Crapsack World (original) (raw)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrapsackWorld
And this line is only for the jaywalkers...
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears it is true."
A Crapsack World is a horrible setting where the jaded notion of "anything that can go wrong will go horribly, horribly wrong" almost always applies, and it corrupts its inhabitants into perpetuating that nastiness against each other. More succinctly, life in one of these places sucks.
Although there are countless ways Crapsack Worlds can be depicted (often with Scenery Gorn), it is usually dark, and on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, so it will have either Grey-and-Gray Morality or Black-and-Gray Morality, if not outright Evil Versus Evil in the worst of cases (beware of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring and the Eight Deadly Words if you decide to go this route though). Settings like these are not kind at all to idealists, who usually get traumatized and/or die horribly when their attempts to change the world through idealism meet tragic ends.
Heroes in this setting are usually Anti Heroes, and often have at least a bit of the Deadpan Snarker about them. Being good will suck, and if there are genuinely good heroes in this setting, expect them to be Knights In Sour Armor and/or Stepford Smilers—more idealistic heroes such as the Knight in Shining Armor tend to not last long in this kind of setting. Any victories they manage to win over the forces of this world are likely to be Pyrrhic in nature.
Villains tend to run the gamut from sympathetic Anti Villains (on any level of the Sliding Scale of Anti-Villains) right down to the most horrific monsters to grace any kind of media. Truly awful villains are especially common in these kinds of settings, both to represent the misery of the setting in general and to give the Anti-Hero someone to whom he can look good in comparison. In truly extreme cases, even the most popular or powerful of these monsters suffer just as badly as everyone else. And Anyone Can Die.
From here, these worlds can be depicted by authors in various ways, whether it would be dramatic or comedic, immutable or mutable. Though most of the time immutable equals dramatic, it is possible to see combinations between these categories:
- A dramatic Crapsack World has plenty of angst to go around, and often makes Woobies out of its sympathetic cast, particularly the protagonist, as they suffer horribly in their attempts to do the right thing or pursue their dreams. Expect characters who do the right thing to suffer for it. Expect characters who do the wrong thing to prosper... and then suffer. Examples: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Chronicles of Darkness, Old World of Darkness, Sin City, Far Cry, Black Lagoon, Disco Elysium, The Dresden Files, Shin Megami Tensei, NieR, Dragon Age, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077, Supernatural, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Elden Ring, Fear & Hunger and The Secret World.
- A comedic Crapsack World is Played for Laughs and is made up of idiots, jerks, Butt Monkeys, and the occasional Only Sane Man, with plenty of Comedic Sociopathy to go around. The "upside" is that it's usually parodic and funny in its extremes. Though people die left and right, it likely has Negative Continuity to facilitate the inhabitants' suffering. Black comedies and Sadist shows are often set here. May be a Crapsaccharine World, a World of Dumbass, a World of Jerkass, or a World Gone Mad. Examples: Borderlands, Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Team Fortress 2, The Good Place, Invader Zim, The Boondocks, Rocko's Modern Life, Ren & Stimpy, Ed, Edd n Eddy, The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Rick and Morty, The Venture Brothers, Prez (2015), Class of '09, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the Nick Verse. Paranoia is not an example of this trope.
- An immutable Crapsack World has agony Inherent in the System, both physically and metaphysically, and cannot be saved or made a better place. Trying to break The Corruption will instead always result in it winning, often breaking every bone in your body in the process, and any positive changes that you try to make will ultimately be torn down and revealed to be All for Nothing — or, even worse, they will only succeed in making things even worse for you and the people that you were trying to help, and/or even accomplish whatever the villains wanted in the first place. Examples: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451, Warhammer 40,000, Xeelee Sequence, Dead Space, Berserk, Dark Souls, Drakengard, Devilman, LISA, SCP Foundation, the Project Moonverse, the Cthulhu Mythos, most Black Mirror settings, and any non-Lovecraft Lite Cosmic Horror Stories in general.
- A mutable Crapsack World simply starts out as crappy, but a determined protagonist and their True Companions, be they the Knight In Shining (or in many of these cases, Sour) Armor or a simple old PI, can actually cause some, but mostly few, positive changes in the setting. See also A World Half Full. Examples: Attack on Titan, Elysium, Mad Max, V for Vendetta, Waterworld, Fallout, Fist of the North Star, WALL•E, Halo, Half-Life 2, BlazBlue, Samurai Jack, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The New Order: Last Days of Europe, The Owl House, the Hellaverse, the Nasuverse, Metal Gear, Invincible (2021) and Final Fantasy XIV.
This kind of world often occurs After the End. Wretched Hive and City Noir are city-sized versions of the Crapsack World. A Dystopia is a speculative Crapsack World ruled by repressive forces modeled after real-life politics. A Teenage Wasteland is a Crapsack World run by kids. If the Crapsack World's continued misery is caused by supernatural forces, see Dark Fantasy, Hell on Earth or Cosmic Horror Story. A Death World and Mordor are Crapsack Worlds taken to the logical extreme.
If a Sugar Bowl (usually the antithesis of this trope) turns out to be one of these under the surface, then you have yourself a Crapsaccharine World. If the people who live in the Crapsack World don't realise or pretend it isn't a horrible place to be in, it is a False Utopia. A Villain World or Death World is likely to be this, and Bad Future is a Sub-Trope. Someone who just thinks the world they inhabit is this is The Cynic or a Straw Nihilist.
For worlds that are almost literal sacks of crap, see The Dung Ages. See You Would Not Want to Live in Dex for other crapsack environments, and on a less negative note, the World of Badass, which is also likely to have elements of the Crapsack World, to give justification on why kicking ass is very important to survival. Compare World of Jerkass, a world which is only unpleasant because all of the characters are horrible people.
This trope is also known as World Half Empty, for the expression of pessimism being a state of seeing a glass with half the amount of water in it as being "half empty". Also, a half-empty glass means it can only be emptied, and can't be refilled. It represents hopelessness and inevitable doom, fitting this trope perfectly. By definition, contrast A World Half Full.
No Real Life Examples, Please! This is not a subjective trope; this is a metaphysical trope that's clearly defined by the writer, not an opinion by people complaining about the world as a whole (localized places that are very horrible in Real Life should perhaps go to other non-metaphysical tropes instead). Also, do not use this page to complain about worlds you don't like. If you have to say "Some people think" or "Arguably," it doesn't belong here.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games
- Visual Novels
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
Other examples:
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Asian Animation
- Ling Long Incarnation: Oh boy, where to start?
- The land swarming with deadly eldritch horrors and the only remaining haven for humanity left is, seemingly, a cramped flying city, which enforces a strict Fantastic Caste System between those with damaged and undamaged DNA, who all live under the sway of a faith based around the ominously named "Lords of Light and Shadow" led by a very Smug Snake named Charles.
- Due to the limited space, reproduction is entirely controlled, and traditional relationships—i.e., those based on love—are harshly punished, as they're seen as frivolous, especially if its between a Highborn and Lowborn.
- If a child is born with genes considered inferior to those of the Highborn parent, the child is immediately taken from them and sent to the slums, and a Highborn doctor actually providing treatment for a Lowborn is a considered a waste of resources, and thus a crime worthy of imprisonment.
- With scarce resources, teams of hunters must risk searching the wilderness for supplies while under constant threat, and even with the advantages of Power Armor, advanced weaponry and experienced warriors, few return alive.
Comic Strips
- Bloom County, especially towards the end. Of course, the door to Outland is in the worst part of town.
- Almost the whole point of Dilbert. Creator Scott Adams raises the suggestion in The Dilbert Principle in citing his reader mail that this is effectively Truth in Television (except, of course, not television).
- The once-lighthearted Funky Winkerbean seems to be set in one of these nowadays.
- Life in Hell. The title is not an exaggeration.
Films — Animation
- Aachi and Ssipak manages to be this both literally and figuratively. The world's main fuel source seems to be human faeces, and indeed there's a lot of cultural focus on it. While this is not a bad thing - well, sans the Squick, - society is governed by a tyrannical regime, the leader in the movie's events being a sadistic creepy little girl with a huge head with no qualms about killing whoever she wishes (at a point in the movie she happily watches a bunch of men being sentenced to death for "misusing the great anus"). However, most of the problems come from the fact that, to incentivize people to "produce fuel", they are offered popsicle-like "juicybars", which are highly addictive and seemingly the cause of the birth of a group of mutants calling themselves "The Diaper Gang" who commit terrorist acts to obtain the juicybars and planning to take control of the supply as they do so once they get Beauty. As people already commit terrorism to steal the damn things, you get a lot of violence all the time, and seeing as none of the characters in the story are good this pretty much implies a bad place to be.
- Russia and New York are essentially portrayed as this in An American Tail. It's amped up a notch in Fievel Goes West to justify the Mousekwitz family leaving New York to go west.
- The island where the main characters of Bird Boy: The Forgotten Children lives turns into this after the nuclear crisis. Best case scenario? You can live an unhappy life in the town. Worst case scenario? You have to survive trying to find copper to pay for food while dealing with violent, territorial rats in a massive scrapyard where there is no law.
- DC Universe Animated Original Movies:
- Green Lantern: First Flight: Cadmendoh, the planet Hal and Sinestro go to to hunt Cuch, is a planet that alternates between crime-filled Wretched Hive city and garbage dump.
- Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths: In the parallel Earth, the governments are busy appeasing a horde of supervillains who are only waiting for sufficient leverage in order to Take Over the World, and the Justice League has been eliminated save for one member.
- Batman: Under the Red Hood: Gotham City is the Wretched Hive it usually is, with a foul-tempered Black Mask controlling the city's crime and the Joker causing chaos. However, it's made worse than usual by the implication that Batman's crusade will never succeed and nothing will change.
- Green Lantern: Emerald Knights: The entire universe was this in its earliest days, being a lawless wasteland in a state of perpetual warfare. The Green Lantern Corps was founded to fix this.
- Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: At the beginning of the film, Gotham has slowly become this since Batman's original retirement. Crime is out of control. In addition to the normal thieves, rapists and murderers having relatively free reign due to a now impotent police force, the new Mutant gang is murdering men, women and children For the Evulz with the intent to take over the city and impose their own violent, blood-soaked despotic rule. Everyone else lives in fear for their lives. Finally, Bruce can take it no longer and decides that Gotham will get better because he will force it to.
- Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox: In the Flashpoint timeline, Atlantis and Themyscira are at war, with humanity caught in the middle. While some are trying to stop it, the vast majority of humanity have accepted their inevitable demise. It's made abundantly clear that the war will lead to the end of the world, and the only solution is to change the timeline.
- The Despicable Me Franchise's world (which overlaps with Crapsaccharine World) is a world where supervillains and criminals can run rampant, even to the point where they have their own damn yearly convention, and a kid can casually announce in class that he wants to be a supervillain. The government and the police rarely interfere, and the only agency CAPABLE of going against villains (the Anti-Villain League) seems to only interfere AFTER a supervillain steals something important.
- The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: After the DUPLO alien invasion, Bricksburg has been renamed to "Apocalypseburg" and descended into complete anarchy and widespread violence and destruction.
- The Lion King (1994): After overthrowing his brother Mufasa, Scar becomes the dictator of Pride Rock simply for the title, devolving into a Psychopathic Manchild who hates criticism and runs everything with laziness as his unified hunting policies turn it into a barren wasteland. He stubbornly refuses to let the pride move elsewhere out of his own ego, which stops him from realizing his reign was ineffectual. Due to this, he is widely despised by all animals, including his hyena underlings. He holds onto his power only because he petulantly whines "[he's] the king [who] can do whatever [he wants]" when Sarabi compares his reign to Mufasa's. As if that wasn't enough, Pride Rock erupts in flames during the final battle. It's only after Scar is killed by his hyena minions and Simba takes his rightful place as king of Pride Rock that the kingdom transforms back to the Ghibli Hills savanna it previously was.
- ParaNorman: The town is a rundown little suburb, the locals have a low tolerance for any behavior that lies outside the norm, and it of course has a dark secret.
- The Snow Queen (2012) takes place in a world conquered by a totalitarian Snow Queen, who has brought on a new Ice Age, and also banned art.
- WALL•E: The entire Earth centuries earlier had been reduced to a trash-filled hellhole, the human population fleeing when it started to become too difficult to breathe and the "throw legions of trash-compacting robots at the problem" approach failed. By the time of the movie, all the WALL•E units (barring one) have broken down, with the last one continuing to pile up the trash into layers surpassing the skyscrapers, with only a cockroach as a friend. Still, things had improved enough for plant life to be viable.
Music
- "21st Century Schizoid Man" and "Epitaph" from In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson describe a miserable pastiche of the modern world, ruled by corrupt politicans and presumably wartorn, if the line 'innocents raped by napalm fire' is worth going off.
- Macabre likes to play that our world is full of killer and tragedy, this is especially noticeable in their album "Gloom".
- The world around the kitchen set used for the video of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" appears rather devastated, indicating the state of the world that existed from 1989 (the ending point of Billy's list of historical names and events) onward.
- The subject of Black Sabbath's "Wicked World".
- Many Bruce Springsteen songs, such as Youngstown or Born in the U.S.A. deal with this theme.
- This trope is the overlying theme of his 1982 album Nebraska.
- As on his 1995 album The Ghost Of Tom Joad.
- Battery City and The Zones, the setting of My Chemical Romance's post-apocalyptic concept record Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. "The Zones" are basically the dry, scorching hot, desert wasteland California becomes after the tragic events of 2012
- "Hunger City", the setting of the David Bowie Concept Album Diamond Dogs (a work that rose from the ashes of an unrealized musical version of 1984) — after an undescribed catastrophe, what's left of humanity here splits up into decadent, scavenging tribes, bringing on The Apunkalypse.
- Downplayed in Los Lobos- "Hearts Of Stone". The chorus is about how there's too many people with hearts of stone, ice etc, but hearts of gold (i.e, good people) are hard to come by. Also, the first stanza talks about him looking to pick a rose but only finding a bunch of thorns, the implication being even things that are supposed to be good are shitty these days.
- The entire setting of the concept album Deltron 3030 but specifically Turbulence, a song describing the setting in detail.
- Fireaxe’s Food for the Gods depicts life - all life - as a never-ending, brutal struggle. The fate of humanity is to careen from one brutal god or ideology to the next, murdering each other en masse. Ultimately, humanity destroys itself to put an end to it all. After a life in this world, your reward is likely to be eternal torment in hell. The best outcome is for God to destroy the universe and fail to make another one.
- The Evillous Chronicles, while occasionally normal, has quite a lot of these at times.
- The Underworld in Hadestown
- The lyrics to Linkin Park's Forgotten seem to describe this.
- Ludwig Von 88 made several songs on this theme. L.S.D. for Ethiopie is sarcasm about humanitarian aid (Don't feed monkeys with peanuts, send these to Ethiopia). In Oh Lord it is mentioned that starved children in Latin America are being eaten by rats.
- The _Mega Man (Classic)_-inspired songs of The Protomen.
- Act II tells us exactly how the world managed to turn into this.
- Nightwish's "Planet Hell" definitely describes one of these. The chorus even suggests that the only way to escape the suffering of the living world is to cross over to the world of the dead.
- In the song Roses, not by Outkast, but by Nik Kershaw, tells what of happens later after a wasteful society turns the world into this trope later on.
- "Here's To The State Of Mississippi" was a brutal take down by Phil Ochs of the state of Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement: Phil depicted Mississippi as a state where murder was prevalent, the citizens apathetic to the killings, the schools taught hatred, the police was brutal and corrupt, the churches were tolerating injustice, the judiciary was morally compromised and so was the government who had left the U.S. Constitution "drowning in an ocean of decay."
Oh, here's to the land you've torn out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of - The opening lines of Shania Twain’s “Up!” strongly hint at such a world.
- In a humorously ironic subversion of this trope, Scatman John's Scatman's World partially takes place in a Utopian society called... Scatland. You know, like crap.
- "Mad World", by Tears for Fears.
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Happy Birthday" is a song about how you should enjoy the crappy party for the fleeting moments it offers as a distraction to the fact that the world is going straight to hell.
Mythology & Religion
- Aztec Mythology:
- The Aztec afterlife required you to run a big damn gauntlet to get to it, at which point... you spend eternity sitting around inside a pyramid, doing nothing, only even getting to eat on the Day of the Dead. On the plus side, you can read the life stories of everyone else who got there, maybe write your own.
- There are a few Aztec afterlives that are a paradise or at least better, but usually involve dying a violent death or under very specific circumstances. Tlalocan is eternal springtime, but reserved for those who died from drowning, lighting strikes and other things related to the rain god Taloc.
- If you think the afterlife was bad, in life the god who controls the sun is a bloodthirsty, warmongering psychopath. If the Aztecs do not constantly war with other tribes and perform grotesque human sacrifices, he will refuse to let the sun rise and the entire world will freeze. However, it's not spite: he'll starve if he doesn't get the necessary hearts. And according to one version of the relevant origin myth, he sacrificed himself that the people of the earth could live to become a sun god. Sometimes all the gods except the wind sacrificed themselves to fuel the ignition of the sun and have no bodies but the temple statues, and so require much blood to persist and protect.
- The stars in Aztec religion were believed to be scary lady skeletons called the Tzitzimimeh who wanted to eat the sun and could possess humans during eclipses. That tells you all about Aztec mythology, that they saw something baleful even in something beautiful as the stars. Those human sacrifices were, in part, needed to keep the sun god strong enough to fend off the attacks from the moon and stars. And that's before we go into the part where they believed that the earth was a sleeping eldritch abomination that also needs to be fed with sacrifices so that it won't wake up and davour... well... the cosmos.
- The basic idea of the Gnostics was that Earth is a Crapsack World made by a flawed would-be God that trapped humanity in a prison of matter and flesh and tyrannizes over them.
- The Bible:
- From Genesis, we have the Antediluvian World, which was apparently so horrifyingly corrupt and full of evil that God destroyed it completely with the Great Flood. All that was left was Noah, his family, and the animals on the Ark.
The LORD saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the LORD regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened ... The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with lawlessness. When God saw how corrupt the earth was, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on earth... (Genesis 6:5-6, 11-12) - The Book of Ecclesiastes is about Solomon's struggle with his faith. His belief that he lived in a Crapsack World offered him no relief of a heavenly afterlife after death, but mere eternal unconsciousness.
- In general, this trope is zig-zagged in the Bible. While the world pretty often goes into this territory thanks to humanity's sins, God (and therefore good) is nevertheless always stronger in the end, and frequently already devising a plan to get the world out of this state. Those plans are often puzzling to humans and often acts of very tough love, but in the long run, they tend to work out. In short, it never gets worse than A World Half Full in the Bible - everything has a loving creator that wants the universe to be well.
- From Genesis, we have the Antediluvian World, which was apparently so horrifyingly corrupt and full of evil that God destroyed it completely with the Great Flood. All that was left was Noah, his family, and the animals on the Ark.
- In Beti-Pahuin Mythology Engouang Ondo threatened to bring a mob of ghosts back to life. At first they laughed and ask how that’s even a threat. He responded by reminding them of how miserable living is from birth to old age.
- One of the basic tenets of both Buddhism and Jainism is that the Samsara (the universe we live in) is an never-ending cycle of pain. Existence inevitably leads to pain. Pain is caused by desire, which generates karma, which leads to reincarnation, which leads to more desire, and therefore pain and karma... It`s a wonder Buddhism has an image as an optimistic religion in the West.
- Sumerian Mythology:
- Only seems to have one afterlife destination, which is a dusty, barren and empty hall described as sucking immensely.
- The entirety of The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ode to the concept that dying can only result in endless tedium and suffering. Also, the goddess in charge of the place routinely threatens to unleash the angry, bored dead to fuck up the living world if her father, the head honcho god, doesn't agree to her arbitrary whims.
- The pain of whatever killed you in life carries on eternally in the afterlife. Ponder that for a moment. There are ways to improve the general shittiness of the afterlife, however. First and foremost is having lots of children.note And consider the Fridge Horror of that considering that in pre-industrial societies the leading cause of death for women is childbirth... Having few, or no, children will severely increase your suffering in the afterlife. The reason for this is unexplained, but one would assume it is related to the lack of grave offerings or something of that sort. There is also the possibility of being upgraded to godhood upon death (which happened to Gilgamesh himself in one of the Sumerian poems) which will give you a small part of the underworld to reign over and possibly improve.
- Classical Mythology:
- The world is ruled by a pantheon of Jerkass Gods who will utterly screw over mortals (often literally) for the most petty of reasons, or no reason at all. (The Olympian gods deposed the Titans, who were allegedly worse, but we only have the Olympians' word for it.) Oh, and by the way, destiny rules everything and man has no control over his own life. Nice to note that of the five deities in the pantheon that were actually nice or nicer to humans, one was god of the underworld, one was his wife, one was a Titan - who created humanity in the first place (Prometheus), the other had that as her primary character trait, and the last one was the dark goddess of magic, ghosts, and witchcraft, described as living in the Underworld too.
- The ancient Greek word for "safe" translates to English as "free from fear". Their word for "safe" meant that they weren't in danger. It's a negative. To them, the default state of existence was "not safe".
- One thing that cements Greek mythology as it: There is a reason that Hope is one of the things in Pandora's Box. The Greeks didn't have a very high opinion of it, because they thought it deludes people into thinking that they live in a World Half Full, only to crush this belief utterly.
- Many mythologies have one or several deities occupied with creating intricate traps and riddles in order to "test" humans. The only problem is that many to most of these tests could only be passed with mastermind levels of omniscience. Which is to say they are impossible, unless you have the Power of Plot on your side OR you don't actually solve it, but are ridiculously lucky.
- Norse Mythology, in which the world is doomed to end in ice and fire overrun by giants and monsters and the gods themselves will die. The light at the end of the tunnel really IS an oncoming train. Going to Valhalla just means training for the Final Battle of Ragnarok.
Podcasts
- Many of the worlds featured in Twilight Histories are not very pleased places:
- “Cato’s War” sees the horrors of Confederate slavery taken to new heights with the coming of industrialization. Factory slaves must keep working even if injured, and the death of a slave is treated as only a minor inconvenience. Worse, slaves aren’t even allowed to have families, and female slave are often assigned to birthing crates, where they are raped until they’re impregnated. Children as young as five are sent to work in the fields. It is mentioned that slaves account for over seventy percent of the Confederate population.
- “Project Gliese” is set in a world where a supercomputer created an army of robots to wipe-out humanity. Billions have died as a result of the robot war. What few humans remain have long given up hope of winning, and are merely trying to survive another day.
- Paris in “The Paris Event” is described like something out of Dante’s Inferno. The asteroid that would have caused the Tunguska Event instead struck Paris. The force of the strike was comparable to that of a hydrogen bomb. You are sent to investigate the ruined city shortly after the impact.
- “City of Pyramids” takes place in a world where Egypt was the only civilization to survive the Bronze Age collapse. 12,000 years later, Egypt finds itself face a new ice age. There is a strong sense that Egyptian society is on its last leg and about to collapse. There’s mass unemployment, but also mass taxation to pay for the constant construction of new pyramids. Oh, and everyone’s houses are melting due to the constant rain.
- “Deep City” takes place in a Soviet city at the bottom of the ocean. The government not only controls the economy, but also the light and even the air the citizens breathe.
Roleplay
- Present in every game in the Destroy the Godmodder franchise, often a result of the sheer destructive force unleashed by both the Godmodder and players. The various settings of the games range from a crater-filled, bloodstained battlefield to a psychopath glitch-creature's mindscape. No matter where the game takes place, there's always death. Tons of it.
Theatre
- Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto has Cesare Borgia, a 16 year old bishop and illegitimate son of a cardinal, who wants to change the world around him, starting with the church. While the play itself tends towards the shiny visually and musically, it also shows the corruption and decay even in the shiny moments — for example, when Cesare sneaks out in disguise to attend a festival and ends up wanting to correct the crowd about history, or when Cesare looks incredibly stylish defending his Jewish friend against racist bullies and making the bullies look stupid, but he and his friends still know that racism is nearly inescapable in Europe.
- Chicago takes place in a completely corrupt world, where love and decency exist only to be taken advantage of. The only good character is Amos, whom absolutely nobody respects. Of all the women on death row, the only one who is executed is the one who is innocent of the crime she was convicted of. Meanwhile, the corrupt lawyer Billy Flynn uses perjury and other underhanded means to get two unrepentant murderesses out of jail.
- The second Bad Future caused by Albus in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in which Voldemort won the Battle of Hogwarts. Harry is dead, Muggles are tortured for fun at Hogwarts, Voldemort has an official catchphrase and holiday, and perhaps worst of all, Dolores Umbridge is once again headmistress of Hogwarts.
- Jerusalem from Jesus Christ Superstar is usually shown to be a downtrodden city ruled over by the Romans, who are usually depicted as if they have taken quite a few lessons from Those Wacky Nazis or a completely corrupt priesthood that is hellbent on seeing Jesus die. The rest of the people of Jerusalem, as evidenced from scenes in the play including the cleansing of the temple, are pretty wretched, as well.
- Back in the day, The Merchant of Venice, with its shady moneylending and religious prejudice, was simply portraying reality. Modern productions often update the setting to a kind of dystopian Wall Street, play up the prejudice for all it's worth, and make everybody who isn't Shylock as nasty as humanly possible.
- Marat/Sade: Twofold, the depiction of France following The French Revolution in the Charenton inmates' play-within-a-play is violent and bloody, and the inmates in the insane asylum acting out said play are often beaten or mistreated.
- Les Misérables has a whole song, "At the End of the Day", which explains why life in 19th century France is the worst.
- London as depicted in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Then again, at the time it was almost Truth in Television. Sweeney's part of the song "There's No Place Like London" pretty much says it all:
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit,
and the vermin of the world inhabit it,
and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit,
and it goes by the name of London.
At the top of the hole sit a privileged few,
making mock of the vermin in the lower zoo,
turning beauty into filth and greed. I too
have sailed the world and seen its wonders,
for the cruelty of men is as wondrous as Peru.
But there's no place like London! - Urinetown: The Musical. A twenty-year drought has caused a terrible water shortage, making private toilets unthinkable. All restroom activities are done in public toilets controlled by a megacorporation called "Urine Good Company" who charges people to use the amenities to control water consumption. There are harsh laws ensuring that people pay to pee, with lawbreakers sent to a penal colony called "Urinetown", never to return. Turns out that there is no Urinetown, they just throw people off buildings and kill them. And then at the end after the people over throw the corporation and take control of the toilets, just when you think that everything's turning around, the town's limited water supply quickly disappears. As draconian as the UGC's rules were, they kept the people from squandering the limited water supply. So now much of the population dies of thirst. Little Sally: "What kind of musical is this?! The good guys finally take over and then everything starts falling apart?"
- Oz in Wicked isn't quite as bad as in the novel but it's still ruled by a Villain with Good Publicity who lies to half of his citizens and oppresses the other half. The only person who tries to oppose him, Elphaba, is so messed-up and bad at being good that she becomes a terrorist, loses her only friend, turns her lover into a scarecrow in a bungled attempt to save him, and ends up having to fake her own death and flee Oz after accomplishing nothing. However, there's something of a Bittersweet Ending, as Glinda is still there. The problem is, she's now a Stepford Smiler whose previous position entailed only "officially being Good", so she isn't having an easy time transitioning to actually fixing the realm.
Toys
- Acid Rain World is a Hong Kong-based toyline where the setting has is decades into a cyberpunk-styled future, where most countries went mad and gone to total war using nukes. Surprisingly damage to human infrastructure wasn't too bad (so it's not The Road Warrior), unfortunately humanity had to scale up industry to attempt a recovery and all that energy consumption has led to further environmental damage that turned the Earth into a grey-shrouded cold desert world with large inhospitable radioactive/toxic zones. The only upside is that technology continues to progress and all that radiation and chemical stew has mixed to create new minerals with strange potent properties. But one symbol of how bad things are is how developed bionic prostheses became (and continue to improve), because so many people end up with mutated limbs that need to be amputated.
- LEGO BIONICLE was fond of using such settings whenever and wherever possible:
- The first example may be the Metru Nui of the Visorak saga: a once beautiful and colorful urban utopia turned into a monster-infested spider nest, with crumbled buildings and almost perpetual darkness, overseen by an Unholy Matrimony of a Big Bad-The Man Behind the Monsters and his Treacherous queen.
* Thankfully, Metru Nui was rebuilt once the Matoran came back as well as the repossession of the Staff of Artakha. - Xia, Roodaka's home island, is an industrial wasteland. The air is smoggy, vegetation is almost nonexistent, and what vegetation there manages to survive is highly acidic. Even the most potable water on the island is dirty and polluted and every now and then fire rains from the sky. If you want some fresh air, you can climb to the top of the island's tallest mountain. Unfortunately the mountain lives and will try to eat you alive. And if the scenery wasn't bad enough, the locals are also terrible. They live in a sexist and highly rigid cast system with males as second class citizens used only for physical labor. No one has a home, as everyone sleeps at their workstation so they can be forced to manufacture weapons at a moment's notice. Murder and treachery are not only the only way to get ahead on the island, but actively encouraged.
- Voya Nui: a barren wasteland with barely any resources, dangerous animals, and no contact with the outside world. Overrun by a Quirky Miniboss Squad composed of Always Chaotic Evil characters, the Piraka.
* While we're at the Piraka, let's mention their home island of Zakaz: like the above, but every inhabitant is an Always Chaotic Evil loon, and their war never stops. Basically a Wretched Hive. - Bara Magna: Also like Voya Nui, but it's a full-blown desert planet. However, the villains here are far more cunning and skilled than the thuggish Piraka.
- The first example may be the Metru Nui of the Visorak saga: a once beautiful and colorful urban utopia turned into a monster-infested spider nest, with crumbled buildings and almost perpetual darkness, overseen by an Unholy Matrimony of a Big Bad-The Man Behind the Monsters and his Treacherous queen.
- As mentioned in Western Animation, Cybertron, home of the Transformers, is usually a burnt-out husk of its former self due to eons of war. A good number of continuities also have Earth or whatever other Transformer-inhabited worlds caught up in the war turn into one. Often Cybertron was already an unpleasant place for everyday people even before the war started, living under the cruel rule of a hideously corrupt government who usually maintained a Fantastic Caste System of some kind.
Web Animation
- The Annoying Orange: Beyond how mostly everyone is either stupid, a jerk, or a punching bag, you can die horribly at literally any moment.
- In the Colour My Series, there's a long list of forbidden activities on the stick-figure citizens. Among these are pets, plants, running, emotion, color, and smiling. There are huge robots to enforce the laws, too.
- The world of GoAnimate consists of troublemaking kids and teens (sometimes adults) who regularly do various bad actions that can range from minor misdeeds to literal terrorism, thus constantly putting everyone's lives in danger because of it. Their families aren't much better, often grounding the troublemakers for excessively long periods of time, giving them Punishment Days that often put their life on the line, and if they die, they are just revived immediately afterwards to continue the Punishment Day. Sometimes, the troublemakers don't even do much bad at all, and are often unfairly punished for being either baby show characters or are seen as troublemakers. On the other half of the spectrum, people who aren't these things often get away with every bad thing they do, including killing said baby show characters and troublemakers, even if such actions are worse than what the troublemakers do. Worst of all, the society of GoAnimate often celebrates the executions of these people, with their funerals being seen as an opportunity to party and have fun, with anyone opposed to it getting shunned or punished by their families.
- In VivziePop's Hellaverse, most of the action takes place in Hell, which is full of apathetic evil cynics with some random mayhem thrown in, and there's also the annual exterminations from Heaven. The living world is not quite as bad, but it's still a very cynical place full of idiots. Heaven is mostly ran by morally bankrupt Tautological Templars, aside from Emily and Sera. People are always getting killed horribly in passing, but they were probably horrible people anyway. The only rays of light are in the main characters' personal relationships, where they actually have some depth and care about each other, at least deep down.
- The world inhabited by the title characters of Lego Pirate Misadventures is pretty grim for a Lego world. Pirates apparently own at least one city, have an academy dedicated to learning the trade of raping and pillaging, and are ruled by a guild stuffed full of Obstructive Bureaucrats. This city also has a hit TV show called "Torture Time With Mr. Cuddles" where people get tortured to death, and people get gunned down in the street for little to no reason. No one seems terribly bothered by any of this, though. Additionally, a world conquering League of Darkness was able to rise to power with absolutely no one noticing before it was too late, necessitating Gag's Set Right What Once Went Wrong gambit.
- Murder Drones: The series takes place on an exoplanet inhabited by Worker Drones who gained independence after a core collapse wiped out the human populace. The planet has "toxic death storms," but what makes it crapsack is that the Workers are forced into hiding thanks to the titular Murder Drones, vampiric mechanical beasts serving an Evil, Inc.. Horrible deaths are so common that Workers have a nonchalant attitude towards the dead unless they're the ones directly in danger. And then we find out that this universe is plagued by a Mechanical Abomination that is the real power behind the Murder Drones.
- Nomad of Nowhere: Nowhere is a desert, with most of the natural resource wells finally drying up aside from Don Paragon's oasis. Aside from our protagonists, virtually all residents encountered are either greedy and self-interested, or impoverished and desperate. Those of the populace who don't fear or despise magic want to use it for their own ends, making it dangerous for a magic-user like the Nomad to stay in any place for too long. Nowhere is also ruled by a magic-eating tyrant and the "governors" he empowered to conquer the desert quadrants.
- Off the Grid takes place in a desert wasteland, populated by mercenaries, Eldritch Abominations, Humanoid Abominations, and Killer Robots.
- The world of Pico is so fucked up that any vaguely-aged kid can pick up a gun, lay waste to the problem, and be hailed a hero, even if said kid is a Destructive Savior with the demeanor of a '90s Anti-Hero at barely half the age. Now throw in his best friends (usually), a suicidal slut, and a Pyromaniac, and add all the Comedic Sociopathy you can imagine.
- Project Morningstar: The Hegemon is a rapacious plutocracy with an expansionistic, xenocidal policy of Manifest Destiny. Anything and anyone is ruthlessly exploited in any way possible to extract profit, while any form of dissent is rapidly put down with overwhelming force. Billions are trapped by debt, working endlessly to the benefit of their corporate masters with only platitudes and token benefits to distract them from their toil, and billions more are Indentured slaves, treated like livestock and brainwashed into mindless obedience for the remainder of their short, miserable lives.
- Tankmen starts with the war-torn remnants of a city, but what what makes it so crappy is that the warring factions don't even know what they're fighting for, but keep on warring as if it were an average 9-to-5 grind.
- Spooky Month: Aside from the Skid and Pump's neighborhood being ridden with violent criminals and neighborhood bullies, there's a festering anomalous and eldritch influence that's attracted a cult to the town, with implications that there's more going on than simple adventures with the boys. Skid and Pump themselves aren't aware of this however, simply just having fun around town regardless.
- Tales From Scorchwater Valley: The eponymous Valley has become this ever since it was striked by a drought, being ridden with Funny Animals that will resort to anything in order to survive, and in the main cast we have our two prontagonists who have to overcome their physical disabilities in order to fight against any danger that comes to them.
The Other Railway
Rusty searches for a steam engine on the Other Railway, a gloomy, diesel-dominated place that no longer welcomes steam traction.
Alternative Title(s): Sick Sad World, Sad Sack World, World Half Empty
- Crapsaccharine World
- Shadowland
- Dark World
- Diner Brawl
- This Index Means Trouble
- Cyberbullying
- Cloudcuckooland
- Setting Gimmicks
- Crapsaccharine World
- Mirror Universe
- FanficRecs/Warhammer 40,000
- Mr Terrorist
- Cosmic Horror Story
- Philosophy Tropes
- Creating Life Is Bad
- Crapsaccharine World
- The War on Straw
- Cruella to Animals
- Crapsaccharine World
- Horror Tropes
- Creepily Long Arms
- Cape Busters
- Capepunk
- Crapsaccharine World
- Cradle of Loneliness
- Tear Jerker
- Crisis of Faith
- The City Narrows
- You Would Not Want to Live in Dex
- Failed State
- Composite Character
- JustForFun/Tropes of Legend
- Cruel and Unusual Death
- Composite Character
- NlVoorDeLol/Legendarische Tropes
- Cruel and Unusual Death
- Country Matters
- Administrivia/Pothole Magnet
- Deadpan Snarker
- City Noir
- Film Noir
- Den of Iniquity
- Black Comedy
- Absurdism
- Determined Defeatist
- Crapsack Only by Comparison
- NoRealLife/Tropes 0 to C
- Crazy Cat Lady
- Cool Helmet
- ImageSource/Comic Books (A to L)
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul
- James Branch Cabell
- QuoteSource/Creators
- Kenneth Branagh
- Firehouse Dalmatian
- QuoteSource/Literature
- Private Detective
- Late to the Tragedy
- Souls-like RPG
- Player Character
- Crapsaccharine World
- Cyberpunk Tropes
- Crapsack World, Escapist Sanctuary
- Cranial Eruption
- TimeImmemorial/Tropes A to G
- Crash-Into Hello
- Kafka Komedy
- Cynicism Tropes
- Crapsaccharine World
- Crapsack Only by Comparison
- Settings
- Culture Chop Suey
- Cruel and Unusual Death
- TruthInTelevision/V to Z
- Wicked Cultured
- Common Knowledge
- Administrivia/Tropes Needing TRS
- Creepypasta
- Civil War
- Civil Unrest Tropes
- Dystopia
- Cower Power
- Survival Horror
- Crazy-Prepared
- Courtroom Episode
- Plots
- Crash Course Landing