Nice Job Breaking It Hero / Fan Works

aka: Fanfic

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Crossovers

• A Is A:
  • Due to the MVTF arriving at the tail end of the First Tiberium War, Kane is able to piece together that the multiverse is still open and escapes into it.
  • Thanks to weaponizing Word of God, Team Rainbow puts together that Jameson Fawkes discovered something vital in the Australian Omnium...Which is revealed after Asami Sato shot and killed him.
  • The entire story Last Stand of the Owl House: The MVTF's attempts to avert the Day of Unity disaster in Owl House instead resulted in the majority of demons and witches slaughtered single-handedly by Emperor Belos, most named adult characters dead, and the Collector released anyway despite preventing that being the MVTF's main goal.
• In Araceil's Untameable, Liu Qingge doesn't even try to talk the qi-deviating Shen Qingqiu into peacefully surrendering and going back to Cang Qiong for medical treatment, immediately assaulting him with his sword — the result is Shen Qingqiu kicking his ass before running away. Then he does it again right as Yue Qingyuan had approached Shen Qingqiu, with the same results plus Yue Qingyuan being furious against him.
• Avenger of Steel:
  • Clark indirectly delivers a speech about this to SHIELD and the World Council (delivered to Fury by proxy via Natasha) as their work on the Tesseract is what drew the Chitauri and Zod to Earth.
  • Potentially applies to the Ancient One; her use of the Time Stone has attracted the attention of Mr Mxyzptlk, but compared to the threat of a mind-controlled Superman, the aforementioned imp isn’t quite as dangerous.
• Avengers: Infinite Wars;
  • Chapter 21 reveals that Padme and Threepio helped to reactivate Ultron by giving a salvaged head a new body, although Ultron and the Avengers each agree after his debut that Padme's actions just made it easier for Ultron and he would have found some way to be a threat on his own.
  • From a historical perspective, Darth Maul observes that an ancient Jedi Master basically created the modern Sith for refusing to tell Freedon Nadd exactly why he was being held back from ascending further among the Jedi, inspiring him to go off and become corrupted into a Sith.
• In Blessed with a Hero's Heart, Kyouya and Aqua could have not only purified a Lich, but also gain its treasure, if they had only bothered to be a bit more patient. Instead, Kyouya attacked him before the Lich could speak and destroyed an object that was personally important to him, Aqua made a slapdash seal that completely screwed with the place, and then ran away when they were attacked. Had it not been for Izuku finding a way to help the Lich recover that object and erasing the seal, Axel would have been in really deep shit.
• In Massive Multiplayer Crossover-but-mostly-Rurouni Kenshin story Blood and Revolution, Saitou and Shun awaken the Earthkami to stop a lesser kami from going to war against humanity with an army of youkai. It turns out that waking up the incarnation of the earth itself is not a good plan. They manage not to literally end the world, but it does cause the end of civilization.
• In The Boy with the Magic Notebook, Maxwell tries to summon a healing rainstorm to heal people after Shatterbird's attack on Brockton Bay. But while it did heal all their wounds, it still left the glass pieces inside them.
• The Chaotic Masters:
  • Adagio likes to note with amusement how rather than ending up in a world without magic like Starswirl intended, the Dazzlings not only ended up in one rich with it, but with events leading to them living like goddesses as the Chaotic Masters' chief brides.
  • Fred casually mentioning how his research shows that chi wizardry is historically a sexist tradition that excludes teaching women enrages Jade, who goes to confront Uncle about it, leading to a fight wherein he reveals that he simply doesn't see her as worthy of learning magic due to her impulsive nature. This forms a rift between the two, which doesn't seem to be mending itself any time soon.
  • Aqualad infiltrates Roulette's auction of magical artifacts to steal the Trident of Triton, which is viewed as a holy relic by Atlantis, and is so determined to do so even when being confronted and outnumbered by security in the vault that he starts a fight which spills out onto the show floor. This breaks the truce that the place runs on, triggering a free-for-all that results in many of the villains in attendance grabbing whatever artifacts they can get ahold of and fleeing before the law can arrive to break things up and make any arrests, ruining the sting operation that the Titans and League were running.
  • While fighting Wong at the auction, Jade accidentally blasts a magic cauldron with her Palisman, indirectly causing Madame Mim, who was imprisoned inside, to break free.
• The events of the three-part finale for Children of Time are largely due thanks to Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and teenage Beth Lestrade. The friendship between Holmes and Watson has been disintegrating, and the argument that they have early on tears a huge rift in their relationship — right as one of Holmes's canonical, Fixed-Point-in-Time cases is beginning. One which Watson ought to be witnessing. The case goes wrong thanks to Watson not being there and Holmes refusing to accept help from Beth. To top it off, when Holmes is kidnapped, Beth follows and is caught, herself, allowing the Big Bad to realize that she is now a Temporal Paradox that ought to be eliminated. Time Stands Still, and Beth eventually dies.
• While not much of a hero, Vash of Christian Humber Reloaded^note A crossover between too many works to list here kills a dragon named Le-Hung Doe as part of atoning for killing another dragon, but learns that by killing him, he has started a Ying-Yang War, in which he must fight demons without weapons.
• Ultimately subverted in Code Geass: Paladins of Voltron. While it's implied that Zenovia the Black Lion destroying the Thought Elevator on Kamine Island exposed Earth to Zarkon, Haggar was already there, and doubtless would have studied the artifact if given the chance.
• In Connecting the Dots, when Kakashi teleports himself to the DC Animated Universe to try and rescue Naruto and the Konoha 11, he appears right in front of Lex Luthor. This is particularly bad as the Sharingan was the last thing Luthor needed to complete the Anti-Life Equation.
• Demon's Curse: After the fiasco at the Tower of Heaven, a (heated and emotional) argument is had where Erza calls out Naruto on not telling the guild he can use part of Zeref's magic. Naruto retorts he NEVER wanted the power to begin with and that he has personal experience informing his decision to keep it secret but eventually Naruto leaves, emotionally dejected, saying that once it gets out, the guild won't treat him the same and he's going home. Later when Erza tells Mirajane about this, Mirajane panics and sets off to find Naruto. Mirajane explains that Naruto had a past case of Power Incontinence and was about to be executed until Makarov and Mirajane negotiated it down to exiled parole on the condition that Naruto stays under Mirajane's supervision and that he can never return to his village on threat of imprisonment or death. A horrified Erza suddenly realizes she might have pushed Naruto to commit Suicide by Cop.
• Tends to be a habit with Naiki Satomi from Divine Blood. Some specifics:
  • Underestimates the Karate Club guys and gets in a position where she has to use a chi burst to defeat them in public, while Gauron is spying on Kaname nearby.
  • Naiki's fear of flying combined with a terrorist takeover of the plane she's on causes her to go on a fear-crazed berserk as soon as the plane lands, which leaves her captured and used as a hostage to insure Deimosu's surrender.
  • Goes back to help Kurz's fight against the Venom Chodarl, splitting the escape party and causing Eija, Kaname, Deimosu and Sousuke to hesitate long enough figuring out where she went for the Musk to attack and force Eija, Kaname and Sousuke to miss the escape.
  • Tries and fails to rescue and protect Tessa from the Behemoth terrorists.
  • Uses a black magic spell that causes her to touch Tessa's soul, starting the mind merge process and also indebting her to a Demon that makes Mara queasy. Twice.
  • In backstory, Naiki's intense fear of flying is due to an... interesting 10 meter trip through a hangar that occurred when she tried to operate a helicopter as a young girl.
  • In the fight against the Behemoth, uses her summoned tentacles to throw Mao into a pile of debris, almost effectively taking her out of the fight.
  • In the Martial Arts Takeout Race, loses control of her newly made Torrent of Debris spell.
  • Before getting one of Persephone's peaches, she spends a lot of the fight against Poseidon being rescued by the older, human martial artists.
• The Dragon and the Butterfly: Whiteout: In an attempt at intimidating Drago and Dagur, Karla ends up confessing to Dagur that they are Hiccup and Mirabel's kids, that Berk has dragons and that there is a village full of other magical users who would be more than willing to walk into whatever trap Drago and Dagur have planned for all of them.
• In End of the Line, Sailor Moon created a magic barrier to protect her hometown from an apocalypse. As Xander furiously explains to her and Luna before he kills them, that very barrier is what caused the apocalypse by pulling magic out of everything in the world. Anything it deemed to be 'fighting' for the good of the world, including many of his friends.
• Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness:
  • Destruction visited upon the Forest of Magic? Marisa injured and trapped in her own house beneath a junk pile? The giant fairies, and the subsequent showdown with Suika? Yukari, who could've prevented it all at the outset, getting decked into unconsciousness by accident when Megas first arrives? Just another day in the life of Coop.
  • The Lunarians didn't have any real idea what the Glorft were planning and were mostly hiding from them. The problem is that if Megas (and her crew) hadn't been there, they probably would have stayed hidden until the Glorft would have gone away... meaning that the Lunarians would have been killed and the Earth destroyed when Warmaster Gorrath smashed the moon into the planet. After overhearing Megas's crew on their return visit, the Watatsuki sisters give this realization to themselves and resolve to be more decisive next time, vowing to annihilate the Glorft should they cross paths again.
  • The story takes a closer look at the worldwide weather disasters caused by the destruction of the Glorft's moon base in the source material. Gensokyo is not spared the wrath of nature, and chaos and destruction are just about everywhere. The Human Village received substantial damage, and youkai elsewhere were rendered homeless. Even in places that survived with minimal to no damage, such as the Hakurei Shrine, Eientei and the Scarlet Devil Mansion, morale is less than optimal: as an example, Hong Meiling took up her post inside the Mansion when the weather became too much to take, and no one blamed her in the least for it.^*For those unfamiliar, Meiling's the Mansion's gatekeeper. It isn't until the moon gets steadily pieced back together that life starts to return to normal... and then Megas arrives.
• Fate/Starry Night: Due to presenting himself as Ritsuka Tohsaka at Homurahara as an excuse to speak to Rin, Sakura comes to the false conclusion that he's yet another replacement for her as a Tohsaka, further undermining her mental stability and bringing her closer to unleashing the Shadow.
• In Fractured, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands crossover and its sequel, this happens frequently.
  • The Trans-Galactic Republic tries to "save" their neighbors from the Reapers with their powerful starships...and inadvertently stokes interspecies tensions, denies the Magnetic Hero known in canon to have pulled the feuding galaxy together, and puts their heads in the sand when the Tyrant Takes the Helm despite having the ability to put a stop to it through their superior firepower.
  • The Vault Hunters clear out a Hyperion spaceport with a huge, Siren-powered rocket launcher...except the detonation also destroys their only way offworld (until Lilith decides to use her powers).
  • In Origins, Samantha Shepard needs to hack a terminal, but sends Legion (her best hacker) away to solve another problem of tailing a thief before realizing how stupid this decision ends up being. She then proceeds to almost get sniped until Garrus saves the day.
  • For a given definition, Aria manages to seize enough power to keep her station by hijacking Trans-Galactic Republic ships...except now those ships aren't used properly and the Alien Invasion gets out of hand when their original commanders would have just blown it all up.
  • Samantha Shepard thinks she can help Cortana with a different computer system, but all this does is start playing AI Is A Crap Shoot straight. Subverted later in that it actually ends up helping in the long run.
  • On a much larger scale, the Neglectful Precursors who thought their convoluted plans would keep the universe from imploding or being overrun by an Alien Invasion they'd fought off eons ago. Instead, they blunder right into this trope by influencing, if not directly causing, the things they worried about (rampaging lifeforms, alien invasions, wars among the lesser races, abuse of Psychic Powers). All because of a religious spat...
• Niamy of Fuck The Jesus Beam decides to deal with the Bombignat threat by releasing O.B.A.M.A. from his prison, despite him having started 95 World Wars as president and, as it is later revealed, being the source of the Bombignats. Upon his release, O.B.A.M.A. says that he will reclaim his domain, and takes control of the Bombignats.
• The God Empress of Ponykind: Celestia kills King Sombra. This allows him to ascend and become a Daemon Prince and pull the Crystal Kingdom into the Warp.
• Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters:
  • According to Nerissa's inner monologue, she only escaped her imprisonment because the Mage released her, in the hopes of redeeming her. Instead, Nerissa killed her and stole her identity.
  • Tarakudo's Xanatos Gambit that ended up with the heroes losing their only source on how to find and remove the Oni Masks happened because he was worried that Will or Jade would realize that losing the masks didn't bother him.
  • Queen Weira tried to be a good ruler and make everyone happy, but her actions unintentionally raised tensions between the nobility and smallfolk, causing the nobles to eventually side with Phobos, leading to his rise to power.
  • The Guardians' assault on Cavigor to free Elyon's parents inadvertently provides a distraction for Drago to escape his cell.
  • Jade's merger of what was left of her universe with the W.I.T.C.H. universe gave Samsara a foothold into reality outside the Shadow Realm.
• In Harry Potter and the Mystic Force, the Hogwarts staff and students all drive Harry away despite needing him to face Voldemort. Subverted/Justified as it turns out most of the key figures were subtly brainwashed by the real Big Bad to get Harry out of the way while he carried out his own plans.
• Horseshoes and Hand Grenades: Ryusei's attempts to save his friend from the coma by killing Gentaro only made Ophiuchus resurrect Gentaro as a Serpent-bearer with a vengeance to kill his former friends. Moreover, Jiro died anyway, and was resurrected by Gentaro to serve him and kill Ryusei. And that's not talking about how this derailed Gamou's plots for the Day of Awakening and how his benefactor Tachibana—Virgo Zodiarts—has to start injecting Cosmic energy into innocent kids to make up for everything. Was killing Gentaro worth all of this in the end, Ryusei?
• In I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, Harry Potter utilizes magic on a massive scale not seen in millennia to defeat an invading Separatist army and in doing so causes all Force users to become magic users. While the first demonstration of this is a trainee accidentally apparating instead of using a Force Jump, it quickly becomes apparent that Palpatine is far more powerful now as well and is quickly learning what he can do with his new powers.
• Infinity Crisis:
  • Loki mentions what he has heard of the Legends’ screw-ups in dealing with time travel.
  • For a given value of 'hero', anyway; the final chapter sees ex-General Ross offer Zemo leadership of his planned Thunderbolts to act against the Avengers if it is required in future.
  • Can be argued for Superman, as putting Thanos into the Phantom Zone gives the Titan a chance to forge an alliance with Zod and Darkseid to become more dangerous than ever.
  • In Of Kryptonians and Queens, Merlin is called out on the fact that he chose to unleash Etrigan to stop one of Morgana's plans, which led to an innocent man being bonded to a demon for the rest of eternity (his role in Morgana's fall from grace is also mentioned, but Kara acknowledges that nobody can be sure how much of an impact his lies may have had on her actions).
  • In In Hand and Foot, the Turtles and the Defenders unwittingly interrupt just as the Hand and the Foot were about to start fighting each other, with the result that the two sides turn their attention to the heroes; Michaelangelo acknowledges that, with hindsight, they could have handled this situation better.
• In the universe Kage (a crossover story between Jackie Chan Adventures and W.I.T.C.H.) and its Recursive Fanfiction Shadows over Meridian, the Guardians are quick to attack Jade when she first arrives in Meridian, thinking her to be a minion of Prince Phobos. That, combined with Elyon losing control and nearly killing Jade, and Caleb secretly countermanding his queen's orders to heal Jade's wounds and practically ordering her to be locked up immediately, is a major part of the reason Jade ends up joining the Knights of Vengeance, beginning the prophecy that dictates that she will cause the fall of Kandrakar.
  • During one storyline in Shadows, Vera Bexley's obsession with revenge on the Mogriffs (due to their leader Metalbeak having killed her grandfather) leads to her tricking her friends into undertaking an ultimately futile mission to assassinate Metalbeak, which ends with all six of them being captured — and since they're the heirs of the most prominent noble families in Castwell's Peak, this gives Phobos' forces the best hostages they could possibly ask for.
• In The Lightning Strike, during the battle against Thanos, Carol Danvers shows up just after Harry, Thor, and Harry's lovers have been desperately trying and failing to stop Thanos, but Carol only arrives after Thanos has received the Mind Stone from Wanda and she wastes time gloating, allowing Thanos to complete the Snap.
  • The sequel The Broken Day opens with the reveal that Harry's two realities have basically crashed together after he tried to use the Time Stone of his world to stop Hela's escape. In this new history, the wizarding world (led by Dumbledore and Grindlewald) basically took over during the Second World War in opposition to Hydra, Hela was released back into reality to be Hydra's "champion", Peggy Carter received the super-soldier serum rather than Steve, the wizarding world basically forces all wizards to fight while witches are essentially meant only to give birth to more soldiers unless they show some exceptional talent, and London has been the heart of a temporal storm for as long as Ron, Neville and Ginny can remember.
• In A Man of Iron, Jon sparing the Moutain That Rides seems to be an uber-bad idea, even more after he abducts Pepper to lure the Iron Man out, yet it's subverted with Tony pointing Tywin Lannister would have been upset about his attack dog's death and made Iron Pointe another Castamere in retaliation.
  • As in canon, Ned offers Cersei the possibility to flee with her children, which leads him to be imprisoned and sentenced to death. The Iron Man manages to save him, but Ned's eldest daughter is killed right before him.
• The Many Dates of Danny Fenton:
  • In TMDDF: Danny and Kara, in chapter 20 Spectra appears in Sam's room, when Sam tries to get her wrist ray or Fenton thermos, she remembers that Jazz confiscated all her weapons, allowing Spectra to capture her. Later it was revealed that Jazz took Sam's weapons on the behalf of Danny because he did not trust Sam anymore. Danny was horrified to learn that his actions cause Sam to be captured, but she forgives him and admits that he had a good reason not to trust her.
  • In TMDDF: After Many Dates: Danny and Gwen, Sam went to Bellwood with Tucker to spy on Gwen, and when they found out about her powers, Sam used her phone to film Gwen using them since she assumed that Danny doesn't know about them yet. This causes Operative K and Operative O of The Guys in White to recognize Sam and Tucker and capture them. While they escape, Sam accidentally left her phone behind and the Guys in White found the video with Gwen using her powers. So thanks to Sam, The Guys in White are now hunting Ben, Gwen, and Kevin in Bellwood along with Danny.
• Metal Gear: Green: Shoto's ice attack, combined with Bakugou and Kirishima's interference, on the USJ Nomu and Shigaraki successfully gives cover to Shigaraki and unpins the USJ Nomu, making All Might and the Ocelot Unit's attempts to control the situation much harder. When they come back to class, Ocelot chews the three out for making an already handled situation more difficult to control. He warns them that if they try another idiotic stunt like that again, he will have them expelled and blacklisted from ever getting into Heroics.
  Shoto: We were trying to help,
  Ocelot: It would have helped if you ran to the stairs! You are not heroes, you are not licensed to deal with villains. You are civilians training to become heroes. Your interference Todoroki, allowed the monster to escape when we had it pinned down. So I’m going to make myself clear, you do something like that ever again, without a license, and I will ensure you never even see a license in your lifetime. Capice?
• My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator: Endeavor charges ahead to try and apprehend The Doom Slayer. The same man who just made mincemeat of 10,000 people in one night. All he gets for his stupid charge is a destroyed vault, three months in the hospital, 48 heroes being knocked out and inadvertently forcing All Might to waste most of his embers of One for All while causing Musutafu a severe hero shortage for a couple days. It's heavily likely that if he does recover from his ass-kicking, Sayaka and Mera will pull his Hero License and hurl him into Tartarus, as they'll likely find his skeletons in the closet.
• In One Foot – Another Multiverse SI Poe does this a lot. Most of his actions tend to be less 'helpful' and more 'why would you do that?!' in nature. Heck, he does it at least once per world. One of the biggest examples is when he accidentally gives Father the formula to nuclear fission while trying to pass the written portion of the State Alchemist exam because he forgot that Amestris is at around World War I levels of tech.
• In Opening Dangerous Gates, the party travels to a town and finds a forcefield blocking their path. They destroy it and continue on their way. When they arrive, they find the town burned to the ground. Some demons thank them for getting rid of the forcefield that was stopping them from reaching the town.
• In Origin Story, Sentry is actually winning in his first fight with Alex Harris. That is, until he decides to fire a bolt of energy made of "the power of a million exploding suns" at her. As a Kryptonian, Alex absorbs and metabolizes sunlight to make her stronger, more invulnerable, and heal faster. Oops.
• In Point Me at the Skyrim, Victoria dropping off two wagons worth of injured Imperial Soldiers in Whiterun to be healed was certainly heroic. It might also could be used as a Pretext for War.
• In Power and Honor, a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002)/She-Ra and the Princesses of Power crossover, Adora transforms into She-Ra in front of the Evil Warriors after Skeletor tricks her into thinking he's a good guy, causing Skeletor to realize He-Man is likely the result of a similar transformation with Prince Adam being the only viable suspect for his true identity.
• The Prayer Warriors have killed many people in their fights against the Greek Gods, Hogwarts and Communist Russia, but it's implied in The Titans Strike Back that their infiltration and destruction of Hogwarts resulted in many Christian deaths, and now that the school has been re-established, they're going to deal with it differently this time.
• Reappearing Problem features the Slayers faced with a side-effect of the Hulk undoing the Snap (Avengers: Endgame); when the Hulk reversed the Snap to bring back the Dusted, he also unintentionally brought back every vampire that has ever been dusted, ranging from the standard mook vampires to the more ancient ones such as the Master and Kakistos, forcing the Slayers to step up their efforts to kill those vampires all over again.
• Super RWBY Sisters:
  • A more accidental example in this case. In the first story, while swimming through the ruins of an ancient castle, Team RWBY stumbles across the remains of Dry Bowser. After leaving the castle, Bowser sends his minions there to learn more about the place. Then after his minions leave, one of them releases a 1-Up mushroom and revives the undead Koopa monarch, causing him to become one of the main villains of the series.
    • It's added further when after Emperor Bowser's death, Jade Toadstool and a few Toads placed a 1-Up mushroom just above his head to taunt him. Guess what happens a thousand years later?
  • A bit of a complicated example, but when King K Rool was still a villain he created a device that he was going to use to get rid of Team RWBY and the Kongs. But he made it so powerful that it has now caused portals to other worlds to appear. One of which led to Erdrea, allowing Calasmos's influence to reach the main universe and which is beginning to cause chaos, bringing in one of the main villains of the Super RWBY series. But seeing as King K Rool has been reformed now, it falls under this trope.
  • Magolor thought it was a good idea to slice Kracko in half with his Ultra Sword to kill him. It worked... until the other half gained a second eyeball.
  • Umber had Ultra Necrozma use a powerful Z-Move on Void Termina to help out the Star Allies. Too bad it caused Dark Xena to come out afterwards.
• Superwomen of Eva: Legacies: True Blue: The first time she meets him, Hikari accidentally destroys Ted Kord's latest invention, which was not really described but potentially world-changing. He takes it extremely well, though.
• In The Swarm of War, after the Kingdom learns about the Zerg and misidentifies them as a Chaos corruption, a decision is made to bring out the hidden superweapon: hibernating Space Marines. Unfortunately, nine of them are corrupted by Chaos.
• There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: When the rest of the Alien Force team fly the Rust Bucket into the Chimeran Hammer to rescue Ben at the climax of Changing of the Guard, they ram right through the Mile-Long Ship's anti-gravity systems, causing it to start crashing towards the ground like a meteor (Vilgax damaging the redundancies by punting the Hulk and Supergirl through them certainly didn't help either). Fortunately, thanks to Supergirl and Ben as Power Girl, they're able to tow the ship into orbit and let it drift harmlessly into empty space instead.
• Warning Letter: The Phantom Thieves are able to steal Light Yagami's heart before he can kill Raye Penber, but Light's sudden change in demeanor, coupled with a sudden cessation of criminals dying, causes his father and L to suspect Light is Kira much faster than in canon. This in turn causes L to turn his attention to hunting Phantom Thieves instead, quickly and correctly deducing that they stole Kira's heart.
• Arguably applies, albeit to a minor degree in The Wisdom Seeker, the sequel to The Secret Keeper; after Voldemort’s death, his remaining loyal followers commit various assaults to try and re-establish the Death Eaters, as they were so certain of Voldemort’s victory that they made their allegiance to him too public for any of them to claim that they were Imperiused like before, particularly in the face of Kingsley Shacklebolt’s planned reforms. However, while dangerous, the Death Eaters lack a clear leader after Voldemort’s death, and so their attacks are limited compared to what they did under Voldemort’s leadership.

Amphibia

• You’re About Seven Years Too Early: Percy and Braddock banish an insubordinate Bog while in charge of Toad Tower due to Grime's absence. Unfortunately, this just incentivizes him to start his quest for power, and the duo realize their mistake only after he's already gone.

Animorphs

• In Animorphs Redux, this potentially applies to the team, as they have reset reality and risk the Yeerks winning all over again, but most specifically for Ax in The Extreme, as his actions create a Z-Space rift that will make it even harder for the Andalites to reach Earth while trapping a vast Yeerk fleet above Earth, all in the name of rescuing one other Andalite from becoming a host, with no evidence that this effort worked.
• In Dæmorphing, Ax starts attacking Estrid and then destroys her lab in a fit of rage. Unfortunately for everyone, this means she doesn't have a chance to test the quantum virus more, so it kills more Yeerks than she intended.
• In Eleutherophobia: Ghost in the Shell, Tom recalls that many of the human witnesses the Animorphs spared were made into Controllers in order to cover up the out-of-place wild animals wreaking havoc around the city.

Arrowverse

• The Cutting Edge;
  • After Laurel is sent back in time from the moment of her death to about a year before Oliver's return, she tries to "convince" Thea to go clean by showing the girl's picture to all her usual clubs, informing the bartenders that Thea's a minor so they won't serve her anything. This leads to Thea becoming so desperate for a fix that she tries to hit up a sleazy dealer located in the Glades, only to nearly get kidnapped by him. Thankfully, Laurel (in her vigilante identity) is nearby and manages to save her, and the whole experience causes Thea to finally take Laurel's words to heart and go clean.
  • Later on, as a result of Laurel trying to convince the Restons to pursue legal means of getting their money after their dismissal, Thea is briefly taken hostage, Kyle Reston is killed, and Moira simultaneously orders Laurel to stay away and refuses to give anyone compensation for the dismissal as she feels that she would just be encouraging criminal behavior. On a more minor note, Laurel forgiving Samantha for her brief fling with Oliver basically leaves Samantha feeling as though she has "permission" to move on with her life and start dating again, giving her another reason to limit Oliver's contact with William.
  • Ted feels that this applies when he learns about the Tournament of Skulls, a fighting contest between various low-level criminals; since the vigilantes have been clearing the streets of most of the people who'd normally take part in such fights, the organizers are turning their attention to the clients of the Wildcat Gym.
  • Laurel will likely feel that this applies to her when she learns that Felicity has been fired from Queen Consolidated and joined her father as a criminal hacktivist rather than becoming Team Arrow's tech support.
• In Wrong Road to the Right Place, Laurel's attempt to find out who is behind the List led to Moira being forced to agree to having a contract put on Laurel's life in the belief that this would draw attention away from her own children.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

• Absolute Trust: Two factors lead to the fall of Ba Sing Se still happening, both ultimately being Alec's fault. First, the fact that Alec publicly subverted four Fire Nationals, including the Crown Prince and the Dragon of the West, inspires Long Feng to contact Fire Lord Ozai to regain control of the city. Second, way back at the Northern Air Temple, Alec forgot that the Fire Nation found the wreckage of the Mechanist's prototype war balloon and used it to create airships; Ozai includes a schematic with his response to Long Feng, which causes the latter to abandon his plans of double-crossing the former.
• The Northern Water Tribe in Reluctant Hero outright abducts the new Avatar when he's found on a Fire Nation ship, forces him to assimilate while he's obviously struggling with his status and the expectations coming with it, and considers to wipe his memory clean in order to make him a better student dedicated to save the world. The teen ends up freaking out and running away.
• "Lee" and Smellerbee force Jet into therapy in The Stalking Zuko Series in hopes of curing his obsession with "Lee". Getting therapy ends up helping Jet realize that "Lee" is probably not a firebender...But his uncle Mushi is since Mushi is constantly making gallons of tea without firewood and goes naked in their poorly insulated apartment in the middle of early spring.

BattleTech

• Riding the Dragon has Cecilia Kurita oppose her brother's coup only to leave herself in the position where she has no choice to claim the throne she never wanted in the first place, since anyone else who took the throne would have to kill her as a rival.

Bleach

• In A Boy and His Dog, Komamaru stop Uryu from the using the Hollow Bait by biting his leg, with Kon catching it when he lets go. However, after Ichigo gives a speech of how while he's not afraid to take on the Quincy's challenge, he won't do it in Karakura Town where it'll put his sisters in danger, Kon then claps in applause... while still holding the Hollow Bait.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

• Chosen To Destroy, written as a Take That! at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, which has the First Evil show up after the Season 7 Buffy finale, basically to gloat over how it's going to open all the world's Hellmouths and kill all the Slayers in the world, and to rub it in that it's all Buffy's fault - while some of it was the First's manipulations, it makes it very clear that the main reason it's going to win now is because of Buffy's ego and stupidity (and Angel's to a lesser extent).
• A Letter to Riley features Buffy telling Wesley, Cordy and Gunn that they almost let Angel destroy himself during Darla's return without ever considering that the reason for his obsession with Darla was that he was under a spell making him excessively fixated on her. As Buffy points out, Giles worked out that Angel was under a spell after talking with him for a few minutes when he hasn't even seen Angel for over a year, and yet Angel's own team never realised that was even a possibility until after Darla has been killed by Buffy and Angel.
• In Taaroko's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy has a moment of panic when she convinces herself that the army of undead Slayers is a side-effect of the spell that activated all living Potential Slayers, but Giles and Willow convince her that’s impossible due to the nature of the magic used being too pure to have such a terrible consequence.
  • A more serious example occurs in Season 9; after the gang interrupted a ritual intended to summon an Old One, they only learn later on that they interrupted the ritual at a point after it would wake the Old One but before the casters could identify which Old One should be awoken, with the result that every Old One trapped in the Deeper Well is unleashed on the world.
• Willow in Xendra reveals that the Watcher's Council is bound by a magical contract. One of the penalty clauses of said contract kills all descendants of the party that breaks it which, as Quentin Travers points out, would cover somewhere around 80% of Western Europe and 50% each of Eastern Europe and North America. Only the fact Willow is considered a third party keeps her from being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions, including potentially wiping out the Slayer line forever.
• Wesley's Mulligan: Wesley killing Professor Seidel (so Fred won't want to do so later on, also so Seidel can't tell anyone Wesley stole his notes, and to prevent Seidel from killing more of his students), and the Mayor and Finch (so they can't corrupt Faith and the Mayor won't kill several seniors on graduation day) does solve a lot of problems without changing history too much, and they all have done a lot to deserve it. However, killing them with the same gun causes a ballistics hit that makes Wolfram & Hart snoop around Sunnydale and threatens to change the timeline in serious ways.

Calvin and Hobbes

• Examples with the Calvinverse:
  • In Chapter 7 of Calvin and Hobbes II: Lost at Sea, Calvin destroys the radio on the ship - their only means of contact with the outside world.
  • In Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, Hobbes and the MTM try to close a hole in reality, and two of their attempts end up making it larger.

Castle

• In Flashforward opens with Kate Beckett (towards the end of Season Four) finding a time portal that lets her switch places with her past self early-Season One, and she immediately decides to use this opportunity to find the evidence that will identify her mother’s killer based on her future knowledge. However, her impulsive act results in her being killed in the past (which also erases her past self in the future), creating a timeline where America and China are on the brink of war after the events of "Linchpin" unfolded differently in the absence of Castle and Beckett (to say nothing of Bracken making a presidential campaign out of the resulting fear), requiring another time-traveller to recruit the Castle of the new timeline to go back and help prevent Beckett’s death.

Charmed (1998)

• In Tempus Fugit, Phoebe is forced to switch powers with Cole so that she can rescue him and Leo from the Underworld (the other two are too injured to use their own abilities). When she doesn't return Cole's powers straight away as Cole is still recovering, their demonic influence nearly drive her to kill Paige as her warped mind causes her to perceive Paige as ‘replacing’ her.
• In The Warren Curse, the Charmed Ones discover that their bad luck in love is the result of a curse on Melinda Warren and her descendants, and go back in time to prevent the curse from ever being cast in the first place. However, when they return to the present, Piper and Phoebe discover that while Patty is still married to Victor because the curse never existed, Piper is married to Dan rather than Leo, Phoebe is married to a still-living Cole, and not only did Paige never exist, but her equivalent counterpart, Patsy, died in a car crash as a teenager. Most significantly, the Power of Three was lost when Prue was killed, leaving her daughter Drea, and the Book of Shadows was subsequently stolen by the Source, leaving the Halliwells unable to save further innocents and driving the world further into darkness as the demons spread without the Power of Three to keep them contained.

Danganronpa

• While Naegi has plenty of these in And Again, Monobear explicitly points out one to him near the end: his decision to send the strongest students off to supervise Mukuro retrieving her arsenal from her room.
  Monobear: What a great idea! Send all the strongest of you bastards away! Defend everyone else with the power to sing and have rich parents! What was your talent again, Naegi-kun: Super High-school Level Strategist?
• Blackened Skies: While investigating the first murder, Kaede uncovers crucial evidence that helps narrow down the list of suspects considerably... but opts to withhold that information from the others, hoping to lure the culprit into a false sense of security and blindside them with it. She also attempts to conceal from everyone an unpleasant altercation that occurred between her and Oowada Mondo that night, as she wants to avoid potentially implicating them. Her attempts to manipulate the trial and control the flow of information wind up complicating the proceedings to the point that Kirumi and Tsumugi are falsely suspected, the proceedings run so long that they nearly run down the clock, and the latter only barely avoids getting framed. Kaede's standing amongst the others naturally takes a massive blow when they learn what she's done, and Celeste claims that they're not so different, as both are willing to lie and manipulate in order to get what they want.
• Fractured Fates: In Chapter 3, Asuna Izumi is undergoing a Sanity Slippage due to all the trauma she experienced during Chapter 2's Deadly Life. In Part 2, Hana encounters her in the courtyard, and takes the opportunity to speak with her in an attempt to console her and hopefully bring her back to her senses. However, Hana inadvertently says something insensitive that sends Asuna into a rage, and she ends up worsening Asuna's mental state as a result.
• In Graduate Meeting of Mutual Killing, Tomoe Chiba, ex-SHSL Strategist, was really focused on helping and getting people to help to escape. In her efforts, she gave Matsukaze a signal interceptor for him to use as he wanted. The interceptor would later cause internal bleeding that kickstarted Matsukaze's death.] Another action she did was dismantling a Monobear. While it wasn't explicitly said, it's possible that [[spoiler:the screwdriver that ended Matsukaze's life was left there by Chiba after being done with the dismantling.
• In System Restore, in an effort to prevent any murders caused by Monobear's "motive" in the second chapter, the Twilight Syndrome video game that he dares the cast to play, the group comes up with the idea of having people guard the game console. Unfortunately, one combination of guards Hinata comes up with is Pekoyama and Kuzuryuu. Unbeknownst to Hinata, Pekoyama has been raised to view herself as Kuzuryuu's "tool", and as such, the former lets the latter play the game, leading to the murder of Pekoyama, by someone hoping to preemptively stop her from killing anyone else.

Danny Phantom

• In Souls Follow After, Maddie and Jack desperately recruit Vlad's help in figuring out what's causing Danny's deterioration in Minds Follow. Vlad figures it out, but keeps the information to himself, only sharing it with Maddie after the fact: becoming a full ghost meant he was slowly succumbing to his deepest obsession: guarding the ghost portal. Vlad ensured he wouldn't meet the same fate by discarding his own obsession of creating the 'perfect' family with Maddie. He cheerfully thanks her for providing this insight, much to her horror.

The DCU

• Daughter of Fire and Steel: Overwhelmed by Krypton's destruction, the guard of the prison ship carrying Zod and his followers decides to release them so they suffer a slow death by starvation while he takes his own life. Instead of fighting among themselves, the prisoners use their smarts to engineer the Phantom Drive into a hyperdrive to scavenge for supplies and survive.
• In Shazam! fanfiction Here There Be Monsters, the Squadron of Justice have just arrived in Venus when Bulletman is attacked by a frog-like monster. Bulletman flies skywards followed by his wife to get rid of the amphibian, with the unfortunate consequence of alerting the Monster Society of the Squadron's presence.

Death Note

• In the Cyberpunk AU Alternative Gods, L attempts to intimidate Light into working for him by blowing up a building. This does not have the desired effect - by the time L contacts him again Light has drawn up a list of criminals he wants L to punish for him.
• In the Grand Finale of Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv) the Shinigami suggest they were going to kill L for knowing too much but Light beat them to it. Oh and Light was going to kill Matsuda and stop the Shinigami invasion that would leave the Earth as a giant craphole but Matsuda shoots him up before he can.
• In Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami, the girl from the bus kills Dark and gets hailed as a hero for doing so, but he goes to the Shinigami world after dying, kills Blud and becomes king of the Shinigami. He even thanks her for killing him and enabling his ascent.
• This is the whole premise of the Death Note post-canon fic The Second Coming.
• In the AU Seigikan Light Forgot the Call (and his hobby of killing people) when he got Easy Amnesia from an accident but later when Light and L have an argument L bashes Light's head against a bathroom sink which causes Light to regain his memories.
• Shadow Of The Valley suggests bad things happen after the only force that is maintaining order in the world is killed...

Demon King Daimao

• In Keena & the Defendants of Constan Magic Academy, main villain Eiko tells Lily that her and Michie can't end up together due to Lily kissing Akuto before (which happened in the actual Demon King Daimao anime, and Lily only kissed him as a "reward"), as it automatically causes her to be engaged to him due to him being the Demon King. Cue short Tearjerker and Sanity Slippage.

Doctor Who

• Happens quite often in the fancomics on Rich's ComixBlog.
  • In The 10 Doctors, the entire reason the Time Lords lost the Time War is that the Valeyard — who the Time Lords created in the first place — killed Damon before he could give the Daleks' attack strategies to the Eighth Doctor. If this hadn't happened, the war would have been much less destructive, the Time Lords and Gallifrey would still be around, and the events of The End of Time would never have happened. Essentially, it's the Time Lords' own fault they got into the Time War, which isn't too surprising.
  • Later, the Tenth Doctor finds the relevant data spool. He reluctantly decides against giving it to the Eighth Doctor, in order to keep history on track.
  • In Outrage, the Sixth Doctor reveals Jem's secret identity to Rio Pacheco. Rio doesn't take it well.
  • In Seeds of Destruction, the Fifth Doctor lands on a lush garden planet, ignoring Peri's request of Pasadena, California. Said planet turns out to be the deadly planet Kryn.
  • In A Time To Kill, the Tenth Doctor completely shatters James Bond's cover, and the spy is injured in the ensuing fracas.

Dragon Ball

• In Dragon Ball Z Abridged: The History of Trunks the Androids eventually get bored with killing humanity. 17 decides he's going to stop killing and become a park ranger instead... right before Gohan kicks him through a building. A pissed 17 resolves to kill every human in response, and then he'll "range the shit out of that park."
• Real Men Don't Make Sandwiches: The whole reason Krillin is staying at Capsule Corp in the first place and winds up making his deal with Vegeta is because Goku kept breaking the water main at Kame House. Why? Because after Trunks' warning about the Androids, Goku has started worrying that his best friend might get killed in the fight, and has been trying to convince him to move closer so he can protect him better. His well-meaning but overbearing efforts have only inflamed Krillin's inferiority complex, and when he realized that Goku was willing to sabotage Kame House in order to force the issue, responded by running away, repressing his ki so that nobody can sense where he is. Which, in turn, has only made matters worse as nobody other than Vegeta knows where he is and are naturally worrying about what might have happened to him.
• In What If Goku Married Bulma?, Goku and Vegeta are upset by how they had to use the Mafuba to defeat Buu rather than triumphing in direct hand-to-hand combat. The two decide to stage a rematch inside the Room of Spirit and Time, releasing him from the bottle he was sealed into and unintentionally giving him a chance to escape. Bulma reads them both the riot act upon learning what happened, as they put the whole universe at risk for the sake of satisfying their wounded pride.
• What If Krillin Became a Saiyan?: When Raditz demands to know how Krillin became a Saiyan, he explains to him about the Dragon Balls, unaware that Raditz's scouter is allowing Vegeta and Nappa to listen in. As a result, the pair decide to come to Earth themselves in order to deal with the 'fake Saiyan' personally, on top of wanting to make wishes of their own.

Fate/Grand Order

• In San Peftastéri, a prequel fic to the Atlantis Lostbelt chapter, Sir Kay uses a leyline to summon his sister King Artoria in a final fight against Lostbelt Odysseus. While they both destroyed a good amount of the Atlantis fleet, they fail to kill Odysseus, and he gets inspired by Kay's action to summon his own servant to use as an asset while dismantling the last remaining leyline. Of course, to anyone who played the game, this is Subverted, as the Servant that Odysseus summoned as a Manchurian Agent against Chaldea ended up killing him in the end.

Final Fantasy

• In Memento Vivere, a Final Fantasy X fanfiction, Jecht forces the party to flee the battle after he tosses his sword at the Espada, thereby losing the weapon. He does it again when he attacks the Moonflow Shoopuf.
• Us and Them: Vincent searches for Sephiroth for seven years, finally tracking him and his adoptive family down to Corel. However, unbeknownst to him, Hojo was tracking Vincent's moves, leading the Shinra to find and capture Professor Gast and Ifalna. Sephiroth is furious when Hojo taunts Vincent for leading him straight to the family.

Harry Potter

• In A Family's Assistance Dumbledore confronts four Death Eaters using the gas main to send a ball of magic-charged gas at 4 Privet Drive and attempts to divert the gas, despite Harry no longer living there. Unfortunately, the mixing of it and his own magic creates a much bigger explosion which destroys most of three streets and kills 92 people.
• In Irreversible Destiny Harry's mother had a prophecy claiming that she should repay Merlin's debt to his mentor Blaze by having a child with Blaze's last remaining descendant. Unfortunately, said descendant happens to be Snape, who, as an Inner Circle member, was subjected to potions and spells intended to create a small army of powerful Death Eater offspring utterly loyal to Voldemort. It also doesn't really help that as a descendant of Merlin on his mother's side, incubus blood was added to the mix.
• In the backstory of Meant to Rule this World, Dumbledore used an illusion to make Tom Riddle believe he set the boy's things on fire in an attempt to teach him stealing was wrong. Instead, he solidified Tom's beliefs that Might Makes Right.
• In New Blood (artemisgirl), Lupin ignores Hermione's warnings about making students publicly confront the Boggart in 3rd year. Not only do we witness 3 examples of child abuse, including a pedophile, but one student, Hermione, collapses screaming at her Boggart. The Fallout of Hermione's fear, a newspaper on London going up in a mushroom cloud, sends shock-waves through the school resulting in the highest Anti-Muggle sentiment in living memory.
  • Hermione accidentally overpowers a Summon Magic ritual resulting in a much stronger type of Air Elemental than intended. Luckily Luna is able to bargain with it rather than be possessed.
• The Power of Seven: This is the best way to sum up Ron's mistake in chapter 26; he reveals to Lavender that Harry is having sex with Ginny, Hermione, Luna and Demelza because he believes that Lavender is dumping him for Harry, when in reality she dumped him for Seamus and had no idea about Harry's sexual activities before Ron brought it up, thus leaving that information to be exposed to the rest of the school.
• In The World as We Knew It, Harry, Remus and Snape create a world where Voldemort never fell out of an idle wish (unwittingly invoking an ancient magic that grants a wish if it's independently made by three different people at the same time), and their attempts to defeat this world's Voldemort lead to the decimation of what's left of the Order of the Phoenix, including the still-living Lily and James.

Hilda

• Hilda and the howling woods: Hilda herself is guilty of this twice in the same night. First, upon reaching her Rage Breaking Point, she tears off the silver bell necklace the Bellkeeper gave Hilda as a gift which was the only thing preventing her from turning into a werewolf, which she does seconds later and attacks her friends. Later that same night, while wolfed out, Hilda gets into a fight with the Two-Headed Troll and, trying to escape it through The Stone Forest, accidentally unleashes The Yule Cat, who plans to kidnap and/or kill every child in Trolberg who wasn't given new clothes.

Invader Zim

• The New Adventures of Invader Zim:
  • Dib accidentally blowing up Norlock's castle leads to the vampire allying with Zim.
  • Viera's attempt to pull a Break the Haughty on Gaz just makes the other girl actively and personally despise her (rather than just a general dislike).
• Top of the Line (Editor-Bug): For a given definition of "hero", Zim ends up making the plot of The Rematch needlessly more complicated when he spitefully destroys the remote Tak uses to control her space station, meaning there's now no way to open the hanger doors, leaving everyone stranded onboard. Then he and Tenn turn the station's central computer back on in search of a way to open them, inadvertently awakening Space Case, who tries to kill all the Irkens.

Lyrical Nanoha

• Game Theory has quite a few examples. The two most notable are Chrono assuming that Nanoha was working with Fate and attacking her in her home, which led to her actually deciding to help Fate fight the TSAB, and Nanoha's consequent decision to help Precia revive Alicia.

Marvel Cinematic Universe

• In What if… Wanda Cast the No Way Home Spell, various heroes unwittingly make things worse after Wanda casts the spell to erase memory of Peter's identity instead of Strange;
  • When SWORD come to the Sanctum to confront Wanda, Wong and Peter about their recent meetings, Doctor Strange is able to delay them, but when he subsequently confronts Wong and Wanda about the Darkhold and Wanda's spell, he distracts them long enough for the Goblin and the Darkhold to get the upper hand.
  • When fighting the Goblin, Wanda deflects one of his pumpkin bombs outside of Happy's apartment so that it blows up near the Damage Control helicopter watching the events. While the bomb doesn't kill anyone, the explosion causes enough damage to give Damage Control "permission" to try and arrest Wanda and Peter, allowing the Goblin to kill May.
  • After May's death, Peter lashes out at Wanda in a moment of rage, driving her away and leading to her succumbing to the Darkhold once again even as Peter regrets his words the moment he spoke.
• In Z To A, Tony nearly makes things worse in the final battle when he tries to destroy the Infinity Stones to stop Thanos getting them. As a result, the energy of the stones is dispersed and channeled into Peter Parker- their 'chosen protector'- while the attack prompts Wanda to tap into her full potential as the Scarlet Witch to defend Peter while he absorbs the power of the Stones to use them against Thanos.

Miraculous Ladybug

• BURN THE WITCH:
  • Adrien convinced Marinette to stop trying to expose Lila's true nature to their classmates, reasoning that her lies would catch up to her eventually. What he failed to consider is that this would leave her free to continue until the truth came out, and the amount of damage she could do in the meantime.
  • Not only did Rose donate a lot of her own money to Lila's nonexistent charity, she convinced others to donate as well. Everyone who trusted her word got burned, including Prince Ali, who is understandably furious when he learns the truth and breaks off their friendship.
• Cheshire:
  • It could to be applied to the original Order of the Guardians as a whole, as it is implied that the knowledge of the Wish was what made the first Black Cat Holder steal Plagg's Miraculous.
  • Master Fu's sudden attack on Cheshire allows her to get Trixx.
  • Misterbug and Pegasus attacking Cheshire after she helped them to defeat Newscaster turned the public opinion against them.
  • Max's akumatization gives Cheshire the opportunity to collect the Horse Miraculous.
  • Marinette's incomplete translation of the Grimoire would allow Hawkmoth to fix the Peacock Pin.
• Feralnette AU:
  • A key part of the reason Marinette Stopped Caring about trying to balance her civilian and superheroine lives and started focusing primarily on the latter while neglecting the former is because she has been constantly blamed for anything and everything that goes wrong, even circumstances that were entirely out of her control. She internalized this blame to the point where she decided to take herself out of the equation as much as possible as 'Marinette'.
    • Bunnyx is especially responsible for this, as she arrogantly assumes her home timeline is the 'correct' one and that all other timelines must be 'fixed' to follow it. This led her not only to traumatize Marinette by making her fix the Bad Future of Chat Blanc while blaming her for its events but leaping in to 'fix' divergences that didn't need to be fixed, pushing Marinette until she finally broke.
  • Enough Rope focuses on Alya posting Lila's 'exclusive scoop' that Chat Noir was planning to confess his feelings to Ladybug at an upcoming fair. This attracts plenty of would-be gawkers to the event, along with making it a prime target for Hawkmoth. Her thoughtlessly endangering everyone, along with the revelation that she knows about Lila's so-called 'lying disease' and still treats her as a trusted source, spurs Ladybug to spell out how irresponsible she's being and blacklist the Ladyblog.
• The Karma of Lies:
  • Played With when Lila speculates that Marinette's efforts to be her friends' 'everyday Ladybug' may have made them more susceptible to believing her lies. While Marinette has worked incredibly hard to support her classmates and help them achieve their dreams, none of them fully appreciate how much she's done for them; instead, they presume that they're lucky enough to have opportunities fall into their laps. Lila exploits this by claiming to have connections to various big names, leading them to believe she'll help them out... much like how Marinette has helped them so much.
  • Adrien ultimately decides that preserving his reputation is more important than going to help Ladybug out during a major battle involving several akuma. This results in a Near-Villain Victory, with Marinette, Luka, and Kagami being exposed as heroes while exposing Gabriel as Hawkmoth.
  • When Mayura attacks, Chat Noir charges in to face her alone, ignoring Ladybug's efforts to contact him. This leads to the Black Cat Ring falling into Mayura's hands. She also takes the opportunity to address the Achilles' Heel Chat Noir exposed to her by taking her first sentimonster down, creating new ones that lack that weakness.
• Marinette Dupain-Cheng's Spite Playlist: Remix:
  • Adrien agrees to help Chloé expose Lila as a liar but worries that her plan won't work out. Rather than sharing his concerns, however, he quietly goes along with it, then balks and backs down while she's putting it into action, leaving Chloé hanging and letting their classmates mock and belittle her. Lila then uses this as leverage to claim that Marinette worked with Chloé to set her up, despite Marinette having transferred to another school. Alya latches onto the idea that her former bestie was a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, making it significantly harder for those trying to expose Lila to pierce through her deceptions.
  • Ladybug's decision to entrust Chloé with the Bee Comb again further solidifies Alya's belief that Ladybug isn't the great heroine she thought she was.
  • Played With after the Ladyblogger akuma is taken down. In the aftermath, Tigress makes a snarky comment about how Alya's still denying what's right in front of her. Alya whirls around and declares that the fact Ladybug chose someone like them to be a hero is just proof of how far she's fallen. After she stalks off, Tigress apologizes but Ladybug reassures them that Alya's mind was already made up.
• The One to Make It Stay:
  • Alya causes a considerable amount of trouble when she films one of Chat Noir's Love Confessions, edits the footage to make it appear that Ladybug reciprocated, and posts the results on her blog. With this one move, she effectively tanks the trust Ladybug had placed in her, encourages the already entitled Chat Noir to step up his efforts, damages her readers' faith in her, and provides Hawkmoth with valuable insight into the heroes' dynamic.
  • Alya causes further breakage among her readership with how she handles the fallout. When commenters attempt to point out how the footage was obviously cut up and edited, she deletes their remarks. Naturally, this doesn't cause the criticism to just go away, only serving to throw fuel onto the fire.
  • Chat's refusal to take 'No' for an answer, combined with his jealousy of Viperion and blaming him, Ladybug and the other heroes for all the tension his behavior is causing, ultimately culminates in Hawkmoth successfully exploiting his crush to steal the Black Cat Miraculous. This means that Plagg ends up in the enemy's hands, Adrien loses his Secret Identity and all that came with it, and Master Fu is forced to leave Paris for safety's sake.
• Weight Off Your Shoulder:
  • As in "Gang of Secrets", Alya and her Girl Posse barge into Marinette's room without permission and demand that she spill all her secrets, claiming that "Friends don't hide things from each other!" This inadvertently convinces Marinette that she should give up her status as Guardian and pass her Earrings to somebody else, resulting in her losing her memories of her time as Ladybug and of the Miracle Box.
  • Eventually, it's revealed that Future!Alix also factored into this decision: she came back in time to convince Marinette to stick it out, but her utter Lack of Empathy for everyone's suffering and accidentally Saying Too Much only strengthened Marinette's resolve to see her plan through.
  • Played With in that Marinette's decision actually changes things for the better, bringing Shadow Moth's reign of terror to an early end. However, Future!Alix still regards this as a bad thing because this diverges from HER timeline, and is intent upon "fixing" everything regardless of how much pain it causes.

Modern Warfare

• In Modurn Warfare 3 The Dead Rise, Soap Soup throwing a knife into General Shepherd's eye triggers his demonic powers, enabling him to come back even more powerful than before.

My Hero Academia

• Apotheosis has this in spades, with many of their mistakes making it even easier for Izuku to make his points.
  • It's constantly pointed out that if All Might had treated Izuku with a little more tact, Izuku would've never become a supervillain.
  • The government puts pressure on U.A. to be harsher on their students to counteract the bad publicity they're getting from Izuku's antics. This leads to the expulsion of Ochako — which makes her susceptible to Izuku's manipulations.
  • Gee, Uwabami, Mt. Lady, Izuku has taken your Quirks and kicked you out of the hero system, but he's offered you a chance to earn your way back in. You don't want to take it, that's fine, completely understandable — but trying to slander him instead? You idiots! All you've accomplished is destroying any sympathy the public had for you and made him look justified in his actions!
  • Several of Class 1-A manage to entrap Midoriya and hold him down while trying to remove the Infinity Gauntlet. And all it takes is Midoriya to needle Bakugou, causing the explosive user to completely ruin the plan, allowing Midoriya to escape, beat them all down, and claim the Soul Stone.
  • Endeavor's ruthless ambition to surpass All Might and to raise a child who would become the number one hero directly leads to him getting depowered, kicked out of the hero system, and publicly ostracized, all while driving two of his children, both of whom had the potential to become powerful heroes, to villainy.
• The "Failed Foresight" AU effectively runs on this. Set in a world where All Might died after his fateful match with AFO, passing on his Quirk to Sir Nighteye, the series explores how Nighteye keeps making terrible, short-sighted decisions. For instance, he decides that Mirio should have One For All... but doesn't bother asking Mirio or getting his opinion first, forcing the Quirk onto him without his would-be protege's permission. Not only does this understandably piss Mirio off, it also messes with his efforts to master Permutation.
• Mean Rabbit: Aizawa singlehandedly sabotages all of Class 1-A when he blatantly rigs the Quirk Assessment Test against Midoriya, ignoring his actual performance in favor of expelling him simply because he's Quirkless. When Midoriya protests the results, he has him prove himself against the five lowest-performing students, then punishes them for Izuku's success. This creates massive rifts among his students, the majority of whom blame Midoriya for standing up for himself, to the point where several of them seriously consider leaving a concussed Midoriya to die during the League's assault on the USJ.
• Played interestingly in The Scorpion Jar. All Might's well-meaning advice to Izuku causes him to have an epiphany: if somebody like him can't become a hero just because he's Quirkless, then what about all the others who aren't qualified because of their poor characters? This spurs him to plot the downfall of Aldera Middle School and the worst of his bullies by exposing all their wrongdoings to the world. After seeing the results, Toshinori is stricken with guilt and wishes to make amends, while Nedzu is thrilled to see a new chessmaster in the making and wants to secure Izuku as an apprentice.
• Think Before You Speak: After being forbidden from expelling anyone in his latest class, Aizawa attempts to game the system by blaming Izuku for Tenya being injured during their first training exercise together. His attempt to get Izuku Convicted by Public Opinion and forced out of the Hero Course backfires; not only does it land both him and Tensei in hot water, it provides the HSPC with the perfect excuse to start probing into U.A. While this is partially a sincere attempt to investigate the matter, the HSPC also wants to get its hooks deeper into the school and its students.
  • Bakugou also ends up on the LOV radar far earlier than canon due to Aizawa's stunt.
  • When musing over the disaster that is Aizawa's actions, HPSC President Saito muses to herself that had Aizawa not tried to force Izuku out of heroics using Tensei via Malicious Slander, they would've have to leave UA alone to ensure that Bakugou's inevitable failure was firmly chained around the school's neck.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

• Anthropology: If Lyra didn't want to be a human so badly, Discord would have never found Earth in the first place. Naturally, he takes great pleasure in pointing this out to her.
• In Chronicles of Harmony's End, Array conspires with Discord to overthrow Harmony (the only force keeping the two of them in line), believing he could destroy Discord himself. He was wrong.
• The Clockwork Consequence... Hoo boy! Let's just say that Twilight's Batman Gambit to escape from Nightmare Moon in the NightMare Moon timeline from The Cutie Re-mark Part 2 was not one of her better ideas. But, to be fair she had no idea just how far Nightmare would go to protect her rule.
• In The Conversion Bureau fanfic The Conversion Bureau: A Beacon of Hope the nationstate of New Athens was created when Celestia tried to convince Socrates the Wise to teach about the magic of friendship. That caused him to have a Freak Out, smash his horn against a wall removing his magic permanently and leave Equestria. Then the other newfoals started following him and....
• A Diplomatic Visit: In the seventh chapter of the fourth story, The Diplomat's Life, Twilight and co. perform a spell to bring back the Pillars of Equestria... but also release the Pony of Shadows, who promptly heads off to free his people from their own prison. (Admittedly, she was prepared for his return, but the spell she intended to stop him turned out to be not strong enough.)
• Pulled on the readers in Dungeon Master Bonbon. When Lyra temporarily takes over the blog, they spam her with asks saying how Bonbon loves her, causing her to break up with Bonbon out of fear she's leading her on.
• In The Enchanted Kingdom, Twilight, Rarity, and Pinkie come up with a plan to free Princess Luna - by getting all the foals in Hollow Shades to believe in her strongly enough to overcome the chaos magic imprisoning her. It completely backfires; the foals start losing their belief and having nightmares, and the magic transforms Luna into Nightmare Moon.
• Fall of Starfleet, Rebirth of Friendship: Thanks to Starfleet's tendency to send anyone for crimes such as thinking Celesto is wrong to far-off prison planets, Dark Conquest has a huge army who's all too willing to follow him if it means killing Unicornicopians.
• Inner Demons: If Celestia had told Twilight about the prophecy sooner, or broken the news to her differently, it's possible that perhaps Twilight's transformation into the Queen of Darkness could have been slowed or altogether prevented. At the very least, Twilight wouldn't have freaked out and turned Celestia to stone in a fit of anger at the revelation.
  • Twilight actually pulls this on herself. After the above incident, she convinces her friends to lock her up in the library basement while Rarity searches for a way to stop her descent into darkness and free Celestia. Unfortunately, since Spike is busy helping Rarity and Twilight's all alone, there's no one to wake her up from her nightmares, wherein the Queen persona consumes her completely.
  • A little later on, Sweetie Belle is on the verge of a Heel Realization, when Rarity's unfortunate wording during a conversation hits an emotional trigger Queen!Twilight had previously planted, causing Sweetie Belle to fully embrace her Face–Heel Turn and reject Rarity as her sister.
  • Apple Bloom ends up accidentally killing Trixie, whose death causes Queen!Twilight to suffer a Villainous Breakdown that results in her transforming into an Alicorn.
• Loved and Lost: Right after Twilight has stopped the Changeling invasion by shrinking the Changelings, Prince Jewelius blames all the other heroes for the invasion, telling the wedding guests and royal guards half-truths about the canon mistakes Princess Celestia, Shining Armor and Twilight's friends made before the invasion. Even Celestia is taken aback by her previously well-mannered nephew's hostility, so aside from nervous requests for him to calm himself, she doesn't try to stop him. She tries to claim that everything would have been resolved differently if Twilight had acted calmly and gathered evidence against the disguised Queen Chrysalis at the wedding rehearsal, but Jewelius overrules this argument by bringing up Celestia's own decision not to postpone the wedding and fully focus on the lingering threat of unknown attackers. When he gives everypony in Canterlot a New Era Speech in which he promises to rectify the collateral damages of the invasion, Celestia tells the panicked heroes to run. This majorly backfires because the heroes' unsuccessful escape attempt has now given Jewelius' slander about them serious credibility. So the guards imprison them on his orders, about everypony in Canterlot starts to despise them, and Jewelius makes himself Equestria's respected king.
  • On a broader scale, the story as a whole can be summed up as what would happen if Twilight's friends, brother, and mentor trusting Chrysalis over her resulted in this trope. The Changeling invasion goes off without a hitch, Jewelius exploits of the resulting fallout, the heroes' own panicked response to his accusations results in their reputations being ruined, and Jewelius' manipulations are easier to pull off because he already has grounds for a justifiable case against them. This leaves everypony so disappointed and angry with them that they can't testify to their side of the story, which makes repairing their social standing even more of an uphill battle. It also ensures that their attempts to warn Twilight and Canterlot's citizens of Jewelius' true nature are doomed to fail - even Applejack's attempt to invoke the Element of Honesty to aid in this respect falls flat because she has a fresh reputation of being a traitor and a fair-weather friend, as well as the fact that everypony in Canterlot has stopped giving value to the Elements of Harmony.
• In The Lunar Guardsman, it's what a few ponies in Baltimare try to invoke after the death of Charybdis and the damage it caused in Horseshoe Bay. Judging by the news articles, and the proclamations of support and thankful letters sent to Luna however, it didn't quite take.
• The Meaning of Harmony: Princess Celestia's desire to activate the Forges and bring true Harmony to Equestria nearly ended up destroying the entire world instead.
• In A Minor Variation, Rarity sends the CMC to deliberately provoke a disharmonious event near the statue of Discord to see if he was showing signs of breaking loose. Oops.
• There are no words to describe Celestia's epic screw-up in Past Sins. Suffice it to say that if she had just held back, almost none of the really bad things would have happened.
  • Because Twilight didn't stop Celestia, Nyx becomes convinced she was in on it.
• The Ponies of Olympus series:
  • Ditzy Don't: Twilight's attempt to help Ditzy by implanting magical copies of the Mane Six's personalities in her head first causes her to outclass Rainbow Dash to the point of her public humiliation, then all the group's negative aspects (Fluttershy's sudden rage, Pinkie's personalities, Twilight's obsessiveness, etc) take over, making her go crazy and chase after Rainbow Dash to force her to let her take care of her.
  • Rolling in Beaches: Wavedancer taking the Rainbow Pearl out of curiosity (and then keeping it to get close to Spike), leads to it being stolen by the Scaly Back River dragons, who in turn break it and accidentally release the Rainbow of Darkness.
  • The flashback at the beginning of Atlas Strongest Tournament incorporates the story of Tithonus, with Celestia as the guilty party.
  • When Rarity saw Ran Biao and Razorwing together, she ran away at the perceived betrayal, which led to Razorwing raping Ran. This led to the breakup of their friendship.
• The Pony POV Series:
  • Fluttercruel honestly just wanted to teach Fluttershy something important for her own good, to let her learn the cruel part of nature, but it ends up corrupting her for real as opposed to being just brainwashed by Discord. Fluttercruel is absolutely horrified realizing this.
    • She also gets Fluttershy, and herself, drunk, which Word of God admits may have had something to do with their behavior following and made Fluttershy more vulnerable to the darkness than she otherwise would be.
  • While it's Loose Canon, it's implied that the Mane Cast are, unknowingly, being manipulated into commanding Princess Gaia's army via a boardgame they're playing with Gaia herself. If this is believed, Rainbow Dash unwittingly guides Gaia's army into "Gaiafying" Gilda.
    • If this is true, it is quite possible that Trixie and Twilight Sparkle are unwittingly providing a front for Princess Gaia to brainwash their own mothers into being her knights.
  • In the aftermath of a battle, your friend-suddenly-turned-enemy lays indefinitely helpless before your group. To help console each other on this tragedy and related circumstances, one mentions that it is not too late to restore or redeem this friend. If you think that taking matters into your own hooves and executing your petrified former friend, Discord, by pulverization is not a logical next step, you are smarter than Galaxia, whose deed costs her life, sets the stage for a 1000 years of tyranny, and worst of all, could have been easily avoided.
  • During the battle between the Dark World!Elements of Harmony and Discord's remaining minions, Spike has to choose between helping Rarity and Twilight, both of whom got separated from the main group while fighting Fluttercruel and Angry Pie (respectfully). He figures Rarity will need more help and goes after her; in fact, not only has Rarity by this point killed Fluttercruel, but Twilight ends up overpowered by Angry Pie, who rips out her Element and leaves her for dead.
• The eponymous Villain Protagonist in The Rise of Darth Vulcan's main occupation-aside from looting ponies- is calling out the ponies for their dumb actions in canon. In-universe, many actions of the Mane 6 and others make the situation with him a lot worse:
  • Twilight tried to get rid of the Alicorn Amulet by dumping it in a void, which allowed it to reach Ted, and gave him the power to become Equestria's next villain.
  • Rainbow Dash attacked Darth Vulcan immediately when he entered Ponyville because of his hostile nature and evil-looking armor.
  • The Mane 6 use the Elements of Harmony on him, thinking he was brainwashed by the Amulet. Not only was he not brainwashed, he believes the Mane 6 were trying to brainwash him. In their defense, the Mane 6 didn't realize the true effects of the power of Harmony, something Luna also claims are not pleasant.
  • Filthy Rich attempted to sell Vulcan out to the authorities and take his bits anyways. This resulted in Diamond Tiara being kidnapped and Ponyville being looted. He was very traumatized by these events.
  • Luna tried to interrogate Vulcan by beating him up. Not only was she given a brutal Hannibal Lecture which drove a wedge between her and Celestia, she also exacerbated the trust issues of what was deduced to be an angry teenager. She is ashamed when she realizes this, but by then it was too late for her to make amends.
  • Twilight ignored his hatred of mind-influencing magic and brought mind-changing spells to his trial. It's no wonder he didn't stick around to help stop Canterlot Castle from falling into a lake.
  • Celestia allowed the ponies of Equestria to brainwash the thestrals into thinking that their need for blood was a mental disorder when it's about as much a disorder as the desire for water and force them to use a woefully inadequate alchemical substitute. As a result, fifteen thestrals have defected and joined Darth Vulcan. And when the Princess finds out, Celestia flat-out bans her from doing anything about it, destroying the last bit of the Princess's trust in Celestia. All this for no better reason than that the ponies of Equestria find the thestral's need for blood creepy.
    • Luna also evoked this trope when she created the Thestrals by using vampire bat DNA in the process, causing the need for blood, instead of a species of bat that ate something innocuous like fruit or nectar.
• Rites of Ascension:
  • Luna pulls this on Celestia after Shining Armor is fired from command of the Royal Guard by inducting him as the leader of her Night Guard, to allow him to secretly continue investigating the conspiracies. Celestia had seen the attack on Shining coming and had been grooming him as a populist voice in the courts, which was central to most of her near-future plans, but she didn't tell Luna because they always ended up butting heads over long-term strategy and she didn't tell Shining so he, and their enemies, would believe he was no longer a threat. Not only does Celestia's plan go up in smoke, but she worries that the relatively unsubtle Shining will be caught doing more than is strictly legal for the Night Guard, at which point Luna's crown and authority (and Celestia's own, if she steps in) would be pretty much bucked. Celestia's setup of all this also means that she played this trope on herself, but since Luna acknowledged Celestia might well have a plan but was tired of being left waiting in the dark, she really has no excuse.
  • Twilight thinks this of herself after her espionage mission triggers a war between Zebrica, Saddle Arabia, and Equestria. Considering things had been volatile for a while, and she stopped a cult leader from wiping out the whole Zebrican continent and triggering worldwide damage, no one else agrees.
• In Screwball Over, Twilight Sparkle and friends discover that their attempts to cure their friend and neighbor Button Stitch of her tendency to turn into her Toon Physics-powered alter-ego Screwball were all part of a plot by Discord to summon an endless swarm of mini-Screwball clones and swamp Equestria. Discord, having been turned back into stone at this point, has left a message mocking Twilight for falling right into his trap with her goody-goody ways. Twilight is only saved from a Heroic BSoD by the reassurances of her friends and the princesses that she shouldn't blame herself.
• In Secrets and Lies, Twilight tries to prevent Discord from escaping without alerting anypony who doesn't need to know what's going on, in order to avoid triggering mass panic. On top of this, she's keeping other secrets from her friends, and her attempts to fix everything without revealing them lead to terrible complications. Her biggest break, however, is when she determines the best way to help Fluttershy is to have her committed against her will, leading to her getting dragged away kicking and screaming and locked up in a madhouse.
• In A Stranger Among the Voices, Twilight and her friends have an offscreen incident early in the story that involved repelling a chimera and forcing it back into the Everfree Forest. At this point, the reader can guess this is the same chimera that attacked Dinky in the previous chapter, which wouldn't have happened if Twiilght's timing had been a bit later, as she notes to herself.
• During Octavia's fight with the minotaur in Stroll, she accidentally hits the knob to one of the burners on the stove, setting Sesame Seed's apartment on fire.

Naruto

• Androgyninja's A Drop of Poison has an especially dramatic example during the Konoha Crush. Shisui curtails the impact of Orochimaru's summons by keeping the giant snakes contained within a smaller area. Unfortunately, said smaller area is one of the civilian districts. As a direct result of his actions, Sakura's parents are crushed; Kin gleefully gloats about Konoha-nin were responsible for all the damage done to that area.
• Blackkat's Reverse has Kakashi forcefully ripping Naruto from his newfound uncle's arms and refusing to hear Kurama's plea to not separate them. It results in Kurama kicking his ass, abducting Naruto, and fleeing Konoha.
• A Case Study in the Sturdiness of the Rookie 9 has several examples:
  • Rather than working to address Naruto and Kiba's Hot-Blooded rowdiness, Asuma encourages Ino to get the boys under control by using her clan's Mind-Body Switch techniques to forcibly take control whenever they act up. This leads to both boys being terrified of their teammate, and convinced that she's mind-controlling Asuma as well, since they see that as the only logical explanation as to why he's not protecting them from her.
  • Kakashi gives his students a fake C-Rank mission to earn Genma's trust in order to set up a vicious backstabbing prank as revenge for stealing his dessert. Their takeaway from this is that it's perfectly fine to betray your allies in order to complete your assignment, leading to Chouji betraying Ino during the Chuunin Exams and creating a massive rift in the Rookie 9.
  • When Ino and Naruto investigate what happened to their teammate, Ino accidentally presses Kiba's Trauma Button; the sound of her voice makes him accept Orochimaru's cursed seal in a desperate attempt to get away from her.
• Escape From The Hokage's Hat: In order to prevent the recovering Naruto from joining a fight, Shizune hits him with an Interface Screw jutsu. As a result, Shizune lacks the energy required to heal Hinata after one of their enemies literally stabs her in the back, while Naruto uses a Forbidden Dangerous Technique that could've fried his chakra network in order to save them. She also completely loses Naruto's trust. To her credit, Shizune acknowledges how she screwed up and does what she can to make amends.
• The Kakashi Way: When Kakashi has to spend some time in protective custody, Ebisu is placed in charge of Team Seven. Kakashi decides to troll him by telling him that he meets his students on the bridge at 10AM, without deigning to mention that he tells the genin to arrive there around 7 or 8. This results in Ebisu repeatedly missing the trio... and gives Indra ample time to step in and teach the kids himself. Played With in that this actually benefits Team Seven, since Indra legitimately wants to help them, but it's also stressed that Kakashi's trick allowed a complete stranger to step in and convince his students that he was their substitute instead, which could have led to horrible consequences if he had ill intent.
• In The Last Prayer, Ino and Kurenai investigating Naruto's mistreatment results in him getting banned from the last two stores that sell to him and his landlord running off with all his tenants' rent money, meaning Naruto and everyone else in the building now have no water or electricity and are facing eviction.
• What You Knead:
  • At the climax of the bell test, Kakashi takes Sakura hostage. Sasuke then lunges at him while he's still got a kunai by her neck; Kakashi immediately pins him to the ground and coldly informs him that willfully endangering a teammate is an automatic fail. To twist the knife, he notes that he was just about to pass them for the teamwork they'd shown up to that point.
  • By deliberately lying about his circumstances in order to keep the cost of hiring ninja to help him out down, Tazuna ensures that the assignment is given to an inexperienced team. When the deception is inevitably revealed, Kakashi spells out for him just how thoroughly he screwed up — not only has he demonstrated that he's untrustworthy, Kakashi is furious over how poorly he's been treating his team, and is uninclined to help him any further.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Discussed in The Second Try: Asuka and Shinji lived for a while in a barren world because they were unknowingly furthering a "wipe humanity out" scheme when they were fighting alien monsters... and because Shinji was sick of everything. In the fourth chapter, Shinji states that all of humanity is gone because of him. Later on, Asuka and he admit that they were part of the trouble in the original timeline just so much like everything else.

Odd Squad

• Olive's Last Partner: Oscar attempts to use a banana creme pie to scare away the Blobisite and steer it towards Otto instead. He tells Olive not to turn around, but she does so anyway and promptly screams as her Trauma Button is pressed. From there, any semblance of rationality she has goes clear out the window as she backs up and manages to collide with the boiler, which causes a small fissure to form within it. Things then go From Bad to Worse as Olive searches for the Repair-inator gadget, finds it on the floor, and tries to use it on the boiler only for it to be ineffective. Just before she can tell Oscar that the boiler is No-Selling the Repair-inator, the fissure bursts completely open and Olive is thrown clear across the room by a blast of orange juice, which knocks her out cold.
• In Viva La Vida:
  • Olive's Sanity Slippage is mostly fueled by Otto not giving her a chance to talk to him about what she's going through. Instead, he prioritizes solving a case involving a number hog, which ultimately leads to her calling him out on, among many other things, not giving her a chance to talk because he's consistently interrupting her. As a result of this mistake, he's left feeling nothing but sadness and regret when she completes her Face–Heel Turn and he fails to get her to have a Heel Realization.
  • In Chapter 3, Olive turns down Otto's offer for the two of them to get pizza together in spite of her realizing that it's a good idea because she'll have a chance to talk to Otto about her issues. Unfortunately, it just goes downhill from there.
  • In Chapter 5, Otto confronts Olive about the sack she's carrying, which contains the cantaloupe used to power Precinct 13579. She reluctantly gives it to him when he brings up the rule that as per the rulebook, he has a right to know what secrets she's hiding, but when she asks for it back, he gives it to her instead of holding on to it or outright refusing to do so. This is what enables her to get away with the theft nearly scot-free.
  • Olive holds on to her badge phone instead of throwing it away when she joins the Todd Squad, allowing Otto to freely reach her and try to convince her to stop before she becomes completely evil. In the Bad Ending, her doing this doesn't matter because she turns down Otto's offer for her to come back to Odd Squad, but in the Good Ending, Otto's phone call causes her to have a Heel Realization.

One Piece

• In This Bites!, Cross calls out Otohime and Shirahoshi's refusing to identify Hody Jones as Otohime's assassin as an incredibly dumb plan that led to a racist organization gaining the freedom to grow without oversight for years until it could launch a military coup.

OMORI

• In He's Impossible, Mari forces Sunny into therapy, threatening to have him committed to an asylum if he refuses, and revealing that she's been going through his things. Although nobody can deny that Sunny needed therapy, the way Mari went about it vastly exacerbates his mental issues, to the point where simply being reminded of her existence causes him to have a dissociative episode at one point.

Pokémon

• In Clouded Sky, it turns out that Waytar's Shield was keeping all of the ghosts in Waytar trapped there, and by destroying it, Tobias sets them loose on the outside world.

Rizzoli & Isles

• In the supernatural AU Blood & Teeth, it turns out that Charles Hoyt survived his death; he was a werewolf who was being used as the test subject for a serum that would suppress the ability to transform, but after his death his body was retrieved and revived so that they could confirm if the drug was the reason for his cancer, which allowed an associate to help Hoyt escape.

Robotech

• Marque and Reprisal: Or Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, depending on one's point-of-view. A tribe engaged in ethnic cleansing in the Serengeti region of Africa during the Global Civil War. A child of the enemy ethnic group survived a massacre and was adopted by a family- who proceeded to abuse him horrifically for over a decade solely because he was of the "wrong" ethnic descent. Four decades later, the child, now a grown man who is a Space Marine colonel, comes back, organizes a militia, and begins an ethnic cleansing campaign against those who shared the blood of his abusive family. And he succeeds, with the remnants of his adoptive family's ethnic group fleeing the Serengeti.

RWBY

• Children of Remnant: By attempting to assassinate Jaune, all Kali manages to accomplish is pushing the world towards a war and antagonize the Claimed into open combat.
• A Rabbit Among Wolves: Team RWBY's interference in the dock heist backfires on them in every way. They ruin the White Fang's ambush, get into a petty argument with them that gives Roman Torchwick all the time in the world to steal the dust and escape scot-free, the ensuing fight causes massive property damage that they wind up being blamed for, and they don't even manage to capture any of the White Fang members. Last but not least, Lisa Lavender uploads a video of the events online soon after, edited to remove any scenes that'd make the White Fang look bad. All of the above guarantees that Beacon will face a PR nightmare trying to explain why four of their students caused such a mess.

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong

• In Lotus Seeds, Luo Binghe finally learns his long-lost Shizun is a willing prisoner within another realm because the man secretly fears a powerful entity's wrath. The half-demon being utterly confident that he can beat anyone trying to hurt someone under his protection decides to forcefully remove Shen Qingqiu from the pocket dimension and bring him back to his heavily fortress — which causes Shen Qingqiu's sudden demise, right in Luo Binghe's arms. To be fair, Luo Binghe spent years fighting and defeating extremely powerful foes, so he had no reason to think it would be different this time.

A Song of Ice and Fire

• In Wearing Robert's Crown Drakebert has the Wall heavily reinforced. And then the Others bring it down in one night, killing most of the defenders who they can raise to reinforce their army.

Star Wars

• In Before the Dark Times, Obi-Wan does the very thing that Anakin pleaded with him not to do: telling the Jedi Council about his usage of the Dark Side and secret marriage to Padme. The Council promptly throws Anakin out of the Jedi, declaring that it's impossible for anyone to come back from the Dark Side after starting down that path. In addition, Mace declares that the Jedi are going to take his children away and start training them from infancy to become Jedi, regardless of what their parents want. Needless to say, this drives Anakin right into a gleeful Palpatine's waiting arms, accelerating his transformation into Darth Vader.

Star Trek

• Discussed in The Wrong Reflection. Gul Morag of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance in the mirror universe blames Starfleet for the resurgent Terran Empire. It's mostly accurate,^*although note that Starfleet wasn't responsible for James O'Brien killing Mirror Miles O'Brien and going back to the Bad Old Days but Captain Kanril Eleya refuses to be held responsible for it because all it happened before she was born and Julian Bashir and Kira Nerys were only doing what they had to do to escape Alliance imprisonment. Still, it is the fault of the prime universe Ferengi that the Terrans now have cloaking devices, something which Eleya fixes by giving the Alliance Starfleet's data on how to defeat a cloaking device.

Steven Universe

• In New Home, Peridot and Steven realize that the Crystal Gems are attacking all the Homeworld grunts that were sent to help neutralize the Cluster, potentially dooming the Earth to destruction and rendering Steven's efforts meaningless.

Sword Art Online

• In Sword Art Online Abridged, Sachi's hit by a double-whammy of this. She encouraged Kirito to act nicer toward his guildmates, so he agreed to a plan he thought was stupid to make her happy. Except the plan was stupid, leading to a near-wipe and Sachi's death. Then Sachi tried to comfort Kirito with her dying words by assuring him "This isn't your fault," except due to her lag it comes out as "this isn't your fault — your fault -- your fault -- your fault," mentally scarring the little bastard and turning "your fault" into his Trauma Button.

Teen Titans

• New Tamaran: Rather than exposing Lex Luthor's crimes, Oracle blackmails him into becoming an Honest Corporate Executive. This allows him to exchange tools with Blackfire for the murders of Starfire and Supergirl, triggering a war between Earth and the Tamaraneans.

Total Drama

• In Courtney's Crusade for Redemption Courtney, once she forces Alejandro's early Robotic Reveal, decides to get even on him for his past misdeeds by pushing him to the lake; Duncan saving him convinces Chris to send Duncan to the heroes' team and Courtney to the villains' one, something that she wanted to avoid.
• In Legacy, the would-be rescuers burst into the lodge at exactly the wrong moment. Tragedy ensues.

Touhou Project

• Everything in Imperfect Metamorphosis can ultimately be traced to Team 9, and Cirno specifically. They were responsible for both releasing the Shadow Youkai and getting Yuuka involved, and their constant meddling continued to make things even worse. Other characters caused a lot of headaches too (especially Eirin and Yukari), but only Marisa, due to having stolen the box from Patchouli in the first place, allowing Team 9 anywhere near it, is anywhere near their level of blame.

Transformers

• In the Beast Wars fic "Eternal Life", Rattrap manages to save Dinobot's life after his battle to save the human race when he discovers that Megatron dropped the fragment of Rampage's spark he used to torture Rampage into submission. Merging this spark-fragment with Dinobot gives Dinobot Rampage's healing abilities, but Dinobot is subsequently corrupted by Rampage's own darkness, the two destroying most of the Maximals and Predacons before the survivors join forces and help bring Dinobot back to himself long enough to help them destroy Rampage before he dies for good.

Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-

• Shatterheart: When Fai finds out about R!Syaoran and Kurogane's Secret Relationship and the fact they were sleeping together, he forces an ultimatum for Syaoran to either tell the truth to Sakura or to break up with Kurogane, which he sees as an extremely codependent relationship. This has the side effect of deteriorating Fai's budding reconciliation with Syaoran. His earlier ostracization and hatred of the latter and forcing him to end his only positive relationship proves the straw to break the camel's back and Syaoran wants nothing to do with him. Since Kurogane was the only one Syaoran could turn to for comfort, his PTSD gets worse and he mentally and emotionally falls apart.

Turning Red

• In Turning Red: Secrets of the Panda, by taking away Mei's panda spirit, Xia not only takes away the very thing that allowed her to protect herself from harm, but she also took away the one thing that allowed her to enjoy herself.

The Twilight Saga

• Okay, Luminosity's only difference is that Bella's a different character, so naturally the differences for good or ill will be her fault...village murdered because of her? And now the Volturi have shapeshifters on their side? Because Bella thought it would help them. Oops. And Elspeth is following in her mother's making-the-Volturi-stronger footsteps.

Warcraft

• A Savage Nature: For all Rognak overall makes things better, some of his actions do have unintended negative consequences.
  • Because he keeps Cenarius from ever dying, Tyrande takes the time to convene with Cenarius rather than race to the Barrow Dens. As a result, a great deal of druids, including Malfurion, are killed before they can be awakened.
  • Illidan is killed by Arthas within hours of being freed from his imprisonment.
  • Jaina causes the invasion of Kalimdor by Kul Tiras because she sent her parents a letter informing them she was pregnant by an orc. A later chapter shows that she gave her father both a heart attack and a stroke because her letter rather implied she was raped.
  Jaina's letter: Mother, I wish for you to know that I am pregnant with my first child. Please do not let father know, the child's father is an orc.

Warhammer 40,000

• All Guardsmen Party: This is the result of sending a Knarloc to fight a Chaos servitor-Titan-techpriest. What's left of both fuses together, remains Chaos-possessed, and is significantly angrier at the Guardsmen.
  • Trading a Necron flyer to a Rogue Trader. Several worlds are cleansed of life by the Necrons chasing after the flyer, and a schism in the Mechanicus is threatened. And that's before the Hereteks get in on the madness.

The World Ends with You

• Eri's Game: Because of her fight with Higashizawa, Shiki unknowingly let her best friend, Eri, get her death wish. Oops.

Young Justice (2010)

• With This Ring: It's Martian Manhunter's fault that the Team gets trapped in a mental training simulation due to M'gann freaking out because he didn't properly assess her capabilities. It was his fault that he deliberately made the simulation unwinnable that Orange Lantern becomes so desperate to save his friends and the remaining survivors that he summons the Ophidian. In the simulation, Manhunter kills M'gann to end the simulation in front of the Ophidian-infused Orange Lantern. This traumatizes Orange Lantern and cause his mind to fuse with the Ophidian's.

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