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"Pepperland is a tickle of joy on the blue belly of the universe... It must be scratched."
The Blue Meanie, Yellow Submarine

Oh, how beautiful a place is the Sugar Bowl! As are the Ridiculously Cute Critters that live in it. The best part? Even when menaced by Mr. Meanie, nothing bad will ever happen!... Right?

Not quite. A popular subversion and parody of the Sugar Bowl setting and its cutesy residents is to have their pwecious wittle town get faced with some of the most horrific and hilariously realistic of tragedies and disasters, basically breaking hell loose upon their land. Whether it's "Mr. Meanie" going stir crazy, invading armies, wars, firestorms, or other acts of Powers That Be, the residents will suffer for their adorableness with pain and despair.

The inverse of this parody is when the cute critters decide to take the offensive. Whether they're really a gang of Killer Rabbits, or secretly evil and planning to conquer our world, they mean our heroes harm in lovably cute musical numbers.

Yet another inverse is when someone throws a Genesis Effect at the Crapsack World, possibly changing it into anywhere between A World Half Full or even a full blown Sugar Bowl.

It should be noted that this can be played seriously in the case of a Vile Villain, Saccharine Show or Knight of Cerebus making themselves known. In this case, it's not for parody and is instead showing the new villain is not to be taken lightly. Done right, this version is normally downright heartbreaking.

See also Subverted Kids' Show, Superweapon Surprise, Crapsaccharine World, Troubled Backstory Flashback, Dangerously Garish Environment, and Horror Comedy. Vile Villain, Saccharine Show is when the show has a villain that by all rights should cause it, but doesn't... most of the time. Art-Style Dissonance is practically a requirement.

Contrast No Endor Holocaust, where, by all rights, the actions of the main characters should have led to massive destruction and death, but didn't, because The Word of God says so.

Has nothing to do with someone on a destructive sugar rush (though this could conceivably be the outcome) or sugar being used as an accelerant.


Examples

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    Advertising 
  • An infamous animated promo for a 1983 special report entitled “Green Street Reds” for the KGO (San Francisco ABC affiliate) local evening news showed a Soviet SAM shooting Santa Claus and his sleigh out of the sky. This resulted in many angry calls from parents with inconsolable children and the offending clip was quickly pulled. You can watch the clip here.
  • The "Let's All Go to the Lobby" promo parody, Follow the Sun...
  • In an old issue of Nintendo Power, there was a full-page ad for the Nintendo 64 game Battletanx: Global Assault which featured tanks blowing up a world of absolutely-not-Teletubbies-honest.
    • Likewise, TV ads for the game had the so-not-the-Snuggles-fabric-softener-bear chased down and mauled by one of the tanks.
  • The initial advertisement for Super Smash Bros. was Nintendo's mascots kicking the crap out of each other to the tune of "Happy Together".
    Don LaFontaine: "Something's gone wrong in the happy-go-lucky world of Nintendo!"
  • UNICEF:
    • The page picture is part of a campaign in Belgium using The Smurfs to raise awareness of child soldiers in Africa. The full commercial is here. UNICEF had to run the advert late at night to avoid scarring any children for life with it. The words at the end are something to the effect of "Don't let war destroy the world of children."
    • If you're familiar with other UNICEF ads, you probably won't be surprised to hear that they seem to have quite a thing for this trope. In particular, their collaborations with other studios/animators often employ this:
  • This ad for 13eme rue, a French action and thriller network. The statement translates to "This is how we'll do a children's show if we have to do one".

    Anime & Manga 
  • Excel♡Saga has the cute little Puchuus, who are actually violent and imperialistic. When they get injured or killed they shift from cute to plain ol' hideous, resembling Golgo 13. There is also a sudden shift from their tiny, adorable cries of "Puuchuu!" to overly dramatic broken English. "Ow that hurt! You make-a me bleeeeeed!". The protagonists seem to enjoy blowing them up and kicking them around.
  • Hibiki's Magic features extremely cute character designs, some of them very Moe. But the subject matter and overall tone of the series is dark, considering it's a Deconstruction of the magical school genre.
  • Arguably the entire plot of Higurashi: When They Cry.
    • Higurashi's story is a time loop wherein several characters always start out as schoolyard best friends in a sleepy little rural Japanese town called Hinamizawa. Each cycle of the loop starts out sickeningly cutesy - playground hijinks, characters making nonsense noises ("nipaa") and other characters gushing over how adorable it is, and typical melodramatization of the mundane. Baseball and hide-and-seek, in particular, are seen as Serious Business with the former regarded as an epic battle and the latter subjected to a child's idea of in-depth military strategy. An episode or two into the cycle, though, characters begin to die in horrifically violent, painful and gruesome ways and one character - Rika - is conscious of the cycle of reincarnation and the futility of fighting it. If you've seen the South Park Mysterion/"Coon And Friends"/Cthulhu episodes, you get the idea. She's Kenny. Only rather than being played for dark laughs, it's played just plain dark. Then, when everyone you care about has been reduced to ashes, wet meat, or a comatose vegetable, the plot reset button gets hit and it's time to watch them suffer all over again.
  • Made in Abyss appears to be a whimsical Puni Plush adventure story about a girl and her robo-boy and, later, an adorable bunny-person. And that's essentially accurate, but along the way they must cope with ruthless man-eating monsters, and a "curse" built into the abyss with effects ranging from those of the bends to horrific mutations and death. The curse created the bunny-person through unique circumstances; normally it turns people into deformed mutants. The main character manages to escape several encounters with dangerous beasts unscathed, but when her luck inevitably runs out, the aftermath plays out in excruciating detail. She survives, barely, with a massive scar from an attempted amputation.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica, another Magical Girl show, takes this trope to horrific and heartbreaking levels. The fact that those cutesy little magic critter Familiars all want to kill the Magical Girls and any poor Muggle who happens to fall prey to a Witch's Kiss is bad enough, but that is but a scratch on the surface of how disturbing and terrifying the world of Magical Girls really is...
  • This is seen in the latter half of Umi Monogatari, as the formerly tranquil island and ocean begin to be corrupted.
  • The book and film versions of Ringing Bell are kind of like this. Watch the first few minutes/pages and you think it is a sweet little story about a lamb that has to learn on how to be careful in the big world, breathing the idea of Bambi and Lambert the Sheepish Lion. Jump to the second half to realize why the movie instead is often compared to Attack on Titan and Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. Doesn't help that the original book had a beautifully watercolored art style even as it quickly enters darker territory.

    Comic Books 
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): We get a chilling vision of what could have happened to Equestria in the form of what the Changelings do to a peaceful land of cute kitty people they just so happened to land in after "A Canterlot Wedding".
  • The Smurfs once had a Zombie Apocalypse complete with The Virus. Only seen by day. And all the Smurfs get bitten, before the cure is spread by accident. And it has lingering effects even after being cured: Grouchy Smurf, the first infected and the one who stayed under its effects the longest, used to not be grouchy before that. Oh, and it predates Night of the Living Dead (1968) by nine years.note 
  • I Hate Fairyland is about a young girl who wound up stuck in the eponymous Fairyland and sent forth on a quest to unlock her way home... 27 years ago. While she hasn't aged physically, mentally she is now 33 years old and has been driven murderously insane after nearly three decades of failure and now goes around causing all sorts of chaos and carnage.

    Fan Works 
  • The Day of the Barney Trilogy is a story in which Barney the Dinosaur commands his young viewers to kill their parents and any other adults they come across. He then takes over using his armies of hooded, mutant "Loved Ones" and enforces a children-only world by having a ceremony occur whenever a child turns 13-years-old: the boys are decapitated, and the girls are brainwashed, locked into rape camps, and forced to give birth to more half-human "Beloved Ones". The premise is taken entirely seriously, rather than being a parody. In the sequel story, it's revealed that Barney is actually an Eldritch Abomination.
  • In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Days Of Future Smurfed", the Smurf Village is destroyed in an earthquake in Empath's advanced years. The last Smurf in his generation that he sees dying when this happens is his half-brother Brainy. In "The New Shop In The Village", Empath in a dream sees the village in a decayed state after most of the Smurfs and Smurfettes in it have succumbed to doing all sorts of drugs, which was after Empath as its new leader has legalized the use of smurfnip once a new strain has been developed that produces only the high but not the Marijuana Is LSD-type hallucinations.

  • The premise of Fallout: Equestria and its various spinoffs. The post-Littlehorn pre-apocalypse Equestria glimpsed through Memory Orbs and journals also qualifies, as the idyllic fantasy land of Equestria becomes a war-torn, genocidal Orwellian police state.
  • Lost Tales of Fantasia Has various Disney characters getting involved in World War II, and Neverland gets bombed to ashes by the Nazis. Later on, the island where both Brandy & Mr. Whiskers and TaleSpin take place meets the same fate.
  • Unicornicopia being destroyed by Discord in My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic.
  • The MLP:FIM fanfic I Am Going To Save And/Or Destroy Equestria is about a world where Nightmare Moon and Celestia destroyed each other, rather than Celestia sealing her sister away. This causes the Fiends, the majority of whom are G1 villains, to be released from Tartarus, and without alicorns to defeat them, the results are not pretty. The entire Equestrian army is more or less annihilated in six minutes, and one of the interlude chapters features a survivor's story of the end of Baltimare, which plays as a combination of Attack on Titan and Night of the Living Dead (1968).
  • The Smurfette Village's titular location is destroyed by a volcano in the second story, while the Smurf Village itself falls to a Synthetic Plague in the third story, leaving only ten surviving Smurfs who destroy the village with a fire to prevent the disease from spreading.

    Films — Animated 
  • Barbie and the Secret Door: The land of Zinnia is a magical land full of fairies, unicorns, and mermaids, and its entire color palette is very bright and almost like candy. It doesn't stay that way when Malucia drains the entire land of magic.
  • Sausage Party runs a lot on this; In it we see cute, cartoony, living Anthropomorphic Food getting cut, cooked and gruesomely killed.
  • My Little Pony: The Movie (2017): The Storm King immediately conquers Canterlot and enslaves its residents, and plans redecorate to be less cute in order to better fit his brand.
  • Wizards: An evil wizard unleashes his hellish forces on an ugly little hippy-dippy land populated by cutesy elves and fairies. Then there's the big battle scene in which little Rice Krispies mascot look-a-likes get mercilessly slaughtered.
  • Unicorn Wars is a war movie where a nation of militaristic, religious fanatic teddy bears are at war with some Eco terrorist unicorns, the main protagonists are a pair of teddy brothers who got recruited in the army and their company is unwittingly sent on what is implied to be a suicide mission into the unicorn forest, War Is Hell ensues.
  • Watership Down. Played straight, then inverted when you find out what the rabbits are capable of doing to each other.
    Fiver: The field... the field... it's covered with blood!
    Hazel: Blood? Don't be ridiculous... Why don't you go fetch me a cowslip? There's some fine grass over here.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: The Cy-Bugs completely overrun Sugar Rush, forcing an evacuation of all of its residents (except for Vanellope, who is a glitch and cannot physically leave) and almost annihilating their world. Fortunately, after permanently stopping the Cy-Bugs, everything in Sugar Rush is reset by having Princess Vanellope cross the finish line.
  • Yellow Submarine: One of these gets the plot moving. The heroes must resort to The Power of Rock to save Pepperland.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Prince Caspian, being a Darker and Edgier adaptation, takes the book's implied holocaust and dials it up as far as the PG-13 rating will allow - which is, as these things go, surprisingly far. The Narnians are assumed to be extinct, Cair Paravel - last seen as a magnificent fortress, an archetypal noble castle - is now an overgrown ruin littered with the catapult ammunition that destroyed it, a number of the talking animals have gone feral, and a deleted scene has the Pevensies encountering a dryad who's dying beside her cut-down tree. As Trumpkin puts it: "You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember."
  • In Oz the Great and Powerful there's Oz as a whole, and the land of Teacups and porcelain people in particular. Though there are dangers in Oz most of it highly colorful, whimsical and safe, especially those parts under the good witch Glinda's protection. The "apocalypse" comes in from the wicked witch besieging it with flying monkeys; the land of Teacups is shattered and its denizens massacred. Main character China Girl is actually introduced after having had both of her legs broken to bits. The rest of the movie could be seen as an attempt to undo this trope and save Oz.
  • Gremlins runs on this. The setting is a small American town straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting, and the first act feels like a lighthearted family comedy about a father who adopts a magical, cuddly pet for his son. Even when Gizmo gets water spilled on him and spawns several evil mogwai, the film doesn't feel like it's going to be any edgier than, say, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with Stripe and his gang's antics being mostly harmless. Then the evil mogwai get fed after midnight, turn into the titular, genuinely scary-looking gremlins, and wreak havoc on the town, including murdering multiple characters on screen. It's an '80s Amblin family adventure film that suddenly drops its characters into a monster movie (albeit still a Horror Comedy) halfway through, at which point you realize why this is considered one of the films that led a horrified MPAA to create the PG-13 rating.

    Literature 
  • Jag Lever Pappa ("I live, daddy") by Siri Marie Seim Sønstelie describes the Utøya massacre, where on July 22, 2011 a gunman Andreas Breivik killed 69 people on the Norwegian island Utøya, most of them teenagers, and wounded many others. Siri Sønstelie, a survivor, recounts how Utøya seemed a paradise for her before the attack, a carefree place of peace and harmony with a special atmosphere where you had fun and could feel completely safe, and how the attacker turned it into hell.
  • The Looking-Glass Wars depicts Wonderland as a Sugar Bowl with a capital named Wondertropolis and food items called things like "tarty tarts", where imagination makes things real and a beautiful queen rules the land with love. Then the villain, who's big on things like mass graves and execution of prisoners and torture and so on, takes over, and everything goes straight to hell.
  • The fate of the land of the Truffula Trees after the Once-ler and his family take to hacking down all the trees in it in The Lorax, leaving it a nearly deserted polluted mess.
  • Our Dumb Century features the an article about atomic testing in the Pacific Ocean: "US Army Finds Last Place On Earth Untouched By War, Blows It To Hell"
  • Sweet Story is about a cutesy children's-story world descending into carnage, savagery and ultimately the end of all life on the planet. Since the reason for it all is that it's started raining candy instead of water, it is also literally about an apocalypse caused by sugar.
  • Villains by Necessity:
    • Turns out that wickedness and evil are needed in the world, otherwise a cosmos of nothing but virtue and innocence will be wiped out in a great blinding light, essentially this trope.
    • On a smaller scale, the protagonists at one point find a village of Gnifty Gnomes; tiny, disgustingly cute little critters who only want to play games and sing songs. After our villains narrowly escape their proposed party, Blackmail gallantly chops down a tree that crushes their village, wiping them out.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Ik Mik Loreland no one is physically hurt, but all the letters disappear from the main character's colorful homeland, everyone forgets how to read and write, everyone's clothes become plainer, and the place just generally looks like it's been sent back to the dark ages.
  • The first teaser for Scream Queens features a perky college girl blowing a bubble while an obnoxiously catchy teen pop song plays. At first glance, it looks like a promo for Glee (both shows were created by Ryan Murphy)... until the girl is stabbed and the bubble explodes with blood, splattering the screen red.
    • Later promos have two of the show's cast members, Emma Roberts and Keke Palmer, stepping outside of a sorority house and blowing bubbles to the camera... and a demonic face shows up in them before they pop.

    Music 
  • Dirty Paws by Of Monsters and Men recounts a story in a fairy-tale forest which is ravaged by a war between the birds and bees. The titular character Dirty Paws leads a group of ground creatures allied with the birds to defeat the Queen Bee.

    Music Videos 
  • Played for laughs in the music video for Mastodon's Deathbound, a solar eclipse ends up driving the inhabitants of Magicland into a homicidal frenzy and much puppet violence ensues.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Savage Worlds first Plot Point campaign, Evernight starts out as a pretty idyllic Dungeon Crawl Standard Fantasy Setting. And then the monsters that suck out people's innards invade.
  • Fittingly, this is the origin story of the Skaven (Always Chaotic Evil Rat Men) from Warhammer recorded in the Doom of Kavzar. Once Upon a Time there was a city called Kavzar, by all acounts a peaceful and prosperous town, where humans and dwarves lived in harmony. They decided to build a giant tower to thank the gods for their well being, but the tower took too long to build, but thankfully a hooded stranger promised to help them. The stranger was able to complete the tower and put a giant bell to his god. Then he left, and the bell rang thirteen times. The rats of Kavzar started growing in size, eating all of the food and causing a famine. The humans aske the dwarves for food, but the dwarves had the same problem. Then the rats grew to the size of men and started eating the inhabitants of Kavzar. Then the giant rats (dubbed Skaven) wiped out the city's population... and this is the tale of Kavzar.
  • Yu Gi Oh Hidden Arsenal: The Naturia Valley is a small valley full of cutesy living plants and plant-animals, generally isolated from the Forever War of the rest of the setting... until the Shaddolls turn up. They burn the valley to the ground to get at the Naturia Sacred Tree, which contains a Sealed Evil in a Can.

    Video Games 
  • Subverted and Played for Laughs 1213 with the Golden Ticket ending where the world ended because everything turned into sweets and everyone died from diabetes.
  • Agent USA is a kid's edutainment game about stopping a Zombie Apocalypse brought on by a berserk television set.
  • The little known shareware game Blip & Blop: Balls of Steel by defunct software house Loaded Studio is all about this: the titular balls start by killing a village of Smurfs (which, incidentally, killed the "great scientist" Gargamel), then destroy (very) thinly-veiled expies of Care Bears, Snorks, Lemmings and various other videogame and cartoon characters. Which are almost all equally evil and murderous.
  • In Burrito Bison, the Gummies bring this upon themselves by kidnapping Bison to wrestle Jawbreaker. Burrito Bison Revenge shows just how bad he left it once he escaped: the Arena is not pretty.
  • The [adult swim] game Candy Mountain Massacre is the essence of this trope. You go play as a badass character with a gun in a sweets-themed Level Ate land killing everything in sight.
    • The sequel turns things into an out-and-out Crapsaccharine World, with one level having you going through what is in all intents and purposes a torture chamber on your way to off the Big Bad.
  • Diablo III has Whimsyshire, a bright and happy land filled with teddy bears, flowers and unicorns that are all trying to kill you, and which explode with comical gouts of blood upon their demise.
  • Dino Run. Cutesy, sometimes hat-wearing pixel dinosaurs, colorful 8-bit Ghibli Hills... and the premise of the game is that all this is about to be destroyed.
  • The end of Doshin the Giant: The final monument is the Tower of Babel, which blocks out the sun. Since Doshin is an embodiments of the sun, that's bad news. Barudo Island begins to collapse, and the villagers flee in terror while Sudoru ponders the nature of life and death. Doshin holds up the tower to let them escape, but since we've never seen any other land mass, we never see anyone actually get to safety, and it's possible for Doshin to walk off the edge of the world, the only conclusion is that everyone drowns. Finally, with the island sunk beneath the waves, Doshin collapses and becomes a new island.
  • Both main games in the Drawn to Life revolve around slowly undoing one of these. An unpreventable one happens in the second game's Bittersweet Ending.
  • Epic Mickey takes place in a slightly-less-cheerful version of Disneyland that has been made even less cheerful after being ravaged by a flood of corruptive paint thinner.
  • Equestria at War, a Hearts of Iron IV mod in keeping with the grand tradition of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Dark Fics, is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a Roman à Clef of World War II in Equestria, with violence and war crimes aplenty. As dark as Friendship is Magic itself occasionally gets, this take on the lore goes that much further.
  • The happy, pious, God-loving populace in Grandia II is the first stop for the apocalypse. When we first visit it everybody is smiling, thanking the lord and hugging miniature sheep while the most upbeat music in the world plays; when we revisit death and slaughter greets us and shortly after that the land is covered by oozing darkness.
  • Hello Kitty Roller Rescue has evil aliens invading Earth with the intention of turning everyone on the planet into a cube, complete with a Downer Ending if you fail to defeat the final boss.
  • The Kirby series is mostly set in the peaceful kingdom of Dream Land on the planet Pop Star, filled with painfully cute little creatures. This sleepy little Sugar Bowl is menaced on a seemingly regular basis by beings ranging from a nightmare demon out to torment the population with horrible, painful dreams to eldritch entities of pure darkness that possess and corrupt all they touch. There's a reason Kirby has a reputation for facing jarringly nasty villains.
    • Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards opens with Dark Matter taking over Ripple Star, a place so saccharine that the planet itself is shaped like a love heart with a smiley face.
    • Kirby: Planet Robobot stands out for having the effects of the Sugar Apocalypse be prevalent throughout the entire game. No matter where you look, every part of Dream Land has been mechanized and industrialized by the Haltmann Works Company, with even poor Whispy Woods being transformed into a rampaging, smoke-belching mechanical beast.
  • Lollipop Chainsaw is either this or the inversion of this: it's a Zombie Apocalypse where the protagonist is a hyper-cheerful, bubbly cheerleader whose attacks create rainbows and sparkles.
  • Several levels in LEGO Dimensions have this taking place at some point or another:
  • Many of the RPG spinoffs in the Super Mario Bros. franchise have made use of this:
    "Then we could get rid of all wishes, and create a world filled with...WEAPONS!!!"
    • One of the most disturbing moments in Super Paper Mario is when you arrive at Sammer's Kingdom just before the world is wiped out. You try to retrieve the MacGuffin in order to stop it... but you can't make it in time and barely escape. When you return, all that's left is an endless white void.
  • The Maw: Your world is a brightly-colored land full of cutesy, silly critters. You're going to eat them all.
  • Mother 3 opens with a bright and cheery forest being set ablaze and the woodland creatures being transformed into bizarre monstrosities, and it only gets worse from there.
  • The whole idea behind Naughty Bear is playing the role of a serial killer amongst a group of teddy bears.
  • Peggle Extreme is a promotional crossover puzzle game whose Excuse Plot involves creatures from Half-Life 2 attacking the peaceful Peggle universe.
  • One of the core aspects of Playstation All Stars Battle Royale is the Demographic-Dissonant Crossover between cuter franchises with more mature ones; the stages represent this with events such as a MAWLR terrorizing Parappa Town or a Desperado RAY tearing up Franzea. Other stages feature a bizarre inversion in which the cutesy universes are the ones doing the invading, such as Hades getting swarmed by an army of Patapon or Specter interrupting a battle between the Helghan and the ISA. Such Mood Whiplash is stated by Word of God to be, partially, the point of the game.
  • In Raze's Hell, you play an alien who goes on a violent Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Kewletts, a band of adorable aliens who want to destroy anything that isn't as cute as they are.
  • Soma Spirits: The World of Joy seems like a happy world while the World of Sorrow is dreary in a comical way, with both worlds being populated by cute anthropomorphic beings. All routes end up being a battle to save one or both worlds from destruction, and two of these routes end with one of these worlds destroyed by Absolution.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog series is no stranger to apocalyptic scenarios, but Sonic Forces is the first to cross into this territory by featuring a city with an Amazing Technicolor Population of Funny Animals that gets mercilessly decimated by Dr. Eggman's robots and, particularly, his new Dragon, Infinite. Infinite's presence makes this a Zigzagged Trope, since while he himself is also a Funny Animal, he is a threatening, menacing character with immense power who's a lot crueler and more violent than the other Funny Animal characters in the Sonic series, even the antiheroes like Shadow or Rouge.
  • Dragon Quest Builders takes place in a version of Alefgard rendered in blocky voxels ala Minecraft, which has been utterly devastated by the Dragonlord.
  • The player's job in Thwaite is to prevent this from happening to a village.
  • Spore Galactic Adventures has two missions made by the cast of Robot Chicken.
    • One of them, "Litterbox Gulch" is a battle between a variety of adorable creatures and bears. The Cute Creatures inhabit a cutesy land and the bears inhabit a disgusting one filled with lakes of what appears to be poop.
    • Another one, entitled "That's My Lunch", is about a little girl named Suzy Woozy leading her pets to a place called "Hugz Valley". On the way, you encounter two monsters called "Blood Beasts", who make you lure Suzy away from her pets so they can lure in a pet to eat. After you have helped them kill them all, Suzy says "Death, Murdah, Scweams of the Dyin'! Bwifday Parties are best when they're paid for in souls!" And reveals to you that the Blood Beasts have killed her pets every year and she simply buys new ones.
    • Many fan-created adventures consist of cute creatures fighting evil creatures, or the other way around. The "Creepy and Cute" parts pack almost encouraged this. Due to the game's cartoony nature, almost all of the violence can be considered this.
  • The World of Light story mode for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a downplayed example: It opens with the Big Bad obliterating the worlds of just about every Nintendo franchise in existence (and quite a few others), leaving nothing but the spirits of their inhabitants, but the most we see of this is a quick Astronomic Zoom as light engulfs the entire universe. So while cutesy worlds like Dream Land and Yoshi's Island do indeed get destroyed, we don't really get to see it happen.
  • The Genocide or "No Mercy" route in Undertale essentially has you causing this by completely emptying the Underground of all its quirky and colorful inhabitants one by one. If you actually manage to do so (a difficult task for both gameplay-related and emotional reasons), your reward is a chilling "The Reason You Suck" Speech from the Fallen Child to you, the player, followed by the Fallen Child killing the game itself (the Steam version even has the game automatically close after this). If you try to play the game again, all you'll see is a featureless void...but wait a few minutes, and the Fallen Child will offer to restore everything and let you play all over again, in exchange for your SOUL.
  • In the WildStar mission "Shiphand: Space Madness," inhaling too much of a hallucinogenic gas will turn the research station into this, with bright green interiors and rainbows, deer in party hats, and angry sentient lamps trying to kill you.
  • This is basically the premise of Purrfect Apawcalypse, a game series set in a world full of adorable cat and dog creatures with sunny personalities... who are being killed off in gory and brutal ways by other cats and dogs with decidedly less sunny personalities.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • People in the Candy Kingdom on Adventure Time explode when they're scared. So Princess Bubblegum has to resurrect the dead. This results in zombies. So she has a huge slumber party with everyone, with Finn guarding the castle, and he can't tell anyone about the zombies. It's actually a subversion.
    • The Cute King and his army of Cuties accidentally do this to themselves. They always fall apart or explode if they work themselves too much.
  • Drawn Together:
    • The Strawberry Shortcake parody people launch a genocidal campaign of dehumanization and consumption of the Sockbat race.
    • The Smurf village is destroyed by a lawnmower.
    • Clara (tricked by Spanky) lures in cute forest animals so they could get eaten. She is horrified after finding out.
  • There's an episode of The Fairly Oddparents involving "the Gigglepies", which are adorable, cuddly, rhyming puffballs of cuteness. Underneath that however, they're actually evil, and their main goal is to sell like there's no tomorrow. First, the Gigglepies take over a world by subjugating the populace to their cuteness. Second, they suck their customers dry of their freedom. Finally, when the planet is sucked dry, the Gigglepies blow up the planet and move on to the next. They are said to taste like manure, which is how the Yugopotamians, who hate anything cute or sweet, beat them: Yugopotamians find manure delicious.
  • "Five Fat Sausages" is a disturbing take on the nursery rhyme about apparently sentient sausages slowly burning to death in a heated pan.
  • Gravity Falls, a sleepy, eccentric town populated by kooky and (for the most part) well-intentioned citizens…destined to be the site of the apocalypse. The darkness begins to set in at the beginning of Season 2, cumulating in Wham Episode "Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future", which ends with the sky opening up and demons pouring out.
    • "Weirdmageddon Part 2: Escape From Reality", the second part of the show's finale. Bill traps Mabel in a world of all the things she likes, which makes it sickeningly bright and cutesy with the same 80s song looping over and over. When Mabel agrees to go back to the real world, it transforms into a hellscape worthy of Bill.
  • Jimmy Two-Shoes: The Unicorn Omnicidal Maniac Twinkles the Terrible causes planets to explode in a cloud of pink dust, which settles in a heart-shape.
  • Littlest Pet Shop (2012): In the second part of the pilot episode, we get an Imagine Spot with the pets running in a flower field into Littlest Pet Shop. Then it turns out "Mrs. Twombly" was actually the Biskits in disguise, and the Largest Ever Pet Shop takes over Littlest Pet Shop.
  • In the Muppet Babies (1984) episode "Fozzie's Family Tree", Gonzo's Troubled Backstory Flashback, parodying the origin story of Superman, depicts his homeworld of Crouton "becoming normal", which begins with the Weirdos' space-age Bizarrchitecture buildings progressively transforming into Earth-style high-rise boxes, and ends with the planet itself transforming into a giant 8-ball after the infant Gonzo's parents send him away.
  • My Little Pony: Some animated incarnations of the franchise are not immune to attempts of destruction upon lands filled with pastel-colored little horses.
  • Rainbow Brite: Inverted in The Beginning of Rainbow Land when you find out that Rainbow Land was originally a lifeless wasteland. Rainbow’s goal is to turn it into a better world.
  • Robot Chicken — Uses the trope to exhaustion. Serial-killing Smurfs, genocidal Care Bears, bitter Strawberry Shortcake, etc. And the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the form of My Little Pony.
    Death Pony: "And I am Death Pony!"
    Mother: "Oh, how sad! The poor thing can't hear."
    Son: "No, mom. I think he said—"
    Death Pony: "Raaaaarrrrgh!"
    Jon Corzine: Hello, I'm New Jersey's governor Jon Corzine. I hope you've enjoyed this re-enactment of our state's proud history. The Garden State. Come get in on some of this rainbow!
  • Scared Shrekless: Duloc was already a Crapsaccharine World at best in the original film, but the Scared Shrekless special revisits it after everyone's cleared out and it's a run-down, creepy mess. To underline the point, that Lyrical Dissonance singing booth is now openly threatening.
  • South Park
    • The three-parter, "Imaginationland", in which the land of good thoughts is being slaughtered by the land of bad thoughts.
    • This also cued the return of the Woodland Critters that Cartman had thought up. They're a level of nasty so bad that even Jason didn't want to meet the person that imagined them!
    • "Woodland Critter Christmas". The sickeningly cute, (yet devil-worshiping) Woodland Critters are subject to a Sugar Apocalypse. To be fair, they DID deserve it.
    • In "Dances with Smurfs", the Smurf village is destroyed by bulldozers. It wouldn't have been so funny if UNICEF had not already been there.
    • The Amazon is commonly a victim of the Sugar Apocalypse in Green Aesops. To prevent this, the kids are forced by their parents to join a choir to travel to the Amazon. The choir is even more sugary. By the end of the episode, nature abhors a vegan, and they all want to destroy the Amazon.
  • Strawberry Shortcake's world has been targeted with this in parodies (see above), but years before those the first of the 1980s animated specials actually played the trope straight. In The World of Strawberry Shortcake, the Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak manages to magically flood the valley of Strawberryland by tricking the kids into using a never-runs-dry watering can that only he can stop, and once they've given him what he wants (all of its strawberries) and the waters recede, it's reduced to a muddy wallow. It isn't even restored to its Sugar Bowl self until the next special.
  • In Trollz, this happened in the backstory, with the old Trollzopolis being destroyed by Simon, as well as a lot of their magic being corrupted and taken. The world almost bit it, too.
  • The Wander over Yonder episode "The Greatest" opens with a race of Ridiculously Cute Critters called Binglebops in the middle of their sickeningly cutesy Bingleberry Festival when Lord Hater shows up and ruthlessly conquers their home planet Bingleborp. And by the final episode of second season of the series, the Big Bad Lord Dominator has destroyed all the colorful planets in the galaxy seen in the series except for one, leaving them completely devoid of life. Guess which is the one planet left?

    Other 
  • This series of art pieces showing the Sylvanian Families being invaded by MICE-IS terrorists, which was forbidden from being displayed at London Mall Galleries' Freedom of Speech exhibition in 2015 for "potentially inflammatory content".
  • The internet meme about an amusement park named "Glaggleland" has one always impending, courtesy of the vile smiley-like beast named Enphoso. While at first it seems like the park deserves it due to its mysteriously obvious Happiness Is Mandatory appearance, it really turns out to be a case of Sheep in Sheep's Clothing as Glaggleland is presented as really being just a wacky and zany theme park without ulterior motives if a little off putting.

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