The relation of cause and effect in Fallout stops just short of Bolt of Divine Retribution. But the cat's relatives WILL send mercenaries after your blood.
While in Real Life there is rarely a direct and easily traced relation between actions and their subsequent reward or punishment, in fiction the connection is usually a lot more... direct. Help an old lady across the street? Several chapters later, she'll turn out to be an elite ex-commandowho will gladly help you storm the Big Bad's castle. Kick the little dog that's barking at you?The dog will sniff you out and lead the heroes right to yourSupervillain Lair.
The Golden Rule states Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Therefore, if you mistreat others, karma will strike you down. Treat others well, and you will be rewarded.
The vacuum by this non-direct causality in real life can be daunting to fill (whole religions and philosophies have and are trying to, describing them is more of Wikipedia's bag) but in stories, it doesn't matter how tiny a helpful or harmful act is for it to have a meaningful and unpredictable effect by story's end. The Aesop here is that every little action, good or bad, will be paid back in kind with the accuracy and timeliness of a laser guided missile. Whether its payload is sunshine and puppies or irony depends on the karma.
If taken too far, stories with this aesop can turn anvilicious or into a Space Whale Aesop about always being kind to strangers, never kicking puppieset cetera, or the universe itself will seem to take delight in making your life a living comedy of errors. It also sort of makes "do good for goodness' sake" a Broken Aesop since virtue never has to be the selfless or thankless endeavor it can be in Real Life — in Fictionland you always get a reward, after all. It's worth noting that in many stories Laser-Guided Karma is what really topples the villain with unforeseen consequences, while the heroes' good deeds give their efforts that final push to succeed via help from the bleachers. It seems along with pride and the Villain Ball, random dickery and cruelty are the top causes of villain self-foilage.
On the good side of the karma coin:
Cell and Frieza from Dragon Ball Z are perfect examples. Their own actions always come back to bite them in the ass. Cell is a fine example of the most stupid Kick the Dog to give himself a strong opponent, oopsie. Then we have Frieza, the victim of the age old trope, the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. His plan to stop the coming of the Super Saiyan might have worked, if he'd just finished Goku off quickly instead of attacking Piccolo and killing Krillin. Talk about a bad case of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain for him.
Probably about 90%-95% of the death toll or sufferers of A Fate Worse Than Death in Franken Fran are the result of this, although some of them are rather excessive. Chapter 10 is probably the worst here. An arrogant germophobe who sees the rest of humanity as immoral, filthy fools who need to be educated and improved by the "elite" gets swarmed by cockroaches, nearly raped, has all her skin burned off, and gets skin grafts made from cockroach exoskeletons. The stress causes her to go insane and try to tear off her skin. An epilogue page in the collection shows her to have recovered from her insanity and attempt to remove her own skin... only for the graft to have gone wrong and her face to be covered in living, twitching cockroach legs.
Mobile Suit Gundam 00: Nena Trinity initiated a massacre of wedding guests in Spain because she was tired and overworked. One girl named Louise Halevy survived. During the next season, said Louise gets a haxx Mobile Armour and kills Nena who is using an old outdated Mobile Suit.
Ali Al Saachez falls victim to this. He gets overpowered and badly injured by the only survivor of a family he almost destroyed. The man, Lyle Dylandy is willing to spare him because he doesn't want to sink to Ali's level. Ali tries to take advantage of this, only for Lyle to beat him on the draw and blow his brains out. Ribbons has his plans collapse around him due to the child he manipulated behind the scenes and who inspired him to try and play god.
Some of the stuff Lelouch does in Code Geass eventually bites him in the ass. The Geass Cult he massacred? His army is appalled once they find out.
In the first revival round of the Liar Game, interestingly Nao chose the one man who apologized to her after the rest of the contestants turned against her, to get kicked out of the game. When he asked why, she explained this revival round was a chance for one person to escape from the game and be free from debt. So after she won the round, she gave him her winnings, which was enough to pay off his debts and walk away from the game a "free man".
Also done more negatively to Yokoya. By bullying and blackmailing his team in the Second Game, he had them all under his rule. However, in the end, three of them turned traitor to the other team and were able to successfully pay off their debts with the help of Nao and Akiyama
Hell Girl plays with this exceptionally well. Not only you can get thrown into hell for as much as making your personal stalker angry, but Ai and her subordinates will make you relive your worst nightmares right before doing so.
Pet Shop of Horrors demonstrates both sides of the Karmic Coin, though to be honest the dark side more often. However, the episode with the little girl who wants a bodyguard, and treats him kindly and with care, stands out as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming for the series.
Happens surprisingly often in the Crapsack World manga Cage of Eden. A group of men who raped and killed Oomori's senpai are eaten by vicious carnivores. Two other students who helped Zaji build a raft and later pushed the others off, claiming to have planned to betray them all along find out that the island they were hoping to reach was just an illusion, and then they get eaten by a large aquatic dinosaur.
Similarly applied to a few of the homunculi. Gluttony, who ate his victims, was himself devoured by Pride. Envy killed himself when in his helpless maggot-form the humans started pitying him, and Pride was Brought Down to Normal, made into the human boy whose form he was inhabiting, despite being extremely, well, prideful of his homunculus superiority.
Comedic example in Mahou Sensei Negima!. Chamo makes fun of Negi in his internal monologue and instantly gets hit by a car. He's an Iron Buttmonkey, so it all works out.
Non-comedic example: Quartum cuts Chachamaru in half, then suffers the same fate at the hands of Negi.
Digimon's Myotismon gets karmic payback for everything that he did to the Digidestined but more specifically, for murdering Wizardmon. This causes Gatomon to Digivolve into Angewomon, the Digimon predestined to kill him. The karmic retribution for the crap he put the others through comes when they combine their energies with her's to form an arrow she uses to shoot him through the heart and kill him.
Bellamy from One Piece. Had he not been such a nihilistic, unrepentant bully and pissed off Monkey D. Luffy, he wouldn't have ended up murdered by his own boss for losing to a rookie (although Chapter 704 reveals that he somehow survived...which, considering the series, is a surprise to nobody)!
Spandam. Do I need to say more?
In Innocent Venus both Jin and Drake are killed by their pet-project war machines which are driven by the brains of little children cloned for the purpose and then implanted in the 'gladiators', where they obviously undergo horror and torment. When they get a chance for revenge, they're not particuarly forgiving.
Seraphim gets this in Kore Wa Zombie Desuka when she decides not to follow through with the hit on Eucliwood. One episode later, when she's killed in an ambush, Eu was on hand to supply blood to revive her.
Mr Don in Eyeshield21 had earlier used Gaou as his punching bag and ran Yamato out of Notre Dame. In the Japan vs. America game, those two are the first who end up beating him for the first time.
Yami Yugi / Pharaoh Atemu of Yu-Gi-Oh! loves the crap out of this trope. He's the laser-guider in which whenever a villain of the chapter (in the first 7 volumes) causes trouble, he uses that specific action against them, especially when he knows they are cheating in his Shadow Game. In Duelist Kingdom arc, he pretty much kills 2 guys with a mind crush after they attempt to cheat.
In Princess Mononoke, the whole mess was started when Eboshi started using the iron from her foundry to produce guns with which she drove out or killed the spirits of the forests that she needed to expand her business. In the end, she gets defeated by the head of the giant wolf spirit she just killed. But since she ran the fundry and gun factory mostly mostly to provide jobs and homes for the outcasts of society rather than for her personal profit, she survived having her whole arm ripped off, but won't ever shot any guns again.
Comic Books
In Love and Rockets, Gato and Sergio are killed in a car crash immediately after murdering Fortunato.
In Camelot 3000, Sir Tristan's reincarnation as a woman initially seems purely random, until it's revealed that he'd raped at least one woman in his previous life. His new female form is therefore both a deterrent and a karmic lesson, especially when he/she is stalked by his/her reincarnation's former fiancee, who won't take no for an answer.
In the early days of Firestorm the villain Plastique tried to blow up a building full of innocent people with a suit that had a bunch of bombs attached to it. So how did Firestorm defeat her? He vaporized her suit to get the bombs, leaving Plastique herself naked in public, laughed at by her would be victims.
Spider-Man in his origin story allows a burglar to escape from a pursuing policeman. One page later his beloved Uncle Ben is dead, killed by the same man. Not a Tragic Mistake, as this event then galvanizes him to devote his life to heroically fighting crime instead of propelling him towards a tragic catastrophe. Which is also why Spider-Man decides not to interfere with the event when he travels back through time in ASM #500.
Flash Thompson seems to be an aversion, as he ends up sharing an apartment with Peter Parker. Averted/lampshaded when he loses his legs when serving in Iraq, saving a fellow soldier, fulfilling the jock ending up crippled aspect of this trope.
Subverted, or maybe double subverted, after he becomes the new host of the Venom symbiote. Yeah he gets awesome superpowers that make him more like his hero Spider-Man and his legs back. On the other hand, the symbiote has a nasty tendency to bring out the worst in people and he's already eaten someone.
Cassidy the vampire is captured and tortured mercilessly by a hitman until Jesse arrives to save him. Jesse knocks the hitman into the pit where Cassidy's been contained, breaking his neck in the fall and paralyzing but not killing him. The last shot is of Cassidy leaning right over him with a big grin and saying "How're yeh?"
In Scrooge and Flintheart's second confrontation for determining who was the world's richest duck, they convert all their holdings into silver dollars and will have the piles measured. Glomgold, worried he might lose, tries to cheat by purchasing a special liquid that can shrink things with the goal of using it to shrink Scrooge's pile of money. His plan is thwarted, and he ultimately loses...by the same amount of silver dollars that he spent to buy the juice
In one issue early in his time as The Flash, Wally West expresses contempt for a homeless man who seeks shelter in his apartment building. Then he's evicted, and thanks to various other misfortunes (his credit cards being inexplicably declined, his superspeed shorting out from hunger, losing both his luggage and his mother) he's reduced to eating pretzels from mud puddles in less than a day and getting the same amount of scorn from passersby (one of who dropped that pretzel in the puddle to see if he was desperate enough to eat it). It eventually turns out that it's all due to machinations from aliens who were deliberately putting him under stress.
In "The Blue Lotus", Tintin defends a rickshaw driver from an abusive racist bully. Later, when the Japanese put a price on his head, he manages to escape the town with the help of the driver's brother.
Likewise, in "Prisoners of the Sun", he defends Zorrino from bullying foreginers, and is given a talisman which will save him from death.
Film
The final outcome that awaits Carter Burke in Aliens is this in spades.
In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh murders the innocent wife of the protagonist even after she argues with him that he has no reason to kill her. As soon as he drives off, he gets hit by a car.
The laser was off that day, Chigurh gets through the car crash with a broken arm, but it is made clear that was more because of pure luck than anything else.
A very literal use of this trope was utilized in Austin Powers in Goldmember, specifically in regards to the film's titular villain. To put it simply, Goldmember betrays Dr. Evil (who surprising for his name, undergoes a Heel Face Turn when he learns that he is actually Austin Power's long lost brother, and that Nigel Powers is his father) and attempts to fulfill that Dr. Evil nearly started: The destruction of the planet with a Golden Meteorite dragged onto the planet by the Preparation H tractor beam. He also kept a spare of the master key (hint: It's his gilded groin) after losing the original Master Key into the shark tank. Dr. Evil, now Dougie Powers, manages to reverse the polarity of the tractor beam, causing the energies caused by his activating the tractor beam to backfire on Goldmember, electrocuting him, fall near the shark tank's edge. He is then arrested, and going by his comments is most likely going to await execution.
In The Dark Knight, Coleman Reese is about to use his information on Lucius Fox as a means of extortion, but backs off when Lucius bluffs him by pointing out a few theoretical flaws in his strategy. Getting off with a warning might make him seem like a Karma Houdini, but then consider what happens later in the movie, when he is apparently considering revealing Batman's identity so as to appease the Joker:
Random caller: Harvey Dent wouldn't give in to this maniac, do you think you know better than him?
Coleman Reese: I think that if we could talk to Dent today he would feel differently.
Reporter: And we wish him a speedy recovery, because god knows we need him now.
Then the Joker calls.
Reporter: Who is this?
Joker: I had a vision of a world without Batman. The mob ground out a little profit and the police tried to shut them down one block at a time, and it was so... boring. I had a change of heart. I don't want Mr. Reese spoiling everything, but why should I have all the fun? Let's give someone else a chance. If Coleman Reese isn't dead in 60 minutes, then I blow up a hospital.
And then you see crowds of people in the streets, trying to kill him. Before he could even resort to appeasement, he ends up being the victim of others' appeasement. It would be too cruel an irony if not for the fact that Reese was, conveniently, an extortionist.
Also, in Batman Begins, a Smug Snake crime lord named Falcone, who is implied to have caused a lot of poverty and corruption in Gotham, eventually gets confronted by Batman during a drug shipment, and chained to a searchlight for the police to find. That's not all, though; in prison, there's a scene where Falcone's talking to a corrupt psychiatrist named Jonathan Crane, and trying to resort to blackmail against him. Crane sprays fear toxin in Falcone's face in response to this, forcing Falcone into an intense panic attack that leaves him permanently insane.
Happens in Deconstructing Harry as the payoff for short story written by the protagonist: borrow a sick friend's apartment, pretend it's your bachelor pad, use his name to introduce yourself to a High-Class Call Girl... hey, that's The Grim Reaper at the door. And he won't believe you're not the guy.
What happens to Rodmilla de Ghent and Marguerite in Ever After. They verbally and emotionally abuse Danielle and Jacqueline and also mercilessly bully the servants, punishing them for "stealing" household goods when they themselves are secretly selling off those same items to buy jewelry and other fripperies. So it's a glorious comeuppance at the end when Danielle - now Princess Danielle - and her royal in-laws enact a lavish spectacle to humiliate the pair in front of the court, then banish them to work in the palace laundry. The karma runs in the other direction too; Jacqueline, the stepsister who always treated Danielle with kindness, gets to live in the palace with her and (presumably) marries the Prince's personal guard, and the servants who raised and loved Danielle all her life likewise get to live with her in the palace.
Hang Em High has a rancher's murderer, who framed an innocent man for the crime and nearly tried to get him hanged by vigilantes. He himself is hanged for his crime onscreen shortly afterward, with his exonerated would-be victim being treated to the sight from the sheriff's office. As for the vigilantes, most of them (save for theBig Bad) are killed by their intended target, who turned out to be a former lawman from a different town and was appointed deputy so he could personally deal with the vigilantes without himself committing a capital crime for real.
In Plunkett And Macleane we get a pretty vicious example of this. General Chance, who is quite fond of eye torture, ends up with a bullet through the eye whilst he's about to gouge yet another person's eye out.
Subverted in The Rape of Richard Beck (also called Deadly Justice): a cop who is flippant and insensitive in his dealings with rape victims is assaulted himself, but as the message of the film is that no one deserves or "asks" to be raped, his attack is not portrayed as karma so much as a terrible experience that he eventually turns into a useful lesson.
Done both positively and negatively in Return of the Jedi. Palpatine ends up telling Luke after he (literally) disarmed Vader to kill Vader and take his place as his apprentice. Luke refuses, so the Emperor attempts to kill Skywalker instead. Negative Laser Guided Karma was inflicted on Palpatine as, because of his attempt to replace Vader and hurting Vader's son, has Vader grabbing the Emperor and throwing him down the Death Star's reactor shaft. Positive Laser Guided Karma was inflicted on Luke as, because of his earlier refusal to kill Vader, Vader ended up saving Luke from Palpatine by doing the above act, also redeeming himself in the process.
Another example from Return of the Jedi is when Luke, Han, Chewie and the droids are surrounded by the Ewoks. While they could've probably fought their way clear, Luke instead gives up his lightsaber and urges Han & Chewie to hand over their guns and surrender. By sparing the Ewoks, and later trying to non-violently win their confidence, the Rebels gain valuable allies in the coming battle. Behind-the-scenes footage of Mark Hamill, George Lucas and director Richard Marquand shot on the set reveal that this was the intention of the scene.
A similar example later (or earlier) in the saga was how Qui-Gon befriended Jar Jar in The Phantom Menace, which later leads the Gungan to bring his people to aid the good guys in the battle on Naboo.
The discovery of Dantooine to have an abandoned Rebel base, and not much besides, could be this to the Empire for the destruction of Alderaan in A New Hope. Then again, Leia is a Force-sensitive, so she may have deliberately lied to Tarkin, knowing that he'd destroy Alderaan regardless. Tarkin wouldn't find out until after the scouting mission to Dantooine, and Vader quickly calls him on his blind arrogance—arrogance that would later get him and his subordinates on the Death Star killed later in the film as an example of this trope hitting the Empire with a double whammy for the same act of wanton and callous destruction.
In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Stacey, with a big smirk, tries to manipulate the conversation so that Ramona and Knives discover that Scott is dating them both. A moment later, Wallace steals her boyfriend.
Arguably inverted as she was trying to stop her brother from two-timing.
Later in the movie, Gideon kicks Ramona down a flight of stairs during the climax, and gets his ass promptly kicked soon after by both Scott and Knives.
In the movie Snakes on a Plane, an absurdly, cartoonishly snooty bald guy tries to throw a small dog at the snakes to cover his escape. This is after he insulted a woman and her child for simply sitting next to him and genuinely being a tremendous douche from scene one. His plan ironically failed because he stopped to gloat about it afterward, allowing the snake to eat both the dog and him. Oh but wait, that's not all: afterwards he and the snake eating him were both sucked out of the plane as it crashes. In keeping with everything else, it's was a borderline Humiliation Conga with fatal results.
The plot of Snatch centres around a stolen diamond that most of the other characters are trying to steal so that they can profit from it... except for Turkish and Tommy, two hapless boxing promoters who don't even know the diamond exists and are doing nothing more morally or ethically questionable than trying to survive a rigged boxing match organised by a psychotic gangster. They end up finding the diamond and profiting from it, while everyone else either dies, gets arrested or loses out.
In Skyfall, James Bond's boss M gets a heart-wrenching version of this. Having given up one agent to save six others in the past, years later she can only watch helplessly as the same agent exposes five others to certain death.
In Kidulthood the film begins with a group of vicious bullies, including the show's antagonist Sam, beating up and humiliating an innocent girl, leading to her suicide. This doesn't come back at him until during the movie's climax, when he meets the girl's big brother. Who happens to have a gun. He is forced to the ground, obviously crapping his pants, before the protagonist manages to talk the brother out of pulling the trigger. Granted, Sam doesn't die, but the sheer humiliation of having to beg for his life in front of a majority of his school still make this a memorable moment.
The Avengers - Loki spends much of the movie belittling Bruce Banner/Hulk, basically describing him as a mindless uncontrollable subhuman to anyone within earshot, even to his very face. Loki even manages to use Banner's more vicious side to steam-roller SHIELD and the Avengers. No prizes for guessing who gets to ram a thick, humbling slice of marble and concrete flavoured pie down his slimy gullet in the denouement!
In The Fury of Hercules the mute warrior Kaldos kills the Queen by throwing a spear at her, stabbing her in the back. Shortly thereafter, a very, very, VERY pissed off Hercules kills Kaldos by breaking his neck with a spear.
Literature
Arianna Ortega from The Dresden Files falls prey to this; she kept her dad from interfering with her plan to gain the prestige to dethrone him by citing legal reasons; when the father of the girl she kidnapped and planned to sacrifice came calling, he used the same excuse that she did to get her father to let him challenge her, which ended with Arianna impaled by ice spears.
Many fairy tales have poor, hungry, often ugly old women who just want some food or a place to stay. They may or may not be a fairy queen in disguise, but it's always a Secret Test of Character, generally with good advice for the people who succeed and deadly curses for those who don't. The most obvious example is "Beauty and the Beast".
In the The Lord of the Rings, each of the Ring-bearers shows mercy to Gollum and is rewarded for it later. Bilbo refrains from murdering Gollum in the goblin caves, and is rewarded (according to Gandalf) by taking very little hurt from the evil of the Ring, and being able to give it up at the end. Frodo is merciful when Gollum finds him and Sam in the Emyn Muil, and is rewarded when Gollum successfully gets the two of them into Mordor. Finally, Sam himself shows mercy to Gollum on the slopes of Mount Doom, and is rewarded when Gollum bites the Ring from Frodo's hand (thus freeing Frodo from the Ring's control) and falls with it into the Fire. Conversely, the Ring's malevolent corruption of Gollum ultimately results in the Ring's own destruction.
In Harry Potter, this trope is subverted and then played straight, then subverted again. Harry allows Wormtail to live, even though Wormtail was responsible for the death of Harry's parents, which first allows Wormtail to find Voldemort and return him to full power. However, as Dumbledore suggested, Harry's kindness meant that Wormtail felt that he was in Harry's debt, eventually leading to Wormtail saving Harry's life in the final book. Wormtail is then rewarded for this act of mercy by being strangled to death by his own magical prosthetic hand, which had been programmed to do so by Voldemort in case Wormtail's loyalty ever wavered again.
Snape does this. Voldemort kills the woman he loves, he betrays Voldemort and spies for the Order. Also, Narcissa Malfoy in Deathly Hallows: Voldemort tries to get her son killed, takes over her house, and treats her family like dirt; she lies to him at a crucial moment, causing Harry to win.
A possible case of Laser-Guided Karma existed in the first part of the film adaptation of The Deathly Hallows, where, after Harry Potter managed to deactivate Umbridges' patronus keeping a hive of Dementors at bay, she and the court were engulfed by them.
Umbridge at the end of Order of the Phoenix. Hates "half-breeds" like centaurs, mermaids, etc. Traumatised so badly by them that the next time we see her (not too long after the incident in question), she's practically catatonic.
Speaking of Umbridge, whenever anyone within Dumbledore's Army betrays the group, Hermione potentially scars them for life with boils in both an Out-of-Character Moment of Pay Evil unto Evil and an instance of Hermione at her most merciless. This is what happens to a friend of Cho Chang who betrayed them to Umbridge and crossed Hermione in the process.
Lockhart, who takes credit for other people's achievements then erases their memories. He gets his memory erased (accidentally) by himself towards the end of Chamber of Secrets.
Having unsuccessfully goaded Harry into inflicting a Cruciatus on her in Order of the Phoenix, Bellatrix gets hit by Harry with an epically painful Cruciatus in Deathly Hallows.
One particularly horrific version appears in the Doctor WhoPast Doctor Adventures novel Festival of Death, in which a character wipes out a species as research into how they are able to resurrect at the beginning of their lives with memories of how the last one went, in the hope of doing this and saving his parents from a shuttle accident. He succeeds, and learns he can only watch, not interfere with what's happened, essentially forcing him to watch all the tragedies and atrocities of his life an infinite number of times.
The Eludidated Brethren of the Ebon Night, who summon the dragon in Guards! Guards!, end up burnt to death as soon as the dragon slips the leash. The Discworld Companion lampshades this in the entry for the Brethren "The thing about karma on the Discworld is that it often happens real soon".
Brother Watchtower: We just wanted what was due to us.
Death:Congratulations.
The Last Hero mentions one tribe with no imagination, and therefore no gods, that was wiped out by a nearby tribe who believed a light from the moon was a signal from their god to increase their hunting grounds. The second tribe was years later wiped out by a third tribe, who apparently got a message from their ancestors living in the moon that all non-believers in their goddess should be killed. That third tribe was years later killed by a rock falling from the sky, as the result of a star exploding a billion years ago.
What goes around comes around. If not examined too closely, it passes for justice.
Walter The Weremouse, by John Dashney, works on this trope. Walter Wampler stops on his way home from work to help an old woman who's struggling with her grocery bags, and when they've been successfully trucked home she reveals that it was actually a Secret Test of Character; she appears to people who don't even have the opportunity for potential (much like Walter, whose life is at such a dead end that occasionally people forget he exists), and if they pass her test, she gives them a special cheese that, aside from being the most delicious cheese anyone's ever tasted, gives them just enough of a shove that they can make their lives go much better, but will have unpleasant consequences if eaten after midnight (hence why the book is called Walter the Weremouse).
Although Artemis Entreri was a Karma Houdini in The Icewind Dale Trilogy, taking Regis captive and cutting off two of his fingers, karma catches up to him shortly after. In The Legacy he tortures Regis even more, to goad Drizzt into fighting for his friend's life. But when it's all said and done, Entreri ends up badly injured and hanging from a cliff by his torn cloak. He is stuck in that position for over a day before he is found... by Regis. Regis taunts the helpless Entreri, takes several of his possessions, wonders aloud if he should bring help for the assassin... then decides that he's not feeling too merciful, and cuts the last remaining strands of Entreri's cloak, causing him to fall. And while Entreri does survive this, he winds up stuck in Menzoberranzan, and he is absolutely miserable there.
In Tom Kratman's Caliphate, an amoral, self-centered pedophile with no redeeming qualities whatsoever is working for the book's bad guys to create a super-virus. When he along with the child slaves being used for both test subjects and his personal gratification are rescued by the protagonist team, two of the children he abused use a shoelace and pencil to create a tourniquet they use to kill him by strangulation.
In O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation", safecracker Jimmy Valentine tries to make a new life for himself as "Ralph Spencer" after pulling a few jobs, but his nemesis police officer Ben Price tracks him down. During Ben's visit, a little girl gets herself locked in the bank vault. Jimmy puts his safecracking abilities to good use by rescuing the little girl, confirming his identity to Ben beyond a doubt. But when Jimmy resigns himself to being arrested, Ben pretends not to know him and says goodbye to "Mr. Spencer".
In Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Jonathan's father Lawrence decides to punish a servant who annoyed him by sending him out on a long and pointless journey on a cold night. When he comes back feverish Lawrence insists that the man attend him as he works all night, and opens a window. He overlooks that feverish as the man is, he's in much younger and in better health, and in the morning Lawrence is found to have died of exposure.
In Warrior Cats , Tigerstar has been manipulating events for a while in order to become ThunderClan's leader. He got set a trap for Bluestar at the edge of the Thunderpath with the intention of killing her, but Cinderpelt ended up investigating the Thunderpath and getting hit by a car, which permanantly damaged one of her legs and dashed her hopes of ever being a Warrior. Before that, in Into The Wild, he killed Redtail, ThunderClan's deputy at the time. Not many moons after that, he learned that Ravenpaw, his apprentice saw what happened, and Tigerstar tries to turn the clan against Ravenpaw, and planned to kill him to make sure he stayed silent. In Forest of Secrets, he led a group of rouges in an attack against ThunderClan, and he surely would've killed Bluestar if Firestar hadn't been present. In A Dangerous Path, he led a pack of dogs to Snakerocks, which ended up killing one apprentice and disfiguring another as well as killing another cat to give the dogs a taste for cat blood. It all came to a head In Darkest Hour when he wanted to unite the clans as one(which is a lot worse than it sounds) under his leadership. He managed to get RiverClan to join "TigerClan" and tried to get Graystripe's kits killed by having Stonefur, Bluestar's son, to kill them. When Stonefur refused, he sic'd Darkstripe on him, and when it looked like Darkstripe was going to lose, Tigerstar got another one of his followers to kill Stonefur. And after his betrayal, Bluestar completely lost her mind, which made her stop caring about her Clan. While his death at the hands of Scourge wasn't one that any sane cat would wish on another, you have to admit that after all that happened he really deserved to die. In fact, Tigerstar was so despised, that his son carried the suspicions of his Clanmates.
Roald Dahl's The Enormous Crocodile. The title character's misdeeds towards other animals throughout the book backfire on him big time, and devious attempts to eat kids are thwarted at every turn. He ends up being thrown into the Sun by the elephant he bit earlier.
Played straight in The Millennium Trilogy. Every single evil doer gets their comeuppance
Gottfreid Vanger is murdered by the daughter he raped and abused for years
Nils Bjurmann first gets "I am a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist" tattoed on his abdomen by Lisbeth, then in the second book he is murdered
Best laser guided karma in the final book with members of the Section. First Zala is shot shot point blank and murdered by Evert Gullberg who then turns the gun on himself
Gunnar Bjork is murdered and staged to look like a suicide
All the members of the section are Arrested by the police in a highly organized raid and crackdown
Niedermann is shot by a rival gang members and then those gang members are arrested by the police!
A Song of Ice and Fire has several instances of this. Probably one of the most shining examples would be Tywin Lannister getting killed by Tyrion, the son he always misliked and mistreated by the end of A Storm of Swords.
His daughter gets the same treatment near the end of A Feast for Crows. She gets arrested by the story's Church Militant and gets punished for her sins in a most humiliating way. Thats right, the same Church Militant she raised back to power earlier in the same book.
In Speak, Melinda befriends the new girl, Heather. When it seems that they will become good friends, Heather decides instead to join the Marthas, a popular clique of girls who do a lot of volunteer work, leaving Melinda behind and even returning the friendship necklace the latter gave her for a Christmas gift. Several months later, Heather comes crawling back to Melinda, asking her help in decorating the Route 11 Holiday Inn ballroom for the prom, a task she was assigned by her higher-ups in the Martha clan and which she cannot do on her own (the girls who were supposed to assist her came down with mononucleosis). Melinda refuses, and the last we hear of Heather is that she missed school the day after prom because "everybody is griping about her lame decorations". Immediately afterward, Melinda remarks that Heather should run away and join the Marines; "they'll be much sweeter to her than a swarm of angry Marthas".
Live Action Television
The premise of My Name Is Earl. Not just laser guided, a karma satellite orbital attack grid is aimed at the cast of characters.
On Tosh0 this trope is invoked in a Web Redemption, when a video shows a man attempting to do a complicated slam dunk falls into a garbage can immediately after littering. In his words "that would be some fast-acting karma."
Exemplified in Angel Season 2, when Darla and Drusilla crash the Wolfram & Hart party after Darla was brought back by them. Angel bursts in, the Wolfram & Hart people wait expectantly for him to save them despite all they've done to him, and then watch on in horror as he slams the door shut and traps them inside with two bloodthirsty evil vampires. Needless to say, they do not survive.
Karma tends to creep up on Angel nearly every season, particularly after his attitude problem in season two.
Alexander Armstrong presented an episode of Have I Got News for You where one of the questions was about a survey claiming women laugh longer at punchlines than men. The joke on the autocue was "Shame you're not as good at delivering them, eh, girls?" He tripped over the line. Repeatedly.
Similarly, in another episode, the host ruined a joke about David Beckham being inarticulate.
In a positive example from Deadliest Catch, the Hillstrand brothers rescued a man from another boat who fell overboard, and ended up with a record haul that season.
The Jaleel White show Grown Ups featured the lack of a response to some negative deed he'd done, prompting some other character to comment on how it will come back and bite him in the ass eventually. Cut to him waking up and looking at himself in the mirror, then commenting with surprise: "what the hell bit me in the ass?!"
Dakota Fred seemed to be on the receiving end of this in the second season of the Discovery Channel series Gold Rush; kicking the Hoffmans out of Porcupine Creek while being a relentless Smug Snake came back to bite him big time when his house and everything in it was ruined by flooding.
Inexplicably, what happened to Rob & Amber at the end of Season 7 of The Amazing Race. Over the course of the season, Rob played the game like he hadSurvivor, including convincing two other team to quit a Roadblock and voluntarily take a penalty, and talking his way onto a closed flight. Alone this was nothing to get upset about, except he gloated constantly and guaranteed their victory, pissing off fans and the other teams in the process. Then, in the finale, when Rob & Amber are sitting alone on the plane to the Final Destination City, the race in hand, Uchenna & Joyce beg their way onto the plane, despite the gate already being closed and the pilot already having pulled away. Uchenna & Joyce eventually win, despite running out of money and having to beg to pay their cab driver at the Finish Line, as Rob & Amber get lost looking for the final clue in Little Havana. The comeback was so improbable (especially with Uchenna & Joyce getting all their money and possessions taken away for losing the previous leg) that it had some fans claiming the whole thing was staged (this rumor was started by a bitter Rob).
It happened to them again on All-Stars. Even before winning the first three legs, Rob's ego was flying as high as ever, and he was already declaring them the winners. Then every single thing went wrong for them on leg four, and Rob had to watch as Charla & Mirna made up a twenty minute deficit to pass them at the Roadblock.
Russell Hantz on Survivor: Redemption Island set off a chain reaction of karma for his tribe. He might have been able to get away with some of his old tricks in Heroes vs. Villains, back when he was an unknown quantity. Not this season (which began through a dare from Rob). Ran the exact same play in the exact same way, which triggered the no-less stupid decision to throw an immunity challenge while only two players ahead. He was the first one gone from the tribe, with the rest following in short order.
When Roy Walker left the British game show Catchphrase (a show he was very well-known for hosting), he was replaced by Nick Weir. He tripped and broke his leg within the opening of the first episode he hosted.
The Malcolm in the Middle episode Malcolm Defends Reese: Mr. Herkabe, not wanting his title of "highest GPA ever" stripped by Malcolm, has his brother Reese publically humiliated in front of the class, and when Malcolm tries to stick up to Reese, he ends up risking to fail his class, and thus not get the highest GPA ever in order to keep Reese from being humiliated again. After Mr. Herkabe lets slip that he failed Gym, his title is automatically stripped, and he has to retake PE as a student. And to add insult to his (rather deserving) injury, he has to take it the exact same PE Class as Reese, who takes sweet revenge on Herkabe by absolutely creaming him at Dodgeball.
Hal has also been victim to this at least twice. Once where his earlier claim that the nads were easy pickings when playing basketball with his sons resulted in him being hit in the crotch, another time was in the episode Red Dress. He ended up burning Lois's red dress that she intended to wear for their anniversary. As a consequence, he ended up having his anniversary dinner all by himself while waiting for Lois, and presumably burn the house while completely drunk in Lois and the kid's absence.
In the first episode of Heroes Volume 4, when Nathan is rounding up and imprisoning people with superpowers, Peter runs into Mohinder and asks him what he thinks of Nathan's plan. To Peter's dismay, Mohinder thinks it's a good idea because of his own experience with turning into a dangerous monster after giving himself superpowers not long ago. Immediately after Peter leaves, Mohinder is kidnapped by Nathan's goons - and realizes that he really doesn't think it's such a good idea after all. . .prompting a Heel Face Turn by episode's end.
One episode of Only Foolsand Horses has Del become romantically involved with an antiques dealer named Miranda. It's obvious to the audience she was only interested in a painting that hung in the Trotters flat, which they apparently don't know the value of. She manages to coerce Del into giving her it for a birthday present, assuring him that she just want to hang it in her home. At the end of the episode Del goes to meet her at an auction house, and finds the painting up for sale. Miranda smugly tells him she's registered the painting to show that it has been in her family for years. Turns out Del knew how valuable it was all along; his grandmother stole it from an art dealer she had been a cleaner for, and Miranda is going to be in a lot of trouble.
Despite any retribution being absent from the actual movie (save for a deleted scene), Saturday Night Live has the "lost" ending of It's a Wonderful Life cover the duly-deserved just deserts for Mr. Potter. Uncle Billy remembers what happened with the money he lost, and the town storms Potter's office after learning he has it. As George starts giving him a beating, Potter reveals he was faking being a cripple. The short ends with George, Mary, and Harry simultaneously whaling on Potter as the town sings Auld Lang Syne.
"The Summer of George" from the eighth season of Seinfeld is pretty masterful example. The episode's main plot revolves around George receiving a huge severance package from the New York Yankees and deciding to use it to fund a summer of laziness, or "The Summer of George" as he calls it. This is all derailed when George slips on a glossy party invitation from the same invitation store where he purchased the cheap invitations that led to Susan's death one year prior. At the hospital the same doctor that gave the gang the news that Susan had died tells them that George will walk again but now will have to spend the whole summer in rehab. Hilariously, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer react with the same indifference the whole group had towards Susan's death as George laments the loss of his summer.
Used quite frequently on The King of Queens anytime Doug or Carrie (or both) come up with a selfish scheme to benefit themselves. A good example: in the episode Buy Curious an elderly neighbor dies and Carrie convinces Doug to buy her house for a small sum then "flip it" to make a larger profit. However, it costs them too much to make repairs to it, theuy inadvently insult an African couple who attempt to buy it, and are forced to sell it to Lou Ferrigno (whom they had forced away from the house, despite him only tending the plants)for much less then they paid for it.
Gregory House of House sometimes finds his underhanded actions will undermine the very goal he was aiming to achieve. Perhaps one of the most poignant instances was when he plugged up various sewage mains at the hospital as a result of his anger at Wilson deciding not to seek cancer treatment. When he finally accepts the decision and resolves to enjoy what time he has left with Wilson, he's jailed for felony vandalism as a result of flooding the hospital and loses that remaining time.
Monty Python - it's likely Michael Palin's travel agent character is a recipient, as he has to vicariously experience the numbing tedium of a typical package tour via customer Eric Idle's nonstop droning play-by-play of such a trip.
On the October 12, 2009 game of Jeopardy!, one of the contestants was Jeff Kirby, who originally appeared on the show in December 1999. As stated in Game Show Winnings Cap, Trebek-era contestants are not allowed to appear again (unless expressly invited back by the producers), but Jeff somehow got through the audition process. He didn't get caught until someone on the show's message board pointed out that he was wearing the same tie he had worn in his 1999 appearance. (Either he has a spectacularly limited wardrobe, or he was thumbing his nose at the powers that be.) What makes him fit into this trope? He finished in third place on both shows (and of course, was denied the $1,000 third-place winnings from his 2009 episode).
Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Best of Both Worlds part II'', Picard, as the Borg "speaker" Locutus, almost sneeringly says to Data that as an android, he would be obsolete in "the new order". Soon, Data realizes that he can connect to the Borg collective consciousness through Picard, and after he does, Picard tells him to tell the Borg to enter their regeneration cycle, which causes an overload that destroys the Borg cube and frees Picard from their control.
In "Chain of Command: Part I", Picard is assigned to investigate the possible existence of a Cardassian planet. But when he, Worf and Dr. Crusher finally get to the location of the apparent base, they discover there's simply a probe delivering false sensor data, and the Cardassians capture Picard. Later on, in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Die is Cast", the combined fleet of the Cardassian's Obsidian Order and Romulan Tal Shiar launches a surprise attack against the Dominion's Founders' homeworld, only for them to realize the planet was, in fact, deserted save a probe delivering false data, leading to an ambush by a Jem'Hadar fleet.
Regina in Once Upon a Time had been mainly a Karma Houdini back in season 1 but come season 2, she gets hit hard with karma. In the episode "Queen of Hearts", she could only watch as her adopted son Henry happily goes to dinner with his biological mother, grandparents and friends without inviting her. Yes, she did just save Emma and Snow's lives but she was also the reason why they ended up in the magical world in the first place.
In "The Cricket Game", Regina is blamed for the death of someone who turned out not to be dead despite huge amounts of evidence against her. This is exactly what she did to Mary Margaret in season 1.
In one episode of Strange Luck, just when it appears to be too late to stop the execution of a wrongfully-convicted man, the person trying to stop the execution, Chance Harper, hits a road slick and crashes into a power pole, resulting in the innocent man living... and the real murderer being executed in absentia in his place by way of being struck by a falling power line.
Music
In Queen of the Wave by Pepe Deluxé, it's strongly implied that Atlantis was destroyed because of the moral failure of its citizens: both "Grave Prophecy" (in which Atlantis's destruction is foretold) and "Riders of the First Ark" (in which the destruction happens) prominently mention The Book of Laws being "forgotten". An even more direct example is when Zailm begins an adulterous affair with Lolix: "The nemesis of Karma starts pursuing him. A pursuit that will eventually lead to the deaths of both Zailm and Lolix..."
Sports
Lakers player Andrew Bynum put a major hit on Gerald Wallace in a game in late January 2009, a hit that caused Wallace to get a broken rib and a collapsed lung. In Bynum's very next game, he got into a collision with Kobe Bryant, which caused Bynum to have a major MCL tear which put him out for 8-12 weeks, the amount of time some NBA fans believe he should've been suspended for the hit on Wallace.
Another sports example would be in the National Hockey League with Eric Lindros and Scott Stevens. Eric Lindros was viewed as the next Wayne Gretzky when he was drafted by the Quebec Nordiques, only to enrage Quebec fans by refusing to play for the team and demanding a trade to Philadelphia. While in Philadelphia, his behavior led many to view him as a self-centered, pampered Jerk Jock who didn't care about anyone but himself and his own stats. This attitude, along with his punishing physical style of play, made the many injuries he suffered, particularly the brutal concussion he suffered from New Jersey defenceman Scott Stevens in the 2000 playoffs, become viewed by many fans as karmic retribution. Stevens himself could also be construed as a victim of this trope. His fierce physical bodychecking led not only Lindros but several other victims to suffer major injuries, while he himself would eventually be forced to retire due to post-concussion syndrome. Connection, perhaps?
Another example from the NHL in which during a match, player Steve Sullivan was hit in the face with a teammates stick causing a cut across his nose. Cue a fan heckling Steve as he skates off. Two short handed goals by Sullivan later, the opposing teams goalie Patrick Roy tries to clear the puck, only to have it go over the glass and hit the same heckler in the forehead. Bonus points for the man's female friend (who is covering his cut with a cloth) giving Steve a thumbs up as he skates by with a few words of his own.
A rare case of MMA Instant Karma, but by former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans' own admission, he was actually in the process of taunting Lyoto Machida (or reassuring himself) by attempting to say "you hit like a bitch" only to be cut off by a looping right hook from Machida made all the more effective by Evans' open mouth.
In the 2012 NBA Eastern Conference playoff series between the Indiana Pacers and the Miami Heat, Lebron James was having a bad game 3 and was missing many free-throws. Pacers player Lance Stephenson decided to taunt the NBA star by making the choke sign from the bench; which rudely hinted at the history of how Lebron James would seem to crack under pressure and lose the big games. The Pacers would go on to win game 3. But the action by Lance would light a fire in Lebron James and he began to play some of the best basketball in his career. The Miami Heat would go on to beat the Indiana Pacers in the series and eventually win their second NBA championship in franchise history. Even though Lance apologized for the choke sign, many sports experts believed that if it wasn't for his actions, the Pacers might have won the series and Lebron James wouldn't have gotten his first NBA Championship Ring.
At the 2012 Vuelta a España, on stage 4, Alejandro Valverde crashed while being the leader of the general classification. This was during a time where Team Sky were setting the pace, trying to use the sidewind to see if other teams could be dropped. When Valverde crashed, Sky accelerated and Katusha went up to help them, despite the unwritten rule that if a GC-contender comes in trouble where they aren't to blame (crashes and punctures), the pack slows down and lets them back in the group. On stage 17, Rodriguez (leader of team Katusha) had a bad day, and third GC-contender Alberto Contador (leader of Saxo Bank-Tinkoff Bank) was in a huge attack, about to win the race. Valverde could have helped Rodriguez. Instead, Valverde accelerated away, leaving Rodriguez to fall to third and eventually Contador won the general classification. Team Sky didn't really get their karma back, as their captain, Chris Froome, got his ass handed to him during the late stages.
In the 2011 fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and "Vicious" Victor Ortiz, Ortiz realized early that he was being out-boxed by Mayweather and would be in for a long night. So he decided to fight dirty by trying to forcibly break Floyd's nose with a headbutt. Afterwards, the ref stopped the fight and took a point away from Ortiz. Victor began being very apologetic, even giving Floyd a kiss on the cheek. After the ref called time in, Ortiz was still apologizing, which Floyd pretended to acknowledge and accept, however, suddenly he unleashed a brutal two punch combo, sucker punching Ortiz and knocking him out. Some fans praised Mayweather for his actions because of what Ortiz did, while others criticized Floyd for not giving Ortiz a chance to get set. Either way, everyone agrees that the KO was legal and Floyd Mayweather Jr. won the fight.
In 2006, during an NFL game pitting divisional rivals the New England Patriots against the New York Jets, the Patriots were caught videotaping Jets coaching signals on the sidelines. Irate, the Patriots decided to use their 2007 season to humiliate the entire NFL, playing each game to beat their opponents as badly as possible. They accomplished a 16-0 regular season, made it to the Superbowl - and lost to the New York Giants.
During the AFC championship game for the 2012 season, the Baltimore Ravens and the New England Patriots played each other for the right to go to the Superbowl. During the first half, the game was competitive with the Patriots seemly having the edge. Before half-time, the Ravens broke up an offenses play by the Patriots. Tom Brady ran the ball and intentionally slid with his leg held high into defensive player Ed Reed's knee, which could have caused a serious injury. Though the action was clear for everyone to see on video, the officials didn't throw a flag, and commentator Phil Simms spoke in concern for Brady, as if he didn't notice what Brady did at all. During the second-half of the game, the Ravens completely dominated the Patriots preventing them from scoring during the final two whole quarters and won the championship game (and the Superbowl for good measure).
During the 2012-2013 NBA season, Boston Celtics superstar point guard, Rajon Rondo, kept losing his temper and getting into fights with other players. He even got into confrontations with the officials resulting in game suspensions and fines. However, this didn't stop Rondo from continuing to lose his temper and start fights during games. So what happened next? At the end of January 2013, Rajon Rondo tore his ACL putting him out for the entire season.
In the penultimate game of the 2011-12 NHL regular season for both the San Jose Sharks and Los Angeles Kings, Sharks forward Ryane Clowe broke up a King rush from the bench. The Sharks won that game (plus the rematch in San Jose) to ensure the #7 seed and the St. Louis Blues while the Kings had to play the Presidents' Trophy winning Vancouver Canucks. The Blues would dismantle the Sharks in six games in round one. The Kings, however, strung together one of the most dominant playoff runs in sports history en route to a Stanley Cup. To pour more salt on the wounds, the Kings also swept the Blues in the 2nd round.
San Francisco 49ers player Chris Culliver went on a homophobic rant just days before Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. When the game came, he was constantly beat on passes and was even called for a pass interference to extend a drive where the Ravens kicked what would be the game deciding field goal.
In 2007, The Colorado Rockies led by manager Clint Hurdle won an important game against the San Diego Padres despite his runner not touching home plate when the winning run scored. In 2011, Hurdle now of the Pittsburgh Pirates wound up on the other end of a game like that against the Atlanta Braves (despite the runner clearly having been tagged out.)
Religion
The "Eye for an Eye" law established by Moses can be interpreted as applying this to real life.
"On the appointed day, Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people. They shouted "This is the voice of a god, not of a man." Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died."
And in Matthew 7 (1-2) (NIV), Jesus warns, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
Folklore
The story of "Androcles and the Lion" is a good example. In most versions of the story, a Roman fugitive slave named Androcles takes refuge in a cave, and finds a lion wounded by a thorn in its paw. He removes the thorn, and cleans the infected wound, nursing the beast back to health. Years later, Androcles returns to civilization, only to be arrested and condemned to be devoured by the wild beasts in the Circus Maximus, the usual punishment for a fugitive slave. The emperor (presumably either Caligula of Claudius) shows up to watch, and as fate would have it, the most vicious beast that is sprung upon Androcles is the same lion that he healed, who remembers and shows affection towards. The emperor is impressed by the display, pardons him, and gives him custody of the lion.
Mythology
Some might say it's subverted in Greek Mythology because most times karma is just the gods helping or messing with the heroes, but the fact is that the heroes good or bad actions have consequences, and the gods represent universal forces, so this is still technically true. Here are some examples:
Achilles's profanation of Apollo's temple led to his death by Paris, who was a servant of Apollo.
Odysseus blinding Polyphemus was what incited Poseidon to curse him, setting the stage for The Odyssey.
Other examples include the greed of Odysseus' crew leading to Aeolus' gift blowing them off course, the plunder at Ismaros being rewarded by storms that blew them off course, and Odysseus' patience and faithfulness at Calypso's island leading to divine intervention aiding his escape. On the other hand, Odysseus only put out Polyphemus' eye because the cyclops meant to eat him, so they were kind of holding each others' lasers. Odysseus' tribulations are as much because of hubris as anything else, because he would have gotten away with blinding Polyphemus if he hadn't decided to boast by shouting his real name at the monster as he left. Polyphemus initially offered to feast with Odysseus instead of on Odysseus in his honor for his cunning; it was only after Odysseus cursed him that Polyphemus cursed him back.
Jason helping an old woman across a stream was fortuitous, for she was actually Hera in disguise, and she set in motion the events that let to his later adventures with the Argonauts.
Jason would suffer both good and bad karma with this trope, as his efforts to dump his lawful wife Medea (who had allowed the Argonauts to escape the land of her father Aeetes) for another woman cost him Hera's favor and led to his disgrace and eventual death.
Jason's betrayal was a case of Laser-Guided Karma for Medea, who betrayed her father, murderer her brother and later tricked the daughters of Jason's uncle into murdering their father. Her father was actively trying to murder (indirectly) Jason using undead skeletons and an unkillable dragon. His uncle was a Lawful Evil despot who murdered Jason's father and stole his throne, and was ALSO trying to get Jason killed indirectly. Her brother...was just kinda in the way, and his murder forced her father to stop his pursuit of Jason to bury him.
Ixion is another mention, given that he first murdered his father-in-law, fled to Mount Olympus to escape punishment, and repaid Zeus's hospitality by attempting to rape Hera. An infuriated Zeus banished him to Hades, where he was strapped to a flaming wheel and left to spin around for the rest of eternity.
Ixion's son Peirithoos is just as bad, convincing Theseus to sneak down with him into Hades and kidnap Persephone to be his bride. Needless to say, Hades was not amused. When Heracles came down to the Underworld on the last of his Twelve Labours, he was allowed to free Theseus from Hades' captivity. The Underworld shook when he tried to free Peirithoos, which was Hades' way of letting our hero know that this was a very bad idea.
Tantalus was a king who tried to steal some ambrosia from the gods. They found out and banished him from Olympus. He invited them to a feast at his home to "try to make it up to them"; he killed his children and fed them to the gods as revenge for being banished. They found out about that, too [they are gods, after all] and now he's in the Fields Of Punishment. He's standing in a lake under a fruit tree, and he's starving. Every time he tries to eat or drink, the food/liquid moves away from him.
Sisyphus' attempts to cheat death (and by extension Hades) ended in failure and got him stuck pushing a boulder up a mountain for eternity.
Instant Karma is an optional game mechanic in GURPS: Thaumatology that can strike people who use ritual magic to harm others.
Magic: The Gathering has It That Betrays, a card that makes any card your opponent sacrfices yours. It also makes your opponent sacriice two cards each time it attacks. Given that Eldrazi (the creature type It That Betrays is a member of) cause people to sacrifice permanents...this is more like Laser Guided Theft.
In Traveller judicial slavery is sometimes used as an alternative to capital punishment in the Sword Worlds. If this is interpreted to imply that this is the penalty for human trafficing which seems likely, then the poetic justice of this is rather grimly amusing.
Video Games
In the prologue of Resident Evil 4, you can choose to rescue a stray dog from a bear trap. Most players do this solely due to the dog's Woobie-ness, to be rewarded when he jumps into their fight with El Gigante, distracting him and making the fight easier.
Early at the fair in Chrono Trigger, Crono has the opportunity to help a little girl find her cat, and to eat a random man's lunch for HP. A few sequences latter, though, he needs character witnesses, and every Good or Evil act comes back up... not that it will matter. Sure, being found innocent nets you a couple Elixirs, but...
At the end of Metroid II Samus spares a baby Metroid that imprinted upon her as its mother. In Super Metroid, the Metroid returns the favor by not draining Samus to death, and then sacrificing itself to save her life in the fight against Mother Brain, triggering the mother of all Mama Bear moments from Samus, who, by the way, now has the Hyper Beam.
In the beginning of Metroid Fusion, Samus gets infected by the X Parasite, whose only natural enemies are the Metroids she all but annihilated. Her life is saved by cells extracted from the last Metroid and these events would have happened with less favorable results even without the baby Metroid.
Another cross-game example: Remember those cute critters that taught you how to shinespark and wall-climb in Super Metroid? At the end of Super Metroid you can take some time off your busy schedule of escaping the self-destructing planet and help them reach their own ship (it's the small dot flying away from Zebes in the ending cinematic). At the end of Metroid Fusion, they'll return the favor by saving your ship from the rampaging Omega Metroid, allowing you to escape the doomed space station.
Quest for Glory tends towards the positive karma version of this trope (usually negative karma is quite predictable since someone is present and may warn you not to do something). Fail to rescue the monkey from the cage? Well good luck going to the lost city. Didn't show compassion to the woman turned into a tree? Well no magic fruit to make a dispel potion!
In a franchise that allows and even encourages wholesale pot destruction, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword manages to sneak in a bit of this. In one of Skyloft's houses lives a woman who says she's an antique collector. Break her stuff and she'll make you pay for it.
A minor act of kindness by Disgaea 3'sChew Toy Almaz towards Sapphire (she overheard him defending her in the guard barracks) in the background story is the ultimate source of his case of Throw the Dog a Bone and Rags to Royalty.
In the second Ryu Ga Gotoku game, Kazuma helping out a fun-loving old lady with item quests will allow him to learn some useful fighting techniques, and eventually discover that she is in fact the former martial arts instructor of a Triad leader he fought in the first game.
Grand Theft Auto IV has this. At one point late in the game, you can choose to either help a man who once betrayed you with a large heroin deal (you're ordered to do so by a mafia boss), or just kill the guy for revenge. Whichever choice you make though, you end up paying for it DEARLY. if you help with the H deal, not only do you get double-crossed AGAIN, but your cousin gets killed. If you go and kill the guy who betrayed you, the mafia boss that ordered you to work with him comes along and shoots your girlfriend. During a WEDDING!
Near the end of Dead Space, you desperately fight to put an artifact back in place on a pedestal to neutralize all the alien monsters on the planet. Then The Mole shows up and steals it away, mocking you. Not five minutes later, said Mole is smashed into paste by the monster that would have left everyone alone if the artifact hadn't been disturbed.
In the sequel, Daina Le Guin dies about 20 seconds after you find out she was a Unitologist using you the whole time.
Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 absolutely love punishing egotistical behaviour on higher difficulties. The game actually actively spawns Special Infected next to people that wander off on their own to scavenge some pills or think they can survive on their own. Chargers in particular have a reputation for this.
Rumour has that "tea-bagging" a downed/dead team-mate spawns a couple of hordes which home in on you.
In Final Fantasy you have a sort-of example with tonberries, which cast a spell called "Everyone's Grudge" (varies from game to game) which does damage that scales with how many of their friends you've murdered.
In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, a priest locked himself in a small fortress with a powerful artifact that could've been used to save his village from vampire attacks for his own personal protection. Almost immediately after the main character takes the artifact from the priest to use against the vampires, the priest gets torn apart by vampires who seemed to have been waiting for the moment they could kill him.
In the original series, a now-retconned plot point revealed Alucard to be Trevor Belmont's father. This would have meant that Dracula had been getting taken down by his own descendants, generation after generation.
In the first Dead Rising, Frank comes across a paranoid gun shop owner warning another man to stay away, while the other man is asking him to let other people use his guns. Finally the shop owner shoots the man with a shotgun, blasting him out of the store. After defeating him in a mini-bossfight, he staggers out of his shop blubbering and terrified, only to run headfirst into the zombie of the man he killed.
In the sequel, Dead Rising 2, Chuck comes across an unhinged CURE (basically a zombie rights group) supporter in a bathroom. He's been keeping a zombie around to spread the disease, because he thinks it's a blessing of sorts. Shortly after you beat him, he stumbles right into the bathroom stall he was keeping the zombie in, and is bitten. Rather than become a zombie, he opts to slit his own throat.
In the scenario of "Battle of Okehazama" in Samurai Warriors 2, a dying Yoshimoto threatens Dark Lord Nobunaga with a speech about Karma that will eventually find him and make him suffer a painful defeat. Nobunaga's answer?
Nobunaga:"...I cannot wait....."
In the Fallout New Vegas downloadable content Dead Money, you spend most of the time trying to access a secret pre-war fortress of technology for the insane former elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, Elijah. At the end of the DLC, when you finally access the Sierra Madre Vault, you have the option of talking him into coming down then simply leaving. Elijah will walk into the vault and try to access whats inside. Then he'll and accidentally trigger an event on the computer that traps him inside. There's no way out of there now, he's trapped in there until he dies.
The hordes of nightmarish Ghost People are victims of karma. The entire construction crew that was building the Villa around the Casino was pulling a scam; they were cutting every corner possible to make the flimsiest, least safe town ever constructed, and saving a ton of money in the process. Partially as a result of their shoddy construction, a dangerous toxic cloud began building up in the ventilation systems. After the bombs fell, with no one to turn off or repair the vents, the Cloud spewed out unstopped for centuries, and the construction workers can be found shambling around the Villa in a horrid parody of life, still wearing their hazmat suits.
Arguably the sacking of the Dales in Dragon Age. While not directly connected to it, it was likely triggered primarily by their choice to not involve themselves in preventing a potential apocalypse, thus souring their neighbors attitudes to them further and considering the elven attitude towards humans, their reason for noninvolvement was likely a petty one when compared to the fate of the world.
Also in Dragon Age: Origins's Dwarf Noble origin, Lord Harrowmont is a Reasonable Authority Figure who will support your character if you were falsely accused and puts his political career on the line to try and save your life (although he ultimately fails because your accuser was one step ahead). You later return to Orzammar and find him deadlocked in a battle for the throne with your accuser, and have the option of handing him the crown.
If you spare Loghain and allow him to live, he's a Grey Warden and is being shipped off to Orlais after Awakenings.
In The Reconstruction, Yacatec is a slave trader who sells his own race into slavery, but he's revealed to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold due to Love Redeems. After the apocalypse, his wife is murdered, and he himself is enslaved by the si'shra.
One of the PvP factions in Dark Souls, the Darkmoon Blade, is all about this. When players kill other players and NPCs, they accumulate sin. The Darkmoon covenant is a covenant specifically based around hunting down those with a large amount of sin.
In one of the Beyond Good And Evil trailers/in-universe Hillian News propaganda videos, Fehn Digler warns that perls are illegal to use as currency, and quotes the Alpha Sections as describing the damage the Mammago Garage (which accepts them) has suffered as "poetic justice".
Sirrus and Achenar rightfully fall prey to this in Myst. After pulling off their scheme to trap their parents in books, they wind up trapped in prison books themselves.
To extend the karma even further, in Myst III, after trapping Saavedro for 20 years, Sirrus and Achenar remain in their respective prisons for the same amount of time.
Webcomics
The Order of the Stick: After conquering the hometown of the paladins, Redcloak loses his eye to a paladin that he had tortured in order to gain information about a plan for which he had, in Start of Darkness, murdered his own brother, who himself had lost an eye to a paladin of the same order who helped conquer Redcloak's hometown. It's like a karma palindrome.
For bonus points, it's the other eye! And afterwards, when Xykon's phylactery is falling, it bounces off the statue of Redcloak, hitting the same eye he lost!! Brilliant!
For double bonus points, Redcloak, as a cleric, has access to the Regenerate spell that would let him get the eyeball back... but Xykon forbids him from ever using it, so that he'll always have a reminder of his failure. Sure, he's talking about losing Xykon's phylactery, but come on...
Also from their first fight with the Linear Guild the guild disables their cleric and moments later loses their own. Roy even said at the time "I think karma just evened that score".
From the same fight, Nale falling off the bridge that he ordered destroyed. And lampshaded again with "Karma-riffic!"
Vaarsuvius unleashes a spell called Familicide that wipes out an enormous number of black dragons and their descendants. Turns out the Draketooth clan that guards one of the gates is descended from a black dragon, wiping out the clan and leaving the gate unguarded.
Material Girl has this happening to the main character right at the beginning.
In WTF Comics, Nikisha (a Dark Elf Dark Action Girl working as an assassin for the villains) helps an imprisoned child she was supposed to be guarding escape. The same child promptly acts as a Character Witness and prevents the heroes from killing her. That is not enough; the Big Good happens to meet her shortly after, and gives her advice on how to protect herself from the Big Bad. Karmariffic, indeed.
In Sluggy Freelancethe exact moment Cloney tries to bite off Aylee's head, Torg chops Cloney's head right off.
A Loonatic's Tale: Not a villainous example, but certainly notable: Dr. Chester is mean to everyone, and the degree to which he is mean is in inverse proportion to how much they need someone to be nice to them (so to his bosses, he's merely surly, but to Dr. Qubert or his own patients, he's actively derisive and hostile). As a result nothing ever goes his way-machines won't work, his bosses wonder why they hired his useless butt, and his coworkers have nothing nice to say either to or about him.
Also worth noting is the children at Hesters summer camp who could have saved themselves some future therapy bills and mental trauma had they been actually 'nice' to Hester, as it stands their hazing of the red headed witch is directly linked to their terrorizing by a vampire.
In Dead Winter, Arlen insists on kicking Liz, Alice, Monday, and Lou out of his shelter (in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse)—and as if that wasn't dickish enough, he also steals the keys to Lou's van. Then the hitman Sixgun comes looking for Monday, and the van out front convinces him that Monday is inside the shelter. Arlen attempts to bar Sixgun's entrance, and just gets shot.
In WormRegent is baffled in the Shell arc by Taylor's refusal to seek any revenge on those bullying her civilian identity. After they discover one of these bullies to be a Type V Anti-Hero Regent takes control of her for a mission then fakes driving her out of town for his team. In actual fact he puts her through a Humiliation Conga by exposing all her misdeeds that he can and revealing her nature to her family, culminating in nearly having her kill herself, all because she messed with his teammate and he knows she'd never do it herself.
Played for laughs in Team Four Star's Let's Play of Left 4 Dead 2 custom campaign I Hate Mountains. During the rescue, they remind each other to remember the lessons learned when they played Hard Rain. After a Beat, they start shooting Kaiser Neko, who was the Sole Survivor of Hard Rain* partly because he got on the escape boat early, partly because the others insisted on trying to save Lanipator despite the fact that it was impossible and thus they also got killed. When the rest of the group runs to the escape plane, a Tank appears and starts kicking their butts; they instantly declare it the Karma Tank (though two of them still manage to get away).
Lanipator gets hit twice with this during part 3 of Blood Harvest. At one point Takahata has been incapped and Kaiser Neko asks if anyone wants to help him. Lani just says he's shooting Taka. A Charger then attacks Lani. Later, Ganxingba gets trapped by fire and Lani decides to throw a gas can and a propane tank to make it worse. He's then grabbed by a smoker. In both instances he calls it karma.
In a Serious Sam: BFE mission, Lani made a joke about fat people and was blown up seconds later. He calmly admitted that was karma.
In the Yogscast Minecraftmachinima, Simon jokingly sets fire to the Yogcave, then stands around yakking while Lewis panics trying to put the flames out. Moments later, Simon is "accidentally" knocked into a deep underground pit. He climbs out and promptly burns to death. Later, when he's respawned and the fire's gone out, he wanders out the back door... and triggers a booby trap and blows up.
While she's too oblivious to see it as such, The Nostalgia Chick has got her disregard for the privacy of others thrown back at her a few times, like Obscurus Lupahiding in her bed or Nella popping up next to her out of nowhere.
Bitey is usally the victim of this in the Brackenwood series. This is mostly because he keeps being a total Jerkass to the many peaceful animals of Brackenwood. However in a twist, in "The Last of the Dashkin" it's revealed that some of those sweet little animals may be just as deserving of that karma as Bitey.
Back in 2008 during the midnight launch of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Screw Attack members Craig and Ben went to their local Gamestop to auction off an early copy of the game they had received, with the proceeds going to charity. At one point a customer in line for the game objected to having his face on camera and angrily ordered them to turn it off. (His face was edited out with a paper bag with a frowney face reading "I don't want my face on camera") Eventually, he accused them of assault and called the cops. When they showed up and the guys gave their side of the story, the cops turned around and arrested the guy who called them.
In Rooster Teeth's Let's Play of Far Cry 3, a lot of the Achievement Hunter gang gets hit with this constantly. Incidents include Jack getting ran over by a truck twice after he reveals that he refused to help Ray with being attacked by a dog, Ray getting attacked by a dog for taunting Jack over being ran over by the truck and Michael getting attacked by a dog when he says that the dogs were attacking him because he was Puerto Rican.
Ed Edd N Eddy are ALWAYS falling victim to this. For example, when the Eds play a trick on Jimmy in Tinker Ed, this leads to Sarah and Jimmy setting up an elaborate trap for them to fall into, resulting in an embarrassing photo being taken of them in fairy-tale costumes which is promptly handed off to Kevin to show to the other kids.
The infuriating part is that it was all Kevin's fault for crushing Jimmy's beliefs in the first place.
Maybe that's why he did it.
Disney's Beauty and the Beast has the prince and his castle and staff transformed for denying a beggar woman shelter. She was really a beautiful (if somewhat petty) enchantress.
The prince really was a real Jerk Ass, and more importantly he was also a prince with the power to make people's lives really unpleasant. This was not his first act of selfishness, and even on becoming a Beast it was not his last. There is no telling what sort of authority he might have grown up to become without learning a lesson about love and selflessness.
A good example in Kim Possible happens to Bonnie. It is revealed that she was the only senior in Middleton High who wasn't graduating because she missed an important quiz on the last week of school, forcing her to attend summer school.
Positive and negative karma example: in The Incredibles, Syndrome being callous about Mr. Incredible threatening to kill Mirage, and Mr. Incredible not being able to carry out the threat is what convinced her to do a High Heel Face Turn and help the Incredibles stop the robot.
An indirect, somewhat subtle example that could just as well be a coincidence. Ozai burned and banished his son, Zuko, when he was thirteen years old. Cut to only a few years later, when Ozai is defeated by Aang, who was (presumably) thirteen years old.
To add to this, it is later pointed out (by Zuko himself, no less) to Ozai that if he'd never banished Zuko in the first place, things would have probably worked in his favor.
And who was it that became Aang's firebending teacher, allowing him to complete his training and defeat Ozai (including teaching him the perfect counter to Ozai's trump card)? Zuko.
Adventure Time example. In the episode "You Made Me," Lemongrab tortures several people in an electrical chamber, tries to KO his mom, spies on the citizens of the Candy Kingdom as they sleep, and assaults a baby. In his next episode, "Mystery Dungeon," he is KO'd by the Ice King, separated from his family (who are in the process of slowly starving to death, as is Lemngrab himself,) brought to the Mystery Dungeon against his will, and is nearly killed when a giant monster squeezes out all of his blood.
In The Boondocks, Riley is playing a game of basketball where he got the center to run off crying by telling her that her parents were getting divorced and waiting until after her birthday to tell her, and she was replaced by an autistic kid. Said socially challenged child turns out to be a child-prodigy at basketball.
Cartman of South Park gets bitten in the ass by this every so often. For example, he feigns Tourettes syndrome (mental disorder that strips people of control over their behavior and speech) so he could swear to his heart's content without reprimand. All goes shiny until he loses control of himself and starts spilling out all his embarrassing secrets.
To balance this however, he is often thrown a bone on the rare occasions those he plots against are presented with similar cruel intentions (eg. bumbling terrorists or immoral anti-tobacco companies). In recent episodes odd occasions have shown the other boys turn on Cartman without provocation or go to similar ruthless measures in their Escalating War with him (especially Kyle, who has an exceptional hatred of him) only for it to fall flat on them (eg. Fatbeard). That said this doesn't prevent Cartman from taking his retaliation completely overboard at times (given all the unprovoked pain and humiliation Cartman went through in Scott Tenorman Must Die, fans seem to be mixed as to whether his revenge on Manipulative Bastard Scott Tenorman counts as Moral Event Horizon or Crowning Moment Of Awesome).
"Humancentipad" is possibly the ultimate case of Cartman getting an episode of this trope. His mother stands up to him for once for the episode and just as he's about to be rewarded for humiliating her on national television, his reward is taken away. So he starts yelling insults and accusations at God, and gets struck down by lightning.
In Phineas And Ferb, a show that thrives on contrived coincidences, if Doofenshmirtz doesn't do anything particularly malicious in an episode, he'll usually get a happy ending along with the other characters.
In The Batman vs Dracula, when The Joker shocks Penguin and tosses him in the river, Penguin recovers just in time to see Batman swing after a retreating Joker. He nearly drops the trope name:
Penguin: Instant karma, Joker!
The Joker is usually a Karma Houdini, but he got it good in an episode of Batman The Animated Series. He pushes Jack Ryder into a vat of chemicals after dosing him with laughing gas. Ryder comes back as the Creeper, who hits on Harley and eventually chases Joker through Gotham in a chase scene so wacky it ends with Joker yelling, "He's a lunatic!" and practically begging Batman for help.
Squidward's horrific luck was intially presented as a product of this trope due to his jerkass attitude, as the show evolved however, his Butt Monkey role became less provoked and leaned more into Comedic Sociopathy territory.
Tom: Gee, I'm throwin' away a million dollars... BUT I'M HAPPY!
Especially noticeable since Jerry had been pestering Tom because he knew the cat couldn't fight back.
Cyril Sneer both suffered and benefited from this trope. When he was a nasty Corrupt Corporate Executive, he would be repeatedly burned and lose money whenever one of his schemes was thwarted. After Character Development turned him into an Honest Corporate Executive and he became a better person overall, his luck dramatically increased and he begain winning Karmic Jackpots.
Alejandro suffers this in the Total Drama World Tour season finale. After manipulating most of the female cast for most of the season, he falls in love with Heather....who tricks him into holding off his victory and kneeing him in the balls before pushing him down a mountain. He suffers the same fate he inflicted on all his victims. DAMN. And in Heather's victory, he THEN gets burned alive under an avalanche of molten lava. He's singed to a crisp and still alive, but still.
The show's host Chris always gets his at the end of each season. Being an egotistical Jerk AssDungeon Master who's job is to keep all the challenges on the show interesting, he goes the entire seasons making the contestant's lives as miserable as possible, all the while cutting corners on the budget whenever possible and making sure the Red Shirt interns get killed. Karma always ends up biting him in the ass in some way or another, but it finally all accumulates to the ultimate punishment when the government arrests him for turning Wawanakwa Island into an environmental disaster.
An episode of Johnny Test was devoted to Karma. Johnny insulted a man with a 'glandular problem' that made him look fat by calling him fat. Thanks to testing a muscle enhancing bar for Bling Bling Boy, Johnny gets the same problem and is insulted by the same man as earlier. Throughout the episode, Dukie keeps telling him to do good deeds, but Johnny doesn't believe in karma...things keep going bad for Johnny until he finally does a good deed, triggering a series of events that returned him to normal. Bling Bling also tried to help Johnny return to normal, and ultimately became a pop star.
In Xiaolin Showdown the monks choose to save a little old lady, letting the villains get away with the "Bird of Paradise." Guess what the little old lady turns out to be.
Later episodes of The Angry Beavers has this happen to Norbert a lot as a result of his increasingly Jerkass behavior.
In the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Barbary Coast Bunny", a sleazy con-man swindled Bugs out of an enormous gold nugget he'd found. Later on, Bugs walked into the man's shiny new casino and every game paid off for him (even the man's gun dispensed coins for Bugs).
A relatively minor example from an episode of The Simpsons, when Homer taunts Bart for his joining the Junior Campers:
Homer: How was jerk practice, boy? Did they teach you how to sing to trees and build crappy furniture out of useless wooden logs? Huh? [The chair that Homer is sitting on collapses] D'oh! Stupid poetic justice!
Despite being a Sadist Show, Family Guy believes in this trope. Lois falls victim to this when Joyce Kinney airs out her dirty laundry about her doing porn (Though Lois equally gets her back by not being ashamed of it), Connie falls victim to this when Chris made her unpopular (and when she made fun of Meg for going to the prom with Brian, with Brian calling her out on making fun of Meg by pointing out that the reason she does that is because she developed sexually earlier than Meg did and takes out all of her low self-esteem on an innocent victim), and Peter falls victim to this at times for all the idiotic and/or jerkass things he's done (one episode had him stand trial for blowing up a children's hospital).
The most infamous example involved Quagmire's sister's abusive boyfriend, Jeff. After emotionally, verbally and physically abusing her, Quagmire, Peter and Joe all hatch up a plan to kill him. It backfires, and Jeff proceeds to assault Peter and Joe before trying to kill Quagmire. When it looks like he's won, Quagmire gets in a car and murders him with it. Easily among the darkest, and most satisfying moments of the show.
Angelica Pickles of Rugrats gets hit with this. However, how she gets hit with this depends on if Tommy, Chuckie, Phil and Lil are involved in what she's doing. If the babies are involved in any way, then, yes, she'll get hit with this. However, she's been shown to pull the wool over her parents and the other grown-ups' eyes easily and incidents involving Suzie solely tend to have things go in Angelica's favor.
Pete on Goof Troop suffers this constantly. Sometimes he will try to do something selfish and end up having to deal with the consequences of his selfish action gone wrong. Other times he'll try to manipulate Goofy, only to have that backfire in a way that causes more problems than it solves. Treating his son as a lesser being can often lead to the boy getting either some sort of passive-aggressive revenge or aid from outside sources (if not the universe itself, which has actively guilt-tripped him about it via bus ads). And in any episodes he appears to be, if only slightly, a Karma Houdini? There's another episode matching it somewhere where out of context he looks like a harmless Chew Toy.
On Garfield and Friends, Jon's cousin's son gets a variation of this and Karma Houdini: On one hand, he gets off scot-free for framing Garfield twice. On the other hand, Garfield manages to get some revenge on the kid despite being scolded and shamed by Jon.
In Toy Story 3, Lotso leaves the toys to die in a garbage incinerator after Woody and Buzz saved him from the shredder. For a moment it looks like he's going to be a Karma Houdini as Woody tells the others "he's not worth it" upon escaping. But then Lotso is found by a Cloud Cuckoo Lander garbageman, who straps him to the front of his truck and drives off with him.
One Looney Tunes cartoon had a mouse destroying the friendship between Sylvester the Cat and a bulldog all so he could get some cheese. At the end of the cartoon, the two are pummeled senseless by the mouse's last prank and, as he heads for the cheese, the magnet he used to perpetrate the last prank ends up pulling a ceiling lamp down on top of him, knocking him senseless.
Real Life
Admit it, you've been a victim of this one time of your life.
In the former category there's the case of Alan Ralsky, the original "King of Online Spam". Starting in the very early days of the internet, he has annoyed and royally pissed off billions and billions of internet users by pushing unwanted garbage into their mailboxes all in the name of fun and profit. He seemed almost untouchable because he shrugged off a lawsuit by Verizon and his immoral business practices of everyday misery were not illegal. He eventually got what was coming to him when he did an interview with Detroit News, which led to many many many people finding the address of his new home and getting him signed up to every hardcopy mailing campaign that they could find. Ralsky, of course, complained when his house was literally being flooded by truckloads of advertising mail EVERY SINGLE DAY, threatening to sue...someone. Probly didn't pan out.
Here's another Cracked list of 4 out of five stories of companies and clever dicks who think that they could troll common people and get away with it only for said common people to bite their asses back rather hard, along with yet another case on Disproportionate Retribution.
And now, a more literal article 5 True Stories That Will Make You Believe in Karma, which even lampshades the rarity of instant karma (...but karma is usually a long-term thing. Rarely do you see the literal Bitch-Slapping Glove of Justice descend from the skies to smack somebody in the mouth for being a jerk. Notice we said "rarely" and not "never".').
Amanda Todd was a girl who was tricked into posting nude pictures of herself online. One person got a hold of them and threatened to post them everywhere if she did not do what he told her to do. When she didn't give in, he posted the photos everywhere. She eventually committed suicide due to the massive amounts of bullying and backlash she faced. Anonymous was quick to post a video saying that they were going to go after her bullies. They made good on their promise.
The effect is, as stated above, nearly impossible to substantiate in Real Life, but Instant Karma is a recurring observation for many transplant-natives to places like Greenwich Village in Manhattan, The French Quarter in New Orleans, and the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco. This is explored in fiction, but with less regularity than it's become a recurring topic in Real Life conversations.
One German agent in Istanbul during World War II was being more of a bother than the Emniyet preferred. So the Emniyet sent a man to go up to him and say, "We have discovered that you are Jewish..."
On the Israeli version of the TV show Big Brother: the "Big Brother" himself, speaking to someone else with him in the black room thinking that the mic is offline, made an extremely rude sexual comment about one of the competitors. Except the mic was online, and the incident resulted in a lawsuit. Big Brother was defeated by excessive surveillance: karma!
From 60 Minutes: A bank tried to take away a woman's house by using forged documents. Unfortunately for the bank, said woman was a lawyer and fraud/forgery expert who trains FBI agents. It didn't help that the bank(s) did things like putting in the wrong date, occasionally listing the target as "BOGUS ACQUISITION", and hiring a sweatshop's worth of people to sign the same name to hundreds of documents. However it ultimately might not matter since it'd be too expensive to fight all these cases and the government is thinking of putting aside billions to make the homeowners settle.
Adolf Eichmann, who came up with and implemented the idea of incinerating concentration camp victims, including Jews, was himself consigned to the flames by the Jews after being hanged for his crimes. His ashes were then scattered over the Mediterranean from an Israeli police boat.
The 10 condemned Nazis hung for their crimes after World War II were burned in Munich, and their ashes were scattered over the Isar. Hermann Goering had taken poison the night before, avoiding this trope. In any case, his body was burned after being photographed with the others.
Ironically, Hitler doesn't count; he had killed himself in his bunker, and his own men burned him and his wife (who had also killed herself) in a funeral pyre at his own request.
He did use prussic acid to kill himself, however. Prussic acid was manufactured by I.G Farben and Degussa under the trade name Zyklon-B. Maybe Hitler was Genre Savvy enough to realize that what goes around, comes around, and the Gas Chambers would soon come back to haunt him anyway, so he decided to take such a haunting literally himself by taking the same poison Eichmann suggested be used to gas the Jews to death with...
According to one Readers Digest History, a rough estimate of German dead in World War II was six million. About the same as Jews from the Holocaust.
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died of a heart attack on 10 December 2006 (Human Rights Day). It was also the 84th birthday of his wife Lucia Hiriart.
Lindsay Lohan's father Michael was convicted of sexually and physically assaulting his ex-girlfriend Kate Majors and somehow managed to avoid getting a jail sentence, getting sentenced to four months of anger management instead, which many people were angry at. Soon, Michael was scheduled for emergency heart surgery due to chest pains, and the surgery would up being delayed after blood clots were found in his lung.
King Louis XVI of France fell victim to this. He provided money and military support for the Americans in their war for independence, in order to get revenge on the British for taking their Canadian territories during the Seven Years War. In fact, the Americans probably wouldn't have succeeded without the French support. Then it came back to bite. Firstly, France had rounded up in so much debt paying for it that they had a financial crisis. Secondly, many French revolutionaries were inspired by the Americans' successful revolution and their ideas about freedom. Both of these factors led to the French Revolution, in which Louis XVI was overthrown.
During the European-Ottoman conflicts it was common for pirates to raid peaceful villages for slaves. Cabin boy Thomas Pellew was captured by Barbary Pirates and Made a Slave. Later he escaped. His descendent Edward Pellew would return to the same place, with two dozen ships of the line.
Griselda Blanco was a drug Queenpin during the 80s Miami drug scene. She was one of the first mega drug controllers before infamous names like Pablo Escobar became known in the media. She was ruthless and known to be responsible for most of the murders that took place during that time-period. She would even have women and children of her enemies murdered. However, she was able to leave the country and avoid prosecution for majority of the murders after only serving 20 years in prison for drug possession. However, September, 4, 2012 she was found gunned down in Columbia.
United States Air Force Col. Michael D. Murphy was a JAG (military lawyer) who at one time ran the Judge Advocate Generals School and the Air Force Legal Operations Agency. Small problem: he hadn't an attorney for over twenty years! He became a lawyer in Texas in the 80's, but failed to file an appeal on time for a client convicted for burglary, so Texas suspended his license. However, he applied for the Louisiana bar, stating under oath that he wasn't under suspension, for which both Texas and Louisiana disbarred him in the mid-1980s. He joined the Air Force before he was disbarred but didn't tell the military that he was at the time suspended by Texas. After getting found out he was court martial-ed, for which he got a light sentence. Normally that would be the end, even if he was retiring in disgrace, but the military judges retirement based on the last rank/grade you served honorably. Long story short, Murphy got to retire as a First Lieutenant instead of as a colonel, costing him millions of dollars in retirement pay.
In 1861, South Carolina led the southern states into secession, forming the Confederate States of America, and started the American Civil War with the attack on Fort Sumter. Four years later (in 1865), General Sherman's army invades South Carolina and burns the state capital, Columbia, to the ground.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln noted that the death and desctruction of the war might be divine retribution for the evil of slavery:
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether".
Also, one of the things that put the nail in the coffin of the Confederacy's fortunes was South Carolina threatening to secede from the CSA as well.
The person from Porlock, who showed up at the exact wrong moment (the reason for the fragmentary state of Kublai Khan, as its author forgot the rest of the poem while being held up), had his name forgotten to history.
Mitt Romney's most disastrous gaffe during the 2012 presidential campaign was to proclaim that 47% of voters who always vote for Obama because they didn't want to take responsibility for themselves. Guess what percentage of the vote Romney received? *
47.2 percent, but it rounds.
The Westboro Baptist Church gets hit by this hard, and fast, every time it threatens to picket someone. When it pickets the funerals of US soldiers, people unite against them and expose them, preventing them doing what they want and annoying them in turn. When they tried annoying Comic-Con, every nerd in the building united against them, embarrassing them and forcing them to leave. When they threatened to picket the funerals of the Boston Marathon victims, the hacking group Anonymous changed all their posts on their Facebook wall to messages of peace and love, as well as memes. Annoyingly, the Supreme Court ruled that their picketing funerals is still legal, and as of yet Anonymous hasn't deleted the page, but one can only hope.
They did get this right next door; the house across the street from their headquarters has been given an LGBT rainbow paint job, so that every day they'll have to see the very symbol they hate.
The political definition of "Blowback" can easily be seen as this.
Jeffrey Dahmer, notorious serial killer, used a piece of exercise equipment to murder his first victim, a teenager. After being arrested and given life in prison, Dahmer was one day working in the prison gym, when a man came up behind him and bludgeoned him to death—with a piece of exercise equipment.
