Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.
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."
Meaningfulconflict is the soul of drama.
Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy occurs when there is no meaningful conflict in the first place because 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.
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 as monotone-miserable as Joy Division. This trope is not just about a World Half Empty, but about Evil vs. 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, angsty and without hope for the audience to really care what happens. Leaving aside how obviously and overly depressing this would be to read, if the characters are doomed to failure no matter what they do, and it is too obvious that they are hopeless, then the ending is inevitable and can be seen a mile off — so why bother continuing on with the story? 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 setting Tastes Like Dirt and the plot basically boils down to a Wangst-fest.
Although for games, this trope has its advantages. It allows people to choose sides with no interest other than the technical interest of playing one side or the other.
Compare Angst Dissonance and Only The Author Can Save Them Now. See also Too Happy to Live.
If the hero of the story openly lampshades their own apathy toward the outcome of the story, they might be a Nominal Hero.
No Real Life Examples, Please. Let's remember the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement.
Examples:
open/close all folders
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.
By the end of Code Geass, a world war breaks out between two factions trying to create identical oppressive worldwide dictatorships. After this, the trope is subverted: after Lelouch conquers the world, he oppresses it to make sure every single person in it will hate him, and then commits public Suicide By Cop, ending the tyranny and marking the first step to world peace. It was his plan all along.
It's already going that way early in Season One; the very first episode features Lelouch mind-controlling a platoon of soldiers into suicide and doesn't seem at all moved, and a few episodes later he carries out an operation which involves sacrificing his own troops without their knowledge as well as endangering and killing numerous noncombatants, making it rather difficult to sympathize with the protagonist.
The soldier's recent actions (happily running around committing genocide) had sent them hurtling across the Moral Event Horizon. Their leader's actions (shooting one of his own men in the back for refusing to shoot an innocent bystander who had seen too much) quite possibly qualify him as a Complete Monster. Throughout the series, Geass manages to avoid Darkness Induced Audience Apathy through Gray and Black Morality.
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."
Dawn of the Silver Dragon, a standard hentai rape plot formula stretched out to four volumes, if you cared about it at all at the first volume the second will quickly shoot it down. By that point you're going to "read" it in a different language so you don't have to follow the plot anymore.
Black Lagoon, especially in its early stages. The anime version tones it down a little.
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 of the Type III variety and up. 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: The battle between Sasuke and Itachi: one betrayed his village and sided with Orochimaru to obtain enough power to kill the other, while the other tortured and mindraped the former by killing their entire bloodline. Oh, and joined Akatsuki.
Though in all fairness, Itachi has been seriously hinted at as not evil, given his interaction with Naruto just beforehand. Also, Sasuke isn't really a traitor yet due to him killing Orochimaru, Deidara, and is trying to kill one of Konoha's most dangerous enemies. And the audience also hopes that, after killing Itachi, Sasuke can finally get better. Of course, then comes The Reveal, and then... well, things just go downhill from there.
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 Complete Monster 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 peoples 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.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The above mentioned variant applies. People can be killed at any moment from witch's kisses or being trapped in their barriers. Being a magical girl is a lonely, dangerous job with no reward. The wishes the girls are granted all come back to punish them in some way. No one can trust each other enough to avoid dying, or becoming the very monsters they fight, a fate episode 10 glosses over as Homura relives the same month over and over to save Madoka from that fate, with increasingly tragic results. Even the last episode is bittersweet at best, with Homura failing her goal, due to Madoka making a contract and erasing herself from existence. And in the end, the world is only a little less hopeless than before.
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 Dead Baby Comedy (literally; it's that kind of comic).
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.
A common problem in horror movies: the cast of potential victims is presented as a bunch of obnoxious jerks, and/or complete idiots, to the point where it's hard to feel bad for them when they finally start dying. Although for many that's part of the appeal. Case in point: British horror film Cherry Tree Lane. A dreary middle-class couple bicker. Yobs break into their house and torture them. Who cares?
This also applies to the related 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.
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 (some) audience members, it seemed more like "bad guys vs.worse guys."
The first Underworld movie. The final battle is werewolves versus vampires, throughout a dark underground complex. Everybody's wearing similar black leather clothes, carrying similar weapons and fighting in extremely low light, and the audience hasn't received any clues to cheer for either side. Even if you wanted to pick a side to support, you'd never know who was who anyway.
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.
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.
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 of course Varicella is still a short-sighted person who can't foresee just how horrible things become when the prince takes the throne and becomes an even greater Complete Monster.
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.
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 indisputedly 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 Bastards 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 sympathise with any of them. This is almost certainly deliberate, as several of Chaucer's characters lets their view colour 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!")
A Song of Ice and Fire, particularly after what happens to the sorta-light-gray principal.
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.
The works of Bret Easton Ellis can have that effect, as pretty much everyone in them is completely shallow, self-absorbed and stupid.
A number of the more recent Star Wars Expanded Universe series are falling into this trope. Starting with The 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.
The 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.
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?"
Live Action TV
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.
The remake of Battlestar Galactica 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.
HBO is famous for this, actually - 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.
Lets just say most hour-long TV dramas, period. They pretty much all boil down to corrupt, self-absorbed people stabbing one another in the back in between bouts of emotionally-void promiscuity. It really says a lot about the subgenre that one of the most sympathetic characters in such a show moonlights as a serial killer.
Nice in-universe subversion in Babylon 5. In the beginning (no word play intended) the protagonists are very much on the side of (in the pocket of?) the Vorlons in their war against the Shadows, but in the course of the show it becomes clear to them that both sides are just as bad as each and decide that the best way to deal with them is simply to not go along with either of them any more.
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.
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.
Musicals
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street shows how to avert this trope by making the Villain ProtagonistCrazy Awesome and giving him a few catchy Villain Songs. With the addition of two sympathetic young lovers whose fate is completely unsure, and the fact that the protagonist has sympathetic traits while the target of his revenge has none, the audience clearly has a side to root for and a hope that the lovers escape.
There's also poor Lucy. The audience feels bad for not noticing.
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 nWo were cool for a while, they were the heels, which meant that they ultimately needed to lose, and lose completely. 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.
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 Face Heel 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.
This trope is why heel vs. heel matchups are typically undesirable from a booker's point of view: the audience would have no one to cheer.
Tabletop Games
Warhammer 40,000 gets away with this because it is a game where you build your personal army however you want, meaning your experience is exactly as dark as you want it to be. But the novels, good lord THE NOVELS, which have to have actual drama to be good, tend to paint their viewpoint faction as some shade of gray (The Grey Knightsnotwithstanding) and the opposition as much, much blacker.
Generally averted with the Imperial Guard, easy to identify with as it consists entirely of ordinary people attempting to battle the worst monsters in the galaxy. And occasionally winning. Also averted with certain Space Marine chapters, such as the Ultramarines or Salamanders.
Especially averted with Ciaphas Cain, (HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!,) an Imperial Guard Commissar. Despite being a (self-declared) utterly selfish abject coward, he comes across as a pretty good guy, managing to survive and succeed in the Grimdark galaxy though a mix of quick thinking, good luck, and good friends.
The World Of Darkness suffers/ed from this. It would take a long time to explain all the details, but suffice it to say when the only sure way to paint the player's monster race and their factions in any sort of positive light is by fighting Complete Monsters, it can become easy to disconnect emotionally from the drama. The game mechanics themselves, especially for Vampire, usually ensure that player characters will either become evil or die in short order. This can be used for its intended purpose of inspiring drama and pathos, if the Storyteller draws this process out over the course of a whole campaign and avoids railroading, but more often it makes the players lose interest.
Which may explain Changeling The Lost's unexpected popularity - the characters are still primarily human, they still have human emotions and human wonder at what's going on, and they still react to things in human ways - and they're all working together against The Fair Folk, apart from the occasional political divide and occasional madman.
The New World Of Darkness also allows plenty of leeway — token outright "good" factions within each group are generally nonexistent, but there's a lot of room for individual characters to be shining beacons of whatever morality they adhere to; it's just that the world does not necessarily make it easy for them. Golconda can also still exist, depending on the storyteller.
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.
From some perspectives, most notably that of Holden Shearer (who's in many ways the public face of the current Exalted development team), the early years of 2e Exalted fell into this.
Holden: Not the soaring, operatic darkness of the 40K universe, but 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
Skyrim basically forces you to choose between fascist, tyrannical Imperials who suppresses religious freedom, and allows foreign thugs to kidnap, enslave, torture or murder their own citizens for the greater good... Or a buncha rebels that are incredibly xenophobic and racist, and who let bandits pillage and massacre minority communities 'cause they only care 'bout the local Nords. When you do help a faction take over, they'll replace amicable and competent jarls with their petty and corrupt local faction bosses.
It's possible to not join either and force them into a ceasefire instead... Then both sides replace good Jarls with their cronies (surprisingly neither wants to replace the other side's bad ones), and you're kinda helping the Thalmor (who want a divided Syirim in order to Take Over the World).
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?
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 thatcrazybastardLynch...
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 a Complete Monster so bad that even his viral doppelganger is disgusted with him. Alex does start showing a conscience and some remorse in the last few missions, but it's too little, too late.
The sequel takes this to its logical conclusion, with Alex Mercer as the villain.
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords veers into this: There's a rising theme of nihilism and futility throughout the game (in a total reversal of the original) - no matter what you do, you cannot save any of the main NPCs, or redeem any of the Sith-aligned villains. Then, in the final battle, the Big Bad reveals that there was no evil plan to begin with - the whole game was just her fucking with you, none of it would have happened if you didn't exist, and if she wins, she'll commit suicide. You beat her, saving nobody but your own party, and she makes a bunch of dull prophecies about how nothing means anything, and then the (uninhabited) planet explodes with a massive (and never picked up, due to killing the franchise) Sequel Hook. Whee.
A light-side Exile can still do a lot of good and help a lot of people on the way, even if your Trickster Mentor gives you hell for it. Kreia has no evil plan towards the PC because it isn't about you; she wanted to build you up as a hero to prove a philosophical point to the remaining Jedi and provide Revan with a worthy ally in his battle against the True Sith.
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.
This is a real problem in Fallout 3, when you're meant to side with one faction or another in a conflict, and they're both pretty much scumbags with varying justifications. One particular quest requires you to choose between racists who condone segregation and murder, or the nice underdogs who do nothing to prevent their Complete Monster leader from mass-murdering the opposition. Strange game. Seems the only winning move is not to play (but then you have an unfinished quest, which sucks).
Alternatively, you can break the script Put a bullet in Roy's head before he gets inside the building after you've completed the quest.
On the other hand, Fallout: New Vegas can suffer from this too. Mr House is very efficient and competent, but only cares about Vegas. Caesar's Legion are an expansionist, imperialistic, brutal slave army that treats women as property, the NCR is well meaning but incompetent thanks to a bloated and largely uncaring of the specifics of the Mojave central government. You could go Wild Card, but can you forge a Vegas that's any better than what was there before?
My sycophant tells me "yes".
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.
Brought up in Marvel and DC: After Hours by the Green Goblin, in which he states that The Joker's plan to make all the superheroes Darker and EdgierNineties Antiheroes is just plain stupid since without Lighter and Softer heroes for contrast, not only will comics get boring since all the heroes are the same, comics will just get so depressing that the audience might as well just kill themselves.
Western Animation
The South Park episode Douche and Turd involves Stan 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 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.
Depending on who you ask, this trope may be happening to Family Guy recently since pretty much every single character has become a massive jerkass with little to no redeeming qualities.
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.
