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."
— James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion, misattributed to Robert Oppenheimer
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, trying to survive in one of these places is gonna suck.
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 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, New World of Darkness, Old World of Darkness, Sin City, Far Cry, Black Lagoon, Disco Elysium, The Dresden Files, Shin Megami Tensei, NieR, Dragon Age, and A Song of Ice and Fire.
- A comedic Crapsack World is Played for Laughs and is made up of idiots, jerks, Butt Monkeys, Chew Toys 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 Jerkass, or a World Gone Mad. Examples: Borderlands, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, The Good Place, Invader Zim, The Boondocks, Ed, Edd n Eddy, The Simpsons, Family Guy, The Venture Bros., and South Park. Paranoia is not an example of this in the slightest.
- 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, Lobotomy Corporation, the Cthulhu Mythos, and any non-Lovecraft Lite Cosmic Horror Fiction in general.
- A mutable Crapsack World simply starts out as crappy, but a determined protagonist and his 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: 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, and The New Order: Last Days of Europe.
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 a 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
- Music
- Myths & Religion
- Tabletop Games
- Theatre
- 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.
- Peanuts: It's a crapsack universe for you, Charlie Brown.
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 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 turned 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 does erupt in flames. 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.
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.
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 Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, most of the action takes place in Hell, which is full of apathetic evil cynics with some random mayhem thrown in. The living world is not quite as bad, but it's still a very cynical place full of idiots. Heaven is also implied to be anything but ideal. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Everything is NOT awesome...
