Basic Trope: A villain gets killed in a manner that serves as a fitting punishment for their misdeeds and is their own fault.
- Straight:
- Chad kills Bobby's parents. Bobby later avenges his parents by killing Chad.
- Emperor Evulz desires to awaken an Eldritch Abomination to destroy the world. However once he finally awakens it, he ends up being its first victim.
- Exaggerated:
- Chad does something horrible to a lot of people. He eventually gets murdered when all of his victims gang up on him to get their revenge.
- Evulz desires to awaken an entire species of Eldritch horrors, and once he does it, they all brutally kill him.
- Chad orphans Bobby by shooting his parents. Bobby immediately steals his gun and shoots him to death.
- Downplayed:
- Chad indirectly causes his own death through poor planning and invoking the wrath of the wrong people.
- Evulz gets (horribly) injured and/or goes into a coma for his evil deeds.
- Justified: Chad wronged a person despite knowing that they could pay him back for the slight he commits against them.
- Inverted:
- Chad was friendly and charitable to everyone he's met, and lived to the ripe old age of 100, dying from natural causes.
- Chad's misdeed ends up benefiting him somehow.
- Chad was a great man who was friendly to everyone...and he died in a car crash at 25.
- Chad dying is the very event that turned him evil.
- Evulz dies by sacrificing his life to prevent the release of an Eldritch Abomination.
- Subverted:
- Chad appears to get killed by a person or animal he caused harm, but is later shown to have survived the confrontation. Alternatively, someone Chad has wronged tries to kill him in revenge, but he kills them instead.
- Alice murders Chad on the grounds that he killed her father. In fact Evulz framed Chad, and Alice now lives in regret.
- Evulz is found dead after the release of an Eldritch Abomination, and it's assumed it was his fault. But then it turns out he didn't actually release it.
- Double Subverted:
- Chad pushes his luck and gets a karmic death that sticks.
- She then proceeds to kill Evulz to avenge Chad.
- Chad was the murderer, but Evulz didn't know and framed him anyway to get back at him.
- Parodied: Chad refuses to give food to a starving vagrant and then gets murdered by a giant talking can of food that appears out of the blue.
- Zig-Zagged: Some villains die, some villains survive, and the ones who get killed aren't always done in in a karmic way.
- Averted:
- Enforced: "This guy's a real piece of work. If we want to give him a satisfying comeuppance, we'd better make it so that his death is blatant karma for the awful things he's done."
- Lampshaded: "What comes around goes around, Chad. You took our loved ones' lives, so now we get to take yours!"
- Invoked: Someone harmed or bereaved by Chad decides to get even with Chad by killing him.
- Defied:
- The people wronged by Chad refuse to kill him.
- Chad's thought the child's parents were being dicks to their child, but he still gets killed anyway.
- The monstrosity that Evulz summoned thinks that death is too good for him.
Go back to Karmic Death so the fiend will die the way he deserves for what he's done.
