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alt title(s): Sick Sad World; World Half Empty; Sad Sack World "All the good people of this world are already dead."
One of The Seven Basic Plots is man against the environment, fighting against the world... but he may not always win.
One environment that is singularly cruel and formidable is the Crapsack World. It is a horrible place to live, and it corrupts its inhabitants into perpetuating that nastiness against each other. A Crapsack World is a world which can be summed up as "pessimism has taken over" or "the world can't be redeemed." More prosaically, it sucks.
Although there are various ways a Crapsack World can be depicted, it usually has the following traits. Physically, the place will be a Wretched Hive full of vice where everything is Darker And Edgier. It will be (over) populated by criminals, not-so- Innocent Bystanders and Gullible Lemmings; it will be run by bad and incompetent cops, Mega Corps with their Corrupt Corporate Executives, and/or President Evil. If the show has elements of magic, the setting will probably cross with Low Fantasy. Expect the villains to have good publicity and the inhabitants to die like animals; if the villains aren't popular, then they are so overwhelmingly powerful that nobody dares to fight them. In truly extreme cases, they suffer as badly as everyone else.
Metaphysically, it will be firmly in the cynical end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, so at best it will have Grey And Gray Morality, but more than likely it will have Black And Grey Morality. It won't have working Karma, laser guided, approximate, or otherwise; villains won't just be Karma Houdinis — they will win more often than not. The heroes protagonists in this setting will be Anti Heroes at best and at worst so unsympathetic and repulsive that the villains start looking good by comparison.
This lack of charisma on the heroes' part is because winning requires that they embrace the setting's darkness and sacrifice a great deal... which will end up being a Pyrrhic Victory as the Diabolus Ex Machina snatches their hopes away. All the while the Karma Meter is brutal on the Player Characters, often turning them bad. Another interpretation is that the setting itself is so dark as to make the Deadpan Snarker Anti Hero seem sympathetic by comparison. Well, it is kind of hard to portray a hero wearing Jade Colored Glasses in a Sugar Bowl as cool. Any truly good heroes will get squashed as a Family Unfriendly Aesop against naivete.
From here, the Crapsack World may be further tailored to suit the Author’s needs. They can do this by choosing whether it will be Dramatic or Comedic; Mutable or Immutable.
A dramatic Crapsack World likely has a lot of angst, plenty of Dark And Troubled Pasts, and anyone can be Killed Off For Real. Expect characters who do the right thing to suffer for it. Expect characters who do the wrong thing to prosper... and then suffer.
If the Crapsack World is played for laughs, it's likely a Black Comedy or Sadist Show populated by idiots and Butt Monkeys. The "upside" is that it's usually parodic and funny in its extremes. Though people die left and right, it likely has Negative Continuity to facilitate the inhabitants' suffering.
An immutable Crapsack World has corruption and pain Inherent In The System, both physically and metaphysically. Trying to fight this corruption will always result in it winning.
A mutable Crapsack World simply starts out as crappy, but a determined protagonist and his posse, be they the Knight In Shining Armor or a simple old PI, can actually cause positive changes in the setting. Compare this one with A World Half Full. If the would looks all sweetness and light on the outside but is more of a Crap Sack World underneath the trope is Crap Saccharine World.
If a Crapsack World is crappy because it is run by kids, it is a Teenage Wasteland.
Crapsack Worlds are common in videogames, because they give a player a great justification for the large number of enemies they typically have to deal with and the conflicts they find themselves in.
When adding examples, remember that this isn't a subjective trope: a Crapsack World sucks for everyone. If you have to say "This troper thinks" or "Arguably," it doesn't belong here.
Well, not everyone. I'm sure Kim Jung Il thinks North Korea is a nice place, as opposed to everyone else who would disagree, although not publicly, of course.
This trope has some dangers. If a story's primary conflict is between two parties that are equally crapsack, then there is a risk of Darkness Induced Audience Apathy. However, a Crapsack World can easily contain a meaningful conflict. For instance, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four is undoubtedly a Crapsack World but the primary conflict is Winston against his State. Since Winston is not an evil person, the conflict between him and and his Crapsack World does not suffer Darkness Induced Audience Apathy.
Please do not list Real Life examples. Though numerous and valid, they attract too much flame and natter.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- The City In Blame! is immeasurably vast and completely unmonitored, with countless civilisations existing within it; most of which are run by cruel and corrupt cyborg overlords. A common goal for anyone in the 'verse who hasn't already modified (or had modified) their bodies to the point of looking only vaguely human, is obtaining access to the Net Sphere - which would serve the duel purpose of stopping the chaotic expansion of The City (which, by the end of the manga, had consumed a majority of the Solar System) and providing an on-line paradise for anyone and everyone. That's right; in this world, absolute escapism is the only hope humanity has left.
- Go Nagai's Devilman, at least the manga version. Half the time, Akira's efforts amount to nothing, if he even gets the chance to fight the Monster Of The Week. Humanity's reaching the end of its rope, demons can possess people with little to no effort, and humanity believes signs of said possessions can be seen in people that don't follow the lock-step. Hence, by the final volume in the series, Witch Hunts are carried out... except half the time the actual possessed people take part to hide their true nature. And the end result? Our hero loses faith in humans and kills a lot of people.
- For the most part life in the GUNNM / Battle Angel Alita universe sucks hard. The few somewhat decent places happen to use things like mind control in order to maintain said decency. We don't know very much about Jupiter and Venus other than the facts that the people of Venus eats babies (genetically engineered to be non-sapient) and in both planets the people have biological immortality, which as a result of this they do not allow the birth of any more children. The places that don't have this limit are in a civil war (Mars), or just happen to be hellholes that don't legally exist which results in assorted miscreants doing whatever the hell they want in said places including and definitely not limited to wiping them out, which occurred on Earth and some asteroid colonies (like the nursery colony the Guntroll team was from).
- Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou does the literal-and-then-some version, but without the moral decay.
- The world of Neon Genesis Evangelion. After half of us have died, Humanity is left in a post-apocalyptic death race against the Angels. The only means of defense is to send what few children were born at the right time out in gigantic Angel-derived Evangelions. All this as the masterminds behind Earth's defense are secretly planning a controlled burn scenario, wanting to end the world in the manner that suits them. Add in the hellish commonness of horrifying things happening to people and the overall bitterness present in most of the cast. The only thing saving it is that all the dead people can eventually be reborn if they choose to be.
- Mirai Nikki. For perspective, the former most sympathetic character, the Woobie lead, was last seen massacring orphans in a desperate attempt to bring his dead parents back to life. His father killed his mother, and then his father was killed by the mob. The second most sympathetic character is a full-blown terrorist Mad Bomber. God's dying, ya see, and he's choosing His successor via battle royale. One of the other combatants who's told to kill by God was four years old.
- Where are the police? Da Chief was corrupt and also a contestant in the running for God, and so he was willing to frame and kill protagonists to get an opportunity to save his dying son. The guy in charge after that is working for the mayor, who, you guessed it, is ALSO corrupt and killing people to become God.
- The Toku style Hero of Justice is a vigilante psychopath.
- The female lead is an Ax Crazy Yandere who, upon being told by the protagonist that he loved her, drugged him and tied him to a chair so he'd never leave. He got out, but he's still with her. Yay!
- Between the warmongering kingdoms and their corrupt nobility, the heresy-crushing Holy See, and the evil Godhand and their ravenous demonic Apostles, life in the world of Berserk really, really, really, really, really, really sucks hardcore. The world seems to exist only to make people as miserable as possible and to give the demons somewhere to play; humanity exists so that the demons have something to play with. The biggest idealist in the entire setting (if you could call a ruthless White Haired Pretty Boy like Griffith idealistic, which again speaks volumes about how crappy the world is) snapped under the pressure and is now the Big Bad.
- Claymore is in much the same boat as Berserk above, as far as ravenous, human-eating monsters are concerned (there are lots of them and they are pretty much unstoppable for normal humans), but normal people tend to be, on average, significantly nicer than they are in Berserk. But then the heroines find out that everyone on their island, demons, Awakened Beings, and Claymores alike, are being manipulated so that they can become perfect weapons to fight the truly horrific monsters on the mainland.
- Played extremely straight in the anime Texhnolyze. The entire population of Lux are either: a) evil, selfish bastards, b) poor broken woobies, or c) some combination of the two. Not to mention that they all live in a cave underground and the entire city survives because of Rafia, which grows from people. And don't even mention above ground...
- Ergo Proxy. 85% of the world's population has been wiped out. The outside environment is completely destroyed and most people who set foot outside are killed from infection. People on Earth are unable to reproduce. Essentially all humans on Earth live in dystopic domes. What's more, the Ridiculously Human Robots are all going insane, and the... things... directly ruling the Earth will all die when the permanent cloud cover dissipates and they get exposed to UV radiation.
- Wolf's Rain takes place 200 years After The End of civilization as we know it. Most of humanity is crammed into crumbling domed concrete cities ruled by warring Nobles, and the environment outside is slowly decaying. Maybe the most telling line in the entire series is spoken by the wolf Hige, who looks at the sky and says, "C'mon, birds, let's see some flying up there." But we don't see any birds at all after that — maybe they're all extinct. Until the final episode, when the world is regenerated.
- Modern Tokyo is portrayed as a World Half Empty in Tokyo Babylon, with frequent suicides, dreary lives, and gloomy commentary on consumerism. All designed to Break The Cutie, naturally.
- Post-apocalyptic Tokyo in Akira.
- Most of the stories in Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix series. The historical chapters feature a decidedly unromantic depiction of feudal Japan full of war, famine, disease, filth, corruption, death & copious amounts of mutilation with sharp objects. But at least the characters in those stories had the breathtaking beauty of nature to raise their spirits. Those who have the misfortune of being born in this world's bleak, Zeerusted future get no such luck. In addition to having all the above mentioned problems, the world is ecologically screwed, full of bigots who mistreat clones and robots, and occasionally ruled by an oppressive theocracy. After people start piling into rocket ships to escape this awful mess, the Earth eventually faces an immigration crisis when the space colonists & their children start coming back in droves because most of the other planets in the universe are even worse than the world that they left! When humanity finally goes extinct in the (chronologically) final chapter, it comes as something of a relief.
- The war-torn desert planet that Now And Then Here And There takes place on, mostly because it's a (slightly) exaggerated version of modern Africa.
- The planet is actually Earth, 10 billion years in the future. The sun is expanding into a red giant and will eventually destroy the world.
- The post-apocalyptic wasteland that is the world of Fist Of The North Star. If you're an Average Joe/Jane, you're a (literally) dirt-poor peasant scraping by on your meager provisions. You'll be constantly on the lookout for roving brigands who, if you're lucky, will steal all of your possessions, effectively sentencing you to death in the desert wasteland, and savagely beat you. If unlucky, you'll be beaten to death, and possibly raped if you're female. Also, you must worry about power-mad martial arts practitioners enslaving you and your loved ones and slaughtering you on a whim as they set to establish themselves or their empire. And just to make things worse, this isn't one of those nuclear After The End series that forgot about fallout; if you don't starve and aren't murdered, you might end up with radiation sickness. If you happen to practice the series' brand of martial arts, odds are you'll fare little better. If you're a low-level villain/lackey, you'll undoubtedly fall under the head-detonating protagonist, Kenshiro, or possibly to another "good guy". If a low-level hero, you must constantly battle thugs, and there's no telling when the previously mentioned power-mad martial artist (who will be light years beyond your ability) will carve a swath of destruction through your homeland, either killing, enslaving, or imprisoning you. If a high level villain, odds are even greater that you'll be killed by Kenshiro, though there is a rare chance of being killed by another high-profile martial artist (such as Rei or Toki). Finally, Kenshiro, the protagonist, has arguably the worst fate of any character in the series. He loses his father; all three of his brothers - granted he kills one of them, (Jagi); his best friend Shin, who was corrupted by Jagi; and virtually all of his other friends. The "off into the sunset" ending with him and his lover, Yuria, is rendered bittersweet when it's revealed Yuria is dying of radiation poisoning and has a limited time left to live.
- There is one brighter possibility in all of this: the environment has begun to recover slightly by the end of the series. And you have to figure most of the bandits are dead by that point.
- Though from what was seen in the New Fist of the North Star OVAs, set years later, the world hasn't really decided to clean itself up just yet.
- The world of Casshern Sins is a decaying mess; all the robots are rusting, and presumably something equivalent is happening to any humans. Only the protagonist is unaffected by the ruin, but he's the one that caused it in the first place; and he's amnesiac, so he can't work out why 99% of the population wants to kill and eat him.
- Jigoku Shoujo is ostensibly set in the real world. But with each grudge Enma Ai satisfies, it's more obvious that hers is a world of miserable bastards. On the one hand, we have her targets, almost always selfish people who deceive, abuse, and hurt those around them. On the other hand, we have her contractors — who, while usually sympathetic, nonetheless resort to damning their enemies and themselves to hell to solve their problems. (The most generous thing you can call it is assassination.) And then there are the cases where the contractors are just as bad, and even where the targets are completely innocent. Ai will take pretty much anyone's contract, and she never lacks for work. The ultimate proof of this World Half Empty is the final storyline of Futakomori, in which hundreds of people in one town go vengeance-crazy, damning even their friends and family. It's a great show, but watching too many episodes in a row is hard on the soul.
- Then there was the episode where a nurse (who was pretty much a good, hardworking person in every way) is sent to hell by a person she doesn't know because said person was a sick bastard who wanted to send her to hell because... well, just because he could. World Half Empty is a massive Understatement for the world the series is set in.
- Pick a Hideshi Hino manga. Any Hideshi Hino manga.
- Any work of Mohiro Kitoh qualifies, most especially Bokurano (the manga at least), which takes in a Multiverse Half Empty with, without giving anything away, about as hopeless a scenario as anyone can imagine. As well as effectiveness savaging modern day life, his work focuses on the individual effort of people to stay noble in the face of such circumstances.
- The Universal Calendar of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. The One Year War which causes the deaths of half the population of the Solar System is between the Earth Federation, a corrupt, incompetent, and racist government unable to properly defend the solar system vs the Principality of Zeon, who started the war by gassing a colony full of millions of people and dropping it on the Earth. Even after the One Year War was over war constantly sprung up due to the weakness (and/or the malice) of the Earth Federation, and Complete Monsters are incredibly common. You can seriously argue that the solar system would have been better off if both sides had wiped each other out.
- The Hentai anthology Cool Devices.
- Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (Goodbye Mr. Despair) takes place in a world where a suicidal, paranoid Large Ham megalomaniac is actually one of the most sane and collected members of the cast. This is all Played For Laughs, of course.
- The Code Geass world isn't too great either. There's the Holy Britannian Empire, which is an oppressive, totalitarian, and Darwinist empire where you're either a citizen or a slave (slaves can sign up to be citizens, but just barely, and they don't get afforded many more rights for the effort). If he gets bored or feels slighted in any way, the Emperor of Britannia will order your country to be either enslaved or razed to the ground. Then there's the Chinese Federation, an overpopulated union of states where starvation is more common than food. Finally, there's the Euro Universe (E.U. for short), a loosely-maintained and hardly-defended union similar to the Chinese Federation but with better living accomdations. They actually make it out to be a pretty nice place with equal rights and everything... until Britannia conquers most of it.
- Barefoot Gen. An autobiographical work set in the author's youth. He grew up in Japan during World War Two. The climax takes place on August 6, 1945. No fantasy or fiction is needed to create a world of horrors, we ourselves have done a fine job of it.
- Japan in Speed Grapher is a crapsack world. Everyone person in power is corrupt, and a mega corporation has bribed even the police force. All but a handful of characters are complete monsters.
- Elfen Lied is set in a world with corruption at every corner, and some of the worst Complete Monsters you'll find including child rapists and sadists. Even little children are rotten and willing to Kick The Dog and kill it!
- Death Note is a world that apparently is riddled with criminals being that pages upon pages of them are getting killed. One particular owner of the death note fills a complete page with names per day. Eventually when Kira rules the world and governments all over surrender to his rule or accept him out of fear, and he starts getting more and more extreme, even killing the lazy, we have ourselves a Crapsack World.
- This Troper just views that world as being ours but with more media coverage of crimes. Due to more media coverage the faces and names of alleged criminals are everywhere. So Kira is just writing down the names of everyone he views as a criminal not actual criminals that were tried and convected.
- Also, the first time we saw him fill a page in the manga, he stated that a lot of his targets were non-criminals whose deaths weren't being noticed by the media. The criminals got heart attacks, the people who he considered immoral or unproductive were dying of illness or apparent accidents. While he made sure to keep the high-profile murders coming, and used criminals for most of his experimentation, there were days only a few criminals died.
- Blue Drop. If you're a Magical Girl, you're a bomb disposal unit. If you're a schoolgirl, you're little more than a sex slave. If you're a guy, you're used as a lab-rat for transgender experiments if you're lucky. If you're not so lucky as to be part of an experiment, you're an animal, a third-class citizen treated like freed Africans in Antebellum America- not a slave, but only just. If you're one of the Arume, alien lesbians who made Earth like this, then you're living with the knowledge that your species is extinct and living on borrowed time, the only option for survival being a cultural change none of them have the courage to make. Both sides are ravaged by and living in the ruins of a war that was literally entirely pointless because of that lack of courage.
- Amberground in Tegami Bachi is a corrupt world of perpetual night, where a man-made sun shines over the capital city of Akatsuki. Life is rough almost everywhere, and even the people assigned to deliver some happiness throughout the world through letters—the Tegami Bachi (Letter Bees)—could be killed by or lose their Life Force (Heart) to mechanical monsters along the way.
- The world of Sai Kano, while never directly shown, is undoubtedly this. We know that there's a large-scale war going on from the beginning, but halfway through we find out that the protagonist's hometown is peaceful because Chie's specifically protecting it, and everywhere else has gone to hell. By the end of the series, all the different countries have either been destroyed, or are committed to plans of mutually assured destruction, and Chie's lost most of her humanity and turned into a Woobie Destroyer Of Worlds out of a desire to give everyone a nice, painless death.
Comic Books
- Basin City a.k.a. "Sin City" from Sin City is one of the darker examples of a Crapsack World. Even the heroes of the story tend to be ruthless sociopaths.
- New Port City, the setting of the comic book Bomb Queen, is a criminal mecca where virtually every citizen is a crook, murderer, drug dealer, member of a hate group, or at the very least beats and/or rapes their children. Even people who were normal before they moved there turn evil. The city's dictator is a supervillainess with a sky-high approval rating. Superheroes are illegal. Throughout the city are designated crime zones where anything goes.
- In some versions of Batman (especially those by Frank Miller) Gotham City is depicted as one of these, particularly in stories set early in Batman's career. It's often shown to be blighted by the worst in urban decay and crime, and it's often suggested that the entire police department is corrupt and venal apart from James Gordon.
- Nightwing used to take place in Bludhaven, Gotham's sister city, which was, if possible, even worse. The corruption was so institutionalized that the clean cops were the ones that had to hide their actions. Sadly, just as things were starting to get better and the police department actually being cleaned up and turned honest, the entire city was nuked into a radioactive wasteland.
- The most infamous version is All-Star Batman & Robin where the super heroes are either sociopaths (Batman, Black Canary, Wonder Woman), future sociopaths (Batgirl, Robin), or morons (Superman, Green Lantern).
- Grant Morrison rejects this incarnation of Gotham, preferring a sparkling divine city of the arts (except the art is crime) over the bleak and grimy shithole Miller writes. Why? Because he says that if Gotham were so disgusting it would mean Batman has failed in his objective.
- The universe of Judge Dredd often looks a lot like this, and MegaCity One certainly does.
- San Futuro the home city of Marshal Law is a post-earthquake wreck largely populated with psychologically damaged war veterans, who also have superpowers.
- The Marvel Elseworlds miniseries Ruins basically treats us to the World Half Empty version of the Marvel Universe. Instead of mad science experiments and random genetic mutations turning people into superheroes, they universally end up horrifically deformed or painfully killed — often both. So widespread is the fear, panic, and paranoia that the entire world seems teetering on the edge of complete collapse, and the protagonist, a reporter who doubles as the world's only optimist, has his spirit completely broken by the sheer horror of it all just before he dies a painful death himself.
- Almost any of the graphic novels of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Metabarons is essentially one long Greek tragedy in space; Technopriests features game designers worshipping a Cosmic Horror whose purpose is to plunge the universe into a deep, inescapable depression; and Megalex features a polluted Earth where the inhabitants make endangered species extinct for fun.
- The setting of Mark Millar's Wanted plays with this: the villains who finally beat the heroes changed reality to make it a Crapsack World... in other words, ours.
- Except it's worse than our world, because it's our world secretely ruled by a conspiracy of supervillains, who can do everything they want, we have no power to change the situation and it wasn't always this way. At least our world isn't (I hope)
- The City (it has no other name) and much of the planet, from what little is seen of it, of the series Transmetropolitan.
- Spider Jerusalem notes that it was even worse when he was a kid, though, and it seems like it's pretty good for the "haves". The "have-nots", on the other hand...
- Spider doesn't seem to agree. "The future is inherently a good thing. And we move into it one winter at a time. Things get better one winter at a time. So if you're going to celebrate something, then have a drink on this: the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year."
- The world of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, especially as filtered through the eyes of its pessimistic main character.
- Just how much of a Crapsack World that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac takes place in is best exemplified in the sixth issue, which occurs after Johnny's "death" and takes place almost entirely in the afterlife. Johnny finds that Hell is almost the same as Earth, the only major difference being, as Johnny puts it, "At least on Earth there were nice people mixed in with the social maggots."
- To be fair, this is Jhonen Vasquez... The filler strips were even greater offenders, with the tortured Fillerbunny and, worst if just because of it's purpose of being nothing other than a Crapsack World: Happy Noodle Boy. "It's quite popular with the homeless insane."
- Sam & Max live in this kind of world. Although it's downplayed in the animated series and the games, in the comic book it's much more evident. The titular characters seem constantly amused and delighted that they live in such a horrible world though, which stifles the more depressing and darker parts of this trope.
- Shakara takes place in a crapsack universe. In the past, the Shakara Federation ruled the galaxy with an iron fist, ruthlessly crushing dissent and forcing all other species and civilisation to conform to their own model. Eventually, Lara Procorpio released a genetic plague upon them, wiping out the entire species - at which point the alliance backing her started conquering the galaxies and spreading terror, chaos, and genocide across the stars. The last of the Shakara, a liquid being also called Shakara, lives only to see vengeance for its creators, which it accomplishes by committing xenocide on a scale that would be impressive in Warhammer 40000 and only comes across as slightly sympathetic because its enemies are worse.
- New York City as presented in Watchmen is Crapsack on a level rivaled perhaps only by Taxi Driver. What's interesting is that the presence of superheroes actually caused it to become like that. It turns out that throughout the entire book Veidt has been manipulating things behind the scenes with the ultimate goal of subverting this trope and making the world a better place to live. The means with which he does this are questionable, however.
- Ruins is a Crapsack take on the Marvel universe, where people are generally paranoid, Captain America is a cannibal, and exposure to radiation just gives you cancer.
- The DCU's Earth-3, especially in the Earth 2 Graphic Novel. Evil is considered good, so Jeffrey Dahmer is president and people engage in recreational puppy kicking.
Newspaper Comics
- Almost the whole point of Dilbert. Creator Scott Adams raises the suggestion in The Dilbert Principle in citing his reader mail that this is effectively Truth In Television (except, of course, not television).
- The once-lighthearted Funky Winkerbean seems to be set in one of these nowadays.
- Bloom County, especially towards the end. Of course, the door to Outland is in the worst part of town.
Fanfiction
Film
- "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."
- No Country For Old Men, period.
- The Third Man - what's really depressing is that it was shot ON LOCATION in a bombed-out, post WWII-era Vienna. That's OUR World Half Empty.
- Fitting, given that it involved Orson Welles.
- In the movie Lawn Dogs, the whole town of Camelot Gardens is full of upper middle class cretins who are distrustful of outsiders, and obsessed with moving up the social ladder. Trent, one of the movie's two heroes, is suspected for crimes he didn't commit, and even physically attacked, twice, for things he didn't do. Devon, a kid, has parents who try to use her only to promote their own image within the town and help their own social status. One can hardly blame Trent and Devon for becoming Rebellious Spirits. They are practically the only sympathetic people in the whole film!
- London as depicted in Sweeney Todd. Then again, at the time it was almost Truth In Television. Sweeney's part of the song "There's No Place Like London" pretty much says it all:
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
and the vermin of the world inhabit it,
and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit,
and it goes by the name of London.
At the top of the hole sit a privileged few,
making mock of the vermin in the lower zoo,
turning beauty into filth and greed. I too
have sailed the world and seen its wonders,
for the cruelty of men is as wondrous as Peru.
But there's no place like London!
- The films of Todd Solondz, particularly Welcome to the Dollhouse, seem to revel in this.
- Repo! The Genetic Opera has an epidemic of organ failures, a country ruled by a corporation that had murder sanctioned by law, and legions of people addicted to painkillers and/or surgery. It's small wonder Nathan locked his daughter in her bedroom.
- Payback. There are literally zero characters who aren't involved in some sort of unsavory business, and the director tried to make the atmosphere as dreary and depressing as possible. The closest this film has to heroes are Porter, a guy who in any other film would be an Anti Villain at best, and his ex-hooker love interest. The film's tagline was 'Get ready to root for the bad guy' which pretty much sums it up.
- Tropa de Elite seems to suggest that, caught between out of control criminals and a vapid, selfish middle class the only options open to the police are corruption or fascism.
- Blade Runner's Los Angeles. Homicidal Artificial Humans? Implied post-World War III setting? Always raining? Blade Runner is the flagship example of a filmic Crapsack World.
- Pottersville from Its A Wonderful Life.
- Children Of Men is a World Half Empty. Massive enviromental pollution, heavy-handed authoritarian police\military presence, a largely apathetic and indifferent population that knows it's the last generation of humanity. Only Britain maintains the semblance of a functioning society, and barely at that.
- The independent film CSA Confederate States Of America depicts a world where the South won the American Civil War. Slavery is still legal and has grown to include Asians. The Confederacy conquered the Union shortly after the Civil War, and then conquered most of Latin America. Having even one drop of non-Caucasian blood means you are automatically put into slavery - unless you're Latino, in which case you live under an apartheid system. Women have not been liberated and sexism still rules. They enter World War II as allies of the Axis and launch a war against Japan, rather than the other way around. One line suggests they've conquered parts of the Middle East as well. All religions not based in Christianity are banned, with the exception of Judaism, and even they have been ghettoized onto Long Island. Many of the people responsible for America's cultural advancement, such as Mark Twain and Elvis Presley, flee to Canada, resulting in that country becoming the entertainment powerhouse. Plus, the two countries are in a Cold War with one another because the country accepts runaway slaves. Being gay also results in blacklisting or some other penalty, it isn't made clear which. In short, not the place you'd want to live.
- The depiction of the world in Se7en is pretty half empty, but I think the last lines of the film say it best:
Somerset: Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.
- Burn After Reading, a pure Shoot The Shaggy Dog story (see its trope entry for the specifics).
- On the upside, Sledge Hammer is a high ranking member of the CIA. And... that's it.
- Let's face it all the Coen Brothers movies depict a crapsack world on some level.
- Death Becomes Her is set in a bleak world where appearances are everything and becoming undead is preferable to aging.
- On the other hand, it is implied that Ernest achieved recognition and popularity in his new life because of his charitable nature, leading him to metaphorically "live forever" in a good way.
- Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Imagine if Monty Python directed 1984, and you should get the general idea of how dark and twisted this movie is.
- Only the wealthy are happy, but they're all corrupt. Even then, a bureaucratic mistake could mess them up.
- Not all the wealthy are corrupt - they're just decadent and utterly moronic. And while the government in 1984 are so terrifying because of their extreme efficiency, in Brazil the horror comes from their utter incompetence, and Kafkaesque bureaucratic insanity that can drive even the most ordinary people to insanity and terrorism.
- Idiocracy
- The Chronicles Of Riddick universe, as first introduced in Pitch Black and expanded on in later films and games, is... well, let's just put it this way: The eponymous Riddick is a sociopathic, amoral mass murderer, and he's the setting's premier good guy. Alien monsters, ravaging hordes, renegade mercenaries turned slavers with a heavy helping of Body Horror, prisons that almost make real-world ones look pleasant by comparison... it's not a nice place.
- Robocop's Detroit.
- Hadleyville, the town of High Noon, Marshal Kane ask the town's help for stopping a returning villain and his gang. Only a 14 year old and his pacifist wife tried to help him. Lampshaded by the judge: "This is just a dirty little village in the middle of nowhere. Nothing that happens here is really important. Now get out."
- The Road to Perdition being a film noir setting has this kind of world.
- Sorority Row is a Slasher Flick and therefore not a pleasant scenario anyway, but even aside from this nearly every 'normal' character is a supremely horrible Jerkass from the therapist who buys sex from his clients in exchange for drugs to the corrupt senator who threatens his potential daughter-in-law to the sadistic backstabbing sorority sisters themselves. When one of the more sympathetic characters in the film is a date rapist you know you are in Crapsack World.
- Dark City, where it's always night, everyone remembers a sunny beach but no one knows how to get there, and telekinetic aliens are experimenting with everyone's minds.
- I Am Legend is set in a post apocalyptic world where a cynical Robert Neville is one of the last survivors of a deadly viral outbreak. Only 1% were immune to this virus, 90% were killed immediately and the other 9% were turned into ravenous zombies trying to infect the remaining survivors. For the first half of the movie, Neville is the only survivor you see, and his dog. Neville searches for other survivors every day to no avail. In flashbacks it's shown that Neville's wife and daughter were killed in an attempt to evacuate the city. Half way through the movie, Neville's dog gets infected and he is forced to kill her, leaving him all alone. He grows even more cynical and even suicidal. That's as crapsack a world as you can expect.
- To be fair, the infected in both the movie and book are much closer to vampires than zombies. But, yeah, still sucks to be Neville.
- Batman Begins and Tim Burton's 1989 Batman set Gotham up quite solidly as this. The Dark Knight begins to get more hopeful.
- Taxi Driver showed New York City through the eyes of a young, disturbed man absolutely sickened by the prostitutes, junkies and pimps. Therefore, it comes out looking like a Hell.
- Back to the Future Part II had a memorable version of this with Biff's version of the world.
Literature
- Earth in Nights Dawn. The environment was completely wrecked; giant storms rage across the surface, forcing all cities to built giant domes to protect themselves. Overpopulation is so great that the anything much greater than jaywalking will cause you to be sent as a indentured servant/slave to a colony world. And the Government allows the crime cults to thrive in the lower parts of the cities.
- A Song Of Ice And Fire wrote this trope courtesy of its deconstructionist nature.
Sandor: There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can't protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, and don't ever believe any different.
Sansa: You're awful.
Sandor: I'm honest. It's the world that's awful.
- House Of The Scorpion is set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, where Mexico is under control of the corrupt quasi-communist Keepers, and life in the United States is so bad, that not only are people crossing the border into the United States, but into Mexico as well.
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Strangely, a rant about death given by a doctor who has just watched a woman he was supposed to be saving die a horrible and painful death is actually the only upbeat part of the entire novel.
- A dramatic fantasy example would be the setting of The First Law. The Kingdom is run by a secret police, many of the main characters are murderers and cutthroats, Aristocrats Are Evil, the Wise Old Mentor likes to blow people up, the peasants are oppressed and the city-folk are slimy.
- The book ends with pretty much no positive changes in the world, a figurehead Jezal as King of the Union, Logen still on the run, Ferro returning to her vengeance-seeking ways, and Bayaz turning out to be the biggest jerk in history.
- The Conan the Barbarian universe is a great example of a Crapsack World in fantasy. What you've got is a Low Fantasy world full of assorted, real-world inspired ancient civilizations, and some barbarians. The choice that the author gives you is basically Barbarism Vs. Civilization. Civilizations are generally decadent and corrupt old empires with scheming, militaristic kings who will do anything up to and including resurrecting a dead sorcerer from an ancient, evil empire (in Hour of the Dragon) to get more land for their nation. The only nation that doesn't seem to be either full of evil sorcerers (Stygia, Koth, Khitai, Zembabwei) or expansionist kings (Koth, Ophir, Nemedia, Turan, everyone else) would be Aquilonia, a Rome/medieval England hybrid that winds up being the first nation that is completely annihilated by a horde of savages, along with every other halfway-decent place to live in Hyboria. Barbarians will find that the line is very thin between savagery and noble savagery, once again, Cimmerians prove to be the only race in this category that have even a rudimentary grasp on morality, everyone else is either a cannibal (the Darfari), an unapologetic savage (Picts fit this perfectly), or a Viking-esque village pillager (the Vanir and Aesir).
- The titular Edge in the obscure fantasy series The Edge Chronicles isn't exactly an ideal spot for a vacation. The Deepwoods are dark and extremely dangerous, the Twilight Woods are a cursed place where anyone who enters will most likely go insane, the Mire is a polluted wasteland, Undertown is a dirty, overcrowded slum, Sanctaphrax is "a seething cauldron of rivalries, plots and counter-plots and bitter faction-fighting", the river Edgewater is choked with sewage and the lands along the rim of the Edge are a desolate barren.
- Things get worse in the Rook Barkwater series. The city becomes even worse, slavery returns, Sanctaphrax becomes grounded and taken over by Nazi-like fanatics, all of the sky pirates are gone, and 95% of the "good" characters from previous books are either jailed or dead.
- And later, both Sanctaphrax and Undertown get destroyed, with everybody who was left. Talk about being unnaturally cheery.
- Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence — millions of years of humanity in a massive Hopeless War of attrition against the Xeelee, who are also fighting a race of dark matter beings who want to render the universe unfit for baryonic life (like humanity). They lose. First the humans, than the Xeelee. Humans manage to make it worse as the Xeelee knew they couldn't win so spent all of time creating a method to leave the universe into one better suited for our type of life. Humanity attacks the superstring and breaks it, with some humans making it thru to over universe that are not suited for our type of life and get to have a thousand years or so of decendants before using up the resources that allow them.
- Really, all of Baxter's books are CrapsackWorlds. That's about all the guy writes.
- Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Everyone is either motivated by greed, selfishness, lust or desire for fame, or callous and apathetic to their fellow human beings. Grenouille, a twisted little troll of a man who kills women for their scent, actually comes across as the most sympathetic character in the whole book - at least he's motivated by a desire to create something beautiful, in the absence of anything else to give his life meaning.
- Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, in which any person who has any kind of talent is handicapped to prevent them from excelling and thus making other people feel inferior. The main character is smart, tall, strong, and handsome, so his handicaps include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, forty pounds of birdshot around his neck, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, and a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows to hide his beauty. [He rebels and dies, and his parents are too handicapped to be aware of watching their own son shot on television.
- Flannery O'Connor had issues. Just about her entire body of work involves unbelievably flawed, unsympathetic characters feuding and bickering with each other, finishing with a tragic, often gruesome climax, usually the consequences of their actions. Of course, since all of her stories were written while she was dying of lupus, this might explain her outlook. Considered one of the premier authors of Southern Gothic literature, which is an entire genre of this trope.
- However, given O'Connor strong belief in the redemptive power of suffering, she certainly didn't see it this way. For example, in response to a fellow Catholic who wondered why she couldn't use her considerable talents to write something "uplifting", she said, "If your heart had been right place, you would have been uplifted."
- India in the Alan Dean Foster novel Sagramanda. Rampant poverty, the poor attacking people to get money, greedy corporations that just leave it that way, a man eating tiger just left alone, multiple hit men, and an insane serial murderer feature prominently, as does somebody who tries to kill his own son because of the caste system.
- The novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole seems to personify this entire trope in the character of Ignatius J. Reilly: Fat, ugly, repulsive, arrogant, full of useless facts but little actual intelligence, utterly lacking in empathy and humor, sponging off his mother with zero gratitude whatsoever, and generally making the world a worse place to live. It doesn't help that all of the other characters in the novel are defined by their flaws and inadequacies, and stumble through their lives without a clue as to what they're doing or how they're affecting others. The novel's climax gives the reader the hope of Reilly finally getting his comeuppance, then dashes it by giving him an easy out that promises the continuation of his repugnant behavior. It's worth noting that the author committed suicide eleven years before the novel's first publication.
- The late Robert Asprin edited a series of short fantasy anthologies with multiple spinoffs known as Thieves' World. All of the anthologized stories were written for the series, and set in a common World Half Empty. At least it started out as one; it later got much, much worse.
- Search The Sky by Frederic Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. Halsey's Planet is slowly depopulating itself, Gemser is an insane gerontocracy where age is the sole factor in determining status, Azor is a Straw Feminist world where believing in gender equality is a crime against the state, Jones is a world where conformity in everything (including appearance, architecture, dress, and habits) is mandatory, and Earth is a coin-operated world where intelligence is frowned on. And all colony worlds are inbred because there were too few original colonists for each world.
- Dystopian worlds in general are Worlds Half Empty by definition.
- The society of Oceania in 1984. A totalitarian regime ruled by a guy known only as Big Brother rules Oceania. Oceania is at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia at any given time, and insists that they've always been at war with whoever they're fighting — the records of history and news are changed constantly in order to favor Big Brother, which is done by the Ministry of Truth. Big Brother's eyes are everywhere through telescreens, which receive and transmit simultaneously. A "Two Minutes Hate" is held every so often in order to direct the people's hate toward Emmanuel Goldstein, the first traitor to the Party. And if you even think anything that might be contrary to the will of Big Brother, which is called "thoughtcrime," the Thought Police will come calling to take you away.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face ... for ever."
- What makes it even more Nightmare Fuel-eriffic is that O'Brien spends a good part of his second conversation with Winston detailing exactly why the Dystopia of the book will never, ever, be dismantled.
- What's worse than THAT is Eastasia and Eurasia are effectively identical to Oceania — all three practice a variety of Ingsoc (the political/social philosophy of Oceania) that calls for the complete destruction of personal identity and the subsuming of every desire and effort to the will of the government.
- Fahrenheit 451. The entire world subscribes to a nihilistic ideology which boils down to "Don't face your problems; burn them instead!" Nuclear war is so prevalent that the sound of jets flying off to nuke entire cities out of existence isn't even commented on. Television has taken the place of the family. Drug use is so ubiquitous that a single EMT team will likely deal with upwards of a dozen ODs a night. Running over pedestrians is the new national pastime. Making the ignorant masses feel dumb (such as by reading books) is punishable by having your house and possessions burned down. Resisting having your house burnt down will result in a giant mechanical spider hunting you down and killing you.
- Anything written by Franz Kafka.
- Anything by Patricia Highsmith. The POV characters of her books are generally either Villain Protagonists who get away with it, or pathetic losers who suffer horribly at the hands of unspeakable villains who get away with it.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe sometimes looks like it's heading in this direction. It's less intense than in other examples, but still, whenever the peaceful, freedom-loving institution of the moment manages to get the upper hand and finally look like it's going to turn things for the better, something happens that screws everything up and plunges the whole galaxy right back in the darkness of endless war. After the Empire there's Ysanne Isard, then Thrawn, then the Emperor reincarnates, then he reincarnates again, then the Imperial Remnant reunites under Daala and starts messing up the place again. Then the cult of Ragnos springs up, then the Yevetha set out to destroy everyone, then there are several more attempts to restore the Empire... and all this in only twenty years. And when the galaxy finally seems to have some peace and things seem to be looking brighter, the Yuuzhan Vong invade and start a war that kills trillions. Then there's another civil war. Then the Empire and the Sith rise yet again. Seriously, how do people from the Star Wars galaxy ever wish for anything but a quick, painless death is sometimes lost on this troper.
- This is an example of most Star Wars authors wanting to tell the same story while hoping to avoid problems with the continuity. The solution? Do the same thing a few years later.
- Let's face it, the series is called Star Wars. Not Star Peace.
- But wars needn't be galaxy-encompassing tragedies of epic proportions. This troper doesn't see why it isn't possible for the galaxy at large to be at a state of relative peace, but with local battles and wars still happening. Local wars, while probably of little interest for the galaxy as a whole, would still have great importance for the people involved, and a story told from their points of view could still be breathtaking, suspenceful and worth reading. This would serve the double purpose of 1) not making us wonder when all hell will break loose yet again, and 2) actually enjoying an epic story arc when it does happen.
- One reason of many that a lot of Star Wars fans don't have any interest in the EU. How much deconstructed 'the galaxy sucks, the world sucks, the Jedi suck, it's all pointless!' can we be expected to embrace? Especially in a series that started out firmly set in the Hero's Journey?
- It really depends on the book and the author. The ending of Outbound Flight aside, Timothy Zahn's novels, for example, tend to stay true to the original feel - there are dark times, but there is also joy and beauty and hope and adventure, and nothing is completely, unambiguously terrible. In some novels it's almost a White And Gray contrast between the good guys and the bad guys, and the Empire is never some monolithic evil structure - it's made of people who are trying their hardest to do what they think is right.
- Of course, Zahn-bashing is more popular now. His characters are being systematically killed off and his preference for Everybody Lives, where the tension comes not from who dies next but how can they escape, gets mocked as unrealistic. A lot of old-school EU fans are very selective with canon. Many like to believe that it ended with the Hand Of Thrawn duology, when the Empire and the New Republic finally sign a lasting truce.
- Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Time Odyssey. The universe will tear itself apart down to the subatomic level by cosmological expansion. The universe only has a finite amount of usable energy, and it's very slowly burning itself up. The very first intelligent species to evolve wasted a lot of that energy on an intergalactic war, and then resolved to last until the big rip. To do that, it systematically, and with much guilt, resolves to wipe out all life which consumes too much energy. If a species has the audacity to consume oxygen for energy, it gets wiped out before it manages to leave its home planet. If a species doesn't put a foot wrong, it gets wiped out when the sun dies of natural causes. Worst of all, apart from the aliens, it's this one.
- Most of Nathaniel "Mr. Sunshine" Hawthorne's work is about how much people suck and the world is a horrible place full of evil. For some reason, he's called a Romanticist.
- Well, a Dark Romanticist, anyway.
- Somewhat subverted with Discworld's city of Ankh-Morpork. It has all the makings of a Crapsack World and yet, due to the brilliance of the Patrician and the sheer stubbornness of its inhabitants, it is the place where everyone on the Discworld wants to live and always bounces back from whatever crisis it faces.
- Whereas the city of Haven in Simon R. Green's Hawk and Fisher series is the Wretched Hive version, where even the "gods" aren't above greed, mayhem, sociopathy and a host of other antisocial tendencies, but still attract worshippers. His later Nightside series draws heavily on Haven to create a similar setting as part of a hidden version of London.
- Voltaire's Candide disabuses the title character of the notion that he lives in the best of all possible worlds (a popular metaphysical notion of Voltaire's time) by tossing him from one ridiculous misfortune to the next, throughout the entire novel.
- However, though the end leaves Candide a poor peasant working to death for the rest of his life, he does consider that the friendships he got from those misfortunes are evidence that at least this world isn't the worst of all possible worlds.
- The Road by Cormac Mc Carthy is set After The End, in a world where there has been no sunlight for eight years, the forests are dead and falling to the ground, Georgia is as cold as Alaska, and the nights are described as being "as dark as the cellars of Hell". Cannibal cults with female slaves roam the countryside, eating the babies of their women as soon as they give birth, and sometimes 'farming' people in their basements, slowly eating them bit by bit. People are dieing from the cold, from some kind of horrible disease that causes them to cough blood until they drop dead, and from starvation, walking through barren farmlands. If this sounds awful that's because, you know, it kind of is.
- Anything Bertolt Brecht wrote pre-WWII.
- The Cthulhu Mythos. A world full of malevolent Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that are destined to someday awaken and kill us all.
- Or so their (usually human) cultists like to tell us, anyway. But of course, there's no reason we should expect them to be anything but perfectly up front and honest with us, right...?
- Considering the glimpses given of their masters, along with more neutral narrations (the Necronomicon wasn't written by a cultist, for example, but a person who was Driven Mad By The Revelation), they're pretty accurate - plus that there's a True Neutral race of alien time travellers, who also confirm that the humanity will go extinct in a horrible way.
- The Timeline-191 series by Harry Turtledove. It starts with the Confederate States successfully seceding from the Union. By the end of the series Germany is still ruled by the repressive Kaiser, the United States has become more oppressive and authoritarian by imitating Germany, and the Czar still reigns in Russia. The Confederate States were taken over by fascists and killed a large portion of the African American population. Britain and France became fascist too, before they were conquered in the Second World War. Canada is occupied by U.S. troops and considered a colony of the American Empire. The C.S.A. is conquered as well. The occupying troops are constantly attacked by guerrilla warriors and kill civilians in retaliation. Several American and European cities have been nuked. Utah has revolted several times and Mormonism is banned and repressed. And to top it all off, Japan has gone on the same imperialistic killing spree through China and Southeast Asia that it did before the start of World War II in real life, but in this world everyone is too busy fighting each other to do anything about it. The only good thing in this world is that communism was squashed thoroughly in WWI.
- While it is indeed a sucky place to live, I would argue that Turtledove presents it as no better or no worse than our own world. I think it is easy to focus on the horribleness of a setting to make it seem like crapsack world, TL-191 no less crappy than our own. Loius Armstrong and his band, for example, making it out of CSA, for example, and the fact the Jake Featherstone, the local equivalent of Hitler, was defeated, argue that this is not a horrible place to live.
- Even then, most of the horrible things that happened there only end up switching around with what happened in our timeline. Some governments that were repressive are much less so. Genocide happens too, but in different places and populations with our holocost not happening, but a parellel one ends up happening anyway. Harry Turtledove is big on making parallels to events.
- China Miéville's world Bas Lag, and especially its apparent largest city, New Crobuzon, featured in his novels in Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council, fits this to a 'T'—-if there's a pool of water in the city which is not stagnant and oily, or any non-corrupt person with any amount of noticeable power, we've not seen it or him.
- There are implied to be nice and happy things in Bas-Lag - Bellis wants to save New Crobuzon from invasion for a reason - but thanks to the particular paths the novels take, we don't see much of them.
- This trope is one of the base premises of a whole genre: Cyberpunk.
- Played for laughs in Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy. Killing billions of people to build a bypass, nothing wrong with that.
- What makes it even more tragically hilarious is that a few chapters later it is revealed that a new propulsion system - the Infinite Improbability Drive - has made hyperspace travel obsolete and no-one will be using that bypass. Douglas Adams knows his tropes.
- How has A Series Of Unfortunate Events not been mentioned? Among other things, the series includes:
- A lumber mill whose manager apparently has no knowledge of healthcare laws.
- A boarding school run by a card carrying Sadist Teacher.
- A village full of insane crow worshippers (no, really) who murder anyone who doesn't follow their ridiculous set of laws.
- A circus where the performers are treated like dirt by both their bosses and the spectators.
- Dragonlance's Krynn at multiple points in its history, but most notably after the War of Souls. Pretty much the only race that's not doing terrible are minotaurs (and even they had some nasty issues to sort out). The elves, in particular, are fucked (One of their nations was conquered and turned into a minotaur colony, the other is underwater).
- Ironically, while the richer, powerful nations like the dwarves, the elves and the humans are having a very unpleasant time of it, things are looking up for the underdog races. Goblins look like they'll have a homeland of their own for once. The draconians have a future as a species. Even the ogres seem to be rising above the 'beasts and butchers' reputation (though if the minotaurs have anything to say about that...)
- The Ancient Egypt of The Egyptian of course, the main point of the novel is how nothing really has changed since then...
- DeSade's novel Justine is pretty horrific. Justine recounts how, at the age of twelve, she asked for shelter in a man's house and was told that she could only stay if she would have sex with him. The person she talks to this about screams at her for being a parasite that wanted something for nothing. Mind you, this is essentially the high point of the story.
- Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series fits this trope very well. By Absolution Gap, the third novel, the series is pretty much a hard SF version of Warhammer 40k
- The Edge the Loner pulp western series by George G. Gilman featured a Wild West so violent and corrupt that the sociopathic walking scar called Edge may have been the only man strong enough to survive it. Inspired by the Eastwood/ Leone spaghetti westerns, the Edge books may well have inspired the equally vile western settings of Vertigo Comics' Preacher and Jonah Hex series.
- Mistborn features a world that starts out a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by an Evil Overlord. After the heroes kill him, things start getting worse, especially when the local Omnicidal Maniac gets released from his can. But Vin and Sazed manage to fix it in the end.
- Most residents of Camorr, a sort of Low Fantasy medieval Venice turned Up To Eleven in Scott Lynch's The Lies Of Locke Lamora, would pay good money (doubtless stolen or extorted) to live in a Crapsack World instead.
Live Action TV
- Veronica Mars There is no one in this world any better than Neutral Evil, except her father and maybe Veronica herself, on a good day, maybe.
- The Wire is an example of the World Half Empty done right, especially in the fourth season (which focuses on four inner-city schoolchildren, only one of whom manages to escape into a decent life). But even "done right" it can be enough to overwhelm people.
- The sad thing is that everyone who knows the Real Life situations they show says it is all what it is really like.
- The 2000s Battlestar Galactica; the human race is made up largely of flawed, amoral, and evil people who barely deserve to continue existing as a species, every victory the fleet wins comes at great cost, and even the completion of their quest to find Earth nets them nothing but the lifeless, irradiated ruins of a dead civilization.
- Admittedly things seem to get better when they are gifted a new planet they decide to call Earth after the real one (this is our Earth btw), but they never broke free of the cycles they were trapped in (since we are descended from them and have done a lot of crap over the years), plus they never even realized how they had been constantly manipulated by 'angels' of some kind, making them nothing but miserable pawns despite getting a sort of happy ending, for one generation at least.
- Things seem to get better when they decide to abandon medicine and technology, revert to hunter/gatherers, and condemn the human race to short, savage lives for the next 140,000 years? No thanks, I'd rather stay in the fleet.
- That's why it says seems. Though in fairness they could have had a good life, and had other civilizations rise and fall such is the time difference. But this is very, very unliklely. Thank you Ron Moore for bring one of the most recurring and deep themes in a great series to its ultimate conclusion for a EsotericHappyEnding at best.
- Carnivale. Truth In Television based on being set in the dust bowl during the Great Depression.
- The Power Rangers franchise averts this by the skin of its teeth and a Never Say Die mandate, as, although a great deal of property damage is shown over the 17 years straight of nonstop alien attacks, no deaths are implied. Cue Power Rangers RPM, where humanity apparently lost its edge over a Time Skip and the entire planet save a single city is conquered, all people presumed dead.
- Even in the happier beginning, the whole universe was implied to be like this, as the distinct impression was given that, aside from Aquitar and Triforia, the villains ruled everything with a harsh iron fist — one gets the impression Earth just took longer to conquer than everything else, and it was only a matter of time before we failed to defend it.
- Yes, this is a children's show, why do you ask?
- The outcome of Earth was foreshadowed in seasons nine and ten.
- Of course, Married With Children.
- Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Played with in one episode where the "heroes" are tearfully united with their real father — a kindly, warm-hearted, selfless individual who is pretty much their complete opposite. After only a short period of time in their company the father is so horrified he ends up kicking them out.
- The review describing Waterloo Road as being set in a town resembling a cross between Dante's Inferno and Baghdad was uncannily accurate. In the opinion of this editor who grew up in the same town, this only proves that the show's creators did indeed do their homework.
- Curb Your Enthusiasm, surely? Nearly every character, recurring or one-time, is a miserable jerkass.
- Weeds. It's somewhat easier to root for the Villain Protagonist when all the forces of law and order are corrupt hypocrites, and all of the other characters are in it up to their necks.
- How can we not mention Lexx, surely one of the biggest examples of a Crapsack universe in science fiction? The main characters are horny, greedy cowards who fly a spaceship that eats inhabited planets for food . The one who isn't horny, greedy, or a coward is undead.
- The Buffy episode The Wish where Cordelia gets transported to an alternate universe where Buffy never came to Sunnydale. Arguably, the entire Buffyverse is one. Or at least Sunnydale and Los Angeles, since they're said to have a higher demonic population than other places.
- Plus, the Hell Mouth seems pretty conducive to terminal conditions. We've had at least three three people with serious cancer-conditions in people in the prime of their lives or near it, and at least one died of heart failure despite showing no outward signs.
- Not to mention sometimes the very laws of physics themselves conspire to kill your loved ones.
- Charming in Sons Of Anarchy where the most positive characters are a Type IV Anti Hero (or is Jax an Anti Villain? Hard to tell.) and a Knight In Sour Armor.
- Black Adder, even though it's hard to tell. The first series starts off with him accidentally lopping off his uncle's head (said uncle absolutely despised him despite not knowing him at all), and throughout the series Blackadder just keeps sliding further down the social food chain, despite all of this being Played For Laughs.
- Several episodes of The Twilight Zone take place in worlds like this. Examples include "It's a Good Life", where one all-powerful boy controls everyone, "Eye of the Beholder" where everyone who is ugly is ghettoized, "Number Nine Looks Just Like You", where everyone has to get surgery to look like one of a limited number of models, and "The Obsolete Man", where religion is outlawed and you are terminated if declared "obsolete".
- Supernatural. This world plain sucks, and hard. While you're alive, you're random victim fodder for all the monsters you've ever heard of (from urban legends to mythological beasts), and some you haven't... yet. The afterlife is a bitch where you are endlessly tortured in the Bloody Bowels Of Hell as time passes according to Year Inside Hour Outside logic, unless you decide to turn in to a demon yourself. Heaven isn't much better, it's ruled by a Council Of Angels who have severe Parental Issues by way of Have You Seen My God. And for a third option, you can stay and become a ghost until you go crazy from loneliness and turn in to a poltergeist. Did I also mention it's The End Of The World As We Know It?
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.
- The Universe in Doctor Who is canonically worn out and should have collapsed long ago, is full to bursting with omnicidal maniacs who invade Earth at least twice a year, and when you get killed by the Monster Of The Week you end up spending eternity in a black, empty void. "Turn Left" shows how quickly things would deteriorate without the Doctor.
- Titus, where the only really helpful advice for getting through life is "Stop being a wussy".
Mythology
- Greek Mythology depicts the world as ruled by a pantheon of Jerkass Gods who will utterly screw over mortals for the most petty of reasons, or no reason at all. (The Olympian gods deposed the Titans, who were allegedly worse, but we only have the Olympians' word for it.) Oh, and by the way, destiny rules everything and man has no control over his life.
- Despite arguably being worse than the Olympians, the Titans are said to have established a 'Golden Age' where man wanted for nothing. Thanks a bunch, Zeus.
- To be fair, many would be very pissed off if their father ate their siblings and tried the same to themselves.
- Sumerian Mythology only seems to have one afterlife destination, which is a dusty, barren and empty hall described as sucking immensely. The entirety of The Epic Of Gilgamesh is an ode to the concept that dying can only result in endless tedium and suffering. Also, the goddess in charge of the place routinely threatens to unleash the angry, bored dead to fuck up the living world if her father, the head honcho god, doesn't agree to her arbitrary whims.
- And then there's Norse Mythology...
- At least the Norse get a massive kegger until the end of time.
- Correction: Viking Warriors get a massive kegger until the end of time. The rest of us are screwed.
- And in this case, "end of time" means all of them are conscripted to fight against all of the forces conspiring against the Norse gods in Ragnarok, which includes the likes of frost giants, fire giants, possibly other kinds of giants (lots of giants in Norse Mythology), the residents of Hel (those who didn't get to go to the kegger) who arrive on ships made out of the toenails of the damned, the Big Badass Wolf Fenrir, a serpent big enough to encircle the world, the Hell Hound Garm, and...everything else that wasn't a Norse god (the Norse gods made a lot of enemies). Oh, and no matter how hard they fight, they're all destined to die anyway... except for (at least) three gods, two humans and probably Níðhöggr. The gods will win the final battle by virtue of last men standing. (The prophecy goes on to predict that some of the dead gods will come back to share the Plain of Idavoll, but...)
- The Aztec afterlife required you to run a big damn gauntlet to get to it, at which point... you spend eternity sitting around inside a pyramid, doing nothing, only even getting to eat on the Day of the Dead. On the plus side, you can read the life stories of everyone else who got there, maybe write your own.
- If you think the afterlife was bad, in life the god who controls the sun is a bloodthirsty, warmongering psychopath. If the Aztecs do not constantly war with other tribes and perform grotesque human sacrifices, he will refuse to let the sun rise and the entire world will freeze.
- Should you die in Pharaonic Egypt, you have to take a very long walk across the desert (hope the people who buried you put a map in your tomb), at which point your heart gets weighed. If it outweighs a feather, you get thrown to the beast Ammit, who eats you. If the feather outweighs it ("We made it really heavy"), you get to... work in Osiris's fields for all eternity. Yay. You get to do what, in all likelihood, you did for your entire mortal life.
- Not quite. Initially, only the Pharoahs got an afterlife. Later dynasties would expand the afterlife to all the nobles. The commoners who would actually work in the fields got nothing. So Yeah..
- This isn't quite true. There just isn't a detailed guide to how ordinary people's afterlife will work, like with the Pharaohs and nobles. Even the commoners were mummified, albeit in a very simple manner, so they must have expected some sort of afterlife for themselves. But that's the ticket - you could expect to be in the same condition in the afterlife as your corpse is in the living world. Think about it for a few moments.
- Hell, in the Christian Bible as well as Dante's Inferno. In fact, regardless of the story, almost all depictions of hell are pretty grim. Even Satan is rarely immune from the tortures. Still holds true even if Satan Is Good.
- And then there's most of Revelation. But at least it doesn't stay bad.
- Hell is supposed to be nasty. We kind of expect that of it. Earth, on the other hand, had to be flooded to lower the crime rates.
- Many mythologies have one or several deities occupied with creating intricate traps and riddles in order to "test" humans. The only problem is that many to most of these tests could only be passed with Light-like levels of omniscience. Which is to say they are impossible, unless you have the Power of Plot on your side OR you don't actually solve it, but are ridiculously lucky.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- I WANNA BE THE GUY! No, you don't. This world has one hit one characters, lethal trap's and the apples fall up! THE APPLES FALL UP!
- Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden sends the good guys to a crapsack alternate future, where mankind was really screwed three times over. First, a gigantic gravity wave devastated the planet, then the Dinosaur Empire from Getter Robo beat up on the survivors, and THEN a full fledged war broke out between the Earth bound Innocent faction and the Space bound Moon Race that totally set back civilization for a good, long while. By the time your heroes get there, the ocean level is about 45% what it used to be, over half the world is a wasteland, the politicans on all sides are scheming, technology hoarding assholes with power complexes, and did we mention the Dinosaur Empire wants to turn the planet into the Mezosic Era, killing us all off, or that some creepy mechanically mutated humans called the Ancestors also want to kill us and literally redefine the world by their terms? It should also be noted that it's implied all the space colonies are destroyed, and whats left of the planet is valiantly struggling to heal from centuries of nukes, biomechanical destructive nanomachines, and more than a few ColonyDrops.
- In an interesting aversion of SRW's idealism, even if you do give the alternate future Earth the ability to have a second chance and change history, that does NOT activate the Reset Button, and the Earth is still shown healing from all of the damage it has taken.
- Castlevania II: Simon's Quest shows what kind of world you saved in the previous game. The land is barren and lifeless, gravestones are everywhere, people are too poor to afford anything but unfurnished brick rooms, most will lie to you or tempt you with sin, expensive mansions once owned by the rich have signs of torture and enslavement, and creatures don't even bother to inhabit areas that people have long since abandoned and left to crumble. Blame this all on "Dracula's Curse" if you want, but there's a reason why most of the games take place inside Castlevania — who's to say things are better on the outside?
- Made a little better in later games, particularly Order of Ecclesia, where The Hub is a small, well-kept village (well, well-kept once you save the villagers). Still, being attacked by Dracula and his monstrous hordes every few decades earns the world a few points in the "crapsack" column.L
- Legacy Of Kain A series of fantasy games where time traveling Vampire lord Kain clashes with his soul-eating undead son across the ages. It's actually Better Than It Sounds. The world of Nosgoth is host to massive web of ancient conspiracies spanning dimensions, where the various supernatural and political forces (all of them evil in one way or another) of the world try to manipulate history to their own ends. The world gradually gets worse, going from great holy wars, to miserable feudal poverty, to corrupt vampire empire, to the point where the world is so corrupt and ugly, and the forces of nature are so out of balance, that the world is nothing but a desert wasteland home to wandering bands of monsters.
- The Resistance games appear to be built purely on this concept. Over the course of the game, every single thing you attempt ends up either failing or blowing up in your face. On top of that, at the end of the second game you singlehandedly manage to bring about the end of the world that the entire goal of the games was to prevent. i.e., The Bad Guy Wins.
- The Oddworld is also a World Half Empty. The first three games center on industrial excesses taken to such an absurd degree that no-one bats an eye at a meat packing plant planning to make their slave laborers into their next product line, while Stranger's Wrath takes place in more of a Crapsack World of a Western, where the townsfolk are so exaggeratedly helpless and cowardly they're literally chickens.
- Combine-controlled Earth in Half-Life 2. The environment and infrastructure are in such an extreme state of disrepair after just a decade or two of Combine rule that it threatens the human race's very existence.
- It's implied in the games (and outright stated by Word Of God) that the Combine has zero interest in Earth's infrastructure; their interest begins and ends with raping the planet of any usable resources (and stealing our teleportation technology, which is by some aspects superior to theirs). Supposedly, Half-Life 2 was supposed to feature a plant designed to remove the oxygen from the planet's atmosphere; this got taken out because of time constraints. Various types of aliens, such as the antlions (insectoid aliens which are extremely aggressive towards any other lifeform), headcrabs (which the Combine actually seems to breed for biological warfare), and ocean-faring leeches which make even wading out a short distance into the ocean a suicidal endeavor.
- Pretty much all of Earth in Command And Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is a World Half Empty. There's the politically unstable hellholes of the Yellow Zones, which are ravaged by war, disease, famine, and Tiberium. Then there's the Red Zones, which are completely uninhabitable by human (or any carbon-based) life, and filled with the horribly lethal Tiberium. the only nice place to live is the Blue Zones, which are clean, healthy, pristine, and.... wait, what are those Scary Dogmatic Aliens doing here? ...oh, crap.
- And this was an improvement from Tiberian Sun, where the atmosphere and oceans had been contaminated enough to leave the human race months from extinction, with the few safe population tucked away in the arctic.
- Shadow Bane: The world has been shattered into numerous fragments, the All-Father is missing or dead, the Green Mother is crippled and in agony, Malor has joined the forces of Chaos, the most powerful sword in existence is in the hands of a vampire queen, and the Titan Torvald has been raised as a walking corpse by the Mother of Winter. Oh, and every time the someone is reborn the world come a bit closer to destruction.
- The Max Payne series takes place in a Crapsack New York, through and through. This is as the game is intended to mirror a noir atmosphere, thus making the presence of a Crapsack World a must.
- Diablo. First game starts with the noble king being corrupted and his kingdom destroyed. Then you have to kill the undead king, plus demons are killing people, the prince has been kidnapped and possessed. After 16 annoying levels you finally make it to the boss and beat him... except the prince is now dead and you just became Diablo's new, more powerful host. Second game lets you kill most of the major demons... too bad it turns out they all end up getting revived, plus Tyrael is corrupted and the thing holding some semblance of stability over the world is destroyed. Oh, and Deckard Cain was apparently crazy the whole time and horrible monsters are even more common. Did we mention there is no god and all the angels (except Tyrael... oh wait) are humongous jerkasses?
- The world that the Resident Evil series takes place in: bioterrorism is common, an American city was nuked in order to end a zombie outbreak, and major corporations are involved in huge conspiracies which could cause the apocalypse. Really, when you get past the action movie cliches and the narm of some of the dialogue, the series is quite disturbing.
- The world of the Grand Theft Auto series, especially Grand Theft Auto IV, which had fewer lighter elements than the others. Here we have a world so filled with corrupt politicians, crooked cops, backstabbing criminals and just plain crazy people that whatever amoral protagonist you're playing as almost looks like a saint by comparison.
- If the Luck Based Mission that is the majority of the game's storyline, stopping a Colony Drop in Mega Man X 5 fails, this leaves a Crapsack World.
- Mega Man Zero elaborates on this, there being only one last bastion of civilisation in the planet, a racist dystopia that gets destroyed before the end of Zero 4. To drive the point home, the Colony Drop mentioned above is now possibly the last hope of restoring it. Which is exactly what it did, at the end of the series.
- And then the Elf Wars occurs sometime after the Colony Drop. Two apocalyptic disasters, one after the other? It has to be a record or something...
- Speaking of Mega Man... The band The Protomen have based 2 albums on a What If idea that turns the Mega Man Universe into one of the most crappy Crapsack Worlds there is.
- The series as a whole is like this, to be honest. The series chronologizes about five hundred years of human suffering due to constant robot uprisings, almost all of which can be traced to two men- Wily and Weil. Fast forward to Mega Man Legends, and humanity has gone extinct, and most of the few remaining sapient robots are trying to kill the replacement species humanity left behind.
- The only time life was not pain was the years between 20XX and 21XX, after Wily's death and before Cain tried copying X. Even the golden age between 22XX and 24XX was marred by occasional maverick uprisings and no less than three malicious Xanatos Gambits running just below the surface.
- The world of Sands Of Destruction doesn't look that bad at first — there's some intense Fantastic Racism, but nothing too alarming. Then you start seeing what the world is actually like as you play. Plagues of natural disasters and hostile creatures. Humans who are literal or virtual slaves to Ferals — beastmen who rule the world, and have so much political and physical power that they can literally get away with eating human children over trivial slights. The fact that the world appears to be headed for an inevitable decay into an uninhabitable desert. And that's just some of the first things you see or hear about. It's not too surprising that the heroes are the ones who said "screw it" and want to destroy the world because whatever comes next will have to be better — even if what's next is nothing at all.
- Any setting in The Suffering. It's bad enough that Carnate Island had seen just about every sort of crime and punishment in history before its infestation by the Malefactors; it's even worse when the city the PC hopes to escape to is a fetid den of urban decay and misery that promptly suffers a Malefactor infestation of its own.
- Implied through the emails in Assassins Creed. :Africa's population has been decimated by a plague, massive number of illegal immigrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexican border... into Mexico, and hurricane season no longer exists, since hurricanes happen all throughout the year thanks to climate change.
- And one continent doesn't exist anymore.
- Hurricanes all year? They're started by the Coriolis force acting on the intertropical convergence zone. So they only happen when the ITCZ wanders away from the equator. Climate change may make them bigger and more common, but they'll still be seasonal.
- Deus Ex A devastating plague is storming throughout the world, a good deal of food seems to be limited to Soylent Soy, and not to mention the all the secret cabals running about in the background. The world could also be considered A World Half Full however, depending on what ending you choose.
- The sequel is once again a Crapsack World, and there aren't really any A World Half Full endings this time.
- Theoretically, the Omar ending is better than the alternatives. You take out all the assholes pulling the strings, leaving the one group that gives a crap about the common man. Sure, the world will kinda suck for a while, but the entire point of the Omar is that humanity can survive this. And once everything is in place on the ground, the stars are waiting.
- Stages 3-6 in Radiant Silvergun take place in an unhabitable post-apocalyptic world where there's absolutely no signs of life, only ruins which are partly transformed into a factory for Stone-Like to produce ships and weapons against the remaining battleship crew.
- The Destroy All Humans series makes the otherwise detestable and villainous lead character likable and somewhat sympathetic by planting him in a Crapsack World, in this case a warped and insane version of America during the Cold War.
- Another parody example that actually has a story of why the world is that way is the PC game Pyst, which is supposedly what the world of Myst ended up looking like after millions of tourists wandered through it.
- Postal series. In Postal 2 at least, every townsperson is a jerk, the cops are mean, and the town of "Paradise" is portrayed as very corrupt and broken beneath the surface. All this is played up for humor, and also makes your Heroic Sociopath the most sympathetic character by comparison.
- The world of Breath Of Fire 2 looks funny and slapstick, right? Except for the cheap circus with the freak show, the children crying from hunger in Whale Cove after you personally take away the family's source of income, the face-huggers, the witch's tower filled with beautiful men turned to stone, and the whole men being seduced to evil and turning into monsters, in service of a dark god you thought was really Saint Eva thing.
- Jak And Daxter. Precursors, Jak And Daxter. Not only is there a world-ending threat every other year, but near constant invasion of strange forces led by multiple Big Bad.
- The world of Team Fortress 2, anybody? Sure, the characters all look like they're from a Pixar movie, but they are all pretty much amoral mercenaries who are killed in massive amounts every day. The only other option to this seems to be a life of submitting to bureaucracy. And it's all Played For Laughs.
- That said, there are some nice people, even among the mercenaries. The Sniper comes to mind (ironically more so than the Medic), as does the Engineer. Also, we never really see anything outside of the battlefield, and the visible bits that don't have people warring over them look fairly normal. Although it's rather telling that even the nice characters in this setting are mass murderers.
- Overlord. Just... Overlord. It's all played for laughs, but the world is so nasty, with everyone either corrupt, stupid, or useless, that your explicitly villainous Heroic Mime and his army of goblins are among the most likable characters. The character's brutal rule as tyrant or madman may actually be an improvement over what it's like already.
- It Got Worse in the second game, where the realm of the first games have been wiped out by a magical Cataclysm that apparently destroyed the haflings and dwarves, there's a massive anti-magic Empire wiping out as much as they can and the only real Hero Antagonists are the Elves that the previous Overlord apparently saved, but now they're all a bunch of whiny hippies concerned with the protection of fluffy creatures.
- World Of Warcraft has this with Tirisfal Glades, the starting place of the Forsaken. It seems like a perpetual cloudy night, demons and Scourge roam the forests, and their very capital city is a bunch of tombs. The music is even the same for when you die and your spirit is trying to get back to your corpse.
- The Worge' race from is told to come from a vicious world, where no corner is truly safe. That humans could never survive there is a gross understatement. Actually, one can make this argument for Azeroth - its full of undead, corrupted wildlife, evil gods, and demons - and then you get to Outland.
- Lets put it this way, the actual heads of the faction tend to be reasonable, but nearly every number 2 is The Starscream. Garrosh Hellscream will likely take control of the horde, and wants nothing more than to charge at the enemy with the entire horde in a fuel of rage, and literally wants to just charge and ignore anything that smacks of tactics. King Wrynn is equally as crazy and determined, and arguably in charge of enough of his faction to force a war no matter what. The few races that aren't burned from a history of dark magic and demons have done other spectatual things to either doom themselves. Only the Taurens lack a significant fraction of their race that's trying to doom the world, and their leader is on his last legs.
- Besides undead fallen lords and their hordes of minions, demons from another world, scheming villainous feudals, bloodthirsty wild animals and monsters, uncaring murderous giant Trows, and no less uncaring mages, the world of Myth is a perfectly fine place to live.
- Despite the Scenery Porn, Riven under Gehn's rule is pretty darn miserable: the landscape is being ravaged for bookmaking materials, the A God Am I ruler feeds dissidents alive to a whale/shark/whatever, La Resistance are a bunch of religious wackos in spook masks, and the underlying fabric of reality is inexorably falling to pieces.
- Ratchet And Clank. Anyone with enough money can buy a BFG. All of the galaxies visited thus far have been dominated by a monopoly, including a literal Mega Corp (with one exception where the "Shadow Sector" of the main galaxy is controlled by an even more evil media enterprise). The president of the Solana Galaxy (the main setting) is a bumbling fool. The robot army designed to defend the galaxy are a cowardly bunch. The corrupt sellout Captain Qwark is regarded as pan-galactic superhero. A commercial may feature murder casually. One of the main sources of entertainment are gladiatorial arenas and deathcourses. Robots are killed for trivial reasons rather frequently, despite usually being sapient. The Only Sane Men are the epononymous heroes, the Girl Of The Week, some criminals (such as Slim Cognito, the Smuggler, and sometimes the Big Bad), and arguably Skrunch (a monkey). It has been getting better since the second game, though.
- It's been getting better because Ratchet's been steadily killing off the scuzzholes like Drek.
- A Crack In Time manages to subtly go overboard. Thousand of years before the event of the game, the Zoni give to an entire race of Too Dumb To Live the power of time travel. They use it for, well, anything but serious applications. This creates such a ridiculous number of temporal paradoxes that the resulting cataclysm (reality being ripped apart!) destroyed 83 celestial bodies before the precursors had to step in to stop the disaster by pretty much placing time itself on life support. You read right, in this 'verse, time itself need to be kept alive artificially, because there was once a race of dumbass too lazy to go to work on foot and that used massive amount of time travel instead.
- The world of In Famous starts out as a pretty crappy place to live in. After having a good chunk of itself destroyed in a catastrophic explosion, Empire City is hit with a contagious plague, forcing the US Government to completely quarantine the city. Gangs and superpowered thugs rule the city, while the poice are either dead or in hiding. Other than the occassional PR-stunt supply drop, the government doesn't even do anything to help the populace of Empire City. Oh, and if you try to leave, the soldiers guarding the borders have orders to shoot to kill. The only thing keeping the government from just bombing the entire city into dust is because they want to recover the Mac Guffin. It's up to the player to decide whether to try and clean up the city or make it even worse.
- And just because they're dueling games, Prototype has a crapsack world where super-viruses can rewrite people into monsters, civilians are shot on sight for no good reason, and people keep dangerous biological weapons in major metropolitan areas. It gets progressively worse the further into the story you get.
- Mass Effect hides one behind bright graphics: the galaxy's peace is stable but fragile at the beginning, but two of the three Council races have wiped out entire races (one being in the middle of doing so, one is thought successful... but wasn't), the human Alliance is being slowly torn apart by internal politics, a race of machines that almost annihilated their creators is running amok, a government conspiracy has wiped out entire human colonies, and the Abusive Precursors are about to return. During the course of the game, the player will condemn at least one race to extinction (and can personally genocide the last of another race), may wipe out another human colony, and may leave the Galactic Council to die at the hands of the Abusive Precursors (one of which takes out a third of the galaxy's military before it's destroyed). Oh, and the previews for Mass Effect 2 indicate It Gets Worse.
- That's not true at all, one Reaper didn't take out a third of the galaxy's forces, just one fleet, also did you not see the dozens of geth ships that were helping the reaper? That said there are still millions of reapers, waiting
- More like 400. Still means that it's likely to defeat them they'll need a superweapon or virus of some sort.
- Actually, while its implied that the Thorian was the only one of its kind, this may be incorrect.
- On the other hand, Shepard states that human life expectancy is higher (up to 150 years), there's easily available genetic manipulation that can prevent everything from diseases to something as trivial as nearsightedness, and thanks to more technology far less people die in wars than before. Shepard can also elect to let the Rachni go, leave the human colony alone and let the Council live. Mass Effect is not utopian by any means, but it's not an absolutely awful universe either, and Paragon Shepard can improve things somewhat.
- Thief and its main setting, the City. The gods appear to be jerks, the major religion is perfectly within their rights to torture suspected criminals and they're not the bad guys, the ones opposing them are terrorist hippie demon worshippers and they're not the bad guys either, the entire City is riddled with corruption from the top levels down, the dead won't stay buried, and at one point homeless, prostitutes and purse snatchers were arrested, killed to be turned into cyborg slaves and sold to the wealthy, and nobody with any power cared enough to notice. The main character, an amoral burgler, has to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing anything about it, and all he does is save the place from complete annihilation; it remains as corrupt as ever.
- In Breath Of Fire Dragon Quarter, the entire population of the world lives underground due to the surface having been rendered uninhabitable. Not too bad, until the logistics of proper air control is brought into question. Their solution? Genetically engineer little girls to suck up the pollution (Who then die). Oh, and everyone has a D-Ratio, essentially an unchangable classification of how valuable you are as a person. A 1/8124 is doomed to a life of menial labor. And the main character has a Dragon inside him, just waiting to bust out like something out of Alien. And this is not a story element, the player can accidently cause this to happen in an irreversible way to force the game to be restarted. There's a reason the New Game+ option in this game doesn't require the player to beat it.
- Paying no attention to a game mechanic that is constantly displayed is not 'accidental'.
- Baroque starts—and ends—in a barren wasteland, the world having been destroyed some time ago in a massive cataclysm known as The Blaze. Which is somehow your fault. And you don't remember anything about it.
- In Dungeon Keeper, the world is a lush, idyllic place full of happy people who live peaceful and fulfilling lives. Disgusting.
- Dwarf Fortress. The motto of the game is "losing is fun". Unfortunately that means the average dwarf will die of any combination of being torn apart by monsters, starvation, terminal depression, being set on fire, or a variety of other methods.
- Phantom Dust takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the last few remnants of mankind are forced to exist in pressure sealed underground sanctuaries to avoid the titular dust and the terrifying freaks it creates. If aforementioned monsters don't get to you there's a good chance your trigger happy and mentally unstable allies will. Not to mention that the dust will erase your memories if you stay out in it for too long. As for the only known bastion of civilization, its leader only communicates through a single spokesperson (who may or may not deliver the message accurately), supplies are gotten through raids on the surface since no one knows how to grow or make more, the non-dust using civilians are kept locked away in what appears to be a giant pit, and, perhaps most tragically of all, its hospital consists of two stone beds lying beneath buzzing, malfunctioning machines run by a nurse who seems to have gotten the job only because she looks cute in the uniform and seems to cure all ailments by stuffing patients full of whatever medication is found on the surface.
- Final Fantasy VI - The World Of Ruin. The name says it all. The ground is barren and crops won't grow. Monsters inhabiting the wild have grown stronger than ever. The entire human population has taken a severe drop. There a few bastions of hope for humanity. Oh, did I mention that this world also has a malevolent God who sits on top of a giant tower and nukes towns if they don't worship him? Yeah, he also occasionally does it if he gets bored, because according to him: "Nothing beats the music of thousands of voices screaming in unison!"
- Chrono Trigger - 12,000BC and 2300AD. In the former, the majority of humanity is left cowering in caves on a frozen planet (it being the Ice Age); the lucky few with magical powers live on a Floating Continent cluster... which is being held up by the stolen power of an Eldritch Abomination that slumbers within the planet. Their ruler has gone mad from this power, and the only decent person among them is doomed to a terrible fate. The latter is 301 years after the Eldritch Abomination emerged and laid waste to the world. What's left of the human race survives in a constant state of starvation, the machines that maintain their lives on the verge of breaking down, and many are left to think they're alone because the landscapes between their domes are inhabited by horrible mutants. And down south, a mad AI is turning humans into energy for her robot army. You cannot fix 12,000 BC, only survive its collapse; fortunately, preventing the horrors of 2300 AD is the goal of the game.
- The planet Pandora in Borderlands. Although it was originally colonized in the hopes of turning it into a lucrative, prosperous mining settlement, it was found to be an almost completely barren and borderline uninhabitable wasteland - and that was before the spring cycle began seven Earth years later and the local wildlife woke up from hibernation. Then, of course, there are the several thousand murderous bandits who prey on the few remaining locals, the extreme scarcity of food, water, electricity and medical supplies, and the near-complete lack of anything resembling functioning infrastructure or an effective government. Death is so common that never once do you see an NPC express grief, even when close friends or relatives are killed.
- Dragon Age Origins takes place in one. The opening cutscene introduces you to a world where Heaven has been destroyed, the world is threatened by a near-unstoppable army of monsters, and the only people who could possibly stop them are nearly extinct and are forgotten and ignored by the world at large, to the point that it might be too late to save the world. It gets worse. Let's see... there's the Knight Templars who go around killing anyone who shows magical ability and didn't submit to be stolen from their family and allow themselves to be turned into a soulless husk or subjected to an oppressive training regimen that possibly ends with their death — and
might actually be ARE completely justified in doing so (mages are the ones who blew up heaven and created the Blight, and their very existence attracts Demons to the world); the fact that elves only exist as virtual or literal slaves to humanity or exiled tribes in the wilderness; the dwarves have been waging a losing war against aforementioned army of monsters for generations and only have two remaining cities; the fact that government and nobility seem to be corrupt and laden with treachery almost by nature... well, from here, let's just mention that the developers specifically mentioned A Song Of Ice And Fire as inspiration and leave it be, shall we?
- Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness gives you the future. A future where infinite night rules.
- Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Hoooolyyyy fucking shit!
- EVE Online is a crapsack world for anyone who isn't a capsuleer or safely tucked away in a station, as most of the game consists of going out and blowing up everyone else.
- And even if you ARE a capsuleer, nullsec is a never ending hell of being podkilled unless you're in a powerful corp.
- Tamriel certainly seems to be heading this way as of Oblivion. In addition to the Daedra invasion in Cyrodill, the Summerset Isles have become a haven for Daedra worshipers, The Nords of Skyrim are apparently preparing for war, and its heavily implied that Cyrodill isn't the only province being affected by the aforementioned invasion. Oh, and the end of the story sees the Empire without either an emperor or heir, leaving Tamriel under the rule of the incompetent Elder Council.
Webcomics
- Ugly Hill takes place in a world where everyone is literally a monster, and quite a few of them are monsters in the figurative sense. The main characters include Eli Kilgore, a likable but shiftless Unlucky Everydude; Snug, Eli's even-more-shiftless and much-less-likeable friend; and Hastings, Eli's overbearing workaholic brother with high blood pressure and a string of failed marriages.
- In 8-Bit Theater, the characters are all stupid and/or evil, kingdoms are completely obliterated on a daily basis, and even the man who controls the universe will wipe out cities in the process of tormenting Black Mage.
- On the plus side, every single problem in the above list can be solved through creative usage of animal husbandry.
- For another good description of that webcomic's world, see this post
 from the website's forum.
- Word Of God also said that if any faction wins, the villains win.
- Something Positive is set in a world where every person generally petty, greedy, self-centered, stupid and/or passive-aggressively oblivious.
- The Oceans Unmoving sci-fi storyline of Sluggy Freelance featured a universe so bleak that individuums on their own could hardly survive. Not to mention that the leader of the pirates is Bun-Bun the rabbit, a sadistic psychopathic knife-wielding Villain Protagonist and Jerkass. Any world where Bun-Bun thrives must be a sad desolate hate-filled place.
- The rest of Sluggy Freelance is not much better.
- Hardly true. There's lots of drama and Cerebus Syndrome, and many Kudzu Plot villains who won't stay down, but the heroes win all the time - just not always conclusively - and there's much happiness and innocence, if less just lately. Also, innocence is a major survival trait, especially for minor characters.
- Flatwood. The light has long gone from the world, and bad things happen to good people. Oh, and you're dead. (Webcomic strongly based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and biblical lore, with Body Horror monsters. Graphic Nightmare Fuel.)
- Suicide For Hire. A couple of goth friends, Hunter Ravenwood (The fox and hedonist) and Arcturus Winrock (The mouse, and only one with morals), sick of the moronic world they live in, and the idiotic populace that inhabits it, decide to open up a business, in which they assist the moronic teen populace with their demise in creative and gruesome ways, and profit from this "business". In this world, guns are sold by indifferent clerks, shanking hobos is a sport, Pizza deliverymen sell Black Market weapons, and a rash of teen deaths is unheralded and unreported by the news. Watch out for the Happy Gun Dance!
- Pharaoh City in Lightbringer was under sole control of Slavers gang - powerfull criminal organization that could kidnapp anyone from anywhere and sold him on an auction to any preverd, pimp or madman who has enough cash. Even police couldn't do anything about it - Slavers were so powerfull their lesser rank members could walk downd the street with kidnapped gil chained like a dog and everybody was to scared to do anything about it. Then Lighbringer come and took them down.
- The world of Two Kinds is a currently immutable example where racism is previlent across the land, the guys standing against the Evil Empire are an Evil Empire themselves, slavery is an acceptable institution, the "gods" are playing a game with the nations, the only people who could effect a change in the war are isolationists and have recently lost their all of their major civilian and military leaders, and one of the protagonists is starting to have aspects of his murderous alter-ego become more and more previlent. The one bright spot here is that this is not the state of the entire planet, just the state of one of the regions on it, the reader really doesn't know what the rest of the world is like . . . so far.
- Oh, and did we mention that the local slave trader is the nicest guy in the setting? Granted, he is pretty affable and does treat his charges as a second family instead of replaceable property like most do, but still...
- He still uses spells that force his slaves to do anythign he tells them too (and it's very heavy hinted he has sex with all his female slaves, as one of his slave who got some Gender Bender was terrified at the though of his master finding out). Of course it doesn't seem like the writer had this in mind...
- Cry Havoc exists in a pretty bleak world. Humanity has been fighting constant low intensity wars for the last six centuries, and are quickly approaching the point that humanities survival is a low probability. Colonialism has ravaged most if not all of the old world, and the new world is hinted at being worse off. And on top of all that, a monstrous race of werewolves has been brought back from extinction. (an extinction that required a decades long war, and the loss of over two thirds of europes population to enact)
Web Original
- Tech Infantry is partly based on the World Of Darkness, so of course it's a dark and pessimistic world, with an oppressive and corrupt government, genocidal aliens, ancient supernatural entities manipulating the unawakened human population for their own mysterious ends, and any idealistic characters quickly getting the hope kicked out of them by a callous and indifferent universe.
- In Vatsy And Bruno, the streets are strewn with garbage, the skies are grey, the protagonists are a pair of non-tax-paying vagrants whose only talents involve criminal acts and the organizations oscillate between ludicrously incompetent and outright murderous. It's a comedy.
- Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning.
- This is actually pretty common on Newgrounds, probably the ultimate example would be the featureless muddy hell of Salad Fingers.
- You can see a pretty good example of this on the SCP Foundation, a pseudo-governmental organization built around containing, securing, and protecting humanity from strange creatures, objects — and people. This is all the more obvious in the roleplaying scenarios, where Agents, Doctors, and Beings are entitled to eliminate anything from the face of the Earth if it poses a significant, uncontainable threat. Or if it's a Mary Sue. Oh... and humans don't matter all that much more, personally speaking.
- In Crushed Underground by sam512, what seems to be all of humanity is imprisoned in a giant underground arcology, doomed to toil until they die. The word "dystopia" is explicitly used. That's bad. It gets worse. They're trapped in the arcology because it's actually a giant fallout shelter, holding the only survivors of humanity. With the outside a radioactive hellscape, and the biosphere completely destroyed, it'll be another two thousand years before they can leave the arcology. The immortal Governor only kept it from the proles to keep the suicide rate down.
- There Will Be Brawl, which takes place in a massively Darker And Edgier version of the Mushroom Kingdom. You're either a petty criminal, an Obstructive Bureaucrat, or in the pockets of The Mafia. Or possibly all three.
- In the Colour My Series, there's a long list of forbidden activities on the stick-figure citizens. Among these are pets, plants, running, emotion, color, and smiling. There are huge robots to enforce the laws, too.
Western Animation
- South Park is full of racism, violence, jerks, idiots and murder.
- And the deadliest diseases in the world. As any long-time fan of South Park knows, in the eponymous town, the more common diseases like the cold and flu don't exist. When a character gets sick, it's always, and we do mean always with one of those terminal life-threatening diseases that land you in the hospital. Which raises the question of why everyone in South Park isn't dead by now and the town itself isn't going through the whole Life After People thing. (Though since Kenny never permanently dies, it'd be more like I Am Legend)
- Even worse is how only Mormons go to Heaven and that no matter what anyone does in their life, they'll go to Hell for not being Mormon. Ghandi is in the same place as Hitler, for crying out loud.
- There's an unfortunate bit of Truth In Television behind that one. In reality, a disturbingly large number of people also believe that if you do just one bad deed, you'll go to Hell no matter what, even if you prayed for forgiveness until you went hoarse.
- On the other hand Hell is depicted as (at least partly) a rather enjoyable place and Satan Is Good. Again, partly.
- The whole point of Stressed Eric.
- Definitely the point of Drawn Together.
- Ditto Duckman. Even the animation depicting the show is deliberately ugly.
- The world of Invader Zim, where humans are generally stupid, ignorant and repulsive and the world they live in is polluted and unclean. The episode "Halloween Spectacular of Spooky Doom" featured creatures from another almost hell-like dimension crossing over under the impression that the other side is a perfect world that they can ruin, but they are so repulsed by their first impressions that they immediately retreat back into their own world. The Irkens, the other main civilisation featured, are a cheerfully xenocidal species that decide rank by the individual's height and whose main form of entertainment is the extermination of entire planets while eating nachos and curly fries. The main characters—-being somewhat more intelligent than most of the others—-nevertheless only seem able to cope by being delusional (Zim), apathetic (Gaz) or ridiculously persistent (Dib).
- The episode "Door to Door" plays with this idea well, as Zim shows a cretinous family what will happen if they don't buy his candy—the Crapsack World will become even worse!
- Of course, as mentioned in the comic books section, this is Jhonen Vasquez.
- The Venture Brothers features this pretty heavily. All of the primary characters are neatly defined by their failures, and the same goes for most secondaries. There will be no Affectionate Parody; cameos are more along the lines of a drug-crazed Johnny Quest, world-dominating Walt Disney-esque, or Fantastic Four where Mr. Fantastic isn't the useless one. The ONLY good character besides the Venture Brothers themselves in the whole show is a Necromancer who doesn't care a dist about messing with the powers of beyond and black magicks.
- However, Dr. Girlfriend and The Monarch have proven themselves to be a genuinely loving couple, and as shown throughout the third season, plenty of the other characters have shown to have some unselfish positives about themselves, too.
- Moralton in Moral Orel. Originally this was played for laughs, but by Season Three it got downright depressing with just how horrible everything was.
- Monkey Dust seems to fit this perfectly.
- Springfield from The Simpsons is a perfect example. This troper bought a fictional guidebook to Springfield and its a horrible place. Matt Groening has said that it's a horrible place to live and the only person who would have any hope of ever escaping is Lisa.
- Perhaps Reverend Lovejoy was telling the truth when he told Marge that Homer's "gone to a better place".
- An in-universe edition of Time magazine featured a panoramic shot of Springfield on the cover, along with the headline, "America's Worst City"
- One has to mention that in one episode, at a church picnic, they have a mirror called "See What You'll Look Like In Hell." Which brings to mind the old saying "emulation is the sincerest form of flattery." So then, am I right to assume that the Simpsons writers are following in the footsteps of the Games Workshop people, in that they're also going out of their way to make Springfield the worst place ever?
- The world of Futurama has many attractions to it, but at base it's stereotypical American trailer park expanded to world size: nearly everyone is annoyed, annoying, credulous, stupid, bigoted, and rude; vital human organs are removed from unwilling donaters on the city streets, at-least moderately-intelligent animals, including humans, dolphins, and whales are killed for food or fuel; it is implied that there will be no qualms about synthesising a needed oil in the cells of gene-spliced third-world orphans who would then presumably be violently harvested. The Earth's most looked-up-to figure is a megalomaniacal, genocidal (of both aliens and his own troops), jerk who's lousy in bed. And Richard Nixon, or at least his head, rules the whole lot, his tyranny (as before) limited only by his incompetence and self-hatred. Now do you want your flying car?
- In the third season of Re Boot, the formerly-bustling city of Mainframe has been turned into a pretty nasty Crapsack World. It gets better, but by the Cliffhanger ending of the fourth season, it looks like it might be on its way back to Crapsackdom.
- Hill Valley in The Oblongs, where the wealthy residents of the Hills never receive any comeuppance for their treatment of the Valley people.
- The world of The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack is a grim, distopian place plagued by violence, diseases, and jerks.
- Megas XLR has the alternate dimension, as shown in "Rearview Mirror, Mirror".
- The world in the 1960s USA/Czechoslovakian series Nudnik seemed to exist solely to torment the titular character.
- The world of Samurai Jack. Basically Aku rules everything, and the only weapon that can stop him for sure is Jack's sword. If you're not a slave, chances are you're being terrorized by some two bit thug. It's been getting better since Jack showed up though.
- The Gotham City of Batman The Animated Series is almost as bad as its comic counterpart. In most other action shows of its time, there were space monsters and futuristic skyscrapers. Gotham was the only kids' show setting you had to walk the streets of while worrying about getting mugged and shot.
- The appropriatly named Miseryville in Jimmy Two Shoes. For starters, it's heavily implied to be Hell. The town is ruled by Lucius Heineous VII, who runs a company dedicated to making people miserable.
- Russia and New York are essentially potrayed as this in An American Tail. It's amped up a notch in Fievel Goes West to justify the Mousekwitz family leaving New York to go west.
- Dougal County in Squidbillies certainly qualifies.
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