Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu

"The Flash: ...You lose. Brainthor: Hardly. Look around you -- the Justice League is completely defeated, and so are you. For all your efforts, you have but inconvenienced me, speck."

- Justice League Unlimited, "Divided We Fall"

Okay, so you've just gotten into a brawl with your local Eldritch Abomination, just after you deliver the Knockout Punch against him. Apparently as a final "screw you," something bad happens to you, or the world you live in, in such a way there is almost no way to solve that problem that will be done without sacrifice.

Congratulations, you just broke your arm punching out Cthulhu.

This trope is called upon as a way of showing the true futility of trying to stop the physical or literal manifestation of an all-powerful being. It really doesn't matter if you have powerful mythical weapons or giant galaxy destroying guns; the physical form of him is irrelevant to his powers to utterly smack you aside with merely a nod. It just can't really be done. Eldritch Abominations such as the namer of the trope himself do not feel much pain from being punched out, since all you did was merely destroy his physical manifestation, and punching him out will only delay your demise as you:


 * 1) Stop him for now; when he wakes up, he is going to be pissed.
 * 2) Find out your punch didn't even graze him.
 * 3) Have a broken arm, so when he wakes up, you will be screwed.
 * 4) Are now possessed or infected with The Virus as a result of touching or killing him, and will eventually become him...
 * 5) Actually do defeat him, but only at the cost of almost everything you were trying to save, up to and including your sanity or your soul.
 * 6) Actually do defeat him, but have drawn the attention of even worse things that want revenge on you.
 * 7) Kill his weak form, then he transforms...
 * 8) Set off his back up plan - can be anything from a child with a water squirter to a bomb to the awakening of a giant demon.
 * 9) Find out that he was the sanest of the bunch; without him, the smaller fry are now beating up one another and the brawl takes out the world since there is no one to lead them. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.

This trope can also extend to normal all-powerful organizations, or an alien race where it is only a temporary victory and the next battle can be for sure a total defeat. For endings related to this trope, either 1) A close call, or 2) all for naught!

Sub-Trope of Pyrrhic Victory. Unlike Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?, this one will happen in a Cosmic Horror Story.

Anime & Manga
"Scirroco: "You may take my life, but I will take your soul!""
 * Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Slow-acting, but inevitable..  Played straight in , averted in another  , and invoked in a third. Arguably, this trope is the driving reason for the plot of Homura's entire story arc.
 * In perhaps a literal example, in Rurouni Kenshin, Sanosuke punches Shishio so hard that he shatters all the bones in his hands. Shishio, however, is barely even temporarily inconvenienced, and answers by punching Sano back, and defeating him instantly.
 * It should be noted that Sanosuke's hand by that point was practically begging to be shattered in its next punch (especially if used with the Futae no Kiwami), after the toll it had suffered in the previous fight.
 * In Princess Mononoke, a giant boar-demon attacks an Emishi village and the protagonist, Ashitaka, is forced to fight and kill him. In the struggle, Ashitaka receives a curse on his right arm, which grants him superhuman strength but will eventually kill him.
 * In Pokémon the First Movie, Ash pulls a Shut UP, Hannibal, and proceeds to try to punch Mewtwo out. It fails, miserably. Then pulls himself off the ground and tries to punch Mewtwo out again.
 * In Zeta Gundam, Camille defeats Scirroco by crashing his waverider into Scirroco's cockpit and crushing his body. With his dying breath, Scirroco mentally attacks Camille and leaves him catatonic.


 * In Slayers Amelia tried to punch out the Physical God Ruby Eye Shabranigdu but broke her arm instead.
 * And of course there's the Dangerous Forbidden Technique Lina often relies on to defeat such demon lords with. Each use risks destroying the universe if executed poorly like when Lina was swallowed up mind, body and soul to fuel it, only returning through a mixture of sheer luck and (in the anime) The Power of Love.
 * Dragonball Z does this roughly every time it turns around. One moment which comes to mind is when Goku uses his Kamehameha at Kaioken x4 in a Beam-O-War against Vegeta, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, and ultimately sends Vegeta flying into the stratosphere. Then Yajirobe gives Goku a light congratulatory slap on the back, and Goku screams in pain due to the Heroic RROD brought about by the Kaioken. Vegeta falls to earth, hurt but not nearly as badly as Goku is, and just transforms...
 * Tien often pulls this trope, over-exerting himself to near death (and in the fight with Nappa, complete death).
 * Arguably the Sailor Moon Manga ends this way. Oddly the characters don't seem to perturbed by the bleak future that awaits them, preferring to enjoy their happy present lives
 * To be fair given how Cosmos's plan to stop Chaos would basically kill the galaxy its understandable that they where alright wit their win.
 * I think this interpretation of how the future will play out is kinda Completely Missing the Point of the entire series. Usagi has been told that there is no third option every single time she faced a new enemy. Every single time, she found a third option anyway. When Chaos rises in the future, she'll just Befriend it or something.
 * Asuka feels the full weight of this trope after defeating the in End of Evangelion. The last shot of her  mecha juxtaposes it with, heralding The End of the World as We Know It.
 * Technically, Shinji Broke His Mind Punching Out 15 Cthulhi.
 * In Bokurano, the dimensional robots are so powerful that conventional militaries stand no chance. You do have Zearth, your own dimension robot which proved to be more powerful than some of them but . Don't want to punch them?
 * This ends up happening to Jaden during his final duel with Yubel in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX;
 * It's not that bad;
 * During the Skypeia arc in One Piece, the Badass Normal Skypeian, Wiper, goes one-on-one with God Eneru. After a tense fight, Wiper manages to kill Eneru by using the Reject Dial, at the cost of severe damage to his own body. Unfortunately for Wiper, Eneru's electric Devil Fruit immediately acts like a Magical Defibrillator, restarting the tyrant's heart. Sorry Wiper, looks like killing him once just isn't enough.
 * Later on, Luffy faces Big Bad . Luffy manages to get some hits in,.
 * The beginning of the HGSS arc of Pokémon Special starts off with Gold . Needless to say, his team is getting their asses kicked, though Gold says that they just have to hold out 'till Silver arrives. How that's going to make a difference is yet to be seen.
 * Taken to the Logical Extreme in Bleach where
 * In Hunter X Hunter, Netero nearly kills the Chimera Ant King Meryem—possibly the most powerful lifeform on the planet at that time -- Later, Gon utterly destroys  In a more literal example,
 * However this is subverted
 * Transformers Cybertron: Destroying Unicron has the side effect of creating an unholy abomination of a black hole that unless stopped using the series' Plot Coupons will annihilate the entire universe, possibly even the multiverse.
 * However this is subverted
 * Transformers Cybertron: Destroying Unicron has the side effect of creating an unholy abomination of a black hole that unless stopped using the series' Plot Coupons will annihilate the entire universe, possibly even the multiverse.

Comic Books

 * Thor managed to slay the Midgard Serpent - a giant dragon among giant dragons - with a massive hammer blow to the head. He was already in constant pain and obliged to wear a full-body armor suit for support due to a curse by the goddess of death, but the death blow literally reduced him to a pulped (yet still living) mass of flesh contained within said armor.
 * Given he was prophesied to die after killing the Midgard Serpent, as per Norse Mythology; this is actually a plus.
 * A more graphic example was when he hit an invulnerable Viking named Herald Jaekelson so hard it nearly tore his hands off.
 * In Fear Itself,
 * The only way for Dr. Strange to beat Shuma-Gorath on his home turf was to tap into the demon's power source. Using Shuma's power started to make him become another Shuma-Gorath though and "killing" Shuma only sped up the process, so Strange had to commit suicide. Luckily someone else was able to save the Doctor, which was good a while later when we learn Shuma hadn't died and reformed his body.
 * In Hellblazer, this is pretty much the only way the only kind of win John Constantine ever pulls off. To get rid of this issue's monster, chances are either someone he loves has to die, or his actions set up an even greater problem to be dealt with at a later date.
 * One Exiles arc features Galactus attacking earth, and for once he's actually at full strength rather than nearly dying from starvation. Eventually team powerhouse Thunderbird manages to break Galactus' skin and insert a device specifically made by that earth's Reed Richards to hurt the creature. Thunderbird is left brain dead from the shockwave though he does manage to get Galactus to flee.
 * At the climax of Marvel Comics' Generation One |Transformers series, Circuit-Breaker, a.k.a. Josie Beller attacked Unicron with all her power, paralyzing him long enough for Optimus Prime to destroy him with the Creation Matrix. Sadly, however, Beller was left catatonic as a result.
 * Played straight litterally in Les Légendaires, where protagonist Jadina attempts to punch the God of Evil Anathos. Anathos stops her attack with one finger, and causes her arm to break in the process. Even worst, he mentionned she is lucky he needed her alive at that point, because otherwise he would have let her kill herself punching him.
 * And before this, Danael already suffered a case of The Virus against Anathos when coming up with a scheme to prevent him from reincarnating into Shimy, only to serve as the host instead of her.

Film

 * In The Astronaut's Wife - a Recycled in Space version of Rosemary's Baby - the heroine.
 * The third film in the series has The Amityville Horror house getting destroyed, though this fails to stop the evil, with it just living on in the form of mundane objects like lamps and clocks salvaged from the rubble, which allows the evil to spread out all over the country and establish "new homes" when people obtain the junk.
 * The 1998 film Fallen is about a demon that can leap from one body to another instantaneously. It ends with
 * Damnatus. All the heroes give their lives to try and stop G'guor, an Eldar spirit accompanying them pulls a Thanatos Gambit, and inquisitor Lessus invokes exterminatus on the planet, but the outro voiceover implies that G'guor will still be back someday.
 * Implied for the inevitable sequel to Avatar;
 * However,
 * And, honestly, do you believe that Cameron would
 * And there is one thing stopping them. The insane amounts of money they need to go back that they may not be able to spend without the unobtanium to fill their wallets.
 * And the obvious fact that attacking the planet on that scale could easily cause irrepairable damage to said unobtanium, making the mission all for naught.
 * No damage would occur to the mineral AT ALL, because.
 * Considering Cameron is planning on filming two more sequels, it's highly likely that the army will step in to help the poor innocent corporation who got kicked out by the evil natives, despite the prohibitive costs of sending a large armed force 4 light-years away (it's mentioned in background material that most of the equipment used by the corporation had to be assembled on location).

Literature

 * In The Silmarillion, when Fingolfin sees all his army defeated, he rides to the very gates of Angband to defy Morgoth himself, inflicting several wounds to him. It doesn't end well. However, he did inflict wounds on Morgoth that would never heal. There's a reason why this is one of the greatest Crowning Moments of Awesome ever.
 * The final battle of the First Age could qualify too, sure the hosts of the Valar have destroyed Morgoth's forces and he's captured and beaten, but the entire continent that everyone not living in Valinor has called home since pretty much the dawn of time ends up so damaged it breaks apart and gets swallowed by the sea. AND even though Morgoth is sealed beyond the Void, it turns out one day he will escape leading to the Dagor Dagorath, the final battle the will destroy everything.
 * Melkor essentially writes suffering and imperfection into fate before the world's creation, and after he becomes Morgoth pours his essence into Middle Earth itself, so that even after his spirit gets banished his presence remains; he is the evil that exists in the world.
 * Two examples occur in The Lord of the Rings. First, Gandalf's famous Heroic Sacrifice, when he killed the Balrog but died from the ordeal. Second, Eowyn actually did break her arm fighting the Witch-King, but that wasn't the worst wound she suffered; just touching the Witch-King is enough to seriously harm you, so when she and Merry stabbed him, their respective weapon arms were hurt and they needed special medicine to recover.
 * Eowyn wound up so deeply comatose she was at first mistaken for dead.
 * One interesting example is from one of H.P. Lovecraft's own short stories. In The Dreams in the Witch House, a fellow manages to stop a servant of said Eldritch Abomination, but is unable to save the child from sacrifice. And even though he manages to stay sane throughout the ordeal, he is later killed by an Eldritch Abomination drilling itself out of his body as punishment, and his friend, seeing this, ends up in a mental institution.
 * This also happens in The Thing on the Doorstep.
 * Even the original Call of Cthulhu had a textbook example of this. When the titular Thing attacks, a sailor rams him with a yacht, forcing him to retreat back to R'lyeh. The problem is, Cthulhu is still very much alive, having reformed soon after getting punched out. As for the sailor, not only does the entire ordeal push him off the deep end, but it's hinted that Cthulhu's cultists kill him soon afterward.
 * Ironically, Cthulhu himself isn't even all that high on the power-scale of Lovecraftian abominations. Yes, he's bigger than a Deep One or Mi-Go, but he's really just a mouthpiece for the real cosmic-caliber deities like Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth.
 * Any kind of victory over Lovecraft's Eldritch Abominations, is, at best, delaying the inevitable.
 * Which is the point of the expansion to the Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) role-playing game, Delta Green. An entire task force, that doesn't officially exist, whose entire duty is to 'delay that inevitable' for another few years, and continually.
 * A literal case in the first book of War of the Dreaming: Peter Waylock attempts to use Thor's hammer against an enemy sorcerer, and ends up breaking both his arms—not good, considering he also can't walk.
 * In The Wheel of Time, the Dragon (no, not that one) took independent action and led a strike force of male channelers in storming Mordor and sealing the hole in the Dark One's prison. (He disregarded the original plan, to include females and use certain absurdly-powerful power-enhancing artifacts, after the forces of evil overran the locations of the access keys to said artifacts and political strife among the channelers resulted in all female Aes Sedai refusing to participate.) Good news: mission accomplished. Bad news: the Dark One subsequently tainted the male half of the One Power, thereafter driving anyone who used it insane and thus causing the Breaking of the World—the face of the world reshaped, billions killed, and the entire utopian society crushed into mythology. Though the society was kind of in the crapper from a decades long war against the forces of darkness anyway, though at least not entirely broken up.
 * In Abhorsen by Garth Nix, the only way to seal the Big Bad would result in
 * In Sabriel, the first book of the series, the titular character's father uses the bell Astarael, which sends anyone who hears it deep into Death, to try to permanently kill the book's undead villain. It doesn't work. It does, however, delay him enough for Sabriel to get away and find a better way of killing him. Which also doesn't work. So she seals him away instead.
 * A frequent Downer Ending in Philip K. Dick short stories. In one case, the Eldritch Abomination in question turns out to be God, and the minor wound the hero received in the encounter ends up being fatal.
 * That would be Faith of our Fathers I assume? In that sense it is seen as a vaguely optimistic outcome, as it's hinted rebellion is impossible, so his minor act of defiance (in literally punching Cthulu in the face) is a victory for the human spirit. After he is 'branded' as a result with a deadly sore, which slowly spreads over his body, he chooses to ignore it and spend his last night making alive love with his girlfriend as an act of humanity, denying Cthulu a moral victory.
 * In a short story by David Brin (which was made into a comic book) a soldier broke the spear by which he ought to have been killed over his knee. The spear belonged to Odin, and his knee didn't really like the treatment.
 * In the Warhammer 40,000 Blood Angels novel Deus Sanguinius, Rafen manages to slay the Eldritch Abomination Malfallax. However,
 * The first arc of the Deathstalker series ends with the protagonist delaying the Recreated long enough for them to be restored to their true forms. However, the stress of doing so leaves him too exhausted to return to his point of origin or even fight effectively. Instead, a man who destroyed countless armies is murdered by a pack of half-mad drug addicts, far from friends and allies. They even took his boots.
 * In Azure Bonds, the red dragon Mist lays down her life to destroy the vile god Moander.
 * Harry Potter:
 * Harry's origin story arguably goes both ways.
 * Voldemort as Cthulhu: Harry survives Voldemort's attack, but both his parents had to die in the process, Voldemort is left alive as a wandering spirit with a big grudge against Harry, and
 * Harry as Cthulhu: Voldemort kills both Harry's parents. But when he tries to kill Harry, who is protected by The Power of Love, his spell backfires, destroying his body and forcing him to wander as a spirit until someone can forge him a new one.
 * In Chamber of Secrets,
 * In Deathly Hallows, Horcruxes, is now a borderline Humanoid Abomination). The reason for this sacrifice is that during his failed attempt on Harry's life, Voldy accidentally transferred a bit of his soul into Harry's body, turning Harry into a Horcrux. This means that as long as Harry is alive, Voldemort can't die either, because a bit of his soul will be tethered to Harry's body. The good news is that the reverse is also true--that due to a complex bit of magic that occurred during Voldy's resurrection, Harry's soul is bound to Voldemort's body, allowing Harry to return to life without the soul fragment in him.. This means that after Neville destroys the final Horcrux, Harry can finally kill Voldemort.]]
 * In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston and Julia
 * In the Chronicles of Prydain book The Black Cauldron, the only way to destroy the eponymous Artifact of Doom is for someone to willingly throw himself/herself into the Cauldron, an act that would kill that person as well.

Live Action TV

 * The seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Scoobies take on . They manage to defeat its army, but only after   Even then,
 * In the season five finale of Supernatural, Sam Winchester deliberately breaks his arm punching out Lucifer when he, after inviting the Devil to possess him,  The upside:   The downside:   The personal kickback is nonexistent.
 * Pretty much the basis of the Wraith conflict in Stargate Atlantis. The tech level of Earth and its allies is enough to hold them off, but there are so many of them each victory is just delaying the inevitable.
 * The first 8 seasons of Stargate SG-1 consist of the Tau'ri and their allies trying to avoid (and sometimes causing) Type 6(ish). As the Tok'ra are fond of saying, lots of warring Goa'uld are preferable to one all-powerful Goa'uld.
 * In season 10, SG-1 manages to "kill" all of the Ori (they're energy beings so "kill" isn't quite the right word), but this doesn't stop their followers from continuing their war on the galaxy.
 * This trope very nearly comes to pass in the Season 4 finale of Angel, when Angel narrowly succeeds in thwarting rogue Power Jasmine's attempt to brainwash the entire human race for its own good by breaking her powers of illusion. While this does weaken her somewhat, it mostly just convinces her that humanity should die instead. Thankfully, Angel's son Connor (who is Jasmine's mortal father) turns up and manages to punch her out for good. Hey, being Cthulhu's dad has its advantages.
 * And the trope then does come to pass, as with her out of the picture, the human race goes from its Jasmine-induced state of perfect understanding and empathy with all other human beings to normal. The crash brings out suicidal and homicidal tendencies in most of the population, including Connor himself. The good guys are forced into a Deal with the Devil for a Reset Button and the Devil in question claims to be dealing with them out of respect for their demonstrated aptitude for inflicting pain and suffering on levels its own minions had failed to match. The messenger of said Devil starts out by congratulating the heroes for "thwarting world peace". Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
 * The series finale features Angel and his gang causing as much damage as they can to Wolfram and Hart, having determined there is no way to take down the Senior Partners themselves. They successfully destroy their agents on the mortal plane and disrupt operations enough to set back the apocalypse significantly. However, the time they purchased for Earth costs them heavily and the Big Bad send an army to make their displeasure known.
 * And the comics show that this results in L.A. being cut off from the rest of the world and plunged literally into Hell. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
 * Are You Afraid of the Dark?: The Tale of the Curious Camera. The protagonists destroy the camera by making it take a picture of a mirror, but the demon possesses a video camera instead. Then they smoke it out of that, only for it to invade the computer.
 * In Pinball Wizard, Ross wins the life-size pinball game, but is doomed to replay it forever.
 * In Super Specs, the attempt to close the portal to the parallel universe results in that universe taking over "our" space and trapping the heroes in a Pocket Dimension.

Music

 * The final act of Fireaxe's epic 4 hour album Food for the Gods centers around the devil leading an army of demons and damned souls and conducting an all-out invasion of Heaven to try and murder God, which culminates in a.

Mythology

 * In Greek Mythology, Sisyphus managed to cheat death by chaining up Thanatos. However, doing so messed up the whole cycle of life and death. So eventually the impulsive Ares frees Thanatos, and Sisyphus was dragged to the underworld. His punishment? Sisyphus must roll a boulder up a steep hill... But it will always roll back down again whenever he's almost at the top, forcing him to perform this pointless task forever.
 * Ragnarok, the end of the world in Norse Mythology, is full of this. The gods kill the giants and monsters, but almost all of them get killed in the process. Odin gets killed by the giant wolf Fenrir, but is avenged by his son Vidar. Thor kills Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent, but dies of the monster's poison. And Loki gets killed by Heimdall, but not before bringing Heimdall down with him.

Tabletop Games

 * In Exalted, the Exalted killed the Primordials. Their Death Curse has led to two apocalypses so far and counting.
 * Also, She Who Lives In Her Name's last act before being sealed away was to Ret-Gone vast swathes of Creation into nothingness. According to accounts by The Fair Folk, who witnessed the whole sequence of events from outside creation, even the splendor of the First Age was just a tiny, burned-out remnant of what Creation used to be.
 * To be more specific, the Ret-Gone didn't just destroy physical area, it supposedly annihilated nine-tenths of Creation on a conceptual level. Whole principles of being ceased to exist, leaving only what players and characters understand as conventional reality. It's a reality with magitech, super-sorcery and god-given Elder God-smacking heroes. But the implication is that the time before the Three Spheres Cataclysm is more or less impossible to wholly comprehend.
 * The whole business of fighting Chaos in Warhammer 40,000. Any really powerful daemon simply cannot be destroyed by physical means, as they live in the Immaterium, and there's exactly one psyker powerful enough to fight them on their turf... and he's on the life support for the last ten millennia. All that He Who Fights Monsters could do is to banish the daemons back to the Warp, for them to return again later. Even though such banishments aren't exactly the bed of roses even for the Daemon Princes, and many lesser daemons could be vanquished entirely with proper procedure, this fight is essentially a defensive one, with no chance of a true victory. And the Enemy is dangerous indeed.
 * For example, take Lucius the Eternal, Champion of Slaanesh, one of the aforementioned Great Champions. If he is killed in battle and the foe takes even the slightest satisfaction from or pleasure in his death, he possesses his killer and eventually takes him over entirely, with the former victor now nothing more than another screaming face on Lucius's armor...
 * What if the Necrons or other mechanical beings manage to kill Lucius?
 * Since the Immaterium is implied to not view time the same way as the material universe, it's very possible that the only thing this accomplishes is to protect the physical universe. Daemons, on the other hand, can very likely make a jump to a later timeline, starting anew with little (if any) visible wait.
 * This is why you can't kill a Titan in Scion - Fate, being an utter asshole in the Scion universe, will go berserk if something that big is taken out of reality. When Ymir died, the Ice Age ended, causing worldwide catastrophe. The best the Gods can do is make the Titans into Sealed Evil in a Can.
 * Kult plays with this.
 * In Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game), it's possible (if your investigators are insanely brilliant and cunning) to hit Cthulhu with a nuclear weapon. The game has rules for what happens when you do this. What are the rules? Cthulhu regenerates about 15 minutes later... but now he's radioactive.
 * That can't be good!
 * There is literally nothing that humanity can do which will kill Cthulhu for more than 1d10+10 minutes. When the stars are right, everything is over. Until then, you might be able to put him back to sleep until next time, at the cost of your sanity and probably your life.
 * and as an added bonus, in the event of Cthulhu's death (which there is no known way to cause) he will be immediately reborn from one of the other eldrich abominations.
 * The entire premise of the Arkham Horror Board Game. You can stop the Big Bad, but they'll always be back some other time.

Video Games

 * In Xenoblade Chronicles, in a literal interpretation of the trope, Dunban loses the use of his right arm after using the Menado to repel the Nigh Invulnerable armies of Mechon not once, but twice.
 * And even after that, he just switches to a weapon light enough to wield with the only arm he can still use and joins your group again later on.
 * Call of Duty 4 's ending pretty much ends up with
 * Apparently, its sequel Modern Warfare 2 also suffers this with
 * The very essence of the trope exemplified.
 * X-COM follows this trope with Terror from the Deep. X-COM forces manage to destroy the Eldritch Abomination that the aliens were attempting to revive that definitely would have killed humanity (being effectively invincible once awoken). Unfortunately, the alien city T'leth (in which the abomination was sleeping) managed to rise above the waves before the final victory, and explodes rather spectacularly. This first of all kills all the aquanauts who secured the final victory, and second, severely poisons huge swaths of the ocean and setting off cataclysmic cascading environmental disasters, such that by the time of the final game in the series, X-COM Apolcalypse, the earth has almost completely been reduced to a wasteland.
 * And by the end of Apocalypse, humanity's last bastion of hope, Mega-Primus, has been devastated by the extended interdimensional war.
 * Except that, by that time, humans already have a number colonies on other worlds, including Mars, as per Interceptor. Furthermore, the original plan was to build a number of Mega Cities to hold all of Earth's population, but the enormous costs only allowed them to build the prototype - Mega-Primus. It's possible that they may build others eventually.
 * Resistance follows this trope, as in the sequel, you find out despite your effort to take down the spire in London, they managed to get to the United States, and most of the United States has fallen against the Chimera.
 * And then after you, making the hero's actions mostly pointless. Although another sequel has been confirmed.
 * Bet you the final one will make humanity officially extinct.
 * Resistance 3 continues the trend. Despite Hale's work in Resistance 2, humanity has officially lost the war against the Chimera. You play as Joseph Capelli, who works with La Résistance to give punching out Cthulhu one last go. Let's hope he finds more success than Hale did.
 * The process of defeating Lavos in Chrono Trigger resulted in it . Now in Chrono Cross, the result is far worse, an entity that consumes time itself, who cannot die because somewhere, there is a dimension where you failed to kill it.
 * That doesn't stop you from chasing the bastard to the literal End of Time and using the eponymous piece of Applied Phlebotinum to cross the time streams, . The only thing that taints this finale is that everything you've done over the course of the game didn't happen in this shiny new timeline, and several characters were only born or created as a result of your actions... so what happens to them?
 * Most of the defeats of Dark Matter in the Kirby series seemed to be type 1 of this, with Dark Matter just coming back meaner and with an even more grand attack on the Kirby universe in the next game. So far, it looks like he finally is dead for good after Kirby 64.
 * Humorously, Kirby doesn't really care; as long he carries his MacGuffin weapon all he does is smack the shit out of Dark Matter and return to eating and sleeping.
 * Just about everyone in Eternal Darkness,.
 * Not really, since each character's actions added up and
 * In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, it is likely that the person who kills the spirit-eater will receive the curse next.
 * Also, you can try to devour the soul of, but Kaelyn will advise against it, warning that doing so might result in this.
 * In Gears of War, the game ends with the heroes . However, when Gears of War 2 begins they find themselves
 * Gears of War 2 also ends with Good idea! Problem:
 * According to Gears of War 3,
 * Persona 3's heroes Then in the Expansion Pack, the heroes end up just going ahead and beating up  - but even then, it's stated that it's going to take a lot more work to solve the root problem.
 * This is a very common theme in Shin Megami Tensei games.
 * Yes, but it's not usually taken to this extent. Nocturne, for example, ends on a fairly upbeat note if you get the Freedom ending (if we ignore the fact that you have simply given this incarnation of the universe some time until God decides to reboot it again). Persona 4 completely averts this, and strongly hints that
 * Actually, that's pretty much the extent it's always been taken to in Persona. In the first one, . In Persona2 Innocent Sin, Persona 2 Eternal Punishment, in a rematch against.
 * Nocturne implies that the protagonist of Shin Megami Tensei II was cursed with a Fate Worse Than Death for killing YHVH in the climax of that game. It didn't even stick, as YHVH/God will keep coming back as long as anyone believes in him.
 * In Castlevania, Dracula curses Simon Belmont just before he is killed, giving him wounds that would never heal. Subverted in Castlevania II when Simon gathers up Dracula's body parts and resurrects him to kill him again, releasing himself from the curse. Yes, that's right. He punched out Cthulhu, broke his arm doing so, then brought back Cthulhu and punched him out again with the broken arm.
 * Julius also paid a hefty price for his victory against Dracula. While he does, he loses his memories and becomes an amnesiac wanderer that gets trapped in Castlevania for decades.
 * In Super Robot Wars Original Generation, one of the main heroes literally breaks his mech's arm to pieces trying to punch out new mech.
 * In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, one thousand years ago, a group of four adventurers sealed the game's Sealed Evil in a Can - only to find that once they hid the keys to that evil's power away, they each became trapped in a black box. And the seal only lasts a thousand years anyways...
 * In the ending of Killzone 2,, but at what cost?
 * In Supreme Commander: the means by which the war was ended by the unspecified victors comes back to bite everyone in the ass in Forged Alliance.
 * In Final Fantasy IV, and FuSoYa manage to take out  This also severely weakens them to the point where their most powerful attacks do absolutely nothing.
 * In Final Fantasy VI, Celes manages to stab Kefka... it just happens to coincide with him becoming a God and destroying the world. It's a long, long time before the heroes are able to try a second time.
 * In Final Fantasy X, the traditional Final Summoning kills the Summoner who performs it and only temporarily gets rid of the monster Sin, which is why the heroes look for another way, hoping to eliminate Sin once and for all.
 * And when they to find one . Of course FFX-2.
 * In Final Fantasy XIII-2, where.
 * The game also sheds a new light to Final Fantasy XIII, when you find out that, in fact,
 * The hero of the first Diablo game winds up with a case of The Virus, since the only way he could come up with to utterly stop the Lord of Evil was to shove a chunk of it into his face. The hero of Diablo II figures out a better way... and hits it with a hammer.
 * The ending of Mass Effect, regardless of whether you save the Council or not, sees the Citadel fleet smashed, and possibly the human fleet with heavy casualties, in exchange for destroying Sovereign. Gets very ominous when you realize that Sovereign was only one, and that the rest of the are still coming, even if you stopped their usual strategy.
 * Entirely likely in Mass Effect 2 as well. Depending on how well or poorly you prepare, your entire team of lovable squadmates may very well die helping you stop the Collectors... and even if they don't, congratulations! You just . Not to mention that you either or you.
 * You know what the worst part of that is? The one Cthulhu you meet that can give you the worst arm breaking if you're not careful?
 * This all gets blown out of the water by the Controversial endings of Mass Effect 3, which go so far as to call into question whether Mass Effect is Lovecraft Lite as generally assumed or Cosmic Horror crossed with Space Opera. To begin
 * Mega Man X: Sigma's first defeat of causes Sigma himself to "inherit" what was later known as the Sigma virus.
 * This is the basic tone of the ending to the 2008 Prince of Persia. A sequel might change it, though.
 * In Halo lore, the Forerunners were forced to activate the Halo Array and commit mass suicide to stop the Flood from taking over the galaxy. The downside? It only sent the Flood to sleep, and now the galaxy is defenseless. And also, because every species that was picked to survive the firing eventually discovered the Halos, the Flood are released again, and nearly take over Earth once they're able to infect a Slipspace-capable ship. Though they are, they then begin a Xanatos Gambit to have the humans and Covenant Separatists deactivate the Halos and then
 * Of course, they are then fittingly.
 * However, this trope comes back if Cortana's story in Halo Legends: Origins (in which she was a Rampant Unreliable Narrator) is true in certain respects. If the right parts are true, the Flood are still around, and our heroes can't use that plan again.
 * In the E3 video demo of Scribblenauts, God, riding a skateboard and holding a shotgun, fights Cthulhu. As per the trope, they both die at the end of the fight.
 * The question is: which one was supposed to be the Cthulhu, given the choices?
 * In the lore surrounding Warcraft, Aegwynn, the super-powerful Guardian of Tirisfal, comes up against the Dark Titan Sargeras (or, some argue, only his avatar) and defeats him with surprisingly little effort. The downside? Sargeras' spirit escapes his dying body and enters Aegwynn's womb, possessing her unborn child who later becomes the first game's Big Bad.
 * Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories's worst ending is essentially this:
 * Another Nonstandard Game Over can be invoked if you defeat  before you're supposed to, because he.
 * An inevitability in Warning Forever, in which your tiny ship fights an enemy that comes back bigger each time after it dies. It evolves to cover whatever weakness you exploited last time, so no matter how skillfully you defeat some ultimate form it had developed, it will be back, and while you'll be exhausted from the last fight, it will only be strengthened by your efforts to destroy it last time.
 * In the Family Guy video game, there is a sequence in Peter's level where you can punch God. This goes about as well as one would expect.
 * Two out of the three Dragon Age endings feature this trope. You can also Take a Third Option, but the jury's out on what consequences this will have for Thedas in the future.
 * There's a more blatant example in the gameworld's lore: that of the Tevinter Imperium. The Darkspawn Blights, one of which you spend the whole game repelling, are the broken arm resulting from Tevinter's long-ago, blood-magic-fuelled, And Man Grew Proud attempt to enter The Fade and usurp the power of God.
 * World of Warcraft has the Lich King Raid as its epic moment, after your party broke their arms trying to punch them. Tirion goes in and helps do him in. Yes Arthas is dead, but there is still a need for another Lich King so Bolvar offers himself to the throne. So much for a victory feast with the Alliance and Horde as Azeroth celebrates the lich king's defeat
 * Arthas himself has an origin story involving versions 4 and 5 of this from trying to defeat the Scourge...
 * Or more specifically to kill Mal'Ganis.
 * Kael'Thas' defeat at Tempest Keep was "only a setback," which you learn when you fight him again at Magister's Terrace.
 * The Old Gods are THE Eldritch abominations of warcraft, unfortunately, they're also burrowed into azeroth's core, permanently killing even one may result in the planet dying.
 * Actually, Word of God confirms that it's basically not possible for us players to permanently kill any of the Old Gods at all, the best we can do is force their influence out of Azeroth. Temporarily. At best.
 * There appears to be a way to permanently remove the effects of the Old Gods (and probably expel them permanently, or at least force them to start from scratch). However, it would result in the death of literally every living being on the planet by activating the Reorigination Device (a planet-wide Reset Button). There may be other problems with this, as the Titans chose to not use it between when they noticed the problem and their departure from Azeroth.
 * Kingdom Hearts:Birth By Sleep: One of the main characters, Ventus, as a result of defeating the Unversed once and for all.
 * Of course, Vanitas was partially to blame.
 * Kings Field II sees the character's father, the former hero and saviour from the first game, get possessed by a demon and release waves of Eldrich Horrors upon the world. Your character must pick their way through this bleak hellscape, and hunt down and kill his own father. Best part - if you fail to get a particular magic sword (obtainable only by sacrificing your one and only friend), then the demon then possesses you. The final narration informs you that peace returns to the land, and life returns to normal... only for your character to slowly fall to the demon and eventually re-release the demons, repeating the cycle - only this time, there's no one to stop you.
 * In the Japanese version of Breath of Fire IV, The Emperor Soniel (largely via his head priest Yohm) attempts to kill Fou-lu (who not only happens to be the King in the Mountain that founded the empire Soniel is head of, but is also a literal God-Emperor coming to reclaim the throne) in increasingly savage ways (including, at one point, the use of a Fantastic Nuke with Fou-lu's girlfriend as the warhead; this merely was the major point in the Trauma Conga Line that shoved Fou-lu over the edge to being a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds). The final attempt involved Soniel back-stabbing Fou-lu with a sword made from the decapitated head of a god whose full summoning failed; this pisses off Fou-lu, who proceeds to decapitate Soniel with the very sword he was back-stabbed with.
 * Unfortunately, the actual Lost Your Head Trying To Back-Stab The God-Emperor moment was a victim of Bowdlerisation in the international Playstation and all Windows ports—leading to a bit of a What Happened to the Mouse? moment.
 * The manga adaptation by Mag Garden not only turned the scene Up to Eleven but turned it into a Crowning Moment Of Take That (to the censorship)--Fou-lu has Blood From the Mouth, decapitates Soniel by a sword of pure energy, and then pushes out the Dragonslayer by hand...after having been run completely through.
 * Breath of Fire II  however, the
 * Bad ending:
 * Normal Ending
 * Best Ending:  Subverted, in that
 * Gradius is BUILT on this trope. Congratulations on killing the final boss and blowing it up into a bunch of pieces! Too bad that each of those pieces will regenerate totally into another Big Bad. Each with their own army.
 * Killing the Bonus Boss of Throne of Baal is an understandably daunting and challenging ordeal.  Defeating it is still preferable to letting it roam free of course.
 * In God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Kratos and his brother Deimos kill Death. It comes at a terrible price: Deimos loses his life saving Kratos during the battle, and Kratos loses his brother again. Especially tragic since Kratos' goal throughout the game was to save Deimos.
 * The Downer Ending of Galerians invokes this trope in multiple ways.
 * Batman: Arkham Asylum: Literally, in fact, considering Batman sprays explosive gel on his glove before decking
 * Depending on how you interpret the Silent Hill series, even the good endings mean that whatever malevolent entities surrounding the place just lie dormant until the next schmuck with a Dark and Troubled Past comes around. And then, of course, there are the bad endings, where you defeat the Big Bad, but your own sanity has suffered beyond repair.
 * In Silent Hill 4, Henry is implied to have literally broken his arm in the good ending.
 * Depending on how you interpret the Silent Hill series, even the good endings mean that whatever malevolent entities surrounding the place just lie dormant until the next schmuck with a Dark and Troubled Past comes around. And then, of course, there are the bad endings, where you defeat the Big Bad, but your own sanity has suffered beyond repair.
 * In Silent Hill 4, Henry is implied to have literally broken his arm in the good ending.

Webcomics

 * In Order of the Stick, the Order of the Scribble's attempts at may count as this. They successfully manage to  with the gates, but one of them dies and the survivors break up for good, with bad blood between many of them. Said bad blood ends up destroying any united plan they may have had for protecting the gates, allowing Xykon to attack them piecemeal.
 * Further arm-breaking occurs when it turns out their solution to containing the Snarl allows for someone to access and control the power of the Snarl without setting it free, which is essentially the main plan of every major villian in the series.
 * Charon McKay's first punch against Deep One Prime was a massive Shoryuken that splintered some of the shadow-armor on her hand.

Web Original

 * In Draw With Me, it becomes
 * In Peasant's Quest from Homestar Runner Rather Dashing
 * Phase, in the Whateley Universe, fighting a tiny aspect of a demon trying to gain a foothold in this dimension. She stalled it long enough that it could be sealed off again. For now. But she ended up with broken bones, life-threatening injuries, psychological damage and hideous nightmares that required intervention to stop.
 * Halloween at Whateley, since killing Sara was the whole point. Not only did it fail, but the two commanders of the force that attacked are now wanted by the criminals as well as the law, and the one who ordered the attack got into deep shit, and a good portion of the attacking soldiers were killed or taken into MCO custody.
 * Jay from Marble Hornets in Entry #52

Western Animation
"Oberon: I am... vulnerable... to iron. You have hurt me. Hurting me was a mistake!"
 * The page quote is taken from an episode of Justice League Unlimited, after the titular league knock themselves out in the process of destroying the Doomsday Device of a near Physical God . The villain, able to rebuild it a matter of minutes and being utterly undamaged, shrugs it off with the above comment.
 * The Justice League episode The Terror Beyond featured a team of Defenders-expies set up to beat back an incursion of Eldritch Abominations, which they end up doing by killing Ichthultu... but  dies in the process.
 * A much less serious version of this trope happened in "This Little Piggy" when Batman and Zatanna picked a fight with Circe. The two make a fair account of themselves until Circe actually starts fighting back, at which point she reveals that she's basically just humouring them. Since Circe is basically a Screwy Squirrel, they manage to talk their way out of further confrontation.
 * Anything, and I do mean anything used to try to stop the Beast Planet; turn your whole planet into an energy gun? Not even a scratch. Ram it with another planet? It's annoyed. Turn a planet into a bomb and blow it up when The Beast is eating it? Doesn't even get heart burn. The best the heroes do is send it somewhere else, so it just attacks another system.
 * Something similar happened with Alpha Q's planets in Transformers Energon. When Unicron came to eat their world Scorponok set off a bomb in the center of the planet in order to destroy him, since their own lives were forfeit anyway. Unfortunately the bomb only sent Unicron into a temporary coma, and when he woke up Alpha Q was trapped inside him, alone and slowly going mad.
 * In Gargoyles, the heroes (and anti-heroes) find themselves up at one point against Lord Oberon, ruler of The Fair Folk. They try various weapons against him, which do nothing, until finally hitting him with an iron harpoon that does some serious damage. Unfortunately, even an injured Oberon is stil the most powerful character in the series, and now he's really mad.


 * Should've made another bell.
 * Though keep in mind the bell was used when his powers were greatly reduced. Given he was at full power by this point, chances are the bell would have done very little to weaken him.
 * In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Admiral Zhao manages to kill Tui, the Moon Spirit. La, the Ocean Spirit, gets pissed, fuses with Aang into an enormous One-Winged Angel, and lays an absolute smackdown on a massive Fire Nation fleet. After Tui is revived via Heroic Sacrifice, La parts with Aang, grabs Zhao, and drags him underwater.
 * Later in the series, the Gaang is fighting knowledge spirit Wan Shi Tong, who's trying to sink his library and trap them forever so they won't try to use his knowledge to hurt people. Sokka manages to knock Wan Shi Tong unconscious by hitting him over the head with a book. The Gaang barely manages to escape the sinking library with knowledge that can help them win the war. But unfortunately, the library still disappears,, and worst of all, the Gaang's new friend Professor Zei gets dragged down with Wan Shi Tong and the library. Presumably, Zei stays trapped there forever.

Real Life

 * Honeybees die whenever they sting a human, or anything else with thick skin.
 * Note that they will try to avert this. If they have to give up their life for one tiny attack, they will make sure to make it count. Usually by having the whole hive sting you at once.
 * Eleazar Avaran, one of the leaders of the Maccabean revolt, where the Jews fought for and won their freedom from Seleucid rule. Eleazar killed a war elephant with a spear, but the elephant fell on him and he was crushed to death.
 * This is also a crowning moment of awesome. Having no idea how to deal with Elephants he ran under the thing when it reared... and allowed it to fall on him, spear planted firmly in the earth.