Nice Job Breaking It, Hero/Literature


 * Nakajima Akemi of Digital Devil Story could be a poster boy for this trope.. Sure, he successfully develops the Demon Summoning Program.  To top it all off,   As icing on the breaking cake,
 * In the Anita Blake novel "Blue Moon" the entire plot's problems, involving hostile vampires, necromancers and werewolves stem from Anita SHRIEKING ABUSE at another city's paranoid Master over the phone, and then stomping into his territory with a bunch of very powerful vampires and weres.
 * To be fair, Anita is a bit too hotheaded most of the time. I'm all for womens rights and being equal to men, but she takes it too far, assuming that any act of kindness from a male is derogatory.
 * Happens every book in Harry Potter.
 * In the first book Harry rushes to save the Philosopher's Stone from Voldemort..
 * In the second he rescues a girl and . Thankfully in both cases villains promptly grab massive IdiotBalls and negate the damage.
 * In the third,, but hey, at least live!
 * Goblet of Fire: Harry comes up with the idea of
 * Worst of all in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where Harry's  The upside -- Voldemort being exposed as alive -- pales in comparison to the loss; ironically, since the entire book was about Harry's frustration with not being believed and attempts to make people believe him, only for Harry to not give a damn anymore when he was shown to be right.
 * And, to a lesser extent, in the same book, when they
 * Subverted in the Deathly Hallows. Harry As this was all part of the plan, and Harry suffered no more than a bruise, it all worked out.
 * For errors committed by Voldemort, see Nice Job Fixing It, Villain.
 * In a more subtle example, the majority of the population tends to call the Big Bad by impersonal aliases, like You-Know-Who or The Dark Lord, while Dumbledor calls him by the name and encourages others to follow suit. This backfires in the last book, when Voldemort charms his own name, so that whoever utters it will be stripped of all wards and exposed to his minions.
 * In the SF novel Legacy of Heorot, human colonists on an alien planet manage to eliminate the "grendels", a native, komodo-dragon like species, that threatened their existence. They find out too late that the grendels were the mature (female) form of these tasty (male) "fish" that are just about everywhere. (Think frogs and tadpoles. Only the frogs are a lot bigger. And have big, pointy teeth. And decide that people taste good.) The mature grendels kept the population down through cannibalism. Now that there are no more mature grendels all of the immature grendels start to grow up and undergo metamorphosis, and they're hungry. Even worse, all of them can move almost faster than the eye can see. Guess what they decide to snack on...
 * Nice job breaking the food chain, heroes.
 * This is more or less how the Sword of Truth series moves from one book to another: Resolving the conflict of one book leads directly to the problems in the next, at least in the beginning.
 * The problem is that all of these things are so contrived that by the sixth book it feels like the author intended to end the series last book, but got such a lucrative deal to keep going he had to think up something on the fly to explain the next story. Apart from that, though, they are decent books...
 * Happens not once but twice in the Eoin Colfer novel The Supernaturalist.
 * The titular group are hunting ghost-like creatures that they can see congregating around injured and dying people. They want to destroy them to prevent them from sucking away people's life force.
 * Done several times in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy.
 * First, at the end of the first book when Vin kills the Lord Ruler he warns her that she has no idea what he does for mankind and that she has doomed the world. In the second book, the protagonists discover that the mists that have covered the world for the past thousand years are growing thicker and destroying crops. In addition, the mists are killing a small fraction of the people that go out in them.
 * To stop this, Vin finds the Well of Ascension, which is rumored to have the power to stop the mists. When she finds the well, she releases the power in it as described in the prophecies. Rather than saving the world, this releases the Sealed Evil in a Can. Oh, and the mists are still getting thicker, but that's the least of their problems from this point on.
 * Also, in the backstory, the Lord Ruler, . The end result of this was an ash-covered Mordor landscape where the sun was red and the plants were brown that was the setting for the trilogy.
 * This happens in Warbreaker as well.
 * And it happens in Elantris, too, when Sarene's curiosity leads to King Iadon being deposed. Sanderson really likes this trope.
 * In the backstory of the Wheel of Time series, Lews Therin comes up with a badass plan to re-imprison the Dark One. Unfortunately, something goes terribly wrong, and from then on all male channelers are doomed to go mad, wreak havoc with their immense powers, and then die horribly. The world gets Broken.
 * Though in his defense, it's technically better than it could have been had the Dark One won.
 * This was also his last resort. His original plan involved both men and women going to fight and seal the Dark One, but the women refused in favor of another plan. One which fell further and further out of reach as the war raged on. The women weren't changing their minds, even after several years, so he had no choice but to go with men only. To be fair, it's possible that if the women went as well, they would of gone insane to, but no-one knows for sure.
 * In the final volume of Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy it is revealed that the swords the hero had been trying to bring together to defeat the Big Bad were in fact the only things which would release the Big Bad from his prison. Whoops.
 * In the Star Wars Expanded Universe New Jedi Order series, it is implied (or outright stated, whichever) that Palpatine formed The Empire and ordered the construction of weapons such as the Death Star to prepare for the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong, a species whose sole purpose is taking evil to a level that Palpatine could only dream of, making the original movies a Nice Job Breaking It Trilogy. However, it has also been commented that since The Empire lost to the Rebels, they might not have done as well against the Vong as they would have liked to think.
 * Not only that but the death of Palpatine created a vacuum of power. It caused a fracture of the Empire into multiple smaller dominions led by psychotic warlords, who, to solidify their positions, hold even worse weapons, like the Sun Crusher. It caused Admirals (and the last Grand Admiral) to start ploys to resurrect the Empire, raising the specter of a new round of Clone Wars, a working prototype Death Star, and various Super Star Destroyers. It allowed for a cloned Emperor, if possible even more insane than the original, to unleash Devastators on Coruscant. It allowed for criminal organizations to flourish and get into the superweapon race themselves, like the Hutt's Darksaber. It opened the way for genocidal races to use left-over Imperial ships. The New Republic isn't even stable and threatens to collapse many times.
 * This didn't even take a long time to occur. The Truce At Bakura, which starts right when Return of the Jedi ends, is a perfect example. The Rebels intercept a message for the Imperial fleet at Endor, which had just retreated, about an attack at Bakura. They decide to send reinforcements as a PR boost, which consisted on one antique carrier and a small group of fighters, many of which are on the verge of breaking down. This leads to Bakura being a bloody, drawn out battle. One Imperial Star Destroyer would have ended the battle almost immediately because it would have immediately outclassed the entire alien fleet. On top of that, the alien fleet only attacked because a force sensitive boy on their side felt Palpatine die through the force.
 * In the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Covenant's breaking the Staff of Law in self-defense has only good consequences. Then in the Second Chronicles the act turns out to have enabled continuing and rather imaginative evil and suffering on a massive scale. Cue a lengthy quest to repair the damage.
 * The Last Chronicles seem to be heading down the same path; with Linden Avery pulling Covenant out of the Arc Of Time; an act that apparently awoke The Wyrm At World's End.
 * In the third book of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy, . As such this also counts as an Inferred Holocaust.
 * Ian Irvine, and the conclusion to the Well of Echoes series. The Magnificent Bastard has gained two artifacts of unsurpassed magic power and is taking over the world. Tiaan tries to stop him by destroying the power sources of all magic, thus preventing anybody from using it. Except then it turns out that said artifacts are the only significant exception, and what she actually did was destroy every single source of power that would have given the heroes a chance. Dang.
 * The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie. The whole plot is preventing arms manufacturers from pulling off a terrorist attack in order to jack up prices for their new attack helicopters... that made a lot more sense when I was reading it. But anyway, the last page states flat out that the sales of the very weapon he used to beat them skyrocketed. Awkward.
 * In Sailor on the Seas of Fate, Elric helps the Creature-Doomed-to-Live to die... And inadvertently sets in motion events leading to the end of the world. Oops.
 * In Kevin O'Donnell's novel ORA: CLE, set in a universe where all computers run unprotected operating systems like DOS and all news are shown in Bulletin Board Systems, the news is censored by a viral software implanted by the global Coalition. This is a perfect excuse for a coup by a group of erudites, who then keep the status quo and keep the censors; as the protagonist is an erudite but does not agree with the methods of the new group in power, he arranges to hack the several levels of censor programs, each more seriously defended, until immediately before deactivating the last one, he's warned by the leader of the group in power about not deactivating the last censor. The protagonist does anyway and . Later is discovered that the censor programs
 * In the final arc of Deltora Quest, Leif and friends have to destroy the Four Sisters who are killing their land slowly by singing evil spells. No one hears their songs, as they are so quiet and have been in place for so many hundreds of thousands of years that everyone just thought of their songs as the sound of silence. When they finally manage to kill the last one, . The Shadowlord thought he had them beat there: die slowly or die quickly were the only options..
 * Older Than Feudalism: Examples in The Bible:
 * Adam and Eve manage to achieve this for the entire human race. Having been given the paradise of Eden in which to live they are told that there is one rule: they must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. One talking snake later and... yeah, nice job.
 * Joseph's eleven brothers plotted to kill him out of jealousy. The eldest son, Reuben, suggests that instead of killing him outright they throw him in a pit in the desert and leave him to die. Reuben leaves momentarily and Judah, another one of them, convinces the rest to lift Joseph out of the pit and sell him to slavery instead of letting him die. Then Reuben returns and majorly freaks out - he was trying to save Joseph all along, and planned to return later to the pit and rescue him. Nice job breaking it, Judah.
 * In the regular Animorphs series, Elfangor tends to come across as noble and wonderful, a cross between The Obi-Wan and Always Someone Better, willing to break his people's laws, yes, but only to serve the greater good. In The Andalite Chronicles, however, we see that Visser Three's capture of Alloran is a direct result of Elfangor refusing to kill a mass amount of unhosted Yeerks. This capture also led to Visser Three's eventual promotion. While he originally gained prominence by being the Yeerks' authority on Andalites, his brutish ways and lack of subtlety wouldn't have let him progress much further. Thanks to Elfangor, who opened the door for him to do what no other Yeerk could, Visser One's agenda is the only thing keeping Visser Three from declaring an all-out space war on Earth!
 * To those who see Visser One as a Noble Demon, she might be guilty of this as well. In the Alternate Reality where the kids never found Elfangor and the Yeerks did declare all-out war on Earth, the humans won through sheer numbers.
 * In the original novels of The Ring, the Asakawa delves into the mystery of the Cursed Tape not only because it's a good story, but to save himself, his family, and his friend from the killing curse. In doing so, he chronicles his investigation in the Asakawa Report, which details every little incident of the quest. By the end of Spiral, the second novel, . At least the Cursed Video was contained...
 * Even in the original concept, it is only the protagonist who realizes that the only way to escape is by, as every previous instance stopped at the victim's death. However, by each film adaptation's sequel, the public at large is aware of this method: it doesn't take long for one to realize that this means the Curse will spread like wildfire throughout the world, especially with the advent of new media.
 * Which creates the interesting mental image of Cursed Tape Rickrolls...
 * Four words, not in this order: 'cup','girls','one','two'...just wait until the effect suddenly shows up.
 * In the second book of Beyond The Spiderwick Chronicles, our young heroes succeed in luring the rampaging fire breathing giants into the ocean using a recorded mermaid song. As it turns out though, the giants were awakening so they could fight off an even bigger threat: a group of evil dragons that would be even more destructive.
 * In the third book of The Darksword Trilogy, Joram destroys the capstone of the Well of Life. While it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, the fourth book describes a lot of the unpleasant consequences.
 * In Isaac Asimov's short story The Dead Past, the main character's research into time travel reveals that the government has been conspiring to hide the fact that . Sometimes the government keeps secrets for good reasons, geniuses.
 * Were they or ? Asimov should have written a follow-up detailing how.
 * Asimov didn't write that follow-up, but Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter did, in their novel Light of Other Days.
 * In another Asimov story, The Life And Times Of Multivac, humans chafe under the generally benevolent but definite control of Multivac. One of them
 * Metro 2033' has an extremely cruel version of this. To bottom line it,  Nice job indeed, Artjom.
 * Early in the first Hollows novel Ivy Tamwood is gifted with a wish. Rather than use it selfishly for herself she gives it to a Mia, a banshee who once gave her life altering advice. Banshees in the Hollows are the life draining apex predators of a world already filled with powerful monsters. Through various means Ivy's wish allows Mia to gain a human mate as murderous as she is, deceive people long enough to drain them of life before they can defend themselves and conceive a child more powerful than any banshee before her. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished indeed.
 * In The Company Novels by Kage Baker,
 * In the Ravnica novel Dissension, Grand Arbiter Augustin IV (leader of the Azorius Senate) explains to our heros that House Dimir isn't the reason why the plane/city of Ravnica has had a significant increase in existence-ending disasters: it's because our heros arrested/killed the leader of House Dimir in the first book. Since Ravnica is a world where every Guild and its leader are legally required to exist, even if they are legally required to attempt to kill everyone, arresting/killing the leader of House Dimir had doomed the plane/city to obliteration.
 * However, as the Rogue Cop Agrus Kos points out, that makes the first book into a no-win situation:
 * In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere
 * A recent short story featured an American sniper recruited to test a prototype portable time machine. His mission? Go back some years before the 9/11 attacks and kill Osama Bin Laden. Which he does, only to return to an America suffering a severe depression due to terrorist attacks using nuclear weapons, which he realizes happened because there was no bin Ladin to desire to do something showy, but strategically minor. So he tries again, going back a little further. And again. And again. The end featured him one of Pontius Pilate's dungeons awaiting execution due to a failed attempt on the Roman's life.
 * In Mitchell Scalon's Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy novel Descent of Angels, Lion (with Luther's help) unites Caliban to exterminate its horrific monsters, despite warnings that this might ruin Caliban. In Mike Lee's Fallen Angels, it is revealed that the monsters stemmed from Chaos taint, and so kept the people untainted, since they would avoid the monsters; killing them unleashed the taint.
 * What Liquidon in Stationery Voyagers is convinced he's done to start the Imperial War of Markerterion. In reality, it would've happened with or without him . But by doing that, he convinced Astrabolo to switch from a campaign of conquest to a plan of viral genocide.
 * Codex Alera -- The Vord? The pretty-much the Zerg Horde of Alien Locusts that have almost eaten the entire world, and indeed already have conquered a continent much larger and more populated than Alera itself? It all began with one queen hibernating in an isolated valley until Tavi woke her up. He had no idea what he was doing or what the consequences would be, but that's cold comfort.
 * In War of the Dreaming by John C. Wright, the heroes' derailing the villain's Evil Plan and keeping the MacGuffin away from him result in
 * In The Ask and The Answer by Patrick Ness,
 * Blade of Tyshalle. Full stop. Deliann, nicest guy you'll ever meet, fucks up. Big time.
 * In Perdido Street Station, Isaac collects a staggering variety of winged animals for his study of flight, then gets fed up and releases or destroys all but one large caterpillar, which he feeds some of New Crobuzon's latest psychotropic street drug. It survives and pupates under Isaac's tender loving care ... and then emerges as a mind-devouring, hypnotic moth-monster that eats his roommate's psyche, escapes into the city, and frees others of its kind, which commence chowing down on every sapient mind they can catch. Nice work, Isaac.
 * In the Dale Brown novel Air Battle Force, a Russian attack on a Turkmeni city is averted by destroying the bombers that would have carried it out; however, this spurs the Russian acting president, who was a bomber crewman and sees it as a personal slight, to
 * In Rogue Forces, a Turkish airstrike aimed at a Kurdish separatist recruitment drive kills the husband and children of former Kurdish separatist commando Zilar Azzawi, who retakes her sword in response.
 * The entire story arc of The Midnight Meat Train by Clive Barker. The protagonist
 * In Ted Dekker's Circle Trilogy, the entire plot of the first book involves the protagonist attempting to save two worlds and, consequently, bringing about the disasters (developing a biological weapon in one, letting evil back into the world in the other) he intended to stop. Nice job dooming two whole realities, hero.
 * In Malazan Book of the Fallen, Poliel is revealed to have begun the plague
 * Pretty much the point of R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novel The Pirate King. The heroes lead a rebellion to free a city of the evil wizards that have been ruling it. They succeed, but leave large sections of the city destroyed, a good chunk of the population slaughtered, with a shortage of food and shelter and a long winter approaching.
 * Kitty Norville just wanted to help out a fellow lycanthrope who called in to her radio show. She had no way of knowing that she was actually enabling  Although, she can share that Nice Job with
 * Defied in Rainbow Six. Homer Johnston is ordered not to kill a terrorist who would go on to  because doing so would most likely lead to the other terrorists killing more children before the Rainbow teams can formulate and execute a plan to take them down. Understandably, no one is pleased about this.
 * In The Burning Realm, Kan Konar sets out to avenge the Deathlings by destroying Xoth, home fragment of the Cthons. He succeeds by destroying the Runestone of the fragment that shielded Xoth from sunlight, causing it to move aside, and forcing the nocturnal Cthons to flee their homeland or perish by the sun's rays.
 * In the original Dracula novel, the five male members of the Nakama insist that Mina Harker stay home while they do the dangerous work and frequently talk about what a relief it is that she's safe at home while they're hunting down the vampire because a woman surely couldn't handle it. Dracula deliberately takes advantage of this as an opportunity to bite Mina and metaphorically rape her. Nice job with the chivalrous misogyny, heroes!
 * In the Necroscope series almost every single victory the good guys have end up solving the immediate problem, but creating something far worse for the next book. Eventually they manage to "win" their way to ending the world.
 * At the end of the second book in the Star Shards Trilogy, Dillon . Unfortunately, in the third book, it turns out . That turned out well, didn't it?
 * In The Pendragon Adventure, without naming the millions of times this happens, a notable mention should go to Bobby, who let the Big Bad nearly win, and it's slammed in his face at every opportunity just about until the end of the final battle.
 * In the first book, even though he's specifically told not to mix territories, he does it anyway, and
 * Mixing territories in general usually leads to this.
 * The plot of War and Democide Never Again is that two people go back in time in order to prevent all the worst crimes against humanity committed in the twentieth century from occurring. Technically, they succeed, but  Nice Job Breaking It, Heroes.
 * In A Song of Ice and Fire, Robert Baratheon is determined to make sure that the exiled princess Daenerys does not survive to reclaim the throne with the hordes of Khal Drogo behind her. Drogo has no interest in thrones or the lands across of the sea... until somebody tries to assassinate his wife. Then he vows to sail across the sea, and conquer or destroy all of Westeros. Nice job waking the dragon, Robert.
 * Actually, there are a lot of moments in A Song of Ice and Fire. Two more that have to do with Dany are when she picks a healer for her husband who was raped by her husband's men. This...didn't go so well. And speaking of that healer, she
 * This happens very frequently in The Dresden Files. Perhaps most notable in Ghost Story, where Harry realizes two different ways he's done this.
 * It gets worse. . And it didn't even accomplish his goal.
 * This is what happens in Dark Sun when they kill the Dragon which had been plaguing the world. Turns out he and the Sorcerer Kings had been keeping a greater evil Rajaat imprisoned. Whoops.
 * Played with as Running Gag in Myth Inc. In Action, in which Guido and Nunzio enlist in the army to try to sabotage it from within. Every attempt they make to mess with its efficiency and operations, however, not only turns out to help the army, but gets them involuntarily promoted for their excellent leadership. Nice Job Not Breaking It, Hero!
 * Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers" was set on a planet where human colonists made Hollywood Voodoo work to replace their aging technological weapons. When the planet's natives finally decided to attack the humans, one of the "jinxmen" noticed that dying natives spewed a purple foam. Deciding this foam must be associated in the aliens' minds with death, he used his powers to project the image of purple foam into the minds of a large group of natives. Another jinxman explained, "Then he learned that purple foam means not death--purple foam means fear for the safety of the community, purple foam means desperate rage." So he tried to intimidate them with an effect that turned them into Determinators. Oops.
 * Septimus Heap has several Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moments:
 * Marcia returning to the Castle in Magyk.
 * Jenna bringing Septimus to the Glass in Physik.
 * Beetle's attack on the DoorKeeper in Queste, resulting in them being trapped in the House of Foryx.
 * In Warrior Cats, during the Omen of the Stars arc, Ivypool tries to protect ThunderClan from being invaded by ShadowClan by getting her Clan leader to declare war on them first. However, the entire invasion was made up by the Bigbad Tigerstar so he could weaken both Clans just before a harsh winter set in. Also during the Omen of the Stars arc, Ivypool was spying on the Dark Forest in her dream, about to learn the plans for the final battle, when Dovewing woke her up.
 * Septimus Heap: Simon Heap should really have known better than to set the Things free.
 * Neverend pretty much collapses due to David leaving it for twenty years.
 * Half Upon a Time ends with