Karma Houdini - Television Tropes & Idioms

"It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."

— Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes

"Frustrating, isn't it? Best not to think too hard about me, or you'll end up giving yourself apoplexy."

—Jarlaxle in a cameo, Baldur's Gate 2

He's kicked the hero's dog, abducted his family and held them hostage, abused the most sympathetic of his Woobie minions, killed off the series' most popular Ensemble Darkhorse and invented a Kill Sat that uses babies as its primary fuel, not to mention jaywalking in front of a bus full of nuns. He's done just about every conceivable thing that would make an audience boo, hiss and hate him with the burning fire of a thousand Foreman Grills. So when the Karmic Hammer falls and the time for his comeuppance finally arrives, the audience is going to sit back and bask in the satisfaction that can only come from watching a Complete Monster get what he so richly deserves, up to and including a highly ironic and gruesomely appropriate death.

Only... that's not what happens. He doesn't get what he deserves. Instead, he thumbs his nose at the hero, dons his baby harp seal cape (made from baby harp seals he personally clubbed himself) and dashes off into the night scot-free. And this isn't a comic book villain, who has to escape so he can come back and be thwarted by the hero time and time again. No. This is it. This is all there is to the story. The show is over. The book is finished. The author isn't going to write any more. The Word Of God has been spoken.

He won't even suffer emotionally. Lonely At The Top? What's that? And no matter how hard he tried to seduce the Love Interest, her running off with The Hero (or with Someone To Remember Him By) will not trouble him at all; there are other women.

And there's nothing the fans can do about it, apart from kvetching about the character on a Message Board and writing snuff-fics that feature him getting what we feel the author should have given him, but (for some inconceivable reason) didn't.

Now in cases where a Karma Houdini doesn't totally get away scot free, you can expect any punishment meted out to him to be nothing more than a mild inconvenience — not nearly what he deserved to get after all of the trouble he caused — as when a Glory Hound's causing massive casualties causes him to suffer, at worst, Reassignment To Antarctica.

In the more irritating cases of this trope, the Karma Houdini has a sudden, last-second epiphany — or is moved to commit a single heroic act that redeems him, allowing him a free ticket to Freedom and/or Heaven, even though roughly 99.9987% of his life up to that point was spent using peasants for target practice. To add even more fuel to the fire, this trope can also be comboed with No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

Even more jarring if the villain is Easily Forgiven because Defeat Means Friendship and goes on to become the Sixth Ranger.

Fans hate these characters (usually). Why else would any author bother writing them?

Some do it to inject a bit of realism into their work.
Sometimes the author worries that a punishment will make the villain sympathetic (and make the heroes look bad), or that it would look to silly to randomly punish villains (who could be unrelated to each other) in the end.
Some authors have no choice but to allow a villain to escape with his crimes, if said villains are based on real life people who were themselves never brought to justice. (Some authors will attempt to placate the audience by having the villain undergo some kind of intangible punishment or loss not recordable by history, but many authors simply won't bother.)
Some authors like creating Karma Houdinis and "evil wins" scenarios because they like being contrary and "edgy", and all True Art Is Angsty anyway. A gentler interpretation is that villains are more interesting than heroes and, despite their horrific actions, people will root for them anyway.
Some authors simply grow enamored of particular characters, and don't want to see them punished or killed (even if the character did just happen to cook the heroine's button-cute little brother in a stew and serve it to her with a side of foie gras). These characters may also have a large portion of the fandom devoted to them in spite of their repulsive actions, although if they commit acts that are especially heinous (like rape or child-killing), their pool of groupies may begin to shrink. (The author may still be on the character's side, however, in spite of everything they do.)
Some Karma Houdinis are created by accident, by an author who got so focused on the heroes' part of the story or delivering a personal message to the audience/readers that they forgot to give the villain a proper comeuppance, thinking that aspect of the story was no longer important.
In some cases, the story assumes only the main characters matter. Luke Skywalker can forgive Darth Vader and make it okay—if the only people who "count" as hurt by Darth Vader are Luke and his group. Citizen 999999 from some random planet, whose family Vader blew up, doesn't need to forgive Vader because he never appeared onscreen in the first place, so his losses aren't real. See Protagonist Centered Morality.
In some very rare cases, the author/filmmaker does write an appropriately grim death scene for the villainous character, but Executive Meddling determines that it's too gruesome, hurts the flow of the narrative, makes the movie run on too long, etc. (This would make it less of a deliberate Karma Houdini and more of a What Happened To The Mouse situation.)

Karma Houdinis tend to be Magnificent Bastard types since it takes a certain amount of smarts to give Karma the slip. Also, they're the kind of people who know just what it takes to get under a hero's — and the audience's — skin, and can manipulate them accordingly, doing everything it takes to become as hateable as possible. However, some magnificent bastards are... well, magnificent enough for the viewer to want them to get away with it — the Heroic Sociopath is designed around eliciting this particular reaction from the audience. Whether or not a villain qualifies as a Karma Houdini can be a purely subjective judgment of course, based on how a viewer feels about the villain's personality and crimes (and whether said crimes are viewed as forgivable or not). It's also interesting to note that a lot of these characters also have more money than God.

This is the polar opposite to Fate Worse Than Death, Hoist By His Own Petard, Karmic Death, and Get Out Of Jail Free Card (the get-out-of-jail element is there, but without the card). Also not the same as Downer Ending, because the villain's plans are still foiled, but there's nothing to guarantee that they don't come back...

Villains be warned, though... this trope is subverted so often that it's not even worth noting unless it's played straight. It doesn't count unless the bad guy gets all the way to the end, scot-free. Further, trying to do a Heel Face Turn after being a Karma Houdini usually results in the Karma Houdini Warranty being lost. See Redemption Equals Death and Death Equals Redemption for typical results.

See also Draco In Leather Pants, perhaps an example of fans rationalizing this. If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him events most often lead to this. Karmic Jackpot, Karmic Death and, most of all perhaps, Laser Guided Karma inverts this trope. For the opposite of this, see The Chew Toy, where a character does good things, or just nothing at all, and is rewarded with the universe smacking them in the face.

It may be worth noting that Karma is a very slow procress. It is so slow that good karma and bad karma bear their fruits when you know you have done something for it, but you do not know what. If you add Reincarnation to it, you subvert the Houdini part as it was just being realy slow. Look up any religion that teaches this: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikihism, variuos Panthan faiths, Sufiism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Scientology, etc...

Since this trope deals with the ultimate fate of villains, there are Spoilers Ahoy...