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You could thumb your emergency cutoff, turn your eyes from the screen, walk out of the theater, close the book...but you don't. You are my accomplice, and my destroyer. My nemesis. My insatiable, blood-crazed god.
Ah, ahhh, Christ...it hurts.
We're not up to feature length yet. What you want is a real ending with plausible plot development.
So there you are, reading a book or playing a game. Within the media, whatever it may be, is some rather illegal and immoral action. Violence, murder, mayhem, general chaos. It's all very enjoyable and so much fun.
So you're reading or playing, and enjoying away, and then suddenly something happens to make you question how right you are to enjoy this socially unacceptable behaviour. Perhaps the characters start musing about what kind of warped mindset would possibly enjoy this. Or maybe they just outright smash through the fourth wall and tell you exactly what they think of you.
Or alternatively, maybe what you're watching / reading / playing has some kind of political message - perhaps it deals with famine or suffering in impoverished nations, or the rise of fascism, or some other example of All Humans Are Bastards. And then the same thing happens - the characters basically turn around and tell you that this is all your fault: " You Bastard, why the hell are you enjoying this?!"
And you're left to wonder in shame. Or, more likely, confusion.
This works especially well in video games, in which murder and theft is the generally accepted way to advance, without thought to moral consequences. If done well, it can be thought-provoking and unsettling, giving the reader / viewer / player pause to consider the moral implications of what they may have previously considered just a bit of fun. It may prompt them to examine both their motivations in reading this and the motivations of the hero - who, if they engage in numerous acts that would be condemned if done by anyone else, may look less and less heroic. If done not-so-well, however, it can be quite Narmy and Anvilicious... and also somewhat hypocritical. After all, if the viewer is a bastard for passively enjoying this great evil, then what does that say about the producers, who ultimately when all is said and done are actively exploiting said evil for profit? And aren't other games really to blame for drilling the "everything is a target" and " your orders are absolute" messages into players' heads for 30 years?
It's worth noting that no less a luminary than Aristotle disagreed with this trope, proposing that tragedy exists in order to cleanse the reader of negative emotions in a healthy way. Arguments against the censoring and removal of violence in video games also argue a similar point, their position being that it is ultimately healthier to perform hideously violent acts upon computer pixels within the fictional realm of a video game rather than fulfill the same urges in Real Life.
Not to be confused with the traditional translation for the Japanese Pronoun "temee". Also not to be confused with the camel mathematician "You Bastard" from Discworld. Possibly somewhat related to those that have killed Kenny. Related tropes include Karma Meter and Videogame Caring Potential, less antagonistic ways for games to include a moral dimension. Unlikely to be related to the use of the phrase in strategy games when someone's opponent takes advantage of a massive and easily forseeable weakness to deliver a full-service ass-whoopin'.
Examples
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Comic Books
- The Joker, of all people, pulls a "You Bastards" on Gotham City (and by extension the reader) by showing up during a game show and threatening Japanese-game-show levels (and beyond) of sadism on the participants. The entire time this is happening, we keep cutting away to the production crew, whose reactions run the gamut between "oh my God, this is horrible" to "keep rolling, the ratings will be awesome". Joker dicks with his terrified victims, but he does little worse than a pie to the face. After he's done he lectures his unseen audience about their expectations.
- Battle Royale did this in the manga. In the final volume the main character writes a letter telling the reader that the evil things in the volume exist only because the reader, and those like him, are evil enough to be interested in it.
- While not explicit, this editor wouldn't be surprised if Light's humiliating end in Death Note along with the heavy handed way in which Near tells him that rather than being a living god, he is an insane murderer, was directed in part against any Misaimed Fandom of the series.
- Done beautifully several times in The Invisibles, most memorably in a Whole Issue Flashback that gives A Day In The Limelight to a helmeted Mook who died in the first issue or two, showing a rather sad life that ran down to that conclusion. It's less Anvilicious than it sounds, largely because the series makes a point of showing the Grey And Gray Morality behind a seemingly black-and-white conflict.
- Which is completely undermined by the ludicrously evil nature of the bad guys in every other issue.
- Done indirectly late in Paradise X, as Loki berates Odin for making him (and a large portion of the other Asgardians) evil. "We fought and died and were brought back to life over and over again for your damned comic book need for excitement!"
- The comic version of Wanted ends on a Take That rant against the audience, shaming them for rooting for the bad guys and blithely accepting the death of wonder and heroism. The movie also ends on a similar note, but is more about shaming the audience with their stupidity and willingness to passively accept dull, unfulfilling lives. And then comes a menacing
◊ Splash Panel (probably NSFW).
- The film version is less rough to the audience, except the ending ("This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?").
- Ironically, an implication in the book is that the only way to handle things is to BECOME a villain!
- A villain with genetic super powers, an inheritance of millions of dollars and reality shaping allies. The Aesop is kind of...cracked.
- The Devil's Chair has a weird moment of Breaking The Fourth Wall where the protagonist tells the audience that the movie's just gotten silly and that they're horrible people for enjoying it.
As you can see it all got a bit silly right here. A girl with her puppies out, a demon, old banana over there in his pajamas. Is this what I promised you? Are we prick teasing you enough? Is this what you came here to see, all my brothers? Look at this poorly written, badly acted bullshit! Is there any truth in this b-movie banality? No! No, there is no truth. Believe no one. Believe nothing. You freaks and geeks. You bloodthirsty morons, fuck you! Bring on the red parade. So are there any pulses in the house? You deadbeat, midnight, freak-geek witted torture-porn gore whores! I know what you're looking for, so have it! Take it! and fuck you all very much!
- This (along with Gorn and Breaking The Fourth Wall) is pretty much the point of Funny Games.
- The 2000 Russell Crowe movie Gladiator has the title character pulling this on his audience, and perhaps the viewers by extension.
- The Belgian movie Man Bites Dog is based around this trope. It's a satire of the media's glorification of violence and criminals done as mockumentary about a film maker who follows a Serial Killer around and films his crimes. The killer himself is charming and likable and the violence is played as Black Comedy, but then it throws in a couple of scenes so disturbing that it makes viewers feel queasy for enjoying the rest of it.
- WWE-sponsored Battle Royale ripoff The Condemned tries to have this as its Aesop with the infamous line, "Those of us who watch... are we the Condemned?". Unfortunately, in keeping with the generally poor standard of the movie, the line came off as overly preachy and hypocritical. Especially since the movie was advertised with irony-free taglines like, "10 People Will Fight. 9 Will Die. You Get To Watch."
- Parodied in Wayne's World, in which (during a fourth wall break), Wayne blames the audience for his problems. For once, the 'audience' reacts appropriately, with the camera's viewpoint turning away and looking for something else to watch until Wayne changes his mind.
- Straw Dogs does this subtly, by deconstructing the entire appeal of The So Called Coward fantasy. Damn it, is that an exciting rampage, but afterwards, you start to think about the subtext.
- The Last Horror Movie, a British mockumentary which, like Man Bites Dog, follows the day to day life and crimes of a darkly comical, Affably Evil Serial Killer who spends the movie talking to the viewer about his POV. In the end, once he's made the viewer confront the fact that they could've stopped watching at any time, he reveals that he recorded this movie over a tape from a video store. The tape that you have rented. He has followed you home. If you've gotten far enough into the movie to see this, that means he is about to kill you.
- In "Crank: High Voltage", Chev Chelios ends the movie by flipping off the audience.
- In Heroes Die the main character (a kind of sci-fi gladiator who kills fantasy creatures to entertain the downtrodden masses of Earth) uses this on his audience, who collectively share his body for the duration of his adventures. Due to the character narrating to his own audience, it also ends up directed at the reader by extension.
- Clive Barker's Mr. B. Gone starts from the premise that the book itself is possessed by a demon who frequently implores the reader to burn the book and set him free. The titular demon goes so far as to repeatedly threaten the reader, bribe them and appeal to their better (and worse) natures as the book goes on.
- Geoffrey Chaucer also does it in Troilus and Criseyde: the character Pandarus contrives various tricks and deceptions in order to bring the two lovers together, which is what the readers (with whom he's conflated - he sits around reading a romance during one scene) wants to see happen. Older Than Print.
- Almost everybody in Maggie by Stephen Crane is a Jerkass, and what's more, most are convinced they're virtuous and everyone else is a jerkass. Naturally, most readers look down upon the characters, a fact that some critics think Crane anticipated and subtly mocked. Then again, others just think Crane was being Holier Than Thou . . .
- William Shakespeare does this fairly often, with characters like Iago, who implicate the audience in his evil schemes while constantly winking at them, or the Duke of Measure for Measure who does questionable things to bring the story to a happy, generically-correct conclusion (while advancing his own power).
- The Norman Spinrad novel ''The Iron Dream" is essentially a giant sword and sorcery tale, ostensibly written by sci-fi novelist Adolf Hitler. From the other wiki:" Spinrad seems intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces — and much science fiction and fantasy literature — can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany."
Live Action TV
- The Vicar Of Dibley provides an especially Anvilicious (and somewhat Wall Banger-y) example - the end of an episode dealing with the character's attempts to get involved in Live Earth ends with shots of people suffering in famine-torn Africa coupled with shots of the cast glaring righteously into the camera as if to say "This is all your fault! You are to blame for this! Yes, you personally!" The episode itself was essentially a publicity spot for the White Wristband campaign.
- The episode "Tsunkatse" of Star Trek Voyager has the crew enjoying a violent alien sport, then feeling guilty about it when they realize the participants are slaves.
- Chakotay in particular, was very interested in it. Then again, he boxes, so I can see why. It was the slaves bit that got him up in arms.
- The final episode of the mini-series Britz ends with a suicide bomber's final recorded message, in which she blames the British public (and by extension the viewing public) for their indifference to injustices committed by Israel and the West in the Middle East for resulting terrorist bombings and actions including the bomb she herself set off in London at the end of the series, and that they only have themselves to blame, as their indifference means they are no longer innocent civilians but worthy casualties of war. However, we're not exactly supposed to condone her actions since she is a suicide bomber (although we are meant to sympathize with the experiences she and her fellow Muslims go through, which is partly responsible for leading her to extremist politics in the first place), and there's more than a hint of slightly deluded self-justification on her part involved.
- Done very cleverly in the House Of Cards trilogy; in the manner of a Shakespearean villain, Francis Urquhart regularly turns to the camera (and through it, the audience) and shares his thoughts and plans with us in a very charming, seductive manner, both implicating the audience as a co-conspirator and charming us on some level into wanting him to succeed, even though his plans frequently place him a hop, skip and jump away from being a Complete Monster.
- Cue angry chef John Cleese in Monty Python's "Dirty Fork" sketch.
- The Dresden Dolls' song "Good Day", in which the protagonist/narrator takes the listener to task for only wanting to hear songs about her being miserable. Yes, that's right. Go ahead and attack people for liking your music.
- "The Most Unwanted Song
" (the result of simply doing what a poll said people hated in music) has a fairly lengthy section where a singer directly blames the listener for different atrocities. ("You. YOU. YOOOOUUUU!")
- On a related note, first word of "B.Y.O.B" by System of a Down, a protest song about political apathy? One very Cookie Monster-esque YOU.
- Done much earlier (and Played For Laughs) by Anna Russell in "The Rubens Woman": "She is dead, and who killed her? Who killed her? You killed her! You!"
- One of the oldest tricks a Heel has to get Cheap Heat is to tell the audience what bastards they are. Just recently, Chris Jericho spent months playing the You Bastard card, lambasting the audience for cheering Shawn Michaels, who he saw as a hypocrite, a cheat, and a coward.
- CM Punk, as a heel, has also been employing this trope. See, he's Straight-Edge and Jeff Hardy (as a face), his rival, was a reformed drug addict, so this naturally led Punk to despise us fans for liking Hardy so much, and very, very... VERY long narc speeches. To those familiar with his pre-WWE, he's done this act as a heel before and is apparently very, very good at it.
Tabletop Games
- The John Tynes roleplaying metagame Power Kill
. It's intended to point out to fantasy Tabletop RPG players that many or most of the actions their characters perform (entering other creature's homes, killing them and taking their belongings) would be considered heinous crimes if they occurred in the real world.
- This can occur even in non-fantasy games. Someone once pointed out in a long-ago review of the science fiction game Traveller that every adventure published up to that time required the adventurers to commit at least one crime in the course of the mission.
- Interestingly enough, the Urban Fantasy RPG Unknown Armies, which John Tyne co-created, also features similar applications of this trope. Many times in the corebook and the supplements, there is a subtle (or not so subtle) hint that G Ms should punish the P Cs in some manner for the kind of immoral or bizarre behaviour described above, usually in the form of legal consequences or Madness checks (most likely in the Self meter). The most blatant example was in the Post Modern Magick sourcebook's section on magick-user lifestyles, which seemed to exist only for the purpose of making players interested in the kewl okult powaz of a certain school go "What the fuck is wrong with me?"
- Also several pictures in the game & its supplements feature a murdered body with the blood or some other item in the scene subtly spelling out "You did it."
- Somewhat similar to the Power Kill example above is Violence: the Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed by Greg Costikyan, which explicitly states that it was designed to be a D&D-style hack and slay game set in the modern world. The message is delivered pretty Anviliciously, with the rulebook repeatedly insulting the reader and taking pains to point out how reprehensible the whole premise of the game is.
Video Games
- In Armored Core For Answer there is a mission where you kill 100 Million People...then go on to become "The greatest monster mankind has ever seen."
- This troper questions the inclusion of this entry, as there's no real subtlety about it. You're ALREADY on the 'bad path' anyway. You aren't going to say, be hoodwinked into this act in the middle of the 'good' and 'neutral' paths. (or rather, grey and greyer.)
- In BioShock, the story arc with the NPC "Atlas" adapts this to gameplay itself. From the game characters' point of view if not yours, you go around killing people just because some NPC contact asked you to. Where is your sense of agency? If you will not exert free will, maybe it should be taken from you.
- Harvester revealed in the end that the whole game was a game-within-a-game to make the player character (and, by extension, the player) into a serial killer. You've been having Steve do steadily eviler acts all game (from minor vandalism to arson to murder), and of course the whole point is to make the 'real' Steve into the kind of person that does those things for fun.
- This may have been part of what Hideo Kojima was going for in Metal Gear Solid 2. Then again, we can't be sure...
- Every boss in the series tends to pull the Tear Jerker card after they've been beaten.
- And taken to utterly Narm-filled heights in MGS 4... It seriously feels like they wrote the backstory for Wolf first based on some african refugee's memoirs, and then tried to double it up on everyone after, thereby crossing the line twice.
- The tranquilizer gun probably became the favorite weapon for many people after the fight with The Sorrow. There's just something about passing by each and every soldier you killed as they scream in horror that gets to you.
- Liquid accuses Snake of 'enjoying all the killing' at the end of Metal Gear Solid. The game gives you opportunities to, among other things, strangle and break the neck of a guard while peeing in a urinal. It's your own fault if it rings true.
- More subtle example from the sequel - there's a pretty young hostage named Jennifer in the Shell 1 core, who you can address by name, guess the measurements of, or knock her out to look up her skirt (you get special Codecs if you call Mission Control while looking up there or after having taken a photograph of it). When the Ninja descends in the following cutscene, one of the bullets she deflects hits the female hostage in the head, killing her. It's your fault if her last memory is of you molesting her.
- How do you even know? Do you see the flashbacks in her mind, last-minute montage style? Because it seems like it would be...I don't know, quite [[Narm Narmful]] to throw a panty shot up out of nowhere.
- At the end of Contact, the main character inflicts this on the player, in a truly magnificent example of the Player Punch.
- The Witcher, thanks to having the consequences of your choices come back an hour later to bite you in the ass, ends up doing this in a sort of way. For instance, you end up as a sort of surrogate father for an orphan, and he occasionally asks you questions regarding your own moral compass and various views on destiny and the world in general. He later turns out to be the Big Bad, thanks to some accidental time travel, and he spits back your own philosophy as a justification for genocide and the creation of twisted mutants.
- Done well earlier on too. If you give equipment to the terrorists, which they insist they need for the medical supplies included, they will later use weapons also included to kill one of your friends. Definitely a Player Punch.
- Done with subtlety and elegance in Shadow Of The Colossus: arguably the whole idea behind the game's minimalistic structure and almost complete lack of dialogue is to silently stress the fact that you are slaying mostly docile creatures that are unique, majestic and beautiful. You Bastard indeed.
- Fallout 3 pulls one of these, very nearly breaking the fourth wall to do so: If you choose to put a dying man out of his misery, a message pops up to tell you that you're a bastard for killing him.
- World Of Warcraft pulls one of these with the Death Knight starting chain in the Wrath Of The Lich King expansion. Working for the Scourge involves many screaming civilians getting slaughtered by you and your compatriots. Then, you reach the race specific execution quest...
- Perhaps done even earlier in the Burning Crusade expansion: one mission requires you to sneak into an enemy camp to investigate certain people. During which you can talk to most of the neutral-via-your-disguise enemy NPC's and hear them talk about going into a nearby town and having drinks or starting a 'leatherball' game. Upon completing this quest, the questgiver orders for you to go back into the camp and kill X no of the enemy characters. Yes, they ARE an evil cult...but still...
- Deus Ex starts you off as a government agent going after terrorists. It looks like a classic FPS at first, but going on a killing spree on your first mission will earn you the disapproval of several characters. Not only that, but you later find out that you're working for the Bad Guys and join up with the "terrorists" you may have been killing off previously.
- The Faceless Mooks of the terrorist organizations, government, and shadowy conspiracies all have conversations which anviliciously remind you of how human (or synthetic humanoid) they are, and how much of a vicious bastard you are for killing them when you could be using your cyborg superspy skills to sneak by or temporarily incapacitate them.
- One part of the game has you talk to the parents of a MJ 12 trooper. The father, has resigned himself that his son is no longer a boy, will give you his son's user name and password for a console, and is accepting that he may be killed by the player (somewhat, he'll curtly say to the player, "I have helped you kill my son, isn't that enough?" if you attempt to talk to him again) The mother on the other hand, will beg you to spare him, and berate her husband for "letting politics get in front of his duties as a father." Continue to kill MJ 12 troopers if you like, but you can't help but wonder if you just killed the couple's son.
- At least, unlike a lot of these examples, Deus Ex does give you the option of not killing everyone, even if it makes the game much harder.
- In The Nameless Mod, playing the World Corp storyline will give you this trope a lot from the PDX gang, who were your friends before the events of the game.
- This was the entire premise of Crusader of Centy: the main character comes of age and sets out on a quest to kill monsters in true adventure game style. But over a series of bizarre circumstances, it is revealed that the monsters are intelligent and (initially) innocent, and you've spent the whole game basically committing genocide because you assumed they deserved to die. An interesting premise, but its presentation leaves much to be desired.
- The Mind Screw last act of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time reveals that the entire world was created as a giant virtual reality MMO for a more advanced dimension's amusment. This was depicted as plainly sick and disturbing leading the heroes to Rage Against The Heavens when they'd become obsolete. Then there's that line about no controlling with a joy-stick. So Yeah...
- Grand Theft Auto (a game series that's downright deliciously wanton), particularly Grand Theft Auto IV, is prone to this though in-game content that's easy to miss in a regular playthrough (such as in radio messages or TV shows).
- Saints Row 2 carries out this trope to the letter in a secret mission: When you find out that Julius was the one attempted to kill you at the end of the first game, you go hunting for him. At the end of the mission, you shoot him in cold blood. Before he dies, he explains that he did it because the Saints, who were originally meant to save the city from violence, had become, in essence, WORSE than the Vice Kings. While this is true, and certainly made me have second thoughts about my behavior in the game, the situation was punctuated by the main character exclaiming how he didn't care, and shot him in the forehead. Worse is that if there had not been a speech like that, the player probably would have done that in the first place, adding even more punch to his words.
- At the end of The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Ganondorf opens the final battle with an explanation that he was just jealous of Hyrule's wind, which has resulted in plenty of fans feeling sorry for him.
- Dhaos of Tales Of Phantasia attempts to pull your heartstrings with the reveal that he's only fighting to save his planet, which loses momentum when you consider that a few minutes earlier he told the player that he didn't care one whit about what happened to Earth.
- The planet's own inhabitants didn't give a rat's ass about what happened to their land, as pointedly demonstrated when, after Dhaos attempts to stop them from making a terrible mistake, they fire the magitek cannon at him anyway, killing the Mana Tree in the process and predictably making Dhaos beyond angry. Dhaos just assumed the humans wouldn't be such colossal morons as to kill their own planet, and when he was proved wrong, he somewhat understandably decided that it would be best for the universe if both humans and elves were wiped outright from existence.
- In Iji, if you play the game like any other shoot-em-up, which is what seems to be expected of you, your enemies at various points call you out for the vast amounts of deaths you've caused (not that this isn't hypocritical on their part). It is possible to play through without killing anyone, in which case you gain a certain amount of admiration instead.
- In ICO, you find the body of Yorda frozen as stone with shadow creatures standing around her that run as you approach. The shadow creatures do not attack you, some approach you curiously, others run while still others fly or run around in circles as if they're confused. To proceed you have to kill them, and as you kill them you realise that they are the souls/spirits/essence/etc of the other horned boys, innocent victims who were sacrificed like you were intended to be.
- Call Of Duty: World at War does this. At two points in the game, in the Russian missions, you have the option to spare or execute a group of helpless German soldiers. Also, one of your squadmates keeps a diary. Before the last mission, Sgt. Reznov will read an entry from said diary. If you spared the soldiers both times, your character is described as a true hero. If you killed both groups, you're called a brutal, merciless savage and if you killed one and spared the other he puts you as morally ambiguous individual.
- Callof Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does this as well when you not only play on the side of Makarov, the new Ultranationalist leader, you get to also gun down an airport full of civilians and shoot them as they pitifully try to crawl away to safety. And to top it all off, you get shot by Makarov himself because you were a CIA agent working on the inside. So not only were you doing horrible things, but you were also on the side of good the entire time. Wow Infinity Ward, wow.
- And Makarov uses the incident as an excuse to declare war on the United States.
- A Marathon: Infinity level-design finalist plays this for laughs. Upon starting, there is nothing you can do but press a button. You do, a bunch of screams let out, and the window next to you fills with lava. You can then go over to a terminal where a stereotypical middle-management type person congratulates you for putting down that miners' strike so quickly.
- In Portal, "You euthanised your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations."
- "There was even going to be a party for you. A big party, that all of your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend, the Companion Cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him."
- In Fire Emblem 9: Path of Radiance, a soldier says in a base conversation that some of the soldiers are not looking forward to the end of the war, because it means the end of their soldiering career, with all its promotion possibilties and great pay. To this Ike says that the men should be ashamed of finding pleasure in the war and should instead concentrate on the great sorrow the war has caused for all sides. That can really hit home at players who don't want the game to end because they want to level their soldiers higher and get everyone to 20/20.
- The point of the song Ai no Uta
for Pikmin seems to basically condemn the player for enslaving the Pikmin and using them in an expendable manner, describing the Pikmin as willing to do anything for Olimar and never asking anything in return.
- Jesse Venbrux's ultra-short (seriously, it takes a few seconds to play) Execution combines this with a Deconstruction of how death normally works in video games: Shooting the prisoner leads to a "You lose" message. Restarting the game leads you to a message that it's already too late, followed by a view of the prisoner's corpse. This is accomplished by adding a bit of data to your computer's registry, so simply deleting the game and re-downloading it will still give you the corpse. On the other hand, attempting to quit without shooting the prisoner leads to a "You win" message.
- Knights Of The Old Republic II did this to the classic RPG mechanic of killing things for XP, by revealing that you're growing more powerful not because you're learning things, but because you're in a way draining your opponents' lives as you kill them.
- A lesson made even more jarring given it's effectively hand-waved by your party members and by the final outcomes in that if you're good you lead to the resurrection of the Jedi Order and if you're bad your actions significantly weaken the already fractured Republic potentially leading to it's destruction. Values dissonance?
- Chrono Cross throws this at you after you kill the Hydra - not only is it revealed that it was the last of its kind, but it was pregnant.
- ...which falls through thanks to the vicious Wall Banger the Dwarves proceed to pull. Hard to care when the overreaction is worse than your crime. Incidentally, according to Razzly, the baby Hydra survived.
- In Earthbound, when Ness reaches Magicant, he can recruit one of the five Flying Men to accompany him through the rest of the dungeon. If one dies, he can go back to their house to recruit another, but the remaining Flying Men get increasingly angerier at you for letting them die, and the graves of the deceased Flying Men have decreasingly detailed inscription until finally, all the Flying Man are dead and the last grave is unmarked.
- 3DO porn game Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has a surprising instance of this, where the heroine is pleading for a job. You get the option of turning the situation into a classic "I'd do ANYTHING to get this job!" porn movie scenario, but if you do the decision blows up in your face as the scene quickly turns dark and wrong, the boss turning into a Complete Monster and the heroine turning sad and pitiful. Then the narrator chimes in with "What kind of sick, perverted monster are you!?" Because really, what the hell were you thinking choosing the porn option IN A PORN GAME!?
- The Escape Ending in Devil Survivor goes out of its way to ensure you feel terrible for the decisions you made.
- In Mass Effect, some characters react strongly if the player chooses a more morally ambiguous option, or just one that character disagrees with ("Do you enjoy committing genocide, Commander?!"). The Turian Counselor is especially notable for having You Bastard dialogue options no matter what option the player chooses.
- Eve Online's chronicles go a long way to fleshing out how the world of New Eden views capsuleers like you. In the course of being your average MMORPG character, you are an immortal directed by a moral compass completely alien to the average denizens of the world you inhabit. Thousands die at your bidding for loot or sometimes for fun, and your kind wage endless wars that up that amount by orders of magnitude. Many capsuleers are so far removed from the sphere of the ordinary person's world that they don't even realise they're carrying a crew aboard most of the ships they control. Good luck not feeling guilty on those rare occasions when those poor saps are given a voice.
- Mildly occurs in World in Conflict, towards the end. Having been under Soviet rule for months, Seattle has many Soviet propaganda posters and images painted around the city, most of them giving idealistic messages about the ending of the Cold War, a new, united world and attacking US and NATO forces for being warmongers. Now listen to the Colonel Sawyer himself admitting that the US airstrikes did more damage to the city than the Soviets themselves, consider that you are trying to save the city from a nuke by the US government and note that the final US assault on the city pretty much levels the whole place. A small pang of guilt is unavoidable even knowing that the Soviets are the aggressors.
- Also occurs in the expansion where you learn Malashenko's wife and child was killed during a NATO assault in Soviet territory. Didn't you blow up some apartment buildings during the assault in Murmansk in the original game with no comments whatsoever on the implications? Or didn't Bannon shell a group of surrendering Soviet civilians in the same mission?
- The entire point, done with beautiful subtlety, of Far Cry 2. Enemies attack you on sight. Patrols attempt to kill you before even checking to see if you're an enemy or a friend. The entire world is hostile. The result? The player learns to attack first. To kill everything in sight. To blow up jeeps the moment they see a patrol. In short: To become exactly the same as all the people you're murdering. Reinforced by a reputation system that sees (at high levels) enemies scream and run when they see you and the Underground, the only decent group of people in the game, to refuse to do business with you.
- Some of the more compassionate behaviours exhibited by enemies had a similar effect. Shooting a guy who is shooting at you? No problem. After all, that's just self defence, at least to some degree. But shooting a guy who is trying to drag his wounded mate to safety? Not fun. The effect is magnified when you can hear him constantly reassuring the wounded fellow that everything will be alright.
- Umineko No Naku Koro Ni does this in a side story: Bernkastel: "Expanding a happy dream into infinity? Effort that brings success no matter what...? It's so sickningly sweet that my tongue will fall off. ......Aah, how revolting. It's the same to you, right? Therefore. I will show you a true, witch-like, granting of a wish. Because you're obviously looking forward to that." She then proceeds to convince a character to defy her aunt because if she doesn't she'll never get to be with her true family again. And then for her troubles her aunt makes her life a living hell. Then Bernkastel says this: "These kinds of kakera exist, ......but what do you think? All of you who love this kind of ill-natured story...like this level of pain more, don't you?"
- In the game Evil Genius, you perform one of these in a game that otherwise tries to allow you to revel in being a Diabolical Mastermind. Each global anti-Evil-Genius group has a Super Agent, an practically-unkillable Super Agent that can only be killed in a certain way. Mariana Mamba? You strap her down in a sugery booth and make her morbidly obese. Not that bad, she can recover. Jet Chan? You challenge him to a karate duel, win, and he flees to contemplate his loss. Thats okay, he's not injured except for his pride. Dirk Masters? You dunk him in a biological tank filled with a chemicals obtained from his own steriod-riddled gym rag. Kinda fitting and justified. But defeating Katarina Frostonova, the emotionally-dead assassin who lived in a Soviet-run Orphanage Of Fear after the KGB accidentally killed her parents? You find the only thing she ever cared about as a child - a big teddy bear - cut it to pieces in front of her. Her running away crying is the only time I felt horrible about what I did in the game.
- in Command And Conquer Red Alert, in the first mission under the Soviet campaign, your goal is to kill everyone in a village. you have three planes and some soldiers. alright, everything's fine, just killing some low-graphics sprites for the level. then the level ends, and you're treated to a (for its time) high graphics CG cutscene of the same planes that you commanded gunning down a family, you see a little girl drop her stuffed bunny, and the camera zooms in on it. nice job finishing the first mission, You Bastard.
- Oh, but it gets even WORSE when you think about it. The opposing forces: about a half-dozen Polish Partisans trying to protect dozens of unarmed civilians (ALL of whom you have to kill). Your forces: about 60+ men and air support. The reason you are destroying this village: a handful of survivors from one of the USSR's less-than-ethical experiments involving Sarin Gas managed to escape, and the village made the fatal mistake of taking these poor, near-dead souls in and reporting the matter to the Western Allies. You Bastard indeed.
- In FMV-driven adventure game Quantum Gate and its sequel Vortex, the 'bugs' you wind up shooting in the 'tween-act minigame were actually fairy people, and the barren planet is actually a lush paradise. Has slight Unfortunate Implications running along the What Measure Is A Noncute line due to the fact that, even if they WERE giant bugs, you were still invading their home on behalf of an evil corporation, albeit one with a noble endgoal.
- Survival Of The Fittest has this, either in cases where people rant at cameras (and by proxy, the audience) declaring them to be sick bastards for watching/enjoying it. This trope is also something of an in-joke on the boards - it's often said that the members have to be at least a little sadistic. It was even pointed out after one handler mused that the memberbase has to be morbid indeed to casually joke about such sbjects as characters suffocating to death.
- In examples of the former, characters Adam Dodd and Bobby Jacks both actively call out Danya for orchestrating the game.
- This wiki: check out the last paragraph on the entry of Comedic Sociopathy.
- Zero Punctuation regularly uses this when covering niche games, directly attacking the audience for choosing games like Halo over Braid, No More Heroes or Psychonauts.
- Especially you, Adrian.
- ...Veidt.
Western Animation
Other
- Parodied / subverted in Ricky Gervais' stand-up act Animals, in which at one point he announces that he's going to spend a few moments "talking about the most dangerous animal of them all" with an accusing finger pointed at the audience... before suddenly pointing at a picture of King Kong and yelling "The giant gorilla!". He then incredulously notes that some people say the most dangerous animal in the world is 'Man', before pointing at King Kong once again.
- Done backhandedly in "Nowadays" from the musical Chicago: the protagonists, having been declared innocent of the murders they committed, give glowing compliments (including floral tributes) to the audience "who made it all possible by believing in our innocence."
- This
movie made for the Australian Discworld Convention ends with Rincewind running into the theatre in which the film is being shown, and finding a copy of one of the Discworld books. Flicking through it, he is shocked to see one of his own adventures, and scans the audience for someone matching the photograph of the author in the inside cover. When he finds Terry Pratchett, he pulls himself up, spits "You BASTARD!" and flounces off.
- In The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Jimmy is about to be executed for having committed the most heinous crime in the world: not having any money to pay his debts. The execution scene is introduced with a caption which asks the audience members who are offended by this turn of events if they would have paid his debts. "Would you? Are you sure?"
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