Navigators of drug-induced psychedelic experiences will report that the events that they are perceiving are overly colorful, delightfully bizarre, or laugh-out-loud hilarious, but might eventually notice that their entire notion of reality is being undermined, or worse.
When Hell isn't ironic or very hot it will often be pretending to be Heaven, until the pleasure turns into suffering.
Corporate advertising and public relations can come across as this. Their messages can be incredibly cheery and optimistic even as the company heads into Chapter 11.
Gundam 00 lampshades this early on, after the Time Skip. The world now pretty much run by the Earth Federation seems to be better off than in Season 1, and it commented on multiple times that lots of people genuinely believe this. However, Celestial Being, Katharon, and anybody else capable looking beyond the surface know the truth: The world looks that way because the obscenely brutal State Sec are doing their best to make sure that's what the majority of the public believes, partially to squelch any potential insurrection as a reaction against Celestial Being in Season 1.
Hunter × Hunter is quite emblematic: the character design is almost cute, you've got fun, adventure, treasures, magical powers, talking animals, life-sized video games, The Messiah, cheerful people who enjoy life and always smile... but wait, did we mention the world is ruled hand in hand by mafia lords and an absurdly powerful Bounty Hunter association? That the exam to become part of said association has an average death rate of 80%? That there's such a high proportion of Psychos For Hire and homicidal maniacs in the population that some get cast as minor characters, or even as good characters? That half of the fauna consists of particularly aggressive monsters, many of which have specifically evolved to prey on humans (there's an entire place with nothing but man-eating animals and plants)? That there are families of Career Killers, and entire groups of Serial Killers who are so powerful that they do not even need to hide and can conduct genocides single-handedly? That torture is a common practice that not even the good guys seem to find particularly questionable? That there's an entire country disguised as an ecologist utopia only to cover up its activities of drug production on an industrial scale? That there's a city with an economy completely dependent on the junkyard it is build on, and that the inhabitants of said city have a peculiar sense of justice, which consists of killing, via suicide bombing, any people remotely involved with even minor offenses done to them? And you thought the real world was bad?
Taken even further when explanations of anything is portrayed in a cartoon-like style. And when those explanations involve death and other horrible things...
Lady Jagara's city in Wolf's Rain is implausibly neat, clean and sterile, and all of the inhabitants seem to be walking around in a trance, pretending that everything's hunky dory and will be forever (it won't, of course). However, it does have an undercity which more accurately reflects the crappy state of the world outside.
Zalem turns out to be this in Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita. You can ask for assisted suicide (the grisly "End Joy," which turns out to be full of blood) and all inhabitants HAVE A FREAKIN' CHIP FOR BRAINS. Also, if you learn about the previous spoiler, a "special team" is going to take care of you immediately. Everybody who doesn't fit or threatens order in any way is eliminated, frequently via being dumped down the floating city's giant garbage chute.
Dai Mahou Touge opens with a Tastes Like DiabetesSugar Bowl for the Magical Land Punie comes from. It's later revealed to be a brutal despotism run by an Evil Overlord who rose to power through a smear campaign against the old monarchy and is more than willing to commit mass slaughter to keep the people in line. By comparison, Earth itself is a more traditional Crapsack World.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni is a Double Subversion. Hinamizawa seems to be a Town with a Dark Secret, Watanagashi is presented as a Fête Worse than Death, Oyashiro-sama a Religious Horror, and the girls a Themed Harem of yandere and Cute and Psycho. Sure, the series is a Psychological Horror and every arc starts with happiness and fun and ends with horrors. However, the answer arcs (which are still creepy, mind you; Meakashi-hen, Shion's arc, may possibly be the most disturbing fragment of the series) show that the people of Hinamizawa really are all good at heart (yes, even the Yakuza family we're initially led to suspect is behind everything, they havenothingto do with the recent deaths and disappearances), Watanagashi's sordid roots have been seized upon to hide the opportunist Big Bad's conspiracy, Oyashiro-sama is an adorable moeblob who suffered more than anyone else in the series, and the Hate Plague isn't limited to the girls nor are they in themselves crazy. The last few arcs, where the Games Club forges a stronger bond and resists the insanity, have them resort to nonlethal and sometimes even nonviolent tactics to protect the village and their friends. Oh, yeah, and there's a happy ending.
Then, one of the two decent New World rulers, Whitebeard dies, and his power fell into the hands of a power-hungry megalomaniac. Marines took considerable losses fighting Whitebeard as well, at the time when there are a bunch of ascendant super-powerful pirate crews on the loose. By now, it is time to drop the saccharine.
In Berserk, an already dark and depressing series, we meet Rosine, a Dark Magical Girl who transformed a crater's valley in a realm for elves filled with birds, butterflies, flowers and evergreen meadows. But, for being young and apparently harmless, Rosine is an Apostle. And before long, we see that her elves' favorite hobbies includes playing war...literally. And not only do they happily slaughter one another, they also like to use their insect-like appendages to skewer one another in the ass. And that's not even mentioning the way they are created..
The melodrama of Elfen Lied takes places in a nice little coastal city and a very pretty inn. Which hides a huge case of Humans Are Bastards taking place in a certain science facility...
The manga Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit takes place is a time where Japan has extremely low crime rates and high prosperity and wealth. This is because of a system where students entering the first grade receive a vaccination. One in every one thousand of these contains a nano-capsule that will kill the recipient sometime between their 18th and 24th birthday, regardless of how they're lived their life up until now, in order to teach the people the value of life. And if anyone speaks out against it, they are deemed 'social miscreants' and get injected with the nano-capsule. Yeah.
Mitakihara, the town in which Puella Magi Madoka Magica takes place. Are you a Muggle? Enjoy living nicely in a technologically advanced city that would make architects swoon, as well as with pretty good social care, only to be a first candidate to get Driven to Suicide by a witch. Are you a witch? Enjoy being able to create entire dimensions as you see fit and have many possible powers depending on your imagination while being warped into a horrifying Eldritch Abomination and getting killed by a magical girl. Are you a magical girl? Enjoy getting your greatest wish granted, your awesome new powers, your cute costume, being turned into a Lich, and being cut off from all your friends while spending the rest of your life at a shitty job where the smallest misstep can spell swift death, and where you will eventually turn into a witch. Fun for everyone!
Chirin No Suzu has a great example of this trope. The first half of the story starts out with a world where everything is great and everyone is happy. However, events in the second half reveal that the world has a dark side to it, and that the world presented in the first half was probably not that great to begin with.
So Ra No Wo To takes place for the most part, in a lush, incredibly beautiful mountain village where people live fairly happy lives. As the series goes on however this is revealed to be one of the few places still like this, with most of the world being rendered uninhabitable due to a past war that was so devastating that it apparently killed off all life in the oceans and humanity technologically regressed to early twentieth century. To make things worse, the handful of major nations left are fighting for what remains and that shrinks every year as the remaining habitable land is undergoing irreversible desertification. Keep in mind as well that nobody seems shocked at all to have teenage girls enlisting in the army.
Hong Kong as depicted in Haou Airen. A bright, shining city full of prosperity and fun things to do... while gangsters train children like the Bastard Boyfriend male lead as assassins in a shadow war filled with rape, murder, and suicide.
The Koalawallaland of The Noozles, where the punishment for a human caught coming into their land is to have their soul trapped forever in a crystal. The ruler enforces his dictates with a police force of koalas whose uniforms are disturbingly similar to Nazis. Admittedly, the law-abiding inhabitants seem genuinely happy with their world. This is a children's show.
More or less every town, city and other form of population concentration points in the world of Kino's Journey feature this trope. For example, the nation Kino visits in episode 12 boasts about its peaceful nature, having abandoned the war machines it used in past wars with its neighbor and its citizens living happily and in harmony. However, how the two nations reached this lasting peace becomes known later on, as Kino witnesses small but well armed forces from both nations slaughter unarmed civilians that belong to neither. These civilians are castaways, no one cares about them, so the wars of the past were replaced with a competition where both nations kill these outcasts as much as they can in a set time limit. At the end the bodies are piled up on a weight meter and the side that killed more "wins the war", after which both return to live in peace.
Comics
A thief in The Unwritten finds himself turned into a rabbit and transported into a magical Winnie the Pooh-like forest setting with other Talking Animals. His life there consists of escape attempts and nervous breakdowns. He eventually meets the author of the books in her fictional avatar as a young girl and tries to tear down her image of innocence and expose her as a middle-aged fraud desperately clinging to childhood innocence. She reveals she's rather well-adjusted, in fact, but that means keeping all her adult fears hidden, and when she lets them out... well, that's the end of Mister Rabbit.
A strip by Argentinian cartoonist Quino depicted a tourist first arriving to a foreign country, who is first delighted when he sees that everyone from the cab driver, hotel employees and people on the street are always singing a merry tune... until policemen, The Men in Black and government agents surround him suddenly, and menacingly observe that he is not singing.
Themyscira aka "Paradise Island" is the birthplace of Wonder Woman and homeland of the Amazons. It's a lush setting full of beautiful women and magical creatures. Magical creatures such as hydras and giant bees. The beautiful women are the immortal reincarnations of women wronged by men and are all (mostly) misandric (man-hating, as opposed to misogynistic which is woman-hating) and violent as a result. The island has been invaded by outside forces several times, nearly wiped out by a nuke, and has gone through at least one civil war. Oh, and there's a portal to hell hidden on the island.
The world Scott Pilgrim lives in. Sure, everyone has superpowers, and everything is incredibly awesome, but there seem to be no repercussions for challenging someone to a fight and beating them to death.
It's not so bad if you have an Extra Life handy.
In Brian Michael Bendis' Marvel MAX Alias series, Jessica Jones used to be the superhero Jewel, and flashbacks are told with brightly-coloured Silver Age-style pages with Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man collaborator, Mark Bagley instead of the noirish art of regular Alias penciller Michael Gaydos. But the flashbacks tell the story of Jessica being dominated by the Purple Man for months, serving him hand and foot while he raped a series of women, him commanding her to attack the Avengers and being placed in traction by Thor for months.
Despite the cheerful facade, the cartoon itself hints at the Crapsack status of the world. The "cute" characters are seen using machine guns and riding tanks through gutted or burning cities.
You could consider The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing to be this. Even though the world always seems a little... off, you don't actually figure out anything too strange until about halfway through.
My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fan works seem particularly prone to this, possibly because the world is shown to be a sugar bowl but is also full of dangerous mythological monsters and even an Eldritch Abomination or two, its huge adult fanbase not hurting matters, with everything from Celestia being depicted as a murderous tyrant to Pinkie Pie having some rather unpalatable hobbies turning up regularly.
The fan-game Story of the Blanks goes in an... unexpected direction halfway through.
Anything to do with Princess Luna is either WAFF (such as Progress) or a Dark Fic that presents some rather nasty aspects existing behind the scenes of Equestria, with even the more morally ambiguous stories (Merely a Mare, etcetera) depicting things as less pleasant than the series. They mostly dried up after her epicallyhammy portrayal in "Luna Eclipsed", but they still exist.
Many "Crystal Tokyo Is Evil," stories have their roots in this trope. While they may look precious and beautiful, they can be ruled by a queen that ranges from a frigid, cold-hearted monster to The Caligula.
Films — Animation
Pleasure Island from Pinocchio is a perfect textbook example of this. The Coachman takes disobedient boys here to allow them to do anything at all that they want, including smoke cigars, drink beer or play pool, but eventually, they are turned into donkeys and sold off by the Coachman.
The world inhabited by the Other Mother in Coraline.
Though the point isn't emphasized, Duloc in Shrek is one of these: it is squeaky-clean and Disney World-like, but ruled by the tyrannical Lord Farquaad.
Toon Town in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is initially oppressively cheery, with the entire landscape singing in unison to Eddie Valiant — then he gets in a fender-bender and he's suddenly at the receiving end of more anarchic cartoon hijinks. Eventually he's reduced to skulking noir-like through dark alleys with Judge Doom. Though that may be justified as it conforms to Toon standards, not human ones. A Toon can shake off being dropped from a ten story building or having a piano dropped on his head, a human can't. And Eddie admitted that he and his brother used to visit Toon Town for the fun of it, finding it "a lot of laughs." As long as the human visitor is Genre Savvy enough to navigate Toon physics, Toon Town does have its attractive side.
Sunnyside, the daycare center in Toy Story 3, certainly qualifies. What originally seems like a utopia for abandoned or donated toys is actually a dictatorship run by Lotso the bear. The new toys are brought into the room where the toddlers play with and misuse them until they're broken, and anyone who tries to break out of their intricate security system is either imprisoned or tortured. But after Andy's toys manage to overthrow Lotso, Sunnyside became much more hospitable.
Behind the surface, the entire world of Toy Story conceivably falls under this. Woody, Buzz and the gang had the best possible ending any toy could have gotten (being given to a new owner who appreciates her toys). Think about it: thousands of toys (which the audience knows are all sentient) are thrown out each year in garbage bags, and are then sent to landfills where they are crushed and incinerated. Toys are routinely misplaced, crushed or broken, and they have no way of repairing themselves. Several of Andy's toys were sold off or trashed, meaning they're likely gone forever. The new arrivals at Sunnyside (before Woody et al. came along) were imprisoned in a sandbox, repeatedly bashed by children, brainwashed or (when they no longer work properly) are thrown in a dumpster.
And THEN you take into account that, as far as has been shown, toys will ALWAYS remain alive and sentient no matter how broken they become. Presumably they must be able to "die" eventually, but do you have any idea how long it takes for plastic to biodegrade? Even if they get passed on to a new owner for (at best) a couple decades, eventually almost every character in the movies can look forward to thousands of years of sitting motionless in the dark at the bottom of a landfill. You know! For kids!
Another Pixar film, WALL•E, features this on the Axiom space liner. What was meant to be a five-year cruise for Earthlings while the titular robots cleaned up the polluted planet instead turned into a perpetual cruise. Everyone has gotten so fat from living in microgravity while being pampered by robots that everyone is traveling on hoverchairs meant for the infirm - no one has actually walked in centuries. Even the entertainment consists of watching robots play golf at the driving range.
Cowslip's warren (the Warren of the Shining Wires) from Watership Down. The Man leaves food daily, there's lots of poetry and culture, and whatever you do don't mention the wires. (Granted, given that their choices were basically "near-complete extermination" or "guaranteed collective survival", the rabbits may have been justified in their choice.)
Frivoli from Twice Upon a Time may be the land of sweet dreams, but it's not much better than the Murkworks on a few levels. Their ruler, the Chef of State, is an illiterate doofus, the "Pantry of Pomp" is an apparent Kangaroo Court, and our heroes Ralph and Mumford are treated like crap for ultimately minor screw-ups, apparently because they're "funny-looking".
Or other Gattaca-type setting: A.I., for instance.
Minority Report looks like it's set in a typical Sci-fi utopian world, but it turns out to be quite creepy.
It's shown early on that it's far from being a utopia. Just the fact that murder is still present should tell you something. The Colin Farrell's character casually reveals that his father, a priest, was gunned down in Ireland only a few decades before. And, oh yeah, the protagonist's son was kidnapped in public and was never found.
Maybe it's averted then when the conspiracy was thwarted, but if John had failed, might have turned into a "world without murder" because of a murder.
The Truman Show, where the whole world, in which Truman Burbank lives, is a giant television studio situated in Hollywood, and he is the main character (and its only inhabitant, who isn't an actor) of an incredibly epic reality show, with 5,000 cameras pointing at him. He grew up in that world, portrayed like a mix of the modern age, and the stereotypical 1950's American suburban society, but is "On air, unaware" the whole time. But he starts finding out. First a flood light falls from the sky, then, he accidentally runs into a fake elevator, which in fact is a make-up room for the actors. Then he notices, that he can't leave his hometown, situated on a peninsula. One time, all flights are booked out, then, the engine of his traveling bus breaks down. Then, when he tries to leave city with his own car, the local nuclear power plant has a meltdown by coincidence, and the whole area is sealed off. He manages to get off though later on, by literally sailing away, and crashing into the horizon.
Typically of low budget children's films, the Mexican Santa Claus movie has an unintentional example of this.
Coruscant in the Star Wars prequels. Although the films mostly show the glittering, affluent urban paradise of the top level, the Revenge of the Sithnovelization mentions that the sublevels of the planet/city can be "worse than Nar Shaddaa," a notorious crime hub.
This is established before the prequels, in the form of an essay written by an Imperial propaganda minister, who cheerfully describes the technological wonders, mentions in passing that crime is being wiped out, and points out the magnanimity of the Emperor in granting a (well, there's no other word for it) ghetto for nonhumans to live in. Note that said author was a nonhuman himself.
Harry S. Plinkett also notes in his review that daily life on Coruscant is busy, bright, and chipper, even when the most traumatic and horrific war to ever be fought in the galaxy is going on. Coruscant is filled with the Republic's ultra-wealthy and privileged elite, and emblematic of the decadent and corrupt society that was the Republic in its final days.
Hot Fuzz: "Statistically, Sandford is the SAFEST village in the country!" Tell that to the castle filled with the skeletons of every minor nuisance to step foot in Sandford.
Serenity shows a failed version to attempt one of these, the Alliance's professed vision of the civilization they want to create and the means that they are willing to employ to reach it, because Utopia Justifies the Means. Only the aftermath of the creation of this "perfect world" is seen, and all that remains is abandoned buildings, corpses, and Reavers.
This is the plot of the Norwegian movie, Den Brysomme Mannen (The Bothersome Man). A man steps off a bus in a desert and is taken to a city where everything seems nice on the surface. He gets a nice house, a pretty girlfriend and almost anything he desires, but there is one catch. Turns out that the place is a dystopia where emotions are nonexistent, food and drink is flavorless and there are no children anywhere.
The Gotham City of The Dark Knight Saga seems more prosperous and optimistic than the Gotham of the older Batman films, but we learn rather quickly that at the ground level crime is eating the streets whole while the upper class just chooses to ignore it, wrapped up in their own success. The citizens of Gotham do care enough to take some action to rebuild their city, and thanks to the Bat himself corruption and crime are taking a beating and the Police Are Useless mantra is cut down, and Earn Your Happy Ending is in full effect.
The first film of the saga reveals that the League of Shadows are partly responsible for the current state of Gotham, having tried to destroy the city, which they perceived as a Wretched Hive, using economic means.
Most of the films of Tim Burton run on this in one form or another. Pee-wee's Big Adventure begins with a typical day of breakfast and a bike ride to the shopping mall— and ends with Pee-Wee's bicycle being stolen and his becoming so distraught that he slowly goes deranged. The Maitlands and their rich friends in Beetlejuice think it would be fun to conduct a séance with the dead... and the fun suddenly stops when the ghosts they resurrect begin to crumble into dust before their eyes. The Joker holds a parade in downtown Gotham City to celebrate the town's 200th anniversary, showering 20 million dollars on the streets to lure the crowds in... so that he can gas them all to death. And in Edward Scissorhands, the neighbors who are so kind to Edward in the beginning turn violently on him once they suspect (incorrectly) that he's a burglar. This may be former Disney animator Burton's way of demonstrating that "Disneyland" isn't all it's cracked up to be - especially since his more realistic movies (Big Fish, for example) depict worlds that are neither wholly good nor wholly bad.
Raccoon City in the Resident Evil movie-verse was a normal American city, the residents of which were completely unaware of the dangerous experiments that took place beneath their streets in the top secret research facility known as The Hive.
The city from the film Metropolis probably counts- well-maintained and prosperous on the top, but the entity maintaining that façade is the proletariat living underground.
The United States in Harrison Bergeron, inspired by the short story of Kurt Vonnegut. A world where everyone is finally equal - by lobotomizing the overtly talented, if needed.
The Untouchables director Brian DePalma deliberately made Chicago crime lord Al Capone's surroundings very lavish and sumptuous:
"My image of The Untouchables is that corruption looks great. It's like Nazi Germany. It's clean. It's big. Everything runs smoothly. The problem is all the oppressed people are in some camp somewhere and nobody ever sees them. So the world of Chicago is a slick world. A world that's run by money and corruption and it looks fabulous."
Lumberton - the white-picket-fence, small-town setting for Blue Velvet.
The house in the Korean film Hansel & Gretel; it's beautiful and straight out of a fairy tale, just don't think on leaving anytime soon.
Literature
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin features a seeming utopia with no poverty, hunger, violence, or fear. Everyone is happy, helpful, and content. But they're all being drugged and genetically engineered to be so, controlled by a supercomputer that in turn is controlled by a secret cabal of immortal "programmers" who live in luxury, apart from the rest of society.
Brave New World is of the "bright and shiny" variety of dystopia. Sure, everyone's healthy and has (and is apparently satisfied with) all the toys and drugs they could ever want, but all of them hatch out of bottles and are programmed from birth to be satisfied with their (also pre-programmed) lives, seven-year-olds having sex is considered late, and the whole thing depends on the intentionally-stupidified and drugged-up lower classes and shallow, selfish, immature upper classes. What education there is (which seems to be entirely for the higher classes) focuses almost exclusively on the applied sciences, with very little attention devoted to theoretical science or liberal arts. It's a peaceful, stable society, but one built at the cost of creativity and self-expression—and very few even realize what it is that humanity's lost as a result. Made slightly better by one of the leaders being a relatively Reasonable Authority Figure, and that freethinking people who can't stand the luscious reality have an option to move to remote islands where life is harsher but more open-minded and less restrained (then again, we never see any of the islands), but not by much.
The descriptive part of Georges Perec's W or the Memory of Childhood, starts off with the eponymous island portrayed as an utopian land ruled by sport. As it goes into detail, the text descends into the description of a horrendous land of slavery and madness, allegory of German concentration camps.
Lois Lowry's The Giver. Everything is a happy-happy joy-joy utopia, where everyone is doing great and society is perfect. Until you find out they're murdering babies and old people. You can also ask for assisted suicide (even if you're young and healthy). And they can't perceive colors, they see in black and white. Also, they don't know emotions like sad, pain, anger, love, happy... or anything like that. The only way this can all work without being corrupted again or making a fatal mistake is via someone who holds all of the memories of what once was (ex, individuality, starvation, etc) in their head to make sure that they don't.
The books also give us some others. For instance, the land of the Mangaboos, a beautiful land with glass houses and lit by six colored suns, and inhabited by beautiful vegetable people. Except that said vegetables are literally and figuratively heartless and horrifyingly xenophobic, trying to destroy anything that enters their land that's not a Mangaboo. Or the Valley of Voe, full of kind, good-hearted people, natural beauty, delicious fruit that grants invisibility... and vicious man-eating invisible bears, such that it's only possible to survive there if you're invisible so the bears can't see you.
The world of the Kindar in the Green Sky Trilogy starts here. It's a peaceful utopia where there is no overpopulation, hunger, homelessness, everyone's employed (there is an option for people to change careers, but it's seldom used), crime is so rare as to be a curiosity, violence is unheard of (even two year olds squabbling over a toy is a sign of ill-parenting), and everyone has Psychic Powers. Scratch the surface and we get widespread narcotic use (in the form of a ritual berry), the psychic powers are fading at earlier ages than ever (the protagonist thinks he's merely average when it turns out he's probably the most powerful psychic on the planet), everything run by the Ol-Zhaan, the Ol-Zhaan run by a secret cabal in its ranks, and one huge Big Lie keeping all in place. Raamo's recruitment was part of a Batman Gambit on D'ol Falla's part to atone for her actions as the grandmistress of the cabal, and once the Big Lie is uncovered, things start to heal up.
The wizarding world in Harry Potter, due to the juxtaposition of the awe and wonder of magic and the heroics of the main characters with the prominent amounts of intolerance, corruption, megalomania, and inbreeding displayed by so many wizards. These faults are, however, acknowledged by the heroes who strive to correct them (particularly Hermione). The series itself makes it clear that the wizarding world has severe flaws in it, and these flaws are what Voldemort exploits to rise to power.
Genua from Discworld, when Lily Weatherwax oversees it. On the surface, it looks like a happy, shiny fairy tale kingdom... because she wants it to be that way. Toymakers are thrown in jail if they aren't able to tell little stories to the children "like they should," thieves are beheaded on first offense, and the Assassin's Guild has packed up and left "because there are some things that sicken even jackals."
Terahnee in Myst: The Book of D'ni. It looked like such a fantastic place to live — until it was learned that it was built on the backs of slaves who were killed if they made a sound or even saw a slave of the opposite sex. And just in case, they were all neutered, and the Terahnee were trained to see through them.
Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is like this - everyone is happy and rejoicing, and then you find out that all their happiness depends on this one child being continuously, abjectly miserable. That child is kept hidden in a basement, starving. And every adult knows about it
Uglies: Magnificent beauty and nonstop fun from the moment you turn sixteen onward. At the price of government psychos putting lesions in your brain and Super Soldiers after anyone who thinks for themselves.
Redwall could be said to take place in one of these. Sure, it's nice inside Redwall, but elsewhere, it's a rather brutal life at the mercy of predatory birds, roaming gangs and stuff of that nature. And all the inhabitants are cute fuzzy animals. Even the ones that are trying to kill you.
H. G. Wells' The Time Machine: the Time Traveler arrives on the future Earth in what seems to be a natural paradise inhabited by the peaceful Eloi, the descendants of modern humans. He later discovers that the Eloi's way of life is sustained by the subterranean Morlocks, who raise the Eloi on ranches like this and feed on them for sustenance (and the Morlocks are arguably the more sympathetic of the two).
Robert Silverberg's The World Inside. Everyone lives in gargantuan apartment blocks ("urban monads" with names like ChiPitts) and never goes out. The entire human race is obsessed with having as many children as possible - one protagonist is ashamed of having only four. It is seen as selfish (and therefore, criminal) to refuse sex to random strangers. And everyone is really, really happy all the time... because the ones who aren't happy are either lobotomized or dropped down the recycling chutes.
Brandon Mull seems to revel in this. His Fablehaven series starts off cheerfully, with a rather enchanting premise (a nature preserve full of magical creatures! Solve your grandparent's candy-coated mysteries to find out more!), but around the second book, starts showing its true, dark colors. His standalone novel The Candy Shop War is similar, starting out with the literally Sugar Bowl concept of magical candy and ending up with several near-homicides, Body Horror, Bad Future, and much more.
Waverton lives, breathes, and sweats this trope. It's not just the adults that are cannibals, it's the children too.
Kafka's On the Gallery.
Here's what's visible through one of the demon's doorways in Nocturne:
"...a breathtakingly beautiful landscape, woods and hills and streams under a mellow sun, yet redolent with an aura of complete and implacable evil."
The main thread of Diablo is a straight-up Crapsack World, but the tie-in novels show what it's like when it's not assaulted by Demonic Invaders. It's not actually any better, but it's better at hiding how screwed up it is.
The Galaxy from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is very effectively portrayed this way in most of its incarnations. It's a shiny, glistening wonderland of incredible science, technology, and living commodities... inhabited by an ignorant, apathetic, and irresponsible citizenry that chooses to use it all for selfish and nonsensical goals, such as mining the past for resources that are rare in the present (and keeping the future from doing the same) or creating doors and elevators with genuine people personalities. It is also gradually revealed that only the very well-to-do ever get to take advantage of such commodities anyway, a large majority of Galactic citizens being penniless hitchhikers.
Fahrenheit 451 is this. Everyone stays at home watching TV instead of going out and doing other things, the media keeps their attention through the media, and nobody thinks because of the lack of books.
Pam Bachorz's Candor where life is idyllic and teenagers behave until you find out that everyone is being controlled by Messages played in music that brainwash them without even realising it.
In The Wind Singer, Aramanth is a walled city in which academia is everything from age two, there is no room for specialisation or non-academic skills, and anyone who dares to rebel is put into brainwashing prison or special teaching, where they are kept as children but grow old and slow and wrinkled. Yet the city is called a perfect society. The city stays like this until Kestrel and Bowman Hath retrieve the voice of the Wind Singer, freeing the Emperor, destroying the Zars and making everyone, including the authorities, happy, so the rules are abolished. Because of this the walls are knocked down, and so the city gets burned to a crisp by the Mastery and it's people enslaved.
In the 1987 picture book Hey, Al. Al and his dog, Eddie, are transported to a magical utopia ruled by birds. Their life there is at first heavenly, but soon becomes terrifying as they realize they are slowly being turned into birds themselves. Think of Pleasure Island from Pinocchio, but even more freakish.
Alypium from Erec Rex is a bright, shiny Magical Land full of humor, wonder, and all sorts of charming happenings. It's all a hotbed of fiery racism, conspiracy, deep-seated political corruption, and murder.
Watership Down. The refugee rabbits, after a hazardous journey, are offered shelter in Cowslip's warren without even having to fight to get in. The rabbits there are all big and well-fed as there is plenty of food left out in the fields, and have even developed their own high culture, such as art and song. The other rabbits get quite annoyed when their Waif Prophet Fiver insists the place is evil. It turns out the reason the food is left out in the field is that the warren's surrounds are intensively snared by the local farmer — the entire warren is one big rabbit hutch.
At first, Matched seems like a utopia. Modern society has too many choices, but this future society does that for you. But then you realize that nobody can choose anything, not their job, or their spouse. They don't even choose what food they eat (it is chosen by statistics) or when they die (everybody dies at age 80).
At first glance, the title world in the Dragonriders of Pern series appears idyllic, a place of bucolic beauty, populated with friendly dragons and playful firelizards. However, it is not all that pleasant. The planet is regularly showered with deadly spores, called Thread, that devour any living thing in their path. There are also frequent outbreaks of plague and the society is highly classist: women are sometimes discriminated against and the mentally disabled are often used as slave labor. That said, this is by no means the worst example on this page; Threadfall is a serious threat, but it occurs infrequently and fairly predictably and the Dragon Riders have centuries of practice at damage control. Plagues, class prejudice and ill-treatment of the mentally handicapped are still major issues, but they're par for the course in anyLow Fantasy setting. (And in many Real Life settings for that matter.)
According to David Foster Wallace's essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (from the book of the same name), large cruise ships are, well, exactly what it says on the tin.
Transformers: TransTech's Axiom Nexus sure looks like a utopia at first glance, compared to every other Transformers universe. It's the only universe where the Civil War never happened, and millions of Cybertronians of all factions and universes live together in a shiny, high-tech city. In actual practice, however, the Civil War still exists... just in the form of political intrigue, corporate warfare, racial/class tensions and bigotry, gang warfare, and lots and lots of red tape. And if you happen to have any tech in your body that the TransTechs find interesting and/or dangerous, regardless of whether you intend to do anything wrong with it or not, they'll at best kidnap you and at worst kidnap you and then (literally) find out what makes you tick.
The Nutcracker: The book is rather dark for largely being about toys and candy, and The Land of Dolls, despite the fact that it's largely made of candy, has some prettyterrifyingdangers.
Istar in Dragonlance eventually devolved into this, as most strongly illustrated by Time of the Twins and the Kingpriest Trilogy. Everything was more peaceful, orderly, and prosperous than anywhere else in the world or any other age- because the Kingpriest had mind-readers seeded throughout the general populace ready to arrest anyone who had evil thoughts. It was a superficially beautiful place and not all that bad to live in- but still a sugar-coated theocratic dictatorship.
The Great Gatsby show us that the world of the rich is not nice: Tom is a cruel bully because he knows his Glory Days are in the past and he suspects (rightly enough) that no one respects him, Daisy is a Stepford Smiler, both of them are infidel, alone and scared and they have to deal with noveau rich delinquents like Gatsby himself, and his only defence is being JerkAsses themselves against people like Gatsby. And the scary part is that Gatsby world is Real Life world. How many of us wouldn’t jump at the chance to be rich even knowing this?
Gatsby's life is also pretty crapsaccharine — he's a gregarious millionaire who throws lavish parties on a regular basis and lives in a huge estate, but everything about him is a lie. He gained his fortune through criminal means, none of his regular guests give a damn about him to the point that only one person other than Nick shows up at his funeral, and he's a deeply lonely and unhappy man. "Poor son of a bitch" indeed. The book as a whole heavily deconstructs the American Dream, so it's not surprising that it illustrates how wealth can bring misery instead of happiness.
In the 24th century of The Unincorporated Man'' by Dani and Eytan Kollin the entire Solar system has been colonized out to the Oort Cloud, Mars has been terraformed, and thanks to nontechnology lifespans are masured in centuries and noone goes hungry, unclothes or unhoused. But everyone is at least partly property in which other people own stock, thertre's a near permanent underclass of "pennystocks" and everyone has a tracker implanted in them. And it's getting worse. Once you were born owning 45% of yourself, now it's 25%.
Alice, Girl from the Future has an adopted son of an emperor who murdered stepfather once informed to be unfit for the throne. He wore a smiling mask to hide his true identity, ordered everyone to wear the the same, painted all the fortresses and prisons with flowers, and renamed his flagship "The Universal Tenderness".
Live-Action TV
The Charmed double episode "It's a Bad Bad World": when the heroes upset the balance between their world and their moral-mirror world, their world turns into a happy happy happy world, where people get death penalty for minor infractions and amputated for breaking house rules such as not using the cell phone at work. The main difference between their world and the evil Mirror Universe is that in their world, everyone is happy happy happy about their perfectly well regulated world.
Not as bad as most examples, but the constant bright and cheery colors of Pushing Daisies belies the background of murder and Parental Abandonment that it's set in.
In Time Force, the mutant criminal Monsters of the Week were innocent victims of the year 3000 Designer Babies process, and because of it received the brunt of Fantastic Racism and were driven to crime. There's also a pretty nasty Cycle of Revenge going on between some of the characters, too. Granted, only a handful (including the Big Bad) were confirmed to be sympathetic (those that were truly good were only re-frozen to keep them from being mind-controlled by said Big Bad), and most were every bit the psychopathic/amoral criminals they were made out to be. Given that the only mutants we ever saw in the series were convicted criminals, it's a bit unclear as to how the regular law-abiding mutants are treated.
RPM takes place After the End... meaning, obviously, The End happened. Only one city still survives, and while it looks to be about the same standard of living as before, it's still under constant threat of being wiped out by killer robots. And as a more specific example, the Teen Genius who acts as Mission Control was abducted from her home as a child and made a prisoner of a government think tank for over a decade - in fact, her attempt to escape was what caused The End.
The setting of "The Happiness Patrol", where the government has made good cheer mandatory, although, largely because of the direction and production design, this comes off more as an Informed Attribute.
The Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", from the Jerome Bixby story of the same name. Small town USA with everyone bright and happy about to celebrate the birthday of a 6-year-old boy with lots of presents and love. Until we find out that the 6-year-old boy (played by Billy Mumy of Lost in Space and Babylon 5 fame) is a telepath who requires everyone to be bright and happy all the time, otherwise he kills them in rather horrible ways. Everyone constantly mumbles to themselves about how happy they are, otherwise they die. Or worse — if they are people he loves, he might try to help them.
One Sliders alternate dimension is a world where everything looks great, and there's a great big lottery which they enter. Wade wins. However, she may have wanted to read the fine print: the lottery does give the winner just about anything you could ask for, but also requires you to give up your life shortly. It's a voluntary population-reduction program, and the real benefit is mainly to the next-of-kin.
There are also groups that try to educate the public on altenate means of controling population growth, such as contraceptives. Apparently, condoms are evil but suicide is good.
In Stargate SG-1 episode "Revisions", SG-1 finds a small idyllic village. It looks like a perfect town until people start disappearing, and everybody but SG-1 forgets they ever existed.
An episode of Stargate Atlantis had the team come across a seemingly beautiful world untouched by the Wraith and with no crime. It turns out the worst criminals were originally sent to an island where the Wraith would devour them. This was so effective crime virtually stopped, so standards became a lot more lax. One man who had been wrongfully convicted of murder was sent there, and a woman who tried to tell the Atlantis team about it was sent to the island for treachery.
Star Trek has done plenty of "planet where everyone is happy and everything is perfect, except it turns out everything is really horrible" stories.
Landing on one of them one filled with beings empowered by human imagination is the only crime that still is punished by the death penalty in the Federation.
On Angel, Lindsey and later Gunn were at one point trapped in a hell dimension that appeared to be an idyllic peaceful suburban neighborhood superficially, but had them living in a home that had a demon in the cellar that would rip their heart out every day, only to have them heal and relive the same thing the next day. And if anyone interfered or tried to upset the status quo all the residents would mindlessly shoot at them with machine guns.
Jasmine's utopian Los Angeles in the previous season, where everyone is happy and fulfilled, but at the cost of mind control. Yet despite that Jasmine's way is incredibly attractive, even after people have been removed from her influence (all of the main characters at some point or other talk about how they miss Jasmine's love and the feeling that everything was finally good), to the point that after Jasmine's death, representative of demonic law firm Wolfram & Hart Lilah shows up to congratulate the main characters on ending world peace.
Played for comedy in Suburban Shootout, where a picture-perfect English village is dominated under the surface by rival gangs of upper-middle-class housewives.
Desperate Housewives. Wisteria Lane, as Brenda Strong will remind you every week, appears to be a placid suburban street in a Day-Glo world. That suicide ten years ago was just unfortunate really. Could have happened anywhere. But did we mention the hit-and-run across the street? That was around the same time. And the recent rash of stranglings? Also, that freak electrocution. And the time half the block was leveled by a tornado. And the plane that crash-landed right into the middle of the holiday block party. There was also some business with a child molester in the neighborhood, but not to worry, he left after we inadvertently caused the death of his sister. Of course, we've had a few arsons here, some hostage situations there. A woman may have been beaten to death with a blender in the house where that nice young gay couple lives, but the details on that are still murky, and a child died of neglect two doors down, but that was like, fifteen years ago. Oh, and the woman who used to live just to the right of where the hit-and-run happened was later discovered to be keeping a mentally handicapped murder suspect chained in her basement. Other than that, wonderful place to live; property values have remained high.
Wizards of Waverly Place. They have leprechauns put in cages to be poked at and harassed, and many characters dying and being Played for Laughs. When Stevie is turned to stone and is smashed to pieces, Alex makes a joke about this.
The X-Files episode Arcadia is set in a seemingly pleasant gated community. The community has some very strict rules enforced by a horrible monster that kills anyone caught breaking them.
iCarly: For every benefit to their cool internet stardom, there's a freaky weirdo stalker, or a corrupt cop trying to bust them, or someone trying to steal their ideas. Out of the 6 parents the main characters have, 3 are completely absent, 1 is an absentee father for Carly and Spencer via a military deployment, 1 is Freddie's My Beloved Smother and the last is Sam's deadbeat probably alcoholic and inflicting a Hilariously Abusive Childhood mom Pam.
Both the modern-day town of Storybrooke, Maine and the Fairy Tale kingdoms of Once Upon a Time are this. The fairy tale realm is littered with corrupted rulership, thieves, and dark magic. Prince Charming's kingdom is flat broke. Cinderella's kingdom is suffering from a drought. And no matter where you look, Rumpelstiltskin is cutting deals. The town of Storybrooke looks like a quiet, idyllic community, but everyone's been ground to submission under Mayor Mills's stiletto heels and Mr. Gold literally owns everything through a Chain of Deals like he did as Rumpelstiltskin.
The "Paradise" in Xena: Warrior Princess season 4 looks like Eden inhabited by a guru who will teach anyone techniques on how to achieve complete peace but he's actually a parasite who feeds on people's goodness and lack of that will turn one to stone. The ones who are immune are eventually driven mad by their own demons.
Maybe to a degree, Hannah Montana. Miley Stewart must manipulate everyone and everything in both of her worlds to lead a normal life and a superstar life at the same time. This often affects the relationships and friendships in her life, and in many cases threatens to derail many of her hopes and dreams (and her friendship with Lilliy and romantic relationships with Jake, and later, Jesse). The Stewarts' mother is deceased by the beginning of the show, Jackson is constantly under Miley's shadow, and being a secret pop star means she has little hopes of attending college with Lilly because of her spotty attendance record and lack of extracurricular activity (unlike Lilly), as she spent that time being Hannah. And revealing herself as Hannah to the dean of her college would complicate matters further.
Devo's "Beautiful World". It starts off talking about how great the world is. Then it becomes apparent that this is someone else's opinion and that the narrator of the song doesn't agree with it. The idea is that the person who says the world is beautiful has been conditioned to believe it is and doesn't know about the bad things. The video makes this apparent.
Definitely exemplified in the song "Handlebars" by the Flobots (by extension, this song makes an example out of Real Life). The first half is well enough off, describing the good that we people can do. It's "good to be alive" in a world where we can do pretty much anything. However, the song takes a sharp turn in the middle:
I can hand out a million vaccinations Or let them all die in exasperation Have them all healed of their lacerations Have them all killed by assassination
R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" is sometimes interpreted as a parody of Communist Chinese propaganda machinery, despite Word of God indicating that it is supposed to be straightforwardly cheerful.
Lily Allen's song "LDN" about London and how everything looks exciting and wonderful at first, but when you take a second look... Indeed, most of Lily Allen's songs come across this way due to the musical style they use and the sound of her voice. "Smile" and "The Fear" come to mind.
"The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton starts out about a nice and sweet song about unrequited love, but soon takes a sinister turn into escapism, cyborgs, and kidnapping.
Dmitri Shostakovich's 5th and 9th Symphonies are portrayals of this trope.
In the video for Travis’ cheery tune "Flowers in the Window", the band drives into a small town in the middle of nowhere that is inhabited solely by beautiful pregnant women. After about four minutes of the band wondering how this could be, Fran Healy wanders to the outskirts and comes upon a solitary shackled man in a pen, screaming and presumably begging Fran to free him. Fran and the boys, fearing a similar fate, high-tail it out of there.
Once the music is in motion, "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO plays like any decent dance tune. Prior to this, we are introduced to members Redfoo and Sky Blue, who learn that — after recovering from a coma — they made the song that destroyed society.
Normal man: Every day, they been shufflin'. … It will get inyour bones.
In the Old World of Darkness, the Changeling: The Dreaming gameline exemplifies this trope to a T. Many gamers apparently looked no further than the colorful interior art (although not all of it is cute) and the fact that you can play children and furry faerie creatures, without actually reading what the setting is about, and mistakenly thought the game wasn't "gothic" and tortured enough for their tastes. Boy, are they wrong. Forget angsty vampires dressing in goth fashions; one of the running themes of Dreaming was that your fae self has woken up and become exposed to a magical world of dreams, imagination, and human potential, which is slowly dying. Disbelief, lack of imagination and the death of potential are literally toxic to changelings; spend enough time around them, and your fae self goes dormant until the next incarnation. Most changelings fall back into dormancy by their 30s, and that's not counting the ones who are slain by cold iron — who are dead forever. Anyone who embraces their fae self looks and acts like a schizophrenic and is likely to wind up in an asylum. Oh, and then there's the threat of Winter, the time when all Glamour fades from the world and human potential has almost entirely withered and died — basically, Ragnarok for the fae. So if you want to keep the world of make-believe, you've got to fight for it. Hard.
And that's not even counting the fact that one half of changeling society is stuck in the Middle Ages, with the other half taking the whole Darker and Edgier bit seriously; or the fact that closing yourself off from the world where potential dies almost guarantees insanity; or that there are creatures literally made from nightmares (of from insanity itself) that have motivations that can really only be described as pure evil...
Paranoia. "Happiness is mandatory, Citizen. Are you happy?"
Bretonnia in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. A bucolic feudal kingdom - where peasants are bound to turf with 90% taxation rate and knights may kill their serfs for merely laying a gaze on the knight's pegasus.
There is nothing inherently wrong with Lorwyn in Magic: The Gathering. The plane itself is a perfectly nice place; not all of itscitizensare, though. Oh, and don't stick around there when the Aurora comes (every fifty years or so), because it turns into Shadowmoor, where you don'twant to end up.
Zendikar might also count. Yeah, it's full of wonderful, fascinating, exotic landscapes. You better enjoy their view from a safe distance, though.
Ravanica counts while you're at it. It looks like an okay place to live, then you realize everyone is trying to kill you, rob you, change your identity, kill you and generally screw you over. Even the "good" people. And you don't get any rest after death.
For a game that looks like it could cause cavities at a hundred paces, Blue Rose sure has a lot of demons. Oh, and the Good country occasionally rewrites criminals' brains to make them productive members of society.
Video Games
The bright, sunny, 1950's America of Destroy All Humans!. Looks all hunky dory on the surface, until you start reading people's minds.
For example: Tales Of The Abyss is a pretty idealistic world where, for once, both the church and The Empire are firmly on the side of good. The downside to this? The game features some truly horrific scenes, such as the fall of Akzeriuth features a small boy drowning to death in a sea of superheated poisonous sludge while you are completely powerless to prevent this from happening. You know, for kids!
Tales Of Vesperia is also pretty good at this. World relations are pretty good and civilization is prosperous. Too bad that humanity's monster repellent and Power Sourceblastia is actually destroying the world.
Dear God, the MOTHERtrilogy, especially the last one. After a long, winding game with a story so vague it's almost taunting you, it comes right out and slaps you in the face with Leder's speech, in which you learn the small island you live on is the only inhabitable place left on earth, and prior to Porky's time travel abuse, there were only a small handful of survivors left in the world, completely oblivious and susceptible to being wiped out by any disaster. Hurricane? Minor fire? Disease? There goes the human race. And then, you know what happens in this colorful and kid-friendly game? Your long-lost brother deliberately electrocutes himself to death and you blow up the island. Yes, all of the main characters and NPCs live through it, but you don't ACTUALLY find out what happened to them after the end of the game.
The world of Eversion starts out bright and cheerful, but becomes gradually less so as you "everse" to higher levels, and it's not long before the game reveals its truecolors.
The Tranquility Lane simulation in Fallout 3. At first glance it's an overly sweet mimic of black-and-white 50's sitcoms a la Leave It To Beaver, but soon you discover that it's being run by a sadistic scientist disguised as a Creepy Child who has been using the people in the simulation to slowly break each other down (reading the designer's journal reveals he'd done the same thing placed in a tropical island paradise prior to Tranquility Lane). In order to save your father, he sends you on increasingly heinous deeds, like murdering a mistress of a man and framing his wife. In the end, you have to choose between allowing the people in the simulation to remain trapped forever, or run a program that sends AI to kill everyone inside, freeing them from their prison but ending their lives in the process.
The town of Andale. It's nice and peaceful (by Fallout standards, at least) and doesn't seem to be bothered by raiders. The townsfolk are cheerful and friendly, and proudly claim that theirs' is the best town in the US of A (as if the War had never happened). But it turns out that they're all inbred cannibals. With basements and sheds full of bodies and fridges full of 'strange meat'.
The Vaults in general may count, as they are portrayed as the ultimate safe havens in the post-apocalypse world, protecting its population not only from the radioactive fallout but from the raiders, mutants and constant war outside (The war that never changes, mind you). As you explore the vaults, you discover that the populations have either willingly escaped the safety of their idyllic homes (rather violently in some cases) or died/gone mad in obscure ways. It soon becomes clear that whatever took place within the vaults was way more fucked than the war and mayhem outside. Take for example Vault 106, in which a hallucinogen gas drove most of them insane, spurring sane survivors to seal themselves off in a small cave in the lower part of the vault and safely dig their way out instead of going through the insane ones to the vault entrance; they didn't get far. How about the musician-populated Vault 92, where an experimental mind-controlling "white noise" was emitted through dormitory loudspeakers to the citizens, causing them to obey every order - even killing each other. A third of the population ended up permanently damaged by the white noise, and soon went out of control; cue total silence for X years. Hell, there's even a series of diary entries in a computer written by a young girl aspiring to be a musician which starts out good and dandy, but which end with her remarking how she is feeling more sick as time passes, evident in her entries as a degrading ability to type properly. The last entry is literally the result of her mashing the keyboard, desperately asking for help to "get the voices out of her head". So much for utopia, Vault-Tec Corp.
All the vaults were really a massive experiment by the US Government. For example, Vault 12 had the door intentionally sabotaged so that small amounts of radiation would seep in overtime, to study the effects of long-term exposure. The result was a city full of ghouls. Other vaults were set up and tampered with to study the (often failed) adaptation of societies under certain conditions. To quote Penny Arcade, "The Vaults were never intended to save anyone..."
The entire Pre-War USA of the Fallout series is like this. The entire world is known, not only feared, to be on the fast track to destruction, and society is more dog-eat-dog than ever before. There are hints that the average attitude in the pre-war world is more cynical and self serving than even our own. On the surface, however, the nation presents itself to be a patriotic heaven filled with wholesome families and optimistic cheerful people. Some hints include that in Washington, D.C.'s alternate Mall, they had a War Museum where we have part of the Smithsonian, and that they willingly allowed the addictive, radioactive Nuka-Cola Quantum to be produced.
Also, the new version of the USA that the Enclave is attempting to create. Until you first run into them, thanks to the radio channel they have that broadcasts their intentions of remaking the Wasteland into a new America, one of peace, freedom, etc. etc. you get the impression that they're actually on to something, that they might actually be able to make everything nice and peachy. Then, when you actually run into them and actually learn a bit more about their future plans, you learn that, in order to make the Capital Wasteland safe, they plan to kill EVERY SINGLE MUTANT by poisoning the area's water supply. Thing is, because of the amount of radiation in the area, that counts as pretty much everyone in the Capital Wasteland.
The Enclave's plan during their first appearance in Fallout 2 was nearly identical: release a variant of FEV into the atmosphere and let the jet stream carry it worldwide, to wipe out all "mutant" life - which, by this point, is EVERYTHING and everyone other than the Enclave. When you confront the President about this plan, he tells you to your face that you aren't really human, and would understand if you were.
Steambot Chronicles, like Tales of Symphonia, does this with the aid of Cel Shading. And, like Tales of Symphonia, it's never outright stated this is the case. It's only after playing for a bit that you begin to realize that most of the cast is still dealing with deep emotional issues, and many of the NPCs in the game see their lives torn apart or ruined, occasionally by your actions.
Chrono Trigger brings us the Magical Kingdom from 12,000 B.C. — warning sign number one right there. At first glance, it is presented as an idyllic world where everyone's needs are taken care of, free time is devoted to the study of science, magic, philosophy and sleep, and the worst thing to worry about is overly pretentious navel-gazing. It'salldownhill from there. Oh, and the "idyllic" floating sky-castles? Those are off-limits to the humans who can't use magic. They are confined to dirty caves on the surface, which is locked in an ice age.
Furcadia is a player-driven MMO with bright cheery graphics, talking animals, unfriendly staff, often rude and/or Stepford Smiler inhabitants, and a background involving slavery to a draconian race and the existence of living dark gods walking among mortals.
While the city Mirrors Edge takes place in doesn't look like it at the first glance, it has a government that would make Orwell blush.
This troper actually stopped running several times throughout the game just to look around and admire the pristine, utopian look of the city. Hard to believe that a brutal police state exists beneath the highly polished surface.
Not to mention that your love interest from the first game is either A: disgusted that you are working with a group that is a cross between the IRA and the KKK or B: has become an emotionally damaged, stone-cold Corrupt Corporate Executive who is trying to hunt the strongest man in the galaxy.
The first game did provide a pretty blatant example, though: the Citadel is a beautiful space station of extraordinary technologies and breathtaking architecture, home of intergalactic politics and justice. Unfortunately, there's also a great deal of political infighting and bureaucracy going on here, meaning that almost nothing can be done through official channels, even when there's a crime syndicate having citizens attacked in broad daylight. Also, nobody is sure how the place even works, because the mysterious Keepers who maintain the station have a nasty habit of self-destructing if anyone tries to stop them. Finally, the very end of the game reveals that the Citadel itself is just one big back-door entrance for the Reapers.
The Mass Relay Network, the wondrous technology that made galactic civilization possible is nothing more than the Reapers' means of sowing and corralling organic life across the galaxy that allows them to harvest it at their leisure. It's Cowslip's Warren from Watership Down on a galactic scale, and the Mass Relays are the Shining Wires.
Illium from the second game is a definite example. It looks like a beautiful, high-class world in keeping with asari stylings and culture; in actuality, it's like every nightmare vision of anarcho-capitalism, where anything (including drugs with known side effects that include neural scarring) can be sold with the proper license and executives can hire mercs to kill their own employees.
Pokémon. No, that's not a joke. The Pokédex and experiences in the games, if paid attention to, will bring about the realization that Pokémon can do horrible things to people and each other. Among others, there are dream-eaters, beautiful creatures that stab you and drain you dry of fluids, cutesy balloons that drag you to the "underworld", ice spirits with galleries of their frozen victims, roaming Physical Gods galore, and finally there's Cyrus who wants to obliterate the universe, remake it in his own image, and remove the soul out of everyone and everything... that's just a small sample of the horrible things in Pokémon World.
Cyrus is just one nasty facet of the Pokéverse's criminal underworld, and his lot only operate in Sinnoh. Midcontinental Johto and Kanto are regularly infested by Rockets who have no intention of leaving their hidey-holes and enough connections to keep them there short of a full-scale invasion. Tropical Hoenn is fortunate enough to host two eco-terrorism factions in Teams Magma and Aqua, who make a mess of the landscape when they're not at each other's throats. Unova has to deal with TeamPlasma, whose mastermind has less-than-benevolant motives. And let's not even get into what goes down in Orre...
On the subject of Cyrus, there's also the fact that he promises "world peace" and rails against war and conflict—suggesting that even the friendlier parts of the Pokemon World contain far more conflict and strife than the game plots themselves let on.
And, of course, there's the fact that children are outright encouraged to go out, by themselves, into this world and train these creatures, forced to make their own way, possibly starving to death or dying from exposure, or falling victim to one of the less cutesy (and even some of them) Pokemon, or being captured by one of the numerous criminal/terrorist organizations. And their parents seem to allow this. Not to mention that these creatures they are expected to befriend and train have powers that basically make them living, breathing weapons of mass destruction.
BioShock is not an example-far from it-but in the sequel, we see what Rapture looks like from a Little Sister's perspective. Needless to say, it's...different. The soft, sad harp that plays throughout only underlies the whole situation.
In Psychonauts, Gloria's Theater has two different settings, which can be shifted by changing the lighting. The first is a tastes like diabetessugarbowl, and the other is a darker and edgier version of the same world where the formerly cute kids in flower and puppy costumes start attacking. After finding out more about Gloria's past, it seems the second setting is more accurate to her life.
Professor Layton is in general a huge fan of the Town with a Dark Secret, but only one city can be considered crapsack: Folsense. This thriving town owed its massive prosperity to a gold mine owned by the Herzen family, but recently the miners found something else. They thought they could refine it into somthing valuable, except soon the residents started dropping like flies. People started leaving the city in droves, calling it "cursed" and attributing it to this mysterious new mineral. And don't get me started on the vampire rumors...
Oh, you thought that was the bad part? We haven't started with the bad part yet. Turns out that the mineral they found "recently" was 50 years ago. It was a powerful hallucinogen that was extremely susceptible to any form of suggestion. If someone expects death, they will receive it. The residents don't even notice their own aging, or the passage of time. It gets worse when you realize some residents can't have possibly have lived to their apparent age +50 years, so only the illusion remains!
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has bright, cartoony graphics. It isn't afraid to throw humor into the plot, and it initially seems to have a much lighter plot than the others. You're not out to save the world, but to rescue your sister. Then you find out that Ganon's still out there, and you've basically been playing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland the entire time. Granted, aside from Ganon's presence (which is kind of a staple of the series anyway) the world isn't too bad to live in in itself. It just becomes a hell of a lot more depressing when you look at it in the context of its backstory.
Link's Awakening has an initially upbeat tone. It isn't afraid to throw humor into the plot (talking animals!) and it initially seems to have kinda the same plot as the others. You're not out to save the world, you're going to awaken the Wind Fish, whatever that means. Then you find out that you're trapped in a reality created by Nightmares, and you've basically been playing in a pre-apocalyptic dreamland the entire time.
Kingdom Hearts: A bright, cheery game in which you play as a boy with a giant key exploring various worlds populated by Disney and Final Fantasy characters. Then you actually think about it. Between Birth by Sleep and Kingdom Hearts, a huge number of worlds populated by Disney characters were invaded by those adorable Eldritch Abominations you see all over the place. At least 99% of their residents had their hearts ripped from their bodies as they were twisted into more abominations! (The remaining 1% either end up in Traverse Town or become summons). Sora does restore many Heartless to their uncorrupted forms in the first Kingdom Hearts. Also, the Keyblade is said to have the power to free the heart of any Heartless slain with it. Unfortunately, the villains are collecting all of those hearts to create a new Kingdom Hearts. So basically, if you're unfortunate enough to be consumed by Darkness, you become a Heartless and a Nobody. When killed by a Keyblade wielder, you reform unless your heart is stolen by other Nobodies. Also, there's the fact that the game effectively takes place After the End, with the one world having been split into countless isolated ones. Oh, and the fact that Heartless will follow the Keyblade Wielder everywhere, and still attack worlds even after they've been sealed. ...Living in the KH Universe really sucks...
And that's not even going into the cosmology given in the first game, that implies all the worlds you visit used to be one big world, until human greed and darkness shattered it, spreading fragments across the sky and giving birth to the Heartless.
A LOT of people were lured in to playing Mitsumete Knight by being misled by the graphics and the generally bright tone of most Dating Sims to believing this would just be another run-of-the-mill happy-go-lucky one. The poor fools.
Taris in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was shown to be one. Sure, the upper levels looked nice and shiny, but they were generally reserved for the snobby rich folk. The most people had to put up with gang-wars in the Lower City, but that was nothing compared to the filthy, mutant-ridden squalor of Undercity.
The original Mega Man series: You live in a world where cutesy, googly-eyed robots of all shapes and sizes are used to help in any job you can think of, with the benevolent, Santa-looking Dr. Light as the authority. Any of these robots can kill you with either a built-in weapon, or something that can used as a weapon, with anything else being the latter. One crazy oldman, motivated by pride and a college rivalry with Dr. Light, makes these robots run amok, with some game openings showing massive explosions that had to have killed a lot of people, so he can rule the world. When Wily is finally caught, he's imprisoned in the middle of the city, and quickly broken out when his back-up robots activate. Given the plots of 9 and 10, you see that humanity is so arrogant that they dispose of still activated (basically alive) robots after a certain age without a pause, yet so dependent on them that they can't make headway on recovering from a global robot virus on their own, and so stupid that actually let Dr. Wily stay alive long enough to be broken out, even though he's pulled his shtick six times by that point. It's honestly no wonder that once Dr. Cain finds a super-sweet robot buried underground, the world gets fucked up HARD.
Santa Destroy in No More Heroes, honestly, doesn't look like to much of a bad place to live. Good pizza, law abiding drivers, and people who generally mind their own business. They don't even require guards at the border. But then you find out that some organization is promoting a bunch of hitmen (many of whom are very mentally disturbed) to fight each other to the death. Also, business men are even more corrupt than normal. It becomes pretty much a crapsack world when it all goes public though. At that point you better watch your back.
Conkers Bad Fur Day, and its counterpartConker: Live & Reloaded. You play the game as a cute red squirrel Conker, who, if you played a certain other game before, is seen as innocent and cutesy in an equally cheery and brightly colored world. But Conker himself is a crude drinker who can do anything from kill others in a gory blaze to wipe out an entire ecosystem if given enough money, there is an on-going war between other cute gray squirrels and not-quite-so-cute manically evil teddy bears, there are an invasion of zombies, singing piles of literal shit, weasels who are either the mafia or the main security force of the only bank in the world, both of which are ruled by a tyrant panther king, grumpy grim reapers who have a vendetta against cats, all this and everyone are foul-mouthed, manipulative bastards whom Conker is surrounded by as he becomes king.
Dark Dawn includes a lot of this in the backstory. The world of Weyard is more vibrant and colorful than ever before... but the decision to release Alchemy back into the world is indicated to have had violent repercussions on the geography, both physical and cultural. Isaac (who opposed this) is hailed as a hero while Felix (who pursued it) is written off as a villain, if mentioned at all. Gimmicky mayors from the first two games have become conquering kings and emperors, and several areas you explore are in the middle or aftermath of terrible wars. Your friends in Champa are still being driven to piracy for a living.
And then there's Morgal, the newly-established nation of brightly-colored furries and skillful musicians... the "newly-established" part involves a violent and gruesome revolution from Fantastic Racism and enslavement, the (recently-orphaned, new) king is being manipulated by treacherous advisors from a nation whose hat is apparently total war, and peace among the beastfolk is maintained by a monthly festival that includes food, drink, and music for the beastfolk, and death by boiling for any human prisoners, be they criminal or innocent (one such prisoner is a child).
Pikmin may look bright and cartoonish, but it's a tragedy for the Pikmin, the monsters—many of whom are simply protecting their young—and almost everyone involved. Just listen to the song from the commercial; it struck a chord among salarymen.
The Telltale Games sequel to Back to the Future has one in Hill Valley in an alternate version of 1986. The city is publicised as one of the cleanest, safest most law-abiding cities in the United States. This is because its ruler (or rather, his wife pulling the strings) is an insane Moral Guardian, who has banned everything from alcohol and cigarettes to public displays of affection, and even Dungeons & Dragons and Science Fiction novels. By 1986 surveillance cameras and bugs are everywhere and Edna is resorting to brainwashing to keep people like Biff rehabilitated.
The city is also closed off from the rest of the country by a thick wall. Apparently, there are other sister-cities in the States, who have decided to follow Hill Valley's example.
Short indie platforming game Appy 1000mg. To say more would be to spoil it.
Ratchet & Clank is cute and cartoony, with a big-eared, fuzzy lead character and amusing robot sidekick. However, all businesses seem to be run by either Corrupt Corporate Executives or slightly-less-Corrupt-Corporate-Executives, people are forced into blood sports, sapient robots are casually killed for things as trivial as advertisements, and the galaxy's "greatest hero" spends a good portion of the series as a Miles Gloriosus who is either working for the villains or causing problems so he can fix them to improve his reputation. It's only gotten better at all because the title duo have been systematically killing the worst of the villains, and even now it's not exactly a nice place to live.
The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion features Camoran's Paradise. The top layer is a beautiful, flower-covered woodland meadow. The bottom layer...isnot. And even the beautiful flower-covered woodland meadow is teeming with vicious Daedra.
Not to mention that, in Camoran's Paradise, you get to live forever. The downside of that? It means that Camoran can torture you forever.
The Blood Elf zones in World of Warcraft, or more specifically the first zone, Eversong Woods. It looks like the typical fairytale elven kingdom. However, there's a massive scar across the land, scorched forests, hostile treants and the elven prince has taken up with some big bad demons. And that's saying nothing of the Blood Elves themselves.
Behind the bubbly cuteness and bright colors, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life counts with its stalking, aging, death, actually watching your animals die, divorce, depression, alcoholism, daddy issues, etc..
Gensoukyou, the setting of Touhou, is explicitly a "paradise", a Fantasy Kitchen Sink refuge for an immense variety of weird and wonderful Cute Monster Girls where they can live and be safe from the prying eyes of humans. Said creatures are also all firmly belligerent and selfish and prone to do everything from attacking random people to disrupting the natural order of Gensoukyou itself, and that's before considering the ones that eat humans. The few human residents are continually at the mercy of the youkai that outpower and outnumber them, safeguarded by a tenuous truce that limits youkai snacking only to hermits and people stolen from outside of Gensoukyou, but can do nothing when, say, a bored youkai wants to steal spring or intend to incinerate the surface or prepare to reignite a religious war. Youkai themselves don't exactly have it easy either, Fantastic Racism against and between youkai rampant, an entire massive Fantastic Ghetto filled with youkai others considered undesirable, and they are just as vulnerable when a powerful youkai (or the borderline-Knight Templar that is the closest thing Gensoukyou has to law enforcement) designates them for a beating.
RuneScape: On the surface, it seems like a decent place to live, but look closer. The gods most people worship are Jerkass Gods at best, viewing their followers as little more than tools to use to overcome the other gods. In the north, a massive area of land has been blasted into a cursed, lawless wasteland by ancient spells, where hideous monsters roam freely and even worse things lurk underground. To the east lies the city of vampires, monsters who farm humans for their blood and seek to invade the rest of the world. A race of Humanoid Abominations seek to attain power enough to ascend to godhood, while their draconian counterparts intend to burn the world to the ground. An ancient, immeasurably powerful Eldritch Abomination tries to break through to consume the souls of everyone in the world, while another one from the depths of the ocean plans to take over the minds of everyone it sees. A seemingly infinite dungeon appears out of nowhere in the far north, confusing and killing those who attempt to enter. All over, you can find tears and holes in the fabric of reality itself, many of which lead to places you're better off not going to.
Many Mario titles appear bright and colorful, and many of the Mushroom Kingdom's inhabitants seem nice enough. Despite that main antagonist Bowser still attempts to make trouble, there are now others worse than him that are more responsible for the inner Crapsack World. The trouble he now makes generally makes him more of a nuisance than a threat (except in the Galaxy games), while even one-time/RPG villains are the main causes of the Crapsack World. Bowser even has to become an occasional ally of his enemies to stop these worse threats.
In Beyond Good And Evil, Hillys seems nice, even though the Domz are invading it. The great alpha sections protect the poor citizens and defend the cities. Only that the Alpha Sections ARE Domz, abduct citizens to turn then into more Domz, the ones who know it are portrayed as rebels, and even the protagonist being the Domz' power source. Not to forget the scene in the very beginning, where the shield for the orphan's shelter cannot be activated because they lack the money for the energy...
Terraria has the Hallow, which is happy, full of rainbows and unicorns, and also monsters trying to kill you. Oh, and did we mention that's it's the only thing that can stop The Corruption on hardmode. However, it's only in hardmode.
City of Heroes Going Rogue. In this expansion for the popular Superpowered MMORPG, you play from levels 1-20 in an alternate dimension from Primal Earth called Praetoria, a gleaming silver and gold utopian empire where everyone is satisfied and Emperor Cole is a nice man, right? Wrong. This is a great example of a Crapsaccharine World because Cole is a Big Bad in a hero's outfit. You can play as Loyalist or Resistance, both of which can be bad or good. In this world, some of Cole's servants can read your MIND to an extent- they detect hostility or dislike toward Cole. The PPD (Praetorian Police Department, not to be confused with PARAGON Police Department) will prosecute anyone Cole or his laws tell them to, and sometimes independently use their power just to punish those they dislike. Nearly everyone with a position of power in Cole's empire only seeks to become more powerful, instead of helping the people. These are ones who chose the Power path. There are those who do work for the people, the ones who choose the Responsibility path, but they're unfortunately rare. There is a Resistance you can side with, and you get two kinds of people there- Crusaders, who will do ANYTHING to bring down Cole, and Wardens, who prefer to do it covertly. You'll find yourself fighting more Mooks in Power and Crusader alignments. The story reveals that Cole is a huge Jerkass who will attempt to silence anyone who opposes him and his empire.
While most of the setting of Dark Souls is a straight up Crapsack World, Anor Londo hides it a little better. On the surface, it's a shiny city that is one of the few places resisting the darkness ruled by a beautiful goddess. It's all an illusion, courtesy of Gwyndolin. The sunlight, the beautiful goddess, everything.
The setting from DMFA has hues of this: while it is pretty colorful and cute, the conflict between Beings and Creatures is highly visible — Creatures consider Beings "fair game", and generally have few qualms about killing them out of sheer catharsis (and usually get away with it), while Beings usually make that distinction based on sapience. The fact that there is an Omniscient Council of Vagueness'' with unclear objectives doesn't help.
DMFA was originally basically Furcadia fanart... (see above)
Last Res0rt shows signs of this — the oh-so-Cyberpunk story is betrayed by a colorful cast of furries, females, and cuddlesome robots.
Sonichu, albeit unintentionally. The author, one Christian Weston Chandler, means for it to be a sweet, happy comic... but the sex, rage, insertion of real-life people as villains and Disproportionate Retribution upon said people, when combined with the crude, child-like art style is just creepy. Also taking into consideration that CWCVille, according to Word of God, has no elections and therefore is basically a dictatorship, and it just gets worse.
Kevin and Kell. A cute, quirky world of Funny Animal characters... where fangs are more powerful than ideals and savage instinct triumphs over reason and empathy. By the world's local ethos (its ok to kill as long as you eat it) ethnic cleansing could just be another name for a BBQ. Perhaps even worse, a Ripped from the Headlines storyline reveals that there is an organization dedicated to opposing this - WikiBeaks, which publishes confidential data that has the potential to cause the predators some serious harm: They post which species are targeted, confidential hunting areas, that sort of thing. Sounds nice? Too bad they are being directly persecuted by the government. That's right, if you're a prey species, there's literally nothing out there to protect you, and the only effective organization that even tries is acting illegally.
4U City in the recent Sluggy Freelance dimension-hopping arc TRIES to be this... It's referred to as a 'Utopia', and everybody is mandatorily happy - any sign of unhappiness results in being immediately pumped full of 'Happy drugs', while any serious departure from the accepted happiness-standard gets you thrown down the 'Judgement Chute', never to be seen again. However, despite this, it fails MISERABLY at looking like a utopia at first glance, due to the fact that it's always raining.
Also, the "Dimension of Lame," whose inhabitants are so pacifist that they embrace the invading demons and readily offer to sacrifice the one person who has any chance of saving them, all in the name of preventing more bloodshed.
Absolutely inverted by Mortasheen The setting is a sprawling continent-sized toxic urban wasteland of twisted science and sorcery that is home to degenerate humans and hundreds of species of horrific bloodthirsty monsters (many created by the humans as living tools or weapons) where life is either nasty, brutish and short or agonizingly drawn out for far too long... and yet most sentient beings who live there cheerfully take it all in stride, and behave pretty much like you'd expect if this was a standard happy-go-lucky Pokémon-like world instead of a hell-world that could otherwise give Warhammer 40,000 a run for its money. However, all the horrible monsters are still nice to their trainers, including the Devilbirds, the Unknowns and the Wormbrains
Charlie The Unicorn was established as being here once. Charlie's kidney was stolen at the end of first film.
Natsumi Step! is a cute, relaxing flash video about a girl on an adventure in a magical place, where she meets cute animals has a lot of fun. She seems to have suffered some heartbreak and depression in the past, but that's all better now, and she gets a happy ending! But there's something... off about it. She kills her boyfriend, possibly with a crowbar, then kills herself. She's in purgatory, and is on her way to Hell at the end of the video. "Natsumi Step!" is meant as "Natsumi stepping" down a train station platform and killing herself.
Neopia is one of the best examples. It's a virtual world from a kids site, right? How bad could it possibly be? How about the resident medievalArcadia only got that way because so-called "heroic"knights STOLE the MacGuffin that made their land that way from a city of Perfect Pacifist People who were helpless to stop these brutes from running roughshod over them and destroying their way of life, and THEN their land became Mordor while the thieves are still called heroes, even the fatking at fault for all of this? No? Then how about a emperor casts a horrific curse on his own kingdom and his own Son to become immortal, and THEN kills his daughter-in-law! That not evil enough for you? What if I told you that a vicious Pirate SUCCESSFULLY destroyed an entire Underwater City, and when they were rebuilding, he attacked them AGAIN? And let's not forget when a sorceress raised a valid point that the supposed guardians of this world do nothing but sit around looking pretty while the regular Neopians struggle with war and disease, and the Faeries are often the CAUSE of those wars? And you know what the sorceress does? Shecrashes Faerieland into Neopia. If none of these dark plots are enough for you, just think - the items related to faeries are way expensive beyond players' ability to buy, and they require players to earn money for months or even years to even get one of them!!
A video by TZ which starts off with two bears in an idyllic paradise telling a joke to eachother. It's an aristocrats joke. The contents of the joke do not match the graphical style at all. Watch the video here, but be warned, it's definitely NSFW.
The movie about Facebook's creation, The Social Network, also shows signs of this. All of the main characters become rich & successful for creating the site... while screwing each other, and having severe emotional problems due to decisions made.
Facebook is especially so given how many people treat it as Serious Business. Mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandparents watch your every move, not to mention companies are sure to go straight to facebook to see if you are worthy of hiring.
Brian Bull's Day Of The Barney Trilogy has Barney and Baby Bop take over the world via a worldwide concert in which Barney encourages the children to kill any adult they can manage to with great success. The adults are driven into hiding and Barney and Baby Bop take the children under their wing as their Special Friends. The kids are well-fed, adequately supplied with Barney toys, and Barney and Baby Bop are always happy to play games and sing songs with them. And when they turn thirteen, the kids get a Special Gift that turns out to be immediate butchering with a machete if you are a boy or Medical Rape and Impregnate if you are a girl. The girls do end up dying as the Loved Ones burst out of their chests, but much later on than the boys...
Heaven in the Salvation War. The Eternal City is filled with temples, covered with jewels from a thousand worlds, and all designed to praise the almighty God, made to wonder the angels with it's beauty. The humans, however, get to live in slums as serfs, constantly living in fear of offending the insane God who is to blind to see that humanity is on the brink of destroying them. The city itself, as noted by several characters, has many cracks and structural problems below the jewels and artificial beauty.
Jasper: Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts. Boy, I'm getting mighty sick of this. (pop! Jasper is transformed into a dog with his head on it) Woof! Woof!
Also "Treehouse of Horror V" when Homer returns from the past to find that Flanders is ruler of the world.
South Park was like this until season 5 came along, and at that point it just became a textbook example of a Crapsack World.
The entire premise of Happy Tree Friends. Although, most of the "crapsack" part of it comes not from anyone being particularly horrible (except maybe Flippy), but simply from most of the inhabitants being incredibly clumsy...
Moral Orel: a seemingly nice suburban town full of depressed, miserable, and extremely disturbed souls trying their damnedest to appear wholesome and normal. Seasons 1 and 2 played it for laughs. Season 3... not somuch.
Futurama, the world of the future looks exactly as we envisioned; flying cars, jetpacks, lazers and a cure to everything. Except that everybody's too poor to afford anything, war is fought on a bigger scale than ever, and everything everywhere is run by idiots.
One episode has several of the characters end up in an Alternate Universe which was almost exactly like the Silver AgeSuperhero comics the Green Lantern used to read as a child. On first glance, the world looked like a stereotypical wholesome and child-friendly '50s superhero setting. Upon closer inspection, the world turned out to be a post-nuclear war landscape whose survivors were forced to live in a psychic Masquerade generated by the mutated Kid Sidekick of the original heroes of that world.
There are other hints of the slightly crappy nature coming through as well, in the form of Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used To Be: Hawkgirl doesn't take too kindly to having the only other female superhero suggest they make cookies for the menfolk, and Green Lantern doesn't know how to take a white superhero calling him "a credit to [his] people."
At a cursory glance, the world the Justice Lords created might look like this. All the super villains are caught, Gotham City is actually clean, and crime has been so thoroughly eradicated that the local superheros are bored out of their minds. Of course, the saccharine side of things is really paper-thin, as it's no secret that the reason for all of this was because the Justice Lords went Knight Templar on the world and took to ruling it with an iron fist.
Adventure Time takes place in the Land Of Ooo, a Fantasy Kitchen Sink filled with brightness, colour, and a literalSugar Bowl in the Candy Kingdom. Except that background elements imply (and Word Of God states) that Ooo is actually After the End, the "Mushroom War" devastating the planet and turning the survivors into the vast array of creatures shown. In addition to hordes of Always Chaotic Evil monsters at every turn and especially horrifying things like Marceline's Dad and The Lich lurking around, Ooo isn't exactly a pleasant place to live. The characters seem geuninely happy about their world (except Ice King, but that's mostly due to him being The Sociopath who can't connect to anyone), but few of them are particularly intelligent, Finn included.
Jonny Quest, if one considers the Venture Brothers as an extended canon (which it is, according to the Word Of God). While Jonny as a boy was happy and content traveling the world and solving mysteries, the grown up Jonny in the Ventureverse is initially shown as highly neurotic due to the years as a boy adventurer, basically implying this to be the fate of all 10 year-old mystery solvers.
Avatar The Last Airbender: Ba Sing Se. A giant, bustling city that is efficient and pleasant to live in (at least for the middle and upper classes), but the world war with the Fire Nation is kept secret (even from the Earth King) and those who try to reveal the truth find themselves spirited away and brainwashed by the Dai Li (their secret police).
Not to mention you're better off as a villain or Designated Hero than a genuine good person. You turn into a Chew Toy or Butt Monkey that begs for death to come sooner. And gender politics, its ok for women to abuse or rape their partners or other people. All in the name of Rule of Funny.
Super Jail! is a show that brings this easily. Just pay attention to the locales Jailbot flies over and not think this world is an anus of hell.
In ThunderCats (2011) this is quite deliberately employed as the premiere's opening minutes treat the viewer to a gorgeous aerial Epic Tracking Shot of a Shining City, the Catfolk kingdom of Thundera, while a soothing narrator tells of the kingdom's "peace and prosperity" and its ruler's "just heart." Less than a minute after the narrator finishes speaking, the camera tilts downward from a bright, painterly city vista to dark, miserable slums where "Alley Cats" are violently beating a hapless Dog.
In The Powerpuff Girls, the city of Townsville. It's frequently shown to be a friendly big city with people that are willing to help, but it's always attacked by monsters and is inhabited by all sorts of criminals and villains.
The bright and cheerful setting of My Little Pony makes it popular for Darker and Edgier fanworks. Apparently, the writers of the G1 series agreed, because damn if the ponies didn't set up shop right in the middle of snake's nest of evil. The first special had some kind of demon kidnapping ponies and turning them into dragons. The second had a catgirlsorceress try to make the ponies into her potion making slaves. The movie starred a group of witches that tried to kill the ponies and wreck the place, because it was getting too nice. Oh, and because it was a barren wasteland before the ponies moved in. The series would establish that no, that kind of thing is not an anomaly. After viewing a marathon of the series, one can be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the ponies are a bunch of Stepford Smilers living as well as they can as an act of defiance to the world that they're stuck in.
In the latest version of the show, the heroines' town — which is on the edge of a monster-infested forest — has recently suffered a bursting dam, a plague of insects, a supposedly incurable disease, a riot caused by a mad wizard with mind-control magic; attacks by a dragon, a hellhound and a giant bear made of space; and cruel gods of darkness and chaos. And the setting's still upbeat.
In fact they seem to think the monster-infested part isn't the real creepy part about said woods, its the fact that clouds move, the plant grow, and the animals take care of themselves, ALL ON THEIR OWN!!!
