Basic Trope: Victory at a catastrophic cost.
- Straight: Bob and his friends manage to stop Emperor Evulz's Evil Plan, but several of his friends die in the attempt, and Evulz manages to escape and will undoubtedly cause problems again in the future.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob and his friends manage to stop Emperor Evulz's evil plans, but all of Bob's friends and family die in the attempt, and Bob himself dies a lonely and miserably slow death as he bleeds out in the mud on a battlefield. And barely a week passes before Emperor Evulz has rebuild his strength and makes another attempt at his Evil Plan.
- Bob and his friends stop Emperor Evulz from taking over the world and causing a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum, and Evulz is Killed Off for Real, but they all die to a man and a big chunk of the continent they are standing on becomes victim to a severe ecological disaster. The generations to come, in the midst of their Mad Max-style hand-to-foot existence, curse the heroes' names alongside Evulz's.
- Downplayed:
- Bob becomes a Hero with Bad Publicity as a result of stopping Emperor Evulz's plan.
- Won the War, Lost the Peace
- Justified:
- It was all part of Emperor Evulz's Xanatos Gambit against Bob.
- The Godzilla Threshold had been crossed.
- Inverted:
- Bob and his friends end up better off after Saving the World.
- Though Bob and his party utterly lost their first fight against Evulz and were forced to flee for their dear lives, they are alive and well nonetheless, and the years of exile gave them an opportunity to build The Alliance of an epic scale and gain tons of personal and combat experience. Evulz, in the meantime, can hardly control the country due to problems with soaring La Résistance and infighting between his generals and warlords. When Evulz finally dies, soon Bob's mates triumphantly come back and resume ruling the realm. In the end, Bob was a Victorious Loser, and their initial defeat a Necessary Fail.
- Subverted: Bob doesn't care about how much it cost, he just cares about winning.
- Double Subverted: ...But he wonders Was It Really Worth It??
- Parodied: Bob manages to catch a mouse that was bothering him, but in the process he completely destroys his house.
- Averted: The victory, if any, is clear-cut and the victors do not lose too much in the process.
- Enforced: The executives hate happy endings, and order the writers to sour the victory.
- Lampshaded: "Well, technically you have won Bob. But what are you gonna do with this victory, now that you have lost everything to have it?"
- Invoked:
- Victory Is Boring
- Emperor Evulz knows from the start that he's not going to win, so he at least tries to screw the heroes over as much as possible before his inevitable defeat.
- Exploited: Every time he meets Bob after this first defeat, Emperor Evulz rubs Bob's "victory" in his face.
- Defied:
- Bob recognizes that a frontal assault would be successful, but at a great cost. Instead, he settles for a siege and a mutually-disadvantageous stalemate so as to get a Victory by Endurance.
- Bob surrenders, at least for the time being, rather than attempting to defeat Emperor Evulz when he knows victory can only come at the expense of his friends or another disaster that he couldn't possibly repair afterwards.
- Discussed:
- "If you're going to lose that much, does it really count as a victory?"
- "Winning is all that matters — we can rebuild afterwards."
- Conversed: "Can't the heroes in this show win without something horrible happening for once?"
- Implied: The story ends immediately after Bob's victory, leaving the audience to figure out what will happen to the heroes.
- Played For Laughs: Bob is oblivious to the consequences of his actions, even though the others keep telling him "it'll go horribly wrong".
- Played For Drama:
- Bob doesn't care at all about the other heroes' deaths, and is thus revealed to be extremely selfish and a megalomaniac.
- Against all odds, Bob won the epic final battle against Emperor Evulz, but at the cost of several close friends and allies. Even though the world is at peace, he is haunted by the loss of those friends and allies, unable to move on or enjoy the peace he helped achieve.
Enjoy your Pyrrhic Victory while you can, before you enjoy paying for all that it cost you.
