Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
|
Norrington: One good deed is not enough to redeem a man of a lifetime of wickedness. Jack: Though it seems enough to condemn him.
No good deed goes unpunished
All helpful urges should be circumvented
No good deed goes unpunished
Sure, I meant well — well, look at what well-meant did!
— Elphaba, "No Good Deed" from Wicked
We all know that karma can be a bitch, but sometimes it's a total jerkass. It's not enough that the bad guy is a Karma Houdini. It's not enough that the good guy Cant Get Away With Nuthin. It's not even enough that he's a Butt Monkey or Chew Toy, put through the wringer for no reason. No, sometimes fate isn't satisfied until disaster befalls the good guy purely as a result of his doing the right thing.
If this happens because the hero helps people who are ungrateful, it can be a case of All Of The Other Reindeer or The Farmer And The Viper. More often, helping out exposes the hero to some other danger, like the wrath of a villain whose plans were disrupted by said good deed, or the wrath of a populace that is opposed to the method of said helping out, such as in many Burn The Witch stories that involve actual witches, or being Arrested For Heroism.
Not every hero can handle this, and if it happens often enough or particularly badly enough, a hero may very well fall. If they stick it through even to the end, knowing what's coming to them, it shows who they are in the dark.
Named for a well-known saying attributed to Clare Boothe Luce. Compare Being Good Sucks, where it's the act of being good (rather than the deeds themselves) that brings suffering, and contrast Laser Guided Karma where every good deed gets its reward.
Examples:
open/close all folders
In General
- Every story involving a fake distress call sent by bad guys.
- The fake Distress Call is subverted in Babylon 5 with Sheridan's actions during the Minbari War. He sends a Distress Call to lure the Minbari flagship Black Star into a nuclear minefield. It's a subversion because not only is the Distress Call actually genuine (his ship being crippled at the time) but the Black Star was only responding to finish him off.
Anime and Manga
- The second part of Death Note is filled with this. Light could have avoided a lot of trouble if he had killed his sister without hesitation when she was taken hostage, Sorichu Yagami gave Mello a chance to surrender instead of just writing down his name, Mello dies because he doesn't strip naked a woman he kidnaps and it is implied Near could have lost because he didn't kill people with the death note to confirm it was genuine.
- Well, with Light, it would have been suspicious if Kira knew about the hostage, and he definitely did want to kill her without a second thought.
- No, he didn't. The first thing he did upon learning that Sayu was kidnapped was persuade the team not to allow the rest of the police to find out to make sure that Kira learn't nothing. Later on, when he realised how dangerous that Mello was he considered killing her, but didn't for the above reasons. And did nothing else to try and prevent the rescue. After all, if he didn't care about Sayu's life he could have just ordered his father to burn the note on the plane.
- Monster is all about this trope. Dr. Tenma saves the life of a young boy, who turns out to be the titular Complete Monster, and spends the rest of the series paying for it. He also has a habit of risking capture to tend to others' wounds, even when he knows they're bad guys.
- Not just that; he eventually gets caught by the police because he stopped to help a little kid who scraped his knee. Poor Tenma.
- A few in Battle Royale, but most notably Yuichiro. He was the only person who ever had any faith in Mitsuko and tried to reach her at all (which actually did succeed), and what happened? She raped him after he was shot in a crazed attempt to "make it better" before stabbing him to death with her kama. Not only that, he was shot with his own gun, which he had traded to a friend as a sign of good faith. Note that the above happens only in the manga, and while Mitsuko does kill him in the movie, the novel and the manga, the events differ slightly in all three.
- Which version of the story is that? In the novel, he takes a bullet for Mitsuko of his own free will, the gun was the friend's to begin with, and the only thing Mitsuko did to him was kiss him and then give him a mercy killing, because he wasn't going to survive anyway. It's still not a happy ending, but it falls under Heroic Sacrifice... plus there really are no happy endings in that story.
- It was the manga, and boy is it hard to forget that scene.
- "How do you like my eyes now, you lying sack of shit?"
- God, Tsuna from Katekyo Hitman Reborn is a very good kid. But it seems that whenever he ends up doing good or something moraly right, he ends up paying for it. Sometimes literally. He saved a rare raccoon-panda thing from being rolled over by a roller coaster, but then the zoo fined him for breaking a few things in the process. He also caught a few infamous crooks, but the police arrested him too for looking like he was one of them, (he was in his boxers).
- On a more serious note, he almost paid a greater price when Mukuro feigned a give-up and asked Tsuna to kill him. But Tsuna, invoking the Thou Shalt Not Kill trope, declined. Mukuro proceded to grab him from behind, whispered why he fails at life into his ear- accompanied by a nasty headbutt- and then throws him in the direction of a nasty, pointed object. Don't worry though... He Gets Better.
- In Fruits Basket, Machi was afraid her baby brother was cold and went to put a blanket on him. Her parents accused her of trying to kill him and forced her out of home.
- This happens frequently to the title character of Kaiji, almost to the point of being the theme of the show.
- His situation starts with him cosigning on a loan for a friend. Months later, this turns out to be a loan from the Yakuza, who show up on Kaiji's doorstep to collect on the loan when said friend disappears. (Funnily enough, he trashes a nice car out of frustration just before this. It turns out to be a yakuza car... and he suffers no punishment at all.)
- He gets an offer to go onto a ship and gamble for one night for a chance to clear this debt. After getting scammed multiple times in multiple ways, he decides to team up with his friend (who apparently didn't disappear after all...) and another man down on his luck to give him a better chance of winning the gamble. Early on, he meets the conditions to leave the ship with his debt cleared, but he refuses to leave until he's helped his two team members do the same. By the end of the allowed time for the gamble, he gets the other two to meet the conditions while losing his own advantage and being taken as a slave—however, with the extra those two got, they can "buy" him back immediately after and all three will be allowed to leave. They keep the money and leave him to be taken away to work off his debt as a slave.
- He convinces someone else to "buy" him back and then takes back the extra cash his friends were trying to keep. He then uses this cash to "buy" back another scam victim out of sympathy. It turns out that this arrangement has a few strings attached, sending him into even greater debt than before.
- He's later abducted by the yakuza again and presented with a race for enough money to cover his new debt three times over. He only gets this money if he finishes first or second. The race is a footrace across a thin iron bar. With a potentially fatal and definitely very painful elevation. There are three times as many contestants as iron bars. Pushing other contestants down is not only allowed, but encouraged, and there's one guy in front of him. The one guy in front of him is slow as hell, but he refuses to push. The guy behind him catches up and isn't so nice... Luckily, he manages to grab the bar and pull himself back up, being disqualified but not injured.
- For another chance to get prize money (and for the winners of the previous "race" to collect theirs), it turns out that they have to walk, though not race, across another iron bar, this time with a dropping distance of several dozen stories and an extremely powerful electric current running through it. When the ten people who have decided to cross are all around the halfway point, he decides to get them to all forfeit the money so they can have the current cut and safely crawl back to safer ground. The power isn't cut... and everyone except Kaiji falls and dies. And then when he makes it, he finds out they were all disqualified because of him asking anyway, and he doesn't receive the prize money he just nearly died over.
- No wonder Lelouch is such a lying bastard, since the universe seems to feel that every single attempt on his part to not act like an evil little sociopath must be dealt with as harshly as possible. Nearly everything that goes wrong can, in some way or another, be blamed on the fact that he wants to protect his little sister and doesn't want his best friend to get hurt.
- The most egregious example: Lelouch decides not to go over the Moral Event Horizon by murdering Euphemia in cold blood and instead decides to accept the third option that would allow everyone to get what they want without any bloodshed. Oops, we can't have that! Instead, his Mind Control Evil Eye goes into Mode Lock at the worst possible time and he accidentally forces the most innocent and idealistic character in the show to attempt genocide.
Comic Books
- The Incredible Hulk is another series that springs from this trope, with Bruce Banner paying an even more personal cost for saving Rick Jones.
- That example is highly debatable, as the moral is almost always played out with the Hulk being Banner's karmic comeuppance for knowingly inventing one of the most powerful weapons on the planet. The fact that he's cursed while saving one person from the bomb he created that could kill millions is mere irony.
- Spider Man tends to suffer this trope a lot, sometimes to the point of Wall Banger status (constantly alternating between The Woobie and Chew Toy) despite usually being a fine example of what a superhero should be.
- He's not punished for doing good specifically. All his bad deeds ALSO go punished, even more so. He's just really unlucky.
- The Sin City story "That Yellow Bastard" is this trope in a nutshell. All Detective John Hartigan wants to do is close his one unsolved case and stop a Serial Killer who likes to rape little girls and slash them to ribbons and put his ass away so that he can finally retire in peace. Said sick fuck happens to be the son of a powerful and ruthless U.S. Senator, one who will not stand for anyone messing with him, no matter how justified it is. As a result, Hartigan pays dearly for saving Nancy Callahan, the eleven-year-old girl slated to become the monster's next victim. Good lord, does he pay dearly.
- Pays it knowing what'll happen, and without regret. As he says, "An old man dies, a young girl lives. Fair trade."
Film
- In Serenity, Mal chooses to do the right thing and protect River even after she goes psychotic, and later he chooses to broadcast the message relating to Miranda to the entire Verse to exact justice for the Alliance's crimes. As a most unfortunate added consequence, Wash and Book are both killed.
- In the Firefly series itself, Simon chooses to find and save River from the Academy, but in the process he loses his entire immense personal fortune and becomes a fugitive on the run.
- Then again, while he does occasionally express that he's not particularly having fun, he never actually indicates that he regrets any step of the process. In one episode he even lets drop that he's rather grateful for Serenity, since River finds it more home than she did even their...well...home.
- No Country For Old Men. Everything bad happens to Llewelyn Moss because he decides to do a good deed.
- In The Last Castle, General Irwin, a convict sent to a military prison, engages in a battle of wits and wills with Colonel Winter, the prison warden. Long story short, Irwin teaches the ex con soldiers how to be men again, and angers the warden, whose hobby was dehumanizing them. At the film's climax, Irwin, after having taken control of the prison from the warden, heads to the flagpole in the prison yard, to raise the American flag upside down, to signal the distress of the mistreated prisoners. As he raises the flag, Winter shoots him fatally, claiming that he did not want him to dishonor the flag, however when Irwin raises the flag to it's full height, it is clear that it is flying correctly, as the prisoners are no longer in distress.
- Mean Girls: when Cady goes to apologise to all the people she's hurt, she includes her math teacher "Mrs. Norbury, who's living proof that no good deed goes unpunished".
- The plot of Dragonheart is kicked off when Draco agrees to give half his heart to save the dying prince...who then grows up into a Complete Monster who terrorizes the entire kingdom and can't be killed unless Draco himself dies.
- Eddie Carr from The Lost World put everything on the line to try and save Ian, Sarah and Nick who were about to fall over the side of a cliff to their death. The scene is so painful to watch because he is giving his best, despite everything that could go wrong trying to hinder him from helping. How is he repaid? Two Tyrannosaurus Rex's crash out of the forest and rip him in half and eat him. At least he could die in peace knowing his final act had been to help his friends.
- If this troper understands it right, this trope is the storyline of A Serious Man.
- In Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, Flint is ostracized in the town because his inventions always fail spectacularly, which is a shame, since most of the things he invented were made with the intent of helping people out. Even when he invents something that does end up working, saves the town from a depression, and gets him the love and respected he always wanted, it still manages to Go Horribly Wrong in the end, threatening to destroy the whole world.
- Two Words: Rachel Dawes.
Literature
- Justine, by the Marquis de Sade, is an incredibly over-the-top rendering of this trope. And that's putting it mildly.
- Happens constantly to Jon Snow in A Song Of Ice And Fire. Actually happens to just about everyone in his family for that matter. And most people in Westeros.
- In Westeros, just kill anyone who crosses you. Really, your life will be better for it.
- In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Richard helps out a homeless person and becomes an Unperson for his trouble.
- Elphaba in the book version of Wicked starts out trying to do good. She ends up getting killed off for real by the end of the book because of it. (The musical version has much more family friendly ending for her though she's still blamed for everything)
- In the Wheel of Time most characters after their heroics are punished accordingly by their local female authority, i.e. Aes Sedai, Wise Ones, Maidens, wife.
- Fighting Fantasy was notorious about the "magical beggar" trope. Virtually every beggar you would meet would give you help that is far more valuable than the single coin you had to donate to them. In one book this is explained by the generosity of your donation: sure, you give a single gold piece every time, but the standard currency for those parts is copper.
- In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin finds a young girl who is unable to speak English and he realizes that she is probably lost. Quentin proceeds to buy her some food and spend the next few hours trying to find her family. His thanks for this is an arrest from the police, who were summoned by the young girl's older brother who thought that Quentin was kidnapping the girl. Quentin is fined seven dollars for this 'crime'.
Live Action TV
- Lampshaded nicely in Crusade:
Gideon: Refresh me, Lieutenant. How did we get in the middle of this again?
Matheson: I believe it was an act of mercy, Sir.
Gideon: Remind me never to do that again.
Matheson: Aye, Sir. No good deed goes unpunished.
Gideon: I'll have that embroidered on a sampler when we have time.
- This trope is often used on Star Trek. A few examples:
- Starfleet Academy's famous Kobayashi Maru test is a no-win scenario where answering a distress call gets you blown up for your trouble. Only Kirk ever passed, and he cheated.
- There's a Next Generation episode called "Samaritan Snare". Guess what happens?
- Geordi quotes this trope in "The Enemy", declaring it the motto of Galorndon Core. As the planet is perpetually covered by electrical stormclouds allowing only intermittent transporter windows and the surface is hot and rocky, this is fair.
- In the dramatic climax of "Redemption", Worf spares the life of his enemy's son Toral, even though Klingon honour all but demands he kill the boy. Years later, Toral makes a surprise return on Deep Space Nine; instead of making something of his life, he's become as bad as his old man. He nearly succeeds in killing Worf and stealing the Sword of Kahless.
- "No good deed ever goes unpunished" is the 285th and last Ferengi Rule of Acquisition.
- Trip quotes the saying in Enterprise's "The Andorian Incident". The good deed in this case is paying a visit to a remote Vulcan monastery... which happens to have been taken over by Andorians, and the away team's arrival makes the situation even worse.
- One episode of Frasier has the title character question whether it's good to be a Good Samaritan on the basis of how frequently his attempts to do good have backfired on him. (Note that the parable itself is not an example — we don't know what happens to the Samaritan afterwards.)
- In Pushing Daisies, Ned attempts to undo the revenge taken by Chuck and Olive on Balsam's Bittersweets and gets arrested for murder as a result.
- And once, when he was still a kid, he climbed up a tree for a kindergarten class to show them baby birds...but they were all dead. So he revived them, and showed the birds to the class...Then they decided to show him the three baby woodpeckers that they were going to release that day...
- Doctor Who is stuffed with this trope. Even if the Doctor's help doesn't screw him at the time, it sometimes has ramifications in the timeline that he doesn't discover till later.
- Scrubs. How often did the nice people suffer/die? Perhaps the best example is the episode "My Chopped Liver."
- Didn't all the patients in that episode survive?
- To be fair to Scrubs (and medical dramas in general), death hits everyone, good and bad. Doesn't matter what you good deed you did if you have an incurable, fatal disease.
- Poor Captain Jack. Children of Earth saw him saving humanity by sacrificing one child to fight off the 456 instead of giving them 10% of all children. Sounds like a good choice, if not for the fact that there is insta-karma built into the choice: the kid he sacrifices is his grandson. And he does so while his daughter is in the room, leading her to officially turn her back on him. Ouch. Not to mention that despite it being the only choice he really COULD make and the right one at that, a large percent of the fanbase has now disowned him as well. Oops.
- In Lost Season 5, Sayid (in the past) is locked in a cell awaiting execution. A young and at this point innocent Ben Linus who is sympathetic of Sayid steals a key and rescues him from his cell. After Sayid escapes, he repays Ben by knocking out a guard (Jin,) stealing his gun, shooting Ben, and leaving him for dead. Sayid hates the adult Ben, but the child Ben was innocent and had just saved his life.
- Ben's motivation had more to do with joining the "Hostiles" than simply saving Sayid.
- Speaking of Firefly what does returning stolen medicine to the settlers get Mal? Being tortured to death and having an ear sliced off (not by the settlers of course and He Got Better but still...).
Musical
- The protagonist in the Broadway musical Wicked finally has enough of her misfortunes during the song "No Good Deed," quoted above.
Myth And Legend
Tabletop RPG
- As a setting, the World Of Darkness loves this. Do a good deed? Well, it'll cost you a pound of flesh and probably not greatly impact things anyway. Do the easy bad deed instead? Get rewarded with power/riches/expediency, but dinged by the Karma Meter. Do option 1 enough times and you'll get killed or ground to a masochistic paste. Do option 2 enough times and you'll destroy yourself. Do half and half and live a quasi-happy/angsty life... for a time.
- So common in Warhammer 40000 that it's rare to see anyone even try to do good deeds anymore.
- Dungeons And Dragons adventure A Hot Day in L’Trel in Dungeon magazine #44. After the PC's rescue a woman from a burning house, the woman sues them for injuring her during the rescue.
- The Abyssal exalts in Exalted have this in spades. Picked out at death to serve Omnicidal Maniac undead gods and given corrupted divine powers, they can choose to go the Dark Is Not Evil route. Only the more positive, life affirming things they do, the likelier it is the said gods take over your body and someone you care about is randomly killed.
Video Games
- The ending of the original Fallout is a pretty stunning invocation of this trope.
- And the Tenpenny Tower quest in Fallout 3. So you've convinced the inhabitants to let the ghouls move in, everyone is quite content, and you leave whistling a happy tune. Then you return a few days later and all the humans are dead. Nice Job Breaking It Hero.
- Poor, poor Marona. Frequently a victim of this throughout most of Phantom Brave.
- Played for comedic purposes in Disgaea 3 during the Almaz ending. He was right to stop Mao, but ends up losing everything for it. Possibly a case where Yank The Dogs Chain went too far.
- Ramza in Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the only legitimately good people in the story. Guess who gets the karmic pimpslaps? His run of bad luck starts when he
stops the machinations of a demon posing as a priest tries to help a desperate squire rescue his Lord (Argath) and Ramza's own brother subtly suggests how to go about it, which leaves his home at Eagrose undefended when the Corpse Brigade comes by to kidnap his best friend's sister.
- To be fair to karma in FFT, when the entire world is full of Jerk Asses, not being a Jerk Ass is asking for trouble. For Ramza to actually go around telling all the Jerk Asses to knock it off? Super trouble.
- In addition, Ramza is arguably one of the only people who survive (he either directly or indirectly killed a good amount of everyone else), and he's vindicated by history, albeit hundreds of years later.
- Colette from Tales Of Symphonia qualifies. Always nice to people, yet fate seems to hate her for no reason.
- It also happened to Mithos in the backstory.
- Luigi, though this is played for comedic purposes since he's become a Chew Toy.
- Subverted in Odin Sphere. Gwendolyn (outside the battlefield) is actually a pretty kind and caring person. She exposes and eliminates a traitor and rescues her half-sister Velvet (despite her own feelings) to ease her father's pain. She suffers punishment for this — but the powers that be give karma the finger by manipulating destiny so that her magically induced punishment ends up being her perfect match, and these two are supposed to save the world.
- In Fate Stay Night, Emiya Shirou stays at school late to sweep the archery dojo as a favour to his friend Shinji. This gets him stabbed in the heart. By Cúchulainn.
- Also, Archer. His entire life turned out to be one big example of this trope as a result of his blind devotion to his ideals, and he keeps on doing it even after death.
- In the good ending for Phantasy Star Portable, you and your partner's reward for saving the galaxy is being discharged from the Guardians and being branded traitors because your partner was an unknowing (not to mention unwilling) pawn in the Big Bad's scheme and you refused to leave her behind. Is it any wonder the Guardians aren't very well liked in part 3?
- In Shadow Hearts: From the New World, we learn that the main antagonist is hero Johnny Garland's older sister, who sacrificed her mind and memory to bring him Back From The Dead. She ends up wandering the land in a silent, amnesiac daze, slaughters the innocent, loses her love interest and fails to revive him, and the final battle against her is fixed so that Johnny is the one to kill her.
- Given what she had become, this could be seen as a mercy kill.
- Mass Effect pulls the fake-distress-call-leading-to-a-trap routine on the player, and it's hinted that in Mass Effect 2, a great many of Shepard's decisions may come back to bite the player in the nether regions.
- Saved the Rachni? They're making an army To help you fight the Reapers
- This seems to be the main M.O. of Talon Company in Fallout 3. They're hired by an unknown client (probably Littlehorn) to hunt down heroic people in order to keep the Wasteland a dog-eat-dog world.
Web Original
Western Animation
- There's a Donald Duck cartoon short where Donald gives an ant a bit of sugar out of kindness. In return for his good deed, the ants invade his house for more and eventually cause it to blow up, presumably killing Donald.
- Happens rather brutally to Zuko in a season 2 episode of Avatar The Last Airbender when a village he saves from corrupt guards instantly turns on him because he was a Firebender.
- And even more brutally three years earlier when he spoke out against sacrificing newly-recruited soldiers.
- And Haru in season 1, who saved an old guy from a cave using Earthbending, but was turned into the Fire Nation soldiers by said guy.
- Eek! The Cat's catchphrase was "It never hurts to help!" It always did.
- Homer's mom became a runaway outlaw once she helped Mr. Burns after a bunch of hippies walked all over him. Even the producers lampshaded this in the commentary by saying that "Never act in kindness" was the moral.
Real Life
- In a roundabout way, this is Truth In Television in the US Military and many private corporations. When people are paid a monthly salary (they get paid the same, no matter how much they work), some people will inevitably work harder and contribute more to the organization's goals than others. Leaders/Managers are then faced with two options:
- 1) Try to distribute tasks evenly and hope that all of the work will get done on time and to an acceptable standard.
- 2) Give the greatest proportion of work to the small group of people who can always be relied upon to get it done quickly and well.
- When it is very hard to get someone fired or meaningfully discipline them, or the boss is unwilling to be harsh to those who don't work, you get option 2). The hard workers get more work to do and the ones who do nothing get nothing to do. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
- It's a well known fact that working fast and finishing early does not get you rewarded with free time and money, but rather with more work and the expectation that this amount is now your new standard by which you will be judged as lazy and incompetent if you fail to meet it ever again.
- Keep in mind that there are companies out there who reward hardworking employees in order to keep them from seeking employment elsewhere, and fire lazy workers for not being productive.
- This article speaks for itself: [2]
- Two words: Michael Moore.
- Alan Turing, a great mathematician and logician who contributed a lot for the existence of modern computers, was injected with hormones that caused his body to go deformed (by growing breasts, for instance), just because he was gay. Seriously, he achieved a lot and was punished for something for which he wasn't even to blame. And then he killed himself. The British government officially apologised for the way Turing was treated... 55 years later.
- Not only was Turing a great mathematician, but he was one of the major people who broke Enigma, the encryption code used for U-Boat communications (as well as the rest of the Wehrmacht), during World War II. It can be argued that without Turing, there would be no British government today. And this was how they treated him...
- Brad Birkenfeld is an American banker who formerly worked for UBS, Switzerland's largest bank. He learned that UBS's secret dealings with American customers violated an agreement the bank had reached with the IRS. He then went to the U.S. government and told them about it. Over the next three years, Birkenfeld voluntarily undertook affirmative actions to initiate contact with and to provide sensitive, detailed information about the misconduct to the U.S. The U.S. government used that information to recover billions of dollars from thousands of people who cheated on their taxes. The only person the U.S. sent to prison? Brad Birkenfeld. That's right, the man who let the government know that the law was being broken by a bank and thousands of rich tax cheaters was put in prison for over 5 years while the criminals had to pay back the taxes they didn't pay when they should have. So, kids, don't rat on rich people breaking the law to the U.S. government or you will be the one going to prison.
|
|
