Upsetting the Balance

So you've finally done the impossible. You've resurrected your loved ones, found a way to live forever, or maybe even reached Godhood.

But guess what? Your actions will come back to haunt you. Because, wouldn't you know it, you just broke a taboo against nature's will. Maybe you stole the Cosmic Keystone that was holding the world together. Perhaps your local god saw your actions as a Rage Against the Heavens, or even caught you making a bargain with his arch-nemesis. You might also have been caught trying to break the rules of Equivalent Exchange, or attempting a Cosmic Retcon that rewrites the rules of the world. Regardless, you will usually be punished for Upsetting The Balance.

The possible punishments can vary greatly, from being Barred from the Afterlife to losing your soul. In some cases, especially mythological cases, the punishment will involve a Karmic Death to match up with the offender's "crime" towards the world's balance. If the god who punishes you is feeling particularly grumpy, they might go even further by causing something similar to an World-Wrecking Wave or an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. They might not care if an innocent civilization is harmed in the process, turning this into The Punishment. If the Balance is vital to the very structure of the universe, disrupting it can even cause the universe to be thrown into chaos and fall apart at its seams, capable of causing an Apocalypse ranging from Class X-4 to outright Z if not restored.

This trope often leads to Horror Hates a Rulebreaker, especially in Gothic Horror works. It is also often the justification of Predation Is Natural - predators killing prey is part of this balance, and hurting the predators to protect the prey disturbs it.

Compare Gaia's Vengeance for upsetting an environmental balance, Balance of Power for upsetting a political balance, and Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu? when defying a more powerful being that isn't necessarily God. Also shouldn't be confused for a Reality-Breaking Paradox, which tends to have even more extreme consequences; you didn't just break the laws of nature there, you broke the universe and reality! Works as a Super-Trope to Balance Between Good and Evil when specifically the conflict between heroes and villains is unbalanced, The Problem with Fighting Death for specifically attempting to cheat death, and Butterfly of Doom when time — as a balance of the cosmos — is altered by time travel (especially if killing Hitler is involved).

Contrast Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu? when attempting to upset the balance and getting away with it.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bleach: Quincies were accused of this trope by the Shinigami due to their method of fighting Hollows not allowing them to move on to the afterlife, but instead totally and completely erasing them from existence. It was feared that these actions would eventually end up upsetting the balance too much and destroy all of existence, resulting in the Shinigami choosing to wipe out every last Quincy they could before this happened.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Anyone who attempts human transmutation will have parts of their bodies, if not all of it, taken away from them. The main protagonists, as well as their teacher, did not get the person they transmuted back, but a poorly constructed corpse. This is because recreating a soul is supposed to be impossible according to Equivalent Exchange.
  • Father was also punished in the finale for absorbing the Gate of Truth to acquire the power of God... only to lose that power as soon as Hohenheim's transmutation circle is activated to reverse Father's transmutation. Without any more souls to sustain him, the Dwarf in the Flask was then pulled back into the Gate that he was summoned from hundreds of years ago.

Comic Books

• Wonder Woman: Warbringer: Amazons are not to bring outsiders to the island, or pass the barrier specifically to interfere with the natural course of death outside it, as Themyscira is a type of afterlife. Diana cannot ignore the cries for help of those on a ship that is sinking right outside the barrier and when she brings the one survivor she was able to rescue ashore on Themyscira the Amazons start falling ill, and violent earthquakes start shaking the island until the outsider is removed.

Films — Animation

• Happily N'Ever After has a magical fairy-tale land monitored by a benign wizard. When this wizard goes on vacation, his two comic underlings are left to maintain the balance between good and evil: it's an actual balance scale with orbs of goodness and wickedness. Jerkass Mambo can't keep his fingers off the thing, which ultimately results in wicked Freida gaining control of story outcomes, shifting them to The Bad Guy Wins. Mambo and Munk have to scramble to Set Right What Once Went Wrong before the wizard gets back.
• In the prologue of Moana, The Trickster demigod Maui steals the legendary Heart of Te Fiti, a Mineral Macguffin that grants Te Fiti—the Physical God who begat all life on Earth—the power of creation. This leads to a slew of horrific events, including the ferocious attacks of the fire demon Te Ka, Maui himself being separated from the source of his powers (a giant fishhook) and stranded for centuries on a small island, and—worst of all—the generation of a slow World-Wrecking Wave that spreads rot and decay to all natural life on the Polynesian Islands (and, it is implied, will continue until the whole world is ruined). As it turns out, this trope was in effect all along: Te Ka is Te Fiti, whose anger and pain at losing her Heart transformed her into the demon and led her to start destroying life instead of creating it. After Moana returns the Heart, Te Fiti is freed from her anger, and she promptly sends out a World-Healing Wave to fix the damage she caused in her rage.

Literature

• N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: Taken to its logical conclusion with the Big Bad of Kingdom of Gods, whose attempt to become a new God would annihilate the universe if it were successful, because Gods are the Cosmic Keystones that define all physical existence.
• Rai Kirah: Fear of this is why the Wardens defeat demons non-lethally whenever possible. They feel something in the universe shift with each demon's death and don't want to learn what would rise in their place if demons were rendered extinct.
• Wayward Children: In the Moors, Arch-Enemy pairs of Monster Lords and Mad Scientists compete, keeping each other in check. When the Master tries to stamp out Doctor Bleak's lineage entirely in Come Tumbling Down, however, it's enough of a threat to the (super)natural order that the Drowned Gods themselves lend their support to Dr. Bleak's surviving apprentice.
• This is a major theme in the tragedies of William Shakespeare. Whenever a rightful ruler is murdered (as in Macbeth or Julius Caesar) or otherwise removed from the throne (as in King Lear, wherein the titular character decides to retire), the entire natural world is dangerously disrupted. All of the plays mentioned above feature characters delivering speeches about the horrific things they've seen—prey devouring predators, terrible weather, the dead rising from their graves, and more—because the human plane isn't the way it should be. There's a bit of Reality Subtext here: Shakespeare was writing during the height of England's monarchy, when people (and especially rulers themselves) believed that kings and queens were appointed by God. Since those monarchs were the ones allowing Shakespeare to write, he naturally had to agree with the idea that they were the embodiment of sanity, order, and law.
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream also features this, albeit more lightly. There's trouble among The Fair Folk: Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of Fairies, are in a marital spat, and as a result, the weather is thrown out of proportion.
• Diane Duane explores this trope heavily in her Young Wizards series. In that universe, Ritual Magic has extremely specific rules, and trying to bend those rules, or reach a power level beyond what you should be able to do, invokes a hefty price that, sooner or later, must be paid.
  • In So You Want to be a Wizard, the first book of the series, main characters Nita and Kit are forced to use what's known as a "blank check" spell to recover a Tome of Eldritch Lore needed to stop the Lone Power's plans. The spell basically asks the Universe to perform a great magical action (in this case, moving an entire creature's lair Just One Second Out of Sync to protect his hoard of treasure), and in exchange, the Universe can ask for repayment of an equal or greater amount, "filling in" the check as it sees fit. We only discover the price demanded in the second book, Deep Wizardry: the Universe fully expects Nita to die in another ritual. The only way she's able to get around it is by transferring her role in that ritual to a willing being; when this creature fulfills her part by dying himself, the Universe considers the ledgers balanced.
  • Book four, A Wizard Abroad, sees the main characters, along with a small army of magic users, going into battle against the Lone Power in Ireland. They enter into the land of The Fair Folk to do so, and Nita discovers that while there, mages' powers are highly amplified; however, to keep the balance, using spells drains their energy and exhausts them much faster than it does in the human world.
• This is a major theme in Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle. Its Functional Magic is rooted in quantum mechanics, with the "Omniwave" representing all possible outcomes of current existence. If something pushes the universe too far in one direction, the Omniwave will act to swing it back on course. And that has enormous implications when the Back Story starts with a World Sundering...
• Villains by Necessity: The forces of Good defeating Evil and banishing it from the world actually upset a cosmic balance. As a result, the world will be "sublimated", and some surviving villains set out to stop it.
• The Scholomance: This one of the basic laws of reality as far as the magical world goes, called the Principle of Balance. If anyone does something that tips the scales too much in one direction, then the universe will engineer some kind of event to tip it back so both sides are more equitable. El initially believes that this is why she was born with so much power and prophecy of doom relating to becoming an Evil Sorceress—both of her parents are paragons of goodness, her father having heroically died to save her mother (who had been pregnant with El at the time) from a maw-mouth during their graduation, and her mother being a Incorruptible Pure Pureness Granola Girl who heals other wizards for free. Therefore, their daughter being destined to be the worst evil wizard society has seen in centuries is par the course. Of course, her theory is later proven to be wrong. While El was indeed born to correct an imbalance, it wasn't one her parents caused.
  • Justified by the balance being the self-contained ecosystem of the Scholomance's Pocket Dimension. Orion has saved over 600 students' lives, meaning the Scholomance has to support more people with less mana, the mals' Food Chain of Evil is starving from the bottom up, and the most powerful mals are getting riled up.
  • As El explains, the Principle of Balance doesn't just account towards good and evil, but anything involving magic that requires a balance. For example, when influence over the magical world tipped too much towards the western enclaves, an extremely talented Chinese artificer was born. Despite being offered spots from all the major enclaves in the world, he instead restored the Shanghai enclave and was made its first Dominus. Forty years later, his enclave is one of the two most influential in the world, to the point that they've been splitting off into creating newer Asian enclaves they can influence to side with them as allies, and can even threaten to make a new school to rival the Scholomance if they don't get a better allocation of seats and classes that favor their children — which is why a Chinese-track had been added to the school in the eighties.
  • The Golden Enclaves reveals that El wasn't born because her parents put too much good in the world, but as a response to Ophelia's crimes against humanity. By slaughtering every student of one year in the Scholomance in order to create Orion, her wizard/maw-mouth hybrid Living Weapon, Ophelia created a terrible imbalance in the universe that needed to be corrected. The universe responded with El, the only wizard powerful enough to eventually stop him when he finally gave in to his hunger, and able to end the injustices that are the maw-mouths. El having the strength to not only kill maw-mouths but do it easily has a more gentle use too, even beyond ending the suffering of those a maw-mouth has devoured—it allows her to create Golden Stone foundations in place of the malia-anchored ones, making her the embodiment of the change in magical society her parents earnestly wished and suffered for.
• In The Quest of the Unaligned, the royal house of Caederan long ago bound themselves to the magic of the land itself, gaining the unique ability to access all four elemental magics. However, this also means that if the royal couple become magically unbalanced, favoring one element over the others, it will destabilize the Balance of magic across the land. At the start of the story, exactly that has happened, with the royal couple's infatuation with wind magic causing natural disasters across Caederan.
• Grounded for All Eternity: Parris tipping the balance between good and evil tears veils between the dimensions and threatens to bring down all of creation.
• The Shadow of Kyoshi: After Yun consumes Father Glowworm and gains his power, he senses that the destruction of a spirit was something deeply wrong to the world.

Live-Action TV

• The revival series of Doctor Who makes it clear that disrupting or changing a "fixed point in time" can have disastrous consequences (from creating a Balancing Death's Books scenario to unraveling all of time). Time Lords inherently know which moments are these fixed points, which the Tenth Doctor describes as a terrible burden.
• Primeval: In the Season 2 premiere, Cutter is convinced that the alternate timeline where Claudia is Ret-Gone came about because the team weren't careful enough about keeping history intact when it came to avoiding killing the creatures and returning them to their native time periods, and throughout the episode he's determined to try and get all the Raptors back through the Anomaly they came from alive, despite how exceptionally dangerous they are, to ensure another alteration doesn't happen. This resolve gone by the next episode however, where Cutter has no problem wiping out dozens of creatures that come from even further back in time.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Lost: Each Changeling Freehold is normally ruled by a rotating group of seasonal monarchs. When the Summer King of Miami staged a coup and declared himself the Freehold's highest power, not only has this destabilized the weather in the region, it's also drawing the attention of the dreaded True Fae.

Theatre

• Tsukino Hyakki Yakou — Shirotenko is a sweet, fluffy four-tailed fox boy who just wants to run into town and play with everyone. The problem? He's also an extremely powerful god — a god of death, to be specific. If he just does what he wants, it could result in this to the point that not only their world, but others, could be destroyed. In some plays, it gets to the point where he can't even speak — though, this is really a convenient reason for him to be silent when he's played by an actor other than his regular actor. He also wears a mask in those productions.

Video Games

• The plot of Azurik: Rise of Perathia revolves around the world of Perathia's balance being disrupted due to the Elemental Discs being stolen and shattered into pieces scattered across the realms. This will result in the End of the World as We Know It unless Azurik finds and restores all the discs before that happens.
• In Diablo III, the Necromancers invoke this. They oppose Diablo and the Prime Evils because the Necromancer believes in a Balance Between Good and Evil, saying that while good should win most of the time, it shouldn't win all of the time. This is because all that lives must die, and all that dies must find a way to assist the living (which the Necromancer refers to as the Great Cycle). But with the Prime Evils around raising the dead and using souls to do their dark work, this balance has been chaotically thrown off, prompting the necromancers into action.
• In Jade Empire, the reason everything has been going so terribly wrong for the country is that its emperor caught and tortured the Water Dragon, a deity who oversees rainfall and the cycle of reincarnation. This is a deep violation of tianxia, not least because it forces ghosts to hang around the mortal world instead of dissipating.
• In Kingdom Hearts III, Sora uses the Power of Waking to restore the hearts of six people over the course of the story. But in the DLC chapter, Re:Mind, it's revealed that this goes against the natural order of things, as he's essentially recreating hearts from nothing. As a result, he'll vanish from existence and lose his ability to use the Power of Waking afterward.
• Balance in a central concept of The Longest Journey, specifically referring to the balance of the two Twin Worlds, Stark (our familiar Earth) and the magic-driven Arcadia, and more generally, between technology native to the former and magic in the latter. The two have coexisted in parallel for twelve thousand years, but in the game a villainous cult attempts to upset that Balance in order to bring about the reunification of the worlds — which they are not ready for and would likely lead to mass extinction in the process. One indication of the cult's schemes is that technological artifacts start seeping into Arcadia, and magical creatures, into Stark, causing unpredictable and dangerous side-effects.
• In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games, each game's Big Bad has this as their plan. Seasons has General Onox capture Din, the titular Oracle, to throw the seasons of Holodrum out of order (the main city of the game changes its time of year every few minutes or so), while Ages has Veran possess Nayru, the Oracle of Ages, to mess with the time stream in Labrynna and cause all manner of trouble in the past and present. Playing a linked game reveals that Onox and Veran were actually just minions of the Big Bad Twinrova, who use the chaos in Holodrum and pain in Labrynna to light the Flames of Destruction and Sorrow, respectively, which are keys in their plot to resurrect Ganon.
  • A more minor example happens in Ages—Link goes to visit Symmetry City, only to discover that it's becoming a flaming wasteland. Turns out that a magical relic called the "Tuni Nut" is required to keep the city in perfect balance; Veran messed with it in the past, leading to the current crisis. Link must go back in time, repair the broken Nut, and restore it to its rightful place to bring Symmetry City back to normal in the present day, which in turn enables him to enter the dungeon found there.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Lucian's use of a Phlebotinum Bomb against the Black Ring is revealed to be the cause of the Voidwoken incursion, as his Deathfog had also killed a vast number of elves living in the area — this weakened their Ethnic God and let the Voidwoken God-King slip through the gap in the Seven Gods' defenses and influence the world directly.

Web Animation

• RWBY:
  • As it turns out, the reason why Remnant is stuck in a Forever War was because Salem asked the Brothers of Light and Darkness to bring her loved one Ozma back from the afterlife. After the Brothers had an argument about what was actually happening, they eventually killed him off again and cursed Salem with Complete Immortality. As long as she doesn't accept the balance between life and death, she can never pass on. Not that she learned her lesson, of course. She then takes this trope further by convincing humanity to attack the Brothers, ruining the relatively healthy relationship between creator and creation. The Brother of Destruction promptly erased humanity and both Brothers left Salem behind for a long time before bringing back humanity in a weaker form.
  • Season 9 adds another layer to the mess. The Brothers themselves are upsetting the balance too. This is because they think balance is something that they need to actively enforce. Their creator the Tree / Blacksmith claims that balance is something that happens naturally on its own — the creator should stay out of it and let their creations figure things out for themselves.
• In Glitchtale, an animated series based off of Undertale, Frisk goes Beyond the Impossible to prevent Sans from getting killed in a Genocide Route. This sets up the rest of the story by causing Chara to come back to life, the SAVE file to corrupt, the RESET button to be unusable, and a checksum in the form of the Bête Noire to be created.

Web Videos

• Squimpus McGrimpus: Parodied in "Animated Cartoon", when the Fazbear Four notice that there are two vacant chairs at the table as they're about to sit down for pizza night. The normally sarcastic Freddy finds himself unable to come up with any snarky quips, which Foxy finds unnerving:
  Fredd:y Y'know, I... don't actually have an answer for that.
  Foxy: Not even a sarcastic one?
  [Beat]
  Foxy: TELL ME TO SHUT UP!
  Freddy: Shut up...
  Foxy: Ah, the balance has been restored!

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: Any Out-of-Character Moment could destroy the universe. When Richard, normally a Bumbling Dad, gets a job as a pizza delivery man in "The Job", chaos ensues— snow in summer, Alien Geometries, and much more. The Wattersons and Lawrence have to get him fired before reality falls apart.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • The balance between the four nations is important to maintain the harmony of world. The expansionist Fire Nation disrupting that balance is part of what causes the spirit world to act up, as demonstrated in several episodes. This is probably best demonstrated when Admiral Zhao manages to kill the Moon Spirit in the Season 1 finale, depriving the water benders of their powers and upsetting the balance of the tide. This ultimately results in the Water Spirit merging with Aang to annihilate the Fire Nation navy until the Moon is resurrected.
  • Balance and harmony play a more central theme in The Legend of Korra, eventually culminating in the conflict between Raava and Vaatu, the spirits of order and chaos respectively. Every 10,000 years, an event known as Harmonic Convergence occurs, and these ancient spirits would have the opportunity to fight for the fate of both the Spirit World and the world of the humans. Had Korra failed to defeat Vaatu, and his human ally Unalaq, they would have rewarded civilization with an era of darkness, effectively throwing "balance" as a concept out the window. The Harmonic Convergence also helps correct another imbalance caused by the Fire Nation by turning random people around the world into air benders — though this doesn't restore the Air Nomad people, it does mean air bending isn't at risk of going extinct.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: The episode "My Fair Mandy" focuses on getting Mandy to smile. While not the first time she smiles, it was in rare doses from mischief or malice. Here, she is made to smile to look cute and reality itself begins to fall apart as a result, which causes the episode's narrator to scream out:
  Sir Raven: You fools! You messed with the natural ORDER!!!
• The Wishfart episode "Cartwheel! Cartwheel! Cartwheel!" has Dez granting Akiko's wish to be alive, but is told by the King of the Underworld that doing so has upset the balance between the living world and the ghost world and will result in The End of the World as We Know It unless Akiko turns back into a ghost or someone else takes her place. Dez eventually volunteers to do the latter, only for Akiko to decide to do the former instead claiming that Dez is too soft to live in the underworld and that she has grown tired of being alive anyway.
• The first season of Jackie Chan Adventures ends with Jackie and Jade successfully destroying the demon Shendu by blowing up his statue form after robbing him of the Twelve Talismans that grant him his powers, including immortality. Instead of celebrating, though, Uncle outright panics and tells them that they've messed up big time—to successfully balance the universe, they had to seal Shendu, not kill him. His absence creates an Evil Power Vacuum, and each subsequent season sees the Chan Clan dealing with a new Big Bad or Big Bad Ensemble that's trying to fill the void (in order: Shendu's own siblings, Uncle's Evil Counterpart Daolon Wong, the Affably Evil Tarakudo, and Drago, Shendu's son from the future who wants to prove himself Eviler than Thou); in Season 5, the good guys actually consider letting Shendu out to push the balance back in their favor (the Powers That Be can apparently only stand one planet-destroying threat at a time). It isn't until the Grand Finale that the group is finally able to seal a fully-powered Shendu, along with Drago, within the void, which fulfills the universe's sense of balance and stops the constant threat of full-scale destruction.

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