Sealed Evil in Another World

When an Ancient Evil or an Invincible Villain can't be killed or imprisoned by conventional means, what is one to do? Banish them to another planet or dimension, of course! That way, the indiscriminately destructive megalomaniac can spend all its time and energy making their lives miserable instead!

The Big Bad was originally from the world the plot was set in, but was sent to Another Dimension after they did their damage. Most of the story will typically be about the heroes doing everything in their power to keep the doorway between this reality and the other closed as other villains are chomping at the bit to meet their idol. Whether they were sent to a Standard Fantasy Setting, an Acid-Trip Dimension, a Physical Hell, Phantom Zone, even a Void Between the Worlds where they had nothing but themselves and a Blank White Void to talk too, expect the bad guy to walk out of it no less of a threat.

In other cases, villains might have been banished to our world from whatever world they hailed from, the unnamed authorities that sent them to us either indifferent to the kind of hell they had just raised for humanity or ignorant that they had pushed their problems onto an innocent population of fragile bystanders. In stories such as this, the villain either strives to return to their world, usually with methods that would destroy this one in the attempt, or they decide they like this new world and plan to break as many "toys" (read:puny mortals) as they are able while they're here.

Unlike most examples of Sealed Evil in a Can, villains who are sent to other worlds have more options. They are too motivated to remain idle until their world is back on the table. They wanted a world to conquer or corrupt or devour, and they got one! They'll remain occupied with the world they're stuck in until an opportunity arises, either when other bad guys who respect their Villain Cred try to spring a rescue or if some heroes accidentally get themselves banished into the villain's lair with the door unlocked. More often than not, they'll find a new unique power source foreign to them or a new population to brainwash into a standing army, making them that much more dangerous when a way out gets their attention.

Not to be confused with Prison Dimension, where the bad guy is sent to an Alternate Dimension designed to contain them in a way that they might as well have been stuck in a can.

More heroic examples of the trope are typically done as the basis for Trapped in Another World plots, the heroes being summoned to other worlds to help fix their problems for them.

Sub-Trope to Sealed Evil in a Can. Compare And I Must Scream, Mage in Manhattan, Sealed Army in a Can and Sealed Evil in a Duel. See also The Exile, Leaking Can of Evil and Resurrect the Villain.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bleach: The anime-only Zanpakuto Rebellion Arc has Koga Kuchiki, a former Soul Reaper who long ago was responsible for a bloody rampage across the Soul Society after events drove him to madness. He was eventually stopped and sealed away by Yamamoto and Koga's father-in-law Ginrei, with his prison hidden on the outskirts of Karakura Town in the world of the living. To ensure that his evil would never resurface, Yamamoto completely erased Koga's existence from the Soul Society's history books, to the point where even the head captain's closest and longest-serving subordinates like Kyoraku and Ukitake were kept in the dark about the whole incident.
• Digimon Adventure 02: Daemon, the second last major villain of the show, proves far too powerful for the Digidestined to defeat in a fight, and sending him back to Digiworld is not an option either as he can freely travel between Digiworld and the real world so he would just come back. So the Digidestined have Ken open a gate to The Dark Ocean, another parallel world, and they banish Daemon there. He is not seen again after this.
• Doraemon: Nobita and the Winged Braves: Doraemon and friends visit Birdopia, an Alternate Universe inhabited by Bird People and accessible by a portal in the sky, and in the Birdopian equivalent of Antarctica the Prehistoric Monster Phoenixia was sealed in the bottom of an ice shelf. Unfortunately, the Birdopian commander Seagrid who harbors a hatred towards humans have plans to awaken Phoenixia and lead the monster through the portal, intending to use it to wipe out humanity.
• Dragon Ball: Lord Garlic was banished into the Dead Zone which he himself created where he died. His son, Garlic Jr, took after his father in this department. Bonus points for wishing for immortality before so, unlike his father, he will never die.
• Naruto:
  • It is eventually revealed that the nine Tailed Beasts were born after the Sage of the Six Paths separated the chakra of the Ten Tails from its body and split it into nine sentient constructs some time before his own death. As for the Ten Tails' dessicated body, which became the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, he used Chibaku Tensei to encase it in rock and hurled it towards the heavens, creating the Moon.
  • After Kaguya Otsutsuki is resurrected, Team 7 fights her off in a lengthy battle that culminates in one of her pocket dimensions, where Naruto and Sasuke successfully use Chibaku Tensei to seal Kaguya in a new moon while separating her from the nine Tailed Beasts, turning her back into the Demonic Statue. Because this time she's sealed in a separate dimension, and because this time Black Zetsu is being sealed with her, there's little hope that she will return a second time.
• Sailor Moon:
  • In Sailor Moon Crystal, Neo-Queen Serenity banished the Arc Villain Wiseman/Death Phantom to the Planet Nemesis. This backfired hard, as he merged with it and became powerful enough to get revenge.
  • Sailor Moon Eternal: Queen Nehelenia was sealed by Queen Serenity into a mirror dimension. Didn't save her from Nehelenia's curse after being sealed, which would bring about the end of the Silver Millennium.
• Slayers TRY: This is the plan of the Overworlders, dump Dark Star in Lina's world and let him be someone else's problem.

Comic Books

• 2000 AD:
  • In the Anderson: Psi-Division story "Revenge", Anderson inadvertently revives the Dark Judges, who proceed to use teleporters to go on a rampage in Mega-City One. Ultimately, they are dealt with by using their own dimensional technology to send them to an "empty" universe, where they remain trapped until "Necropolis".
  • In the Zombie special crossover, this spectacularly backfires. In a What If?, the Judges of Earth's Mega-Cities decide to deal with Sabbat, the Evil Sorcerer directing the hordes of zombies, by banishing him to another dimension with the Soviet Apocalypse Warp. This causes Sabbat to spread to every other 2000 AD universe and infect all of them with his zombies.
• Mister Mxyzptlk from DC Comics is an incredibly powerful Reality Warper who's impossible to fight beyond his one weakness: if he says, spells out or reveals his name backwards ("kltpzyxm"), he is banished back to the Fifth Dimension from whence he came for 90 days.
• Pilot And Huxley: A pirate transforms into a tank with a one-way travel cannon to save Pilot and Huxley from The Grim Reaper by sending him to the Coop World, an alternate dimension inhabited by chickens. The Grim Reaper vows to get his revenge by the time he got there.
• The Transformers (Marvel): It's revealed late into the series that the reason Optimus Prime feels such a desperate need to defend Earth (despite the humans making it very clear neither side is welcome) is that when the Decepticons boarded the Ark in an attempt to wipe out Optimus and his best warriors, he deliberately crashed onto the nearest planet in an attempt to take the Decepticons down with him. The prequel Transformers '84 by IDW Publishing goes further and reveals that his goal from the very start was to lure Megatron and his greatest warriors aboard the Ark, and then slam it onto the nearest lifeless planet he could find, hoping that even if Megatron wasn't outright killed he'd be trapped forever. To his horror, he realizes it never occurred to him that just because a world seems lifeless, that doesn't mean life can't evolve there later.
• Transformers: Twilight's Last Gleaming ends with the Decepticons banished to Cybertron by the Autobots. Given the Allspark was destroyed and Cybertron is unable to sustain life, the lack of fuel implies that the remaining Decepticons will eventually starve to death.

Fan Works

• In the Child of the Storm universe, Surtur's realm of Muspelheim is also his prison, having been locked within by the Alliance of Realms eons ago in order to stop his rampage across the universe as the original Dark Phoenix. The looming threat starting in the second book is the seal is starting to weaken.
• In both Her Shadowed Realm and its Spiritual Successor Ages of Shadow, Jade's Face–Heel Turn and subsequent transformation into an unstoppable force of evil results in her family and friends having to banish her to the Shadow Realm, trapping her within it. In both fics, she eventually makes contact with an Alternate Universe and tries to find a way to manipulate events via proxies so that she can escape her imprisonment.
• A Tale of Two Rulers: When an experiment in dimensional portals creates an invincible Animalistic Abomination in the lab, Vaati traps it in a Containment Field and dumps it through the portal. It has the small side effect of inflicting an apocalypse on Tamriel.
  Vaati: Then we can roll him through it and make him some other universe's problem. [huff]

Films — Animation

• Invoked in Lilo & Stitch. The destructive Experiment 626 is sentenced to be imprisoned on an asteroid, but he escapes and crashes on Earth. The Galactic Federation pursues and arrests him again, but discovers that in his time with Lilo's family "Stitch" has greatly reformed his behavior. With the aid of a legal loophole by Lilo, the Federation thus decides to change Stitch's sentence to exile on Earth, allowing him to continue living with Lilo and Nani.
• The Dazzlings from My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks were actually sirens from Equestria who were infamous for using their Compelling Voices to create a magical Hate Plague and feed on the disharmony of other creatures, until they were banished to the human world by Starswirl the Bearded. Despite this, the Dazzlings soon began to prey upon the human inhabitants, albeit with their powers weakened due to the lack of Equestrian magic, until events from the previous movie gave them an opportunity to regain their full power.
• In Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, the Krang are a race of Eldritch Abominations who invade and assimilate all worlds they come across, only to be banished to another dimension via a mystic portal by the Hamato Clan. In the film, the Foot Clan manage to reopen the portal and free the three remaining Krang, only to be horrifyingly transformed into mindless beasts for their troubles.
• Rock and Rule: The Villain Mok succeeds in summoning a demon from another dimension through a pentagram in the stage floor. Fortunately, Omar and Angel are able to dispel the demon, and it retreats back to its home dimension. Mok ends up being tossed into the pentagram hole as well. He makes one desperate effort to crawl back out, baffled as to how his demon was defeated, before losing his grip and plummeting into the depths of the alternate dimension. Mok and his demon can play canasta there, perhaps.

Films — Live-Action

• In Ghostbusters (1984), this is how Gozer is ultimately stopped. The Ghostbusters use their proton weapons to trigger an explosion that seals the dimensional doorway giving Gozer access to our world, banishing it back to where it came from. This is only temporary, as it returns years later in Ghostbusters: Afterlife through a different portal, forcing the protagonists to switch to the Sealed Evil in a Can method instead.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Hela Odinsdottir in Thor: Ragnarok was banished to the realm of Helheim by Odin when she defied him and tried continuing Asgard's reign of conquest beyond the Nine Realms. When Odin dies of natural causes, Hela escapes through a portal into Midgard, ready to restart her campaign as though she never left.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: Due to abusing the power of the Tesseract, which is actually the powers of the cosmic Space Infinity Stone located inside it, for malevolent purposes back in Captain America: The First Avenger, Red Skull ended up being sent via the Space Stone to the planet Vormir to guard the location of another Infinity Stone, the Soul Stone. It's deemed a punishment because retrieving the Soul Stone requires the seeker to sacrifice the life of someone they love (a soul for a soul), and as Red Skull only cares about himself he can never obtain the Soul Stone to use its power.
  • Kang the Conqueror from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a Multiversal Conqueror who was so big of a threat that the Council of Kangs, an Alliance of Alternates made up of various other versions of Kang, deemed him too dangerous to allow free and had him banished to the Quantum Realm within the Sacred Timeline, his Multiversal Power Core too damaged for him to escape. After Janet repairs it, he manages to regain his powers before she destroys it to prevent him from escaping back into the Multiverse, leaving him to conquer the Quantum Realm until Cassie unwittingly leads herself, Scott Lang, and the Pym Family back there.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) ends with Dr. Robotnik being banished to the Mushroom Planet with one of Sonic's portal-rings.
• Wishmaster: The Djinn are trapped in the Void Between the Worlds and the only way to release them is to complete a deal with a member of their race, i.e., asking for three wishes.

Literature

• In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, Lord Foul the Despiser was originally a Cosmic Entity who threatened the entire Multiverse, until their opposite number (a being called "the Creator") imprisoned them within the world of The Land. The fabric of reality holds Lord Foul prisoner there - however, if the Creator ever interferes with events in that world, it will break reality and set Foul free once more. Thus Foul is able to torment the people of the Land unopposed, though their ultimate goal is to destroy reality themself and take their evil back to the wider cosmos.
• In The Cosmere, the malevolent god Odium is confined to the Rosharan solar system by a two-part version:
  • The gods Honor and Preservation bound Odium to the Rosharan system, primarily the desolate planet Braize. This has caused 7000 years of grief for Rosharans, but other gods are reluctant to interfere, since it protects the rest of the Cosmere (and the gods themselves) from his depredations.
  • Odium's constant attacks on the inhabited planet Roshar provoked Honor and the ten Heralds to forge the Oathpact that confines both the Heralds and almost all of Odium's power to Braize. Each time the Heralds break under torture, they and Odium's armies are both released to Roshar for another war.
• Creature of Havoc: In the Golden Ending, you defeat the Sorcerous Overlord Zharradan Marr by destroying the portal to the netherworld where he built his private study, stranding him there forever.
• The Devil is a Part-Timer!: The Evil Overlord of a Standard Japanese Fantasy Setting loses to the hero party and flees across dimensions to modern-day Japan... where it turns out he mostly can't regenerate his magic power and ends up stuck working part-time for a hamburger chain restaurant. The hero follows him and has to get a job in a call center.
• Dune: In the original novel after being deposed as Emperor, Shaddam IV is exiled to Salusa Secundus by Paul Atreides. Except for Irulan and a few other family members, most of Shaddam's family accompanies him into exile.
• Labyrinths of Echo: While everyone believes that Loyso Pondokhva, The Archmage hell-bent on destroying the world, was assassinated during the War of the Codex, Max eventually discovers that the Mage Killer sent after him was unable to defeat him and instead sealed him in another world on the brink of apocalypse, hoping that it would take Loyso with it when it goes. Instead, Loyso managed to stave off its end for centuries, biding his time to find a way to bypass the seals trapping him there.
• Shades of Magic: The first book revolves around an Artifact of Doom from Black London, an alternate Earth that fell in a magical apocalypse. The protagonist disposes of it by sticking it on a dying Dimensional Traveler and sending it on a one-way trip back to Black London.
• Star Wars Legends: In the Legacy of the Force novel series, Centerpoint Station is destroyed in order to keep anyone from from ever using it as a weapon again. This comes back to bite the Jedi and the Alliance hard in the Fate of the Jedi series, as the station was keeping the black holes making up the Maw in place, which itself was created to keep a Force sensitive entity called Abeloth prisoner. With the station gone, the Maw began to fall apart, which in turn allowed Abeloth to escape the prison.
• Skulduggery Pleasant:
  • This was the original fate of the Faceless Ones. Long before the series begin the Ancients banished them to a dimension where they could do no harm. A few of them return in the third book, The Faceless Ones, but are killed by the Sceptre of the Ancients. The next book, Dark Days, reveals that during their imprisonment they managed to tear through into another reality, where they killed galaxies full of innocent beings. They fully return at the end of the fifth book of phase two, through Valkyrie, but they seem content with just hanging around for the time being.
  • This is how Darquesse is defeated at the end of the last book of phase one, The Dying of the Light: Three Sensitives invade her mind and trick her into believing she has won, wiped out all life on Earth and conquered the stars. She then opens a portal to the realm of the Faceless Ones, intent on killing them next. Since she can open the portal herself, she isn't stuck there, but the hope is that since she isn't as powerful as she believes she has become, the Faceless Ones will kill her. Even if they don't she shouldn't have any reason to return, believing she has wiped out all life in the universe. She returns in book three of phase two, Bedlam, though has lost her genocidal tendencies for the moment.

Live-Action TV

• Buffyverse:
  • Angel: When Illyria first manifests, the rest of Team Angel discovers that she is the leader of an army of fellow Eldritch Abominations who has been sealed away in another dimension and race to try to prevent her from releasing them so she will Take Over the World. They are unable to prevent the portal from opening, but in a particularly dramatic moment of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, the entirety of Illyria's army had long since died off and rotten away because their prison dimension had nothing for them to feed. Illyria spends the rest of the series trying to deal with the depression of having no purpose left.
  • The Big Bad of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5 Glory used to rule over a hell dimension with two other gods, but grew too powerful, so the other gods banished her to Earth in the form of an Uncanny Valley Girl, forced to share the human body of Benjamin Wilkinson. Glory plans to return to her hell dimension by causing a dimensional collapse that would destroy Earth and a good part of the multiverse with it.
• The Clandestine from Ms. Marvel are a group of Human Aliens from the Noor Dimension who were banished to Earth for undisclosed crimes, with their end goal being to return to their home dimension. However, the frequency between Noor Dimension and Earth's Dimensions are so incompatible, opening a portal between them could destroy the world.
• In the Stranger Things 4 finale, it's revealed that the Upside Down — which has been established as a Dark World version of Hawkins inhabited by monsters as an infectious Hive Mind — was originally a barren wasteland with (presumably) non-malicious indigenous lifeforms. That is until Vecna, later revealed to be Henry/One, his body mutated when Eleven banished him there after he killed the other subjects at Hawkins Lab, used his god-tier psychic powers to create the Mind Flayer and transform the world into the hellscape it is now.

Podcasts

• Ain't Slayed Nobody: Towards the end of Season 1, it transpires that Colin Brock and his cult seek to free the eldritch god Mgepgathg — the stillborn bastard child of Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath — from the dark star where he was imprisoned by his parents.
• The Magnus Archives: The main characters are faced with a choice after the Fears successfully take over the world — attempt a difficult Banishing Ritual to eject the Fears into The Multiverse, or sacrifice their own world to kill the Fears forever. In the Grand Finale, they banish them — exactly as one of the Fears wanted all along, so it could spread to other worlds.
• Malevolent:
  • The Entity/John is sealed away in a mysterious tome. However, the first episode establishes that while in said tome, he was technically residing in The Dark World, a sort of dumping ground for everything that dies in every world and universe, some sort of ultimate end for everything. While he was technically in the tome for only 10 years, due to the nature of The Dark World and how time works differently in different planes of existence, he lived, in his own words, "lifetimes upon lifetimes over there.", having forgotten who or what he once was during that time.
  • The King in Yellow is currently trapped in the Dreamlands, his own domain, as a result of an imperfect ritual causing him to lose a piece of himself, and thus not being at his full power. In his current state, he can only reach out to people who are dreaming or already mentally unstable, instead of coming over into the world himself.
• Old Gods of Appalachia: The titular Eldritch Abominations locked away beneath the Appalachians are not originally from Earth, having been banished here eons ago by The Light due to the planet being a remote backwater where the Old Gods could be kept without continuing to be a threat to the rest of the universe.

Tabletop Games

• Arkham Horror 3rd Edition includes this as a way to defeat several Great Old Ones:
  • Azathoth is utterly impossible to fight directly, but the Investigators can win by completing a ritual to lure it into a lifeless alternate future Earth before it can end the world.
  • One way for the Investigators to defeat Ithaqua is to perform a Banishing Ritual to relocate him to an uninhabited planet, depriving him of both cultists and victims.
• Magic: The Gathering: In the set March of the Machines, thanks to Wrenn's sacrifice, the phased-out country of Zhalfir exchanges places with the corrupted plane of New Phyrexia, cutting it and its armies off from The Multiverse while making Zhalfir an independent plane from Dominaria.
• Warhammer 40,000: At some point in human history, the Emperor defeated the star vampire C'tan known as the Void Dragon and trapped it on Mars (in the process inspiring stories about Saint George and the dragon). As the Void Dragon has power over machines and Mars is the homeworld of the Machine Cult, it's all but stated that the Omnissiah the Cult prays to is a life-hating Eldritch Abomination.

Video Games

• Age of Wonders series: Sometime between Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic and Age of Wonders 3, the wizard kings of Athla began to explore the astral sea through the last portal left by the defeated shadow demons, finding endless worlds and strange new magics. However, the dark elf king Meandor eventually returned without warning and convened in secret with Queen Julia of the wood elves and Merlin, the leader of the Wizard's Circle. It's not known what was said, but it was enough for the trio to decide that the last shadowgate had to be closed at any cost, and the source of true magic on Athla was destroyed by Merlin to do it. This left the immortal, megalomaniacal wizard kings (and Meandor, who went back through the portal) stranded in the astral sea with no way to get back home. This state of affairs lasts until Age of Wonders 4, after the Big Bad of 3 — the leader of a clandestine cult that worships the wizard kings as gods — successfully restores the shadowgate and removes the barrier between worlds.
• Bravely Default II: In one of the Multiple Endings, the second bad ending shows that the main villain, the Night's Nexus, can repeatedly revive itself no matter how many times it's beaten. This forces the fairies to seal it away forever by freezing Mag Mell, the homeland of the fairies, in time. To further prevent its escape, the Queen permanently cuts off Mag Mell from the rest of the world, with Adelle staying behind, believing she has to atone for her sister's crimes.
• Dawn of War: The planet Tartarus actually serves as a prison for a Bloodthirster. Ironically for a daemon serving a War God, it's The Unfought, encountered only as an ominous floating head, and instead the Daemon Prince Sindri Myr serves as the final boss.
• In Divine Divinity lore, after Lucian the Divine's son Damian turned to evil, Lucian removed his memories and stranded him in the demons' home dimension rather than kill him. It doesn't work for long. In Beyond Divinity, the player character unwittingly helps him return to Rivellon, and he becomes the main antagonist of Divinity II.
• Dragalia Lost: Harle actually ends up being a heroic example as he is banished to an alternate dimension by an evil imposter named Loki. He manages to return to his own world with proper planning where he enacts revenge against Loki by doing the same to him. Said banishment doesn't last though as Loki is shortly brought back by the Progenitor.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, the Daedric Princes have been largely sealed out of Mundus, the mortal realm, via metaphysical barriers put into place by the Aedra, the deities who participated in Mundus' creation. This prevents the (mostly malevolent and destructive) Daedra from manifesting at full divine power within the mortal world outside of a few specific scenarios, forcing them to work through mortal agents and empathic "artifacts" most of the time. In their own realms within Oblivion that surrounds Mundus, the Princes are virutally Omnipotent.
• In the climax of Eternal Darkness Alex is forced to stop Pious from summoning one of the three active Ancients by summoning whichever of the others can defeat it in Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors... then, before her own Ancient could cause a slightly different apocalypse, use the power of the fourth Ancient, Mantorok, to reverse her summons and banish it into another universe. Mantorok was a relatively-benign god of entropy and has been mortally impaled under Angkor Wat for millennia, so a few thousand years of the status quo before the stars align again is about as happy an ending as a Cosmic Horror Story could expect. Completing the game against all three Ancients unlocks the true ending, revealing that, thanks to Mantorok's manipulations, all three timelines happened together, and Alex banished each of them into the timeline where Pious tried to summon it. Chattur'gha was sent to the timeline where Ulyaoth killed it, whereupon Ulyaoth was summoned to its death at the hands of Xel'lotath, and Xel'lotath's victory was cut short by Chattur'gha... leaving no challengers to Mantorok's dominion.
• Final Fantasy V: 30 years prior to the game's events, the Four Dawn Warriors managed to defeat ExDeath, following him to another world. While one of the warriors objects to sealing the enemy there, he eventually relents, though choosing to remain in order to watch over the seal. Turns out that the Dawn Warriors' world and the world where Exdeath was sealed were originally one, split apart to contain The Void. Exdeath's goal is to re-merge the worlds to access the Void.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: When Ganon attempted to conquer the Light World, the knights of Hyrule fought to defend the sages while they seal him in the Dark World at the expense of the former losing many men in the process of the seal. However, Ganon through his alter ego Agahnim later had the maidens descended from the sages warped to the Dark World in order to break the seal.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, this is how Ganondorf is finally defeated. After Link sinks the Master Sword into Ganon's skull, Zelda calls upon Rauru and the Six Sages to seal him away in the former Sacred Realm, which from there on is called the "Evil Realm."
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Twili people who inhabit the Twilight Realm are descended from a tribe of sorcerers who were banished from the Light World when they attempted to take control of the power of the gods. Over the ages, they adapted to survive and built their own kingdom in the alternate dimension. Eons later, the villainous Ganondorf is sentenced to execution by Hyrule's sages, but when he miraculously survives and attacks the sages they resort to trapping him in the Twilight Realm. There, he poses as a god and tempts the jealousy of the dejected Twili noble Zant, convincing him to usurp the Twili throne and invade the Light World in revenge for the Twili's exile, thus giving Ganondorf the means to escape.
• Myst:
  • Many years after the D'ni civilization collapses, Gehn, a major half-D'ni character, tries to resurrect it, as he remembered at 8 years old, but he can only manage a shadow of its former glory. The D'ni had a skill in an Art of Writing, able to create "linking books" which could send its user to other universes. Unfortunately, Gehn is also very unskilled at this, meaning that his written worlds collapse into oblivion, taking its inhabitants with it. When Gehn marries and has a child, whose mother dies in birth, he leaves the baby, named Atrus, with his mother. Many years later, Gehn returns to retrieve the now-teenage Atrus and teach him the ways of the D'ni. As Atrus studies with Gehn, he realizes how evil, corrupt, and unskilled Gehn actually is. After attempting to escape, Atrus is later forced to travel to a world called "Riven", where he meets a young woman named "Katran"^note although he calls her "Catherine". As Gehn is a despot over Riven, and many other unstable worlds, the two formulate a plan to destroy all linking books leading out, to keep him from subjugating and leading other worlds to ruin. The famous intro to Myst highlights this, with Atrus throwing himself into an extradimensional fissure, taking the final linking book, to Myst, with him, leaving Gehn trapped in the world of Riven for 30 years, until the second game in the series, when Atrus, now with his own familial problems, sends you to Riven to capture Gehn, and rescue Catherine.
  • This would be retconned into a plot element in Myst IV: Revelation. Sirrus and Achenar, Atrus' sons, become as corrupt as Gehn, when they discover the vast possibilities of the power of the Art of Writing, accidentally trap themselves in books designed to act as bait for explorers who happen to discover the island of Myst and try to plunder it. 20 years after the events of Myst, this element was changed into the books leading to physical worlds from which there is no exit, similar to Gehn's situation in Riven. In Revelation, Atrus plans to release Sirrus and Achenar, hoping that they have reformed in their solitary confinement in these worlds. Unfortunately, on a visit to Atrus' home, to determine their innocence, the brothers have already escaped, and have seemingly abducted Atrus' now-10-year-old daughter, Yeesha.
• Nobody Saves the World: The original League of Wizards banished the Calamity from the world. Unfortunately, it didn't stick.
• Pokémon: Due to its violent actions in our world, Giratina was banished by Arceus back to its home, the Distortion World, where time and space are altered. Giratina isn't so much evil as it is just aggressive, however, and from here it maintains the balance between the two worlds.
  Giratina's Pokédex entry: It was banished for its violence. It silently gazed upon the old world from the Distortion World.
• R-Type: this is what 26th Century humanity did to the Bydo, the psychotically evil living superweapon they created, which then turned on them. Unfortunately, the Bydo eventually figured out how to open a passage back... to the 22nd century, whereupon they resumed their attempt to murder their creators.
• Risk of Rain 2: The game's Big Bad, Mithrix, was banished to Petrichor V's moon by his brother Providence due to his obsession with "perfecting" the planet's life forms. Though he was free to continue his creations, he was unable to return to Petrichor V and remains trapped there by the time the UES Safe Travels arrives.
• RuneScape: Inverted in the quest "Shadow of the Storm". Prior to the events of the quest the demon Agrith-Naar was summoned to Gielinor from his demonic realm in order to limit the ways in which he can influence the world. The Saradominist mages that summoned him were unable to destroy him, so he disguises himself as the human Denath. The quest involves Denath recruiting a cult to "summon" a demon, but he tricks them to chant the summoning incantation backwards in order to be banished to his realm instead. Immediately after his banishment, massive storms start in the local area. Ultimately you are tasked with summoning him again to slay him.
• Sonic Frontiers: Has the true Big Bad of the game, and Greater-Scope Villain of the franchise, the All-Consuming Void known as THE END sealed away three times over in the parallel digital dimension known as Cyber Space. First by sealing it in the person shaped can known as the Titan SUPREME, then by locking SUPREME and most other Ancient technology into Cyber Space to ensure it can't get out through possessing SUPREME, and finally topping both off by not only building a wall around the dimension itself via six gargantuan towers that make skyscrapers look puny by comparison and are riddled with the most intense platforming challenges in the base game. But also having said wall powered by the Chaos Emeralds, which were relocated to a remote location who knows how far away! They REALLY didn't want this thing getting out.
• Them's Fightin' Herds: The Predators are banished to a completely different realm known as The Hold, which is described as an empty void between dimensions.

Web Animation

• Charlie the Unicorn: Flashbacks in the Grand Finale show us that chaos spirits once escaped their home dimension through a portal and tormented civilization for thousands of years. In the end, Charlie manages to banish them back where they came from, with the help of his cynical song that activates the machine to open the portal once again.

Webcomics

• Tales of the Questor: When the Faerie Court grants Quentyn Three Wishes from the malevolent Prince Dolan to reward Quentyn and punish the Prince, Quentyn uses his last wish to force the Prince back to the Land of Faerie, "never to hunt this plane again".

Websites

• SCP Foundation: SCP-2317-K, alternatively known as Malikir Tsoh and the Devourer of Worlds, is a Humanoid Abomination found trapped in a pocket dimension (SCP-2317) and chained up within by a group of sorcerers. While the SCP Foundation have an elaborate set of rituals that allegedly contain the beast, in truth all it does is keep the Foundation's morale up, as they have no actual method of containing or destroying it when all of the chains used to imprison it inevitably break.

Western Animation

• The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes: In the Grand Finale, the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and various allies prepare for the arrival of Galactus. They eventually manage to trap him in the Negative Zone... seemingly uncaring that the Negative Zone actually has inhabitants of its own. They simply hope that Galactus won't be able to find worlds to devour in there.
• In Centaurworld, The Nowhere King waged a long and bloody war with his army of minotaurs before he was banished to the Void Between the Worlds, his minotaur army rampaging across the Human World while the various Shamans of Centaurworld kept all but one of the Rift Key pieces to themselves.
• In Conan the Adventurer, Sett the Serpent-God was sealed in Another Dimension known only as "The Abyss" a thousand years ago by all the good magicians of the time. His High Preist Wrath-Amon spends the series trying to breach the barrier between worlds to bring him back. Similarly, his serpent-man Mooks are banished to the Abyss by the slightest touch of starmetal.
• The Owl House:
  • In the first episode, Eda claims that giraffes originated from the Demon Realm before they were banished to the Human Realm for being "freaks."
  • The Collector was banished to the Void Between the Worlds and a spherical cage by the Titan that would become The Boiling Isles, only able to interact with people in the form of a shadow while his body remained imprisoned.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Hordak's backstory turns out to be that he is a clone of the interstellar conqueror Horde Prime. As Hordak was considered defective, Prime cast his clone out on a suicide mission which resulted in Hordak getting pulled into the dimension containing the planet Etheria. There, he built himself an army and attempted to conquer the planet, in hopes of getting back in contact with Horde Prime and showing him he was of value to his master's empire.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Krang is a warlord from Dimension X who was stripped of his body and banished to Earth for his crimes. Much of his goals involve getting Shredder to open a portal back to Dimension X so he can conquer it. Later in the series, things get flipped with Shredder and Krang becoming trapped in Dimension X and searching for ways to get back to Earth.
  • In the 2012 continuity, it's revealed that Krang was banished to the 1987-iteration of Earth by his cousin Kraang Sub-Prime because he was too dangerously inept to be anything other than a hindrance. The fact that his first appearance in the 2012 series has him nearly destroy 3 entire dimensions speaks volumes.
• In Teen Titans Go!, Raven traps Terra in the trash dimension for all eternity after a fight involving Beast Boy.
• Transformers:
  • Beast Wars: It's revealed that the secret mission of the Axalon was to dump the immortal serial killer Protoform X onto some dead world, hoping his evil would be trapped there forever. Unfortunately, the Axalon is sidetracked due to trying to pursue the Darksyde, and eventually Protoform X is forcibly recruited into the Predacons, upon which Megatron rechristens him Rampage.
  • Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015): Predecessor Villain Megatronus, so-called "First Decepticon" shows up halfway through the first season and kicks Big Bad Wannabe Steeljaw into a subordinate position despite being trapped in a prison dimension. He forcibly recruits Steeljaw and his followers into trying to find a way to free him.
• In the series finale of Trollhunters, the heroes manage to stop the Nigh-Invulnerable Morgana Le Fay by shoving her through a portal into the Shadow Dimension and destroying the Skath-Hrun, the one thing that could open portals too and from there, at the same time. She would later be brought back by the Arcane Order in Wizards (2020), none too pleased that they ripped her away from her eternal rest.
• This trope is combined with Sealed Evil in a Duel in the first season finale of What If…? (2021): After Ultron's body is taken over by Arnim Zola, the team is betrayed by Killmonger, who attempts to take the Infinity Stones for himself. Uatu leaves Zola and Killmonger alone within Infinity Ultron's empty universe, to be guarded over by Strange Supreme.
• Xiaolin Chronicles: In the Grand Finale, after Chase Young transformed into a dragon gets defeated by the Cosmic Dragon, he is sealed in another unknown dimension.

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