Pyrrhic Victory / Literature

Pyrrhic Victories in literature.

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• Patrick Bateman from American Psycho gets away with everything, but is just as miserable and lonely as he was in the beginning. Nobody actually cares about him, and there are implications that all of his crimes only happened in his own sick mind anyway.
• And Then There Were None:
  • Vera's lover Hugo refused to marry her because he wasn't financially well-off enough to support her, so she decided to solve that problem by letting his nephew Cyril drown at sea so that Hugo would get the family inheritance instead of him. However, Hugo can tell that Vera wasn't honest about her claims that Cyril's death was just an accident and since he genuinely loved his nephew, he leaves her, meaning that her horrifyingly extreme attempt to get the man she loved to marry her only ended up driving him away from her for good.
  • General Macarthur, after learning that his wife was cheating on him with one of his officers, sent that officer on a virtual suicide mission to get rid of him. It worked, but his wife died of a broken heart soon after, leaving Macarthur alone and utterly consumed with grief and regret for the rest of his life. By the time U.N. Owen starts offing people on the island, he's ready to accept death as the fate he deserves.
• Angel in the Whirlwind:
  • In The Oncoming Storm, Kat Falcone manages to turn what should have been a major defeat for the Commonwealth into a strategic victory. Kat ruins the Theocracy's surprise attack by finding their staging area, forcing them to launch the invasion before the supply ships had caught up. Kat then leads most of a fleet weakened by an incompetent admiral into an orderly retreat under fire, then joins with forces in much better shape to come back and rescue trapped Commonwealth ground forces and go scorched earth on the system's industrial base before also retreating. The Commonwealth is down a system but took relatively light casualties, while the Theocrats are stuck with a worthless system and serious supply problems.
  • In Falcone Strike, characters on both sides regard forcing Pyrrhic victories in this manner as a winning strategy for the Commonwealth. Unlike the single-system polities that the Theocracy has rolled up before now, the Commonwealth is big enough to trade space for time as it ramps up war production, while the Theocrats are lacking in the required industries (due in part to revolt-suppressing economic strategies). If the Commonwealth can survive for two years or so, they'll gain the advantage.
• Animorphs ends with a cliffhanger implying the deaths of all but one of the surviving protagonists. While worth it for the free fate of Earth (at least temporarily), almost all of the children who survived until the end of the war were emotionally broken beyond repair from their trauma and the things they were forced to do.
• The ending of Gifts, the first book in Annals of the Western Shore. Canoc gets his revenge for his wife Melle's death by unmaking Ogge Drum, but he's killed by a Drum crossbowman. With Orrec unable to fulfill the duties of brantor through lack of gift, it's implied that Caspromant will lose its standing and, at least for the time being, become a part of Roddmant.
• In An Outcast in Another World, the Village is successfully defended from its invasion by the Infected...in the sense that not everyone died. In the process, several thousand people did in fact die, including many named characters. Additionally, the Locus of Power was destroyed, dooming the area to become a Blighted zone and forcing the survivors to abandon their homes and relocate.
• In Arena, a short story by Fredric Brown, an energy being, right before the first major battle between humans and aliens, states that they cannot coexist peacefully, and a war between the two will end in one extinction and one stone age. Since both races had the potential to evolve to the energy-being's level, unless their civilization was ruined by this war, the energy being snatched up both a human and an alien Roller and pit them against each other in a one-on-one duel with the complete and instant annihilation of the enemy's battle fleet up as the stakes specifically to avert this outcome.
• In Arrivals from the Dark, the Earth governments turn the Curb-Stomp Battle that was the Battle of Martian Orbit (where a Faata starship obliterated a dozen human warships) into this trope in order to conceal the truth about the true nature of the defeat of the invasion (assistance by another alien being) and to maintain morale and faith in the Space Navy. As such, the official story holds that, while the Faata did indeed destroy half of the Third Fleet, they also sustained damage in the process, which eventually proved fatal when they attempted to land the ship in the Antarctic.
• In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, whenever the looters are going to seize one of the properties of the actual or future strikers, they end up with a worthless property. D'Anconia blows up his ore mines and docks, Dannager abandons his coal mines, Wyatt blows up his oil fields, Rearden walks away from his steel mill, etc.
• In Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. Dad sounding out Mum over been scammed for the Rock Garden Julia responds with an exchange:
  Julia: In my exam today this term I'm not totally sure about, Pyrrhic Victory came up. Do you know what a Pyrrhic Victory is Dad?
  Dad gave Julia a very complicated stare.
  Jason: A what victory?
  Julia: Pyrrhic. Ancient Greece. A Pyrrhic Victory is one where you win, but the cost of winning is so high that it would’ve been better if you’d never bothered with the war in the first place. Useful word, isn’t it? So, Jace. Looks like we’re doing the dishes again. Wash or dry?
• In Dickens' Bleak House, one of the major plot points of the book is the infamous legal case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. Near the end of the book, the characters finally win the case, but the cost and time — several years, and the modern equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars — that had to be invested in trying to untangle its legal Mind Screw rendered it bankrupt by the time they finally finished. It ate up all its own assets, which would have been worth a fortune if it had been some halfway competent lawyers who drew up the mess in the first place.
• The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, Marcy and the others' efforts pay off, and Ms. Finney is reinstated... only for her to promptly announce her resignation, because the community is divided enough as-is, and she wouldn't be able to go back to teaching the way she did before with so much scrutiny on her. Marcy, having fought tooth and nail for this victory, doesn't take it well, but does come to terms with it.
• In the William Gibson short story "Dogfight", the main character wins the aerial combat video game, but in the process alienates everyone he might possibly celebrate his victory with.
• In the Legacy of the Twins trilogy for Dragonlance, towards the end, Caramon travels to an alternate reality showing what will happen if Raistlin succeeds in opening the portal and confronting Takhisis: Raistlin defeats her, and all of the other gods, and becomes the sole god of the world... and, in the process, he exterminates all life. Absolutely nothing is left on Ansalon or in The Multiverse, just Raistlin, slowly dwindling away into oblivion as his madness and his empty, futile hunger consumes him utterly, as he is so corrupt and evil that he cannot even create new life to replace the old. Caramon's revelation of this so horrifies Raistlin that he gives up and allows himself to be trapped in the Abyss, where Takhisis torments him forever more, because he cannot bear the thought of such a "victory".
• Dreamblood Duology: Ehiru manages to stop a major war between Gujaareh and Kisua... by basically making it possible for Kisua to walk right in and invade Gujaareh.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Grave Peril: Harry risks everything to try to save Susan from the Red Court Vampires, and he succeeds. But Susan has been corrupted by the vampires: while she isn't a full vampire, she is nonetheless irrevocably halfway towards becoming one, and she leaves town to protect herself and Harry. Also, Harry's actions to try to save her resulted in the White Council of Wizards going to war with the Red Court of Vampires, which has devastating consequences (people die in wars), and Harry also killed a lot of vampires with his magic, and possibly some humans as well (though it's hard to say), which indelibly stains his soul. Of course, the consequences of not doing all that (Amorrachius, the Sword of Love, Excalibur, one of the greatest weapons of against the darkness, would have been unmade and destroyed permanently) were even worse.
  • Turn Coat: Morgan is dead, the (only identified) traitor in the council is dead, Dresden and McCoy have no further information on the Black Council, the White Council has lost three of its most valuable members (the man Morgan was framed for murdering, Morgan, and the traitor), virtually everyone within the council needs to go in for deprogramming from mind-control magics, the Senior Council is now living in a permanent state of wondering if their actions were truly their own, and their newest member may or may not be a member of the Black Council.
  • Changes: So Harry won the war, wiped out the entire Red Court, and saved his daughter. He only had to make a Human Sacrifice of his daughter's mother and become Mab's servant. And as Ghost Story shows, destroying the Red Court only led to an Evil Power Vacuum and even worse forces moving in.
  • Skin Game: Not for Harry this time, but Nicodemus. He managed to recover the Holy Grail, but lost the other four artifacts (which were strongly implied to have been his real targets), two Denarians and their coins, his followers, his influence and reputation in the supernatural world, and even his own daughter. And if that wasn't enough, the only other success he had from the book, shattering the Sword of Faith, was undone when Butters turned it into a lightsaber.
• Duckling Ugly: Cara, a girl so ugly she was once called "the Flock's Rest Monster", is invited to a paradise called De Leon where a magic fountain makes her supernaturally beautiful. She returns to Earth to take revenge on Marisol, a girl who bullied her, by stealing her boyfriend and using magic to make her ugly. She succeeds, but in doing so, she unwittingly activates a curse that causes everything and everyone around her to become ugly and rotten, while she remains beautiful. As a result, she is kicked out of Flock's Rest. When she tries to return to De Leon, she finds out that she can't go back, because the portal is closed. She is forced to wander eternally in search of a way to return to De Leon, never able to stay in the same spot for long lest everything around her turn ugly.
• The first Dune novel ends with Paul Atreides defeating the Harkonnens, overthrowing Emperor Corrino by marrying his eldest daughter and receiving more praise from the Fremen for being The Chosen One. Come the next novel, Paul's fanatical followers unleashed a jihad which destroyed many worlds in his name which gave him a lot of enemies and conspirators inside his court. Likewise, he's trapped in the prescient future where he couldn't do anything to stop the jihad that he created and feared that his family name would forever be tarnished including all the achievements that his father, Duke Leto, made in the past. Then, he foresaw that his Fremen lover, Chani, died of giving birth to his children and he's unable to prevent it. In the end, Paul went to the desert after being blinded by a stone burner while his twins and his empire are left in the hands of his sister, Alia, who is slowly possessed by their grandfather, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.
• Ender's Game has Ender defeat the Buggers, only he ends up doing so by wiping them out entirely when they were revealed to have attacked only before they realized humans were sentient, and he gets exiled from Earth as well (not to mention how every human ship involved in the battle is destroyed either by Bugger Defenders or the M.D. Device).
• In the Farsala Trilogy by Hilari Bell, the Roman Empire Expy have many rules about their conquering of other territories and one of those rules is that if they don't have full control of the country within a year then they will withdraw their forces and offer allegiance with it instead or just leave it alone. This rule was put in place because early in their history, they were victors of this and vowed that victory would never cost so high again. According to the books, they're so good at taking over countries that out of the dozens they'd taken over only two were been able to resist past the time limit.
• Five Little Pigs: The murderer of Amyas Crale has long since gotten away with the crime, with Amyas's wife Caroline taking the fall (and having since died in prison). Even when Poirot confronts the person at the end, he admits that he can't actually get them convicted. Elsa may have escaped legal consequences, but all she accomplished was killing the one man she ever really loved, and she was deprived of even the satisfaction of hurting Caroline by Caroline's dignity in the face of imprisonment. While she's now wealthy and above investigation, she lives an empty and miserable life, and considers herself more dead than her victims.
  She and Amyas both escaped — they went somewhere where I couldn’t get at them. But they didn’t die. I died.
• The Four Gospels' Judas Iscariot may be an example. Sure, he got a tidy sum for betraying Jesus, but, according to Matthew, he was so overcome with guilt afterwards that he hanged himself. Exactly how things worked out for Judas varies a bit depending on who's telling it. The Gnostic Gospel of Judas (rejected when New Testament's contents were formalized) even claimed that Judas "betrayed" Jesus under Jesus's orders. Of course, that "tidy sum" of earthly treasure is a mere pittance compared to the honor his fellow apostles would have of "sitting on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel", not to mention sharing in the same inheritance that the Lord and His believers would receive from His Father. To compare it to another part of the Bible, Judas' thirty pieces of silver is the equivalent of Esau's bowl of pottage which he traded his birthright inheritance for with his brother Jacob, which brings us the Aesop that sacrificing one's future (heavenly) inheritance in exchange for the satisfaction of immediate short-term (worldly) gain isn't a good thing.
• Described as an inevitability in Sergey Lukyanenko's novel Genome in a war between two galactic powers with relatively equal military strength. A historical example is cited with the ancient Taii Empire, whose territory once spanned much of what is now owned by the younger races. They engaged in an all-out war with another empire, resulting in a Taii military victory but at the cost of utter devastation of their empire. The Taii briefly described in the book are now a dying power, holding no more then several dozen worlds and flying enormous ships that are ridiculously inferior when compared with more modern ships of the younger races. The same fate is predicted for the humans or the Czygu in a total Bug War. This prospect would force the humans to recruit the aid of a colony of Church Militants whose goal is the total extermination of all aliens for the betterment of the "true children of God". This would cause all other alien races to ally against humanity, resulting in this for everyone who survives.
• By the end of PLAGUE (4th GONE book), Caine Soren finally got that important position of evil dictator he was pushing for since book 1. However, he doesn't really have supreme control at all, everyone hates and disrespects him, and the love of his life just left him for his twin brother/arch enemy and got pregnant with his demon child, who certainly stirs shit up for him later.
• Gone Girl: On paper, The Bad Guy Wins; Amy literally gets away with murder, and gets everything she wanted in the end. But she still isn't happy. She's still an empty, miserable person with nothing to live for except maintaining the façade of a perfect life and marriage. The husband she's essentially made her prisoner even admits he just feels sorry for her, which enrages her.
• The Great Pacific War: The US victory is portrayed this way, wrecking the American shipping fleet and sending the economy into decline, causing it to lag behind Britain and Germany as a world power.
• In Handle with Care, Charlotte wins the lawsuit against her best friend Piper but is left friendless with no social life and lost both daughters - one to shipped away to sort out her bulimic problems and the other drowned in a skating incident. Piper lost her job and her reputation is destroyed. Charlotte never had the chance to cash in the cheque because Willow died, placing the cheque in her coffin, making all her efforts moot.
• In Harry Potter, the backstory of Voldemort's wizarding ancestors the House of Gaunt reveals that they were originally very wealthy and influential in wizarding society. However, they were also VERY arrogant, to the point that they maintained their blood purity (namely from Salazar Slytherin, one of the founders of Hogwarts) via inbreeding. This had led to a NUMBER of defects in the family line, which included mental instability. By the time of Voldemort's birth, the Gaunts had managed to maintain their blood purity...at the cost of their family fortune, sanity, and prestige, all of which would have given their boasts a LOT more credibility.
• In one of The History of the Galaxy novels, the first battlefield use of the LIGHT annihilator device by La Résistance results in the total destruction of not one but two Earth Alliance armadas. However, the colonists lose nearly all ships in the process, leaving them with a total of eight warships, while Earth still has plenty of ships in other systems. They also lose the only existing annihilator they have (at the moment). Their only advantage is the fact that Earth has no idea the colonies are virtually defenseless. The new colonial admiral manages to enact a daring plan to steal two flagship-class cruisers from an Alliance shipyard... by stealing the shipyard with tugs. Oh, and the admiral's own son was killed in the explosion.
• Honor Harrington:
  • Late in the Second Haven-Manticore War, when the latter's latest missile breakthrough swings the Lensman Arms Race heavily in their favor, Haven launches an all-out assault on the Manticore home system in a desperate attempt to destroy their industry before production fully ramps up. Although Haven's invasion fleet is repulsed before accomplishing their objective, the casualties they inflict in return leave Manticore strategically crippled.
  • The Mesan Alignment managed a potentially crippling strike on the infrastructure of Manticore and its ally Grayson, just in time for their manipulation of the Solarian League leading to the largest navy in known space launching an overwhelming attack at Manticore. It seems to go off brilliantly, but it puts the Manticorans in such a precarious strategic position that they're willing to accept not only a permanent peace treaty with their decades-old enemy Haven but a formal military alliance when it's offered, and the Havenites deliver proof Mesa was behind everything, including their long war. The end result is that the two most technologically advanced and combat-experienced navies in the known galaxy team up, utterly curb-stomp the Solarian invasion force in the most one-sided battle in human history, and launch a plan to tear the Solarian League apart while also looking for revenge against Mesa. The Alignment leadership realizes things did not turn out quite the way they'd hoped.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Winning the Games is depicted as such. Because There Are No Therapists, survivors of the arena walk out with wealth and fame for life, but with severe PTSD and nothing to help them cope with their experiences — and if they're attractive enough, they're pimped out by President Snow as Sex Slaves— and they have to mentor the tributes for the following Hunger Games until they die. For example, Haymitch, the mentor to Katniss, has spent twenty-four years trying to mentor children and bringing home corpses. The trope is Invoked in this case — the Capitol doesn't want the Victors to be able to lead a coup.
  • Katniss's mental breakdown in Mockingjay. Even though the Capitol fell, Prim's death takes precedence.
• In I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Ted is damned to And I Must Scream for eternity, but he manages to save Benny, Ellen, Gorrister, and Nimdok from the same fate. AM itself is also effectively condemned to an equally awful fate; quite who exactly the pyrrhic victor is can be debated.
  "At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet... AM has won, simply... he has taken his revenge... I have no mouth. And I Must Scream."
• Happens in Back Story in the Kane Series story "Lynortis Reprise". When King Masale finally conquered and destroyed Lynortis (which would be impossible without a traitor Kane himself leading him through hidden passages to the city), he had spent so much time, effort, money, and men on the two-year-long siege that he had to give up his dreams of conquering the land that lay beyond Lynortis.
• Lampshaded in The Lies of Locke Lamora. Locke and Jean kill their enemies, but they have to leave Camorr forever, they're both injured (Locke especially so), and all their friends are, by the way, dead. The exchange goes something like:
  Locke: So this is winning.
  Jean: It is.
  Locke: It can go fuck itself.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Lampshaded: "Today we may make the enemy pay ten times our loss at the passage and yet [we may] rue the exchange. For he can afford to lose a host better than we to lose a company."
  • In fact, Pyrrhic victories are quite common throughout Middle-Earth's history. The War of Wrath ended with Morgoth's defeat, but all of Beleriand was laid waste in the battle and sank under the sea. The Last Alliance managed to defeat Sauron, but lost so many people that the kingdoms of Elves and Men ended up depopulated and ripe for attack by Sauron's human allies, which led to the destruction of Arnor and the reduction of the Elves to just a few small settlements. The final victory over Sauron in The Lord of the Rings avoids being Pyrrhic in that it leads to Sauron’s final defeat, the humbling of his allies and the restoration of Arnor … but it is still HUGELY costly, since destroying the Ring meant the final waning of 'magic' in Middle-Earth and the departure of the remaining Elves to the West.
  • Other materials show the War of the Ring was almost much more this. If the dragon Smaug hadn’t been slain and Erebor retaken by the Dwarves, Sauron's armies would have probably succeeded in destroying the Western lands, up to the Shire, and driving the last of the Elves overseas quicker despite Sauron's defeat. Thankfully averted, as the Dwarves of Erebor and the men of Dale held back part of Sauron's forces long enough for news of his defeat to reach them.
  • The other two Battles of Beleriand against Morgoth (that the Elves actually won) were Pyrrhic as well. The first ended with one faction of Elves demoralized so badly they essentially demilitarized and took to a "stay hidden" policy against Morgoth since the bloodline of their leaders was killed off, while the second ended with the death of Fëanor, greatest of all the Elves. Sure it was still a crushing victory for the Elves short-term, and he was a right bastard to be sure, but one can only imagine what he would have done for the war effort (not to mention morale) had he lived.
  • Nírnaeth Arnoediad was partially this for Morgoth. Despite winning his greatest victory in Middle-Earth and securing much of the North, it is some time before his forces recover.
  • Morgoth also suffered this in his battle with Fingolfin. Though he eventually killed him, ending the life of one of the greatest elven kings, his actual objective was to crush Fingolfin to show that he wasn't a coward and it was futile to oppose him. Then Fingolfin basically ran rings around him for most of the fight, inflicting many wounds that Morgoth only survived due to his giant size, and even when the elf got tired and started taking hits, he still managed to stay standing and maimed Morgoth's leg (giving him a permanent limp). On top of that, the eagle Thorondor showed up to take Fingolfin's body (so Morgoth couldn't desecrate it), and clawed Morgoth's face as a parting shot. It's said that the story isn't told much by elves or orcs: elves, because of the tragedy of losing their hero-king, and orcs, because their God of Evil made such an embarrassing showing.
  • The Battle of Azanulbizar, which ended the War of the Dwarves and Orcs, was a somewhat mixed case. Though it pretty much broke the back of the orcs of the Misty Mountains (they weren't able to sally out in a real force for another 150 years), the dwarves lost more than half their people, with the death being described as "beyond the count of grief." What's more, though they did accomplish their objective of killing Azog, their other objective, that being to retake Moria, had to be written off as a loss (the balrog didn't help matters).
• In The Lost Fleet, the 100 years war between The Alliance and the Syndicate Worlds is chock full of such battles. Any victory is won with huge casualties. This is in large part due to both sides forgetting complex fleet tactics and switches to an Attack! Attack! Attack! mentality, where each ship individually charges into battle and hopes to win through sheer "fighting spirit". Battleships are considered to be posts for cowards, as they have too much armor and shields and can't get to the battle fast enough. Then Captain John "Black Jack" Geary is discovered as a Human Popsicle and revived and uses his knowledge of fleet tactics to win without this trope... though the Alliance "won" in the sense that it isn't tearing itself apart quite as fast or as bloodily as the Syndicate Worlds.
• Malazan Book of the Fallen:
  • The third book, Memories of Ice, has two:
    • First the siege of Capustan is lifted when the protagonist army arrives, but the defenders (who are honorable mercenaries) have nearly been killed to the man.
    • This trope is used again in the concluding battle where the allied armies of the Malazans and Caladan Brood capture Coral. But a huge percentage of the named characters are killed during this second battle and the army is a shell of its former self.
  • In book eight, Toll the Hounds, The Undead army of everyone who has ever died since Hood became the God of Death manages to hold off the forces of Chaos long enough, but most of them are destroyed even beyond undeath.
• Discussed in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy. Some in the skaa rebellion consider the raid on Holstep Garrison to be a victory even though they were wiped out to a man once the garrison received reinforcements because it proved that the long-oppressed skaa that they were capable of rising up and would be an inspiration for generations to come. The main characters disagree because they lost the garrison shortly afterwards, they needed the army to fight a battle they could win, the nobles barely take notice, and the Lord Ruler holds a public execution of random skaa to punish the rebellion.
• The trope is discussed in the book Palabros de honor after the idiom was added into the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. It mentions that the words 'Pyrrhic victory' are sometimes misused in Spanish to refer to a victory by a small margin, before going to the example of an association football match to explain the idiom's proper usage: if a team wins 6-0 (which in said sport is an outright Curb-Stomp Battle), but one of its players is sent off, others are injured during the match, and this means none of them will be available for the next game, which just so happens to be the decisive one, then that 6-0 is a Pyrrhic victory.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • Kronos, the Titan Lord, is called "the Crooked One" for his ability to engineer schemes which leaves the good guys in a tight spot either way. It is possible to foil him, but it almost never happens without cost, often a heavy one.
  • The third book is a good example of this. They finished their quest, saved Artemis and stopped the baddies from harnessing the powers of a world-destroying beast... but two of their teammates died in the process, and the younger brother of the second one is not happy. It got worse when Percy realized that not only did he have another demigod bent on killing him, but said demigod was a son of Hades, which qualified him for the prophecy that could destroy Olympus and all of Western civilization. Ouch.
• Perdido Street Station ends on this note. The protagonists have saved the city, defeated the Slake Moths, foiled Mr. Motley's plans, and kept the Crisis Engine out of the hands of those who would misuse it. But in the process, Lin is lobotomized (and may never recover fully), Isaac and Yagharek's friendship is destroyed, Yagharek loses any chance of getting his wings back, a lot of people die, and the surviving heroes have to flee the city forever, as they're still thought to be criminals.
• The Riftwar Cycle: In A Darkness at Sethanon, the invading army of the moredhel finally captures the city of Armengar, but with devastating losses—not only is the city an invader's nightmare, built with technologies and magic long lost to mankind, but those in charge of the defense blow it up just when the invading army has finally broken through, leaving the moredhel with a ruined city and great losses. Ten years later, the risk of a devastating defeat or a Pyrrhic Victory is what spurs one of the moredhel chieftains to oppose the efforts to launch another invasion, going as far as allying himself with the humans to accomplish it.
• R.A. Salvatore:
  • The Crystal Shard has the final battle presented as one of these for the good guys.
  • The Thousand Orcs has another. The last of the survivors of the attack on the town are spirited away by means involving a fake idol of Gruumsh, the orc god. When the other orc shamans hear about this, they not only bring in thousands of new recruits to avenge the sacrilege, they also perform a rare ritual on the orc king that makes him permanently stronger and quicker.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: This series is rather good at giving us wins with undermining costs attached.
  • It's heavily implied that whoever wins the Iron Throne in the end will have won such a victory, as the cost of warfare is rapidly depleting all their resources while an exceptionally long winter is coming.
  • Historically, the Dance of the Dragons was this. Although the Green faction officially won and crowned Aegon II over his elder sister (Rhaenyra, head of the Blacks), this came at a very great cost to their family as a whole. 1) Almost every Targaryen on both sides was dead. 2) The majority of their strongest dragons were outright dead, the rest were either disabled, very young, and/or sickly. 3) All the fully experienced dragon riders and handlers from both sides were dead (the massacre at and sacking of the Dragonpit cannot be highlighted enough), meaning most of their know-how was lost, which then fed back into #2: any sick dragons couldn't get better since there was nobody left who knew what to do to care for them properly. However, the ultimate tragedy of the victory was that Aegon II died ignominiously via surprise poisoning only a few months in, leaving the throne to... the last remaining son of Queen Rhaenyra anyway. So, so much for that Green win. Said son (Aegon III) had also observed his mother being eaten alive by Aegon II's dragon, instilling in him a deep hatred for and/or an understandable fear of dragons. It is maliciously rumored that he was responsible for killing the last Targaryen dragon himself due to this fear/hatred, permanently crippling the Targaryens' strength. Except, he's actually on record as having tried to hatch dragon eggs several times and then failing to get healthy outcomes. It's more likely that Aegon didn't know exactly what he was missing in the process to both properly hatch dragons or care for the rest, and was desperately trying to work it all out while some of the rapidly diminishing number of pieces of the puzzle were still available to his family. By the time he died in turn, there were no known dragons left in Westeros.
  • Sunfyre was a dragon that had an almost unmatched record of winning fights with other dragons. But, each duel fought added crippling scars to the once-stunning dragon. It died in its last fight in the civil war, a winner who expired as much due to the injuries sustained over years as it did from the fresh batch of Body Horror.
  • Sunfyre's rider, Aegon II, also counts. Aside from the general mess that was the Dance of the Dragons, he personally took part in and won several dragon duels, but, like his dragon, each victory cost him permanent, crippling injuries to the point that by the end of his life, he turned to alcohol in a desperate attempt to dull the chronic pain he experienced, and his injuries would probably have killed him just like what happened to Sunfyre if he hadn't been poisoned first.
  • So, Theon Greyjoy takes Winterfell in a daring attack using a small band of Ironborn raiders. So far, so good. But, deciding to try holding a large castle in enemy territory with a small number of allies? Not happening. Theon loses the place faster than he claimed it. And he ends up paying the price in a very, very, very nasty way by the manner of Ramsay Snow.
  • Houses Frey, Bolton, and Lannister, and the Red Wedding.
    • Sure, in the short-term, the Freys and Boltons are given all of the credit for killing King Robb and decimating the Northern forces in one night, and House Bolton gains control of the North, but Stannis and his armies are coming for the Boltons, the Freys now find themselves the unspoken enemies of almost everyone else in Westeros for violating Sacred Hospitality (the one custom that was thought to be universal across the entire kingdom), and several of their own "allies" are actively working to undermine them, leaving their position more and more precarious. The Boltons also inherit Robb's war with the Greyjoys (who have transformed From Nobody to Nightmare due to Euron succeeding his brother Balon), the imminent invasion of the Others, and only a handful of Roose's new vassals aren't actively plotting against him. His only heir is his sadistic bastard son Ramsay Snow, whose endless parade of Stupid Evil actions are rapidly destroying what little support the Boltons have left. When he marries Ramsay to "Arya Stark" (actually Jeyne Poole) to secure their hold on Winterfell and the North, Ramsay abuses and rapes his new young wife for his own sadistic pleasure, so it's no surprise that she takes the first opportunity to escape the castle.
    • While Tywin Lannister manages to destroy the Starks as a noble house, in the process, his eldest son is crippled by Tywin's own mercenaries and later denounces him, Gregor Clegane renews tensions with Dorne, and his last-minute Tyrell allies poison his grandson and take a large chunk of his political power.
  • Cersei makes her illegitimate son Joffrey king but is unable to stop Ned Stark from informing Stannis Baratheon that he is the true king or stop Renly from leaving the city and proclaiming himself king. Joffrey then executes Ned, causing the North to declare independence and they capture Jaime. The Lannisters gain the throne and a three-front war to match. Then add the fact that Joffrey and Tywin are killed shortly after, Tyrion is on the run, Cersei is running the Kingdom into the ground, and Kevan gets killed just as he is trying to fix what he can. Winning only weakens House Lannister.
  • The Battle of Castle Black ends in this for the Night's Watch. Yes, Stannis shows up to save them and Castle Black remains under the Night's Watch's control. However, Stannis soon leaves to retake the North from the Boltons, meaning that the Night's Watch, already very low on manpower due to the dilapidation of the organization over the centuries, is now dangerously low on men after the Great Ranging and the battle. In addition, several buildings and constructs are damaged quite badly in the battle, and winter is coming, and with it, the Others and the army of the dead.
  • Cersei learns to her cost that populist religious movements are not a toy, even if they initially get you what you want. They pay back. With interest.
  • Ser Loras's impatience with the slow-sapping operation already in progress leads him to directly charge Dragonstone, securing an important victory for Cersei at a time she desperately needs one, but at the cost of a thousand seasoned troops, none of which would have been lost had Loras been willing to wait.
  • The song "The Dornishman's Wife" exemplifies this concept. It is about a man who is murdered after sleeping with titular woman. He still maintains that he can happy knowing he slept with the woman.
• In the book of 2nd Maccabees, Jason the corrupt (and eventually former) high priest continued to slaughter Jews in chapter 5 without realizing that a victory that destroys his own people is the worst possible defeat because he was thinking he had won a battle against enemies rather than against other Jews.
• In the Soul Rider series, the two most powerful wizards on World eventually meet for the titanic duel they’ve been awaiting … and by the time it’s done, both have exhausted all their power and been reduced to fighting with hands and teeth. One eventually kills the other and croaks out “I won!” before dying, but both have been damaged so badly that no one can tell the bodies apart.
• In Starship Troopers, it's pointed out early on in the war that killing 1,000 bugs for each human is a net victory for the bugs, as their soldiers can be hatched at need and can be ready to fight in a matter of weeks, while it takes the better part of a year to make a Cap Trooper battle-ready.
• Yes, at the end of the Star Trek: Destiny series the Borg are eliminated as a threat once and for all. It only cost 63 billion lives, dozens if not hundreds of inhabited planets throughout the Alpha Quadrant, the destruction of almost half of Starfleet, and significant casualties among all of the other major powers of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. President Bacco states that the toll essentially sets the Federation back almost a century.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Invoked by name in Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter. This triggers Fridge Logic when you wonder who it was named for.
  • In the X-Wing Series novels Wedge's Gamble and The Krytos Trap, Ysanne Isard attempts to turn the New Republic conquest of Coruscant into one of these by poisoning its water supply with a virus that kills nonhumans but is harmless to humans, trying to Divide and Conquer. The attempt fails.
  • New Jedi Order:
    • In the Enemy Lines two-parter, Wedge Antilles commands the defense of Borleias against the Yuuzhan Vong after the fall of Coruscant. The Yuuzhan Vong gain the planet, but in the process lose a worldship and one of their greatest generals—former warmaster Czulkang Lah—among other heavy losses. The New Republic forces fare far better: while they do end up sacrificing the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya to destroy the worldship, they do so without losing the Lusankya's crew and most of its weapons (which were transplanted to other ships, Lusankya having already taken considerable damage before the final confrontation). Furthermore, the tactical victory was worthless: Wedge's goal in the campaign was simply to drag out the battle and buy time for the New Republic to regroup, while inflicting as many losses on the enemy as possible. Czulkang Lah's final communication to his son, Warmaster Tsavong Lah, shows another perspective on the trope:
    Tsavong Lah: Still, a great victory.
    Czulkang Lah: No, son. Limited facts can point at victory when in fact there is only defeat to taste.
    Tsavong Lah: Defeat? You have achieved the conditions of victory. You have once more brought glory to Domain Lah.
    Czulkang Lah: In a minute I will be dead. Too many clever minds, however heretical they may be, have undone me.
    • A couple books later in Destiny's Way, it's revealed that in the process of conquering half the galaxy, the Yuuzhan Vong have lost nearly a third of their warriors. This results in an untenable position for them, giving the New Republic, now the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances, a chance to fight back.
• The Stormlight Archive: For millennia, the Voidbringers arrived in great Desolations to drive humanity off the face of the planet. Humanity, with the help of the divine Heralds, always managed to defeat them... but not without horrific casualties. It wasn't uncommon for ninety percent of the entire planet to be dead by the end of one Desolation, and they were knocked so far into the Stone Age that the Heralds couldn't be sure they'd have rediscovered bronze by the next Desolation. Eventually, the cycle of destruction became too much and the Heralds gave up, telling humanity they had finally won for good. By the time the next Desolation finally comes back, technology has advanced to the Steel Age, but people have forgotten all the magic and artifacts they once had. The Almighty advises that their best option is to just survive as long as they can; while they can't win without the lost artifacts, if they can convince the enemy that he might lose again, he'll begin making mistakes.
• The Sunne in Splendour: Early in the book, Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian side win a great victory at Wakefield, and their primary antagonist, Richard, Duke of York, is killed. For good measure, they murder his teenage son Edmund, red wedding style. They think this is the beginning of their final victory, but they don't count on the Duke of York's oldest son Edward rising up, rallying his troops and exacting ferocious revenge. While the father was likable and a skilled politician, his eighteen-year-old son is charismatic, handsome and a brilliant Warrior Prince. Appearing every-inch a king, Edward has no problem winning over the people and is soon crowned Edward IV.
• Time Scout: Congratulations, Skeeter! You just stood up to a bully! A bully with massive wealth, criminal connections, government power, and a vindictive nature. And you've a checkered past he won't have any trouble using against you.
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Small-Town Tyrant Bob Ewell is able to get away with severely beating his daughter and having a black man framed for it and imprisoned. But anyone watching the trial knew what he did, destroying what remained of his reputation, and driving him to harass the wife of the black man he imprisoned, spit in Atticus' face, invade the home of a judge, and later attempt to murder Jem and Scout, an action that got himself killed by Boo Radley.
• In the backstory of Warday, the US technically won World War III. The Soviet Union is apparently in total anarchy, while the US is merely moving towards a Divided States of America situation.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Dan Abnett's novel Brothers of the Snake, a chapter of Space Marines retake a refinery from Chaos forces. They realize that the place was tainted by something it had pumped up from under the earth, and it could not be used any more — which meant they could just have blasted it from orbit, without losing three Marines in the fight.
  • In a similar vein, the defense of Vervunhive, which leaves the hive with so many dead it is officially decommissioned at the end of the war. Although with Heritor Asphodel dead, Chaos has nothing to celebrate, either.
  • Ciaphas Cain, in Caves of Ice, digs his troops in to protect a Promethium refinery that he later has to annihilate to stop a Necron tomb from reawakening. (Still, taking out an Ork Waaagh and a Necron force is a solid deal for one refinery, especially since they managed to evacuate the facility beforehand.)
  • The final book of the Ultramarines series has a surprisingly major one. The Ultramarines successfully beat back a massive force of traitor marines and permanently kill a daemon prince, an act practically unheard of in the universe, but Ultramar itself has lost several worlds and almost four companies' worth of marines.
  • The novel Death of Antagonis in Space Marine Battles series is just a long string of those for the Black Dragons and just to punctuate it, their Captain goes traitor.
• In The Warlord Chronicles, the Battle of Baddon Hill is a major one for King Arthur. He smashes the Saxon forces, (including mortally wounding Aelle, one of the Saxon kings), but... his most powerful and reliable ally, Cuneglas, dies in battle, the Christians gain greater influence in the sectarian battle against Pagans, which they later use to undermine Arthur's non-sectarian government, Mordred discovers a taste for battle, Nimue turns against Merlin and Arthur for good, etc. Some of these results are directly linked to Arthur's downfall.
• Whateley Universe:
  • The Halloween battle. What was originally intended as a cover so that the Goobers could kill Sara Waite turned into a full-on attack on Team Kimba, with many others getting caught in the cross-fire, and it ended badly for everyone- while the Whateley crew won, they ended up with thousands of dollars of property damage, more than a few injured, a staff member dying and that triggering a rager attack by another staff member that turned him almost committing suicide because of the death of his girlfriend. It turned out worse for Englund, the instigator- almost everyone on the staff and more than a few students hated him even though they couldn't prove that he did it, the attack on Sara wasn't successful, and the staff member who went rager now wants to kill him with extreme prejudice. The Syndicate (the main evil attackers) lost hundreds of their soldiers, and the main general ended up nearly losing his boyfriend. In other words, nobody won and everybody lost.
  • The attack on Team Kimba in the simulations. On the one hand, Team Kimba managed to successfully fight off the attackers after being placed in a situation where they had no weapons or armour except their powers, and were placed separately against specially-chosen enemies with the sims turned up so any attacks would really injure them. On the other hand, everyone was horribly injured; Tennyo ended up in the grip of a Heroic BSoD after being forced to remember memories that weren't hers, but that she thought were hers; the New Olympians are now very aware that Team Kimba is powerful enough to potentially defeat them; and while Make and Overclock are captured by the MCO, Ayla and the Mad Scientist reveals that they escaped. Again, nobody won and everybody lost.
• The backstory to The Wheel of Time series has the triumph of the Light and the sealing of the Dark One in the Age of Legends made out to be one of these for all concerned. The backlash of the sealing left a taint on the male half of the One Power that doomed every man who touched the Power to creeping insanity and death, without exception; this left a bunch of completely insane men with the power to level cities and raise mountains running around causing almost as much damage as the war that they ended would have, destroying so much that the knowledge and culture of the Age of Legends was in large part lost forever. And for Lews Therin, the hero who led the charge to seal the Dark One? His nemesis tracks him down at his mansion and uses a Dark version of Healing to cure his madness, allowing Lews Therin to see that, while insane, he had murdered everyone and everything he had ever loved. He did not take it well.
• In World War Z humanity managed to be victorious over the zombie hordes. But the war and overall situation devastated the planet.
• Worm:
  • Leviathan is ultimately forced to retreat from Brockton Bay by Scion, but a lot of people are dead, most of the city is destroyed, and it is sheer anarchy in the streets.
  • Endbringer fights tend to result in this at best. Either a large portion of a continent is rendered uninhabitable or just SINKS, or potentially hundreds of Capes die forcing the monster back. The exception was the Behemoth fight in India, Scion shows up to KILL him! It doesn't stick, because More Endbringers show up in response, and they're unpredictable and immune to the tactics used against the others.
  • The Slaughterhouse Nine tend to provoke this on both sides. The heroes lose members, countless civilians are killed in the crossfire, and members of the Nine drop like flies unless they're Nigh Invulnerable like the Siberian. Their attack on Brockton Bay is a perfect example: They break Panacea, work on depopulating the already devastated city and irreversibly traumatize more than a few of Capes and civilians. In return, the Nine lose Crawler and Cherish, get handed a humiliating "defeat" and have to invoke Lowered Recruiting Standards to get their numbers back up.

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