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Well it's a pretty tough call when all you can see is numbing government when you look at the TV, and the big business Satan, and cops who'd love to take your head off if they had half a chance. - Corb Lund, Expectation and the Blues
Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. - Warhammer 40000.
Sturgeon was an optimist. Everyone and everything is ugly, stupid, cowardly, weak, rude, violent, apathetic, shoddy, run-down, dirty, diseased, satanic etc., etc. Living in a Crapsack World isn't something interesting or to be cherished, it's just the awkward period between an unwanted birth and a meaningless, lonely, unremembered death. Any example of hope, beauty, kindness or love is a candle in the dark, usually just there to make the bleak, hateful world existence seem even worse.
Taking an established story and twisting it into a Crapsack World is one of the simpler forms of parody. The sheer repulsiveness may get to the audience, but on the upside makes it very easy to kill off characters — it's not like anyone would care about those morons anyway.
May be the setting of a Sadist Show or Black Comedy. If the show has elements of magic, the setting is often Low Fantasy. If it's a crime haven, then it's a Wretched Hive of scum and villainy. Compare Sick Sad World, World Half Empty and Black And Gray Morality, which aren't parodic. Dystopia taken to an extreme. The polar opposite of Mary Sue Topia and Sugar Bowl.
Examples:
Film
- The alternate 1985 version of Hill Valley in Back To The Future Part II, where Biff Tannen runs everything.
- 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!
- The Butterfly Effect embodies this trope in its entirety.
- London as depicted in Sweeney Todd. Then again, at the time it was almost Truth In Television...
- The L.A. of Falling Down is so crapsack it drives a man over the edge. How much Truth In Television is there is an exercise for the viewer.
- Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
- The universe of The Chronicles of Riddick.
- Granted, we only see a handful of planets, two at war and one a prison planet, which may skew our view a bit.
- Not to mention the number of worlds that are almost totally unsuitable for life: An ice world (granted we didn't necessarily see the whole planet, but this being sci-fi we can probably assume...), a planet too close to its sun, and the horrible Grue pit from Pitch Black.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Western Animation
- The adult residents of South Park choose to kill each other over the Iraq War than to debate it peacefully. This trope was lampshaded in the episode "Red Man's Greed" where Stan remarks that they don't want to leave South Park and remember all the good times they had. We then see a Montage of scenes from previous episodes where horrible things happen.
- Not to mention that, as we have learned from watching South Park, the more common diseases like the cold and the flu don't exist. When a character gets sick, it's always with one of those terminal life-threatening diseases that land you in the hospital. Which raises the question as to why everyone in South Park isn't dead by now and the town itself isn't going through the whole Life After People thing (although since Kenny never permanently dies, it would be more like I Am Legend).
- Quahog is run by Adam West. No one messes with Adam We.
- Then subverted when he occasionally displays intelligence and responsibility.
- The whole point of Stressed Eric.
- Definitely the point of Drawn Together.
- Ditto Duckman. Even the animation depicting the show is deliberately ugly.
- Springfield from The Simpsons gradually degenerates into this. All the Flanderization and self-derogatory jokes make it a place where no sane human being would choose to live. It was probably inevitable.
- And the show also portrayed New Orleans as such in A Streetcar Named Marge, in a takeoff of Sweeney Todd. The city's residents were not amused.
- Plus there's all the lawsuits. The Springfieldians sue or threaten to sue each other so much you'd think those people would just stop leaving their houses.
- Perhaps Reverend Lovejoy was telling the truth when he told Marge that Homer's "gone to a better place".
- Though not as dark, Futurama has a few elements of this; suicide booths, anyone?
- There's also a robotic Santa Claus that comes to torture and kill people every Christmas.
- Suicide booths? That sounds like the "Joy Booths" from "A Mind Forever Voyaging" (Infocom). Of course, that game, one of the most portable games ever, doesn't run on my computer, so I only know from the implications of the manual and the Invisiclues.
- The "Joy Booths" were virtual reality devices that some people would remain in until they died from exhaustion or thirst or somesuch. The Futurama suicide booths had no function besides killing whoever stepped inside and activated the controls.
- "Would you like a quick and painless death, or slow and horrible?" "Yes, I'd like to make a collect call..." "You have selected: slow and horrible."
- Not to mention that the Earth's military hero is a trigger-happy Ted Baxter who declares wars with alien races for so much as looking at him funny. This troper gets the feeling that Zapp would gladly take the vow of celibacy if it meant working for the Emperor so he could do just that (that is, if Futurama didn't take place 37,000 years earlier).
- Zapp Brannigan... celibate? Have you gone mad, man?
- The world of Invader Zim, where humans are generally stupid, ignorant and repulsive and the world they live in is seemingly 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, but they are so repulsed by their first impressions that they immediately retreat back into their own world.
- And the Irken aren't much better...
- This is Jhonen Vasquez's favorite trope, as one can see in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.
- On Daria, the Show Within A Show "Sick, Sad World" is an exaggerated version of the world of Daria.
- 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. The Mad Scientist is barely able to invent his way out of a paper bag, the evil villains go through minions like an alcoholic through six-packs, and life is cheap — even some of the main characters are repeatedly killed. 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 real successful character in the show was literally mistaken for a cancerous tumor at one point.
- Not to mention that the ONLY good-natured character in the whole show is a Necromancer who doesn't care a dist about messing with the powers of beyond and black magicks. Even his daughter seems to a be a selfish and insufferable teenager.
- Weeeeell... there's also the Venture Brothers themselves. But given how they're the ultimate incarnation of Too Dumb To Live (being that they died a horrendous amount of times already, with a less than cheerful method of They Got Better), I think they can't actually be called characters, they're more of a pair of Butt Monkey s who are only there to remind you that if you're naive and made of sugar, spice and everything nice you'll not survive the world. No matter how many times the world has to prove it to you.
- Another good-natured character is Dr. Killinger, the therapist. Much like the Necromancer, he's a dedicated professional who honestly (and rather effectively) helps his clients deal with their issues. Much like the Necromancer, he also has a somewhat skewed moral compass, since he doesn't care a dist about helping a villain becoming a more effective and dangerous villain. He also carries a demon head in his Carpetbag of Mysteries. Last but not least, he's also a recruiter for the Guild of Calamitous Intent. It's a sad, sad world where the closest thing to a caring therapist is a supervillain.
- Metropolis from the series Pigeon Boy has to be the most crime-ridden, corrupt fictional city this editor has ever seen. Here are some of the incidents in this place:
- A corrupt businessman orders men to take over his oil tanker and crash it so he can claim the insurance.
- The Mayor orders all the people at a retirement home to clear out, no questions asked, so he can have it demolished.
- The president of a bird seed company makes what is essentially bird seed ultra crack (that causes people to binge on it uncontrollably) and gives it out, withholding this vital piece of info.
- A corporate executive makes a window cleaner that makes people bald and immediately purchases four wig companies so he can cash in, as well as ignoring that there is an antidote.
- A female radio host stops someone from reporting that a hurricane is coming on the day of the city's massive picnic event, saying, "people only want to hear good news!".
- You get the idea. It gets to the point when it would probably be easier for the SAS to launch a police action against the city to take care of the corruption once and for all, than have the problems solved by a kid who has been magically given gadgets by ordinary, run of the mill pigeons.
- The point of Tom Goes to the Mayor. The town of Jefferton is an extraordinarily drab and ugly place where the people are all either apathetic, bitter, stupid, or flat-out insane. Jefferton also celebrates idiotic local holidays like Tootle Day (where dogs are married) and advertises utterly impractical products like the Eez-Zee Stoolstrip Tester (a home starch detection device).
- The popular Flash series Madness Combat is certainly an example. The location ("Somewhere In Nevada") is populated by emotionless moronic clones who can literally be killed in the dozens by a single guy in minutes not to mention the story can never really end as the main character never permanently dies. Even the artwork is deliberately dark and grim.
- This is actually pretty common on Newgrounds, probably the ultimate example would be the featureless muddy hell of Salad Fingers.
- Moral Orel by the third season plunges straight into this as the ironically named town of Moralton is ruled by incredibly reactionary beliefs backed by morally bankrupt hypocrites/bible-thumpers, all of which lead horrendously depressing and just plain disturbing secret lives (the ice-cream man is revealed to be a serial rapist, the nurse regresses into a childish state at home with a teddy bear family she treats as real, the main characters' father is just a horrid alcoholic who follows incredibly bigoted 1950's ideals). The main character is shown to be one of the few genuinely morally decent (though incredibly naive) characters, who by the second season finale has seen his father's "True Nature", as his mother refers to it.
Newspaper Comics
- Is there a better example in all of fiction than Funky Winkerbean? This troper has been informed that it was once a quirky, funny strip, but it's been a dismal non-stop parade of tragedy for as long as he can remember reading it. From the famously dragged-out demise of Lisa Moore via cancer (that she thought was in remission until the hospital revealed the tragic testing mixup), to the aging band leader's tragically ironic hearing loss, by way of the gym teacher's impotence and the suicide attempt of a spurned girl who recently returned as the new HS teacher, the only recourse the pitiable denizens of the Funkyverse have is that damned resigned half-smirk they're always sporting in the last panel. One is driven to wonder just what author Tom Batiuk has against the concepts of happiness and joy.
- You left out the promising young musician who had her arm amputated as the result of a drunk-driving accident, and of course the title character's lengthy battle with alcoholism. It says something very scary about this strip that these two events are in no way related to each other.
- 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).
Television
Literature
- Bored of the Rings and, to make a bold assumption, Barry Trotter and Doon.
- Barry Trotter starts out as a straight Crapsack, but isn't exactly one by the end of the book. (I only read the first one.)
- Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning.
- 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.
- A Song Of Ice And Fire is a world in the midst of a civil war, where childhood basically doesn't exist and the bad guys win again and again. It's amazing anybody ever came up with the concept of heroism.
- 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. I doubt things improve much in the Rook Barkwater series.
- They don't improve. 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 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.
- Patrick Susskind's Perfume. Everyone is either motivated by greed, selfishness, lust or desire for fame, or callous and apathetic to their fellow human beings. Grenouille's quest for beauty and perfection, however warped the means by which he pursues it, seems sympathetic by comparison.
- Two words: Harrison Bergeron.
- 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 Pip and Flinx universe is worse, although other parts of the Commonwealth aren't so bad. The church pretty much runs it, everybody is pretty much evil other than Pip, Flinx, and a few friends, the A-aan a reptillion species are hell bent on killing everybody, and they were almost integrated into the Humanx Commonwealth instead of the insectoid thranx because they looked more human, despite them being far worse morally.
- The Damned anyone? A massive bunch of species controlled by some squids with mind control powers, who casually alter their DNA, and send them off to die, and the people fighting them are a bunch of rag tag species who barely get along, with only one capable of combat at all. And once they get humans to ally with them they operate behind their backs.
- 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.
Comic Books
- 'The City' (and much of the planet, from what little is seen of it) of the series Transmetropolitan.
- 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."
- 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. The fact that it was ultimately blown up is probably a blessing for all involved.
- The universe of Judge Dredd often looks a lot like this.
- The Marvel miniseries Ruins basically treats us to the crapsack 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.
- Hell, the regular Marvel universe isn't exactly a rose garden either. The majority of earth's population seems to be composed of close minded, paranoid bigots who usually lash out at even the most benign superhero teams for saving their lives because "they're dirty mutants" or "they can't be trusted". Every government in the world seems to be licking their lips at the concept of subjugating superheroes and turning them into mindless super solders for less than benign purposes, especially Canada. Freaking Canada for godsake. On the other side of the spectrum, if you live anywhere that doesn't fall within the New York state area, you're screwed if you need any kind of super powered help. Even if you do live in New York, several comics have hinted at the fact that unless you're rich or have connections, There is no way the Fantastic Four or the Avengers are going to help you due to massive amounts bureaucratic red tape. And that's not even counting things on a galactic scale, where most of the universe is ruled by the Kree and the Skrull Empires respectively, who constantly fight massive bloody wars over who is Eviler Than Thou. Or used to be, until they were largely overrun. By Annihilus. Whose name means exactly what it sounds like. What's not held by the Kree, Skrulls, or Annihilus is mostly controlled by the Shi'ar, who used to be presented as an honorable Proud Warrior Race allied with the X-Men. In recent years, the "honorable" and "allied with the X-Men" parts have been dropped. Finally there's Galactus, a genocidal Cosmic Horror who destroys entire civilizations and can't be destroyed because he is necessary for the very universe's existence. Galactus actually was killed once (he got better), and an even worse Cosmic Horror rose to take his place until the heroes revived him. On the plus side (such as it is), Galactus has agreed to keep Earth off his meal list. Oh, and Reed Richard's civil war related dickery will make earth a paradise in the future.
- This editor disagrees. While all of the facts pointed above are true, there ARE lots of positive elements as well. Beginning with the fact that the Marvel Universe hosts some of greatest fictional heroes ever, most of whom, even when faced with personal tragedies, never give up the good fight for long (and almost never lose.) While there is certainly a lot of mutant prejudice, much of the public does not share that vision- it's just that the anti-mutant factions get more screentime (there is even at least one pro-mutant organization.) And while some Cosmic Entities are evil (and most are uncaring) there are benevolent ones as well. Civil War was an intentional attempt to "darken" things a little, but its effects are slowly but surely being unraveled; even Captain America's death is certain to be undone (probably by the time his new movie debuts.) For a better example of a major Superhero Universe that has been more successfully darkened, see the DC Universe .
- On the other hand, even the Marvel Universe looks like Disneyland in comparison with the Wildstorm Universe, where even the number one ''superhero'' team is a bunch of amoral bastards who hold no qualms about torturing or killing already-defeated opponents and who once actually took over the United States themselves (oh, yeah, and they've killed two U.S. Presidents). They're only the "good guys" in comparison to the super-villains, all of whom without exception are baby-eating, dog-raping, Nazi Omnicidal Maniacs who slaughter entire cities or even countries just for fun. Ordinary citizens in the Marvel Universe might hate and fear mutants, but those in the Wildstorm Universe live in mortal terror of all superhumans - and it's entirely justified.
- 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.
- Any graphic novels by Alejandro Jodorowsky: the Metabarons is essentially one long Greek tragedy in space; Technopriests features game designers worshipping a transdimensional 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.
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 villains are probably some of the least unpleasant people around. People generally fall into four categories, the fairly intelligent but utterly evil (Black Mage, Thief, Sarda), the people who are, while not entirely stupid or actively malicious, too delusional to realize the suffering they cause (Red Mage, King Steve), the moral but so completely idiotic they are completely useless (Fighter, Black Belt), and annoying passers-by. The so called Light Warriors are essentially a group of murdering, destructive thugs, the only actually decent person is the No Respect Guy (well, girl), kingdoms are completely obliterated on a daily basis, all people with any authority are horribly stupid, and even the man who controls the universe will wipe out cities in the process of tormenting Black Mage. Also, pretty much the entire species of Humans, Dwarves, and ''especially'' Elves are jingoist to the point that they are almost constantly warring and don't see the others as sentient beings, and the rulers generally see their lessers as sacrificial pawns to achieve their goals.
- Forget the Elves/Dwarves argument, if 1031
 is any indication the Khee'bler and Sahn'tah elves have their own dirty laundry to deal with.
Thief: The biggest improvement from my end is that it takes less paperwork to keep two teammates' worth of booty than three.
Drizz'l: Wait, what?
Thief: Hm? Oh, I probably didn't say a thing.
Drizz'l: Is this one of your crushing Khee'bler 100% taxes?
Thief: Nothing like that. It's more like fifty-six individual taxes. Between three and twelve percent. Each.
Drizz'l: This is why my people are revolting.
- On the plus side, every single problem in the above list can be solved through creative usage of animal husbandry.
- Something Positive is set in a world where every person but the main cast (and at least part of the main cast) is petty, greedy, self-centered, stupid and/or passive-aggressively oblivious.
- I would argue that the main cast is also petty, greedy, self-centered and passive-aggressive, with the bonus of being devoid of empathy and insufferably arrogant. There's not a single likable one among the bunch.
- The Oceans Unmoving sci-fi storyline of Sluggy Freelance featured a universe so bleak that individuums on their own could hardly survive. Instead of vacuum (which is merely the absense of air) the space between settlements is filled with a timeless void that would literally freeze you in time when your aura gave up, and it needs at least a minimum number of people huddled together to create a stable environment, a lifeforce-filled bubble. Consequently, space pirates roam around on their (literally) flying ships and abduct anyone who cannot defend themselves and selling them into slavery, or "harvesting" them for their time. Which means if they attacked a village and even if they only took half the population and stuffed them in their hold, the other half left behind might not make it. 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.
- Admittedly, by the end of the storyline the relatively heroic protagonist finds an "unlimited time source" that can be used to recharge time auras (including those of the time-frozen) indefinitely.
- Heck, the rest of Sluggy Freelance is not much better.
- 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 blackmarket weapons, and a rash of teen deaths is unheralded and unreported by the news. Watch out for the Happy Gun Dance!
Other
- This trope is subverted quite nicely in Mortasheen of all things. Although the setting is warped and tbe posiblity of grusome death is quite high, the author mentions that "Though dark and gruesome in concept, I think of Mortasheen as a generally happy place, its denizens taking a sarcastic and laid-back 'Addam's Family' approach to the ghastly world around them and the ever-looming threat of a painful demise." Don't beleive me? It says so in the manual
Video Games
- The 2007 game Overlord is very much a fantasy Crapsack World — everything in it is so stupid, twisted, or vile that your explicitly villainous Heroic Mime and his army of goblins actually manage to be among the most sympathetic characters in the game.
- The Destroy All Humans series similarly 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.
- Oddworld is something of a Crapsack World. 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.
- The vast majority of characters in the Grand Theft Auto games are slimy, corrupt, or criminal in some way. Each game is set in largely grimy, crime-blighted urban metropolises riddled with institutionalized corruption, where even the 'innocent' civilians tend to be stupid, arrogant and/or corrupt. Prostitutes walk the streets in broad daylight and policemen tend to not notice crimes unless a gun or explosives are used (or you trespass on police or military property). (A few notable exceptions include San Andreas' The Truth, who grows marijuana but is otherwise harmless, Kendl, CJ's sister who is the brains behind his business dealings, and Jimmy Hernandez, the only cop on the C.R.A.S.H. team who isn't actively corrupt.)
- Niko Bellic is also an exception, at least in the beginning of the game. He commits crimes, but overall he's not a bad sort: he's just trying to make his way in the Crapsack World of Liberty City.
- This troper disputes the validity of calling any GTA protagonist "not a bad sort".
- Computer game example: 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.
- 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.
- In the webcomic Concerned, which takes place in the Half-Life universe, specifically a few weeks before Half-Life 2, it is shown that some of the disasters of Half-Life 2 (particularly Ravenholm) are caused by Too Dumb To Live Gordon Frohman, a human who reveres his alien overlords. He's even responsible for Black Mesa.
- It's implied in the games (and outright stated by Wordof 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 crapsack. 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.
- Did we mention that the entire Mediterranean Sea is also now the world's largest ecological disaster?
- And if you like the scenery wait till you meet the people. First up is the Brotherhood of Nod; To their Magnificent Bastard leader Kane, everything from terrorism, genocide, inhuman experimentation, and complete anarchy are just a means to an end. Specifically, the end of the Global Defense Initiative, the "legitimate" world government which is bound by endless tides of red tape, internal corruption, and a quite fuzzy definition of "sufficient force." Nod also has a particularly extensive (though questionably accurate) archive on the atrocities committed by GDI. And then we have the aliens: the Scrin; who created this ecocalypse in the first place.
- The 1997 RTS game Total Annihilation had a crapsack Galaxy, a Used World taken to its logical extreme: super-efficient manufacturing and even more effective weapons have used up the resources of an entire galaxy. The cause of the war? The transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine. Entire civilisations have been built up and torn down in a matter of weeks, again and again over thousands of year, until there is nothing left. Both sides have essentially been destroyed, and the game takes place at the very end of the war, using the remnants of the once-great Arm and Core. This was not elaborated on very much, but has been expanded on by fans.
- It gets even better. According to canon, the Arm wins the war and starts on the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding a worthwhile civilization in a completely used-up galaxy. The Core weren't quite finished yet, though: the entire storyline of the Core Contingency expansion details the Core's secret plan, in case they ever lost: a secret Commander who would build an implosion device to annihilate everything in the galaxy except himself, thereby winning the Great War by a score of one to nothing.
- The spiritual successor of Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, is not as bad, and even get better with time, but starts pretty badly even so. The game also starts at the near end of a thousand years war. This time around the Cyborgs are much nicer, but they probably have the worst possible position in the bunch. There's the UEF, a sort of American Imperialism stumbled at German Nazism and went to the space sort of deal. The Aeon, a cult of an alien religion that has its original preachings perverted into a Knight Templar ordeal that has an ever increasing number of believers thanks to brainwash. The Cybrans, the cyborgs mentioned earlier, are a ragtag band of humans with computer interfaced brains trying to fend off both other factions, although they also compose a large number of space pirates and some terrorists. If an UEF loses to the Aeon, they're brainwashed and absorbed. If the Aeon loses to the UEF, they're captured and presumably go through a rehab. The Cybran only seem to capture and offer to join them or keep the prisoners, but if the Aeon finds them, it's a complete purge of the "impure" (although it's implied that the computer interfaced brains aren't brainwashable), and if the UEF defeats them, they become null-willed slaves to work as labor and intelligence. Also, with the UEF ending you get to finish the Planetary-Scaled A-Bomb (actually a cannon) and bullying the other two into submission, while the Aeon use to force peace in a universal instant brainwash (strong enough to work on Cybrans) where everyone is happy under the "Way". The Cybran only seem to free every Cybran slave and making their FTL means inoperative in the galaxy for a few years, presumably to let each planet evolve a bit in times of peace and see if they enjoy it.
- Then come the Seraphin and fucks everything up very fast.
- 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.
- Star Craft isn't a happy place either. The Terrans were struggling to get along as is, and then not one but two alien races show up, one an unstoppable organic force and the other willing to take extreme measures of the forcer (including the destruction of terran planets). And of course, the terrorists see that as the perfect opportunity to take over. Not that the official government was much better. You can count the good characters on one finger. (Although there are 2-3 more in the novels).
- The Tex Murphy games take place in a post-apocalyptic world. (Most of the time is spent in San Francisco) While the world is slightly better off than you might expect given that World War 3 has occurred fairly recently, the place is still pretty crummy.
- The city of Rapture in Bio Shock started out as a utopia, but once ADAM was introduced, and the Magnificent Bastard Frank Fontaine realized what it could do, things rapidly started spiraling downward into a world of insanity and violence.
- The Rogue Isles, the "Villain" half of City Of Heroes/Villains is pretty bleak, and you work to make it bleaker. (Paragon City on the Hero side ain't exactly a paradise either.)
- Handled interestingly in the Fallout series. While the post-apocalyptic wasteland might be an unpleasant place to live, it's better (at least in parts) than the world before the bombs fell.
- Warcraft and World Of Warcraft hides this nature behind it's bright colors. The world has been shattered by several catastrophies, major and minor. The heroic races are displaced and suffer from in fighting, conflicts with each other based on old (and more recent) grudges and in some cases suffer from a lack of proper leadership. Demons, undead and thousands of other evil creatures stalk the land and battle for power, and you can't dig a three foot hole without unleashing some ancient evil. Things aren't always portrayed as completely hopeless, but the world has a long way to go for peace.
- The ironically named "New Eden" of EvE Online is a crapsack galaxy. The Amarr are corrupt theocrats that rule 1/3 of the galaxy. The Minmatar not enslaved by the Amarr are too obsessed with vengeance to build their own infrastructure. The Caldari State is a soul-crushing society of Obstructive Bureaucrats, and the Gallente Federation is hopelessly corrupt. Millions of unseen, faceless ship crew are killed daily in the un-ending territorial wars fought by immortal, uncaring pod-pilots (the players). And this was before the empires went to war.
- The Witcher has a semi-standard fantasy world... except that everybody is a violent bigot, diseases ravage the countryside and to cut it short pretty much everybody has a crappy old time and takes it out on everybody else. Even the titular hero (who is already stretching the definition) needs to bully and brutalize his way through to accomplish anything good. A telling moment is when it turns out that in an early village pretty much everybody is a vile, hateful, traitorous prick to the extent that their evil spontaneously manifests into a corporeal form and kills the whole village.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 is the undisputed, ultimate crapsackiest Crapsack of them all. As well as every sick, twisted, brutal, hateful death and horrible thing that can happen to the average person in Warhammer, you have just as good a chance of being killed under suspicion that you might have seen one of the vast selection of monsters, aliens and daemons as actually getting killed by them. Between the endless hordes of Orks spread across the galaxy, the relentless tides of daemons and daemon-powered super soldiers of Chaos and their limitlessly malevolent gods, the sadistic and rape-happy Dark Eldar, the capricious, manipulative and mass-murdering Eldar, the incomprehensible vastness of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, and the nearly invincible, and impossibly advanced Necrons (whose star-eating trickster gods, incidentally, are seemingly controlling everything in the entire galaxy in the background), it's practically impossible not to die a brutal, gory death. And that's not counting the supposed good guys, including the Imperium of Man, which is among the most oppressive, bleak, and dystopian regimes imaginable. In this Crapsack Galaxy, death is probably the best thing that can happen to you. Until you realize that death would result in eternal torment as your soul is tortured and devoured by either a Chaos God, a daemon, or a star-eating personification of Death.
- In a slight exception, the Tau are both the nicest and the luckiest faction. They not only stand out for being (occasionally) willing to accept the surrender of enemies and actually integrate them into their society, they also happen to be totally immune to psychic effects (including having their souls eaten by daemons: having no warp presence, they don't technically have souls). They do, however, have no qualms about using threats, war, genocide, forced sterilisation, concentration camps and mind control when it's for the "greater good", and being an optimist in Warhammer 40k is basically setting yourself up for a horrible letdown and an awful death.
- The Warhammer 40k universe is so bleak, in fact, that the designers specifically added the Tau because they wanted an idealistic race.
- Which they then followed up with the Necrons, just to bring the balance back. The second edition Tau sourcebook, Codex: Tau Empire, also makes the Tau more hard-edged, greedy, jaded and brutal than before, though they're still the Care Bears of 40k.
- The first Tau Codex was, in effect, set during their first phase of large scale expansion, though at the end of it they still weren't a large enough empire for anybody to really bother too much with. The second Codex is set during the phase after that, and their leaders have come to realise a few 'truths' (some of which are still wrong) about the rest of the galaxy.
- It says something that the Flashman expy is the most decent and heroic individual in the whole setting.
- Although, for the record, there is one genuine, honest to goodness aversion in the setting: the Space Wolves and their leader, Logan Grimnar, despite being Space Marines, are supposed to be quite likeable and friendly, in a BRIAN BLESSED kind of way. Logan was the only person who protested when members of the Redshirt Army were consigned to concentration camps after surviving (and winning) a war against Chaos. No one listened to him, of course, but the thought was there.
- There's also the Tanith First-And-Only, who are genuinely heroic and pretty nice guys. Except that their star of glory came in the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, which ends a good few hundred years before the "here and now" of 40k, so every last one of them is dead and forgotten.
- Warhammer. Take the most ignorant and paranoid aspects of Medieval Europe, combine with the barbarism and savagery of the Conan series, add a dash of the original versions of the stories told by The Brothers Grimm, and garnish with just enough Steam Punk to allow mass murder to be undertaken more efficiently. Basically Warhammer 40,000 without the plumbing: you don't live a miserable life and die, you live a pointless, painful life soaking in excrement until you're killed horribly by some monster, a daemon, or your own side.
- The World of Darkness. 'Nuff said... though the reboot is not as bad. Mostly.
- This editor is of the opinion that the Changeling The Lost gameline for the new World of Darkness 2.0 is even bleaker than anything they had written for the old game (except maybe Wraith: Oblivion).
- Comfy Chair Games ups the ante on that with Spine Spur, a horror RPG set in a Crapsack World so foul, vile, miserable and nasty that it makes the World of Darkness look like Smurf Village.
- Alpha Complex in Paranoia is a Crapsack World played for laughs, being a Dystopia ruled by a paranoid Master Computer and infested with back-stabbing social climbers, squabbling secret societies, rogue robots, mutants, and worst of all, bureaucrats.
- The dystopian bizarro punk Planescape setting for Dungeons And Dragons tabletop RPG, especially those parts set in Sigil, the teeming and violent megalopolis in the center of the Planes, high above the Concordant Plane of the Outlands.
- Sigil and the Lower Planes were quite awful, but the Upper Planes were heavenly... though not without dangers.
- And also any campaign set in the Underdark (Forgotten Realms) or Underoerth (World of Greyhawk) realms. What happens when sociopaths, fascists, maniacs, murderous savages, ancient intelligences, and alien predators make their societies all within the same few caverns of the world? That.
- The RPG adaption of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series (see above under "Literature").
- Twilight 2000. World War Three has killed 90% of the human race, and you're stranded in enemy territory trying to get home. If "home" hasn't been nuked itself. The metaplot has a few rays of hope, but basically you're screwed. If the Communists don't get you, disease or radiation will. You'd be hard-pressed to slide the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism any further towards the latter end. And it's great.
- H.O.L. (Human Occupied Landfill) RPG. Subverts the usual bleak and postapocalyptic setting by approaching the whole thing with a seriously twisted sense of humor.
- The German RPG Engel (Angels). Bleak, feudal, postapocalyptic, with an undercurrent of pedophiliac vibes. A papal theocracy is busy abducting preadolescent peasant children, wiping their memories and turning them into winged "angels" through experiments with magics and ancient advanced technology, then sends them out to kill heretics and monstrous mutated creatures. The upside is, the angels gain various supernatural abilities, and yes, they can fly. The downside is, the angels die once they enter puberty.
- "Right now, the moment you begin reading this, humanity is devastated by an alien attack from the edges of our understanding." That's the first line of the Bliss Stage core rules. It only gets worse from there.
- All Flesh Must Be Eaten. A horror RPG that, in all cases, there are zombies on the loose. How much of a crapsack the world is depends on the individual scenarios — everything from a full-scale Romeroesque Zombie Apocalypse to a more subdued Sly Alien Invasion. In any case, though, the world is definitely a crapsack when the dead rise.
- The Battletech universe started out like this; an ongoing two hundred and fifty year-long war raging across hundreds of worlds had reduced human civilization to near ruins; technology had regressed hundreds of years, hundreds of worlds had bene left uninhabitable and yet wars continued; no faction had any chance of vicotry, only prologing the conflict. All this was the result of the collapse of a Golden Age that wasn't even that golden to begin with.
- Things got better for a while with the prosect of peace, albiet simply due to the arrival of a greater menace. Of course, then the genocidal toaster-worshippers came along...
Anime
- The Shinigami World in Death Note is a Crapsack World, but, seeing how many people Light kills, the Human World only looks nice.
- The Mainland World of Bobobo is a Weirdsack world, which is completely normal compared to the [[Cloudcookooland Bobobo World,]] which takes place inside the Protagonists head. If you believe the Surreal Them Tune, several Characters also originate here.
- The series version of Hellsing plays with this visually. Not only is it always night, but several street sequences show all the bystanders with evil shadowed faces for no good reason. This could just be a visual representation of the main character's mental state, though.
- 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 sucks hardcore. The world seems to exist only to make people as miserable as possible and to give the demons somewhere to play, and humanity in turn so that the demons something to play with. The biggest idealist in the entire setting snapped under the pressure and is now the Big Bad.
- The world in Claymore seems to exist only so yoma have somewhere to play, and humanity in turn so that they have something to play with (and feed on). The biggest idealist in the entire setting snapped under the pressure and is now possibly the Big Bad.
- Played extremely straight in the anime Texhnolyze.
- Galaxy Express 999 is halfway between Dystopia and Crapsack World, except with the entire universe. Every single planet has something seriously wrong with it, either because the rich rule everything, it's only nice on the surface... or in the sad case of one planet, "Survival of the Fittest" destroyed a world where nothing could be injured, by making everything die.
- How could you forget the obvious Neon Genesis Evangelion, esp. End Of Evangelion? Even for the non-protagonists, life isn't exactly funny.
- 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 at one point 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.
- La'Cryma from Noein is a "possible future" world set 15 years in the future where everyone lives in underground hovels (because the entire surface of the Earth is ruined), eats bugs, and are constantly under attack by giant freaky-looking flying things with multiple faces, arms and legs that shoot death beams from their eyes.
- The afterlife of Bleach ("Soul Society") is one big crapsack. People who die live forever in a medieval Japanese slum, basically waiting to either be attacked by soul-devouring monsters or beaten up by the good guys who are naturally more interested in getting into endless fights-of-the-week with each other than actually helping anyone.
- Actually, souls can also die in Soul Society, like Hisana, Byakuya's wife, and when they do, they reincarnate into the real world (without any memories), as explained in the first movie.
- Modern Tokyo is portrayed as a Crapsack World 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 & robots, occaisionally ruled by an opressive theocracy & after people start piling into rocketships 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! When humanity finally goes extinct in the (chronologically) final chapter, it actually comes as something of a relief.
- The wartorn desert planet that Now And Then Here And There takes place on, mostly due to the fact that it's a (slightly) exaggerated version of modern Africa.
- 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.
- 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 scrapping by on your meager provisions. You'll be constantly on the lookout for roving brigands who, if you're lucky,
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