It Got Worse - Television Tropes & Idioms

Bleach probably sets the new record for most iterations of "got worse" in a single 20 page issue, with the release of chapter 364. Two of the best captains get downed in 3 pages, without any buildup or warning. Then two of the best Espada are revealed to still be alive in another 4 pages. Then Aizen, Tosen, and Gin are freed from the Blazing Fortress that Yamamoto had trapped them in at the start of the fight by the weirdass thing that Wonderweiss came in with, free to do as they please, and right in front of Kira and several of his injured buddies. While the last page hints at a Big Damn Heroes moment by a certain third party, it's going to be have to be pretty damn big to make a difference at this point.
- It was pretty damn big.
  - and it got better.
  - And THEN it got worse.
  - Let's put it this way: Tite Kubo is in love with the Big Damn Heroes trope. However, in order for Big Damn Heroes to be required, things must first look very bleak indeed. Thus, events in Bleach tend to get constantly worse until someone shows up to save the day, at which point things briefly get better before quickly going to Hell again in order to set it up for someone new to come save the day.
The Kill Em All ending of The End of Evangelion where, after the JSSDF has nuked Tokyo-3, invaded NERV, slaughtered most of the cast, and Unit-02 gets EATEN by the Eva Series, it got worse when a moon-sized Rei/Yui/Lilith spawns out of the Earth and absorbs the souls of every human on the planet, all to the tune of a catchy but ultimately suicidal song. Only after that is the worst over, with any human who wishes to being able to return to a normal state of existence. Only Shinji, Asuka and possibly Rei have done so by the time the credits roll, however.
- For that matter, how about the series as a whole, especially after episode 16? "So I had to watch as my Humongous Mecha horribly maimed my best friend while I could do nothing about it? I'll see you, and raise you the girl I have a crush on going through Mind Rape and completely breaking down. What? You counter with the other girl I have a crush on dying in a Heroic Sacrifice...after which I find out that she was a clone of my mom? Ok, then how about the one person who shows me unreserved love and kindness actually turning out to be my enemy, who I am forced to kill in the most horrific way possible." Tokyo-3 is not a very happy place.
- Let's abridge this. The world comes under constant assault by alien beings with each attack taking more and more of a toll on the characters and ending in mental breakdowns and death. AND THEN THE WORLD FUCKING ENDS.
  - Asuka's situation later in the series. After her sync-rates start to drop, and she gets increasingly angry on the issue, eventually she disobeys orders and tries to defeat an angel herself. Cue Mind Rape.
Just about the summary of most of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, thanks to a Groundhog Day Loop plot that's been repeating itself for about forty thousand days (over a hundred years), and only one of the protagonists can remember the previous cycles. Typically follows this pattern: two people die on the night of a festival, one person gets suspicious of his or her friends, the suspicious person kills someone, Rika turns up ritualistically murdered, and thousands of people die overnight.
- And then in Minagoroshi-hen, It Got Worse.
- And after that, in Matsuribayashi-hen, It Gets Better.
- Going by the speed at which the loop shortens, and bearing in mind that it's known to cover several years at one point, the number should be more like several *thousand*. Oh, and although Rika is the only one to explicitly remember earlier loops (with some help from a friend), the others aren't unaffected - Satoko's trap-building skills are the result of long experience. In short, by the time it's all over, none of those close to Rika are exactly normal people.
Narutaru is the poster anime for this trope, as it starts out on a light and deceptively cheerful note and ends up getting systematically darker and more disturbing with each episode until the anime ends on a pitch black note (and the manga it was based on — only the first half was actually animated — is far worse).
- Bokurano is pretty much the same way. Mohiro Kitoh seems to enjoy doing this to kids.
  - Actually Bokurano could be a textbook example for this trope. Everything gets worse in every possible moment. Especially in the moments when you think "God, that can't get worse now". Sure it can!
Saikano is an example of this trope to the point of causing chronic depression.
- The sentence above also describes Grave of the Fireflies.
- The particular release of Saikano that this troper watched actually had a warning at the end of almost-happy episode 10, saying that absolutely nothing happy was going to happen after that point. This troper hasn't yet been able to bring himself to continue.
  - This troper saw the same version. He foolishly thought it couldn't get worse, considering the majority of supporting cast were either very dead or pretty much resigned to the fact that they'd die soon. This troper had a hard time sleeping afterwards.
It is pretty difficult to get worse than the beginning of Texhnolyze but the show manages to do so in spades.
School Days is a deconstruction of the Love Triangle, in its original visual novel (Choose Your Own Adventure-style) video game format about a quarter of the endings fall under this. For the infamous anime, they made one that was worse than any in the game: Girl A snaps, kills the hero, Girl B snaps, kills Girl A, then flees with the hero's rotten, decapitated head to die on a boat alone at sea.
- NICE BOAT, though.
The final two episodes of Berserk are the moment when the series starts spiraling into horror, concluding the Band of the Hawks arc on a very horrific and depressing note. It all starts when Griffith activates his Crimson Behelit and transports everyone to hell. After the Godhand explain the nature of demons, Griffith accepts their Deal With The Devil despite Guts's best attempts to reach him. Because this is the ceremony for the birth of a new Godhand, which only happens once every 216 years, every demon in the Berserk universe comes out of the woodwork to eat the Hawks alive. Many characters that we had come to like die horribly until only Guts and Casca are left, Guts because he makes a very badass showing against demon after demon after getting his bearings, and Casca because the monsters have even worse in mind for her than being eaten. Then Griffith gets reborn as Femto, the fifth member of the Godhand, and gets his hands on the now-naked Casca. Then a demon snaps its jaws around Guts's arm as he tries to reach them, and Guts does everything he can to make a dent in the demon's hide as Femto starts having his way with her, and when the sword breaks, Guts uses what's left of the sword to chisel off his own arm in a serious Badass moment to free himself so he can save Casca and kill Femto, a Hope Spot that is very cruelly quashed when Guts finally gets free and rushes Femto, only to have another demon come down right on him and pin him down, clawing out his eye and forcing him to watch as Femto rapes Casca to insanity right in front of him. And that's the point where the anime ends.
- And in the manga, after a brief reprieve as the series moves back to its present day ("Band of the Hawks" is a flashback), it just keeps getting worse from there.
  - For the world, anyway. Guts actually gets better, as hard as his life remains.
  - And in the latest installment of the manga? It all got worse. Griffith/Femto takes advantage of the Skull Knight's dimension warping attack in order to unleash Hell on Earth. This troper only wonders how Miura is going to top this one.
  - On the plus side, the return of the supernatural to the world means that the Dragon Slayer might get a chance to live up to its name.
The last Story Arc of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has plenty of this. The previously immobile enemies wipe out the Redshirt Army in seconds. Mauve Shirts die left and right. A Space Ocean swallows the Cool Ship, rendering Spiral Power useless. The Dai-Gurren Brigade is caught in an inescapable Lotus Eater Machine. It's revealed the entire universe is threatened by the protagonists' very existence. If this were another Humongous Mecha anime, this would trigger bucketfuls of Heroic BSOD. In Gurren Lagann however, this only succeeds in triggering awesome.
Pretty much the ending of Zeta Gundam in which the AEUG destroys the Titans, at the expense of most of their pilots, Kamille's psyche, and pretty much every ship that was at Gryps 2 barring the Argama. The actual getting worse happens in Gundam ZZ, where the squeaky-clean Axis forces form Neo Zeon and invade Earth as the decimated AEUG and Earth Federation scramble to get their acts together.
- Yet ZZ somehow manages to be a comedy that takes Refuge In Audacity...
  - ZZ stops being a comedy rather fast. And this troper dares *anyone* to watch this scene and claim it's still a comedy.
- Subverted in the movies, where Kamille does NOT end up mind-screwed and tearfully reunites with his girlfriend Fa in a Bittersweet Ending which may or may not invalidate ZZ's existence.
- The Novelization dials it up a notch, Kamille got mind-fried and then watched as Rosamie sacrificed herself to save him from Gates Cappa who has a free shot at the mentally crippled Kamille, at that point, he thought she was his mother and well, when Fa came to pick him up, she did not know he opened his helmet and that he is presumably dead.
Code Geass: If things look like they're going to get slightly better for Lelouch, the universe will fix this by an inconveniently timed bullet/confession/precision-guided meteor strike on whatever Lulu loves, etc.
- The biggest example is the infamous Wham Episode where everything explodes due to the smallest mistake. "For example, if I ordered you to kill all the Japanese..." Shit hit the fan in a way that no one could predict.
  - "It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated."
About 2/3rd's of the way through MaiHime, the heroine of the series even remarks "I've finally hit rock bottom" after one of her friends tries to backstab her, which causes her to lose her temper so that her veritable little sister abandons her, her younger brother remarks that he doesn't want her help anymore since he doesn't want to be a burden on her, and the HiME war seems to be getting out of control. But, that statement being as it is a beacon for It Got Worse: The next episodes see her little brother and the guy she finally realized she had a thing for dying in front of her, both killed by the now possessed Dark Magical Girl, what-used-to-be her adopted little sister; her other good friend going off to die in a Heroic Sacrifice to take out her best friend who has gone mad; and her entire life and everyone she actually cared for pretty much being in entire ruin by the final episode. But at least They got better.
Can basically be used to sum up most of Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid. A shadowy organization is working against Mithril, providing their enemies with technology to match theirs. Sousuke is not only pulled off of his assignment to guard Kaname and leave the job in the hands of someone he doesn't trust to protect her adequately, he is further commanded to never have any contact with her again. Instead, he is ordered to devote his energy to working with a Humongous Mecha that he hates because its technology is unreliable. Eventually he slips into a Heroic BSOD and simply walks away from a mission, wandering through Hong Kong, acquiring a bottle of scotch, and letting himself get picked up by a prostitute. And then It Gets Worse: he finds out that his worst enemy, Gauron, is still alive and claims to have had Kaname murdered in Sousuke's absence.
Both the anime and the manga of Chrono Crusade use this. Often. Most of the examples are far too complicated to list here, but here's a few cliff note examples, avoiding spoilers as much as possible: After the heroes are attacked on a train, they seem to defeat their enemy—only to put themselves into an even more dangerous situation. They win the fight, but inadvertently give information to the Big Bad in the process. Another scene has the heroes finally reaching one of their goals, when they're attacked by the Big Bad. Chrono attempts to protect Rosette, but gets badly wounded in the process. In the manga, his fear of Rosette getting hurt causes him to fly into an Unstoppable Rage and unseal his powers, which drains Rosette's lifespan drastically as he uses them. He manages to stop himself, only to be stabbed by Aion, who then takes off with one of the members of their Nakama. In the anime, Chrono recovers to fight Joshua—removing his horns, but also "stopping" his time in the process. Aion then kidnaps Rosette and abandons Joshua and the other apostles for dead. And that's not even talking about how either the anime or the manga ends...
The first dozen or so episodes of Now And Then Here And There.
In Excel Saga, the story of Pedro, the cursed migrant worker, is a comedic version of this. Oddly enough, it's also the only continuity the show has until almost the very end.
Ghost In The Shell:Stand Alone Complex in both seasons, particularily towards the respective ends.
Barefoot Gen, set in Hiroshima during World War II, begins with wartime shortages and deprivation. Then Little Boy drops. Afterwards, the title character must deal with famine, crime, and occupation.
- In a similar vein, Grave Of The Fireflies gets so worse so fast, that the main characters don't even get to see the occupation.
During the One Piece Sabaody Archipelago arc, the Marine Admiral and his subordinates are picking the Straw Hats apart one by one. And then Bartholomew Kuma shows up to utterly annihilate them.
- Think rock bottom has been reached? Oh ho, think again. The whole Whitebeard War arc is pretty much one big It Got Worse, and we have still yet to reach the Godzilla Threshold.
Elfen Lied is pretty much an ongoing downward slide of It Gets Worse.
Reading the Welcome To The NHK manga (not the anime) tends to feel like It Gets Worse, and Worse, and Worse, and Worse, and ...
Gantz pretty much lives this trope. The first issue sees the protagonists die. Things get no better for them as they are forced into a bizarre war-game by a sentient 1337-5p33king black sphere.
- I'm not sure there even will be an end to how much worse it gets but even in an early mission the enemies rapidly scale from 20-foot tall statues to a hundred-foot Buddha trying to kill the team. And that's not even the worst they face in that incident. Which compared to the Osaka and Italy missions was pretty much a walk in the park.
  - Not to mention the complications created by Gantz' ability to bring the dead back to life and alter memories which is exploited by at least one team member with predictably screwed-up consequences.
You think Claymore is pretty grim and bleak? Try chapter 95. Bad news: a new type of Awakened Beings appear that have no weak points. Good news: they die on their own if you fight them long enough. Bad news: they reproduce exponentially be infecting people with their parasites. Good news: Riful is still alive. Bad news: she is attacked by the Organization's hunter-killers. Good news: said hunter-killers are killed by Alice. Bad news: that's because Alice Awakened. Very bad news: Alice Awakened because Beth, Number #2, was killed by one of those parasites that turn people into mindless monsters. And the very, very bad news: the cause of all this is still at large... and it is immensely more powerful than any of its spawns. Holey shit.
Gyo by Junji Ito is a beautiful example. What starts with one dead fish ends up wiping out humanity. Every time you think the horror has reached its limit, it increases exponentially.
- Uzumaki by the same author also does a good job, especially the final few chapters.
Twentieth Century Boys ends its first two arcs with things getting incredibly worse. The first arc has Kenji and Fukubei seemingly die stopping Friend's Humongous Mecha, Friend take credit for its destruction and become the beloved savior of Japan while the second ends with an even more sadistic man take over Friend's identity, kill a ridiculous amount of the world's population and become the president of the world. Both instances are also Hope Spots.
While it's normally more optimistic, the point of the recent flashbacks in Mahou Sensei Negima seem to be to show exactly how everything went to hell for Negi's parents immediately after the war ended. (And judging by Negi's past, things didn't really get better for the Springfield family for a while.)
The manga MPD Psycho by Eiji Otsuka uses this as a primary plot device, with its body-hopping serial killers and web of conspiracies. The live-action TV adaptation actually tones this down a bit; which is rather unexpected, since it was adapted by Takashi Miike.

Close Anime and Manga

The "Made to Suffer" arc of The Walking Dead is pretty much one continuous case of this.
An upcoming year-long story arc of Iron Man has literally been summarized by the writer as "Things. Get. Worse." Given that one of the issues starting the arc ends with Iron Man's head being blown off...
The last chapter of the most recent Empowered volume hits this trope hard. When you have to repair someone's suit with duct tape and carry her across the outside of a space station with buggy artificial gravity in a decaying orbit... only to found out that the backup portal will only get one of you to safety? Well that still was not Rock Bottom for Emp's day.

Close Comic Books

Both Syllables.

Close Fanfiction

The German movie Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). It starts off with the main character (a respected professor) falling for nightclub singer Marlene Dietrich. He gets fired from his job because he spends the night with his new girlfriend and comes in late for work and joins her group who travel from place to place performing, where he quickly ends up spending what little money he has saved up. They can't make enough money so he's pressured in to becoming a clown; part of his act involving him having eggs pulled from his ear and then crowing like a rooster. Eventually the group decides that they should go back to his home town and make him perform there. He does, to an audience of his old colleagues and students who came specifically to laugh at him. His wife, who he did all this for, cheats on him during his act and he attacks her, while repeatedly crowing like a rooster. After he fails to kill her, he goes to his old desk at the school where it is implied he kills himself. It doesn't sound so bad written out but watching it is just painful and horribly depressing.
- To be fair, the professor in "Der Blaue Engel/The Blue Angel" kind of had it coming. The film portrays him as a cliched evil teacher from hell at the start of the film, and his downfall itself is centered on the fact that he only goes to the nightclub to catch his underage students there in order to further torment them by way of busting them for sneaking into a nightclub.
No Country for Old Men: It's bad enough that Llewelyn Moss, the protagonist of the story, gets caught in the motel and is shot to death. And then that rotten scum bastard Chigurh hunts down the protagonist's widow and kills her too. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Chigurh, after killing Mrs. Moss, successfully evades the area with the cash in hand and disappears, but not before breaking his arm in a car wreck. Last, but not...uh...best...the sheriff vaguely reminisces on his attempt to bring the villain to justice and admits defeat.
Trading Places does this to Winthorpe. After being used to a luxurious lifestyle his whole life, he is framed for embezzlement and loses all of his money and friends. Later, after committing several crimes at a banquet, he is out on the street wearing a filthy Santa costume. Then a dog whizzes on him. Then the sky whizzes on him (i.e. it starts raining). He tries to commit suicide, but his gun jams... then fires accidentally when he throws it away, breaking a window and scaring (just scaring, hopefully) a poor cat.
- The kicker really comes when he learns that his bosses put him through the ordeal for a bet! The money they bet with? One dollar!
The Descent. A group goes caving, there's a cave in, it turns out that the group leader lied and took them to an unknown cave without telling anybody where they were going, one of them breaks her leg... Oh, and there are cave beasties trying to eat them, the main character is losing her mind, and they still haven't found another way out.
Pretty much the entirety of the Australian Made For TV Movie Scorched can be described as "and then It Got Worse".
The Mist. The final 10 or so minutes. David Drayton survives the horrors of a past few days, escapes with his son and 3 other people, sees his wife killed by spiders from hell, only to get stuck in the mist in the middle of nowhere, without fuel and with a gun. Then they all decide to kill themselves, so David kills them all, including his 10-year-old son, only to discover that the gun only had four bullets, leaving only him still alive. He THEN discovers 1.5 minutes later that the mist is beginning to clear and the army is successfully battling the creatures from the mist. Two things make this scene particularly depressing — he sees the woman with kids whom he refused to help in the beginning of the movie and the Dead Can Dance song "The Host of Seraphim" is playing during the whole scene.
- Make that 3 things. If you notice, the army caravan was headed in the same direction they were. They had been driving away from help the entire time.
- Make that 4 things. The mist and monsters don't go away until after David kills his son. Ms. Carmody had previously wanted to sacrifice Billy saying his death would save them all. It seems that, in the movie version at least, she was right.
  - In the story version, in which the main characters mostly survive, Ms. Carmody is only shot once, giving her time to utter one last "You will all die out there!" For the film, before she can say anything, they probably deliberately had the character be shot again, in the head, so as to prevent her from saying something that basically turns out to be true in the movie's ending, which would give her followers a last laugh and, in their eyes, vindicate her claims in a way that the film makers probably tried to avert on purpose. Given the room for a "Billy as a sacrifice" theory above, they may have subtly, and perhaps accidentally, failed to avert it entirely.
"It Got Worse" is a fairly good summary of the second half of The Dark Knight.
- In a more detailed summary, The Joker and all the gangsters are in custody, the city is safe, Gordon is alive and the new commissioner...then it's revealed that The Joker's gang took Harvey and Rachel and strapped them to bombs. Batman goes after Rachel and the police after Harvey, but Joker switched the addresses, so Batman saves Harvey, with serious injuries, while the police are too late for Rachel. Meanwhile, one of the Joker's men has been fitted with a bomb that destroys the police station, allowing everyone else, including the Joker, to escape. Then Batman's Secret Identity is compromised until the Joker puts out a general hit on the blackmailer with the consideration of blowing up Gotham General...which he does, right after giving Harvey a Hannibal Lecture that turns him into the Ax Crazy villain we know and love and sends him on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge. Then he threatens the whole city, with an implied threat to destroy the bridges and tunnels out - naturally, him being the Joker, this is just a ruse to get everyone on the ferries for a little "social experiment." Only then does the film present a glimmer of hope.
Darryl Revok's backstory.
Mrs. Terrain's declining health — "there's been a little complication with my complication" — in Brazil.
- And on that note, the entire movie itself. Any time It Gets Better is a Hope Spot whose sole purpose is to make the protagonist fall from that much higher.
Schindlers List is a steady descent to hell for the Jews in Poland, even when some of them say that things cannot get any worse, they do.
- Given the story's setting and subject matter, this isn't surprising at all — the Holocaust in general was a long series of things getting very, very worse for the Jews during World War II, along with everyone else that the Nazi regime considered undesirable or inferior.
Roman Polanski's Chinatown is this trope in a goddamn nutshell. When we say that Jake Gittes, the protagonist of the movie, does not know what he is dealing with, we mean every word.
Pretty much all of Aliens involves things steadily getting worse. But a particular standout is when having already had most of the squad killed and their dropship destroyed, Bishop discovers that the entire facillity is about to suffer a nuclear explosion.
- And then there's Alien 3.
The Butterfly Effect takes this trope and runs away with it.
The whole plot of District9 is a series of It Got Worse on both overall and individual scales:
- A horde of aliens strands to Earth after their superiors die of an epidemy. They have no way to return home and are starving. Then humans relocate them to the surface and even establish contact of a sort but then quicly get dissillusioned about them and lуае them to the mercy of a greedy and unscrupulous corporation. Ensues 20 years of neglect and oppression, 20 years of living in unbelievable slums, starving and dealing with cannibalistic negroes and cruel mercenaries. And then aliens are finally moved...into a regular concentration camp.
- The pen-pusher desc-jockey pin-stripper Hero Wikkus "Spineless" Van Der Merve resided more or less happily in his cubcile in the bowels of the ~~Omnicidal United~~ MNU, when he is yanked out of there and entrusted with evicting a horde of extra-strong irascible aliens from their slums into the said concentration camp and is accompanied by a Colonel Bad Ass who despises him and treats him like crap. THEN he accidentially gets sprayed with alien substance which slowly, seemingly painfully and oh so gruesomly mutates him into an alien.THEN the Corrupt Corporate Executive decides to dissect him alive so they could study the mutation process and gain access to the alien DNA-based weponry.THEN he escapes but has nowhere to go, since MNU spread lies about him being a terrorist and having sex with aliens and even his wife denounced him. So he rushes to find the alien who created the substance, finds him, together they obtain the substance needed for the cure. THEN Wikus learns that the alien changed his mind and will only be able to cure him in three years.THEN panic-stricken Wikus knocks the alien down, highjacks his shuttle and makes a desperate rush to the mothership but gets shot down and is forced to fight a whole platoon of mercenaries while wearing alien power armor.Ok, the rest perhaps classifies as "It got worse but HELL MORE AWESOME" but still worse.

Close Film

Hubert Selby's Requiem For A Dream. In fact, he was probably thinking "How could I possibly make this worse?" the entire time writing the book.
- On the DVD Commentary for The Film Of The Book, director Darren Aronofsky recalls a conversation he had with Selby during the planning phase. Aronofsky asked if Harry was supposed to survive the end of the novel. Selby's response: "Of course he lives. He has to suffer more."
While good things do occasionally happen in A Song Of Ice And Fire, when bad things happen, they do so in the very worst possible way. And the same goes for characters that do bad things.
In the future world described in The Time Machine, the human race has degenerated into Morlocks and Eloi. In the even more distant futures, Morlocks and Eloi have disappeared, along with all other forms of vertebrate life. Little is left but an endless ocean, a dying sun and a bitter wind. And a creepy flapping thing that comes after you.
- The flappy thing has been theorized to be the final devolution of humans. In the book's defense, the existence of Time Travel at least makes it more hopeful than some universes.
This could be said for number of the books in the Harry Potter series, but I feel that Goblet of Fire is a huge It Got Worse. Let's see... near the end, Harry and Cedric get through the myriad dangers of the Triwizard Tournament, only to not tie for the Triwizard Tournament, instead being transported to a place where Cedric gets promptly killed, Voldemort is restored to his body, Harry gets tortured repeatedly and nearly murdered. He finally escapes and the worst seems over... until Mad-Eye, a Death Eater in disguise, brings Harry up to his office and nearly kills him again.
- It also is the turning point of the series, which from that point on becomes grimmer and darker with each book.
In House Of Leaves, Tom Navidson's meaningless death came after the house started trying to eat everyone inside it. That came after Will Navidson being stranded in the labyrinth for a week, which was directly after Holloway blew Jed's head off. Really, it was a downward spiral, or maybe a string of It Got Worse moments.
This trope is pretty much the bread and butter of the Sword Of Truth series. Each book somehow gets progressively worse, despite the first book starting with all of creation being on the brink of oblivion. Terry Goodkind is almost disturbingly fond of the plot rape.
Thomas Hardy adores this trope, especially in his later novels. "It Got Worse" could be an alternate title for Jude the Obscure. Jude begins his life as an unloved orphan, grows up to be tricked into marriage with a coarse woman who destroys any chance he has to reach intellectual fulfillment and then leaves him, and then falls in love with his cousin Sue, who proceeds to marry his mentor. Sue eventually runs away with Jude, but refuses to marry him, which (due to Victorian morality) condemns them and their children to an endless cycle of transience and poverty. It Gets Worse. Their nine-year-old son pulls a murder-suicide, hanging himself and his siblings when he realizes Jude and Sue can't provide for them. Sue has a mental breakdown and leaves Jude for her first husband. It Gets Worse. Jude meets Sue privately to try to convince her to return, but finds that she blames her children's fate on her and Jude's sins and means to devote the rest of her life to religious penance. This completely obliterates any hope Jude has in both religion and humanity. His first wife then tricks him into remarrying her, just in time for him to get pneumonia and die. As a final kicker, he dies alone because his wife is out on a date with another man.
- A Radio 4 Panel Show about literature once had a round "Things literary characters would never say". The winner was "Anyone in a Thomas Hardy novel: 'Things can only get better.'"
There really isn't a whole lot else in A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Seriously. The Snicket Warning Label has its name for a reason.
The Seafort Saga can be described as "Anvil drops on Seafort. Anvil drops on Seafort. Two anvils drop on Seafort. Giant anvil drops on Seafort..."
Germinal. At the start of the book, the coal-miners are overworked, underpaid, and working under horrible conditions. Enter the protagonist, who convinces them to go on strike to improve their lot. Their failure is more than just a little tragic.
"It Got Worse" pretty much sums up the whole of Ian Irvine's Three Worlds series, giving him scope to end every book (even some at the end of supposedly self-contained series) with a ridiculously hopeless-seeming Cliff Hanger. Mauve Shirts get killed off at random, plans fail, main characters get ambushed, captured, tortured and horrifically injured; it's not an Ian Irvine book if someone isn't trying to scale a frozen, razor-sharp mountain ridge with at least two broken limbs and losing blood by the minute, while being pursued by vicious soldiers with some sort of Secret Art-powered flying machine,and he's still doing.
The first half of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is essentially this happening over and over again.
The first half of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy is also a laundry list of bad news for NATO. First, the Soviets launch a Macross Missile Massacre against the outpost on Iceland, resulting in a Five Man Band situation for the Americans. Two chapters later, a NATO carrier strike force falls victim to Bombers On The Screen. To top it off, by Chapter 28, the Dirty Communists make a strategic breakthrough in the town of Alfeld, West Germany. Fortunately, that book ends happily when General Colonel Alekseyev refuses to help unleash Mnogo Nukes after the Red Army fails to make progress.
A rather big part of the Silmarillion can be called this — although sometimes it got better for brief periods of time, the inability of the Noldor to defeat Morgoth was a Foregone Conclusion. Perhaps the best example of It Got Worse within the overall work is the story of Turin Turambar, which invokes just about every doomed hero trope in existence.
The Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove takes It Got Worse almost as far as it can go in regards to the human race. Over 8 books we get: a world wide clandestine civil war, which develops into open revolution, then open war that killed practically everyone on the Mars colony, followed by a Colony Drop that leads to the utter collapse of all civilization in North America (when next we see them they are basically techno-tribes fighting wars killing millions for possession of North America). Next we have a plague that cripples Southern Europe, which is partly good because no one notices (outside the government of City Europe) that a quarter of a million people died when a storm hit France. Europe and Western Asia go to war with Africa. The rulers of South America, Australia, Africa and all of Asia are removed from power, causing civil wars there and the rise of Warlords. Civil War (notice the pattern?) breaks out in Europe and the ruling Emperor kills 20 million of his own people just to hold off the enemy, and only survives because the Warlords backstab the new Fuehrer of Europe. Then the leader of the original rebels returns from Pluto with 100 million copies of himself, killing half the human race. Then a plague breaks out at the end killing off basically 99.99% of the human race (which by this stage probably doesn't consist of many people)...and it gets even worse. Eventually, Earth returns to just being inhabited by plants and the only surviving humans were already leaving Earth 10 years before and colonized another planet..but only after some of them help another Earth from economic collapse even worse then their Earth did. All this because a General didn't do what he was told.
This is pretty much the story of the Mistborn Trilogy. No matter what happens, until the VERY end of the series, things get worse. Even if the good guys win. Heck, especially if the good guys win. Oh, and this is a series that starts with the world as an ash-covered wasteland under the millennium-long tyrannical rule of the seemingly immortal Lord Ruler.
John Steinbeck's work in general, but The Grapes Of Wrath in particular.
"Robin Hobb" seems to love this trope as well, as a lot of her plots seem to centre around "What's the absolute worst thing that could happen to my main character?" Particularly in her Farseer Trilogy.
The story "Tough to be a god" by Strugatski brothers starts by a nice, brave and kind charachter from a shiny Utopia being a on a medieval planet to study comparative history (Don't ask). The standard medieval world is bad enough, but then an Evil Chancellor Reba usurps the power and goes all Pol Pot on educated people (where "educated" means everybody who can write his own name, unless he is an aristocrate; but even this is not a 100% protection). Then Reba poisons the king and the prince and blames the protagonist on it. Then hero's Love Interest is killed, he snaps and goes on Roaring Rampage Of Revenge, at which point he is forcibly removed from this world, but his earlier thought indicate that because of his actions it will yet get worse on this world (because by killing all Lawful Evil Mooks he paved the way for Chaotic Evil barbarians). Oh, and he is now pretty much outracized on Earth, too because of his actions...
"It Got Worse" is the entire plot of The Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf's Children, written by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steve Barnes. The story begins with a bunch of Earth's best and brightest on a ship headed to a new planet for a colonization project. It's only after they arrive that they find out that the cryogenics they used during the long trip caused ice crystals to form in their brains. So a bunch of Earth's best and brightest are stuck on an alien world — and they all have brain damage to various degrees. Things go bad when people start to vanish, and the colonists think that a murderer is in their midst. Turns out there is, and it's one of the local wildlife: a deadly predator with Super Speed which is dubbed a grendel. Things seem to get better after it's finally slain (but not before it killed about 20 more people). Then they find out that the "fish" (which they call samlon) they've been eating are actually baby grendels — and without the mother pumping chemicals into the water to slow down their growth, they quickly mature into vicious and hungry adult grendels. The colonists only survive thanks to the desperate actions of Joe Sikes, who dumps oil into the island's rivers and lights it on fire. And this is just the first book. Things somehow get much worse in the sequel after a rather peaceful Time Skip thanks to a twisted Magnificent Bastard and a huge swarm of flesh-eating bees with Super Speed. Flesh-eating bees with Super Speed. Thankfully things do get better in the end.
The beginning of American Gods. Having been in prison for three years, the protagonist gets out, only to find out his wife has died in a car crash. Caused by her performing an ultimately fatal sex act on the driver, who just happens to be his best friend from before he went into prison. Ouch.
Voltaire's Candide is long stretches of It Got Worse, with occasional respites of getting better so things can get worse again.
World Binder is about how It Got Worse for both its entire series and the world it is set in,because of the efforts of The Chosen One. Things continually get worse for the protagonists,too - the climactic battle at the end meticulously crushes the hopes of the entire human race. Only a small incidental detail prevents it from becoming an utter Downer Ending.
The Thai novel, The Judgment by Chart Korbjitti could be described as this. Malicious gossip proceeds to ruin the life of a guy who just wanted to do the right thing by taking care of his father's insane (or merely mentally retarded) widow. Cue a downward spiral into alcoholism, social ostracization, the death of the lead's principles, recurring illness, a beating from some angry villagers, being cheated of his life savings, and death that is contrasted with the village's modernization.
The Chaos War in the Dragonlance novels.
- And then it got worse when the Dragon Overlords showed up and enslaved Krynn.
  - And then the War of Souls happened, and it got even WORSE.

Close Literature

In a Season 4 episode of Battlestar Galactica, recurring character Cally is on the edge of a nervous breakdown due to stress, mixing medications, and the fact that her husband appears to be having an affair. Then, she learns that her husband is actually a Cylon, which provokes her to take her infant son to an airlock, with plans to kill them both. She's talked out of it by the very woman she suspects her husband of cheating on her with, but then after Callie has handed the woman her child, she knocks Cally out. She regains consciousness in the same airlock, in time to see the woman on the other side of a glass barrier, still holding the kid. The woman then kills Cally by launching her into space.
- Which doesn't make much sense when we find out later that Cally was the one who was the cheater, and her child isn't her husband's child at all, and she knew about it at the time. I think I sense a plot hole......
  - Cally didn't cheat, she slept with Hotdog before marrying the Chief (Word Of God). She wanted to get herself and her child out of the living-with-a-Cylon-nightmare, it didn't matter that Chief wasn't the biological father, so the attempted murder-suicide still makes sense for a medicated and mentally disturbed person such as she was at the time.
  - And it gets even worse in Sometimes A Great Notion, where Earth's revealed to be a desolate wasteland that was inhabited by Cylons. Because of that, half the cast became ~~borderline~~ suicidal, a quarter of the cast lost all hope, and the rest are now paranoid and reliving past lives.
  - And then a mutiny breaks out on board Galactica.
  - It got better, surprisingly, but then Ellen Tigh reappeared and Anders remembered his past as a Cylon, which caused Tigh to lose his affection towards Caprica-Six which caused her to miscarry, and once again bring up the "Who's the final Cylon" debate, respectively. Oh, and the reason Anders could remember his past was because of a gunshot wound to the head, and now he's brain-dead. Or is he? This is Galactica, people, if the stars' reactions to the ending script is any indication ("I cried, I was relieved, I was furious), it's never going to get better.
  - Somewhat Jossed. It turned out Boomer, who apparently had a change of heart and returned Ellen to Galactica, was on orders from Cavil to kidnap Hera Agathon to be studied. To this end,Boomer emotionally manipulated Tyrol, brutally beat up her "twin" Athena, seduced and had sex with an unsuspecting Helo, all while Athena was forced to watch while she was Bound And Gagged and Stuffed Into A Locker. Boomer succeeds in getting Hera to Cavil, but not before using her ship's FTL jump to cause a chain reaction that badly cripples Galactica, and then starts having second thoughts when she begins to bond with her "niece." Finally, Adama is forced to realize that Galactica is going to kick the bucket, and conducts a rescue mission as a last hoorah. After a huge battle, Boomer redeeming herself by rescuing Hera and returning her to Galactica before getting shot to death, and the "Opera House Prophecy" coming true, Cavil's forces are defeated, and Starbuck makes one last jump with the ship using coordinates she learned from a certain song. Galactica gets irreversibly damaged with that jump, but it turns out they've made it to a habitable planet - our Earth. All in all, the series gets somewhat better, resulting in a Bittersweet Ending.
After almost every Supernatural episode everyone thought that Dean was going to recover from his nervous breakdown and gain some peace and some self-worth. After venting his frustration out on his car? No. After acting like a Jerkass before telling Sam how he was feeling? Nope. After being tempted but deciding not to sell his soul to bring his father back? Nah. After letting out the traumatizing secret that's been eating him apart for a good portion of the season? Hell no. After finding out just how deeply self-loathing he is but forcing himself out in "What Is and What Should Never Be"? God no. When Sam dies in his arms, the breakdown finally culminates in selling his soul like it's a worthless piece of tat in "All Hell Breaks Loose." Even after he makes the revelation that he doesn't deserve to die in "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", we're still reminded that it's too little, too late and he's going to hell whether he likes it or not. And let's face it, has anything ever got truly better on this show?
- It Got Worse. He got torn apart by demonic doggies in the season finale and now gets to hang in hell. Can't wait to see how they top that in season four. Poisonous fire?
  - Becoming an Angel's bitch apparently. It remains to be seen how much worse this actually is, but being Supernatural it's hardly likely to be sunshine and roses. Oh and he appears to have developed a level of PTSD resulting from his time in hell. The Supernatural writers really are making Break The Cutie into an art form.
  - Season 4 provides a very good example of It Got Worse. First, we find out that Dean remembers his time in Hell. Then we find out that 40 years passed in Hell as opposed to 4 months on Earth. And then we find out that during those last 10 years, he tortured souls in exchange for not being tortured himself. And then we find out that he enjoyed it. Jesus Christ, writers.
  - And when they start dropping hints about more shattering revelations, you have to really wonder what is left. Really. It boggles the mind.
  - But then, of course, It Got Worse. Dean was forced to torture Alistair for information despite the high possibility of that fucking him up royally. During their little torture session Dean found out that it was him getting off the rack to torture souls that began the apocalypse in the first place and that it's his job to stop it. And "supposedly" their dad made it 100 years without breaking, where he only went 30. Also then we discover that Sam is drinking Ruby's blood for more power, Uriel was killing off angels because he sided with Lucifer, and Castiel was losing his faith. So much good times, I hardly know what to do with it all.
  - And even WORSE as of the finale. Zachariah wanted the end of the world to come so that everything would be a paradise(as he is certain his side would win - although rogues like Uriel, not to mention the mere fact there is a struggle in the first place put the odds at closer to 50/50, Castiel defied him and is probably dead, Dean told Sam that if he walked out the door that was the end of them and when he called to apologize his words on the voice mail were mystically transformed by unknown forces from loving apology to hateful rant ("you bloodsucking freak, I am going to kill you, etc."), and if that weren't enough, Ruby manages to lead Sam right into breaking the final seal—killing Lilith. So the season ends with both boys standing above Lilith's corpse as Lucifer is about to rise. Probably only God could save them now, but if Zachariah's right, that won't be happening. I really think we've finally hit rock bottom of "It Got Worse" for this show. One has to wonder how much worse whatever the angels planned to do to Dean so that he could beat Lucifer would have been. We'll probably find out in September when season five starts.
  - This Troper was right, the angels did have nefarious plans for Dean. Vessel of Michael. Man, watching a possessed Dean coldly cut down Sam would be painful to watch. Good thing they haven't gone there yet.
In Babylon 5, the Shadows have been manipulating events behind the scenes, leading to an outbreak of war between the Narn and Centauri, followed by Centauri attacks on other neighbors after the fall of the Narn. Then, it gets worse when the Shadows become openly involved, using their highly advanced ships to attack most of the other races. Then, it gets even worse when, after the main character drops a nuke on the Shadow homeworld, the Vorlons whip out their Planetkiller ships, using them on any world under the Shadows' influence, regardless of population or how many people were under Shadow influence. Yes, it gets even worse; the Shadows respond with their Planetkillers, which happens to be a frickin' cloud the size of a planet which envelops worlds before nuking them to hell and back! They wipe out planets under Vorlon influence, again, without regard to population. Then it gets better. But not for Londo.
In the NCIS season 6 finale, Ziva is left behind in Israel after Tony kills her boyfriend. It gets worse when the last shot of the episode is Ziva being tortured in Somalia.
- She gets better.
In the Doctor Who episode "Army of Ghosts," the Cybermen have crossed the dimensions from a parallel world, infiltrating five million advanced cybernetic soldiers into every city on Earth. It is, as the Doctor noted, not a invasion, but a victory, so complete and sudden is the conquest. But then, in the bowels of the Torchwood institute, the Void Sphere opens, and four Daleks emerge.
- To make it clearer, four Daleks might not sound like much, but they are the bigger threat and could easily defeat millions of Cybermen. One would probably win.
  - "This is not war, this is pest control!"
- And not just ANY four Daleks. The CULT OF SKARO.
- Of course the millions of Cybermen were inferior knockoffs from an Alternate Universe with technology comparable to at best, really advanced 21st Century Earth matter instead of the Mondasians who have probably held their own against the Dalek Empire.
The first episode of Lost is a good example: around 40 people are crashed onto an island: they're dying, burning, getting ripped up by engines, and overall mayhem is going on. At the end of the episode, as all the trauma seems to be settling and the people are ready to start to go search for the black box from the cockpit in the jungle, what better time to find out that a tree-ripping, machine-noise-making monster lives right next door?
Let's just say the work of Joss Whedon embodies this trope and leave it at that.
- Let's not. Dollhouse. "Epitaph One". Period.
It Got Worse is probably a good way to describe Hawkeye's numerous breakdowns on MASH, going from just making stuff up in a Season One episode to a massive one that he doesn't exactly recover from in the Grand Finale.
Law & Order: SVU is made of this trope. The show is about a crime unit that investigates sexual crimes, so the story almost always starts with some sadistic and horrible crime. As the twists and turns of the mystery unfold, the scenario almost always gets worse. More victims are found, the runaway turns up dead, the victim commits suicide — whatever. There's one thing that's certain about every episode: no matter how bad it starts, it will get worse.
Criminal Minds has several episodes in which the unsub they think has killed a limited number of people actually has killed dozens more ("The Fox", "Open Season", "To Hell..."/"...And Back"), or the unsub escalates the violence ("Omnivore"), or the crimes themselves turn out to be even more horrific than first imagined ("Legacy"). In "Lucky", what seems to be just another serial killer turns out to be a cannibal, and then it really gets worse: the cannibal fed one of his victims to the rest of the community in a pot of chili.
- It Got Worse is pretty much the catchphrase of this show. Don't forget that at the end of "...And Back" the team comes home, tired and a bit horrified, right before Hotch is attacked in his apartment by the Reaper. In the next episode, only four hours after "...And Back"'s events, the team gets a new case, realizes Hotch is missing, and only three of the characters can know that Hotch is in the hospital after being stabbed nine times. He got better. Sorta.
Torchwood. Children of Earth. Jesus Christ. It's like the universe was watching and secretly planning, "how can we make this even more of a living hell for the Torchwood staff?"
- Also "How can we make what they're doing to the kids any worse?" From they're taking them, to they're taking them and the kids won't age, to they're incorperating them into their bodies, to they're incorperating them into their bodies because the kids produce feel-good chemicals. For 60 years the kids have been trapped unaging, plugged into an alien's body because they make them high. There's signs they're at least partially concious too.
- Not just the Torchwood staff.
The West Wing episode "18th and Potomac" involves the staff desperately trying to plan their response to a public relations nightmare about to snap the Bartlett presidency in half. And then Mrs. Landingham is smashed by a drunk-driver at the aforementioned intersection. Cue cheerful credits music!

Close Live Action TV

Warhammer 40000. It never got better.
- An appropriate example: The Eldar. Once rulers of a galaxy-spanning empire whose technology had relieved it's every citizen of all need for manual labour and given them the ability to move planets "to get a better view" and extinguish stars descended into anarchy amidst an orgy of cultish violence and depravity, destroying their empire and much of their civilization. Then it got worse: The combined lust and excess of the species coalesced in the Warp to spawn a new Dark God, destroying their homeworld, everything around it for about fifty light-years and submerging the entire region in a Warp-realspace overlap where Daemons play amongst the ruins of the lost Eldar civilisation.
  - Then it got even worse: That new dark god eats Eldar souls for breakfast, literally, and consequently hunts down and destroys the few survivors wherever possible. Oh and then the Humans grew to fill most of the power vacuum, and also want to hunt the last dregs of the Eldar to extinction. This isn't anything personal though; the Imperium feels that way about all sentient alien species without fear or favour.
  - And now the Necrons, who the Eldar were just barely able to defeat at the height of their power, have started to wake up again. Of course, the Eldar are on the verge of extinction, so they have no hope of defeating the Necrontyr. On top of that, their old foes the Dark Eldar, Orks, and the forces of Chaos are on the rise, and a bunch of extra-galactic bugs are barging into the picture as well. If the Eldar decided to ally with the Tau and those hairy mon-keigh (fun fact; "mon-keigh" doesn't mean "human", it means "those who must be exterminated"), they might be strong enough to defeat one of those threats...and of course, instead of forming an alliance, the nominally "good" guys are still trying to kill each other.
An inherent part of the Old World Of Darkness series, especially Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. To take an example from the backstory of the latter, first the spirit of order went crazy. Then the essential spirit responsible for turning ordered matter into energy was imprisoned, dooming all natural things to a slow death as the very essence of creative energy within the universe ran out. Then little pieces of said spirit oozed through the side of the cage, driven mad in the process, dropping into the material world like radioactive, acidic, mind- and soul-devouring monsters. Then the central spirit itself started breaking loose like its pieces did. Those who peek into the cage are driven mad by the exposure, able to do little more than mewl softly and attack the sane. There's a reason that the game had an "End World Now" button.
- And White Wolf kicks it up a notch with the newer Age of Sorrows, in which Exalted takes place. Exalted are reincarnating god-men who were cursed by primordial gods (whom they killed basically out of spite) and slowly but surely go more and more insane and aggressive with time. Exalts get STRONGER the longer they live, as well. Insane, aggressive, and POWERFUL god-men are BAD. The lead, biggest 'n baddest Exalts, the Solars, were exterminated for their madness in the bloodiest war existence could comprehend. Their usurpers, the Dragon Blooded, drastically decayed reality because they couldn't hold it in place as well as their superior dead brethren could. At the time Exalted takes place, the once-dead Solars have been reincarnating, and are VERY pissed off. Making this situation worse, the world has Eldritch Abominations galore SURROUNDING THE ENTIRE WORLD and about half the mighty Solars became LIQUID EVIL DEATH and are working under 13 pseudo-gods (who in turn are commanded by the primordial gods slain in the beginning FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE) with the ultimate goal of ENDING REALITY. Really, was living under the rule of some prick gods ALL THAT BAD when compared to how It ALL Got Worse?
- To clarify, the setting of Exalted has the following It Got Worse moments. Total chaos of omniexistence -> primordial assholes create the world as a vacation spa and play Cosmic Xbox -> their servant Gods create the Exalted to beat up said primordial assholes and take over the cosmic Xbox, leading to said Exalted getting cursed -> The most powerful Exalted go nuts after centuries of raw power and cursed madness, and are put down by their brethren -> The weakest of the Exalts are set up as a puppet government, but HEY LOOK a plague that wiped out 90% of the world's life (yes, all of it). Oh, and hey look, the chaotic monstrosities from way back are coming to wipe this ugly 'reality' out of existence. -> Luckily, one woman gets access to the ultimate superweapon, stops the baddies, and sets up a brutal dictatorship with her decadent, incestuous descendants -> Hey look, the Solars are BACK. Except for the 2/6s of them who now work for the primordial assholes they KILLED and want to cast EVERYTHING into a Void so they can finally stop suffering. And the 1/6 who will be the private buttmonkeys of the primordial asshole survivors they imprisoned. IN THE FLESH OF THE ENEMY LEADER. And did I mention those ineffable chaos things? They're hungry, too. And all of the Exalted are busy plotting to kill each other 'for the greater good'. The gods are either corrupt or jaded. The setting's Prometheus is dying and his children are invading to steal magical metals and SOULS to feed him...did I leave out anything? Oh, right. The Exalted are all still cursed. (Including the ones who have the best shot of seeing what's going on. Their curse turns them into micromanaging jerkasses who make critical blunders - and gets worse when they work together.) Take that, Warhammer 40k.
  - Of course Exalted represents something of a subversion as well, seeing as the basic premise is that the player will eventually be strong enough to punch all of those threats in the crotch... simultaneously... while also surfing down a mountain... on the back of a dinosaur... whilst on fire from his/her awesomeness.
  - Whereas Warhammer 40k is probably the better example: you are working for one of those threats, and it does not matter how well you do or who you fight-you are helping make things worse, and when you die, you'll contribute to making things worse.
  - So what would it take to heal the Warhammer 40,000 universe? (Other than total effacement? We don't want to defeat the purpose of omnisalvation...)
  - It depends on how many species you want around afterwards, but the main things would be taking the Warp back to the way it was before the War in Heaven(calm and populated by non-sentient non-demonic creatures), annihilation of the Necrons, Tyranids, and Dark Eldar, and copies of the Necrons' Inertialless Drives for everyone so they don't have to go into the Warp for FTL travel to start. The God Emperor getting up and saying "Let us give peace a chance, then blow them to hell if they betray us like the other aliens did in the Age of Strife" would also be good.
Really just about any RPG module qualifies as this. You head off to a town to find a missing person, but it turns out he was kidnapped by Kobolds, but the Kobolds are really working for a local group of Goblins. The Goblins themselves are actually in the employ of a Necromancer, but the Necromancer's true master is... and so on and so on.
The origin of the monster Grond in "Champions" is pretty much this. While in prison, a criminal volunteers for medical experiments. But one night, they inject him with the wrong stuff. He pitches a fit, the guards throw him into a shelf of chemicals, which enter his bloodstream through cuts from all the glass. He escapes the prison, falls into a heavily polluted river, and gets struck by lightning. And they think radiation was involved too. Bloody hell.
Bliss Stage. Just read it. It never gets better. Those poor kids.

Close Tabletop RPG

Throughout most of the game of Final Fantasy VI, villains are constantly one upping the heroes and making things worse. Practically every time the players get ahead they're forced to go two steps back. When the party meets up with The Resistance to battle the empire, the guide and leader of the resistance gets killed by a recurring purple octopus and the entire party gets seperated. During this the party members attempts to stop a villain from poisoning an entire kingdom but no matter what you do you can never succeed. After they finally regroup and start to sucessfully deter the Empire, the main character turns into a monster and flies off into the distance. Then, after going on a mission to restore the character to normal, the party inadvertantly reveals important secrets to the Empire that only makes them more powerful; the villain also tricks the characters into distrusting each other. Some short time later the party leads them directly to an important source of power that they weren't even sure existed. Although the encounter initially results in damage to the Empire, the party is tricked by the Empire into thinking that it has decided to abandon its evil ways, and then gets tricked into helping the Empire locate yet another source of power under the pretense of initiating negotiations. Then, the only good person in the Empire is murdered by the most evil character in the entire game. At this point the party has basically done nothing but assist the Evil Empire into tapping into the source of all power. In a last ditch effort to put a stop to the Empire once and for all, the party confronts them at the source of power, only to bear witness to the Emperor's lacky (afformentioned most evil person) killing his own ruler and then taking control of the ultimate power all for himself, causing a chain reaction in the process that initiates cataclysmic events resulting in mass death and the face of the world being completely restructured. After this, said villain becomes a literal god of the planet, unleashes hordes of monsters, and smites entire towns for opposing him, or just for fun. The world at this point is so bad that people long for the days of the Evil Empire. The only person that likes the new world other than the big bad is a man who makes money by hosting fights to the death. Plants and most people alike have given up their will to live, including many members of the party, one of whom joins a cult that worships the Big Bad an spends his entire time walking in a circle.
- That's a wall of text. Here's the short version. Shit got worse.
To a lesser degree than the above, Final Fantasy V. First, the Wind Crystal breaks, and Lenna's father mysteriously vanishes after giving the four heroes the quest to protect the rest of them. They fail. Completely. Although you do get shiny new jobs out of the crystal shards. So much for "the nick of time." Also, most of the royalty who aren't in the party ends up if not dead, then in a very bad way as the result of Exdeath. Lenna, Faris, and King Tycoon are reunited after King Tycoon's possesion by Exdeath is broken... only for Tycoon to die moments later . Then in the second half, Galuf's old friend Xezat dies. Then Galuf dies. Then the last of the four original heroes, Kelger, dies. And then Exdeath gets the power of the Void and uses it to trash the recombined world. And then he becomes an eldritch abomination of immense power and nihilism. Fortunately, being more of a lighthearted game, all of this only ends up making the heroes more determined.
In Call Of Duty 4, the mission "Shock and Awe" goes from bad to worse very fast. You start off rescuing an advance unit of Marines trapped by Al-Asad's fanatical soldiers, and right after evacuating them, the Cobra helicopter that's been backing you up all mission long goes down. You swoop in to save her, and learn that there's a nuclear warhead found in the city. After you pull her out, and are bugging out of town, the nuke goes off. You survive the aftermath....for a few minutes.
The Jumi and Dragoon arc of Legend Of Mana drops the game into this trope, although there are alternatives. The former has the character watch as an entire race of people are annihilated by a single individual who is constantly powered up by the murders, before your character is finally turned into a rock. The latter starts with your character being imprisoned in Hell. It gets worse from there.
Secret Of Mana was, as a whole, a long series of It Got Worse. It starts off with a world-spanning evil empire. Then the evil empire wants to blow up the world, and each step they progress ruins the entire world's essence. Then, just as things look their darkest and the Heroes have found their last hope... the bad guys vaporise it in a column of light. The world-destroying weapon just finished its boot-up cycle. Now it and its organic opposite will blow humanity back to the stone age if they aren't stopped. You think stopping just the weapon would work? Now its organic counterpart will make sure that no living thing but itself can survive. Oh, and it's also the last source of magic in the world, so blowing it up will deprive a dependent humanity of magic and eventually cause the world to fall apart at its seams.
Likewise, Gears Of War — particularly the PC port with additional chapters — is basically a series of It Got Worse moments. The planet's overrun with Mooks and their giant insect-dinosaur pets, the Phlebotinum the team spent the entire first two-thirds of the game finding and deploying didn't do its job, the last-ditch nuke got hijacked by the Big Bad and oh, yes, Mission Control can't contact you with important information half the time due to enemy signal jamming.
Killzone 2. Oooh, boy, Killzone 2. So, Visari's dead! The war has finally concluded. Pshaw, "The madness begins", right? It turns out only a few fleeting moments later that those words are hardly a lie. An ungodly huge Helghast fleet enters out of nowhere, obliterates whatever aerial support the ISA ground forces still had in the blink of an eye, and, to top it off, the player character quite possibly resigns himself to death.
The Halo series has things get worse, then humanity makes an even more unlikely stand, but causes further worsening. First game, most of the planets of Earth's formerly vast empire have been obliterated and their military is shattered, the Covenant have crushed the only project showing any military success against them with a few hundred survivors, who through sheer heroic potency manage to wipe out the entire Covenant armada and destroy a galaxy-threatening superplague. Except they won so hard that the Covenant panicked and found Earth (now one for the few planets left) by accident and released the same superplague. Now even fewer humans manage to be in exactly the right place to destroy a good chunk of the Covenant, split its forces and ally with the best fighters, and stop them wiping out all sentient life. Except in doing so, they handed the superplague, now with added Hivemind, access to interstellar travel, meaning in a few thousand years they'll have to erase all sentient life to stop it, and pushed the Covenant into launching an invasion of Earth that kills over 99% of our surviving population (Less than a million on Earth left) and obliterates our military. But then even fewer humans than before manage to wipe out the entire Covenant militarily, kill the superplague's Hivemind, and win the war. Oh, and then it becomes an It Got Worse for the Covenant.
- One of the chapters is actually called "Wait, It Gets Worse."
The plot of Half-Life is another long string of these. The major plot points, in order: Gordon Freeman, player character and MIT-educated scientist, draws the short straw and has to do hazardous materials handling for an experiment at the super-secret government lab where he works. Naturally, the experiment goes awry and Gordon gets knocked out and experiences a nightmarish vision/cross-dimensional trip. After this he must make his way through the crumbling wreckage of the lab, dealing with malfunctioning machinery. Then, he must fight off monsterous creatures armed with only a crowbar and 9mm pistol. Then, he makes contact with a rescue squad, only to discover that said squad is really a paramilitary force that's wiping out monsters and witnesses alike. Then, after evading them, he winds up having to deal with TWO different varieties of huge frickin' beast in an attempt to find his way to someplace that might be reasonably safe, while STILL dealing with both aliens and soldiers- the latter of which, by the way, are tracking him through devices in the HEV suit he's been wearing all this time. Then, he survives a shootout with a trio of government-employed Glock Ninjas, only to grab a Distress Ball and get mugged for his gear, captured, and left for dead in a trash compactor. Then, he must crawl through a hazardous waste management armed with little more than his trusty crowbar. Then, he has to flee across the mountainside chased by a frickin' helicopter gunship, then shoot said gunship down, then go mano a mano with a TANK. THEN, after navigating a warehouse trapped to the gills with explosives, he gets caught in the middle of a Battle Royale With Cheese between the soldiers and the aliens, with both sides quite willing to take time out to shoot at him. THEN, as if that wasn't enough the soldiers bug out leaving Freeman to deal with the aliens all by himself. Finally, he's roped into teleporting into the aliens' home dimension- a place that was the Trope Namer for Xen Syndrome - navigating some Nightmare Fuel landscapes, annoying jumping puzzles, and seemingly endless aliens, en route to a final confrontation with a giant wooden idol shaped like an infant with a head that's on fire. And his reward for all this? he gets abducted by a mysterious individual who's been lurking about all game, who can apparently warp spacetime more or less at will, who is quite obviously evil, and who offers Gordon the choice of being sent into a massive swarm of aliens without any weapons- or going to work for him doing unspecified but certainly hazardous work. So, fellow troper, how bad was your week again?
- The sequel plays this straight for about half the game — Gordon goes from being chased through sewers by the police force of an Orwellian dystopia to being pursued by a helicopter during a speedboat chase through a irradiated marsh, then he arrives at a safe haven only to have it attacked by the enemy ten minutes later, leaving him separated from his allies and forced to crawl through a zombie-infested ruin while throwing junk at said zombies for lack of ammo. This is followed by a road-trip down a deserted highway, still chased by the bad guys and also forced to deal with ravenous Antlions and hazards. However, after that the game starts a mild deconstruction of the trope. While the situations continue to get more threatening over the course of the game, they don't feel like it because Gordon has allies and is actually working proactively against the antagonists. Whereas up until this point he simply been struggling to stay alive.
- It's back to business as usual in the Half-Life 2 expansions, but this example is already overlong, so let's leave it at that.
  - No, I want to continue this trainwreck. Episode One was actually hopeful, what with Gordon and Alex surviving, stealing some good info from the Combine, blowing up the Citadel, stranding the Combine on Earth, and escaping City 17 as it exploded. But then Episode Two comes along and Eli Vance gets killed by The Combine who also steal all of the rebels' secrets.
- And you know that's just Gordon's week. Barney Calhoun and Adrian Sheppard likewise have their own problems that gets worse by the minute.
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue starts off with a world being controlled by a Corrupt Church that claims to worship the goddess Althena but seems more focused on maintaining its own power; meanwhile, the dark god Zophar is slowly reawakening. So you have to journey to the church's headquarters to ask Althena for help. The "Althena" that the church follows is a fake who works for Zophar, as do all of its higher-ups, and the real Althena is imprisoned by a mystical seal. So you go on a quest to unlock the seal, but by the time you finish, Zophar has almost returned. Then you find out that Althena has been dead for 1000 years, and has left nothing but an inspirational message behind. And Zophar picks that exact moment to descend from the world, vaporize the ocean, and start destroying everything. So Lucia decides to absorb Althena's power and all the magic in the world to fight him. But Zophar catches her off-guard and eats her, stealing all the power she absorbed for himself. So now the world is rapidly turning into a barren wasteland, you have no magic, and you have to fight the God of Destruction who also has the power of the Goddess of Creation.
Eversion. It starts off as a cheery and cute little freeware platformer with a flowerlike protagonist that does the Goomba Stomp on cute little goombalike enemies. But as you use your eversion powers to get the gems you have to collect, things gradually get darker and darker. Soon, you're dodging evil hands that shoot up from the pits, the goombalike enemies have turned into evil one-red-eyed monsters with More Teeth Than The Osmond Family, the gems you collect become skulls, the plants become lethal thorns, blood goes flying when you stomp an enemy or when you die, and the whole world in general becomes a scene out of Hell itself. And, if that wasn't enough, there's an evil Outer Limits Twist in store at the end...
Everything in a Jak And Daxter game goes wrong eventually. Everything. Even in the Lighter And Softer first game. Bombs able to blow up the universe? Check. Near-infinite supplies of Dark Eco kept in underground silos that are quite easy to open with the right robot? Check. Villainous aristocrats? Big ol' check. Always Chaotic Evil aliens coming to ally with a cyborg Omnicidal Maniac? Check. And, of course, whenever it looks like the world's been saved, it goes straight back to hell within the week. Oh, and Jak spends about half his life breaking it. Apart from that, it's all good.
Fate Stay Night. All three routes have quite a bit of it in that things will suddenly get a lot worse, in the order of Fate (most idealistic route; town remains mostly unmolested, only bad people die and Shirou wins all battles through Heroic Spirit and Deus Ex Machina), Unlimited Blade Works (middle route; Caster drains and castrates a lot of townspeople (though without killing), Shirou loses Saber, Ayako is abducted, Ilya is killed and Shirou has to depend a lot more on external factors like I Let You Win and exploiting his opponent's Fatal Flaw) and finally Heaven's Feel (most cynical route; massive human casualties across town, all the Servants except Rider are killed or corrupted, Shirou loses all his ideals and his Reality Marble and becomes an Anti Hero that must depend upon a Dangerous Forbidden Technique to win that gives him brain damage and eventually kills him). But hey, at least the final endings are all happy... Well, mostly...
Dead Space. Isaac's heading to a ship to repair a transmitter and meet up with an estranged girlfriend. Said ship turns out to be overrun with some of the freakiest monsters ever. And it turns out that the ship's engines stopped, so that they're going to crash into the planet their orbiting. Then, once Isaac fixes that, the ship's going to run into asteroids unless Isaac manages to shoot them down. Then, it turns out that something's poisoning the air, a Mad Scientist created an Implacable Man, the cure for the air poisoning won't work until you deal with a lovecraftian monster, then your attempts to get a call out for rescue are blocked by a space slug that inexplicably selected the antenna array to sit around, then it turns out the military opened a escape pod full 'o necromorph and now their ship is full of superfast necromorphs, the regenerator returns, then The Mole is revealed, then when you finally seem to have stopped the monsters the mole returns steals the marker and reveals your girlfriend was dead the whole time, then the Big Bad Hive Mind shows up. Then there's a ending that implies that Isaac's either freakin' insane or killed by his zombie girlfriend. Shoot The Shaggy Dog indeed.
- Dead Space: Extraction does this right off the bat and ends in Kill Em All.
The opening cutscene of Ace Combat 6 is a very good example of It Got Worse. You can watch it being MST 3 K'd here.
The Rune Scape quest Hunt For Red Raktuber goes pretty much like this. The player hears from Larry that the penguins have built a submarine. The player infiltrates the penguin base and finds a group of dwarves who teach the player to disarm the submarine. The player infiltrates the submarine and finds the captain has been overtaken by the sea slugs. Then, after supposedly disarming the sub, the player lands on a tiny island south of Ape Atoll and finds the king of the penguins and some KPG agents. The dwarves are from a splinter group of the Red Axe who didn't want to wait for the Red Axe to bring down the humans, and all the player did was send the sub to the island so the King Penguin could take control. Oh, and they take Larry with them to be interrogated and leave the player to die on the island. Yep. It Got Worse. That is, until you find the polar bear ally who is disguised as a tree and get him to give you a ride home.
In Dwarf Fortress, when several of your dwarves die to a siege, megabeast or accident, the carnage may not end there. The death of a dwarf upsets his friends and relatives, who may get angry enough to tantrum, start fistfights or, in extreme cases, become suicidal or Ax Crazy. This results in more deaths, which make even more dwarves unhappy... The resulting tantrum spiral can destroy your entire fortress.
- It does not help that the the fortress guard responds to tantruming dwarves with beatings and incanceration, which makes them even more unhappy. A guard skilled enough in wrestling may even end up beating a dwarf to death for a minor offence.
Diablo.First, the titular demon drives the king insane and posseses his son. The three heroes who stop him, a Rogue, a Mage and a Warrior, become a slave to Andariel, a mad Summoner, and Diablo's new host, respectively. When Diablo is defeated again, his brother Bhaal corrupts the Worldstone, forcing its destruction. This causes Tyreal, the only Angel who can be called a good guy, to become corrupted. And as if that weren't enough, there's a rumor that Deckard Cain, the series mentor, was lieing about being the last of the Horadrim, and was a senile (and possibly insane) old man all along. Oh, and the heroes of Diablo 2 (except, oddly enough, the Barbarian) have gone ax crazy.
Prototype: the first Hunter fight. So you've got this beastie that actually poses a threat by itself, as opposed to the Marines who need numbers. After much effort, even with Marines shooting it alongside you, you succeed in defeating and consuming it, gaining back health and a new power in the process. But wait, we're not done yet, there's two more dropping in! Alex takes one down (or runs down an invisible timer, it's not too clear), but guess what? THREE Hunters drop in, and despite Alex's bravado one can't help feeling at least a bit worried, especially if they struggled with the previous ones. Drop two more (or run down another timer?), and guess what? Five of the fuckers. Fortunately after a while your task switches to destroying fuel tanks instead of killing them all, and that's the last wave... but for what it's worth you'll probably be real tense as the situation just seems to get keeping worse.
In Resident Evil, Sherry Birkin's life story should be titled It Got Worse. First, she gets dumped at the Police Station with the crazy rapist police chief that her parents are paying off because her mother can't be bothered to protect her because she's too busy tramping around the sewers of Raccoon City with a gun for basically no reason. Then, she gets word that her dad's being attacked by the monsters that have started popping up out of nowhere. Then one of them comes after her because Birkin came up with a craaaazy scheme to stick his virus in his daughter's locket to hide it from the company he made the virus for. Then of course, turns out another monster is after her: Her own father, who needs to find a host to implant his embryos in. And that someone needs to be very closely related to him. Guess what that means for poor Sherry? Don't worry, though, Annette's finally going to step it up and cure her daugh- Nevermind, Birkin just killed her. Claire, once again, picks up the slack for the Birkins, and gives Sherry an abortion shot. But it's not over. Not even close. Now Birkin's eating the train which is about to blow up because Umbrella is fucking terrible at making labs that don't blow up. Sherry comes to the rescue and is finally not completely useless by stopping the train, thus killing her own father. Then, Claire, Sherry's new mommy, runs off into the sunset to find Chris. But it's not all bad. Leon can take care of her just fine. Until the government decides to take her into custody. But, whoopsie. Someone found Will's will and Sherry is put under Wesker's care. And then, he goes and gets himself killed by going all Clipped Wing Angel on us. If Sherry isn't in a padded room rocking back and forth by now, she's about to go ax crazy on someone.
- Leon Kennedy's first day on the police force in Raccoon City turned into this. Then his mission to save Ashley Graham, the president's daughter.
- Most of the characters stories could be seen as this. Claire's brother goes missing, and she tracks him down to Racoon City, only to find it overrun by Zombies. She ends up taking care of a child that is being stalked by multiple monsters, and leaves her and the one other person she escaped the Zombie apocalypse with to go find her brother. In Paris, she is kidnapped by the company responsible for the viral outbreak and sent to a prison camp. She escapes just in time for another zombie apocalypse. This time, though, she ends up in Antarctica, her love interest/sidekick is killed, but she reunites with her brother and manages to escape from another self destruct system.
Batma Arkham Asylum is MADE of this trope. Joker takes over Arkahm. Joker lets out the inmates. Joker unleashes big ass Titan monsters. Joker sends Scarecrow after you. Joker MUTATES HIMSELF INTO A TITAN MONSTER! It Got Worse: The Video Game.

Close Video Games

In Erfworld, Parson Gotti is Trapped In Another World in forced servitude as Chief Warlord to Lord Stanley the ~~Plaid~~Tool, who summoned him as a last resort to repel an invading coalition composed of pretty much every other nation in existence. They're outnumbered more than 10 to 1, and Parson attempts a desperate plan to use their dwagons (yes, dwagons, with a "w") to target the enemy's siege engines, hoping to buy a little time. He manages to take out about half of the enemy siege units... but then about half of his dwagons and warlords are lost in the counterattack. Their best spellcaster is rendered catatonic, another is driven mad, and another is killed outright; only two remain unscathed. Stanley, suspecting betrayal, takes their remaining dwagons and one of the casters and goes off to create a new kingdom elsewhere, leaving Parson behind to face the assault.
- Lately, it seems to be getting better.
  - It did◊
The climax of the webcomic It's Walky mainly consisted of several months of this.
Most of Goblins seems to be It Got Worse in one form or another.
- To the point that the few plot twists that aren't It Got Worse to the protagonists are revealed from the perspective of someone to which it is.
The Order Of The Stick seem to spend their time watching things get worse. Blame Cerebus. Holes torn in reality. Roy dying. Shojo dying. The team is split up. Roy's body is used as a bone golem. Haley is even DEEPER in debt to the Thieves' Guild. Vaarsuvius makes a Deal With The Devil, then crosses the Moral Event Horizon within five strips. Rich Burlew is an awesome writer, but seriously — is the moon going to slam into the planet next?
- No, but Belkar approved of V's decision. When Belkar approves of what you did...
College Roomies From Hell!!! was strictly a Gag Series until, at the end of a Mushroom Samba, a very real Satan unceremoniously kills Dave and takes his soul to Hell; according to Word Of God, fan outcry was all that saved him. Even so, Cerebus Syndrome wasn't generally considered to have set in until "The Adversary," where, while being chased by Satan, Margaret explains to Dave that she's fated to bear the Antichrist; meanwhile Roger being a "werecoyote" is revealed to be slowly driving him insane, like it did to his mother, who now lives in the woods and eats people. And that's right, boys and girls...It Got Worse.
- Mike's mother Hazel gets engaged to a Tuxedo And Martini supervillain who, not realizing the connection, kidnaps the male Roomies; this leads to Roger going berserk and tearing a room of his Mooks to pieces, in the first (and angstiest) of many "full-court" fights against them.
- Tsundere Crazy Survivalist Margaret realizes she's killed someone for the first time (something even the cast page had explicitly pointed out she hadn't done "yet") when the shotgunned body of Roger's mother, who had tried to eat her, turns human in front of her.
- When Marsha finds out that April is carrying Mike's child, her chronic jealousy leads to a knife fight, that ends with April accidentally killing Mike, on the same day Dave gives Mike's biological father a fatal heart attack in front of Mike's sister — and Dave's beta love interest — Blue.
- Finally, Marsha tries to kill April only to be interrupted by Hazel...who kills Marsha, turns her into a cyborg, and puts April into a coma — making sure she can still feel pain — until Mike's son is born.
- If you think this is Rock Bottom, keep in mind, they've still got that pesky little Apocalypse to worry about...
Jack. Lets see, ~~born~~ created without genitalia, had a terrible life, died, stuck in Ironic Hell paying for your sins by personifying your major one and doing the worst job in the universe with no memory of why? Well it could be worse, at least you’ve got friends, are in a reasonable position of power to protect them, have occasional angelic support, and aren’t fighting both your Super Powered Evil Side and trying to control a Complete Monster you are sharing a body with after you destroyed his to keep him from ressurecting. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
- Everything, of course! The said monster has apparantly found a way to escape his "prison" and another complete monster, who earlier served mainly as a Butt Monkey, Took A Level In Badass and chewed your ear off. Well, at least It cannot get any worse!
In Zebra Girl it always gets worse. The last two story arcs has been nothing but this.
Eight Bit Theater mostly consists of things getting worse for everyone. But a special one is the team's plan not only failing to kill Sarda, but also making him even more evil and hate-filled than before.
- And things just keep getting worse. First they have to fight the strongest sage in the world, then they have to fight the strongest sage in the world who just absorbed all the power of the 4 elements, then they have to fight the strongest sage in the world who just absorbed all the power of the 4 elements, plus all the evil of the 4 fiends and twice the evil of Black Mage, who just dropped their levels down so far Red Mage can't even cast spells any more, and transformed into the incarnation of chaos itself.

Close Web Comics

What happens in Danny Phantom episode "Public Enemies". It's bad enough he has to deal with his parent's constant pursuit of his ghostly half, but that's been upped to the nth degree after Ghost Cop Walker sends waves of cops to terrorize Amity Park, leaving Danny to not only stop the mess, but deal with the aftermath of the ghosts possessing authority figures and eventually the mayor whom declares Danny the leader of the whole ghost invasion, causing him to be a Hero With Bad Publicity. Despite Danny striving to do good regardless, the real kicker is how the entire town mistreats his ghostly alter ego for the rest of Season One, solved only by the beginning of Season Two. That's got to be frustrating.
- Another great example is "The Ultimate Enemy." Under stress for a big test, Danny accidentally ends up with the answers for said test! And he plans to cheat. Of course, that's not just the end of it. His teacher found out and the Fentons and friends gather together to talk about it when they're all killed. Oh, but that's not all, folks! He goes to live with his former archenemy, Vlad, whom he asks to remove his emotions (by splitting his human and ghost halves). And you'd think it'd end there, but it doesn't. Danny's ghost half kills the human Danny and then unleashes 10 years of complete destruction on everything in his path. This is why the Reset Button exists.
The Simpsons episode "The City of New York Vs. Homer Simpson", Homer's flashback to his last visit to NYC goes like this: he gets a stranger to take his photo, but after taking it, the guy steals his camera, so Homer goes to a cop to report it, and the cop steals his suitcase. Then someone steals his wallet and a bird steals his hot dog. He's covered in trash dumped from a nearby window, and while cleaning himself off, inadvertently tosses a banana peel onto a pimp. The angry pimp chases him and the ladder he climbs to escape falls down a manhole...
Homer:... and that's when the C.H.U.D.s came at me.
Where to even begin with Avatar The Last Airbender? In Season 2 the Gaang starts getting chased by Zuko's much more competent sister, Azula, and her two friends who can throw knives and block bending. Then they make enemies with the government (Dai Li) of Ba-Sing-Se and the Fire Nation captures the city by the end of the season. Then in Season 3, the Fire Nation successfully captures the entire invasion force.
- Speaking of season 2's finale; when Aang gave up his love for Katara in order to save her by activating the avatar state, his most powerful trump card. And is shot down almost immediately by Azula, nearly rendering him worse than dead.
- Or how they introduce the Series Finale? Zuko revealling that the plan by his father upon the advent of the comet is to burn the entire Earth Kingdom to the ground, destroying all life in an attempt to claim the land as permanent Fire Nation Territory. Making the whole "Stop the Fire Lord" thing a whole lot more serious.

Close Western Animation

Doom Metal band Warning's album "Watching From a Distance" is one of the most depressing albums ever made. The first song is heartrending, and each song just gets more depressing.
In another of the most depressing albums of all time, Queensryche's magnum opus concept album "Operation: Mindcrime" tells the story of an angry, drug-addicted, politically and socially frustrated young man recruited as a political assassin for a shady revolutionary who falls in love with his courier, an ex-prostitute turned nun who's still getting sexually assaulted by her priest on a regular basis. The first several songs set up the characters, who they are, what they believe, and how they got to the point they are. By the time the actual events of the story begin, Nikki (the main character) is strung out, burned out, and wants out. Then it gets worse.
Doctor X: Kill her. That's all you have to do.
Nikki: Kill Mary...???
Doctor X: She's a risk. And get the priest as well.
Another uber-depressing (albeit absolutely brilliant) concept album is Pain of Salvation's "The Perfect Element, pt. 1" It introduces us to an adolescent girl who runs away from home after being sexually abused by her father. On the street, she encounters a kindred spirit in a boy with whom she presumably has sex in their mutual desolation. The focus then shifts to the boy's perspective, who reminisces to the listener on the events in his life which led him to the streets all the way back to his birth. At the end of his reminiscence, it's implied that he kills his mother. He later reconciles briefly with the girl, whom he may or may not have impregnated, only to tell her to get away from him. The last we see him, he's lying on a bathroom floor, apparently considering suicide. And this is just the first part of a projected trilogy of albums. Bear in mind that this is just this troper's interpretation: the lyrics are kind of vague.
The album "Angels of Distress" by the Finnish Doom Metal band Shape of Despair. Just when you think the music can't get any more bleak and depressing, it does.
The Irish folk song "Why Paddy’s Not at Work Today" plays this one for laughs.
All the misfortunes piled upon the band Pink Floyd, to the point of absurdity.
Brooke Lundeville's folk-style ballad "The Wreck of the Crash of the Easthill Mining Disaster" only gradually reveals the full tragedy of the industrial accident and its 17 65 ~~159~~ ~~164~~ ~~172; yes, the puppies count~~
Sonata Arctica's "White Pearl, Black Oceans" is pretty much pure this. Its about a lighthouse keeper who gets bored, goes to town, and has a one night stand with a girl. Sure, not that bad. But it then proceeds to explain how he, upon leaving that night gets the SHIT beaten out of him by her hence unmentioned husband. This leads to him lying unconscious without anyone to run the lighthouse, by the time he wakes up, a ship has wrecked. (Possibly the very same which the girl, who was pregnant, had just left in.) He pretty much goes through hell from there, and eventually kills himself.
"Handlebars" by The Flobots.Most likely a social critic about people who join the army or become corrupted governators,presenting their Coming Of Age Story that just gets worse as they grow.From being carefree childs,to manipulative politics to Magnificent Bastarts that can lead to The End Of The World As We Know It at will.The melody and music videorepresent it quite well.

~~222~~ ca. 50,000,000 victims' untimely demise.

Close Music

While this wiki has Finagles Law, Murphy's Law is and variants thereof tend to apply, some examples being:
- "Just when you think things cannot get any worse, they will."
- "If anything just cannot go wrong, it will anyway."
- "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will."
- "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
- "Things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance."
- "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."
- And, Smith's Law: "Murphy was an optimist."
  - For the record, Murphy designed fighter planes in World War Two. It was his job to consider the unpleasant possibilities, if he was going to make chunks of metal fly around in the middle of a battle.
While on it, the WHOLE World War Two can be (mostly)described by It Got Worse.
- As can World War One, the Chinese Revolution, the American Civil War, the Vietnam War... It's almost as if there were a pattern.
  - The 1918 flu pandemic (death toll estimated at between 50 and 100 million, on top of the millions WW 1 claimed).
Lampshade Hanging example: This troper is fond of commenting that everything can be made worse with fire.
- Or drowning. Or drowning IN fire.
- Worse... Or better?
- So does this Troper, but usually with the addendum "Unless you're freezing to death".
  - I don't know, if you're freezing to death and then get set on fire, it's not exactly an improvement.
  - Sam McGee thought it was an improvement.
  - A little bit, at least. Right before the "ohdeargodthepain!" moment would be the distracting "what in the bleedin' hell just happened?" moment.
  - Original poster of this example back with conclusive evidence.
I've heard the entire history of Russia summed up as "Somehow, things got worse."
- Unless it's that infamous grim Russian sense of humor(tm). Wherever it came from...
  - ...as a defense against the series of tragedies that makes up Russian history.
  - Gentlemen... as we all know, Everything is worse with Bears
  - There were several moments in Russian history when it really looked like things were going to get better, though. And, often, they did. For a few years. Just long enough to spark some hope in the future, so that it could all be crushed as things got worse all over again (but in fun, new, interesting ways!).
"It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."-Just when you think things are as bad as possible...it gets worse.
Another Real Life example: the death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit. The day before the news broke, Benoit had been replaced in a match for the ECW Championship at the PPV event "Vengeance: Night of Champions" (where it was widely believed he'd win the title) and the announcers cited a "family emergency" as the reason. The next night, Vince McMahon broke kayfabe to relay the news to the RAW viewing audience that night that Chris Benoit had passed away; this was followed by a three-hour tribute to Benoit featuring footage from a DVD documenting most of his career, including his famous match at WrestleMania 20. Just as the show was coming to a close, the trope kicked in HARD — news broke across the Internet (and the twenty-four-hour news channels) that Benoit had committed suicide after killing his wife Nancy and his seven-year-old son Daniel.
- WWE would only make things worse for Benoit fans by excising practically his very existence out of their history, which led to a DVD set for Steve Austin being delayed so they could edit out matches featuring Benoit that were originally scheduled to be on the set. That exclusion left segments covering Austin's full Face Heel Turn off the DVD, much to the dismay of both WWE fans and Austin himself.
  - Recently, though, WWE has mellowed about it, and Benoit matches are gradually coming back into existence.
The history of the film Heaven's Gate, and how it affected studio United Artists, is just one big parade of It Got Worse. Sometimes, Doing It For The Art isn't worth it.
This video is a fine example.
In a not-so-depressing context, this trope is the entire point of a certain improv game called...well, you've probably guessed by now.
Michael Jackson's career and life from 1993 onwards — child molestation allegations twice over, his seemingly decaying appearance, a hemmoraging fan base, two failed marriages many people believed to be scams, dangling a baby off a balcony, financial problems, etc.
- Eventually culminating in his death from a cardiac arrest at 50... right before kicking off a European concert tour aimed at countering much of the above problems.
Let's read the story of Kevin Eldridge, flying a Super Corsair in an air race. His plane had been giving him minor trouble all week, but nothing serious. The engine started to vibrate, so he figures it would be time to pull out of the race and land. Then his crew informs him his plane is on fire. (Interesting fact; in the Super Corsair, the fuel tank is directly behind the pilot.) Then he tries to bail out and gets stuck. Then he gets loose and breaks his leg. Then...
After Achy-Breaky Heart, no one thought things could be any worse. We were so wrong...

Close Real Life

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Examples