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Darkness Induced Audience Apathy
"By all means, writers, let your story wander around the dank, twisty little passages. You may even permit that journey to come to a bad end. But without some light source, your story will be eaten by the Grue of Indifference."
It is often said that 'conflict is the soul of drama'; without some form of conflict to fuel things, there's no engine to drive the story and thus little reason to engage with it. However, we here at TV Tropes would like to propose an amendment to this phrase which includes something important but, sadly, all too often forgotten:
Meaningfulconflict is the soul of drama.
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy occurs when a conflict exists that simply lacks any reason for the audience to give a damn about how it is resolved. This is often because the setting is extremely but meaninglessly Darker and Edgier, and all sides are abhorrently, equally evil — or at least, far enough gone that any difference between the two is splitting hairs. As such, consumers of media affected by Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy tend to approach conflict between parties or factions with remarkable indifference; because no matter who wins, the universe will still suck. (And while it would be really nice to see them alllose, it ain't going to happen.) In other words, there is nothing at stake. While there is a conflict happening, for all that the audience is concerned there might as well not be because they likely have little reason to care about who wins or loses. (And even when there areclear-cut good guys, they can be so smug, priggish, hypocritical, unpleasant, or just plain annoying that it's hard to feel too sad if the bad guys defeat them, especially if the bad guys actually have a good reason for hating them.)
This is basically the emotional result of Black and Black Morality. Because the conflict between the equal evils is essentially meaningless, there is no dramatic tension. Maybe one Eldritch Abomination eats you in a slightly less painful manner than the other one, but either way, you're still screwed. You can't support any factions or hold on to any ideals after this effect has set in. All you can do is sit agape as the writers apparently attempt to outdo themselves at making the setting even worse and more unpleasant and more nihilistic to the point where the media is a bland miserable monotone. This trope is not just about a Crapsack World, but about Evil Versus Evil and too much cynicism producing this effect.
A variant is basically when Shoot the Shaggy Dog meets True Art IsTooAngsty; a story is simply too bleak, hopeless, and...well, angsty for the audience to really care what happens. Leaving aside how obviously and overly depressing this is to read, if the characters are doomed to failure no matter what they do, and it is too obvious that they are doomed and their every action to avert this is pointless and hopeless, then the ending is inevitable and can be seen a mile off — so why bother continuing on with the story? (Especially if Developing Doomed Characters is done badly and you can't care about who's in it.) This, of course, does not mean that all stories have to end happily — but most of the time, a good Tragedy works because the characters involved are given a chance to escape theirDowner Ending but, for whatever reason, fail to do so; take away this chance, and usually what will happen is that the story just ends up being a lengthy description of unremittingly unpleasant things happening to someone.
When applying to individuals, this is basically one of the reasons why the "Wangst" trope happens.
A sure sign of audience apathy setting in is if they start rooting for the Omnicidal Maniac - the setting is so bleak that no part of it is worth saving. When total oblivion looks like your best option, something is wrong.
Often results in readers saying the Eight Deadly Words, or concluding that the plot boils down to a Wangst-fest.
Video games that provoke this reaction may still get their player base, mostly consisting of players that are perfectly happy to play the game and skip the story. For example, if the game requires the player to pick a faction to play as, they would simply choose sides with no interest other than the technical interest of playing one side or the other (or, such as in MMORPGs, the interest in teaming with real-life friends).
Compare Angst Dissonance and Only The Author Can Save Them Now. See also Too Happy to Live and True Love Is Boring.
Sometimes the result of Developing Doomed Characters.
Status Quo Is God is usually the result of the trope when the audience knows that all and any changes that could have made a positive impact in the setting won't stick.
If the hero of the story openly lampshades their own apathy toward the outcome of the story, they might be a Nominal Hero.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Ergo Proxy can, in its early stages, fall victim to this trope. Near the beginning of the series, there were a few moral dilemmas stemming from black and black morality. Stop the Proxy that's loose in Romdo and the fascist government regains total control over the city. Don't stop the Proxy and it'll continue a murder spree.
Desert Punk, albeit a comic series falls into this. Almost every single character is a massive Jerk Ass, and the few exceptions never prosper in this world. By the middle of the series, it's quite clear that none of the three major characters have a Hidden Heart of Gold. Pretty much summing things up is the comment by the Lemony Narrator in the last episode in respect to the After the End setting, which is to the effect that "With people like this, it doesn't matter if humanity goes extinct."
And it somehow makes even that terrible because Tea R is killed by a Gilgamesh spawn from Kiyoko after it destroys everything, therefore everything is gone forever and can never be brought back potentially better.
Gundam, with Tomino's insistence that all Gundam takes place in the same verse, has become this as it requires multiple genocides, several apocalypses, archaeology completely failing to notice previous civilizations (let alone all the mobile suit storage containers) and all aesops broken and lost with the passage of history. To put it another way, nothing that anyone does in any series matters in the long run until ∀ Gundam, ten thousand years after the eponymous mobile suit destroys all but a tiny portion of humanity.
Within specific series, Victory Gundam suffers from this the most, with Zeta Gundam following behind (at least, near the end).
Black Lagoon, especially in its early stages. The anime version tones it down JUST a little, but it's still very easy to not care about what happens to anyone in this series since they're all jerks, evil or psychotic.
Let that sink in for a moment: he obliterates humanity just to be an asshole. He obliterates humanity. Just to be an asshole.Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
An alternate viewing is that it wasn't anything as human as to be an asshole or even to escape meaninglessness but the man-made ultimate soldier simply being the ultimate soldier. The sequel further posited that Geist literally physically thrived on continuous warfare, a trait unforeseen by his designers, so you can't really write him up as an insane man or a programmed machine.
Texhnolyze. While there are characters who are noticeably better or worse than others, no one is truly good, with even the most sympathetic characters being Anti Heroes. A lot of viewers saw the show's Downer Ending coming a mile away, and were just waiting for everyone to give up and die.
The final episodes of Paranoia Agent, when a mysterious but solitary menace turned into a city-wide all-consuming biomass, destroying uncounted Innocent Bystanders amongst a handful of previously developed characters. Fortunately this was a brief enough period to avert Ending Fatigue, and still got the point across by changing scope.
Naruto: Sasuke versus Danzo. Sasuke just left two of his companions to die because saving them would've been inconvenient and joined a terrorist organisation to destroy the entire Leaf Village for having eradicated his clan (the Uchiha were planning a coup, which likely would have resulted in a civil war) even though only four people knew of it. Danzo is a true Konoha patriot... except his vision of Konoha is a vaguely fascist society which places almost no value on the individual. Danzo has also had a hand in murdering a group of peaceful activists in a foreign country which ended up radicalizing the survivors into becoming the terrorist organization that Sasuke would join, and was willing to let people in Konoha die so he could become Hokage. Not to mention the mind control he used at the ninja version of the United Nations.
Cannon God Exaxxion. The alien invaders are basically Nazi Elves. The defending humans don't give a crap about collateral damage and will basically kill and destroy at will. While Kenichi Sonada had dipped his toe in this trope before, this was when he took a swan dive into it, and never really surfaced.
Season one of Hell Girl in particular can get a little ridiculous. Every episode, you're introduced to a new villain with no real objective other than to prove his/her guilt in as many obvious ways as possible. Even when they get what's coming to them, it's not before they've completely ruined someone, or many people's lives, sometimes irrevocably. And you know the next episode is just gonna feature someone even crueler.
Bakuman。 features this in-universe with the main characters' reactions to Nanamine's "Classroom of Truth," in which everyone, including the main characterdies, with Mashiro saying that having the main character's efforts turn out to be in vain doesn't work.
Don't bother getting attached to story arc characters in Darker Than Black. They'll be dead in a few episodes, anyways.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica can become this for viewers who have been unable to avoid spoilers thanks to the memetic nature of the show's fandom. Knowing that everythingafter episode three is one long road of misery, suffering, and Deus Angst Machinauntil Madoka rewrites reality kind of takes away from the impact.
The spin-off Puella Magi Kazumi Magica devolves in this shortly before the climax. When all the girls start to fight each other due to their different view points, it becomes hard to root for one or other due to the fact that they all (although to different degrees) are so morally rotten that several of them already spot a blue and orange morality
Neon Genesis Evangelion. To sum up, in the beginning of the story an explosion was set off that wiped out half of humanity. The remaining survivors that are fighting the monsters that caused this are all mentally unstable, ineffectual, or trying to finish the job. Everything the hero does backfires spectacularly, the villains hold the cards, and by the end everyone dies.
On that note, the third Rebuild of Evangelion film has also turned into this for several viewers.
Hot Gimmick is one of the few shoujo manga that fits this trope. Every character is a jerkass or a idiot, and nobody receives any major character development (in fact the opposite seems to happen). The Esoteric Happy Ending doesn't help, not even when the novel ended up fixing it.
It looked better as of the ending of the Siege storyline, that things would improve. Captain America was alive again, and The Avengers had stopped fighting each other and were actually allowed to be heroes. Then Avengers Vs X Men made Cyclops an even bigger Jerkass and derailed Captain America into being one as well. Not to mention, the only purpose of the crossover was to Retcon the aftermath of Decimation.
Alan Moore's works often skirt the edge of this Trope, or dive right over it: V for Vendetta, for example, gives the reader the choice of fascist totalitarianism that keeps order and keeps the people fed or the chaos and violence of the post-revolutionary era which the comic makes overtly clear will lead to mass starvation (we're to understand that the eventual "voluntary anarchic order" will make things better in the long run). Watchmen gives us the choice of "inevitable" nuclear annihilation or a Roman peace maintained by fear and a lie.
The Walking Dead is obviously not meant to be a light-hearted comic, being set in a Zombie Apocalypse, but even for the genre it gets progressively darker over time. Every single gain the characters manage to find is always ruined, many characters continually die in dark and gory ways, and the ones who've managed to stay alive become more and more traumatized until Rick declares "WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD!" And since the zombie apocalypse is global with no known cure, there seems to be no end in sight.
Wanted. In a fight between a group of nihilistic, mass-murdering, serial-raping assholes who want to continue ruling the world in secret and a group of nihilistic, mass-murdering, serial-raping assholes who want to rule the world openly, why should the reader really care who wins? Heck, you might as well root for the series' antagonist, Mr. Rictus. At least he's good for some Black Comedy (if you're amused by the slaughter of children). The You Bastard ending seems to indicate that the author himself hates both the story, and anyone who read it through to the end. One of the possible interpretations is that he's condemning anyone who could accept a universe so devoid of hope.
Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal was responsible for destroying Roy Harper's character following his dismemberment at the hands of Prometheus and the death of his daughter in Justice League Cry For Justice. On the one side there is Roy, reeling from the loss of his only child, grappling with the fact that he may no longer be able to use a bow and arrow, and suffering from impotency and hallucinations (whose source was not clarified as stemming from grief, pain medication, or his infected right arm). He lashes out at his friends and family for trying to help, begins stealing pain killers from Dr. Mid-Nite, goes back on heroin, and turns into a murderous anti-hero after being goaded into killing Prometheus's ally the Electrocutioner (by a hallucination of Lian) then burning down his home. However, on the other side, his friends and family truly don't help the situation that much. They don't seem to have fully understood just what Roy has lost. Dr. Mid-Nite was completely oblivious to the fact that Roy was stealing pain killers, quite easily in fact. Cyborg designed him a shoddy mechanical arm meant to work around the infected nerve endings in Roy's arm, while simultaneously enhancing his pain and limiting whatever abilities as an archer he had left. Wally West does absolutely nothing to help, Donna Troy stops after Roy accuses her of "whoring around in space with Kyle Rayner" while her husband and son died in a car crash. Though, someone who's gone through everything Donna has should've understood Roy's suffering a little easier. And Dick Grayson consigns to have Roy locked in a substance abuse center for super villains after he has a vivid hallucination while on heroin. Dick does so with the consent of Black Canary, who washes her hands of Roy and considers him a lost cause. It's hard to root for Roy when he's acting like such an asshole, but given that his family and friends treat his loss with such negligence, it's hard to side with anyone in this comic.
The DCU had a period like this, from approximately the Graduation Day storyline (the Sudden Downer Ending of Young Justice) to the Sinestro Corps War. Geoff Johns (who wrote both the aforementioned storylines, though Graduation Day was mandated by Executive Meddling) may have slipped a bit of meta-commentary on this into his Infinite Crisis, as this trope is essentially the reason why the villains of that story want to destroy the universe and remake it in their image.
Tischman's brief Cable run had a sound concept: averting the Reed Richards Is Useless trope by exploring what would happen if a godlike superhuman intervened in real (sort of) wars. Unfortunately, in execution, the cast consisted of 75% villains (including everyone on both sides of the various conflicts, even the side Cable ostensibly fights for), 21% helpless victims, 3% actually sympathetic characters who accomplish anything, and 1% Cable himself, who is a Mighty Whitey played depressingly straight and who flat-out admits that even with all his phenomenal power, he can't really change anything, and that his goal is basically making things better for a handful of people for the immediate future. And that's before you get into the Unfortunate Implications: the main villains are all but stated to be essentially the embodiments of the baseless "conspiracy of Greedy Jews that secretly controls everything bad in the world" theory from the bad old days. You'd think having an artist who was an actual veteran of The Balkan Wars would allow them to handle subjects like this more tastefully, but apparently not.
This is the attitude some people have had towards Avengers Arena. The promises that the series would feature a lot of deaths by the end has resulted in a heavily Broken Base, with some people rejecting the book along these lines.
Starfire runs right into Herb of the Musk, who is so dedicated to Just Following Orders that despite realizing that she's desperately trying not to kill him, he just uses her hesitation to casually beat her unconscious. X-COM then Mind Rapes her and almost vivisects her. Only the appearance of the other Titans proves her a non-combatant(due to being more subtly Mind Raped), which leads them to instead draft her without a second thought and imprison her in an environment that browbeats her with UN legislature that aliens have no rights, and she's not an exception.
Jinx makes a friend for the first time since she left both the HIVE Academy and the Titans, a rogue alien clone of Akari Unryuu, only for X-COM to accidentally-on-purpose return her to alien control so they can experiment on her.
Raven gets a pat on the head by X-COM psi researchers, who refuse to acknowledge her Eldritch Abomination father as real, instead encouraging her to abandon her training and embrace her darker emotions to tap into her new-found Mind Control abilities. She of course gets Drunk on the Dark Side.
Titans!Ryoga efforts at bonding with his fellow Titans are mocked by his militaristic counterpart, saying that pretending to be a Nice Guy will only make them unready for his inner darkness when it finally breaks loose.
Cyborg gets it the lightest - his courageous superhero act is mocked by X-COM, who want him to Stay In The Lab building superweapons.
All in all, you don't read the fic wondering what will happen to anyone from the X-COMverse, as it's mentioned multiple times that they will likely all die in the titular assault on Cydonia. They don't care if they live or die, or what happens to their civilization after they kill all the aliens, so why should the reader? What you wonder is if Our Heroes the Teen Titans will make it out of the Waffen-XX dimension alive, or if they'll even get to die sane.
Rainbow Double Dashs Lunaverse gets here with the season 1 finale 'At the Grand Galloping Gala', due to earlier chapters making it appear that, in order to stop the corrupt Courtiers who have been trying to control the Elements, Trixie and the other Elements have decided to commit treason by poisoning those Courtiers with a potion that will make them confess all their secrets to whoever is listening. Trixie's actions are just as illegal as those of the Courtiers, her motivation is identical (taking out bad ponies so that the nation can prepare to war against Corona), and the only difference between them is, essentially, that Trixie is the protagonist.
Background Pony can become this for some readers. The story is so relentlessly bleak and resolute about grinding Lyra into the dirt, without so much as a hint of hope that things will get better, that it's easy to simply become exhausted with the entire narrative. The ending is especially bad in this regard, either ending the story in the best way possible or just adding one final bout of angst to the pile.
All He Ever Wanted. Full stop. When almost every character is either an unlikable bastard/bitch or being constantly tortured, readers may not be sure who to root for at all. Of if there's any character worth rooting for. Specially considering that in the canon Hetalia verse, all nations are given at least some sympathetic and/or kind moments, even the worst Jerk Asses... and yet the fic removes almost all of them; i.e., seeing Prussia as a megalomaniac, abusive, rapist NaziCard-Carrying Villain when he's at most a Hot BloodedButt Monkey in canon is all kinds of NO.
The Prestige suffered from this. Nolan didn't really give the audience enough clues about who the real protagonist was (the one we actually wanted to see win), because both main characters acted rather heinously at times. It isn't until the end when one character triumphs that the audience goes "Oh, I guess he was the good guy all along", and by then, we're not sure if we should be happy or angry about the outcome.
This one is particularly tricky because we don't know which twin was doing what throughout the movie. All we can really be sure of is that the brother that gets executed tried to save Angier from drowning. For all we know, the one that survives was responsible for all the worst things "Alfred" Borden did.
It should be noted that the original which it was based on had two completely different protagonists who were the offspring of the magicians and were trying to reconcile why their families have been at odds for so long. The documents they find show that both men made a great deal of mistakes that led to being equally to blame. It also had a different ending.
Two words: The Room. Johnny is a wuss, Lisa is incredibly stupid and callous, Mark is a douchebag, and Denny has drug problems. The writing and acting don't help, either.
Land of the Dead is notorious as the worst of Romero's Living Dead series because of this. Humans Are The Real Monsters is taken to the Anvilicious extreme, and the alternative is to root for the zombies... who, despite the director's best efforts, are quite obviously still dangerous undead predators that nobody sane would want to see receive anything other than bullets in the brain.
However, the entire series was building up to this kind of setting. One notices at the end very direct sympathy is shown towards zombies. Rather than the worst of the series, it's merely a logical extreme of the already established theme.
Being John Malkovich suffers from this; all the main characters are, at the very least, horrifically selfish human beings who don't really care who gets hurt in pursuit of their various wants. The only remotely sympathetic character in the movie is John Malkovich himself, and that's mostly because he's more of a plot device than an actual character.
For the uninitiated, Charlie Sheen(!) has, by the end of the movie, very likely learned that John Malkovich is trapped in his own head while other people dominate him, and he is likely going to follow the puppetmasters who are possessing Malkovich into the next host, an adorable and harmless seven year old girl.
Of course, by going in this direction (and invoking this trope), the writers and directors are Completely Missing the Point of "horror." You can't truly feel horrified at a given situation if you don't give a damn about its victims.
One way to sidestep all this is to have a horror film where the "victims" are basically sympathetic people and the monster is defeated in the end but there's still a chance it could come back; everybody wins that way. (Leprechaun, for example.)
The genre of suburban/middle-class peril: films from Fatal Attraction to Cache/Hidden suffer from the fact that their heroes are smug and successful without any moral virtues or other good qualities to endear them to the audience.
The third Pirates of the Caribbean movie had this problem, with everyone backstabbing each other and shifting alliances on a whim that it got hard to root for anyone by the end. Of course, such a thing should be expected, given that the protagonists are all pirates by this point, even Will and Elizabeth. Even so, the climax of the film had them cheer about how pirates represent freedom and such... when they pillage and murder. Hardly heroic.
300. The narrator described the Spartans as the ultimate good guys. Because of his unreliability, though, it turns out the Spartans were just as insane and bloodthirsty as their Persian enemies. Because of that, while the narrator described the battles between the Spartans and Persians as "good vs. evil" (or "order vs. chaos" if you prefer), to audience members, it seemed more like "bad guys vs.worse guys."
Also based on Frank Miller, Sin City. Hartigan is the only guy who's close to good, Nancy is a Neutral Female, and all the other characters alternate between "amoral bastards" (Marv, Dwight, The Girls of Old Town) to "amoral monsters" (the people they're up against).
Law Abiding Citizen; at least for more sensible viewers who're not cheering Clyde on after he's murdering attorneys, judges and lawyers indiscriminately. He's initially seen as sympathetic, because Darby killed his wife, daughter and got away with it by paying off Clyde's attorney, but after the aforementioned slaughter during the movie's second half? Not so much. The members of the justice system come off no better, as they're unilaterally portrayed as horrible individuals who could care less about enacting true justice than do stuff that only benefits them. Well, except for Cindy, though she dies too. No side looks any better than the other near the film's end. Nick, very conspicuously, has ethical issues with his job. He's suppressed most of them by the Time Skip, but Clyde brings them roaring back.
The Final Destination series has this problem involving the second variant of this trope. There's no point in getting emotionally attached to them or rooting for them to make it, because the rules say death will not be cheated and they're all going to die.
Besides, with the mentioned war between two alien species, the black semiliquid polyvalent stuff that shoggoths are made of, and a group of human scientists exploring eldritch ancient ruins, they wanted to avoid being labelled Dueling Movies with Prometheus.
Some critics said America's Sweethearts had this problem, particularly with the eponymous couple. Eddie is a ticking time bomb (although it's understandable, given the headline-making breakup) and Gwen is an unapproachable, manipulative Rich Bitchwho can't even put ankle boots on right.
And the agent is mining all the drama for his own benefit. The only likable character is Gwen's sister mainly because she has to put up with Gwen and is just beginning to grow a backbone after losing a bunch of weight but her goal is to get together with Eddie so it doesn't really matter.
This could be the reason why Welcome To The Dollhouse and other films by Todd Solondz have never gotten much mainstream attention. Everyone, seemingly without exception, is profoundly miserable, solipsistic, or sociopathic. Sometimes, they are all three.
An older example of this trope can be found in the Universal movie House of Frankenstein. The characters aren't very likeable (with the possible exception of Daniel), the story is rather cynical, and in the end, everybody dies. Not even Svengoolie's So Bad, It's Good sense of humor could save this one.
Believe it or not, The Breakfast Club can have this effect on more cynical viewers. The crappiness of Shermer, Illinois, pretty much goes from being Played for Laughs (as in Sixteen Candles) to being Played for Drama. Every adult barring the janitor Carl and possibly Vernon is a viciously selfish scumbag of some sort, abusing the kids for their own benefit. The kids themselves, while morallybetter people, are so deeply dysfunctional that one can't help but feel a bit nihilistic. "When you grow old, your heart dies" sums it all up perfectly.
Ask a person who was around in The Eighties about this trope, odds are their answer will be To Live And Die In LA. Richard Chance is really not that different on the morality scale from his quarry, Rick Masters, and many of the characters are slimy or apathetic. John Vukovich is seemingly the only guy with some normal standards of goodness, but by the time the film's Downer Ending comes around, he's become just as bad, if not worse, than Chance himself.
Funny Games: The only remotely likable characters are heartless murderers. Their victims have all the personality of the plastic case the DVD came in. Oh, and the movie frequently pauses so the characters can (literally) turn to the camera and insult you for watching it. So what reason is there for the viewer to not take the DVD out and chuck it in the recycling bin again? This story clearly isn't going to end well, after all.
And the only remotely likeable characters in the whole movie? They're the grandparents. And their grandson gets an erection from stabbing them to death. Yeah...
Hannibal and Hannibal Rising both suffer from this. Almost none of the main characters have any redeeming attributes- and those who do are mercilessly picked on or forced out of the action. Meanwhile Hannibal Lecter himself, the murderous psychopath and villain of the past two movies, is practically presented as the hero now.
The Ides Of March sets itself up as a movie in which an idealistic US presidential political campaign manager has his idealism destroyed by the paranoid nature of politics and corruption. Which might be interesting, except the character in question does some morally questionable actions from the beginning of the story. This makes it hard for the audience to like him or view him as the Wide-Eyed Idealist the script insists he is. As a result, the entire plot just seems sort of pointless.
Too many Oliver Stone movies to count, where several characters had a tendency to act like complete jerks and do the occasional questionable act. The most particular who have to be Platoon (which ironically won Best Picture in 1986), where in it, the American soldiers themselves were a bunch of Sociopathic Soldiers (with the exception of Sgt. Elias Grodin and Pvt. Chris Taylor), who made themselves out to be as bad as the Vietnamese soldiers they were up against. They finally crossed the Moral Event Horizon, when they raided the Vietnamese village and nearly attempted to massacre the villagers there. This leaves only the aforementioned Elias and Taylor as the remaining sympathetic characters left, and even then, there's no point in caring about the war they're in.
John Singleton's Higher Learning, his follow-up to the Oscar-winning Boyz N The Hood and to Poetic Justice, was not a great success because not only did it contain an embarrassing amount of Narm, but almost all the characters were hard to like. (Like The Birth Of A Nation, to which it has occasionally been compared, this is a movie in which the black characters are bad and the white characters are worse.) In fact, the only two truly sympathetic characters were a college professor whose role is fairly minor and a female student-athlete who is killed by being shot in the stomach - extremely unfair, since she has not hurt or even acted rudely to a single person throughout the movie. Everyone else is at best a Jerkass, Innocently Insensitive, or just generally irresponsible. Then there's the girl's murderer, a Villain Protagonist of sorts, who is not heroic by any measure; however, we're led to understand how he became extremely frustrated and then enraged by his Crapsack World environment. Life at the college campus is so miserable, in fact, that in the end the nominal hero of the story just gives up and runs away, which is hardly a heroic thing to do.
Tim Burton's Batman Returns failed to live up to the expectations set by its predecessor, and much of that was because all four of the main characters - including Batman himself - are murderous brutes. Some of them really are fighting for justice, but only occasionally do they do anything truly heroic - and the few characters that have no moral flaws, such as Commissioner Gordon and the Mayor, are so ineffectual it's hard to see them as heroes. That leaves Alfred Pennyworth as the one character you can comfortably root for - and let's face it, an elderly man isn't going to be seen as a role model by most people.
Lloyd Kaufman faced this problem when writing Health Club Horror. He wanted to have the monster only kill bad people (which was an idea left over from an unfilmed script he worked on the previous decade with Stan Lee), but the monster was also basically a bad guy. His solution was to make the monster a hero, and make the movie a comedy. Thus, The Toxic Avenger was born.
Iron Sky: Okay, so on one side of the conflict we have MoonNazis who want to either conquer or perhaps destroy the Earth (the movie isn't quite clear which). On the other side you have the people of Earth, a collection of Jerkasses and Dumbasses so universally horrible they actually come close to making the Nazis look like good guys by comparison. The whole thing is so bad the fact that the movies ends with both the Nazis' moonbase and most life on Earth being destroyed can be considered a happy ending.
Melancholia. There's no point to the plot. Or the characterization. Or the dialogue. Everyone just dies, after living a sad life. But it's okay; the film assures you that they were all complete Jerkasses. We never see anything happy in the movie or anything that implies their world is anything other than apathetic and depressing. True Art Is Angsty taken to its logical extreme.
Interactive Fiction
Adam Cadre's Varicella attempts to avert this by having its Villain Protagonist, while still amoral and self-centered and willing to murder people to claim the Regency, not as evil as his rivals for the Regency, nearly all of whom are truly horrible people who seem to enjoy their acts of abuse and rape. But Varicella is still a short-sighted person who can't foresee just how horrible things become when the prince takes the throne and becomes even worse.
Literature
Robert Cormier wrote a lot of books that fit easily into this, and a few books that would have avoided this if the likeable characters hadn't died or been beaten into submission. The best chance his characters are ever given is that the next life might be better than this one (and his later works deny even that.)
Hells Children by Andrew Boland, is this for most people.
The Hunger Games seems like this at times, especially when District 13's war tactics and overall militarism become morally questionable. Hell, forget District 13, a lot of people find Katniss horrible enough that this happens.
Deliberately used in The Sound And The Fury: the first brother is severely mentally handicapped, and although hard to hate, his section of the book (written from his perspective) is so confusing that it's impossible to identify with him. The second brother is completely insane and lusts after his own sister, so you really want to turn away from him. The third brother already has turned away from turned away, and narrates in a completely comprehensible style, so at first you like him, but then he's a total Jerk Ass who hates everyone around him. The only sympathetic characters are the ones who never get to narrate.
Some things to point out here. The first brother, Benjy, has severe autism and is essentially a child in an adult body. Anybody with autism and anybody who likes children ought to be able to identify with Benjy. The second brother, Quentin, does not really lust after his sister. He lied about it to his father because he was trying to protect her. He tries to be a good person, but he lives in a world that frankly does not care about his values. He self-destructs because he is unable to adapt to the standards of the world. Quentin is actually quite sympathetic. The third brother, Jason, is indisputably a Jerkass. However, his mother beat her nastiness into him. This could qualify him as a Jerkass Woobie.
While Blood and Chocolate is by many standards a good book, it suffers from this twice over. On a larger scale, Humans Are The Real Monsters who hate and fear werewolves, while werewolves sometimes provide very good reason why humans hate and fear them. On a smaller scale, any of seven or eight different characters, including the main character and both love interests, could be argued to be the most repulsive character in the book for one reason or another, and of the two characters who're most likeable one's a Straw Feminist who's not treated very seriously and the other gets eviscerated by a supposed friend. The silver lining is that the werewolf female lead and human primary love interest could balance each other out—except that humans really can't trust werewolves, so he winds up trying to kill her.
Robin Wasserman's novel Skinned has a similar problem, since it initially discusses Fantastic Racism against cyborgs, then applies Cybernetics Eat Your Soul. Do you support genocide, or do you root for inhuman freaks?
This comes full circle when it is revealed that at the highest levels, the Watches are actually working together; the conflict between them is mostly for the sake of keeping the Others away from normal people, and the Watches often deliberately sabotage their own efforts to overtly influence human society. Their real plans to improve the world are much more subtle and cooperative.
Many Tom Holt books suffer from this. The protagonists are sometimes just as cynical, ruthless, selfish, vapid, cowardly, and/or nasty as the erstwhile antagonists. Valhalla and Little People are particularly memorable in this regard.
In "The Merchant's Tale" of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the merchant's tale of a wife's adultery is supposed to show women as dishonest, but the poisonous way all characters, including the wronged husband are portrayed makes it difficult to sympathize with any of them. This is almost certainly deliberate, as several of Chaucer's characters let their view color their stories and how badly they tell them.
Wuthering Heights can induce this reaction, in the 'too bleak and angsty and without hope' subcategory. (Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books parody this with an anger management class for the characters, who are warned that their drama has made the story more angsty and angry as time goes by, and they risk going the same way as Titus Andronicus: "Once a gentle comedy of manners, it's now the daftest, bloodiest tale in all of Shakespeare!")
Ethan Frome can induce similar reactions as Wuthering Heights. The utter hopelessness of the story has driven many an English Major to the bottle.
A Song of Ice and Fire, particularly after what happens to the sorta-light-gray principal.
If we're talking about Ned, he was definitely more on the side of strongly light with a bit of gray thrown in for texture. The closest character that comes close to him is Jon Snow, who still maintains his honor and dignity, to some extent or another, despite the crap he's put through.
This has not gotten any better by the end of A Dance with Dragons. Yeah, Anyone Can Die and all that, but Martin is running out of protagonists that the audience cares about. Most of the ones left alive are all horribly traumatized.
Murdering children and raping women seems to be a requirement to live in Westeros for one half of the character cast. The other half of the cast are required to murder and rape gleefully. The gratuitous, random murder and rape gets irritating and the cast of unlikeable characters grates after a while.
Many of the critics and even some of the fans claim that Twilight suffers this badly in the Love Triangle the third book Eclipse is built around. Edward, Bella, and Jacob all come off as extremely possessive, selfish and emotionally manipulative Jerkasses to the point that some found all possible resolutions to the triangle equally repugnant.
There's also the issue of the Volturi. They are built up as a corrupt government who ruthlessly murder vampires over any slight, forcibly "collect" powerful vampires, and look for excuses to destroy the Cullen family. The problem is, vampires as a whole are a bunch of murderous animals who do nothing but think about their next meal and who to kill to get it. Thus, not only are the Volturi the only ones trying to instill any sense of order into the vampire world, but they're the few actually keeping the vampires from slaughtering humans without restraint. Even the Cullens in no way condemn or try to stop this behavior, which makes their declarations that human lives are valuable come across as rather hollow. Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be defending humanity, the werewolves apparently slack off a good bit (they do nothing to stop Peter and Charlotte in Midnight Sun, even though there were werewolves transforming at that time), and actively go against their duties when Jacob imprints on Renesmee and puts her before his job as Alpha. This is all best summed up by their actions in Breaking Dawn. The Volturi try to use Renesmee as an excuse to kill the Cullens and their allies, the allies are so kind as to go outside the city limits to slaughter people during their stay, the werewolves do nothing to stop this because the allies are needed to protect Renesmee, and the Cullens loan cars so the allies can find victims more easily.
One problem Twilight has is that all of the characters that are jerks are pushed to the front of the story, often having incredibly fucked up backstories despite being portrayed rather positively (Jasper, Sam), while the ones that aren't are either pushed to the background as fast as possible (Bella's school friends), portrayed negatively despite not really showing any negative traits (Bella's school friends again, Charlie in the early books, and Leah, although her case is more that her negative traits exist but aren't really her fault so much), or made worse in an apparent attempt to make them less sympathetic (Jacob, Charlie again). About the only character in the book that isn't either a massive jerk or made one, but still stays roughly important in the story is Alice, and to a lesser extent, Carlisle.
The works of Bret Easton Ellis can have that effect, as pretty much everyone in them is completely shallow, self-absorbed and stupid.
Given that this is deliberate, you probably know what you're in for when you start one of his books.
A number of the more recent Star Wars Expanded Universe series are falling into this trope. Starting with New Jedi Order, the books have become progressively darker and everything just seems to be getting worse. Came to a head in Legacy of the Force, which ended with Jacen dying after being hacked to pieces and left in an incinerator, the galaxy under control of Daala, and the galaxy wrecked by yet another pointless war.
Malazan Book Of The Fallen doesn't always do this, but it did creep up during Midnight Tides. That novel depicts a war between the Tiste Edur (a nation that keeps humans as slaves and is ruled by an insane emperor who works for an Eldritch Abomination) and Letharas (a brutal, expansionist empire that takes the flaws of capitalism as far as it can without being Played for Laughs). You can't even blame one side for being the ones to initiate the war, since they're both pretty eager for it even before the first blow is struck. Sure, individual characters on both sides of the conflict can be quite sympathetic, but the outcome of the war isn't that suspenseful, 'cause you know you're gonna wind up with a regime of violent, oppressive conquerors either way.
Specifically, both sides of the conflict are more or less interchangeable morally and the only real difference between them is their goals. The only concrete reason why one side is specifically good and the other is bad is because the writers say they are.
The Mayor Of Casterbridge. Everyone is, without exception, demonically evil or flat.
Donna Tartt's The Secret History sometimes inspires this - it's not uncommon for readers to respond to the revelation that one of these unsympathetic characters will be murdered by thinking "Only one?"
Dubliners by James Joyce is a book of short stories where every single one is about a disappointing, half-lived life that will probably end in isolation and ignominy. Hope spots are few and far between, and usually swiftly replaced by misery.
The Child Thief falls into this at the beginning, and for some readers, until its end. The story is billed as a darker retelling of Peter Pan, and it shows - rooting for Peter is all but impossible given his bloodthirsty and careless ways. The real world is not much better in the book - because it focuses on Lost boys and girls, everyone has horrible stories in their past. Although there are a few characters the reader can identify with, they pale in comparison to the horrible people around them rather than providing a real contrast.
Brought up in Through the Looking-Glass. Tweedledum and Tweedledee recites the poem about The Walrus and the Carpenter. After hearing the poem, Alice wonders about who is the most sympathetic of the two. But the twins points it out that both of the duo ate as many of the oysters as they can. After much thought, Alice concludes that both of them were very unpleasant characters.
The Clique, an Indecisive Parody. The protagonists are an Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse, but the series does very little to make them seem likable or sympathetic, there's loads of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, and it's heavily implied the main character is a sociopath. And the series ends with absolutely none of them getting what they deserve.
The first Codex Alera book falls into this. The author just continuously keeps setting up Chekhovs Guns, chapter after chapter- literally all named characters besides the protagonists turn out to be evil, and all trials the protagonists get through are just setting them up for an even worse event. By the time the book ends, the world has become grindingly, unrealistically dark- a universe where female protagonists can be threatened with rape four times in the space of three days, and there are five antagonists in one novel. By the book's end, you get the feeling that the author was just stringing different subplots and Deus Angst Machina into one- and failing. Yes, the characters may live in a dark, cruel world. Yes, they can suffer. But if there's nothing else in Alera but rape and torture and trauma, then why would anyone want to read about it?
Live Action TV
This could very well be a reason Damages never got a wide audience. The main character often seems to lack a conscience, as do her competition.
Pretty much the case for most FX Network shows: they mostly feature awful people doing awful things to each other. Nip Tuck was especially guilty of this, with the added bonus of graphic plastic surgery sequences.
Deconstructed with "The Shield"; the writers went out of their way to reaffirm the black and white morality in the final season's resolution by having the Strike Team called out of their shit and pay a karmatic price for their crimes.
Soap Operas and Teen Dramas often fall into a variant of the trope. Instead of all sides of the conflict being evil, Rule of Drama destroys all chance of lasting happiness. Thus, there is no point in rooting for a character you know is going to end up suffering. In soap operas, both sides of the conflict can end up being completely unsympathetic despite not being evil. The heroes are usually Too Dumb to Livepurity sues. The villains, while sometimes interesting, pick up the Idiot Ball a lot and have inconsistent motives.
Too many VH-1Reality Show series to count. Even the celebrities we're supposed to feel sorry for are complete Jerkasses. In fact, the only one we can stand the whole time is Dr. Drew himself.
Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined) slid into this trope as the series went on. Helo is the only character who doesn't at least skid on the edge of the Moral Event Horizon at one point or another. (Well, Kacey, Nikky,and Hera never did anything reprehensible. They were also all under 5 years old.)
And speaking of Battlestar Galactica, this trope is probably one of the biggest reasons for ratings failure and cancellation of its spin-off, Caprica. It's really hard to find someone to root for in its main cast.
By the end of The Sopranos, pretty much every character with dialogue has proven themselves to be pretty hideous excuses for human beings.
Rome is full of ambitious, petty, and murderous "heroes";
Six Feet Under features characters who are not exactly evil, but tend to be so weak, neurotic, or just apathetic that the events of their lives are at least as doomed as anything in a Soap Opera. The series drifted away from its quirky deaths and focused more on the Ficher's love lives, which took a lot of variety out of the show.
Babylon 5. Can potentially occur early on with the Centauri and the Narns, on one side you have a bunch of pompous drunkards with a declining empire filled with scheming lordlings with a severe manifest destiny mindset, on the other side you have a bunch of ill tempered religious fundamentalists who seem to mostly be incredibly proud of just how proud they are and seem obsessed with settling old scores even to their own detriment. Ultimately though after the shit really hits the fan it becomes very involving as certain people learn something from the whole sad mess and others fail to.
Joss Whedon's shows are sometimes in danger of falling into this, due to his happy people = boring televisionSignature Style. This tends to be the reason some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans call Fanon Discontinuity after season five. You had Buffy Summers Wangst throughout the majority of the sixth season, had a mutually destructive and degrading hookup with Spike, then became a complete bitch. It had gotten so bad that Buffy's close circle of friends would rather have Faith, a once Ax Crazy rogue Slayer, lead the Potentials because she looked saner than Buffy around that point. The Scoobies themselves are no better, if they're not on a Wangst fest then they're doing something that makes them look unlikable to the viewers eyes and they are supposed to be the heroes of the series.
The Practice. At the beginning of the series, the attorneys are bright, fresh-faced and idealistic. By the end, they've completely sold out their standards and principles, end up representing drug dealers and undeniably guilty clients with money to keep the firm running, hire an anti-trust attorney who was fired from his previous job for embezzling money, and rely upon several questionable defenses (patriotism, doubt) in order to bolster their cases.
Mad Men can get like this for some viewers. There's hardly a single character that isn't basically a selfish asshole. The first season is essentially just watching the main character drink and cheat on his wife without any consequences.
Ringer is full of awful people. Bridget is the protagonist simply because she's the one telling the story. The most likable character is a former drug addict who is aiding and abetting a fugitive, accepted a bribe, and is covering up murders, while everybody else is having affairs, lying and manipulating people, pretending to be somebody they're not, running a Ponzi scheme, murdering people (or at least hiring hitmen to do their dirty work), falsely accusing a teacher of rape just so they can turn around and sue for defamation of character and split the settlement, faking deaths, etc. Everybody is corrupt in one way or another. The situation is interesting enough, but it's hard to care what happens to any of the characters. It's fun to see how they make things worse for themselves by continuing to be such terrible people.
One of the reasons British historical dramas of the 1980s (like The Borgias and The Cleopatras) flopped so badly was because they were trying to reproduce the success of I Claudius. But whereas I Claudius had evil characters who were partly sympathetic and always entertaining to watch, the shows that came after it featured much weaker, less sympathetic villains. The Cleopatras was especially bad in this regard, as it was essentially a drama about horrible rulers murdering their equally horrible family members. If a character started out decent, there was a good chance he/she would be forcing their subjects into costly wars for their own selfish benefit and dismembering several of their own children by the time their story arc was over.
One of the problems with the Gormenghast miniseries was that the most sympathetic, proactive character (Titus) didn't appear until well after it was underway. Those unfamiliar with the books might have been turned off by the endless, unsavory antics of a weird, menacing royal family and the Affably Evil man who was trying to exploit them. Only when Titus appeared did the audience really have someone to root for.
The Wire, excellent show as it is, can get this way the further the series goes. The overall range of characters aren't entirely unsympathetic or irredeemable, but the circumstances that force most of them to commit reprehensible actions for the sake of getting up on the social ladder, or even simply to survive, will make even the most cheery optimists feel despair at some point. Not only that, the fact that the characters themselves have a tendency to act like complete jerks one scene after another, makes it hard to empathize with them. Although the series isn't entirely absent of happy endings for a few characters (and given their rarity, they stand out a lot), it's in such stark contrast with everyone else's pyrrhic victories and downer endings, the show can be disheartening and occasionally very depressing.
It was stated in one of the commentary tracks that part of the reason why the show has the genuinely funny scenes and entertainingly humorous dialogue to the extent that it does is simply because the show would be too soul-crushing to watch if it didn't have these moments of levity.
Boardwalk Empire somewhat falls into this, in that nearly every character is corrupt or evil to some extent. It says something that by the third season, some of the more moral and sympathetic characters are a sensitive Shellshocked Veteran turned cold-blooded hitman, a friendly former IRA bomber, and Al Capone.
Scandal is rapidly entering this as the second season progresses. The rotten things the characters do are arguably to save the more sympathetic characters from the more evil characters. At first. Then it turns out they are all selfish ass-hats.
Malcolm in the Middle, to a tee. Virtually every character (the titular Malcolm included) is, at the very least, a horrible human being who either corrupts or screws over people for the most petty and shallow reasons, and by the time the show's inevitable Bittersweet Ending comes along, The Evil Matriarch reveals her plan to control Malcolm's life even after he leaves home, and her sadism continues unimpeded.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia follows in a similar vein. All the principal characters and most secondary ones are selfish, unlikeable assholes. To its credit, both it and Malcolm are (very dark) comedies, so at least you're not expected to root for any of the characters. In fact, you are supposed to laugh at whatever situation they've wound up in.
Drake & Josh is an interesting example. While the show itself generally didn't suffer from this, one specific character seemed to be trying to instill it, and succeeded in some episodes. The titular duo's younger sister, Megan, who, by constantly humiliating and bullying her brothers (often using outright illegal means), was clearly meant to be a negative force in the show, almost always came out on top, no matter what the circumstances. A few episodes went smoothly with Megan only making a cameo appearance or two, then suddenly appearing at the end and getting the last laugh by humiliating her brothers anyway. This is especially true in any episode where Megan plays a central role, because you simply know that she'll be winning out in the end, even if she does reprehensible thing. There's a reason why it's difficult to find people that really like her that much.
iCarly suffers from this badly, due to even the characters who are supposed to be the nice ones tending to just stand by and never help anyone unless they have something to gain from it.
This is the principal complaint aimed at seasons 4 and 5 of Breaking Bad, as the characters on the show who haven't crossed the Moral Event Horizon are either dead or pushed to the sidelines.
Community is normally pretty good at keeping characters flawed, but sympathetic, but whenever Pierce gets an episode centered around him, it starts to fall into this, as no matter what he does he is always forgiven as soon as the storyline is over.
Doctor Who sometimes veers dangerously close to this trope, particularly with the Russel T. Davies series. Almost every series ends with some sort of complication despite the day being saved, and the Doctor is often forced to realize that humans can be just as bad andsometimes worse than the monsters he fights, with the Series 3 ending taking it to what is probably the darkest extreme: After the end of the universe, humanity cannibalizes itself to become a species called the Toclafane, who ultimately kill and maim because it's fun.. While The Doctor and his companions generally remain sympathetic, the endings can make it rather tricky to care about what happens to them.
Music
Joy Division. Ian Curtis' lyrics and low-key vocals make his death of little surprise. Martin Hannett's spartan production adds to the effect; Even Bernard Sumner says in the "Joy Division" docu-film that Unknown Pleasures is almost too dark, and he prefers the more varied arrangements of Closer.
In a similar vein, this can also to apply to many overly pessimistic Hardcore Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap artists.
Professional Wrestling
Ignoring the insanity of Vince Russo's endless use of the Shocking Swerve, this trope was one of the main causes of WCW's decline. While the nWowere cool for a while, they were the heels, which meant that they ultimately needed to suffer defeats, and meaningful ones. This, however, was a fact seemingly lost on everyone there (especially those members of the nWo who were involved in booking the stories - funny that). After years and years of watching the villains run roughshod over absolutely everyone, gloating and laughing, the whole thing just became pointless and depressing - they were never going to be defeated, and that was that. So people just changed the channel. In the end, the one saving grace was that the group's leader, "Hollywood" Hogan, reverted to being Hulk Hogan and returned to being a face - but that in itself could be considered a Karma Houdini.
The inVasion angle of the summer of 2001 also suffered from this. WWE fans, WCW fans, and ECW fans had hated each other for years, so when WCW and ECW unexpectedly decided to team up against the big bad WWE, it looked like a battle for the ages. Except...the WWE writers sabotaged the whole concept by casting every WCW and ECW representative as a heel, even though many of them had done nothing wrong. Worse, the leader of the WWE team was Vince Mc Mahon, hardly a likable character; his opponents were his children Shane and Stephanie and ECW chief Paul Heyman, all of whom were likewise Jerkasses. Finally, at the actual pay-per-view event WWE trounced the WCW/ECW Alliance so thoroughly that when Stone Cold Steve Austin defected to the Alliance and helped them pull off an unexpected victory, it was hard not to see this treachery as WWE getting its just deserts. (And all the Alliance members ended up joining or rejoining WWE shortly afterwards anyway, so what was the point?)
Triple H has been responsible for this at times, most tellingly during 2002-2004, when he basically made a career of buryingfaces so completely that even today (coupled, it has to be said, with WWE's almost decade-long refusal to properly build new stars), WWE has an extremely small amount of top card faces, as there are so few people left for fans to take as credible threats. Granted, the Heel Face Revolving Door makes it possible to turn a top heel into a top face at the drop of a storyline, but the top heels tend to spend most of their careers as heels for a reason: they're better at it.
Looking at the entire history of the business, it's understandable that one would see sports-entertainment itself as this. Due to the Heel Face Revolving Door described above, almost everyone has been a heel at some point in his or her career. Even worse, many of these heels are unrepentant for their past actions even after turning face, simply laughing along with the audience or just resorting to the Hand Wave whenever anyone tries to bring up the crimes they committed in the past. So with the exception of John Cena (who's been a face for so long now that all of his past evil deeds have been effectively erased from memory) and a few others, it's hard to truly care for any of these characters. Particularly true when they exhibit Jerkass behaviors even while playing the face, or when one realizes that they're just one Shocking Swerve away from becoming heels again.
This trope is why heelvs. heel matchups are typically undesirable from a booker's point of view: the audience would have no one to cheer. When there is a heel vs. heel feud, it's usually a sign that one of them is about to turn face (for example, Sheamus versus Randy Orton in January 2010).
Role Playing
Abusing The World Is Always Doomed trope is a surefire way to get players to not care what happens to the world or even take on the role of a Omnicidal Maniac to quickly destroy everything just to have something different happen. Shock value goes out the window if there's always a monster or some other force threatening the state of the world every week.
Having most of the characters act like total jerks is also a quick way to cause heavy disinterest in the setting, especially if the setting is in a Crapsack World. If there are no such thing as good people or the people that try to do good are always punished, then players will become extremely disinterested knowing that [{Status Quo Is God nothing will change]] and that everyone only thrives in being a prick to one another.
Having a balance between good characters/factions and evil characters/factions is tricky to obtain. Favoring the role play too much to the good guys will cause Good Is Boring and favoring the bad guys too much will make players believe that Evil Is Cool for the wrong reasons. The conflict between opposing factions can also turn off players if the reason behind the conflict isn't interesting or meaningful.
Tabletop Games
Wraith The Oblivion is a game where upon death your soul incarnates in H. R. Giger's worst BDSM nightmare, is taken in by a society whose repressiveness would embarrass a fascist, finds that there is no happy afterlife for him, and then must struggle to survive as a mad force of Eldritch Abominations and their howling-mad servants of Oblivion seek to unmake the world. One source book went so far as to deal with the ghosts born of the Holocaust. The bleakness drove it straight into Audience Alienating Premise and it was definitely one of the less popular games. This is the game where your character's sweater is made out of the soul of another person who is experiencing And I Must Scream.
GURPS is too diverse a system to fall into this generally, but several of its Alternate Universe Earth settings fell into this for gamers; most notably, Reich-5 was retooled into a new villain for crosstime campaigns because your options there consisted of "Nazis, Nazified Americans, Imperial Japanese, and the inevitably doomed resistance". Reich-2 was this in-story for Americans after the British signed a truce with the Nazis—no one much cared whether Hitler or Stalin won the war.
With the recent revelations in the last two Horizon adventure packs that the only four major factions (The Draco Foundation, the Great Dragon Hestaby, Buttercup, and Horizon) that could still be said to be in any way 'good' (or even anti-heroic) are really as expedient and guilty of atrocity and terror as the rest, and only differ in the nature and scope of their self-rationalizations but are as mired in the basest of motivations as every other setting villain, some fans believe that the Shadowrun universe has finally hit this threshold.
The part where several of the writers openly expressed scorn on forums at the idea of shadowrunners having any kind of ethics (even antiheroic ones) instead of just being people who gladly do horrible things for money, and the recent promotion in storylines and flavor text of several NPC shadowrunners who exemplified that utterly amoral attitude from 'the runners even other shadowrunners look down on' to 'well-respected and widely admired figures of their professional community' isn't helping much either. One of them (Haze) is canonically a serial rapist who uses drugs to incapacitate his victims. Another (Clockwork) is a Fantastic Racist who makes money selling fellow runners with technomancer powers to megacorporate vivisection labs, and openly admits to anyone who asks that he'd cheerfully sell out anyone, including other team members, to the authorities in return for money (something that's normally considered an unforgivable sin among even the most depraved criminal community, and yet is entirely ignored in-setting). Another (Kane) has been the reigning world champion of excess collateral damage and carelessness with the lives of innocent bystanders for two editions. All of these characters have been promoted to signature NPC status, instead of their prior canonical treatment as cautionary tales/shadowrunner antagonists.
Warhammer 40000 skirts this, as a setting based on unending war and horror that runs on Black And Black Morality (well, maybe Black and Very Dark Grey Morality). However, most fans accept it as part of the basic premise of the setting, and most stories are told from a smaller scale perspective where there is good and evil, and good can indeed triumph despite the bleakness of the setting as a whole. Other bits of source material turn things up to 11 and use the bleakness as a source of black comedy.
Horus Heresy novels in particular can fall into this range after enough Doomed by Canon, unpleasant people on both sides, obligatory war crimes scenes, and downer endings.
The Gaunt's Ghosts series avoids this by presenting the 40k universe through the lens of the eponymous regiment, detailing how ordinary human soldiers deal with the horrors of the setting and yet still managing to triumph via ingenuity and sheer determination (and a bit of luck), though not without loss.
In the view of some of the current authors, large chunks of second edition Exalted fell into "shitdark", defined by Holden Shearer as "a setting so relentlessly shitty and miserable and hopeless that it becomes impossible to emotionally invest in it or care what happens to it."
Video Games
In God Of War it sometimes becomes hard to say why you should care whether Kratos kills that god/saves himself/kills that other god and all the rest too. It's not as though Kratos being in charge would be an improvement given how he acts. As it turns out, the game does manage to make them all lose, leaving the victimized humans as the ones left. Shame Kratos messed up the sun, sea, seasons, and sky before he died. And even then, OR DID HE?
He did release Hope into the world, but unless Hope can magically fix the world it's not likely worth much.
Kane and Lynch: Dead Men was this for quite a few people. On one hand, Kane's trying to save his family. On the other hand, he's a bastard who betrays people, takes people hostage, and does generally bad things to accomplish his goals. In fact, the only reason that the bad guys captured his family was because he betrayed them and they wanted revenge. And let's not even get started on the Ax Crazy Lynch.
Every faction in Geneforge, with the possible exception of the Barzites, has some supporters who'll argue in favor of it on the Internet. Every faction also has some haters who argue that the misdeeds it commits render it unworthy of power. But given that the only one that doesn't cross the Moral Event Horizon at least once is the faction of Wide Eyed Idealists who canonically get massacred by the fourth game, this trope probably sums up the setting best.
In Prototype, the "hero" is a sociopathic, people-eating, viral monstrosity driven by little more than a desire for revenge on those he thinks made him into a monster. The only possibly redeeming feature he has is his desire to protect his little sister. His enemies are a military splinter cell comprised entirely of sociopaths and an even more destructive viral monstrosity. None of the above are all that concerned about the civilians or sane military personnel caught in the crossfire. And then you find out that the real Alex Mercer was so bad that even his viral doppelganger is disgusted with him. But, this is up to the player via Gameplay and Story Segregation. Canologically, Alex is much more redeemable; he's not specifically shown killing any innocent bystanders in the story, including there being an achievement for going throughout the game without doing so (the eating innocents part is entirely up to the player). He's shown to be very caring over New York, as shown by the final mission where Mercer ends up performing a Heroic Sacrifice (but he survives) to stop a nuke from destroying the city.
The sequel takes this to its logical conclusion, with Alex Mercer as the villain. The new protagonist isn't any better as far as the Gameplay and Story Segregation goes as he'll still eat half the population of New York before game's end, but the plot tries to hamstring a sympathetic backstory for him to show Even Evil Has Loved Ones to paint him as the lesser evil out of the five or so evils running around in total. How well it works is a matter of personal taste, but since some see him as a Replacement Scrappy on top of everything else, one wonders why these games don't go have the player character deliberately be the most evil person in the conflict of all and go balls out crazy.
The lore of EVE Online can be summed up with: "Everything sucks." It's so bad that the writers have to tell the readers when the ending is not a bad ending. The second book especially is a perfect example of this trope. Gameplay-wise? A perpetual Hopeless War for territory between pilots who can never die eventually becomes hard to tell apart from a Perpetually Static galaxy.
Fallout New Vegas can suffer from this. Mr House is very efficient and competent, but only cares about Vegas and it's unclear whether he can implement his plans for the city. Caesar's Legion are very effective at bringing order and safety to the untamed wastelands, but their kind of order is brutal, unforgiving, technophobic and misogynistic. The NCR means well, but its bureaucracy and military overexertion mean it couldn't effectively govern or protect the Mojave. You could go Wild Card, but can you forge a Vegas that's any better than what was there before?
Drakengard. Dear God, Drakengard (the first game, at least). Between the incredibly bleak world and characters who have few, if any redeeming characteristics, it's practically impossible to find hope or optimism in it.
Similarly, the sequel, Nie R, which has the strangest ending of Drakengard cause an apocalypse, and all four endings of which involve the extinction of humanity.
This is most notably subverted in Shin Megami Tensei II, in which the chaos faction is good, and the game ultimately provides little reason as to WHY the player should oppose them after meeting Lucifer, who in the game genuinely desires to save both the demons opposing YHVH and humanity.
One of the big flaws with Mercenaries 2. In the first game, each playable character had their own distinct personalities (Chris was the closest thing to The Hero, Jennifer was the Lady of War, and Mattias was the Comedic Sociopath). In the sequel, all three are written as if they were Mattias taken a step further, going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge and tearing Venezuela apart because...the Big Bad shoots him/her in the ass. On top of that, while the factions in the first game were a mixed bag, in the sequel all of them are completely selfish Jerkasses; even the Allied Nations, who were the closest things to good guys in the first game, loses whatever noble intentions they had in favor of "We want that oil, dammit!" for no real reason other than the developers had an opinion about what they saw on the news.
Niko Bellic in Grand Theft Auto IV moves to the United States for a fresh start at life, but it goes down the toilet when his cousin, Roman, gets him roped up in his debt and antics. The entire story shows Niko doing nothing but trying to please his selfish cousin who always seems to get himself into trouble while Niko always bitches about it as he continuously helps his cousin out. It eventually leads to Niko being hunted down by a mobster throughout the game but it doesn't build up from there as Niko just continues doing side jobs for random people while still complaining about his cousin's gambling habits and debt. On top of this, nearly every person Niko meets is either a backstabber or suffers from attachment issues, making nearly everyone unlikable and leaves the player wondering why they should care about a bunch of crazy people or even care about the main character who always bails out his cousin from his own problems instead of just letting his cousin suffer from his own stupid mistakes.
One of the selling points when the game was released was that you could make choices that would impact the story. The problem was this wasn't the case. Almost every choice you made did nothing to the plot, and the choices as to who to kill always had an obvious "right" answer (from a gameplay standpoint if nothing else). The only choice you made that actually changed anything was the Deal or Revenge choice that set up your ending, and someone at Roman's wedding would still die either way. Basically, the player was given the illusion of free will and then had it yanked out of their hands. Even the player was getting screwed.
The Laura Bow games involve a large cast of characters, all of which are nasty egotistical stereotypes. The main goal of the game is to spy on all of them to learn their little secrets, such as who is blackmailing who and who has had an affair and such. And then they all die like mayflies, slaughtered one by one by a serial killer, which you cannot prevent. So why exactly should you care about any of these characters?
Spec Ops The Line: Throughout the game everything the protagonist does doesn't do much to help anyone, but only make things worse, on top of the game insulting the player for escapism, being pathetic, wanting something they can't have and never will amount to, doing horrible things that the game forces you to do (conveniently sidestepped with a "stop playing" justification), being evil for "wanting to help" without knowing what they're doing, an addiction to violence, and unable to tell fiction from reality. Not only does the protagonist make everything worse, the game blames you and mocks you for it, and if that wasn't anvilicious enough, an anvilicious monologue at the end talks about how fantasies are pathetic. Like the piece of fiction you play. Which, by the way, you paid for.
Web Comic
Prequel's Katia just keeps losing everything, leading to many readers quitting the strip after Sigrid takes almost everything she has.
The protagonists are unrepentant and hypocritical murderers, there's no point in the people who die learning last-minute lessons, and everyone else is apparently so stupid they never put two and two together to figure out the protagonists commit such horrible acts, and so they are never stopped. Congratulations, you just read everything wrong with Suicide for Hire.
The main reason a lot of people consider Season 8 to be Survivor: Fan Characters's worst season is that it became hard to root for anyone in the later stages of the game with the most positive character in the finals having devolved into a huge liar and easily-manipulated idiot and the other two finalists being an arrogant, smug Ted Baxter and an emotionless demon who backstabbed her best friend and rubbed many readers the wrong way about how the author and everyone else seemed to practically hand the victory to her. The rest of the cast having a lot of characters that were either one-dimensional caricatures or people who practically exulted in being obnoxious to others didn't help.
South Park is a Black Comedy and also subsequently a Sadist Show and have the entire cast full of obnoxious jerks, with the main characters being Good Is Not Nice at best and SociopathicEnfant Terribles at worst. The closest to a completely likable character is Leopold "Butters" Stotch, and even then, he's not a completely good role model.
There are two In-Universe examples in two episodes. In "Douche and Turd", the episode involves Stan Marsh suffering a case of this, refusing to vote in a school mascot election owing to the fact that one is (quite literally) a giant douche and the other is a turd sandwich. The lesson he learns from a member of PETA is that all elections involve either a douche or a turd of some sorts and one must simply choose the lesser evil.
This happens again in "Butterballs" where he believes he's trying to do the right thing, but Kyle Broflovski argues that the real right thing to do is to let Butters find the courage to confront his grandmother himself. In the end, Butters tells his grandmother off, which means Kyle was in the right all along, while Stan is the one to learn his lesson the hard way.
The Critic. Reviewers wondered if the audience would have any sympathy for Jay Sherman. The second season made him more of a Woobie and gave him a sweet girlfriend with an adorable daughter. (And at the very least, Jay was miles more sympathetic than just about any other Jon Lovitz character.)
Family Guy suffered from Flanderization to the point where the main characters were almost unlikable for being overall jerks to each other and other people while getting away with it. The later seasons toned it down, though not by a whole lot; the family are pretty much used to the dysfunction and just roll with it like it's another everyday occurence.
In Beast Machines, the planet is essentially already dead and taken over before the first episode and the protagonists are so flawed that watching them tends to provoke nihilism rather than attachment.
This is also why a lot of episodes focus in some way on Foxxy Love or Xandir, or at least acknowledge them as the voice of reason (or as close to reason as the show allows), as they are the characters that get closest to relatable. Which says a lot about how the rest of the cast is.
Some episodes of Sponge Bob Square Pants tend to float around this trope, mostly after Seasonal Rot started taking affect. Episodes focused on the Plankton/Krabs rivalry tend to fall into this the most.
This trope led to Allen Gregory getting cancelled. Everyone was an asshole.
Young Justice has this. While the heroes are definitely likable, almost nothing they do ever matters. Failure Is the Only Option if they try and do something against the Big Bad; even the ending of the first season ultimately turned out to make little difference.
Invader Zim, if you consider Dib to be the real hero. Neither he nor Zim have any friends or moral support, both suffer from Failure Is the Only Option, but Zim is a Love to Hate nimrod whose SPECTACULAR failures are not only hilarious, but well-deserved. Dib, on the other hand, is trying to save everybody and repeatedly puts himself in harms way to do so. The fact that the series ended without him getting any real acknowledgement (minus a brief pat-on-the-back moment in one episode) and the rumors that the unproduced Grand Finale would have given him a Kafka-esque fate only make it worse.
Cat Dog can cause this as well. The two main characters (especially Cat, ironically the most sympathetic character) get screwed over at the end no matter what (and often rather cruelly) and few (if any) characters are genuinely likable, which can cause viewers to lose interest. This may be why the Grand Finale movie gave them something of an Earn Your Happy Ending.
The "Rita and Runt" segments of Animaniacs had this. The characters (usually Rita) almost always came into some serious danger during the course of each episode, and they never found a home note At least not until Wakko's Wish. due to the status quo demanding that they remain strays. This may have been part of the reason these two characters didn't show up in later seasons (the main reason being that Bernadette Peters was too expensive to keep on as the voice of Rita).
American Dad abuses Aesop Amnesia so heavily that it makes the characters look like they're just pretending to learn their lesson so that they can get away with everything they did in the episode. Nearly every character has some ulterior motive to get what they want and when they're called out on it, they just apologize and are Easily Forgiven.
Sidekick. You know you've fallen into this trope when the character who tries the hardest to show compassion for others is also one of the greatest super villains in history.
League Of Super Evil. We're supposed to root for the protagonists because... why exactly? They don't seem to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
, "Always Keep a Door Open"
