Crossovers
- Berlioz effectively serves as the 'Gilligan' of The Aristocats' Island, constantly hindering the group's efforts to find a way off.
- Fall of Starfleet, Rebirth of Friendship: The only reason that Grand Ruler Celesto manages to stay in power and serve as the Big Bad is because he's got a pair of powerful artifacts, one of which lets him warp reality to his liking while the other lets him empower himself through the strength of his followers' belief in him. If not for those, he would have self-destructed and brought his whole empire crashing down around his head ages ago.
- Inglorious Bosh'tets: Tali's entire crew qualifies as such, being Chaotic Stupid through and through. The worst of the lot by far is Prazza, a Small Name, Big Ego who constantly blames Tali for the fallout of all of his idiotic, self-centered and short-sighted decisions.
- Kimi No Na Iowa deconstructs this with Willie D, who is all too painfully aware that she's a burden on her friends and comrades, and that nobody really likes her as a result. The guilt has led to her developing suicidal ideation, believing everyone would be better off if she wasn't around anymore.
- One Foot – Another Multiverse SI: The titular Self-Insert, Poe, spends the majority of his time firmly in this category. Occasionally he gets to be a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, but for the most part, his bumbling through the multiverse leaves every world he visits worse off than it was before he arrived. While he's gained all manner of powers, he doesn't possess the innate knowledge required to utilize any of them effectively, and his efforts to use any foreknowledge he might have from the source materials of the various worlds he visits constantly fail due to gaps in his knowledge and/or unexpected divergences that existed before he arrived.
- Total Drama Infinite: The first season has the Non Sequitur-spouting King Harkinian, who directly causes his team to lose the first challenge by destroying the makeshift hot tub Edward makes. As a result, he's immediately voted off.
- Project Rewrite has Komaeda Nagito. All of Hajime's efforts to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and prevent any of the murders, tragedy and despair from happening are undermined by Nagito's obsession with "strengthening Hope by causing Despair".
- Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): MaNi/Elder Brother, an offshoot of Ghidorah's right head. Ironically, for all his derision of San and the Ghidorah-attached Youngest Brother, just about everything that MaNi does after he's gained his own body ultimately makes things worse for his master. Without MaNi's Stupid Evil, Monster X wouldn't have gained their even more powerful final form in time for the Final Battle, and Ghidorah in such a scenario would have probably had a lot more time to work on breaking a conscious and intact Vivienne instead of expending precious time and energy saving an unconscious Vivienne's life. Even when MaNi infects one of Godzilla's Titan allies, this indirectly leads to Keizer Ghidorah suffering the setbacks of Sharing a Body with said Titan, which in turn contributes to Keizer's defeat.
- Under Cover Of Darkness: Willaim going missing as the group is making their way towards the Reynolds farm winds up having a massive amount of terrible consequences for the rest of the team as they search for him. To add further insult to injury, by the time they find him, he's become a mauler, and when Phoebe shoots him, Wanda beats her up and breaks her nose.
- Juleka vs. the Forces of the Universe: Chat Noir repeatedly proves himself as such:
- When Hawkmoth akumatizes a Loony Fan into Shipper, Chat Noir outright refuses to fight them simply because they happen to be into Ladynoir. Instead, he sits on the sidelines and gleefully 'suggests' that Ladybug should give in to their demands and couple up with him already.
- Against the All-Seer, he decides against following Ladybug's plan, because why would he attempt any kind of flanking maneuver when he'd much rather stick close to Ladybug and keep flirting with her? Even worse, he blows the plan to keep the All-Seer unaware of the new ally they'd called in by directly addressing them while trying to steal their thunder.
- Worth noting: Chat gets incredibly jealous of other heroes proving themselves to be better partners to Ladybug. This does not encourage him to become more reliable himself; if anything, it makes him worse.
- Scarlet Lady:
- The titular Nominal Heroine tends to be a Glory Hound at best, brazenly Stealing the Credit for all of Chat Noir's hard work, as well as that of the other Miraculous heroes. At times, however, she delves straight into this territory.
- During The Gamer's rampage, she actively sabotages Chat Noir's efforts to protect Marinette, as she secretly wants the akuma to get his revenge upon the other girl for beating him in the tournament tryouts. Why? Because she's jealous that Marinette got to spend time with Adrien and wants The Gamer to Murder the Hypotenuse on her behalf.
- She spends much of the Despair Bear incident refusing to deal with any of his mind-controlled victims, screeching at her "sidekicks" to handle all of the fighting... right up until she gets caught herself.
- She accompanies the Dwindling Party in "Zombizou", pretending that she's there trying to protect everyone, when in reality she just wants a front-row seat to Marinette getting captured and turned into a sweet-heart zombie. By the climax, she's openly and brazenly sabotaging the survivors, gloating about how she intends to hand Marinette over to the grossest zombie she can find.
- Lampshaded by Chat Noir when she finally bothers to show up for the massive battle with Party Crasher, as he immediately warns Viperion to be ready to counteract this effect.Chat Noir: (to Viperion) Better use Second Chance for when she screws this up for us.
Viperion: Yep.
Scarlet Lady: HEY!
- Adrien is a strange invocation of this trope in "Desperada", as he plans to Be as Unhelpful as Possible as Aspik in order to get off of the temporary hero roster, so he can continue being Chat Noir unimpeded, and therefore pick up the slack of the true Millstone, Scarlet Lady, more effectively.
- The titular Nominal Heroine tends to be a Glory Hound at best, brazenly Stealing the Credit for all of Chat Noir's hard work, as well as that of the other Miraculous heroes. At times, however, she delves straight into this territory.
- Two Letters: Adrien's tendency to put his Skewed Priorities ahead of everything else and treat superheroics as a game is repeatedly brought up in the later stretches. In particular, Marinette stresses to him that this is why Ladybug chose to strip the Ring from him before she retired: she simply couldn't trust him not to continue being such a horrible excuse for a 'hero'. Luka notes that he likely would've been more of a hindrance than a help to the new Ladybug.
- The Wavering Peahen: Lila becomes one to Hawkmoth after she's entrusted with the Peacock Pin, as she dramatically overestimates her abilities as Pavona, proving so incompetent that the heroes actually prefer having to deal with her over Mayura.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- Inner Demons: Fluttershy sees herself as one after her attempt to help Rainbow Dash rescue Pinkie Pie went horribly wrong, as she was incapacitated and held hostage while Queen Twilight threatened to kill her unless Dash forced herself onto Pinkie Pie. Fluttershy feels so guilt-stricken about this that she attempts suicide. However, she eventually subverts this by proving to be a critical part of the team.
- Played for Drama in Accidental Companions: The rest of Team Seven sees — and treats — Naruto as one, leaving him convinced that he really is nothing more than a burden who only manages to make things worse for the rest of the group.
- A Father's Wrath: Danzo becomes one during the Fourth Shinobi War, complaining about their participation and insisting that they should drop out and let Orochimaru and countless others die. He even sabotages their own supply lines by refusing to send valuable aid to where Kabuto is stationed, leading to that front being lost and a lot of deaths.
- Son of the Sannin: While Danzo Shimura had some shades of this canonically, he much more actively works against the better interests of Konoha here, especially during Shippuden. Case in point: he willingly leaks Konoha's intel to Akatsuki, ensuring the failure of several critical missions to try and protect the various hosts of the Tailed Beasts before they're captured. When confronted about this, he declares that he intended on letting Akatsuki extract all the Tailed Beasts, then wipe them out and seize control of all of them in Konoha's name. Eventually, it's revealed that he was actually brainwashed by Obito.
- Rosario Vampire: Brightest Darkness Act VI has one in the form of Arial Kuyumaya. While she does help Moka and the gang escape from captivity in the HDA, due to her stubborn obsession with Dark, as well as the yandere tendencies that come with said obsession, the group openly state on more than one occasion that Arial has caused nothing but trouble since she met up with them.
- The Lady of Flowers: Joffery manages to bring House Lannister crashing down around his ears when he attempts to rape Sansa, setting into motion a domino chain of disasters that continues well after he gets killed at the Purple Wedding.
- Don't Keep Your Distance: Paint couples this with being The Heart of her group; while a very caring and compassionate girl, she's also grown up sheltered and isolated, and has a bad tendency to make reckless, impulsive decisions. She gradually starts getting better about this, especially after all of her friends call her out for freeing a pair of wolves who had imprisoned them and several other youngsters for several weeks simply because she felt sorry for their former captors.
- Candy for Your Thoughts?: Owen intentionally acts as one after being forced to join Heather and Alejandro's team during the volcano challenge, hoping to help Cody's team win by slowing Heather and Alejandro down.
- Total Drama 60 Club turns this into a major strategy during the two-team stage: whenever the outsiders have the advantage of numbers, or even tie with those who are part of an alliance, they flagrantly throw challenges with the intent of teaming up against the alliance members and voting them out.
- Morgan in Total Drama Legacy. In "Here Come The Sons... And Daughters", she doesn't put in any work for her team during the statue-building challenge, and ends up hindering them instead. Is it any wonder that she gets Voted Off the Island first?
- Total Drama: Superstar Showdown: The Hopalong Ralphcakes are loaded with these; the worst of the lot being Arthur, as he's more interested in playing The Gadfly and harassing Trey than putting a single sliver of effort into any of the challenges. He's also got Karven as his sidekick, and the equally obnoxious Pungeon Master Puck.
- Taylor Hebert, Medhall Intern: While Greg means well, his severe social awkwardness and inexperience repeatedly makes things worse for Taylor at Winslow despite him trying to help her. This reaches the point that Ms. Harcourt forces him to work as a janitor. However, over the course of the story he gradually grows out of this, learning from his mistakes and becoming a True Companion for Taylor.
