The villain's own weapon or malicious plan is the cause of his downfall and/or death. This could be something as big as a Mad Scientist who creates monsters and/or a Weapon Of Mass Destruction getting killed by his own creation, or as small as prankster accidentally setting off his own trap.
In media intended for young children, it is often a Death by Irony that releases the hero from the unpleasantness of actually killing their enemy; a more specific type of Self-Disposing Villain.
If the hero is not responsible for the death in any way, it can also be a Karmic Death.
A "petard" is an explosive device (basically a bucket full of gunpowder) intended to demolish gates and fortified walls; being too close to the detonating explosive could well toss the engineer into the air. Thus, this term literally means "Blown into the air by one's own bomb" and was first coined by Shakespeare in Hamlet.
If an Eldritch Abomination, God of Evil or otherwise supernatural evil entity gets Punched Out by the same powers it gave, you have a Faustian Rebellion in action. If it's an Ancient Conspiracy, Government Conspiracy or other organisation whose Applied Phlebotinum is empowering the one who will bring them down, you have a Phlebotinum Rebel. If it's a Mook, long abused, who finally snaps and turns against him at the last moment, it's The Dog Bites Back. It's it's a Video Game boss whose attacks can be redirected back at them, it's Tactical Suicide Boss. Gone Horribly Right is a sub-trope where a Super Prototype works too well, destroying the person or persons who created it and/or threatening the world/galaxy/universe.
Compare Nice Job Fixing It, Villain and Beat Them at Their Own Game (a video game variation on this).
As this is often a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Examples:
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Commercials
This 1993 Energizer commercial features the Witched Witch of the West trying to fricassee the Energizer Bunny, and winding up all wet as a result.
Anime and Manga
Near the end of the Stone Ocean arc of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, EnricoPucci achieves godlike status as he has gained the ability to speed up time and move the universe towards destruction and recreation. Pucci has already killed off most of the heroes, and all that's left is Tagalong Kid Emporio Alnino. Pucci stops the universal reset just short of a full cycle in order to catch Emporio at the one moment they were both in the same location — the Green Dolphin Street prison — in order to kill him. Pucci thinks this will be easy enough, seeing as how Emporio has one of the weakest abilities in the entire series, but unknownst to him, Emporio borrowed one of his fallen friend's abilities, and just as Pucci is in the perfect position to kill Emporio, Emporio is in the perfect position to kill Pucci. The kid surprises him with a weather-changing ability and uses it to poison him with fatal levels of oxygen.
Soukou No Strain kills off Medlock by having Ralph override her ship and order her own killer robots to tear her apart. The real irony is that she had recently turned good, and the good guys assumed she got out safely like they did and didn't think anything of looking for her...
Many Sailor Moon characters died this way (in fact, the protagonists themselves rarely kill anyone, except for monsters-of-the-week) — at least when they were not offed by the Big Badfor their constant failures, betrayed by their peers, or redeemed. Kunzite died of his own reflected attack; Mimete died when she used a machine built by Eudial, whom she killed; Tellu was eaten by the giant plant she summoned; Viluy had her Nanomachines turn against her and "erase" her; Cyprine and Ptilol (regarded as one person) were tricked into blasting each other, and Sailor Lead Crow was sucked into the black hole that she tried to use against Sailor Moon.
This only happened in the anime; the Scouts regularly killed villains in the manga.
In the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh!, when Yugi dueled Marik's mind-slave Steve the mime Strings, the only way he was able to beat his invincible card setup was to use it to his own advantage so that his monster would be destroyed and regenerated an infinite number of times within a single turn, and due to one of the effects Marik had on the field, Strings was forced to keep drawing cards from his deck every time the monster regenerated, until he ran out of cards and lost the duel by default.
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds plays it in another angle. While locked in the Facility, Yusei is forced into a duel with the head jailer. His Iron Chain strategy is to exhaust the opponent's deck, but Yusei reveals that his last two cards (from a deck all cobbled together from other jailed duelists) actually depended on a high graveyard count, and he wins the duel with them.
In Negima!, Negi used the same power Rakan tried to use on him. It failed to keep him down for the count though.
A good example of the monster variety: Babidi is done in by Majin Buu (while Buu was his father's creation, not his own, he intentionally released him).
Frieza was cut in half by his own attack (he even lampshades it) which led to his first demise (though he got better later on).
Once in a movie and once in the series, Garlic Jr. opens a hole to the Dead Zone, an empty dimension, to try to capture our heroes. No points for guessing what happens both times. Even worse, being immortal, the Dead Zone is the ONLY known thing which could potentially defeat him. And he let it be used against himself TWICE. He was asking for it, really.
Dr. Gero, thrice (in the "real" timeline and in the two future timelines).
And in the original Dragon Ball, Tao Pai Pai got blown up by his own grenade, as Goku kicked it back to him (although like Frieza, he made an Unexplained Recovery later on. In both cases, they came back as cyborgs.)
In Rurouni Kenshin the puppetmaster Gein surrounds Aoshi with oil soaked wires that he lights causing a forest fire. Aoshi uses Onmyō Hasshi to hit Gein with a Kodachi, and reveals that he has tied a wire Gein had left during the battle. Gein begs him not to kill him but Aoshi pulls Gein into the fire Gein had set himself killing him. Aoshi escapes the fire by using a hole he had dug earlier.
In an early episode of Fullmetal Alchemist, Ed does battle with an alchemist who transmutes a sword and is later impaled by it. Needless to say, he doesn't get better. This also shows up much later in the Brotherhood series when one of the generals awakens the Mannequin Soldiers so they can take back the city. They promptly eat him.
The main villains of both series also fall victim to this. In the first anime Dante, tired of Gluttony's whining over the loss of Lust, transmutes his reason away and turns him into a mindless monster. She is later killed by him because he's gone berserk. In the second anime, Pride eating Kimblee proves his downfall when Kimblee's soul ends up distracting him at a crucial moment and causing his death (something Pride never even considered, because he assumed it was impossible for any soul he consumes to maintain its individuality). Father's attempt to absorb Greed for his Philosopher's Stone also backfires when Greed uses the connection between them to use his Homunculus power on Father, turning his body to charcoal and leaving him vulnerable.
Gato, the gangster who hired Zabuza and Haku, gets slaughtered by Zabuza.
Zaku ended up having his arms blown up by his own air tubes (implants which let him perform sonic and air pressure attacks) after Shino snuck some of his bugs up into them, clogging them.
Sasori the puppet master gets impaled by his first creations: puppets made to look like his own parents, wielded by his own grandmother. She suggests that the human heart left in him made him hesitate upon seeing them rushing toward him, rather than dodge it.
And after he was resurrected, he was defeated again by getting trapped in his previous puppet body, controlled by Kankuro, the same guy who he EASILY defeated before.
In filler news, two of the three Jannin from the Land of Greens arc were whacked by having their own powers used against them. The first was Gentle Fist'd by Hinata in a way that smothers him in his own magnetic powder, effectively making his jutsu into a ball of suck by breaking the "off" switch; and the second had his ice-crystal death ray reflected back at him by Naruto's headband.
The third was also defeated because he was crushed by Chouji who swallowed the water from his jutsu.
Almost happened to Deidara when Sasuke pinned him to his explosive clay bird with two large shurikens and sent the bird plummeting down to a minefield he had set earlier, but he manages to escape.
It almost happened in a flashback as well, when Itachi used genjutsu to trick Deidara into wrapping explosive around himself instead of Itachi, but Itachi stopped him because it was his mission to get Deidara to join Akatsuki.
Pain lost one of his remote-controlled bodies when he used it to absorb Naruto's Sage chakra. Without proper training, said chakra turns people into stone frogs.
Kisame suffers this twice. First, his own sword Samehada betrays him for Killerbee/the Eight-Tails because he fed it so much of his chakra while they fought. Then it turns out that the huge water jutsu he used to drain the Eight-Tails chakra and trap Killerbee attracted the attention of Raikage and company. Raikage and Killerbee (rejuvenated by the chakra Samehada just gave him) promptly team up to decapitate Kisame. While this wasJust as Planned, even he said it worked a little too well.
Sasuke absorbed Orochimaru into his body using the technique Orochimaru intended to use to take over Sasuke's body.
Danzo's death is also an interesting case. Having spent his whole life preaching his principles that a shinobi should never show any emotions in battle, and consider the mission to be above comrades, guess how he died? Sasuke pierced his Chidori right through his teammate (whom Danzo had held hostage) to kill Danzo.
In The Prince of Tennis, Hajime Mizuki attempts to use Yuuta Fuji's desire to defeat his hated-loved older brother Shuusuke, by (among other things) teaching him a Deadly Upgrade-type skill that could seriously injure him - without telling the kid about the last detail. Well, when it's Mizuki's time to play against the older Fuji, the other deliberately gives him the advantage... and then completely trashes him, all because he's pissed off at Mizuki for the way he treated Yuuta.
In the Grand Finale of Mai-HiME, after the Obsidian Lord sheds his host body and reveals his true Eldritch Abomination form, he taunts the heroine and says that as long as the HiME Star (supposedly the prime source of the violencethat's surroundedtheir school) hangs in the sky above their school, he will keep regenerating. Cue about a dozen charging, re-energized HiME and one blown-the-heck-up celestial being, leaving him wide open to be blasted into oblivion.
Fate/stay night: It is already ironic that Kirei Kotomine was killed with the Azoth dagger he gave Rin years before. What is even more interesting is that the dagger was given to him in the prequel by Rin's father, Tokiomi Tohsaka who was Kirei's teacher. It was then used to stab Tokiomi by Kirei while Tohsaka's Servant Archer (Fate/zero 's Archer, aka, Gilgamesh) watched impassively.
Precia Testarossa, desperate to reach Al Hazard before dying of her disease or being arrested by the TSAB, tried to go do the dimensional transference when she had nine out of 21 Jewel Seeds, short of even the 14-seed bare minimum she suspected she would need. She falls to her death as the transference fails and her lair collapses.
Even though no one dies, Luffy is beaten around by Foxy for nearly their entire fight. Foxy uses both his power to slow down time and mirrors to reflect his "slow beams." At the end of the fight, however, he's caught by one of his own beams, reflected from a shard of the same mirrors he used earlier, allowing Luffy ample time to set up a truly epic finishing punch.
Also with Eneru, the very gold ball he grafted onto Luffy's arm meant to slow him down becomes the very thing that ends up stopping Eneru's energized death ball and defeating the fake "god".
Moria uses his 'Shadows Asguard' technique in order to absorb one thousand shadows on the island to fight Luffy. While he's much bigger and stronger, he's also slower and struggling to keep the shadows in. Luffy defeats him handily through a combination of Gear 2nd and Gear 3rd.
Subverted in Rave Master with Six Guard's Sean. When he's knocked out by his own sleep-inducing power, he ends up fighting in his sleep and is even stronger than when he's awake. He grinds his teeth, too.
One of the Death Note owners, Kyosuke Higuchi, is killed when his notebook is repossessed by Light, who recovers his memories and writes Higuchi's name in a scrap that he tore out of the notebook earlier.
Light himself suffers this fate at the very end of the anime when Ryuk makes good on his promise to Light in the very first episode and writes Light's name into the Death Note.
Subverted in Bleach during the fight between Kurotsuchi and Szayel Aporro. Szayel possesses Kurotsuchi's giant-demon-baby Bankai. Just as it starts to turn on him, it self-destructs, with Kurotsuchi remarking that he'd obviously already thought of that. Apparently someone's been doing their reading.
AND used straight. Kurotsuchi's awesome in that particular respect. He works in a job where being eaten is a job hazard. So what does he do? He implants packets of drugs inside himself and his lieutenant so anything that takes a bite out of them or otherwise consumes them gets an nasty overdose.
...how many jobs do you know where being eaten isn't a hazard?
Charlotte traps Yumichika in a technique that will slowly kill him while making him completely undetectable to the outside world, giving a Hannibal Lecture on how Yumichika will die alone and unmourned. However, Yumichika reveals that now he can finally use his secret, ultimate technique without fear of Squad 11 finding out, and kills Charlotte.
Hachigen kills Barragan by teleporting his rotting arm into Barragan's stomach, causing him to age himself to death.
Tosen gets a taste next. When his hollow form gives him the ability to see, he becomes so focused on his new-found sight to the exclusion of everything else, allowing Hisagi, his former lieutenant, to sneak up on him and land the finishing blow from behind.
In 421, this happens to Aizen. Relying on the Hogyoku for power was fine when it still considered him a worthy master. The moment it didn't, the Hogyoku took back all of the power it had given him leaving him vulnerable to Urahara's sealing kidou.
IN 466, Yukio tries to kill Toshiro with an inescapable Zerg Rush of Eldritch Abominations programmed to zone in on Toshiro's location and crush him. Then Toshiro flashsteps right next to Yukio and freezes his Fullbring. Yukio can't do anything but scream in terror as his own monsters surround him and Toshiro, knowing full well that Toshiro will be able to dodge their attack while he can't.
Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles is basically an epitome of this trope. Basically REF has weapons based on technology provided by Haydonites, a Not So Harmless race. When they clash, the question becomes: will Haydonites manage to turn humans' Haydonite-based weapons against humans, or will humans defeat Haydonites with Haydonite-based weapons? Both actually happens, but in the end humans win, at least for the moment.
In the Bile Fascination-filled Queen's Blade, the assassin Melona's primary means of attack is to squirt some sort of acidic fluid... from her breasts. Reina defeats her by blocking off her nipples with her Breast Plate, causing the acidic liquid to back up, swelling Melona's breasts to massive sizes.... and blowing them up.
Ranma ½ includes this on a few occasions, usually as a way for Ranma to beat opponents who, for whatever reason, outclass him. The best example is the Musk Dynasty story; Ranma's opponent Herb is far stronger and better trained at ki attacks then Ranma is, and knows how to disrupt the Hiryu Shoten Ha, which normally feeds off of the opponent's ki (which makes it a tentative example of this trope). Realizing that his opponent's attacks have left large quantities of ki floating loosely, he tricks his foe into apparently destabilizing the Hiryu Shoten Ha again- instead, Herb actually gives Ranma what he needs to gather all of the available ki, coalesce it into a single massive bolt, and drop it right on his head.
In an earlier story, the Date Monster of Watermelon Island, Ranma is stuck in female form and defenseless against Tatewaki Kuno, who has lost his delusions and thus is capable of actually concentrating on defeating Ranma for once. Aware that his Training from Hell has conditioned him to attack watermelons, s/he slips one onto Kuno's head, whereupon he knocks himself out cold and restores his memory- and thus his delusions.
The Martial Arts Dining story might also count by a technicality; Ranma's winning move, the Parley du Foie Gras, not only takes advantage of a loophole in the rules, but also turns Piccolet Chardin's normally advantageous mutations into Ranma's key to victory. Piccolet's rubber-like face allows him to eat faster then Ranma can, but also makes it easy for Ranma to force his own food down Piccolet's throat.
Actually referred to by name in an anime-exclusive OAV; early into the Christmas Scramble OAV, Kodachi mockingly points out that Kuno's unidentified but huge present is far too big to even get through the door, never mind into Akane Tendo's stocking. Kuno, horrorstruck, points out that he's been hoisted with his own petard (probably not in the original Japanese, though, as Kuno's Shakespearean references are a Woolseyism). And is promptly squashed under Shampoo's bicycle.
In Gundam Wing, several OZ officers end up killed by their own Mobile Dolls, who use a visual enemy identification system, when they have them target an enemy in the same spacesuit they were wearing.
Not really an example, seeing as one of the Gundam Pilots deliberately set it up by wearing an OZ spacesuit and shooting at a Mobile Doll, causing it to register the spacesuit as a threat.
A Heroic example of this trope would be in Endless Waltz. Heero uses his Twin Buster Cannon to destroy the Big Bad bunker. Though Heero survives Wing Gundam Zero is destroyed by the third shot's recoil.
Ah, but the super weapon with a programming defect may as well be the same as the mad scientist whose creations kill him in the end. This also happened in the live-action movie, G Savior, directly to the main antagonist.
Gundam Seed Destiny has the Federation once again trying to nuke ZAFT into space dust... only to get spectacularly one-upped when ZAFT's Neutron Stampeder detonates their nukes in-flight and even while still in the launch tubes. And yes, it's every bit as plausible and awesome as it sounds.
In the mid-season of Code Geass R2, when he is badly wounded and expecting help from Charles, V.V. instead gets his Code taken from him by Charles out of anger for lying to him too many times, and is left to die.
Jessie Mavia in Kinnikuman lost to Kinnikuman when he was goaded into going on the offensive. This was a mistake because, while Jessie is a master at move counters and reversals, he has no original moves of his own. Taking the initiative as he did left him wide-open to Kinnikuman reversing Jessie's attacks.
In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, Paul released his Chimchar because it lost one too many battles, and considered it weak. In the Sinnoh League, he was defeated by Ash who used the same Chimchar...as a fully evolved Infernape.
Bianca's Minccino in Black and White had a dreadful habit of cleaning anything it found dirty. Bianca pulled out a Poké Ball that was just as unclean as Ash's badge case (she delivered that to him as well), and when Minccino saw that, it darted up to clean it off. After that, though... wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, click.
In Digimon Xros Wars, Neptunemon is killed by his own trident. It has a homing ability, and Shoutmon X4 uses that to his advantage and jumps behind Neptunemon, causing the trident to have to pierce through him to reach its target.
Baccano! provides an indirect example of this. After first inflicting damage on Szilard Quates herself, Ennis, one of his created homunculi, gives Firo Prochainezo instructions with her dying words on how to finish him off. Consequently, since the method of killing Szilard involves absorbing his knowledge, Firo is able to save Ennis.
Most of The Seven Kin of Purgatory were defeated this way.
Tenchi Muyo! has a spectacular moment in Episode 7. The episode's main plot of Ryoko and Ayeka trying to win Tenchi's heart reaches its peak when they trick Mihoshi into returning to the Galaxy Police and locking Washu in her lab before turning on each other. Everything falls apart spectacularly when Sasami defeats an alarm Ayeka put in to keep Ryoko out, the two girls finds out Washu was already in his room, fall prey to said alarm (which launches them into the lake) and, for good measure, Mihoshi returns... and crash lands on the house.
Gold and Silver from Yaiba are both defeated by their own features: Silver is knocked out when he accidentally shot his electrical laser while in a water pool and Gold is impaled by Yaiba's sword after the latter took advantage of Gold's super strength and super elastic arms to get propelled with enough force and speed towards the titan.
Reiji Mizuchi from Metal Fight Beyblade loves striking fear into his opponents till they're broken wrecks. Ginga ultimately delivers an epic Shut Up, Hannibal! on him. The sight of Ginga not being afraid of him causes him to have a Villainous Breakdown and be overwhelmed by his own fear, allowing Ginga to defeat him. He's last seen as the same broken wreck he typically left his opponents in.
In the Kingdom Hearts II manga by Shiro Amano, things are being stolen all over Twilight Town. Everyone seems to think Roxas, Hayner, Pence, and Olette are responsible. Hayner believes that Seifer is behind it, and suggests that he be hoist by his own petard.
In Pokémon Special, Black only managed to beat Lenora because she had her Stoutland spam Take Down, a move that, while powerful, whittled down its HP and allowed it to be taken out in one good hit.
Lupin III manages to use Inspector Zenigata's own knowledge of the facts against him when Zenigata foolishly lets him know that he was onto him for saying "Gas Chamber" instead of "electric chair". Zenigata manages to lose enough time just running to the execution chamber to call off the execution that Lupin's prison break succeeds once again.
In the anime version of THE iDOLM@STERPresidentKuroi convinces the audio technician from the Idol Jam to conveniently forget where he put the CD with the 765PRO idols songs. This comes to bites him in the rear, when Chihaya starts to sing in acappella, making the tech (and crowd) be so moved by the scene that he restarts the audio in the next chorus, effectivelly creating a greater effect on the public than it would be if she had just started singing normally.
Also, this little stunt was the last drop for his own group of Idols who didn't want to keep up with his crap anymore and quit his company before the song Chihaya was singing even ended.
Comic Books
In both the Spider-Man movie and the comic storyline it was based on, the Green Goblin attempts to kill Spider-Man by impaling him with his hovercraft, but Spidey jumps to avoid it and it hits GG instead.
Spidey: I'm just sayin' there's only one way this is gonna go down, it happens every time. We'll fight for a bit, you'll tear my mask, but in the end I'm gonna leap outta the way and you're gonna do something that makes you kill yourself.
In the limited series The Thanos Quest, the titular supervillain seeks (and ultimately attains) the Infinity Gems in order to become God and thus a worthy mate for Mistress Death. However, he miscalculates spectacularly when he discovers that omnipotence made him not her equal but superior, preventing anything other than a servile relationship; for the extra kick in the teeth, he is now subjected to the (no pun intended) cold shoulder of the cosmic being, who considered his pursuit and attainment of godhood a heinous betrayal, and his subsequent attempts at wooing her back childish and insulting.
It doesn't get much better in the follow-up storyline The Infinity Gauntlet, as when Thanos decides to give up on Mistress Death and fully embrace his status as God, eventually defeating Eternity and becoming the very embodiment of the universe, he makes another grievous error (or perhaps not) when by forsaking his body in replacing Eternity, he leaves it (and the Infinity Gems) vulnerable to theft by his upstart "daughter" Nebula.
Subverted with Lex Luthor: the kryptonite ring that he used to bedevil Superman ends up giving him fatal radiation poisoning due to prolonged exposure. However, he cheats death because of his brillianceJoker Immunity.
Used in the tongue-in-cheek Punisher Kills the Marvel UniverseThe Punisher actually manages to kill the nearly unkillable Wolverine. How does he do this? By forcing good ol' Logan into a generator, using his metal bones as a conductor to electrically fry every cell in his body.
Mentioned for being hilarious, the otherwise quite forgettable Superman vs. Dracula comic ended with Dracula draining Superman's blood and absorbing his power - at which point his head exploded. Superman, after all, is solar powered.
After a rooftop battle in the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a defeated Shredder is about to use a thermite grenade to kill both the turtles and himself, when he is thrown off the roof by Donatello's bo staff. Boom.
Unus the Untouchable was a mutant criminal with a force field that protected him from all harm. Eventually, it got so powerful that not even air could get through.
In Watchmen, Dollar Bill was killed when his cape was caught in a revolving door in a bank, and was was shot by some thug. It becomes double when the bank happens to be the one who he worked for, and made him put on a cape
The Punisher 2099 villain Fearmaster has a hand (later a claw) that can turn anything biological it touches into anything else. When the Punisher finally corners him, he tries to turn Frank's entire body to mud. Too bad he forgot that he chopped off one of the Punisher's hands two issues prior; all Frank has to do is reach out with his prosthetic hand, grab Fearmaster's arm, and shove the claw right back in his face.
In Teen Titans Terra died by accidental suicide when she imploded the HIVE complex out of sheer rage, trying to kill Deathstroke when she thinks he betrayed her.
The U-Foes, enemies of the Incredible Hulk, seem to kill themselves off like this the first time they turn up— their newly gained powers are strong enough to potentially take down the Big Green Machine, but Power Incontinence kicks in. Vapour can turn herself into any gas... but soon cannot keep her molecules together. Ironclad can increase his mass... which keeps increasing so he cannot move and sinks into the ground. And their leader Vector, just like Unus above, can repel things— eventually he repels the air around him so he suffocates, then he repels Earth itself and shoots out into space. X-Ray's ability to manipulate radiation very nearly causes him explode from absorbing too much energy. They come back.
In Final Crisis, Batman shoots Darkseid with the same bullet that he used to kill Orion. Then, Wally West and Barry Allen turn intangible and run through him, causing the Omega Beams that were chasing them to hit and blow him up.
In one of the later comics, Conan the Barbarian comes across a particularly vile Zingaran noble/religious fanatic who assassinates his rivals by giving them the Ring of Molub, a Clingy MacGuffin that can only be stolen or passed on to others without their knowledge. The ring is connected to an ancient, Nigh Invulnerable demon of the same name who graphically slaughters the bearer of the ring and anyone who tries to stop it. Conan later acquires the ring himself and then passes it to the noble by slipping it on his finger. Then he breaks his finger just to make sure he can't get rid of it.
When Emperor Palpatinereturns from the dead to restore his empire, he captures Luke Skywalker and nearly turns him to the Dark Side. Leia eventually boards Palpatine's flagship to rescue her brother, and the two Skywalkers defeat Palpatine. In retaliation, he summons a devastating storm of dark side energies to lay waste to the New Republic fleet, but Luke and Leia overwhelm him with the Force, causing him to lose control of the storms. His flagship (and he himself) are subsequently torn apart by them. But he is stillNot Quite Dead.
In the Atari Force second series, the Dark Destroyer intended to destroy Martin Champion's New Earth universe with an anti-matter bomb. However, as Dart tried to defuse the bomb, she accidentally deactivated the fail-safe mechanism and caused it to detonate. The Dark Destroyer, who at that point was defeated by Martin Champion in a fistfight, ended up dying in the explosion of his own bomb while the Atari Force team escaped.
Gorgon, one of the few villains Wolverine has faced that is a better killer than him in every way, also has Taken for Granite powers — hence the name Gorgon. Wolverine defeated him by popping his reflective claws when Gorgon tried to turn him to stone.
In one Fantastic Four story, Doctor Doom gloats to an imprisoned Reed Richards about a torture room he designed full of thousands of mirrors arranged in such a way that the myriad reflections are so incomprehensible to the human mind that looking at it without protective goggles can induce a Heroic BSOD. At the end of the story, about five issues later, Doom and Reed's climactic battle leads to Reed chasing Doom into the aforementioned room, where Doom beats the living crap out Reed and strangles him while screaming about how much he hates him. However, Reed manages to tear off Doom's mask just before he passes out, and the sight of his grotesquely disfigured face reflected at him thousands of times drives Doom completely insane (he gets better).
In Astérix and the Roman Agent, Magnificent Bastard Tortuous Convolvulus has sown seeds of discord in our heroes' village, and for a time convinced them that Asterix, Obelix, and Getafix have been suborned by the Romans. After our heroes set their differences aside and pwn all four Roman garrisons, Asterix gives Convolvulus a gift and thanks him for "keeping your end of the bargain". Centurion Felix Platypus is enraged and has Convolvulus chained up and taken back to Rome as a traitor.]] Convolvulus is back up to his old tricks before long, however.
In The Broken Ear, after several failed attempts at assassinating General Alcazar, Corporal Diaz is given a time bomb set to go off at eleven o'clock. Diaz sets his watch by the street clocks, but at ten o'clock, when he thinks he still has time to spare, he is puzzled to see a municipal worker adjusting a street clock to make up for time lost due to an earlier power cut. The corrected time: eleven o'clock. BOOM.
In the Batman mini-series, The Cult, Bats is able to turn Deacon Blackfire's own doctrine against him when he beats him within an inch of his life, then let him live for his followers to deal with. His followers, who were broken by him into believing that their own suffering meant nothing in the greater scheme of things, were so enraged by his own weakness, they literally tore him apart.
Eastern Animation
In Firing Range, the inventor is killed when his empathic tank sense fear in him, triggering its attack.
Fairy Tales
In many Fairy Tales, someone describes the crimes to the villain without using any names and asks what a suitable punishment would be; the villain, who has usually framed the hero or heroine for the crimes in question, then (often gleefully) prescribes a horrible punishment and is subjected to it. These include:
In the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, the witch instructs Gretel to stick her head in the oven to see if it is hot enough (with the intention of pushing her in to be cooked). Gretel feigns ignorance, causing the exasperated witch to stick her own head in the oven to show Gretel how it is done... and she is inevitably subjected to the same fate she had planned for the two siblings.
Fan Fiction
One Star Trek: The Next Generation Fan Fic involving Q creating a second Jean Luc seems to be written just to conclude with Data telling him "I'd say you were hoist by your own Picard."
In any given Marx Brothers film any dialogue between the two resident Pungeon Masters was likely to end with the quick-witted Chico getting the better of the exasperated Groucho by turning his own wordplay against him.
Aliens: the Corrupt Corporate Executive who ordered the colony to acquire the alien eggs (and thereby caused all of their deaths) was eventually killed by the aliens himself.
The film Merlin has Mab. She created Merlin (half-human, half-fae) to preserve the old ways. But, her cruel actions such as killing his mother and imprisoning a lady he loved, made him instead want to destroy the old ways. When he succeeds, Mab literally disappears because Gods Need Prayer Badly.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ends with the cannibal butcher Ms. Lovett being shoved into her own oven. Todd has his throat slit with his own razor, exactly as he did to his victims.
The unspoken reason for Rotti Largo's terminal illness? Exposure to the same poison that he used to kill Marnie Wallace.
Vic Deakin (played by John Travolta) of John Woo's Broken Arrow hilariously and literally gets hit by the nuke he intended to slaughter innocent millions with. It doesn't detonate, though.
In Dumb and Dumber, an enemy poses as a friendly hitchhiker, intending to drop pellets of rat poison into Harry and Lloyd's food. But before he can succeed in this, he needs first aid when his ulcer flairs up (which was induced by Harry and Lloyd's own practical joking). Harry and Lloyd try to administer his emergency pills, but they mistake the pellets of poison for the ulcer medication, and feed him his own rat poison instead.
In Stealth, a medic attempts to inject an initially unsuspecting Ben (Josh Lucas) with 'pain relief' medicine (actually poison). Ben politely refuses, but the medic's stubborn insistence clues Ben in that something is wrong and a struggle ensues. The medic ends up being stuck with the needle himself and dies, showing Ben what the medic was trying to do (not that it wasn't fairly obvious).
This moment in itself leads into Ben's commander being hoisted by his own petard. In trying to cover his tracks by having Ben killed and failing, his duplicity is revealed to his superiors by Ben and he is relieved of command. Then he takes a bullet rather than face court martial.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, after Judge Doom reveals himself to be a toon, he meets his end by getting sprayed with "Dip," a toon-killing cocktail of paint thinners that he himself created.
In Dream House, Jack Patterson tries to kill Will and Ann in a house fire. It does not end well for him.
General fate of James Bond's adversaries. Some examples: Doctor No's metal hands made it impossible for him to climb to safety (admittedly, he would have even more of an hard time without any hands at all. On the other hand, he lost his hands from his work with nuclear reactors in the first place), Oddjob was electrocuted through his steel-bladed hat, Goldfinger was sucked out of his own depressurizing jet, Trevelyan was crushed by his own evil satellite dish, Carver got shredded by his own giant drill, Renard was skewered by a rod of plutonium with which he was trying to blow up a submarine, Baron Samedi is knocked into the casket full of poisonous snakes into which he was intending to sacrifice Solitaire, etc.
Don't forget Hellboy crushed him with his own giant gear.
In Golden Army Mr.Wink dies after launching his Rocket Punch into a griding machine. Hellboy even states before "I wouldn't do that" and after that happened "Whoa. Told ya."
Nearly occurs in the Iron Man movie , where the shrapnel that forces Tony Stark to wear his electromagnet comes from a Stark Industries missile used by terrorists. Obadiah Stane's Iron Monger suit was also reverse-engineered from the remains of Tony's first suit.
Not to mention Stane being killed by the same device he decried as useful only for "publicity."
In the sequel, lots of Hammeroids get blasted out of the air by fire from their own. Also defied, according to the novelisation, as Ivan Vanko specifically constructs his armour so that in case of a mishap (which incidentally doesn't happen) he won't cut himself with his whips.
In the Super Mario Bros. movie, Mario and Luigi use Koopa's own de-evolution guns against him, turning him into a tyrannosaurus. Then they blast him a second time, turning him into primeval slime.
Tank Girl. Kesslee had a device that drained a person's blood from their body, killing them, and purified it into drinkable water. He used it to kill one of his subordinates, and at the end of the movie Tank Girl used one to kill him.
Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. The Indian who had acted as Captain Seas' assassin by using the Green Death (created from the venom of poisonous snakes) falls into the pit holding the snakes and is bitten repeatedly, killing him.
At the climax of ''GMK'', Godzilla explodes after his own nuclear breath backfires and instead tears him open from the inside out. Somewhat a subverted example in that, Godzilla isn't killed but instead reduced to a disembodied yet still-beating heart.
In Hannibal, Mason Verger is eaten by the killer pigs he had been training to eat Hannibal Lecter. There's even a bit of The Dog Bites Back added in for good measure.
Hannibal: Hey, Cordell. Why don't you push him in? You can always say it was me.
Bridgekeeper: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
King Arthur: What do you mean? African or European?
Bridgekeeper: I don't know that! AAAAAAGGHHHH!!!!
In Help Im A Fish, Joe the pilot fish dies (ratherhorribly) when he drinks too much of the Anti-Fish potion, effectively turning into a human. Whilst underwater. He drowns.
The Avengers (1998). While Sir August is fighting Steed, he's stabbed through the chest with his own fighting staff and then hit by a bolt of lightning from his Weather Control Machine and killed.
In The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Former Chief Inspector Dreyfus is killed when his Bavarian castle is disintegrated by his own doomsday weapon. It was supposed to be fired at England, but Clouseau hoist himself into the castle with a conveniently placed catapult. He proceeds to land on the doomsday machine, causing it to swivel around and hit Dreyfus instead, who has his legs disintegrated. Then the doomsday device overloads and starts to dissolve the rest of the castle. The last thing we see of Dreyfus is him slowly vanishing while playing the organ that any self-respecting villain must have in his Bavarian castle hideout.
In Perfume, Grenouille ends his own life by dumping his perfect perfume over his head, causing a nearby crowd to become overwhelmed by the concentrated beauty and devour him.
In the first Transformers live action movie, the Decepticon Frenzy is killed by one of many CD like 'throwing stars' which he himself fired. The thing arced in mid-air and came right back at him.
In Spider-Man, The Green Goblin is stabbed in the chest by his own glider after trying to use it to kill Spider-Man (Spider-Man senses it, and quickly gets out of the way). This led the Goblin's son to believe Spider-Man killed his father.
In Bride of the Monster, Dr. Eric Vornoff is killed by his own giant octopus. "He tampered in God's domain."
Ghost Rider's Penance Stare allows him to burn the pain of all the people someone has hurt into that person's soul. The film's villain, a demon, has no soul and is thus immune. Near the end, he takes on the power of 1000 evil human souls to start the apocalypse. Guess what happens.
Jurassic Park uses this, create prehistoric monsters and there is a good chance they'll kill you. It is played better in the book and the dinosaurs aren't created as weapons but for entertainment but it otherwise fits the trope.
Rather literal in Law Abiding Citizen. Clyde is about to activate the bomb he set up in city hall. Nick tries to talk him out of it. He activates it anyway, and Nick leaves him in his cell and locks the door as Clyde realizes the bomb is now in the cell with him. He accepts having finally been outplayed and sits on the bomb as it goes off.
The Wind in the Willows/Mr. Toad's Wild Ride: Chief Weasel tries to blow up Toad Hall from the dog food factory. Rat switched the labels on some barrels labeled "bones" and "explosives" earlier on. You can probably figure out how this ends...
In Disney's Tarzan, Clayton repeatedly tries to slash Tarzan with his machete. Unfortunately for Clayton, the two of them are fighting in a thick jungle, where Clayton cuts just the right vines to accidentally hang himself.
In Godzilla: Final Wars, Gigan fires two spinning disks from his chest at Mothra, who dodges it. Gigan then sets Mothra ablaze with his laser beam. As Mothra is burning, Gigan turns around to savor his victory, only to have the two spinning disks come back and decapitate him.
It is not really known why the disks came back, although the yellow powder Mothra threw might've been the cause, as Mothra has reflective scales in the films Godzilla vs. Mothra and Godzilla: Toyko SOS.
In Edge of Darkness, Craven gains a measure of symbolic revenge when he forces Bennett, the man who ordered the radioactive thallium poisoning of both Craven and his daughter Elle, to drink a jar filled with thallium-tainted milk.
In Traitor, the Deep Cover Agent protagonist Samir is unable to break his cover by giving the suicide bombers that are planning to blow up busses in the United States fake equipment. His solution? He arranged for them all to be on the same bus, so that they only managed to blow each other up.
Kinda sucks for the bus driver, though.
In Resident Evil: Afterlife, Albert Wesker escapes from the ship in a helicopter, then triggers the ship's self-destruct device, only to find that Alice found the bomb earlier and stashed it on the helicopter.
In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Jade Fox tries to kill Mu Bai with a hail of poison darts, but Mu Bai deflected them back at Jade Fox.
A literal example of this trope occurs in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where the torch-bearing orc clearly didn't make it out of the explosion place. Also many orcs were crushed by flying boulders, not that this stopped the others much.
The director's cut also gives us a straight example: the dam that Ents break to flood Isengard was recently constructed by Saruman to speed up weapon production. It was also said production that made felling that many trees necessary, giving the Ents a reason to attack in the first place.
Flash Gordon. At the end Ming is impaled on the nose cone of one of his own war rockets.
In the sequel, Faxx shuts off Cain's life support and uses his brain to create Robocop 2. Later, Cain goes on a rampage when OCP unveils him, and Faxx becomes OCP's scapegoat. Cain himself is defeated when Lewis offers him a canister of his own drug Nuke, and Robocop takes advantage of the distraction to kill Cain.
The Terminator series is a prime example of this trope. We created the Skynet system, and right after it comes online it tries to eradicate us by implementing an all out nuclear war.
Batman Returns has the Penguin getting this in spades. When he appears to have the race for Mayor of Gotham City in the bag, Bruce Wayne and Alfred broadcast his previous rants directed at Batman over the loudspeakers during his speech, which include such gems as "I played this stinking city like a harp from hell!" Penguin's Villain with Good Publicity status goes bye-bye, and the eggs and tomatoes are broken out. Later, after his plot to kill all the first-born sons of Gotham is foiled, Penguin straps rockets to his hundreds (thousands?) of penguins in order to destroy the city. Alfred is able to jam the signal used to control them, sending them off to follow a new beacon. When Batman arrives at his Elaborate Underground Base, Penguin wields a sword-umbrella, only for Batman to simply pull out a small remote control with a blinking red button. His eyes shift from the control, to something on the opposite side of the screen. Penguin does likewise, and sees his entire penguin army. He snaps (further than he already had) and is able to take the controller and press the button. The rockets launch, destroying what remains of the park, but also releasing a swarm of bats from the Batski which immediately descend upon the Penguin (a double Hoist By His Own Petard when you remember that he used a similar swarm of bats released by an umbrella in order to send the Ice Princess off a building and kill her, framing Batman for the whole thing). He stumbles backwards, through the ceiling glass, and into the icy polluted water.
Max Shreck, the other major villain, after receiving a Humiliation Conga of his own for his manipulation and betrayal of the above villain, is eventually electrocuted by a power overload to the Arctic World park (presumably coming from the power plant that he had been doing a lot of his evil doings for), with the Kiss of Death delivered by none other than Catwoman, whose alter ego (Selina Kyle) he had been treating like shit through most of the movie. Turns out that one really can have too much power.
In The Pelican Brief, a hitman who had previously planted a car bomb rigs another car in a second attempt to kill the heroine. Luckily, when the car has engine trouble, she recognizes the sound from the previous incident and gets out of the car to flee. The villain attempts to run her down in his own car, but loses control and crashes. Ironically, the impact alone would probably have been enough to kill him, but the car he crashed into? The very one that he rigged to explode. KABOOM.
Towards the end of the live action Popeye movie, Bluto, who is already winning the fight against Popeye, decides to rub it in by shoving spinach down Popeye's throat *
Yes, in this adaptation Popeye hates spinach, as he did in the original comics actually
. Of course, the spinach gives Popeye the strength to win the fight.
In the climax of Strange Days, protagonist Lenny Nero, after literally getting stabbed in the back by his former best friend Max, ends up clinging for dear life to balcony railing twenty-two stories above the streets of Los Angeles, with Max dangling from his necktie hoping to take Lenny down with him. Lenny proceeds to pull the still-stuck knife out of his back and use it to cut his tie off, sending Max plummeting to his death.
Bo Catlett imagines how easy it would be to kill Chili if he just had Bear loosen some of the screws on the railing of his deck, which overlooked a cliff. When the eventual showdown happens at Cat's place, he's surprised to learn Bear actually did loosen them.
Subverted in L: change the WorLd, in that K is perfectly willing to die from the virus she created so long as it achieves her goal of ridding the world of humanity. L doesn't let her.
Non-Fatal version appears in the Daredevil film, when Matt Murdoc's partner Foggy puts some stuff in Matt's coffee as a practical joke. The moment Foggy's head is turned, looking at Elektra, Matt switches their coffees, giving Foggy a taste of his own medicine.
At the end of Dirty Pretty Things, the villain, who runs an illegal organ harvesting operation that preys on desperate illegal immigrants, has the tables turned on him by the heroes, who knock him out and steal his kidney.
Pirates of the Caribbean: In At World's End, Barbossa not only cites the code at the gathering of the Brethren Court, but calls on Captain Teague to enforce it, all to avoid fighting Beckett. Jack's motion for the Court to fight won't be entertained because only the elected Pirate King can declare war, and there's no King because a Pirate Lord will always only vote for himself. So Jack calls for an election, lets everyone else vote for themselves, then throws his support behind Elisabeth, who's gung-ho for bringing war on Beckett. Now Barbossa has to go to fight Beckett, since he not only cited the rule that says Elizabeth can declare war, but called on Teague as well. He's got a better chance of surviving a war than a fight with Teague.
Lord Shen in Kung Fu Panda 2 invents cannons, which he uses to kill some of the best kung fu masters in China and plans to conquer all of the land. Po manages to find inner peace and masters the technique for catching raindrops without breaking them, which he uses to catch cannonballs and throw them back. Thus Shen's entire armada gets destroyed by their own weapons. He is killed when he tries to kill Po with his knives and accidentally cuts a rope that holds his biggest cannon, which falls on him.
At the end of Robots, Big Bad Madame Gasket falls into her own incinerator, which she was previously established as using to melt down lower-class robots into products for her son's company to sell.
In the original 1960's Ocean's 11, Danny Ocean's team decides to hide the stolen cash in Bergdorf's coffin. The plan was to wait until it was shipped to San Francisco for the funeral and buried, after which they would retrieve the money. This went quite wrong when his widow, who had not been informed of this, decides to have the funeral there in Las Vegas... and the money then gets burned with him.
Starscream's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder comes back to bite him in his shiny, metal ass terminally this time in Transformers: The Movie when he dumps the badly damaged Megatron out into space. This of course, puts Megatron in a position to be found by Unicron and reformatted into Galvatron. Naturally, Galvatron decides to test his new weapons out on Starscream.
In Muppet Treasure Island, the first step of Silver's planned mutiny is convincing First Mate Mr Arrow to leave the ship in a leaky lifeboat, causing the rest of the crew to assume he drowned. When the plan fails and Silver winds up in the brig, he escapes and flees the ship... in a lifeboat which later to be incredibly leaky.
Weekend at Bernie's starts this way: Bernie defrauds his own insurance company and rewards the two employees that discovered it with a weekend retreat at his place. He intends for the mob to off them; the mob offshiminstead.
Harry Potter and the Deathly HallowsPart 2 has one involving Snape. He invented Sectumsempra, a spell used for emulating the effect of a sword. Guess exactly which throat Voldemort slices with it? (In the book, Nagini is used instead.)
Literature
The term is actually used in The Green Mile to describe how by trying to plead innocence, Percy Wetmore ends up looking extremely incompetent.
In A Series of Unfortunate Events, Count Olaf is killed by the same harpoon gun he packed planning to release the biological weapon on the island. This is after being nearly poisoned by that same biological weapon.
In A Tale of Two Cities, most of the revolutionaries, including Ernest Defarge, Barsad, and the Vengeance, are eventually executed by their own guillotine.
Used in Jurassic Park. The monsters where created for a theme park rather than as weapons but the trope is still followed.
In Thanks To The Saint's final story, "The Careful Terrorist", Simon Templar is opposed by a gangster, and his professional hitman, nicknamed "The Engineer", and manages to make him blow himself and his employer up. Then he quotes the Trope Namer.
In Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Voldemort is finally defeated when his own Avada Kedavra is reflected back in his face by an Expelliarmus from Harry. Arguably, the first time Voldemort tried to kill Harry, only to have it backfire and blow up in his face, counts too - even though he didn't stay dead.
Something similar occurs in Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets when Lockhart's memory charm backfires on him, because he was using Ron's very broken wand to cast it. Dumbledore mocks this ("Impaled on your own sword, Gilderoy?").
Non-fatal example: In OotP, we see a memory of Harry's dad picking on Snape by making him hang upside-down in midair. In the next book, Harry finds the potions book of the guy who invented that spell...and at the end of the book, it turns out to be Snape himself.
In Deathly Hallows Crabbe tries to kill the main trio with Fiendfyre. Since he lacked the skill to actually control Fiendfyre, the cursed flames consumed their summoner.
Tom Riddle Sr., upon finding out that his pregnant wife was a witch and had used magic for making him fall in love with and marry her, abandoned her and her unborn child and purposefully never bothered to find out what happened to either of them. Said child grows up to become Voldemort, learns the truth, and decides to kill Tom Riddle, Sr. in revenge for his having been abandoned by him and left to be raised in an orphanage.
Umbridge really shouldn't have gotten onto Harry for even perceived lying. He actually weaponized his detentions under her at least twice later on. The second time basically ended up like this:
In a supplementary material to Guardians of Ga'Hoole, a Tropical Screech Owl named Honeyvox drinks the potion meant for his enemy, muting him for life.
In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000: Gaunt's Ghosts novel First & Only, Rawne is kidnapped and tortured by Heldane before Corbec and other Ghosts rescue him. He intended to make him a "pawn" but succeeded in only making him sensitive to influence. This, however, let Rawne sense when Heldane was about to unleash his actual pawn, and bring his weapon to bear beforehand.
In a kind of play on this trope, in the first of the newest Wild Cards novels, "Inside Straight", African American Ace Stuntman manages to win a challenge on the reality show he is participating in by accusing one of his opponents of using a racial slur against him. In the next novel, "Busted Flush" Stuntman main role in the storyline is fighting a genuine racist (while the guy who he accused of being a racist went on to be part of the UN super team).
In Graham McNeill's Warhammer 40,000Ultramarines novel Dead Sky Black Sun, Honsou has Uriel killed by putting him into the daemonculaba. He breaks free. Since this was the process by which the Unfleshed were created, they smell it on him, and are willing to listen to him; he gets them to join him on an attack on Honsou's fortress.
In Logos Run, an evil circus master tries to kill the heroes with his dangerous poisonous snake. Once introduced to a scent, it will unerringly kill that person. His comrades all wondered why the snake had never bitten him. After sending the snake, he is injured in an unrelated event. The intended victim actually helped him by bandaging him. When he woke up, the first thing he asked was who put the bandages on him. The snake struck right after he got the answer...
In A Song of Ice and Fire, the loathsome city of Astapor brutally trains eunuch slave Super Soldiers for sale as mercenaries as well as to defend the city. Astapor has nothing to fear from its own soldiers, who are robotically loyal and cannot disobey an order from their masters. However, no one thought it was a bad idea to sell every single soldier they have to an ambitious warrior queen, thus turning their entire garrison into a foreign army that's already inside their walls.
Then there's Cersei's ''brilliant'' actions as Queen Regent: she reinstates the Church Militant wing of the Faith of the Seven in order to pacify the rioting faithful, while plotting to expose frame the betrothed of her son (the crowned king) as engaged in an extramarital affair. However, the guy she sends to seduce and spill on her son's fiancée ends up tortured by the new High Septon, and confesses that he's had relations with Cersei as well. She ends up in the cells rather quickly.
Hell, the very first book has Ned Stark, whose plans to expose Cersei's adultery and Joffrey's illegitimacy end with him playing straight into the Lannisters' hands.
In Atlas Shrugged, Robert Stadler tries to take over a Death Ray installation that he feels belongs to him. The outcome of the struggle is the obliteration of him, the building, and everything within a 100-mile radius.
In Matthew Reilly's novella "Hell Island", the Island is overrun by 300 mountain apes who were genetically modified to be supersoldiers. They were controlled by silver disks, and anyone wearing one was immune to them. The island hadn't been overrun at all... it was part of an exercise. Schofield has Mother wipe out the disks, so nobody is immune, and everyone who was previously safe was killed by the apes, before Schofield drowned them.
Also in Ice Station when the one remaining French soldier attempts to take out the marines by planting a Claymore mine at a dead-end corridor. Rebound discovers his plan and turns the mine around, resulting in the gruesome death of the Frenchman at the hand of his own mine.
Somewhat amusingly, the aforementioned French soldier? His name is Jean Petard.
And later, the "bad guys" were themselves hoisted by not cleaning up the body of Petard.
In In The Penal Colony by Franz Kafka, the officer is killed by the machine he helped create. Somewhat subverted in that the officer went into it willingly.
A throwaway joke in one of the Discworld books mentions that it's not often that weapon inventors are killed by their own creation and the widespread belief in this happening is due to the unfortunate death of William Blunt-Instrument in an alley.
Also, in The Colour of Magic, Garhartra the Guestmaster casts a spell to stop a flung bottle of wine in mid-air. Eight hours later, he returns to the room just in time for the spell to wear off, and the bottle resumes its interrupted journey, smacking him on the head.
In Wyrd Sisters, Felmet commissions a play to slander the witches and make it so that people recognize him as king. Said play forms the perfect opportunity for the witches to meddle, and the ghost of the old king to possess an actor and tell everyone that Felmet killed him.
Lilly in Witches Abroad uses mirrors to amplify her powers. In the end she is trapped in her own mirrors, probably forever.
The vampires in Carpe Jugulum bite Granny Weatherwax in order to make her a vampire as well. Unfortunately, she sent her spirit into the blood they drank, so instead of transforming her they find themselves becoming more like her.
The villain in Feet of Clay attempted to poison the Patrician by using candles with the wicks soaked in arsenic. Vimes does the same trick with holy water in the climax. The villain also used a golem to help with the plot, and it's a golem that ends up arresting him.
Narrowly averted in His Dark Materials, where Mrs. Coulter is to be separated from her daemon by the same process she used on kids at Bolvangar, but manages to escape at the last moment. Arguably played straight immediately thereafter when her would-be executioner, still needing the energy released by the process and pressed for time, does it to himself.
The Xyliens capture dying souls and turn them into robots. Some of those robots rebel.
Alhox puts Bluque in charge of the war effort so that Alhox can focus on humanitarian concerns. Bluque launches a coup.
Bluque set up the entire thing because the Mystery Wanderer suggested it. The Wanderer then knows every security loophole, and uses it to trap Bluque and his army in the Muellex right after Bluque sent Alhox into exile. Leaving Markerterion with no leadership. But then, King Melchar's Evil Plan backfires. Turns out, sending almost your entire world's population to other worlds to wreak murder and mayhem can be a really bad idea.
Varikton Vanqushun, like the characters thatinspired him, has a huge problem with his plans backfiring. Kill your daughter for starting a charity organization? A whole La Résistance of Church Militants shows up. Try to suffocate and starve those Aviatets to death? They join forces with Commie Land and gain the weapons they need to defend themselves, and a motivation to fight. And then become a rival force of evil. Try to one-up those suckers and the human race simultaneously by stealing alien technology? A very pissed off, radioactive, kung-fu alien with a Mosquatlon, Violently Protective Girlfriend show up and blow your dictatorship to ash. And if you do succeed at stopping them, you'll have to deal with the Teal Fleet's wrath. Because the aliens you would've killed were carrying information vital to The Empire's plans.
By not counting on Viola's involvement in trying to foil the Buliod's-infecting scheme on Whixtitout, Astrabolo inadvertently allows Viola's ink to create a cure that renders Gel Pens immune to Buliod's disease. Therefore allowing one whole portion of the population of Statios to have one less reason to be afraid of Astrabolo. Which is why, when freed from a muellexic trap 60 years later, he makes sure to drop five simultaneousatomic bombs on Port Metaball.
The Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Speckled Band features a villain who dies after being bitten by the poisonous snake he intended to use to murder his stepdaughter so he could keep her money. Holmes even remarks that he is indirectly responsible for what happened when he hit the snake with his cane to drive it away, which made it retreat and bite its owner in anger, but says he's unlikely to lose much sleep over it.
In the Warhammer 40,000 novel Grey Knights, the Big Bad Valinov is freed at his execution by Ligeia's death cultists and proceeds to use the servitor-mangler meant to kill him on Riggensen, who had succeeded in breaking him.
Basically, Warhammer 40000 stories tend to end due to the villain inevitably screwing himself over (unless he actually succeeds, which happens a lot).
Two books in the Demon Headmaster series do this. The first one is when the Headmaster falls into a machine that he uses to clone life, although that only lasts until the next book, where the machine clones him. The clone—who has the Headmaster's powers—is undone by an information overload in his brain.
Stationery Voyagers, of course, has Clandish "Cybomec" Consto. After having his only fuel rod removed, he still uses his electroblast to fry Pextel's librionic body. But this only has the effect of draining what little remained of Cybomec's own librionic energy and knocks him dormant. Thus, allowing the other Voyagers to defeat an otherwise unbeatable foe.
In The Killing Star, both humanity and the our alien nemeses get Hoisted: first a race of aliens, whose only apparent purpose in the universe is to cause the deaths of others, nearly destroy mankind by flinging giant rocks at us at just under light-speed. Their reasoning? Because they heard "We Are The World" once centuries ago, and thought we meant it to say humanity was a unified nation that would attack them now that we have relativistic spaceships, because it seemed like a logical train of thought to them. One wonders how they ever got into space. In the end the humans nuke the Earth's sun, killing a good chunk of their fleet, and a few humans flee with the genetically engineered clone of Jesus Christ (no I'm not making this up...) into deep space, planning to retaliate when they get the chance.
To be fair, the motivation for aliens' genocide of humanity was entirely logical and rational (1. any species will place its own survival before that of a different species, 2. Any species that has dominated its planet will be intelligent, aggressive, and ruthless, 3. They will assume the first two rules apply to us).
It's logical...assuming you have perfect information on what you are up against, and there aren't "third parties" (other species) watching who punish the genocidal. Let's say, for example, that you hear my radio emissions, and decide to wipe me out. Oops! Looks like I had 100 systems settled to your one (or handful). Have fun dealing with my retaliation. Not only did you NOT wipe me out, but now I've gone from a "possible threat" to a "confirmed threat".
In Field of Dishonor, one of the villains is Denver Summervale, a professional duelist (and we're talking actual gun duels not happy go lucky card games for your soul). He hires himself out to kill people by goading his victims into challenging him to a duel and killing them there, where it's considered legal. When he kills someone close to Honor, her eventual response is to walk up to him, accuses him of murder-for-hire, goads him into challenging her, then shoots him down with contemptuous ease during the duel itself.
Mesa certainly has one of these coming, seeing as how their massive conspiracy to exterminate the Star Empire of Manticore and the Republic of Haven by keeping them constantly at war with each other has resulted in a massive, massive increase in the levels of technology employed by the Manticorans and Havenites. Well, as it turns out, Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki are very, very much Not Quite Dead, and the end result is that Manticore and Haven - whose space navies are now approximately a thousand times more Bad Ass than they were - are teaming up to turn all that technology, skill, pent-up anger and experience on them. Essentially, Mesa is facing the single set of Allied nations in the galaxy that is ready, willing, and able to destroy them, and has spent the better part of a century honing themselves to do just that.
In The Dresden Files, Lord Raith has a fairly squicky predilection, which he ultimately becomes the victim of. Lord Raith, as a White Court Vampire, establishes dominance over his daughters by raping them and showing them that his mojo is more potent. His mojo, however, is also capped off and incapable of being refilled due to a death curse laid on him by Harry's mom — who's also the mother of Lord Raith's son Thomas. Raith expends the last of his reserves trying to kill Harry and Thomas, which would break the curse... and provides the perfect opportunity for Lara to return the favor and use him as a Puppet King.
Big example in Changes on Red Court vampires who tried to curse Dresden's bloodline to death. To wit: the Red Court has the ability (through massive and incredibly difficult preparation) wipe out everyone within a certain bloodline, killing the sacrifice, all their siblings, their parents, all their siblings, their grandparents, their siblings, etc, etc. The plan was to use Harry's daughter to kill the Blackstaff, who is Harry's grandfather. Instead, Harry sacrificed the newest Red Court Vampire (who happened to be his lover) which wiped out every single Red Court Vampire that was still alive at that point.
In Ghost Story, this is how the Corpsetaker is finally taken down, as Mortimer Linquist, an ectomancer who she was torturing with hundreds of wraiths, seizes control of those wraiths and uses them to destroy her for good.
Another example occurs in Grave Peril. Bianca enlists the help of a few fellow sorcerers to stir up turbulence among the ghosts of Chicago, which messes with the barrier between the living and spirit worlds, allowing the ghosts to have a greater influence (i.e. cause more havoc) among the living world, for the sake of sending one particularly nasty ghost with a grudge against Harry after him. This backfires on her at the end of the book, when Harry uses that same turbulence to his advantage, empowering all the spirits of people killed by Bianca and her minions. The ghosts proceed to go wild and slaughter every member of Bianca's entourage, including Bianca herself (who was killed by the ghost of woman she killed but blamed Harry for, which is what set off her whole vengeance scheme in the first place).
The Codex Alera has Kalarus, whose entire province becomes Alera's Pompeii when Gaius Sextus sets off the volcano he planned to unleash on the entire continent in the event of his defeat.
In Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, forgemaster Inch spends a great deal of time torturing The Hero, Simon, by strapping him, crucifixion style, to the giant waterwheel used to power the forge's works. Simon manages to escape with Guthwulf's help; in the ensuing confrontation, Inch's belt gets caught in the wheel and he's carried off to his messy doom.
The Big Bad in Black Dogs summons a demon to destroy another character, but it backfires and demons, being the hostile creatures they are, attacks him instead.
Snot Stew: Toby teases the family's vicious dog Butch by leaping down into his enclosure and slipping out through a hole in the fence. He also bullies his sister Kikki by eating all of her food. Turns out these don't work well together, as he discovers when he tries to squeeze through the hole... and can't. Accidental Nightmare Fuel follows as Butch proceeds to maul his back end, with Toby screaming that he's eating him alive. He survives, but only because the humans rush him to the vet, and he loses his tail in the process.
In The Hour of the Dragon, Zorathus tells Valbroso how to open his chest, without mentioning that if you do it with your bare hands, you will be poisoned.
To cash in on the Outer Limits franchise, a series of short Outer Limits children's books were released a few years ago. One of those books, The Lost, was about a rebellious teen who uncovers a conspiracy in her neighborhood where the adults are brainwashing their own teenage children with a machine that changes their brainwaves into sensible, hard-working adults. Like any Cruel Twist Ending, she ends up brainwashed herself and becomes good-hearted and obedient, much to their parent's joy. Then she and the other teenagers take their parents (as well as the doctor responsible for administering the "therapy" in the first place) and subject them to their own machine out of the belief that they will be helping them become just like them.
In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, the Three Shadowed Ones use Mephisto's Staff of Summoning against him and two companions, to summon a chimera. Mephisto goes "Hi, Chimmie!" and chases after them with its aid; the staff only summons, it does not command, and the chimera likes him better than them.
Quite a few baddies from the Nightside series have gone down this way, either having their deadly gifts backfire or turned against them by John and his allies, or suffering a Villainous BSOD that leads them to commit suicide with their own destructive powers.
Subverted in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: it is officially claimed that Ewell fell on his own knife, but actually he was backstabbed by Boo Radley while trying to kill the children.
The Atrocity Archives has as its villains the remnants of an alternate universe's Third Reich. They managed to turn the Holocaust into a massive necromantic working, attracting the attention of a Great Old One they got to fight on their side. Thing is, after it destroyed the Allies, it proceeded to drain everything from the universe, to the point that said universe is facing imminent heat death only 60 years later and the Nazis are breaking into our universe in order to find a way to keep that from happening.
The victim in ''The Fairy Tale of Father Brown''orders his men to shoot first, ask questions later; he is later gagged so he is unable to reverse the order.
In Artemis Fowl:The Opal Deception, Pixie Opal Koboi arrogantly declares that she has no need of magic when she has science, and has a pituitary gland surgically implanted in her skull so that her body will generate more growth hormone and make it easier for her to masquerade as a human child. The hormones generated by the gland sap her of the last of her magic just as she needs to use her mesmer power.
Her former partner, Briar Cudgeon, suffered a more fatal version of this. He activated the defense systems in Koboi Labs in order to stun the Bwa Kell crime ring after his plan to betray them was revealed. However, he was later thrown into the plasma powering the defense systems and was fried by the substance he had activated himself
In False Memory, the antagonist is a psychiatrist who mind rapes his patients and has them do all kinds of terrible things for his own entertainment. When things start to fall apart around him, he puts off a persistent patient (who has a pathological fear of Keanu Reeves) by telling her The Matrix is real, and she must hide from the machines. It works, but she decides he's an Agent and shoots him dead in his office. Then hires his secretary.
Non-fatal example: In Too Many Magicians, the Marquis of London attempts to coerce Darcy into working for free to solve a murder, by using circumstantial evidence to have Darcy's right-hand sorcerer, Master Sean, locked up on suspicion of the crime. Darcy turns the tables on the Marquis, citing circumstantial evidence to suggests Lord Bontriomphe, the Marquis's right-hand man, was the culprit ... and had killed the victim on the Marquis's instructions. Foiled, the Marquis grudgingly pays Lord Darcy's expenses, Master Sean is released, and they join forces with Bontriomphe to track down the real killer.
In Death: A big moment of this is when Eve Dallas killed off her Complete Monster of a father with a knife while he was raping her. The interesting part is that she was only using the knife to cut some cheese to eat, and when he caught her and attacked her, she managed to grab the knife and pretty much cut him to pieces with it.
Goliath: In a Crowning Moment of Awesome moment of badassery]], Alek kills Nikola Tesla with his own electrfied cane
Grahame Coates, step up and be recognized! Grahame always fires his employees mere weeks before they have been employed long enough to qualify for the severance package. The exception: Fat Charlie Nancy, who has been working for Grahame Coates for an unprecendented two years. So, naturally, when Fat Charlie's brother makes Coates think that Fat Charlie is on to his long-running embezzlement scheme, Coates thinks that Fat Charlie would be the guy to pin it on. Fat Charlie is arrested and then promptly told by the policewoman interviewing him that it's laughably obvious that this has been going on for longer than even Fat Charlie has been working there, and he's being let go on grounds of being innocent.
In the Red Dwarf novel, an alternate reality evil Lister takes a massive dose of Luck Virus to protect himself from the Rage, a hive mind of fury that kills anyone it possesses. However, when he gets a taste of the Rage, as per its nature, he wants to be possessed by it more than anything in the world. And the luck virus has a way of granting one's deepest desires.
In John Lymington's novel Night of the Big Heat, spider-like aliens from another planet are heating up a Scottish island in the middle of winter, in order to better suit their preferred hot climate. It gets hotter and hotter until just when the entire cast seems doomed, the intense heat causes the island's trees and shrubs to catch fire. Although the humans escape unharmed, the aliens end up getting burned alive by the fire caused by the very heat they created.
In the 1967 movie adaptation, the screenwriter apparently felt that it made no sense for heat-based aliens to be vulnerable to fire, so that film's example of this trope has the intense heat created by the aliens (which are changed to energy creatures resembling living scrambled eggs) instead cause a storm, and the ensuing rain melts them all.
Comedy example: In Otherwise Known As Sheila The Great, Sheila and her friends booby-trap the bathroom toilet seat by coating it with toothpaste, hoping Sheila's sister will sit down without looking. Not only does it fail to fool Libby, but Sheila herself forgets about it overnight and gets a toothpaste-covered rear in the morning.
Inkspell: " But one day, the monster didn't come to fulfill Capricorn's will. It came for Capricorn's life..."
In the D&D pick-a-path book Dungeon of Dread, the best ending has the Evil Sorcerer, who stocks his dungeon with monsters by transforming victims into them, gets transformed into a nasty little lizard/vulture critter.
In the Nightside series' Lilith War arc, Lilith resurrects the dead as an army to unleash upon the city and fight at her command. She overlooks the fact that one of the resurrected is her human husband, John Taylor's father, who turns out to be necessary to stop her by reversing the Babylon Working.
Live Action TV
In the Season 7 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm titled "The Black Swan," Larry tells Marty that introductions are a pointless and unnecessary social convention. Later, when Marty didn't introduce the Stonemason as Larry was calling him an asshole, Marty reminded him of his own policy regarding introductions. Larry responds "So I'm hoisted on my petard."
In the Stargate Atlantis episode "The Tower", the villain dies due to a scratch from his own poisoned dagger. It is likely that this is a deliberate reference to the above-mentioned work of Shakespeare, where Claudius and Laertes are both done in by the very poison they had conspired to kill Hamlet with. (Well, Claudius also gets stabbed a little bit. And, in one notable adaptation, hit by a chandelier.)
The Huntsman from The 10th Kingdom. Earlier in the miniseries, we are told that his magic weapon is a crossbow that, when fired, shoots bolts that will not stop until they hit the heart of a living being. So quite naturally, during the climax when he and Wolf are struggling over the weapon and it is accidentally fired upwards through the skylight, the rule of Karmic Death (as well as the law of gravity) dictates the arrow comes right back down and stabs the Huntsman in the heart from behind. Despite its predictability, however, it's one of the more satisfying versions of the trope this editor has ever seen.
In Primeval, Oliver Leek amasses a mind-controlled army of vicious predators from the future in a bid to obtain power. This royally screws up when the mind-control device breaks, and the predators kill him.
Similarly, the woman who had raised a sabre-toothed tiger from a cub that she found is killed by it at the end.
In the Grand Finale of Star Trek: Voyager, the Borg Queen is tricked into assimilating Future-Janeway, causing her to contract a nanovirus (ten years in the making and about seventeen ahead of its time), killing her... again.
In the earlier two-parter "Year of Hell", the Big Bad uses a ship that has the power to Ret Gone anything. Janeway's Heroic Sacrifice causes the ship to target itself and everything that happened in the episode is undone. Oddly enough, this actually gives the Big Bad a happy ending — he had unwittingly wiped out his own homeworld and family when he used the ship during a war. With the ship gone from the timeline, the life he lost had been restored. Though he is once again working on temporal calculations.
The villain wasn't killed in the Doctor Who episode "Dalek", but Henry van Staten surely paved the way for his eventual fate. His policy of using torture on his alien captive caused said alien to go on a murdering rampage when it finally got loose, and his fondness for wiping people's memories and dropping them off in a town starting with the same letter as their last name got turned around on him by his newly appointed second-in-command.
Goddard: And by tonight, Henry Van Statten will be a homeless, brainless junkie living on the streets of San Diego, Seattle, Sacramento... Someplace beginning with S.
In Genesis of the Daleks, when the Daleks turn on Davros and his followers Davros (in his one and only moment of compassion) begs the Daleks to have pity on the scientists who helped to create them - but they don't, because Davros did not include pity in their data banks. More or less the same exact thing happens every single time he appears- he makes more Daleks to replace the batch the Doctor has killed, and they turn on and either kill or imprison him soon afterwards. You'd think he'd notice the pattern at some point, but no.
Similarly, in "The Age of Steel", John Lumic is defeated because all devices in the parallel universe are capable of interfacing with each other, allowing Mickey and the Doctor to get the code to deactivate the emotional inhibitors into the system.
Lumic's own creations also turn on him at one point:
In The Robots of Death, Taren Capel is killed by his own robot revolutionaries when Leela uses helium to change his voice.
Not forgetting "Evolution of the Daleks", where The Cult of Skaro's human soldiers, when contaminated with Timelord DNA, end up destroying the Cult's own Dalek Thay and Dalek Jast.
And "Last of the Time Lords" when the Archangel network The Master used to become Prime Minister allows humanity to pool its psychic energy to restore The Doctor.
The Second Doctor actually uses this phrase in The War Games after subjecting the scientist to his own processing machine.
Alright everyone, pop quiz! The Earth is secretly ruled by a species capable of both editing people's memories and giving them post-hypnotic suggestion and have controlled mankind for over 10,000 years. How do you defeat them? Answer: Use the suggestion the aliens arrogantly supplied you to have them tell mankind to kill them all on sight.
And how do you make sure everyone has received the suggestion? Embed it as static in one of the most watched videos of all time. The Moon landing right between "one small step for man" and "one giant leap for manking". You could be killing them right now and not know it.
The Time Lords created a method for saving themselves from the Time War by implanting a signal in the Master, which drove him insane no surprise he eventually causes the undoing of their plan by turning on them and helping the Doctor save everything else from the Time Lords' plan.
Then there's the Plasmavore from "Smith and Jones", who had been hiding from Judoon scanners by feeding on humans and incorporating their DNA. Then the Doctor lets her feed on him, and as we (especially those Judoon scanners) all know, he's not human, either.
In the Lost Season 4 finale, Ben kills Keamy with Keamy's own knife. It also works on a metaphorical level; killing Keamy has the result of killing everyone on the freighter, including innocent people; Ben had been avoiding killing innocents until Keamy "changed the rules" by killing Alex. Thus Keamy dies by his own weapon and as a result of his own actions.
On an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a killer was captured in Canada, with the defense arguing that he shouldn't be extradited, because he could be executed for the murder upon return to the US. (The Canadian government is politically opposed to the death penalty.) When the judge asks if that wouldn't result in Canada becoming a haven for American killers, the attorney says that's only a theoretical possibility and shouldn't influence the decision. Then ADA Alex Cabot announces they only want to extradite the perpetrator for kidnapping and car theft, which aren't capital crimes. When the defense complains that it's just a ploy so they can get him back to the US and then charge him with murder, the judge (with obvious amusement) points out that it's just a theoretical possibility which won't necessarily influence his decision. Owned!
In the original Law & Order, the police suspected a Japanese tourist of traveling to America to have his wife killed for the insurance money so he could pay off the Japanese mob. But by the time they figured that out, the man had already gone back to Japan. While the Japanese man was "mourning his wife," he badmouthed America for having so much violence, and when first questioned by the detectives, said a black man did it. The DA's office was having trouble extraditing the man, so DA Arthur Branch puts out a fake story that they had captured the shooter and needed the Japanese man to come back to America and identify him. The man does return, and is promptly arrested. Branch even cited this trope as his plan.
On Law & Order: UK, DS Brooks confronts his corrupt ex-partner who has been trying to implicate him in the theft of evidence. After taking the box of cigarettes that Brooks offers him, the Genre Savvy man frisks him and finds that he's wearing a wire. After destroying it, he confesses to having had someone else steal the evidence. Little did know that there was another microphone hidden in the pack of cigarettes. If only he'd curbed that nicotine addiction. . .
In an early episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the villain is a professional mob hitman known for taking great efforts to cover his tracks, such as (in the show) putting a victim in his deep freeze (a la real-life example Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski) to slow down the post mortem process and thus make the victim's time of death appear later than it was. After he appears to have completely gotten off, Detective Goren drops a hint that there is possibly some remaining evidence in his garage, whereupon he spends a night tearing up the floor looking for it ... something he would only do if he had consciousness of guilt. The detectives arrest him, in his garage, in the morning.
In the Pie-lette of Pushing Daisies Chuck laments that she was hoisted by her own petard - her vacation was also smuggling monkey figurines, which got her killed. It prompts Ned's reply, "What's a petard?"
In Heroes, Mohinder talks about the upsides of Nathan Petrelli's plan for snatching and interning enhanced humans, only to get snatched himself shortly after by the stormtrooper squad.
In Life (season 1, "Powerless"), the main villain becomes obsessed with Reese (they both go to the same AA meetings, and he figures that she lied about her dark past), so he holds her hostage in her kitchen and forces her to drink a massive bottle of vodka, and finally she tells him about her past in a totally awesome speech, and when he looks away for a second, she grabs the empty bottle of vodka and whacks him across the head with it, thus giving her partner and his backup time to break in and save her.
In The Closer episode "Tijuana Brass", a corrupt Mexican cop looking for an accused murderer (who plans to testify against the drug cartel the cop works for) has the word spread among locked up convicts that whoever kills the guy he's looking for will get a big reward. After his corruption is ultimately revealed and the protagonists arrest him, his former coworkers book him under the name of the guy he had put the hit on, which results in him being murdered in prison.
Nonfatal example: the humourless forum administrator in the children's television program Lift Off was in the habit of digging up new things to ban, at one point producing a ban sign with a mirror on it. Then he was convinced to turn it around. Then pure force of Lawful Neutral kicks in.
One episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation featured a woman and her father who co-owned a construction company and wanted to end the marriage to the woman's husband without getting a divorce, since Nevada divorce law would give the husband half of her shares in the company. They try to frame him for attempted murder, since Nevada law also requires that criminals not profit from their misdeeds, which would have meant the husband wouldn't get anything belonging to his wife. The scheme backfires horrifically when the CSIs uncover the woman and her father's plan and charge them with conspiracy, and it's implied that, under the very same law they tried to use to deprive the husband of any part of the construction company, he's going to end up owning the whole thing.
Meanwhile, in Miami, a wife uses the fact that she's part of a set of triplets to set up what seems to be an airtight alibi for herself (and thus, all of them) for her husband's murder. Except it turns out that the husband has been using a body double because of his high profile job, and the body double was the one who died.
In one episode of new Battlestar Galactica, in Season 2, a big Cylon Raider fleet fleet is disabled by a Cylon Logic Bomb, which they previously planted onto Galactica.
The inventor of Hymie the KAOS robot on Get Smart gets killed by his own invention. Something similar happens to many Big Bads, including "Mr. Big" in the pilot.
The inventor of the Cybernauts on The Avengers gets killed by his own invention, as does his brother who tries to follow in his footsteps.
Invoked in Robin Hood...sort of. Guy of Gisborne gives his sister Isabella a vial of poison, intending for her to use it. She instead laces the blade of a dagger with it and stabs him in the back. On the other hand, Guy is also impaled on the sheriff's sword, an injury which kills him before the poison gets a chance.
The Sheriff of Nottingham is blown up by explosives that he himself brought into the castle.
On Merlin, Hengist, villain of Lancelot and Guinevere, is killed and eaten by the pet monster he'd spent the whole episode feeding people too.
By the end of season three King Uther discovers that his genocide against magical users has turned his own illegitimate daughter against him.
Morgana succeeds in her plan to make Guinevere look as though she was cheating on Arthur with Lancelot and have her banished from Camelot - unfortunately, these actions put Guinevere in a position where she is able to overhear Morgana's plans to invade Camelot, and race back to sound the alarm.
On Supernatural, this happens all the time, normally to the humans who mess with the dark arts. They always get what's coming to them, and almost never from the main characters.
Plus this is what the Trickster does to his victims. Ironically, it's also how he dies. He tries to trick Lucifer by creating a doppelganger of himself, but since Lucifer taught him how to do that in the first place, he easily sees through it and kills the real one.
And in the Season 4 finale, Ruby reveals herself as The Mole and is killed by the Winchesters with the same demon-killing knife she's been carrying around for the last two seasons.
On Sanctuary episode Sleepers, Tesla loses his powers by his own "Devamper", which was powered by the very ability it ended up taking away. And really his own fault for making both ends of the weapon functional.
On Spike TV's 1000 Ways to Die, a pair of dimwitted terrorists were blown up by their own bomb when they forgot about daylight savings time while setting the device's GPS-based timer.
The Big Bad of Dollhouse, Boyd Langton, spent a good portion of S2 manipulating the main cast into creating and handing over a device capable of wiping and imprinting anyone, not just Actives. Topher uses it to wipe Boyd, reducing him to a Doll-state, and he blindly—happily!—follows Echo's instructions to strap a bomb to his body and blow up the Rossum headquarters.
In an episode of The Adventures Of Superboy, a demon turns Loretta York into Yellow Peri, a powerful witch who wreaks havoc. When Superboy confronts them, Yellow Peri sets a photo of him on fire. Like a voodoo doll, this causes him to burst into flames, falling to the floor and screaming in agony. The demon laughs and mocks him. Angrily, Superboy blasts him with heat vision, but it has no effect. The demon smugly boasts that only magic can hurt him, and Superboy immediately grabs him, causing the fire to spread to him and reduce him to ashes. Fortunately, with him gone, his curses wear off, Superboy is healed, and Yellow Peri reverts to Lorretta York.
Non-death example: In the sixth-season episode "Older and Far Away," Dawn makes a wish to the vengeance demon Halfrek that everybody would spend more time with her. Halfrek makes the dream come true by magically making it impossible for any of the guests at Buffy's birthday party to leave the house. She then comes and taunts them... until she realizes that she can't escape the house, either, and reluctantly reverses the spell.
Death example: Maggie Walsh is killed by her own creation that she was planning to sic on the heroes.
In Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey enacts a masterful gambit to ensure that the Employment Secretary is removed from his post after suggesting a brilliant idea to move large sections of the armed forces Oop North, which has received much hostility from senior civil servants and military officials because they'll, well, be Oop North and far away from Harrods and Wimbledon and all the nice cushy things down south which they like. He expertly plays on Hacker's paranoia to make Hacker think that the Employment Secretary is using this plan as part of a coup to secure Hacker's job. It works, the plan is scuttled, the Employment Secretary gone, and Humphrey is left to leave in smug satisfaction of another job well done... until in the last minute of the episode, Hacker realizes that now the Employment Secretary is gone, there's nothing to stop him safely implementing the plan...
Models Inc. ended with Emma Samms' character getting shot by a hitman she'd hired to shoot her ex's new wife-to-be at the wedding... but most viewers never saw this, as the original broadcast of the episode ended on a Cliff Hanger at the fatal gunshot. Aaron Spelling had the foresight to film an alternate ending in case of cancellation *
but not enough foresight to also bring closure to Carrie Anne-Moss' storyline; if anything, Emma's death would have made things even worse for Carrie
.
In Medium episode "You Give Me Fever", the guy responsible for causing another guy to kill himself after infecting him with a deadly contagious disease. The villain took a vaccine to protect himself. Allison confronted him but there was no proof other than her visions. The woman was upset until she had another dream. The villain was allergic to the vaccine so he had to take steroids to counter the reaction but it made him vulnerable to the flu. He was last seen in the hospital dying.
In the final episode of Blackadder II, Ludwig the Indestructible prides himself on being a Master of Disguise, and plans to use this, and the knowledge that Nursie always goes to fancy dress parties as a cow, to infiltrate Queen Elizabeth's court. Unfortunately, his pride in his disguises means he makes the mistake of disguising himself as a cow, rather than as a mad old woman with an udder fixation.
An episode of Cold Case featured a villain who would abduct women and imprison them in a windowless cell for months in order to break their spirit. Once this was achieved, he would leave them there to starve to death. However, he stashes his latest victim within hearing distance of a church that rings its bells every Sunday. With this, the woman is able to keep track of the days and retain her sanity. Her refusal to snap rattles him so much that he finally makes a mistake that gets him arrested. To top it off, at the episode's end, we see him being tossed into a cell very much like the one he'd barricaded his victims in—and he's claustrophobic.
Frequently the premise of Tales from the Crypt episodes. For example, one episode had an adulterous woman killing her wealthy soap magnate husband when she realized he'd gotten wind of the affair and that she would get nothing in the divorce. She takes his body to the soap factory and dumps it into the compressor, then takes the bars of soap home, intending to wash them down the drain, but then getting the macabre idea to take a shower with them. Suddenly she begins screaming in pain and we see that her skin is rapidly developing disfiguring welts and blisters, being destroyed by the gastric acids that are now present in the "soaps". The show ends with her wailing in agony, huddled on the floor of the shower, the water turning red with her blood.
The trope name is said in full on at least one occasion in series 2 of Robot Wars. The robot in question, Caliban, had a flail weapon to run the gauntlet with. When Sir Killalot came along, it picked Caliban up by the flail, prompting Jonathan Pearce to say the phrase. As Caliban ended up last with a measly 0.2m, it makes the trope very literal.
In the Bones episode "The Bullet in the Braincase", a sniper who has been using the names of other snipers in order to purchase supplies (and sticking them with the bills) is located when Booth discovers a piece of land bought using his name. When Booth confronts him, the sniper taunts him to jump the fence and enter the property without a warrant. Booth jumps the fence and points out he doesn't need a warrant; after all, the property belongs to Seeley Booth. Cue the Oh Crap look and the suspect running away.
One episode of Hogan's Heroes had Hogan explicitly invoke this trope to describe how a plan had gone wrong/would go wrong.
From Community episode Home Economics Vaughn ends up having this happen. His usual method of revenge for people who piss him off is to write songs with rather passive-aggressively spiteful lyrics in which he denounces them as a 'B'. Unfortunately for him, he gets a response song written about him in The Tag, which he apparently did not anticipate.
The Villain Protagonist of the TOS Outer Limits episode "The Bellero Shield" is Judith Bellero, the scheming wife of an idealistic scientist, who learns the hard way that Ambition Is Evil as she's subjected to this trope twice. When a gentle alien who protects himself with an impenetrable force field is accidentally drawn to her husband's lab, Judith kills him and passes off the force field as her husband's invention. Judith demonstrates the force field on herself—but realizes too late that only the alien can turn it off! Even while the alien turns out to be Not Quite Dead and frees her before expiring, her guilt over the murder drives her insane, a la Lady Macbeth, and she imagines herself still trapped behind the shield.
Another TOS Outer Limits example: In "The Special One", alien invader Mr. Zeno poses as a human teacher to indoctrinate child prodigies. It turns out that the kid he's currently working with was playing Fake Defector all along, and uses one of Zeno's own weapons to force him to retreat to his home planet.
Happens three times on The Prisoner: In "Checkmate," Number Six determines which of his fellow villagers are prisoners and which are guards by observing their mannerisms (prisoners are meek and submissive, while guards are defiant and confident). Using this knowledge, he recruits a team of prisoners to make an escape...and is foiled when they notice how confident and defiant he is, become convinced that he is a guard testing their loyalty, and turn him in to Number Two. Then, in "A Change of Mind," the new Number Two uses psychological tactics cribbed from the Red Scare and the Cultural Revolution to turn the whole Village against Number Six, declaring him an "unmutual" and ostracizing him. At the end of the episode, Number Six, pretending to have been converted by the experience, persuades Number Two to call the whole Village together for his public confession and repudiation of his sins. Instead, he uses the opportunity to declare that Number Two is "unmutual." The villagers, conditioned by Number Two to automatically believe such accusations, form an angry mob and run him out of town. In "Hammer Into Anvil", Number 6 uses Mind Games (and the inherent paranoia of the Village) to drive the current Number 2 into reporting himself to the authorities for incompetence.
In the episode with Hamlet, Mike challenges Pearl to a Shell Game, winner gets to choose the movie. Mike wins and decides on Hamlet and mentions "any version". Boy, does Pearl give him Hamlet!
In the Series Finale featuring Danger: Diabolik, Pearl goes on a madcap spree, pouring Mountain Dew on Brain Guy's brain, then futzing with the Satellite of Love with a remote control. When the controller breaks and engages the reentry protocol, she can't fix it because Brain Guy's brain is still messed up!
In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers season two, Lord Zedd and Goldar's chased the Rangers to a far-off planet with the powerful superweapon Serpentera. Impatient, Zedd decides to use Serpentera's main cannon to create an Earth-Shattering Kaboom despite Goldar's pleas. The Rangers escape with what they were looking for as the planet is destroyed and Zedd chases the Rangers back to Earth. When he tries this again, Serpentera's batteries run out of power, forcing him to retreat!
In the Biblical Book of Esther, corrupt Persian minister Haman is hung on the gallows he built for his rival Mordechai, who also happened to be Queen Esther's uncle and caretaker. So this is Older Than Feudalism.
When Theseus traveled on the road to Athens, he encountered numerous bandits/serial killers who had unique murder methods. Theseus offed them with their own methods. These included:
Epidaurus, who would beat people to death with his club.
Siris, who would tie people between two trees that he had bent down. Then he let go of the trees, ripping them in half.
Sciron, an elderly man who would ask passersby to wash his feet as a sign of respect. When they bent over to comply, he would punt them off a cliff and into the jaws of a sea monster at the bottom.
Cercyon, who would challenge passersby to wrestling matches, then kill them after they had lost.
Procrustes, who would invite passersby to stay the night at his place. If they were too short for the bed, he would stretch their bodies until they fit. If they were too tall for the bed, he would chop off the excess.
The fate of King Diomedes of Thrace, who owned four man-eating mares. One of Hercules's labors was to steal said mares, and Hercules accomplished this by feeding Diomedes to his own animals, which somehow made them tame enough to capture without a fight. (In some versions, Hercules did this in revenge after the mares had eaten his young friend Abderus, even though Diomedes wasn't involved in Abderus's death.)
Medusa also gets defeated this way in various versions of her myth; Getting turned to stone by her own gaze via mirror or somesuch. The ones where her eyes merely get stabbed are closer to Death by Irony.
The Greeks obviously loved this trope.
Professional Wrestling
During the "Monday Night Wars" between the WWF (Now WWE) and WCW, Eric Bischoff would often spoil the outcome of WWF Raw matches on WCW Nitro (Raw was pre-recorded, while Nitro aired live in the same timeslot). In 1999, he gave away a spoiler that Mick Foley was going to win the WWF title, and mocked Foley as someone who was dumped from WCW because he couldn't "put butts in seats". A huge number of viewers proceeded to switch channels to WWF Raw to see Foley win the title. Obviously, this wasn't a death, but it was arguably one of the things that sent WCW on its downward spiral.
Made doubly devastating in that this happened on the same night as the infamous "Fingerpoke of Doom" match, where Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash put months of feuding and a WCW title match entirely to waste.
For the next year or so afterward, fans going to WWF events would hoist signs saying "Mick Foley put my butt in this seat".
The really painful part for WCW was that at the time Nitro lasted until 11:10 or so in order to fit in with the Turner networks' scheduling, while RAW ended at 11PM. Nitro's last, unopposed segment drew huge ratings...which means that most viewers who switched to RAW switched back to Nitro afterwards and were at least somewhat interested in seeing Nitro's main event; had they not known about Foley's title win, they would have been content to watch Nitro. Well, content until the Fingerpoke happened at least.
Edge, on two separate occasions, used the Money in the Bank Briefcase (a prize earned in a match that allows the victor to challenge a champion to a title match at any time the briefcase holder desires) to blindside and defeat a champion after they'd just taken an asskicking from someone else. So lo and behold, on the 6/30/08 edition of Raw, he showed up as World Heavyweight Champion to boast that Raw had no world champion and never would, due to his screwing Batista over the prior night. These boasts were interrupted by Batista, who came out and beat him senseless... and then CM Punk, who was at that point the present owner of the briefcase, proceeded to run out with a referee and use his title shot then and there in what has to be the Crowning Moment of Awesome of his WWE career.
CM Punk was the victim of a double-barrelled one as the result of his feud with Raven in Ring Of Honor. Punk cut promos talking about how his Straight Edge revolution would destroy the revolution that Raven was a part of (i.e. ECW), and ragging on the "debauched" ECW fans, as well as Raven's history of drug and alcohol problems. After beating Raven in a dog-collar match, Punk decided to sink the boot in by tying Raven to the ropes and forcing beer down his throat... only to be jumped by ECW icon Tommy Dreamer, who proceeded to do just that to Punk. As an epilogue, when Punk make his WWE debut, it was in the revived ECW.
Actually this is true of pretty much any wrestler. If the announcers build up a match as a certain wrestler's "specialty," (IE: Jeff Hardy in a ladder match; Team 3D in a tables match) said wrestler will lose nine times out of ten.
Anytime thumbtacks show up in the WWE, more often than not, the person that brought them out is going to be the one that falls into them.
A frequent spot in WWE matches will have a wrestler attempt to slam his opponent through the announcers' table only for to be reversed and have the opponent slam the wrestler through. This especially happens to Triple H a lot since his Finishing Move, the Pedigree, leaves him wide open to a back body drop (onto the other announcers' table) or a low blow that sets up the other guy's finisher. For some reason, Triple H keeps trying.
Ric Flair's another one that this often happens to. He generally goes to the top rope at least once per match, and you can count the number of times he's successfully pulled off a top-rope move without being countered over his decades-spanning career on your fingers. It's gotten to the point where even the commentators have become Genre Savvy about this, with the color man generally screaming at the top of his lungs, "DON'T DO IT, RIC! THIS NEVER WORKS!"
Somewhat justified; Ric Flair won his 2nd (NWA) World Championship by beating Harley Race in a steel cage match.......with a bodypress off the top rope. Hey, if it got him a HUGE win once.......
In the same vein, has Kurt Angle EVER successfully hit anyone with a moonsault? His form is perfect but the opponent always seems to just move out of the way.
An old-school spot had the heel wrestler remove the cushion on one of the turnbuckles, exposing the metal ring that hooks the ropes together. Most of the time, he'll be the one to get a face full of metal. (A favorite of George "The Animal" Steele, who would bite off the cushion, which at that time had extra packing insulation, the better to give him the "rabid animal" look)
Smackdown, 2/11/11: Vickie Guerrero tried helping her boyfriend, Dolph Ziggler, win the World Heavyweight Title by setting Edge up in a match where his Finishing Move was banned and she was the ref. It was working perfect...until she decided to try and Spear Edge. Being much smaller than him and never having used the Spear before, all she did was injure her own leg and take herself out of the match, allowing Edge to sneak in a Spear of his own on Ziggler and call in a second guest ref (none other than Clay Matthews of the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers) to win the match.
The WWE RAW Supplemental Draft of 2011: John Cena has been sent to Smackdown and The Miz is happy since Cena won't be fighting him for the WWE Championship anymore if he beats him at Extreme Rules 2011, especially since John Cena was determined to get the title and hold it until Wrestlemania 28 next year in his match against The Rock. But at the final pick of the night (where it was Smackdown's Mark Henry, Christian, and Cena against RAW's Miz, CM Punk, and Alberto Del Rio), Henry turned heel and beat up Cena and Miz pinned him....leaving RAW to be the one who picked up the win. Who did they get? The same man Miz pinned!
Vince McMahon tried to screw CM Punk at Money In The Bank when John Cena locked him in an STF by having the bell rung and declaring Cena the winner. This causes Cena to release the hold and punch out the man Vince sent to have the bell rung, telling Vince he doesn't want to win that way. Cena ends up losing because of this, giving Punk the victory. What's worse is Cena was winning at the time and might have got a legit victory if Vince hadn't done this, leaving Vince with no one to blame except himself.
Radio
Adventures in Odyssey: Dr. Blackgaard's death is doubly ironic. Not only does he become infected with the same lethal virus he was developing, but he commits suicide first, right before his professor-assistant reveals he found a way to create an antidote for the virus.
In the recent radioplay Elvenquest on BBC Radio 4, the Genre-savvy villain Lord Darkness played by Alistar McGowen creates, in a series full of lampshading and parody, a machine called "The Petard of Irony"- basically, taking the worst fate you have ever wished on an enemy and turning it on yourself. The only problem is, the person he uses it on, the so called 'Chosen one', is a dog from our world that's been transformed into a person upon arriving in the world the story is set. Seriously. Listen if you don't believe it.
In one episode of The Navy Lark Povey receives a memo from Admiralty which allows him to get rid of officers that have been at sea for "twiddly-upmty" years and plans to use this as an excuse to drum the crew of HMS Troutbridge out of the navy. Upon appeal it seems the memo can also be interpreted to get rid of officers who were at sea "twiddly-umpty" years ago and the episode concludes with the Admiralty board resolving to throw Povey out (Status Quo is God but only after lunch).
Tabletop Games
Mishra in Magic: The Gathering relied heavily on his machines and weapons, to the point of falling to the manipulations of a cult of machine worshipers.
Then there are redirection spells, meaning that the spell your opponent hurled at your face is suddenly pointed at their own nether regions. Ow.
Truly sadistic GMs in just about any game have been known, instead of railroading difficult PCs, to give them just enough leeway to get in over their heads due to their own actions and decisions.
One early 1st Edition AD&D adventure from Role Aids concluded when the hero shows the Big Bad a branch from a tree in which the villain had gotten trapped as a young boy. This triggers a panic attack in which the Big Bad cries aloud: "That tree tried to kill me! Kill me!" Unfortunately for the evil wizard, the obedient flesh golem Mook at his side takes its orders very literally, and compliantly snaps its maker's neck.
In the Greyhawk D&D setting, the tyrannical mage Tuerny was eventually tricked into getting trapped inside an artifact of his own invention: the Iron Flask that bears his name.
In Warhammer Fantasy Battles and Warhammer 40K this is a danger with daemonweapons. Misfire also does this.
In 40K the perils of the warp rule does this for psykers - especially if you're a Librarian casting vortex of doom.
One Paranoia mission calls for a volunteer to test an experimental "traitorkiller". When activated, it explodes. This is intentional; the idea is that traitors will volunteer to prevent it from being used against them.
Theatre
In Oklahoma!, Jud Fry dies when he tries to stab Curly with a knife and falls on it himself.
Stand-up comedian & ventriloquist Jeff Dunham's wife had the idea to breed their pet Chihuahua, resulting in the runt of the litter, Rusty, who Jeff claims will urinate on his wife in the middle of the night when the two have an unresolved argument.
One of Jeff's puppets, Achmed the Dead Terrorist, was killed when his incompetency at suicide bombing resulted in Achmed being the only victim of his own bomb.
In Punch and Judy, a traditional part of the story sees Punch about to be hanged for his many crimes, but he can't understand what to do with the noose... so the Hangman puts it around his own neck to show the condemned man what's supposed to happen, whereupon Punch pulls the lever.
The Trope Namer is Hamlet, in which King Claudius' plan to poison Hamlet ends with being poisoned himself.
Toys
In BIONICLE, the Bohrok-Kal are about to release their leaders, the Bahrag, with the Toa's own Nuva Symbols when the Toa use their abilities to cause the Nuva Stones to start feeding power to the Bohrok-Kal. At first the Bohrok-Kal are overjoyed at this, thinking they were going to be powerful enough to rule alongside the Bahrag but soon they realise the Nuva Symbols were giving them too much power and, inevitably, they lose control of their abilities and are destroyed by their own powers.
In Age of Empires 2 (Conqueror's Expansion for sure) there is the Petard unit. It is a large, bulky guy carrying two giant kegs (looks like one in each arm) of gunpowder, it then walks into (say) a wall and explodes, killing the unit and doing a good deal of damage, destroying most weak buildings.
Plays the trope straight in that, if the Petard is attacked and killed, the unit explodes anyway, leading to a literal case of Hoist by His Own Petard.
Spamming these is a quick way to take down most buildings, and don't worry, We Have Reserves .
Twice in Bioshock. The first incident, you just hear it in an audio-diary and see the result: sinister detached Mad Scientist Dr. Suchong is killed by one of the Big Daddies he's been working to produce, when his attempts to make them "imprint" on the Little Sisters unexpectedly succeeds. The second time, you're there to see it happen: "Atlas"/Fontaine being mobbed and killed by a whole gang of Little Sisters armed with syringes... Definitely creepy.
There's a third one, available as a special achievement. After you kill Sander Cohen, take his photograph. Since the entire mission for Cohen rests on killing his "apprentices" and taking their photos, the name of the achievement, appropriately enough, is "Irony".
In fact the main character, Jack, himself was more or less a creations of Fontaine's meant to help him take over Rapture. In the end he becomes the very thing that leads to Fontaine's downfall.
Nitro Splicers plus the Telekinesis Plasmid is a very literal example of this trope.
In Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Dracula's power is borrowed to form the Dominus Glyph. Shanoa kills him with it.
This trope is used doubly for Barlowe, as he not only gets killed by his own student/"daughter"/experiment, but ALSO by his own moves if you have the foresight to pull it off of him mid-fight.
In one of the the Bad Ending of Dawn of Sorrow, Celia Fortner kills Mina in front of Soma, hoping to trigger his transformation into Dracula. She succeeds. Pity that she then ends up being the first victim of the new Dark Lord.
The "Mina" that was killed was actually just a fake. But Soma won't know it unless he satisfies the conditions for the Good Ending.
In Devil May Cry 4, you can catch and and throw back Credo's giant throwing spears which not only deals great deal of damage but also makes him vulnerable for some time.
Tekken: When Kazuya Mishima was a kid, his father, Heihachi, tossed him into a ravine so he would man up. He managed to survive and climb out after making a Deal with the Devil, and defeated Heihachi in the first game, then proceeded to throw his father down the same ravine.
Far Cry: Instincts has Jack Carver, infected with a beast-man mutagen, face down the Mad Scientist behind the whole project. The scientist has a group of animal-human hybrids at his beck and call, and orders them to attack Jack. By this time, however, Jack's killed so many mooks and bosses that the beasts view him as the alpha, turn on the mad scientist, and tear him to shreds.
Done in The King of Fighters '97, in the Sacred Weapons Team ending. Orochi is on the ropes, and uses his power to force Iori into the Blood Riot, commanding him to kill Kyo and Chizuru. This backfires on him when Iori grabs Orochi instead, giving Kyo and Chizuru time to finish Orochi off.
Done again in The King of Fighters XI. After you defeat The Dragon Shion, Magaki pulls Shion into a portal and emerges for the final battle. After his defeat, Magaki opens the portal again to escape... and Shion throws a spear into his chest from inside it.
Played straight, averted and subverted on several occasions throughout the Mega Man franchise:
Most notably in 2, wherein Metal Man can be OHKO'ed by his own weapon. For those wondering how you can fight Metal Man with his own weapon, towards the end of the game in Dr. Wily's castle, you re-encounter all of the Boss Robots again in rapid succession.
Gate, Big Bad of Mega Man X 6, was literally struck down by Sigma, who he himself resurrected. Whether or not Gate actually survived is never elaborated, as he was either rebuilt (and forgiven) by his former colleague Alia or not.
Dr. Weil of Mega Man Zero built a space satellite that will destroy any inhabitable area outside of his empire. Too bad he has a Bastard Understudy that decided to take matters into his own hands. Yet Dr. Weil survives, even though he's the prime target of the Kill Sat that was so powerful, it leveled an entire city. When he merged with Ragnarok's core to destroy Zero, he gained it's weaknesses as well as it's strength. As a result, when the Satellite exploded, Weil perished in the explosion, but the reason all the crap in Mega Man ZX happened was a result of various factions trying to exploit Model W - the remains of the Ragnarok satellite after it was demolished. No points for guessing who's been pulling the strings the whole time.
Rock Man Minus Infinity has the Toad Spell, which is two of the bosses' weakness. It turned the debris Dust Man inhaled into toads which damages him when he inhales it in. It also turned Toad Man, who also used it, into a easy to squish toad.
The entire Kirby franchise falls under this, since you tend spend almost the entire game hoisting enemies by their own petards by spitting their projectiles back at them, or copying and using their attacks against them. Particularly notable is the Miracle Matter boss in Kirby 64, a transforming 20-sided die lookalike that turns the tables and mimics the abilities you've been copying and using throughout the game, but at the same time can only be damaged by the exact same ability he's using to attack you.
In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of The Betrayer, Myrkul is either given eternal rest by the spirit eater, or devoured by him, depending on the players choice. The spirit eater is Myrkul's own creation, for extra irony, the existence of the spirit eater was intended to give him immortality by abusing Gods Need Prayer Badly and ensuring he always had at least one person remember him. This is lampshaded with his last words "A final irony, even in this" (the player can take a third option ensuring he fades away, but where is the fun in that).
Unfortunately, the developers Did Not Do the Research here, as both Akachi's Rebellion and Myrkul's death happened before Ao instated Gods Need Prayer Badly, so he'd have had no way of knowing this would be possible when he created the spirit eater.
In Metal Gear Solid 3 Colonel Volgin, who has the ability to course electricity through his body, gets killed by a bolt of lightning. It's lampshaded with Snake saying, "Fried by a bolt of lightning, a fitting end".
It's made even more interesting in how, throughout the game, he commonly chants "Kuwabara, kuwabara", a Japanese expression meant to ward off lightning. In the final battle against him, however, when a storm rolls in, he not only neglects to say it, he outright MOCKS the lightning!
The final boss in Painkiller is Lucifer, but he is a Puzzle Boss who cannot be directly shot to death. Instead, you have to deflect his thrown sword back to him.
In Super Robot Wars, Wilhelm von Juergen committed a mistake by putting Lamia Loveless into the core of ODE. Not only this slows down her assimilation because she's not a complete human, her willpower causes her to refuse being assimilated and pretty much wrecks the harmonious order of Bartolls (this is signified in the game with very high moral drop). It is no wonder that it tried rectifying things by doing a Player Punch.
In the Metroid Prime series, the titular Prime can only be destroyed by the very Phazon it produces. In the first game, Samus defeats it by standing in the pools of Phazon it excretes, thus activating the Hyper Beam. In the second, Samus has no compatible suit, but she can absorb motes of free-floating Phazon released by Dark Samus for the same effect. In the third, she's locked into Hypermode by the environment on Phaaze, so blasting Phazon at the enemy is pretty much all she can do. One wonders why a creature that was mutated and enhanced by, which produces, and at one point became composed of the stuff can be hurt lethally by blasts of it.
Because the substance is an incredible energy source that supercharges normal weapons. It also helps that it's been described as 'weaponized' phazon.
At this point it's safe to say that the main purpose of Samus' hyper-adaptable armorsuit is to find a way of making any gadgetry she stumbles across into implausibly devastating armaments. The grapple-beam gets replaced with industrial lifting equipment in Metroid Prime, but by Metroid Prime 3, it can be adapted to suck the life out of enemies, with a side order of paralysis. As with many examples on this page, 'overloading' something with more of whatever it likes is a popular method of Petard-Hoisting, but Samus Aran could weaponize a Brita filter.
Happens many, many times in the Resident Evil series.
Wesker is gored by the Tyrant he releases in Resident Evil (This is later retconned) to make it his plan.
Carter is killed by the Tyrant he releases in Resident Evil: Outbreak File #2.
Ozwell Spencer is murdered by Wesker, the man he genetically engineered to make into a god.
In MadWorld, if a boss has a fancy weapon, chances are Jack is going to use that weapon as part of a gruesome and painful finishing move.
Also, Leo started the Death Watch competition in order to test his father's new virus and vaccine, choosing this method of testing because he was fascinated by the games and considered them to be fun. He is eventually killed by the winner of the competition, by being cut with a chainsaw and pushed off of the giant floating stadium which was where the final match had taken place. The spoilered section is not a because of the death, but because of the plot.
Also, the Black Baron (the pimp that introduces the Bloodbath Challenges) is always used by his silent girlfriend to demonstrate the challenge's defining death trap. He comes back every time, of course. After the final boss fight with him, his girlfriend tosses a spike bat at his head, which Jack promptly picks up to bat the Baron flying into the dartboard used in the Man Darts challenges, just as he did to tons of mooks before.
In Killer7, Curtis Blackburn is executed when Dan Smith sets off his evisceration machine, which guts him and hangs up his corpse like it did the little girls he was organ-farming.
In Gunstar Heroes, the evil Emperor takes the gems to awaken an ancient weapon of destruction, only for said weapon to hit him with an energy beam from the gems, then wipe him and his army out in the final cutscene.
Toyed with in any game where one can rocket jump, Team Fortress 2 for example, where one is literally hoisted by one's own explosive weapon. Of course, if your health is too low, your corpse will be making the landing.
Engineers can be killed by their own sentry guns if they get in the way of its target.
Also, Pyros can airblast several of the projectiles in the game back at the person who shot them (or anybody else, for that matter).
Several killers in the Ace Attorney series would likely have gotten away with murder if they hadn't tried to frame someone else for it.
Take one example: In the third game, one murderer comes up with an insanely elaborate, multi-layered alibi. If you actually think about it, though, he might have avoided conviction had he just not bothered to set one up at all. There was absolutely nothing to solidly connect him to the guy he killed; the only reason he gets found out is because the alibi involved committing a different crime, which is what gets Phoenix involved. Had he just gone to the murder scene, killed the guy, then gone home, with no attempt to set up an alibi at all, no-one would've even known where to start looking for the killer.
In Silent Hill 1, Dahlia gets fried by the very god she was trying to summon, and Kaufman, if you saved him earlier, gets dragged to hell by Lisa.
Done rather bizarrely in Silent Hill 2, when the twin Pyramid Heads will commit suicide on their own weapons once James comes to terms with the truth.
In Silent Hill 3, Vincent insults Claudia at an inopportune moment and earns a knife in the back.
Emphasizing the above example, he turns his back toward Claudia as he tells Heather, who is on his other side, to kill Claudia, who has just hinted (and he seems to get it) that she is willing to kill him if he gets in her way, which seems to guarantee she'd be willing to kill him if he actually tries to go so far as to kill her, which is exactly what he's indirectly trying to do through Heather. He so much brought about his own death that Claudia's action could almost be justified as self-defense, if we didn't know she probably had the situation well under control and didn't have to fear anything from Vincent's threat.
Claudia herself, is of course, killed birthing the God.
Possibly subverted. Claudia dies similarly to Dahlia, but it's almost more of a suicide than a possibly unexpected side effect. Claudia appears to know for a fact that if she swallows the fetus, she will die, but she's willing to make that sacrifice. Where usually this Trope seems like a type of ironic justice when concerning villains, Claudia's death seems more like an emphasis on what she's willing to sacrifice for her cause. But then, she's not exactly a Card Carrying Villain.
And in Silent Hill 4, Andrew DeSalvo is locked into a cell of the prison where he'd acted as its sadistic warden, and later brutally murdered by one of its prisoners, Walter Sullivan.
Viking Battle For Asgard: Freya would have probably lived and managed to avoid screwing over the entire pantheon if she had just lived up to her promise to free Skarin so he could earn entry into Valhalla.
In the MMORPG Ragnarok Online, the 3rd Job Class Warlock has a skill called Chain Lightning, which bounces off of enemies. It's quite powerful, but the thing is, if no enemies are left, the Chain Lightning will bounce back on you, even in non Player Versus Player maps. Made funnier by the irony that the passive skill Soul Drain works on yourself if you get killed by your own Chain Lightning.
Monks/Champions will never use Extremity Fist on Crusaders/Paladins pre-Renewal. Reflect Shield: 40% damage back to you: a 75000 damage of Extremity Fist will give the Champion 30000 to himself.
Hoisting enemies up with their own petard is also a part of Advance Guardian Heroes' gameplay; an important technique involves blocking just as an enemy attack hits you. If it's a physical attack, enemies are simply stunned, but magic attacks get reflected back at them. Considering the difficulty level achievable by said game, countering quickly becomes a habit.
The Big Bad of Thief 2: The Metal Age dies in classic Bond-Villain fashion when Garrett recalls his poison-gas robots to his citadel. When the Citadel is sealed off, the robots and the gas are trapped inside, rather than rampaging through the local ecosystem while Karras stayed safe and sound.
Many RPGs have a game mechanic where a character sacrifices health. Too many of these without healing, and the trope is invoked.
Also, special magic/skills/abilities that allow to reflect attacks and magics back at the attacker/caster.Even more effective if the backfiring attack was an instant-kill.
A form of this: In the intro to Command & Conquer Red Alert, Einstein uses a time machine to erase Hitler from history. In the intro to Red Alert 3, the Soviets use a time machine to erase Einstein from history.
Not a clear-cut example, as the time machines are different. One was developed by Einstein (a different Einstein, though), and the other by Dr. Zelinsky.
Final Fantasy games make it possible for characters (be they heroes or villains) to hurt or kill themselves by casting magic on a target with a reflective spell in effect.
Emperor Gestahl and President Shinra are notable examples in the series of what happens when you lose control of your genetically-altered human weapons.
In Final Fantasy V, Exdeath becomes absorbed by the very cosmic power he was obsessed with controlling, erasing his personality and creating a new entity that wants to completely destroy the world he devoted his existence to conquering.
Sean Keanan. Leader of the Raincoat Cult that worships its god in the form of a creepy faceless mannequin with a sword driven through it. When he stumbles over to it and screams to be given strength after losing the fight, it falls over, driving the sword in the middle right into his eye.
At the end of Hitman: Codename 47, you kill the Mad Scientist who created you.
Also, In Contracts and Blood Money respectively, you can grab a gun that a wounded guard dropped on the floor or snatch it from a guard's hand, and kill them with it.
In the first mission of Halo 2, the Covenant sets up you the bomb on Cairo Station, but MC turns the bomb against its setter-uppers.
On a bigger scale, the Prophets end up losing the civil war they instigate and are now likely extinct. Granted, there were mitigating factors, but still...
MC and Cortana capture a Covenant flagship in the novel Halo: First Strike and use their own weapons against them.
In The Godfather: The Game, it's dangerously easy to hit yourself with your own Molotov Cocktail. If you don't run fast enough, your own dynamite or bomb can take you out too.
Pokémon that can use Explosion and Selfdestruct. Funnier if the opponent uses Protect or is a Ghost-type.
Any Ghost-type who uses Curse, which takes off half their total HP to curse its opponent...when they're already at half-health or lower. Or when their opponent's attack has just/is about to take off at least half their HP...
In both cases, it becomes an inversion of this trope if the first Pokémon previously used Destiny Bond.
Hi Jump Kick is a powerful move, but if it misses, it hurts the user. Guess what happens if you miss with too little HP.
Don't forget about Dragon-type and Ghost-type Pokémon, which are weak to their own types.
The ability Synchronize also transfers Poison, Paralysis and Burn if they were inflicted by that status themselves. A Pokémon with the ability Guts also has its attack boosted when it has a status effect, but competitively, it's mostly self-inflicted.
The move Magic Coat and the new Dream World ability Magic Bounce/Magic Mirror negates Status moves and entry hazards, then throws such effects back at the opponent. You can essentially make them status cripple themselves and get their hazards on their side.
Counterattack moves such as Counter, Mirror Coat, and Metal Burst (where the user deals back 1.5/two times the damage, respectively, that the user has sustained from the target's attack of the same turn) can invoke this trope when the target has used a particularly powerful offensive move, especially if the user is wearing a Focus Sash or possesses the Sturdy ability*
both of which, provided that the Pokémon in question is at full health, allow a Pokémon to retain oneHit Point and survive what would normally be a one-hit knockout move. However, prior to Generation V, Sturdy's effect was limited in that it only provided immunity to moves that were specifically designated in text as one-hit knockout (OHKO) moves, although no damage at all would be taken from said OHKO attacks.
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The moves Mirror Move (the user uses the move last used by the target) and Snatch (the user steals the effects of the status move used by the target, usually a healing or stat-changing move) can occasionally lead to this trope.
In Mass Effect 2, the Heretic faction of the Geth develops a virus which they intend to use on the main collective, intending to turn them all to Reaper-worship and war against the organics. Apart from simply destroying them, you can choose to turn the same virus on them, restoring them back to the collective.
On a more thematic note, the Thanix Cannon upgrade was based on Reaper technology. Said cannon is used against the Collectors in the climax, so you end up using Reaper weaponry against the Reapers' servants. For an added bit of thematic appropriateness, it's Garrus who gives you this upgrade.
There's also the Collector Rifle, a reverse-engineered Reaper weapon, that ironically proves to be highly effective at killing Collectors. Particularly ironic if you chose to use this weapon to deliver the killing blow to the Humanoid-Reaper.
In God Hand the tall mooks will sometimes try to grab and suplex Gene. Wriggling the left thumbstick to carry out the Action Command when prompted allows Gene to counter-suplex them for good damage. The gorilla luchador also has a move where it slams Gene into the ground, then attempts to jump on him. Hitting the Action Commands allows Gene to dodge, causing the gorilla to hurt itself more than the initial slam hurt him.
In BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, at one point in Bang's Story Mode, after beating Jin, Yukianesa proceeds to freeze her own user.
In Jade Empire, the true Big Bad, Master Li is defeated by the last spirit monk (AKA the player character) whom he trained to overthrow the Emperor. His last words say it all:
Master Li: I'm a better teacher than I thought.
The battle with Hades in God of War III kicks off with Hades telling Kratos "Your Soul Is Mine!" and at one point early in the battle, he attempts to consume Kratos's soul using the Claws of Hades. Kratos takes the Claws away from Hades at one point during the battle, and then proceeds to use them to consume his soul in the battle's finale.
From the same game, Kratos steal Hercules' cestus and uses it to cave his skull in, and kills a giant scorpion by impaling it on its own stinger. In the second game, Theseus is stabbed through the guts with his own spear and has his head smashed in with the door he was trying to prevent Kratos from passing through, and the Barbarian King is crushed with his own hammer.
And let's not forget Kratos and Ares from the first game.
Ares: That night...I was trying to make you a great warrior!
Kratos: You succeeded. [kills Ares]
In The Neverhood, Klogg, after killing Willie Trombone with the giant cannon, gets this when he steps on the cannon's remote as he tries to stab Hoborg from behind, causing the cannon to fire wildly. Naturally, it hits Klogg in the face.
Many of the bosses/villains in the Super Mario Bros. series. Indeed, you defeat Giga Lakitu and Megahammer by firing their projectiles back at them (spinies and bullet bills respectively), as well as King Kaliente and Prince Pikante by sending back the coconuts fired in Super Mario Galaxy and it's sequel.
Bowser's plots in those two games to create an "evil empire" are above his station and full of flaws, but the biggest monkey wrench to his plans is holding Princess Peach in his clutches, as he wants her to rule alongside him. While it used to help the trouble he caused in the classic Super Mario games remain intact as Princess Peach was the only one who could break the spells, now it does nothing but increase Mario's chance of foiling Bowser's self-deluded, inevitably doomed plot.
In the Mario & Luigi series, many enemy attacks could be countered by sending their own attacks back to them.
Even better: The operation was supported by the Awesome, yet ImpracticalOdin that Mengsk commissioned as a publicity stunt and was being piloted by Tychus Findley whom Mengsk himself released and sent to Raynor as The Mole to assassinate Kerrigan.
In StarCraft the Confederacy used the psi-emitters to lure the Zerg onto their enemies. Sons of Korhal later use those psi-emitters to draw the Zerg into attacking the Confederacy.
The unofficial expansion/modpack Huncraft ends with Duran mocking the now infested Raynor, and detonating him. Before exploding, Raynor runs up to Duran and the explosion kills them both.
In the first game, Al Mualim is defeated by his own student using the same arts he taught him.
In Uplink, this is an Awesome, but Impractical way to finish off the evil Mega Corp at the end of the game: the player can destroy the corporation's main computer using a virus developed by the very same corporation. (There are other, more Boring, but Practical ways to accomplish the same goal, but hey, Rule Of Cool.)
In World of Warcraft, one of the bosses in the Stratholm instance has an enrage timer that can be beaten ONLY by having a character pick up his dropped sword (which did much more damage than most weapons available at that level) and using it on him.
Similarly, in the Tempest Keep version of the Kael'Thas fight, the weapons dropped by the dead advisers are practically required to defeat him.
In the fight against Halfus Wyrmbreaker in the Bastion of Twilight, the players generally need to free the dragons he has imprisoned and defeat them after he bends them to his will in order to counter his abilities (for example, making the Proto-Behemoth's breath do less damage or making his Shadow Novas take long enough to cast that they can be interrupted), and give him a damage buff that will enable you to beat his enrage timer.
Several achievements require you to trick bosses into killing their own adds with their area of effect abilities.
In Cataclysm, Deathwing is slain by the Dragon Soul, the Artifact of Doomhe created long ago to control the other Dragonflights.
In Star Wars Battlefront, infantry trying to destroy a tank often throw grenades that stick to it. You can drive this tank up to them so that they're right next to their own grenade when it explodes–making this a literal case of Hoist by His Own Petard.
The same principle applies to plasma grenades in the Halo series. First rule of getting stuck: find the one who done it and go Action Bomb on 'em.
In Might and Magic IX, the god of chaos, Njam the Meddler, has been driving the plot with the aim of entrapping Krohn, the chief god, in a shell of unbreakable frost. Guess where Njam ends up? Yup.
In Luigis Mansion, one of the portrait ghosts, Slim Bankshot, is a billiards master. He'll shoot billiards around the room when you enter, and very rarely, one of them will hit him as he walks around the table.
In Wild ARMs, the demon Berserk lures the heroes into some ruins that happen to have a device that amplifies a demon's powers, with the intent of taking out the heroes with the increased power. Unfortunately for him, a rather trigger happy ally of the heroes happens to be in the same room as the device that controls the amplifier, and proceeds to break the crap out of it (despite not knowing what it does). The result: Berserk actually gets WEAKER, allowing the humans to defeat him. As is typical with this trope, he didn't even NEED the power boost; Berserk was more than strong enough to take them as he was, having toyed with them in the previous encounter(s) with him. Had he fought them elsewhere and seriously, he would've killed them easily.
In Pikmin 2, a new enemy called the Decorated Cannon Beetle shoots boulders that home in on the current captain. It's entirely possible to manipulate the boulders into hitting the Cannon Beetle or other enemies in the area. See Misguided Missile.
In Mario Kart, it is incredibly easy to hit yourself with a Green Shell. What's much harder is getting them to hit your opponents.
Ratchet & Clank: At the end of the first game the eponymous duo sends Drek onto his artificial planet and then destroy it with the laser he intended to destroy Veldin with.
In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, there are enemies with shells so strong that the only way to hurt them is to throw one of them at the other.
The Vendigroth Device in Arcanum invokes this; certain powerful mages have the ability to seal themselves in a magical cocoon at the moment of their deaths, regenerating their bodies and increasing their lifespans. Because magick and technology disrupt one another in the Arcanum-verse, the device uses science to turn a mage's own power against them, making the cocoon destroy their bodies.
In Sonic Generations, when you fight Silver the Hedgehog, he tries to squish Sonic with a giant ball of debris when he's down to his last hit. When Sonic hits him, he's knocked into the ground and promptly ran over.
Played straight when the subject Helen has been experimenting on for the entire run of the comic dumps her even though she has fallen in love with him, and takes over another secret lair, which in another timeline leads to Helen's near-death and existence as nothing but a brain in a tank.
Othar's twitter: When Othar Tryggvassen builds a deathtrap he does a pretty damn good job of it. Some would call this irony. Everyone else, stupidity. Sigh.
In Everyday Heroes, while J.P. Wunsch is in prison, he tries to rebuild his power cuff that turns him into Wrecking Paul.
In Cuanta Vida, the BLU Medic is killed when he's (accidentally) injected with the injection he meant to use on Blue Scout/Jeremy.
In Order of the Stick, Xykon sends several goblins to their deaths simply to observe the effects of walking into Dorukon's Gate. They invariably explode, but Xykon is a For the Evulz kind of guy, and thinks it's funny. During the fight with the PCs he shatters Roy's ancestral sword, and Roy picks him up in a bout of Unstoppable Rage and throws him into the gate himself. Of course, it takes more than the destruction of his body to permanently destroy a lich, but it does set his plans back months while he seeks out a new Gate.
Tsukiko is a necromancer with a rather disturbing fondness for her undead creations, believing that, since the undead are the antithesis of life and Humans Are Bastards, the undead must be misunderstood, lovable souls. Redcloak demonstrates his own belief that the undead are nothing more than tools to suit a purpose by using a 'Command Undead' spell to force Tsukiko's thralls to devour her.
Girly: Called out by Clone Sidekick Hammergirl, as she is smashed to death with her falling hammer to reveal a hollow center!
In Juathuur, the juathuur deserters with whom Meidar is fighting left the path in large part because the Secret Test of Character she had for each of them left them disillusioned. One particular former juathuur, Rowasu, kills her in the end.
Nature of Nature's Art: SV, why did you decide that harnessing the power of malice would be a good idea? Sure, it's a rather unorthodox definition of malice, but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately killed you - or "[devoured] you as you [devoured] it", as you put it. At least you realised it at all.
In Spacetrawler, Yuri goes full cyborg, incorporating more and more weapons into her body. Martina decides that Yuri is going too far and needs to be restrained. To incapacitate Yuri, she uses a bomb that Yuri herself had commissioned from the Eebs.
Top left corner of the room at the top of the stairs, after "hiding" as Nepeta (the catgirl; talk to her to take control).
... a few strips later, Gamzee wounds him with a bow and arrow, then walks slowly across the room to garrote him.
Vriska stabs Tavros with his own lance after he tries to kill her, killing him.
As the Thief of Light, Vriska has apparently complete ownership over fortune, with the ability to alter luck-based events to her whim. When she refuses to back down from going off to fight Jack, Terezi makes her a bet her ego could not refuse - a simple coin flip. Heads, she stays. Scratched heads, she goes. The double entendre of the word was intentional and understood by both to be death. Vriska forces the coin to yield the scratched head, gambling that Terezi did not have the courage to go through with it. She was wrong in the Alpha Timeline, and dies in accordance with their agreement.
In Mitadake Saga, Kira has their own name written into his Death Note by the very girl he betrayed and left for dead - in her own blood. This is realized far too late.
Subverted here: Col. Tora Scobee, a bionic wolf, plants a bomb in the office of his rival, Borzoi, who is a Russian Wolfhound. Borzoi sees the bomb just as Scobee is getting into his car, and Borzoi chucks the bomb at the exact moment Scobee is inside. The last scene with Scobee in a full-body cast and his boss, Stinky, berating him.
Stinky: Scobee, this rivalry with Borzoi has got to stop. We're running out of spare parts!
Petey in Schlock Mercenary just loves to do this sort of poetic justice, to the point of turning it into a standard procedure.
A government explicitly responsible for defenses cuts some expenses on this part and he had to intervene?
Petey: You must demonstrate the ability to defend the surface of this planet. A Frigate armed with light shields and a fully operational plasma lance has just entered orbit. All you need to do is shoot it down. Petey: In ten minutes it will be overhead, at which point it will destroy this building and any who remain inside.
U.N.S. requests the extradition of mercenaries who blew up a TV company, pulled an insider job in process and planted fake evidence. After the local government itself hired them to attack the company via special interest group as a sting operation and part of a social engineering program, also made money on this insider information, and planted fake evidence. The case is clear, so he's most eager to cooperate...
Petey: but I expect that you will get quite a rise out of them when you explain to them that these proceedings will be made public as part of the extradition process.
...and since they didn't learn fast enough to drop it fully:
Detective Fitzsimmons: These thugs might get away with blowing up buildings, but there is still the question of illegal soldier boosts. Petey: Question? There is no question at all. The human Toughs have illegal boosts, which they acquired via a fugitive U.N.S. researcher. Petey: Oh, wait... you mean the "does the U.N.S. want the details of that technology released as part of these proceedings" question.
Web Original
In the MSF High Forum, The Manager Has made the mistake of checking to see if the snake he just nearly fed two PCs to is okay. Good news! The snake is okay. Bad news! It's in a bad mood.
Also occurs in MSF High proper, for the first female-to-male TG in the comic.
In general, any Web Original story in which a character maliciously causes sexualized transformations has at least a 20% chance of applying this trope. See also: countless stories on FurAffinity.
While Let's PlayingNew Super Mario Brothers Wii, The Runaway Guys frequently abuse the bubble mechanic. This can backfire when the sole player who's not bubbled winds up dying. In particular, Episode 14 illustrates this well — in part by being the first episode of that Let's Play that had to be broken up into two videos due to its length...
Heroic Sociopath Jobe of the Whateley Universe created a serum that would let him turn women into his dream girl - a drow hottie with incredible regeneration abilities. Yep, you guessed it. He accidentally received an injection. In addition, just to rub it in, the amazing regeneration means he can't find a way to turn back to his old self.
Power mimic Counterpoint has this happen to him more than once in the Whateley Universe. In a holographic simulation, the version of Counterpoint attacks Phase to steal Phase's powers; but Phase figures out how to use his density-changing powers to kill someone with density-changing powers. Counterpoint beats up Chaka to get Chaka's Ki-manipulation power; but Counterpoint can't use both yin and yang (he's a very masculine god of war) and so the built-up yin in his system nearly kills him before Chaka saves him. And then he tangles with Jobe...
In the College Humorspoof of Inglourious Basterds, Nazi colonel Hans Landa is an extreme stickler for grammar who becomes increasingly frustrated with Monsieur La Padite's grammatical errors and unwillingness to cooperate with him. Triumphant with his discovery that there are Jews hiding under La Padite's floorboards, Landa mistakenly utters a dangling participle and chooses to commit suicide out of shame.
Ink City: Trevor plotted to paralyzeYakko and Rigby so he could experiment on them. Instead, he wound up trapped within his own paralyzing fluid. Rigby then broadcast a video of this latest kidnapping attempt to the City at large as proof of Trevor's nature; Trevor had previously used a video of Rigby attacking him to damage his friendship with Phoenix and paint himself as the victim.
Goodbye Kitty: Black Kitty's deaths are often caused by this.
In a Citizen Kane themed episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, Buster enlisted Babs and Plucky to discredit Montana Max after Max framed Buster for cheating on an exam by planting a false book of answers. The title is actually lampshaded by Babs and Plucky.
Buster: C'mon guys, it's time to hoist Monty by his own petard!
Babs: What's a petard?
Plucky: I hope it's not heavy to hoist; I'm hernia prone.
In the Codename Kids Next Door episode "Operation C.R.I.M.E.", the Villain of the Week was a kid who was supposedly a psychic who would predict crimes by using crayons to draw what bad thing the students at Gallagher Elementary are about to do. However, it turns out it was a lie, so that the kid can be the only one to get pizza bagels in the cafeteria, but unfortunately, it was lima bean sandwich day.
Though he survives, it's his own love for opera that undoes the villain's plan in An American Tail 2. How? Watch it for yourself.
Not to mention it was his own secret weapon that shot him and his cronies out of town.
In The Addams Family, Mr. Adams used the scissors of a member of a gang on the entire gang. The owner got promptly chased afterwards when Mr. Adams explained, "Why blame me? He's the one with the scissors."
In Avatar The Last Airbender, Zhao plans to conquer the Water Tribe by capturing the moon spirit (in the form of a koi fish) to cut off their ability to waterbend, rendering them defenseless. They end up anything but defenseless when he kills the spirit and enrages its companion, the ocean spirit, enough to use Aang as a medium to become a giant water monster, wipe out Zhao's entire fleet, and drag him to a watery grave. Him killing the moon spirit also makes this a Karmic Death. Especially ironic considering that his "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Zuko a few minutes before would fit perfectly considering the circumstances behind him killing the Moon Spirit.
Later there's Combustion Man, who twice tries to use his explosion powers after a nasty blow to head. The first time it detonates prematurely, sending him flying back. The second time it doesn't even leave and blows him up.
Iroh's lightning redirection technique is basically a way to make this happen to someone. Zuko is the only one who uses it in a weaponized fashion, where Iroh and Aang (and actually Zuko too, once) use it to simply redirect the lightning off in a different direction.
Plankton's first appearance in Spongebob Squarepants results in this. Having controlled Spongebob mentally into delivering him a Krabby Patty, Plankton threatens to force him to drop it into a special analytical machine. However, after Spongebob gives a mouth-watering 'eulogy', Plankton attempts to eat the Krabby Patty but falls into the machine instead.
A better Barbie example would be how Exact Words screws over the evil lady in her version of Rapunzel.
And Diamond Castle wasn't even the first time Barbie bounced back a spell to its caster: in her version of 12 Dancing Princesses, her Evil Stepmother has a wish-granting flower. Barbie has a fan. Figure it out.
An interesting variant in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker in that Joker is killed by the same weapon he used on one of his own thugs in an earlier scene. What makes this interesting is that, while in order of appearance he shot the gun first, the scene where he dies chronologically happens some forty years before he actually killed the goon. Considering also that he was shot by Tim Drake, who was brutalized by Joker and used as a psychological weapon against Batman, he might have been hoisted on two petards at once.
And then, later on, Joker - now residing in Tim Drake's body with the wonders of modern technology - is ended for good by his own electrical joy-buzzer.
More than that. Joker is undone by the new Batman (Terry McGinnis) using the same methods Joker always used to unnerve Bruce Wayne - jokes and insults. Turns out Joker can dish out but he can't take.
In the series proper, Derek Powers gets infected by the very nerve gas that he was going to sell to a foreign dignitary.
Also, even later, he ends up being backstabbed by his son, who was acting under the belief that he should backstab anyone for power, a belief that Derek Powers ironically taught him.
Shriek is rendered deaf after his shockwave suit malfunctions, the drug dealer selling Venom slappers on the street dies(?) of an overdose after falling into a pile of them (and Bane himself was rendered a vegetable after a lifetime of using Venom), Cuvier's fate is sealed after he is injected with too much of his splicer formula...this happens a lot in the series.
Syndrome in The Incredibles is knocked onto the wing of his jet and subsequently sucked into its engine. There's a long enough pause between the two that Syndrome easily could have survived had he not been wearing a cape — which the audience has been warned is a bad fashion choice for a superhero, or remembered one of his rocket boots was still working.
This happened a good deal to Syndrome. His robot was so smart that it figured out his wrist computer was a threat and shot it off. He was knocked into the engine by Mr. Incredible's sports car, that Syndrome had essentially paid for by hiring him for secret hero work. Also, this secret hero work helped Mr. Incredible bounce back from a flabby has-been who barely survived a prototype robot, into the efficient, superheroic persona of his glory days who could fight back. And his right-hand, Mirage, betrays him at the critical moment, largely due to his own cavalier attitude when Mr. Incredible was threatening to kill her.
Speaking of the robot, the only way destroy it is to let it attack itself which becomes a Chekhov's Gun when fighting and second and more powerful robot.
"Mystery of the Lizard Men". The Big Bad fires a laser at the Quests' ship, Dr. Quest reflects it back with a mirror and blows him up.
"Arctic Splashdown". An enemy Mook tries to blow up the Quest's ship with a bomb. Race Bannon gets rid of it by throwing it off the ship, it lands in the Mook's raft and blows up.
"The Curse of Anubis". The Big Bad is killed by a cave-in caused by him shooting his pistol. To be fair, the walking mummy he was shooting at would most likely have killed him anyway.
"Dragons of Ashida". Dr. Ashida breeds huge carnivorous lizards that he uses to hunt down escaped servants (and eventually the Quests). At the end of the episode his servant Sumi finally has had enough of the doctor's abuse and throws him into the dragons' pit, where he's eaten alive.
"Pirates from Below". Villains try to blow up the Quests' vehicle with a mine. Race Bannon removes it and releases it, and it floats up to the bottom of the Big Bad's boat. Boom.
"The Devil's Tower". Von Dueffel blows off his biplane's wing with a hand grenade and crashes.
"The Quetong Missile Mystery". General Fong shoots a guard, who falls on a Plunger Detonator and blows Fong up with one of his own mines.
"House of Seven Gargoyles". Enemy Mooks shooting at Dr. Quest while they're under a glacier cause an ice collapse, killing them and the Big Bad as well.
"Terror Island". Dr. Chu Sing Ling is blown up by a power plant explosion caused by one of the giant monsters he created.
"The Riddle of the Gold". Ali plans to use a tiger to kill Dr. Quest, but the tiger ends up killing him.
My Little Pony: He doesn't get killed, but in the episode "The Revolt of Paradise Estate", the wizard Beezen gets chased away by his own magic wand, which was brought to life by his own magic paint.
Transformers Armada has a schemer by the name of Thrust. Sideways convinces the guy to side with giant, planet-eating Transformer Unicron. While everyone else is trying to defend their home planet from Unicron, Thrust is standing on the big guy's shoulder. Unicron starts to transform, and Thrust is knocked off balance and crushed in one of Unicron's joints.
To make it even more ironic, Thrust was in the middle of gloating to Galvatron (whom he'd betrayed) when this happened; he ended up begging Galvatron to help him, but Galvatron simply walked away, leaving him to his fate.
In the finale of the 1981 Spider-Man cartoon's Story Arc, Doctor Doom, who has finally taken over the world through clever use of a satellite-mounted laser, has his plot foiled and is subsequently vaporized by the same device.
In "Leave the Busting to Us", Doof escapes from Perry in the van he stole from the Bust 'Em people. He then mocks Perry for having to stop at the traffic light since he's a good guy, while as a villain he doesn't have to obey the rules... then is promptly caught up in the tornado accidentally created by his Gloominator 5000-Inator.
As you can see, Doof isn't particularly fond of this trope. Once when Perry uses it on him, he says "that isn't clever, its just cliche!"
On Drawn Together, Clara shuts down Wooldoor Sockbat's "Clum Babies" store (Wooldor's sperm have magic healing powers) in a transparent parody of religious objections to stem-cell research. She contracts tuberculosis shortly thereafter.
Clara: Please! [cough] I don't want [cough] to die [cough] so ironically... [passes out]
The first occasion occurred in "Return to New York" with Baxter Stockman, where, after the main power source of his exo-suit is destroyed, he gets back up, again, and gloats about how each component of it has its own backup power supply, which prompts Donatello to work over to an arm-cannon that was cut off earlier and says "So what you're saying is, this arm should still be fully functioning right?" Cue hilarious Oh Crap! moment before Don blows away Stockmen with his own gun.
The second occasion occurs in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover movie Turtles Forever, where the Utrom Shredder's latest body proves suprisingly vulnerable to his Technodrome's super-laser.
In the season 2 finale of The Spectacular Spider-Man, Green Goblin's glider is damaged after Spider-Man uses one of his own bombs against him, which then sends Goblin into a large container of more of his own bombs, originally intended to kill Spider-Man, creating a tremendous explosion. Unfortunately, Joker Immunity applies, because of course, No One Could Survive That.
An earlier example would be Venom's return. Venom stole a genetic cleanser in order to strip Spidey of his powers, and then reveal his identity to the world, so he would be defenseless against all the enemies he made over the last few months. However, it was Spiderman who used the cleanser to separate Eddie from Venom.
Batman says this almost word-for-word in Batman The Brave And The Bold when his reliance on Superman-like powers while on the alien planet Zur-En-Arrh leads to his being taken out by a Kryptonite Factor-like weakness.
Said again in another episode by second generation Batman after The Joker is exposed to his own gas.
The Herculoids. Gorvak, the leader of "The Android People", is killed by the warrior android duplicate of Zandor he created.
In The Mr. Men Show, Little Miss Naughty's pranks tend to backfire on her.
In G.I. Joe: Resolute Cobra Commander's last ditch effort to in getting back at the Joe's is aiming his super weapon on Washington, and to ensure he survives he locks himself up in a saferoom. Duke then aims his WMD at his base and traps the Commander in his own saferoom. However, he somehow escapes.
In one episode, the narrator even said the phrase word for word. Clearly this saying has been around for some time.
V.V. Argost gets this during the finale of The Secret Saturdays. After killing Zak's mirror universe counterpart and absorbing his powers, he proceeds to absorb Zak's powers as well. And here's where V.V. made his big mistake. Zak Monday was an anti-matter counterpart to Zak Saturday. And anti-matter and regular matter do not mix. Argost learns this the hard way when the combination atomizes him out of existence.
He actually gets a triple' dose of this because Zak tried to warn Argost about it but he couldn't hear him because he had to protect himself from the sound-based weapon he was using to absorb his powers in the first place. So not only did the mixing matter and anti-matter cause his death, the weapon he used to do it and what he was using to protect himself from it all lead to his demise.
In the Justice League animated series, Amazo has copied the powers of six of the seven Leaguers and is winning handily. Just as he's about to win, Martian Manhunter reveals himself and deliberately lets himself be copied so that Amazo can use telepathy to reveal Lex Luthor's true intentions. Once he realizes he was just a pawn in Luthor's latest scheme, Amazo leaves to explore the universe and find himself.
In the South Park episode "Crippled Summer" Nathan's attempts to get rid of Jimmy backfire on him, thanks to his sidekick Mimsy.
While he almost always walks away from it, this seems to happen to Reboot's Megabyte quite often.
Megabyte steals a supposed weapon from Hexadecimal, which turns out to be a viral bug that freezes whatever it comes in contact with, starting with him.
His attempts to leech energy from games backfires when he gets stuck within two games merged together and attacked by the resulting game characters.
Attempting to steal Mainframe's core energy gets him knocked into said energy and becoming part of a game which would destroy the entire system if lost.
Doublecrossing Mouse more than once turns out to be more than a mistake when she reconfigures his portal to the Supercomputer to one leading to the Web.
Then there's turning Hexadecimal into a weapon, which, once she gets free, gets his Tor wrecked.
In Transformers Animated Optimus beats Soundwave to scrap, using Soundwaves own electric guitar, Laserbeak.
In the Family Guy episode "Padre de Familia", Peter demanded that the brewery where he works fire all illegal immigrants. Soon, he found out that he himself is an illegal immigrant. Three guesses what happens next.
Happens to Stewie when he plans to enslave the viewing audience during Kids Say The Darnest Things via hypnogoggles. Unfortunatly for him, Bill Cosby ends up using them against him.
Discord from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic is ultimately defeated thanks to quite a few of his own petards. First, he let the mane cast get back the Elements Of Harmony and letting them try to hit him with them, which he'd ensured wouldn't work since he'd broken apart their friendship, in order to crush any hope they had left. Unfortunately for him, Twilight Sparkle figures out how to break his Mind Rape on the rest of the gang and they confront him with their friendship, and the Elements Of Harmony, renewed. Applejack mentions this, but Discord, having turned her into a liar and not knowing she's turned back, doesn't listen to her. He refuses to believe his Mind Rape had been undone and thus tries to repeat what he did before, only to be done in by his own Genre Savvy. It's impossible to tell whether or not the Elements Of Harmony will fizzle out until they're just about to fire, rendering Discord incapable of realizing his folly until it's too late.
Dr. Doofensmirtz from Phineas And Ferb is usually defeated this way, if not by his own stupidity. Parodied in one episode- Doof criticises Perry for catching him in his own trap, saying that its not ironic, its just cliched and lazy.
In the animated film version of Planet Hulk, the Red King gets a triple whammy on this trope, as he is betrayed by his Shadow who he had personally sought after, infecting him with his greatest weapon which he personally called his "Legacy", which led to him being burned to death by the very Mecha-Mooks that he had called upon as reinforcements as they had been programmed to exterminate all infected beings.
In Dial M For Monkey a villain obsessed with gold ends up being melted underneath a pile of gold bars.
Rugrats: If Angelica does something to the babies or tries to get something for herself, chances are that what she did will turn around and bite her in the ass. These have included revealing she broke Tommy's lamp (and forgetting that the grown ups can hear her), handcuffing herself to her bed and wiping out on the ball that she had earlier tossed over the fence.
On the non-Angelica side of things, there's the Junk Food Kid, a toddler bully who was beaten when Tommy bust the humongous bubble gum bubble using a candy cane she tossed aside.
Real Life
Ongoing, non-evil example: Many people will tell you that the level of play in the National Basketball Association is way down from its Magic/Bird/Jordan peak. It is - and it's not for lack of star power. Two decisions meant to maintain continuity are largely to blame:
The Rookie Salary Cap, meant to prevent such owner foolishness as Glen "Big Dog" Robinson's infamous $100 million rookie contract by putting a limit on how much rookie contracts can be worth (About $5mil a year, for five years, max). This led to a flood of high school players and "one-and-done" college players rushing to the league to get their rookie contracts "out of the way" so they could make the big money, which then led to many rosters full of players who are literally learning on the job.
A Veteran's pay scale was put into place to keep owners from low-balling veteran players on contracts. Players with six years or more NBA experience are guaranteed at least $1million a year (You get $1.5 with 10+ years). This led to owners signing less-experienced (and often less-skilled) but cheaper younger players to fill roster spots.
Expanding the league by nearly a third (From 23 teams to 30 over the last two decades) hasn't helped, either.
Then again, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that this is just a result of looking through the Nostalgia Filter.
Marie Curie's major claims to fame are her study of radioactivity as well as discovering radium. The dangers of radiation exposure weren't understood at the time and she ultimately died of radiation poisoning.
Then again, if it wasn't for her studies on radium and radioactivity, we might not have fully understood radiation poisoning as well as we do, which makes her a martyr for scientific knowledge.
Her husband Pierre as well. He didn't die of direct effects of radiation exposure (Marie died of leukemia, almost certainly caused by her extensive long-term exposure to all manner of radioactives) he did have a rather famous burn on his chest (probably a radiation burn from the vial of radium he often carried in his shirt pocket) and was suffering symptoms that may have been radiation sickness when he stumbled in the street and was run over by a horse-drawn cart (radiation sickness can cause dizziness, confusion, and delirium).
Maximilien Robespierre, who was behind much of the Reign of Terror that followed The French Revolution, was ultimately himself executed by the guillotine which he so adored. Along with quite a few others. (Another irony is that several people who participated in Thermidor actually were against the guillotine, as it was too slow— and were more in favour of shooting their victims randomly with cannon from a distance and throwing them into a mass grave to die.)
However, the rumor that Dr. Guillotin was executed on the device he had introduced (referenced in the above Discworld example) is untrue.
It's also shown in at least one film that Louis XVI had a hand in designing the guillotine, which he was later put to death by.
Lord Shang Yang, author of The Book Of Lord Shang and notorious in ancient China for his draconian punishments, met his end under a punishment that he himself formulated into Qin law when he was convicted of treason against King Huiwen of Qin. The punishment, which was reserved for law enforcers who broke the law themselves, called for not only the offender's execution, but that of his family as well. Ouch.
And it gets better: when he tried to hide out in a hotel in an attempt to escape the above fate, he was refused, as the strict laws he had enacted in Qin while in power made it illegal for a hotel owner to admit a guest without proper identification.
The Qin Dynasty did itself no favors in being so harsh—they only lasted 15 years.
Joke/urban legend: A terrorist once sent a mail bomb which had insufficient postage. It was returned to him, and he, forgetting what was in it, opened the envelope. (Does that count as a suicide bombing?)
From the same source: Two animal rights activists were protesting the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn, Germany, by freeing a captive herd. Suddenly all two thousand of pigs stampeded through the gate they were opening, and trampled the hapless protesters to death.
The infamous Pope Alexander VI died in suspicious circumstances. While many historians attribute his death to a plague, a popular rumor claims that he accidentally drank poisoned wine intended for one of his political rivals.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had maintained his grip on power for more than three decades by terrifying everyone around him. One night in 1953, Stalin stayed up drinking with his goons until about 3 or 4 AM, at which time he went to bed. When Stalin didn't come out at his usual hour, people began to get concerned, but they left him alone since they were under strict orders not to disturb him and too terrified of his wrath to risk going in to check on him. By the time one of his cronies finally mustered enough nerve to see what was going on, it was 10 PM of the next day and Stalin was dying of a stroke. Stalin lay for almost a full day, helpless and alone. Had his stooges checked on him, they might have been able to get the doctors in on time, but as it was, Stalin's own brutal tactics kept his thugs from saving his sorry hide. If that isn't poetic justice, I don't know what is.
To add insult to injury, interior minister Lavrentiy Beria (who was a Complete Monster) mocked Stalin after his apparent death. When Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria crouched down to kiss his hand, and when Stalin went unconscious again, Beria spat upon his body. Beria would later gloat that he killed Stalin with poison.
Stalin had also recently initiated (or was about to initiate) a purge of doctors.
This really applied to the USSR in general, and still does in communist countries (North Korea especially). As was remarked later "Oftentimes, the one who put someone in the gulag yesterday was sentenced to the gulag today."
Generally, just look at photos or video of who is around the Leader to find out who is "in favor." The best example is on the cover of a book Soviet Censorship◊. Let's just say those who fell out of 'favor' were never seen again.
Stalin's policy of cleansing the "worker's paradise" of intellectuals (i.e. people smarter than him) often backfired, as it meant the Soviet Union would end up with inferior technology thanks to all the smart people being sent to Siberia. Now imagine What Could Have Been if he would've had a little more foresight.
Additionally, he would often shut down technological breakthroughs that were ahead of their time and wouldn't be discovered (or implemented) again for at least a decade. For example, his aircraft designers during World War II had many innovative ideas for jet fighters and bombers, which Stalin quickly suppressed, making the scientists work on designing cheap, fast-produced planes. Once the tide in the war had turned, he didn't feel the need to improve on what was already working.
The exact opposite being done by Germans, who managed to develop from scratch quick solutions of dubious reliability such as interleaving wheels on tanks, play with projects doomed from the start such as tanks too heavy to move anywhere and a giant cannon that could break anything, but hit nothing, and really produce expensive military innovations such as jet fighters and ballistic missiles without prerequisites that would make them efficient — during the war which they started already short on resources.
On one occasion, late in his life, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, considered by many to be the "inventor of radar," reportedly was pulled over in Canada for speeding by a radar-gun toting policeman. His remark was, "Had I known what you were going to do with it I would never have invented it!"
NFL player Plaxico Burress served time for unlawfully carrying a gun at a nightclub. This case is special because:
It was only made public knowledge that he was carrying a gun because he accidentally shot himself.
He accidentally shot himself because his gun was in a style of clothing that only an idiot would wear to a nightclub.
The NYPD only found out about this because it was on the news, because he was so popular, and not because he'd gone to a hospital. *
Hospitals in New York are required to report this kind of case, because the hospital did not do this because Plaxico was famous, and were found out because he was so famous, this makes an example for them too
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King James II of Scotland was a big supporter of the use of then-modern artillery in warfare. He was killed when one of his own cannons exploded.
The Peacemaker Accident. The USS Princeton was the first screw propelled ship in the US navy hosted a large number of dignitaries and most of the cabinet. The opportunity was used to show off different cannons to the higher ups. One of these was named the Peacemaker. Its explosion killed 7 including the Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of State, the Captain, and the head of the construction, equipment and repairs.
Enron's accounting fraud. A lot of the transactions used in the fraud created large amounts of extra debt, and a lot of the other transactions and investments lost value very quickly when the company was being investigated, significantly speeding up the bankruptcy.
A Greek brass worker named Perilaus invented the brazen bull, a particularly gruesome brand of execution. The victim would be placed inside a hollow brass statue of a bull, and a fire would be lit underneath. The screams of the victim were turned, by the bull's inner workings into the roars of an angry bull. Perilaus presented it as a gift to Phalaris, a ruler of a local city-state. So disgusted was Phalaris with this invention that he ordered its creator to be its first victim.
His words revolted me. I loathed the thought of such ingenious cruelty, and resolved to punish the artificer in kind. "If this is anything more than an empty boast, Perilaus," I said to him, "if your art can really produce this effect, get inside yourself, and pretend to roar; and we will see whether the pipes will make such music as you describe." He consented; and when he was inside I closed the aperture, and ordered a fire to be kindled. "Receive," I cried, "the due reward of your wondrous art: let the music-master be the first to play."
On Christmas Eve of 2008, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo went to a party held by his relatives dressed in a Santa suit, opened fire on them and killed eight, and then set fire to the house with a homemade flamethrower. His original plan was to establish an alibi and flee the country; however, the homemade flamethrower burned part of the Santa suit into his flesh, sabotaging his plans and driving him to commit suicide.
On February 16, 2010, a man responsible for a string of terrifying holdups in Adelaide, South Australia was arrested due to the fact that not only were two of the stolen cars used for the robberies parked on his property, he had in his possession a SPAS-12 shotgun, which was clearly identifiable on the released CCTV footage of some of the robberies, and is very rare, not to mention illegal to own in Australia.
Thomas Midgley, Jr. is a double example: he invented leaded gasoline and CFCs, contributing to some of humankind's greatest screwups, then died when a machine he built to hoist him out of bed malfunctioned and strangled him.
Talk about irony. Literally hoisted by one's own invention.
The 2009 Cincinnati Bengals played their final game of the regular season against the New York Jets. The Jets would only enter the playoffs if they won, but the Bengals already had their best position locked up and so rested their players and visibly did not play hard to win the game. The Jets won handily. The following week the Jets played Cincinnati again, and eliminated them from the playoffs.
The urban legend of the guy who was killed by his own fart gas. The MythBusters busted this one.
In 1982, Universal Studios sued Nintendo of America on the grounds that their Donkey Kong arcade game was a rip-off of Universal's King Kong. However, Nintendo's lawyer Did Do The Research, and found out that Universal had previously won a lawsuit declaring King Kong was in the public domain. The judge ruled that Universal had acted in bad faith by threatening Nintendo's licensees, and Nintendo received $57,000 (plus damages and attorney's fees) as a result.
In 1927, Isadora Duncan, a dancer known for wearing long scarves, died from a broken neck when a large silk scarf draped around her neck became entangled around one of the vehicle's open-spoked wheels and rear axle.
Also in 1927: J.G. Parry-Thomas, a Welsh racing driver, was decapitated by his car's drive chain which, under stress, snapped and whipped into the cockpit. He was attempting to break his own land speed record which he had set the previous year. Despite being killed in the attempt, he succeeded in setting a new record of 171 mph (275 km/h).
1928: Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian physician, died following one of his experiments, in which the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, L. I. Koldomasov, was given to him in a transfusion.
The Collyer brothers, extreme cases of compulsive hoarders, were found dead in their home in New York in 1947. The younger brother, Langley, died by falling victim to a booby trap he had set up, causing a mountain of objects, books, and newspapers to fall on him crushing him to death. His blind brother, Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some days later. Their bodies were recovered after massive efforts in removing many tons of debris from their home.
The term in question is still valid today; several movies and TV shows dealing with The War on Terror, such as The Kingdom or NCIS, have pointed out that bomb-makers often lose a finger or two to their own bombs, or worse.
In 2004, when it looked like John Kerry might win the presidential election, the Democrats scrambled to change the rules so that an appointee of the governor (Romney, a Republican) wouldn't serve out the term. Six years later, under a Democratic governor, Ted Kennedy died too quickly for them to change the rules back, but it didn't really matter since the Democrats couldn't possibly lose a Massachusetts Senate election, right? Right?Right?
Infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was responsible for the deaths of 17 young men, most of who were black. Two years into his prison term, he was brutally murdered by being impaled through the ass with a broomstick and having his head bashed in with an iron bar. His killer? An African-American man.
Also killed alongside Dahmer by the same man was inmate Jesse Anderson. His crime? Murdering his wife, then trying to pin the crime on two black men.
Similarly, rumor has it that is was a woman executioner who flipped the switch on serial killer Ted Bundy, who killed 36 women.
In 1917 the British were having a problem with a particular German-laid minefield off the coast of Ireland. It seemed that however diligent the RN minesweepers were in their duties, ships were still being lost in this field. The Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Sir William Reginald Hall, deduced that the Germans were eavesdropping on the minesweepers' radio traffic, and were simply sending a U-boat out to re-lay the minefield when they heard the sweepers broadcast the 'field cleared' message. The British response? To leave the minefield intact and broadcast a false 'field cleared' signal. UC-44 sailed out to re-lay the field...and was sunk by the mines. The only survivor was her Commander, who was furious that the RN minesweepers had done such an inefficient job of clearing the field.
More than one bomb maker has met his end while assembling a bomb, and more than one bomber has had the bomb go off before he could arrive at the target. At least a few have died from accidentally setting their bomb vests off while giving their buddies one last good bye hug. It's not a job that lends itself well to on the job training.
And of course, the same has been known to happen to professional soldiers as well, be it from accidentally shooting themselves, to incidents such as the infamous 1967 USS Forrestal fire. An accident on the flight deck resulted in a massive fire and a chain reaction of munitions explosions, killing the entire damage control party, leading to the current American Navy practice of trainingallsailors in damage control and firefighting.
On Dec. 17, 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu order his security forces to fire on anti-government protestors, but on Dec. 22, the Romanian army defected to the demonstrators, and on Christmas Day, he and his wife were executed by firing squad.
Even better, his wife Elena's Last Words were reportedly, "Can it be that the firing squad is still in use in Romania?"
Numerous politicians have put out campaign commercials, or made speeches, attacking their opponents that have ended up hurting them far more. In one of the more notable cases in recent history, Meg Whitman, running for governor of California, made a speech about how California used to be such a better place back in the day, which was the reason she moved there, and she'd like California to be like it was then. Her opponent's campaign immediately put that portion of the speech in an advertisement, helpfully pointing out that Whitman's opponent, Jerry Brown, had been the governor during the time Whitman was pining for.
Unblack metal is this trope applied to a musical ideology. Basically, it takes the sound of Black Metal-a genre of music known for Satanism-and pairs it with Christian lyrics.
In 1964 US President Lyndon Johnson's administration started a bill that would end legal discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. A southern congressman, not liking the "race" part, added "ending legal discrimination on the basis of sex" hoping that people would decide not to vote for it due to this. As a result, several female members of the House took up the bill, and the bill was passed...protecting race, color, religion, national origin, and sex.
The Chinese philosopher, Han Fei Tzu, was imprisoned by the leader of the Chinese state of Chin due to a policy of imprisoning and/or killing scholars and intellectuals. Said policy was proposed by none other than Han Fei Tzu himself.
In April 2011, Lady Gaga, the infamous diva of odd clothing choices, tripped and nearly broke her nose while performing a concert in Atlanta, GA. What did she trip on? An article of ridiculous clothing she had ripped off as a part of the show.
The Lapua Movement was a radical right, anti-communist political movement in Finland in the early 1930s. By pressuring the Finnish government through kidnappings and assaults, the Movement managed to pass several anti-communist laws, including the Protection of the Republic Act, nominally meant to ban "anti-government entities". After the Movement attempted to overthrow the government, the Lapua Movement was banned under the Protection of the Republic Act, the very legislation the Movement helped to legalise.
The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a huge death camp from 1975 to 1979. When Vietnam got fed up with them, the Khmer Rogue had so devastated their own country that they were in no shape to resist. The war was over in two weeks. Oh, and what was one of the big things that caused Vietnam to say "enough is enough"? Cambodians fleeing into Vietnam to escape the Khmer Rouge. It should say something about how badly communism failed in Cambodia that the monarchy was restored.
In the 2011 Women's World Cup Quarterfinal between Brazil and the USA, Brazil held a 2-1 in extra time. In the final minutes of extra time, one of the Brazilian women faked an injury to draw out the medical team and went off on a stretcher. Seconds after being carted off, she hopped off the stretcher and rejoined the game with no difficulty - drawing a yellow card for her flagrant diving. However, her stunt led the ref to award 3 minutes of injury stoppage time, and the USA scored the equalizing goal in the 2nd. The USA would then advance on penalty kicks.
Pablo Escobar, the kingpin of the notorious Medellin Cartel, kept attempting to kill those who opposed him politically. Ultimately, many of these hits lead to his defeat because they angered the wrong people and lead to a massive manhunt against him that ultimately lead to his downfall.
And that wrong people (besides the Colombians) were the U.S Goverment.
Employee restraint clauses are supposed to help defy this by preventing companies from creating their own competitors, at least for a time. Supposed to.
In 1976, on the eve of the West Indies Cricket team's tour of England, English captain Tony Greig (an expatriate South African) commented, "If they're down, they (the West Indians) grovel, and I (...) intend to make them grovel." The comment incensed the West Indians, who proceeded to annihilate England in the series. West Indies captain Clive Lloyd commented:
"The word 'grovel' is one guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of any black man. The fact they were used by a white South African made it even worse. We were angry and West Indians everywhere were angry. We resolved to show him and everyone else that the days for grovelling were over."
A Congressman who was campaigning against a cell phone ban while driving got into a fenderbender while conducting a radio interview on the subject on his cell phone.
The Comics Code Authority forbade any reference to drugs, even negative portrayals. When Stan Lee was asked by the US Government to do an anti-drug magazine, the CCA refused to approve it. Stan Lee just released it without CCA approval, and readers happily filled in that approval gap. Result: The CCA ended up looking clueless and eventually going out of business altogether in 2011.
In 2002, a 79 year-old Belgian, who apparently hated his estranged family, rigged his house with 20 deadly booby traps, from tripwire shotguns to an exploding beer crate (set to detonate when a certain number of bottles were removed). Apparently, he was smart enough to realize that his memory was going to Hell in a hand-basket, so he wrote a list of 20 enigmatic clues to remind him where the traps were. Too bad the list didn't help at all, and he ended up being shot by one of his own traps.
