along with their friends and family, and lose anything and everything pursuing a life of crime alongside numerous others of the profession. Even in the rare cases they become rich and powerful by the end they'll have to go through tragedy after tragedy to get there, and if there's money in a sequel even then.
• Persona 5: The Traitor realizes eventually that being Shido's hatchet man only left them an empty, lonely wreck while their time pretending to be a Phantom Thief was the only time they formed genuine bonds and were really happy. Unfortunately, he's in too deep for anything other than Redemption Equals Death.
• Red Dead Redemption II: Arthur Morgan has no real love of the outlaw life, only doing it because of his loyalty to Dutch van der Linde and his love for the gang and his hatred of modern civilization. Over the course of the game, this gets him beaten up, betrayed, and infected with tuberculosis, which will kill him by the game's end if nothing else gets there first. If he goes Low Chaos, he'll be able to redeem himself and at least die peacefully watching the sunrise, but High Chaos Arthur doesn't get this last reprieve.
• Shovel Knight: King Knight as a member of the Order of No Quarter is a Butt-Monkey and No-Respect Guy who was given command of Pridemoor Keep just to get him out of the competent people's hair, and it's made clear that for all his theatrics and self-aggrandizement, he's miserably lonely and just going through the motions (for example, he regularly hosts banquets that no one ever attends). King of Cards lays it all out; he was once a beloved hero with friends and a loving mother... and by joining the Enchantress so he could officially be a king, he lost all of it in exchange for just being a Puppet King nobody acknowledged. On some level, he's constantly aware that he screwed up big time and lost his only chance to be a hero.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines follows this trope pretty much the same way the game it's based on:
  • Overall, committing evil actions in the game will result in losing your Humanity. If you aren't careful about recovering it, this will in turn result in your character gradually becoming more Ax-Crazy, which will not only limit your dialogue options so you can only be a dick with everyone around you (thus making it very hard to find allies), but also cause you to more frequently suffer "frenzy", which causes your character to go in Unstoppable Rage and randomly attack everyone on sight with no control, often breaking the Masquerade in the process (and doing that too many times results in a Game Over).
  • In the endgame, there are five different endings, depending on which faction you ultimately chose to ally with. This being the World of Darkness, none of these various factions really qualify as truly good, but choosing the more Noble Demon sides (Strauss and the Anarch) typically results in better outcomes for your character. Meanwhile, sticking with LaCroix or betraying your kind for the Kuei Jin will respectively result in your death and being Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves with a Fate Worse than Death. Choosing the fifth "Lone Wolf" can only end well if you kept a decent enough level of Humanity, otherwise you die the same way than if you side with LaCroix. Notably, the Unofficial Patch provides an additional ending averting the trope by allowing you to side with the Sabbat if your Humanity is low enough, which ends with your character being fine.
• The Genocide/No Mercy run in Undertale is meant to invoke this feeling.
  • From a gameplay standpoint, the No Mercy run requires you to kill enough of the randomly encountered monsters so that no more will appear in each area. The game is also coded to decrease the frequency of random encounters as you approach to quota (probably in order to ensure that no one falls into a No Mercy run unintentionally) so a lot of time is going to be wasted simply walking around looking for monsters to kill. Furthermore, on a No Mercy run you're powerful enough that you will kill almost every single monster in a single hit (the exceptions can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare) so the gameplay quickly becomes rote and unengaging. And what bosses do take more than one hit to kill are difficult, so freakishly difficult (and lampshaded as such) in a frustrating fashion that you don't get any satisfaction from actually fighting them because they're so unfair and cheap and are deliberately designed as such.
  • From a storyline standpoint, the game does everything it can to guilt-trip you into abandoning a No Mercy run after you begin it. For example, Towns will be empty in No Mercy because everyone is fleeing for their lives from you, the normally uplifting or upbeat music is modified to sound bleak or in some cases creepy, and what would be the second boss of a regular run will refuse to fight you in No Mercy, because he believes you're lashing out in confusion and fright and that you can be a better person if you try, and offers his friendship to you. You kill him in a single hit, and his final words are to say that he still believes in your potential to be a good person.
• In Pokémon, the move Frustration invokes this (though it's more "Being Evil is Impractical"). It grows stronger the more the user hates its Trainer, but it's considerably easier to make them happier (simply walking around will do it) while methods of making them dislike you are rather limited. What's more, many Pokémon start off with a neutral affection towards the player, and the move's inverted counterpart, Return (which grows in power the more the user likes its Trainer), is far easier to use, making Frustration not worth the effort.
• Injustice 2: Despite his constant ranting about how Hobbes Was Right, it becomes clear that this is how Superman actually feels about being a tyrant. He misses being a hero, wishes he and Batman were still friends and, would probably like to listen to Supergirl and go back to being The Cape, but is too disillusioned with conventional heroics to actually follow through and do it.
• Mafia II has Vito realize this late in the story, after losing most of the people he cares about, and with two criminal organizations and the FBI after his head. Had it not been for Leo repaying him a favor for saving him, he most certainly would have been killed. In Mafia III, where Vito returns as an NPC, this can either be proven right where he can wind up dead at Lincoln's hand (either because he turns against him or he's outlived his usefulness) or wrong, where he can end up in a pretty comfortable position or even potentially the new Don of the city if Lincoln chooses to leave the city.
  • Mafia II: The Betrayal of Jimmy has the titular character realize this at the end of the first DLC campaign. Rather than be broken by this realization, however, it serves as his reason for going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, despite supposedly showing Big Boss's fall to villainy, uses a similar system to Pokémon where gaining Heroism is considerably easier than earning (and retaining) Demon Points. About the only thing a player can do to stay on the bad end of the Karma Meter is to obtain a nuke or two.
• Deltarune: Lancer really, really wants to be evil (mainly to impress his dad), but generally tends to be bad at it, poking the poodle at every turn and generally just being an energetic goofball. So when the time comes for him to do some actual evil acts, he just cannot do it. He needs to convince himself locking the Lightners up is for their own good, and even then he doesn't buy it much and hates it the whole time, and even under threat of death he simply cannot kill them like he's supposed to. It's the only thing that gets some genuine sorrow out of the little guy.
• Sword of Paladin: Anguis is an Omnicidal Maniac who thinks nothing of draining other worlds to death and killing others to survive, but it becomes clear that he doesn't truly feel fulfilled from simply surviving by taking from others and that he secretly envies the party for being able to fight for things other than themselves. When Nade and Anguis have their last offscreen duel, Anguis states that he wants to fight Nade in order to understand the latter's mindset.
• Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader: The Imperials often subject themselves to horrible treatment due to their self-destructive dogma, or just general ineptitude caused by bureaucracy and backwards thinking. The guy piloting your ship hasn't slept *in thirty years* due to someone messing up some implants. As for the forces of Chaos, a lot of cultists usually end up being human sacrifices, or cannon fodder for imperial agents to shoot through.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney: On occasion.
  • Trying to follow Manfred von Karma's creed of perfection at the cost of justice nearly broke Miles Edgeworth and Franziska von Karma; Miles had his feeling of his own guilt in his father's death reinforced to the point where he had nightmares every night, and Franziska was constantly forced to compete with Edgeworth (despite being 7 years his junior) and tied her self-worth to beating him. They wind up much happier people once they start focusing on doing their jobs right instead of always winning.
  • Acro, and later Marlon Rimes, deeply regret their crimes as they led to the loss of someone they greatly admired- Russel Berry for Acro, and Jack Shipley for Marlon. Marlon even begs for the death penalty after it's revealed that everything he did was ultimately over a misunderstanding, despite it becoming increasingly clear that Jack Shipley's death was a genuine accident. In the end, the court shows mercy on him gives him a lenient sentence to let him atone, something he's very grateful for.
  • Appears twice in The Great Ace Attorney: Ashley Graydon's involvement in an espionage scheme leads to his father's death, and Klint van Zieks was blackmailed into being a Serial Killer and hated himself for it.
• Kotomine in Fate/stay night has this psychological issue where only Evil Feels Good for him; he takes no satisfaction in good, finding that Being Good Sucks. However, he was raised to have a moral compass, so he kept trying to be good anyways, until he had a chat with Gilgamesh and decided to be evil instead. However, due to him still having that moral compass, he finds his own evil revolting even as he takes pleasure in it. Ultimately, by the time the story starts, Being Good Sucks and Being Evil Sucks and it pisses him off so much that he attempts to bring an Eldritch Abomination into the world to get some answers. Basically: If being good is supposed to be a good thing, why doesn't he like it? If he should just be evil, why does that feel wrong to him?
• The Big Bad in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was The Sociopath and consequently suffered from a severe case of I Just Want to Be Normal. Hongou suffered from prosopagnosia, a mental disorder disabling the ability of an individual to recognize faces, and as a result he felt completely disconnected from his fellow man, seeing other humans as nothing more than indistinguishable "monkeys in a zoo". He hated living like this, and became a Mad Scientist and Corrupt Corporate Executive of an evil pharmaceutical company willing to stop at nothing in the hopes of finding a cure.

Web Comics

• As a shoulder devil, Rangi in Devil May Care can only get paid if he uses his position to tempt people into doing the wrong thing. The only problem is that he's a Nice Guy and doesn't have the heart to make anyone do anything genuinely bad, only doing it because he needs the money. So when he's stuck with an easy mark (like a woman who's about to cheat on her wife), he's understandably mortified.
• Trudy of General Protection Fault loves Nick, but her scheming to take over the world and using him in those schemes ultimately drives him to reject her. In the Bad Future, this leads to her killing him, losing her sanity in the process and hunting down the rebels to "avenge" his death. In what actually happens, she tries to kill him, but is unable to go through with it, and ends up on the run, tormented by dreams of guilt about her actions and by Nick's last disappointed look toward her. After Nick and Ki get engaged, she slips past the Despair Event Horizon and once attempts suicide, but meeting Akhilesh enables her to come to terms with herself and work more toward atoning for what she has done.
• Dominic Deegan:
  • During the "Court of Karnak" arc, Karnak and Bulgak both realize that reigning in Hell is utterly meaningless because no one truly rules Hell; they are all prisoners. Bulgak responds by renouncing his old, selfish, egotistical self, which releases his essence back into the world. Karnak simply appoints himself warden.
• Alt-Schlock in Sluggy Freelance learned this far far too late after he'd eliminated nearly all of humanity and created a Crapsack World of only one city whose few remaining citizens are living drug addled lives with no memories and that the only way to maintain it will slowly destroy what's left. He finally shuts off the nano machines keeping himself alive because he's lost everything and doesn't even want to live anymore. Schlock-Prime is heading in the same direction.
• The Order of the Stick prequel book Start of Darkness details the origins of Xykon and Redcloak. Redcloak eventually learns how much being evil sucks after Xykon makes him kill his brother (who had already tried to run away from Xykon's evil scheme twice).
  • Xykon himself may have a lot of Evil Is Cool going on, but he also lost the one joy in his life (coffee) when he became a lich. The revelation that he could no longer taste his favorite beverage caused some severe Sanity Slippage, and now the only thing that gives him any pleasure is hurting others.

Web Original

• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is about the, well, horribleness of evil. The point at which Billy/Dr. Horrible stops being an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain is the point at which his personal life starts going downhill. In the end, he's totally succeeded at being the supervillain he always wanted to be... but the girl he loved was caught in the crossfire and died. The final shot is of Dr. Horrible as Billy, depressed and lonely.
• Angel Dust seems to revel in being a promiscuous, drug-using gangster/porn star in the pilot of Hazbin Hotel, but the Addict video has him reflect on how much his afterlife actually sucks; his boss exploits him and is heavily implied to rape him, and sex has become a job and just isn't fun any more. He signs up for the titular hotel not just for the free room, but because it promises to help him break his addiction and make a real life for himself.
  • Sir Pentious realizes this in the official release. After constantly losing a one-sided rivalry to Alastor and being made into an easily expendable pawn by the Vees, he realizes that being an Overlord of Hell is not as cracked up as he thinks it is. He signs up with the hotel because Charlie was the first person to show him any kindness.
• Voldemort goes on an impassioned rant about how much being the Dark Lord sucks near the end of A Very Potter Musical.
  Voldemort: You think killing people might make people like you, but it doesn't, it just... it just makes people dead.
• Glove and Boots gives us Zombie, who is a nice guy who likes puppies and singing, but by virtue of being a brain-eating zombie, can never be accepted by Mario or Fafa.
• Ask That Guy with the Glasses was once asked "Do you love your job?"
  Ask That Guy: NO! IT'S THE WORST JOB IN THE WORLD! I JUST KILLED THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE! [after recovering] I'm sorry. Every now and then I get these little slips of humanity, but I make sure to crush them as soon as possible.
• This is the central theme of the second half of Llamas with Hats. In episode 6, Paul gets fed up with Carl's violent outbursts and general obnoxious behavior and leaves while cutting off all contact with him, like any sane person would (and should). For the rest of the series Carl's mental state degrades further and further, no longer being comical and over-the-top, but instead showing that he's genuinely mentally ill and delusional. As of episode 11, Carl has destroyed all life on Earth, and there's nothing left for him to do but wander around talking to himself. The series ends with Carl being Driven to Suicide by the realization that, in the process of bringing about the apocalypse, he's killed Paul as well.
• Red vs. Blue: Poor Washington. After being a belittled, betrayed Butt-Monkey when he was on the side of good, he has a Face–Heel Turn... and gets pretty much the same thing, with the addition of getting his butt kicked by the Reds. After the Meta betrays him in the finale, the Reds and Blues forgive him and he joins their group for good, and winds up much happier for it.
• Springhole: In How To Keep People From Admiring & Idealizing Your Villains, Syera advises that to show that one's villainous organization is not to be admired, make clear nobody is really having fun in there.

Western Animation

• Amphibia:
  • Sasha Waybright gets hit with this big time at the beginning of season 3, after realizing that her grab for power at the end of season 2 was the last straw for Anne after years of controlling and manipulation, and now she is utterly alone.
  • King Andrias reveals that, despite being the ruler of a prosperous nation loved by everyone, he's not as happy as he appears. Because he got to where he is by betraying his friends and allowing his toxic relationship with his father to take control of his life, he ultimately feels empty inside trying to earn the love of someone who has no intention of giving it.
• Avatar franchise:
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Prince Zuko realizes after he averted a Heel–Face Turn that he's still not happy even after getting everything he thought he wanted, because after his wanderings through the Earth Kingdom, he knows on some level that he's on the wrong side. He realizes the depths of his mistake when he sees his father plan outright genocide against the Earth Kingdom.
    • His sister, Princess Azula, learns the hard way that while being an Evil Overlord may get you all the power and success in the world, it also means that basically everyone around you is really only there either because they're scared of you or they were manipulated into it. Unlike Zuko, Azula's pride won't let her admit that she was wrong — the resulting conflict pretty much destroys her mind. However, Word of God claims that it's not totally beyond repair.
  • Sequel series The Legend of Korra has Varrick, who was a Chaotic Neutral Corrupt Corporate Executive who attempted to mastermind a full-scale war out of a civil war, having threatened innocent lives and secretly backstabbed the heroes. By Book 4, he develops a conscience after making a huge breakthrough, and realizes how dangerous it was. This leads to his Heel–Face Turn, and afterwards admits how horrible a person he was to discover the means to a terrible weapon.
• The Batman: In the episode "The Apprentice", a kid in Barbara Gordon's class falls in with the Joker. Both have a weird sense of humor, and Joker makes him his sidekick as a mock to Batman and Batgirl. However, when they succeed against the caped duo and the Joker tells him to kill Batgirl, the kid is horrified. He just wanted to make a statement and defy convention, not go and kill people. He wisely bails and the now favorable odds let the heroes beat the Joker.
• In the Batman Beyond episode "Joyride", one Jokerz initiate tags along as another member of the gang hijacks an experimental advanced fighter craft. He becomes increasingly horrified as the hijacker goes mad with power and does things like attacking a rival gang armed with nothing but chains and tasers. When he overhears the guy denouncing the Jokerz as a crutch and ignoring Terry's warnings that the craft's illegal nuclear reactor is going critical that's the last straw. He knocks down the lunatic with a folding chair and leaves the Jokerz forever.
• Beast Wars:
  • This is essentially the reason for Dinobot switching sides during the first arc. He couldn't stand working for an evil guy like Megatron, and after failing to take leadership from him, jumped to the other team.
  • Rampage is clearly aware of what a nightmare his life is ("I regret everything, my sweet."). It's implied at the end that he's also a Death Seeker.
  • Waspinator defects in the series finale, citing the fact that he's "sick of being evil, sick of being Predacon, and Wazzzpinator especially sick of getting blown TO SCRAP ALL THE TIME!"
• In the Bravestarr episode "Brother's Keeper", Bravestarr captures one of a pair of bandits who are brothers. The bandit admits the life of crime sucked and he's glad it's over, and the only reason he'd kept on with it was to look out for his brother, who is a much more unrepentant low-life.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • This is one of the Central Themes for Gotham City villains: Barring The Joker and Diabolical Mastermind Ra's Al-Ghul, every villain has Hidden Depths that let them know a life of crime sucks and would attempt redemption. All There in the Manual has a lot of examples or Redemption Failure, and by the time Batman Beyond sets in, all of Batman's Rogues Gallery has died, said Screw This, I'm Outta Here (Poison Ivy) or even found Redemption (the Ventriloquist and possibly Harley Quinn). Bane and Mr. Freeze's destinies are And I Must Scream, and all the others had been forgotten.
  • In "It's Never Too Late", aging mobster Arnold Stromwell's life has become terrible. His marriage is crumbling, and his organization is falling apart due to Rupert Thorne's rise to power. Eventually, Stromwell sees that his own son has become a drug addict as a result of his organization dealing them. At first, he still isn't convinced enough to accept Batman's conditions and make a deal with the police, until his clergyman brother Father Michael (who had saved him from being run over by a train when they were kids, an act that cost him his leg) helps him out of charity one more time, resulting in him finally deciding to retire and turn State's evidence.
• In the The Boondocks episode "A Date with the Booty Warrior" where Huey, Riley, and a few other delinquents are sent to the local prison to Scare 'Em Straight, they end up being held "hostage" by the thugs sent to talk to them as a bargaining chip. After Ruckus helps most of the kids escape and they realize they've got no leverage, the leader of the gang laments to Huey that he threw away his entire life by committing murder and all he has left to look forward to is handing out Prison Rape when he could've been President.
• In Gargoyles, the one hurt worst by Demona's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and Fantastic Racism is, ultimately, Demona herself. She originally genuinely wanted to help gargoylekind, but her willingness to throw humans under the bus at the slightest provocation ultimately resulted in the deaths of both of her clans, her former friend Macbeth hating her, and creation of the Hunters. She remains a desperate, miserable lonely woman, who only keeps going because of her need to shift the blame for all the tragedies she caused herself onto some outside party, even as she just keeps creating more tragedies for herself in the process.
• In Gravity Falls, Pacifica discovers this the hard way after discovering her family are liars, cheaters, and sociopaths. After this discovery, she's willing to put an end to her family's villainy.
• Infinity Train: Grace in season 3 has an epiphany in the final episode that all her manipulation and attempts to control other people have left her alone, the one thing she was so desperately afraid of happening.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, Chloé Bourgeois's bullying ways have made her an outcast from her peers, to the point where they threw a party when they thought she was leaving Paris. Her attempt to ally with Hawk Moth resulted in her losing her idol and her access to a Miraculous for good. And while her greatest desire is to earn her mother's approval, said mother is a self-absorbed bitch who never gives Chloé the time of day.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: A lifetime of being every story's evil monster hasn't been kind to the beast from the Land of Legends — by the time he meets the ponies, he's cripplingly lonely and profoundly unhappy, and very tired of his lot in life.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Several villains seem to enjoy being bad at first and reject friendship, but that is mainly because they have never given it a try before. Once they get a taste of friendship, they usually realize how empty and alone they really are, leading to several of them doing a Heel–Face Turn.
    • Discord is a Physical God with near-infinite power, and certainly seems to enjoy unleashing chaos on the world whenever he gets a chance, but in all the eons he's existed, he has never had a single friend. When he finally gets one, he's astonished to find that she matters to him more than anything else, and chooses to preserve that friendship by agreeing to use his power for good, "most of the time". In the Season 4 finale, he falls victim to Lord Tirek's temptation and betrays the ponies, believing that he'll regain the freedom he thinks he needs... only to be betrayed in turn and realize too late that evil has no sense of loyalty. In contrast, despite his betrayal, Twilight Sparkle still considers him her friend, convincing him to take their side again, presumably genuinely this time.
    • The changelings are a race of emotion eaters who feed on love from others to survive. It is eventually revealed that their hunger can never be satisfied by taking love by force, and their ruler Queen Chrysalis was just using them to gather love for herself so she could become more powerful. Once Starlight Glimmer showed them what happens when they share love instead of taking it, with their fellow changeling Thorax as proof, they all immediately share love and transform into more beautiful forms in the process, overthrowing their abusive former ruler and freeing their former captives, finally free from their constant hunger. Chrysalis is the only changeling remaining who refused to change and redeem herself, vowing revenge on everyone responsible for her losing control of her hive, especially Starlight.
• In Steven Universe, being tyrannical god-empresses of gemkind has not actually been kind to the Diamonds' psyches. Blue and Yellow are still grieving over Pink's death, and since they have no one to help them through it, they've both snapped in their own ways; Yellow Diamond tried to repress her feelings so she could rule effectively (which just meant that she blows up whenever she's reminded of Pink), and Blue Diamond was so overwhelmed by her feelings that she was effectively incapacitated by Excessive Mourning for millennia. Pink Diamond was The Baby of the Bunch and got no respect from the others no matter how hard she tried. She eventually grew to outright hate the other Diamonds, and underwent a Heel–Face Turn when she realized what Gem colonization did to planets. White Diamond holds the other diamonds to standards so impossible that she doesn't meet them herself, and has a mental breakdown when confronted with her own off-coloration.
• In the "Fallen Angel" episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), there was Angel, a young girl from Casey's neighborhood who he tried to be a Big Brother Mentor to, who wanted to join the Purple Dragons because she thought Evil Is Cool, despite Casey's attempts to talk her out of it. She changed her mind quickly when his attempts led to him being captured by the Dragons, who obviously intended to kill him in as the finale to their violent initiation rites. Fortunately, Casey told her where to get help.
• Total Drama: Courtney might be one of the show’s strongest, most determined competitors who will do anything to win, but at the end of the day, her over-aggressiveness, arrogant attitude, and willingness to betray everyone and anyone in her pursuit of the million dollars eventually makes her hated by the entire cast, including her former friends and boyfriends who really did care about her, but broke things off as soon as it came out she was plotting to take them down too. When she can’t win the prize in spite of all her efforts, she’s left with nothing and no one.
• By the end of Transformers: Prime, both Knock Out and Megatron have come to this. Knock Out genuinely defects to the Autobots as they would treat him decently. For Megatron, it took getting killed, Barred from the Afterlife from his use of Dark Energon he'd been poisoning himself with and being possessed by Unicron to make him realize just what kind of a villain he had become.
  Knock Out: (shrugs) I'm joining the "winning team".
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The Dark Hand Enforcers originally had no problems being criminals, but after several seasons of getting caught up in demonic plots and getting nothing for it, they become rather sick of it all.
• Wacky Races: In "The Super Silly Swamp Sprint," while having Muttley set up some remote-controlled mosquitos, Dick Dastardly laments that it was the other racers that forced him to be a bad guy. So maybe it wasn't his idea after all.
• Phineas and Ferb: "The finale" suggests that Doofenshmirtz, despite his Card Carrying Villainy, never really wanted to be evil; his absurdly horrible childhood just conditioned him to feel as though he had no choice. He pulls a Heel–Face Turn in the series finale after a heart-to-heart talk with his daughter Vanessa, who tells him that he is actually a good person doing bad things and she wants him to quit making himself unhappy. As shown in the previous penultimate episode (taking place about a decade or so in the future), he does indeed remain a good guy and he eventually finds a new purpose in life as a science teacher after undergoing a midlife crisis... that Doof asked Perry help him achieve.
• Dan Vs.: Played with. Dan's insane obsession with revenge prevents him from doing anything worthwhile with his life or forming any meaningful, healthy friendships. However, "The Barber" shows that he enjoys getting revenge so much that he thinks this is worth it, and his plot against the local animal shelter directly led to him adopting his Right-Hand Cat Mr. Mumbles who's one of the few positive influences in his life.
• Elena of Avalor: Elena's cousin Esteban was secretly responsible for Shuriki's invasion of Avalor and the untimely deaths of the king and queen (and seemingly the rest of his family) in the show's backstory. Since then, he became her right-hand man out of fear of her, and though he does seem to take joy in it, he does appear troubled by some of the things he has to do for her (such as hurting civilians) and tries to minimize the harm that comes with it. That said, the miraculous return of his family causes him to betray Shuriki and he hides his betrayal from them in the aftermath, something that torments him throughout the show. When his secret is eventually exposed, he once again feels he has no choice but to side with the villains to avoid Elena's wrath, but this means becoming a pariah to his people and being disowned by his family. Realizing this leaves him devastated and drives him down the slippery slope, at best leaving him a Stepford Smiler while at worst meaning The Gloves Come Off.
• Samurai Jack: Aku shows that this trope can apply for those who are Made of Evil. Being an entity of pure malevolence, he literally needs to do things in the most evil way possible, no matter how obviously inefficient they would be. This causes him to prolong his feud with Jack for five exhausting decades.
• A recurring theme in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is that everyone who goes down the path of evil generally finds themselves alone and miserable, even when they get what (they think) they want.
  • This is ultimately a big part of why Catra is miserable. She has a lust for power and control that makes her life actively worse, causing problems that will come back to wreck Future Catra's day, or just plain not getting her what she wanted. On top of that, it undermines her true desire for affection and acceptance, with these actions and her own unwillingness to ever forgive a slight driving away everyone who remotely cares about her. By the end of the fourth season, all her friends have left her, she's suffered two consecutive Villainous Breakdowns, and has been treated to a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that leaves her so broken she won't even defend herself against attack. She only finds the love she wanted all along when she finally has a Heel–Face Turn in the final season.
  Double Trouble: (capping off said speech) We both know this was never what you really wanted.
  • Throughout Shadow Weaver's entire life, the Dark Side drives her to ruin what little good things she had in a never ending quest for power with no reward at the end and leaves her unable to form a meaningful connection to anyone or anything, to the point where all she does is abuse her foster daughters. She doesn't know how to do anything other than hate and bring pain to others and it eats away at her until the only peace she ever attains is when she decides to sacrifice herself to save Adora and Catra, even telling Catra she's got a bright future ahead of her, while a person of her character has no place with them in the universe.
  • As the leader of the Horde, Hordak must cultivate a ruthless, stoic, and unapproachable exterior and desperately hide his physical illness and emotional vulnerabilities. Living among ruthless minions who are constantly jockeying for power results in Hordak being lied to, manipulated, and separated from the woman he loves. Like Catra, it's implied that what he really longs for is not power, but self-worth and love. Unfortunately, events that he set in motion culminate in Hordak losing everything he worked for and being mind-wiped by Horde Prime before he can realize his mistake.
• South Park:
  • In the "Woodland Critter Christmas" episode, Kyle willingly takes The Antichrist's essence into his body, but immediately feels the excruciating pain of "having one's soul on fire". Stan replies with "what did you expect, dude, he's the son of the devil!" "Yeah, but I didn't think it'd be so... dark and evil!" The whole incident was a Christmas story written by Cartman.
  • Back in the first season, Satan's son Damien joins the boys' third grade class. For some reason, no matter how much he terrorizes and tortures the other third graders, he just can't get the kids to like him.
  • Eric Cartman himself would be hit by this. While his evil tendencies have given him momentary successes now and then, they do nothing to benefit Cartman in the long run while his horrible personality causes him to be despised by everyone, including his own friends. This is shown at the end of the "Post Covid" duology, Cartman would grow up to be a homeless, lonely, and miserable alcoholic in a future where he remained evil, while a previously timeline showed him having a much happier life if he decided to reform.
• As mentioned above in the Film section, in keeping with the franchise's overall theme of the Dark Side never being worth it in the long run, Darth Maul is hit hard by this in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. A combination of Darth Sidious and Maul's own evil actions cause him to lose his mother, his brother, his homeworld, and everything he ever worked for. The trauma of his brother's death affected him deeply, and he attempts to make Ezra his Replacement Goldfish but is baffled and frustrated by his refusal to abandon his friends. At the end of his life, he can only bitterly confirm that the Sith took everything from him and his only hope is that Sidious will someday be defeated. He dies declaring that Luke will one day "avenge" him and Obi-Wan, failing to grasp that Obi-Wan's plan isn't for Luke to take revenge for the Jedi, but only to bring about their return. Thus while Obi-Wan peacefully passes and becomes one with the Force later on, Maul dies still tortured by sorrow and rage.
  • Crosshair of Star Wars: The Bad Batch is the only member of Clone Force 99 who sides with the Empire after Order 66. His loyalty to the Empire over his team costs him the cameraderie of his squad as his friends refuse to compromise their morality. By season 2 all this gets him is a role as a tiny cog in the Imperial war machine, shunned by the "reg" clone troopers he's serving with, and serving under an admiral who only views him as a tool.
• In the episode "Bad Stretch" of Static Shock, The redeemed Rubberband Man shows this. Before he was a banger with his older brother. But years of getting into trouble meant he had enough. When the Big Bang happened and any chance of getting revenge blows up in his face, he did time and became a good guy. However, his brother Ebon comes in and tries to bring him back but he refuses. Why? Because every time he gets caught up in one of Ebon's schemes, he ends up in trouble. And now that he has a better life, him becoming a gangbanger will ruin that and for him, it cannot happen
• Early on in the second season of Xiaolin Showdown, Raimundo, who had turned on his comrades and subsequently joined Wuya after being denied promotion, has just been rewarded by Wuya for help in restoring her and helping her take over the world with his own personal arcade. He is soon lonely and disappointed that he has no one else to enjoy it with, and pleads for his friends when they are captured to join him. Their impending execution finally convinces Raimundo to turn on Wuya.

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